Authors: Daniel Suarez
“No one will ever come for us. As of last month, I have been imprisoned here for twenty-eight years.”
This news came crashing down on Grady like a great weight. “Twenty-eight . . .” His voice trailed off as he slumped down against the wall. “My God.”
“Please do not lose hope so soon, my friend.”
“But twenty-eight years. I . . . I don’t know that I—”
“My history is not your future. Much suffering has been experienced, but in the process much knowledge has also been gained. Do not lose hope.”
Grady tried to keep from sliding into an emotional abyss, but he finally sat up a bit. “Okay. I’ll try. But God . . . twenty-eight years.”
“We are entombed here, true, with the goal that we never speak to another human. Left to the mercy of AI interrogators that have been grown specifically to study our minds and create models of how we perceive our universe. By design we would eventually perish under their tyranny as they altered our brains. Perhaps a decade or fifteen years after our suffering began.”
“Oh God . . .”
“But we avoided that fate, did we not? And we must save the others who are no doubt still suffering. We must take back more and more of ourselves as time goes on.”
Grady found himself nodding. “Yes. Hell, yes.” He stood up and examined the incredibly thin black thread. “What is this wire made of?”
“The same fibers you no doubt still have in your brain.”
“And what happened to the brains they were in?”
“The donors are very much alive. The same systems that put those wires in your brain can also safely remove them. We can show you how.”
Grady almost reflexively ran his hand over his scalp but stopped before he injured his hand. “Yes. I’d like my thoughts to be my own again.”
“You sound young. How long have you been a prisoner, son?”
Grady concentrated on that. “I don’t know. I was brought here . . . it was sometime in 2016, I think. I’m fairly certain. After the . . .” The trail of his memory ended there.
“Well, then you are the newest prisoner we have found thus far. I am certain the others will want to hear of current events in the outside world.”
“Others? There are more of you?”
“Yes. We call ourselves the Resistors.”
“I saw your symbol.”
“Then you are an electrical engineer?”
“Sort of. A physicist really. Among other things.”
“Renaissance people are very common here—those whose ambitions do not fit neatly within the categories of society.”
There was a pause.
“But I’ve been quite rude. Let me introduce myself. My name is Archibald Chattopadhyay, nuclear physicist and researcher. I also have an abiding passion for Greek poetry—but I suspect the former, not the latter, was the reason for my incarceration.”
Grady laughed. “Good to meet you, Mr. Chattopadhyay.”
“Do call me Archie. Everyone does.”
“Okay, Archie.” Grady grimaced in concentration. “My name . . . I’m pretty certain it’s Jon. The AI called me that. I’m not sure about my last name. Maybe Gordon? Or Garrison?”
“You are an Anglo then—American from your accent.”
“Yes. That sounds right.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Jon. We’ll obtain your true identity from your cell support system.”
He paused.
“But we will also need to give you medical attention. You must have consistently refused to cooperate. In such situations interrogatory AIs attempt to isolate you from your past, to break down your reasons for resistance. In my experience such strategies seldom work. The human psyche runs deeper than our four dimensions.”
“I’ve been hearing a lot of that sort of thing.”
“Consciousness is more durable than they believe. And you are safe now, Jon. We will never abandon you now that we’ve found you.”
Grady felt suddenly emotional—whether from post-traumatic stress or some other cause he couldn’t tell. He started breathing fitfully. “May I join your group, Archie?”
“You are one of us already, or we would not have found you.”
Grady nodded to himself. “I want to learn everything I can. I want to get back at these bastards.”
“For what reason did the BTC imprison you?”
“My mentor and I developed a gravity mirror. A way to redirect gravitation.”
There was a low whistle.
“Oh my. I am most honored indeed to meet you, my friend. What a wonder that must be. And what was your mentor’s name?”
“Doctor Bertrand Alcot.”
“Hmm. I do not know of him. Certainly he is not among us, but we have only located a small minority of the prison’s cells. Rest assured we will do everything within our power to locate Doctor Alcot.”
Grady felt reassured. “Good. Strange how I can recall Bert’s name so easily, but not my own.”
“Not at all strange. These AIs eliminate specific memories. Some people have no memory of their wedding or their children, but complete recall about the contents of their automobile glove compartment.”
“Why did the BTC lock you up, Archie?”
“I had the misfortune to perfect nuclear fusion back in 1985.”
Grady frowned. “Nuclear fusion? But . . .”
“Yes?”
“The head of the BTC, this Graham Hedrick guy, he—”
“Claims he invented fusion.”
“Yeah.”
“This is one consequence of unaccountable power. Graham Hedrick was born into the BTC. He did not join it. His father was head of their biotech division in the ’70s and ’80s. He clawed his way to the directorship and now seeks to revise his own past as well as ours.”
“How the hell can he do that?”
“Compartmentalization is deeply ingrained in the BTC. Very few in the organization have the whole picture. And a policy known as ‘The Necessary Lie’ makes it even easier. Deceit is viewed as necessary to ‘protect against social disruption.’ That gives Hedrick broad discretion to perfect his own history—to make himself a legendary figure with work he’s appropriated from others. Those who know the truth have been disposed of—or, like me, sent to Hibernity. It was Hedrick who urged the previous director to build this prison—because he wanted to erase me.”
“That son of a bitch. He actually claimed he invented fusion.”
“I am more concerned with future generations than my own scientific credits.”
Grady looked over at Junior coiled on the floor next to him. “You said you took over the AI in your cell. How did you do that?”
“I had a great deal of time on my hands. And a strong incentive not to let these damn AIs get ahold of my mind. Back in the ’80s the AIs were not as capable as they are now. The equipment not as reliable. There were weaknesses that no longer exist. But once I had control of my cell, I set about finding other prisoners. Organizing us. And now, decades later, we have taken over whole sections of Hibernity. Turning the machinery against the guards. The security turrets, the surveillance cameras, and many other systems. The guards do not dare walk their own prison now, for they have no idea which of their machines are trustworthy and which are not.”
“Hedrick allows this?”
“In order to ‘allow’ it, Director Hedrick would need to know about it. And he does not. Hibernity’s systems are monitored from BTC headquarters. No alarms ever sound there. We have the power to make wardens of this prison look very incompetent if we wish. And the garrison is considered quite expendable—most of them are clones of some notable commando.”
“I met the guy they’re copied from. Morrison.”
“Yes. The guards very much resent their lowly status and the ubiquitous surveillance by AIs. Any discharge of their weapons is carefully tracked. Trouble must be explained to their superiors. No, we have far more leverage over them than they over us. They are, thus, complicit in our charade that Hibernity is fully under BTC control. And by making them look good, they in turn inform us in advance of inspections and internal reviews.”
“But what about the research data these interrogation AIs are supposedly producing? Doesn’t anyone at BTC headquarters ever look at it?”
“They read reports. We’ve tasked our AIs with falsifying reports. And new orders are issued from BTC headquarters based on those findings. Orders that are never carried out. And so the cycle repeats. Sadly, we can only falsify our own AI’s reports, and I fear that the majority of prisoners here in Hibernity are subject to actual research.”
“Do you ever consider—”
“Escape?”
“Yes. If you’re so organized—if you’ve taken over parts of the prison and gotten the cooperation of the guards . . .”
“Gaining control of our cells and portions of the prison is one thing. Effecting escape from Hibernity another entirely. It is not sufficient for just one of us to escape. And we are, all of us, encased in hundreds of feet of solid rock. Even the guards do not know where our cells are or how numerous we are. It is a secret known by very few. I am nearly a thousand feet below ground by my estimation. We have so far been unable to get our physical bodies out of these interrogation modules. They have a shell of aggregated diamond nanorods that’s a hundred and fifty times harder than steel. When the prisoner is sealed in, the shell is sunken into molten rock, and then a probe burns its way to the surface to create a narrow pressure channel—the same tube that my polymer worm followed to you. But that narrow conduit is all that connects us to the outside world. And we lack any material capable of penetrating our prison wall.”
“That channel—does it handle communications? Maybe we can hijack the uplink and—”
“I am glad you are ambitious, Jon, but the channel is not for communications. The BTC abandoned radio communications decades ago in favor of extradimensional signal processing—or EDSP. We Resistors use our carbon thread wires only because we have no other means. But BTC communications do not traverse four-dimensional space-time. They are quite impenetrable.”
Grady remembered a conversation with Alexa—or at least her telepresence robot—some time ago. Funny what memories survived in his mind. “They seriously use extra dimensions to communicate?”
“Specifically a fifth dimension—one where gravity is forty-two orders of magnitude more powerful than in our perceived space-time.”
“So, a gravity brane—which is why gravity is such a weak force in our four dimensions.” Grady snapped his fingers. “Damn! I knew it.”
“Yes. This compactified fifth dimension is curled up from our perspective, less than a thousandth of a millimeter in size, but present everywhere in lower dimensional space. Thus, it can always be accessed.”
Grady considered the implications. “How do they interact with it?”
“Their transmitters are nanotech—diamond lattice structures they call a ‘q-link’—a tiny mass that they vibrate at high frequency to send gravitational waves through higher-dimensional space.”
Grady nodded to himself.
“
Where they would be strong enough to be detected. And gravity permeates all dimensions. I get it: a gravity radio.”
“I suppose of all people, you would understand.”
“So we really live in a five-dimensional universe?”
“Actually a ten-dimensional universe—but let’s leave that for another day. The point is that the BTC can transmit and receive information undetected.”
“Which is why no one’s noticed them.”
“Undoubtedly. But they also use q-links to track things.”
“Things like us.”
“You learn quickly. Yes, there is a small q-link diamond inserted deep into your S1 sacral vertebra. With this device, their AIs can track you no matter where you go in lower-dimensional space. And they have positioned weapon satellites in the L4 and L5 Lagrange points in the Earth-moon system—or as Homer’s
Iliad
might describe it: the ‘Greek’ camp and the ‘Trojan’ camp. From this distance, they can direct powerful lasers at spinning mirrors positioned in low-Earth orbit. From there, it is a small matter to instantly kill an escaped prisoner anywhere on the Earth’s surface.”
Grady sighed. “So even if we escape—which is nearly impossible—we won’t live long.”
“There are numerous obstacles to such an endeavor. But none of them insurmountable. We must pool our intellects and tackle these problems one by one. For example, your cell’s medical systems can be reprogrammed to remove the q-link diamond from your spine. Several of us have already done so. It doesn’t help us escape, but it would be a prerequisite of escape.”
“We need to get a message out, Archie. We need people to know that we’re here. That we’re alive.”
“We have been pondering this very idea for decades now. I fear it will require some time yet.”
“I don’t give up easily. Not even gravity eluded me.”
Grady heard a gentle laugh over the line.
“Oh, I think our membership will be very pleased to make your acquaintance, my friend.”
B
enigno Cruz shouted down from
the bridge of the
San Miguel
through an open hatchway. “Arius, lubricate that damn winch! What did I tell you?”
The three-ton lift on deck smoked and squealed ominously. His fifteen-year-old nephew, Arius, waved to him noncommittally. The boy was a good deal younger than most of the equipment down there. And seemed half as smart.
Cruz moved to the railing and leaned over. “Damnit, now!”
Down on deck a half-dozen Filipino crewmen scurried about, two of them guiding a basket net bulging with yellowfin tuna as it lifted up from a purse seine net drawn along the starboard side of the aging trawler. Blisters and tears of rust were visible all about the boat, but Cruz was confident his vessel was strong where it mattered. It had to be. Or at least he prayed it was. They were a thousand miles from the nearest landfall—and that was intentional. Away from all prying eyes except the Lord who watched over them all.
And today the Lord had delivered his bounty. Jesus and the Saints had smiled upon them. Cruz kissed the gold crucifix from around his neck as he looked down on the school of tuna thrashing within the purse seine net. Not bigeyes but yellowfin. “Thank you, my Lord.” Just like the old days.
He’d be able to repay some debts. Maybe service the boat. Maybe pay some people. Bribe some people. It was a long list.
Things had been hell since the WCPF Commission had closed high seas pockets one, two, and three near the Philippines, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. Overfishing or not, the Nauru Agreement had well and truly screwed him. He had bills to pay, and his bills were the type that came looking for him with a knife when he was late.
Cruz stared down into the net, trying to calculate his end. The “net of the nets,” as Lolo used to call it. The
San Miguel
’s hold was only a quarter filled, and this catch might bring it up to thirty or thirty-five percent. He started roughing out capacity figures for his family’s ancient trawler—mentally removing a portion to account for leaks and pump problems. No good filling her to the gunwales if they went to the bottom in rough seas on the way back. Then there was the extra cost of fuel and food from the length of this journey—the repairs they had to make at Fiji. The bribes to make sure no one reported them.
And then transshipment of the catch to an Indonesian trawler in midocean to hide the catch’s origin. The Indonesian’s cut, too.
Cruz shook his head in worry. What sort of world was this where even good fortune was stressful? But he shouldn’t be ungrateful. The good Lord had provided because the Lord helped those who helped themselves.
He would never have gone out this far, but with all the aircraft and fast boats looking for “illegal” fishing trawlers like his own—and what did that mean exactly, “illegal”? As if fishing God’s ocean could ever be illegal! The eastern high seas pocket was the only way to get away with it, and the risks and expenses just kept piling high. He’d had a recurring nightmare of drowning, and his sister told him it was debt he was drowning in, not water. That sounded about right.
But looking down into the purse seine as another load of tuna came up from it, he nodded to himself. The risk was paying off. He could keep the business going another season. He must. He had to. If the engines didn’t have a major problem. If Greenpeace stayed the hell away from him. If he didn’t get any major fines. If he greased the right palms. So many ifs. A thousand generations had fished the sea, and he was damned if anyone would drive him to poverty on the land.
Cruz glanced up at gathering clouds in the distance. Weird clouds. They were like a massive smoke ring miles across and miles in the air, towering over them.
One of the crewmen shouted up to him and pointed at the gathered clouds. “Benigno!”
He nodded back. “Let me worry about the weather. Just get those fish in the holds.” He knew there was no severe weather predicted for this region of ocean—and nothing had been on the satellite images this morning.
Cruz stepped back into the control house as his taciturn second mate, Matapang, entered from the far hatchway. “Mat, where’ve you been? I sent for you fifteen minutes ago.”
“Can’t just stop what I’m doing every time you call.”
“What’s going on with the port engine?”
The second mate frowned. “It’s gonna give us problems—connecting rod, I think. But it’ll hold for now.” He pointed through the windows. “Are you keeping an eye on that?”
Cruz followed his gaze toward the horizon where the clouds had suddenly turned nearly black. What appeared to be a major squall line had materialized a couple of miles away in the last few seconds. “Heavenly Father!”
The men on deck were now shouting and pointing at the looming clouds.
Cruz had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t behaving like a storm. It was behaving like a . . . like some sort of mini-typhoon—although there didn’t even appear to be heavy seas. It was all in the sky, as if a massive hammer were coming down onto an anvil of sea. He could actually watch the clouds circling in real time, reaching up into the stratosphere and turning blacker by the second. “What is that?”
Lightning coursed through the clouds ominously. Followed by rumbling thunder.
Matapang walked over to the far side of the bridge and looked down. “We need to release that net and get under way.”
“The hell we do! There’s four million pesos of tuna in that net.”
“Then tie it off with buoys.”
Cruz couldn’t help himself. He got right up in his second mate’s face—the man was half a head shorter than him and thinner. “Shut your mouth! We lose that net and those fish in rough seas, and I might as well not bother to make it back.”
“Your debts aren’t my debts, Benigno. You’re not going to kill us all because—”
Cruz raised his fist. “Shut your mouth, or I will shut it for you.”
The sailors on deck were all shouting now.
Cruz and Matapang glanced forward, reluctant to take their eyes off each other.
But what they saw beyond the bow made them forget everything. Somehow something colossal was rising up out of the ocean. No, that wasn’t even the way to describe it—it was as though the ocean were rising up into a vast hill, lifting up like a single great wave. And yet this wave didn’t move anywhere but up, rising into the sky as the hill began to grow into a looming cone.
Cruz crossed himself as the shadow of it fell across them all.
Matapang dropped a wrench that he’d been secretly holding behind his back, and then he ran out to the railing, where he shouted down at the crew. “Release the net! Get ready to make way!”
The sailors awoke from their stupor—staring at the impossible sight a mile off their bow—and they began scurrying around to set loose their only good net. Cruz watched their preparations with almost as much horror as what he saw unfolding in the sea ahead of them. Almost. For if truth be told, the rising mountain of ocean put the very fear of God into him. He started whispering as he clutched and kissed his crucifix.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done . . .”
Matapang ran back into the control house. “Stop praying and start closing hatchways!”
Cruz shot a glance forward as a deep roar came to all their ears, and he immediately thought the mountain of water had started to come tumbling down onto them. But instead, the sea was starting to rush into a reverse vortex, pulling them sideways—and upward into the sky.
Lightning flashed again. Thunder boomed.
Cruz kept praying as his gaze kept following the sea up, up into the clouds. It wasn’t cresting. No, instead, it was still rising, like a volcanic cone of ocean a quarter mile across lifting upward, spinning around its center. The entire crew had stopped what they were doing again, most of them collapsing onto their knees, crossing themselves. Praying.
What was it? Cruz had never heard of anything like this in all the centuries of seafaring lore. There was a thousand-foot-tall tower of solid water, the black, swirling clouds parting to accept it.
The ocean was
pouring
into the sky.
And now the outer edge of that slope finally reached the
San Miguel
itself. The trawler started listing backward onto its stern as the angle of sea beneath it rose.
Cruz gripped the wheel. “We need to turn about! Start the engines!”
Matapang clawed his way to the windows. “They’re still trying to cut away the net!”
Cruz was past caring about his financial ruin. A bizarre tsunami unlike anything he’d ever heard of loomed in front of them, and if they didn’t turn, they’d be swamped. They’d never crest this titanic monster. They were going to slip down-wave by their stern, and Cruz knew all too well the leaks and weaknesses there. The bilge pumps would themselves be drowned, along with the engines, as the rusted stern hull caved in.
But something even stranger was happening. Rather than feeling himself falling backward, Cruz felt both himself and the ship falling forward, upward—as though he stood upside down at the edge of a great hole. A hole in the sky.
“Dear God! What’s happening?” He looked to Matapang, who was silently moving his mouth, unable to find words.
And then the
San Miguel
starting moving forward, “up” the face of the wave that now reached high into the sky. It was a five-thousand-foot mountain of water roaring up, into, and past the clouds.
Cruz willed his knotted hands off the tiller and clawed on handholds to reach the bridge hatchway.
Cruz looked out the hatchway behind them and could see that they were already hundreds of feet above sea level. They’d apparently been falling upward into the sky for some minutes already. He pulled the hatchway closed and rammed the bolt home. A glance to port. “Mat!”
Matapang awoke from his daze, pulled the port doorway closed.
Outside, on deck, he could see that a rising gale was rolling over them. And yet there was no wake or bow wave around the boat. They were moving along
with
the water at a speed of at least twenty knots—far faster than this old boat had ever gone. Winches and nets flailed about as the men gave up on cutting the net free and instead tried crawling in through the nearest hatchway. The net as well seemed to move alongside them. They weren’t moving relative to the water but with it.
The steep slope of ocean now filled his forward view. Wind was howling around them as they moved faster and faster.
And then Cruz felt his body grow lighter and lighter until finally he was in free fall, along with everything else in the cabin. “Dear God, what’s happening?”
Matapang stared as if comatose at a void that spread before their boat, and sailors, fish, and equipment fell skyward, the roar of water filling their ears. The sea itself began to come apart into a turbulent mass of white water, and the temperature dropped rapidly. Their breath condensed into fog as they panted in fear.
Until finally they stared straight into the heavens, falling upward along with a thousand Niagara Falls—the roar filled their ears as terror gripped their uncomprehending minds.
• • •
“A fishing trawler got caught up in the test, Mr. Director.”
The voice came over the intercom into the observation gallery. Graham Hedrick sat surveying a control room lined with thin film displays and workstations—most of it AI-automated but not all. There were still a few scientists down there manning workstations. A towering holographic satellite image spread before him on a central dais. It was focused on a broad expanse of the South Pacific, where a supernatural funnel of water rose from the sea, pouring into the upper atmosphere. The view from space was spectacular, but then it was always spectacular. It was the test results that needed to be spectacular.
“Do we power down Kratos, Mr. Director?”
Hedrick frowned in irritation. “We’re not going to interrupt a billion-dollar test because some pirate fishing boat wandered onto my test range. This section of ocean was supposed to be clear of shipping—whose responsibility was that?”
A pause.
“An AI, from strain R-536, sir.”
“Damnit.” It was immensely unfulfilling reprimanding AIs. They always had a built-in you’re-the-one-who-created-me excuse. “Find out which team evolved R-536 and where else it’s been deployed. This was sloppy work—not checking for unregistered vessels. Give it and its progeny a red ticket.”
“Understood, Mr. Director. What about the fishing trawler?”
“Jam its distress calls.” Hedrick cut the connection, then brought up his project leads onto several holographic screens. “What’s our telemetry look like?”
The elder of the two scientists spoke first.
“Kratos is maintaining ninety-four percent power with no discernible fade. We’re projecting a gravity field a mile in diameter from an altitude of twenty-two thousand, two hundred thirty-six miles. Displacing approximately four hundred billion—”
“Maximum acceleration?”
Both scientists were suddenly quiet, waiting for the other to talk.
He stared hard at them. “What is our maximum acceleration?”
This finally shook an answer out of the older one.
“Zero-point-nine-eight Earth gravities.”
Hedrick looked to the younger scientist. “So there was no increase in the excitation of the boson field? Mass remained constant?”
The scientists exchanged looks.
“Can you please explain how all these changes made no difference? This is where we started.”
“Our changes may not have increased gravitation, but Kratos is far bigger than anything we’ve—”
The elder scientist cut in.
“We’re still evaluating the quantum physics of this technology, Mr. Director. There are competing theories as to why Mr. Grady’s apparatus works at all. It’s possible that what it’s creating is actually a distortion in space-time, not a manipulation of gravity. Even the Varuna AI hasn’t come up with answers.”
“Not good enough. It’s been years since we harvested this technology, and we still don’t even understand it. It’s not enough that we reflect gravity. We need to be able to create gravity from energy. We are no closer to doing that today than we were three years ago.”