The Pacific Coast Highway was gone.
Below the Icarus, the coastline was a jagged scar of landslides and whitewater. The tsunami had chewed the edge of California like a wild animal.
Jason sat in the pilot's chair, watching the dark waves roll in. The stealth drive was dead. The "Lightning Coil" Tesla had installed was a burnt-out husk of copper slag. They were flying on backup diesel power, slow and loud.
"We're naked," O'Malley muttered, cleaning his Thompson for the tenth time. "Every radar station from here to Oregon can see us."
"There are no radar stations," Jason said. "Gates controls the coast. And he wants us to see him."
"Approaching the Bay Area," Hughes announced. "Fog bank ahead."
The Icarus punched through the gray mist.
Jason leaned forward.
San Francisco appeared.
It wasn't the city of cable cars and Victorian houses.
The Golden Gate Bridge—built two decades early in this accelerated timeline—spanned the bay. But it wasn't red. It was chrome. And it was blocked by a shimmering blue energy field.
A literal dome of light covered the entire city peninsula.
"A force field?" Sarah asked, incredulous. "That's impossible. The power requirements..."
"Look at the center," Einstein pointed.
Rising from the financial district, towering over everything, was a pyramid.
It was black glass. Smooth. Alien.
The Transamerica Pyramid. But fifty years too early, and twice as tall.
It pulsed with blue light. Data streams ran down its sides like digital rain.
"The Silicon Citadel," Jason whispered. "He turned the whole city into a CPU."
"Contact!" Hughes yelled. "Swarm inbound!"
A dark cloud rose from the Pyramid. It looked like smoke, but it moved against the wind.
"Birds?" O'Malley asked.
"Drones," Jason corrected.
Thousands of small quadcopters. Primitive, clockwork rotors buzzing like angry hornets. They swarmed around the energy dome, a defensive hive mind.
They didn't attack.
They stopped in mid-air, hovering in formation.
They shifted. The cloud morphed.
It formed a face.
A giant, pixelated face made of drones, floating in the sky.
Gates.
The mouth opened. The drones rearranged themselves into letters.
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE.
NO FLESH ALLOWED.
"Showoff," O'Malley grunted.
A beam of light shot out from the tip of the black pyramid.
It wasn't a laser. It was a wide, pulsating cone of blue energy. It hit the Icarus instantly.
"Shields up!" Hughes screamed.
"We don't have shields!" Jason yelled.
The beam passed through the hull. Nothing exploded. No heat. No impact.
"We're fine," Sarah checked her arms. "It didn't hurt."
"It wasn't aiming at us," Jason realized. He looked at the control panel.
Every screen on the bridge flickered.
The radar went blue. The radio went blue. The engine diagnostics went blue.
Text began to scroll across every monitor.
UPLOADING... 20%
UPLOADING... 40%
"He's hacking us!" Hughes shrieked, typing frantically on the keyboard. "He's overwriting the OS! He's taking control of the ship!"
"Lock him out!" Jason ordered.
"I can't! It's a digital virus! It's rewriting the code faster than I can delete it!"
CLUNK.
A loud mechanical sound came from the reactor room.
"Jason!" Oppenheimer's voice screamed over the intercom. "The control rods! They're moving! They're retracting!"
"Stop them!"
"I can't! The servos are locked! The computer is pulling them out! If they fully retract, the core goes critical! We'll melt down in sixty seconds!"
Jason looked at the blue screens. Gates was grinning at him from the drone cloud. He was using the ship's own brain to kill them.
"He's using the digital interface," Jason realized. "He's using the wires."
Jason turned to O'Malley.
"Cut the cord."
"What?"
"Go analog!" Jason roared. "Smash it!"
He pointed at the main computer bank.
O'Malley didn't hesitate. He grabbed the red fire axe from the wall.
SMASH.
The axe buried itself in the console. Sparks showered the bridge. Glass shattered.
The screens died. Black.
"The servos are still moving!" Oppenheimer yelled. "They have residual power!"
"Manual override!" Jason yelled, sprinting for the engine room ladder. "Crank them down by hand!"
He slid down the ladder, skinning his hands. He burst into the reactor room.
Oppenheimer was hanging off the manual crank wheel, straining with all his might. The wheel was fighting him, the servos whining as the computer tried to pull the rods up.
"Help me!" Oppenheimer screamed. The radiation alarm was blaring.
Jason grabbed the other side of the wheel. O'Malley grabbed the top.
"PUSH!"
They threw their weight against the machine.
GRIND.
The wheel turned an inch. Then another.
The servos whined in protest, then popped. Smoke poured from the motor housing.
The resistance vanished. The wheel spun freely.
They slammed the control rods back down into the core.
The hum of the reactor dropped. The alarm silenced.
"Scrammed," Oppenheimer gasped, collapsing onto the floor. "Core is cooling. We're safe."
Jason leaned against the hot metal casing, panting.
"We're safe," Jason said. "But we're blind. We just killed the navigation computer."
"We're flying a brick," Hughes called from the top of the ladder. "No instruments. No radar. I'm flying by looking out the window."
"Get us on the ground," Jason ordered. "Anywhere safe."
"There is nowhere safe!" Hughes yelled. "The drones are everywhere!"
Jason climbed back to the bridge. He looked out the shattered window.
The drone cloud was reforming. It looked angry now.
"Island," Einstein said, pointing out the port side. "There."
In the middle of the bay, a rocky island rose from the fog. A fortress.
Alcatraz.
But it didn't look like a prison.
There were sandbag emplacements on the roof of the cell block. A flag was flying—not the Stars and Stripes, but a red flag with a typewriter silhouette.
"Alcatraz?" O'Malley asked. "You want to land in a prison?"
"It's the only place outside the force field," Jason said. "Set her down in the yard!"
The Icarus banked hard, descending toward The Rock.
A red flare shot up from the prison yard. A signal.
"They're waving us in," Sarah said.
The airship touched down in the exercise yard, kicking up dust.
Before the ramp even lowered, they were surrounded.
Fifty men and women leveled rifles at the ship.
But they weren't soldiers. They wore tweed jackets, newsboy caps, and ink-stained aprons. They looked like a university faculty that had gone to war.
Jason stepped out, hands up.
A man stepped forward. He was young, broad-shouldered, with a thick mustache. He wore a typewriter strapped to his chest like body armor. He held a shotgun in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other.
Ernest Hemingway.
In this timeline, he hadn't gone to Paris to write. He had come to San Francisco to fight.
"You brought a balloon to a drone fight," Hemingway grunted, spitting on the ground. "That's brave. Or stupid."
"I prefer 'desperate'," Jason said.
Hemingway looked at the Icarus, then at the drone swarm buzzing just outside the island's perimeter.
"Gates can't touch us here," Hemingway said. "The rock is thick. And we don't use computers. We use lead and ink."
He lowered the shotgun.
"Come inside," Hemingway said, turning toward the cell block. "Let's have a drink. And then we can talk about how to kill a glass god."
Jason looked back at the glowing blue dome over San Francisco. The Pyramid pulsed, a heartbeat of pure data.
He followed the writer into the prison.
"We're the inmates now," Jason whispered. "And the warden is a machine."