System Seven (44 page)

“Probable breach? What does it mean, a probable
breach?”

“Details on screen,
sir.”

A stolen IT services
company van and a service call at the ministry communications building by the
same company.

“Send a panel out to
investigate.”

“Sir, we’re
overextended with Signus Alpha. Shall I–”

“Yes! Break out a
panel from Alpha.” He remembered the gold dots glowing on his personal LCD. In
a more controlled voice, he added, “It could be related.”

No mistakes.

“Panel dispatched.
Grab updated to two minutes five seconds, sir.”

He again eyed the
three remaining gold dots, the minimum required to execute J86 in one city.

“Confirm J86 is still
enabled.”

A moment later,
confirmation came.

• • •

Only yards from shore,
black storm clouds raced counterclockwise. Their bulk rose thousands of feet
into the sky, lit with flashes of lightning. Thunder cracked the air. The eye
of the hurricane had tightened to become a twister with a narrowing center.

Kaiya stole a look up
from their sand burrow. A single shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom, robbed of
its warmth but not of its hope. Again she tried to force change, imagining a
steel plate to shield them. Again nothing happened. Stuck in a nightmare with
no way to wake up, she was finally helpless.
What did I do to deserve this?

She hunkered over the
boy’s tiny frame and hugged him tighter. The thought of him being ripped from her arms was too much to bear.

“Kaiya?”

Her head whipped up in
time to catch a flurry of windblown sand in the face. Who’d called her name?

“Kaiya?”

The voice cut through
the roar of the storm, like a voice-over on an entirely different soundtrack.
She ducked back down and listened intently. Long seconds passed with nothing
more. It was a trick, a way of getting them out of the safety of their hole,
the symbol of her defiance. If she held any power left at all, it had to be in
maintaining their place.

“Ryota!”

The boy shifted in
response. It wasn’t just her imagination.

“Kaiya!”

The voice seemed from
beyond the dream, from the waking world – but she couldn’t wake up! Were they
finally trying to save them? Intuition said yes. She couldn’t stand the thought
of missing their help. She yelled into the squall, “Here! We’re here!”

Thunder pealed and the
wind tore at her hair. The storm wall toppled high overhead and converged to
blot the sun. In the sudden darkness, lightning flickered. The island shifted,
a small lurch at first, then as if starting to rise. Two of the palm trees rose
like twigs to disappear into the streaming torrent of the twister. The boy
screamed and tried to stand.

“No Ryota! No–” She
felt a groping hand against her knee and screamed also. It found her calf, then
slid to her ankle and pulled her leg violently down into the sand. She kicked
but the heavy, wet sand held her leg. Lightning flashed as Ryota slipped down
to his hips. “Nooo!” She prayed then, as
hard as she’d ever prayed.
God, please
take us now, take our souls and lead us to peace.
God,
please take us now, take our souls right now and lead us to
–

“Kaiya! No! Stop
praying for that! Live, girl, live! Stop resisting and come with me! Austin
needs you!”

A brilliant light
split the darkness from above. The roar of the wind died off and the twisting
storm slowed. Gone was the sun and blue sky, replaced by a heavenly downpour of
white light that saturated the clouds and turned them gray-blue. Peace soaked
in, numbing fear until it faded completely. Nothing would ever hurt her again,
nothing could ever bring her pain again. She was going
home
– a home from a long, long time ago.

Another tug almost
tore Ryota from her grip. With an effort, she looked down into the boy’s
terrified eyes. “No!” She screamed, splitting the silence. “Leave him to me!”

The voice and grip
would not relent. “Come–” another violent tug and the boy slipped completely
under the sand, “–
on!
”

The luring light
forgotten, she began to scream but stopped when another voice, sharp and quick,
filled the dream.

“Copy that. Signus
Alpha to grab now.”

The clouds peeled back
to reveal more of the brilliance above. From the retreating billows emerged
black birds, thousands of them, all diving towards her little hole in the
island. They grew larger as they neared, revealing shiny black claws amid a
flurry of wings. Their wild cries pierced her soul.

The hand on her leg
released and instead surfaced from the sand.

“Come with me, Kaiya,
or you’ll never serve Austin sweet and sour pork again!”

There was no time to
analyze that. Riding instinct, she took hold of the outstretched hand and
allowed it to tug her into the gritty darkness below, back towards Austin.

God, she hoped back
towards Austin.

• • •

“Signus Alpha in
pursuit.”

“Damn it!” Director
Tomov pounded his armrest. “How did he
do
that?”

He stood and pointed
at the display. “Somebody tell me how he slipped past fourteen fucking panels!
Forty of our best trained minds and no one saw him? Someone tell me!”

No one dared speak.
The panels sliced through the mesh, tracking residual energies of the three
targets, maneuvering split-second switchbacks, morphing imagery – countering an
endless stream of tricks as Gerrit barreled through bubble after bubble of unsuspecting
dreamers. There was just no getting ahead of him. Two panels dropped off,
casualties of the sudden alterations.

“Keep the linkage
together – communicate! Stay cohesive, damn it. Get into his stream!”

The visuals grew more
chaotic. Rapid shifts presented realties at mind-boggling speed. Three more
panels fell off, unable to stay on the chase. Another gone, then another.

“Nine panels. Eight.
He’s wild. Hard to track.”

“Get those panels
reconnected. Shut him down!”

Tomov tried not to
panic. No one had ever been so dynamic and agile, so dimensional. No one had
ever moved with such confidence so fast in the mesh. The control room began to
swim. He planted a hand on a console to steady himself and looked away from the
screens. “Patch me to AGT Ops. And get me double blues with Coke.”

The AGT director came
online. “Tomov, what’s happening?”

He exhaled heavily and
turned back to the screens. “He’s got the boy. I don’t know if we’ll stop him.
Standby for the bender. I’m certain he’ll be there for the pick-up of the body.
And J86 is still on the table.”

“Understood. We’ll
take care of him. Keep this line open.”

“Right.” The panel
count dropped by another two. Gerrit was wearing them out, plain and simple.
The panels had trouble reconnecting – the speed made synchronization nearly
impossible.

The AGT director
announced, “Heads up. There’s a mix of birds in the air out of Yokota. Seven
Hueys and a C-130. Scrub of the base comms shows reference to a training sortie
but no word on what the 130 is doing. The Hueys are spreading out all over
Tokyo and the 130’s on its own circuit, outside our zone. No precedence for a
night sortie of this design. I’ve got someone working on the roots. In the
meantime, you might want to get in there and see if we have anything to worry
about.”

He directed his ops
officer to coordinate rider teams to join the AGTs for intercept and
inspection. He sat down, waiting for his blues.

History was about to
be made alright, and not the preferred version. In a way, the scenario was
inevitable, had been for years. If not here, then Zurich or London or Malaysia
or wherever the breakout occurred. The number of incidents unraveling in the
past year alone... too many indications of subversion growing right under G2’s
nose. He looked up at the incident map and couldn’t help wondering if Stan and
Laura still lived in Tokyo.

Overseer’s voice broke
into his thoughts. “
Answer ready.”

“Answer to what?”

“
The answer to your
last inquiry regarding target A2 and how he slipped past fourteen panels. The
answer is apparent: target A2 has superior governance in the mesh
.”

“No shit, Oscar.” He
looked at the gold dots and decided he didn’t care. “No
shit
.”

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there,
wondering, fearing,

doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream
before.
- Edgar Allan Poe

Once Johan had Kaiya
and Ryota securely in his keep, split-second leap-frogging proved to be almost
fun. While the pair sat alone in a train car rolling through the Swiss Alps, he
extended his reach farther than ever, pummeling through Saoghal like a god.

There were mouse holes
to crawl through and skies to disappear into, crowds to absorb him, and
children to hopscotch over his chalk line form. Under the pews of a church in
Luxembourg and out a stained glass window to become a bird that flew to a tree
down the avenue before shrinking into a drop of rain blown by the wind. He
struck a branch and split into two, curled around the curve of the drop and
exited the dream only to join a nightmare in a house fully engulfed in flames.

An old man, face
streaked with tears, sat in a rusted wheelchair and listened to screams from
family trapped upstairs. Caught off guard, Johan shrank and flew into the
glowing embers of a door frame, emerged briefly in the openness of Saoghal,
then slid down and away towards the billions of dreams that awaited.

He kept the stints
brief, morphing at every chance, shifting emotion to blend into the scenery. He
was a young woman entering a doctor’s office one moment – the weathered door of
a lighthouse facing a rising sun the next. Confidence grew by measures until it
appeared inevitable he would completely lose them. He shook free of
that
feeling before it could be used
against him, too.
Leave nothing of your
self behind.

Vaguely, the notion of
fatigue presented itself, a shocking first suggestion of limitation in the
dream world. He didn’t slow and felt no different except for a gnawing
realization that every snap of change that he affected became one more trick
expended by his core – so that he would become that much more familiar to them
if only they thought to pay attention.
Someone
would.
He tried to set that aside but found it far more sticky a thought
than anything he’d encountered so far. He was tiring and they had to feel it. Time
once again became the enemy.

Amanda
. He would deliver Kaiya to safety first. To accomplish that he couldn’t
have a posse trailing him. Creativity remained fluid, the playground of Saoghal
still an ocean of possibility. An idea formed from that ocean, one that held
promise of something truly ingenious if the realm operated like he imagined it
did.

In the smallest, most
private molecules of his existence, he began to build a false world, a pseudo-dream
of the most typical kind. He installed a simulation of his shifting meta
engaged in some of the same tricks he’d already used. He added several “leaps”,
ghostly paths of sim-meta to form a deceptive trail for them to follow. The
process was slow and incredibly tedious, attended to between real dream jumps
and morphs with great care and timing. They could not be allowed to see what he
was creating. For it to work, where it led could not appear familiar.

If the idea of fatigue
had surprised him before, its actual effects, felt now in the complex efforts
of dream weaving, shot thin bolts of fear into his core.

• • •

“Sir, he’s slowing–”

“I see that.” Director
Tomov stood. The blues amplified the good news by factors. “Panels are up by
four, now five. He’s wearing down. There’s no way he could keep up that pace, I
knew it.” He hadn’t, but that wasn’t for
them to know. “Signus Alpha, stay alert, your target’s weakening.”

“Confirmed. He’s also
leaking fear. Starting to unravel.”

On screen, the target
raced into another dream, a field of yellow wheat blowing in the wind under
blue skies, lit like the afterlife. Signus Alpha shrank to the size of an ant
and raced among the tall columns of wheat to follow A2. In a blink he shot into
a light beam. They managed to follow, bouncing to the upper atmosphere before
reflecting back against the eye of a man walking across the field towards his
wife in a reunion dream. A2 shot into the darkness of the man’s iris and made
exit from the dream. They tracked him into another, a school boy’s fantasy
where a beautiful teacher unbuttoned her blouse.

“He’s reaching his
limits, sir. Back up to thirteen.”

The director nodded.
It was only a matter of time.

• • •

Johan clamped down on
a feeling that threatened to get away from him – the feeling of pure joy and
relief. Controlling his happiness proved almost as hard as managing the dream
weaving. He was finally
free
, alone
with his two charges in the placid blackness of Saoghal. He distanced himself
from the cunning construct he’d made for his pursuers – proud of it but unsure
how soon they would escape.

He had slowed some,
allowing them into his dream, and then masterfully transferred them into
that
, a cornucopian bubble of worlds
inside worlds, like a Pandora’s box. With luck, he had time enough to secure Kaiya
and the boy.

• • •

Snow laden mountains
gave way to countryside similarly buried; an occasional stream, jutting trees,
or farmhouse broke the blanket of white. Ryota sat at the window and gazed
farther than his eyes could see, likely dreaming of things familiar.

Kaiya rested. The
stress of arrival on the train had passed, replaced by hope that she might
actually make it back to the reality she’d once called home. That there were
dimensions beyond that reality made perfect sense now. Dreams could not be
experienced if they didn’t have some basis in the fabric of the universe.
Before, she’d only glimpsed them as a passerby, remembered them infrequently,
and considered them a chemically induced abstraction. She’d never imagined the
underlying, coherent space that allowed for the experience in the first place.
New understanding grounded her and offered a view to reality that before would
have swept her away in a hysteria of denial and avoidance.

In the beginning, she
had
fallen into the depths of insanity,
a lucid sensorium whose memory would forever haunt. General Shang’s
introduction to bodiless existence had redefined evil and mortified the shallow
bowl that once contained her world. Yet, in that shameful lunacy – from it – a
rearrangement of identity had occurred, forming a cogency of self that never
would have manifested otherwise, even after the progression of an ‘ordinary’
lifetime.

She was more than
she’d ever imagined.

Character strengths
she’d recognized before were dimly lit tips of self that hadn’t yet been fully
exposed. Weaknesses and faults were in fact shards of greater traits not
completely realized or managed. Emotions were not blindsiding forces scratching
to be let in: they were the very components of her being and as such were
utterly valid and beautiful in their complexity. The whole of identity held
depths that had yet to be illuminated, leaving her infinitely curious and
powerfully endowed with a sense of soul and of the present moment.

In the now, sitting
next to Ryota, she existed in the exquisite knowledge of self, pondering the
efforts of someone she’d never met who held her fate in the balance. Hope
burned deep. Hope to return to the world to live more fully than she ever
thought possible.

Ryota sat up and
strained to see down the tracks.

She stood and leaned
over to see. A town lay ahead and the train was slowing. She entered the aisle
and beckoned Ryota to join her at the door. Together they watched the edge of a
modest township slip by. The train rumbled slower and slower until the station
came into view and the brakes were applied in a squealing symphony. The arrival
felt good.

Two men stood on the
platform. One held a lantern in the shape of a lighthouse. The door opened and Kaiya
urged Ryota to step down. One of the men stepped forward and said with the same
voice from beneath the sand, “No Kaiya. Home is further on for him. Your return
is now. Come, say your goodbyes, please.”

“But–” She stared into
eyes deep as oceans that impelled her to understand.

“Please, Kaiya. Timing
is everything.”

With that, she hugged
Ryota, giving him every bit of love in her heart. She ran a hand over his hair.
“You are wonderful. I hope to meet you when we’re awake someday.”

He nodded and said in
a little voice, “Me, too.” He stepped back as the doors closed and the train
blew its whistle. Steam swelled into the cold air. He waved from the window.

“He
can
talk!”

The man took her arm
and guided her towards the doors of the station. “It’s time to return, quickly
now. Brace yourself. I’m told this next step may be unsettling. Please relax
and do not fight it, regardless of your fears. Safety lies just ahead.”

• • •

Austin circled around
to the far side of the koi pond and leaned against the low wall, listening to
the street noise below.

I’m in Japan. I flew here from Scotland. I flew
myself here...

Once again the surge
came, an avalanche of awe and disbelief that any of it were real.
Fucking surreal
, like a bullet train in
a crazy dream that just wouldn’t stop. To wield the power left him feeling like
God, an altogether frightening sensation. It took an exercise of focus and
calming before the feeling subsided.

He scanned the sky. Only
a helicopter passing high overhead with a baritone thump. Adrenaline waned, its
slow withdrawal a drain on his senses. Concern for Johan added a layer of
mental fatigue. If the hacker lost to the Comannda, if he were to be captured, things
would go bad so fast... again he tried to clear his thoughts and be calm.

“Warning.”

He spun at the voice
and almost sent the frail figure sprawling. Wrapped in a black kimono robe, an
old man with round eyes and a gaunt face stood staring at him with a look of
perpetual anticipation.

For a moment it felt
as if he’d fallen into a dream.

“Target is booby
trapped.” The voice was as frail as the man’s body. “Get up there, overhead.
Wait for the big flash before snatching the package.”

Done with the message,
the old man walked away. His body dissolved in the shadows while his pale head
floated until it, too, disappeared. The encounter felt like a visit from the
dead.

He donned the helmet
and worked the straps. A flash? What kind of flash? And why should he wait up
in the sky, exposed to the AG craft? It didn’t make sense.

He floated a handful
of tiny rocks from the roof into the air and dropped them – the grid was tight,
responsive to intention. He leapt over the edge and rocketed skyward. The surge
felt good, the propulsion intense. Properly miniaturized in the sky, he
followed the GPS northwest and scanned constantly. Distant aircraft dotted the
night. Nothing black and no holes in the clouds. He stirred the grid, hardening
it against any surprises.

The GPS signaled
arrival at the final checkpoint. Directly below was the clinic, lost somewhere
in the field of lights – lights that included emergency vehicles. It was a
medical facility but why so many? He spotted more flashing lights from units
heading towards the area. It might be a ruse to help cover the grab. He’d have
to wait for the big flash, whatever that was.

Seconds drew into
minutes that felt like hours. Sitting in the sky with his feet dangling over
the city below made him feel exactly like a yellow duck in a shooting gallery. The
conclusion came of its own accord: he couldn’t wait, couldn’t just
sit
there. He thought of making a quick
dip to find somewhere safe to watch. The yellow duck feeling suddenly turned to
one of someone staring at him, as if drawing a bead. Panic struck. He spun full
circle trying to spot the threat. Just the high altitude breeze and him – and
perhaps an invisible observer. He forced his attention downward, afraid of
missing the signal for him to act.

“Fuck this,” he
muttered inside the helmet. “Next time, I do the planning.”

• • •

AGT-3 slipped into
position in the stratus and drifted just beneath the clouds. Its pilot keyed
his radio. “Target located, five angels over the clinic. Please advise.”

An infrared signature
combined with the organic filter made the subject easy to spot. The pilot
centered the targeting daemon’s lines on the glowing red dash two kilometers
distant: a man, floating unaided two miles up in the air. The briefing didn’t
do justice to actually seeing the phenomenon.

The response came.
“Lock it up and prepare to follow. Two and Five will join you shortly.
Standby.”

“Lock established.
Hard targets approaching from the northwest, eight clicks out. Looks like Hueys
hustling.”

“We see them. Keep
yourself faded and await orders.”

“Copy that.” He
fiddled with the view of the clinic below, not wanting to miss the pyrotechnics
should they let them off. Based on the report and what he saw right now, the
guy could probably counteract the explosive effects. It would come down to
agility, speed, and tactics.

He massaged the
rubbery skin of the control stick, both excited and nervous at the prospect of
the chase.