“Shut up! You’re full of shit!”
“I’m not, I’m telling you…. For me it started as far back as the service, and that was a long time ago. Please give me the gun and I’ll show you.”
I scanned the jacks. Besides the guns, they each had a bayonet tucked in their arms, and each one had a brick of explosive strapped to its belly.
“You’d never get all three of us, if it came to that,” the old man said. “It doesn’t have to come to that.”
I aimed for his shoulder and pulled the trigger, but he was faster than he looked; his palm connected with my wrist and the bullet blew a chunk of brick from the wall. Before I could bring the gun around, something stung me in the side of the neck.
I turned and saw something whip back into the closest revivor’s arm as it snapped shut. Before I could do anything else, my head got heavy and my legs went soft.
“Sorry,” Buckster said.
I wanted to throw a punch, but my arms were like lead, hanging by my sides. I made it one step before I went down.
“Get her in the car,” I heard him say. The revivor standing over me nodded, and things started going blurry.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said. His voice sounded far off. “She’ll come around. We can use someone like her….”
It was the last thing I heard before the lights went out.
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo
I’d been staring at the computer for hours, but I hadn’t entered anything. In fact, I hadn’t even unboxed my notebooks yet. I was too busy reading what was already in there. I stared at the screen with all the lights off, not totally believing what I saw.
I thought no one knew much about what happened two years ago. No one talked about it and Nico said it got covered up, but these people knew about it. They knew everything about it. People from their group were seeing the needle heads long before I ever was. More than thirty people saw it a year in advance. They reported in from all over the city, the state, and beyond. They knew about me and Nico. They knew about everything.
Ott, Zoe. Potential E1.
I stared at the icon that represented me, until the heart shape blurred. There were a lot of connections that led there, along with the two who came before me. Penny, and …
Hyde, Noelle. Potential E1 (Deceased).
Potential E1. Whatever E1 was, it was important to them. They’d been looking for it a long time. They thought it might be me, but I wasn’t the first one they’d thought it about. At least one of them ended up dead.
I touched the heart with Noelle’s name over it, and a red message box popped up.
Classified.
None of the references to her said how it happened, how she died. There were a few pictures of her; she reminded me a little of Penny, except her eyes were green like mine. In one picture she was dressed up in a suit, with her hair in a tight bun. She had the same tattoo as Penny, the snake around her neck, swallowing its tail.
In the next picture she looked like a bag lady. Her hair was a rat’s nest, her teeth were yellow and brown, and her clothes were filthy. The last picture might have been taken with a cell phone. She lay on the sidewalk, covered in blood. I closed her file.
When I picked up the glass to take a drink, I realized it was empty. I grabbed the big bottle and tipped it until the neck clinked against the rim. I watched the clear liquid trickle in and the level rise until it got a half inch away from the top. I put the bottle down and the cap on.
Back at my old place, I’d had an old shot glass I liked to use, but on top of my new liquor cabinet I’d found a smoked-crystal glass that I really liked. It was twice the size of a regular shot glass, and had a fancy emblem carved into it. I picked it up and drained half of it in one gulp.
I didn’t know where to start, so I just surfed around to try to get the hang of their system. I tried to follow single threads, but there were so many of them and they branched out so often, I didn’t know how anyone could make any sense out of it all. There had to be some kind of data miner….
After some fiddling, I found it. I entered in my name and set it going, but right away parts of the nebula changed color as hundreds of little green points appeared.
Do all those reference me?
More kept coming. There were still too many. I tried again:
Nico W.
I didn’t know how to spell his last name. What I punched in got a similar result …worse, actually.
I thought for a minute, then entered in the phrase:
Green room.
I set it going, but that time nothing popped up, at least not right away. I let it spin in the background while I brought up one of the dream entries at random:
…I’m sitting in the dark, in some kind of cage. I’m sitting in a couple inches of cold water, and there are wires connected to the base. I know he can electrocute all of us if he wants, from wherever he is. They did something to us, I can sense that, but I don’t know what. Some of the people in the cages around me seem disconnected, almost lobotomized….
Someone named Petra Loeb had made the entry. I opened another one:
…a flash that lights up the street as bright as day, and then the noise comes. The first boom is like a hammer in my chest, and I feel like my heart skips a beat. It keeps getting louder and louder, until it feels like my head is going to split apart and I’m screaming and staring as the tower begins to fall into the fire. I can see it’s the CMC Tower. It’s so big it doesn’t seem possible, but it’s falling, and everyone is screaming as that cloud of fire begins to expand through the streets, toward us.
That was by a Daniel Moser. I picked out one more:
…from the balcony of Alto Do Mundo, and watch as one by one the buildings turn to shadow and blow into ashes. It’s nukes; I know that. It probably happens in seconds, but to me it seems slowed down, so I can see every goddamned detail. Nuclear fire, cleansing it all, and wiping the slate clean … The miner popped up. It was pretty quick, but nothing seemed to happen. I panned back until the grid took on the shape of that big ring, the nebula with the dark center, and the star sitting on its edge. At that distance, I saw three green points scattered across the map, and unlike the others, they were inside the dark part. I touched the first one.
THE GREEN ROOM. Location of significance. Frequency: Extremely Rare.As of this time, location N1071 (the green room) has been seen by only Element One potentials and is the only known vision time-wise to breach the void after the Event takes place. The few existing reports all describe common dimensions and common fixtures. A picture appeared, and my mouth parted slightly. It was the room—the green room where I first saw the dead woman. The table in the middle looked a little different, but it was the same rectangle shape and the same gray color. The folding chair was there in front of it. It faced the far wall, where three lights hung overhead against the cinderblock. The walls were all painted dark green.
The image displayed here is a computer rendition modeled on verbal descriptions. So far, no attempt to locate this room in the real world has been successful, leading us to believe that it may not exist in our reality at this time.The common room elements are:The switchbox, observed to control the lights at the far end of the room.The call box, on a swivel system set in the wall. It presents a blank metal panel when closed, and a single handset with no keypad when opened. The location of the remote connection is unknown.The table and chair, which together form what appears to be an observation area, focused on the far wall beneath the lights.The scanner, which appears to be concealed in the wall behind the observation area. It has been observed on one occasion to direct a laser reader of some sort toward the far wall. Its schematics and purpose are unknown.The room has a single metal door with a glass pane affixed at eye level. It leads to a short corridor, but it is not known where that corridor leads.As of this time, the location has been seen by only Element One potentials, and it seems often to overlap with visions of other key Elements; these human Elements may appear in the observation area, or on the other side of the room. Whether or not the others who appear there truly have, or will, appear inside the room itself is a subject of some debate. It may be the viewer’s mind combining the jumbled information.It is believed that the rarity of this vision is tied to the fact that it may exist only after the Event occurs. That would imply that potential Element One candidates may be among the few who will survive it.This is also the only vision in which subject Vagott has appeared.The purpose of the room has not been determined. I just stared for a minute. It wasn’t in my head; other people had seen it. Not many, but some. It was real.