What do you care? Jax demanded of himself. Let Stanley have the spotlight. You hate the army!
But it was impossible not to enjoy the admiration. Jax had basked in the praise of the HoWaRD officers while making his report on Operation Flower Power. There had been laughter and applause as he’d described squirting Major Widmark. Everyone agreed that the exercise would have been a total success if it hadn’t been for the untimely burst of blowback. Jax would have hypnotized the C.O., and then retraced his steps along the trail of security guards he’d bent on the way in.
Jax didn’t mention that if he could bend his way into the Ryviker facility, the newly free Elias Mako could do the same to gain access to Fort Calhoun. Mako was the most cunning mind-bender who had ever lived.
With Brassmeyer and Stanley out of town, HoWaRD continued to focus on the army’s hypnotic database. Jax was interested to learn more about the Arcanovs, but the blowback made it difficult for him to read anything off a screen.
It must have been obvious how much Jax was suffering because even Wilson noticed.
“What’s the matter, Dopus? You look terrible.”
“Since when do you care if I’m sick?”
“I don’t think you’re sick. There’s stuff you do that nobody else can, and I remember the effect it had on you. What’s Colonel Rod got you up to?”
“If Colonel Rod wanted you to know, he’d tell you,” Jax shot back.
Wilson raised an eyebrow. “So you are working on something special. I remember you stumbling around Sentia, green in the face because Mako made you a video star. I think Rod’s trying the same thing.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking —” He never finished the sentence, because at that moment, a fresh wave of mesmeric images hit. Jax wasn’t sure which bothered him more — the blowback itself, or the fact that it made him let his guard down. How could he be reckless enough not to watch what he was saying around Wilson, who was not only an enemy, but who had once had such strong ties to Mako?
“Oh, that looked real painful,” Wilson said in mock sympathy. “It must have been a bad one.”
Jax gagged once, lurched forward, and threw up all over Wilson’s army boots.
By the morning of Thursday, October 4, Jax was so ill that Brassmeyer had to help him into the helicopter. By this time, even the colonel was concerned.
“Geez, kid, you’ve aged thirty years since all this started! I think you’re losing weight, too! What can we do to help you?”
Jax just shrugged and took his seat. He had told the colonel again and again what was causing all this. If the man didn’t understand it by now, he never would.
The flight to the desert southwest was just a blur. At first, Jax was too weak to speak. But as they crossed into Arizona, his headache lessened, the nausea receded, and his vision began to clear. By the time it occurred to Jax that he was starting to feel better, he was 100 percent fine.
He turned to Brassmeyer. “They took the messages off the air, right?”
“The last one aired at nine twenty-two,” the colonel confirmed. “I wondered if you’d notice.”
Jax bit his tongue. Yeah, he noticed — the way a drowning man notices when he’s pulled out of the water. Put that in your database, Roderick.
Soon the artificial community appeared on the horizon. Brassmeyer tapped the pilot’s shoulder. “Take us in closer, and circle.”
As they approached Delta Prime, Jax could make out the individual buildings and roads. It was a busy place, bustling like the kind of city it had been created to simulate. The chopper descended a little more, and they could see pedestrians coming and going.
Jax checked his watch. 9:46. Fourteen minutes to go. Although he had barely given a thought to Operation Aurora beyond his own misery, he was suddenly filled with a burning curiosity about what would happen when ten o’clock rolled around.
“How do you think it’s going to go?” he asked the colonel.
“That’s why we do the exercise,” came the reply. He produced two sets of binoculars and handed one to Jax.
Jax peered through the field glasses. They gave him a perfect street-level view. A woman walked a large Doberman, a workman started up a light pole, a couple pushed a baby carriage, a grocery-delivery boy rode by on a bike.
“Two minutes,” murmured the colonel.
It all looked so normal that Jax couldn’t imagine what might possibly happen here that had a senior military officer hovering in a helicopter, waiting with bated breath.
“Ten seconds,” Brassmeyer intoned.
Jax counted down in his mind. Three seconds — two — one —
The people stopped.
All over the streets, they stood, not frozen exactly, but unmoving. The cars continued to roll as drivers let up on the gas and ceased steering. There were fender benders and collisions. One car jumped the curb, flattened a fire hydrant, and went into a shop through a plate-glass window. The hydrant sent jets of water in all directions. Pedestrians were being drenched, but no one moved to get away from the spray.
Jax picked up the binoculars for a closer look. The bike messenger stopped pedaling, coasted to a halt, and keeled over into a flowerbed. The Doberman was on its hind legs, frantically licking its owner’s face in search of signs of life. The animal seemed to be howling. The parents stood passively by, oblivious to the presence of their baby or each other.
“Outstanding!” breathed Brassmeyer.
About a half-dozen people apparently hadn’t been affected by the post-hypnotic suggestion. They were running around amid the “statues,” yelling into faces and shaking arms and shoulders in search of some kind of reaction. They were joined by others, running out of houses and buildings in search of some kind of clue as to what was going on. Their panic was evident. Many screamed into cell phones, trying to sound the alarm.
Black smoke began to pour out of a small luncheonette. A group of the unaffected rushed inside and began dragging out immobile customers and employees. Those being rescued offered no help. Jax’s hypnotic command prevented them from moving, even to save their own lives. Seconds later, the storefront was engulfed in flames. The firehouse was barely half a block away, but no one came.
“We’ve got to wake these people up!” Jax said urgently. “Come on — give the trigger word! Snap them out of it!”
The colonel tossed him a dismissive gesture, eyes never leaving his binoculars.
“If you won’t do it, I will!” Jax undid his seat belt, stuck his head out the side of the bubble, and bellowed, “Briar Rose! Briar Rose!” His voice never made it past the clatter of the rotor blades.
Red with rage, Brassmeyer grabbed him by the belt and yanked him back into his seat like he was a rag doll. “Try that again, mister, and you’ll be in restraints!”
“But I did this!” Jax wailed. “This is my fault!”
“It was my order,” Brassmeyer amended. “You did what you were told. For once.”
“But someone’s going to get killed!”
“Let me worry about that!”
That was the trouble, Jax thought desperately. Brassmeyer wasn’t going to worry about it. He was in a business where sacrificing lives was all part of a chess game.
I know a way to make him listen to me!
He turned blazing eyes on the colonel.
With the reaction time of a striking cobra, Brassmeyer’s meaty hand snapped out and covered Jax’s face. “Do you honestly believe I could spend time around mind-benders and never give a thought to what I would do if any of the nine of you decided to try something like that?” His hand was pressing hard, imprisoning Jax against the seat. “I’m going to pretend that little stunt never happened. But mark my words — if you ever get out of line again, you’re gone. And you might want to think about how you and your family will get along without military protection now that Dr. Mako is on the loose. Am I going to have a problem when I take my hand away?”
“No,” Jax barely whispered.
By
now several plumes of smoke reached skyward from houses and buildings in Delta Prime. Reports were coming in from a mobile command center that was monitoring cameras strategically placed around the town. There were fires started by unattended cooking, and floods from sinks and bathtubs left running. Injuries were widespread, mostly minor falls. But the military personnel were keeping an eye on a few situations that were potentially more dangerous.
“Should we move in and try to extract the more serious cases?” came the voice from the command center.
“Not yet,” was Brassmeyer’s decision. “Let’s not contaminate the experiment until it becomes absolutely necessary.”
Jax was horrified. People were suffering down there, and for what? The experiment was over, wasn’t it? The hypnotic “attack” had worked. To leave victims twisting in the wind when you had the power to help them was cruel and unnecessary. But he didn’t dare try to argue with the colonel after their last exchange.
When the experiment reached the fifteen-minute mark, Colonel Brassmeyer ordered the pilot to land. The chopper set down about a mile away from Delta Prime, next to the cluster of tents that represented the mobile command center. There were at least a dozen other helicopters standing by.
One tent seemed to be some kind of field hospital. Another was the command center itself. Inside, soldiers followed video feeds coming in from all over the town. Watching them made Jax feel crushing remorse. One screen showed a howling toddler desperately trying to rouse his mother from her mysterious stupor. A pile of people sat at the bottom of an escalator where the moving staircase had deposited them. A forklift truck pushed up against a wall, its driver immobile at the controls. The wheels spun relentlessly, clouds of burning rubber rising from the tires. In a supermarket, an automatic meat slicer worked its way through an entire corned beef brisket and kept on slicing.
Jax cringed as monitors all around the tent showed electrical transformers sizzling, sparking, and exploding. On one of them, Jax noticed the pole worker tossed from his position at the box. He hung limply from his safety belt, unmoving.
The true purpose of Operation Aurora began to sink in at that moment. The post-hypnotic suggestion to stop dead was more than a tactic to disable a town’s resistance; it was a weapon of mass destruction, and the proof of it was right before his eyes. Electrical explosions, fires, floods, accidents; a population unable to move, much less defend itself.
After half an hour, the colonel gave the order to send individual teams into Delta Prime to rescue anyone they deemed to be in serious danger. The helicopters came back bearing the dangling pole worker; the baby in the carriage, who was being doused with ice-cold water from the hydrant; and a man who had been halfway down a flight of stairs when ten o’clock hit, and had tumbled to the bottom. There were also cases of smoke inhalation and some minor burns. Next door at the field hospital, doctors greeted the wounded with the words “Briar Rose,” neutralizing the post-hypnotic suggestions so that the patients could wake up and receive treatment.
Still, Brassmeyer refused to do anything to help the several dozen people who were unaffected, and who were becoming wildly hysterical as they watched their town fall apart, and their neighbors and loved ones fail to snap out of this immobile and unreachable state. Eleven o’clock came and went, and there was still no mercy for Delta Prime. The broken fire hydrant stopped spewing, signifying the end of the town’s limited water supply. Fires spread from building to building, house to house. Choppers bore more and more evacuees to the field hospital.
“Are you just going to let it all burn?” Jax pleaded.
“It’s not a real town, Opus,” the colonel told him patiently. “Nobody lives here. These people are all volunteers.”
“But they didn’t know they were volunteering for this!”
At that moment, the trapped forklift broke through the prefab wall it had been pushing against. The machine disappeared in an avalanche of plaster and lumber. In what looked like slow motion, the entire building collapsed in on itself. In another monitor, clouds of dust and debris obscured the street. When it dissipated, the people were still there, still unmoving, covered in a layer of white. The terrified Doberman, also powdered white, cowered by its mistress.
Brassmeyer consulted his watch. “Mark the time — eleven twenty-three. I’m pulling the plug on Aurora. Give the signal.”
The Arizona sky turned beige with sand and dirt as the entire fleet of choppers lifted off and headed to the devastated town. Minutes later, the loudspeakers echoed around the desert.
“Briar rose. Briar rose. Briar rose.”
Jax watched the monitors as the living dead of Delta Prime came back to life amid the wreckage of their temporary home.
“Really, Wilson?”
Wilson slouched in his chair in Captain Pedroia’s office, his black boots — carefully cleaned and spit-shined after Jax had thrown up on them — on the desk.
“Whatever,” Wilson mumbled, unfolding his long legs and bringing them down to the floor. He hated his regular sessions with HoWaRD’s psychiatrist, but there was no getting out of them.
“It must be hard being here without your family,” Pedroia began.
Wilson shrugged. “At least I don’t have parents running my life and sticking their noses where they don’t belong.”
“No,” Pedroia agreed in amusement. “You have the US Army doing that now. And you might have noticed that they’re pretty good at it.”
Another shrug. “I like the army. They blow stuff up.”
“And how do you find living on your own?” the psychiatrist persisted.
“I’m not homesick, if that’s what you mean.”
“But surely it’s a huge adjustment.”
“What, you think Stanley can hack it, but not me?”
“Stanley’s not on his own; he’s with me,” Pedroia reminded him. “And besides, he’s a special case. He’s never had a family.”
“Except the Arcanovs.”
“You know what I mean. He’s never lived with parents. He’s bounced around orphanages his whole life.”
“Boo-hoo,” Wilson drawled.
The psychiatrist frowned. “I thought you liked Stanley.”
“Stan’s the man,” Wilson said positively. “About time somebody took Dopus to school.”
Pedroia leaned back in his chair. “Did it ever occur to you that your friendship with Stanley isn’t a friendship at all? Maybe he just makes you feel better about the inferiority complex you have for Jax.”
Wilson was silent a moment. Then, “Wow, doc, you must be a genius. Did they teach you all that in college?”
“I’m not an idiot, and neither are you. It’s no disgrace that Jax’s powers are greater than yours, but for some reason, you can’t get past it. Who are you trying to impress, Wilson? Not me, obviously. Is it the colonel? The army?” The psychiatrist stood up. “Or are you proving yourself to someone who picked Jax over you a long time ago? Someone like … Dr. Mako?”
“Come to think of it, where is Dopus?” asked Wilson. “He’s been gone since yesterday.”
“That’s none of your business. It’s classified.”
“I’m making it my business.” Suddenly, Wilson leaped out of his chair and stared into Pedroia’s eyes. The captain lashed out with his arm to block the mesmerizing gaze, but Wilson grabbed his wrist and forced it away. The psychiatrist was strong, but the young mind-bender only needed a few seconds….
Wilson saw his own triumphant smile in the PIP image of himself from Pedroia’s point of view. He may not be a rock star like Stanley or Dopus, but Wilson DeVries had been trained at Sentia, learning at the feet of Dr. Mako himself.
He leaned in to his subject’s face. “Now you’re going to tell me everything you know about where Jackson Opus is, and why he went there.”
Completely bent, the psychiatrist was powerless to resist. “It’s called Operation Aurora….”
“By our calculations, the post-hypnotic suggestion reached seventy-nine p
ercent of the population. We were expecting more, but some people don’t watch TV, I guess. If we’d disseminated the message over the Internet as well, we feel we could have cracked ninety percent.”
Colonel Brassmeyer had assembled all the officers of the Hypnotic Warfare Research Department in his office for this debriefing on Operation Aurora.
“Were there any casualties?” inquired Major Elizabeth Bigelow, who had been sent to this meeting to report back to the army chief of staff.
“There might have been,” Brassmeyer replied, “but we stepped in when we thought life was at stake. We had about sixty injured, half of those from a building collapse. But let me tell you, that town is dust. Think about it — we didn’t command those people to destroy anything. They were only hypnotized to stop what they were doing and stay still. And in less than two hours, the power had failed, the water was out, and what hadn’t fallen apart was on fire.”
“What’s your assessment of the resistance we could expect from a population subjected to this kind of hypnotic attack?” Major Bigelow probed.
“An invading force would encounter negligible opposition,” the colonel boasted. “The unaffected are too stunned by what’s happened to everybody else to fight back. The biggest threat we encountered was a nervous dog. It would be a cakewalk.”
Lieutenant Kyushu spoke up. He was in charge of statistical analysis for HoWaRD. “I’ve run some simulations, applying the Aurora numbers to larger population centers. For example, if the hypnotic message had been run in a city the size of New York, we could expect injuries into the hundreds of thousands including at least five hundred fatalities. Property damage would be estimated somewhere between thirty-five and sixty billion dollars.”
“Of course,” Brassmeyer conceded, “in a big city, it’s impossible to allow for any difficulty we might have in delivering the trigger word to end the hypno-attack. In that case, the collateral damage would increase exponentially.”
Bigelow seemed puzzled, so Captain Pedroia stepped in. “If we can’t terminate the suggestion, we risk widespread deaths from dehydration. The hypnotized would stop still for days, unable to look after their most basic needs.”