FAI

by Jake Lingwall

  FAI

  Jake Lingwall

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the author.

  For Ellen Lingwall.

  Chapter One

  “Hey, wait!” the security guard said.

  Kari froze in place, her heart racing faster than a hacked auto-auto. This was a stupid idea. Why did I let Motorcad talk me into this? She looked back over her shoulder, which proved difficult with the heavy pile of boxes she was holding.

  The security guard who had been talking to the pretty, but too young, secretary was rushing over to her. She checked the status on her swarm of stinger drones waiting outside of Cabinet Member Rosewood’s office. Just in case.

  “Let me get that for you,” the guard said.

  He gave her a genuine smile, which Kari was entirely sure he did for the simple reason of trying to impress the secretary at the front desk.

  “Oh, great, thanks!” Kari said. She let the breath she was holding out slowly and ordered her small drone army to stand down. She was more relieved that she didn’t have to use her drones. I’ve stung enough people with drones already, but I’m getting to her office one way or another.

  The guard strode past her, using his mind chip in combination with the proximity sensor on the door to unlock it before pulling it open for her. The fact that the security for the building wasn’t fully automated spoke a lot about the cutback in government spending since the end of the war.

  “Do you need a hand with that?” Steven Promell said.

  Her mind chip identified the guard and displayed his information to her as she walked by. She had downloaded the database of personnel with access to the building, hoping it would give her an edge as she tried to break into the federal building.

  “No, I got it. But thanks.”

  “Have a wonderful day,” he said.

  Oh, I will. I’ve waited too long for this. Kari strode down the hall, holding her pile of boxes lower now so she could see where she was going. Her mind chip augmented her reality, displaying information about the blueprints of the building and who occupied the offices she passed. It was all information she had seen before, as she had been planning this for months. The Academy of Gifted Young People took nearly all her time, but this was important.

  She helped murder dozens of good people and tried to overthrow the entire government. I can’t let her get away with it. Rosewood had eventually been given a Cabinet position under the new presidential regime, and every time Kari saw her face on the net, she dreamed about taking her down.

  Kari rode an elevator to the fourth floor and followed the directions of her mind chip until she came the office of Duane Maugham. She was careful not to touch anything or leave any trace that she had been there. She connected to the legacy door with her mind chip and quickly hacked it. She convinced it that she was Duane, and then she stepped inside to the abandoned room. They really should spend the money to upgrade all their doors to be like the one downstairs. Worth the money, since any script kiddy can get past these old things.

  Not that I’m complaining. Kari set her boxes down on the floor and relaxed her stiff arms. She took a minute to catch her breath before unpacking the goodies she had brought with her. She was brisk and efficient. Duane wouldn’t be back in his office for at least another month, but her window of opportunity to access Rosewood’s office down the hall was much slimmer.

  Kari checked the camera feed showing her Rosewood’s front desk and found it already abandoned. Dang it! She never leaves this early. Kari had monitored Rosewood’s assistant for weeks, finding patterns in her behavior. Her entire plan was based on the fact that Allison ran a tight schedule. Usually, anyway.

  Kari reached out through her mind chip and overrode all the security cameras in the area to replay blank footage. It was a trick she had used so many times now that it was second nature to her. There goes my set of eyes. Good thing I brought my own.

  Out of the first box crept three modified crawlers, their long, thin metal legs clinking softly on the tile floor as they prepared to follow Kari out into the hallway. She grabbed the backpack from the largest box on the bottom and slung it over her shoulders. Finally, she covered her hands with the gloves from one box and connected them to the wires hiding beneath the shirt of her delivery uniform.

  Here we go again.

  A notification blinked in the corner of her vision, alerting her that the gloves had been successfully connected to the rest of her minimal exoskeleton under her uniform. Not exactly an “exoskeleton,” it was really just a set of connected tools someone breaking into a semi-secure office building might need.

  She placed one hand on the door before remembering she needed to dispose of the evidence. She turned around, and a light-green gas leaked from her gloves. It covered the cardboard boxes and melted the surface of them. Good luck getting prints or DNA from that.

  Kari stepped outside the room and was relieved to find the hallway empty. She used the gloves to quickly clean any prints off the door handle to Duane’s office and walked toward Rosewood’s office. Joseth paid for his crimes with his life; it’s time you face the consequences as well.

  She reached back and gently unzipped one of the side pockets to her backpack. Out of the pocket buzzed fifteen of her latest inventions, microdrones. They were slightly bigger than the mosquitoes they were based on. They were nothing but an energy cell, a camera, and wings. They split up in the air and spread out down the hallway in all directions. Each of them selected a suitable lookout point to land and started broadcasting footage back to Kari.

  The door leading to Rosewood’s office was identical to the one downstairs. It was one of the least exciting Vision Corp inventions of the past the few years, but it was one of Kari’s personal favorites. It used a combination of digital, proximity, and biometric information to identify people who had access. And it did all of it locally, which had prevented Kari from hacking it beforehand. Luckily I brought a key.

  The three crawlers that had paced alongside her on the quick journey from Duane’s office crawled onto the door. They scaled the door and positioned themselves appropriately. Kari took a step back as her inventions went to work. The crawlers sprouted a heated spike, similar to the ones she used on her hacking drones. The distinctive smell of melting metal reached her nearly as quickly as the low hissing sound the crawlers made as they dug into the door.

  A cloud of sparks burst from the door with a loud pop that sent Kari taking two steps back. Her next reaction was to check the camera feeds from her microdrones; no one was coming. The Vision Corp door flashed various warning indicators, but her crawlers continued to work on breaking into Rosewood’s office, where the paper records she was after hopefully waited for her.

  The door groaned, and its lights flashed chaotically before it clicked opened. Excellent. Kari pulled the door open and jogged through Rosewood’s office, eager to get to the large set of filing cabinets she had sought for months. All of Kari’s other efforts to try to tie Rosewood back to the assassinations of the leaders of the (then divided) States had been fruitless.

  She had almost given up hope when she had observed how overprotective of the filing cabinets Rosewood was, leading her to believe that the proof she needed was secured inside. Motorcad had insisted this was a big risk to take based on a hunch, but she had come anyway.

  She reached the metal cabinets and pressed her gloves up against them.
Kari turned her face away as electricity pulsed out of her gloves and into the cabinets, destroying all their locks. And now we find out if she kept anything we can use to connect her back to Oedipus. She probably destroyed anything too obvious, but there has to be something in here. I’ll take even the smallest detail I can use to make the connection.

  Kari took her backpack off and opened the largest section and activated her next set of specialized crawlers. She had designed these crawlers to pull out a document and take a picture of its contents before putting the document back in place. Every picture that was captured would be processed with the finest language-processing algorithms money could buy. If the algorithm matched anything in the document, that piece of paper would be set aside for Kari to take with her.

  She didn’t wait for her “librarian crawlers,” as she liked to call them, to do all the work. Kari set her mind chip to record and started pulling documents out of the lowest drawer in the center cabinet. She was a fast reader, but her eyes were only able to catch a word or two before her mind chip notified her that the document had been recorded, processed, and determined it wasn’t match.

  She rifled through document after document, her anxiety growing with every paper that didn’t contain anything she could use. There has to be something here. There has to be. Something that conflicts with her alibis, or a slip in accounting trails, or even some fake data she might have generated in order to explain herself if anyone had really pressed for details.

  Not finding a match was only one of her concerns; every second she spent in Rosewood’s office was another second that things could go wrong. Henderson was still after Kari, despite all his accolades and promotions, and if he found her, she knew it wouldn’t end well.

  A notification blinked in her mind. From the camera feed of her microdrones, she could see Rosewood’s secretary striding down the hall toward her office. No, it’s too soon! I don’t have a match yet! Kari kept pulling documents out for matches as she ordered four of her microdrones to try to distract Allison.

  The drones dutifully flew down and started to buzz around the middle-aged secretary, causing her to slow down and swat at them like flies. Her microdrones didn’t have the agility that her larger drones excelled at, and two of them blinked off-line after getting smashed by the secretary’s hands.

  Another notification blinked in the corner of her mind. Great, what now? Kari checked the notification and kept herself from shouting for joy. A match! She was tempted to pack up, but she knew one match might not make a strong enough case. David had insisted she would need four or five documents to really build a strong argument against Rosewood. She ordered the crawlers to keep going and the rest of her microdrones to try to slow Allison down in any way possible.

  The next paper Kari picked up matched as well. The crawler that found the first match had apparently hit a gold mine, every paper it examined now apparently containing incriminating evidence. She couldn’t control her excitement as she pumped her fists in the air and let out a small squeal.

  Allison was having a rough time, swatting away the sudden swarm of technological bugs. Kari had over a dozen matches now, so she stopped pulling new files out for inspection and instead secured the matched files into the protective case she had brought in her backpack. I’d love to get more, but I can’t be too greedy. Better to leave with a dozen than end up in Henderson’s prison again. The crawlers climbed back into her bag before Kari put it over her shoulders and turned to leave.

  “Stop right there!”

  Kari fell backward into the open drawers, which stopped her from hitting the ground, but it caused further problems as they closed behind her. She stared at the security guard who was standing in the doorway. How did I not see you coming? Kari checked the camera feeds but remembered she had sent all her microdrones to distract Allison.

  “Dang it,” Kari said out loud.

  The security guard just stared at her with a look of profound bafflement on his aging face. His nose was several sizes too small, which maybe enhanced his look of puzzlement.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t supposed to catch me,” Kari said.

  “Oh, so you are stealing something,” Tyler Wailner said. Her mind chip displayed his personal information for her to see.

  “Well,” Kari said, trying to pull herself up as gracefully from the drawers as possible, but admittedly struggling enough to make both of them uncomfortable. “In a way, I guess. A few papers, and a few hundred copies of others.”

  “Really?” Tyler blinked a few times and leaned in closer, as if to get a better look at her.

  “What?” Kari said, looking down at herself as she sent out dozens of orders with her mind chip. “I don’t look the type or something?”

  “You really don’t . . . but I guess that doesn’t matter. Gonna have to take you with me either way.”

  “Tyler, as much as I would like to, that’s just not going to work for me.” Kari sidestepped closer to the wide windows at the back of the room. Tyler scratched his head. I need to work on my timing.

  The window behind her shattered as dozens of stingers hit it at once. The flock of drones she had kept waiting outside attacked, executing her backup escape plan. Shards of glass scattered across the wood floor and hit the back of her shoes, but she had deliberately stayed far enough from the window to escape the effects of any sharp shards.

  Tyler covered his face and shouted. Kari used the time to swing her backpack in front of her and open the last compartment. She pointed it at the wall across from her and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  She pulled it again and again, but still the hook didn’t shoot out of the backpack and anchor into the wall like she needed it to. Come on!

  “That was it?” Tyler said.

  Kari spared a glance to the guard and found him looking across the room at her.

  “Give me a second, would you?”

  “I really shouldn’t . . .”

  “Please?” I don’t want to have to shock you with my drones, Tyler, so if you could just give me a minute, that would be great.

  “Oh, why not . . . she’s a real beast, and I’m going to retire soon anyway.”

  A loud, screeching siren kicked into effect as the building’s aging security system reacted to the broken window. Kari pulled the trigger again, and still nothing happened. She tried to run some diagnostics on it with her mind chip, but nothing happened. It’s a dud. Great. More ambitious guards will be arriving any second.

  “Why don’t you just take the fire escape? Just right outside the window,” Tyler said.

  “Oh.” Kari stepped over to the window and found that he was telling the truth. “Good idea. Thanks, Tyler.”

  Tyler just brushed her gratitude off lazily with his hand and turned away as she climbed out the window. It only took her a few seconds to make it to the bottom of the ladder. The final drop to the ground was taller than she would have liked, but she jumped down anyway, landing on top of some manicured bushes. She didn’t have time to complain about the impact’s effect on her knees as she raced out to the back of the building.

  That’s a heck of a response time . . .

  Four police auto-autos had arrived behind the building already, and officers were rushing in. I need a plan C now. She didn’t have to think for long as a van rammed into the side of the fence directly across the lawn from her. Kari ordered her small drone army to accompany her, expecting a fight. Instead, the auto-van’s door slid open, and Motorcad leaned out.

  “Better run, Professor Tahe,” Motorcad said. “I don’t have any bail money for you this time.”

  Chapter Two

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” Kari said.

  She flipped through the camera feeds from her drones, checking for signs of pursuit. Where are they? Her drones fanned out around the van, searching in all directions for signs of enforcement officers.

  “Good thing I ignored you,” Motorcad said. “Otherwise your drones would be tear
ing into those enforcement cars and you’d be running down Tenth Street looking for an open sewer drain to hide in.”

  “Why aren’t they following us?”

  “I know you don’t mean to insult me, but you’re not the only professional in this fine self-driving vehicle.”

  Kari sighed. After one last check of her drones, she ordered a handful of them to land on top of the van and the rest of them to fly out of town. A hundred drones flying around their auto-van would draw unneeded attention.

  “You’re welcome, by the way,” Motorcad said. “I’ve never been in the sewers, but I hear they aren’t pleasant. And then, they probably would have chased you down there and you’d be trying to dodge energy blasts by—”

  “Thank you,” Kari said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Kari returned her attention to the real world and gave Motorcad a disapproving look. They had been constant companions for the last two years while they avoided the government and got their school off the ground. On the most part, they got along extremely well, but he did have a knack for getting under her skin at times.

  “Why would you follow me here? Didn’t think I could do it on my own?”

  “You really need to work on your gratitude, Kari. You’re starting to make me regret saving your butt.”

  He’s right. It was a good thing he was here, even if he was supposed to be taking care of the school.

  “Even though you’re supposed to be running the Academy right now, I’m glad you followed me against my wishes and were able to give me a ride.”

  “You told me to not let the business run into the ground while you were away. I did that. Without you, there is no Academy, so I made sure everything went smoothly with Rosewood. Besides, I wanted to be able to claim partial credit for her downfall. You know? Gotta keep the rep up. Can’t have the world thinking I’m just a ridiculously good-looking and competent teacher.”