Glitch (22 page)

“No way.”

“He tried to kill himself. That’s nothing. Ask your mother—”

“She told me some nasty stuff.”

“These Rogueslaves think the Rogues will make them into super humans. Most of the time, they’re just made into goo.”

“How’re we going to convince him?”

“We’re not.”

“What?”

“We’re going to beat him.”

“In a contest?”

“I believe Joss won’t come willingly, no matter what we say or do. We could force him, but Gramgadon might kill him before letting him go. He could do this in any number of ways that would look legal. Gramgadon is allowed to have his home and to exist because of loopholes in the IGL that allows for any number of individuals to work for the Fight Lord Council. Most of these jobs are fronts for Rogueslave activity, but the industry is so out of control and so lucrative that the Consortium and the IGL have been corrupted.” He smiled. “But if we offer a contest, Gramgadon won’t refuse.”

“Dad, tell me you didn’t set up Joss.”

“He did this on his own. I’m not sure of that, but I can guess. I’m just doing what I think is best, honey.”

“What kind of contest?”

“The ones with the highest stakes.” He glared at the far house. “Can’t you see it? It’ll be grand, just like your Uncle Pic said: father and daughter together in the arena in a contest of skill against the Rogues. I’ll battle Gramgadon—the man who killed my son and your brother—and you’ll battle Joss, a fellow student of yours who betrayed us. Because I’d bet a pretty penny he’s going to get his illegal package and thumb his nose at us. Zain, the most powerful fight lord, will back our doubles, which mean this contest will count. The hype will be huge. We can destroy our doubles in a single stroke. This is what the Rogues and the Consortium both want.”

“Mom’ll be pissed.”

“Of course.”

“Okay.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“And if we lose?”

“We’ll distract them from the Protocols, so it won’t matter.”

“I thought if you lost another contest ...?”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m much stronger than anyone thinks. They’ll never get me. Besides, you possess the Protocols now. They won’t think to announce them as the prize in your contest. Just mine.”

Her father went rigid, as if someone had hit him upside the head with a pole. “It’s time ...” Simone sensed only the wind blowing through the stalks, rustling the leaves, making the corn silk blow about. “If I tell you to fly, you fly.”

“What is it?”

“Ghost Hunters.” They both heard rustling and turned at the same time. “Fly!”

Simone launched herself into the air as three silent Ghost Hunter cydrones entered their row of corn. She heard a high-pitched keening like razor shards cutting into her ears. She pictured the clouds above her and, in seconds, found herself darting upward, away from the white-hot ragged pain below. The keening fell away as the screeching of the wind high up beat it back.

She dimmed herself and floated several hundred feet above a black canvas dotted with rolling hills. The house sat at the bottom of a valley. A winding creek pushed through the property. She saw rapid movement through the cornfield. She sensed something look up a her.

A part of her wanted to rush back to summon again and to show all of them (whoever they were) not to mess with the Wellborns. But her father had just been telling her how they couldn’t get him. He had been telling her he was stronger than anyone suspected. Something about his confidence beat down the anxiety.

He wants them to find him
.

She entered a fresh batch of low cloud cover rumbling in from a distant stretch of mountains to blanket the ground in mist. She descended until she reached a copse of bunched-up magnolias some distance from the field. Where the copse ended, a patch began of weed grass peppered with wildflowers. Beyond it was a cut in the ground through which a creek gurgled. Beyond that was a gravel parking lot ... with Cliff Nable’s black van.

She returned to the copse that ran up against the creek. She dipped down inside. The groove in the Earth was over five feet deep, just about right for her to move unseen. She avoided contact with the gurgling water as she moved to a short, covered bridge constructed of steps forming an arch. She hid under it like a devious troll planning to snatch a passerby.

She remained still, as if she dozed, in the deep shadow under the bridge. She had dimmed herself. If someone looked closely they’d see outlines of a near-invisible human shape. After a time of mumbling her calming mantras, she roused herself and floated all the way to the house without seeing or hearing anyone. Nose first, she pushed herself through a bottom-floor red-brick wall and into a dark space full of clothes, shoes, and small boxes. She imagined she would have sneezed, if she’d had a body.

Now what?

She began to shine in full-disembodied glory, like some multi-wicked candle burning with one big flame. She heard snapping flickers of energy triggering. The closet was lit now, but she couldn’t stop the display. She felt like yelling for her father. She covered her mouth and tried to keep quiet. She had no idea what to do to quell her anxiety.

She looked at the exposed brick wall, considered running away because her father would want her to leave. No one would blame her. She could hide in the woods until her mother arrived. Or she could spend however long it took thinking about Sterling and moving through the air to return home. She could tell her mom what she’d seen and what had happened and let the professionals—good people like her mom and her brother—handle this. She could do that, sure, but something stopped her from pushing herself back through that wall.

She wanted to know why Cliff Nable’s van was here and if Joss had betrayed them. She also wanted to help her father.

“Get a grip,” she said to herself in a whisper. Simone doused the resplendent light so that she no longer glowed like she was on fire. “Think.”

She glanced at an electrical outlet in the closet. One of those old-fashioned shoe-shining devices that spins a soft fabric was plugged into it. She had never tried using such a conduit for travel. This one gushed energy that only she could see, two tiny jets of delicious light she itched to taste.

She remembered standing on Uncle Pic’s porch soon after seeing her father again for the first time in years, still shocked by what had happened, as well as shocked she was talking to her father after so many years of thinking he was dead.

“Simone,” her father said, “you should take your time with being a ghost because you may not get your body back for a little while. But there are a whole bunch of fun things you can do as a disembodied person that you can’t do with a body. I’d show you something fun, but you can’t do it here because my brother-the-engineer, ever the contradiction, doesn’t have any electricity. He loves that damn mech of his, but he lives out here like a Luddite. Remind me to show you what you can do with a simple electrical outlet. You remember a few years ago when the hives lost power in Atlanta?”

She did. No one could explain it, and so the news pundits and everyone’s parents and everyone at school blamed it on the Rogues. “That was you?”

“I also shut down the Southeastern Conference championships.”

“Wow.”

“Got their attention. Oh, and you can use electrical circuits to travel fast. Real fast.”

Simone reached down with a finger, as if she were checking the outlet for dust. The latent energy pulsing a few inches away from the outlet hinted of
 
electric chocolate. She paused, imagining she stood in a bathtub about to stick a knife into an electrical socket. The buzzing feel of static electric discharge, the kind from walking on carpet with stings right before you touch a metal door knob, tickled her finger. The sensation changed to a physical connection, as if she were grabbing hold of the most textured, solid, and real object—something built for your hand and that you’d waited your entire life to grasp.

She stuck her entire arm into the wall, dove forward, and disappeared into the circuit of energy that powered the house.

* * *

Skippard Wellborn allowed himself to be escorted out of the corn by four aggressive Ghost Hunter cydrones. These were all scuffed up, unmarked, dented, but in perfect working order. They had been cleaned of Consortium serial numbers and branding. That meant the Consortium was more corrupt than he’d thought because someone in the military had gotten this hardware for the Rogues.

They surrounded him, each one primed to blast him and capture his bits. Skippard smiled at them because he’d designed their ancestors’ wetware.

They were efficient machines meant to do one thing very well. He also understood their weaknesses. Instead of exploiting that ability and giving away his knowledge, he followed the lead drone toward the house. They moved without sound and with deliberate care, as if they feared he might dart away.

Skippard whistled a nice tune about Dixie and wishing he were there. In fact, he was in a region once called Dixie, except this country and the culture around it had been transformed in the last few generations so that the mountain culture that once existed was gone. He was a big part of that change, and he was glad for it.

Most people believed that all things must pass, he told himself, but not Skippard Wellborn. He was determined his was to be the generation that challenged such fatalistic notions applied to human beings. Culture may come and go, sure. But death, where’s your sting? He liked that bit of poetry. It was Promethean, and it inspired him as he strode forward like the Titan he imagined himself to be.

He switched his tune to something more upbeat and contemporary, but the smart machines that led him couldn’t understand or feel the emotion of music. This was what made humans worth fighting for, no matter the cost. We can feel and know and dream and be, he told himself. The RAIs can only pretend.

Skippard calmed himself so that he didn’t expand and alarm the drones. He limited his energy to no brighter than a muted nightlight. When they arrived at a back door in the country home, it opened and Cliff Nable appeared.

“Traitor,” Skippard said.

Cliff stepped aside. He hid behind registered Consortium Mirrorshades, even though he didn’t need them. They were affectations, sure, but they were also Band-aids. Some Interfacers who’d gone deep came back, inhuman. The retinal lenses they had embedded in their eyes were quite capable of projecting all the metaverse data they needed. The shades did another thing very well: They hid soulless eyes.

He allowed Skippard to pass without a word. The drones stayed outside.

“You’ll pay,” Skippard said.

The door slammed shut behind him, and Skippard sensed a powerful cybernet encircle him. He could feel the house lock down with enough energy to power a small town. He saw no generator trucks outside and didn’t think there were any running nearby. That meant the Consortium was turning a blind eye as major energy brokers funded this house by pumping the juice in.

He floated forward into a quaint living room lit by a soft glow from a few table lamps. It had a large, oval weave rug on the polished wood floor. A wide, fieldstone fireplace with a cherry-wood mantle dominated one wall. The room even had requisite Americana paintings: one of a horse in stride, another of an eagle in flight. Gramgadon, back in human form, sat on a couch, hands on knees. Joss, the Sterling student, sat next to him, sipping what looked like a chilled glass of iced tea with a lemon slice.

Across from them, on another couch, sat four individuals who looked like spectators picked up at the fights in Alabama. One wore a baseball cap of a local Alabama fight team. A beer gut pushed at his t-shirt, and a cut on his lip still dribbled blood. Another’s nose had been bashed in, while a third’s lip had been split right down the middle. He didn’t seem to care. All of them stared straight ahead, in the meat-puppet look of four brain-dead vessels of the Roguelords.

Skippard glared at the fourth, a skinny young man, maybe no more than twenty-five. The young man may have worked at some local shop, maybe was a hardware store clerk or, even, a car salesman. He sat walleyed, as if he were still shocked at the energy that now surged into his cortex and destroyed any sense of who he was. Anger bubbled up, and Skippard considered blasting out the walls and burning these meat puppets to bits so that their masters could feel the sting.

So, here sits the Blood Tricad, plus my double, SWML, he thought. It wants a body so bad …

“What have you done now?” He stared at his double, who fancied itself strong enough to animate a nearly dead body. Skippard saw a flicker of awareness in the man’s eyes, but recognized something else looking back at him.

“A contest, of course.”

The voice was garbled and hoarse, as if several people had tried at the same time to use him to talk and his voice-box couldn’t handle the load.

The other three puppets’ heads all snapped up at once. They spoke simultaneously: “We challenge you, Wellborn Maker Lord.”

The laughter that followed was childish and mean-spirited in a way that reminded him of a boy from his childhood who used to stick firecrackers in frogs’ mouths and laugh like hell when they blew up.

Joss stopped mid-sip, as if he’d just realized what these men sitting in front of him were. “Are those ...?”

Gramgadon raised a hand to silence him. “I told you, hold your questions until later.”

Joss gulped and rushed a sip that spilled over the brim and onto his shirt.

“What’s he doing here?” Skippard asked Gramgadon. “He’s got no status.”

Cliff walked into the room, rounded the back of the four puppets, as if he were the one pulling the strings. “Let’s make this easy, Skip. Explain to me why I shouldn’t force you to give over the Protocols?”

“That’s what it was always about with you. I used to think you were interested in creating helpful Transhuman warriors. But you want to make yourself powerful, no matter the cost. Right? I set up the Protocols so that they must be earned. If you forced them from me, the Guardians would destroy them, and they’d create a new key, encrypted, hidden, and only I would be able to open them. Sorry, it’s a recursive loop. Your new masters have to win them, Agent Nable.” Skippard crossed his arms and pretended not to be annoyed. “By the way, what would your Consortium bosses think of this? How do you expect to keep your involvement a secret? You’re more outlaw than I ever was. You’re in the same room with the goddamn Tricad and SWML. Hell, you look like a proud papa. I bet you helped murder those four men.”