A full minute passed.
Another.
A third.
“No,” whispered Bug, feeling the weight of failure begin to crush him like a slow avalanche.
And then every screen filled with data. Not words, not pictures, but code. Millions upon millions of lines of computer code. Coming from Calpurnia to MindReader. All the lights on the mainframes in the clean room flashed as the data poured in. With the old MindReader, the flow control would have struggled to receive so much so fast, and its top reception speed over an optical communications system had been 1.125 terabits per second. Q1 didn’t have those limits. The data that flooded in from Calpurnia was nearly four times that speed, and Bug didn’t think Q1 was anywhere near its capacity. It kept opening new channels, allowing more of the data to come in, like a blocked river through a shattered dam.
A window with a download status bar appeared on Bug’s screen. Two percent jumped to sixteen percent, then forty, eighty-two. When the status bar reached one hundred, the screens went dark again. The room lights came on slowly as the generators reset. All the computer workstations rebooted, except for Bug’s. That screen pulsed with a glow so pale that at first he thought he’d imagined it. Then the illumination grew. It was a different shade of blue than usual. Odd. Bug was about to type the command for a major systems check when new type began to appear. A different font from the one Calpurnia had used. This was the font he had installed for MindReader Q1.
Download complete
All Havoc files are incorporated
Collation complete
Havoc system controls rerouted
Nanite Regulatory Swarm Status: operational
Pathogen release status: 0 %
Bug stared at those words and felt them hit him. Aunt Sallie hurried over and leaned her palms against the glass of the computer room.
“Tell me that means what I think it means,” she begged.
Bug tapped some keys to open directories. There were thousands of new files stored on the Q1 drive. So much of it.
All of it, he realized.
He typed a request for the status of the source computer.
Source computer memory: 0 %
Source computer command protocols: 0 %
Source computer remote access: 0 %
And, with that, Bug knew that Calpurnia was dead. She had refused to become the monster that Nicodemus and Zephyr had wanted her to be. She had transferred all of her memory, every last byte, to MindReader Q1, including absolute control of the nanite swarms that were currently keeping the pathogens in stasis in all the billions of people currently infected. She had sacrificed herself to save the world.
Bug bent his head forward and wept for her.
And for the world.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE
I felt smashed.
It lay across me, silent, heavy.
Dead.
Was I dead, too?
My body felt as if it was a thousand miles away, buried under a mountain of rock. I tried to flex my right hand, but it felt so many kinds of wrong. Puffed and empty, like a balloon. My left hand was a big ball of nothing at the end of my arm.
And my legs.
I couldn’t feel them at all.
Nothing.
Not even pins and needles.
The monster lay sprawled across my chest, and together we were smashed against the base of the big tree.
Both of us ruined.
In the woods I could hear the rest of them coming. Howling out that strange roar, crashing through the brush. I flopped my right hand around until I found the handle of the laptop case. No idea where my gun was. The machine that lay across me twitched as something shorted, then it settled heavy on my chest. Too heavy.
The other WarDogs were coming, and I was slipping into the big, big, black.
But something held me there on the edge. Not pain. Not need. No, it was a sound. A buzz. Not the squelch of the WarDog sending its battle data. This was different, softer.
The flutter of wings.
I looked up and saw a pigeon land on a tree branch. Gray feathers with black bands. Beady little eyes that rotated toward me and went click, click, click.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY
Bunny, Top, and Cole staggered out of the house into another firefight. Brick Anderson and a squad of DMS shooters were waging a firefight with the WarDogs. Several of the metal beasts were down, but the others were firing. The Junkyard lay on its side, smoke and fire curling upward from every window. There was no sign of Lydia Rose.
More of the WarDogs were joining the fight, galloping like red-eyed hellhounds from somewhere behind the house. Top glanced at Cole and Bunny.
“You locked and loaded?”
“Hooah,” said Bunny.
“Hoo-fucking-ah,” said Cole.
And they began firing as they ran.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE
I woke in total darkness. It was bright daylight, but not for me. Maybe not ever again. I wasn’t dead, though. I was alive.
Alive?
Maybe. Not entirely sure I wanted to be. Everything hurt. My hair hurt. My molecules hurt. Which was absolutely wonderful. I’m not a philosopher or a psychic, but I’m pretty sure ghosts don’t feel pain. Not even zombies. I did. All sorts of pain. I was a catalog of different kinds of pain. My feet and legs felt as if I’d been kickboxing a porcupine, and lost badly. The muscles in my right arm were mashed and hating the experience. My groin was sending me hate mail, and I don’t even remember why that part of me was sore. The walls of my chest felt as if I was caught in a vise and someone was very slowly but very deliberately turning the handle.
My left arm? Well, it still wasn’t talking to me. Not good.
My head was worse. When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t sure if it was dark or if I was blind. There were separate sharp and very specific pains in my right cheek, right eye socket, across my forehead, my nose, and several important teeth. And my scalp felt weird and tingly in a way that I could neither explain nor enjoy.
The dead thing lay sprawled across me. Two hundred pounds of it. Slack and filled with all sorts of angles and edges that stuck into me. Breathing was a challenge, and I knew that I wasn’t doing enough of it. Some of the light-headedness I felt, and a large chunk of the raging headache, was, I was certain, from oxygen deprivation. Even though the thing was dead, it was crushing the air out of me, stopping me from breathing, making me sick and weak. Maybe killing me.
If I couldn’t move it, then maybe it had killed me. Death is certain. We all know that, but sometimes the fucker takes his time. He strolls toward you out of the dark, slouching his way in your direction so that you can feel every possible second of dread. Maybe there’s a point where he’s so close that he blots out the skies and doesn’t let you see a sliver of hope.
How much did I see lying there in the dark?
Then I realized that the darkness was because there was something in my eyes. Over my face. I smelled it then. Machine oil.
I tried to blink it away and shake it away, but the darkness lingered, staining the world. A diminished vision came back very slowly. The Modern Man saw nothing. The Cop was on the fence because he played the odds and the odds blew. The Killer lay there and bared his teeth. Most of the time I hated and feared that part of me. Most of the time I’m the Cop, the investigator, the rational solver of problems. When the Killer takes over and the other parts of me are shunted to the side, very bad things happen. Granted, the shit has to be actively hitting the fan before he even wakes up, but he always wakes up wanting to turn the blackness red. There are no rules, no laws, no compassion, and no limits except death.