Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2 by Elizabeth McLaughlin (reading list txt) 📗

with me that the coast was clear. Turning the mirror around in my hands I looked for some indication of how it had come to be there. Something in this pristine condition couldn’t be from before the storms and as far as we knew our shelter was the only one still standing. So where the hell had it come from?

“Look there,” one of the group pointed to the back of the mirror. “It says 149. See? You can barely make it out but it’s there.” Sure enough, printed in dark ink against a dark brown background. I rubbed my thumb over the material. It felt like something that had been made industrially. Not printed, but not by old equipment. I dropped the mirror fragment into my game bag, taking care to nestle it carefully to avoid cracking the glass.

“Let’s fan out, folks. There might be something else here.” The group spread out in a pattern originating from where we found the mirror. Each foot of grass and shrubbery looked the same as the last. Just as I was going to call the group back together something knocked against my foot. I reached down and dusted off the object. It was rectangular and fit in my palm. The thing looked vaguely reminiscent of a tablet except for the fact that it was flexible. I felt around the edges of the thing and felt my thumb sink into a button.

“Greetings! I am X2 Alpha Niner Bravo. How may I help you today?”

I dropped the thing as if it were aflame. It was a communications device. But something like this couldn’t survive the tempest that had been the surface for the better part of two hundred years. That meant it had to be recent. I picked up the little electronic device, hands shaking.

“Where are you from, X2A9B?”

“I am a communications device manufactured for the purposes of Mission Zero.”

I didn’t notice the rest of the group gathered behind me. When I glanced up I found them clustered around the little device staring at it as if it was a monster ready to jump out at them. I motioned them back. For all I knew, the machine was capable of killing me where I stood.

“What is Mission Zero?”

“Mission Zero is classified.” The console spat at me in a monotone. Its voice had changed from an affable, friendly tone to a mechanical one. A shiver ran down my spine at the shift. The little machine wasn’t as advanced as Gabriel, but it was damned close. I didn’t want asking the wrong questions to piss it off.

“Jacob, is that....?” Defne, one of the women who had excelled at hunting spoke up.

“It’s a tablet of some kind. There’s no way this thing could have survived out here for all of these years.” I turned it over in my hands. It started to emit a series of soft beeps, which almost made me drop it over again.

“X2A9B, what are you doing...?”

“Locating...locating...” The mechanical voice sang softly.

“Get rid of that fucking thing Grandad! For all you know it could be calling down a hail of missiles on top of us.” Marcus eyed the device suspiciously.

“I don’t think it is. The missile silos were all destroyed. You’re too young to remember, but there were meltdowns all across the continent. Really bad stuff. It isn’t trying to annihilate us. I think it’s looking for its home base.”

Sure enough, the machine stopped chanting and pulsed a faint red blip not unlike a radar array on its dirt encrusted screen. Wherever it was trying to return to wasn’t anywhere near the shelter, but wherever it was, it was big. I pinched to zoom back on the screen and the unlabeled point of origin still covered a sizable portion of the screen.

“Does this mean there are other humans out there?”

“Is that dot another shelter?”

“What the hells does this mean?”

The questions ping ponged through the group. I held up a hand. “We’ll take this back to the settlement. I’m sure there’s someone there who knows more about this than we do. Or who can at least find out.”

The idea that there were other humans alive on the surface was...well, it was impossible. If there were other people, did that mean there was another shelter operational? Would they be hostile if we showed up on their doorstep? As conversations broke out among us, I turned the device over in my hands and noticed a something engraved into the back of it. A shape like a double-helix was etched into the top of the material. It was reminiscent of a strand of DNA. Was it a logo? A symbol? Or was it a letter from a language I didn’t recognize? No matter what it was, a machine like this meant that there was something else out here.

Someone else out here.

The device joined the broken piece of mirror in my game bag and we started our long, slow trot back to the settlement.

32

Author’s Notes

Thank you for purchasing my book! I hope you enjoyed the read. The Quantic Dreams series was a great experiment into how to turn a passion project into an appealing series for all readers. In many ways the conflicts that Jacob faces are ever true. We all want to look out for our families and the responsibilities he faces are impossible problems. Like the rest of us, Jacob does the best that he can with the information that he has. Nothing he does is perfect, and he is all too aware. The events of Deviant and Defiant are something that I believe could genuinely happen in the future. The effects of climate change become more severe every year and we will face increasing drought, storms, and cold as the years pass. The response from world leadership has been slow, so sluggish that the effects we could have negated back in the ‘90s have become reality thirty years later. The ravages of climate change have already had a domino effect. Our economies, our resources, cultures,