RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (15 page)

Miranda smiled and nodded again then continued her work without ever saying a word.  They walked through a few more huge rooms and out a huge patio door onto a large pool deck, it was absolutely awesome.  Within minutes the food arrived and it was delicious.  The coffee was gourmet, that was no lie, but
Jeeves hadn’t prepared it as Dodge implied, what a nut.  Who would have guessed that he had a talented Spanish chef as well as a refined older gentleman as a butler?  What other surprises did John have up his sleeve?  He thought he knew the man but was beginning to wonder. 

“Ya know
John, you could allow your kitchen help to talk to the guest.”  John laughed.
         “Dude, she’s allowed to talk to you, she’s just extremely shy, especially around new people.” 

“Okay, if you say so.”

They finished their food while talking about what they might find added to the circuit design file.  They were both anxious as they made their way back to John’s man cave over the garage. 

Of course this wasn’t an average garage just as nothing else on the estate was average.  It was large enough to house John’s entire fleet of vehicles that numbered upwards of twenty and
ranged from “oddly cheap and ordinary” all the way to “look at me, I’m so stinking rich!” 

They both ran up the stairs taking them two at a time just like they used to do back at ESS for fun.  When they walked into the room, they were both a little winded and John stooped over for a moment with his hands on his knees.
         “Wow that’s harder than it used to be,” he said.  They plopped down in a couple of nice leather chairs adjacent to the machine running the crack.  A few key strokes later and John announced it had completed and was ready to be loaded into the viewer.
         “Sir would you like the honor?” John said as he rolled out of the way of the keyboard, “after all it’s your design.”
         “No you mean it WAS my design before some hacker got hold of it.”  Dodge wheeled up to the keyboard, cracked his knuckles and began typing. 

His fingers moved with great agility as he hammered in the launch codes and password sequences necessary to start the viewer.  It was a very complex piece of design software that few people could operate and doubtful any at the level of Dodge Kerrington. 

He loaded the files, ran all the assemblers and rendered the layers with incredible speed.  He hit the regen matrix icon which loaded a fresh set of rendered layers.  It appeared on the holographic viewer that was directly in front of them to the left of the traditional 2D display. 

There it was, right in front of them, in all of its magnificence.  A master piece of technology, the key to immortality, almost 10 years of their lives had been poured into this project and several more decades of other pioneers prior to them that started the first work. 

John worked the code during that time under the direction of Dodge, but really either one of them could have been the department head.  Dodge was chosen primarily because he had been there longer.  John was so talented with the software that they made an amazing team.  There were certainly many other contributors but the two of them were really the core of the project, without them it would have failed. 

They sat looking at it in awe of what they created; they had forgotten the beauty of their accomplishment.  The thousands of tiny complex circuit lines were a thing of beauty to them.  Its
many layers of traces that were each displayed in a different color looked like a carefully woven tapestry of yarns.  They were laid together with geometric precision, never touching each other, except where designed to do so.  The layers were populated with Ultra Microscopic components that could only be placed by nanobots in an extreme clean and controlled environment.  They sat there admiring it for almost five minutes. 

“Okay let’s have a look at the layers that shouldn’t have anything in them,” said Dodge.  He began turning off the various layers that he was familiar with.  One by one the design became less and less complex to view.  He turned off 28 layers, all those that he remembered being part of the core design.  Still, six layers remained. 
“What was in them?”
 

He zoomed in, way in.  He turned on the layer detail and clicked on the trace nearest the crosshairs of the pointer.  There it was just as plain as day.  No more wondering, no more cracking,
no more doubt.  Right in front of them in letters that jumped right out of the viewer and reached right into their chest and caused their hearts to skip a beat . . . ,      “lc_Implant_WirelessReceiver_Section1_Layer1.” 

They both sat back for a moment with their mouths hanging open.  They both knew exactly what had been done to their design but why?  John got up and paced around a bit.  Dodge spun around in his chair, watching him nervously.
         “Please tell me this is just a bad dream and I’m going to wake up and all this crap will be gone.”         

             
“I wish I could!” said John, in a sarcastic tone.
         “Where do we begin?”

             
“I guess with Ron Simpson.  He was the last one that opened the file almost ten years ago.”
         “I guess so.  We need to find out if he viewed it as we are now or if he was only able to view it like we did before.”
         “Good point, he might be innocent in all of this, just as we are.”
         “I remember Ron, nice guy, always on time, kind of quiet, just did his work and kept his head down.” Said Dodge. 

“Have you seen him around there lately? 
         “No, as a matter of fact I haven’t seen him.  I know he transferred out of development into sales about four years ago.  I saw him a few times after that but then not so much.  I’ll check on it tomorrow.” 

They both leaned back in their chairs and looked at it again.

“This is definitely not good,” said Dodge.  It means someone went to an awful lot of trouble to turn our little one way transmitter into a bidirectional transceiver.  Someone at Biotech or LifeTech didn’t want us to know that they were making these additions.”

John agreed.  “We were trusted with all this technology, yet they went to a lot of trouble to hide this additional capability from us.  It seems that they are doing it without the need for the needle probe, or maybe even the entire Restoration console.”

“Do you think the government is developing a way to spy on people?” asked Dodge.
         “I don’t know but I would think if they were able to read our thoughts we would already be in their custody being questioned or even dead.” 

“Maybe it’s a mind control thing, you know, someone wants to control the masses or subtly influence people in a subliminal way.”
         “Yeah maybe, let’s keep our minds open and our eyes open even wider.  I believe this could get a little dangerous.  I think for now we had better keep it just between the two of us.” 

Dodge agreed as they continued to look at the additional layers in wonder of their origins.  John believed that whoever performed the work possessed skills at least equal to that of Dodge’s and that was a rare individual.

Dodge looked at his watch, it was only 9:00 a.m.  They had plenty of time to research the list of people that worked on the project. 

The obvious first choice was Ron Simpson.  He was the last person to access the file and so it made sense to start there.  Dodge had interviewed every single person that worked on the project with the exception of John because John was already there at the company and was pretty much his equal. 

He kept a copy of all the personnel files at home in his stash of micro drives and it was now coming in quite handy in this research.  There were twelve people including John and Dodge that were involved so that left ten people to be researched including Mr. Simpson. 

They decided to divide the list but to work on Mr. Simpson simultaneously first.  The World Wide Web was naturally their best resource after they quickly exhausted the personnel file on
Ron.  The company personnel files available to Dodge at the time of the interviews were very limited to only what he needed to know to determine good candidates for the positions.  Basic resume information about past jobs and performance and a few personal references were about it. 

The most valuable information turned out to be the social security numbers and dates of birth.  This basic information in the hands of John was gold.  John’s hacking skills were unsurpassed, giving him the ability to circumvent the best of security systems to retrieve pretty much whatever he wanted. 

At one time John even worked on a covert team of professional hackers hired by the CIA to hack into the Pentagons file system.  They got the job done in less than a week followed by an intentional public disclosure of the breach and were immediately arrested by federal agents.  It was the only way to force the hands of those in charge to improve the system.  In less than 24 hours they were released and very quietly rewarded for their success in agreement with the contract. 

Their team spent the next two years remodeling the Pentagon’s security systems to be as un-penetrable as possible.  Dodge had never asked John about the payoff but it was pretty well known that this was the beginning of John coming into some very good personal wealth.  From then on he continued to make career moves that yielded even better salaries and accomplishments. 

John had worked so hard to get where he was and now Dodge was also on the cusp of great success and wealth.   Dodge couldn’t help but think that if it blew up in their faces they could both lose everything, so it was pretty important to them that they find out what was going on.

  They each spent several hours going through numerous documents related to Ron Simpson.  It was hard to believe how much of a trail one person leaves in the world of digital systems in this modern age.  They saw where he was born, went to preschool, kindergarten, all his grades through high school, college, graduate school.  Everything seemed normal and it seemed he was for sure a legit American Citizen.  This discovery squashed any thoughts of foreign espionage that they were having.  This guy was clean, squeaky clean; not even a traffic ticket, but where was he now? 

They started searching for his current whereabouts and it didn’t take long.  There on the screen was the story from the newspaper; it caused a lump to form in Dodge’s throat, the kind that also makes the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up. 

“John, you had better take a look at this man, you’re not gonna believe it.”  John quickly rolled over to Dodges station and he too had the “oh shit!” moment.  There on the screen was a photo of a badly burned wad of metal that was once a car.  It had a tarp draped over part of it with fire and police apparatus all around.  He read the headline.
         “Local Tech Engineer Killed in Train Accident.”

According to the story in the paper his car had become disabled at a railroad crossing.  The engineer of the train said they came around the tree blinded curve in the tracks at 11:45 p.m. to see the car apparently stranded on the tracks at the crossing.  A witness from another approaching car said the engineer leaned on the whistle and flattened the wheels of the train throwing a sea of sparks high into the air trying to stop but still hit the car at a fairly high rate of speed.

  Other witnesses said the man must have been unconscious because he made no effort to get out or to move the car.  Upon impact the car burst into flames and was pushed almost a half mile down the tracks before the train could stop.  The deceased man was later identified as their very own Ron Simpson.

John and Dodge looked at each other; they were both thinking the same thing but neither of them wanted to say it, was this simply an accident?    But on the other hand if it was an accident then the whole thing probably ended with Ron Simpson right there on those tracks; that would explain why nothing ever seemed to come of it.  It could have been a single man working alone on some scheme that never got finished. 

“All right, well that’s a dead end,” said John, “no pun intended.  I guess we move on to the other people and see what else we can find.”

  They worked for several more hours and found nothing on any of the other people.  They were all still living and working at various jobs, some were still at ESS.  Others had moved on but with no issues and no one else in the group was missing.  It was getting late and Dodge needed to either head home at normal
time or come up with a story to cover so that they could continue working.

“Hey John, I have to either go home or call Linsey and tell her that we’re going out to do something, what do you think we should do?”         

“Well I don’t know about you but I would like to keep going.  I’d like some answers before I sleep again.”

  Dodge agreed and decided to call Linsey.  She answered in a very noisy environment.
         “Hey where are you?” Linsey’s voice blared out of the phone so loud that John heard it and grinned.
         “I’m hanging out with John tonight, we thought we should go get a sandwich and catch up some more, you know, old times.”  Linsey paused.  “Oh sure that’s fine, I’m taking the kids to that new movie they wanted to see and we’re standing in line, it’s really noisy.  I was hoping you would come join us but that’s okay, you go ahead and catch up.  You and John need to do that, I’ll see you when we get home.  Love you!”
         “Love you too!” Dodge sort of yelled back into the phone so that she could hear him.