Six Strings to Save the World

by Michael McSherry

  “No!” I hear Alpha scream, her voice pained. “It wasn’t meant for you!”

  “Dex!” I cry out from the ground.

  He spins to look at me with eyes that are wide with pain and fear.

  There’s a flash of motion behind Dex and Alpha is there. She wraps an arm around his neck, pulling him from his feet in a chokehold. As she does, the Autotuner fighters open fire on us. Alpha is already moving, already running with Dex held tightly in her arms. She covers the distance to the waiting carrier and disappears inside with Dex. And with a ripple of red Rez the craft leaps into the air, hurtling skyward.

  “Inside!” Mixy’s voice booms from the Carnegie’s speakers. “Inside now!” The Carnegie’s turrets spring to life as Mixy’s drumming fills the air. Bolts of Rez intercept some of the Autotuner fire while Lydia and Dorian attempt to counter some of the attacking fire.

  “Grab Caleb!” Dorian yells.

  Lydia is at my side a moment later, shoving my Gibson into my hands and ripping me up to my feet. The electric buzz helps to dull the pain as she hooks my free arm over her shoulder, launching us toward the Carnegie.

  A roar fills the air, separate from the Autotuner Rez exploding around us. The jets from before are back, this time making an attack run, spraying machine gun fire down indiscriminately. The Autotuner ships are caught unaware, and one flares into a fiery ball as it falls from the sky. The Carnegie’s covering fire intercepts the stream of bullets coming our way, turning the rounds to molten lead that sprays the ground around us. As the jets make their pass, the rhythmic thumping of helicopter blades fills the air. Searching spotlights emerge from over the nearby buildings as more aircraft approach.

  Tori barrels directly into the Carnegie’s open shuttle bay while Lydia carries me the last dozen yards. I stumble forward, freed of Lydia’s grasp, and tumble to the floor. Dorian enters a moment later, dragging something along behind him.

  “Get us out of here,” he orders Mixy over the comms.

  With a sudden surge of acceleration, the Carnegie rockets forward, its cargo bay closing. I look at what Dorian towed on board. I realize the what is actually a who. There’s a flicker of green Rez in the air as Dorian continues dragging Sola’s unconscious form across the cargo floor.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Two hours with my Resonator and some focused time under Lydia’s Rez is enough.

  My burned skin peels away in the shower like candle wax, revealing a freshly healed layer underneath. I scrub at it, watching as the water chases it in circles down the drain of my shower. I can’t stop trembling. Once every few minutes I swear I can hear Dex screaming, but I know it’s just my head playing tricks, like a needle that keeps jumping to the same groove on a vinyl.

  I step out of the shower, dry off, and string my Alto’s necklace around my neck. I run my thumb and forefinger over its smooth polish, trying to distract myself from the thought of Dex’s screaming by repeating to myself what I know for a certainty.

  Dex is not here with us. He’s with Alpha, wherever that is; Mixy tried pinging his wallet computer but it had been disabled, most likely destroyed. And whatever is happening to Dex, I’m not there.

  When I step outside my room, the upper level corridor is empty. The Carnegie thrums with a gentle vibration, and I can hear Mixy’s drums keeping a steady tempo below-deck, telling me he’s still actively piloting us somewhere in the Atlantic. We escaped Paris quickly enough, evading the Synthesizers and French military alike. At least some governments aren’t controlled by the Synthesizers.

  The quiet of the ocean doesn’t seem real after all of it.

  I find myself at Tori’s door without really meaning to go there. With a gentle tap, I hear her voice from the other side, weak and exhausted. “Come in,” she says.

  The room’s lights are set to a deep blue, and Tori is lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She’s showered and changed into new clothes, but she left her bloody, dirt-laden outfit from the fight bunched at the foot of her bed. I pick it up and walk it over to the Carnegie’s wall, palming open a chute for recycling.

  “Do you think they’re going to kill him?” she asks me, continuing to stare at the ceiling.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I think the Key is inside Dex now, whatever it is. And the Controller General still needs it to open the Prima Maestri vault. So I think she’ll need to keep Dex alive, too.” I bring myself to sit down next to Tori. Her fingers seek mine out and I hold her hand. It’s warm. Soft. I hadn’t realized how cold I was.

  “You know I killed her,” Tori whispers, finally turning to look at me. “She was going to kill me, so I killed her first.”

  “Mifa?”

  She nods somberly. “Dad always said I might have to, one day. I didn’t know what it would feel like.” She’s quiet for several seconds, looking for the words. “It’s different than regular Autotuners. The Synergists look too… human.” Tears well in her eyes and she squeezes my hand tightly.

  There’s a gentle tapping at the door, which slides open a moment later to reveal Lydia. Her skin roils between purple and black. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she says, her head bowed, unwilling to meet our eyes. “You two need to come see this.”

  * * * * *

  “Breaking news today as several hundred eyewitnesses report an armed conflict in urban Paris. National armed forces responded to combatants and unidentified aircraft in the city at 21:00 hours local time. Reports are still coming in but our correspondents have confirmed from multiple sources that several individuals exchanged weapons fire over a twelve block area of downtown Paris. Video footage captured these individuals utilizing as-of-yet-unidentified weaponry.”

  We’re gathered in the Carnegie’s main hall watching a view-screen with a patch into BBC news. The anchor’s calm, just-the-facts voice does little justice to the video footage that comes on screen. The display starts off pointed at the ground with a French woman speaking quickly, and as the camera swings around, the Eiffel Tower is clearly visible in the background, lit up against the night sky.

  There’s Tori and Mifa flying through the air in a blaze of colors, slamming into the ground. The camera shakes and suddenly cuts to black.

  “Why are you making us watch this?” Tori demands of Lydia.

  “Because this broadcast aired ten minutes ago.”

  “What does that matter?” I ask.

  “Just wait for it.”

  After ten more minutes of dead air, it becomes apparent. The screen cuts to black in the middle of the anchor’s sentence, and a moment later, the frame is filled with the face of a man wearing a slim-cut three-piece suit. He smiles warmly at the camera, rubbing a hand along the shadow of stubble framing his jaw. For several uncomfortable seconds he just watches the camera, making it feel like he’s watching me.

  When he speaks, his voice is surprisingly low, and his English is layered with a soft British accent.

  “Brothers and sisters: You have been lied to. We are not alone, amongst the stars or upon this planet. We have not been for some time. What you have witnessed tonight is the resurgence of a war that is older than any human alive today. It is a war between powers born in the stars, come to Earth to carry on their bloody struggle.”

  “On one side are creatures more foreign to you than your imaginations might permit, but who have come as allies in our defense. They fight to keep you from a terrible enemy—one that many of your governments unknowingly serve, even as I speak. Your enemy is the thinking machine: the Synthesizer Construct. They have conquered dozens of worlds before us. And now they conspire to conquer Earth. To conquer us.”

  He nods in a reassuring way. “Information is power, friends. And so I arm you with information now.”

  The screen jumps to still frames of space, apparently taken from a telescope given the grid and coordinate lines imposed on the picture. Amid the deep blacks and spotted stars, a cluster of vague black shapes are visible on screen. Their outlines are apparent only by the absence of sta
rs on the frame. A green overlay highlights the dark shapes, a digital counter in the corner of the screen numbering them first in the dozens, then in the hundreds.

  “The Synthesizers are done hiding. We are ill-prepared. We are weak. We are divided. But I ask you now: Join us in our resistance, if you are able. My name is Baahir Awan, and this is my promise: Fight with us, or ultimately, suffer with us.”

  The camera jumps back to Baahir and begins to pan out slowly. Behind Baahir is a dark-stained upright piano, set near a rock wall growing thick with branching vines. The camera continues panning slowly out, and as it does, Baahir swings back around the bench where he sits, settling his fingers upon the piano keys. Then he begins to play, and the vines upon the rock-wall begin to writhe, worming and shifting as though drawing themselves closer to the source of the melody.

  Slowly, the frame widens to reveal two more people standing on opposite ends of the piano, their eyes trained carefully upon the camera. They’re holding instruments—one a lute and the other a small drum—but they leave their instruments hanging at their sides while Baahir continues to play a sad melody. The frame continues widening, revealing more and more people, some carrying instruments, some not. At last the frame settles, showing dozens of people standing side-by-side in a gargantuan rock cavern. And near the right-most side, I see them: Mom and Mr. Patel.

  “You saw them?” Lydia asks.

  “Yeah,” I whisper back.

  “We’re going there now.”

  “No. We have to find Dex,” I say.

  “We don’t know where Alpha took him,” Dorian says. “What we do know is that the Synthesizers have the Key, and that they’re done hiding their cards. The Controller General is coming to Earth, and the Synthesizers are pouring warships into Earth’s orbit. This is the end-game.”

  “Which means we have to do something!”

  “Mixy is communicating with Fleet right now,” Dorian assures me. “They have a few hundred ships in Overdrive, but they need time. And we need to get our feet under us before we can do anything about Dex, the Synthesizers, the vault—any of it.”

  “It is only Dex,” I bristle. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Dorian, Lydia, and Mixy remain quiet.

  “I mean, you tried to kill him,” I explain. “So sure, why not leave him for dead while we’re at it?”

  “That’s the score, Caleb. Once in a while you have to spend a life to save more.”

  “Well now we lost the Key and Dex.”

  “Think, Earth-Son,” Mixy cuts in, attempting to head off Dorian’s temper. “It is not clear how the Key operates. We do not know where the Prima Maestri vault is. There is information to be gained. We are only stronger for taking the time to regroup. And you will see your mother, again.”

  “We still don’t know where to find them,” Tori says, crossing her arms. “They’re in hiding.”

  “Baahir just told us where to find them,” Lydia responds, calling up the video again and pausing on a full-screen shot of the cavern. “That’s where we trained Baahir. Same way we started training Caleb. They know we’ll have seen the broadcast. They’ll expect us.”

  Dorian turns where he’s sitting and looks at me, placing his hand on my shoulder and squeezing, almost to the point of pain. “I hated it, Caleb. I want you—I need you to know that. I didn’t want to kill Dex. Certainly didn’t want to kill you, either. And I promise you, there’s going to come a time when you understand what it means to have to make a decision like that.”

  “Whatever.” I try to shrug him off, but his fingers dig deeper into the meat of my shoulder.

  “Listen to me. I don’t know what you were expecting from me, but I’m doing exactly what—”

  I grab his hand and rip it away from my shoulder, hard enough to let him know we’re done.

  * * * * *

  I never had a problem falling asleep when I was a little kid.

  Dad said I heard lullabies in my head.

  In a way, he was right. As early as I can remember, I always had a song in my mind when I drifted off to sleep. When I learned piano, I would work my fingers the way Dad taught me to for songs I had memorized, humming the melody until I drifted off. After Dad died, I liked to tap my fingers on my chest to the drum beats of his favorite Clapton songs and think of him singing to Mom and me at the breakfast table each morning. It’s a habit I carried through my whole life—to have a song in my head when it hit the bed—but tonight it’s just not helping.

  I’m on the edge of sleep, lingering in that space between dreaming and waking when something makes me bolt upright in bed.

  A sound?

  What was it? I hate the feeling of waking up like this, uncertain of what brought me awake, but being certain that something just happened. I train my ears as hard as I can, but all I can hear is the thrum of the Carnegie carving its way through the Atlantic, and my own breaths coming in slow succession. I stay like that for what must be several minutes, staring into the dark and just listening.

  I’m about to lie back down when I hear it: a faint scream.

  I throw my covers off and step out into the hallway. It’s empty, and so I pad my way barefoot down the hallway, still listening carefully. I reach the float-tube and try to enter, but for the first time since I’ve set foot on the Carnegie, the glass thrums with a dull red energy and a soft, failing bass note chimes over the comms. I try my palm to the glass again and am met with the same response.

  I’m locked out.

  The scream comes again, rising in pitch and stopping abruptly. It floats up through the float-tube, echoing. I recognize it, because I’ve heard it before: Sola.

  I pound at Dorian’s door. Then Lydia’s. Then Mixy’s. Each time I’m greeted only by silence. At last I come to Tori’s door, and I knock hard with a full fist. “Wake up!” I yell. “Something’s wrong!” But even at Tori’s door, I get no answer.

  Rushing back into my room, I pull my Gibson off the wall and close the door to my room. Then I strap the guitar over my chest and turn the neck down until I’m pointing at the ground. I start to pick the high E string, with my left-hand finger on the highest fret. The shrill note is annoying, and I feel my skin prickling with the generated Rez. I start to pick tremolo and loose a beam of energy directly at the floor. The lightning is a tight, narrow bolt that leaps the short distance to the floor of the Carnegie.

  The polished white of the floor turns a tar-like black where I’m pointing. I can see the Carnegie fighting to retake the space in the floor, to cover the black with more white, but eventually the beam of Rez wins out, and the black mark starts to widen. I keep this up for several minutes, tracing a wide circle in my floor, burning through the floor with the focused beam. At last, I’ve got a full, scorched circle of floor in the middle of my room. I take the Gibson back to my chest and hold it tight, then I jump bodily into the middle of the scorched circle.

  The ground underneath me gives way and I go crashing down to the level beneath. I land in the middle of the Carnegie’s kitchen, behind the countertop. For a moment, I remain entirely still, peering around the dim interior of the Carnegie. Mixy’s pilot’s dome is unattended, and I can see dark water beyond flashing by with the occasional bubble or fish as the ship continues on its course.

  Sola screams again, her voice echoing around the empty lounge.

  I go to the float-tube on this level, which is open, and step in. The tube sends me down.

  I emerge into the cargo bay, which has since been transformed into some sort of holding area. The space is cut in half with a wall of glass, and on the other side, I can see Mixy, Dorian, and Lydia looking down onto a high table. Sola is lying on the table, eyes wide, mouth stretched back in pain. And from where I’m standing, I can see Mixy is performing some sort of surgery on her, three hands questing through her open abdomen.

  She screams, a tortured, horrendous sound, and I realize they’re performing surgery on her while she’s awake.

  “What are you doing?!”
I scream, rushing forward and pounding on the glass.

  Dorian and Lydia turn, startled by the intrusion. Mixy turns around more slowly, holding a small, pulsing blue orb in his hand.

  “Synergists carry self-contained communications relays,” Mixy answers calmly. “We had no choice but to remove the device to protect ourselves. How did you get down here?”

  “You locked me up there so I wouldn’t see this?” I feel the heat rising to my face.

  Sola’s eyes are looking about the room now. They pass over my face without even a glimmer of recognition.

  “Get away from her! RIGHT NOW!” I point my Gibson at the glass. They’re suddenly all very aware that I’m the only one down here with a Resonator, and I can see it by the way they slowly step away from the operating table.

  “She’s a machine, Caleb,” Dorian explains quietly. “A convincing machine, I’ll give you that. But still a machine.”

  “Then why are Mixy’s hands covered in blood?” I ask. “You’re torturing her. Look at her!”

  Dorian glances back over his shoulder at Sola, who’s shuddering violently on the table, her voice croaking.

  “Put her under, Mixy,” Dorian orders.

  “Don’t move,” I say, training my Gibson on Mixy. But he ignores me, lumbering over to his tactile displays and swiping through several commands. A moment later, Sola’s eyes close, and her breathing slows. There are several fibrous cords running into her spine from the table.

  “Lydia,” I say, looking to her. She can barely meet my eyes, and her skin is roiling with a dark blue. “If you get your Resonator, can you close her back up?”

  “Yes,” she nods. “Synergists have nanite technology to repair damage to their gelcircuitry, but I can hasten the repair of her biological components.”

  “Do it.”

  Lydia walks over to the Carnegie’s wall and sets a palm upon it, and a moment later her Resonator is delivered to her.