He paused and made eye contact with Olan Harrison. The old man showed no surprise. "Again, it's a lot of supposition. Is your basis for any of this solid?"
"We have reports from the coma patients we picked up." James While made another gesture, and holograms of brain wave function appeared floating beside him. "They're already exhibiting signals that we can detect, tied into steep changes at the cellular level. Their brains are changing, their DNA is changing, and it looks to both myself and the Logchain like the wind-up to a second blast." He took a breath. "In essence, it seems they're being rewired to act as transmitters for the line, to further spread their own infection."
Silence resounded. Eyes around the room flashed left and right.
"So if this is true, then the end is coming," Harrison said, contemplatively. "How long do we have, and what do you suggest we do?"
James While paced. "I can't predict how long, though we should have better data soon. I've already assigned our Bordeaux facility to begin the enormous task of tracking every coma-triggered person on the planet. Expertise and equipment are currently en route. I'm also launching an unprecedented review of the SEAL, to root out whomever was involved in this plot."
He let that hang. They would surely know already that he was looking into them all, and be expecting this. Perhaps they wouldn't have thought it would be stated so nakedly.
"You're investigating us," Harrison said flatly.
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Drill deep, son. Dig the bastards out. Don't let anything stand in your way."
While nodded. "In the meantime, I would like to put motions before the Heads for an enormous resource requisition. I believe we need to invest in shielding equipment that will allow a portion of humanity to withstand the next hydrogen line blast, in the event it cannot be prevented. Lifeboats, if you will, to ride out the coming storm. Currently that kind of shielding equipment only partially exists, used to minimize ill effects at the Logchain. We will need a prodigious investment of qualified human capital to progress the technology to a practical stage. At the same time we have to begin screening lists of survivors to place into these lifeboats."
Harrison smacked his gums. "You want us to fetch the people and build the Ark before we even know if it will float."
"That's right. We have to assume that the technology will catch up in time. To do anything less will be to leave the response too late. And I'm suggesting a dozen Arks, with three thousand per Ark. Those numbers should allow us to restart a modest level of civilization once the threat is passed. That is the level of thinking that is now required; planning for the continuity of our race. Currently we have several underground facilities that might serve, but we must build others, beginning today. I am sending projected sites out to you all now, with required roles."
Silence met him. Eyes dropped as they opened their attachments.
James watched them. His requisitions abandoned thousands of ongoing projects, but they'd seen the footage from the Multicameral Array. This was real.
"Do it," Harrison said. "The SEAL is at your disposal. Start your preparations."
James While nodded. He already had. Now his plane for the Logchain was waiting.
* * *
Joran Helkegarde slipped in and out of nightmarish sleep, punctuated by the hammering of the helicopter's blades and Sovoy's voice telling him to, "Shut up, stop crying, nobody cares." He saw bodies transforming again, and his Array in chaos, and all his one hundred subjects gone, while a nuclear bomb burst across the sky in his mind.
The Array had looked so beautiful in the snow. One hundred young men swimming on an ocean of thought. Thought soup, Sandbrooke had said, but now Sandbrooke was dead, and he'd done it.
His arrogance.
He thought back to what While had said at the end of their conversation, with the knife still hanging over his eyes.
"I don't trust you, but I don't have the luxury of writing you off. Find a way to stop a second blast and you'll have a chance. Show me how brilliant you can be, or this will be your life, and your legacy."
Joran had looked past the knife hovering over his face and seen the lifeline being offered. He'd jumped on it greedily.
The line had cut out, but the message resonated. While's offer pushed the pain and self-pity back, made the horrible visions of the Array fade. He started to think clearly, in methodical steps.
Someone had used his Multicameral Array to launch an unprecedented attack on the world. They'd piggybacked on the first ever successful transmission from the human mind onto the hydrogen line, warping his moment of greatest triumph into his greatest failure.
How?
Now those moments came back to him, and he pushed the weakness away. Guilt would help no one now. He called to Sovoy, and kept calling until Sovoy woke up and came over, cursing and angry. But soon Sovoy sat down, and listened, and the light came back on in his eyes. They began to brainstorm. Ideas flowed, and a working theory started to form.
The transfer off the helicopter happened but he barely noticed, locked into discussion with Sovoy as they wheeled his gurney out and down, carted deep underground. Before they were shoved into a shared cell off a plain white hallway, he asked for paper, pens, and to speak to James While.
Half an hour after that the call from James While came in, carried on a laptop screen.
He was standing in what looked to be the empty cabin of a luxury jet. Oval windows studded the rounded walls left and right, through which blue sky showed.
"What do you have?" he asked.
"It wasn't just Hello," Joran said hurriedly, keen to get it all out and prove he could be useful again. It was guesswork built on existing knowledge and hearsay, but it included information at its base that no one else had access to. "The transmission had to have been more. The simple binary toggle of yes/no on the line couldn't have done what we saw; not when the signal is made up of human thought already, not when we were just adding focus at a local level."
While's face remained impassive. "You're telling me something I already know. I need more than that."
"No, wait. You didn't know that. How could you? You may have assumed it was a complex code, but you didn't know that. Assumptions will get us all killed."
While's expression hardened. "You're wasting my time."
"Piers Sandbrooke," Joran blurted. "He's the only person who could have double-spoofed the transmission up the data spines. Nobody else had access."
"Anybody could have hacked that system."
Joran shook his head so hard his arm throbbed. "Not possible. There was no intranet to the data spines, no circuits to hack, and only myself, Sovoy and Sandbrooke could have pre-loaded the signal in, locked by biometrics. It would have meant going round to every pod and typing the code in manually, and no one could do that without being seen. Every pod in the underhall was staffed at all times, so it's impossible."
While looked away for a moment, tapped on a keyboard they couldn't see, then looked back.
"Those were security measures you never reported, not SEAL-approved. Still, it doesn't explain the fact that Sandbrooke died in the arena."
"So he was willing to die for his cause. That's worth knowing, surely?"
While stared. "I've just ordered the interrogation of his every known acquaintance and family member. If there's anything there we'll find it. What else can you tell me?"
Sovoy tapped the white board urgently.
Joran remembered. "Yes, brain waves. I'm willing to bet you're seeing subdued brain wave readings in all staff who were evacuated from the Arrays? Nothing massive, just rounded peaks and troughs, but a clear pattern with the shift localized from the pre-frontal cortex to the spine, where there's new activity."
Now While's expression showed a faint ripple of surprise. "How did you know that?"
Joran's heart leapt. "I didn't, it's a mathematical guess based on several theories we've just invented. That the line could have that kind of instantaneous genetic effect, it suggests deep, a
utomated change. I think you're going to see more of that; the movement of consciousness into the spine." He was almost babbling now. "Those things in the arena were not thinking creatures, they were a regression. Get me some skull-caps and I can start measuring the changes in thought; that'll be a beginning to knowing what's happening on the line, and from there we can build up to prevention. I just need data."
While looked at him for a moment, weighing his request. Then he tapped more keys.
"Prove that theory. I'm sending you all the data I have. You'll be moved to a lab; you'll have staff and equipment. Get me hard answers and a solution before the second strike comes, and you'll turn your legacy around."
He shut the connection. Joran looked at Sovoy and saw the excitement mixing with shame on his face. He understood it. It was selfish to be glad that their careers would be saved when thousands had just died.
But it wasn't functional. Like a faucet, Joran turned the shame off. It wouldn't help him survive the days and weeks to come.
LARA
7. JANINE
Lara didn't see Witzgenstein for three days.
In that time they kept her locked alone in a sealed-off cube in the back of a semi-truck trailer with metal panel walls. There was a narrow cot with a thin mattress on the floor, a toilet that ran straight through a hole in the chassis, a skylight in the ceiling that was locked an inch open, and a single copy of the Bible.
The trailer drove and Lara rode. They pushed food and bottled water at regular intervals through a sealed metal flap in the door. They pushed a damp towel through the flap once a day, which she used to mop herself down. At times she caught the sound of the convoy around her; other engines, other voices, but not many.
Her jailers didn't talk to her. Nobody answered when she called out or banged on the walls.
This was it.
The prison rolled on, and she lay on the cot and gazed up through the skylight at blue and white skies, with her hands on her swelling stomach, thinking and not thinking. Sometimes long periods passed where she could have sworn she'd been asleep, but could remember no moment where she'd opened her eyes or closed them. Time became a seamless stream of consciousness, broken by the one circling question she couldn't let go of.
Who was she, now?
It was an old favorite. There was no answer. A prisoner, a leader, now a prisoner again.
She'd stopped thinking about things that were too real, like her children, because they hurt too much. The stress of those thoughts left her anxious and drained, and she could not afford that. She had another child inside her now, and had to protect it. So she ate the food they gave her, and rested, and let her thoughts run in pointless circles about herself.
Sometimes she looked at the Bible. She didn't read it, but looked carefully at the cracked leather spine, ran her fingers over the worn front, embossed with gold, and sounded out the lists of exotic names at the back, savoring each strange combination of letters like a rare fruit. She held it like an idol against Witzgenstein, even though that made no sense. Not reading it, but holding it close, was the only meaningful rebellion she could make.
Finally, the convoy stopped.
Voices called up and down past her, and for a long time there were grating sounds, and rasping sounds, and shutters grinding open, and voices cursing. After that there was a long, long silence, until her door was opened for the first time in three days and three nights.
It was dawn outside, and the heavenly scent of fresh air overwhelmed her. Flowers, grassy sap, dew, so many things. She saw black iron railings and pavement and a towering figure in the narrow doorway that she recognized.
Crow.
For a moment she felt she might be rescued. Even as she felt it, she knew it wasn't true, and that hopes like that would break her faster than despair.
"She's ready for you," he said.
"Crow?" Lara asked. Her voice was rough from lack of use. "What are you doing?"
"Collecting you. I can't say more."
Lara rolled onto her side, looking at his broad, tanned face. There was something different about him. Perhaps he was beaten. Maybe it was something on the line. He seemed flatter somehow, like a carbon copy of himself.
"Can't or won't?"
At that he smiled, though it faded fast. "Can't. There's things I can't say. Witzgenstein, Lara." He paused a moment, seemingly trying to find the words for some complex thought, and failing. A hint of panic crept through his gentle features, then was squashed beneath smooth coppery skin. "You'll see. Come."
He held out a hand, and she took it. His touch was cold, sending a shudder through her, but he didn't seem to notice. He stepped backward so she could slide through the open door. Her feet dangled over the edge, and she peered out. The sight beyond came like a physical blow. It took long seconds for her to fully grasp what she was seeing.
"Oh no," she whispered.
Her stomach lurched. She felt she might be sick.
"Yes," was all Crow answered. "It is."
She looked. It hurt physically, like a blade knifing inside her heart. It was wrong, and a sign of how defeated she really was.
It was the White House.
The lawns of President's Park were forested now, thick with looming shrubs and leafy saplings. The iron railings were interwoven with ivy through which an array of wild roses sprang. Through that and above it, the south, semi-circular portico of the White House bulged outward, all neo-classical white columns and tall windows, a symbol if there ever was one.
Her eyes misted. The urge to vomit grew. She hadn't been to Washington since a childhood trip with her parents, when she'd held their hands in front of the railings and gazed in, feeling a deep sense of awe like nothing she'd felt before. Even as a child she'd understood that it was a special place, a sacred place, and just standing there before it made her special and sacred too. It was important and so was she.
As she'd grown older, watching from afar as politics grew dirty and scandals rocked the People's House, she'd still held onto that sense of hope, that there really was a shining city on the hill, that ideals mattered, that there would be liberty and justice for all. Seeing a black man occupy its highest office as a young woman had fueled her toward the law, keen to make her own contribution. She'd had such plans back then, of tearing down walls and bringing people together, until one day in New York she saw one of the white men who'd lynched a boy in her hometown, walking free, and the panic attacks had struck.
Her dreams were left in tatters. She wasn't able to answer the call, let down by her weak brain, but that feeling of awe never left her. That was real, or at least it seemed to be, and perhaps that was the reason she'd never wanted to come back. Shame, for letting the dream down. Fear, that it would no longer have the same effect on the woman she'd become. She'd already let that young, breathless Lara down enough.
When Amo had sent a team to Washington DC to set up a cairn, she'd asked them not to paint on the White House itself. That would be a kind of sacrilege. She didn't really believe in God, but she did believe in the dream of America, with the White House as its most potent symbol, standing for everything good and pure.
Now that symbol belonged to Witzgenstein.
Crow placed his hands gently under her arms and lifted her down. He led her along the sidewalk on unsteady legs, while she could scarcely think. She hadn't thought any more could be taken from her; perhaps her children, which was a terrible thought, but she had imagined it many times. She'd had nightmares about losing Amo ever since her coma in Pittsburgh, and they'd already lost his legacy under Drake, when New LA erupted. But this was something much deeper. It was wrong, and her skin crawled and her body shivered as Crow led her through the iron gates and up the long white drive.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. She felt herself reverting to a childlike state of denial, more terrified than she'd been since the demon outside Pittsburgh gripped her in its fist.
"No," she cried, and yanked at her hand in Crow's fist, but he j
ust held her more firmly and kept walking. As they drew closer there were people standing on the overgrown verges flanking the path, lined up to watch her. "No," she cried again, trying to pull away, but Crow advanced without breaking stride.
She began to sob hysterically. She couldn't help it. She pulled and pulled but still they advanced. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Someone had to stop it, but there was no one left to appeal to, no God to intervene, no Amo or Anna to swoop in. Beside the door she saw her beautiful children, standing with Alan's hands on their shoulders, gazing blankly at her.
She screamed. She jerked and pulled, but Crow kept on. This was defeat like she'd never felt and she was not prepared for it. Her legs collapsed and she fell, but Crow caught her and carried her up. She could barely see for the tears.
"Crow, please, stop," she sobbed. "I can't do this, I can't."
"You can," was all he answered, and kept walking.
They passed under the portico and entered the entrance lobby. Pictures of Presidents past lined the walls. The American flag hung everywhere, silent and still for thirteen years. She beat weakly at Crow's chest and face.
More blank faces lined the route through stately rooms, Drake's people and her own, empty-eyed children, hollow adults, gathered to witness this final humiliation. Along the West Colonnade she managed to get the sobs under control, though her breathing was still ragged. At the end of the overgrown walkway the final door was opened, and together they passed into the light-filled expanse of the Oval Office.
There Janine Witzgenstein sat behind the President's desk. Lara felt any shred of herself that remained melt away, leaving her empty inside. She wasn't Lara anymore, that was clear. She wasn't the little girl her parents had been so proud of, nor a mother, nor Amo's wife or an aspiring lawyer or a barista or a leader of her people, or anything, she was just defeat.
It filled her. It emptied her. She sagged in Crow's arms like a dead animal.
"Welcome, Lara," said Witzgenstein, standing and spreading her arms generously, her voice ringing resonantly round that awesome space. "Welcome to the New United States."
The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8) Page 9
