James Knapp - Element Zero

“What about the radiation?” someone asked.

“The explosion created a radioactive cloud of steam and smoke that right now is moving along the shoreline at a distance of ten miles,” Mr. Raphael said. “That could change.”

“The next launch won’t be a warning,” Osterhagen said. “What is the situation at Alto Do Mundo?”

“The detonation of a Leichenesser charge cleared a hole,” someone said. “But he’s streamed in more of them. I’d say we put a weak link in the chain, but it’s reforming.”

Osterhagen looked offscreen for a second, then nodded and cut back in.

“We just got a report that the revivors in the street are being ordered away from the CMC Tower,” he said.

“Why?” Raphael asked. “Moved to where?”

“Outside a five block perimeter around the tower,” Osterhagen said. “We have to assume it’s to protect them, and that it’s a precursor to some kind of strike. Start getting your people out of there.”

“How? We’re surrounded from the ground and the air—”

“Any way you can, Robin!”

“What about the virus?” Ai asked. “Has it been deployed?”

“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “That’s how this information was obtained. Ott was right about Flax. We seeded her revivor matrix and transitioned her onto their network. Fawkes cut her off, but not in time. She received the alert along with the rest to clear the CMC Tower.”

“How long before the virus will take effect?” she asked.

“It should have worked by now,” he said. “It might be taking longer than expected to propagate, but we have to consider the possibility that it failed.”

For the first time that day, I saw something like confusion appear on Ai’s face before it went back to its drugged-out expression.

“Failed how?” she asked. “The tests were successful.”

“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “Assuming the Huma version of Fawkes’s revivors matches the ones we had in custody, then it should have worked. But as of this morning, that version changed. It could have invalidated the virus partially, or even completely.”

“But the virus affects them,” she said. “It reaches them, I’ve seen it.”

I closed my eyes and tried to cut through the anxiousness and pressure that emanated from every consciousness in the room, even those piped through remotely. I took a deep breath and focused on Ai.

She was the elephant in the room; her consciousness hung over her tiny body like a small, broken planet whose pieces were carefully held together by gravity. Tentacles of light stretched out from the fragments and connected to the men and women at the table. More tentacles wove through the room to touch Penny and even me. They floated through the walls, ceiling, and floor, across the city, I figured, to reach Raphael, Osterhagen, and the rest. She was amazingly calm in the face of what was going on, her thoughts ticking away beneath the colors of her mind like the tiny pieces of an incredibly complicated clockwork machine. She was tied into the future model that was displayed on the wall, tuned to the smallest change, and looking for some clue, any clue that might tell her what to do as time ran out.

She didn’t know, though, and that scared me. Underneath it all, she was confused. Things weren’t happening like she expected anymore. With all of her knowledge, she wasn’t sure what to do.

Penny was calm, but was ready to physically act. She spent a lot of time like that, and she almost never relaxed, even when she was drunk, but I’d never felt her so alert before. Part of her mind was turned toward me and I sensed a bond there, a protectiveness I’d never quite noticed before. I’d always known she would kill for me, but somehow I’d never seen the devotion that drove it until that moment.

I reached out, following the connections Ai kept with the others at their remote locations, and found Osterhagen and Raphael. Raphael was worried. He was worried for himself and us, but mostly he was worried for the people on the ground; he was afraid for them, and not just our people but the innocent bystanders about to be caught in Fawkes’s attack. Osterhagen was angry and frustrated. He was confident he could defeat Fawkes—in fact, he was certain of it—but the nukes had tied his hands, and, yes …there …buried away deep inside, he was scared too.

The people in the room continued to talk in restrained, clipped tones, and as I took the pulse of their thoughts as a whole, I realized that fear had begun to creep into the entire network. It was fear of the unknown. It was the fear that despite all the manipulation and information tracking and careful planning, they were delving into an unknown where they couldn’t see clearly. That scared the hell out of them, all of them.

Even Ai.

They don’t know what to do, I thought, and even though I felt like that should make me scared too, it didn’t. I thought maybe I knew what they didn’t.

There was someone I needed to communicate with. The person who had stood next to me in my vision and the only one in the room I knew would survive along with me if we failed.

“ …the lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it …”

Hans Vaggot was isolated, and I could tell that although Ai was watching him, she wouldn’t touch him. He was being left alone to retake the satellite, and as soon as I entered his mind, I knew he was getting close. There was a relief there, like a cool undercurrent beneath the hot colors of his mind. He’d recently made some kind of breakthrough and was closing in. I couldn’t tell how long it would be, but although he was still focused like a laser, I could sense his hope—he knew he would succeed; he was only worried about the timing. If he knew it and I knew it, then at least Ai and Osterhagen knew it too. Despite their misgivings, they had begun to think that in spite of everything, they still might stop the event from happening.

Except they were wrong.

Mr. Vaggot, I whispered into the back of his mind. I felt the flow of his thoughts hiccup, and I knew he’d sensed me. In a second, Ai would sense me too, and when she did she’d shut me out again. I only had a short time to communicate with him, to plant, maybe, an idea in his mind. It was an idea that I didn’t totally understand myself yet, but somehow I knew it was the answer. When I thought back to what I’d learned about Noelle, who came before me and before Penny, it suddenly seemed clear. She’d known. She’d known all along; she just couldn’t handle it.

I took a long swallow off the bottle in my hand and wormed my way further into his mind.

When you retake the satellite, don’t shut down the launch, I told him. I felt anxiousness in him from somewhere deep inside as the command took root. Don’t shut it down. Wait for my signal….

I felt Ai then, and my eyes snapped open as the connection was broken. When I looked over at her, her large eyes had narrowed and there was a hard glint in them.

“I told you to leave him,” she said in a low voice. “I—”

She stopped short and perked up, as if she’d heard something. The anger went out of her eyes and I felt a spike of alarm from her, licking out of her consciousness like a solar flare.

“Robin, wait,” she said.

“Hold on,” Mr. Raphael said. He checked something offscreen.

In all the activity, no one else saw Ai sit up straight suddenly. Her eyes looked startled as they opened wide and stared into space. The others around the table jerked in their trances, sitting up straight along with her.

“Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, and the voices quieted.

“Yes, Motoko?”

“Abandon the CMC Tower immediately.”