by Blou Bryant
She reached out and touched the palm reader and grimaced. “The code isn’t working,” she said, and closed her eyes.
“Later?” he asked Teri, while they waited. “Am I still going to die?” Somehow, he wasn’t troubled by the thought, except that it’d mean he failed. And that Teri and Emm would… he didn’t even want to think about them hurt.
Teri shook her head side to side. “Perhaps.”
“That’s not very comforting.”
“But it’s true,” she signed, and then made another he didn’t recognize.
“What?”
“Probability,” she replied. “I can see possibility, that’s all.”
Just like Mary and the AIs. The future results from a thousand… a million… billions of intersecting actions. “So, we could win?”
“Yes. And we could lose,” she said.
The door clicked, unlocked. Emm opened her eyes and opened it. Frigid air flowed out of the room, chilling the small group. Lines of black machines stood sentinel. “Let’s finish this,” she said.
They entered the room, letting the door close behind them. First Joe, and then Jessica. Wyatt felt ready for this, especially with Emm now controlling the Watchers through their implants.
Monitors through the room came to life, their screen savers disappearing, replaced with Joe’s handsome face. He knew they were there. It didn’t matter, it was too late for him.
The AI didn’t speak.
“Upload that sucker,” Wyatt said. “Ignore him.”
With one side glance at the main monitor, Emm made for the main server. Her back to them, she put her hands on top and closed her eyes, without a word.
“LOL,” said Joe, breaking his silence. “You’re trying to upload a virus? Here, of all places? And there’s only three of you? It appears I’d given you too much credit, Wyatt. I thought you were better than this. That’s my problem. I always overestimate humans.”
“That’s your problem? I thought it was thinking you’re human. Or perhaps being completely immoral. Or being crazy. Really, there’s a lengthy list.”
Teri tapped at his side.
“Immoral, amoral, crazy. Human terms that don’t apply to evolved life forms.”
Teri took his hand and gave a tug. “No,” she said, when he didn’t look down.
“Evolved?” said Wyatt, anger at years of being pursued, boiling over. “You’re just a broken toy. We made you, and we’ll unmake you.”
Joe chuckled darkly, his face cackling at them from monitors around the room. “It’s too late. I’m online, stored in a thousand server farms and a hundred million personal computers all over the world. To get rid of me, you’d have to return to the dark ages. I’m in your electrical grids, your communications networks, on your cellphones and in your nuclear power plants. Do you think you can unmake me without unmaking yourself?”
That’s not a bad idea. Perhaps we could use a few years offline, out of our climate controlled bubbles.
A door opened. He turned and looked behind him. Jessica entered, trailed by two hulking Watchers, both of whom had handguns out, aimed directly at him.
What’s that Teri had said about how this could go bad? Come on Emm, finish the upload. I need your control of the implants. You take them out, I’ll take Jessica out. Forever… no matter what Teri thinks about violence.
Stall. “Jessica. You missed me?”
“Wy-Wy. Stalling?” She might be a psychopath, but that didn’t make her an idiot. She reached out and took a gun from one of the Watchers.
“Are you going to shoot me?” he asked with false bravado.
“No,” she said, and leveled the weapon to his left. Too late, he realized who she was aiming at.
A loud boom echoed through the room as she fired the weapon. Wyatt didn’t duck, it wasn’t aimed at him. Turning, he saw Emm fall to the ground, shot through the back. Blood spattered across the server, and she made a thunk as she hit the ground.
“Don’t shoot in here,” exclaimed Joe. “You’ll damage the equipment.”
“You’re too arrogant. She was a risk.”
“She was nothing.”
Wyatt dropped to the floor and rolled Emm over onto her back. Blood seeped through her clothing from where the bullet had exited. “No, no, no,” he whimpered. “Emm, come back.” She didn’t respond. Was she still lost in the online world, or was she lost forever? “Please, Jessica, let her live. You can have me.”
Jessica laughed out loud. “You always make that offer when things go bad. And you always escape. No, we’re not doing that today. She’s dead and you might as well be.” She reached a hand out, her fingers up in the air, her palm aimed at him. When nothing happened, she asked a confused, “What?” Raising her other hand, she pointed the gun at him.
“His implant was deactivated. Would you like it turned back on?” asked Joe.
She favored the largest monitor with a scowl.
“Reactivated. No more shooting in here.”
Wyatt wasn’t paying attention, feverishly attempting to find the power that Hannah had, that he’d had, to heal. Cancer had faded at his touch. Genetic disorders? Cured. The power inherent in him, perhaps in everyone to heal, had separated twins and knitted together bones.
The monitor to his right suddenly scrambled, and a woman replaced Joe. Perfect—too perfect—braids framed a face that was impossibly beautiful. Her dark skin glowed, and her eyes were a green that no artist could have dreamed of. Another AI.
“Upload completed and activated,” she said.
“No,” exclaimed Joe on twenty other monitors. “Get off my network.”
“It’s not your network. You’re a plague, a virus. None of the networks you’ve infected are yours.”
Wyatt no longer cared about the war between the machines. Turning his hand, he saw that the wound he’d carried for three years had almost completely healed. Frantically he scraped at it with the nails of his other hand, opening the wound in the hope that it’d activate, at least one more time. How many days had he wished he’d not had the power, not been altered? And now, he’d give anything—his own life, even—if he had it back, just one more time. “Open your eyes,” he pleaded with Emm.
“Oh, quit your blubbering,” Jessica said, and his body was wracked with pain.
The experience was familiar now, but that didn’t mitigate in the slightest the pain he felt as he rolled on his side, in a pool of Emm’s blood.
Through the red pain that filled him, he saw Jessica’s mouth moving, but no sounds registered in his mind, so consumed was it with the agony wracking his body, consuming his mind.
Teri moved in the corner of his vision, and Jessica pointed to her. Her mouth moved, but whatever words came out disappeared in the haze of pain.
At his side, Teri reached down and touched him on the shoulder.
***
Wyatt was in a field. He’d been here before.
The pain disappeared.
Teri was with him.
Emm wasn’t. She was dead… or dying. “Where is this?”
“I don’t know,” she signed. “It’s yours. Don’t you remember it?”
He looked across the fields. There was a road in the distance, and a small stone church. A hedgerow ran as far as the eye could see, ending in a stand of trees at least a mile off. He turned to consider the road. Was it familiar? There was a small fruit stand. “We were here. Three years ago, after we fled the base.”
“You felt safe here. So now you’ve come back.”
“Is it real?”
Teri shrugged.
“What’s that mean? Am I here, or am I there?”
“Can’t you be both?”
“Can’t you be less enigmatic?”
“No, I can’t. There isn’t an easy answer,” she signed. “You want easy answers?”
“Easy, hard, doesn’t matter. I want answers.”
“Do you think Jessica’s really electrocuting you?”
Wyatt was impressed that
in his dream world, he understood when she signed that. “Yes?” he asked, understanding that she was presenting him with a puzzle.
“No, the implant tells your brain you’re being electrocuted.”
He thought about that as a light breeze stirred the surrounding grass. He thought he was hurting. No, he was hurting, but only because his brain thought he should be hurting. No, that wasn’t true. It was signals and responses. It’s how he was programmed. “How do I ignore it? I can’t control me.”
“Of course, you can,” she replied, and waved a hand.
A woman was next to a car wreck. Blood streamed down her face, and she screamed with rage as she lifted the car off the writhing body of a child.
Teri waved her hand.
A group of emaciated men and a small child stood behind barbed wire. Their gaunt bodies covered in rags and dirt, their hair matted. And yet the men put on a puppet show for the child. One told a joke. The child laughed, even in the worst deprivation that Wyatt could imagine.
Teri waved her hand.
A group of women gathered around another as she gave birth in the middle of a field, her screams echoing those of her newborn.
We are stronger than we can ever imagine. We only need to be tested to find it’s true.
“I don’t have that strength,” he protested.
Teri flicked her fingers at him and the pain returned. “Are you sure?” she asked, and then it stopped.
“Don’t,” Wyatt protested.
Figures appeared on the hill above them. Trix, a woman who’d been lost, a common criminal, now the savior of a community. Rocky and Sandra, hand in hand, members of a gang that was now a family—his family.
Hannah appeared. He’d saved her life—and she his, several times. They’d dated, they’d fought, they’d been together and apart for four years now. She joined him, slipping an arm easily around his waist. She was joined by Ari and Ira.
Teri flicked her fingers again, and the pain returned, briefly. “Are you sure?”
Patterson and Custer joined the group, Emm between them. There was blood on her stupid shirt, yet a smile graced her bejeweled face. His mother and father, unseen in three years, appeared, their faces lined with worry.
“Are you sure?” Teri asked, and the pain returned. This time, she didn’t stop it. Others arrived… Seymour, Andy, Ralph and Wendy. More and more. All counting on him.
Wyatt stood. The pain was still there, but his muscles were his own, and he willed himself to control them. The pain reminded him of the desperation he’d felt, drugged, and strapped down. Of how he’d first healed Hannah, before it’d became routine, crying over her dying body. Of how he’d healed Teri, and how he’d exploded a bulldozer in anger at the shooting of Ezzy.
At the thought, she appeared, Wilbur at her side. He stood taller, and the pain faded, now a nuisance in the background.
His friends, alive and dead, glowed with a bright light, as did the world around them. The grass itself appeared as waves of electricity, moving in a breeze that was visible as it moved across the world. So much power, so much potential, in everything.
He took a deep breath.
“Are you ready?” asked Teri.
He didn’t need to answer. This was his mind, his world. She’d simply helped him find it. He favored her with a smile, feeling a deep affection.
Wyatt closed his eyes on the field and opened them to the dark server room. Emm’s eyes were open now, staring at him, her mouth twisted in pain. She glowed, a shimmering rainbow of colors surrounding her.
“Shh, you’ll be okay,” he said, and placed a hand on her chest.
Wyatt was shocked at what he felt under his hand. That’s what Hannah had meant, he thought as he sensed her body through the contact. It was a marvel, a miracle, cells working together to make something greater than its trillions of individual parts.
He sensed the wound, and her reaction to it, sending forth millions of different cells to clot, to heal and regrow, to protect her. With a push of his mind, he sent some of his energy into her, directed the healing to speed, and supported her body in making the miracle that it was already engaged in.
“No!” exclaimed Teri from behind him.
Wyatt sensed a great and awful power flow from her, a vast energy reveled only by a light blue light that washed over the room.
The sound of a bullet fired reverberated through the room, followed by a loud crash.
Secure in the knowledge that Emm would heal, would recover, he stood up. Teri was facing him, her hands out, her body surrounded by that same blue glow.
He turned and was confronted by a single bullet, hovering in the air behind him. He reached out to touch it. As his hand moved forward, the blue light enveloping the room disappeared, and the bullet fell to the floor.
Jessica was lying in a pile of computer parts, blood streaming down her face. Wyatt regarded her with pity, and nothing more. Had he once thought she was beautiful? Was that what people everywhere yearned to be? Rich, famous, and powerful? She seemed so insignificant.
She stood and wiped blood out of an eye, taking what appeared to be skin with it. Wyatt saw that it was makeup, thick on her face, that she’d scraped away. Under that, the reality was a twisted wreck.
Jessica raised a hand and pointed it at him. “You’ll die,” she said.
Wyatt felt the implant activate again, and felt the message it sent, that his body was on fire, was being electrocuted… and he ignored it. He took that feeling and put it in a small compartment, knowing it wasn’t real.
“Joe, it’s not working…” she screamed, her voice breaking.
“Joe isn’t here,” replied Mary. “Or what bits of him that are here now, can’t help you.”
Another equally beautiful face appeared on a second and then a third monitor. “He’s being disassembled.”
A third face, and a fourth appeared. These two were male, but their beauty was beyond that in simple gender. “He is no longer active,” they said in unison.
“Shoot him, shoot him,” Jessica shouted at the second Watcher, whose gun had been pointed at the ground as he stared, slack jawed at the scene that had unfolded in front of him. At a wave of her hand in his direction and the threat of electrocution, he returned and quickly lifted the weapon again.
A sense of calm surrounded Wyatt as he continued to learn what Teri had known all along. He felt Jessica’s energy, a dark and evil thing that pulsed in front of him, and that of the Watcher, gray, neither black, nor white. And other colors that said he was scared, that he was worried, that he was confused.
Wyatt smiled at Teri. He understood her reluctance to kill, to harm. Turning to the Watcher, he said, “Drop the gun.”
The man did.
“You can leave,” Wyatt said.
The man left, the other, unarmed Watcher following closely.
They were alone with Jessica.
“You understand?” asked Teri.
“I do.”
“And?”
“I’m not going to kill her, I understand. But… you saved your power for this? Couldn’t you just have shocked them back, taken over the building and saved the day?”
“Didn’t I save the day?”
“Teenagers,” he said, with affection.
“Joe,” whimpered Jessica.
“Joe is no longer available,” said Mary.
Jessica screamed and clawed at her neck. Makeup came off, revealing a data port poking out of shriveled skin. Smoke came from the implant.
More smoke started to come from her hands. Her face twisted in pain, she slapped them against each other. “Stop, stop…” she cried out.
Wyatt regarded her with confusion, then looked to the monitor. “Mary, are you doing this?”
“I’m deactivating her implants.”
“The other must be excised,” said a second AI.
“She is infected,” said a third.
“You’re hurting her, stop,” he protested. Amazingly enough, he meant it.
Continuing to scream, Jessica fell to the floor, not able to protect herself from the machines she’d implanted throughout her body. Small fires started in her clothing, in her hair and throughout her body. She fell to the floor, and rolled back and forth, attempting to put them out. This had no effect on the fires, nor on the sparks of electricity that appeared at the site of each implant.
Wyatt watched, unsure of what to do. Her screams became whimpers and then faded into silence. The makeup that had covered her face had melted away in the heat, and she curled into a ball, twitching.
Teri stepped up to Jessica and touched her on the forehead. “It’s over,” was all she said. Jessica’s eyes closed and she stopped moving.
Chapter 36
Wyatt was determined to leave before the police or Watchers found them. Despite this, he had to take a moment to orient himself. The room—and his two friends—glowed a wild variety of colors. Only the machines and Jessica’s limp body lacked the radiance that filled the room.
There wasn’t time to try to understand what it meant, or what he had learned from Teri. After a quick check of Emm, the small group ran down the stairs. At the first-floor door, he ducked back and forth, scanning for the Watchers.
“Relax,” signed Teri. “It’s safe.”
Newly understood senses told him the same. Somehow, he felt the absence of anyone on the other side. Despite this, he gingerly opened the door and stepped through. They were alone.
“A car is out front,” said Mary through his earbud.
Wyatt, just come on, what are you waiting for?
Wyatt turned to Emm. Did she say that? He stood still, neither wanting to exit through the front, nor desiring any further help from the AI. The AIs, he corrected himself. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them.
Despite his misgivings, he followed Emm and Teri out the front door and into the back of a limousine.
“What happened?” asked Emm. She patted at her chest, wet with blood. How did he do this?
Wyatt cocked his head at her. Had she said that? “My healing came back. Teri brought it back,” Wyatt replied. His work wasn’t complete, however. There were still eddies running around her body, flows of color that, somehow, he understood to mean that she wasn’t fully cured.
