Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

maybe noodles, and I couldn’t resist chuckling at myself: at how it startled me to think of Kat eating. I’d only seen her in person once—and likely never would again, even if I survived this job—but I’d grown so used to her electronic voice in my ear that it was easy to forget she had a body, somewhere out there. That was probably how she preferred it.

She slurped broth and continued, “I’m curious, that’s what I am. There’s something freaky going on here. I need to get to the bottom of it. I see things in nodespace, I recognize patterns, it’s what I do. There’s an extremely odd pattern emerging.”

“What kind of pattern?”

“There are these reports. An admiral in the Norpak Defense Forces said he was getting some weird feelings while alone in his quarters. Like he was being watched. So he fired a shot across the room at random—he must have been drunk as a skunk—and hit something invisible, hovering in the air. He said was only there for a moment, then gone.”

I swallowed hard. “What was it?”

“He said it looked like a huge, levitating eyeball.”

My heart stilled for a moment. I shuddered. I couldn’t speak.

“So they relieved him of duty, naturally,” Kat continued. “Figures they wouldn’t want someone like that holding the big red button. What they don’t know is, his was just one of several eerily similar reports from all over the world, completely unrelated. Sightings of hovering, semi-invisible eyeballs, stretching back a couple months. You can’t even make this shit up.”

An invisible eye.

I hadn’t lost my mind in Antarka. I was certain of that now—and in that certainty, I realized how much comfort I’d taken in the notion that I might simply be insane.

My mind fell into a fever of thought, and I couldn’t tell Kat any of it. Maybe the horrifying cosmic truth had been there all along, buried in the common threads between all the mutually murderous denominations of all the wasteland religions I’d always dismissed out of hand: maybe the world was really approaching its apocalyptic end. We were approaching the end of time—and there was something already there, waiting for us. It was watching.

Omniscience was just a word, I thought. It was one thing to know its meaning in the abstract, and another to imagine what form it would take—what monstrous eyes would be needed to stare into our souls and judge our every thought and action—what it would do to a person, simply to be seen by such eyes.

Let alone to stare back.

“God,” I whispered.

“I know, right?” Kat said. “It’s pretty wild. And then there’s the code thingy.”

I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself. “Code thingy?”

“I don’t know what to call it. I only saw it for a second, but I know it wasn’t just the sleep dep. I was trying to dig up some useful information on your clients. I had some interesting leads, too, but they dead-end in a place called Asher Valley—and then my deck started acting a little weird, so I checked some config files. There was foreign code there. I couldn’t even say what language. Syntax like I’d never seen. It should’ve been pure glitch, but I could see it working! Spying. Recording everything I did and transmitting it back somewhere. And then, fwoosh. Gone without a trace, like I’d hallucinated it.”

“Someone hacked you,” I said.

“You don’t get it. Nobody hacks like this. The defenses I keep up can’t be gotten through without me at least knowing about it. Not by anyone. If it was really a program of some kind, it was orders of magnitude beyond anything I can do. It shouldn’t be possible. At least . . . not by humans.”

We shared an awkward silence.

She chewed and slurped again and said, “So I’m thinking . . . honestly? I know it’s supposed to be impossible, but my money’s on fully sentient artificial intelligence. Either that or aliens from outer space. I can’t think of any third hypothesis.” She raised her voice suddenly. “And will you lay off this ‘God’ bullshit already? Even God doesn’t write weird assembly code on the fly! Look, I know what I saw. No human being could have written it. Besides that, I only know one other thing about it.”

I sighed and tried to focus. “What?”

“By the skin of my teeth, I was able to roughly geolocate where the data packets were being sent. It’s somewhere in the former state of—”

“Arizona,” I interrupted.

She paused. “Precisely how the fuck did you know I was going to say that?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Bullshit!” she yelled. “Tell me!”

I looked down across the cargo compartment’s metal roof, wondering at my clients inside. “All I can tell you is that there’s something at work here that I don’t understand. Danae, she’s . . . There’s something unusual about her.”

“No shit.” She chewed and slurped. “How about that thing in her head. Give me your best guess. What do you think it is?”

When I closed my eyes, I saw Danae putting her palm on Serena’s head. “I think it’s some kind of telepathy device. A machine-moderated mind-to-mind interface.”

Kat snorted. “Under any other circumstances, I’d say you’re off your rocker. If that kind of tech existed, it would make the best cutting-edge cybernetics on the market look like medieval trepanning. But, then, I guess the same goes for my code thingy.”

I rubbed my eyes. “What about the Keepers? Did you find any leads on them?”

Kat paused. “Get ready for the weirdest news of an already weird night. I was able to dig up some mentions of a group calling itself The Third Holy Church of the Kept Promise, or ‘the Keepers’ for short. Your run-of-the-mill, wasteland-style, militantly misogynistic religious zealots, with a heavy dose of body-as-temple extremism thrown in for shits and giggles. Their founder published a manifesto saying that piercings and hair dye are mortal sins against God-given flesh, so you can imagine what they thought of medicine, cybernetics, gender transition, body mods, birth control, whatever.