The 49th Mystic Page 27

  Now he gave us a pause.

  “They needed someone on the inside, naturally. Simon knew everything from the beginning. Eden really was his town. Now it’s mine, because I took the liberty of cutting off this valley from the controllers. I have activated explosives that will detonate if anyone tries to enter or exit this valley. You’re all stuck here, period. Now . . . Questions.”

  His mention of the explosives might have caused a ruckus if not for the staggering implications of the rest.

  “What about my wife?” my father asked, rising to his feet.

  “She was exterminated because her mind wouldn’t cooperate with the programming. Neither would your daughter’s, but that’s another story. Next question.”

  “You expect me to believe that my memories—”

  “Are reformatted and manipulated in a facility just beyond the tunnel. It’s a rather complex procedure that takes a good six hours. Technicians from the main control center in Colorado rotate in every six months. Four days ago I took the liberty of killing the last two stationed here, then I rigged the entrance with explosives. No one, including the controllers, can get in; no one, meaning you, can get out. Eden is now cut off from the outside world in every way. I’m quite sure the controllers have been pulling their hair out these last few days.”

  The claim was too much to grasp, even for me. I tried to imagine being hooked up to electrodes and having my brain reformatted. I knew from my father that erasing and implanting memories had been accomplished in mice and monkeys since 2011 and would be possible with humans one day, but so soon?

  Then again, if Vlad was right, it was 2038.

  He could clearly see that his assertions weren’t penetrating.

  “If you still doubt me, just take a good look at Hillary and the slab of meat who used to be Simon. I took her up the mountain in the wee hours yesterday morning, hooked her up, and imprinted her brain with a few memories that suited my purposes. Unfortunately, the controllers have since managed to kill the entire system, so Hillary will be the last.”

  He eyed me standing at the podium and stayed in the aisle. “Get this through your skulls: beyond the exit tunnel, you’ll see nothing but pure hell, a wasteland ravaged by nuclear fallout.”

  “That can’t be right,” Maxwell Emerson stammered. “I was on the phone with Salt Lake organizing our holdings just before the terrorists took down the grid—”

  “Are you deaf? There was no grid failure out there. The terrorist attacks that have you all up in arms were only false information fed to you by the controllers to keep Eden focused. Second to religious fear, there’s nothing as effective as an outside threat to create and maintain solidarity among tissue-tops.”

  “We communicate with the outside world all the time!” Linda objected. “And television . . . Surely you aren’t suggesting that none of that is real.”

  “It’s real to you. All external communication functions as part of numerous algorithms and a few controllers who’ve taken your calls and played their parts. No one in this valley has watched a movie made after 2018 because none have been made. Same for books, music, and news. It’s all AI. Every bit and byte of the external world.”

  My brain hurt. Panic lapped at my mind. The thought that everything I’d believed to be true about this world was only half true felt like a terrible betrayal to me. How could I possibly believe what he was telling us?

  “Other than specialized equipment needed, all vehicles and appliances predate 2018, not because Simon had a thing for modest living, but to maintain the illusion. Should I go on?”

  “Why hasn’t the fallout affected this valley?” my father pressed. “And what about the planes that fly over?”

  “The fallout hasn’t wiped you out because you live in a protected bubble. As for the planes, no one has ever actually seen a plane fly over, only contrails high above. They’re part of a sky that isn’t really there.”

  Vlad scanned the room.

  “So hard to swallow, even after watching Hillary’s little demonstration. So I’ve prepared another. Follow me outside. It’s time for show-and-tell.”

  With that Vlad Smith turned and walked out of the church.

  The cacophony of a hundred incredulous voices exchanging frantic questions filled the room the moment he was gone. But they hurried from the pews and followed like a herd of sheep after their shepherd.

  I was the last to leave. My father waited for me by the pew. His eyes were wide, but the dazed look was gone. He looked at my leg.

  “Is this real?” I asked. “It’s 2038?”

  “I don’t know. I . . .” He shook his head.

  “But is it possible? I mean, the technology?”

  He pushed through the outer door, frowning. “What he said about your mother . . .” He ground his molars. “I always knew there was something wrong.”

  He wasn’t thinking straight. We’d just learned that our whole world was upside down, and he was fixated on an old grievance.

  He wasn’t done. “Give me one chance and I swear . . .”

  I held my hand out and stopped my father on the top step. Vlad stood on the edge of the fountain pool, arms crossed as the town hovered around. I looked at the cliffs, the trees, the sky above us, now overcast and gray, trying to imagine that we were in a haven protected from a world that had been destroyed by the fallout of nuclear detonations.

  Where did this leave me? And the seals? He’d said that my mother and I were special. If his only objective was getting me to write in the book, why was he doing this?

  “Do you see that sky above you?” Vlad cried out.

  We all looked up.

  “What do you see?”

  Clouds, I thought.

  The world suddenly went dark. And I mean pitch-black, because there was no power in Eden and now there was no sky, a fact that drew a chorus of exclamations.

  “That is your sky,” Vlad’s voice rang out. “No? You don’t like it? Then how about this?”

  The dark sky was replaced by a blue sky with a hot, blazing sun.

  “You prefer light? Do you think that ball of fire up there looks like a real sun? It doesn’t, in truth, but this is the only sun you know.”

  The moment I saw that sky, I knew he was telling the truth. I too had seen a real sky, high above the deserts and mountains of Other Earth. I’d assumed the difference in hue was caused by elevation, or distortions in the atmosphere, or perhaps by the shifting of my perceptions from one world to another.

  “That’s not your sky.”

  Immediately the darkness above was lit by a thousand tiny points of light, connected by a grid of long, thin cables or rods of some kind.

  “That, my friends, is your real sky. A three-inch thick, three-dimensional matrix of ingenuity stretched over this valley and the three hundred meters beyond. Here is your sky, your surprisingly rare rain and snow—everything but lightning. Its base is constructed of carbyne fibers, a material forty times stronger than diamonds. The electronics above your heads is advanced enough to pop your brains. Impressed?”

  Silence.

  “What’s lightning?” someone asked.

  “Something no one in this valley remembers.”

  The grid above us vanished and the overcast sky was back.

  “Better?”

  Vlad was holding a device the size of an iPhone between his fingers.

  “How do we know what’s really out there, past the tunnel?” RG asked.

  “You don’t. That wasteland awaiting you could be a fabrication. But you’ll never know because if you try to leave this valley, you’ll pay for it with your life either way. Dare you find out? At least it’s safe in here, assuming you play along.”

  “God help us . . .”

  I don’t know who said it, but they reflected the sentiment of every last soul in Eden, Utah, in that moment.

  “Indeed,” Vlad said. “I really am your god. And you, my pathetic tissue-tops, are at my mercy. As of now, the only law that remains in
Eden is God’s original and only true law: an eye for an eye. If you don’t give me an eye for an eye I’m gonna blind all of you. I’m gonna gouge out every single eye in this stink hole and feed your pearls to the swine.”

  I cringed at his comment about blinding. But if his objective was only to manipulate me, why would such a brilliant adversary continue to mess with the others? He knew there was no way I would ever write him into the book, regardless of what he did.

  So then what?

  He pointed at the council, who stood together at the perimeter. “Barth!”

  The confident bulldog of a man hesitated, mouth parted in shock. “Yeah?”

  “Simon is dead. You’re in charge. And I want you to execute your charge now. How do you classify murder?”

  They were all looking at him. “It’s a capital crime.”

  “Punishable by?”

  “Death,” Barth said.

  “Is that why you killed David’s wife? Because she threatened to kill us all?”

  Barth blinked. “Yes.”

  “An eye for an eye?”

  “An eye for an eye.”

  “Good. That’s what I told David. Now, please do your duty and kill who needs killing today.”

  Barth reached down to his ankle, pulled out a gun, turned to Hillary, and shot her in the heart before she could react.

  “Good boy,” Vlad said. He turned his eyes to me. “Lights out, little girl.”

  The world went black again. All but one remained in stunned silence. That one was Peter, weeping. I couldn’t imagine the pain of losing both mother and father as he had. His sister, Carina, was missing . . . My heart broke for him.

  When the sky came back on, Vlad was gone.

  But his threat still hung in the air. Lights out, little girl.

  He was going to blind me.

  24

  DARPA

  STEVE COLLINGSWORTH’S mind tripped back to the administrative meeting earlier that morning.

  “I still see waiting as our only reasonable alternative,” Bill Hammond, the project leader, had said. His eyes scanned the other six seated around the conference table. “We have to accept the fact that everything we’ve built could collapse.”

  Steve had waited for someone else to say what he was thinking—the director perhaps, Theresa Williams, seated at the far end, watching them with hands folded in her lap. But no one did. They’d already stretched ethical boundaries to their breaking point. After so many years, most in the room had long ago set aside their personal convictions for the good of the project. As had he, for the most part.

  But this . . .

  Steve cleared his throat. “Am I the only one seeing the risks of sitting on this? We’ve had our share of fortune as it is, but maybe it’s time we come clean.”

  “Our success has nothing to do with fortune,” Hammond said, staring him down. “Unless you consider hard-won science from the best minds in the world a matter of mere fortune.”

  “I’m not talking about the science or the technology. All I’m suggesting is that we reconsider the downside of covering up.”

  “We’ve spent the last three days thinking that through and come up empty-handed. Unless you have something new to share with us.”

  Theresa Williams pushed her chair back, walked to the window, and stared at the desert vista that extended to distant mountains. When she spoke, her words were soft and deliberate.

  “As of now, this is still an internal matter. Find a way. I don’t care what it takes, find a way to shut him down.” She’d faced them all. “Find a way, people, because if he’s not bluffing . . . God help us all.”

  Now, just a few hours later, Steve sat with Walter Hitchman, desperate for a fresh, unbiased view. They’d faced hundreds of technical challenges over the past two decades—untold thousands leading up to the establishment of Eden—but never had they faced the imminent collapse of the entire habitat.

  I don’t care what it takes, find a way, the director had said. So Steve was, in spite of the protective order that limited details of the incursion to top-level engineers.

  “You’re sure he’s accessed the detonation fail-safe?” Walter asked, leaning back in a swivel chair. “It would take some incredible savvy to break into—”

  “And rigged all the exits,” Steve interrupted, aware of his sharp tone. “It was the first thing he did. Before severing all lines of communication. And the fact that he was able to operate the memory module before we pulled the plug demonstrates his savvy. This guy’s no amateur.”

  “He knew how to operate the MEP? Who is this guy?”

  MEP was a designator for the Memory Editing Protocol used to modify a human brain’s memory patterns.

  “No one knows, but he’s got the administrators running for cover. Hammond’s already covering his tracks.”

  “What about the director?”

  “Blindsided. It’s not every day mankind’s great hope for survival gets thrown under the bus. Even if we figure out how to get out of this mess, heads are gonna roll.”

  “And all this from one man who found his way in.”

  Steve shook his head. “He’s not just any man. Whoever he is, he knows things he has no business knowing.”

  “Someone on the inside, then?”

  A drop of sweat from Steve’s forehead fell and darkened the blueprints he’d spread out on the table. The agency had been locked down for the last three days. Every viable resource had been retasked to finding a solution for Eden.

  “It doesn’t matter how he got in. The fact is, he’s cut us off and taken full control. There has to be another way to get in there without collapsing the seal.” Steve slapped the table. “Come on, man. Out of the box. You helped design the thing.”

  “A thousand engineers helped design it,” Walter said.

  “Yeah, well, I can’t trust a thousand engineers. Most of them didn’t even know what they were building.”

  “Okay,” Walter said, spinning in his chair to face a console. An electronic version of the blueprints on the table slowly rotated on his screen, showing the extremities of the sinkhole and its carbyne seal. A few taps on the sensor pad and the architectural drawings shifted to show deeper levels, all the way down to the huge atmospheric conditioners located below the northern cliff.

  Walter quickly zoomed back out. “Okay, let’s start at the top again. The seal itself is impossible to breach without collapsing the sky—that’s what the hatches are for. But you said they’re rigged.”

  “Correct.”

  “The control facility and all three lower tunnels are also rigged?”

  “Everything. We’ve had a team all over that mountain with sniffers. Explosives everywhere. Forget the entrances. I’m talking about finding a way in that hasn’t been conceived of. A way that would escape his notice. Under, through, over . . .”

  Steve ran his hand through tangled hair. His brain was fried—twenty-two hours since he’d slept.

  “We could haul a digger over there,” Walter said. “Low tech. But it would take a week to penetrate the west wall without explosives, and explosives would compromise—”

  “No explosives. What about under?”

  “Same thing.” Walter turned in his chair. “What if we used the purifier vents to release a gas into the valley?”

  Steve shook his head. “Unless you can come up with a gas that puts them all out—including Smith—for a week while we tunnel under.”

  “Blow a hatch before he wakes, then.”

  “Like I said, blow any of the hatches and we might trigger the emergency protocol.”

  Walter crossed his arms. “Actually, you didn’t say that.”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? You don’t think he would know that? One false move and the whole thing comes down.”

  Walter leaned forward. “Look, I don’t know what you expect me to find that a hundred other engineers haven’t, but—”

  “You helped figure out how to make this thing, right?” Steve s
napped. “So figure out how to unmake it!”

  “And if no one can?”

  Steve slowly exhaled, eyes on the white wall. For a few long seconds he just stared, mind lost in a thousand dead ends.

  “Two more days. If we haven’t figured this out by then, I’m going to blow the whistle. The rest of the world has a right to know. Our great white hope is about to go down in flames.”

  “They’ll crucify you.”

  Steve gave Walter a hard look.

  “We’re dead already.”

  25

  I MIGHT SAY that chaos clawed at the fabric of Eden that morning, when we all learned we lived in a sanctuary created by DARPA in the aftermath of a nuclear war, and our identities had been manipulated through altered memories. All but mine, if Vlad was telling the truth about my brain not taking to the programming. But in truth, he’d started weaving chaos into our fabric the moment he set foot in the hospital with the Book of History days earlier.

  All of this to manipulate me. All of it because I was the 49th in another world.

  Why?

  Lights out, little girl . . .

  Within minutes of Vlad’s vanishing act, the residents began to unravel. It’s hard to explain how the human psyche reacts to the discovery that everything it thought of as true is only a lie. Like a balloon cut free to float away into space, it drifts, lost. In that space, up and down mean nothing, nor do true and false. All bets are off. Familiar laws feel like relative abstractions made up for the benefit of those in power.

  Vlad had made it clear: Barth was now the law. Problem was, Barth’s tethers to reality had been severed along with ours. Apart from that simple edict, an eye for an eye, I don’t think he had any clue how to fulfill his role.

  “How do we know he’s telling the truth?” Betsy Williamson demanded. “He’s saying that my memories of being abandoned as a child are implanted? That all this trauma I’ve suffered for all these years is based on a lie I believed? My rashes and stomach problems are the result of a false memory?”