Those That Wake 02: What We Become (33 page)

The Old Man’s hand came away from Laura’s cheek and swept back, prepared to strike her with all his impossible strength. Mal sprang forward from his place and launched himself into the air, clasping his fists together and bringing them over his shoulder like he was cocking a baseball bat. His arc carried him to his enemy, and as he came down, Mal swung his clasped fists with all his might.

The fists connected with the Old Man’s ancient face, filling the room with a resounding crack, as if someone had fired off a rifle. The Old Man’s head snapped to the side and whipped directly back without any sign of pain, without a flicker in the gleaming eyes. His gnarled hand came up, and he swatted as though trying to rid himself of a fly. Mal was flung off his feet, sent tumbling to the floor, where he rolled off his back and up to his feet again, teetering on unsteady legs, blood pouring from his nostrils, from his lips. He shook the pain from his head and charged in.

The Old Man’s hand swatted again, but Mal slid beneath it, and it passed over his head with a heavy rush of air. Mal fired two uppercuts into the torso and a clean hook to the chin. Rather than respond to the attacks, the Old Man’s hand reached out toward Laura, her body standing in a helpless fugue before him.

“No.” Mal gritted his teeth, throwing his arms around his opponent, wrapping him tightly, and plunging his knee into the Old Man’s kidneys. It struck as if against a stone pillar, and the Old Man opened his arms, tearing effortlessly from Mal’s embrace. Staggering, Mal was not able to dodge as a hand struck his chest and threw him into the heavy ornate desk.

Mal spun and grasped the edge of the massive desk. A roar tore from Mal’s throat as he lifted the impossible burden, and then, his muscles bunching into knots beneath his flesh, he thrust the load like a battering ram at the monster.

The Old Man reached out and took hold of the desk’s leading edge and, almost daintily, tossed it aside. The desk spun into the air and splintered with a deafening report straight through the ceiling as, amidst a shower of plaster and shards of masonry, the room was exposed to the sky.

The force of having the desk wrenched away catapulted Mal halfway across the room, where he hit the floor with such impact that he felt bones grind together within him. He coughed out the pain, choking on a swell of his own blood, and pushed himself agonizingly up. He rose just in time to see the Old Man’s hands grasp Laura’s body, lift it, and hurl it like a missile at the wall.

Laura’s electrical life buzzed around the Old Man’s vast brain, a gnat by comparison. His strength was, as it had always been, the minds of others: how he could manipulate them, what they could be made to give him.

She fired the lightning of herself outward, toward the captive brains, and spread her energy wide. She found in herself the prism of Laura that she had seen through Mal’s eyes. She plucked from it the sense of hope for true happiness in the world that she represented to him. She saturated the captive minds, hitting them with millions of volts of pure, unadulterated hope.

In the throes of this inexplicable rush, the countless brains—for just one instant—rejected the Old Man’s touch. In that instant, the blinding orb of the Old Man’s brain flickered and diminished, became a sick and desiccated thing once again.

Laura saw it, even as—so distant that it was less a sensation than a notion—she felt her body shatter apart.

As the neuropleth faded from her senses, Laura sought out one mind. She found it before she was gone, just beside her, a thing of gray fire, as if made from iron.

We were always together, Mal. Always.

Laura’s body met the wall with unbearable force. Mal saw the neck twist and the limbs break apart, and felt the world slip inescapably from his grasp.

A life of anger, of rage, of
fight
that coiled always within him sprang loose as he turned back to the Old Man.

The Old Man looked up at him, the vitality siphoned away like blood from an open wound. The creases of his flesh held sway again, swallowing his moist, malignant eyes. The legs creaked; the torso went flaccid. Teetering on legs that couldn’t hold him, he looked at Mal and gulped in enough air to speak.

“You . . . mustn’t,” he said.

Mal’s fist struck, ending the Old Man forever.

WE WERE ALWAYS TOGETHER, MAL
.
Always.

Mal collapsed to his knees before Laura’s mangled body, squeezing his eyes shut. Looking at it would drive him mad, like seeing the world itself bent out of shape and twisted into a grotesque aberration.

“I can’t do what you can, Laura,” he said. “You can fight in a way that I never could. You taught me . . .”—he made himself look at her—“that sometimes the fight is more important than I am.”

He put his hand down on her cooling skin, felt the last of her life trickling away, and he stepped up to the doorway in his head.
If you try to go into another body like Remak did,
Rose had said,
you’ll become like him—your own body will turn into what Remak was
.

And if I’m like Remak was,
Mal excoriated himself, willed his words to be true,
then I can do for Laura what he did for me
.

Mal let his anger fall away and found his feelings for Laura, his very heart. He rode that emotion, let it carry him like a bolt of lightning into the neuropleth and straight to the mind he wanted, fiery silver and burning from within like the bright blue of Laura’s eyes.

He poured himself into her brain, felt his body shift, melt, coalesce. He turned into what Remak had been, a being of energy, of will. That will coursed through Laura’s brain, through her nervous system, into her body.

He
became
Laura—her broken bones fused together by his hope; her dying heart strengthened by his love; her dimming life fired by his will. He remade Laura and, in becoming her, unmade himself.

In the middle of the ruined floor that was once the monster’s lair, its roof exposed to the sky, Laura opened her bright blue eyes. For an instant, just an instant, there came a fleeting sense of Mal.

She reached out fast, tried to grab it. But, empty, her hands turned to fists and her face broke into anguish, and she beat her own chest in anger, in misery.

“Mal!”
she screamed, beating at her own chest.
“Mal!”

She screamed until the anger was gone and only the grief was left.

“Oh, Mal,” she said through tears.

Laura walked amidst dazed people, reemerging onto the streets as if in a stupor. Their heads swiveled slowly about them, gathering in a city that was somehow unfamiliar. Their eyes found the buildings, the sky, one another. What they did not seem to be doing was folding themselves immediately back into their cells. Few that Laura passed were focused on, or even held, a cell. Eyes found Laura, saw her, gathered her in. One person, a man in smart business attire, stopped her to ask if she was okay. They were not invisible to each other; at least, not for the moment.

In the distance, the top of Lazarus Towers dwarfed the skyline around it. But the tallest of the towers, the central one, was rent open at the top, blown out from the inside. The twisted metal looked like a hand stretching upward, pleading to God.

Laura found herself in front of Rose’s building, hesitating before the entrance. Her hope was not gone. Mal had shown her hope, and she had given it to all the minds in the neuropleth to free them for a moment. The people rushing around her, alive with vitality she barely recognized, showed her that it had meant something.

She spared the building one last look, her eyes gliding upward toward the floor Aaron and Rose waited on. Then she turned away from it and joined the flow of people around her.

Her hope was not gone, but now she was alone.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

This was the question Aaron Argaven asked himself. He found his answer, as he did with so many personal dilemmas these days, by conversing in his head with Laura, imagining her shining eyes filled with righteous indignation, a sarcastic lilt to words that sprang forth from her preposterous, naive, and utterly invincible good intentions.

So he walked briskly and confidently—Laura, of course, would have said arrogantly—into the office of Intellitech’s new CEO. He laid out his eight-step plan to recall the current cellens technology, provably dangerous to human brains as they were. It was a solid plan, as it included the PR campaign required to guard them from liability during the initial steps all the way through to profit projections for the last steps, which involved a safer, more efficient cellens technology that Intellitech would, naturally, patent.

Roderick Van Allen had been recruited to usher Intellitech through the difficult times following Alan Argaven’s unfortunate passing. Van Allen was a trim, dignified man who maintained an athletic physique through tennis on the weekends and who had a gift—he felt—for feigning vast reservoirs of patience even when he was struggling to hold his temper in check.

“I’ll take it under advisement, Mr. Argaven,” Van Allen said.

“I’d appreciate a more considered response,” Aaron replied, his posture straightening.

“I see,” Van Allen said, no longer bothering with the pleasant smile of—so he had hoped—dismissal. “You are familiar with the current financial climate?” It was absurd that anyone old enough to read a newsblog would not be. Corporations had entered a suddenly dangerous and uncertain age, facing a swell of regulatory thinking from communities and governments. Corporate bodies were now at each other’s throats for their space in a reduced power pool. Smaller or less cautious corporations were being pulled apart as if by wolves, and even the larger ones were girding themselves for a long, cold winter. It was as if some basic agreement between the corporations, some invisible foundation upon which they worked and tacitly cooperated for their mutual benefit, had fallen out from under them overnight; as if some invisible force that impelled the world to look away from the control they had handed over to faceless corporate agendas had dried up and withered away without warning.

To Van Allen’s question, Aaron replied with a curt nod.

“Then you should have no trouble understanding,” Van Allen said, “why your plan does not fit Intellitech’s strategic profile at this time.”

“Intellitech is a tool,” Aaron said, disappointed though not surprised that he would have to condescend to explain this. “You are the person charged with applying it. But it is such a powerful tool that you have a responsibility to wield it with compassion and care.”

“Intellitech is not a tool.” Even as he said it, Van Allen was shocked that he had allowed himself to be pulled into an argument of semantics with a child. “It is an entity unto itself in the employ of its shareholders. I am the man charged with guiding this entity, and my sole responsibility is to those shareholders.” He struggled to find a properly patronizing tone to end on. “Is that perfectly clear to you, son?”

Aaron considered him as he might a pile of trash that had inexplicably wound up in the middle of his living room.

“What’s clear to me,” Aaron said, “is that Intellitech no longer serves a useful purpose. My promise to you, Mr. Van Allen, is that within five years, I’m going to send this company crashing down around your shareholders. Is that perfectly clear, sir?”

Aaron didn’t wait for an answer or for further comment of any kind. Instead, he walked from the office as he had entered, briskly and with confidence.

Aware that he was more capable than any ten CEOs currently presiding over corporate bodies, but also aware that people in the business of corporate finance had difficulty taking a fifteen-year-old seriously, Aaron determined that he needed help. It was a tricky business, because the help in question needed to be capable of carrying out his orders—that is, allowing for his superiority—but at the same time must have a singular talent for the work in his own right. After three weeks of carefully parsing electronic resources and following an indistinct trail, he found the help he wanted sitting in a tiny, gloomy basement apartment in a suburb of Chicago, surrounded by computers and other electronic tools of the trade.

At Aaron’s appearance, Arielle Kliest displayed an uncharacteristic show of fear. She quickly gathered herself, collecting her hard, beautiful face into a mask of resignation at whatever her fate was to be.

Aaron explained his five-year plan for the downfall of Intellitech and several of its ilk, through an aggressive strategy of community and environment improvement, which included the exposé of the ozone satellites and the dangers of current cellens technology, as well as the refurbishment of New York City’s East River; a plan that would fall directly in line with the country’s current push for corporate regulation and community responsibility. At the same time, the plan would create a financial base that would fund similar projects and carry the two of them into a limitless future.

“Every corporation in the world wants me dead,” she said coolly. “They don’t quite know who I am or what I was to them yet, but they’re figuring it out.”

“Consequently,” Aaron extrapolated for her, “it’s only a matter of time before someone finds you. It only took me three weeks, though I am, admittedly, quite good at finding people. Wouldn’t the most sound strategy for survival be to head them off before they came at you?”

Kliest had long ago come to this conclusion. Immediately intrigued by Aaron’s five-year plan, she sat back on her lumpy, uncomfortable couch and considered it with the mathematical precision she had once used to decide the fates of corporations and countries.

“Impressive and ambitious,” she concluded. “But impossible.”

Which was what Aaron had been waiting for. It was a test, really, because anyone who believed his plan as presented could work was not worth his time. So he pulled out his big gun, his nuclear weapon of world corporate realignment. He had been planning on offering it to Intellitech if they had fallen in with his plans, but it was clear now he had waited until the right time.