Suddenly a great horn blared, the sound like a physical assault. Rebecca dropped to her knees. Her hands shot up to cover her ears. She felt herself scream but couldn't hear it. Only the ache of her jaw and her gasps for breath told her something was happening.
Blind.
Deaf.
Pain.
Then silence.
Then darkness.
Her body went limp and she slumped to the tracks. Released from the stimuli, all she could do was gasp. Crystal spider webs spun before her eyes. She heard her own breathing, but from a thousand miles away. Her heart raced. Her muscles felt like jelly.
Then a surge of nausea gripped her. She felt seaborne, as wave after wave tumbled her stomach. Her head reeled with the inequity of her senses. Finally Rebecca opened her mouth and vomited, retching over and over until she lay curled in a ball. She shivered, wishing she would die.
Time passed, and with it came the realization that she'd most probably live. Carefully she reached out and felt Andy beside her. What had happened to them? What was next? Fear filled her chest, rushing her heartbeat. She gripped his hand and felt his weak grip in return. At least he was still alive.
She tried to stand but couldn't find the strength. After a full minute she managed to communicate the need to each and every muscle, forcing them to cooperate. She managed at last to sit up before a light snapped on again.
She lacked the power to fully turn towards the light, so she was forced to watch from the corner of her eye. This light was a simple overhead hanging far down the tunnel which produced a pool of white against the dark floor. Two black stick figures were heading towards her. Just as they reached the edge of the light and were about to step into darkness, another light snapped on. One after the other until seventeen lights had snapped on and the pair of black suited men stood before her and Andy.
Rebecca squinted at them. Although the light was as blinding, it still brought tears to her eyes. She wiped a string of drool from her lips and acknowledged them with a wave of her hand, the motion almost sending her crashing to the rails.
"Don't—no more...light." It was the best she could manage.
"You take the woman and I'll bring the man," said the one on the left.
The other nodded as he placed his hands beneath her armpits and heaved her to a standing position. He pulled her forward, helping her through all seventeen pools of lights. She flinched at first, but eventually came to trust that the lights were of the helpful variety.
They carried her and Andy to the end of the tunnel, then through an immense steel door large enough to fit a train through. But instead of a train, the door opened into a room filled to the ceiling with computer equipment. From PODs to last-century CRT monitors to plasma screen displays, not an inch of wall was bare. Code, text and images flashed from each one in a scintillating similitude of the world's largest television store.
Rebecca was dragged to the center of the room and dropped on a lounge chair. Seconds later, Andy plopped onto the chair beside her. His head lolled. His eyes were closed—unconscious.
Her head began to clear. The raw mush of her mouth tasted nasty from the bile leaching into her breath. Her eyes watered. She cleared them with the back of a hand. She felt blood returning to her muscles and with it, a malaise so deep it threatened to overwhelm her. But against her will she moved first her feet, then her legs. The pain wasn't as bad as she'd expected. In fact, the more she moved them, the better they felt.
"Rebecca Mines. You're not expected by the Deacon."
A rotund fellow about her height had managed to step in front of her without her seeing him. He wore PODs over each eye and was spectacularly effeminate.
"I wasn't expecting to see the Deacon," she managed to retort. "Not until this morning."
"Then it's clear you're in violation of Ack Ack Protocol number 1. In the event you are able to fix–-"
"Rebecca, is that you?" asked a new voice that sounded vaguely familiar. "Get a job, Bender," snapped the new voice.
The rotund fellow stalked off only to be replaced by a rail-thin man who hunkered down in front of her. He lifted her lids, then felt her pulse, all the while shaking his head and smiling. "You're going to be okay. The effects of the Bio-Guard don't usually last more than an hour or so."
She groaned as another spasm of pain assaulted her head. Her answer flew away assaulted by lethal shards of misery.
"Pretty nasty, isn't it? It keeps unwanted intruders away, like the Day Eaters, those wretched things. Why'd you try and enter that way, Rebecca? We would have let you in the front door."
"Unnh."
"There now," he whispered. She felt a sting in her arm and vaguely realized he'd injected her with something. "Close your eyes, Rebecca. Dream of Velvet Dogma."
She'd meant to ask him what he meant, but sleep overtook her in a freight train rush.
Chapter 18
When next Rebecca opened her eyes, the misery that had possessed her had disappeared, leaving a general feeling of ennui. Her limbs, which had felt cracked and broken, bore no evidence of the pain. It was as if it had never happened. Only her memory proved that wrong, but this, too, she wanted to forget, because along with remembering came the echoes of her agonies.
She reclined on a vinyl chair, the cushions gripping her back and legs. She pushed herself to a sitting position and looked around. The walls were as before, covered from floor to ceiling with monitors of all shapes and sizes. Men and women wearing PODs and more invasive cranial interfaces moved among workstations interspersed throughout the oval shaped room.
Rebecca was in the center of this room, inside a sunken circle about a dozen feet across. Andy lay next to her, groggily making his way through the depths of consciousness. There were four additional chairs arranged in a circle, and all but one was occupied by people with sometimes drastic accouterments. Each wore dual PODs. A faceplate of some unknown metal covered the chin and mouth of one. Another had wire leads attached in place of hair. Their clothes, like those of the other men and women she'd seen moving about the room, were utilitarian, boasting pockets and slots filled with tools, wires, filaments and silicon mesh.
She managed to stand, ready for the room to start spinning, but it didn't. Miraculously she was okay. She spied a tray of water bottles and grabbed one. She rinsed her mouth clean of the bile taste by swishing the water back and forth, then swallowing it.
Andy wobbled to her side. He ran his fingers through his hair. "What the hell happened?"
"Some kind of Bio-guard," she replied, remembering the words the man had said before she'd passed out.
"Bio-what?" He grabbed a bottle of water and poured half down his throat and then half over his head.
"She said Bio-guard," came the voice of an approaching man.
They turned to see the same rail thin man who'd approached them earlier and put Rebecca to sleep. His haggard features were that of a person nearer death than life. Skin pulled taught over high cheek bones held the pallor of crushed china. His salt and pepper hair had been buzz cut. As near death as he seemed to be, his face was still lit by a smile. Not just a smile, but one nearly as magnificent as Abraham's, as if their happiness had been carved from the same wooden ark of pain.
"I don't care what you call it," grumbled Andy. "Why'd you have to hit us with it?"
The man gently took Rebecca's arm and checked her pulse. He was vaguely familiar. A nagging sensation convinced her that she knew him.
"We didn't know you were coming." He lowered her arm and graced her with a smile, then he checked Andy's pulse. "Had you called ahead, we would have made arrangements."
"There was no calling to be done. We were with the Day Eaters."
The man rolled his eyes and shook his head. "They set you up then. They know where our defenses are. Hell, we put them up because of them. Sorry about that, Andy."
"Yeah. Me too, Cody."
Cody. The name sparked a memory. Rebecca examined him closely. Cody Larkins? But he'd been a b
ig, happy fellow known for snapping down pizzas during late night study sessions at Dominguez Hills. Could this be the same man?
"How're you doing, Rebecca?" he said.
"Cody Larkins?"
"In the flesh," he said, once again gracing her with his smile.
"But you're–-" What could she say without being rude?
"Thin? I'm half the man I was? I'd like to say it was the result of good eating and healthy exercise, but it's more the result of happenstance."
Rebecca raised her eyebrows.
"I don't want to bore you with the details. You've just gotten here."
"I think it's important that she knows," Andy interjected. "She needs to understand your motives. Cody, here," he said placing a hand on the other man's shoulder, "is a victim of the organ levy. He put his kidneys up for collateral and was forced to remit payment before he was truly ready. So they took them."
Her eyes widened. "His kidneys?"
"Both of them." He nodded.
"It's not so bad," said Cody. "I do dialysis once a day and barely notice the hunger."
"Cody has to limit his intake or his blood sugar levels cause pancreatitis." Andy reached over and grabbed Rebecca's hand. In one of his first overt signs of affection, he pulled her to his side and locked his fingers with hers. "So he barely eats and he barely drinks. It's a tough way to live," he added, the last bit to her and her only.
"How did it—" Her voice trailed off.
"Tell her how it happened," Andy suggested.
"They came in the middle of the night." Cody struggled to keep his smile alive as he told the story. "I tried to fight them, but didn't stand a chance. When I awoke the next morning, there were twelve-hour savers covering the wound, and a note scrolling across my POD. My bill had come due and they took my kidneys to make it right."
Rebecca let go of Andy as her hands went to her own skin, feeling it, owning everything inside herself from the comfort of her surgically untainted flesh. She couldn't imagine waking up and her organs not being there. Damn. Watching Cody she changed her mind. She could imagine, and Cody was not in the place she wanted to be.
"Cody, I'm so sorry."
"Don't be. You didn't do it. Besides, you're Velvet Dogma. You're our great hope for change. Come on over to my workshop. I have something to show you."
They followed him across the room to the glassed-in area with a wall-sized computer screen. He entered and sat at an old fashioned keyboard that looked as out of place and quaint as a manual typewriter has when she was in high school. When Rebecca and Andy were in place, Cody tapped a few keys and turned to the screen.
"The reason we've gone old school is to keep Rebecca off the grid. I have some hypotheses, but I'm not quite ready to reveal them. If I'm proven correct, I'll understand your whole situation." He tapped a few more times, then pointed. "There."
The screen was comprised of a crystal clear viscous liquid that gave the image enough three dimensional depth that Rebecca felt able to reach out and touch, in this case, a tree-covered hill.
"As Andy must have told you by now, we've purchased the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky."
"The cave? He told me, but I didn't realize until now it was a whole cave system. You can buy something like that?"
"You can buy anything given enough money. In this case we did a little hacking, reallocated enough funds to make the purchase, then covered our tracks. So you, my dear Rebecca, are the proud owner of 560 underground kilometers of cold Kentucky cave."
"Just what I always wanted," she muttered. What would she do with a cave? Another thought struck her. "Wait a minute. If you can get money so easily, then why not use it to help yourselves more directly?"
"It wasn't all that much money. Tourism isn't like it used to be. The cave was sold some ten years ago by the government to a wacko survivalist movement. Less than a year later, they asphyxiated themselves by plugging up all the entrances and powering up their generators. Once the property made its circuitous journey through probate, it languished for a long time. When we stumbled across it, we looked at the possibilities and it seemed the perfect locus to place some secure servers. Then it was only a matter of secretly moving money from one account to another before we had enough to buy the old place."
A wire diagram of the cave system appeared and enlarged on the screen.
"As you can see this place is massive. Even though it's called Mammoth Cave, it's really more of a cave system than an actual cave. Some of the notable caves in the system include Frozen Niagra, Grand Avenue, Great Onyx, Violet Light and the River Styx."
"River Styx?"
"Yep. But we chose the Mammoth Dome as the place to align the servers.
Rising 192 feet high, we can build vertically, using the interior design of the cave to facilitate security of the project, as well as cooling space for the equipment."
Cody typed madly for a second, murmuring under his breath at the cantankerous keys. Then a diagram of the servers appeared, superimposed beneath the wire diagram of the Mammoth Dome. What looked like nearly a hundred rectangular shapes the size of VW Bugs fit in the cylindrical space like rice in a straw. Wires connected each of them to the one next to it ending in a final waterfall of fiber optics that fell to the ground beneath, only to be gathered into a circuit box the size of a Cadillac.
"How is it powered?" She approached the screen and pointed to a pit with what looked like a cylindrical power plant inside. "This is it, isn't it? Fusion, I bet."
"The locals call it the Bottomless Pit. It actually bottoms out one hundred and five feet below cave level—not so bottomless after all. There's fifty feet of water in the bottom regulated by a deep mountain spring. We placed a Fuji-Sanka 343 light fusion reactor at the apex of the pit for access and control. If a critical event occurs, we release the reactor by removing titanium retaining rods and the whole shebang tumbles into the water in the bottom of the pit, using the natural cooling power of the springs to hasten shut down. With this particular model reactor we're self sufficient for a millennium."
"Self sufficient? Do you think that's necessary?"
Cody looked at Andy. "You sure haven't explained things."
Andy shrugged. "She's not one to take explanations well."
Cody considered Rebecca for a moment. "Once we go online and figure out a way to harness that beast you created, we're not going to have a moment's peace. Everyone from the Transvaal to the Pacific Rim Amalgam will be on our trail trying to bring us down. They're going to trace our transmissions through the satellite nodes and find out where we are, but if we can remain impregnable for long enough to populate the ID with the information Velvet Dogma has collected, then it'll be too late for them to do anything. In the meantime, they'll try everything they can, including tactical nukes." He held his hands out expansively. "What are a few backwoods rednecks to the rulers of the conglomerates? Trust me when I say they don't care."
Rebecca hadn't really considered the devastation her program would cause once the information was sown into the digital landscape. She felt a rush like she hadn't felt in years. Cavalier, like Don Quixote, but with a weapon like no other—information that had been meant to be hidden finally revealed.
"This is some plan you guys have. It's going to take a long time to get everything ready, though. There are so many details still have to be worked out." She grinned as excitement shook her system. "But I'm game if you are. David would have wanted it this way. I'm sure of that."
"Rebecca," Cody said with a queer look on his face. "This has already started. Your brother was the one who supervised the placement of the reactor. Everything is all but finished."
All but finished? What?
Cody looked at her with reverence. "All we've been waiting for is for you to be released from prison. You're a little ahead of schedule, but there's not so much to do. In fact, we could power it up any day now."
"You mean it's already in place? Everything's ready to go?" Rebecca looked from Cody to Andy.
&nb
sp; "That's exactly what I'm saying. All we need is you in place to call it to its new home. You do have the password, don't you?"
"Yes," she whispered.
"Would you tell me if I asked?" He wore a mischievous grin.
She glanced at Andy, then back to Cody. "I don't know if I should."
"Let me put it this way." Cody pushed the keyboard aside and turned to face her. "I think I know what's been killing everyone. I think I know how to stop it."
"But if you have the password, then what use do you have for me?" She hadn't realized that she'd been afraid of this until Cody had asked her. His request had made her want to slink away and hide, fearful that he'd somehow find a way to take it from her. But she knew that was ridiculous. She couldn't imagine him doing anything aggressive or evil.
Cody spoke slowly, his voice filled with emotion. "Rebecca, there is nothing that we would ever do to you. You are more than the receptacle of a password which will give Velvet Dogma to the world. You are Velvet Dogma. Your passion created it, your sacrifice allowed it to endure, and now your return will breathe life into that which has waited, just as we have, for you to escape the bonds of government only so that you may bring it down." His eyes teared and his voice cracked. "We love you like a sister, Rebecca, and although we can never replace David, we hope to become as dear to you as he was."
She stared at him open-mouthed. She'd been totally unprepared for his speech. From anyone else she'd have dismissed it, but Cody breathed truth. She wanted to believe him. When she managed to catch up to her thoughts, she swallowed hard. "And you've done this for me?"
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