Unleashed

by Amy McCulloch

  ‘I wish,’ I mutter. ‘Jinx, go ahead.’

  He steps into the centre of the locker and projects the Team Happiness presentation so we all can view it. This is my third time watching it, but it still doesn’t creep me out any less.

  There is silence in the locker as we cycle through the different parts.

  When Jinx lowers the projection, Tobias stands up. ‘I’m not listening to this. I’m going.’ He strides out of the locker.

  ‘No, Tobias, wait!’ I say.

  He spins around. ‘My dad is not involved in that. That’s not what Team Happiness is about. You’re telling me there’s some kind of sick plot to control people? That they might implement some kind of mind control?’

  ‘I’m not telling you that they might implement it. I’m telling you that it’s already happened. My mom was part of the beta test. She’s been updated.’

  Tobias folds his arms across his chest, his bottom lip jutting out. ‘How can I believe you?’ There’s a tremor in his voice. ‘I don’t need this.’ He walks off into the darkness.

  ‘Tobias!’ I say.

  Ashley grabs my arm as I attempt to follow him. ‘Let him cool off a bit. He’ll come around, I promise. It’s just a big deal.’

  ‘A big deal?’ says Kai. ‘It’s huge.’

  I turn to all of them. ‘We have to stop it from going any further. This can’t be rolled out to level 1 and 2 bakus. I mean – my mom has already been changed. We can’t let it happen to more people.’

  ‘But how?’ Ashley asks.

  ‘Yeah, what can we do about it?’ asks River.

  ‘That’s just it. We need to get back into Moncha HQ and find out where they’re keeping Monica. She’s the only one who can take back control from Eric and get him to reverse it.’

  The cage door jangles, and we all look up. Tobias is back, his fingers wrapped around the metal webbing. He looks so sad.

  ‘Lacey, I . . .’

  ‘It’s okay, I understand,’ I say. ‘It’s a lot to take in.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Let me finish. I’m sorry for storming off. I still can’t believe this is something my parents would be involved in, but your mom . . . she was so kind to me in the hospital. If something has happened to her – I want to be there with you.’

  ‘There’s a good man,’ says a gruff voice from behind Tobias. Tobias almost jumps out of his skin.

  I scramble up off the floor to see Paul’s face staring at us through the wire. His eyes are dark.

  I swallow, wondering how much he heard. By the looks of it – maybe everything.

  ‘Everyone, this is Paul . . . he lives in my building.’

  ‘So it’s true,’ he says. ‘Team Happiness has been activated.’

  My jaw drops. That’s definitely not what I was expecting him to say. I move to hide Jinx instinctively, knowing that if Paul’s here, his baku George can’t be far behind. He grunts, acknowledging my gesture. ‘Don’t worry, George won’t give anything away. I disconnected him from the Moncha cloud years ago.’

  I start in surprise, but then I nod. Paul grits his teeth. ‘Besides, I think I know where Eric would hide Monica Chan.’

  My eyes open wide in shock. ‘Where?’ I ask.

  ‘At the secret Moncha testing facility. Lake Baku.’

  ‘LAKE BAKU?’ I ASK. ‘WHERE is that?’

  Paul shakes his head. ‘I don’t know exactly. I’ve only heard rumours about it. Asking too many questions about it was one of the reasons I was forced to leave the main board of Moncha.’

  ‘You were on the board at Moncha?’ asks Kai, his nose scrunched up. I can see why he’s sceptical. Paul is the definition of scruffy, with a white-speckled beard, oil-stained clothes and shoes with a hole in the top. He doesn’t exactly look like a top-level business man.

  ‘I was indeed, young man.’ At that, his lemur baku George leaps into the locker and runs circles around Kai’s husky baku, creating a small whirlwind that almost blows the husky off his feet. The display of strength from the baku is enough to make Kai reconsider his assumptions. Anyone who has such a high level baku probably once was high up at Moncha Corp. That, or extremely rich. And considering Paul lives in my building, it’s doubtful that he is very rich.

  ‘Do you know more about Team Happiness?’ I ask him.

  He nods. ‘If you don’t mind listening to an old man?’ He raises an eyebrow at Kai, who stiffens in response.

  I stand up and gesture for him to take a seat in my chair. ‘Please, Paul. Tell us what you know.’

  ‘I’ll have to start at the beginning.’ He presses his fingers against his brow, deep in thought. ‘Oh, it must be twenty years ago now, I was running my own artificial intelligence firm, working on the self-driving cars you probably drove over here in.’

  River bounces up and down on my desk. ‘Yeah, we did come over in a self-drive! Cool!’

  Paul looks up at him and nods. ‘I was invited to attend an angel investor meeting where a young upstart named Monica Chan demonstrated the first ever baku, Yi. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I knew from that moment on, I had to be a part of her company. I couldn’t believe such innovation and skill had come from someone so young. Actually, you remind me so much of her, Lacey.’ Paul fixes his gaze on me and I blush furiously. He’s made comments like that before but I never realized how close he was to Monica herself. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been able to stop asking him questions – but that might have been precisely why he didn’t tell me.

  ‘I joined her board of directors right from the start, helping out with the financial side of the business, gathering investors and making sure Monica developed a sustainable business plan.’

  I can’t believe I’m learning so much more about my favourite tinker. We’ve had an unwritten rule not to ask too many questions, but I’ve always been curious. Then a thought strikes me. If Paul worked at Moncha from the start, maybe he knew my dad? I lock that thought away as Paul continues to talk.

  ‘I always believed in what Monica wanted to achieve. She was smart – and not just in companioneering. She knew the dangers of their technology if it fell into the wrong hands. She drew up an agreement to make sure control of her company was handed over to an independent board of directors if she ever retired or was absent for a long period of time. But her co-founder, Eric Smith, was also smart. Monica might have been the Ceo of Moncha, but he had plans of his own. It was all to do with the leash.’

  Instinctively, my hand goes up to the leash at my ear – covered in duct tape now.

  Paul’s brow furrows, casting a dark shadow over his face. George comes over and curls his tail gently around his neck. Paul reaches up with his arm and scratches the baku’s head. They have such a natural connection; it’s something I always envied before Jinx came along. But the look on his face sends a chill down my spine.

  He clears his throat before continuing. ‘The leash is the connection between baku and human. It uses the owner’s own kinetic energy to provide power to the bakus, revolutionizing the concept of battery life. But Eric saw the potential for even more uses for the leash. He pushed for his own lab and team, dedicated solely to the study of leash technology. Nothing they did could be released to the public without Monica’s approval, of course. But that didn’t stop him experimenting. That man had quite a few wacky, ambitious ideas and often needed to be reined in.

  ‘The craziest of Eric’s ideas was a way to make people happier by figuring out a way to tweak ambition and desire. He thought that if people no longer had any wants, if they didn’t feel like they were lacking something, missing something . . . then they would be happier – and more productive at their jobs, of course.

  ‘You have to understand, we were living in an age of intense envy, where social media was a highlight reel of the most golden and shiny parts of people’s lives, everything viewed through a filter. It was cited as the cause of skyrocketing levels of depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses across the generations. He wanted to reverse th
at process via the leash. If we could be satisfied with our reality, then as a society we would be more content, or so he thought.’

  ‘This is just like in the presentation,’ I say to the others, who nod.

  ‘Presentation?’ Paul asks.

  ‘Jinx stole the internal Team Happiness presentation from the cloud. That’s how we knew about the update to begin with.’

  Paul sighs. ‘It seemed so far-fetched to the board at the time . . .’

  ‘But now he’s done it,’ I say, darkly.

  ‘So it seems,’ replies Paul. ‘And since bakus are so prevalent . . . it will be very hard to stop him without Monica’s cooperation.’

  I screw up my nose. ‘This is like super-villain level disgusting.’

  ‘Agreed!’ says Zora, emphatically.

  ‘So why do you think she’s at this Lake Baku place?’ I ask Paul. ‘What is it exactly?’

  ‘Lake Baku is Moncha’s top secret baku test centre. Access was restricted to a very limited group of employees. Even as a board member, I couldn’t find out exactly where it was. That was, until I saw that Moncha Corp had made a huge purchase of land. I think Monica took inspiration from other business leaders in the past for that, like Walt Disney who bought hundreds of acres of land in Florida to have plenty of room to build his theme parks but also to keep advertisers and other rival businesses away. In Canada, one thing that we don’t lack is space. Once I saw that invoice for the land, I started asking questions about it. I heard the name Lake Baku, started putting two and two together . . .

  ‘Then I was pushed out of the board before I could investigate any further. Demoted. They used my injury as an excuse,’ he gestures towards his missing lower arm, his sleeve pinned up over the elbow. ‘But I know it was because I got too curious. Some people were sent to live up there – to run the experiments and test the bakus. People . . . who were never heard from again.’

  My heart stops. ‘Do you think my dad could have been one of those people?’ It comes out as barely a whisper.

  Paul turns to me, his eyebrows knitted together in a frown. ‘Oh, Lacey, it’s been a very long time since I worked at Moncha. But I did know your father. He was a great engineer, and I was as surprised as anyone when he disappeared. All I know is that Lake Baku would be the perfect place to hide someone like Monica from public view.’

  I blink, finding it hard to process the information. I’ve always been good at compartmentalizing – something I’ve learned from the laser-like focus I’ve acquired from spending so long as a companioneer. Jinx leaps up on to my shoulders and nuzzles my neck, calming me. Instinctively, I bury my hands in his electronic fur. My dad . . . Jinx . . .

  >>It’s going to be okay. But we need to focus on Monica.

  Jinx is right. Getting Monica back is the best chance I have of reversing the update to Mom’s brain. I take several deep breaths, then stare around at the people in my locker – the team of teens and one old man who are thinking about how to find the founder of one of the biggest tech companies in North America.

  ‘Wait, I know where that is!’ says Tobias, breaking the stunned silence brought on by Paul’s appearance and revelation.

  Paul raises a single bushy eyebrow. ‘You do?’

  ‘The moment you said it, the name rang a bell. I’ve never actually been there, but I’ve seen it marked on this old map of the area on the wall of my dad’s office. I used to study it when I was younger. It’s in the Muskokas, near where we have our cottage. Aero, pull up a picture of my dad’s map.’

  Aero spreads his wings out so wide, they almost reach end to end in my locker. The others gather round his wingspan as a photograph of a map of the Muskoka region, north of Toronto, is prominently displayed. Tobias uses his fingers to zoom in. ‘Look, we have a cottage here, on a private lake.’

  ‘Dude,’ says Kai, impressed.

  ‘Lake Washington,’ reads out Ashley. ‘You’re so fancy you have your own lake named after you!’

  A blush rises in Tobias’s cheeks, entering his hairline. ‘Yeah, but at what cost, right?’ he mutters darkly. ‘Anyway, Lake Baku should be . . .’ He moves the map with his fingers. ‘There.’ He zooms in, where sure enough, there are the words LAKE BAKU in tiny print.

  ‘Find her, Lacey,’ says Paul. ‘Bring Monica home. That’s the only way you’ll be able to save Moncha Corp – maybe even the world – from Eric Smith’s update.’

  PAUL LEAVES US THEN, SHUFFLING back to the elevators to head up to his apartment. He looks tired, worn down. But he promises to look through his old files to see if he can find any paper copies of the agreement that Monica had drawn up in the event of her absence.

  It frightens me what the implications of that are. That we might need legal back-up. It all seems way above my pay grade. And definitely above my school grade.

  The atmosphere inside my locker is a state of shock. ‘Now we know about Lake Baku, we have to check it out straight away,’ I say.

  ‘It’s all private land up there,’ says Tobias. ‘There’s a ton of security.’

  My shoulders slump with disappointment.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ asks River.

  ‘That part’s easy,’ says Tobias. We all turn to look at him expectantly. ‘Like I said, my cottage is on that private land. My parents always throw this massive pre-Christmas party and I was going to invite the team anyway . . . so I’m sure I can convince them to invite you and Zora too,’ continues Tobias, unaware of the thoughts running through my brain. ‘We leave on Friday, straight after school.’

  ‘Friday? That’s still two days away.’ My mind races. Who knows what might happen in two days?

  >>Tobias’s party sounds like the best shot we’ve got, says Jinx.

  ‘We can’t go any earlier. We can’t skip school,’ Kai says. He might give off a tough-guy attitude, but even he values his place at Profectus.

  ‘Neither can we,’ says Zora to me, gently placing her hand on mine.

  ‘We’ll leave on Friday,’ Tobias reconfirms. ‘But we’ll only have a couple of days to look for Lake Baku – then it’s Christmas Eve and you’ll all have to go home,’ continues Tobias. ‘It’s tight timing but . . .’

  ‘No, that sounds like it will work,’ I say. Then I turn to Zora. ‘Do you think your parents will let you?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Zora replies. ‘If you can make it happen, Tobias, I’ll be there.’

  ‘Right. And you, Lacey?’

  At first I’m hit with an almost uncontrollable urge to yell at him: MY MOM WON’T CARE; HER BRAIN HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY THE UPDATE. But I force myself instead to take a deep breath. The reality of what we’ve been told hasn’t yet sunk in for Tobias, the way it has for me: the fact that my mom’s mind has been altered. Instead, I just nod.

  ‘Great. I’ll message you once it’s all confirmed.’

  Slick buzzes up against me, butting up against the duct-taped end of my leash. I jump out of my skin and bat him away.

  ‘Whoa, what’s wrong with your bug?’ Kai asks.

  ‘He wants to update me,’ I say. ‘But not only that . . . Slick is the reason I was in the coma. After I let Jinx go, he shocked me and injected me with something that affected my memory. Jinx saw it all. Eric Smith’s orders.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘That’s unbelievable!’

  ‘No way!’

  There’s a chorus of shocked protestation, and they all turn to stare at the beetle.

  Tobias is straight there, pulling me into a hug. ‘It’s all right, Lacey. We’re going to find a way to stop this and get all these bakus back to normal.’

  I smile up at him, but then that smile dips into a frown. ‘I feel like I’ve dragged all of you into this when you could be living your own lives and focusing on school . . . not this kind of end-of-the-world, conspiracy-theory, bakus-turning-on-humans stuff.’

  He grabs my hand, and warmth floods my body. ‘We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want to be. Stop worrying, Lace. We’re g
oing to find Monica.’

  ‘Thanks, Tobias.’ I reach up and kiss him on the lips, bolder than I’ve been in the past. Heck, if I’m thinking about taking down the founder of the biggest tech company in North America, shouldn’t I be brave enough to kiss the guy I have a crush on?

  He starts as if surprised, but then gently leans into the kiss. There’s a chorus of groans from the audience that makes us giggle – it’s affectionate, I know. ‘Can I take that as a yes, then?’ he whispers.

  ‘Sure,’ I say back, with a small smile.

  Kai throws his arm around Ashley’s shoulders and pulls her close. Even their bakus walk side-by-side, haunches bumping into each other.

  Once everyone has gone, Zora turns to me and gives me a high five. ‘Nice move, girl! Looks like the key to breaking your shyness is to plot to save the world.’

  I grin, poking my tongue out at her.

  ‘And the code worked perfectly,’ she continues.

  ‘With you at the computer, I wouldn’t expect anything less.’

  ‘Damn right!’ she says. ‘Want to head upstairs with me? I have to grab some pjs and my toothbrush from my apartment first.’

  I side-glance at Vegas, who I know is lying under a blanket in the corner. ‘I’ve just got a few things to finish up here, but I’ll meet you at mine?’

  She gives me a sceptical glance, but then nods. She knows that sometimes I just need some time to myself to decompress.

  When everyone has gone and the basement is quiet again, I let out a deep sigh of relief.

  Jinx hops up on to the desk. >>At least we have a plan. Hopefully Tobias can get you to his Christmas party at Lake Washington.

  ‘Yes, and then we hope Paul’s right, and Monica is at this Lake Baku.’

  I pick up Vegas from underneath the blanket and lay him gently down on my main work table. Even though he’s a robot, I can’t help but want to treat him with gentleness and kindness. I still feel like I’m reeling from learning so much about – and from – my friend the tinkerer, but nothing helps focus my mind more than companioneering.