by Ryan Rinsler
He didn’t need telling twice. He ran, faster than everyone around him, until he reached a point in the tunnel where there were civilian-looking people stood watching those who were retreating.
“What's happening?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know,” gasped Connor, panting for breath. “Someone said gas.”
“Gas? Oh my god.”
“What is it?”
“What’s gas? That’s the end. Oh my god. It’s the end!” he shouted, beginning to wail. The others stood around him began pacing and wringing their hands too, causing Connor to panic. He couldn’t stay there with them, he needed to help.
“It’ll be OK,” he said, before setting off running back in the direction in which he just came. He didn’t want to be a crying civilian. He didn’t want to be someone who sits back and hopes someone else can sort the problem out without him. He wanted to help, and he was going to try.
Ruby was up ahead, and beyond her a row of six soldiers, filling the width of the tunnel, each on bended knee aiming their weapons down the tunnel. Two more stood behind them, and without warning, flames burst from large tubes they were holding on their shoulders, and rockets flew down the length of the tunnel and exploded on impact with the stairs. Connor flinched heavily as the thump of the explosion beat through his chest, ducking and holding his weapon tightly. The six soldiers opened fire, followed by more rockets. Connor sidestepped, allowing more soldiers to come past, pushing himself against the wall to make sure he wasn’t obstructing anyone more helpful than him in this fight.
Ruby pointed to six of them, who each ran and crouched ahead of the six soldiers already firing down the tunnel.
“Fire!” came a shout — the front six each opened for at least ten seconds, then, as they reloaded, the rear six opened fire, then the front six, then the rear. It continued like this for ten or more repetitions, with ammunition runners feeding each of them magazines as they ran low. Connor was exhilarated, his eyes wide, an expression of awe and amazement on his face.
Ruby turned and pointed at him and a few others next to him. “Fill the gaps!” she shouted. The others knew what this meant, and tucked into the rows of firing soldiers to provide even more firepower. Connor followed suit and joined the back row. He lifted his weapon and looked through the scope, and to his horror, a pile of what looked like twenty bodies and body parts lay at the foot of the stairs. As soon as a pair of feet appeared, they were shot by the firing squad, causing them to tumble down the steps and be finished off as they hit the floor. More rockets zoomed down the tunnel and exploded on impact, with clouds of blood and smoke filling the air for a few seconds and obstructing their view.
Connor waited until his line was ready, then opened fire as they did. The first three bullets hit the ceiling as he wrestled the gun under control, but after a second or two his aim was near perfect.
Another two rockets. They all paused as the smoke and fire died down. He raised his gun once more and took aim, and flinched at what he saw through his magnified scope. There were six enemy soldiers inside the tunnel, and before any of them could react, they fired something toward them. There was a loud crack ahead of them, and a thick, red fog whipped down the tunnel like an immense swarm of angry bees.
“Fall back!” shouted Ruby, pulling soldiers from their positions and forcing them to retreat. A shower of bullets flew down the tunnel toward them, with Connor tripping and stumbling to escape. He fell through an open door and into a small storage room, where he dropped to the floor and watched as people fled past the open door, turning to fire their weapons in the direction of the enemy. The air in the tunnel was becoming red as the gas expanded, and suddenly one of the resistance members came to a halt right outside the door.
What’s he doing? thought Connor. He should be running!
The man turned to him robotically and raised his gun. Shocked, Connor tried to scrabble away from the direction in which he was pointing it, but it followed him, constantly pointing at his head.
Connor saw a bright flash, then took huge gasp of breath as he reemerged back in the ranch. He ripped off the cap, writhing on the bed, trying to clamber into a seating position before Jacob rushed to his aid. His eyes flew around the room frantically, his breathing erratic, each breath shorter than the last.
“Breathe!’ shouted Jacob. “Slow it down.”
He held his breath and collected himself, before exhaling deeply. He mentally restrained his breathing and brought it under control, before slumping back down onto the bed. He took a moment to collect himself.
“Stanley,” he said, sitting up once more, checking around the room.
“I’m OK,” he replied. “My host couldn’t connect, I’ve been here all along.”
“What the hell happened, bro?” asked Matt.
He had no idea.
“There was fighting. Someone had got to the bunker. The enemy,” he said, breathlessly. “They’d found them and were breaking in. Raiding them.”
“What happened to you?”
“I was shot,” he replied. “I was shot, but, not by them.”
“What do you mean?” asked Stanley.
“It was one of us. They just stopped and turned on me. It was like a robot. I have to go back in. Nolan, can you connect me?”
“Host offline. Your host is offline.”
“Offline? You mean dead?”
“Usually, that’s what it means,” said Stanley. He turned to Nolan. “Can you check my host’s status in another timeline?”
“What for?” asked Connor.
“If my host is offline in other timelines, it means the attack is happening in the defaults, not just Red Oscar.”
“I thought Red Oscar was a default?” asked Connor.
“It stopped being a default timeline the moment you set foot in there,” replied Stanley. “Anything can happen. Butterfly effect, you know?”
Nolan was tapping furiously on the screen. “Offline. Two I checked. I checked two of them. ’
“Oh, that’s not good,” said Stanley, taking a seat. “That’s really not good.”
“I have to go back in. Nolan, can you connect me to anyone else?”
“What good will it be you going back in there?” asked Matt. “Shouldn’t you leave it to those guys? Surely taking over someone else is just going to give them another person to worry about.”
He had a point.
“Let’s just wait,” said Stanley. “They might get back in touch with us and request you connect.”
“They can do that?” asked Connor.
“Oh yes, they can communicate with us via the seeker. That’s how we get the codes for whichever hosts you’re going to use. If the opportunity arrives they might want you to reconnect.”
Connor took a deep breath and rubbed his face. “It was bad. People were running. Dying.”
Kate sat beside him and rested her hand on the small of his back.
“What do you think’s gonna happen?” he asked Stanley. “Have they been hit like this before?”
“Not in the bunker, I don’t think. That’s been their safe place for years. Lots of ways in and out, almost off the grid. They took a lot of precautions to make sure that place was never discovered, but it looks like it wasn’t enough.”
“Can they hold them off?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Stanley. “You’re better equipped to answer that than I am. I don’t know their strength, nor their numbers. Sure, they’ve held off attacks before but whether they’ll do that this time remains to be seen.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” said Jacob. “We just need to wait. Ride it out.”
“I feel so helpless,” he said. “I was there, dad. They were running scared.”
“Mana and Ruby will get them through it,” said Stanley. “Between them they can take on anyone.”
“I hope so. For all our sakes.”
49
The minutes ticked by slowly
, the hours dragging like an eternity for Connor as he awaited news, a message, any kind of signal from Red Oscar. He sat in the living room with Jacob, Kate, Matt and Stanley, with no sound other than the antique grandfather clock ticking in the corner and the clicking of logs burning in the fireplace.
“How long has it been?” he asked.
“Three hours or so,” said Jacob. “Who wants a cup of tea?”
“I’ll help you,” said Kate, accompanying him to the kitchen.
“I want to go back in,” said Connor. “Is it worth sending them a message to see what’s happened?”
“Their Seeker isn’t receiving at the moment,” said Stanley.
“What?” exclaimed Connor.
“It’s OK, sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t mean anything, it might be that they’ve lost power or have switched it off to clear history.”
“But it could also mean that they’ve taken over the bunker, right?”
“It could do. We’ll try again in an hour.”
Connor rubbed his eyes. Jacob and Kate entered with tea and snacks and laid them down on the low coffee table in the center of the group. Jacob handed Connor a cup, which he received gratefully, then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Stanley staring at him. When he turned and made eye-contact, Stanley averted his gaze.
“What is it?” he asked, not to antagonize, but through curiosity.
“Sorry,” he replied.
“No, it’s OK, I’m just wondering.”
Stanley was a deep shade of red. “I’ve heard so much about him, and even though I’ve never met him it feels weird being in the same room as you, knowing, you’re… well, you look like him.”
I look like him, thought Connor. Diplomatic.
“What have you heard?” he asked. Stanley looked uncomfortable to hear this question, shuffling nervously in his seat.
“Only rumors,” he said. “But you can probably believe them based on who told me and also what we already know.”
There were a few seconds of silence before Connor prompted him to continue. “It’s OK,” he said. “I need to know.”
Stanley took a deep breath. “Back when the resistance, our resistance I mean, here, back when they first made contact with me, I asked pretty much the same thing. They all spoke of this one man, the most evil person ever to have lived, but they never said his name. I’d hear stories about things that had happened to people, resistance members in the default timelines, that made my toes curl, but some things I’ll never forget. They’d tell me these things, and everyone else who started, so we’d know what we were up against. I guess they wanted to make sure we were strong enough and that we knew how important the work of the resistance was. After a while I started to think they were just stories, maybe rooted in truth but nonetheless embellished to make the newcomers more fearful and, I guess, determined. It wasn’t until I met somebody who’d come up against him first hand that I realized that none of it was exaggerated. It was all true, and if anything, it was just the tip of the iceberg. And don’t get me wrong, these stories weren’t told like this, around a campfire – nobody wanted to speak of it. They weren’t tales, they were warnings to newcomers. I remember my second time visiting the defaults. I forget which timeline it was, maybe Red something but not Red Oscar. It’d been a month or two since I joined the resistance so I was still learning myself, but we were recruiting hard back then. Every day we brought on more and more members, maybe ten a day, so if anything I was more knowledgeable than a lot of them. I’d already made the jump into the defaults, met with some of the resistance fighters over there, but I was still wet behind the ears, and by a big margin. The thing is, I already knew about the G.P.P. and all that stuff, the coup, but it was so big that it kind of escapes you. It was the small stuff that was the most terrifying. The things you can relate to. When we’re talking about billions of people it’s hard to fathom, but the firsthand account from one person makes it real. That’s what I experienced back then, and that’s what really switched me on to what we were dealing with.”
“Tell me,” said Connor. The whole room was deathly silent, all eyes on Stanley.
“It was rare that we’d get eye-witness accounts from anyone who’d come anywhere even close to him. He sat within such a tight circle of people that he was almost like an enigma. He still is. If you were in the same room as him it would either be very temporary, or you were on ice so thin that it was absolutely inevitable that it would crack. The only time anybody outside that circle would get a glimpse of him was at his speeches. He did maybe one a year, sometimes two, and the people who attended those speeches were either one hundred percent sympathetic to his cause or one hundred percent loaded.”
“Loaded?”
“Controlled. Their brains wired by NanoBots.”
“I was at one of those events,” said Connor. “I saw him.”
“You’re incredibly lucky. These speeches were normally to display new technology to the shareholders, and sometimes would showcase that tech in a real life demo. The person I met, and I forget her name but I’ll never forget her face, had been at one of these demos. When the second wave of Restraint Bots had been through beta, they did a live demo event at Mountain View, which was broadcast online for anyone who wanted to watch it. He stood in the middle of the stage and in front of about six hundred people, and what turned out to be around three billion around the world, and without any introduction they brought out two teenagers, a girl and a boy no more than fifteen years old, who were dragged onstage by their cuffed wrists, fighting all the way. He still didn’t say anything, he just watched them wrestle and cry in front of this sea of faces. He eventually took out a P-Needle and fired one into each of their chests, and they immediately stopped fighting and stood still. Then, still without saying a word, he took out his BlackBook and started controlling them, there and then. He made them walk around the stage, do dances or whatever, but they were both in tears. He’d muted them but left their facial activity in tact so that everyone could see their anguish. When he eventually did say something, he told the audience that up until that point these two were completely unrestrained, or immune, basically. He boasted that the Restraint Bots activate in less than three seconds and can give full control to either immune or unloaded hosts almost immediately via a simple app on their BlackBooks. He then went on to say that these two were brother and sister, twins, and that their immunity was shared between them. I heard later that they’d been in hiding after their parents had been killed fighting for the resistance. As a message to the world he was going to show everyone truly what these restraint bots were capable of, and at that point a glass tank rose up from the stage floor, like a big shower cubicle, with flames roaring up from the bottom of it. Apparently the flames were six foot high inside and were coming out of the top like some kind of furnace. The kid, the lad walked over to his sister and picked her up in his arms like a groom would carry a bride over the threshold, and without a pause he walked toward the flaming box. Apparently the crowd started to get agitated and as an automatic door opened on the glass box there were a couple of shouts from the audience. The thing was, the woman who was telling me this story said that they were excited. The crowd were shouting with excitement, not fear or disagreement. These two kids, without struggle, walked to the fire and turned around, then took a bow and stepped into the box, standing there still while the flames ravaged them. It only lasted a few seconds before the glass tinted and hid the extent of what had happened, but what this woman had witnessed changed her forever. At that point I realized that human life was cheap, not only to him but to those he was pitching to. Half the world had watched this happen, and the resistance suddenly felt very small. It wasn’t until later when we started developing weapons like kicks that we could use against them, that we managed to fight back a little, but even now it’s like we’re just fighting the symptoms, not the disease. The fight right now is against the Scouts, not Silk Corporation, not him. The resistance in the default timelines
has so far to go before they can even think about making a real dent that I doubt they even know where to start. I don’t know if you’re the answer, Connor, but having you with them will feel like a step toward fighting the cause of all this instead of just causing Scouts problems and sabotaging supplies. That’s why you’re so important.”
Silence befell the room once more, this time for a few minutes as they each attempted to digest what Stanley had just told them. It was overwhelming, the mountain they had to climb seeming too steep and too great for them to even attempt. There were battles going on all around them, in Mana’s timeline and his own, winning none of which would get them any closer to bringing down Silk Corporation. His head burned with the sheer thought of how they could possibly begin to tackle it, but he had to. He had no choice.
Knock knock.
Everybody in the room jumped to attention.
“What the hell? What time is it?”
“Ten thirty,” whispered Jacob. “Don’t answer it.”
They held their breath for a few seconds and shared worried glances.
“What are we going to do, just leave them outside in the rain?” asked Connor.
Jacob climbed out of his seat and grabbed a pistol from the open gun cabinet. He checked it, clicked off the safety and pointed it at the door. “OK, go and answer it but stay clear of the door. It might just be Alex but it’s best not to take any chances.”
“I’ll go,” said Stanley, getting out of his seat. Connor stood up too and joined Matt and Kate, who were now stood on the other side of the room.
“Easy...” said Jacob. Stanley walked calmly toward the door and placed his hand on the lock. He slid on the safety chain, and with a quick glance around to check Jacob was ready, he clicked the lock to the left. He pressed down the handle, and opened the door slightly, extending the safety chain fully.
“Yes?” he said, through the gap. Connor could hear a faint mumble from behind the door, but it was barely audible due to the rain. “No, I don’t think so,” said Stanley. “There’s nobod–”
Suddenly the door burst open, snapping the safety chain and smacking Stanley in the face, knocking him unconscious to the floor. Stood in the doorway was a young woman, short badly chopped hair, black jeans and a long, grey hoodie. Connor watched as she raised a shotgun in their direction, and counted three flashes from the barrel, sparks exploding from the end like firecrackers on the fourth of July. Momentarily mesmerized, he suddenly flinched, as did Matt and Kate, but it was so unexpected they did little to get out of the way. As Jacob returned fire, Connor turned to Matt who was stood right beside him. Matt’s face was bright red, wet, covered in blood, his expression one of terror as he stared back at Connor.
