Jimmy slid into the Reverend’s cognitive networks. The Reverend’s cup of tea, halfway to his mouth for a sip, slid out of his fingers and tumbled to smash on the wooden floorboards. A wet stain spread around the Reverend’s feet as his body shuddered at the invasion, his mind struggling to resist.
Nancy watched dispassionately. “Can I speak to you privately?”
Smiling back from the Reverend’s face, Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. “About what?” But he instantiated a series of dense security blankets around them.
“You and I have had our differences,” said Nancy, “but we’ve known each other a long time. I think we want the same things.”
“Do we indeed?”
In augmented space, Nancy watched Jimmy crack the Reverend’s mind open like a nut, spilling its contents into a data bucket.
Nancy nodded. “Kesselring approached me today. He’s worried you’re gaining too much power, and he’s convening a meeting of senior shareholders to limit your reach.” It was a gamble. For security reasons she couldn’t connect to the other splinters of her mind. She couldn’t be sure.
Jimmy stopped disgorging the Reverend’s mind. He looked at Nancy.
“Is that right?”
5
“Copy that, DCA, we’re releasing control to you now,” said Connors. Her networks handshaked with the capital city aerial routing system. Up ahead, the spike of the Washington Monument rose above an urban sprawl that spread, twinkling, to the horizon.
Four fighter drones rose up in formation around their turbofan to escort them in.
Vince’s mind was still roiling. How was it possible that the old Russian, Mikhail Butorin, had dug up an ancient text that just happened to explain where to find Willy’s body? It had been the critical clue that led them to him. And yet it came from a two-thousand-year-old manuscript found a hundred years ago, buried in the Egyptian desert. Was the text just random coincidence? Or had Butorin purposely lied? Any other conclusions stretched all believability.
All the things he was obsessing over—ancient carvings on buildings depicting what looked like alien creatures, the Voynich manuscript, images of Buddha with multiple arms and legs, even the Buddha carved from a meteorite—the Terra Novan hypothesis fit all these, but it felt too neat.
“Are you going to tell me why you need to speak to Allied Command?” Connors asked. “You’re not going to be telling them some doomsday nonsense, are you?” She turned to him. “Can I trust you?”
“Yes, you can trust me.” He was going to tell the truth, or at least, he was going to tell most of it.
The Mall hovered into view, that green strip of space in the middle of Washington that stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol Building. Vince remembered family trips to the Smithsonian as a child. The memories were still vivid. For forty years he’d lived on Atopia, but he was still American, and this place held an aura that inspired him.
Why wait till now, though? His mind kept circling back. Why lay dormant for two hundred million years? If these beings existed, they had almost god-like power. Why would they be interested in us? Mindless destruction didn’t make any sense.
The web of turbofan transports in the air grew denser. Below, Vince saw traffic moving like fish in a stream. He was overcome by the idea that he was watching the dying motions of a doomed world, the people going on with their lives as if anything mattered anymore, as if they were still alive.
But was it doomed?
The Potomac River snaked around the city into the distance, and their turbofan dropped down and followed it, accompanied by their drone escorts. It wouldn’t be long until Vince was locked down.
“One thing.” Vince touched Connors’s arm. “I’d like to release Hotstuff. I don’t know if I’m going to get out of this, and it’s not fair for her to be stuck in some hellhole with me.”
A part of her would always stay inside him, but he could release her core identity into one of his shell companies. Bob had already released his proxxi entirely. It felt like the right thing to do, but he needed Connors’s help.
She looked at him, her expression unreadable.
Vince let go of her arm. “I know you could get into a lot of trouble—”
“Go ahead.” Connors opened a channel for Vince to let Hotstuff out.
6
The key to creating convincing synthetic realities was attention to detail, and nobody was better at it than Atopian pssi-kids. And no pssi-kid was better than the legendary Sidney Horowitz. Sid laughed grimly at his own internal monologue. It was the same trash talking he used in the game worlds, but this was no game.
This was real.
The adrenaline felt like holding a mouthful of nails, but he wasn’t in any physical danger. Zoraster was the one who was there physically, but looking at Zoraster, the big monkey looked remarkably calm. Zoraster smiled at the drone Sid was inhabiting.
“Is it working?”
“You wouldn’t be standing there if it wasn’t,” Sid replied, projecting a smile.
This was a one-time shot. Hacking into a hardened military network wasn’t something that you could do on the fly. Mikhail and the Ascetics gave them a collection of back-doors and exploits to get inside the military networks. They said they would work. Soon they’d find out.
The skirmish they started with Alliance forces was blossoming into a full-blown battle. Hundreds of incoming Alliance drones lit up Sid’s situational maps. He hacked into everything he could, even distant command posts and orbiting satellites, burrowing into their sensors, subtly modifying them. Detecting stolen or wrecked systems was much easier than detecting small changes in data flow. The sensors were the eyes and ears of the robot attackers that created their reality, each one feeding into the main situational map of the enemy.
By controlling their reality, Sid controlled the battle and could destroy at will, but he had other goals.
It was a game of misdirection played out in milliseconds using optical and radio cloaking, alternately jamming and releasing communications while he slipped in false sensor readings. The attacking weapons systems just missed their marks as they aimed at shifting ghosts.
Sid launched cyberattacks at the same time as kinetic ones—defusing and exploding ordnance in transit, recognizing patterns that would be forming in the future, splitting the battle into alternate realities, and having the enemy attack itself in bursts of friendly fire. Both sides were layering reality filters with feints and decoys, and it was Sid’s job to see through it and anchor a base reality for his team to fight through.
Sid helped the Grilla commandos dance through the raindrops of incoming fire without getting wet—or not too wet, anyway. He was purposely leaving gaps in their defenses. If the Allied forces decided the battle wasn’t possible to win, they’d carpet-bomb the area. Zoraster’s plan needed the Alliance to send in a transport to mop up, and that was what Sid was trying to engineer.
A nearby explosion rocked the drone Sid’s main point-of-presence was riding in, blinding him. A tank-bot wheeled across the dusty ground, the air buzzing with shrapnel. It took aim.
“You okay, kid?” grunted Zoraster in a private comm channel.
The Grilla bounded from behind Sid’s drone in two loping steps, grabbing and tossing the two-ton tank-bot into the air like a child’s toy. Even a natural mountain gorilla could dead lift a ton, and a raging Grilla in an exoskeleton and battle armor was something fearsome to behold.
“Yeah, I’m—”
Before Sid could finish, another explosion fried his drone. His primary subjective dropped into dimensionless space for a fraction of a second while he latched onto another bot nearby. By the time his senses returned, the comm channels were filled with screams.