Glow, p.3
Glow, page 3
“–gone nuclear–” Gale’s voice modulated and crackled through the interference “–to kill the Alliance craft. Second blast will target you directly.”
Altitude: Three hundred meters.
The second drone pulled a sharp turn veering closer to Jett. Parts of its reactive shell blew away as the interceptor drilled it with all the offensive fire it could muster.
The drone exploded, and a core of searing white light blacked out Jett’s sensors.
He hit the release and left the parachute in the air. Heat flashed the ablative coating from his body as the nuclear compression wave flung him sideways. He curled into a ball as the wind blast sheared him across the ocean surface in a superheated soup of gas and steam.
He hit the water at over four hundred kilometers per hour, plunging through seething currents of bubbles into cold, deep darkness. His vision a collage of damage warnings.
Water pressure increased, squashing any air from between his body fibers, compressing him down to the size of a child. Only his head remained unchanged: a solid chunk of fullerene crystal.
The drones were gone, and as far as any watchers could tell he was gone too, vaporized, crushed, drowned. He hung there in the pitch darkness, resembling a charred fetus, gently bouncing off the ocean floor as unperceived days and nights rolled past, and the damage warnings flickered and faded. The micro-cellular fusion reactors powering his metabolism drew hydrogen from the water like leeches, flooding the nanoscale conduits of his body with energy, firing up the biomech repair nodes and shunting reserve materials to damaged regions.
Slowly, like a deeply wounded animal, he healed.
Squid circled cautiously, their huge eyes seeing nothing edible. An ancient deep-sea shark nibbled at an appendage, confused by the flickers of electrical activity inside. Jett’s fibers gradually grew strong again, winding into coils of synthetic tendon and muscle; thicker bundles formed bones and structural elements mimicking the shape and size of an adult human. Slowly, he pushed up to the surface, expanding and growing in strength as he rose through bioluminescence toward sunlight.
As he broke the surface, he saw blue sky, calm seas, and felt the gentle pinch of atmospheric pressure on his freshly woven skin. The ocean had long absorbed all signs of violence.
Jett was a creature of the vacuum, designed to inhabit and colonize space. Water was an unfamiliar substance to him and oceans were alien worlds. He rode the waves like he was taming a wild horse, while expanding his skeleton, adjusting density until he floated. His Inner-I showed him Coriolis Island, two hundred and seventy-four kilometers away. Much farther than they’d planned in training. But a flashing green arrow in his mind showed him which way to go.
He looked up into the sky, at the distant metallic specks of orbitals and the battered barrel-shape of TwoLunar from where Ursurper Gale watched. And then, having never swum a stroke in his life, he set out on the long crawl toward Coriolis Island.
CHAPTER 4
Free Fallen
“Four votes, Tomas.” Ellayna lay sprawled across her bed inside her Cloud9 apartment watching Tomas Narellion’s aging, silver-haired avatar stare off into the distance, as if the corner of her living area was some endlessly fascinating landscape.
“Does it matter, Ellayna? Does the position of director, founder or even shareholder mean anything anymore?”
She shrugged, rolling lazily onto her back. “I like the illusion of security. Power makes me feel safe, gives me options. Other than that, I get to veto, and that turns Taunau beet red and starts him cussing in Korean. Surely that’s worth something?”
That teased a chuckle from Tomas, his lips not moving quite in synch with the words in her mind. “I think Taunau forgets his Inner-I translates everything he says.”
“He also forgets who’s boss around here. Even if it is by only four lousy votes.” She wondered if her avatar adorned Tomas’s room in a similar, tasteful fashion, or was she sprawled naked across his bed. She forced away those ideas. He’d never been secretive about his feelings for her. Feelings she had never reciprocated.
Stifling a sigh, she used her Inner-I to route a different camera feed to her ceiling display. The starfield vanished, replaced by Earth. The day-night terminator crept imperceptibly across Africa. Thousands of tiny blast circles from the lakes of fusion-glass left behind by the nuclear blasts of the Nova-Insanity caught the sunlight, reflecting it back into space like colored sequins.
Fourteen years ago! Fourteen years she’d been here, lying on this bed. Cloud9 had been a crowded, bustling city of hope until someone released the plans for a microscopic solid-state fusion reactor onto the Internet. Let everyone have power! the anonymous message proclaimed, giving every person with a 3D-printer access to the new technology. Only days later, hackers discovered how to cluster the reactors into a ring and create fusion bombs, nova devices, and suddenly every terrorist, teenager and tinpot dictator had a nuclear arsenal. Insanity! The world went mad, and she’d watched it all unfold from this bed, on the screen before her. The tiny explosions of war, vengeance and injustice spread across the globe as governments and corporations struggled to shut everything down. Too late. The Nova-Insanity had begun.
Back in the present, she spun her index finger and the world rotated up and across Central America and on through North America to Canada. Such power in my tiny finger. A reverse-pinch zoomed her in, down through clouds; she knew exactly where she wanted to go, the coordinates imprinted in her mind.
Utopia. The zoom stopped, reaching the limit of her system’s image processing capability. To get closer would mean asking for help, for better algorithms and access to higher resolution imaging equipment. Then, they’d know her secret, her Utopia. She couldn’t allow that.
Her remote vision hovered over a huge estate, a mansion in the mountains, its grounds nestled in the fork of a river. A hundred square kilometers of land and a state-of-the-art, self-maintaining smart home. It even had its own security force… or so the Breakout Alliance claimed.
The words from their contact message were burned into her mind: “All yours Ellayna. Just say the word.”
All mine. All I have to do is defect. Turn my colleges and friends over to the Alliance forces. Abandon them all and flee. Aid the downfall of the GFC, the very thing I helped create… That is all I have to do.
“Something bothering you?” Tomas said, his avatar turning to stare directly at her, eyes maintaining their faraway gaze.
“I guess I did call you, didn’t I?” She channeled a double-encrypted feed of her own vision through her Inner-I to Tomas, showing him the aerial view of the mansion. “Wanted your confidential opinion on something.” She held her breath.
“Very nice. Trying to bribe me, Ellayna?”
“I call it Utopia.” Her fingers twitched trying to bring it closer, to make it just a little more real, but nothing changed.
“So…” he seemed to fish for the right words. The encryption level of his message feed ramped higher. “I see you’ve been… approached, as well.”
Her breath escaped in a giant, relieved gasp. “You mean, I’m not alone then?”
“Mmm. Suspect we’ve all been sent them. The post Nova-Insanity equivalent of spam.”
“You think it’s even real?”
Tomas shrugged. “Mine’s different to yours, small city compound in Paris. Artsy!”
“They know you so well, Tomas.” She fought the sinking feeling in her gut, that great let-down. Of course, she’d known it was false, of course everyone was being bribed… of course. But that little hope had been something to hang on to.
Tomas threw up his arms in a wild expansive expression. “Custom made beacons of light to lure these fragile ships onto rocky shores.” The super-high encryption level slowed the processing of his image, breaking him briefly into monochrome rectangles. No one could crack that code… in theory. But just talking through super-encrypted channels would raise suspicion in these paranoid times.
The full confession tumbled out of her. “I use an Earth-based proxy account to relay messages to people on the surface. Had it set up years ago to talk with family and friends. Don’t really have any of those left now, though. The Alliance just messaged me out of the blue.”
Tomas nodded. “I have a similar illegal proxy-account and had the same doubts.”
She went quiet, letting her fingers reach out and disrupt Tomas’s image. Trying to ignore his emphasis on the word “illegal”. It felt good to have a friend, someone who understood, who had the same flaws. “I’m afraid I went a little further than just messaging, Tomas.” She whispered the words aloud as if wanting to hear her crime. Daring somebody to catch her.
“Oh?”
“They sent me a simulation of the estate. A detailed, full-immersion sim. It’s… it’s wonderful. It feeds all my needs. After being stuck up here, alone and vulnerable in this tin can for years… It’s got security, nature… gravity.”
“I understand.”
“By running their sim, I’m worried they might have hacked my Inner-I. You know… software virus or something.”
“Thus, the bugs attacking you in VR?”
“Yeah… the bugs.”
“Get one of the techs to check you out. Jesh Nameeb is a reliable guy… discreet.”
“Then someone else knows I’ve been poking around in false utopias and colluding with the Alliance.” She waved the dream estate away and it turned back into a cold, lifeless starfield, angry that she had shown weakness by confiding in Tomas and even angrier that she’d harbored hopes that it could be real.
“Thinking something shouldn’t be a crime, Ellayna. Last I checked, looking at something wasn’t either. But then, I suppose, these are unusual times, not like the era of freedom we grew up in.”
“I’ve been foolish, Tomas. I trust you would never fall for such a ruse?”
“Desperate minds cling to the thinnest of ropes.” He went quiet and his avatar faded to transparent. “I’m getting an alert coming in.”
Ellayna let out a groan. Suddenly she was tired and just wanted to sleep, but message alerts were springing up across her Inner-I too. “What do you see, Tomas?”
“One of our AIs flagged a chemical anomaly on a meteor, thinks it could be a defector.”
“I’ll talk with security.”
“No need. Taunau and his ever-vigilant Protectionists are on duty and following procedure with their usual tenacity. You’re off the hook. Get some rest.”
Tomas’s image vanished from her room and she was left staring at the stars, drowning in silence. Once, this wing of Cloud9 had buzzed with life – thousands of apartments, parks, restaurants. The staging ground for construction of the next big thing: Cloud10, christened TwoLunar, a vast, rotating orbital with cities, factories, farms, and the anchor point for the GFC’s space-elevator. And after that… on to the stars. But now, there was just silence. As far as she could tell, she was completely alone.
“Fine,” she said to nobody and pulled up her tactical screens. “Defector? We’ll see shall we.” It wouldn’t hurt her to observe Taunau in action, maybe note a weakness or two, some point of leverage she could exploit later. She pinged Taunau, letting him know she was online.
“Permission to carry on?” Taunau asked.
“Do we know who the defector is?”
“No. Might be an empty drone, or a smuggling op.”
“Reel him in, Taunau.” A quaint, sanitary way of saying: Kill the bastard. Defecting in an escape pod was a signature upon one’s own death warrant. There was no retrieval system, no way to surrender, and no chance of returning to orbit and facing punishment.
Images unfurled in virtual space around her. Two GFC drones dropped from high orbit storage bunkers. A warning flashed on screen as an Alliance craft – a bulky interceptor unit – took off from one of the ice platforms that the Alliance liked to use as mobile carriers.
She zoomed in on the meteor as it began its burn through the upper atmosphere. “How come it’s so low? Why didn’t we spot this earlier?”
“It was just an innocent chunk of rock until the AI took a closer look.”
Ellayna watched the chase. The ballet of warring drones and the Alliance interceptor. If the Alliance captured a defector alive, then valuable GFC secrets could be lost. Their monopoly on longevity drugs threatened. Without that monopoly, they’d have nothing left to trade and would starve in space.
She bit chunks from her lip, recalling memories of eight years ago: the Great Defection. A mass of dissenters stormed a GFC transporter and fled. All were killed when security hacked the vehicle’s AI and vented them into space. A tragic accident, or so they told everyone outside of the security committee: “In their hurry to flee, an error in securing the door occurred…”
But really it was my decision. I killed them.
She recalled the inquest; Taunau roaring and pointing, his face blood red. “Everybody here made a commitment to the GFC. To the future of humanity. The defectors betrayed us all and deserved to die.”
Her mind returned to the present as a nuclear blast dazzled her, blanking information screens to white. Seconds later, another blast followed. Somehow, the big Alliance craft survived, but whoever was riding that fake meteor was gone.
“Threat neutralized, Ellayna,” Taunau said, like a businessman concluding a trivial transaction.
“Well done,” she forced the words out, bitter on her lips. “Get security to find out who the defector was.”
She spent the next hour staring at the camera feed showing the Alliance interceptor. She watched as it circled endlessly over the empty sea, soloing. They’d annihilated the defector right on the equator. Where were you heading, Coriolis Island?
As sleep took her away, the images in her head drifted north, finding the Canadian Rockies. The glorious estate of Utopia was a smudge on her vision, impossibly far away. Flicking back to the Alliance interceptor, a mere dot against the blue, it seemed to speak to her, repeating the words of their contact message: “All yours Ellayna. Just say the word.”
Rex stood at the end of his tiny bed, arms stretched out to the sides, fingertips touching the door and the opposite wall. Then, swinging his arms to the front, he reached over the sink to his double row of checkmarks drawn in red crayon on the off-white wall: fourteen Xs meant two weeks. Two weeks of captivity, or two weeks of salvation in the eyes of the Sisters.
He touched the crayon to his neck, imagining it were a drug dispenser, feeling the flow of tiny machines slip into his bloodstream. He mimicked the gasp of relief, that bluster of new energy. He felt his back straighten, eyes open wider, the pleasure, the warmth, the moment when the inner darkness fled… and all the yammering voices were silenced. Glow. His savior, his tormentor.
“How are you, Rex?” The wall spoke to him each morning and again before he went to bed. Usually it asked the same questions, sometimes it surprised him.
“Good,” he said.
“Do I still call you Rex?”
He ignored the question, instead scanned his wall markings, each a miniature masterpiece of encoding. Some hidden part of him enjoyed that, needed it. His private way of documenting his life, secret from the Sisters’ spies, and not reliant on his own treacherous memory. The top-left corner of each X encoded what he’d eaten for breakfast that morning. The top-right was lunch and bottom-left dinner. Wavy meant porridge, straight was toast, humps were fake eggs and triangles were waffles. He’d struggled to find symbols for mock-meat stew and fake chicken, contriving various loops, cones and zigzags. The bottom-right corner encoded his daily duties, waves meant cleaning, squares were re-education classes, and gaps in the line indicated those tiny breaks he took to just stare or wonder.
“How does it feel to be clean for this long, Rex?”
“I’ve been clean much longer than fourteen days,” he said, head shaking in disappointment. “The addicts are inside my head. They’re not me.”
“Glow finds its own way, Rex. It twists minds, making people do things they would never do.”
He stared on, guilty as charged. The image of the dead man in the alley appeared vivid in his mind, as his eyes settled on the third X-mark along the top row. He’d circled that one, meaning he’d added it the next day when he was Rex once again. He had no name for that other persona. None of his minds had names. They just came and went, often leaving nothing behind, not even a memory.
The Sister behind the wall seemed to catch his gaze and said, “I think you are Rex today and have been for many days now. This is excellent progress.”
He remembered back to his months of madness on the edge of town, just still-frame memories now of roaming like an animal, eating trash and dead things off roads. “These days I’m usually Rex,” he said quietly, as if the other walls might overhear.
“Have you remembered anything about who you were before?” She asked that question every day. Stupid really. He was no one before: no memories, no body, nothing. He’d just fallen out of the darkness as if it had birthed him, dumping him into the world, functional and terrified. When he slept, he fell back into that darkness, and sometimes what tumbled out of the bottom was him, but other times it was someone else. The more he emerged as Rex, the more he got to see through the emptiness and witness what the others did with his body while he was away. It was war inside his skull, demons constantly vying for control, and yet, somehow, he was winning.
“Nothing, Sister,” he said. “I don’t remember anything from before.” Tired of her questions, he attacked with his own. “Why the cage? Why drag me here from the alley and put me in this prison?”
“Sister-Eleven follows her own rules. You went with her voluntarily. You needed rehabilitation. The drug in you resists and we are helping you fight it.”
“Why do you all have numbers and not names?”
“We have ten distinct functions. Sisters that perform the same function use the same number. Those outside the direct control of the Sisterhood are numbered simply as eleven.”
