Daniel Suarez - Influx

“Careful.”

She looked up to see Jon Grady standing off to the side, a small rucksack on his back.

“Yeah, thanks for the warning.”

He pulled the door closed, then rammed a dead bolt home with a loud click-clack . “Follow me. We need to keep moving.”

Davis stayed on his heels down steps worn from the passage of many feet and years. At the bottom was a winding corridor lined with more steam and water pipes and electrical conduits, and also cluttered with moving dollies, sawhorses, cardboard boxes for computer equipment and fiberglass insulation, piles of lumber, tarpaulins, electrical cabling—there was stuff everywhere. Twin grooves in the center of the stone floor led off down the corridor, which was lit by bare fluorescent fixtures at intervals.

“What is this place?”

“Steam tunnels. Old. Really old. Those slots in the floor were for coal carts.”

Davis stayed close to Grady. He seemed to know where he was going, and as they rounded a corner, she couldn’t believe how far the next corridor stretched into the distance. “These connect the buildings.”

“Most of them, yeah.”

“How did you know about this?”

“To be honest, I can’t remember. My memory’s blank in spots. But I do seem to know.”

“Alcot. He’s why you came here. You spent time here—but you weren’t a student?”

He shook his head. “I’m not good with structure. I prefer to do things unofficially. But he helped me. Now I want to help him.”

“You’re saying Doctor Alcot is alive, too?”

“I’m hoping so.”

Two Morrison clones in hockey jerseys and jeans raced through the basement corridors, delta-wave guns at the ready, as the fire alarms wailed. They rounded a corner to see a dozen other Morrisons like themselves, but in various outfits and hairstyles—beards, crew cuts, and ponytails—converging on the same place, in front of the huge steel door.

The fire alarms finally stopped.

They all lowered their weapons as one of them, wearing ratty army surplus pants and a T-shirt, kicked the massive steel door in their path. “Fuck!”

“The rest of the building’s clear.”

The angry Morrison was still kicking the door. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Eta, we shouldn’t be bunching up like this. The old man would have our asses if he knew how many of us were gathered in public.”

“Fuck off, Rho. They went through this goddamned door.”

Rho stowed his weapon and brought up a hologram. “It’s not even on the tactical plan.”

“Goddamned right it’s not. TOC fucked up again.”

Rho spoke over his q-link. “TOC, we’ve got a steel door blocking pursuit of the target subjects. This door is not on the tactical plan.”

“Copy that, Rho-Sigma. Will advise, please stand by.”

“Advise, my ass. I’m gonna delete the AI asshole that did this to us, I swear to God.”

“We’ve gotta bring this door down.”

Eta turned on him. “Yeah? Tech level four, nonlethal, and you’re gonna bring down a steel gate?” He kicked the door again for good measure. It was like kicking the side of a locomotive.

A voice came over their radios. “TOC to Team Charlie, Team Echo. Redeploy to indicated coordinates.”

Eta ignored the call as the others started to move. Instead, he was rummaging through his cargo pockets.

Rho called back to him. “Eta!”

“I’ll be damned if I’m going back to Dad empty-handed.” He produced a small black cube wrapped in a translucent material.

The others had stopped and were looking on, intrigued.

Rho approached. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission…”

“Where the hell did you get that?”

“Never mind where I got it.”

TOC’s voice came over the radio again. “TOC to Team Charlie—”

Eta silenced his q-link..

“You are way off reservation, kemosabe.”

“Stop being such a pussy.” He rubbed the surface of the steel door clean of debris and then pressed the small black cube onto it. The device stuck in place. “We are getting through this door, and we are getting Grady.”

“That’s illicit nanotech. We’re not authorized to—”

“Terminal kinematic mechanosynthesis. I promise it won’t destroy the world.” He shoved Rho back and stared him down. “This mission is not failing. Do you read me?”

The others remained silent.

Eta raised a mass spectrometer wand, scanning the walls with a broad green laser beam.

“Eta—”

“Shut it!”

A hologram appeared above his wrist, listing possible manufacturing options given nearby materials. He looked up from the display and smiled. “Chain golem it is…”

He tapped several menus, and the black cube suddenly cast a blinding light as it sank into the steel door—eating through it like fire through paper with a deafening sizzling sound. As it did so, white-hot light wavered menacingly. Ribbons of black material started streaming down from the edges of the expanding burn site. These ribbons then curled back up and started knitting themselves into a series of chain links. Unlike in a regular chain, these seemed not to be looped together. Instead, they regrouped and re-formed magnetically or by some other method not clearly understood by anyone present. The links kept piling up, then coming together to form still larger groups of links that began to move collectively with purpose.

Already most of the steel door was consumed, and the process began to eat into the hinges and frame. Flakes of rust and dirt had fallen free from the reaction, gathering on the floor in a pile.

But by then the kinematic automaton stood, its metal feet clattering on the concrete floor, like a barrel full of chain mail.

Eta pointed through the opening and looked at the chain golem’s face of seething chain links. “Double time. Human target. Hunt acoustically…”

Looking at the extent of the tunnel ahead and behind, Davis thought out loud. “New York division would have known to watch these tunnels.”

He cast a look back at her. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just… I’m surprised they don’t have these tunnels guarded.”

“It’s not the FBI. It’s the BTC. They might have better technology, but they don’t always seem to know how to use it.”

“Where are we heading?”

“Subbasement of Pupin Hall—the physics building. That much I do remember.”

“Did you travel down here a lot?”

“It got me into buildings. I think I lived in Pupin Hall’s basement. There was a way into the tunnel system from there.”

They were now coming out into a much more modern utility corridor lined with color-coded foot-wide steam pipes with labels like “Low Press Steam” and “Chilled Water Sup” and arrows showing the direction of flow. Above and below these were orderly bundles of power and data conduits curving around a bend a hundred or more feet ahead.

“Mr. Grady, you need to tell me what’s really going on.”

“I know I sound crazy, but everything I told you in Chicago was true. The BTC exists, and they’re very dangerous.”

“But why would they choose you? No offense, but you don’t exactly have a record of scientific achievement.”

He looked back at her. “They made sure of that. But they knew what I was working on. They have AIs that try to find people who fit a pattern—disruptive innovators. People like me.”

Davis pondered Cotton’s list of undistinguished victims at unknown companies.

“The BTC was created back in the ’60s, and they’ve been hoarding major technological advances for decades. If you knew just how advanced human technology really is, Agent Davis… well, you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”