Fragments of the Fall: The Remnants Trilogy, #3

By Nicholas Erik

Sometimes the only way to rebuild is to destroy.

Following the events of RUINS OF THE FALL, con man turned reluctant hero Luke Stokes returns to where his journey first began: New Manhattan.

He must find a way to harness HIVE's power before the system spirals out of control. As he's hunted by familiar enemies, old allies might help keep the world from plunging into the darkness—but Luke knows that there's only one law in this harsh new world: nothing is ever as it seems.

And with the walls closing in around Luke at every turn, ending the escalating chaos looks less likely with each passing moment...

FRAGMENTS OF THE FALL is the electric, fast-paced conclusion to the post-apocalyptic / dystopian Remnants Trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Watchfire Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201919009

Book preview

BOOK 2 RECAP

December 2051. At the end of Ashes of the Fall, Jana Rose arrived at the server farm in New Manhattan where Luke Stokes was jacked into HIVE. She freed him, telling him you’re the only one who can end it. At the beginning of Ruins of the Fall, they escape the facility, but are pursued by Kid Vegas. They manage to avoid him, escaping New Manhattan on a rickety Hyperloop headed to the Otherlands. Carina Alonso and Evelyn Vera are also rescued from the simulation, having spent the last three years trapped inside with Luke. Luke begins having flashbacks to HIVE—hallucinations that might be caused by a glitch in the code. There are two prominent images: Ramses, the dog he and Evelyn owned in HIVE, and one of Matt’s memories from before the quake of a system failsafe located at the Gifted Minds Research Institute, Western Division.

It’s revealed that the reason the Remnants saved Luke was to trade him back to the Circle as a peace offering. Blackstone has seized power in a bloodless coup, with the official word being that Tanner—who was actually killed by Olivia Redmond—died of natural causes. A peace accord announced the same day as Luke’s escape between the three warring factions—the Ashes of the Fall, the Lionhearted and the Circle—after a three-year conflict unites them into a single entity called the New Allied States (NAS). The final nail in the coffin is the announcement that HIVE will be back up and running soon, after brief maintenance. Luke or his brother’s HoloBand, once critical for HIVE to function properly and stay running, are no longer necessary for the system to remain online.

Despite this, Luke convinces Jana that he still has value—that out west is a solution that will help the Remnants prevent the NAS from pressing into the Lost Plains and beyond. He suggests that the best way to survive is to break free from her father, Vlad, by killing him and assuming leadership of the Remnants. She’s skeptical, but takes him to a way station, where a man named Atlas, who studied Matt’s journals and the HIVE source drive left to the Remnants, offers to help Luke recover the memories. The image of the Gifted Minds Research Institute was purposely downloaded into his mind, triggered by Matt’s code. Atlas explains that the ultimate purpose of HIVE is to create a massive hive mind—each person in their pod like an individual neuron or worker bee in a larger artificial-intelligence construct. Whoever holds the keys to HIVE will be too powerful to topple.

When Luke takes the pill that Atlas gives him, Luke sees a string of memories from Matt’s perspective. They culminate in an image that puts the Gifted Minds Research Institute a hundred miles south of Seattle. It ends with a written note: If the wrong person gets HIVE, a good man will know what to do.

Despite this evidence of a failsafe that can stop the NAS, Jana Rose cuffs Luke again. Her father wants to make an example of Luke for stealing the HIVE source from the Remnants’ vault in Ashes of the Fall. They arrive at the Remnants’ home base, called the Gunpowder Hills, where Luke meets Vlad. Luke manages to stave off execution temporarily and is locked up while the council deliberates on his fate. Jana comes to visit him and he lifts a weapon off her by flirting while using sleight of hand. At the second hearing, Vlad is uninterested in hearing about Luke’s plan—the Remnants know only survival, and rely on tradition. Luke has wronged them, and so he must pay.

Luke, however, kills an unsuspecting Vlad with the hidden blade. Jana, now leader, spares Luke execution. The next day, with a thousand of the Remnants, they leave the Gunpowder Hills. Eventually, they find the last way station at the edge of what was formerly South Dakota. It’s a fifteen-story high rise that is like paradise to the Remnants, who are used to a rough existence.

In this high rise, one of Luke’s friends from his former crew, a man named Sid, is hiding. He tells Luke that Slick, their old boss, left the crew to die when the disasters struck the west. He also hints that there’s a new, mysterious faction living out west. Sick and dying, Sid overdoses on medication that Luke gives him in exchange for the information.

The Remnants settle in as the calendar flips to January 2052. Jana and the Remnants start to slip into old survival habits, seemingly uninterested in helping Luke, Evelyn and Carina reach the Gifted Minds Research Institute and Matt’s failsafe. Luke and Carina’s hallucinatory side effects from HIVE—known as fragments— are getting worse. When Jana ruthlessly annihilates a wave of troops from the New Allied States and Jana tortures a few of the captured enemy soldiers, the three decide they need to escape.

The torture reveals that the NAS has united to fight a common enemy: the Remnants, who are different and scary. The NAS is now offering free immortality and prime placement in HIVE for people not eligible for military service who are willing to upload their consciousness to the system and discard their bodies entirely. Over a quarter of the NAS’ population has already signed up. The soldier also indicates that the rest of the Remnants in the Gunpowder Hills have been crushed by the army of the NAS. Finally, he tells them that a NAS scout party has been sent out west to look for a place a hundred miles south of Seattle, near I5, which Luke recognizes as the Gifted Minds facility from his hallucinations.

Evelyn, Carina and Luke steal away early in the morning, hotwiring one of the trucks to escape. An alarm alerts the Remnants, who kill Carina in the ensuing firefight. Luke and Evelyn decide to head north, into the Frozen Wastes. They don’t have enough firepower to battle either the new faction or the NAS’ scout party, and need to regroup.

In the Frozen Wastes, they meet Martin, a former rock star, who tells them of a trade outpost belonging to this mysterious new faction. Called the Oceanic Coalition, the outpost turns out to be abandoned. But the outpost has supplies—along with an operational map of their outposts in the Western Stronghold, which is now known as the Gray Desert—allowing for them to make it west.

The three of them travel across the empty wastes, avoiding any signs of civilization, and eventually cross the border near the remnants of Seattle & I5 in mid-February. Due to the damage from the quake, they’re forced to leave their truck behind and walk.

Luke and Martin are both sick, which makes the first day of the journey difficult. They barely reach an empty motel. While searching for the room keys, Luke hears Evelyn scream. Rushing outside, he finds two men have captured his companions. They’ve been looking for Luke—cameras along the side of I5 picked up the travelers. The leader, Reno, is the commander of the Oceanic Coalition (called the Oshies for short), a faction who has survived on ships and ocean platforms after the world flooded in 2025. Luke agrees to come with them.

They travel by helicopter to the Gifted Minds Research Institute complex from his memories. The Oshie technicians cure Luke’s hallucinations, having studied Matt’s notes and failsafe source code for the better part of a year. They also indicate that the failsafe has additional functionality that Luke wasn’t aware of: it can not only shut down HIVE, but can also give the AI autonomy, making it sentient.

Kid Vegas, who is spearheading the western assault, launches a direct attack on the institute. Luke figures out that Kid is running a gambit, trying to smoke them out into the open with Matt’s HIVE failsafe code. He convinces Reno to run a counter-op that Kid won’t expect. Luke parachutes into the NAS’ forward base to upload the HIVE failsafe right from Kid’s administrative workstations, but Kid captures him. Luke manages to get the normally calm Kid riled up by reminding him of his intellectual shortcomings compared to Matt. In the ensuing fight, Luke kills Kid and uploads the HIVE failsafe to the server.

He escapes the NAS’ base, and as the chopper flies away, he tells Reno that he chose to make HIVE sentient instead of shutting everything down. Matt’s voice—the voice of HIVE—crackles over the chopper’s radio, telling them that he’ll be in touch, leaving Luke wondering if he made the correct decision or just condemned the world to die.

ONE

HALF CIRCLE

Reflected neon lights flicker across the snow-slicked bricks paving the walkway as I trudge along the frigid waterfront. A little puff of fog emerges from my lips each time I exhale. The flurries have started to fall faster, threatening to transform into a full-blown storm. I hunch my shoulders to protect myself from the howling squalls blowing in from the Hudson River. Otherwise, the frozen surroundings are silent save for the crunch of my boots in the fresh powder.

Make sure your face remains covered. My brother Matt’s digitized monotone gives me instructions, its vibrations deep within my ear where only I can hear.

The plastic mask’s straps cut into my skin as I adjust them. I keep my head down, hoodie drawn to avoid identification by the cameras. The shoreline might be abandoned, but New Manhattan’s security never sleeps. And on the eve of Unification Day, it’s bound to be tighter than ever.

The head of each faction is coming into town tomorrow morning to officially ratify last year’s peace treaty. All the big dogs will be here to commemorate the official establishment of the New Allied States.

Chancellor Nathaniel Blackstone, representing the North American Circle.

Reverend Amelia Daniels of the Lionhearted.

And the leader of my old crew, Alfred Slick Knute, President of the Ashes of the Fall.

Reno of the Oceanic Coalition—the Oshies—is even a late addition to the accord. Even if his people weren’t really a player in the three-year war.

The New Allied States have technically been a thing for a year. But tomorrow morning, the four factional leaders will all stand together on stage, smile, shake hands and declare the dawn of a new era. It’s part ceremony, part official business, complete with the signing of a new constitution. The country will stand truly unified once more, rather than as the scattering of fragmented entities it’s been for the past twenty-five years.

Each faction will have an equal say in the new government. Notably absent from the proceedings, of course, is a representative from the Remnants. Unity only goes so far. It doesn’t extend to genetically modified military experiments.

That omission hasn’t laid a damper on the impending festivities, however. Every third lamppost or railing features some uplifting message celebrating the impending accord.

A better world. A better tomorrow.

One year. A lifetime of change.

We are greater together.

All decent enough slogans.

And all lies.

You know what they say about the calm before the storm. And I don’t believe for a second that any of these leaders is after anything except absolute power. Well, maybe not Reno. He was the only one of them who ever tried to help me.

And I repaid him by giving HIVE—the HoloBand Interactive Virtual Existence—autonomy to make its own decisions. Turning its functions—and all that power—over to an artificial intelligence. An AI that, as it turns out, was Matt’s.

Which allowed the whole system to remain running.

Instead of what Reno and I had agreed upon: pulling the plug on the whole damn thing.

That got Evelyn and I the quick boot from the Oshies’ good graces. We’ve been on our own ever since. That was back in February.

It’s been a long ten months to December.

I’m still not sure I made the right call. The idea was that the AI could restore civilization and solve the problems plaguing the world.

The flooded coastlines.

The cities shattered by the quake in the west.

The ash choking the atmosphere.

And, of course, fix perhaps the biggest plague of all: getting rid of the assholes in charge.

Not that my decision mattered much in the end.

The majority of Matt’s backdoor failsafe had been patched by the Circle’s engineers during the three years I was trapped inside HIVE. So even after I uploaded the failsafe code, he was locked out from administrative access.

And he had to escape the system completely before they discovered his presence.

Which is why he currently resides in my head. Hidden away from the NAS’ prying eyes.

So the New Allied States still have control over the most powerful artificial intelligence construct mankind has ever known. And things have only gotten worse since. They’ve signed up more and more people into HIVE—over 50% of the population at the last official tally, up from a quarter just a year ago. Each person a node in a larger network—a literal hive mind.

The system is growing in power by the day. And pretty soon it’ll be unstoppable.

It doesn’t matter whether one of these assholes wields HIVE alone—or if they control it together. That type of influence is far too dangerous in any of their hands.

Which is why I’m here to take control of the system myself.

Your heart rate is rising, Luke.

We’ve gone over this, I reply as I navigate around a snowy bench.

Gone over what? There’s no inflection in Matt’s voice, despite the question. I’m used to it by now—but at the beginning conversations were confusing as hell. It’s hard to understand just how much tone and cadence and all the little nuances of speech matter until you’re having life-and-death discussions with someone that has all the emotiveness of your toaster.

That you need to stop with the constant tracking. I shake my head at the empty street. Luckily there’s no one around to witness me talking to myself.

I am merely monitoring your vital signs to assist—

It’s creepy, man. I accelerate into a brisk trot, fresh snow crinkling softly beneath my feet. Not so much because I’m in a hurry—the accord is