Prison of Souls (Science Fiction Thriller) Read online

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  Muted sunlight shone through the three-story windows in the lobby, reflecting on polished chrome support beams and white tile floors: flashes of warmth in a sterile corporate shell. In the center of the room rose a sculpture of a fish. Its bejeweled eyes followed us as we crossed the granite floor toward the security desk.

  A guard eyed us over the monitors. “Good day, Mr. Zacharai.”

  “I’m sure it’s good to someone,” Zacharai said.

  I followed him down a long hallway, past a string of vacant offices, as his dress shoes clicked on the tile. The last room, scarcely larger than a closet, contained a table and two chairs.

  Zacharai closed the door and eased himself into one of the chairs. “I’m not going to play games.”

  That didn't sound good. My fingers tensed and I resisted the urge to ball them into fists. I was an imposter—I had to stay cool.

  He scrutinized me. When he finally spoke, he sounded disgusted. “We know you’ve been feeding information to Joshua Briar’s lawyer.”

  This, I had not expected.

  “Why would you do that?”

  I couldn’t answer. I was too busy trying to grasp the implications. Quentin Navarez was Pyxis? I was wearing the face of the man who had been feeding Crystal information.

  “Say something,” he demanded. “Why would you jeopardize the program like this?”

  “I wish I knew.” It was all I could think to say, and it was honest. I had no idea why Quentin Navarez, a relative newcomer to Walt U with no ties to me or Crystal, would send me information.

  Zacharai threw me a skeptical look. “You expect me to believe you did it on a lark?”

  I wondered how quickly I could exit the building. I could run faster than any human—of this I had no doubt—but there was no telling what technological marvels this facility might harness to hunt me.

  “Look, I’m not your enemy.” Zacharai leaned back in the chair, folding his arms over his chest. “The guys upstairs think you’re trying to bring Briar back into the fold. If you can sell the idea you’re trying to use his talents to benefit the program, leadership might go easy on you.”

  Was he coaching me? Why?

  He leaned in and lowered his voice. “I’ve seen too many men murdered here, Quentin. If you want to live, you tell them you wanted to stop beating around the bush and finally run experiments on Briar, since he’s obviously the key to wireless tunneling. You tell them you had the program’s best interest at heart. You do that, you might live. Now come with me.”

  I watched him stand. “Where are we going?”

  “Upstairs.” He pointed toward the ceiling. “Attis is waiting. Have you met her?”

  “No.”

  “This will be a treat for you.”

  I reluctantly followed him upstairs to a mahogany door, carved with the image of a snake consuming its own tail. Zacharai lowered his hand to the knob and gave me one final look. “They’re communing in here via some new psi-gadget. Don’t let it scare you. And remember what I told you.”

  I nodded dumbly.

  He opened the door into cavernous darkness. “Here he is, Attis.”

  #

  I could just make out electric sconces on the far side of the room, tiny globes of light in a universe of black. The air was cold and smelled of burnt rubber.

  My eyes slowly adjusted. Sunlight peeked above a curtain rod, hinting at ornate crown molding along a coffered ceiling. Heavy curtains flowed from the rod, pooling onto an elevated platform. Squinting, I could see people—six of them—standing on the platform like stone sentries, amorphous in the dark.

  My mind was gray fog, churning.

  A woman, old but steady, stepped down from the platform. “My name is Attis.” Her expression was stern, her brow and cheeks sharp. Horrible energy seemed to radiate from her, felt but not seen. “Why don’t you start by telling me why you sent those documents to Joshua Briar’s lawyer.”

  “Wireless tunneling.”

  “You’re running into trouble with the experiments?” Her voice seemed to exist in both my mind and my ears, like two radios playing the same program in different rooms.

  I tried to focus on what little I remembered of my intended ruse. “Briar has unique properties we’d like to look at.”

  Attis frowned. Her eyes flashed purple. “You should have come to us.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She stepped closer. “You told him about the Capgras and the nanites. There was no need. We could have worked out a deal with the prison to give you access.”

  Did she have a contact inside the prison? Maybe Slaven? Perhaps Attis and her cabal had been double-dealing Walt U and The Gas all along, playing one against the other.

  I wanted to ask questions, probe deeper. Anything I said might expose me, but I had come here to extract information. I might never get another opportunity.

  I took a deep breath and glanced around the shadowy room. “Do you have a contact inside the prison?”

  “We haven’t had a contact in Gasconade for thirty years. For a short time, we tested on prisoners before we realized they were too old for the first batch of nanites. Then, of course, we tested children. But we could get back inside the prison anytime we wanted. Places like that are easy to infiltrate.

  “It’s obvious why you’re interested in Briar. We might have been persuaded. After all, we did keep him.”

  “Why did you keep him?”

  She motioned to the five men standing silently behind her. “Because we thought Briar might be useful. You don’t destroy your most novel test subject. We’ve kept our eye on him.”

  Something about this narrative didn’t compute. “If you thought he might be important, why would you leave him in prison? That was not a safe environment.”

  As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. I had used past tense to describe the prison, as if I'd had personal experience there.

  Attis appeared not to notice. “We like having him locked up, as we admit to being distrustful of his abilities. But we pulled a few strings to get him assigned to Gasconade, so we could have him close if we needed him. It didn’t hurt that he was a local. Most locals end up there anyway.”

  So they didn't want to kill me, but were willing to subject me to the maniacs in the general population. “How did Briar inspire such fear and awe?”

  “He could quantum tunnel by willing it.” Her eyes drew me in. Her hand slid onto my shoulder, and cold radiated through my shirt, into my bones, like she had been carved from ice. “His ability was unique. While this makes him helpful as a test subject, it also makes him dangerous. You put him in a sim, he breaks free. You tunnel his mind, he travels the timeline. He has something physiological. Something we do not understand. He cannot be controlled.”

  I felt my mind latch onto something she had said, some potential for redemption. I glanced away, interrupting the hypnotic attraction of her eyes. “I know Briar is a risk. That’s why I gave him information—I need his cooperation.”

  She tilted her head.

  “I may have underestimated you,” she said, “but in the future, please keep one thing in mind.”

  I tried to calm my hands.

  “Failure to inform the group of deviations can be hazardous to your health.”

  For we are Ouroboros, she whispered in my mind, the beginning and end.

  “Follow me. I want to show you something.” She pushed through the doors into the hallway, now shockingly bright, and I saw her clearly for the first time. Beneath the LEDs, her eyes appeared gray—not a hint of electric purple. She was a thin woman in a neat blue suit, ordinary except for her nearly-alabaster skin.

  She put her hand on the small of my back and directed me into the waiting elevator. When the doors opened on the basement level she led me into a white hallway, enclosed at the far end by a pair of gray doors. “Few have seen what I am about to show you. You must not speak of it. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “I am
showing you because our relationship is at a pivotal juncture. Acting without our permission, as you have done, suggests you don’t trust us. We want you to trust us. You have a remarkable aptitude for filling in the blanks in our schematics, especially with regard to nanotechnology and quantum tunneling. We would like to keep you in the fold. So we are prepared to divulge our secrets, hoping you’ll understand the magnitude of the risk should you choose to leave.”

  This was quite a sales pitch.

  “Before I take you inside, please understand some of what you will see and hear will be shocking. You may doubt quite a bit of it. That’s natural. We have trace arrays from the particle accelerator to confirm the more esoteric bits, but those arrays are hardly intuitive.” Attis put a hand on one of the doors. “Keep an open mind.”

  She pushed the doors open. In the center of the room rose a monolith, similar in shape to the one in the execution building, but grander. It pulsed slowly, bathing the room in alternating light and dark. Attis strode toward it, invisible and then visible as the shadows cycled. I followed. At the base of the monolith, she said, “This is what’s at stake if we don’t perfect wireless tunneling.”

  “Yes ma’am.” It was safer to play along, but I had no idea what she meant.

  She caressed the monolith. “Has Zacharai told you the story?”

  I shook my head.

  “I suppose I ought to start by explaining what you’ll find most shocking and work forward.” Attis shrugged, as if she had no choice but to overwhelm my sensibilities. “What do you know about time travel?”

  I knew enough—two semesters advanced astrophysics—but what if this was something Navarez had been working on? Or a test?

  She didn't wait for a response. “People of your era think time travel is science fiction, even though it’s not. Time travel into the future isn’t even theoretical, but rather an inevitability of mass and acceleration. Anyone even the least bit familiar with the GPS satellites orbiting Earth knows they are travelling forward through time, relative to you, at this very moment. Just a little bit, mind you. But the effect is real. Time travel into the past is trickier—more theoretical certainly, given the science of your day—but quite possible in practice given the science of tomorrow.

  “But there is a catch. Whole objects cannot be sent back intact, at least not with any known technology in the time where I originate. Instead, they must be sent one atom at a time, because they must fit through tiny wormholes which we do not have the capability of enlarging. The wormholes exist at the smallest scales and can only be glimpsed in the heart of the largest particle accelerators. So, while it’s true whole humans cannot be sent back in time, sending individual atoms—or smaller particles, to be more exact—of human consciousness is easy. Of course this requires human consciousness to be converted into discrete packets, but in the future, that’s standard. Given your role in developing nanite technology, this should be intuitive to you. The hard part, from our perspective, is reassembling those packets in the past, so a person’s mind can start as a cohesive cluster of particles in the future, transmit bit by bit through a wormhole, and then reassemble into that same cohesive cluster of particles in the past. Following me so far?”

  The similarities between what she was describing and McSorley’s experiments were too stark to be ignored. My brain had been converted into billions of individual synthetic cells—discrete packets—so they could be moved into various vessels, or through time. Who the hell are these people?

  Attis was waiting.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m following you.”

  “Good. By the year 2100, most people had processors implanted in their brains, supplementing their natural human intelligence. Later came quantum processors connecting their brains to vast reserves of information. Thus began the most productive period for humanity, right around 2250. We called it The Awakening. Within decades, we solved the world’s energy problems. Poverty vanished. We shed our bodies, becoming pure information.”

  “The people in the future have no bodies? They’re just data?” I could hardly conceal my incredulity. So much for keeping an open mind.

  She took the question at face value. “The whole point of your nanites is to convert organic brain cells into quantum particles that can be processed by the computers of the future. But no, not everyone in the future transforms themselves into data.

  “You have to understand, in the hive we were connected, so we only admitted the purest minds. The impure remained physical, to complete tasks outside the hive. We built Capgras so we could leave the computer, because sometimes it was nice to be physical. But for the most part, we stayed in the grid—all knowing, all seeing, all powerful. With our machines and slaves, we ruled the world.”

  I glanced around the cavernous room, ready to run if I had to. A security door stood near the elevator hallway. I assumed stairs lay beyond, but if the door were locked, I wasn't sure I could break it down.

  Had she just said slaves?

  “We were gods.” She pressed her forehead against the monolith, the way a parent might seek closeness with an infant. It was strange. “But the beginning of the end came on December 21st of the year 2473 at 31 milliseconds past midnight. That was the moment our orbiting telescopes spotted the rogue planet invading our solar system. We ran the calculations instantly—64 years to evacuate Earth. Even with our centralized intelligence, we would never have been able to evacuate the billions of physical bodies. You might think it simpler for those in the hive, and you would be right, but we hadn’t located a suitable Earth substitute, and the logistics were uncertain, even with modern technology. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t know.” I intended to make her spell it out.

  She grimaced, her fingers tensing on the monolith. “In all possible timelines, all possible futures, Earth is destroyed by a rogue planet the size of Jupiter in the year 2537. Every living being on Earth dies. I saw the first images of the gas giant. I saw the orbits of the outer planets ripped wide. I watched the ellipse of the Earth’s orbit elongate, turning winters into ice ages. Which brings me to why we came back now. If we start the evacuation hundreds of years in advance, we might improve space flight and reconnaissance such that evacuation of the planet becomes feasible.”

  This was the most incredible thing I had ever heard. “You’re saying you came back in time to begin a centuries-long process of evacuating Earth?”

  “I don’t know if it will ever be possible to evacuate everyone, but we will save the human race.”

  I pointed at the monolith. “What about this?”

  A troubled look came over her, like I had not reacted as she had hoped. “The science lesson continues. Okay. That’s fine.”

  Damn right it was fine.

  “For a person to jump back in time, his consciousness must be transmitted one bit at a time, which requires a computer at the destination wherein the consciousness can be reassembled. The first such computer did not exist until the 23rd century. We needed to go back further, which meant we had to find some way to create it earlier—no easy feat. The good news was that sending messages to the past was easy; the bad news was that no one was listening until the twentieth century. Eventually we got lucky. We successfully transmitted a simple message to a scientist running quantum entanglement experiments five hundred years in the past. This man helped us build the first computer capable of hosting a human consciousness, completed in 1976. I quantum tunneled from the future to the past, into the computer, and worked with him to develop the grid I would need to bring my compatriots back with me.” She tapped the glowing skin of the monolith. “The technical name for this is an immortality grid. It’s somewhat like the artificial reality grid you have at the university, except the purpose of this is to host consciousness in its native state, to allow it to persist indefinitely and to mingle and combine with others at will. I like to think of it as our ark. There are six million human consciousnesses on board, looking for Mount Ararat.

  “We simply
cannot manufacture six million Capgras,” she said. “We need human hosts. We need access to the physical world to set our plan into motion. We have deals to make. Schematics to explain. Our programs at various universities have allowed us to build extremely advanced technology with the schematics we’ve harvested from your future, but at some point, we must bring all these separate projects together into a cohesive master plan, and we cannot do that from inside the server. And even if we could manufacture six million Capgras—and I assure you the materials are far too exotic—they only work as temporary hosts, an inconvenient reality we did not realize until we built them here in the past and tried to use them for the first time in a more enduring capacity. Stay too long, you go crazy. We’ve seen it happen. There is some crucial physiological component we have been unable to duplicate, without which the human mind unravels. The Capgras introduces an entropic element, shedding nanites. We suspect it has something to do with the interface between the synthetic body and the…”

  She continued talking, but I wasn’t listening. They intended to copy themselves over the existing identities of six million people. That was mass murder on a scale I could hardly fathom, and it wouldn’t leave a single corpse.

  “…nor can we manually jack six million humans to this computer—it would take at least fifty years to load all of our minds into six million individuals, even if we did so with several at once. By the time we finished, we’d be sitting ducks for local governments who would never believe we were trying to save them. Now you understand why it’s so important to perfect the wireless tunneling. We need a way to transmit our minds into six million people at once, people in motion all over the world, walking on streets or flying in airplanes or driving in cars. We need a continuous stream of coordinates for each of the six million targets, so we can prep their brain cavities remotely and then fire our brains bit by bit into their skulls via the subatomic pivot dimension. We know this is possible. In the future, we’ve done it on smaller scales. We must do it here, in your present.”