The Lucid: Episode Two Page 3

  The gurney stopped moving, and more sharp sounds erupted.

  Gunfire?

  "Stop! Please!" the doctor shouted.

  "Get down! Get down right now!"

  In a moment, someone was unbuckling Adam's restraints, and a couple of sets of hands helped him to sit up.

  A man dressed in a hospital gown and holding an automatic weapon leaned in and looked at Adam. "Shit! He's doped!"

  Another man, also in a hospital gown, leaned in. "Dude, you good to run? You ok?"

  Adam blinked, his eyes widening as he tried to fight the effects of the drugs in his system. "Can't... my family... they have my family."

  "His family?" a woman's voice asked. "They grabbed his whole family?"

  "That surprises you?" one of the other men asked.

  "These people. What is all this? What do they want with us?"

  "We'll figure it out later," the first man, the one with the weapon, was practically shouting. "We need to get out of here! If we can get to the parking lot, maybe we can swipe a van or something."

  "I heard a chopper yesterday," another man said. "If that bird is still out there, I can fly it. We can be in the mountains in no time."

  "Good," the first man said. He grabbed Adam's arm and pulled him up, roughly, handing him over to some of the others.

  Now standing, Adam could see that there were at least half a dozen people in the hall. His legs woke up slightly. He had the odd feeling of standing on someone else's feet, someone else's knees providing maneuverability. The doctor who had drugged him was lying face down with his hands on his head. The two soldiers were laying dead on either side of the gurney. Adam tried to look away from them, but couldn't.

  "More soldiers will be here any minute. We have to move!" the first man said.

  They started down the corridor, yanking Adam along. He pulled away, stumbled, and leaned against one of the walls to keep himself steady.

  "We don't have time for this!" a man shouted.

  "My family," Adam said. He pressed against the wall as his legs struggled under his weight. There were shooting pains that seemed to climb rapidly up one leg then the other. He took a few breaths until he felt steady enough.

  "Where are they?" the woman asked.

  "We can't go on a rescue right now, okay?" the first man shouted. "We get the hell out of here, call the police, and let them handle it."

  "No," another woman said. "They're in on it. It was the cops who grabbed me and brought me here."

  "So we have to get his family now," the first woman said.

  The man turned on her and was about to yell something when the doors at the end of the hallway burst open and three soldiers ran in, guns raised. They tossed something that looked like a soda can down the hallway.

  "Run!" the helicopter pilot shouted, and everyone did exactly that. There was a loud bang, and suddenly the hall was filled with acrid smoke that burned Adam's eyes and lungs.

  He was coughing and hacking, the sting of the smoke burning its way into every part of him, but he managed to keep to his feet and keep moving, with the help of the woman.

  They had grabbed the weapons from the two dead guards, and she carried one, though it was obvious she didn't know how to use it.

  "Where do we go?" one woman asked.

  "This way!" the first man shouted. He kicked though a door, gun raised, and they all ran through.

  From behind them, Adam could hear the gunfire start up again, and shots impacted the doors as they closed behind them.

  "I'm hit!" one man shouted.

  "Keep moving! This corridor leads to the way out!"

  They moved, and Adam stumbled along beside them.

  He looked up to see the room numbers.

  T-60.

  They were in the wing where his family was being held!

  "T-38," Adam said, grabbing the arm of the woman who was helping him. "My family. They're in T-38."

  "They're close, then," the woman said. She shouted, "His family is in this wing!"

  "We don't have time!" the first man shouted.

  "We can split up," she shouted back. "Go get the helicopter ready. Give us ten minutes! If we can't get to you, take off. We'll fend for ourselves!"

  The man looked her, and then over at the pilot. "How long does it take to get the helicopter ready to go?"

  "Not long, but we'll have to hold them off while it spins up."

  "So you could use some ground cover," the man said. He shook his head. "Fine. We'll split. I'll go with you three," he said, pointing at the woman and two of the armed patients. "We'll create a distraction while the rest of you make for the helicopter. We'll get his family, and then we'll get the hell out of here!"

  Everyone nodded, and the helicopter group ran down the corridor as the armed patients moved everything they could find in front of the doors they had just pushed through. They then started moving as quickly as they could toward T-38.

  SIX

  "People are not technology. People are not technology."

  It had become a mantra for David as he watched all hell breaking loose in the facility. It had started with an eye roll--one of the few exasperated body movements David could still do since losing the use of most of his body. Now it was a droning message on repeat--a reminder of why he chose to focus his life on computers and machines rather than human beings. When a machine lets you down, you can fix it. You can reprogram it. Not so with humans.

  Not yet.

  But that was changing, wasn't it?

  The Suppressed--the victims of the heavy metal poisoning that was spreading in a viral-like vector around the globe--had some surprising and oddly useful characteristics.

  Like the UVFs and David's own MCU, with the right combination of frequencies and patterns the Suppressed could be controlled.

  David had already found the right combination--to a degree. Thanks to his work and research, his employers could now control emergency personnel, law enforcement, even military personnel. It was imperfect--fractured. It required a constant signal refresh using radio and communication systems. But it was there. It worked.

  David used it now.

  He called up a schematic of the building and used security cameras and sensors to determine exactly where Adam Bolland and his rescuers were. He then called up the location of all of the armed personnel in the building and started directing them to various points, blocking some exits, attempting to funnel the escapees toward others.

  The response from his personnel was sluggish--a downside of the imperfect system. The Suppressed were responsive enough, but they lacked autonomy. All their thinking had to be done for them, and it was exhausting.

  It was frustrating to David, to be so close, and yet complete success evaded him. It was a bit too much like his own body--the loss of mobility, the fact of his limbs being present but somehow disconnected and out of reach.

  He was working to change that, too.

  So far he had avoided heavy metal contamination, but one day soon, once he had learned all he could about all of this, and once he had mastered it, he intended to voluntarily contaminate himself.

  Because he had learned something else that he had not yet shared with his employers.

  The heavy metal could bypass the central nervous system entirely. In fact, it could replace the autonomic and central nervous systems, and take up their functions on its own.

  It was major contributor to the effect that led to people becoming Suppressed. And in general, the bypass was common knowledge. But those studying the substance and its effects had not yet discovered that the bypass could be total and complete.

  Even better, and more relevant to David's work and his condition, the metal was responsive to certain frequencies. David's work had allowed him to use the contamination as a channel to reach in and control the actions of individuals, much to the delight of his employers. But almost by accident David discovered just how totally the effects of the heavy metal could supplant the body's own systems.


  In a sense, it was like the metal was a sort of sleeper agent, permitting the nerve cells, replicating like mad in the body, consuming and replacing nerve material until there was nothing but the metal left. For a time, the Suppressed would behave exactly as they always had. But eventually certain patterns would repeat, certain signals would not entirely make it through. The feedback to the brain would be deceptive, and would lead to a sort of sleepwalking state.

  Dr. Wu, the researcher leading the study for the World Health Organization, had reams of data and had posted hundreds of reports about how the metal was slowly penetrating and replicating within nerve tissue. But she and her team had overlooked an important fact that David had managed to discover on his own. The metal wasn't just breaching nerve material, it was out-and-out replacing it. And if they could work out the how of it, they could actually control an individual's every thought and action. Completely. Totally.

  And there was a side benefit to the infiltration of the metal. It could replace dead or dying nerve cells with "healthy," fully functional heavy metal particles. Which meant David could undo the damage that was done to his own body.

  He hadn't mentioned his discovery or any of his research to his employers. He kept it completely off of the network, stored in a secured file in a system only he could access. But the supporting data was growing. The possibilities grew with it.

  And then there were the Lucid.

  Adam Bolland and his kind represented a singular danger to David's plans.

  For starters, their ability to resist the effects of the heavy metal meant they could not be controlled like the others. But they also represented another potential threat--if the rest of the researchers studying them, such as the insipid Dr. Wu, were to "crack the code" and create a way to immunize people, David's plans could come unraveled.

  The Lucid represented the biggest threat to David's vision of the future.

  And those plans--they went beyond merely restoring his body. No, David had gotten a taste for commanding others. He was getting good at it. His employers had praised him for his loyalty and his results, but they had no idea that he was planning to go much bigger than they had intended.

  They wanted to have a cure or inoculation standing by so that they, themselves, would never become suppressed. They also wanted to use the heavy metal contamination to create a population of Suppressed who would work like drones for the benefit of their government. Totalitarianism on autopilot.

  David wanted to remove the "government" from that equation, and replace it with a god.

  No one else was as uniquely qualified as David to take the next leap in human evolution. At present, he was a man in a box. He could control his environment and have a modicum of mobility via facial expressions and vocal commands and a limited range of minute movements. But his research and discoveries were making it possible to start controlling that environment with his mind alone. And by extension, he was getting closer to controlling people with only his thoughts.

  Once he cracked the code on using the heavy metal contamination to replace his own autonomic and nervous systems, he would easily be able to take the next step. Everything was in place.

  Because unknown to his employers, David had already discovered how to transmit the control signal directly to the minds of the Suppressed. It was tricky--and it took a great deal of programming, all done in secret and in the little amount of spare time he allowed himself each day. But he had worked it out. The crucial, missing component was his own contamination. And until he knew how to make himself impervious to the downsides of it, he was at something of an impasse.

  But once he was able to take full control of his body, he would take full control of the local population, and then focus on the world beyond.

  First, however, he had to put down this sudden band of Lucid allies that had ransacked their facility.

  And he'd had enough of Adam Bolland.

  "Terminate all of them," he said. "No one leaves this facility alive."

  "Yes sir," the commander replied.

  David smiled, and watched, and waited.

  SEVEN

  10 YEARS EARLIER

  "Uric Acid," Jocelyn said.

  "Uric?"

  "Right. C5H4N4O3." She rattled off the compound's formula without considering her audience.

  The two men standing in front of her were wide-eyed.

  "It's carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen," she said, "combined, it forms an acid."

  One of the men blinked, the other nodded, but Jocelyn knew they were clueless.

  And this is where they sent me, she thought.

  The WHO had shipped her out to Panna to study a meteorite and the impact it had on the surrounding ecosystem. Jocelyn couldn't really blame them, however: it was her research team that first postulated the theory of heavy metal poisoning, caused by extraterrestrial meteor remnants.

  They'd tried to narrow their search for possibilities to meteorites that had struck the earth within the past 30 years, but that left somewhere around 1.6 million meteorites to explore. It was estimated that anywhere around 70,000 meteorites hit the planet every year, and about half of these might be large enough to deliver their dangerous heavy metal payload.

  The problem for Jocelyn's team wasn't just that there were too many meteorites to explore -- there were -- or that there weren't enough people in the entire organization to explore them -- there weren't -- but that none of the known strikes were close enough to anything of any importance.

  None of the larger strikes were near cities or metropolitan areas, and none were close to underground water tables or major lakes.

  Until this year.

  One of her teammates had stumbled into the office one morning and rushed to Jocelyn's desk, begging her to examine the Panna strike from ten years ago. Jocelyn was confused, but complied.

  The researcher scanned the report. It was just as Jocelyn had remembered it -- medium-to-large-sized impact crater, middle of the forest, right in the center of a forgotten island nation that no one cared much about.

  Then the employee smacked something down on the desk in front of her.

  Panna.

  The label on the water bottle told Jocelyn everything she needed to know.

  She pulled up a map of the Panna manufacturing plant and bottling facility and examined the coordinates.

  She was stunned. The meteor would have hit directly in the center of the island's aquifer system.

  The same system used to bottle the millions of gallons of Panna water that were exported into the global economy.

  The next month was a blur. They made plans to travel to Panna and explore the site for themselves, hoping to not run into any trouble from the corporation and local government.

  So now she stood here -- staring at two men who had been assigned to her research team against her will -- trying to explain how the metal poisoning proliferated so much.

  "Don't worry about what it is. It's found in animal urine and naturally-occurring enzymes, and it causes the heavy metal we found to replicate itself. The unique characteristics of the ecosystem here allow it to continue completely uninhibited, where it finally finds itself bottled up and shipped around the world with the label Panna on it."

  The man on the right nodded again. "So, what you're saying is, this metal is now in the water?"

  Jocelyn rolled her eyes and turned away. How am I supposed to get anything done when all I have for a team is college dropout surfer punks?

  She headed for the station's headquarters, a squat yellow building that housed two 90s-era computer terminals and an oversized satellite dish on the roof.

  And Panna water.

  The first thing she'd noticed when she stepped off the plane and into the breezy, one-gate airport in Panna was the water's local ubiquity. It was everywhere. Instead of soda machines, many of the small restaurants around the city offered nine flavored versions of Panna, complete with the standard flavorless kind.

  The building she was headed into
now hardly had a toilet -- just a hole in the floor with a poorly-constructed seat added to the top -- but it had an entire refrigerator full of Panna.

  It was actually difficult for her to not drink Panna. She was able to find a grocery chain that sold an off-brand jug of water, and she'd hastily carted one back to their makeshift lab and tested its purity. Finding it safe, she drove back to town and bought up the entire shelf.

  She opened the door to the small two-room building and stepped inside. The air was a cold shock against the humid, warm sea breeze from outside. She slid into a chair behind a desk she'd been given and opened the calendar program.

  "Dr. Wu, your appointment is here."

  One of the men must have followed her up the dirt path, as he was now standing in the doorway, looking toward the road.

  She stood up and nodded. That was prompt. For an island nation that prided itself on its "chill factor," she was always surprised when someone showed up to a meeting on time.

  The man followed her up the path as they approached the three vehicles. The center vehicle, an SUV, parked near the edge of the road and Jocelyn watched as a man opened one of the passenger doors.

  A woman stepped from it. She was tall and thin, and her hair and clothes gave her a look of business severity--the sort of appearance you expected from a female CEO who had fought her way up the corporate ladder using the heads of misogynistic executives as rungs.

  She shifted her business suit before making her way purposefully toward Jocelyn.

  "Dr. Wu." It wasn't a question, nor was it the kind of utterance that Jocelyn felt invited a response, so she simply stood there, awaiting the strange woman's extended hand as it reached toward hers.

  She stuck her hand out and immediately felt it sucked into the vortex of the woman's powerful grip. The woman stared at Jocelyn, her face unreadable.

  "My name is Mrs. Halpern. Do we have a place to meet?"