And the bomb… His addition to the plan, against orders. A good thing. But not good enough. The President had lived.
When he was clear of the uplink location, and the logfiles had been magnetically wiped and his slate and mission phone wiped, shorted, and dropped into the bay; when the cutout machines had all suffered mysterious data loss, and the members of his virtual team – Ava and Hiroshi and the Nigerian – had all scattered to the wind; when he was on the move, walking through the noisy crowds on Market Street, only then did he pull out the encrypted phone reserved for the next conversation, and dial his superior, the head of the Posthuman Liberation Front, the man code-named Zarathustra.
I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
The tone sounded in his ear. One-time cryptographic pads aligned. He had sixty seconds of talk time.
“Mission failed,” Breece said softly. “Interference of some sort. Cause unknown.”
“The bomb was out of plan.” Zara’s voice was distorted, electronically warped to prevent voice print recognition.
“Don’t worry about the bomb,” Breece told him. “Worry how we were stopped. Worry how someone knew we were coming. Worry why the target lived.”
“I tell you what to worry about,” Zara replied. “Not the other way around.”
“They detected our asset. They knew we were there. They were ready for us.”
“You killed dozens against orders.”
“They were the enemy. FBI. ERD. DHS, all of them.”
“I tell you who the enemy is. Stand down until you hear from me again.”
Breece cut the connection in frustration and kept walking.
What have you done to overcome him? Nietzsche had asked.
I’ve killed, Breece thought. That’s what I’ve done.
What about you?
The man called Zarathustra leaned back in his chair and stared out at the bustling city beyond the windows. He was tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, broad-shouldered. A man accustomed to physical action. Yet history would know him – if it ever truly knew him at all – by what he did through others.
Breece would need watching, at a minimum. The man was becoming more and more extreme, turning into a liability. Not now. Not in the immediate wake of this. But soon.
Seventy men and women dead. The President still alive. The collateral damage was high. Messy. Very messy. But in the end, the mission had been accomplished. The American people, and the world, would know fear.
Martin Holtzmann jolted back to consciousness in his room at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The pain was rising again, pushing its way up his left side, up the shredded mass of the muscles of his leg, up the shards of his shattered femur and pulverized hip, up the broken and bruised ribs of his torso, to lodge in his fractured skull. The pain was epic, growing, building, threatening to burst out of his ravaged body. His heart pounded faster and faster. Sweat beaded on his brow.
Holtzmann scrambled for the pump, found it, pressed the button over and over again. Some sweet opiate flooded into his veins. The pain receded from the apocalyptic levels it had been approaching, and his panic receded with it.
Alive, Holtzmann thought. I’m alive.
Others weren’t so lucky. Seventy had died. Many he’d known. Clayburn. Stevens. Tucker. All dead. Even Joe Duran, standing just next to him, had been killed.
If I’d been one seat over…
Joe Duran had known. In that last instant, he’d understood. There was no way Holtzmann could have spotted the assassin by chance alone…
If Duran had lived… They would have come asking questions. Questions that would have led them to the Nexus in his brain…
But he’s dead, Holtzmann reminded himself. He’s dead, and I’m not.
It was a guilty kind of relief, but relief it was.
What the hell happened? he wondered.
The details were all over the news. Steve Travers, the Secret Service agent who’d fired on the president, had an autistic son. Early evidence showed that he’d installed Nexus to connect to the boy, and somehow the Posthuman Liberation Front had used that to subvert him. The group had already claimed responsibility, releasing a statement.
“Today we’ve struck a blow for liberty against those who would oppress you. Whenever and wherever tyrants seek to dictate what individuals may do with their own minds and bodies,” the distorted shape of a man proclaimed, “we will strike.”
But how? How had they done it?
It took sophisticated software to turn a man into a human puppet like that. Holtzmann knew. He’d commanded a team that had done so. Oh, it could be done. But the so-called Posthuman Liberation Front that had claimed responsibility hadn’t shown such competence in a decade, if ever. For the length of his career the PLF had struck him as jokers, more notable for their bombastic statements and their ability to evade capture than for any harm they’d done. So why now? What had changed?
Martin Holtzmann lay on his hospital bed, troubled, his mind clouded by painkillers.
After a few minutes he issued commands to his Nexus OS. The day’s memories, all he had seen and heard and felt, to the extent he could still recall them, began to spool to long-term storage.
Holtzmann reached for the opiate button again.
Ling Shu woke in space, the hundred billion stars of the Milky Way rising above her. She blinked away the illusion. The projection ceased, and her room appeared. Clean lines, teak wood, Chinese characters covering one wall, another wall given entirely to a massive window that looked out over the heart of Shanghai.
Ling could see the lights of the city out that window, now, the twenty-story-tall female face on the skyscraper across the street, winking and smiling, advertising some product for the humans to consume. The world inside her felt more real. Distant storms sent shockwaves through the ebb and flow of bits she swam through. Digital thunder had woken her, the echoes of vast explosions across the planet. She breathed it in, felt the data permeate her, felt herself pull meaning from the chaos.
The US President, nearly dead.
Stock markets, halted to stop their freefalls.
A new bounty on her friend Kade’s head, announced by the Americans.
She could feel the world reorienting itself. Even with the official markets closed, vast flows of money and data moved from place to place in the dark. Bets were being made and hedged. Insurance was being sought and provided. Contingency plans being activated. Semi-autonomous agents zipped commands, requests, transactions to and fro.
She could not see all the swimmers, but she could see the ripples they left in the sea of information. And she knew what these ripples meant.
War.
War was coming.
And Ling must reach her mother.
HOME AT LAST
Samantha Cataranes hopped down from the cab of the tanker truck with a wave and a laugh. The driver shouted a farewell in Thai and was off, hauling his cargo of precious fuel-excreting algae – probably pirated from some Indian or Chinese company – further south to the border with Malaysia.
Around her, the village of Mae Dong, a tiny hamlet in rural Waeng district, stretched for a few blocks on either side of the road. A fuel station. One restaurant and a pair of tea houses. One guest house where a traveler might find a room.
Sam started towards the guest house. The July heat was brutal. The sun pounded down on her tanned skin. July should be a wet month, but the rains were late again this year. The fields were yellower and dryer than they ought to be. The rice paddies were browner. Only the gene-hack drought-resistant rice in those muddy paddies kept this country fed.