(R)evolution (Phoenix Horizon Book 1)

by PJ Manney

He threw again, hoping the grenade landed far enough away to keep them moving to their final destination. As Tom dragged him back in, Josiah’s eyes rolled up into his head, remembering . . . Had to keep the FBI and the CIA distrustful of each other, not sharin’ information. Otherwise, they’d have found those terrorists and 9-11 wouldn’t have happened! And we couldn’t have gone to war in the Middle East to grab oil and influence . . . Had to do it or the country’d been lost!

  “No, you don’t understand yet, do you,” said Tom. “I apologize, that’s my fault. I can only hold a fraction of the web of existence in my mind, and it’s difficult to explain even that small part to you. But I’ll try. People think the world’s growing more complex, but it’s only because they’re growing more connected that they finally see and fear the complexity. It was always there. But all the complexity, all the connections, confuse and distract them. They can’t see the big picture, so they can stop being afraid . . .” Another toss on “4,” another explosion.

  “Funny . . . humanity’s great at the tiny patterns. We can find quarks in an atom and Jesus’s face in a tortilla. But that big picture is so elusive, so overwhelming, people refuse to believe something as obvious as their life in Des Moines affects lives in Delhi. That’s big picture lesson number one: Mutual need unites us. You can’t get away behaving like a rampaging mountain gorilla if you’re concerned about those outside your troop. Evolution didn’t wire us to see the big picture—yet. We hunker down in our narrow primate lives with our little brains, only capable of close association with about a hundred and fifty others: the size of a tribe. Our tribe.”

  The grenade at “5” hit a hanging fluorescent fixture and bounced, lying halfway to its target. “Shit . . .” He punched the door button as fast as he could. BOOM! The elevator rattled on its rails for a moment, then continued. “Goes to show, anyone can get sloppy. Anyway, there’s always someone around who thinks big. Socrates, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin . . . At least by the time humanity got to Einstein, no one wanted to kill him for thinking up relativity. But because we’re now so enmeshed with technological networks, we all get a glimmer of the big picture. And we need to see it more than ever. Unfortunately for you, the more who do see, the more enemies you and your friends will have.

  “Can’t you see everything’s connected, Josiah, but you don’t feel the strings? Life’s web is not a spider’s web with you in the center, but a hugely dispersed web with many centers all interlinked. Or imagine it like the network of neurons in the brain. You might think your little neuron is indispensable to the system. But it’s not. Even though your acts were not chaos theory’s piddly butterfly wings—but dragon wings whipping storms into hurricanes—history will continue gratefully without you.”

  Another toss ’n’ tremble at “6” and this time, he took care to aim. “Removing you, Carter, and Bruce simply stops your goals from infecting us. If I removed the entire Phoenix Club from the system, there’d be a slight hiccup, a moment of needless panic as society reassesses priorities and jobs are refilled, and then . . . we’d go on and grow without you. Because the future is change and change is the future.”

  The universe craved equilibrium. The concept of karma, the effect of one’s deeds on their past, present, and future, was a physical law of the universe and Tom could see it as plainly as Josiah squirming under his hiking boot.

  At “7,” his grenade toss was unnecessary. The hallway was already alight, chunks of burning wood and plaster having fallen from the floors above. He threw one anyway. “Karma reflects the interconnectedness of everything. And it doesn’t apply to some next, reincarnated life, it applies to this one. Of course evildoers are eventually vanquished. Their denial of interconnectedness, thinking they can do what benefits them and hurts others, lays the groundwork for their destruction. Newton’s third law: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction—whether you’re a bloodthirsty dictator or a saint. No deed, good or bad, goes unpunished.”

  He tossed a grenade on “8” and the building groaned bitterly, fed up with violence. “The fall of empires is karma, because if leaders screw the system to their benefit, denying interconnectedness, the system will screw them. And everyone who let them get away with it. How many empires have to fall before we realize that?”

  Tom paused. “I am today, Josiah, what you will be tomorrow. Do you understand now?”

  Rheumy eyes glistening with tears bore into his. Lips tried to voice a thought, then stumbled, failing, . . . but that’s not the ball you use, Davy, that’s not the right one . . .

  Tom sighed. “Didn’t think so.” The doors rattled open. “The ninth circle. Final home for the worst of the worst: traitors.” He tossed Josiah over his shoulder and followed the concrete corridor about forty feet, halfway to the last fiery ceiling hole. Tom felt the intention before Josiah’s hand crept down his back for a grenade dangling from Tom’s jeans. He slapped the old man’s wrist. “Don’t even think about it. I got eyes in the back of my consciousness.” Josiah tucked his hand under his chin and whimpered.

  The glass-enclosed lab appeared empty, but banks of fluorescent lights were on. Inside were a hundred steel tables lined up in neat rows, each with a nanofabricator on top. The clean-room door was locked. The blast of Tom’s Glock reverberated down the empty hall, and he kicked the demolished door open.

  He could feel Carter hiding inside.

  Tom dumped Josiah on the hard linoleum floor, the old man sliding on his ass to a corner like a terrified child cowering under his towering shadow. Tom popped the Glock’s magazine out, pocketing it. That left one bullet chambered. He presented it, bowing with a ceremonial flourish.

  “Mr. Secretary, your way out is one bullet. Make it count.”

  Head bowed away from the bogeyman, Josiah tucked his hands under his armpits and pulled his knees under his chin as far as arthritis allowed. Disgusted, Tom tossed the gun at Brant’s feet. Soon enough, the old man would play. It would be the president of the Phoenix Club’s only salvation. And they both knew it.

  “Carter!” He could feel his partner’s presence, crouched behind a supply cabinet against a wall. “White metal cabinet, fourth sprinkler from the door. You can’t hide anymore.”

  A surprisingly calm voice said, “Why not, Peter? So you can gun me down? Or infect me?”

  “I know the future. You’re going to die regardless of what you or I do. And I can’t help but infect you. I could sing “The End” like Morrison, but I don’t think you’d like it.”

  He stood in front of the first line of fabricators. Each had a silver emblem on the front: “Biogineers.” His first company seemed several lifetimes ago.

  It was time to get to work. Tom made a pile of anything flammable on a fabricator table in the center of the room, then poured a bottle of cleaning solution on top of the pile. “You know why the Catholic Church burned heretics at the stake instead of giving them a much more merciful beheading? ’Cause they were fucked up, sadistic sons of bitches who wanted to make the poor, free-thinking bastards suffer as much as possible. I understand that now.” He took a piece of paper, rolled it up, and lit it with Josiah’s cigar lighter. Ceremonially touching the pile like a torchbearer at the Olympic flame, he waited for it to catch. “In fact, burning alive is dead last on my personal ways-to-go list, but sometimes, it’s the most appropriate choice, especially when you have to destroy bots.” When it was good and hot, he threw nanobot transportation packages (bundles of shrink-wrapped plastic bottles) onto the pyre. The burning plastic made a noxious stink, but it was a roaring fire in no time.

  Carter scuttled, diving under one of many steel tables holding the nanofabricators, but not before he aimed a Beretta M9. If Tom had not had the luxury of slow-time to move, it would have struck the center of his chest. Instead, it clipped his shoulder. Jerking back with the impact, he instantly cut the pain receptors to his shoulder, sent extra nanoplatelets to the wound site to speed blood coagulation, and kept coming as though nothing happene
d. He had to stop being so cocky.

  “I can feel you in my brain, Carter. You’re a big, bright red flag that sounds like cymbals crashing and tastes and smells astringent, like . . . scotch. I feel you on my skin, like a tingling I want to gouge out with my fingernails and in my muscles, like a sharp ache. I can even feel you in the continuum of time.”

  “Davy!” cried Josiah, still huddled in his corner. “Please come back, Davy!” When Davy didn’t come, Tom could feel Josiah pick up the Glock and aim at its confused, disturbed, heartsick target . . . It exploded, and darkness fell on a small part of Tom’s mind named “Josiah.” The old man’s whimpering ceased.

  Tom reeled in the dying vortex, but he urged himself forward. “He caught my drift.”

  Screams of insanity, causing bloody chaos, erupted on the intercom. Carter had left it on to monitor the floors above. By the noise level, every solidier was infected, shooting anything that moved, including each other. It sounded like the end of The Wild Bunch.

  “How could you do this to all of us?” asked Tom.

  “That carnage’s not my fault. It’s yours.”

  “You’re in such denial, you don’t know all that mayhem is to stop you?”

  After a moment of silence, Carter said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you why.”

  “Why?” Tom flung the closest steel table aside like cardboard. It crashed into fabs, plastic and metal shrapnel flying.

  Carter took aim again. Moving quickly, Tom dodged the bullet by a foot.

  “I was lazy the first time,” chided Tom. “Not anymore.”

  Carter leaned against his table’s leg, thick smoke causing chest-crushing cough spasms. Careless, his gun hand leaned out in the aisle.

  BANG!

  Carter’s gun skittered across the linoleum, ten feet away. He dived to retrieve it, and Tom shot again and again, pushing the battered firearm down the aisle, too far for Carter to reach without exposing himself to a bullet.

  Carter was silent for a few seconds, then finally croaked out, “I may not know the future like you, but I know the world enough to know someone’s got to control everything people like you create. I didn’t want it to be the government. Or we’d have Brave New World, like Josiah wanted.” Coughs racked his body again. “And I didn’t want corporations or the rich to control it because of the price. I wanted it to be us. I thought between you and me, we could manage it and be fair and let everyone evolve. If they wanted to. With my . . . persuasive abilities and your . . . fucking moral imperative . . .” Another fit gripped him. “We just needed help. So I danced with the devil. I was dancing with him already. Worked it from the inside. Got the backing and support. When I found out what Josiah planned, I tried to keep his support and undermine him at the same . . .” He coughed uncontrollably.

  “You arrogant motherfucker . . . you can’t dance with the devil without learning the steps. And then you’re a devil yourself. I know better than anyone. Josiah would have succeeded enslaving the world for its own damned good. And you would have helped. And what about Dulles? Why did you let him die? He was trying to stop all this and save us!”

  Carter snorted. “Fuck it. You do know everything.”

  “And what about Nick? You killed Nick!”

  “They were going to kill him anyway. It was all planned before I joined. They were going to develop Nick’s research in a way DARPA wouldn’t have allowed for years. If I hadn’t done it, they wouldn’t have given me the patents, and they would have given them to Lobo. Better I killed him and let him . . . go humanely. Lobo’s a fucking animal.”

  “A dead animal. And what about me?”

  Carter scrambled to the door. Tom dashed to intercept him, but Carter was still quick and slipped past. Tom slowly aimed at the back of Carter’s left knee. The joint exploded and spewed a slow-motion floral spray of bright red blood like a small firework burst. Each blood drop was a mini-mirror of Carter, a tiny bead of mercury divided through vigorous shaking from its greater whole. Tom saw a multitude of Carters in the spray of blood as he screamed, tripped, and stumbled to the floor.

  Tom shook the meditation from his thoughts. They were running out of time. Limping forward with his now-painful left knee, he yanked Carter up and grabbed both upper arms from behind. He squeezed them back just hard enough to dislocate both shoulders with an extra tug. Carter squirmed and panted in agony. Tom had to dampen his own pain receptors so his own shoulders would not fail him.

  “I know you hate me,” growled Carter. Squeezing harder, Tom teased the line just before connective tissue tore. Carter struggled to get the words out over the pain. “But you would never have accomplished . . . half as much . . . if I hadn’t pushed you . . . either by ignoring . . . or driving you. I made you, Peter. I gave you dreams. I gave you a life! I made you reach for things you didn’t believe you’d have. And look what you’ve done! It might have got out of control . . .”

  “Out of control? You’re insane! You almost enslaved the world, asshole!”

  “I could have freed it! It would have been as easy.”

  “Easy for whom? You? Or me?”

  Carter didn’t answer. Enraged, Tom threw Carter facedown on the steel table. His nose blew open, blood gushing. Tom held his head down, crushing his neck with both hands.

  The bloody man sputtered, spitting out a tooth. “Not leaving a beautiful corpse,” croaked Carter. “Please . . .” he wheezed, desperate for air. “Don’t kill . . .”

  “You’ve got to go. Like the rest of them. But you wanted me to do it for you, didn’t you? You’re the most lazy, self-absorbed, self-destructive, narcissistic sociopath I’ve ever met.”

  “Not . . . yet. Going to have . . . a kid. Let me at least see him . . . be born. And then I’ll know . . . I did something worthwhile.”

  Tom had looked forward to the moment all morning. A wide, white and toothy grin split his soot-darkened face, and he practically sang the words, “He’s not your son, Carter.”

  Furious, even savage, for the first time, Carter’s body jerked madly under Tom’s grip. “What the fuck’s that mean?”

  “He’s my son. My sperm samples. Not yours. Amanda fooled us both. She wants to name him Peter for more than just sentimental reasons.”

  Carter sagged under Tom’s grasp, a small snigger escaping his blood-soaked face.

  Tom released him. The fire spread, engulfing fabricators and nanobots. Flames licked at natural gas lines above the workbenches at the wall. They had only moments.

  “Why don’t you just kill me, hold your breath, and get the fuck out?” asked Carter.

  “I’ll never make it. I told you, I know the future already. Radical evolution has its disadvantages.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. I wonder who it’ll be worse for. You or me.”

  “You. You’ll think about it more.” He snorted, “Some Superman. I never even saw you in tights.”

  Tom smiled. “Asshole.”

  Carter grinned back, bloody and gap-toothed . . .

  . . . as their world exploded in a white miasma of energy.

  The blast hurtled everything in its shattering path spinning through the air. Tom overturned the blood-smeared steel table as a shield and threw himself over Carter. He couldn’t say it was without thinking, because he was thinking of eight things at once, like the shrapnel’s trajectory and the timing of the blast wave’s impact and what effect it might have on a steel table protecting them. But clearly, his automatic impulse was to save Carter. Not kill him.

  As much control as Tom thought he had over his mind, his unconscious was incorrigibly independent, no matter what the upgrades. Pain in the ass.

  As the blast retreated, the person below him felt different than before. Like a network came online and linked to his. Tom heaved himself off Carter. The hyperreality bots Tom had unleashed on the Phoenix Camp and covered his body with had been inhaled and absorbed and had reached Carter’s brain. But instead of insanity and fear, Carter locked eyes with him
.

  Is this it? thought Carter. This question swirled on top of the fear of mental exposure, death, and the unknown territory of Tom’s mind. But he wasn’t afraid of his visions, unlike Josiah and the others. He was in control as ever, fighting to keep a lid on his secrets.

  “Welcome to the Occupation,” thought Tom.

  They both heard the R.E.M. song play in the background.

  I have to die listening to that alt-shit, too?

  Even if I forced you, it won’t be for long.

  Carter coughed hard, gasping for oxygen that wasn’t there. Tom opened his mind to share Thomas Paine, Homo excelsior. Between coughing jags, Carter regarded his friend for the first time in boundless wonder and mind-tripping awe.

  I am everything you wanted me to create. And more, thought Tom.

  Then forgive me, Pete. Please.

  R.E.M. ceased, and a lone acoustic guitar strummed an opening riff in a flowing legato as a pleasing, light tenor sang the Beatles classic of love, loss, and the need for connection, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

  Finally, a decent song, thought Carter, fighting the pain of his broken body, a brutal carbon monoxide–induced headache and useless panting from the smoke inhalation, which would only bring his end sooner. Good taste occasionally breaks out in you, Bernhardt. A sonorous string section picked up the bass lines. It’s really good. Who’s covering it?

  Me.

  As Tom sang of their love lost in exchange for control and betrayal, he asked, Why? I need to know.

  Carter’s mind released its tight rein, and Tom relived his memories, fragmented and subjective like all recollections: Peter refusing to cheat with Carter on an organic chemistry test; Peter humiliating an arrogant Stanford professor with his accurate prediction of biotech’s future, which he then helped bring about; Peter’s simple, heartfelt wedding to Amanda; Peter working later nights than anyone at the fledgling Biogineers; Peter refusing to partake of the club’s camp prostitutes; Peter refusing to murder Anthony Dulles . . .

  The memories had one theme: Carter could never have done those things. His perfection and grace masked the frightened, jealous boy who both admired and hated Peter for his ability and honesty. Carter recognized Peter’s desire to become an aristocrat like himself. But self-made men make aristocrats insecure. After all the years and travails they had endured together, only with this technological link did they share the understanding of how fundamentally different—and similar—they were.