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Chapter 36

Las Vegas, Nevada

Monday

4:25 p.m. Pacific Time


Forbes magazine had recently estimated that Talbot Davidson had a net worth of somewhere between seven and ten billion dollars U.S. and likely had other offshore holdings that had not been reported. Forbes had no idea about the money in Cayman and Swiss banks that he’d acquired through supporting data theft operations, drug running, piracy in the Indian Ocean, and trafficking everything from counterfeit toys and clothing to guns and humans. And Forbes had no idea about the crypto mining farms he had set up all around the globe having yet to reveal the total number of crypto currencies he had amassed. No, Forbes had no clue. In reality, Talbot was worth more like ten times what Forbes had estimated. He knew all the right people, had large legitimate operations to launder his clandestine funds through, and had paid off or gotten leverage on enough congressmen and senators in the U.S. to overturn a veto or impeach a president. Talbot was untouchable, almost. There were only a handful of people who had managed to gain leverage on him, and by a handful, Talbot knew that really meant one.

He swerved his Lamborghini through the traffic at breakneck pace, weaving in and out between the sluggish drive time middle class Luddites. Those sheeple had no idea. They truly were nonplayer characters—NPCs, as Marcus called them—and their lives were inconsequential. A majority of them were inconsequential. In fact, he and Ingersol had run a simulation based on Marcus’s version of the Simulation Hypothesis and found that the amount of suggested power for maintaining connectivity between real players and a worldmap as complex as our reality would have an asymptotic limit on the number of real players. The power and computation requirements would tend to infinity as the numbers grew larger. The inflexion point on that curve was somewhere around five hundred million people. That had proven to be an interesting number and turned up in many conspiracy theories. Talbot did have to confess that the model he and Ingersol had developed had a shit-ton of assumptions and wild-assed guesses, so they could have been very wrong. What he did know, though, was that there were a lot of lives in this world that seemed to have zero impact on humanity and weren’t important—maybe even detrimental.

His life, on the other hand, was extremely important, at least to himself, but he was also certain it also was to the actual real human players in the Simulation or whatever the Hell Reality turned out to be and that he had to survive and thrive in order for humanity to do the same. He had done his best to thrive and to avoid being compromised or to allow someone, anyone, to get leverage on him. But he had loved Marcus too much through college. The man was nothing but brilliant and exciting to be around. At one point earlier in life he’d allowed himself to become compromised in a way he couldn’t get out of. But Marcus had saved the day for him when nobody else could. And now he was the one person who still had leverage on him. And the one Real Player, the one Superuser, Marcus Dorman, had called in a favor on that leverage. It was time to make good on a promise he’d made years prior. He knew it had been on the horizon since he and Marcus had dinner just days before, but once the order came through his universe, his role in the Simulation had been activated.

It couldn’t have come at the most inopportune moment either. Talbot had been in his penthouse overlooking the action of the Strip from his all-glass exterior bedroom suite wall. In the middle of the afternoon, he had managed to clear his schedule long enough to order his two favorite NPCs up to his suite for some fun. Power and money afforded any indulgence and Talbot enjoyed indulgences from both persuasions, usually at the same time. He was in the middle of the throes of those indulgences when his virtual glasses went into alarm mode.

The glasses had been sitting on his nightstand by his double California king-sized bed when the buzzing in his ears went off. At first he was certain that he hadn’t reached some new level of pleasure, but the buzzing soon turned into an alarm that squelched desire. It was a feature of the glasses. If they were within Bluetooth range, they could send alerts to the implants and that was exactly how it happened. The buzzing had quickly escalated from a “you’ve got mail” level to a blaring klaxon alarm suggesting that the world was on fire. It wasn’t, yet.

“You two, don’t stop what you’re doing,” he had told his indulgences as he untangled himself from them and crawled off the bed. Taking his glasses from the nightstand and stepping to the glass wall, he felt and heard the handshaking of the glasses with his implants. With hindsight he realized how iconic of a moment that had been as he stood naked, his tight perfect billionaire’s body sweaty from sex and glistening in the sun as it filtered over him. Wearing nothing but the sunglasses, looking out over Las Vegas like the god he was, he stood straight and still while he read the incoming message.

“So, what’s all the ruckus, M,” he whispered under his breath.


T,

NOW! NOW! NOW!

M.


That was all the message said. It didn’t need to say more. Talbot completely understood what had to happen next. He hadn’t hesitated. His mind completely ignored the rest of the world and set forth on what had to be done in the next few moments, the next hour, the next few days, and so on. He immediately turned to his walk-in closet, one that was larger than most of the penthouses in the building, and began throwing on clothes as fast as possible, all the while ignoring his indulgences, who were theatrically overdoing the sounds of passion as if they were making cheap internet porn. There was no time to worry with them. If Marcus needed him “NOW! NOW! NOW!” then that meant NOW! NOW! NOW! And he wasn’t about to let Marcus down.

Talbot tucked in his T-shirt, buckled his belt, and zipped the Armani trousers. Quickly, he then pulled on a golf-style technical material shirt that he could leave untucked. Once he’d slipped it on, he grabbed his nine-millimeter Sig Sauer P226 Emperor Scorpion in the carbon composite inside-the-waistband holster and slipped it inside his pants at his back, clipping it to the belt. He adjusted the fit and how the grip rubbed at his lower back until it was comfortable and then threw on his Level III armored dark gray sports coat and didn’t look back. If he never made it back to that penthouse, it would be of little loss or consequence to him. He gave his indulgences no further thought.

It had taken him less than ten minutes to get dressed, five to get down the private elevator to the parking garage, and then another couple to make it to the freeway. The bright red sportscar was likely nothing but a flash to the NPCs driving—if that’s what you called it—along his way. He zigged and zagged through and around them and pushed up Interstate 15 past North Las Vegas at over one hundred and eighty kilometers per hour. He could see the Bigelow building off to his west. His plans to one day steal all of the UFO secrets from Bob would have to wait. Besides, Talbot had plenty of his own secret weird things to sort through.

He had built the U.S. offices of Davidson Aerospace just outside of Nellis Air Force Base properties so he could overwhelm the other support contractors with presence. It had worked. Davidson owned most of the business in and out of Nellis, which included the highly classified stuff over the mountain near Groom Lake. Davidson Aerospace was connected to every aspect of highly classified space efforts, missions, equipment, and technologies, including the things that people didn’t want to believe in—other than the true believers and conspiracy nuts.

The tires squealed as he pulled off the exit to his complex. The building was a testament to all of the research and work that had gone on in the high-tech military space arena for the past twenty years. The large, high bay at the center of the campus stood taller and spread out farther than Madison Square Garden. The ancillary buildings spread about it filled an area as large as a division one college. Talbot employed almost three thousand people at those locations. Between there and the other campuses around the world, the Davidson-Schwab campus in Austria, and his clandestine locations, he likely had over twenty thousand people working for him around the globe. Most of them, he was certain, were all non-player characters and unimportant.

Finally, he made it through the campus traffic to his parking spot. Talbot didn’t badge through security like everyone else. He was waved through. The doors and gates all opened for him as he approached. He’d added software to the security systems he could control through the implants in his head a long time ago. There were no metal detectors for him—if there were, he’d simply overwrite the software for them. He had sent orders before his arrival to have all the hallways cleared and people removed from the path he was planning to take. He had no time for chitchat with a security guard or any of his engineers and scientists or any of the many office assistants needing his signature on this or that. There was no time. Marcus needed him NOW! NOW! NOW!

Through several doors and to the main office he rarely frequented he continued. There was a biometric lock he pressed his palm against for show. The screen scanned his palm with a red fanned-out beam and then it turned green with the words ACCESS GRANTED in white letters across the middle of it. The real lock he controlled with his implants. The door opened and he rushed in to his desk. The door closed automatically behind him. He sat in his desk chair and sent several wireless mental commands to activate the command center. Multiple monitors rose from mahogany cabinets around the room. A projector screen slid down from the ceiling and the whirring of the fan in the projection system filled the room as it warmed up.

Talbot pulled the top left desk drawer open, revealing another biometric panel. He pressed his thumb against it and thought in his password sequence at the same time. The top of the desk slid back about fifty centimeters, giving him a full desktop area with no clutter in his way. Through his virtual view there were multiple machines, keyboards, touchpads and screens sitting on the clear desktop. There was nothing there in the real world but his virtual worldview was a smorgasbord of data overload.

Talbot activated several of the touchpads and began typing in commands at a furious pace on the virtual computer systems. Finally, he had made it to the main menu for the Davidson-Schwab Inflatable Hotel Module control system. The system connected through various backdoor pathways into the Huntsville Operations Support Center in Alabama. The pathway was a completely new technology for transmitting and encrypting data. Once it had been invented, he and Dorman had bought every piece of knowledge of its existence and had everyone involved either paid off or taken care of. He had friends who were good at doing either of those when needed.

He started up the operating system commands for the DSIHM and could see a virtual three-dimensional wireframe model of the module as connected to the ISS in front of him. The three-dimensional data that Karl had transmitted to them a few days prior had updated all of the connection points, electrical systems changes, and additions to the ISS as the model continued to build itself. The data connection that the Huntsville contact and Ingersol had been able to create added real-time ISS data through the NASA Near Space Network system. There before him was the entirety of the International Space Station. As long as there was data flowing between the network of communication systems around the globe and the space station, Talbot could see real-time whatever NASA would see, plus a more detailed set of data coming from the instruments built into the DSIHM.

He pulled down the file menu and opened a folder marked as RESET. He waited for the program to activate and then there were suddenly red and blue lines that appeared in the DSIHM and throughout the ISS. Now was the time for boots on the ground. He opened the messenger application and virtually typed out a message.


K,

How are you, my man?

T


Talbot waited for a bit longer than he’d expected. He was starting to grow impatient when his implants buzzed at him to let him know there was a response. He opened it and read.


T,

Better. Took a new injection today that is helping. How can I help you?

K


K,

It is time. Throw the switches as planned.

T.


T,

Understood. Five to ten minutes depending on traffic.

K


Talbot exhaled for what seemed like the first time since he’d gotten the “NOW!” orders from Marcus. He had nothing else to do until Schwab came through on his end. Talbot had spent over two years trying to figure out how to make things happen in a fully automated way, but in the end, there had to be somebody there in space to perform certain aspects of the procedure. While he waited, he logged into the autopilot of his two-man hexacopter and had the preflight warm-up sequences begin. He wanted it to be ready when it was time to go.


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