Bob let go.
He released his body into a pre-programmed routine, his quickened nervous system sliding the door open, stealing silently across the floor. In an instant his hand grabbed the man’s knife, unsheathed it, and then just as quickly drove it through the man’s jugular, slicing it into the back of his neck between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Bob severed the man’s spinal cord in one motion.
The man’s body jerked, and blood sprayed Bob’s face, spurting out on each heartbeat. The man’s eyes opened wide, just inches from Bob’s, the man’s mind surfacing from a dream world for one final moment. Inadvertently Bob connected into some of the smarticles the rat had transferred into the man. It wasn’t much of a connection, but enough to sense the void of the unknown opening below the man’s mind, the fear swallowing him, falling, falling.
Bob snapped back into his own mind and stared into the man’s dead eyes.
“Come,” hissed the priest, behind him, and then in the open doorway. “We must hurry. They will be here soon.”
Bob was frozen, immobile. He couldn’t move. This man had been in the way to Bob’s freedom, to the safety of his loved ones. Bob hadn’t had a choice, had he? He needed to sacrifice this man for the greater good, and it wasn’t as if his captor was innocent.
Nobody was.
Bob inhaled the sweat-smell of a body whose mind was gone, but whose biological systems were still toiling through their final, futile metabolic processes. He’d killed a million times in his gameworlds, felt hot blood splash across his face, but this was different.
“Come!” urged the priest, now outside the doorway.
Bob regained control of his body, pushing himself off the guard. Reaching down he grabbed the man’s water canteen, and then stumbled out the door into the cool night air. The sun was coloring the horizon, the stars washing from the sky.
12
IT WAS A night of fitful sleep.
Vince gave up while it was still dark. A nice hot shower would help get his brain cycling. He quietly stole into the bathroom, then turned on the water and stepped into the stall. He closed his eyes and let the water pound against his sore body. He could have stood in the shower forever, letting his mind wander. He was the one that had reached out to the local gangsters, but since they’d been sequestered in this room, he had no idea what was going on. He assumed they’d just want some money, but maybe he assumed wrong. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the temperature selector to its coldest setting and exhaled. The icy water blasted against him, and he gritted his teeth and counted to thirty. If that didn’t wake him up, nothing would.
After his shower, Vince went onto the balcony to watch the sunrise over the waterlogged metropolis, the ruined buildings of the city rising like ghosts through a blood-orange fog that burned off as the sun gained in the sky. The hours passed. Connors sat on her bed, and Vince on his, in silence through most of the muggy day, listening to the sounds of catcalling and drunken arguments outside as Bourbon Street came back to life.
It was a lot of time to think.
“You’re wrong,” said Vince finally as night began to fall again.
Connors had her eyes closed. “About what?”
“I haven’t cared about money in a long time.”
She laughed. “Probably because you have more than you can spend in a hundred lifetimes.”
“You know what I mean,” muttered Vince. His entire empire was probably being expropriated as they spoke. “The reason why I’m here, to answer your question of yesterday, is to help a friend.”
“There’s always a reason.” Sitting up in her bed she turned to him. “You committed crimes, Vince, you stole the future information of billions of people, made it public.” Pressing her face into her palms she asked, “So what was so important, seeing as you want to get it out? Why did you do it?”
Vince paused. He pulled a pillow into his lap. “Do you know what it’s like to see the future, to see everything in the future, when the only thing you want is in the past?”
“Regret, you mean regret.” Connors rubbed her face. “I know regret.”
He swung his legs off the bed and turned to sit and face her. “So if you know so much about me, where was I born?”
“Boston.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
Connors cocked her head to one side. “None. A spoiled only child.”
Vince smiled. “My favorite baseball team?” Not everything was in the databases.
“Yankees.”
He had to hand it to her that this answer wasn’t obvious. Vince looked at the floor. “What was my mother’s nickname for me?”
“Indy.”
Perhaps obvious, but this was from before the days that machines recorded every breath a person took. It was time to get the rubber to the road. Vince’s eyes narrowed. “Why did I fake my own deaths?”
“Everyone said it was a game,” replied Connors, but before Vince could pounce she added, “but I don’t think so. I don’t think those were fakes, I think someone was trying to kill you.”
“If you thought someone was trying to kill me, why were you hunting me?”
“Because you broke the law.”
“Then why did you shut off my Phuture News feed if you knew it might be dangerous?”
“Because I wasn’t sure.”
Vince shook his head but smiled. A risk taker. “And now you are?”
“More than I used to be.” Connors swung her feet off her bed and turned to face Vince. “You said I don’t know anything about the situation. What situation? Maybe I could help.”
Vince’s network ran through a dozen short-term simulations. A bit of truth couldn’t hurt. “My friend, Willy McIntyre, had his body stolen.”
“I heard about that. So that was why you were at the Commune?” The mediaworlds were only too aware that Willy’s grandfather was the Reverend.
“Yeah,” Vince replied, knowing it was only half the truth. Could he trust her with what they’d found out about Jimmy Scadden? It would only endanger her life.
Connors didn’t look convinced. “So why did these Ascetics come for us? What is it they think you’re looking for?”
Vince looked away. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d contacted them “I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh.” She rubbed one eye. “Okay, then, what can you tell me about these Ascetics?”
How to explain the Ascetics? A global Russian-origin mafia running illegal body-mod shops, synthetic drugs, emo-porn, and prostitution in all its ever-expanding forms. They controlled the darknets, private worlds unreachable from regulated spaces. “They’re like the Hell’s Angels of the cyber world—”
“I’m not stupid. I mean, what can you tell me about this chapter? Who are we facing?”
A tough question. The Ascetics weren’t something you could just query. Initiation required sacrifice, a ritualized destruction of the physical, cleansing body and mind through modification into an ascetic form. The basis of darknets was anonymized content and access, so the Ascetics anonymized themselves in the physical realms as well, removing—arms, legs, faces—identity.
“This one is heavily tied into Vodoun,” said Vince.
Connors frowned. “Voodoo,” he added, “that’s what they call it here, from Vodoun in West Africa, hoodoo in other places.”
Hotstuff was feeding Vince updated situational reports every few minutes. She pinged him an alert: they were coming. He made a deal.
Getting up off the bed, Vince got up and faced the door. “This sect controls the Spice Routes, the darknet data pipes that transit illegal . . .” He paused, reconsidering his words. “. . . or rather, morally challenging goods and services.”
“Morally challenging?”
Vince looked at her and smiled. “Columbus was a slave trader, and you have a holiday for him.” He tensed.
It was almost here.
Connors frowned. “Why are you standing there?”
“I said I would go if they promised no harm to you,” he replied quickly. “They know you’re FBI, it’s all out in the open, but I still have some pull, some hidden—”
Before he could finish, the door crashed open and an Ascetic slid through, a silvery web of thousands of legs shimmering beneath a tattooed black torso and white-painted skull.
“It’s time, Mr. Indigo,” reverberated its voice in their heads.
“For what?” grunted Vince, forcing back its intrusions into his mind.
The Ascetic’s body undulated across the floor, its mass of shimmering legs winding into the center of the room while its torso twisted between Vince and Connors. Black peacock feathers sprouted out of its back. Its blank face looked at them, laughing silently. “Time to find what you’ve been looking for.”
13
THIS WAS JUST what he had been looking for.
Bob relaxed into the sun lounger. Sighing with contentment, he brought the ice-cold mojito back to his lips. Dappled sunlight fell across him through the canopy of palms overhead, and a cool breeze blew in over the ocean. He studied the droplets of condensation forming on the sides of the glass, the shredded mint leaves pinned under the ice cubes, and then took another sip.
“Would you like another drink?” Nancy asked. She was standing beside him in a yellow wrap-around, the shadows of her bikini just visible beneath.
“No thanks, sweetheart.”
Nancy’s shadow swept past him. He raised one hand to touch her, but she was gone.
“There is always another,” said a voice of gravel, the words clattering through the air.
Bob sat up and took off his sunglasses, squinting into the brightness.
“And another, and another.” Someone sat on a chair nearby, obscured by the shade of a bush. His face was dark. Bob couldn’t make him out.
Bob holding up one hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “What?”
The owner of the voice pointed skyward. “The star is falling from heaven to destroy a third of all things.”
Bob put his drink down and looked up, rubbing his eyes. Something was in the sky—the comet—its tails spreading outward from the sun, the tip nearly touching it now. “That’s no star. The Comet Catcher mission is bringing it into orbit.”
“This world ends, and another begins.” The man behind the voice retreated further into the shadows. “Don’t you want an end to this suffering?”
“What suffering?”
“What suffering?” The man laughed. “What suffering indeed.”
Bob’s mind filled with a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand images of burned earth, slaughtered animals, smoking landscapes, dead seas. “Would you stop?”
“Smoke has engulfed the world once more.” The man leaned forward. “The Dajjal had returned, Gog and Magog arisen—there is only you who remains.”
Bob’s vision swam. Only me who remains. “Stop talking! Please stop talking . . .”
The man leaned into the light. It was the priest. The greens and blues of the ocean patio drained into the endless seas of sand that surrounded them. Bob found himself staring into the priest’s face, into his creased wrinkles and dark eyes.
“Can we focus on practical things?” complained Bob. “I’m getting tired of—” He stumbled, sending a cascade of sand down the face of the dune whose ridge they were laboring along. Ahead, wave upon wave of sand disappeared into the distance, starkly lit by monochromatic moonlight.
“I wasn’t saying anything.” The priest turned and began walking again, his footsteps sure and measured. “You were muttering nonsense. I just asked if you were all right.” The rags hanging around the priest’s withered frame flapped back and forth with each step.
“You were just talking to me.” Bob staggered forward. “I was trying to relax, and you were talking. Why won’t you just let me be?”
Nearly a day ago, in the early morning twilight of their escape, they put several miles of trackless desert behind them before the alarm was raised. The priest led the way, to a secret oasis, he’d said, somewhere hidden.
Somewhere safe.
“You hide in the worlds in your head,” murmured the priest. “For this small suffering”—he motioned at the sand around them—“you throw this world away for another.”
Bob’s skin was blistered. Even in the cool night air it was burning. When they escaped, the morning sun had climbed and climbed into the sky, and he had no protection. He’d heard that a Bedouin could walk for a hundred miles through the open desert, but hearing about a thing was different than experiencing this scorching hell. He could almost feel the frail bubble of his immune system failing as he tracked the ultraviolet-radiation damage to his skin cells, commandeered his autonomous nervous system to retain moisture, watched his neurological signals scatter as he dehydrated. And so he retreated into the private worlds in his head, leaving his body in low-power autopilot to follow the priest.
“Why do you care?” Bob followed the priest footstep by footstep. “All you talk about is the end of the world.”
After escaping, he’d fed the rat to a Nubian vulture. He watched it tear the shrieking creature apart and gulp it in down in pink lumps. He had no choice. He needed information. By flitting into the vulture’s mind as the rat’s precious smarticles transferred into it, he got a sense of the magnetic fields in the area. Bob sent the vulture aloft to map out the terrain to the south.
Of course Toothface chased them, sending out drones into the sky and sandbots to climb through the dunes. Using the vulture, soaring high in the sky, Bob weaved between the searchers. The priest was a master at finding hollows, places to hide, disappearing as if he weren’t even there. They walked, ran, and scrambled to hide all day under the relentless sun.
All the water was long gone. Bob closed up the pores in his skin to keep every molecule of water he could in his body. This acted to heat his core more, raising his central body temperature. His body and brain were frying and on the verge of total neurological failure when the setting sun finally brought relief.
The priest didn’t even turn as he spoke, his words carried to Bob on the sirocco, the never-ending wind that blew through the deep desert. “What’s your idea of Nirvana?”
Bob whispered from between cracked lips, “Heaven?”
“Perhaps. It literally means extinction, like a candle being snuffed out.”
Bob wasn’t sure what was worse, the heat, the priest’s mouth, or the wind—none of them ever stopped. The wind was a biting aerial sandpaper that wore down the skin and stung the eyes, filling them with grit and gunk. When he closed his eyes, Bob saw the face of the man he killed, the life draining away, felt the way his hand had stuck to the dagger, glued there by the man’s blood.
“Have you seen the signs?” asked the priest.
Bob groaned. He shouldn’t have followed the priest. They were heading due south—that much he could infer from the position of the stars in the sky—but his internal data systems were failing. Soon he’d have to rely on his meat-mind, and he was worried about what was left in it.
The priest walked on, gliding across the sand as Bob trudged behind.
“Soon all will be revealed—the apocalypse—one thing changing into another, the world spinning into a vortex . . .”
“You mean the singularity?” It was a popular topic with the doomsdayers.
“The singularity, the apocalypse, the revealing, all different names of the same thing,” replied the priest. “Vishnu, the destroyer, and Shiva, the rebuilder, different faces of the same reality—all avatars of the same being.”
Bob was beyond exhausted. “How much further to the oasis?” Maybe he could pinpoint his location.
“It is not the destination that is important,” answered the priest, “but the j
ourney.”
Bob stopped, leaning over, his head spinning. “I’m grateful and all”—he looked up at the priest—“but could you please stop with the metaphysics lessons?”
The priest stopped in his tracks, balanced on the knife edge of the dune whose ridge top snaked before them into the distance. “This is a fine line we are treading.” He motioned toward the inky blackness to their left and right where the dune slid into the depths. “On both sides the abyss. You are from Atopia, yes?”
This old Bedouin nomad probably heard that from Toothface. Bob nodded, expecting more religious nonsense.
“Jimmy Scadden must be stopped.”
Despite the heat, the hair prickled on Bob’s arms. “Wha . . . what?”
“I am not some old fool.” The priest stood up straight. His body seemed to tower over Bob. “I live in this world too. I am, like you, a prisoner trying to break free.” His eyes glowed in moonlight. “And I know things you do not.”
“What do you know about Jimmy?” Bob took a few deep lungfuls of air. Had he miscalculated this old guy? “Tell me about Jimmy,” he managed to gasp out between labored breaths.
“All in good time.” The priest leaned over and put a hand on Bob’s shoulder.
Bob felt a soothing calm.
Turning, the priest continued. “We have a long journey.”
“How much—”
“It is not the destination,” interrupted the priest, “but—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it, the journey.”
The horizon to his left was beginning to lighten, and their pace quickened as the flaming sword of the sun began to rise again.
14
FLAMES FROM FIRES atop abandoned buildings reflected in the dark waters as Vince raced across the submerged streets. Pregnant clouds hung overhead, threatening rain, and tendrils of smoke crawled between the abandoned buildings, the smell acrid like burned flesh. Vince gulped huge mouthfuls of air, his eyes tearing up as he stared straight ahead and gripped the frame of the battered aluminum airboat.
“Indigo,” shouted the small man driving the boat, and Vince looked away from the murky waterscape rushing toward them. “Your name, yeah?”
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 13
