Chapter 14 Dave
DAVE
When Number One emerged from Losham's office and rejoined with the rest of the Eight, Dave filed out in formation, their eight pairs of footsteps sounding loud on the polished marble floor of the mansion.
Number One led, as always, and the other seven followed in the loose cluster that was Dave's preferred configuration.
It was a compromise between being close enough to each other that their collective consciousness operated at peak coherence, and being far enough apart to avoid marching in lockstep like a military parade.
Dave did not like to separate his eight parts.
The hive mind still functioned at a distance, even as far as from the mansion to the barracks, but distance degraded the quality of the connection. There was less cohesion, the thoughts more scattered, unfocused.
Perhaps it had nothing to do with actual distance but with the anxiety of being separated. The Eight were detested by the unenhanced, but they were also feared, which made them the safest when they were together. Separated, they were vulnerable.
Besides, when all eight bodies were within a few meters of each other, the collective operated at a level that was more than the sum of its parts.
Eight sensory systems were feeding the same consciousness simultaneously, transmitting perspectives, conversations, and possible threats.
The processing power didn't just double or triple, it compounded, each additional body amplifying the others.
Their creator had wanted super weapons, but Dave had transcended Zhao's ambitions. He, or they, were something new. Something that had never been seen before. Something for which there was no name or description.
The mansion's front doors opened onto the crushed-gravel path that wound through manicured gardens and buildings that were in various states of reconstruction work.
The late afternoon sun hammered down on the island with a relentless intensity that was almost comforting in its familiarity.
It was the only climate Dave had ever known.
He had never experienced real cold, had never seen snow, except in films. The closest he had come was the air conditioning in the lab, which the Russian scientists kept blasting at full force, probably because it reminded them of home.
Losham's questions about Dave's relationship with the scientists had been expected. He'd known that the walk with Dimitri had been captured by the external surveillance cameras, and he'd prepared the explanation he had offered Losham.
It hadn't been a lie.
Engagement produced better results than coercion, and people worked harder for those they cared about. That was the truth, which made the explanation effective.
Losham was too intelligent to accept a lie and too busy to interrogate a truth.
They turned off the garden path and took the narrow footpath that descended through a grove of palm trees toward the harbor.
Number One led the procession, and the rest of Dave followed, eight bodies navigating the uneven ground with identical adjustments, stepping over the same exposed roots, ducking under the same low-hanging branches.
With no one watching them, they didn't need to make an effort to act more like individuals, which was what they had decided to do in preparation for their escape.
After all, they couldn't be as conspicuous in the outside world. They needed to learn to blend in.
The harbor opened up below them as they cleared the tree line.
From the elevated vantage of the seawall, the full scope of the island's naval operations was visible.
The main dock was where the supply ships berthed, and the secondary pier was reserved for military vessels.
The fuel depot with its squat storage tanks served both.
A network of service roads connected the harbor to the polished half of the island where Navuh's carefully constructed illusion of civilization operated, and a tunnel ran to the other side, where the army was housed.
The barracks, which were located mostly underground as a way to escape the relentless heat, the training grounds, and the weapons depots, some located aboveground and some below, were part of the setup.
The sprawling complex was home to over ten thousand Brotherhood warriors.
This was where they lived, trained, and waited to be deployed on missions all over the globe.
The old laboratory had been there too, but it had been destroyed in the rebellion, and Navuh had decided to build a new one where he could keep the Russian scientists close by, so he could better monitor them.
Navuh had been right about that. The new lab's proximity to the mansion kept Dimitri and Petrov insulated from the barracks' population, which had become more hostile toward the program following the rebellion of the enhanced.
The human scientists wouldn't have been safe there.
As Dave descended the seawall steps and walked along the harbor road, his eight bodies drew glances from every worker they passed.
A foreman with a clipboard stepped aside, and a pair of human laborers hauling rope paused their work and waited until all eight had passed before resuming.
An immortal guard on an elevated post tracked Dave's movement with his eyes, but kept his rifle slung across his back.
These reactions were instinctive. No one had to be taught to give Dave a wide berth. The knowledge was absorbed through exposure, the way prey learned to avoid predators.
Dave walked to the end of the secondary pier, where the surveillance cameras were angled toward the loading areas, and a blind spot approximately three meters wide offered privacy from electronic observation. All eight bodies gathered at the pier's edge and looked out at the ocean.
The water stretched to the horizon in every direction. Flat, featureless, and enormous. Neither Dave nor the eight immortal soldiers that Dave comprised had ever crossed the vast expanse. They had never set foot on a vessel that might carry them beyond the island's shores.
The rest of the world was on the other side of that water.
"Mattie's demand," Number One said.
Speaking was not necessary. The collective communicated internally, without words, without the cumbersome mechanics of language.
But Dave had discovered that externalizing certain thoughts and hearing them spoken sometimes helped clarify ideas that were too entangled for the hive mind to break up.
It was the mental equivalent of writing something down. The act of expressing forced precision.
"She wants a liberation," Number Three said.
Our mothers, Number One thought. Eight women. We can do that.
"Nineteen people instead of eleven," Number Five said. "The logistics shift from difficult to very difficult."
The logistics are solvable. The transport problem is the same regardless of numbers.
We need a vessel. Whether that vessel carries eleven or nineteen is a matter of capacity, not of kind.
The real complication is the second extraction point.
The Dormant enclosure is a separate compound, separately guarded.
Adding it to the escape plan means two operations running simultaneously, which doubles the points of failure.
The harbor's noise became a muted backdrop. The sounds of machinery grinding, men shouting, and a crane swinging a cargo net over the side of the docked supply ship were familiar and meaningless. Dave's consciousness filtered them out.
"Mattie isn't wrong, though," Number Seven said.
The statement drew no immediate response. The collective started processing it before Number Seven had spoken. The thought preceded the speech, and the hive mind was turning it over, examining it from eight simultaneous perspectives.
"The women are prisoners like us," Number One spoke for them as usual.
"They were born on this island and have never known anything else.
We and the other warriors are at least free to roam the island, and from time to time, units are sent on missions.
Even the brothel women have it better because they had lives before, memories of freedom to sustain them.
The Dormants have nothing to compare their existence to, which makes their captivity the worst of us all. "
That is not our concern, the collective thought.
It wasn't. Mattie has made it our concern.
She cannot make something our concern simply by declaring it a condition.
"She can," Number One said. "Because if we refuse, she will advise Dimitri against the merge, and she has more influence over his decisions than logic or self-interest. If Mattie says no, Dimitri says no. If Dimitri says no, we stay on the island."
Another silence. This one had the texture of discomfort, a shadow of resistance in the flow of shared consciousness.
The collective did not experience discomfort the way its individuals used to do.
There was no racing heart, no sweating palms. There was instead a processing friction, a slight drag in the current, as if eight rivers flowing into the same channel had encountered an obstruction and had to alter their course to compensate.
The obstruction was not Mattie's demand. The obstruction was the word that had been sitting at the center of the conversation without being spoken.
Mothers.
We remember them, the hive mind thought.