The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “You’re taking me somewhere,” Justin said. He looked at the bodies that surrounded them. The being tilted its head down. Yes.

  Justin had no choice. If it wanted to kill him—if it wanted to take him to Lindo—it would do so. This thing had just dismembered five soldiers that individually could flip a car or kill twenty men.

  Justin gave it his hand, and it helped him out. Justin reached back into the vehicle and grabbed his bag.

  With another tilt of its head, the creature gestured for him to follow. Justin paused for only a moment before he obliged.

  As Justin walked by his captor’s side, he was completely unaware that the creature that now escorted him was the same one who had turned his early life into hell.

  Chapter 2

  Cynthia Revo watched Jeremiah Sabot with two pairs of eyes. One pair was mounted into a video monitor that took up almost an entire wall. From this, she could see the entire room. The other pair was in the corner, low to the ground, unable to focus or turn. These watery brown eyes were those of an invalid, a stroked-out shell that survived only on life support.

  Sabot had been busy all morning. He was her guardian, assistant, and true love. They had been together for almost forty years. Sabot was seventy-five. He was black and Samoan, six-five, and while he appeared to weigh about two hundred and eighty pounds, he was an even five hundred. He was ageless. He looked exactly as he had thirty years before, when he became a Tank Minor. It was Cynthia who had designed his body. He was much larger than the Coalition spec’d Tank Minors, somewhere between a big Tank Minor and a tiny Tank Major. He had not been modified since the civil war.

  She was brilliant, wealthy, and eccentric. He was from the ghettos of Chicago and had used the army to get out. She was everything to him, even now when age had been kind to him and cruel to her. Her beauty still showed on screen, in the room in which she imprisoned herself, guarded from all intrusion, even the Northern Star. She had learned about Evan’s plans before the Northern Star had come fully online, and she had warned the U.S. president, only to learn that he and the other world leaders had been compromised by lust, greed, or love. They knew what was coming, and some had even helped usher it in. And so, in the face of a global mutiny, the discarding of democratic governments, the rise of a transcontinental military dictatorship, and the untoward havoc of the Northern Star as a god entity online, Cynthia had fought. The battle killed millions, and when, in the end, Evan acquired the final component he needed—the Consciousness Module—the Northern Star decimated everything that stood in its way.

  It had nearly succeeded in killing her, too. But Cynthia had always been quick. She had always found solutions to trump inexorable odds. And so she fought on. When the Northern Star reverse data pushed—a process that caused the brain to hemorrhage—she again beat the odds by dumping her mind into this exile. Her body barely survived—that was the cost—but her mind was saved. She was still herself. Pulled from cyberspace and reconstituted in a private server, cut from all outside lines.

  Her consciousness now remained in this limbo, trapped, a purgatory somehow fitting for the woman who had created the means for it all. She was neither here nor there. She was in between. But she was alive . . . and always plotting.

  The watery brown eyes watched Sabot. He was preparing a weapon that had taken Cynthia four years to design. A massive capacitor, used for an instant draw of electricity, was mounted into a metal box that Sabot could strap to his back. Attached by a thick cable was a five-foot long “gun” that was covered in wires and modules; three jointed prongs at its muzzle looked as delicate as the limbs of a daddy longlegs.

  The rest of the cavernous room was either a lab or a museum of the bionic age. A huge metal throne filled one corner; it was used to maintenance a Tank Major. Next to it were crates marked “explosive.” Next to that, tools and spare parts. Two massive drive chains hung over a wall-mounted rail, glimmering brass in the overhead light.

  In the opposite corner was a metal bed that looked to have been pillaged from an insane asylum. Heavy straps and chains hung from it, and it was surrounded by a squirrel’s nest of monitors, wires, and computers. Crates of food, crates of supplies. A set of bunks. Canisters of precious fuel. Weapons racked along the wall, some big, some small. Ammo cans beneath them. Most of it had been stolen either by Sabot or by the few sympathetic parties who still remembered Cynthia and understood the evil that now ruled the world.

  For Cynthia, the time had passed unceremoniously. Before the civil war, she had been the most powerful person in the world, the inventor of the Mindlink, which saved the global economy after we sucked the oil tit dry. She was a shepherd who had ushered modern society into a digital universe that she had designed, owned, and controlled. A universe more important than the real one.

  But after the civil war, when the Northern Star went online and Evan took control, Cynthia was relegated to the sewers. All of her assets were frozen, and all the Data Nodes, the MindCorp infrastructure, and employees that had once served her, now served him. After five years, even Evan thought she had gone off and died, an injured animal that had crawled into a musty den to suck in its last breaths.

  But she was alive, even if just barely. And she would still go online to understand the state of the world, the state of Evan and his monstrous invention. Not as a Sleeper—he would sense her immediately—but at the consumer level, where she was but a trickle of data, where the mindscape was inconsequential and easy to ignore.

  Cynthia thought of the lies that parents tell their children. She remembered how her mother would tuck her in for the night, check the closet and under her bed, and reassure Cynthia that there were no monsters.

  Cynthia knew many by first name. They existed in droves.

  Or when something horrific happened—like a gunman walking into a random school and shooting it up, killing a dozen children and teachers and then themselves—her mom would hold her tight, pet her hair, and tell her that evil never wins.

  But evil always won. It was a necessity of war, separate from sides or ideologies or nations. If blood was spilled, if violence was the answer, it wasn’t about right or wrong—that didn’t come into play. It was about which side would slip further into the dark, and how much of themselves they were willing to place on the altar. Because the world wasn’t about the good and bad. That was fine for fables to read with children at your feet, but if as an adult you thought in such binary terms, you were a simpleton.

  No, the battles of the world were based on the reality that each side wished to impose, and evil was the necessary sacrifice to win. Evil fights evil, and good has nothing to do with it. Good doesn’t have the guts; it is a flower in a firestorm. The twisted nature of war has only one friend, and it is a slithery fellow that lets some people go and keeps others for itself, haunting them for the rest of their lives, feeding off the sins they can never shake, because they are too great to forgive, even when to not do them would have meant their life.

  Even though Cynthia was smarter, better equipped, and had surprised Evan by attacking first, she had lost. And it was because she hadn’t wanted to be evil. She hadn’t realized that in war, evil was a tool, not a trait. But Evan had. And that was why he had won.

  We must stop him, she thought, but her mind had drifted, and her words came over the loudspeaker. Sabot looked up from his work. Her avatar waved him away.

  “You worry too much,” Sabot said. His age showed only in his eyes.

  “You don’t worry enough,” she replied. Her wet, brown eyes on him, her slack face in the corner of the room. He looked at both her ideal image and her physical form. Both were the same mind—he didn’t prefer one or the other. Love worked that way.

  He stopped what he was doing and went over to her bed. He stroked her forehead and hair. From cyberspace, on the monitor, her younger version watched him. Both were quiet.

  “It’ll work,” Sabot said.

  “It may not,” her avatar responded. Sabot dabbed spit from the av
atar’s husk.

  “It may not,” he agreed. He smiled. “I wanted to retire and live on a beach.”

  “Walk barefoot in the sand,” her avatar said.

  “Surf in the morning, nap in the afternoon.”

  “Rum-fueled sex at night.”

  Sabot nodded. “Yeah.” For a moment in the daydream, it still seemed a possibility. The mind’s tricks to keep its passenger sane.

  “I would have been bored in a month,” her avatar joked.

  Sabot stood up. “Well, then I guess we might as well do what we’re doing.” He kissed her still face.

  “I can feel that.” She paused. “I’m scared, Sabot.”

  “Me too. But there’s no reason to be. Either we succeed or we fail.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “It might be nice,” Sabot said. “I don’t know anyone that’s come back and said otherwise.”

  They both became alert as a message was passed to them.

  “They’re close to the location,” Sabot said. “I need to go.”

  Sabot walked over to the weapon he had readied and slung the strange electric rod under his arm. He threw on a jacket that did little to hide his modifications, then strapped the capacitor to his back.

  “Be careful.”

  “I will. I’ll be back shortly.”

  He left out a side entrance, and fifty yards later—past the hidden turrets, smart mines, and surveillance cameras—he exited into an abandoned subway tunnel.

  = = =

  The skeleton man—Justin wasn’t sure what to call him—gently directed him where to go. People were on the streets, but no one seemed to notice them. Those who were on their side of the street cast their eyes away as they passed and restarted their conversations with “So, yeah,” pretending normalcy, as Justin and his wraith-like companion walked by. They couldn’t have done anything anyway.

  Justin looked back. The people they had passed were gone.

  Justin still wasn’t sure if the being was a robot or a very advanced Tank Minor. Artificial intelligence had never reached the level that late twentieth-century science had predicted. The rigid precision of the CPU was its downfall: AI would always be too simple, too complex, or so close to human that it shared our flaws. The porridge was never just right. It was why such ethical disasters as Forced Autism existed, and why the human mind had been melded with the CPU. Inferential leaps, gut instinct, and imagination—combined with raw processing power and nearly limitless data—that was the solution without compromise. That was our evolution.

  Not AI, Justin decided.

  And while the Northern Star could control bionics by satellite—it had done so during the civil war—“Lindos” were slower and not nearly as coordinated as a human-driven bionic. Whereas this thing moved liked lightning. Plus, why would Evan kill his own Tank Minors?

  So that left human. Justin snuck a few glances at his chaperone. It was six and a half feet tall, but all limbs. Its gait was longer than a human’s, concealed by its shredded cloak. Its arms were geometrically built like a primate’s, but bent severely to not appear so, yet there was nothing organic in its design: it was built from a spider web of matrixed metal. Each hand was a hand within a hand. A set of long metal fingers lay over a smaller set. Its feet were thick toes, splayed and strong. It never settled down on them—there was no heel. And intertwined in all of this were wet black cords, wired like muscle, but thinner, almost a thick filament. It was electrostatic tissue, Justin decided, but like none he’d ever seen, and in such a small quantity compared to the others whose musculature was similar to a man’s. It was an insect-like mimicry.

  Justin asked it a few questions, but it just glanced down at him momentarily and remained quiet. It didn’t have a mouth, and Justin saw no other means by which it could speak. Justin took his cue after a few silences and let his mind rest. He wasn’t going to get answers here.

  They walked four miles northwest, out of the ghettos that formed the outskirts of Chicago, and into the fringe where the city and nature lapped together like the ocean and shore. There were buildings here, sagging and destitute, but no people. Deer trotted openly down the road, staring back at them with their reflector eyes. A pack of raccoons gathered on a stoop and quietly watched them walk by.

  “Where are we going?” Justin asked.

  The skeleton man pointed ahead. A four-story office building was just in sight at the end of the road. Its front was cement, overgrown with ivy. The second story and above was a wall of windows, but few remained intact. Those that remained looked like cataracts on an old crone.

  Five minutes later, the skeleton man opened the creaky front door and ushered Justin inside. They entered a hall that led to a small lobby. It was early twenty-first-century come-and-go business housing; linoleum tile led to thin-ply, wear-resistant carpet and furniture that looked as if it would take only minutes to be uncomfortable, and maybe even a bit itchy. A drop-down ceiling with fluorescent light fixtures and textured tiles reminded Justin of moldy crackers. Even new, it would have been a dull, despondent place to work. Now—furry with dust, the floors and countertops covered in decades of scat, the moldy couches bored out by critters so they could birth in its white, musty plumes—it felt like a place that could foster only failure.

  But Justin was wrong. This humble office building bore one of the greatest inventions ever created. A directory stood in the middle of the hallway. Behind its shattered glass, “M NDWAVE RES AR H” was pressed into the felt. Mindwave Research was Cynthia Revo’s startup out of college. It was what had later become MindCorp.

  And beneath it, pillaged from the other company names that had occupied this space decades before, was a message:

  “JSTN, B SR 2 DUK.”

  Justin’s heart raced. Amid a floor of filth, Justin saw a perfectly clean circle of tile, the same diameter as the directory’s base, by the wall. It had been moved so as to be unavoidably seen.

  The skeleton man appeared not to notice. It pulled him down the hall. They left behind the little light that had crept in, and Justin had to use the bionic’s dull green eyes as a beacon while he shuffled and crunched through petrified turds.

  Eventually his eyes adjusted. Doors to the right and left were broken open, revealing more office space. Ahead was a set of double doors, framed in metal, dinged but not breached. When the skeleton man put its stringy hand around the door handle, Justin expected it to be locked, but it clicked open and led to a landing. They stepped through.

  Beneath them was a Plexiglas cage surrounded by hundreds of bare server racks. This was ground zero: where Tom the chimp had defeated his peer, Jerry, with just the power of thought. Justin’s curiosity now outpaced his fear, and he noticed details he normally wouldn’t have. One: that the Plexiglas cage—about the size of a bedroom—was lit. Two: that up until this point, the air had been stale—and farther in it should be worse—but in here it was crisp. Circulated.

  The skeleton man didn’t appear to notice. He walked down the landing stairs to the main floor.

  The skeleton man opened the Plexiglas cage and waited for Justin to walk through. Inside, hundreds of metal balls were anchored into the cage walls. They were shiny. New.

  On one side, a twelve-inch hole had been cut through the thick clear plastic. The air . . . tingled.

  The skeleton man ushered Justin into the center of the room and then stopped, as if there was an invisible “X” only he could see.

  When Justin’s feet hit that point, the skeleton man’s alert nature and darting eyes vanished. It slunk back toward the cage door as if in a trance. As it did, a hum filled the air, growing in intensity. And before the bionic could exit, the door slammed shut.

  Outside the cage, a massive man, covered head to toe in a lead suit, emerged from behind a wall of server racks and ran toward the small hole. He held a giant wand that flashed and jolted with white, electric sparks, and when he reached the hole, he thrust the front of it through.

  Justin hit the
ground. Under attack, the skeleton man’s alertness returned, and like a jumping spider, it jolted to the side of the cage opposite the man and ricocheted back to strike.

  SCHZZZZZZZ. The cage became a lightning storm as arcs of electricity jumped across the metal balls. The current was drawn to the skeleton man, and in mid-air, the bionic curled up like a dying insect and crashed against the wall where the man stood, nearly breaking through.

  And then the current found Justin.

  He smelled the burning as his clothes caught fire. His body snapped rigid under unbearable pain, and he heard the man on the outside scream. Justin saw the skeleton man reach up and drag its claws down the Plexiglass, still trying to attack.

  Then Justin passed out.

  Chapter 3

  Mike Glass watched indifferently as a large Tank Minor worked around him. He was vertical, strapped to a metal rack with chains that could anchor a barge. Across from him, he saw a man in a bed, his right leg and left arm covered in gauze, blood seeping through it. Glass didn’t recognize him. On the screen, a redheaded woman stared at him. He didn’t recognize her either. He was designed to not wonder or question—those traits had been stripped away. He had finished the mission, and had he not been subdued, he would have walked back to his capsule outside the city. But he did not struggle, because he had been given no new instructions.

  The large Tank Minor stood up.

  “He’s ready,” Sabot said.

  “I’ve reflashed his mission constraints,” the woman on the screen said. “Three minutes?”

  Sabot nodded. “And counting.”

  “Can you hear me?” Cynthia asked Glass. He nodded. “You can speak. Sabot, the man to your left, has wired back that functionality.”

  Glass didn’t respond.

  On the screen, Cynthia sighed. “Say you understand.”

  “I understand,” Glass said. His voice sounded as if it came from a soup can.

  “Do you know your name?”

  “Miiii,” he tried. “Miiii.” Then: “No.”