Bluescreen

by Dan Wells

  “Make a hole!”

  “Get me a room with a DORD; she needs an immediate brain scan.”

  The flurry moved away, melting into the rest of the chaos, and Marisa watched them go in stunned silence.

  “This is crazy,” she muttered. “This is completely crazy.” She sat on the chair, suddenly shivering, wrapping her arms around herself to try to warm up, or keep still, or something. Anything. She felt like her brain wasn’t working anymore.

  “I think you’re going into shock, too,” said the nurse, and pushed Marisa’s head gently down, between her knees. “That will help with the blood flow,” said the nurse. “Do you feel a little better?”

  “Yes.” Marisa breathed slowly, controlling each long exhalation, trying not to hyperventilate. The Bluescreen cartel had talked to her—not just anyone, but what sounded like the lead programmer. Someone who had worked with eLiza and a man named Lal, turning a few lines of code into a criminal threat so dangerous that it terrified even him. He was so afraid of his partner he couldn’t even tell her his own name. He wanted her help, but what was she supposed to do?

  “Marisa!” A man’s voice this time. She looked up, wild-eyed, and saw Saif running through the crowd; she jumped up so fast she got light-headed again, and he caught her and held her for a moment before pulling back slightly, studying her face, looking over her body for signs of injury. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. He was dressed simply, in dark slacks and cowboy boots and a denim shirt so pale it was almost white. She felt herself crying, and shook her head, embarrassed. “I don’t know.”

  He took her hand. “I came as soon as I heard—I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “I’m okay,” she said, and remembered the dull ache in her stomach. “At least until the adrenaline wears off again.”

  “Again?”

  “I just had kind of a big scare,” she said. She looked at the bustling hallway, wishing she could take him somewhere more private to talk, not wanting to let go of his hand. Instead she just lowered her voice and leaned in closer, whispering in his ear. “One of them talked to me. One of the Bluescreen people.”

  “What?”

  “Through Franca Maldonado—he used her as a puppet to give me a message.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “No,” Marisa whispered, “he asked for help. He said it’s gotten too big, and he can’t control it anymore. They hired Tì Xū Dāo, and it sounded like some other gangs as well, but they’ve slipped their chains, and now they can’t control it.”

  “Damn it,” Saif growled. “The last thing we needed was a drug war. But . . .” He paused, his teeth clenched, staring into space. Finally he shook his head. “Why you?” He looked back at her. “Why would this traitor talk to you, of all people?”

  “I don’t know,” said Marisa, shaking her head. “But I . . . They know who I am. They saw me through your eyes last night at the VR parlor. I’ve been keeping my djinni off because I was afraid they’d try to kill me, but it’s been back on for hours now and I’m fine. This traitor—Nils, I think—he’s protecting me. He knows that I know what’s going on, and he doesn’t have anyone else to turn to, so he’s keeping the rest of them off my back so I can do . . . I don’t know. He cut the connection as soon as I said his name.”

  “You can’t trust him,” said Saif. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Look around,” said Marisa, pulling back. “It’s already too dangerous. They have to be stopped. Do you have any better ideas?”

  “If he talks to you again, just . . . everything he says will be a lie, okay? Don’t believe anything . . .”

  Marisa watched him struggle for the right words. “What? What do you—”

  “Excuse me?” A doctor had walked up next to them. “Ma’am?”

  Marisa saw the sadness in the doctor’s eyes, and felt a sudden flurry of nerves. What had happened to her father? She gripped Saif’s hand, warm and strong, and brushed the hair from her face. “Yes?”

  “Are you the young lady whose friend collapsed here in the hall?”

  “What? Yes, yes of course.” She felt a rush of gratitude—the bad news wasn’t about her father—but then almost immediately felt guilty. Something terrible had happened to Franca. “Is she okay?”

  “Do you have contact information for her family? We can’t read it off her djinni, it’s . . . completely bricked. And we’re reading essentially zero brain activity.”

  Marisa inhaled sharply. “Is she dead?”

  “No,” said the doctor. “But her brain might be.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Marisa’s father was released six hours later; they would have held him longer, but the family couldn’t afford to keep two people in the hospital at once, and Chuy’s injury was worse than Carlo Magno’s. They cleaned the leg, stitched the wound closed, and prescribed a painkiller strong enough to get them mugged if anyone knew they had it. All Marisa got was an antibiotic ointment and a wide bandage, covering half her stomach. Saif called a cab, and the three of them rode to the restaurant.

  San Juanito was in shambles. Marisa walked through the front door in silence, looking at the bullet holes lining the walls and the splintered wood of the plastic-coated tables. Broken glass crunched under her feet. Carlo Magno hopped behind her on his crutches, and she righted a fallen chair, dusting it off so he had somewhere to sit.

  “This is terrible,” said Carlo Magno, chuckling softly as he collapsed into the chair. “I built this place with my bare hands.”

  Saif eyed him strangely. “You don’t sound too broken up about it.”

  “I’m high,” said Carlo Magno. “Ask me again when these painkillers wear off.”

  “Sahara’s on her way,” said Marisa, reading the messages that had stacked up in her djinni. “And Bao. I don’t know what they’re going to do, just . . . stare in shock.” She laughed, though it sounded thin and desperate, with none of the drugged goofiness of her father’s chuckle. “Staring is all I can seem to do.”

  Saif walked alongside her through the rubble. “It’s not too bad,” he said. “The windows are gone, sure, and that’s going to be trouble if it rains, but most of the tables are okay, and almost all the chairs. If we sweep this up and give it a good scrub, you can open for business tomorrow. Put up a big banner outside that says ‘Drive-by special! Half-price entrees!’ Make it a survival thing, like your neighbors should all be proud to eat here because the attack couldn’t keep Mirador down. They’ll come because of the bullet holes, not in spite of them.”

  “I like this cuate, Mari,” said Carlo Magno. “Where’d you find him?”

  “Drinking butterscotch in a dance club,” said Marisa.

  “I guess I can overlook that,” said Carlo Magno. “He’s got a good head for business.”

  “Two years of business school at USC,” said Saif.

  “I don’t think I can overlook that,” said Carlo Magno with a frown. “What are you, twenty-one?”

  Marisa rolled her eyes, feeling her face flush with embarrassment. “Papi . . .”

  “Twenty-two,” said Saif. “I did some school in India before I came here.”

  “Ay, hombre,” said Carlo Magno, “Marisita’s barely seventeen years old.”

  “Por favor, Papi, can we stop talking about this?”

  “If you sleep with her, I’ll have you locked up for statutory rape,” said Carlo Magno, his speech slurring from the drugs. “Or just shoot you. I dropped my gun in the fight, can you see it anywhere? Hey you, in the denim shirt, find my gun.” His eyes started to close. “I need to shoot that guy who was in here with my daughter.”

  “He is exceptionally doped,” Saif whispered.

  Marisa nodded, too embarrassed to look at him.

  “He’s falling asleep.”

  “Gracias a Dios.” Marisa dragged a table closer to her father’s chair, propping him against it so he wouldn’t fall and hurt himself as he slept. His leg was wrapped up like a
mummy—not a hard cast, but layer upon layer of thick, cloth bandages. Blood was already seeping through the inner layers, darkening the surface without discoloring it. She’d have to change his bandages when they got him home.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” said Saif.

  “Just forget he ever said it,” said Marisa.

  “No,” said Saif, “I mean your restaurant. The attack. The . . . everything.”

  Marisa looked at him, somehow looking as comfortable here in the ruins of her family restaurant as he had in the dance club, or the VR parlor, or even the hospital. He fit perfectly, everywhere he went—and she couldn’t help but think about how well he had fit around her, holding her, and how well she’d fit in his arms. He’d come halfway across the biggest city in the world just to find her, just to see if she was safe.

  “I punched you in the face,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  She took a step toward him, reaching for the bruise on his cheekbone, the cut in the center of it barely concealed by a bandage. “I’m just . . . so sorry that I punched you in the face. I thought you were just another rich idiot, but you’re really trying to help. You’re trying to help me.” She brushed his skin with her fingertips, feeling the warmth of his skin, the smoothness of it. He touched her hand with his own, staring into her eyes.

  “Marisa,” he started, “I—”

  “Andale, gringa!” It was Anja’s voice, shouting from outside. Marisa tore her eyes away from Saif’s, and looked toward the door in time to see Anja walk through, followed by Sahara and Bao. They ran toward her, and she met them in the middle of the room, catching both girls in a tight embrace. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” said Anja.

  “Your family’s fine,” said Sahara. Camilla and Campbell hovered in the air behind her. “Don’t worry, I’m not broadcasting.”

  “Hey,” said Bao, waving at Saif. “The dude from last night. Sorry I forgot your name.”

  Saif nodded toward him. “Saif.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Bao. “I just don’t like you.”

  Saif pressed his lips into a thin, humorless smile.

  “I got your message about Nils,” said Sahara. “That must have been freaky.”

  “You have no idea,” said Marisa. “But what really worried me came at the end: I said Nils’s name, and he cut off the connection—probably because he was scared, maybe because he was found, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, he severed the link to La Princesa’s mind while it was still live. And she didn’t come back.”

  “What do you mean, she didn’t come back?” asked Anja. “She hasn’t talked to you again?”

  “Her mind hasn’t come back online,” said Marisa. “She’s in a brain-death coma in the hospital, because the way Nils severed the link caused a glitch in her neural circuits. Bluescreen took control of her body and then never gave it back again. She’s a shell.” She looked at Saif, because she couldn’t bear to say the next part while looking at Anja. “If the link goes down while anyone else is being controlled, I think the same thing might happen to them, too.”

  “That’s . . .” Bao shook his head. “I speak two languages, and I don’t know any words bad enough to express how bad that is.”

  “How many people have the malware?” asked Sahara.

  “Ask the dick who sells it,” said Bao, and looked at Saif. “That word’s not bad enough either, but I had to say something.”

  “Hundreds,” said Saif, “maybe thousands. Look, Mari, can I talk to you in private?”

  “Anything you have to say you can say in front of all of us,” said Anja. The group looked at Saif, but he only growled and looked away. “Fine,” said Anja. “That’s more or less what I expected.” She looked at the rest of the group. “Frankly, I don’t think brain death is our primary concern here: before that ever becomes an issue we have mind control, gang warfare, and world domination to deal with first. We know we can’t go to the police, so who? Some random programmer on the inside? That’s a great resource if we can use it, but how do we contact him? He said he’d feed you information, right? I’m not volunteering to be the next speaker he talks through and then puts into a coma.”

  “We could follow Tì Xū Dāo,” said Sahara. “They probably went back to whoever hired them, right? That might lead us straight to Bluescreen, and then . . . I don’t know. Maybe we can get a message inside somehow.”

  “That’s not going to help,” said Saif. “Even if you could find them—which you can’t because you don’t have their djinni IDs—what are you going to—”

  “We do have their IDs,” said Marisa suddenly. Her father mumbled and shifted in his chair, not quite waking up, and Marisa lowered her voice, practically bubbling over with excitement. “San Juanito has them.” She ran to the corner where she’d dragged the fallen podium that contained the hostess touch screen, and stood it up with a grunt. It powered on, and she brushed away the layer of drywall dust that had settled on it after the fight. “I used the restaurant’s digital marketing system to flood their vision with ads during the firefight. That means it read their IDs, just like any other storefront. They should still be in the cache.” She opened the file system, found the ad board history, and scrolled through it for the time of the attack. Six names appeared, none of which she’d ever seen before, in the same block as the Maldonado enforcers who’d come to fight them off. “That’s them.”

  “Johara’s the best way to track them,” said Anja. “Do you still have that back door open?”

  Saif raised his eyebrow. “You have a back door into Johara? The biggest ISP in the world?”

  “Not full access,” said Marisa, “but we can piggyback on their positioning system to find djinnis. I’ve been saving it for a rainy day, never using it because there’s always a risk that they’ll see what we’re doing and plug the hole. I’d say this is the rainy day we’ve been waiting for.” She blinked onto Johara’s website, entered the message board, and flipped the preference switches that opened the back door—a security hole in their forum that gave a user limited access to the company’s tech support tools. A few seconds later she was in. “Technically speaking, this is illegal,” she said. “Not just the hacking, but tracking djinnis for private use. Sahara, I need you to cover my trail.”

  “Already working on it,” said Sahara. “Find those blowholes fast, and let’s get out of here.”

  Marisa copied the IDs over from San Juanito’s computer, and started the search. The Johara system narrowed them down slowly, pinging satellites and data centers and relay towers, leaving in each one a tiny remnant of the search itself, all evidence that could be traced back to Marisa.

  “Still searching . . . ,” she said, flexing her metal fingers, barely daring to breathe.

  “I’m burying your server trail as well as I can,” said Sahara, “but if I do much more they’ll be able to just follow mine and find us anyway.”

  “I need to help you,” said Anja.

  “Keep your djinni turned off,” said Marisa. “We can do this, and we can’t risk losing you to Bluescreen again.”

  The search narrowed to North America, and then California, and then Los Angeles. Marisa watched as it sectioned off each part of the city. Los Angeles had tens of millions of people, almost all of them with djinnis, which meant there were thousands of relays and repeaters to sort through—it took time, but it would allow a very specific result when they found the target. The Johara display highlighted areas on the map, drilling down to . . .

  “Mirador,” said Marisa.

  “Your search found us instead?” asked Bao.

  “No,” said Marisa, “the map’s not showing San Juanito, it’s . . . south, maybe a mile or two. A warehouse.” She looked at him. “But it’s here. The Bluescreen headquarters is right here in Mirador.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “What do we do?” asked Bao.

  “We talk to the police,” said Saif. “If they’re not working with Tì Xū Dāo, maybe we can trust them—�
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  “You keep suggesting that,” said Marisa. “You know we can’t trust them. Even if they hadn’t warned the dealers about the drone we were using, there was a barrio-wide shootout this morning and they still haven’t followed up on it. The police are out.”

  “And we can’t go to La Sesenta, either,” said Sahara, falling into her standard role as the leader. “Not after what happened last time. We have to do this ourselves. Our way.”

  “You want to try to hack them?” asked Anja. “The programmers who figured out how to circumvent every cyber security system in the world?”

  “Not a hack,” Sahara said, and looked at Bao. “An infiltration.”

  Bao looked at her in surprise. “You want to go inside? In person? Did you get shot in the brain this morning?”

  “No, she’s right,” Marisa said, and blinked on the satellite display, saving the image and cutting the connection to Johara. She looked at Sahara. “We’re still hidden?”

  Sahara nodded. “They’ll find your search history if they’re paying attention, but they won’t trace it to us.”

  “Thanks.” Marisa looked around the restaurant for a large screen, and found an undamaged TV on a side wall. She sent the satellite image to it, and the five of them stared at the top-down view of the warehouse. It had a wide stretch of pavement around the building, with a fence around that, and the roof bristled with solar trees.

  “What are you trying to do?” asked Saif. “Specifically. I assume you don’t want to blow it up or murder everyone inside, so . . . what? What’s your endgame?”

  “First we need to cut their connection to the net,” said Marisa. “And then trash their system, so they can’t control anybody ever again.”

  “They’re connecting over satellites,” said Anja. “See the size of that antenna? The only way to shut them down will be to cut their power.”

  “But look at all the solar trees on that place,” said Saif. “There’s no way you’re killing their power supply.”

  “You’re not thinking about the kind of hardware they’ve got in there,” said Marisa. “The VR is probably as simple as a chair, like we used in the parlor, but the server farm they’ll need to run it has got to be massive. They almost certainly supplement with an outside power source.”