Hacker the outlaw chroni.., p.21
Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles, page 21
Do you like it?
He didn’t hear the question as words, only as awareness that he himself had formed into words. An awareness that was familiar. So familiar.
Yes, he heard himself say. His entire being, every shred and fiber of him resonated with gratitude and there was only one response possible. Yes. If he could have said it a million times with a million voices it still wouldn’t have been enough to express the gratitude and awe that overtook him in that instant.
This was not simply a being, but Being itself. The creative One from Whom, through Whom, and to Whom all things existed. Without this Presence, existence was impossible.
He knew all of this instantaneously. He needed no evidence because it was self-evident.
Austin was silent, rendered speechless with wonder and awe. But he knew that this was only the beginning.
4.5
DAY 3 - 11:59 pm
I STUMBLED out of the saltwater tank, blinking to focus my eyes, and rushed into the apartment with Mom’s words resonating through my mind. She was where I’d left her, slumped forward in the wheelchair with her chin resting on her chest.
I reached her and felt for a pulse, but I already knew she was dead. It’s what she wanted and what I’d help her find: lasting peace and freedom.
“I love you, Mom,” I said, placing a kiss on her head. “I’ll save him, I promise.”
I ran to a nearby shelving unit and scanned the medical supplies Austin had stacked there. Mom had said that something Austin had put in his veins had killed him. I had to assume she meant the Kick compound. He’d said he wanted to go deeper, but the only way to do that was to up the dosage to minimize his brain activity. The dosage must have been too much for his body to process.
Tracing my finger from box to box I scanned the labels. I had to find the epinephrine. Mom said I needed to put something in his veins to jump-start his heart, and the only thing I knew that could do that was epinephrine.
My gaze dropped to the bottom shelf. A red plastic container the size of a thick book was bound to the shelf by a single black strap. Thick white letters were printed across the top: Epinephrine.
I pulled the case free and charged back to Austin.
Dropping to my knees beside him, I snapped open the case’s lid. Inside, embedded in grey foam, lay several vials of clear liquid and a large syringe with a capped needle. Epinephrine: medical adrenaline, the kind used to jolt patients’ bodies out of anaphylactic shock or cardiac arrest. It’s a last-resort solution, sometimes administered directly to the heart tissue and has been known to bring clinically dead patients gasping back to life.
With trembling fingers, I worked the needle cap loose and drew an entire vial of the drug into the syringe. It didn’t look like enough, though, so I drew another, holding it to the light.
I tossed aside the empty vial, and it skittered across the floor as I leaned over Austin’s body. Getting the drug into his body would be the easy part, but how would it circulate? His heart wasn’t pumping so it would do no good to inject it into his arm.
Jab it into his heart?
Without a better idea I straddled his body and, syringe in my right hand, ran my left over his ribs, feeling for a gap. I couldn’t just stab him, using the syringe like a knife. If I hit a bone, the needle could snap. If my aim was off, I could puncture his lung and miss his heart entirely. No, I’d have to lean into it and push it in slowly.
I traced my fingers over his cold skin, feeling for what I thought might give me the best shot at his heart, and marked the gap with my fingers.
I took a deep breath and pressed the thin needle against his skin. The flesh gave beneath the pressure and the needle punctured it, releasing a bead of blood. The needle flexed dangerously and scraped against a rib. The needle was too thin and too short.
I slid it out and sat up. What now? How could I reach his heart?
Austin’s head had flopped to the side, exposing a large, pale blue vein in his neck.
There. I leaned close and worked the needle beneath his skin until it was inserted into the vein. Holding it steady, I jammed the plunger home and watched the fluid as it entered the vein, ballooning it slightly.
I jerked the needle free and tossed it aside. I leaned into his chest with my hands. I had to circulate the adrenaline on my own. It was the only way to get it through his heart and into the rest of his body.
* * *
THE THRUM vibrating through Austin was like the roar of a million tides. It was life itself and it filled him in a way that he believed he had known once before, long ago. Even before he was in the womb of his unknown mother, this was here. This is where all things came from long before anything ever was, and this was where he belonged. He knew it all in less than an instant, in the impossibly small space between thoughts—here, where the past, present, and future seemed to be all happening at once, beyond time.
Here there was only love, unending and inexhaustible, bottomless, extending out to the entire universe, wrapped around it, cradling it.
Here there was only God.
Who are you?
The revelation came as an instant flash of knowledge—not an answer that came as a thought or even words, but something far more fundamental.
I AM that I AM.
A deep, impenetrable gratitude as deep and fluid as a million oceans coursed through him. All of those years of seeking and wrestling and struggling for knowledge, revelation, and truth was possible only because he was being led forward, beckoned. The struggle and pain of pursuing the answers had led him here.
These were the words of Jesus when asked who he was. Before Abraham was, I AM. The life he’d lived with the simple belief of a child, as a child, came flooding back to him. This was that kingdom of heaven, as much inside of him as beyond him.
But the him he’d always thought of as him, wasn’t really him. He realized that he could no longer sense possessing a physical body. He had no fleshly hands to hold in front of his face or legs to stand on. He’d been stripped down to the core of who he was, without a body or brain, which had no significance here where the expanse and depth and height and width of truth was too much for his or any mind to hold. And this reality too much for a trillion minds to grasp. In a short lifetime of scraping together philosophies and ideas and facts, he’d learned many things, but all of that knowing was, at best, hollow and, at worst, a shadow that he’d fallen in love with.
You were created to love and be loved.
The truth thundered across the cosmos in a shock wave of raw energy and love. It spread in all directions at the same time, causing all of existence to shimmer and vibrate. There was nothing he could ever do that would cause him to be loved less than he was in that moment—or in any moment of his existence. Nor could he possibly be loved more. Nor could he disappoint the One who’d breathed him into being. Austin was fully known in ways that he couldn’t understand, and yet he was fully, completely accepted and treasured.
How was it possible that such unfathomable perfection would love him so completely? He wasn’t perfect; nobody was.
And yet, he was loved. He knew that without question. Here, all things were as they should be or they would not be at all. In this Love, all things were held together.
In dying, your life blooms; in letting go, you find your true self.
The universe suddenly swirled and shifted, revealing an overwhelming panorama of spiral galaxies that stretched before him, more than could ever be counted. Billions of them, or maybe billions of billions.
Purple veins of shimmering energy crisscrossed the vast open space, coiling and connecting in all directions in geometric patterns he could barely process. Newborn stars pulsed within dense clouds of swirling, multicolored gas. In the distance, a massive star collapsed into itself, compressing into a pinpoint of light that disappeared before erupting again in an explosion great enough to wipe out entire galaxies.
Look closer.
Immediately he saw beyond the galaxies. Yet not beyond as if overlaying them. Entire dimensions shimmering in light, expanding outward in a swirling, dervish motion—a dance—as they raced across the void at speeds no human could ever experience while bound to the limited dimensions of his earthly existence.
There was no end to them. No edge to any of it. Everything stretched as far distant as was possible for him to see and beyond. There was no beginning and no end.
Austin watched in stunned awe, surrounded by an overwhelming sense that he too was eternal. He too was known long before he was ever born, before the foundations of the worlds were laid.
The words were like salve that worked deep into the fractures of his heart. He’d never considered it before. There was no evidence, there were no facts, to prove that he was anything more than his biological mind, yet it was now a self-evident truth that didn’t need proving any more than his own existence.
His mind wasn’t him. There was a part of him that existed beyond his body, beyond his mind, beyond his thoughts. There was a place where this deep resonating existence connected with him and, there, he was at home. The realization brought him back to his childhood, growing up in a monastery, learning of an infinite God and being in wonder and accepting that truth without question. This was essentially that.
But then the words had put God in a box, as words could only do. In truth, he saw, God was not defined by words. God was the Word itself. Infinite. And he was in awe once again. Weeping with gratitude and ecstasy without shedding a tear.
How long Austin remained in that state of raw bliss he could not know, because there was no time in his awareness. He only became aware that there was yet time at all when something changed.
There was a jolt of light and his field of vision shuddered.
What was that?
There is nothing to fear.
Another flash and he felt himself being drawn down. Falling away.
But he couldn’t go! Not now!
The world he’d seen earlier materialized around him as he was drawn downward. Within seconds he was falling through the clouds with the boy once more by his side. The child spoke not a word as they tumbled through empty space.
They were careening toward the earth far below. He looked over at the young boy.
“I don’t want to go back!”
The child was silent, his focus intent on a pinprick of darkness far below. It was death, he thought. Or the dimension his body had lived in.
“Please . . . I want to stay.”
But the boy said nothing. The pinprick of darkness ahead grew into a yawning abyss that stretched wide to swallow him again.
“No . . .”
He felt the boy release his hand.
Then Austin was alone, rushing into that darkness.
* * *
I BLEW hard into Austin’s mouth again, struggling to fill his lungs. I locked my elbows, placed the heels of my palms over his chest and drove my weight into him in the hope that his heart would spasm to life again. The adrenaline was in his veins, but was it circulating?
“Hang on,” I said and tilted his chin. Two more long breaths into his mouth before switching my hands to his chest. I was gasping for breath myself as I compressed his rib cage, tank water still dripping off my face.
One, two . . .
“Come on . . .”
Three, four, five . . .
Again, more breaths and compressions until I was sure I would crack his ribs. But I didn’t care, I had to bring him back. Again and again, but with each breath, each compression, each thump on his chest, the finality of his death became my own.
“Wake up!” I screamed, as if to myself as much as to him. “Wake up!”
Austin had moved into this apartment to escape the world, to drop off the grid. Reclusion meant privacy and peace, but also isolation. No one was coming.
There was nothing I could do. My brother and father were dead. Austin was dead. My mother was dead.
I was alone.
Darkness crushed me with that realization. It was as if I’d been dropped into the middle of the ocean with a lead weight chained to my neck.
I lifted my chin and screamed at the ceiling, a ragged scream filled with years of pain.
I really was alone.
4.6
STONE PAUSED midstride and listened, but the only sounds were the old wood groaning under the strain of the wind. The lobby was filled with scaffolding and plastic-wrapped stacks of lumber.
His eyes traced the floor, which was covered in a skim of dust that had been disturbed in a trail from the door to the elevator and nowhere else. Twin lines, thin and parallel, carved a fresh path in the grime. Between the lines, which he assumed had been made by the mother’s wheelchair, were footprints.
Veering toward the stairwell, he paused only to glance at the gated, open-air elevator that rose through the vaulted ceiling. A lighted digit above the door indicated that it was parked on the top floor.
He took the stairs, moving quickly and silently. He heard the girl’s scream as he reached the top floor’s open doorway. He paused at the threshold, waiting, listening.
Another scream. Just the girl. That didn’t mean she was alone in the apartment with her mother, but he suspected that was the case. Her anguished shrieks piqued his curiosity.
Stone hadn’t bothered reattaching the sound suppressor to the gun’s barrel. There was no need. No one would hear her screams or the gunshots.
He moved deeper into the dimly lit hallway, angling right, following the sound of the girl’s voice, which came from an open doorway across from the elevator.
He reached the door, pistol cocked by his face. The massive room beyond the entrance was dim and filled with blinking server racks and medical equipment. Several feet into the room a woman sat in a wheelchair with her back to the door. The mother.
The girl was out of sight, somewhere on the far side. Stone held his weapon in both hands, arms now extended. Rolling off the wall and around the threshold, he entered the apartment.
* * *
“I WON’T give up on you,” I whispered. “I won’t . . .”
I leaned down to blow into his mouth again, three quick breaths, knowing it was hopeless, but unable to stop. A loud crack echoed through the apartment when I straightened to pump his chest again. Something slammed into my right shoulder, knocking me to the floor. I cried out and grabbed my shoulder. Pain radiated from it, hot and fiery. A bloom of red blood spread across my shirt, below my collarbone.
I’d been shot?
But then it wasn’t a question. I’d been shot!
I jerked my eyes toward the source of the sound. The view was mostly blocked by shelves and a desk, but I still caught a glimpse of black pants and shoes walking toward me.
Frantic, I pushed upright and struggled to my knees, feeling like a trapped rat, as a second gunshot split the air. To my left, the doorframe to the tank room splintered. Another crack! sent a bullet across my scalp, grazing it and stinging like the lash of a bullwhip.
“Trust me, if I wanted you to be dead, you’d be dead.”
Stone . . . but how had the man found me? No one had followed me here, I was sure of it. My eyes searched the room, looking for some way around him. The sharp pain in my shoulder pulsed in agonizing rhythm with my heart.
“Stand up,” he said.
I crawled forward, keeping the desk between the man and me, and peered around the corner. He stood twenty feet beyond the console. The large control panel was the only thing separating us. The only way out was through him.
I pressed my back to the mammoth desk, which provided my only shelter. Blood soaked my shirt, making the material cling to my skin. A cold chill worked through the right side of my body and my head felt light. I was trapped and no one knew where I was. No one would rescue me this time. He was going to kill me.
He fired three more rounds, and monitors on the console shattered, raining down shattered glass on me.
“Your mother’s dead, I see,” Stone said. “They’ll blame you, of course. Isn’t that how this story goes?”
Get a grip. Think . . .
But the only thing I could think was to stall him and even that would do nothing.
“Racked with guilt from killing her own mother, a loving daughter takes her own life.” Stone continued. “However the story really goes, I have to kill you, you understand.” He paused and let the words settle on me. “How quickly and painlessly is up to you.”
I felt myself starting to fade, as much from fear as with the loss of blood.
“Why are you doing this?” My voice sounded weak.
“It’s quite simple. You took things that didn’t belong to you, things that could cast my employer in an unfortunate light. I can’t allow that.”
He took a step, angling around the console. I heard the clink of a bullet casing spin across the floor as he kicked it.
I peered under the desk and saw his black shoes on the other side, close. A few more steps and he’d see me.
“Your friend, Pixel, died slowly,” he said. “You, however, don’t have to. Just stand up.”
My eyes flicked toward the tank room and, driven by instinct more than logic, I lunged forward and scrambled through the doorway. I slammed the door shut behind me and jammed my thumb against the doorknob’s button lock.
Panting hard, I leaned there against the door and squinted into the room’s darkness. If only the hacks could have allowed our bodies to travel through time and space and not just our consciousness, I would’ve gotten into the tank and escaped through another reality, because that was the only way out.
Eyes adjusting to my surroundings, I crawled toward the far side of the room. There had to be something I could use to defend myself. My hands bumped against the legs of the stainless steel table where Austin laid out his tools for calibrating the tanks. I stood and bumped the tray with my arm. Metal wrenches clanged and scattered across the floor.
