The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  WarDon shot another loogie into the trashcan. “I feel like my hand’s been forced because of their ineptitude. President Michaels will be included, I assume?”

  “Yes,” Evan said. “Less so, but we’ll need him to agree on policy. He’s already malleable because he innately believes what we believe. Upsetting the applecart will open the leaders’ minds to new possibilities. We need them to be open to new concepts in order for the King Sleeper to successfully coerce their policy.”

  “How does the boy do it?” WarDon asked. “I saw what I saw, but I still can’t fathom.”

  “It’s simpler than you think. It’s just subliminal suggestion on a massive scale. It’s very similar to what was done in 1950’s when they’d flash “drink Coke” during a movie. Except this barrage is ongoing, day in, day out. It’ll seep into their minds like it was their own idea. But they have to be accepting of the message first.”

  “You couldn’t say “Kill the Prime Minister,” WarDon replied.

  “Exactly. That wouldn’t work unless they really wanted to kill the Prime Minister or they weren’t adverse to the act of murder itself. We’ll see policy shifts of ten percent if we’re lucky. But in voting governments that’s enough and it’ll be a huge edge.”

  “It’s amazing isn’t it? Frightening,” WarDon replied. “We’re taking away free will.”

  “Not really. We’re becoming their First Lady. Gentle whispers in the night. We can’t make someone change a view they strongly agree with. That’s why we need turmoil to begin the process.”

  “I bent some arms. The UN will host the energy summit. They just need to know the date. This will work?” WarDon asked.

  “History favors this approach,” Evan replied. Evan relished history, it was a costless case study, mistakes and victories that could be cut and pasted in any era if you were acute enough to adjust for the times. “Pink . . .”

  “. . . Flamingo. History’s important.” WarDon replenished his tobacco and offered some to Evan, who declined. That night Evan headed back to the base in Virginia to get everything in order. He told WarDon he needed three months.

  Chapter 6

  –Three Months Later–

  Xan Shin sat across the airplane aisle from President Jintau and watched out of the corner of his eye with a bit of befuddlement.

  Why was he coming?

  The President had been acting strangely. Not overtly. He wasn’t coming into the office wearing his pants on his head. But Jintau was a confident leader, and lately he was . . . softer. Xan would walk into his office and the President would be staring off into space. He would not eat because of nausea.

  That President Jintau had accompanied him on a plane to the United States only added to the Xan’s growing concern. Jintau had agreed to attend a Coalition meeting sponsored by the UN to discuss future energy ‘resource’ policies. Oil. They mentioned it last in the document “wind, solar, thermal, nuclear, natural gas, and oil.” But the conversation will be about oil. It made no sense to go. Xan had expressed that to the President, but he and his advisors all agreed that regardless of the tenuous relationship of the Coalition, Jintau believed: “Like parents to a child, we need to project a united front.”

  Xan’s surprise continued when every other countries’ leaders agreed to attend. All leaders from the European Union, non-voting leaders of the United Nations. All of them except a few African warlords. With all of the dissent in the Coalition, the importance of this meeting was the one thing they agreed on. Xan’s purpose for going was clear; he didn’t understand what possessed his President to follow his.

  They were on a small plane, but Xan pictured the fuel injectors taking that precious liquid, spraying it into microscopic drops and igniting it with a spark, gone forever. He could see the jet fan spinning out the window and he watched it, because each spin was closer to the last he would ever see. He felt a headache push in on his temples and he closed his eyes. Maybe some rest would help.

  Xan was forty-nine and he had served many roles for China. He was a polymath. At twenty-two, he joined the Chinese aeronautical division as an engineer and test pilot. He flew into space and landed on the moon in 2036, the first space mission to have done so since the U.S. Apollo Missions. But while his fascination was with aeronautics and space travel, those days were dead. He might as well have been a blacksmith. So he transitioned his skills and imagination to another division far less interesting, but one that he still excelled in because excelling is what he did: weapons and online infrastructure.

  Xan was unexceptional in physical appearance. He wasn’t short or tall, five-foot eight and one hundred and sixty pounds. While many Chinese had very distinct, almost sharp characteristics, Xan’s features were like antique glass that had begun to sink toward its base. His eyes turned down, his nose was flat and long, and his mouth was too large for his face. It revealed a toothy smile that made him suddenly interesting, but that smile rarely came out. Deep frown lines hyphenated the corner of his lips.

  Xan had always been a serious person. Even as a child his mom would tell him time and time again “don’t forget your joy.”

  Well, mom—what was there to have joy about?

  Be respectful of your elders!, his long dead mom demanded.

  Sorry, he said back. She was still around after all these years.

  “Headache?” the President inquired.

  Xan opened his eyes. “I’m fine, sir. Thank you.”

  The President was a thoughtful man who had historically shown good judgment. But this wasn’t a good idea. The energy summit was masturbation. The oil was gone. Xan could care less about the oil. As the old generations died out, the new ones would grow up without it. The world would survive. It would prosper and evolve. The ‘how’ is what Xan feared. The new frontier was cyberspace. And it wasn’t a new piece of discovered land—or even a world—it was infinite. And while MindCorp had given it structural order, it was still a derelict society trying to find its way. There were positive aspects, but the majority of what it allowed was for people to wallow in their filth and desires. It had become a drug. Who would guide this new era? To Xan, that was all the mattered.

  They know we have oil, Xan thought. While most of the world’s satellites had died and burnt up on re-entry, there were still a few up there ticking, and a couple of loops over a certain mountain region in China would show a lot more activity than what someone would expect. It would even show what looked like a pipeline. What could, actually, not be confused for anything else.

  They’ll bring up the oil vein. That’s what this is about. The President shouldn’t have come. We should have shored up the ports and cut off diplomatic ties and waited for the other nations to shed their old skin and its nagging, itchy expectations. And afterwards, when the world was sober, come back.

  Xan closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep. He woke up upon landing and the headache was still a houseguest he couldn’t get to leave.

  = = =

  John Raimey was held hostage and worse, running late.

  “Babe,” he said, somehow managing to frown and smile at once. “I got to go!”

  Tiffany looked down at his penis. It had another idea. Raimey’s eyes followed hers.

  “Damn this thing!” he grabbed his wife and pulled her into the shower. She squealed as he pushed her back against the shower wall and kissed her deep, their tongues dancing together, firm and soft, in a motion they had learned over the ten years they’d been together.

  Instead of dropping down to suck on her nipples, he picked her up like she was a feather.

  She pulled her own hair and moaned as he attacked her with the same passion as he had the first time they lay together.

  Ten minutes later, Tiffany moved from the shower to the bed and crashed on the comforter not caring that she was wet. She watched her husband get ready. He was applying deodorant and brushing his teeth double time.

  She admired his physique. His chocolate skin stretched across his muscular back. His t
riceps hung from his arms. Even just after sex, it made her blood warm.

  Raimey disappeared into the closet and reappeared dressed in his fatigues. He quickly moved to Tiffany and planted a big kiss on her mouth and then ducked down to her belly and gave her a zerbert.

  “You are a bad woman,” he said. She smacked him on the ass as he left.

  “You like it.”

  “Yes . . . I . . . Do.”

  Tiffany watched her soldier leave and for the first time her stomach didn’t sour. This was one of the few missions he had been cleared to tell her about. He and his team were supporting the Secret Service at the UN Energy Summit.

  “We’re just glorified security guards,” Raimey had said the day before at dinner. “That place has been locked tight and cleared for two weeks now.”

  = = =

  “My balls itch,” Janis said while he rubbed the butt of another soldier’s rifle against them over his fatigues.

  The rifle’s owner snatched it away. He put the butt of his rifle up to his nose and faked a whiff. “It smells like your sister.”

  Janis’s eyes softened and he slowly pulled his equipment out of the locker. “My sister’s dead, dude. Not cool.”

  “Oh, man. I’m sorry. I was just fuck—”

  Janis jumped on him. “HA. You Mexican motherfucker! I got you Carlos. I’m in your head, bitch!”

  The other soldiers laughed. This team had been together for over five years and they had bonded into a family. Since the early twenty-first century, The Terror War had never ended. There were breaks. There were different faces and organizations, but their tenet was the same: destroy the U.S. Kill the infidels. When the Coalition invaded the Middle East the mess just splattered. They had been overseas for two years organizing the occupation and handling specific missions against high value targets or hostages. But the Middle East was flooded with soldiers, and the general populace had been moved around and stripped of technologies that would allow them to coordinate. In the U.S., Raimey and his team lacked the luxury of support or the benefit of superior technology. In the last four months eight of their men had died. Two years in Iran had produced one casualty.

  The twenty soldiers remaining laughed and joked like high school jocks because they had no choice. This was what they trained for. They understood their worth and they understood the absolute cost.

  Raimey walked in and while they continued smile, they lined up on each side of the locker room and saluted.

  “At ease, sorry for being late.”

  Raimey went to his locker and packed his armor and gear.

  “Are we taking a plane?” a soldier asked.

  “I think we’re on a cleared track,” Raimey said. The military would clear train tracks so they could use high-speed rail. “You all ready?”

  “Oorah,” they said.

  “Oorah,” Raimey replied. They marched out to their transport. It was a nine-hour train ride from O’Hare to New York City.

  = = =

  There are two types of genius. Imaginative genius is found in people who can, from out of the blue, come up with a previously unheard of or unrecognized concept or solve a formerly unsolvable problem. They stare at the sky, watch the clouds roll past, and then poof, they understand how to inhibit the HIV virus so it doesn’t attack white blood cells. There is no pattern, there is no focus on research. The knowledge comes to them like God itself whispered the answer into their ear.

  Intellectual genius involves research, patterns, and adaptation. This genius takes information and existing ideas or inventions and gleans new solutions and knowledge from them.

  Cynthia Revo was an imaginative genius. The Mindlink had been in her head since she was thirteen. Evan Lindo was an intellectual genius. He lacked imagination, but when pieces of a problem were laid before him, the solution—the bridge to span the chasm—assembled in his mind.

  Evan was in a military bunker one mile below Wilmington, Virginia at the heart of an army base. WarDon knew where he was, the President knew too, but other than that and his hand selected staff— which now numbered in the hundreds—they were completely off the grid. The engineers and scientists moved around him like worker bees. A quarter mile up and all around, blowtorched metal fell, disappearing mid-flight in waterfalls of fire.

  There were technical aspects of MindCorp’s operation that were known to the outside scientist or computer engineer. The client system of the Mindlink, the two-way data feed and the multi-aliased frequency modulation that allowed the brain to be read and fed by the Mindlink, those could be discussed and duplicated.

  Where it got complicated wasn’t in one user connecting in, it was how MindCorp could keep track of six billion users connected in. How they organized the data into threads that could be easily tracked and properly maintained. MindCorp had had a one hundred percent up rate until Justin decided to fly to the moon. Before that, for the last ten years, their servers had never crashed. Ever.

  The Data Nodes, Data Crushers, and how the Sleepers interacted with them was the mystery that had kept Evan sleepless for the last five years.

  Data Nodes were local, regional, and national hubs where all the data of the world coursed through with astounding order. In each was a Data Core—the blue fuses all the data streamed through—and those were integrated with Data Crushers, the interface that MindCorp Sleepers used to connect into cyberspace and maintenance the system.

  The Sleepers were the key, they were what kept the system constantly functioning, and their interaction with the system was the big “HowdTheyDoThat?!” But Cynthia had given him the cypher when she provided a self-contained Mindlink for the Tank Major program. Five years of pain, suffering, and a growing inferiority complex was wiped out in one week of backward engineering.

  He hated Cynthia, he supposed, but he hated her like one company hates its rival. It wasn’t personal. It was professional. She was smarter than he was and he couldn’t stand that. She knew something that he didn’t and it gnawed on him like flesh eating bacteria. It was like none of his accomplishments mattered in the giant shadow of that little redhead.

  “Banging her bodyguard,” he mumbled while he worked on a circuit board near the gigantic black tube of an unpowered Data Core. It was so obvious. He wondered about the voice in the back of all people’s heads that said mean things for no real reason. His seemed to do that a lot.

  He smiled a bit and the very act made him feel better. He heard whistling and he realized it was him. She was an imaginative genius: the upper crust of genius-dom, the ones that are always put on a pedestal. He was an intellectual genius: the grunts, the blue-collar union guys that ground and ground to get an inch.

  He was okay with that. I’ll be the turtle, she can be the hare. The Data Core was on schedule, the King Sleeper rested comfortably in a room a few hundred feet from where he worked. And because of that boy, he had leapfrogged her. He understood facts of cyberspace that she could only consider as theories. And by the time she found out, it would be too late.

  Justin clearly proved that innate aptitude played a much higher role in Sleeper efficiency than their education or experience level. There was a swimming aspect to cyberspace, a liquidity in the medium that didn’t treat everyone fairly. It was fascinating. Even in cyberspace where the mind was free, there were Darwinian principles that separated the weak from the strong.

  Why aptitude over education? That was the question he had asked himself time and time again. It was the way the mind interacted with the Mindlink. Brains were just gooey processors, in the end. But they behaved in ways that no microchip or supercomputer could. It was the inferential leaps. It was the lack of rules. That was the key. This was clearly proven in 1997 when an IBM computer called Deep Blue took on the chess master of the day, Gary Kasparov. Computationally, Deep Blue should have never lost. But it did. Since then, computing power had grown by a billion and yet the same outcome still occurred as it did in 1997. The man could win. Not always, maybe not as often, but much more than he sho
uld. It wasn’t cold hard processing power—humans lacked that—it was our imagination that allowed it. A computer tried to get there another way, pure math and analytics. And sometimes it would succeed.

  Both had their weaknesses. But what happened if a high aptitude Sleeper was combined with a supercomputer? What happened when you gave one exceptional human mind as much computational power as ten million Deep Blues? That was the question. Evan whistled while he worked because the King Sleeper had showed him the answer: Engineered evolution.

  Days now. Just days. And the world would tremble in the wake of his invention. It would kneel before the United States—before him—cowering and awaiting sentence.

  “Yo,” a slow, southern voice said above him. Glass.

  Lindo was so focused he didn’t see the black military boots and blue jeans two feet away from where he knelt. Lindo didn’t look up, he was almost finished wiring the Data Crusher interface, a Mindlink on steroids.

  “No problems?” Lindo asked.

  “No problems. We’re all set.”

  Lindo closed his eyes and ran down the checklist. It was all done. Everything was in place. Tomorrow will be an interesting day for the world.

  The chess game begins.

  Chapter 7

  It was a crisp fifty-eight degrees in New York City. Thin clouds hung like kites in the blue sky and the sun snuck through the rows of skyscrapers and bathed the streets in its golden warmth.

  Raimey couldn’t enjoy it. He was surrounded by chaos. The Great Migration—when suburban families migrated back to the cities after the oil ran out—had taken place over the last ten years and it had caused the already massive infrastructure of these cities to bloat like a tumor.

  2020 population of New York City: 10,220,454. 2058: 55,873,200. 2020 footprint of New York City: three hundred and five square miles. 2058: six hundred square miles. Twice as large, five times the population. New York had become a sweatshop.

  And they had come to complain. Five million frustrated souls surrounded the UN building. Even from his elevated position, Raimey could not see street. Down every avenue he scanned, the earth curved before the end of the protestors.