John took a long, slow, deep breath in the dark. He held it. He let it out. He closed his eyes and tried to relax.
“I know you can hear me.” He didn’t care anymore. He didn’t care if they were listening. He didn’t care if he gave it all away.
As much as Sergeant Cruz, or Danny, or any of them, Ian was one of John’s soldiers. John had been the commanding officer. And he knew the score. Just like Amarta did, back at the hospital. It wasn’t John’s job to complete the mission. It was up to his men—his friends—to do that. It’s an officer’s job to get them what they need, to remove obstacles, and to get them home.
So let the fuckers hear.
Everything.
John opened his eyes and scowled. Then he spoke to the dark again.
“Things have been different since our little get-together. I’ve been . . . different. I didn’t have a clear sense of when it started. Not at first. So I didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t until I was locked in that steel coffin and I had some time to think that it finally came to me.
“You know all this. And I know you know. And you know I know that, too. So cut the bullshit already.”
And then John knew something more. He didn’t hear it. It didn’t play in his mind. It just appeared.
Hello, Captain.
There were no words. No voice. No cadence. It wasn’t spoken. It was just a thought, almost like a memory. But he knew who it was all the same.
“You lied to me,” John whispered.
Then he knew something else: Well, that’s not exactly true, is it? I told you what you needed to hear. Nothing more. So you could do what had to be done. And you did.
“Well, you got what you wanted from me. And now I need a favor.”
And then John knew. Without explanation, he knew, just as he knew how to disassemble a rifle or disable a man’s vocal cords, that what he was asking for didn’t work that way. Wisping another’s mind, their location, their sights and sounds, their sense of space, all that was easy. It wasn’t “reading,” but it was analogous—a direct experience of their conscious state.
Searching a mind was possible as well, but when you went looking, it was always easy to get lost. It was better if you could get the target to retrieve what you wanted on their own, to bring it to the fore of their thoughts, where it could be experienced as well.
But that wasn’t what John was asking for either. He was asking for the insertion of a thought. And that was altogether different, different even than the bond that now allowed him and the Wisper to communicate over unknown miles.
Before John could object, he knew something more. There was another option. It wasn’t perfect. But the old man could give someone a dream. If they were already sleeping, that is. There was no guarantee the message would get across. Or that the receiver’s brain wouldn’t turn it into something gross, or grossly Oedipal, or even a nightmare. A dreaming mind wandered, openly, without the focus of the conscious. It was like a flooded river, breaking its banks and swallowing the land as it meandered to the sea. There were no walls. No rules. And nothing to hold onto.
John nodded. “Better than nothing.”
And then John knew to wait.
And then he knew to begin.
He took a deep breath.
“Hey kid. I hope you get this. I hope it comes through.”
And then John knew to stop, and that he shouldn’t speak as if addressing someone. He should just let his thoughts run. In fact, he didn’t have to speak at all, and it was better if he didn’t.
“I think better out loud.”
John settled into the manual wheelchair, now locked and immobile. He grimaced through another spasm. Were they bothering him less these days? Hard to tell. Maybe he just didn’t care anymore.
He began again.
“People want the world to make sense. They want there to be a clear reason why the murderer on TV did what he did. If he was abused as a child, then the world is sane, because a sane world has room for insanity. When there’s a reason.
“But life’s not clean like that. Not really. Some guys will hold on, push through the torture, for their kids. But then, I’ve seen guys with everything to live for, good fighters even, experienced soldiers with difficult missions under their belt and two kids and a pregnant wife back home . . . just get to that point where they give up. I don’t mean surrender. I mean they just can’t take anymore. They’d rather it just be over, they’d rather be dead, despite everything that would mean.
“I’ve seen other guys, some of them with almost nothing, hold on for weeks. For a dream. A wish, even.
“I guess what I’m saying is, that’s hope. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Some guys will hang on for a loved one. Others will say goodbye. Some guys will find it in spite, or rage, or a job left undone. There’s just no telling where it’ll come from, or what will be enough. To endure. And we can endure. All of us.
“When I was at the hospital, I tried giving folks a little hope. That’s where I learned you just never can tell what someone’s Big Important Thing will be. You have to find it. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes you have to go digging, ask a lot of questions. Wrestle, even. But you can never tell in advance. And sometimes it’s the craziest thing. Like a picture of someone who isn’t even born yet.
“I knew this one gal. Ex-Navy. She was going through months of painful rehab, just attacking it, showing up every day before the therapist, going all out, enduring the humiliation of falling down in front of strangers, the agony of someone forcing a leg straight that don’t want to go, of drooling on yourself because it takes every ounce of what you got to make it one more palm-width down the bar. And I’m pretty sure she was doing all that just so she could walk up to her ex’s door, ring the bell, and see the look on his face when she stood there—stood, on her own two feet—and threw his ring on the ground.
“Hope is like that. It ain’t always pretty.
“Most of the time, of course, most folks don’t have to think much about it. Not hard to come up with a reason to live when livin’ is good.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t know what will do it for you. No one does in advance. Not even you. Not till the pain starts. But I do know this: there’s always something. Always. There’s always a reason to keep going. Because you don’t have to make it to the end. It’s never, ever about making it to the end. It’s only about making it to tomorrow.
“Just tomorrow. Okay?
“I’ll never ask for more than that.
“Not that that’s easy. I know how hard it is. I thought for the longest time I was hanging on for a chance to walk again. I thought that’s why I kept running. When that got taken away, I thought, ‘Well, shit. This is it. No reason to keep going now.’ May as well give up. It’s too hard. I’m too damned tired. Of the pain. And the looks. All of it.
“And I am. Damned tired.
“But there was that day, back at the garage. Xan had spent the whole afternoon dead-lifting stacks of crushed cars and you sneezed in the bathroom and teleported yourself and exactly two-thirds of the toilet out into the yard, and she screamed—more at your bare ass and the magazine in your hand than that you came out of nowhere—and she let go of the chain and the stack of cars fell and shook the ground and almost crushed Roger the cat, who ran into the building and ended up right behind one of Wink’s doohickeys and spent the next three days floating weightless and randomly appearing and disappearing all over the place. And later that night we were all sitting around that little table in the kitchen and Xan was making quadruple-decker pizza sandwiches and Wink was sticking green peppers up her nose and the whole lot of us were just laughing and carrying on.
“I didn’t know it could be like that. After Mom.
“Anyway.
“Like I said.
“You never can tell.
“The world doesn’t make sense. That’s for sure. Not like people want it to. Or maybe it makes perfect sense and it’s people who are messed up. Doesn’t much matter.
“Believe it or not, my time in the cave wasn’t the hardest thing I ever had to endure. There was this one time. I came home from school. Dad was still at work. My sister was locked in her room, wouldn’t come out, wouldn’t say why. Turns out my step-mom had taken my little brother to the hospital. He’d acted out in class, and she’d had to pick him up early. Her story was that he was playing with the cigarette lighter in the house where she couldn’t see. That he had stole it from her purse. And that’s why she had hit him.
“But the burns . . . she said the burns were his own doing.
“I had football practice, so my sister came home and it was just the three of them in that house for the longest time. She never would say for sure she saw it. My step-mom holding my little brother down, all of seven years old, and flicking that lighter under the skin of his elbow until it blistered and smoked.”
John looked down.
“She was only ten. She probably figured she’d be next.
“Torture is hard.
“Sometimes family is harder.
“Shit. You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this. I guess I just wanted you to know. Why I did it. Why I got myself captured. That’s the big question, right? That’s what everybody wants to know. You. Mr. King. Everybody.
“My step-mom took away something that day. And I think, on some level, that’s why she did it. Like with these assholes trying to break you. Not just anger. Control. Things were never the same with my brother and sister after that, that’s for sure. I held on as long as I could, but I was a bigger kid. Harder for her to get ahold of me. And other adults, teachers at school, they might listen if I had stories to tell. So she let me off easy.
“But they weren’t so lucky. And whatever was left of my mom . . . of my family, got taken away.
“I had a lot of guilt. Lemme tell ya. For the longest time. About not being able to protect them. About not being able to hold onto that. That thing I didn’t even know we had until it was gone. That thing my step-mom destroyed. It was the doc, ya know, who really got me to see it . . .”
John thought about Amarta.
“Part of my old job was recruitment. We all had to help. Guys who passed always had to help identify candidates for training. It starts with something called Hell Week. You can probably figure out what that is. We make those guys lift downed trees over their heads and set them on the ground, over and over, for no other reason than to make them puke and then have them do it some more.
“Part of it, of course, is that we need strong guys. But there’s a real limit to how much shit like that matters. We need fast guys, too. And smart ones. The real point is to see when they give up. So we make them run through peat bogs, waist-deep in water, until their legs give out and they have to crawl on their hands and knees five hours in the dark to make it back to camp. If they’re one of the faster ones, they’ll get a couple hours’ sleep before we wake them up with bugles and blindfold them and drive them out to the middle of nowhere and leave them there in their underwear and make them navigate back with nothing but a star chart. Only they can’t talk to each other. No sound. We got guys up in the trees in full brush camo, listening. One guy speaks, he’s out. Game over.
“But most of the time, like with the log-lifts, we wanted them to tap out. We wanted them to quit. On their own. Because we weren’t looking for the strongest or the fastest or the best marksman or some guy with forty kills to his name. That’s where the movies get it wrong. They always show us picking the super-soldiers who can snipe a target silently through the throat from half a mile away in high wind. That’s all well and good for the line services, but in my experience guys with all kinds of crazy awards turn into assholes more often than not. My team needed something different. We needed the guys who were above average marksmen, sure. Guys who were reasonably strong, reasonably fast, definitely. But who, on top of all that, just wouldn’t quit. Ever. No matter how bad it got.
“In my line of work, you never knew what was gonna go sideways. Guys on the front line have support. Sure, they get cut off sometimes. But what they’re trained for is to hold a line. And to advance it.
“My job, there was no support. There’s only the team. Anyone gets caught, their existence is disavowed. So the other men in your unit are everything. You get a mission, you divvy it up. You have to. And so, at some point, you’re gonna have to run intrusion and show up with the hostages at the rendezvous point having entrusted your life to the man who’s supposed to meet you there with transport. And you need him to be there. No matter what—bleeding, with a broken leg and a fractured jaw, holding his own intestines, driving an old beat-up Chevy rather than the chopper he was supposed to have. Whatever.
“Shit.” John snorted.
“I’m talking a lot.”
He shook his head. “Funny how much easier it is to open up when the person you’re talking to can’t talk back.
“Point is, I had a decision to make. Back in Texas. I had to decide whether or not that guy was gonna show up with the transport. If not . . . well, let’s just say I had a good run. I was ready to call it quits.
“But it didn’t come to that. In the end, it was an easy decision. For me. I didn’t know where you all were. I didn’t know where you’d be. And I couldn’t chase you all down. So. Yeah. I got myself captured. Because . . .”
John took a deep breath.
“Because I knew, of all the places in the world, this was where you all would be.
“Do you understand?
“I knew it.
“And look at you. Out there trying to finish the mission. By your damned self. Ha. And here I said you weren’t a fighter.
“But I knew you all would come. And that’s why I’m here. On the inside. Ready. Waiting. And that’s why you gotta hang on. You hear me? You gotta hang on.
“Because Ian . . . man . . . you might be the only one in the world who would believe this. But . . .
“They’re coming.”
John looked down at the armrest of his chair. He knocked his fist on it twice. “The ladies . . . I promise you.” He grasped it again as if it were the foundation of the very pillar of the world.
“They’re coming.”
Static buzzed through the intercom in every room of the dam complex and surrounding stations. Diners in the commissary stopped their chatter. Technicians looked up from computer screens. Guards paused their reconnoiter. Workers stopped cranes and lifted welding helmets. Everyone waited.
For their new leader.
For the man who would be king.
For the emperor of the world.
“My friends . . .
“I don’t have to tell you the significance of this day. And I won’t waste your time with platitudes or rousing speeches. You are not some clod-footed army.”
Listening in his glass-walled cell, John smirked at the jab.
“You are the saviors of mankind. Everything our species ever does, in our lifetimes and beyond, will be marked from THIS DAY.”
The sudden increase in volume caused slight feedback.
“I know many of you have heard rumors. That I have disbanded the executive committee. That I have unplugged the Founders. I am here today to tell you . . . it’s all true.”
The Red King paused. If there were gasps or whispers, he heard none.
“I come to you today, not as your leader, but as your friend. I want you to understand this decision, and how I did not come to it lightly. I come with a message of hope.
“Many of you do not know the legacy you have inherited. The roots of our organization go all the way back to the 1960s, in fact. To the first genuinely scientific theories of social control. It just so happens that humans were putting men in space, and on the moon, at the same time psychologists were discovering just how efficiently we can fool each other. And ourselves.
“It was natural, in that time, for men to ask . . . Could we control it? All of it. The whole human enterprise. Or would we destroy ourselves in nuclear fire? Or neo-plague? Or environmental collapse?
“It wasn’t the first time the question had been asked, of course. But past efforts amounted to little more than the forcing of mankind into a cage. Forcing the social order to fit some ideal of conformity.
“And people resisted. As they always do. And the whole world turned feral. The result was two world wars and the ticking catastrophe we call civilization.
“The Founders wanted to ensure mankind wouldn’t blow itself up. They wanted to prevent the destruction of the 20th century from ever recurring, and end the terror of the 21st. And so they took the first truly scientific approach. They ignored politics. Denied history. Rejected philosophy. They burned every cold calculation made from the seat of a warm chair and asked, what would work? Really work?
“And so our organization was born. At first, it was nothing but an intellectual hobby. A puzzle. Tinkerings with an intractable theorem. But by the 1970s, Western detente with Russia brought new membership and a bit of structure, and the Advanced Theoretical Working Group met twice a year in a small post-war home in a suburb of Princeton, New Jersey. Nine men and two women from seven different countries.
“By the early 1980s, with the help of cheap computing, they made their first true discovery. They proved it, in fact.
“You see, the brain isn’t an all-purpose computer. The best among us, such as those in the Working Group, can mimic that. But the great mass of humanity was never so. This is the problem with the history books we all read in school, filled with centuries of exceptions—the discovery of new lands, new technology, new art. As if that’s ever what concerned the great mass of people. History, as written, is nothing but a catalog of anomalies, a study of outliers.
“For the Founders, the question was not ‘What are we capable of?’ The question was ‘What are we?’ Really.
“And the answer was simple. Perhaps even obvious.
“Animals. Bounded by an animal’s brain. Oh, it pretends like we’re in control. And we create explanations that preserve that illusion. Like self-determination. We tell ourselves that all over the world young men are disproportionately violent—grossly so—because of socioeconomics, or poor upbringing, rather than what it is: sexual display by an aggressive ape.
“The Founders showed—no, proved—that it was only ever so. And more to the point, that we would never escape. Ever. We couldn’t. For it is coded in that which makes us.
“Once you accept this thesis, difficult though it may be, you see proof of it everywhere. That young people, upon reaching puberty, when they shed their childhood and graduate to the sexual collective, suddenly become obsessed with conformity and shame. That when food is plentiful, people everywhere stuff themselves without control, and an epidemic of obesity sweeps the globe. That the ugly idolize the beautiful; the weak, the strong; the poor, the rich.
“We’re not in charge of ourselves. We’ve never been in charge. Our genes are running the show, just as with every animal, and they have been since the beginning. Whether we’re grunting and throwing spears or carving statues of David doesn’t much matter to them. It’s all affectation toward one end: their own persistence.
“And therein was the perfect model for the Founders. To save mankind, they would have to cheat it. For the old order proved that people will resist, eventually, if they know they are being cheated. But our genes, like the devil, tell us they don’t exist. They tell us we’re in control and give us just enough freedom to convince us that’s true.
“We would have to do the same.
“All that surrounds you was the inevitable result. From here, we will engineer a new world. We will end the business cycle, that carousel of greed. We will end war and poverty. We will enable great cures. Because our gaze will penetrate walls, governments, networks, corporations, society, and the very mind itself.
“Our noble Founders have given this to us. And they made only one mistake—a remarkable feat considering the scale of their enterprise. Those to whom they gave the burden of saving the species were themselves of the same species and so liable to all its limitations.
“It is a forgivable oversight. One I have remedied.
“You see, I have no such limitations. Where a council deliberates, I act. Where they are selfish and manipulative, I am as bright and clear as the sun. I will do what no committee—what no mere man—ever could.
“I will save us.
“All of us.
“And so today I ask for your loyalty. Your obedience. Your friendship. And in return, I will bring peace to the world.
“Forever.”
The man paused.
“Begin cycling the machine.”
The thick-necked Mongolian guard pushed John down the hall to the door of the detention room, where The Red King waited. The skin of his chemical-burned head was less swollen. The pink had subsided to a tannish gray. He stood triumphantly.
“Today I thought I might give you the chance to change your mind. But I’m in such a good mood, I thought, why not let him see his friend instead? Why not let them speak?”
As John approached, The Red King placed his hand on the soldier’s thin helmet. “Did you sleep?”
The door hissed open. The Armenian and several guards were inside. They were just bringing Ian up from his hole. He was awake and still held immobile by the restraining chair with the tubes up his nose.
“Good morning,” the Armenian smiled. “I hope you were able to get some rest. We have an exciting day today.”
Ian wouldn’t look at John. He was too busy glowering at the man with the magnifying glass. “I hope ids bedder dan yesderday. Because dat shid was weak.”
Everyone, even John, snapped their attention to the young man, whose eyes burned defiantly, despite the pain and horror of the day before.
“Is ur bansy ass gonna fuggin’ bring id doday, or whad?”
The Red King glanced at John. This wasn’t what the emperor of the world had wanted him to see.
From the seat of his wheelchair, the soldier’s middle finger snapped to attention. And although he couldn’t see it himself, John was absolutely sure he was giving the best ‘fuck you’ face of his life.
The Armenian was unmoved. He took his seat like a concert pianist takes the bench. Then he unrolled a canvas sleeve full of thin tools. As he examined them, he said, “I will do my best to oblige. Now. Do you have a preference as to which testicle will go first?”
Ian thought for a second. “Surbrise me.”
“As you wish.”
The gaunt Armenian pulled several shiny blades from the sleeve. He held them up to the light and admired them. He turned to Ian. “Then let’s begin.”
He leaned down and pressed the scalpel.
The room shook. The lights flickered.
The dam complex rocked on its foundation.