An Armageddon Duology (17 page)

“
J
ohn
, can you hear me?”

A woman’s voice. Probably his mother’s.

He was at the seaside. A strong wind was blowing, waves crashing, muffling sound. No, he was in the water, floating on his back, incoming waves smashing against him, up and down, right and left. Dizzy.

His whole body hurt.

“John?”

“Please, ma’am.” A male. “You shouldn’t even be here.” That would be dad.

Sirens. Why were there sirens at the sea?

Another jolt and his eyes opened. He was staring up at a ceiling, a blurry sphere above him condensing slowly into a fluid-filled bag. A tube ran from it to his right arm. Across from him was a shape on a gurney. A woman with brown hair. Her leg was immobilized with a metal shell of some kind. Blood soaked bandages on her head and shoulder.

“Rebecca.”

He tried to sit up but found himself unable to move.

“Hold still, Captain Overlord,” came the woman’s voice again. “You’re strapped down or you would have bounced all over the place. Highway infrastructure deterioration and all that.”

“Angel?” he turned his head painfully to the side. The motion was restricted and stiff. There was something fitted around his neck.

“Rebecca’s banged up, but she’s okay. Well, broken leg, I think. Maybe a concussion. We’re inbound to the hospital and will be there in twenty if the traffic opens some. Frank will meet us there. I was lucky to catch a ride. Not policy you know, but with the world going to shit the plumbers get some perks.”

Savas looked down at his body on the gurney. A few bandages. Ripped clothing. Otherwise, he seemed to have escaped any serious injury. He let himself settle back into the padding of the gurney. He closed his eyes. “What the hell happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“They hacked the damn car. Nearly killed us. We spun out and crashed.”

“That’s about it,” she said. “You were lucky she steered into a row of construction barriers and attenuators. Course you were going nearly seventy at that point, so it was still a mess.”

“Yeah, that part I don’t remember.”

“Frank and I followed the last known GPS pinging from your car and alerted local emergency responders. We got up here as they were extracting you from the car. A really twisted cage you two were stuck in.”

“Jesus.” He looked toward Lightfoote, her bald and pierced image surreal in the sounds of the siren. “And the worm?”

She smiled. “Well, it was likely not your plan, but that act of crazy on the highway may be a breakthrough.”

“How?”

“The worm in the car’s system—it never got a chance to go into hiding again, to erase itself from memory and go latent. Bang, you cut the power and froze everything in place. We’ve got a crew extracting the computer elements from the Charger. We might get lucky.”

“What does latent mean?” He just wanted to sleep.

“It’s like Herpes.”

“Herpes.”

“Yes. Cold sores come out every now and then. Not from new virus you get exposed to, but from virus hiding out in your cells. The genetic material is dormant,
latent
. Waiting to be activated. Usually for herpes it’s stress of some kind. For the worm—well, we don’t know all the things that might wake it. But the programmers have established some flags. Apparently investigating Anonymous members like Hanert was one of them.”

“Wake it up?”

“Well, not really wake. It’s not sleeping. That’s just scientific vernacular. For viruses, there are proteins that react to signals or stresses and then go and start making the virus again from the genetic code hiding out in the cells. That’s waking up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“For the worm, the signals are detected by smaller pieces of code floating about, placed there by the initial infection, and they wake up the worm, which then assembles, like the parts of a mature virus particle, from various pieces of code across the net.”

This would have given him a headache on a good day. Now it was torture.

She continued. “Usually, after that, the worm disintegrates, so the active, fully functional copy is lost, and the encrypted genome hides out latent. That’s the problem getting at it. I couldn’t get my hands on anything functional. Until now. Just maybe your automotive catastrophe trapped our little monster in a cage.”

“So you can study it.” His voice was hoarse.

“It’s going to be tricky. As soon as I try to connect a live computer with functioning operating system to the thing, the worm is going to try and go active. Like melting the ice off
The Thing
. Look out. I’ve got to prevent that, prevent it from taking over whatever system I’m using to study it. And prevent it from erasing itself before I can look inside.”

“Can you?”

Lightfoote stared into space. “I don’t know.” She turned her intense eyes on Savas. “But I’m going to try.”

He was beginning to drift off. He fought the currents dragging him under.

“Lopez, I mean Gabriel and Mary. Have you heard anything?”

Lightfoote shook her head. “They’ve gone dark since we gave them the keys to the databases. My guess is they’re prepping.”

He nodded. “How’s the world doing?”

“A few days of martial law sure has an effect on a town. It’s like some apocalyptic thriller. But no zombies, sadly. The worm’s been quiet since the massacre. Well, quiet is a relative word. It’s still spreading, penetrating more and more systems. No one has a solution to that yet. But so far no direct attacks. No other mischief.”

Her voice seemed to fade. He was staring up a deep well, trying to communicate. “That’s good. That’s good.”

“But I think everyone knows it’s a calm before the next storm. Someone has a grand scheme. Phase one is done. Phase two will be worse, I bet.”

She looked down at Savas, but he was already back under. Her hand found his. “Goodnight, John. Rest up. We’re going to need it.”

A
lanky adolescent
male slouched in a baroque chair, the office around him out of a seventeenth-century painting. He sported shoulder length black hair and rumpled denim attire, square prescription sunglasses masking his eyes. Across from him, a young woman with a shawl over her bare shoulders scribbled notes and nodded her head. The boy hardly looked at her.

“I will have to submit my evaluation next week, Tony,” she said.

“That’s not my name.”

The woman nodded. “And I will continue to use it as per the juvenile privacy laws. Tony. I will not know your real identity. We protect those under custody.”

“Jesus Christ. How long do we play this game?”

The therapist sighed. “You do want me to write you a good report, I assume? You want to go home?”

“Home? You’ve got to be kidding. Don’t you read the files they send you?”

“Foster home. You ran away from home and your mother is a recovering alcoholic. Yes, I know. I meant, don’t you want out of here?”

The boy completely repositioned his frame in the chair, whipping a leg across the other and folding his arms across his chest.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out very soon no matter what you write. I’ve made sure of it.”

“Hacking the city council’s computers is a serious offense. Hasn’t this experience humbled you at all?”

The boy laughed. “It was an experiment. Not for the hack. That was all too easy. For the effects. Learned a lot about cybercrime investigations and protocol. I’ll follow up on the outside. But I’ve gotten all the data I can from this, so there isn’t much of point in continuing here. And, you know, what I found on their servers was a thousand times worse than anything I’ve done. And they know it. I squirreled it all away where they can’t touch it. They’re not going to fuck with me.”

The woman stopped writing. “I’m worried about you, Tony. You manifest a collection of antisocial behaviors and extreme, nearly delusional idealizations.”

“Don’t forget boundary issues. I think you still show too much cleavage for a doc. Go with the more discrete pushups from Victoria’s. I like small and well-made. You don’t have to look like you have implants, you know.”

The woman buttoned the top of her blouse and angled her body to the boy. “Yes, that is what I mean. You are alienating. Hostile. Even to those you know mean you well. Psych profiles place you in the top percentiles for intelligence. If you would have cooperated on the examinations we could have placed you more accurately. But you don’t use that intelligence wisely. You purposefully lash out and degrade those around you.”

“Or, you could just be more honest and say that people want to maintain the facade of comfortable lies and masks they use. Jesus, don’t you all get tired of it? Or is it that you’re all just so fucking scared all the time? Fuck all your boxes. Fuck all your strata and rules and cages. Look at you! Borderline anorexic, overly made-up, over-slutted, and probably thinking to get a boob job. Honestly, did you sign up for this shit when God handed out the double X’s?”

The woman looked away from him. “Is that why the girl left you? Did you treat her like this?”

The boy turned to face her for the first time. “Seriously? You know my fuck-buddies? Is that why they picked you?”

“We receive detailed dossiers on our patients. Personal relationships are often part of that. All anonymous. We try to understand and we need backgrounds to see the big picture.”

He laughed, throwing his head back. “You lying motherfuckers. You’re a goddamned Fed! I should have known it. All this therapy for juvenile offenders! You’re profiling me!”

The woman froze slack-jawed but said nothing.

“I can’t believe I didn’t see through it sooner. I guess they picked you for that. I kinda trusted you. It was like instinct. All those pheromones and those boobs and the neural pathways—zap! They fuck you up. You really want to know? Zap! That’s what the girl was. Lots of research you can read online. It’s like heroin, you know? Same brain pathways. Same high. Same addiction and withdrawal. Except it also plugs into all these emotional pathways. So it’s a hundred times worse than heroin. Hormones and receptors and neural pathways designed over ten million years to get chunks of meat to fuck and make more chunks of meat.”

The woman paled and pulled back slightly in her chair.

“These thoughts, Tony, I am concerned—”

“You are
concerned
,” he barked, chuckling. “You don’t give a fuck except for what kind of checklist of personality traits you can enter into a database for your puppet masters. Fingerprints, blood type, you likely got my DNA. Now it’s gonna be some kind of brain-print. You need a pattern, profiles, data for the algorithms to train on. Not really there yet, are you, though? But let me help. I can tell you all about our relationship.” He leaned forward toward the woman. “I think you like talking about sex. I think it arouses you.” He held his face steady in front of hers. “Maybe that’s why you do this.”

The woman licked her lips.

The teen pivoted his body again and looked away from her. “Anyway, that fucking girl. I can tell you, heaven and hell, love and loss. All that. Damn, that panic. Lost, lost, lost.” He replaced his glasses. “But that’s the withdrawal. You’re sick, all the hormones fucked to hell. Then, you finally come out of it. Then you
see
. You finally know the truth.”

“Which is?” Her voice was hoarse and dry

“That there is no love. No destiny. No meaning to these stupid feelings.
That’s
the delusional thinking, doc. Then you understand that emotion is the problem.”

She shook her head vigorously. “Don't you see, Tony? This is just another form of extreme idealization. You went from an extreme belief in transcendent love to an extreme disbelief in all love, a rejection of all meaning in human emotion.”

His voice turned cold. “Look, dogs love us. Cats nurture their young. Birds have emotions. The only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the animals is a small first step in abstract thought. That’s it. With emotion, we’re puppets to our dicks, our ovaries, some asshole with a shiny car or a promise that you’ll live forever. Cut the emotion! Engage the fucking homunculus.”

He stood up and pressed his jacket flat, buttoning it closed.

“We’re done here,” he said. “You go write your report. Like I said, they’re not going to do anything with me. They wouldn’t dare. File it. It won’t matter. In ten years, it won’t even exist.”

The woman’s eyebrows arched upward, but he didn’t pause to consider her confusion. With confident steps, he walked to the door of the office and left.

I
t was
one of the largest water filtration plants in the United States. Twelve acres, drilled through bedrock to a depth of over four stories in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, it sat over one of the main supply lines feeding water from the Croton Reservoir into New York City. Water flowed from the force of gravity upstate through two eight-thousand-foot-long tunnels into the plant, where particulates were removed, solids dewatered by centrifuges, and the filtered water disinfected with ultraviolet light and chlorine. Chemical alterations were then made to control corrosion and add fluoride.

The entire process utilized several networked controllers, twelve workstations, five separate operator interfaces and numerous ‘intelligent’ devices, including flow meters, pressure and temperature sensors, transmitters, and automated chlorination analyzers. Everything was networked, highly modernized, automatic, and requiring far less human oversight than anything else like it ever produced.

On the evening of October 27th, the first sign of problems was detected by a skeleton crew manning the equipment to analyze the quality of the final water to leave the facility. A young woman with Indian features and lush black hair gazed at the readings from a dilapidated sensor, a relic from the early testing of the computer systems. Her body was tense, the white of her lab coat contrasting with the deep caramel of her skin. The readings from the other sensors were normal. She felt that she shouldn’t care about this artifact of older tech, one that management had never given the order to remove. While it had never acted up before, common sense told you that someday it would fail. It shouldn’t bother her when all else appeared normal.

But it did. She spoke into a mobile phone.

“No, Larry. Everything reports nominal. It’s only the older ovation monitor. It’s screaming on the chlorine and fluorine levels. Look, I didn’t want to get you out of bed for this. Probably just the old unit has finally gone senile on us.”

There was a pause in her speech as she listened intently. “No, really, no need to come in. Look, I know your close, it’s just I...Okay. All right. Fine. I’m happy just to log it, but if you want...Okay. Yeah, I’ll call the chemists on three.”

She walked up to the bank of computer monitors to check once more the readings from the chemical sensors. Satisfied that all was within normal parameters, she sat down to open a video call with the staff upstairs.

“What the hell?”

The computer was unresponsive. She moved to a nearby terminal, but it too had completely locked up. The unease that had buzzed in the background of her mind at the anomalous readings came much more strongly to the fore.
Is there a computer problem?
In all the years she had worked here, there had never been a glitch affecting more than one unit. Multiple computers down alongside the dangerous readings coming from the other unit—she whipped out her cell phone and called the upstairs number directly.

“This is Deepta from Analysis. Look, are you guys having any computer problems?” Her brow furrowed and she listened. “Yeah, me too. Look, I need to ask you a favor. I’m getting some ridiculous readings on an older sensor. It’s not networked with the others; it’s probably just failing. But all this has me nervous. Is there a way you can monitor your additive levels? Yeah? Sure, I’ll wait. I’ll put you on speaker while I recheck that damn unit.”

She pressed a button on the mobile phone as she walked to the far wall and crouched in front of the older equipment again.

A voice erupted with distortion from the small speaker of the phone. “Okay, Deepta. Give us a few minutes here. There is a panel of sensors directly on the additive pipes. They
should
be read by the main software—and all that looks good—but they also display the values on the sensor units themselves. We can read them off directly. Hang on.”

“I’ll be right here.”

She shook her head. The anomalous readings had not normalized. In fact, they were shooting up. It was like they were unloading their entire store of toxic chemicals into the New York City drinking water!

The door to the operations center burst open. A middle-aged man with a crop of silver hair dashed into the room. He was roughly dressed, clothes obviously thrown on in a hurry, hair uncombed. He rushed straight to the computer monitors as he put on his glasses.

“Mike, wait that’s no good. There—”

“Deepta! What the hell’s wrong with the interface?”

“It’s down! I’m trying to tell you. All the machines! And not only here, but on other floors.”

“But the software’s still running. I just can’t access anything. God, we’ll have to reboot everything!”

“Mike, come look at these readings.” Her superior shuffled over and bent down to examine the older unit. “Please tell me this is malfunctioning.”

His face paled. “I grew up on these things, Deepta. When they fail, they don’t give readings like this. The checks are too thorough in the logic. This is not failure behavior. We need to find out what’s going on with the treatment chemicals.”

“Right. I’m on the line with—”

The phone popped. “Deepta? Mike? This is Herman Richards upstairs. We have several people double-checking, but your aberrant sensor is
not
, I repeat
not
malfunctioning. Our pipe sensors are screaming. The valves are completely open. We’re dumping everything into the supply!”

“Can you shut things down from there?”

“So far no! All computer control is locked. We can’t get into the system. We’re force rebooting a few to see if that clears the problem. Meanwhile we’re poisoning the water supply for millions in the city! We’ve got to get a public health message out. Get this on the news. Something!”

“Calm down! We follow protocol. Deepta, get the manual open and let’s go by the book on this.”

“We went paperless three months ago, Mike. The hard copies were recycled.”

“Jesus!” He shook his head. “Then go from memory! Meanwhile, we’ve got to shut it down before too much gets out there.”

The voice on the phone sounded panicked. “I know! What if we can’t?”

“Then we’re going to have a hell of a lot of sick people come tomorrow.”