“Hurry,” Nancy urged as they seated themselves and clipped in their webbing restraints. “Commander Strong and Kesselring are with us now.”
“Did Bob make it through?” asked Sid.
Nancy’s projection shook its head. “He’s here, but it’s not that easy.” She opened a connection.
A splinter opened in Sid’s mind, and he saw an ocean. It was a view from just offshore of Atopia. Someone was in the water. “He’s swimming?” Sid said incredulously. It was Bob, churning through the surf, cutting under a wave as he pulled away from the beach.
The passenger pod jolted and began accelerating, pinning the passengers back into their seats.
“Uh, guys, don’t mean to spoil your reunion,” Bunky said from the seats behind Sid. “But where exactly are we going?”
Sid networked them into the display that was tracking Bob, and then uploaded the flight plan. “We’re going to the only place that’s still safe,” he replied.
“At least for now,” added Nancy.
“And where’s that?” grunted Bunky.
Sid’s face squeezed into a grimace under the growing acceleration. “You’ll see.”
With a muffled roar, the pod exited the cannon, launching into the air. In an instant it was enveloped in a layer of plasma that cut off the data connection. It would burn off in a few seconds as the pod cleared the first tens of miles of the atmosphere, arcing on a ballistic trajectory toward Montana.
“OH GOD,” WAS the last thing Nancy heard from inside the pod. It was Shaky, trying to hold down his lunch.
Nancy smiled and shook her head, then retreated her primary perspective back into her physical body on Atopia. After talking with Commander Strong, she’d made it back to the service elevator. It was already on its way up to the top level, past the Solomon House to Kesselring’s retreat.
The elevator pinged to the top level. The door slid open.
Nancy expected to be greeted by the rolling green fields and trees of Kesselring’s private gardens, ready to start planning the final stages of removing Jimmy from Atopia’s networks and halting the attacks underway. Instead, she found blackened earth, still burning.
Jimmy stood in the middle of it all with a falcon on his arm.
20
NATURAL HUMANS HAVE two systems for making decisions—the fast-thinking emotional gut reaction, and the slow-thinking logical process. When it comes to decision making, slow-thinking generally comes up with better results, but it is the fast-thinking that makes us human—quick responses that follow the path of least resistance, the potential pain of losing greater than the promise of gaining something else. The human mind is biased and flawed, but in a systematic way.
Humans are irrational, but predictable, and Bob was counting on it.
He was just past the edge of the swells and swimming toward deeper water, filling his lungs with the rest of the perfluorocarbons, networking into the water to find his old friends. He hoped they were still there. Below in the depths, a great white shark turned with a flick of its tail and swam upward into the kelp.
Incoming pings from his mother and father hit his networks, but Bob ignored them. He had to focus. After diving in the water, he lost track of Nancy. He couldn’t pick up her signature anywhere. The last he saw, she was in the Tower Two elevator on the way to the upper levels. Kesselring was inside with them, she’d been able to tell him that much. He hoped they had enough to hold out until he could finish.
Cutting through the water, he saw his family’s habitat in the distance, the deck of his old room just visible. He remembered how Nancy came and cleaned his place up one day when he was out surfing, the frustration he felt when he came home to find his comfortable and carefully arranged mess tidied up. He wished he could come home to that clean room now, be frustrated with her perfection, but the mess of his life was his own alone now.
The white shark breached the surface beside him, exploding up out of the water, and Bob grabbed its dorsal fin, holding on tight as it dove back down again.
“Sacrifice,” said the priest, his projection riding shotgun with Bob into the depths, his robes flowing in the rush of the water, “is the only way to salvation.”
Bob nodded. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he replied, communicating through sub-vocal channels, “but I need to do this alone.”
In seconds, Bob reached the undersea ledge of Atopia, fifty feet down. Through glass window-walls, he watched people flash by, sitting in their apartments, none of them aware of what was going on. The avatar of the priest nodded at Bob and let go, disappearing in a rush of bubbles as Bob reached the edge of the ledge at over a hundred feet. The blue-black of the abyss opened beyond, and Bob urged the shark down into it.
He still couldn’t reach Nancy. There was too much interference in the networks. In the deeper water the smarticle concentration fell off rapidly, reducing bandwidth that could pass through its mesh, but even so, Bob could feel another presence.
“Sid, is that you?”
“I’m here, buddy,” came the reply.
The pressure was building, and Bob urged the last bubbles of air from his lungs. The oxygen he’d stored in the perfluorocarbons would keep him going for at least ten minutes. That should be enough time.
“You’re on your way to the Commune?” Bob messaged. The light from the surface was waning as he dove deeper. Sid sent some information—his passenger pod was over halfway through its journey, sixty miles above Minnesota and arcing downward. “Yeah, we’re almost there.”
The cold was intense. Bob shivered. “Good.”
LOOKING OUT OF the window of the passenger pod, Sid craned his neck to try and get a view of the Pacific Ocean, where Atopia was, where Bob was. The curve of the Earth was covered in swirls of clouds. “Where are you going?” he asked, but he already knew. Following the external sensors on Atopia, he watched Bob’s body, still clinging to the shark, now three hundred feet down.
“I need to get down to the main trunk,” Bob replied after a pause.
There were external access airlocks built into the length of Atopia. They had manual controls. Bob must be heading for one near the computing core of Atopia, down below the fusion reactor, five hundred feet below the surface.
Sid shared the data feed with Sibeal and Bunky and Shaky. “You sure you want to do that, buddy?”
He watched Bob dive ever deeper.
BOB DIDN’T REPLY. Jimmy had to know where he was going, but in the confusion of the initial attack Bob disabled the deep-water kinetic defenses. A part of him knew he was going to do this all along. He amplified his visual system, adjusting for the low-light conditions. The shark slowed and the deep-sea pressure hull of Atopia loomed out of the blackness. Bob released the shark and swam the last few feet, grabbing onto a handhold to steady himself.
“You’ve been a good friend, Sid,” said Bob, twisting the external release mechanism. The cold and pressure were slowly shutting down his biological systems. “Can you do one thing for me?”
“Anything, buddy, you name it.”
“Take care of Nancy—promise me you won’t let anything happen to her.” The door to the underwater airlock opened. He hesitated, but there wasn’t much oxygen left in his system. His cells were dying already.
“Of course I will,” he heard Sid reply, now a faint signal.
Bob swam into the airlock and punched the button to close the door. Pumps banged loudly, pumping air into the chamber. Bob put out a hand to steady himself against the wall, and then leaned over to retch out the perfluorocarbons as the water pumped out below his knees.
“What are you doing down here?” Jimmy’s projection sat cross-legged on the floor of the airlock.
Bob gasped for air. “They’ve stopped the attack. I just want to talk to you.” Standing up, Bob pulled a metal tab from his swimming trunks and began unscrewing an access panel.
“Just a temporary hiccup,” Jimmy replied, smiling. “And we were talking, but you swam away.”
Bob finished unscrewing the panel and reached in to pull out a mass of optical wiring. This was as close to the routing core of Atopia as he could get.
Jimmy watched Bob. “You know, these chambers can be used for more than just pressurizing.”
There was no way he could get anyone or anything down there quickly enough to stop Bob from doing whatever he was doing. The pumps fired up again and a hissing noise began.
Bob found the photonic transducer array. Closing his eyes, he ripped open a cut on his index finger with the metal tab and pressed the cut onto the transducer, sending a flood of smarticles from his bloodstream onto it. He coagulated the blood, forming a hard connection to the machine. He was connected directly into the core now. Even Jimmy wouldn’t be able to track everything. He started flooding the networks.
The noise of the pumps increased in frequency. The air pressure in the chamber was dropping. “Stop it.” Jimmy’s projection stood up and walked next to Bob. “Don’t make me do this.”
Bob wheezed. “I’m not making you do anything.” He felt Jimmy’s networks trying to stem the flow of information gushing from him into the core.
“Stop it,” insisted Jimmy again, banging one hand against the wall of the airlock.
Bob was trying to contain it, but his cellular membranes began shredding in the sudden and massive decompression. He doubled over, coughing, keeping one hand on the transducer while the other came up to his mouth. He brought it away. It was covered in blood.
“Bob!” Jimmy yelled, his eyes growing wide. “Stop!”
Bob’s internal organs began rupturing, and blood ran out of his nose and ears. It was nearing vacuum in the chamber. Still he kept his finger on the photonic array. His body sagged against the wall.
“STOP IT!” Jimmy screamed, but he was now screaming at himself. Nobody else was left in the chamber.
Trailing a streak of red against the wall, Bob’s body slid down to slump into a pool of its own blood.
21
SID PULLED THE restraints of his seat, his knuckles white on balled fists. The image of Bob’s inert body lingered in the shared display of the passenger pod. Tears streaked down Sid’s face. The only sound was the low hum of the pod’s life support system recycling the air.
Sibeal reached into the display with a phantom and clicked it off, then reached with her real hands to hold Sid’s. She encouraged him to release the webbing tabs.
Shaking his head, Sid muttered, “Why did he do that?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Sibeal.
“Jimmy didn’t need to kill him.” Sid clenched his teeth and looked at Sibeal. “He could have just left him unconscious. Why did he have to kill him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“And why didn’t Bob try to stop him?” Sid mumbled. “He could have hacked the controls. He didn’t even try . . .”
“Ah, sorry,” said a quiet voice from the back of the pod. It was Shaky. “But how do we even know that just really happened? Maybe it was a fake.”
Sid began breathing again in shallow breaths. “It seemed real enough to me. None of the connection streams ever switched, it was continuous”—he analyzed the data they received—“and the encryption tags were intact.”
Shaky shrugged. “Even so, you Atopians . . .”
“I don’t know, is the answer.” It wasn’t something Sid could analyze, wasn’t something he could crunch the numbers on.
Shaky shrank back into his seat. “Sorry.”
The pod cut through space in silence while Sid ran through the connection mechanics again and again, searching for any evidence of tampering.
“Hey.”
Sid glanced over his shoulder while the bulk of his mind focused on the analyzing and replaying the scene of Bob’s death over and over again. Bunky was reaching forward in his seat to reach out and touch Sid’s arm.
“Look, I know this is a shock,” continued Bunky, “but there was no good reason why Jimmy wouldn’t have killed Bob.”
Sibeal turned around. “Bunky this isn’t—”
“Let me finish.” Bunky held up a hand. “We might have to accept this at face value.”
“You don’t understand.” Sid’s voice was ragged.
“No, I don’t. So tell me.”
“Bob was the only one that ever stood up for Jimmy, protected him. We grew up together.”
“So you were mates as sprogs, then?”
It took Sid a second to decode what he meant. Sprog—cockney for child. “Yeah.”
“Sometimes mates kill mates in war, mate.” Bunky gripped Sid’s shoulder. “I know. I was in the British Army when the Troubles rose up again in Ireland. It was why I left.”
Shaky frowned. “I didn’t know that.”
Bunky nodded. “Yeah, and if you want to make whatever he sacrificed himself for to be worth it, you need to get a grip, right now.”
Sid said nothing. The muscles in his jaw flexed.
“Or do I need to remind you,” continued Bunky, “that we’re in a thirty-foot long capsule,”—he checked the altimeter reading—“forty miles in space above enemy territory, in the middle of a war, traveling at six thousand miles an hour straight into an enemy blockade.”
The Commune wasn’t just a Luddite ashram. Its founding fathers, some of the richest people in America, had foreseen a day like this. It had been built with a final battle in mind. There was a fortress under those farms. While it might be safe on the inside, the problem was that Allied forces had encircled it—the Commune’s perimeter was now an enforced no-fly zone.
Nancy knew this, and must have had a plan, but since comms were cut off for twenty seconds in the plasma burst of launch, they hadn’t been able to contact her. They were heading straight into this mess at nearly two miles a second. The heat shield of the capsule was already heating above a thousand degrees as they reentered the thicker layers of the atmosphere. Their chairs swiveled around to take the g-forces in the opposite direction.
“This Nancy girl that Bob spoke of, to take care of—that’s the same one that bundled us into this thing?” Bunky asked.
Sid nodded. “Yes.”
“Try her again—seems the first order of business would be making sure she’s all right.”
Sid tried again. “I have been.” Jimmy was steadily regaining control of the Atopian ecosystem, driving out the Terra Novan tunnel Bob wedged into its perimeter. Sid’s connections were shutting down.
“I think the first order of business,” Sibeal interrupted, “would be making sure we’re not blown to bits by the Allies or the Commune.”
“We should be okay. Did you check the flight plan?” Sid summoned the details Nancy gave them. They had to assume Nancy had a plan. He noticed that Commander Strong had authorized Allied tags for their capsule. He pointed this out to Sibeal. “That should let us straight through, at least until it’s too late to stop us reaching the perimeter. And I assume she contacted the Commune to tell them we’re coming.”
From here, they had no way to communicate with the Commune directly.
Sibeal shook her head as the g-forces of re-entry squeezed her back into her seat. “Assume she contacted them?” The acceleration was piling up, much more than at launch. Their trajectory was taking a steep dive into the Commune.
“And we better hope that those Allied tags are still good.”
The pod ripped down through the atmosphere, blazing a bright tail behind it as the comet rose over the curved horizon. Holding their breath, they breached the Allied no-fly zone. Sid spun a viewpoint out into the surrounding area. The Allied attack on the Commune had stopped. Everything in the Allied networks indicated a stand-down status. What happened? Why’d they stop? The auto-rotating b
lades of the pod popped out, shifting their capsule from a ballistic into an aerodynamic flight path. It began decelerating hard again, squeezing them into their aerogel seats. They neared the Commune’s shield.
Sid detached from his body to watch from the outside. Like a helicopter, the pod hovered just at the edge of the aerial plankton dome a mile and a half in the air. Then, like magic, an opening appeared underneath them. The plankton parted to allow them through.
“We’re in!” Sid exclaimed inside the capsule.
Flight plans uploaded from the Commune into the pod’s controller, and it slid through the air to land upright on its landing gear, in a field a few hundred yards from a barn on the outskirts of the Commune village. Two people in a horse-driven buggy were coming their way along a dirt road.
Unstrapping himself, Sid motioned for the rest of them to do the same. “Seems we have a welcome party.”
Sid had never been inside the Commune. He wondered what would happen next. The door to the pod slid open just as the buggy arrived. Sid took a deep breath. “Hello, thanks for letting us in, my name—”
One of the men hopped down from the buggy. “I know what your name is,” he said, his face obscured by a large black hat. Sibeal stuck her head out from behind Sid.
“But,” said Vince, taking off his hat, “I don’t believe I’ve been introduced to your friends.”
22
SO THIS IS what it feels like to be dead.
Bob pulled back the blinds hanging on the window of his old room and peered out. After his external meta-cognition systems rebooted, he flitted his primary viewpoint into his family’s habitat, one of the few above-ground living quarters on Atopia that sprouted up out of the water just offshore, attached to one of the mass driver legs. The seas were calm, gently rolling, with nothing to hint at the titanic events that had just taken place beneath its surface.
I just died.
And yet.
Here I am.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 29
