Divided- 2120

by Brian Savage

  “We received another email, and we even watched the video file that was attached. I then forwarded it to my personal email, so I could continue working at home,” Jack said slowly, as if interpreting for a non-native speaker.

  “The system says there isn’t another email,” Charles said firmly, “and frankly, forwarding official Corporate correspondence to your personal email is against Corporate policy. Do you have the email in your personal account, then?”

  “No. It was also gone this morning,” Jack said. Phil was smiling gleefully at Jack and Brant now. Probably feeling somewhat vindicated after the abuse over the voice call.

  “We watched the file and even took a screenshot of it,” Jack said, pulling the folded photo out of his pocket. He stood and took a step forward, extending it toward Charles. Charles hesitated before stepping forward and taking the photo. He looked at it for a second.

  “Is this a joke?” Charles asked, not sounding the least bit amused. “This is the office symbol for IT Remote.”

  “What’s IT Remote?” Jack said, taking the photo back.

  “IT Remote is comprised of all the techies who are responsible enough to be allowed to do their work remotely. They work virtually, whereas techies like Phil, who need a bit more management, must report to a home office,” Charles said. The white cloud that had displayed the emails turned into a black shadow creature, which fired flaming projectiles at Charles.

  “This was on a display screen in an aerial that targeted an entrance into the Third Ring,” Jack said, folding it back up and handing it to Brant.

  “The remote workers can work on the systems in Fleet vehicles for the Corporation,” Charles said, “but that email and video never existed.”

  “We watched it,” Jack stated, doing a surprisingly good job of controlling his frustration.

  “I don’t know what to tell you. The system doesn’t lie.” Charles stood. “Is there anything else we can do for you?”

  Jack lowered his head, thinking to himself. He looked up. “Can you get me the names of the techies working on aerials yesterday? Specifically, between noon and fifteen hundred?”

  “I can, but I don’t know how that is going to help you.” Charles cocked his head to the right slightly.

  “Just need to tie up some loose ends,” Jack said.

  “It should be in your email now,” Charles said. “If that is all, we have work to get back to.”

  Brant was only half paying attention to the ongoing conversation; instead, he was distractedly watching the goblins and sprites fighting and bickering, zooming from one side of the cube to the other. He was amazed at how real the holograms looked. He watched as the shadow slowly shrunk and began to take a more solid shape. He couldn’t quite make out what it was, but it became more and more clear until what stood before him, half hiding behind a tree, was a clown holding a solitary red balloon. The clown waved at him, beckoning.

  “Hey. You ready?” Jack had tapped him on his chest.

  “Yeah…Yeah, after you.” Jack brushed by and through the vines that hung across the cube entrance. Brant looked back toward the clown and found a small goblin snapping his tusks together where the clown had stood. He nodded toward Phil and Charles and ducked out of the cube.

  “Phil is a weird freaking dude,” he said to himself.

  Chapter 7

  Back in the office, Jack and Brant opened their emails to check the names Charles had sent over. They hadn’t said a word from the techie’s cube back to the office. There didn’t seem to be a point. The email and attached video didn’t exist to anyone except for the two of them, and neither of them were going to start questioning reality to each other. They both wordlessly accepted that whoever had perpetrated the attack on the gate had found a way to remove any sort of trace evidence that led back to them. It made sense, now that they knew where that emblem came from.

  How do you hack into a system that was deemed un-hackable? With permission, of course. Jack and Brant checked the three names. They searched for them in the D.I.E. database. The first, a female techie named Aeralyn James, was relatively new to the remote section of the IT department. She had been transferred to the remote work group within the month as part of a contractual extension. The company wanted her; she wanted more freedom. The second name, Joshua Harraves, was an established white hat that had been working for the IT department for a few months. He had been caught hacking the power grid and diverting large amounts of power to his home. They said there was something like thirty automated systems that took care of everything you could think of, from cooking eggs to walking his dog. He had taken the white-hat job as part of a plea deal to keep from being terminated. The last was a family man, with three kids and a stay-at-home wife. Harn Ferris was in his mid-forties and had worked for the company for years before accepting a remote working position so he could be at home with his family more.

  “I think the white hat did it,” Brant stated after reading the short bios supplied by the system. “He definitely has the know-how, and the criminal background.”

  “Maybe. We can start with him. We need to figure out which one was logged in to that aerial. I don’t care what IT says; the file existed. Whoever did this obviously had the know-how to delete an email.” Jack printed one-page sheets with photos, addresses, and rough work schedules.

  “Looks like the family Ferris lives outside the rings. The other two live in the First Ring,” Jack said, looking at the sheets. “Let’s talk to the family man first and work our way back in.”

  “Got it.” Brant jumped up from his seat. “Gasser?”

  “Yeah.”

  Brant didn’t bother to hide his excitement. He loved driving the gasser. Seeing his enthusiasm, Jack felt a little bad for what he had said to Brant on the fourth floor. Was he too hard on the kid? He hadn’t decided if he had been right to chastise him so harshly, but he did decide that he did like Brant, though some parts of his personality were unbearable.

  They headed out of the office, making their way along the walkway past the ranges. Below, Jack could make out agents practicing entry into a standard-sized apartment home. From his vantage point, he could see a baddie hunched down behind a leather sleeper couch. As he passed, the baddie turned its mechanical head, a red light set dead center. It followed Jack and Brant as they walked by. That’s strange, Jack thought to himself. He stared the baddie down, trying to figure out why it would be tracking them like that.

  Jack ran straight into a female agent, coming the other way. “Shit, sorry,” he said, stepping to the side to allow her to pass. She gave him an angry huff and stomped on.

  “I think she likes you!” Brant quipped, amused.

  Jack looked back at the baddie as they continued on. The baddie was now completely focused on the door across the room from where he was hiding. It gave no indication that it had been watching the two agents at all. Jack checked the walkway in front of him before doing a double-take, now almost having to turn completely around to glimpse the robot. The agents breached the door into the room and the baddie was obscured by dust and smoke.

  Jack and Brant walked down the row of blacked-out agent vehicles. Each one had a dark grey number painted on the hood in huge block print. Their vehicle was “33.” As they approached, the lights flashed once. The gasser had identified the implants of the two agents and was letting them know where it was. Jack felt an odd sort of affection for the vehicle. It had basically just said, “HI,” to them in recognition. Like a big puppy, he thought.

  Brant walked around to the driver’s side door, which was silently opening on its own. They climbed in, sliding onto the cold, black leather seats. The interior was dark, lit only by dim LED lighting throughout, that glowed from every button and hand hold, and a thin strip that made its way around the entire interior. Likewise, the back seat matched the front, albeit without the driver’s control system. The tint on the windows made day seem like night inside their gasser, which in the past had given agents a false sense of security
. The black paint on the skin of the vehicle was actually photovoltaic, which tripled the fuel efficiency of the large, jeep-like SUV.

  Brant paired his implant with the vehicle, as the driver. The engine started up, nearly silently, only running on fuel above thirty-five miles an hour. “Where to, boss?” Brant asked.

  “Ferris lives at 2211 182nd Street,” Jack said, flipping through the three sheets he held. The gasser pulled forward from the long row of matching vehicles and made its way toward the rear exit of the Third Ring, the one used for deliveries and agents.

  Their trip through and out of the rings was uneventful. At times, they were free to speed down open and empty streets, other times slowly crawling through the throngs of people, surprised that a gasser was trying to utilize the street in which they walked. Jack read and reread the bios on each subject, studying their pictures. Aeralyn kept catching his eye. The thirty-year-old remote techie didn’t fit the stereotypical computer whiz. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a high ponytail at the back of her head, and her green eyes seemed to shine from her tan face and above high cheek bones. A strand of hair, having escaped the otherwise tight ponytail, hung like a perfect flaw across her forehead. She wasn’t smiling in this Corporate photo, but Jack felt that, at the time the photo was taken, she had been happy. Her face looked warm and inviting.

  “Get the fuck out of the way!” Brant fumed, raising both hands at an old lady walking directly in front of them down the middle of the street. “What is she doing?” he asked, looking at Jack and shaking his head. Jack looked up from the photo and saw the old woman moving along, not stooped in old age but with the deliberateness that came with that age.

  “Hang on.” Jack started to open the door. As he did, the woman stopped and straightened. Her nose turned toward the sky, as if sniffing something on the air. Slowly, she began to turn around. She moved, not as if she had just noticed them, but like she had known they were behind her the whole time. Jack still held the door, partially open, one foot hanging out just above the pavement.

  Brant and Jack watched as the white hair gave way to a sickly yellow skin tone. Once turned completely around, she smiled a toothless grin, eyes disappearing beneath fatty, wrinkled rolls. She waved a claw of a hand feebly at them. A trickle of something dark and black ran from the corner of her mouth.

  “What the fuck…” Brant said, both agents transfixed by the sight. Jack felt his blood run cold.

  The white implant they could just see under the old lady’s right ear was dirty and crusted with greenish-yellow gunk that seemed almost luminescent. The little LED light that was supposed to be blinking wasn’t blinking at all. The woman slowly turned to her left, further highlighting the unlit implant. She seemed to be cackling as she limped to the sidewalk and disappeared into the crowd.

  “What the hell was that?” Brant said, a trace of fear in his voice.

  “I don’t know, it looked like her implant wasn’t functioning properly,” Jack said, trying to sound sure of himself.

  “No shit, it wasn’t blinking,” Brant said, looking across the gasser at Jack, who was still looking after the woman. Jack turned and faced forward. He pulled his foot back in the vehicle and shut the door. He took a deep breath.

  “Alright, ready?” he asked, glancing at Brant.

  “Yeah,” Brant said, easing the car forward between the bustling groups of people. “That was fucking weird, man.”

  They made it out of the rings and into the outside city. The wall of the First Ring started around Ninetieth Street, so they still had a ways to go. The building styles outside of the rings became dated. On top of the addition of wood as the primary building material, unheard of inside the rings, the buildings became claustrophobically closer together; the only spaces between buildings were the streets themselves. The tightly packed, mostly apartment-style living housed millions of people. The crowd size also increased, as did the number of people unwilling to yield the street space to the black SUV.

  Moving got slow. The steady downpour of rain did nothing to disperse the crowd, now walking with their shoulders nearly touching the outside of the gasser. Brant became more agitated with their proximity; Jack could tell by the way he had stopped yelling at people and simply sat with his jaw clenched and knuckles white on the control system.

  Jack leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  He awoke to Brant gently shaking his shoulder and felt more tired than when he first shut his eyes for rest. Groggily, he straightened in his chair and surveyed his surroundings. They were parked on a street across from a row of two-story town homes. Jack saw 2211 marked clearly on a door across the street. The town home itself was no more than three widths of the front door wide and featured a small, stained-glass window to the right of the door.

  They knocked and were ushered in by a woman with greying temples and wrinkles that didn’t match her age. Jack couldn’t tell if the wrinkles were from laughing or crying, or just a life full of both, but the woman walked stooped from a life of scrubbing floors and lifting children. She told them her husband would be down shortly, then disappeared around the corner at the sound of breaking glass and screaming children. The agents found themselves in a small living room space, with older, green, upholstered couches and one brown reclining chair. The fireplace with mantle screen took the center of the wall to their right. Inside the fireplace, a variety of seasonal decorations stood arranged in an immaculate tableau of fall.

  Family pictures covered the walls, with images that showed Mrs. Ferris had been a fairly attractive and less tired woman when only two children had been in the picture. The agents stood, taking in their surroundings. Occasionally, a child would run into the room, pause at the sight of the strangers, and be scooped up by their mother and ushered into a different room of the small home.

  A few moments passed during the agents’ scrutiny of their new surroundings. They heard the creak of loose steps and both turned toward the sound. A slight huff in his breath, a man came down the stairs from the story above. Jack recognized him from the employee photo on the bio sheet but noticed that Mr. Ferris had gained no less than thirty pounds since the start of his job as a remote techie. The man approached with hand extended, trying to catch his breath, and frowning as if he didn’t understand why climbing up and down stairs was more difficult as of late. After exchanging pleasantries, Jack questioned him about his work the last couple of days. Mr. Ferris answered amicably, and admitted to working on aerial systems the day of the crash. He was, however, able to show that the systems he was working on were for the manufacturing side of the Corporation. “Programing the next generation,” he said proudly. Jack and Brant nodded to each other.

  They thanked Mr. and Mrs. Ferris for their time and made a prompt exit, declining a tray of coffee and cookies that Mrs. Ferris had sat on the table. The agents made their way back to the vehicle in silence, only speaking when sealed safely inside the gasser.

  “I don’t think it was him,” Brant stated, as he reconnected to the gasser.

  “Why?” Jack asked, leading his partner to talk out his theory on the matter.

  “Well, this guy isn’t the brightest or the best, he doesn’t seem like someone capable of hacking the Corporate system and deleting emails from the most secure server in the world, and on top of that, the dude has swallowed the Corporate line. He legit likes what he does.” Brant started the gasser.

  “I agree,” said Jack, nodding.

  “Besides, of the three names we got, one was already a criminal; my money is on him.” Brant pulled forward and did a U-turn in the empty street.

  “Don’t assume,” Jack said. “It could just as easily be the girl.”

  “You going to be able to terminate your girlfriend, if it is?” Brant asked, smirking. “I saw you staring at her picture almost the entire trip over here.”

  Jack looked at Brant. He might be an ass, but that didn’t make him any less perceptive. “She’s a pretty girl, thought you could appreciate that,�
�� he said, deflecting.

  “Oh, I definitely appreciate it. Makes the case more interesting.”

  Jack couldn’t tell if it was sarcastic.

  “Which one is closer? Your girlfriend or the criminal?” Brant asked, smirking again.

  “They both live in the First Ring,” Jack said, ruffling through the sheets. “He is on Rattier Street, she is on Downing. Let’s try your boyfriend first.” Jack smiled to himself at the joke. Brant was less amused.

  “Not cool, man,” he said as he accelerated up the street.

  “I’m funny,” Jack said as he leaned back and closed his eyes again.

  Jack opened his eyes once when they passed the security checkpoint into the First Ring, and again when he felt the car come to a stop. This time, he hadn’t given himself completely over to sleep, worried he would wake up groggy again. He eyed the tall condominium. “Seems pretty pricey for a techie,” Jack observed out loud.

  “Those ex-convict techies get big bucks to find and fix security loopholes. I guess they need to keep them well paid in order to keep them from just taking what they want,” Brant said, looking up at the tall building. “What floor is he on?”

  “Fourth floor,” Jack said, heading for the sliding-glass entry way. Brant followed close behind. As they entered, the sliding-glass door glided open silently. No discernible metal attachments marked the doors, making it seem like the entire glass entry moved to permit their entrance. They stepped in and checked the board to their right, pressing the button next to the lit name, “J. Harraves.”

  They waited momentarily, received no response. A small display screen below the names scrolled, “Mr. Harraves does not appear to be home, leave a video message?” and gave the option of “Yes” or “No.”