The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  “Does this mean you’re not going to give me the coin?” I asked.

  She laughed, a strange, almost robotic laugh. “Why should I give you the coin, Mr. Fowler? Give me a reason.”

  “I’m going to assume that saving the world isn’t enough for you.”

  “Don’t be grandiose, Mr. Fowler. You’re not saving the world, you’re trying to rescue an idea. Such a pedestrian idea, too. That money is worth something. Wouldn’t you like to see what the world looks like without money?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to go all ‘money is the root of all evil’ on me.”

  Rachel smiled, more broadly this time. “Money isn’t the root of evil. Money and evil are both just ideas used to control people. Maybe it’s time people stopped relying on fictitious ideas.”

  “Collective delusions,” I said. “That’s what Keane calls them.”

  “He’s exactly right,” Rachel replied. “And he should know. The DZ was his idea.”

  “The DZ is a physical place,” I said. “Not an idea.”

  “People thought East Berlin was a physical place, too,” said Rachel, “but I can’t find it on any maps. Did the place disappear?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “But there was a wall around it. Once the wall came down, the boundary between East and West Berlin disappeared.”

  “Wrong,” said Rachel. “Once people stopped believing in the idea of two separate Berlins, the wall came down. Ideas shape reality, not the other way around.”

  “Then you should be thrilled about the success of iotas and New Dollars. The whole world revolves around an idea you created. If Gerard Canaan gets the last iota, that idea is threatened. He’ll create an unlimited supply of iotas, gradually reducing the value of both iotas and New Dollars to nothing. Is that what you want?”

  Rachel shrugged. “When I said ideas create reality, I was stating an empirical fact, not expressing a preference. I have no allegiance to the iota. Whether people rally around the banner of the Kingdom of God, or the Brotherhood of Man, or the Scientific Progress, or the Almighty Iota, it makes no difference to me. This idol, like all others, will someday fall.”

  I smelled something acrid and sulfurous, and for a moment I thought Rachel was using olfactory aids for her apocalyptic speech. I turned to see tendrils of dark smoke trailing from the door I had just come through.

  “Smoke grenades,” Rachel said. “The mercenaries seem to have gotten through the trapdoor. I’m afraid the rubber seals on the lower door weren’t meant to last eighty years.”

  Damn it. They were using my own plan against me. They were going to try to fill the chamber with smoke to blind me and use their helmets to see through the smoke. I guessed that meant Minotaur was back online. Once they’d given the smoke time to spread, they’d throw down a couple of flashbangs, or maybe a grenade. They’d probably need to get some Semtex or C-4 to get through the metal door, and then they’d come through, guns blazing. I figured I had somewhere between two and four minutes.

  I was tempted to grab the coin from Rachel’s hand and make a run for it, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy. She hadn’t told me where her escape route was, and I wasn’t about to rely on her revealing it in order to save herself. Someone who engineers a worldwide financial collapse and then hides under a military base isn’t the sort of person whose survival instincts you want to depend on. I wondered if Rachel—or whatever her name was—was insane. Did terms like insanity even apply to someone like her? If she was delusional, then the whole world was in the grips of her delusion. Keane may have designed the DZ, but she created the algorithm that ran the world.

  “You know,” I said, “you remind me a lot of Keane.”

  “And tell me, Mr. Fowler,” Rachel said with a smile, “is that a compliment?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I replied. “I just meant it as an observation.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s unavoidable,” she said. “The man you call Erasmus Keane is my brother.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Somehow it made perfect sense. It takes a special kind of lunatic genius to invent a new currency with the intention of crashing the global economy—a sort of genius I was all too familiar with. Keane had designed the DZ; Rachel Stuil had designed an algorithm that was now the foundation for the international financial system. Keane’s motivation had ostensibly been to keep Los Angeles from imploding, but I suspected he’d done it to amuse himself as much as anything. The main difference between Keane and Rachel was not that Keane was the good one of the two; it was that Rachel thought bigger. I wondered if she was even smarter than Keane. Signs pointed to yes.

  And yet, here we were, trapped like rats underground, Green River mercenaries about to bust down the door and kill us both. Did she care? Was this part of the game? Is this what she’d planned from the beginning?

  I found it hard to believe. Frankly, I didn’t think Rachel had an endgame planned out. To her, it was all about the interplay of order and chaos. She didn’t have a death wish, but neither did she have some grand goal in mind. She would keep playing as long as the game interested her. The biggest danger, from my point of view, was that Rachel had gotten bored. Despite this realization, my curiosity got the better of me.

  “Keane didn’t mention he had a sister,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Rachel said. “Is this really what you want to talk about, Fowler? I’ll answer whatever questions you like; after all, you’ve earned it. But the clock is ticking. Do you want to know about Erasmus Keane or would you like to know how to get out of here?”

  That was an easy one. As curious as I was about Keane’s sister—and Keane himself—I had come here for one reason. I’d known Keane was a liar when I went on this mission, and I wasn’t leaving without the coin. “If Canaan gets the last iota,” I said, “it’s all over. Your game ends, and not with a bang, but with a whimper. New Dollars and iotas gradually lose their value and fall out of use. But if you give it to me, the game keeps going. There’s no telling what might happen next.”

  “Oh, Fowler,” said Rachel. “You’re so adorable, trying to tempt me with the prospect of new horizons and undiscovered countries. Sadly, there is nothing new under the sun. I’ve already played out all of the possibilities, and none of them are terribly interesting—other than global chaos, of course.”

  “If you wanted chaos, why all the games? Why not just hack the algorithm yourself and have it over with?”

  “I don’t want chaos,” she said. “I just find the possibility interesting. In any case, crashing the system myself feels like cheating. As it was, I practically had to tell Canaan how to find the code. I had assumed someone would find the notches in the reeds years ago. With my intellect, it’s sometimes difficult to gauge how challenging a puzzle will be for the average person.”

  Just as modest as Keane, too, I thought. “So you set up this whole puzzle, allowed me to find you down here, and now you’re just going to sit on the coin until Green River busts in and kills us both?”

  “It had to end one way or another,” said Rachel. “But I’ll tell you what, Fowler. In recognition of your valiant efforts, I’ll give you a choice.” She placed the coin on the coffee table in front of her. “You can have the coin, or I can tell you the way out of here. One or the other, not both. Save your life or win the prize.”

  “The prize is worthless if I don’t get out of here,” I said.

  “True,” said Rachel. “Which is why I’m also going to give you this.” She picked up a small ceramic bowl from the table next to her and put it on the coffee table between us. I saw that it was half-filled with a fine silvery powder.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  She pulled a matchbook from her pocket and set it next to the bowl. “Aluminum and iron oxide. Commonly known as thermite. It burns at four thousand degrees. Hot enough to melt titanium. Drop the coin in, light the match. In a few seconds, the coin will be a lump of slag.”

  “If I
destroy the coin, Canaan’s fortune is secure,” I said. “He gets what he wants.”

  “Yes, but he’ll be unable to manipulate the algorithm. You wouldn’t have to worry about Canaan—or anyone else—crashing the iota on a whim.”

  “You would do that?” I asked. “After all this effort to find the code, you’d just let me destroy the coin?”

  “This phase of the game is over, Fowler. You won. Consider this your prize. You protect the global economy from chaos.”

  “But I don’t get out of this room alive.”

  Rachel shrugged. “That would be up to Green River,” she said. “But I wouldn’t bet money on it.”

  I regarded her for a moment. Frankly, it seemed like kind of a shitty deal. Canaan would still get essentially what he wanted: He wouldn’t be able to create an unlimited number of iotas anytime he wanted, but he’d be protected from anyone else doing the same. Also, this option would most likely end up in me being dead. Was it worth the cost? I’m sure I wasn’t the best person to ask for an objective appraisal of the value of my own life, but I was leaning toward no.

  “Tell you what,” Rachel said, seeing me hesitate. “I’ll flip a coin. Heads, I reset the code. Tails, I tell you how to get out.”

  I said nothing. I didn’t like either of my choices, but I didn’t like the idea of leaving it up to a damn coin, either. I watched as smoke swirled around my boots and snaked along the floor. Any second now, the Green River mercenaries were going to blow the door open and the decision would be made for me. This couldn’t be the end. There had to be some other way out of this. Come on, Fowler, use your head. You didn’t come all this way just to fall victim to Rachel’s games.

  Rachel tossed the coin in the air. For a split second, it hung at its apogee, glinting in the faux sunlight from the window, and suddenly I knew what I had to do.

  I got to my feet and swiped the coin out of the air. “No deal,” I said, stuffing it in my pocket. I picked up the chair I’d been sitting in, bringing it over my head as I stepped toward the beach view. After three quick steps, I hurled the chair against the display, shattering it into thousands of pieces. Centered in the wall behind the display was a hole, roughly three feet in diameter. I could see only a few inches of concrete; beyond that was only blackness. I could feel the air being pulled out of the room into the tunnel.

  “You’ve got a draft,” I said, as smoke curled around my legs and vanished into the hole. I thought I saw the hint of a smile on Rachel’s face. She did enjoy a bit of chaos. I climbed into the hole and began to move as fast as I could on my hands and knees down the tunnel. It didn’t matter where I was going, as long as it was out.

  After a few inches, the concrete gave way to dirt; the tunnel overhead was supported by ribs made of two-by-fours about a foot apart. I had just enough room to crawl without hitting my head. I’d gone about ten feet when I was hit by a blast of wind and a clatter from behind me: Green River had blown the door. A moment later came several quick bursts of gunfire.

  I scurried as fast as I could, knowing that very soon somebody was going to peer down the tunnel with a flashlight and an M4-A4. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but it didn’t matter: if I didn’t reach a bend in the tunnel within a few seconds, I was going to be a very big fish in a very small barrel.

  Then my left palm came down on something much harder than dirt: concrete, rough like the opening behind me: not a floor, but a hole in another wall. Reaching forward, I felt a vertical barrier of something like canvas. I pushed on it, and it gave a little on the bottom, like a curtain. Knowing I had no time to be delicate, I threw all my weight against the fabric and found myself falling through the opening, my upper body pulling the rest of me across the concrete lip and downward. I fell maybe six feet before my hands—and then my elbows and forehead—hit gravel. I rolled onto my back and then lay there for a moment, dazed and hurting. Something warm was trickling down my forehead to my scalp.

  I became aware that some kind of hard ridge was digging into my lower back. Reaching toward it, my fingertips felt a thick metal lip. Train tracks.

  Somewhere on my belt, I knew, I had a flashlight. But it would take a few seconds to find it—seconds I didn’t have. I rolled off the track onto my belly, my fingertips brushing the wall I’d just come through. If this was a subway tunnel, there were two ways I could go. I was too disoriented to determine which direction was more likely to take me away from Alpha Base, so I got to my feet and picked a direction at random. Running my fingertips along the concrete wall to my right, I staggered through the darkness. Over the crunching of my boots on the gravel, I heard the echoes of men yelling.

  Using the wall to my right as a guide, I sprinted down the tunnel, praying the way ahead of me was unobstructed. After a few steps, I located the flashlight and flicked it on. All was clear: nothing ahead but more tunnel, gradually curving to the left. I heard footsteps behind, but I was around the bend before they could get a shot off. I heard shouts followed by more footsteps. I was winded and dizzy and my head hurt, but I kept running. As long as the curve in the tunnel held out, I’d be all right, but once I hit a straightaway, I’d be a sitting duck.

  I switched off the flashlight, both to avoid making myself an easier target than necessary and because I was hoping I might see some sign of daylight ahead. The Green River guys were relying on the infrared cams in their Minotaur helmets, so they weren’t using lights. If I could find an access tunnel, I might be able to reach the street before I was shot to death. A hundred yards or so ahead, I saw what I was looking for: a sliver of illuminated gravel. I flicked the light on for a second to make sure my way was still unobstructed. My head was beginning to clear, the dizziness replaced by a throbbing ache in my temple. That was fine: pain I could deal with. Disorientation would kill me.

  As I approached the patch of illuminated gravel, I flicked the light on again for a second. On the left-hand side of the tunnel, I saw a series of metal rungs disappearing into a narrow shaft overhead. I turned off the light, grabbed the rungs, and began to climb. To my left, just around the bend, I heard several men approaching. I vanished into the shaft as shots rang out below me.

  A moment later, my head clanked against something hard. A manhole. Now the question was whether or not I was inside Alpha Base’s protected zone. If I was, they’d have welded the manhole cover in place, and I would soon be dead. I pressed my shoulder against the metal and shoved with all my strength. It moved.

  I pushed the cover aside and squirmed through the opening, then slid it back into place. I stood for a moment in the middle of the dark street, trying to orient myself. Glancing at my comm display, I saw that I’d been following the tunnel north by northwest. That was good; I could make a beeline to the nearest DZ border to the west without have to backtrack past Alpha Base. I just had to traverse roughly a mile and then figure out how to get over the wall.

  A more pressing concern, however, was the group of a dozen or so gun-toting men approaching from down the street to the south. These were not Green River mercenaries; from their clothing and mismatched gear, I judged them to be gang members, probably Tortugas. Evidently this area of the DZ was still under contention. Being dressed as a Green River mercenary did not bode well for me. Someone yelled in my direction. They pointed their guns at me. I ran.

  This was a residential part of the DZ; I was surrounded by tract houses and dilapidated apartment buildings. There had clearly been some fighting here recently: a row of beat-up vehicles was arranged as a makeshift barrier across the street to my right; to the left, a car was on fire, casting monstrous shadows of the approaching gang members on the bullet-riddled stucco apartment building across the street. I went north, toward the wall of vehicles, then turned left to dart down an alley. I saw immediately that I’d made a mistake: the alley dead-ended in a chain-link fence forty feet ahead. I could climb it, but there was no way I’d clear it before the gangbangers riddled me with bullets. I skidded to a halt, spun around, and took aim. I had ten in the m
agazine and one in the chamber—just enough to take them all out if I was very lucky. I was also wearing body armor, so unless one of them got off a headshot, I still had a chance to survive this. I took a deep breath and steadied my hand, waiting for the first man to round the corner.

  He didn’t come. Instead, I heard shouts and several bursts of automatic gunfire. My pals from Green River, coming up from below, had joined the fun. Hopefully they and the Tortugas would keep each other entertained for a few minutes. I holstered the Glock, sprinted to the fence, and clambered over. There was no sign of pursuit.

  I traversed several blocks, mostly through alleys and backstreets, and eventually found myself on a street lined with several small shops that had been thoroughly vandalized and looted. Just down the street to the south I caught sight of a men’s clothing store, and I decided to stop in. There wasn’t much selection, but I ditched Conroy’s vest, jacket, and shirt in favor of my black T-shirt, having come to the conclusion that whatever protection was afforded me by the body armor was outweighed by the giant target it put on my back. To gangbangers, I looked like a mercenary, and to the mercenaries I looked like a deserter. Either was likely to get me shot.

  I tucked the Glock into my rear waistband, stepped back out the gaping hole in the plate-glass window, and continued on my way. It turned out that I needn’t have been worried. The rest of the DZ neighborhoods I cut through were quiet. I heard occasional gunfire in the distance, but no sign of any fighting nearby. I made it to the western wall without incident.

  Getting over the wall was less of a challenge than I expected as well: After following the wall about three hundred yards to the south, I encountered a gaping hole in the wall that had been caused by an explosion of some kind, possibly a shoulder-fired RPG. I climbed over the rubble onto the freeway. Stopping to listen for drones, I heard nothing, so I sprinted across the northbound lanes. Crouching between two cars on the median, I stopped again, but still heard nothing. The drones were either distracted elsewhere or out of commission. I ran across the remaining lanes.