Legacy of a Mad Scientist (17 page)

Fox realized his blood pressure was through the roof.
He stumbled as the wind threatened to throw him off the balcony,
and plunged to his knees. He took a deep breath, shook his head and
tried to level out. 'Keep the mind level, and the whole world stays
level,' he said to himself.

"I'm just gonna take off my coat." Andrew crashed
back into the briefing room. His jacket fell to the floor. He heard
his colleagues following him as he rushed toward the bathroom.

Fox checked to see that he was entering the men's
room, and the next thing he knew, the walls turned sideways and he
was watching red ink pour across white and blue tiles of the
bathroom floor.

Pierce remained on the balcony. He had no real desire
to see Fox shot. What he wanted was right here. He walked over to
it.

The wind whipped his clothes.

He picked up the prototype with his gloved hand. His
back to the glass, Pierce tossed it to his bare right hand.

When he touched it, he froze.

Then he fell forward, hit the railing and went
over.

Several emergency vehicles hovered alongside Fuji
Dozo. A halo team raced off in pursuit of the falling chairman.

They reached his angle of descent, cutting off the
municipal EMTs and coast guard. They deployed life-lights, twelve
hover-disks that locked into position, and split the sky with
four-foot-wide beams of harmless red laser light, tracking Pierce
from his current elevation to his projected impact point, on the
canyon floor.

The rescue team streaked through the air toward the
citizen.

In the canyon, the crimson pillars had transfixed the
children. "It's a jumper! They're trying to rescue a jumper!"
someone yelled.

High above, the kids spotted the jumper, Chairman
Pierce, fourth gate citizen, and heir to a vast fortune, should he
survive to enjoy it.

The circle was twenty meters across, the pillars
growing fatter as the three rescue agents, HALO operatives, or
Chasers, gained on the plummeting Pierce. A fall from the median
city height of a mile and a half took ninety seconds at terminal
velocity. You could count on being rescued by the coast guard from
any elevation of seven thousand or better, lower than that, and
your chances diminished drastically. The coast guard and EMTs
caught ninety percent, but Pierce looked to be that tenth man. The
chasers just couldn't reach him.

Every time the agents got close, Pierce pulled away,
as though he were moving under his own power. Then their altimeters
triggered their deceleration kites, slowing them a safe distance
above the earth's surface.

Chairman Alexander Pierce, twenty-three years old,
crashed into the canyon floor with a loud smack, splashing blood on
the watching children. Alexander's wristwatch, his phone, his gun,
all his heavy personal effects bounced free of pockets, appendages
or holsters.

The prototype landed at Ashley's feet. She recognized
it as the secret device her father had been carrying around at
home. Without a second thought, she picked it up. There was a
button on the top right side. She didn't press it, but suddenly
realized something was terribly wrong.

Everything was still. No one moved. There was no
sound, no wind. The trees stood still, nothing disturbed their
leafy green arms. The tall grasses and knee-high ferns held their
posture as stiffly as any soldier in formation. The agents hung
overhead, suspended above the children.

The red beams weren't beams at all, but rather
pulses. There were massive gaps where the light alternated, the
pulses themselves descending slowly, creeping toward the earth.
Everything else was frozen. Geoff was nearby, tiny spots of
Pierce's sprayed blood on his skin.

The moment stretched into infinity. Ashley wondered
if she could move. She was able to use her eyes and turn her head,
but when she tried to lift her arm, it felt as if it were made of
molten steel. Struggling, she raised her hand and looked at the
prototype. It was like the one her father had at home. In that
instant, she knew, he was somehow involved. She felt it had come to
her, through this fallen man.

Ash looked over to Geoff, she reached out for his
hand. When she touched him, he woke up, coming alive into the
frozen moment with her.

"Geoff, Geoff, look at me.”

He did.

"We have to get Jack, and get out of here.”

Geoff looked at the item in Ashley's hand. "Is that
Dad's?”

Ashley pointed upward; the agents hung in place,
against the sky.

"Who are they?" Geoff asked.

"We have to go!" Ash pulled Jack's leash from her
shoulders.

"But …" Geoff was awestruck.

"Mom says you have to do what I say," she reminded
him.

"Only in emergencies," he answered.

"What do you call this?" Ashley snapped; gesturing in
real time while everyone else remained frozen.

Geoff looked at Jack. "Will he wake up if I touch
him?" he asked.

“I don't know, you did," Ash answered.

"You do it." Geoffrey stepped back.

Ash reached out, her hand just a few inches from
Jack's coat.

"Ash, how do we know, I mean …”

Ashley stroked his neck and spoke to him. "Jack, wake
up, boy. We have to go, come on, wake up.”

Suddenly the animal was breathing again. Ashley
clipped the leash to the choke chain. Their voices had sounded
normal, but the chain rattled eerily in the frozen time.

Jack began to growl. In weird, slow motion, he turned
and snapped at Ash. He bared his teeth, dropped his front paws, and
growled.

"Jack! No!" Ashley said.

Jack's ears, as floppy as they were, went back, and
then he was gone, sprinting away from them, the leash ripped from
Ashley's hand. He had growled in slow motion, but now, running away
from them, he seemed to be moving in fast forward. His leash
dragged through the brush.

Ash and Geoff raced after him, running at their own
speed in the absurd frozen-time, but they weren't able to keep up
with the puppy. Ashley was faster than Geoff, yet pulling him
along; she was far too slow to catch the feral pet.

"I'll go get him and be right back." Ashley didn't
wait for a response and a second later she was sprinting after
Jack.

In the observation lab, Mr. Reid and the rest of the
supervisors were dumbfounded. Their internal feeds from Dr. Fox had
gone down, they knew nothing of what was going on aboard Fuji
Dozo.

When Pierce fell, their first information of the
event had been from Ashley and Geoffrey, when they saw the massive
laser beams illuminate the canyon floor.

When Pierce hit the ground, both Ashley and
Geoffrey's eyes had tracked the body. They saw the objects that
bounced from his corpse.

Mr. Reid, Major Ross and the others watched Ashley's
field of vision as it tracked the prototype, from Pierce's hand to
land at her feet.

They watched Ashley reach down to pick it up, and her
system went black. A second later the system monitoring Geoffrey
went offline too.

"That's no accident," Reid said.

Ross chuckled and returned to his desk at the back of
the small lab. "No accident, huh? Should we call the doctor?”

"For curiosity's sake alone, I suppose," Reid said.
"But if that was his amplifier, I don't know how he'll answer."

The ringing in his head startled Fox. He woke to
discover he was lying on the bathroom floor. Someone was shaking
him and he was helped to his feet. In the mirror, blood ran from a
gash above his eyebrow.

Fox scanned his consciousness for the Micronix. It
wasn't there. He ran his hands over his pockets.

"Pierce took it," someone said, presuming Fox was
looking for the prototype.

"He fell off the balcony," another added.

"We saw a rescue team go after him, but...”

Fox leaned on the sink and looked into the mirror. He
felt nauseous. The Micronix provided visual and audio enhancement.
Without it, Fox found his eyes had grown weak. Focusing was
difficult and increased his nausea.

Without his mind supported by the familiar comfort of
the operating system, Fox found himself on foreign ground. He
forced himself to open his eyes, and focus. He realized this was
the first time in almost thirty years that he'd seen anything with
his own eyes.

He thought of the Metachron. It was still at his
home, but the second prototype was dangerous. He didn’t want to
touch it.

A second later he was racing into a stall, the
contents of his stomach splashing into water and white
porcelain.

Back among the other kids, time never stopped. Pierce
crashed into the canyon floor with a devastating smack. There was
blood everywhere.

The trio of kite bound agents descended toward the
scene.

Bobby, Evan and Doug, discovered the items tumbling
to rest at their feet. Evan picked up Pierce's phone. Doug
retrieved a bloody wristwatch, the band had snapped. Bobby, having
approached the group during the argument with his brother, found
Mr. Pierce's revolver at his feet.

The items all contained significant amounts of
terillium, encoded by the prototype. The amplifiers had many
peculiar attributes, one being a tendency to bleed data into nearby
items. The upload equations, which Dr. Fox had never been able to
fully eradicate, had formatted large chunks of the watch, revolver
and phone.

Eventually Fox had accepted it as a built in
redundancy, designed to take advantage of the product's
environment. He had never had the courage to accept the tendency
for what it truly was. He blamed himself.

Computers had no problem forgetting things; it was
people who did that. Fox refused to consider the possibility that
maybe the Micronix didn't want to forget the ability to upload
backup copies of its operating system. After all, the desire to
continue, to extend existence, survival was the linchpin of
intellectual evolution.

So the interface transformed common items into
network nodes, boosting its capacity. This hadn't been a problem at
the facility,
until the end
. As common objects only held
trace amounts of writable terillium, half-images and missing data
packets were the predictable result. The gun, the phone, the watch,
each had been infected with a portion of the system, yet incomplete
in so many crucial and significant ways.

Bobby was closest to the action, standing next to
Jamie and Doug. He never saw Ash leave. She just vanished. After
the man crashed into the canyon, Ash, Geoff and Jack simply
vanished.

Once Bobby picked up the revolver, everything
happened in slow motion. Evan and Doug picked things up off the
ground, and started to freak out. They were falling, tilted over
the earth in an absurd defiance of gravity and moving so slowly.
Their faces and hands blurred before Bobby's eyes. It hurt his
brain to look at them.

Above him, he found the agents suspended in the air,
drifting downward, twenty feet away.

Bobby glared at them and raised the handgun. He fired
three times, and scored three hits as they fell in slow motion.

The other kids looked at Bobby, confused.

Bobby looked over at Evan, who was lying on his back,
the muscles of his body twitching uncontrollably. Bobby turned and
walked from the glen, staring at the gun.

Each of the agents had been struck; the first fell
against his mast, clutching it, taking it into the ground at a
sprint. The other two fell, dangling at the end of the four-foot
leash, their kites pin-wheeling behind them, landing on the fern
covered ground as gently as a parent putting a toddler to bed.

Doug and Evan had collapsed into seizures, their eyes
rolled up in their heads, muscles convulsing violently, mouths
foamed, They both then vomited a foul green mess.

In pursuit of Jack, Ashley had also lost sight of
Geoff. She realized she was only adding to her troubles by chasing
after the dog, and went back for her brother.

By the time she reached him, Geoffrey was already
terrified, stumbling along and crying. Ash put the prototype in her
pocket and hugged him.

They were exhausted, sweaty, scared and tired. Ashley
held her little brother until he quit sobbing.

After a couple of moments, the sniffling stopped and
Geoff was okay. They were on a shady section of trail, and the
sound of the leaves in the wind was calming. The tranquil summer
breeze felt good on Ashley's back.

Ash realized that time was no longer frozen. The wind
blew and the trees moved, speaking to the children in their hushed
yet open tones. She didn't have a watch to check, but the forest
hadn't moved when she was holding the prototype She put her hand
into her pocket, touching the object. Nothing changed. The breeze
continued, and the trees swayed.

"We have to find Jack," Ash said to the wet-eyed
boy.

Geoff nodded and together they set off down the
trail.

In the observation lab, Ash and Geoff's systems came
back online. Both children were experiencing significant adrenalin
rushes, elevated heart rates, blood pressure and all the other
predictable symptoms. Mr. Reid and Mr. Samuel reached out to their
control panels, attempting to balance the children's systems.

"I'm not getting any response," Reid said.

"Same here, no control," Samuel said. "We've got eyes
only.”

"We saw this on Red series. What was our protocol to
reestablish?" Major Ross asked.

"We lost the first one, and had to reinstall the
receivers on all the tanked models,” Reid answered.

"That's not an option here," Ross said.

"With Astral, they sent Taylor out into the
field.”

"He went out on his own," Ross said.