They had rented an old beat-up conversion van that looked like it should be rusting in a field somewhere and parked it in the tall grass just down a dirt road from the Polyani farm on the rear side. To complete the look, they had local law enforcement plaster a bright pink tow order to one of the side-view mirrors. The broad, fencelike array rose over the trees and towered between them like a silent guardian. The van faced the opposite direction such that they could come and go from the driver’s side door without being seen from the house. An adjacent stand of trees provided cover and made a handy toilet.
“Stakeouts can be really hard,” Agent Quinn had warned her. “Tense. Boring.”
“That’s why I have this,” Nio said as she bolted two metal tubes together.
At the country junkyard where they’d purchased the van, she had run around like a kid at a candy store, filling a grocery store cart with scrap and old tools, including a refurbished air pump, a busted refrigerator compressor, a bar magnet from an industrial lift, heavy wire mesh from the cab of a backhoe, a short length of explosive cord used to detonate tree stumps or other debris, and two sections of foot-wide metal tubing with bolt collars that looked like it had been pulled off an old boiler.
“What is all that for?” Quinn had asked with a skeptical look.
“You’ll see,” she told him.
Since the lot of it had cost a total of $186, he hadn’t argued. Later, he watched, perplexed, as she sat cross-legged in the back of the van fitting the piping together and covering one end with a clear plastic window that she had cut herself.
“What’s the mesh for?” he asked.
“Part of it goes inside. The rest is for a helmet.”
“A helmet? That suggests it’s dangerous.”
“Not for you,” she had reassured him.
They slept in shifts and took turns wearing headphones attached by wire to the sensitive passive listening device at the back of the van, which converted fluctuations of light into sound by detecting otherwise imperceptible variations in lightbulb output or window reflections, both of which vibrated with the ambient noise inside the house. The sound quality was poor, but they could hear almost everything that happened. They didn’t have a warrant, but by law, they didn’t need one. The Supreme Court had ruled that because such devices only detected “openly available information,” it was therefore public, consistent with earlier rulings that said it was legal for companies or other organizations, including law enforcement, to register a person’s gait or facial features without their consent since such traits are “public-facing.” The defense, on the other hand, had suggested that with sufficient technology, anything about us might be revealed, including our secret desires and attractions through a decoded combination of facial expressions, body posture, temperature, involuntary muscular fluctuations, and chemical signals. Even our thoughts weren’t safe. Since we use different pathways when angry versus happy, or when lying versus telling the truth, and these pathways could already be revealed by fMRI, it was theoretically likely that a device with sufficient sensitivity to parse our thoughts remotely would one day be invented, and that it would use nothing but “openly available information.” They argued that passive detection technologies were not like fingerprints, which required touch—an act of intention—to be deposited on a surface. But in the immediate wake of the Caulfield massacre, the court was unmoved.
“It doesn’t bother you?” Quinn asked as Nio handed him the headset. “Listening to them like this?”
A song was softly playing on the radio. Nio turned it off. Outside, a nearby cricket was chirping insistently.
“No signals,” she said.
“Not even the radio?”
“It’s the speakers. If there’s any kind of EMF signature inside the supposedly derelict van, then this is all a waste of time. Your phone is off, right?”
“It might be a waste of time anyway,” he grumbled, switching positions with her.
“Didn’t take you for a blues man,” she said as he adjusted the headset over his ears.
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.”
“So tell me one.”
“You realize we could be out here for days, right? Eating convenience store food and shitting in the trees.” He nodded to the half-used roll of toilet paper stuffed in the side bin of the driver’s side door. A white plastic bucket, their trash can, was already half full of chip bags and jerky wrappers. “How much more of that stuff can you eat, anyway?”
Quinn watched Nio take a big bite of a beef stick.
“Sick of me already?” she asked as she settled on the floor in front of her mysterious contraption. A ring of bolts held the glass over one end of the tube. “I thought guests didn’t stink until the third day. We’re only on day two.”
“I can’t call my wife—”
“I told you, they’re almost certainly monitoring nearby cell towers. If you call your wife from anywhere near here, then yes, this is definitely a waste of time.”
Outside, the cricket kept chirping. Quinn wanted to step on it.
“I looked up the site,” he said. “Back at the motel.”
“What site?”
“That ‘alternative medicine’ site where Mr. Sands found the ‘science’ that convinced him to feed his wife brain tissue. Servers were in Albania. Go figure.”
“Makes sense with the new government.”
“It was exactly like you’d expect. Crystals. Magnets. Something called ‘phlebotic therapy.’ Any legit research was either misquoted or taken completely out of context. They say in tiny letters at the bottom that they accept no responsibility for what their users share, but the whole rest of the site is designed to look official, get you to sign up, come back. If you never scrolled all the way to the bottom, you’d never read the disclaimer.”
“You think a disclaimer does any good?”
“You don’t care that they’re passing themselves off as a legit health care portal?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I would think you of all people would want to see sites like that shut down.”
“Why? Because they don’t accept the approved curriculum?”
“They’re misleading people. I can’t believe you’re defending them.”
“I’m not gonna cry if they get shut down, but the way to help people is by helping them, not by canceling their autonomy.”
“I don’t want to cancel—”
“Yes, you do. You just said it. You want to control what they can or can’t read.”
“I want people to have the truth. There’s a difference.”
“That’s such bullshit,” she scoffed.
Quinn’s face flushed red.
“I know that’s what you think,” Nio added quickly. “But unless you have a monopoly on it, the only way you can make sure people have the truth is to let them see everything. What you really want is to enforce a truth. I know you think you’re all progressive or whatever, but no one’s Right or Left of an omnipresent center.”
“Here comes the conspiracy.” Quinn raised his hands. “Everyone, wait for it.”
“You realize there are real conspiracies, right? COINTELPRO? Did they teach you about that at the academy?”
“They did.”
“Did they tell you the FBI wrote a letter to Dr. King urging him to commit suicide?”
“Yes. And it wasn’t cool. There’s been a formal apology on the Bureau’s website for decades.”
“Oh, wow. A whole apology. How about Operation Mockingbird?”
“Don’t know that one.”
“CIA propaganda machine. They wiretapped journalists, founded fake periodicals, ‘leaked’ false or out-of-context intelligence reports to newspapers and wire services so that they would unwittingly run the story the agency wanted. There’s Project Camelot, part of the US Army’s counterinsurgency program. They hired teams of social scientists to study and develop the means to destabilize political systems. All these programs took place when the news was supposedly truthful and authoritative.”
“What’s your point?”
“You’re telling me people honestly thought there were WMD in Iraq? Intelligence wasn’t faked to justify war? The NSA didn’t inaugurate a massive communications sweep of their own citizens with the explicit approval of a nominally progressive administration? MI-6 doesn’t quietly assassinate people or destroy whatever inconvenient facts—”
“I said you made your point.”
They were quiet.
“For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why people like you kept putting up with it. Finally, I did. You wanna know?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Battered wife syndrome. A battered wife is the victim, right? Can’t really be mad at her. And she always protests what her husband does. She knows it’s wrong. But she never leaves him. Take any political party, and it’s the same classic abusive behavior: you mistreat someone, you lie to them, but you buy them presents after and say you really have their best interests at heart. If they wake up to the truth and call you on it, you tell them they can’t do any better, that the world we have is basically the best of all practical alternatives, or if not, that change comes slow and anything else might be worse, and we wouldn’t want that, so in the meantime we just have to accept a certain amount of institutional rape and pillage as an unfortunate fact of the world, but by God if any one of us steps out of line...”
Nio shook her head and returned to tinkering with her machine.
“You done?”
“We’ve completely given up on fixing anything. That’s too hard. So, the next best solution is to enforce an orthodoxy. If everyone thinks ‘the truth,’ then no one will rock the boat and we can keep pretending everything’s fine.”
“I gotta take a piss,” Quinn said through gritted teeth. “Maybe you should take your pills.”
He let the headset dangle as he opened the door and walked through the grass to the trees. A breeze blew and whipped the heat from his flushed cheeks.
Immediately, a shotgun blast broke from the house. It blared through the dangling headphones.
“Shit!”
Even the cricket heard it and momentarily stopped chirping. Nio heard Quinn stomping through the grass as she jumped into the passenger’s seat and started the engine. Since the van was facing the opposite way, she drove in an arc up to the road, where Quinn opened the side door of the moving car and got in.
“Take the wheel!” she said.
“What?” Quinn’s pants were still undone and he was trying to close them in the seat.
“Take the wheel! I need to get it ready!”
“God dammit!”
The van slowed for just a moment as Nio climbed over the seat and Quinn climbed in. Then he gunned it. He had turned his phone on while running—in lieu of zipping his pants. He hit the emergency button and the device dialed 911.
“What about the helmet?”
The wire mesh slid loose around the back of the van.
The operator came over the phone’s speaker, but the signal was jumbled and the call was lost.
“Dammit!”
Local PD were asked to be on standby. A series of roadblocks had been devised, but the net would only drop if Quinn could alert them.
Nio had run a heavy line from the air pump to her machine and was now creating a vacuum in the heavy metal tube.
A man darted across the graded dirt road and disappeared.
“Fuck!” Quinn slapped the steering wheel in frustration.
The intruder had broken through the trees moving impossible fast. For a brief moment, he was framed in the van’s headlights. He was dressed from head to toe in a black suit made of angled plates the hummed so quickly they reduced him to a blur. He could be seen, but no details could be captured. Nio caught sight of the blurry Commodore-style keyboard from Gerry’s computer strapped to his back.
“Take the path!” Nio pointed to the right.
“We won’t fit!”
“Take it!”
Quinn spun the wheel and the back of the van fishtailed. Everything bounced as they hit the ungraded path. Quinn accelerated as branches bounced against the vehicle. Several snapped and scraped loudly against the metal. The spin caused Nio’s device to slide to the back, pulling it free of the air pump.
“Shit!”
The corner of the front bumper deflected off a stump. Nio hit her head on the wall of the van as Agent Quinn nearly smashed into a pine.
“I told you!” he yelled as he swerved.
“Just go! We only have to make it to the field on the other side. It’s the closest extraction point.”
“Extraction?”
“The array blocks transmissions! He has to get a couple hundred meters from it before he can signal. Everywhere else is yard or trees!”
“Signal for what?”
“You’ll see!”
The van was bouncing over the uneven tractor path, and Nio had to hold tightly to her device to reattach the tube.
“Whoa!”
Quinn slammed on the brakes and Nio’s lost her screwdriver. It slid under the driver’s seat, and she tightened the screw on the tube’s aluminum collar with her thumbnail.
“What are you do—” She looked up and froze. “Whoa.” She scrambled to the front.
The open field was full of dinosaurs. The lack of tree cover allowed the nearly full moon to shine. Only it wasn’t a field. It was a cracked and deeply overgrown parking lot. The creatures, who were probably migrating across the nearby national forest on their way to summer in Canada, were drawn by the flowering weeds and ferns that grew like a miniature forest from the numerous cracks in the nearly invisible asphalt.
Disturbed by the sudden appearance of the vehicle, a large male strode in front of it, as if to circle the juveniles in protection. The headlights reflected off the tinted scales of his side.
“Parasaurolophus,” she said.
There were at least 30 spread out across the former parking lot, which was broken only by the occasional rusted lamp post, which, in the darkness, had first appeared to be dead trees. Some distance away, at the far end, was the dark hulk of a store. The sign had been removed, but the dark coloration on the siding revealed it had once been a Walmart.
“He’s in here somewhere,” Nio said, reaching across Quinn’s chest to turn off the headlights. “Leave the engine running until I—There!” She pointed up.
A shape descended from above. Three dark ovals with a lighter inner ring erupted from a smooth center mass. It was a drone, only it had no rotors. It was silent.
“Gotcha.”
The intruder leapt up—much further than a man could jump—and the drone latched onto the shoulder loops of his uniform. It started to rise as swiftly as it descended, without so much as a sound.
“Kill the engine!” Nio called.
Quinn rotated the ignition as Nio stomped on the modified compressor, which covered the rear of the tube. The cord exploded with a loud pop that caused both of their ears to ring. The explosion forced the magnet at speed through the center of a copper coil, generating a brief but massive spike in current, which passed into the tube and was converted to a microwave burst. The range was limited, but the resulting EMP was enough to disrupt the induction coils on the drone, which immediately dropped like a dead weight at the same time Nio screamed and clutched her scalp with both hands. She collapsed. She hadn’t had time to finish her mesh helmet. Despite that she knew it was coming, the pain was incredible—as if the rods in her skull were trying to rip themselves free. She could feel heat as well. It hurt to touch her scalp, but it also hurt not to. She held on and desperately hoped she hadn’t cauterized her own brain tissue.
She raised a hand. “I’m okay,” she panted, even though she clearly wasn’t. “Just go.”
Quinn burst out of the car, which caused the closest parasaurolophus to raise its blunt-crested head, even as it continued to chew the cluster of weeds it had pulled from the asphalt. He froze, and the creature wandered several steps forward. It was smaller than an elephant but also longer, with a stout tapering tail that projected backward for balance as it grazed on its hind legs. Having no instinctual fear of humans, dinosaurs were generally fairly tolerant, but if spooked, they could stampede like wild cattle—only five times as heavy.
Quinn drew his weapon and took off at a trot, his tensile-weave forelegs propelling him faster than any non-augmented human. It took him barely four seconds to find the intruder, who appeared unharmed despite falling from a height of fifty feet. He had extricated himself from the drone’s harness and was about to take off on foot.
“Freeze! FBI! On the ground!”
The noise rattled the herd. A juvenile ran to its mother, who curled her body in defense around it. Both Quinn and the intruder were very aware of just how easily they could be trampled to death should the van-sized animals suddenly start to run.
Quinn took out his phone with one hand while keeping his weapon trained with the other. He hit the emergency button again. But nothing happened. He barely glanced to it—it had been fried by the EMP—but it was enough for the intruder to spring forward. He was fast, faster than Quinn thought possible—faster than him. He pulled the trigger instinctively as his phone hit the ground. The shot was knocked wide and the bullet hit one of the dinosaurs in the rump. The animal rose up and bellowed through the blunt crest on its head. The sound was like a resonating pipe organ. It filled the air and caused the other creatures to panic. Quinn landed a punch—or thought he did. But his fist hit nothing but air. In rapid succession, he was struck three times with the side of a flat hand: once in his left gut, once over his right lung, and once on his throat. The alternating blows were powerful, like piston shots, and he lost both his breath and his balance. As he stumbled back, he tried to bring his gun around for one more shot, but a fourth blow struck the crook of his right shoulder, causing his arm to drop like dead weight. A moment later, he was on his back, his own weapon pointed at his face.
The intruder turned just in time to see a bull dinosaur swing its tail. He was knocked back and had to roll out of the way of another. Quinn couldn’t get up. He had to wait as a terrified female strode over him. He had lost his breath and he couldn’t move his right arm. But at least it was tingling. That meant it was still attached. For a moment, he hadn’t been sure.
The intruder was in a crouch, waiting for a clean break to the trees. He easily spotted Nio coming up behind the fleeing dinosaurs. She had a crowbar in her hand.
“No—” Quinn tried to stand but could only turn onto his side. He curled his feet under him and tried to breathe, but he could only manage a few gasps.
Several saplings and slim pines were felled as the herd crashed through a nearby grove on their way back to the distant hills. The weeds of the overgrown lot were trampled. There was no more cover. Holding the crowbar like a sword, Nio yelled and came at the intruder, who merely sidestepped out of her way. She swiped and fell forward as the crowbar clattered.
But her ruse had worked.
She had used the crowbar to rip the keyboard from the strap on the man’s back. She also caused a distraction.
The soldier turned suddenly to see Gerry Polyani in his standing exo-suit.
“You killed my sister!” Gerry screamed as he landed one solid punch with a metal-covered fist.
The man in black was knocked back, but as before, recovered his ground instantly. The robotic suit was stronger, but the man who controlled it was unprotected at its center. After easily dodging another blow, the intruder swiped empty air in Nio’s direction before crushing Gerry’s ribs with a solid blow. The exo-suit, instead of protecting him, now held him exposed, like the broad side of a barn.
Sirens.
Local PD were descending quickly from the road on the far side. The man in black looked at Nio, who clutched the keyboard. She was scrambling toward the approaching squad cars. But something was wrong. Her legs were wobbling.
The man in black took a step toward her, but when he saw Agent Quinn regain his feet, he fled, leaving Gerry motionless and bleeding.
Nio collapsed, which surprised her. She hadn’t been anywhere near the intruder. She felt odd. She touched her stomach. It was wet. She looked down at the specks of blood on her fingers.
“H-how did that happen?”
She lay back and looked up at the stars and started hyperventilating uncontrollably. By the time Quinn hobbled over to her, arm dangling at his side, everything was shaking.
“Do y-you believe m-me now?” she joked.
She turned to the side and vomited.
The last word she said was “S-semmi.”