Prodigal (34 page)

Lea and Tiernan talked into the thickest recesses of night, falling asleep together on the couch only a few hours before dawn. Lea awoke before he did, careful not to disturb him as she slipped out of his arms. Proceeding in silence, she went into her bedroom and put on a fresh change of clothes, returning to find Tiernan just as she had left him. She wanted him to have that peace, temporary as it was—especially now that she had burdened him with the truth.

Lea didn’t envy him that, for there was no way Tiernan could have understood what he asked of her; but now that he knew, she experienced the selfish stirrings of relief—and gratitude. There was no turning back for either of them, but at least she had someone to stand by her side. Someone flesh and blood, who could touch her and be touched back.

So how could that be wrong?

Her misplaced conscience supplied the answer.

Cray.

Lea turned that notion over in her head again and again, all the way up to her building’s landing pad, where a pulser waited to take her over to the Works. During the brief flight, she wondered why she suddenly felt guilty over her affair with Tiernan. The two of them had been together for months, at her own instigation—but until last night, the relationship had never ventured beyond their physical liaisons. It was easier without the emotional quotient, or so Lea had always believed. But now that things were different, she began to understand. Cray had always been the one she confided in, the one who knew her better than anyone else. In sharing that part of herself with another—a living, breathing man no less—her actions amounted to a betrayal of that trust. Lea had, in essence, moved on.

Cray, meanwhile, had nowhere else to go.

His prison gleamed in the light of a new day, its pyramid apex breaking the misty cloud cover that rolled over Manhattan. Lea signaled approach control, and right on cue a private message appeared on her integrator—gelling all the conflicts that brought her back time and time again:

back so soon
—
you must really miss me

“I do,” she said, but only to herself. “God help me, I do.”

The pulser touched down just long enough to drop Lea off, then roared into the sky to rejoin the dozen other aircraft that orbited the Works. She timed her arrival deliberately, giving herself enough of a window to get down to the bionucleics level just before shift rotation. At most, she would have ten minutes alone in the lab while security screened the daytime staff. Logging on to an access node at the edge of camera range, she quickly went to work.

Lea used the time to run a series of private requests, routing each one across multiple nodes and through different subdomains, each relaying a single piece of a hidden construct back to her display. She had meticulously scattered the components, utilizing swaths of native code connected via an intricate framework of encrypted tunnels, knowing that a decentralized program—even as massive as this one—would evade detection. Gradually, the individual parts assembled themselves into a whole, providing Lea with a covert interface that she used to assert control over bionucleic containment. The thing was buried so deep that even Vortex wasn’t aware of it.

He’d probably purge the code if he knew.

Lea ran an integrity check, which came back clean. A garrison of firewalls stood between Vortex and the outside world, which kept his consciousness—and Lyssa’s—from flooding the Axis. The interface put all of them at Lea’s command—a fail-safe she had installed, in the event it became necessary to dump the matrix outside the local system. In all likelihood the resulting singularity would destroy the Axis in an instant, but that wasn’t her greatest concern. She just wanted Vortex to have an escape route in case the Assembly got wise to her game and tried to have him erased.

With that finished, she locked down the node and headed for the Tank. On the other side of the airlock, Vortex already waited for her. Behind the illusion of his form, the Tank swirled with a maelstrom of color and light.

Lea found it difficult to meet his gaze.

“Not a morning person,” he remarked. “I remember what that was like.”

“Sorry,” she replied, trying to be casual. “Long night.”

“They all are these days,” he said, observing her closely. “I catch you at a bad time?”

Lea considered telling him, wondering briefly how to do it. She had to settle on the short version—the one that didn’t include Tiernan. Vortex listened thoughtfully as she told him about Bostic, and the Assembly’s new views on the
Inru.

“I’m not surprised,” he said when Lea finished. “The Assembly’s been on ice too long. They don’t realize how fragmented the Collective has become, even about the war.”

“It’s crazy.” Lea shook her head. “With a bunch of fanatics running around, hell-bent on destroying civilization, you would think we’d all be on the same side.”

“Doesn’t work that way in corporate circles. Too many politics involved, too many competing interests.” Vortex seemed bitter as he recalled his own experience. “I worked some of the factions when I was back in the world. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit they pulled, undermining Collective security while pursuing their own narrow agendas.”

“You think that’s what Bostic is doing now?”

“No question. He needs a victory to consolidate his position with the Assembly, so he declares one. It’s a business decision, pure and simple.” He leaned in toward her, as if sharing a secret. “The hard part is making it stick.”

Lea started to get the twisted logic of it. “That’s what he has
me
for.”

“Precisely,” Vortex agreed. “Bostic has you pegged. He figures you’re in too deep to give up the fight, even if he yanks material support—so he gets you to do the dirty work for free. For him, there’s no downside. If you finish off the
Inru,
he gets all the credit. If the whole thing blows up, he still has you to take the blame.”

For the second time, Lea couldn’t help but admire Bostic’s cunning. “That man has discovered a whole new level of sleaze.”

“Congratulations. Now you know what it really means to be a corporate spook.”

“So what can we do?”

“Play along—for as long as we can.”

“There’s no time, Vortex. I’ve got less than a week and nothing to go on.”

“That’s not entirely true.” His tone was playful, as was his hint.

“You
found
something?” Lea asked.

Vortex beckoned her to come closer.

“The
Inru
plan,” he replied. “I think I know what it is.”

Vortex was gone, absorbed into the flotsam of his bionucleic matrix. The Tank rearranged itself into an array of flat images—simultaneous feeds he had pilfered from the Works’ research archive, utilizing a stealth gateway Lea had rigged to give him localized access. They flashed by at such speed that Lea couldn’t recognize them until Vortex slowed down and arranged the relevant pieces in a coherent order. Most were official documents with embedded video streams, along with a few scientific reports that displayed the exotic jargon of some obscure discipline. The dates Lea saw indicated they were very old—better than a century.

“The key was actually something you found at Chernobyl,” a disembodied voice explained. It sounded like Vortex, but with a shrill, subliminal echo—probably Lyssa stalking the perimeter, ever watchful of these sessions. “I had my suspicions when you described the
Inru
lab, but wasn’t sure of the connection until I got the forensic data from Novak’s post. After that, I had to cross-reference my analysis with the historical record—most of which was classified, by the way.”

“Is that what I’m seeing here?”

“CCRD experimental files, Project Nightwatch,” Vortex reported. “It took me a while to crack security and balance the interface protocols with a conventional system—otherwise, I would have found it sooner.”

Lea sat on the end of the interface chair, absorbed by the massive display.

“What
is
all this?”

“A research project conducted one hundred twelve years ago,” Vortex said. “Highly secret.”

“On what?”

“Practical telepathy.”

He augmented the video streams, particularly the one that presented an eerily familiar scene. Two human subjects, submerged in suspension tanks, were connected via a thick cluster of fiber links—a smaller, more primitive version of what Lea had seen in Chernobyl. A crowd of technicians and scientists gathered around them, taking notes, while the subjects thrashed around inside of their tanks. They appeared to be in agony.

Lea held her arms to fend off the chill.

“The Collective wanted to see if there was a way to induce telepathic abilities in persons who showed no previous disposition toward psychic activity,” Vortex narrated. “Nightwatch was devised to make that happen. Over the course of twelve years, fifty-three test subjects were conditioned with a regimen designed to stimulate growth in those regions of the brain thought to be responsible for psychic manifestations.” He paused for a moment while Lea stared, horrified but unable to look away. “The two you see here represent the terminal stage of that research.”

Another cut, and the two bodies lay on examination tables. A masked medical examiner went to work on them, opening their skulls before the feed abruptly ended.

“Nightwatch had only limited success in achieving their goals,” Vortex went on, shuffling some of the still pictures and documents for Lea. “They reported nominal increases in latent telepathy among members of the experimental group—but since very few of them survived, they had difficulty repeating the procedure with any reliability. The Collective eventually shut Nightwatch down, saying the research methods were flawed and the results too inconclusive for them to justify the cost.”

Lea closed her eyes, hoping the images would fade from her mind. “That’s one way to look at it.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty sick stuff.”

Vortex had reasserted his image by the time she looked back up.

“History repeats itself,” she observed. “Is that what the
Inru
are doing?”

“In a way,” Vortex said. “Obviously, their technology is far more advanced—but the principle is the same. From what your GME found, it looks like they’re using a similar approach to what Nightwatch did.”

Lea recalled a single word from the rush of documents Vortex showed her—something Didi Novak had also mentioned.

“Biomagnetites.”

Vortex nodded.

“The idea has been around for a while,” he said. “Parapsychologists investigated biomagnetism as a possible source for various forms of ESP as far back as the mid-twentieth century. Their efforts were dismissed as little more than voodoo science. It wasn’t until the beginnings of theoretical nanopsychology that the theory regained acceptance in the more radical circles—and you saw where
that
led.”

“Down a very dark road,” Lea said, remembering the lost highway that had led her to Chernobyl. “Still, it’s hard for me to imagine the
Inru
taking their cue from something like this. Nightwatch was such an obscure project, it’s doubtful their hammerjacks would have stumbled across it by accident.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because
I
never did.”

Vortex gave her a dry smile, so much like Cray Alden that it made him seem human again. It was hard to conceive that both of them, at one time, had been in the game as enemies—with him as hunter and her as prey.

“Neither did I,” he agreed. “But the evidence leads in that direction.”

Lea remained dubious.

“It’s still a big shift in the Ascension paradigm,” she argued. “That’s been the
Inru
’s goal all along, to evolve human beings past the point of synthetic intelligence.”

“It might now be the only way to achieve that goal.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it,” Vortex prodded. “Most of the
Inru
technology was destroyed. They have only bits and pieces, which they cobble back together the best they can—only it’s not enough to re-create Ascension-grade flash, at least not in a refined form. So they go back to the drawing board, creating a variant based on an
earlier
version—then hope like hell that they can make it work.”

Lea thought of the unknown virus under Novak’s microscope, of how it had so much in common with flash—yet behaved so differently.

“And it does,” Vortex continued. “Just not the way they expected. Maybe there’s a side effect to the design—something that caused a massive failure in Chernobyl. Whatever it is, you can bet the
Inru
won’t stop until they fix the problem.”

“You actually think they can use telepathy to achieve Ascension?” Lea asked.

“It’s a real possibility,” Vortex said. “Near the end of my Ascension, I was
wired,
you know—hard-linked to everything and everyone around me. It was almost like…
drowning
in some massive consciousness.” He trailed off into a loaded silence before he could finish. “Those
Inru
hammerjacks would have picked up on it in a heartbeat, Lea. There’s no way they could have missed it.”