S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus (51 page)

Not that the tracker app is of much use to me. Now that all of our old L.I.N.C. implants have been replaced, it can't see any of the rest of us other than Kelly, who still has his original. Now, without the new identity codes, we're as invisible to the tracker as the island's thousands of un-implanted Infected Undead.

“
Looking for the hack of the ArcWare codex that Micah came up with,” I answer, and then, realizing nobody ever told Kelly about it, I explain: “After you took off alone to save Jake, he finished it using Ashley's self-learning algorithm. But you would've known that if you weren't off gallivanting around here with Jake.”

“
You're not going to let me off the hook for that, are you?”

“
Nope.”

“
Well, as I recall, I wasn't gallivanting. I was rescuing.”

“
And I was worried sick.”

He sighs. “What do you need the hack for?”

“
I figure if Arc developed a failsafe, then it's got to have a code, right?” He nods and waits for me to go on. “And code can be hacked, which means we might be able to block the failsafe using software.”

“
How do we get the hack into the implants?”

I shrug. “I doesn't matter. I can't find a damn thing on here anyway.”

“
Reg and Ash are working on the servers. Maybe they'll come up with something.”

He stands up, offering his hand. I take it and let him pull me up. But instead of leaving, he wraps me up in his arms. I can feel the tension inside his body, like it's a herculean effort to touch me. He still doesn't know if I'm sick or not. I feel fine, but who knows how long it might take for me to start showing symptoms.

I yield to his touch, suddenly realizing how much I've missed it. I lean into him and close my eyes and pretend we're not here in this hellhole, that we're somewhere else, anywhere, home, school.

After a few moments, I lift my face. There's only a couple inches difference between our heights. He leans down and our noses nearly touch. His eyes flick between mine. Then he surprises me with a quick, dry peck to the forehead before releasing me. “I'm going to check on Jake.”

I'm still standing there, hurt and stunned, when Reggie finds me. “There you are. Come with me.”

“
Where?”

“
Server room. Looks like we finally caught a break.”

 

I follow Reggie down the hall
and through the smashed doorway and find Ashley sitting on the floor, her legs crossed beneath her. She's huddled over her Link. When she looks up, her face brightens. “You've got it!” She gestures for the tablet. “Gimme! I've been looking for that. I was afraid we'd lost it.”

“
What's going on?”

She hurriedly connects some wires to the tablet and scrolls through a bunch of screens, cursing under her breath about how she can never find anything on it.

Finally she holds it up and shows us streaming code.

“
They're Arc's machines, all right, just as you suspected. I recognize some of the code from when we hacked into
The Game
. It's not the only thing coming through here, though. There are several thousand individual streams passing through these machines, maybe forty or fifty thousand at any given time.”

I lean over and shrug as I watch the code flash by. “Data streams. So what?” How Ash could possibly see distinct patterns in it is beyond me.

“
So, what we're looking at is
The Game
.”

“
Raw code?” I say. “We already have a hack for it.”

She shakes her head. “Not the base program. Still haven't located the root files yet. It might be that these servers just annotate the raw data coming in and deliver it to Arc Entertainment for editing. Looks like everything coming out of Gameland, though. But that's not what I wanted to show you. Look here.”

She swipes the screen and it clears. Then she taps it a few times and a schematic pops up with several red dots.

“
Micah's tracker? I was just looking at it. But what are all those dots?”

“
It's actually not his tracker, though it's very similar.” She points. “These dots are us, our new implants. Well, most of us, anyway. Kelly's not here, obviously, because he didn't get one.” She expands a section of the schematic and the dots separate and gain alphanumeric labels. “This cluster here is the three of us. And…this one over here is Tanya. Jake's way over here, down near the baggage claim.”

“
Well, at least we know he's doing his job,” I murmur. Of course, it doesn't tell us if he's awake or not. “What's that one?”

“
That's Stephen.”

“
They're tracking him, too, then.”

“
Looks like it. But that's what I wanted to show you. See, there's no one else in the entire airport.”

“
Our mystery missing person is really missing,” I say.

Ash nods and taps the screen again with a flourish. “That was me sending our new identifier codes to our Links so Micah's tracker app on them can be updated.”

I stare at the six dots on the tablet screen. There should be seven. “Where's Micah? He should be there, too.”

Ash shakes her head. “We looked. He's not in the system.”

“
I'm not understanding.”

Reggie holds up Micah's Link. “We can still see him on the app on his Link, so we know his implant is functional. It looks like he never got the new implant.”

“
Maybe because he was so badly hurt?” I suggest.

“
Maybe.”

“
So, you're telling me the failsafe shouldn't affect him then, either?”

They both nod. “You just didn't know because he was passed out on the tram from all the drugs you gave him.”

I wince. Definitely my fault.

“
But the big, big news is this,” Ash goes on. She swipes the screen again and points. “See this bit of code here? And this one here? There are several hundred of these separate streams in here. They're quite distinct from either the tracking app code or
The Game
's codex. They're nearly identical: each made up of a sequence of roughly four million bits.”

“
Four million. Is that all?”

Ash nods, not realizing I'm being sarcastic. Or ignoring it. “They all repeat every two and half milliseconds, like a beacon—well, several hundred nearly identical beacons.”

“
A virus?”

“
We think they're the tracking programs for all the Players inside
The Game
. All of them carry a unique identifier code.” She looks up. “And the strange thing is, a handful of them are streaming
outside
of the main game stream. They're not embedded. Guess which ones.”

“
Ours.”

She nods. “We think the program they're embedded in is the failsafe.”

“
Clever. So the program doesn't reside inside our implants, but in here. They must communicate to our L.I.N.C.s through Arc's towers.”

But as soon as I say this, I realize the deeper implications. We now have a way of defeating Arc's failsafe. Crack the program and we'll be free to leave. But then I have another thought. “What if we just shut the servers down? No beacon, no failsafe.”

“
You read our minds.”

“
There's a problem with doing that, though,” Reggie cautions. “Arc will know almost immediately what we're doing. They're probably not monitoring each individual sub-stream—I mean, how could they, right?—but they'd sure as hell know if all of them suddenly stopped transmitting. I don't think it'll make them very happy.”

“
And don't forget,” Ashley adds, “this is their connection to
The Game
. Without it, they can't stream
Survivalist
on Media. No Survivalist, no advertising. That's a lot of money they'll lose.”

Reggie nods. “That'll really piss them off.”

“
After what we've done to their people—to their experiment—I doubt they're very happy as it is. So why haven't they come?”

It's been bugging me that no one has tried. We know of at least one person who was planning on coming through the tunnel and
he
never showed up. When the tram didn't arrive back on the Foxhurst side, they had to have figured something went wrong. But they never sent anyone to investigate. Why not?

As if reading my thoughts, Reggie says, “They're in no hurry. Remember, they can easily track us. They know we're here. As long as we don't try to leave, they're not going to panic. My bet is they're working on a plan right now to fix what we broke. But if we shut down the servers, that'll just force them to come get us that much sooner.”

“
Sooner than what?”

He doesn't answer.

“
Okay, so we just have to make sure we take them by surprise. As soon as we're ready, we slam all the servers down and go. That means Micah needs to be as strong as possible. Think Arc will wait one more day?”

They shrug.

“
Keep working on that program. See what else you can find out about these servers. See if you can reconfigure those sub-streams so we won't have to shut everything down.”

“
What are you going to do?”

“
First, I'm going to check on Micah. Not sure if there's anything I can do to hasten his recovery, but I can try. The quicker we can get him ready, the sooner we'll be able to ditch this place.”

“
And what about Stephen?” Reggie asks.

“
Screw him. He had his chance. We leave him for Arc to deal with.”

 

“We should skedaddle tonight,”
Kelly says, after he finds me later that afternoon. “Even that might be waiting too long.”

“
Not till Micah's strong enough to walk,” I tell him. “If someone has to push him around in a wheelchair, that's just going to slow us down. That's two less people available to fight.”

“
I'd rather not fight. In fact, I'd rather just slip out and go home.”

“
Unfortunately, with them tracking us, that's not possible.”

“
And what about Tanya? Has she snapped out of it yet? Kind of a long time to be in shock.”

“
I don't think it's shock.”

“
Drugs? Brain damage?”

“
Not drugs. Too much time has passed. Her system would've cleared anything by now. “I think Arc did something to her.”

“
Well, I still think our best chance is to hightail it as soon as we can.”

“
Now I know you've been hanging around with Micah too long,” I say. “You're beginning to sound like him.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
Skedaddle, hightail.”

“
You're changing the subject.”

I give the cardboard carton sitting on the floor a vicious kick. It flies into the corner and a couple dozen unwrapped granola bars spill out. They weren't any good to eat anyway. “Yes, I am changing the subject, Kelly, because I don't want to talk about it. I've made up my mind. We'll leave when Micah's ready. Not a moment sooner.”

“
Okay.”

He digs a couple fingers into the Vlassic jar he brought in with him and fishes out a pickle and holds it up in front of him. It's gray-green and limp and probably tasteless, which will make it the perfect complement to the leathery Cool Ranch Doritos he brought with him from the stash in Tanya's room. Reggie found several cases of assorted snacks in one of the upstairs restaurants. The Cheetos were the first to go, naturally. They were the only things that still had some flavor and texture left to them after being expired nearly a dozen years.

“
Nice dinner,” I remark.

Pickle juice runs down his arm. He gives it a sour look, then takes a bite.

We've been eating canned and bottled and processed packaged foods for only a day and already I'm starting to fantasize about fresh fruit and vegetables. This morning I woke up with the taste of Eric's meatloaf in my mouth. I even smelled fresh-baked bread and my stomach grumbled so loudly that I was sure someone else might've heard it. But then I realized what I was smelling wasn't meatloaf and bread but the coppery stench of the dried up blood out in the hallway. A week ago I probably would have puked at the thought, but today it just makes me shake my head.

Kelly cracks open a beer and swirls it. He holds the bottle up to the light and watches the floaties spin around in it before downing half of the bottle in one gulp. He lets out a long burp.

“
Pig.”

“
Better a pig than a sitting duck.”

“
I get it. You've made your point.”

“
I'm not the only one itching to leave. Jake was telling me this morning that he's getting a really bad feeling in his stomach. He thinks something big is going to happen soon.”

If he's only just now getting that feeling, he's days late.