The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “You got in his head?” WarDon asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “That can be done?”

  Cynthia’s silence was confirmation.

  “How much oil?”

  A graph popped up mirroring Cynthia’s words. “Ten years of consumption for the entire population. Eighty years or more if they follow today’s standard practice of government and subsidized use.”

  WarDon leaned back in his chair, which groaned under his weight. He shook his head and laughed. “Those sonsofbitches. Smart sonsofbitches.”

  “Can I ask a possibly idiotic question?” Cynthia said. “Why do you care? They can’t jump start their economy with it, we’re already adapting to life without it.”

  “Cynthia, don’t take this the wrong way. You’re smarter than hell, but you have too much trust in mankind,” WarDon said. “They aren’t thinking about bringing back cars or making Tupperware. They won’t refine this for public consumption. What they have, by having these wells, is a perpetual war machine. Our military is nothing without oil and we have a limited supply of it. We got a lot stockpiled, maybe even decades, but if they got this, it doesn’t mean shit.”

  “But why would that matter now? Everything’s digital, the economies are intertwined and we rely on each other for consumption of goods and services.”

  “You’re saying the countries don’t matter anymore?” WarDon replied slowly.

  “For economy, yes,” Cynthia insisted.

  “In an academic bubble you may be right, but the folks at the top, the Presidents, Dictators, Prime Ministers, all got there because they wanted to rule something. They aren’t there out of civic duty; a type of person wants this. And if countries don’t matter, why have so many of them? If you got the means, why not rule it all?”

  “Not everyone thinks that way.”

  WarDon let out a huge belly laugh. “You Ivy Leaguers! Cynthia, come on! You’ve been in cyberspace too long. Where are your competitors? Why isn’t your software open source?”

  “It wouldn’t work if there were competitors,” Cynthia bristled.

  “You guard your advantages so there are no competitors. You paid lobbyists to bribe politicians for favorable policies and you sued the hell out of any would-be competitors if they got within a hair of your patents. And God bless you! It’s the American way. But why do you think a country would behave differently?”

  Cynthia turned to Sabot.

  “He’s right,” Sabot said. Evan couldn’t remember another time where Sabot had spoken during a meeting.

  “You told me five minutes ago that China has found an oil reserve and I immediately told you what that meant for the U.S., and Sabot,” WarDon pointed to him, “thought it right away too. So either he and I are geniuses or we understand the underbelly of man.” WarDon leaned back. “I know which one it is.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “So what now?” Cynthia asked.

  “I don’t know. I need to take this report to the President and we need to assess our options.” WarDon turned to Evan who nodded in agreement. “As much as I’m ribbing you, I can’t express how important your contribution has been.”

  “Thank you,” Cynthia said. She underestimated WarDon. She understood why a lot of people thought of him as a bully, but she dismissed that now as just appearances. She had fallen for it too. He may not be a genius, but he knew his business.

  = = =

  WarDon and Evan rode from MindCorp to the Derik Building. Evan thumbed through the report.

  “Bad?” WarDon asked. He was distracted. He still felt ill.

  “I think Cynthia was being conservative. With just this vein, assuming a hoarder’s mentality, they have one hundred years of oil,” Evan replied. He licked his index finger and continued to flip through the pages.

  “How much do we have?” WarDon asked. He was told awhile back, but dammit if he could remember. Meeting after meeting, he had become a bureaucrat.

  “Two decades of aggressive use. We have native oil shale that can be refined, but the supply can’t keep up with demand if there was a major war. We’d hit a choke point.”

  “Do you think I’m being paranoid?” WarDon asked.

  “We’re paid to be paranoid. But I don’t think they’re going to be actively aggressive. To that point, I agree with Cynthia. They’ve been our economic partners, hell, they surpassed us, a long time ago. Look at the history. They discreetly absolved our debt in 2021. That wasn’t charity. They did that so our default wouldn’t affect the global economy. That is more important to them than land. But their prudence is harder to gauge than a reactive government. I think they’re keeping the oil secret ‘just in case.’ If something happened to cyberspace that made it uninhabitable, if a computer virus was created that could actually affect people—and there will be, Don, mark my words—that would be catastrophic and everything would topple. Very few things consumed—other than food and basic life necessities—are goods anymore. The global economy relies almost entirely on digital services. And technology hasn’t given us more options, it’s dithered us down to no options. Everyone, rich or poor, uses a Mindlink, and in that way, there’s no diversity. If that interface gets compromised, there’s no back up plan. We can’t regress to an oil-based economy. There’s nothing over the horizon than can replace the MindCorp-based economy. But if I’m China and I just found a vein of oil, I hang on to it like a food ration. It’s not my first choice, but it’s there if I need it. That can help them delay what, for everyone else, would be inevitable: total economic collapse, rioting, looting and government overthrows.”

  “Society would crumble.”

  “No question.”

  “What should we do?” WarDon asked.

  “Expose them publicly. Humiliate them. Announce to the world that they have no problem letting the rest of us rot.”

  “What will that do?”

  “They’re as concerned with the economy as we are. They understand it’s balancing on a needle. They don’t want to use the oil; they want the digital economy to prosper. Their politicians will backtrack out of fear. They’ll share it.”

  “Evan, they’re not going to share the oil.”

  “There’s something I should show you that will convince you otherwise.”

  Evan hadn’t expected those words to come out of his mouth, but he was excited. He was riffing like jazz.

  = = =

  WarDon and Evan traversed the field of server bays to Evan’s office. They found Mike Glass seated at the door, his feet kicked up like a mall cop. He quickly stood and saluted WarDon. Neither chair slid or made a sound.

  “At ease, Mike.”

  “Anyone swing by?” Evan asked.

  “A tech saw some bandwidth spikes on a quarter of the servers. I told him to come back when you’re here.”

  “Good.”

  They went into the office. The “office” was the size of a basketball court. In a corner was a desk, a bed, a kitchenette, and bathroom with a shower. The rest of it was used for Evan to experiment and design. The room was dark except at the center where overhead lights revealed a massive computer and two Sleeper chairs. When they got closer, WarDon saw a young boy asleep on one with a Mindlink on his head.

  “You have a son?” he asked.

  “This is the anomaly,” Evan said, ignoring the stupid question. WarDon’s face slid. He turned from the boy to Evan and back again. He noticed the IV drip. A screen the size of a van flickered on and Evan sat down in the other Sleeper chair.

  “The anomaly?” WarDon asked.

  “Yes. What caused MindCorp, for the first time in its history, to shut down a Core.”

  “Impossible.”

  Evan put up his index finger. “Improbable. But it’s true.”

  Evan hesitated before he put on the Mindlink. “Before I demonstrate what the King Sleeper can do, to save our country I need about two hundred billion dollars and a forum to expose China.”

  “I’ll check my co
uch cushions,” WarDon said sarcastically. He still didn’t know what to make about the boy. This kid’s abducted, he thought. He glanced over to Glass who stood coolly looking in their direction and his heart sank a little. No, he’s an orphan.

  = = =

  Pete couldn’t help what he felt. He was the victim. His parents never believed him about his uncle. He was just a kid and he came to them crying and told them, but they didn’t do a damn thing. He remembered his mom standing up and going to the bathroom like she had a case of the squirts and his dad moving his head around Pete’s slumped, sobbing silhouette to get a clear view of the TV.

  “You tell anyone about what we done, and I’ll come back and cut it off,” his uncle had said a week later, before he left. Shocking that Pete grew up into a piece of shit. He knew it, he accepted it. A lot of people had a monkey on their back, but Pete had a devil and the little fucker was hot as fire and his talons dug deep.

  He didn’t need a shrink to know what had happened: his uncle broke him. Whatever circuits normal kids had in their head, his uncle pulled them out and swapped them around in his.

  Pete had seen photos of Uncle Josh as a kid. The first photo, in the programmed series he watched as a ritual before he went out, was a photo of Uncle Josh as a boy. That was his type. Strawberry blonde hair, eight to twelve, freckles were a plus. He had found a boy a week before that matched perfectly. And just two train stops over.

  His virtual server was a theater. It didn’t have seating. He floated near the center of the screen. He was naked and the light of the photos bathed over him. Most of the thousands of photos he had taken himself. He had time to build his library. His craving had developed by the time he was eighteen, and he was forty-five now. He was nearing climax—the start of his night when he would disconnect and go out for real—when the images slowed down. He noticed this immediately because he liked them to flash by in a synaptic overload. It condensed his memories into one pleasure string that looped over and over him. Now it stopped. A photo of a young stomach (James Taggert, back when I was twenty) was frozen on the screen.

  His Uncle Josh, as a boy, appeared in front of him.

  “Peter,” the boy said. It wasn’t Josh’s voice. It wasn’t even a boy’s voice. And it wasn’t Josh—his obsession had made it so. It was a skinny, pale boy, around twelve, with dark hair. The boy turned and looked at the screen. The images shuttled back and forth.

  “My, my. You are a sick fuck,” the boy said. But it was a man’s voice. “These are Peter Roach originals!”

  The boy rotated back to Pete. They both floated mid-air, awash in the pedophile’s sexual depravity. Pete tried to shut down the program.

  “Not gonna happen,” the boy with the man’s voice said. Pete’s head suddenly felt like a dozen fingers were prying into his skull.

  “You have done some bad things, Peter Roach. I can feel them. I can see them. You are a vile thing. Barely human.”

  Josh made me into this! Pete wanted to yell but he couldn’t. His mouth was frozen shut.

  “Yes, he did. And you had no support. Your mom was a spineless enabler and your dad was an angry drunk.” The boy floated closer to Pete. He could see his facial features. His eyes were all black. When he spoke glowing purple plasma filled his mouth. It was as if the skin of the boy was a costume for something more powerful. “But that doesn’t matter because what you have done—however you got here—is worse. You have littered the world with the gravestones of boys who now share your same fate.”

  What are you going to do! Pedophile Pete asked.

  End your torment once and for all, the boy said, and his mouth opened wide and the plasma ball rolled out and snapped to Pete’s head like frog snagging a fly. And then Pedophile Pete felt nothing. His synapses coursed with data, his mind cycled at forty times its normal rate. It was his life flashing before his eyes, than it was light flashing before his eyes. And then . . .

  = = =

  WarDon couldn’t believe what he had witnessed. He sat down on the floor and unbuttoned his collar. On the screen he had watched two things: Evan Lindo as Justin’s father, guiding him through an exercise to ‘heal the boy’s brain.’ And another where Justin’s actions in that exercise killed a sexual predator. Lost in his thoughts, he heard Evan (as Justin’s father—what the fuck is going on?) tell the boy he did great and that he should rest now. The boy asked when he’d see him again. Evan/Justin’s father said soon, he would have more exercises tomorrow.

  WarDon stared at the floor. He heard the leather creak when Evan sat up in the chair.

  “Is it real?” WarDon asked. He didn’t look up.

  “It’s very real,” Evan replied. “Pedophile Pete is dead.”

  “I don’t believe it,” WarDon said.

  Evan laughed. “Oh, believe it. We can head over to his disgusting perv palace and peek in. He’s in his chair, eyes rolled back, tongue out, and probably nursing one hell of a nosebleed. It’s called a Reverse Data Push. The boy does it subconsciously. That’s one of the reasons he’s so powerful. He can put a codec inside a person’s head and trigger it to take a stream of data and expand it logarithmically. It’s like injecting the brain with a pound of heroin. It’s too much, the synapses burn out, the cell walls rupture from the electrical impulses.”

  “And the boy doesn’t know.”

  “No. I’ve created a construct that gives him the impression he is doing mental exercises to get out of a coma. He has no idea that those exercises are connected to real people or events.”

  WarDon finally looked up. He looked like a giant boy playing Army. “How not?”

  “Cyberspace works differently, Don. In the real world if you want someone to shoot a gun they have to pull the trigger. But in cyberspace, if you want someone to shoot a gun you can have them turn a door knob and program it to be so.” Evan walked over to the boy. “This kid is the answer to our prayers. You must get me the proper finances to see this through and then we can set up a strategy to humiliate China. Pink . . .”

  “Flamingo. What does that have to do with it?” WarDon felt his head buzz. He felt . . . odd.

  “You get me the funding and I’ll make it so we can influence the world. I showed you that the King Sleeper can kill online but he can do something much more powerful. He can coerce. But the seed needs to be planted. China needs to be embarrassed and uncertain. It’s like hypnotism. The person has to be susceptible. Pink . . .”

  “Flamingo,” WarDon said. He sounded distant. He felt a migraine coming on.

  “I want funding and full control, answering to you only when I see fit.”

  “No problem,” WarDon said. Suddenly he felt better.

  = = =

  The next day Evan met with WarDon to discuss the suggestion construct he would need to use the King Sleeper. They met in a conference room. WarDon didn’t want to see the King Sleeper again. He hadn’t slept all night.

  “Don, you have contacts at the UN, correct?”

  “Quite a few.”

  “Enough to call in some favors?”

  “I’d imagine so.”

  “Good. I need them to host an energy summit.”

  “For the King Sleeper?”

  “Exactly. We’ll use the summit to ‘out’ the Chinese. The chaos of this assertion will make all participating countries—even those who aren’t present—susceptible to the King Sleeper.”

  “I thought we were just going after China,” WarDon said. Evan shook his head.

  “We want them all. If China doesn’t bend on its own, we can use the other nations to force them. This is a rare opportunity we’re creating.”

  = = =

  Twelve years as Secretary of Defense through three sitting Presidents, WarDon knew the secrets on Capitol Hill. He called in his IOU’s. He skimmed off defense contracts and depleted slush funds. He blackmailed politicians who had closets full of bones. Within two weeks WarDon had secured the funding. To keep the plans out of the digital space, WarDon and Evan met in person. The
President was away on some pointless fundraiser and Evan came down from Virginia—where the King Sleeper now resided—to DC. He and WarDon met in the Oval Office. Evan walked in to WarDon admiring a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

  “He hit every branch of the ugly tree, but he was a great President,” WarDon said.

  Lindo let out clipped laugh.

  WarDon continued. “Back then it was about your ideas. You could be an ugly sonofabitch, you could have knotted up legs not worth a damn, because you weren’t getting your photo snapped a thousand times a day, doing a video blog, or on late night TV. Citizens either saw change or they didn’t and if they didn’t you hit the bricks.”

  WarDon turned and gestured for the two of them to sit. “Now you gotta look like a movie star, and you got to grow another set of hands for all the dicks you have to hold to get here.” WarDon kept his eyes on the painting. His tongue moved under his lips like something was stuck in his teeth. “I wanted to be President for a long time, Evan. I never told you that, did I?”

  Evan shook his head.

  “It wasn’t for the vanity. I got enough power, maybe more power than the President. But he gets to make the final call. I’ve been through three administrations and while I’ve liked most of the Presidents personally—except McHale of course, he was a moron—they were better off doing Broadway than running a superpower. The word ‘Politician’ used to be despised. It was like calling an Asian a “gook’ or a black—” WarDon waved his hand. “You get the idea.”

  Evan found WarDon’s exposition interesting. He was more insightful than Evan had given him credit.

  “Back in the day, it was a duty. It didn’t end in a book tour and a TV show.”

  Evan realized that WarDon had tobacco chew in his mouth. WarDon spit into a trashcan that had been there since Andrew Jackson took office.

  “I just wanted one that really had an opinion that was theirs. That wasn’t driven by polls or a backroom deal. I don’t even think about it much anymore . . . and that makes me sick a bit. They got no convictions. They’re polished like a brass banister on a stairway. They got no grit.”