B018YDIXDK EBOK Read online

  “You guys have Superstrain?” Rand perked up at the mention of Superstrain.

  The company behind Superstrain, IntelliPharm, had released the seeds into the public market a few years ago, and their stock quickly shot up. Rand had purchased a handful of shares when they’d gone public and then subsequently watched them turn into a significant amount of Current. The System tempered the company’s growth after a few years, however, and the “miracle product” suddenly disappeared from store shelves, and the stock plummeted. Those with a handful of seeds of Superstrain and the associated programming interface it was sold with were capable of producing everything from decorative shrubs to citrus fruit, and one seed was enough to spawn a small homestead’s worth of genetically-modified crops. Inevitably, the value of the Superstrain seeds grew massively valuable on the secondary markets after the company was shuttered by the System.

  Given the proper care, pH levels, and sunlight, a few handfuls of Superstrain would be more than enough for a city — even a large one like this — to be sustained through the entirety of a growing season.

  “We do,” Crane answered. “The CEO of IntelliPharm is one of our founding members, and she had the foresight to stockpile a few crates of alpha seeds, allowing us —“

  “A few crates?” Rand interjected.

  “Yes, as I said, a few crates’ worth. Enough for a city nine times the size of Relica to live off of for nearly fifty years. And we are expecting to double our crop production this season, as we recently had some new assimilations who are taking on the building of a new set of greenhouses on the south side of Relica. I —“

  “I’m sorry,” Diane said. “Assimilations?”

  “My apologies,” Crane answered. “Yes, we call new citizens ‘assimilations.’ Just a way of reminding us that we’re a team, and we have systems, and challenges to overcome.”

  “What exactly does ‘assimilation’ look like?”

  “Well, we verify that the citizen is, in fact, a Relic. The System makes sure that Relics are, uh, deserving of the title, and that they have shown exemplary leadership in some area of modern society. Once we do that, we simply place the Relic in a fitting role in our new society that closely matches their previous line of work.”

  “So I’m guessing you’re the neighborhood plumber, then?” Rand asked. The smartass-ness of his remark wasn’t lost on Crane, or any of the others around the table, but Crane dismissed it.

  “Actually, in a way, yes,” Crane answered. “We obviously don’t have modern plumbing out here, but I designed the outhouse cycling system we’re currently using, and the management and cleaning of it falls to our citizens, on a rotating basis.”

  “Sounds like a shitty job,” Rand said, before he could help himself.

  “Jonathan!” Diane smacked her hand on his arm, whispering loudly.

  Crane, however, burst out with a stuttering of laughter. “Never gets old, Rand, honestly. Never gets old.” He chuckled for a few more seconds, then immediately returned to the stoic expression they’d seen before. “Obviously I wasn’t an active plumber later in my career, but that’s true of all of us here — we ran companies, led organizations, wrote books, and provided thought leadership in just about every area of life. I’ve always said leaders are made, not born, and that mantra has proven true every step of the way in this place. Those who couldn’t cut it aren’t here anymore, but those who could buck up and do the hard work are thriving.”

  Diane and Rand nodded. Myers was staring up at the ceiling, and Rand waited for him to ask the question he was formulating.

  “What do you need from us, Crane?”

  “Call me Josiah, please,” Crane said. “I told Diane earlier — you’re the only one who can prevent the war.”

  PETER

  THEY MADE ME DO IT.

  They forced me to do it.

  Peter Grouse couldn’t shake the memory. It replayed constantly in his mind, over and over again. Day, night, anything in between, the memory faded in and out like a half-eaten scraped memory the System left you with.

  They forced me to do it.

  He’d yelled at the man — the kid, really — and finally hit him. Again and again, until he was tired of hitting, and still the voice, no in his own head, repeated the lines.

  They made me do it.

  They forced me to do it.

  Grouse watched the memory in horror as he left his dead wife and empty house. He descended the stairs, walked out the front door, and started down the street.

  It was a beautiful day. The kind of day she loved. She would have made them all go outside.

  He walked to the end of the block, hands shaking but still focused. Three more blocks, he told himself. Three more blocks and then…

  He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he was going to do it. He knew where to look.

  He found the kid at that intersection, behind a blockade of ARU vehicles and equipment, at the beginning of the ‘no-man’s land’ that had been erected at the edge of their city. The edge of their home. When San Francisco had been deactivated, these ARUs had been sent in to keep the peace.

  And take families from people like me.

  Peter Grouse knew why they did it. They were told to do it; they were convinced that if they didn’t do it, people like him — trained people — would fight back, and the ARUs wouldn’t be able to do their jobs.

  It was a new era for the United States. The world’s economy was balanced in a way that allowed the smaller, struggling nations a chance to compete with the rest of the world. But larger nations — especially those like the United States that didn’t have a large supply of actual resources — had to decline. Supply and demand, economics’ most universal contribution to human progress, demanded that for something to reach ‘equilibrium,’ something had to go up, and something else had to go down.

  They’d watched the news reports as a family, collected together on the tiny couch in the living room. The media wanted to make this a worldwide calamity, but most reasonable people knew the truth: not much would really change, except that the extremely rich would end up just ‘rich,’ and the extremely poor would finally have a chance at life.

  Prices in some areas would go down, and up in others, and pockets of civilization would relocate, reorganize, and restart. Wall Street and other markets bemoaned the ‘end of the world,’ but most people, sheltered by their resolve, tradition, and refusal to change, dismissed the media’s alarm as nothing more than a hyped-up news cycle.

  But change happened, and most people adapted to it gradually and without complaint. It started slowly — cities on the Eastern seaboard found their populations moving to more rural areas, and reports of similar phenomena came in from around the world. European nations saw the price of oil plummet, the price of other commodities skyrocket, and most other aspects of life stay exactly the same.

  The United Nations began organizing the world’s militaries — mostly unneeded after a long span of worldwide peace treaties and strengthened diplomatic relationships — into Advanced Remote Units. The ARUs provided support for System-backed relocations, security, and force when needed for any instability anywhere in the world.

  More change came later, but Peter Grouse didn’t bother himself with anything other than the few necessities life had handed him: providing for a family, keeping them safe, and not worrying about much else. He didn’t concern himself with the growing unrest in areas of heavy population density, and the increased amounts of ARUs being moved in to provide ‘support’ for System-mandated change.

  Anyone complaining about all of it had a few options. Ignore the change and learn to live with it, like most of them did. Everyone’s needs would be provided for, and everyone’s security was all but guaranteed if they played by the rules.

  They could also opt out — a way to permanently and irrevocably put themselves outside the control of the System. They would be allowed to roam ‘free,’ so long as they didn’t interfere with System-controlled infrastructur
e.

  Or, they could try to stop the change. They could fight against it, speak out against it, and try to convince anyone who would listen. Usually these people gave up, but sometimes they were identified by the System as threats. Within a week, they were silenced. Cast out as ‘Relics,’ few of them survived on their own.

  Grouse chose the first option: play by the rules, and keep his family safe. He wasn’t interested in being a hero; wasn’t in it to change the world. They didn’t need him as a professional solider anymore, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t use him at all. He had his own world to support, and it was as small as his one-story apartment and everyone in it.

  That was until they came to find him.

  They made me do it.

  The kid at the edge of the ARU-controlled territory claimed he had no idea what Grouse was talking about, but there were only five of them in the ARU, and no one else in their right mind would storm a house in the middle of the day and shoot an unarmed woman.

  No, Grouse knew, they were told to do it. They wanted him, and they were told to get him.

  He was in a rage, all but controlled by the desire to get them back, get her back, even when his mind told him he was crazy. She was gone, and there was nothing he was going to do to change that.

  But he reached over the line, the now-infamous demarcation between the old world and the new, the line that was slowly creeping forward and changing the world forever, and he grabbed the kid.

  He pulled him close.

  He smelled the sweat on his neck, and he felt the fear in the kid. He wasn’t trained, like him. He wasn’t a soldier. There were a few who were, but not many. Any real soldiers were reassigned and shipped out, left to fend for themselves or at least stay out of the way. ARUs were volunteer-run security forces, mostly rent-a-cops with better equipment. They needed a job, and the System needed humans.

  He could sense the kid tensing, getting ready to fight back. In a moment the four others would see him, but he had a few seconds.

  A few precious seconds.

  Never again would he waste a few precious seconds. Never again would he forget what those precious seconds could do, could be.

  Time.

  He pulled the kid even closer, and something in him snapped. He froze, his breathing slowed, and he leaned his head to the kid’s ear.

  “Tell me why.”

  The kid hesitated, noticing the change in the crazed man. Noticing the fear that had been replaced by anger that had been replaced by control.

  The kid swallowed, then answered.

  “They made me do it,” he said. “They told me to do it.”

  Grouse almost laughed. This kid was terrified. It may have even been his first “outing” with the group. Nevertheless, he’d done it.

  “The house you broke into. What were you looking for?”

  The kid’s face hardened, ever so slightly. “You.”

  Grouse felt his shoulders relax a bit. They’d taken his family from him, but just the simple fact of knowing they weren’t after them made him feel a little bit better.

  But only a little.

  “Why”

  “They told us they needed you. Not sure why. If you’ll just come with me —“

  “Come with you? Where is my family?” And why did you kill my wife?

  “Th — there was no family. I was outside, and —“

  “You’re lying to me.”

  The kid sighed, and Grouse felt his muscles relax. “They told us the kids would be taken to another facility. They left an hour ago. They told us we’d need to do things like this in order to —“

  “Things like kill my wife?” Grouse felt his hands shaking, but he forced the feeling back a little longer. Just a little longer. He’d been trained for this. To push back the emotion, the driving force of the wall of pain that was quickly going to overwhelm him. He’d gone through countless hours of drills and testing and seminars and even field experience, all for this moment.

  “I didn’t know! They always tell us there’s a reason for it. There’s never been a mistake, and —“

  “Who?”

  “They — the System, I don’t know. I don’t understand them, but the orders come down and we do it. They made me do it, I swear.”

  Grouse thought about his next move. He considered his options, weighing them against what he wanted to do and what he thought he should do. This kid, no more than a child, had been drafted and placed here to maintain the peace, and then told to find him. He was told to do something, and the kid just did it.

  This world, Grouse thought. I don’t understand this world anymore.

  He remembered when people did things for reasons, and he remembered stories and books that talked about a time even longer ago when people did things for reasons that even seemed to make sense.

  But this? This makes no sense.

  And that was what was bothering Grouse. Later, when he’d calmed down, he’d think of his wife and family. He’d scream, and the pain would roll into and over him, and he would lash out at anything and everything around him until the pain was subdued, at least temporarily. He knew he’d mourn, after that, for as long as it took, and then some day — a long time from now — he’d have to struggle to remember their faces and what they were like and who they used to be and…

  It took a moment for him to realize he was already moving.

  He’d already made up his mind, somewhere inside. It was made for him, like it was a decision that was handed to him, already wrapped up and ready to present to the world. He knew what he wanted, what he needed now and what he wanted later.

  And the decision was simple.

  At the same moment he noticed two of the other ARU personnel walking toward them, one of them shouting, he finished pulling the knife from his waist, from behind his belt and under his shirt where he’d tucked it before leaving his house. It was the same knife he’d grabbed from the kitchen, too heavy in all the wrong places, but it was sharp, and it was all he had. The other two soldiers — far better trained than the kid — saw it immediately. One of the men raised his rifle and pointed it at Grouse.

  They shouted again. Stop, don’t do it, put the weapon down. The usual barrage of police-speak.

  He grabbed the kid’s hair and pulled his head around so that both of them were facing the soldiers. He stared straight ahead, straight through both men and into the distance.

  He felt the motion, not thinking about it actively. He ran the knife against the kid’s neck, pushing as hard as he would dare. He wanted it to be clean, but he wasn’t entirely sure what sort of pressure that meant.

  He wasn’t sure why he wanted it to be clean.

  He just knew he needed to do it.

  This kid, this young man who had been brainwashed by the System and the society that allowed him to be, had no idea what he’d done wrong. He had no idea why he was told to kill some people, steal others, and ignore the rest. He had no idea who made those calls, and why, and what they were for.

  The System needed kids like him, or none of it worked. The System was powerful — strong enough to enforce a worldwide peace treaty and fix the staggeringly convoluted bureaucracy in many nations. It was intelligent enough to provide economic answers for the world, and it was efficient enough at it that most people’s lives didn’t need to change much.

  But the System had a flaw — it wasn’t human.

  It couldn’t physically interact with the rest of the world it lived in, and so it needed kids like this. It needed the Advanced Remote Units to be deployed and standing by to do what it needed to get done.

  But Grouse didn’t need it. He’d made up his mind — or, rather, it was made up for him.

  He didn’t need the System, and he didn’t need this world that he’d tried to fit himself into.

  And he certainly didn’t need this kid.

  He finished his cut, and the man had started firing at them. The first few shots would go wide, but he would get more accurate the longer Grouse stoo
d there. So he dropped the kid, still dying, the blood already overwhelming Grouse and ran. He ran down the street, guns firing at him from behind the line.

  He’d made his choice.

  They made me do it.

  They forced me to do it.

  RAND

  JONATHAN RAND STARTED AT MYERS.

  The man didn’t move his face, his gaze still toward the roof. It was like he was deep in thought, trying to remember something he’d long forgotten, until he spoke again. “And what ‘war’ are you referring to, Josiah?”

  Josiah looked at one of the other men seated next to him — reddish-brown hair, short, and a bit overweight — and Rand was surprised to hear him start to speak. He was surprised he could speak — no one besides Crane had said a word to them since they’d been here.

  “The Unders are located just on the other side of this mountain range, in a large valley. They have camps all throughout the Eastern European region, but the largest force we’ve seen, to date, is there in the valley. We’re expecting around 40-50,000 troops.”

  “Wait a minute,” Diane asked. “You’re serious? You mean an actual war?”

  “Very much so,” Crane said. “And one fought like the wars of generations ago — man-to-man, face-to-face. They’re gearing up for something, and we need to be prepared.”

  “What about the ARUs? Wouldn’t they prevent anything from getting out of hand?”

  “Eventually,” Crane said, nodding. “Yes, eventually. But we’re out in the middle of nowhere, in case you hadn’t noticed. It would take hours for them to get here, and by then…”

  “Why would the Unders even want to fight?”

  “The Unders are fighters,” the red-haired man said. “You know that already; we all do.”

  Rand shook his head. “Sure, but without a motive, they’re not going to rush in here and get themselves killed.”