Trust or distrust.
But that was the corrosive nature of any conspiracy; it played on the fears inherent in all human beings, the terror of having your secrets known by the unknown, the vicarious thrill of keeping a sinister secret yourself. These people, this group Lebedev called the Illuminati… What they were doing lived in darkness, and the part of Anna that was still an officer of the law wanted to see them dragged screaming into the light.
She found herself back at the army tent, and ducked beneath the door flap. The place was empty, but the comms gear and the big screen were as live as they had been hours earlier. The snow of static on the monitor shifted slightly as she came closer, as if her presence were a breeze disturbing a scattering of leaves.
"I know you can hear me," she said. "I want to ask you something."
After a few seconds, the static settled into the familiar pattern of dispersion she'd seen before, the phantom no-face. "I will help you if I can,
Anna," said Janus. "But please understand that I don't have all the answers "
"These people… the Illuminati. The Tyrants. Back in D.C. there was something that D-Bar said to me, a phrase that I couldn't get out of my head." She sighed. "He talked about something called 'the Icarus Effect.'"
"Ah, yes. A sociological construct, originally conceived in 2019 by Doctor Malcolm Bonner of the University of Texas. It's a very interesting theory, a societal echo of something that occurs in nature. Imagine a pack of animals, among which is a single individual exhibiting signs of nascent evolutional superiority. Not common superiority, that is, but a marked difference from the norm. A rare excessive." The ghost-face shimmered. "The individual's renegade nature threatens the stability of the pack. The others close ranks against it. Expunge or terminate it.
Stability returns, and the pace of evolution is slowed to a more manageable scale."
"We're not talking about animals here," Anna insisted. "This is about people."
"Indeed. But the principle is the same. Like brave but foolhardy Icarus, those who dare to go beyond the boundaries will fall to their deaths."
"But who gets to choose where those boundaries are?" she asked. "This group Lebedev talked about. I thought the Illuminati were just a historical curiosity, some kind of pre-millennium modern myth. But you expect me to believe that they're still around, and they've set themselves up as the… the stewards of humanity?"
"I couldn't have put it better myself" Janus allowed. "They have been here for a very long time, Anna. They believe that gives them the right to run the world, and so they do not wait for the Icarus Effect to play itself out. They induce it wherever and whenever they deem it suitable. The Tyrants are one of the tools they use."
A chill passed over her. "How… how many times have they done this?"
"You mean, is this the first time they have manipulated global events to their own design? Oh, no. As I said before, the Illuminati have actively taken control of human history in this manner on many occasions. They have a long, long reach. World wars, disasters, famine, assassinations, cover-ups…all have been set in motion to deliberately retard the advancement of society when it threatened to go too far beyond the borders they created. We can't be allowed to fly too close to the sun, do you see?" Anna thought she detected bitterness in the artificially distorted voice. "Imagine a vast steel hand enveloping the world. We must wear the invisible chains they have fashioned for us, because they believe only they have the right to judge when humanity can step from the cradle."
The screen flickered and began to display a mosaic of images, video, and still photographs from the last hundred years. She saw soldiers on the battlegrounds of the Great War, Vietnam, the Pacific, Europe, the Persian Gulf. Grainy footage of a space shuttle blossoming into a fireball. A clip from the Zapruder film. The Berlin Wall midcollapse. Waves of dark oil across the Louisiana coastline. Gas attacks on the Tokyo subway.
Diagrams of what looked like a flying saucer. Blurry news camera shots of an airliner striking the second tower. Tanks rolling through the burning streets of Jerusalem; and there was more, but she couldn't recognize every fractional moment.
Anna thought about Janus's words and looked down at her hands, very aware that she was seeing them not through the eyes she had been born with, but through augmentations that made her more than human. Transhuman. The word resonated with cold possibility; it felt a million miles away from Anna's very ordinary existence. The hacker seemed to sense her train of thought. "A society that can augment itself at will, a human race capable of exceeding its physical limits through the application of technology… Can you imagine what kind of threat such a thing would be to those who want to control us?"
"We're flying too close to the sun," she said to herself.
"The Illuminati see themselves as an intellectual elite. If we are Icarus, they think of themselves as Daedalus, his father. The guiding hand of the parent. The creator and mentor."
Anna's lip curled. "I studied Greek mythology in college, and I remember that Daedalus was an arrogant bastard. The man built a maze of death, and killed his nephew when he thought he might be smarter than him."
"And the Illuminati have killed, and worse. But the truth is, what you have seen is only one thread in the whole. What is taking place right now, the assassinations that claimed the life of your friend and all the others, these things are only the precursor. This is just one battle in a greater campaign they plan to win. At any cost."
Her mouth went dry as the scope of that statement settled in her thoughts. "What do you mean?"
When Janus replied, she felt a stab of fear deep in her gut. "Would you like me to show you, Anna? I've been building a model of all the potentials. It is incomplete, but there is truth there. You could consider it… a glimpse of our tomorrows."
And then she heard herself answering. "Show me."
The hacker Janus did as Anna asked. The screen rippled, and the cascade of images returned-but this time they were almost too fast for her to register, a barrage of light and color and sound that washed over her with hypnotic force. She couldn't look away, and across her scalp she felt her skin crawl. The image-storm stuttered and blinked like an old analog television signal, hazing as it tried to tune itself into her. Anna suddenly became aware of the augmented optics in her eye sockets, for the first time feeling them as if they were spheres of hard, heavy steel.
Something was happening; Janus's images were moving in synchrony with the digital processors built into her artificial eyes. It was like a switch flipping inside her mind; and she saw – the skyline of a city made of tiers, fires raging, and weapons discharges sparkling in the twilight, chaos, and disorder rising like a tide – crowds of panicked people desperately trying to flee hordes of crazed rioters, all of them augmented, all of them mad with wild fury – a wall of video screens filled with a storm of screaming, hissing static, and before them an enhancile woman collapsing to her knees, tearing at herself in crazed agony – orbiting above the Earth, a communications satellite shutting down, lights dimming, dish antenna retracting. Then video screens, holograms, advertising billboards, cell phones, televisions, computer monitors, all of them showing the same message in bright red letters – NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL – a field of crosses, made from machine parts and cybernetic limbs, behind a sunrise over barren grassland. In the distance, a string of fallen power lines- -a ghost town of fallen buildings and empty streets-a dead future
It ended as quickly as it had started, and Anna stumbled, suddenly robbed of her balance. Her eyes throbbed and her skull ached. The woman rubbed at the skin of her face and it was hot to the touch. She glared up at the screen, which had returned to its neutral aspect.