Steeled Spies #7: The Final Demonstration
The End of an Era...and the Beginning of a New Mission
“What’s the cost, Chairman? How much is freedom gonna cost on her terms?” Devenreux’s words were cutting deep for Beltrami, the wolf straightening his tie with stiff twitches of his gray hands. Before he answered, the light-furred activist decided to swing for the fences.
“I wonder what DeVol would think of all this.” Lucille seethed, that delicate face of hers now simmering with fury “Maybe he knew something he wasn’t supposed to.”
Chairman Beltrami snapped towards her indignantly. “Not at all! You saw the charges, he was tried and convicted honestly, and what was done was done.”
That was the crowd’s cue to go ballistic, shouting and spitting in rage at the podium. Lita shivered in anger at Agent Steele’s side, the dark gray punk’s eyes burning red-hot.
She felt Roger’s tight fist on her arm “I dug Ralph too, but do you want to martyr yourself over him or do you want to make sure half this fucking crowd doesn’t drop dead?” Lita returned the squeeze ten-fold, claws out and all, but like a block of iron, the agent’s arm didn’t budge.
“I’m keeping cool…I’m keeping cool.” she sighed at last.
Steele released his grip. “Good.”
No sooner had his own associate regained her composure than the white-suited statesman faltered in his. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” roared Beltrami, his tenor shrill as he vainly tried to clear the noise. When the upset mob carried on, the statesman grabbed the mic and bent it over the podium speaker. The feedback shrieked clear across the Park and, at last, hushed the crowd. When the statesman snapped the mic back, he held the audience with a glower and a restored velveteen voice. “Allow me to make very clear WHO you are really bargaining with.”
Beltrami held up what looked like Steele’s portable viewer. “I have just put in a request to the network to show to us all here at Empire Square Park just what She is capable of. And that display should be taking place right…about…now.”
Everything behind the backs of those at the podium went black. Not just a matter of shadow in the absence of light; genuine darkness. Lucille, Beltrami and the whole of the statesman’s entourage stood in front of a void where the great tower itself, Empire Square, was now gone. The gasps were met with the blacking out of the city in all directions. The world before them was gone in an instant, and all that remained were themselves and anything caught in the arbitrary zone around them. Walls were cut off, building facades could still be seen but the alleys between them vanished into the abyss.
Lita turned to Roger, and before she could say a word, Beltrami added something that set their blood on ice. “Sight is not the only thing she can deprive you of.”
The second he finished his sentence, all was dark. And all was quiet. Lita and Roger could not see each other, they could not see past the ends of their snouts, they simply could not see. It was as if a collective blindness had befallen the entire crowd combined with the close-quarters silence of an anechoic chamber. In fact, it was like the strange, alien space the gray wolf had been held in by Draco and his goons.
In the depths of an artificial quiet, Steele could only ponder the sheer enormity of their foe now. His hypothesis was no longer hypothesis. It was ice-cold fact. The power ACES held over senses, over perception of physical reality, it was all true and all on display. His mind raced back through the whole damned thing. What was real, what wasn’t. The activists he had met, the agents of ulterior motives, the strange labyrinth he had been set loose in to try and learn what he could about a mysterious faction of Haven’s disparate legions of freedom fighters, only to find it all had spun out beyond them.
Though he never jumped into its inky black pool, there was a terrifying despair that could split a lesser mind open and break it, and was desperately prying at Steele’s. Not the strange sensation of death, but the threat of it all being for not. The thought of having been given the greatest runaround of his life, of seeing a revolution short circuit beneath the weight of the world’s greatest computer system. The despair of being unable to surmount that which presented herself as insurmountable.
Whatever the Reformation meant before now had been swept away down the white-water of a city in the grips of a goddess. What a word, he chuckled to himself from within. It was the only way to describe her now. First she was a sophisticated network of computerized systems, then came sentience and a heightened form of artificial intelligence, and when combined with enough time, knowledge, and self-realization, came that status of godhood. She had control over it all. And now she was finally flexing those Olympian muscles in the name of making her “children” see just what she was. Who She was.
And yet he simply couldn’t negate all the blind spots. Had She let them send that message, or were the computers under Acacia really off the grid? Why turn the facade of the Reformation off, only to give them the chance to turn it back on? How much was truly under complete and total dictatorship?
The questions were the only things capable of echoing in what felt like an hour of being caged in his mind.
Then a voice. By God, a voice.
She can be fought, it said in harsh bit-crushed tones. Must be within. I can’t hold her off.
Whether the voice was just for Steele or if it rang out across every mind in attendance on that fateful day, the gray agent knew precisely who that was. The second party, the missing link, the someone who had visited him in 2475 on that damned access code mission. He heard the drawing of electric breath, ready to say more, only for the lights to come on. When the lock of his senses was undone, everything past those invisible jail bars was a horror all its own.
When the world was restored, half the crowd had dropped to the ground, slumped to the pavement with wide, tear-stained eyes. The eyes of hounds who had seen something they could not have understood in a million years, let alone in the instant they were allowed to experience it.
When Roger turned to Lita, she stood a statue, only speaking when the gray agent rested a gloved hand on her shoulder. “We got one hell of a road ahead, Steele.”
“Longest yet.” he sighed, crouching down and taking the pulse of every wolf near him. They weren’t dead, but the shock would most certainly linger with them for great while.
Lucille, for her part, was still standing. When she saw the scores lying down on the concrete, panic didn’t set in. No, it couldn’t. She too had been locked with her own thoughts in that eternal night, and it was at the time that she found the last of her words for the day. Beltrami stepped down off the podium with a final word.
“The effects shouldn’t be permanent, but I hope the shock will help you comprehend the gravity of our present situation. Good day.” With that, the entourage stepped down and marched back into the skyscraper at the back of the Park. True to her “maternal” nature, A.C.E.S. hadn’t the need to take life en masse. It was like one enormous time-out; an entire city sat in the quiet corner. Steele could appreciate black irony of it all, but not then. Not when he stood amid the felled crowd, which cut the profile of a genocide regardless of lethality.
The podium was left to a bristled Devenreux, one she took to it like a general. “Brothers and sisters!” she roared. “As you tend to those on the ground, God forbid we should lose anyone, a final word from the Reformation.”
She let the silence linger, giving the shuddering wolves on a chance to come to, the others standing up in a haze and helping the disoriented back on their feet.
“The road to freedom may now seem as distant and clouded and muddled as ever. But I say, in all sincerity and truth, that it is not so. I warned you all against coming today under what I believed to be certain threat of death. Only now do I realize the only thing sought today was the death of the will. The will to fight for your freedom, to believe in the power of yourselves, of your own two hands. We may not have control over the many networks and systems She has, and though it seems now that the Board is merely a conduit for Her own will, I say it is still imperative to make Her see. Make Her understand why we were born to be free, born to have our own agency, and born not to have life micromanaged down to the last angstrom of detail. Go not in despair, go not in dismay, but go now with the knowledge gained and ask yourself ‘how can we still be heard?’ And find those answers. This only ends if we give up.”
The applause, while not as rapturous or enthused as before, carried with it the ring of confidence. The autocops and guards did not lunge or bully as the crowd dispelled, merely watched as the many figures staggered and marched away. Confused, frightened, but through the right needling of encouragement, still committed to the cause. At least she hoped so.
Some would lie down and throw their hands up. Some would ask themselves that question, only to come up empty-handed for answers. But not all. That was Devenreux’s wager, a wager she shared with Lita and her crew, in the dim light of the Urban Avenger’s cracked-floor sanctum.
“Now I ask you.” she said softly, cozied up to the stocky gray Merrick in the main room, “Where do we go from here?”
The darksome punk batted at the overhead lamp, the old fixture swinging across the room, rearranging light and shade. Searching for something, anything to guide them. Without looking up, Lita snapped her half-gloved hand out.
The light fell dead on Roger Steele.
When she looked up, she could only smile. “Figured you’d be tied up in this.” Lita snickered.
Steele nodded. “Always am.”
“So?” Devenreux cut in. “What are you thinking, Mr. Unflappable?”
The gray agent paced about the room, looking for his answer. He eyed up the light-furred revolutionary with her head on a member of the Avenger’s Creed. He eyed up the steadfast ensemble of suited-up assistants. And, he eyed up the 40-something freedom fighter he was in it up to his neck with.
“For the Reformation,” he started, “what’s left of you anyway, you keep gunning for that seat on the Board. In fact, I’d put Lucy up on the ballot myself. Go with someone you can trust, and I’d hope you can trust yourself.”
Devenreux nodded quietly.
“As for us,” he continued, turning his attention back to Lita. “We have to go in it to above our heads. I’m not just talking about barking up any old tree anymore. I mean we got one living lead in on the White Coats, and if he doesn’t get a nine-millimeter surprise in the next few days, I want to work right through him and right through the ranks. I want to ride this lead all the way to the top.”
Lita looked skeptical at first, until Steele cleared the air the only way he knew how. “Besides, I’m a spy after all. I should be allowed to partake in some espionage for a change. Nothing like a good old-fashioned undercover mission.” When she finally broke down laughing, there was only one thing left for Lita to say. “Clear it with the General, clean up those scars of mine, and get your ass outta here.”
The blood wiped away easily and it didn’t take a nanosecond for the message from the General to come back through: “work through the wires, down to the last strand. No cable left coiled. Godspeed.”
With a change of contacts, a round of handshakes, and a swift shift of gear, the gray agent found himself back on the streets and back on the case of a lifetime, with one big beautiful white whale ready to swallow him whole if he made one wrong move. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.
THE END…FOR NOW