Jeremy Robinson - Blackout

Pradesh.

The hacker had broken free from Chesler’s grip and dashed past King toward the dark shape. He spread his arms wide as he ran toward it, shouting: “I’m ready!”

As soon as he touched the thing, Pradesh stopped moving. King didn’t notice any other distinctive physical changes, but something was different. The hacker’s sudden silence and lack of movement was profoundly unnatural.

“Guess that ‘mind of God’ stuff didn’t work out for you,” King muttered. “So much for infinity and beyond.”

Suddenly, Pradesh disappeared. It was as if he were nothing more than a human shaped balloon popped by a needle; one instant he was there, and then nothing. King was still trying to digest this when he realized something had changed. The dark shape was moving. Toward him.

Tentacles snaked out along the deck, pulling the thing along with a smoothness that concealed just how fast it was moving. King barely had time to pull back from the corner before the writhing tendrils reached that spot.

He spun and aimed for the gangplank and the waiting Zodiac, heaving Brown ahead of him. A glance over his shoulder showed the thing creeping relentlessly onward, following him-or so it appeared-like a bloodhound. Then he saw Chesler, riveted in place and staring at the dark mass-not literally turned to stone, but petrified nonetheless. King almost called out to the Alpha Dog contractor, but he knew it was already too late.

He pitched Brown into the Zodiac and followed, shoving the rubber boat away from its mooring as he heaved himself over the inflatable gunwale. The black shape slid past Chesler, missing him by mere inches, and oozed onto the gangplank, just as King fired up the outboard.

The water around the riverboat was crowded with passengers who had sought escape from the dark shape by leaping overboard. Many of them were struggling to stay afloat, the cold water and their sodden clothes conspiring to sap their strength. Several heads turned in King’s direction in the instant that the outboard roared to life; frantic hands grasped the sides of the rubber boat. King felt a pang of guilt as he opened the throttle and pushed through their midst.

The shadow thing was right behind him, pulling itself across the surface of the Seine as if the water were no different from the solid deck of the riverboat. Its tentacle-like protrusions barely left a ripple as it reached out again and again to draw itself forward. The screws of the Zodiac’s motor were gradually propelling the craft faster than the shape appeared capable of moving, but if King stopped to help even a single beleaguered swimmer, the thing would catch him. Moreover, he knew that he wouldn’t be doing anyone a favor by performing a rescue; the creature, whatever it was, was coming after him, and King had a pretty good idea why.

The swimmers he’d already passed thrashed desperately to get out of the thing’s path, and for the most part, none felt its deadly touch. A few unlucky souls however lost the race and vanished in an instant as the tendrils brushed them. Then King saw something that all but confirmed his hypothesis.

A tendril snaked out to the shape’s left and plucked a man from the water. King only caught a glimpse of the man’s horrified face as he was pulled back, still very much alive, into the dark mass, but he nonetheless recognized the victim as one of the ten who had received a quantum phone from Brown earlier in the evening.

He recalled Pradesh’s words. I gave it a brain. The hacker had been only half-right about that. His quantum computer had awakened the black hole, or whatever it was, and evidently imparted some rudimentary degree of awareness to it, but it didn’t literally have its brain — the quantum computer network-and correcting that condition was its only priority. It was hunting down the quantum phone devices, collecting them together and integrating them physically into its being.

King knew less about quantum physics than he did about black holes, but he knew that one of the most difficult concepts for the novice physicist to grasp was the idea of quantum colocation. Experiments had proven that subatomic particles could literally be in two places at the same time. Pradesh’s quantum computer seemed to take advantage of this property; the hacker had said the device didn’t have a physical location, but what he had really meant was that it existed in ten different locations simultaneously; the ten quantum phones. The dark shape was evidently entangled with the quantum computer, linked to and benefiting from the artificial intelligence subroutine, but it needed more. It needed to be in physical contact with the computer. That was the sole reason it had come to the riverboat, where all ten recipients of the devices were clustered together like fish in a barrel. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe that with each assimilation, its intelligence multiplied.

How many has it already taken? Am I the last?

The quantum phone in his pocket suddenly felt very heavy. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to hurl it away or crush it out of existence, but what would that accomplish? At best, he would throw it off his scent and damage a tenth of the thing’s “brain” but there was no guarantee of even that. No, until he understood the threat better, hanging onto the device was imperative. Keeping the phone was probably his best chance at figuring out how to beat the dark shape, and as long as he kept it in his possession, he knew where the thing would go next. He’d just have to make sure he kept it at a safe distance.

Safe, he thought disparagingly. This thing can walk on water. Nowhere is safe.

With the outboard throttle wide open, the riverboat and its surrounding crowd of fleeing passengers receded into the distance. King lost sight of the dark mass, but his last glimpse of it had shown it moving only about half as fast as the Zodiac. That at least was something in his favor.

A faint orange glow radiated up from the darkened cityscape-fires resulting from the earthquake, probably fed by ruptured gas lines-but it did little to illuminate the immediate area. King eased off the throttle, searching for some hint of the riverbank. He was uncertain about leaving the river. On solid ground, moving through streets that were probably choked with debris and filled with frightened survivors, his lead on the monster would quickly evaporate. But he couldn’t stay in the Zodiac forever.

He needed to make contact with Deep Blue and Aleman. The latter’s technical expertise would be invaluable in figuring out how the quantum computer worked and how to shut it down. He checked his Chess Team phone again; still no signal. The citywide power outage would have knocked out the local cell phone network, but his phone was satellite capable, designed to provide instant communication almost anywhere in the world. Solar flares and other electromagnetic phenomena could disrupt the signal. Was something like that at work here? Or had the quantum device somehow taken control of Chess Team’s network?

Brown might be able to tell him, but King doubted the sullen gambler would willingly offer him any assistance.

A subtle change in the texture of the surrounding darkness alerted King to the nearness of the riverbank and he hastily reversed the screws just as the nose of the Zodiac crunched into a sloping concrete abutment, sliding several feet up its angled face before coming to rest. The sudden stop pitched King forward, but he quickly regained his equilibrium and cautiously extended a foot out into the darkness. He felt solid ground beneath the sole of his shoe.

He grasped Brown’s biceps and hauled the gambler to his feet. “Let’s go.”

Though he was no match for King in terms of physical strength, Brown tried to pull free. “I’m not going anywhere with you. And I don’t think you’re going to sucker punch me again and drag my ass all over Paris. Not with that thing chasing you.”