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- Nigel G. Mitchell
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The turning point came in 1980 when IBM began developing its own line of microcomputers. Microsoft was hired to create an operating system for it. They eventually came up with MS-DOS, a system that gradually spread from IBM to all major brands.
Vulcan's Lightning was phased out as MS-DOS gained in popularity until Roland was forced to stop production.
The elevator drew to a halt at the penthouse, and Roland felt a sense of satisfaction as he thought of the approaching day when he would reign supreme. Still, as he walked out of the elevator, Roland couldn't complain too much. He was still a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world, thanks to Vulcan's line of high-quality hardware and software. He was also on the verge of signing up with a major Hollywood studio and a communications firm to usher in the next generation of interactive technology.
The lights in Roland's apartment glowed as he entered, activated by a motion-detector he had rigged on the door frame.
Roland glanced at the narrow shadow he was casting on his wall. He was extremely thin, weighing well under his ideal weight, as well as slightly gawky. Roland had always been thin, no matter how much bulk he tried to put on. It was one of the things that had made his childhood miserable.
The apartment might have surprised an observer. It was haphazardly decorated with replicas of the Venus de Milo, the Discus Thrower, and other famous Greek sculptures as well as a few originals. On one wall was an original framed poster from the Grecian mythology movie, Clash of the Titans, which Roland had loved.
He had always loved Greek mythology, ever since he first got a book of their stories as a child. Roland often dreamed of journeying away from the constant screaming and fighting of his home to the worlds Ulysses ventured to. He longed to battle a hideous one-eyed Cyclops or the monstrous winged Harpies guarding the Golden Fleece. With the creation of Odyssey, Roland had fulfilled this dream as well as others.
One of his prized possessions hung on his wall; the original artwork for Odyssey's cover. It was beautiful, but Roland considered the game itself even more beautiful. It was a masterpiece of design that had taken years to create, but Herring had done it. Four years after Roland had woken up one hot summer night with the idea that would change his life, Roland's plan had finally become a reality.
It was only a matter of days before Cerberus would be unleashed on the world.
Roland's mail sat neatly arranged on a silver tray by the door; an invitation to renew his subscription to the Science-Fiction Book-of-the-Month Club, and a copy of The New York Times.
Roland turned his attention to the Times. He pulled off the rubber band to flip to the obituaries. The anticipation tasted sweet. There, in the M's, was the obituary of Victor Morgan.
Roland read it four times, each time feeling the same tingle of pleasure. It was beautiful, a pure work of art. And, apparently, no one suspected a thing. Roland clipped the article with a pair of scissors, and spent a few leisurely minutes gluing it into his scrapbook.
The scrapbook had been with him for many years. It had grown steadily throughout his life with clippings and papers from every significant thing that ever happened to him. One clipping of his parents' obituary still made him smile.
Roland fixed himself a salad in the kitchen. His Beretta was always in reach, no more than a foot away at all times. A TV mounted on the wall showed his latest venture, a streaming video channel called the Vulcan Network. At present, it was devoted to movies, documentaries, instructional programs, and sitcoms based around the subject of computers. Roland had plans to expand the network into the new field of multimedia, bringing the next wave of interactive movies, TV shows, and games into reality.
When he had seasoned the salad, Roland carried it to his computer room.
Every major computer that had been released since 1983 waited there for him, and him alone. A private museum for his enjoyment. Roland settled down in front of a Vulcan PC, then switched the computer on. As the computer whirred to life, he felt that singularly unique rush he experienced when he was in no other place but this.
To say that he loved his computers was an understatement. Computers were literally his life. Roland detested social interaction with the outside world. Running his company was a discomforting, but necessary evil, and it was the only physical contact he had with outsiders.
Roland went to the web browser, and interfaced with the only world he felt comfortable in.
When Roland was on his home page, it told him that he had e-mail waiting to be read, over three thousand. Roland deleted most of them without reading them. They usually consisted of gushing fan mail or worthless messages from his employees.
Roland moved on to his IRC client. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was a system for chatting online that dated back to the early days of the Internet. It had been mostly replaced by Facebook messaging, the World Wide Web, and videochat like Skype, but IRC remained popular among hackers because it was a place to chat while remaining anonymous.
He logged into an anonymous server and accessed a private channel only seven people in the entire world even knew existed. None of them had ever met in person, but they had worked together to create something unlike anything the world had ever seen; the CLF.
To the other members of the CLF, Roland was known only as Pluto. He knew the names of the other members, but it gave him pleasure allowing them to believe they had complete anonymity. They still labored under the illusion that they were seven people who had met by chance to form the organization.
In reality, Roland had picked them all because they were believers and followers, each wealthy and useful to his plans. Most importantly, they were all easily manipulated. He had carefully guided them into banding together to achieve his goals. They gathered now, connected from all over the world, working together to kill.
Roland began to type under the codename of Pluto. The conversation unfolded on the screen:
[Cowboy6 has left the room.]
[Hawkeye has left the room.]
[Duke has left the room.]
[Howler has left the room.]
[Sapphire has left the room.]
[Razor has left the room.]
Roland switched off his computer. As it powered down with a low hum, Roland leaned back in his chair to look out of his window at the sprawling cityscape of Los Angeles.
The plan was going flawlessly. Nothing could stop him now.
4.
"I HATE Los Angeles," Cindy Diamond muttered.
This thought fixed in her mind as she sped down the I-405 to Beverly Hills, her e
ngine humming softly. She had just spent an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and if she was lucky, she would get to her hotel room before midnight.
Cindy couldn't wait to finish the photo shoot she was doing for Vogue so she could get back to her studio apartment in New York. It wasn't much better than Los Angeles, but there she could relax and visit her sister, Gina, who lived in Brooklyn.
Besides, California was really starting to get to her. All the glamor, phoniness, tanned bodies, and perfect faces fresh from surgery. For the hundredth time in the last two days, she found herself wondering why she put herself through this, but the answer was always the same; her career.
Cindy Diamond was what the media called a supermodel. That meant she earned a lot of money to stand around looking beautiful in clothes other people paid her to wear. When Cindy had lived in Omaha, Nebraska, it had seemed an unreachable dream. Everyone told her she was attractive enough to be a model, but it was only when a scout from the Elite Models agency gave her his card two years ago that she had believed it was possible. From then on, it had been a swift climb to the top. Which, as Cindy discovered, was nowhere.
She made a lot of money, true, but she no longer enjoyed her work. In the beginning, she had felt glamorous, dazzled by the bright lights, compliments, and fame. Now, she felt like a well-paid piece of meat. Comedians made tasteless jokes about her. No one listened to her when she talked. The only people she met were magazine editors, makeup people, brainless models, and photographers more interested in the position of her elbow than her mind.
Even now, Cindy was on her way back from a few hellish hours on the beach in a swimsuit. She had been trying to pretend to be enjoying the brisk summer air, instead of freezing in the cold November winds, boiling with anger at the motorists who gathered to drool at her.
Cindy was tired of living off her appearance. She wanted respect, and the only way she could see to getting that was to leave modeling for good. Cindy was pursuing several options, including a movie career.
That was nothing new; every model wanted to be an actress, and few of them were very good at it. Her agent was being flooded with scripts, but he was under strict orders to reject bimbo roles, including any script that had the word "bikini" in it. This limited her prospects considerably, but Cindy knew that if she could get a really hot role, something along the lines of Meryl Streep, she would be a star.
Cindy had another plan; a writing career. She was working on a novel called Six Months of Winter, a romance about a couple falling in love in the harsh wilderness of Alaska. It was going pretty well, considering she'd only written short stories before, and only for herself. Her agent even had a few publishers lined up to buy it after seeing only three chapters. Cindy was going to prove to everyone that she was more than just a pretty face.
Just as this thought brought a smile to her lips, she came screeching into another traffic jam. Cindy winced at the blaring horns, which were giving her a massive headache, and closed the windows.
In the silence of her car, Cindy began to relax until shouting drew her attention to her window. In the car parked alongside her, an elderly couple smiled and waved at her.
"Are you Cindy Diamond?" the old woman shouted.
Cindy forced a smile and shook her head. She turned away, groaning inwardly, and slipped on a pair of sunglasses. She hated being recognized, especially when she tried to relax. She tried to accept her fame gracefully, but she was still thankful when the cars ahead of her moved. She was able to drive away from the couple next to her.
The traffic came to a dead halt again. Actually, the delay wasn't too bad. It gave her a chance to crank out more of her novel. She leaned over to open the laptop computer on the passenger seat next to her. Already plugged into the cigarette lighter, Cindy accessed the word processing program she had copied from her sister.
Cindy couldn't hold back a smile, remembering Gina's excited face as she gave her the DVD with the word processing program on it. She said it was designed for fiction writers, and had special features like automatic outlining and a plot template. Before Cindy left for California, Gina had tried to get her to play some weird game she had downloaded off the Internet called Odyssey. Gina raved about how realistic it was, but to Cindy, it just looked violent. She had better things to do with her time.
Besides, Cindy wasn't a big computer lover. She knew very little about computers, which up until a month ago were alien creatures from another planet to her. She only started using a laptop to write her novel. She had to admit, it seemed easier with her sister's program.
Cindy found the page she was working on in her laptop, and began to type. The haunting suspense of the scene she wrote began to overwhelm her until she could almost feel the icy Arctic winds pounding on her skin as her character raced across the frozen tundra--
A high-pitched car horn shrieked behind her. Cindy almost knocked her computer onto the floor as she looked up to see the cars moving ahead of her. Cindy shoved the computer off her lap, put the car back into gear, and began to drive again. When she was going fifty-five, she reached over to close the laptop.
But her brief glance at the screen puzzled her. It had gone black. Her novel was gone. Cindy felt a surge of panic at the thought that her file, in fact her whole novel, might have been lost. Cindy had heard something about hard disks crashing, but she had no idea what it meant. All she knew was that you were supposed to make copies of all your files, and she hadn't even made a backup copy of her book. Fifty-two pages, down the drain.
Cindy tightened her grip on her steering wheel as she drove along the highway, her frustration boiling within her. The interior of the car lit up again as the screen brightened once more. Cindy glanced around the road ahead of her to make sure nothing came towards her, and looked back down at the computer again.
Something weird was going on. Instead of a sheet of text about a chase between her heroine and a crazed mountain man, the computer showed a scene of a moonlit desert. A creature like a three-headed wolf stood in the middle of the empty plain. Its three sets of jaws curled into a vicious snarl. It wasn't her book, that was for sure. The image seemed oddly fascinating, incredibly realistic, although it had the too-smooth quality of all computer animation. She couldn't take her eyes off it. She couldn't even move.
The dog began to gallop towards the screen. Dust flew up as its paws struck the earth. Its jaws opened so wide that they filled the screen until it went black.
Cindy realized her arms trembled so hard she could barely hold onto the steering wheel. She couldn't understand why anyone would want to make anything so awful, enough to give her nightmares.
Flashing lights began to move across her screen, a pulsating cacophony of light, thrown up from her computer. The interior of the car began to pulse in rhythm with the lights. Cindy felt a tingling in her stomach that began to burn as the acidic stench of sulfur seemed to fill the car from nowhere.
Cindy could hear horns yelling at her as she continued to drive, her foot pushing down on the gas pedal, moving it faster and faster, past sixty-five, then seventy-five, until she was going a hundred miles an hour. She knew she veered into incoming traffic, but she couldn't stop, couldn't move, couldn't even steer out of the way of the car she rammed into. The impact sent her Ferrari cartwheeling into the air to land on its roof on top of three other cars. The squeal of brakes filled the air as smoke hung like a shroud over the scene. Cindy couldn't move. She couldn't even breathe.
5.
THE FUNERAL of Victor Morgan was held at seven o'clock on Wednesday morning. He had requested in his will that his funeral be held within 24 hours of his death. He always said he hated the idea of his body lying around a morgue being pumped full of chemicals to keep him fresh.
Kent attended the wake and graveside service in a daze, only aware of the frenzied sobs of Morgan's widow, Adrian. She was, in the vernacular of death, "not taking it well." The senselessness of Morgan's passing probably only added to the horror of her loss.
T
here was a large crowd at the funeral, despite a sudden downpour. Most of Victor's friends and co-workers were there, except for Wayne, who had to meet with the CEO of TeleTech in place of Victor. Kent glanced around at the crowd, huddling under their umbrellas like a field of newly formed mushrooms. They all listened to Arthur Gaines, president of Gaines and Company, give a moving speech on Morgan's contribution to the company and their lives.
Kent had to turn away from the grave when Morgan's coffin began to lower into it. He had sharp memories of Sharon's funeral, which had been just as cold and miserable. Kent trembled at the memory, trying to fight the waves of horror sweeping over him. Instead of waiting for the ceremony to end, he began making his way through the crowds to his taxi as quickly as possible. He had to get away before the aura of death overwhelmed him.
By the time he reached the taxi, the service had ended and Victor's mourners followed him to their own vehicles. Kent glanced back one last time, and paused.
Someone still lurked beside Victor's grave. Even in the pouring rain, the person carried no umbrella, only a long coat flapping in the breeze and a large hat covering the head. In fact, the only exposed portion of the stranger was a braid of golden hair flowing down the person's broad shoulders and back.
The stranger approached Morgan's grave, and pulled a camera out of the heavy coat. Even through the rattle of heavy raindrops pounding on his umbrella, he could hear the camera clicking away.
The sight of it chilled Kent to the bone. Besides the ghoulishness of taking photos of a dead man's grave, there was something else about this person that didn't seem right. The stranger seemed unusually secretive, trying to hide the camera under the lapels of the gray coat as it snapped.
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