The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

“Can I play again?” she asked.

  Evan’s head was spinning. Not like it was for the King Sleeper. That was the equivalent of aliens landing on earth, but still. The program was a one-way data feed. This girl should not have known what was on the screen without being shown. Yet, she did. Which meant she got into the program and understood what was going on. It didn’t make sense, but this new world was still a mystery even with all the doctorates and technology and big words used to describe it.

  “Of course,” Evan said. He packed his things. “Soon.”

  He ruffled her hair. He would come back with a more relevant test. Maybe she was one in a hundred, maybe after testing some other subjects he would find out this was the norm. But he didn’t think so. Raimey tested well . . . Evan looked at Tiffany. How would she test? He needed more subjects to understand what made someone unique before he could leap to conclusions.

  Evan told Janis to pack his things and said goodbye. He didn’t need to, but he would come back to test Raimey. If his daughter were there again, what the hell, maybe he’d test her too.

  = = =

  “How you doing?” Raimey asked Janis. It was midnight and neither could sleep. Tiffany and Vanessa had left hours before and Raimey and Janis had been quiet for the last hour, letting the television do the talking.

  “I’m good, I’m curious to see what all this testing is about,” Janis said.

  “I’m happy for you, man. It sounds like it might be something very cool.”

  “Who knows? He couldn’t have been more vague. Maybe I’m going to be the world’s most efficient secretary,” Janis said with a laugh.

  “Whatever gets us out of here,” Raimey said.

  “It sounds like you’ll be next,” Janis said.

  Raimey nodded and turned back to the TV. “Thanks for setting me straight, Eric.”

  “Ah, man. It was nothing.”

  “Not true, don’t say that. It’s too easy not to count my blessings. I’m not saying this isn’t tough, I’m not saying I know what my next steps are, but you’re right.”

  “It’s either live or die.”

  “Yep, live or die, choose one,” Raimey said. “I know I don’t have to say it, but I always got your back. I hope we’ll be working together soon, but if you ever need anything, I’m here for you.”

  “Same goes.”

  Raimey woke up the next morning when they wheeled Janis out of the room. They said goodbye, knowing that either they would talk soon or possibly never again. The project was top secret, the location unknown. There were a lot of people in Raimey’s past that he wished he could see again. But they were elsewhere, some with different names, some with different faces. The constant Raimey had was his family. The rest of the world was slick like oil, slipping through his fingers, always flowing away. He had chosen this life, he had known what he signed up for, but watching his best friend get wheeled out, never knowing if the eye contact they now shared would ever be shared again, filled Raimey with melancholy.

  Janis left, the door closed, and now Raimey had to face the world without his friend’s bulletproof humor. He had to face the world with determination because his family deserved it—and more—they needed it. Raimey fell asleep and dreamed of a field of flowers, his daughter’s voice just over a hill calling for him, and the sensation of being whole. Even asleep, he knew it was just a dream.

  Chapter 10

  Janis felt his hands. He didn’t feel the air current, he didn’t feel hot or cold, but he sensed the movement, the connection of his brain to a limb that he could move. That he knew, rationally, didn’t exist. His eyes focused on the two shapes hovering over him: Evan Lindo and Cynthia Revo. They were grinning ear-to-ear.

  “I take it I’m alive,” Janis said with a thick tongue.

  “Better than that,” Evan said.

  In the last eight weeks Janis had had two major surgeries. The first procedure culled him down to fit into the Tank Major battle chassis. They removed the majority of his large intestine, his stomach, two thirds of his liver and cut down his spine five inches from the bottom. They removed his shoulder joints and cut the lower two thirds of his pelvic bone, leaving the upper portion in the shape of a halo. They removed his penis.

  Janis, who had been six feet tall and weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds the day of the UN bombing, was now a head attached to a body the size of a sack of potatoes. He weighed eighty pounds.

  He would never eat food again. He was fed intravenously with a high calorie/low waste nutrient solution. What left his colon and kidneys was cell waste, nothing more. With antibiotics and steroids, his body healed quickly. He was not allowed to look in a mirror; military psychologists forbade it. He was in their care two hours a day.

  When his body had healed to where he could be put under again, Eric went back in for the spinal fusion surgery. The torque and power of the battle chassis was too much to strap him in like a kid riding a rollercoaster. The body would bludgeon and bruise from the g-forces of the suit in battle, both in what it would deliver to a target and what the suit would be targeted with. The only way to keep the human component alive was to mount it directly to a shock-absorbing platform that was then mounted into the chassis. In the platform the body was suspended in a shock absorbing gel, floating like a baby in a womb. The suspension platform was then hard mounted to the battle chassis with both vertical and horizontal suspension, guided by a computer that monitored the movement with gyroscopes that adapted the suspension platform for tilt and roll. The battle chassis moved around the suspension platform, not the other way around. For Eric, he would never feel the jarring reality of his body around him. It would feel to him like he was on a raft gliding over rolling waves.

  Once the spine was fused to the suspension platform it would be a part of his body for the rest of his life. The fusion was painful. Not only were quarter inch pins put in each vertebra, they were then connected together by a rod that put Janis in perfect posture. He could no longer move his back.

  It took Eric three weeks to recover from the spinal surgery. The pain was masked with drugs and a physician induced coma. If it weren’t, if a dose was forgotten in the middle of the night, or the IV got crimped against the bed, his body would realize the trauma it had received and he would go into cardiac arrest. He was kept alive by the numbing properties of narcotics.

  At three weeks they began to bring him out of the coma. When they saw he was coming to, they connected the implant into the back of the suspension platform. The modified Mindlink connected into the spine through the platform and hijacked the nerves that would normally be used to raise a leg, wiggle a toe, or give someone the finger.

  He woke up with his brain already adapting to the implant. They had him connected to a computer and while his body was just a bag of blood, bone, and organs—on the screen—the fully limbed wire frame figure his mind was connected to moved like a man regaining consciousness: his arms raised and lowered, they went to brush his head. His legs rubbed together like they were starting a slow fire. His toes curled and straightened. As far as his mind was concerned, his body was whole.

  Cynthia and Evan hardly left Eric’s side. Cynthia hadn’t been away from her home this long in ten years, but she couldn’t tear herself away. She didn’t understand the feeling of wonderment that had come over her through this process, but it was the same as a woman giving birth to a child. She was in awe of her own mind, her own will, her own ability to take this man who was nothing and turn him into a lord of war.

  She and Evan had become, if not friends, respectful of the other’s intellect. The Tank Major design was brilliant and Cynthia couldn’t ignore the mind behind it. Sabot had seen this slow thaw and it made him uneasy—he didn’t trust Evan—and jealous. For all Sabot had, he didn’t have Cynthia’s mind. He would always be a companion that Cynthia would have to dumb down to. Day-to-day it wasn’t an issue. In their bedroom, the intellectual contrast never crept in. But after meetings with her scientists and engineers, she would
explain what they had covered in metaphors, and that was enough for Sabot to understand that while she loved him, he was not a peer.

  Lindo was, and in some areas, superior. The Tank Major program was an indication of that. And now they were working side-by-side, leaning over the bed of a man who had been reduced to a human bowling pin wrapped in gauze, with a web of wires shooting out from underneath. And they celebrated this monstrosity as if they had added and not taken away.

  Sabot’s face was as placid as a wax figurine. Lindo glanced at him from over the hospital bed and read nothing, par for the course for a soldier who could have been a professional poker player. But Sabot was in turmoil. He didn’t like Evan. He saw the oily slick behind the eyes and he knew that Evan was a calculating personality, his comments and responses weighed and measured for the greatest affect. And those men were dangerous. They were manipulators.

  He had told Cynthia as much weeks into the project and she had dismissed him.

  “I can handle Evan,” she replied. She was programming using the Mindlink. On a nearby screen, code scrolled upward faster than anyone could type. “He came to me, not the other way around.”

  He didn’t understand Cynthia’s obsession with this project. Either she didn’t understand what she was building, or worse, she knew exactly what it was. And that meant that Sabot didn’t know her as well as he thought.

  Sabot had come from poverty. He had learned young that emotion was weakness and a gang would beat you up just to hear you cry. When Cynthia hired him, suddenly he was immersed in the company of the most powerful men and women in the world and their peculiar trait was one they shared with the masses that worshipped them: they forgot they were human. In the projects, strength and resolve were camouflage. Inside they all knew they were nothing. The wealthy were the opposite. They were so validated by their greatness that it never occurred to them that they could be wrong. Cynthia should have been too smart to fall into this trap. Yet here she was, evolving the art of war in a world that needed no more.

  He waited for her to look up at him, throw a wink or a smile, or even take a few minute break so they could talk a bit. But she didn’t. She was focused on her affront squirming in the hospital bed.

  Sabot made a decision. He moved away from the window and felt the cold kiss of the outside world, the real world, retract its lips. He was tired of men playing God. Suddenly everything felt so pointless. The world was run by the insane, by the inane, that had everything but still wanted more—which showed they shouldn’t be there. They weren’t leaders, they were bottom feeders who learned to swim on their back, sucking all the light and hope from the world for the temporary feeling of levity. For the temporary feeling of relevance.

  He looked at Cynthia and didn’t know her. He looked at Evan Lindo and knew him perfectly. He looked at Eric Janis and a tear welled in his eye. He was a lab rat, convinced if he did right the cheese would be his.

  He didn’t know why the fuck he was here. Sabot walked out of the room, down the hall, and took the four flights of stairs to the main level. He left the Derik Building and walked five miles to a hotel. He had no home, but now he had a place to sleep.

  He would talk to Cynthia tomorrow and she wouldn’t understand, but that was fine. His mom was still alive, so was his sister. When was the last time he had seen them? Two months? No . . . it had been four.

  He would see them tomorrow, stay for a week, listen. Listen to his mom. Really listen. Ask his sister what she’s been up to. Follow up with more questions so he could hear her voice. The big stuff isn’t important. We all turn to dust. The big stuff isn’t big at all, in a galaxy of a billion stars, in a universe of a billion galaxies. With other worlds that have surpassed ours a million years before and would never know our failure. And other worlds awash in primordial ooze, sorting out the gift of life from the rubble and slime.

  Line up the sight and pull the trigger, when the earth is gone, the universe won’t tear. Smile. Be happy. Because the end is near.

  = = =

  Mohammed Jawal was in a New York safe house when the UN was bombed. He was connected into the news feeds and camera feeds just like everyone else. While others watched in horror when the UN collapsed into itself and the millions of privileged Americans crushed one another while fleeing, Mohammed cried. He thanked Allah. He blessed whoever had caused this beautiful wreckage.

  The bombing invigorated his army and bold new plans came from it. While the media called their attacks on MindCorp “failed attempts,” they were all successful. Mohammed wanted an air of dread. That was terrorism’s greatest strength: perceived randomness. That no one was safe. He had infiltrated capitalism’s most powerful institution and almost lopped the head off its queen. Now that queen would only focus on her well-being. She would focus on her kingdom. That left the government.

  Dread. Had they ever felt it? They would know it now. The new plan was insidious but Mohammed’s personal feelings had little to do with his objectives. They were days away from killing the extended families of military and political leaders. Grandchildren. Sons and daughters. Living grandparents. For some, close friends and neighbors.

  Collateral damage. That’s what the Coalition called it when they bombed the Middle Eastern towns, destroying whole residential blocks. Or when children, so frightened they peed themselves, were cut down by gunfire when they ran into the middle of a firefight. It was an accepted part of war. The military wrote reports on it. They discussed it in air-conditioned rooms while drinking coffee. But they had never felt it. They had never pulled aside rubble until their hands were raw searching for their only son. They had never been handed unrecognizable remains and told it was their mother. But now they would. They would finally feel the collateral damage of their war. The tangible agony of innocent lives lost. The question “WHY?” looping their brain in a harpy’s scream, driving them insane.

  Branches of the Western Curse communicated and coordinated through a shareware application that served no purpose but to send and receive imbedded messages. The shareware was ‘lost’ in that it had no portal. It could only be accessed for programming, as if it were still a work in progress not yet ready for public consumption. Functional code bookended the messages and leapfrogged over them. From the outside it was an incomplete, but properly coded piece of shareware. Internally, it was a way to discretely exchange messages that were untraceable to a source when it was not in use. Mohammed pictured it floating in space like a lone, dark asteroid.

  But someone had broken in and requested Mohammed Jawal by name.

  “It’s a trap,” one of Mohammed’s officers had said.

  But Mohammed didn’t think so. The information in the message could be used against this person too easily. Even without verification, if it were anonymously sent to the media, the spotlight on this public officer would be so intense his hair would singe.

  Mohammed didn’t know how this man knew of him, but it appeared this individual had paid attention for some time. The man wanted to meet virtually, something that Mohammed and the rest of the officers forbade. But if this man were an ally, his resources could change everything. The UN bombing had thrown the world on an awkward axis, like a toy top wobbling as it lost its spin. If there was a time to be bold, it was now.

  Nothing is free, Mohammed thought to himself. Mohammed could connect from anywhere; it didn’t have to be at his safe house. In fact, he preferred it be somewhere public where an ambush would lead into a throng of civilians. He could have guards around the perimeter; that would make sense. The majority of the Western Curse did not look like Mohammed. They were clean-cut, dark skin, light skin, men and women. This, once again, was not about religion, but about equity. Cause and effect, an eye-for-an-eye.

  After an hour of prayer and three hours of meditation, Mohammed went online and put a message into their unfinished shareware. He would meet this man who promised resources. He would meet him for five minutes and if that went well, they could plan accordingly. He’d send the locat
ion one minute before they were to meet via the shareware. Thirty seconds after it was posted, the time and place would be deleted.

  What does ‘Western’ mean? Mohammed reflected. Almost the entire world was westernized. He had always equated it to a greedy, self-imposing ideology. He had given it an image and form, the U.S. occupying the majority of it. But was it an antiquated term, like ‘terrorist’? What if people that were a part of “Western” society wanted it to burn as well? Was the enemy of my enemy my friend? Or am I looking to not toil, to find the easy way . . . am I greeting the same monster in a different cloak?

  It took Mohammed time to find sleep.

  = = =

  Mohammed was in a Thai discothèque. It was modeled after discos from the 1970’s. Barry White—Mohammed knew the name because the information came to him through the Mindlink—sang about love in his smooth baritone. On the dance floor, beautiful Asian women tranced. Men bobbed through the crowd, some with rhythm, most not. Everyone was dressed according to the time period. Bell-bottoms, afros, long hair, flowered shirts and hints of hippy. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.

  The place was authentically filthy but Mohammed didn’t worry about germs. It was a high-resolution texture, a design choice, nothing more. You could fuck anyone, you could take enough drugs to kill an elephant, you could even lick the toilet seat if you like, and nothing of consequence would ever come your way. Unless you wanted it to: there were programs that allowed a person to experience every disease known to man.

  Mohammed didn’t like how he felt as he moved through the crowd. He wanted to hate the decadence, the sexual casualness, but he caught himself looking at the women, he caught himself feeling the music. Not dancing, nothing silly, but the groove of it vibrating through him like a second heartbeat.

  Woman watched him as he slid by, the path through the crowd tight and ever changing. He was looking for a tall black woman who would be toward the back of the club. He was a medium size white man with muttonchops, a mustache, a green sleeveless vest and bell-bottoms.