75
Near Vientiane
Laos
CHRISTIAN DRESNER BACKED AWAY from the screen depicting Smith crawling toward Javier de Galdiano, whom he clearly didn’t yet realize was dead. Zellerbach was still on the other terminal carrying out his attack on individual components of a network that extended to every corner of the world. And Randi Russell had her back pressed to a low steel wall, occasionally shooting blindly over it in what was looking more and more like what it was: a last stand.
He turned toward a blank wall and activated his Merge’s video capability, pulling up feeds from public webcams all over the world. They hovered in front of him bordered by two bar graphs, one in blue depicting the total number of people currently online and the other in red representing those targeted. He focused on an image of a busy street in the financial district of London, following the well-dressed people rushing along the sidewalks and the vehicles choking the street.
The confident stride of a man approaching a crosswalk faltered and Dresner watched him grimace in pain and grab his right shoulder. A woman next to him reached out a helping hand but was unable to prevent him from collapsing to his knees. She started to call for help but then fell silent when she saw that the man she was hovering over was only one of many.
Cabs continued to move through the streets, their drivers not heavily targeted by LayerCake, but a bulky Mercedes in their midst suddenly swerved and jumped the curb, scattering people Dresner’s system had determined were innocent.
He kept his breathing even, trying not to think of his failures, of Smith and Russell, of the future. The ramifications of what was happening were impossible to determine and would have to be allowed to unfold over the coming months and years.
For now, there was only this moment. A moment when people died, when children were orphaned, when industries, governments, and militaries wavered. A dangerous and solemn moment.
Another car veered toward the sidewalk but then managed to correct and roll safely to a stop. Dresner took a hesitant step forward, though the motion had no effect on the image being projected on his mind. The people lying on the concrete weren’t moving but also didn’t have the profound stillness of death. He’d watched this play out in the North Korean facility more times than he could remember and it always followed the same pattern. Something was wrong.
The red bar hovering to his right began to flicker and a moment later disappeared.
De Galdiano.
The Spaniard had full access to LayerCake and had used that access to modify the judgment criteria into something no one would match.
Dresner shut down the video feed and rushed to his terminal, but when he reached for it an intense pain in his right arm stopped him. The confusion he felt was quickly dispelled by a crushing tightness in his chest and a sudden inability to breathe.
De Galdiano hadn’t changed the Merge’s criteria to target no one, he realized. He’d changed it to target its creator.
The room began to swim around him and he reached for his Merge, fumbling the power button with a thumb quickly losing sensation. His legs gave out and he hit the floor, still clawing desperately at his unit.
The pain continued to grow and he abandoned his efforts in favor of trying to deactivate the subroutine. Unable to remain on his knees, he fell to his side, concentrating on the familiar human outline icon fading in and out of existence in his peripheral vision. The launch button he’d used only moments ago now glowed with the red letters “abort.”
It pulsed irregularly, keeping time with his dying heart for a moment, and then went black.