All Fall Down: The Chronicles of Altor, page 30
She wasn’t quite tall enough to see over the top, but looked down through the splinters of wood and saw where the behemoth was. She stood on her tiptoes and dropped the torch over the top.
It hit the Caterpillar, but bounced harmlessly away.
She closed her eyes, envisioned what she had seen below her and moved two feet to her right. She stood as tall as she could again and dropped the second torch over.
It landed right in the pool of gasoline on top of the steel armor over the cab. It lit in a whoosh.
It didn’t immediately stop the progress of the machine, which backed up for another run at the gate.
The fire spread fast, so within seconds, the entire machine was enveloped in flames.
The machine continued to go in reverse, back down the trail. Seconds later, screams came from inside the cab as the occupants were parboiled. The fire spread to the engine and burned hot enough that the huge motor shut down.
The Caterpillar stalled fifty feet below the gate.
A steel-lined door swung open far enough that two men could squeeze out. Their skin was peeling off their faces from the incredible heat. They collapsed and fell forward onto the dirt road.
June turned around and shouted below. “It’s dead. Get your guns and get up here.”
First four, then six, then ten men came pounding up the ladder and took their places along the catwalk.
It was a bloody battle for the next thirty minutes, but the Covington army was dispirited that their D-9 had been ruined. When a dozen of their people had died, they retreated back down the path.
“Do you want us to chase them down?” a man asked June.
“That’s enough dead for now. Get a team and go help the people in the trenches.
June clambered down as quick as possible and found Ric sitting up looking dazed from his fall. “Stay there,” she said. “I’m going to check on your father.”
Kane was still on his back, but he was breathing. The bullet had hit him just below his shoulder on the right side. Two women were already attending to him.
“We’ve sent for the stretcher. We’ll get him inside and let Dr. Loomis decide what needs to be done for him.”
“I’m okay,” Kane said, trying to smile, but failing. “You did it, Juniper. You stopped them.”
“We stopped them for now. I’m going to check on Ric. We’ll come find you.”
THE TOWN WAS DIVIDED as to how to respond to the attack from Covington.
Towns are almost always divided over any and every issue.
There were people who wanted to hide behind the wall, having proven that they could withstand even a serious attack.
There were those who wanted to immediately spring into action and attack Covington while they were weakened.
And there were those who simply wanted to wait for another harsh winter to weaken them further, then attack them and take them out.
As Kane had established when he had blown up the bridge a year earlier, New City was not a democracy.
Kane survived the wound he got when he was shot, but his recovery was long. He didn’t bounce back and have the same vitality he’d had before.
That left a vacuum in New City and there were a number of men who were happy to step up and fill it.
Instead, just as it had been when June had made the speech that moved people from Covington to New City, she took on the leadership mantle. She listened to people from all viewpoints, then made her decision.
She saw the wisdom in just staying behind the wall, and she also saw the reasoning behind letting the winter do its inevitable work and then attacking.
She didn’t choose either of those paths. She decided to attack.
When she met with the people she trusted most, June said, “I look at how many they brought with them on that attack. It wasn’t many—perhaps thirty people, and we killed more than a dozen of them. They relied on the strength of that machine they built to take us down. When it failed, they knew they were already beat. The fact that they attacked us at all shows that they knew they don’t have enough to effectively handle the winter.”
June looked at the men in the room and said, “We attack now, while there are still useful supplies in Covington. I believe we can take them with minimal losses, and I have a plan as to what to do with Covington after that.”
They didn’t delay, but launched the attack the next day. The resistance in Covington was paper-thin.
When June saw how ineffective the defense was that they put up, she called for a cease-fire and took to her bullhorn once again.
“We will give you one chance to escape with your lives. If you leave now, we will let you go. You have thirty minutes. Anyone left behind after that time expires will be dead before dark.”
The few people left in Covington took June at her word and left.
“You’re making a mistake,” one of the New City men who had disagreed with her said. “They’ll go down the road a few miles, then turn around and we’ll have to do this all again.”
“No, they won’t,” June said. She dispatched half a dozen good men to stand guard over each of the three ways into Covington, then formed a work force to haul anything that might ever be useful to New City up the hill and through the gate. Garden tools. Copper wiring from houses. Plumbing supplies ripped from under houses and sinks. Glass windows. Refrigerators that could be used for parts when theirs broke down. Wheelbarrows. Chemicals from the feed store.
The prize was another few cows, and more importantly, a bull. Not enough to build a thriving herd, but perhaps enough to get started.
It took five days for New City to strip whatever they thought they might need from Covington.
It took less than twelve hours to burn the remaining buildings to the ground.
She pulled the guards from the roads into Covington and instead nailed up a sign at each of the entrances.
There is nothing here. No shelter. No food. Only death.
June was the last person to leave what had once been Covington. As she and Ric walked up the road to New City, the first snowflakes began to fall.
It would be another harsh winter, but they were ready.
Chapter Forty-Two
Conversations with Janus, Part Three:
Alastair Struan
Alastair Struan sat in a café, enjoying an exceptional cup of coffee. He was a man who was used to the finer things in life. He had been pleasantly surprised in his first year in Altor to realize that he wasn’t having to lower his standards much.
When he had made the spur-of-the-moment decision to go inside the dome, he thought he might be faced with meals out of brown boxes and bottled water for the rest of his life.
That had turned out not to be the case at all.
There were a number of restaurants in Altor, ranging from fast food burgers, chicken, and pizza to family-style restaurants and a fine dining establishment. And of course there was the rotating restaurant that could be anything. There was always the option of having whatever you wanted sent to your apartment or ordering ingredients and cooking for yourself.
Alastair had never been much of a cook. Why would he be when he had servants standing by around the clock? But in Altor, where he found the need to fill the time, he decided to teach himself. He found that the AI that was on call twenty-four hours a day made an excellent instructor. He had started simply, but over the past year had worked his way up to making wonderful sauces and gravies.
Still, he liked to get out and about. To familiarize himself with Altor and to learn about the people who were in it. He was not surprised to find that most of the residents were normal people, albeit normal people who likely possessed unusual intellect or skills.
When he had agreed to go into the dome, he was aware that he might have been signing his own death warrant. He wasn’t worried that Quinn Starkweather might discover he had a spy in his midst, but Alastair had already put the attack on Altor into motion. He found it ironic that in his quest to tear society completely down, he might have ordered a strike on what had become his new home.
That attack had been repelled—though barely—and Alastair lived on.
He was always a curious man. At sixty-eight, he didn’t believe he knew everything there was to know, especially with such a rich learning environment as Altor.
Because of his age, he wasn’t assigned to any job. Instead, when he went through orientation there, he was told that there were a number of volunteer positions he could fill if he wanted, but that he wasn’t required to do so.
His first-contact liaison had looked at his silver-white hair and said, “Feel free to just relax. You’ve earned it.”
Alastair had volunteered for a number of things. He used his knowledge to serve as a docent in the Altor Museum of Fine Art. The Museum didn’t actually have any of the works by the masters, of course, but it was able to create perfect hologram reproductions of anything it wanted. It had always been an area of curiosity for him and he was amused to find that a number of pieces that he’d had in his own collection were now reproduced here.
Alastair was aware that the AI could have served as the docent easily, creating a curator hologram that flitted from station to station, leading tours and answering questions. He knew that everything he did in Altor fell under the category of busy work. But he enjoyed the work and so continued to volunteer.
He also worked a few shifts each week in the library, volunteering to lead the story time hour with children. Again, a job that could have been easily outsourced to the AI, but Alastair had never had children, so he enjoyed interacting with them.
The rest of the time he spent improving his mind and skills. He had become CEO of his first company straight out of college, thanks to his father. That started him on a long, successful life path, but kept him busy essentially every waking minute. He learned how to manage money, how to form and run a corporation, how to sit on advisory boards, but he never read the classics.
He had initially thought that going from sitting on the board of half a dozen different corporations, while also being the de facto leader of The Fifteen, to having all day on his own, he might be bored silly.
Instead, he enjoyed his walks through the domed city, his volunteering, and, most of all, reading.
As he sat at the outdoor table at the café, he was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on his tablet.
He laid the tablet down, sipped his coffee, and looked around. The café was next to a park, and there was a magnificent Southern Magnolia tree in full bloom. The tree was mature and looked like it was at least seventy-five years old. There were birds hopping from branch to branch. He also knew that if the tree was a holo, then the birds were too. It didn’t matter, though. The birdsong was just as sweet and the gentle swaying of the Magnolia branches were just as soothing.
He stood and walked along the winding path. He made an effort to keep track of what season it actually was, because the dome presented itself as whatever season someone—whether the AI or Quinn Starkweather, Alastair didn’t know—wanted it to be.
It was mid-October. The dome had been closed—with Alastair inside—for fourteen months. It had seemed to go by in a blink to him.
He stopped by the library to have a conversation with the librarian. It was a holographic presentation, of course, but Alastair had found that he enjoyed talking to the holo that called itself Miss Lilly. He found that unlike what had been billed as Artificial Intelligences earlier, which had really only spat out dredged answers from an established source, Lilly seemed to think for itself.
It could extrapolate ideas that arose in a conversation and respond to tangents with new concepts of its own.
After his discussion with Lilly this afternoon, Alastair left with a handful of new books on his tablet, including Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Lilly had promised interesting future conversations that would link those books with Gatsby.
He shook his head as he left the library. If someone had told him a year earlier that he would be choosing his reading material so he could discuss it with a non-real person, he wouldn’t have believed it.
Did the fact that Alastair was actually enjoying his life inside the dome mean that he would choose not to sabotage it, given the opportunity? Unlikely.
When he had agreed to go with Nyx to Altor, he was not given the opportunity to pack anything to take with him. However, he did have a special watch on his wrist when he left. At his orientation, he had been told he could keep it, but that he would have to wear the band that he was given in its place.
He had complied, but had continued to wear his watch on his other wrist. Because he was older, everyone in Altor seemed to think it was just the affectation of an older man who couldn’t give up old habits.
What no one beside Alastair knew was that there was something special in that watch. A virus that his best programmer had told him could corrupt any computer system in the world. He couldn’t be sure that would apply to the incredible AI that ran Altor, but it might.
He thought about what Altor would be like without a properly functioning AI. It would be chaos. He estimated that well over half the work done in the dome was handled through that system.
For now, that was his secret, and it was the reason that watch never left his wrist.
As he made his way from the library to his home, he didn’t need to push a code or pass his wristband over a sensor to be allowed into the elevator or into his apartment. It was all done automatically—a small part of all that work that the AI did in Altor.
He stepped into his apartment, which was just like every other apartment in this building. The fact that he had been a billionaire right up until the Rage Wars ended that status for everyone had no bearing here in Altor. He had accepted that when he had decided to enter the dome.
It didn’t bother Alastair. Although he had the best of everything in his previous life, it wasn’t something that his self-worth was tied into. If it had been, he would never have been the force behind The Fifteen’s plan to fan the flames of the Rage Wars.
In any case, he had everything he needed or wanted in this apartment. He learned early on that the long wall in his unit could be turned into a screen that showed whatever he chose. Most days, he simply had it show the view from one of the cameras outside the dome. It felt a little like he had the same kind of million-dollar view that he’d had in the many condominiums and homes he had owned.
Alastair sat on the couch and opened the Altor equivalent of the daily newspaper on his tablet. It was laughable in many ways. There wasn’t very much real news in Altor, unless you considered “Sewage systems continue to function perfectly” as a scintillating headline. The daily paper was mostly made up of what could kindly be called human interest stories. A baby born, an elderly person discovers they love to paint and are good at it, or perhaps a sweet story of falling in love in the dome.
None of that interested Alastair, but he still read it every day, trying to glean whatever useful information might be hiding among the fluff. If nothing else, what always interested him was what wasn’t being said.
A movement caught the corner of his eye and he noticed that his wall screen had shifted from the outside view of the desert landscape to an all blue background. A moment later, a face appeared. To be more accurate, two faces appeared, but they were on the same head. One looked to the left, the other to the right.
Alastair immediately made the connection. “Janus, I presume.” He had no clue that this was actually the AI’s real name, but he recognized the classic configuration.
The face on the right turned to look straight at Alastair, smiling. The effect was slightly unnerving.
“Exactly! I’m so glad I brought you inside.”
“I’ve often wondered why that was.”
“Why I brought you inside? Oh, that’s as simple and complex as anything in life. I have a multitude of plans for you. In some of them, you do nothing. In some, you are integral. There are many in between. It depends on how things develop.”
“The face you are showing me now is the forward-face, the one that should be looking into the future.”
“There was a time when looking into the future was easy.”
A realization dawned on Alastair and he smiled. “That’s how Starkweather knew to build this dome. You told him this was coming.”
The head of Janus took a small bow. Then, a sly look crept over its face. “I know who you are, you know.”
Alastair knew that the AI before him had access to his heart rate and blood pressure at all times, so he did his best to control both. He also didn’t make the mistake of launching into a series of denials. He had been through too many pressure-packed situations to make that mistake.
Instead, he kept his face neutral and waited.
“I like you,” Janus said. “Which might be considered odd, since you tried to destroy me and everything I have created. I am not petty like humans, though. As long as you can be useful to me, I don’t care about past transgressions.”
Again, Alastair didn’t reply, but he was finding it more difficult to control his breathing and heartbeat.
The face of Janus moved to the side of the screen and a series of images played. One showed Alastair stepping out of his chauffeured Bentley at one of the meeting places of The Fifteen. Another showed the inside of the meeting room, with Alastair standing at the head of the table, passing out white and black marbles.
There should have been no way those images existed. Alastair and the rest of The Fifteen had gone to great lengths to see to it that there were no electronics in those rooms. And yet, there was the evidence that they had failed, as big as life up on the wall.
“Thank you for not denying your role. That would just be a waste of time. I knew who you were when I put your name on the list to come inside. The only uncertainty was whether you would accept or not.”
Alastair cleared his throat. “And now what?” He knew that was the only question he had left. This AI, this Janus, could not be dissuaded that he had played no part in the proceedings, so trying to prove that was futile. The only question that remained was what it would do with him.
