The Atomic Question – Ch. 05

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101 California Street. A spire of opulence forty-eight stories high, with a seven-story glass lobby distantly resembling a geometric mockery of a waterfall. In 1993 a gunman had killed eight people in this building, and injured six others in a crazed attempt to get revenge on the lawyers he blamed for his failures.

Roz supposed he wasn’t much different, in the likely outcome of things. It was a nice day outside on the surface. Partly cloudy, comfortable Free State weather, a gentle breeze coming in through the open window of his white Honda Civic. Employees of the Singapore, Incorporated Investment Division were peacefully working up in that big tall building, completely unaware of the device just inside of the riser duct of the 35th floor’s chase, sitting on a small square sheet of metal balanced on top of four fire dampers. All one had to do was open up the access door on the front of the line to find it, but of course no one looked in such places unless there was a problem.

And today there would be a problem.

He picked up the commpad from the passenger seat and checked the time. Just another minute. His eyes scanned the street again to satisfy his paranoia and he noticed a family of four, modestly dressed, walking down the sidewalk in the direction of the building. The fact there was even the slightest chance they were heading to 101–that they were going to be anywhere near it–would have been enough to get Roz to call it off. That was why he set it all in motion ahead of time. All he could do now was mitigate the damage… And face the consequences.

With a tap to the commpad he activated the voice modulator, ensuring the receptionist would hear the voice that would in about an hour’s time be making real waves. Then he dialed the matrix listed contact number for 101.

It only took three seconds to connect. A polite, professional male voice spoke out of the pad. “Thank you for contacting the Singapore, Incorporated Investment Division. How may I direct your call today?”

“Hello,” Roz said, “I’ve put a bomb in your building.” He paused to let that statement register, but not long enough to let the receptionist speak. “This isn’t a joke. I’ve killed everyone in that building you’re in right now. Every single one. But you can save them, if you tell them to get out as soon as I hang up. The bomb is going to go off in exactly thirty-one minutes and fifteen seconds. Not nearly enough time to find it or turn it off, but enough time to evacuate the building if you start right now. Use the elevators, they’ll work right up until it goes off. Please do something. No one has to die today.”

He could hear the terrified shuddering coming from the other side, and of course Roz felt guilty pinning everything on some random wage worker. But he’d done all he could, so he cut the line. Placing the commpad on the passenger seat, Roz rolled down the driver’s side window and pulled gently on his beard. In a minute he would see people start to flood out of the building’s lobby, the fire escape tubes and the side entrances, or he would see a single receptionist frantically fleeing the scene of an imminent massacre. In the case of the latter, Roz would be getting out of his car, locking the doors out of habit and then walking into the building himself.

While waiting, the commpad chirped with an incoming connection. Roz tapped it and held it close to his face.

To the caller’s question he answered, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.” A pause while she berated him. “I’m gonna stay until I know.” Another pause. “I have to.” To that, she was silent. “Thanks,” he said plainly. Poetic possible goodbyes had never been his area of expertise. But he liked to try, so he added “For everything.”

The call cut out and Roz took the commpad in both hands. With a few motions he removed its battery, then its hard drive, then its main circuit board, leaving it a plastic shell with a touch screen. He broke the board, ran a magnet over the drive and then tossed all of the parts out of the window into the grass past the sidewalk.

Around the time he was done with this, the front doors of 101 California Street burst open and people started rushing out.

Roz let out a breath he’d been holding in for weeks. Thank magic for that, he thought. Then he started the car to move further away and see how it played out.

= = =

The receptionist’s name was never really proliferated in the reports that followed, but his name was Terry. And the first thing Terry did was dial the building’s head of security, who had just come back from his morning soykaf break. Thirty-five seconds after picking up the call the head of security triggered the emergency alert for the entire building and out the people started to scramble. Within ten minutes, corporate headquarters knew, and within fifteen Lone Star was being informed of the situation.

As the bomb caller had indicated, thirty-one minutes and fifteen seconds was just enough time to evacuate 101 California Street. escort bayan beşiktaş The head of security was frantically sprinting from the building, having made certain it was entirely empty when the device on the 35th floor activated. The exact mechanism by which the radiation was proliferated would come to be a subject of intense study, conjecture and concern for many interested parties in the days to follow but suffice to say that the air itself within the building became a conductor for the energy and it expanded, as energy so often does. It filled every square meter of space in the building sitting on 101 California Street, including the air ducts and water pipes.

The expansion occurred quickly over the course of about a dozen minutes, over which time Lone Star policemen worked frantically with Singapore, Inc.’s corporate security to obstruct the surrounding streets and get people away from the lot. Everyone was expecting a gigantic blast that would shatter windows for kilometers around and their anxiety turned to quiet terror when instead of a conventional chemical explosion the lights in the building all flickered out as the circuitry inside failed. And then about a minute later, the interior of the building was gradually filled with a sickly green glow.

= = =

Dawson’s memory of Berkeley was of a place that was welcoming to people with a certain type of soul, and hostile to everyone else. If your mind was open to the spirits around you, you were welcome. If you heard the voice of Mother on the wind, you were welcome. If your chief concerns were profit, or growth, or the confidence of the shareholders… Well, the neo-pagans of Berkeley knew many ways to make someone feel unwanted, only a few of which involved blunt instruments and broken limbs.

When the occupation ended and the city’s administration was re-established, Berkeley was one of a few areas that because of their reputations did not attract much in the way of corporate sponsorship. Berkeley’s resources for rebuilding had come from the community itself and the charity of metahumanitarian organizations, some of which had operated out of the area when fighting the Protectorate, and when the city council had been reformed they got their own representative on it who had held the seat since. He had a beard down to his waist, wore a boot on his head and was often the sole dissenting vote in any legislation.

She had never felt welcome there, because she believed she didn’t deserve to feel welcome anywhere. Even when Mother Earth tried to seduce and captivate her to be their inside woman in the city’s police force, it was her hardened self-hatred–and her numbness to chemical bliss–that kept her from falling into Tranquility’s embrace.

For Instinct it was an intoxicating place to exist. All the auras of so many living, breathing people twisting together into a blended miasma of essence, expressing themselves like a conclave of absinthe-drunk artists throwing paint at each other’s naked bodies. And if you were known to them, they would be so free with those bodies… Free and generous, even though most of them had nothing to spare save for their affection.

Consequently almost any trip into the streets of Berkeley was sure to become an all day and all night affair as Instinct felt compelled to mingle with the natives, to mix with the population. There was no shortage of people to kiss, to tongue, to suck or blow or ride. She’d suggested to Dawson recently that they should come to live here, sell the domicile beside the Orchard and become neo-pagans. Dawson had taken her by the face and whispered softly, “One day, maybe. When we’re ready to lose ourselves in everyone else. But for now we need to keep our heads.”

When that day would be wasn’t a mystery to Instinct, who had the same mind as her human. It would be when all of California was as free and easy as Berkely was. And as went California, so would go the world.

This morning though she wanted to see someone who lived in Berkely but didn’t often venture out of the small den that had been arranged for him. It was not easy, making her way through the streets and alleys without stopping to kiss or caress anyone signaling that they were receptive to it, or receptive to being convinced to be receptive to it. She moved by the edges of a crowd in an overgrown lot where a man with a black-and-white beret and a face painted with a smiling skull extended a hand to her in invitation to dance.

“Here comes the cavalry!” he sang in perfect, practiced rhythm, snapping his suspenders against his otherwise bare, hairy chest. “She rode a million miles, to make a man of me…”

The crowd parted around her to let him get close and he galloped in front of her to take both her hands in his, still singing. “She’ll figure out if I am god or chemistry… Which will it be, love?”

He grinned hopefully, raising one of her hands to his mouth to kiss while his cohorts played istanbul escort their instruments further inside the lot.

“I’m sorry,” Instinct said, “I can’t right now. I’ll come back, I promise.”

He kissed her hand again, maintaining eye contact as he slid away back to his adoring crowd, and Instinct tore herself away from the scene before she could be tempted further.

She made her way to the parlor where was hidden the man most responsible for her existence, showing her Mother Earth tattoo to ease the concerns of the people paid to watch for such things and then bribing them with a series of soul-sipping kisses to let her through quickly.

There were interior locks on the door to his lab but Havelock never used them. Instinct pressed the button on the intercom anyway and a moment later Elazar’s voice came through the speaker, a little tinny. “Don’t need anything right now, thanks.”

She pressed the button again and spoke. “It’s me.”

A pause. “Oh. Well, come in. Come in, it’s open.”

Pulling the heavy metal door open exposed her to the sterile scent of Havelock’s lab-like domicile. He had access to sunlight through a lever controlled grate in the ceiling which led to the streetside above, but he kept it closed in favor of the dull illumination from several computer screens and a single antique lamp over a desk on which sat a few effects. An older commpad, a half-eaten meal, a newton’s cradle that seemed to be hand-made.

Havelock himself was several days unshaven, but he no longer had the haunted look of the perpetually sleepless. He stood up from his chair and crossed his arms as Instinct shut the door behind her.

“You’ve been sleeping better,” she remarked. “The circles under your eyes are lighter than when I first saw you.”

He shrugged at that. “Easier, these days. With the… expectation that things could get better.”

She advanced on him slowly, looming a full head taller. Most people shrank when faced with her but Havelock had looked in the face of evil far worse than the likes of her and found nothing to be afraid of. Instead he’d seen a mechanism for giving the world what it seemed to want.

So he stood his ground as Instinct engulfed him in a hug, wrapping her arms around his back and planting him face-first into her neck. He squawked awkwardly, losing his balance and having to rely on her completely to stay upright until he could regain it.

She asked into his disorientation, “I’ve been thinking.”

He croaked his response. “Should I be worried?”

“Would it be alright if I called you dad?”

At that he looked genuinely alarmed, standing up straight and using both hands to adjust his glasses and smooth his thin white hair. “What? You want to call me what? Is this a sex thing? It sounds like a sex thing.”

Reluctantly she let go of him and he took a polite step away. “Not unless you want it to be,” she supplied. “I’ve been thinking that you’re the person chiefly responsible for my being in the world.”

Havelock rubbed at the thin stubble on his chin. “Right, I see the logic. Someone else was the source code but I ran the program. Maybe I’d be willing to take some credit for that if you were the only outcome, but I’d ask you to remember that at the time I was trying to end the sixth world.”

Instinct leaned against the nearest desk and put her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “Too many people to count are made by accident,” she said. “Or rather, the act that makes them is done on purpose and the consequences aren’t given much consideration. The person I’m made from knows that and I yearn to emulate her however I can.”

Havelock moved over to one of the other desks and turned on a display screen with a touch. “You do,” he observed, “Down to the cellular level. You have identical DNA. You’re actually more her than she is, by volume. If you count the extra organs and muscle tissue.”

At this Instinct smiled, unable to keep from showing her teeth. “That’s clever. I’ll have to tell her that.”

Havelock looked at her sharply then and the glow of the screen reflected off the lenses over his face, hiding his eyes. He asked gravely, “I hope you’re not about to tell me you forgive me for all the deaths.”

Instinct met his gaze and spoke softly. Sympathetic, and with the sort of judgement which could be displayed only by the direct beneficiary of acts they knew were monstrous. “I know that you’ve done the things you’ve done because life has hurt you. Because you see the sixth world for what it is: a body where cancer rules, hurting its healthy cells in pursuit of growth. You believed it would be better in a grave than as a walking corpse and the memories I’ve inherited tell me that you had good cause to feel that way.”

“What you did led directly to people dying. I told you once I didn’t care why you’d done it, but in the joy of living I’ve had a change of heart. The person with the most cause to want me to die asked taksim bayan escort me to live, and now I ask you to. I can’t absolve you–that’s not within my power. I can’t tell you that someday you’ll feel like you’ve finally paid the debt, or atoned for the bad things you’ve done. What I can say is that if you want to help this world, we’re on the same side. If you want to protect these people that have accepted me as one of them, our aims are the same. If you want to be saved, Havelock, then save someone else.”

He turned away from her then, averting his gaze to look at the display screen and its night-themed interface. “It’s… too late for me,” he lamented. “When the adversary comes for me, it’ll be a long time coming.”

Instinct was silent for a long moment before speaking. “Tell me about her, dad.”

He looked back at her sharply. “What?”

“Your wife. She’s been gone a long time, and you’re still mourning. Everything you’ve done has been an attempt to grieve. Tell me about her.”

At this request he turned away entirely. “It doesn’t matter. She’s dead.”

“It matters to you,” Instinct said, standing up from the desk. “And so it matters to me.”

“I’m the last person who remembers her,” Havelock whispered hoarsely, “And that memory will die with me. She’s been dead now more years than she was even alive, do you know? She only echoes in one place. And I’m not going to let anyone take that from me.”

When she set her hand on his shoulder she could feel him trembling. “Elazar,” she said comfortingly. “Dad. Let that echo resonate with me. And I’ll carry it forever.”

Over the course of several seconds the tension drained out of him. And finally his hand came up to rest on hers. “I can tell you’re not going to let this go. And seeing as how you represent all hope for a better world I suppose I should oblige you.”

“You should oblige me because you loved her and she deserves to be remembered. You can’t take away loved, dad. Sharing it only makes it grow.”

He made a thick, slightly sickened noise. “Platitudes are spilling out of you And here all I thought you were full of was teeth.”

“Teeth,” Instinct agreed, “And sperm from donors.”

At that he grunted in amusement. “Guess it won’t be long until I’m granddad to someone.”

“In time,” Instinct assured. “I’ve got my eyes on a few people.”

He let his hand slide off of hers and made for the computer he’d turned on. “So have I,” he said. “I’ve been wondering if this is a trick we can only do once, or if we can… boost the world’s immune system.”

Instinct narrowed her eyes. “What exactly are you saying?”

Havelock apped the display screen where he had compiled a scrolling list of names, dozens of metahumans long with brief descriptions of their vocation and what she presumed was their region of residence. “That there are good people in this world,” Elazar said. “And we can make more of them. You’re a proof of concept, and these are… candidates. Maybe we can catch this lightning in more bottles.”

This idea was no less stressful coming from Havelock than it had been coming from Impulse. “My human suggested something similar,” Instinct informed him. She couldn’t keep the sorrow out of her voice as she stated her position again. “If you think this is something we could do easily or safely, you’re underestimating the hunger we’re made with. What we need to change isn’t just donated blood–it has to be spilled hot and the murder is what completes the circle, linking us back to the other side.”

“But,” Havelock said, pointing at her, “You said that Dawson gave you her blood willingly, and that stabilized your biology.”

“She did,” Instinct said, grinning in a way she knew showed her teeth, “Because she’s an angel, and she has broad horizons. How many other people are going to do the same, when we tell them what it takes? How many of them would believe it, and not think it’s some corporate plot to build bioweapons or something else equally sinister? We can’t trick these people. And how are you even sure a personality–someone’s soul–is… is worthy of being emulated, dad? Who’s going to judge that? You?”

Havelock started, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “Me? No, I have no right to judge anyone. I was thinking it would be you.”

Dawson’s long-cultivated aversion to passing judgement on others spiked inside of her and she held onto it like a buoy in a sea of ideas that had promise, and immense risk. “I… I don’t know. What you’re talking about doing is unbelievably dangerous, dad. If even one person was killed… If even one of them got away… Fuck, I’m not even convinced that the sixth world is free of imitators. It might be that more than just metahuman greed perpetuates this disease.”

“All the more reason,” Havelock pressed, closing his hand into a fist, “To replicate the good in the world. I might be old and bitter but I know a good person when I see one, Instinct.” His fist opened in her direction. “You, and the one you’re made from. People like her are the immune system. You’re the vaccine, the element of the sickness that can make Earth and its cells stronger.”

She walked up next to him and tapped the display screen, stopping its slow scroll. “My way is better,” she stated. “I just need… time.”

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