The truck started to list into the hole. Haq held on to it, his arms cradling the truck high and low. But it slid and ground against the pavement, and then it fell through, leaving a ragged chasm eighty feet in diameter behind.
Haq fell with it.
Chao turned his attention to the rebels. “Sorry guys. Party’s over!”
The truck hit the water first. Haq had rotated so he was on top of it, riding the truck like a raft. The water here was deep.
He looked around. Twenty feet away was a pillar that rose up to the bridge. Near it were the heat sinks. He tried to lunge forward, but the truck log-rolled with his momentum and he tumbled into the water.
He sank like a stone. The water pressed against his flesh; it was burning hot. His helmet held some air—a mixed, torturous blessing. He would live for a few minutes before he asphyxiated.
It was so dark. The world. My life, Haq thought. The truck sank past him, as if in a race. How far will I go?
I’m so sorry, Batrisyla.
Haq could see the pillar. For no fathomable reason, he cupped his hands and moved his arms in a breaststroke. His body moved forward. Sinking still—but forward.
His helmet remained clear of water, the air trapped inside. Again and again he pulled himself forward, careful not to mimic the effort with his lungs. He told himself that he didn’t need to breathe; he was just a machine after all. Just keep the lights on.
When his feet hit bottom, he had pulled himself to the base of the column. He began to climb, praying to Allah that he had enough air.
= = =
Chao detached the boy and put him down. He didn’t need some rebel nut job accidentally shooting him. The threat was gone; Haq had sunk into the sea. Even Dr. Lindo had chimed in to congratulate him on his victory.
“Clean it up,” Lindo had said before vanishing as he always did.
Chao jumped down to the pier and chased after the rebels. He caught them and tore them apart one by one, spilling their blood and guts onto the ones who were still alive, relishing the screams that filled the air.
Aadil ran from cover to cover. Only he and four others, including Tazeem, were still active. Most were dead, and the others were gravely injured. Chao crushed the wounded with flying leaps as he searched for the rest. It was over.
Aadil felt sorrow. They had failed. He was unafraid of death—he would see Batrisyla again—but the children were un-avenged. They would continue to live as tools for some terrible purpose. They didn’t deserve that.
Evil shouldn’t win.
Behind him, he heard another person being gutted by Chao. Rivulets of blood rolled down the giant’s helmet. Gore covered his chest as if he were a butcher.
Then Chao came for them. He cornered Aadil, Tazeem, and the others. Chao looked down on them, all the evil and hate in the world boring through his eyes. And he only said one thing.
“This was because of that old hadji bitch, wasn’t it?”
He reached for Aadil.
This is it. Aadil closed his eyes. Batrisyla smiled at him. She let him know that it would be all right, to not be afraid. She reached out, ready to usher him into the afterlife. To their new beginning together. But death never came.
“This is for my sister,” Aadil heard. He opened his eyes. Chao’s outstretched fingers were an inch from his nose. Haq’s huge hands gripped Chao’s neck and face and one of his legs. He picked Chao up and slammed him down into the pavement. Again and again. He didn’t stop.
“This is for the children!” Haq yelled. Chao’s helmet shattered. His body flailed, trying to get away, to get leverage, but Haq’s grip was too tight, and Haq was too strong. The ground crumbled from the blows.
Chao’s shoulder gave way. He registered this. Then his chest cavity collapsed when Haq slammed him against the corner of a cement pillion thirty times in a row.
Chao tried to fight back, but his body was broken. The electrostatic tissue that had made him so powerful was compromised.
Haq let him go.
“Crawl,” Haq commanded.
Chao crawled.
“Yell for Lindo to save you!”
Chao would have obeyed, but his voice box was crushed.
Haq turned Chao over. Chao coughed what would have been blood, had he had much of it.
“Not here. Never again,” Haq said. And then he crushed Chao’s head between his hands.
Aadil hugged his brother-in-law. Haq hugged back the best he could.
“How? How are you here?” Aadil asked.
Haq tapped his helmet. “It held some air. Maybe Allah, too.”
= = =
Haq found the remaining Minors. They tried to surrender, but he declined. After all, they had never given that option to his people.
Inside the ship-base, the Sleepers were easy to coerce. They spoke in their detached way, and within an hour the children began to wake. Dr. Lindo watched from every monitor on the ship-base, but he said nothing.
Hours later, Haq lay on the beach. He stared past the devastated pier, past the converted battleship with its nuclear reactor, past the misery that had occupied this land for thirty-five years, and watched the ocean waves roll in, breaking ten yards from shore into a million diamonds that pummeled the sand. Rays of sunlight had broken through the fog.
From his low perch, Haq watched as the men and women gingerly moved across the damaged pier that connected the ship to land. He would have helped, but he was too heavy. As it was, the pier already groaned in the wind, pieces of it tearing off with no warning and crashing into the sea.
Aadil approached Haq and collapsed next to him. “The kids are off. We did it.”
“Is he still watching from the screens?” Haq asked.
“No.” A look of concern washed over Aadil.
“What?”
“Toward the end it was a woman. She had the same voice that came from the rotted soldier a day ago.”
“Asking for John Raimey?”
“No. She was screaming for someone named Justin.”
Haq didn’t recognize the name. Why would he? The world beyond this ocean was a mystery that they would never solve. Maybe it was for the best.
“When was this?” he asked.
“Just before the last boy was freed. Then Lindo appeared again, just for a flash, and he mouthed something before the screens went blank.”
“Do you know what he said?”
Aadil scratched his head. “I could be wrong, but it looked like ‘no value.’”
They watched families rush to children they hadn’t seen in years. The children could barely move. They were confused, like coma patients just coming to. Their limbs were thin and pinned to their bodies. Their hands, frozen claws.
Neither Aadil or Haq knew why the children had been used as fuses, but they understood that the world had moved into a place darker than the darkest night—and that their region wasn’t a part of it. They were leftovers from the previous world, a previous war—the remnants of forgotten decisions made by leaders who were now dead. They were an exploited people who had to be controlled and abused in order to enable another part of the world to prosper. The pyramids could attest, and the Road of Bones would prove, that progress came by way of slaves. Pay ’em a nickel if you have to, give ’em a place to stay, but acknowledge the truth while you sleep warm in your bed and they on their mat.
“What do we do now?” Aadil asked.
“I’m going to go to the other boroughs and speak to the other Tank Majors and anyone else who’s around. We didn’t mean to be bad, Aadil,” Haq said. “We were doing our mission. There wasn’t any other option. But . . . maybe it’s a blessing no one cares about us. We can tear down the walls. We can rebuild. We can start anew.”
“What about the rest of the world?” Aadil asked.
“We can’t save the world, Aadil. We did what we did, and maybe we can do a bit more.”
Haq smiled at Aadil. The thick scar tissue stretched awkwardly around his mouth, but the smile was still
beautiful. It was strange to say, and stranger to think, but the giant’s smile filled Aadil’s heart with hope.
And then a one-hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb detonated one mile above them. Neither of their eyes registered each other as their bodies peeled away. No child screamed. The rat people and the residents from Haq’s borough didn’t tuck under a table. There was no time to react, to even be aware. They were atomized instantly, an homage to the Big Bang that had first brought the magic of the world into existence—and all of the evil, too.
Three hundred miles overhead, a surveillance data satellite—one of the Northern Star’s thousands—watched the fire cloud billow out like a doughnut, the heat vaporizing the regional cloud cover, giving a crystal clear view of the cigarette burn now stamped into the earth. It crackled red and orange, and then, as the hours passed, as the fires died down, and the heat dissipated, and the sand cooled to glass, it became indistinguishable from its surroundings.
The entity that controlled the satellites, that embedded itself into machines and men, that whispered thoughts into people’s heads—thoughts that they would wake up to think of as their own—that controlled the industrialized world’s governments and military with clinical efficiency . . . that entity watched a moment longer—at least some of him—and then moved on. For him, time was different now, and a minute felt more like a year.
Two hundred thousand people died when that fusion reaction ignited the sky, and four seconds later, Evan Lindo had moved on. The other Pieces of the Northern Star—eleven geniuses he had abducted to expand his mind—whispered assuredly:
No one will ever know.
Part II
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”
—Sydney J. Harris
Chapter 1
–Chicago. 2093–
“JUSTIN!”
Justin McWilliams’s eyes snapped open, the scream echoing through his head like a gunshot through a cave. His body shook—he shouldn’t have pulled out of cyber-sleep so quickly—but he had no choice. He felt the bile rise, but he was still tethered down by the electrodes that had shocked his muscles out of atrophy. He clawed and scrapped at them, tearing them from his slender, pale frame.
He made it to the sink just as the vomit rolled down his chin. He let it go. It was string and spit, nothing more. His right arm hurt. He looked at it. In his rush, he had forgotten to take out the IV, and now it pulled awkwardly underneath his skin; blood pooled, growing like a blister. He winced as he flexed the needle back into place and removed it. He grabbed a washcloth that was crispy from lack of use and pressed it into the crook of his arm. His heart hammered from what had just happened. He had to leave. He didn’t have much time.
Justin had been online, uninterrupted, for three months. He was a Sleeper. The designation was vague. Sleepers were many things: programmers, maintenance men of the system, hackers. But two things united them: long durations outside of the natural world, and a high aptitude for code manipulation and perception.
99.999% of the people online only saw the programs that allowed their lives to go on after oil depletion had nearly taken away what was expected and demanded. They saw solid office walls in the rooms they worked in. The meals they ate, the wine they drank, could be Michelin Star-worthy or from a greasy spoon. The Caribbean water lapping their feet was warm and clear, and—if they were quick—the little silver fish that darted between their legs could be picked up, and the fish’s eyes would stare at them blindly as they gulped the air, starving for oxygen. Couples celebrated decades together without ever having met in person. Sex was fulfilling and overwhelming, as anything could be ordered without fear of disease or pregnancy, and just as in the early twenty-first century, most bandwidth was devoted to this banal quest to sate the libido.
But the 0.001%—those with high enough aptitude to be Sleepers—saw the programs for what they were. More importantly, they saw outside the program. They saw the abyss, the separation of these virtual things, these virtual worlds that were now as concrete as, and more important than, the world they were modeled after. Sleepers saw the tenuous strings that kept this reality together.
Back when MindCorp—the company that created the Mindlink and the software that allowed humanity to reside online—ran the online universe, the programs and portals orbited a sun. Now, they orbited the Northern Star.
It was a sentient being both human and CPU, a sickly white and purple orb stringy with tentacles that coursed and pulsed and reached out to the various programs and portals—and, yes, people—it chose to manipulate or eradicate. Twenty-five years before, during a civil war between MindCorp and the United States, it had taken control of all the world’s governments and cyberspace. At its heart, it was Evan Lindo, the man who had ushered in the age of bionics, who had ignored ethics for advancement, who believed wholeheartedly that hundreds of men and women throughout time have propped up our dumb species and that it was time for the masses to give back.
Sleepers saw the Northern Star every time they moved into the black. They could feel it. Its power, its searching. Its lust for knowledge.
Justin-01 was the most gifted natural Sleeper in the world. He had been found as a child thirty-five years before. His brain was different, his ability to deconstruct and reconstruct cyberspace unheralded, and the first time he went online—without any intention—he shook down the local MindCorp servers. Online he was more powerful than a nuclear bomb, not only able to create new realities, but able to subliminally persuade the masses—and even kill. The U.S. government, motivated by Evan Lindo, had tracked him down, killed his family, and used him as a secret weapon to manipulate the governmental powers of China.
Later, China stole him and used him in kind against the U.S. This made no difference to Justin; he was used by a different master, but used all the same. It was only thanks to the mercy of the American Tank Major sent to retrieve him—a Tank Major who instead chose to free him—that he wasn’t still wired into a Data Crusher like a transistor, tricked by a software construct to murder and destroy.
And now, that Tank Major’s daughter—Vanessa Raimey—had called out to him. She had found him, a needle in a haystack on the other side of the universe. Vanessa Raimey, who was thought to have died during the civil war a quarter century ago, was alive. And somehow, she was now a part of the Northern Star. When she called out, he had seen a section of its glowing orb flicker like a sunspot.
And in his shock, he had acknowledged her. But the Northern Star was a singular consciousness, even with all of its moving parts. And its Will, what controlled it, was Evan Lindo.
Evan saw Justin too.
“YOU’RE ALIVE!” the Northern Star bellowed in genuine surprise. A tentacle reached for Justin—impossibly far—at nearly light speed. Up close, it was like a disco ball the diameter of the earth, its billion flecks a billion bits of consciousness that it took from every living thing online.
Justin felt all of its strength, all of its yearning, just before he triggered a failsafe that shot him out of cyberspace like a slug from a gun.
And now Justin was awake. And for this minute, he was safe. But he had to go.
NOW, he urged himself. He was still in the bathroom staring at the lanky pale man in the mirror.
NOW! He ran into his apartment and collected what he could. He may have been the King Sleeper in cyberspace, but here he was just a scared forty-seven-year-old who had no friends because friends would unintentionally betray him. He was a man who had paid for sex since his twenties because he couldn’t risk even so much as his name, and certainly not love. He had loved only four people in his life, and the first two had died—shot and incinerated in the home in which he was raised.
There was no anonymity in cyberspace. The user could be routed and shunted anywhere they wanted to go, but the user’s mindscape—their consciousness in the digital world—was always connected to their physical body.
And n
ow the Northern Star—Evan’s intelligences, whims, and desires multiplied by a trillion— knew Justin’s address. And it commanded armies.
If Justin didn’t move quickly, he’d be dead. Or worse.
= = =
A man, lean, his body built with purpose. His eyes the color of moss. His hair cut short in a military style, formerly blond, back in his youth when he was new and loved, when his mother was still around and his father still functioned despite the booze monkey on his back, when he had a chance for something other than what he became. Now his hair was dark brown, pressed against his skull, which was square-jawed and muscular like the rest of him.
This is a dream. He is naked in a room without furniture, without a door; they’re not necessary, they don’t matter. The walls are mirrored. They are not perpendicular to one another, but angled, an octagon, as if a fitting room had been turned into a prison cell.
He looks at his body. His arms. His slack penis, the hair around it trimmed. He’s slightly bowlegged, his quads well developed, his calves tight and angular, the layers of muscle existing with purpose. The shadow of a six-pack licks underneath the tight skin wrapped around his stomach. His chest is muscular, striated when he moves, clearly defined. His shoulders are like grapefruits, connected to arms with horseshoed triceps and biceps, veins clearly visible, pumping with blood. A perfect machine, the best that God could make.
He stares at himself. He looks to the left, the right, the ceiling. He is at peace. This is the dream he has when he rests to maintain the implant. He is no more this man now than a scorpion is a butterfly.
= = =
The message wakes Mike Glass. It has been sent on a secure frequency used specifically for him. There is no computer or phone, yet the message rolls into his mind as if it had been whispered in his ear. He is a weapon. An assassin. Death’s shadow. He has single-handedly changed the tide of war.
But this is a pickup. He is stateside now. He is to acquire and defend a subject at all costs. A GPS coordinate of the subject’s last known location fills his head: it’s on the outskirts of Chicago, in the ghettos. Another GPS coordinate is downloaded: the drop-off. The last part of the message is an order to go dark.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 71