Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  Amadeu felt a tingle as it touched his skin. The fibers at the tip of the spike found each nerve at the point of insertion, and dulled them each individually. Like a secret invasion force quietly silencing guards, it pacified Amadeu’s defenses, and started to open a small aperture with minute delicacy. Parting the epidermis whilst hardly tearing a single cell of its delicate structure, the multitude of hair-thin fibers of the spike negotiated their way past capillaries and veins, moving them aside without spilling their precious contents. As the gap in Amadeu’s skin was opened, the tendrils drove ever deeper, the first already starting to flow passed the thin layer of muscle to the boney discs of his upper spine.

  In many ways they were doing what the fatter, blunter fibers in Lana’s hand had to her many victims before driving their body to mutation, but this was infinitely subtler. The spike probed Amadeu’s delicate nerve endings with needlepoint accuracy, as opposed to the chainsaw brutality Lana had brought to bear on those unfortunate enough to cross her path.

  The spike continued its way inside, drawing power through the link coming from the computer. Once it was fully inserted, with only the gel-like connective surface showing, it would form a smooth bond with the skin it had displaced and it would draw what little power it would need from the spine itself. It would only ever respond to a port like itself, and even then only at the direct bequest of its owner, Amadeu.

  But now it was just getting its purchase, getting ready to open up a line into Amadeu’s mind. Slowly but surely the fibers snaked into his spine, so slowly, so softly, they snaked up to the blue pulsing neurons and merged with them.

  Amadeu felt the base of the spike draw level with his skin, and he knew this meant that the full two inches of the spike had now wormed themselves into him. He fought a surge of instinctive repulsion at the thought. He suppressed a feeling of violation and reasoned with his desire to rip out the spike which he had just allowed to invade him.

  And then, as he wrestled with this emotion, something happened. A request.

 

  It was not on the screen. It was in Amadeu’s mind. Not heard, not in his middle ear. No, it was … written across his memory. He remembered it happening, no, he was remembering it happening as it did. Real-time memory, that was the only way to describe it. But it didn’t describe it. Amadeu saw that now. When they had experimented before, it had taken the soldier fifteen minutes just to understand he was being asked a question, ten more to understand that question, and an hour to answer that question in a way that the computer could accept.

  Amadeu settled his thoughts. He contemplated everything he knew about how his mind worked, and how the software was designed to speak to it. He braced himself for what was to come, and as he did so he envisioned the metallic spike in his neck not as a physical entity, but as a portal, a mouth to speak with, eyes to see with. A new sense. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and focused. It took him a few moments to find his tongue in this new language, but soon he isolated that part of his mind where the question had been sent to and, in a way only he truly understood, and with that part of him only he truly knew the computer was listening to, Amadeu replied.

  Amadeu: ‘open connection.’

  - - -

  Lana moved her fingers as part of a full systems check. The smaller two fingers of her left hand were still not responding properly. As the fist went to clench, they instead bent backward and out in a horrible mockery of the human hand they were supposed to replicate. She looked at them, and queried her machine mind as to how long it would take to repair them. They were cracked at the skeletal level, as bad as the damages she had incurred in King’s Bay, if less widespread, and the machine estimated eleven days without further movement of those joints.

  She cursed and noted the date, setting a limit on further action till they were locked back into place. She rose tentatively from her hiding position, shaking off the mud and debris she had used to hide from scans from above, and scanned her position. She started with passive scans, in case a team was nearby, and then went to active sensors.

  Comfortable that she was alone, she stood and began to make her way across the late evening toward a nearby town. After a little over a mile, she came to a telephone pole. She tested its sturdiness before applying her weight, and then shimmied up the pole. At the top, she clapped onto the wire with her good hand and used the forefinger of her other hand to link with the wire.

  Connection was quick and smooth, her internal systems less affected by the battle than her external ones were. It had already been a week since the fight, and still she was far from whole again. But she would get there soon enough, she calmed herself by saying. She scrolled through various cable channels. News programs flashed across her mind.

  Riots in New York, protests in San Francisco. Two militia groups in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had sent mailed declarations of independence to their governor, and several police officers had been killed in the ensuing standoffs. The New York Stock Exchange had reopened briefly to allow a balancing of annual budgets but closed again after strictly limited trading. The new president had fixed prices to stop hyperinflation, and the National Guard were doing spot checks on supermarkets and guarding deliveries of basic groceries.

  She smiled vaguely at this news. A pleasant by-product of her efforts, but not what she needed now. Tapping into the phone system, she hacked a local substation and made a fake call to a number in Vermont. The call was rerouted automatically to a number in Reston, Virginia. A voice answered. It greeted the caller and a mild-mannered conversation ensued between a mother and her daughter away at college. But this was not a real conversation, and the mother and daughter did not exist. Hidden within the unobtrusive static that quietly popped and crackled on the line was a second signal. The mother was Lana, the daughter was her bug loitering in Saul Moskowitz’s house. The download of information was long and slow, the method horribly limited, but soon Lana was trolling through the details of Saul’s past few days at work and at home.

  Her machine mind was sorting and arranging the data into neat little packets, cross-referencing subjects and names, categorizing and analyzing the information as quickly as it could come through the slow link. It was well ahead of the flow when the name came through, and recognition was instantaneous.

  Neal. The file opened without prompt, such was the level of priority set by Lana on any information pertaining to his whereabouts. The recorded conversation was spotty. It was between Saul and someone on his office phone. The machine tracking Saul was under strict instructions to remain passive when inside Ayala’s team’s headquarters. The place was rigged with the most persnickety of detection devices, and any unknown signal would set off alarms that would have them soon closing the tap on her little font of information.

  But though one-sided, the conversation was nonetheless informative. They were moving Neal, that much was clear, Saul was to arrange transport for Neal’s affects to a location in Colorado. Neal would travel separately under close guard. Saul was to arrange things for four days from now. Neal would be moved before then.

  She analyzed the information as the last of the updates streamed into her system. Details of the way Saul was going to ship Neal’s effects. Details of the timing and hints at the destination, but no more on the arrangements for Neal himself. The upload complete, the mother and her daughter said their goodbyes and the conversation ended, Lana dropping to the soil next to the pole’s base.

  She considered the timing. He would be moved within the next four days. She would never have as good a chance at him as when he was in transit, but getting close to enough to follow him would be difficult, and she had no intention of going anywhere near the White House again, not since Ayala’s teams had been so reinforced. That said, she could follow the package Saul was preparing straight to its destination. She knew when and how it was going to be shipped. She knew its rough destination. It would take her right to her target.

  Four days. She glanced at her two bro
ken fingers. Seizing them with her good hand, she deployed her weapons array and fired at the already damaged armor at their base. Bending back with all her force, they slowly started to snap, the material around their base giving under the force.

  Once the armor around them started to give, they came away smoothly, her black skin finally tearing as she ripped her dead fingers from her body. She only had four days. She had no time for the vestigial little fingers to heal and no need for them anyway. She initiated the process of sealing the stubs left by her blunt surgery and set off to get in position. She needed to carefully maneuver herself into a strategic spot to intercept the delivery Saul was arranging. As she jogged away, she tossed the two fingers to the ground without qualm.

  - - -

  Amadeu wandered out of his office. He felt slightly discombobulated. He looked left and right, but his vision of the corridor was blurry, like a fog was blocking his view. No, not a fog, more like a wall of cloud. He pushed at the cloudwall and it was cold, like ice crystals touching the tips of his fingers. He thought of the heat of his body, and he pushed through the crystals, feeling them melt against him. Seeing the way they melted away at his touch, he swished his arms through the cloud, wafting it outward and clearing the hallway.

  His vision open, he looked up and down the corridor again. No one was there. He felt like he should be expecting someone. Like a visitor should be arriving any moment. He moved on, hoping to meet them. He came to the building’s entrance. A guard sat there. Amadeu said good morning, but the guard did not acknowledge him. Outside the building, he looked left and right again. Again there seemed to be a fog, but as he thought of his internal warmth and shook his head, the fog lifted, more easily this time, and he panned around. He saw the entrance to the covered bridge ahead of him. The bridge led away from the mainland peninsula he and his colleagues worked on, to the fortress island. To the SpacePort. He thought of the SpacePort and decided to go there.

  He was at the SpacePort. The wall was thick here, not crystals but a sheer block of ice that chilled him when he touched it. It did not give. He worried that he was going blind, but when he thought of it, he knew that his eyes were not the problem. He did not know why, but he knew it was true. He stepped around the edges of the ice wall, and looked for a gap in its cold edifice. He stepped back and he was a thousand feet away, surveying the fortress as a whole. He skated around it, parts of it hidden from him, parts of it covered by a loose fog, parts open. He saw an entrance and stepped into an open door, finding himself in the air-conditioning ducts of the building. He jumped from one fan to the other, aware of his position but blind to his surroundings. He could feel temperature and humidity, he could feel the air as it passed through the system, but he could not see it.

  At last his eyes opened. No, only one eye, and he could not move it, but he could see the inside of the great chamber at the heart of the fortress. He could see the Climber, the powerful machine designed to climb the tether, carrying cargo into space. He tried to go to the machine. He tried to study its design, to view it with the critical eye of someone who had participated in its design, but again the fog came, solidifying to ice at key points as he tried to focus on the machine.

  Frustrated, he looked for that part he knew best: the machine that controlled it, the simple, non-invasive interface that he had designed for the pilots and engineers to master the complex and powerful machine. Finding it, he saw it was clear, a hint of fog vanishing as his hot eyes focused on it, and suddenly he was in the machine. He looked out, and he felt the bounds of the machine as if it was his own skin.

  The climber was essentially a fat cylinder, forty feet high, twenty feet across, with smooth walls. At its top, it began to taper, thinning to ten feet across. A series of flaps arranging like a flower were able to close and form a point around the cable, smoothing the aerodynamics of the craft as it drove up the tether that it was built to ride. On one side, a series of flaps running from the top of the craft to the bottom were open, allowing the climber to be slid around the base of the tether, accepting it into the craft. As the machine enveloped the tether, the flaps closed.

  Inside the car, two long lines of big, thick rubber tires lay open like a mouth turned on its side, its rubber teeth ready to clamp down on the tether as it slid into place between them. In total, eighteen tires, nine on each side, ran from the top to the bottom of the cylinder’s inside. When the cylinder was in place around the bottom of the tether, then the wheels came together, gripping the nanotube with their malleable but ardent teeth, and the climber was ready. The rest of the engine car’s space was taken up by the drives that powered the big wheels, all linked to the main fusion generator, a second backup waiting to take the load, if, for some reason, the first failed.

  Amadeu saw the technicians working through the battery of final tests. He felt the pop, tickle, and surge of systems flexing in final preparation. And, seemingly in seconds, the machine was counting down, the gantries were pulling back, and the heavy cylinder began rising up the cable, lifting off the two great trolleys that had slid it into place.

  He felt a tug. Like gravity was trying to stop the machine from rising. But not gravity. He could feel that the machine was working perfectly. No, the tug was not on the machine that he was rising with, it was on him.

  There was language.

  Suddenly words came and he looked at them, seeing their strange shapes and knowing that they held meaning. Knowing even that he knew what that meaning was. He looked at them, and then he felt a part of himself talking to him. No, not a part of himself, he was asking himself a question, he was trying to tell himself what the letters meant.

 

  Yes.

  He looked at himself. He nodded to the version of himself that spoke this language, and then he saw that other part of himself talking to someone else.

  “Yes,” it told them. He wanted to see who he was talking to, and instantly he was sitting in his office again. Birgit was in front of him. She looked unhappy. His head swam as his world refocused, and he reclaimed his own senses, a spring of bile begging to rise at the sudden shift in perspective.

  “What did you do?” Birgit said to him, angry and concerned all at once.

  “I … errr …” a laugh escaped his lips as realization came, “I was talking to the machine.”

  He was stunned. She thought she understood; he had connected with the machine, he had conversed with it. But she didn’t understand, and as she fussed over him, he gripped her shoulders and she stopped, looking into his eyes, stunned, perhaps a little afraid.

  “I did it, Birgit. Not just connection, I was in the machine. I was over in the fortress, I was in the climber as they prepped it. I was in it as it lifted off. I was in the corridor cameras, the front door security system. The air conditioners.” He laughed again as she started to grasp what he was saying, seeing past his mania to the simple joy that was fueling it.

  “Birgit,” he said, at last, “I looked out from the camera on some technician’s laptop as it faced the climber and then at will I leapt into it through the network, finding those systems I had designed and … the fog … the walls … I’ll never call them firewalls again …” he laughed again, “… Icewalls, the walls fell as my mind worked into those systems I had access to, either because they were not well protected or because I had worked on them and knew the passwords.”

  His intuitive mind had interpreted the system security as haze, some of which he could pass through, some more impenetrable. Simple systems had opened to his highly computer literate mind with ease, more secure ones had been more difficult, but the fog had been clearest on those systems he had designed himself. As the artistic side of his brain had encountered visual blocks, his logical left-brain had been hacking as only it knew how, talking with those systems it knew best and clearing the way.

  He had been one with the machine. At the end, Birgit had been speaking with his logical left-brain, and he had been forced to use it to understand and reply to
her. That was a little disturbing. Without that conversation, he wouldn’t have even known he was under; heck, he hadn’t even truly realized he wasn’t in his body, not truly. His right brain just made the leap. He needed an anchor, clearly. He would have to work on that.

  And as he thought this thought, the computer to his side flickered to life, and code started flashing across the screen. He looked at it and Birgit followed his stare.

  “What is it doing?” she asked, her voice tinged with concern as she fretted over the link.

  Amadeu was confused at first, then he realized, “Not ‘it.’ Me,” he said, “I am studying the program, my right brain is working with my left brain to interpret the code driving the interface, and telling it what it needs. It needs my left brain to translate for it, I can feel them talking.” He laughed again, amazed at the sensation, the code slowing as his attention veered toward the conversation he was having with Birgit.

  Usually the left-brain is the core of what we feel we are. He could see it much more clearly now. When people refer to their conscious and subconscious minds, they really mean their left and right brains. The vast majority of people have trouble listening to their intuitive right brains, women are inherently better at it than men, thus women’s intuition.

  Occasionally some people think more with their right brains than with their left. They are often our greatest artists. They are also often considered insane. But the biggest difference is with age. We forget how to listen to our right brains with time. We imprison them with logic and prejudice until our greatest source of creativity and brilliance is locked behind a wall of assumption and primitive common sense, and then it is heard only as an echo.