Paul smiled. “Oh yes.” The last couple of weeks had been busy ones, itself a blessing at his age. First the devastating news of possession. Then the slow response, the determination by himself and the others at his elite West End club that they should not become victims of the beyond. The web of discreet contacts put out, offering an alternative for those who could pay for it. His solicitors and accountants had been tasked with shifting his substantial holdings into a long-term trust that would pay for maintaining his stasis. It didn’t cost much: maintenance, rent, and power. Even if the trust was badly bungled, he had enough money in the bank to keep himself secure for ten thousand years. Then once it had been arranged, there had been the arguments with his children and their swarm of offspring, all of whom had adopted a quiet waiting policy to obtain his wealth. A brief legal battle (he could afford much better lawyers than they), and that was it, and here he was: a new breed of chrononaut.
His habitual dread of the future had faded, replaced by a keen interest in what awaited. When the zero- tau field switched off, there would be a full solution to the beyond, society would have evolved radically to take knowledge of the afterlife into account. There might even be a decent rejuvenation treatment available. Possibly, humans would have finally achieved physical immortality. He would become as a god.
A flicker of greyness, shorter than an eyeblink . . .
The pod cover lifted, and Paul Jerrold was slightly surprised to see he was still in the Lancini. He’d expected to be in some huge technological vault, or perhaps a tasteful recovery room. Not right back where his voyage through eternity had started. Unless these new, magnificently advanced humans had re-created the Lancini to provide their ancestors with the psychological comfort of familiar territory, a considerate way to ease their introduction to this fabulous new civilization built in his absence.
He glanced eagerly through the big, dirty window opposite. Dusk had fallen across the Westminster Dome. The thriving lights of the south bank glimmered brightly in front of the steel grey clouds smothering the vast arc of the dome. A projection of some kind?
The pair of medical staff attending him were somewhat unconventional. A girl leaned over the pod, very young, with amazingly large breasts squeezed up by a tight leather waistcoat. The adolescent boy standing beside her wore an expensive pure-wool sweater that was somehow wrong on him; his face was stubbly, with animal-mad eyes. He held a loop of power cable in one hand, plug dangling loosely.
Paul took one look at the plug, and datavised an emergency code. He couldn’t get a response from any net processor; then his neural nanonics crashed. A third figure clad in a jet-black robe slipped out of the gloom to stand at the foot of the pod.
“Who are you?” Paul croaked in fright. He levered himself up into a sitting position, skinny hands with their bulging veins gripping the edge of the pod.
“You know exactly who we are,” Quinn said.
“Have you won? Did you defeat us?”
“We’re going to, yes.”
“Oww shit, Quinn,” Billy-Joe protested. “Look at these old farts, they ain’t good for nothing. No soul’s gonna make them last, not even with your kind of black magic.”
“They’ll last long enough. That’s all that matters.”
“I told you, you want decent possessed you gotta go to the sects for bodies. Fuck, they worship you. All you’ve gotta do it tell them to bend over, they ain’t gonna put up no fight.”
“God’s Brother,” Quinn growled. “Don’t you ever think, shithead? The sects are a lie. I’ve told you, they’re controlled by the supercops. I can’t go to them for anything, we’d just give ourselves away. This place is fucking perfect. Nobody’s going to notice people going missing from here, as far as this world’s concerned they stopped existing as soon as they walked through the door.” His face jutted out of the hood to grin down at Paul. “Right?”
“I have money.” It was Paul’s last gambit, the one thing everyone desired.
“That’s good,” Quinn said. “You’re almost one of us already. You don’t have far to go.” He pointed a finger, and Paul’s world howled into pain.
Western Europe had hooked eight AIs in to London’s communication net, which gave him enough processing capacity to review each chunk of electronic circuitry in the arcology on a ten second cycle, providing it had a net connection. All processor blocks, no matter what their function, were datavised on a fifteen-second rota and examined for suspect glitches.
He wasn’t the only worried citizen. Several commercial software houses had gripped the marketing opportunity and offered possession monitoring packages. It consisted of a neural nanonics program which sent a continual capacity diagnostic and location datavise to the company security centre, who would alert the police if the user suffered an unexplained glitch or drop out. Bracelets were also spilling into the shops which did the same thing for kids too young for neural nanonics.
Communication bandwidth was becoming a serious problem. Western Europe had used GSDI authority to prioritize the AI scanning programs, leaving them unimpeded while civil data traffic suffered unheard of capacity reductions and switching delays.
The visualization of the arcology’s electronic structure was a theatrical gesture, impressing no one. It stood on the table of the sensenviron secure conference chamber like an elaborate glass model of the ten domes. Fans of coloured light rotated through the miniature translucent structures with strobe-like repetition.
South Pacific studied their movement as the other B7 supervisor representations came on line around the oval table. When all sixteen were there, she asked: “So where is he, then?”
“Not in Edmonton,” North America said. “We kicked their asses out of the universe. The whole goddamn nest of them. There’s none of the bastards left.”
“Really?” Asian Pacific said. “So you’ve accounted for the friend of Carter McBride as well, have you?”
“He’s not a threat to the arcology, he only wants Dexter.”
“Crap. You can’t find him, and he’s just an ordinary possessed.” Asian Pacific waved an arm at the simulacrum of London. “All they have to do is steer clear of electronics, and they’re safe.”
“Got to eat sometime,” Southern Africa said. “It’s not like they’ve got friends to take care of them.”
“The Light Bringer sect loves them,” East Asia grumbled.
“The sects are ours,” Western Europe said. “We have no worries in that direction.”
“Okay,” South Pacific said. “So tell us how you’re doing in New York? We all thought the police had got them that time as well.”
“Ah yes,” Military Intelligence said. “What’s the phrase the news anchors keep using? Hydra Syndrome. Shove one possessed into zero-tau, and while you’re doing that five more come forth. Emotive figures, but true.”
“New York got out of hand,” North America said. “I wasn’t prepared for that.”
“Obviously. How many domes have been taken over now?”
“Figures of that magnitude are unnecessarily emotive,” Western Europe said. “Once the possessed base population climbs above two thousand, there’s nothing anyone can do. The exponential curve takes over and the arcology is lost. New York is going to be this planet’s Mortonridge. It’s not our concern.”
“Not our concern!” North Pacific said. “This is bullshit. Of course it’s our concern. If they spread through the arcologies this whole planet will be lost.”
“Large numbers are not our concern. The military will have to deal with New York later.”
“If it’s still here, and if they don’t turn cannibal. The food vats won’t work around possessed, you know, and the weather shields won’t hold, either.”
“They’re reinforcing the domes they’ve captured with their energistic power,” North America said. “The arcology caught the tail end of an armada storm last night. The domes all held.”
“Only until they complete their takeover,” South Pacific said. “The remaining domes can’t barricade themselves in forever.”
“New York’s inevitable fall is regrettable, I’m sure,” Western Europe said. “But not relevant. We have to accept it as a defeat and move forward. B7 is about prevention, not cure. And in order to prevent Earth itself from falling, we have to eliminate Quinn Dexter.”
“So like I asked, where is he?”
