It's dark when I wake, and the air is empty. For a time I feel lost, not in space or time but in myself. I can't remember who I am, gasping for the line to hold onto, but there's nothing there.
The air is thin.
I pull myself together slowly. My clothes are mostly dry, and I shrug on the inner thermal layers. I feed the fire, then remember the USB key in my jacket pocket, and dig it out. I turn it in my hands, like I'm inspecting a fine diamond. So much effort, for this.
I don't waste time. A search of the mansion reveals everything I need, but none of it working. A flashlight with no working batteries. A laptop with no power supply. A can of ravioli with no can-opener.
I improvise on the last one, and eat cold old pasta huddled on a leather sofa next to my fire. Outside the storm rages on, tearing at the house, but inside it is warm. Probably I can just stay here forever, but the wraith-shreds inside me push awkwardly. I push back, but right now they have more willpower than I do.
By the morning I've got a generator working, dug out of one of the huge garages, amongst various Ferraris and Porsches. There is no attachment to run it to the laptop, so I improvise that too, shelling cables, fusing wires and using the transformer from a lawn mower. I carry it all over to my fire and switch on the computer. It lights with a reassuring chime, just audible over the chutter of the generator. Damn, they build these things to last. All I need now are some VR goggles and I'll be back where I started, opening the prepper bible Cerulean made for me before he died the first time, tucked away in Sir Clowdesely.
When the desktop comes up, showing a background photo of a tall, well-muscled man and his beautiful wife with three cute kids, I take a deep breath then insert the USB key. The drive icon pops up, unlabeled, and I open it. Inside there are dozens of folders and one text file. The text file is titled:
READ ME
I scan the folders, which have names like:
Multicameral Array
Logchain
Olan Harrison
SEAL Heads
Apotheo Net
Ark 12
T4
I get the dizzy sense of standing on the edge of a huge precipice. I don't know if I'm ready for this moment, because perhaps it's all here. Everything I've wanted to know, everything I need to find somebody to blame.
I remember shark-eyes in the lobby of the research facility, telling me it's not about revenge, or justice, but about protecting the people I love. Lara, I think. My kids. That's a good thing to think. I hold them close, pushing away the chill shreds of Feargal in my middle, and doing this for myself.
No folder looks better than another for me to start with, so I click on the top one, Multicameral Array. That only leads to another 'READ ME' text file, along with dozens more folders. There are Alpha, Beta, Gamma and so on, as well as 'Pre-Event', 'Event', Post-Event', and many more.
I click further through folders, but within each there are dozens more like Russian nesting dolls. I scan what must be thousands of neatly organized files. There are images, videos, text, spreadsheets, pdfs. They have names like:
Multicameral Alpha remit SEAL 11/16
Gamma Post-Observation sign-off.354
Permissions High-wave Trancing – log99
I feel myself tumbling down into the rabbit hole. I click more rapidly, looking for the end to this endlessly branching inner system of folders, but I can't find it. I get twenty levels deep into the organizational tree, but it doesn't end. It's overwhelming and reinforces the dizzy feeling.
I pull all the way out to the root directory and try another thread, digging into the Logchain folder. Just as before, there are dozens of folders with strange names like they're written in a different language. Screens rush by, and excitement blurs into frustration. It's like the first time I discovered the Deepcraft user-made worlds portal. It gave me a migraine for weeks before I figured out the specific route through its menus to the best place to build my calm, static, real world, non-violent, limited-player Yangtze facility.
It just keeps on going.
Deep in, I randomly click on a video.
It shows a long white hallway ahead, high-tech looking, like a sterile lab of some kind with clinical strip lighting above. Someone's breathing heavily. The camera starts to jog side to side, as whoever's holding it runs forward. There are floor-to-ceiling glass panels set into the walls ahead, and as the cameraman runs ahead I catch a glimpse of what's behind each, and-
Jesus goddammit, I know the occupants, though they're on the blurry screen for an instant each only.
A gray zombie. A demon. A leper.
I lean in, glued to the little screen as the panting gets louder and the jolting motion from side to side becomes more violent. More glass panels pass by; a blue thing, a yellow one, another wraith, and then we're beyond the types that I've seen and onto the truly bizarre, things that hardly look human, like something out of a Ripley's Believe It Or Not. A giant jellyfish thing, spurting feebly, hanging from metal stakes. What might be a hugely enlarged human cell, oozing fluids. A kind of electrical zag twisted into a helix, like bottled lightning.
I'm barely breathing by the time the camera goes down. The floor rushes up, a hand flies out but fails to stop the fall, followed by a thump, jolt and the lens cracking on the floor. The cameraman shouts in pain as the camera comes to rest on its side, so the gray concrete floor fills most of the frame, along with the white hall stretching onward.
The hand comes back, pawing at the floor, then the cameraman coughs and blood sprays across the lens.
"Here!" he tries to shout, though the sound gets dampened by the blood in his mouth. The camera jostles as he rolls beside it, then lifts at an awkward, lolling angle, to point at the nearest glass cell wall. I can't see into it yet; we're not close enough, the angle is too tight. The cameraman crawls onward. He coughs more and blood spatters the floor before him. The footage begins to warp, with electric grid lines cutting across it like the signal is cutting it out on an old TV.
The cameraman crawls round the edge of this last glass cell and peers in, and it's something very different. Behind the glass is a man, not like the bizarre science fictional monsters that came earlier, but healthy, handsome, muscular, and motionless. His eyes are closed. He's too tall, too perfect, too calm.
"It's this," the cameraman croaks. "Thirty-seven."
Then he takes a ragged breath and his head cracks off the floor. The camera clunks beside him, phasing crazily with static bands.
A moment later the camera starts to drag backward, as if pulled on a string. There is only the grating on the concrete, as gradually the camera slides away in this amateurish zoom-out. In stages I see the body of the cameraman, wearing some kind of protective haz-mat outfit but still lying sprawled, with blood spreading beneath his head. The figure of the naked man recedes out of view then the electrical disturbance flares up, until the image is so corrupted there's nothing left to see but static.
The video ends.
I find I'm holding my breath. What the hell did I just see? I scan up and down the folder, looking for some kind of explanation of what that was, but I can't find anything obvious, just the label 'Event 3:17'. I'm tempted to watch it again, but there's time for that later. My hand is shaking as I click on another file, this one an image.
It's a series of graphs, what might be brainwave patterns, with dozens of tiny red crosses marked out on each of them, scribbled with indecipherable notes.
I click another, a text file, which begins all in lower case then shifts to upper case, written in a kind of scientific shorthand I can't follow, rife with complex equations and ungrammatical sentences. It seems to be about the feasibility of something to do with the brain, but I have no idea what feasibility it's measuring.
I click on.
In another folder I find hundreds of time-log reports, pay claims, with dozens of names and percentages next to them. Is this a staff appraisal sheet? A high school grade transcript? I click on, out of Logchain and into AR
K 12, where I finally find something that makes some sense.
Zone 1 Maine MARS 3000
Zone 4 Gap Fallout Bunker
Zone 5 Brezno Nuclear Weapons Silo
Zone 6 Istanbul Airport Storage
There are twelve zones listed in total, but I can't see beyond the first four. I stare for a long few seconds, my mouth going dry. I know all of these from our days of planning Anna's assault. I've been to the first four of them. I've killed the first four of them.
Something in my stomach rebels at that thought and I almost vomit to the side. I swallow it back, then click feverishly on Maine. Inside there are dozens of folders, but many of them I recognize.
Lars Mecklarin
MARS3000
Command Roster
Habitat Roster
Event
Post-Event
Unification
I click on Lars Mecklarin, and end up rifling through folders and files detailing his life and works in uncompromising detail. His books are here, many of which I've read, as well as his doctoral research papers. There are early drafts of the MARS3000 building plan, with all of his notions about alternating a rich environment, using people as entertainment, total knowability of human responses, and so on.
It's familiar, almost comfortable to find and read through, but I only have to look up to see the context; I'm sitting in a Russian millionaire's Bond-villain retreat, hours after breaking into some psychotic pseudoscience facility intended to test and perhaps develop some kind of psychic ability.
It's mad. Lars Mecklarin was a part of it, even if he didn't know what part that was.
I keep searching through the Roster files until I find her; not for any real reason but just to see her there. Salle Coram. Of course I know her file backwards, along with just about every other person listed here. I know their names and their doctoral subjects, their projected roles in a future MARS colony, their research specialization, along with Lars' planned route for them through the social jungle of an enclosed underground bunker. I memorized all of them in the months after Maine. I've been to some of their houses, but seeing them here, scrolling through lists of their lives, makes them real in a new, weird way.
All this same detail is there for Gap, Brezno and Istanbul. I don't see Bordeaux, but it's surely here somewhere. I sit back and take a breath. It's a damn treasure trove of intelligence, enough to fill a lifetime's study. I'm guessing that's just what it represents. Someone's entire record of the SEAL, of what they did, what happened and how. It's a dense forest of data with no clear way through.
Then I remember the text file from the opening folder, and click back to find it. Yes, just one labeled 'READ ME' here, but it's a doozy; dozens of megabytes. If that's all text, I know from my days editing self-published books, it's millions of words. Longer than Game of Thrones.
I take a deep breath. I rustle in my dried clothes and pull the jacket up over my shoulders, cutting off the chill breeze on my back, and lean in. I click the file, and it opens, and I read.
To whomever may find this, my name is James While, and I was Chief Operations Officer of the SEAL before the Event brought down the world. This record constitutes a complete accounting of my investigation into the conspiracy that brought on the Event, and even now maintains its stranglehold.
Perhaps it will mean nothing to you. I hope it will be helpful. It is my belief that we cannot go on as a world straining toward civilization, without the light of truth held up to dispel that most vicious of lies, now believed by every surviving member of the SEAL and all 12 ARKs.
That this was unavoidable. That it couldn't have been helped. That it was merely an awful occurrence atop a perfect storm of bad luck.
That is a lie. Here is my evidence. You will make up your own mind. Was our world destroyed with intent, or without?
Your answer will determine the shape of your future. Either all survivors are still at risk, soon to be targeted by whichever power brought on the Event, or they are not. The danger is either present or gone.
I won't be there to answer your questions. Placing this evidence in places it cannot be intercepted and destroyed is my final act. I wish I could do more.
I have failed in my role, and my failures will outlast me by far. I only hope you will choose to remedy my failure, and use my findings to bring back the cleansing light of truth I so longed for.
Yours,
James While
I suck in a breath, having forgotten to breathe.
Failure? I don't know this man, James While, but I feel like he's speaking directly to me, as if his ghostly hand is reaching out from the past and touching my shoulder. Now I'm being called to finish the work he began, and that strikes a new chord within me.
It's not rage.
I felt rage after Istanbul. I let it fill me on the suspicion that the worst might be true, that this apocalypse was done to us, and now here is the evidence.
It is real. I shudder though I'm not cold.
Somebody did this. Somebody killed my mother and father, killed my friends, killed my world and Lara's world, caused the deaths of Feargal, Cerulean and dozens of others, and left us to flail in helpless savagery, ripping each other apart. Somebody did this to us on purpose.
And instead of the old rage, blooming up as the black eye in the sky, I feel a deep, gouging sadness. It's quiet, barely troubling the line, rather it stacks up as blocks of ice like a wall around my spine, cutting me off from myself. That people did this to each other. That they thought this was all right.
The sadness tells me to sit down, and look at the screen, and suck down as much of this sickening grief as I can bear, in search of the truth.
So that's what I do.
INTERLUDE 6
Rachel Heron sat across the table from James While, in room A12, Building 4, midway round the Logchain loop; one of her own rooms in her own facilities, cuffed by the wrists to a metal hook in the table. While looked at her and tried to square what he'd known with what he now knew.
What they'd just seen was a clear crime against humanity, and the obvious starting point for the assault on the hydrogen line.
The types from the T4 were never supposed to be made real. The SEAL had voted very clearly on that, when the T4 was first discovered. Analysis, yes, investigation, rendering of cells even, construction of basic DNA for testing, but nothing like this.
Now he'd put the whole complex on lockdown. Fresh forces were incoming. His squad was already securing every room and computer, rounding all Rachel Heron's people into an open pen to prevent the destruction of any incriminating records. The scale of the cleanup required was going to be epic.
And there sat Rachel Heron, slumped slightly, just recovering from the adrenaline shot that had brought her back around, but proud still. Unashamed. She didn't look so attractive anymore. Now she looked more like the Disney villain.
He tapped the table, drawing her gaze to his. She met it, but seemed only partly present. He felt that same distraction himself; the corridor had fried his thoughts, leaving a tight squeeze in his head.
"Interference on the line," Joran Helkegarde had told him five minutes earlier, explaining what it had felt like to be so close to Alpha Array. "In your head there's a confusion, a pain, nausea and vertigo."
James While checked off those sensations clinically. He'd taken painkillers and a tablet to stabilize the nausea. It helped, but it didn't help with the deeper sickness, rising from the sense of betrayal.
He studied Rachel Heron and saw it in her face, in her eyes. She'd known about this, and lied to his face. She was complicit, just as Olan Harrison was complicit, along with at least some of the other Heads. They'd withheld it from him intentionally, marking them all out as possible perpetrators of the hydrogen line blast. In the aftermath of the Array blowing, they'd only covered it up.
The pieces were spinning into place, making him dizzy. It had been going on for years. The creatures in the corridor were part of it. But there was so much still he
didn't know.
"Rachel Heron," he said firmly, waiting for her eyes to settle on him. "You are under arrest in accordance with Article 33 of the Geneva Testament, the charge being Crimes against Humanity. The punishment if you are found guilty will be summary execution or lifetime imprisonment, whichever serves our purposes more fully. Your rights have now been suspended in line with the SEAL charter, and your only chance in this matter is full, frank, complete disclosure of your crimes. Am I understood?"
She looked at him. One of her eyes ticked rapidly, as some part of her came back online. Then she laughed.
"You boy scout," she said, more amused and dismissive than anything else. "James While, moral guardian of the SEAL. You really didn't know?"
He didn't respond to that. Whatever defenses she had left, she would employ them now, but belittling him was a weak hand, good for nothing.
He signaled for one of his team to come over. She stood behind Heron, wrapped her arms around her head, then smoothly drew a knife and held it close to her face. Heron's gaze focused on the blade, then back to him, and laughed again.
"You're going to be disappointed."
"Why?"
"Because I don't know anything. Not about what you want." She stopped to take a breath. "The Logchain has nothing to do with the Multicameral Array, James. I realize that you feel you've hit upon the mother lode, and without a doubt we've lied to you, but not about the things you think. I don't know anything about the attacks, about the coming attack, about how the T4 got into the general populace, or why some people are being thrown into comas. I am not involved in any way with any terror cell, any plot to destroy the world, or overthrow the SEAL." Another breath. "Those positions will not change, no matter how you torture me. They can't because they're the truth."
She stopped, and James While eyed her, making his judgments. Perhaps she believed that. Perhaps she was just a gifted liar. She'd lied about so many other things.
"You have creatures that shouldn't exist beneath your facility," he said. "You've been lying about them even after the Arrays blew up. Explain that."
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