“I love you,” gasped Olympia. She felt something brush her leg. Looking down, she found her cat, Mr. Tweedles, staring up at her and purring. “Mr. Tweedles!” Olympia leaned down and picked him up, squeezing him into the hug with her mother.
Her mother stopped protesting and hugged her back.
Opening her eyes, Olympia looked out the large bay windows on the front of the house. Through her tears she could see someone on the front lawn, looking at the house. A young man seemed to be staring at her, and he looked familiar.
CINDY STRONG WOKE up with tears in her eyes, still dreaming of her proxxid children. She had wanted to let them go, yearned to release them, but felt compelled to stay, felt the need to stay by their sides as they aged and died before her eyes. It felt like being trapped in a dream. She wanted to get back to her husband, Commander Rick Strong, but always she had been drawn back in, the needs of the proxxids outweighing her own.
She found herself staring at a ceiling, lying on her back. With some effort, she lifted herself up onto her elbows. Looking around, she blinked. It was her apartment, the one she shared with her husband. Her mind had been ripped from the endless replay of the small cottage on Martha’s Vineyard where she lived with her proxxid children.
Where was her husband? Why was she lying in a stasis pod? What happened?
“Rick?” she whispered, her throat dry, and then again and louder, “Rick?!”
“Jimmy’s taken him.”
Cindy turned her head. Sitting on her couch was Bob.
“Or something has taken him,” Bob continued, his expression grim. “I need your help.”
“WHAT ARE YOU doing?” roared James, still towering over Jimmy.
“Letting them go,” Jimmy replied.
All around them, the palace crumbled. Cobwebs of cracks ran through the marble walls as they disintegrated, chunks of plaster falling from above. The creatures ran away, the purple curtains bursting into flames, pouring billowing black smoke into the frescoed ceilings.
In the middle of it all stood Bob, staring at Jimmy and James as they fought.
“We need them,” screamed James, “they feed us.”
“I think that they”—Jimmy held up his hands—“feed you.”
He ripped his hands down, and in the same motion, the walls of the palace came away, tearing its reality to shreds. In its place appeared a world from Jimmy’s inVerse, a synthetic-space projection of a different palace, a Spanish palace. The three of them were now standing in the middle of an open courtyard under a deep blue sky, surrounded by a three-story terracotta palazzo. The walls were decorated with intricate murals inlaid with tiny blue, white, and gold tiles. A baby played between potted ferns next to a pool filled with colorful koi fish. A fountain bubbled water into the pond, while dragonflies buzzed at the water’s edge.
“How much of this is a lie?” Jimmy demanded, facing James.
The baby by the pool was Jimmy, and his mother walked over to pick him up. She walked back to the table where she was sitting together with Jimmy’s father and another couple, guests of her parents. They were having coffee. Jimmy’s mother sat him down on her lap and gripped him tight. “Who’s my little stinker?” she growled into his face, shaking him.
The exchange could have been affectionate, but in this rendering Jimmy’s mother looked threatening, gripping Jimmy too tight, her eyes menacing.
Jimmy was transfixed as he watched. “Is this a lie?” he demanded again.
“A lie?” James swept his hand across the scene, pulling it apart. “All of life is a lie, Jimmy.”
Bob was weakening. In the background, James methodically tore through the Atopian networks, rooting out any threads of Bob, erasing any trace of him. He was disappearing from the realities he lodged himself into. Bob fought back, enlisting the help of the disappeared that were awakening, asking them to hide little pieces of him. They were connected into Jimmy’s mind, and some of them were fighting back, but James was powerful. James was killing Bob again.
In the melee, James took control of the military networks. In a splinter of his mind, Bob saw James’s face plastered across the mediaworlds, preaching calm and control while he ranted and raved on the inside. World after world fell away around the three of them, flashes of New York, of Big Ben in London, of places Jimmy and James had trapped souls. And at each stop, more were released.
“You want to release them?” cried James in frustration. “Then release all of them, all of them can witness the end.”
25
“THERE ARE NO such things as coincidences,” Connors said. “That’s the first rule.”
Sid was looking at the information in Willy’s body again. He instantiated a private space to talk with Connors, to get her input as a professional investigator. Mohesha was the one who interpreted the information they got out of Willy’s body. Sid hadn’t involved himself too deeply out of respect for her seniority and skill. Maybe that was a mistake. Mohesha had given them the first clues to hacking into the machine, but Jimmy was still looking for Willy, and now so was Mohesha.
Why? They must have missed something.
Connors created a diagram of her investigative procedures on the wall of their workspace. “And you need to look at all your background material. It all needs to make sense, to be coherent.”
Vince was with them. “And I want to know why we haven’t been able to speak to any of these creatures in the old machine, if it exists. If the bad guys are here, where are the good guys?”
Sid hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe they’re already helping and you just don’t know it.”
The attacks against the Commune had resumed. In a splinter of his mind, Sid watched a white-hot sheet of plasma burning high over the farm buildings outside. Gobs of it began raining down as the Commune’s dome started to fail in places. The falling plasma ignited the wooden buildings into flames, and then, like the wall of an aquarium shattering, the dome burst. Even through a hundred feet of bedrock Sid heard the thunderous impact that destroyed the ground level of the Commune. A part of Sid was helping in the defense, hacking into the Alliance networks outside, but it was a losing battle.
They were in the underground complex, open caverns with bioluminescent ceilings that glowed blue. The buildings below were nothing like above, rectangular bio-plastic cubicles stacked to the ceilings. Sid and his friends were corralled into a string of buildings directly underneath the Church. Bunky and Shaky were much happier being underground. They’d already gone off to inspect the digging gear.
“So you really want to take this apocalyptic text literally?” Connors asked, looking at Sid and Vince.
They both nodded.
“The legend is true somehow,” Vince replied.
Connors rolled her eyes.
“Or,” Vince added quickly, “whoever is orchestrating this thinks it is. Either way, there should be Four Horsemen out there.”
“Good point.” Connors looked at a diagram hanging in space between them. “So if that’s true, in the analysis, there are two outliers and one big problem.”
“What’s the big problem?” Sid asked.
“If we’re fighting the Four Horsemen, who are they?”
Sid pulled up a network map. “Jimmy’s the center pivot.”
He pointed out the main trunks of data exchange on the nervenet. Most of them routed through either Atopia or Terra Nova, the two competing platforms, but the vast majority centered on the large cloud around the connection point of Atopia.
The Ascetics had neutralized smaller infections, but the large ones, three huge clouds on the network maps, were too diffuse to single out individual people. The big problem was that there were only three large end-point clouds; one around Atopia, one around Allied Command, and one around DAD—the agricultural contractor for the Department of Defense.
“There before me was a white hors
e, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest,” Vince said, quoting from the sixth verse of Revelations. “The White Rider.”
“That’s one,” Connors said, pointing to the large cloud of data connection points around Atopia. This cloud of activity was at least twice as large as any of the others. They all assumed, by now, that this was Jimmy Scadden. The implication being that he was a kind of anti-Christ. Sid had argued that most historians viewed the White Rider as the savior, not the destroyer, but this was a matter of interpretation.
Connors pointed at another nexus point, this one a clouding of connection around Allied Command. “And there you have the second rider.”
“A fiery red one, its rider given the power to take peace from the Earth,” said Vince, again quoting Revelations. “Yes, sounds like a military reference.”
Connors traced her finger along to the third nexus. “And at DAD we have the third one.”
Vince nodded. “A black horse, holding a pair of scales—the agricultural contractor for the department of defense—DAD—famine and pestilence, makes sense to me.”
“That’s three.” Connors held up three fingers. “So where’s the fourth?”
Sid shrugged. “There isn’t one.”
“I think the fourth is more of a metaphor for what happens next.” Vince accessed more of the Revelations text. “Before me was a pale horse, its rider was Death. They didn’t even give him a color.”
“Actually, they did,” pointed out Sid. “They translated as ‘pale’ from the original ancient Greek of ‘chloros,’ which could also be translated as light green.”
Vince shrugged. “Okay, so the Green Rider. I don’t recall seeing anything referencing green.” He began running searches anyway.
Sid turned to Connors. “So you think we’re missing a node?”
“If you think the Apocalypse is literal for what’s happening out there, then you’re missing one.” She paused. “It wouldn’t make sense that one of them is a metaphor.”
All of the other network traffic was routed through Terra Nova and Atopia. Sid began breaking the traffic down, seeing if he could get any more detail on it.
Connors left him to it and returned to her analysis. “And the two outliers that don’t fit are that POND message, and the hint about where to find Willy’s body.”
Vince nodded. “Keep going.”
“There’s no way that a mysterious message from another universe shows up right when all this starts to go haywire.” She took a deep breath. “And that hint for finding Willy’s body, appearing in a two thousand year old text?”
Vince wagged his head. “So if it’s not real—”
“—then someone faked it.” Sid completed the thought for Vince. “Or it’s just a coincidence.”
Connors held up a finger. “But there are no coincidences. That’s the first rule.” She brought up a new workspace with Mikhail and the Ascetics on it. “So the Willy hint came from Mikhail. How much of that network traffic goes through the darknets? Maybe that POND message was meant to throw us off track?”
“So you’re saying the fourth horseman is in the Ascetics? Mikhail?”
Connors nodded. “It would make sense, wouldn’t it?” She took a deep breath. “In any investigation, you need to step back, usually it’s staring you right in the face.” Connors took a literal step back. “Who’s at the center of all this?”
They stared at each other.
“We’re at the center,” said Sid after a pause, and then after more consideration. “Bob’s at the center.”
Connors nodded. “Okay, so in these two outliers—the POND message and the ancient clue about Willy—have you applied everything you know about all of yourselves to them?”
Sid shook his head. He hadn’t. It seemed like a long shot, but he started running processes, pattern matching everything in their own backgrounds and histories. He also grabbed everything he had on Bob, which was a lot. They’d lived their entire lives together. He had petabytes of Bob.
26
BOB SHOULD HAVE left, should have escaped to protect himself, but Jimmy was starting to lose the battle. James was too well entrenched.
So Bob stayed, enlisting the hundreds and then thousands of people who were released from James’s control in the fight. Bob sensed another presence fighting with him. It was the priest, helping support Bob at the fringes. One world crashed into the next. And then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.
Through the sensory whitewash of a thunderfall, Bob regained his senses, the splintered parts of his psyche reintegrating in one place. He found himself standing in the cave that Jimmy used to hide in. Jimmy was sitting on the floor with his proxxi, Samson.
A fearsome monster, clawed and fanged, lurked in the corner.
“It was never my mother,” screamed Jimmy at the monster. “It was always you!”
“I am you,” snarled the monster.
“Did you kill them?”
“Why would you care?” The monster came out from the shadows. It was a distorted version of Jimmy, its skin flaking, hands curled into claws, teeth protruding. “We killed them, Jimmy, you and I together.”
Jimmy shook his head, but he knew the truth. “You used me, just like you used them.”
“And it made us strong.” The monster edged closer to Jimmy.
Despite his struggle to hide parts of himself, Bob was disappearing from existence. James was wiping him out. The image of Jimmy and James faded before his senses.
“I can destroy you,” whispered Jimmy. He stood up to the monster. “Because I can destroy myself.”
In a mind-collapsing thunder, the world around Bob buckled.
27
FROM A HUNDRED MILLION miles away, the dot of light that was the Earth flickered and dimmed, then grew lighter and darker by turns as the space power grid echoed energy back and forth from one terrestrial power web to another. The bright pinpoint of light that was the battle in the South Atlantic flared and then went dark.
“Whoa!” Sid exclaimed. “Did you guys feel that?” A massive spike in network traffic exploded from Atopia. It lit up the entire multiverse in a wide-spectrum pulse, even creeping below the bombardment assaulting the surface level of the Commune.
Then everything went silent.
The thunder above stopped.
Sid’s main subjective was still in the private space with Vince and Connors, sifting through the masses of pattern matching. Nothing new was coming up. The disruption pulled his attention back into the underground cavern.
Sid looked at Willy. “What happened?”
“The attack stopped again.”
“And?” That was obvious, but what had stopped it?
“I don’t know,” replied Willy.
Sid’s mind jumped from one splinter to another. The Allied forces outside the Commune were standing down again. Energy surged in massive waves back and forth through the space power grid, microwave radiation that was bouncing through the hundreds of power grid satellites in low earth orbit, down to transmitter arrays and back again. Ground potentials around the world spiked. The communication networks filled with noise.
From what he could sense, the attack against Terra Nova had stopped again as well. Tyrel and Mohesha were sending connection signals. He tried to latch onto them, but the heaving electrical interference from the space power grid was too much, saturating even ground-based systems.
Vicious, Sid’s proxxi, materialized in the underground cavern. Sid expected an update on what was going on outside, but he grabbed his attention on a private channel, back to the pattern-matching algorithms running in the background. “You need to see this.”
Sid shook his head. “The attacks just stopped. We need find out what happened on Atopia.” Everything was emanating from there.
“This is more important.” Vicious plugged a data feed in
to Sid’s mind.
The world shimmered and reformed.
Sid found himself standing in a steaming jungle filled with alien-looking plants. Green monsters with spiny dorsal fins lumbered toward him. In the next instant he watched a mushroom cloud rising into the air over corrugated tin shacks, and a moment later he was watching Assyrian troops amassing outside Jerusalem. His head filled with figures and dates, streams of nearly unconnected meta-data. “What is this?”
“The contents of the POND message.”
His proxxi slowed down the data stream. Sid was now standing next to Bob in Battery Park in New York. A huge Nazi flag draped down the side of one of the old World Trade Center buildings.
“I applied one of the old time-cloaking encryptions you and Bob used to play with as kids.”
He and Bob used to play games, hiding worlds from their friends, interlacing them in time over the top of the ones they were in. Places that were there but not there at the same time. The information they were seeing was Bob’s own sensory data, like thousands of gameworld simulations, but these were streams from Bob’s meta-cognition systems. It was like Bob had lived hundreds of lives.
“Any guess what this means?” Sid asked. The data had to be corrupted somehow, cross-connected on Atopia, or from Bob carrying the data beacon.
“I already checked all that.”
Sid tried to make sense of it. “So Bob sent himself a message encoded in neutrinos? From another universe?”
His proxxi shrugged. “I don’t know what to say.”
Sid brought up some simulations of possible ways to create neutrino bursts. The entire Earth was bathed in the signal that Patricia picked up, a signal that must have literally been sprayed across the cosmos.
Just receiving the message was a stretch with existing technology. Creating it required energy on unimaginable scales, larger than even a supernova. How was it possible? And if Bob sent himself a message somehow, then why wouldn’t he have told them?
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 31
