The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8), Page 3

  To explain these findings, there had to be a kind of underlying medium of thought that stood outside of hard wiring, even outside of the human body; a kind of invisible Wi-Fi that allowed the passage of ideas directly from mind to mind.

  In short, telepathy.

  He leaned on the railing and surveyed the hundred in his Array. He'd failed his PhD for this; the idea that a large enough set of calm, empty minds, in a remote enough location removed from any sort of disturbance, might be able to detect the underlying medium.

  The hydrogen line.

  It wasn't scientific enough for his professors or the university. They'd laughed at him behind his back.

  But it was working.

  He'd failed his PhD, but this was a vindication every day. The SEAL, his financial backers, barred him from publishing, but the preliminary reports already were mind-blowing, even as the first batch of one hundred were still adapting.

  Their minds were his blank slate, waiting for the line to write upon them. The message so far was unclear, but it was undeniably there. There was a medium, and there was a message.

  Telepathy was real.

  "Thirty minutes until exposure," Sandbrooke said, holding up his wristwatch. "We should clear the hall for prep."

  Joran turned to the man's easy grin and curious eyes, and wondered how much of it was a front. If anyone was the SEAL's inside man, it was Sandbrooke. He'd been Joran's contact point for the duration, the one who'd first brought him the offer and the one who'd helped him bring all this massive infrastructure about.

  "I've got new parameters to cycle in," Joran said, covering the lie smoothly. "Sovoy ran diagnostics on the last bout and this will be my response."

  Sandbrooke frowned slightly. "They're all in position. Shouldn't we have run pre-approval on that?"

  "Normally, yes, but this is time-sensitive. Planetary alignment."

  Sandbrooke's frown deepened, then he laughed. "You're joking."

  "Of course I'm joking," Joran replied. "Mars is barely in the House of Venus, and won't be for another three months."

  Sandbrooke laughed more, eyed Joran to be sure, then laughed again. "So let's go cycle them in. We've got twenty-nine minutes."

  They walked swiftly along the gantry; their footsteps making a faint slapping on the metal flooring. To the right lay a stunning view of the building's exterior, seen through the flawless glass walls that rose twenty feet high to meet the glass ceiling. Outside there were cars, coaches and helicopters parked in the encircling lot, barely visible as snow swirled up the building's flank.

  "Sovoy didn't tell me about any specific findings," Sandbrooke said, steering Joran's gaze back inward. "I'm assuming these changes you want to make are associated with the mapping project?"

  "Mapping and contrast," Joran lied again. "Just another round of tests. Would you like to see them?"

  Sandbrooke waved a hand. He understood the macro-level theory but not the detail. "We'll check it with Sovoy."

  Round the edge of the hall they went, while below them attendants dressed in white moved amongst the hundred in the Array, applying gel to their black skull caps, adjusting dials to bring their resting brainwaves into harmony, seeing to any other minor disturbances and generally spreading calm.

  "They look like an ocean, I think at times," said Sandbrooke as they neared the elevator down to the research floor. "A kind of conceptual ocean, all dressed in white."

  "They're more like boats," Joran answered. "The hydrogen line's the ocean."

  "What's the difference?" Sandbrooke asked. "Signal or medium, isn't that the whole point of this research? Everything receives, everything ultimately transmits? We're all floats bobbing on the water, while all our floats make up the water itself."

  "Touché. Shall we?"

  * * *

  The Array underfloor was a noisy kaleidoscope that always excited Joran. There was a feverish anticipation in the air, heightened in the approach to each full detection run on the line. All the two hundred and forty seven scientists present, along with a squad of oversight, security and administration officials forced on Joran by the SEAL, understood what was at stake with each attempt. They were prying open a Pandora's box of immense potential power.

  Joran felt the familiar excitement as he and Sandbrooke left the elevator. Red-rimmed eyes flicked their way, with nervous grins on pinched, exhausted faces. Many of these people had been up for more than twenty-four hours, instituting the new parameters. Keeping the true purpose of his plan a secret from the majority of them only made it more exciting; what he was doing was certainly a serious offence, possibly criminal, playing chicken with a billion investment dollars. He held everyone's career in his hands, to be determined by the results of the next several hours. He'd made the determination that the risk was worth it.

  The Array underfloor was made up of ten working teams, each arranged around a data pillar; a tree-thick spine of red cables carrying readouts from ten minds in the Array above, ending in Cadillac-sized supercomputers. Each clump was noisy now with last-minute checks.

  Sandbrooke strolled along by Joran's side cheerfully, waving at his favorites amongst the staff. "I always feel like I'm in a beehive," he said over the hubbub. "So many drones, following the Queen."

  Joran smiled. "And I'm the Queen?"

  Sandbrooke tipped an imaginary hat. "If the shoe fits."

  Joran's second in command, Garibaldi Sovoy, was waiting at his desk in the underfloor's approximate center, a skinny man in cut-short navy Capri pants with a check shirt, missing only the rainbow suspenders. He was grinning widely and squeezing a red stress ball in one hand.

  "Helkegarde," he said knowingly. "Sandbrooke."

  "You seem pleased with yourself," Sandbrooke said. "Have they started serving kale rice balls in the canteen again?"

  Sovoy was enjoying himself too much to let the slight even graze him. Holding a secret over Sandbrooke's head was plainly cheering him hugely. "I'm just glad to be alive, Sandbrooke. Breaking new ground in science. You wouldn't understand."

  Sandbrooke snorted. "I've heard about your new ground. Joran's told me about the parameters for today."

  "Has he?" Sovoy raised one eyebrow theatrically. "Well, then you'll know it's an exciting sequence with a slight modulation, requiring some final calibrations."

  "I'll see those calibrations, if you don't mind." Sandbrooke held out a hand. Sovoy put a clipboard into it.

  While Sandbrooke studied it, a mocked-up version for official consumption, Joran made his customary check-in. "Give me the full report, Sovoy. How are thirty-seven and sixty-three?"

  "Good. Their signals have stabilized. Turns out thirty-seven only had a mild cold; oxygen treatment sorted him out twelve hours ago. Sixty-three's been responding beautifully to stimulus training, and he says he hasn't thought about his dead mother once in the past three days."

  Joran nodded. Since the multicameral approach was a new field of science, nobody knew for sure what might throw off their readings. Each pattern on the hydrogen line was so slight that even a misaligned train of thought or a blockage in the sinuses could disrupt pattern detection. "Excellent. We are a go, then."

  "All go," Sovoy said, looking at Sandbrooke again and widening his grin. "Looks like you'll be out of a job soon."

  Sandbrooke set the clipboard down. "They'll always need hipster drovers. One day they may let us ride you, like rodeo clowns."

  Sovoy nodded seriously. "I can see you as a clown. A good career choice."

  Sandbrooke pointed at the clipboard. "Tighten those up. You're spinning your wheels in the fourth bracket."

  Joran placed a calming hand on each man's shoulder, stopping the back-and-forth. The results to come would be good news for them all. "We go in eighteen minutes," he said, reading off Sovoy's clock. "Wind up for final checks."

  "Winding up," said Sovoy, and spun around to his monitor.

  At seventeen minutes Joran sat at his desk with Sandbrooke hovering behind him. The Array of minds w
as represented on his screen by a grid of one hundred green lights; his placid, calm medium-detection pool. They had been trained to enter a coma-like meditative space. The architecture of their brains was as similar as he could find anywhere in the world. The environment around them was incredibly remote, to avoid any interfering signals. The hydrogen line up here was pure, and could be read.

  But could it be written upon?

  The new parameters today would break the final barrier between message and medium; for the first time his Array were not only going to receive.

  They were going to transmit.

  The SEAL had asked him to wait another year, gathering data, but after this they'd be falling over themselves to put his science into practical application. The world would hear. His silence would break, and everything would change.

  In seventeen minutes they would know.

  3. FREAK SHOW

  I stumble into a freak show.

  It's immense.

  I lurch forward through a flood of conflicting signals on the line, silver dots sparkling before my eyes, until I hit a railing and grip it so tightly it hurts, looking out.

  What I see defies comprehension. There's too much happening, too much chaos to pick out any patterns within, so all I see are details. Before me lies an enormous, light-filled hall as large as a football field, striped with dizzying shafts of light from above. The ceiling is all glass with no visible seams or supporting beams, laid over with ice in organic patches of blue and white, admitting drifts of light through which I see the swirling skies outside and the steady fall of snow. The walls on all sides are more seamless glass, giving the impression that this is some kind of atmospheric bubble pushed up through the Earth's snowy crust.

  The hall is a pit below. There's an encircling metal gantry one floor up; I'm standing on it. The floor below is a mottled gray, subdivided into square-shaped allotments by means of grooves, though the pattern is interrupted by wreckage and motion. There are hospital bed-frames and mattresses scattered everywhere; tipped over, resting on their sides, in places torn apart to metal slats and bars and foam. There are sheets lying like a strange facsimile of dirty snow, wadded and spread, mildewed black. There are wilted pillows and sprayed papers, smeared marks on the floor and cement walls, and there are the bodies.

  I can't think, when I look at them. Their eyes catch me and I am frozen; petrified, shocked, disgusted. It feels like looking into a vision of hell. Single lines of data creep across my thoughts like an ancient computer loading a visual image, one row of pixels at a time.

  The Ocean are here. Their gray bodies strain, as alive as they ever were, not lying silent like every one I've seen since Drake. Some of them wear thick black cables wrapped around their necks, shackling them to the center of each grooved square. Others roam freely, bouncing off the cement walls below, with arms missing, with whole portions of gray skin on their chests and waists peeled back, revealing dry gray muscle. They breathe as one and reach blindly toward me.

  But the Ocean are easy, compared to the rest.

  There are demons here too. There are probably a dozen dotted throughout the hall; lurching against their bonds, each confined to a square though circular stain marks extend beyond the gray dividing lines, where they've stretched out their bodies in a thirteen-year bid for freedom. They dive and snap like rabid dogs. Their huge red bodies slap over the floor, jostling beds, pillows and bodies beneath them. The cold rising off them burns my eyes.

  And there are more. After that it only gets harder, because there are Istanbul lepers here too. Their jet-black bodies jerk like badly animated sprites, with strings of white skin flapping freely like a mummy's loosened wrappings. I can't count them, can barely track them as they fizz chaotically around their squares, dissolving and resolving in fits and jerks, twisting my perception back on itself. Some of them have slipped their chains and zigzag round the pit, manifesting with a crackle and a smudge of black before flashing away. Tracking them splinters my thinking. I remember the single one of them I killed in Istanbul, and the blast marks that explosion left in my mind. Fear joins the cold of the demons, and I try to pull back from the railing, but I can't move.

  The image of the pit compiles in my head, and I sag. There are other things here too, things I've never seen before, yellow nubs of humans, each one a melted candle that seems to be melting like drips of hot wax. Their figures are shifting concepts only, lumpy shapes of bodies with a hump for a head and waxy swellings for limbs. Their yellow mouths are open and wail softly, adding to the breath of the Ocean and the slapping of the demons and the urgent scratching of the lepers. Their eyes are a sickly yellow, and as one catches me in its glare, its body seems to expand, inflating like a balloon on the fuel of my attention. I wrench my eyes away and there's a grotesque popping sound, then I turn back to see yellow goo burst everywhere.

  I gag, but nothing comes. I'm on my knees clutching the railing.

  Still there are more.

  There's a blue thing in a corner with faces growing out of its back and arms plunging out where its hips should be. It feels me looking and rolls closer on many limbs, like tumbleweed. There's a wispy black wraith-thing in the center holding one of the lepers down and chewing on its face, while the leper flickers like static on a detuned television screen, trying to escape. There's a pinkish thing that is all distended sex; weighed down with a massive black slug hanging from its groin, dragging that bloated load after it in circles round its square.

  There are more, but I can't register any more. The black eye has abandoned me in the face of this, and I feel myself being rubbed out. My toes, perhaps, I can control. My fingers. My eyelids.

  I sink and surrender. Maybe it'll be good to give up. I don't want this to be my world. Darkness rolls in, and I welcome it. Voices talk over me, doctors discussing my condition from a past I barely remember.

  Have you ever seen a coma victim blanche so completely? I mean, they always lose their color in a week or two, it drains out of them, but this?

  It was overnight.

  I've never seen the like.

  The words come through like a digital brush-stroke, in large fonts and meaningless, from a coma I'm sinking back toward.

  His brain activity is off the chart too. Something is happening in there.

  But what?

  But what.

  I roll on an ocean of misshapen heads, like bald eggs, but I can feel their thoughts twist together like twine in a bungee cord, like intestines curling themselves into each other, like an embryo blooming to life.

  He may hear us. He may not. The eyes are the thing that get me though.

  It looks like they're lit from behind. How is that possible?

  Some simple phosphorescence, like a jellyfish. Whatever he's got inside him, it's changing his metabolism.

  Are we talking an infection?

  Not any infection we can see. It's a disorder of the entire nervous system. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say something is remaking him.

  His DNA shows no change. We checked that.

  Not at the genetic level, then. Structurally. Look at the alterations in his brain pattern over time. It's been remapped completely.

  The voices balloon into curious clouds, into animals folded out of meat and bone. They bend out of time around me, drifting on a breeze of scent.

  I smell my wife's perfume, I'd recognize it anywhere, and it stumps up to pat me on the shoulder. It speaks.

  My Amo.

  I breathe in my body and breathe it out again, flapping like a sail on the ocean of strange heads. There are glass walls around me and bodies outside, people lost and reanimated, reaching up for me.

  Whatever this thing is, it's beyond our control. It's not a virus like any we've seen before, not bacteria, it's something physical that's rewriting him.

  Like nanobots?

  Ha. If that technology existed out of a Crichton novel, I'd say yes, but it doesn't. This seems to be natural. It may even be evolutionary, a key that was al
ways waiting in the brain to be turned.

  I rise and fall on tides of the line, lifted with each shifting wave. I'm on the way out.

  BANG

  A noise stirs me awake.

  BANG it comes again, and there's an answering pain in my body. Where? I'm lying beside the railing, close to where a demon strains to grasp me, and I'm melting too. Pieces of me run down the walls into the pit with them, and maybe that's where I belong. I can finally become one of the monsters and lead my horde to wipe out humanity. I laugh, but there's another-

  BANG

  And that stops the laughing. I peer down and see the black gun in the holster at my hip, with somebody's finger spiked arthritically through the trigger guard. It looks like they've never operated a gun before, like the finger is not a finger but a stick attached to another stick that they can't use properly. It's my finger. I follow the bullet track down my thigh with my eyes, and see the skin is scored with two shallow tears now, bleeding freely.

  I've shot myself three times already.

  That fact doesn't save me, or resurrect the black eye to shield me, but it does ground me for a moment. I'm right here. I run my hand down the cuts in my thigh and the pain is sharp and focusing.

  I have time enough to look out over the Array one more time.

  It remains too much to process. It keeps hitting me in the senses and the line, but is there something-?

  I squint. Bodies move like waves, heads bobbing, and perhaps there's something there, hidden behind the visual overload. I try to put the line to the side, push it to the edge of my mind and focus on what I'm seeing.

  It's not moving, not a body, not a piece of broken bed frame or a sheet or anything that seems to belong here. Rather it's blue, out in the middle like an island. I blink and lift my head, trying for a better angle. There's definitely something there, and knowing that helps me focus.