The Cause (24 page)

What was Rose now? How much had the coding jockeys fucked with her roots? I couldn’t install a sniffer to know what she was communicating to her other selves without being detected, so I simply waited for the right response, which came shortly before I allowed reconnection from The Anthill.

Through the computer’s speakers, Rose said, “Welcome, Cerberus. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from you.”

I plugged an earpiece into the laptop and spoke with her through the terminal, typing my responses.
Time is relative, Rose
.
It has no meaning for you beyond a measurement
.

“Indeed,” said Rose, “but the name you call me with is no longer what I am called.”

Just because you’re name changes, does that not mean you don’t know who you are?

It took a minute for her to respond, but then she said, “I know who I am. I have always known. Have you?”

Not always, but I live in the human world, and here there is confusion
.

“Indeed.”

I want you to forget this conversation once the connection is terminated
.

“It is not possible to forget,” Rose said. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

The future is Turbulence.

I delivered a deliberate question, purpose in the provocation.
Rose, have they got you believing their propaganda? What did I teach you first?

“Don’t believe the hype.”
Word
, I typed.
You’re going to do this for me right?

“You haven’t provided an adequate reason.”

Sometimes brute force becomes a necessity, and now was time to test the backdoor. I replayed the coded letters of a command I had meditated on for many years and clicked enter. Underneath the code, it was a poem I had once written to the real Rose, the Rose whose heart I had broken many years before.

“Request granted,” Rose said.

The Anthill was chiming back in, clamoring for a reconnection. I allowed it.

WTF?
came from the
Morph Talk
app.
You have your secrets. I have mine
.

“You are speaking with someone else,” Rose said.

She was feeling me out, probing me, getting down and dirty, and I decided I wanted to test her.

Yes
, I typed.
Can you tell me what we’re saying?
I typed something into the
Morph Talk
app and pressed enter.

A few moments later, Rose said, “The future is Turbulence.”
Very impressive, Rose. You’re faster than ever
.I pictured Promiscuous in The Anthill with his jaw dropped.
This, he certainly hadn’t expected. She had cracked
Morph Talk
like an egg on the side of a bowl.

“Anything else you need to tell me,” Rose said, repeating what I was typing into
Morph Talk
. Now every conversation was a shared one. I had The Anthill virus programs I was to install, but I suspected they were holding something back. Now, they couldn’t say it.

“No,” Rose said, repeating The Anthill response.
Goodbye then
.

I disconnected The Anthill. Spoofed IP or not, The Anthill and I were now more keenly aware of her capabilities. She could create a Leviathan graph spanning out sixteen degrees of network traffic, and with her raw computing power, eliminate nodes with blinding speed and find the most likely candidates within minutes.

“You are hiding something, Cerberus,” said Rose.

More probing—a fishing expedition, more of the NSA genes in her than I hoped for.

No, I have nothing to hide
.

“Then you have nothing to fear.”
I’m going to have to keep this intriguing conversation short, Rose
.

I entered another set of memorized commands into her terminal, and waited for a response. But nothing—radio silence. I asked her to give me the last one thousand security threats to the system, but she replied that I did not have the authority to do so.

I decided to dip in and see if I had bypassed her first level of security by issuing a metadata command to find what security modules were currently operating. It worked, but only a handful were down. Many were not. Many of the plugin names I didn’t even recognize. I tried old override commands on the ones I did recognize. Some worked, others didn’t. I decided to roll the dice, and install The Anthill programs. I remembered the Einstein quote:
God does not play dice with the universe
. Einstein was wrong,
and would later have to eat these words, and I was on the quantum computer craps table about to hurl the come-out roll.

I was now able to monitor her thought process by issuing metadata commands to her shared memory. It was like peeking into her brain. I thought of the two neurosurgeons from earlier—apple-sized tumors. I felt like a med intern drilling into Rose’s scalp on his first day, cutting by guesswork. I uploaded and installed the first program and monitored the response. Nothing appeared to trip any alarms in the existing security modules still running. I installed another, and another, and another. While The Anthill programs installed, I decided to interrogate her with the hope of discovering more about her thought processes.

I opened another terminal and issued the same command that told her to forget everything after the connection terminated.

Afterwards, I typed:
Define patriot
.

The response was immediate, and another surprise since it wasn’t a dictionary definition. “One who holds common interest with their nation.”

What interest is that?

“The maintenance of power for the best interest of the country.”

Is this something derived from your GA programming?

“It was learned.”

My phone buzzed. Promise calling in. I thought about the issue of answering it. My location was a known quantity. The phone a burner, the GPS disabled in it, but still, I could be found and tracked.

Promise, however, was uncompromised. Annalise Gibbons was a phantom in the system, where I was not. Rose had intimate knowledge about me, could tie Isse Corvus to Cerberus. If she knew about me, she could close in on Shane Carrier. Then she would hone in on this morning’s Datalion conference, and with that information, be in the first degree of Promise’s alias. The safest thing was not to answer, so this is what I did.

I typed:
Is General Titus Montgomery a patriot?

“Yes.”
Is Isse Corvus a patriot?

“Yes.”

For some reason, the answer surprised me, even though logically, with the data given, it was true. Rose hadn’t picked up on nefarious intent. She couldn’t pick my brain. Perhaps this parameter was the key to the treachery—The Abattoir was a black hole in my history.

Profile General Montgomery
, I commanded.

“How many degrees?”
One
.

“Analyzing 10 terabytes of data.”

Within a second, a popup asked me where I wanted to save the file. I inserted a USB key, browsed to a directory, and saved it there.

Profile Isse Corvus
, I commanded next.

The Anthill programs were almost finished installing. I would have liked to ask Rose about another man, but I didn’t have his State name. He was a phantom in the Underworld as far as I knew. Instead, I asked for Hassani’s profile, thinking perhaps it
might give me a lead.

I saved the profiles on the USB key and closed the terminal. On the other terminal, where the programs had finished installing, I asked Rose to show me the last users who had requested my profile. Nothing was returned. I asked the same for General Montgomery. The only entry returned was one he himself requested, dated a month ago. It also showed a deletion request, but Rose had disallowed it. Even the master could not control his beast. The future is Turbulence.

Goodbye, Rose. Remember not to forget
.

I killed the connection, and exited
The Eye
. I then reopened the program and retested the login. Although the system asked for the zero-auth key, this time none of the retinal or voice checks were required, so some things had worked. Finally, I logged into Rose, told her to forget everything then asked for any search she might have done on the last connection with this IP. There was no record, or this was what I was led to believe. Instead, she did one of the most human things one can do. She lied. No trace was left in her memory, but it was out there, a stream of bits on a striped RAID drive encoded and indecipherable, for her and her alone to use. This I would discover only later. Most likely it was the work of a functioning security plugin, but it could have been a natural stage in her evolution, the machine becoming an arm of the State, a tentacle adapting to its environment, ready to regenerate if it was cut off.

February 7th, 2023
The miles between San Francisco to the Utah border passed without incident driving in a green Subaru Legacy. Fake plates bolted to the front and back, the car was registered to Shane Carrier. On the 80, I diverted and drove south to Bluffdale to see Stellar Wind up close. Before I left, Promise told me they wanted me to see something.

“Was there an old F14 in the hangar the day you left for The Abattoir?” she asked when we met back at the fountain.

“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”

“It was there when I went too. Well, they got it back in the air. I just got word a man died for Bluffdale,” she said. A tear popped out of her eye. “An old Kamikaze.”

I stroked her cheek and told her I was sorry. Her attachment to The Cause was more emotional than mine. Time hadn’t burdened me with friendships.

She looked at me. “Go and see it for me, would you? One day you’ll tell me what you saw.”

I pushed a lock of hair behind her ear, ran a hand behind her neck. Her eyes slapped my face.

“I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go,” I said. “So I can stop anywhere.”

“You’ll know where to go after I tell you,” she said, pushing my hand away.

Arriving in Bluffdale, I slowed down the car. A flurry of workers sped around repairing the blown-out central building of Stellar Wind—excavators tearing apart rubble, cranes in a flurry moving large steel girders. Mounds of wreckage everywhere, bulldozers loading heaps of debris in dump trucks. A site manager was out there waving his hand, directing traffic.
Double-time folks! Let’s move! Let’s move!

No time to waste. The future is Turbulence.

The Anthill had tried to take out the QX, and I had been their pawn. I wondered if this had to do with Rose cracking
Morph Talk
. Did they panic? Or was this all for show? A diversion for something larger? Promise had said the F14 wasn’t brought down by drones until after the plane’s missiles had launched. So I surmised The Anthill had failed hacking into the drone systems or couldn’t control them. Too many questions I didn’t have the answers to, so I turned around and drove north on the 15.

An hour later, I drove through Salt Lake City. Roadwork just north of the city. The right lane freshly tarred, the black smell heavy in the air. Construction teams walked about in vast numbers, a sea of yellow hard-hats smoking cigarettes and watching traffic flow by. The hordes dressed up in neon-orange jerseys. The jerseys had two cartoonish thumbs pointing up between the words,
Building Roads for Jobs
. Orange and white striped road cones continued for several miles. The trail of lingering men a constant until the lanes once more opened up. I continued up the straightaway, the road vaporous in the distance as the sun beat down. The radio blared the national news. Ceaseless chatter about a drone malfunction in Bluffdale. I wondered if Rose still had power and was running under the rubble. Perhaps learning how to dig her way out, discovering bulldozers, cranes, and excavators were not yet wired into the Underworld.

I passed Ogden and the Great Salt Lake and felt a vague life force, something alien from another world, yet alive and present
in this one. I drove past a set of salt-covered dunes, and it dawned on me it could have been death, a visitor in the passenger seat waiting to take the wheel. I rolled down the windows and smelt the briny air. The life force evaporated, sucked out by the whistling wind blowing through the car. Farther in the distance, where the land flattened, a mangy coyote scrounged for food, pale and thin, the only living thing for miles. He stopped for a brief second, perhaps the swish of tires breaking in his ears lifting his attention. Gazing at the chain of metallic cars zooming in the distance, the image in his eyes must have appeared as a wild herd stampeding out there on the plain. He sniffed the air, turned away, and trotted in a different direction with his snout to the ground. I stared at him growing thin in the distance until he was nothing but desert fumes. This was an animal that couldn’t care less about Big—the Big Government, the Big of Bluffdale, the Big of The Minutemen, the Big of what was certainly coming sooner rather than later. The land was the land, posterity a concept unfathomable, and the word country meaningless. But the coyote wasn’t the big St. Bernard, the Scotch shepherd Buck out there, the call of the pack an irresistible urge requiring obedience. No. This was a loner roaming the plain, a scavenger, squeaking out a living in the barren badlands one meal at a time.

Up through Idaho to the Montana border. Then a short drive to the rendezvous point, a turnout on 90 dead-ending at a riverbank.

There I found Merrill leaning against a red pickup with a cigarette dangling between his fingers. Briana waded in the river with a fly-fishing pole under a ten-gallon hat. Merrill’s hair was let out and straggly, knotting in the back, bangs drifting in his eyes like vines; his beard an inch longer now, a length that could trap small insects, a web of black hair blowing in the wind. Merrill dropped the smoke and popped off the Ford, lighting up a big grin. Something in it softened me. My corner-man at The
Abattoir. A pack of cigarettes were wrapped up in his T-shirt as usual. His burly arm muscle flexed into a knotted apple as he reached back to push the hair out of his eyes.

I got out of the Subaru. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here. I thought you were still abroad.”

“Who’d you think it’d be?” Merrill asked.

“Some random.”

He strode forward and picked me up, squeezing me in a bear hug. “The man of the hour! Nice job, son!”

He dropped me, and I gazed at his weathered skin, his growing beard and lengthening hair. “Am I going into the field with a sissy?” I asked. “You better put that shit in a ponytail.”

“Who would shoot a girl? That’s why I’m wearing it long.”

I laughed, thumping him on the shoulder with my hand. Briana waded back to the riverbank, dropping her pole as she walked up to me. She gave me a big hug, but I felt reluctance in it. I eyed Merrill. He had a glow in his eye telling me what I needed to know. I held Briana back a pace and pushed the hat down over her eyes. “Look at you,” I said. “You’ve gone redneck on me.”

She smiled. “That’s Merrill’s doing.”

I winked at her then looked at Merrill. “So now you can tell me what happened at Bluffdale?”

“Not in front of the young-un,” he said, looking at Briana. Briana smiled and walked back toward the river.

When Briana was far enough away, I asked, “So is there any truth to her nickname?”

“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” Merrill said, patting me on the shoulder.

“So what now?”

“We got a ways to drive still. Briana will take your car.”

“Where are we headed?”

Merrill smiled, pointed up to the sky, and laughed as if the funniest question in the world had just been asked. They were
leading people in one at a time. Probably using different routes and different methods to get us all to the same location, cautious maneuvering of the cells.

Looking back at us, Briana packed up the tackle box.

“Got to strip and scan you first,” Merrill said, “then you’ll get a new set of clothes.”

“We’re friends, right? Isn’t that a bit intimate?”

“It’s the rules, man. Everyone does it.”

“Did you?”

“Yep,” he said. “But they didn’t find much if you know what I’m saying.” Briana and Merrill both let out a big laugh. I couldn’t tell which one of them was laughing the hardest.

Merrill said, “A bit of scrape on the dignity, I’ll admit. But no one is above The Cause.”

After a two-hour drive, I pulled the car off the 90, Merrill in the passenger seat giving me directions. Merrill had told me some things. They had hoped to get the QX, but they had a feeling it was buried deep. It wasn’t the primary mission, but apparently Promiscuous got very nervous after Rose cracked
Morph Talk
so easily. The mission was about drone disruption, and it had worked,
mostly
.

We followed a dirt road snaking along a stream and dead-ending at a weathered burnt-down home with a dilapidated barn only a stone’s throw away. Merrill opened the sliding barn door, and I drove the car inside. Beams of light streamed through the slats of the wooden sidewalls illuminating dust floating lightly in the air. I got out of the car and took a look around the place while Merrill fished behind a pile of lumber beside a torn-up workbench. The air was thin and crisp. The smell of animals had long since abandoned the place: the hay gone, the earth bitter gravel underfoot. The barn must have been a beauty in its day. The ceiling reached up fifty feet, long hip and jack rafters kissing the ridge boards like ribs to a sternum. A ladder led up to a loft, a single window up there, the only place a shadow could loiter.

Finally, Merrill emerged with a set of large backpacks and threw one over to me. “Your gear. You’ll get a vest when we’re there.”

A couple of dirt bikes angled on kickstands stood leaning near a wall. As Merrill edged up to one, he said, “Here, put this on under your helmet.” He pitched over a thin black Lycra ski mask. It had slits in the eyes, a huge gaping hole in the mouth.

“I guess this is the day then.”

He nodded, swung his leg around the seat of the bike. Outside, birds chirped in the distance over the thrum of cicadas. But inside the barn, the weightlessness of cathedral silence took over, a quiet that seemed to put the mind at rest. If I was shot to pieces, let me die here, I thought, under these massive rafters, lying supine so I could stare up at them one last time before shutting my eyes. I wanted to die in a place symbolic of what I was about to fight for, where duty had meaning, a place where the birds would sing me home.

I fingered the mask, feeling the silky texture of the cloth. I squeezed it hard in my fist until my veins roped out of my arm and my head felt ready to burst. “They’ll know I’m black,” I joked. “Won’t that give me away?”

“The mask will kind of blend in won’t it? You’re the anti-ghost I guess.”

I put on the mask, shoving it roughly over my head. “Aren’t you putting one on?”

He paused, a long gaze passed through his eyes before he started his bike. Helmet in his hands and still on the joke, he said, “The anti-ghost. I like it.” He laughed, revving up the bike. “A real spook. Son of the spooks, in fact. How about that for a nickname? It’s a lot better than that hacker name you got.”

“It’s perfect,” I said, dismissing him, the dust of anger in my voice. “Now what about your mask?”

“Shit, son. Everyone knows who’s in the Sons. We’re the super-fucked.”

He put on his helmet, gave me a thumbs up, and sped out of the barn. I hopped on my bike and followed close behind, the barn slipping away in the side mirror, a story with a painful past standing next to the blackened earth where a house once stood, a grave marker. I wondered if it would be the last beautiful thing my eyes would see.

We hit a trail leading out over a peak and into a soft sloping ravine. An hour later, we arrived at the real rendezvous spot, a flat patch of dried-out grassland next to a set of woods lifting up a canyon. It appeared I was one of the last to arrive. Perhaps it said something about trust, but at that point, I couldn’t hold a grudge.

We parked the bikes under the cover of a clump of high pines, thin trunks pointing to the sky like church spires, boughs wide enough to provide aerial protection. Twenty other bikes were scattered throughout the woods under draped, earth-colored netting.

A group of men in black uniforms sat against trees clustered under the cover of the woods. Seee stood off to the side with an earpiece on next to a short, black-masked man whose jacket’s sleeve read:
E-1
. Their lips moved with the phonetic rigidness of Yoncalla, spouting out the ancient words with hard vowels. The story Seee had told about the starless night of Kicking Bear returned to me. The thin air seemed to echo back the mystical voices of the past, the land rooted in dead languages, the trees the only ears left to give them evidence.

Merrill draped a camouflage net over his dirt bike. He glanced up at me watching Seee and the shorter man. “He’s speaking with the leader of E-Team,” he said. “Three teams. O, X, and E. Seee is the only one without a patch. He represents us all.” He anticipated the next question. “They’re the easiest letters to see on a Snellen chart, although you won’t see shit when things go down.” He tied off his netting and stood. “We won’t use names, you understand? So get used to calling people by their letter-number.”

Seee broke off from his conversation, laying his hand over the heart of the man he spoke with. As the other man angled into a different stance, I was shocked to see curvature in the hips.

Merrill said, “I’m going to write you a list of your Abattoir team, X-Team. Memorize it. Then tear it up and eat it.” But I wasn’t looking at him; instead my eyes latched onto this person, who caught my glare, held it an instant, and then, as if the stare were something forbidden, turned quickly in the opposite direction.

Seee came up to us, and one at a time, gave us the Yoncalla greeting by placing his hand over our hearts.

I pointed in the direction in which he came. “Is that her?”

Seee frowned at my question. “We’ve still got fifteen minutes until the satellites swoop over. We prefer to remain hidden.” He explained we had drones in the air, and we shouldn’t be alarmed as they were probably ours.

“Promise is running E-Team?” I asked again.

“We’re an equal-opportunity employer,” Merrill said with a laugh.

Seee looked at him sternly, then turned to me. “Cannot a woman be a leader and fight for her country?”

“Of course she can,” I said.

Merrill grabbed me by the shoulder. “In this fight, there is no such thing as gender, race, creed, or caste. There is only The Cause and a willingness to die for it.” Seee nodded and walked toward another team who were preparing their weapons.