The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  "The people in comas," Joran muttered rapidly, his eyes flickering back and forth from James While to whatever readouts lay in front of him. "There's something different about their signals on the line, a flattening aura that extends to anyone within a few feet of them, meaning they provide a kind of buffer from the signals sent on the line, which may explain why-"

  "How can we use that?" While interrupted. Joran frequently rambled off into explaining the depths of his research.

  "Use it?" Joran blinked as he refocused. "We can't yet, not yet, but with the Prime Array coming I've got twenty fresh subjects slow-baking, transmitting data signals up a spine, and I'm recording results in a full double-blind trial, and the results are positive so far."

  James While often lagged behind when Joran was on a roll. He'd authorized the Prime Array, Joran's idea for a final massive Array perhaps a thousand minds strong, to be located in the middle of Eurasia, and satellite facilities for testing, but the rest of it was new to him.

  "Positive in that they're providing a shield, something we can use? Will it be enough to block another infection signal?"

  "Another infection?" Joran asked, again briefly confused as his train of thought was redirected. "Well yes, no, but perhaps. Not as is, but with augmentation?" His eyes zipped multiple times to the readouts. "Look at what they've been doing in the Logchain, James, to restrain their samples, some combination of magnets and DNA manipulation? We can't use them for that, because there's no way to get in and change the DNA so much, but with some? Their brains are special, they have the buffer, so we could use them and blow them open, but that would mean personality death, suspending core brain function, and scrubbing off the gray matter, if we-"

  James While focused on the key question, because the details were lost in Joran's flow. "You're talking about blowing open human brains. Killing people."

  "Of course I am!" Joran snapped. "I can extract the coma brains, the bits we need, or expand them, and marry that with whatever magnetic resonance amplification I can create, then it may be possible to extend the protective buffer wide enough to cover ten feet, even a hundred, a bunker. This is how we can water-proof your Arks."

  "So you're talking about sacrificing twelve brains?" James clarified. "Twelve people turned into shields?"

  Joran shook his head. "Much more than twelve. Twelve for the core, perhaps, but most likely twenty-four at minimum, maybe thirty-six, forty-eight, so they can function in unison. And before that, I'll need probably a hundred or so for experimentation. There's too much we don't know, too many variables; we need to learn to rewrite the personalities out, remove the humanity to make for purely mechanical protection. It's all happening at the core, James, as if we were always wired for this, but-"

  While cut him off again. "You're asking for permission to round up and kill two hundred people in comas. Is that correct?"

  Joran frowned, as if that was obvious and no moral quandaries came attached. "At least. Right away. Now."

  "Do it. Spread your acquisition distribution, I don't want the balance in any one area depleted too much."

  Joran frowned. "Of course." He'd been the one to explain the necessity of an even spread of coma sufferers around the globe, when James had first asked him why they shouldn't just gather them all up and kill them at once, to stop whatever fuse was sizzling within them from going off. Apparently they were on some kind of parallel dead man's switch.

  "I've already sent out scouts," Joran said. "I expect-"

  While cut the transmission.

  * * *

  The investigation powered on.

  James While tore into the mountain of evidence with a team of thousands; digging through paper trails, money flows, logistical logs dating back decades, affidavits from hundreds of interrogations, satellite evidence, SEAL records and witness testimony, but little concrete emerged; bare slivers that led to dead ends. The trail of every raid ultimately vanished down the rabbit hole, lost in blind spots in global coverage, tucked into obscure folds in the world, spiraled into disintegrating hearsay.

  For all the mustering of the SEAL's resources, he had no answers.

  So he dug into Olan Harrison.

  DNA analysis back from Harrison's body suggested extensive gene therapies had already been conducted, pressuring his cell walls nearly to mush. In the Alps facility's storage old samples showed catastrophic attempts to lengthen his telomere strands via a dozen different methods, thereby extending his life, though all had failed. Deep tissue analysis of the scars in his skull showed that Apotheo Net transponders had been inserted deep into the gray matter of his brain multiple times, through eleven holes drilled in the bone, and a complete picture of his working mind had been captured.

  That picture still existed. Most likely it was another rabbit hole left behind for James While to stumble down, but there was nothing else to go on. He ordered Apotheo Net staff to compile the data into a working AI personality, which he then spun up within an offline server in his jet's cabin. At the press of a button, this copy of Olan Harrison would express itself into the real world as a holograph.

  James While pressed the button.

  He looked young, as he had forty years ago when first riding his meteoric rise to mastery of the world's communications; a vital and strong man with a full head of tousled golden hair. He blinked 'awake', taking a moment to look around himself, though that was an affectation; movements of the holograph's head didn't change the angle of the single camera lens While had allowed him to 'see' through. Still he looked down at his own hands, then last of all looked up at James While.

  "Hello, James," he said.

  To hear his own name in Olan's voice, absent the crackle of old age, brought a swell of sadness mixed with anger. This was the man who had betrayed his own legacy.

  "Tell me this wasn't all you, Olan."

  Harrison smiled. "I imagine you're very confused now. Angry. I understand that."

  "But you did it. Tell me who joined you. Tell me where they are."

  The holograph looked around, taking in the curved walls of the jet.

  "I see we're on your jet. You're running me disconnected from any network. Very astute."

  "Tell me who killed you."

  Olan frowned. "He's dead? I see, that's a pity. But I'm not a live copy, James. However the real Olan died, I wasn't present for it."

  "But you know who was close to him. You must have suspected what they were planning."

  "Did you know what I was planning, James?"

  While paced. Looking at Olan made him angrier. That they'd left this copy behind was an insult to him.

  "Why didn't they erase you? When they killed Olan why didn't they delete your file too?"

  "I couldn't say. Perhaps they thought I would misdirect you? I doubt your people could pick out a rogue command in the complexity of this personality program, even if they knew it was there."

  James While paced faster. Every avenue was closed to him. It felt like the world was made of mirrors, only reflecting back the world he already knew. There had to be a way through, but he couldn't find it. There was no pattern to crack, or at least none he could see.

  He cut the holograph, and with a gesture sent the file down to several research teams below. If there was anything inside Olan's code, they'd pick it out. Probably they'd only waste their time. He didn't have a choice but to try.

  In his plane he paced.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  * * *

  Joran Helkegarde stumbled upon the pattern by accident.

  He didn't see it at first. In his efforts to gather the first hundred coma victims for his shielding experiments, drawn evenly from across the whole of the world, he had to make a register of all the sufferers out there.

  Bordeaux was already tracking four hundred and thirty-four. His own estimates, based on existing distribution patterns, put the global number somewhere between seven hundred and two thousand. That left
three hundred to sixteen hundred unaccounted for, and that was an untenable ignorance.

  He chartered a jet to Bordeaux. Sovoy joined him, as he joined him in everything now, as if by clinging to Helkegarde's shirttails he might absolve himself of his own guilt and responsibility.

  He found Bordeaux in shambles.

  The bunker was ancient; once a nuclear weapons silo, all metal gantries and waterlogged basements. The tech for tracking coma sufferers was ridiculously outdated, with little automatic transfer between precise GPS coordinates as transmitted by monitoring teams on the ground, often necessitating hand-passed lists of data to be entered into joint servers before popping up on a disorganized rabble of big screens.

  James While hadn't been here himself, too lost in the big picture up in the sky. The SEAL Heads had been fired, erasing any sense of oversight. Bordeaux was a headless beast, flailing uselessly at a level of institutional incompetence that would have seen the Multicameral Array broken within a week.

  Here, with no one knowing what a success condition even was, following a directive that no one understood or knew how to enforce, they just muddled along. In many areas Joran's own expansion of research activities had shoved monitoring into smaller, less well-equipped spaces. In one room they scratched coordinates onto chalk slates while paddling through inch-deep drip water. The best minds had already been fired, or shifted at Joran's own command into his research stream, gutting the original intent of Bordeaux. The data at its very source was corrupt.

  "Shit in, shit out," Sovoy said.

  So Joran cracked the whip. High on a diet of stimulants from James While's own supply, barely sleeping and living at a frantic minute-to-minute pace, he snapped Bordeaux into shape while also juggling the progress in Istanbul, construction of his thirteenth Prime Array, and setting up prep for the buffer experiments.

  He kicked out his own Multicameral, Logchain and Apotheo Net teams, sending them off to satellite facilities and re-dedicating Bordeaux to its original purpose; tracking the spread of the infection through the global population. He installed hundreds of networked systems keyed into glass display panes running down the spine of twin grand halls on the upper level. He oversaw code that allowed statistical analysis of the influx of data on a dozen different parameters, while at the same time sending out new iterations of line-detecting equipment and rigorous checklists for monitoring teams to follow. He set Sovoy in place as the Bordeaux Head and authorized him to whip consent however he had to.

  Within days the quality of the data improved exponentially. Coma subjects who had fallen through the cracks were now registered, as working teams formed organically and the true importance of the mission seeped into the minds of the people working there.

  Sovoy gave stirring speeches from the top gantry, about the future and global survival, and with that the doors above were sealed. Working shifts spun around the clock. Data poured in, and at last Joran began to see meaningful trends. The magnetic reading equipment he'd manufactured based off the shielding pods in the Logchain gave simplistic hints at hydrogen line activity, measuring more its impact on other factors like brain wave, barometric pressure, true North orientation and radiation, but the data was there.

  In New York one coma-candidate was shaping up to have an immensely strong signal. Another just north of London was growing likewise. He ran through lists of names and placed check marks against the ones he wanted. He splayed them out across a global map, surveying the spread, and it was then that he saw the pattern.

  He called Sovoy, and Sovoy came in. They only had five days of accurate, detailed data by that point, but the flashing lights and shifts were as clear as the evidence for neutrinos pulsing through deep pools of water. It was no surprise they hadn't been noticed before, with the stream of information already so unreliable. Now it was as clear as day.

  "Here," said Sovoy, tapping the screen. "Here, another a day later. Then here. Project it backward to the start and we're talking about one hundred already. Maybe more."

  Joran stared. It was there. It was going to complicate things for him. It was a second wave assault that had to be stopped. He called James While at once and sent the filtered data up in a rich stream.

  "The shadow SEAL are taking coma-sufferers," he told While, having learned by then to give him only the top line summary. "Day by day, so we don't notice, spreading the distribution, but the pattern is there. They're taking them right out from under our noses."

  James While's eyes lit up. Joran thought he'd never seen him so excited.

  "Take your one hundred," While said, with a new purpose that had been absent from his voice for weeks. "And lock the rest down. They're not getting a single one more."

  14. SUFFER

  In the light of day Lara's left temple was hot and tender, her left eye still saw only white, and the pain in her arms pounded with every beat of her heart.

  The President's bedchamber was hot and sultry, though the windows were open and the curtain drawn. Witzgenstein was gone, peeled away from a position circled around Lara's head some time before the dawn. The feeling on the line as she'd disengaged had tickled, like damp strings trailing along her scalp. She'd kissed Lara's forehead tenderly.

  "You'll see," she said quietly. "No, don't wake up. I'm building something better."

  She'd gone.

  Now a man that Lara didn't know was standing before her. He wasn't from New LA, which meant he had to be one of Drake's people. He was older, in his fifties, with gray hair and sad eyes. He just stood there, looking down at her, like a robot frozen mid-program.

  "Hello," Lara said, reaching out to him on the line. The sense of him was foggy and imprecise, part of a new world only beginning to come into focus, but she could feel Witzgenstein's influence upon him. He was a flat, lukewarm gray beneath the bridle of deep red. There was some sense of the reins stretching back through the air, but Lara couldn't focus clearly enough to distinguish where.

  All of this was new.

  She shuffled to her feet. The man didn't move.

  "You're guarding me," she said, but he didn't respond. She took a step; the slight jolt sent an electric shock of pain up her thigh, up her spine and into her skull. She grunted and took another step toward the door.

  Now the man moved, clearly barring her path.

  Lara slowly turned around. The room was luxurious, if musty and marred by damp patches on the walls. Thirteen years of neglect. The bed was still perfectly turned down, a four-poster of dark walnut with cream blankets trimmed with royal blue. The walls were custard-colored with white paneling, ornamental plaster tracery scrolled across the ceiling, the curtains were a pale blue floral, the carpet a faint gray, and the windows looked out over the familiar South Lawn.

  Like a hotel. Like a nice hotel.

  She went to the bathroom, every step like an old woman's, and her guard followed. She moved over to the accompanying sitting room, where a large window arch, spoked like a wheel, gave an excellent view over people busily hacking into the lawn's overgrowth.

  Priorities, of course. The White House had to look nice.

  She sat down. Her guard came to stand over her, now holding a tray with some food on it; a few rounds of bread, some cheese, chicken slices, orange juice. Luxuries, most likely mined from one of the supply depots before Witzgenstein burned them down. With a cool, damp flannel pressed to her pulsing temple, Lara ate.

  She looked out of the window, as if pining for Witzgenstein's return. She didn't look at her guard, didn't speak to him again, but on the line she turned her entire attention to unpicking the fog around him.

  There was a great deal of work to be done. Her success of the night before had come in a moment of intense emotion, fueled by pain and rage, with her clumsy misdirections masked by the hate Frances and the others felt.

  That wouldn't work for long, or for the things she needed to achieve.

  She had to get better. Like a lawyer honing a sharp argument, whittling away all the unnecessary evidence, tri
mming off unnecessary words and building an airtight, argument-proof bullet of logic, she dug deep into the line.

  It made her head ache worse. It was like staring at a fuzzy watercolor portrait, a vivid mixture of colors, temperatures, emotions, motions and scents overlaid atop the real world, jumbled together in a white-static barrage that most people would never think contained any meaning. How often did you look at anything through a microscope and really understand what you were seeing?

  It dizzied her. Just in this room, just gathered round herself and the man and the spaces Witzgenstein had moved through, the information was so dense it made a kaleidoscope of sensation. It helped that he stood still, and she sat still, and neither of them spoke, but the fog remained baffling. At moments of frustration, as the fog stubbornly refused to part, that frustration bloomed off her like three-dimensional ripples, causing subtle distortions that made the line much harder to read.

  At such times she managed her breathing, and counted panes in the window arch, and worked toward control. She'd done meditation before, in yoga classes after her later panic attacks, and they'd become a staple of her life in her barista days, keeping her functioning while she went into Sir Clowdesley every day. She knew about staying calm, perhaps better than anyone left alive.

  Each time, calm returned faster, so the room became a placid fog again. Outside the room there was a whirlwind of activity, keeping the great ongoing painting of the line in constant motion, but in here, in her garret prison there was enough quiet to work by.

  And work she did.

  It was like learning a language. She sliced colors into a dozen varieties, then a hundred, seeing the shades and giving them names, remembering the color game Amo had played with her on their first date. 'Fawn', he'd said, holding her hand, 'Isabelline. They're both kinds of brown.'

  So she subdivided the line; in color, in sound, in emotion, in taste, in smell, in every way she could parse it. Gradually the fog sharpened like an image resolving on a screen, pixel by pixel, turning into something she could recognize and understand.