Matthew Granger was in a foul mood.
His dinner – his first decent meal in three years, a rare steak prepared by France’s top chef – had just been interrupted. He had told his staff to alert him when Jason Delacroix was confirmed dead, but the fatigue- clad Millennial brought only speculation.
‘We found the airship, sir,’ he said.
‘Survivors?’ asked Granger, placing his fork gently on the table but making a point to keep a grip on his steak knife.
‘We can’t be sure,’ replied the Millennial agent.
‘Who was in charge of this operation?’ asked Granger, rising to his feet and slipping the knife into a small hold built into his right cyber-kinetic leg.
A hush fell over Granger’s operations room as he marched through the door. Two dozen Millennials hunched at their terminals and did their best to not catch their master’s eye. They knew, either from experience or from rumours, that you did not want to be in Granger’s line of vision when he had been given bad news.
‘Who was flying the drone that engaged the Guardian vessel?’ he asked. A bespectacled youth with a mop of wiry hair raised a tentative hand.
Granger strode up to his terminal and scrolled quickly through a ream of densely-packed data on the screen.
‘You had them in your sights,’ he said quietly, dangerously.
‘Y-yes, sir,’ the programmer stammered, ‘but I couldn’t be sure—’
‘You had them in your sights,’ repeated Granger, ‘and, according to this report, they transmitted an out- of-date clearance code. So, you fired a warning shot?’
‘Yes, sir, I did, but—’
Granger spoke through gritted teeth. ‘We are standing on the brink of a new world order. Everything we have worked for is ours for the taking. Only one man can keep us from claiming our prize – a traitor to our cause, a terrorist – and you had that man in your sights and you fired a warning shot?’
Granger’s voice had risen as he spoke, until these last words came out as a scream. The young programmer was cowed into silence. He had turned quite pale.
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said the Millennial who had collected Granger, ‘but the airship was destroyed and the target almost certainly killed.’
Granger rounded on him. ‘Jason Delacroix has survived worse than this. He had all the time he needed to bail out of that airship and escape on the ground!’
‘We’ve diverted all available drones to the area, sir, and we have sympathisers among the French Gendarmerie who can...’ The Millennial tailed off, as Granger turned away from him with a snort of contempt.
‘I have devoted my life to the fulfilment of a new world,’ he raged, ‘a better world for everyone. And when I put my trust in other people, they let me down. People like you—’ He rounded on the trembling programmer. ‘—don’t deserve to live in the world I built. And you won’t!’
Granger grabbed hold of the programmer and pulled up the back of his shirt, revealing his standard DI socket. Granger reached for the steak knife and cut out the plastic ring embedded in his spine. His victim screamed as Granger pulled out his Direct Interface socket.
Granger dashed the blood-soaked DI socket to the floor. ‘Don’t let me see your avatar again!’ he ordered, pointing with the knife to the door.
‘Sir, please,’ the boy snivelled. ‘W-what will I do? Where will I...?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Granger. ‘I don’t care. You’re nobody now. Nothing. Live out your life in the dreary real world. You are not welcome in mine.’
Nobody spoke, nobody even breathed, as the programmer shuffled out. His head was bowed, his hands clutched to the hole in his back, and he was sobbing.
Granger addressed his remaining followers, more calmly: ‘I trust you have all learned something from this. We are not playing games here. This isn’t a practise run. What happens in the next few days will decide the future of humanity. We will bring order to our existence, or perish in chaos. There is no room for doubt, because doubt leads to mistakes. If you cannot pledge your unswerving, unquestioning loyalty to me, you should leave this room now.’
As he had expected, nobody dared stir.
Granger waited for a moment for his words to sink in fully, then reminded his people that Jason Delacroix was their first priority. He wanted him found and killed, along with anyone he had been in contact with, anyone who could know his secrets.
Granger returned to his suite with a feeling of dread in his stomach. He sat back at his table, placed his napkin on his lap.
‘I need a new knife!’ he barked.
He hadn’t planned for this. He had watched his enemies growing in number from his prison cell, but he didn’t have a contingency plan for them finding a secret weapon.
He hadn’t counted on the Guardians finding Jason Delacroix, alive.
He wouldn’t let them beat him. He had waited too long, fought too hard, planned too well to let anyone stand in his way now.
There was a terminal in his room, of course. Granger kicked off his shoes, lay on his bed, took a fresh adaptor from the drawer beside him and plugged himself in.
He closed his eyes and, when he opened them again, he was elsewhere: a white-walled conference room with a long, polished table, a video screen and a water cooler. He was looking through the eyes of his avatar: a fat, black, hairy spider, a metre and a half tall. Granger thought of this room as the centre of his web.
The room had no doors and no windows. The only way to reach it was to set the Point of Origin in the Metasphere to its exact co-ordinates – and these were known to only five people. As soon as he had adjusted to his new perspective, Granger ran a subroutine buried in his avatar code sequence, and messaged the other four.
As he waited for them to respond, he paced the conference room, luxuriating in the ability to stretch his eight legs. His cyber-kinetic walking system was at the bleeding edge of technology, but this felt like the real thing. This was freedom.
They arrived one by one, popping into existence around the table. A white Siberian tiger was first, followed by a slavering werewolf. The third avatar to appear was a spider, like Granger’s, but smaller and red in hue. The fourth was a pyramid, with a single blue eye poised atop it.
These were Granger’s most trusted lieutenants, the leaders of the four armies that would take back the Metasphere for him. Squatting at the table head, he asked each of them in turn for a progress report.
‘I have a force of sixty assembled in the west,’ said the werewolf, ‘with more on the way.’
‘My force of eighty is en route to the Northern Corner,’ said the tiger, ‘though as you know it is a good march from our position here.’
‘We have had no shortage of recruits to our cause in the east,’ said the pyramid.
‘That is good to hear,’ said Granger, ‘because I am moving up the schedule. I want our assault to begin in all four locations, twenty-four hours from now.’
‘Sir,’ protested the red spider, ‘I’m not sure we can... As you know, our target down here is a thousand miles from any big city. Our equipment, our recruits, are—’
‘Twenty-four hours,’ said Granger. ‘I don’t care what it takes, or what it costs, you will be ready. Is that clear?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the spider, meekly. The others confirmed their assent too, with the Siberian tiger boasting that her men would march through the night on her say-so.
‘We need to move fast, people,’ said Granger. ‘Right now, the Four Corners are in the hands of the faltering governments, and therefore vulnerable. But the Guardians know the locations of all four and they won’t wait long to make their move. I want those servers secured.
‘Any intel on where they’ll strike first?’ asked the tiger.
‘It could be anywhere, but the Southern holds the Uploaded, and if the Guardians are anything, they’re sentimental. I will fly to the Southern Corner myself and take charge of the team there.’
The red spider opened his mouth to protest, but Granger silenced him with a glare.
He dismissed his lieutenants, who each dived through their exit halos and vanished. They had a great deal of work to do, in the real world.
Granger had work to do too, but he lingered for a moment. He brushed a hand over one wall of the conference room, and it became transparent. Through the wall, he could see the skyscrapers of a thriving meta- city, and flocks of avatars in the sky. He longed to fly with them, but that would have to wait.
Granger couldn’t show himself in the Metasphere. His avatar was too well-known. The wall was transparent only from this side. Soon, though, when this world belonged to him again...
He smiled to himself. It had been irrational of him to worry about the Guardians. They were a disorganised rabble, clinging to outmoded dogma. They had no one with Granger’s genius, leadership or vision. So, let them come, he thought. Let them come for the Four Corners, and we’ll just see who reaches them first!
The race was on.