by Xander Gray
It was clear she wanted me to focus on the billions she might save, but all I could think about were the mothers, fathers and children, wiped clean from their minds, replaced by the self-righteous overlords of time. What happened to a person’s soul if his mind were erased? Somehow this seemed worse than murder, like spiritual obliteration.
“Due to the importance of your assignment, we will permit you to work with Briar.” She grabbed my wrist. “But first, let’s boost your brain. One of our symbiotes recently used our schematics to build a new intelligence enhancer.” She retrieved something from her shirt pocket. I expected to see pills, but it was a microprocessor.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I could not let Attis cut my skull. If she expected me to be organic—and I had no reason to believe otherwise—there was no telling what she might do upon seeing my purple nanite brain.
“Oh, don’t worry. We’re not going to stick the whole processor in there. We’ll install a jack at your brain stem.” She reached into her hip pocket and retrieved what looked like a cell phone—the same device Slaven had used. “Let me scan you with this.”
Attis pressed a button. The device emitted a click, followed by three short beeps. A look of confusion crossed her face. “How is this possible?” She tapped the button again and stood swaying, as if hypnotized by a snake charmer. Then her jaw dropped and she pointed at me.
“You.”
I bolted for the door, twisting to lay into it with my shoulder. The door blasted from its hinges. I had barely registered the presence of the stairs when I felt Attis grasp for my shirt. I grabbed the railing and swung around the landing, onto the next flight, then sprinted up several more flights, swung open a door, and burst into the lobby.
I ran beneath the fish sculpture, my eyes trained on the glass front door. I shot through it, exploding onto the parking lot in a shower of glass.
Still, Attis kept up. She grabbed for me again, her fingers grazing the back of my neck. I spun on her, nearly toppling from the changed momentum, and punched her in the abdomen.
She clutched her midsection and fell, twitching on the blacktop. I touched my own abdomen, sensing vulnerability.
Then a buzzing filled the air and I looked up to see the two quad-copter drones hovering above the entry gate, their blades screaming like motor bikes. Each sported some kind of cylindrical device—possibly cameras. Hopefully not guns.
A guard climbed from the security booth and stood beneath the drones, his hair blowing in the gusts from their blades. Back at the building, another guard had reached the shattered doorway, drawing a gun from his hip.
I considered scaling the fence, but I doubted I could outrun the drones and I would be a sitting duck up there if either guard shot. I might have surrendered, but for Zacharai’s warning: I’ve seen too many men murdered here.
There was only one other way. I ran toward the gate.
The drones revved in pitch and swooped in to flank me. The gate guard raised his gun and fired. The windshield of a nearby car exploded.
Time seemed to slow. I became acutely aware of my legs, cycling like pistons, and the way each footfall jarred my hips and torso. I estimated the distance between my position and each drone, and the subsequent distance between each drone and the guard. Once the leftmost machine reached the most advantageous position, I jumped, catching it in both hands.
Its blades raged, vibrating their plastic housings, shaking my body. I landed in front of the guard, swinging the drone into his head. He fell, his skull shattered.
He was human—the gore spilling from his head proved it.
My God.
The second drone circled back on me. The cylinder on its undercarriage whined, spraying bullets.
Pain exploded in my chest, my arm, my leg.
I reached back like a discus thrower and hurled the body of the first drone. The two collided in the air, crashing in a shower of plastic and metal. In the resulting mess, a blade chopped an irregular rhythm against the pavement.
Shots boomed behind me. The lobby guard charged. “Stop! Stop!”
I turned and fled past the front gate, into the woods.
Chapter
Twenty-four
I was crossing a stream, surrounded by pines, when my left leg twitched. I thought I had just tripped on a rock, but the leg twitched three more times as I climbed the slope. By the time I reached the dark underside of the bridge, it was clear something was wrong. I sat on the concrete base of a massive steel support and pulled off my shoe and sock. My toes were twitching, and every now and then, my leg bucked.
The body was damaged.
I pulled my shirt up. There was a puncture wound where a bullet had struck my chest, a clean hole outlined by a perfect ring where the skin appeared more plastic than flesh. I found another hole in my arm, and a third in my left leg. There was no blood. These bodies did not bleed. But I could feel a strange illness of electronics or physics or who-knew-what pulsing through my limbs.
Waiting for the cramp to leave my foot, I reflected on my experiences with Attis. However unlikely time travel seemed, it explained the technology. It also explained why they would need bright academic minds to build future technology via schematics—hardware could not be transmitted bit by bit and reassembled, but schematics could be. And what of the apocalypse? Might a rogue planet be adrift toward Earth? I could think of one man who might be capable of answering: Pyxis—Quentin Navarez.
Unfortunately, Attis knew Navarez had sent me information and would consider him complicit in my attempt to breach Nexus. Attis might be dispatching cars at this very moment to collect him for questioning.
I had to warn him.
I slipped my shoes and socks on and lowered my shirt over the bloodless bullet hole. I stepped into the stream, the clearest path forward, and surveyed the gently rolling hills. My feet felt sure on the stream bed, and by the time I hopped the barbed wire fence on the far side of I-70, five miles outside Pine Bluff, I had forgotten the danger of a high speed leg twitch. My heels ripped divots from plowed fields, left trails of dust above furrows. I dodged bales of hay and rusted tractors. Finally I bounded over a fence onto a side road. I changed direction when I reached the road, sliding onto the gravel shoulder, stirring dust, and then I bolted toward the campus, my feet a blur on pavement made orange by the setting sun.
When I saw the campus on the horizon, I considered slowing down. Passing cars at this speed wasn’t prudent, and though the road had been deserted thus far, I would surely encounter traffic as I approached the sprawling parking lots. But while it might have been dangerous somehow to publicly flaunt my superhuman abilities, the threat to Navarez seemed more real. My legs pistoned, my arms swung, and as luck would have it, I didn’t encounter a single vehicle until I hurdled a drainage ditch on the edge of the parking deck. Unfortunately, said vehicle was parked.
My leg spasmed, and I careened off balance. I pinwheeled my arms and twirled sideways into a parked pickup. Its grill exploded, scattering metal, as the bumper folded around me. My head whacked the hood, and the world danced a drunken pirouette.
I pulled away from the grill, smelling grease and smoke. My vision cleared. I patted my chest. Whether I had further damaged the Capgras was unclear. My shirt hung in tatters. Grease covered my arms and hands. A dull ache permeated my midsection.
Two girls watched from a bench near the edge of the lot, bookbags slung over their shoulders. I couldn’t tell if they had seen the crash. It didn’t matter. I raced up the tree-dotted hill toward the campus at full speed, not looking back.
#
I burst through the lobby of Powell Hall, past empty benches and untended vending machines, into the yellow stairwell. I bounded up the stairs two at a time. My hand firmly on the railing, I swung through each landing, and then banged through the door on the third floor and bolted down a dimly lit hallway. I didn’t slow until I reached Navarez’s office, at which point I stopped abruptly, my sneakers barking. A bright strip beneath
the door told me Navarez was here or had left his lights on.
I pushed the door open.
Navarez spun his office chair to face me, puzzled. Then his eyes widened. He tried to stand and fell back into the chair, knocking a stack of books from his desk onto the floor. He whimpered like a frightened animal.
I wasn't sure why my appearance would frighten him, but then I remembered: I was wearing his face. I knew what seeing a doppelganger felt like. I should have been more careful. I focused on my own face and felt my skin reorganize. Filaments slid over my skull, tightening in some places, loosening in others. Without a mirror, I could only hope my face had returned to form. “Do you recognize me?”
“You’re in a Capgras.” He shook his head, mouth agape. “You could be anyone.”
“I’m wearing my real face now.”
He opened his mouth several times in quick succession, like he didn’t know what to say. “Joshua Briar?”
“Yes.”
“You look different than in the papers.” His voice was tense rather than panicked. “You were here yesterday.”
I noted the speed with which he composed himself. Clearly his familiarity with the technology made seeing his doppelganger more palatable.
“There’s no time to chat,” I said. “I suspect Attis is sending someone to deal with you. We have to go.”
His eyes shifted around the room, from the landscape photos hanging on the wall above the bookcases to the tribal figurines clustered on the windowsill above his desk. He rubbed his knees nervously. Finally he picked up his desk phone and punched a number into the keypad.
My muscles tensed. What if he was calling Attis?
“Hon. Hon. Listen to me,” he said into the phone, his expression stern. “We have trouble at work. Yes. The sort of trouble we’ve talked about. That’s right. I want you to grab the bug-out bags and take our daughter to our spot. Use your father’s old car. Minimize contact with others. Yes. Yes. I’ll explain later. I don’t know. I’ll come by tonight if I can, but I can’t make promises. I have to go. I know. I love you too.”
He hung up the phone, stood, and flicked off the lights, plunging the room into darkness, and then he pushed me into the hallway and locked the door behind us. One recessed fixture illuminated the hallway—two had burned out.
He directed me through the darkness, into a faculty lounge. “What is going on?”
“You first.” I sat at one of the tables, figuring I would be less threatening if I reduced my profile. “Why have you been sending information to my lawyer?”
He shook his head, cleared his throat, and adjusted his glasses. “I need to confirm your identity with a scanner from the lab. In the meantime, please explain why you think I’m in danger.”
Clearly he wasn’t going to say anything incriminating until he vetted me. “We really don’t have time for this.”
He rocked nervously from heel to toe. “You wait here.”
“No way.”
Navarez looked toward the door, raising one hand.
“What?” I whispered. “Do you hear something?”
He lowered his hand, but kept watching the door.
I stood carefully, mindful of the chair, not wanting to make noise. “If you get nervous and decide to earn brownie points with Attis by turning me in, we’re sunk.”
“There are cameras,” he said, eyes still on the door, as if waiting for its handle to turn. “I can’t take you into the lab.”
He was worried about getting caught admitting a known security risk. “Other than McSorley, you’re the only person with access to the lab I know well enough to impersonate.”
“McSorley lost his access.” He seemed to be thinking, coming to terms with something, the staccato of his popping knuckles marking each second. “You can come, but we have to be quick.” He opened the door and surveyed the dark hallway. Nothing stirred. He moved quietly, deftly for a big man, to the stairway door.
I feared Attis would leap from each bend in the stair case, shattering my cybernetic heart. I shuddered. As I rounded the second floor landing, my leg twitched, striking the door with a hollow bang, and I tripped, catching myself on the banister.
Navarez, already on the next landing, opened the exit door. Cool air wafted into the stairwell. “What’s wrong with your leg? Take a hit to the abdomen?”
“Yes. Several.” I stepped into the courtyard. “I’ve also been shot three times.”
He grabbed my arm. “Shot? Where?”
“Arm, chest, and leg.” I raised my shirt to show him the bullet hole.
“Pull that down.” He pushed me ahead of him on the sidewalk. “We can’t have people seeing the hole in your chest.”
The sky had darkened, a thin strip of pink clouds holding the last daylight. The pretzel man stood near his cart, folding his red and white awning. A woman sat watching him from a table, chewing a pretzel, her hand resting on a textbook. Two young men wearing bookbags sat on a planter, one showing the other the faintly glowing screen of his phone.
I did not feel safe.
“Your abdomen,” Navarez said, leading me away from the courtyard, toward the entrance to the window-walled breezeway. “There’s an energy cell there: a neutron-induced fission betavoltaic battery. It’s a marvel of modern engineering. Unfortunately, there’s no room for shielding. Some schematics translate better than others.”
“You think I jarred the battery?”
“Or cracked it.” Navarez walked cautiously to the end of the breezeway and scanned his ID badge. The scanner beeped, the bolt disengaged, and he swung open the door. “Let’s hope you’re not leaking radiation.”
My mind conjured images of Hiroshima and Three Mile Island. “How much radiation?”
“If there’s a serious breach, the Capgras will go inert.” He moved fast, down the hall and around the corner. “You’re not dangerous to others.”
But what would happen to me?
Navarez paused outside his office door, holding the key to the lock. “If the energy cell shuts down, you’ll have an hour of residual power in the brain stem. After that, the suit goes dark. I know what’s supposed to happen, but only in theory. I think our best bet is to get you back into your real body.”
“My real body is in the Gasconade County Correctional Facility.”
He opened his office door, revealing documents scattered on a cheap desk, a half-eaten hoagie on the computer monitor, and potato-chip bags overflowing the trashcan. An umbrella, half opened, lay propped against a cabinet. Pencil shavings lay piled on the floor beneath a wall-mounted sharpener.
Quentin Navarez was a slob.
He opened the supply cabinet and retrieved a scanner. He aimed it at me. The device emitted the familiar click followed by three short beeps. “I’ll be damned. It’s good to meet you, Joshua Briar.”
“Likewise, Mr. Navarez. Or should I call you Pyxis?”
He slipped the scanner into his pocket. “I always intended to divulge my identity. Please understand, this is not how I imagined meeting you.”
“I’ll bet. Tell me about it after we get out of here.”
“One sec.” He knelt behind his desk and unzipped a duffle bag. His hand rattled inside the bag and came away with a blue hunk of fabric, which he unraveled, revealing an oversized sweatshirt. “Put this on. If we don’t cover you up, you’ll attract attention.”
My shirt was muddy from my trek through farmland and ripped from my collision in the parking lot. I nodded my thanks and pulled his sweatshirt over my head. It smelled musty. I did not complain.
Back in the hallway, he drew a plaintive breath and pointed toward the glass-walled room. “All the stuff I wanted to show you is in there.”
“I’m familiar with those things.” I pointed toward the pulsing cubes. “In all the wrong ways.”
He squinted at me. “Let’s go someplace we can talk.”
#
All the previous denizens of the courtyard had headed home or vanished into academic halls.
The only sound was the buzzing of high-powered pathway lights. All color had seeped from the horizon. Stars shone, and a sliver of gray moon peaked above the library.
“We can’t take my car.” Navarez stared toward the parking lot. “It has GPS. They can track it.”
I pulled Navarez into the shadows. “Give me your phone.”
“How could I forget?” He handed it over.
I popped the battery and handed it back. “Can they track me?” I pointed at my head, hoping he understood I was referring to whatever signal his scanner had detected.
“No,” he said. “You emit a localized signal.”
“Good.” One less thing to worry about.
#
We walked to the restaurant across from the university. A thick curtain of cigarette smoke hung above the tables. Rowdy students gulped beer and snapped pictures with cell phones. A group of soccer players near the rear wall batted a wad of paper back and forth on their table, shouting blow-pop and throwing their hands in the air every time it shot onto the floor. Though more civilized, these students displayed the same rowdy physicality that drove gang interactions on the yard. I felt strangely comfortable, nuzzled into a booth with Navarez. The students weren’t dangerous, and their boisterousness made us inconspicuous.
A waitress with big, red hair emerged from the kitchen and put two glasses of water on our table. She had the look of someone who had been on her feet too long, her posture strained, her eyes red. Navarez ordered onion rings and a pitcher of Bud. I simply raised my hand and said I didn’t need anything. Perhaps I would order later.
“You’re going to explain all this to me?” He sipped water and then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
I would have preferred hearing his secrets first, as they existed as prelude to mine, but I owed him an explanation. I told him how I had impersonated him. I told him about Zacharai and Attis, the emphasis they had placed upon my use as a test subject for the wireless tunneling experiments. He nodded at this, but didn’t expound. Finally I told him how Attis had scanned me and chased me into the parking lot.
