The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  Vanessa walked past the partition. A television played behind her and the slight light from it was enough to see by. On the other side of the partition was Chao: a human head, a mechanized neck, and a bucket of organs. Strings of electrostatic tissue connected the bucket to braces fused into his skull. The bucket was actually an armored organ capsule that contained his spine and the organs necessary to life. Doctors and nurses called the soldiers “bowling pins” at this stage. It took roughly three weeks for the organs to bond to the capsule walls, and for the patient to move on to the build. Like all the rest of them, Chao was seated in a deep, sterile container, buried to his chin in a thick anti-bacterial gel that kept out airborne contaminants. It looked as if he were drowning in snot.

  “What do you need, Edward?” she asked.

  “It’s your birthday today,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Any plans?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I was just asking.”

  Vanessa didn’t respond. Chao nudged his chin at the television. “The clicker isn’t working. It’s been stuck on the news.”

  In the left-hand corner of the screen was a photo of Cynthia Revo, and below it, in bold print: “MindCorp: Dangerous?” A large, dark man stood on a podium addressing a stone-faced crowd. Watermarked on the video: “India’s President, Manmohan Nehru, addresses Parliament on the dangers of the MindCorp monopoly.” It was too quiet to hear, but by the body language, the president of India wasn’t for it. Across the bottom, the crawler stated: “India has applied to become a Coalition member in 2070.”

  Vanessa went over to the monitor. The “clicker” was a voice command module, and sometimes it got a gremlin. She did the ol’ unplug-and-plug reboot.

  “Doesn’t make me feel very good that I’m all chopped up and I’m relying on the same people to put me back together that can’t keep a TV working,” Chao prodded. Vanessa stood up on her tiptoes and plugged the cord back in to the interface. Chao grunted approval.

  “You’ll be good as new in a few days,” Vanessa said. Even with her back turned, she could feel his eyes crawl over her. She didn’t know what he was looking at though. In the sterile suit, she could have been a pear.

  “Hmm. Yeah. But in some ways, never.”

  The voice command booted up. A small light blinked green.

  “Ah, good,” Chao said. “One more day, and—Superman!”

  Chao paused. Here goes, Vanessa thought.

  “You’re pretty. Why did you fuck with your face?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “You’re the shrink. What would you say to you, you know, if you role-played?”

  Vanessa gritted her teeth. Why would Evan work with this guy? “Do you need anything else?”

  “It’s an honest question.”

  Kove snorted awake. “Oh, hey, Vanessa.”

  “Alan.”

  “I was just asking her a question,” Chao said.

  “Quit messing with her,” Alan said. The two skulls argued. “Hey, Vanessa, my head’s really hurting.”

  “I’ll talk to Dr. Rafayko.”

  “You couldn’t just—”

  “I’m not a doctor, Alan.”

  “Which begs the questions, why are you here?” Chao exclaimed. “Bam! Back to the topic. I know Evan doesn’t give a shit about your old man, but—wait! Is that it? Is that why you did all the stuff to yourself, like in rebellion? Spite your nose to cut your—”

  “Cut off your nose to spite your face,” Kove corrected.

  Chao’s wet head nodded. “That! Ah, it’s that.” Chao was satisfied. “You can go.”

  Vanessa didn’t know why, but she was near tears. “I don’t get why you are the way you are, and I don’t care, Edward. They can put you in the biggest robot suit in the world and you’d still be a little man. You’re a horrible person.”

  Chao laughed. He laughed so hard that the tray shook.

  “WHAT?”

  “I didn’t know I was your type.”

  Vanessa got out of the room as quickly as she could. She shut the door behind her and looked up and down the hall. She was alone. She banged her head against the wall, trying to replace the sadness with pain.

  “Pull it together, he’s an asshole,” she said. She breathed in deeply, daydreaming about bashing his stupid face in with a bat and gouging out his eyes. It calmed her.

  When she got back downstairs, General Boen and his bodyguard, Wilkes, were by her desk. Boen came over as she approached. She went for the handshake, he went for the hug, and it became an awkward medley of both.

  He gestured to Bethany, who was nearby, acting busy. “She said it’s your birthday today. Happy birthday.”

  “Thanks.”

  He couldn’t believe how much she’d grown and how her appearance had changed. Both her father and mother had been clean-cut—Earl had known them both—but Vanessa looked like the dirtiest girl at a strip club. She was covered in tattoos and piercings.

  “What do you want?” She stopped herself, realizing that she sounded harsh. “I didn’t mean it that way, but why—”

  “No, you’re right. I do want something,” Boen said. And then he told her.

  = = =

  Razal suited up and walked over to the armory with his sniper rifle. On the tarmac, the engines on a C-130 cargo plane were spinning up. It was for them.

  “I’m still waiting for that that C-note. What’s shaking?” the armory attendant asked. They played poker together.

  “A mine’s gone quiet in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Usually it’s a caravan,” Razal replied. “I’m gonna pack up on this one. Fifty and fifty for the fifty.”

  “Anyone we know?”

  “Some EU Tank Majors.”

  The attendant disappeared and came back with fifty rounds of incendiary, fifty rounds of armor-piercing, both of them in .50 caliber. “Be safe. You going with Twitchy-twitchy-speaks-a-lot?”

  Razal looked around. “Shhh. Dude, come on.” He sighed. “Yeah.” Across the tarmac was a warehouse-style building. “He hasn’t come out yet?”

  “Erica drove over with a lift about an hour ago.”

  Razal took the ammo bricks and started across the runway.

  “C-note!” the attendant yelled. Razal gave him the finger.

  Thirty years before, when the United States, the European Union, and China formed the Coalition to infiltrate oil-rich lands and take the last of the oil, a strange political correctness had overcome logic. In the Middle East, cities were divided and walls erected, and the people that lived in those confines were provided with food and supplies. It was costly, and still was to this day, because even though the oil was gone—in the sense that no civilian could go out and get some—it wasn’t gone. Off the coasts, oil rigs still pulled up crude. Land-based pumps all over Iraq and Iran, Saudi Arabia, and South America bucked and mewled like broncos being broken. These boroughs had to be maintained. To leave them now would usher in genocide.

  But with MindCorp’s growth and the world moving online, the demand had shifted toward microprocessors and all the other components that kept the virtual world going. And in that salvation was again exhaustion, because nothing comes for free: rare earth metals were needed, and the Coalition, which had begun to wither, redoubled its strength. But this time it had learned from its mistakes. In Africa, they just took. And with bionics, they could do so easily. This time, the natives would have to figure out how to survive on their own.

  Razal walked into the warehouse and saw the living monolith getting prepped. Two technicians scrambled over the giant, smearing his joints with thick black grease. One carefully injected some into two massive drive chains that rotated slowly—counter to the other—around Raimey’s waist. A small, fit woman stood on an electric lift at Raimey’s chest height, eleven feet in the air. His chest armor had been removed, and hung on the lift. Razal could see Raimey’s exposed ches
t—his true chest. It was mounted midway up, on a suspension track that had two feet of travel either way. It was flaccid, peppered with little wounds where Erica had cored out the equivalent of bedsores. She was bandaging them now.

  “Razal,” she said.

  “How goes it?”

  “Big sexy is nearly done.”

  Raimey huffed a possible laugh, but didn’t say a word. Razal had worked with him for six months after another spotter had died in the field, and the entire time, Raimey had been chewing on his lower lip. A nervous tic.

  Erica reinstalled a milky plastic sheath that covered John’s body.

  VVVRRM.

  VVVRRM.

  VVVRRM.

  She air-wrenched it in place, then took a hose and filled it with suspension gel. She replaced a dozen plates that fit together like a puzzle, each one half her size. These were the last-resort reactive armor. She attached wires to each plate and carefully routed them through conduit channels.

  Reversing the lift, she rotated it ninety degrees so that the chest armor was facing John. She eased it in, realigned, and continued. A sharp ding filled the air as the chest armor made contact with John. Erica stopped the lift and pulled out a heavier air wrench to anchor bolts the size of soda cans.

  “Done,” she said. Sweat peppered her brow; working with components this size was hard work. She drove the lift out of the way, brought the platform down, and jumped off. With a motorized pallet jack, she brought over the hydraulshock artillery magazines.

  “Clear?” Raimey asked.

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  Raimey knelt down and picked up the hydraulshock magazines.

  Together, Raimey and Razal walked over to the C-130. Erica ran after them. “Hey!” She lugged a massive black helmet with a six-inch-thick, bulletproof visor in the shape of a skull. “Forget something?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Raimey said.

  Raimey’s fingers were too big to manage such dextrous movement, so Razal shouldered his rifle and took the helmet. Erica gave a quick wave and jogged back to the warehouse.

  “That would have been bad,” Razal said.

  Raimey looked down. “Why?”

  That stopped Razal in his tracks. The giant boarded through the belly of the plane, and a moment later, Razal followed.

  Chapter 2

  A gavel struck. “Order.”

  The warble of disjointed conversations began to die down as the hundreds of men and women from various countries found their seats. U.S. President Joseph Austin sat with other Coalition leaders at the front of the room, on an elevated platform. His perfectly tailored suit enhanced an athletic frame. His hair was thick and full. His skin was smooth and he glowed with health. Around him, the other men and women in power looked the same. Online, they looked preordained for their positions of power.

  “Order.” India’s President, Manmohan Nehru, hit the gavel again, and this time the conversations ceased. Nehru was dark. Dark skin, jet-black hair, tall and wide. The President of France said something offhand to Nehru and the two men laughed for a moment.

  In front of the panel was a desk, and behind that was an empty chair.

  “Ms. Revo, are you here?” Nehru asked. There was no need for microphones; his voice carried across the auditorium effortlessly. No answer.

  To a well-dressed woman behind him: “Time?”

  “4:59 p.m., Central U.S.”

  At five on the nose, Cynthia appeared in her chair. With a frosty stare, she looked at the leaders perched above her and calculated very quickly what they had contributed to society: nothing. Yet they sat on a panel that looked down at her. These scholars with their vacuum principles and funky facial hair. These “leaders” that couldn’t run a sandwich shop.

  They had called her to this council to discuss UNITY. As with most advances, these leaders didn’t understand it, and so they feared it, ignoring history and the millions of advances before that had been met with uncertainty only to become pillars of modern life. Cynthia pondered the irony: limitless information had somehow made man dumb. She didn’t hear the question.

  “Cynthia?”

  “Yes?”

  President Nehru looked down at her, waiting for an answer.

  “Please repeat the question.”

  “It wasn’t a question. I said we’re here to discuss UNITY.”

  “Yes. I got that memo. Have I not been transparent with its purpose? The Coalition has approved the land deeds and plans. We’ve incorporated the security protocols you’ve requested, as redundant as they may be.”

  She sensed the auditorium grow as more people filled in behind her. Press. She didn’t need to turn around—she could see everyone. Various colors and languages (translated instantly by software) continued to pour in.

  “I wasn’t aware this was an open forum.”

  Nehru answered, “We’ve chosen to be transparent with the world.”

  “I don’t know why I wouldn’t have received that same courtesy.” She looked at the board one by one. “What are you scheming?”

  “We just want our citizens to understand our intent. The Coalition is feared as an empire-like entity, and yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. We want peace and prosperity. The Coalition is an opportunity for nations to work together.”

  Cynthia couldn’t help but smile.

  Nehru was annoyed. “What?”

  “Words. What do you want?”

  President Austin cleared his throat. “UNITY is being implemented in countries outside of the Coalition and its partners.”

  “Yes?”

  “That worries us.”

  “David, you granted land deeds and launch rights. You’ve championed it to other countries as a human rights issue. Now you oppose it?”

  “What we have works just fine,” Nehru said.

  “Does ‘what we have’ work just fine?”

  “Your attitude is unnerving, Ms. Revo,” Nehru replied.

  “I don’t have time for foolish things, and this is just that. UNITY reduces the global data network to a single pool. It’s easier to manage and maintain, it will triple the bandwidth, which we sorely need, and it will bring the network to parts of the world, poor regions, remote regions, that have no access or means to build out the traditional network infrastructure. In the modern era, there has never been a greater disparity between the havesand the have-nots than there is now. Those with access to our network have very little variation in quality of life. Yes, some live in mansions and some live in slums, but online, everyone has opportunity. Without UNITY, only a few lucky enough to have other access will evolve. Those left behind, in parts of South America, in most of Africa, and”—she looked directly at Nehru—“among the disparate poor in India, and a hundred of other countries that you can’t place on a map . . . those places, those cultures, will be unrecognizable to us in twenty years. We will have abandoned them.”

  “So it’s about the greater good? It has nothing to do with profit,” Nehru said sarcastically.

  “I’m worth the GDP of most countries present. Money means nothing to me anymore. And even if it did, who are you to judge? Most of you have quadrupled your net worth since coming to power. Yes, what I’ve created benefits the greater good. And fine, I will make more money because of it. But it gives opportunity to people who normally wouldn’t have it; it gives them a chance. The opportunities you take for granted, that you leave to spoil because you have so many more . . . how can you say that they shouldn’t be available to others? Even the scraps?”

  “That’s enough!” Nehru said. He pounded the gavel—and suddenly it vanished. Everyone turned to Cynthia. This was her world. She would not be silenced.

  “There are no great minds in here, except one. And the atrocity isn’t that your greed has overtaken your oath. It’s not that pragmatic thought has been cast aside, and a technology that could eradicate nearly all of the world’s ills has been treated as an opportunity to feed yo
ur ideological platforms for political gain—as if politics serving itself has ever done anything good. No, the atrocity is that you are so willing to chain others—even the unborn—down, and that there are great minds right now that we will never know, that will never bear fruit, because they you deny them the means. Choice is everything, and you quake at the thought. You are cowards, when history has shown, repeatedly, that advancement benefits us all.”

  President Austin spoke up. “Cynthia, the goal of this panel isn’t to be confrontational. The Coalition and MindCorp have worked together in harmony for over a decade. But even among the leaders up here, we have common interests, as well as the sovereign interests of our nations to consider.”

  “Evan Lindo manages your security, does he not? We got out of that game years ago.”

  “But we must use your network,” Nehru said. “And that’s the problem. MindCorp owns one hundred percent of the digital infrastructure for civilian and governmental use. And the client-server structure inhibits our ability to use it securely.”

  “That is why it’s secure. Why isn’t Evan here to state his case? Why hasn’t he reached out to me to set up a meeting?”

  Nehru ignored her question. “And it’s all accessible to you.”

  “You say ‘me,’ as if it all goes directly through my ears. You know that by the nature of data, networks, and the client-server structure that must exist, this is unavoidable.”

  “So if I send a sensitive document to the President of Russia, MindCorp can see it.”

  “I don’t handle your security protocols, and as a policy we do not interfere with these transfers . . .”

  “Sleepers could.”

  “That’s the beauty of our system. Client-server makes it impossible to remain anonymous in cyberspace.”

  “That isn’t true. ‘Hosting’ by hopping through another individual is used by clandestine operations.”