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“What about the sick?” I ask.
“We can’t take them,” he says.
I can’t help but feel disappointed in Dante. He had once set my mother free even though the Guild had turned her into a monster, but now he was turning his back on the people of the Eastern Sector.
“Unfortunately, if what you say is true, the virus progresses so rapidly we have no time to find a cure,” Loricel says. “But the diseased represent a clear and immediate threat to our operations here.”
“It doesn’t sound like we’ll be safer on Earth,” Erik mutters.
Next to him Jost has gone pale. No doubt he’s wondering how to protect Sebrina. I want to kick Erik right now.
“Can we prevent the singularity?” I ask, trying to focus on something positive.
“That is what Protocol Three is for,” Loricel explains.
If the first two protocols alter people’s psychology and destroy whole metros, I’m not sure I want to know what Protocol Three does.
Albert is the one to finish the explanation. “Protocol Three will end the Cypress Project.”
“End it?” I echo. The Cypress Project was once an idea—the theory that with machines men could manipulate the most basic strands of the universe to create a perfect world. Now that idea was Arras itself.
“The men who created it were scientists. It stands to reason we would create a termination procedure if the experiment was deemed a failure,” Albert says.
“And Arras is a failure?” I ask, feeling slightly insulted.
“It will be a failure if it results in the death of two worlds.”
“But the people in Arras—”
Loricel holds up her hand. “Protocol Three will allow for total evacuation of every metro in Arras before the world unravels.”
“And that’s it?” I ask. “We press a button and then poof! No more Arras?”
“That oversimplifies things a bit, but—precisely,” Albert says.
In a way it’s what I wanted, but I’ve seen Earth and I know the hardships generations will endure rebuilding that world.
“You would let Arras go?” I ask Loricel.
She laughs at this. “I’ve been trying to let it go for hundreds of years.”
I can’t help it. I don’t want to see Arras destroyed. Does that make me the same as Cormac?
“You spoke to me once of the greater good,” I say to her.
“Age understands what youth cannot,” she replies, but she offers no other explanation.
“How do we do it?” I ask.
Jax and Albert share a look and my stomach clenches.
“That’s the hard part,” Albert says.
TWENTY-ONE
ACCORDING TO JAX, WE PRETTY MUCH HAVE to bust into the Guild offices in Cypress, hack their controls, and start evacuation procedures. Which will work—if we don’t get caught. Returning to Guild-controlled Arras unnoticed won’t be simple, especially if we need to break into the Ministry offices. But then there’s still the matter of the self-destruct code—a code only Cormac knows.
Because we wouldn’t want this to be too easy.
