They walked inside together, but once the door completely shut behind them, Nick abruptly stopped, unable to see a thing in the complete darkness. Quiet wet sobs were coming from all directions, and he felt unnerved, imagining a host of damned souls floating in the pitch-black space.
“My apologies,” said Johan. “Kir, turn on his night vision. Here you go.”
Nick’s eyes instantly adjusted, and he realized that they were standing inside a large industrial hall, filled with dozens of biochemical vats of some sort. They were empty, their once transparent walls smeared with flaking splotches of dried-up fluids from inside. However, some sagging conduits still held small amounts of a bubbling liquid, and the soft gurgling was what produced that unsettling ghostly crying. Johan paid no attention to this industrial cemetery, confidently making his way through, and Nick followed him, squeamishly dodging the furry grime of low hanging pipes. They walked past the gaping doors of non-working elevators, down several flights of rotting stairs, and out into a long straight tunnel, which, surprisingly, wasn’t as dark as the floor above the ground – its cracking paint was covered with frayed illuminating strips, glued on probably half a century ago, but still giving off some faded glow.
Johan stopped, took a napkin from his pocket, wrapped it around his finger and traced a signature on the surface of a seemingly random section of the wall. A bulky panel slid away, and bright daylight burst through the hidden door, making Nick freeze – the surgically clean interior was in such contrast with the sordid underground passage, that he suspected that Johan had once again messed with his optic feed.
He touched a curve of the polished doorframe, and a firm correlation between his visual and tactile senses gave him some reasonable reassurance that his vision was unaltered, and the room wasn’t an apparition. He walked in, and his eyes instantly stopped on the workbench in the center. It was covered with unfamiliar lifelike objects: clumps of spiderlike devices weaving invisible webs in meditating movements, swarms of fitfully breathing ellipsoids glimmering in the artificial daylight, slowly pulsating spheres hanging in the air without any visible support. Nick managed not to let his imagination run wild regarding the purpose of these things, but just then his gaze fell on an exposed human brain that sat on a surgical tray. He gasped and almost jumped at the sound of laughter that suddenly came from behind him.
“Don’t freak out, it’s just this useless shit-for-brains simulator. You get to keep yours, I promise,” Johan patted his shoulder. With some effort Nick unglued his eyes from the two wrinkled hemispheres, and took a closer look at the rest of the room.
As he’d already noticed, there wasn’t a lot to see – just a solid closet half-built into the wall and a well-worn gray armchair that vaguely reminded Nick of Hilgor’s attachment object.
“Please, make yourself comfortable, so that we can start,” Johan gestured towards the seat.
“We should begin with Elisabeth,” said Nick, taking a step back in order to face Johan straight on. “I have to insist. If a sufficiently large chunk of my memory is wiped out, I won’t even know why I’m here, and there is no particular reason to believe that you’ll help me to sort it out. I want to search Elisabeth’s memory before you fuck up my brain.” He sat down and dropped the tension in his voice, “I promise that I’ll cooperate once I get what I need.”
Johan leaned against the workbench, not too subtly enjoying their reversed height disparity.
“Well, actually, you can’t leave this place without my help so I believe in your honesty. Also, and don’t get me wrong … my neuro-assault capabilities are absolutely unnecessary in our situation, but I have deactivated your neuro-defense shield, just to be clear. But yes, we can start with Elisabeth,” Johan lightly touched something invisible in the air, and his eyes refocused on his internal screens.
Nick silently watched him, and imagined a scenario in which Elisabeth had changed her mind about her travel plans and never came to Earth3. One step at a time, he told himself … and never mind that each of them could bring him to a solid wall. “Will it take you long to hack her implant?” he asked.
“It depends. But to put things in perspective, Nick, for everyone but me … and everyone includes the government … it takes more than an hour to crack even the most basic citizen chip.”
“I see,” said Nick, “and how are you so sure?”
“How do you think? I keep track of all hacking software out there for my safety … I coded half of them in the first place. You’re in a completely different league with me, my lucky cyber criminal,” Johan flashed Nick a bright smile, continuing to move his fingers over his virtual controls. “My break-in program is an order of magnitude faster and completely untraceable. Still, your Elisabeth is a big shot, so her implant security is going to be reinforced. But I would be shocked, frankly, if I couldn’t crack it in a blink.”
All of a sudden, he stopped, and nodded contently. “She is on Earth3. She’s been staying in a private corporation, standard embryo genetic enhancement plant. They make DNA adjustments for skin sun protection, to be precise.”
Nick unclasped his hands, and for a moment pressed his cold palms against his temples.
“What would she …” he interrupted himself, and his voice trailed off.
“Okay, Nick, let’s find out,” Johan’s eyes glittered with childlike excitement, his fingers started moving faster, and his smile turned into a ferocious scowl. But then he froze with an astonished grimace.
“Oh …” he said, and Nick didn’t like the sound of that at all.
Johan crossed his arms over his chest and thoughtfully peered at something in space. “She is using the president’s personal cybershield, which I helped them to design before I quit,” he said finally. “I wonder how your friend managed to get her hands on it. It’s going to be hard, Nick – I did a hell of a job on that one. But don’t you worry, I happen to enjoy a good challenge. Makes our petty crime more fun, doesn’t it? Relax, my amateur sleuth, and let me focus now. Feel free to walk around, by the way, lest your butt starts hurting. Just don’t break anything.”
Johan began pacing the room, periodically swearing under his breath, his eyes focused on some invisible point in the distance, his fingers dancing in the air in front of him.
Nick shuffled around the workbench for a while, but eventually returned to the chair, closed his eyes and forced himself to relax. It was a mistake. His memory, not distracted by some urgent task, instantly rushed towards the very place that Nick was trying to avoid, knocked down the protective dam and flooded his mind with the flashbacks, each of them reminding him of various ways in which he killed Lita. He killed her in several steps, and this thought felt like a jagged rod turning inside Nick’s heart. He’d had many chances to get out of her life, never to return, before it was too late. He could have done it right after he felt that unexpected, inappropriate, irrational sting of jealousy in that small open restaurant in Oren when Remir was in the hospital, and she told him her story. That sting and the swell of pity were loud and clear warnings that she had stopped being a part of his work. He should’ve started looking for another outlier if only he’d had had the decency of being honest with himself back then.
And then there was that exact moment when he pushed both of them past the point of no return. He remembered how she called him after the coup, and gave him that desperate hug in her room … and how, instead of freeing himself from her arms, stepping back into the corridor and getting the hell off that world, he took the mask from her face and dropped it to the floor.
“Got you, motherfucker!” the delight in Johan’s voice was beyond mere jubilance.
Nick opened his eyes, and saw Johan pacing back and forth in front of his chair, rubbing his hands and glowing with satisfaction.
“It wasn’t easy, but it still didn’t take me too long, did it?” Johan abruptly stopped, noticing the absent expression on Nick’s face. “What�
��s wrong, my dude?” he asked with concern. “You are all set! I’ll connect you to her implant, and you can dig there to your heart’s content. Meanwhile I’ll prepare for my test, but will wait for your green light before I start.”
Nick shut down his Beta Blue memories, and acknowledged Johan’s words with a slight nod.
“Listen, you look like you need a prayer, comrade,” said Johan, refocusing on his internal screens. “Are you a believer in something, by any chance? Probably not, our Dark Triad lot is a cynical one. I am no help with that either – blind faith goes against my scientific principles on top of my natural skepticism. But I will be happy to stand in for your guardian angel,” he paused. “Okay, I just gave you minimum control over Kir – just to view and copy her implant memory recording. No other functionality yet, sorry. But welcome to everything she has ever heard and seen, because, imagine that, you are in luck again – her overconfident highness has never erased anything. How very arrogant of her. She trusted her golden shield, you see, but as we have just proved, destroying records is the only way to keep them a secret … at least until my program hits the market. I am sending you her implant access link, just follow …”
There was no blackout or even the slightest shift in Nick’s perception, but Johan was suddenly standing in a different place, staring into space, and a triumphant smile was twisting his features into a grotesque grimace.
“The file transfers worked perfectly, just as I expected! Both upload and retrieve functions were flawless, Nick!”
Nick shook his head, trying to orient himself, and Johan’s gleeful expression immediately dimmed.
“Wait, now with your memory loss. Tell me you recognize who I am. Come on, Nick. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“You connected me to Elisabeth …”
“Excellent!” Johan’s face lightened in relief. “Only a few hours of memory damage! Not a big deal at all! Easy to fix. That and the quick change to make the export function repeatable, and I am ready for my long overdue fame and vengeance! You can’t even imagine the magnitude of what just happened! I’m a …”
“Stop for a second,” Nick interrupted hoarsely, “did I find anything in her recording?”
“Oh, you’re good. I almost had to pour a bucket of water on your head to calm you down. You said that you found more than you had hoped, that you could trade your stolen information for anything at all.”
Nick got up and took a blind step forward, squeezing his eyes as if the room’s artificial sunlight was suddenly too bright. “I told you …” he said flatly, “that I could trade this recording for Lita, did I?”
“You said you could trade it for anything. What’s wrong? I haven’t seen you go pale before, pal.”
Calm down and sober up, Nick ordered himself – it wasn’t the happy ending yet, he was far from being done. “What was it about?” he asked.
“No idea. I didn’t pay attention, my euphoric friend. Some project she was involved in. I don’t care all that much about your business, to be honest – I have my own things to be excited about. But don’t worry about your trivial memory loss – you can watch your precious recording as many times as you want now that you have it in Kir’s memory, can’t you? But hold on a minute before you start … there is something special I brought from Earth just for this very occasion.” Johan rushed to the closet. “It had to wait for a while, you know …” he opened the door and reached deep inside one of the shelves. “Twentieth century’s red wine, imagine!” he said as he lifted the bottle into the air. “Now we need glasses and something to open it – something sharp!” Johan continued to go through the contents of his cabinet, but Nick couldn’t wait any longer.
“Sorry, Johan, I need to see what I got. Kir, play the last download.”
“Impatient … fine,” Johan glanced at Nick over his shoulder, “just don’t forget to pay attention to your taste buds while you are watching.”
Nick removed everything but the recording playback from his vision, leaving audio as the only connection to the room.
“Kir, find the most relevant data,” he said and the camera immediately started moving at eye level along an empty corridor with steel-colored walls.
“This wine must be excellent,” Johan went on in the background. “Your compatriots have lost the pleasure of thinking, but they have preserved the traditions of drinking quite well.”
The footage was jerky, jumping up and down in rhythm with a fast walk. It was very quiet, the silence broken only by the sound of Johan rummaging in the closet.
“Now, damn it, what can we use for an opener? All this junk around, but …”
The hallway on the screen made a sharp turn and came to a dead end in the form of a massive closed door with a smooth metallic surface. The perception of movement stopped, and Elisabeth’s face stared at Nick from the reflection.
Her face didn’t change in response to a loud explosion of glass shattering against something hard, and Nick guessed that the sound had come from the non-virtual room. He swiped the playback down and saw Johan standing in an expanding pool of wine. He was staring into the distance with an expression that instantly made Nick’s heart go numb.
“What now …” Nick whispered.
“It can’t be …” for some reason Johan was whispering too, and then he turned to Nick with a look of total disbelief. “My security alerts just went berserk. They noticed my hack of that bitch’s data … and they just unleashed the hunt. Holy shit, it’s fucking massive!”
Nick was suddenly back in the chair, with Johan’s face looming right over him, his hands tightly squeezing Nick’s shoulders. His expression was enough to make Nick guess that their situation wasn’t good, and a quick glance around the room confirmed this assumption.
The workbench was covered with mangled shards; all the funny delicate objects were gone. A sturdy metal pipe was perched against the wall.
“Listen to me,” said Johan, “you had one more memory loss. Some major shit happened, and we need to get the fuck out of here quickly. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“You said something about a cyber raid …”
“Good, you remember that much,” Johan let go of Nick, and picked up a half-full garbage bag from the floor. “They detected her security breach, there is something funky about your Elisabeth. For some reason, they used the best government resources to watch her perimeter. My fuck up, I admit, I should’ve been more careful, should have crawled deeper, but, damn it, I was too impatient … and I didn’t expect that. The crackdown is fucking insane too. Have you heard of the Cyber Delta Force? They are only deployed if there is a direct threat to the Commonwealth’s safety. Imagine, they are all now looking for the origin of this particular break in.”
Johan moved around the tables in quick jerky steps, hastily sweeping the remaining debris into the trash sack. “I lost them in the net, but they’ll trace the physical origin of her security breach to this lab location. I have to get rid of the hardware quickly and lay low for a while.” Johan snapped the bag closed and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “You don’t have to worry. You have nothing on you – I wiped all recordings made on Earth3 from Kir’s memory.”
“Wait,” Nick said this very quietly, mildly surprised that the light in the room had suddenly become brighter, “you did what?”
For a split second everything turned into a silent blur, and then bolts of searing pain shot through his brain. His fingers let go of something unpleasantly warm and slender, and he collapsed onto the floor, screaming.
“Kir, cut his optic signal! Don’t move you moron or I’ll shut down your moronic brain!” Johan’s voice thundered inside Nick’s skull, making the pain intolerable, but Nick understood.
He froze, face down, squeezing his head in his hands and moaning through clenched teeth. The pain abruptly stopped, and the red veil in front of his eyes changed to total blackn
ess. He heard a fit of a wheezing cough and realized that Johan was also lying on the floor nearby.
Then there was the sound of awkward scrambling, and Johan’s cracked voice interrupted by uneven gasps came directly from above, “Calm down, you psycho … I don’t have time for this … you have your file, you do.”
“How?” Nick’s lips felt leaden, too heavy to move.
“Before wiping Kir clean I saved your stolen recording to your brain using my program. This is how you got the second memory gap, my ungrateful co-conspirator. But you need to know how to get it out, don’t you – which won’t happen if you harm me. Are you following?”
Nick swallowed and nodded.
“Fine, now get up, but don’t come close. Kir, return his vision.”
The room came back, and Johan was now standing at its far end still clutching at his throat.
“You could have killed me, you superhuman imbecile. You almost blew it.”
“Why did you bother to save my file? Why didn’t you just fry my brain?” asked Nick, getting back to his feet.
“Maybe because I have a soft heart, and I’m a sucker for love stories. Or maybe it’s because I would have had to deal with your body and a homicide investigation on my back in addition to everything else. I told you, there was an agreement – no homicides here. I would get in hot water with our people in addition to the Commonwealth’s police. Not to mention that it’s gross and I’ve never done it. Now, it is time to leave!”
“Wait … my memory gap started when I was about to watch the recording. I need to download it now to find out how I should handle this cluster fuck.”
“I am afraid, it’s not wise, my clueless one,” in spite of genuine anxiety in Johan’s eyes, he managed to maintain his mocking expression. “The transfer from the brain works reliably only once in the beta version. I told you, I left it as the final touch to fix before the release, which is apparently being postponed for now,” his grin was rather nasty. “I wouldn’t export your recording to Kir just yet – I’m sure your local Cyber Delta Force will decide to take a peek into your implant before they let you enter Earth’s infospace. They are not complete idiots, my friend, and by the time you get home they’ll connect the dots between your dead outlier, Elisabeth and your presence on Earth3 while this shit started happening.”
Fire of the Dark Triad Page 23
