The Justar Journal: An AOI Thriller

by Brandt Legg

  The man pointed in the direction the woman had left with Fye as they began to run. It was frustratingly slow for Grandyn, since he had to continually ease back his pace to allow the rebel to catch up, but there was nothing else he could do. The description of the entrance to the PAWN center, which the man gave him as they jogged through the trees was insanely intricate, and Grandyn believed what the woman had said; that he’d never find it alone. He just hoped they’d both make it there. Grunges could be anywhere, and although Grandyn could run silently, his companion absolutely could not, and as they continued to climb in elevation, the trip got even more sluggish. The rebel was not in bad shape, but the exertion at 1800 meters above sea level had him huffing and puffing. Grandyn was now, at least, mostly dry.

  Finally, after one two-minute rest and a long sixty-five minutes after they began their journey, the rebel announced they were close. It took another eight minutes to navigate the labyrinth of traps and hidden entrances before they were at the final door. By then they were in a subchamber, four meters underground. The man’s retina scan got him and Grandyn in, and the people inside were already expecting them.

  Once they’d cleared the last of the entrance doors, Fuller, the woman who’d taken Fye, was waiting. “She’s fine,” were her first words to Grandyn.

  “Take me to her.”

  “Of course, but you can’t go into the medical wing like this.” She motioned to his clothes and he looked down at the dirt and leaves plastered to his sweaty body.

  “Take me to her,” he repeated.

  “Grandyn, they won’t let you in. She’s fine. Take ten minutes to clean up.”

  She started walking down the corridor. The walls were a silvery gray, with soft lighting. It appeared to be construction similar to the smaller POPs where the walls and rooms were built in modules and dropped in place before they were buried, but this one was much bigger, and more elaborate. As he followed her, he counted eighteen side corridors, and they were nowhere near the end of the main hall.

  “You can shower in there,” she said, pointing into a small room. “At the other side of that wall you’ll find a rack of clean Tekfabrik jumpsuits.”

  Grandyn took one more look down the hall, wondering if he could find her by himself, imagining confronting armed guards. He ducked into the shower room, and less than five minutes later emerged looking like a new man. In the shower his mind had wandered from Fye to their baby, which Fuller had said nothing about. It was his first question when he found her waiting in the hall.

  “I’m sorry, Grandyn . . . She lost the baby.”

  They’d murdered another Happerman. He wanted to cry. He wanted to collapse onto the hard floor. He wanted to kill every AOI agent in the world.

  “Take me to her!”

  In less than a minute they arrived at the medical wing. There were no guards, nothing that would have stopped him from going inside. Twenty-eight beds lined the two sides of the long narrow room. Only a few were empty. An operating room was at the far end, and a smaller room off the entrance was filled with medical supplies on shelves and in cabinets.

  Fuller took him to Fye and then left them alone. He stared for a moment, her face gaunt and pale. She looked empty.

  Fye started to cry when she saw him, gently at first, but then, as he climbed in the bed and held her, she sobbed heavily. “We lost the baby,” she whispered between the tears.

  “I know. I know.”

  She held him tight. They lay together that way until her tears ran out about ten minutes later. He’d been unable to cry. It was all he could do not to head back out into the forest and start hunting grunges.

  “We can try again,” she said softly.

  “Yes, we will. I love you.”

  A few minutes later Fuller appeared. “We’ve informed upper-command that you’re here. Chelle Andreas sends her regards, and has ordered an escort be provided whenever you’re ready to leave. She’d send a Flo-wing, but the AOI is shooting everything out of the sky. She did authorize armed AirSliders for both of you.

  “We need to go as soon as possible,” Grandyn replied.

  “The doctor would like her to stay put and rest for three days,” Fuller said.

  Grandyn looked at Fye.

  “I’ll be fine in a few hours,” she argued.

  The doctor was consulted and said she should not travel for at least thirty-six hours. He gave her something to make her sleep.

  While Fye was out, Fuller took Grandyn on a tour of the underground center. It was expansive, one of PAWN’s oldest, and among the larger facilities.

  “In the second part of the century, PAWN changed their tactics and opted for more numerous and much smaller POPs,” Fuller explained.

  Grandyn studied maps of the area and planned a route to their destination in the California mountains. He also watched the war updates. It was one horrific scene after another, but four hours into Fye’s slumber, the news abruptly changed.

  It appeared as if the AOI had stopped. There were no major bombings, and no new outbreaks reported. Were they waiting for something to happen? Were they trying to bait PAWN into coming out? The entire PAWN center was buzzing with questions.

  Then, an hour later, an intercepted AOI communication changed everything.

  “Get the doctor to give Fye a wakeup shot,” Grandyn told Fuller. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  She made no attempt to stop him.

  When Fye woke, Grandyn explained the developments. She agreed that if they were going to have any chance at making it to the City, they would have to leave immediately.

  Chapter 46 - Book 3

  The Chief was furious. The Trapciers had been compromised. It had to have been either Blaise Cortez or Deuce Lipton behind the attack. Deuce had the technology to be able to change the program which controlled the INU-bio interface the Imps relied on to allow their human-thinking minds to mesh with the machine form, but Blaise, as the inventor of the entire DesTIn system, and so closely involved with the Imps, was even more likely to be the culprit.

  Either way, it didn’t matter at this point which one had done it. She had no proof, and no solid method of retaliation. The AOI didn’t even know where either of them was and, without the Trapciers intel and analysis, she had bigger problems. Much bigger. Her war plan was suddenly in disarray.

  She was actually correct in that both men were involved, although Deuce only indirectly, when he agreed to provide the satellite. When Blaise had first developed DesTIn, he’d installed a “back-door,” through which he could extract information. Deuce’s top engineers had, long ago, discovered the “flaw,” and corrected it on all their installations. DesTIn was an indispensable program, and widely used. Deuce decided not to broadcast the presence of the issue, knowing that one day he might need some of the data Blaise would be able to collect. The Imps had never detected it.

  Every Imp, CHRUDE, and even some high-end cyborgs were based on DesTIn, and therefore possessed the code. Blaise developed a new program that also allowed him to crash their systems, which were previously believed to be completely secure. The move effectively rendered all of the CHRUDEs useless, and turned Imps back into regular Traditionals, or, as he told an assistant, “The Imps are now like humans with a bad headache.”

  It was impossible to know how long it would last. It could be days, or as little as twelve hours. Blaise would have about a fifteen-minute warning before the Trapciers were up and running again. In the meantime, he had a second use for the satellite. He needed to find the “great TreeRunner,” as he often called Grandyn. His hope was that he could locate Grandyn and Fye and then follow them straight to the List Keepers.

  Earlier in the day, Blaise had written a DesTIn program to track Grandyn. It ran billions of variables and computed every possible route and destination. Utilizing unauthorized KEL data and AOI military global overlays to formulate historical patterns and extrapolated data to applied radiuses. He caught a break by retroactively mapping movements along the coastlines from
Deuce’s Ryder Island, and eventually traced images that showed Grandyn, Fye, and Twain coming ashore in a small powerboat near the redwoods. From there, he tried to track Deuce’s larger vessel, but it disappeared less than forty meters from the beach. Blaise, extremely impressed, shook his head.

  “Deuce ought to be running the world,” he said to himself. “I’d do a much better job, but he’d be good, too . . . and, at least people find him likeable.”

  As the program continued to search for Grandyn, the husband and wife team working on the Chief-assassination plan appeared at his office door. He’d moved his entire human team to this new location after the Imps’ betrayal. The place was completely untraceable to him; a small building that, according to the signage on the blue-painted metal exterior, claimed to be a health research firm, but instead housed a “wizard’s workshop” of VMs, INUs strung together, and other gadgetry understood by no one but Blaise and a few assistants. The interior, comprising a series of glass rooms, contained a million kilometers of wires and tubes, half of which were part of his anti-monitoring, anti-detection defenses. The other half were used for the opposite purpose of monitoring and detecting his targets. Blaise liked the place, and although machines made him feel comfortable, the Imps weren’t missed.

  “We have an idea,” the husband said. Miner had provided information on where the Chief was holed up. A special bunker had been constructed near Washington, DC, and not only was it ultra-secure, it would also enable her to survive down there for as long as a year. Supplies, communications, air, and water were all self-contained.

  “It needs to be more than an idea,” Blaise replied. “With all the special features and precautions she’s got built into her subterranean world, you’ll need help from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.”

  “If she’s really in the Washington bunker,” the wife began, “we can destroy it by reprograming one of the AOI drones and dropping one of her own Sonic-bombs right on top of her.”

  Blaise smiled. “Poetic justice to be sure, but the only possibility would be to find a drone with a payload intended for a nearby city, somehow access and override the launch protocols, which are the most secure on earth, and of course, it could only be done in midflight, after which you’d then have to redirect the flight plan without detection while avoiding all of Washington’s air defenses.”

  “Correct,” the husband said. “We think it can be done.”

  “Excellent,” Blaise replied. “I always relish achieving the impossible. Show me.”

  The woman pulled up a VM and began a simulation of the mission. “The bunker might survive,” she said. “Sonic-bombs had been developed long before the bunker was built, so they may have factored that into construction design.”

  “If they could,” Blaise said. “Look at what those bombs are doing around the world right now. It may not be possible to build something to withstand them.”

  “Yes,” the man said. “That’s why we like this idea. The bomb is intensely powerful, and because none of their enemies possess it, or anything close, they might have foregone the precaution.”

  “Your plan is ambitious, and according to your own scenarios, the odds of success are only fifty-four percent,” Blaise said. “What is your backup?”

  “We could use someone on the inside to get to her. We have assets,” the man said.

  Blaise, of course, knew this. He had long used and paid informants inside the AOI. The information was very valuable, particularly times and places of raids, suspects, and other activity that could save his clients’ lives or property. But the likelihood of getting one of the moles into the Chief’s bunker seemed extremely unlikely. The airstrike was a better plan.

  “Stick to the bombing,” Blaise said. “Make sure it works.”

  The Chief dusted off her original war plan, the one she’d spent years working on before the Imps handed her a foolproof version created by the highest forms of intelligence. The Trapciers’ script, as they called it, had run trillions of scenarios and had taken into account every imaginable datapoint from air temperature, to the accuracy of lasershods when fired from every distance, to death rates, plague-spread paths, LEV speed, KEL footage, and billions of other inputs. A few more days and it would have been over, but someone had to screw with her Imps.

  “Damn them!”

  She now saw her original plan as inept, but there were many salvageable aspects that could now be implemented. The Chief ordered the burning of all the forests in California, Oregon, and Washington Areas. At the same time, mass numbers of Breeze-Blowers were deployed. The dust-sized computers, equipped with video transmitters, which would blow along with the wind, would make hiding much more difficult for the rebels. But that was only the beginning.

  In recent months, manufacturing had also been stepped up on swarm-drones, monitoring-mimic-drones, and neuron-mites. She may have lost her robotic brain trust, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t use machines to obliterate the enemy. Her final move was to order more plague.

  “We’ll see how the Council likes that,” she said to herself. “I think all of Missouri Area is about to get sick. Oh, is that where the Chairman lives? How unfortunate.”

  Chapter 47 - Book 3

  Lance toasted Sarlo. “The Trapciers are on the ropes and the Chief appears suddenly lost,” he said cheerfully.

  “I don’t think I can celebrate after all of the horrors I’ve witnessed in this sadistic war,” Sarlo said sadly. “And it’s not going to stop. All this reprieve does is give PAWN a chance to blast the AOI back . . . and us. What damage is P-Force going to do now that there’s an opening?”

  “We will return the peace,” he said, ignoring her rhetorical question. She knew what P-Force was about to do. “And I’m sure one of the assassins will succeed. The Chief can’t survive this. I understand even the Council is worried that she’s gone too far. And what do you think Deuce is thinking? He’s also got to be trying to take her out. He can’t sit by and watch as she destroys the whole world.”

  Looking at the VMs, Sarlo said, “How are we ever going to recover?”

  “We rebuilt after the Banoff. We’ll do it again.”

  “The Banoff plague killed billions, but in five years. Even the Banoff war didn’t do anything close to the kind of damage the Chief has done in the last two days.”

  “I hate the woman, but she isn’t the only one to blame. The Trapciers, those filthy Imps, are using her to try to take over.”

  “I just don’t believe it,” Sarlo said, shaking her head.

  “How can you say that? Look at what they’re doing. We’re Traditionals. They want to either kill us all or, at the very least, enslave us all.”

  “Why?”

  “So they can rule the world,” Miner said, looking out at the Toronto skyline.

  “Then why not just eliminate us and make a billion androids?”

  “That’s probably just what they intend,” Miner sneered. “This is only the beginning. A week from now, how many humans will be left? Then they’ll need the AOI out of their way, and I bet the Imps will kill the Chief for us. But by then it won’t matter anymore.”

  “I disagree,” she said, taking a meal from a serving bot and then sending it to Miner.

  “I know.”

  Miner wasn’t used to her total opposition to any of his views. Sometimes she looked at an issue slightly differently. Her fresh perspective helped illuminate a point he might otherwise have missed, and her input ended up making his position stronger. But in this case, he believed her to be absolutely wrong. He wanted to change the subject.

  “You know, if these damned List Keepers are really as great and powerful as some people seem to think, what the hell are they doing? Just watching the world die?”

  “Maybe they don’t exist,” Sarlo said. “Or maybe they were all wiped out in one of the first waves of Sonic-bombs. If they were real, the Trapciers and the AOI would surely have seen them as a threat and wiped them out early. I mean look at this bloodba
th.” She quickly enlarged several VMs showing summaries of the AOI bombings. “These aren’t all PAWN positions, or even people opposed to the Aylantik. Why is she hitting all these places? How is the Chief choosing her targets?”

  “It’s those freaks you like so much,” Miner snapped. “I’m telling you the Imps want to kill us all.”

  “Last week they were helping you.”

  “Were they? It’s all part of their plan. I don’t know why you don’t realize what’s going on. They’re a lot smarter than the rest of us, and they have been directing the war. Why? How the hell should I know why or what, I just know they are!”

  Sarlo turned to the live feeds from P-Force. They had ten dedicated screens constantly rotating the increasing activities of Miner’s private army. They had been doing a remarkable job of avoiding detection – a combination of tactics, training, technology, and luck.

  “They still haven’t found the Trapciers?”

  “Not yet, but now that the Imps are down, we’re going to have a big night. You heard the captain.” Only minutes earlier, Miner had reviewed and approved plans with the captain of P-Force. Guerilla attacks were scheduled for that night in forty-three locations. “If PAWN gets into it tonight, and with the Trapciers out of commission, I’m sure they will. It’s going to be quite a different wake-up for the Chief in the morning.”

  “She’s sure to be expecting it. She’s been waiting for counterattacks. Even without her Imp advisors, the Chief has certainly had a plan in place from the start, ready to deal with whatever P-Force and PAWN throw at her. We need Deuce,” Sarlo said, feeling the irony in her words, knowing they would taste extra bitter on Miner’s lips. The man they had tried to destroy for years was the one most able to save them.

  Chapter 48 - Book 3

  Fye would not even consider staying at the Crater Lake PAWN center once they had intercepted AOI orders to torch all the forests in California, Oregon, and Washington Areas. The Chief had apparently grown impatient, and was desperate to flush out the rebels. Fye and Grandyn knew that with the forests in flames, they would never make it to the City buried deep within one of North America’s largest wilderness areas. The doctor implored Fye not to go, but she could not be swayed.