MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 38

At the foot of Ayers Rock, Jonah paced up and down between the Guardians’ land yachts. He looked at the catapults on their backs.

He climbed into the seat of the catapult on the yacht that had brought him here. He was wearing his parachute harness. He had reset the spring and set the catapult for his build and weight. He wasn’t sure he had done it right.

Jonah found the release catch by his left side, closed his fingers around it.

He couldn’t bring himself to pull it.

He jumped out of the catapult seat. He could still hear gunfire from the top of the rock, though less persistent than it had been. What could he do up there anyway, without a weapon? Hadn’t he done enough?

But what if Sam was in trouble?

He could climb the rock, he thought. It would take him some time, but at least he would get there, and in one piece. At least he would be doing something.

His mind was made up. Jonah set off, away from the land yachts, around the rock. He had barely gone two steps when a voice sounded behind him:

‘Jonah? Jonah? Are you there? Can you hear me? Come in, Jonah.’

This ought to have been a day of celebration.

The Guardians had taken one of the Four Corners. Sam had led the way into the control room herself. In her worst nightmares, she could never have predicted what she had found there.

‘Sam? Is that you?’

‘Jonah!’ Sam had found a comms program on the system and entered the frequency of the land yachts’ cockpit radios. ‘Listen, I’m in the control room, but we have a big problem here.’

The control room lights were flickering as the power supply dwindled.

‘The control room?’ echoed Jonah. ‘You mean you—?’

‘Yes, Jonah, we did it. A few of the Millennials are still fighting in the corridors, but we did it. We won. But, listen, what you did on the Island—’

‘It worked, Sam. The plan worked. I got the Uploaded to remember, and they—’

‘I know it worked, Jonah. It worked too well. The servers here are in a worse state even than we thought they were. They’re failing!’

‘Failing? But... Won’t that mean...?’

‘It means that a quarter of the Metasphere is about to crash. Hard. It means that every avatar logged in to that quarter will be lost. For ever.’

‘What... What can we do?’

‘You have to get back there,’ said Sam.

‘I can’t. I wish I could, Sam, but—’

‘You have to stop the Uploaded from remembering, before they—’

‘It would kill me, Sam. The way I used to get to the Island – it would kill me to try it a second time.’

‘It’s their only chance, Jonah. We can evacuate the living, most of them, but the dead...the dead can’t leave the Island. They’re stuck there!’

‘The mistwall!’ said Jonah. ‘Granger’s barrier. Now you have access to his systems, maybe you could—?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Sam. She cut off the connection.

The control room was in turmoil. Twenty Guardians hovered helplessly over the monitors and datapads. Twenty more were panicking loudly. Of course, the people Sam had led here had mostly been fighters. She needed programmers, technicians. She needed a leader.