The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  “They’ll make it,” Justin said. He held his hands up as if he had already scrubbed in.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Okay, so what do I have to do?”

  Her avatar sighed. “Pull off my pants. I’m wearing a diaper . . .”

  Justin cleaned her up and repositioned her body on the bed to relieve hot spots. Afterward, he sat next to her and they braved the quiet.

  “Do you think people will care if we win?” Justin asked.

  “No. The world has moved on. Most of the world is willfully ignorant to the tragedies that allow them to be. The rest of them are enslaved.”

  “They would care,” Justin said.

  Cynthia smiled, but it was empty, knowing. “Do you know the laws of thermodynamics?”

  “No.”

  “Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be shifted from one form to another. In society, we have progress, stasis, or entropy. Stasis never lasts; entropy leads to dissolution and war. Only in progress is there peace.”

  “What does that have to do with what we’re talking about?”

  “There will always be slaves, Justin. There will always be the haves and have-nots. In the very nature of progress is sacrifice. And for the majority of the world to prosper, some must suffer. It has never not been that way: not everyone can have a place at the table. The downtrodden and abused are necessary to further mankind.”

  Glass interrupted them with a moan. He stared straight at them. “I will never rest until you are dead.” His owl head tilted down and rolled back and forth.

  “That wasn’t for us,” Cynthia said.

  “What’s happening?”

  “He’s being reborn.”

  = = =

  The memories came one at a time. Images, thoughts, and conversations dripping into Glass like blood through an IV, slowly filling him with life.

  A drip. Little hands hold wooden bars and a big man yells at a woman with streaks of black running from her eyes. The big man hits her and she crumples to the floor. He hits her again, her head bounces, and for a moment, her eyes roll back. She crawls toward the front door. The whole time, the man is yelling, “CRAWL, YOU WHORE! CRAWL TO ’EM.” The last thing the boy (it’s me, it must be me) sees is her bare feet. The big man sulks, walking back and forth and drinking from a bottle. And then he comes over to the bars, and Mike has never felt so much fear, and the man screams, spit flying from his mouth, “Your momma’s a whore! You probably ain’t even mine!”

  Another drip. Again, his (my) hands are small. He (it was me) is hungry. I walk through the old house. Wind freely passes through its warped boards. The kitchen is a mess, pots and pans piled in the sink, rot filling the air. The boy (no, me) picks up a banana that is black as night, and little brown flies scatter in a plume. I take a bite; it’s beyond soft. It melts in my mouth without any sweetness and I spit it out. I cry. I look outside. I’m afraid of it—it seems so big; I’m always in the house. But I go because there’s nothing in the refrigerator (somehow I know I already checked) and there’s nothing in the pantry except things I can’t cook.

  Leaves are on the wet ground. My feet are cold—they were filthy even before—and I walk down to the creek. The gone man is my dad and he’s taken me there before. I work along the banks, afraid of the water; I’m too young to swim. I find a frog. I cry again because it looks at me—we could have been friends—and then I eat it. I find worms. I dig my hands into the mud and pull out slithering night crawlers that whip to be free and I eat them up. I eat until I’m full, and then I drink from the stream.

  The next day’s the same. And the day after that, too. But by then, I’m no longer afraid.

  Another drop swells and falls into the others, growing the pool: a teenager with a scraggly beard, buckteeth, and a mullet. He’s on top of me, raining down punches. He’s big, almost twenty (somehow I know we call him “Big Jim”) and he’s been held back in school. It’s my first year. Big Jim calls me a “weirdo faggot.” He calls me a “shitcricker.” I can hear, but not see, kids around us laughing. Big Jim stops for a moment to look around and soak in the attention. Then he spits on my face and begins punching again.

  “But I’m no longer the boy crying by the creek,” Glass says. When Jim looks up, my fingers find a six-inch branch. I pull it into my hand.

  On the fifth punch, Jimbo’s knee rises ever so slightly, and my right arm frees. I shove the branch into his left eye. He screams and falls back, clutching at his face. The branch is an inch deep. Jelly and blood roll from his eye socket. The kids scream and run for a teacher. And I stand up and lean over him.

  “Tell me you’re sorry.”

  Big Jim can’t hear me over his wails.

  I say in full voice: “I’m going to poke your other eye out if you don’t say you’re sorry.”

  Somehow this gets his attention. The overgrown boy with the stick through his eye snivels and rolls his good one toward me. He’s deathly afraid of what stares back. He whimpers and then screams, “I’M SOOOOORRY!”

  That was my last day of school.

  The pool grows. All indications point to a troubled man who cannot connect with the world. At the behest of a teacher who had tutored him after cornering his father years before, he joins the army. A year later he’s recruited into the Navy SEALs. And then he’s twenty-two.

  The memories are no longer confusing. Mike Glass knows he is Mike Glass and he knows the memories are his. He stands next to them, a quiet, invisible observer.

  He sits next to himself in a car at the end of a dirt road that leads to a farmhouse. He can see his breath. On each side of the path, the crops, corn, and wheat sway in the wind. Dusk is coming, and the pink of the vanishing sun is draining the blue sky to black.

  He pulls the slide of his handgun. It’s a Heckler and Koch Mark 23 .45 with a silencer. A glint of the brass, and he lets it back. He gets out of the car and walks into the rows of corn. He jogs toward the house.

  At the house, dogs are running around, playing, yelping, wolves with manners. They ignore him. Because I was already here. Yes, he was. He had just left. He doesn’t know the details, but the Mike Glass in this memory does. He has come back to complete a mission. A barn is a hundred yards to the right of the house. He moves to it, instinctually using cover, obscuring him from the house and its chimney smoke, a sign that people are home.

  He slides the barn door open, moves behind the ATVs in the center and waits with his pistol drawn at the door. Ten minutes go by, and then he hears muffled, deep laughter. Two men. The door opens, and a large man appears in the gap.

  Phit!

  It sounds like an air gun, but the .45 caliber round blows the back of the man’s head off. Another man appears, shocked. Glass fires again, and the left side of the man’s face disappears into a meaty gore. Glass drags both men inside. Then he closes the barn and moves to the house.

  He is crouched now, with the pistol out in front playing follow the leader. He moves to the back of the house, adjacent to the kitchen window, and presses against the wall before anyone inside can see him. The woman’s in the kitchen. There’s a man, still not spotted. The BOY is upstairs.

  The BOY? Who’s the BOY? the present-day Glass wonders. Twenty-two-year-old Glass knows—there is an unmistakable emphasis, a feeling of discovery—but this memory isn’t ready to reveal.

  The door to the living room is unlocked. He slides it open and slips in. No noise. A cat in the room wouldn’t glance in his direction.

  A wall separates him from the woman. He leans over, low to the ground, and sees her. She’s washing dishes, her back to him. His shot enters the base of her skull and travels out through her forehead. She collapses, unaware of her death.

  He moves to her, checks her pulse, and drags her into a walk-in pantry. This is done in less than thirty seconds. He moves through the dining room, through the family room; he sees the stairs. Up the stairs. They don’t utter a creak.

  The shower is on. He maneuvers i
nto the master bedroom. He sees a shadow of the man—cast onto the bed by the bathroom lights. He slinks in against the wall, left of the bathroom door. The man gets into the shower. The shower is to the far right; a shower curtain is used instead of glass.

  Glass leans in, aims at the shadow head, and pulls the trigger. The silhouette crumples, tearing down the curtain. Shower spray and blood slick the floor. Glass leaves him; his exposed body won’t foul the mission.

  The boy is in his room, connected to cyberspace through a Mindlink. The twelve-year-old doesn’t see Mike Glass enter the room. He doesn’t know that his family is dead. Glass presses a rag to his nose before he can scream. It takes four seconds, just long enough for the boy’s eyes to look into his own. The fear. The absolute fear in them. Present-day Glass shudders as two memories merge: him by the creek, chewing through a twitching frog, and this boy staring at him, too confused to be horrified.

  The boy’s eyes roll back—he’s out. Glass picks him up easily; he’s small for his age. Glass leaves out the front and places the boy on the lawn. The dogs stay in the shadows and bellow like they’ve lost one of their own, but they don’t come near. He gets fuel from the barn and douses it and the house. He lights it on fire and leaves with the King Sleeper.

  The memories build within Mike Glass. They are almost entirely ugly, devoid of remorse, a lion’s eulogy for its prey. But a few register as wrong. And a few tiny crumbs hold beauty. And those that do are almost entirely centered around her.

  “Vanessa,” he says. He can see her. He can touch her. And when he does so, she doesn’t wilt in fear. She leans forward in want.

  “We share the same blood,” she says. And they do, and that matters to Glass, because blood is life.

  The black memories he leaves be. He has seen enough to know his sins. He chases the ones of her, lusting for their warmth, wanting to soak in what had been hope, just as one wakes only to close their eyes again, trying to recapture a dream.

  She is the only thing he has ever loved.

  Chapter 7

  China Girl drove Kove to the military base north of the city. The base had been built during the Terror War, when the Derik Building was the epicenter for bionic research and implementation. Back then, new bionics were shuttled to the base daily for training and deployment around the world. But now, most of it was unused. There were no wars—certainly not in Chicago—and even globally the battles that took place were small, the meek rising, only to be slapped back down with an iron hand. The Northern Star had ended petty conflicts between nations.

  They passed the main entrance without slowing down—the check-in was now a mile up the road. Kove’s head rose feet above the windshield. He had torn out the front seat and peeled the roof off to fit. The fresh air did him well. The hangover was still there, but the cool wind masked the pulsing flashes of withdrawal.

  They swept by a rusted-out Harrier, where squirrels had made the engine intakes their home. A helicopter sagged to the ground. A tank. Another helicopter. A dozen ancient Humvees. Not even worth recycling.

  Kove was an addict and disenchanted, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew what the world had been, and now, what it was. He’d had a front row seat for most of the show.

  He was tired of Evan, no doubt—they’d been roommates too long. He was tired of the digital communication and lack of privacy (when you have to tell someone to get out of your head, Kove thought, things have gone too far), but he thought then—and now—that Evan did the right thing.

  All revolutions come with war. They come with cost. Countries rise and fall, empires too, and it was only our short lives that made such things seem an impossibility. To Kove, the only thing that seemed clear was that too many opinions bake a bad cake.

  When Evan took over he got rid of the politicians. He got rid of overspending. He unified laws across continents—laws that were enforced, in some cases, directly by his oversight. He maintained innocent until proven guilty in cases of assumption, but if you were caught in the act, jail or worse was imposed immediately. The economy stabilized. People could walk down the streets safely, knowing that they were always being watched. Basically, Evan made the entire world Singapore.

  And Kove thought that that was just fine. Freedom was a vastly overrated principle.

  “You’re thinking about something, but I can’t quite follow it,” China Girl said.

  His thoughts had drifted into their link. He turned away from the rusted past whipping by and looked at her. Was she trying to strike up a conversation?

  “Just how things have changed.”

  “You knew Evan when he wasn’t the Northern Star,” China Girl stated.

  “I did.”

  “What was he like?”

  “You’d be surprised—he hasn’t changed much. There’s just more of him to go around.”

  They reached the checkpoint and were waved through. The disrepair found in the periphery of the base vanished. This base was active. Thirty Tank Minors of varying levels were on hand, along with five Tank Majors—old models, the second generation after Raimey. The soldiers in them were young, though.

  He’s recycling, Kove thought as they drove past one. The idea made him shiver. Tank Majors—especially the old ones—weren’t inherently interchangeable. Most were fused into their outer bodies, their spines and ribs hard mounted to the metal lattices that held them in place. To take them out required surgery.

  A thought hit Kove. “How old are you?”

  “I’m told I’m twenty-five. You’re . . . seventy?”

  “No, I was born in 2022, so . . . shitballs. Yes.” Kove laughed.

  “What’s funny?” China Girl crooked her head, waiting.

  “Nothing really. Just—time flies. My mom used to say that every day when she woke up she’d think she was eighteen. Until she looked in the mirror.”

  China Girl parked the truck. “I’m surprised how high the sky is.”

  “You’ve never left the bunker?”

  “I’m Evan’s assistant.”

  “But before.”

  “I don’t have a before.”

  A Tank Minor came out and saluted them. When he saw that a spider was driving, his hand wavered, but he quickly pulled it together. Kove stepped out of the truck, relieving its springs. The Minor began to speak to Kove, avoiding the gaze of China Girl.

  “She’s the boss,” Kove said and headed to a charge station.

  China Girl told the Minor to fuel the helicopters and vehicle transports, and to put all bionics on standby alert. They were to wait for Lindo’s orders. He was now sifting through cyberspace searching for Glass’s location.

  = = =

  Cynthia was alive. Evan had uncovered the hack that had released Glass. It was beautiful. Simplicity through mastery, a test in patience that few could afford, followed by gentle moves to trigger the tumblers. She had exploited a fact that almost no one knew: Evan was neither omniscient nor omnipresent. And if you were quiet, you could sneak by.

  Evan’s presence in cyberspace was like an ocean current. It was powerful and vast—and its riptide could suck you down—but it was directional. Evan had to choose where he went, what he focused on, what was a priority and what could wait. Unlike a normal person, who could multitask two or three things, he could multitask millions—and for each task, he was there. But he was not everywhere; despite being the largest and most powerful force in cyberspace, he occupied only 0.05% of it at any one time.

  Still, what he did occupy, he did so with complete domination. When Evan’s mindscape unfurled and covered a portal or program, all of it was his. He could destroy it at the speed of light; he could read minds and manipulate thoughts; to boost his local intelligence, he could skim a bit of the population’s brainpower and use it like a cluster computer. And the speed with which he moved guaranteed that every few weeks most of the population would at some point cross his path. It was like swimming in a lake. The water is warm and inviting, but suddenly a cold streak rolls across your feet. You kno
w it’s only water, but your imagination drifts to the monsters that may lie at the muddy bottom.

  Evan knew he had to find her. He no longer felt fear, but he understood that genius, time, and resources were good mates for revenge, and that Cynthia had all three. So he collapsed all of his other tasks and focused his entire energy toward cyberspace and the minds that occupied it. Only the Sleepers shooting between the programs and portals saw the change. The pulsing sun flattened and expanded in a solar flare. The sperm-like Sleepers vanished, disconnecting immediately. But the seven billion others stayed online, blissfully unaware that their programs orbited this sentient sun, and a clock hand had just been extended that would soon pass over them. Someone knows where she is. Maybe a former employee who’d helped hide her underground, or maybe a person who’d run into her on the street as she’d scuttled from one safe house to the next. But someone knew. And when he found Cynthia, he would find Glass.

  And more importantly, Justin-01.

  = = =

  The plane landed at a small abandoned airport northwest of the city. Decades of weather, grass, and weeds had turned two of the runways into broken tiles, but the one they landed on was pristine. Cynthia had maintained it.

  The plane slowed down, and its batwing structure swung clockwise as they taxied toward a hangar just big enough to house the plane. Inside the hangar, the engines wound down and the belly of the plane slowly lowered. Raimey stepped out.

  He had slept most of the fourteen hours. Sabot had radioed back to check on him a few times, and they’d spoken for a bit, but in response to most of the questions Raimey had asked, Sabot had crackled back with, “Cynthia will tell you.” At least the murderous tension of a day before was gone.

  Sabot and a Sleeper pilot climbed down from the cockpit. Sabot said something to the Sleeper, and the man walked the opposite way, farther into the hanger. It was just the two of them. A large recycling truck was parked nearby.

  “Is this what you use to get around?” Raimey asked.

  “No one blinks when they see a garbage truck,” Sabot replied. “The back is completely gutted. You’ll fit.”