Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

FEAR

THE

FUTURE

The Final Volume of The Fear Saga

by Stephen Moss

Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Wilesmith

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For my wife and parents, whose unwavering support allowed me to explore this world,

for my friends, whose encouragement helped see this through,

and for the many people who have joined me in this journey.

Though dark and bloody, it does have an end. I hope you enjoy it.

Contents

Prologue

Part 1:

Chapter 1: With Disturbing Alacrity

Chapter 2: Mind-er

Chapter 3: Thrum

Chapter 4: Of One Mynd

Chapter 5: Meeting Room

Chapter 6: Meating Room

Chapter 7: Saddle and Break

Chapter 8: Covered

Chapter 9: Clandestination

Chapter 10: Shockwaves – Part One

Chapter 11: Shockwaves – Part Two

Chapter 12: Reflex

Chapter 13: Feng Shui

Chapter 14: The End of the Rope

Second Part:

Interval A: Her World

Interval B: The Fall

Interval C: Event Planning

Interval D: Lost in Translation

Interval E: The Ball Rolling

Interval Epilogue …

Part 3:

Chapter 15: Ladybird

Chapter 16: The Mourning Jog

Chapter 17: Satellites

Chapter 18: Schools of Thought

Chapter 19: Tin Can Ally

Chapter 20: Newsworthy

Chapter 21: The Missing Link

Chapter 22: Riotous

Chapter 23: The Farm

Chapter 24: Preemptive Strike

Chapter 25: Reaching Out

Chapter 26: Ad Minister

Chapter 27: Ugly Behavior

Chapter 28: On the Run

Chapter 29: The Closing Door

Part 4:

Chapter 30: A New Day

Chapter 31: TASC Manufacturing Plant 47

Chapter 32: Hekaton’s Carcass

Chapter 33: Catcher’s Mitt

Chapter 34: The Ball Rolling

Chapter 35: Tidal Unity

Chapter 36: Seeking Doubt

Chapter 37: Finally, Countdown

Chapter 38: Finger on the Button

Chapter 39: The Alzheimer’s Switch

Chapter 40: Sacrificed

Chapter 41: Ignition Sequenced

Chapter 43: Pawns Forward

Chapter 44: Exchange – Part One

Chapter 45: Exchange – Part Two

Chapter 46: Consequence

Chapter 47: The Shylock

Chapter 48: The Forgotten

Fifth Part:

Interval F: A Different Approach

Interval G: Advocating for Devils

Interval H: Before

Interval I: During

Interval J: and After

Interval K: The Cost of Membership

Interval L: Callback

Interval M: A Painful Divorce

Interval N: Counting Beans

Interval O: Taking the Leap

Interval End: Dropping an Ocean

Endgame:

Chapter 49: Under the Radar

Chapter 50: Dying Another Day

Chapter 51: Tight Space

Chapter 52: New World Order

Chapter 53: Post-Man

Chapter 54: Interval’s Closing

Chapter 55: Strategic Imperative

Chapter 56: Tactical Imperatives

Chapter 57: Watching the Wall

Chapter 58: The Truth Will In

Chapter 59: Stepping Into the Fray

Chapter 60: Final Solution

Chapter 61: Hitting the Fan

Chapter 62: Claustrophobia

Chapter 63: The Red Zone is for …

Chapter 64: Psychotic Conundrum

Chapter 65: The Shattered Cliff

Chapter 66: Crapshoot

Chapter 67: Numbers Up

Chapter 68: And Now, Watch This…

Epilogue

The call continued at all times. It was a constant flow of information, the amount that needed to be said far exceeding the method by which they could now speak.

Birgit’s home had been stabilized since it was lost. Its long, lazy rotation was now around an axis whose north pole was perennially pointed at its origin, at Earth, the place they had once been tethered to.

Terminus was a vast amalgamation of structures that had once housed more than eighty engineers, scientists, and astronauts. Now it was home to only two: Birgit, the doctor who had been trapped here while giving virtual birth to a machine god, and the station’s captain, who had not dared interrupt the infinitely complex process.

They were alone now. It had been a hard truth to accept. A red, raw fact, itching away on the surface of their lives, suppressed slowly, and only through long days and nights of conversation, argument, drinking, and weeping in the many far corners of the station as they reconciled themselves to their fate.

For their home was now a new world, small perhaps, but still only the second satellite of the sun to be inhabited, having been severed from the first.

But while they may be lonely, they were both eminently capable, and they would not waste their long, lonely exile.

The captain had almost unparalleled experience with spacefaring, and especially with the massive Terminus One station that had been his charge. His days were full to bursting with the task of maintaining and protecting the massive network of modules, from the remaining habitation module they called home, to the labyrinth of laboratory and science hubs that had once been the life of the station.

Dr. Birgit Hauptman, for her part, roamed those laboratories and science hubs, filling them with new purpose. For hers was a mind humanity could not afford to lose to the void. She pursued her experiments with vigor, and all the while her mind was linked to the station, into the network, via her spinal interface node on the back of her neck, managing, monitoring, and speaking to her companions: the machine and the captain who had sacrificed everything to stay with her.

Birgit:
‘yes, rob, through [portal 43.2a] and then onto the comms hub.’

Captain Cashman acknowledged the instruction, the portal’s location appearing as a visual place in his mind as she sent the thought to him. Another voice joined them. The station’s third resident.

Minnie:

Birgit:
‘yes, minnie, it should help the connection a great deal.’

Birgit thought it offhandedly. This was not the Minnie that Birgit knew, the Minnie that Birgit had raised. This was just a copy. This was, well, just a machine. Birgit could still ‘speak’ with the real Minnie as well, but it was like a static phone call with a distant loved one, and really only served to remind her of what she was missing.

There was a pause in the conversation, then Birgit went on, ‘¿maybe we can even paint again, Minnie, one day?’

Birgit did not try to disguise the patronizing tone in her mind when she spoke to this Minnie. Nor did she try to hide her disappointment at not being able to fully commune with the real Minnie anymore, though she knew the conversation was being transmitted back to that version, that truly beautiful artificial mind.

And the real Minnie was constantly updating this version of herself in return. Tweaking, adding, refining, trying to make it better.

But it was all but pointless, they both knew that. Just as it would be pointless for Birgit to try and protect the feelings of her machine progeny. The act of masking her emotions would only dull the connection even more than the inept and inadequate laser communications system they had jury-rigged already did.

This was not lost on Rob, not completely, though he did not really understand the depth of the bond that had formed between the two. But he did understand what they meant when they said ‘painting.’

Rob:
‘oh no. not the painting again. you know that freaks me out.’

Birgit laughed to herself, and then, purely out of spite, sent Rob a mental image of the last three-dimensional image Minnie had created as she learned and developed her understanding of the concept of creativity. It was a poor imitation of the full fractal complexity that Minnie was capable of, but such were the limits of their communications, and it still boggled the mind to try and absorb the flowing forms and abstract shapes that morphed and formed within the cloud of esoteric substance that were Minnie’s finger-paintings.

Rob:
‘jesus. i wish you would stop doing that.’

He felt Birgit laugh through the connection, along with the warmth of her regard for him, for the man who had selflessly joined her on this endless journey, and who, no doubt, saved her life a hundred times a day with his diligence and skill. So naturally she showed her deep appreciation by giving him as hard a time as possible.

Birgit:
‘oh, rob, you big girl’s blouse. ¿how can a man who stares at the cosmos all day get nauseous looking at a painting?’

But in truth she understood his feelings quite well. Minnie’s interpretation of abstract was absolute, and her paintings defied understanding, quite literally. They resisted any attempt at rationalization. For a man like Captain Rob Cashman, that was anathema. For Birgit, it was impossibly beautiful, and she wept when she allowed herself to truly bathe in their all-encompassing, multi-sense form. Crying with joy at their beauty, and with sadness at the fact that she might never again see them in their full, unabridged glory.

Might
never see.

For among the many projects she was working on with the help of Rob and the copy of Minnie that inhabited the station’s network was one that held not only the promise of helping earth in the coming war, but also of reconnecting her with her daughter, the fruit of her mind.

Chapter 1: With Disturbing Alacrity

It never failed to amaze Jim, even after all these years.

They were going to believe it.

His new office was a shambles, partly because of the mess of boxes and materials that bore witness to his establishing order over his new domain, and partly because of the more figurative shambles that was the collection of teams and administrative entities that he was putting together at a mad pace.

He sat at an unassuming desk in his new office at District One. Outside the door was the broad space he had requested and been given to house the team he was forming. TASC had officially entered the big leagues, and whether it wanted it to or not, that meant that the new state would need to vastly increase its ability to handle and react to the sea of ever-changing information that was the lifeblood of the political echelon they now played in.

The buzz from the hive of activity outside his door was set to the beat of the greater sound outside the walls, the massive rebuilding effort still getting underway all over the broad stretch of land at the southern end of Sao Tome, and on the once mighty fortress that had been Rolas Base. They were just getting started on that work, a project whose scale beggared belief. But they had the ability and the impetus to rebuild it, and far away at District Two they were even now building the tools that would accelerate the process in the massive orb of gold and magnetism that was the Resonance Dome.

Jim studied the report in front of him. It was not formatted in the way he would normally insist on it being, but then it had been created in a very different way than his briefings had been back when he was the White House chief of staff. It had been created by his new press secretary and her team, but with the help of the strange entity known as Minnie, a mind whose exact nature and capabilities Jim was still coming to terms with.

At some point, Jim knew, he would have to bite the bullet and have one of the spinal interfaces put in so he could commune with Minnie directly. A growing number of his ever-expanding team already had been through the process.

The insertion of the device itself was apparently fairly innocuous, but that was just the first stage. After that you had to be trained on how to handle the process, a stage overseen by the young Portuguese scientist who had spearheaded the development of the interface software himself.

It was all done with Minnie’s assistance, of course, for you were now stepping into her domain. It was an evolving process, becoming ever more flexible and efficient as more people went through it and they continued to codify and refine it. And it would need to be faster. Much faster. Because it was a program that had ever more people signing up for it as the growth of their organization accelerated.

Jim found himself rubbing the back of his neck, as he did anytime he contemplated the strange little gelport Neal was pressuring him to have installed there. He shook his head and set aside the whole concept. He would do it, he just, well, he had too much work to do right now.

He focused on the report in front of him:

TASC Information Office Update: Beijing Politburo Strike Corollaries.

It was a lengthy report, and one he had read several times already. He scanned through the pages seeking the highlighted sections that denoted changes since his last review, one concession he had managed to get to the process he had spent so many years perfecting.

The report detailed the various profound effects being felt since Neal’s brutal but essential strike at the heart of the Chinese Communist Party. Not surprisingly, the Chinese were more than a touch displeased at having the unofficial center of their political landscape wiped so thoroughly from the face of the Earth.

One might think that such an act would have instantly provoked a counterattack, and one of potentially devastating proportions, and indeed that had been the fear of many when they heard about the shocking blow.

But while Neal had been extreme in his final measure to stop the pervasive and devastating terrorism of the last of the Mobiliei Agents, he had not been as foolhardy as some might think. For the attack’s very extremity and boldness was, in the end, proving to be its saving grace.

Jim reviewed the details. He looked for, read, and then reread the key information he sought, and when he was comfortable that he was up to date on the key details, he waved in the small group of people even now gathering outside his door.

“Come in, come in. Take a seat, if you can find one,” Jim said to the four people he had heading up the information monitoring and counter-flow effort. They filed in, moving papers from the two chairs and stacking various boxes until they were all either seated or leaning on some form of impromptu perch.

“Minnie’s waiting on line two,” said one of them, and another of them leant forward and pressed the speakerphone button and flashing ‘2’ on Jim’s phone to bring Minnie’s disembodied voice into the room. The three people present who had been through Minnie and Amadeu’s little intro to the next millennium did not comment on how antiquated the phone now seemed, or how strange it was to hear Minnie’s voice come through such a limited, language-only device. They just looked to their papers and waited for the meeting to kick off.

“Hello, all,” said Minnie through the speaker, “I can feel three of you directly. Are Jim and Andrew also in the room?”

Jim said yes, as did the one research analyst who had yet to get a spot in interface school.

“OK, let’s get started,” said Jim. “First off, in the latest news releases from Beijing I see they have already consolidated the outstanding posts on the Standing Committee.”

“They have, sir,” said one of the four researchers, a former Chinese national who had worked for Jim as an intern some years ago and willingly answered his call to head up the Pan-Asian intelligence team. “The surviving five members of the Standing Committee have announced internal party elections in two months time, and named Li Yunshan as the interim chairman.”

“And it appears they still persist that this was all an accident?” said Jim to answering nods.

“They do,” said Andrew, “and moreover are taking up the line that the photos of the incident were fakes, a fiction we have been very keen to help promote.”

The incident they were referring to had actually been shockingly quick. From Banu’s arrival on the scene to put an exclamation point at the end of Quavoce’s final conversation with Agent Pei Leong-Lam, right through to her departure from the city’s immediate airspace once more had spanned less than six seconds.

A particularly loud and obtrusive six seconds, to be sure, but six seconds, nonetheless.

In most places in the world that have been so quick as to have defied anyone to capture it on film, but with an estimated fifteen million cell phones in Beijing, there had indeed been two quick and albeit blurry photos captured of the event, photos that had quickly gone viral across the globe.

But two very different information agencies had immediately gone to work to discredit the images. Their methods and reasons for doing so could not have been more different, but together they constituted the greatest propaganda machine in history.

The first was the Chinese Department of Xuānchuán, an ambiguous word that meant either publicity or propaganda depending on who you were talking to. The Chinese government had spent nearly fifty years persistently telling the people of China that its borders were all but impenetrable, its army unparalleled on earth. So to admit that a single craft had penetrated those defenses to the very heart of the nation, and then departed without so much as a scratch on its strange hull, would have been too great an admission of vulnerability for the mighty state.

For the newly sovereign TASC, wanting the leaders of the world to know what awaited them if they stood in the way of TASC’s mission was one thing, wanting the people of those nations to know was another altogether. And so for this rare moment the propaganda machine of the injured but still mighty Chinese state had an unlikely ally. An ally who had turned its very different skillset to flooding the internet with some even more amazing photos of the event, albeit ones that had some very fatal flaws in them.

The flaws had been deliberate, and when they had been discovered, the photos as a whole had been dismissed, along with verbal accounts that were even now being deleted and silenced by a zealous Chinese internet censorship bureau.

Another of the analysts now spoke up. “Minnie and I have included a briefing on which news channels are still reporting on the incident, how much time they are dedicating to the story, and the disposition of their analysis over time.”

Jim started thumbing through the update, looking for the relevant section, and one of the analysts prompted him, “Page eighty-three, sir.”

Jim found it and took a moment to read it. They all knew what it indicated, but they waited for Jim to see it himself. The information showed what is often referred to in the misinformation industry as a ‘credibility curve.’ It was different by region.

The more developed nations of Europe were already moving on, both in terms of which version of the story was being given greater credence and the tone with which they were approaching the entire event. It was starting to become comical, a topic for comedians and late night talk show hosts. The persistence of more fringe media outlets that this was in fact an attack was only fueling that change.

For most, it seemed, the credibility of the story was quickly accelerating down the far side of the curve, plummeting into the region of conspiracy theory, to join 9/11 government cover-ups and Elvis sightings. That was in Europe. In the US it was holding on a little stronger, but their greater appetite for conspiracy theory was well known. Elsewhere it was fading into obscurity, with greater speed the farther you got from the sight itself.

“And what …” said Jim, slightly distractedly as he finished reviewing the data. He lifted his eyes and started again, “And what of the cover story. Our … gas explosion?”

He said it with the distaste they all felt for the stereotypical and unimaginative alternative to reality that the Chinese had been pushing for the last few days. But there was not much else the Chinese could say.

Luckily for Neal, the building had been all but deserted, a factor they had considered in planning the attack. In fact, if the Party chairman himself had not been being forced to be there by the Agent that had controlled him for so long, then the party leadership would probably have been all but unaffected by the strike, barring the loss of some junior aides unfortunate enough to be working at that hour.

“Actually,” said Minnie, “we have an idea of how to help with that story as well.”

“OK,” said Jim, “I’m all ears.” After all, a story that well used needed all the help it could get.

But it was not Minnie who spoke, another of the analysts spoke up, making it painfully apparent to Jim that she was having sidebar conversations in the ether. Jim ignored the slight, mostly because he really didn’t care about such things, and listened.

“Well, sir,” said the excited but nervous analyst, “it seems to us that we can do the reverse of the manipulated photograph release we did to discredit the Skalm pictures, and release a version of the photos that we can claim is the unaltered photo:
with
the explosions, but no Skalm …”

Jim nodded, but with a frown. “Creating obvious forgeries is one thing. Creating photos that must stand up to the most rigorous of study is another.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Minnie from the phone, and Jim stared at the grey plastic box on his desk as if it had just said it wanted to go on a date with him.

After a moment’s silence, Jim prompted an explanation. “Err, OK, Minnie. Care to elaborate?”

“Of course, Jim. I would not alter the photos at all. I would use the original photos and database images of the city of Beijing to create a virtual copy of the city. Then I would reenact the events of that night, but without the Skalm present, and capture images of the same moments in time from the same virtual locations as the original photographers. In the end, the images generated would be indistinguishable from reality.”

Jim was doubtful and he looked around. Indistinguishable was a strong word, an absolute, and several decades in politics had taught him not to believe in absolutes. That said, he now noted that each of the three analysts who had met Minnie in person, as it were, did not share his skepticism.

“Indistinguishable?” said Jim, not hiding skepticism.

“Yes,” said Minnie, “They would be real pictures of a three-dimensional space as tangible to me as the original. If I then deleted the virtual construct from my memory, even I would not be able to tell if the images were genuine or not.”

He stared at the phone once more. What credibility would they have if this were discovered? What credibility would anything have if such a capacity for forgery were discovered?

What innocence was the world going to lose next, thought Jim, then breathed deep and moved on. They had much to cover, and more work, both predicted and unforeseen, was soon to come.

- - -

As the rest of the week unfolded, an unwitting Chinese media took up the new images willingly, perhaps even starting to believe the fabrication themselves, and the story started to fall by the wayside. Not that its passing signaled a return to normality for the news stations or the people they serve. The world was still reverberating from the myriad of disasters that had recently befallen it.