A/N the First: Ah, it finally begins. Thanks to mxpw, the world's best beta (go vote for him in the fourth annual Awesome Awards!) and to all of my pre-readers and to everybody that's reviewed and has been patient.
There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle. — H. L. Mencken
PART V: ZEUS
You Only Leave Twice
14 MAY 2008
BUNKER 77142135
06:00 OMST
The alarm clock rang.
Chuck didn't roll over or move to acknowledge it. Since he'd glanced at the clock seventeen minutes before, he'd been keeping count in his head, ticking off the seconds and then the minutes, the ten minutes, the five minutes, until it was time to roll out of his sleeping bag and face yet another day.
His final day.
Siberia in May was almost balmy...for Siberia. Chuck imagined that if somebody from the tropics ended up in Siberia, they'd view it as something close to the apocalypse, and that view wouldn't be far from the truth. He'd gone outside the day before, to stare at the landscape and wish it a final good-bye, and everything had just seemed bleak, like he imagined an apocalypse to be. Somebody creative like a poet or an artist would probably find some kind of consummate beauty inside the bleakness, but Chuck had just seen a barren landscape and a metaphor for his own prison.
He'd gone back inside and fixed himself a final MRE, knowing he wouldn't eat today. The nerves knotting his stomach into pieces wouldn't allow for it.
Still, appearances had to be maintained. So once he crawled free of his bunk, he rolled the sleeping bag up and stowed it neatly at the foot of the bunk. He took his time in the shower, trimming his beard to a manageable length very close to his face and combing his hair so that he looked presentable.
Neatly, routinely, as though he did it every day, he packed all of the possessions he wished to keep. The last time he had left the bunker, it had been with only the clothes on his back, pockets stuffed with rations, the pictures sewn up into his parka. He'd put his life in the hands of...
He scowled and closed the bag with just a little too much force, which meant he had to stop and take a deep breath. He couldn't keep thinking things like that. Everything had to be in control. He had to remain in control. He didn't have a choice.
A glance at his watch—picked up off a street vendor in Seville and checked routinely for surveillance—told him he had only half an hour. He finished closing the duffel bag a lot more gently and took his pack out into the kitchen, leaving the bunk room precisely as he'd found it three months before: in militarily precise condition. The rest of the bunker was a different story altogether.
He'd spent the day before overworking the bunker's incinerator, divesting the world of some of the darker realities of Project Lincoln that he had uncovered in the CIA's database, all of which had been printed up and stuck with putty to the cinderblock walls. The files had been tucked away so deep that even Graham himself likely knew nothing of them all. This made one side of Chuck's mouth twist up, humorlessly. The walls had contained secrets even the Director of the CIA probably didn't know existed for weeks, just lying out in the open for anybody who visited the bunker to find. He really was the greatest security threat the CIA had ever hired. Now those same walls were looked bare and almost forlorn, the less-incriminating articles and files abandoned by their damning brethren. Chuck couldn't bring himself to actually care.
He couldn't bring himself, for that matter, to care about much these days. Some of it was by choice. Others—he couldn't afford to care about.
With only half an hour left, it couldn't hurt to look around one final time, make sure he hadn't missed anything, though it likely wouldn't matter anyway. He went through the bunk room first, stepping under the red twine he'd used to string significant events together. Following that twine, he checked the kitchen and down the brief hallway to the office.
His computer was on.
Had he left it that way? Chuck frowned; he left the computer running most nights so that it could analyze chatter, pick up signs of any Lincoln trigger phrases being used. It was also set to alert him to see if anybody had twigged to his location, though he'd turned that off. They knew where he was. But had he shut down all of it the night before?
Warily, he stepped into the office. He didn't reach for a gun. That was a Lincoln reflex. That was no longer his way.
The screen was mostly dark, though it was on. In the center, a single cursor blinked. As he blinked back, words scrolled across the screen.
ARE YOU ALONE? Y/N
Chuck felt all of the saliva in his mouth dry up and his stomach suck itself inward, leaving a vacuum of panic. He knew firsthand all of the precautions he'd set up on that machine. For somebody to have hacked his computer...
His fingers trembled as he touched the keyboard. WHO IS THIS?
A FRIEND. ARE YOU ALONE? Y/N
Chuck stared at the words. The last time he'd faced something that cryptic, he'd been Intersected—in the very same spot, standing just like he was now since the office was the only room tall enough to let him rise to his full height.
The similarities made his heart pound. But, he thought, he already had an Intersect and the bosses had made it clear that he'd lost the game. And the amount of security he'd set up around the bunker would let him know somebody was coming. He checked the monitors.
Siberia was as cold and depressingly empty as ever.
His fingers hovered over the 'Y' key. What was the harm? He'd see anybody coming, and they'd be there soon anyway. He tapped the key.
The words on the screen disappeared immediately, to be replaced with fresh ones. DO YOU HAVE THE INTERSECT? Y/N
Goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold raced up Chuck's arms to the back of his neck. HOW, he typed, DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE INTERSECT?
I HAVE MY SOURCES.
The words hovered there for ten seconds before disappearing like they had before. Chuck reached for the keyboard once, twice, to demand his mysterious 'friend' list all of his sources, but paranoia held him back. What if this 'friend' was bluffing?
Finally, new words appeared. And Chuck's breath clogged in his chest, the room spinning a little.
I INVENTED IT.
Months of searching in Burbank and finally here in Siberia, of pulling apart every government file in search of the mysterious inventor of the Intersect, hacking almost every computer from the President's to the mailman's, and Chuck hadn't found the inventor. The inventor had found him.
His hands were beyond trembling, making it difficult, but he managed to type, WHO ARE YOU?
ORION.
The Intersect had two creators listed. Codenames O and P.
Orion.
The great hunter in the sky, known for his prowess with the bow and arrow, Chuck thought. It was apt. Orion had hunted him down to a secure bunker in the middle of nowhere and had obliterated his firewall like soggy tissue paper.
But for what?
The words on the screen changed, answering his question.
I CAN REMOVE IT.
Chuck's hands fell away from the keyboard. He could almost feel his body sag, as if he were some kind of puppet whose strings had been cut by a ruthless puppet master. His heart continued to thud against his ribcage, pulse spiking in his ears. All of that told him it wasn't a dream, but his brain just couldn't seem to accept that.
He lifted his hands and typed in a simple message. HOW?
NOT SECURE ENOUGH. WILL CONTACT YOU AGAIN IF YOU WANT MY HELP. DO YOU? Y/N
Did he? Once he had the Intersect removed, he was no longer property, Chuck thought. His final tie between the government that had screwed him over and himself would be sliced. Thanks to Carver and Lincoln, his mind wouldn't fully be his own ever again, but he would no longer belong to the United States government.
But without the Intersect, what would stop the Lincoln programming? What would stop him from being taken over when his guard was down and he allowed somebody to get close? Terror at the thought hat he could be used against innocent civilians—or anybody, really—had led to so many sleepless nights, he sometimes felt like a lifeless zombie, drifting through reality with his cognizance checking in only when it was convenient. It all boiled down to one thing: what right did he have to remove that safety net, that Intersect between society and the monster inside him?
Every right. It was his brain.
No right at all. He would do everything in his power to preserve human life.
The words blinked on the screen, replaced by words that felt far more urgent.
DO YOU WANT MY HELP? Y/N
Chuck placed his hands on the keyboard. This could be his only chance. A hacker as powerful as Orion wasn't someone to be found: he was the one that found you.
And if Orion could remove the Intersect, Chuck could truly be free of the invisible bonds...and so could the monster.
His finger hit a single key.
N.
For a long time, the screen stayed blank. Had Orion left? Was he (or she—Orion could be a codename meant to throw somebody off a lady-hacker's scent) disappointed? Relieved? A sick ball of dread rose in Chuck's chest, even though he knew he'd made the right choice. He'd seen a man use Garret Kohl, a functioning, breathing man who should have had his own thoughts and his own ideas; he'd seen Carver use Garret Kohl to try and kill Chuck as though Kohl were nothing but a Golem. Chuck had in turn used Kohl, like that very same Golem, to kill Carver. Somebody with the right information could do exactly the same thing to Chuck. Without the Intersect, he was vulnerable and everybody he knew was vulnerable because of it.
The screen flickered and new words appeared.
IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND, GET IN TOUCH.
HOW?
CHECK THE ADS IN THE WASHINGTON POST TWO WEEKS FROM TODAY. YOU'LL KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT. I CAN HELP.
"No you can't," Chuck said aloud, the first words he'd spoken in nearly a week. His voice sounded foreign to him.
GOOD LUCK, Orion told him, and the computer shut down on its own, making Chuck shiver. Unfortunately, he didn't have time to marvel over how easily the hacker had done that. Movement on the monitor gave him a split-second warning before the alarms began wailing.
A snowmobile was coming in, and coming in fast. He checked, only one snowmobile. Relief and disappointment spiraled through him.
Chuck moved out of the office and gave the bunker one last look. With a shrug to himself, he switched the generator not to the off position but to the increased power load position, picked up a small radio receiver and his pack, and left the bunker one final time to meet Casey.
A/N the Second: See you next week! Hope you enjoyed the prologue chapter of Zeus, the fifth part of What Fates Impose.