NANOLION™: $53.99
The WiFi hub and servers rested in an enormous shallow concrete bowl the size of a football field. Curved plastic shelves were interleaved in circles throughout the room like a maze. They were filled with chunky black boxes with tiny lights flashing along their faces. Routers, servers and thick silver batteries were packed in tight arrays. Streaming from them were dense black optical lines and ropes of twisted yellow, green and blue wires, threaded together to form anaconda-sized cables that wound through the room to a central trunk. There, they coiled up the massive pillar in a helical twist and exited out into the city to take in data from the air. Thin antennae were scattered everywhere, twitching. All of it was dotted with Patent marks and ®s and ©s, warning us that the ideas of these cables and their configuration were owned.
I was instantly filled with hatred for the whole thing, like it was an enormous, poisonous oak in a fairytale, enfolded by snakes and insects. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to destroy it.
Kel, Henri and Margot fanned out. The guards were no doubt right behind us. The room hummed around me, and I unplugged a wire to see what effect it might have. Somewhere in the city, perhaps a small FiDo emerged, but I couldn’t see the effect from here. I had no idea where to begin.
Kel bit her lip. “What now?”
Henri pulled an axe from a fire safety box on the wall. You could see he was in full hero mode, ready to chop away at cables and computers, but Margot stayed his hand. “I do not want you crispy,” she said. She took the axe and shook her body, miming an electrocution.
“Speth?” Kel asked, taking up a tactical spot near the room’s main door.
Then I saw it. It was almost exactly the thing Margot said wouldn’t exist. Along one curve of wall, there was a break in the shelves and servers. An enormous metal box with a red lever labeled MAIN POWER. Turning it off wouldn’t be enough, but destroying it might. Without electricity coursing through the cables, we could chop them to bits, and how could they reprint them without their precious WiFi? The tether would be cut. The WiFi would melt away. This was what I had been looking for.
I sprinted to the lever, my heart full, my body flooded with relief and anticipation. But just as quickly, my resolve wavered. The food printers wouldn’t work without the WiFi, either. How would people eat? Beecher’s dad had worried everyone would starve.
My face crumpled. The system had us all backed into a corner. Small yellow lights pulsed all around the room as the servers ingested words and spat bills into the ether, but there was no way to stop it without potentially risking the lives of everyone we knew.
I felt the words long caught in my throat, and the silence and servitude that closed in around us. Silas Rog had laid out his plan for me, and I was not alone. He would do the same to everyone like me.
My resolve rekindled. It would be better to starve.
I pulled the lever as hard as I could. The room’s persistent hum stuttered and pitched down for just a moment. The yellow lights began to strobe, then returned to their previous blinking state. The hum redoubled and filled the room with a rising whine. From the interleaved rings of shelves, silver batteries began to kick on. Small blue pinpricks of light flicked to life and illuminated each NanoLion™ logo. The room turned cold blue with that light, and my body seemed to freeze in it, as the WiFi continued on.
“Enough,” a voice echoed above me. It was Rog. This was no voice through an intercom; he was actually here. “These batteries will last for months. Everyone will remain connected. You will stop—now!”
But I would not stop.
“Everyone is going to know you’re a fraud!” Henri shouted.
“Slander,” Rog shot back.
Henri was looking upward. Did he see Rog?
“You think people are going to fall for your mind-reading machines?” Henri cried out.
“What matters,” Rog said, “is the Law.” I could hear his smile. “If the Law proclaims them accurate, they are accurate.”
“Look,” Kel whispered, looking up with her eyes.
Rog stood on a low-railed platform jutting out two stories above us. He was flanked by the brothers who had killed Sam, and beside him stood Saretha. She was bleary-eyed, but she stood obediently at Rog’s side with a weak, admiring smile. Had he medicated her? Was she seeing something different than we were? I forced my eyes away from Saretha and scanned the room, frantically seeking some way to shut everything down.
“I see little point in making promises. But, consider—” Rog interrupted himself to gesture to the brothers to get down on the floor and find me “—generations of your family indentured. Generations.”
Saretha barely reacted. I moved deeper into the room, where the shelves of servers formed long, curving passageways. I began to unplug whatever I could find. I knew it made little difference—I might set them back an hour or a day, but the overall effort was futile. The smart thing would have been to flee.
“You think you have the right to change things? You will cause traffic crashes and hospital deaths, and old people will be unable to obtain medicine,” Rog warned. “The poor won’t be able to print food.”
He was trying to chip away at my conscience, which only made me angrier. A real alternative might have stopped me, but he’d shown his hand. We would all be imprisoned within months with his fake “improvements.” What kind of life would that be? And I was willing to bet Rog wouldn’t let himself starve. There were other ways to eat.
“You will be held accountable, and in the end, you will accomplish nothing. You cannot turn off the power!”
His voice grew more strained. He was concerned. He had no idea how much this boosted me. Without meaning to, he’d let me know I could do real damage. The question was: How?
A guard burst through a door on my left, and at once Kel had him on the ground, unconscious. She now had a pistol in her hand.
It took only a second for her to draw on Rog. Rog moved to the edge of the platform, unconcerned, and scowled down, giving Kel a clear shot. Kel pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. She looked more closely at the gun as Rog laughed from above, his face a waggling pixelation of glee.
“Fingerprint keyed,” Kel said with disgust, tossing the weapon aside.
Henri and Margot were set upon next. The guards tussled and fought with them.
Rog spotted me and pointed down a manicured finger. “There,” he called, eager to have me caught.
Another guard appeared. Kel took him out with ease. I ducked down farther, hiding from Rog’s view, desperate for ideas. The guards were coming in with weapons, but they weren’t shooting at us. Rog still wanted us alive.
Then I froze. Ahead of me, beyond a curved shelf of servers, I saw the indigo brother. His thick features turned to me, looking ghastly in the cold-charged battery light. He smiled. Then Kel was on him from nowhere, pulling him down by the neck and assaulting him with blows from her long limbs. I futilely pulled out another wire or two, but my efforts were pathetic.
“Speth!” Kel shouted, still struggling with the massive brother.
Behind me, the maroon brother was stalking up the aisle, his face flushed and determined. Lit by the blue battery light, his ruddy cheeks looked almost black and splotchy.
I whipped out the only thing I had that resembled a weapon—my grapple hook. He pulled a gun. He had a clear shot, and with dread, I realized I was about to die.
“Stop!” Rog warned. The maroon brother startled, and then his brow narrowed. The room hummed with the sound of a thousand NanoLion™ batteries keeping the WiFi powered. Did Rog really want me alive this badly?
“Aim carefully,” Rog said slowly, his eyes wide.
Suddenly I realized that he didn’t want me alive at all. He feared what would happen to the batteries—those stupid, volatile NanoLion™ batteries!
At once, they turned to targets in my mind. I didn’t care how dangerous it would be to hit them. It didn’t matter anymore—Rog would see me dead or worse if he caught me.
The maroon brother had to aim perfectly—he had to hit me, and nothing else. All I had to do was hit any one of a dozen battery packs near him. But I only had one shot.
I pulled the trigger. The line shot out, and its sharp spear zipped by the brute’s head. I let go of the gun; I couldn’t be connected by that wire when it hit. I ducked and averted my eyes from the coming explosion. The maroon brother made a small, fearful noise, but then he laughed.
“I’m coming for you, sister,” he warned.
Behind his head, the grapple had pierced a battery’s case and—that was all. Nothing. The maroon brother holstered his gun and cracked his knuckles. He took a step. He could take care of me by hand now. But then the battery behind him bulged, like a steel balloon, emitting a high-pitched whine. The corners of it wrinkled. It hissed. He turned, his expression full of growing horror.
Blue-white jets of flame flared out. He staggered back, crossing his arms in front of his face just as the battery pack exploded.
Rog wailed from the platform above, like the coming inferno was inside him. A sudden, blinding white light filled the room as another pack burst. There was a brief scream, then another high-pitched whine, followed by yet another explosion and more white light.
I stood there too long, stunned and horrified by what I had just done. This isn’t going to stop. This is a chain reaction. I’d known what was coming, but watching it happen was something else entirely. Panic and amazement blossomed together in my gut.
Rog’s building, WiFi and all, could not withstand the white-hot intensity of a hundred thousand NanoLion™ batteries exploding. I looked up and understood that we had to go—now.
Rog turned on Saretha, murder in his eyes, but she had slipped away from him. She was on the railing, two stories up, facing Rog. She looked back at the drop with her odd, Zockroft™-induced smile, and slipped from sight with a nauseating thud.
No! I screamed in my head. Not Saretha. Not her, too!
I pushed my way through the heat. The hum of the batteries warbled as the glow increased and spread. I had to shield my eyes to see as I worked my way through the room, telling myself the fall was not that far. Flames licked up all around me. The brothers were silent, obscured by the chaos—dead, or perhaps they’d bolted.
My heart pounding, I found Saretha splayed on the floor, her head turned away from the heat of a ruptured battery core. Another explosion sounded across the room. I raced to her, profoundly relieved to see her eyes flutter at the sound.
“We have to get out,” Kel yelled. The hum of the room turned into a moan.
I tried to help Saretha up, but she was barely conscious and could not stand. She had broken her legs in the fall, one of them badly enough that the angle of her shin made me queasy.
“Leave me,” she croaked, expecting shocks in her eyes, but they didn’t come. The tether was broken. She shouted, more resolved. “Leave me!”
“That would be dumb,” Margot said. “Henri, carry her.”
Henri obediently picked her up.
“Henri the hero,” Margot commented, pushing him along.
We fled up the stairs fast. We were good at this, traveling like a group with speed and efficiency. We burst out from the stairwell into the garage. Immediately, there was yelling from the opposite side.
“Get them!” Rog screeched.
Rog and his guards might have fled the inferno, but they weren’t going to give up on capturing me.
“There!” a voice yelled, clearly meaning us.
“Two o’clock,” Kel announced, looking at dozens of shapes gathering on our right under the flickering light.
Kel and Henri raced left, to a gleaming Nayarit Silver Ford Brute™. After a moment, Kel did something to the thumbprint reader. It clicked open.
The hard garage floor rumbled with a low, ominous hum, followed by a series of thuds. Dust shook from the ceiling. Doors opened at the far end of the garage, and security agents began to pour out. There was no Legal jargon this time: no warnings. There was no hesitation for fear of hitting a NanoLion™ battery.
Gunshots rang out, and I knew they meant to kill us.
Kel rushed us into the vehicle. Bullets pinged off the glass and hood. It was bulletproof—of course; it was a Lawyer’s car.
In the confusion, I got in last and found myself in the driver’s seat.
“Go,” Kel barked. “Go!”
The seatbelts clicked in around us. There wasn’t time to argue with Kel. I knew the basics from driving class.
“Ford™ is not responsible for injury, loss of life or other risks associated with automobile accidents. Please drive responsibly,” the car chimed as the engine roared to life.
We jerked forward, plunging into a crowd of security guards who dove away in the nick of time.
I was driving too fast, by any normal account. No time for caution. The car flew up the exit ramp and arced through the air onto the street. We came down hard with a screech of metal and a shower of sparks behind us.
News dropters wobbled and buzzed in from both sides of the street, encircling our car.
Rog and his men scrambled to follow us. A few seconds later, an Ebony Meiboch™ Triumph appeared out of the darkness of the garage and bounced into the street behind us. In my rearview mirror, I watched it roar after us. The thin, flame-orange highlights told me exactly who was back there. Several other large, similar cars spread out behind.
The news dropters spread out, and more came in from up high. Then, suddenly, all of them faltered and dropped out of the sky. One banged off our hood and went spinning to the pavement. Another glanced off the roof.
“The WiFi is down,” Kel confirmed. “There is no tether.”
I couldn’t help but smile at this. Behind us, two of Rog’s cars skidded out, dropters caught under their wheels.
Excitement flooded through me. Rog would have no way to coordinate. He would have no way to track us. The only task left was to lose him and figure out where to go.