Darkness in the Brightest Day - Part 1

Dissenters

That evening the guests started to arrive; they called themselves "dissenters". The meeting was represented as a cocktail party. One of them was particularly notable to Jake.  She was tall and had long straight black hair.  Her olive skin and other features gave her a mysterious racial ancestry but one thing was certain: she was gorgeous.  She walked with such grace and her clothing accentuated her already attractive figure.  He found out her name, Riojme, when translated back to English, was Emerald.  He found out later from Lulu that she was only 19 and that she had been taken by the Aye from rebels and given to an adoptive family to raise.  Lulu had been her teacher for several years and now she was in an apprenticeship for fashion design.

The meeting began as soon as all had arrived.  The large concrete slab outside was covered solid with flying cars, called vacikarce.  The meeting was called to order by a bald middle aged man with a beard.  There was a crisis to discuss:

 "Friends, we have a big problem.  One of my contacts is a fellow dissenter in Oregon who is in commucation with one of the last rebel groups.  This group has been able to keep itself hidden in the forests out of visual range of the Aye's satellites and away from its robots and drones.  They've managed to keep fighting with computers instead of guns so if the Aye has seen them, it must not deem them a big threat.  They have hacked into some of the Aye's files.  It seems that the Aye has designed a retrovirus to make humans more submissive and drastically reduce our rate of reproduction.  According to our estimates, within four generations we'll be extinct.  The virus is being engineered here in the towers of Los Angeles.  They have access to a U.S. military installation from before the war with the Aye.  Many decades ago they found a small atomic bomb.  They kept that bomb for an emergency and now they've arranged to smuggle it to us.  It will be here a week from tomorrow.  We are all asked to sacrifice our lives, but one of us must take the bomb to the medical tower."

The group began to argue.  They wondered whether the report about the Aye was true.  Though it had killed many, many people, it had never seemed to want to kill all humans.  After all, it could unleash its robot armies at any time and kill everyone directly.  Most in the group wanted to have nothing to do with the plan.  Some were even talking about reporting it to the Aye but they were concerned that the threat was real.  Some expressed doubt that even if the tower was destroyed the Aye would just build the virus somewhere else.  No one volunteered to take the bomb.  At last, Riojme spoke up:

"The Aye murdered my parents when I was a baby.  For that alone, I would gladly give my life to kill it.  Now it wants to kill our species.  We must have the courage to do what needs to be done.  I will take the bomb myself.  I have a medical appointment for Wednesday after the bomb arrives so the Aye will be expecting me."

The plan's details were layed out by the bald man.  The bomb was rather low yield and needed to be delivered very close to where the virus was being manufactured,.  Otherwise, the blast would end up spreading the virus rather than destroying it.  That meant she needed to get it out of the parking area on the top of the tower and into the building.  It turned out that the bomb was around 90 pounds.  It was small enough for a man to carry but seemed quite heavy for a small woman like Riojme.