Quake

by Patrick Carman

  Dylan kissed her and touched her face as the Tablet sent out a soft ping sound, like a tiny bell being struck three times.

  “Here we go,” Faith said as she began searching for the network settings. She found them quickly and began entering the codes Hawk had provided them with.

  Relay one: 342459

  Relay two: PPd23ed

  Relay three: WS404.12.7.8

  A user-name and password screen appeared, and Dylan pulled out his own Tablet, reading off the information he’d stored there.

  “User name is paulallen@itsme.com.”

  “Password is if6was9,” Faith said, typing the password in as she said it.

  They both watched as a small, spinning wheel appeared on the screen. It was searching for mail.

  “Slow,” Dylan said as he waited impatiently for the message they hoped had arrived.

  “Three routes, all different systems,” Faith said. “Still, shouldn’t take more than ten seconds.”

  “I love it when you speak nerd to me,” Dylan joked. “Don’t stop.”

  The wheel stopped spinning before Faith could come up with another goofy thing to say and a message appeared. It was from airwalk@stalefish.ws.

  “It worked,” Dylan said, surprised once again at Hawk’s ability to hack into things. “We just bypassed the most secure data system in the world and found our little buddy. Awesome.”

  “He once bought me jeans on the State system for almost nothing,” Faith said. “The Western State can’t hold Hawk, at least not digitally.”

  They leaned close, their heads touching softly as they peered into the screen and read Hawk’s message from inside the Western State.

  Why didn’t someone tell me this place was so kickass? Check it out!

  Dylan clicked on an animated GIF Hawk had attached, expanding its size and showing the inside of a vast room filled with row after row of rack-mounted server hardware. Thick ropes of blue cord snaked along the floor as thousands of red and green server lights flashed.

  “I was thinking he’d take pictures of State Disneyland or a five-D movie theater,” Faith said. “Should have known better.”

  “He’s found hacker nirvana. That’s gotta be a good thing.” Dylan tapped the animated image back to small and Faith read the next section of Hawk’s message.

  They took me straight into testing when I showed up, must be a thing they do. I completely wiped my Tablet before heading in, but man, they had a load of prebaked questions designed to trip me up. They’re on high alert with everything going down. They even body-scanned me in case I swallowed a bomb. So that was weird.

  They bought my story—I liked it outside the States until the crazy wolves showed up and I couldn’t leave my house anymore—and I checked out clean of any nefarious activity. Then they took me to an intake room with metal walls and a white table and a guy in a white lab coat tapped a few commands onto his Tablet. My Tablet screen filled with a test that was obviously for monkeys and dipshits (tell Clooger he would have failed it).

  Faith stopped reading and looked first out the wide window and then at Dylan. She had been thinking of how hard it would be to tell Hawk that Jade had been taken. Now Clooger, with his beard and big smile, loomed huge in her mind.

  “This sucks,” Dylan said. He put a hand on the small of Faith’s back and shook his head woefully.

  There was nothing to do but keep reading.

  And guess what the first line on the test was? No seriously. You should guess. It said the following:

  “Meredith told me you would be the one. I’ve been waiting for you, Hawk.”

  Noah’s dad! I found the sleeper cell, or more like the sleeper dude! It makes sense when you think about it. Meredith would have sent someone with mad tech skills, and Neal Gordon has them. We messaged back and forth enough for me to know I needed to act like a normal intake. Then he started feeding me tests. He said he’d give me the answers if I needed them, because I had to clear for the highest level of coding work in the Western State.

  But you know me—I didn’t need Neal Gordon’s help.

  I answered the first round of questions and Neal Gordon faked an eyebrow raise and tapped on his Tablet a few times. Two more people came in and I thought I’d blown my cover. These ones were dressed in black, one woman and one man. They both said hello and nodded at Neal Gordon. Then he sent another test to my Tablet.

  This one was also a piece of cake, more math and fewer visuals. When they all three nodded approvingly, I thought about backing off a little, but then it hit me. If I’m the smartest guy in the room, maybe they’ll assign me to a job that gives me access to mainframes. Bingo. That’s exactly where I wanted to be. I’m thinking to myself, even if it’s low-level clearance, I’ll be in the right place faster than I could have hoped for.

  The rest is like the NASA space program: history. I took four more tests, aced them all in what I can only assume was record time, and they assigned me as a trainee in the picture shown above—which just so happens to be one of twelve floors filled with communication servers. Here’s me, at my new desk!

  Hawk had taped a piece of black tape to one of his front teeth. He was sitting behind a desk not much bigger than the ones they’d provided at Old Park Hill High School with a giant grin on his face. Faith laughed, but a second later the laugh rolled gently into tears and she was crying, leaning hard into Dylan as he contained his own laughter.

  “Why do we always have to be the bearers of bad news?” Faith said, feeling her wounded heart unravel all over again.

  “We don’t have to tell him, Faith. We could wait.”

  Faith wiped her tears and stared hard at Dylan, slowly shaking her head. “What if we don’t make it? What if Clara and Wade and Hotspur Chance finish us off? I know it seems impossible, but it is possible. And if it happens then Hawk will be trapped in there and never know what happened to everyone. For the rest of his life he’ll send out messages, and for the rest of his life he’ll get silence and emptiness in return. We can’t risk something that sad. We have to tell him while we still know we can.”

  Dylan nodded, agreeing that while it was hard and cruel in its own way, it was the right thing for them to do.

  “Finish reading it,” Faith said, sniffing as she stood and folded her arms, staring out at the city streets below.

  Dylan tapped the goofy photo shut and read the rest.

  I’ve got zero clearance, but there are only six people working on this floor and they’re spread out all over endless rows of server halls. It’s like a rat’s maze in here! And Neal Gordon has done some nice work here, guys—he’s got me set up with access to what we need. All I have to do now is hack, hack, hack. And more good news: Neal Gordon GPS-tagged all six people working on this floor with a microchip, and that data goes directly to my screen. I know where everyone is. They put me on a programming task that would take a regular programmer like three days to figure out, but I did it in under an hour, so that freed up some time.

  I can track where everyone is moving and log out if any of them gets too close; otherwise I’m in serious hacker-mole mode. The system is insane, in some ways good and others not so good. It’s layer upon layer of code, stacked up like a thousand pancakes, a maze of confusion even I have to step back from about every hour so my head won’t blow up.

  Connection is fine, you can send messages and I’ll get them. Looks like the relay time to me is about twenty minutes per satellite. I’ve got it set to hold the messages at each junction so they look like they’ve died, harder to trace. Same deal with my messages back to you, so figure an hour delay or about that on any communications.

  I’m lifting pancakes, one at a time, working my way to the bottom of the code stack. Down there, in the soggy syrup of this unbelievably complicated system, is where I’ll find Hotspur’s original programming foundation.

  Best news of all? These guys are all on programmer time. They practically sleep in here, so I can work through the night and crash under my desk if I
need to. And Neal Gordon is the bomb! He brings me all the high-voltage caffeinated beverages I can handle and takes on some of the smaller hacking tasks. Life is good.

  Wish me luck—miss you both—gotta bolt!

  Hawk

  P.S. This was sent at 10:41 a.m. WST. Tell Jade I LOVE Narnia, it’s the best book I’ve ever read, and I miss her and I’m sorry. And tell her Aslan is watching over her, me, you guys—she’ll know what I mean.

  Dylan pulled his Tablet out and checked the time.

  “Ten forty-one a.m. Western State Time earlier today,” Dylan said. “That’s quite a while ago, like four hours. And no other messages yet.”

  Faith didn’t respond as she kept looking out the window. She’d moved closer to it, laying her palm on the glass and feeling the warmth of the sun. “We’re going to get her back if it’s the last thing we do.”

  “Yeah, we are.”

  They spent the next fifteen minutes trying and failing to write a reply that included all the terrible things they needed to say. It was a lot harder than Faith thought it would be.

  “This is impossible,” Faith concluded, and it was.

  They tried once more, failed again, and agreed to think about it as they made their way toward the zoo and figured out what they were going to do once they got there. In the end, they could muster only the basics, and try to word things so they weren’t technically lying.

  Great job, Hawk! We wish you had told us you were going on this mission alone, but we understand. Let’s get this job done and then we’ll figure out a way to get you home. If we can save the world, we can spring you from the Western State. We have a beeline on Hotspur and the twins: Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon. We’re headed there now, already within a few miles. Clooger and Jade are not with us. Let us know if you figure something out; meanwhile, we’ll get close and hold.

  We miss you, too. Faith and Dylan

  They looked at each other for mutual assurance and Faith pressed send.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here. The walk will do us good.” Dylan was more assured than Faith, because now he had an even bigger reason to finish what they’d started. “It never had a name,” Dylan said, holding the old black Tablet in his hand. “Let’s call it the Vulcan.”

  “Help! I’ve fallen into a sci-fi black hole and I can’t get up,” Faith said.

  It did them good to joke around a little bit, and a spring returned to their step. Faith could feel the determination rising in her blood. She grabbed Dylan’s hand and pulled him toward the door.

  “Let’s go get Hawk’s girl back and kill Hotspur Chance.”

  Chapter 9

  When Elephants Fly

  They were quickly down the stairs and out of the building, walking toward the Sunset Highway and wishing they could fly. It would take them at least an hour to reach the grounds of the zoo on foot, but they were way too close to take any chances. The closer they got, the more Faith could feel the dark presence of Prisoner One, Hotspur Chance. Faith thought of how easy it would be to take him out if she could get within sight of him. That’s all it would take, and then she’d snap his neck. There would be nothing he could do, because he was a single pulse who couldn’t protect himself.

  As they walked, they began to cycle through their options and realized that they didn’t have many. The only plan they could come up with was to lure Wade and Clara away from wherever Hotspur was hiding and then circle back and hope to beat them in a race for the stronghold.

  “What would Clooger do?” Dylan asked when they’d cut the distance from downtown Portland to the zoo in half. They had veered into a parklike setting full of trees and underbrush. The elevation was rising fast, and checking the GPS system, Faith had realized the Washington Park Zoo was at a much higher elevation than the city below.

  “Clooger would take it slow,” Faith answered, half out of breath as the path grew steeper still. “He’d do a bunch of night surveillance and use all the Hawk techno firepower he could get.”

  “Still no word from our man on the inside,” Dylan said. He’d been checking the Vulcan Tablet every five minutes, just in case.

  “He would have gotten our message over an hour ago,” Faith said, a worried edge in her voice. “Why isn’t he at least sending a quick update? It’s not like him.”

  Dylan shrugged as if it wasn’t that big a thing, not yet. But then he checked the Vulcan Tablet again.

  “You doing okay?” Faith asked.

  “Sure, I’m good. A little nervous, but good.”

  “He’s going to contact us,” Faith said. “He just needs a little more time.” She reached toward him, but Dylan moved off a few steps and checked the Tablet again. Sometimes he retreated emotionally, just as she did, when things got tough.

  Dylan checked the Vulcan Tablet for messages over and over again as they passed through the rest of the parklike setting and found themselves looking across a field dotted with trees that ended in a fence line. They’d arrived at the zoo without a plan, worn out from the long walk.

  “Let’s sit and think for a minute,” Faith said as she slumped down with her back against a tree and took a water bottle out of her pack. As she guzzled, Dylan checked again. This time, there was a message.

  “Hey, we got something. He’s back.”

  They huddled together under the cover of trees and read Hawk’s new message as the sun was dipping toward the ocean, ten miles away. There was a time, before the globe decided to do some melting, when the ocean was fifty miles away.

  Six nineteen p.m. WST. Another two hours and the sun would be setting.

  Good news—your location scouting checks out with what I’m finding on my end. But hey, before I get into this, make sure and send me a note that Jade is okay. I feel like a total nimrod for not asking in my last message—I was in a high state of geek euphoria, but that’s worn off completely and now I can’t stop thinking about how this was all a terrible idea.

  I’m crashing! Need candy, more caffeine. Miss you guys.

  Okay, so you’ll let me know, then—cool.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to tell him,” Faith said.

  “We’re not going to have to,” Dylan encouraged. “We’re going to find Jade and get her back. I know we are.”

  “I like your confidence,” Faith said, but she was feeling the heaviness of a secret she hated having to keep. “Let’s keep reading.”

  The message from Hawk continued:

  I found two interesting things so far at the bottom of the pancake pile of code layers.

  1) While they were building the Western State there was an offsite software development hub located in—you guessed it—Portland, Oregon. Well, not exactly Portland, but close. When they built the light-rail system a million years ago, they had to run it under a small mountain below the zoo. At the time when it was built, the train arrived at a station 260 feet underground. Second-deepest tunnel in North America, halfway to hell. Getting down there is going to be tricky, because I’m guessing the elevators don’t work anymore and those shafts are the only way down. Amazing as it may seem, the trains will still run under the zoo, back and forth between downtown Portland. I know, weird, right? They’re wired into the Western State mainframes, and I can move those trains from here using a software override. Now here’s the amazing part: no one ever knew where that secret programming location was. I know only because I’ve bypassed a bunch of protocols and I knew Hotspur was planning something from the earliest days of the States’ development. Everyone who knew about that underground lab and its purpose is dead and gone. Hotspur made sure of that. I’ve got a termination list a mile long in here—all dead, I’ve checked the State system. We’re talking several hundred people here, guys. Whatever he built down there was top secret and complex.

  “Did you get to the end of number one?” Faith asked. She had leaned in so close to Dylan she could whisper the words and he could still hear her.

  “Just now, you beat me there.”

&nbs
p; “This is even crazier than I thought it could be,” Faith admitted. She was feeling the darkness of everything stacked against them.

  “Let’s finish reading; we’re almost done,” Dylan said.

  2) The fact that this train still moves and Hotspur Chance coded that into the Western State security system seems odd to me. Like maybe he was thinking if all else failed, he could somehow operate something down there from inside the Western State. I don’t know, still sorting it out. But I’d say the odds of him being down there, under the zoo, in some sort of offsite bunker, are pretty high. And from the looks of these foundation codes for the Western State, he can tap into basically anything from that location. The downside for him? It looks like I might be able to put up a firewall he’d have to break through. It’s also possible I might be able to control some parts of the lab. Undetermined, since I can’t even see the lab on my Tablet yet. Working on it.

  So, what to do? If you guys are already there, I’d stay put until I can see about controlling some of the parts under the zoo. There’s something else here, I can’t quite figure it, but there’s definitely some sort of back door built into the core software foundation. I think there’s a code basement only Hotspur knows about, but it’s hard to say. Hacking, hacking, hacking.

  I do have some bad news, at least for me. Records show that no one who’s ever come into the State system has ever left. People have tried—not too many, but a few—and it just flat out doesn’t happen. Once you’re in here, you stay in here. I guess we knew that, but honestly, you guys, I might have had a little too much self-confidence on this one. I really thought I’d be able to get out, like, easily.

  I’ve probably landed myself in a prison even I can’t get out of.

  Hawk.

  Dylan looked out toward the zoo and the sun setting over the very top of the hill. The tree cover was overgrown and gnarly, like a jungle over the fence line.

  “We know where Hotspur is. Two hundred and sixty feet underground. He must like enclosed spaces.”