Chapter 55: Chapter fifty-four

Present day

 

After Detective Price had released her from police custody, Liz had gone to the Washington safehouse; which took the form of a storage unit rented under an assumed name on the outskirts of town. She retrieved the key from where it was hidden under a false patch of mould on a wall, and let herself in. The interior was fairly spartan, but not entirely uncomfortable. The mattresses the man had found were soft enough and the icebox was well-stocked.

Once she was there, she waited. And waited.

Eventually, as she was running low on food and wondering how to get more when she had no cash and her accounts were bound to be monitored, the unit door opened and the man entered, bloody and wearing borrowed clothes.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Tracking down the Program agents became untenable, so I had to get captured instead. We talked, they died, and I gathered some vital intelligence. Also, I retook my name.”

Liz blinked. That was a lot to process. She decided to start with the easiest question first. “Your name? What is it?”

The man cocked his head at her. “Oblivion. We already discussed this.”

“Oh. I thought you meant… never mind. Did you find why the Program kidnapped me or why they’re trying to kill me.”

“I think so. But there’s one more person that needs to be here before we have that conversation. She should be here shortly.”

“Is that the person who has been helping you?” Liz asked. She narrowly avoided asking if she was the person who had had slept with because it was really none of her business.

“No. That was a double-agent the Program placed to throw me off the trail and find out what I knew and who I was working with. I expect she’s dead by now.”

She had no idea what to say to that, but she was saved from saying anyone by someone else entering the unit. Someone who looked almost identical to Detective Price, but who seemed entirely different in a way Liz couldn’t put her finger on.

“Liz, meet Dusk,” Oblivion said. “Dusk, Liz.”

Dusk smiled at Liz. “I expect you’ll want some kind of explanation.”

“I think I can guess most of it. You’ve been working undercover with Oblivion.”

“It’s more complicated than that. But yes, essentially.”

“So, none of you superheroes are really dead. You’ve just been faking.”

“Reaper, Bodycount, and White Knight are,” Oblivion said.

“The Wraith is too,” Dusk added. “Alesha got the report just before.”

“Then we are the only ones left. I got confirmation from a Program examiner that only two candidates passed. I got something else too.”

Dusk rolled her eyes, though Liz wasn’t entirely sure at what. “What?”

“Smythe is dying. Close enough now that even his subordinates notice.”

“Could your prosthetics keep him alive?” Dusk asked.

Liz thought on this for a moment. “That isn’t really what they were designed for. But some of the underlying technology could, theoretically be used for that. It would take a lot of money and effort though.”

“Smythe has both of those in abundance,” Oblivion said.

“It wouldn’t explain why he needs the cerebellum implant though. That was what they had me working on the most when they had me.”

“What does the implant actually do?” Oblivion asked.

“It allows the brain to communicate with technology wirelessly with, theoretically, no loss in speed. You could swap in new prosthetics and have them work like real arms instantly. I never finished a working prototype though.”

“How far does the signal reach?” Dusk asked.

“Well, it’s designed for use with things that are attached to the user’s body, so not very far. But it wouldn’t be very difficult to connect to a signal booster and have it reach as far as you wanted.”

Liz thought on this for a few moments, along with everything Oblivion had told her so far, and her stomach sank. “You think he is going to control the kinetic bombardment platforms remotely?”

“I think that’s what he wants us to think he’s going to do,” Oblivion said. “Have us chasing after some superweapon that he is going to point at the world. The problem with that plan is it’s really stupid.”

Dusk nodded. “It’s the plan of a B-movie villain, not Kessington Smythe. He doesn’t care about having big guns, he cares about being smart enough to know where those guns will be pointed, and make sure he’s standing behind them not in front. The satellites are a misdirect.”

“That’s an expensive misdirect.”

“Only if he actually goes ahead with building them,” Oblivion said. “Much cheaper if he just makes it look like he’s going to.”

“That only reinforces that he is doing something big though,” Dusk said. “He wouldn’t bother with that level of distraction if there weren’t something important to distract from. Something more than just saving his own life.”

“So, then, what is he up to?”

Oblivion and Dusk looked at each other.

“We don’t know,” Dusk said.

“Anything in your mind palace?” Oblivion asked.

“Mine’s mostly used for assuming identities. You?”

“Nothing that can predict Smythe.”

“So, you’re at a dead-end?” Liz asked.

“Not necessarily,” Dusk said. “The Wraith hacked my copy of the account records that Branson looked into just as we planned. Changed the numbers on two accounts. One was nebulous, the money seemed to go all over the place. Probably paying off operatives.”

“Useful,” Oblivion commented.

“Not as useful as the other one though. It was used to purchase several pieces of property around the world. If we look through those, we might be able to find out something about what Smythe is planning, or even where he’s planning on having the surgery to implant these prosthetics.”

Oblivion nodded. “We don’t need to know what he’s planning in order to stop him. We just need to find where he’s planning it.”

“Exactly. A bullet to the head puts a stop to most plans.”

“There’s a laptop in the corner there. Feel free to use that.”

Dusk smiled wryly at that. “Still no good with computers then?”

You are reading story Oblivion at novel35.com

Oblivion shrugged easily. It was a more natural movement that Liz had seen him make since she had met him, and it made her wonder what Dusk was to him. She was beautiful after all, and they certainly shared a lot of interests.

Liz felt her face heat up a little and scolded herself from engaging in such nonsense instead of focusing on important matters.

“This might go faster if you help,” Oblivion said, pulling her out of her head and back to the topic at hand.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “But I don’t really know what I’m looking for.”

“None of us do,” Dusk said. “Something that suggests secret facility with advanced medical capabilities might be a good start, but really anything that stands out as strange. Smythe is smart, but he has a big ego. He might not be able to help himself from making little jokes he doesn’t think other people will pick up on.”

Liz nodded and they got to work going over each of the properties that the account had been used to purchase and checking their location against nearby population, satellite coverage, whether local government was amenable to bribes, and a dozen other things the two heroes seemed to think were relevant.

“Wait a minute,” Liz said on the eighth such property they were going through. “What name did you say that property was bought in?”

“David Clark,” Dusk supplied. “Why? Who is that?”

“David Clark is nobody,” Liz said, “and it might be nothing. But Andy Clark and David Chalmers are the co-authors of a semi-famous philosophical paper.”

“What’s the name of the paper?”

“The Extended Mind.”

There was silence for a moment.

“What kind of systems could your implant communicate with?” Oblivion asked.

“Theoretically? Anything.”

“That sounds much more like Smythe’s idea of power,” Dusk said.

“What does?” Liz asked. “I feel like I’ve missed something.”

“Do you know what an ASI is?” Oblivion asked.

“An artificial super-intelligence? Of course, but—” Liz stopped speaking for a moment as the implications of that sunk in. “You’re saying he wants to turn himself into a supercomputer? That’s insane.”

“It’s only insane if it doesn’t work. Could your technology do it?”

“I mean, maybe. It’s not what it’s designed for, obviously, but I suppose it could work.”

“That will be where his cash assets are going then,” Dusk said. “It’s hard to move around too much money without a paper trail, but he might be able to fund his AI research completely off books, especially if he has been working on it long enough, and it would explain why Bryson had records of almost everything else.”

“That would be big enough to warrant satellites as misdirection.”

Liz thought on that for a moment. “You dismissed the satellite weapons because they were something from a B-movie. Isn’t this similar?”

“The kinetic bombardment satellites aren’t practical,” Oblivion said. “You have to wait for them to get into position to fire on anything and something has to be within their orbit to be a target in the first place.”

Dusk nodded. “This is something else. If his computing system is powerful enough, and he is able to use it as an extension of his own brain, as he seems to think he can based on that David Clark thing, then he will essentially become a god. There will be nothing we can do to stop him because whatever we try, he will have already thought of it. The only option is to get into the Program’s base and destroy this project before that happens. And, we need your help.”

Oblivion’s head snapped to Dusk then. “Can we talk privately for a moment?”

They walked out of the storage unit and left Liz to her thoughts.

 

 

“What?” Dusk asked once they had gotten out of earshot.

“You want to bring her along?” Oblivion asked. “She’s a civilian.”

“And? You already put her in danger by bringing her to the Night Market.”

“I didn’t have another way to guarantee access to the auction. And that was a couple of orders of magnitude less dangerous than this will be.”

“Chances are good we are going to need three people to pull off this infiltration, and having someone along that knows about the tech we are planning to sabotage could well be vital.”

“Technology is a lot easier to break than to build. We don’t need her along, we just need some powerful explosives.”

Dusk was confident in her tactical assessment, so why wasn’t Oblivion agreeing with her? Unless…

“Is this sentimentality Oblivion? From you?”

“I think you know me better than that. I just don’t think we need to put her life at risk to get this done.”

“Excuse me,” Liz said, stepping from around a corner. “But don’t you think I should get a say in this?”

“Of course,” Dusk said, considering her conversational options. “We won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, but we could really use your help and we will do everything in our power to keep you safe.”

“That isn’t true,” Oblivion said. “We will both try to protect you, of course, but the priority is stopping Smythe. This will be significantly more dangerous than accompanying me to the Night Market.”

Liz thought for a moment. “Are you familiar with Robert Oppenheimer?”

“I know the broad strokes.” Oblivion said.

“Well, I presume you know the quote from the Bhagavad Gita that everyone knows?”

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Liz nodded. “It was his thoughts on the tests of the nuclear bomb, and he spent a significant portion of his later life trying to mitigate the risks that came from that. From a project he had been a part of. We have a responsibility for the things we create. Besides, they came into my home and took me. I can’t just let that go. I’m coming with you.” She paused, then added, “If you really think I can help that is.”

Dusk looked at Oblivion.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re in.”

Liz gave a nervous laugh. “Okay, when do we leave.”

“Immediately. We’ve wasted too much time already.”

Oblivion nodded. “And we have a stop to make along the way.”

You can find story with these keywords: Oblivion, Read Oblivion, Oblivion novel, Oblivion book, Oblivion story, Oblivion full, Oblivion Latest Chapter