by Nick Cook
‘Make it five hundred volts this time,’ he said.
‘But that will kill the subject,’ the woman operating the controls replied.
‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and it will loosen its tongue long enough for us to get something useful.’
The woman scowled as she adjusted a dial and the machine emitted a loud humming sound. Fresh crackles of energy erupted from the electrodes and poured straight into the alien’s skull.
A new feeling began to radiate from the Grey, swamping my thoughts. There was anguish, yes, but also something else. I could feel that the Grey wasn’t angry or even afraid. In fact, more than anything there was a sense of disappointment and even sadness transmitting from him. Then a new image appeared…of me shooting the Grey.
But I can’t…
I heard a single word in a strange wavering voice that was not my own.
Please…
I just can’t! I replied.
Then I’m so very sorry, the alien voice said in my head.
My hand started to raise the Empyrean Key by itself. I tried to fight it, but my wrist flicked forward and activated the particle icon. The shimmering lab became solid around me. I pocketed the Empyrean Key, still powerless to stop my actions, and took out my LRS.
I knew where this was going and I gritted my teeth, trying to force my hand to put the pistol back in its holster. But the alien was in charge of my body now, my hand not obeying me as it raised the pistol.
The Grey turned towards me as tears ran down my face. Thoughts of warmth and understanding, love even, flooded my mind. I knew in that instant that this alien, his whole species, cared deeply about all of humanity – despite what the people in this room were doing to him.
My tears almost blinding me, my hand raised the LRS at his skull.
A tingle ran down my spine at the sound of a pistol being cocked behind me.
I spun round, suddenly in control of my body again, to see Alvarez pointing a pistol straight at my head. Cristina was standing next to him, an orb similar to the Empyrean Key in her hand, but made from plastic not stone.
‘Oh, two can play at your game, bitch,’ she said.
I spun, my training reflex kicking in. I pivoted back on to my left foot and just managed to duck as Alvarez’s bullet hissed over my head and I heard something metallic being struck behind me.
‘One of the oxygen tanks has been hit,’ someone shouted. ‘Get the hell out of here!’
Everybody started racing for the door with shouts and cries, Alvarez dragging Cristina away as she snarled at me. I turned round to see the Grey still staring directly at me, his body continuing to jerk as electricity poured into his skull.
Once again I lost control of my own hand. The LRS aimed itself at the alien. And then I – no, he – fired. A bullet hole appeared in the Grey’s forehead.
As his head dropped back on to the gurney, a single thought replaced the agony of a moment before… Thank you, Lauren Stelleck. And then the thought faded to silence as he died.
I stood there for a second, the pistol in my hand now hanging by my side. Gas was venting the bullet hole in the oxygen cylinder with a steady hiss. I tore my gaze away to the electrodes still sparking each side of the Grey’s head.
My survival instinct kicked in and I dived back behind the equipment rack, striking the tuning fork against the Empyrean Key as I landed. This time just a single icon flickered into display – the star-shaped one for E8.
I managed to flick my wrist forward as a whoosh came from the middle of the room and a bright fireball rushed out as the oxygen tank detonated. I felt the wash of heat over my skin as a rack toppled towards me. Then it and the room vanished as I was pulled out of the particle world into a higher level of reality.
Chapter Twenty-Four
For a moment I couldn’t quite understand where I now found myself. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t the cold vacuum of empty space in E8. I wouldn’t have lasted there for long without any air to breathe. I would have been immediately forced to return to the lab and take my chances that the explosion blast wave had passed. I began to take in my surroundings – whatever this place was, it was like nothing like anything that Lucy had ever conjured up for us before in E8.
I was standing on a mountain and around me were a ring of dome-shaped summits. But I only had a split second to take the scene in before a wind screamed into me. I crouched behind the lee of a stone wall to shelter from the sudden howling storm.
Overhead, storm clouds materialised in what had been an inky blackness. They scudded and flickered with a strobing electrical storm without any rain, illuminating the darkness with spotlight bursts. Every so often a blinding zigzag of lightning crackled down from the sky to earth itself on one of the surrounding peaks.
OK, what was going on?
This specific location had obviously been conjured up by the captured micro mind. But why something like this and not a tropical paradise like Lucy sometimes favoured? If the feel of this place was anything to go by, the micro mind that had created it seriously needed some counselling. But I realised there was something distinctly familiar about the bulbous mountain ranges. When I glanced up the slope suddenly everything fell into place.
The jagged shapes of the Inca site of Machu Picchu were silhouetted against the stormy sky above me.
This location had to be everything to do with Cristina. With me, Lucy had conjured up my aunt’s old rooms at Christchurch College in Oxford, somewhere I felt immediately comfortable. But for Cristina the micro mind had created a version of somewhere familiar to her. The implications of that were huge – the Overseers had obviously finally realised what someone with an audible-based synaesthesia condition could do. And they must have put two and two together about the significance of the stone orb they’d previously seen me with. Maybe they’d 3D-printed the facsimile I’d seen Cristina carrying. It was obvious, just based on the fact that this place existed at all, that she’d learnt to control the micro mind just as I had. And the consequences of that could be bad – very bad.
I drew in a lungful of the hot and sticky air that was already making my coveralls cling to my body and I glanced down the mountain, but I couldn’t see any sign of lights of the town below. Maybe this simulation didn’t run that far? But the real question was what I going to do next? Wait for the fires back in the lab to die down, then return and take my chances?
A slight flicker of light drew my attention to one of the buildings above me. It was the Solar Observatory, the same building that Professor Evelyn Fischer had blown up back in the particle world to expose the hidden tunnel beneath it, which led down to the underground city of the dead. But here in this alternate reality the whole building looked very much restored. Was that significant?
The orange flicker of light in its window shone like a beacon in the darkness. Maybe I would find more answers up there? Certainly being inside the Solar Observatory was preferable to being stuck outside during a lightning storm in the mountains.
The wind howled across the slope as I leant into it and began my ascent. The gale screamed louder, turning small bits of gravel into projectiles that peppered my body with stinging pinpricks of pain.
With a blast of noise and thunder a lightning bolt lanced from the sky to strike the ground only a few hundred metres further down the slope, close enough to leave my ears ringing. But it was the second bolt that smashed into the mountain even closer that woke me up to what was happening here.
This wasn’t a natural thunderstorm. It was as if this whole place had been built with some sort of intent and every sense told me that intent was to kill me. Cristina had to have everything to do with that.
I did my best to run up the slope into the battering wind as it did its best to sweep me back down the mountain. I drove myself forward, fighting for every step until I made it to a stone staircase at the edge of the site. I stumbled up them as another crack of lightning hit, this time splintering a rock. I glanced back and any doubts that I was the intended
target were swept away when I saw the rubble from the bottom steps I’d only just climbed. They were being whipped away down the slope in a cloud of falling debris.
I raced to the top of the steps and dived left along a passageway between two buildings sheltered partly from the wind. The sky rumbled again and again, as the AI equivalent of Zeus launched almost continuous lightning bolts at me.
I weaved through the Inca site, my feet slipping on the rocks, drawing closer to the Solar Observatory and its glowing light.
The wind was now a full no-messing hurricane. As I left the cover of the stone buildings to reach a plateau, it roared around me, making my grey coveralls vibrate like a flag in the wind. I raced across the open area and ducked down an avenue between buildings, the Solar Observatory only twenty metres ahead of me now.
I sprinted straight towards its door as the sky blazed with sheet lightning. I was certain the next strike would leave nothing of me behind but a pair of smouldering boots on the mountain. My heart slamming in my chest, I finally leapt through the doorway into the small stone building. The roar of the storm fell instantly silent.
Disorientation slammed into me. Rather than the stone interior of the Solar Observatory, I found myself standing in Cristina’s apartment back in Aguas Calientes in Peru. But this wasn’t a personalised version of her home, filled with happy memories, but a twisted, darker version. Furniture had been tipped over, papers thrown everywhere, the small kitchen wrecked. This looked like the last time I’d seen it – after Villca, the chief of police, and his sidekick had ransacked it. They’d been looking for Cristina’s drawings about the symbol she’d seen with her own synaesthesia ability at the Solar Temple at Machu Pichu and had then abducted her.
But why had the AI in the micro mind recreated such an awful moment in Cristina’s life? Maybe there was clue here somewhere.
To one side of the room was a short corridor, and I could see a bathroom through a doorway. Straight ahead was a closed bedroom door. I moved towards it with a dark sense of foreboding building inside me, not helped by the strong stench of something decaying now pulling at my nose.
I opened the door and gasped as my eyes locked on to the two figures on the bed.
Gabriel, Cristina’s husband, was curled round their baby boy, the skin of both grey with death. I didn’t want to see the awful details, but my eyes wouldn’t look away. Gabriel’s back was riddled with bullet holes, with dried rivulets of blood running from them. The blood had soaked the sheet beneath to black. Flies skittered over the faces of Gabriel and the baby.
Nausea rushed up through me and I backed out of the room. I tore to the bathroom and vomited into the bowl of the toilet. Why, when I knew this awful nightmare had never actually happened?
I wiped the last of the sick from my mouth with some toilet paper and took a shuddering breath. It was then that I noticed a red light beginning to pulse behind me.
I turned slowly to see the glowing red micro mind I’d seen in the lab now floating in the corridor, a sense of malevolence radiating from it that electrified my senses. This thing certainly wasn’t anything like the cheerful Lucy avatar who had welcomed me on my first visit to E8.
I desperately needed answers and raised my head to it. ‘Why are you showing me this? This never happened.’
The micro mind just hung there, the ruby light pulsing slowly deep within it. Somehow its silence was even more terrifying than if it had actually spoken.
‘OK, so you obviously made this for Cristina, but why?’
‘As though you don’t know,’ Cristina’s voice replied from the next room, her tone like brittle glass.
The tetrahedron dissolved into the air and disappeared.
I felt beads of sweat pop over my forehead as utter dread swept through me. I stepped forward and turned into the main room.
Cristina was sitting on the sofa waiting for me. She was holding a pistol aimed at my chest and had the plastic version of the Empyrean Key in her lap. It was only then that I realised that everything I’d been carrying, including my LRS and stone orb, had vanished.
I raised my hands. ‘What is this, Cristina?’
‘You mean you don’t recognise your own handiwork in my home, Stelleck?’
I tightened my gaze on her. ‘What you mean?’
She shook her head at me. ‘Don’t play innocent with me. I brought you back to the scene of your crime.’
‘I promise you that whatever you think you know is wrong.’ I gestured towards the bedroom. ‘And that never happened.’
Cristina glowered at me, her eyes thin slits. ‘Even now you can’t face the evil that lives in your own heart.’
I took a half-step towards her, but Cristina tightened her grip on the trigger.
I stopped dead again. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been shown, but this is a lie,’ I whispered. ‘Please think this through, Cristina. You were abducted by Villca. He was the one who ransacked your house looking for your drawings. You must remember that?’
‘Yes, and maybe that part is true, but, as Colonel Alvarez told me, that action also saved my life from the terrorists who then turned up and murdered my family.’
I held up my hands. ‘Whoa there, Cristina. That’s not what happened. Can’t you see that Alvarez has been lying to you?’
She let out a hollow laugh. ‘Lying? I saw the photos of how you butchered Gabriel and my beautiful son. You even killed my cousin, Ricardo. And now I’m going to make you pay for everything you did.’
‘But, Cristina, your husband and child are still alive. And it was Villca who murdered Ricardo.’
Cristina’s eyes blazed and she clenched her jaw. ‘Liar!’ She raised her gun towards my head.
I knew in that second that this was only going one way. Electricity hummed through my nerves, preparing me for action. I took rapid breaths to fill my lungs with oxygen.
I took in the window beyond Cristina and once again all my endless combat training with Niki kicked in. Almost on autopilot I dropped to the floor, sweeping my foot out at Cristina’s ankles to hook them away, toppling her sideways. Her pistol went off with a crack and punched a bullet hole through the ceiling. But Cristina twisted away from me on the ground, bringing her weapon back round for a second shot.
My eyes snapped to the window. Even though part of my brain registered that her apartment had been on the third floor, I still leapt towards it. It was my only chance.
A bullet ricocheted off the window frame as I brought my hands up to protect my head and crashed through the glass.
My mind stuttered when I found myself back outside the Solar Observatory, lying on the ground, not falling from the third-storey window. The thunderstorm still crackled overhead.
It was only a brief reprise as Cristina came bursting from the doorway, her pistol aimed towards me. I rolled sideways as a bullet ricocheted off the stone floor.
Pure survival instinct kicked in and I was back on my feet and sprinting away through a passageway between the buildings. There was another crack of a bullet and stone splinters flew out from the wall less than a metre from my head.
I glanced back to see Cristina running after me, her features contorted into absolute hatred for the woman she thought had murdered her family. There was no way I would be able to talk her down before she put a bullet in my head.
Cristina screamed at me, a cry of animal fury, and the storm seemed to answer her. Thunder roared all around us, lightning crackling down over the ancient Inca site. My stomach was a hard ball, my lungs burning, as I sprinted flat out towards the end of the passageway, opening up some distance between us as I turned a corner. I dived on to the steps covered with boulders and small stones from the earlier strike. Cristina would be on top of me in seconds.
I grabbed a rock the size of a tennis ball and drew my arm back. As Cristina rounded the corner, I swung it towards her head with full strength. Cristina tried to turn, but the rock smashed into her temple anyway, the impact sending a sickening jar up my arm. As she l
urched into the opposite wall and slumped to the ground, her pistol skittered away.
Blood trickled down her face as Cristina turned, her eyes burning into mine. ‘I don’t care what it costs me – it’s time to die, bitch!’ She raised her arms in the air.
In the sky directly overhead a glow of brilliance started to flicker in the clouds, growing stronger fast. I could almost taste the static charge building in the air.
Cristina screamed, her body shaking like some mad Inca priestess summoning the sky gods. And then those gods answered her.
I just had time to leap away as a massive lightning bolt came streaking straight towards us. With a roar the buildings around us exploded. The world spun, white light blinding me, a concussion wave slamming into me like a giant’s fist. Rocks pounded my body as I was thrown over a low wall. I crashed on the far side as a choking cloud of debris rained down on me.
My ears sang with a high-pitched whistle and I tasted something metallic in my mouth. I spat out the blood from where I’d bitten down on my tongue.
The dust began to settle and wooziness rolled through me as I staggered back to my feet, my brain throbbing inside my skull. All that remained of the blast area – where there had been buildings a moment ago – was a huge pile of rubble. Cristina was nowhere to be seen.
‘Where are you?’ I cried out as the wind roared past me, but no reply came.
With every part of my body aching I hauled myself over the wall and staggered back to where Cristina had pulled the lightning down on top of us. I started to heave away the boulders, ignoring the stinging cuts in my hands and only dimly aware that the storm had flickered to silence at last.
Nails splitting, shredding the skin on my hands, I kept digging desperately at the dirt. Then with the tips of my fingers I felt something give beneath all that hardness.
