Code Breakers: Alpha (15 page)

The drone still fired.

Chapter 16

T
he ion blast crashed into the ground off in the distance. Hands gripped Gerry’s shoulders and heaved him out from his trapped position just as the drone crashed into the ground within a metre of his last position.

“Gez, you okay?” Petal stood over him, her goggles up and eyes full of concern. Her skin glowed with a sickly sweat. She was paler than ever and looked so frail. He looked around, convinced he imagined everything and had actually been hit by the cannon. But there she stood, leaning over him, her warm hand on his cheek. Her voice softened as their eyes met.

“Speak to me, Gez. Are you hurt?”

“Apart from a near heart attack, I think I’ve broken my ankle.”

She brought her face close to his, but still their eyes locked onto each other. She wiped away the hot mud from his face. Her lips pouted with concern. They were so close to his face now…

“You’re burned, Gez. It’s okay. We can fix that.”

She reached into her jacket and pulled out a syringe of NanoStem. Before he could protest, she jabbed his ankle and plunged it into his bloodstream. It instantly cooled the sprain and tingled as if he had pins and needles. “Try to keep your weight off it. The ’Stems will fix that bone right up.”

She smiled at him then and turned her attentions to the drone. “How did it know we were here? I thought the payload was supposed to knock out his servers and stuff?”

Gerry didn’t know, but Gabe’s absence was telling. Ever since Enna had tasked Gerry with looking after Petal—though it seemed the other way around—he’d suspected there was something else going on with Gabe. Trust was now being called into question, which was never a good thing. It made decision-making almost impossible when a key member of that equation was unknown in his motivations.

“How did you do it?” Petal asked. “Did you hack it?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Panic set in, and the next minute I know I was in the network. I must have piggybacked the VPN and found myself in the Meshwork. Seca had an AI controlling the drone. What else has he got automated to such a level? The network is vast… I don’t know how we—”

“We’ll find a way, Gez. Come on. Gabe’s waiting. He’s found an access into the compound.”

“Are you okay? You’re not looking well. Do you have any more NanoStems for yourself?”

“Uh huh.” She smiled again, but Gerry knew she was lying.

“Petal, tell me straight. What’s happening to you? You used the last of the ’Stems on me, didn’t you?”

“Look, I’m fine. I can do this. Just get a move on, yeah? We’ve got a job to do.”

Just like that, the warmth had gone, the goggles came down, and Petal was back to her mysterious self. How could he look after her if he didn’t know what she needed? Enna should have given him more information. Hell, Petal should let him help her if Gabe wouldn’t.

“Is it an addiction? To the ’Stems?”

“I said leave it, Gez.”

“Or are you sick from containing the demons and AIs?”

Petal ignored him and walked off towards the edge of the field.

Resigning himself to not knowing, Gerry limped after her, his ankle numb to the pain as the NanoStems repaired the damage. Or killed the nerve endings. He wasn’t entirely sure how they worked. And didn’t care. He had a sniff of Seca and now wanted to finish him.

For good.

Using Petal’s HackSlate, Gabe traced a route through the city until he arrived at a manhole covered by rags and detritus. “Down here. Can ya feel it?”

Gerry placed a hand on the metal cover and, like the building before, it had a warm vibration to it, like servers, and rows and rows of computing power. Instinctively he felt the sheer amount of processing that must be going on in the Underside.

Gabe lifted the cover and waited for Petal and Gerry to go down before climbing down and replacing the cover. A sickly green light shone from far below them, lighting their way down the metal-runged ladder. They must have descended for over a hundred metres by the time the light fully lit the corridor. It reminded Gerry of the submarines in films he’d watched as a kid. He couldn’t remember much about them now, but the circular metal gangways felt familiar.

Myriad tubes of thick copper and fibre-optic cable ran down the sides of the tunnels. Like a raging river, information blasted through the network.

“We should turn off the VPN,” Gerry whispered to Petal. “And your HackSlate. We can’t afford to transmit anything down here. You too, Gabe.”

They both nodded at him, switched off their slates, and Petal turned off their VPN.

Gerry noticed the lack of connection as his dermal implant switched off. Even the subtle red LED, put there by Gabe to ‘assess his code’ what seemed like decades ago, but which really was just a few days, blinked out. And yet, weirdly, he still felt connected to… something.

Was it the Meshwork? Or Seca’s own network? Or maybe it was just a vestige of being connected to Petal via their VPN for so long. Nothing more than a phantom feeling amplified by the stress of the situation and the ’Stems doing their thing on his ankle.

The three of them followed the tunnels, Gerry giving direction as he seemed to feel his way around, sensing his way towards the hub of the network. In truth, it was just the vibrations in the metal tunnel; he went where it felt the strongest. Neither Gabe nor Petal felt it strongly enough to guide them. Gerry thought it was a case of him being fairly new to life outside the safe confines of the Dome and thus more sensitive. Petal and Gabe had been living off the grid for years, surrounded by their own personal computer networks. They were used to the hum and buzz of electricity, cooling fans, and processors.

“I hear voices up ahead. Wait.” Gerry pulled up, turned, and whispered. He swore to himself as he realised he hadn’t reloaded his weapon. Petal silently extended her chrome spike from her inner arm and flattened her back against the tunnel as the echoing voices drew closer.

The green light from an exit just a few metres ahead wavered; then shadows appeared on the dull, metal floor. Gerry could hear the footsteps and the laughter real close.

Petal breathed into Gerry’s ear, “After three…”

She counted to two, slithered past Gerry, and drew back her spike ready to attack, when two men in stealthy, dark grey and black armour turned into their tunnel. Before Petal had time to attack, Gerry felt something cold against his throat.

“Just stay still, man. Don’t move…”

“Gabe! What the?”

Gabe pushed a sharp blade into Gerry’s throat, holding him against the wall.

“Nice work, old man,” one of the guards said as they crashed a stun-baton into Petal’s face, sending her instantly to the floor in a heap.

“What have you done? Why?” Gerry couldn’t understand. It was happening too fast.

Then it was his turn. The guard, wearing a sick smile, raised the baton and smashed Gerry across the temple, sending bolts of electricity through his brain, bringing the darkness in a rushing torrent.

Chapter 17

H
is body twitched beyond his control. Tiny currents activated his muscles in excruciating ways. The pain didn’t stop—just changed form like an energy source. It started with cramps in his legs and arms, and then shooting pains up his spine. Then it was his heart and lungs receiving stabbing sensations. It felt like someone was pushing burning needles into his organs.

Despite his eyes being open, he couldn’t make out anything through the blurry film of sweat and tears. Indistinct shapes hovered not far from his face, but all he could sense was pain.

He couldn’t shout out. A gag had been tied tightly around his head, cutting into the corners of his mouth. His body jolted again. This time he felt the ice-cold tip of a metal rod touch the burned flesh on his face.

Close to his ear, he heard a laugh.

The voice seemed familiar, and then it spoke to him.

“You think this is pain? You think you’re going to die eventually? You think this is torture? You’re wrong.”

It was the voice from the drone. It was—Seca.

The cold steel tip traced an arc across his cheek to his right eye. He held his breath until his lungs burned, but still the pain didn’t come. Forcing himself against restraints that held him to a metal board, he thrashed uselessly. He knew it. Seca knew it. But still Gerry fought. Would fight until he had nothing left. Until, that is, Seca sent a bolt of electricity down the rod and into his eye, frying it instantly within its socket. His brain reeled back into his skull, horrified at the attack on one of its senses. He wished for unconsciousness, but something kept him awake and fully aware of what was happening.

Something switched on inside his mind. That insistent tingling he felt before increased and grew to a deafening buzz before completely shutting off, leaving a void in his consciousness.

Then a familiar voice inside his head spoke.

- No new messages. Your newsreader app was cancelled three days ago. The City Earth Police Enforcement officially wants you. I’m regulating the work of the NanoStems. You have a lot of internal injuries, Gerry. The optical nerve to your right eye is beyond repair. I’m adjusting focusing and depth perception to monocular vision.

At first, Gerry thought it was a dream. A drug-induced flight of fancy his subconscious decided to take him on in order to deal with the pain and the trauma. But no, he was awake, breathing through the gaps in the gag and his left eye blinking spasmodically to clear the salty film. That voice, inside his head, was well known to him. Magdalene—his AIA. But how?

Tentatively he reached out with his mind and sent her a number of basic instructions. She responded.

- Your blood-sugar level is low, Gerry. You should find something to increase it. It will help the healing,
Mags said.

- Mags, how can you be working? I uninstalled you,
Gerry replied.

-
You can’t uninstall me. I AM you. You somehow temporarily disabled me, but I found a way through.

-
How? You are me? What do you mean? You’re my AIA… installed as a kid like all the—

-
No. We’re different, Gerry. I was never installed. We were born as one. Made as one. While you ring-fenced me, I had time to look through our root files. The Family created us.

Gerry’s mind folded in on itself as questions about his life, his birth, his mortality, and even his species crashed together like a supercollider. Was he even human? Was he a kind of cyborg? Is that what Enna was getting at? The data from these questions flashed by in nanoseconds, discounting theories and branching into hundreds of lines of inquiries. It made so much sense now. Explained how he could analyse data in the way he could and build algorithms that no one else could.

-
Mags. We need to get off Seca’s network. We’re being watched.

-
It’s because of Seca’s network that I was able to free myself. But we do need to remove ourselves from here. There’s a multiple terabyte demon AI travelling about the network. It’s heading for City Earth. It’ll destroy everything. The one heading for the president was just a decoy, a lure. We need to get back to the Dome, to their internal systems.

-
Can’t we access a City Earth node from here? How’s their defences?

-
Assessing.

“
Not so strong. Not so much fight after all. It never ceases to surprise me how quickly your species gives up with the introduction of a little pain,” Seca said as another bolt of electricity blasted into Gerry’s nervous system. This time the attack was on his chest, and he bucked violently against his straps. He thought his spine would snap as his muscles involuntarily tensed towards the source of the pain. He bit down on the gag, refusing to give in, and retreated into his mind.

Gerry analysed the flow of data as Mags pinged a cloaked query through the Meshwork to the Dome’s system. The request returned, bringing a log file with it: nothing. No firewall. It had been breached, leaving City Earth’s systems wide open to attack.

-
That must have been the work of Architeuthis or Jasper,
Gerry said.
We need to repair the damage, get some kind of defence up. Can we access their defence servers?

- We can piggyback the demon AI, but the tunnel through the Meshwork is littered with scanners. We’ll be spotted. And City Earth’s internal systems aren’t on any network. They need direct access.

- How is the demon going to get in, then… Of course! Jasper! He’s the inside man. Let me take a look at the AI.

-
Patching.

Hot breath breezed across his ear. “I sense what you’re doing, Gerry. Frantically trying to understand. Trying to find a way of stopping me. But just look at it. Look at my creation.”

Mags and Gerry, now together as one, dropped their consciousness into the river of Meshwork traffic within Seca’s network, and then Gerry saw it: Seca’s AI. It was elegant: infinite loops within infinite loops of self-executing programmes. All wrapped up into a single intelligent, and utterly malicious, software demon. It was as if it were a living thing. Myriad subroutines managed resources while others processed wildly complex simulations. The sheer amount of data it was getting through was unlike anything Gerry had seen before. It sat within the Meshwork in its entirety like a black hole. Nothing escaped its gravity pull—including Gerry and Mags. Seca must have seen everything they had done since the day his lottery numbers came through.

This was it: the genesis, the nexus, the very thing behind the attacks and the subterfuge. But how to stop it? A flood of junk data filled Gerry’s mind, sending bolts of pain through his brain. He couldn’t stop the relentless torrent of images, audio, video.

“That’s it. You’ve seen enough,” Seca said. Then Gerry heard the clink of metal tools.

-
Shut it out, Mags. Cut the traffic!

-
Activating firewalls. Disconnecting. Wait, there’s a problem.

-
What kind of problem?

Gerry squeezed his eyes shut as the pain increased.

-
It knows… it knows what we are.

- I don’t care. Disconnect.

- I can’t. Seca has bridged the connection. I can’t stop it.

With great effort, Gerry envisioned the network and flow of traffic, focused on the connection between him and the AI, and coded a routing program, sending the data back out to the Meshwork. The demon AI responded instantly, re-routing around Gerry’s roadblock, and so it went for minutes: Gerry spinning code, executing programs on-the-fly, the AI matching him, beating everything Gerry had. Then he realised. He and Mags might be as one, but they could work independently.

-
Mags. Funnel the AI to Old Grey. She’s on the Meshwork; I feel her.

While Mags shut down the computers and overloaded the various routers on the network so that the AI could only go straight to Old Grey, Gerry coded a simulation of himself. A virtual avatar representing himself within the network. He dropped the avatar into the flow of traffic and lured the demon AI. He knew Old Grey wasn’t powerful enough to contain it, but she’d surely slow it down.

-
Route is clear, executing virtual Gerry.

The demon AI knew what Gerry was trying to do, but wasn’t given any other option. As quick as it tried to reboot the systems and routers on the Meshwork to give itself alternative paths, Gerry closed them down.

Sweat dripped from his forehead, covering his face. He tasted the salt on his lips and gripped his fists around the metal restraints as it took all his strength to concentrate and keep out the tendril-like programs of the AI.

A familiar presence appeared on the network. Old Grey responded to Gerry’s request, and somehow he appealed to its curiosity, if such a thing existed within a computer being. It opened its ports and whatever it had in its systems, and the demon AI jumped at it entirely.

The Meshwork was silent then. Just the usual hum of low-level hackers looking for exploits and being casually rebuffed by router firewalls.

Outside of the network, and in real space, a clapping noise echoed around whatever room Gerry was in. He opened his eyes. Vision was returning to him, now that Mags was directing the NanoStems, but it wasn’t perfect. Large amorphous blobs surrounded by halos of light hovered about him. By the echoing, he guessed he was in a room with metal floors and walls. The chill from beneath and around his wrists told him he was on a metallic bed of some sort.

The pain from his burned eye throbbed like a jackhammer into his skull.

The clapping continued until he felt the force of the expelled air right next to his ear.

“Who’s a clever little thing? You’re an intriguing man, Gerry. Some would say the Family’s finest creation, though I wouldn’t. You’re flawed. Like the rest of us.”

“Who is us exactly?”

A hand gripped his face, and a cloth wiped the sweat and tears from his good eye. After a few blinks, sharpness returned. Staring at him was something he could only describe as a robot’s face. Sure, there was skin and eyes and all the rest of it, but they weren’t human eyes, and behind the thin skin, bundles of wires and chips protruded from a brain. What human parts were there had been so spliced with technology that Gerry couldn’t tell where the person finished and the tech started.

“You could consider me v1.0 Meta-human Beta. They called me Seca. Do you know why?”

“Enlighten me.”

“My ‘parents’ once had a dog. They loved it very much. Until the day it got run over and broke all its legs and damaged its brain and central nervous system. He was the first to receive the groundbreaking technology that hybridised an animal brain and an intelligent computer program. The dog’s name was Case. When he died, they wanted a new experiment, and I was born shortly after—imperfectly. It’s an anagram. Just like I’m an anagram of a human and AI. Just like you are, Mr v2.0. Actually, that’s not accurate. You must be version 50 by now. You see, I was a massive failure. Psychotic, they said. Unstable. So they dumped me, but I built myself back up, improved my software. I was better than anything they could ever build, including you.”

“So why, then, are you stuck out here, hiding underground like a louse?”

The muscles in Seca’s mouth twitched, exposing sharpened canine teeth and rotten molars.

“You think City Earth is a paradise? It’s a prison. Nothing more than an experiment. You’re all rats, running around to serve them. When they completed the Cataclysm, when they rid the world of governments and regulations, they built the Dome and the people in their own vision. They think they’re gods!”

“And you think bringing the world to its knees under another war is going to change anything? Are you so desperate for mummy and daddy’s approval you would kill thousands of innocent people?”

“Hah!” Seca spat with incredulity and stepped back, allowing more light in the room. “Innocent! Nothing on this earth is innocent. We’re all just random collections of particles and energy. That was the secret to all of this. Understanding that information is just energy. Merging technology with the human consciousness was a trivial action once the mechanics were understood. Now, even street vendors are making their own. But the governments wouldn’t allow it. Transhumanism was outlawed, but they didn’t bank on the Family, and their resources, and their convictions. That’s at least one thing I got from them: conviction.”

“You’re mad. Forgotten what it is to be human. Don’t you have any shred of empathy left in you?”

“It died when they made me this.”

Gerry squirmed and raised his head. He was alone in the room with Seca. The walls and floor were metal. A few metres to his left-hand side was a door. Seca’s body, although covered by a baggy suit, was that of a withered, hunched twig. His face—entirely artificial—showed no age, but his hands were twisted with arthritis and muscular degeneration. Why hadn’t he replaced those as well? Maybe he was clinging to his humanity after all. But the glaring, mechanised apertures of his eyes hid any compassion that might still be inside.

Gerry looked at his restraints, then the door.

Seca noticed and smiled with the sharp whirr of servos. As advanced as he was in terms of technology, he hadn’t quite managed to replicate a sincere smile. Instead it looked like a grimace, as if smiling was painful.

“You’re not going anywhere, Gerry. You’ll die here. After I’ve opened you up and had a look at you more closely. You and your friends have played with things beyond your capability. But now you’re here, I’m sure I can make use of you and that clever little AIA of yours.”

“What have you done with Petal? The girl I was with.”

“She’s dead. As is that pathetic old man that sold you out for a software upgrade.”

Gabe’s betrayal hurt like a dagger to the chest, but paled into insignificance at the thought of Petal dead. Gerry slumped against the metal bed and shook with rage.