I’ve still got most of the long tendril of bots snaking out and forming the mesh network between me and the bridge, but now my closest awareness is several hundred meters back from where I had just been. It’s very disconcerting, having my eyes blinded like that.
“He’s got some kind of jammer,” I say. “I can’t get my cloud anywhere near him.”
“Can you block the way ahead?” Lin’s voice asks over the speaker phone. “Keep him on the bridge?”
“On it,” I say.
I reach out, extending my cloud out over the Mississippi River on either side of the bridge, careful to leave plenty of space between them and Jeff’s van. I close back in on the bridge, well past the minivan. I reach into engines and carefully but quickly kill several cars by blocking up air intakes. The already slow traffic grinds to a standstill as the cars sputter to a stop. There’s no shoulder on the bridge, no way to get past the jam.
“OK, he’s stuck,” I report. “Get us over there.”
Evan drives as fast as he can, but the traffic rippling back from the stopped cars on the bridge slows us to a crawl before long. He pulls over to the shoulder and we jump out. With a big cluster of my cloud having been taken out by Jeff’s jammer and the rest focused up forming a perimeter around his bot zone, I’m short on bots nearby.
“I can’t form a flight suit,” I tell Evan. “Can you carry me?”
He nods, understanding the situation. He encases himself in a suit and me in a shell that reminds me of the old bulletproof shields we used in Africa. I’ve got my bot senses live so it’s not quite like the sensory deprivation chamber we had then, but the darkness is absolute inside. I make a note to make it easier to take passengers when we fly. This isn’t ideal. I ignore my sensory deprivation chamber and probe the perimeter of the range of Jeff’s jammer. I have him completely surrounded, but I have no idea what he’s doing in there, no matter how many eyes I have looking in on him. When Evan finally cracks me open at the edge of the bridge, I have to blink and shield my face with my hand against the morning sun we’re facing into. I peel back just enough bots to give myself some shade as Evan and I sprint out along the narrow space between the cars and the railing.
I pull my bots back towards me, navigating the ones on the far side of the jammer around the perimeter of the jam zone so that I don’t lose them. I trail them behind me and park most of them in a pile in sleep mode just before we enter the jammer’s range. I jam a handful into my shirt pocket, turned on just in case I can get the jammer stopped before their connection times out. I see Evan doing the same. I pray to Mom that we can reactivate them when we kill whatever is projecting the strong field of static on all of our control frequencies.
I traverse the distance of a couple of football fields with a strength born out of my many mornings of running with Andrea. I hear Evan puffing behind me, falling behind. I can finally see the corner of Jeff’s new ride. Jeff steps around in front of it to the narrow shoulder of the road.
“I didn’t want to do this,” I hear Jeff shout, “but you gave me no choice. You’ll want to stop following me if you value the planet.”
“What are you talking about?” I bellow back.
“I left you a recording,” the distant figure yells. “You’ll want to listen to it.”
I see him step up onto the concrete barrier on the side of the bridge. It’s a long, long way down to the placid water of the Mississippi, but he jumps without hesitating. I’m torn for a moment between running back to the edge of the jammer’s range or running forward to just turn the thing off. I think the minivan is closer.
I sprint ahead as fast as I can, thankful again to Andrea for forcing me to become a runner over the last year. Even as fast as I am these days, it feels like it takes forever to get there.
“He just jumped off the bridge,” I puff out to Lin as I run. “The jammer is still going so I can’t do anything about him yet. I’m making a dash for his car, hopefully I can get that thing turned off and take him out now.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Run then!” her voice in my ear encourages me.
I arrive and look over the edge where he jumped. Jeff is down in the water, swimming awkwardly downstream. Part of me wants to just jump in after him and strangle him now, but at this height that’s borderline suicidal and I’m not into that anymore. I’m not sure how he thinks he’s going to avoid getting slagged as soon as I get that jammer stopped, but knowing that it’s Jeff makes me very wary as I approach the van. There’s a tablet sitting on the driver’s seat that I can see as I step towards the passenger door.
I look around for the jammer. It’s gotta be here somewhere, or at least something that controls it. I saw Jeff reach over to the passenger side with my bots before I got cut off by his jam. I don’t see anything on the seat or floor, so I open the glove box and start rummaging through it.
Evan catches up and slams open the drivers side door, his breathing harsh and ragged. Nothing in the glove box. I wrangle the rear door open, adrenaline roaring through my system, and start digging through the loose electronics. There are like a hundred random things here and I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Evan grabs the tablet from the seat and taps the screen. I hear Jeff’s voice fill the minivan.
“Hello, brothers and sisters. I do not know which of you are there following me, but it is absolutely imperative that you stop your pursuit now and go back to the storage container. I am certain that you know which one I mean. The nanobots that I planted there will begin uncontrolled self-replicating five minutes from the time I jump from the bridge.”
I stop cold and do a little calculation. Can we even get back to the storage container in time? Maybe, but it would be tight. He’s got to be bluffing. No one would do this. The risk is too great, it’s beyond suicidal.
No, wait. My index reminds me that he already did it once in Denver.
“You may be tempted to pursue me instead of handling that situation,” Jeff’s voice continues. “It was a calculated risk to put the world at risk like this, but I have every confidence in both your abilities and your judgment. I would remind you that failure to contain the nanobots before they spread widely will certainly doom the world. I have an oxygen tank from our medical supplies and can remain submerged for a very long while, and as you know, our nanobots are largely ineffective underwater. Waiting for me to surface would be a poor choice.”
Dammit. I should have prioritized solving the underwater signaling problem last year. I make a note to get that done if the world doesn’t end today.
“I sincerely hope that there are more than one of you present,” Jeff’s recording continues, “I do not think that one Butler heir could contain an outbreak of freely growing nanobots alone. Oh, and I suppose you will need access to your clouds. You will find the controller for the jammer in the back of the van, it’s the small gray box with the loose wires hanging from it. There are two unlabeled buttons. The larger one will deactivate the jamming field. I do hope you succeed. I have plans for this world, transformational plans, and it would sadden me for it to end this way.”
The recording ends. I find the small push-button controller that matches his description. I seize it and frantically hit the bigger button. How long was I in range of the jammer? Did the bots in my pockets lobotomize themselve?
I feel the familiar sensation of the bots reconnecting, the reassuring extra appendages that I can feel as if they were my own flesh. I look out over the river and can’t see Jeff anywhere. He must have submerged himself as promised. I’m tempted to wait for him to surface or start scanning the surface of the river, but there’s no time. I sprint westward along the bridge as I reach out with my current tiny cloud, reconnecting to the pile of bots I’d left behind. I feel the software sync them into my distributed robotic body and I’m whole again. They rush towards my biological self and a second later I’m in the air, my flight suit forming around me as it lifts me up. Evan is right behind me. I spread a layer of bots just over the water of the river, hoping Jeff surfaces while I’m still in range, but he doesn’t.
Other people have gotten out of the nearby cars and trucks, a bunch of them looking out over the edge of the bridge to see what happened to the guy who jumped off, even more of them staring at the two guys that just tossed through the jumper’s van and then flew off like superheroes. I hear sirens in the distance.
I don’t have time for this. I pull every last bot I have against my skin to force out as much speed as I can. I pull way ahead of Evan. With my larger cloud and his greater mass, he can’t keep up with me.
From Evan: I’ll catch up, keep going!
I skim over the tops of buildings, making a straight line back to the Store’N’Go, not caring who gawks at us or how much attention we draw.
“What’s happening now?” Lin’s voice says in my ear. “I could only hear part of that message. Did he say the end of the world?”
“Can’t talk now,” I reply, not willing to lose any focus even for an instant. “Tell you later.”
I bolt through the sky, pushing myself faster than I thought my cloud could carry me, but I still arrive too late.
Mom, if you’ve got any pull with the other angels, I could really use some help right now.
What had recently been the storage unit is now a roiling puddle of dark gray doom.