Final Empire (6 page)

I wasn’t sure which one I found more appalling: that at the ripe old age of twenty-one, McGarrity felt the need to share his life story in prose, or that a publisher was desperate enough to give him an advance to write it. “You have
got
to be shitting me,” I groaned.

“Oh, no, Mister Moxon,” London assured me. “I am
not
shitting on you, sir. As artificial intelligence housed within a swarm robotics unit I haven’t the biological capability to defecate. And even if I had, I would not do so on you, or in your general vicinity. That would be a serious breach of etiquette.”

“That’s...nice.” I squinted at the projection, then back at London. “Can you show me more?”

“Absolutely, sir.” She scrolled through numerous holo-forums, stopping at his itinerary: McGarrity planned to make appearances all across Europe, and then North America throughout the following months. If he was behind my frame job and the attacks, he didn’t seem overly concerned about being caught.

I shook my head. “I know he’s a notorious risk-taker, but this seems excessive.”

“Even if he’s not responsible he might know something,” Peyton offered.

“It’s settled then!” Karin announced, throwing a fist in the air. “I’ll go prep the transport – wheels up in ten!”

“Damn it,” I shouted. “Stop doing that! You’re not the one who makes the plans around here.”

“Fiiiiine,” she said eyes widening, taking an exaggerated step backwards. “Then why don’t
you
make the call, ‘Mister Moxon’.”

“Okay well...” I nervously scratched the back of my head as London, Peyton and Karin stared at me, anticipating a response. “Yeah, let’s go in like, ten minutes.”

Karin straightened her posture and saluted as if I were a five-star general before she spun on her heels, racing up the staircase.

“What are you going to say to McGarrity?” Peyton asked.

“I have
no
idea,” I said, taking a few steps towards my computer station. I pressed my thumb into the corner of the desk, triggering a small drawer to slide open. I reached inside and pulled out a K-9 handgun. “But until I figure out who I can trust, I’m not going to take any chances.”

“And I’m not going to take any chances with my future husband,” Peyton said. “Your headaches are getting worse.”
I opened my mouth to protest and her hand darted out, covering my mouth.

“Shush. Not a word.” She tapped her wrist-com and it illuminated with a projection. A map of Switzerland. “I contacted a neurologist there. He’s one of the best in the world, and he’s
completely
discreet. We can be in and out of his office in an hour and we’ll have plenty of time to track down McGarrity before tonight.”

“But I feel—”

“You’re not fine,” she interrupted. “Don’t even say it. And you’re doing this. Now.”

“The road to the New World will not be paved, as it does not yet exist. We must forge it as one, blazing a trail that only the believers may follow. Do not fear this journey. It is your destiny. Embrace it.”

- Herald of The Order
(Darknet Holoforum
)

“I’m going to be honest with you,”
Doctor Zbinden said, taking a long drag from his cigarette. “It doesn’t look great.”

I’m not sure why, but when a doctor delivers bad news it sounds exponentially worse in a German accent. It must be my conditioning from a lifetime of watching villains in action movies.

The doctor exhaled through his nostrils, sending a pair of grey plumes through his dimly-lit office.

“You see this?” He traced a line through the air, motioning at the holographic depiction of my brain; the glowing blue projection hovered mid-room, rotating slowly to display every angle. “This red portion is much smaller than it was before your visit to Cerveau-N, but...”

“It’s still there.”
I knew
it was there – he didn’t need to remind me. It’s all I thought about all day, every day.

“But you’re feeling healthy? Aside from the headaches?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Aside from that I’m fantastic. Never better.”

“Ah, okay. Good, good...” The cigarette hung loosely from his bottom lip, dripping ashes as he swiped through my file on his tablet. He rattled off the names of a dozen different drugs that my last doctor has prescribed me: some to relieve pain, some to keep the mass from expanding, and the rest to cope with the side effects that the other drugs were causing. “So tell me a little more about these headaches.”

“They’re sharp. Sometimes triggered by bright sunlight.”

“Uh huh...that is common. Are they getting more intense? Give me a number between one and ten.”

“Nothing worse than a three,” I shrugged, not willing to admit that just an hour ago a freight train rushed through my skull that could have easily been classified as a solid ‘eleven’.

He scribbled a note with his finger before flicking his eyes back towards me. “And what about memory loss? Hallucinations?”

“Yeah, well...my short-term memory has been on the fritz since the operation...but my IQ seems to be intact.” I explained that aside from the splitting headaches and occasionally forgetting what I ate for breakfast, I’d been in decent shape. That much was more or less true.

“Nothing else?” Doctor Zbinden prompted.

“If you mean hallucinations,” I chuckled, “no, nothing like that.”

“Don’t laugh.” He took a final drag before twisting his cigarette butt into an overflowing ash tray on his desk. “A patient told me last week that the giant man made of marshmallow from that old movie was chasing him... the one about the busters who catch the ghosts?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it once or twice.” Or several hundred times, but I wasn’t keeping count.

The doctor sat on the edge of his desk, taking on a slightly paternal posture. I sat across from him on a padded examination table covered with a white sheet of paper that crinkled loudly whenever I shifted my weight. “You do
realize that there is no cure for this,” he said flatly. “If Cerveau-N could not get it all, no one can.”

I nodded weakly. He was right and I wanted to agree just to be polite but I couldn’t force myself to say the words out loud.

“So have you made all the necessary arrangements?” he asked.
“Yeah. Peyton is running the Moxon Corporation, so if anything happens to me she’s got everything in her name.”

“I know,” he said, motioning to the small holo-screen that hovered above his desk, “we have news here in Switzerland. I’m not taking about your financial assets.”

“She knows that the tumor was removed during my surgery in France last year, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“And the detail about the remaining piece that could not be extracted?”

“She knows it’s there...” I started down at my shoes. “I might’ve left out the part about it being malignant.”

“You haven’t told her yet?” he asked. “You’re waiting for a special occasion, maybe?”

I stared back over my shoulder at the white office door. She was sitting on the other side, thinking this was a routine check-up she’d scheduled for me – just a quick visit to discuss my meds and possibly adjust the dosages. Shit, I should’ve told her. There is so much I haven’t told her, so many things she deserves to know.

“I know your previous doctor,” he said, pulling a fresh cigarette from the breast pocket of his lab coat. “Dinneen is a wonderful, talented man. We’ve met at conferences, shared drinks and stories...but as you Americans say, he likes to coat things with the candy.”

“All right...”

Doctor Zbinden brought the cigarette to his lips and cupped a hand over the tip, lighting the end with a Zippo. “Did he mention how sudden things can happen? How rapidly this could progress?”

I shook my head. I’d been routinely missing scheduled check-ups since the bulk of my tumor had been removed last year. If it weren’t for Peyton I wouldn’t even be here now.

“Many years ago,” he began, “I diagnosed a patient with a tumor, not much different than yours. It’s an emergency, so we schedule surgery immediately...but not immediate enough. He flies to Switzerland with his fiancée, and we make all the arrangements – within twenty four hours he’d be operated on to remove the mass. She found his body the next morning on the floor of the bathroom.”

My heart skipped a beat. “So it was sudden...” I asked. “painless?”

“Yes,” he says. “
So
sudden and painless that he still had a toothbrush in his mouth when she found him. He didn’t even have time to blink before the lights went out. There was no deathbed chat with his loved ones, telling them how much they meant to him. It was a lightning strike.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“Jesus...” I whispered under my breath.

“Jesus has nothing to do with this,” the doctor said, blowing a fresh cloud of smoke from his lips. “This is science. You have time, yes. How much? I cannot tell you. All I can tell you is that right now, time is not your friend.”

“Given enough time, science cures everything.”

“Yes, this is true. In ten, maybe fifteen years we may no longer have cancer. I’ll be out of a job.” He motioned to the picturesque snow-capped mountain visible from his office window, framed by a cloudless sky the color of blue silk. “I’d actually prefer that...take an early retirement and spend it on the slopes. But that is a very large-sized ‘maybe’.”

“But that’s the direction things are going,” I said emphatically. “I’ve read the research. Breakthroughs are happening all the time.”

“That’s quite a gamble.
Waiting
around for a cure? I can’t guarantee you
one
year, let alone ten or fifteen.” He took his cigarette in his fingers, glancing down at it. “We all take risks, Mister Moxon. We make choices, roll dice. But we have to accept the consequences of our choices...and we have to realize the odds we face when we place a bet.”

“There’s a solution to every problem,” I said, probably trying to convince myself more than him. “You just have to work the equation, balance the variables...I have a plan. It’s going to work out.”

“If you say so,” he replied with a shake of his head. “But that young lady out in my waiting room? She’s not something to be ‘solved’. She needs the
truth
. And she would be better off hearing it from you instead of someone like me.”

London’s rooftops were dusted with a fresh layer of snow, reflecting like polished silver under a full moon.

As our transport made its descent, Gavin pressed his palms into the wraparound window, gazing at the busy street below. “No one is looking up...can’t they see us?”

“It’s the cloaking,” Karin shouted from the cockpit. “I could put this baby down on Westminster Abbey’s front lawn and no one would know the difference.”

“Please don’t do that,” I grumbled.

A familiar hand ran back and forth across my shoulders. “Everything all right?” Peyton asked, not much louder than a whisper. “You’ve been on mute since we left Switzerland.”

I didn’t even realize it, but I’d been staring out the window for the last hour without saying a single word. Of course I
wasn’t
all right, and of course I couldn’t tell her why. The entire trip my mind had been working out probabilities, poring over thousands of pages of medical journals I’d consumed since my surgery. I was re-reading the same statistics in my head, hoping I could make sense of them.

“Just the migraines,” I said, blinking hard. “They’re a little worse than usual, but I’ll deal.”

The check-up with Doctor Zbinden was a mistake. I didn’t need to fill my head with doubt and meaningless information I’d already learned on my own. Yes, I knew a small portion of the tumor remained, but who the hell was he to tell
me
what I should or shouldn’t do? Or what my limited options were based on his experience?

Focus,
I screamed inside my own head. I bounced to my feet, lightly smacking either side of my face. Get it together, Moxon – this is no big deal. The medication was working just as I knew it would, and my back-up plan was still firmly in place. I’d had recurring headaches on and off for more than a year, and this was no worse than the previous ones...not significantly worse, anyway.

Karin put the transport on autopilot causing it to hover in place, bobbing gently in the gusting wind. She strolled from the cockpit, handing transparent jellybeans to everyone in the passenger bay. “These are your earpieces, boys and girls. You’ll notice they feel like chewing gum – that’s normal. Just poke it into your ear and it’ll be almost invisible.”

Peyton rolled the tiny clear device between her thumb and index finger, inspecting it beneath the overhead light. “So we can hear
you
...but how will you hear us?”

“The speakers are multi-directional,” I explained. “They’ll function as microphones as well. Just speak clearly and she’ll know what’s going on.”

My pilot walked to the edge of the transport’s passenger bay and pressed her palm into the overhead compartment, triggering a hatch to pop open. It revealed a small arsenal of matching grey pistols.

“Whoa,” Peyton said, eyes widening, “
Guns?
I thought we were just going to
talk
to McGarrity, not shoot him.”

“This isn’t an assassination,” I replied, reaching up into the weapons cache. I grabbed one of the small angular handguns and tucked it into the back of my jeans, pulling my t-shirt overtop. “But I don’t know whose side he’s on. I’m not walking in there armed with nothing more than a veterinary student and a comic book dealer. No offense, guys.”

“I’m with Peyton,” Gavin said. “We grew up in the Dark Zone and we’ve had a few brushes with the law over the years, but those days are
over
, man. Helping you get into Arena Mode was our last hurrah.”

“Relax, these aren’t guns. They’re Model One Zungenbrechers.” I handed one of the pistols to Peyton, allowing her to inspect it.

“Zungen-
what
?” She flipped it over, poking and prodding at it from every angle. “These aren’t like anything I’ve seen before, and I grew up around a
lot
of guns.”

“Exactly,” I explained. “They’re new Frost Tech...well, Moxon Tech now, I guess. Zungenbrecher is a German word that basically means ‘tongue twister’. They’re urban peacekeepers designed for crowd control: the bullets penetrate the flesh and cause a little bleeding, injecting a non-lethal dose of diazepam into the target.”

Peyton creased her brow. “Diazepam is just
valium
– we use it to calm animals before surgery.”

“Right. But combined with a few different high-potency barbiturates it gets delivered fast enough to work as a tranquilizer. Dizziness, disorientation, unable to speak...then a few seconds later your target is sleeping.” I snapped a clip into one of the guns and handed it to Gavin. He nodded and accepted it, but Peyton looked far less convinced.

“So...the person you shoot will be lying unconscious in a pool of their own blood...but they’ll be alive. That sounds lovely.”

“Look,” I reassured her, “you saw what McGarrity could do in the Fortress.”

She had, along with the entire world. He routinely used his ability to bend light into a construct of a broadsword – a weapon that sliced through everything from titanium to solid rock like it was made of warm butter. He was on our side then, but now I didn’t know who to trust, or what kind of a nightmare we could be walking into. I knew Peyton and Gavin were going to come with me whether I wanted them to or not, and since that was the case, I wasn’t going to let them come empty-handed.

Peyton blew out her cheeks and nodded in surrender. Without further protest she unbuttoned her fitted leather jacket, sliding the weapon into the inside pocket.

I zipped on my ragged red hoodie while Gavin adjusted his wool overcoat, all of us careful to ensure our weapons were out of sight.

“I’ll put you guys down on the rooftop,” Karin said, slipping back into the pilot’s seat. “This should be in-and-out, but if there are any issues you have multiple exits; if you can’t make it to the roof I’ll grab you from a balcony, or the alley behind the hotel.”

“Wait,” Gavin said, “what about Interpol? You know, the whole ‘most wanted man in the world’ thing? What if someone recognizes Mox?”

I’d already checked ahead. “I haven’t been on any news feeds in the UK, and even if I had, the authorities wouldn’t be able to mobilize fast enough. We’ll be in the air and cloaked before they get a single squad car in the vicinity.”

“What about London?” He added. “Shouldn’t you have brought her along for support?”

“She’s was damaged during my escape in New York – I need to make some repairs before I can use her as riot armor again.”

“Will you guys stop worrying?” Karin shouted from the cockpit. “You bunch of babies are acting like you’ve never been on a mission to capture a homicidal superhuman before. Now hold onto something – I kinda suck at landings.”

The Savoy Hotel’s hoverpad allowed us easy access to the top floor.
No confirmation code required – just pull up and land. The security was surprisingly light, especially considering the caliber of guests who frequented the famous establishment: rock stars, politicians, royalty, gods of the business world, and now – for reasons I will never fully understand – Steve goddamned McGarrity.

We padded across the snowy tarmac and down a flight of stairs into a small marble lobby. It was white and crisp and ultramodern, in stark contrast with the rest of the hotel’s décor. It had been obviously retrofitted to accommodate the more affluent guests once the hoverpad had been installed, and opened to the exclusive penthouse level. Once inside we walked single file, eyes locked forward in a feeble attempt to appear inconspicuous. As it turns out, it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d been accompanied by a marching band complete with a drummer and clanging cymbals – the lone security guard would never have noticed us.

The portly senior slumped behind his desk was wearing VR goggles and noise-cancelling headphones. He reached up and grabbed invisible objects, moving them from one place to another like an oblivious mime. If I had to guess, he was remote controlling a robot in his home, and was organizing his kitchen cupboards. Using virtual reality to control basic two-armed machines was becoming a popular way to vacuum, dust, or perform heavy lifting with minimal effort, and it was a great way to kill two birds with one stone while sitting prone at a desk job. We snuck by undetected, letting the lobby’s heavy double doors slam shut behind us.

The lobby opened into the hallway. The Savoy’s decor looked more like a carpeted museum than any hotel I’d ever stayed at; statues, paintings and antique vases lined each side of the wall, leading to the Royal Suite at the end of the corridor: McGarrity’s room, according to the visitor log that I hacked just twenty minutes ago.

Towering cherry wood doors were blocked by a pair of guards clad in black. At least we assumed they were security guards, given their posture (and intimidating stature), until we drew closer. It was then that we realized the white logo embroidered onto their jackets was a small crest topped with a crown, and the words ‘London Metro Police’ were inscribed below in small block letters.

Shit
.

We were just steps away, and they’d noticed us walking towards them. If we turned and left now it would seem far too conspicuous.

We slowed our approach, shooting each other panicked glances.

“Are you lost?” one of the cops called out in a clipped British accent.

“No!” Peyton blurted, her body stiffening, freezing in mid-stride.

“Well you look lost,” the other cop added with crooked grin. “Did you forget which suite you’re in?”

“N-no,” Gavin stuttered. “We’re here to see Steve. McGarrity. The guy in that room behind you.”

The officer’s jovial grin melted away. “How did you get up here, then? You need a key card to access the elevator, and it’s for registered guests
only
.”

“Um, well, I
do
have a card in here somewhere...” Gavin pulled open his jacket and dug a hand into his breast pocket.

Realizing what he was searching for I reached out, clasping his wrist through his overcoat. “Nope, no need to show them
that
card,” I said swiftly, my stare burning a hole through Gavin’s eyes. “I think if we just
ask nicely,
the policemen will be kind enough to notify Mister McGarrity that his friends have arrived.”

And with those words the doors flung open, revealing the dopey, blond-haired idiot I’d been glad to have out of my life for the last eight months; the man I was willing to give a one-of-a-kind prototype jet to in the hope that he’d teleport to the other side of the planet, as far away from me as physically possible.

McGarrity wore a fuzzy white bathrobe that was wrapped to his body, held in place with a loosely knotted belt (a belt I’d hoped would maintain its integrity). He was barefoot, but between his toes were purple foam separators, and several of his toenails gleamed in the overhead lights.

“Oh, I am
so
sorry,” one officer said meekly, “I didn’t mean to interrupt you during pedicure time. I don’t know how this lot snuck up here.”

McGarrity ignored the apology. He locked his feet in place and his expression darkened, eyes filled with fire. “
Moxon
. Matthew Moxon. You have a lot of nerve showing up here. Especially after that shit you pulled.”

The hallway fell silent. I reached behind my back as inconspicuously as possible, lifting my hoodie, curling my fingers around the grip of my pistol. I left it tucked in place but let my index finger slip over the trigger.

His top lip quivered for a moment and then he bent at the waist, bursting into gales of laughter. It was the sound of a rusted garden tool scraping down a chalkboard. “I’m just messing with you, man! Bring it in.” He pulled me into a full embrace, patting me on the back. I flipped my hoodie back over the weapon and he didn’t seem to notice.

“Look at you,” he said, drawing back while clutching my shoulders. “Matthew freaking Moxon, in the flesh. Man, do
you
look tired. Or maybe it’s just your age...I know you’re like,
super
old now. Didn’t you turn the big ‘three-oh’ this year?”

I pressed my lips into a thin line. “Good to see you too, Steve.”

He released his grip and glanced at Peyton. “And if it isn’t
the one and only Patty!” He threw his arms around her with the same enthusiasm, squeezing her tight. She was stationary, arms locked at her sides. I think she was too stunned to correct him. “And wow,” he added, “you’re looking
fine,
girl. Still with the pink hair, huh?”