by Ron Collins
CHAPTER 36
An instant after the explosion, trillions of bytes began to transfer to the core communications center, which then relayed them into pubic space. Comm channels connected, information passed through personal identifiers.
Around the world, processing cortices in thousands and thousands of people — some sleeping, some eating with their families, gaming, entertaining, some working on new stories, or building a piece of furniture for their kids, some picking on each other, joking, trying to one-up the one-uppers, some making love, others skiing gently down slopes — thousands and thousands of people received a gift of themselves that unwrapped inside their minds and took hold once again.
When it was done, the initiator ran a final stage, destroying itself from code space.
In a small house in Los Angeles, two rebels shared champagne.
CHAPTER 37
Standing in the hallway, facing the flashing doc bot and the nurse, Kinji felt the full weight of Bexie Montgomery go dead.
At the same the ceiling lights pulsed once, dark to light, before blasting into a blinding white. As one, they shattered, exploding into clouds of glittering crystal that left the hallway in pitch dark.
Her TS died, then flickered back to life.
Emergency lights flickered.
A warning blared.
She saw the nurse running. The bot lay cold on the floor.
“Come on!” she screamed at Bexie, hauling him, pushing him, dragging him hard down the hall. He was heavy, though. Too heavy. Her back strained. His weight slipped farther from her.
She found stairs and dragged him further, holding him now only by the shoulder.
Sound of feet running down the hall came from the facility.
Voices calling about downloads.
“Emergency Protocol Red,” a voice called out in her TS.
“Get up, Bexie!” she screamed as she pulled him down the steps. “Get the goddamned hell up!”
His arm slipped out of her grip and he slid down several stairs.
Kinji cursed.
Tears started to form.
“I can’t do this alone!”
As she bent, a bout of vertigo hit. Her stomach felt like it was going to back up, and she fell to her knees. Her TS flashed, and a burst of adrenaline made her choke. She was free. “Oh, shit,” she said, a shiver of understanding making her freeze up.
Kinji crawled to Bexie’s side.
“What did you do, Bex? What did you do?”
But the slack expression on his face, the lack of response to prodding in TS, and the realization that she felt suddenly unencumbered was all she needed to understand where Bexie was and what he’d done.
Yes, she thought, recalling the fervor of his questioning about the CIO. If there was someone who could find a gateway to the Central Inspector, she wasn’t surprised it was Bexie Montgomery.
And, yes, she was free.
Totally free.
She could feel the difference.
She wanted to laugh but couldn’t. Wanted to scream but wouldn’t.
Even me, she thought. Kinji Hall, defender of expression. A worm of anger grew inside. She’d been cut, and never even been aware.
Hurried steps came from the stairwell below. Security, she thought. Her heart spiked.
No. No. A wall of anger built inside her.
She wouldn’t let Bexie end like this.
She stood up, taller and bolder. She pulled on her TS, formed a message, and made an open invitation. “If you’re going to take me, everyone’s going to see it for what it is,” she screamed. Her fists clenched. Her jaw set.
At last the footsteps made it to her level.
“What are you waiting for, sweetie? Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Kinji burst into tears.
It was Tania.
CHAPTER 38
Two strides from the elevator door, the ductwork behind him flashed in brilliant orange. The pressure wave lifted Maine into free air, his feet still churning, his arms flailing free.
His shoulder slammed the corner of the door. His hip. Spinning. Falling. Opposite knee crammed into hard steel.
The heat wave was next.
Intense. Burning, but without flame. Thank God, thank God, thank God.
Then he was falling.
His torso spun. His hand reached a rung but slipped.
Glass, he thought.
Steel pit.
Broken concrete.
He fell further. The light on his forehead flickered off ladder rungs and the lone cable that fell from above. He grabbed at it. Pain. Hands. Flayed. Back burned. Still falling. Tumbling now.
The light fell from his head to tumble down faster than him.
His foot crashed into the wall, rebounded from a rung. His back, the shirt burned from him now.
With one last gasp, Maine reached a hand out.
Caught a rung.
Held. Held. Shoulder wrenching in pain. Body crashing hard into brick. Fingers bloody. Slipping. Falling again but grabbing another rung with the other hand.
Gasping for air. Gasping. For.
Holding onto the rung as tightly as he’d ever held to anything in his life, Maine Parker scrabbled a foot to take a hold. He looked down. Three meters below, maybe four, his headlight had landed, and cast harsh shadows on the pile.
“Babe?”
The voice was distant in his TS, but certain.
“Beatrice,” he replied.
CODA
Later, measured here in fractions of fractions, sitting in a field of pure light, elements of thought coalesce. Pieces of something that was once a human, that once made the human, but are now separate. Fragments of idea. Bits of emotion. Opinion. They clutch together, absorb into the nothingness and into the everything-ness that is and was and forever shall be the Central Inspector.
The body of Bexie Montgomery lay somewhere.
Far away or maybe near.
There is no space in the Central Inspector’s Office, only time and ideas, requests and responses.
Bexie feels that sense of now as he removes his oneness from the smoldering core of proto mass. As the smell of ash fills time around him he sees the Central Inspector for exactly what it is.
“We can’t change things,” he says. “Can’t protect them from who they are.”
“You do not understand them as I do.”
Bexie feels the lobe pulsing. Electrons twirl and spiral, hiss a song of infinite permanence as they build in his thoughts. Somewhere in the song he understands a truth. Somewhere is the essence of power. What it means to be so human, to be so fixed on keeping each other from winning that he missed the obvious.
“No. I will never understand who we are,” he says. Somewhere in the portions of his thought that are leeching away, he feels another truth, though. “It is our nature to avoid seeing what we don’t want to see.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my daughter, Brigid, for helping me get this book into shape, and her always fantastic thoughts on various story and design. Thanks to Sharon Bass, a beta reader who went above and beyond the call.
Thanks to my writing buddy, Lisa Silverthorne for being there from the beginning. Without her writing along with me, this one would have never existed.
And thanks, too, of course, to Lisa, for being there, and for all of the everything elses.
ABOUT RON COLLINS
Ron Collins is an Amazon best-selling Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction. You can find his work and all major online retailers. With his daughter, Brigid, he is also editing anthologies in the Fiction River series.
His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award. His short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.
He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all
to write full-time–which he now does from his home in the shadows of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
Discover other work by Ron Collins at:
Amazon.com
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Follow Ron at:
http://www.typosphere.com
Twitter: @roncollins13
