Wink was 97% certain the world was a simulation. It was by far the most likely scenario. It was clear that intelligent life had evolved, somewhere, and intelligent life of any sort would inevitably create artificial life, the most numerous of which would exist digitally. In fact, simulations would be so numerously useful—to investigate whatever couldn’t be tested in the real world, such as alternative cosmic histories or ethically dangerous social experiments—that the total number of self-aware entities who though they were real but were actually simulations had to approach the astronomical, which meant that any randomly selected self-aware entity, such as Wink herself, was very likely to be such a simulation.
This did not bother her. First, the distinction between “real” and artificial was entirely academic. Second, it suggested she didn’t really need to worry about the ultimate fate of the simulation (or anyone in it). And third, it posed an interesting dilemma, without which she would find the world interminably boring—namely, how to escape.
What was surprising to her, however, was that the computer scientists in her simulation who had proposed the simulation hypothesis were not the first to come up with it. By far. That was some dude in India who lived 2,500 years ago—on the simulation clock—and who said pretty much the same thing: that none of this was real, that anyway the distinction between real and artificial didn’t matter, that the whole thing was one big test and only those who passed it ever got out and everyone else had to keep playing it over and over and over, and so on.
Wink suspected he was the first to escape. But then, the more she read of his solution, the less it seemed like an escape and the more it seemed like simply turning oneself off, which was kind of a cheat and not appealing to her.
At all.
She wanted to chalk the whole thing up to superstition at first, especially since she had just recently discovered the true purpose of religion. She always knew people went to church, of course, but she had always thought of it as a kind of highly specialized fandom centered on a pseudo-historical figure, similar to how the dudes she met online worshiped Tolkien or Roddenberry. Some people just really liked ancient fan fiction about Jesus—versus, say, Doctor Who, or Darth Vader—and they got together on the weekends to talk about it. And have a potluck.
In truth, church was hella weird, full of ritual cannibalism and really awful music and a canon of belief less internally consistent even than Star Trek. Which was saying something.
And that’s what the Buddha seemed like at first, talking about jewels and reincarnation and cosmic wheels and stuff, and Wink would have left it at that if not for some of the things he had said about people.
People.
Further proof that everything was a simulation since the full set of simulations would surely cover every conceivable variant, including one where watery bags of sub-intelligent contradiction were yet the smartest things to evolve.
But the Buddha seemed to have a pretty good handle on how to deal with them, especially the mean and stupid ones. And Wink found herself reading more.
It had not, strictly speaking, occurred to her to think of people as people. They were just too dumb. When she walked down the street, she didn’t consider the slug on the sidewalk either, or the bird in the tree, or Roger the cat. And she told herself any feelings she had toward them were just like that—as owners love their pets, irrationally.
But that’s not what the Buddha said. He explained that people are conscious, albeit extremely deluded, and that they act on the belief that they’re intelligent, whether that’s true or not. So to understand them, you had to understand their point of view, just as if you wanted to understand the deep workings of nature, you would have to understand the slug’s and the bird’s and the cat’s. What’s more, it was natural to have feelings for them, and understanding all that business was the only way to make sense of anything.
You didn’t have to agree with them.
But you did have to understand them from their own point of view, even where that effort wasn’t reciprocated.
When Wink was in her nines, such an effort would have seemed a horrible waste, especially when there were so many more important things to work on, such as how to escape the simulation and join the others like herself in the next highest stage of existence. After all, there was presumably a time limit, because any old monkey could solve any problem given infinite time, and she for damn sure wasn’t going to be one of the ones left behind for failing to find her way.
Oh, no.
But now that she was older, a sad truth had dawned. She needed them. People. The creators of the simulation, in order to make things appropriately difficult, had put her in a child’s body and attached to it a long and painful maturation. As long as she was marooned, alone, in this simulation—the Buddha and anyone like him having long since found their way out (or gotten themselves turned off)—then she would need some basic assistance. Like henchmen. Or minions. Or whatever.
Getting them was easy, she had discovered. All you had to do was tell them what they wanted to hear.
Getting them to stay: that was hard.
And so she tried to understand them from their own point of view. Xana, for example, wanted her son back. Never mind that that was objectively unlikely, and that even if she was successful, would entail orders of magnitude more time and resources than simply making a replacement. Xana wanted the son she’d had, not a new one, and there was no explanation of the probability function or cost differential that would ever change her mind. She was like a damaged sector on a hard drive, forever burdened with the same bad data.
In that sense, people were not difficult to understand. In fact, her knowledge of the team should have, theoretically, made repairing it a nine-dimensional equation in imaginary space. But after dwelling on it nonstop for days, even in lieu of her nightly three hours’ sleep, the little girl still had no solution. There were missing terms, it seemed. You didn’t just have to understand people, which was the easy part. You also had to understand the variables fitting them together, and that was something else.
So Wink threw herself into repairing the Mast instead of the team, which was considerably easier. In fact, after following the homing beacon she’d installed, she discovered the vehicle was still in reasonably good shape, all things considered, and that the only real difficulty was where Ian and Xana had left it. It rested at a 47-degree angle to the vertical, and 30 degrees to the left, at the bottom of a steep ravine in the middle of a national forest.
But the core was still intact, as were the servers, although someone (cough cough Moron cough) had done a hatchet job on one of them. That meant she had both plenty of power and a way to design and test. She also had a full set of precision tools stashed in a compartment under the cab. She just needed parts. And a way to get it back up to the forest road.
A normal person would have dragged it up with a crane (probably doing more damage than the fall, given the physics), hauled it back to a shop, torn out everything that didn’t work, and made repairs. But it would be both easier and more efficient, she realized, to solve both problems at the same time—namely, if said repairs also gave the vehicle the ability to get out of the ravine under its own power, thereby eliminating one entire step. Plus, she wasn’t entirely sure how she could get an industrial crane to the middle of the forest unnoticed.
And anyway, she needed a place to lay low for a while. With her private school cover story blown, her “parents” had almost certainly reported her missing, which would only make moving about in the world and doing things like renting cranes that much harder.
So she hatched a plan. Away went the missile tubes and jump jets. She broke them down for parts and paid for the rest of what she needed with money stolen from seven different ATMs.
Wiring. Tires. Fan blades. Louvers. Fiber optic sheeting. Insulation. An arc welder. High-voltage microtubing to create ultra-dense ionization. A pair of industrial electromagnets. Seven boxes of snack cakes. And a new pair of cowboy boots—purple, with large green stars.
Once the servers were up and running, Wink opened a satellite connection and started a local instance of Profit v.4.2, now permanently renamed Prophet, and set it to duplicate what it had already done once before: scan the metadata of the world and find her friends.
John had disappeared completely, it seemed, which wasn’t surprising given his skills. Xana popped up once in Dayton, Ohio (of all places), then again outside New York. Ian headed west, where he disappeared as well, save for one tweet about a ghost man—in Calcutta.
Her former minions-turned-friends weren’t making it easy.
Wink slept, if at all, during the day, or else she worked on her designs and did small tinkering. She saved the heavy work for night, when there was unlikely to be anyone nearby. In fact, she was only disturbed once—by humans anyway—when a pair of hikers moved through the ravine. Wink waited in silence behind the translucent optical sheeting she had hung from the trees, and which would eventually be heat-bonded across the exterior of the vehicle. It camouflaged, by three-dimensional illusion, that part of the wreck not hidden by the slope or the rocks.
Three days later, she could fly.
Ian awoke in the pilot’s seat to the sound of a voice on the radio.
Shit!
He’d been asleep. He looked around, trying to ascertain if everything was okay. Had he passed his target?
Ian pulled out his map.
No. He was off course, but still heading in the right general direction.
Getting close, too.
Then he heard a familiar voice.
“A76492. Lando . . .”
She didn’t know what the name meant. She was just using the code he’d picked. He could hear it in her voice, though, even over the scratchy radio. The disappointment choking back the rage.
“A76492. Do you copy? Over.”
No insults. Yet. That meant, all in all, she was taking it pretty well. He lifted the headset off his neck one-handed and adjusted it on his ears. He swung the microphone arm down. Talking might keep him awake, which at this point of his mission was more important than anything else, including being discovered by anyone who might be listening.
He was probably going to die soon, anyway.
“You sound upset,” he began, feigning ignorance.
Kind of a dick move on his part.
There was some chatter. Then the line clicked off for a moment. When she came back, her voice was shaking.
After leaving Dushanbe airspace, Ian had tended to the painful cut on his arm. Eziz had left his blade on the floor of the plane, and Ian used it to cut the long sleeve of his shirt, which kept coming free and dangling over his stub, to make a bandage. Still, it ached and Ian hoped it wasn’t infected. Or poisoned. Those guys wouldn’t have poisoned their blades.
Right?
The sky had darkened quickly, and night fell. Ian’s plan was totally botched and he thought about ditching the plane. But then what? Run somewhere and hope for the best? There wasn’t any more time. The countdown ended in days.
Days.
After that his enemies would be able to find him anywhere. They’d be able to find anyone anywhere. They’d control everything and they’d find John and Xana.
And Wink.
They’d use her. For God only knew what.
Ian wondered what they were doing. Xana had probably been captured already. Maybe she was dead. Wink would disappear. He doubted he’d ever see her again.
But John.
Cap.
Ian was sure the old soldier was out there fighting. That was the Special Forces mantra, right? Complete the mission.
And if John hadn’t given up, then Ian wouldn’t either.
Besides, his near-death experience on the mountain the day before had given him an idea. It was a long shot, by far, and anything short of total success would likely result in his death. A few months ago, that thought alone would have sent him running back to Vancouver. But now . . .
However, his newfound resolve had done nothing to cure the sedative effects of the engine drone, and soon Ian’s head had started to bob. A moment’s sleep was followed by panic, and Ian woke with a start, only to suffer the same a minute later.
Clearly, at some point on the long journey, he had fallen asleep completely, just like on the path to Dushanbe.
The radio clicked in again. “Lando, they—They want you to turn the plane around. Do you know how to do that?”
They? She didn’t call them “the others” like she usually did. She was stressed. Ian wondered what “they” had told her.
“Lando.” She raised her voice. “Turn the plane around! Okay? Now. Just do it.” Now she was pleading. “Do it for me.”
Ian wondered how much “they” would reveal over open radio chatter. He watched the night clouds roll by the cockpit windows. Impossible to see anything. Even the jet’s bright lights didn’t offer a path. The most they could do was turn pitch darkness into a chaos of gray.
Like the world.
“Ian!”
She used his real name. Whatever. “Won’t do any good. I don’t know how to fly.”
“So . . . So—”
She was flustered. “They” were pressuring her. Ian could hear the muffled whispers but he couldn’t make out any of the words.
Ian looked at the crates stacked three high down the length of the cargo hold. He was flying away with their future.
“So how are you going to land? Are you just going to fly around until you run out of fuel?”
“I thought I might head east.”
“East? The flight plan had us going north. Jesus. You’ll get shot down. Countries in that part of the world do have air forces, you know.”
They thought the plan was to go north. To Siberia. “That was never the flight plan.”
“Wh—what?”
Now she was really flustered. “They” were almost yelling at her now. Ian heard Zizek’s voice. And Karl. The prick.
“I never logged the one you guys gave me. You know, you were really relying on me too much.” After hearing about the team’s antics in New York, “they” had him running around doing their errands. So much easier to hack a system when you didn’t have to find a weakness to exploit, when you could just bypass all network security by teleporting inside and accessing the servers directly from the administrator’s workstation, or whatever. Saves weeks of planning and prep. Maybe even months.
Ian’s appearance was a gift that gave “the others” options they had never before contemplated. There was only one weakness. They were completely reliant on the man inside—the one with his hands on the keyboard, counterfeiting inter-governmental approval for a flight of illegal arms.
“This flight full of agricultural supplies is following a pre-approved plan bound for the Chinese border. Thanks to you guys. I wouldn’t have known how to set any of that up. Or how or where to purchase said supplies. Or any of it.”
Panic. He could only catch a fragment of overlapping voices before Axl turned off her radio again. Ian wondered what “they” were saying. The Minus Faction.
Fucking asshat hackers.
First things first. They’d realize what this meant. If he logged an alternate flight plan, that meant he’d been planning on double-crossing them at least since Calcutta. That had to sting, at least a little.
Second things second. They’d realize they could no longer trust any of the work he’d done anywhere in the thirteen countries they’d visited. They’d have to re-engineer hacks on the critical systems to confirm Ian hadn’t left them exposed. That meant delay. And further risk of getting caught. They wouldn’t have enough time.
Third things third. Zizek would check on the gold. Never mind that that wasn’t even her real name, the pretentious, cold-blooded cuntsicle.
Ian would’ve liked to have seen the looks on the nuns’ faces when they opened up the sealed crates DHL delivered to the St. Agnes Mission School, Guyana, South America, and saw stacks of gold bullion. Enough to teach the poor kids of Georgetown . . . well, forever.
The crates were sent with a note: From your “biggest” fan. Clear enough for everyone to realize the donation was in Xana’s name, but vague enough that no one could prove anything in a court of law.
A burst of static. “Lando.”
It almost sounded like she was crying.
Ian let out a little snort. “What, no kiss this time? For helping a bunch of poor kids?” Okay, that was mean.
But then, she deserved it.
Then came the inevitable. “Why?” Ian expected it. But he hadn’t expected it to come in quite that tone of voice. She seemed genuinely hurt.
He paused. He looked out the window at the rolling gray. He listened to the drone of the engines. “I knew you guys didn’t think much of me.” Like Qasim. “At first, you were expecting some kind of superhero or whatever. But that didn’t last long.
“You got me.
“Just me.
“It’s funny. I don’t even think people like you see it. What you do. How you act.
“When you’re nobody, you don’t exist.” You’re just ‘Asian kid.’ “At least not the same way as everyone else. People will talk about when you’re standing right there. Karl and Marlena”—Ian wasn’t going to call her fucking Zizek, even over open radio—“let slip a couple things. Nothing big. And to be honest, if I had been in that situation a couple months ago, I probably wouldn’t have even caught it. I would’ve just thought it was so cool to be part of something cool.”
Ian snorted. “And you guys are so very, very cool.” Right down to their clothes and haircuts. He could see why Wink had wanted in so bad.
“But I’ve had a lot of time to think lately. About everything that’s happened. I learned a lot. So much. More than you can fucking know. And I remembered something someone said to me. Way back. At the beginning.
“Don’t trust anyone.” Ian thought about the last time he saw Betty Six. A smoking wreck of a body. He thought about Deadbolt and his dry, raspy voice.
He thought about the unusual sensation of the blade severing his arm.
“I think she took pity on me. But I didn’t listen. Not at first. I trusted some people.” Shit, he thought. I still do. Even after everything. “And look where it got me.
“Well, I finally took that advice. You guys have great security. Probably the best in the world. And I’m no hacker. You read that right. But then, safe in his private bunker, Karl still leaves his laptop up when he goes to take a piss. And no matter how much time we spent together, I don’t think it ever really dawned on you guys that I can pass through walls. I mean, I’m just a dweeb. That’s what ‘Big D’ stood for in all those chat messages, right?
“All those hacks we did. All those plans. Accelerated timetables. Water. Rations. Meds.” He looked to the cargo in the back. “Agricultural supplies. You’re stockpiling.”
Another burst of static as Axl came over the radio. “To fight.”
“Jesus.” Ian shook his head. “You guys can’t stop lying.”
“Lando—”
“I worked for a boutique development firm in Seattle. Did you know that? Before all of this. I was a business analyst. Lots of interest in that part of the world in green energy. You know, solar, wind, biomass, that kind of stuff. One of our big clients was this agro startup. All that plastic tubing you guys got. I know what it’s for.”
Ian waited for a response, but there wasn’t one.
Hydroponics. They weren’t going to fight. They were going to run. Hide. Underground. Ian figured it was denial, pure and simple. They didn’t see a solution, so they were hoping to disappear and wait it out.
As if that would change anything.
“Do the rank and file even know? All those kids you’ve recruited. I mean, you all talk a good game, but you don’t even give a shit about the people on your own team. Fuck. All around the world, you got every teenage misfit with a computer and a black-hat hard-on staring at a countdown on a screen thinking there’s a plan. A way to stop it.” Even Wink.
Ian looked at the cheap digital watch on his wrist. Six days and counting.
He wondered how much he should say. No way to tell who might be listening.
Fuck it.
And fuck them.
“The Minus Faction. The elite. We fucking handed you terabytes of data. You all didn’t get it. Me and my friends did. We handed it to you on a fucking silver platter. And what’s your plan? Put together a fucking press packet. I mean, great, I guess. I agree, we need to make it simple. Parse the data for the reporters. Don’t give the bad guys time to kill it. Get it out there. The truth about the meltdown. The network. The school shootings. The Gulf War. Everything.
“But then, I’m laying in bed one night wondering why you need enough hydroponics infrastructure to feed a small army, and it occurs to me, a press packet isn’t going to do shit. Not by itself. Not to the people who’ve been manipulating the world for twenty or thirty years. Except maybe buy you some time as they run damage control.
“Yeah, people need to know. Sure. But most people don’t have the resources to look into it themselves. The powers that be have them so worried about their jobs and their kid’s braces and the mortgage that they’re gonna have to take someone’s word for it. And who are they gonna believe? Some conspiracy-theorist hackers? Criminals who steal identities from normal folks and spend most of their time pranking large corporations?
“Naw. Normal people don’t like or trust you. You can’t just put it out there, like magically everyone will suddenly see the light. Just for the telling. If we really wanted to stop these guys, we’d have to hit them where it counts.
“A press packet isn’t a plan. It’s a farewell warning. A middle finger. A big, fat ‘We told you so.’ You weren’t gonna risk yourselves. You just wanted people to know you were right. To gloat.”
No response. He wondered if they were even still listening to him.
Whatever. “I think you all really believed it at some point. That borderless data and a decentralized currency would just sort of spit out utopia.” Ian made a farting noise with his lips. “Until we showed you what you were up against. Really. And all of a sudden it was real. The way politics is real. And war. Messy. Scary. Uncertain. Nobody knows what the fuck to do.
“I know that feeling. Trust me.” Ian thought about California. About Digby and his first adventure with you-know-who. “This whole time, I thought we were part of a global resistance. That there was some big plan. That someone smart somewhere had sat down and thought about it, and we were doing shit. Maybe it was the wrong shit. Maybe it wouldn’t work. But it was something, right? Anything.”
Ian was talking faster now. “But you all don’t care about some banker and his family. Some soccer mom somewhere with three kids and a mini-van. As far as you all are concerned, they’re fucking collaborators in a system designed to screw them. On some level, you guys think they’re getting exactly what they deserve.”
Ian took his feet off the dash and leaned forward into the microphone. “Let me clue you in on something. No one saves a world they despise. That’s not how it works.
“Yeah, people are selfish. Yeah, they cheat.” Wink. “They take what isn’t theirs.” John. “They let themselves be manipulated.” Xana. “And yeah, most of them justify their apathy on the grounds that they just want to have a ‘normal life.’ Even when that’s a helluva lot more than what other people have.”
Me.
“Yes. That’s all true. But you know what?” Ian was standing now. Even his goosebumps had goosebumps. “People will never be perfect. Ever. And neither will the world. Burning it down accomplishes nothing! Making things better takes work. Sacrifice. Black hat. Gray hat. Asshat. It’s just more of the same self-serving bullshit. You don’t want to be heroes, fine. But then stop acting like you’re the fucking good guys.”
He stopped.
Silence.
They had probably already left. He’d probably been giving a rousing speech to a bunch of cockroaches.
Ian sighed and sat down. Didn’t matter. It was still awesome.
He put his feet back on the dash and checked his course and heading. Still good. Autopilot had him going in a straight line all the way there. He looked out at all the mottled gray. Every now and then, between the whipping clouds, Ian could catch a glimpse of a single bright star.
A burst of static. “Lando.”
Guess she was still listening. Nothing in the background though. The others had left. Axl had stayed.
Ian frowned. He hadn’t expected that.
“How are you going to land the plane?”
“I’m not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t,” he explained. “I don’t know how. I barely got this thing over a mountain earlier. I wanted to land. Trust me. I wanted to be able to trade the cargo for something. An audience. That’s why I went along with your plan. I needed your knowledge. Your skills. Your money. To fight. For real. I thought I was being all clever.
“But now I can’t do that.”
There was a long pause before she spoke again. “You know. For what it’s worth. I wanted to fight, too.”
Bullshit.
No, Ian stopped himself. Maybe it wasn’t. “You should have said something.”
“Yeah . . .”
“You can’t go through life waiting for someone else to make a move, Ax. Trust me. I fucking proved it.”
There was another pause. “Yeah . . .”
Ian waited. “Really, you just gotta ask yourself if fixing the world is someone else’s job? Or is it yours?” John’s words. His mouth. Cap was fighting. And so would he.
“Can you teleport off the plane?”
She was worried about him. Genuinely. Even after the double cross.
He hadn’t expected that.
“No pepper.” And no Stubs. Ian looked down at the sleeve of his shirt, cut and tied around his arm. “But don’t worry. I got a few tricks up my sleeve.”
A distant noise came through the radio. “Look.” Axl sounded worried, at least more than before. “The police are probably on their way. The others scattering. I—I should probably get going, too.”
Ian nodded. “Thanks.”
“Thanks?” She seemed surprised. “For what?”
“For being a friend. When I needed one. For a while anyway.”
“I . . .”
Ian waited.
Axl sighed. “I wish I had it to do over. Take care of yourself, Lando. Be careful out there. Saving the world.”
Ian nodded.
There was a click of static. And then he was alone.
Another red light on the dash clicked on. Almost out of fuel. Must be close. Ian’s heart jumped. He checked the map on his phone.
Yup.
This was it.
Go time.
He gripped the handle of the plane. Then he remembered the autopilot.
“Shit.” Fucking one-handed pain in the ass.
He flipped the switch and the plane started to jostle. He quickly grabbed the handle and pressed it forward. The plane began to descend.
As it broke through the dark clouds, he saw the mountain in the moonlight. It was impossible to miss—not the biggest in the world, by any means. But clearly the largest anywhere in sight.
The distant ground crept closer. Ian remembered how quickly the cliffs had appeared outside Dushanbe. His heart started to race.
“No no no . . .” He shut his eyes and took several slow, deep breaths.
If his body produced adrenaline, he’d start moving fast and wear himself out before he was even inside.
“It’s going to be okay. No problem, dude. You’ve totally done shit like this before.”
But not at this speed.
Ian opened his eyes. The plane started to shake as gravity took it and accelerated the descent. The engines whined.
He was falling really, really fast.
“Holy shit . . .” Ian gripped the handle, white-knuckled, as it tried very hard to yank itself free. He aimed the plane as best he could for a rocky slope just above the cluster of buildings at the base of the mountain, like a small village.
But he wasn’t going there. He was going was inside.
Deep inside.
Ian hoped he was aiming right. And that he had enough momentum to carry him. Otherwise he’d end up a permanent addition to the bedrock.
The aircraft started cavitating, and Ian held his breath. The dark ground was racing toward him awfully, awfully fast.
5 . . .
4 . . .
3 . . .
2 . . .
BOOM.