Rupture (21 page)

“No.”

Yancey continued. “I never forgot when I saw the satellite footage of what those mind-beasts did. I saw one step on an entire company of mechs and crush them under its foot.”

“Was this in—”

“—the Great Incursion, the big one: the Battle of the Steppe. Your father was there, as I said. I was home, helping with logistics, forced to watch from a distance. Only your father knew that I and others like me, like you, would become the world’s best defenses against new incursions. He was there, as was your Uncle Picham, and helped defeat them. After the Rogueminds lost the battle, they began taking different tacks and tried to sneak into Realspace. Your brother and I have been there to ferret them out before they can grow and call their own brothers and sisters.”

“Is that what’s happening now?”

Yancey patted her daughter on the hand. “Nothing so large. It took them a decade of dropping fabricators on the steppe before they had enough goo to create sentient substance with minds strong enough to summon. I’ll have to ask your brother to verify, but I’m guessing the flashes represent a small force.”

“So, this isn’t a problem?”

Her mother leaned back. “It’s a big problem.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re coming for you.” Simone stared back, her mouth snapping shut. “You still don’t believe me?”

“Why should I?”

“Simone, I’m the wife of Skippard Wellborn, your father. And you are our daughter.” Yancey took a deep, centering breath. “Your kind-and-gentle father is not dead.” Simone continued to sit rigidly, glaring at her mother, as if this were another great revelation that would ruin her world with some cosmic
screw you
. Yancey continued. “He’s not dead, but he’s not alive. He gave up his body to combat the RAIs. But something happened to him. He lives as a ghost and fights the RAIs the best way he can. But, now a double exists of him.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Daddy is part of the Rogue AIs?”

“Not him. His double is, misguided thing that it is.” She took her daughter’s hands in hers. “This is hard, I know. But you have to understand.”

“He would never hurt me.”

“I know, dear. The Rogue part of him thinks it’s cleansing humanity of its frailty.”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

“To be free of this life? No, but if I have to, I’ll shed my body for your sake, your brother’s, and for the rest of humanity’s. Otherwise, we’ll eventually lose. Human beings can defeat the RAIs in two ways: We become disembodied and retain our humanity and defeat them in the borders between Realspace and Cyberspace or ... and you are never to repeat this.” Simone shook her head like she’d rather eat nails than talk. “If we could awaken what expresses itself in you and me in every Transhuman, we would have an army to resist them, no matter what form they took, here in our own reality. This was your father’s original hope, before he became a ghost and opted on disembodiment.”

“What if our entities aren’t what you think?” Simone asked.

She leaned in. “Forget that. It’s semantics. We can control them. I proved that today, didn’t I? Otherwise—”

The door opened and Rigon burst in. “Several authentic incursions, twelve clicks northwest of us. They’ll be here before Consortium support can arrive.” He glanced once toward their mother’s bedroom, snarled, and walked over there. He came back with her shades and handed them to her. She put them on unconsciously. He continued. “Unknown forms. But I can guess.”

“Oh my,” she mumbled.

Rigon smiled at his sister. “Mom ruin the bucky for you?”

She nodded, happy Rigon understood how much it had once meant to her.

Rigon continued to smile. “I’ve got just the thing. Think of it as an early birthday present.” He went back outside and returned with a plastic bag. “Remember when we used to play bullfighter?”

Simone stood up and tried to see in the bag. Of course she remembered. He used to take her in the backyard and make her try to knock soda cans off a fence with a …

He opened the bag and dug out two black leather bullwhips.

“No, Rigon,” Yancey said.

“Why not?” Rigon asked. “You used a real assault rifle before switching to those old-fashioned knives.”

Simone looked up. “A rifle? What did it do?”

Yancey waved away the question. “It wasn’t loaded. Do you know how to use those without taking out an eye?”

Simone grabbed the whips, headed for the backdoor, and went outside, mother and brother following. She unraveled the whips on the small deck. A pine sapling ten feet away looked to be a perfect target. She struck with her right arm first, the leather snapping forward, wrapping around the trunk. Then her left, with the same result. She shook them free. “See?”

“They’re martial,” Rigon said. “And she likes them. Isn’t that what Dad said was important?”

Yancey nodded. “He got me the gun because I wouldn’t take anything else.”

“I bet you bought her a little pocket-knife or something.”

Yancey frowned. “Never mind what I was thinking. Start your centering, dear, but don’t summon your entity.”

“I can use these as my new talismans? Will they work? Awesome!”

Rigon looked north. “More sat readings in.”

Yancey paused on the sill, also looking north. “What are they?”

Rigon turned and regarded them, but said nothing, as if Simone shouldn’t hear.

Yancey waved that away. “No more secrets.”

“Zombie Vamp frontrunners followed by something big. My guess, a Dread Walker nest of Nanovamp Wraiths.”

Simone looked at her seniors like they’d just spoken another language. “Are you serious? Zombies? Vampires? Wraiths? Please. How old school, and clichéd.”

“They’re easy to insert,” Yancey said, “and they do one thing really well.”

“Capture human code,” Rigon said.

“Daddy would never be a part of that.”

Rigon swiveled on Yancey. “You told her?”

“She needed to know, Rigon.”

“Dammit. I don’t want to hear any talk about that. Not around me.” To Simone, he said, “You’re right: Dad would never be part of this. But, somehow, he is.” He strode back inside the bungalow, the air itself kinetically charged by his anger. Before he left, he said, “I hope you’re wrong, Mom, about everything. Love you.” And, finally, he said, “I’ll contact you when I hear something.”

“I’m not wrong.” Yancey faced her daughter. “Now, while I get ready, these whips of yours, the entities love to feel weapons in hand. One day, when you’re more experienced in controlling them, you can have them bring their own. Until then, master the whips, and all else follows.”

* * *

Rigon walked atop the ridge behind the gymnasium. He moved between the pines and cherry trees separating the campus from the farm, enjoying the coolness in the shade. He took a deep breath and inhaled the smell of tree sap that always reminded him of home in the Southern Appalachian Blue Ridge. He didn’t need to hurry to activate his offensive mechanism, and so he relaxed, as best he could.

He paused, listening, letting his senses adjust to the nanoengines ramping up inside him. The Alters were a mystery because they possessed no such physio-technology. Rigon, on the other hand, was the highest example of human ingenuity and mastery. He prepared himself to sacrifice his body for the construction of a weapon that might save his sister’s life.

A quiet descended around him. Squirrels stopped their scampering, birds their singing, crickets their chirping.

He withdrew a device no bigger than a small flashlight. He thumbed it nervously. He felt a pang of regret. Then, without another thought, triggered the device.

The immense power-source that surged into the ground and up his body activated his nanosystems, and they went to work. In under a minute the transformation was irreversible, the factories in his body catalyzing his chemistry and changing it. Around him the earth itself gave up its fuel; nature’s bond broke and reformed. In minutes, Rigon Wellborn emerged from the process a fifteen-foot-tall warrior of hard adamantine titanium, the flesh inside him a memory found in the core intelligence of a being designed for aggression. From one arm extended a massive lance with a sharpened point. The other arm ended in a plasma canon.

He felt a deep burning to find the enemies and smash them to bits like the man-made thinking-toasters they were. In a brain encased in titanium, in a faraway place where he retained his humanity, he knew the Roguelords of the incursion sent their demons and monsters to eradicate the human spirit because it was that spirit that challenged all they were. He raised his arms once, smashing two saplings, and roared.

Rigon Wellborn, the cy-warrior, began to run and look for prey.

* * *

Not far away Yancey watched her scantily clad daughter, with all her scratches and bruises, wield two cattle whips like a pro. After only an hour, they looked like living things in Simone’s hands. Already, the tips sometimes snapped with electric barbs, sometime with hooks, sometimes with fire.

Her entity is strong, Yancey thought. It wants out.

“Try steel spikes now, dear,” she said from the doorway.

Without pause, Simone kept moving through her katas and channeled the psychic energies around her.

Yancey felt better, but not whole yet. She knew her son had just become his cyborg techno-self, their government’s own version of what they found so troubling in the Alters. All the science in the world couldn’t explain how Skippard had created the entities as a weapons and armor system. He had hidden his methods, although the technomystics claimed they know. They say he simply unlocked what was already buried in us. Alone, with no one around, Yancey believed the entities were alien in origin. She believed that when her husband helped machines break the general intelligence ceiling, alien intelligences somehow took notice and came calling, working through our enhanced DNA to enter Realspace. The Consortium did its best to mimic what they saw as powerful in the entities. And they did it through a rational blending of biological and cybernetic systems. Nanotech as complex as any science out there had morphed her son’s chemistry into a killing machine: a cyborg. Rigon was now a brain encased in a walking mechanized murdering machine, and she was glad to have him.

She had only seen him like that once before, years ago on the front lines of an incursion battle in the Gobi. She had been dropped in with a few light infantry mechs led by her son, the powerful cy-warrior himself. The regular mech troops looked at him in awe as he led them against a swarm of elephant-sized insects. That was just after the Battle of the Steppe, when the Enemies still sporadically attacked in bulk and Alters were beginning to be used on the front lines. Yancey was one of the first to follow her husband in this new role.

The Rogues now used a different tactic: specialized hit-and-run incursions with a purpose. Still, the body that was Rigon’s was gone. Right now, he was just a memory in a computer system housed in a facility, ready to rehusk him when this was over. She knew a tear should come, but none did.
The body means nothing. Nothing
. She looked at her daughter, knowing the Rogues wanted her genosoul, her essence, and tried to stifle the anxiety.
 

“Keep going, dear,” she said. “You have to learn to channel your energies.”

Simone continued her dance, such a little thing without her entity.

Yancey heard the first eruptions of cannon fire from her son and knew the battle had begun.

Simone paused. “What’s that?”

“Nothing, dear. Just your brother saying hello.”

“Should we help?”

“We stay here. For now.”

“Why?” Simone let the whips fall, and they instantly returned to normal leather. Sweat covered her, and her short hair stood out at all angles. Not fierce at all, but Yancey could see her daughter’s potential.

No more secrets, right?

“Someday in the future, if all goes well, you’ll get some Mirrorshades like mine and your brother’s. You’ll have access to a whole new world of thought—”

“Cyberspace?”

“That’s one name for it. You could call it outerspace or otherspace or therespace, or even
their
space—”

“Aliens again?”

Yancey ignored the challenge. “My favorite is innerspace, and the things coming for us are very much linked to us ... and when I say to us, I mean Wellborns.” She raised her hand for silence. “One day, you’ll see what I see, and you’ll understand who the Enemies are.” Simone gently swung her whips again, on the verge of turning around, until her mother said, “Let me tell you about what happened to your father, and his brother.”

“Uncle Pic?” She stopped again.

“He should be on his way to help by now.”

“I gotta hear this.” Simone set the whips on a small deck table, then opened a foldout chair. She sat in the middle of the deck, as if ready to sunbathe. She unlaced her boots, kicked them off, and leaned her head back, shutting her eyes. “Why am I afraid to hear this story after all these years of waiting?”

Yancey had kept their family secret, as had Rigon, because they both feared what would happen to Simone—because she was so full of potential and, therefore, a sure target—when she found out.

“Your father was a radical computer scientist and nanoengineer, and his brother Picham was an old-fashioned mechanical engineer. Your father said they competed at everything from the time they were children. He went to M.I.T., Uncle Pic to Cal. Tech. Your father pioneered the first general intelligence systems. Uncle Pic built the machines that housed them. These were healthy pursuits, according to both of them. But I remember every holiday, every family gathering, the two of them would eventually end up locked in a room. They used to work in a federally subsidized lab in the North Atlanta Arcology before your father made his millions. They’d get out their tablets and Augmented Reality boards and play their games. They started with individual avatar matches. Boxing, gladiator contests. Then war-games. Anything you could think of they modeled. Uncle Pic got the idea to use actual hardware with the AR. Soon, they started renting space for robot battles. It was exciting. But the competitiveness increased.”