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  “Their motive is a matter of principle. Ours doesn’t align with theirs, and that’s a threat to their population.”

  “Why?” Diane asked. “They chose their life. They wanted to live out of the reach of the System, and they’re doing it. Why do we matter at all to them?”

  “Because our goals, and what we stand for, directly threaten them.”

  No one spoke for a moment, and Rand wasn’t sure if Crane thought the three of them were letting his words sink in, or if the man knew the truth: that none of them knew what he was talking about.

  The other man seated next to Crane, opposite the red-haired man, spoke. “We want to destroy the System, to render it obsolete.”

  Crane flashed him a glance, and the man defended himself. “What? It can’t hear us out here. Besides the satellites, there’s nothing around that —“

  “That doesn’t matter,” Crane snapped. He cleared his throat and turned back to Myers, Diane, and Rand, and explained. “We are a little hesitant when it comes to talking openly about the System. There have just been too many coincidences during the last few months, and we know that the possibility of a singularity-type development of artificial intelligence is imminent. The longer we wait, the —“

  “It’s already happened,” Rand said.

  “Jonathan!” Diane flicked her head around and stared at Rand, wide-eyed.

  “They have to already know,” he said. “There’s no way —“

  “Know what?” Crane asked.

  “Seriously?”

  Crane didn’t answer, and the three men at the head of the table waited for Rand’s explanation.

  He turned to Diane first. “What do we have to lose?” he asked her. “We’re out here, literally in the middle of nowhere, and our only way out was rendered obsolete by those things they shot at us.”

  Diane glared at him, but didn’t speak. Rand turned to the three men again. “By the way, those things were pretty impressive. I hear they’re not street legal yet, though.”

  Crane dismissed him. “You and I both know there are plenty of ways around that. Rand — what are you trying to say?”

  Rand suddenly wanted to take it back. He realized how ridiculous it all sounded, and how unbelievable it was, but his mouth betrayed him. “It’s already happened,” he said. “The singularity. It’s already happened.”

  “That’s preposterous. If that was the case, we’d all be —“

  “Dead, or slaves to a race of robot overlords, or hurtling through space toward a new home planet, yeah, I know,” Rand shot back. “Trust me, I’ve heard all the theories.”

  “This theory is a new one, though,” the red-haired man said. “A sentient computer is developed and… nothing changes?”

  “Hear me out,” Rand said, growing more agitated. The two men next to Crane had smirks on their faces. “The deactivation of Umutsuz happened in a day, and the fact that Myers was sent here? Right in the middle of all of this?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “It’s not a coincidence!” Rand shouted, pounding his fist on the table. “Myers — dammit, tell them!”

  Myers looked up at Rand with a long expression on his face.

  “Myers, come on — you know it’s true. It has to be!”

  Myers shrugged. “I — I’m sorry, I don’t… I don’t remember anything before —“

  Rand let out an exasperated sigh. “Ok, fine. Fine, whatever. Let’s back up.” He looked at Crane. “Josiah, why do you want to destroy it? And why do the Unders not want it to be destroyed?”

  Crane took a moment to look at each of them in turn. Rand felt annoyed, but he allowed the man his dramatics. “They need the System, in order to continue living the same way. The irony of living outside of the System is that it strengthens them.”

  “Figuratively, right?” Myers asked.

  “And literally. Think about their tech capabilities. They’re every bit as advanced as the rest of the world, but they’re only using discarded and stolen tech. Just about everything they have they ’acquired’ somehow other than Current. They’ve got Tracers, for God’s sake.”

  “But how does that make them dependent on the System?”

  “They’re dependent on existing outside of the System. Don’t you see? Take down the System, and you take down their way of life. The System casts them off, like it does us, but in their case it doesn’t track them, require pIDs, register them in the Metabase, or anything. They have basic access to the net, but it’s for tracking the Boards or informational queries, that’s it. Even their communications technology is a century old, and all working offline.”

  Rand suddenly understood, and he couldn’t argue with the man’s assessment. “If we take it down, they’ve got nothing to steal from.”

  Crane nodded. “Their way of life simply ceases to exist. Every Tracer, gun, or product they own they either built or crudely manufactured, or they stole from a System-controlled registry. The System knows it’s gone missing, but it’s the most efficient entity the world’s ever known. It just creates another product — and a job or two in the process — and goes about its day. It probably even deletes the record from its memory. It’s faster and cheaper that way.”

  Rand looked over at Myers. The sharply intense, serious man he’d known from his corporate years was gone, replaced by a withered shell. Myers was staring at Rand, but his eyes were empty, hollow. He felt a pang of regret as he watched him.

  Diane jumped in. “Josiah, we’re with you. We don’t want a war any more than you do.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “So,” she continued, “we need to get Myers to the ICPL, in Paris. That’s the only way we can try to communicate with —“

  “I’m sorry,” Crane said. “I — we — cannot allow that to happen. That’s why we brought you here.”

  “But we can prevent the war. Myers can,” Diane said. “If we get him —“

  Crane held up his hand, and Rand was surprised to hear Diane fall silent.

  “Again,” he said. “We cannot allow that to happen. Myers Asher is the one man the Unders want, and he is within walking distance of their largest encampment.”

  Rand’s eyebrows shot up. “Wait, you’re saying —“

  “Yes, Mr. Rand. We are going to give Myers to the Unders.”

  RAVI

  RAVI FELT THE BLISTERING PAIN pounding at the back of his skull as he sat up. Even sitting was painful, thanks to the wounds from the gunshots that hadn’t yet healed. He involuntarily reached into his pocket for one of the pills Sol had given him and placed it on his tongue, then swallowed.

  He waited a few more seconds then looked around. At first he couldn’t tell if he had gone blind or if there was just no light in the room, but he reached a hand out and felt the wall. It was smooth but irregular, and cold to the touch.

  A cave.

  His eyes slowly focused and adapted to the low light conditions, and he could make out a few small crates stacked against the wall opposite him. A dark lump — a person — lay on their side in front of him in the center of the cavern on its floor. He reached out and poked them.

  The person stirred and groaned. Merrick. Ravi reached his other hand out and rolled Merrick to the side so that his back was on the floor. Merrick slowly turned his head, blinking, and saw Ravi.

  “What happened? I went in and out,” he said.

  “You got hit, someone hiding in the bushes. They got me next.”

  “Ary?”

  Ravi shook his head. “No, they didn’t — she…” he wasn’t sure what to say next, so he just let the words spill out in whatever order they came to him. “She, I think it was… I think it was her.”

  Solomon’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, her?”

  “I think she lured us here.” Ravi’s eyes fell down the cave floor. He could feel Solomon staring at the top of his head. “I — I’m sorry, Merrick. I didn’t know.”

  He waited for the man to lash out and berate him, but it didn
’t come.

  “She fooled me too, then,” Merrick said, rising to a sitting position. Ravi saw the man wince as he placed his open palms on the cave floor, and then remembered the torture he’d been through back at the Unders’ camp. He reached a hand in his pocket and felt around for another pill. There were none left.

  Merrick turned to face Ravi. “It’s not your fault. We made a decision, and we agreed.”

  “But you —“

  Merrick held up a hand. “It’s not important now, Ravi. We need to figure out why she lured us here, then we need to figure out a way out.”

  “Why don’t we figure out a way out first? Like, maybe we just leave the cave and run away?” He flicked his head toward the open cave entrance, about twenty feet up and to the right, and Solomon followed his gaze.

  “Well, for starters,” Solomon said, “there’s no way they’re just leaving us in here because they forgot about us. The fact that we’re unbound means they’re very confident there’s nowhere we can go, and nothing we can do to fight back. Look.” Merrick stood up, his large build almost coming into contact with the rock ceiling.

  Ravi stood, following Merrick. They both reached the opening and peered out. They were looking out over a cliff, straight down into a sharp canyon that seemed to be no wider than a few hundred feet. The day had somehow advanced into dusk already, even though both of them had been out for most of it. The dwindling light in the valley made it hard to see the valley floor, but it eventually came into focus.

  It was a long drop.

  Their cave was nothing more than a small hole in the side of the cliff, and it was hard for Ravi to believe that their captors had somehow carried both of them up here and into it.

  “This isn’t where they hit us,” Ravi said.

  “No, it’s not. They moved us — I woke up a few times while they did it, but not long enough to figure out where we were going.”

  “Did they just carry us up here on ladders, then?”

  Merrick smiled. “No, actually. Check this out.” Ravi watched as Merrick leaned far out of the cave opening, holding on to the edge with his left hand, and looked up. He pointed with his right hand, and Ravi leaned out to see.

  Far above them, a wooden platform hung in the air, suspended from somewhere above it.

  “They didn’t carry us up here. They took us down here.”

  Ravi immediately understood. The platform was not unlike the kinds he’d seen mounted to the tops of tall buildings in the cities, used for painting or cleaning or washing windows. It could raise and lower itself on a huge pulley system, delivering its occupants to this — or any other — opening in the cliff face.

  “We’re in a vertical prison,” Ravi said.

  “We are. There’s no reason for them to suspect we’ll try to escape, as it’s a hell of a fall straight down, and probably an impossible climb straight up.”

  Ravi nodded.

  “Not that it matters anyway,” Merrick said. “I’m afraid of heights.” The man shuddered, then swung himself back into the safety of the small cavern. He sat on the rock floor, his body tucked away from the edge of the cliff.

  “You?” Ravi asked. “Of all people, you’re afraid of heights?”

  Merrick shot him a glance. “What does that mean — you of all people?”

  “Nothing, just… you seem… qualified.”

  Merrick laughed. “Trust me, I’m capable of plenty, and I’ve been a Hunter for long enough. But everyone’s got to have a fear, right?”

  “You make it sound like you chose it.”

  “No — not at all. But I did choose to live with it. Never really did what it would take to overcome it, that’s all. Busy with other things.”

  Ravi sat on the floor and swung his feet out over the edge. “Not me,” he said.

  “Afraid of heights, or not afraid of anything?”

  Ravi chuckled. “Heights. They don’t bother me. Wish I could say that about everything.”

  “Like I said. Everyone’s got to be afraid of something.”

  Ravi nodded, considering this. They sat quietly for a minute, then Ravi spoke again.

  “What about Myers Asher? What’s he afraid of?”

  Merrick looked up and out, into the small circle of sky he could see from within the cave.

  “A lot of people have asked me that, actually. You’d be surprised. He was always the ‘unshaken leader.’ Quiet and meticulous, but intense in all the right areas at all the right times. He’s a good guy, too. Or was — hard to say if he’s ever going to be the same.”

  “You mean because he was scraped? It took a decade of his memories?”

  “Well, that. But also…” Merrick paused, then seemed to rewind something in his mind, starting from the beginning. “We created that technology. We knew it better than anyone. It was only supposed to affect the auxiliary internal BSE memory devices people were having implanted. A failsafe, or a ‘reset’ button. Something that was never supposed to be removed, unless it was being upgraded or there was a security issue.”

  “Like resetting criminals back to a safe memory strand. I remember the news headlines.”

  “True, but even that was a worst-case scenario option. Just removing someone’s memory doesn’t change who they are — an unstable person will be that way, with or without a certain timeframe of memories.”

  “But scraping does more damage than that?”

  Merrick didn’t respond at first, and Ravi had to look back at the man to see him nodding.

  “It does. Unfortunately, we were never able to create a ‘perfect’ scrape technology. We did what we could to keep the effects minimal, but scraping always removes a chunk of real, biological memories. And it can change someone’s personality, too.”

  “How so?”

  Merrick shrugged. “That’s what we were working on when everything… went south. We thought we were on to something — something that would allow us to map the areas of the brain most likely to be affected by a scrape or removal of a BSE memory device, but we never finished.”

  “You think Myers’ personality changed?”

  “I know it did. I knew the man for a long time. I never answered your question, though. What is Myers Asher afraid of?”

  Merrick stood up again, and stuck his hands in his pockets as he looked out their naturally-formed prison cell.

  Ravi watched him carefully, examining the man’s expressions and facial contortions as he wrestled with the answer.

  “Myers Asher is afraid of just about everything. It’s the reason he’s meticulous — a perfectionist, really — and the reason he loves planning and calculating. He can’t live with himself when he guesses wrongly, or misses out on an opportunity due to a lack of proper planning.

  “He’s afraid of losing, but not in the same way you and I are. He hates being wrong, but not because of pride. It’s an internal struggle he’s always had, and I think where we are right now sums it up perfectly.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We’re sitting in a prison cell that belongs to a group of people that wants answers from us, or to use us, or something. Myers is out there, somewhere, and another group wants to find him for the same reasons. Meanwhile, the world is in a quiet turmoil, turned upside-down and forced into submission by a computer program that we all saw coming — hell, we created it — and that we all thought was going to save the world. And Myers Asher knew all of it.”

  “He knew the System would become sentient?”

  Merrick shook his head. “No — I mean yes, I think he did. Myers planned for this contingency. He thought it might happen, so he created an entire scenario-based plan for what to do if it ever did happen. But that’s not what I’m talking about. He was afraid we’d lose sight of who we are, as humans, and get caught up in all of it. He was afraid we’d never be able to compete with something smarter — better — than us. And he was afraid we wouldn’t care enough to do anything about it. Look at us now.”

  “So he has a plan t
o get us out of this mess?”

  “Yes, but the problem is that what he feared the most actually happened. He was afraid that his plan would be lost.”

  Ravi furled his eyebrows. “Lost?”

  “He had the plan. Ready to go. Not a guarantee, but it was something. He was afraid it would get into the wrong hands, so he made sure it was committed to memory —“

  “Oh, come on,” Ravi said. “Seriously? You aren’t saying —“

  “Yes, exactly,” Merrick said. “He had the plan to get us out of this mess, and he was the only one who knew what it was. He told me he had it, and a little of what it involved, but that’s it. His wife, Diane, knew part of it too.”

  “And there Myers Asher was scraped.”

  “And therein lies the rub,” Merrick said, nodding again. “He doesn’t remember any of it anymore.”

  MYERS

  8 YEARS AGO

  “MYERS, COME on. You can’t be serious.”

  “Please call me Mr. President when we’re in here.” Myers Asher glanced around quickly, but he didn’t need to imply anything.

  “Sorry sir,” Solomon Merrick said, playing along for the sake of the other two people who had joined them in the oval-shaped room. “Again, though, Mr. President, you’re not actually suggesting —“

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” Myers said. “I’m giving you a direct and personal order. It’s not a game anymore. You know that, I know that. It’s real, and it’s growing. Fast. We talked about this already, Sol.”

  Myers Asher sighed, watching Solomon run a hand over his freshly-shaved head as he considered Myers’ request. He allowed the breath to escape from his nose, flexing his nostrils as he eyed the President of the United States of America. It wasn’t the America of their childhood, and it wasn’t the America of even a decade ago. He’d campaigned for a presidency of a nation that no longer existed.

  How he was supposed to know that, at the time before all of this happened, he wasn’t sure. Some of the smartest men and women in the world worked just outside his doors, and none of them had caught it.