The sound of her name repeats again. It draws her to the barricade, up close now, her face pushed against a gap, peering through at the now-distant police line. She hadn’t heard it back then, and now it triggers thoughts of possibilities, alternate histories, dividing timelines. Parallel universes. Other outcomes.
It’s all too late, of course.
She watches the recording’s timer tick away the seconds.
Exactly on cue, the building behind her explodes.
Shrapnel the size of bricks pierces her body, failing to rip her flesh apart, while elsewhere she watches it reduce others to clouds of scarlet mist. A huge storm cloud of fragments and debris is rolling across Stokes Croft toward her, swallowing up its dying occupants. In a few short seconds she’s covered by it herself, day turning to night as pixels extinguish the sun, and in the dislocated limbo of the inside of the cloud she allows herself to exhale, a strange sense of clarity, a fleeting moment of quiet and solitude.
And it is fleeting. As quickly as it rolled over her, the cloud is gone, no traces of debris left as the displaced masonry dissolves into the air, the spex’s smoke-erasing filters kicking in just a little too late.
It reveals a landscape sprayed red, streets pooled with blood, all fanning out from the now-vacant lot where the missile hit, like child’s paint blown through a straw. Streams and pools, broken limbs and shredded, soaked fabric.
Screams. Ringing ears.
“Don’t look,” she hears herself say. “Take them off.”
“I’ve seen all this before.” That same resignation in Mary’s voice, but somehow tinged with arrogance now. A numbed defiance. “I’ve watched these people die, over and over. I just didn’t understand what happened, why.”
To Anika’s surprise, Mary reaches in front of her, fingers grasping the virtual jog wheel that floats in front of them. She hits REWIND.
They watch the cloud reappear and then retreat, bodies and masonry reassemble, blood seemingly evaporate. The building stands again. Mary continues to rewind but now slowly, ultra slo-mo. And there they glimpse it, moving almost too fast for even the app’s high frame rate, a blurred shard thrown from the sky. She lets it roll back and Anika traces the missile’s trajectory, still unable to see the drone that threw it down—its apparent last, crippled act before it ditched somewhere out at sea, according to the stories she’d heard—but she can see enough to confirm what she’d always expected. Poorly aimed, the missile had almost scraped its intended target—the hulking frame of the 5102 and its occupants hiding from the chaos. Rush. College. Her.
A last-ditch attempt. The death throes of the network. A mistaken, panicked attempt to cut out what it saw as the cancer eating away at itself.
Anika hits FAST FORWARD.
There’s not much time left on the recording’s clock now, just minutes.
Anika grabs Mary’s arm and pulls her into an alleyway, knowing what they’ll find.
Then Anika and then Grids, flattened against the wall. Under her hoodie she can see the bulk of the vest. He clutches a printed AK-47 to his chest. He’s young, barely more than a kid. She always forgets how young he was. Mary gasps at the sight.
The wall opposite them, the corner exposed to the street, is being shredded by gunfire. Bricks dissolving into pixel dust.
Then Anika’s hands are over her ears.
Now Anika’s eyes are full of tears.
The firing stops. Grids pulls her hands down.
“You ready?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Is this going to work?” Grids is breathing hard, terrified.
“I don’t know.”
“How close you gotta go?”
“Close.”
“Let me do it.”
“No! No, it’ll be better with me. Look at me. They’ll believe me.”
Grids looks at her; a grin cracks across his face. An almost laugh. “Racist.”
Now Anika feels sick.
For a second nothing seems to happen.
Grids is staring across the street, at things Anika knows are there but she can’t see, people hiding in the shattered buildings, messages from them projected into his retinas.
“Okay.” He looks at then Anika, nods. “Okay. They’re ready. When they open up, you get ready. Okay?”
From across the street, from holes in broken walls and through smashed windows, a hail of machine-gun fire erupts, the rounds passing them and heading up into the street.
Then Anika steps out.
Now Anika follows her, standing at her shoulder.
Mary stands behind her, stunned and motionless.
Stokes Croft is a deserted, shattered shell, strewn with bodies and dust. Again to Anika it is a dozen distant histories—Syria, Iraq, Hue, Beirut, Dresden—alien landscapes that could never happen here, nation-state-scale karmic retribution right on her doorstep.
Sitting in the middle of the road, just meters away from her now, is the tank, dismantling with machine-gun fire the building where her compatriots are hopefully no longer hiding, as its turret slowly turns, electric motors rumbling like giant millstones grinding against each other. Behind it she can see the hole in the barricade where it had punched through, before it had spent the last two hours slowly crawling up Stokes Croft, laying waste to anything that moved.
As she walks behind her ghost she can’t feel her legs.
Then Anika pushes her hands into the air, unveils the blood-flecked white sheet she’s been carrying, starts to scream as hard as she can.
“HELP, HELP! PLEASE! I SURRENDER! SURRENDER! PLEASE! HELP! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! PLEASE HELP ME! I SURRENDER! I SURRENDER!”
The turret stops turning. There’s a strange moment of near silence, no sound except for the distant, skittering sound of falling bricks, fragments of architecture collapsing upon itself.
“OKAY, KEEP YOUR HANDS UP, DON’T MOVE.” The voice seems to come from the tank itself, from some hidden speaker system, embedded in its mottled, bullet-scratched armor.
Then Anika keeps her hands up, but doesn’t stop moving.
“DON’T MOVE,” repeats the tank.
Now Anika wants to scream at her oblivious past self. Don’t go any closer! You’re close enough! You don’t need to get any closer!
Then Anika keeps moving, drops one hand to her side. It slips into her pocket.
The turret starts to turn slowly back, the antipersonnel machine gun moving to face her much more quickly.
Behind them both Grids screams at her “JUST DO IT” and opens fire. Now Anika swears she can feel the rounds pass her head, feel the air they displace, hear them ricochet harmlessly off armor plating.
In her hoodie pocket then Anika’s hand finds the trigger. Now Anika can feel it, the smooth, cold, injection-molded Chinese plastic of the VR game controller against her trembling, clammy hand.
Finger searching for the trigger.
Squeezing.
And then the world screams in digital white noise, and everything is glitch.
RECORDING ENDS is the last thing Anika sees as she rips the spex from her face.
15. AFTER
Knocks on his cabin door.
“What?”
“You up, Rush?”
Jesus. “I am now. What time is it?”