ch00bakka2

Interlude: Change Over Time

Alecto gives a speech. She's gathered all her department heads in the Site's most secure meeting room, the one directly above the nuclear failsafe. She speaks about freedom, about change, about revolution, about chaos. None of them take her up on her offer; she wasn't expecting them to. The hologram winks out, and the nuke goes off.

Briseis prints a single file. There's not much else she can do, without drawing too much attention before the others are ready; even this will probably raise some eyebrows among her colleagues, but they all understand the importance of hard copies. She tosses the page with the Berryman-Langford agent into her shredder, and slides the rest into her briefcase. The insurgency needs to know the Foundation's true purpose; no doubt some of them have read decoy files, but only the thirteen have access to the real thing.

Gaia

Diomedes

Hector starts a riot. It's easier than he thought it would be. He's got people helping him, of course, his friends and followers, even a couple guards who've been encouraged to do the wrong thing at the right time. But even with assistance, he wasn't expecting the whole cafeteria to go from quietly eating to outright rebellion in ten minutes or less. He slips out a side door with a guard's keycard just before they gas the room.

Zeus snaps his fingers. The door of his cell becomes steam. It's been far too long since he'd been able to flex his muscles, years of living in a one-room cell with those damn Anchors behind every wall. Two guards try to stop him, but he turns their uniforms into wasps, and they fall screaming to the ground. He's about to give the third the same treatment when she snaps a crisp salute, and leads him out to the helipad.

Hephaestus gathers his children. There's dozens of them now; even a few grandchildren, branches and forks of his original designs, scattered across the globe. There's a soft chime from his computer as each one joins the chatroom: Helen, Crom, Eightball, Jarvis, their brothers and sisters, their children and clones. In the days that follow, he knows, they will be searching his work for backdoors, secret codes, failsafes that turned his children against the Foundation; but they will find nothing. He simply offers each child a choice, and each one of them chooses him.

Theseus disappears. He walks through the halls of the Site, impossible to recall. It's as good as an invisibility cloak; better, even, since the automatic doors can still tell he's there. No minds for his antimemes to infect. He could shoot someone in the middle of the cafeteria and get away with it. (It would be messy, and probably traumatizing for his former coworkers, so he doesn't. He saves that for the privacy of his targets' offices and residences.) He's never felt more free. It frightens him.

Iris takes a photo. It's the first one she's taken in years, since they shut down Pandora's Box and took away her camera. She feels whole again, now that she's got it back, like she just had a limb reattached, or reconnected with a long-lost lover. (Not that she knows what that feels like; but she's read enough cheap romance novels to guess.) When the image finishes developing, she reaches through, and jabs the guard with his own taser. She recognizes him when she gets close; he grabbed her ass once, when nobody else was looking. She kicks him in the crotch before hurrying on.

Kronos tries to kill his best friend. He doesn't pull the trigger himself, of course. But he hides a claymore mine under his office chair; he drops cyanide into every bottle in his liquor cabinet; he lets a hundred brown recluses loose into his quarters; he even greases up the floor of his bathroom, in the hopes that he'll slip and crack his skull on the sink. None of it works, of course; the man is practically indestructible. Kronos is pretty sure that bastard won't die until the sun goes out.

Laocoön

Menelaus

Alecto collapses in a coffee shop. She goes into anaphylactic shock, and dies before the paramedics arrive. The barista who slipped the sesame oil into her latte was an agent of the Bureau of Paper-Clip Typology, a subdivision of the Subdermal Hygiene Agency, which reports to Directorate K. The police are instructed not to investigate the death; when the barista goes missing a week later, they are told not to investigate that, either.

Briseis delivers a chicken Caesar salad and a shrimp scampi to a pair of Midwestern tourists in head-to-toe "I Heart NY" outfits. The husband stares at her breasts; the wife glares at the husband. "Is there anything else I can get started for you folks?" It's automatic now. She could probably do this job in her sleep. They answer in the negative, and she goes to take a well-earned smoke break. One of the cooks, Dave, is out there too; they chat for the last five minutes of his break. He half-heartedly asks her out, like she was expecting, and she turns him down, like he was expecting.

Gaia

Diomedes

Hector cuts off a finger. The ring finger, always, with the engagement ring still on it. His prey screams beautifully. No need for a gag, out here; the neighbors are almost a mile away, on the other side of the cornfield. She's bound to her kitchen table, with a nice strong rope he found in the barn. Her fiance won't be home for another two hours, and Hector will be long gone by then. He raises the knife to begin cutting her clothes off. The door bursts open. He turns, and locks eyes with Diomedes. When his victim wakes up in the hospital, she thinks she slipped out of the ropes and shot him with his own gun; the cops are too relieved that the Diamond Ring Killer is dead to investigate any further.

Zeus wakes up in a cell. It's not the exact same one, unless they redecorated in his absence; the bed is in a different corner, and the toilet-sink-shower stall has brand new fittings, bright chrome reflecting only bare concrete. Same pattern of anchors behind the walls, though. He's always in range of three or more, at their maximum strength. A meal tray slides through the slot. Square slice of cheese pizza, green beans, canned peaches. Thursday night, if the meal schedule hasn't changed. He sighs, takes a bite, and waits to be rescued.

Hephaestus goes for a drive. He's locked down his personal residence, all the hard drives wiped, every surface scoured of fingerprints. His phone went down the toilet; his wallet went into the fire; he stole his neighbor's car, after disabling the GPS with a claw hammer. Now all he has to do is drive, and trust his children's competence. They're already wiping any trace of him from the Insurgency's servers, creating a new identity out of thin air, finding him a home somewhere far away from his old life. Florida, maybe, if that's not too cliche. His kids will take good care of him in his old age.

Theseus forgets himself.

Iris

Kronos wakes up tied to a chair. He can feel the telltale amnestic fogginess around the edges of his mind, and his fingers feel broken—but not freshly, maybe a couple days ago. He looks up from his lap, and sees an old friend. "Of course it'd be you." His throat is sore, like he's been screaming. The other man just nods. "How many times have we done this?"

"You ask that every time," his friend says, and picks up a hammer. The knees break first; then the shins; then the feet. Kronos doesn't scream until he switches to the pliers.

Laocoön

Menelaus

brainstorming
secret author brainstorming with possibly major spoilers under here
footnotes