Enemy Invasion (3 page)

Hack got up and walked over to the machine. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Someone spilled a glass of Coke over the keyboard.”

“That will cause issues.”

Jonesey smiled persuasively. “Think you could…you know…use the magic on it?”

Hack frowned and looked back at the cubicle entrance. “I don’t know. This place is too public. I’ve been seeing people following me. I think someone has found out
about…the thing...”

Jonesey punched him on the arm. “Getting paranoid, man! Have you been playing too much
Left 4 Dead
again? Survival horror always freaks you out.”

“I know what I saw, Jonesey.”

“Come on! No one is watching! Look at this place No one cares!” He put his hands together like he was praying. “It’s for that girl who works at the Asus stall on 3. She
is going to be soooo grateful if I fix it.”

Hack pointed to a sauce stain on his friend’s T-shirt. “Maybe you’d have more luck if you washed your clothes for once.”

“Who has the time? Pleeeeease!”

Hack groaned. “You owe me.”

Taking a final look back at the walkway, Hack crouched and placed his right hand on the exposed innards of the laptop. Jonesey leaned in, fascinated.

“This is my favourite bit.”

“
Shut up!
”

“Sorry.”

Focusing all his attention, Hack pressed his hand against the motherboard. Blue electricity leaped around his fingertips and licked the components. Hack closed his eyes…

...and became one with the machine. He sensed the data stored in the hard drive, the dormant operating system, damaged chips. Mentally flying through the computer, Hack visualized its
processors healing, repairing and becoming healthy again – like a body mending itself.

He opened his eyes, removed his hand and pressed the
on
button. The screen flickered into life and Windows started to boot. Jonesey threw an arm around him.

“You’re a genius! A complete freak, but a genius!”

Hack shushed him. “Keep it down!”

“Sorry,
Tony Stark!
” Jonesey said as he closed the laptop. “Forgot it has to be a big secret!”

“Have you looked at the net recently? Beijing is talking about registering kids with virus-related powers. So is Washington. I think that’s who’s been watching me. Some
government organization.”

“Chinese? American?”

Hack shrugged. “Who knows?”

Jonesey snapped his fingers and turned to his desktop PC. “Check this out,” he said, and brought up a series of saved images and web grabs. “Been doing some research for
you.”

Hack leaned in as his friend flicked through the pages in rapid succession: images of military personnel walking alongside a group of teenagers, a grainy photograph of an aircraft carrier,
satellite photos of a base in a desert, and endless blog entries on the subject of the fall virus, kids with superhuman powers and an organization calling itself HIDRA.

“HIDRA,” he read aloud. “What’s that?”

Jonesey sniggered. “Stands for Hyper-Infectious Disease Response Agency. Can you believe it? The UN created it ten years ago to investigate virus outbreaks. It was intended as a scientific
operation, but it got taken over by the military pretty fast. This guy’s name keeps coming up.” Jonesey flicked to an image of a hard-faced man with a crew cut so short he was
practically bald. The man looked directly at the camera – blue eyes flashing with a kind of fury. “Major Bright. He used to work for HIDRA but went rogue – sounds like a real
lunatic. HIDRA arrested him for crimes against humanity or something, but he disappeared six months ago, presumed dead. Word is he’s alive but in hiding. There’s, like, a gazillion
conspiracy blogs about this guy and HIDRA.”

Now Hack laughed. “Yeah. All rumour, hearsay and pure fiction.”

“No smoke without fire,” Jonesey said. “In fact—”

He stopped as a commotion broke out near the escalators. One of the stallholders was screaming at a stranger dressed like an American tourist. The stallholder had snatched a pair of sunglasses
from the man’s head and brandished them in the air. There was some kind of micro-device attached to one arm – a camera? The stallholder thought so.

“You like to take pictures, huh? You spying on me? Who you from?”

The tourist held up his hands and backed towards the escalators. The stallholder and his friends had other ideas, however, moving in to block his escape route.

“I said, who you from?” the little man said, jabbing a finger in the tall American’s chest.

Hack and Jonesey watched this from the cubicle opening. “Another corporate spy,” Jonesey said with a shake of his head. “We speed up their systems, fix glitches in their
software, then they come down here and try to steal our tricks. Goddamned big business. And they call us pirates!”

“I don’t think that’s what this guy is after.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I’ve seen him before.” Hack hadn’t been sure at first because the clothes and haircut were different, but now he was: the “tourist” was the coat guy
he’d seen four times on the MTR underground system. “I’m out of here.”

He moved to the back of the stall, planning to jump the cubicle wall and exit via the emergency stairwell just a few metres away. If he was lucky, the fake tourist wouldn’t even notice him
leave.

“Wait!” Jonesey said, grabbing his arm. “What about tomorrow night? The IFC infiltration, remember?”

IFC infiltration
– typical Jonesey, making everything sound like a stealth mission. Hack had almost forgotten his promise to help with the Goodware Inc. issue.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I should be laying low. I’m going to keep my head down in Tai-O for the rest of the holidays. Give it a month, okay?”

“Aw, come on!” Jonesey pleaded. “Goodware stole my game and now they’re shutting up shop and shipping out to Europe! If we don’t hit them this weekend, there
won’t be any evidence left by next week!”

Hack looked back at his tail – the stallholders were still keeping him occupied. Jonesey got down on his knees and did the praying thing again.

“Okay, okay,” Hack relented. “But if I see anyone following me, we abort. Right?”

“Right!” Jonesey said as he went over the wall. “8.30 p.m. tomorrow at the usual place...”

But Hack was already through the fire escape door and two flights down...

2

Hack’s “power” was a result of the meteor shower six months before. Or, at least, that was his explanation.

It had been an unusually warm March night, so he and Danny had run down to the beach after a day’s fishing and plunged into the sea, screaming and hollering against the water’s
coldness. They swam for a while and then floated on their backs in the stillness, bodies quickly adjusting to the temperature. A shooting star (in fact a meteor burning up as it hit the
earth’s upper atmosphere, Hack knew from his science classes) streaked across the sky from east to west. This sight, although spectacular, was quite common.

What happened next was not.

A multitude of shooting stars lit up the night in the full spectrum of colours: whites, reds, oranges, even blues. Sometimes the paths of the exploding meteor fragments would intersect at a
point, creating a larger dot of light that quickly extinguished.

“It’s like the stars are falling,” Danny said, floating by Hack’s side.

“Yeah,” he agreed, although he well knew that the light show was merely debris from a larger meteor storm that had destroyed itself several days before. There’d been panic that
the storm was headed straight for earth, a possible extinction level event. Then the storm simply collided with itself – the result of a lucky burst of solar radiation, both NASA and the
Chinese National Space Administration claimed. There were plenty of other explanations buzzing around online, however: from nuclear missiles being fired into the storm, to stories of kids with
superhuman powers being used to deflect its course.

It was hard to know what to believe.

Hack didn’t mention any of this to Danny, however. He could talk to Jonesey and the guys at GC about all of that, but Danny was different. He was a village kid who knew the alleyways
through the seafood markets and the best fishing holes like Jonesey knew his way around the innards of a PC. Danny would go to work on the fishing boats, settle down with one of the girls from the
market and probably stay in Tai-O for the rest of his life. Hack, in contrast, was already on the move. Increasingly he spent his free time at the GC or the other tech-dens in the city. In a couple
of years there would be exams, university and opportunities that would take him far from the sleepy village. They lay on their backs in the sea that night, watching the light show above them, each
processing the event differently.

Eventually, the cold got the better of them and they moved their numb arms and legs back to shore where a crowd of people had gathered to stare at the sky.

“You boys ought to be careful,” one old man called after them as they pushed their way through and went to their piles of clothes. “It’s too cold for swimming.”

Picking up his jeans, Hack turned to say something smart, but he didn’t get a word out. Pins and needles shot up his arm, as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. Looking down,
he saw blue veins of electricity shooting from the iPhone in the pocket of his jeans, along his fingers and up to his shoulder. For a brief moment Hack’s mind flooded with an unstoppable
gibberish flow of data.

Then he hit the sand...

He was vaguely aware of being carried from the beach back to his grandfather’s house… Of being laid on his bed and a doctor standing over him… Of noticing the hairs along his
forearm standing on end…

He awoke just before dawn, feeling thirstier than he ever had in his life. After staggering to the kitchen and downing three glasses of water in quick succession, he returned to the bedroom and
found his iPhone (in fact a pretty good copy he’d bought six months before) lying by the reading light. The white back casing was blackened, as if it had been plugged into a power supply with
too much voltage. Wiping the carbon residue away with his thumb, he sat on the side of the bed and tried holding the buttons in the reset sequence, to no effect. Then he recalled the final seconds
before he collapsed at the beach: the data that burst through his mind, almost as if he had been linked to the machine.

Feeling just a little silly, Hack held the iPhone in both hands and closed his eyes. He concentrated on making some kind of connection; on plugging into the machine somehow.

For a moment nothing happened…

Then images began to form behind his eyelids, just flashes at first, growing in complexity. He sensed the internal flash drive, practically burned out by the earlier power surge. He imagined it
coming to life again, and sure enough the process began. Within a few seconds the machine felt warm in his hands and he opened his eyes. The screen was illuminated and the usual apps were
present.

He’d repaired it.

Over the next few days Hack excitedly experimented with other pieces of electronic equipment around the house. In terms of computing power, it didn’t come much smaller than a phone, but
Hack was mindful that his first experience of connection with the machine had knocked him off his feet. Therefore, he took it slowly, trying to connect with simpler items such as the television and
the Blu-ray player before he moved onto more complex things.

Soon enough he felt ready to connect with his laptop. The greater complexity of data, components and structure left him feeling drained upon his first attempt and almost led to another burnout,
but he soon learned how to control the flow between himself and the machine. When connected, he found that he could control and manipulate the computer’s inner workings with his mind alone.
He could also download data from the laptop and hold it in his brain – as if he had some kind of internal storage in his head, something akin to photographic memory.

Growing comfortable with his own new power, Hack began to research the meteorite storm and found out about the fall virus in Australia – how it put most people into a coma for which there
was no cure and how it also gifted a small number of immune children with incredible abilities. Following the meteorite showers, it seemed such children were turning up all over the world.

A girl in Paris seen flying over the Eiffel Tower…

A student in Beijing who could punch holes in solid metal just by thinking about it…

A kid who disappeared on a passenger jet over the Atlantic and turned up thousands of kilometres away in Poland…

Hack realized he was one of them. One of the new breed of humans touched by the fall virus. And he understood that this was something he had to keep a secret. In Hong Kong, there had been
stories of kids with suspected powers being picked up and transported to the Chinese mainland – never to be seen again. There were similar stories coming out of America. The CIA. The PSB. Why
wouldn’t they want a piece of kids with such powers?

So, apart from the times when he helped Jonesey and a couple of other trusted friends at the GC with particularly tricky hardware problems, Hack kept his power under wraps. Being able to change
channels on the TV without the remote or carry files around in your head was fun at first, but no great shakes. The power almost became an afterthought. A skill Hack had, but never used. It was
just safer that way – he had no urge to end up in Guantanamo Bay or anywhere like it.

But then Jonesey got him involved in the Goodware situation…