Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (128 page)

“The old dome. The Family’s old HQ. I don’t know why. He’s the first visitor we’ve had from the Family for decades.”

“Wait,” Gerry said. “How old are you?”

The boy smiled and shook his head slowly. “I know, I know. I look about seventeen. I’m coming up on fifty-something. I don’t know the exact date. It’s easy to lose count out here. But as much as I’d like to tell you about my illnesses, I think we ought to move on. It seems like your AI’s gone rogue.” He pointed to the bodies.
 

Petal and Gerry shared a look as if to say
no shit
. What AI hadn’t gone crazy at least once?
 

“If we help you with the data vault, will you help us get to the old dome?” Gerry asked.
 

“Yeah, of course. You’ll need to go there if you’re to switch off the defence system anyway. There’s only so much you can do from here. The Family built in several layers of redundancy to avoid its workers and… experiments from taking over the farm.”

“Lead the way, then,” Petal said.
 

Galvin entered a code on a panel next to the door. It slid open, revealing a wide, long hallway with vaulted ceilings. The air was cooler inside. Great columns created a colonnade through the hall. It must have stretched on for nearly a hundred meters, and at least twenty-five wide. At the far end, illuminated by an amber glow, was a heavy-looking vault door.
 

“Down here,” Gal said in a hush. Even with his low voice the words still echoed.
 

He led the way. Gerry noticed footprints in the dust.
 

Jachz, he thought. Just what the hell was he up to?

Walking three abreast behind Galvin, Gerry and the two women followed, all watching above and beside them for any potential attacks. The gathering shadows in the edges of the hallway were perfect for hiding some psycho, or perhaps another tracker ’borg.

“I don’t like this. It’s far too quiet,” Petal whispered.
 

“I know what you mean,” Gerry said.
 

Despite their nerves being stretched, they weren’t jumped or attacked by the time they reached the door. The keyboard’s screen, OLED this time, indicating it had been installed after the terminal room. It had room for twelve digits.
 

“I don’t know the code,” Gal said. “It looks like your AI friend did, though.”
 

The amber light from a discreet source above the door illuminated the blood on the off-white keypad. It was smeared all over, making it impossible to see what order and what number Jachz may have used.
 

“Are you still being suppressed?” Petal asked Gerry.

“Yeah. We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

“A screwdriver and a battery?” Petal asked.
 

“Nah, I’ll cheat.” Gerry wiped the blood off the keys with the sleeve of his jacket and closed his eyes to recall the numbers tattooed on Chaos’s finger. If the numbers weren’t for this, then he had no idea what they would be for. He recalled the numbers and punched them in one at a time: 5-9-2-1-5-8-3-1-5-7-4-1.
 

With a clunk and a whir, gears and servos within the doors activated.
 

“How the hell did you do that?” Petal asked as both Holly and Galvin looked at him with a mix of confusion and awe.
 

“Oh, you know. Lucky guess,” Gerry said with a smile.
 

He stood back and pulled Petal to the side of the door while Holly and Galvin stepped opposite. Once the doors finished opening, a white light burst out. Inside, the silhouette of three figures moved away from a central shape. When Gerry’s eyes adjusted, he recognised at least two of the forms: Endymion and Jachz.
 

“Come in,” Endymion said. His cybernetic eye glowed red in the bright room. “And bring that fool Galvin with you.”

Gerry hesitated. The door behind him at the other end of the hall slammed shut.

“You’ve played the game well, Gerry. Why stop now? Come in, bring your friends, and let’s finish this.”

Seeing as he had little choice, Gerry stepped into the room. Holly and Petal followed him inside. Gal hesitated before he, ultimately, joined them also. Once inside, the door whirred shut. The lights dimmed, reducing the harshness and allowing Gerry to take in all the details.
 

Jachz was in a heap in the middle of the room. A strap across his chest crackled with electricity, keeping him pinned to the white-tiled floor. The tiles themselves showed the scuff marks of decades of footsteps.

“Jachz?” he called. “Are you okay?”

No answer. His body remained still, but at least his chest was moving.
 

“He’ll be fine,” Endymion said. “We just needed him under control for a while.”

Standing either side of Jachz were two of the dark tracker ’borgs. Both carried rifles: the ones confiscated from Gerry and the others. The room was no larger than ten meters square, and apart from the front panel of a server embedded into the rear wall, it appeared utterly featureless.
 

Endymion stood by the panel with his arms folded across his chest. His cybernetic eye expanded and shrank as he observed Gerry, then Petal, then Holly. The server panel was made up of what looked like a large chunk of quartz crystal. Embedded into its surface were a number of interface ports. Half a dozen fibre-optic cables hung from the ports, and on the end of each one were the common neck port jack plugs.
 

“So,” Gerry said, stepping forward. “This game, what’s the objective? Who wins?”

“If you play it right, we’ll all win,” Endymion said.
 

“And if not?”

“You die, of course.”

“So what exactly do you want from us?” Petal asked.
 

“Galvin has already told you—we want to leave here, take down the defence system, but we need a way into this”—the man-machine tapped a metallic finger to the server panel—“and beyond. Behind this room is the data archive, the centre of all the Family’s knowledge. And our ticket out of here. But no one has ever managed to get inside.”

“How many people have tried?” Gerry asked.
 

Endymion thought for a moment. “Last count… two thousand and fifty-one.”

Holly made a choking noise. “And what happened to them?”

Endymion fixed her with a pained grin. “They didn’t make it.”

“So what are you?” Gerry asked. “Another of the Family’s experiments gone wrong?”

“Oh no, I’m one that went right. But aren’t we all Family experiments on some level? Your friend here certainly is.” He pointed to Jachz in his prone state. And then pointed at Petal. “And you, your tech can be traced back to a genesis within the Family.”

He looked curiously at Holly. “You… what are you?”

Holly rolled her eyes. “Human, douchebag.”

“Are you sure about that?” Endymion asked with a terrible rictus grin on its face.
 

“Fuck you, robofreak,” Holly said, gripping her dagger.

“Easy, Holly,” Gerry said. “Don’t rise to its bullshit.” Regarding the man-machine, Gerry stepped forward until he was just a foot away. He looked up into its eyes. “Let’s get this over and done with. You want me to go into the system and open the vault?”

“Indeed.”

“And if I’m to do this, I want you to let us all go. Including Jachz.”

Endymion gripped both of Gerry’s shoulders and stared at him directly in the eyes. “If you do this, Gerry, we’ll all go. Let’s see what you’ve got in that brain of yours, shall we?” He turned away and picked up one of the fibre-optic cables and handed it to Gerry.
 

“Wait, before I agree to this. There was a girl with the viroborg. Was she okay?”

“Yes, she was still alive.”

“What does it want with her?”
 

“I don’t know. They don’t concern me. If you survive, you’re free to follow that up yourself, of course. If you survive.”

Gerry took one more look around the room, trying to find a way out. They were outnumbered, out-armed, and still needed their help if they were to leave. Even if they could take their captors down, and with Petal in the mood she was in that was possible, they still didn’t know the way out. And who knows how many more they would have to fight before they got free of this place.
 

“Gerry, you don’t have to do this. Let me,” Petal said.
 

“No. I can’t risk losing you again.”

“How touching,” Endymion said. “Get on with it, Gerry. Why don’t you show us what your parents have made in you? You’re one of their crowning achievements, are you not? What better person to bring down the Family’s technology than their own son.”

“You overestimate my ability to give any fucks regarding my parents,” Gerry said, lifting the cable. “But before I do this, I’ll warn you: you try to do anything and this will be your end.”
 

Not giving the man-machine time to respond or for Petal to protest, Gerry plugged into the server and his mind was immediately swallowed by the data archive.
 

***

The system stretched out into a 3D representation of a grid. A million nodes, all interconnected to each other, distributing the data like a great quantum mesh. Gerry’s mind traversed this architecture at the speed of thought.
 

Oddly, he felt entirely calm during the experience. There didn’t seem to be any malevolent AI or some other interested party wanting to rape his mind like he’d grown accustomed to. There was no threat, no battle for control of the system. It was all just laid bare for him to navigate about as he wished.
 

That in itself brought him a degree of discomfort.
 

He picked a datastore at random and unpacked the information inside: configuration files for a type of worker ’droid. Another segment held video recordings of scientists experimenting with these same ’droids.

All very mundane and unhelpful.
 

He spun out a search string program to gather his bearings and at least narrow down where in this system of petabytes he needed to look in order to unlock the data archive Endymion was so interested in.
 

A few seconds later 2.3 million results came back.
 

Gerry coded a series of filters to sort through the number of records.
 

All the while, he did his thing of organising the data into a kind of memory warehouse. Log files over there, configuration and preference files here, graphic and audio assets there and so on, passing each piece through the filter, all the while keeping his own defensive programs up in case of some kind of AI attack.
 

Eventually, he narrowed down a number of references to the vault and navigated to the particular light-drive that held the security credentials. He was surprised to find that there were no user restrictions on the files and he would be able to read and execute the programs at will.
 

That didn’t seem right at all. It definitely felt like a trap.
 

He backed away from that particular partition and considered a different approach. The server that he was connected to was capable of great processing and data power. More so than even Alpha or Omega. This was a true supercomputer of the current era, and it seemed like a waste to use it for something as simple as a key to unlock a vault.
 

Gerry spread his mind further out into the system and searched for the software that controlled the defensive perimeter of this facility. It took a few moments, but he found it—there would be no need to enter the archive if all Endymion wanted was to shut off the system.
 

Gerry could do that right now by coding a patch for the program and rebooting it to interrupt its current configuration. He could, but he didn’t want to. One thing he had learned—the Family knew when something was dangerous. If they felt Endymion and his fellow mutants would be better off trapped here, Gerry found it hard to argue with.
 

If he let them out, as suggested, what risk would they pose to Libertas, or even Bachia and Darkhan—or any settlement? There’d been so much bloodshed to bring peace to these places, and he couldn’t just let yet another faction into the world to threaten the safety of those who fought so hard and sacrificed so much.
 

Endymion would just have to find a new player; Gerry wasn’t going to play his game. Gerry would make him play Gerry’s game.

While his search programs were running, he found the source of the suppression. Throughout the pyramid, and others like it in this Korean Empire facility, there were microwave transceivers that disrupted the radio signals and pulled apart data packets.

That’s why he and Petal couldn’t use their VPN.
 

Gerry overloaded the processor cores responsible for running the software and forced that particular program to shut down. With the suppression disabled, he sent Petal a message.
 

—
Petal, it’s me, Gerry. Are you receiving this? Don’t give anything away.

— Yeah, Gez, sweet. How did you do it? What’s going on in there?

— I’ll explain later. Right now, I need you and Holly to try something.

— What’s the plan?

— I need the trackers and Endymion to plug into the system.

— By choice or force?

— I’ll leave that up to you. Whatever’s easiest for you.

— I’m on it. Stand by, Gez.
 

Gerry’s mind rejoined the server as he continued to plot and plan. He altered the job configurations of the main processing units. At the moment, they were just set up to run a bunch of maintenance scripts and routines, to keep the drives in shape and report on the general facility operations.
 

None of that was needed anymore, so Gerry created a special program just for Endymion and his sidekicks.
 

A few minutes went by, and he thought about contacting Petal for a progress update when he saw three new guest users on the system. She’d done it! She’d got them connected. Gerry simultaneously launched his new software program and disconnected himself from the system.