Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  Liane nodded. “It’s just not credible. I’ll have our legal team get to work on due diligence right away and we can go from there.”

  But even as Diana prepared to launch into a rebuttal, blaring feed notifications declared an urgent incoming call. It was Kendrick. Her chest tightened.

  “Even if there’s a small chance that what Diana says is true,” said Hsu, “I can’t afford to wait for confirmation. I need to get in touch with the Taiwanese defense minister and the UN Security Council right away.”

  “There’s no way I can allow that,” said Liane. “We need to keep this as contained as possible until we know what’s really going on.”

  “Given the circumstances, that’s not a call you get to make,” said Hsu, anger rising. “It’s your damn country that’s going Machiavelli on the rest of us.”

  Letting the debate gain steam, Diana accepted Kendrick’s call. His face appeared in front of her on an encrypted stream, dark smudges below his eyes and stress lines turning his expression into a topography of fear.

  “It’s happening,” he said, his voice high and reedy. His eyes flicked back and forth. “Diana, I don’t know what to do. There’s no more time. It’s happening.”

  Her heart froze, blood moving through her veins like glaciers carving out mountainsides.

  “What’s happening, Kendrick?”

  His head twitched to the side. “Shit,” he said. “I gotta go. They think I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Kendrick,” she hissed.

  But he was gone, his image vanishing into the roiling vortex of the feed, Rachel’s eye boring through where it had been superimposed to skewer Diana as she tried to regain her composure.

  Diana placed a palm on the cool, smooth glass of the tabletop, steadying herself. Then she stepped around the table, behind Hsu, to stare out over the angular skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco. Clouds scudded across the sky like an advancing army. The bay was covered in whitecaps, as if an invisible baker were smearing frosting onto the crest of every wave. Diana’s tongue was thick in her dry mouth. Something burgeoned inside her, a conviction that burned hot in her gut.

  There.

  Sunlight glinting off something. No, not something. Somethings.

  Off to the southwest, a flock of drones was launching from a skyscraper around Civic Center, spiraling up and schooling around five helicopters lifting off the roof. The armada rose, arranged itself in formation, and then angled for downtown, engines screaming. Looking down, Diana caught glimpses of a parallel squadron of matte-black trucks roaring through the grid of streets far below, lights flashing, sirens wailing, civilian cars parting automatically before them like wheat before a falling scythe.

  “That’s the federal building,” Liane’s voice came out in a harsh whisper.

  “Fuck me,” said the CFO, choking on the words.

  “Niitakayama nobore,” said Dag.

  “Niitakayama nobore,” Hsu echoed softly. “A new Pearl Harbor.”

  Everyone had joined Diana at the window, looking out over this metropolis that had inspired so many dreams of riches and conquest, from colonizing conquistadors, to gold-obsessed forty-niners, to Silicon Valley moguls eager to put their dent in the universe. They all watched, transfixed, as fate approached in a tempest of whirling blades and burning rubber.

  Helen was taking her place in history.

  CHAPTER 33

  Diana appraised Rachel. The chairwoman stood erect, outwardly calm but brimming with barely concealed tension in the face of the coming storm. She had spent her life building Commonwealth. Doing so had required laying new fiber across every corner of the planet, defeating competitors, gobbling up new entrants, orchestrating a cybersecurity program to rival the ambition of the Manhattan Project, cultivating relationships with countless political leaders and corporate partners, challenging every assumption, managing a cantankerous board, overcoming the fear of attempting the impossible on a daily basis, optimizing an unprecedented business model, and leading an army of technologists to apply the feed’s algorithms to every conceivable application and embed them in every manufactured object.

  Anyone who pushed themselves to such extremes suffered greatly. Rachel had sacrificed everything on the altar of the feed and had stopped at nothing to defend it. She had entered the geopolitical arena to implement a carbon tax when Dag demanded it in return for Javier and Emily’s exploit. An exploit that would have destroyed public trust in the feed, and Commonwealth with it. An exploit that Rachel still had no idea had been the handiwork of Javier, her brilliant software architect who had helped secure the feed’s digital ramparts before deciding to help breach them in the name of social justice. They were witnessing the child of Rachel’s ambition being harnessed to Helen’s chariot on its fiery ride to global annexation.

  Diana’s dream was dying alongside Rachel’s. It was too late. Helen had won. Diana had done everything she could to stop the avalanche she’d helped start. But sometimes doing everything you could just wasn’t enough. Time was cruelly finite, and she simply hadn’t had enough of it to orchestrate an effective resistance. Diana had dared to hope that if she unlocked her vault of hard-won secrets, called in every favor, and used every trick she’d learned over the years, she could defeat, or at least deflect, Helen’s inexorable ambitions. She remembered the smell of Helen’s perfume, the bounce of her blonde curls, the cold calculation at the heart of every maxim.

  Who was Diana to challenge such a matriarch? What was she thinking, trying to organize a last-ditch effort to avert such a well-prepared campaign? David had defeated Goliath with technology, a sling that had rendered the giant’s bulging muscles obsolete. Diana held no such trump card. She was David, unarmed, about to be pummeled senseless by Goliath’s massive fists. She was a failure as a spy and now a failure as a defector. She was a failure as a friend—she had none. A failure as a partner—Dag despised her. And a failure as a moral being—she had lied, killed, and betrayed more times than she cared to count, all for a cause she no longer believed in. She was, in short, a failure.

  Whatever Helen’s wrath held in store for double agents, Diana deserved it, many times over. The halo of flash-freezing blood materialized in her mind’s eye, tiny ice crystals forming as steam billowed up from the scattered gore. She wouldn’t receive the mercy of a quick death, and she had dealt out far worse. Ruining lives was often crueler than ending them.

  But staring death in the face wasn’t what drew a searing line of pain through her soul like the red-hot steel of a half-forged katana. Death was inevitable, and an early, painful death was a professional hazard in her line of work. What hurt was knowing that everyone whose life she’d touched, every agent she’d cultivated, every relationship she’d built, every person in this very room had been doomed by her efforts. Helen would squeeze every last contact from Diana’s broken mind before letting the grim reaper exact his toll. Helen would co-opt Diana’s network and put them to work establishing her empire. And whatever Helen had been planning to do with the people in this room, the revelations Diana had just shared with them would seal their fate. Nobody who knew the truth could live. They would be a threat to the new regime, and a regime whose jurisdiction included the whole of the digital and physical world would harbor no such threats.

  That regime would be the legacy of Diana’s failure. She had fled persecution only to enable it. Life was nothing but a vicious circle that transformed you into the object of your deepest fears.

  We’ll go off-grid, start over. A sad smile teased at the corners of Diana’s lips. If only she had listened to Dag over breakfast that day, actually listened instead of putting the conversation on autopilot as she tapped her feed like a junkie. She had wanted a mission so badly. But what was a mission, really? An adventure? An opportunity to help forge a better world? Maybe that was the case for someone somewhere, but Diana had to admit that for her, a mission was an excuse to feel important, to expand her hoard of precious secrets, to polish her ego, to distract her from t
he miserable reality that a lifetime of missions had added up to.

  For a shimmering moment, Diana indulged the fantasy of paths not taken. She and Dag sipped fresh coconuts under the shade of palms on a West African beach, or they tilled a hobby farm in the French countryside, taught chess to orphans, chased the sunset at music festival after music festival, raised a brood of spoiled children, trekked the Himalayas, debated the relative merits of history’s greatest horticulturalists, or piloted boats along Amsterdam’s canals. We’ll go off-grid, start over. If only.

  Something clicked inside her, like a boiler switching on in a forgotten subbasement.

  Finally sensing Diana’s gaze, Rachel met her eyes.

  “Turn it off,” said Diana.

  Rachel stared back, unblinking.

  “Turn it all off,” said Diana. “It’s the only way.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Staring into someone else’s eyes was far rarer than people assumed. In conversation most people let their gaze hover at a socially neutral point in space, flicking around to take in body language or facial expressions, letting peripheral vision do most of the work, maybe dipping in for a brief second of eye contact to accentuate a point. Lovers occasionally transgressed this norm in moments of intimacy, but even that was unusual. Even if you did look into someone’s eyes, doing so meant shifting your focus back and forth between them.

  This was different.

  Rachel’s single eye was a stained-glass window, lavender panels stitched together with flecks of green the exact shade of weathered bronze. Behind that luminescent partition raged a silent inferno whose flames Diana could glimpse only in the interstices through which Rachel’s soul shone.

  Turn it off.

  The implications were unfathomable, the scenarios impossible to anticipate, the contingencies infinitely recursive. Efficacy bred dependency. The feed was the information infrastructure that empowered nearly every human activity and on which nearly every human activity relied. A talisman that lent mere mortals the power of demigods. Doctors used it for diagnosis. Brokers used it to place bets. Physicists used it to explore the mysteries of quantum entanglement. Farmers used it to grow food. Kindergarteners used it to learn the alphabet. The feed was power, water, transportation, communication, entertainment, public services, relationships, industry, media, government, security, finance, and education. Without it the churning torrent of human civilization would cease. The feed was lightning captured in grains of sand, a miracle of science, engineering, and culture that wove the entire world into a single digital tapestry of unparalleled beauty and complexity.

  Turning it off was madness. But leaving it on meant surrendering the feed, the world, to Helen. It was an impossible choice.

  Rachel closed her eye. As the eyelid shut, Diana suddenly became aware of Rachel’s age. The decades had inscribed deep lines across every centimeter of her face until it resembled a satellite image of eroded, rocky foothills, an archetypal example of the ravages of time. Chlorine had leached her silver hair, leaving her ponytail dry and stiff. Her simple, elegant suit made her thinness appear slender, but exercise, stress, and elderliness had taken a toll, leaving too little meat on fragile bones.

  Rachel exhaled slowly through her nose, and her posture shifted subtly, as if she had been holding that particular breath for half her life. Then her eye opened again, but she was no longer looking at Diana. She was gazing out across the city.

  The lights in the conference room clicked off. The gentle background hum of the building’s internal processes died. Diana’s files vanished from the shared feed. No, not just her files. The feed itself was gone. It was as if Diana had just stepped through the red satin curtains, Nell’s sure grip leading her into the exotic feedlessness of Analog.

  But this wasn’t Analog. This was Commonwealth headquarters, the nerve center of the feed. Just a moment before, Diana had been playing in the final match of the World Cup, a key node in the deluge of global attention, and now she was standing in the middle of an empty stadium, her teammates vanished, the crowd abruptly absent, the cameras off, nothing but the frantic beating of her terrified heart and a distant ball rolling to a stop in the grass. The millions of voices that were her constant companion, always there, murmuring just below the threshold of hearing, had been silenced. The humble drinking cup that she constantly dipped into the font of all human knowledge had been slapped away. Her access to the vast prosthetic mind whose presence she had long since taken for granted had been severed.

  The lights in every window in every skyscraper around them shut off, rippling out across the city, the state, the country, the world, as feed-enabled electric grids failed. Every car in sight, from the streets of downtown to distant vehicles crossing the Bay Bridge, froze as if captured in a still photograph. The container ships and yachts plying the bay coasted to a stop, their bow waves dissipating and their wakes catching up to make them bob where they sat marooned on the open water.

  The ominous swarm of drones and helicopters converging on them came to a halt in midair and then descended to land on the nearest patch of clear ground they could find, per their emergency backup protocols. The convoy of trucks died along with all the civilian cars, their lights going dark and their sirens quiet.

  Diana imagined transoceanic flights automatically detouring to make emergency landings, surgeons whose equipment failed midcraniotomy, a feed soap opera dissolving at the moment of a transcendent plot twist, control panels winking out before terrified astronauts, newsrooms descending into an unprecedented hush, nuclear power plants shutting down, a vocal track evaporating to reveal a pop star was lip-synching to a packed arena, a trail map fading from an endurance runner’s vision, ovens shutting off before the lasagna was ready, students cursing as their research papers melted away, Wall Street’s algorithmic ballet extinguished right in front of traders’ eyes, a hidden sniper pulling the trigger to no effect, factories grinding to a halt, pumps ceasing to push wastewater through treatment facilities, and tourists at the Louvre being thrown into utter darkness. The world was a windup toy that had unexpectedly exhausted its clockwork motor.

  The feed was gone.

  Silence reigned.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Diana. “Please follow me.”

  CHAPTER 35

  The sculpture garden was dim, the only illumination coming from sunlight filtering through exterior windows. Carrying the briefcase in one hand, Diana led the group through a dreamscape populated by monsters that darkness had enlivened. The rich shadows playing across the avant-garde pieces made solid marble appear to shift and react as they passed, incarnate imagination trying to throw off its physical shackles as reality frayed around the edges.

  Other Commonwealth employees stumbled out of offices and into the space, murmuring to each other in confusion as they tried to wrap their minds around the impossible absence of the feed. Diana navigated by the layouts she’d memorized in preparation for tapping the board meeting. The others followed her, overlarge egos deflated by shock and fear. For the moment at least, they were happy to follow someone who had a plan, any plan.

  Instead of paralysis, crisis conjured practiced clarity within Diana. This was an op, and running an op required clear thinking, rationality untainted by the deadly panic to which civilians so often succumbed. Panic, uncertainty, confusion, these were Diana’s allies, moats to hold back the opposition as she struggled to make it to higher ground. She had used spray paint and psychedelics to distract and confound the guards while spiriting Dag away from the abandoned Arctic oil platform. She needed to use this ruse to even greater effect.

  Data wasn’t insight. Helen and her confederates would be trying to figure out what was going on. Given the sensitivity of the raid, Helen would have shared the strategy behind it on a need-to-know basis. Now her sound infosec would work against her as ignorant field commanders improvised with incomplete information, unable to solicit mission-critical updates and new orders.

  Helen herself could only spe
culate. Even though she had initiated the raid after noticing Dag’s escape and deducing Diana’s defection, she didn’t know what they’d done after escaping the Arctic. She’d have to assume that Diana had been able to pass along some kind of warning to Rachel, but her plan to sack the quarterback required that the quarterback actually be there. Diana almost pitied whatever adjacent officers were suffering her wrath at this precise moment, made guilty by their presence at the undoing of her long-laid plan.

  The steel door was right where it was supposed to be. She shouldered it open.

  “Single file,” she called back. “Hold hands.”

  Diana reached back to take Rachel’s hand.

  The emergency stairwell was pitch black. Diana ran the briefcase along the wall until it hit a railing. Feeling ahead with her foot, she found the edge of the first step and began to descend, instructing the group as she went. They followed, obedient, robbed of their vision, their neighbors’ sweaty palms and Diana’s curt orders their only companions as they forged ahead into darkness.

  Stairs became landings became stairs became landings until flight after flight merged into a single extended journey through a special level of hell characterized by burning thighs, blindness, crippling doubt, and heavy breathing. Diana watched her thoughts coalesce and dissipate like sediment-laden eddies in a mountain stream. Mental acuity was most valuable when it was least accessible, and the best way to retain it was to treat every movement, every breath, every heartbeat, as a meditation. Either your monkey mind controlled you, or you controlled your monkey mind. Perceiving the formation of her own emotions, reactions, and lines of thinking freed her from their constraints, allowing her to see the world simply as it was instead of the convenient illusion her brain constructed from it.