The Last Mayor Box Set 3

by Michael John Grist

  She brought a doctor to her, and she tended to her burns. The pain was there but at one remove, filtered through the line. Her legs and feet had it worst. Her scalp in places, her face, her back, her arms. She looked at the raw wounds as they were doused with cold water, then cleansed with burning antiseptics, wrapped carefully with thin gauze.

  Tonight would mark her for the rest of her life.

  She had them put her in a wheelchair. She almost wept, when at last her thoughts turned to her children, and what she'd made them witness.

  No better than Amo as he killed Drake. The things they'd seen. It wasn't fair, and she wanted nothing more than to go to them, but she couldn't. Her emotions would be too volatile, and she couldn't let her control slip, not for a second, not after what she'd done to Witzgenstein, and to Frances.

  They'd all seen it, her naked show of power on the line. Some of them might recognize it. Some of them might have learned, and be waiting for their chance to walk her back into the flames.

  Seeing her children would make her weak, and she couldn't afford that now.

  She looked at her face in a mirror. She wouldn't be the same. No longer beautiful. Mottled, now. Handsome, perhaps. Fearful. The patches singed out of her hair wouldn't regrow. Her neck would always be raw. She would wear these wounds with the shame they merited.

  Witzgenstein's screams would never be enough. They would always be too much.

  She looked round the Oval Office one last time. There was no cairn to leave behind. No one would ever come this way again. No one would sit in that chair. The power of the old world, along with all of its symbols, was now thoroughly broken.

  The convoy stretched down to the gates; thirty-one vehicles loaded with supplies, people, and failure. Thirty-one pairs of hands let off the parking brakes at once, and thirty-one feet pressed on the gas pedals, and every one of them was Lara. She lay in the back of the tabernacle, Drake's silver airstream, her eyes closed while the convoy rumbled to life, working the net deeper into her people. She would sleep soon, and she couldn't let them rise up while she was unconscious. She knit her net deep around their hearts, a bridle so far in they would mistake it for their own hopes and dreams, a lie for the ages.

  So she made them like Drake's hollow-eyed children; flat and obedient, not trusted with their own free will.

  She didn't pause to think it was impossible. She only acted. Crow had died, and in death some remnant piece of him on the line had physically hurled her from the fire. If that was real, what couldn't be?

  What wouldn't be?

  She pinched off all her threads, and in the midst of the pain in her body, she fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  The bombs didn't fall that night or the next day.

  Lara lived out fever dreams, while her dressings were checked and changed, and they pumped antibiotics into her system, and long discussions went back and forth about skin grafts.

  She cut them all short, swimming up from the depths of the line to exert control. She didn't speak, didn't open her eyes, because she was in another conversation now.

  She was speaking with Crow, deep in the line. There was some of him there still, exchanging dreamy explanations and inspirations. What next? What now?

  He wanted her to trust. To let the people go again, and forgive. He said the fever had broken with the death of Witzgenstein, and they could now be trusted to do the right thing. Lara only had counter-arguments. Everything she'd lived argued against that. They had cheered for her death by fire, and that had come from within them, and she couldn't find it in her anywhere to forgive them.

  What forgiveness could there be? What foundation stone would remain?

  They would keep going, just as Amo had told them. They would wander for forty years in the desert, if that was what it took. She thought back to his days after Maine, when the guilt of what he'd done held him deep in its embrace, and she'd done everything she could to snap him out of it.

  Now all she had was the ghost of Crow, and he couldn't snap her out of it, because he wasn't even real.

  "You're dead," she told him. "You aren't real."

  He couldn't argue. He argued, but she didn't listen. His arguments had no weight.

  Forty years of wandering had a ring to it. Her generation would be done. The next generation could start afresh. Let all memory of the past be erased in an endless stream of disheveled gas stations, crumbling cities and rusting cars. Let it all be erased.

  "And if Amo needs you?" Crow asked. "If the real world calls?"

  "Let them call. We are nothing now. A genetic remainder, left from an equation we couldn't balance."

  Crow just shook his head. "People have lost more."

  "I don't think so," said Lara, and stopped listening to him. Part of her knew, even in the depths of the line, in her sleep, that he would be gone soon. Nothing would be left. He'd used up his purple spark in saving her, and she couldn't offer anything in return.

  When she woke properly, it was a week later and the bombs had fallen.

  Washington was gone.

  She felt the shift on the line as surely as the burns on her skin. Not nuclear, this time, but a crater blasted into the deep ocean of the line, which the waters of thought wouldn't fill for years.

  Was it the bunkers? Was it someone else? She didn't care. It wasn't her world. Postpone her for forty years and she could care. Her people wouldn't wake up for that long.

  "You can't do that to them," Crow said, muffled now, already distant.

  "It's been done before. We did it to you. So this is our reservation. We need a time out."

  He protested and she listened, but didn't change.

  They changed her bandages. Her skin cracked and sealed and in places healed raw. States passed by, old lines in imaginary space that didn't matter now. Soon the signs would be gone and no one would know.

  She felt the other bombs fall, in a necklace across the world. She could even feel Amo and Anna, bright lights out there in the wilderness, pushing through the ocean of living and dead minds. They spoke to her like whale song in the depths of the line, telling her their corrupted hopes and dreams.

  It didn't change her mind. Forty years was right, and fair, and necessary.

  But it changed her destination.

  It raised the specter of work left undone, and here was an army of people with no other purpose. If there was work for them to do, then she would take them to do it. It raised a new question, about who was really right, and who was wrong, and couldn't there be something better than this?

  She had to know.

  The convoy straightened up, bound for the west, and her people came with her. In their hearts they believed it was the right thing to do. They didn't know why. They followed blindly, just as they'd followed Drake and Witzgenstein before, into death or damnation, because Lara wanted them to. And Lara didn't care what they thought.

  She just had to know.

  21. WHY

  The black eye catches nothing.

  I scour the land to the furthest extent I can, but all I find are wispy trails. People came this way, people like me, like the shark-eyed man, like Lucas, but different. Their tracks on the line are unfamiliar, perhaps cleaner somehow, purer, more neatly arranged.

  But they're gone now, far to the East.

  I kneel before James While for hours, a grotesque idol, but I can't turn my gaze away. His echo on the line is still there, a faint buzz of life like the body doesn't quite know it's dead.

  I've never noticed that before.

  The buzz speaks of pain. A lifetime of pain, culminating in a death of extraordinary anguish. They cracked open his ribs while he was alive. Cause of death must have been blood loss. It doesn't smell in here, and part of that's the cold preserving him, but I'm also confident they were only here within the last two or three days.

  I missed James While by two or three days, and that breaks my spirit. If I hadn't spent three days reading his notes, I could have saved him. I
might have been here and I could have fought them, whoever they are.

  But even so, I'm starting to get a feeling for them now. The butterfly I felt earlier is right there before me, fluttering in James While's cratered chest. Its wings are dappled red with his blood.

  I remember, this is how he found Olan Harrison.

  I think back to those images in James While's meticulous notes; the old man on his operating bench, ribs cracked open, horror and pain on his face. But was there something else, too? Was there a sense of accomplishment in his eyes? Perhaps if I'd been there, if I could have seen him in the flesh with the line buzzing slightly just like it buzzes around James While now, I might have known for sure.

  But that was fourteen years ago, and I was nobody then.

  All I have now are photographs made of digital megabytes, not even real. Still, the butterfly flaps its wings, and somewhere around the world a tornado begins. I picture it growing slowly at first, a zephyr building from local variances in pressure, enough to swirl plastic bags in the air and make the leaves rustle, but steadily getting bigger and stronger until it climbs into visibility.

  Now it's a twister. It scours the land like the raging finger of God, raw nature destroying its own creation, tearing up barns and ripping a path through corn fields, decimating cattle and yanking mosquito blinds off your windows, setting the storm shelter rocking and making the children cry underneath the table, wearing helmets and clutching your hand so tightly, terrified to die.

  I blink, and James While's glistening interior comes back into focus. I can see his spine. His lungs hang slack from their tubes, like cuts of meat in the butcher's window.

  The tornado from a butterfly's wings. I think, from such small things are whole worlds shifted. Probably the tectonic plates begin with a trickle of magma only, a tiny reversal in the Earth's magnetic core, and that makes for earthquakes that can topple cities or knock a species into extinction. Probably the Ice Ages began with only the slightest wobble in the planet's axis, and led to millions of tons of ice raking down from the poles, cutting a swathe through the dinosaurs and the mammoths and our distant human ancestors.

  I see the shape of this world now, in the ribs spread either side of James While's body, like a gory angel watching over me. I see the train of events linking him to me to Olan Harrison and the SEAL, all of us trapped in a confluence of events brought about by one man, by one desire, by one beat of the butterfly's wings.

  And finally, after many hours of communing with this poor dead bastard, I see the things that James While never could see, because I have lived a life he never could. I see why he left me his great work, so that I could reach this moment and know it for what it is.

  Because Cerulean always came to me.

  Because Drake came to me too.

  Because part of James While is here with me even now. They're all trying to change me, fighting a war in my mind for what comes next, because they were never really gone.

  The ocean is not just the gray zombies, I see, or the red demons, or the lepers, or any of the thirty-six expressions from the T4. The ocean is the medium, and the medium is the message, and they're both one and the same. We're all thought soup, we all transmit and receive at the same time, we all come from it, and go to it, and live within it.

  So Cerulean was never really dead. He was always with me. And with that come the tears, and the final revelation.

  Olan Harrison isn't dead.

  I see the new reality spread before me like a ribcage, unveiling all its gory secrets. The Logchain, the Multicameral Array, the Apotheo Net were all rungs on a ladder leading to this. James While served a purpose, just as the SEAL served a purpose, and I served a purpose, all part of a plan decades in the making.

  Chills rush through me, making me woozy with the light of understanding. James While never saw it but I do, because now I know why.

  Why kill seven billion people? Why cause such enormous suffering, such tremendous loss, such a devastating apocalypse?

  I see it as clearly as I see James While's heart. I see the pattern arcing back decades and on into the future. It tells me where to go, and what I need to do, and thrusts the black eye out along their trails with a vigor I've never felt before, with a towering rage to match, for all the crimes they've committed to reach this point.

  I know who, and where, and when, and how.

  And now I finally know why.

  END

  THE LIES - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Sincere thanks as ever to the Ocean Elite: Pam Elmes for a lightning-fast read through along with a lot of great typo catches, Debbie Middleton for some excellent and confusing finds, Joe Z, Brita Morrow (amongst others) for pointing out the difference between 'pot plants' and 'potted plants', Katy Page, Angelic Lane for a huge number of valuable notes despite being hospitalized, Amber Reid for a really thorough readthrough with in-depth comments, Kristin Fugate, Alyse Wolfard for sharing some very helpful thoughts, Jacinda Matzer for a wide range of very useful ideas, Rebecca Barnes for a deep dive and discussion on Logchain theory, and Renee Beauchamp for extensive helpful comments.

  I really appreciate all your help and support.

  - Michael

  THE LIGHT - CONTENTS

  ANNA

  AMO

  LARA

  SIEGE

  FAR EAST

  Acknowledgements

  AMO

  INTERLUDE 1

  Olan Harrison stood by the body's side and waited.

  They were in his private chambers on the Redoubt's eleventh floor; floor-to-ceiling windows spanned the exterior wall, offering a view out over the spiky gray Huangshan mountain range, Eastern China, now bathed in a low mist. The scale and scope of the panorama was dizzying, with the drop falling away to the winding river far below, where the missile arrays, access road and sentinel autocannons were effectively invisible within the carefully sculpted lay of the land.

  All of this for James While, to evade detection from above. He caught himself smiling, and tapped the body's hand.

  "You were dogged," he said. "I'll give you that."

  There was more than a grudging respect there. He'd loved this man, in his own way. Using him, turning him against himself and watching his madness grow, had been one of the greatest disappointments of Olan's life. Also one of the greatest victories. It came naturally, these days, to hold opposing views in his head at the same time.

  The body's eyes flickered beneath the eyelids.

  It was strange still, even after thirteen years of working with the Lazarus protocol, to think about a fractured mind trying to find itself within a new body. No one understood the process better than Olan Harrison; he'd been the first person in human history to have his consciousness dragged down off the line, and even he didn't understand it fully. The things the line did to you, while you floated helplessly up above…

  He focused, rallying his mind back to the body before him. It didn't look anything like his old friend; the Redoubt wasn't that far advanced with their clone technology. Still, minus the ravages of the line, it would be the same man, and with his mind back in a new body, it was all about steadily synchronizing the two. When you got down to the hardware vs. software argument, it was all academic really, only an order of magnitude away from updating the operating system on your cell phone.

  It was strange to think that such matters had once occupied his every waking moment, back when he'd run a global communications company. He'd agonized over the ethics of sending out brute force system updates to millions of cell phones across his many networks, just to counter the threat of a potential computer virus in one region.

  He'd gotten over those moral qualms, and come a very long way since. What was the fall of the old world, but the ultimate operating system update, an upgrade to human 2.0? He allowed himself a small smile. So the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Did that make this hell? Another smile.

  Not for him.

  "He's rising toward consciousness," came the small v
oice in his left ear; an implant surgically attached to the inner cochlea.

  Little Olan, he called this, the strongest of the voices in his head. Thirteen years of use had integrated it thoroughly into who he was; neither an angel or a demon on his shoulder, only an artificial echo of his own mind, providing a steadfast reminder of what 'Olan Harrison' really was, in the face of so much chaos.

  The Apotheo Net had worked such wonders. Back then, he'd dreamed of uploading his consciousness into the Internet 'cloud'. He'd had them drill into his skull just to place the electrodes closer to his brain, to make a higher resolution record of his living mind. Their efforts had succeeded beyond all expectation, producing an accurate artificial intelligence version of him, but still there was no way to actually transfer 'him'.

  They could make electronic copies. But the Olan Harrison that he was, trapped in his skull and his aging body, could not just be beamed out through a telephone wire. He'd had to turn to the line for that…

  Still, he'd found a use for Little Olan. Without him none of this could have existed; the Redoubt, the Lazarus program, the pitfalls they'd placed on the road toward the cure. Without Little Olan's shepherding hand at the tiller Olan himself would still be far above, floating alone while the hydrogen line cannibalized him for parts, with his 'Shadow SEAL' organization fallen into disarray.

  Little Olan had kept it all running after Olan himself died, working in close tandem with Rachel Heron. He owed them both his life, which in some ways made what was to come even harder.

  "How long until he wakes up?" he asked the AI.

  "Red cell count elevated," Little Olan answered. "I estimate three minutes. He will be vocal. Shall I anesthetize?"

  Olan toyed with that prospect. Should a painful death be met by a painful birth? Life was not supposed to be easy, and the lot for this particular man less easy than others. He was here primarily, after all, to suffer. It wasn't fair to promise him anything else.