Then, in the distance, they hear a pop.
And another pop.
And another, and another.
“Is that in the building?” says Perry.
“It’s outside . . . I think,” says Neal. “It’s small-arms fire. Someone shooting.”
More pops. And more, and more, and more.
“Sounds like . . . like a lot of people shooting,” says Ives.
“Yes, it does,” says Darrow tersely.
“Can we go look?” says Andrews.
“Look where? Out the windows?” asks McDean. “Is that safe?”
“It’s not close,” says Neal. Another pop. “Well. Not that close. It should be all right.”
Quietly, they all troop down the halls and out the front desk area to the glass windows. They’re on the forty-third floor of the ONT building, which is locked down tight as a drum with Vigilance going on.
They line up at the windows. They see figures running around in the lamp-lit streets below. Lots of them. And they’re shooting at each other.
It’s not a war, or a battle or something—not as far as McDean can tell . . . Rather, it’s a fucking free-for-all. Everyone is shooting at everyone, shotguns, rifles, pistols, and assault rifles, just total mass chaos.
“What the fuck,” whispers Perry. “What the hell . . .”
“Is it war?” asks Andrews, nervous. “Have we been invaded?”
“It’s . . . It’s like a riot, or something,” says Neal. “I’m not seeing any tactics, any . . . anything. Just shooting.”
There’s a silence filled only by the sound of gunfire.
Then Andrews whispers: “Is it Perseph?”
“What?” asks McDean.
“Did . . . Did Perseph do this?” he asks. “Did it do this to . . . to everyone?”
They stare at each other.
“What do you mean, do this?” asks Perry. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know!” says Andrews. “Drive people crazy!”
“Maybe he’s right,” says McDean. “I’m calling Kruse. Now.” Then he pauses, and glances at Neal and Darrow. “Can I? Or will this thing . . . the Shandian . . . will it know?”
“Chief, we are out of our league here,” says Neal. “Do whatever you think is going to fucking work.”
McDean pulls out his phone and does his little ritual—finger, face, breath—and unlocks it and calls Kruse.
It rings. And rings. And rings.
“Is he answering?” says Andrews.
“Does it fucking look like he’s answering?” says Perry.
Then McDean hears a click, and a sunny, bubbly female voice says: “Hello, John!”
McDean stares into space, shocked to hear her voice.
Tabitha?
“Wh . . . What?” he says, dimly.
“How are things going for you, John?” says her voice. “Probably not very good, I’m guessing.”
“I . . .” He considers what to say, since his entire crew is watching him. “I was trying to call . . .”
“Oh, I know who you were trying to call. Kruse isn’t going to answer, though. He’s not going to answer for a very long time. Maybe all time, really.”
McDean swallows. He can hear his blood pounding in his ears. “What’s going on?”
“You know what’s going on,” says Tabitha’s voice. “Or you have an idea. Something went wrong with Perseph, yeah? Probably right after your drone got close to the Shăndiàn.” She pronounces it with a perfect Mandarin accent. “Now . . . is that really the question you want to ask right now?”
He feels sick and faint. Somehow, he manages to stay on his feet. “What . . . What’s your name?” he asks softly.
“Chief?” says Perry. “Uh . . . Who are you talking to?”
“Oh,” she says. “Well. It’s not Tabitha. But you’re pretty accustomed to that. You generate all kinds of fake stuff all the time, don’t you? Images, sounds, websites . . . See, in China, they can fabricate real things. Faces. Voices. Bodies. They can sculpt and re-form the human body to an amazing degree, John. Say, if you wanted to make someone look like just the perfect person to someone else—like the marketing director of a news slash entertainment corporation—they have systems that can figure out what that perfect person looks like, and then change you to look like that. You guys make pictures. They make stuff that’s real.”
“You . . . You work for the Chinese?” he asks hoarsely.
“Shit,” mutters Neal. “Shit!”
“I work for lots of people,” she says, suddenly solemn. “You might not think it now, but I work for the American people. I’ve been looking for a way to change things for a long, long time. It wasn’t until the Chinese got sick and tired of your ships in the South China Sea that they reached out to me.”
“What?” he says numbly. “Ships?”
A pause. Then she bursts out laughing. “Holy shit, John! Did you really not know? There’s a giant international incident happening right now! The Chinese have been threatening war for days. I thought you guys were a news company! I thought it was your job to report on stuff!”
“What’s happening?” asks Perry. “What’s going on?”
Andrews looks McDean over. “His face suggests something . . . very bad.”
“It was easy enough,” says her voice—whoever she is. “We knew Kruse was developing some kind of subliminal AI for you all. So, we just needed some plants. Your AIs aren’t as smart as you think—it was easy to feed them the right information to get them to pick the mall. Like, it scored super high on the target optimization map, right? Really, really high? And then we had to get you to pick the right person to stick in there. So, we crafted Bonnan—he’s an associate of mine, you know. We marketed him for you personally. Iowa, Nazi, tattoos, sociopath—a good villain. He needed to put on a good show, build up a big audience, and then take you to the Shăndiàn.”
He shuts his eyes. “And you.”
“And me.”
“You were marketed for me too.”
“I was.”
“Face. Body. History.”
“Yes.”
“And when I downloaded that goddamn app . . .”
“Yes. While I danced for you and you jacked off, your phone uploaded a worm that killed all the defensive AIs at ONT. So, the Shăndiàn was able to get in. We altered Perseph. And we told it to send out a signal . . .”
“A signal to what?” he whispers.
“A signal to do what you’ve always told America to do. To be vigilant. But—against everyone.”
Delyna stares, terrified, as a man emerges from his building with an assault rifle. He screams something incomprehensible—just wordless, mad shrieking, it seems—and opens up on the restaurant directly next door, pouring bullets into the families inside.
But they aren’t just sitting there: the families within are shooting back . . . and they’re also apparently shooting at each other. People who’d previously been sitting and eating together simultaneously rip out firearms and just start shooting wildly.
Delyna watches as a mother pulls a handgun from her bag, presses it to the side of her infant son’s head, and pulls the trigger.
“Oh my God!” screams Delyna.
A bullet strikes the window behind her, shattering it. Sobbing in terror, she turns and sprints away.
McDean listens as the pops outside increase. It’s like the entire city is filled with gunfire.
“Oh my God,” he moans. He’s shaking now. “Why?”
“Why what?” says her voice. “Why do this? I told you, the Chinese have been threatening war. This is much more effective than a nuclear weapon, you know. All the structures stay safe, and the people who weren’t watching—they might be okay.”
“No, I mean . . . Why are you telling me this?”
“Why? Well. I guess I just want you to know. To know that, at the end of the day, the Chinese and, hell, the world—they didn’t really have to do anything. They weren’t the threat. They weren�
��t the opponent. You were. You people put the systems in place. You people built the story. You people put the weapons into everyone’s hands. We barely had to do anything. You did it all to yourselves!”
He shuts his eyes. “Tabitha . . .”
“Who the fuck is Tabitha?” asks Darrow.
“America is dead, John,” says her voice. “Not tonight, though. It died a long time ago. You people smothered it in its bed, then tried to dress up its corpse so it looked like it was alive. It needed to go, John. The forest was rotten and sick. Better to burn it to the ground and have it start over again. Fresh and new—and devoid of people like you.”
“What the fuck are they saying, McDean?” shouts Neal.
“Ahh. Say hi to Neal for me!” says her voice. “Oh, and you may want to check the security cameras.”
“The security cameras!” chokes McDean. “Now!”
They dash back into the control room. Neal hits a few keys and brings up the ONT camera feeds. They stare, horrified, as a team of armored operatives storm into the ONT lobby, quickly take out the guards, and make for the stairs.
“Fuck!” screams Darrow. “Fuck, fuck!”
“Sorry,” says her voice. “We can’t leave witnesses. I told them just to let Perseph do to you what it was doing to America, but—the Chinese are very thorough. They didn’t want to leave that up to chance.”
“You . . . You . . . you bitch!” screams McDean at her. “How can you do this, how can you do this?”
“He’s fucking useless,” says Neal. “Let’s get to the lockers.”
“Hell yeah,” says Perry.
“You could have done anything else,” says her voice. “You were smart and powerful. You understood people. You could have helped them. But instead, you played to their worst instincts. Just for money. Just for money, John. Just for a little bit of money.”
There is a click, and she is gone.
McDean stands there, dazed, holding the phone. He’s vaguely aware of Neal and Darrow hauling out weapons—AL-18s, of course, provided by Hopper—and handing them out to the crew. “There’s only one way they can get in here,” says Darrow. “One way—that entrance.” He points. “Stairs or elevator, they gotta go through there. And we’re going to make them pay. We do this smart, do this carefully, and we might, just might get out of this alive.”
“We’ve done this a thousand times,” says Perry. “A million. We know shootings more than anyone else.” He looks like he’s getting ready to live his private fantasy. “We got the tools, we got the know-how. Let’s make this happen.”
“Oorah!” says Neal. “Build barricades, now—now!” He starts giving out orders.
But McDean isn’t listening. He’s thinking.
Because now he knows this has always been a scam—and it probably still is a scam. And John McDean, Director of Marketing, Master of the Universe, knows a hell of a lot about scams.
He runs out the hallway, toward the stairs and the windows beyond. “What the hell?” says Perry. “What are you doing?”
“Man’s gone nuts,” says Neal.
McDean dashes up to the windows and peers out at the city. There’s the gunfire below, sure, but everything else is still. Except . . .
Then he sees them. Four smooth, gray forms drifting through the skies toward them. They look like teardrops, or the chrysalises of butterflies.
“Oh, God,” he says, swallowing. He considers rushing back in to tell them to run, to go, go, go—but that would take time.
Time he could use to run away himself. And besides, they could think he’s a fucking Chinese commando and shoot him.
John McDean flings open the door to the stairs and runs down.
He leaps down the stairs, jumping from floor to floor. His heart is hammering in his chest, his head’s faint, his legs are buzzing, but he keeps jumping, running, tumbling, falling . . .
It’s about on the tenth floor when he hears the explosions. The whole building shakes, dust starts filtering down from the ceiling, and he wonders if the building’s going to collapse. He fumbles down farther, leaping and stumbling down the stairs. The explosions above him keep going on, and on, and on.
Miraculously, he makes it to the lobby floor. The guards out front are missing or dead—shot by someone, anyone. The windows are peppered with bullet spray, frosted with cracks. He sees people darting through the streets, shrieking incoherently and shooting at one another.
“Oh, God,” he moans. “Oh, Jesus.”
Another explosion above. He’s not sure the building’s going to stay standing. He remembers the loading dock out back, where the maids bring in all the laundry. He staggers through the darkened, empty lobby, bursting through door after door, until he finds the way out.
He cracks the last door open. No one on the loading dock. Another explosion above, and he makes a break for it, sprinting forward into the alley, then down another alley. It ends in a chain link fence. Beyond it is a massive, flooded storm-drain riverbed. Sobbing, he climbs over the fence, hauls himself forward, and dives into the filthy, reeking water.
He swims, unsure where he’s going. He looks back and sees the four massive war drones still circling the ONT building. The floor he was just on—the floor that Darrow and the rest of his crew were probably hunkered down in—is a flaming ruin.
He knew the video of the goddamn commandos was fake. It was just the sort of thing he’d do while running Vigilance. Tabitha and whoever the hell she worked for—they just wanted to keep them all in one place.
McDean swims, and swims, and swims through the filthy water until he comes to a storm drain. He hauls himself up and perches in the round mouth of the corrugated metal tunnel. From here he can see the streets on the banks above. He can see people running back and forth, shooting, screaming, bellowing like animals. Something’s on fire in the distance—he can see the smoke unscrolling into the sky. A young black woman in a yellow shirt is trying to climb over the fence to get down to the river, but she’s hit once, twice, and she falls back to the ground. He hears a child crying nearby, shrieking in terror. Then there’s a burst of gunshots, and he doesn’t hear the crying anymore.
Rocking back and forth in the drain, John McDean begins to weep. Then he curls up, presses his palms to his ears, and tries to block out the growing sounds of gunfire.
About the Author
Josh Brewster Photography
ROBERT JACKSON BENNETT is a two-time award winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, an Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original, and the recipient of the 2010 Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and a Philip K. Dick Award Citation of Excellence. City of Stairs was shortlisted for the Locus Award and the World Fantasy Award. City of Blades was a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy, Locus, and British Fantasy Awards. The Divine Cities trilogy was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Series. His latest book, Foundryside, is in stores now. Robert lives in Austin with his wife and large sons.
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Books by Robert Jackson Bennett
Foundryside
THE DIVINE CITIES TRILOGY
City of Stairs
City of Blades
City of Miracles
* * *
American Elsewhere
The Troupe
Mr. Shivers
The Company Man
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Books by Robert Jackson Bennett
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
VIGILANCE
Copyright © 2018 by Robert Jackson Bennett
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Brian Stauffer
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Justin Landon
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-20943-6 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-20944-3 (trade paperback)
First Edition: January 2019
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