The Lightcap

Table of Contents

Part One: Memory

Day 1

SV

Orientation

The Lightcap

Consequences

Election Night

Ensyn Memo

11 Months Gone

Glass

Damen Theda

Part Two: Muse

Suspicion

Escape

Assassin

No Enemy

Rescue

Calm

Storm

LaMont

Clear

Aftermath

The Lightcap

Dan Marshall

This is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to real persons or corporations is completely coincidental, except when it isn’t.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, and any other information storage and retrieval systems, except for brief quotations within a review, without permission in writing from the author.

Contact Dan Marshall at
[email protected]

Copyright © 2013 Dan Marshall

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1482725371

ISBN-13: 978-1482725377

DEDICATION

To Courtney, with love.

To Katy, with remembrance.

Thank you for always believing in me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chronologically speaking, the first acknowledgment belongs to my mother, Judith Williams.  Writing this novel would have been much more difficult had she not given birth to me.  All my love to Courtney Stoneburg for being a great partner and for putting up with me while I talked about nothing other than this book for the past seven months.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Peate, whose work made this novel readable.  MW Messina created the amazing cover. You can see more of his work at
mwmessina.com
. Thanks to all the friends, coworkers, and strangers who showed interest during the writing process.  Your encouragement was very much appreciated!

Part One

Memory

“Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.”

—Albert Einstein

First days were always the worst.  As the alarm went off, Adam groaned inside, remembering this was the day he’d anxiously anticipated for the past three months.  Adaptech, Adam’s employer, had recently merged with Brain Sync, a company that did not market or sell products to the public but subsisted entirely through government projects, private industry contracts, and licensing fees.  Just over twenty years before, Brain Sync pioneered technology known as the Mind Drive, which allowed the user to control electronic devices through thought alone.  In an unexpected move, Brain Sync licensed the Mind Drive to Adaptech for a reasonable fee rather than market it themselves.  Having a sole license for sought-after tech, Adaptech made a killing on the market.

Adam snapped out of his early morning haze and realized the alarm still blared in his ear. 
BLEEP BLEEP BLE—
klaxon ended with a thought.  Seated in silence, Adam tried to clear his mind, but he could only focus on the slight hum of the electronics in his apartment.  He took a deep breath and pushed himself up and across his room, grabbed a comb and worked it through his curly hair on his way to the bathroom. 
Best to at least attempt a good first impression,
Adam thought, brushing his teeth with one hand and his hair with the other.  He failed to maintain a rhythm, just like the game from his youth where he’d tried to rub his head with one hand while patting his stomach with the other.  He gave up on the hair and focused on his teeth.  No time for a shower. 
If I can’t have nice hair, I can at least have fresh breath,
he thought as he left the bathroom
.

He put on a maroon shirt, dark grey pants, and a black vest with matching tie.  This was all new territory.  He hoped his clothing presented a confident front.  Internally he was a wreck, heart racing beneath his chest as he stepped into the hall to begin his commute to work.  He summoned the building’s elevator and stood pantomiming his opening lines, lines he’d rehearsed what felt like a hundred times.  “Hi, I’m Adam Redmon, manager of the Programming Division.  I’m looking forward to working with you,” he said, thrusting his hand into open air and shaking a phantom limb attached to an imaginary employee.

“Oh, Adam, I’ve heard so much about you.  I bet you’re the best boss ever.  I’m honored to be working for you,” came a lilting voice behind him.

Caught off guard, Adam turned abruptly to see the face of his neighbor Hana.  She poked at the air, mocking his fake handshake, taunting smile playing against the corners of her mouth.  They enjoyed giving each other hell; it was their way of being neighborly.  Some traded sugar.  They traded sarcasm.

“Oh, not you!” Adam joked, “I’ve heard about you.  The higher-ups warned me that you’re a troublemaker, rabble-rouser, just plain bad news.”  He feigned a look of dismay.  “You’re not going to be able to get away with any of that funny business while I’m the boss.”

“I guess we’ll just have to make sure you’re not the boss for long,” Hana quipped.

They looked at one another, and Adam wondered why she seemed so oddly serious.  Her eyes were cool and detached, but then the edges of her lips turned up again ever so slightly.  She grinned and said, “Don’t look so pale.  I was kidding.”

The elevator dinged as it reached their floor.  Eye contact broken, they stepped inside.  Adam let Hana go first, since he’d heard recently that chivalry was making a comeback.

“Floor?” Adam asked as he selected the ground level.

“I’m going to the roof to look over some cases.  I like to work with a view. Besides, I pay extra to live in a building with heated roof access, so I may as well use it.”

“I’m going to the street level.  Need to get to the office,” Adam said as he lit the button for the roof.  “You mind?”

“Not at all.  The other elevator is out of order, anyway.”

They stood in silence for another few seconds, trading goodbyes once the elevator opened on the ground floor.

Stepping outside Adam’s apartment building was like stepping into an icy Hell, due to the razor bite of frigid wind and the noises of the city sounding like cries of the damned.  He queued a playlist of
tencho
music on his dome, Japanese pop mixed with techno samples, catchy beat struck against cacophonous refrains of scraping metal, and fell into step with the rush of pedestrians as he headed toward the subway stop by his apartment.  There were trade-offs to city life, but being able to get lost in music and thought while stepping in cadence with the crowd, legs on autopilot, was something Adam felt he couldn’t live without.  Even so, the concrete fortress of New Metra City could be brutal.  Each summer felt warmer than the last.  Sunlight blasted off steel and asphalt, life choked from lungs with each breath.  Winters weren’t any better, with frequent blizzards and increasing snowfall each season.  Rising water levels and severe weather changed the landscape of the City in recent years.  Parts of the island lay underwater, subway platforms often flooded, and emergency repairs to bridges and other infrastructure was more common, to the growing frustration of the stockholders.  Several tunnels had closed for more than ninety days due to flooding during the past fiscal year, and there had already been more closures than at this point a year before.

As he reached the stairs to the subway stop, Adam flushed with anger when he saw that it was closed due to maintenance. 
Damn it
, he thought,
between the weather and strikes and broken equipment it’s a wonder anyone gets anywhere in this city.
  He mumbled angrily to himself as he tightened his scarf against his neck and started walking briskly toward the Adaptech headquarters.  Sixty blocks in twenty minutes.  He cursed silently as he realized he was going to be late.  On his first day.  When his new team would be waiting. 
Fuck.

He sent a message to the office:
“
It’s Adam.  I’m sorry, but I’ll be late.  Unexpected subway closure.  Coming in on foot.”  His thoughts were translated to zeros and ones, then zapped instantly to the office of the Chief Executive.

The Mind Drive had come a long way in a relatively short amount of time.  Adam was old enough to remember keyboards, mice, and speech recognition, input methods that either caused irreparable damage to the nerves in the wrist, or made you appear mad as you shouted commands at your computer.  Antiquated forms of interaction that were long overdue for replacement.  Adam had read about neural interfaces during his youth, each article promising that the tech would be available within the next five years and that it would revolutionize the way human beings interacted with technology forever. 
Marketing hogwash
, Adam thought at the time.  He never imagined that not only would the tech some day come to market, but that he would be working as a lead programmer for the prestigious company that had a monopoly on selling the device.

As he dodged around slower moving groups of pedestrians, Adam thought back to the first Mind Drive he’d used in his early teens while attending a consumer electronics convention.  Clunky, cumbersome, prone to error.  The human mind was not known for its ability to stay on task, and the first generation of the device was panned due to its tendency to output junk data as neurons misfired in the operator’s brain.  To make matters worse, the device resembled a football helmet without the face mask—such a fashion disaster that it would never catch on outside data entry and academia.  Detractors mockingly referred to the device as a “dome” and its users as “domers”.

As with many prototypes, the next generation was vastly improved.  New learning algorithms allowed greater personalization by the domers, enabling them to train the device to ignore idle thoughts and extraneous input, and built-in error correction using context-aware Artificial Intelligence was introduced.  If you were walking down the street while composing a message, there wouldn’t be a line in the middle that read, “Nice ass,” simply because you were distracted by a passerby.  The same could not be said for the first generation.  By the time the current iteration, v5, had been released four years before, complaints about stray thoughts were distant memories.  Now, Adaptech benefited from an almost eighty-five percent adoption rate of v5 in Metra Region, and over fifty percent in the other three Regions.

If you had any type of electronic device that accepted input and weren’t desperately poor, you had a dome.  Public acceptance of the technology improved as it was miniaturized, though the dome label stuck, even as the device shrunk with each release.  V5 was the smallest by far, shrunk to the size of an old pair of behind the ear headphones, with a third arm that ran forward down the middle of the skull, from the back where the occipital and parietal bones fused to an endpoint where the hairline met the forehead.  The three arms each ended in a small circle, about the size of a thumbnail, commonly called a bubble.

The previous version was roughly the same size, but v5 passed audio through the bubbles into the upper jawbone, below the earlobe, allowing your messages or feeds to be read to you.  With v5, domes could be used for both input and output, which solidified it as one of, if not
the
, most popular consumer electronic device of all time.  At that point, most people rarely ever took them off.