by Brandt Legg
He didn’t know what typical crowds were at the Muttart Gardens, but on this weekday afternoon in May, it seemed fairly quiet. Still, he treated each face as a threat, every movement, spotted in his peripheral vision, as an attack, while all the new sounds in the faux wilderness added to his confusion.
He quickly found a pamphlet containing the garden’s layout and scanned for the Dawn Redwood, where he hoped Wen would be waiting. Since he didn’t know exactly how Franco had tracked him to Calgary, or how Rong Lo had found him in Vancouver, Chase kept close to the edge of the pathway as he moved toward the rendezvous point. The intoxicating aroma of blooming flowers and organic earth weren’t enough to entirely ease him. With each step he prepared to dive into the trees. Chase wished now that he’d taken Flint's gun.
A few moments later, after a turn in the trail, the Dawn Redwood came into sight. And then, as if materializing from the forest, conjured from memories and magic, Wen appeared. All the fear and anxiety he had been grappling with over the past five days evaporated in that instant. Simultaneously, a new battle began, trying to keep himself alert as he felt now fallen into a glorious dream. She smiled as their eyes met.
Franco had already ignored a call from Sliske. He was too busy and too angry to debate every decision and rehash the monumental stakes in play. However, when the chairman of GlobeTec called, unless Franco was in the middle of killing someone or being killed himself, he answered.
“How many does he have suited up?” the chairman asked, referring to the number of people Sliske had implanted with RAIN, making them CHIPs.
Franco had worked with the chairman long enough to be able to ascertain his level of pleasure or disgust in any given situation, and his tone and phrasing of the question clearly indicated the Chairman was ballistic and beyond concerned—so far beyond that fear had entered his mind.
“I’m not certain, but more than a thousand, maybe two thousand,” Franco responded, having sent the Chairman an encrypted message notifying them Sliske had sent two CHIPs to help him track Chase.
“He’s got two thousand CHIPs on the street?” the Chairman said, a wheeze to his words as if he’d been punched. “How in the hell did he get that many volunteers? People are going to notice!”
“Maybe Sliske believes if he gets enough CHIPs out there, it won’t matter who notices.”
“Well I sure as hell am noticing!” the Chairman thundered. “How many more do you think he has ready to go?”
“That’s difficult to say. Sliske and I are not exactly close. The only reason he told me as much as he did is because he wanted me to use a couple of them to help me apprehend Chase Malone.”
“How are they performing?” Franco could detect the Chairman’s excitement, finally having a chance to test RAIN in the real world—CHIPs in the wild—to know if his plan was working. It had been his grand scheme, after all. Sliske was merely co-opting and accelerating it, perhaps stealing it.
“They are beyond anything you can imagine,” Franco said. “I’m sitting next to them, and I still cannot fathom what they are capable of, or even that they are real.”
“My God, it’s happening,” the Chairman said, awed. Then, turning cold, he added, “But Sliske may be a problem.”
‘‘Today was the day a thousand dreams would die and a single dream would be born,’” Franco said, quoting The Kiss of Deception, by Mary. E. Pearson.
“Yes, it is,” the Chairman replied. “Quite appropriate, Franco, should I read that one?”
“Not your type of story.”
“Okay, good. I’m lost in the Brilliance trilogy, by Marcus Sakey.”
“‘The radio host had said there was a war coming, said it like he was looking forward to it . . . ’”
“Yes, that’s right,” the Chairman said, laughing. “Good opening line.” Franco always amused him, and they shared a love of books. “You know what to do then? About Sliske?”
“Yes.”
“See to it as soon as this business with Chase is completed.”
“Consider it done.”
Fifty-Four
The IT-Squad Operational Officer informed Tess that the squad leader of the Edmonton unit had secured the abandoned minivan that the Astronaut and Wen Sung had used to escape.
“Patch him through,” she said.
Almost instantly, the man’s face appeared on a large monitor in her office. Tess gave a voice command and a smaller image of Travis filled the bottom corner of the screen. Travis, on his way to catch a flight to San Francisco, held rank over field operations.
“What do we have?” Travis asked the squad leader.
“Surveillance cameras have the Chinese national arriving here alone, as we previously reported. The Astronaut got out at the West Edmonton Mall—we’re still running that down, but it looks like he gave us the slip. The woman went into a nearby park and then we lost her.”
“You have people in the park?” Travis asked.
“Affirmative. There is another rather interesting development,” the squad leader said, looking down at notes he’d scribbled. “Less than twenty minutes ago, a man we’ve ID’d as a Chinese MSS agent, Rong Lo, recently left the minivan.”
“Of course he did,” Tess said, annoyed. “Where is he now?”
“We’ve got bits of his route from various optics, but the area is not as full as we’d like,” the squad leader said, referring to the lack of cameras in the area. “But we’re getting it narrowed to a smaller grid.”
“Tess, what are the sats showing?” Travis asked, knowing she would already be scouring live satellite feeds, looking for where he went.
“We’ve got him,” she said excitedly. “Who knew there were pyramids in Edmonton? Get the unit to the Muttart Conservatory, now!”
CHIP-0630 picked up Franco and CHIP-0830 near the parking garage at Oxford Tower. After they’d escaped the insane, near-death head-on with Flint, 0830 had hacked the Edmonton Police dispatch system and Oxford Tower’s tenant directory, then reported that the high-speed-chase-parking-garage suspects had taken hostages in one of the offices and also made a bomb threat. In the mass evacuation of the building, Franco and 0830 slipped out. Meanwhile, 0630 had picked up a new car after crashing the Honda. To buy time before the car’s owner reported it stolen, 0630 accessed the Transportation Ministry and found the contact information for the vehicle’s owner, who he then texted a notification that the vehicle had been impounded, and could not be released until after five p.m.
Franco sat calmly reading his book in the backseat of the car while 0630 drove and 0830 continued to scan networks for any sign of Chase.
“Might have something,” 0830 said as he detected two outside entities pulling data from area traffic cams. “Head south on Bellamy-Hill Road and then east on 97th Avenue.”
“How can you read while we’re in the middle of a critical mission?” 0630 asked Franco in the rearview mirror.
“It’s how I relax.”
“Why do you memorize all the first lines of books?” 0830 asked.
“Several years back, I read The Last Librarian, a novel about the end of books, and the characters often quoted from different authors.”
“It’s the first volume of The Justar Journal, by the same author as The Cosega Sequence,” 0630 said.
“Right, and in the opening paragraph of The Last Librarian, the line, ‘It started as revolutions often do, as something quiet and almost routine,’ made me think of TruNeural, and of RAIN.”
“Rapid Artificial Intelligence Nodule,” 0630 said, tapping his head.
“Yes. You CHIPs implanted with RAIN have started a revolution.”
0630 nodded. “We are the next step in human evolution. Survival of the fittest. Those without RAIN implants will be lost.”
“It seems a dangerous time for humanity,” Franco said. “I’m not sure any of us will ultimately survive the merging of men and machines.”
“‘If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off
reading some other book,’” 0630 said as they crossed the North Saskatchewan River for the second time that day.
Franco smiled, recognizing 0630 quoting the first line from A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket. The smile faded as he realized there would be no happy endings.
Inside the Temperate Pyramid at the Muttart Conservatory, Chase and Wen fell into each other’s arms as if civilization had crumbled, leaving them the last two remaining people, and they had been searching for each other through the tangled dangers and hollowed-out aftermath, struggling for years to find another survivor. As they held each other, Chase felt the pyramid spinning, the confusion and desperation slipping away. It felt like an hour went by before they reluctantly released each other.
“There are people after me,” he said, apologizing with his eyes at bringing her more trouble. “I think I lost them, but it’s impossible to be sure.”
“Who?”
“GlobeTec security.”
Wen nodded, calculating the risks and consequences this new information created. “TruNeural has deployed CHIPs,” she said. “Have you encountered any?”
He was shocked she knew anything about the RAIN CHIPs. He frantically searched the area as if Franco or the CHIPs might suddenly appear, and then looked back at her, confused. “Yes, have you?”
“It’s possible, but I’m not sure.” She paused, as if trying to recall every encounter in a terrible journey that began long before he knew she was running. “There were people after me today,” she said, urging him down the trail. “Not long ago.”
“Rong Lo?”
Wen’s eyes filled with anguish, she held his gaze, distraught, overcome with sadness at having unleashed such evil onto him. “I don’t know . . . I did not see them,” she finally answered.
He stopped in front of a eucalyptus tree and took her back into his arms. “Why did it take you so long to contact me?”
“There is so much to say. Please be patient with me, Chase. I will explain everything, but we should keep moving now.” She stopped and softened him with her eyes again. “We must leave Edmonton immediately.”
He nodded, signaling his willingness to wait for the answers he’d wanted so badly. “I came on the bus.”
A half-smile crossed her lips only for an instant as she grabbed her pack. “I came in a borrowed van. They will be looking for that, and will find it soon.”
“Then let’s start walking,” he said as they came to a crossroad in the trail, still in the middle of the pyramid. “This way.”
They followed signs back to the entrance, scanned the area as far as they could see, then crossed the expanse until they reached the small fifth pyramid when an awful sound stopped them cold—an approaching helicopter.
Fifty-Five
A police helicopter circled the pyramids as Chase and Wen huddled in a cluster of pine trees, the needles scratching their faces.
“They’re looking for me,” Chase said. “I kind of led GlobeTec Security and the Edmonton Police on a car chase through downtown.”
She surprised him with a smile. “You always were a troublemaker.”
“Me?” he asked with mock defensiveness. He wanted to say it was her that upended the balance in the world—certainly in his life. But even without her call for help, the spiral had begun when he’d sold RAI to TruNeural. The timing of the two huge crises in his life had been cruel coincidence, but secretly Chase was glad, because he needed her strength to help him survive it. This beautiful woman standing next to him had somehow escaped the repressive communist regime in China and eluded the devious Rong Lo, surely she could assist him in stopping Sliske and Franco from starting a chain reaction that would lead to an unimaginable apocalyptic future. “Tell me you have a great exit plan.”
“Follow me,” she said as the helicopter swept back toward the city. Wen led him into Gallagher Park and down a thick stand of trees until they emerged on a busy street. After jogging across it, then finding concealment in more wooded areas, cutting through a residential neighborhood, and winding up in a commercial strip on 95th Avenue, she finally stopped. Chase stood on the sidewalk, breathless, hands on his knees.
“Hungry?” Wen asked, pointing at the faded neon sign above a wide window that read Lola’s Diner.
“Very,” Chase said, looking in the window and seeing a table getting served something that looked like fish and chips. “But aren’t we in the middle of running for our lives?”
“Yes, and this is the last place they would look. What fugitive in his right mind would stop for a meal?” She winked. “Come on.”
He couldn’t help but kiss her.
The place had an intentionally dated look, as if it’d been there, unchanged, since the 1950s. Neon and chrome accents, Art Deco architecture, and the perpetual aroma of bacon grease and coffee. However, it was a more modern incarnation of something that had come before. Spacious and cozy at the same time.
Chase leaned over and kissed Wen. He wanted to be far away from Edmonton, their problems, everything. He wanted to be alone with her in a cabin at the edge of the world.
Wen kissed him back, smiled, and said, “I’m sorry we lost those years.”
A waitress appeared, catching them in the moment. “Aren’t you two sweet,” she said, giggling. “Y’all can sit anywhere you like.”
They found a booth as far away from the front door and large windows as possible. The same waitress, wearing an “Alasie” name tag, found them a minute later and offered hot coffee. Chase gladly accepted a cup, but Wen ordered tea.
“There is so much I need to tell you,” Chase began, keeping his voice to a whisper. “And ask you. How did you know Twag? And why is the MSS so intent on getting you? And me? How do you know about CHIPs and TruNeural and—”
“I’ll have to tell you that when we’re not in a public place.”
He studied her carefully. Her gaze revealed nothing, yet he saw a hint of the fire he’d always loved about her.
They were both famished. By the time Alasie returned, Wen told her they were ready to order.
“Alasie, that’s such a pretty name,” Wen said.
The waitress smiled. “Thank you. I’m Inuit, and in my language it means ‘she who is honest and noble,’ and I am honest, but I don’t know about noble.”
For ten minutes, Wen and Chase both kept a nervous watch on the door while talking about their options for getting out of town. The weight of all that was left unsaid hung heavy as their current circumstance permitted no talk of the five years since he’d left China, or even why she had finally risked everything and fled her homeland.
Chase’s prepaid tracphone vibrated. Once again he hoped it was Boone, but it was Dez.
“Brutal news,” his partner began, without even ensuring him the call was encrypted. “Derek is dead.”
Fifty-Six
The news of another death crushed him. Chase slid back into the booth as if bracing himself against a storm—a disaster of conspiracy, fear, and incredible greed. Derek, the second of the Garbo-Three to be killed, had just gotten them most of the information Chase needed to complete the AI Anecdote.
“Damn it, no,” Chase said, trying to muffle his voice and emotions to avoid drawing any attention. “We had extra security . . . and Franco is up here. How could they have gotten to him? How did they know?”
Wen looked at him, worried. He gazed back at her, desperate to be alone with her, to find a way to escape to be together forever. Her eyes mirrored his feelings as they stared, locked into each other, while he continued to listen to Dez.
“We need to get Branson out,” Dez said, referring to the final Garbo-Three.
“Ask him,” Chase snapped. “Make sure he knows how close we are to stopping the people who murdered Porter, Lori, and Derek, the people who are going to end humanity. Then see what he does.”
“You know he’ll stay. Branson knows about SEER, he believes the simulations, he’ll do whatever it takes to get the final key, even if it kills him
.”
“I know,” Chase said quietly. “Have Adya move all the security to Branson. We’ll protect him. If he doesn’t get it by the end of the day tomorrow, it’ll be too late anyway.”
“It’s not fair, what you’re asking.”
“Of course it’s not. Nothing is fair anymore.”
After the call, Wen wanted to know the details.
“I can’t go into it here,” Chase said apologetically. “Not now.”
Alasie brought their food and refilled Chase’s coffee. They thanked her, then Wen added, “That’s a lovely necklace you’re wearing.”
“Oh, thanks, I made it myself.”
“You’re very talented,” Wen said.
“One day I hope I can support myself making jewelry. Right now it just helps with the bills a little,” Alasie said, smoothing her skirt. “We don’t have much money. I live with my grandmother, but there’s a big community of Inuit in Alberta. Where are you from?”
“China,” Wen said, smiling.
“Wow. Is this your first time to Edmonton?”
Wen nodded, widening her eyes bright, as if it was very exciting.
“Well, welcome then, and enjoy your meal,” Alasie said as she left them.
Wen ate a delicious tuna salad sandwich and Chase forced himself to eat the fish and chips, his appetite now gone with the news of Derek’s death. Still, Chase knew he needed food. They both tried to slow down and relax, hoping they’d lost their many pursuers.
Alasie returned and chatted for another minute, suggesting they visit the Muttart Conservatory and the West Edmonton Mall. “It’s got a roller coaster, an ice palace, a massive waterpark, and—”
“We might do that,” Chase said, cutting her off so Wen could order more sandwiches to go, saying the food had been so delicious. After she left again, Chase found a car rental place on his phone only a fifteen minute walk away. Wen suggested a route that would take them to a place they might be able to sneak across the border on foot, then the plan would be to get to Seattle.
