He and the varcolac were one now, in purpose and power. Nothing could stand in his way. Barely anyone was left alive in the world who even understood what was happening, never mind who had the power to stop him. He sensed something else, too; the varcolac was stronger. It was breaking free, breaking more fully into this world. There was no stopping it now.
The marine who had been trying to save Alex’s life roared and rushed him, but Ryan flicked his fingers like he was shooing a fly, and the marine flew backward and crashed against the wall. He slumped to the floor and lay still.
Outside, someone was shouting with an amplified voice through a speaker. The man spoke in Turkish, a language Ryan wasn’t sure he had even heard spoken before, but he found now that he could understand it perfectly. The voice told those inside the building that it was surrounded, and they should surrender peacefully. A dozen armored soldiers burst into the cellar laboratory and trained their submachine guns on Ryan and the handful of other still-living people in the room.
Ryan laughed. He laughed with power and delight and invincibility. It didn’t matter what anyone thought of him anymore. It didn’t matter what they did to contain him, to push him down and marginalize him. He was the only one who mattered anymore.
Ryan tossed his supercomputer backpack and oxygen tank onto the concrete floor. He wouldn’t need them. He rose from the ground, effortlessly, and spun gracefully in the air. The soldiers shouted at him to stop, but he ignored them. They fired their tiny, insignificant weapons, and Ryan barely noticed. With a flick of his hand, they all died.
Giddy, Ryan shot up higher, passing through concrete and steel and wood like they didn’t exist. From above the roof of the Institute, he could see the Turkish soldiers arrayed in the streets around him, with their armor and guns and trucks and grenades. They would kill him, if they could. That made it self-defense.
Ryan spun, waving a hand or throwing a fist, and each gesture scattered men and their vehicles like bowling pins in a hurricane. They crashed into buildings, into each other, or were crushed by their own falling trucks. He tossed one man five hundred feet in the air and watched him fall. He made another man’s body heavier and heavier, laughing as the man tried to run away, until his body crumpled from its own weight.
It was only what they deserved. These were bad men, killers who imposed their will on others by violence. They were the sort of men who had mocked and bullied him all his life. They didn’t deserve to have their minds joined with the glorious whole. Humanity would be better off without them.
But the goal, ultimately, was not killing. When the soldiers were all dead, Ryan stopped to consider. Now was the time to make the varcolac’s vision real. It was time to bring humanity into the next stage in their evolution. He needed to start assimilating other minds into his own.
Ryan dropped back down into the cellar. Most of the people there were dead, but there was one woman, Lisa, who sat cowering behind a control station. She was a computer programmer, an intelligent woman. He would assimilate her mind, her memories, her knowledge into his own. He walked up to her, took her head and chin in his hands, and broke her neck.
No! That wasn’t what he had wanted to do. What was wrong with him? Ryan waved his hands up and down and flexed his fingers. They moved as he intended. He looked at Lisa’s dead body lying slumped on the ground. Maybe it had just been an accident. He didn’t know his own strength.
Oh well. It wasn’t like she was all that important. He would try again, and he knew just whom he would try next.
In an instant, he was back in Krakow, in the elementary school gymnasium. It was the middle of the night, and the room was empty and dark, lit only by security lights. Ryan knew, however, that Nicole had been sleeping in her office most nights. She claimed she was too busy to waste time traveling to her assigned lodging and back.
He opened the office door, and there she was, asleep on an army cot. Perfect.
Ryan leaned over her and rested his hand on her head. Her breath came in a soft rhythm. He had always secretly had a bit of a thing for her. She was intelligent, quick-witted, attractive. And the secret intelligence agent thing was, of course, pretty sexy. Now she would be his forever. And not in some temporary, physical way that would be over in a moment and regretted by both of them. Not as a slave to her beauty, manipulated into doing whatever she wanted. No. She would belong to him.
He reached into her, feeling the electrical sparks of her mind. Suddenly, she was there, connected to his thoughts. Her experiences and memories were available for him to touch and access at will. He knew her childhood fears. He knew her pleasures and her regrets. She was utterly exposed.
She resisted, of course. Her mind flailed away from him, and she woke, jerking back and reaching for the pistol under her pillow. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t hurt him, and physical distance couldn’t pull her mind away from him, not anymore. She knew he was there, in her mind. She tried to close herself off to him. Reflexively, she thought of the one piece of knowledge she must hide from him at all costs, trying to close it away, keep it hidden. And by doing so, of course, she gave it to him.
She knew the location of the nuclear weapons Turkey had recovered from Romania. The CIA had uncovered the information through a combination of human and stealth drone intelligence. If the Special Ops missions tonight were successful, another mission would be sent to take the nuclear missiles out of the equation.
Ryan twisted his hand, and Nicole’s heart ruptured. He felt her thoughts slipping away. No, no, no! He hadn’t meant to do that! She was supposed to join with him! He reached out, trying to repair her heart, to put it back together, or at the least to pull her mind into him before it was gone altogether, but it was too late. Her bulging eyes stared into his as she died, and he could see the hatred there.
He hated himself. And then he knew. The varcolac was far superior to humanity, so Ryan had assumed it was above such base instincts as deceit. But of course, the varcolac was a sophisticated, intelligent being, capable of doing anything to achieve its desired outcome. It should have come as no surprise to him that the varcolac could lie.
It had never had any intention of uniting humanity into a single, efficient mind. It needed no companion with whom to travel the stars. The varcolac was, by definition, one. There was nothing it wanted from humanity that it could not simply take. He thought he had understood it, but he had understood nothing. He didn’t know what the varcolac wanted, or why. How could he have deceived himself into thinking he could understand the motivations of such a creature? The varcolac was varelse after all.
Ryan didn’t want to be the One anymore. He was done with this. He wanted to go back home to his lab and study the mathematics of particle physics. He wanted to eat French fries and drink Coke until two o’clock in the morning, immersed in solving the latest puzzle. But he was quite sure it was too late for that. He had thought he was the varcolac’s equal, or at least enough that it saw him as a kindred spirit. Now he realized he was just of sufficient intelligence to be its disposable slave.
A single, burning desire sliced through his self-loathing: the desire to teleport to the Romanian missile silo. Ryan knew the desire had not come from him, but he felt it more powerfully than any of his own desires, so strongly that he barely questioned it. Nicole’s office disappeared and was replaced by the dark inside of a silo, with the smell of dust and machine oil and wet metal. The darkness was nearly complete, but Ryan could see like it was bright day. The space was dominated by a white rocket decorated with severe-looking Cyrillic lettering. He had no idea how to tell a standard missile from a nuclear one, though the radiation symbols on doors and walls were a clue.