They landed in a place that Irene thought she would never see again. The command room of the Lair looked smaller than she remembered it. The table that had once been piled high with John's projects now stood empty. The place felt empty, neglected. When the Tomorrow People had moved out of the Lair and into the Refuge, they had gone quickly, and thoroughly, taking everything they needed, and nothing that they did not. It looked like when they'd moved back, they'd kept their footprints light and their bags packed.
"What's wrong? What happened?" Tim asked. His light came on. With it, the screen that banked one wall of the command center sprang to life with a thin pop and the high pitched whine of electronics warming up. "Is that you, Irene?"
"Hello, Tim," she greeted. What was she supposed to say next? It's good to see you? I missed you? Both were true, but Tim was a computer. She could access him and his facilities at any time and anywhere she wanted. That she hadn't was beside the point.
"One of Irene's students tried to kill her," Stephen stated. Letting go of her, he stepped back and ran an appraising eye down her body. The gun had never fired, so she was fine, if a little shaken. He looked shaken, too. Considering that the last time she'd been shot, he'd been the one who carried her bleeding body to the hospital, she wasn't surprised.
"Just now?" Tim asked.
"Yes," they all responded at once. "Just now." Irene, Stephen, and Charlotte all looked at each other, amused at the perfect overlap of their words. Irene felt her mouth widening, a chuckle building in her chest. It was cut short with Tim's follow-up.
"That cannot be a coincidence." He dropped into silence, broken only by the whir of his fans. No one dared interrupt, knowing that he'd answer their unspoken question as soon as he could. A moment later, the lights in the command center shut out. "You need to see this. As usual, I have been monitoring the news feeds…" In lieu of a verbal explanation, he brought the television to life. Unlike nearly everything else, it hadn't been moved out, perhaps because it was so big. Or perhaps because, by Ultra standards, it was so antiquated that there was no point in taking it. The images it displayed, a mix of black and white and color, grainy video quality and sharp, that came into view didn't make sense at first. They were too complicated, with too much movement.
"Where's that?" Charlotte asked, at last.
"Everywhere," Tim responded. "I have news footage from several major US cities and cell phone images from smaller towns across the country."
"Only the US?" Stephen asked.
"I am only showing you the images in the US," Tim answered.
Riots. Mobs. That's what Irene was seeing. Images of people fighting
She forced herself to find one section to look and focus on it, rather than trying to take in the whole mess. In the section she chose, the video was jittery and grainy, yet she could see that, in some place with palm trees in the background, easily two dozen people brawled. Fists swung, legs kicked, and bodies crashed. Irene took a step closer to the screen as if that could bring her closer to any of the places and a clearer understanding of what was happening.
"What's this about, Tim?" Stephen asked.
"Roughly two minutes ago, fights began to break out around the world. As far as anyone reporting in can tell, there was no cause in any of the situations."
The screen froze, then one of the segments started to grow in size until it took over the whole picture. The cameras showed a mob of people in Times Square shouting and brawling. Police cars had surrounded and cordoned off the intersection, which hadn't stopped drivers from pulling right up to the cordons and honking as if that would be enough to make the crowd disperse.
Tim rewound the relevant video and played it back. A newscaster stood in front of the camera with an open-mouthed stare on her face and a dangling microphone in her hand. "What's going on?" she asked. Suddenly realizing that the camera was on and filming, she stumbled through her name and identification, then trailed off with a shake of her head. "It was a farmer's market," she said. "We were covering a farmer's market and then, all of a sudden, everyone started fighting."
Irene saw the vestiges of booths and tables—most of which had been knocked over and smashed—strewn through the crowd. Thrown food was smeared down the walls and across the windows, the destruction overshadowed by the video screens and billboards that made Times Square so recognizable. Sirens cut through the air, forcing the reporter to yell her baffled questions. Near the edge of the crowd, where one person could still be distinguished from another a man picked up a stroller with its toddler still strapped inside, and raised it above his head as if to smash it to the ground. The mother screamed and reached for her child. Everyone could see how this was going to end.
Then, without so much as a shouted cry or a puff of smoke, the crowd stopped fighting. They just stopped. The man lowered the stroller back to the street with no apparent awareness of what he'd been about to do. He mumbled something to the mother, turned, and meandered away. Everywhere people returned to their shopping, oblivious to the fact that the stands were all so much kindling. EMTs rushed through the cordon to pull out those who hadn't been lucky enough to avoid being trampled or thrown.
The clip ended and Tim cut back to the live feed and the reporter, still on the scene and now much more composed. "In what some are already calling a flash mob gone wrong," she stated, "Times Square held host to a full-scale brawl that lasted… how long did it last?" She paused, waiting for the answer to come. When it did, her eyes widened. "Sixty seconds exactly." Another pause. "Really? Someone was clocking it?" She looked back over her shoulder at the selection of screens and cameras that made this location one of the most well-recorded ones on the planet. "OK, I guess several people were clocking it. It's now been verified that the event took exactly sixty seconds. So far, no one has claimed credit for organizing this act of destruction." Lowering her microphone, she murmured, "Well, I know I sure wouldn't."
"Tim, back the video up again," Irene said. She'd watched in horror at what the people were doing to each other, yet she thought she'd seen something else too. Tim obliged. Tearing her attention away from the foreground action was harder than Irene thought it would be, and it took another two tries before she was able to figure out what her subconscious had caught on the first pass. One of the electronic billboards had an ad running during the riot.
"It's the game!" she said, the connections snapping into place with a force that had her physically reeling backward. "Balloon Busters. There was an ad playing during the riot and as soon as it went away, the fighting stopped. Is there anyway to verify if the ad was playing anywhere near the other fights? It probably was. I'm sure it was. The game's making people violent. Well, not all people. Just some people, and I think it's making them violent toward Tomorrow People, which implies that the the rioters aren't Tomorrow People." She had to stop talking to breathe, and in that moment became aware that everyone was staring at her. Even Tim was somehow staring at her, which was amazing since he didn't have eyes.
Tim rewound the video one more time and played it back slower and without sound. Now that they were looking for it, everyone saw the perfect match in timing.
"Wait, is it the ad or the game that's causing problems?" Stephen asked. "Because I know I've wanted to punch Luca a couple times over that stupid game."
"It's the game," Irene concluded, certain now. "Or it was the game. I don't know how it works, so let's say for now that the game has been priming people and the ads were designed to be a trigger." She sat down heavily on the couch underneath Tim's console; her head whirled with the pieces of the puzzle and possible hypotheses for how to put them together. Primers, triggers: that was weapon terminology. If someone had designed the game to be a weapon, who were they planning to use it on? And was it too late to shut it down?
"Delete the game, Tim," Stephen ordered. "Delete it from everyone's phones and computers. Right now."
"You're not going to argue with me?" Irene asked.
Stephen shook his head. "The worst thing that can happen is that people will be annoyed at not being able to get their video-fix. Tim can always put it back."
"I can't delete it," Tim responded.
"Look, if it's some kind of ethical thing…" Stephen started.
"With respect, Stephen, the issue has no bearing in ethics. It seems that I cannot delete the app at all."
"But you're a computer, Tim," Irene said. "A super computer." Tim didn't have powers like the Tomorrow People did—not for lack of both Jedikiah and John trying—but he was tapped in to every computer system in the world, with no constraints due to firewalls or security systems. If there was something in the internet that needed doing, Tim could do it. "What do you mean you can't delete it?"
"I mean that once the app has been downloaded to its targets' phones, it cannot be deleted. Not by me or by the user."
"Does that mean that there's a computer out there more powerful than you?" she asked.
"Until now, I would have believed that that was unlikely."
"And now?" Stephen asked.
"Despite the evidence to the contrary, I would still say it's unlikely. There is something else going on here."
"Aliens?" Charlotte piped up.
Irene was on the verge of reflexively dismissing the suggestion, except that she seriously had nothing better to offer. What was that about eliminating the possible? Or was it eliminating the impossible? At any rate, there was something out there more powerful than Tim, something that was using a common game to turn regular human beings violent, like the goal was to incite a war or to… to set up a distraction?
"If you can't delete the app," Stephen asked, "can you at least reprogram it? Make it so that it doesn't have any effect?"
"With sufficient time to analyze how the program works, assuming that I can get access to the raw code, I might be able to do the reprogramming you suggest."
"Which means no," Stephen concluded.
"Correct. I can attempt to get started on the analysis in question, but I would not recommend waiting until it is finished before you develop other options. If Irene's hypothesis is true, then the conflicts we just witnessed are only the beginning." He paused, the light of his projector dimming for a moment. "Further, there is no guarantee that I would be successful."
The mood in the room turned somber. Getting caught in the throes of discovery made it easy to forget that success wasn't a guarantee. Irene leaned back against the couch; Charlotte settled in close to her, one knobby shoulder pressing against Irene's arm.
"We'll figure it out," Irene promised her. She squeezed her eyes shut. But how, she wondered. How was she supposed to solve this one? Well, the first thing she was going to need was more time, and there were a couple of more pressing points to get off her plate. "Tim," Irene said, "I need to send an email to my department chair…" She still had two classes that afternoon which she would not be returning for, plus she had to tell someone about Josh. If he was running around campus with a gun, someone was going to get hurt. While she had no idea if his action was caused by the game, Tim was right about the timing. The two events had to be related.
But, why had he picked her? Why had the people in the crowds picked their targets?
So busy was she in composing the email and in puzzling through her own situation that she ignored the commotion out in the main room, ignored Stephen and Charlotte rushing out of the room.
She looked up when she was done and noticed the empty room. "Tim?"
"Cara and Russell have arrived," Tim informed her.
Oh. Irene squeezed her eyes shut and tried very hard to teleport. She'd gotten used to having Stephen and Charlotte back in her life, one at a time and spaced slowly over weeks. She wasn't ready to face the rest of them. She couldn't deal with the pity that had sat so strongly in their eyes. That pity had been why she'd left. Though she knew that Cara would never have kicked her out, Irene simply couldn't deal with living each day surrounded with people who could only see her for what she'd lost.
Tim, despite his lack of mind-reading powers, understood exactly what she was thinking. His voice was soft and kind as he said, "They're still, and always will be, your friends, Irene." He let that hang in the air a second before adding, "And they need to know what is going on."
She nodded. Tim was right. He did that a lot.
There was no place to hide in this stripped down room, and no way for her to escape. Even if Stephen or Charlotte didn't slip and mention that she was back here, eventually one of the others would sense her thoughts. And the longer she kept away from them, the more hurt everyone would be. Strangely, going out to meet people she'd once lived and worked with was more difficult than that first day of her class.
Steeling herself, she opened the command room's doors and stepped into chaos.
A half dozen Tomorrow People clustered around Cara, Russell, and Stephen. Charlotte stood off to the side, looking lost. On seeing Irene emerge, she ran over and slipped her hand into Irene's. "You were right," she said. "They were at Times Square. They were the ones everyone else was fighting."
Irene felt her breath slip out of her as another piece of the puzzle slipped into place. Her friends. Her friends had been attacked, and this time they hadn't made it out unscathed. At a glance, Irene spotted torn clothing, cuts, and the distressed expressions of people who had no idea why they'd been targeted. She knew that expression well as it had lived on her own face when she'd first come into her powers and learned how that had changed her place in the world, and it appeared on the face of every other new Tomorrow Person who'd come to the Lair in her time.
"So what are supposed to do?" Russell demanded. He was wearing baggy jeans, a t-shirt, and his favorite green over-shirt, all of which were smudged like he'd been rolling in the dirt. "Because I, for one, am not going back into hiding. I've wasted enough years of my life holed up in this-this…dump!" Pulling back his leg, he unleashed a powerful side-kick on the nearest piece of furniture. The wood inside the couch's arm crunched as his foot broke through it.
Cara watched the assault with the jaded patience of someone who expected no less. "It didn't used to be a dump," she stated. "I know the furniture isn't as nice as in the Ultra offices, but it served us well." Her tight black sleeveless shirt had a large rip over her stomach through which Irene saw a red welt. Long scratches along her collarbone seeped blood in which strands of her hair caught as she looked around, making eye-contact with each of the others in turn. "Maybe it was too soon for us to go topside. We lived down here well—"
"I say we fight!" One of the others yelled. Irene didn't recognize him. He was tall and skinny with a pile of tight brown curls that bounced as he spoke. His ruddy face grew redder when Cara brought her attention to him, though he held his ground. "It's our world, too! We shouldn't have to hide from it."
Who was he to say that, Irene thought? If she didn't know him, that meant he hadn't joined the Tomorrow People until after Ultra's fall. What did he know about having to live in hiding? About having to live in fear?
"Yeah!" another person agreed. "We just have to let them know who's really in charge!" She spat the pronoun with the contempt one might have toward a hunk of goo one had stepped on. She had wide eyes set in a wide face and a restlessness that suggested that she was only barely holding herself back from the challenge in her words.
"We can't all stay down here," Russell continued, rubbing now at the top of his head like he was rubbing at a goose-egg. "There are too many of us, for one. Where would we put everyone? And, really, why should we have to be the ones who change what we're doing? We were just getting used to living topside again. We're not just going to roll up and quit the first time someone doesn't like what we are, are we?"
Cara spread her hands wide in pleading. "Russell, this isn't like the kill squads. This isn't one group out there that we can define and avoid. The way people turned on us—the way they have been turning on us—could happen anytime, anywhere."
"Then we should/i fight back," Russell announced. "Why should we always have to be on the defensive? Why do we always need to be the ones to cower and disappear until the problem goes away? Ultra is gone. The days of the kill squads are supposed to be over. We found the Refuge. Whatever happened to the idea that Tomorrow People could live without fear?"
"This is just a setback. We'll figure out what happened and find out how to make sure it doesn't happen again."
"What if we can't?" Russell asked, not unreasonably. "What if Ultra was just the first wave of humans—" He stopped, scowled, disliking the word the excluded him when it shouldn't, because he was human. "The first wave of Saps trying to kill us because we're different?" He lashed out with a fist, this time, punching the already sagging couch-arm. A second punch followed. "What's holding us back?" he asked, at last. "They attack us and we have to run, right? Because we can't fight back."
They could. The Tomorrow People all trained in hand-to-hand combat because Ultra had forced them to a live in a world where needing to protect oneself from a kidnapper or killer was a constant and real threat. They couldn't count on weapons or even the use of their powers, after Ultra had devised all the various ways of halting or removing them. So they all practiced in martial arts, which had the added benefit of helping to fill the long hours that they had to spend underground. Irene didn't think martial arts is what he meant, though.
"What do you have in mind?" Cara asked.
"John could take care of himself."
Cara's face darkened. They didn't know where he was, what had happened to him, nothing. Jedikiah was gone, too, so it didn't take much to assume that the two were connected. Beyond that? Irene knew that Cara believed that she had failed him. "Don't talk about him like what he could do was something we should aspire toward." John could kill. He'd subjected himself to the Annex project and had the part of his brain that prohibited killing burned away. He was lucky he hadn't been killed, like so many other victims of the Annex project had been. Lucky, or not? Because he'd become a damaged Tomorrow Person and simply being able to kill had changed how he thought about killing. He treated it as an acceptable solution to problems, and look where they had landed all of them.
"Why not? We have access to all of Ultra's equipment. All of their supplies of the serum. Everything. It's not like what John went through, and not for the same reasons. We just need to give ourselves a fighting chance, and living down here? That's not it. That's giving up. I've had enough of giving up."
The rest of the group cheered while Stephen and Cara made eye contact, their expressions worried.
Sensing that he was winning his argument, Russell un-balled his fists, forced himself to stand down. "All we'd be doing is fixing a part of our brains that don't work the way they're supposed to. The Annex Project is over. Ultra's gone. But why shouldn't we put to use the tools they left us? It's not like what John went through; it's just a shot. One little prick in the arm, and then we don't have to hide. No one's saying that we have to kill, either. But at least we'll be able to do more than run if they come after us."
"I'm in," the girl said. "Where do I sign up?"
Two other people, neither of whom had spoken before now, stepped forward. "Me too," they both said. Two girls, one with mid-length wavy hair and a strong nose, wearing jeans and camp shirt, another with her hair shorn close to her head and wearing a blue and white sundress with a high hemline. Like the others, neither were people that Irene recognized. She didn't know them, and she wasn't sure she wanted to change that. What had been going on that had all the new people so eager to turn themselves into killers? Had post-Ultra life been so fraught with danger that they saw no way to live without fighting to the death?
Cara shook her head. "No, I won't allow it. John regretted his decision. He regretted it every second of every day and he would have given anything to undo it. We've survived this long. We can survive a few more days down here and then we'll get back to figuring out how to live up there."
"What if it's not a few more days?" the ruddy-faced boy asked. His jeans bore a large rip down his right leg, and bruises had begun to form on the exposed parts of his arms.
The girl in the sundress got a mean look. "Besides, how do we know that John regretted anything? How do we know that John even existed and isn't some kind of bogeyman you created to control us?"
Cara was losing. Even without her powers, Irene could sense the room turning against the current leadership. It felt a lot like how her classes had turned away from her. Russell probably wouldn't go over because he'd known John and had suffered the worst of Ultra's attacks; the others, though? They were starting to physically drift into their own group and all it would take was one person to step forward for them to go after the Annex serum. The last time the Tomorrow People had been brought to this level of schism, they'd had a clearly defined enemy in the Founder and Ultra; now their enemy could be anyone with an iPhone and a couple extra bucks to spend.
Irene couldn't stand to see Cara looking so at sea about how to deal with this new revolt. "No!" Irene shouted. Next to her Charlotte jumped, her hand squeezing Irene's so tightly in reflex it hurt. Everyone turned to look at her. From the gasps of surprise, she understood that they'd had no idea she was standing there. Maybe she could have stayed in the command room. "Not being able to kill doesn't make you broken."
The wavy-haired girl eyed Irene up and down, then scoffed loudly. "What do you know about it?"
To be spoken to as if she knew nothing about what it meant to be a Tomorrow Person hurt. "What do you?" Irene challenged back. Through her shirt, she rubbed the scar on her stomach from where she'd been shot during an Ultra raid, an injury that would have been fatal if not for Stephen's defiance of the rules that the other TP had lived under for so long. The raid that had killed three of her friends. "You have fantastic powers and all you want is to restore an ability that you probably never would have used anyway? Being able to kill only gets us all dead." It was the wrong thing to say. She saw the girl's face close up before she turned away and disappeared. One by one, the other new Tomorrow People also teleported away. To the suddenly much-emptier room, Irene repeated, "Why can't we find better ways to solve our problems?"