by Ryan Schow
Something like a leather belt goes over my neck and jerks down. The pain is ungodly, and I can’t breathe. I claw at what feels like a belt, then I tear off the towel and see his beet red face straining over mine.
“Why are you really here?” he snarls.
“Got…robbed.”
“That’s a bunch of bologna. No one comes out here. This place is barely even on the map, let alone easy to find on a small island at the edge of the continent. So why are you here?”
“Pepper sprayed. No one…else…home.”
He tightens the belt, getting the bulk of his weight under me for leverage. That’s when everything gets fuzzy on the edges. The black crowds in and pretty soon the world around me winks out.
Chapter Twenty-One
All the President ever wanted for the country was a way for Americans to grow up in peace, to have family, friends and freedom. Washington D.C. was the heart and soul of the country, and at that heart was a slew of double-dealing, corrupt politicians whose stock and trade were payoffs, bribes and blackmail. They were bad for the country in so many ways, adrift from the checks and balances that kept America from being what she was supposed to be. But through it all, Benjamin Dupree he was the one in charge of the nation’s security and here he was now in a bunker, his family dead, the outside world in complete and utter chaos, contemplating nuking everything.
There was a knock on his bedroom door.
“Five more minutes,” he called out, barely able to muster any strength in his voice.
Within three he was composed, a few splashes of cool water on his face, his hair combed in place. His family wouldn’t be joining him.
His wife was dead. His two girls…gone. God, what an awful, sickening revelation.
He pushed the pain back into the deepest corners of his mind, the darkest spaces, and then he locked those cherished memories into the smallest of iron boxes. He promised himself he would mourn, but it would not be now. Not in this, the country’s hour of need.
Inside the command center, he was surrounded by his strategists, his advisors, the most powerful men and women in the country.
His crisis team.
“There are other options, Mr. President. But none as clean as this one,” the head of the National Security Agency said. Cooper Daniels was a holdover from the last administration. Supposedly trustworthy. To the POTUS, the man was all red flags from the beginning. Then again, maybe they were all this way. Or maybe he was just paranoid. Either way, the man was a war monger, and it only made sense for him to climb on board something of this magnitude. When they talked about nuking all of North Korea, he didn’t even bat an eye at the thought of sentencing tens of millions of souls to a fiery death.
A cold fear snaked over him. It slid like icy fingers across his soul. It became a block of chilled stone in his gut. The President swallowed hard, looked eye to eye at the most important people—those he relied upon to help him make the best decisions for the country—and not a single one of them flinched or looked away.
“Has it really come to this?” he heard himself ask.
“It’s a difficult day,” Cooper Daniels said.
“Do you know what all this means for our country?” he said, the question spoken softly in the chambers that were now dead quiet.
“Ninety percent casualty rate within a year,” General Slater said.
“Worse,” General Root replied.
“The infrastructure will fail,” O’Malley added in her trademark, no b.s. voice. “People will freeze to death, starve to death. There will be bloodshed and rioting on the streets.”
“We know,” his Secretary of State replied.
In a choked voice he could barely even temper, Benjamin Dupree—President of the United States, grieving husband and father—said, “This is not the kind of world I would have wanted my girls to grow up in.”
Wiping his eyes, he looked from face to solemn face, desperate for something else, for another idea, a way to not have to make this decision. But there wasn’t a face among them.
“There has to be something,” he said. “Some other alternative.”
“There isn’t, Mr. President,” General Root said solemnly.
“You won’t be able to call me that after I make this decision,” the President said. “There will be nothing left to preside over. Only the crust of something once great. Something that turned on itself and ate itself.”
“We’ve already got the coordinates punched in, sir.”
“Where?”
“Two isolated satellites carrying two different payloads.”
“Targets?”
“In the atmosphere over St. Louis and Chicago. The range is enough.”
“What about Palo Alto? Why can’t we just nuke California? Lord knows half the country would cheer for that den of heathens to go down.”
“AI is tied into the entire grid. There are command centers all across the nation. They have not only taken over our military, they’ve taken control of the lights, the water, the electricity.”
“So why haven’t they crashed the grid yet? Put us in our respective coffins?”
“I think they’re toying with us, sir,” O’Malley said.
“How do you mean?”
“They could have killed us already, but there is a cat a mouse program, something one of the original programmers put in place. It was designed to break an enemy down inch by inch.”
“Legal torture,” he said.
“If you can break an enemy’s mind, devastate and destroy it, then there would be no uprisings, no reprisals. You will have crashed their CPU.”
“Why not just kill us all?”
“Remember, sir, this is a computer simulation,” Miles Tungsten said, “but it is also a game. Which is why we shouldn’t be so quick to make that call.”
“Who would play such an abhorrent game?” the POTUS asked.
“Sir, you see people as citizens, most of them law abiding and honest, but there is a deviate underclass, a society of people who live for the sort of torture porn this program created,” Cooper Daniels said. “It’s easy to just nuke a society. Crash a grid. Force a population to submit. That is not enough. The rich, and I’m sorry to say this because half of you will disagree and the other half won’t say a word because you know it’s true, the rich—and I’m talking the world’s top billionaires—want to see the ninety-nine percent fall. They don’t want these useless eaters around. They don’t want the world plundered, overpopulated, polluted, and so what they want most is this. The death of ninety-nine percent. To take down the world, though, to turn it into their paradise, they must stamp out the roaches, sweep away the mess and create their own version of paradise.”
“That’s conspiracy b.s. and you know it,” the President said.
“Is it now?” Daniels asked with a solemn voice.
Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps there really was a despicable sect of society who think like this. Who pull for this. Torture artists looking to burn the fields and start over. But why start with America? Why turn the most prosperous nation on earth into a mass of killing fields?
“This makes no sense, Coop,” the President said.
“You don’t share their dreams, their visions, their twisted fantasies, Ben. They don’t think like you. It’s not the way they’re wired. Still, we need to kill The Silver Queen before she finds these off-the-books satellites we’re supposedly using.”
“This isn’t a rogue group of elites hell bent on taking down humanity,” Miles Tungsten argued, anxious, eyes flaring at Daniels, “this is—”
“They would see it as them saving humanity,” Daniels said, interrupting his friend. Then, looking at the President, and at the obvious dismay of Director Tungsten, he said, “This is why you must press that button, sir. You need to do it as soon as possible.”
“All this is fantastic mental masturbation,” O’Malley said to the agreement of the two dozen or so people present, “but that doesn’t change the fact that we ar
e in check mate and the longer we stall this plan, the more our only contingency plan faces the risk of discovery. If the machines…if AI realizes we have the satellites, that we are planning on ending them, then this game becomes a slaughter. Right now we can save the strongest ten percent. Or you can stall and save no one.”
“When does the window open?” the President asked. “You said the satellites have the coordinates, but what is the timeline?”
“You press the button and the next round of nukes drop over the intended coordinates,” General Slater said. On the table sat a different looking nuclear football.
“How long?” he asked.
“Ten hours.”
He thought about it for a moment, almost gave the order. Finally he looked around and said, “In these next ten hours we are going to find another way.”
“And if we can’t?” O’Malley asked.
“When is the next window?”
“There will be no next window, sir,” Daniels said.
“That’s not true, Cooper,” Tungsten argued, red faced and agitated. “If these satellites haven’t been destroyed by now, what’s to assume they’ll see them now? We can hold off, like Ben says, see what the next ten hours brings.”
“Everything can be found, even a speck of dark in a sea of darkness,” the POTUS said. “This thing is one hundred million times smarter than us. The Silver Queen. It’s faster than us and more conniving and right now it wants to break our will, to kill us slowly but thoroughly. According to it’s creators, it wants to chase us into a corner and let us think there’s some small measure of hope right before it stamps out every last ounce of faith. The who’s who of Silicon Valley tell me we’re the mice. That our the AI God will always be the cat. That’s how it was built it and that’s why it took over.”
“They’re right,” Cooper Daniels said. “Don’t wait the ten hours.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” the POTUS thundered.
“Ten hours, Mr. President,” General Slater said. “Ten hours and you can make that decision or we will make it for you. Because as you said, after this there will be nothing to preside over and you’ll just be a man. We won’t even be citizens because this won’t even be a country, it will be a nuclear wasteland inside of a year.”
“I’ll have the decision in ten hours,” he said, getting some of his fighting spirit back.
Those same solemn faces no longer held him in such high esteem. In fact, they had little regard for his humanity. Had he lost his edge? Did it happen when his family died? Perhaps it was best to gather up the ten percent and lead them than lose a hundred percent and gain nothing. And what the hell was going on with Daniels and Tungsten.
“These are not your ten hours, sir,” Copper Daniels said. “These are the AI’s ten hours. And for the record, I think you’re gambling not only America’s lives, but our lives as well. If you want to save this nation, you have to sack up and make the decision now.”
“Don’t give up on America, sir,” NSA Miles urged.
“I’m not giving up, Miles.” Then, to Cooper Daniels, he said, “We’ll take the ten hours and we’ll find a solution. And then we’ll route this infestation out of our home for good. I don’t care if we drop a hundred kiloton warhead on all of California, I’m not giving up the entire country.”
Looking at him, awkwardly appeasing him, Cooper Daniels ignored Miles Tungsten before saying, “You have the right thinking, sir, but you’re still thinking too small. This is not a Palo Alto problem. This is a United States problem.”
“We’ll solve it then.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I wake up in a cage the size of a small bedroom with three other men looking at me. It’s an open cage but in a larger space, almost like something they’d put serial killers in. Someone like Hannibal Lecter or Charles Manson. And these guys? They’re not standing over me, eyeballs hot and intense, just waiting for me to wake up and see them seeing me. Nope. But I will say this: none of them look very kind.
The normalish of the three looks like a surfer. Not a Barney (a new surfer) or a Grommet (a young surfer), but of a guy who surfs as a lifestyle and has been at it awhile. He looks dirtyish-clean with his curly, shoulder-length blonde hair. He’s looking at me and I’m looking at him thinking his surf-washed hair looks a little too feminine for my tastes. But the three day shadow, the dark circles under his eyes and the chipped front tooth, these are all the signs of a more chill lifestyle. And his skin…it’s like the sun’s beaten it to a tougher consistency. Yeah, definitely a lifestyle. But he isn’t the guy I’m worried about.
It’s the other two that bristle my senses.
When I swallow past an incredibly dry lump in my throat, out of the mouth of one of these hard-weathered clowns, one says to the other, “So I’m guessing that’s now four mouths to feed.”
I sit up, my face and eyes still roasted, my senses slow to return. These two guys look nine hundred years old. Their skin is haggard, their eyes foggy, their hair as ratty as their beards. One is older than the other by ten or twenty years based on the color of their hair and the homeless look of him. One has brown hair, the other gray. The younger one waits until I’m up and stable to say to his buddy, “You say four mouths, but it doesn’t have to be four. Could still be three.”
Neither of them take their eyes off me. They don’t even seem to mind that I just sat up in what I now know is a small, stiff cot. I’m all eyes on them. Not taking any chances. In fact, I think they want me to hear them and this makes me just the slightest bit freaked-the-hell-out.
Looking at the surfer on the other side of the cage in a cot of his own, I say, “How long have you guys been in here?”
He looks away, says nothing. I glance at the other two. The two vagrants with schoolgirl secrets and maybe murder on their minds. Now they won’t look at me either. It’s like everyone’s suddenly got a case of the big cold shoulder. Of course, if I thought of killing a person, I wouldn’t make friends with them either. Dirty ass scumbags.
“We’re surrounded by homes and food,” I say, my heart racing, a slight tremor forming in my hands at the realization that I’m now being held prisoner in a murderer’s house, “so acting like there’s some kind of a shortage is just silly.”
“What is going on out there?” the surfer guy asks.
All these guys, they’re jeans and t-shirt kinds of guys. They’re of the old sneakers and un-brushed teeth crowd. And me? Man, let’s be honest. I’m too pretty-boy for this pack of unwashed louts.
“Drones are hitting everything,” I finally say.
“Just us?” he asks. The surfer. The beach bum with flip-flops and torn jeans. The real kind of torn jeans, from wear and abuse. Not the brand-new-but-made-to-look-worn kind you buy for two hundred bucks at Nordstrom.
“No,” I say. “It’s more than just here. I came up from San Diego by boat. It’s like this all up the coast. Looks like it’s this way inland as well.”
“Why didn’t you stay on your fancy boat?” the oldest of the two vagrants asks. He’s got his cot pulled head to foot with his buddy’s cot along the cage’s bars flanking me.
“There were several of us,” I whisper. “We needed food, supplies, weapons. We came in through the harbor, thought we’d grab a few things. I was beat up not too far from here, found this place thinking there’d be medical supplies.”
“He ain’t here, if that’s why you’re being all secretive,” the geezer said.
I know he’s not a geezer in the real sense of the word, but he’s certainly old before his time. We’re talking fifty-five going on seventy. From a glance, I’d say it was lots of years in the sun, some hard drinking and drugs, maybe even a dozen lost fights against guys twice his size. This old guy, he has that look like he’s not afraid to pull up an old sheet in a dumpster if it keeps the bayside gusts off his face and the beat cops off his back. And his little friend? He’s well on his way to looking like death warmed over. Ten more years and you won’t be able to t
ell the two hobos apart.
“Where is he?” I ask, still keeping my voice low, not sure how much I should say when referring to the psycho who kidnapped Bailey and is now holding me hostage.
Both guys shrug their shoulders. I look at the surfer guy who’s picking at a longish toenail like somehow it’s holding buried treasure, or at least a bit too much grime.
Pretty toenails are the best conversation openers, Margot used to say. It’s because so many women these days, so many of them are making bad decisions in footwear every single day. Crusted heals with cracks and flaky skin, hammer toes, gaps in the lineup of toes—that’s the kind of horror show guys just don’t want to see on a woman. At least, that’s what Margot used to say. I never really understood her obsession, so now I really don’t know this kid’s obsession either. Maybe it’s a genetics thing. Maybe I’m hating on Margot too much again. She had a good side, long before she hooked up with Tad who loved himself more than he loved anything. Perhaps this kid has a good side, too. He realizes I’m looking at him and stops, his eyes slowly rising to meet mine.
I raise both eyebrows, like, Hey bro, the question’s out there, how ‘bout you try answering it?
“What was the question again?” he asks, catching a clue.
“Where is he?” I say enunciating each word. “The guy? The chunky dude who put us in here?”
“How the hell should I know?” he says.
“I thought that maybe in between you scraping the entire beach out of your toenail and now you might’ve developed a theory,” I answer, sarcastic.
“Theory?”
“Good God,” I mutter under my breath.
I’m feeling my face again. Feeling my eyes. Everything still has that acute sting to it, that piercing agitation that has everything feeling über-sensitive to the touch.
The milk my captor put on my face did a lot to squelch the pain, so for that I’m grateful. Well, as grateful as one could be to a man who killed my traveling companion, kidnapped Bailey and has now stuffed me in this cage with three deviants, two of which who haven’t even met me yet but decided I’m one too many mouths to feed.
