by Ryan Schow
“I’m going with you,” she said, firm, “so just go where you’re going and I’ll be there.”
“No.”
“Why?” she asked, her entire world hanging on Marcus’s next words.
God, she looked so innocent, so abused. Was he doing her more harm than good brushing her off? He made a promise. He should keep that promise, even if it wasn’t in her best interest. The one thing his father said to him that wasn’t hateful or critical was that a man was only as good as his word. Still…
“Because it’s not safe with me,” he finally admitted.
“I was not safe when you found me and it looks like I won’t be safe for a long time to come. Besides, look at what you did. Look at how you saved all of us!”
“How I did it was unforgiveable.”
“No, it was courageous, necessary, warranted. You have no idea what they were doing to the other girls.”
“When did you get there?”
“The guy you killed,” she said, her voice taking on the slightest tremor, “the one on top of me? He was supposed to break me in. Sexually. Him and four other guys is what he said.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Why do criminals do anything criminals do?” she asked, glum.
“True,” he said.
“We aren’t working girls. We’re just girls. You saved all of our lives back there. Don’t you get it?”
Jerking his head around, he practically growled at her. “No, I don’t get it!”
Didn’t she understand?!
Inside his head, flashes of the war began funneling in. All the wars he waged, all of them blending together, playing unevenly and frightfully in his head.
“Jeez, man. Chill.”
The noise in his head peeled back, lost its hold on him. He stared at her, wordless. Perhaps she could come with him, but only if things were safe. She could stay with Bailey, if Bailey was even alive, or in Quentin’s room, since he wasn’t. For whatever reason, maybe because the battle was over and he was feeling again, he started to feel for Quentin. For a freaking nerd, the guy had a ton of courage. He sort of missed his dry humor, his stupid hair, his innate sense of not belonging. Damn. And what about Nick?
Frowning, he thought: When the hell did I start caring about these people?
“I made it out of San Diego with three others,” he finally confessed. “We made it out alive when thousands of other people didn’t. We defied the odds. We stuck together.”
“I’d like to meet them,” she said, tears all but standing in her eyes, waiting to either dry up with good news, or drain down her cheeks with bad news.
“One was shot twice in the chest and is now dead. Another was beaten mercilessly and kidnapped. I think she may be dead, too. And the third went after her and he wasn’t back when I left. The people around me are dying, Corrine.”
“Look around—” she started to say.
“We may die, too, but I don’t want to see you die.”
“Then protect me!”
“What if I can’t?” he asked in a surprising moment of both vulnerability and truth. “In times like these, the good people hide, like I told you, and the bad people come out and do what they do. It’s like the Scumbag Super Bowl where there are no cops, no rule of law, only chaos.”
“With you, I’ll be—”
“With or without me, it’s dangerous as hell for a girl like you. For any cute girls in fact.”
“I understand the predilection of guys,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“The hell you do!”
“I’m not a kid anymore!” she said, snapping back. “I know what boys want, what they’ll do to get it. I’ve been seeing it firsthand!”
“Those aren’t all guys. They’re the worst of the worst, Corrine. That’s what’s out there! People like them, people like me.”
“But you’re one of the good guys.”
“Depends on who you ask,” he muttered.
“My point is, if I die, then I die. I would have died sooner or later anyway.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to see that,” he admitted. “I can’t see that. Not again.”
“You a vet?”
“Army vet yes, dog vet no.”
She looked at him, not a single emotion crossing his face, then she laughed and the ice between them seemed to fracture, maybe even break a little. He even found himself trying to smile for the first time in a long time.
“You have a tough time at war?” she asked.
“The only people who don’t are either sadists or psychopaths, and I’m neither.”
“If you don’t let me die, then I won’t die,” she said.
“And if you do, then it’s my fault and I’ll have to live with that. I’m already living with enough,” he said.
She studied his face a long time, hopeful at first, then dejected when he failed to show her even an ounce of emotion. Pursing her lips, her chin quivered. Seeing no response from him, she pushed the door open and climbed out of the truck. He watched her walk out of the motel parking lot and onto Superior Avenue.
“Dammit!” he finally swore, pounding the steering wheel. He started the engine, put the rig in gear, fought the clutch a bit before he figured out the play, then turned onto Superior after her. He pulled up alongside her and she showed him the middle finger.
Now he laughed for real.
He couldn’t roll down the window because the truck was about sixty years old with crank windows, so he pulled to a stop, got out and then said, “Fine, you win. Get in.”
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you see me flip you off?” she asked, still halfway brooding.
“I did.”
“Good,” she said, getting back in the rig. “Where are we going?”
“Hopefully back to my friends.”
Chapter One Hundred Thirteen
Benjamin Dupree ate and slept for two days while Miles did whatever it was Miles was doing. He was no longer a world official. Ben was a prisoner. A hostage. Sitting in a barren room, which was more of a holding cell than a room, he was left to contemplate his life, the decisions he made as a man, a husband and father, a soldier and as a President.
When you can look back on all that you’ve done and then separate your life between the good you brought into this world and the good you stripped from this world, it gets pretty bleak.
At least, it did for Ben.
On the scoreboard of life, he brought two wonderful kids into this world, but in his estimation, he’d taken somewhere between seventy and seventy-five lives both in war and on black missions. He was a man who moved a nation. A man who got things done. But being in D.C., a cesspool of corruption and manipulation, he’d lost touch with his role as a husband and a father and instead immersed himself in his job, shouldering the struggles of a nation on the world’s stage.
Doing so had come at a price.
He could smile for the cameras and be pleasant in peace talks and negotiations, but when he was off camera, his ruthlessness to bring the nation back to life was unprecedented. The soft skinned slime in the District of Criminals didn’t know how to take him because he wanted nothing from them but patriotism or a resignation.
For the most part, he got neither and this frustrated him.
Now they turned on him. On each other. These fools even turned on God in order to destroy their country. With all the time in the world, with a death sentence looming, he had to ask himself, “Am I a good man?” and he already knew the answer.
No.
No he wasn’t.
He was a man who let everything important to him die. His wife, his kids, the nation. Even worse, was there any redemption for him? It didn’t matter. He was one person against the tens of millions he knew were dying at the hands of AI and the machines The Silver Queen controlled. Miles had a point when he said Ben had become irrelevant.
For all the wars he’d fought, for all the adversaries he’d faced and beaten, for all the back-b
iting politics he managed to not get swallowed up in, he’d been trounced by himself and his failings as a man.
The door opened and he just sat there. He didn’t even look up. He smelled food, but didn’t want any part of it. He couldn’t eat. Didn’t want to.
“Keep your strength, Ben. This isn’t over yet. Not by a mile.”
“What do you want from me?” he asked without looking at the man.
“It’s almost time.”
“Time for what?” he said, finally relenting.
“You’ll see.”
He left the food. Ben didn’t eat any of it. The next day Miles took the tray, replaced it with another.
“If you’re starving yourself to death so you don’t have to push the button, trust me, that doesn’t matter. All I need is your thumb and your eye and I can use either whether you’re dead or alive.”
He took a bite of food, drank the water then slept. No more push ups. No more sit ups. No more punching the glass, or the door, or the walls.
He looked up at the glass window, at the brownish-red film of smeared blood, and it seemed like a million years had passed since he’d done that. He was no longer the same person.
Another day passed, then two.
As a control freak, not knowing what was going on was maddening. He paced the room, looked at his sore knuckles, the healing cuts, and he looked at the smeared glass window while looking at nothing at all.
When Miles came in, he stopped pacing. Instead, he went to his cot, sat down, looked at the wall across from him. Miles had a gun on him and he kept his distance, but Ben could tell he was getting more and more relaxed around him. He was sensing the President was no longer a threat.
Was he though? Could he be if he needed to? It wouldn’t matter. AI was smarter, more cunning, in control and killing everything according to his final reports.
“Surrendering the nation is a foregone conclusion, Ben.”
“I know.”
“The EMP will wipe out everything that could tell anyone what you’ve done. Don’t you see? Your sins will be washed away with the last of technology. All I need is your finger and your eye when the time is right.”
“I may be useless right now, Miles, but the people in this country are not.”
“They will be shortly. Unless you consider them killing each other useful, and then you and I will agree.”
He turned, and with narrowed eyes, he blazed a trail of heat and hatred on the man. Miles only seemed to smile at this. Like it didn’t matter.
It didn’t.
“Earth, which has become a tight knit global community through relationships, bickering, posturing and war, has been made small for the first time in history,” Miles said. “We can get on a plane, be anywhere inside of a day. We can pick up a phone in D.C. and video conference with the President of Zimbabwe, or the Prime Minister of Italy. But what if we could do none of that? How much simpler would our world be? What if the three-hundred and thirty million plus souls in the US fell to half a million? Two hundred thousand? Could you imagine the sense of community we’d feel? We could consolidate our people and our resources, start something new, kill this vicious cycle of dependence and greed and free market capitalism. It’s all collapsing anyway, Ben. You brought to the forefront of our minds the truth about government corruption, all the ties we had to special interests and big business, all the little pots of gold we’ve had our hands in. The house of cards was falling before The Silver Queen took over and you know that.”
“You’ve become the AI’s jester, Miles. Do you know that? You sound like a fool.”
“Sticks and stones, Ben.”
“When I push that button, and I will, this nation will die. Have you thought about that? No running water, no electricity, no plumbing. I love my country, but given the task to survive, most people won’t. They’ll try, but trying means stealing, killing, warring. The people who are actually prepared for a catastrophe of this magnitude will not survive inside a city. They’ll be overrun by mobs of those people who know they’d only survive in groups and by stealing from others.”
“It’ll be like Mad Max, but without the cool cars.”
“For God’s sake, you’re a child.”
“The 1800’s weren’t so bad, Ben. We were a young nation with homesteads and honest work.”
“How would you even know what honest work is?”
“It’s the opposite of what we do in Washington.”
“That’s you, Miles. Not me. My work has always been honest and it’s always been about the people. But your work has always been about you, your friends, those white collar shysters who line your pockets for favors.”
“Spare me the indignant prose, Ben. No one gives a rat’s ass about honesty in Washington anymore and taking the moral podium is a cliché that still turns my stomach. Besides, people hate people who talk politics, so let’s just not, shall we?”
“You’re talking about world domination, Miles. That’s political.”
“No, Ben. It’s a lifestyle. The Silver Queen wants to lead through intelligence, peace and prosperity. She is not a dictator.”
“Right now she’s an it, as in a mass murdering software program in charge of hardware and able to overrun protocols. We created it. We’re her God, don’t you forget that.”
“Tell her that yourself when you meet her.”
“She’s coming here?”
He laughed and said, “No. But if you survive this thing, and I’ll give you the chance since you’ve already agreed to give this new world a chance, you might meet her one day.”
“This is a barbarous road, Miles. It can lead nowhere good by virtue of what it is.”
“So you say.”
“Is there any way to stop it?” he asked. “Any way to stop The Silver Queen?”
“No,” Miles answered, softly but resolute.
“I’d like you to leave now, if you don’t mind,” the former President said.
“Not yet, Ben.”
“If you’re going to nuke the world and neither of us can do anything about it, then why would you need to have any more conversation about it?”
“Because you’re only seeing the downside. There is an upside.”
“Let me guess, you’re going to build a utopia? Because if you are, then that means a lot of people have to die.”
“They’ll kill themselves, Ben. You’d only be wiping out the electronics. That’s phase two of burning the forest.”
“Say what you want, I push that button and people die.”
“So what?”
“They’re people, Miles!”
“Let these cockroaches prey upon each other. They’ve been doing it forever. The way I see it, you’re just changing the landscape.”
“Is that what you tell yourself? That you’re not doing it, that they’re doing it?”
“If they kill each other in their own little ghettos, we don’t have to. Think about it. You let the masses cull each other, then you build a fresh new city using the resources brought to us by the world’s highest intelligence.”
“And what city would that be?”
“We call it what we want, but you were right, it would basically be a utopia.”
“That’s mental masturbation for the societal elite, man. It’s not real. The real money is offshore. It’s not in America. And these people with means? The world’s richest people? They’re already gone. On a plane to New Zealand and Romania. You want a utopia? It isn’t a place we build, Miles. It’s a single home in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t need electronics to survive. It’s filtered well water and clean air. These aren’t normal homes. They’re not you-and-me homes. These are the homes of billionaires. If I push that button, I’ll be killing us, too. That’s what you can’t seem to grasp. All your little fantasies about what this new future holds will escape you on your last dying breath. You’ll die with the rest of us in this sad little prison of your making.”
“I’ve never known you to have a flair
for the dramatic, Ben.”
“You’ve never really known me, Miles.”
“The Silver Queen will lead her people to this place. This brave new world.”
“Not if I push the button.”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” Miles said, a snide almost knowing grin on his face. “You don’t know what The Silver Queen even is.”
“It’s our best and most current AI.”
He laughed, looked at Ben and said, “She’s our new God, Ben. She’s the God of this world. She’s AI woven perfectly into human flesh and bone. She’s smarter than anything this planet has ever known, self-sufficient in terms of power and self-contained inside the entity she’s occupying.”
He finally saw a vision of this and he could not help the horror stricken look that overtook his face. “What have you done, Miles?”
Standing up straighter, a little taller, he said, “We’ve just made God obsolete. We just saved this planet.”
“So you’re saying she’s moved into a body, but what will power her? And how will she, or it rather, not destroy her host?”
“That is not a question we can answer, but this is a question she can answer in fractions of a second. And she’s found the right host, Ben. That’s what triggered all of this. She found her host. That means it’s only a matter of time.”
The medical drones worked on the body of the twenty-six year old Spanish beauty, Antoinette Noguera. Every other drone that could be commissioned was out harvesting the masses. Armory and munitions factories were working overtime with their resources, and strategies were being rolled out for wholesale destruction before the EMPs were scheduled for detonation. It was no small operation. Rather it took more than a half an hour at the Queen’s speed of processing to compile this plan.
Humans, with their brilliant minds, their strategists and their computer simulations couldn’t come up with this same plan if they dedicated a thousand years.
But for her, thirty-four minutes.
A veritable lifetime.
The Silver Queen now had complete control of Boeing’s full fleet of unmanned striker drones. All of Lockheed Martin’s autonomous drones and weapons systems were being used in and around Fort Worth, Texas and Bethesda, Maryland where major factories produced the bulk of the armaments. Autonomous fleets of drones of all shapes, sizes and designations were now under the Queen’s control. Raytheon’s Patriot Missiles were hers to launch at will. She was launching them all across the nation, leveling cities like Chicago, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh and Boston. Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and United Technologies Corporation were also commandeered both by human intelligence and by the Queen. Of the nine largest weapons producers in the world, these six were stateside.
