Sid’s face squeezed into a grimace under the growing acceleration. “You’ll see.”
With a muffled roar, the pod exited the cannon, launching into the air. In an instant it was enveloped in a layer of plasma that cut off the data connection. It would burn off in a few seconds as the pod cleared the first tens of miles of the atmosphere, arcing on a ballistic trajectory toward Montana.
“Oh God,” was the last thing Nancy heard from inside the pod. It was Shaky, trying to hold down his lunch.
Nancy smiled and shook her head, then retreated her primary perspective back into her physical body on Atopia. After talking with Commander Strong, she’d made it back to the service elevator. It was already on its way up to the top level, past the Solomon House to Kesselring’s retreat.
The elevator pinged to the top level. The door slid open.
Nancy expected to be greeted by the rolling green fields and trees of Kesselring’s private gardens, ready to start planning the final stages of removing Jimmy from Atopia’s networks and halting the attacks underway. Instead, she found blackened earth, still burning.
Jimmy stood in the middle of it all with a falcon on his arm.
20
Natural humans have two systems for making decisions—the fast-thinking emotional gut reaction, and the slow-thinking logical process. When it comes to decision making, slow-thinking generally comes up with better results, but it is the fast-thinking that makes us human—quick responses that follow the path of least resistance, the potential pain of losing greater than the promise of gaining something else. The human mind is biased and flawed, but in a systematic way.
Humans are irrational, but predictable, and Bob was counting on it.
He was just past the edge of the swells and swimming toward deeper water, filling his lungs with the rest of the perfluorocarbons, networking into the water to find his old friends. He hoped they were still there. Below in the depths, a great white shark turned with a flick of its tail and swam upward into the kelp.
Incoming pings from his mother and father hit his networks, but Bob ignored them. He had to focus. After diving in the water, he lost track of Nancy. He couldn’t pick up her signature anywhere. The last he saw, she was in the Tower Two elevator on the way to the upper levels. Kesselring was inside with them, she’d been able to tell him that much. He hoped they had enough to hold out until he could finish.
Cutting through the water, he saw his family’s habitat in the distance, the deck of his old room just visible. He remembered how Nancy came and cleaned his place up one day when he was out surfing, the frustration he felt when he came home to find his comfortable and carefully arranged mess tidied up. He wished he could come home to that clean room now, be frustrated with her perfection, but the mess of his life was his own alone now.
The white shark breached the surface beside him, exploding up out of the water, and Bob grabbed its dorsal fin, holding on tight as it dove back down again.
“Sacrifice,” said the priest, his projection riding shotgun with Bob into the depths, his robes flowing in the rush of the water, “is the only way to salvation.”
Bob nodded. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he replied, communicating through sub-vocal channels, “but I need to do this alone.”
In seconds, Bob reached the undersea ledge of Atopia, fifty feet down. Through glass window-walls, he watched people flash by, sitting in their apartments, none of them aware of what was going on. The avatar of the priest nodded at Bob and let go, disappearing in a rush of bubbles as Bob reached the edge of the ledge at over a hundred feet. The blue-black of the abyss opened beyond, and Bob urged the shark down into it.
He still couldn’t reach Nancy. There was too much interference in the networks. In the deeper water the smarticle concentration fell off rapidly, reducing bandwidth that could pass through its mesh, but even so, Bob could feel another presence.
“Sid, is that you?”
“I’m here, buddy,” came the reply.
The pressure was building, and Bob urged the last bubbles of air from his lungs. The oxygen he’d stored in the perfluorocarbons would keep him going for at least ten minutes. That should be enough time.
“You’re on your way to the Commune?” Bob messaged. The light from the surface was waning as he dove deeper. Sid sent some information—his passenger pod was over halfway through its journey, sixty miles above Minnesota and arcing downward. “Yeah, we’re almost there.”
The cold was intense. Bob shivered. “Good.”
Looking out of the window of the passenger pod, Sid craned his neck to try and get a view of the Pacific Ocean, where Atopia was, where Bob was. The curve of the Earth was covered in swirls of clouds. “Where are you going?” he asked, but he already knew. Following the external sensors on Atopia, he watched Bob’s body, still clinging to the shark, now three hundred feet down.
“I need to get down to the main trunk,” Bob replied after a pause.
There were external access airlocks built into the length of Atopia. They had manual controls. Bob must be heading for one near the computing core of Atopia, down below the fusion reactor, five hundred feet below the surface.
Sid shared the data feed with Sibeal and Bunky and Shaky. “You sure you want to do that, buddy?”
He watched Bob dive ever deeper.
Bob didn’t reply. Jimmy had to know where he was going, but in the confusion of the initial attack Bob disabled the deep-water kinetic defenses. A part of him knew he was going to do this all along. He amplified his visual system, adjusting for the low-light conditions. The shark slowed and the deep-sea pressure hull of Atopia loomed out of the blackness. Bob released the shark and swam the last few feet, grabbing onto a handhold to steady himself.
“You’ve been a good friend, Sid,” said Bob, twisting the external release mechanism. The cold and pressure were slowly shutting down his biological systems. “Can you do one thing for me?”
“Anything, buddy, you name it.”
“Take care of Nancy—promise me you won’t let anything happen to her.” The door to the underwater airlock opened. He hesitated, but there wasn’t much oxygen left in his system. His cells were dying already.
“Of course I will,” he heard Sid reply, now a faint signal.
Bob swam into the airlock and punched the button to close the door. Pumps banged loudly, pumping air into the chamber. Bob put out a hand to steady himself against the wall, and then leaned over to retch out the perfluorocarbons as the water pumped out below his knees.
“What are you doing down here?” Jimmy’s projection sat cross-legged on the floor of the airlock.
Bob gasped for air. “They’ve stopped the attack. I just want to talk to you.” Standing up, Bob pulled a metal tab from his swimming trunks and began unscrewing an access panel.
“Just a temporary hiccup,” Jimmy replied, smiling. “And we were talking, but you swam away.”
Bob finished unscrewing the panel and reached in to pull out a mass of optical wiring. This was as close to the routing core of Atopia as he could get.
Jimmy watched Bob. “You know, these chambers can be used for more than just pressurizing.”
There was no way he could get anyone or anything down there quickly enough to stop Bob from doing whatever he was doing. The pumps fired up again and a hissing noise began.
Bob found the photonic transducer array. Closing his eyes, he ripped open a cut on his index finger with the metal tab and pressed the cut onto the transducer, sending a flood of smarticles from his bloodstream onto it. He coagulated the blood, forming a hard connection to the machine. He was connected directly into the core now. Even Jimmy wouldn’t be able to track everything. He started flooding the networks.