Prometheus Road by Bruce Balfour Read Free Book Online Page A

legs, a chair that looked like someone had beaten the stuffing out of it, and bookcase after bookcase of neatly shelved textbooks and paperbacks. “You live here?”
    “Better than living in a cave,” Magnus said with a shrug.
    Tom started to comment on the huge library, then frowned when he saw what appeared to be a small black vehicle parked next to a large airlock hatch. “Is that—?”
    Magnus caught his look and nodded. “Buick Sunburst—2015 model. Hybrid engine runs on a hydrogen fuel cell or solar, depending on what’s available. Getting fuel for it is a pig, since there isn’t much sunlight in this hole, but it beats walking.”
    Tom couldn’t help staring. He’d never actually seen a car in real life, only in books. The Buick’s black solar paint looked shiny and clean, even under the dim light. “You drive that thing around down here?”
    “Perfect size for the tunnel, once I get it over the mag-lev track rails, of course. I just have to be careful not to break it—spare parts are hard to come by. The closest Buick dealership is fifteen miles away and sixty years in the past.”
    “How did you get it down here?”
    Magnus hopped up to a sitting position on one of the crates. “Three days of digging and blasting where Sausalito used to be. The BART station there was buried deep, and I had to make a ramp that wasn’t too steep so the car could get into the tunnel. With all that noise, I was sure the siliboys were going to nail me, but I guess I was deep enough not to wake up the wards.” He gestured at the overstuffed chair. “Have a seat. You can have the comfy chair.”
    Tom looked at the chair and the springs poking through the seat cushion, thought better of it, and frowned at Magnus, who was now drinking from a water flask.
    “Who are these ‘siliboys’ you keep referring to?”
    Magnus coughed and snorted water out of his nose. “The gods, boy! Telemachus and all his silicon friends—although they weren’t really built out of silicon. The AI Dominion. The bad guys.”
    Tom nervously looked around, hoping that the ears of the gods were not listening.
    “We’re safe down here as long as you don’t hang around too long,” Magnus said, wiping water off of his face. “No bugs in the tunnels. No bugs in the ruins. Didn’t think it was worth their while after they screwed everything up, I guess.”
    Tom felt as if Magnus were speaking a foreign language. “What are you talking about now?”
    “The Big Bang. What you people like to call The Uplift or The Cleansing.” Magnus paused to study him. “Don’t you know anything?”
    “Less than I thought, I guess.” Magnus was talking blasphemy, and it made Tom uncomfortable. As they had learned in school, the scriptures clearly stated that the massive earthquakes of The Cleansing had come about because of the sins of humankind. The entire western region of the country had launched itself skyward in the same moment, flattening the cities and killing tens of millions of people. The Earth had been forced to set an example in retaliation for human neglect, and they all knew that more could have been killed were it not for the intervention of Telemachus and the other benevolent gods of the Dominion that watched over them. “The earthquakes—”
    Magnus interrupted him with a raised hand. “First off, they weren’t earthquakes, at least not in the normal sense of the word. The siliboys used their nanotech on us, lad. Sure, it was sneaky the way they covered it all up with stories about the Ring of Fire erupting along the Pacific Coast, but they were the ones that caused it in the first place. Above and below ground, nothing was safe from the nanobombs. The underground stealth bombs spent days quietly digging their way down to their targets in the earthquake faults, then the Dominion triggered them and let Mother Nature do the rest. One Big Bang and a huge chunk of the country was thrown back to the Stone Age. It worked out so well that