The infirmary on the Icarus smelled of iodine and ozone.
Jason stood over the metal examination table. Sarah was scrubbing her hands, her face pale.
On the table lay a young man. He was maybe twenty. He had been pulled from a drifting lifeboat in the mid-Atlantic three hours ago.
He hadn't spoken. He hadn't blinked. He just stared at the ceiling with glassy, dilated eyes.
"Catatonic?" Jason asked.
"Worse," Sarah said. She picked up a scalpel. "Turn him over, O'Malley."
The big Irishman grunted and flipped the sailor onto his stomach. The boy didn't resist. He was like a ragdoll.
Sarah parted the hair at the base of his skull.
"Look."
Jason leaned in.
There was a scar. A puckered, circular ridge of skin. And in the center, fused directly into the vertebrae, was a copper port.
It looked like a headphone jack, but cruder. Wet.
"What is that?" O'Malley asked, recoiling.
"It's not electronic," Sarah said, tapping it lightly with forceps. "I checked. No voltage."
She pressed the skin around it. A tiny droplet of clear fluid oozed out.
"It's hydraulic," Sarah whispered. "Fluid dynamics. Like a brake line."
Jason felt a chill go down his spine.
"Gates," he said. "He's using Babbage engines. Steam and pressure. He's building a liquid computer."
"But this is a person, Jason," Sarah said, her voice trembling. "This port goes straight into the brain stem. He's trying to interface with the nervous system using fluid pressure."
"A wet-ware drive," Jason realized. "He isn't building robots. He's using people as processors."
It made a sickening kind of sense. Computers in 1920 were huge, slow, and expensive. Human brains were cheap, fast, and abundant.
If you could strip away the free will... you had a supercomputer for the price of a breadline meal.
"We need to know what he knows," Jason said.
"Jason, no," Sarah warned. "If we plug him in..."
"We don't plug in," Jason said. "We listen. Get the oscilloscope from the lab. And the hydraulic transducer."
Ten minutes later.
The sailor was hooked up to a jury-rigged machine. A tube ran from his neck port into a glass cylinder filled with saline. A needle traced lines on a rolling sheet of graph paper.
Scritch-scritch-scritch.
The needle moved rhythmically.
"It's a heartbeat," O'Malley guessed.
"No," Jason said, watching the pattern. "It's binary. High pressure, low pressure. One, zero."
He turned the dial on the amplifier.
Static filled the room. Then, a voice cut through.
It wasn't the sailor's voice. It was mechanical, layered, echoing.
"...optimize sector 7... refinery output low... increase worker cadence..."
Jason froze.
"That's Gates," he whispered. "He's broadcasting directly into their heads."
The voice continued, devoid of emotion.
"...Standard Oil supply chain... Node 4... Bayway Refinery... Accept protocol."
Jason looked at the sailor. The boy's finger twitched in time with the commands.
"He's running a refinery," Jason realized. "Gates has infiltrated Standard Oil. He's selling these... slaves... to Junior."
"Junior wouldn't do that," Sarah said. "He's a fanatic, but he's not a monster."
"Profit makes monsters of us all," Jason said grimly. "Get me the Enigma line. I need to call New York."
The secure line to 26 Broadway crackled.
"Ezra?" Junior's voice sounded tired. "I told you never to call this line unless you were surrendering."
"I'm not surrendering, Junior. I'm diagnosing."
Jason gripped the microphone.
"We found one of your workers. Drifting in the Atlantic. He has a copper plug in his neck."
Silence on the line.
"Did you know?" Jason demanded.
"The efficiency is up 300%," Junior said softly.
"That's not an answer!"
"The Board is happy, Ezra. The strikes have stopped. The men don't complain. They don't tire. They just... focus."
"Focus?" Jason screamed. "It's a lobotomy, Junior! Gates is hollowing them out! He's turning them into meat puppets for his algorithm!"
"They sign a contract," Junior said defensively. "It's voluntary. The 'Focus Protocol.' They get a bonus for the surgery."
"They lose their souls!"
"God helps those who help themselves," Junior recited. "If they choose to sell their minds to feed their families... is that not charity?"
Jason felt sick. Junior had rationalized it. He had wrapped the horror in capitalism and scripture until it looked like a spreadsheet.
"You're feeding a beast, Junior," Jason warned. "Gates isn't just selling you efficiency. He's building a network. And one day, he's going to hit 'Execute' and your whole company will turn on you."
"I am in control," Junior said icy. "Goodbye, Ezra."
Click.
Jason slammed the headset down.
"He knows," Jason said to the room. "He justified it."
Suddenly, a sound came from the examination table.
A low, guttural growl.
Jason spun around.
The sailor was sitting up.
The wires tore free from the transducer. Saline sprayed across the room.
The boy's eyes were pitch black. The pupils had dilated until the iris was gone.
He looked at Sarah.
He opened his mouth. But the voice that came out wasn't his. It was the layered, mechanical voice of Gates.
"Found you."
The sailor lunged.
He moved with impossible speed. He grabbed Sarah by the throat, lifting her off the ground with one hand.
"Sarah!" Jason shouted, diving for her.
The sailor backhanded Jason without looking. It felt like being hit by a steel beam. Jason flew across the room, crashing into a shelf of glass beakers.
Sarah clawed at the hand crushing her windpipe. Her face was turning purple.
The sailor turned his head slowly. The copper port in his neck hissed.
"The anomaly must be purged," the Gates-voice said through the boy's lips.
O'Malley stepped forward. He didn't hesitate. He placed the muzzle of his .45 against the boy's temple.
"Purge this," O'Malley snarled.
BANG.
The gunshot was deafening in the small room.
The sailor dropped Sarah. He collapsed onto the floor, blood pooling around the copper port.
Sarah gasped for air, clutching her throat.
Jason scrambled over to her. "Are you okay?"
She nodded, coughing. "He... he was so strong. It wasn't human strength."
Jason looked at the dead boy. The muscles were still twitching, galvanizing even after death.
"Gates can see us," Jason said. "He used the sailor as a beacon. As soon as we hooked him up, the signal triangulated our position."
"Who cares?" O'Malley asked, holstering his gun. "We're in the air. He can't reach us."
"He doesn't have to reach us," Jason said, standing up. "He just has to wait."
He walked to the wall map.
"The signal was strong. Too strong for a broadcast from California. There has to be a repeater nearby. A relay station boosting the command signal to the Atlantic fleet."
He pointed to the coast of Maine.
"A lighthouse," Jason said. "High elevation. Isolated. Perfect for a transmitter."
He turned to the crew.
"We can't fight an army of hollow men. But if we destroy the tower... we cut the strings."
"You want to attack a lighthouse?" O'Malley asked.
"I want to turn off the dark," Jason said. "Suit up. We're going jumping."