Daniel Suarez - Influx

“Your body was designed. If you want to have children, the BTC should choose the genetic material from which your offspring are made. You must see the ethical requirement for this. Anything less is theft, Alexa.”

She could barely hear him as the mental fog closed around her.

He came close and patted her hand. “You’ve already achieved what would thrill anyone else. You hold one of the top positions in this organization—a benefit we bestowed on you. As a rational, reasonable individual, you must see that it’s the Bureau that will decide whether you have children.”

Alexa felt herself coming slowly back to her senses, her heart pounding. She barely had any recollection of what Hedrick had just said to her.

“Are we clear on this?”

Alexa nodded absently.

“Good.” He studied her. “You can go.”

Alexa approached the twin doors. They opened automatically and closed behind her just as quickly. She moved past Hedrick’s secretary and guards in apparent calm. As she rounded the corner, she saw Mr. Morrison leaning against the corridor wall.

“I see the director respects your valuable contributions.”

“Go away, Morrison.”

“Where’s our esprit de corps?” He fell in alongside her.

“What do you want?”

“You may think you’re better than me, but at least I earned my place here. I’d say I was here before you were even born—except you were never born, were you? Maybe that’s why you lack even the ambition to fuck Hedrick out of simple gratitude.”

She moved so fast even Morrison couldn’t react before she punched him hard across the face—sending all two hundred and fifty pounds of him hurtling down the hall.

Morrison rolled back onto his feet and shook his head clear. “I see that touched a nerve.”

She stared him from several yards away. “Don’t make the same mistake twice.”

He nodded, still rubbing his jaw. “I’ll make damn sure I don’t.”

Despite every effort not tobe impressed on his journey—Jon Grady was impressed. He’d been sitting in a luxurious leather seat for nearly a half hour before he discovered the hypersonic transport was already under way. It was that quiet. The pilots had the cabin window shields deployed—whether to conceal from him their route or to protect the aircraft he couldn’t tell.

When Grady heard the scramjet kick in, the shield disappeared, revealing a wide window by his elbow that he didn’t think could be made of glass. Below the sun was rising at the far edge of the world.

It was the most miraculous sight he’d ever seen. His mind caught fire as the universal laws paraded before him. He felt inebriated with joy.

Grady guessed they were at least a hundred fifty thousand feet up. Maybe higher. It didn’t feel like they were moving, though he could see the lights of metropolitan sprawl gliding by far below. They must have been doing three or four thousand miles an hour. Maybe more?

Down there was the entirety of the human race. His eyes followed the curvature of the horizon. Unlike with a photograph, the harder he looked, the more there was to see. He hadn’t expected this—that the most magical moment of his life would be given to him by his enemies. Grady couldn’t remove the grin from his face.

After a while he tried to orient himself to the globe—deduce where they were. But “up” didn’t appear to be north. He couldn’t see a recognizable polar ice cap—they weren’t that high. The modified gravity field disoriented him further. It was nearly impossible to tell what he was looking at in the darkness below.

The gravity field was a stable one Earth g . But then again, that might be his technology erasing all sensation of falling. Most people didn’t know that astronauts on the space station were experiencing almost a full g of Earth gravity; it was the fact that they were falling around the Earth that gave the sensation of weightlessness. In fact, it was gravity that was causing their orbital fall—and so the zero gravity sensation was actually being caused by gravity.

Not on this incredible machine. Everything was stable and normal here—like he was sitting in some millionaire’s home theater.

Grady turned to face the uniformed BTC officers seated across from him—young Morrisons both. “I didn’t feel any acceleration—not even when the scramjet kicked in.”

Neither of them answered.

“It’s my gravity technology, isn’t it? You’re canceling out the force of acceleration in the passenger compartment?” He beamed at them. “Amazing.”

He looked again out the window. Too bad this was an evil conspiracy. Otherwise this would really be fun.

“Are we in the mesosphere? We are, aren’t we? You could probably make use of the gravity fluctuations in the mesosphere for additional propulsion. Maybe even stabilization. Is that what you’re doing?”

The Morrison clones just stared back at him.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

The pilot’s cockpit wasn’t visible from this cabin—in fact, there wasn’t even a door leading to it from where he was. The craft had only been traveling for an hour or so when the glass faded into an opaque surface. Materials science again? It looked like the glass itself had changed from clear to opaque. What innovator was doing time in Hibernity for that breakthrough?

He turned again to his guards, but they stared back at him like statues. No point in asking.

Frustrated that the window shield had come down again, Grady tried to get his head back in the game. It was distracting. It really was. They were rolling out all the stops. Beyond first class. This was infinity class. A private hypersonic jet with a front-row seat to the cosmos. His gravity technology had made it possible. God, he wanted to be working on this.

But there was no way. He remembered all too clearly the cruelty of his captors. The life they had stolen from him and from others. And only a vague sense of the lost memories he’d never get back.

His fellow Resistors had put their faith in him. He would not fail them.

Grady looked around at the burled walnut millwork and the fine leather all around him. This, too, was a gilded cage. He raised his flute of champagne to his guards. “To human ingenuity.”

They stared like Sphinxes.

The landing a half hour or so later was completely silent and without the sensation of acceleration or deceleration. It was as though they were in a hotel courtesy suite, not an aircraft. Before long a pleasant tone sounded, and his guards removed their seat belts. Not that anyone had needed them.

A black door slid silently upward, then aside, and the guards ushered Grady into a brightly lit hangar. He stood for a moment at the top of the metal stairs. A midnight-blue Cadillac Escalade with diplomatic license plates stood idling below. Dozens of guards patrolled the hangar perimeter, dressed in plain clothes, with long guns slung at their chests. It looked like regular twenty-first-century technology. Grady knew the BTC had outgrown firearms decades ago. These seemed oddly out of place given everything he now knew.

He stepped down the stairway and felt balmy summer air wash over him. The fragrance of mown grass brought an onslaught of memories—hazy and indistinct though they were. He felt so alive. He spotted painted numbers on the hangar door. They glowed in magenta and violet. He felt their invisible geometry. His synesthesia, he knew, but it felt good to be surprised by numbers again.

He turned to a guard. “Where are we?”

“Keep walking.”

Grady glanced back at the cobalt-blue hypersonic aircraft looming over him. Its lines were slanted in antiradar angles, giving it the look of an Aztec sacrificial knife. It was a remarkable machine. Silent. Invisible. Fast. He guessed they’d just traversed half the world in under two hours.