Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  “A recent study published by The New Yorker indicates that small businesses, including crop farms, would be adversely affected by tightening immigration standards. Should you be elected president, would you sign or veto a bill that—”

  And the lights went out.

  All of them. Lights, speakers, cameras, everything.

  Bang.

  The library was plunged into total darkness. No emergency lights. No alarm bells. Nothing. There was a shocked collective gasp from the audience. Fryers fumbled for the battery-operated backup microphone that had been placed there for situations like this. For accidents or power failures. He found the button, tapped it, bent to speak into the mike.

  “Please,” he said, “remain calm.”

  The only one who heard his voice was him. The microphone was as dead as the lights.

  Fryers froze in place, immediately trying to remember the protocols drilled into him by the Secret Service. Wait. Listen. The emergency system will kick in.

  There was a scream. Of course there was. Someone always had to scream. Someone always had to panic. Always.

  “Idiot,” he muttered, because he knew what happened. What inevitably happened.

  One scream became two. Became five.

  He shot to his feet. “Everyone, please calm down!” he yelled.

  The volume of panic was already rising. Fryers dug into his pocket to remove his cell phone, punched the button to get the screen. A flashlight app would be helpful. He was surprised everyone else wasn’t doing the same thing.

  Except the screen did not come on. His phone was dead, too.

  That was …

  His mind stalled. How could a power outage take out his cell phone? And the emergency lights were battery operated, too. The Secret Service had wire mikes and flashlights.

  But there were no lights on in the hall.

  None.

  That’s when he heard the screams turn into cries of pain and dull, angry thumps as blind people began fighting their way toward the doors. In total darkness.

  Fryers tried to yell.

  Tried to keep this from becoming what he knew it would become. Blind, destructive panic.

  He tried.

  And failed.

  At the end of sixty seconds, when all the lights finally flared back on, and cell phones began automatically rebooting, and the speakers squawked with alarm bells, the crowd had already become a tidal surge of blood and broken bones.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE VINSON MASSIF

  THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS

  ANTARCTICA

  AUGUST 19, 11:19 P.M.

  Not sure how long it took us to recover.

  Not sure we actually did.

  Three, four minutes dragged by before I could even summon the willpower to rise, let alone the sheer muscular commitment. My head rang with the after-effects of the light. My brain felt bruised. The horrendous smell and taste still polluted my senses.

  It was my flashlight that jolted me out of the daze. The light came on again. Pop, just like that. It wasn’t a matter of the switch moving. The light had already been on but when that big machine did whatever the hell it did, the power in the flashlight simply died. Ditto for all of our other gear. Pop. Out. And now it was all back on. I turned my head and stared at the light as if seeing it could reveal some answers. It surely did not.

  Top got to his feet first. He was the oldest of us, and probably not the strongest, but in many ways he was the hardiest. He struggled up and stood swaying over me, chest heaving from the effort, hands shaking as he checked his gear. The process of doing that kind of routine check made sense. It was a reset button to reclaim normalcy and control. Doing routine things can do that. When he was done he still looked like crap, but less so. He blinked his eyes clear, then hooked a hand under my armpit and pulled me up. My muscles were composed of overcooked rigatoni and Play-Doh. It didn’t even feel like I owned a skeleton anymore. Top had to hold me up until I could stand, however badly, on my own.

  It took both of us to get Bunny on his feet.

  We stood in a nervous huddle, legs trembling, faces pale with sickness. Nerves absolutely shot. Burned out like bad wiring.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” breathed Top. And he crossed himself. I had only ever seen him do that once before.

  Bunny wiped pain-tears from his eyes and sniffed in a chestful of air.

  The machine sat there, cold and silent and dark. Around us the impossible city loomed, mocking us and everything we believed in. Top’s prayer faded into nothing.

  Bunny coughed, cleared his throat. “What … what…?”

  “I know,” said Top.

  Bunny’s head snapped around. “Top, did you…? I mean…”

  “I don’t know, Farm Boy,” said Top, but he was clearly in distress that ran deeper than the physical. “This is some voodoo shit right here.”

  “It’s nuts,” said Bunny, shaking his head, “but for a moment there I…”

  Once more his words trailed away, and he shot me a very strange look. A suspicious and horrified look.

  “What?” I asked cautiously. “What did you see?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t see nothing.”

  “Bunny … look, I saw something, too.”

  His eyes widened. “What?”

  “I saw something, too,” I repeated. “For a couple of seconds after that thing went off I saw…”

  And I stopped, too. How exactly do you have that kind of conversation? You need to hear that someone else shared it so that it’s not just you. And you’re afraid that it is just you. But at the same time what if it’s not just you and stuff like this is possible? You see the problem? There’s no way to Sudoku your way out of it.

  “Say it, Cap’n,” said Top. “What’d you see?”

  I wiped sweat out of my eyes and took a moment. “I saw two things and neither of them make any sense,” I began. “I saw me—my body—kneeling a few feet away, looking right at me.”

  “Yeah,” said Bunny, nodding but not looking anything but scared shitless about it.

  “Then for a second I was somewhere else,” I continued. “I was in your cottage, Bunny. Lydia was there and…”

  I let it tail off. Bunny’s face went from a greasy mushroom white to a livid red.

  “What else did you see?” he asked in a low growl. A frightened dog growl, but definitely a growl.

  “The fuck does it matter what else he saw?” barked Top. “He saw it.”

  Benny wheeled on him. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I saw my ex-wife,” he snarled. “Clear as motherfucking day. Sitting at the kitchen counter drinking that shit mint tea she drinks and reading stock numbers off her damn computer. Want to know where Apple stock is right now? I can still taste that son of a bitching tea.”

  He dragged a trembling hand across his mouth, which had become wet with spit. He looked at the moisture, shook his head, then they both looked at Bunny.

  “What did you see, Farm Boy?”

  “What,” exclaimed Bunny, “so we’re all just going to accept that this stuff just happened?”

  “What did you see?”

  Bunny cut a look at me and then he looked up at the ceiling far, far above us. “I had a nightmare,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t see Lydia or your ex, Top. I didn’t see anyone I know.” He shook his head. There was a quaver in his voice that made his teeth start to chatter. It wasn’t the cold, though, and we all knew it. He was simply that scared. “It couldn’t have been anything but me freaking out. It was this weird place … like the beach, except the ocean was black and oily, and the sky was wrong. Not our sky, you know? The stars were wrong. And … and there were monsters.” He stopped and shook his head, unable or unwilling to continue. “There aren’t words for it, you know?”

  They both looked at me. As if I had any answers.

  “I feel sick,” said Bunny. “That air we brea
thed? I feel like crap.”

  He raised his BAMS unit. The light was no longer green. Now it flickered back and forth between green and yellow. Mine was doing the same thing. So was Top’s. I peered at the tiny digital screen to see what kind of particles it had picked up, but all it said was: SYSTEM ERROR.

  Top frowned. “Was it me or did the power go out when that thing flashed?”

  “It went out,” I said.

  “And it came back on?”

  “Yeah.”

  He held up his watch. The digital display was flashing the way those things do after a power interruption. “All my gear’s in reset mode except the flashlight. It doesn’t have a circuit breaker. Just a battery. It went off but came back on.”

  We all checked our gear and got the same results. Bunny said, “You think that machine is the EMP weapon they were building?”

  Top shook his head. “Can’t be the EMP cannon. It’s too big.”

  “I know, but we got hit by something like that.”

  “EMP would have fried the electronics,” said Top. “This just interrupted the power.”

  “What can do that?” asked Bunny. “I mean to everything, even our flashlights?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” said Bunny. “If something could interrupt electrical conductivity all the way down to a watch battery, wouldn’t it fry our central nervous system? I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, guys, but why ain’t we dead?”

  We had no answer for that.

  Top gave the big machine a long, hateful look. “Cap’n, I’m two-thirds convinced we ought to put some blaster plasters on that thing and blow it back to Satan. We got a nice airplane waiting outside.”

  “Yes,” said Bunny fiercely.

  I shook my head. “Blowing it up isn’t our job and we don’t know what will happen if we damage it.”

  They didn’t like it, but they nodded. Hell, I didn’t like it, either.

  “Let’s gather what intel we can,” I said, “find Erskine and his team, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Hooah,” agreed Top.

  “Hooah,” said Bunny, but his voice was small and unemphatic.

  We stood in silence, lost in the strangeness of the moment, still caught in the net of whatever had just happened to us. Three soldiers, gasping like beached trout, feeling small and scared.

  That’s when we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  INTERLUDE FIVE

  OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE

  EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK

  WHEN PROSPERO WAS TWELVE

  “Did my son talk to you about his God Machine?” asked Oscar Bell. He sat on the doctor’s couch, legs crossed, hands resting on his lap. Greene thought he could see a flicker in the man’s eyes. Nerves, perhaps, or excitement.

  “Please understand, Mr. Bell, that I encourage an air of unrestricted confidence in my sessions with your son,” said Green. “However, that comes with a certain level of trust. He knows that what he says goes no farther than—”

  Bell held up a finger. “Don’t. You want to stick to some set of bullshit doctor-patient rules, then consider your services terminated.”

  That hung in the air, ugly and real.

  “I…,” began Greene, but once more Bell cut him off.

  “I don’t need a blow-by-blow. I don’t want to know what the kid jerks off to, and I don’t want to know what he thinks of me. That’s all psychobabble nonsense and we both know it. But I do want to know about the God Machine. And I mean everything.”

  Greene felt as if he had been nailed to his chair by the force of Bell’s green-eyed stare. The man frightened him, and that went beyond the threat of a massive financial loss. Bell seemed willing to give him a few seconds to work up to it.

  Finally Greene took a breath and said it. “Prospero does not believe he is a human being. Not entirely. It’s his belief that he is either an alien from another world or perhaps another dimension, or that he is a hybrid of human and alien genes. It is his belief that he is not your actual son but the product of some kind of genetics experiment. He believes that you ‘adopted’ him only as a means of profiting from the genius he gets from his alien DNA.”

  Bell uncrossed and recrossed his legs. “Kid has some imagination.”

  “Has he said any of this to you, sir?” asked Greene.

  “Don’t change the subject, Doctor. Tell me what Prospero’s told you about the God Machine.”

  “Well … your son has been researching the artists and philosophers of the surrealism movement and believes that their works represent visions of the world from which he comes. Notably the paintings of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, and the pulp fiction horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Your son is uncertain as to whether the surrealists are from the same world or if they somehow traveled there in dreams. I think he’s leaning toward the latter opinion.”

  “And the machine is what?” asked Bell. “A phone so E.T. can call home?”

  “No, sir,” said Greene. “Your son believes that it will somehow open a doorway and allow him to return to his true home.”

  “Did he say anything about EMPs?”

  “I’m not sure what that is.”

  “Electromagnetic pulses. Has Prospero mentioned that at all?”

  “No, unless a ‘null field’ is the same thing.”

  Bell’s eyes flared momentarily. “What did he say about that?”

  “Not much. He said it was an unwanted side effect and he was trying to correct it.”

  “Correct it?” Bell shot to his feet and for a moment Greene thought the man was going to punch him. Then Bell sagged back and sat down hard, shaking his head. “Correct it, Jesus fuck.”

  “Is something wrong?” asked Greene.

  Oscar Bell ran trembling fingers through his hair. “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.” He took a breath and bolted his calm back in place, one iron plate at a time. “Exactly how was he planning on correcting it?”

  “I’m not sure. Something about a mathematical pattern that he couldn’t solve unless…”

  Bell’s eyes hardened. “Unless what, Doctor? I need you to be very specific.”

  “Very well,” said Greene, “but believe me, I’ve looked into this myself and there’s nothing to it. Not even a mention on the Internet. Prospero believes that the key to making his God Machine function properly requires a sequence code that can be found in certain rare books he refers to as ‘The Unlearnable Truths.’ These are, according to him, books of magic that have been hidden for many centuries. He said that they are guarded because they contain dangerous secrets.”

  “What kind of secrets? The God Machine isn’t magic, Doctor. It’s absolutely bleeding-edge science. I have forty physicists scratching their heads trying to understand what the fucking thing does, do you know that? I have guys at MIT, Cal Tech, and Stanford losing sleep over it. I’ve got two Nobel laureates about to go into therapy because my twelve-year-old son’s designs make their heads hurt. The only thing they agree on is that the machine is real. It will do something, but wild as it sounds, Prospero understands quantum mechanics on a level that no one alive can match. No one. I sat down with Stephen Hawking and he started to cry when he read Prospero’s notes. It was like he was having a religious experience, and we’re talking about Stephen goddamn Hawking.”

  “Not to be rude, Mr. Bell,” said Greene, “but what makes you believe the machine will do anything at all? From what Prospero tells me, it doesn’t work.”

  “Doesn’t work? Jesus wept. Maybe it’s not doing what Prospero wants it to do, but it sure as shit does a lot of other things.”

  “What things?”

  Bell’s eyes narrowed. “That’s above your pay grade, Dr. Greene.”

  “I feel I must caution you about placing too much stock on your son’s projects,” said Greene. “Since he’s discovered surrealism he has become visibly detached from the real world.”

  “What
he’s doing is real to him.”

  “Perhaps,” conceded Greene reluctantly, “but encouraging it is hardly in the best interests of Prospero’s emotional and psychological health. His fascination with these ‘Unlearnable Truths’ has become an obsession, and I fear what will happen when he finally becomes convinced that no such books exist. He is placing a dangerous amount of faith on ultimately possessing them, or at least reading them so he can divine their mathematical secrets.”

  “Has Prospero told you the titles of any of these unlearnable books?”

  “No. A few. Even though I could find nothing on anything called the Unlearnable Truths, there is plenty on the Net about the individual books. As I mentioned, the titles appeared in horror stories written in the early twentieth century. They don’t really exist. It’s only Prospero who believes they’re real.”

  “Interesting.”

  “No, sir, it’s not interesting. We’re talking about Prospero’s mental health.”

  Bell shook his head. “Mental health? I think that ship sailed a long time ago.”

  “Mr. Bell, we’re talking about your son.”

  Bell stood up. “That little freak is nobody’s son.”

  Greene stood up, too, angry but afraid of this man. He wanted to punch Bell, break his nose, throw him down the stairs. He kept his fists balled at his sides. It was clear, however, that Bell was aware of Greene’s anger. He even glanced down at the white-knuckled fists.

  “Let’s be clear,” said Bell quietly. “You’re going to shift the focus of your sessions and talk only about things that relate to the God Machine, the science behind it, and Prospero’s intentions for it. You will also write down the titles of every single piece of art and every single one of those unlearnable books. You’ll do that right now, before I leave your office. If I like what I see, and if I am assured that you are going to continue to remember that you work for me, not for the boy, then I’ll consider whether to increase your hourly rate. What is it now? Four hundred an hour? That sounds low to me.”