فصل 5

While we in the LoneStar region would like to remain neutral in this matter, it’s become clear to us in Texas that High Blade Goddard intends to impose his will upon all of North Merica, and perhaps the world entire. Without Grandslayers to check his ambition, we fear his influence will grow like a mortal-age cancer.

As a Charter Region, we are free to do whatever we wish within our borders. We are, therefore, breaking off all contact with the MidMerican scythedom. Effective immediately, any and all MidMerican scythes found within our region shall be escorted to the nearest border and ejected.

We go as far as to question Mr. Goddard’s right to be High Blade, since an edict from Endura was never publicly made before the Grandslayers perished.

As a matter of policy, we do not wish to involve other regions in our decision. Others can do as they see fit. We just want to be left alone.

—Official proclamation from Her Excellency, High Blade Barbara Jordan of Texas 5 Your Service Is No Longer Required

from: Thunderhead Primary Communication Exchange

to: Loriana Barchok

date: April 1st, Year of the Raptor, 17:15 GMT

subject: Re: Authority Interface dissolution

mailed by: TPCE.th

signed by: FCAI.net

security: Standard encryption

My Dearest Loriana,

I am sorry to inform you that your services as a Nimbus agent are no longer required. I know you have performed to the best of your ability, and this permanent release from service is by no means a reflection on you or your work for the Authority Interface. However, I have decided to dissolve the Authority Interface in its entirety. Effective immediately, it shall cease to exist as a managerial entity, and therefore you are released from service. I wish you luck in all of your future endeavors.

Respectfully,

The Thunderhead

If someone had told Loriana Barchok that her job would cease to exist less than one year out of Nimbus Academy, she would not have believed it possible. She would not have believed a great many things possible. But those things had all happened. Which meant that anything could happen now. Anything. For all she knew a hand could reach out of the sky with tweezers and pluck her eyebrows with impunity. Not that they needed plucking; her eyebrows were fine. But it could happen. She wouldn’t put anything past this peculiar world anymore.

At first, Loriana thought that the e-mail from the Thunderhead was a joke. There were plenty of pranksters at the Fulcrum City AI offices. But it became quickly evident that this was no prank. At the end of that horrible earsplitting noise that blew out many a sound system around the world, the Thunderhead sent every Nimbus agent everywhere the identical message. The Authority Interface had been shut down; every single agent was now unemployed—and unsavory—just like everyone else.

“If the whole world is unsavory,” another agent lamented, “then of course we’re out of a job. We’re supposed to be the professional interface for the Thunderhead; how can we do that if we’re unsavory, and, by law, forbidden to talk to it?” “No point in obsessing over it,” said another colleague, who didn’t seem bothered at all. “What’s done is done.” “But to fire all of us?” Loriana said. “Every single one with no warning? That’s millions of people!” “The Thunderhead has its reasons for everything,” the nonplussed colleague said. “The fact that we can’t see the logic shows our limitations, not the Thunderhead’s.” Then, when the news of Endura’s sinking broke, it became evident, at least to Loriana, that humanity was being punished for it—as if somehow everyone was complicit in the crime. So now the Grandslayers were gone, the Thunderhead was irked, and Loriana was out of a job.

Reevaluating one’s life was not something easily accomplished. She moved back in with her parents and spent a great deal of time doing a whole lot of nothing. There was employment everywhere—free training and education for any profession. The problem wasn’t finding a career path, it was finding something she actually wanted to do.

Weeks passed in what would have been despair but was dialed down to melancholy by her emotional nanites. Even so, that melancholy was deep and pervasive. She was not accustomed to idle, unproductive time and was completely unprepared for being cast into the winds of an uncertain future. Yes, everyone in the world was subject to those winds now, but at least others had jobs to tether them to the familiar. Routines to keep their Thunderhead-free lives in some semblance of order. All Loriana had was time to dwell on things. It was overwhelming.

At her parents’ behest, she had gone in to get her nanites tweaked in order to raise her spirits—because not even melancholy could be tolerated these days—but the line was too long. Loriana could not abide waiting, so she left.

“Only unsavories wait in line,” she told her parents when she got back, referring to the way the Thunderhead organized the AI’s Office of Unsavory Affairs—with intentional inefficiency. Only after she said it, did the obvious occur to her. She, herself, was unsavory. Did that mean that pointless lines and horrendous waits were now going to be the norm? It brought her to tears, which in turn made her parents more insistent that she go back to have her nanites tweaked.

“We know things are different for you now, but it’s not the end of the world, honey,” her parents had told her. Yet for some strange reason, she thought that it might be.

And then a month after the world went unsavory, her former boss showed up at their door. Loriana assumed it was just a courtesy call. Clearly it couldn’t be about rehiring her, since her boss had been laid off along with all the other agents. Even their old offices were gone. According to the news, construction crews had shown up at Authority Interface headquarters throughout the world to convert the buildings into apartments and recreation centers.

“The work order just showed up,” said a construction foreman on the news report. “And we’re happy to do whatever the Thunderhead wants!” Work orders, supply requisitions, and the like were the closest thing anyone had to communication with the Thunderhead anymore. Those who received them were to be envied.

Her boss had been the head of the Fulcrum City office. Loriana was the only junior agent to be working with Director Hilliard. If nothing else, it looked nice on the résumé Loriana never sent out.

How she had become the director’s personal assistant was less about her abilities and more about her personality. Bubbly some might call it, although others would call it annoying.

“You’re perpetually cheerful,” Director Hilliard had told her when she offered Loriana the position. “There’s not enough of that around here.” That was true—Nimbus agents were not known for their sparkling personalities. She did her best to liven things up and see many a miserable glass as half-full, which, more often than not, irked the other agents. Well, that was their problem. Loriana suspected that Director Hilliard took guilty pleasure in seeing her subordinates rankled on a regular basis by Loriana’s positive penchants. Although these many weeks without a thing to do, and no prospects for the future, had popped most of her bubbles, leaving her about as flat as any other Nimbus agent.

“I have a job for you,” Director Hilliard said. “Actually, more than a job,” she corrected. “More like a mission.” Loriana was thrilled—the first positive thing she had felt since the Authority Interface had been shuttered.

“I have to warn you,” Director Hilliard said. “This mission will involve some travel.” And although Loriana was much more skilled in staying put, she knew this might be the only opportunity she’d have in the foreseeable future.

“Thank you so much!” Loriana said, vigorously shaking her boss’s hand long past the point where most others would have stopped.

And now, two weeks later, she was out in the middle of the ocean on a tuna long-liner that wasn’t doing any fishing, but still reeked of its last catch.

“There weren’t many options when it came to ships,” Director Hilliard had told everyone. “We had to take what we could get.” As it turns out, Loriana wasn’t the only one chosen for this mission. Hundreds of Nimbus agents had been brought in. Now they populated a dozen mismatched ships. A bizarre ragtag flotilla bound for the South Pacific.

“8.167, 167.733,” Hilliard told them in the preliminary briefing. “These numbers were given to us by a reliable source,” she said. “We think they represent coordinates.” Then she brought up a map and pinpointed a spot somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. The targeted spot showed nothing but empty sea.

“But what makes you think they’re coordinates,” Loriana asked the director after the briefing. “I mean, if all you had were random numbers, they could mean anything—how can you be sure?” “Because,” the director confided, “as soon as I spoke my suspicion that they might be coordinates, I began to receive advertisements for ship charters in Honolulu.” “The Thunderhead?”

Hilliard nodded. “While it’s against the law for the Thunderhead to communicate with unsavories, it’s not against the law to imply.” On the fourth day out—still several hundred miles from the coordinates—things began to get weird.

It began with the autopilot losing its connection to the Thunderhead. Without that connection, it could still navigate, but couldn’t problem solve. It was just a mindless machine. Not only that, but they lost all radio connection to the outside world. This sort of thing simply didn’t happen. Technology functioned. Always. Even after the Thunderhead went silent. And in the void of answers, speculation quickly became incendiary.

“What if this is worldwide?”

“What if the Thunderhead is dead?”

“What if we’re truly alone in the world now?”

There were people who were actually glancing at Loriana, as if she might lighten things with a silver lining.

“We’ll turn around,” blustered one of the agents—Sykora was his name—a small-minded man who had been a naysayer from the beginning. “We’ll go back and forget about this nonsense.” It was Loriana who made the crucial observation as she looked at the blinking error screen.

“It says we’re thirty nautical miles from the nearest network buoy,” she said. “But they’re supposed to be twenty miles apart, aren’t they?” A quick check of the buoy grid showed no signals. Which meant the Thunderhead had no presence in these waters.

“Interesting…,” said Director Hilliard. “Good catch, Agent Barchok.”

Loriana wanted to preen from the praise but didn’t let herself.

Hilliard took in the uncharted waters ahead. “Did you know that the human eye has a huge patch of nothing just off the center of its field of vision?” Loriana nodded. “The blind spot.”

“Our brains tell us there’s nothing to see there and fill in the blanks so we don’t even notice it.” “But if the Thunderhead has a blind spot, how would it even know that it exists?” Director Hilliard raised her eyebrows.

“Maybe someone told it….”