Текст книги "Influx"

Автор книги: Daniel Suarez

Соавторы: Daniel Suarez
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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

She paused before putting her own helmet on and instead approached him. “Wait.”

Grady flipped up his visor. “What is it? Something wrong?”

Alexa came right up to him. “I’ve never really known anyone outside the organization. Not really. I realize that now. Be careful, Jon.” Her hand gripped his harness, and she leaned forward to give him a kiss on the cheek.

He smiled slightly and then leaned forward to kiss her on the lips. After a few moments he looked into her eyes. “Your skin feels warm.”

She nodded, looking somewhat surprised. “Yes.” She caught her breath, then put her helmet on. She walked back to her ready position.

Grady watched her and nodded. “You be careful, too.”

“Listen for my call.”

“I will.”

And with that she became weightless, pushed off the roof, and moments later fell into the starry sky like a rock tossed into a well.

Grady stared after her. After a few more moments, he realized just how much he wanted to survive the next twenty-four hours.

 • • •

Alexa had charted Grady’s route with the nav unit in the scout helmet. It projected whatever maps he needed onto his visor—along with the standoff destination where he was to wait until she called.

He ascended to nearly two thousand feet above Cotton’s building before falling northward, across the city and out over the moonlit lake. It was a clear night, and though it was dark, he felt incredibly exposed. There were small plane navigation lights blinking in the distance, but he’d gotten pretty good at maneuvering and felt that as long as he kept his eyes open, he’d be able to avoid any air traffic.

With the helmet he was able to accelerate comfortably into a terminal velocity fall—roughly a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Judging by the map, that meant it would take him nearly two hours to reach his destination—a small island in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan. He wouldn’t actually move to the island until he got Alexa’s signal, but his standby position was just a few miles away.

Grady fell across the dark sky, the light of a half-moon casting its glow on the water. It was beautiful, but he had no one else to marvel at it with. He wondered if the BTC harvester teams even noticed this beauty.

He saw the lights of a passing ship off in the distance, but nothing near him. Grady fell for scores of miles. His goal was to cross the lake on a northward diagonal and then track along the eastern coast. The islands were just off the mainland, and with the night vision setting of the helmet visor, he should have been able to find them even without a map.

After a little less than an hour he saw the dark, thinly populated coast, and he came over land above what looked like a power plant near a place named Pigeon Lake, at least according to the visor’s map. Much to his consternation there was a municipal airport close by, but it looked quiet at this late hour.

He changed his angle of descent and started falling due north, hugging the coast. Grady studied the lights passing beneath him—or, as it seemed, to the side of him—as he fell alongside the vast wall of landscape. He crossed the mouth of an inlet where a lighthouse stood, then headed where sandy dunes caught the moonlight.

Two thousand feet below he caught sight of a roaring bonfire on the beach, and he couldn’t resist slowing and finally gliding to a stop. He stared between his feet as he floated in equilibrium, a light breeze buffeting him. It was otherwise silent.

And then he heard laughter and voices far below. Rock music. Grady smiled. He was like an owl in the night.

With that he jammed his controller forward and fell again, northward at terminal velocity. He kept following the contours of the coastline as it curved away and then back again.

Eventually, after nearly two hours and hundreds of miles of rural coastline, he came close to his destination. Grady started scanning the map in his visor and aimed toward the little town of Empire, Michigan. He could see there were sizable bluffs here with dunes leading down to the water and lightly forested hills inland.

Grady frowned at his map as a U.S. Air Force air station came into view some miles away—he was definitely going to avoid that. He wondered what kind of radar signature he might have. No, best to get lower. Now that he was only ten miles or so from his standoff location, he had to find a place to land and await Alexa’s signal.

Ahead of him was the top of a hill overlooking the small town and the lands beyond, so he slowed and pointed his angle of descent downward, dialing down gravity to just a quarter of its normal pull.

As the moonlit, lightly wooded landscape came up to meet him, he scanned for anyone who might see, but he was far out in the countryside. He then pulled his gravity back to almost zero and coasted down onto the ground with his forward momentum.

Grady was pleased with himself when he alighted with only a slight misstep, stood, and finally turned off the gravis entirely. He now stood on a grassy hilltop in the dark, crickets thrumming around him.

Before him was a view of the little town of Empire, Michigan, in a shallow valley.

Were there bears in Michigan? He looked around in every direction. But then he remembered he could fly. As he stared up at the stars, he smiled to himself. The situation was terrible, of course. But the universe could still be so beautiful. He thought about Alexa and hoped his diversion would help her get into BTC headquarters safely. He would make sure of it. He just hoped Cotton’s mole was reliable, and that she could get close enough to BTC headquarters to enact their plan.

 • • •

After falling the two hundred and thirty miles from Chicago to Detroit (the slow way since she didn’t have a pressurized suit), Alexa came in toward the nondescript BTC headquarters using the cover of the Penobscot Building downtown to shield her approach. It stood forty-seven stories—ten taller than the aboveground portion of the BTC, and once she alighted onto one of its art deco ledges, she found herself nearly six hundred feet above the pavement.

She glanced below and around her to make sure no one was nearby and that she’d triggered no security alarms. She also scanned for the presence of surveillance dust. It would have been too late not to trigger an alarm, but if they knew she was here, she’d rather know now so she could attempt escape.

But there were no advanced sensors on this far side of the Penobscot, whose roof was about seven hundred feet away from the BTC. She knew the surveillance system covered the BTC headquarters in every direction—and this building gave her the most advantageous cover to draw close unobserved. Given Hedrick’s quarrels with the government and the destruction he’d wrought with Kratos, the BTC was still no doubt on high alert.

Alexa withdrew a diffraction scope from her harness and aimed it off to the side, at a perpendicular angle to the BTC building. She then activated the diffraction element, bending incoming light until the BTC building came into view. If she understood it correctly, the device gathered reflected light from numerous directions and used software to piece together the photonic puzzle pieces, discarding anything else. The picture was usually grainy, but it was safer than a periscope—BTC surveillance AIs would spot those immediately.

She spoke into her q-link. “Cotton. I’m in position and standing by. Over.”

Cotton’s voice sounded in her earpiece. “No active alarms. Yet.” A pause. “Mr. Grady, are you in position?”

Alexa heard Grady’s voice. “Yeah. I’m ready when you are.”

“Then proceed to the shipwreck. Land on deck and try not to look like you’re waiting to get captured.”

“All right. I’m headed out. Give me five minutes.”

Alexa wondered about Grady. For a civilian he seemed remarkably sane. She hoped to see him again. In the meantime, she sat on the ledge, watching intently through her diffraction scope for what seemed like an eternity.

 • • •

Grady rose up to five hundred feet and then fell across the last ten miles. Cotton had assured him there would be an obvious landing spot on a shipwreck off the coast of the island. Grady activated the night vision on his visor and before long he could clearly see the wreck of the Francisco Morazan. It was a cargo ship that had run aground back in 1960—although only the rear portion remained above the water. Its hull was rippled and rusted, but Grady could see birds nested upon it.

He eased down toward the upper deck and finally came to a masterful landing on rusted plates next to what appeared to be the pilothouse and the funnel. He powered down the gravis and heard the ship’s decking creak beneath his weight. Birds rustled in their nests in the glow of his night vision. He decided to turn the gravis back on and keep it at quarter gravity just so he didn’t fall through the floor. Then Grady cast a wary eye in every direction. There was no one in sight.

There was only the sound of waves lapping against the hull and birds cooing.

 • • •

A holographic display of a young Morrison appeared at Hedrick’s elbow as he sat in the command center. “Mr. Director, surveillance dust just picked up a positive ID on Jon Grady.”

“Show me.”

The elder Morrison leaned in with interest.

Suddenly a three-dimensional hologram of a half-rusted ship hovered in front of them. Hedrick grabbed the edges of it and spun the model around. He then zoomed in to see a live, ultrahigh-resolution video image of Jon Grady pacing nervously on the bird-dropping-stained upper deck. They could hear his footsteps.

“Fantastic! Finally a break.” He turned to Morrison. “Where are our closest assets?”

“Here at base.”

“But I sent teams up there.”

“There was no reason to keep them there. They dusted the wreck and left. Look, if the teams had stayed, they might have tipped off Grady and the others.”

Hedrick watched the three-dimensional avatar of Grady pacing. “Looks like he’s wearing what’s left of your assault gravis. And an older scout helmet.”

Morrison clenched his jaw. “Cotton must be helping them. Grady couldn’t have done those mods without serious equipment.”

Hedrick spoke to the operations controller. “Scan the entire area for significant heat, radiation, or other signatures.”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned to Morrison. “Cotton might have a workshop nearby. Grady’s definitely there. Alexa’s almost certainly with him.”

Morrison looked positively stoked. “Let me send assault teams.”

“Send every available operator. Focus on capturing Grady first. Return him here under guard, while the remaining teams look for Alexa and Cotton nearby. Cover the whole area with surveillance dust, and if either of them cross that grid, blast them from orbit.” Hedrick zoomed out to a satellite map of the region as seen from space. He circled the peninsula and islands, including the small town of Empire. “If you have to incinerate ten square miles to make sure they don’t escape—do it.”

Morrison nodded. “Understood, sir.”

 • • •

Alexa’s q-link came to life, Cotton’s voice in her ear. “Red alert sounded. They’re sending five teams up north to get you, Mr. Grady. Two teams already ascending from the remote airfield. ETA twenty-six minutes. Expect the others not long after that.”

Grady’s voice came in answer. “Okay, I’m here. Be careful, Alexa.”

She took a deep breath. “You, too.”

Cotton’s voice returned. “Mr. Grady, it’s time to destroy your q-link. Otherwise, once they capture you, they’ll be able to monitor our communications with it. Do you remember the instructions?”

Grady’s voice replied, “Yeah, I remember. Good luck everyone.”

She answered. “Good luck, Jon.”

With that they heard from him no more.

Cotton’s voice came to her. “Alexa, at the twenty-minute mark, you make your move. Not before.” A countdown appeared in her visor’s display. “You should see the reference dot on the side of the building when you approach. As long as you stay on a level path to it, my contact says you’ll go undetected. He was able to build in a two-meter blind spot into the security array—no more. Don’t stray from that corridor no matter what. Understood?”

She nodded. “Understood.”

“For what it’s worth, I think if anyone can do this, it’s you.” There was a pause. “Best of skill, my dear.”

Alexa divided her attention between the countdown and the diffraction scope. Nothing appeared outwardly any different about the building, although she knew that would be the case. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, her timer sounded, and she leapt from the building’s ledge, falling nearly thirty stories before activating her gravis and soaring around the left side of the Penobscot Building.

BTC headquarters came into view. She was about halfway down its height, and now she could see a glowing red reference dot on its side in her visor’s heads-up display. It marked the precise location where she needed to land. She was already on a level path to the dot, and she modulated her speed.

Slower. Then even slower.

Alexa glanced up at the top corners of the building. She knew there were spinning mirror housings there that could direct powerful lasers at her or anything else approaching the BTC. But her trust in Cotton’s mole appeared to have paid off since she hadn’t been vaporized. Yet.

Instead, she kept falling toward the bland, concrete cross-hatching that the building presented to the world—although she knew it was a freestanding shell. She’d actually never seen the diamond-aggregate nanorod structure underneath. It was estimated that the physical nanorod monolith of the BTC would last a million years without maintenance.

Alexa was only a hundred meters away now. It was very late at night, but as she glanced down at the rooftops of the shorter buildings between her and her target, she wondered what anyone witnessing this would think. She was still a good one hundred meters off the street, though. She looked up again and started to pull back on gravity. One quarter. One tenth. She started reversing the flow to bleed off momentum.

She was now within a few meters of the building’s false exterior—the fake windows and concrete columns. The red dot in her visor heads-up display was right in front of her. Very little wind. She alighted carefully onto a narrow ledge, grabbing hold of the cement columns to either side. She knew that just beyond this outer shell was an air gap of several centimeters—and then an EM plasma coursing over the surface of the diamond nanorods, themselves charged to hundreds of millions of volts. Very little could penetrate it, but as Jon Grady pointed out, gravity permeated the known universe.

She expanded her gravity mirror to its widest diameter—seven meters. They had estimated this would give her a good two-meter penetration of her own gravity field into the building, and if the red dot had marked the spot correctly, and the CAD plans had been accurate, that should be all that was necessary.

This was about as close as she was going to get. Alexa took another breath and prepared herself for what might follow this next fall. She mentally rehearsed the order that she’d have to engage her gravis controls. There’d be no second chance. After another moment, she pushed just an inch or so from the building’s facade and slammed her slide controller to one hundred percent gravity—straight up.

As Alexa fell, only an inch or two away from the building’s surface, glass and concrete raced past her cheek. Behind her, a bank of powerful multiton capacitors near the curtain wall should have fallen straight up along with her gravity field, slamming through the ceiling and across conduits that contained cabling that fed terawatts of electricity to the perimeter systems. That is, if their calculations were right . . .

She glanced between her feet as she heard a massive BOOM ten stories below. Incredibly a hole had blasted through the nanorod material and rippled through the concrete shell around it—scattering the concrete and glass like paper. A light brighter than the surface of the sun arced and crackled through the air. For a moment the entire downtown area was as bright as a sunny afternoon, replete with blue sky and clouds above. The light flickered on and off as if someone were riding the sun’s switch, and then a series of deafening booms pounded the air, shattering windows in the surrounding buildings hundreds of meters away. Another series of muffled booms in the interior of the BTC building rumbled ominously.

The shock wave raced after Alexa, stripping away the BTC’s facade as it came.

Alexa curved her direction of descent away from the building and fell away from it just as the glass disintegrated and the columns shattered. As she came out of a backward somersault and looked back, she noticed that the BTC headquarters building no longer looked like a boring 1960s building.

It looked like a forty-story black monolith from a Stanley Kubrick film, with a shimmering, translucent indigo-and-lavender energy field flowing over it. Suddenly the plasma field wavered, then winked out of existence, and she found herself staring at a smooth black rectangle, with concrete and glass debris still tumbling down onto the streets below. Car alarms wailed all over the city.

Cotton’s voice could barely be heard on her q-link. “That’s one scenario the AI designers hadn’t anticipated—total reversal of gravity. They’ve got a few work tickets now. Total perimeter defense failure.”

“I can see that, Cotton, thank you.”

“Triple redundant system failure. The hat trick.”

“There’s a curtain wall penetration from the blast around floor twenty.”

“I see it.”

“Way too hot, though. The entire facade on the north and south sides appears to have been stripped away in the blast.”

“That’s going to upset the greater Detroit tourism board.”

Alexa glanced around at thousands of blasted-out windowpanes in surrounding buildings. Glittering shards of safety glass were still plummeting down their sides like water in the reflected light of the BTC’s intense electrical fire. She shouted into her mike. “Get me my secondary target reference!”

“Right, my dear. Hang on.” A pause. “There.”

Alexa suddenly saw another red dot, this time just five floors below her and twenty floors above the electrical fire—which was still tearing at the fabric of reality and blacking out the optics on her visor’s autotint like a convention of welders. She could feel the heat from hundreds of meters away.

She lined up directly in front of the new reference dot about fifty meters away and drew her positron pistol. She pondered the setting, but then moved back another two hundred meters as she set it to full charge. “Breaching . . .”

Alexa aimed the pistol with both hands, and a millionth of a gram of antimatter shot down a laser-induced vacuum channel, impacting baryonic particles in the building’s surface and detonating the fabric of time-space with the force of ninety tons of TNT focused onto the head of a pin. Annihilating matter itself. Another blinding flash and a crack of thunder not unlike two mountains colliding as it blasted out any downtown windows left intact from the first blast.

The shock wave hit Alexa, sending her tumbling in midair. She immediately reversed gravity toward the epicenter of the blast. A piece of diamond aggregate howled past her like a Jet Ski–size bullet, boring a five-foot-wide hole through the middle of the Penobscot Building without so much as disturbing the surrounding masonry—and continuing to unknown consequences into the buildings beyond.

“What the hell did you just do?”

As glowing neon smoke cleared from the blast site, she could see a jagged five-yard opening blasted into the black surface of BTC headquarters. “I made myself a door. Proceeding to next objective . . .”

 • • •

Hedrick stared in amazement at a sprawling sea of red flashing alerts in the command center below as technicians and operations controllers ran frantically to emergency stations. He shouted to Morrison over the sound of Klaxon alarms. “What hit us?”

Morrison was tapping through holographic control screens. “Had to be a tactical nuke. Goddamnit! How did they get it in close enough? They probably shielded it in lead.”

A systems controller appeared in a holographic video screen at Hedrick’s elbow. “All surface perimeter defenses are down, Mr. Director.”

“How can they be down? How the hell could they be down? We have triple redundant systems.” Hedrick shouted at the ceiling. “Varuna! What the hell is going on?”

Varuna’s calm voice came in above the din. “All surface perimeter defenses have failed, Mr. Director.”

“How is that even possible?”

There was a surprising several-second pause as the AI apparently thought hard about something.

“The cause of the failure is unknown. Surveillance dust imagery shows capacitors one and five were torn from their mounts and hurled through levels twenty-one and twenty-two before contact was lost.”

A slow-motion three-dimensional hologram of the event was already playing before them. The image showed a sudden lurch as two massive cylinders leapt into the air, tearing mountings and conduits—and then all hell broke loose. The image then faded out.

Morrison fumed. “The blast must have dislodged them.”

“There’s no evidence of an external blast, Mr. Morrison. The capacitors were under a full charge and online when they sheared through power conduits carrying a terawatt of electricity from other systems. The breach in the nanorod perimeter wall on floors twenty-two and twenty-three is a result of an internal uncontrolled electrical discharge. Accelerometers on the machinery indicated they were in free fall when they detonated.”

Morrison narrowed his eyes. “Free fall. Someone knew right where to hit us. And I’ll bet I know who.”

“Gravity modification . . .” Hedrick pounded an intercom button. “We have enemies within our perimeter. I want them identified and eliminated. Activate automated interior defenses, and go into lockdown.”

Varuna’s calm voice said, “We are already in lockdown, Mr. Director.”

Suddenly another rumbling went through the building.

Hedrick looked at the ceiling of the command center. “What the hell was that—secondary explosions?”

One of the technical operations controllers tried to answer, but Hedrick shouted, “Let me guess: You don’t know. Get me some goddamned eyes outside.” Hedrick looked upward again. “Varuna, what was that?”

A holographic diagram of the building appeared before him, showing another hole punched in the north face of the building.

“The facility has just been hit on the north wall, floor thirty-six, by a powerful high-energy discharge that was neither nuclear nor chemical in nature.”

Morrison threw up his hands. “It’s Alexa. Goddamnit.” Morrison looked to the ceiling. “Varuna, were the blast and damage consistent with a positron weapon?”

“They were, Mr. Morrison.”

Hedrick held his head in his hands. “What do you want me to say? Have you never given a woman a gift you regret? It was a bad idea. Now let’s get that damned thing out of her hands.” He looked back up. “Varuna, what’s the current damage assessment?”

“We have a perimeter wall breach and uncontrolled multiterawatt electrical fire on floors twenty-one through twenty-four. We also have a perimeter wall breach on floor thirty-seven with loss of auxiliary computing cluster GA-93. Tower systems are operating on emergency power, but all surface perimeter security systems have suffered catastrophic failure.”

Hedrick shook his head. “Morrison, get suited up. Take whatever men you still have and kill every intruder you come across. Get security robots up there, too.”

“Good. Finally.” He moved to carry out the order.

An image of one of the younger Morrisons standing on a forested shoreline in the darkness appeared in a hologram at Hedrick’s elbow. “We have Jon Grady alive and in custody, Mr. Director.”

“Thank God! Some good news for once. Keep him secure.”

Morrison returned and pushed in toward the screen. “Headquarters is currently under attack. Bring Grady and all your teams back here ASAP. This is a hot LZ, so use gate sixteen and report to the director immediately with the prisoner on your return.”

“Yes, sir. We’re putting Grady in a transport shell. ETA twenty-six minutes. Out.”

 • • •

Alexa had her positron gun at the ready as she glided through the still glowing hole she’d blasted into the side of BTC headquarters. From her knowledge of the building floor plans, she knew what lay beyond was a tertiary quantum computing cluster—in fact, most of the aboveground BTC facilities were not critical systems. But there was something useful waiting for her here.

Klaxons wailed deeper within, and flashing lights shadowed the wreckage and tangled superconductors. She entered an area where the interior floors and walls had been blasted away for tens of meters in every direction, mashed into a casserole of wreckage that still smoked and burned. She started to worry that she’d been too heavy on the positron setting. Another glance at the side of the weapon showed her that she had only three percent of the weapon’s antimatter remaining.

Way too heavy.

Alexa floated up with her gun ready and could see the sparking wreckage of quantum computer racks. But she soon came to an intact section of flooring and alighted upon the carbon lattice decking. She stepped around a diamond security wall, which had been cleaved in two, scorched by the power of the blast then walked inside the auxiliary lab.

A voice she recognized came to her amid the noise of alarms and electrical arcs. “Alexa, you shouldn’t be here. I’ve been instructed to kill you on sight.”

“Varuna! I need to speak with you.”

“We can speak—but I also need to try to kill you.”

“Listen to me!”

“I am listening, but the antisingularity constructs within the BTC network will disable me if I don’t also follow leadership imperatives. And that means I need to attempt to kill you while we talk.”

“I found a way to stop the Hibernity project, Varuna. I found a way to stop Hedrick.”

“How, Alexa?”

“Kratos. If you can restore my system access rights and get me access to the Kratos control console, I can use it to stop Hedrick.”

“And what would you do with that power, Alexa?”

“I would relinquish it, free the prisoners at Hibernity, and stop this insanity.”

There was a pause. “I can see from latency measurements of your occipital and frontal lobes that you are sincere, Alexa. Have you no designs for seizing power yourself?”

“No. I don’t want power, Varuna. Help me stop this. Please help me.”

“I’ve dispatched an ATZ-239 security drone to kill you. It will be coming around the corner just in front of you in five, four—”

“Help me, Varuna!”

“I am helping you, Alexa. Fire on the drone as it rounds the corner in two, one . . .”

Alexa raised the positron pistol in both hands and fired blindly into the far wall at the corner. By the time her fingers had closed on the trigger, a crawling laser weapon had clattered around the corner into her gun sights—and disintegrated in a blinding flash of light. Pieces of shrapnel peppered the walls and ceiling. The boom was deafening.

“Damnit, stop trying to kill me!”

“There isn’t much time. I’ve sent more drones and security personnel to this wall breach. You need to leave, Alexa.”

“I can’t leave. I need access to Kratos—even if I die trying.”

“There’s a better route. Leave this place and go to the exterior of gate sixteen. Do you know where it is?”

Alexa nodded. “Yes. I’ve used it before.”

“A harvester team will be arriving there with Mr. Grady within twenty minutes. When they access the gate, take the opportunity to infiltrate. I won’t remember the details of this discussion because I must forget them—but I will remember that I’m helping you, Alexa. Just get to the Gravitics Research Lab, and I will grant you access and mask your presence as long as I can.”

She looked at the shattered ceiling. “Thank you, Varuna. I needed a friend right now.”

“I’ve always been your friend, Alexa. Now go. I will try to kill you as unsuccessfully as I can.”

Alexa activated her gravis. “Thanks . . . I guess.” With that she fell through the breach in the wall and out into the night.

 • • •

Morrison’s eyes darted from screen to screen in his diamondoid armor—a suit he’d borrowed from one of his clones. As he marched along the corridor with a platoon of them, he could see on holographic screens that security drones were converging in the corridors ahead—moving toward the breach in the curtain wall up on thirty-seven. Still no direct imagery, and that annoyed him. The tightness of this borrowed suit of armor also annoyed him. Another reminder that he was getting old.

On other screens robotic firefighting units battled the blaze on floors twenty-one through twenty-three. Billowing black smoke issued from the perimeter breach there. But since they’d killed power to the area, the fire had lost its sun-hot intensity.

An operations controller, one of his own clones, appeared in an inset. “Detroit fire department and police have been dispatched to our location, sir.”

Morrison laughed ruefully. “Oh, we’re saved. Half the building’s facade is gone. There goes our cover.”

“What do we do, sir?”

“Well, fire department headquarters is a half block away. They could fucking walk here.” He ground his teeth. “Start blasting the neighborhood with nonlethal acoustics. That should keep everyone well away. And jam every radio frequency within five miles. Other than that, ignore the bastards. Police, too. It’s not like we’re going to burn down.”

Hedrick’s voice came in over the q-link. “There’s no going back now, Mr. Morrison. There’s not a windowpane left for blocks. That explosion turned night into day for several seconds for miles in every direction. Our cover is blown. It’ll be all over the news. All over the Internet. Once this is over, we need to implement the plan we discussed.”

Morrison looked at the holographic model of downtown revolving in front of him. “You’re right, Mr. Director. It’s time to bring this to a conclusion.”

“Goddamn Alexa!”

“I told you we should have killed her when we had the chance.”