Catalyst

  Then Tom authorized his processor to see him, and Elliot jumped.

  “Hey, man. Don’t say my name.”

  “Uh, you!” Elliot exclaimed. His dark eyes moved over him with concern, and Tom realized what a wreck he must look. “This is a surprise.”

  “Lieutenant Blackburn told me you’d been arrested and brought here.”

  Elliot’s lips quirked. “I had nine months of freedom. I worked as an activist, and I even fell in love, and then the National Defense Authorization Act got me. I’ve been detained. Indefinitely so far. I thought if I was public enough, high profile enough, I’d be safe.” A shadow passed over his face. “But it was like no one noticed the day they came for me. Even Tony just stood there. The crowd seemed to be deaf and dumb. I think I had too much faith in people.”

  “No, there’s a reason no one helped you,” Tom told him. “Vengerov’s got control over the public. There’s no hiding in a crowd because the crowd’s all been mind controlled.” He explained quickly about the Austere-grade processors, watched Elliot sink down onto his cot, troubled.

  “I really am out of the loop.” He looked Tom over. “Are you . . . are you still training here?”

  “I’m a fugitive. No one else can see me. Blackburn’s one, too.” Then Tom shrugged. “Oh, I also blew up the skyboards.”

  Elliot stared at him. People seemed to have that reaction when he dropped the bomb on them.

  So Tom sighed and dropped down onto the cot and explained it all to him—his ability with machines, the skyboards, Vengerov’s attacks on the other executives.

  When he finished, Elliot sat there, rubbed his head. “So that was you at Capitol Summit.”

  “Sorry, man. I was trying to take down Heather. I didn’t think about the position I was putting you in.”

  But Elliot just chuckled. “That was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” His eyes grew distant. “I remember when they told me I had to fall into line with the image they were crafting for me, act the way they wanted me to act. There was a whole group of Wyndham Harks executives there, and one of them had this quote he liked: ‘We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.’ But he didn’t mean I got to act and create my own reality, no, no. He meant they—people like him, people who mattered—were the ones whose actions mattered, the ones who’d create reality for the rest of us, and the rest of us had to obey and fall into line with their vision of the world. I had to fall in line. And for too long, I did.”

  Tom nodded like he understood.

  “But when you fired those first shots at them,” Elliot said, catching his eyes, “I could finally see another path. I didn’t know that was you, of course, but it made me think of you. Of everything you’d said to me.”

  “I’m honored,” Tom said.

  “That’s why I fought back against them. I realized that they don’t get to create my reality if I reject them. They can’t dictate the terms of my existence to me.” His eyes flashed. “Even if they keep me locked up forever, or if they reprogram me to force me back into in line, I defied them and they can never take that from me.”

  Tom felt pretty assured of his disloyalty now, so he felt safe leaning closer and saying, “You’re not going to stay locked up, Elliot. We’re going to fix the world. For good.”

  “I’m in,” Elliot pledged.

  “You haven’t heard the plan—”

  Elliot chuckled. “One of my plebes, saving us all? Of course I’m going to be a part of this. Tell me what you need me to do.”

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  TOM RETURNED TO Blackburn’s quarters. The military had already cleared out most of his possessions after his arrest, but it didn’t make much of a difference. There’d never been much in the place, anyway. The couch was still there, where Tom had been sleeping.

  On it rested a coiled up neural wire.

  Lead sank into his gut. He’d agreed to start downloading the information he’d lost. Blackburn must’ve prepared something.

  Now it was going to start.

  Tom couldn’t bring himself to hook the wire in. He’d originally planned to crash on the floor of Vik’s room, but then a nightmare scenario occurred to him—what if he woke up in the pitch-dark of Vik’s bunk with a neural wire hooked into his brain stem access port, and he didn’t remember where he was right away?

  There was a lot he could share with his friends, but he couldn’t stand the thought of them seeing how screwed up he still felt over Vengerov. So screwed up that he couldn’t even hook in a neural wire, even to get back some of the knowledge and fighting skills he’d lost. He was still sitting there, contemplating the neural wire, when boots creaked on the floor behind him, light spearing into the dim room, Blackburn emerging from his bedroom.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to Ramirez?”

  “Yeah. He’s in once we come up with something.” Tom twisted the neural wire around a finger, anxiety dancing in his stomach.

  Blackburn picked up on it right away. “Are you going to be able to do this?”

  “It’s fine,” Tom said automatically. After a moment, he admitted, “I can’t hook into the system. I mean, I can, because I’ve done it thousands of times, but I just can’t. You know what I mean?”

  “You’re thinking about this the wrong way,” Blackburn told him. “You’ve formed some mental association between this”—he pointed at the neural wire—“and feeling powerless. That’s not the case. This is power. Your ability is your strength.”

  Tom’s head pulsed. It may be his strength, but Vengerov had also made it very clear it was his weakness. He’d turned everything that made Tom strong into a weapon against him. His ability, his friends, his memories, everything but Medusa.

  Blackburn rubbed his palm over his mouth. “Then again, I suppose I could give you incentive.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s someone visiting our system. She wants to see you.”

  Tom’s heart jumped. “She’s here?”

  “I told Medusa to come,” Blackburn said. “I’ve kept her updated about our brainstorming, but I think today’s your day to liaise with her. Consider it motivation to get over some things faster. I can begin your downloads while you’re meeting her.” He smiled. “Unless you want me to tell her you’re not feeling up to it.”

  The evil bastard knew Tom wasn’t going to let that happen. “No way.” He grabbed the neural wire and jammed it into the nearest access port, then connected it with his port.

  His senses drained as Blackburn chuckled. “Thatta boy.”

  HE SHOT OUT of himself and immediately was drawn down a pipeline of signals. For a horrific moment, he felt out of control, but he knew it was her. Then he resolved to life in a program. The setting was a lush garden, with lakes and waterfalls, the water so clear it reflected the vivid blue sky, the leaves of the trees.

  “What is this place?” Tom wondered.

  “You’ve been off Earth for so long. I thought I’d show you something beautiful.”

  Tom spun around. Medusa stood on the rocks with him amid the garden, her black hair loose about her shoulders. “Suzhou. The Lingering Garden,” she explained.

  Tom gazed at her, his heart swelling in his chest. It had been so long, so long. “Hi,” he said dumbly.

  She laughed. “Hi.”

  “Medusa.”

  “Yaolan,” she reminded him.

  “Yaolan.” He drank in the sight of her , the girl he’d thrown himself into space to save. The reason for everything.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. She drew forward, her fingers sliding across his palm, and Tom seized her small hand, drawing his palm up to her cheek, brushing her hair aside. There were so many emotions inside him, his chest felt full of them, and he wondered how to tell her she’d been the reason he’d escaped, the light burn
ing at the end of the tunnel for him.

  There were probably many articulate things he could’ve, should’ve said, but instead he blurted, “I’m in love with you.”

  She tensed. “Um, excuse me?”

  “That was kind of a bomb to drop on you, I know,” Tom said, realizing it. “But I have to say it. I realized it up there. I love you. I know you said once I needed you to need me, but that’s not true.”

  Her fingers braided with his, and he found he suddenly couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “I realized that, too. I need you, not the other way around. I always thought I was okay on my own, that I could shift for myself, whatever happened. But I was up there and I was totally alone and it was like I . . .” Tom stopped, thinking of the way he’d totally disintegrated. There’d been no Tom Raines when he’d spent so much time by himself. He didn’t exist anymore. He hadn’t existed until he had them all back again. He’d never burden Medusa by confessing all that, so he just said, “It’s okay if you don’t feel the same way. I wanted to tell you once.”

  “Tom.”

  He looked up, and she drew his head down and kissed him. He clasped her in his arms, but she stepped back, a line between her brows. “Tom, you’ve been gone for over a year. You’ve been held prisoner. I don’t know what you’ve been through, but . . . but I don’t think this is the right time for impassioned declarations.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “I was making an impassioned declaration?”

  She smiled back. “Don’t you remember in Hawaii, when you told me you’d be doing something wrong if you took advantage of the way I was feeling then?”

  “But you wouldn’t be . . .”

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly back then. I was in a bad place. Don’t you see that this is the same situation?” She turned back to him, her hair rippling in the breeze. “I’d be the one doing something wrong if I accepted this right now.”

  Tom stuffed his virtual hands into his virtual pockets. “So when would the time be right?”

  She peered back at him. “If you say it again one day. Later. At the right time.”

  “The right time.”

  “If there ever is one,” she added darkly.

  Tom gazed at her intently. “What’s going on?”

  Agitation lit her face. “I can’t tell you. I need to show you.”

  And with those words, they suddenly drew out of the Spire’s server, shooting through the internet. He focused on her, on Medusa, and never let her out of his mind. They resolved in an internet hub, sending commands to all the neural processors. Algorithm after algorithm she called up before Tom’s eyes, and he felt sickness spread through him seeing what Vengerov was doing.

  Searching people, categorizing them. Some had been classified as expendable—the weak, the elderly, the deficient. There were Trojans already being planted into their neural processors, ready to trigger at a command to order their brain functions to shut off.

  Tom thought of how Vengerov had tried to reprogram him early after his capture, how much sense it had made to Tom at the time that there were too many people and too few resources, and it had seemed only logical that vast chunks of humanity could be erased.

  Vengerov was going to do just that.

  And then they were back in the Spire’s systems, in the program of Suzhou, in the garden that suddenly didn’t look so serene anymore with the presentiment of doom hanging over them both.

  “We have to act now,” Medusa said flatly, “before he triggers the depopulation subroutines. Before he turns his attention back to the Spire and the Citadel, all the cadets and Combatants on both sides—we’re the only ones who still can act. We have a plan.”

  “Great,” Tom said, because that was more than he and his friends had come up with. “Tell me about it.”

  “We’re going to attack the hubs Vengerov is using to transmit information to the Austere-grade processors.”

  Vengerov had stripped almost all knowledge from Tom’s neural processor. He was embarrassed to admit, “I kind of lost everything I’ve ever downloaded. Can you . . . can you tell me what hubs are again?”

  Medusa didn’t roll her eyes. “Hubs are like . . . data information centers. They’re supercomputers that generate the network every Austere-grade processor is a part of now. If Vengerov controlled a bunch of interconnected spiderwebs, the hubs are the places where the threads meet. So every bit of information that gets installed in people’s neural processors comes from the hubs first. They send it along those threads. If everyone with an Austere-grade processor knows to look out for the ghost in the machine, for instance, they know it because the command to do so was sent to them from a central hub.”

  “So you think destroying them so they can’t control people with Austere-grade processors—that would fix things,” Tom surmised.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s got backup hubs. And backups of backups. But we’ll destroy as many as we can, and then we’re going to spread a virus to corrupt the data being sent from the remaining hubs. Hopefully if we do both those things, we can wreak maximum damage on Obsidian Corp.” A smile twitched her lips. “He’s put Austere-grade processors in billions of minds. People with Austere-grade processors have a built in subroutine where they have to precisely follow the laws of their lands.”

  Tom nodded, remembering Zane and his plebes, how they couldn’t break any regulations.

  “They don’t just follow them, they’re compelled to.” Medusa’s eyes gleamed. “What we’re going to do is send them a new understanding of the law. Everyone who has an Austere-grade will suddenly feel it’s their legal duty to kill someone who works at Obsidian Corporation or LM Lymer Fleet, and destroy any equipment owned by those companies. If we’re lucky, Joseph Vengerov will be right in reach of someone with an Austere-grade processor and he’ll die.”

  “He won’t,” Tom said flatly. “There’s a fail-safe of sorts. He can’t be killed by anyone with one of his machines. And besides that, my friend’s dad works for Obsidian Corp. He’s not a bad person, he just needed a job. For all we know, Vengerov’s employees have Austere-grade processors, too. Maybe they got them way before everyone else.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” Medusa said, “but this is the best plan we have. It’s a way to do significant damage to his company in very little time. We’ll only have a few minutes before Vengerov realizes what’s going on and corrects it. He’ll figure out it’s us and send every ship he has to us, and then we’ll be dead. Our only chance is to damage him enough that he can’t strike us.”

  Tom kept thinking of the strategy conversation he’d had with his friends and Blackburn. He knew as soon as Medusa and her people acted, that was their last shot. Whatever they did on their end, they’d have to do it at the same time as the Combatants on her end.

  He imagined her proposal at work. Every person with Austere-grade processors mobilized, for a brief period of time, against Obsidian Corp. That was an army of billions. There was a lot of damage that many people could inflict. Maybe Yaolan and her coconspirators had the solution. Maybe that would do the trick. It would have to, if it was their only shot.

  Before Vengerov retaliated, at least.

  And he would retaliate. He’d hit back harder. It’s what he always did. Tom’s head throbbed as he remembered a day long ago when Blackburn said violence was the only means of handling men like Vengerov. But he’d been wrong in a way, because Vengerov had one trump card Blackburn never would: he’d been willing to risk the entire planet to retain his dominion over it. That alone gave him an advantage no one else could match. Once Medusa struck, Vengerov wouldn’t blink about simply lobbing some nuclear weapons at the Spire, the Citadel, and forget collateral damage.

  People were entirely expendable to him, after all. At best, they were resources to be exploited and then discarded. He didn’t value human potential that wasn’t immediately evident. He didn’t care what dwelled inside them or what lay down the road for them in the future. He only cared about their immedi
ate use to him and his agenda. Vengerov had seen something useful in Tom, the weapon, but he never would’ve given a second thought to the destruction of Tom the fourteen-year-old in a VR Parlor, even with this ability in his future. Vengerov believed himself a visionary, but he was too short-sighted to see human potential.

  For a moment, Tom found himself thinking of what Wyatt had said about someone out there being the smartest person in the world, and the way a man like Vengerov would waste that. There were eleven billion people on the planet, and so much they could do if given the chance.

  One of those people with Austere-grade processors was the smartest person in the world. Probably smarter than Wyatt, smarter than Joseph Vengerov, smarter than Blackburn. Or maybe there wasn’t one smartest person—maybe there were a hundred, a thousand, a million brilliant people of genius intellect. Even if only a tiny fraction of that eleven billion was truly brilliant, there could still be thousands of Wyatts out there. What could all those people do if they had a chance, if they had the same opportunities a man like Vengerov had?

  And then in a flash, Tom knew what they had to do. He knew. He laughed at the sheer perfection of the idea.

  “What is it?” Medusa said.

  “I just realized that my friend Wyatt is not the smartest person in the world.”

  Her brow furrowed. “What’s your point?”

  “My point is,” Tom said, hope flaring to life within him, “I know how to save the world.”

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ONCE, TOM AND Vik had made a delightful discovery: Yuri Sysevich, who was awesome at practically everything else, sucked at most video games. They discovered this playing a fighting game, when Yuri unwittingly attempted to battle them and inflicted no damage at all.

  “Why are you not getting injured?” he said, distressed, as Tom, Vik, and Wyatt pummeled each other, and his character flailed impotently at the air. “I am throwing fire from my hands.”