The Trigger Mechanism

by Scott McEwen

  “Facebook, Instagram,” the driver said, “but now I’m trying to do my own thing.”

  “Cool,” Jalen said, feeling excited and invigorated. He could smell the ocean, and in the quiet cabin of the electric car, they could hear the gulls circling overhead.

  “So this is California.” Jalen smiled.

  “Nah,” the driver said. “This is Silicon Valley. California’s another state.”

  “Yeah.” Wyatt nodded, his scowl warning Jalen to rein in the excitement. “Don’t let the salt air go to your head.”

  * * *

  The safe house that Wyatt and Jalen shared was a former Airbnb. Darsie had found the single-bedroom apartment on the website, and in order to keep total secrecy, he bought it outright. “Guess you could say”—Darsie smirked—“I booked it for life.”

  The apartment itself was nothing to write home about, save for the location close-ish to downtown San Francisco. It was shabby chic, with a little more emphasis on shabby. But it came with a couple of Darsie’s personal men.

  “The room has already been swept,” Darsie’s head of security said to the boys as they entered. “It’s clean. And we’ll have someone out here day and night.”

  That seemed to satisfy Wyatt somewhat, though Jalen watched him proceed to do his own assessment: lifting up lamps, going through kitchen cabinets, taking the top off anything electric, and looking in air vents.

  “Think I need a nap,” Jalen said, flopping on the couch. “You can take the bedroom.” Even though it was afternoon, the predawn trip to the airport had made them quite tired.

  “Okay. But no more walks,” Wyatt said dryly, going over to check the lock on the door. Out the window, a gleaming black Mercedes was parallel parking out front. “Actually, don’t think we’re getting that nap.”

  And sure enough, approximately one minute later, Darsie came barreling through the front door. He pulled out a barstool from underneath the kitchen island and sat down, his head in his hands, veins throbbing in his temples.

  “Morning,” Wyatt said, pouring him a cup of coffee. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “There’s been a development. It doesn’t look good.”

  Jalen watched Darsie’s perfectly manicured hands shaking as he lifted the mug. “At Red Trident, we monitor all the internet traffic on the network. Every site that is visited, it’s all tracked. Hi Kyto, of course, knows this, so we’d never expect her to make this kind of mistake.”

  “What did she do?” Jalen leaned in.

  “Let me ask you, have you ever heard of a Raspberry Pi?”

  Both boys shook their heads.

  “Well, it’s a device you can use to create a VPN—virtual private network. I noticed that Hi Kyto purchased one with a private credit card midyear.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I just know, okay? The point is a Raspberry Pi—or a device like it—can be used to make secure tunnels and then connections. They’re practically unhackable. Two weeks before the fires, security cameras in the restaurant across the street from Red Trident captured this footage of Hi Kyto’s laptop.” Darsie flipped on his iPad and slid it over to Wyatt. There was Hi Kyto, having an iced tea and French fries and a salad. Her computer was open. Wyatt zoomed in.

  “The security camera at the restaurant takes images only every five seconds, so it’s possible she visited different sites, but what we’ve done is analyze URLs and imagery to build the following progression. Go ahead and swipe left.”

  Wyatt swiped through the photographs. “First she visited the website of the drugmaker Zovoricin. She looked at the chemical makeup of the drug,” Darsie said. “Next she visited sites about the chemical process of addiction.”

  Jalen looked on in horror: public records, medical data, scientific reports, addiction specialists—in an hour and a half, she’d visited approximately forty-five information sources, everything from how a person becomes addicted, to the chemical process, to the spiritual deterioration, and finally, the change in the brain anatomy of chronic users.

  “Since she has a photographic memory, this is only a snippet of what she could have learned over the days, weeks, months,” Darsie continued. “The last image is most damning.”

  Wyatt flipped, and there was Hi Kyto on the Tor browser, searching for recovery groups in California.

  “Days later, Encyte, armed with knowledge of the crippling effects of addiction, lured Daniel Acoda to strike the match that caused the biggest wildfire in California’s history. And,” Darsie said, pausing, “Encyte contacted Daniel through a chat group in Tor.”

  Jalen waited a few minutes to respond. “This topic is pretty common … there are a lot of people who have these addictions. Maybe she was looking for—”

  “For what? She works for me. She’s a student. Sure, maybe taken in isolation, this means nothing, but this is a very strong coincidence, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Jalen blinked, not sure if it was disappointment or fear he was feeling. What if he couldn’t do this? Darsie, though he’d suspected the worst, clearly didn’t want to believe it, either.

  “I’m sorry,” Wyatt said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Darsie snapped. “Just get to the bottom of this. Jalen, stay on her. Get me something definitive. I just want to move on.”

  CHAPTER 42

  It doesn’t have to mean anything. On the sofa, Jalen stared at the ceiling, thinking of what he would say to Hi Kyto, his motivations oscillating from anxiety to rage in light of what Darsie had shown him. Sure, it didn’t look good, but it wasn’t enough to convince him yet, so he turned the words over in his mind until he thought he’d crafted the perfect text:

  Hey, just got here. What r you doing?

  “That was lame, wasn’t it?” Jalen looked at Wyatt. “Maybe I should say something funny.”

  “Just chill.” Wyatt came over from the kitchen, took the phone, and set it down. “She’ll write back.”

  Seconds later, the cell vibrated across the coffee table. Bzzzzzz.

  “Told you,” Wyatt said as Jalen opened the text.

  Was wondering what took you so long. LOL. Wanna see my internship space?

  Jalen felt a smile creep across his face. Hi Kyto actually wanted to hang out with him. She was looking forward to it. Then he felt a flash of guilt. He wasn’t just hanging out with her, he was spying on her. He texted back.

  Yes! Just getting settled.

  Gotcha. Meet me here in the morning. Her response included a pin drop in the heart of the downtown tech scene near the new AT&T stadium.

  “We’re in.” Jalen looked up at Wyatt and flopped back down on the couch. “You’re gonna be with me, right?”

  “Yeah, bud. The whole way.”

  * * *

  “But I thought you were in school,” Jalen asked as they walked into the tech campus.

  “I am in school.” Hi Kyto flashed her badge to a security guard, who herded them through the metal detectors with a distracted wave. “Yeah, I’m a student, but it’s my summer internship. Well, I work year-round,” she said, leading them into the large, almost futuristic lobby. “My boss—you know, the guy who funds my fellowship at Stanford—this is his building.”

  Jalen followed her, looking back over his shoulder through the glass doors leading outside to a courtyard with a Japanese-inspired rock garden where the overwhelmingly young employees from the various businesses in the Red Trident building took breaks, pacing among serene stones, frantically typing on their phones, blasting music through their headphones, and grimacing in the rare San Francisco summer sun. Wyatt blended into the crowd, wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, and backpack slung over his shoulder.

  “Hey, dude,” Wyatt said in the earbud. “Security’s pretty tight. Not going to be able to follow you in. I’ll be at the café across the street. The one where Hi Kyto was in the video Darsie showed us … Scratch your head if you copy,” Wyatt said.

  Jalen smiled at Hi Kyto, trying to act normal as h
e rubbed the back of his head, giving the signal. “So this is the stomping grounds of the infamous Hi Kyto,” he said to her.

  “That’s my handle, but at work, they call me Julie.”

  “But everyone knows, right?”

  “That I’m a gamer? Sure.”

  “That you’re one of the most famous gamers playing today.”

  She nodded.

  “Bet it’s hard. At school, being recognized everywhere you go.”

  “Sometimes. But truthfully, I’m not all that special. I mean, sure, I’m smart.”

  “Yeah—uh, ‘brilliant’ I believe is the word,” Jalen said and saw her blush.

  “Whatever.” Hi Kyto rolled her eyes. “For much of my life parents and teachers have put me up on a pedestal, but at Stanford I’m far from the smartest kid on campus, often not the smartest in the room. And I like that. Let me take you upstairs.”

  She led him to a big elevator and they whizzed up to the seventh floor. “Like everyone else in the Bay Area,” Hi Kyto continued her tour, “my boss had a company that he sold for a lot of money, which he then invested in a bunch of other companies that are now worth a ton of money. Anyway, I work for one of those companies.”

  The elevator dinged and they stepped out. Below them, the Red Trident operations center, where dozens of people milled around on the floor. To his surprise, the people fell into different age categories. Some of them, like Hi Kyto, looked like they were in their late teens, but Jalen knew in actuality they must have been in their early twenties, maintaining a sort of nerdy, late-pubescent aurora about them. Then there was the grown nerd meets prepster who moved about confidently. The final third of people in the building were old—late thirties, forties, fifties. Soft-looking adults with round bellies stuffed into too-tight jeans and hoodies. Jalen had this feeling that everyone, even the old geezers, were putting on a show, doing this imitation of entrepreneur. He was surprised to see that even among the best and brightest, a group mentality seemed to predominate.

  “Hands down the best perk about working here is the food,” Hi Kyto said, grabbing a bottle of sparkling water from a long ice chest. “Everything’s catered. Hungry?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Jalen said. “Starving, actually.”

  Jalen grabbed an omelette and sausage, and Hi Kyto opted for a pastry and a coffee. Jalen got a fresh orange juice, overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices in Red Trident’s café, which was more like a three-star restaurant. On the same floor where you could order anything you wanted for breakfast, lunch, or dinner 24/7, you could also get a haircut; play pool, Ping-Pong, or cornhole; or step into one of the several gaming centers.

  “Yeah, so I work a lot,” Hi Kyto said.

  “Where?” Wyatt looked around at the sea of high-end cubicles.

  “In a lab. I’ll take you by, but I can’t let you in.”

  “Big secrets goin’ on in there, huh?” Jalen smiled, trying to flirt, but also knowing he needed as much information about that lab as possible.

  “Yeah. But even as much as I work, there are people here who literally never leave. See that guy.” She nodded to a man in a silver jumpsuit. “They call him the desk troll.”

  “Why troll?”

  “Because he sleeps under his desk.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No one knows why he does it because we have sleeping quarters, if you ever want to crash here.”

  “Cool,” Jalen said.

  “Dude, see if she wants to go somewhere,” Wyatt broke into Jalen’s earbud. “You’ve seen her world, now get her out of it.”

  Jalen cleared his throat. “Uh…”

  “You want Hi Kyto out of her environment, her normal routine,” Wyatt coached. “Let her experience something real and then she might confide in you.”

  “Wanna get out of here?” Jalen said to Hi Kyto.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leave. Go find something to do. Doesn’t all the Wi-Fi around here start to feel like it’s burning your brain? Let’s take a hike or something.”

  “A hike?” she said. “Like walk in the woods?”

  “Yeah, like over the Golden Gate Bridge. I hear there’s a park.”

  “That could be fun, but I want you to meet someone first,” she said. “Remember I was saying that I’m not that brilliant?”

  “Yeah, I do. And you’re not a good liar.”

  Hi Kyto laughed. “Whatever. Well, I want you to meet someone who’s truly brilliant. He’s actually a student at Stanford—but a graduate student—not undergrad like me,” Hi Kyto said, leading them to the elevators.

  They went down to the fourth floor and through another security checkpoint into a less secure area. “So wait, what’s that all about?”

  “Remember I told you my boss owns the building?”

  Jalen nodded.

  “Well, I work for his security company, Red Trident. He has several other businesses housed here, but some of them have less stringent security requirements. It’s kinda the deal with this one.”

  “Okay,” Jalen said, following her down a long hall. They walked past a room that instantly took Jalen back to a more comfortable place. The air was damper, smellier. The clean, almost sterile decor of the Red Trident facility fell away and was replaced with tattered posters that smacked of public school as they entered a start-up called Ocean Guardian.

  Although the medium varied, plastered on the walls and everywhere around them was one specific theme—the ocean—in watercolors and vintage postcards, even indoor graffiti. The employees, who looked decidedly more like surfers than the tech goons on the seventh floor, all smiled at Hi Kyto as she walked inside.

  “In my opinion,” Hi Kyto whispered, “this is the coolest start-up in the building.” The guys and girls in the space all stood at drafting tables, working on designs. At the back of the room, up on a platform, was the head table, which was occupied by a tall, handsome man who looked somewhere between nineteen and twenty-four. His long, dark hair framed the sides of his face as he studied a drawing.

  “That’s the brilliant guy you wanted me to meet?” Jalen asked, not bothering to mask the annoyance in his tone.

  But Hi Kyto hadn’t heard the question, striding over to the good-looking guy on the elevated desk. “Morgan, this is Jalen. He’s a gamer friend of mine.” She smiled at Jalen. “Morg’s going to save the world.”

  “Morgan Whittendale.” The guy reached his hand out to shake Jalen’s. “And I don’t know about the whole world, but we’re gonna start with the oceans.”

  “Morg,” Hi Kyto said. “You’ve got to tell Jalen about Ocean Guardian.”

  “Love to.” He flashed his polished white teeth. “First, I’ve just got to finish this sketch and send it to manufacturing in Singapore. Just give me five minutes … Grab a tea and I’ll join you guys by the beanbags.”

  Within Ocean Guardian, Wyatt had noticed a sitting area where a cluster of people looked like they were squatting on the ground. Upon closer look, he realized it was a beanbag-themed lobby.

  “In fact, I’ll take a pu’er myself,” Morg said. “If you don’t mind letting it steep for me.”

  Hi Kyto poured two teas, one for herself and one for Morg. She extended the pot to Wyatt, who politely shook his head.

  “Shoot,” Morgan said, scrolling on his Apple Watch. “Gotta deal with something. Be right back.” He jogged off to the other side of the room.

  Jalen, having already worked up an appetite from his stroll around Darsie-ville, was also starving. He scarfed down a gluten-free cookie and pounded a Red Bull, and they both fell back into the beanbag chairs, waiting a good forty-five minutes until Morg returned.

  “Sooooo sorry, guys…” Morg said as he strode over and sat down. “We’re trying to launch Phase Two of our project. I’m just completely behind.” He’d fastened his hair back into a ponytail, allowing part of his bangs to fall, hugging his perfectly symmetrical face.

  He lifted the tea to his lips and frowned. He sign
aled his assistant. “This is cold. Can I have a new one? Well,” Morg said, turning to Jalen. “So this all got started when I was fifteen. At the time, I was studying neuroscience and wanting to follow my hero, Robert Sapolsky, into the field of primatology. Well, I was surfing one day and I saw a dead sea turtle. An adult leatherback—a gorgeous, highly endangered creature. It had ingested a plastic bag, likely mistaking it for a jellyfish. For no reason but someone’s laziness, it died a painful death … left to float and rot on the surf. It was awful, and I decided then that I had to do something to make a change in this world, and I would start with the oceans.”

  Jalen looked over at Hi Kyto, seeing in her face what was clearly admiration.

  “I’m sure you’re aware of the miles and miles of the plastic in our oceans today.” His spiel began like the introduction of a nature documentary. “Well, the first stage is to clean that up. So we’re launching the world’s largest recycling project.”

  “Tell him about the fleet,” Hi Kyto said.

  “Yeah, so we have a fleet of boats armed with nets. And on the back of our boats are mini solar-powered recycling facilities … So basically, we compact trash with solar-powered compactors, making it into a string of blocks that we can pull behind our oceanographic vessels. We call it the Tail of Life.”

  Morgan paused to accept a fresh cup of tea from an enthusiastic young assistant. “So when the Tail of Life gets beyond ten miles long—instead of burning fossil fuels to tow it back—we set in motion a sea anchor and we combine all the Tails together in what we call an Ocean Harvest. With multiple tails connected front to back, we make what’s effectively a giant raft of plastic. We then use water brakes and inflatable sail technology to let the prevailing westerly winds blow this giant flotilla, once assembled, back to a major city in the United States—Portland, Seattle.”

  “So, Morg,” Jalen said, putting an almost sarcastic emphasis on the nickname. “What if it doesn’t go?”

  “Well, if need be,” Morgan’s friendly surfer tone teetered on irritation, “we can pull it back into the harbor. But I’m not inclined to do that, because I’d like to see it work with zero carbon footprint.” He thought a minute. “Actually, it’s not really zero because of the plastics we’re taking out of the ocean … there’s a massive negative carbon footprint.”