Jimmy was transfixed as he watched. “Is this a lie?” he demanded again.
“A lie?” James swept his hand across the scene, pulling it apart. “All of life is a lie, Jimmy.”
Bob was weakening. In the background, James methodically tore through the Atopian networks, rooting out any threads of Bob, erasing any trace of him. He was disappearing from the realities he lodged himself into. Bob fought back, enlisting the help of the disappeared that were awakening, asking them to hide little pieces of him. They were connected into Jimmy’s mind, and some of them were fighting back, but James was powerful. James was killing Bob again.
In the melee, James took control of the military networks. In a splinter of his mind, Bob saw James’s face plastered across the mediaworlds, preaching calm and control while he ranted and raved on the inside. World after world fell away around the three of them, flashes of New York, of Big Ben in London, of places Jimmy and James had trapped souls. And at each stop, more were released.
“You want to release them?” cried James in frustration. “Then release all of them, all of them can witness the end.”
25
“There are no such things as coincidences,” Connors said. “That’s the first rule.”
Sid was looking at the information in Willy’s body again. He instantiated a private space to talk with Connors, to get her input as a professional investigator. Mohesha was the one who interpreted the information they got out of Willy’s body. Sid hadn’t involved himself too deeply out of respect for her seniority and skill. Maybe that was a mistake. Mohesha had given them the first clues to hacking into the machine, but Jimmy was still looking for Willy, and now so was Mohesha.
Why? They must have missed something.
Connors created a diagram of her investigative procedures on the wall of their workspace. “And you need to look at all your background material. It all needs to make sense, to be coherent.”
Vince was with them. “And I want to know why we haven’t been able to speak to any of these creatures in the old machine, if it exists. If the bad guys are here, where are the good guys?”
Sid hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe they’re already helping and you just don’t know it.”
The attacks against the Commune had resumed. In a splinter of his mind, Sid watched a white-hot sheet of plasma burning high over the farm buildings outside. Gobs of it began raining down as the Commune’s dome started to fail in places. The falling plasma ignited the wooden buildings into flames, and then, like the wall of an aquarium shattering, the dome burst. Even through a hundred feet of bedrock Sid heard the thunderous impact that destroyed the ground level of the Commune. A part of Sid was helping in the defense, hacking into the Alliance networks outside, but it was a losing battle.
They were in the underground complex, open caverns with bioluminescent ceilings that glowed blue. The buildings below were nothing like above, rectangular bio-plastic cubicles stacked to the ceilings. Sid and his friends were corralled into a string of buildings directly underneath the Church. Bunky and Shaky were much happier being underground. They’d already gone off to inspect the digging gear.
“So you really want to take this apocalyptic text literally?” Connors asked, looking at Sid and Vince.
They both nodded.
“The legend is true somehow,” Vince replied.
Connors rolled her eyes.
“Or,” Vince added quickly, “whoever is orchestrating this thinks it is. Either way, there should be Four Horsemen out there.”
“Good point.” Connors looked at a diagram hanging in space between them. “So if that’s true, in the analysis, there are two outliers and one big problem.”
“What’s the big problem?” Sid asked.
“If we’re fighting the Four Horsemen, who are they?”
Sid pulled up a network map. “Jimmy’s the center pivot.”
He pointed out the main trunks of data exchange on the nervenet. Most of them routed through either Atopia or Terra Nova, the two competing platforms, but the vast majority centered on the large cloud around the connection point of Atopia.
The Ascetics had neutralized smaller infections, but the large ones, three huge clouds on the network maps, were too diffuse to single out individual people. The big problem was that there were only three large end-point clouds; one around Atopia, one around Allied Command, and one around DAD—the agricultural contractor for the Department of Defense.
“There before me was a white horse, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest,” Vince said, quoting from the sixth verse of Revelations. “The White Rider.”
“That’s one,” Connors said, pointing to the large cloud of data connection points around Atopia. This cloud of activity was at least twice as large as any of the others. They all assumed, by now, that this was Jimmy Scadden. The implication being that he was a kind of anti-Christ. Sid had argued that most historians viewed the White Rider as the savior, not the destroyer, but this was a matter of interpretation.
Connors pointed at another nexus point, this one a clouding of connection around Allied Command. “And there you have the second rider.”
“A fiery red one, its rider given the power to take peace from the Earth,” said Vince, again quoting Revelations. “Yes, sounds like a military reference.”
Connors traced her finger along to the third nexus. “And at DAD we have the third one.”
Vince nodded. “A black horse, holding a pair of scales—the agricultural contractor for the department of defense—DAD—famine and pestilence, makes sense to me.”
“That’s three.” Connors held up three fingers. “So where’s the fourth?”
Sid shrugged. “There isn’t one.”
“I think the fourth is more of a metaphor for what happens next.” Vince accessed more of the Revelations text. “Before me was a pale horse, its rider was Death. They didn’t even give him a color.”
“Actually, they did,” pointed out Sid. “They translated as ‘pale’ from the original ancient Greek of ‘chloros,’ which could also be translated as light green.”
Vince shrugged. “Okay, so the Green Rider. I don’t recall seeing anything referencing green.” He began running searches anyway.
Sid turned to Connors. “So you think we’re missing a node?”
“If you think the Apocalypse is literal for what’s happening out there, then you’re missing one.” She paused. “It wouldn’t make sense that one of them is a metaphor.”
All of the other network traffic was routed through Terra Nova and Atopia. Sid began breaking the traffic down, seeing if he could get any more detail on it.
Connors left him to it and returned to her analysis. “And the two outliers that don’t fit are that POND message, and the hint about where to find Willy’s body.”
Vince nodded. “Keep going.”
“There’s no way that a mysterious message from another universe shows up right when all this starts to go haywire.” She took a deep breath. “And that hint for finding Willy’s body, appearing in a two thousand year old text?”
Vince wagged his head. “So if it’s not real—”
“—then someone faked it.” Sid completed the thought for Vince. “Or it’s just a coincidence.”
Connors held up a finger. “But there are no coincidences. That’s the first rule.” She brought up a new workspace with Mikhail and the Ascetics on it. “So the Willy hint came from Mikhail. How much of that network traffic goes through the darknets? Maybe that POND message was meant to throw us off track?”
“So you’re saying the fourth horseman is in the Ascetics? Mikhail?”