Animus Intercept Page 28

  The world disappeared in a thundering cloud that steamed up the Buckyball's windows. Then it was as if Zeke's imaginary giant friend slapped the sphere with one massive hand. His cage's shock-absorbing pistons hissed as the Buckyball jolted sideways. His windows cleared, and for a moment he was underwater – a disconcerting image of a submerged deer kicking its legs furiously – before bobbing to the surface.

  The scene settled down a bit. Zeke was skittering along the water toward a forested slope, rising at skyscraper-elevator speed. In minutes he'd crest and flow over the mountains or the current would shove him through the lower-lying crevices. Either way, wasn't much to do but enjoy the ride.

  Which got bumpy when the wind blew him across the rising surface right into the tree line. The water roiled against the mountainside, tossing his Buckyball up and down and to and fro like an out of balance washing machine on spin cycle. About then he started to strongly regret the two shots of whiskey he'd had an hour ago.

  Just when he was on the verge of losing it the currents carried him through a crevice to the other side, and for a long two seconds he sat poised at the pinnacle with the Nevada desert panorama stretching before him – and then a monstrous gust of wind blew him from his perch as the water started to descend. At first he thought he was in for a long fall, but he caught an updraft which yanked him into the clouds and what felt like a supercharged jet stream, based on the speed and the fact that he was watching the flat terrain below slide past just as if he really was in a commercial jet looking down.

  The Buckyball bobbed and weaved a bit in the air, much as a jet would in bumpy weather, but just when Zeke thought he was going to fall the wind would scoop him up again. It was one fuck of a bumpy ride, like the worst stomach-lurching turbulence he'd ever experienced on an airliner – without any breaks. But screw it. He was still alive, and eventually he was going to fall. Unless he got dragged out into space, which he sincerely hoped didn't happen.

  Zeke noticed he wasn't the only thing in the air that didn't belong: sections of roofs, tree limbs, wings from a plane, shredded lumber from buildings or homes, flowers, grass...people? He could've sworn a person – a young woman with short hair – sailed by, but was gone in an eye-blink. It was hard to focus on anything with the sphere spinning unpredictably in all directions. Another glimpse of the ground, and he swore he spotted another Buckyball bounding along a sandy ravine below. But then his sphere shifted and it was gone.

  Zeke decided to close his eyes and stop trying to see out the constantly moving windows. Let Jesus or Zeus take the damn wheel. As if he had any choice.

  At some point he started to fall. A burst of butterflies in his stomach and he opened his eyes. A sense of weightlessness. Free fall. As a former Ranger, he was familiar with that feeling. He kept waiting to be bumped back into the "jet stream," but the weightlessness persisted. The Buckyball stabilized and he could see the ground rushing up to greet him. The first real test –

  The impact stopped the thought. As cushioned and cradled as he was, Zeke did not expect to feel pain – but he did: the pistons on the cage at his feet bottomed out and the shock blew up through his body like a kick from a horse. He didn't lose consciousness, but his vision blurred and his mind turned fuzzy. Then the Buckyball was rolling again, and the cage held him upright, but his head was spinning along with the sphere's windows.

  Zeke didn't register the Buckyball stopping at first. He felt he was still in motion, much like after a long day on the road. But after a minute or two the vibrations in his body eased even if his thoughts didn't. He appeared to have been plunked down on a grassy field at the edge of an enormous body of water. He gazed out through a side window at hills interspersed with water. A large fish with a square head lay flapping its fins ten or so meters away. It took him several uncomprehending moments before he realized he was staring at a hammerhead shark.

  He took some time to collect his thoughts. The wind was still howling outside, but it was a more normal wind, gently rocking his sphere. Due to the speed of its passage, the main tidal force was supposed to occur over roughly ninety minutes. Had an hour and a half passed? In some ways it felt like no more than a few minutes; in other ways it seemed like a lifetime. He watched the grass outside bending and realized that the wind had reversed - now coming from the east - which implied that Animus had released its tidal death-grip on Earth since he'd been pulled in that direction.

  Was the air safe to breathe? The Buckyball featured some simple but precise sensors/meters for measuring the air, temperature, and even radiation levels, but he'd have to disentangle himself from his protective straitjacket and break down the cage/cradle first. He wouldn't want to do that and have the wind pick up dangerously again.

  Zeke bided his time for another thirty minutes, sweat breaking on his brow as the Buckyball started to heat up. When the wind didn't change, he disconnected his harness and broke down the attached cage. He slapped a magnetic handle mounted on the cage one of the pair of magnets inserted flush with the inner wall and slid out one of the drawers - so precisely machined that it and its mates were invisible except for the circular magnets.

  He detached one water bag from a string of them and moved from window to window as he drank. The electrolytes made the water taste like crap, but who was he to complain? Zeke guessed he was one out of several million who was still alive. He couldn't see much except hills – some with grass, some torn-up dirt. Somewhere in the plains? It reminded him of western South Dakota or Nebraska.

  Zeke opened a panel that exposed the external environment meters. A series of luminous bars which each ranged from green to red indicated air quality, radiation levels, and temperature. The radiation levels and temperature were green. The overall air quality index was just shading into red. He took that to mean he could breathe outside for a while without hacking his lungs out. Fortunately, the Buckyball stocked a high quality respirator.

  He popped two more panels, folded out the plastisteel handles, and rotated a larger panel until it came free. A rotating pressure handle inside the wall opened a small, outer entrance/exit. Zeke crawled out and stood up.

  The air tasted like bad barbecue. Zeke's first deep breath was rewarded with a slight burning in his chest, as if he'd inhaled smoke from a campfire. He coughed and looked around.

  His breath caught – for reasons that had nothing to do with air pollution. Another Buckyball rested atop a hill no more than one hundred meters away. A young woman in shorts – couldn't be more than thirty or forty, Zeke thought – was waving frantically at him. Zeke raised one hand and waved back.

  Maybe the end of the world wasn't going to be quite as bad as he'd expected, he thought.

  "WELL, THAT'S it, then," said Mallory, raising a glass of bourbon in toast to the holograph of Earth, returned to near-normal two hours after Animus's perigee. "Here's to the best world I've ever known."

  "That has to be the lamest epitaph for a civilization in the history of the universe," said Andrea.

  "Epitaph?" Mallory's words had a slight bourbon-inspired slur. "Our civilization ain't dead, sweet lady. What you see down there's a mere bump in the road. The human race is just getting warmed up."

  Andrea shook her head and turned away as if she couldn't bear facing his strained smile. Zane wasn't feeling all that tolerant of it, either. Aside from a few military friends and a slough of ex-girlfriends who probably cursed his name, David wasn't leaving much behind. And he wasn't known for his love of the human race. He was probably already planning his moves on what he described as the "hot nerd chicks" on Proxima Beta. All fifteen or sixteen of them.

  "I think we've seen enough," said Zane. "Unless anyone objects." No one spoke. "Andrea, take us toward Beta. Medium impulse."

  "Yes, sir."

  They'd take the slow boat ride out of their solar system. No need, thought Zane, to rush since they needed three days to prepare for suspended animation, and after that superluminal speed would quickly reduce any progress made at subluminal to a t
iny footnote.

  Unlike the smooth, uneventful freezing process portrayed in science fiction - where you just hopped in without any preparation other than stripping to underwear - real-life suspended animation took a minimum of three days of fasting and cleansing. The first two days you purged yourself while drinking electrolytes. The third day you drank a green preservative-glycogen-electrolyte concoction called "Gatorade." If your immune system and other body and organ functions tested okay then, you were good to go.

  It wasn't a fun process. Nor was waking up.

  Normally, they'd go into the SAC in shifts, with at least one person staying awake in a crew this small, but Patricia changed that equation. Her human body could be in suspension while her mainframe mind would remain awake and in charge. That saved taking periodic breaks from superluminal while someone performed the required system and equipment maintenance checks every few weeks. Now they could travel to the Proxima Centauri system hell-bent for leather without breaks.

  They meandered across the solar system at a leisurely eighty thousand kilometers per hour. Staying out of the subluminal compression drive allowed them to remain in peak condition during the three-day fast.

  A final day of guzzling "Gatorade" and they were ready for hibernation. They gathered around the Suspension Animation Canisters. Zane would be the first to go under – Patricia the last. Zane noticed that her expression was no more cheerful than his or the others.

  "Gonna get lonely for us, Patty?" Mallory asked.

  "Patricia." Her faraway gaze and tensed jaw – classic features of apprehension – surprised Zane. "I will miss some of you." She glanced at Zane and looked away.

  "You've done this a couple of times, Captain," said Andrea. "Do you dream?"

  "No. There's nothing. You might as well be dead."

  "It would be hard to dream without any brain electrical activity," said Dan.

  Andrea raised an eyebrow. "Maybe there's more to us than that?"

  "Not likely."

  "Okay." Zane let out a breath. "I guess it's time to get some serious brain freeze. See you at the red sun."

  He stepped into the upright titanium alloy canister. The door closed and was ratcheted tight with a pair of compression handles. He peered out through the transparent plastisteel pane into Keira's – Patricia's – green-blue eyes. She looked immeasurably sad.

  They performed the numerous rigorous safety checks. The countdown to full SA involved precise steps. Missteps could be near-instantly fatal. The first step, also unlike the near-instantaneous process portrayed in fiction, was chilling the body by slow degrees. Slow, painful degrees. It was like being gradually dipped into an icy pool. This was Zane and most people's least favorite part of the procedure.

  Zane tried to relax and think of somewhere warm. That beach in San Diego where he first met his son. Seagulls rising in the warm spring air. But at one point in his visualization the ocean froze over and snow began falling on the beach. Luckily, his discomfort was fading along with his consciousness.

  His last image was of his dad standing on the beach in a snow suit giving him a grinning thumbs-up.

  Chapter 17

  MULTI-COLORED LIGHTS FLICKERED in Zane's eyelids. He felt he was floating gently upward. Consciousness returned in bits and pieces. By the time his eyes fluttered open Zane had a pretty good idea of what was happening and where he was.

  He was wrong. He was not in a Suspended Animation Canister. The only thing he was suspended on appeared to be air. He craned his head sideways. Light beams were flashing all around him on hundreds of people...well, not people. The fly-like bodies were not people. He searched his mind for the word. Zikkan. The room and the non-people were more than familiar. He knew where this was, but it made not even the remotest form of sense that he would be there.

  Zane was used to feeling disorientation, sometimes even extreme disorientation, on awakening. Waking up in a strange motel squared. That came with the territory of space travel in a variety of ships. But this was way beyond that. The "ah-ha!" moment that always eventually came refused to arrive now.

  "What the fuck?"

  Zane twisted his head toward the familiar groaning voice. Mallory lay in the air, rubbing his forehead and looking around with utter incomprehension. Next to Mallory lay Patricia, then Andrea, Dana, and, Dan. Odd, because Dana hadn't even been on this mission. Nor had she made the survival "cut." Further down, Horace and his four crewmembers were also stirring awake.

  But that was the least of the oddities. Because Zzullzhrun was floating in the air next to Dan. She had already sat up and was peering about with just as much shock as everyone else.

  Zane rolled off whatever was supporting him and planted his feet on a solid floor. He turned to his crew. "Everyone okay?"

  They murmured and grumbled.

  "Teleportation?" Zane suggested.

  "That's one possibility. How long were we under?" He looked to Patricia along the rest of them.

  "The date is July 22, 2018."

  Zane stared at her along with the others. "2018? The 22nd is only about two weeks after we arrived here for our first mission."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You're sure that time is right?" Talk about deja vu all over again.

  "As sure as I can be of anything right now, Captain. That's what my internal clock is telling me."

  "So what just happened? Did we go back in time?"

  No one appeared in a rush to reply. After a few moments, Dan Mueller cleared his throat.

  Dan rubbed his face. "I'd say that's the least likely explanation."

  Zane looked at him. "What's the most likely?"

  "Virtual reality?"

  "Come on."

  Dan spread his arms wide. "More likely that we journeyed back in time?"

  Horace hobbled over, stretching his body as he walked. Adele and the four other surviving Peacemaker crewmembers wandered up behind them. Andrea and Dana joined the circle of people forming around Zane.

  "Now ain't this a kick in the pants," Horse opined.

  "Okay," said Andrea. "What the hell is going on here?"

  "Patricia says it's 2018," said Dan. "July 22, to be precise."

  Everyone turned to Patricia. She offered an uncharacteristic shrug.

  "That's impossible," said Mallory. "We all just watched the end of the world, didn't we?"

  "I didn't," said Dana. "I watched a room disintegrate down in Nellis Level 8. And then I was here."

  "I watched it from the Ardent," said Horace. He turned to his crew. "Didn't all of you?"

  "I did," said Adele. "It was horrible."

  Her crewmates echoed her sentiment.

  "So we were all there," said Zane. "In some sense."

  "And now we're back on Animus?" Andrea shook her head in slow denial.

  "Thoughts?"

  Zane looked around them, settling on Patricia.

  "I think Dan's probably right," she said. "We were in some extremely advanced form of virtual reality."

  "No fucking way," said Mallory.

  "I agree with David," said Zane. "Nothing could create that much real detail. I know my dad. I know my ex-wife. I know Colonel Hurtle. No program could imitate them, no matter how smart or advanced it was."

  "Even if it used your own thoughts?" Dan asked.

  "My own thoughts?" Zane shook his head with barely suppressed violence. "I learned I had a child. A son. Something I never imagined. No way that came from me."

  "An insightful enough AI with access to our thoughts might be capable of pulling that off," Dan said with another shrug.

  "Bullshit," Mallory snapped.

  "My ICU – independent cognitive unit – no longer exists," Patricia announced. She pointed down a row of suspended or dead Zikkan to a doorway opening on the alien hangar and their ship, lit up in clear view. "I'm running wireless off the Cheyenne's mainframe."

  "They removed your unit?" Zane felt he was rapidly falling down a rabbit hole.

  "I've performed an inventory
on my body. The unit was never installed. We were never in 2021."

  "Then Dan's right?" Dana was shaking her head in apparent rhythm to Andrea's. "We were all imagining everything?"

  "Look at these fly people." Dan motioned to the still Zikkan. "What do you think they're doing? Right now I'd say dreaming away their lives in their own world or worlds."

  "I think that's a logical guess," said Patricia.

  "I'm not buying it," said Mallory. "Stuff happened down there I never could've imagined. Trust me on that. There's no way in hell any fucking machine, no matter how 'insightful,' could understand people that well."

  "Who can say what it's capable of understanding?" Dan asked.

  "I'm with David," said Zane. "Count me as a fellow Luddite, but there are limits to what an AI can do. The people I dealt with weren't computer simulations. Neither were any of you, obviously. Are you saying we all shared the same dream? But none of you – no offense – were more real than the others who aren't here."

  Zane knew he was rambling, but it was hard to get a rein on his thoughts, even more so than usual. Maybe an AI with godlike abilities unimaginably greater than theirs could pull it off, but that was too much for his feeble human mind to accept.

  Dan's eyes had glazed over in reflection. "I'm rather skeptical on that score, myself. The only thing I'm certain of is that we're being manipulated on a monumental scale, and I don't understand why."

  No one spoke for a few moments.

  "It knows we want to fuck with this place," said Mallory. "Why doesn't it just kill us instead of putting us to sleep and feeding us fairy tales?"

  Dan nodded. "An excellent question."

  "We know more than we did before," said Zane. "Assuming it's not an illusion."

  "It knows more as well."

  "Let's start with the basics," said Horace. "When, exactly, did this virtual dream start? When was the last time we were in actual reality before whatever put us in here put us in here?"

  Zane rubbed his temples, hoping to massage some clarity into his brain.

  "When the lights were flickering inside the Cheyenne," said Patricia, "just after we saw the cloud of alien machines over the ruins of the Mountain of Remembrance."