The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

assistants and then cut his own throat with a pen. With its intelligence on, it triggers the same murder-suicide impulse, but on the scale of the entire world.”
    Travis tried to recall the thing’s possession of him. He couldn’t. His memories of it, vague only a few hours earlier during the interrogations, were simply gone now. All he had left were memories of his own descriptions of the experience, but even those were going.
    Paige saw his expression. “No one ever remembers,” she said. “In a few more hours, you’d forget you ever held it at all, without others reminding you. No idea why it does that.”
    “Why did it save my life?” he said. “From the killer in the suit?”
    “If we understand anything about its pattern, it works like this: first it addresses any needs on the part of the user. The more desperate the need, the better. So it helped you kill your attacker. And then—I’m guessing a little here—it gave you the ability to read the language you saw on my wall, because that’s a need too, if we’re going to prevent what’s coming.”
    “But is that my need, or yours?”
    “It’s everyone’s need now.”
    The way she said it didn’t lend itself to doubt.
    “So then what?” he said. “When it’s done with the user’s needs, it gets busy with its own?”
    “Something like that. It may toy with the person for a while. Reveal some painful insight into an old wound, things like that. That may be why it uses a voice from the person’s past, one with a strong emotional impact. But yeah, it turns toward its own goals pretty quickly, and they’re always the same: cause as much harm in the world as possible, as quickly as possible.”
    “Nice.”
    “We understood all that about it, early on. The danger was so obvious, we considered locking it away and never studying it at all. But the potential for good was too big to ignore. It knows everything. And everything about everything. It knows how many blades of grass are in Kansas right now, and the length, angle, and arc of each one, and how the arc would change if the wind were half a mile an hour stronger. It knows the cure for cancer. The cure for everything.”
    “I assume you asked it.”
    “We asked. We brought in late-stage cancer patients and let them hold it. Should’ve worked, right? But it didn’t. Either it didn’t consider their need compelling enough, or …” She hesitated to say the next part, then exhaled and went ahead. “Or it just didn’t want to tell us things like that.”
    Travis waited for her to continue. She looked outside again, maybe reliving the angst the thing had inspired in her over the years.
    “You probably don’t remember,” she said, “but when it switches from help mode to kill-the-world mode, the light changes.”
    He didn’t remember, but took her word for it.
    “The focus of our research, of Aaron Pilgrim’s research, was figuring out how to extend the first part, indefinitely if possible. How to control it, as a user, and not let it change. Pilgrim was the only one who ever gained any ground on it, in that regard. He learned how to keep it tame for minutes on end. And then indefinitely. He mastered it, by some combination of focus and … who knows? He said he didn’t even know. He just got to where he could control it, keep it talking to him as long as he wanted.”
    “No cure for cancer, though,” Travis said.
    She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “Looking back, we have no idea what it really told him,” and Travis understood where the story was going.
    “There was no warning at the time. No sense that there was anything wrong with him. He made his move in 1995, after six years of working with the Whisper. He shut down Border Town’s defense system and killed eight security personnel on his way out. He took three entities with him. One was the transparency suit you recovered for us this morning. Another was the Whisper. The last one I’ll describe later. It’s important. It’s still unaccounted for, and it must be part of his plan.”
    “To take control of Border Town?”
    She nodded. “In a way that wouldn’t have been possible in 1995, all by himself. He’s spent these past fourteen years assembling his own organization. You could call it a dark twin to Tangent.” She met his eyes, and looked more grave than when she’d been dying. “There are things locked up inside Border Town that make a joke of every military on the planet. Pilgrim knows how to use