“I need you to listen without interruption. I’m going to tell you who you are and more. But I must do it quickly. Off mission, you are designed to maintain short-term memory for no longer than three minutes. It’s a safety implemented by Dr. Evan Lindo to control you.”
Glass remained quiet. Cynthia had to hurry; she had little more than two minutes left before his mind would reset.
“Your name is Mike Glass. You are fifty-seven years old and have been a soldier for the last thirty-nine years. You are Dr. Evan Lindo’s personal assassin and have been so for nearly that entire length of time.”
“He is my creator,” Glass said.
“NO! He is a man, flesh and blood, and nothing more. Your were loyal to him, evil for him, and he betrayed you. Twenty-five years ago, you loved a woman named Vanessa Raimey. She was the only thing you ever cared for. The rest of the world was gray, but not her. She was light. She was warmth. And she loved you too.
“But Evan needed her, and he knew your true nature. Mike, above all things, you are a killer, and that is what made Vanessa that much more special. Somehow she dissolved your indifference to life. Evan knew he could ask you to take the lives of a thousand men, but he could never ask you to give up the one thing that made you feel. The one heart on the planet that beat for you, the one heart for which you would be saddened at the thought of it going still. And so Evan had to make a choice, because he couldn’t have the both of you.”
“Two of his giants attempted to kill you. They failed. You fought back and almost won, but in the end you were up against too much. He took Vanessa and made her a part of him. And then he took over the world.”
“The Northern Star,” Glass said.
“Yes. Evan serves himself and not one person more. And after taking the only thing you ever loved, after dismembering your body, he still couldn’t let you die. Because your gifts allowed him to play. They allowed him to invent. And Evan loves his toys.
“He woke you up in your hospital bed—I have seen it—and he sat cross-legged as he said that he understood why you betrayed him. He asked you to choose—loyalty or death—knowing the whole time what you would say. He hoped for it. And when you chose death, he showed you what he had become, and he tore the memories from your mind and whittled you down into a killing machine with no more of a soul than a corpse.”
Cynthia paused.
“All of this means nothing, because in one minute and seven seconds, you will reset and once again be Lindo’s tool. This conversation will be erased. You will look at me blankly, and again not know my name. You will quietly observe your environment and wait for orders to attack or a chance to flee. But through the most difficult effort—effort that has resulted in the loss of many lives—we have your memories. Not all of them, not even close, but enough for you to see what you were, and what you’ve lost. Most of them are sins. You bathed in them, Mike. But some of them are pure, and most of those involve Vanessa. I can give these to you. But unlike Evan, I will not use force. It is your choice. Receiving these memories won’t hurt you, but it will be confusing. And you will mourn for what you’ve lost.”
“Why would Evan do this to me?”
“Because you’d kill him if you knew the truth.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“To kill him because you know the truth.”
“Thirty-two seconds, Cynthia,” Sabot said. He was near Glass, working on a computer tethered to him.
“Will you do it, Mike? You must choose. I’ve controlled armies and I’ve felt men die, and I can’t be what I was anymore. I will guide you. I am powerful like Lindo, but I have learned the error of my ways. Taking a man’s free will is murder. You must decide.”
“I knew love?”
“More. You—against all odds—discovered humanity.”
“Sometimes I see a woman’s face. She is laughing.”
“That’s Vanessa.”
“I want to talk to her,” Glass said. He sounded like a child.
“First you must know who she is, and then I hope you do.”
“Eight seconds,” Sabot said through clenched teeth. The security protocol to Glass’s implant was a floating algorithm. It had taken hours to hack, and they could only do that because Glass had rebooted from the EMP.
Glass turned to Sabot. “I want to see her. Show me. All I know is cold.”
Sabot fired off five quick keystrokes. Glass slumped forward, rattling the chains.
Sabot turned to Cynthia, alarmed.
“It’s working,” she said. “Connect me in to remove the limiter.”
= = =
Justin woke up to tears streaming down his face. Searing pain ran from his wrist to his ankle as if liquid fire had hijacked his veins. His eyes focused on an LED fifty feet above him.
A giant black man with dreads to his shoulders eclipsed the light.
“Be still, Justin.” A woman’s voice filled the room.
Justin was groggy. He could have easily closed his eyes and called it a night. But then he felt something slip out of his arm, and it was replaced by a throbbing. He craned his head. The large man had removed an IV needle.
“Vitamins and food,” the man said. “You’re malnourished.”
The man helped him sit up. That sliver of pain was overtaken by fire. Justin held up his gauzed arm and looked down at his leg.
“I ducked,” Justin coughed.
“I’m sorry about the electrical burns. That wasn’t the plan,” the Tank Minor replied.
“You’re Sabot.” Justin had never seen Cynthia’s bodyguard in person, but in every photo or video of her he’d ever seen, this man had been standing behind her.
Sabot nodded. Justin registered movement and looked over the big man’s shoulders. A twenty-foot Cynthia was watching him.
“Hello, Justin.”
“What . . . where am I?”
“Safe, beneath the streets,” she said. It could have been her size, but she was difficult to look at, as if her life force could drown out his own.
Sabot offered Justin a pill and water. “You’ll want it.”
Justin stood up, and fresh pain made the room waver. He took the pill and gulped it down.
“Jeez,” he said, gingerly testing his injured leg.
“For all intents and purposes, lightning passed through you,” Cynthia said.
“Yeah, I remember,” Justin replied. His grimaced and did a trust fall onto his leg. It hurt, but held.
They were in some kind of electronics warehouse. The floor was metal, the walls were metal, and exposed I-beams framed it all. On one side was the Cynthia theater and a bunch of medical equipment; he thought he saw a bed. The rest was storage: a lot of computer equipment, food, and weapons.
“I thought you were dead,” Justin said.
“It was close,” Cynthia replied. “How is Xinting?”
Xinting was Justin’s foster mother; she had raised him since he was twelve years old. She was a scientist, and was there the day John Raimey stormed the Chinese base to take him back. She had pled with the giant for Justin’s freedom. She said she would take him far away. And the giant acquiesced. Cynthia had used back channels to make this financially possible.
“She’s good. She told me what you did.”
“It was the only way,” Cynthia replied.
“No. You could have had me killed, or you could have taken me for yourself.”
“Yes, I could have.”
He walked toward the theater. The bed became clear now, and he saw Cynthia’s sunken frame. Her avatar looked down on it. “And what would that have gotten me, Justin-01? Do you think I wouldn’t still be here, an invalid, buried in the ground? Would the Northern Star not exist? Would the governments not have taken my empire? Would the untouchables of this world still not be enslaved, with the modern world blind by choice so that they can live comfortably? No. This was the inevitable. I used my wealth and resources to save a boy. Then I used it to start a war. And I think it’s fitting th
at we are where we are. If a cat rested on my chest, it could end my life. And you think that would worry me, don’t you Justin?”
“It would worry me,” he said.
“Because you are strong. When you think of death, a place in your chest shrinks. My tenuous string to existence has set me free. By losing everything, I have nothing left to lose, and my path is so clear now. It is so clean—without ulterior motives, political plays, worry about cause and effect, or how today’s decisions can come back to haunt me. No reason to placate, no reason to soften my words to tiptoe around sensitivities. Time is all we have. It was all we ever had. It is given to us and taken away, and not until we are close to death do we see that it is so. There’s power in the end. Maybe only then can we really reflect on who we are.”
Her avatar stared off, its eyes wide. “I see what must be done. I have seen it for over twenty years.”
She turned back to Justin and smiled. “It’s good to see you are well. I had always wondered. Every now and then I’d send out a ping to see if maybe you’d respond.”
“I stayed off the grid,” Justin said. “Only in the last few years have I gotten back on, and even then, I made sure I moved quietly.”
“Do you still feel it?”
“The power?”
Cynthia nodded.
“Yes. It’s there. I think that’s how Vanessa found me.”
“She found everyone.”
“What do you mean?” Justin asked, perplexed.
“When the Multiplier in the Middle East went down, her scream was like a solar flare. Every Sleeper heard it.”
“Then how did the Northern Star find me?”
“The same way I did. You responded.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Says the elephant to the ants crushed underfoot. Your mindscape shook cyberspace, Justin. Just as it did when you were a child.”
Twenty feet away, the skeleton man groaned. With the stacks of crates and aisles of gear, Justin hadn’t noticed him. He went over.
“Don’t get too close,” Sabot warned.
The skeleton man was unconscious, his chin to his chest, and his hands and feet twitched like a dog chasing a rabbit in a dream. The ghillie suit had been removed, and Justin saw the fully alien architecture at work. The matte black body lacked either a chest or abdomen; a thick, boxy, armored spine connected his hips to his shoulders. While the limbs were honeycombed and looked incredibly delicate, the spine looked as if it had been hammered from steel billet. Wires of electrostatic tissue ran the length of it in channels, and strangely studded armor covered it in plates like an armadillo. Unlike the human spine, shiny wear marks revealed at least a hundred points of articulation.
“Did you send this thing to get me?” Justin asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“This is Mike Glass.”
A wave of nausea slammed into Justin. Bursts of light starred his vision as his heart broke into a sprint. A crowbar rested against a nearby crate; without hesitation, Justin grabbed it and swung it into the man who had ruined his life.
“YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” he screamed. The crowbar vibrated with every strike, shaking Justin’s arms, but neither the strikes nor the scolding had any effect on Glass. The skeleton man’s head tilted as if listening to a far-off whisper, but otherwise he appeared completely unaware of the assault.
“Stop, Justin. You’re going to hurt yourself,” Cynthia said.
Justin paid her no mind. He swung until his arms were too weak to hold the crowbar and his hands were blistered. Only then did he drop the crowbar and collapse across from his reaper.
“Why would you have him here?” Justin asked, his voice hoarse with pain. Mike Glass had killed his parents and taken him from his home when Justin was twelve. Evan may have been the one who’d ordered the hit, but Glass was the one who had entered his home and shot down Justin’s chance for a normal life.
“Mike Glass, as you see him, has no idea what he did to you. You don’t see it, and you may never be able to reconcile this point, but he is a victim just like you.”
“Fuck you!” Justin yelled. “Fuck you to defend him! He killed my parents! God knows how many other people he’s killed.”
“Mike Glass has four thousand, three hundred and fifty-four confirmed kills. He’s a soldier, Justin. That’s all he is. He’s only pulled the trigger once on his own behalf, and that’s why he’s so important.”
“This is wrong. You’re insane. Where’s the exit? How do I get out of here?”
“The elevator is behind you, through the hall.”
“Is your grunt going to kill me?”
“Sabot left, and he wouldn’t stop you anyway. It’s just the three of us.”
Justin looked around for the hulking Samoan. “Where is he?”
“He’s going to fly across the world to get the man who saved you.”
Justin’s mind spun. He felt like his temples were pressing inward, trying to touch each other. “How?”
“I’VE BEEN PLANNING THIS DAY FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS!” Cynthia screamed, her anger palpable. “I HAVE BEEN IN THIS BUNKER—IN THIS HOLE—THINKING OF ONLY ONE THING: THIS DAY AND THE DAYS BEYOND.”
Justin stared up at her, as if she had peeled back her face to show the devil.
“I’ve planned for twenty-five years,” Cynthia said again—quieter, sadder. “This is the only way. There is no other way. Please stay. If you leave, all of this is for nothing.”
Chapter 4
-Africa-
Chinelo opened the door quietly, as he had been taught. It was the third of the month, his turn to assist—just as every other day it was another child’s. Chinelo was thirteen, on the cusp of manhood according to his tribe’s culture.
This morning there was commotion. Chinelo was woken by Nwabudike, the boy who had assisted the Guardian the day before. Nwabudike told him that something out in the plains had spooked the wild animals enough that they had run through the outskirts of their village. And a hunter who had been out in the bush reported to Nwabudike that he had heard a sound like a lion’s roar, only it lasted for twenty minutes.
The children had strict twenty-four-hour shifts, and Nwabudike was at the end of his. It would be unacceptable for him to pass the message directly to their Guardian. So he passed it to Chinelo.
It was five a.m. Chinelo walked into the large shack. Bones, the Guardian’s dog, looked up from underneath the chair of his master, then bedded back down. He and Chinelo were on good terms, and Bones was too old to bother barking.
“Sir. Sir,” Chinelo said. He walked around the Guardian’s feet. Four steps got him to the Guardian’s knees, and four more got him to the giant drive chains that wrapped around his waist. The Guardian slept a lot now; the elders in the village said that for his kind, he was very old. You could see the deep creases in his face, the only part of him that was exposed. He was snoring.
After sixteen steps, Chinelo looked up at the Guardian’s head.
“Sir,” he whispered again. He was hard to wake. One day, Nwabudike said, they would come in and he wouldn’t. “Sir!”
The Guardian’s eyes shot open. His face was creased with time, but his eyes were sharp and clear. He looked over to his little assistant.
“Good morning, Chinelo.” John Raimey let out a big yawn and checked a window. A hint of light crept through. “What time is it?”
“It’s five.”
“Five!” The Guardian liked to sleep in. He became more alert. “Is everything okay?”
“Something spooked the animals on the plain. Something large. A hunter heard it. He said it sounded like something from the past, before I was born. The war.”
“Hmm,” Raimey grunted. A generator whine filled the air as he powered up. Unlike his contemporaries, for Raimey it took time.
History portrayed Raimey as the first Tank Major, but that wasn’t true. His closest friend, Eric Janis, was the prototype. But that part of history had been erased
when a design flaw allowed China to plant a virus in Janis’s implant. He went insane and destroyed a military base while Chinese special forces air dropped in under the cover of chaos and stole the King Sleeper. Raimey’s first mission had been to kill Janis.
Raimey had been a quad amputee who could no longer provide for his family. Even now, thinking back, the memories of his wife’s sacrifices were still too fresh. She had cleaned him like a baby; he had chipped away at her every day with his depression. She withered away before his very eyes, and he was too consumed by self-pity to notice.
A mentor, General Boen, had sat before him, next to Dr. Lindo and Cynthia Revo, and offered him a monkey’s paw: we will turn you into the most powerful creature that has ever walked the earth, and for the privilege, we will provide for your family.
But you can never see them again.
His wife had had cancer; his daughter needed a future. He was an anchor dragging them into the depths. Of all the regrets, that was the one from which he couldn’t find an out. So they wheeled him away, chopped him down, and built him up. He was designed without compromise, limitations, or budget constraints. He was a product of an era when the United States was against a wall and needed a hero. Even now, thirty-five years later, he was still the most powerful Tank Major ever built, and his body, down to the bolt, consisted of an alloy of armor that had never been fully duplicated. It made him nearly indestructible.
But his legend was built on the hydraulshock. The standard power delivery of a Tank Major was 3,500,000 foot-pounds; Raimey’s was 5,000,000 foot-pounds. Miles away, soldiers could distinguish the telltale boom of his attack from the sound of the others. Within a quarter mile, soldiers needed special hearing protection, and within fifty yards the extreme energy of his movement caused a concussive blast that could knock them down. Of all the myths that had been born from the shock and stress of war, Raimey was an anomaly in one important way: the stories told about him were true.
“Get to the zone,” Raimey said to Chinelo.
The skinny boy stepped into a corner of the room marked “safe,” and Raimey rose thirteen feet into the air.
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