Six Strings to Save the World

by Michael McSherry

  The light behind me is drowned out soon enough, and more than once I bump into Tori as we fumble our way through pitch black. “Watch where you’re putting your hands!” Tori yells at me, slapping at my wrist.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, glad that it’s dark enough that she can’t see how badly my face is burning.

  “Now I remember why we quit coming here,” Dorian says after five minutes of winding through the dark.

  “Quiet,” Lydia whispers, and we all come to a halt. “Do you hear that?”

  I train my ear to the quiet, expecting to hear some sign of Synthesizers. I do hear something, but not the machine-modulated music of the Synthesizers. It’s a piano, reverberating softly on the rock, seeming to fill the whole space around us with quiet music. I recognize the tune, a gentle, lilting thing, but can’t put my finger on it.

  “Clair de Lune,” Tori volunteers, as though she read my mind.

  “That’ll be Baahir,” Lydia’s voice floats from somewhere up ahead.

  We continue down the tunnel, on and on as the music grows. It’s not loud. But it feels so much fuller as we continue, and more than once I swear I can feel the rock underneath my feet moving, vibrating along with the gentle song. Eventually, I pick up the slightest trace of light from up ahead. The tunnel continues to widen, opening up to permit a bit of daylight from overhead.

  We emerge into a partial cavern that makes the Carnegie’s parking spot look small. Sunlight pierces through a large gap in the rock overhead. Twin waterfalls spill over the rock shelf down into the expanse, splashing down into a pool occupying half the cavern floor. The other half is a sandbar, tracing a large perimeter around the cavern.

  Half-submerged on the sandbar near us are fifty or so Autotuner aircraft. Their obsidian frames have been painted over with a mix of colors, and a few among them have been painted with flags: there’s the United States, there’s Germany, there’s Japan. As I stand next to the others, looking over this weird collection of Autotuner aircraft, Clair de Lune suddenly picks up new volume. The sand beneath our feet begins to shift and so I jump up with my Gibson, strumming a chord and hovering.

  The Autotuner ships begin moving, and for a moment I think we’re in for a fight. But it’s the sand beneath them that’s moving, carrying the ships toward the cavern walls. From the opposite side of the cavern, I hear a low rumbling, and watch as the rock there begins to shake. A moment later, the stone wall cleaves itself in two, a crack widening from the point where sand meets stone up nearly fifteen feet. I blink my eyes a few times, watching the stone around the crack start to bend like soft putty, pulling away from the crack.

  The music peaks in volume as one last note is struck, and the rock stops moving. A moment later, a middle-eastern man I recognize from the broadcast emerges, flexing his fingers and smiling broadly at us.

  “Captain. Lieutenant.” Baahir bows slightly to Dorian and Lydia. “Welcome to my little revolution.”

  * * * * *

  Baahir leads us from the cavern and farther back into the rock formation, speaking so casually that he might as well be showing us around a new apartment. “The entire island sits on a shelf of rock three kilometers long. You can see a good deal of the fauna overhead.” He gestures to a break in the rock above us, where tropical leaves cut across the light, sending shafts of sun and shadow dancing down to where we walk. “We have clean water feeding in from overhead. Insulation from Synthesizer observations below-ground. The menu here is limited to what we can catch and grow, a lot of fish and vegetables, but we get out often enough to find variety.”

  I’m struck by the way none of the tunnel formations look natural, the farther back we go. Some are so smooth and straight that you would think they were drilled and polished. “I’ve made some new arrangements,” Baahir says, gesturing around us. “Obviously. I needed to accommodate our changing circumstances.”

  “You’ve been stealing Autotuner ships,” Dorian observes.

  “I prefer the term repurposing.”

  “They’re not dangerous?” I ask.

  “Oh, they’re extremely dangerous,” Baahir explains. “That’s sort of the point. But if you’re asking whether they’re part of the Synthesizer collective anymore, then no. We’ve destroyed the processing centers within the vessel. These are merely shells, collected and repaired over the years.”

  “Shells for?” Tori prompts.

  “Rebel pilots. We’ve constructed quite the armada. This place is only one of fifty facilities.”

  “Fifty?” Lydia asks, incredulous.

  “Are you Composers so arrogant that you believed we would perish when you abandoned us?” Baahir asks. “We are strong. A cause worth dying for is like Archimedes’ lever. And we will move this world, by the end of all this.”

  “If you’re so strong,” Tori begins, her voice edging toward anger, “why didn’t you contact my dad? Why make him look for you?”

  The air of nonchalance surrounding Baahir evaporates. He stops walking and turns to us, his features fierce. “I am not a man to forget his brothers, Ms. Patel. Your father had lost a great deal and sought to protect what was left to him. You. I helped him to disappear. What would I be if I sought him out, to bring him into this war once again?”

  Tori studies her shoes sheepishly.

  “Come then,” Baahir says, turning on his heel and returning to his role of gracious host. “We’ve much left to see.”

  We walk farther down the webwork of tunnels and emerge into a second large cavern. This one is almost perfectly cubical, shaped with such precision that each angle looks like a craftsman spent hours with a chisel and hammer. Each of the walls has three levels, walkways on each level tracing the square room’s perimeter, dotted with a series of doors.

  Baahir turns and there, on the wall nearest us, is a shabby-looking upright piano. I recognize the wall, crawling with vines, as the same one I saw on Baahir’s video stream.

  “That’s your Resonator?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Baahir nods. “My Rez is a bit of an oddity. It does not manifest in the visible spectrum. It affects atomic fields, allowing me to reshape matter.” He points around the room. “I shaped our living quarters myself. What do you think?”

  “Awesome,” I mutter, still gazing about.

  A head peaks over the ledge of the highest level in the room.

  “Guten Tag!” cries a bearded man. His head disappears, but a moment later he reemerges, leaping from the ledge and plummeting toward the stone floor below him. I wince, expecting to hear a dull thud, but instead I hear the bright sweep of mandolin strums. He touches upon the ground, light-footed amidst a wash of orange-tinted Rez.

  He’s not alone. More faces appear in the doorways around us. Some old, some young. Men, women, and a few teens my own age. Their clothing is varied, distinctive, each bearing a mark from different countries and different peoples. Their greetings ring through the cavern. “Bonjour! Konnichiwa! Hola!” Most of them are carrying an instrument, and they brim with different colors of Rez. The air shimmers with all of it. Baahir greets them cheerily, calling out many by name and merely introducing us. But when Baahir places his fingers in his hand and lets loose with a harsh whistle, silence comes immediately. The rebels snap themselves into a neat formation, straight lines occupying well over half the stone floor underneath us.

  “Impressive,” Dorian mutters. He whistles abruptly, then turns to face Tori, Lydia, and me. “Well?” he asks. “Where’s your formation?”

  “Not a chance, Cap,” Lydia sighs.

  “Caleb?” a voice breaks through silence.

  The rebels’ formation parts at the middle as two people press forward across the cavern. Mom and Mr. Patel are running toward us, each of them wearing greasy, dirt-stained clothing, and both of them smiling broadly. I move without thinking, and Tori is there at my side, moving right along with me. I meet Mom and she wraps her arms around me, squeezing my face against hers.

  Tori and Mr. Patel are laughing together, huggin
g. Mr. Patel reaches over, pulling me into a tight, one-armed bear hug. And with a surprising bit of strength, all five-foot-nothing of him lifts me a few inches off the ground, shaking me from side to side.

  “Where’s Dex? Still on your ship?” Mom asks after a moment, looking across the cavern, eyes passing disinterestedly over Dorian and Lydia. The smile fades from her face when she meets my eyes, sees the worry there. “What happened?” she asks quietly.

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am,” Dorian says, stepping forward.

  “Is he dead?” Mom asks directly.

  “No, Ma’am,” Dorian shakes his head. “But he is in trouble. The Synthesizers have him.” Dorian rubs at the back of his head, struggling to make eye contact. “And he’s been infected with some sort of compound.”

  Baahir nods grimly. “So they have finished their Key.”

  “You know about the Key?” Lydia questions. “Then what can you tell us about the vault?”

  “Come with me.”

  Baahir dismisses the rebels with a wave, then leads us quickly to yet another tunnel. The air takes on a freshness as we move, crisp and tinged with ocean salt. From up ahead, I can hear the rhythmic crashing of waves against rock. We round a corner and emerge into another cave, only this one opens out to blindingly bright blue sky and ocean.

  The cave walls are covered from top to bottom in what I can only describe as computer carnage. Wires and displays have been strewn about, tucked into nooks and crannies in the rock, lengths of cabling stretching between them in a confusing web-work. Some of it looks familiar, but the majority of the tech looks alien: unfamiliar symbols flash across displays, a few beams of charged Resonance cross small distances in enclosed glass tubes. Everything buzzes in a way that shakes my bones, so low that I can barely hear it.

  The cave sits ten or fifteen feet over the ocean, and as another wave crashes at the rocks below, I see a spray of ocean water dampen the rocks nearest the opening.

  “What are you showing us?” Dorian asks, impatient.

  “This is what we’ve been up to all these years,” Baahir says. “We knew we couldn’t beat the Synthesizers outright. So we’ve been gathering intelligence—stealing it—for years. We’ve repurposed enough wreckage from Synthesizer ships to get a good processor base going. And we’ve got stations like this all over the world.”

  “The vault, Baahir,” Dorian prompts with a firm voice.

  Baahir leans over and taps one of the displays. Several dozen more monitors blink to life, bathing the entire cave in a white glow. Lines of text begins to scroll across the displays, filling the screens, some accompanied by pictures, others with complex equations.

  With a few clicks he enlarges a video file, expanding it on a central screen. The video shows some sort of large, mirror-covered cube floating over some sort of raised platform. But the mirrors are shifting and bending, running through with rainbow distortions like oil running over a roadside puddle. Every few moments, a series of large, golden characters glow brightly against the mirror surface. The symbols each rotate in unison, and after one rotation, they fade away, their gold lines sinking back into the silver. Something about the cube makes me intensely uneasy.

  Baahir raises an eyebrow. “You mean this vault?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “We’ve been trying to piece together a full picture for a while now.” Baahir leads us from display to display, pointing to random bits of information on displays like I’ll somehow understand their importance. “Getting information from Synthesizers requires a delicate touch.”

  I glare at Dorian and Lydia.

  “We think they found the Prima Maestri vault sometime in the late nineties,” Baahir continues, oblivious. “The Controller General diverted significant resources to Earth in order to find a way inside.”

  Baahir enlarges a display window and steps back as a video stream begins to play. The mirror cube is there again. This time, two Autotuners come slinking into the frame, stopping beside the mirror box. Their eyes warm to a red glow and they begin to focus two narrow beams of deep-red Rez at the box. The mirror surface gives only a slight ripple.

  “They’ve attempted several methods of cracking it,” Baahir says, gesturing at the screen. The video feed jumps to a second stream, and this time the Autotuners are pouring some liquid over the top of the cube. The liquid slides off of the cube, exploding in a cloud of steam.

  “Liquid nitrogen?” Lydia asks, pointing.

  “Yes,” Baahir nods. “The vault is apparently immune to concentrated Rez weaponry, extreme cold—as seen here—and small-scale explosives.”

  “I don’t get it,” Dorian says. “Why would the Prima Maestri leave a vault that can’t be opened?”

  “Best guess?” Baahir offers. “Whatever the Prima Maestri left inside, they didn’t think it belonged in the hands of a species that wasn’t technologically advanced enough to open it. We’re not ready.”

  “And neither are the Synthesizers,” Lydia concludes.

  “Agreed,” Baahir nods. “But they’re a tenacious lot. They kept testing. Kept prodding. And eventually they figured out something very important. A backdoor, of sorts.”

  The screen jumps again, and this time a familiar figure approaches the mirror cube: Alpha. She’s carrying a small glass dish in her hand, sealed on top. As she nears the cube, the flowing mirror surface begins to ripple violently.

  “What is it?” Tori asks.

  “Prima Maestri cells,” Baahir says, freezing the frame. “We think the Synthesizers scraped together samples from old relics. It makes sense, in a way: if the Prima Maestri made the vault, why shouldn’t a Prima Maestri be able to access it?”

  Dorian sighs and rubs at his temples. “And they’re all long dead, of course.”

  “The Synthesizers concluded that the vault needed to be opened with a live bioresonance,” Baahir nods. “A living host, resonating with a Prima Maestri genetic pattern. An elaborate counterfeit, in a way. And so the Controller General commissioned the Key: a culture of Prima Maestri cells intended to incorporate into a living host.”

  “Dex has alien DNA now?” I gape.

  “If the Synthesizers succeeded, then yes. A portion of his DNA has been rewritten and micromachinery is altering his cellular makeup. A mixture of biological and synthetic.”

  “Back up. Synthetic? Like a Synergist?”

  “Much more advanced. The Prima Maestri blended nanotechnology on a cellular level, far beyond the Synthesizers’ capabilities. The perfect marriage of animal and machine. A new biosynthology.”

  “How did you get this information?” Lydia asks.

  “We’ve been kidnapping Synergists.”

  “You’ve been doing what?!”

  “It’s not easy business.” Baahir shifts uncomfortably. “And as you can imagine, it’s been incredibly dangerous.”

  “Just tell me you know where the vault is,” Dorian demands, uncaring.

  “We’ve narrowed it down to North America.” Baahir shrugs. “As helpful as that is.”

  “How do you know they didn’t take it off planet?”

  Baahir cues another video. This time, the footage is of several Autotuners encircling the vault, straining to push or pull the cube in any direction. They move in unison, working until they start to smoke, but the cube doesn’t budge. “The Prima Maestri anchored the vault’s relative position to Earth, somehow. It’s here to stay, wherever it is.”

  “That’s good for us,” Dorian assures Baahir.

  “Even so, we have no way of finding it. I’ve exhausted every lead. Chased every thread to its end. What I lack is information.”

  “Not exactly true,” Lydia says.

  Baahir’s eyebrows raise slightly.

  “We have someone aboard the Carnegie you ought to meet.”

  * * * * *

  Dorian orders Lydia, Tori, and me to take a trip to the Carnegie to retrieve Mixy, Sola, and Dorian’s ratty old wheelchair. Mixy hates flying, apparently. He reminds me of lapdog
s held over water, the way their legs start to paddle before they even get wet. Two of Mixy’s arms do exactly that, swimming us through the air up to where Lydia and Sola wait, watching us with equally disgusted faces.

  “You’re going too fast, you madman!” Mixy bellows.

  “You’re going to fall off if you keep that up!” I yell at him over my shoulder. “Can you swim?”

  That seems to shut him up. When we finally touch down on the rock, Mixy stays low to the ground, hands spreading out to give him the broadest base possible.

  “I always hated this place, Earth-Son,” he explains. “Too much water. Far too much water!”

  “You spend all your time inside a submarine!”

  “INSIDE!”

  “Can you push me off this cliff now?” Sola asks Lydia.

  “Sorry,” she shrugs. “No can do.”

  Lydia has me push Sola in the wheelchair down a new tunnel Baahir opened. Lydia and Mixy following close behind us. Mixy rambles on about why the rock fortress is terrible, but something seems off. If I had to guess, Dorian probably gave Lydia and Mixy orders to keep an eye on me. The thought makes my skin crawl. And more than that, it makes me angry.

  We eventually enter back into the cavern plaza, where Mom, Dorian, Mr. Patel, and several other rebels are waiting.

  “You’re sure you’ve disabled her comms?” one of the rebels asks nervously. “We’ve gone through great pains to shield this place from Synthesizer observers.”

  “Do you think me an amateur?” Mixy rumbles in challenge.

  Mom walks quickly forward, blocking our progress entirely. She stops directly in front of Sola and me, then stoops down until her face is level with Sola’s. “You’re a machine?” she asks.

  “I am comprised of biological and machine components,” Sola answers flatly.

  “But you’re one of the Synthesizers.”

  “I am,” Sola nods.

  “You know that the Composers want information from you, right? And you know they’re most likely going to do terrible things to get that information from you.”