I realized you weren’t a nobody. I thought I’d give you a chance.”
“To do what?”
“Be somebody.”
A couple revivor sigs blinked on in the corner of my eye; then two big guys came in through the door. I could see their eyes glowing as they moved through the dark.
The reminder went off then. The text file popped up and displayed two messages:
Right away, I knew it was wrong. I changed the name on the file when I saved it, and it was the same as last time. Whoever was fucking with my head found out about the text file. Someone else had written that note.
I didn’t know anything about any ship. Whoever made me write it wanted me to go there. They wanted me to trust him. That was all the reason I needed not to.
I pointed the gun at the old man and cocked the hammer. Off to my right I saw the two jacks pull guns from their coats and level them at me.
“Cal, take it easy!” he said. “Don’t!”
“Fuck you.”
I kept the gun on him. The two thugs had their guns pointed at my chest.
“Cal, you can trust me. Lower your gun and they won’t hurt you.”
“I think you’re the hub, Doc. I think if I take you out, they won’t do shit.”
I saw orange light behind the old man’s eyes, and I the two jacks relaxed. They put the guns away.
“That girl, the redhead, she’s not the only one, Cal. There are—”
“Shut up! You’re full of shit!”
“I’m not, I’m telling you…. For me it started as far back as the service, and that was a long time ago. Please give me the gun and I’ll show you.”
I scanned the jacks. Besides the guns, they each had a bayonet tucked in their arms, and each one had a brick of explosive strapped to its belly.
“You’d never get all three of us, if it came to that,” the old man said. “It doesn’t have to come to that.”
I aimed for his shoulder and pulled the trigger, but he was faster than he looked; his palm connected with my wrist and the bullet blew a chunk of brick from the wall. Before I could bring the gun around, something stung me in the side of the neck.
I turned and saw something whip back into the closest revivor’s arm as it snapped shut. Before I could do anything else, my head got heavy and my legs went soft.
“Sorry,” Buckster said.
I wanted to throw a punch, but my arms were like lead, hanging by my sides. I made it one step before I went down.
“Get her in the car,” I heard him say. The revivor standing over me nodded, and things started going blurry.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said. His voice sounded far off. “She’ll come around. We can use someone like her….”
It was the last thing I heard before the lights went out.
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo
I’d been staring at the computer for hours, but I hadn’t entered anything. In fact, I hadn’t even unboxed my notebooks yet. I was too busy reading what was already in there. I stared at the screen with all the lights off, not totally believing what I saw.
I thought no one knew much about what happened two years ago. No one talked about it and Nico said it got covered up, but these people knew about it. They knew everything about it. People from their group were seeing the needle heads long before I ever was. More than thirty people saw it a year in advance. They reported in from all over the city, the state, and beyond. They knew about me and Nico. They knew about everything.
Ott, Zoe. Potential E1.
I stared at the icon that represented me, until the heart shape blurred. There were a lot of connections that led there, along with the two who came before me. Penny, and …
Hyde, Noelle. Potential E1 (Deceased).
Potential E1. Whatever E1 was, it was important to them. They’d been looking for it a long time. They thought it might be me, but I wasn’t the first one they’d thought it about. At least one of them ended up dead.
I touched the heart with Noelle’s name over it, and a red message box popped up.
None of the references to her said how it happened, how she died. There were a few pictures of her; she reminded me a little of Penny, except her eyes were green like mine. In one picture she was dressed up in a suit, with her hair in a tight bun. She had the same tattoo as Penny, the snake around her neck, swallowing its tail.
In the next picture she looked like a bag lady. Her hair was a rat’s nest, her teeth were yellow and brown, and her clothes were filthy. The last picture might have been taken with a cell phone. She lay on the sidewalk, covered in blood. I closed her file.
When I picked up the glass to take a drink, I realized it was empty. I grabbed the big bottle and tipped it until the neck clinked against the rim. I watched the clear liquid trickle in and the level rise until it got a half inch away from the top. I put the bottle down and the cap on.
Back at my old place, I’d had an old shot glass I liked to use, but on top of my new liquor cabinet I’d found a smoked-crystal glass that I really liked. It was twice the size of a regular shot glass, and had a fancy emblem carved into it. I picked it up and drained half of it in one gulp.
I didn’t know where to start, so I just surfed around to try to get the hang of their system. I tried to follow single threads, but there were so many of them and they branched out so often, I didn’t know how anyone could make any sense out of it all. There had to be some kind of data miner….
After some fiddling, I found it. I entered in my name and set it going, but right away parts of the nebula changed color as hundreds of little green points appeared.
More kept coming. There were still too many. I tried again:
I didn’t know how to spell his last name. What I punched in got a similar result …worse, actually.
I thought for a minute, then entered in the phrase:
I set it going, but that time nothing popped up, at least not right away. I let it spin in the background while I brought up one of the dream entries at random:
Someone named Petra Loeb had made the entry. I opened another one:
That was by a Daniel Moser. I picked out one more:
