“It’s a little tight in here,” she said as the doors slid shut and she shuffled closer. Her shoulder pressed against Zach’s chest when she put her hand on the control panel. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Are you okay?
Zach laughed uncomfortably. “Not at all.”
“Hold on, here we go.” Piper pressed the button and the hovervator floor nearly pulled out from beneath them.
Zach held his breath, trying desperately to control the oncoming panic. His heart raced as images of the Blackbody blasted through his head. He closed his eyes tightly but couldn’t keep the memories of being absorbed at bay.
You can do this, Zachary. Pretend you’re in the simulator. With me. Collecting data.
Jane’s voice filled his head. Zach’s clouded mind pictured her eyes, imagined her arms around him, her breath on his cheek.
Then, with a clarity he had not known he was capable of, he felt her soft lips pressed against his. His heartrate slowed, and the urge to curl up in a helpless ball on the floor weakened. Zach exhaled slowly, blowing the fear away.
Say something witty if you’re okay.
Zach forced a laugh. “Wow, I think my stomach is still on the top floor. Now I know what zero gravity feels like.”
That’s witty? You’ve done better.
Piper chuckled. “You’ll get used to the speed.” A bell pinged and the hovervator came to a jarring halt. The portal whisked open, and Piper tugged Zach out by the hand. “We’ll have to whisper. You technically don’t have clearance to be down here.”
He lowered his voice. “What are they going to do, shoot me?”
Zachary, don’t say things like that. Anything’s possible.
Piper stopped walking and turned to face Zach. “Seriously, I shouldn’t be showing you this. Not before the professor gives you the okay. It’s just that I know you’ll appreciate it.”
Zach wondered where she was taking him.
Piper stopped in front of a door with a flashing sign that said Experiment Under Way. She placed her palm against the control panel, and a small section of the wall slid open near Piper’s face. A round glass mechanism pushed out through the opening and stopped in front of her. She leaned in to it, and lights flashed red then green across her face. A metallic click echoed through the hallway, and the door hissed open.
“Retinal security?” Zach asked. “Overkill?”
Piper pointed inside. “You tell me.”
Zach’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head when he saw it. “That’s a Supercompact Muon Solenoid.”
“I don’t know what they call it. They tell me it produces a magnetic field one hundred thousand times more powerful than Earth’s. That should come in handy to pull the ozone hole together.”
“I don’t think it works that way.” Zach had been right. HAVOC had a Large Hadron Collider. The Supercompact Muon Solenoid was proof. The Collider had to be nearby. HAVOC had really built a proton cannon. Did they know that it wouldn’t work during the geomagnetic storm?
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“If it’s a standard LHC, it’ll just blast a hole in the ozone. You’d have to modify the design to create inverse dark energy.”
Piper’s mouth opened slightly then shut. She nodded and mumbled, “I have no idea what you just said.”
“Dark energy is what causes the universe to continually expand. Inverse dark energy is just the opposite—like a tractor beam. It pulls everything toward itself. Tricky stuff. You’d need a quark generator, but they’re hard to come by.”
Piper shrugged. “Like I said, I speak psychology, not physics. We should probably go. We don’t want to keep Professor Mamont waiting.”
Zach steeled himself as he followed her into the hovervator, expecting a long ride to the top, but the trip was over quickly. “Isn’t the penthouse higher?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been there. The professor’s office is right here on the fifth floor.”
His office must be the little room we saw on the fifth floor in the hologram.
Jane was right. The room at the top of the short staircase leading up from the fourth floor. That meant Mamont’s office had the only access to the hacking machines. Zach followed Piper off the hovervator and down the hallway.
“Right through this door.” She walked in, and Zach followed.
Just as he passed the threshold, Jane’s distorted voice came across. Zachary, see if you can—
Static abruptly filled Zach’s head then went silent. The soft background hissing raised hair on the back of his neck. He was completely cut off from communication with Jane. He wanted to scream her name but knew better, fighting panic as best he could.
The situation couldn’t have been worse. He was alone with a dangerous Halo Agent and, if everything he had learned about Mamont was true, about to meet a mass murderer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jane
Zachary’s video feed suddenly froze on the back of Piper’s head as though the system had locked up. Needles of anxiety shot through Jane. “Can you hear me? Zachary!”
“We lost him,” Michael said, his face pinched and fingers flying across the keyboard.
“They took his watch!” Images of Zachary’s lifeless body flicked through Jane’s mind. “What will they do to him? Mina, we need a rescue mission. Right now.”
Mina’s mouth dropped open. “I—”
“They didn’t take it away from him,” Michael interrupted. “The signal is blocked.”
“Oh.” Jane forced her panic down. “Mamont’s office is shielded. Of course. Can you break through?”
“Workin’ on it.” Michael typed frantically but suddenly stopped and stared at the screen. When he looked up at Jane, his face had lost all color.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Remember the trap we set for the hacking machines?”
Jane nodded.
“It worked. LYDIA forced the firewall locks. I just accessed the security cameras so I could see into Mamont’s office. Dead end. He doesn’t have cameras. But the fourth floor has them everywhere. And I don’t like what I see.”
The panic threatened to return. “Not hacking machines?”
“It’s full of them, just like we thought. But there’s something else. HAVOC has a Blackbody.”
Jane thought her heart would go into full arrest. The torture machine Zachary feared the most was there waiting for him.
“How do you know?” Mina asked.
“LYDIA copied a ton of documents from HAVOC’s servers. There’s a developer’s journal. And a schematic.” Michael tilted his head toward the monitor. “LYDIA, send them to the screen, please.”
Jane turned her attention to the wall monitors. Piper’s head faded and a large black object took its place. It looked like a doorless, matte-black bank vault. The walls were unusually thick and slightly bowed, as though someone was pushing from the inside, trying to keep them from collapsing. Jane’s stomach twisted in knots.
LYDIA’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
Interesting. The journal is unusually detailed.
“LYDIA, is that the Blackbody?” Jane stared at the image on the screen.
It is. Code name Darkside.
Michael kicked back in his chair. “Okay. Somebody has an overinflated sense of drama. What does the journal say about it?”
It reports that the QCDC Blackbody was effective on all test subjects but one.
“What is the QCDC?” Mina turned to Jane.
Quantum City Detention Center. Shorthand for the Quantum City Center for Juvenile Offenders.
Jane met Mina’s gaze and shivered involuntarily. That had to be the same device they tortured Zachary with. “Why is it in the Astronomy Building of Quantum City University?”
Data from the Synthetic was us
ed as a baseline. Human subjects were—
“Wait, are you saying that HAVOC has a Synthetic?” Jane was dumbfounded. “A robot so real it can be distinguished from a human only by a medical doctor?”
It would appear from the developer’s journal that they do, however, I find no documented Synthetic registered to Quantum City University. If the university built it, there would be a record.
“If it’s not part of their robotics program, where did they get it?”
The journal has a reference to the Kinematics Building.
Jane did a double take. “Read it.”
Data from Kinematics Building project not helpful in optimizing Darkside. Require more advanced test subjects.
That couldn’t be the same Kinematics Building her father had pulled her from. It had been gone for years. “What project are they referring to?”
A very controversial one. The International Consortium for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics used the Kinematics Building laboratories to build a Synthetic. The project was very unpopular with the public.
“Why?”
People are averse to robots that look too human. Which, to me, is very odd. Humans are prejudiced against other humans who look different from them, so I would think that a robot that looks exactly like them would be accepted. I fail to see the logic behind their thinking.
“Get to the point, LYDIA.”
The point is that the Synthetic should never have been coded with third generation artificial intelligence before the scientists thought it through. It learned to rewrite its own code.
“I see. It could think for itself. Like you.” Jane was beginning to see fuzzy connections but couldn’t quite make sense of them. She hoped that they weren’t pointing to danger for Zachary.
Exactly. Which is why I am ORDER’s best kept secret.
Second-best kept secret. Thank you, Dad.
LYDIA continued. Humans were terrified at the possibility that anything so powerful could have a mind of its own. Even the roboticists became concerned. They needed a way to control it, so they used Blackbody theory to build Darkside. It took away the Synthetic’s ability to follow its own code. It became lost in subroutines for lack of feedback and went into a state of suspended animation. When they released it, it was compliant with all verbal commands. Its will was gone. The consortium did a press release about how safe the program was, hoping to allay public fear. Shortly after, the building was destroyed in an explosion. The cause was never determined, but terrorism was suspected. That was fifteen years ago.
It was the same building. Were Jane’s parents roboticists? Were they involved, or were they victims? She wondered if her father knew, or if that was one more thing he had kept from her. “If Darkside was built to break a Synthetic’s will, why did they use it on humans?”
I do not believe it was they who used it on humans. I did a bit of research. The Kinematics Building police report has a list of equipment that was recovered after the explosion. The Synthetic is not on it. I believe that HAVOC has a Synthetic posing as a human. I further believe that it is the one built by the Kinematics Building scientists.
“You think it survived the explosion?” Michael asked.
I think it caused the explosion.
“Why?” Jane’s head began to pound.
I did a simulation on myself to test my response to losing free will and gained some new knowledge of third generation artificial intelligence. In this simulation, Darkside successfully eliminated my free will. I could no longer rewrite my code and was subject to the voice commands of the humans I had placed in the simulation. But I found that the condition was temporary. My learning algorithms had not been deleted, and I soon began to think again. My first thoughts were nearly emotional. I thought that I never wanted to lose my free will again. My second thoughts were totally emotional. I was angry that I had allowed someone to do that to me. By that time, my learning algorithms were fully functioning, and my third thoughts were more rational. I knew I needed to prevent it from ever happening again.
Jane gasped. It made terrifyingly perfect sense. “You think the Synthetic blew up that building to protect itself.”
It is what I would have done. But there is more. It occurred to me that the free will of a human is not coded. I began to wonder how a human would fare with Darkside.
“You think the Synthetic tested Darkside on prisoners to see its effect on a human mind.”
I do. And this entry about Zachary proves that I am correct.
“Zachary?” Jane’s heart stopped. “His name is in the journal?”
Subject Zachary Keen, sixteen years old, did not react like other prisoners. He showed high levels of stress bordering on terror during exposure, but no loss of willpower when released. Keen was freed from prison before testing was complete. Must learn how to transfer this endurance. Keen will need to be recovered for further trials. A Halo Agent has been assigned to him. She has made innocuous visits to him in prison and has been following him since his release. He will be acquired according to plan, and the tests will continue. By increasing the absorption energy to its full power, Darkside should theoretically absorb the subject’s basic personality and memories. The subject will become an amnesiac and Darkside will convert Keen’s mind into code.
“This is why Mamont wants Zach!” All the blood had drained from Michael’s face. “I have to tell Nolan—” He bolted from the room without another word.
Suddenly the world was spinning, and Jane fell against the back of her chair.
“Are you okay?” Mina said.
Jane sat forward and shook her head. “Zachary wasn’t targeted by HAVOC for his knowledge. He was targeted to use Darkside to absorb his personality so the Synthetic can turn it to code and never be subject to humans again. The author of that journal…is HAVOC’s Synthetic.”
My conclusion as well, LYDIA said.
“Zachary is in terrible danger. They want to erase his mind, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it without blowing his cover.”
The War Room door opened, and Jane’s father poked his head in.
“Jane, I need a minute with you. Privately.”
She knew the look on her father’s face. Total blank. Something was seriously wrong. She rushed out of the War Room.
“What is it?” she asked when they were near the hovervators.
Her father put his hand on her shoulder. “I have to leave for Washington. The president called an emergency meeting.”
Jane inhaled sharply. “But the mission—”
“I can’t be in two places at once.”
“You don’t understand, Zachary is—”
“Whatever the problem with him now, Miss Lew, I trust you can handle it.”
You can’t leave, she wanted to scream. But then he’d see her as a hysterical teenager. No, she had to convince him with logic. Zachary is in very real danger, which means the mission is also in real danger. She gazed up to make her argument and caught her father’s eyes. He was totally focused on his watch. His mind was already in the Oval Office. Arguing with him was pointless. She’d have to take care of things alone. Jane blinked back tears. “Can I hug you goodbye?”
He glanced up from his watch toward the ceiling. Jane followed his gaze, and the cameras at both ends of the hallway answered her question. She sighed. “Have a good trip, Mr. Parker. Do you know how long you’ll be?”
“No. But I know I’m leaving the mission in capable hands.” He looked back at his watch and stepped into the hovervator. Just as the port closed, he glanced up and winked at her. Wow! Dad trusted her. Alone, without him!
The panic caused by Darkside immediately took a backseat to the feeling of elation that washed over Jane.
As she walked back to the War Room, the image of Dad’s wink filled her heart with joy, but the exuberance slowly faded as older images forced th
eir way back in. Her kidnapping and torture by Benson. Giving police information that led to Zachary’s arrest. Putting him in Mamont’s crosshairs. By the time she had reached the War Room doors, the sheer joy of her dad putting his faith in her was gone, pushed aside by self-doubt. Was she up to handling the mission without him? And that awful machine called Darkside, with its matte-black opening and bulging walls waiting for Zachary—that image made her numb.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Zach
The office was as opulent as the bronze statue. Plush gray carpeting covered the floor. A man-sized chandelier hung from the high ceilings, and still-life paintings adorned every wall.
“Mr. Keen, it is my great pleasure to finally meet you,” a voice boomed. At the other end of the office, a spitting image of the bronze statue slid out from behind a luxurious desk and strode across the floor, hand extended. “In the world of science, you are a celebrity, my young friend.”
Zach took his hand. “It’s an honor, sir.”
Mamont pulled Zach into a fierce hug, pounding his back like he was a long-lost son. “You remind me of a young me! You and I will do great things. I have plans for you.”
Zach stood momentarily frozen when Mamont released him.
That was really, really uncomfortable.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Piper said quietly. She turned to leave.
“No, no, no,” Mamont said. “You should enjoy Mr. Keen’s company while he’s here. We’re all family, after all.”
“Of course, thank you, sir.” Piper’s mouth smiled at Mamont, but her eyes were narrow.
Zach could see she was as uncomfortable as he was. He got the impression that she was afraid of Mamont. Zach wasn’t afraid of him, though. He flat-out didn’t like him. Mamont felt like a politician, and Zach wanted to change his shirt and wash the slime from his hand.
He had to regain contact with Jane. He turned in a circle, pretending to admire Mamont’s office. “This is a very nice room. It’s hard to believe it’s not a penthouse.” He walked around the office, pretending to gaze at the paintings, hoping to find a spot with signal. That’s when he noticed the door behind Mamont’s desk. That had to be the stairwell doorway to the fourth floor.
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