A Child Of Our Time (The Veil Book 2) (9 page)

The police and soldiers are at the hatch, Alice poised to throw the pilot out. A brief struggle and all tumble out onto the grass, Alice rolling across the ground and quickly righting herself.

Two more National Guard VTOLs appear overhead. The police and soldiers are up on their feet and backing away from Alice.

“Run child!! Run to Lucius!”

One of the VTOLs opens fire, its rounds tearing through Alice’s mechanical body. A single round rips through her cranium, her body goes limp and she collapses.

Lucy looks on, mortified, the soldiers’ attention returning to the VTOL. They make for the hatch. Lucy grabs the controls and applies full thrust, the downdraft knocking the soldiers off their feet as the VTOL lifts away. The other two VTOLs quickly maneuver to hem Lucy in, but she skillfully dodges them to leave the two craft in disarray as she exits the park and heads into the forest of buildings. The two VTOLs coordinate themselves and give chase.

AMOK

Justice Garr has just managed to establish communication with the National Guard VTOLs pursuing Lucy, only to witness them taking down Alice.

“Commander Torrence! Hold your fire!”

Torrence vents his own anger at the actual trigger man—the pilot of the second VTOL.

“Goddammit Reese!”

An arrogant Reese is unrepentant.

“I had a clear shot and I took it.”

Landelle is beside herself with the events being played out, siding with Reese.

“It’s run amok. It must be destroyed before it’s too late.”

“This is Lucy we are talking about, Deborah.” Says Garr. “She is not just a machine. She is an individual. Her actions are human.”

“It is quite capable of imitating such behavior,” insists Landelle.

“What we have made, we have made in our own image.”

“I don’t believe that. It’s not enough. To be human is…is more than that.”

Avoiding Lucius, Garr looks worriedly at the others to gauge their opinion. She is met with stony faces. An agitated Landelle paces about, before turning on Garr.

“Alka, the host has control of a heavily armed gunship. We have no choice—” Landelle catches her slip of the tongue too late, a tight-lipped Garr staring daggers back at her. The silence lasts as long as it takes Lucius to process what he has heard.

“The
host?
”

Neither answer him nor dare look him in the eye.

“The
host!?
” persists Lucius. “You’re talking about Lucy, aren’t you.”

Boyce and Moule look to Garr with puzzled expressions, Garr remaining tight-lipped as Lucius props himself up, the strain showing.

“Alka! Answer me!”

The turmoil boiling up inside Garr begins to show. Landelle makes one last attempt at intervention, addressing her directly.

“Justice Garr, this has gotten completely out of hand—”

Garr blurts it out.

“Alice was a military experiment to see if a high-order MBI could control a quantum computer.”

Landelle slumps at the disclosure.

Lucius understands the words and their individual meanings, but not the context.

“What?”

Boyce and Moule are equally perplexed.

Garr resigns herself to the truth, come what may.

“The military want to use quantum computers for advanced warfare prediction.”

All take a moment to digest what Garr has just said. Boyce is the first to challenge it.

“They’ve had quantum computers for over a decade. Why would they want an MBI to control one?”

Garr feels the need to sit and does so. “Because for warfare prediction their operation becomes exponentially complex. Beyond normal human ability.”

Moule has her own line of thought.

“Superposition. This is about quantum superposition, isn’t it? An advanced quantum computer generating all possible outcomes of a military engagement. A vast array of potential solutions in the blink of an eye, with every nuance accounted for. You would just need to select the most favorable and you would be unbeatable.”

“But you’d have to observe all the possible outcomes at once,” counters Boyce. “To understand which the correct one is. To collapse the quantum wave function.”

“And Alice demonstrated that an MBI could so just that,” Garr says. “But the myriad of choices overwhelmed her. She became obsessed by quantum superposition and it drove her insane.”

Horror and realization creeps onto Lucius’s face.

“Ellis told the military he could build an MBI to cope, didn’t he. A more robust mind, using synaptic profiling.”

“And integrate a quantum computer directly into it,” admits Garr. “Then he died in that awful incident. We didn’t know which of then three he made the host. Now we do.”

“Pi to five trillion places,” says Lucius. He scrunches his eyes in anguish. “Ellis lied.”

Garr abruptly surfaces from a deepening mood. Landelle’s ears prick up.

“Lied about what?” Garr asks.

“About how he was able to create a mind to control a quantum computer,” Lucius says. “It wasn’t just the synaptic profiling, Alka. Lucy…Lucy’s…”

“What is it about Lucy that you are not telling us, Lucius?”

Lucius is wracked with indecision. “I can’t…I promised—”

“Lives are at stake, Lucius.” Garr says. “Hers most of all.”

“If I break the promise I risk losing her trust, Alka. We cannot afford for that to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know what she would do next—” Lucius is cut off by some other train of thought surfacing from his subconscious. “JoJo and Eleanor…dammit, of course. A mother and father figure.”

“Lucius, what are you talking about?”

Lying back in his bed, he muses his insight for all to hear.

“Quantum superposition. It would be so easy for her. Like selecting something in her favorite color, or a puzzle she likes, or toy she wants to play with. Child’s play.”

Garr’s brow furrows with a deepening concern.

“I don’t understand—what do you mean?”

“The purest form of reason. Innocent. Unencumbered by rationalization like you or I—or Alice. She would simply see straight through to the solution.”

Another, darker realization. Lucius confronts Garr with it.

“General Korin. He must have known.”

“Known
what?
”

* * *

The two National Guard VTOLs chase Lucy into the city’s maze of buildings, each snaking its own path between the skyscrapers as they hunt her down. Reese sneaks along an alternate route to head Lucy off. Just as he is about to block her, so she manages to dodge him. He tries another tack and again he is dodged—
But how? There’s no clear line of sight.

“It must be tracking us on the city network. I’m turning my global positioning off.”

Lucy has built her simulation from reference material overlaid with what real time data she is able to obtain—the VTOL’s cameras, media channels, traffic monitors, and anything else she can unlock. Consequently, bits of reality pop in and out of existence in her simulation as she traverses the city and this has served only to put her in a heightened state of anxiety. Nevertheless she is able to expertly elude her pursuers.

She has a map display up. One of two markers blinks out. Then the other. She looks out and about through the cabin windows for any sight of them. There is none. Then one pops into view as it passes a weather station atop a high rise. Immediate evasive action takes Lucy around the United Nations Building, a tight turn that slews her out over the East River. Reese is waiting. He opens fire, clipping Lucy’s VTOL. She dives toward the river, a hail of gunfire raking across the water.

Torrence rounds the UN to drop after her.

“Reese! Hold your goddamned fire! That’s an order! We need to get it away from the city first.”

It gives Lucy the chance she needs and she heads back into the city. Torrence is right on her tail, but he can hardly keep up, unable to match her skill.

“Jesus, look at that thing fly.”

Ahead is an impossible turn—it looks as if Lucy is going to be cornered.

“There’s no way out,” says Reese. “We have to take it down here.”

But Lucy as other ideas. In a single death-defying maneuver she rolls her VTOL such that its thrusters push directly against the side of the building, making the turn. Torrence is astonished, but still has a job to do.

“I see how she did it.”

He copies the maneuver, barely making around the turn. Reese follows, also only just making it. But now there is another complex juxtaposition of buildings. Lucy negotiates it with another trick, but Torrence slows up—
no way
. Reese zips past him to take the turn first, scraping the side of the building.

Torrence follows, but doesn’t make it, slamming side-on against the building, bouncing off, bits of VTOL and masonry falling away. His VTOL drops with only a degree of control, alarms sounding off the catastrophic damage. His main focus is on the vertical thrust—there’s just enough, the engines whining under the strain, the ground rushing up.
Brace-Brace-Brace.
He hits, the underside of the fuselage crushing in, anti-fire foam flooding out of the engine intakes.

He is alive, if not more than a little shaken.

* * *

A strained Lucius grapples with the Tap, his nurse besieged by uncertainty. In the background are the ghostly projections of the others in the Cantor Satori tower.

“James, I need a direct connection with Lucy’s MBI unit.”

Boyce’s avatar turns from his console to respond.

“The only way in his her diagnostic stream. And that’s locked.”

“It will open for me.”

The real Boyce taps away at his console, all gathered about him. A final tap and he is ready for the inevitable response. But not this time.

“Good Lord. We’re in.”

This has everyone’s immediate attention, as one by one they realize the significance of what they are about to see, each turning to look at the projection system.

The nurse is beside herself with worry, but Lucius is adamant.

“Whatever happens do not unplug this. A life depends upon it.” He grabs her arm to assert his final request. “Keep me going.”

Moule is distraught at his intent. “Lucius! No! It’s too much strain.” A desperately solemn Garr stops her with a gentle touch of her hand.

The projection of Lucius clears, the system now resolving a new view.

A VTOL flight deck.

There, for all to plainly see, is a terrified little girl at the controls. It takes a moment for it to sink in. But only a moment.

Landelle’s hand goes to her mouth to cover a silent gasp. Boyce and Moule are speechless, leaving Garr to struggle with her own sense of horror.

“Lucius…she’s just child.”

“She is a child and she is not a child,” says Lucius over the speakers. “But it is a child that we have put in harm’s way, Alka. Ellis created her that way to get the stable mind he needed. A malleable mind.”

“Oh, my God,” Garr croaks. “What have we done?”

Emotion overwhelms Landelle, the thought of what might have been, her eyes glistening with the beginnings of guilty tears.

“And when she is a child she talks like a child, thinks like a child, reasons like a child,” Lucius muses to himself. “And when she is not a child, she puts childish ways behind her.”

He activates the Tap, his body tensing, the apartment digitally disintegrating as he is rushed into Lucy’s world.

* * *

Lucius arrives with a lurch toward the VTOL’s open hatch, grabbing at its handholds just in time, the wind from the craft’s passage buffeting him. Framed by the hatch, the cityscape rolls and pitches before him, the engines whining up and down with each manoeuver. For a moment Lucius cannot help marveling at the super-real simulation he is in, but he has a most important task to perform. Composing himself, he looks forward. Up front he can see a frightened Lucy at the controls. Leaning out of the hatch he can see Reese’s VTOL in pursuit—but just then, it pulls back.
Alka
. Lucius withdraws into the cabin and, one handhold at a time, makes his way toward the flight deck.

Although the Tap has given him strength and mobility, in the real world it reaps its toll. The nurse frets at the sight of him, the immense strain stiffening his body rigid, the medical monitors beeping furiously. She gives him an injection to help.

As he reaches the flight deck the real world starts to seep through to the virtual—he can feel the Tap sucking the life out of him. Then the kick from the nurse’s injection—it’s that little extra he needs.

Lucy is right there before him, at the VTOL’s controls, completely focused on flying the craft. The deft movement of her hands, her poise, her reactions—they are not those of a child, they are those of an experienced pilot. But her face tells a different story. Lucius can see she is terrified out of her wits.

He moves himself next to her. She is not startled, but rendered mute through the sheer terror of the situation. All she can manage is to look to him for what to do. He places a calming hand on her shoulder.

“You’re not being chased anymore.”

Lucy calms just the tiniest bit, settling the VTOL into a steady flight, but she is still very frightened. Lucius points ahead of them.

“Look. There’s the Pan Am building.”

Not too far away is the roof top of the Pan American Airways building, the airline as was, now resurrected some years past by Robert Cantor himself.

Another frightened, questioning look from Lucy. Lucius remains calm.

“Focus on just that. You don’t need the rest of the simulation. Set us down on the roof.”

Lucy nods, calming a little more, chunks of the cityscape whiting out one by one until only the Pan Am building remains.