The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  When I get hold of that, and chew it like a bit of rubbery steak, the black eye gets thick. The chaos backs right up.

  And I stand.

  I'm not giggling any more. Shark-eyes is gone. I wipe drool from my chin and look around.

  It's all still there. It's beating at my shell now, hammering picks into my resolve, but I have time. Shark-eyes gave it to me.

  I move fast, thinking clearly again.

  I scan the reception desk; in the shadows lie a keyboard, a mouse, a large monitor and a pen set at perfect gaps apart, as if they've been aligned with a ruler, but the computer has no power and there's nothing in the drawers. Midway through checking I stop, because this is not important.

  The signal is important. The source, the shield, that's what I'm here for.

  I stride through air as thick as mud to the security gates, which remain closed so I roll smoothly over them. The metal detector doesn't blink as I pass through, though the signal intensifies again, briefly dropping me to my knees.

  Then I'm up and at the elevators. There's no power so I set to work with a crowbar from my pack to lever open the silver doors. Inside the flashlight illuminates mirrored walls and four buttons on the control plate:

  -1

  1

  2

  Tower

  It's near now, I can feel it playing with my sense of perspective. Vertigo strikes and I lurch sideways into the wall. I feel drunk. My mouth goes dry, I'm losing control, but I don't need much to punch out the access hatch in the ceiling. Pulling myself up through it helps; like I'm running along a balance beam rather than edging across step by step. The friction of speed will help me stay upright. The thought of Lara and Witzgenstein spurs me onward.

  The shaft is dark and towering, like all elevator shafts before it, but screw this place. I let violence take a hold of me, and snatch onto the recessed ladder rungs set into the wall, climbing like I'm stamping on Ocean skulls. Ten rungs up I think I hear some kind of noise, and react.

  BANG BANG

  The pistol recoil feels damn good, and the sound it makes is deafening. Why did I fire? I don't know. From above there's a metallic PING and a crunch, then I feel one of the bullets whip past me and down to PING off the elevator top below. I squeeze the pistol grip so hard it hurts.

  "Come on!" I shout up into the dark. "Come for me, let's go!"

  It feels great, this defiance. It drives the thick soup of the signal, even now trying to steal back into my ears and between my lips, a little further away.

  BANG BANG

  I shoot at nothing again and there are more PINGs. I jam the gun into its holster and fly up the rungs in a rage. They think they can do this to me? They think scaring me in a goddamned elevator shaft is going to have some kind of effect?

  "You'll have to do better than that!" I yell, driving the black eye up ahead, clearing my way. Another seven rungs and I'm at the next floor, where the metal doors are sealed tightly in the darkness. I jam the crowbar in between them and wrench open a gap.

  Light pours in through the narrow crack, and along with it a staggering punch on the line. I almost lose my grip and fall. Even dreams of protecting my people is nothing before this. I'm back in Screen 2 with Drake leaning over me, whispering mastery in my ear about how he's going to take away my wife and children and remake my world, and how much fun it's going to be, and I know there's nothing I can do. Again I'm standing atop a van in Times Square with a thousand dead bodies around me and the gun to my head, seconds away from pulling the trigger.

  BANG

  The pistol flashes in the darkness, suffusing my face with a salty exhalation of spent gunpowder, cramming the noise of it into my ears and setting up a ringing tinnitus in its wake. I blink and find myself barely hanging from the rungs by one hand, with the gun still pressed close to my head.

  What the-

  The flashlight weaves crazily round the shaft from its place in my breast pocket, though there's plenty of icy blue light pouring in through the narrow gap in the doors now. My head rings and I feel a trickle of what must be blood run down my jawline.

  Did I just shoot myself in the head? Again?

  I rip a glove off with my teeth, too shell-shocked to be much slowed by the line, and run my fingers up over a tight, hot furrow along my right temple. The skin has torn, blood is leaking out, and I laugh.

  I did. Goddamn. But I do feel clearer.

  "It's not that easy!" I yell up into the shaft. I yell it through the gap. "I'm not that easy any more!"

  I tuck the glove into a pocket and press my face to the gap in the doors, but all I can make out beyond is a metal walkway, a railing, and a bright white ceiling that looks to be made out of sky. I force laughter out like barks, setting my body headlong into the stream of confusion spewing out from inside, and jam my left hand into the gap. The crowbar is gone, probably fallen down the shaft when I drew the gun.

  I catch my balance and get both hands into the opening, teetering on the rungs. With a grunt I push outward, and the doors open a few inches. I see more, and more of the line bursts against my chest, but I just curse and push harder, driving the doors open until I can clearly see the insanity on the other side, and step through into-

  INTERLUDE 1

  Fourteen years earlier, Joran Helkegarde stepped onto the second floor gantry walkway encircling the Alpha Station of the Multicameral Array, and let out a breath of awe and admiration.

  It hit him every time.

  Beside him Piers Sandbrooke laughed. He had an easy laugh to match his tousled blond hair and teasing blue eyes. "You're too easily impressed, Joran. Have you seen what they're doing at Gamma Array?"

  Joran didn't have much to say to that. It had taken eleven months to get the Alpha facility built, seven more to staff it and bring on the experimental volunteers, and he'd been over every inch of the plans a dozen times, written and rewritten the theories behind it until he could recite the equations in his sleep, and you'd think he'd be sick of it, but this? To actually see it, to feel it humming through him, to feel it really working? It blew his mind every time. The possibilities were endless. The possibility of today was immense.

  Before him lay the enormous, light-filled hall of Alpha Array. The ceiling stood twenty feet high, formed from an unprecedented single pour of glass. The clarity through it was astounding, like the polished steel reflecting mirror on the Hubble telescope; revealing the swirling white Siberian storm above in minute, high-resolution detail. Getting that made had cost nearly a hundred million in itself, but it was worth it.

  "They're still running their Array in a null chamber," Sandbrooke went on happily, ever ready to gossip. "In Delta, I mean. Nothing in or out, of course, but they've tried varying materials; like the floor, they've gone for rubber, not cement. Apparently there's some refraction, an echo, but that actually increases signal absorption? Preliminary figures are coming, I talked to Yeary, but …"

  Joran tuned him out, not caring about what the other stations in the Array were doing. He'd ceded a certain degree of experimental control from the outset, as long as his core vision remained intact. That had been the one condition he'd laid down when the SEAL came knocking, after his research proposal had been roundly rejected by every established scientific organization on the planet.

  Shows them, he thought idly. Shows Sandbrooke. His rise had been meteoric. If today went well, he was about to launch through the stratosphere.

  But for this moment, he admired the central asset in his Array. One story down from the metal gantry lay the Array floor, subdivided into a hundred ten-foot square allotments by means of slim dark lines grooved into the gray plastic floor. Within each square lay one of his crack, hand-selected team of one hundred sensitives, each bedded down like a perfectly planted potato. They lay on low plastic gurneys aligned North-South like compass-needle soldiers primed for battle, shaven-headed and wearing simple white hospital gowns. All were males between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four, all lay with their eyes close
d, and all of them wore the plastic neural caps with assorted pads suckered to their bald skulls, with thick bundles of cables running away like secondary spines.

  "… the walls, which are ten feet thick," went on Sandbrooke obliviously. "That's Gamma, from what I hear. As much of their signaling as they can reduce, so they say, though naturally all their habitation's in a shielded cage, like the Faraday rig you set up here, but not quite the same…"

  Joran let him fade again to a background drone. The scale of the plan was tremendous, representing billions in investment capital, all to make his pseudoscientific dream into a functioning reality. The breakthroughs they were making every day were going to rewrite human understanding of their place in the universe for generations to come, though of course those discoveries had slowed to a crawl of late. Today was the pivot point that would change all that, right up there with the moment the idea had first come to him, sitting in a Princeton doctoral lecture on the varied signals produced by a normal, bicameral brain talking to itself across its left and right hemispheres.

  "Consider the medium, not the message," the professor was saying, in explaining the speed limits to thought. In the brain, or so he explained, the 'medium' was the hard lines of brain matter; organic 'wires' that electrical impulses could transmit along. No matter how powerful or important the message, it could travel no faster than the wiring would allow.

  The idea had set Joran off in another direction entirely. The medium, not the message.

  In that moment it had seemed that the old professor had simply never fully put the pieces together, while in Joran's head the potential clicked into place. His face had flushed and he'd looked around at his fellow PhD students, each of them a competitor for research money and university positions and ultimately scientific glory, and felt certain that every one of them had just glimpsed the same gaping hole in existing science that he had.

  But none of them had shown any sign of it.

  The medium was the essential question.

  Joran had left the lecture that second and raced to his room, where he'd stayed up all night working out the mathematical landscape of his theory. He'd known he wasn't the first to theorize a kind of 'medium' through which all thoughts passed, different from the 'hard' wiring of the brain, but he would certainly be the first to approach it in this way. All the evidence thus far was anecdotal.

  He dug into research, and found out that twins were perhaps the largest area of evidence to date, with various casual studies conducted that had come up with numerous findings that were either not replicated, or not explained via any meaningful theory. Sometimes these theories were about twins who'd never met each other, who could essentially read each other's minds. Others were about twins who could say where their twin was at any time, or twins who knew when their twin had just died or fallen sick or suffered an injury. Very little of the surrounding literature had an experimental basis, but the sheer amount of it still set Joran's mind alight.

  To explain these findings, there had to be a kind of underlying medium of thought that stood outside of hard wiring, even outside of the human body; a kind of invisible Wi-Fi that allowed the passage of ideas directly from mind to mind.

  In short, telepathy.

  He leaned on the railing and surveyed the hundred in his Array. He'd failed his PhD for this; the idea that a large enough set of calm, empty minds, in a remote enough location removed from any sort of disturbance, might be able to detect the underlying medium.

  The hydrogen line.

  It wasn't scientific enough for his professors or the university. They'd laughed at him behind his back.

  But it was working.

  He'd failed his PhD, but this was a vindication every day. The SEAL, his financial backers, barred him from publishing, but the preliminary reports already were mind-blowing, even as the first batch of one hundred were still adapting.

  Their minds were his blank slate, waiting for the line to write upon them. The message so far was unclear, but it was undeniably there. There was a medium, and there was a message.

  Telepathy was real.

  "Thirty minutes until exposure," Sandbrooke said, holding up his wristwatch. "We should clear the hall for prep."

  Joran turned to the man's easy grin and curious eyes, and wondered how much of it was a front. If anyone was the SEAL's inside man, it was Sandbrooke. He'd been Joran's contact point for the duration, the one who'd first brought him the offer and the one who'd helped him bring all this massive infrastructure about.

  "I've got new parameters to cycle in," Joran said, covering the lie smoothly. "Sovoy ran diagnostics on the last bout and this will be my response."

  Sandbrooke frowned slightly. "They're all in position. Shouldn't we have run pre-approval on that?"

  "Normally, yes, but this is time-sensitive. Planetary alignment."

  Sandbrooke's frown deepened, then he laughed. "You're joking."

  "Of course I'm joking," Joran replied. "Mars is barely in the House of Venus, and won't be for another three months."

  Sandbrooke laughed more, eyed Joran to be sure, then laughed again. "So let's go cycle them in. We've got twenty-nine minutes."

  They walked swiftly along the gantry; their footsteps making a faint slapping on the metal flooring. To the right lay a stunning view of the building's exterior, seen through the flawless glass walls that rose twenty feet high to meet the glass ceiling. Outside there were cars, coaches and helicopters parked in the encircling lot, barely visible as snow swirled up the building's flank.

  "Sovoy didn't tell me about any specific findings," Sandbrooke said, steering Joran's gaze back inward. "I'm assuming these changes you want to make are associated with the mapping project?"

  "Mapping and contrast," Joran lied again. "Just another round of tests. Would you like to see them?"

  Sandbrooke waved a hand. He understood the macro-level theory but not the detail. "We'll check it with Sovoy."

  Round the edge of the hall they went, while below them attendants dressed in white moved amongst the hundred in the Array, applying gel to their black skull caps, adjusting dials to bring their resting brainwaves into harmony, seeing to any other minor disturbances and generally spreading calm.

  "They look like an ocean, I think at times," said Sandbrooke as they neared the elevator down to the research floor. "A kind of conceptual ocean, all dressed in white."

  "They're more like boats," Joran answered. "The hydrogen line's the ocean."

  "What's the difference?" Sandbrooke asked. "Signal or medium, isn't that the whole point of this research? Everything receives, everything ultimately transmits? We're all floats bobbing on the water, while all our floats make up the water itself."

  "Touché. Shall we?"

  * * *

  The Array underfloor was a noisy kaleidoscope that always excited Joran. There was a feverish anticipation in the air, heightened in the approach to each full detection run on the line. All the two hundred and forty seven scientists present, along with a squad of oversight, security and administration officials forced on Joran by the SEAL, understood what was at stake with each attempt. They were prying open a Pandora's box of immense potential power.

  Joran felt the familiar excitement as he and Sandbrooke left the elevator. Red-rimmed eyes flicked their way, with nervous grins on pinched, exhausted faces. Many of these people had been up for more than twenty-four hours, instituting the new parameters. Keeping the true purpose of his plan a secret from the majority of them only made it more exciting; what he was doing was certainly a serious offence, possibly criminal, playing chicken with a billion investment dollars. He held everyone's career in his hands, to be determined by the results of the next several hours. He'd made the determination that the risk was worth it.

  The Array underfloor was made up of ten working teams, each arranged around a data pillar; a tree-thick spine of red cables carrying readouts from ten minds in the Array above, ending in Cadillac-sized supercomputers. Each clump was noisy now with l
ast-minute checks.

  Sandbrooke strolled along by Joran's side cheerfully, waving at his favorites amongst the staff. "I always feel like I'm in a beehive," he said over the hubbub. "So many drones, following the Queen."

  Joran smiled. "And I'm the Queen?"

  Sandbrooke tipped an imaginary hat. "If the shoe fits."

  Joran's second in command, Garibaldi Sovoy, was waiting at his desk in the underfloor's approximate center, a skinny man in cut-short navy Capri pants with a check shirt, missing only the rainbow suspenders. He was grinning widely and squeezing a red stress ball in one hand.

  "Helkegarde," he said knowingly. "Sandbrooke."

  "You seem pleased with yourself," Sandbrooke said. "Have they started serving kale rice balls in the canteen again?"

  Sovoy was enjoying himself too much to let the slight even graze him. Holding a secret over Sandbrooke's head was plainly cheering him hugely. "I'm just glad to be alive, Sandbrooke. Breaking new ground in science. You wouldn't understand."

  Sandbrooke snorted. "I've heard about your new ground. Joran's told me about the parameters for today."

  "Has he?" Sovoy raised one eyebrow theatrically. "Well, then you'll know it's an exciting sequence with a slight modulation, requiring some final calibrations."

  "I'll see those calibrations, if you don't mind." Sandbrooke held out a hand. Sovoy put a clipboard into it.

  While Sandbrooke studied it, a mocked-up version for official consumption, Joran made his customary check-in. "Give me the full report, Sovoy. How are thirty-seven and sixty-three?"

  "Good. Their signals have stabilized. Turns out thirty-seven only had a mild cold; oxygen treatment sorted him out twelve hours ago. Sixty-three's been responding beautifully to stimulus training, and he says he hasn't thought about his dead mother once in the past three days."

  Joran nodded. Since the multicameral approach was a new field of science, nobody knew for sure what might throw off their readings. Each pattern on the hydrogen line was so slight that even a misaligned train of thought or a blockage in the sinuses could disrupt pattern detection. "Excellent. We are a go, then."