Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Only your consciousness survives. And they do a pretty good job at erasing any memories that don’t serve their purpose along the way. That’s why every time I appear to you, you seem equally shocked, because of that memory they implanted inside your mind; the one where I supposedly died in your arms.
If this is Ahmed trying to feck with my mind, it’s working like a charm. I feel rattled to the bone. What does this all mean? If any of this is true, how come I don’t know about it?
You and I aren’t married?
We are, just not the way your mind thinks. I can’t tell you more than this right now but understand this: they’ve been playing you like a pawn, Cole. Just like they do with everyone else on this planet. We’ve been lied to for centuries, but now, with the high level of tech we’ve reached, they can do it without us even realizing it’s happening. That’s why we fight them, Cole; we need to destroy this system to build a new one from the ashes of the old, rotten system. Can you understand that?
I’m not nuking an entire city to make a statement, and neither should you! No matter how bad this world is, killing innocents by the millions is not the answer!
Who said anything about this being our nuke? They planted that nuke, Cole. They got to Al’Hasi and they gave him everything he ever wanted: an army of fanatics, the latest gen weapons, and all the information he needs to defeat you. He’s always wanted to wage his own little war, so it wasn’t too difficult to get him on their side. Heck, he probably thought it would help the cause initially but he let his thirst for power get the better of him in the end. How do you think he is always a step ahead of you? We are trying to turn the nuke into a large EMP weapon that will disable the entire city, including its central AI.
We’ll then be able to retake some measure of control over our lives. If you fail this mission, if we don’t manage to detonate the EMP, then they’ll blow the nuke, and if it’s not this one, they’ll blow another one and make it look like we did it. We’re not mindless terrorists like Ahmed has become, Cole. We just want humanity to regain its freedom, the true freedom we lost so long ago.”
If that is true why do the megacorporations bother with the Rewind program? What’s the point exactly?
Long ago, men in power all around the world understood that terrorism generates so much fear in the heart of the population that its very existence, in fact, allows them to pass any law they desired under the guise of protecting them from this scourge. In fact, they could impose any new idea and measure of control they wanted, in the name of fighting terrorism. And while original terrorism was indeed a problem, it was never as bad as what it became over time with the help of very high-placed officials who used it for their own devices. It’s easier to have the people submit to any new measure, no matter how ridiculous it may sound, when they are afraid for their lives.
So when they saw how effective it was to get people to embrace war in the name of defeating terrorism, they started staging horrible acts of their own, acts in fact that terrorists with limited weaponry and resources could never have pulled off on their own. They got the help they needed from our own so-called governments back then to use terror as an excuse to impose new laws, and to shape the world the way they wanted it, with the people’ support because of fear.
My thoughts are so scrambled by her words I don’t know what to think anymore. A part of me wants nothing more than to believe her, which would mean she is still alive and that I can perhaps see her again. Then again, there’s that little thing about me dying soon that doesn’t make me so happy.
No, feck this shit. This has to be a trick. They know Tanya and I are about to stop them so they try to trick me; it’s their last measure of despair.
“Shut up!” I shout out loud this time.
“What’s happening, Cole?” asks Tanya with palpable worry in her synthesized tone.
I wonder what my next move should be. Do I tell Tanya? What if any of this is true? Then she could be working with them, perhaps not knowingly. Maybe she’s a watchdog, making sure I do what I’m asked, or she takes over like she just did.
I’m getting paranoid now; my thoughts and emotions overload my mind completely. I can’t even hear the blaster fire and rockets being thrown at us anymore.
“Nothing, Tanya. Sorry. What’s our status?”
“Only a minute or so left. This thing is well built, one layer of security on top of another. It’s been designed to be tamper-proof.”
“Can you detect any radiation emanating from the device?”
“I can’t, Cole, but it’s probably perfectly shielded in the core, the way it should be. I can’t access the core without putting both of us in mortal danger.”
The more questions I ask myself the less it all makes sense.
Cole, listen to me, adds Vassiliki.
I feel like putting my hands on my ears but I forget I’m not in control of my own body right now. In fact, I’m not in control of anything anymore. Right this instant I’m shaken to the core, completely lost and paralyzed. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. My dead wife, who apparently isn’t dead, is telling me I’m doing everything wrong by following orders, something I’ve done all my life as a career military officer. And that no matter what I do, I’m dead anyway cause I time traveled and my body will expire in about three hundred minutes or so. Then there’s the possibility that I could be working for the wrong side altogether. I feel like my head is about to explode. Literally.
Look into your heart, Cole. Forget your brain and your thoughts; they fecked with that part of your being so much they have you running on auto-pilot. You can’t trust any of it. You must feel it on some level, Cole, that you were always a great soldier, one with integrity. You never just followed an order blindly, yet lately, it’s the story of your life, isn’t it? Just listen to the sound of my voice, and just feel my every word. You are going to die today, no matter what happens next. Now knowing that, the question you must ask yourself is: do you want to die doing the megacorporations’ dirty work, ensuring humankind’s slavery for more centuries to come, or do you want to do something about it?
There is no way I can make an informed decision anymore. Both my life as I perceive it and what Vassiliki’s telling me ring true. It’s a 50/50 type of deal. I got to trust either my gut or my heart. But even if I do so, I have only a handful of seconds to make a choice. You’d think knowing that I’m going to die with certainty would make this easier. Yet, my conscious self is rejecting this notion with everything it’s got. It’s shouting at me, telling me that I’m only going to die if I listen to her lies. This must be what it feels like to lose it, to become a loony and have one’s brain fried.
The countdown on the nuke or EMP—I still haven’t have decided which is which now—is down to forty-two seconds. The shields are blinking heavily around us. If I am to do something I’ll need to do it fast.
I must decide now. Do I stay the course and complete my mission like I remember doing from dozens of times before? Or do I take a leap of faith and trust what I think I’ve learned today?
C H A P T E R
XVIII
Mission completion time: T minus 27 minutes.
I realize I have no other choice. Time has run out, and the only way I can make a decision and act on it is to activate bullet-time. It will slow time to a crawl and allow me more time to make this decision. I send the mental command to my neuronal augment.
“Why are you activating bullet-time, Cole?” says Tanya sharply.
“I need more time to think.”
“To think? What the hell, Cole? You said you weren’t willing to use it because your ass is on the line and now you want to use it to think? What am I missing?”
“Look, we’ll talk about this later; for now just concentrate on what you’re doing.”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” says Tanya.
Join the fecking club.
“Radio silence until I make contact again. Co
nfirm?”
“Whatever,” Tanya answers, clearly pissed at me.
I can’t blame her.
The countdown on the device seemingly stops at thirty-seven seconds. There are flames all around me that look suspended in time. They still move but so slow it’s a tantalizing view. The flames are a result of the multiple rockets exploding outside the shield cover provided by the overlapping drones.
I am still unable to think straight and the injection of the cocktail of drugs allowing my brain and reflexes to be augmented drastically doesn’t help me at first. At the very least I have more time to think now, no matter how lost and strange I feel.
I wonder if Vassiliki can talk to me in bullet-time like Tanya can. I can feel her still working to diffuse the device’s mechanism, now with improved accuracy thanks to bullet-time. I wonder how long I have. And I wish I knew whom I can trust right now. My world has been flipped upside down and I don’t know who or what to believe anymore. Of all the way things could have gone wrong today, this feels like the worst possible outcome since I don’t even trust myself anymore. My heart is telling me that Vassiliki is telling the truth, and my brain is telling me I’m being used to do the terrorists’ bidding. I wonder if by the end of the day I will have an answer. I’m not sure I’ll like it, but it would be nice to know what the feck is going on. Cause right now I feel trapped in an LSD-infused nightmare gone very, very wrong.
I’m still here, Vassiliki says.
How?
You must at least have figured that one out, Cole. The only way I can talk to you is through a backdoor to Tanya’s programming. I once worked with you at Rewind where I designed her for you. Just like you, I thought I was fighting horrible men intent on killing innocents. And while there are still some out there like Ahmed, today this is not what this is about. While you stopping Al’Hasi is important, we’re trying to get some of our freedom back. The world has been conspiring against us for as long as we can remember; our parents, and their parents too. So on and so forth, Cole. It all started in the first half of the twentieth century. Governments found a way to subjectively take control of our lives, one idea at a time. The human psyche is both strong and weak. It can easily be influenced and manipulated, and when television came to being, well, a high-placed, controlling group of men went to work to exploit it to achieve their nefarious goals. Through television and misinformation they convinced us war was good.
Why do you think that news presenters and influential people are pretty, Cole? That’s because our brains are programmed to trust handsome people. So it didn’t matter what these people said, as long as they repeated it enough times, hammering the information in, it eventually sank into our subconscious minds and became truth.
I felt like a battleship was hammering into my skull. Some of what she was saying rang so true that my entire being tickled and trembled at the implication of it all.
So, what are you saying? The world has gone to shit so you want me to team up with you and rebel against it?
In a manner of speaking. It may certainly seem so from your perspective, but in fact you’d simply be freeing yourself from a system that has vowed, long since you were born, to control everything you do. What you eat, what you think, and what you want in life.
What about Al-Hasi? Is he trying to help this goal?
Once upon a time I thought so. But Al’Hasi has lost his way. Once upon a time he wanted that change too, but now he’s willing to kill millions in order to trigger that change. And that provides the megacorporations with a perfect opportunity to use him so he does their bidding.
He told me he works for you; maybe not in so many words, but he clearly implied it.
And at some level he probably thinks he is. He got approached by the megacorporations and now he thinks he is using them to free the people, while they are manipulating him instead.
So what do I do with him and his goons?
That part of your mission you can still complete. In fact, I encourage you too. Ahmed has become a dangerous zealot. His armed troops are nothing but thugs thinking they’re freedom fighters while, in reality, they are working for the system.
Okay, so let’s say for the sake of argument that I believe you. You need me to blow up that EMP which could very well be a nuke. How can I trust I’m making the right choice here?
This IS a nuke, Cole! Make no mistake about that. It’s been sent here by the megacorporations; they used Al’Hasi like they use everybody to do their dirty work for them. They want to make of New Geneva an example for the rest of the world, especially now that there is a new resource crisis looming, so eradicating a city is that many less mouths to feed. More and more people are fed up with eating protein food bars, working ten to twelve hour shifts six days a week while others live in luxury. The megacorporations know they’ve pushed us too far, Cole. We’re almost ready to rebel now, and so they want to use fear so people fall back in line again. It’s the same cycle over and over. But since things are bad and the general population is feeling that it can’t go on like this for much longer, they need to send a message, and that is what this nuke is all about.
I get the picture. But if this is a nuke why would you want Tanya to stop what she is doing?
She just needs to load in the data disc you got from Ahmed. That will turn the nuke into a massive EMP weapon strong enough to blast every electronic system in the city. We have powered-down our own server farms in shielded areas all around the city. When the system restarts, it will no longer be connected to the United Nations of the World central neuro-net. It will no longer recognize the credit currency; local resources will be shared among us all equally, and we will start building a world without outside interference.
If this is a trick to make me blow the very bomb I’ve come to stop, then I can tell you already: if any of this is true, they won’t let you. They’ll come at you with everything they have.
Perhaps. We’ll give them a good fight though. We can’t let this go on forever, Cole. We have agents in three other cities right this moment, just like you. They will be deployed to try and regain control of other cities in time. So whether or not we succeed in New Geneva, it’s not really our only hope. It’s a systematic attack on the nerve center of those who’ve enslaved humanity.
This world is unfair. That much I know deep in my bones.
I have one more question. Why send me back through time? My mission, after all, was to stop the nuke, but you’re telling me their mission is to make sure it blows up. Something doesn’t add up here.
Tell me something, Cole. In the future before you time jumped back, had you physically been to the site of the explosion you’re supposed to prevent? Have you seen the nuclear blast with your own eyes?
I felt it. I saw fires in the distance. I saw the news.
Yeah all of this could have been fabricated. I think what happened is that we in fact managed to detonate the EMP and that’s what they want you to prevent, even if it means nuking the city instead of losing control over it. Were you driven to Rewind through the underground tunnels? The old shielded tubes?
I was.
Why do you think that is?
To avoid radiation exposure, I presume.
No, Cole. We hunted them; we disabled most of the city, and they sent you back in time to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. They’d rather lose the entire city than have it fall out of their hands. You either do what they tell you, or they’ll silence you; that’s what it has become to be human in the year 2175. It started a long time ago, little by little, but today, they don’t take chances anymore. Believe me, Cole, if a nuke had really detonated, do you think you would have survived?
I did ask myself this question. I thought we were just lucky distance-wise.
No, Cole. Especially under the domes, there is no such luck. A nuke will incinerate the entire city before you have the time to say ‘What happened?’
I start to feel really angry inside. If she is right then I’ve been manipulated my entire
life and I’m darn pissed off about it.
If I make it out of here alive, I’ll rip the Rewind facility with my own bare hands.
I understand how you feel but it would be more beneficent for us to seize control of it. That way, we can undo whatever retaliation they have in store for us.
Are you seriously considering using me again? Without my knowledge? What do you plan to do? Tell a nice tale to my present self and ask for his help?
No, Cole, we’ll do the same Rewind has been doing to you all this time. We’ll transfer your consciousness so it can benefit the present you that is unaware of any of this. But we’ll do it with both your knowledge and consent, if you think it’s a good idea.
I hate the idea of this charade continuing, but under the circumstances I have to admit she is making sense.
Well, let me think about it.
You need to decide now, Cole, not about your future post mission, but about releasing the EMP instead of the nuke,” says Vassiliki. “Tanya is almost done. She has disconnected the nuclear core of the device, but she’s about to stop the countdown. You need to have her enter the data chip in the device instead. It will release the city-wide EMP and fry every computer, every television, holo-vision and other propaganda machines this world uses to control the masses. People will feel afraid and lost without these at first; they’ve lived under that rule for so long they’ve become dependent. But by cutting their access to the source of misinformation, perhaps over time, we can build a better world.
Who doesn’t want a better world? One where words like justice, equality, peace and happiness are at its center. I long for this new world. On a subconscious level I always have.
Time to take a leap of faith.
Tell me what to do? I say, my decision made.
You know what to do, Cole. Give your life meaning. Do what you feel you must in your heart.
Her image vanishes and I was left looking at the countdown. Eighteen seconds left.
I take a long, deep breath.
Rewind 717: The Adventures of Time Traveler Anti-Terrorist Agent Cole Seeker Page 18
