Republic of Infidels I – The Remains – Chapter 5: The Fall
Rachel half-dozed as the train sped southeast on smooth rails. She was exhausted and would’ve liked to go to sleep, but it was often difficult for her to fully disengage when she was travelling beside strangers.
Her seatmate was a uniformed soldier with Arab-looking eyebrows over his tinted glasses. He fidgeted with the beret in his lap as he watched the report on the screen fitted into the seat back. She avoided meeting his eyes, but glanced briefly at the screen.
It was another of the endless reports on the chaos in the United States, notably the recent terror attacks in the Midwest. It had become a flash point for political violence ever since the president had annexed major tracts of farmland in the region in order to expand urban resources. The landholders were being compensated, but for others, principle mattered more.
The report went on to note that the Church of the Revelation, the pseudo-Christian cyber cult suspected of hacking and activating several secure missile systems, was now claiming solidarity with the landholders. That hardly surprised Rachel as the Revelationists claimed solidarity with whoever happened to be causing the most harm that day.
The British soldier seemed especially interested in the report. Rachel couldn’t see his name tape from her vantage point, but she noted the winged dagger emblem on his beret and made a note to ask Vikram what it signified.
As she drifted back to sleep, she wondered if Alec had landed in Naples yet. They’d texted back and forth almost continuously. She planned on calling once she finally arrived in Himalaya with the objective of impressing him with her fresh Italian vocabulary. She’d do the bulk of the audio course on the long flight over, then pester Vikram for his assistance. That meant she’d have to tell him about Alec, but she was excited about that.
She roused herself as the train pulled into King’s Cross. It was difficult in the predawn darkness to convince her body it was time to wake up, but she had a tight connection. She forced herself to round up her belongings.
Her carry-on bag caught on the corner of the overhead bin, but she lacked the height to disengage it. The soldier reached over her head and plucked it from the bin.
“You go first,” he said, still holding the bag, indicating they should move out of the way.
“Thanks. She moved ahead of him while still avoiding his eyes. She didn’t like being recognized, though it was rarer for her than her brother. When she got down to the platform, he handed her the bag, and gave her a nod and a smile. She kicked loose a stuck wheel, the agent of its intransigence.
As she turned to go, intending to plow through the crowd to make the next Heathrow express, some odd instinct caused her stop and glance over her shoulder. The soldier was still near the train, greeting a prematurely greying man with chunky black rimmed glasses and an intimate fondness in his posture. The soldier kissed this man full on the mouth. He tilted him back a little as though posing for a photograph, something the other man tolerated only for a moment before pushing him back with a laugh.
Rachel smiled, suddenly charmed to see such unabashed affection. Then the final boarding announcement rumbled over the crowd, and she had to run to make her train.
Vikram stretched out over the cracked vinyl sofa and eyed the arrival board. The old flatscreen was faded from being faced too close to the window, and the software refresh rate was sluggish. He predicted Rachel’s flight would spend a good half-hour circling over the single runway before it would be permitted to land.
The Tribhuvan International Airport VIP lounge was tacky and outdated, but as a member of the British Foreign Service and a UN delegate, Vikram was obliged to partake of their amenities. He’d appeared on Nepalese television the evening before for what Rachel referred to as his dog-and-pony show. Mostly shaking hands with overinflated generals and taking photos with the president. Then dinner with the president and his wife—and later the president and his mistress.
None of it bothered him. It was the kind of diplomacy he could do in his sleep. In the west he spent a significant amount of time hidden behind security details, being transported in secure vehicles to closed-door conferences. The region’s significant investment in his family’s services meant he was freer to move around on his own. He’d become an adopted son of sorts—even a point of national pride. His reputation, viewed with cynicism and suspicion in the west, had never been a problem for him here.
So it was not a surprise when one of the hostesses cautiously approached him with an offer of coffee. She spoke English to him, but it made her smile when he politely thanked her in her own language. He had a reasonable idea of the quality of Nepalese airport coffee, but he accepted it graciously, and made a show of drinking it. It wasn’t terrible, and he decided to stick it out.
Typically, the BBC played on one of the smaller screens bolted to the wall. Another report on the Church of the Revelation. The bombastic-yet-effective cyberterror cult had lately been amusing itself by setting off networked ordnance wherever it could hack in. The report was a superficial recounting of some recent trespass, but Vikram knew better than to be complacent. The group had done well for itself, combining dispossessed evangelicals and stolen military intelligence into an effective shield. They’d hacked various kinds of EVs and crashed them into tourists. They’d blown an old US destroyer in half after one of the sailors gave them the ordnance intranet access codes. He’d since disappeared, and Vikram had endeavoured to find him, hoping it would lead him to the Revelationist command.
During the last secure diplomatic mission to Washington DC, Vikram himself had advised the Americans that the Revelationists and their ilk would spread their server farms all over the world, not concentrate them in any one place. But the American Joint Chiefs had insisted on dropping bombs directly into their own heartland, assuming the landholder unrest must also represent some kind of guerrilla front. Vikram warned them that their drones would only make more terrorists, and they’d done it anyway.
The world had just negotiated the end to almost a hundred years of conflict in the Middle East. East and West had come an inch from nuclear war, then agreed to a radical no-conditions nuclear de-proliferation treaty. They’d even updated the Geneva Convention. He, Vikram, had just defanged the last scion of the brutally repressive Putin regime. Now the United States was again insisting on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
When his supervisor had asked him what Vikram thought their disposition towards the US leadership should be, Vikram had recommended assassination. He’d made it a joke, but he hadn’t actually ruled it out. The US government had thoroughly earned this civil war, and he disliked the back channel supply of arms and UN special forces pouring into the breach. In his opinion, if the government insisted on killing its own citizens, it could use its own citizens to do the job.
Vikram felt the rumble of jet engines and went to the window. The 737 bounced on its landing gear as it met the runway, and friction caused the wheels to smoke as they fought against the poorly maintenanced tarmac. Ten minutes later, Rachel was through the gate, spirited past customs by the power of his diplomatic credentials.
She hugged him tightly. He felt himself warm in that particular way he did whenever he saw her, as though he had not known how cold he’d been. There was a bright flush to her cheeks that he rarely saw. He knew at once she had news for him.
“You’re happy about something,” he observed as they made their way down to the waiting transport. She didn’t say anything, only looked out at the scruffy airfield with unjustifiable fondness.
It wasn’t until they left the chopper at base camp that Rachel finally deigned to give him her fresh intelligence. He’d arranged for the Land Rover to be left at the helipad, knowing she would’ve had little driving practice in England.
“Well, what is it?” he teased, though he a solid guess.
“Oh, I met someone. When did father update the bridge?”
She indicated the new set of bright white arches that supported the span across the wide divide. The high road itself was technically impractical and geologically disruptive, punching through each mountain spur as it did, but the Nepalese had insisted on the design and Radhesh had done his best to fulfill the contract without damaging the landscape too much.
“Who?” Vikram asked, ignoring her diversion.
“One of my students,” she admitted.
“Scandalous. I’m sure the university ethics committee will be along to arrest you any day now.”
“Right, says the man who—”
“Watch yourself.”
She grinned. He occupied himself by looking out the window at a landscape now so familiar he could have ascended it blindfolded. Where the mountains had once intimidated him, he now felt oddly sheltered by their enfolding heights. It was just as well—the death threats were pouring into his office by the minute.
Just as they reached the final turn before the approach, the Crown Hydro dam slid into view—a subtle trick for something so monstrously large. It spanned two sharp mountain spurs and was as tall as a skyscraper. Rachel flipped the Land Rover into self-drive mode to take them up the precarious switchbacks. Incrementally, they ascended the dam’s flank.
“It looks finished,” she said, clearly pleased. “We won’t have to stay here much longer.”
Vikram said nothing, not wishing to raise the issue. He too had disliked this venture at the outset, but now with a career in the international spotlight and the increasing fame of his linguistic brilliance, Himalaya had become his refuge. He didn’t intend to make that point to Rachel, who would rightly—and righteously—say that he’d brought it on himself. Vikram, the wonder kid. Vikram, the darling of the 24-hour news cycle. Thinking about it had started to make him feel a little ill.
“Do you have plans for after you’re finished training or do you plan to hide in academia for the rest of your life?”
“I enjoy teaching, but it lacks variation,” she said airily, eyes tracking the progress of the passing slopes. “I’ve been thinking about trauma surgery.”
“Not reanimation?”
She looked at him with narrow eyes. “That was one time, and I was five. Also, you let me.”
“And yet mother didn’t put me in therapy.”
“Mother didn’t let you have another pet for two years, either.”
The Land Rover jerked around the last turn and Rachel turned it back to manual control, increasing the gas to get them up over the last of the slope. The original runway-sized worksite had been flattened and widened over time to form a smooth broad shelf that hugged the lip of the dam. It stretched back, cutting into the mountain face to form an area large enough to comfortably fit the small village that now occupied it.
Vikram watched as Rachel noted the few changes, keeping one eye on the road. People they knew waved at them. Many of them were refugees from the global displacement caused by recent conflicts, and many more of them local Nepalese who had decided a company town was a better prospect than their worn-out communities. It was clean, utopian and protected—but it was also potentially easy to isolate and besiege, something Vikram believed he’d have to reckon with one day.
The locals called it Taaj—The Crown—after the hydroelectric corporation that had commissioned the dam. Kālō Caṭṭāna, the Black Monastery, loomed into view as Rachel directed the Land Rover around a slight bend.
The ancient, ornate black structure jutted into the sky over their heads, forbidding as always. Rachel slowed the car, and he could feel her dislike. He understood it—there was something about the structure that was just too jagged and large. It was built on three levels, largest to smallest, and turreted on each of its twelve corners. The causeway access, cut into a mountain overhang, was too narrow for vehicles. They’d have to walk the final two hundred feet through the mist that gathered there.
She jerked the brake, and got out, leaving him to haul her luggage out of the back. Radhesh walked towards them, a broad smile on his face as Rachel threw her arms around him. Vikram watched this for a moment, again feeling a small comfortable warmth rise up through him. Whatever else he and his sister were, gifted and cursed as they were, he never took it for granted that they were blessed in their family.
As Vikram locked up the car, his father cast him an apprehensive glance. Vikram tried to inject some reassurance into his smile, but it was no good. There was no more delaying the inevitable. He could only hope his parents were adequately prepared.
“What do you mean, you’ve decided to stay?”
Rachel hated the preening, princessy tone in her own voice, but she couldn’t stop herself. Her mother and father sat relaxed at the table, both of them serene in a way she understood to mean they were in full expectation of her reaction.
It was an odd venue for this conversation. The regional interior ministry had allowed Radhesh to retrofit the Black Monastery with non-invasive architectural adjustments that made it fit for human habitation. Floor-to-ceiling plate glass made a barrier between them and the columned veranda, which was breezy and warm for the moment, but would be icy and inhospitable in winter. The building was also wired for electricity so that the pleasant tasteful lighting made the space only irritatingly low instead of evoking the feeling of being crushed. The area where they now sat served as a kitchen and lounge, forced by necessity to be fashionably open-plan.
Taken together, it looked to Rachel like a boutique cave hotel for millionaires. She had to admit it had come a long way from the bare rock it had been when they’d first arrived, but it still made her feel confined.
“The Nepalese government has asked us to remain to help with their infrastructure and their civic development,” Nadia said calmly. “We decided to accept. Your father will continue to work on projects in the region, and I’ll continue to oversee the creation of more rural academies.”
“You promised we’d return to Delhi. Even Vikram says the Nepalese administration is totally corrupt.” Rachel turned and looked for Vikram. He’d disappeared, too cowardly to face her wrath. “Bastard.” she growled.
“We thought you’d be happy for us,” Radhesh said, putting on his disappointed-father face.
“No, we didn’t,” Nadia said with a sigh. “Rachel, we know it’s painful for you to be here. We only asked you to come here in the summers so that you could spend time with us and hopefully develop a bit of insulation against… ”
She gestured vaguely, but Rachel knew what she meant — the quiet lack of external occupation. The absence that made it so much harder for her to know why she should get out of bed at all. She belonged in an urban landscape where there were enough distractions to keep her grounded.
“You don’t have to live here with us year-round,” her mother finished. “We never expected you to.”
Now she looked down at her feet, leaden with guilt. How they managed to make her feel excluded while reminding her it was her own petty fault was a gift they had all shared from the day she’d spoken her first words. Vikram did not have this problem. He had always been a bridge between them, always far more simpatico with their less gifted, but still exceptional parents. He had their patience and tolerance, while she was a perfect cliche of the spoiled second child.
“Come with me,” Nadia said, holding out her hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Rachel sighed and took her mother’s hand, allowing herself to be led from the room to the door that led to the causeway. They paused en route at the Land Rover so that Nadia could retrieve a case of new iPads bound for the schoolhouse.
Rachel took the case and followed her mother through the manicured garden that surrounded the cluster of buildings set against the sheer mountain face. These buildings were large with severely pitched roofs that nearly reached the ground meant to deter the buildup of winter snows. Radhesh had built them not long after their arrival, and the local children who occupied them had flourished under Nadia’s instruction. Many of the oldest students had since returned to take up rural teaching careers themselves, a special point of pride for the Kori family.
Inside, the structure was generously proportioned with sliding, sound-proofed dividers set up to make several different classrooms. A group of small children sat in front of a holographic projection of an old Attenborough nature documentary, learning about now-extinct species. One of the students, seeing them enter, turned and gave a little wave. Nadia put a finger to her lips, then took the iPads from Rachel and put them into a crate.
This task accomplished, they left together. Rachel felt her cheeks warm as she looked down at the gravel path under her feet.
“Do you,” she began, then stopped and took a breath before meeting her mother’s eyes. “Do you ever wish that Vikram and I were more… normal? More like them?”
“No,” Nadia said, without hesitation. “I never did. Do you?”
Rachel shrugged and sat down on a mosaic-covered bench that had clearly been constructed by student hands. She let her fingers move over the smooth shards of ceramic. Nadia reached over and brushed a strand of her daughter’s hair away from her face.
“What are you thinking, my Rakhila?” she said in Russian, the language they always used for intimate conversation.
“I met someone,” she admitted.
“Handsome?” Nadia said with a smile.
Rachel pulled out her mobile and called up a photo Alec had sent her early that day. A selfie, slightly paint spattered, in the reflective glass of the greenhouse where he liked to work. Nadia leaned over to look, and grinned.
“I see your problem,” she said, acknowledging the pain Rachel hadn’t expressed. “Would you like to invite him here? It would mean a bit of trouble, but your brother could—”
“No,” Rachel said quickly. “It’s too early for all that.”
Nadia took her hand. She had strong hands, her mother.
“If you want to go, we’ll understand. Wherever we are is your home,” she said quietly. “That doesn’t change, ever.”
Rachel nodded, ashamed of her behaviour. Her mother linked her arms around her shoulders. Together they watched as the children spilled out of the schoolhouse and ran off laughing, their whole uncomplicated futures ahead of them.
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14viidxl38431490
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Dylan Simcoe hunched in his chair. He stared at the empty desk in front of him, sweating as the temperature rose inside the nondescript college counsellor’s office. The Riverside Baptist Technical Institute was not a well equipped organization, notably lacking in basic amenities such as air conditioning and a regular full-time counsellor. Legally it was required to retain a therapist in order to meet funding standards for colleges in its league, but it was cheaper to contract them on a rotating basis.
That, in any case, would have been the reason the board would have given out if anyone had ever bothered to ask, which they wouldn’t. They also, if asked, would have disclosed several religious organizations as being benefactors of their institution, which Dylan also knew to be a lie.
He had never attended Riverside, having attained his skills through self-education and direct instruction. He had no interest in the students here now being educated in the same discipline. He was not expected to mingle with them face to face, though there was a good chance he knew some of them online.
Online was where Dylan preferred to live, spending his time building and interacting with dark web hacker networks. He didn’t like driving two hours out of his way just so he could sit in this shitty office and look at the black mold on the ceiling while he waited for his contact to arrive. His apartment was a trash pile, but at least it was air-conditioned.
He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. A gallon of diet Mountain Dew coursed through him. He fidgeted, his foot and leg working, seizure-like, while sweat trickled down his neck.
Miryam, for the benefit of anyone outside, entered the room with a warm smile, but it dropped as she shut the door behind her. She was about his mother’s age, and had once been a friend of his family’s. That was before their farm was bulldozed for a social housing complex. His parents had both been shot by state police while trying to defend their property. Dylan had been a kid back then, and so he had been dropped off at an aunt’s house before the demonstration, not aware he would never return home.
Life had gone downhill from there. His aunt spent the next ten years in and out of rehab. He dropped out of high school just before graduation, preferring to play the stock market or game instead of interacting with other humans. It was only in the last two years that Miryam’s people had contacted him, told him that he still had a legacy. That he had a mission.
“I’ve warned you about your temper tantrums, Dylan,” Miryam said in her deep stern voice, her high boned face hard with disapproval.
“This is important,” Dylan insisted. “Urgent.”
She moved around the desk and sat down. She rested her folded hands on the blotter, adopting the pose of counsellor in the unlikely event someone opened the door. She fixed her dark eyes on Dylan, her mouth thinning into a line.
“You know that I hold your interests dear to my heart. You know that I want you to thrive, to achieve something material in this cause.”
“Reverend—”
“But you need to show respect to the people who are helping you, often at great risk to themselves.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her. “But that’s just it. I want to do something real. I’m tired of… “
He wanted to say he was tired of one-off missions, of driving Teslas into tour groups, of knocking out drones and crashing cargo ships into each other. Even pulling down fighter jets was starting to bore him, though everyone on the hub agreed it was his best thing. He was always able to get a couple thousand upvotes on the pilot’s helmet cam footage before the moderators caught it and took it down.
Miryam softened slightly. “Is this about the girl?”
“No,” Dylan lied sullenly, knowing he’d never deceive his benefactor. Miryam was extremely skilled at spotting untruths, something he—an unbeliever—found ironic given her stated calling.
He had met Natsuki at the kids coding camp his handlers insisted he join, ostensibly to give him some visible legitimacy and account for his swollen resources. He had another job while he was there—to scope out the older kids for anyone promising that might be useful to the organization. He’d completely abandoned that goal after he met Natsuki. She was a visa student, beautiful, funny, excellent with the kids, and empathetic towards Dylan’s deprived upbringing.
She’d agreed to go to dinner with him, had been unfailingly kind, and had held his hand as they’d walked along the riverfront. For the first time in his life, he felt as though he’d met someone who wanted to understand him, even if there were a few cultural barriers. Her enthusiasm for the interests he held in common with her made him wonder if he had misjudged the whole, seemingly indifferent female gender.
He had seen her off at the airport, and had kissed her cheek after she hugged him. He’d promised to visit her at the Kyoto address she’d given him. His message history was now full of smiley little emojis, her preferred way of answering his texts. But, as time passed, they had dwindled in number. The delays between her responses had grown longer.
He told himself that this was normal, but it sent a bolt of anxiety through him. His feelings of inadequacy were returning. The Heartland conflict had intensified, making it impossible for her to return, and he, Dylan, believed he had the power to end it. Not just to resolve it, but to do so in favour of the heritage he had been denied. He could not have been presented with a better moment to bring it full circle.
“Something real,” Miryam repeated. “Do you know what you’re talking about, young man?”
“The Promise,” Dylan said quietly. “God’s promise. No more bulldozers. No more federal projects. Just us, and the land, and the crops.”
Miryam considered him. He was sure that she was weighing his blatant insincerity against the possibilities they had never given voice to. Up until now they had made limited incursions against the food producing African nations—disrupting supply and driving up costs to punish American consumers for abandoning their own producers. There was always talk about scaling up, about making a permanent hole that would result in a global sea change that would force the administration to capitulate and return farmland to its caretakers.
That was given pretext, anyway. The religious angle, to Dylan’s mind, made excellent cover even if a large number of the Revelation collective’s members were in fact true believers. It didn’t matter what they believed—the plan was nothing less than a global coup. Only a handful of programmers on earth were capable of triggering it, but it was Dylan’s birthright. He was done waiting.
He spent the following evening hiking to the top of Eagle Mountain as the sun set behind him. He had his laptop in a backpack and an untraceable mobile phone, alive with encrypted messages of encouragement from the hub. Many of them were the same guys who followed his gaming career on Twitch. He’d hang out with them in the virtual lounges, having more in common with them than the people he encountered in reality.
He knew that all of that would change. He would change. He already had a plan for locating Natsuki, having thoroughly researched her information so that when the time came, he’d be able to evacuate her from the chaos. Like a superhero, he would shed his dorky, awkward exterior and become the secret warrior he had trained to be his whole life.
He slipped on a bluetooth headset and opened up an audio stream. His audience would be able to hear him, but he needed to be free of distractions, so he muted the volume.
“Coming up on 37° 28 9,” he said into the headset as he looked around, searching for the promised clearing.
Eagle Mountain was not exceptionally high, but it was the highest peak within driving range. To accomplish his task, he would need a good signal and a clear view of the night sky. Luck had furnished him with both. He felt good. Strong. Even the hike, something out of his normal practice, did not fatigue him. He was ready. He was primed. Tonight, he would erase the record, and begin a new world order. Vikram Kori, whose illegal manipulations were known the world over by agents of the organization, was about to go down.
You never saw me coming, did you, faggot.
He looked at his mobile, turning down the brightness so he wouldn’t become night-blind.
im so ready
i know finally
what r the coordinates??
0°03’25.7″N 27°24’11.9″W
Dylan checked the time. He had a few moments to get his bearings. He found a good spot where he had a clear view of the sky. The chopper waiting on standby would have plenty of room to land when it came to collect him.
As he lay back and watched for the approaching light passing through the firmament, he thought about Natsuki, how much he wished she was with him now. He should have made her exfiltration a condition ahead of time, but it wouldn’t have made him look too good in her eyes. She’d know the reason if he was too far ahead of schedule. She was quick, a born programmer, and he loved that.
“Ten minutes,” he said to his audience as he pulled out the laptop, and called up a raw code window. It was already filled with lines—a program that would run after he made the initial attack.
An alert appeared on his navigation bar. Dylan looked up. After a moment of searching, spotted the drifting light, moving among the stars as though it too was millions of miles away: The Atmospheric Regionless Cloud.
The ARC was a nuclear satellite the size of the Titanic, housing most of Earth’s internet servers. It facilitated almost all online commerce, media streaming, communications and remote system relays.
The last technological contribution of Aeneas Musk before his suicide, the ARC supposedly belonged to no country, operating under a global treaty supervised by the UN Security Council. After demonstrating its limitless bandwidth and its superiority over the old Starlink system, the last terrestrial ISPs agreed to move to its global servers in 2035. Land based servers were eventually abandoned—except by those who understood that privacy was power and that conglomerating these services in the ARC made them vulnerable to the very small number of hackers with the skill to break into it.
Almost all of those hackers had taken a powder in a bunker somewhere near Vladivostok last year, leaving Dylan the foremost cyberterrorist in the world. Tesla autonomous vehicles might be robustly encrypted when operated through the satellite, but Dylan bypassed it on a regular basis to stunning effect. He sent public transit off bridges, trucks into busy pedestrian areas and crashed e-bikes into oncoming freight trains. He’d even effected the assassination of the US senator from New Jersey when she and her family made the mistake of using a ride share.
Her real mistake was pushing for legislation against the National Agricultural Protection Front. Dylan had received many tokens of admiration and a considerable bonus after her death was confirmed. He was rich by anyone’s standards, but he had nothing he really enjoyed spending money on beyond technology and junk food—though he had made a point of moving a large amount of his on-paper fortune into the appropriate stocks, because all global currencies were about to suffer a serious disruption.
“Five minutes,” he said to no one in particular. He opened his mobile and looked through the last photos he had taken—selfies with him and Natsuki.
Her face was so open, her smile so natural to her face. Somehow she’d actually made teaching those brats how to code less miserable. He wondered if they’d ever get the chance to do something like that again. If he succeeded in his objective, the world would take a long time to re-stabilize enough to consider such things. It would take years, probably. Some regions—the food producing areas that had moved to Africa because of climate change—would never recover at all, because they would cease to exist.
As the ARC’s trajectory moved over the Pacific Ocean, Dylan added a few more lines of code, adjusting the ventral thrusters—the engines that would propel the satellite into Earth’s gravitational field. It would make landfall over the Congo. In a flash, the continent would be erased from the market, no longer a rising economic force, but a blank slate on which his own disenfranchised nation could write a new destiny. The African Renaissance would come to an end. North America would rise again.
That was the pitch, anyway. Dylan doubted that it would do more than scramble the status quo. It didn’t really matter to him who came out on top. It wasn’t about politics. It was about the power of chaos. The big reset. An experiment in human resilience. One giant culling of anyone who couldn’t measure up.
He opened his chat history with Natsuki, then hesitated. What to say in this moment? He wished he knew how to explain that he had his finger on the scale of history, and he was about to let it go, to re-balance it, and that he wanted her to be with him for the aftermath.
Hey, u up?
After a moment, the read receipt popped up, a friendly little blue checkmark. He smiled, feeling a flutter in his chest and added a follow up message.
Miss u.
He waited, glancing at the laptop screen. On his mobile, the words Message Not Delivered appeared under his message. He frowned, pressed the retry button, and was greeted with the same notice.
He could not believe it. She’d blocked him.
Ignoring the increasingly urgent hub messages asking about the ARC, he frantically scrolled through her social media. She had “liked” everything he’d ever posted or replied to, and had even shared their photos prominently in her image galleries. He refreshed the feed. It too returned an error message. In less than ten seconds, she had blocked him on every single site.
“You fucking cunt,” he said out loud. This remark was greeted with a chorus of question marks from the chat hub.
He threw down his headset, tossed aside his mobile and turned to his laptop. Eyes blinded with furious tears, Dylan typed rapidly into the code screen. He was sweating, his heart thumping in his chest, his rage was so visceral that all thought of his mission had fled. He had been rejected by women all of his adult life. He had been ghosted, blocked and insulted for daring to have expectations. This would be the last time.
He checked the coordinates. The ARC was drifting over the Pacific Ocean, heading east. If he pulled it down now, the eastern Asian seaboard would be well within the blast radius. His cell phone was ringing now, his handlers desperate to reach him, to stop him.
Fuck you. Fuck them. Fuck everyone. You made me do this.
Through a haze of angry tears, he made the necessary adjustments so that the ARC’s thrusters would slow its descent. It would enter the atmosphere and break apart before hitting the ocean, causing an unprecedented nuclear explosion. Dylan felt that was appropriate for Japan to provide his stage. He would erase it, erase her, and everyone she had ever known or cared about. She had made him believe that he was counted among that number, and then blocked him without an explanation. He hoped she lived long enough to regret it.
Dylan typed the letter “Y” into the screen, and pressed enter. The code zipped itself up, and the automated program started, issuing instructions to the satellite, and counting down to the pre-written broadcast of the message his organization wanted humanity to receive.
Then he lay back, letting his tears run down his face into his hair as he waited for the star to fall on another bitch who had led him on. He was going to rescue her, protect her from the hurricane of change. He had done all of this for her and now she was just another corpse on the pile. He’d been so sure.
Between one breath and the next, Dylan neither saw or heard the silent bullet as it punched a hole in his chest. His body collapsed, his nervous system reacting automatically to the catastrophic damage. There was a crunch on the rocky ground and a blur of white light as someone picked up the glowing laptop.
“The idiot changed the coordinates. It’s going to go into the Marianas Trench.”
The voice was a woman’s. Dylan thought it sounded familiar, and had just enough time to recognize Miryam over the muzzle of the pistol before it fired a second shot into his forehead.
“I’m sure I sound foolish,” Rachel said in her half-baked Italian.
“Not at all,” came the voice from the phone. “Show me where you are. I want to see.”
Rachel held up her phone and turned on the camera, giving Alec the view she was currently enjoying—a dusty copper light that hugged the hard-edged cathedral of mountains spread out before her. The dam had the best view anywhere in the Crown, and as long as she stayed away from the edge, she wouldn’t get dizzy.
“Now you,” Alec said. “I want to see your face.”
“I look like hell.” She turned on the front camera, showing him her tired face and messy hair. “Happy?”
“Yes,” he laughed. “Call me later?”
“I will,” she promised. She ended the call and took a deep breath. She had something bad for him and he was making it far too easy. Maybe she would invite him to come stay after all. She scrolled through the photos he’d sent, mostly goofy, one or two very nearly explicit.
“So that’s what you like,” said a deep Russian-accented voice from just behind her shoulder. “Should I be jealous?”
“Goddamnit,” she snapped, pulling her phone to her chest and jerking away.
Sergei grinned at her, evidently having just finished a patrol shift with his security team, because his uniform shirt was unbuttoned over a sweat-stained undershirt.
Rachel narrowed her eyes at him, taking in the additional muscle he’d somehow managed to add to his already meaty frame since she’d last seen him two summers ago. He seemed even more angled in his face, his jaw a little thicker. His platinum hair was cut into a high fade that added to her overall opinion of him as an aesthetic tribute to fascist eugenics.
“What are you doing here?” she sneered. “I thought you were gainfully employed elsewhere.”
“I got bored,” he said mildly, and then flashed her another grin with lots of sharp teeth. “And I missed you, Rakhila.’
“Don’t call me that,” she said automatically. It was his little game with her, and she hated it.
He shucked off the blue uniform shirt and stuffed it into his belt, going to the edge of the parapet to take in the breeze. He seemed to know she was considering shoving him over because he turned his head to look at her, that plastic smile still in place.
“So your new boyfriend,” he teased. “Is he coming to visit?”
Rachel felt her stomach twist. She had, through studied apathy, never acquired the full appreciation of Sergei’s activities the way her brother had. What little Vikram had intimated to her was enough to make her totally averse to allowing Sergei and Alec to ever meet.
She’d hoped for an early end for him at the hands of some rival thug, or perhaps a life sentence, but so far Sergei had done well for himself. He was also an accomplice in Vikram’s clandestine activities. She resented her brother for cultivating him, for making him into a project. By doing so, it allowed Sergei to remain close. Vikram could claim that it was hardly up to him to tell their chief of security to send his own son away, but she knew the real reason—Sergei was one of his most important intelligence assets in Russia because he had no issue betraying his national institutions.
“You didn’t have to teach him how to perform emotions,” she’d once snapped at Vikram. He’d just given her that look—the one that said trust me, everything is under control. As far as she could tell, it was. Sergei hadn’t been a fixture in their lives for the past couple of years. Still, she was angry with Vikram for not putting her feelings ahead of his grand plans. She should’ve put more pressure on him to clean up after himself.
“Why aren’t you in Moscow?” she demanded.
Sergei got down off the parapet and circled back around her. His eyes moved over her with shameless entitlement. She wanted to punch him in the solar plexus the way she’d once done when they were younger, but she knew she’d only succeed in bruising her fist.
“I told you. I got bored.”
“What else did you do? If I make a phone call, how fast do you go away?”
His smiling mask slipped and she caught a glimpse of his true face—the one characterized by the animal curiosity that searched for arteries and pressure points. He seemed on the verge of telling her when they were interrupted by footsteps. Vikram approached them, mobile in hand.
“Something’s wrong.”
He shot a look at Sergei, whose face reanimated into the ironic smile of before. Vikram’s eyes went to Rachel’s, questioning. She gave a shrug, pulled out her phone and looked at it, hoping for another message from Alec.
There was nothing. Not only was there no message, her screen had gone grey. Vikram showed her his mobile screen, the same absence in evidence. His troubled face mirrored her own internal trepidation.
Sergei lingered at the margin, then moved towards the edge of the dam. Something in the darkening sky had caught his attention.
Rachel looked at Vikram. “What is it?”
Suddenly her screen came to life, but showed only a static black and white message reading NO ARC SIGNAL.
“How is that possible?” she wondered, looking up at her brother, hoping that he had the answer.
He shook his head, evidently as baffled as she was. “The backup servers should have kicked in.”
“It’s stopped,” Sergei said abruptly, tilting his head back and raising his eyes to the sky.
Her hatred of him temporarily forgotten, Rachel went to stand beside him. She followed the direction of his gaze and picked out the bright new light that was hanging in the twilight firmament when it ought to be moving steadily along its orbit. She knew every star in the sky, just as Vikram did. She also knew that the ARC, the Atmospheric Regionless Cloud, an internationally-owned, nuclear-powered satellite that hosted most of the world’s internet and telecommunications, had never experienced a signal malfunction before.
She felt dread thickening in her chest. She looked over at Vikram. It was on his face, too. Only Sergei seemed unaffected, his expression betraying nothing more than mild interest.
“It’s been hacked. We were warned about attempts, but I never seriously thought… ” Vikram trailed off, and looked down at his phone. “Damnit, we need to find a way to contact the control centre in Delhi.”
“They’ll have attacked it,” Sergei said calmly. “Most of the engineers will be dead by now.”
“You mean that’s how you’d do it,” Rachel said tonelessly, observing that for once, his smile was not affected—just a slight tautening of his mouth. Expressing pleasure at being understood.
Then, as the three of them watched, the satellite suddenly dropped from the sky. Like a shooting star it zipped over the horizon and disappeared in the thin band of azure light.
Rachel felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. Unconsciously, she reached out for Vikram’s hand. She tried not to think about what was about to happen, but she knew as well as everyone else did that the ARC represented nuclear power on a scale that exceeded all human precedents. Her brother’s hand squeezed hard, hurting her, just as she was sure her grip was hurting him. She raised her eyes to the deep blue void.
Alec.
Alec Vigna gave up on the canvas after the third try and finally succumbed to the desire to check his phone. The image Rachel had sent was an extraordinary array of mountain peaks, flushed pink in the dusty, misted sunset. It was a gorgeous view, but he would’ve preferred to see her standing under that sky, well within arm’s reach. He wanted to kiss the places where the light gilded her brown skin. He considered telling her this, but then refrained. It was too much even for him.
It was late afternoon in his part of the world, and the greenhouse he used as a studio was nearly to boiling point, so he’d taken off his shirt. He snapped a photo of himself—a paint spattered vogue—then sent it to her, hoping she’d laugh.
He lay back on the old sofa, then reached under it and pulled out a tray full of newsprint sketches. All of them were various aspects of Rachel—her fingers, her mouth. Some of them his artistic estimations of the more intimate parts of her. These fantasies of his rendered in fictional tableaux seemed paltry now that he’d actually held her in his arms. He reached down, sliding his fingers under the waistband of his shorts. Letting the memory of her greedy mouth and the press her soft curves saturate his consciousness.
As he looked up through the glass ceiling, a feeling of sudden alarm stabbed him like a needle. A black streak wide as a ten lane highway appeared in the deep blue, accompanied by a delayed, thunderous rumble that was so deep and pressurized the greenhouse glass began to crack.
He threw his arms over his face just in time. The loose shards rained down on his bare chest and stomach, piercing his skin. He cried out, rolled and tried to shake off the glass, succeeding in only driving it in deeper.
His mobile phone suddenly lit up, the holographic display activating of its own accord. He snatched up the phone and ran out of the greenhouse, just in time to miss being sliced to ribbons as the rest of the glass shook loose.
His mother was already waiting on the deck, staring open mouthed. The Tyrrhenian Sea, normally a blue jewel, darkened under the shadow of the broad ribbon of black cloud that now streaked across the sky. Alec forgot about the pain of the glass still clawing at him. He raised the phone to view the message now projecting itself. It was speaking, but the roaring in his ears prevented him from hearing it. Still, he could see the English words perfectly well.
“What does it say?” his mother cried into his ear, her eyes round with terror.
She could not speak or read English. Alec was unable to find his voice. He stared as the words typed and re-typed themselves in mid-air.
PRAISE BE TO OUR LORD JESUS, PROPHET OF GOD AND THE END OF DAYS. WE ARE THE REVELATION AND HE WILL TAKE US TO HIM, TOGETHER WITH ALL THE RIGHTEOUS. THE WICKED WILL BURN. SO IT IS WRITTEN.
GODSPEED TO HIS CHOSEN. DAMN THE SINNERS. SO IT IS WRITTEN. AMEN.
Alec raised his eyes to the horizon just as the mother of all explosions shook the earth under his feet. Every remaining glass window in every house shattered. All the car alarms began to blare at once. He turned to look, and saw his mother clutching at her leg, trying to stop the blood from a cut made by their shattered glass deck table.
He moved to help, not aware of his own wounds, not able to hear the screams of the people below who could not themselves hear their own screaming. Above, the sky had turned into a black and green wound. A light as bright as the sun surged up over the horizon. It throbbed as lighting issued from it, covering the sky in a spiderweb of electricity.
He looked up to see the source of the roar and perceived his own death thundering towards him in the form of a colossal wave. A mountain of water taller than any skyscraper sped towards him, blocking out all light, tearing through ancient stone like tissue paper as it climbed the slope like a reverse avalanche. As it reached to embrace him, Alec wondered dimly if being in Himalaya might save Rachel. If she would live to understand what was about to kill him. If anyone could, he thought, it would be her.
The water reached the deck. He felt a sandpaper slap across his body, then a pop as his neck vertebrae cracked. Then he felt nothing but wet, blue darkness.
Vikram left his parents sitting with the rest of the village around the communal fire. They were in shock, just as everyone was in shock, but they understood that he and Rachel had to be alone. Apart. Their grief, like their condition, was unique. They could share it with no one but each other. No one else could possibly understand.
Vikram had always struggled to control the condition that had been named mnemothesia just for him and his sister. He hated that name, how reductive and clinical it was, how utterly it failed to describe what had been with him almost from birth. Unlike Rachel, he had not benefitted from therapeutic education in how to manage the condition, instead living his early years in a chaos of recollection. He’d had to teach himself how to control perception, how to identify authentic experience and separate it from the total recall he carried in his head at all times. It had taken him years to learn how to unfocus the whole picture. How to choose information, interrogate it for value.
It wasn’t until Vikram had begun the deliberate pursuit of polylingualism that he’d found a way to put it in order. The complexity of language had given him discipline in a way nothing else had. He knew his metaphysical and philosophical versions were imperfect. His mother, who had been his first tutor, had to give him the frameworks he needed to understand moral choices. To give context to pleasure, emotions, and other human experiences normally learned through socialization.
She couldn’t help him now. No one could help him. He was in free fall, all of his mental discipline crumbling just as all human creation was now crumbling. His every waking moment was there in his mind at once like a mosaic made of shifting sand.
At first, it was all he could do to keep breathing. He hadn’t been able to keep food down. Sleep was an impossibility. The desire to claw out his own eyes had been almost irresistible. Then he’d seen his sister. The look in her eyes shook him, the whites visible all the way around, like a terrified animal. Her pain was enough to give him strength, to refocus his mind. He caught her attention from across the table, and nodded his head to indicate she should go ahead of him. That he would be along shortly.
The trail that led up the sky burial ground was steep. This was where the monks had given the remains of their dead to the vultures. Offerings that had been made for thousands of years, the traces of which no one would ever find, were still hauled up to these slopes. The Griffon vultures and other scavengers took the soft tissues first, skeletonizing the remains. Then the Lammergeiers had their turn. They cracked and consumed the bones, demolishing all evidence of the decedent and leaving little more than a stain to witness them.
Neither of these familiars were in evidence after dark, but Vikram could see the little fire in the near distance, a burning glow in the heavy, ozone-laden darkness. He paused to look up. A thin, vertical streak of white light burned up from the horizon, disappearing into the cracked sky. Silent lighting still arced across the heavens like static, piercing the occasional wave of purple aurora. If this was disturbing, it was nothing to the dark ocean now lapping at the feet of the Himalayan mountains. It was illuminated in shades of pale green and purple, reflecting the lighting as it fractured the sky above.
It was impossible, he told himself. It was impossible that even the most powerful nuclear blast humanity was capable of detonating could have so dramatically altered the surface of the planet. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to model the possibilities. The one thing they did know—the fact that encompassed all others—was that the ocean had surged up like God’s own wrath and covered the human world and drowned everything Vikram had ever worked for. Nearly everyone he’d ever known was gone. It had taken a day.
He thought very seriously about walking the twenty paces to the edge and stepping off. His body would break on the rocks and become another a feast for the vultures. He wondered how long they would persist, those consummate survivors, now that they were the last of earth’s fauna.
With an effort, Vikram turned himself back to the path, and made his way up to where his sister waited. He found Rachel holding herself, her eyes wide and red. She stared into the fire, her cheeks stained with the tears that would not cease. She did not weep or sob, but gazed unseeing into the flames. As he crunched through the gravel, she raised her head, eyes bright, her lips parted as though she wanted to ask, wanted him to tell her that what they had witnessed was not real. That it had not happened.
He helped her up and put his arms around her. He felt her shake with despair, felt his own shock, his own terror infusing into the sound of her pitiful weeping as she let herself go.
“Why would someone do this?” she whispered, nearly unable to find her voice.
“I don’t know.” He wished he could give her more. Wished he could find an explanation for why any human mind would seek to bring about this end.
He could not understand. He could not give her understanding. He only felt pathetically grateful that whatever this judgement was, it had spared Rachel. He wanted to weep into her shoulder, but he held back. Her pain was more important. As long as he held her foremost in his mind, he could hold back the tide of insanity threatening to consume him.
Crunching feet on the pathway made them raise their heads. Sergei picked his way towards their little camp, bottles of vodka in hand. They had not invited him, but Vikram was glad he’d come. Rachel too seemed glad, if only for the sweating bottle of Stolichnaya he held out to her.
Together they sat. Rachel did not object to Sergei’s closeness, nor did he seem inclined to antagonize her. Vikram noticed the mobile phone sitting next to her, but he could tell by her shattered state that she had no hope of her young man having survived.
Vikram raised his eyes to Sergei, who showed no sign of outward trauma. He was instead introspective, something very rare for him. Growing up, Vikram had acquainted Sergei with his own particular psychological profile. He’d amused himself by teaching Sergei how to approximate certain human expressions and emotions, though he’d never be able to truly impart their deeper meaning to him. Sergei was, in most respects, a textbook psychopath. Thanks to Vikram, he was an especially high functioning one. He also, thanks to Vikram, looked on the Kori family as his kin group. As with most psychopaths, he did not incline towards harming them, though Vikram never took that for granted.
The thing Sergei had for his sister had always troubled Vikram, but he felt that made it more important that he fashion Sergei into an ally. Neither of them would ever call the other “friend”, but it was important to keep him well-disposed and close at hand. And he’d been useful in other regards. Vikram didn’t relish the violent shuffling the new order would experience when the remainder of humanity arrived, but having a man of Sergei’s distinctive qualities might make a difference for his family’s future, such as it was.
“Sakhalin?” Vikram prompted, studying him. “Your mother?”
Sergei shook his head, then took a pull off the Stoli before handing it to Rachel. “Father’s losing it. Everyone’s losing it.”
“But not you,” Vikram said in a tight voice.
Sergei only stared at him across the fire, silently reproaching him for even bothering to mention it. They both knew Maria Vetrova was dead. They also both knew that Sergei couldn’t care less. That was true on any day.
“Some must have survived,” Rachel observed a little thickly, though she didn’t seem that interested in the prospect. “They’ll come here, won’t they.”
“Likely.”
“What then?”
Vikram watched the bottle of liquor dangling in her hand. She had ceased to relinquish it to Sergei. Half of it was already gone. He didn’t like the state she was putting herself in, wanted to stop her, but what was the point? She was hurting just as much as he was. Her experience of their condition was different than his, thanks in part to his own careful work in helping her learn to cope with it, but it was still damaging and painful for her. She had an organic level of organization he lacked thanks to the early tools he’d given her— the counting, contemplations on the unquantifiable nature of chaos, and other diverting meditations. As a result, her behavioural and emotional development had been much more natural than his, but her mind was still a churning engine burning on the fumes of the same infinity of now-irrelevant knowledge. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to intoxicate herself out of experiencing the death of meaning.
Instead, Vikram raised his eyebrows to Sergei, who shrugged. Vikram then turned his face towards the swollen sea, wanting some relief from the heat of the fire. He gazed out, his eyes picking out the horizon as though expecting to see the ships already making their way to this last little continent. With any luck, the members of the Church of the Revelation had been killed by their own divine gesture, but Vikram had no intention of counting on luck. He knew they were responsible for hacking the satellite and driving it into the earth, but he did not yet have a unified theory. He doubted if he ever would. He couldn’t say what was or wasn’t possible, and it ripped him apart to be so powerless. He thought about Eugenia, his work, all the people he relied on. All the people he’d manipulated and maneuvered into conformity with his vision of a genuine and lasting peace. Someone had outplayed him. He took bitter solace in the idea that they might have survived. He wanted someone to punish.
The sound of glass on gravel raised Vikram’s head. The bottle of Stoli slid from Rachel’s hand as her eyes closed. Her head fell back on her neck. He was about to get up and go to her, but Sergei slid over to take her weight as she began to fall back. He put his arm around her shoulders, letting his knuckles brush lightly under her jaw.
“She’s like a leopard that’s been sedated,” he said with a grin, letting his thumb move over her lower lip, then pulling his hand back as though expecting to get bitten.
Vikram felt an exquisite bloom of horror unfolding inside him as he perceived the fondness in Sergei’s expression. He looked down at Rachel, his brow furrowed as he moved a lock of hair away from her face. When her eyelids fluttered, he smiled as though surprised and charmed by this. He was evidently not concerned with what Vikram thought of his handling of his sister’s unconscious body.
“Enough,” Vikram warned.
As Sergei raised his eyes, Vikram could see the calculation falling into place behind them. Eyes that had been full of affection now flattened into the pitiless blue that was nearly black in this oppressive darkness. His smile broadened with the realization that the dynamic between them—the one where Vikram had the means and the ability to protect Rachel from him—had fractured.
Sergei watched Vikram insolently across the fire, his fingers now moving through Rachel’s hair. His expression had never been more readable than it was now, and Vikram took the message with perfect clarity.
I can take her whenever I want, and you are not strong enough to stop me.
Vikram closed his hand around one the end of one of the sticks now burning brightly in the middle of the flames. He stared at his adversary, waiting to see what he would do. Sergei licked his lips, but said nothing. He tilted his head in what seemed to be respectful approval of Vikram’s signal of intent to do violence to him. With exceeding gentleness, he lowered Rachel to the ground. She slept on, oblivious to the danger.
Sergei rose to his feet, looking down at her with that strange look on his face. Strange because such regard, genuine and without malice, was so alien to his features. Then he looked at Vikram, and his face resolved itself into that familiar, cold amusement. He turned and headed back down the path, disappearing into the bruise-coloured darkness.
Shaking, Vikram held fast to the burning brand until he could no longer hear Sergei’s footsteps.