Cupertino,
California
October 5th
Oh my God.
They had Gwen.
This was crazy, I didn’t know how they could move so fast. They couldn’t have known who I was before the incident with the
bus, yet it was not 24 hours later and they had already made on attempt to get
the ring and were destroying my company and had kidnapped Gwen. In my worst nightmares I hadn’t expected an
organization this ruthless and effective.
I didn’t go home, I was scared of what might be waiting for me there, so
instead I went to a local mall and bought a fresh T-shirt, which I went into
the washroom to put on. I walked up and down the mall, afraid that everywhere I
looked I might see another Core member, but everything looked normal. I didn’t see much, just walked up and down
the mall, waiting for a call.
I finally got
the call at about 11:00am. “Yes?” I
said.
“This is the
Core.”
“What do you
want?”
“We want the
item that was given to you.”
Oh, god. “Is Gwen hurt?”
“No, your
girlfriend is fine. Give us the ring
and everything will work out.”
“Let me talk
with her,” I said.
They put Gwen
on the phone. “God, Peter, they’re
terrorists. Call the police, don’t give
in, Peter,” she cried, and then they cut her off.
I couldn’t
change the flow of events, I didn’t have any control, I didn’t have any
choice. They had forced this upon me,
and there was nothing that I could do, but I needed to see the situation, maybe
there was some leverage that I had. I
knew they had to get the ring willingly, and I had other information that Leonardo
had given me, and best of all they didn’t know that I knew those things, and
maybe that would be an advantage, but in any event… there was no choice, I
needed to try and get Gwen.
“Where should
I meet you?”
“There is an
abandoned warehouse at First and Brannon.
We’ll be on the top floor. Meet
us there in ten minutes.”
Gods, that
wasn’t enough time. “I need more time
than that.”
“If you need
more time, Gwen will be dead. You make
the choice.”
“God dammit,
even traffic will take me longer than that.
You have all the cards, and I want Gwen alive. I need half an hour.”
“You’ve got
half an hour. Not a minute later. Goodbye.”
The person on the other end of the line hung up.
I was running
to my car, trying to think. I needed
help, needed backup, but I didn’t know how much the Core knew about me. I had to assume that they would be able to
trace my e-mail logs and phone logs for some time back… so I needed someone that I hadn’t talked
with in years but that could help me now.
Miraculously, someone came to mind, and a number sprang unbidden from my
memory as I remembered how to reach him.
I stopped by the nearest pay phone, dialed his number from memory,
reached the familiar voice. “Yes?”
“Don, this is
Peter.”
A brief
pause. “Hello, Peter. It’s been a while.”
“It’s an
emergency.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m supposed
to be meeting someone in half an hour at First and Brannon, in that old
abandoned office building. I need
backup.”
There was
another pause. “I can arrange
that. What kind of backup?”
“I might need
a distraction so that I can get out of the building.”
“Do you care
about what type of distraction?”
“No, just
anything.”
“How will you
signal it?”
“I’ll send an
e-mail to your pager.”
“Is this
important?”
“Absolutely. First priority, Don. This… pays me back what you owe me.”
He thought for
a while. “Okay. I’ll be there. Stall all you can.”
I prepared my
phone with a message to Don’s pager – all it needed was one keystroke and it
would be sent. I drove to the address
that they had designated, timing it so that I got there at exactly 30 minutes
after the first call, slowly got out of my car and took the stairs up to the
fifth floor. The Overnet was on and I
could sense the presence of three of the Core at the top of the building, along
with a human being that was hopefully Gwen.
I reached the top.
The entire top
floor was empty, with no walls or furniture obscuring everything. Bright picture windows circled the floor,
letting the afternoon sun into the building.
The walls were done in a tastefully done dark brown, and there was plush
carpet on the floor. At the end of the room stood four people:
There was
Gwen, looking very pale and scared.
Holding her
was a tall man, about six foot, with black hair and black beard, wearing a
business suit very well and being very handsome and sure of himself. I looked at him and immediately knew that
this was Demon.
A smaller,
skinny man, with a large nose and fading hairline. Set against Demon he looked weak and ferret-like, but I knew that
he was cunning and sneaky: Snide.
And
Roberta: Serene.
Demon
spoke. “Hello, Peter. My name is Xavier. Roberta you have had the pleasure of meeting, I believe. This gentleman to my right is Darwin.”
His politeness
and formality seemed almost macabre in the situation. I played along. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said.
“Now,” he
said, “if you would be so kind as to hand over the ring to me, we will be happy
to let you leave with Gwen.”
Gwen shook her
head. “Don’t do it, Peter, don’t do
it. They’ll just kill you.”
Xavier sighed,
motioned to Snide. Snide walked over to
Gwen and grabbed her roughly, holding her mouth, apparently enjoying it
immensely. Xavier looked back at me,
“That certainly isn’t true, Peter. The
item that you have belongs to us, and we want it, but we consider you to be an
innocent participant in all of this.
Give us the ring, and you can have your life back.”
“What does
that mean?” I asked.
“Exactly what
I say,” said Xavier. “You can have
Gwen. The legal and business problems
facing your company will suddenly vanish.
Everything will be as it was.”
It was so
tempting, so easy, but Gwen was still afraid, trying to shake her head “no”
against Snide’s grip, and he tightened down and said, “Stay still, you bitch.”
… and it was
on those words that everything hinged.
When it came down to it, I just didn’t trust the Core, not really. Xavier… Xavier was supposed to be the most
worthless and brutal of them, and Snide wasn’t dealing with Gwen like someone
who was doing an unpleasant task, and their first instinct had
been to try and destroy or threaten everything that I held dear to give them
leverage… I didn’t trust the situation, but I needed to get out of there with
Gwen alive.
I bowed my
head, pretended to think, placed my hands behind my back, and reached for my
phone. I pressed the last button on the
phone, sent the message. I didn’t know
how long it would take or what the distraction would be, but more than anything
I trusted Don. “I have to think… look, can I really trust that you’ll let me
walk out of here?”
“Absolutely,”
said Xavier. “You have everything to
gain, and nothing to lose. You really
can’t use that ring. If you keep it,
you’ll eventually be killed; we can’t let a human have access to that
technology. But… we don’t care about
you, otherwise.”
“I know about
the Overnet,” I said. “Why won’t you
just kill me?”
“Because
knowledge of the Overnet isn’t an issue.
You certainly can’t tell anyone about it, not in believable
fashion. The number of humans that can
access it is so vanishingly small that no one will be able replicate your
results; for all we care, you can go
ahead and become a psychic or a faith healer, if that’s what you want. It won’t impact our long term plans.”
I held out my
hand in front of me, as if to take off my ring; looked down at the floor again,
counting seconds; wondering when the hell Don was going to come through with
his distraction. While I waited, the
seconds seemed to stretch into hours…
… when a wrecking ball came
through the west wall, ripping out the windows and smashing a small hole into
the wall, sending shudders through the floor and reverberations throughout the
room. I flicked into the Overnet,
applied the smallest bit of power to move Snide aside and drew Gwen towards me
as I ran towards the hole in the wall.
The wrecking ball hit again, smashing a
bigger hole, and I timed it so that I would just be able to reach the ball in
time, while I dragged Gwen along, and then I jumped onto the ball and grabbed
the thick cable with one hand just as it started to descend again…
… when Snide tweaked something, as well,
and I lost my grip on Gwen, and she teetered over the edge, and I tried to
reach for her as the ball fell again, and I could see Snide come up behind her
and push, and he just grinned at me as I watched Gwen fall five stories and hit
the ground and lie still. So
still. So dead.
The grief didn’t hit, yet. I had to get out of there, and the wrecking
ball cantered back towards the wrecking truck, and when it reached the lowest
point of the arc I jumped off and cushioned my fall as I hit the ground. My goal, then, was to get out of there
alive, and while I automatically tried to elude the Core, every image in my
mind kept going back to the image of Gwen on the ground, dead.
Gwen was dead. But the grief didn’t hit, yet.
I automatically tried to hide myself in
the crowds that were watching the commotion in the building, and somehow, there
were scores of police around the building, pointing searchlights into the fifth
floor and demanding that the participants come out; under the view of the
public, the Core were not inclined to just fly around and pursue me, so it
seemed that there were limits to the amount of control that they had over the
media. They spent precious minutes dealing with the authorities and invoking
their contacts to get them out of the situation, and in that time I managed to
get far enough away that the obfuscation field protected me and I was able to
hide from them, despite the fact that there were three of them looking for me at
the time.
But the grief didn’t hit, yet.
I received another message on my phone:
Message from:
Savior
Meet me at where we first met. Turn off your phone.
I did as he instructed, not understanding it, and after half an hour managed to find Don at the specified corner. I got into his waiting car.
“Thanks,” I said.
He nodded as he started up the car. “Pleasure. What now?”
“I need to go somewhere remote, I think, and then we need to talk.”
He grunted and started the car moving.
The grief hit.