Nano Contestant - Episode 1: Whatever It Takes (2 page)

U
NDISCLOSED

SKYLAR WENT INTO the data room. It was her favorite room in the house. She was a hacker to the core but was never really able to afford any of the expensive equipment. Matthew Davenport, on the other hand, had made a lot of money being the chief digital engineer for Pinnacle. He had custom built the most cutting edge hardware for his home lab. The man was a genius, and it showed in every aspect of the data room. She was greeted by Hobbes, the computer system, as soon as she walked in.

“Good afternoon, Skylar,” said Hobbes in a thick British accent.

“Hi, Hobbes.”

“Would you like to see the headlines?” he asked.

“Yes, Hobbes. Put up the top five stations.” Skylar adjusted her hair tie on one of her six braids, each of which, was a different color. She frequently changed her hair to a new color and style.

Five video feeds showed on the wall. They were all covering Matthew’s trial.
 

“Mute the feeds.”

The video feeds all went silent.

“New post-it board, Hobbes. Left side.”

The left wall turned white. “Post-it board ready, Skylar. What would you like to do?”

“Hobbes, I want all the info you can find on Mr.Davenport’s arrest and trial. Monitor the web for any information coming in about him. Then put all the monitored information together and highlight anything that is related and then sort by source credibility.”

“Of course, Skylar. Detailed or summarized?” Hobbes projected a hologram in the shape of a cylinder on the right side of the room. News articles, pictures and social indicators flowed from the wall into the cylinder. Then they were sorted.

“Summarized for now. We can get details on particular items later. I want an overview as fast as you can, Hobbes.”

“How fast, Skylar?”

“75%, you can pull power from the rest of house if you need to. We will be in here all night.”

“Very good, ma'am. 75% power.” The hologram began to spin faster. The text and pictures became a blur. The lights in the rest of the house dimmed momentarily as the processing power amped up.

Roland came into the data room.

“Good evening, Roland,” said Hobbes.

Roland stood next to Skylar. “What do you have so far?” He eyed the news feeds.

“Looks like Hobbes is almost done with all the chatter about the trial. I figured that was the best place to start.
 

“Your database is complete, Skylar.” The holographic cylinder changed from a busy blur of information to a steady green.

Skylar motioned for the database, and it moved across the room in front of her. She spun it around a few times to inspect it. “That’s a lot of data.”

Roland looked at the hologram. “Yeah. Let’s start with what we know.”

Skylar gave the hologram a little shove towards the post-it board. “Hobbes, group the data you’ve gathered into related sections so we can see them.”

Hobbes organized the data. “Yes, ma’am. There are three main groups.” The green cylinder broke apart into three sections and went onto the post-it board. “Matthew, Judge Hennessy and Pinnacle.” Head shots of the two men and Pinnacle's logo displayed over their sections.

Skylar pulled up a hologram of several folders. One had a picture of a skull and crossbones on it. She opened it and began working on its contents in a holographic terminal.

Roland squinted at Skylar’s work. “What’s that?”

Skylar smiled and continued typing on her holographic keyboard. “This is my own special design. This is a special web crawler to help me find things on the internet that people don’t want found.”

Roland watched as Skylar’s fingers flew over her keyboard. “Good. Get all the dirt you can.”

Skylar hit the execute command. Her terminal became a blur as Hobbes took over and began processing the data. Every so often a report would come through and be displayed briefly on the main screen before being moved over to the post-it board.

Roland held up his hand. “Wait a second, Hobbes. Put that last one back up.” He pointed to a private email with a spreadsheet attachment.
 

The email displayed on the large wall, and the spreadsheet was pulled up on the smaller wall to the right.

“Look at this one, Sky.” Roland scrolled through to the bottom of the email. “Right here. You just pulled this undisclosed private financial correspondence between Pinnacle’s financial department heads. Nice.”

Skylar came over to look at the wall more closely. “Yeah, their title says they are in charge of ‘Special Projects.’ They are talking about moving a lot of money around. These dates are very recently too.”

Roland went over to the wall with the spreadsheet. “This one for twenty-five million is marked three days ago, when my dad was arrested. Its memo cell says it was a donation to the 'injured police officer charity.’ ”

Skylar joined him. “This big one for fifty million is marked for this morning. Whoa, look at who it’s for, and on the same day your dad was sentenced!” She tapped the wall to highlight a cell on the spreadsheet.

Roland looked at the highlighted cell. “To Hennessy.”

Skylar nodded and pointed to the cell next to Hennessy’s name. “The memo cell says it’s for ‘scholarships for law students.’ Both of these could very well be shell organizations to funnel funds into private, offshore accounts.”

Roland went back to looking at the other spreadsheet entries. “Ok, those two money transfers match the arrest of my father and his sentencing today. Whatever they are covering up must be big. That’s why they needed my dad to take all the blame and any suspicion away from Pinnacle. I bet, if whatever they are covering up came to light, they would lose a lot of business.”

Skylar went back to the spreadsheet too. “Yep. But they would stand to lose a lot more than just their consumer business. They are pretty much the sole supplier of robotics and tech for the North American Union government. They would lose trillions of dollars in government and defense contracts if it came back on them.”
 

Roland turned towards Skylar. “Sky, I think Pinnacle bought themselves a judge.”

Skylar went back to typing on her holographic keyboard. “Roland, I bet this isn’t the first time either. Just a sec.” Several new emails and reports came up.

Roland went over to look at them. “What are these?”

Skylar swiped her hand and the terminal disappeared. “I widened the search time frame from just Mr.Davenport’s trial to similar trials in the last ten years back to 2104. Looks like I was right too.” She pulled up the city newspaper article from two years ago in 2112. “Look at the headlines - Man sentenced to life in prison. He was a Pinnacle employee who was caught selling android blueprints to the Arabs.” She pulled up another undisclosed financial statement and pointed at the cell.

Roland nodded. “Look at that one, it’s also for twenty-five million.”

Skylar pulled up three more. “Over the last ten years, here are four different cases of Pinnacle employees either going to jail for life or getting the death sentence.” She pulled up Pinnacle’s internal emails and spreadsheets that corresponded with each verdict’s timeframe. “And each one has a large deposit being made in a judge’s account.”

Roland looked between the headlines, the spreadsheets and the undisclosed emails from Pinnacle’s Special Projects Division. “Looks like each time some employee is being sentenced, a judge is getting a truckload of money. But all four of these are for less than fifty million.”

Skylar nodded. “You’re right, but none of those trials were as fast as your dad’s, and none of them got a one year sentence ending in incineration.”

Roland went back to the headlines. “And all those older ones were labeled as corporate espionage or embezzlement. Looks like Pinnacle escalated this time and got my dad on treason.”

Skylar stepped back to look at all the documents together. “So, they paid the higher fee and got a faster and more extreme sentence.” Skylar swiped her hand through the air next to a section of recent stories about Mr.Davenport’s trial. She read off the headlines as she scrolled through them. “Pinnacle says employee acted alone, Pinnacle found blameless in terrorism trial and Pinnacle's business is always above board.”

Roland crossed his arms. “Yeah, right.” Roland began pacing. “If they are buying verdicts, then could it be that Pinnacle is also actually the one selling android tech to the terrorists?”

Skylar sat down on top of the desk. “Then they made your dad the fall guy, just like those other guys?”
 

Roland stopped pacing for a moment and threw his hands up in the air. “It makes sense. When you have the kind of money and power that Pinnacle has, you can buy whatever you want. Judge, jury and verdict are all just line items on their expense report.”

Skylar crossed her arms. “If it is Pinnacle, what can we possibly do about it?”

“I’d have to get close enough to them to find the evidence and then expose them.”

Skylar hopped off the desk and walked over to Roland. “If they caught you looking into it, then they would come after you, like they came after your father. Any ideas how to do it?”

“In order for me to even get close, they would have to not suspect me in any way. They definitely cannot connect me to my dad, but, hopefully, with different last names and no records connecting us, maybe I can find a way.” Roland looked at the video feeds. One had an advertisement for Pinnacle. “Wait, look at that advertisement.” Roland pointed. “Hobbes, full screen that feed with the Pinnacle ad and unmute.”

The whole wall came alive with Pinnacle's advertisement for their bi-annual Tech Games. The announcer’s voice boomed into the data room. “This year’s Tech Games will be even bigger than ever before! Watch as digital humans are pitted against hybrid humans battling it out in speed races, hand to hand combat and mind games! The grand prize has been doubled for this season’s Tech Games to one hundred million dollars! During the event, all contestants will stay at our luxury Tech Games mansion on Pinnacle’s private property and tour Pinnacle's headquarters to see the latest tech.”

Roland watched the advertisement for another few seconds. He pointed at the ad. “What about this? Could this be it? Maybe that’s how I could get close to Pinnacle. I wonder if I could be a contestant in the Tech Games? While I’m at their headquarters, maybe I could snoop around in between the games to find the evidence I would need.”

Skylar shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. You don’t qualify to be in the games. “You’ve either got to be a digital, you know, a human with digital DNA, or a hybrid, which is a human with an android implant, like a robotic arm, or you would need a nanotech enhancement. ”

“Well, could you make me into one of those, Sky?”

“Digital DNA is out, because you have to be genetically modified at conception. And I don’t think you’d like becoming a hybrid, because you would have to cut off one of your arms or legs. Maybe, and I mean a big maybe, there’s a small chance with the nanotech.”

“How small?”

“Look, nanotech is a very unpredictable science. In the twenty-five year history of the games, there have only ever been five contestants that have tried it. All five of them died. Nobody’s tried it in the last twenty years. The games are dangerous enough even without untested tech.”

“I’ve got to try it. This would be the perfect cover.”

“But…”

“Sky, I’ve got to at least try it. Let’s find out what it would take to submit me as a contestant.”

C
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N
ANO

“SKY, I KNOW you said the chance of me getting the nanotech to work was very slim, but I think I might have an idea that might give us a leg up.”

“Good. Let’s hear it, because right now we got nothing.”

“Ok, so about a month ago, my dad and I were talking about a new project he was working on, a nanotech project.”

“You mean, at Pinnacle, he was working on a nanotechnology project?”

“No, no, this was his own personal project.” Roland pointed his fingers towards the floor. “He was working on it here, at home.”

“Are you sure? Because if it was for Pinnacle, they’d have all the rights to it, and we’d never be able to use it.”

“Yeah, that’s one of the things he was making a big deal about. He was saying that he had done all the research during his off time, and he had never even brought it up at work, because he didn’t want them to be able to take any of it away from him.”

Skylar jumped up and walked over next to Roland. “Well, let’s see it!”

“Ok, let’s look through Hobbes’ files.” Roland swiped his hand through the air to clear the screen on the wall. “Hobbes, show all the projects that my dad has been working on over the last year.”

The wall changed to show a list of projects. Then they blurred out and a password warning came up. “I have the list, sir, but you’ll need to put in a password to open them.”

Skylar squinted at the blurred wall, trying to see some of the file names. “Well, what’s the password, Roland? Let’s start going through these.”

“Dad encrypted it with a DNA lock. It was coded through his blood.”

There was a whirring noise coming from the desk. Then a panel on the top of the desk raised up and slid to the side. “I’m ready to accept your password now, sir.”

Roland walked over to the desk. “He coded my DNA into the system too.” He put his right thumb on the top of the glass.

Skylar bent down to look at the panel. “Mr.Davenport was never one for sparing expenses. I’ve only ever read about DNA level encryption.”

There was an audible click sound. Roland winced and held up his thumb. A single bead of blood had formed. “Not when it comes to security anyway.”

“Thank you, sir. I am running your DNA against the encryption.”
 

A hologram of a DNA helix appeared in the middle of the room. It began to spin faster and faster. Small sections of the helix were breaking off and flying towards the main wall. On the main wall, they were fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It only took about ten seconds to work through the entire helix. The jigsaw puzzle was in a rectangular shape. It flashed green, and then the encryption lock was removed.