Amazing.
On closer inspection, he found some wounds to one leg, a cut clear across his face, but nothing major. Just seconds before he’d been at peace with death, and now, it was like he was reborn. He expected he would be horrified, in shock, after a traumatic accident where he was injured, almost killed, but it was quite the opposite. Vince had been overjoyed, ecstatic, hopping around in the swamp examining the mangled turbofan, marveling at it. He cheated death once again, and this time by himself.
Vince opened his eyes and looked at Agent Connors. She was asleep.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
Vince looked up to see Hotstuff, her eyebrows arched as she stared at him.
“Huh?”
“Whatever.” Hotstuff was streaming him summaries of the threat reports. It wasn’t much—they didn’t have much network access—but then again, there wasn’t anything to report either. It seemed that cutting him off from Phuture News had also separated Vince from whatever was chasing him.
“Any questions?” asked Hotstuff.
“Um, no, this looks…” but Hotstuff signed off and faded away without letting Vince finish his sentence. He frowned.
“I think your proxxi is jealous.”
Vince turned to see Agent Connors smiling at him, her eyes half open. He forgot that he had opened his pssi channels to her and she was able to see his proxxi. He had wanted to be sure that she had the same situational data he had. They were in a dangerous spot.
“Of you?” snorted Vince, shaking his head and returning his attention to the nearly empty threat reports.
“The second we get out of here, make no mistake, you’re going to jail,” continued Agent Connors. “So don’t get any ideas.”
Vince looked at her. “Me? Ideas?”
Agent Connors rolled her eyes before closing them again.
Hotstuff popped back into his visual frame, sitting across the table from him. “There’s someone coming,” she whispered.
Before Vince could ask, Hotstuff sent him the report. An Ascetic was walking toward them. So his feelers had found something. Vince spun a viewpoint outside, watching the crowd of partygoers part like the Red Sea around the advancing figure—a stump of flesh suspended between six spindly metal legs, gliding spider-like across the ground.
Vince kicked Agent Connor’s leg under the table, and she jolted awake. He spun the information packets on this Ascetic into her networks.
“Mr. Indigo, I presume,” the Ascetic hissed directly into his head. It wasn’t speaking. It had no mouth. It closed the last few feet of distance by lifting itself up on its hind legs to bring its head even with their balcony.
“Yes.” What was he supposed to say? There wasn’t any use running.
“I have someone who wants to meet you,” continued the Ascetic, the naked slab of its body hanging in space in front of them. Skin was grafted across its face, pulled taut; no eyes, no ears, no mouth. “Someone you’ve been wanting to meet.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” whispered Agent Connors.
The Ascetic turned its body toward her, revealing a large, square cross emblazoned on its flesh. “I am deaf, but I hear all, I am blind, but I see all. Ms. Connors, do you see?”
Sheila’s face went pale. “What do you want?”
“It is not what I want,” hissed the Ascetic, just a voice in their heads. “But what you want.”
7
“We don’t hunt people.” Sibeal looked up, considering her statement. “Or, we don’t hunt humans. You’re our first.”
Willy’s primitive avatar flickered. As the Alliance—America and Atopia and its allies—blockaded data pathways to Terra Nova, there wasn’t enough clean bandwidth getting through for him to project something more sophisticated. It was becoming obvious they were planning some new action against Terra Nova, but the mediaworlds, and even Phuture News, remained quiet.
“You’re not hunting me,” said Willy’s avatar after a pause. “Just my body.”
Sibeal nodded. “Not really even your body—we’re hunting your proxxi, Wally, who’s stolen your body.”
Even Sid stopped for a moment to contemplate just how weird this situation was. He’d convinced Willy to come down and talk to the glasscutters, but his signal was getting weak. Even if the signal from Willy’s body was being routed through Terra Nova, his virtual presence wasn’t allowed inside it, and transmissions from Terra Nova weren’t allowed outside in Allied space anymore. His awareness was being squeezed into the thin cracks of the multiverse in between.
Willy’s avatar remained static for a few seconds, and just when Sid thought the connection had been lost—“I’m not sure Wally is responsible,” came the audio stream from the avatar, but its lips didn’t move. “He might be doing what I asked, or what he thought I asked.”
Sid had filled everyone in, about Willy telling his proxxi to keep them safe, no matter what, when he was running his illegal business.
“So you’re saying it wasn’t him?” echoed ReVurb, the phracker—phuture cracker—Sibeal invited to be part of her team.
Sid didn’t trust phrackers. Even if they weren’t telling the truth, they could engineer the future so what they were telling you became true. They were slippery. Only a small part of a phracker was in the present. Most of them hung around in expensively maintained alternate future realities that spun outward from the present moment in time. The other parts of them sat in the past, winding through post-factual worlds that could have happened if different decisions were made.
“I’m sure it’s my proxxi that stole my body,” Willy replied. “But I’m saying he’s not responsible.”
“Because you set him on this course?”
After an even longer pause, Willy’s avatar nodded. Sibeal and ReVurb had been interrogating Willy for a good hour already.
“So me and Willy have held up our end of the bargain.” Sid stretched his phantom limbs. “How about you show us what you know?”
Sibeal looked at ReVurb, who nodded, and data packets were sent into Sid and Willy’s networks. Sibeal pulled their primary subjectives into a view of the American east coast from a hundred miles up, overlaying the names of cities and districts.
“Each of these,” Sibeal explained, pointing toward red dots that appeared one by one, “are suspected points of entry by Willy’s body into the AEC infrastructure.”
“Suspected?” Sid frowned. “But I thought you had something concrete—”
With a stuttering breath, ReVurb pulled himself into the present. “He’s invisible in the zero timeframe, we can only derive his appearance by second-order artifacts in the positive and negative—”
“I get it,” interrupted Sid, assimilating the data they’d sent him. They couldn’t observe Willy’s body directly in any data feeds, only a derivative of him in the past and future, like the wake of an invisible boat. Even so, Sid should have been able to see it.
“There’s some very strong glass at work here,” added Sibeal, “like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
A light bulb went off in Sid’s head. “And the only reason you saw any of this was because Willy came into the underground.”
“Right, we have our own sensor networks.” Sibeal pointed at the city centers of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, then spun the globe to indicate other points of contact in London, Paris, and Istanbul with the trail fading in southern Asia. “This is as much as we have.”