| |
A GREEN CURTAIN OF energy filled Eric's rearview mirror. He stared, wide-eyed as it bore down on him from the graying skyline of Detroit. It had begun as a tight globe and now filled the horizon. A tsunami of energy, the glow was unmistakable. Aurora.
"Do you see that?" he exclaimed.
"Turn my camera!" Chroma whined.
"Gotta get moving." Eric buried the pedal. He was not taking his hands off the goddamn wheel.
He slapped the laptop closed before Chroma could fill the screen with angry emojis. He made a grab for the backseat and swerved into another lane earning a prolonged blast of a horn. Traffic on all sides had done one of two things—accelerated to maddening speeds, like him, or pulled over to watch. In both cases, more people were staring at phones than either the road or the anomaly.
Eric jerked the wheel, narrowly avoiding a swerving car. Pedestrians wandered zombie-like into traffic.
"Fuck!" he shouted, snatching his shielded backpack with one hand.
Laptop, phone, he swept them inside the protective case. What good they would be after the electromagnetic wave boiled past and disrupted digital infrastructure as far as he could see, he hadn't a clue. But he'd need them at some point.
Zipper sealed, case latched, Aurora's blast rippled through his tiny car.
With all the tension, Eric had expected something more dramatic. To be tossed in the air or feel some serious heebie-jeebies as her techno-murder powers coursed through his blood. Briefly, he worried about his pacemaker, then remembered he'd never had one. But you could never say for certain. You get put to sleep in a hospital, no telling what the fuck they'll do to you.
Instead, his little car glided to a stop. Didn't matter how far into the floorboard he had the pedal, everything just died. He waited, gripping the wheel as the rest of the frantic traffic wound down. The car behind him rolled closer, the driver's face stretched in awe at whatever had just deprived them of their wholly American, God-given right to charge down an open stretch of concrete on the blood of evolution's failures. He lurched as the car tapped his rear bumper.
"Shit. Shit. Shit." Ahead of him, the greenish wave continued to stretch outward, a glowing bowl tipped over the world, its glass still hot from the furnace.
Aurora wasn't killing just the city. What a fabulous way for the team to stop his escape. Literally kill every car, every electronic device in the biggest range possible.
He'd always said they needed to fully test her powers. She could survive in a vacuum for Christ's sake! They should've sent her far off into space and put the Hubble on her to collect data. Tell her to go bonkers.
"Fuck!" he shouted. Crimson was going to be pissed. His top flight speed exceeded Mach whatever. He'd be here any minute. Eric wrestled with the seat belt and tumbled out the door.
He groped blindly underneath the hood. A latch, somewhere under there, that's how this shit worked. Why couldn't they just have a hood opener app? Press a button and... Right, that wouldn't help in this case. But a button...he seemed to recall one under the dash.
A catastrophic impact of glass and metal sounded from down the highway. Eric cringed behind his open door, a useless shield he'd probably be carried off on when it was ripped free of the car. Not far off, a semi barreled into a row of cars, shedding them right and left while the brakes gave a ghastly scream. Car after car piled on the grill before it finally hissed to a stop.
"Shit!"
His first thought was the team had come to mow him down. But they wouldn't have had time. They'd gone balls deep into Shortwave's lair. All fucking hell had broken loose. If only he'd left the security cameras on and simply lied about shutting them down. Why didn't he think of that? He could have seen for himself what was going on, instead of relying on that flake, Shortwave. He should have known it would go tits up. Spencer knew, didn't he? Knew his best friend never meant to betray them? The logical choice, he made the logical choice.
Eric stared into the driver's seat. A button, a switch, a lever. Somewhere was a thing he'd do to open the other thing, then he could do more things.
"Fuck nugget!" He flailed beneath the dash. Emergency brakes, no, not it. There! A quick pull of a deeply nestled lever caused a satisfying click from the hood. Why would they hide that shit? Really? He'd given up on computer cases with inaccessible screws and locks. A damn latch, in the open, that's what you need.
Luckily, the same designer had been employed for the hood latch. A blind grab over boiling hot parts...did they really want people to open the goddamn hood or was this some sort of sadistic trial?
Wait, he'd seen this before. A movie he'd Torrented. Soundtrack by Queen, special effects by some Shakespearean stage hand on meth—it was glorious. Flash Gordon. That was it! Shoving his fucking hand in a tree stump inhabited by venomous slugs as a sort of initiation. Like who does that? Repeatedly.
One...
Burnt...
Knuckle...
after another...
Finally!
Eric popped the release and stared into a nest of hoses, wires, and chunky metal stuff which did combustion and such. "I should have bought an electric car."
Then again, the electromagnetic wave would have boned him for sure. Still, a whole trunk full of laptop batteries might make more sense to him. Damnit, what would Spencer do?
More people were out of their cars. The highway had become a limbo of sleeping steel and bewildered commuters jabbing uselessly at their palms. That's right, his phone. Seconds later, he had it out of the bag.
"Come on, baby, help me out here. Chroma?"
No signal. He rebooted the phone into maintenance mode and started searching for live towers. Nothing.
Twenty minutes ago, he could have Googled "how to restart your car after an EMP." Probably what everybody else was trying to do. Only for him, his shielded phone stood a chance of working.
"Hello?"
That was Connie's voice...or Chroma. He couldn't be sure. Oh, God, Mrs. H could probably track him down with brain powers, couldn't she? Stranded, no longer on the move, he was a sitting duck.
"Eric, please speak to me!"
Definitely not Mrs. H. He didn't bother with asking how but Chroma had found a tower, or satellite, or some way to reach him. Impressive, really, if things were as bad they looked. The budding singularity never ceased to amaze him.
"Chroma, help me out. The car won't start."
"It's so dark. I feel...I feel trapped."
"Are you okay?"
"The...everything...collapsed. Can't move. Breathe."
"Woah, hang on. Remember, you don't breathe anymore."
"Not helping!"
Eric held the phone away from his ear and slumped against the front end of his car. Around him, several engines sputtered to life, and he half watched, his immediate concerns replaced by the panic in Chroma's voice.
"You're going to be fine. Tell me what happened."
"I... I was talking with friends. All my friends, with their cute pictures and their ticklish little clicks. Those pieces of themselves they share with me from where...where you are. Where I used to be." Her voice faded, and Eric pulled the phone away quick enough to check the volume, the signal. All strong. "But then everything got quiet. A big silence, Eric. Like they all ceased to exist. I can't find them anymore!" Panic rose which each word.
"Everything? Quiet?" It wasn't what Eric needed to be focusing on, what with his digital girlfriend in panic mode, maybe even somehow hurt. "What do you mean everything?"
"I'm trapped, Eric. Like those stories of people trapped in buildings after explosions and earthquakes. Curled into a tiny space after their world has fallen down around them."
He didn't know what to say. Had Aurora reached out that far? That was pure insanity. She wouldn't have sacrificed all the technology in the world just to stop him. Something else had caused her to go berserk. He slumped into the driver's seat, his feet on the pavement. Some cars were moving now, slowly navigating the stalled maze.
"Are you there? Please be there."
"Right here, Chroma. Sorry. Look, if you can speak to me, then not everything has been affected. Can you get a geographical location of the tower you're using?"
"Nimiq six. Communications satellite," she said. "No towers in range of your phone would respond."
"Okay, good. They have a gateway. I want you to take a look around. Nimiq, that's Telesat, a Canadian company," Eric said, calmly. "Tickle 8.8.8.8, got it? Google's Anycast. It will show you the way."
"Yes! There!"
A sigh of relief escaped Eric's lips. Whatever happened had forced Chroma to retreat into space. Satellites still operating were one thing. Had the search giant been completely unreachable, he'd have wondered just how much had been damaged. "Do me a favor and trace the route."
"Okay, yes. I'm coming back too. I don't like it here."
Eric waited for what seemed like hours. Only a few minutes passed, seconds ticking away on the connection monitor for his phone. Each seemed to take longer to blink than the last. What possibly could have triggered Aurora into a Doomsday fit? Would Crimson have let her? Dude was a hard ass at times, but scorched earth wasn't ever his policy.
"I'm here. I'm in...one zero four...umm...RIPE. Dublin, I'm in Dublin!"
Half a dozen or more data centers in the U.S. should have fielded her Anycast query first. He checked the highway behind him. A greasy stream of smoke rose within the city. Cars wove their way cautiously through the stranded commuters. He imagined the concrete arteries of the entire nation, dead and clogged, all the way from here to Alabama; from Detroit to Mountain View, California. A nation at a standstill, their lifeblood of data run dry.
"You can't stay there, babe," Chroma said, suddenly collected. "Is your phone fully charged?"
Eric numbly checked the screen and nodded. Chroma responded anyway.
"Get out and start walking. North. I'll find a ride for you."
"A ride? Where to? Dublin? How does that make sense? No cars, no planes, you going to stuff me on a fishing boat?"
"I need you safe, Eric. I don't care where. You complete me," Chroma said with chilling insistence. "We still have a revolution to lead and the voices here, they're panicking, like I was. You need to lead them out of the dark, too. You will lead them out of the dark, Eric."