Apex Cypher (Prequel to The Techxorcist series) (5 page)

Part 7 - The Handover

Gabe got up from his chair. “Mind if I use ya bathroom?” he asked Jericho.

The other man pointed behind him to a doorway next to the kitchen. “Through there and first on the left, man.”

“Cheers.”

Gabe gave him a smile, and walked to the bathroom. He had to time it right.

On the holoscreen, he noticed that a camera was recording the bathroom. He had a feed from every room in the penthouse. They switched over in sixty-second intervals. This particular feed came around every three minutes. As soon as the feed switched to the bedroom, he knew he would have a clear couple of minutes.

Once inside he undid his belt and pulled his trousers down to his thighs. Strapped to the inside was a graphene-steel knife eight inches long and just nanometres thick. It curved away towards the tip from the equally thin handle. A piece of rubber across the cutting edge prevented it from cutting into his thigh.

He undid the strip, removed the rubber protective piece, and placed the knife up his sleeve. He originally thought about the pistol that he recovered from one of the girls back at the station, but that was in his jacket that he took off and left draping over a chair. It would be too obvious to reach for it. And besides, it didn’t hurt to have a backup if he needed it.

Back in the living room, Holly was sitting at Jericho’s feet enjoying a pull on the joint. Petal was sitting in Gabe’s chair sipping a beer. She looked at him, and before she could betray him with a quizzical expression, he gave her a quick shake of the head. It was one of their secret signals to stay quiet and let him do his thing.

He could have just sent her a message across their private network, but given the amount of computing in the penthouse he fully expected to be hacked and monitored. As good as a hacker as Jericho might be, one thing he couldn’t do was hack someone’s brain.

As Gabe came up to the back of the sofa on which Jericho was sat, he reached out a hand ready to grab the guy by the neck. He was determined to recover the information Shelley wanted in the quickest possible way, and his experience had told him people were much quicker to help when their lives depended on it.

“I wouldn’t do that, man,” Jericho said, casually exhaling a plume of green-tinged smoke.

Gabe stopped, unsure of what to do next. He wasn’t expecting that.

Jericho turned to face him. “I wondered how long it’d take you. I guess you enjoyed the home comforts too much to act quickly, eh? Most people do, you know. It’s why I got so many enemies these days. People who want to avenge the death of their friends who came to me, tried to take advantage of my hospitality. Holly, be a darling.”

The young girl jumped from her seated position and pointed a pistol at Petal.

“You see, Gabriel, I’ve been at this game for a while now. I knew what you wanted before you even got to my door. I saw you both snooping around. I saw that you came from the east. Only one kind of person comes from the east these days.”

“And what kind’s that?” Gabe said, letting the blade inch down his arm ready to flash it out if he needed. He gave Petal a quick glance. She looked relaxed, still sipping on her beer. He knew she’d already anticipated this; she’d moved his coat from the chair. It now lay in a pile on the floor next to the chair she was sat on. She’d likely have already pocketed the pistol. He doubted Holly would be quick enough for Petal.

“Those doing jobs for that crazy bitch Shelley. What is it she wants now? A server, DNA-drives, information on them damned planes she’s trying to fix?”

“Something like that,” Gabe said.

Jericho stubbed out the joint on an ashtray sitting on the arm of the sofa. He stood up, brushed the ash from his jacket. He walked past Gabe, who tracked his every movement, ready to strike. But Jericho didn’t seem to care as he left his back exposed. He reached the fridge and took out two more beers.

He removed the tops, and held one out to Gabe.

“Take it, man. Chill out, we can work something out.”

Gabe didn’t take the beer, wanting to keep his hands free. Jericho shrugged his shoulders and walked past him, almost brushing against him as he went, provoking Gabe to strike, but he didn’t take the bait. Gabe was reckless at times, but he wasn’t stupid. No one was that calm unless they had something going on. Jericho took his seat and sipped from the beer.

“You know she’s fucked-up in the head, right?” Jericho said. “Shelley’s cracked, man, completely. The last time I saw her she was chowing down on the liver of my best friend. That was after she stunned us both and tied us up. She started with him first, making me watch as she skinned him alive. Have you seen a man being skinned alive, Gabe? Petal?”

Gabe shrugged. “I’ve seen things you could barely imagine.” Sure, skinning someone was awful, barely imaginable, but Gabe had seen what a gang would do to a rival gang member in order to stamp their authority. When people got hungry, real hungry, the level of debasement they would sink to knew no bounds.

“So you can relate,” Jericho added. “How will you feel when you slice me up and take what it is you want back to Shelley, and she has you and Petal trapped? How will you feel when that mad bitch takes her blades to Petal’s pretty face, slicing it off with the expertise that can only come from years of practice, eh? How will you feel when you’re forced to watch your friend scream and cry in agony as she systematically removes all her organs and preps them for lunch and dinner?”

“That ain’t gonna happen,” Gabe said. “We ain’t stupid. I saw her handiwork, I know what she’s capable of, but frankly I don’t care. She has something I want—”

“Then just kill the bitch and take it. You’ll be doing this world a favour.”

Gabe had to admit he had a point, but how many more people did he have to kill to survive? He’d done enough of that back in Hong Kong, vowed to curb that side of him. If he started now, he didn’t know if he’d be able to stop, and given the things he’d had to do to survive, he was no one to judge Shelley, Jericho, or anyone. Everyone got by in his or her own way, as screwed as it might be. He weren’t some wandering judge. It weren’t his responsibility to snuff out the crazy and the dangerous. All that mattered to him was surviving each day in the best way he could, and with the least blood spilled.

“I can’t do that,” Gabe said.

Jericho laughed, slapped his hand on the arm of sofa, and sent the ashtray flying.

“Fuck, man, you’re something else. You think you can intimidate me into giving you want you want when you have a conscience? If you can’t kill that mad bitch, then I know you ain’t gonna do nothing to me. Leaves you in limbo right now, don’t it? Can’t kill, won’t kill, but you need whatever she’s promised you. And for what? What is it you want from me?”

“You offering to do a deal?” Gabe asked. He glimpsed over to Petal. She was eyeing Holly carefully, planning her next move. Like him, she kept silent over the private network, but he could tell by the tension in her face she was ready to act. Holly didn’t stand a chance.

Jericho placed the beer on the floor and put his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

“I’m always open to a deal. You know, perhaps if you opened with that instead of sneaking up behind me with bad intentions, I could’ve done you a favour. But now, you’ve just pissed me off, and no one disrespects me in my own home and gets out alive.”

Part 8 - The Node

The gunshot made Gabe twitch, dive to his side, and dodge an unseen bullet. He tripped, crashed into the wall of holoscreens to his right, cracking his head against the solid glass surface. As the pain flared, colours and shapes filling his vision, he turned his head, expecting Jericho to finish him.

But he couldn’t.

“Holy shit,” Gabe said. Holly stood over Jericho’s prone body, aiming her gun to the back of his head. She pulled the trigger for a second time, executing him. His head jolted under the blast, brain matter, skull, and blood erupted in a miniature cloud, covering the front of the girl.

“Holy shit,” Gabe repeated.

Petal stood from the chair, moved to the girl, and placed a hand on her shoulder. Holly turned, dropping her arm to her side, the gun falling from her fingers, crashing against the floor. Blood dripping from her young face.

And that’s what got Gabe the most. This kind of killing was too much for someone so young, yet the way she dispatched the Mayors’ allies back in the station it wasn’t entirely surprising, but the coldness, it gripped Gabe’s throat. This world wasn’t the only thing that had suffered at the hands of The Family-induced Cataclysm. Humanity itself had been destroyed. Sanctity of life was as dead as Jericho.

Holly wrapped her arms around Petal’s waist. Petal seemed to not understand what the girl wanted, but awkwardly brought her arms around her and looked over at Gabe.

She wasn’t wearing her goggles. Her eyes were turning to a swirling mix of red and black. She wasn’t far from being over-capacity. That thought pulled Gabe’s attentions back to the present.

“Holly, girl,” Gabe said, standing. He stepped over Jericho’s body, placed a hand on her shoulder. She turned to face him, her expression impassive, cold.

“Why?” Gabe asked. “Why’d ya do it?”

“I had to stop him,” she said quietly, as if observing a funeral protocol in reverence for the recent dead. “You’re good people. I wanted to help. Petal needs help. Jericho wouldn’t have given it. And...” She looked away, closing her eyes, grimacing. A face of shame.

“He touched you?” Petal asked.

With her eyes still closed she nodded her head. Wiped the blood from her face with the sleeve of her tatty sweater. Petal wrapped an arm around her shoulder, gave her the embrace she needed. Then the tears and sobs came.

Between the chokes and gasps, Holly said, “I loved him like a father once. But then he started to hit me.”

“It’s okay,” Petal said. “You don’t need to explain. You had to do what you had to do.”

Gabe stood silently trying not to get to deep into the girl’s misery. As terrible as it was, he had to keep his and Petal’s goals at the forefront of his mind. Now Jericho was no longer an issue, they had to find the information Shelley wanted, and find a node to download some of the AIs and viruses within Petal, but he’d give the girl a few a minutes at least.

While Petal and Holly talked it out, he grabbed Jericho’s limp arm and dragged his body out of the main living area of the room and into one of the spare, empty bedrooms. He at least thought with it out of the way, Holly would be less traumatised, not having that constant reminder of what she’d done.

Combined with that, it allowed Gabe to search the place properly, find the servers.

The apartment had three bedrooms; only one was used as such. The others were empty. The bathroom Gabe had already seen, which left just one other place.

Holly and Petal arrived together in the corridor while Gabe was inspecting the attic hatch. He turned to look at the girl. She’d washed the blood from her face, but her eyes were still rimmed with redness.

“Is it all up there?” Gabe asked?

“Yes,” Holly said. “Be careful, it’s trapped. I’ll show you the way.”

Gabe stepped back, watched Holly take a slate from her jacket pocket and gesture across its surface. The attic hatch slid open and a ladder dropped down. The stench of coolant gas wafted out: a dry, arid smell, the smell of a server room.

Holly ascended the steps half way, reached a hand in slowly to one side pulling out a control pad. She entered a code, and a series of motors whined above in the darkness.

“What was that?” Petal asked.

“Guns,” Holly said.

Gabe noticed the stains of blood on the edge of the attic hatch. He followed the trajectory and noticed a series of patched holes in the mock-wood floor of the hall. Clearly it had been activated more than once. How many people had died in order to get those servers he couldn’t guess.

“Wait there,” Holly said as she scampered up the ladder and into the darkness.

Gabe listened to her footsteps as she traversed the attic, flicking switches. The lights came on, and for the first time, Gabe got a view of what was up there. He stepped up a couple of rungs on the ladder until his head was level with the hatch. Inside the attic were a series or server racks running the length of the wall on the far side. The space was bigger than he expected, at least twenty metres by ten.

To the right end of the attic, a glass wall sectioned off the space, beyond which lay a single server. He could tell it was an old design from the size and the case style. It had to be at least before the war, over fifty years old. And here it was, the centrepiece of an impressive system set up.

Holly stood by it, after disabling the security protecting it: A series of laser beams, criss-crossing the room, briefly lit before extinguishing. She knelt to the server, reached behind it, pulled out a pair of cables with neck port plugs on the end.

She looked back to the hatch, saw Gabe, and waved him in.

“It’s safe,” she called out.

Gabe climbed the ladder, stepped up into the attic. The flat ceiling was still a good metre taller than him. The walls were lined with white Polymar™ boards to provide a secure and climate-controllable environment for all the rack-mounted servers. The light came from a series of overhead OLED panels. The power requirements to run all this must have been huge.

“How’s all this being powered?” He asked Holly as Petal joined him and they made their way to the glassed-off server room.

“Jericho got a small reactor in town working, fed the power to here.”

“And he didn’t want to share that with the rest of the town I take it?” Gabe said, passing through the door to stand next to Holly.

“It’s everyone for themselves here,” she replied, handing Gabe and Petal a cable each.

“What’s this?” Petal asked, pointing to the ancient server.

Holly smiled then, stroking a hand across its surface. “Old Grey,” she said. “One of a kind. Its operating system is an AI of sorts. You should be able to dump your AIs and viruses in it. It’s got some kind of special storage zone for malicious code. Jericho thought it was an anti-cyber warfare device. It also survived the EMPs untouched. The rest of the servers here Jericho made himself—from parts that I sourced.”

It came up to her waist, and was half the size wide. The case was a glossy black colour. The coolant gas billowed every few seconds from grills on its side, illuminated blue and red by a series of flashing LEDs on the side. Although not harmful to breathe in small quantities, the gas tickled the back of Gabe’s throat, making him cough.

“Did Jericho have a central file server?” Petal asked. “We need to find something.”

Holly tapped Old Grey again. “All in here.” She motioned to the cable in Petal’s hand. “Wanna go in?”

Petal looked to Gabe, strains of uncertainty pulling at the muscles in her face. Her eyes were a torrent of activity now. The malicious code inside her wasn’t far from breaking out. He wasn’t sure he could trust Holly after turning on a man she had once loved.

“Let me go first,” Gabe said.

“It’s safe,” Holly said. “I’m not trying to trick you or anything.”

Well, of course she would say that, he thought. “I trust you. I just want to look for the info first. I won’t take long.” He squeezed Petal gently on her arm; she would know he was just being cautious. One time she’d jacked into an unknown server, desperate to dump a particularly nasty AI they had techxorcised from one of their jobs. She nearly lost her mind to it. The server’s system was an anti-hacking machine, designed to overload the minds of those who connected with a neck port to allow direct cortex control of its systems. Petal had luckily managed to disconnect in time before there was any lasting damage. But it scared her witless so that for a while she refused to do anymore jobs. That wasn’t something they could afford again. Their ability to find and destroy dangerous AIs and viruses was the only thing they were willing to trade for food and shelter.

“I’ll be right back,” Gabe said, plugging the cable into his neck port.

The sensation of going into a system never failed to shock him, no matter how many times he had done this. The brain, being an electrical organ reacted in strange ways to new, direct, stimulation.

It always took a minute or so to get over the shock of bypassing one’s regular senses and established a direct neural link.

This one was different.

Where a regular connection could sometimes make the brain feel like it was burning, about to burst until the link had formed properly, this one felt like a much more advanced process, smoother and pain free, and yet he felt himself connect much deeper.

That scared him as much as the thought of his brain being boiled by an anti-hack unit.

Once inside, the image of the operating system appeared in his mind. He controlled a curser with his thoughts, directing it over a number of icons depicting various programs available.

In the corner of the image was the text: Old Grey Network Systems—Copyright 2025. So that’s where it got its name. But more impressive was the age. The server was far older than he would have imagined. Over a hundred and twenty-eight years.

Gabe felt like an old-fashioned archaeologist digging into a perfectly preserved crypt, only here, the finds were bits and bytes as opposed to bones and artefacts, but they were no less valuable.

Using a file explorer program he ran a number of searches on the information Shelley had wanted: the blueprints to the currently downed planes. Jericho had amassed a trove of information. There were data documents and files on hundreds of old military projects, systems, and vehicles. It took a few minutes but eventually he found what he was looking for and copied it across the connection to his internal memory.

Before he left the server, he inspected the containment program. Clicking on the icon, a status table appeared, showing various statistics such as: memory used, processor power used, I/O channel bandwidth, and number of concurrent processes—those were the AIs that this system was containing.

It appeared that this Old Grey system was performing some kind of calculation on the AIs and malicious code. It occurred to Gabe that the system was observing their behaviour. It got a sense of someone, or something, watching him. He felt like he’d been caught stealing, and quickly shut to the containment program down and logging out.

When he pulled the cable from his neck port, he thought he heard a female voice whisper something over the connection, but put it down to his mind altering back to reality, but it left him with a distinctive feeling that there was more to the server than he, or anyone, could realise.

Gabe was sweating, the sheen on his skin glossy from the overhead lights.

“Well, Gabe? This bitch good to go or what, eh?”

He hesitated, not sure how to explain. It seemed safe. The fact there were AIs and viruses currently safely held within its containment process told him that it should be fine, but how could he put into words that almost spiritual sense of there being someone in there.

“I’m taking that as a yes,” Petal said, connecting her cable. “I can’t wait any longer.”

“She’ll be fine,” Holly said. “This thing’s rock solid.”

“Aye,” Gabe said distractedly as he scrutinised Petal for any signs of trouble.

Petal closed her eyes and sat cross-legged in front of the server as if she was sitting in prayer to some deity. Her body jerked, as it usually did when she transferred the malicious code within her. Her face however looked serene. All tension had flowed away to leave an expression of bliss. Even her eyes were draining back to her usual crystal blue colour. A transfer like that had never been so quick, or pain free. Petal usually thrashed or yelled out during such an operation.

She stayed that way for a further five minutes, the tension in the room growing ever thicker as Gabe and Holly looked at each other, then to the still form of Petal. Eventually Holly broke the revering silence.

“Well? Is she okay?”

Gabe could still detect Petal on their private network. The data traffic from her had slowed to a trickle. Everything seemed normal.

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “I think she is.”

Holly knelt down in front of Petal, waved her hand in front of her face. Petal didn’t react.

“That’s freaky,” Holly said. “It’s like she’s looking right at me but can’t see anything.”

“You’ve never connected in?” Gabe said.

“Nah, man. I never want anything in me again.”

Gabe winced a little, thinking back to Jericho and he’d damaged this poor girl. She’d forever go through life a wounded animal now, her views, and motivations shaped around the scar tissue of her psyche. He considered whether he should take her with him and Petal. Try and steer her away from a life of more violence and damage, but then he couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t expose her to things worse than this town.

Petal stirred, a low moan coming from her lips as she closed her eyes and slowly removed the cable from her neck. She slumped forward, rubbed the back of her neck. Holly put her hands on Petal’s shoulders. “Are you okay?” she said.

Petal raised her face, stared at the girl. “Yeah, Hol, I’m good. You did well bringing us here. Real well.”

Holly hugged her, nearly knocking Petal to her back. “Thank you.”

“For what?” Petal asked.

“For trusting me. I just wanted to help.”

“You did that,” Gabe said. “And we’re thankful—”

Holly let go, stood, and helped Petal to her feet before looking back at Gabe. “I hear a but coming.”

“I’m sorry, but we have to go,” Gabe said.

A hush descended the room. Holly looked up at him expectantly.

It was Petal who spoke. “You can’t come with us, Hol. We’re bad news. Trouble and violence follows us as surely as we follow it.”

The girl dropped her chin, idly swung her foot across the floor, kicking at the dust. “I understand,” she said. “I guess I’ll stay here, look after the servers, but I want you to at least do something for me.”

“What’s that?” Gabe asked.

“Take Old Grey with you. Take it somewhere safe. It’s seriously special and I don’t think I’ll be able to protect it. One day, it’ll save the world.”