Code Breakers: Beta (4 page)

Petal considered taking the woman’s communicator: a small bud within her ear, but couldn’t trust that it wasn’t transmitting GPS data as well as receiving radio communications, so she removed it and crushed it underfoot. Her comrades would likely be on Petal’s trail soon enough, but that might slow them down for a few minutes.

She inspected the large metal cylinder attached to the rear wall. It was essentially a huge upside-down cone. Pipes snaked into it from the ceiling. Next to it a metal ladder protruded from the wall. She climbed up, poked her head out of a trap door, and noticed that a secret level half a metre high ran the length of the building, beneath its flat ceiling. Water gathered from gullies in the roof and filled the space. It flowed down the pipes into the cylinder below.

Climbing back down, she inspected the curious machinery closer. Towards the bottom of it, around knee-height, it had a wheel, a quarter metre in diameter, and beneath that a pair of tubes. She found thick, rubberised hoses wound up on the opposite wall.

When Petal inspected the buggy she realised what it was: A hydrogen splitter. The system was designed to separate the hydrogen gas from water.
So that’s how the Bachians fuelled some of their vehicles
. The building must have been a reserve, a getaway contingency.

She checked the buggy’s hydrogen tank: a thick metalled cylinder that ran the length of the vehicle. It was certainly big enough to hold a large capacity. A small dial on its side indicated a full tank. She didn’t know how far she’d get in it, but certainly with a full tank, it’d be far enough away to make any search for her difficult. And however far she’d get, it’d be a good way to start her journey to Criborg, as Gabe advised.

An old-fashioned ignition system still had the key in it. She checked the transmission for neutral and fired up the engine. A belch of water vapour came from the twin tailpipes. The engines hummed with electricity.

Taking out the slate, she entered the coordinates given to her by Gabe into the buggy’s navigation computer. A 3D image of her destination glowed within the holographic display.
It’s
an Island? What the hell?

Chapter 4

G
erry counted at least eight of them between floors one and twenty-one. Eight highly trained and augmented security operatives disguised as residents, cleaners, and maintenance people going about their morning business. Despite their attempts at looking normal it was the small things that gave them away: the way they looked at him, their eyes filled with recognition; the way they held their gaze a fraction too long; the false smiles and casual nod of the head that was a little too eager; the tell-tale EM traffic that surrounded them. They weren’t even cloaking it.

Regular people don’t process that much data going about their daily lives.

There was one, however, in the vicinity that he knew wasn’t part of this cabal.

Courtesy of the ID lookup he discovered Kaden Willis: seventeen, smart, super-smart in fact, and in an apartment two floors down from Gerry’s assigned room. He was running a secure, or so he thought, game of Aliencraft from his bedroom. There were currently nine other kids from the building hooked into the gaming server. The only other thing worth noting from his ID record was the expulsion from his last two schools, and his unusually high IQ. He was now being home-schooled by his mother, Loane Willis, an environmental policy advisor, and not very well by the looks of it. She was nowhere in the range of the building. Probably had no clue as to what her son was up to.

Bran, Malik, and Elaine waited in the hall as Gerry poked his head through the door and checked out his apartment. “Everything to your satisfaction?” Elaine said.

Without even looking at her, Gerry sensed a sneer. She had that kind of voice.

“It’s fine.” He didn’t even bother to look beyond the basic aesthetics of the room: glass, ceramics, ergonomic desk, sofa, kitchen area, and a bedroom with mood lighting. He had no plans to stay there. “Are you three going to stand out there all day, or are you going to leave me alone?”

Bran shook his head, smiled, “We’re all done here, Mr Cardle. Just wanted to make sure you arrived safely and were happy with your new lodgings.”

Gerry didn’t answer. Just nodded and waited for them to leave.

A few seconds passed. “You’re still here,” he said.

The three goons finally left. Gerry walked to his door, turned, and made sure they were actually leaving. He traced their IDs and plotted their route across a 3D overlay map. They left the tower and headed back toward to the park. When it was clear they weren’t coming back, Gerry entered his apartment and closed the door behind him.

His prosthetic eye and on-board microphone system recorded everything he saw and transmitted it back to The Family on their space station via his direct, and secure, feed. He didn’t want them knowing all his plans. If he did find Petal alive, he didn’t want to put her in more trouble.

The Family, and his mother, Amma, talked a friendly game, but he’d seen and heard enough to suspect their intentions. Connecting with his AIA, Gerry created a series of low-level software patches that intercepted the signals from his on-board microphone and scrambled them into incomprehensible junk data. With the attack from the digital entity, getting through the layers of security became a trivial task, but he still had to devise it so The Family received a signal, so he made sure that they received a distorted, garbled version of the truth: something to resemble regular EM interference. That should buy him time to do what he needed to do.

After spinning the code with his mind and altering the software, he rebooted the system’s core files and confirmed The Family received a feed with interference.

Satisfied his feeds back to The Family were scrambled, and their communication channel blocked, he made his way down to the nineteenth level. While a suspicious cleaner finished up his various tasks within the corridor Gerry paused for a moment and took the opportunity to scan for any available networks outside of the Dome in the hopes of tracking Petal.

Nothing came up. No Meshwork, no non-City Earth traffic at all. It was as if there were no networks at all outside of the Dome. He presumed the internal security within the city had blocked access. He’d have to find a way of getting beyond it.

The cleaner had turned out of the corridor and entered the elevator. Wasting no time, Gerry arrived outside Kaden’s door and rapped against its surface. On the third knock the boy opened the door.

“Yeah?” Kaden said. His hair was shaved through the middle, sides spiked up, dyed green. He wore various glass rings through his nose, lips, and ears. Each one no doubt filled with dopamine receptor regulators. The kid wore a sharp suit over a tatty t-shirt with the words Black Sabbath scrawled in patchy white text. He spooned breakfast cereal from a white china bowl.

“Kaden Willis, right?” Gerry said.

“Who wants to know? You got something to do with the school, or my mom? I’ve already—”

Gerry pushed the kid back, entered the room, and closed the door behind him.

“Look, kid, I’m just a guy, okay? Listen up. You pretty much live in this apartment twenty-four-seven what with your home-schooling and Aliencraft obsession, right?”

The boy backed away, held his arms out, tried not to look at the pile of contraband in his room. He failed. Gerry picked up on it before the kid even realised he signalled his guilt by shifting his eyes to an open room off the main living area. “What the hell is this about?” Kaden said.

Gerry stepped forward, sensed an opportunity. “What you got in there? Illegal upgrades, software patches? Wait, don’t tell me you’ve got some hot-chips to get you out of the D-Lottery.”

“Um, no?” Kaden’s face said it all as he blushed with guilt.

Gerry pushed past him and stood at the doorway to what looked like Kaden’s room, what with the Aliencraft poster hanging on his wall amid various band photos. A bag of computer chips sat haphazardly on the boy’s bed.
Definitely hot-chips.

When Gerry managed the D-Lottery algorithm at Cemprom, he had worked on a system to seek out these kinds of chips, but wherever they were coming from, the makers always seemed one step ahead. “We can work something out. If I forget about what you’ve got in here—”

“You some kind of pervert?” Kaden said, looking Gerry up and down.

Gerry wore a basic, nondescript suit of grey wool. Certainly nothing to give the idea that he was a sex pest. “No. You really don’t know who I am?” Gerry said, slightly disappointed that news of his daring act of saving the City, his death, and subsequent resurrection didn’t seem to have had any effect on the citizens so far. But then he doubted The Family let any of it get out. Can’t have the public knowing they were all nearly turned to gibbering zombies controlled by an evil AI.

Kaden shook his head. “Look, about that. I can explain. I was just holding—”

Gerry held up his palm, “Don’t say another word, kid. Hear me out first before I’m forced to take you to The Family for your crimes. I have a direct line these days.”

“Dammit. I knew this would blow up in my face.” Kaden slumped to the sofa, sat on his hands, probably to hide that they were shaking. “You can’t tell my mom about any of this. I’ve caused her so much trouble these last few months already.”

“Well, you can redeem yourself. I’d like you to do me a favour.”

“What is it?”

“You’re going to be me.”

Kaden took the offer immediately. Gerry hacked City Earth’s ID database and hooked Kaden up with his credentials. The fact he could do that impressed the kid so much that by the time Gerry had told him he wanted him to walk in and out of the building a few times and hang around in his apartment during the day and some evenings when his mother was on business, he jumped at the chance.

Gerry recognised impressive hacking skills in Kaden. The fact he administered an Aliencraft server under the nose of the building’s security got Gerry’s attention. Those kinds of games generated a lot of traffic. The kid must have scripted some brilliant traffic shaping protocols to hide the source allowing him to get away with it undetected.

He wondered if that’s how Gabe and Petal got started: Gabe the mentor, she the student. Although there was a difference: Gerry had no plans to take on an understudy. He preferred to do his work alone. Even at Cemprom he preferred to keep most of his code and research away from his colleagues. He quickly learned information was power, and by giving it away, you weakened your own position. While Gerry accessed City Earth’s ID database, he procured a new identity for himself, allowing him to walk about the City with relative freedom. He chose a government official, one whose job it was to work with the various districts under the Dome. It meant that for a while at least his travels wouldn’t be questioned.

***

It took about an hour for him to walk from his apartment building to his old house. He took the scenic route rather than one of the trains or city shuttles. Fewer eyes and scanners out in the open, and besides, the Dome was in spring mode to reflect what should have been spring outside, although with the climate still struggling to recover from the forty-year nuclear winter, it was difficult to spot what season it was out there in the abandoned lands.

He enjoyed breathing the cool breeze created by the Dome’s systems, the bright sunlight, the bloom of the plants and trees. Outside of the poorer areas and the governmental zones, like Cemprom, City Earth had plenty to offer in terms of scenery.

It was a shame so few took advantage. But then it wasn’t their fault. They all had roles and responsibilities, and the curfews trained people to spend their spare time inside with their families, watching the various tightly-controlled media outlets.

The sun crested the Dome towards its zenith. Gerry checked his internal clock, run by his AIA: 11:30. Once through the parks, Gerry looped around, followed the river, and ended up in his old neighbourhood. It brought back a flood of memories of his old, fake family.

While on the station, he learned the woman pretending to be his wife was executed for her crimes against the City after colluding with Jasper. His kids were re-assimilated with a new family. When he eventually walked out of the alley and faced his old house a mixture of relief, guilt, and anger washed over him, threatened to paralyse him.

The house reminded him his last two decades of life was a sham.

He walked up the path, weeds now overgrown and covering the stone slabs. He opened the door and slipped inside. Darkness shrouded the place. Much of its contents had been taken away, just like his old life. The place was an empty shell. Memories of times echoed around its bare walls.

Using his night-vision, a function of his upgraded optical prosthesis, he plotted his way through the house. Room by room the voices of his kids came to him. The memories clear as day. But those memories were cyphers, placeholders. Had his wife known all along? Had she planned on betraying him from the start? He’d never know. She’d been wiped from the records. She might not have existed in the first place.

An old slate lay in the detritus of the kitchen. He ran his finger across the display and it flickered to life. Cracks crawled across its surface, obscuring the picture beneath, but he could see it as clear as the day he took that photo. He and his family sat around the kitchen table, sharing smiles and happiness. It was real, wasn’t it? The look in their eyes and his wife’s weren’t faked then.

Maybe for a short while reality and something substantial had overwhelmed the veneer of the unreal.
Maybe
.

Gerry left the slate on, left that image to shine out in the room, grounding the place to a time before the veil had lifted and the mechanism of his life was left exposed like a flesh wound. He wiped a tear from his real eye and descended into the basement, where his office used to be. He intended to base his operations there and find Petal.

Thump
.
Scuffle
. Someone was in there. Immediately Gerry’s new combat protocols kicked in and he glided to the door, muscles ready, fists tight. With a hand ready on the door’s control panel he put his ear to the door and heard breathing.