Code Breakers: Beta (14 page)

He passed a number of burnt-out strip-malls, the windows long since smashed, and the fronts home to rats, dogs and the truly downtrodden, each shop a microcosm of life clinging on to scraps and false hopes.

Beyond these malls of despair and desperation, the bridge connecting the two halves of the city loomed like a great steel spine: semi-circular struts traversed the dried-up river like vertebrae. A gang of five Red Widow members huddled around a small square in front of the bridge, checking people as they passed.

The checkpoint stretched across the street to a tall concrete building, still mostly intact.

The group of fanatics were stopping random people, giving them a shake down, causing a scene before pushing them off into the sea of desperate humanity. Occasionally they’d let one through and send them across the bridge into the darkness. He could only assume they were the ones chosen to live.

He ducked his head, merged further into the crowd, developed a limp, a racking cough, and hoped he could pass without incident.

Within the crowd he heard a rattling, rolling noise. He looked down and saw the top of a young girl’s head. Like the rest, she wore dirty rags around her thin frame. She sat on a wheeled board, and propelled herself across the rough ground with her blistered and swollen fingers, probably from being stepped on by the uncaring group around her.

She looked up at Gerry, stared right in his eyes, and cocked her head. She seemed to be reading him. Or listening.

“Can I help you,” Gerry said. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” she said, not specifying to which question she had answered. “You’re very noisy,” she added. “He’ll hear you.”

“What do you mean?” He certainly wasn’t making any more noise than anyone else around him. The girl beckoned him down to her level. He knelt, looked at her, realised she couldn’t be much older than ten or eleven. And yet her eyes were already world-weary, her cheeks hollow. “What is it?” he asked again, intrigued by the girl.

She reached up and tapped her thin index finger gently against his head. “From there,” she said. “So much noise, signals, and data. He can hear you, too.”

“Who can?”

“The man in the box.”

Gerry smiled, wanted to laugh. It was utterly absurd, but the way she looked into him, it was as if she could see inside his brain. Could she really hear his thoughts, his data processing?

“What can you tell me about him? Is he a bad man?”

She smiled, shook her head. “Neither. He just listens. Come, I’ll show you.”

Intrigued, he stood, followed the girl as she paddled her wheeled board out of the flow of people and towards a battle-scarred tower. Its facade chipped and damaged from various munitions. Great chunks hung away, held from falling by a webbing of rebar. Its multiple windows were devoid of glass and covered with rusted steel sheets.

She pointed up to a distant window. “He’s waiting up there.”

Gerry focused his mind, had his AIA scan the area for any radio or data signals. To his surprise, he detected a weak and intermittent signal, fragmented beyond coherence, the data packets scrambled and incomplete.

He opened his connection to Malik and the others back at the truck.

—
I think I’ve found something. I’m investigating. I’ll update you shortly.

To the girl, he said. “Hey, thanks—” He looked down to find she had gone, vanished back into the crowd. He pushed forward, squirming back into the crowd to try and see her, but she was nowhere to be seen. He turned his attentions back to the dark window, decided he’d check it out.

Chapter 19

A
sharp tang hung in the air, shifted about the white-walled medical lab. The bed Petal lay upon took her weight, cradled her spine. So comfortable she could have stayed there forever. She closed her eyes, waited for the phantom movements from being in the sub to give way to the stillness of solid ground.

Her muscles still twitched, neurons fired, balance readjusting to waves and currents that were no longer there. It could have been the latest shot of ‘Stems, she thought, that continued to stimulate her nervous system. She’d had three doses inside a day. More than she’d normally tolerate.

A taste of metal coated the back of her throat. Her mouth felt oily and slick. She opened her eyes, turned to her side, and found a pitcher of water on the bed stand.

A cup had already been poured for her.

She reached out her right arm, felt resistance. A wire twinned with a narrow tube came from her wrist where her old implant used to be.

The skin around the old wound had healed, and pressing her fingers against it she felt something hard beneath the skin. A new chip, an upgrade perhaps? How long had she been out during surgery? She glanced around for a clock. A holoscreen attached to the end of the bed flicked with various metrics. The time read 03:02. She’d been out for about three or so hours. The soreness in her body made it seem like weeks.

She tried to access her new chip with her mind, but everything fogged. She couldn’t detect it in there. She thought perhaps it wasn’t online, or needed booting up or something. Hopefully it wasn’t a botched procedure. Given the missing code within the submarine’s stealth module, she had to wonder.

From another tube attached to her upper arm, an almost-clear liquid dripped into her. The wire traced back to the computer unit attached to the end of the bed. She took a closer look at the numbers and charts.

Heart beat, blood pressure, mental cognition, and something else: a stream of assembly code flowing vertically. Next to the stream were a series of graphs. She didn’t understand the notation beneath the graph. It appeared that this was perhaps the code running on her implanted chip. She recognised some of the routines, but it seemed more advanced than the last time she checked. The last time being with Enna in her lab.

To the side of the bed sat a remote control panel like a small slate. She pressed her finger against a red spot labelled ‘help’. And then she wondered if her own slate, the one that Gabe had given her, was still in the sub. She didn’t know if Sasha had remembered to recover the slate after General whatshisname tore a strip off her.

As she came fully around, she blinked her eyes against the bright glare. Overhead OLED panels simulated the summer sun perfectly. Alas, there was none of the relaxing heat prickling against her skin. The place felt dead. No atmosphere, no fresh air. She already missed the salt-air from the sea.

All around her were white walls. No artwork, no attempt at decoration. Not even a decent sized holoscreen for entertainment purposes. It seemed so militaristic.

The electronic whine and click of a lock caught her attention. She looked up at the door beyond the foot of her bed. Dr Robertson stood in the doorway carrying her broken slate.

It was safe then!

Deep ravines cut through the soft skin of his forehead, each one thick with concern or concentration. He entered the room, avoided eye contact.

“Vitals are looking good. Your new implant seems to have installed okay.”

“Good to know,” Petal replied, with a hint of sarcasm. “Doc, I—”

“Wait, I know you’ve got questions,” he said, running a hand through his hair, as his entire body seemed to sigh with a sagging movement. “But, there’re things you need to know first.”

“You recovered the data on the slate?” She sat further up. Her muscles groaned with the effort, but already her strength was returning.

Jimmy Robertson took a step back, looked down at the slate, his eyes intent almost as if he were peering directly into the data itself.

“You’re not dying,” he finally said looking up at her. The corners of his mouth tightened, moved upwards ever so slightly, a small proud smile. “You were never dying. Your friends were right to be concerned, but it wasn’t as bad as they thought. You were mutating. Adapting.”

Mutating! God, it sounded like she was some kind of freak. “What do you mean mutating? Adapting? To what?”

He stepped aside, pulled the holoscreen closer to her. “You see that flow of data,” he pointed to the flow of assembly code she noticed earlier.

“Yeah, it’s a data stream. I’m assuming that’s because of the implant, right?”

“It’s so much more.” Now his smile stretched real wide. He looked like a proud father whose daughter had learned to walk or ride a bike for the first time. “It’s your operating system. Isn’t it amazing?”

“Um, yeah, sure. Not to put a damper on things, but what exactly does it, and my implant chip, actually do?” She studied the graphs, managed to realise that some of the bars in the image indicated the input and output traffic of data, and another bar represented some kind of computational process. Beyond that she didn’t really know.

“You don’t understand,” he said now, sitting on the bed. He rubbed his forehead. “How best to explain? Your neural network within your brain isn’t entirely organic. That’s where your chip comes in. It connects a multicore quantum computational chip to that network, allows your brain to subordinate tasks. It also helps in things like your reaction speed, your strength.

“The chip improves the flow of data to and from your nervous system and your brain functions. Think of it as a second brain, but with lots of added abilities, like how you can connect remotely to computer networks, or how you can retain and manipulate artificial intelligences and viral code. It’s why you’re a rock-solid code safe. This chip is a more advanced version of the one that you had previously. I’m afraid that one was permanently damaged when it was removed.”

She thought back to the night when those cruel bitches cut it out of her without a care in the world. As if it were some cancerous tumour that needed to be sliced out and discarded.

“So, what exactly am I?”

“That’s a little complicated. You’re not quite—”

“If you’re gonna tell me I ain’t human, I kinda know that already by now.”

Robertson’s eyes widened a little at that, and then his shoulders relaxed, as if it were one revelation he didn’t have to take responsibility for. He still gripped the slate, held it close to him. He bounced it up and down slightly.

“The info on this slate from your friends,” he said. “It’s not entirely accurate. Enna, I’m assuming some kind of bioengineer, had read you all wrong. She thought your DNA was breaking down and assumed you were dying with some kind of condition, which to be fair is how it looks to someone who doesn’t know what you are.”

She couldn’t but help to feel a twinge of worry at that. She thought about all the times Gabe had taken her to Enna to get a shot of NanoStem or some other medical procedure. Had she operated on her properly? Had Enna really known what she was doing?

She asked again, “What am I?”

“Probably best if I show you.” Robertson stood from the bed. “Are you up for a stroll?”

Petal swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. Her head swam, she reached out. Robertson caught her hands. She quickly let go, “I’m fine. You might want to disconnect this first.” She held up her arm with the tube and wire still attached.

“Of course.” He entered something on the holoscreen, rendering it blank, and with careful and agile fingers disconnected her from the machine.

A tiny electrical charge tickled at the wound on her wrist when he removed the wire and tube. “Did you find my old chip?” she said suddenly realising the robes she had stolen from a Red Widow fanatic were no longer on her, replaced instead with a dark-grey form-fitting one piece body suit. She wore slipper-light shoes, split at the toes and with a thin rubber sole.

“It’s okay,” Robertson said, making his way to the door. “All your belongings are safe. But you won’t need that chip any more. Your new one is greatly upgraded.”

“Sounds great. But I can’t feel anything yet. Or access my systems.”

“You will do shortly. It takes a while for the neural pathways in your brain to sync with the chip and vice-versa. You should be good to use your upgrades within a few hours.”

He held the door open with a sincere smile that reached his eyes.

“Who don’t like upgrades, huh?” Petal replied, walking out into a sea of grey corridors.

Jimmy Robertson led Petal through what seemed like miles and miles of tunnels. If she weren’t counting exits and turns, committing the layout to memory she’d easily have gotten lost in this underground labyrinth. It was vast in its scope. Way more than Seca’s compound.

“So where we going, Doc?”

“Doctor Robertson,” he replied with a sigh hanging on his voice. “You’re going home, right back to where you began. Back to where I…” He stopped, his words laced with heavy regret choking in his throat.

This is it
, Petal thought. Finally, after all those years of wondering who she was, or where she came from, she would know once and for all. But aside from that, this doctor intrigued her. He exuded kindness, but she could tell he held a fierce intellect in that old head of his that displayed so clearly years of frustration, grief, and perhaps failure.

He didn’t seem to fit this place at all. She remembered the way he looked at the General when he took Sasha from the submarine bay. There was hatred.
No, not hatred
, she thought.
Envy
. Yes, he was envious of the General.

Perhaps his stature within this group wasn’t what he wanted or deserved?

A familiar voice caught her attention, as they turned left at a junction in the tunnels.

Up ahead, a large room branched off to the right. Looking through a small windows at head-height, next to a thick steel door, Petal saw the General in front of ten soldiers dressed in camouflaged fatigues, lined up in a grid formation. He barked orders, his face puffed and reddened. They carried out a gun kata with their rifles.

Sasha stood at the back of the group. Petal waved at her look-a-like, but Sasha didn’t notice: Sasha’s attention focused only on the weapon in her hand as she carried out the required movements. She looked so much more skilled in there than she appeared in the sub.

Compared to the other men, she moved faster, more fluid.

General Vickers yelled at one of the men who stumbled no more than an inch within the middle of the kata. Vickers grabbed the guy by the lapels of his combat shirt, shouted in his face, showed him the movement with the grace of a cobra, and ordered him to start again. Vickers pointed to Sasha as he did so, using her as an example of how to do it right.

“Intense dude, this general of yours, huh?” Petal said looking into the window. “Do you two get on well?”

Robertson sniffed with a hint of derision. His easy-going expression tightened enough to create the beginnings of a sneer. “Vickers is a capable military leader,” the doctor said between clenched teeth.

“Like that is it? Two men of status, vying for power and control?”

“He thinks it’s something like that,” Robertson said, now standing in front of the other window watching the group of men perform their manoeuvres while the General looked on.

Vickers looked up, caught Petal’s eye, and gave her a wink and a cheesy-as-hell smile.

Petal politely nodded back, then looked away.

“He’s a bit of a douche,” she said as she watched him prance around at the front the room yelling instructions until his face became red.

“Like I said, he’s a capable military leader, and unfortunately, in these times we need men like him. But don’t mind him. Come on, let me show you your genesis.”

As they walked away, Petal couldn’t but help feel something far deeper existed between the Doc and Vickers than he let on.

After a further ten minutes of traversing the dull grey tunnels of the Wake Island underground city, they came to an old steel door covered in dents and patches of rust.

Robertson took an old-fashioned key from his pocket and unlocked the door.

“No electronic bolts here, huh?”

“You can’t hack a mechanical lock remotely,” he said giving her a sly wink.

He opened the door for her and stood back. She hesitated, but moved inside once she saw two person-sized pods hanging from a series of rails bolted to the ceiling of the room. Inside, the place looked like the rest of the compound: grey and white. It had a tiled floor, a single computer station to the right wall.

The door slammed behind. Her heart skipped a beat as she jumped. She turned thinking she’d been locked in, but Robertson was in the room, hunched over the door, locking it from the inside.

Her attention returned to the pods. Although they were tubular than pod-like. They reminded her of the transcendent pods that Enna had in her lab, only they weren’t transcendents in these tubes. They were her.

“Welcome home, Number Three,” Robertson said, his arms wide and his face beaming with pride.