Patrick Lee - The Breach

Even keeping the survivors alive upstairs. Including Chase. Chase, whose importance the Whisper had emphasized above all others. Pilgrim had only vaguely wondered why. Maybe the guy would turn out to be an exceptionally useful subordinate for him, given time enough, and pressure. Who knew? Who cared? If the Whisper wanted him here, that was enough.

Below, Jackley was using the carbide bit as more of a blade than a drill, cutting a manhole-sized circle into the foot-thick blast door. Now he hooted excitedly, because he'd come back around to where he'd started. The drill bit met the beginning of its own circular track, and the excised plug of steel dropped an inch, settling on the bottom of the widened opening with a heavy thud.

"Magnet," Jackley said.

The man behind him lifted the battery-powered workhorse magnet from the platform and handed it to him. Jackley held the magnet's base against the steel plug, and switched it on. With a bass hum, it drew itself against the metal hard enough to pull Jackley off balance. Now each man on the platform took hold of the magnet's broad handle and leaned back, drawing on it.

"Careful now," Jackley said. "Closer she gets, the softer we pull."

The plug slid outward, two inches, then four, then six. At eight inches it began to tilt, and Jackley stopped the others with a gesture.

"Pull us away," he said.

The others gripped the beams on the shaft wall and pulled the hanging platform back from the blast door, allowing the plug plenty of room to fall without landing on the platform itself. Jackley leaned forward carefully, his stomach braced against the platform's safety rail, and gave the magnet one last tug.

The plug tipped out of the opening and tumbled away into the pitch blackness below. Silence as it plummeted nine stories. Then, impact. Like a battleship's deck gun going off. Pilgrim felt the reverb in his bones. He loved it. Loved everything about this moment. Jackley and the others looked up at him, grinning like idiot kids. It made him laugh.

Only one thing left. Jackley just had to wriggle his body through the hole in the blast door and hit the override, ten feet inside the lab. Then the doors would open wide. The men let go of the shaft wall, and the platform swung to the center again. Jackley grabbed hold of the opening, steadied his footing, and shoved his head and upper body through. In a few seconds he was halfway in, his legs kicking comically in space as the men laughed and pushed on his feet to help him.

Then came a scream from overhead, somewhere in the inky darkness of the shaft, high above. Not a human scream. A metal scream. Some mechanism protesting with a squeal of friction. And then surrendering. Silence.

The men stopped laughing, and looked up.

Jackley stopped kicking. "Fuck was that?" he said, his voice muffled through the opening, which was mostly filled with his ass now.

For another second, nothing happened. Then Pilgrim felt a breeze. Gentle as a sigh, it blew straight down the elevator shaft and through the open doorway around him. The men down on the platform reacted to it as well; it tousled their hair about in little whipping motions.

Then one of them flinched hard, and screamed like a ten-year-old girl. A second later the world in front of Pilgrim's face filled with blurring metal, there and gone in the same half second, and the support lines for the maintenance rig snapped with guitar-string twangs, just audible over the sickening crash from right below. Pilgrim staggered back from the open doors, and two seconds later, down at the bottom of the shaft, came an impact that dwarfed that of the steel plug a minute earlier.

The echoes took forever to fade. When they did, Pilgrim heard against the silence a high, keening cry. He returned to the open doors and gazed down on the blank darkness where, seconds before, the rig had hung. Now there was only empty space. It took him a moment longer to process what else he was staring at, and then he understood where the cry was coming from.

Jackley. Guillotined neatly through, where the elevator had scraped past the opening in the blast doors. Sliced like a cross-section in an anatomy textbook, right through his ass, blood pumping from his severed body like water from a compressed sponge. He was still alive. His upper half still hung there inside the lab, out of Pilgrim's sight. But not out of his hearing. The crying went on and on, high-pitched and incoherent.

This could not be part of the fucking plan. How the hell had the Whisper let it happen?

Pilgrim turned. His eyes went to the hinged steel box five feet away, blue light flaring from the seam.

But he didn't move toward it. His eyes locked onto something else, which stopped him in his tracks.

A.45. Hanging in thin air. Three feet away. Aimed at his face.

The hallway fell silent. Even Jackley's cries had stopped. The gun hovered, granite steady.

"But I did everything it told me to do," Pilgrim said at last, hearing a tremor in his speech. "Right to the end."

"And that's where you are," a man's voice said.

Pilgrim saw the gun's muzzle flash, but didn't live long enough to hear the shot.

He could let it be over now.

Pilgrim was dead. The Whisper was in its box. He could wait for Paige and the others to come down. They were sprinting down through the stairwell right now, from thirty stories above. They'd be here in a couple minutes.

He could let it end just like this.

Only he couldn't.

Because the Whisper had been out there all these years, seeding the world with vines that all converged on this moment. Something very big was about to happen, whether or not he left the Whisper in its box. He could feel it. All that this thing had ever done, in its twenty years on Earth, had been to place Travis in this corridor, at this moment, alone.

For a reason.

Time to find out what it was.

He crouched, set the gun aside, unlatched the steel box and opened it. Blue light blazed. He pulled off the top of the transparency suit and dropped it against the wall, and with his bare hand, he lifted the Whisper from the box.

There was no trance effect this time. No erotic intensity pushing his logic and willpower aside. Just Emily Price's voice, steady and even.

"Hello, Travis."

"Hello," he said.

"All appearances to the contrary, I really have no tendency toward screwing around. Let's get right to it, shall we?"

"Let's," Travis said.

"There's something very important coming out of the Breach, just over three minutes from now. Entity 0697. It's critical that you be there to receive it. You alone."

"What is Entity 0697?"

"You'll see. It's time to make your way down now, Travis. While you do that, I'll tell you as much as I'm sanctioned to tell you."

Travis looked at the stairwell door, through which Paige and the others would arrive in the next minute or so. Then he went past it, to the elevator shaft, and stepped onto the inset ladder inside. Only the elevator shaft went all the way to B51.

He descended, unhindered by the Whisper in his hand; he freed two fingers from around it to grip the rungs. The blue light settled into the rhythm of his pulse, flaring over and over on the dull walls of the shaft.

"I'll tell you the story of your life," the Whisper said, "the way it would've gone if I hadn't come along and started changing things. Fifteen years in prison. You get out. You do not move to Alaska. You join your brother's software business in Minneapolis. He shows you the ropes. You learn very quickly. Programming, it turns out, is only another species of detective work, at which you're a natural. It's all about cause-and-effect logic, if/then reasoning, shot through a prism of creativity. Your insight greatly enhances the development of your brother's fledgling artificial intelligence system, Whitebird. Over the years it progresses through iterative leaps, the major upgrades corresponding to the belt-color rankings of martial arts, in reference to the old eight-bit Karate games it was once tested on. First iteration, Whitebird. Second iteration, Yellowbird. Third, Greenbird. By April of 2014 your brother has put the project entirely under your control. You create Bluebird, which Sony purchases for two hundred forty million dollars. It becomes a standard bearer for video-game intelligence. Tangent takes notice of you. In October of that same year they recruit you to live at Border Town and design specialized software and hardware for them, based on the Bluebird architecture. You rise to prominence within Tangent in short order. At some point after that-here I'm limited in what exactly I can tell you-things begin to go badly."