Alarms were blaring.  Someone had entered the building.  As Damon Wade and Kenji made their way down to the lower levels, they found themselves at a dead end.  Tapping a keypad, a service elevator compartment opened up.  Wade pushed the slightly disoriented Kenji into it.

“V.i.V.?” Wade asked. “Begin all primary downloads, arm all lower level charges above Alpha priority and see what you can do to stall the intruders.”

V.i.V. appeared and gave a quick nod before vanishing.

“Wade, I didn’t really know if it was you all those weeks ago, and now you’re here and we’re heading to a part of this building I didn’t even know existed,” Kenji trailed off.

A reverberating siren pierced Kenji’s eardrums. It felt as if a devastating shockwave was unleashed in his head.  The force brought him to his knees. Wade only looked over after hearing Kenji cry out in pain. He saw Kenji’s body and face contorted in pain, but glancing down at himself, he was seemingly untouched and unharmed.

“V.i.V., show me Times Square, Cairo and Johannesburg,” Wade said. “We need to see what’s going on.”

Three separate screens appeared before Wade, but the sight was all the same—throngs of people clutching their heads, screaming for help.

“No no no!” Wade slammed his hands on the door.  It opened. Wade dragged Kenji, still in shock, to the nearest desk terminal.

“We’re out of time,” Wade lamented.

Kenji opened his eyes as the piercing abated.

“Wade, did you hear that?”

Wade ignored Kenji and ran his omni-sensor over Kenji, confirming his fears with a beeping noise.

“You have a bio-neural interface chip in your head?”

Kenji gasped and nodded.

“It helps me interface with security better.  Don’t you have one?  Wait, you can’t hear that?”

Wade shook his head.

“No. Source Point seems to have accelerated their plans. They’re using Telecom satellites to disperse the signal, incapacitating 75 percent of the world’s population.  Faust is scared, he must have …”

Wade paused to read a news blog.

“He began onsite installations a month ago,” Wade said. “Nearly everyone has them now, or at least the people that matter.”

“Why would Source Point and Faust do this?”

“Money, status, power; it doesn’t matter anymore.  I was trying to preemptively trying to stop them by shutting down this main server room. Damn it!” Wade hurled a chair across the room.

The chair bounced off the drywall, leaving a sizable hole, from which a blue glow and a soft whirring emanated.

“Wade you need to see this,” Kenji stammered.

Kicking the hole in, Wade and Kenji found themselves in a massive underground chamber.  At the far end on a raised platform stood a lone terminal. Behind it was a deep well, containing rotating arms.  It was from here that the cause of the light came from, giving off radiant energy.

“What is that?” Kenji questioned, before being brought to his knees by the piercing siren being pounded in his head again.

A disembodied voice spoke.

“It’s the Source.”

David Faust’s full figure in hologram form appeared in front of Wade.  His eyes, glittering with greed, shone bright despite the distance between the two men.

“Hello Damon.  I’m glad you could make it.”

Wade ignored the voice and focused on helping Kenji climb the platform.

“Ignore him, let’s just finish our job,” Wade whispered to Kenji. “Millions are going through what you just went through. We have to save them.”

“Ah Damon, I thought we were past all the unpleasantness.  You didn’t really think I would leave the Source unnoticed, despite the entire ruckus that’s been going on.  After all, you stole from me and torched my lab, all for some misguided crusade.  You could’ve stayed off the grid, lived a pathetic mediocre life in exile.  But you came back.  And to think I had given up on you.  You always knew how to disappoint me.  And yet, we are not so different from each other I think.  Both men of vision, both willing to do what is necessary.”

“I’m nothing like you.”

“You say you aren’t, but deep down you’ve made your choice.  You chose your path 13 years ago.  You chose to side against your own kind.  Wade, don’t you see?  I’ve accomplished what we as fellow scientists all wish to solve—freedom from chaos.  You thought that the Source is only an instrument of chaos, but it’s also an instrument of control.  You betrayed that idea when you decided to steal from me, by hiding it from the world.  But now, I can truly show humanity their future.” He breathed, gesturing to the world.

Wade seethed.

“When I find you …”

Faust held up his hands, walking in front of Damon.

“It’s not me you have to worry about, Damon.”

He smirked as the hologram flared off.

In its place a very real and very armed Yu Long Zhou stood, flanked by Karen Forrester.

Standing up, Kenji was alert and loosened up his shoulders.

Zhou cracked his neck.

“Friends of yours?” Kenji asked.

“You could say that.”

Wade’s eyes drifted from the tall Asian man to the face of the woman he never thought he’d see again.

Forrester spoke, glaring with all the venom in the world.

“You certainly could.”

Read part 12 here.

Read part 14 here.