Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (51 page)

Below this quiet hilltop, Clay sleeps. From deep within, all that she is desires to
hold him. Hair flying behind, Tharcia runs surefooted down the hill. Home.

As he stands alone through the long night, Lian is unaware of waiting. He is deep in gratitude. Lian’s constant exercise is to be awake, to hold his mind in open surrender to his Creator. Gratitude, the most difficult practice. The grace of it, when his mind enters that state, is to feel watched over and protected.

The priests stopped making noises
at twilight, loudspeakers long silent. For Lian, it is enough to be mindful of the moment, feel the night, the stars in stately procession across the heavens, the acrid smoke upon the air.

An act of redeeming grace has entered his
existence, the return of his Lylit. Lian finds the circumstances uncanny. Forbidden to visit Earth down the lost millennia, he was helpless. But his exclusion was broken by the mortal’s conjuring. Committed to memory ages ago by Lylit herself, the ancient spell when chanted by her chimeral twin opened Lian’s path to his love’s prison, where he can now protect and rescue her. Gratitude. Since his arrival, one hundred and eight angels have died, one hundred eight of Lylit’s misguided tormentors. Not a single one remains.

T
his act of grace so richly layered. The angel Raziel had brought Lylit to a place of safety. Raziel, Lylit’s friend from deep time before mortal beings, had with the girl’s mother created one of two fraternal twins. Lylit and Tharcia, tiny embryos in the womb, together became the chimera, a form in which Lylit could safely hide. Tharcia, another act of grace. If Lylit had continued as a twin, separate, she would have been captured and killed at birth. The human embryo had called out strong and pulled her in.

T
he mother’s sudden death drove the girl’s relentless search. Without that, Tharcia’s rage would have directed itself elsewhere. She would never have stepped onto the path that ultimately called him to free Lylit. But the seed of Tharcia’s rage was her abuse at the hands of a selfish uncaring man. Without the rich weave of forces, Lylit would have remained silent and alone, until Tharcia lived out her ordinary life and died her ordinary death.

Th
e act of grace a mystical hologram. Lylit’s memory of the lost spell, her stratagem of enabling Tharcia to recite it, the shared library called the Internet that allowed Tharcia to focus her intention on a pentagram large enough to contain Lian’s true form. All these potentialities now fused into one sublime reality are tonight the focus of Lian’s profound gratitude.

A
subtle light arises within his heart, a divine presence that touches him personally and is always with him. The loving hand of his Creator, enfolding him in the light of bliss. Lian knows that nothing is accident, all is grace, sees himself as part of everything, his spirit safe in the sensing he is cared for, that his existence is meaningful to the Creator. Lian exists as an unbounded loving servant of all there is.

The practice of gratitude is not to ask but to give. Lian
in all the depths of time has asked nothing for himself, nothing save for Lylit’s existence. But he wonders now, if he can ask the same question the girl asked relentlessly of him. For what is his job, his role and duty, if not to be a teacher? All he can accomplish is based on fulfilling that single task correctly.

Lian’s eyes open
. Lylit is before him, floating as human form with iridescent wings in the dark night of this world’s turning. A beguiling goddess girl on the wing. Without her, he had been a distortion of his true being. She is changing him even in this moment.

I hear your song of gratitude, Lian. You are beautiful.

You are here. Therefore I am beautiful.

It is noon. Many Sleepers dream on, safe in their invisible cocoons. Most Wakers are either dead, or deep in bliss of an altered consciousness. Sami Lang is one of these.

She is taller. From her forehead extend graceful sweeping forms that curve back over her silver hair.
Sami’s skin is deep blue from head to foot. It is not clothing, it is not paint. Her fine-grained ultramarine flesh is bare in morning sunlight, her body muscled taut. She knocks more loudly. The streets are quiet, no one is with her. Strand is not answering. She touches the door, her fingers disappear beneath the surface. Something within clicks.

Inside the offices, the scene is as she left it hours ago, but Strand is not at his computer. He’s stretched out asleep on the sofa, his face has a waxy sheen. She kneels beside him.

“Boss, it’s me.”

She touches his forehead. He is very hot, clothing damp with sweat. She looks at him intently, reading his body. His eyes open.

“Sami,” his face takes on a sublime glow, looking up at the blue-skinned vision. Small neat lettering arches above her nipple.
The Singularity is Nigh.
It is not a tattoo.

“I did it, I got it done.”

“Chris, what is it? What happened?”

“The Whalesong…” Strand lapses into unconsciousness.

She gets water, lifts his head so he can drink. Eyes partly open, glass at his lips, he is distantly aware his cheek presses Sami’s bare breasts. She looks on him lovingly.

“You’ll be fine, Boss. Rest. I’ll stay with you.” To her mind the information comes.
Equine Encephalitis exists in the western United States, a cycle between the Culiseta melanura mosquito and birds of freshwater lakes. When bitten, humans have symptoms of high fever, stiff neck, headache, confusion, and lethargy. Encephalitis, swelling of the brain the most dangerous symptom…

“Damn!”
She does not know enough yet, to help him, senses it is too late, no one out there to call. She rests his head, soaks a cloth in cool water, places it over his eyes. The blue woman turns to the cluttered desk, Strand’s computer still logged in.
Good. I’ll have access to everything.

On his laptop, first thing she sees, the convo with Gary and Carl three decades in the future. Reads quickly, who survives, who dies. Sami jerks forward.

”Me? I don’t make it?”

She reads the article two more times, much faster than she could have done yesterday. There it is, recorded in Whalesong, her indelible obituary. Directly in her vision on the screen,
Carl Vogt’s damning words from a future time.
Sami didn’t make it. We don’t know what became of her.

She sits back. “Shit fuck and damn! What goes wrong?”

She fights to slow her breathing, relax in the chair. Eyes closed she follows her breath. In. Out.
What do I do, what gets me?
It comes to her, outrageous but clear in her mind. The single act that can save her. She has to cure herself of being dead by altering the future.

Focusing her
mind, Sami tries to recall every idea, every stray thought, every plan and half-made wish since this morning, since yesterday. Nothing clear, there were so many things... But she’s damn sure she’s not dying from a forgotten whim.
Alright, I’m going to stay right here until night comes.

She concentrates on the idea with intensity. That is what she’s going to do. Stay here, watch over Chris.
She sits on the floor near him, folds her legs into a lotus, slows her breathing begins her meditation mantra. Back straight, eyes closed, wrists lightly on her thighs, she’s focused on a single thought:
survive.

Through
long hours she is silent, keeps her mind in stillness. Sami holds within herself a vision of her oneness with all there is, gratitude for her unlimited potential as a conscious being. She moves through a state where the core of her life is ultimate reality, into one of spiritual bliss. Her mind is still.

When
Sami opens her eyes, Strand’s breathing is more relaxed, his forehead not as hot. She stands and stretches her body.

Sits at Strand’s computer. Finds
the paragraph,
Who lives, who dies.
The words swim in her vision. The article is different now, no mention of her death, she’s safe in the future, as far as she can see. Sigh of relief, of deep discovery. Sami understands something new, something real.
The Akasha is flexible, it is not fate.

Looking further on Strand’s laptop, Sami backtracks, sees
the work he’s done, the twelve hundred files of redacted Whalesong he’d worked through tirelessly over two straight days, the knowledge he thought safe for the world to know.
Compared to six billion whale messages? How pitiful. This is supposed to accomplish something, go somewhere. We are not the ones to stop it.

She transfers the original Whalesong source to her own partition
on the mainframe, opens another window and logs in as herself. She re-starts the decoding, pipes the results to a partition that Solberg will be able to find. With the full power of NOAA’s supercomputer cavern behind it, the processing will blaze through. In a few hours, six billion Whalesong messages will be whole and shared with all of surviving humanity. She is certain that enough people will understand. She turns to Strand.

On the back of his hand she sees it, an infected spot.
Probably the bite. But when was he out West in the last week?
Kneels on the floor beside the sofa, wipes his overheated face with a cool cloth, speaks to him in low tones. Beside her on an ottoman, his laptop. She reads decoded Whalesong articles at a rate few humans can match. She has a lot to learn.

E
arly evening, Strand wakes. He smiles weakly at her, face beaded with sweat. For a time he is coherent, mind sharp, talks to her about the limitless possibilities of the intellect, the knowledge which humans are nearly ready to receive. “We will release the Whalesong someday, Sami, but for now it’s safe. I made us safe.” He smiles at her until his eyelids droop. “Angels, Sami. I have a headache.”

“Boss I wish you had listened. You could have come with me. The future is so big,
Chris, so damn big and beautiful. The women are coming together and…”

Strands eyes lose focus, his breathing slows. In minutes
, Christopher Strand lies still. She watches the tension melt from his face. She will sit with him as he begins his journey. Holding his hand in hers, she ponders the Whalesong, knows the knowledge is meant to be shared, onward bound for others to receive.
This was never meant for us alone.

At noon local time, three hours after Lian’s published announcement, William Exley and Veronica duLac
park their cars at Nevada’s Creech AFB, slated to be first in rotation for Reaper Six’s 42-hour mission. The RPV is scheduled to lift off from Maryland at 5 pm EST, one hour ahead of the Sleep deadline. Mission commanders want the bird off the tarmac well before anyone is affected, if such a thing can possibly exist. There are many doubters.

Exley and duLac will command Reaper Six for the first seven hours,
after which the second mission crew will slide into the command chairs. Exley and duLac will retire to rest, occupy guarded quarters until called again to the control module. The pair does not believe there will be a crew rotation, that the mission objective will be met in the first hours. It is a duty they swore on the flag of the United States to execute and uphold. It fills them both with dread.

In the briefing room, Colonel Bob Reed stands before a
large LCD panel at the front. The group is small, only Exley, duLac, and two commlink specialists. On the remote video monitor, two fuel and weapons crewmen face them from their station at Andrews.

“The objective tonight
,” Reed begins, “is to target a major munition directly at the location of the portal field’s vortex whorl. On my screen here is a photograph of the intruder at the Pentagon. As you can see it has grown to an extremely large size. Doctor Shackleford’s team has provided us with a new visual graph of the field gradients. Here, you can see that the field has expanded in scale with the intruder.

“This is actually good for us, because it both enlarges the size of the vortex whorl, your target, and raises it
farther above ground. Again, the best science informs us that the blast from your payload will travel through the portal and release its energy at the source of the field, thereby destroying the generating equipment. We expect that no blast energy or radiation will be released in the locality of the Pentagon itself.” Reed concludes. “It is our best calculation that this will permanently close the portal.”

Exley feels Veronica tense
at the mention of radiation. His glance at her the briefest flicker. Beneath her professional exterior, her eyes hold fear.
Going nuclear on the Pentagon. The B63G laser-guided bomb.

But what if the scientists have this one wrong? Exley
knows that a nuclear explosion in the location will wipe out not only the Pentagon, but neighboring Arlington National Cemetery, the city of Arlington. The blast radius will touch the far banks of the Potomac and north to Georgetown, Washington, the entire zone radioactive for centuries.

Reed follows with the overall mission briefing. The
armaments portion confirms that a B63G guided bomb now hangs from hard points on the fuselage of Reaper Six. Because that weapon is at the upper limit of what the RPV can carry, no other munitions are aboard.