Mask (4 page)

******

Deep down, in the lowest levels of the Division of Information Control, a simple desk was positioned at the far end of a long line of workstations.  The young Hacker Tech sat with her back to the wall, occasionally peeking above her desk vids to view the thousands of other Techs living out their meaningless existence below ground like so many Morlocks in this forced conformity Hell.

Her name was Evey Wells
, employee number F-451.  Recently, she had become known to the Ministry of Arts as
Slipknot
.  She entered the final protocols and nuked the hundreds of firewalls and layers of security that protected the Forbidden Archive Servers.  She smiled as she initiated a massive file dump, distributing the forbidden books, paintings, essays and music to every network and workstation in the system, all accompanied by the hash-tag,
brought to you by the Ministry of Arts
.

“
Too slow, just too damn slow,” she said, grinning as she shook her head.

She inserted a compact drive into a home-made interface and launched a virus that would forge the Deputy Director’s ID track across numerous proxy addresses, linking him to the tag
Slipknot
.  It would delay the investigation just long enough to send Garraty away forever.  The Ministry was inviolable, they never admitted mistakes.

She smiled as she removed the drive and interface.  Satisfied, she deleted the dual echo boot and returned system control back to the Deputy Director’s desk vid.

She disengaged the implants with a painful ‘snick’ and unplugged her interface and dropped it to the floor.  Wiping the blood from her eyes, she typed a few key strokes with her other hand and purged her existence from the record.  Evey stood up and fondly patted her desk vid array as she glanced up at the ceiling, imagining all of the floors above and one office in particular.

“Just you and me, Jason,” she said, grinning.  She couldn’t wait to see Mister J. Lint again, to feel his arms around her.  This time it would be for good.

Evey pulled her hood back, revealing dyed, bright orange hair that had been pulled back into a pony tail.  She unzipped her jump-suit and pulled her arms free and tied the suit around her waist.  Underneath, she wore a simple black t-shirt that she had cut short.

She casually strolled along the aisles to the elevator bay on bouncy toes, sliding her index finger across each desktop.  She held her head high and smiled, ignoring the bewildered looks she received from each of the lowly hacker-techs as she passed.  She was looking
forward to watching the gray dissolve into the unimaginable colors that she knew lay just underneath the surface, just like the photograph from so long ago.

Evey Wells had spent years sacrificing and countless hours hacking the system from dangerous access points.  And through it all, she lived in perpetual fear of discovery and the re-education assignment that would follow.  But their work had not been in vein, and now she was anxious for the coming
revolution — it was going to be exciting, it was going to be fun.

Her eyes sparkled with
anticipation.

Tony stepped back from his new purchase.  It hadn’t been as simple to put together as the odd little salesman had said, but it was shiny.  It was neat.  He pulled down the large crowbar he had to substitute for the power handle and turned the machine off.

Tony dropped his work apron on a chair as he left the attic workshop and skipped downstairs to the pizzeria.

“Yo, Tony, where you been?  We got orders piling up here,” Kevin shouted across the kitchen.

Tony stared at Kevin, dark hair, tanned, white fucking teeth, good looking little prick and young.  Tony hated Kevin; under different circumstances he would fire the little bastard, but not tonight.

Soon.

“Yeah, yeah, you got it under control, so shut the fuck up and roll the dough.  I got this here.”

Tony walked around to the prep station and started pulling tickets.  His mind wandered as he piled on the pepperoni and peppers and cheese, ticket after ticket.  In the oven, out of the oven, box them up and shoot them down the line for Shawn to load into the shitty old Corolla he used for deliveries.

But Tony was dreaming of thousands of pizzas going out every hour, every day, year round.  He was going to drive a Ferrari, a red one.

“Tony, you need to hire someone.  You’re too old to be sweating like this,” Shawn shouted from the small seating area out front.  “Let me help out tonight, and you can get over to Maria’s and get a beer.”

Tony just smirked; he’d fire that little bastard too.

He could run the whole thing by himself.  And spend all the cash himself too.

In time, the final ticket was out of the oven and Shawn left with his last delivery.

Tony grabbed a dough bucket, spun it upside down and sat his significant ass down.  He pulled out a Camel and sparked it up, leaning back against the flour bags.

“In the kitchen?”  Kevin asked.

“In the kitchen, in the toilet, up your ass if I feel like it, you little shit.  Shut the fuck up!”

Kevin just shook his head and headed out to the front of the pizzeria and flipped the sign over to closed and walked out, the little bell ringing against the glass.

“Good riddance,” Tony said to the closing door.

Tony stretched and looked around his kitchen.  It was time after all.  He’d fire both of them in the morning.

He stood up, flicking his smoke into the sink and walked back to the prep table.

He carefully rolled out a ball of dough, working it into a circle and then laid it out on the pan.  He ladled on the perfect amount of sauce and then piled the cheese on, spreading it out to the edges.  He stepped back and admired the pie; this was going to be mind-blowing.

He picked up the pizza and returned to the machine upstairs.  Tony lifted the lever and slid open the door to reveal a small chamber, the perfect fit for a large pizza.  He set the pizza inside and then closed the door and locked it.

He stepped over to the crowbar power handle and fired up the machine.  It buzzed, hummed and the lights on the read-outs twinkled.  Tony gingerly touched the keypad, entered the codes, placed the wire harness over his head and thought about where the pizza would end up.  He really didn’t understand how it all worked, but then he didn’t really care.  Holding his breath, he pushed the button.

The machine hummed a little louder and then was quiet again.  Tony pulled off the wire helmet and ran to the rat-hole of an office next door, and there on the corner of the desk, next to the empty liquor bottles, cigarette cartons, worn-out ledgers and old copies of hot rod magazines was the perfectly cooked pizza.  The pizza glistened — mozzarella and crust the perfect golden brown.

Tony returned to his workroom, thinking about the strange man who had sold him the machine.  “The only one like it in the entire world,” the man had said.  Tony opened the door on the chamber again, and there sat the uncooked cheese pizza.

“Holy shit!” he shouted.  “I’m going to be fucking rich!”

He set to work, preparing for the next day of business.

The following morning a new sign hung in the window under Tony’s Pizzeria:

Now Delivering World-Wide in 5 Minutes or Less

******

The steam rose from his delicacy, and he salivated like one of his remote ancestors before the hunt. Technology Control Officer Brixlewhii Bapthphat, Third Class leaned back in his hide-covered gravity chair and stretched his feeding orifice into what earthmen might have loosely referred to as a smile.

Giving the reproduction and teleportation technology to the earthman was only a minor offense.  At least, he was fairly certain it was, but out here orbiting a small moon of Jupiter on his one-man monitoring station, the food was intolerable.

Besides, he loved pizza and Tony made the best.

He sat on an antique wrought iron and stone bench in a small village square next to the open-air café.  He gazed over the top of the local paper from behind dark, tortoise
-shell Ray Ban sunglasses and watched himself eat a salad.  A Chef salad he recalled — no anchovies.  This was the ultimate out of body experience.  And, unlike that old song, he
could
see how he appeared through other people's eyes.

He watched his younger self’s mannerisms and expressions, part of a psychological armory replete with skilled and practiced deceptions.  He had been good at this.  He noted the khaki linen dress pants, crisp white shirt and yellow tie with an abstract floral design that he remembered fondly.  His favorite Gucci shoes graced his cuffs, legs crossed just so.  His thick blond hair and tropical tan show
ed off his friendly white smile and accentuated his piercing blue eyes.  He absorbed the scene with an odd déjà vu, a subtle, yet visceral experience akin to how an aroma can temporarily infuse and overwhelm the senses with sharp memories of childhood — the mind connecting nodes, both real and imagined.

The memory of his early adult life was like watching a grainy, old black and white film compared to the Technicolor reality that sat across from him now, romancing the not quite forgotten young secretary, Rachael.  She was beautiful,
with long auburn tresses, dark eyes and an athletic body.  The body reminded him that he would sleep with her before the afternoon was over, a quick interlude before conveniently losing her number.

He had never been one for allowing emotions to get in the way of a good lay.  His work possessed him
, and these weekly excursions to the cafes or nightclubs were more of a diversion — down time to allow his mind to rest and wander where it would.  And to be fair, he had never intended to hurt anyone.  He always pleased the women — saying all the right things, doing all the right things.  He was liberal with his affections, and the women felt wonderful for that brief time they spent with him.  But in the end, he remained detached and emotionless.  He enjoyed these women much like a ride at an amusement park.

He continued to watch himself.  His younger self grinned at just the right moment.  There
, the old familiar move to touch her knee with just the right amount of pressure, the right amount of sensitivity, the right amount of desire.  He felt oddly voyeuristic watching himself across the café working his charisma on the young woman.  She seemed such a shy and proper young lady, but had proven to be quite different.  He very much regretted not staying in touch with this one, but he had made no exceptions.

He looked down the avenue, watching the sunlight sparkle off the passing cars, fountains
, ornate glass and stone facades of the buildings that surrounded the square.  The day was beautiful, a cloudless sky, palms whispering in the breeze along the sidewalks.  The atmosphere was the perfect Zen-like harmony between nature and the first morning of Spring Break at Daytona Beach.  He had forgotten clean air. He breathed it in and relaxed for now.  There was no hurry.

He recalled that Rachael would pout slightly about dessert and that he would give in, after the proper amount of protest.  The Crème Brule was casual foreplay prior to agreeing to the rendezvous in the fashionable Hotel La Strata next door.  Since they were still on their salads and they would not leave the hotel until
three o'clock, he had nearly two hours before his participation was required — his reason for being here now.

Now
, he mused to himself,
what an interesting and paradoxical concept
.

He glanced back at his younger self to see that he had moved his chair closer to Rachael’s.  He thought about what he had become over the years
— first ambitious, then increasingly reclusive and finally bitter and resentful.  His ambition had driven him professionally, but also had driven him away from Rachael and all the many others after her.

His ambition had arrived later in life, born of selfishness and a sense of disembodied revenge.  As a precocious only child, his parents marginalized him.  He was reared by nannies when he was young and then ‘allowed’ to grow and discover himself on his own, which translated into taking care of himself.  He never bonded with his parents, never received the attention that most children get.  Both of his parents had been top scientists and researchers, working endlessly to further their careers.

His fondest family memories were of his aunt, who had long since been buried and marked..  Even those memories lacked the normal expectations of family love.  He could not recall a report card or an award ceremony that his parents had taken note of.  They had even missed his graduation from high school, mentioning in passing that they would be working on some special project.  They left the week before graduation with a simple note: "Gone for now, Patty and Thomas."  How he wished just once he could have called them Mommy or Daddy.

Mommy
, he thought.
Here I am a man of eighty-three years of age and I’m thinking about my mommy
.

Well, he never really had a
mommy, so the thought was moot, but still bitter.  He had longed to resurrect a real childhood, but that simple desire was never manifest in the potential outcomes.  He had run the math, performed the calculations and gone through the nearly infinite permutations, finally coming to the conclusion that his childhood was lost.  It irrevocably happened.  And while he assumed his parents loved him as much as they were capable of, never a day went by that he was not painfully aware that he was only assuming, knowing for a fact, however, that he was low on their priority list.  He could not even remember being punished, and that was certainly not for lack of trying.

His youth had been spent in the presence of police officers, marked by frequent visits to cold sterile rooms that still stank of cigarettes and other less identifiable fluids, the ghosts of angry detainees and grumbling blue uniforms long gone.  He would sit in that familiar gray metal chair while a detective would question him from across an old stained Formica table.

Eventually, one of the officers would make a call home, expecting his parents to come to help straighten out this wayward boy.  The hardest part of those visits was seeing the pity in the detectives’ eyes when his parents did not come.  They would locate his none too sober aunt and eventually she would show up – his guardian.  After the usual paperwork, the officers would allow him to leave, knowing full well that he would be back.

He began to direct his intellect
toward academic life in earnest upon turning sixteen, when he came to the realization that his parents would not engage him, and that his simple goal of generating even negative attention was useless.

He still had no idea how to categorize the
ir inability to bond.  He never heard from them again after that graduation note — no good-byes, no best wishes — just a simple announcement of their absence.  He never even felt grief when he finally came to the realization that they would not be returning, although he had been curious, as a scientist himself over the years, as to their whereabouts and what they had been working on.  And over the course of his work, his investigations and his life, he had discovered many things.  None of those discoveries included his parents’ fate — forgiveness for his childhood was also notably absent. 

After the methodically reckless years, he graduated high school and left for college to study physics.  He had relished the awards and notoriety, graduating early with
honors, and then moving quickly through the master’s program and receiving his doctorate at twenty-four.  He chose private industry over academia and left school behind, accepting instead a research position with Luna-Dyne Carbide, a large defense contractor.  And this had satisfied him for a time.

H
e quickly rose through the ranks, heading up increasingly secret and black projects.  The projects, the cutting edge of advancement and the unleashing of his intellect fed his ego.  And even though the confidential nature of his work deprived him of the acclaim he had so desperately coveted, the drive remained.

Now he would remedy that drive, a subtle change.  He would make a small deviation from the expected.  The results were calculated and predicted.  He knew that fate, destiny and coincidence were not minor forces to be tampered with, and that the certainty of any outcome was always shrouded.  But the science was sound.  The plan would work
. He was confident.  Heisenberg could kiss his ass.

He glanced back, noticing the couple getting up to leave, giggling and laughing hand in hand.  He watched Rachael’s curves in her tight business skirt as she locked arms with his younger self and walked down the sidewalk to the Hotel La Strata.

Yes, he had been a fool
, he thought again.

Not because she was beautiful, but because she was a metaphor for all the things he could have had, if he had known what he knew now.  The most important aspects of life were not contained in spreadsheets, ledger balances or even complex computer modeling software.  All of the artificial intelligence in the computing world was trivial compared to the power of that simple connection between two people, binding them, compelling them to love each other.  A simple thing taken for granted by so many.  He knew, however.  He was painfully aware of what he had denied himself
— a wife and the opportunity to rejoice in a childhood he never had through his own children.

His progeny were AI automatons, military targeting drones and super
-conducting lasers.  He had taken his superior mind into many evil places, the darkest corners best avoided.  And he had succeeded.  He had come, conquered and been rewarded with quiet praise, respect and, increasingly, with fear and extended solitude.  Eventually, he came to be imprisoned within his own laboratories.  He had become a security risk, no longer allowed the pleasure of open spaces or human contact.  His working budgets, however, were as close to unlimited as conceivable, and his privacy and latitude for research were unquestioned.

He had made many men rich and powerful, satiating their dreams for glory and conquest.  They were more than content to allow him the luxury of pure research, so long as he turned out new and improved methods for destruction.  In reality, he had created the new paradigm of modern warfare
— death from above with an option to buy.  And although he was safe inside his subterranean bunker, away from the smells and charred remains of victory, he was still aware of how his discoveries were utilized and the consequences.

But today, he would change that reality.  He glanced at the front entrance of the Hotel again then to the clock across the square
— one hour now.  Again the doubts assailed him.  No, this was the only way.  This had a higher purpose, a higher calling, a destiny of greater magnitude.  For was it not destiny that allowed him to make this obscure discovery?  Was it not destiny that allowed the development of the machine in secret?  And was it not destiny that allowed him to actually embark upon this mission, this mission of mercy?

He faced an imperative; he must save humanity from the evil
s of his own doing.  He would not become the scientist of repute in the underground lair — no, he would not be Merlin for Pendragon.  He would not create the mist; he would not lie down with the dragon — not today or ever again.  He thought about the paradox and laughed.

He looked at the
hotel yet again and waited — forty-five minutes until his new life began.  Thinking back, he remembered how Rachael looked to him through his much younger eyes on this day so long ago.  She was up there now, yearning for him.  He smiled and felt that wave of déjà vu again.

He noticed that as the clock wound down he had begun to tremble, a slight waver in his until recently dead nerves.  He had certainly never shed a tear for the people he had destroyed.  And while he had not launched the orbital platforms, nor had he targeted the arrays, and neither had he encoded the firing sequences
— he was still responsible for the murder of three billion people.  Murderer didn’t seem to quite convey the proper magnitude.  But he would take it all away and restore the lives stolen.  He would make amends.

And even as his mind spun he began to doubt his ability to liberate himself from the impending evil.  The years of projections ran through his mind.  He had seized upon this course with unwavering intent, but now that the hour was at hand, waver he did.  The clock told him he now had fifteen minutes to make his choice.  He
had to decide to walk away or change his life.  He began to sweat in the cool breeze, feeling the weight of the moment upon his bent shoulders.  He was a bitter, lonely old man, with only a wasted life of evil to his credit.

Finally, the tears did begin to fall down his wrinkled cheeks.  But even at this very late hour
, they were only tears of self-pity.  He hated himself, and his passion for his mission returned — the passion that had gripped him during the initial testing, fabrication and final assembly, the passion and hatred that had driven him long into the night working for this moment.

His tears slowed and dried in the sun.  He looked again at the sky
and then at the people passing by, all the futures that might now be allowed without his influence.  He mulled his choice over again.  A family would have been nice.  A nice, simple research job at a university would provide for a family, and he would be happy.  But no, the ambition and the need for acceptance, the hated drive was there — a visceral, evil compulsion to achieve that could never be extinguished.  He would never stop; the permutations always remained the same.  He always raced down the same road to death.   No, he had chosen correctly or, rather, he had no choice at all.