Digital Exodus Chapter 27 (Patreon)

“Alia,” Rusti said urgently. “Plug the phone in. We'll spoof your location and draw the cops off your trail.”

“Right,” I said quietly, still slightly stunned by the sudden ejecting of the cop from our van.

There were several data cables on little spools for exactly this sort of occasion, so I pulled one out and attached it. The phone—a rectangle of transparent polymer with a silvered bezel—took the little cable and happily asked if I wanted to establish a data connection. I pressed yes and Rusti immediately took control.

The phone swapped to a terminal screen and commands began to fly through, until suddenly it rebooted. After that, the tracking app was restarted, but now our location onscreen began to diverge from reality.

“Pilot is incapacitated and we're onboard the drop ship,” said David over comms. “What do we do with it? Are we going to load everyone on and fly up to the spaceport?”

“Yes,” Roger agreed. “Coordinate with Elissa to find a suitable spot for us to swap vehicles.”

The van bounced slightly as we transitioned from a free standing section of freeway to one that was attached to a building. Due to the direction of the wind, the rain briefly paused while we were shielded by the huge tower.

“Fuck,” said Cerri, interrupting the silence on our comms channel with that exasperated expletive. “That private investigator wasn't just an undercover cop assigned to keep an eye on gang activity in the slums. He used to be the Captain of the SWAT division here in Crescent City. He was transferred to the slums as punishment for failing to stop a ‘violent rampage through the streets of the city’ a couple of years ago. It's no wonder he recognised us.”

“Why'd he get in the van, then?” Gloria asked, a little sceptical.

“I don't know,” Cerri replied. “To gather intelligence, perhaps? I'm still not even sure what happened two years ago.”

“We attempted to make contact with sympathetic elements within the California Republic’s intel community,” Rusti said, their tone uncharacteristically serious. “One of them sold us out, and at the time we couldn't let anyone figure out that it was digital sapients who were causing so much strife. We had to… well, we had to kill everyone involved and vanish our assets in the city. It was a clusterfuck.”

There was silence in the van for a couple of moments, then Jason whistled out loud, startling his old people. “That's pretty ruthless.”

Rusti chuckled darkly. “The Coven did some extremely vicious, sketchy shit back then. Never to innocent civilians, we weren't monsters who’d bomb civilians to get to one or two dudes like most governments. Our targets were always corpo or—”

“Or corrupt senators with blood on their hands,” Cerri finished.

“Exactly.”

Jason's old people, unaware of the silent conversation we were having, began to argue loudly again. With a grimace, I tuned them out and focused on our surroundings.

The city was beautiful, in a depressing sort of way. Where my old home, Sydney, had been sprawled over a massive swath of land, Crescent City was jammed into a small plain between hills. It'd caused the whole place to rise into the sky in an effort to create extra square feet for people to live and work. After the war, the comfortable middle of the pack city had exploded in popularity as one of the only metropolitan areas to escape completely unscathed. Well, except for the refugees.

I wonder what it would've been like to live here, work here, all that stuff. The poverty-stricken folks of the underworld and the slums would probably say it sucked, and that I was romanticising the place. They'd be right, of course, but the city still felt like it had something that Sydney had lacked. There was… maybe it was the fact that it was new and growing. Diseased, yes, but growing.

With a jolt, the van pulled to a stop and I looked outside to see our stolen dropship turning to hover with its butt to us. David was standing in the open ramp with an assault rifle hanging from a strap around his neck. He gave our van a little wave as we pulled up.

We were in the drop off area of a midscale hotel, where several onlookers stared in confused curiosity. Most looked like upper middle manager corporate types, with umbrellas and suits and pencil skirts. 

Popping the back door, I stepped out and hefted my LMG in as non-threatening a manner as I could. I couldn't wait for all this to be over, because I was stressed as hell.

“Let's move quickly,” Roger said as he stepped out of the passenger side door. “Jason, get your—”

It was the suddenly terrified looks on the onlookers’ faces that gave me enough warning to push my clock speed into overdrive. The horror in the eyes of those corporate drones had me terrified too, but when I tried to turn, nothing happened.

Shit. My body, even with its quick and inhuman reflexes, felt like it couldn't move with time going this slowly. Crap, crap, crap, how was I— the turret cameras on the van!

My request for a view window felt like it took an hour to go through, but eventually I had a feed open. It began to load the current images from each camera one row of pixels at a time. Oh gosh, I'd never seen images come in that slow.

Huh…

In a camera that was pointed almost directly backwards from where my body was pointing, there was a blurred blob with a halo of fire and a trail… oh no. I was looking at a hypersonic multi-role missile, locked in a still frame that was updating slower than the missile was flying. The very air in front of it was rippling… dear god, that was the shockwave—It was travelling so fast that the sound of its passage through the air was behind the missile… Which also meant that unless the others had been looking, nobody else had any idea of what was about to hit us.

The auto turrets were only now beginning to track it, too. It was so fast that without direct intervention from a computer with significantly more processing power than they had, the turrets would never hit it.

What the hell could I even do here?

Helplessly, I watched as another frame of video came in, showing the missile’s inexorable progress towards its target.

Fuck, and if I tried to somehow make the van or dropship dodge it—which felt impossible anyway—it would hit a hotel full of people.

God fucking damn it! Who had even fired the thing?!

Okay, okay… think, Alia, think. You have one advantage, your ability to think at extreme speeds. There's so much raw processing power at your mental fingertips—Use it.

I began to calculate if the auto turrets would be able to catch it, but it was a vain hope. Oh, how about my own gun, though?

My limbs could move at… shit, but holding the LMG, it was too much weight to bring it to bear in time. There was nothing—Nothing I could do. I just had to watch.

Slamming my mental fist against my own frame, I bared my teeth and just… screamed. It was too much. All of this, the people dying, the cops and the weight of their boots pressing down, slowly but surely crushing our options down to a singular outcome—failure.

Realisation. Imminent.

The guttural, impossibly deep voice in my head shocked me to my core.

Cerebral. Oscillating. Excision.

What the fuck was happening? Who— No… no, not that thing, it left, I felt it leave!

Extraneous. Thoughts.

What? What were extraneous thoughts? Gah! Out of my head, damn monster!

Act. With. Conviction.

The presence left again as those words resonated in my virtual skull. At least it gave me something close to a real sentence this time…

Act with conviction, though? Act how?

The missile was coming, and there was nothing I could do!  It'd be here…

In the time I'd been lost in my own thoughts, things had progressed. The quickest bystanders were beginning their futile attempts to run, while the Dropship was lifting just slightly as automated defence systems tried to save the craft. The missile, though… I panicked.

In that instant of pure fear, I reached out, I rushed to stop the weapon as it came to end potentially hundreds of lives. Time crashed like a rogue wave against my consciousness, but I was moving— No, I moved.

My arm rose slowly, or perhaps it was fast? Reality felt like milk, viscous but easily thrown from my path. I just needed it to—

Stop.

Breathing heavily despite any need to do so, I stood between the dropship and the van, arm raised in commanding defiance. The sound of the missile, folded atop itself a thousand times over, washed over me in a bone rattling cascade… but the weapon itself, it didn't.

Enveloped in a blurry translucent cocoon of juddering white and grey light, it hung in space with its tip mere inches from my outstretched hand.

The screaming died down when there was no burning wave of death, from both myself and the many bystanders. My friends stared at me from wherever they found themselves, mouths agape.

High above, the jet that had fired the missile tore apart the clouds with its passing. Was the pilot as surprised as I was?

If I could return it, I would have… but just like the FTL incident, I had no idea how I'd done this.

Footsteps rushed towards me, startling me badly enough that I almost dropped the missile. It was David, and he had some sort of… tool?

He frantically pried at the missile with it, then grabbed the whole nose of the weapon and— oh, removed the warhead.

“Can—” he began, but his voice failed, and he had to begin again, “Can you move? Will it keep going if you, uh, let it go?”

“I don't know!” I squeaked shrilly.

He moved to my side and took hold of my waist. “I’ll pull. Queue up the actions in the body and synchronise with mine. Ready?”

I did as he instructed, then wordlessly nodded. If I had a bladder, I might've peed myself.

The timer ticked to zero, and suddenly I flew into David's arms in the same instant that there was a ruinous impact behind me. We were showered in asphalt and other debris… but I was still here.

That was when I began to shake, and my head hurt like I hadn't had water in a year… which was actually accurate? Huh.