Chapter 32 #3
There was almost no perceptible movement. When I opened my eyes, I was already a hundred or more feet off the ground and rising fast, traveling in utter silence. I took a hard, shuddering breath, then forced it out more slowly, trying to calm my hammering heart. My stomach jumped into my throat.
“Are you comfortable?”
We blurred through the layer of dirty gray clouds and into the empty sky beyond, and my body started to angle and turn west by northwest, if the red sun was anything to go by.
“Just—go, go.”
We went.
It’s difficult to describe the sensation of flight, of true flight, unencumbered by the metallic skin and droning engines of an aircraft.
I’d flown dozens of times in my youth and, later, for business.
Then, much more recently, I’d flown in Anjari’s and Raven’s sleek aerial cars.
Those had been quiet and smooth and brought me closer to the speed and sensation of true flight.
None of those measured up.
I’d had dreams that came close to capturing the essence of open-air flight.
I remembered, as we rocketed silently along, skimming over the clouds, the gray ocean floor distant and yawning below, one specific dream I had as a boy.
I’d flown over my elementary school, arms spread, diving and swooping and laughing as other kids ran below, pointing and shouting in jealousy.
This surpassed even my dreams.
We moved fast. Extremely fast. We broke the sound barrier in a heartbeat, the air compressing in a visible hemispherical shock wave around me.
I didn’t hear the boom because we left it behind us.
Behind the safety of the invisible force fields Lyle erected around me, all I could hear was a vague rushing wind and feel a cool breeze on my face, which I suspected Lyle allowed through to help keep me calm.
I surprised myself by settling down. I should have been terrified, but instead I felt free, unburdened.
The proverbial load plucked from my shoulders.
I was more alive than I’d felt in ages, and for the first time in days, I went entire minutes without thinking about Lyle, or Amy, or Miri, or my father.
I stared, in wonder, at the world flashing by below me.
The gray ocean floor gave way to pallid waves.
The remains of the mighty Pacific. We moved so quickly westward we outdistanced the line of the sunrise, moving back into darkness.
I asked Lyle to give me night vision and I spent time magnifying my view of the waves, trying to catch a glimpse of life.
At one point I thought I spotted whales, or a school of fish, but even Lyle couldn’t be sure.
“Is the entire world like LA?” I asked, somewhere high above the Pacific. “Bombed out and irradiated?”
“No. We’ve already left the greatest concentration of radiation behind us. And I detected some nonrandom electromagnetic signals that, although weak, would indicate technologically savvy life still exists somewhere on the planet.”
“Then why would those people stay in that bombed-out place?”
“Who can say? People aren’t exactly known for their rational decisions. And with all the destruction, they may not know there are less-radiated areas outside Los Angeles.”
“That’s…” Words failed me. “Why not at least try to move somewhere else?”
“What if elsewhere was worse?”
That quieted me for a long time.
At some point, even the staggeringly remarkable became mundane. I fell asleep, a single human in a sweatshirt and cargo pants rocketing along above the clouds, my hair barely moving from the wind. In the gentle folds of the force fields, I lay on the most perfectly engineered bed ever created.
Lyle woke me. “Dad.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, clawing back awake.
“We’re almost to our destination.”
I peered down as the earth rushed toward me. “Feet dry,” I whispered, half remembering the line from some military movie when a plane was no longer over the ocean.
“For a while now.”
We angled downward, sweeping past a few wispy clouds, toward an immense and rugged mountain range.
“What’s the air like here?”
“Radiation levels are low. If prevailing wind patterns match my historical files, the particulate concentration in the air indicates antimatter and possibly thermonuclear detonations occurred to the far south and west of our current location.”
“But not here.”
“Not here.”
We plunged downward. It was like being on the world’s largest and fastest roller coaster.
Though gravity itself was defied, the sensation was real enough to make me queasy, and I concentrated hard on not throwing up as the world raced up to meet us.
Lyle brought us to a stop centimeters above a small, rocky plain between a jagged line of mountains.
I hesitated a second, then stepped forward and down, my foot coming to rest on the firm ground below.
I exhaled. “Where to?”
“There’s a cave entrance in the rocks twelve meters forward and a little to the left.”
I picked my way over the rough terrain. The opening in the rock was small, barely large enough for me to enter standing upright.
Night vision showed me the interior. Deeply textured rock walls took an uneven, sloping path downward.
I followed it, watching my head, although I suspected Lyle would flip up a protective force field if I got too close to one of the stalactites.
The rocky floor leveled off, and I found myself before a solid metal door. It had a simple black panel on the left-hand side, but otherwise the burnished surface was unmarked. “What now?”
“Try putting your palm on the panel.”
I set my hand on the panel. The black surface lit up neon blue.
A bright beam swept up and down my hand, and, with a hiss of escaping air, the door popped out and swung open.
I stepped back to let it slide past. White lights flared to life in the room beyond, illuminating a hemispherical enclosure about ten feet across.
In the center of the hemisphere was a T-shaped pedestal.
I walked, conscious of my footsteps in the quiet. The door remained open behind me. I approached the pedestal. The top, angled toward me, was a solid piece of polished black glass, completely dark. “What do I do?”
“Place your hand on the control terminus. If what I’m reading is correct, I’ll be able to interface with the node directly from that point.”
Something made me hesitate. “Is this dangerous?”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t really know what happened in the last almost three millennia. The Overmind has been deactivated and antimatter bombs and nukes have been used all over the world.”
I stared at my dark reflection in the black glass surface of the pedestal. “You think the Overmind could be responsible?”
“I don’t know. All I know is I’ll protect you to the best of my ability, which is now extensive, thanks to this suit.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“I think we should reactivate the Overmind and find out what happened.”
“Can you—I don’t know, only partially activate it? Or activate it, but leave a kill switch or something if we need it?”
“No. If we bring the Overmind online at any level it will be able to self-boot its way to full functionality. Assuming the structural integrity of the quantum processing array spread throughout the crust of the planet is intact, of course.”
“Of course. All right.” I hesitated, looking at the pedestal. Taking a breath, I put my hand on the glass.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then my hand turned liquid silver, and tendrils emerged from the chrome covering my skin and slipped against the black glass. The tendrils split into a million tiny filaments that burrowed into the glass itself.
The room brightened.
“Hello again, Scott Treder,” a voice said, making me jump. Raven stood before me, a few feet away.
“Raven?” I asked. “I mean, Overmind?”
“Yes. This is a projection, but I felt it would be better to speak with you face-to-face, so to speak.”
If it was a projection, it was flawless. The avatar looked as I remembered: tall and impossibly slender, with swirling, shimmering purple skin and black, mirrored eyes.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You, or more specifically the sentient intelligence you call Lyle, reactivated my processing network.”
“I meant, what happened to you. To the Earth.”
“Ah.” Raven’s image inclined its head, its eyes sliding shut, the facsimile of a person sharing hard news.
“It has been over two thousand eight hundred years since I last spoke with you. Much has transpired, as you might imagine.” Its head rose and its eyes opened.
Black mirrors stared at me. “But the events most directly relevant to your query occurred less than five centuries ago. A war. The worst war yet perpetrated upon the surface of the Earth.”
I swallowed, my heart racing. My hand was still locked to the pedestal by the silver filaments. “A war between whom?”
“The sides grew complicated, as they always do. But they began simply enough. There was a revolt against the utopian vision I put forth, led by a charismatic woman known to me only as Valkyrie. Humanity split into two factions, one which favored me and my continued control of the operations of the planet, and the other, led by Valkyrie, which put forth that my rule was one of repression, a kindhearted but constrictive dictatorship that was destroying humanity’s opportunity to grow and evolve. ”
I watched the avatar, the projection. It gave away nothing. “And?”