Twenty One: Hopes and Wishes

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The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

–Mark Twain

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2052 Old Germany

The two guards in the office were the easiest of the kills, as one of them was at his desk watching internet porn, while the other was playing a video game on his terminal. The gamer had kept open one of the monitors on his multi-screen system for a view of the security grid work of the compound, watching it out of the corners of his eyes in case of emergency, but for the most part they stuck to themselves and did whatever they wanted with their time, so long as one of them made the station check-ins every ten minutes. The two guards would switch off hours, alternating so the other one didn’t have to do anything for the hour.

Of course, whenever there was a shift change they just signed the sheet without actually checking in, a mistake that proved fatal in this case. Mwamba simply hit them both with poisonous darts from his blowgun, thus of the guards, their deaths were the least painful, as they were the least culpable in the sense that they knew nothing beyond the four walls of the internet, and were the least concerned with the world around them. They managed the horrors of the world by gladly accepting the opiate of mass communication entertainment. Zombies at best, perverts at worst, they were not the ones that the Reckoners had come for; they were just bumps on the road to their real goal.

Mwamba looked at the screen of the grid network, pushing the body of the guard onto the floor and sliding into his chair. Using the holographic keypad and touch interface, he highlighted one particular room in the house and opened a smaller pane with a live camera feed from the room. The black and white image was speckled with static due to aging electronics, but the feed was constant: the target was in bed, deep asleep. Closing the video panel, Mwamba opened another interface control where he ordered the security master computer to override the presets for the locks throughout the mansion, and then ordered all the locks undone throughout the house while locking everything in the bedroom. Next, Mwamba overrode the locking codes and replaced them with his own so that they could get into the bedroom when they needed. Finally, before shutting the system down, passwords irrevocably altered, he disabled all communications transmissions. Although this would eventually alert the division command of the problem, it would go undetected until morning, and in the meantime prevent the General from sending any distress calls in case he were to wake and find himself locked in. Hopefully, he wouldn’t even notice them enter.

Mwamba and Wayland hadn’t survived this long on hopes and wishes.