(R)evolution (Phoenix Horizon Book 1)

by PJ Manney

  “It could be.”

  “You, Católico, are still a softhearted dreamer. I thought you finally got smart.”

  “Are you smart enough to realize it’s either Brant or you left standing? With my help, it will be you.”

  Bruce gestured to Vera. “And what do you think?”

  Don’t speak! Anthony Dulles yelled silently to Vera in Tom’s head.

  “I think Tom’s right,” Vera replied.

  “You do?” Bruce stood and paced the room, limping behind the sofa. He wandered back and forth three times in thought, and finally asked, “Do you know what I hate about technology?”

  Tom snorted, “Ironic, coming from you.”

  “I hate that illusions we create about our lives are revealed by technology to be lies. When you can data-mine so much information and uncover things never known before, you find out what you thought is, really isn’t. And vice versa. That can be very upsetting. Even for those of us who wield data for a living.”

  “How do you know the data isn’t an illusion?”

  “It can be. But luck reveals the truth.” Bruce paused behind Vera and leaned over her, slipping his arms around her shoulders like a shawl. He traced a pattern with the tiny remote along the skin of her cleavage and his other hand ran up her neck, fingers raking her hair at her scalp. He pulled her head back and kissed her neck as she snuggled into his embrace. “And I’m a very lucky man.”

  Tom saw the flash of emotion in Bruce’s eyes. The light around their bodies darkened and cymbals crashed in Tom’s head, silencing Billy Idol. As Bruce pressed a button on the remote, Tom sprang from his seat and threw himself at the couple. Time slowed to an extreme. But Tom wasn’t Superman. His mind might manipulate time and space, but his body could not defy the laws of physics and human anatomy, however optimized and augmented.

  A wall of bulletproof Plexiglas rocketed from the floor, two inches thick and ten feet wide. The top edge caught his chin like an uppercut with a ton of force behind it, tossing him to the marble floor. Four walls rose instantly around Bruce and Vera, thrust into the air from hidden, explosive hydraulic lifts under the marble parquet. The open top met the ceiling and sealed them in.

  The floor patterns made sense. Each marble rectangle was an instant, mini panic room.

  With a sharp jerk of the arms and a loud grunt, Bruce snapped Vera’s neck. Unlike the ease depicted in movies, the action took effort and was exaggerated in Tom’s slow-time. She sagged, head lolling to the side. But she was still alive. Her eyes flicked violently, panicked at witnessing her own death.

  As Tom struggled to his feet, he hacked the house computer, looking for the panic room’s files.

  Bruce’s voice was modulated through a speaker in the ceiling, “I’m lucky because I’m in complete control of my world.” He laid her down, caressing her head as she twitched, then came around to sit beside her. “I did love you,” he said to Vera. “But data is data.” He turned to Tom. “Like you were never blind.” Putting his hands around her throat and squeezing, he ruminated thoughtfully, “You know, sometimes I think we’re all ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much.’ Information is equal parts power and curse. No one ever thought of that when we decided we needed to know more to maintain control. Sometimes I wonder if all the control is worth it. Oh, well. What’s that song the wife sings, you know, in The Man Who Knew Too Much?”

  Vera lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Tom found the commands for the panic room as he muttered, “Que Sera, Sera.”

  “Right. ‘Que Sera, Sera.’ Whatever will be, will be.”

  And the walls came plummeting down.

  Bruce’s face froze in shock, and he stabbed at his remote control without effect as Tom dived over the falling wall in a forward roll. Tom’s second command to the house server sent the wall racing back up to the ceiling behind him. Shaft and a white security guard rushed the room and fired senseless bullets at the Plexiglas.

  Tom opened up his perceptions to check on Vera. Her fading mauve/suede/cinnamon vibration meant she would be dead in seconds.

  Bruce’s reflexes were excellent, but not good enough. While he leapt up, ready to attack, Tom, with the luxury of slow-time, could find the right vertebrae and hit it, hard. Bruce’s body (coal-black, acrid, and stinking of sulfur) went limp, and Tom caught him, but staggered. His own vertebrae hurt coal-black-sulfuric, too.

  He felt Bruce’s pain, just like he felt Talia’s.

  “Thought you might like to know how Vera felt,” hissed Tom. Turning to Vera, he didn’t need to check her pulse. Her vibrant colors and flavors were gone. There was no vibration. She was dead. Anthony Dulles’s prescient memories mourned for her.

  Then Tom triggered the wall to retract once more and lifted Bruce in front like a shield.

  The bodyguards fired while Tom repositioned Bruce to take the hit. One bullet hit Bruce’s thigh and Tom’s thigh hurt. Another bullet passed through Bruce’s shoulder and Tom felt the pain. Changing tactics, the bodyguards rushed Tom, who tossed Bruce aside like a toy and fought the two men. It was no contest. He could anticipate every move, dodge their bullets, and using some recent Internet videos, executed a swift punch to Shaft’s neck vertebrae and another to the white guard’s temple, leaving the men motionless at his feet.

  Tom’s own body felt lesser trauma to the same places. Distance learning over the Internet had its advantages. Supersensory synesthesia did not.

  It was time to end this.

  Cruelty grew in his synapses, suffusing his being, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to stop it. It tasted like Bruce. Grabbing Bruce’s broken, bleeding body by a foot, Tom dragged him to the enormous white-marble gas fireplace and placed his feet onto the grate. Then he went into the all-white kitchen and returned with a fire extinguisher and a bottle of cooking oil.

  “So here’s how it’s going to be,” said Tom. “I ask questions. And you answer. As you may have noticed when I paralyzed you, I made sure that I didn’t damage the spinal cord too much. Need some of those nerves for the pain. So let’s get down to it. Who trained the three 10/26 kids to become terrorists?”

  “Fuck you,” Bruce spat between gritted teeth.

  Tom turned on the gas, then pressed the ignition button. Lobo’s expensive driving shoes with the ridiculous black nubby bits on the soles (ridiculous since he never drove himself, much less a manual-shift two-seater) seared and cooked in the blue flames.

  “Fire seems so miraculous,” mused Tom, as the rubber melted like licorice chips, and the leather soles ignited. “It’s the ultimate technology. It turns sand into glass and ore into metal, water into vapor, and raw food edible and disease-free. It’s been used to fight wars since the dawn of civilization, forever altering the balance of power. No wonder the Greeks had their stories about Prometheus. Bringing fire to mortals was the ultimate creative act: In fire’s crucible, men became like gods, evolving ourselves and everything around us.”

  The burning man whimpered. Tears of pain rolled off his cheeks onto the cold marble floor.

  Tom’s feet stung as though standing on lit coals. His eyes watered, too, but he had to keep his systems open. He was too vulnerable in Bruce’s territory to ignore any hint of danger. “Am I being too philosophical for you? I’ll turn it off if you tell me.”

  “Motherfucker!” Bruce gasped. “Turn it off!”

  He got down low to Bruce’s face and whispered, “But you haven’t told me anything yet . . .”

  “We made our own terrorists. So we could destroy them! Terrorists make everyone afraid!”

  Tom rose gingerly, walking with difficulty. He turned off the flame, then blasted the burned feet with a quick squeeze of the extinguisher trigger. The fire was out, but the sting remained. “Who ran the cells from the club?”

  Bruce was aware enough to notice. “You feel my pain?”

  Tom nodded. “With great power comes great affliction.”

  “Fucking retard.” Bruce closed his eyes. They popped open at the sound of the ga
s hissing. “You don’t get it! We had to control bots. Not the market. If we hadn’t, some terrorist group might have done it on a global scale . . .”

  “. . . and not controllable by the club.” Tom sighed and turned off the gas.

  “Could have been a lot worse.”

  “Well, they were just a bunch of entertainment people. You’re right. Coulda been worse.” He grabbed the bottle and poured oil on Bruce’s feet, up his legs to his chest.

  “Whaaaaat?”

  “The big problem with your story is the lack of a central character. And no one is more sorry than me.” He flipped on the gas and hit the ignition button once more. The oil caught quickly, flames traveling up its trail. “You see, since torture can’t be relied upon to work, I have to already know, or at least have a damned good suspicion, about the answers. The rest is just the illusion of causal effect. In this case, I already know you ran the cells. You financed them, you arranged the training and the plan. You chose the children. And you and the club had them killed. You killed everyone on 10/26.”

  “Why do this if you know the answers!”

  “Torture isn’t just about information. Anyone who says that is lying. It’s about retribution. You can’t destroy all those lives, including mine, and not pay. And it scares the sheep. As excruciating as this is, I’m enjoying it.” Bruce’s pain traveled quickly up Tom’s body. His legs too painful to stand, he knelt down and rocked near Bruce’s head to whisper, “Who’s the sheep now?”

  “Inhuman fuck!” Bruce spat through tears.

  Tom laughed through tears. “Great choice of words! No, Bruce. This is the most human part of me. It’s the most human part of all of us. Even a mouse feels empathy for his fellow nesters. Only humans torture and hate for no appreciable gain, except that it feels so good.”

  Flames engulfed the oil-soaked clothing and flesh burned in earnest. The stench was metallically-sulfury-sweet.

  Tom curled into a fetal ball of hurt. “It’s the same dopamine response our brains get with sex, food, and drugs. And music. You of all dopamine junkies should know. So we do it again . . .”

  The burning man’s screams echoed endlessly in streamers of charcoal spikes around the huge room.

  “. . . and again . . .”

  Smoke rose, billowing to the ceiling, darkening the perfect white paint.

  “. . . and again . . .”

  He had to admire Bruce’s fortitude. If he had felt the torture’s full effects, Tom would have passed out long ago.

  Bruce’s eyes flittered in panic from one immobile ceiling sprinkler to another.

  “I shut them down,” confessed Tom.

  Bruce stopped screaming long enough to grunt out the words, “Kill . . . me!”

  “No. Time to live a little in my shoes. To know what your future holds, unable to do anything except watch it all end in agony. Lucky for you, your future is very, very short.”

  From far above the house, a high-frequency vibration ran through Tom that felt like aluminum foil chewed by the metal blades of a food processor. It sent shivers up his spine. The house was being scanned. Unlike the lobster in the proverbial pot, he could feel his core body temperature rise incrementally.

  “Good-bye, Bruce.”

  “Don’t . . . !” The dying man gasped for breath.

  “I’m sorry. The gods have found you. And you’re my burnt offering.”

  Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” chased a limping Tom through the house, accusing him of mental illness and atrocities, past, present, and future. Rummaging in the foyer closet, he grabbed Vera’s floor-length dark-chocolate Imperial sable.

  “Peter!”

  In the garage, two black Mercedes looked shiny and new, fresh from the detailer. It was a shame to leave perfectly good getaway cars behind, but the eye in the sky watching the house would track them. He opened the garage door a couple of feet, threw the fur over his head, and crouched down on all fours, scooting out under the garage door at the farthest corner of the property. It was twilight. He continued to scuttle on all fours along Pacific Coast Highway’s sidewalk, hoping he looked like a neighborhood dog to the eye in the sky. He avoided crossing lines in the road, for fear spy satellites would wonder what the black blotch was that interrupted the painted line’s continuity.

  Cars sped by. He dashed through the crosswalk, dodging cars, and scampered into McDonald’s. At the counter, he stood and arranged the coat around his shoulders like a cape.

  “A Big Mac. To go.” He shut his eyes tight and ratcheted down his amped-up senses.

  Blinding light enveloped the beach. It was much brighter than the light that struck the young terrorists’ cars in Vegas, because it was destroying a larger target. Patrons screamed, hands flying to stricken eyes. The sounds of cars breaking, skidding, crashing, blinded drivers honking horns.

  After the light died away, Tom was the first to see the result. Lobo’s house was gone, vaporized, just like the 10/26 terrorists. And Bruce’s phantom pain was gone from his body. But the memories remained, and the flavor of the man’s personality suffused his mind. Like Dulles had.

  In place of Bruce’s house was an ashen, glassy pit surrounded by beach sand on the ocean side, melted asphalt on the street, and the singed, smoldering walls of the houses next door. The technology to destroy a target with such precision was remarkable. It also proved once and for all the 10/26 terrorists were not suicide bombers. A laser weapon in orbit high above earth had killed them—a weapon the government regularly denied existed.

  The question remained: Did those who vaporized the house know Tom was inside, or would he have been collateral damage? STTW sensors had existed for years: sense-through-the-wall radar that could identify people through feet of concrete.

  So Josiah knew he was there, assuming he was on Bruce’s side, otherwise he would not have sacrificed so valuable an asset.

  But it didn’t matter what they knew, because he knew their next move.

  Leaving the restaurant employees and patrons struggling to regain their vision, he walked to the parking lot. There stood Pop in an empty parking space next to an early ’60s Volkswagen Type 2 Bus. With Tom’s 3.0 senses, Pop appeared absolutely real, dressed in his comfy cardigan, sweatpants, and sheepskin slippers.

  “Do ghosts see other ghosts?” asked Tom.

  Pop didn’t speak, but he held out his hand to Tom.

  “I don’t have time for you now, real or not,” said Tom.

  His father disappeared. In his place stood Talia, her hand out to him. “Baby? I’m real.” Once again, she had found him with his GPS nano-RFID, still embedded in his leg from long ago.

  His father might have been a hallucination, but he didn’t have time for her, either.

  “Tom!” She chased after him. “What happened?”

  “Keep your voice down . . . They’re dead. Bruce killed Vera. And the club killed Bruce. And they know enough to want me dead, too.”

  “You let her die?”

  Hundreds of people swarmed the street, trying to grasp what fresh cataclysm had befallen a community accustomed to fires, floods, landslides, earthquakes, and celebrity DUIs. The sirens from nearby Carbon Canyon Station’s fire trucks blared. Despite Tom’s clothes stained with oil, blood, and smoke, no one paid any attention to him. “I tried to save her, but there was nothing I could do. And she was a big girl.” Some part of Dulles’s jaded spymaster spoke for him.

  Talia knew those words and looked at him in shock. “That’s not you speaking.”

  “No, it’s . . .”

  “And I’m a big girl. So you’d let me die? Or Ruth?”

  “No! Why are we fighting about this?”

  “Why?” She looked frantic. “Everyone’s gone! You’ve driven everyone away!”

  He didn’t answer. Within a block, they were at their front door.

  “Won’t they vaporize this place, too?” she asked.

  “No. If they know I got out, they’ll want to take me alive now. Josiah will want the sat
isfaction. I’ll go to camp. You and the mercenaries will still attack from the outside.”

  Talia unlocked the door, and he went upstairs to strip his filthy clothes and shower.

  Hot water coursed down his face and body, and for a tiny moment, he relaxed, his mind’s floodgates opening a crack. But a crack was enough to loose the deluge. Vera and Bruce’s suffering, with all their pain, shock, fear, in all its Technicolor, smell-o-taste-o-touch-o-hear-o-vision glory, felt like his own. His knees buckled, and he crouched, huddled and shaking in the corner under the expensive showerhead that simulated the broad drizzle of falling rain.

  Through the steam, a familiar outline stood on the other side of the shower door, his hand outstretched once more.

  “Peter. Let me help you.” The voice rang clearly in his mind, even though Paul’s lips didn’t move.

  “Leave me alone!”

  But it was Talia who jerked back a towel at the open shower door.

  “Not you . . .”

  “Who then?”

  His chin drooped on his chest. “Pop.” Her look of pity angered him. “What? Your dad can howl for blood, and I’m crazy if I see mine?”

  Her livid violet bitter cocoa–ness, dilating pupils, and wan cheeks all embodied fight or flight. He knew she couldn’t stay. But she was trying.

  “You don’t understand what it’s like to be me,” he continued. “It’s . . . lonely.”

  “I can’t be like you,” she murmured.

  “I know.”

  “What’s the price you pay to yourself? To me?”

  “You think I don’t know?”

  “Please, baby. Just stop. Ruth said she made antidotes. Take them. We’ll follow her to China. Her friends can figure out how to get rid of the crap in your head. We’ll get back at the club another way.”

  “You’re crazy. Not me. There’s no next time. One enemy’s gone. There’s two to go. And am I supposed to let everyone become mindless automatons who only think they make their own decisions and live their own lives, but are really happy slaves of the Phoenix Club? I thought you wanted to stop them, too.”

  “I can’t save the world! Only me!”