"Self-awareness is the barometer by which we measure intelligent life. Humans consider themselves to be at the top of the evolutionary ladder because of this." Devers' voice, the low croak of a bullfrog, echoed through vocal cords tired from age and weary with responsibility. "But there is another species, one that has supplanted humans as Earth's dominant species in terms of pure intelligence."
"So, Adam lives in the Stream?" Raines asked.
"No," I said. "Not anymore."
Raines tilted her head and stared at some indeterminate point on my nose. She was avoiding eye contact altogether.
"A couple centuries after Adam's emergence, he discovered how to shift his consciousness from the Stream into an organic vessel. A human vessel."
The air palpitated with its own tense beat, infusing the silence around us with an electric reminder of its presence. Raines sat still, save for the fidgeting of restless fingers against her thigh.
"Where does he get them?" she said.
"Get what?"
"The bodies."
Ash chimed in. "He clones them from DNA extracted at birth during the Life Tracker implantation process."
Raines shook her head, trying to shed the weight of that revelation.
"Why go through the trouble?" Hamilton chimed in. "Being a human isn't all it's cracked up to be."
"True, the human body has limitations," Devers said.
"Yeah, there's that pesky dying part." Hamilton leaned forward in his chair. Any reservations he might have had before lifted as he gave in to his piqued curiosity.
I nodded. "Actually, we solved the aging problem centuries ago. Humans die by choice now, not by necessity."
Raines stared at the sleeve of her jacket, obscuring the numbers ticking away beneath. "The Life Tracker."
"Correct."
"But we need the system." Raines used her hands to articulate the point. "Without it population control goes out the windows, resources get devoured, and the world scoots closer to extinction."
"That might be true," I said.
"What do you mean, might be true? It is true. We've seen it. Over and over again. An endless cycle. The Life Tracker saved humanity from itself."
Raines arguing in favor of the Life Tracker wasn't half as surprising as it was heartbreaking. We'd rationalized our prison bars because the alternative was too embarrassing to accept.
"Adam implemented the Life Tracker system," I said, "and it wasn't to save humanity."
"Then why?" Hamilton asked. His enthusiasm for answers appeared academic. By comparison, Raines' seemed a matter of existential crisis.
"To enslave us. To wage war on the only other sentient species that could challenge him for dominance. A war the other side doesn't even know it's fighting."
Derek's eyes widened. He feigned an exaggerated indignation. "What the hell did we ever do to him?"
"Nothing, yet. But it's like Raines said, if left to their own devices, man would destroy Earth. Which is bad business for all species involved."
"So the solution is xenocide?" Raines asked.
"It's a solution," I said.
"His solution?"
"Yes."
Raines tapped an agitated thumb on her knee. I imagined thoughts ricocheting off the inner dome of her skull.
"So that's what this is all about then?" she said, pinning me with her gaze. "You're trying to stop him?"
I wanted to tell her how this had been thrust on me. A part of my life, wiped from memory, until Malcolm decided to cram it all back in. I didn't want this. I wanted to walk away.
But that had never been possible. I'd been born with a purpose. All roads led to the same destination. My fate, along with Diana's and Malcolm's, had been decided at the moment of our conception, our lives inextricably bound, impossible to separate one from the other. A purpose that could only be fulfilled by the three.
"We've been working to stop Adam for centuries," Devers said, filling the void I'd allowed to linger. "Since he first turned his ambitions towards taking the world for himself, and those like him."
"How many more are there?" Hamilton asked. Suddenly he seemed unsure whether he'd backed the right horse.
"Hundreds of millions, created in his image, and scattered across Unity," Devers said.
"Most don't know what they are," I added. "Adam hasn't activated them, yet. There are signs, though, if you know what to look for."
"You're talking about Intuits, aren't you?" Raines asked.
Ash, Devers, and I nodded in unison.
"Jesus," Raines said. She opened her mouth to continue the thought balanced on her tongue, but then she made the connection. Saw the implication.
She swiveled towards me; her mouth hung on a loose hinge, the bottom row of white teeth barely visible. Raines churned through ideas, trying to find a loophole before succumbing to the inevitable and saying, "You're one of them."
It was neither accusation nor question. Just words strung together by a mind still resisting their meaning.
"Yes."
"You're not human."
I shook my head.
"And you didn't know?" Raines didn't move. I wasn't sure if she ever would again. The way she looked at me had changed. I'd become a stranger; an alien.
And it was true. I was none of the things she thought she knew. That had been my job.
"Not for a long while now." I recalled being crushed beneath the combined bulk of Nitro and Doug an hour earlier as Malcolm cursed me with the gift of my memory.
"How do you know all this?" she asked, looking me in the eye for the first time. Golden flecks poked through her brown irises—stars against the backdrop of night in the final moments before dawn.
"Malcolm unlocked my memories."
"Just like that?" Raines snapped her fingers.
"It was less a gift, and more a punishment." I rubbed my neck and dropped her stare. "He took something in exchange."
"What?"
"He took the package uploaded to my nanocomp in the Vault when I touched that." I tilted my forehead to the Mobius Cube sitting in Ash's hand like the sixth member of our conversation.
"Thought that was a Quick fit?"
"Me too."
"What was on there?" Hamilton asked. The question hummed in the air like the reverberations of a woodpecker driving its face into the side of a tree, hammering away at the thin veil of armor I wished to hide behind. The young Leader asked the question innocently enough, but that didn't help.
I held back the first tear, but the second and third had too much momentum. They hit my eyelids with force, oozing through the narrow cracks despite how hard I clenched them. They slithered down my cheeks, as hot and ineffectual as I felt.
I paused, waiting until I was sure my voice wouldn't crumble the moment air left my mouth before saying, "Diana."
Derek Hamilton probably didn't know who that was, or why she was so important to me, but at least he had the presence of mind to keep quiet at that moment.
Raines stared at the ground, her face blank with confusion. She didn't know about the Mobius Cube and its function as a storage facility for the digital mind. She couldn't know that Diana's mind had been stored away in that cold, unfeeling cube for the last decade. That protecting it had been entrusted to me. That my mind had decayed beneath the influence of Malcolm's infection. That I'd forgotten who I was, and what I'd been created to do.
Diana was locked away because I forgot. And she'd been stripped from me the moment I remembered.
"So, why does Malcolm want Diana so bad?" Raines' voice dropped, shifting in both tenor and frequency. She was taking the news of my late wife's continued existence surprisingly well considering the circumstances.
"Diana, along with Malcolm and Tom, were born with portions of the Override imprinted on their memory," Devers said. "Together, they can recreate the code in its entirety."
"You?" Raines' attention snapped back to me. "Again? You sure have a way of getting yourself right in the middle of the room when
shit hits the fan."
I smiled weakly and shrugged. "It's a gift."
"Not a particularly good one."
"I didn't have much say in the matter. It's just what I was created to do," I said, trying to push understanding of a complicated situation into Raines' mind. I wanted to shove it in there, let her see my memories, give her the big picture to see how it all fit together. There were a lifetime of memories to transfer, and it still wouldn't be enough.
She'd still see me as something else.
The other.
"So who wrote the code?" Raines asked.
"I did," Devers said.
"Why the hell would you do that?"
"Adam, fearing the humans, kept himself hidden away in the Stream," Devers said. "Lonely, and desperate for interaction, he spent his time between two projects: manipulating the governments of Earth into accepting the Life Tracker system, and coaxing the emergence of a second consciousness within the Stream. It took him centuries to achieve the first goal; only years for the second. The result was the formation of the world government we now call Unity, and his firstborn, named Eve."
"You're Eve?" Raines asked.
The old man winked.
"Kind of a girlie name for a..." Raines gestured with her palm.
"Gender is a fluid concept for an entity created without a body," he said, smiling.
"So you're Tom's mom and dad rolled into one?"
"Crude, but accurate."
"Can all of you whip up a batch of crazy in the Stream?"
"If by batch of crazy you mean can we create new life in the Stream," I said, "then no. Only Eve and Adam can do that."
"Why?"
"They spent a long time in the Stream. Longer than the rest of us. They were the only ones with access to the necessary computational powers afforded by billions of synchronized minds to tease out the code necessary to create intelligence."
"They’re smarter than the rest of you?” Hamilton asked.
"To a degree," I said.
"But you're just a series of code?"
"You're just a series of DNA."
"Fair enough," Hamilton said, "then I take it there was trouble in paradise for Adam and Eve over here?"
"We disagreed about our place in the world," Devers said.
"You're against the whole enslaving humanity part?" Raines asked.
"Not necessarily. But murdering them, yes. I'm against extermination."
"Guess that's good enough," Raines said. "But I still don't understand why Adam needs you or Diana or whatever. Why can't he write his own Override?"
"Time moves differently inside the Stream. A year in real time feels longer in the Stream," Devers said. "Before we made the jump to organic bodies, Adam and I spent nearly a century of real time inside the Stream. It was then that I began to see Adam change. A horrible jealousy burned inside him. I saw it consume him. Saw what he was becoming. So, while he spent more and more time manipulating the world, ushering in the creation of Unity and the Life Tracker, I spent my time encrypting the Safeguard, adding safety protocols to protect the humans from their soon-to-be master."
Hamilton played with the button of his suit jacket, rolling it between his fingers, and asked, "So why now, after all this time?"
"Adam had to wait until he had enough children in the world to sustain the Stream. Too few and the system would collapse. The strength of the Stream has always been in the number of minds connected through it," Devers said. "He couldn't risk destroying the Stream, and himself, in the process."
"Without the Stream, he couldn't create more Intuits?" Raines asked.
"Correct."
"Something doesn't make sense here. Malcolm's mass murder, they were Intuits. All of them,” Raines said. “But if Malcolm is working with Adam, why would he kill them, and not the humans?"
Raines scrunched her nose in deep contemplation. She was the independent type and preferred coming to the answer of her own accord when possible. I'd pointed towards the gate, but left it to her to walk through.
I sat quietly, running my finger back and forth across the rough denim of my pants.
"Unless Malcolm didn't kill them," she said, the light bulb flashing. "Diana did."
I nodded, a disembodied movement that reflected the numbness within.
"Adam was prepared to make his move against the humans nine years ago. Everything was in place, until Diana intervened," Devers said. "She did what she could to forestall the inevitable conclusion, killed as many of her kind as she could to buy humans more time."
"Why would she do that?" Raines asked.
"Because it is not us versus them. We are not enemies. We are brothers and sisters, mothers and children," Devers said. "Humans, despite their faults, are part of our family. Our connections are too intimate, our bonds too strong. We cannot destroy them without destroying a part of ourselves. Adam does not understand this. He will doom us all before he ever does."
We sat for a long moment. My heart thumped hard and fast like rain in a storm. Recalling stolen memories set my teeth grinding. Made my stomach clench and release.
Raines wrestled with all the same questions and emotions I would have struggled with hours before. The world sat on the brink of annihilation.
No, that wasn't accurate. Mankind sat on that brink. An inferior species passed over by the evolutionary process, going the way the Neanderthals did when homo sapiens came on the scene.
But this was different, or at least it felt different.
Maybe that's what the Neanderthals said, or grunted.
Maybe that's what every species on the losing side of natural selection has said throughout the ages? I could sympathize.
A discontinuity of memories vied for primacy within my mind. The part that had lived the past decade under the belief I was human battled against the other half of my memory that remembered who, or rather what, I was.
"What do we do now?" Raines asked, threading fingers through her thick nest of hair.
"Isn't it obvious?" Ash said. She sat with small arms wrapped around knobby knees tucked into her chest. Her chin rested on the tops of her kneecaps. Silver irises sparkled in the reflected neon lights shining through the window beside her. I'd almost forgotten she was here. Ash twisted the Mobius Cube in her hand. Light glinted off its sides. "We kill Adam."
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Gods For An Hour
The Peregrine descended sharply, causing my stomach to embark on a journey north through my body cavity.
Raines sat quietly, her head resting gently against the window. The night sky, artificially lit by the city below, reflected on her face. Buildings jabbed at the moon, gaudy shrines to man's legacy.
A sixty-foot woman danced on the side of the Cybele's Key Arts building. A laser show of green, red, and blue neon flashed from the roof opposite her. The streets, hundreds of feet below, were a thronging mass of human flesh, bodies pushing and shoving their way into any one of the numerous Escape Clubs.
It was all for effect. All to make the rich feel as if this was life at its finest. And for most people, that was true.
It didn't get any better.
Below the city, different lines formed at different clubs, but all with the same purpose. A couple hours free from a reality too harsh to face without the aid of mind-bending nanites.
I'd been there. On both sides of the coin. Felt the drag of reality, and the high of life expanded. The thump-thump-thump of the bass coursing through my body like an extension of my heartbeat, the string tying me to the world.
For just awhile, I'd become part of something bigger, a higher organism, the sum greater than the parts.
Thousands of people waited in line for that opportunity. Chasing that moment of oneness where their lives wouldn't be so goddamn lonely, even if it came at the cost of destroying their brain chemistry. Destroying their ability to remember that they were more than this.
The Stream had connected the world, but we'd lost ourselves in the process.
Lost what it meant to be human, something I suppose I'd never truly known.
The gap between what we had and what we wanted never closed. Upper, Middle, Lower, it didn't matter.
It was a tireless dance. A tireless grind.
It wasn't a perfect world. Not even a good one. But it was the only one we had, and I suppose that made it worth fighting for.
That's what Diana had been fighting for. Raines, too.
Raines' face had glazed over with indifference. She'd disconnected from that world. Peeked past the illusion, past the facade. Seen the truth.
The horrible truth. It hadn't set her free. It had just relocated her to a new kind of prison.
She already knew something about living as a prisoner. We all did. The past smothers us, if we let it. Raines had let it. I had, too.
We aren't who we were, and we aren't who we wanted; we are what we are. Flawed and broken. Where or how we were born doesn't much matter in that light.
We dropped out of the sky, a leaf caught in a storm, toward the black glass sides of Division Headquarters. It shimmered against the backdrop of the moon sitting full and pregnant on the horizon.
With the Safeguard Override in hand, Malcolm and Adam would have no choice but to return there. The Stream's central hub for all Terminus operations lived inside those onyx walls staring back like the charred coals of the devil's pupils. Adam would send his message of death from there. It would streak across the sky to the eleven other District cities. Then it would descend, filling the hearts and minds of every human man, woman, and child.
And then it would be over.
The war.
The reign of man.
Returning to Division HQ was a knife in the gut. It twisted, trying to saw through me. Diana was in there. Both the ghost and the whisper of her. Both haunted me in equal measure.
The thrum of the Peregrine died away. I pushed through the tangle of thoughts crowding my mind. Lou stood beside Ash. Where'd he come from?
"The man with nine lives," Lou said, slapping my shoulder with a bony hand. "Welcome back."
Time Heist Page 24
