Ghost of the Gods - 02 (13 page)

Mark noticed he was not wearing a hospital ID bracelet, which meant they had to be using his RFID bracelet as an electronic substitute. He had no doubt the entire hospital was under USAG surveillance. Unless he disabled his bracelet, the hospital might know the instant he left the property. If the hospital’s systems were linked with USAG systems, then Enforcers would also know the instant he was gone. Would they care? He continued dressing as fast as he could. Time was his enemy. He had to be out of this room before anyone came by. Mark stopped tying his sneaker. He froze in mid-thought. There was a memory capsule inside his mind. No, not one; there were dozens of capsules from Sarah. How could he have missed them? He opened one after another. The hours of life experiences in each capsule poured out into his brain and was relived instantaneously in infinitely compressed time. He now owned memories of Sarah panicked and searching for him everywhere. She had gone to the church to confront the priest who was Paul’s accomplice. Mark focused on the last capsule, causing it to expand in his mind. Sarah’s thoughts and feelings flooded into him like cool, sweet water. She had found him and was leaving the church; she was calm and in control. He tried again to send her a memory capsule. This one made it. He warned her not to go back to the nest and asked her to meet him as quickly as possible. An anxious reply from her arrived instantly. She was on her way.

Mark put on a hospital gown over his street clothes and body armor. He then loosely pulled a second gown on backward over the first. This added bulk would make it harder for anyone to notice he was dressed to go outside. The only things that showed were sweatpants and sneakers. It was not uncommon in hospitals for patients to walk the halls for exercise in their own street clothes. He doubted this hospital was any different. The only complication was his coat. He would have to carry it in the dry cleaning bag and try to draw as little attention as possible. Mark cracked the room door open and peered out. A patient with a visitor in tow walked past. He could not see the main nursing station but suspected he would be ignored when walking past.

Ten short minutes later, Mark was casually looking through an outside window in a large and very busy admitting area. It was cold outside. There was condensation on the glass. The room was noisy and smelled of disinfectant. There were other patients in robes. Every few minutes an admitting nurse called out names and people shuffled about. Mark didn’t know how much time he had before the staff discovered a seriously wounded man had somehow walked out of his room, and they instituted a manhunt for his own good or worse. Using his bracelet, they would be able to pinpoint his general location instantly. He had no time to waste. Mark had hoped there would be plenty of civilians in the building to provide cover. This room was better than he could have imagined, filled with ragged and exhausted people. When he ditched the hospital robes, he would blend right in. The faded blood stains on his sweatshirt and pants were almost perfect camouflage. He was not the only person in this room with stained clothing.

Supposedly, bathrooms were off limits for USAG surveillance. Mark’s plan depended on that rule being true. He waited in the lounge area until someone else entered the bathroom. He wanted as many people as possible in the bathroom providing cover when he made his move.

He followed a young man with forearms covered in tats into the bathroom. The room looked like close to a full house and smelled like it too. He picked a stall and locked the door, quickly taking off the hospital robes and stuffing them behind the toilet. After some frustrated searching he found the hidden catch on the RFID bracelet. Opening the catch disabled the RFID circuitry. Mark knew he was now the invisible man to RFID readers, but cameras would still see him. Would this anomaly set off alarms in some software program or monitoring room? He was about to put that question to the test. There was an RFID reader at the bathroom entryway.

Mark walked out of the bathroom. An elevator
dinged
and he froze. His heart was pounding with fight or flight adrenaline. He stared as a pair of medical workers in scrubs filed off the elevator, followed by a hospital security guard complete with badge, radio, and sidearm. No one was interested in him. Mark walked straight to the sliding glass exit doors and stepped outside. Cold air slapped him in the face, then the sensation was gone. The night was quiet. Off in one corner he saw the glow of someone smoking. An assist informed him it was twenty-five degrees. After a few deep breaths of the cool air, Mark felt refreshed and almost in control.

Walking down the street, knowing he was a ghost, was insanely risky. For the first time since entering the protectorate two weeks ago, the USAG overlords were not tracking his movements. He was receiving updates from Sarah as she advanced toward him on an overcrowded train. She’d had to leave Ralph behind for a few hours to make it easier to go unnoticed while changing identities. A 120 pound Rottweiler could draw a lot of unwanted attention. In a memory capsule he experienced the anxiety and betrayal she felt from leaving her companion in a deserted building miles from any place he knew. Mark was not following a direct path to rendezvous with her. Instead, he was turning at each block based on how many people he saw. For now, intermingling with other pedestrians was his best defense against Enforcer surveillance. Mark turned a corner. A powerful wind blew down the corridor formed by tall buildings. Remnants of litter from an overturned can scurried about. The street looked miserable but had a surprising amount of foot traffic. He tucked into the wild.

An hour later, he was standing in the shadows on a sidewalk trying to blend in with his stained clothing while keeping alert for Enforcers. The area was a popular center for the arts and alive with street activity. This particular set of blocks with its eateries, coffee shops, galleries, and theaters was the epicenter of the art district. Down at the corner of the block was a burned out art deco movie theater that was too badly damaged to repair. It seemed almost like a commissioned piece of artwork commemorating the horrors of the plague. From a memory capsule he knew Sarah was inside. She had disabled her bracelet after entering through a shattered doorway. They were both ghosts now. Hidden inside the art deco theater was a large backpack of gear they’d cached just for this kind of emergency. The gear included extra sets of RFID bracelets, picture ID cards, a thick roll of money to use in the Outlands, gold coins for bribes, and other necessities.

Shortly after arriving inside the protectorate, they had singled out this movie theater as an ideal location. The nearest RFID readers and surveillance cameras were over a block away in either direction, and the street was constantly busy with foot traffic. Just outside the art deco theater was the worst vantage points for Enforcer surveillance they’d found. He and Sarah had previously exercised their exit bracelets more than once from within the crowds of the art district. It would appear normal for their new identities to pop up here tonight.

The surveillance cameras covering this block had to be overloaded before either of them could enter or leave the theater. Mark was waiting to make his move. Street performers began to arrive and stake out positions along the promenade. He knew it would not be long now. There was a huge playhouse at the center of the block that staged spectaculars. Right on schedule, the doors opened with a throng of people exiting. Mark blended into the middle of a river that was heading in the direction of the art deco theater. He was counting down the seconds, as was Sarah. Memory capsules were flying back and forth between them.

A street performer began playing an alto sax. The musical notes took on a ghostly echo from the surrounding buildings. Mark tensed as he watched an Enforcer Humvee crawl through the crowded intersection. Lights on the roof were flashing to part the sea of people. Enforcer Humvees were mobile RFID readers. He prayed he was lost in the chaos and his missing bracelet would go unnoticed. He knew another venue would be letting out shortly and then another. Mark willed their doors to open early. The Humvee crawled by within arm’s length and kept moving.

Mark was 20 feet from the entrance to the art deco theater. It took all his willpower to keep his eyes averted from that shattered doorway. The crowds were now thick enough that the entrance was completely shielded from street level surveillance. He prayed there was nothing hovering in the night sky looking down on him.

Mark peeled off from the crowd. Glass crunched loudly under his sneakers as he ducked inside. The interior was illuminated with shafts of light from dozens of broken windows. He sensed no one was coming after him from the street. Sarah stepped out from behind a ticket booth. She was dressed in jeans, a sweater, knee high boots, and a new, long coat that was hanging open. Her makeup and hair were completely different. She was smiling and crying. It felt as if the clouds had parted when she slipped into his arms.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered. “I just couldn’t believe this was happening.”

“It was easy for me,” he said. “I was unconscious. This was much harder on you.”

“Mark, I…”

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Sarah. “Let’s get you ready.”

Two hours later the next surge of foot traffic was poised to begin. Mark had traded in his stained rags for new clothing Sarah had purchased on her way to meet him. He was wearing an overcoat length goose down parka, Chicago Cubs baseball cap, and jeans. They each had a cloth shopping bag filled with emergency gear hidden inside expensive clothing store boxes. Together they looked like an utterly forgettable urban couple.

One again the doors of the huge playhouse opened on schedule like ocean tides. The crowds outside the shattered doorway began to rise. At what felt like a peak, Mark and Sarah stepped out in the vibrant, noisy stream of people. They kept low profiles, trying to remain lost in the countless faces on the street. After half a block Mark closed the catch on his new RFID bracelet, activating it. Minutes later Sarah did the same. The ghosts were now solid. It was unlikely the bracelets would be scanned by any checkpoint until they left the area. They switched directions, entered a coffee shop, and then emerged carrying cups. Their new RFID bracelets seemed to work. If their transformation was going to be spotted, this was the moment it would happen.

It was getting very late. They had walked and taken trains halfway across Chicago. To Mark’s surprise they were still free. To any surveillance cameras they looked like an ordinary couple out on the streets. Sarah’s long blond hair trailed behind her on the windy sidewalk as they strode along, hand in hand. Ralph was with them. Sarah’s mood had noticeably brightened once she had Ralph back. The sidewalk traffic was thinning. Mark felt more relaxed with every block and hour they added between themselves and the art deco theater.

“I want to get back to the singularity as soon as it’s light and there’s enough foot traffic so we don’t stand out,” he said. “We need to finish this and get out of here. Every day we stay in Chicago is a day the Enforcers might come after us.”

“What do we do now? Just knock on their front door? Excuse me, can we please touch your singularity?”

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “I guess we’ll improvise when we get there. They may take one look at us and start shooting, which will solve everything.”

Mark Freedman – Chicago Protectorate – February 5, 0002 A.P.

Mark and Sarah had not uttered a word since turning the corner. The townhouse that held the singularity should have been in sight. Instead, they came upon a scene of devastation. Fire trucks and Enforcer Humvees were parked around a smoldering mound. Red, blue, and white strobes flashed in the morning light. Mark could hear squawks from radios and an occasional shout. Before arriving at this mayhem, miles away, they’d known something had radically changed. The tidal pulls of the singularity had evaporated and the vortex boundary layer had been missing. Mark had suspected the singularity had entered some new stage where the effects were concentrated over a smaller area. He had been thinking about how a black hole shrinks as its strength increases. With each passing block he thought they would hit a stronger vortex that was closer in to the singularity, but nothing like that had happened.

“It looks like an explosion and not a fire,” said Sarah.

“I’m getting a lot of stray thoughts, bits and pieces about a superheated detonation. Normal accelerants along with residential chemicals and gas have been ruled out. Common explosives have also been ruled out. The consensus is some kind of military thermobaric or fuel air weapon.”

An assist was projecting into Mark’s awareness diagrams and engineering data for thermobaric weapons from grenades to missiles. The assist had already searched, found, and was presenting best fits for the damage arrayed before his eyes.

“Could the singularity have exploded?” asked Sarah.

“Can’t be that,” said Mark. “The singularity wasn’t part of the physical world. It was cyberspace. It was a program. It was nothing but signals on the n-web.”

“How can you be so sure?” she said. “The singularity was software, but what was it running on?”

“You’re saying the hardware exploded?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“We’ll never know.”

An idea came to Mark out of nowhere. Sarah continued speaking, but he was no longer listening. He began to plan. There was another thread to pull. Who knew what might unravel?

Mark and Sarah were outside an ornate gothic church. Mark felt like he knew this place from all the memories Sarah had shared with him. The doors were 10 feet high with huge iron hinges. It was an overcast, blustery midday in Chicago. There was steady foot traffic on the sidewalk. The background noise of street conversations and the stray thoughts buffed Mark like a second wind. He was trying to reach into the depths of the church to pull out stray thoughts. So far he had nothing.

“I can feel the priest’s emotions inside along with one other person,” said Sarah. “The priest’s agitated. Something’s wrong.”

“He’s about to become a whole lot more agitated,” said Mark.

As he opened the door, he smelled incense. An assist informed him incense was originally used in Catholic churches to symbolize prayers rising to heaven. There was also a practical matter of hiding the body odors of worshipers long before deodorants were invented. Mark smiled at how nuanced the interface’s assists were becoming. Inside, the church felt and looked deserted. He heard Sarah softly instructing Ralph to stay beside the doors as she locked them from inside. She hung her police badge around her neck, then began attaching a silencer to her Beretta.

The cathedral was dim and filled with shadows. As Mark edged deeper inside, he saw the priest and his old friend Paul in an alcove. The two men were exchanging harsh whispers. Mark felt rage glowing inside him as he silently walked closer. The desire to bludgeon Paul into unconsciousness was irresistible. He could easily see himself acting on the impulse. Unprovoked violence was morally wrong and would gain him nothing, but he wanted it. His hands balled into fists. He could imagine Paul’s blood puddled on the floor. He could smell it. His rage had become a firestorm. He was now within 30 feet of the target of his fury.