'Yes,' Michael said. 'I think we're advancing through a vast artificial intelligence and watching the play of the neurons. We're inside it, all right.'

  'Inside it? Zapata asked, looking fearful for the first time.

  Yes,' Michael said. 'We're advancing through a huge brain and it knows that we're here.'

  'Jesus Christ,' the Cowboy said.

  They advanced in silence now, each trying to deal with his own emotions, and Michael found himself

  glancing constantly at Bonnie and feeling concern for her. He didn't want to think of what could happen to her when they reached the far end.

  'Fuck, man,' Zapata said, 'I feel dizzy. I think I'm gonna fall down. Oh, shit, I won't make iti'

  Then his knees gave way beneath him and he staggered drunkenly and collapsed, his weapon clattering noisily on the

  floor of the tunnel as he rolled over and came to rest on his back, beside one of the many lifeless cyborgs. Gumshoe knelt down to check his pulse and found, to his relief, that it was still beating, though too slowly for good health. He also noticed that Zapata was breathing heavily and was covered in sweat.

  'He's alive,' he said, straightening up again, 'but he seems to be in a bad way. How do you guys feel?'

  'I feel like shit,' Ben confessed. 'In fact, I feel the way Zapata was feeling just before he collapsed. I don't think I'll make it, either.'

  'I feel a bit weird,' Satchmo said, 'but I don't feel that bad. I can make it. I know I can. I ain't going back, brother.'

  'What about you, Cowboy?'

  Tm finding it hard to concentrate. A lot of memories are crowding in. My wife and my kids, departed friends — they keep popping clearly into my head like they ain't done in years. Apart from that I'm okay, though.'

  'Michael?'

  'I feel perfectly fine. I'm concentrating on the energy source and getting some kind of feedback. I think it comes from Wilson. I think we're in some sort of contact and Wilson, in some form or another, is waiting for us at the end of the line. I fully intend getting there.'

  'And you, Bonnie?'

  Bonnie smiled at him, warming his heart. 'Women are stronger than men,' she informed him, 'and this woman is stronger than most. Besides, I'm not going to leave you two guys — where you go, I go.'

  Gumshoe nodded, glanced down at the unconscious Zapata, then turned back to Ben. 'Are you willing to stay here with Zapata until we come back?'

  I don't think I've a choice,' Ben replied, though his disappointment was clear and acute. Yeah, I'll stay here.' He glanced at the dead cyborgs all around him and added: 'I guess we 11 be safe enough here.'

  'Looks like it,' Gumshoe said.

  Ben sank to the floor beside Zapata and double-checked the unconscious man's pulse. 'It's still beating too slowly, but not dangerously slow, so I think we'll both be okay if we don't go any farther. The best of luck, guys.'

  Gumshoe nodded sombrely at him, then turned to the others and pointed with his index finger along the tunnel. 'Let's keep going,' he said.

  As they advanced into the light, stepping around more dead cyborgs, the Cowboy repeatedly checked his wristwatch to ascertain how far they had walked and approximately where they might be. When they came to where the tunnel turned away at a sharp angle, he estimated that they were under the Potomac, under the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and were now heading obliquely for Arlington and the grounds of the Pentagon.

  'It's going where we'd expected,' he said. 'To the Pentagon basement.'

  'Good,' Gumshoe said, though he didn't feel at all good about it. In fact, he felt a growing fear at the thought of being reunited with his parents in their nightmarish condition and of having to put them out of their misery. Normally this kind of fear would have been buried in outrage, under his mortal hatred of the cyborgs. But now, as he advanced along the tunnel, stepping over what appeared to be an endless sea of dead cyborgs, he was surprised to find that his hatred was dissipating, his outrage subsiding, to be replaced by a deep sadness and even pity for the cyborgs, being reminded by their dead bodies that they were, in fact, human beings, albeit surgically mutated, who had doubtless suffered great pain, both physical and emotional, when being turned into what they had become.

  If he had any rage left — and if so, it was deeply buried — it was reserved for that individual who had originally created the cyborgs, who had built the first flying saucers, using both constructs for the purposes of scientific advancement no matter how high the cost in human suffering. Yes, when Gumshoe

  thought of Wilson his buried rage flickered. And when he glanced sideways at Bonnie, his first and only love, unconsum-mated though that passion was, he recalled that she, too, had lost her family to the cyborgs and that the subsequent ruination of her childhood hopes was therefore Wilson's doing. For this reason — and because of his own parents — Gumshoe, despite his sudden unexpected sympathy for the cyborgs, was able to cling to his healthy outrage and keep control of his fear.

  As they came to the end of the long tunnel and entered the vast basement of the Pentagon, Michael concentrated on Wilson, concentrated even harder, and the feeling that he was inhabiting Wilson — or that Wilson was inhabiting him — grew constantly stronger. Indeed, he felt that he and Wilson were in some kind of communication, though not yet actually speaking to each other. Like the Cowboy, he was starting to have flashes of what seemed like recollection, but in his case they were not recollections from his own past, but from the past of someone else altogether. The scenes came and went, too quickly for him to grasp fully, but they lingered in the back of his mind and were gradually taking shape. Michael tried to shut them out, to think of Freedom Bay instead, but this only served to break his concentration, which he knew could be dangerous. Accepting the visitations (for thus did he view them) he stepped with the others — with Gumshoe and Bonnie and Satchmo and the Cowboy — into the immense Pentagon basement and beheld a scene that defied imagination.

  This was Wilson's domain.

  Chapter Forty-two

  There, spread out before them, squatting cross-legged on the immense floor in that magical incandescence filled with darting nodes of light, were hundreds of Men in Black and similar numbers of the walking dead, male and female. Most of the cyborgs had seemingly died off in the tunnel —

  certainly none were visible here — and the vast ceiling and floor and high walls were, like those in the White House basement, covered with webs of hair-thin wires and innumerable silicon chips, with the nodes of light darting from one to the other to render those walls, floor and ceiling insubstantial and to form what looked like a vast, ever-changing, star-filled cosmos.

  The spectacular beauty of this effect was, however, defiled by what could be discerned clearly through the haze of dazzling light, beyond and above the bowed heads of the hundreds squatting on the vast floor: row upon row of steel-frame beds with surgically mutated humans lying upon them. Some were swathed in bloody bandages. Some had severed limbs and gleaming prosthetic replacements. Some had stomachs sliced open and vital organs missing. Some had faces that had been peeled right off the bone and replaced with membrane-thin metal masks. Some were breathing through tubes and defecating into

  plastic bags. Some were no more than torsos wired up to computer consoles. Some were half human, half animal while

  others, having survived the first terrible stages, were now on their way to being converted into cyborgs.

  There were hundreds of beds, hundreds of bloody groaning humans, and above them, in wire cages strung from the ceiling, were creatures so crazed by the physical changes wrought upon them —

  recognizable neither as humans nor as any kind of known animal — that they were clawing at the bars with mutated bloody hands or frantically banging their heads against them, trying to kill themselves.

  Last but not least, along a nearby section of wall were illuminated glass display cases in which the severed heads of the more famous cyborg abductees were on display. These included the US President and his entire family; the ^/ice President and his family; the elderly Queen of England and most of the British Royal Family; and a wide variety of other former world leaders. All in all, then, though mercifully hazed by the incandescence and slightly obscured by the glistening webs of shooting nodes of light, or neurons, this place looked like a basement of hell.

  Bonnie screamed at the sight of it.

  While the men in the group were still frozen by disbelief or horror, Bonnie had screamed instinctively, shocked mindless by what she was seeing. And yet her screaming, which reverberated around the vast basement, did not cause even one of those hundreds of bowed heads to move. It did, however, jerk those around her out of their dazed immobility: Gumshoe was the first to reach out to her, pulling her into his arms and pressing her face against his shoulder. Michael saw him doing this and felt only gratitude. Then he turned to the front again, trying to define what he was witnessing, and realized that the hundreds of clones and walking dead were facing, albeit with heads bowed and as if they were unconscious, an even brighter light, a gigantic luminous crescent that appeared to emanate upwards from a raised dais at the far end of the basement to send its silvery striations beaming into the general haze of shimmering white incandescence.

  A single man was stretched out on a table on that dais, his face turned up to the ceiling, wires emerging from the stereotaxic skullcap he was wearing and running up into the crescent of light and gradually melting into it.

  Though Michael could not see into the dazzling centre of that light, in which millions of fireflies were frantically at play, he knew that it was the heart of a giant neuron computer, a vast intelligence, expanding every second by feeding off the brains of the hundreds bowed before it. More importantly, it was taking into itself, by electronic means, the singular, brilliant, cold intelligence of the man on the bed.

  'Wilson!' Michael exclaimed involuntarily.

  Gumshoe had been pressing his cheek to Bonnie's bowed head, but he jerked his own head up as soon as he heard Michael's outburst. He followed Michael's gaze and saw what Michael was seeing — the neuron-filled heart of that great artificial intelligence, a thinking machine — and then he saw the man who was wired to it, transferring his thoughts to it.

  'Oh, my God!' Gumshoe exclaimed as Bonnie, recovering slighdy from her shock, raised her head from his shoulder. 'That's him. That's Wilson?

  'Jesus,' Bonnie said. 'Christ!'

  'What the hell's going on here?' the Cowboy said. 'Where the hell do we start?'

  'Those Men in Black and those walking dead on the floor,' Satchmo said, 'seem to be in some kind of a trance. The Long Hair's screaming didn't waken a single one of 'em. They don't seem to even know that

  we're here, so we've got the run of the joint. We can do what we want to do.'

  'What's that?' the Cowboy asked laconically.

  'I have to make contact with Wilson,' Michael said, 'and find out what he's up to. That's my first priority.'

  'And my first priority,' Gumshoe said grimly, 'is to find my folks and put them out of their misery.'

  He was nearly in tears at the very thought, but Michael had no

  time to be sympathetic or let anything, even Gumshoe's pain, deflect him from his task. 'We came here to put an end to the reign of the cyborgs and that means we go to Wilson first. Now, come on, let's go.'

  'But my parents—'

  'They have to wait,' Michael said harshly, surprised by the tone of his own voice. 'We have to get to Wilson first, before he completes what I think he's doing. That may be more helpful to your parents than simply shutting them off. Now come on, damn it, let's go!'

  Gumshoe looked stunned, but he rallied quickly enough. 'You're no better than that fucking Wilson,' he said. 'The work always comes first.'

  'Don't let your heart rule your head,' Michael said, 'or you might make a mistake.'

  'That's what Wilson said, Mike.'

  It was Bonnie who had said that and her words cut to the quick. But Michael, even as he flushed with guilt, said, 'Shut up, Bonnie. I'm going.'

  He started forward on his own, thinking, Wilson has inhabited me, but convinced that what he was doing was right and that he had no other choice. The others followed, Satchmo on one side of him, the Cowboy on the other, Gumshoe and Bonnie trailing behind more reluctandy, both looking grim.

  Stepping between the many people squatting cross-legged on the floor — the Men in Black — the clones — and the unfortunate walking dead, none of them now walking, all seemingly in a trance or perhaps drained of mental energy — they held their weapons at the ready and kept their eyes peeled.

  In the case of Satchmo and the Cowboy, they were watching the clones and the walking dead, waiting for one to wake up and maybe attack them. But Gumshoe and Bonnie were clearly looking elsewhere: at the hundreds of beds with their bloody, anguished victims and at the even more unfortunate cases in the cages strung from the ceiling. Bonnie was looking for her parents and her beloved younger sister, missing so many years, and Gumshoe, who couldn't clearly recall exactly where he had seen his parents, was dreading the thought that they might have been further mutated and put into a cage with the other lost souls.

  Luckily, neither he nor Bonnie saw anyone that they recognized, though both of them were close to being traumatized by the time they reached the front of the mass of unconscious people and were approaching the great sphere of light in which millions of artificially created neurons were in frantic motion. Beneath that glorious, almost magical, vision they saw again the man on the bed.

  Though the stereotaxic skullcap hid the colour of his hair, he was clearly in his late thirties or early forties and had a pale, unrevealing, handsome face. In that shimmering, incandescent light, he looked almost angelic.

  He also looked like an older version of Michael.

  'Wilson,' Michael said, though he hadn't planned to speak, had certainly not rehearsed the words and was still trying to come to terms with the fact that both shocked and exhilarated him: that the man on

  the bed was his mirror image. 'You called and I came. I think you know who I am.'

  'Yes,' Wilson said.

  Michael heard that single word resounding through his head even though he knew that Wilson — at least, the Wilson on the bed — had not uttered a word. He closed his eyes because a bridge had been crossed and at last he and Wilson, virtually his double, could communicate. They did so now without speaking.

  'Why did you call me?' Michael asked. 'Why did you bring me all this way? I know it wasn't an accident.'

  'No, it wasn't an accident. You were called here for a purpose. You were trained in mental telepathy, as I knew you would be, and I read your mind throughout the years of that training and sometimes let you read mine, though you were not to know that. You were trained in Freedom Bay, which once was mine and is where I died. But when my people extracted strands of my DNA for future use, they extracted more, at my personal instructions, than were needed for my own cloning.

  Those DNA strands were preserved for twenty years until your time had come.'

  Gumshoe looked on, stupefied He had met Wilson before, in this very same nightmarish basement, but the aftershock of his terror had obviously blinded him to the physical similarity between Wilson and Michael when he, Gumshoe, had subse-quendy met Michael for the first time in the Be-Bop-a-Lula club. He was not so blind this time, though he wished that he was. He saw Michael standing there, the spitting image of Wilson, albeit years younger, and he saw that Michael seemed to be in a trance and was staring, wide-eyed, at the man on the bed. That man was, of course, Wilson. Neither Wilson nor Michael had said a word so far, but Gumshoe sensed, with a deep, sure conviction, that they were reading each other's minds. The thought filled him with fear.

  'You, Michael, are a clone, in effect the only true son I have. You were cloned twenty years after my own rebirth by those — yes, Michael, those in Freedom Bay — who had no choice but to do as I commanded because I owned their minds. I did not lose Freedom Bay. It was taken over too late for that. Some of those who were flown into the colony when the Americans took it over had already been brain-implanted and programmed for my future use. Your so-called parents were mine, Michael, placed there to do my bidding; and when the time was ripe, they covertly did just that — they covertly supervised your cloning — and then brought you up as their natural son.'

  Michael felt surprisingly calm. He should have been shocked, but he was not. He realized that he had been preparing all his life for this moment and that something in the back of his head had always told him so. Now he still thought of Chloe with affection, thought of his parents the same way, but this emotion sprang out of respect, not out of blood kinship. He had always been slightly apart, always aware that he was different somehow, and now he saw that the extraordinary disciplines he had developed in Freedom Bay were due not only to Dr Branden-berg's training but to his own singular nature. He had been created for a purpose and was being used and this was as it should be. He could feel proud of this.

  'Dr Brandenberg,' Wilson continued, 'never knew about your origin, your true purpose, and neither did your parents. They did what they did because I willed it — and later, when you were successfully cloned, I wiped the knowledge of that cloning from their minds and let them think of themselves as your natural parents. Your sister Chloe is not your real sister because she was born naturally. Your so-called family was a subterfuge, Michael. Your real father is me.'

  'Why?' Michael asked, calmly accepting the truth of this, not frightened by what it implied, feeling proud of his part in it. He was not like other people, not like Gumshoe or Bonnie, and he took his pride

  from this awareness, feeling no grief at losing them. His mother and father in Freedom Bay, his sister Chloe, even Gumshoe and Bonnie, had certainly meant something to him, but now the time had come to cast them aside for the greater good. He would do so without qualms.

  'The evolution of the species,' Wilson continued. 'From the cave to the stars. This final leap cannot be made without careful preparation and I alone have been fully prepared and can now make the leap. I am leaving the Earth, my son. You will follow me in due course. Others will then follow you, but they must be prepared. I needed an heir, Michael, someone right here on Earth, someone disciplined enough, motivated enough, to be able to live with an awareness of his destiny and not be frightened by it. You, of course, are that man. You have been trained to respect your mind. You acquired some human weaknesses from friends and family in Freedom Bay, but you believe in the sanctity of the mind, in the power of the intellect when not governed by emotion, and your parapsychological training, your life of discipline and learning, has served to strengthen your faith. You are my son and disciple, my heir, and you will do what you were born and bred to do. That is why you are here.'

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51