Cole nodded and said, “Operation Char-broil is a go. I hope to meet you back at the transport in ninety minutes.”
They separated to do their tasks for the operation. Gaia hacked the security opening, and Cole went around the rear of the facility.
As they breached the opening, they had to take off their glasses. Since the facility engineered borgeys, their human eyes could sense light. The illumination was just sealed within the factory.
Linda prepped their bomb while Chip navigated with stealth to the main computer. He was a Sherpa before this extinction happened, and knew how to get to difficult places. They were almost there.
Cole went to the access dock where the borgeys were sent out all over the planet. He had to time the production producer opening between each new borgey. He was lucky they were deactivated upon distribution or he would’ve been seen. He was also happy of the arrogance of the Program for not posting any surveillance.
He slipped in between the new borgeys inside the plant. All he had to do was EMP the backup generator so it wouldn’t kick in the redundant reserve supply.
It was still dark in his area, so he kept his glasses on. He saw the generator and shot it.
As it whirred down to nothingness, he began to leave. That was when things deconstructed quickly.
His glasses chimed a proximity warning in his ear as the walls became active with embedded security sentinels. He just thought the walls had ornate tech design on them. They have actually compacted security in case of an infiltration.
He began to shoot his Magrupt at a slew of sentinels, but there were too many. As he began to spray, the lights intruded and obliterated his sight with his night vision. He was blind!
Just as he was expecting sight impaired death, he heard metal crashing with deadly impact. That was the last he heard before a sonic disruption cascade disabled him completely.
He began to awaken from the dark. He realized he wasn’t at the factory anymore. He was in the woods near a fire. He got up woozily with a headache.
“Your team executed their mission well. So don’t worry.”
He shockingly turned to the voice, and saw a borgey sitting across from him! He quickly looked for his Magrupt.
“If you’re looking for your weapon, I have it,” she said.
“Get crunched, borgey! My squad will avenge me!”
“Your squad left two days ago, and I’m not a borgey.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know a titanium alloy left leg covering, armbands and a half torso skin-tight suit was in style right now, borgey!” Cole yelled at her.
“I’m NOT a borgey!” she yelled back. “Borgeys don’t save humans, they kill them! Who do you think pulled you out of that swarm of sentinels wanting to shred you?!”
How was he in the woods? All he remembered was hearing clanging metal and an ear piercing tone. Now, he was in the woods with his enemy.
“I was almost a borgey, but the factory found a flaw in my physiology. After I was transformed and before my final programming, they found out I had Allan-Henderson-Dudley disease along with Sickle Cell Anemia. I was put in the discard pile.
My father always told me I had a frighteningly fast metabolic rate, so I woke up minutes before they were going to incinerate me along with the rest. I got away before the cremation.
I guess you can call me an in-betweener. I’m human with robotic advantages. I’m not a borgey.”
Cole was doubtful.
“Why didn’t you take the mist to cure every disease? It’s been out for a century.”
“I think you forgot where we are. Victoria Australia is the back-end corner of the world, and an Aboriginal community isn’t very high on the list. I’m fine now. That transformation cured my neurological and blood disorders. I just wasn’t top enough to keep.”
“The Program doesn’t want a glitch in the system. I guess that’s why it’s killing us.” Cole got somber.
“Those sentinels were tough, but since I’m still human, I had to stop them from taking you out. I lost my entire family. I won’t lose another living person.”
“Well, thank you. I know it was tough. There were about twenty of them,” he said.
“It wasn’t that impossible,” she said. “When you can hack their programs, they fall like action figures on an angry kid’s floor.”
“You can hack?!” Cole was surprised.
She had to elucidate.
“When the factory cured my neurological glitch, I was programmed to their network before I was turned. I was discarded because I wasn’t perfect. They thought I would be a worthless metal melted heap, but I got away. How do you think I was so close to you to see them attack you? I’m invisible to them. They can’t attack what they can’t sense.”
Cole had an epiphany for her use. The main problem was they were in Australia, and couldn’t fly back even if they did have an aircraft.
“You have a special gift, what’s your name?”
“Alikira Nguyen. What are you talking about?”
“You can hack borgeys,” he clarified. “But it really won’t make a difference. We can’t get back home.”
“How adept is your team?” she asked.
“They’re a pretty smart bunch, why?”
“Before they left, I planted my homing beacon on the fuselage of their plane when we left. It was locked, so I couldn’t place you there. With those borgeys patrolling, I couldn’t just leave you. They should find the signal soon. Don’t worry, it’s encrypted.”
“How did you make it undetectable by the Program?” he asked.
“No, it’s very detectable. I just ghost piggybacked it off one of a borgey’s homing devices. It could be in Borneo by now, and it will have no clue of the actual signal location.”
“What did you used to do?”
“I used to be a tech-ripper. My community was as discarded as I was. I hacked all food supplies, so we could eat,” she said. When the Program took over, the hacks stopped.”
“You were a renegade,” Cole said.
“A renegade who helped my community eat,” she clarified. “I call it being a moral justice marauder.”
Cole understood. “That’s ingenuitive; maybe I should’ve called myself that.”
“Why? What did you do?”
“I’m not a horrible person. I used to smuggle medical Canibus to MS victims in Tokyo because they didn’t need the Xvapronic opiate overdose.”
“You took care of the indigent?” she asked.
“I was in prison because Japan thought any form of Canibus was illegal, so yeah. I helped them.”
“That means you know of the two-tiered medical system.”
“I’m a health nut. What do you think?”
She punched him.
“Hey, Lady! What did you do that for?!”
“If you knew the mist was impossible for me to take considering my status in the Outback, why ask the question to see if I was a borgey?!”
Cole thought he could scramble her binary reasoning if she was a borgey by asking the paradoxical question.
“The reason I asked you that is because a borgey can’t rationalize a contradiction! They don’t know human social norms! I thought I would see a processing glitch, and deactivate you when I got back my Magrupt!”
She got angry.
“Have I finally passed your test now?! Do you believe I’m not a borgey?!”
“Yes! You saved me from those sentinels, and we’ve been naturally talking all night without any glitches! A borgey’s not advanced or intelligent enough to concoct a plan to hack our leader with this much intricacy! We may not even be able to get back to base now!” he yelled. “You’re legit!”
Alikira felt like she would always be mistrusted.
“When your team comes back to retrieve you, leave me here.”
Cole remembered how they called him a malcontent, and he had to earn trust. He knew she could weather the storm with some credible backing.
“What are you g
onna do out here in the wasteland? I guess since it’s the Outback, the word ‘wasteland’ is kind of an oxymoron.”
“Hey! Don’t discount my homeland, buddy!” She pointed at him. “I’ll do what I’ve always been doing!”
“What? Hiding from borgey patrols and factory sentinels? Sorry to say, dear. Your hiding place is smoldering rubble, and the sentinels are gone as well. I heard Wallaby races can get boring very quickly. Look, they took me in without any skills. With your borgey hacking, they’d b stupid not to accept you. I bet you can even control the borgey patrols here.”
She thought about his rational argument.
“Are you ready for the bigotry, loathing, and hatred that’ll come?”
“I was considered a criminal. I turned them around, and now I’m a trusted leader, so bring it on.”
“I just hope you’re ready. The main difference between us is you look human. I don’t have that attribute anymore. Just prepare yourself.”
Cole thought he was ready, but he had no idea.
Chapter Three: Guess who’s coming to Dinner?
Carlos was checking the landing gear of their plane. They had a rough landing after their sortie to Victoria Australia. It was because of their heated conversation in transit.
“We shouldn’t have left him, guys,” Gaia said.
“Cole is a Neo-Khaos leader. He understood the consequences of that title,” Chip rebutted her. “We waited until the borgeys came to investigate. There wasn’t anything more we could have done.”
“We could’ve circled back to see if he made it,” she said.
“Face it, Gaia,” Steve chimed in. “Cole blew up in the factory. Stop pipe dreaming.”
“Like I always say I do. I overcompensate,” Linda said. “That bomb was built to take out two factories.”
“Although, we never saw a body,” Chip said to counter.
“Obviously, you haven’t seen one of my bombs then.”
“We’ve been in the same squad for over a year, Linda,” Chip said. “Of course I’ve seen your shrapnel wet work.”
“Then what aspect don’t you get about total obliteration? I make my bombs so we don’t have to come back.”
“I’m still on about that ten percent,” Gaia said.
“You know what Cole said about that highly unlikely ten percent,” Steve said. “Stop hoping, Gaia. We’re in a war. Casualties are commonplace.”
“Ease up, Steve,” Linda said. “We all loved him, Gaia. It’s just time to let him go.”
“Call me stupid, but he still may be alive.”
Steve put his hand on his bent brow and said under his breath at Gaia,” …Stupid.”
“Get off her, Steve!” Chip yelled at him.
“Her not believing he died when Linda makes super bombs I’m surprised we didn’t have any shrapnel embedded in the wings from a kilometer away is stupid! She has this crazy notion all will be great because we executed without dying ourselves! Gaia has to wake up! This was never a candy and flowers mission! She’s been in this war for a few years, and she refuses to realize what’s been slapping her in the face all this time!”
“Shut up, all of you!” Carlos yelled. “If I can’t concentrate while balancing our glide path in the dark without an ILS beacon, we can crash and die anyway!”
Everyone got quiet.
“ILS?” Linda asked in a whisper.
“Instrument Landing System!” Carlos answered in anger. “I’ll show you flight gauges later! As for now, shut up!”
As they stayed silent, Carlos dropped them from the clouds in a shaky glide path. It wasn’t a perfect three-point landing, but he got them back on the ground.
When Sledge greeted them, they felt terrible.
“Did the mission work? Where’s Cole?”
“We blew up the facility, so we won’t have more borgey production,” Linda stated but struggled to finish her report. “Cole Soloed to take out the backup generator and… we lost him, Sledge.”
Sled became quiet. He had to keep composure.
“Cole Soloed so the rest of you wouldn’t get killed. He said he never was a soldier, but he was the consummate leader.”
They all resumed the resistance, coping with their casualty of war. It wasn’t easy, but they had to continue.
Carlos was checking for any foreign object damage on the gear and happened upon a disk with a blinking light. He dislodged it from the fuselage and took it to the pilot’s station.
While in the plane, he turned on the manual navigation system with the disk near the compass world map. After the disc decoded, he saw their location and a simulated arching path back to Victoria!
He ran from the plane to inform the mission squad.
“We’re back on to finish our Victoria mission, guys!”
“Steve looked up.
“That mission was completed six days ago. The facility is soot now. What else would we have to finish?”
Carlos went to Gaia and grabbed her shoulders.
“You were right, Gaia. Cole’s a ten percenter!”
Gaia smiled as Chip spoke in doubt.
“How do you know, Carlos? His instructions were clear. Let it go.”
“It’s kinda hard to just let it go when he’s requesting retrieval.” Carlos showed the blinking disk. “As I was checking the gear on the plane, I found this. I checked it with the nav system, and saw it was a beacon saying come to get me, fellas!”
Gaia cheered up from her funk.
“We need to go! He might be in trouble!”
“Hold up, Gaia,” Steve said. “This could be a borgey trap.”
“Why do you think borgeys have instilled creative tactics just to blank a single squad? And not only that. A fraction of a squad? They were programmed to probe our main base commanders. You’re mistaking them for conniving humans. They aren’t that advanced. That’s why they’re trying to probe Sledge.” Gaia tried to defend the beacon.
Linda added.
“Steve, you’re so grizzled, you’ve become unnecessarily paranoid. We have a chance to get Cole back, a good chance. We’ll charge our Magrupts and go get him. You can still drop a borgey, right?”
She played into his machismo.
“I can drop a slew of borgeys with a charged Magrupt. They’re mindless simpletons.”
“Since the Disruptor wants to prove himself, let’s go get our leader.”
Steve let them know the obvious. “Prepare for disappointment.”
Alikira was listening in the abandoned hangar for any engines with her hypersensitive hearing. The borgey patrols were being held at bay. She honed in on the whir about a hundred fifty kilometers out.
“Your team is adept, Cole. They’re about fifteen minutes from rescuing you. Are you sure they’ll accept your ‘tin-foil’ sidekick?”
“You’re human, Alikira. A tad more advanced, but still human. They’re adept, but also smart. They’ll listen to me.”
“And when the guttural logic you’ve been beating into them for a year bests your explanation and they deactivate me, then what?”
“They’ll listen. You won’t be deactivated,” he assured her.
“Your confidence is admirable. Just expect the dark unexpected result.”
Cole always taught them to trust no one. Were his words powerful enough to work against him? He didn’t like the taste, but now he had to eat those words.
“When they land, stay in this hangar until I explain and call for you. You saved me, and a permanent deactivation isn’t the accolade I wanted to give you.”
Alikira felt better because he began to harness reason.
“You better be good. I’m hiding in this dilapidated hangar, and I hate roaches.”
“You can step on roaches,” he said. I’d worry about the scorpions if I were you.”
She looked at his sarcasm.
“I understand scorpions. If you don’t disturb them. They won’t disturb you. Roaches infest
and just look creepy.”
“You just scrapped sentinels thousands of times larger than a bug. Why do you jump at crawlies?”
“I just don’t like them okay; drop it, Cole.”
He might have overstepped playing with her. She might have swallowed one while sleeping. All he really knew about her was her advantage he could use. She wasn’t a tool, she was a woman.
“Do you have a nickname? Alikira is kind of hard tap spelling in Morse code.
“What kind of code?” she asked. “No. I’ve always been called Alikira.”
“It’s a dead analog code from centuries back. We use it to communicate because the Program only knows open radio frequencies and digital transmissions. I’ll teach it to you. I must make you a simple nickname. Did they make you with wires?”
“I was augmented with titanium, integrated CPU tech, and fiber optics. They didn’t ‘make me.”
As he eschewed her snark, he began to think. He finally came up with a painfully simple nickname.
“I got it! I’m calling you Di.”
“Was that your mother’s name?”
“No, it’s short for dioptrics. You know, your form of wiring.”
“I said fiber optics.”
“Fiber takes too long to tap out, so I thought of a synonym. Dioptrics was easier to shorten.”
“How simple is this code?” she asked.
“We tap it in dots and dashes,” he said. You just have to learn the alphabet. For instance, Di sounds like dash dit dit. Dit dit.”
“Kind of like ancient binary.” She compared it to what she knew.
“Well, I guess, but you’re not just dealing with zeros and ones for the language. You have twenty-four dot-dash combinations to represent the English alphabet.”
As Cole taught her the letter code, Gaia was pensive in the air.
“We’ve never flown in the daytime. Can’t we be seen?”
Chip answered her nervousness.
“The borgeys can see us with their detection sensors, but since they’ve been cut from the Program’s cyber link, those junk piles are just detecting their future executers. The Program could never see us. Day or night.”
“It can see us through satellite, Genius.”
Cyber Thought Police Page 3
