The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  He nodded.

  “My mother completed it. She betrayed us.”

  “She protected us. It was the only way. She told us that the Looking Glass was inevitable. That the only thing that could change was who controlled it.”

  “And now she does.”

  “We do,” Desmond said.

  “And what does that mean? For the rest of the world?”

  “It means things will change—but we decide when and how. Not Yuri. Or Conner. Or bureaucrats or politicians.”

  Peyton took another sip of coffee.

  “I saw him, Peyton. In the Looking Glass. Your father. He’s there, waiting.”

  She squinted at him. “How?”

  “Yuri scanned him before he died.”

  She rubbed her temples. “This is going to take some getting used to.”

  Desmond leaned closer to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She leaned into him and let her head rest on his chest, just below his chin.

  “Don’t worry. He has all the time in the world,” he whispered.

  He had waited for this moment for a very long time. He had never been so sure of anything in his life. “But we don’t.”

  Peyton didn’t move, but her breathing accelerated.

  “Des, I know… you care about her.”

  There was no question who the her was. The door to the OR was only a few feet away, and it loomed like a third presence in the room.

  “I do love her. She was there for me—we were there for each other—at a time when we needed one another. She’ll always have a special place in my heart. But I didn’t love her the way I loved you.”

  Peyton’s chest was heaving now. She sat up and looked at him.

  “The way I still love you.” He couldn’t keep the emotion out of his voice, and he didn’t care. “I created it for you—the Looking Glass. I wanted to fix myself and go back and do things differently. I want to start over.”

  She took his face in her hands. “I told you before: you don’t need fixing. And we don’t need a machine to start over. All we need is each other.”

  Epilogue

  The twenty middle schoolers sprinted back and forth on the tennis court, some panting, all sweating through their clothes. Avery checked her watch and blew the whistle. As they were packing up, she called to them, “Remember, tournament next week. Bring your A-game.”

  They waved to her and taunted each other as they walked to the bus stop.

  The tennis courts were located in Washington Highlands, a rough, low-income neighborhood in the nation’s capital. That was what had drawn Avery to it—and why she stayed in her car after practice and watched to make sure every one of her kids got on the bus safely.

  Back at her apartment in Arlington, she showered and plopped down on the couch, a towel still wrapped around her hair. The scar from the chest wound was still red and gnarly. The surgeon had told her that she would likely be a little self-conscious in a bathing suit for a while, but she knew she wouldn’t. She had a good story to go along with the scar.

  She stretched out on the couch, opened the Rendition Games app on her phone, and typed in her pass code.

  The apartment faded away, replaced by her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house. It was well lit, the midday sun blazing through the large double-hung windows. Grass spread out for about an acre around the farmhouse, and beyond it, a soybean field stretched as far as the eye could see. It was slowly disappearing, being mowed down in neat rows as her father crossed back and forth in his new John Deere combine.

  As she watched, the giant machine came to a halt, the door swung open, and her father got out and sauntered toward the house.

  Avery descended the straight staircase, following the smell of chicken and mashed potatoes. Her dad had always been the meat-and-potatoes type, and her mother had always obliged. She smiled at Avery when she entered the kitchen.

  “Hi, honey. Did you get a nap?”

  “Nah, just read.”

  “You need your rest, sweetie. Are you going back tomorrow?”

  Avery poured three glasses of tea and set the small breakfast table. “Figured I’d leave Tuesday morning. First class isn’t until that afternoon.”

  Her mother beamed as she set down the mashed potatoes. “Wonderful.”

  The door swung open and her father took off his volunteer fire department cap. “What’s wonderful?”

  “Avery’s staying until Tuesday.”

  “Well, I’m going back with you,” he said as he sat down. “I need to get a PhD in computer programming to run that blasted machine.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Avery said.

  “You try going from the horse-and-buggy days to driving a spaceship, young lady.”

  Avery laughed. “You’re not that old, Dad.”

  “Well maybe my brain just ain’t as sharp as all these other folks.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your brain, honey.” Her mother reached out and grasped both of their hands, and Avery’s father said grace.

  “I tell you this, this ole farmer has had about all the change and progress he can stand.”

  Avery took a bite of chicken. It was delicious. “Oh, Dad. I think you can relax. I have a feeling things are going to stay the same for quite a while.”

  An Army major escorted Desmond through the halls of the Pentagon to an auditorium. The seats were filled with flag officers, cabinet secretaries, and intelligence officials. The vice president, Speaker of the House, and president pro tempore of the Senate sat in the first row.

  The president and his secretary of defense waited by the dais. When Desmond joined them, the president stepped to the microphone.

  “Our guest requires no introduction. You’ve read Agent Price’s report and the recommendations from the Rubicon Group. I’ve met at length with Mr. Hughes over the last few days. Listen to what he has to say. Ask questions—tough ones, because I know you’ll have them. And keep an open mind. We’re here to figure out how we can work together. Because we have to.”

  He stepped aside, and Desmond took his place. Desmond cleared his throat and looked out at the faces. He saw skepticism. Aggression. And here and there, curiosity. It was going to be a tough crowd.

  “Since the beginning of time, we have been at the mercy of our environment. Hurricanes. Floods. Famine. Drought. Disease. And in the last few decades, we have increasingly been a victim of another force: our own creations. War. Nuclear weapons. Environmental pollution. In the coming years, those creations will only become more powerful. This place,” Desmond motioned to the Pentagon, “was built to fight an older kind of enemy. Other nations. Armies. Not a poor kid in an impoverished corner of the world who creates a bioweapon and gets on a plane. Not the radicalized PhD student who decides to build a dozen nuclear bombs and put them in suitcases and get on a boat. And those are just the scenarios I can imagine.”

  He took out a sheet of paper. “Here’s what some of the techies who work for me said might be in store for us. Drones that can control the weather. A computer virus that kills every computer in the world, like digital locusts. A machine capable of digging into the ground at the tectonic plates and causing earthquakes and tsunamis.” Desmond squinted at the page. “Okay, this is a little out there, but a virus that decreases intelligence in every population around the world except for those pre-treated with a vaccine via drinking water. Such a novel gene therapy would render everyone outside the perpetrating group subhuman, subservient to the remaining humans with normal intelligence.”

  The group was starting to whisper among themselves. Some were taking notes.

  “And here are a few scenarios I’m sure you’ve thought of. A robot that costs what an average worker earns in a week, can operate on solar power, and will work twenty-four hours a day for decades without replacement or even maintenance. Such a device will make ninety percent of the world’s manual laborers unemployable. And if you outlaw it here, the countries that don’t outlaw it will become the manufacturing hu
bs of the world. If you ban trade with those countries, the countries who don’t will enjoy a huge economic advantage.

  “And finally, an artificial intelligence capable of doing over half of the work in the world: technical support, data entry, simple medical diagnoses, routine legal work like wills and real estate, and accounting. This would be a world built by humans—but with very little need for human bodies or human minds within it. This is the world that is coming. And the transition to that world will be a very painful journey.”

  Desmond took the bottle of water from the dais and sipped, letting his words sink in. “What we offer is a way to prevent these catastrophes—both natural and man-made. A way to model scenarios and understand the future. A way to identify, via their brain activity, those who would do others harm—and stop them instantaneously. But our solution is much more than that. It is the key to a new kind of existence. And it is already here, inside each of you, and me.

  “I’m here today to ask for peace. The Citium is not your enemy. We are simply here to help. We want to work together. But I warn you, we want a peaceful, kind world, and we’ll have it—with or without your help.”

  Desmond let the words hang in the air. “Any questions?”

  One of the generals snarled. “You’re asking us to surrender?”

  “No. You only surrender to your enemies.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Put it this way: you want control, don’t you? Of us, hell, of the whole world.”

  “I don’t. Believe me, it’s the last thing I want. What we demand is very simple: we want the human race to stop killing each other.”

  After the meeting, Desmond returned to his office, stretched out in a zero-gravity chair, and activated the Rendition Games app.

  When the scene came into focus, he was in the living room of his childhood home. The walls were as they had been—unburned. In this Rendition, the Ash Wednesday bushfires had never occurred.

  A face peeked through the wide opening and smiled. “Where you been?”

  “Meetings,” Desmond muttered.

  He got up and hugged his brother. Conner’s grin reached toward his ears, tugging at the smooth, recently shaved face, with no scars or burn marks.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Generals and politicians.”

  “You should stay here.”

  “I’m seriously thinking about it.”

  “Boys!” their mother called from her craft room. “Help your father.”

  He was dismounting his horse when they greeted him outside. He handed the reins to Conner and thanked the boys before hiking to the house. They fed and watered the waler, and began sweeping up the barn.

  “Tell me what happened after Buenos Aires.”

  “You saved my life.”

  “How?”

  Desmond leaned on the broom. “Yuri was going to kill me.”

  Conner stopped too. He stared into one of the stalls, waiting for his brother to finish.

  “You wouldn’t let him. You saved me.”

  “And what happened to me?”

  “Yuri shot you. The bullet was intended for me. We tried, but we couldn’t save you.” Desmond’s eyes filled with water. “I’m sorry. We tried so hard—”

  “I’m glad.”

  “What?”

  “That you lived. You’re better out there than me. I was a shell before you found me. Probably would have been dead in a few years.”

  “And in here?”

  Conner turned to his brother. “It’s everything I thought it would be. I’m home. This is where I was meant to be.”

  On the other side of Washington, DC, Peyton Shaw was standing at a similar lectern, in an auditorium at the National Institutes of Health. The faces staring at her were friendlier.

  “The history of infectious diseases—and medicine in general—has been reactive. Someone gets sick. We react. A new pathogen infects hundreds, thousands before we realize it. We react.”

  Peyton clicked the mouse, and the next slide appeared. “That ends now. For the first time in history, we have a way to know when a new pathogen invades its first host. And more: we have a way—wirelessly—to gather data on that pathogen. We have a way to simulate how that virus or bacteria affects the human body, and test cures virtually. Then we can deploy that cure wirelessly, without direct intervention.”

  She stared at the shocked faces and the nods from those who already knew the truth behind the cure to the X1 pandemic.

  “What I’m describing is not something in development. Not a future innovation that will require massive investment, long waits, inevitable delays, and implementation problems. It is here, now. Inside each of you. And me.”

  She clicked again, and an image of the Rapture nanites appeared on the screen. “This is going to change health care. We are going to cure every disease and stop every pathogen—before it gains a foothold. I’ve dedicated my life to fighting infectious diseases and training others to do the same. For the first time, I have what I need to accomplish that. I’m here today to share it with you all.”

  The world was just starting to return to normal. The X1 pandemic was rarely talked about, nor was there much talk about the mysterious deadly disease that followed, the disease informally called “X1 syndrome” and formally, sudden acute cerebral syndrome.

  The Washington, DC, housing market had also returned to normal, which meant tight supply and high prices. Desmond found a place in Kalorma that needed some work, but had a big back yard. Peyton thought it was perfect. They bought it the same day they toured it.

  She was home when he arrived, a glass of wine on the kitchen island.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “Let’s just say, I never thought I’d be glad I was raised by the most confrontational, argumentative human who ever lived.”

  “A room full of Orville Hugheses, huh?”

  “A lot like that.” Desmond poured himself a glass of water. “When’s everyone meeting?”

  A small smile crossed Peyton’s lips. “In a little while.”

  “How long is a little while?”

  “Long enough.”

  She took him by the hand, walked backward down the hall, and kicked their bedroom door open while kissing him, just as she had done that first night, in her dorm room at Stanford.

  They were both lying on their backs, sweating, watching the ceiling fan spin, when her phone buzzed. A reminder:

  family dinner

  “It’s time. You ready?”

  He grabbed his own phone from the nightstand and opened the Rendition Games app. “Yeah.”

  They had selected London because it was the one place their entire family had lived together. There was a lot of pain there, but it was home.

  The streets were teeming with activity, bustling like the world before the X1 pandemic—because it was. In this Rendition, the outbreak had never occurred. There were other changes too, but they were much more subtle.

  Peyton let Desmond open the door to the building, and they rode the elevator to the flat she remembered from her youth. It was just as it had been back then, before the purge, before they fled in the night, before her father had to fight for his life.

  Lin Shaw opened the door and hugged them both. Andrew and Charlotte were already there, as were Madison and her husband. Peyton was happy to see that in this Rendition, Andrew was the same man—body and all—that he was in the corporeal universe. Even the prosthetic was the same, hanging from his left arm.

  The swinging doors to the kitchen opened and her father burst through, back first, carrying a pan of Yorkshire pudding with oven mitts over his hands.

  As soon as he released it, he hugged Peyton, mitts still on, pressing heat into her back.

  “Hi, Dad. It’s so good to see you again.”

  A tear rolled down her face.

  Lin Shaw opened her eyes. Richard Ferguson sat in a chair in the corner.

  “Good visit?”

  Lin nodded.

  “Let me kno
w when they’ve exited the Looking Glass.”

  “Of course.” He stood, and paused by the door. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She wasn’t. The project she had dedicated her life to—the Rabbit Hole—was a particle experiment whose outcome was impossible to predict. She knew the facts now. A quantum force had shaped human evolution. The evidence was written in our DNA, left over eons for us to find. The quantum force, the Invisible Sun, was a beacon, drawing all advanced species to it—like gravity asserts force on mass. But why? And to what end?

  Some in Lin’s organization believed there was no reason, that the Invisible Sun was simply a force like gravity, that it led to nothing. That it existed because of the laws of the universe and had no greater purpose.

  Lin disagreed. She believed they were on the verge of the greatest discovery in history. Her father had long theorized that the code in the human genome was like a bread crumb left for all sentient life on worlds across the universe, written in the language of math and quantum physics—a lingua franca any sufficiently intelligent life could speak.

  But the ultimate question was: what would happen when they turned the Rabbit Hole on? It would begin generating subatomic particles that matched the code in the human genome, but to what end? Lin believed that it was a step taken by countless other scientist and explorers on countless other worlds in countless other universes. History repeats itself, and so it would here on Earth. She believed the Rabbit Hole would connect the Looking Glass to all the other Looking Glasses in the universe, to those who came before us—and to whatever came next. She believed the human race’s destiny was to enter the Looking Glass and pass through the Rabbit Hole into the next chamber of existence. She believed the passing was a natural, inevitable event.

  Ferguson and others on Lin’s team were not so optimistic. They feared that the particles generated by the Rabbit Hole might disrupt the Looking Glass—like a magnet running over a hard drive. Others believed the impact would be even more dramatic—perhaps an explosion that would consume the world. They argued that the code in the human genome was like a Trojan Horse, waiting for a sentient species to find it. That would certainly answer the question of why no one was out there.