Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (10 page)

“
F
IFTEEN SECONDS
,” Austin said, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. In the entire time I’d known him, he’d never been this animated. “Your stats are unbelievable.”

I sat on his couch, clutching my unsteady hands in my lap. The water had puckered my skin like a prune, and it felt good being in dry clothes again.

Now Austin was telling me about the data he’d gathered—“much more than I’d expected from your first hack”—and how short it’d been, but all I could think about was Mom.

“Fifteen seconds,” I repeated, shaking my head. “It felt much longer than that, like you said it would.”

“Hack time is pliable, elastic. It’s similar to what we experience in dreams.” He handed me a steaming cup of tea. “It took awhile for your mind to quiet enough for the Kick to initiate, which is normal. If anything, you attained a relaxed state much more quickly than I anticipated. But once you did, yes, you were under only fifteen seconds.”

I held up my hand. “Look at me, still shaking.” I smiled at him. “I hadn’t expected any of that, any of what happened.”

“Neither had I.” Austin placed a small digital recorder on the coffee table, then sat in the chair across from me. “Now, let’s talk about what you saw. Start at the beginning. We need to document every experience so we can cross reference everything, look for commonalities and anomalies. As much as you can remember. We have to figure out how you were able to go under so easily.”

I began to unfold my experience, beginning with my vision of floating in the ocean. When I got to the part about the rip or tear in the white air he stopped me.

“A tear?” he said.

“Yeah. It hung in midair, and I stepped through it into your apartment.” I shook my head. “What
was
it?”

“The ocean was probably a mental projection you used to quiet your mind, but the white void—I suspect it was another abstraction your subconscious created to limit your awareness, like a firewall.”

I paused. “Is it real?”

“No more so than the ocean you saw. It’s your subconscious contextualizing the environment around you.” Austin drifted into his thoughts for a long beat. He touched each fingertip on his right hand to his thumb, that nervous habit of his, indicating his mind was in heavy-processing mode. I waited for him to cycle through it seven times. Then he said, “Did you try walking
around
the rip?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Because it moved with you so that it was always in front of you.”

A chill tickled my spine. “You
have
seen it!”

“Not a rip in the air, but something like it. I picture a door before I hack; I learned early in my research that my mind needed a mental cue, like a hypnotic suggestion to give my surroundings context. That you figured that out on your own is amazing. You found yourself in front of a rip of some kind. I go through a door. I call it the threshold state because it seems to be some kind of psychological division between physical reality and the ghost state.”

“Ghost state?”

He shrugged. “It has nothing to do with ghosts. It’s just a name I came up with to delineate it.”

I nodded, thinking of how I’d felt moving through Austin’s apartment and then to the bridge and hospital: like a ghost.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He was eating this up. “What happened next?”

“I was in your apartment, standing next to you at the control panel. I could see my body like I can now—solid—but when I tried to touch you my hand went through you.”

“That’s the ghost state,” he said with a smile. “Just like when I read your cell-phone screen and heard your thoughts.”

“It was weird, but it got weirder when I left the apartment.”

Austin’s smile faded. “What do you mean, ‘left the apartment’?”

I told him all about how I’d moved around the apartment simply by thinking about it, and how I’d
willed
myself outside and to the top of the bridge.

“It’s not like I flew to the place or traveled to it, I said. “I just thought about it and was there.”

“No sense of movement at all?” he asked.

“Nothing. It was like blinking and finding myself somewhere else, almost faster than I could think it.”

He stood and began pacing, fingertips tapping against one another, his mind clearly spinning. “This is new. This is amazing.”

“What do you mean ‘new’?”

“A new phenomenon, leaving the apartment. I’ve never done that.” He pointed at me. “We have to figure out why it happened
now
, to
you
. This is a serious breakthrough.”

“You’ve
never
traveled outside of the apartment in a hack?”

“No. My experience has always been localized.” He squinted at me. “Why were you able to, what was different? We have to run diagnostics and go through each data point. There must be something different about your hack that I missed. It could be any of a thousand variables—your biochemistry, an isolated reaction to the Kick, anything.” His eyes got wide. “The bridge,” he said. “Did you go anywhere else?”

I told him about the hospital and about seeing my mom die. As I did, my throat tightened. “I didn’t recognize any of it,” I said. “I’ve never been in that hospital, not before tonight. Was it real?”

Scenes from the experience gripped me: my mother lying there, the doctors working frantically to pull her back from death, her lifeless eyes and gaping mouth.

“I don’t know,” Austin said.

“One of the doctors mentioned a blood clot. Thing is, my mother doesn’t have a blood clot. She just had a checkup. She has lots of problems, but a clot isn’t one of them. It had to be a dream, right?”

Austin was silent.

“Right?” I said again, looking for reassurance. “Tell me you’ve had dreams during your hacks.”

He stopped pacing at a plush leather chair and plopped down into it. “No, never. I don’t think dreaming is possible during a hack.”

“This doesn’t make any sense. The date of my mom’s death was two weeks from now. Is it possible that I saw the future?”

He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess it depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether or not time and space are linear. Some physicists postulate that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously and that we simply experience whatever present slice of the universe we happen to be in at the moment. Others think that hypothesis is ridiculous.”

“What do you think?” I asked and watched his reaction.

“As a scientist I think anything’s possible,” he said without hesitation.

“So what does it mean, seeing my mother dying? How can that be?”

“Are you sure your mother doesn’t have a blood clot? When was her last MRI?”

I shrugged. “Three, four months ago.”

“She’s been bedridden so it’s possible that she developed one since then. There’s only one way to know for sure: have Benton do an MRI on her. If it proves negative, it wasn’t a premonition. But if it’s confirmed . . .” He thought about it. “Well, that’s something completely unexpected. Either way, this is something else new.”

“You’re right,” I said. I glanced out the window. The sky was a beautiful electric blue. “I have to get her into Dr. Benton’s.”

I set the teacup down, stood and rounded the sofa.

“Whoa,” he said, standing to his feet. “You can’t leave. What about the FBI? You can’t just go traipsing into your mom’s apartment. You got away from them once, but I don’t think they’ll let it happen again.”

“I can’t just sit around and let my mom die. If what I saw wasn’t a dream then I have to tell Lettie. I have to do something.”

“Call her then, but don’t go. You’re safe here. Out there you aren’t.” His eyes contained more compassion than I’d seen in them before. Was I growing on him, or was it simply that having grappled with his own demise, he was now more concerned about others’ feelings?

“I can’t do that,” I said. “The FBI took my phone. Maybe I can find a pay phone or something.”

“Wait here a minute,” he said and walked to a nearby shelf. He returned with a mobile phone in his hand. “I hate these things, but this is the best option.”

He handed it to me.

“It’s a burner,” he said. “Got it at Walmart. The minutes are prepaid and the number is untraceable. Use this to call Lettie, have her take your mom in. But you can’t leave here. Okay?”

“Thanks.”

I took the phone up to the roof and dialed the number for Mom’s room at Cedar Ridge. Lettie answered.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Where are you?” Her voice was strained. “A federal agent came here in the middle of the night looking for you. What’s going on?”

“It’s complicated.” A beat. “I’m helping them with a case, but that’s all I can say.”

“They seemed really worried about you. Where’ve you been?”

“Somewhere safe. I promise.”

“You need to come home now. We’ll figure this out, but you have to come home.”

“I can’t, not yet. I will soon.”

“Honey, let me come get you.”

“No.” I was silent for a moment. “But you have to do something for me. It’s important. I need you to get Mom to Dr. Benton. Today. Tell him she needs an MRI.”

“An MRI? She just had one a few months—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “Just . . . do this for me. Please. I can’t explain why, but you just have to trust me. And don’t take no for an answer. It has to be today.”

“They’re so expensive, and insurance won’t cover it if—”

“Lettie, listen to me. I had a
vision
, okay?” I let my words hang there. My grandmother was a spiritual woman who often talked about how God spoke to people in unusual ways—dreams, visions, even in tiny coincidences. I knew this would get her attention.

“What kind of vision?” she asked.

“The kind that feels real. It was early this morning. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, but I think that’s what it was. I saw Mom die of a blood clot. I think it was a warning of some kind. I know it sounds ludicrous.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Lettie said. “If I do this, you have to promise you’ll come home.” Her words were firm, strengthened by determination and belief.

“First I have to—”

“
Promise
me.”

I was silent for a moment. “Okay, but the MRI has to be today.”

“I’ll call Dr. Benton then.”

“Today,” I said. “Please.”

“I’ll make sure of it.” She sighed heavily on the other end of the line. “What have you gotten yourself into, child?”

“I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “Soon.”

“Please be safe.”

“I will. The moment you get the results, call me back at this number, but don’t give it to anyone else. Especially not the FBI. I’ll be home soon,” I said and I hoped it was true.

A
USTIN STARED
through bleary eyes at the digital brain scan that filled his computer monitor. He would compare the black-and-white image against the sequential database he’d developed to meticulously track his scans, but he already knew what he’d discover.

It had been twelve hours since Nyah’s hack. After calling her grandmother she’d crashed in the guest room, exhausted. He hadn’t heard a peep from her since then, which gave him the time he needed to parse not only her data, but to update his own.

He leaned closer to the screen and traced his index finger across the stark image. The tumor that was rotting his mind from the inside out was a white mass set against the grey ridges of brain tissue. On-screen, the brain could have belonged to any of the hundreds of terminal patients whose cases he’d researched over the years in the hope of finding clues to help his own condition, but it wasn’t somebody else’s brain; it was his.

And despite his best efforts, the tumor was still destroying him with stunning speed. There was no escaping the data. Unlike people, data was incapable of lying or spinning the truth. It wasn’t right or wrong, it just
was.
It’s the reason he’d always put more faith in science than he had in people.

The universe was built on immutable principles and laws, facts that led to reliable conclusions. Facts were never flawed, only the people who interpreted those facts were.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are
, someone had once told him that. But bending fact to serve one’s perception could only lead to delusion. Insanity. And he wasn’t insane. Not yet, anyway.

In fact, Dr. Benton believed Austin’s tumor had significantly elevated his already formidable cognitive abilities. Somehow the fibrous mass had created unusual neural connections that didn’t exist before, which allowed him to think more creatively. It was precisely because of his tumor that he was exceptional.

It was a hypothesis that seemed to bear itself out experientially. With each new day, the growth expanded and his mental processes grew more acute, more lucid. He required less sleep, but whether that was explained by a deeply rooted instinct to survive or, rather, by higher brain function, he didn’t know.

Either way, he’d been driven to the point of obsession with finding a cure where experts claimed there was none to be found. He was convinced that, given enough time, he would find one. He simply needed enough data to lead him to it.

At the moment, however, the data led to only one conclusion: he would die, sooner rather than later. That’s what the three neurologists back in Boston had told him, as well. There was nothing they could do for him except make the symptoms more bearable.

Only Dr. Benton had offered a solution beyond symptom management: an aggressive and experimental chemotherapy paired with radiation that he said might shrink the tumor.

Might.
But even if it worked, he’d said, the possibility of destroying brain tissue was high—collateral damage, he’d called it. That was the price of surviving to see his twentieth birthday.

Austin would rather die. What would he be without his mind? Nothing. He
was
his mind. The only thing he’d ever had that set him apart—that made him exceptional—was his powerful intellect. Taking that away, even if it meant he could continue to exist, was not an option. He would exist, but he would not be living.

I think, therefore I am.
It had always been his core belief.

His temples pulsed painfully.

Where are those pills?

Austin swept his attention across the cluttered desk. He spotted the amber bottle behind a stack of reports and grabbed it. He emptied the last two pills into his mouth and washed them down with a half can of warm Red Bull.

He only took the powerful meds when the pain became unbearable. They dulled his senses and fogged his mind. His
mind
. He didn’t want to lose it to cancer or its cure, so of course medicating it into a stupor made no sense, either.

He’d suspected a tumor was growing inside his head months before his Boston neurologist confirmed it. It began as an unshakeable feeling that something inside him was slightly off, that he wasn’t well. Yet it was nothing more than a hunch.

Christy, his only friend at the time, often counseled him to have his headaches checked out, but there was no physical or psychological evidence to suggest the problem was anything other than stress-induced migraines. At the time, he’d been seventeen, living on his own, starting a new life, attending— even acing—graduate-level classes at Harvard. When he wasn’t studying or doing research, he was busy developing software on the side.

Then everything ground to a halt. The migraines became more frequent and the pain more acute, like rusty drill bits boring through his skull. Blurry vision and insomnia followed until he couldn’t even venture out of his apartment without sunglasses.

He’d experienced the worst of it when he and Christy were trapped in St. Matthew’s hospital, an experience he still didn’t know how to process. It hadn’t been a shared delusion; he knew that much. But if not that, then what?

A voice broke the silence. “Austin, you’re not going to believe this.”

Austin jumped and spun his chair around. Nyah stood a few feet away in a black t-shirt and jeans, holding the mobile phone he’d given her.

“My mom,” she said. “What I saw was real. It was
real
.”

“The blood clot?”

She nodded. “Lettie just called. The MRI revealed a clot in her leg.”

“You caught it before it could dislodge and hit her brain,” he said.

Nyah grinned. “She’s going to live.” She rushed to him and bent down to hug him, pressing her cheek to his. “Thank you.”

“What’s the plan then? What are they going to do?”

She backed up a step, ran her palm over her scalp. “Dr. Benton’s giving her a round of blood-thinning medication, hoping to dissolve it.”

He forced a smile and stood. “That’s great.”

“You know what this means? I witnessed an event that hadn’t happened yet—and won’t now. How’s that possible? You said something about time not being linear?”

He shook his head. “It could mean any number of things: overlapping timelines, ripples in time, wormholes . . . there are as many theories as there are people who’ve studied it. It’s fascinating.” And it was, but it was difficult for him to get excited; his thoughts seemed murky, as though they were drifting through dirty water.

She cocked her head to the side, concern wrinkling her brow. “Everything all right? You don’t look so good.”

He rubbed his forehead. “Just tired. I haven’t been to sleep yet.”

Nyah turned her attention to the images on the screen. “These new?”

“No, they’re a week old. I went in and had an MRI taken. I do it every week.”

She bit her bottom lip and turned worried eyes on him.

“The growth has accelerated since my last scan,” he said. “It’s getting worse. I have some tingling in my hands today and this gnawing headache.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “You’re the smartest guy I know. And I’m the smartest girl you know.”

“Yeah,” he said and switched off the monitor, making the image disappear. He wished he could make the tumor disappear as easily. “We should suit up and get in the tanks as soon as we can. The more hacks we do, the better.”

“We? Together?”

“In tandem, yes. I spent the day poring over the data from your hack. There had to be some explanation for the phenomena you experienced. Some technical component that explained why I’ve never been able to go beyond a localized out-of-body experience, but you were.”

He walked to the control panel, Nyah close on his heels. “Well? Did you find out?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was a mistake,” he said. His fingers ran across the keyboard, calling up a screen that compared the metrics of her hack and his baseline. “When I ran the hack protocol I didn’t adjust the Kick dosage to account for your lower body weight.”

“Wha . . . you gave me too much?”

He shook his head. “Technically, yes, but you weren’t in any danger.”

“So what happened? How did the dosage difference change things?”

“The synthesized compound I’ve been using—the Kick—typically elevates brain activity. The mixture you received had the opposite effect. Instead of amping up your brain activity, it inhibited it.”

“You mean it shut down my brain?”

“Certain functions, yes. As I was running the system diagnostics I saw this.” He pointed to a spike on a line graph filling the adjacent screen. “See how low your brain activity is compared to mine? This explains the differences between our experiences.”

“You’re sure?”

“Not entirely, but it makes sense. You were able to experience the hack more effectively than I have because the stronger dosage of neurocompound stripped away the mental firewall that keeps us from seeing reality as it truly is.”

“You’re saying we
think
too much?”

“We have preconceptions, yes. We’re programmed to see the world a certain way.”

“And the higher dosage numbs those preconceptions?”

“It mutes it, yes, and dials the brain’s filter back enough for the reality behind reality to come through. Really, there’s only one way to be sure. We have to test it, so I spent all day reconfiguring the system so we can tandem hack.”

“I can’t wait.”

He continued: “We’ve tapped into a layer of reality that’s unconstrained by space. The next step is to see what happens when we do it together. We’re getting closer. There seems to be a progression here, each new level revealing a new set of possibilities and a new paradigm of awareness. Right now we’re in the temporal state, within our physical bodies. Beyond that there’s the threshold.”

“The ocean I saw,” I said.

“Then there’s the first firewall, the white void you saw, and beyond it—through the rip—is the ghost state. Each new state levels up the senses dramatically and strips away physical and mental limitations.”

“Each level gives us more abilities,” she said.

“Like a video game. But to progress you have to hack the firewall blocking each level.”

“There are other firewalls?”

“That’s my terminology. What it really is . . . .” He shrugged. “Who knows? Some natural phenomenon made to protect layers of reality.”

“Eventually leading to what?”

“I think the top level is the state that allows the manipulation of matter itself.”

She chewed on a fingernail, eyes flicking back and forth. “When are we going to do it? Hack together?”

“I reprogrammed everything so it can handle dual hacks seamlessly. We’ll replicate the exact parameters each time and the system will synchronize our Kicks as closely as possible. They may not be perfectly aligned, but it will be close enough that we’ll cross the first firewall at approximately the same time. I hope.”

“You hope?”

“I don’t know how any of this works yet.” He thought for a few moments, then held up an index finger. “I have an idea. Come with me.” He held his hand out to her. She grabbed it and he led her into the adjacent room, which served as his study. He stopped in front of a large painting that hung halfway up the wall. It was of an ancient door, the color of blood. It seemed to be floating in midair.

“When you pictured the ocean,” he said, “your subconscious created a mental cue that led you to a breach in that first firewall, the rip. I think it’s essential that we both hold the same mental cue in mind when we go under. I think it will increase our odds of arriving at the same firewall. Can you do that?”

She stood there, intently studying the image. “I should think of this door when we’re in the tanks?”

“Yes. Pay attention to the details. We need to see the same thing, I believe.”

She turned toward him and smiled. “Okay. Got it.”

“That’s it? No, take some time with it.”

Nyah tapped the side of her head. “No need. Eidetic memory. I’m a genius, remember?” With that she turned and walked out of the room. “You coming or do I have to do this by myself?”