A la Node

1 – I woke up on Wednesday

When I awoke, it took me some time to figure out what was wrong.

Well, there was no alarm, that was one thing. Not being a morning person, waking up to silence usually indicates that I’ve long overslept and the clock radio has given up its futile task.

No, it was something else. Not just that I was uncomfortable, either, lying on my back with arms to my sides in that peaceful pose that only corpses can be put into for any length of time without cramping.

I began to roll over, drifting back beneath the surface again, sleep a warm sea welcoming me home. Mid-roll, my forehead came into sharp contact with something cold and hard, and the delicious warmth of unconsciousness was jerked away from me to the accompaniment of a multitude of very wrong sensations. Of course my forehead hurt, but also something had wrapped around my arm and was pulling at me painfully. Blankets were twisted strangely around my legs, and there was the distinct and disconcerting smell of cucumbers. For a moment I hung in that twilight space between dream and awake, where you are not quite sure if things are real or not. I saw strange images, some other room, some bed not my own, blinking lights, strange blankets twisted around my legs.

I don’t know how long I sat up in that bed, staring at the far wall, before I was convinced that yes, I was really awake, and yes, this really wasn’t my room. The dream-state faded away, and I took a long, deep breath. I took another one. I felt OK. Pretty decent, really, as if I had had an especially long and refreshing sleep. Now I just needed to find out why I had woken in a hospital room.

Despite not looking quite like any other I had been in, it clearly was a hospital room. There were the pale green walls, a little table with white plastic pitcher and little vase of fake flowers. There were ruthlessly bland pictures on the wall. Medical equipment? I hadn’t been in a hospital in a long time, but the tall white cylinders with blinking lights had a definite hospital look to them. The thing wrapped around my arm which had pulled at me when I tried to roll over gave every impression of being an i.v. drip; though its long clear tube disappeared into one of the cylinders instead of into a bag full of liquid hanging up somewhere.

Well, I thought, all I had to do was wait, a doctor would come in and tell me what had happened – obviously nothing too horrible, considering how well I felt. There was no obvious button to call a nurse, so I figured I would hang out for a bit, and if no one came, I would wander out of the room and see what was up.

I tested my arms, legs and every body part I could consciously feel, just in case, and found everything pain-free and in working condition. I felt good, and couldn’t remember having ever woken up feeling so well. I had definitely overslept, to feel this rested. It didn’t explain where I was, but the feeling was nice, and worries about the situation that put me here faded into the background.

Thus I had been in no hurry to leave the room, but had gotten out of bed and was trying to make sense of the cylinder with the flashing red light when the door slammed open. A man came into the room so quickly he actually slid across the floor trying to stop. On his heels were two more men in white lab coats and a woman in blue military uniform. They pulled up short behind him with startled looks on their faces.

The first man wore something in between lab coat and uniform – crisp white smock with insignia on the breast and shoulders, and a thin plastic belt that was alive with illuminated symbols and shapes. His hair was thin, but what there was of it stood out crazily from his head as he gaped at the bed I had gotten out of, and then at me, and then back to the bed.

“You!” he choked out, but his voice sounded heavily accented, I wasn’t really sure if it was a groan or a word.

“Hi,” I said, conscious of the agitation in the room. Really, it should be me gaping and staring, but I felt an odd compulsion to comfort the poor guy, who seemed to remain in a state of utter shock.

“You are out of beed! Awok!” It was definitely a strange accent, but he had a point.

“Yes, I’m awake, out of bed. Can you tell me where I am? What happened? I don’t remember anything, just went to bed last night, and…”

The woman gasped as I spoke. Slowly, the man licked his lips, and turned to look at the other three figures, who remained frozen near the door. The woman stepped forward.

“Weven’t really prepared for…” Her accent was also heavy, but didn’t sound like anything I had heard before. It sounded like someone had taken English and pulled and stretched at it like silly putty.

The first man, I decided to just assume he was the doctor in charge, said “Yes, uh, never expected…” and trailed off.

I’d had a few minutes to think since rising easily out of the narrow hospital bed. I was dressed in some kind of white long-johns, they were thin and clung to my skin all over in a not-unpleasant way. I’ll spare you the details of discovering that not only had an i.v. been installed, but that I had a catheter and what seemed to be its solid waste equivalent as well. I panicked a bit when I realized I was attached thus to the white cylinders flanking my bed, but there was a little green button marked “release” on the catheter, and I pushed it. This caused a deeply disquieting sensation deep inside me, but no actual pain. A few seconds later, the thing slid free of it’s own accord and I went looking for the button on the other device.

The catheter and it’s mate disturbed me on several levels, but mostly because it implied I had been there for some time, not just overnight. So these doctors had been taking care of me, but judging from the stunned looks, hadn’t expected me to hop out of bed this morning. What had happened? A coma?

“Well, I’m awake,” I said evenly and politely. “So What’s going on? Where am I and how long have I been here?”

The woman spoke again “You on New Jersay. You air safe, but preps have been made to move… we planning to move you to someplaice more…” She seemed to give up on ending that sentence, and the doctor gave it a try instead.

“Someplaice safer. We move you to a very safe location. Scuse me, I would like to query the vivibot please…” He sidled towards me, as if afraid to come too close, and I realized he was trying to get to the white cylinder I had been looking at. I let him shuffle past, and as he touched it, the red blinking stopped. He smiled up apologetically at me. I looked at the military woman, who also smiled nervously.

“How… How do you feel?” she asked.

“Fine. Um, you didn’t say how long I have been here.”

The tight smile tightened further, giving the impression of barely controlled panic.

“True, complicated though. Explain more soonish.”

My composure was rapidly deteriorating, but I kept my voice polite.

“Why do I need to be moved someplace safer? What is the danger here?”

The smile dropped completely off her face then, but before she could make any kind of reply, the lights in the room flickered and deep bass rumble throbbed in my chest. The lights went from flickering to a bright red color, and everyone in the room except for me fell into a sort of action-ready pose, knees bent and arms out, as if ready to spring in any direction at any moment. I goggled at them.

The purpose for their pose became obvious: the room suddenly shook violently for about 3 seconds, causing me to stumble back against the bed, while the doctor and the woman stayed planted in their action movie stances.

“Earthquake?” I asked.

The doctor shouted incoherently, apparently to no one and about nothing. The other two lab-coated men, who had been slowly edging their way back toward the door anyway, rose and darted back out of it. “Hellwithit,” the Doctor said. “Know what, we’re just goin. Marjory, forward Pinchard to the boomer, I’ll bring mister breakfast.” She snapped a smart salute and darted out the door. The doctor took a deep breath and gave me an appraising look. He had been doing something to the white cylinder, and now appeared to remove something from it – a white block that seemed to come out of the thing’s seamless surface, and which left no hole or indentation when the doctor pulled it away and slipped it into his breast pocket.

“Sir,” he said solemnly, “Shaking was due to bomb. Like us all to leave before the next one. Come with me.”

There followed a long period of running down red-lit hallways. Immediately outside that room had been a short passage with a rather heavy looking door at the end, through which we ran, but not before the doctor had waved his hands in a complicated series of gestures in front of it. I was expecting a hallway lined with hospital rooms, but instead there were long corridors with few doors, and those windowless and closed. One open door seemed to give entrance to a large room full of white boxes and cylinders.

The run finished up in front of a thick steel door that reminded me of a bank vault. The doctor was panting and red faced as he gesticulated in front of the door and then chivvied me through it before it was half open.

I don’t know how to describe the thing I saw on the other side of that door. “Blimp” comes close, “armored blimp with mirror finish and rocket engines slapped on” would come closer. If I had been able to get more than a glimpse at it during the dash across the floor of the immense chamber that enclosed it, I could perhaps do justice to the engines, the crazed tangle of antennae, the scattered protuberances and turrets, the overall bulk and confusion of it. As it was, this impression came in a blur while we ran hard for the open door we could see in the heavy overhanging belly of the monster.

The doctor couldn’t keep up, stumbled once, but I ran back to him and hauled him to his feet. The sense of impending disaster had seized me, though I had no idea what doom the red lighting and then the sudden blast of sirens portended. I half carried the doctor into the blimp-thing, and was crowded through by about 20 men in uniform that had come out of nowhere to flank our retreat. They saluted the doctor, who was bent over and gasping for air. He didn’t notice, just sat heavily on the floor just inside the doorway and waved them on. They promptly took positions in front and behind me and began marching me down the corridor into the heart of the ship.

The chamber we ended up in was crowded with people in lab coats, uniforms, and labcoat-uniform combinations similar to the doctor. The room was a strange combination of lounge and cockpit, and it’s inhabitants all seemed to be in the process of strapping themselves into low slung reclined seats built into the floor and walls. As the first half of the soldiers entered and broke off to the right, I was exposed to the dozens of eyes that had looked up at the entering men. A silence fell like wet cement. A soldier came up behind me and gently forced me to walk ahead of him to an empty seat.

“Seet,” he said very quietly, apparently unwilling to break the silence any more than necessary. I could feel every eye on me as I sank down into the seat, which was warm and shaped itself to my backside. I busied myself with the belts that lined it, and found that they were too simple to convincingly occupy me for more than a few seconds. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks, and not understanding what exactly I ought to be embarrassed about simply made them grow hotter.

I was saved thinking about it further by another deep throbbing bass vibration and change in the lighting from red to a deeper, almost painfully bright red. The shock wave when it hit was nothing like the “earthquake” I had experienced in the room, this was the sensation of a slamming into a wall you didn’t see while running. The shaking started then, yanking the whole place back and forth fast and hard. I heard many yelps and yells now, and the sound of many belt buckles snapping shut. The seat itself saved me from the whiplash and blunt trauma – its belts tightened and pulled me deeper into the form-fitting seat which shaped itself around me, reached up and held my head and neck, braced my ribs, and pushed up between and outside my knees.

The shaking stopped, but the sirens and hideous lighting did not, and soon there was movement of another kind, acceleration pushed me back into the supportive seat. Alarming sounds came from all around, bangs and screeches and penetrating deep rumbles.

From the first tremors I felt in the hospital room to this preposterous takeoff, one minute and 32 seconds had passed. I know this because many hours later, as I sat fidgeting in a far-too-comfortable office chair, a motley panel had assembled to alternate between reading out the tedious minute details of my rude awakening, and yelling at each other unintelligibly.

The details were mostly unintelligible as well. This was partly the thick stretchy accent, and partly the jargon – a mishmash of ridiculous sounding events, procedures and people. The time-line I caught, though, the time the medical machine said I woke up was 9:38:02AM. It was a Wednesday morning. The ship had taken off at 9:39:34AM, and landed in Spokane (or somewhere near it), about 35 minutes later, though “landed” was a generous term.

The entire flight had been under some kind of acceleration, up, down, jerking side to side, or lurching forward and back. Often all of these simultaneously. The red light had gone from intense painful redness to a series of wavering, staccato blinking patterns of painful redness – I assumed these were the states that existed beyond “red alert”. We were apparently being shot at – according to the harried men at the front of the conference room, the “boomer” was hit by over seventy eight thousand rounds of ammunition, four air-to-air missiles, and grazed the destructive range of 43 other in-air explosives.

I was impressed. As we had tumbled out of the hatchway, set too far off of the ground and at an awkward angle, I was able to take one good look back at the vessel, embedded painfully into the hard dusty plain. It reminded me then of nothing so much as an old Nerf football a dog of mine had chewed to destruction when I was a kid. Still we fell out of it bruised, dizzy and dazed – but alive. I was ushered quickly to the doorway set at an angle into a concrete bulge on the surface of the flat featureless landscape, and down a steep flight of concrete stairs, and then further down in a rickety elevator.

Two of the soldiers from the ship seemed to have taken responsibility for me, they jogged me down the stairs and left a murmuring crowd standing in front of the elevator as they gestured everyone out of it and me in. The three of us rode down for a very long time, and then proceeded through further interminable hallways. The soldiers were polite, but refused to answer any questions. When they did speak, which wasn’t often, they were short unintelligible words, augmented by gestures without which I would have been lost. I thought back to the hospital room, and realized that the accented speech used by the doctor and military woman must have been deliberately slow and careful for my benefit.

I ended up in the large but cramped conference room, on the soft black chair that insisted on forming itself to my body as I sat. The attempt to make me comfortable disturbed me and made me angry, it felt false and manipulative. Something hideous had happened while I slept, not to mention since waking up, and until answers were forthcoming, I did not want comfort. Finally, I found that if I pulled my feet up onto the seat and hugged my knees, the chair was unable to cope with my distribution of mass and I could maintain my angry tension. I could feel the shock draining from my system, adrenaline seeping away and leaving a cool sweat behind. My stomach started to cramp and I realized I was desperately hungry.

I assumed when they brought me here, that this would be the debriefing. Someone would tell me how long I had been asleep, or in a coma, or dead, or whatever, and what had happened meanwhile. It was obvious that a lot of time had passed, long enough for the world to become a strange and threatening place. I had let emergency and panic hold back my need to know, but sitting there, away from the explosions and sirens, I began to grow angry and afraid at the continued failure to clue me in.

They did not debrief me.

Instead, I perched uncomfortably in the corner in the front of the room and watched the men and women in labcoat-uniforms try to detail the events of the last eight hours to the agitated crowd, and it occurred to me that not only was my presence here unexpected, but it was also some kind of major problem. An embarrassment even. They never seemed to refer to me directly, or even look at me, but there were points in the talking where all the attention of the room seemed to flow my direction and linger there uncomfortably.

The people in military uniforms took over from the lab coat people to lay out the tactical situation. With pictures and the snappy military speech, the words started to come into focus and I found I could follow much of it – the accent was still strong, but a subtle shift in my perception changed the flow of words from a foreign language to a blurry singsong form of English.

This group, it appeared, were under attack from several powerful military forces. This wasn’t a surprise at that point, but watching the speakers and their series of images and charts (mysteriously appearing in the open air above their heads as they spoke) the real import of this started to sink in. The Finks were hunting them down, sifting through hundreds of thousands of decoy leads over a bleak and blasted landscape to find where this base was. The Ruskies we harrying both the Finks and this group with ground and air power, images of copper-red oceans with huge white ships and flocks of aircraft flashed by. The UN (the same UN I knew before I went to bed last night? I had no idea.) was fighting on all fronts, trying to subdue everyone simultaneously.

While they spoke, a new presence made itself felt in the room. Someone had come in, but I could not see the door from where I huddled. There was a ripple of movement and murmur that slowed the speaker slightly, but did not stop him. After a few minutes, my attention was again arrested by the military presentation, which seemed to include a list of nuclear weapons this group apparently had control of. I don’t know why this in particular, on top of everything else that had happened so far, sent chills down my spine, but it did. Before they could get to the point and presumably say whether a nuclear holocaust was on tap for this afternoon, a ripple passed through the crowd again, and the speaker stopped.

The man picking his way carefully through the dense pack of seated and standing audience was the man I had mentally referred to as “the doctor” since seeing him slide comically to a halt in my room this morning.

He commanded the attention of the room. He stepped up to the podium and dismissed the speaker with a curt nod. He looked around, taking everything in with harried, tired looking eyes. There was a large bruise on his forehead, over his right eye.

He spoke carefully, slowly, and I knew this was for my benefit. “Everyone, quietness, please. Things have changed, we know. The war presses us into the cracks, and our purpose is unclear. Our patient, as it were, is awake.”

This caused a low, uncomfortable murmur in the room.

“Listenall. This changes nothing. We have the samples, the genome, the data. They would kill him, would kill us all to prevent Science. We fight for Science, even when our Grand Central Project has walked out of the room. They know that, they know they have to do more than kill him to stop us. Killing him ourselves would not stop them. We stop here and we fight. And he deserves better. He deserves to know.” He looked at me, intense piercing eyes peering out of a rumpled old face. I stared back, my mind spinning around his words: __Killing him ourselves__ There was a roaring white noise growing in my ears.

“Marjory!” he called out, and the woman I had seen with him in the hospital stood up, but made it look like a retreat. “Marjory, take him-”

I assume he told her to take me somewhere and explain, but I didn’t hear – the world had been slowly closing in around me, and at that point the darkness filled my eyes. The chair probably kept me from falling over.

Waking up again, I at least knew why I wasn’t in my own bed. When I shifted under the thin blankets, there was a startled yelp that brought me fully awake. The first thing I saw was Marjory’s face, slowly turning red.

“Jeesfuk. Scared me. I am so used to seeing you asleep, for so long, when you move it…” she trailed off.

“You are Marjory?”

“Yes, Marjory.”

“Please tell me what’s going on?”

She sighed deeply, then stuck the tip of her tongue between her lips and bit down on it. She seemed to have to think about it for a minute before starting, but finally she said “We don’t know who you are, or how long you have been unconscious. At least three hundred and twelve years, faras we can tell.”

If I had been told when I first woke up, maybe it would not have registered, not seemed possible, not seemed real. Now, though… I knew already that it must have been a long time, but three hundred years… No, it didn’t quite register then either, but at least it had context.

“What do you mean unconscious? Was I… alive?”

“You have been alive. Better. Your senescence processes have been completely halted. You haven’t aged. Your cells divide, die, divide – but you accumulate no transcription errors. Your flesh heals, your mind dreams – we watch it, but nothing brings you awake, til now.” She was looking directly at me now, eyes wide. “We study you. Have studied you. For over one hundred years, we have hid you, studied you, fought for you. You are the reason we exist, the enigma that started it all.”

“I don’t understand, what do you mean I started it all?”

“We don’t have much time, I can’t explain all. We are an organization that began defending our right to learn your secrets. We were the scientists who wished to learn from you, there were others who felt you should be destroyed.”

There was a vague rumble. I was in a small room that seemed to be empty but for the hard cot I lay on, and I couldn’t see the source of the light which then turned slightly pink. Marjory acknowledged this change with her eyes, but said nothing.

“Is there any food?”

There was, and I was ravenous. Little packets very reminiscent of MRE’s provided a surprisingly tasty meal, which I ate while sitting up in the cot. Marjory ate with me, and we didn’t speak, both of us probably searching for the right words. Afterwords, the silence stretched.

“Were you guys planning to kill me?” I finally asked.

She didn’t cringe, but I could see the impulse in her carefully controlled features. “Some thought it would be better to leave you, let the Finks destroy you. Dr Angeles disagreed. So did I.”

We were both silent then, listening to distant thumps and rumbles.

“So I’m an enigma, then. And you guys studied me, and somehow this pissed everyone off?”

“You didn’t age,” she said, as if this explained all. “For over three hundred years, and we have never found how you do that.”

I considered this. “But that’s great, isn’t it? I mean, not aging is. If you can figure out how it works, but even if you can’t, you know it’s possible.”

“I shouldn’t blame you for being a fool, should I? After all, you just woke up. What was life like, before?”

“Fine, I guess. This isn’t the real world,” I said, gesturing around at the universe in general, “not to me, it isn’t. To me, the real world is my little college town, my little job there at the library. The real world is a distant war off in the middle east, a lot of politics and financial crap, but basically nothing really dramatic. I just get up and go to work. Play on the computer, eat dinner, go hiking in the hills. All this,” gesturing again, “is just a horror movie, or a video game. It isn’t real and I haven’t decided if I want to try and believe in it.”

“Now is all war and chaos. You wouldn’t know it, but you have many children in this blasted world.”

“What?”

“You have many children. Grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Before we took custody of you, there were many experiments. They couldn’t find the factor, so they took your DNA, stem cells, sperm. Bits of you were injected into thousands of people, millions of mice and monkeys. Eggs were fertilized, the children doomed to be biological experiments, trapped in the lab forever.” There was a deep anger under her calm words. I could feel her strain to maintain her calm.

“You?”

“My grandmother. My mother was harassed all her life by those who wanted the experiments to continue, though all those who started them were killed. My grandmother shot one of them in the head herself.”

“I… I’m sorry.”

She looked sharply at me, and her face softened. Her eyes looked moist. “No, you were just a freak of nature, you did not do those things. But consider, you represent immortality, and many, many people were willing to do those things to seize that power. We here at the Project wished to unlock that secret, but share it with the world, deepen our understanding of humanity. For Science. We were careful to be ethical in our experiments, but it’s true that you were always a specimen to us, never a human being. The immortal corpse, just a body whose cells did something amazing.”

“And the Finks?”

“They.. they have a point, though Dr. Angeles would never acknowledge it. You are the cause of chaos. We fight for you, over you. We fight for Science, others to become immortal, others for equal access. The Finks see you as abomination, causing chaos just by existing. The UN, though mostly that means the Free French now, they want to end the fighting, but they agree destroying you would be a first step. It makes no difference, though, the data is out there. Every gram of your mass has been sampled, sequenced and scanned. Your body holds no more secrets.”

“Why fight at all? You have the data, why can’t everyone have the data and be happy with it?”

The lights had gradually gotten a little more red and the rumbling thumps louder and more frequent.

“Can you not see it? Immortality would destroy us all. War has thinned us out a lot, but the planet holds billions more than it can sustain. That people die is the only thing that saves us from being completely over-run by ourselves.”

I let this sink in for a while. I suppose she had a point, but it did not sit well with me. The red in the light deepened, and I sensed that this indicated that things were not going to get better in the near term.

“The Finks have located our general position, they’ll bomb their way to us eventually. I’m sorry, we wanted to protect you – we all chose this fight, but you…”

Marjory reached her hand out toward me, but stopped, seeming afraid to touch me. I closed the gap myself and brought her hand to my heart, held it there with both my hands. Her eyes were big and brown and staring at me.

“Grand-daughter…” It was clearly as strange for her to hear as it was for me to say. “I am sorry too. I would never have chosen… ” I trailed off, knowing I would have chosen immortality if it had been offered. I would not have chosen this insanity, but would things have been any different if I had been awake for the last three hundred years?

“They come. They are sending troops in rather than rely on saturation bombing – they know we have better tech than they have, and they have to be sure they get us.” She was looking off into space as she said this, and it suddenly occurred to me that she must be receiving communications in some invisible way – implants? I thought of the doctor gesturing at doorways, and that I had seen no phones or radios anywhere among the soldiers.

Her hand did not leave my chest, and the warmth and solidity of it were melting through my desperate attempt to believe this was all a dream. “Dr Angeles has surrendered. The UN is here as well, they say no one will die until they’ve dealt with you. Dr. Angeles hasn’t told them you are awake. You’re something of a symbol, and everyone of course hopes the secret is still somewhere inside you. They’ll want feed of your body being destroyed.” Tears were flowing freely from her eyes now, but she kept her voice steady.

“What a mess,” was all I could think of to say.

Her eyes focused on me again, through the tears. “You know, there’s a religion centered on you. Nutcases all over the place think you are divine, that you’ll wake up when the human race is ready and lift us all to immortality. I understand now, suddenly, how people can believe such crap. I so want to believe it myself right now, I want you to save us somehow, be a god in disguise. We’re good people here, we just wanted to understand…”

I knew that they were coming, but still it was a shock when the door opened. What looked like a giant insect walked in, then stepped to the side, a tall human in green uniform followed. More insects came in behind him, and I saw that they were soldiers, but wearing segmented black armor and large bulbous helmets that reminded me of ant heads. The unarmored man, clearly in charge, stared down from a considerable height at Marjory and I. He seemed to take in the tableau with a sort of slack-jawed confusion. One of the insects pointed something at me, and I braced for death.

“Biocheck pos. c-5 c-5,” he said.

The man in charge snapped something back at him, and the device once again pointed at me. Another of them grabbed Marjory by the arm and hauled her away from me. “Biocheck pos,” said the insect again.

“So, you are Mr Breakfast.”

“I am?”

He grunted, and I though a hint of a smile crept onto his face. “Yeah, you’re him alright. Awake, after all these years – how did they do it?”

“I woke up on my own. Why don’t you have an accent?”

“Accent? Oh, I see, yes, the adaptives,” he tapped his temple meaningfully, “we’ve got access to the pool here, your lady friend’s adjustments to your speech pattern are pretty good, I’ve adjusted to your channel.” We stared at one another for a few more long seconds.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to kill you. You being awake doesn’t change that, as curious as I am to have a chat with you.”

I watched his face and realized he was still thinking about something. He could have done the deed the second his soldier confirmed who I was, but he hadn’t. I ransacked my mind for something that would give me a handhold. I had no idea how I had lived unconscious for three hundred years… but they didn’t know that.

“I woke up only a few hours ago. You don’t know what I’ve been telling Marjory, I asked her to keep it off the net.” He glanced at her, she was staring hard at me, her face under careful control.

“I looped a pseudo, figured it didn’t matter at this point, and he was insistent,” she told him.

That seemed to suffice. “So?”

“Immortality is no mystery to me. I made sure no one would extract that from me while I slept.” I watched his face, but he gave nothing away, just looked at me.

“I woke up because now is the optimum time. Before there were too many factors, after and you would have destroyed these people.” I gestured vaguely at the walls. “But a few people now, in the right positions of power, now it can work.” I tried to look at him as if I could see right through him. At the same time I tried to figure out where the hell I was going with this.

“Go on.”

“I chose to sleep when I did, the world wasn’t ready for me. There was too much order and too little understanding, but now the world is a very different place. It isn’t hard to do, you know.”

Now his stare was hard, intense. Did I have him, or was he just broadcasting my words back to headquarters for the bosses to laugh at? Marjory spoke up and I tried hard to suppress the hopeless dread that came over me.

“It’s true,” she said, “I’ve simulated with his parameters, it’s totally outside of anything we’d thought of before, it’s – ” there was the tiniest of hesitations as she searched for something convincing – “a semi-conscious modal feedback lock, simply amazing. It’s not physiological at all, it can’t be gotten from samples or scans.”

His eyes never left mine. there was nothing to do but keep going.

“No one can know, but these people must live. We’ll need them and their expertise. Let them slip away, then wipe this place off the map. Tag them and we’ll pick them up later one by one.”

I knew he would shoot me. Felt the certainty so deeply that I could say what I said with absolute calm and certainty, knowing it no longer mattered, it was all over.

“You, I, Marjory. One or two trusted others. We’ll rebuild this world, we’ll have all the time in the world to do it. I’ve been waiting for this moment, waiting for you.”

After an infinity, the insectile soldiers suddenly moved. The saluted their commander and filed out of the room behind him, none of them spoke. Marjory came to my side, her skin shiny with sweat.

“How… how does it work?” the officer asked, his voice hoarse with emotion.

I took a deep breath, took Marjory’s hand in mine and gestured for him to lead us out into the hallway, up to the surface, out into the world we could all rule together.

“Well, it’s a mental thing. Took me about 25 years to perfect it, but Marjory and I can guide you, things will go a little bit quicker. You’ll need a lot of B vitamins…”