Vince’s expression turned from excitement to confusion. “Bob sent the POND message? Why didn’t he tell us?”
“Maybe he didn’t know about it himself,” ventured Sid, trying to make sense of it. “Should we ask him?”
Vince hesitated as well. “Maybe you should explain to me what’s in the POND message.”
Sid was still sifting through it himself. Not all of it was Bob’s sensory encoding. Some of it was instructions, some of it network diagrams. He couldn’t make sense of much of it yet, but one consistent message came through. He forwarded this part of the message to Vince.
In the cavern, Bob was explaining how he had to sacrifice his physical body to get close to Jimmy, how he let Jimmy kill his physical body to force a wedge into Jimmy’s mind. Jimmy was gone. With the truth revealed, he destroyed the other side of himself. Bob now had control of all the Allied weapons systems.
“So Bob killed himself?” Vince said to Sid. In augmented space, the message that Bob had sent himself in the POND transmission sat in highlighted bold text in front of both Sid and Vince: Don’t let me kill myself.
Sid nodded. Some of the network diagrams in the POND message looked familiar. They matched what they found inside of Willy’s body. He began to see what he couldn’t let himself see before. “That network traffic between Jimmy and Bob on Atopia, I’d discounted it before as an artifact of the volume of traffic going through Atopia.”
Vince understood what Sid was saying. “So the fourth nexus point was inside Atopia.”
Back in the cavern, Vicious asked Bob about Nancy, about his family. His face impassive, Bob replied that James wiped them out, erased their minds, destroyed any traces of them in the networks.
Vince slumped into a chair in the private workspace, squeezing the heels of his hands against his temples. “Usually chloros translates as pale, as in the pale rider, and like you said it also means pale green.”
Sid waited for him to finish his thought.
“But there’s also another meaning of chloros.”
“What’s that?” asked Sid with a mounting sense of dread.
“Chloros can also be translated as recently dead.”
Sid stared at Bob. “There was another translation for that ancient text where you found the clue for Willy. In ancient Greek, Pobeptoc could be literally translated as Robert.”
“The Book of Robert,” said Vince quietly. “So the Fourth Horseman…” He didn’t finish his words.
They both stared into Bob’s smiling face.
“So Bob is Death,” whispered Sid.
28
Smoke was still rising from the blasted top levels of Atopia where Kesselring’s private gardens once stood. The charred remains of Kesselring’s retreat stood at one end, but at the other was a single copse of green trees that remained intact, a small patch of green against the blue of the seas and skies beyond.
Bob sat next to Nancy, holding her hand. Her face was blank.
The priest stood in front of Bob. “Give Tyrel back control of the weapons systems.”
Bob still had full systems access to Terra Novan resources, even access to all of Mikhail’s darknets, and now, with Jimmy gone, he’d taken over control of Allied networks as well. He held the world in his hands.
Looking at Nancy’s blank face, Bob felt rage rising up inside him. “Should I?” She was gone. Bob was sitting next to her body, but it was an empty shell. James had erased her mind and any traces of her in the networks. Bob’s mother and father, as well.
He’d failed them.
“We are not here to inflict more suffering, but to reduce it, ease it,” replied the priest, his long robes flowing in the wind. When the network pyrotechnics had cleared after Jimmy destroyed himself, the priest appeared. He had never been far. “And the longer you hold them, the more they will fear. We don’t need the weapons systems.”
The green trees at the edge of the destruction swayed in the breeze. Nancy sat with her hands in her lap.
“Is it gone?” Maybe Jimmy had destroyed himself, but whatever had infected him, was it gone as well?
“No.”
“Then how do we stop it?”
“Do you want to stop it,” asked the priest, “or do you want to stop the suffering?”
“Nancy?” Bob squeezed her hand. “Nancy!” he yelled, shaking her.
There was no glimmer of recognition in her eyes. No connection in the hyperspaces surrounding them. Just a blank mindspace filled by her body.
Why did I run? I could have saved her. The rage of self-loathing rose in the back of Bob’s mind. Why was it that he could protect everyone but the ones he loved?
“They’re awakening now, all of them,” said the priest.
“All of them?” choked Bob between his tears. “Not just the disappeared?”
The priest nodded.
“Give back the weapons,” insisted the priest. “We don’t need them.”
“Why should I?” Bob snarled from gritted teeth.
“Because”—the priest paused and laid a hand on Bob’s head—“there are better ways to stop the suffering.”
29
“You sure you’re okay?” Sid asked Bob.
Bob’s main subjective was already in a meeting with Tyrel and Mohesha as they tried to coordinate a stand-down of the Allied forces and African Union forces. Sid received a message from Zoraster. He was safe. A splinter of Bob’s mind walked together with Sid and Vince and Willy up the service tunnel toward the central bunker to meet the Reverend. The rest of their gang went ahead, leaving them an opportunity to catch up.
Sid checked and rechecked, querying Bob’s cognition frameworks while Willy and Vince made small talk. He had to make sure this was Bob. So far every test returned a positive result. His friend had cheated death. He felt ridiculous for coming to the conclusion that Bob was the Fourth Horseman when all seemed lost.
In a flash, it all was over.
“Guys, you can stop,” laughed Bob, “it’s me.”
Vince and Sid hadn’t disclosed what they thought they’d discovered to anyone yet. Too much was happening, and anyway, Bob had released all the weapons systems back to Allied and Terra Novan control. Terra Nova was badly damaged, as was Atopia. Mohesha and Tyrel had enough to handle without throwing something else onto the plate, something that didn’t seem to have any bearing.
Even so, with both sides standing down, everything under control, something didn’t feel right. What had they missed? The pieces just didn’t seem to fit. Then again, as Zoraster told him, war wasn’t neat. It was messy. Maybe Sid just had to let it go.
While it had been a happy shock to find Bob standing in front of them, walking and talking, that was only because Sid assumed that all of Bob’s cognition systems would have perished with him. Having his dead friend returned to life wasn’t that all that surprising. The line between physical and digital had long since been blurred for Sid. Talking to the resurrected version of Bob didn’t faze him.
Sid contacted his own mother on Atopia the second normalized channels had opened. She scolded him, told him what a scare it was seeing him on the newsworlds. He told her it was a mistake. The relief that he felt, knowing his family was okay, was intense. He couldn’t imagine what Bob had to be feeling. “I’m sorry about Nancy, about your mother and father,” Sid said to Bob.
Bob kicked some gravel along the floor of the tunnel. “Me too.”
Talking to his dead friend might not disturb him, but Sid was worried. He knew Bob could lash out. Sid was tensed up, waiting for the explosion, waiting for Bob to process what had happened. Sid waited for the screams and tears and anger.