February 26, 2013
The car bumped and jostled them northward. Justin had a theoretical floorplan for the building based on the original plans filed with the city - who knew whether it'd been changed since then.
Paul listened to the white noise of the kid's typing threatening to put everyone to sleep. Unable to bear it any longer, he asked, "Anything I can help with?"
Justin blinked at him for a moment as if trying to understand what the question could even mean. "Um, no?" He checked back at the screen. "That is, no. I'm trying to figure out what we're walking into."
In a large, flow-through apartment in Munich, a young woman smiled, ready. "We online?"
The other two voices in her headphones responded.
"LandMind here."
"Gravmag ready to go."
A tall, bearded German man placed a cup of coffee beside her and left a kiss on her shoulder. She smiled at him, but said nothing.
"Sonnenkind here," the woman said into her headphones.
The other two voices welcomed her as they sat down to business.
"This one's yours."
Caitlyn took the little bluetooth earpiece from Justin and positioned it in her ear. "Hello?" she tested it out, feeling self-conscious.
"You ready for something awesome?" the high, lilting voice in her ear responded. She could practically see a broad smile come across the airwaves. "I'm LandMind."
"Caitlyn, er, GingerPrincess."
"A pleasure, Princess." The smile sounded bigger. "My friends and I are going to get you guys through this if it's the last thing we pull off."
Caitlyn looked up at Justin and mouthed, "Who are they?"
"Friends," he said, grinning at her. Justin reached out and handed the other earpiece to Felix. They'd decided that it seemed smartest for the people who were closest to Apple to have her friends in their ears. Technically, the three voices were there for her, not actually for the group of hunters.
"Sunny?" he asked over his headset. "Are we ready to go?"
Caitlyn watched him pause for a moment to listen to the voice in his own ear before declaring, "Then let's get this show on the road."
Up ahead, they could all see the tall, glass tower looming through the trees.
When we cease to dream, we cease to be ourselves.
Apple hadn't been herself for days. Somewhere deep inside her mind, she could see a little more than she had before. She understood a little more than she had before. She was more unsure than ever of what she was supposed to do.
"Supposed doesn't cover half of it," her only companion, a grey tabby cat, told her. "Why does there have to be a supposed to? Who's choosing these rules?"
Shrugging, Apple settled herself in the never-ending expanse of white. "Do you know whether anyone's coming for me?"
The tabby cleaned one of its paws and ignored her.
"Fine then." Melanie Coburg crossed her arms and settled back. She could wait as long as it took.
The Agents were using those Mind rounds again. Paul could see the dim glow of them in the agents' hands. "Keep away from the blue rounds, okay?"
Caitlyn looked back at Paul. "I was planning to stay away from all of the bullets, thanks."
"These ones don't bother the flesh," he shot back. "Those are the same bullets they used against us in the bunker. They'll cloud your mind."
"Your mind, maybe," Felix replied and grinned. "I got shot down there, remember? Made it out just fine."
Paul followed Justin's eye across the room with the three Technocrats in it. "If you get to that other computer panel, do you think you can figure out where Apple is?"
"No," Justin replied, "but I'll bet Sunny can." He tapped his earpiece. "What do you think, Sunny?" He looked back at Paul after a moment. "Worth a try."
Paul looked up at the two former soldiers. "Harold and Jeff, wait for my signal."
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened the Killdeer app, setting his targets as the three agents in the next room. Paul slid the phone on the ground and watched it skitter to a halt at the feet of the nearest agent. A shrill, double chirp emitted from the phone. All three agents stood transfixed, staring at the phone for the moment Paul needed. He nodded to the two others.
Harold and Jeff took point, swinging their bodies out into the room, armed with the guns they'd taken from the bunker, complete with glowing blue bullets. The two closest agents crumpled to the ground, fast asleep. Justin slipped through the newly created opening as Paul shot the third agent.
In Germany, Sunny shouted into her microphone, "Seriously, Grav! That was ridiculous. Just because we're not here for them doesn't mean we should get them killed or something!" She'd never been one for heroics.
"Oh, shut it," came the eloquent response. "Nobody caught us, and now we have three sleepy technobutts."
"Mature," LandMind replied.
Linked into the few remaining, somewhat-working cameras, Sunny watched the group make its way from the underground automatic parking lot into the first sub-basement level of the compound. Offices upstairs, R&D had to be down. "If you head left," she suggested to Interface, "you'll find your way to a second bank of computers. Plug the sunshine USB into it. My program should get me access to a few more cameras."
She watched him search the terminal for an opening and then slot the drive into place.
Data surged through her computer, nearly shorting out the backup system that'd been installed to take some of the weight out of her more-intense encounters in the Web. "Do we have that other backup? I'm gonna need it!" she yelled without looking over her shoulder.
Heller, the large German man, hefted a tower almost as big as their Irish Wolfhound over to her desk. Wordlessly, he piggybacked it into the secondary system, and Sunny breathed a sigh of relief. "You're the best," she told him and backed it up with a quick kiss. "Now, go build something wondrous while I try to keep these idiots from getting killed?"
Heller's eyebrows went up. "Which idiots? Grav and LandMind or the hunters?"
Sunny shrugged. "All of them."
He nodded and headed back to the workshop they'd installed in one corner of their apartment.
The cat pawed at Apple's side. "You might wanna think about waking up, Sleeping Beauty."
The hacker opened her eyes and looked down. "Why?"
"Because someone's coming for you."
"LandMind, do you read me?" Caitlyn yelled into her headset.
"Loud and clear, Princess, just like the last three times."
"Well, sorry for that." she shot back irritably. "I took a smack to the ear. Wasn't sure this thing was still working." Hiding under one of the white-stained, wooden desks that sat in endless rows on each level, she felt utterly useless. "Can you see what's going on with everyone?"
"I'm your eyes and ears."
Caitlyn crawled to the next desk, looking for one with a computer that was still running. They'd been heading down into the bowels of the building for over an hour, slowly making their way from level to level. However, Sunny'd told Justin that the third basement level had almost no remaining cameras that worked, which meant they'd entered the floor blind and found five angry agents with guns drawn. "What's going on?"
"Not much. Agent Craig and Agent whoever are having some kind of heart-to-heart near the old geezer. I can only get a bit of it out of Felix's earpiece."
She crawled through to the next desk, looked around the next corner, and had to stifle a scream of horror. "What the shit?!" she asked in the fiercest whisper she could manage. On the far side of the wall stood a half dozen rows of glass tanks. Most were empty, but a few held… something.
"What's going on?" LandMind asked in her ear
"They've been experimenting on something down here," she whispered to him. "I don't-" Something in one of the far tanks jolted her up to her feet, and she rushed into the area.
The light that came from the tanks throbbed a gentle yellow, not sweet like sunlight - sickly and dying. The empty tanks had nothing, just the stark whiteness of hygiene. The two in the middle, however, stood side-by-side and glowed faintly. "What happened to him."
"To whom?"
"Eric." Caitlyn placed a hand on the tank that held their former comrade. He floated a few inches off the ground in whatever aqueous solution filled the tanks. In the one beside him, she saw Chloe's body. "I don't know what they've done to them, but this is so much worse than anything I'd expected to find down here." Chloe's skin was smooth, nearly pristine, and she seemed peaceful. On the other hand, Eric's face had twisted in some kind of grimace that shouldn't have stuck around if he was, as Caitlyn theorized, in some kind of medically induced coma.
Behind her, Jeff shouted. "What the? You don't just shoot a man when he's trying to talk." It was possibly the most offended Caitlyn had ever heard Jeff manage to be, which was saying something. "That's just not on! I may not like the guy, but he deserves some respect."
The sound of a silenced gun reached Caitlyn's ears.
"Don't let them out," Sunny said over the headset. The camera in Justin's phone showed the two people suspended in their glass enclosures. "All the data I got from the system suggests that he joined up with them. Your friend Eric asked for this. Also, if I'm reading everything right, the girl's dead."
On the the other channel, Grav was talking to Felix. "I can't believe the old guy shot an agent pointe-blank. How's your own cuddle-me-Technocrat?"
"Paul?" Felix asked.
"Yeah."
"That blue bullet seems to have put him asleep. I have no idea how to wake him up. Any idea what those bullets do?"
Grav'd been going through the weapons data that they'd grabbed from the computers on the first floor. "Mind rounds. The description here looks like some kind of sleeping agent. Interesting that it doesn't affect you guys."
"Comes with the territory, I guess," Felix replied offhandedly.
"Are you sure he joined up?" Harold asked, staring at Eric.
"Positive," Sunny said. "I'm looking at his intake paperwork."
"When was it?"
She scrolled back up to the top of the document. "December sixth. This says he came to the Guiding Hand as a member of the Warriors of Truth."
"I remember him talking about some group that was supposed to be around to give us help," Felix put in. "He was going on about it right before Gale showed up in the Hunter Cave."
Sunny heard their shoes on the floor as the group headed away from the tubes. She let out a long-held breath, thankful that nobody had been stupid enough to try to break the two out. "I'll forward you the data when this is all over. It's got info on Eric and his daughter Chloe both. Stuff on her doesn't look too promising. She's a labeled RD, Reality Deviant, just like he is. They're part of different research projects, though. His part looked at hunters under stress; hers focused on work with spiritual entities."
"So she never really did come back," Caitlyn said sadly.
Sunny had no idea what they were talking about.
Apple did everything she could to try to force herself back into her body. She knew it was down there, somewhere. It had to be. She remembered leaving it when they injected her again with whatever that blue stuff was. It wasn't the same as the stuff from the underground holding space.
"If I'm supposed to head back," she called to the cat, "how am I expected to do that?"
"I didn't exactly say you were going back, did I?" The cat tilted its head, halfway between interest and immense boredom.
"Then what?"
"Hook her up, Interface," Sunny called over the system. "Gale's waiting for our word."
"She kinda already looks hooked up," he responded.
The fifth and lowest floor of the building was nothing but banks and banks of computers at highly-polished desks. The floors gleamed a glossy white, and against the south wall stood a hospital bed with a figure lying on it. There was nobody else in sight.
"Where'd everyone go?" Jeff asked, looking around them. "This is way too easy."
Justin agreed but preferred not to do so out loud.
Apple lay spread across the hospital table. She looked thinner than Justin remembered. Maybe the just hadn't been feeding her properly or something. The dreadlocks around her left ear had been shaved away, and a usb cable was plugged directly into her head.
"What the heck is that?" Harold asked, pointing at the port.
"It's a usb port," Justin replied calmly. He'd seen it before. He'd even seen her plug in before to do… well, to do something. He was never quite sure. "Is it going to be safe if I disconnect her?" he asked Sunny.
"Should be. We're just going to pull her through, anyway."
Justin had no idea what that meant but trusted the voice in his head. He reached up and gently disconnected the cable from the side of her head. Apple moved ever-so-slightly.
"Hook her up, Interface. Gale can't wait forever."
He pulled the sunshine usb from his pocket and loaded Sunny's last program into Apple, who opened her eyes and blinked at him once. With a smile, she disappeared from the table, leaving nothing behind.
Jeff shouted. Felix swore and looked around; he probably thought they'd failed again. Caitlyn stood motionless. Harold furrowed his brow.
Justin cried. A voice in his head, not Sunny's, more familiar, echoed quietly, "Thank you. Keep yourself safe." His friend was gone, but she was safe.