Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (37 page)

She disappeared in a burst of light.

* * *

As the light receded, Mara felt cool night air dance across her face, and she shivered. She stood outside the transceiver node building on top of Rocky Butte, looking at the roof, now capped with scaffolding where the dome had once been. She could see the dull glow of a new sphere suspended in the middle of the metal framing, dangling over the hole the explosion had left in the building’s hexagonal roof. New satellite dishes—if that’s what they actually were—had been installed at the outer edges of the building.

From this angle on the ground at the back of the building, she couldn’t actually see the roof itself or the hole in it, just the light that poured upward from inside the building. The wind carried voices and sounds that she was sure came from there—probably construction workers or engineers getting the transceiver up and running again.

She scanned the area to make sure no one had seen her. That’s when the strangeness of the view caught her attention. No city lights, no traffic, no planes taking off from the airport. But the valley was not completely dark. In the distance she could see hundreds, perhaps thousands of ambling lights making their ways along what she presumed were sidewalks—glowing pedestrians going here and there like glow-in-the-dark ants following paths their predecessors had laid for them. Shadows shifted and skewed in dozens of directions, giving the cityscape an oddly fluid, teeming-with-life feel.

Looking down from the horizon to immediately below where she stood, Mara saw a stream of lights wrapping around the foot of the butte, tracing the road leading up to the front of the transceiver node building. It was the path she and Cam and Sam had taken the first time she’d been here. These closer lights were more discernible as people, some emitted an inner light, others—not yet transformed—simply reflected the glow of those around them. Though these people weren’t disembodied and didn’t glow green, for some reason they reminded Mara of the dispossessed spirits displaced by Prado’s viral soul back in Portland.
That seemed like years ago, a different life. Does a different body make that true?
Anyway, the living holograms and their friends shuffled soundlessly up the road heading in Mara’s direction. Then they stopped walking—hundreds of them, all in the same instant—and tilted their heads upward in unison, looking up the hill.

Mara stepped back, preparing to run for the building, thinking they stared at her. But then she had a thought:
See the light. Share the light. Be the light
.

She froze.
Where did that come from?

The chanting refused to be dismissed, kept repeating itself, bouncing around in her head like racing thoughts that kept her up some nights.

“Mara? Can you hear me?” It was Cam’s voice in her head, speaking over the strange thoughts that she couldn’t stop thinking.

“Cam? Did you just shoot that creepy chant into my brain?” she signaled him back.

“They’ve re-established the Sig-net. Where are you?” he asked.

“At the node on Rocky Butte. Why have I got that
see the light
crap in my head?”

“I told you. We don’t normally communicate verbally inside each other’s minds like this. In reality, when we communicate via Sig-net, it’s more akin to what you might think of as telepathy—sharing thoughts and ideas. You’re receiving the information the shimmers are broadcasting.”

“I’m not sure I can deal with this.”

“The Sig-net has been down since you transitioned, so you haven’t conditioned your mind to deal with incoming information. You just have to ignore what you don’t need. Shunt it aside in your mind. It’s like when you are having a conversation in a noisy restaurant. You just tune out all the voices except the people you are talking to at your table.”

“I’ll try.” She rubbed her temples and shook her head.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for Abby. I was hoping she would show up here again. She mentioned at the firehouse that she had to get to a gathering, and, judging by the lines of people heading in this direction, this is where it’s happening.”

“It’s likely they will attempt uploading their transfiguration experience to the array again. The fact that they have reestablished the Sig-net means they are close to initiating the power grid and tying it back into the larger transceiver array.”

“I guess that means I should go find her.”

“Mara, you don’t have much time. Remember, if they are successful in uploading the transfiguration experience, you will be affected as well.”

“I get it. I’ll be turned into a hologram, before I even got used to being synthetic.”

“Why don’t you bring me there so I can help you? Dealing with these new thoughts can be very confusing at first.”

“No, she’ll just use you to get to me. Now I need you to hang up or whatever it is you do when you’re done talking in someone else’s head. I can’t go fight the Aphotis and the shimmers with all these voices bouncing around inside me.”

“Be careful, Mara.”

She sensed he was gone, and all she could think was:
See the light. Share the light. Be the light
.

“How about just
ride
the light?” Mara said out loud. Still holding both sides of her head, she was enveloped in a burst of light and disappeared. When she opened her eyes, she found herself inside the building, on the third floor standing next to the railing overlooking the remains of the atrium. The floor beneath her feet slanted forward, and she had to grab the edge of the column to maintain her balance. Debris filled the center of the atrium, reaching almost to the second floor. The pristine white walls and translucent columns reaching to the roof were blackened and scarred, although Mara could make out the muted glow of plasma running through the pipes embedded in the columns. While the place looked trashed, apparently some of the infrastructure still functioned, as Cam had guessed.

The chant ran through her head, but she found the best way to deal with it was to concentrate on something else. Surveying the space below, she guessed that, with all the destruction and debris, particularly on the first floor, the building was no longer usable as a gathering place. The space would not have accommodated the large numbers of people approaching anyway. That meant the crowd would remain out front, outside. So if Abby was here—leading the charge, as it were—she’d be up on the roof. That would be her stage this time around.

Mara turned and focused on the stairwell door across the way. Recalling an additional flight of stairs leading up from the third-floor landing, she assumed that was where she needed to go.
Probably has a couple guards posted at the entrance to the roof
. She shrugged off the concern and headed that way, dodging fallen ceiling tiles, light fixtures and crumbled Sheetrock along the path.

As she approached the stairwell door and reached out for the lever to open it, a shiver ran through her body, and she froze with her hand extended inches from the door. An image flashed into her mind. No, it was a memory. She could see a giant tear rip through her own chest, releasing a burst of light to spread through her body, consuming it like a forest in a wildfire. Her body turned molten, roiled in the air like lava in water, formless and oozing. The image of a glowing fetus flashed in her head. It was growing …

Mara snapped out of it and fell into the door without opening it. Pressing on the door handle, she steadied herself by grasping the door frame. A feeling of euphoria, so intense it disoriented her, swept over her. Gasping and shuddering, her hand slipped off the handle as she pushed in vain against the door. Giving up, she twisted around, rolling her body across the front of the door until her back pressed against it, and then she slid to the floor.

The memory faded, but a chorus of thoughts came through louder than before.
Be the light. It is within you—the belief you must harness to make the transformation. See the light. Share the light. Be the light
.

It was beginning to make sense to her now. It was even appealing. If she had to live out the rest of her life in an artificial body, what did it matter to her what it was made of? Light did seem better, more malleable, less prone to damage. Eternal. Immortal.

Immortal? That’s why they seem drawn to Abby?

Pressing her hands to the sides of her head, she groaned and growled, trying to shove the words into some dark corner of her mind. But that didn’t help—they just kept coming, thousands of words riding into her brain on thousands of signals.
Be the light
. She couldn’t eject the cacophony from her head, saw light push in on her from the periphery of her vision. A part of her called to it, wanting it to overwhelm her.

No!
She pushed back.
It’s like being in a noisy restaurant, as Cam said. Just ignore it
.

Squeezing her eyes closed, she visualized sitting at a table, talking with him. At first he was drowned out, and she could not hear what he was saying. She concentrated, stared directly at his lips as they moved. Eventually the surrounding noise receded, and she could hear him.

“You have to hurry,” he said. “They have tapped into the transceiver array and have started the upload. You have to stop them, or we all will be changed forever.”

Snapping from her reverie, Mara grabbed the door jamb and pulled herself up. Pushing the door handle until it clicked, she leaned forward, using her weight to lever open the door and stagger into the stairwell. She felt light-headed, dizzy. The noise in her head was dampened somewhat but still there, still taking a toll on her ability to think. She leaned forward, letting her weight propel her up the steps, keeping her balance by holding on to the railing. At the top of the first flight of stairs, she maintained her grip on the railing and swung herself in a wide U-turn into the second flight and raced up them haphazardly, just fast enough to keep from tumbling onto her face.

After the last stair, she careened forward until her shoulder slammed into a cinder-block wall next to a door on which was painted the word
Roof
. She let out a heavy sigh and grabbed the door handle. Resisting the urge to fling it open, she slowly pushed the handle down until she heard a
click
, then opened it just a crack. Cool air flowed through the narrow opening and brushed past Mara’s cheek as she looked outside.

Don’t see any guards.

Some forty yards away, she could see the scaffolding where the dome used to be, ablaze with the spinning light of the sphere suspended nearly thirty feet in the air over the hole in the roof. Mounted along three sides of the metal framework were some translucent fire hoses running from the hole to the top of the scaffolding. Glowing plasma flowed through them. The whole structure seemed like the diabolical creation of a mad scientist bent on destroying the world. To add to the B-movie quality of the scene, a handful of people clad in white biosuits and clear bubble-glass helmets continued to work on it. The odd thing was, the people’s heads inside the bubble helmets
glowed
, making them look like walking candles.

Biosuits? Why would people made of photons need biosuits?

The door swung open, yanking Mara’s arm and sending her tumbling face-first onto the roof. When she rolled over, she looked up at two men in blue uniforms. They weren’t the same two she had met earlier, but they were shimmers. In addition to their glowing expressions, Mara noticed something odd about the sky above their heads. Iridescent streams whipped across the atmosphere, appearing to flow and coalesce in sheets around the building, like an Arctic aurora.

One of the guards cocked his head, and, oddly, a lone signal in Mara’s head stood out from the thousands of others she was ignoring, like a voice in a crowd that she recognized. It was Abby.

“Bring her to me at the front of the building but don’t touch her,” the signal in her head said.

The cop’s gaze settled on her, and he said, “Get up. Let’s go.” He crooked a thick finger and backed up.

Mara had come looking for Abby, and, since the cops were taking Mara to Abby, there didn’t seem to be much reason to put up a fight, so Mara complied. After she stood up unsteadily, the cop pointed to the left of the sphere, and she walked in that direction. As they cleared the scaffolding, Mara could see a gathering of several dozen people on the roof at the front of the building. Even from this distance, she could tell that all were shimmers, except for one lone figure, a silhouette in a crowd of light. They all turned to watch her approach.

Abby smiled as she stepped away from the group. “Well, you took your sweet time getting here. I thought you would sit there on the third floor forever and take a nap. I would have been disappointed to miss your transfiguration.”

“You’ve been tracking me,” Mara said.

“Not difficult to do now, given your newly acquired physiology.”

Mara stopped several feet from the group and looked past them, beyond the edge of the roof at the front of the transceiver building. Three stories below, thousands of people, mostly shimmers, had gathered. Their ranks spilled over the edges of the butte and streamed around its base and faded into the darkness of the surrounding valley. All had their hands raised to the heavens and emitted that strange summer light that seemed to gather in the night sky above. Following the flow of the radiance, Mara’s head craned upward and then swiveled as she turned to face the scaffolding. They were sharing their experience, and it was flowing into the sphere, and from there to her and the rest of the world.

“Just let go and let it happen,” Abby said.

Mara turned around and said, “The last thing I need right now is to hear more words. I didn’t come here to talk.”

“You won’t be able to fight this, Mara,” she said. “You’re a part of this community now, linked by the voices speaking to you. Soon you’ll be a foot soldier in my new army, in this new reality that we will build. Can’t you feel them pulling you, calling you?"

Feeling her resolve melting, Mara grabbed her temples and staggered into a crouch. The aurora above intensified; the sphere grew brighter.