The shock morphed into horror.
How could he run the base, guide Shadow Mountain’s warriors, without theTaounahaby his side? Without the mouthpiece’s connection to the elder gods? How could they defeat this new enemy, one unlike any they’d faced before, without Benioko by their side?
Shadow Mountain had lost their connection toTabenetha.
Disbelief crashed through him. How could the Shadow Warrior let this happen? Had a trickster pushed their way into the waking world and forced the mouthpiece to vacate his earthly shell? If so, why hadn’t Wolf’s danger gift activated? Why had he not seen Benioko’s death in time to prevent it?
He’d known Benioko had aged, grown thinner, and weaker...more lined and withered. He’d known the Old One’sspirit had started to drift, barely tethered to its mortal husk. But he hadn’t expected the Shadow Warrior to recall the Old One’s spirit—not before a new mouthpiece stepped into the role.
He’d been certain they had time...time for theTaounahato train a new mouthpiece...time to stop the world from imploding...time to keep the apocalypse at bay.
Instead, the Shadow Warrior had recalled his mouthpiece, on the eve of theWanatesa,as humankind headed into its final battle. He’d left the Kalikoia deaf and blind when they needed the elder gods’ guidance most.
Day 26
Washington, D.C.
Clark Nantz settled into the Pininfarina Xten office desk chair, smiling as the Technogel upholstery conformed to his body. Without doubt, this ergonomic chair was worth every penny of its one-point-five-million-dollar price tag. An eight-hour stint in this chair, while hunched over his laptop, didn’t even put a kink in his back. He scooted the die-cast aluminum base and polished arms under the African blackwood desk and reached for his laptop, pulling it closer.
The screen was already up, the programming module’s cursor blinking at him, a coy, even smug,blink blink blink, as though the computer alreadyknewthis new virus wouldn’t work either.Which wasn’t much of a leap. The two previous viruses he’d uploaded into the nanobot programming module hadn’t shut the NNB26 prototype down. But then, he’d engineered his little prodigies to resist computer viruses.
At the time it hadn’t occurred to him his bots would go rogue and refuse the kill switch programming. Or that they’d prove impossible to destroy. He tried everything from heat, to freezing, to EMPs and acid washes to eradicate the technology. And finally, two different computer viruses. Nothing had successfully terminated the little bastards.
But this final virus would work. It had to.
He’d gone outside the company this time, reached out to brilliant computer genius through clandestine hacking forums via the Tor browser. A freelancer. Someone who prized anonymity and was simply known as TermX. Someone whose unorthodox programming was creating an enormous stir throughout the programming universe.
TermX excelled at creating revolutionary computer viruses. He or she approached programming from unexplored angles, creating viruses that shut the target down and kept it inoperable. There was no repairing what a TermX virus broke. Nor did the secretive hacker have morals or agendas. For the right price, they’d create whatever the customer asked for.
And Clark had offered a fortune to create a nanobot virus to shut his little prodigies down...permanently.
Authors and artists had their own distinctive voices. A unique perspective or style that set their work apart from others. Programmers had something similar—a unique coding script that varied from programmer to programmer. Clark had programmed the NNB prototype in his own unique script—just as he’d created the code for the earlier virus attempts. All three projects carried his own distinctive voice—for want of a better word.
He’d also—foolishly—created the bots to evolve, to learn, to adapt, to survive. Which they excelled at. Over the past month, they’d evolved into a sentient, highly reactive entity.
Those first two virus attempts could have failed because the bots had recognized the scripts during the upload process. They could have recognized his coding voice, identified the potential danger, then moved to protect themselves by corrupting the download.
If that was the reason behind the earlier failures, this last virus would circumvent that. They wouldn’t recognize this script—thus, they wouldn’t identify the danger. Which meant this last virus should work. It had to.
If not, he was all out of ideas.
He grimaced and hit the execute key. Until the virus fully uploaded into the NNB26 programming module, he was living in a computerized version of Schrödinger’s cat—with the virus simultaneously successful and a failure.
As the virus uploaded, he accessed the atomic force microscope atop the prototype’s testing tank. Beneath the one million magnification, the bots looked like a colony of gunmetal gray, semi-translucent ticks strewn across the bottom of the tank. But even as he watched, the bots formed a tight huddle and started to swell.
A familiar buzzing came through the tank, via the laptop’s speakers.
Interesting…they hadn’t huddled and buzzed since their attack on Lovett five days ago. Not even during the first two virus downloads. The vibrations deepened to a guttural hum and the ball got thicker. They must have been reacting to the virus upload.
After Lovett’s electrocution by the little bastards, Clark had locked the nanobot lab and the NNB26 holding facility down. The only room currently staffed in the basement was themorgue. He’d restrict access to the morgue too if he didn’t need Doctor Comfrey to continue her research. No, he didn’t expect the bots to electrify the entire basement, but he wasn’t taking chances either. The damn things had proven far too ingenious; God knew the trouble they could get into.
Still, the active bots were safe enough in their sealed room. They couldn’t escape their tank. They’d be right there waiting for him when he deactivated them for good.
Out of habit, he clicked over to the atomic force microscope mounted on top of the holding tank in the storage facility. He didn’t expect to find any movement through that microscope. Although these bots were also the NNB26 prototypes, they were inert. Unprogrammed and inactive.
Or at least they were supposed to be. Only this time, when he pulled up the screen to the atomic force microscope, movement caught his eye. Scurrying bodies. The window must not have switched from the testing tank to the holding tank. Before he could hit the key to switch windows, he caught a good look at the scurrying bodies and his fingers froze.
These were not the same nanobots. They were black, rather than translucent gray, and ant-shaped rather than tick-like. These were not the bots from the testing tank. These were their unmutated brethren… their inert, unprogrammed counterparts.
