“What?”
Jimmy held the sliver of glass up to Sid’s eye. “Where’s Willy, Sid?”
14
Faith wasn’t something that came easily to Vince. He had it once, but it had been ripped from him, replaced with a need to control. Sitting alone in his cell, Vince knew it was this that drove him to build Phuture News—his desire to control, a futile attempt to hold destiny in his hands.
But in the end, his creation had controlled him. He had robbed himself of his own freedom.
Trapped in a jail cell, he felt free for the first time in years. All he had left was faith now. It was a funny thing, to feel free in a jail. He smiled and pulled a woolen blanket around his shoulders, then settled into the metal cot.
There was nothing to do but wait.
After cooperating and giving them his information, Colonel Kramer transferred him into the minimum-security brig at the Anacostia-Bolling base just across the Potomac from the Pentagon. Vince bargained each bit of freedom—for a shave, for a shower, for a cell with a tiny view of blue sky—for every new piece of information.
Soon enough they’d discover the lies, but that wasn’t in Vince’s control.
Not anymore.
He did everything he could. His struggle to believe the Terra Novan story had been replaced by the simple idea of doing the right thing. In his mind, that meant sticking up for people close to you, so he carried out his end of the plan Sid and Bob laid out.
The network map of the nervenet that they recovered from Willy’s proxxi indicated that a senior member of the Alliance military command in Arunchal Pradesh was another nodal point, just like Jimmy. So Sid and Zoraster snuck into Arunchal to infect this nodal point with their own virus. Vince came to Washington to unload the information that Terra Nova discovered this ancient machine. If they were right, then Sid would see the network of crystals light up as the information passed from Colonel Kramer to his senior staff, and from there into the nervenet. He hoped it worked.
And if it didn’t, then he’d just alerted the Alliance of a dangerous new doomsday cult. Either way, there wasn’t much more he could do.
Closing his eyes, Vince drifted off. His mind went back to the voodoo ceremony, to the night on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. In his mind he saw the hulking figure that had risen out of the fires with a star pattern burning in its forehead. Half asleep, Vince opened his eyes. The presence from the fires on Ponchartrain was standing in his cell next to him. Vince wasn’t surprised. He smiled. “Bob,” he whispered. “Is that you?”
The figure moved toward the door, and, silently, it slid open. Swinging his legs off the cot to stand, Vince followed his rescuer out and down the hallway. Other detainees were in their cells, but they all looked away. Vince followed in a dream. At each checkpoint, the guards opened the doors and looked away at just the right moments—chatting to a colleague, dropping a coffee, everyone looking at anything but Vince. Like a ghost he slipped out of the building until he was standing outside next to a dumpster.
Vince woke to find himself standing alone in the alleyway.
He’d thought it was a dream.
Hotstuff stood in front of him, her glowing virtual presence in sharp contrast to the dingy alley. Blond hair fell in waves over her black sweater. “How the hell did you get out here?”
Vince blinked and looked up. The sky was clear and blue, but the air was freezing cold. He shivered. “I don’t know.” No alarms were raised. It was quiet.
“Let’s just get out of here.” Forwarding a set of phutures into Vince’s networks, Hotstuff constructed a set of escape routes. They might not own Phuture News anymore, but they had enough backdoors to last a lifetime.
Wiping the diagrams from his workspaces, Vince shook his head. “No.” He plotted paths to the Federal detention center.
“Seriously?” Hotstuff shook her head in disbelief, but she was already following him out of the alleyway onto a tree-lined street, turning left toward the center of Washington. She frowned at his orange jumpsuit. “At least let’s get you into something a little more fashionable.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
Connors looked up. “Vince?”
He smiled. “Time to get going.”
But she didn’t budge from the cot she was sitting on. The cell looked a lot like the one Vince had been in; rough concrete walls, folding metal cot, gray steel bars. Detention wasn’t the most imaginative of businesses.
Connors frowned. “What do you mean, time to get going? Why are you here?”
“They’ve released us,” Vince replied. “Come on.” He smiled and held out his hand. “Before they change their minds.”
Connors hesitated but then rocked forward onto her feet. She didn’t take his offered hand.
Vince dropped his hand and began leading the way. “Don’t talk to anyone,” he instructed. “Just follow me, strict orders.”
They walked out of the cell block hallway, out past the guard at the desk who just happened to be holding the door open and talking to his wife in a virtual space as they passed. Outside the cellblock section, the rooms were filled with desks, federal agents busy filing reports, standing chatting at coffee machines, all of them looking away from Connors and Vince as they walked past.
“I heard you cooperated,” Connors said, following quickly on Vince’s heels. “I’m glad you did. I told them everything, every detail, about how you asked to come here and give yourself up.”
Vince jogged down the stairs, glancing up at Connors as he turned to the next flight. “Good.”
“I was worried you sided with the terrorists,” continued Connors. The newsworlds were flooded with stories about the attack in Arunchal and the capture of the Grilla linking this all back to Sid and Bob and Terra Nova. “I’m so relieved you kept your head and weren’t so wrapped up in it that you couldn’t see the truth.”
“And what’s that?” Vince asked as he banged open the doors to the ground floor. They walked outside.
“How dangerous these religious extremists are.”
Vince walked without saying anything.
“Hey, slow down.” Connors grabbed his arms and swung him around. “What’s the hurry? Where are we going?”
“I just want to get out of here,” replied Vince. “You can understand that, can’t you?” He tried to reach for her, but she backed away.
“They didn’t release us, did they?”
Pedestrians slid by, sidestepping them as if they weren’t there, and a wind kicked up, driving wet leaves past their feet.
“We need to go.” Vince turned and kept walking.
Connors paused but then ran after him. “You don’t really believe all that stuff, do you?”
Vince said nothing.
“Thoughts can be viruses,” she continued. “You know that, don’t you? Virulent memes can rip through thought-space, half-truths and deceptions can destroy just as violently as kinetics. It almost destroyed Atopia, and now you’re stuck in it again. Why can’t you see it?”
Alarms began sounding. “We need to go.”
“I can’t come with you.”
“You can’t stay here. They’ll think you were a part of this.”
The wind whipped up again, sending leaves spinning into the air. They were hiding between the lines of perception in this reality, but the lines were blurring. The base finally noticed Vince had disappeared from his cell, and it wouldn’t be long till they saw Connors was gone as well. The authorities had all the information they needed. This time the directives going out to the enforcement branches wouldn’t be to capture, but that dangerous terrorists had escaped, shoot to kill.