After Life (Power Reads Book 2) Read online

  She began to rise up and away from her physical body, and turned to see a growing orb of brilliant white light, brighter than the most powerful star and yet every bit as gentle as starlight. Warmth flooded around her, enveloped her in a comforting blanket of peace and contentment as she rose up toward the centre of the light, the darkness fading away behind her, rising faster and faster and yet as calmly as a feather lifted by a warm summer breeze.

  The brilliant light surrounded her and all memories of her troubled life fell away like worn skins to tumble behind her into oblivion. Arianna was smiling broadly yet she had no mouth. She felt her heart racing with joy even though no such organ beat within her. Warmth caressed her even though she had no skin with which to sense it, and the questions that she had fell away with her concerns as she let herself be taken by the light until it consumed her.

  Ahead, figures milled in the brilliance, and though she could not clearly see them she knew somehow that they knew her and were waiting. She sensed family, friends, people she had long ago pushed from her mind to avoid the grief of recalling their names.

  Connor.

  The smaller of the many silhouettes awaited her and she knew with all of her heart that he was there, that he was safe, that he had always been safe and that all of her suffering and grief had been for nothing because nothing ever really dies.

  ‘Connor!’

  She called out to him, reached out for him not with her hands but her heart, and felt his smile and his laughter and his happiness reaching out for her too, connecting with her as though he had never left and…

  The bright light shivered as though it had been cast against a vast sheet of glass and an unseen projectile had shattered it into a billion pieces. Arianna cried out in despair as the warmth vanished and she felt Connor’s presence ripped away from her as sure as he had been torn from her life. The light faded to a mere haunting ghost of what it had once been as the glowing rainbow colours and elegant freehand watercolour strokes of creation were yanked into orderly geometric spirals, lines and corners. Harsh, painfully bright and angular.

  Streams of information flowed past her like highways filled with billions of headlights, passed through her like laser beams as she felt herself falling downward into blackness. Memories of her life rushed back in a tsunami of emotion: joy warred with pain and hope clashed with despair in a hymn of human suffering. Arianna cried out in horror as the emotions overwhelmed her and crushed her down and with a deafening crash that sounded as though she had hit the ground head–first from a mile high, the rush of data vanished into blackness and the world fell silent once more.

  The voice, when she heard it, seemed alien.

  ‘Welcome.’

  Arianna realised that she could feel her eyes and that they were shut. With a titanic will of effort she opened them.

  She was standing in a small, clean room. A potted fern of some kind stood in one corner, warm colours from outside glowing against the walls. An attractive, dark haired woman sat in a reclining chair nearby and watched her with a calm smile.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  Arianna looked down at herself and saw her body glowing as she stood on the projection platform built into the floor. Sparkles of light glittered like fallen stars as they traced the outline of her legs. She moved her arm to touch herself and it passed straight through her body. She jerked it away again.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the woman said. ‘You’ll soon become familiar with your new status as a holosap.’

  Arianna looked at the woman. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Perfectly well,’ the woman replied. ‘My name is Penny. You’re in the Re–Volution headquarters in London.’

  Arianna looked around her and realised that she was standing in her own office, the one she had last seen only the day before. The chrome Crucifix on the wall was gone, it’s mark on the wall covered by a plastic Re–Volution logo. See the light. She turned and saw that her full length mirror was still there. Her reflection glowed and shimmered, partly transparent, but more shocking was the face of a stranger looking back at her. Lynda, from Icon’s camp, her features as forlorn and lonely now as they had been hours before.

  Arianna, her mind filled with memories of the wonderful warm light and of Connor waiting for her, forced herself to ask the right questions.

  ‘What happened to me?’

  ‘We’re just trying to work that out,’ Penny replied. ‘Your download was activated remotely and we cannot locate your details on our database. What’s your name?’

  ‘Lynda,’ Arianna replied. ‘Lynda Griffiths.’

  Penny nodded and swept a perfectly manicured finger over a touch screen mounted into the arm of Arianna’s chair.

  ‘Can you recall anything about your life, Lynda?’

  Arianna stared at the floor near her feet and shook her head. ‘Everything’s just a blur,’ she replied. ‘I’m not sure what I’m seeing?’

  ‘Your neural connections are not yet complete,’ Penny explained. ‘It will take time but hopefully within a few days you should be able to remember everything that happened to you, right up to the moments before your upload. You understand that I need to report your upload to the police. They may wish to interview you in case your upload was the result of foul play.’

  Arianna nodded. ‘Of course, that’s fine. I’d like to know what happened myself.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Penny replied. ‘Your record in the database lists you as missing, presumed dead. You were only thirty nine years old. I’m sorry for what has happened to you, Lynda. Do you know why you were not here in the city when you uploaded? Our data puts you somewhere south of the Thames.’

  Arianna shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry but I don’t. I would never have willingly set foot beyond the perimeter though, it’s far too dangerous. Somebody must have taken me there.’

  Penny nodded and scanned her touch screen.

  ‘It’s possible you were abducted, although according to this you’ve been missing for some years.’

  Arianna changed tack.

  ‘Perhaps you could run some sort of scan on my upload?’ she suggested. ‘Maybe it will allow you to see what I can’t recall?’

  Penny inclined her head. ‘Perhaps, but that would be a police matter and they would need a warrant to access your data stream. I think that for now it’s best that you remain under restrictive measures until your history can be pieced together.’

  Arianna shrugged. ‘That’s okay. You’ll let me know as soon as you find something?’

  ‘Of course,’ Penny assured her. ‘Do you have anybody waiting for you?’

  Arianna shook her head. ‘Like I said, I don’t recall much right now.’

  ‘Okay,’ Penny said and shut down her touch–screen. ‘You’ll be assigned a quarters in the colony. You’re downloaded, but for the time being you won’t be able to move freely. Everybody is very sensitive here after the terrorist attack on our headquarters.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Arianna agreed and mustered a cheerful smile. ‘It’s not like I’m going anywhere now.’

  Penny smiled but her eyes were fixed intently on Arianna’s. ‘You’re handling this remarkably well, Lynda. Most of my clients find adapting to their new existence difficult and disorientating.’

  Arianna shrugged again. ‘Are you kidding? I’m immune to The Falling now. I don’t care how weird it feels, it’s better than dying for real…, I mean, forever?’

  Penny offered a final smile and reached out for a button on her chair.

  ‘You’ll be sent directly to your new quarters in the colony. Your escort will arrive shortly afterward. The transfer process is extremely rapid.’

  Arianna took a deep breath even though she technically had no lungs with which to inhale. Penny touched the button on her chair and Arianna reeled as data flashed like a whirlpool of stars spiralling down into a bottomless pit of darkness. Even before her brain had been able to properly process the image she found herself standing in an apartment th
at seemed to her as solid as anything in the real world. As she took in the scene, she gasped.

  Leather couches, soft carpets, broad windows that looked out across a tremendous vista of tumbling cumulus clouds rolling over pristine, forested mountains. Bright flares of sunlight burst through the cloud from perfect blue heavens to drift like glowing beams across the world below as though the hand of God were gently caressing His own Creation. A waterfall plunged down hundreds of feet from a mountain crevice into a deep, shimmering azure lake nearby, rainbows dancing through the clouds of vapour.

  Arianna gasped at how beautiful the holosap’s world looked, realised in colours more vivid than dreams. The apartment in which she stood was part of a palatial villa perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the forested hills and valleys. Arianna stepped up to the window and slid it open, the impossibly fresh smelling air wafting past her, the sound of the water and of birds in the trees. Clearly, there was no pandemic in this world. It was Heaven, or Nirvana, or whatever paradise one chose to call it, a far cry from Icon’s pitiful, freezing domain.

  It’s not real, Arianna. She gathered her thoughts, most of them haunted by the doctor’s parting words as she hurried across to a familiar looking panel on the wall. Clearly, the colony’s digital architects had decided to make the environment seem as real–world as possible. She tapped the panel, wrote a short message and entered a name into the transmission request window.

  To Alexei Volkov, from rebyohnuk. I need you.

  ‘Hurry,’ she whispered as she sent the request.

  ***

  38

  New Orleans

  ‘Stay down.’

  Kerry’s voice was a whisper as she crouched low behind a wooden fence that lined a parking lot near the airport’s main terminal.

  Marcus crouched alongside her and peered through cracks in the fence to where the airport terminals and control tower loomed. The vast, open expanse of the airport meant that there was no easy way to reach the radar tower, but that it was their target was made clear by the fact that in a world now devoid of electrical power, the primary radar dish was still spinning slowly.

  ‘It’s active,’ Kerry said. ‘They’re here all right.’

  Marcus scanned the airport and let his gaze fall on the enormous satellite dish, almost as big as the control tower, sitting at the end of a concourse near the terminals.

  ‘We’ll never get across there without being seen,’ he said. ‘They’ll be onto us the moment we step out of cover.’

  ‘They could have been onto us by now,’ Kerry pointed out. ‘They know roughly where we’re coming from and this is the main road in.’

  Marcus thought for a moment. ‘They’re letting us in?’

  ‘Yep,’ Kerry replied. ‘Easiest way to catch us I guess, just let us into their lair and then encircle us.’

  Before Marcus could stop her she got up from behind the fence and jogged alongside the high hedges that led to the airport’s main entrance. He scrambled to keep up as she moved beneath the main Terminal sign and toward an up–ramp marked Departures. There were no guards present, no spheres or humming swarms of Wasps awaiting them. The thought that they were all waiting in ambush sent shivers down Marcus’s spine that warred with those from his fever.

  ‘This is insane,’ he hissed at her. ‘They could send a hundred Wasps at us right now, or a dozen of those spheres!’

  ‘Then why haven’t they?’ Kerry challenged. ‘I think that they want us alive and the Wasps can be unreliable, so they’ll come at us with their troops instead.’

  ‘And that’s better how?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Marcus trudged along behind Kerry as she climbed the up–ramp, which turned left into the terminal entrance proper. Here, she slowed and hugged the concrete walls, easing her way up until she could peek around the corner and see the terminal entrance.

  Marcus’s guts plunged as he peered over her shoulder and saw two metallic spheres guarding the terminal entrance. Above the spheres, clinging to the concrete walls in angular, glossy black balls, were two swarms of Wasps.

  ‘Shit,’ he uttered.

  ‘Good,’ Kerry whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re letting the machines do the guard duty,’ she replied. ‘Machines can be fooled.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Marcus whispered. ‘We could get into the airport from any direction, just head back down to the lot and jump over a wall. These things are here for decoration.’

  ‘No, they’re here for a reason,’ Kerry snapped back. ‘Think about it. They post Wasps and spheres here, forcing us to move out across the open ground outside the terminal. They don’t think we’ll try the main entrance for fear of death.’

  ‘And unsurprisingly, they’re right. We go that way, we’re finished.’

  ‘But if we can get past, we can get halfway to the satellite dish without exposing ourselves.’

  ‘How? You can’t put the Wasps into stand–by without access to a computer, and those spheres are lethal.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kerry agreed, ‘but they’re also flawed. They must be powered by electricity so they must have a power source, batteries or whatever, and they must have delicate electronics inside them. Wires, silicon chips, stuff like that.’

  ‘So? You think you’re going to outrun them until their batteries run out?’

  ‘No,’ Kerry said. ‘But they couldn’t find us when we were camped out under that tree, and I think I know why. The spheres couldn’t get over the stream to look for us, and the Wasps just couldn’t see us from any distance away. Their sensors must be too small to resolve distant targets.’

  Marcus frowned. ‘So they passed us by.’

  Kerry nodded. ‘Plus the spheres, although likely remotely controlled by humans, are limited in their mobility and reaction times. They can be out–manoeuvred.’

  Marcus checked over his shoulder in case hordes of machines were approaching them from behind. ‘This gets better and better. So what are you suggesting?’

  ‘We attack them.’

  ‘We do what?!’

  ‘We attack them and slip past in the confusion.’

  ‘Just like that?’ Marcus uttered. ‘And if we do, don’t you think the soldiers controlling the machines will just send in the troops to finish us off?’

  ‘I’m counting on it,’ Kerry said. She watched the two hanging balls of Wasps and the two spheres for a moment longer, and then turned to Marcus. ‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do.’

  Marcus listened to what she had to say and then shook his head. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously,’ she confirmed. ‘Let’s get to it.’

  ‘But if we get this even slightly wrong…,’ he said as Kerry got up and hurried back down the ramp.

  ‘I don’t want to think about it,’ she replied.

  Marcus followed Kerry down to the nearby airport parking lot, where hundreds of vehicles lay rusting under the burning sun. One by one, using bits of pipe yanked from engines and old plastic jerry cans foraged from trunks, they began syphoning from old bowsers with tanks big enough to still contain useful amounts of gasoline. Marcus hunted down empty glass bottles, collecting them along with fragments of dried rags and abandoned clothing hanging to the bones of long dead victims of The Falling.

  It took almost thirty minutes to find enough gas to fill both the cans. Kerry led Marcus back to the up–ramp and gestured across to their left.

  ‘The ramp comes back down the other side of the multi–storey,’ she said. ‘Get over there and be ready.’

  Marcus sighed, but he hurried along across the front of the huge parking lot until he found the western access road leading to the up–ramp on the far side of the terminal. Carrying his jerry can and bottles, he crept up the ramp and under the terminal entrance shelter until he could see the two spheres and swarms guarding the main entrance.

  In the distance a bright rectangle of light marked the east entrance, and he glimpsed Kerry appear clos
e against the wall there. In typical fashion she did not hesitate. Before Marcus had a moment to draw breath and prepare himself he heard a clicking sound as Kerry lit the Molotov cocktail she had prepared and hurled it at the entrance. The flaming bottle arced across the terminal entrance and trailed oily brown smoke.

  Marcus’s heart skipped a beat as the silent projectile smashed right alongside the furthest swarm of Wasps. A bright spray of flaming gasoline, smoke and shattered glass showered down over the swarm and the sphere right below it. Marcus saw the two spheres jerk into motion as though startled awake, one of them draped in streams of burning gasoline.

  The two swarms of Wasps suddenly hummed loudly.

  ‘Shit.’

  Marcus grabbed his own Molotov and with his lighter ignited the tinder–dry rag stuffed into the bottle’s neck. He stepped out as the two swarms began to break apart, and with a heave of effort he hurled his flaming bottle toward the nearest swarm.

  The bottle spun through the air and smashed into the Wasps, exploding into flames that coated the Wasps in burning gasoline and sprayed down on the second sphere even as its feet flicked out to propel it after Kerry.

  Marcus ducked back against the wall as the second sphere rotated toward him and its guns flared. A deafening crescendo of bullets shattered the wall near where he cowered but ceased almost instantly as he heard a dull explosion and a deep thud.

  Marcus peeked around the corner, another Molotov in his hand as he saw the sphere topple onto one side as flames seethed inside it. The burning gasoline had seeped in through the open gun ports and he could see wisps of blue smoke as the flames melted vulnerable wires and cables. The Wasps above the damaged sphere were airborne but crashing wildly into the walls of the terminal as the sticky, flaming gasoline scorched delicate circuits and blurred their optics with fluid and heat. Others skittered across the floor, their wings malfunctioning and their glossy black abdomen pulsing as they tried to sting the flames that enveloped them.