“Hate us?” laughed Jimmy-on-the-desk. He spread his arms wide. “The world loves us.” Smirking, he nodded at Bob. “And you can call me James, I’m Jimmy’s better half. I know you talk to yourself sometimes too. Come join the party.”
“I’m nothing like you,” Bob said to James.
James smiled. “You’d be surprised.”
Bob kept approaching the desk. “The more important question is, do you love yourself, what you’re doing?” he said to Jimmy.
James laughed again, louder. “This is ridiculous.” He laughed, but in the background Bob felt him testing the networks, trying to find the hole that was allowing Bob to be inside their mind.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” Jimmy asked. “On the beach, you said you wanted to talk.”
“We have no time for this,” James insisted. Now he stood and blocked Bob.
The network traffic in Jimmy’s cognition systems became frenzied as James tried to force him out, but Bob had driven a splinter deep into Jimmy’s mind. The creatures began to converge, but now Jimmy held up his hand, forcing them back. They hung in a menacing circle around Bob.
“This thing”—Bob pointed at James—“is not a part of you. It’s preying on you to get what it wants.”
James confronted Bob, was just inches from his face. “Lies, just lies to try and confuse us.”
The frustration at how difficult it would be to remove Bob’s connection was becoming apparent. James grimaced. Just bringing more force to bear wouldn’t solve it. He couldn’t just destroy Jimmy’s mind. It was where he existed as well.
“I’m not lying, Jimmy,” Bob said. “Did I ever lie to you?”
“I’ve always been a part of you.” James tried pulling Jimmy’s attention away from Bob. “He’s the one that hurt you, made people laugh at you. Do you remember? I’m the one who protected you.”
“I know you have weaknesses, Jimmy.” Bob ignored James. “We all do. This thing knew yours, exploited them. God knows the world is a horrible place, and a lot of people deserve punishment, but you need to let them go.” Them, the disappeared, the ones Jimmy trapped within the pssi-system.
“Let them go?” James was working himself into a fervor. “After what they’ve done?”
Bob knew James needed Jimmy to agree to block out Bob, but Jimmy wasn’t cooperating.
Bob pointed at James. “He is not a part of you, Jimmy.”
“Who’s made you strong?” insisted James, his face distending, staring at Jimmy. “We’ve done this together.”
Bob shook his head. “He’s killed everyone who loved you. He killed your parents, killed Patricia.”
“Lies, all lies!” yelled James, now a grotesque caricature of Jimmy, a monster that towered over the room.
Jimmy cried out. “My parents abandoned me—”
“No, they didn’t.” Bob forwarded copies of the data Patricia Killiam collected before she died. “This thing lured them away and killed them.”
With Bob this far inside their shared mindspace, James had no way of intercepting or adulterating the data. “He’s just trying to trick you, trying to make you weak—”
“Patricia loved you, and this thing killed her, too.”
“She was an old woman,” James insisted, “she gave up, she had no will to live.”
Bob paused to let Jimmy analyze the data. “And I loved you, too, Jimmy. I still do.”
“He doesn’t love you,” growled James, fire burning in his eyes. The creatures encircling Bob morphed into monsters with fangs and claws menacing.
Bob looked straight into Jimmy’s eyes. “And now it’s killed me, too.”
“Lies!” James screamed. “He’s being clever. He let himself die, he swam down there, trapped himself. Get rid of him, Jimmy, we have no time for this. Get rid of him!”
But the little boy Bob had once known, tears streaming his face, stared at the monster towering over him. “No,” Jimmy said quietly.
23
Sid leaned back in his rocking chair and looked into the sky. It was snowing, or at least it was snowing on the outside. High above his head the Commune’s shield deflected the snowflakes, sending them skidding and tumbling across the sky. It seemed like they were in a giant inverted snow globe, the snow churning and dancing outside while the real world inside it watched.
He was sitting on the covered front deck of the Reverend’s church, the floorboards creaking as he rocked back and forth. Vince and Connors sat on a bench beside him. The Reverend leaned against the railing in front of Sid. A man and woman in a buggy, pulled by two horses, clip-clopped past, the man tipping his hat at Sid. Nodding and smiling, Sid waved back.
“So the attacks stopped?” the Reverend asked Tyrel.
Mohesha nodded, her projection appearing with Tyrel’s just beside the Reverend on the deck. “Yes, Commander Strong called a halt to the operation. Beyond that we have no information.”
“Good.” The Reverend bowed his head and glanced at Sid. “Perhaps young Robert Baxter succeeded in his efforts, as great as the cost was.”
It was midday. Even through the snow, Sid saw the tops of the mountains ringing the Commune. To say this place was a fortress was an understatement. It had a near unlimited supply of energy tapped from the magmatic upwelling below, matched with a continuous flow of fresh water from underground aquifers fed in from the mountains.
Using Sid’s network diagrams, the Ascetics had neutralized more than a dozen people identified as nodal points, infected by whatever was flowing through the crystal networks. Everything now rested on what was happening inside Atopia. Sid stopped rocking and leaned forward in his chair. “Did we manage to get in touch with Nancy or Kesselring?” Still nothing from Nancy since she initiated contact with them in the pod.
In fact, nothing at all had come out of Atopia in the past hour. The Atopian reality blackout meant that half of the world was unaware, but governments of the Alliance were clamoring for information. The viral skin that infected Atopia not so long ago was still fresh in people’s minds.
“No.” Tyrel shook his head. “And the access keys to the Terra Novan systems that we gave to Robert Baxter are still active.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Sid saw the couple in the buggy disappear into the mouth of an access tunnel that led underground. The Commune had opened them when the first attack awakened the sleeping behemoth of the Commune’s defensive systems. The smoking remains of Allied drones were scattered high in the hills around them. Above ground was only a small part of the Commune’s infrastructure. The larger part of it stretched below, in the networks of tunnels that stretched under the granite shields of the mountains. This place could withstand a direct nuclear strike.
Sid let out a long sigh. “I’ll see what I can do about that.” He was the most familiar with Bob’s networks and systems. It would be like bringing a part of him home, if he could find anything. “Do we still have any connections into Atopia?”
Mohesha shook her head. “Nothing.”
Sid hoped Nancy and Commander Strong had the situation under control, but the longer this information blackout persisted, the more worried he was.
“Do you know where Willy’s body is?” Mohesha asked after a pause.
Sid looked to his right, at Willy and Brigitte nestled together. Willy shook his head.
“No, we don’t know where Willy is,” replied the Reverend. The people in the Commune were serious about keeping their privacy, and the Reverend had had enough of his grandson being used as a pawn in this game.