by Stan Lee
“Can I get you anything? Glass of water?” she says coolly, stepping away from the table. Cameron studies her, trying to get a read, trying also to get his reeling emotions under control. He seizes on a single comforting truth: Olivia might know about his activities, but she doesn’t seem to know about his cyberkinetics. If she did, she’d never have risked being this close to him. Her body is fifty percent bionic, the embedded software regulating multiple vital organs and systems. He could seize control in a moment; he could kill her with a thought. The knowledge makes him feel bold.
“You can get me the hell out of here before I miss my whole graduation ceremony,” he says. “You can tell me what you meant when you said my father went ‘full mad scientist.’ And I want my phone back.”
Olivia offers a tight-lipped smile. He can’t help noticing that her bio-data shows no reaction at all; no adrenaline spike, no increase in heart rate. She’s completely unfazed.
“I’m afraid the ceremony is long over, although we do plan to cut you loose before your lovely mother stops leaving angry voicemails on your cell and starts calling the police. And you’ll get your things back. Maybe I’ll even answer some of your questions—after you answer ours.”
“Questions about what?” he asks.
The smile disappears.
“Don’t be obtuse, Ackerson. It doesn’t suit you.”
She leaves. The door slides closed behind her.
* * *
Now, sitting alone at the table, he reaches out and scans the room. The walls are a scramble of software on the inside, some of it deeply protected, some less so. The cameras are unsecured—but they’re on a closed circuit, and unless he can find a way to free the data from that loop and send it out into the world, they’re not going to be much use. And when it comes to getting information out of the building . . . Cameron closes his eyes and concentrates the way he did earlier today as he entered Oz, sending his consciousness toward the system, slipping across the threshold between meatspace and cyberspace. He needs to be cautious—this is hostile territory, and who knows what kind of malicious software might try to creep along the bridge between his brain and the network?
He lets out a low whistle at what he finds, his awe making him briefly forget how much trouble he’s in. There’s a river of data running through the place, buried under layer upon layer of encryption. He can sense the depth, but not the details. The building itself is outfitted with an intricate web of security—he senses fingerprint and iris scanners, panic buttons, a series of nested lockdown protocols that starts with sealing off individual rooms and ends with a controlled explosion that’ll turn everything inside to ashes. He doesn’t dare dig any deeper. Instead, he draws back and waits, watching for any weaknesses, any movement.
That’s when he realizes: he’s not alone.
There’s someone else inside the system. Another intelligence—not human, but android, and Cameron can’t help being impressed by Olivia’s ingenuity. This is a whole other level of security: on top of the usual encryptions and firewalls, the building has a virtual guard, a bot lurking inside the code, scanning everything. It’s lucky that he didn’t try to hack any of its servers. The guard bot would have surely noticed the disruption and raised an alarm, shutting him down before he even got started. It doesn’t seem to notice his presence at this level, though. Unless . . .
That’s not quite it, Cameron thinks. It sees me, but it doesn’t care. And it doesn’t care because . . . because it doesn’t know I’m not supposed to be here.
For the first time, Cameron feels a spark of cautious, hopeful excitement. He’d hoped to find a weakness, but instead he’s found something better: a potential ally. The AI is designed to monitor the system, watch for incursions, and reason its way to certain logical conclusions about what it sees. And that makes it more sophisticated than the average computer program—but even a sophisticated AI is dumber than most people. Go beyond the range of its programmed responses, and it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. In terms of its skill set and threat detection abilities, this cyber-guard is more mall cop than Navy SEAL. And if a mall cop sees another mall cop dressed in the same uniform and carrying all the right gear, does he stop to ask questions if the other mall cop tells him what to do?
Cameron doesn’t think so. But there’s only one way to find out.
He concentrates his energy on the guard bot.
Hello, he says.
The bot replies immediately. Hello. I am Omnibus. OPTIC sentry program: all updates downloaded.
Cameron duplicates the bot’s response and bounces it back.
Hello, Omnibus. I am . . .
Wait, he thinks. I can’t be Omnibus too—the thing might get confused. Cameron starts over:
Hello, Omnibus. I am Batman. OPTIC sentry program: all updates downloaded.
Hello, Batman, says Omnibus, and in real life, Cameron bites down hard on the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing.
Omnibus, give me operations status.
All is well. Last system check performed at twenty-two thirty-six hours. Status: secure. Next system check to complete at twenty-two forty-four hours.
Cameron does the math in his head: so the bot scans and reports every eight minutes. He’ll have to work fast—but that’s not a bad thing. If he plays his cards right, he’ll be able to create ten different kinds of chaos before his kidnappers even begin to guess what’s happening. And when it comes to finding his way out . . . Well, he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
Omnibus, unroll your protocols.
Omnibus, who seems happy to have some company on his lonely robot mall cop beat, tells him everything he wants to know.
* * *
Cameron is just committing a plan to memory when the door to the room slides open. He turns, expecting Olivia, but this time his visitor is a man. He’s tall and gaunt, dressed in a white lab coat, with spiderlike hands dangling at his sides. He moves into the room with uncanny smoothness and presses one hand against the wall; a sensor glows red, then white, as a panel slides open to reveal a large black box surrounded by an array of screens.
“You’re grimacing. Are you in pain?” he asks, and gooseflesh ripples out on Cameron’s arms at the sound of his voice. The way the man says Are you in pain? has a creepy, giddy edge to it—it’s like he’s hoping the answer is yes so that he can poke you right where it hurts.
“I’m fine,” Cameron says.
“If so, I can give you something. You can trust me,” says the gaunt man. “I am a doctor.”
Cameron shudders, not because he doesn’t believe the man, but because he does. This doctor pulls a tangle of electrodes from the black box, deftly unraveling the wires with his long fingers. It’s not hard to imagine him holding a scalpel, peeling someone’s skin open with the same confident grace.
“If you’re a doctor, didn’t you swear some kind of oath to do no harm?”
The man laughs. “Cameron Ackerson, I’m not going to hurt you. What do you think this place is? I just want to talk to you. I don’t mind telling you, your extracurricular activities have caused quite a headache for my employers.”
The man dumps the untangled electrodes on the table, then crosses the room and presses his hand against another panel. The sensor glows, and Cameron feels a tickle in his head as a new digital voice joins the chorus. The cameras have been turned on. All he needs is one last stroke of luck—and to keep the guy distracted long enough to make it work for him.
“What’s your name?”
“You can call me Six,” the man says.
“Dr. Six?”
He shrugs. “If you like.”
“Who are your employers?”
Six smiles. “Well, of course you’ve met Olivia. I guess you could say she’s an influencer. You know all about influencers, don’t you? That’s what you wanted to be, isn’t it? With your little YouTube channel. Although, you haven’t posted a new video in ages. What happened?”
“Maybe I didn’t want
to be internet famous anymore,” Cameron says.
“Or maybe you found a new hobby,” Six replies, and the smile disappears. He leans in, attaching the electrodes to Cameron’s head. “Don’t squirm now, or we’ll have to restrain you.”
The screens behind the panel come alive with undulating lines as Cameron’s brain activity renders into a digital readout. Six lifts a tablet out of his pocket and taps it, focusing more on the screen and less on his patient.
“Your bedside manner sucks, dude,” Cameron says. The doctor snorts.
“Tell me, Cameron, does the name ‘Nia’ mean anything to you?”
Cameron swallows hard and says nothing—but on screen, one of the undulating lines spikes wildly. Six grins.
“Interesting,” he says.
His next volley of questions comes rapid-fire, as Cameron struggles to stay one step ahead. Some are easy to answer; some, not so much.
Who are you working with?
Why did you target Daggett Smith?
What is the source of the program you used to uncover our account network?
Do you believe in democracy?
Why are you involved with Nia? How did you meet her? Is she even a she? Where does she live? How do you contact her?
Cameron shakes his head. “I told you, I don’t know.”
“You’re lying,” Six says, but he frowns. The digital readout doesn’t seem to be telling him what he wants to hear; he leans in closer to tap the screen, then snakes a hand out to adjust one of the electrodes on Cameron’s head.
That’s the problem, Cameron thinks. I’m not. He’s hedged and told half-truths to avoid revealing his cyberkinetic abilities, but he hasn’t had to lie about Nia. Everything they want to know about her is stuff he doesn’t know himself—the same questions he used to ask her, only to get evasive, teasing answers. If he weren’t so nervous about this creepy doctor, who still looks like he’d rather be peeling Cameron’s flesh than probing his mind, he’d be getting righteously annoyed at Nia for being such a cipher.
On the other hand, he thinks, she was smart to cover her tracks so well: Olivia’s people may have been able to trace him, using their considerable resources to scrape his works for fragmented digital fingerprints, but it’s very clear they have no idea who Nia is. And Cameron, who has been quietly interfacing with the tablet in the doctor’s hands, peering into its history for clues, finally knows the answer to the one question Nia couldn’t unravel. Who was running a vast network of troll accounts that could steer the discourse on any topic as it pleased? Who was manipulating the algorithms to silence some voices while augmenting others? Who was the spider in the center of the dark web, spinning lies and spitting poison to keep people angry and afraid?
Olivia Park hadn’t told him the name of her organization, but Omnibus, the guard bot, was happy to supply it.
OPTIC—also known as the Omni Psyop Tactical Intelligence Corporation.
He and Nia have clearly caused them some trouble.
Now it’s time for Cameron to cause them a little more. Omnibus has just completed his latest security sweep, which gives him . . .
Eight minutes, he thinks.
“You know,” Six was saying, “we’d love to meet with her. With both of you. We need people with your skill set, and you—you and your friend—you could really make a difference here.”
“Yeah? You want us to help you kidnap a few more kids so they can’t walk at commencement? I didn’t just miss my graduation for this, you know,” Cameron says. “I also missed dinner. You assholes could’ve at least waited until after I’d had a burger to snatch-and-grab me.”
His snark has the desired effect: Six gently lays the tablet on the table and leans forward, earnestly.
“Surely you realize by now that snatching people isn’t really what we do here,” he says. “Look at this place. It’s not a torture camp—it’s an office. A research facility. We don’t even have a real prison cell. We had to stash you in our napping pod.”
“Napping pod?” Cameron says, incredulously. Inside his head, he thinks: Five minutes.
“Listen to me, Cameron. You want to change the world, don’t you? Well, that’s what we do here. We change the world, by changing conversations. Did you know that the last coup in the Middle East started with just a dozen posts on social media? Did you know that there could be an entirely different man occupying the presidency in France, if only his ads had been reposted by a few high-value, strategically placed accounts?”
“They said that was Russian hackers,” Cameron says.
Six laughs. “The Russians did their part. They were also sloppy. That’s the difference between their operation and ours. You know what they say: If you want the job done right, buy American. And they do, Cameron. They buy what we’re selling. They pay through the nose for it. We could have a new Daggett Smith on the air tomorrow, saying all the same things—or saying worse, if we want him to. And here’s the thing: You can’t stop us. You can only slow us down a little and piss us off in the process. As you can see, our resources are limitless.” He sweeps his hand, indicating the room—the cameras, the sensor-equipped panels, the three screens in the wall, on which Cameron’s brain activity is still being rendered in an increasingly colorful digital display.
One minute.
It’s the moment Cameron’s been waiting for.
Hey, Omnibus. Special delivery.
“That’s why it’s in your best interests to j—”
Six abruptly stops, whirling back to look again at the screens. The lines are ablaze, dancing wildly as Cameron focuses all his energy on the zip file he’s just hitched to Omnibus the guard bot—the one he’ll run up to the security system’s mainframe in about thirty seconds, a little surprise package bundled up with a doctored report of a hacking attempt on one of the system’s servers. The report will trigger a series of outcalls across the network, as administrators kick down the secure doors to track the intruder, who appears to be already inside. And when those doors open?
“What are you doing?” Six says sharply, staring at the screens as Cameron counts down the final thirty seconds in his head. “What are you doing?”
The screen nearest Six begins to stutter, the display blurring and fuzzing. As he steps toward it, the lines suddenly twist over on themselves, the dancing brainwave patterns resolving into a message that requires no interpretation. It fills the whole screen in a loopy cursive scrawl.
Eat My Butt, it says.
“You were right,” Cameron says, pulling the electrodes off his head one by one and dropping them on the table. “It’s been way too long since I uploaded a new video. Gotta keep that content fresh!”
Six’s face contorts with confusion as he looks at the display, at Cameron, at the tablet on the table—and then up at the cameras on the far wall.
“How?” he says, grabbing the tablet and jabbing at its surface, which has been quietly mirroring the security cameras for the last five minutes. The final frame still lingers on screen: a wide shot of the room, of Six, of Cameron sitting in the chair with electrodes on his head.
By now, the footage of Six’s last monologue should be out the door and fully uploaded to Cameron’s YouTube channel—and OPTIC’s tech team should be scratching their heads as Omnibus, the helpful guard bot, earnestly explains that their system has been infiltrated . . . by Batman.
It’s the most elaborate hack he’s ever pulled off, and without so much as stroking a keyboard—a fact that would fill Cameron with excitement and pride if not for the way Six is looking at him. The confusion is gone from the doctor’s face, and in its place is a cacophony of emotions: anger and frustration, but also a dark sort of glee that makes Cameron’s hair stand on end. In his rush to compromise the system, he hadn’t stopped to think about what would happen afterward, about what Olivia Park might do to people who broadcast the faces of her operatives out into the world. He’d actually believed Six’s pitch about OPTIC: that they weren’t that kind of black ops organizat
ion, and ruthless as they might be, that they weren’t in the business of murdering people—an assumption that now seems terribly naive.
A broad smile blooms on Six’s face. “So, there is something. I told them there was something. When they first brought you in, I saw your scans, and I told them—”
The man suddenly leaps toward the table, and Cameron lets out a little yelp, but it’s the tablet he wants. He grabs it and hurls it across the room, and as it smashes against the wall, Cameron sees the machine’s life flash before his eyes. It’s a burst of fragmented information: scraps of correspondence, medical files, photos—and what he sees makes Cameron gasp. For a split second, his head is filled with images, poorly lit pictures of what look like sculpted gargoyles—only sculptures don’t bleed. These are pictures of human beings, real people with too many limbs, with wings or claws, with their bodies encased in a mass of bone like an insect’s exoskeleton. He sees blood, and sutures, and . . .
Six.
The doctor is gazing at Cameron, his lips peeled back to expose miles of bright pink gum line and two neat rows of gleaming teeth.
“What do you know about my garden?” the man asks, and Cameron takes a careful step, keeping the table between them.
“N-nothing,” he stammers.
The doctor stares at him, the smile dancing on his lips, seeming to weigh his next move. Cameron is dimly aware that there’s a great deal of noise in the hallway outside, but in here, the silence stretches on and on. He feels beads of sweat begin to roll down his temples. He’s afraid to move, to breathe, to blink.
When the door opens behind him, he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t want to take his eyes off the man in the white coat.
But Six looks up, and his eyes narrow.
“I don’t know you,” he says.
From behind Cameron, Dr. Nadia Kapur’s voice says, “The boy goes now.”
* * *
Cameron turns slowly and nearly sobs with relief. He’s never been so glad to see his psychiatrist—so glad that he only wonders for a moment how she found him before deciding that he doesn’t care.
