Chapter 10
Janis felt his hands. He didn’t feel the air current, he didn’t feel hot or cold, but he sensed the movement, the connection of his brain to a limb that he could move. That he knew, rationally, didn’t exist. His eyes focused on the two shapes hovering over him: Evan Lindo and Cynthia Revo. They were grinning ear-to-ear.
“I take it I’m alive,” Janis said with a thick tongue.
“Better than that,” Evan said.
In the last eight weeks Janis had had two major surgeries. The first procedure culled him down to fit into the Tank Major battle chassis. They removed the majority of his large intestine, his stomach, two thirds of his liver and cut down his spine five inches from the bottom. They removed his shoulder joints and cut the lower two thirds of his pelvic bone, leaving the upper portion in the shape of a halo. They removed his penis.
Janis, who had been six feet tall and weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds the day of the UN bombing, was now a head attached to a body the size of a sack of potatoes. He weighed eighty pounds.
He would never eat food again. He was fed intravenously with a high calorie/low waste nutrient solution. What left his colon and kidneys was cell waste, nothing more. With antibiotics and steroids, his body healed quickly. He was not allowed to look in a mirror; military psychologists forbade it. He was in their care two hours a day.
When his body had healed to where he could be put under again, Eric went back in for the spinal fusion surgery. The torque and power of the battle chassis was too much to strap him in like a kid riding a rollercoaster. The body would bludgeon and bruise from the g-forces of the suit in battle, both in what it would deliver to a target and what the suit would be targeted with. The only way to keep the human component alive was to mount it directly to a shock-absorbing platform that was then mounted into the chassis. In the platform the body was suspended in a shock absorbing gel, floating like a baby in a womb. The suspension platform was then hard mounted to the battle chassis with both vertical and horizontal suspension, guided by a computer that monitored the movement with gyroscopes that adapted the suspension platform for tilt and roll. The battle chassis moved around the suspension platform, not the other way around. For Eric, he would never feel the jarring reality of his body around him. It would feel to him like he was on a raft gliding over rolling waves.
Once the spine was fused to the suspension platform it would be a part of his body for the rest of his life. The fusion was painful. Not only were quarter inch pins put in each vertebra, they were then connected together by a rod that put Janis in perfect posture. He could no longer move his back.
It took Eric three weeks to recover from the spinal surgery. The pain was masked with drugs and a physician induced coma. If it weren’t, if a dose was forgotten in the middle of the night, or the IV got crimped against the bed, his body would realize the trauma it had received and he would go into cardiac arrest. He was kept alive by the numbing properties of narcotics.
At three weeks they began to bring him out of the coma. When they saw he was coming to, they connected the implant into the back of the suspension platform. The modified Mindlink connected into the spine through the platform and hijacked the nerves that would normally be used to raise a leg, wiggle a toe, or give someone the finger.
He woke up with his brain already adapting to the implant. They had him connected to a computer and while his body was just a bag of blood, bone, and organs—on the screen—the fully limbed wire frame figure his mind was connected to moved like a man regaining consciousness: his arms raised and lowered, they went to brush his head. His legs rubbed together like they were starting a slow fire. His toes curled and straightened. As far as his mind was concerned, his body was whole.
Cynthia and Evan hardly left Eric’s side. Cynthia hadn’t been away from her home this long in ten years, but she couldn’t tear herself away. She didn’t understand the feeling of wonderment that had come over her through this process, but it was the same as a woman giving birth to a child. She was in awe of her own mind, her own will, her own ability to take this man who was nothing and turn him into a lord of war.
She and Evan had become, if not friends, respectful of the other’s intellect. The Tank Major design was brilliant and Cynthia couldn’t ignore the mind behind it. Sabot had seen this slow thaw and it made him uneasy—he didn’t trust Evan—and jealous. For all Sabot had, he didn’t have Cynthia’s mind. He would always be a companion that Cynthia would have to dumb down to. Day-to-day it wasn’t an issue. In their bedroom, the intellectual contrast never crept in. But after meetings with her scientists and engineers, she would explain what they had covered in metaphors, and that was enough for Sabot to understand that while she loved him, he was not a peer.
Lindo was, and in some areas, superior. The Tank Major program was an indication of that. And now they were working side-by-side, leaning over the bed of a man who had been reduced to a human bowling pin wrapped in gauze, with a web of wires shooting out from underneath. And they celebrated this monstrosity as if they had added and not taken away.
Sabot’s face was as placid as a wax figurine. Lindo glanced at him from over the hospital bed and read nothing, par for the course for a soldier who could have been a professional poker player. But Sabot was in turmoil. He didn’t like Evan. He saw the oily slick behind the eyes and he knew that Evan was a calculating personality, his comments and responses weighed and measured for the greatest affect. And those men were dangerous. They were manipulators.
He had told Cynthia as much weeks into the project and she had dismissed him.
“I can handle Evan,” she replied. She was programming using the Mindlink. On a nearby screen, code scrolled upward faster than anyone could type. “He came to me, not the other way around.”
He didn’t understand Cynthia’s obsession with this project. Either she didn’t understand what she was building, or worse, she knew exactly what it was. And that meant that Sabot didn’t know her as well as he thought.
Sabot had come from poverty. He had learned young that emotion was weakness and a gang would beat you up just to hear you cry. When Cynthia hired him, suddenly he was immersed in the company of the most powerful men and women in the world and their peculiar trait was one they shared with the masses that worshipped them: they forgot they were human. In the projects, strength and resolve were camouflage. Inside they all knew they were nothing. The wealthy were the opposite. They were so validated by their greatness that it never occurred to them that they could be wrong. Cynthia should have been too smart to fall into this trap. Yet here she was, evolving the art of war in a world that needed no more.
He waited for her to look up at him, throw a wink or a smile, or even take a few minute break so they could talk a bit. But she didn’t. She was focused on her affront squirming in the hospital bed.
Sabot made a decision. He moved away from the window and felt the cold kiss of the outside world, the real world, retract its lips. He was tired of men playing God. Suddenly everything felt so pointless. The world was run by the insane, by the inane, that had everything but still wanted more—which showed they shouldn’t be there. They weren’t leaders, they were bottom feeders who learned to swim on their back, sucking all the light and hope from the world for the temporary feeling of levity. For the temporary feeling of relevance.
He looked at Cynthia and didn’t know her. He looked at Evan Lindo and knew him perfectly. He looked at Eric Janis and a tear welled in his eye. He was a lab rat, convinced if he did right the cheese would be his.
He didn’t know why the fuck he was here. Sabot walked out of the room, down the hall, and took the four flights of stairs to the main level. He left the Derik Building and walked five miles to a hotel. He had no home, but now he had a place to sleep.
He would talk to Cynthia tomorrow and she wouldn’t understand, but that was fine. His mom was still alive, so was his sister. When was the last time he had seen them? Two months? No . . . it had been four.
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He would see them tomorrow, stay for a week, listen. Listen to his mom. Really listen. Ask his sister what she’s been up to. Follow up with more questions so he could hear her voice. The big stuff isn’t important. We all turn to dust. The big stuff isn’t big at all, in a galaxy of a billion stars, in a universe of a billion galaxies. With other worlds that have surpassed ours a million years before and would never know our failure. And other worlds awash in primordial ooze, sorting out the gift of life from the rubble and slime.
Line up the sight and pull the trigger, when the earth is gone, the universe won’t tear. Smile. Be happy. Because the end is near.
= = =
Mohammed Jawal was in a New York safe house when the UN was bombed. He was connected into the news feeds and camera feeds just like everyone else. While others watched in horror when the UN collapsed into itself and the millions of privileged Americans crushed one another while fleeing, Mohammed cried. He thanked Allah. He blessed whoever had caused this beautiful wreckage.
The bombing invigorated his army and bold new plans came from it. While the media called their attacks on MindCorp “failed attempts,” they were all successful. Mohammed wanted an air of dread. That was terrorism’s greatest strength: perceived randomness. That no one was safe. He had infiltrated capitalism’s most powerful institution and almost lopped the head off its queen. Now that queen would only focus on her well-being. She would focus on her kingdom. That left the government.
Dread. Had they ever felt it? They would know it now. The new plan was insidious but Mohammed’s personal feelings had little to do with his objectives. They were days away from killing the extended families of military and political leaders. Grandchildren. Sons and daughters. Living grandparents. For some, close friends and neighbors.
Collateral damage. That’s what the Coalition called it when they bombed the Middle Eastern towns, destroying whole residential blocks. Or when children, so frightened they peed themselves, were cut down by gunfire when they ran into the middle of a firefight. It was an accepted part of war. The military wrote reports on it. They discussed it in air-conditioned rooms while drinking coffee. But they had never felt it. They had never pulled aside rubble until their hands were raw searching for their only son. They had never been handed unrecognizable remains and told it was their mother. But now they would. They would finally feel the collateral damage of their war. The tangible agony of innocent lives lost. The question “WHY?” looping their brain in a harpy’s scream, driving them insane.
Branches of the Western Curse communicated and coordinated through a shareware application that served no purpose but to send and receive imbedded messages. The shareware was ‘lost’ in that it had no portal. It could only be accessed for programming, as if it were still a work in progress not yet ready for public consumption. Functional code bookended the messages and leapfrogged over them. From the outside it was an incomplete, but properly coded piece of shareware. Internally, it was a way to discretely exchange messages that were untraceable to a source when it was not in use. Mohammed pictured it floating in space like a lone, dark asteroid.
But someone had broken in and requested Mohammed Jawal by name.
“It’s a trap,” one of Mohammed’s officers had said.
But Mohammed didn’t think so. The information in the message could be used against this person too easily. Even without verification, if it were anonymously sent to the media, the spotlight on this public officer would be so intense his hair would singe.
Mohammed didn’t know how this man knew of him, but it appeared this individual had paid attention for some time. The man wanted to meet virtually, something that Mohammed and the rest of the officers forbade. But if this man were an ally, his resources could change everything. The UN bombing had thrown the world on an awkward axis, like a toy top wobbling as it lost its spin. If there was a time to be bold, it was now.
Nothing is free, Mohammed thought to himself. Mohammed could connect from anywhere; it didn’t have to be at his safe house. In fact, he preferred it be somewhere public where an ambush would lead into a throng of civilians. He could have guards around the perimeter; that would make sense. The majority of the Western Curse did not look like Mohammed. They were clean-cut, dark skin, light skin, men and women. This, once again, was not about religion, but about equity. Cause and effect, an eye-for-an-eye.
After an hour of prayer and three hours of meditation, Mohammed went online and put a message into their unfinished shareware. He would meet this man who promised resources. He would meet him for five minutes and if that went well, they could plan accordingly. He’d send the location one minute before they were to meet via the shareware. Thirty seconds after it was posted, the time and place would be deleted.
What does ‘Western’ mean? Mohammed reflected. Almost the entire world was westernized. He had always equated it to a greedy, self-imposing ideology. He had given it an image and form, the U.S. occupying the majority of it. But was it an antiquated term, like ‘terrorist’? What if people that were a part of “Western” society wanted it to burn as well? Was the enemy of my enemy my friend? Or am I looking to not toil, to find the easy way . . . am I greeting the same monster in a different cloak?
It took Mohammed time to find sleep.
= = =
Mohammed was in a Thai discothèque. It was modeled after discos from the 1970’s. Barry White—Mohammed knew the name because the information came to him through the Mindlink—sang about love in his smooth baritone. On the dance floor, beautiful Asian women tranced. Men bobbed through the crowd, some with rhythm, most not. Everyone was dressed according to the time period. Bell-bottoms, afros, long hair, flowered shirts and hints of hippy. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.
The place was authentically filthy but Mohammed didn’t worry about germs. It was a high-resolution texture, a design choice, nothing more. You could fuck anyone, you could take enough drugs to kill an elephant, you could even lick the toilet seat if you like, and nothing of consequence would ever come your way. Unless you wanted it to: there were programs that allowed a person to experience every disease known to man.
Mohammed didn’t like how he felt as he moved through the crowd. He wanted to hate the decadence, the sexual casualness, but he caught himself looking at the women, he caught himself feeling the music. Not dancing, nothing silly, but the groove of it vibrating through him like a second heartbeat.
Woman watched him as he slid by, the path through the crowd tight and ever changing. He was looking for a tall black woman who would be toward the back of the club. He was a medium size white man with muttonchops, a mustache, a green sleeveless vest and bell-bottoms.
He saw the woman. She had a short afro and perfect dark skin. She leaned against a wall ignoring a very drunk white kid about six inches shorter than her. As he approached, it was clear to the woman who he was and he heard her tell the drunk kid to beat it.
“Hello,” she said. Up close her eyes had a sad quality, almost like they were melting. Her voice was flat and lifeless. The woman gestured for them to sit at a nearby table.
“I’m breaking a lot of rules,” Mohammed said after they were seated.
“Rules you created,” she said with a smile, but it was cold. It was clear that this wasn’t the “person.”
“Rules nonetheless,” Mohammed said. “You have five minutes.”
“I only need one,” the woman said. “I am obviously not a supermodel and you aren’t a little white guy, let’s just get that out of the way.”
Mohammed nodded.
“Is your focus mostly on the United States?” the woman asked. “The Western Curse would seem to indicate that, but I understand that you are a patriot of your home country. Iran is occupied by many forces.”
“Tell me what you want,” Mohammed asked dismissively.
“I don’t share your political view but I can empathize with it.” She played with a discarded straw left on the table. “But a war is coming that’s much more im
portant than the one you are meddling in.”
Mohammed started to interrupt and the woman’s eyes shot up. They had changed. For a moment they were Asian and the fire in them caused Mohammed to back down.
“World War III is coming, Mohammed. It’ll be a quiet little war—most of these people will never know—but it will decide the fate of humanity. Do you know what all of this is?”
The woman gestured to the bar, to the people dancing around them.
“It’s a new universe. A place where truly anything is possible. A fresh start where all the mistakes we’ve made as a civilization can be righted. But it needs a steward and that day is fast upon us.”
“This world is false. We can save the real one,” Mohammed said.
The woman shook her head. “Not without this. You know where we were headed before the Mindlink. Society was going to eat itself. It’s no secret. We’ve seen what we become when we’re scared. But look at us now. In the last ten years, vehicle pollution has gone down to zero. We’ve diversified our power needs with clean or near clean energy. Physical possessions no longer matter so manufacturing has gone back to the essentials. Already, nature is reclaiming lands around the mega-cities. The Mindlink has turned earth into an apartment and that’s good. You may empathize with your homeland, but you wouldn’t live there. You’re appalled by the Coalition, understandably so, but you are Western-educated, you’ve lived too long as Westerners do. You’d go back to caves? Maybe shepherd some sheep?”
The little white guy looked angry. The woman pointed her index finger to the table.
“This is all that matters. For the last one hundred years, scientists, philosophers and dreamers have looked to the stars. They saw man expanding outward. But the stars are here. The shared minds and the unlimited potential inward is our expansion. I don’t think we’ll ever leave earth. I don’t think there’s anything out there that justifies the cost. Why search God’s universe when we can create our own?
“I don’t deny the atrocities that have befallen the Middle East, but let’s say you succeed. What next? You’ll be hunted, that much is guaranteed. And you’ll be found because someone around you will rat you out for money or amnesty. What about your country? You haven’t been there in fifteen years and let me tell you, it’s over. It’s a wasteland, sucked dry and forgotten. Nothing will be re-built there by your enemies or otherwise. At this point, if you asked the Coalition nicely, they’d probably give it to you. Your cause is thirty years too late, Mohammed.”
“What do you want?” Mohammed asked again.
The woman put the straw down. “Ten years ago, we, the Chinese, smuggled multiple caches of weapons and explosives into the United States. Not a shipping crates worth, I’m talking enough to start—and finish—wars.”
“Why?”
“Because we could. Oil was running out and we had to plan for the future. Think of it as the inverse of a bomb shelter.” The woman smiled and sat back. “I don’t need you right now, but I may in the future. I’ll be forthright: I want to compel you. I want to provide enough resources—weapons—so that you can’t possibly turn my offer away. In exchange, you owe me. If I die, you owe my country or my successor.”
“What kind of weapons?” Mohammed asked. Their own weapons were useful, but not sophisticated. He had a couple of Browning .50 caliber machine guns, a thousand assault rifles of various origin, and explosives; the most exotic was about one hundred pounds of C-4, the rest were created by his chemists, mostly fertilizer bombs and dynamite.
“Ahh, interested, right?” Xan/the black woman said. “Everything, barring vehicles. Any conventional weapon you can think of and their components. The most advanced body armor for your soldiers. Chemical agents, their delivery systems, AND . . .” Xan drummed the table for the build up, “. . . a few portable toys that have the habit of leaving mushroom clouds.”
“How?” Mohammed was beside himself. Chemical? Nuclear?
The woman leaned toward him. Her eyes were Asian again. “The IOU isn’t bringing in my mail while I’m away, Mohammed. Many of your soldiers will die. Maybe all. But those that live—I highly recommend you don’t lead the charge by the way—will benefit greatly from this arrangement. This isn’t a temporary partnership, but a beginning. I’ve read your books, I’ve watched your interviews and I understand your position. But when has an idealist won? When has ‘right’ ever had anything to do with it? You need me to make your cause relevant, I need you to secure my country and this world’s future. But if you agree, there is no going back. I can promise one thing, we are dealing futures in life and death. Yours and mine are included. But is that such a large cost for the universe?”
Xan paused. He was done with his pitch.
Mohammed sat thoughtfully, regarding the beautiful black woman who had just offered him the world. “How can I trust you?” he finally asked.
“I will deposit five hundred million dollars into the account of your choosing as a show of goodwill. I will also provide a small cache of weapons so you can see how you’ll be equipped. You have to lay low now. No more attacks on MindCorp. Nothing. The government’s got their hands full searching for Allah’s Will. This works with our plans. Be forgotten. They’ll remember you soon enough.”
= = =
Xan woke satisfied with his first encounter with Mohammed. He was at a military base located in northeast Beijing, a city bloated like all others in the world because of the oil crisis. The base was at the edge of the sprawling, smog-choked city that seemed to burn red regardless of the day. It was as if continental drift had broken China apart like a puzzle. From one window of his office he saw the city expanse dip over the horizon. From the other side of his office he saw farmers working land with their donkeys and plows.
Xan sat up from his reclined chair. It was a Sleeper chair and the more he was online, the more he appreciated it. It had electrodes built into the form fitted, reclined cushions to stimulate the muscles. A hole was cut out under the anus so that the bowels could evacuate without issue. When the chair sensed a finished bowel movement, a bidet shot up water. A funnel was attached to the penis and an IV was inserted to provide nutrients. He hadn’t been under long enough to need these perks, but he would soon. This was the first time he had successfully used a Forced Autism candidate. He had done it from his office, but deeper in the base, in a section that once was an airplane hanger, was the Data Core that Dr. Renki had helped design and ultimately died for.
He stretched his arms to the ceiling and then walked across his large office to the kitchen. Coffee was brewing and he got himself a cup. Xan thought it was odd how Mohammed had changed his appearance so drastically. It was obvious that he didn’t understand how the digital tail, which connected a person in cyberspace to their real world location, could be traced. He could be a talking giraffe and his physical location could be found in a millisecond.
But they could not find Xan or even know it was he who spoke. While Xan wasn’t a powerful Sleeper without hijacking the mental horsepower of a Forced Autistic, he understood cyberspace and he knew the tricks. He looked like a black woman because he had paid a mercenary to wire a brain dead woman in the U.S. for him to connect through. The mind could be a CPU or a fuse, and for this poor woman whose life had all but ended—not at his own hand, she had attempted suicide—she was only a conduit.
If they traced Xan they would find the shriveled up husk of a former beauty queen, most likely deceased. She had been used, the identity now cracked. Her IV had given her two weeks to live. After that she would just fade.
Xan needed Mohammed because, while China had many operatives in the United States, they weren’t an army. Mohammed had access to nearly a thousand individuals, some native to the U.S., some smuggled in, but all trained and willing to die for their cause. Xan needed their cause to be his. And now, after the meeting, he thought it was.
Instinct had saved many a bacon since man straightened their backs and Xan trusted his now. There was something in the shadows
that Xan felt but couldn’t see. He acted accordingly. He no longer kept staff in his office and he kept the door locked. He preferred the isolation and the silence, and over the last few months his trust in his peers, even his bosses, had grown thin. The death of President Jintau should have united the parties. They should have been relentless in their quest to find the culprit. But instead, nothing. Vacillating. Debating. And China wasn’t alone. The EU—with their own cultural nuances—was behaving the same way. And so was the U.S. Countries prone to violent reactions against adversaries were acting like neutered dogs with a bitch bent over in front of them: curious, but for all the wrong reasons. Some of the more fringe politicians in the parties had even suggested that they offer the oil to their allies; that this unification would help solve the current predicament. Then, then, they could solve the terrorist problem.
On a whim, Xan spoke with the military doctors who treated the politicians and officers. Since President Jintau’s death, complaints of migraines had jumped six hundred percent. Which meant, in real-world terms, that if ten officials used to get treated for migraines, now sixty do. It could just be stress from the upheaval and uncertainty, but it was not statistically insignificant, and that bothered Xan.
The Core was functioning at ten percent strength. Above twenty percent, Xan would have to be in the same physical location as the Forced Autistic.
Xan learned the hard way that Forced Autism was messy work. It took two days to complete the process, taking a conscious individual—who was most likely pleading for their life—and turning them into a CPU interface for cyberspace. What was left was a lobotomized, catatonic remnant of that former person. But their mindscape was up to eighty times larger than before the procedure.
Xan’s team of technicians and surgeons had learned from the first three subjects’ brains boiling out their ears. Today their fourth subject, designated S-04, did fine. Xan felt the expanse of his (its?) mind like it was his own. It was a strange feeling. It was like being able to see all around you at once and for a mile in either direction. Never having to focus, the information and decisions just rushing through your mind like an open dam. It immediately made Xan one of the most powerful Sleepers in the world.
Combined with the processing power of the Data Core, he could manipulate and hack the most difficult of security protocols. And because his ghost Core was parasitic and rode on the back of MindCorp’s, it was virtually undetectable.
MindCorp thought they controlled cyberspace, and they did. They just weren’t aware that an ear was against the door listening in to all of their plans and breaching the most top secret of files.
His phone rang. “Yes?” he said. He listened to the warble on the other line. They had saved him the trip. S-04 was fine, better than fine. It was time to move forward with the plans. “I’ll be there tomorrow at 0600.”
He hung up and walked to the northwest corner of his office. The contrast between the views felt like an optical illusion. To the north, rolling farmland, a distant mountain range and the gray ocean water. To the west, the jumbled heights of a thousand high rises, jagged and unplanned like broken teeth with the red, caustic atmosphere that hung over and around them like they were a city built on Mars.
He sighed. China’s economy developed too late to include much of the population. Ninety percent of the people he now looked down upon, people he couldn’t see, were living in poverty. The outskirts of the cities utilized the same technologies as they did one hundred and fifty years ago.
This economic and technological lopsidedness kept most of the population in the dark, unaware of the happenings of the world. Maybe it was better that way . . .
The peak of civilization was in 2005. That was the historic marker. Xan’s mentor used to talk about that. Most discussions centered on Peak Oil, but what about Peak Civilization?
All countries and nations crumble, entropy was a law, like gravity. It took hold, spinning and spinning, like water against rock, the centrifugal damage unseen by one person’s lifetime, but through generations deep canyons were carved and mountains turned to sand.
Our peak was in 2005. Now we’re just hanging on, wondering what’s next.
Xan looked out into the red haze. Coal. Abundant and deadly. How long until the earth gasped one last breath and died? Xan read a long time ago how a Chinese traffic cops life expectancy was in the early forties. Not from being hit by a car or violence but from the pollution. That had not changed.
Those rolling fields. Maybe regression was better. How many times has man achieved their dreams only to realize it wasn’t enough? The human race pushes and pushes. We ignore our families, we half listen to our loved ones. We laugh so rarely. Always looking ahead and wanting what’s next. But when we get it, it’s just rot and disappointment.
S-04 was working which meant he was going to be online for one month straight. He had a hunch what was going on, why the world was so confused. And he knew where to start: with ones like himself, the shadow men. All governments had them. They were the ones that whispered into the public figure’s ear. They were the third man back in the photograph. And they chose that, they wanted that anonymity, because that granted them power and the ethical leniency to do what was truly necessary for their country. To abduct eight Chinese Sleepers against their will. To kill an innocent scientist who knew their face. Xan knew to search three rows back; there he’d find the answers. Everyone closer were temporary fixtures. If they wanted their face seen, they weren’t important. They were just pawns.