Connors had her eyes closed. “About what?”
“I haven’t cared about money in a long time.”
She laughed. “Probably because you have more than you can spend in a hundred lifetimes.”
“You know what I mean,” muttered Vince. His entire empire was probably being expropriated as they spoke. “The reason why I’m here, to answer your question of yesterday, is to help a friend.”
“There’s always a reason.” Sitting up in her bed she turned to him. “You committed crimes, Vince, you stole the future information of billions of people, made it public.” Pressing her face into her palms she asked, “So what was so important, seeing as you want to get it out? Why did you do it?”
Vince paused. He pulled a pillow into his lap. “Do you know what it’s like to see the future, to see everything in the future, when the only thing you want is in the past?”
“Regret, you mean regret.” Connors rubbed her face. “I know regret.”
He swung his legs off the bed and turned to sit and face her. “So if you know so much about me, where was I born?”
“Boston.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
Connors cocked her head to one side. “None. A spoiled only child.”
Vince smiled. “My favorite baseball team?” Not everything was in the databases.
“Yankees.”
He had to hand it to her that this answer wasn’t obvious. Vince looked at the floor. “What was my mother’s nickname for me?”
“Indy.”
Perhaps obvious, but this was from before the days that machines recorded every breath a person took. It was time to get the rubber to the road. Vince’s eyes narrowed. “Why did I fake my own deaths?”
“Everyone said it was a game,” replied Connors, but before Vince could pounce she added, “but I don’t think so. I don’t think those were fakes, I think someone was trying to kill you.”
“If you thought someone was trying to kill me, why were you hunting me?”
“Because you broke the law.”
“Then why did you shut off my Phuture News feed if you knew it might be dangerous?”
“Because I wasn’t sure.”
Vince shook his head but smiled. A risk taker. “And now you are?”
“More than I used to be.” Connors swung her feet off her bed and turned to face Vince. “You said I don’t know anything about the situation. What situation? Maybe I could help.”
Vince’s network ran through a dozen short-term simulations. A bit of truth couldn’t hurt. “My friend, Willy McIntyre, had his body stolen.”
“I heard about that. So that was why you were at the Commune?” The mediaworlds were only too aware that Willy’s grandfather was the Reverend.
“Yeah,” Vince replied, knowing it was only half the truth. Could he trust her with what they’d found out about Jimmy Scadden? It would only endanger her life.
Connors didn’t look convinced. “So why did these Ascetics come for us? What is it they think you’re looking for?”
Vince looked away. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d contacted them “I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh.” She rubbed one eye. “Okay, then, what can you tell me about these Ascetics?”
How to explain the Ascetics? A global Russian-origin mafia running illegal body-mod shops, synthetic drugs, emo-porn, and prostitution in all its ever-expanding forms. They controlled the darknets, private worlds unreachable from regulated spaces. “They’re like the Hell’s Angels of the cyber world—”
“I’m not stupid. I mean, what can you tell me about this chapter? Who are we facing?”
A tough question. The Ascetics weren’t something you could just query. Initiation required sacrifice, a ritualized destruction of the physical, cleansing body and mind through modification into an ascetic form. The basis of darknets was anonymized content and access, so the Ascetics anonymized themselves in the physical realms as well, removing—arms, legs, faces—identity.
“This one is heavily tied into Vodoun,” said Vince.
Connors frowned. “Voodoo,” he added, “that’s what they call it here, from Vodoun in West Africa, hoodoo in other places.”
Hotstuff was feeding Vince updated situational reports every few minutes. She pinged him an alert: they were coming. He made a deal.
Getting up off the bed, Vince got up and faced the door. “This sect controls the Spice Routes, the darknet data pipes that transit illegal…” He paused, reconsidering his words. “…or rather, morally challenging goods and services.”
“Morally challenging?”
Vince looked at her and smiled. “Columbus was a slave trader, and you have a holiday for him.” He tensed. It was almost here.
Connors frowned. “Why are you standing there?”
“I said I would go if they promised no harm to you,” he replied quickly. “They know you’re FBI, it’s all out in the open, but I still have some pull, some hidden—”
Before he could finish, the door crashed open and an Ascetic slid through, a silvery web of thousands of legs shimmering beneath a tattooed black torso and white-painted skull.
“It’s time, Mr. Indigo,” reverberated its voice in their heads.
“For what?” grunted Vince, forcing back its intrusions into his mind.
The Ascetic’s body undulated across the floor, its mass of shimmering legs winding into the center of the room while its torso twisted between Vince and Connors. Black peacock feathers sprouted out of its back. Its blank face looked at them, laughing silently. “Time to find what you’ve been looking for.”
13
This was just what he had been looking for.
Bob relaxed into the sun lounger. Sighing with contentment, he brought the ice-cold mojito back to his lips. Dappled sunlight fell across him through the canopy of palms overhead, and a cool breeze blew in over the ocean. He studied the droplets of condensation forming on the sides of the glass, the shredded mint leaves pinned under the ice cubes, and then took another sip.
“Would you like another drink?” Nancy asked. She was standing beside him in a yellow wrap-around, the shadows of her bikini just visible beneath.
“No thanks, sweetheart.”
Nancy’s shadow swept past him. He raised one hand to touch her, but she was gone.
“There is always another,” said a voice of gravel, the words clattering through the air.
Bob sat up and took off his sunglasses, squinting into the brightness.
“And another, and another.” Someone sat on a chair nearby, obscured by the shade of a bush. His face was dark. Bob couldn’t make him out.
Bob holding up one hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “What?”
The owner of the voice pointed skyward. “The star is falling from heaven to destroy a third of all things.”
Bob put his drink down and looked up, rubbing his eyes. Something was in the sky—the comet—its tails spreading outward from the sun, the tip nearly touching it now. “That’s no star. The Comet Catcher mission is bringing it into orbit.”
“This world ends, and another begins.” The man behind the voice retreated further into the shadows. “Don’t you want an end to this suffering?”
“What suffering?”
“What suffering?” The man laughed. “What suffering indeed.”
Bob’s mind filled with a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand images of burned earth, slaughtered animals, smoking landscapes, dead seas. “Would you stop?”
“Smoke has engulfed the world once more.” The man leaned forward. “The Dajjal had returned, Gog and Magog arisen—there is only you who remains.”
Bob’s vision swam. Only me who remains. “Stop talking! Please stop talking…”