Kill Switch (24 page)

*   *   *

White-hot light blasted me out of that moment.

*   *   *

I saw Bug in his office. The threadbare goatee he'd been trying to grow these last few months was now a full beard. Scraggly and unkempt. Like the rest of him. Bug was a small guy, thin and nerdy, but that had changed. Now he was a skeleton, a stick figure. Gaunt, with hollow cheeks and dark smudges under his eyes. His hair was badly brushed and his nails were bitten down to raw flesh.

He was at his console in the MindReader clean room. Except it wasn't clean. His desk was a mess, littered with pizza boxes and plastic plates on which half-eaten food was going bad. Cans of Red Bull and empty coffee cups were everywhere. Amid the detritus was a framed picture of his mother, murdered by the Seven Kings. There was a picture tacked to a wall-mounted corkboard. Grace Courtland, my former lover and a victim of the Jakobys. That corkboard was crammed with photos, many of them overlapping like a pile of dead leaves. I saw my old teammates John Smith and Khalid Shaheed. I saw Colonel Samson Riggs and Sergeant Gus Dietrich. I saw so many of the people I'd known and fought alongside. The people I helped bury.

And there, in one corner, was my own face.

And Top Sims and Bunny.

Lydia Ruiz was there, too. And Sam Imura.

All of us.

All of the dead.

I wanted to yell at Bug, to tell him that Lydia and Sam and a lot of the others weren't dead, that he was wrong.

But he wasn't wrong. This was Bug but this wasn't now. This was what the world was going to do. To us and to Bug. There was none of the innocence left in his face. All of the joy of life had been bled out of his eyes and all that remained was fear and hate.

So much fear. So much hate.

If the world could destroy someone like Bug, if the things that bad people do could erase the powerful innocence of a person like him, then what hope was there for anyone else?

I wanted to say something to him, to warn him to step back from the abyss, to find an anchor for his hope. To continue being alive while he was alive. But I wasn't Jacob Marley and this wasn't a Christmas story with a happy ending.

*   *   *

Blast.
The bright heat.

Again.

*   *   *

I saw something else, something that shifted my brain into another gear without bothering to use the clutch.

It was me.

In bed. Hooked up to fifty kinds of weird machines that beeped and pinged and insisted that I was still alive. Some kind of alive. Not the good kind. I looked thinner, wasted, smaller, deader.

But not dead.

I was in an oxygen tent and there was a man with me. He wore a hazmat suit, but I could see his face. I knew him.

Dr. William Hu.

He sat in a chair beside my bed, bent forward as he read through a thick stack of medical test reports. His face was drawn but his eyes were intense. The floor around him was littered with papers.

“No,” he said, and flung a file folder away. He read through the next one, growled the same thing. “No.”

It went soaring across the room.

“No.

“No.

“Goddamn it, fucking no.”

He was alone and I was sleeping. Or in a coma. But somehow I knew he was talking to both of us. He flung down another report.

“Don't you goddamn die on me, Ledger. Don't you do it. I won't let you die, you son of a bitch.”

I watched him search for answers. I watched Dr. Hu fight for me. As if my life actually mattered to him. Maybe it did. I can't stand the guy. Never could. He hates me, too. So not once have I ever wondered how deep that animosity ran.

Perspective is every bit as sharp a knife as assumptions are dull.

“Shit,” he snarled. “No, no, no.”

*   *   *

Blast
.

I was elsewhere.

And somewhere else again. And somewhere else after that.

Was this the same thing that happened back under the ice when I was in the bedroom of the cottage shared by Bunny and Lydia? Was I walking through someone else's life again? Is that what the dead do? Is a haunting some kind of perverse peeping Tom show that never ends?

I saw the man with the blurry face several more times. Nearby. At a distance.

And I realized that I'd seen him once before. When I was awake. When I was alive.

Down in the ice. Down in the frozen cavern of Gateway. He'd been there, ducking out of sight right as everything started going to hell.

Who was he?

What was he?

*   *   *

Blast.

Elsewhere.

*   *   *

This time I didn't know where I was.

For a moment I thought I was back inside the cave down in the Antarctic. It was a cave and it was huge, but …

It was hot. Geothermal heat. I could see steam rise from vents off to my right. Huge columns rose twisting toward a ceiling that was so vast it was lost in shadows. Every once in a while static lightning flashed within that smoke, and in the strobe bursts of light I saw things.

There was a machine. The same one we saw in the ancient city. A massive ring of steel and copper and glittering jewels.

Except it wasn't the same. This one was even bigger. Two or three times the size. Monstrous. And it was glowing. It was alive.

I thought about that word.
Alive
. Felt it. Tasted it. Knew it to be true. The machine was actually alive. It pulsed. Throbbed. Breathed. Lived.

But that was only part of what I saw. As troubling and frightening as that machine was, it paled almost to insignificance by what hung in the air above it. I'd glimpsed it before, but now I saw it. It was titanic. It stood there, miles high, dominating the sky. More powerful than the tortured landscape of the fuming vents of superheated steam.

It was a thing. A creature. Maybe a god. I don't know and even though I was already dead and insubstantial, I knew this monster could hurt me. It could consume me. Its legs were like towers, like skyscrapers, and the body was vaguely humanoid. But the head … Jesus Christ. The face was covered by thousands of wriggling feelers that knotted and twisted like gigantic gray-green worms. Long worms surrounded its mouth. But … no, they weren't worms, they were more like tentacles, but each one was bigger than the largest arm of the greatest squid or octopus that ever lived. The creature tore at the air with scaly claws that looked like they could slash through plate steel, and behind it, stretching out from its back, were leather wings.

That's what I saw standing above the machine. A god from some drug-induced nightmare universe.

I hoped.

I prayed. I screamed. I begged the world to make this thing nothing more than a fantasy of a dying mind. Or a dead man's nightmare.

The godlike creature threw back its head and from that mouth, hidden by those writhing tentacles, came a roar so impossibly loud that it shattered the ground on which it stood. I saw vast pillars of lava leap up and then everything was covered with smoke and fire.

The flames wrapped around me, around my ghost, and burned me down to nothing.

 

INTERLUDE FIFTEEN

BELL FAMILY ESTATE

MONTAUK ISLAND, NEW YORK

WHEN PROSPERO WAS SEVENTEEN

“Christ, Corrine,” gasped Bell as soon as she entered his study, “you look like shit. What happened?”

“I need a drink first, Oscar. Bourbon. Hit me hard.” She sank into a chair and held out a hand, grunting her thanks as he gave her a tumbler he'd filled with four fingers of Pappy Van Winkle. It wasn't his usual drink, being more of a scotch man, but Sails had brought the bottle on one of her previous trips. She preferred the rougher taste of bourbon to the smooth burn of single malt. Sails took a huge gulp, forced it down, gagged, coughed, and nodded her thanks.

Bell set the bottle down on the edge of his desk and pulled a chair close to hers. Sails looked like she'd aged ten years; she was grainy and pale, with dark smudges under her eyes and a nervous twitch in her hands. She took another substantial mouthful.

“That fucking machine,” she said.

“What about it? Was there an explosion or something? I told Prospero he needs to make that regulator work or—”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It's not that. I mean … maybe it's that, too. But this was … this was…”

And she began to cry.

Oscar Bell came out of his chair, pulled her out of hers, and held her close. It pissed him off that he had fallen in love with her, that they were in love with each other. That was inconvenient and it went against one of his strictest rules: never let sentiment interfere with business. But, it had happened, and now it was a fact. He loved this cold, vicious, brilliant monster and she loved him.

He held her close and let her cry it out, let her cry herself to the point where she could find her voice again. It took a while. It required more of the bourbon, and by the time she was calmer and they were seated together on the big sofa by the fireplace, her voice was thick from weeping and slurry with alcohol.

She spoke and he listened.

“It's the God Machine,” she said. “I hate that godforsaken thing.…”

The Gateway team, led by Marcus Erskine, had built two scale models of Prospero's machine. Each one had cost upwards of forty million dollars. The first one, Bell knew, had been a spectacular failure that had exploded seconds after it was turned on. Five technicians had been killed, eleven others injured, and the lab destroyed. It was almost exactly the same thing that had happened at Ballard Academy when Prospero had fired his first prototype.

The first Gateway test had yielded other effects, as well. It generated an electrical nullification field—one of the “side effects” that irritated Prospero—that was far more powerful than anticipated. It was so strong that it blanked out power on half the continent. The Russian and Chinese research stations had gone dark for an hour and when they came back online there was a massive exchange of furious communication with Moscow and Beijing. Diplomats had to scramble to keep everyone from going to a high state of combat readiness. Not that America ever accepted blame for it. They claimed to have been victims, too. Luckily there had been some sunspot activity and in the end everyone blamed that. It was the “Kill Switch” Oscar Bell had promised, but it was still uncontrollable.

That was bad, but it was fixable. Erskine had anticipated some kind of problem along these lines, though not as massive. The null field was the golden egg at the end of this hunt. A controllable, predictable, reproducible electrical null field was the whole point of Gateway. Erskine had been putting increasing pressure on Bell to obtain the last component for safe management of the device—the crystal firing regulator—but so far even though Prospero now had three of the Unlearnable Truths he had failed to discover exactly what that was. Prospero said that it was a numerical code for passing the God Machine's power through transformers attached to each of several large gemstones, but there were thousands of possible patterns, and experimentation to try and crack the code had resulted in damage ranging from explosions to true electromagnetic pulses that fried the machines at Gateway. It was becoming cost prohibitive to do anything more than keep the God Machine in idle mode, and the whole program was millions over budget. Erskine and his superiors were looking to hang the blame on Oscar, and there had been thinly veiled threats about consequences. Bell could lose the contract and there was an outside chance that if it all failed Gateway would require Bell to pay penalties to the government. That would ruin him. Bell had coerced Stark and his staff at Ballard to turn the screws on Prospero and he'd railed at Mr. Priest to find the rest of the books. He was bleeding money.

And now Sails was here, talking about how much she hated the God Machine.

Oscar Bell wanted to scream.

“What's the problem?” he asked cautiously.

“Side effects,” she said.

“What are you talking about? This whole thing is about exploiting the side effects. The whole Kill Switch project is a fucking side effect.”

“No,” she said. “Not that. It's the dreams. Those terrible dreams…”

Bell's heart nearly jumped into his throat. Memories of what Stark had told him after Prospero's machine blew up the first lab at Ballard. Oscar had never shared that part of the God Machine with Sails. Until now he'd thought it was only tied to that one test. “What dreams…?”

“It started that night,” said Sails. “Bad dreams. Jesus, Oscar…”

She told him about a problem that was not reported at first, and not taken seriously even after people started talking about it. Everyone put it down to stress and grief over the disaster. It was only after the second machine was fired that Dr. Erskine and his staff started paying attention to those dreams. And to their effects. The second machine ran for three weeks before failing. The Gateway scientists had done a lot of work on the sequencing of the power regulators, and though they were far from perfect, they seemed to allow the God Machine to run in idle mode, at 5 percent capacity.

The night of that first day erupted into screams.

“Why?” demanded Bell. “What was happening?”

That night several members of the staff reported extremely strange and unusually vivid dreams. It took the base psychologists nearly a week to put together a cohesive story and even longer to cross-check it. The upshot was that during the time the energy from the God Machine was active in low idle, several staff members claimed to have been inside the dreams of their friends and coworkers, and two of them swore that they had been home. One in Saratoga Springs and the other in Cheyenne. During those dreams they were able to see things at those locations with incredible clarity, and one of them remembered what was on TV. When this was checked out, the substance of those observations matched reality with eerie precision.