His cautious side remained adamant. “Patricia said no connections to Atopia under any circumstance.”
“Sid’s gone and we can’t find Vince. What difference does it make? This is all gone to hell already.” His emotional side clenched his jaw. “Make the connection.”
“Let’s take a minute and think.” The main part of his mind considered what the rest of him was saying. “Who set this off? ”
“Does it matter? We need to get everything we know to Nancy.” The face of his emotional facet turned beet red.
His cautious side took a deep breath. “I guess you’re right…”
All the parts of his mind were coming to the same conclusion.
“We’ll make contact in the place nobody else knows about.”
They all nodded. They all knew what he was thinking.
15
Vince leaned back and stretched his neck. “You really shouldn’t switch off my Phuture News feeds.” It was all that was keeping them safe, he didn’t add.
Special Agent Sheila Connors was busy with her remote team. They were firewalling Vince off from the world. She grunted, “You and your friends have been busy.”
Connors shared a mediaworld about the terrorist attack in New York. It was filled with images of Robert Baxter emerging from the pneumatic tube system. “A few thousand disappeared, plus six billion future infractions. Half the world is on the hunt for you and your gang.”
Vince watched the news report, still working in the background to release his agents into autopilot. Each new security blanket Agent Connors created restricted his outward paths. He only had a few minutes, perhaps seconds.
“Our gang?” Vince snorted. “We had nothing to do with that.”
“You’re sure?” Agent Connors’ tech team continued to jam up the communications channels around them. “So you didn’t hack into the phutures of ten billion people?”
Vince paused. He didn’t like to lie. “That was for a good reason—”
“And you’re not operating an international espionage ring, modifying the future on a massive scale?”
Vince shrugged. “Like I said—”
“There’s always a good reason with people like you.”
Vince smiled. People like you. Coming from Atopia, Vince felt like an intruder, but it wasn’t because of the technology. He felt like an intruder when he watched people, walked by them in the streets, watched them living their little lives. Once he’d been like them, before the wealth, the fame.
Now he was different. He felt… what? Sorry for them?
Down below he watched the lights of Atlanta slide by, twenty million of those little people living their futile lives. Maybe she’s right, he thought, looking out the window. Maybe I am just a rich asshole. “I’m not going to argue, but you really shouldn’t turn off my Phuture News feeds,” he repeated.
Agent Connors raised her eyebrows. “Or what?” She was using a version of pssi, and in an overlaid display Vince watched her phantoms cycling through their security controls. Mr. Indigo was hers now, and she clicked off the control of his proxxi.
Vince felt the last of his connections close down. He could still see, but he felt blind.
In the Commune, he had been cut off from his future feeds, but his proxxi Hotstuff was working in the background. And the Commune was a data dark spot. There had been some measure of safety—the dangers Vince couldn’t see couldn’t see him either. But now Hotstuff was shut down, and out here, in full view of the world, it wouldn’t be long until whatever was hunting him would catch up. Watching the last of the lights of Atlanta disappear, he realized they must be on their way to Cuba. Almost the whole southern half had become a gulag for the Alliance.
At least it would be warmer than Siberia.
He didn’t need to see fighter drones approaching, didn’t need to hear Agent Connors’ attempts to argue that they weren’t carrying a deadly virus. He didn’t need to watch the flames and roar of the attack, the desperate attempts to fight back. He didn’t need to see it, because even without his future feeds, he knew it was coming.
16
The gray seas of the English Channel rolled beneath clouds that hung above it like stains against the sky. The chalk cliffs of the Dorset coast stretched into the foggy distance, and Durdle Door, an oval hole burrowed through the cliffs by the ocean and time, stood above the beaches like a doorway to another world. Smooth rocks, with heads full of seaweed, lay about in jumbles in the tidal pools. In the middle of them, a small boy in swimming trunks, with awkward legs sticking out at angles, was waiting.
“Bob,” said a little girl, approaching cautiously. “Is that you?”
The boy nodded.
She dropped her bright orange pail and began running to him.
The boy stood, waving a tiny fishing net in the air. “I figured you would see me here,” he said. “And before you ask, I feel fine.” The first thing out of her mouth was always, how are you feeling? So Bob pre-empted.
It was one of their childhood worlds, where Bob and Nancy came as kids to hunt through rocks, to swim, and explore—a special place that was theirs alone. It was Bob’s safest place, even if storm clouds filled it now. Nancy ran to hug him. They sat down facing each other on the wet-seaweed rocks, up to their ankles in tidal-pool seawater.
“What happened in New York?” Nancy asked.
Bob rocked back a little. It wasn’t like her to just jump straight into it. “I don’t know what happened.” Bob saw the explosion of mediaworlds linking him to the attack. He was monitoring the chatter of network traffic searching for him. He’d attached his identity to hundreds of metatags of people leaving the city. It would take time for them to sift through it, hopefully enough for him to get away. “I had nothing to do with it.”
Lightning lit up storm clouds in the distance.
“Why have you been hiding from me, Bob? Why are you running?”
A peal of thunder rolled across them.
“I’m not running.” He shook his head. “I mean, I wasn’t running. It was Patricia who asked me to leave. She sent us out to find Willy’s body.”
Nancy frowned. “She sent you to find Willy’s body?”
“I don’t know why.” That wasn’t entirely true. “There’s something in Willy’s body, something to do with Jimmy she needed us to find out.” Looking down, he picked a periwinkle off the rock and inspected it. The tiny creature retreated into its shell. “It’s not safe. She made me promise to take you with us, but I failed, I left you behind.”
More lightning, and the hollow crackle following it came quicker, louder.
Nancy grabbed both of Bob’s hands. “Jimmy’s assembling his own private psombie army in cities all over the world. I’ve seen it. Is that what you’re trying to stop?”
What should he tell her? He wanted to tell her everything, how much he loved her, how much of a danger Jimmy was. But what made sense? More than just their lives were at stake. Say nothing, and you might lose her. Say everything, and you might lose her. What was the right thing to do?
“Be careful of Jimmy, he’s not what he seems.”
Nancy shivered. “I know. I don’t trust him, or Kesselring, they’re playing power games—”
“He killed Patricia.” Bob squeezed her hands. “And his own parents. It’s not just politics. Something else is going on.”