Hastings said, “You’re saying she somehow recorded this after she died.”
Harbin shook his head. “She didn’t record anything.” He turned the machine around and hit the button that would have ejected the cassette had there been one inside. “There’s no tape. There hasn’t been one in this machine since Fraser first found it and turned it in after returning to base.”
This seemed to confuse them even more.
“How is it playing, then?” Raffalo asked.
“I’m not sure playing is the correct word for what’s happening.” Harbin settled back in his chair and pulled the device closer. He studied their faces for another moment, then turned to Martha, who gave him a reassuring nod. He leaned closer to the recorder, pressed the Play button again, and spoke in a soft voice, “Sophie, can you hear me?”
At first, there was nothing, only static coming from the single speaker, then they all heard it, quiet at first, barely a whisper. Sophie’s voice.
“Yes, doctor. I can hear you.”
Hastings let out an audible gasp.
Amber Roush’s eyes grew wide and she seemed to sink down into her seat.
Raffalo didn’t move at all. His face had gone horribly pale. When he spoke, he sounded like a frightened child. “How is that possible?”
Harbin spoke into the recorder. “Sophie, can you tell us where you are?”
“I…I’m not sure.”
“Is it a place?”
“It feels like I’m…everyplace…all at once. It’s cold. I’m cold.”
“Can you see me? Can you see Dr. Chan and the others?”
“Yes. I can see…everything. Everyone.”
Hastings frowned. “Is that tape recorder connected somehow?”
“Not with wi-fi or any other conventional connection method known to us…but somehow it is,” Harbin said. “Sophie, how are you able to speak to us through this device?”
She ignored the question. “Can I talk to Tennant?”
“Maybe later.”
“I’d like that.”
Harbin glanced up at the senators, their eyes fixed on the recorder. “Who else is there with you?”
“Everyone is here.”
“Your mother and father? The people from your village?”
“Everyone. We all run now. We all run together.”
Harbin pressed the Stop button and the recorder clicked off. “For some reason, this only works when we hit Play. It’s the only time she hears us. I haven’t figured out why. Although Sophie is the only one who speaks to us through this particular device, we think all those who were infected, all those who connected, are there.”
“Where?” Raffalo said, clearly much louder than he had hoped.
Martha said, “We believe their consciousness uploaded to the internet. To the cloud.”
“You do understand how far-fetched this all sounds?”
“Yet, here we are.”
At the corner of their table, one of the candles flickered and went out, the other four were still burning as were the half dozen or so up on the desk with the senators. Others placed around the chamber fought back the dark but were losing. The Capitol building had very few windows, and without power, the darkness inside was thick.
After Portland, when groups of runners were spotted in Little Rock, Denver, and outside of Atlanta, Homeland Security had taken the extraordinary step of shutting down all internet service providers, severing the country’s internet backbone.
That hadn’t been enough.
The ANA Shim virus spread.
Less than a day later, large groups of runners appeared near Los Angeles and downtown Dallas.
Other places, too.
The ANA Shim virus spread.
The nation’s power grid was taken offline less than twenty-four hours later.
The ANA Shim virus still spread.
Amid all of this, when Martha had first heard Sophie’s voice, a single thought had come to her, one that frightened her more than all others—
Death didn’t mean the same thing anymore.
Martha found herself eyeing every shadow, second-guessing every cold pocket of air. She tried not to think about the ghosts huddled within the corners of this particular building, one of the oldest in the country—the wars, the disease, the death—this building had seen throughout history. John Quincy Adams had died in this very room. Two hundred years of specters watched them now. Listened. She wouldn’t turn to the dark galley at her back for fear of what she might see. She hoped to God none of those here found a voice; hearing Sophie was enough.
Hastings cleared his throat. “You expect us to believe the dead are speaking to you?”
Raffalo had one eye pinched shut and the tip of his finger in his ear, scratching at something deep.
From his briefcase, Harbin took out a thick manila envelope and set it on the table next to the tape recorder. He tapped it with his index finger. “At first, we didn’t believe it, either, but the more we talked to Sophie, the more we realized it was true. It’s amazing, actually. Her consciousness seems to have not only joined with the internet but all the others who have passed on, what we referred to as the hive mind. Their thoughts have become collective, a single mind. Together they’ve been able to seamlessly and almost instantly pick through data on any electronic device—not just those connected in a traditional sense but things like this tape recorder, anything and everything that uses electricity. They created their own means to transmit data. I imagine it would have taken a government team months, maybe years to figure out who was actually responsible for mutating the virus, who took Dr. Cushman and Frederick Hoover’s work and attempted to weaponize it and began this…infestation. With the two of them dead, we may never have figured it out. But Hoover is part of that collective mind now, too, up there in the cloud somewhere, and he didn’t want that knowledge to die with him.”
A door opened on the side of the room and General Westin stepped in with Tennant, one hand on her shoulder. The door closed behind them. Tennant looked nervous. Martha had suspected Westin had been listening somewhere nearby but she hadn’t been certain. Without releasing Tennant, he silently stared over at the two of them.
Hastings and Roush glanced at the general but said nothing.
Senator Raffalo gave up on his ear and made several more notes. The corner of his mouth twitched. When he looked back at Harbin and Martha there was no hiding the anger brewing behind his flushed face. He made no attempt to conceal it.
Harbin wasn’t about to get flustered. He continued. “Through our connection with Sophie, through this tape recorder, Hoover provided not only the names of those responsible but every detail from their first contact with him to everything they’ve done since. Every action they’ve taken to attempt to cover their tracks. This new mind, this hive mind, doesn’t forget. They don’t seem to miss anything.” He patted the thick envelope again. “The amount of information here is staggering.”
Martha turned to General Westin. “When Dr. Cushman said to give you her best, I think we all misunderstood. It wasn’t some kind of slight. She wanted you to have the DARPA document.”
Senators Hastings and Roush had been whispering to each other but had fallen silent.
Westin’s eyes fixed on Senator Raffalo, who had his finger in his ear again, his free hand attempting to write something. “She must have known I’d get the information back to the president,” Westin said. “I wouldn’t allow it to…vanish, as some might. She was right. We reviewed not only the ANA Shim information but a copy of the data Sophie Riggin provided. Had any of that information ended up here…with this committee first, with you in particular, Senator Raffalo…I hate to think where it might have gone.”
Martha expected Raffalo to deny the accusation, to maybe stand and storm out of the room, but he did neither of those things. Instead he pressed his finger deeper into his ear and turned to Senator Roush. “Do you hear something?”
Either because she was still processing what
Westin had said or because she didn’t know how to respond to that question, she said nothing.
“Well, I hear something.”
At this, she shrunk back, eased her chair away from Raffalo, nearly rolled into Hastings beside her. “Don’t you wear a hearing aid?”
Raffalo scribbled something else down on his notepad and shook his head, his finger buried in his ear. “I’ve got a cochlear implant. You don’t hear that? Like a hum.”
This was enough for both Hastings and Roush to stand. They crossed around to the other side of the large desk.
Westin looked over at Harbin and Martha. “Can the sound generate here? From an implant?”
Martha stood, got a better look. “You’re not wearing the external component, are you?”
His finger twitching in his ear, Raffalo shook his head. “It’s in my desk. I haven’t worn it since this business started.” His free hand scribbled something else down on the notepad.
Martha said, “Cochlear implants use conductive transmission. Without the external component within range, there’s no microphone, no power, it’s nonfunctioning.”
“Well, I hear something, damnit, and it’s getting loud,” Raffalo shot back. His finger looked like it was buried down to his knuckle.
On the tape recorder, Harbin pressed Play again. “Sophie, is the sound about to generate here? In this room?”
“The bad man needs to run.”
“Sophie, Martha and I are in here. Tennant, too. You don’t want to hurt us, do you?”
“The bad man deserves to run.”
Raffalo tried to stand, got halfway to his feet, then fell back in his chair. “Ah, Christ, stop it! Get it out!”
“I want you to come and run with me, Mr. Raffalo. Will you come and run with me? With all of us?”
“I don’t hear anything, do you?” Martha asked.
Harbin shook his head.
“His nose is bleeding,” Senator Hastings said, stepping farther away.
Raffalo slammed the side of his head down on the desk. Not once, but twice.
He dropped back into his chair, his eyes bulging. His breathing went to sharp gasps, every muscle in his body tensed and he twisted to the right and back again, his bloody finger digging impossibly deep in his ear.
“We’re all waiting for him.”
Raffalo’s eyes fell on the pencil in his other hand and without any hesitation, he grabbed it with bloody fingers, shoved it into his ear, and slammed his head back down onto the desk. There was an audible crunch, a sound Martha knew she’d never forget, and he fell forward, still.
A hush fell over all of them.
The room dropped into silence.
Harbin said, “Sophie, did you do that?”
Her answer was immediate. “No. Not me. But the bad man deserves to run.”
Tennant was the first to move. She stepped away from General Westin and crossed the room, went to the large desk at the front, and eyed the dead man for a moment before reaching into her pocket.
The Bluetooth speaker wasn’t large, smaller than her palm, JBL printed on the side. Below that, was a flashing white light. Wrapped twice around, a rubber band held the external half of Raffalo’s hearing aid against the black plastic. Tennant switched the speaker off and softly said, “For Momma, Poppa, Sophie…everyone,” before setting it next to the dead senator’s head.
Martha went over to her, wrapped her arms around the girl, and tried to pull her close, but Tennant wouldn’t move. She was reading the notes scrawled by Raffalo in a hand impossible to ignore. The same phrase written hundreds of times across every inch of the notepad page:
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Fraser says hello.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Fraser says hello.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Fraser says hello.
According to current calculations, 4,390,000,000 souls around the world are connected to the internet.
That number might be larger than we think.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
James Patterson is the world’s bestselling author and most trusted storyteller. He has created many enduring fictional characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Middle School, and I Funny. Among his notable literary collaborations are The President Is Missing, with President Bill Clinton, and the Max Einstein series, produced in partnership with the Albert Einstein Estate. Patterson’s writing career is characterized by a single mission: to prove that there is no such thing as a person who “doesn’t like to read,” only people who haven’t found the right book. He’s given more than three million books to schoolkids and the military, donated more than seventy million dollars to support education, and endowed more than five thousand college scholarships for teachers. For his prodigious imagination and championship of literacy in America, Patterson was awarded the 2019 National Humanities Medal. The National Book Foundation presented him with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, and he is also the recipient of an Edgar Award and nine Emmy Awards. He lives in Florida with his family.
J. D. Barker is the international bestselling author of numerous books, including Dracul and The Fourth Monkey. His novels have been translated into two dozen languages and optioned for both film and television. Barker resides in coastal New Hampshire with his wife, Dayna, and their daughter, Ember.
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