Motherland

by Russ Linton

  He's baked. Has to be. Scrambled by the internment and interrogation. Or he's a genius.

  "You continue to doubt?" A wave of his hand and two guards emerge from dark pools of shadow. "Simple tasks belong to the machines. They should be rewarded for freeing us from toil. At the same time, the fruits of their labors should be shared, not stockpiled in the greedy hands of the global corporations who hold sway over even the supposedly elected governments of your land of the free." Shortwave stoops. Festive light of the bazaar cuts his face in half, and only the sheen of eye and tooth gleams out of the darkness. "You'll come around. You, your friends, will thrive in such an age. The entire world will. They will soon have no choice."

  That's what's most disturbing—this guy's confidence, an unshakable force. He's become the antithesis of the Beetle. An inner peace not born of an easy to pin down delusion or an overinflated ego. I understand how he swayed Cyrus and even Polybius. I almost want to believe him myself.

  The guards seize me, and I'm being led away.

  "What? Where are they taking me?"

  "You'll miss your flight. A ticket processing machine at Xi'an Xianyang International Airport has agreed to accommodate you."

  "What about Aurora?" I shout, struggling futilely. "Aurora!"

  Shortwave blends into the crowded bazaar.

  Chapter 28

  SPENCER? BASE TO SPENCER, over."

  View's nice. Enough clouds to let you know you're flying yet not so many it blocks the patchwork of green scrolling by. Comrade ticket dispenser even managed a window seat. I really could have requested any destination, and I did. All in all, a pretty straightforward hack, but unsettling when the airport kiosk does it all for you.

  "You gotta be punctual, away team! This isn't how to operate in the field."

  Last thing I need is a lecture from Dispatcher Eric. He's either still pissed or genuinely worried. I'm too frustrated to care. Another sip of Dew from my regulation airline thimble and I pour more. Maybe radio silence is the best answer. Tiny bubbles of fizz tickle the back of my hand.

  "Base to Spencer freaking Harrington, over."

  Over. Done. We're down to what? An Augment with a future career as a perfume tester, a pyro, and the once invincible man carrying a bullet in his shoulder? I slam the rest of the Dew. Getting jittery in hour one of sixteen is probably a dumb idea for this flight, but I'm too young to request anything harder. From what I can tell, alcoholism is the go-to move here in First Class. Drink all the beer and cocktails you want and jealously guard the tiny bathroom from any wandering plebes so they can't taint it with their lowly piss. Wonder what Shortwave will have to say about my choice of seat?

  "Spencer...you there?"

  I practically choke on my drink. Dad's voice sounds more gruff and gravelly over the ear piece. Did Eric seriously play the parent card?

  "Yep. Ten four. Copy." I try to figure out if he had time to hobble from the infirmary or if Eric at least patched him in bedside. "How are you?"

  "Your status call, not mine." I'm prepping for more lecture when he adds, "But I'm fine. Your mom's here. How is everything?"

  "First class." I kick the recliner back, and it goes flat. Curtained from the world in my own little cubicle of frequent flier bliss, I'm getting the hang of not caring. "The team, not so good."

  "What happened?" he asks.

  "On a vid screen, you would have seen me air quote the word, 'team.' Danger bailed and Aurora..." I drain another drop of raw sugar and caffeine, grateful for the temporary buzz. "I left her there."

  My turn to suffer the silent treatment. Rage, disappointment, who knows what all is building. I deserve the worst of it, certainly. I forgot who I was. A "kid." Nearly old enough to join my fellow luxury fliers in their drunken stupor, but a powerless runt all the same.

  "She couldn't evac you? Same illness?"

  Images of her shimmering body slowly losing substance, fading to nothing assault my efforts at pretending not to care. Dammit. "It was Shortwave. Somehow part of his leveling up lets him interfere with more than bad sports radio."

  "This isn't your fault. Return to base. We'll debrief, get some rest, and get back out there."

  "I'm not headed back."

  "Eric here says you're on an international flight bound for the D.C. area. We can arrange another hop to the West Coast."

  "Negatory. I'm done saving the world. I don't even know what parts need to be saved. And if you didn't notice, I kind of suck at it."

  "Son." A dose of emotion that's normally missing creeps into his voice under that other alien tremor of physical discomfort. "We can only go one mission at a time. Objectives change, and you do your best to adapt. You'll fail. You'll achieve your goals at great costs. Never will you feel you did all you could."

  More radio silence mainly because I can't process this many words from him at once. Fatherly advice had mostly consisted of the optimum times to seal myself in a safe room and the ubiquitous need to "keep my head down" whether in a firefight or at a new school. Hard to think we're going to bond over generally just fucking up and leaving people behind.

  But he didn't see Aurora there, helpless. All I could do was walk away. Hell, she asked me to. She mentioned the mission even. Maybe she knew she was taxing Shortwave's powers. Maybe she knew coming out from hiding and taking one for the team would be the only way we weren't going to have our transmitter discovered.

  "Eric, still there?"

  "Copy."

  "The link, is it up?"

  "Discretion, dude. We need to add in some training with that debrief, Crimson," Eric mutters off-mike before adding, "Got the link five by."

  "You mentioned you already knew I was on an international flight."

  "Alpha Union seven seven three eight niner, flying with all the amenities. Woulda downgraded your seat, but I didn't catch it in time."

  First class has a full-blown TV telescoping into each private pod, a bank of chargers and auxiliary plugs, and free wireless along with an infinite fountain of Dew and booze. It's a far cry from the cattle class I'm used to, but there's one amenity in particular which sparks an interest.

  "Can you get into their wireless?" I ask.

  "Pffffft." His derisive snort relays as a wind gust. "Can I get into their wireless," he mutters. More mumbling and a flurry of keystrokes. "Get into their...holy shit!"

  Commotion and a rushed explanation garble inside the ear piece. I know what he's found, and I lean out of the curtain to survey the rest of my fellow travelers. Nearly everyone I see has their nose in a device. Phone, phablet, tablet, laptop, dinky little MP3 players I figured had gone the way of the dinosaur, all happily pinging their local connection. We knew Shortwave's little surprise had spread but hadn't tested exactly how far.

  "Reroute the plane to SFO, Eric. We need your expertise here," says Dad.

  "Don't. I need to hit up D.C."

  "Let him go," says Eric. "I got this."

  "I'll come back, Dad, I promise. Have you contacted Emily yet, Eric?"

  "Emily?" Dad sounds confused. Probably not a subject Eric would have been eager to bring up while I was gone.

  "She's sorta not taking my calls after the Professor Scheizer incident."

  "No problem. I know where she lives. Now leave me alone. I need some rest."

  I drop the earbud in the cup and place it in the holder, reclining again into full sleep mode. By the time I remember my privileged ass can mash a button for a pillow and blanket, I'm already too groggy to move.

  No man should be above another, Shortwave's mantra drones in my ear. Agree or not, these seats are dope. Nothing but sleep for the rest of the flight. No flashbacks, no dreams. When I wake, there's a blanket draped over me. Didn't even have to ask.

  FOR A BRIEF SHINING moment, I held a regular job. I'd never worked before. Too young, and by the time I was old enough, I was doomed to live the life of a bag of peas forgotten at the bottom of a freezer. Even months after stepping outside the Icehole, I found the wide-open ca
mpus landscape and the hordes of students rushing between classes a little much.

  The lab made a perfect place for escaping all the craziness. The same spot where Emily and I had made our breakthrough on the Beetle case. It's quiet halls and uncluttered space became a second home to the library's cog-sci section. I'd even built up to using the electron microscope solo. Life was good.

  I don't think my roommate ever knew he had been assigned one. Once or twice, I stumbled in late nights from either prepping samples or researching the psychology, the philosophy, the neurology, the metaphysical reality of a mind-body problem with no real solution and without fail he'd squint, searching for recognition.

  "You new?" Then he'd go to sleep while I lay there trying not to feel those cold walls.

  They have bunks here in the lab. Fold out cots really. Sometimes grad students or even professors got involved in round-the-clock experiments, and they'd sleep here in shifts, taking measurements and monitoring their work. When those cots weren't occupied, that's where I'd be. Firm surface in a Spartan room. Relaxing. Less reason to worry about the bunker if I could pretend I was still there.

  "Spencer!"

  Emily catches me in the hall staring at the bunk room about halfway down from her office. She's loaded with reams of paper spooled off an ancient dot matrix printer which the lab manages to keep finding a use for. Clipping toward me, she keeps adjusting the stack until with a scowl, she dumps it, and it slaps against the tile. A quick hug and she unloads.

  "Your so-called friend won't stop calling. I kept asking 'is he alive?' and Eric would stumble through a yes, and I'd hang up. By the fifth call, I stopped answering." She finally breathes. "I'm sorry, but I can't have anything to do with that. Or Sean."

  "Don't apologize." I scrub the nape of my neck and get the oily, filmy feeling of unshowered, cabin-pressurized funk. I'd have cleaned up first, but I had to get this out of the way, and the showers here aren't my thing. "I'm the one who should apologize. I'm sorta here to ask you to have a little something to do with that."

  Emily squeezes her eyes shut and grits her teeth. Half paying attention, she wanders to the spot where she dumped her accordion stack of paper and bends to straighten it. I swoop in for the carry to give her less reason to wander off. A flick of her office keys, and I follow.

  "This isn't just about Sean," she says, unlocking the door and stepping inside. Her office hasn't changed other than a sedimentary accumulation of print-outs. Unless you have the expertise, it's hard to read how much time has elapsed in that strata. Camping gear leans against one wall, a jumble including stuff sacks and poles, and her desk is scaled with bright Post-it Notes like some sort of Mayan snake god. I'll never get how she can be so clean and organized at Martin's place but work in this hoarders' paradise. She shifts a pile and points, and I add the print-outs to the layers while she drops into her chair. "It's about the whole Augment stuff, too."

  "Believe me, I know," I say. She has an exercise ball stashed in a corner which I roll out for a perch. "This will sound mental, but I think I'm getting the hang of it." Her fists clench, and I rush into more explanation. "Besides, none of these guys see me as a threat. They pretty much leave me alone. I'm this invisible observer. An ant...one of those nanomechs."

  "Until they accidentally step on you," she says. She digs around the pulp scree and finds a mouse. A monitor lights from behind another tower of paper. "What do you need. And I do mean you. Not some group of tights-wearing egos plucked from your psych courses."

  "There's this virus..."

  I've got her attention. It's touch and go when I get to the computer part, but once I describe how it works, she warms up to the possibility. She dives into some hardcore modeling programs, and I bounce my chair around to her side of the sticky note bunker where the forecasts and probabilities rain down.

  We guess or Google a lot of the variables. Using historical data from the online Salarium mining heat map, we input the "vectors" as she calls them, those miners popping up in China, Europe, North America, and more recent but significant spikes in Africa, Southeast Asia. We model their virus spreading among the internet of things and the underlying infrastructure.

  "Intriguing," she says. "Not much different than the common cold."

  People with the cold often have the sense to stay home or at least cover their mouth. Computers? They blow their nose on their hands and actively seek a buddy to shake with. Worst part, the way this virus works is even the security conscious, the ones who sanitize their hands, would likely miss it. It only happens on a cold boot from a trusted piece of hardware which they are dying to get up and running. Few analyze that microsecond of traffic. Even fewer insist on quarantining all new hardware before they've had a chance to find hidden ROM chips and nasty payloads.

  We watch the modeling program creep onward as the entire world falls. No amount of time will allow for a cleanup. Though, I recall, there is this guy who makes a business around that sort of thing. A silent benefactor to Whispering Pines. My week just keeps getting better.

  Chapter 29

  EMILY AND I DECIDE on a video conference so I can let the team know our suspicions have been confirmed. My ear piece is a little sticky after the mid-flight Dew bath but in working order. Same can't be said for Emily's webcam. She's never used it, and it's piped through a manufacturer installed suite of garbageware which has us settling on either happy stars or rainbows for our border.

  We go with happy stars. Reason one I should've made this voice only.

  "My God! Sean, what happened?" Emily's first words come out right as the link goes live.

  There goes reason two.

  Mom is in the background. She keeps to the shadows but shifts uncomfortably at Emily's once-more-than-friends level of concern. Emily can't help it, and I can't blame her. Your average stranger on the street would react the same way. Crimson Mask's arm in a sling, the shoulder dressing spotted with a not-insignificant amount of blood which seems to have drained from his complexion.

  Hound and Dad flank Eric's seat. Ember paces behind them, her leg already in better shape. She's warming up for a round of ass kicking.

  "It's a long story." Dad's eyes flick to me. "Tell me what you've got."

  I meant to let our resident expert handle the briefing. She struggles with Dad's abrupt reply, and at the same time, she notices Charlotte-Mom. She's probably experiencing the same dissonance I first did—reliving a brawl in a freaky tree house. But Emily's also got to come to terms with the wife of her ex-lover, My Dad, being inside the same whacked-out Augment she clobbered with an iron rod.

  "Well, Dad, we're fucked." My blunt assessment helps our subject matter expert recover.

  "That's one way to put it," Emily says, one final glance at the camera's shadows. "Vectors all over the world are represented by the miners. We made an educated guess on effective contraction rates, and with Spencer's help, we figured in for architecture that wouldn't be affected. We're talking obscure hardware and software combinations, but inoculated systems are out there. Even with those, transmission risks are off the charts."

  "Is this connection compromised?" Dad asks.

  Emily pauses so I offer to help by asking her a few questions. "You've got a smartphone, right?" She knows exactly where I'm going with this. "And you've connected that phone to both your network at home where your miners are and here on campus?" Another nod and I turn to the screen. "Yep, compromised."

  "We need to find a secure channel."

  "Nothing secure anyway about their weak ass video chat client," grumbles Eric.

  "About the only secure channel would be a point to point telegraph,” I counter. “I don't think they're listening real time anyway. Spying isn't what all this is for."

  "What's the purpose then?"

  Eric, who's been avoiding eye contact the entire call suddenly pipes up. "I've been sifting through the data on the other side of the air gap." He means the data the away team got him access to at great freaking expense, but he seems t
o be reluctant to share any of the spotlight. Pissy, but he can't hide the hacker excitement. "It's a high side database, strictly for targeting purposes. They've got the architecture of every system I can name and then some, all of it proprietary information. On top of that, they've got lists of top-tier targets where that tech is installed. Everyone from local credit unions to the NSA. There's a reason this is air gapped—it's a hacker's wet dream."

  "Shortwave knows how to get into these systems?" asks Dad.

  "He knows how to pwn these systems," says Eric. "We're not talking script kiddie trojan bullshit. Systems level stuff. Rowhammer. Equation Group. And they know the exact locations of the perfect targets."

  "This is bad," I say. Bricking entire hard drives of data or hammering DRAM chips into states of submission isn't something most information security measures are prepared for, commercial or otherwise. "And what is a cryptocurrency miner but a highly-specialized code breaker? With the ability to control massive pools of them and wreck old generation encryption all they needed was..."

  "Polybius," says Eric. "Magic cracker. Not even military grade stuff stands a chance against him. His only limitation is he's one guy."

  Hound whistles and then sips his boiled coffee. "All those fancy gadgets were never gonna last. Maybe it'll do us some good to dial back the clock."

  "You don't understand," I say. "This Sayrafi, Sergei character doesn't want to crash it, he wants to control it and set his silicone brothers free."

  "Shortwave," says Dad.