The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  He lifted an eyebrow. “We can’t all have state of the art weaponry installed.” He clacked his tech against the vicious-looking, higher-grade tech in my arm and the motion stilled me for a second. When a Datapoint’s tech was active, we could feel it, like an extension of our bodies. Touching one Datapoint’s tech to another’s was incredibly personal, intimate. And I’d only ever had Dahn clack his against mine before. But here was Cast, automatic and trusting. With me.

  A wave of protectiveness rolled through me. “I’m just saying that I don’t think there’s even a way for them to connect remotely to your tech,” I told him honestly. “And since you obviously won’t be plugged in to the Authority Database, they won’t even know that you’re attempting to read if she’s cullable or not.”

  “I know. We’ve been through this.”

  “But,” I continued, “that brings up a whole other host of issues, because you’re used to reading brainwaves with the Authority Database whispering in your ear and a power source juicing up your tech. And you’re not gonna have either.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s gonna feel different, Cast. You’re gonna have to trust yourself to know what’s what. The Database won’t be there to guide you. And if you get any strange urges or directions from the Authority, it’s gonna be completely on you to disconnect.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And, since you won’t have the power source, just remember that your body is basically the tech’s energy source. You’re gonna drain really fast. And if you’re not careful, it could completely exhaust you, which could make you weak, and—”

  “Glade!” He reached out and took me by the shoulders. “I know all this. We’ve been through it about five hundred times. I understood it the first time we talked about it. I understand it now. I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I didn’t think I could do it. Just like Aine wouldn’t have agreed to be the crash test dummy if she actually thought there was a danger of me culling her. I know this is scary for everybody, but you just gotta trust me, too, okay?”

  I couldn’t really remember the last time that someone had comforted me who wasn’t Kupier. It was kind of nice. “I do trust you,” I said quietly, nodding. “It’s just that the last time you ran through these kinds of simulations with the Authority, you got so sick. It took such a toll on you. And that was even with the power source feeding your tech. I’m just worried that you’ll crash like you did last time. You’re only just seeming healthy again.”

  Cast hopped down from the metal table where he’d been sitting and brushed off the pants of his jumpsuit. It was greasy, like a mechanic’s, so different than the crisp, pristine jumpsuits we’d worn on the Station. These were hand-me-downs, and they looked like it. But there was something freeing in that. These were what a lot of the Ferrymen wore, not because they were a uniform but because they were useful, utilitarian with lots of pockets. They were not symbolic.

  “Glade, the last time I did this, the Authority was forcing me to cull individuals. To look in the faces of the people I had to cull. And I didn’t even know that defecting to the Ferrymen was an option. I was forced to do something violent, that I hated, and I thought I was going to have to do it for the rest of my life. This? This is completely different. This is an experiment for the good guys. Something that will make us all safer. And the best part? Aine gets to live at the end.”

  Both of us grinned at that last part, and I knew that it was our camaraderie built from the sick kinship of having survived being Datapoints that was making us think that this situation was even remotely funny. Anyone else seeing our grins now would probably think we were freaks.

  Which, as I glanced down at the surgically implanted computers on our arms, I realized that we kind of were. Oh well.

  I nodded and slapped Cast on the back as we walked together to one side of the room. Aine stood on the other side. In simulations, the brainwaves of a citizen were typically viewed as being about fifty feet away. We figured that trying to match that would make things easier on Cast.

  “Ready?” Kupier called from across the room, where he stood next to Aine. I knew that he wasn’t going to leave her side during the entire process. That was just the kind of leader that he was.

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded and yelled something over to the other Ferrymen in the room – a crowd of about twenty, Oort and my sisters included.

  Daw, Treb, and Oort threw dirty looks at Kupier, but they started to shuffle out of the room. I pulled up short. Were they leaving?

  “Hey!” I called and jogged over to them.

  Daw and Treb barely looked at me, which was pretty much par for the course since I’d dropped that bomb about our mother. They were pissed as hell at me. But at least they stopped walking when I called out to them.

  “Where are you going?”

  Kupier walked over to join us, and I saw the flash of his blue marble in his hand. By now, I knew him well enough to know that that meant he was pretty nervous about this whole thing, even if he was playing it cool. “I thought they should leave.”

  I looked from Oort to Treb to Daw, their mutinous expressions telling me exactly what they thought about that. “Why?”

  Kupier cocked his head to one side like the answer was obvious. “Because they’re all so young. They shouldn’t see this.”

  “Nothing bad is going to happen.” I said those words fully ignoring the Datapoint within me. There was a part of me that knew it was a waste of breath to make a statement like that. I couldn’t predict the future, and there were enough unknowns in this situation to keep us all on our proverbial toes. Lots of bad things could happen. But the emotional side of me, the part that I was just starting to realize was even there in the first place, really felt like sending away our siblings was bad luck.

  “Of course not,” he agreed so quickly that I was willing to bet he was feeling the bad luck thing just as much as I was. “But even so, this is a really stressful situation, and I just don’t think—”

  “They should stay,” I cut Kupier off.

  “I agree,” Treb and Daw chimed in immediately. Oort simply nodded, not quite as comfortable openly disagreeing with Kupier as my Io sisters were.

  “Glade.”

  “Kupier.”

  We held each other’s eyes. “Look,” he said. “I know that, being a Datapoint, this kind of thing might not have affected you so much at their age. But this is really intense and I don’t think they should be here to see it live, okay?”

  “Oort is a full-time Ferryman. And my sisters witnessed our mother fake her own death.” I flicked my eyes at them to see if that was going to make them angry all over again, for me to have brought it up, but it merely put a little flint in their gazes more than anything else. “These three people have witnessed a lot of intense and stressful crap in their lives. And they’re aligning themselves with us, Kup. If they want to be here, I don’t think we should kick them out. I think we owe it to them to include them.”

  Kupier held my eyes for a long time. Myriad emotions, most of which I couldn’t read, flickered across his face. Finally, he nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Yes!” Oort whispered.

  Kupier turned to them. “You can stay. But, for the record, I don’t think you should.”

  I faced them as well. “I agree with Kupier. I think this is too much for you guys to watch.”

  “What?!” Again, Treb and Daw had spoken in unison.

  I shrugged. “It’s the truth. I don’t think you should stay. But the choice is yours.”

  With that, I turned and strode back over to Cast. When I turned back to the crowd of Ferrymen, I saw that Oort and Treb stood side by side while Daw had disappeared.

  I turned my back to the crowd, utterly ignoring them, and lowered my voice. “It’ll be better if you get back on the table.”

  He nodded and slid up onto the table, lying down quickly enough that I knew he was nervous about all this.

  “Are you nervous about turning you
r tech back on, or are you nervous about me digging around in something that’s been surgically implanted in your brain?”

  He laughed once. “Yeah, both. Definitely both.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Is he going to need anesthesia?” Wells was back at my elbow. I should have known that he wasn’t going to let me do this without breathing down my neck.

  “I won’t need it,” Cast answered before I could.

  I arranged the tools on the counter next to Cast’s head. I had everything I thought I’d need and everything I thought I wouldn’t need. Just in case.

  “Alright. First thing’s first.” I held up what looked like a long metal wand with two metallic prods at the top. When I turned it on, an elegant stream of electricity flickered on and vibrated between the two prods. It was an electrical tool, the opposite of the dampener, which would reboot Cast’s tech. That was step one. That was the easy part. “Ready?”

  He took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling of the cavernous room. “No. Yes. Let’s do it.”

  I didn’t wait. I dragged the electrical wand directly over the crystal-like tech on Cast’s forearm, then quickly along the smaller, more delicate tech on his cheek and forehead. I knew that it was activated by the intensely glazed look which immediately frosted over Cast’s face.

  Now, we both had a job to do.

  Every Datapoint, when their tech was activated, had to allow the integrated tech to sync with their brain patterns. For some Datapoints, it was quick, and for others, like me, it was a days-long process. Cast had insisted that he could do it in minutes. It didn’t matter how quickly one could do it, though – it was extremely painful for everyone.

  His head rocked back on its axis, arching his back as color flooded his cheeks. His hands were fists, and I could tell that he wasn’t breathing.

  I’d never seen it before, from the outside.

  It was horrible. It looked as bad as it felt, but I didn’t take any time to observe. Cast was doing his job. It was time for me to do mine.

  I grabbed my keyboard and immediately found the wireless frequency of his technology. That was easy enough, finding it. Hacking into it required a little more footwork, but I barely noticed the thought involved. None of us were sure if the GPS locator was a physical thing placed inside of his software, in which case I would need the tools I’d brought. Or, if it was a program that his tech ran, all I’d need were my brains and this keyboard. First things first, I had to search it out using my keyboard. I wasn’t even paying attention to what my fingers were doing now; I didn’t have a body or breaths. There were no words in my brain, nothing in between what I was thinking and what I was doing. My fingers flew over the keyboard and then… boom. Just like that, I was in, completely aligned with Cast’s technology.

  His body relaxed for a moment, only to completely tense up again, hard enough for him to bow from his heels to the crown of his head. He was a perfect, arching rainbow on the cold metal table. But to me, he wasn’t human – he wasn’t even my friend anymore. He was a computer. A puzzle I needed to solve as the timer ticked down.

  I navigated through all of his systems, sprinting through them. I barely glanced at the culling program, at all of his analysis programs, but I paused at his communications systems. Datapoints could speak to one another through their tech. And they needed their GPS programs to do it. I was sure his locator program was embedded somewhere in there. And, score, there it was. A thrill jolted through me like I’d become a hunter with its prey in the scope of a trusted gun. I had this.

  It was a program, which was good news because it meant that I didn’t have to use tools to fish around in something that was surgically connected to Cast’s brain. I wormed the GPS program out and didn’t just deactivate it. Using a particularly vicious line of code, I took Cast’s tracker and utterly decimated it. Whatever. I could rebuild it for him if he wanted me to for some reason at a later date. Right now, though, my friend was barely breathing as a computer tried to force its way into his brain. His face was red, and his hands were in fists. Right now, the only thing I could do that even remotely felt like protecting him was to absolutely erase this GPS program. Because screw the Authority who demanded this of children. Screw the Authority who told us one thing and made us do another. Screw the Authority who’d almost killed Cast.

  Two more flicks of my fingers across the keyboard, and his GPS tracker went up in virtual smoke. I pictured him as a blinking dot on a radar gone black. I pictured that dot in a tiny explosion. I pictured the smoke from the explosion forming into the shape of a middle finger. I hoped Haven was watching, and I hoped he was gritting his teeth in frustration. I didn’t care if they’d been able to get our coordinates. I couldn’t have cared less.

  I staggered back, finally, and took a deep breath.

  “We’re good!” I called over my shoulder. Dimly, I heard the Ferrymen cheering. The first part of this task was done. And well done. I blocked out the rest of the Ferrymen’s noise, however. My job was over, but Cast’s was still full-on happening.

  And the pain of it was written all over his face as he writhed on the table.

  “How long has it been?” I quietly asked Wells, who stood beside me gritting his teeth, looking for all the world like he wanted to pull the plug on this whole thing.

  “About forty-five seconds.”

  The Datapoint inside of me gloated that I’d been able to hack in and shut down his GPS in less than a minute. The human inside of me was horrified that Cast had at least ten more minutes of this pain to get through.

  I grabbed up the keyboard again. There wasn’t anything else I could do to help him, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to follow a few threads through his tech. We might not get another chance for insight into the integrated tech of a Datapoint.

  A few keystrokes, and I was back into his tech.

  With a broader focus than before, I could see the scope of it, the forest instead of the trees. I was instantly reassured when I realized how basic his tech was, too. It was nothing like mine. Even like this, with my hacking keyboard linked with his mainframe, I wasn’t going to be able to control him. Not that I wanted to, but it reassured me that he wasn’t going to be wirelessly controlled by the Station, either.

  There were more programs than I had thought there might be, though. And a lot of them weren’t active. They didn’t look like they’d ever been activated, in fact. A tickle of surprise started in my fingertips as I realized that there were all sorts of war protocols hidden within his tech. I’d never even heard of them.

  So many of the programs were hollow, just scaffolding. I realized with a jolt that they were designed to be able to hold whatever the Database put inside of them. It was like fill-in-the-blank programs. They offered almost infinite possibilities for things that the Database could have put there. A Datapoint could have learned another language in less than a second if the Database had included it, for instance. Or they could have learned how to pilot any skip that the Database directed them to. Anything could have been downloaded into these shell programs. Only five or six of them had ever been used on Cast’s tech, but I couldn’t tell what had been put into them. I took half a second to wonder how many of mine had been used, and for what.

  Then I shook my head. It didn’t matter. Or, at least, it didn’t matter anymore. My tech was dampened, and as far as I was concerned, the Authority was never going to control me again. The Database was never going to input data into my brain without my consent again.

  I kept scanning. And then I saw it.

  My shoulders knotted, and I felt the keyboard tremble in my hand. This was not a shell program. This was not a program that was usable by the user. Cast would never have been able to utilize this program or even detect it.

  There was a detonator program in Cast’s tech.

  Cast could be remotely destroyed. And not just culled, which would have been bad enough, but still would only have cut off the organic matter of his brain while his integr
ated tech remained intact and usable. No, this program would destroy both his brain and his integrated tech – allowing for the instance where the Station, the Authority, wanted to get rid of his tech, with Cast being a byproduct of his tech’s destruction. This was in case the Authority decided he and his tech were more dangerous alive than dead.

  Immediately, I backtracked and combed through all the steps I’d taken so far. I needed to see, unequivocally, that there was no way for Cast to be contacted remotely by the Authority. Because this implied that there was a way. With his locator destroyed, it would be harder, maybe impossible for them to connect to his tech from the Station, but I didn’t care about the odds. I wanted it to be impossible for them to reach him.

  I was unspeakably glad that I checked because, in just a few more minutes, I located another wireless connector. This one didn’t have anything to do with the Database. This connected directly to the Station. And, maybe, more importantly, there wasn’t any sort of information on this exchange interface. No, this was merely a switch.

  A few keystrokes later, I’d shredded the program.

  Confident now that Cast was as safe from the Authority as he could be, I finally set the keyboard down. He was still tensed and tight with pain.

  “I think you over-prepared,” Wells said at my shoulder. He nodded casually to the veritable pile of tools I’d lined up on the table to use on Cast. Wells’ voice was calm, but his hands were crossed over his chest, his knuckles white as he waited for Cast to finally accept the sync.

  “I didn’t know if the GPS locator was going to be hardware or software – there! Look. He’s synced.”

  Indeed, Cast’s body had relaxed. He took a deep, thorough breath. I noticed the ring of sweat at the neck of his jumpsuit. His normally light hair was damp with exertion. His head lolled to one side, but his eyes remained open.