Hex

by Rhiannon Lassiter

  The gates into the system were firmly shut; no watchdog program waited for her outside. With a mental shrug Raven exerted a little pressure and the security sprang to life with the most advanced question and answer routine she had ever encountered.

  > ?who <

  > accepted user < she told it.

  > ?authorization <

  > authorization provided <

  > password <

  > correct password. < Raven was disappointed. It was easier to fool this system than she had anticipated. It was designed to catch out an illegal access attempt by requesting certain responses. But Raven, deep in the heart of the net, need only tell the circuitry that she had provided the correct answers for it to believe her. In another few microseconds she had gone through an elaborate sequence of security protocols none of which put up the slightest resistance at all. Finally the system delivered itself up to her just as absolutely as the government system had.

  > you may enter. database records/programs/operating specifications of this system are at your disposal. < If Raven had been present in the flesh she would have laughed. The system of the main agency for exterminating Hexes had just thrown itself open to one of them without providing any resistance at all.

  But entering the system did not automatically provide Raven with the answers she needed. It took her a while to find the entries for the date 15.03.2366. And more microseconds passed before she located the entry she wanted. It was three lines long.

  > at 1400 hours three cps operatives (names appended) collected suspected hex—rachel hollis—from her place of residence. at 1530 hours the hex was delivered to dr. kalden. background trace results in database. < Raven called up the database and discovered that the CPS had traced Rachel as far back as her adoption in 2361 by Carl and Vanessa Michaelson in Denver, Colorado, USA. They had even discovered the specific orphan asylum and it was at that point that Raven discovered the single most alarming line of data that had ever drawn her attention.

  > ?siblings ?hexes. initial search = no results. ?indepth search <

  For a moment Raven considered erasing the whole entry, the whole database if necessary. She would have been prepared to crash the entire system to protect herself. But a moment’s thought assured her that this was unnecessary. Instead she appended an addendum to the file.

  > indepth search completed. results negative. no siblings exist. results confirmed. no further investigation possible. < Having achieved what she considered the most important point, concealing her own existence, Raven continued her investigation, centering in on Dr. Kalden.

  She discovered something surprising. Raven had never bothered to think much about the CPS. Her priority had been to stay out of the sight of any official databases and out of the way of any security services. Gangers in Denver had considered that hiring Raven was worth the trouble of putting up with her difficult personality because she was so meticulous in keeping them out of the sight of the law. But now that Raven was actually inside the system of an agency devoted to exterminating Hexes, she found it was not exactly what she might have expected.

  The European arm of the Center for Paranormal Studies was run by Governor Charles Alverstead, who was politically responsible only to the central parliament of the European Federation. But underneath him was a whole host of operatives who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the agency. From what Raven could discover they were apparently divided into three main categories. Two of these were what she might have expected. There were the administrators and investigators whose work was to track down suspected Hexes. Then there were the operatives who processed known Hexes to the death chambers where they were given lethal injections to exterminate them. All of this was what Raven had anticipated and she was unaffected by the cold-bloodedness of the operation. What had surprised her was the existence of a third area of the CPS where no other area should have existed. What else was there for an extermination agency to do?

  References to this third area were obscure, mentioning only Dr. Kalden and results obtained by his department. Raven had to search through the files for over an hour of real time before she could piece together the fragments of information to get some kind of idea of the overall picture. Her conclusions were staggering.

  When the CPS had been converted from a research department to an extermination agency, in the year 2098, it had retained a portion of its original facilities for surgical experimentation—principally a laboratory and hospital where the initial investigations of the Hex gene had taken place. That facility had remained largely disused until over two hundred years later, in 2320, when suddenly all references to it were classified as confidential. Raven deduced that the laboratory had started up again to continue the experiments. Nothing else could explain the information in the databases. The majority of Hexes were listed as collected by operatives and exterminated according to the due process of law. But one in eight had the same entry as Rachel’s file, concerning the Hex’s delivery to Dr. Kalden. Raven could draw only one conclusion.

  Detaching herself from the system Raven raced back through the net, making each connection with the speed of thought. Reaching her own terminal she rejoined her body in an instant and turned round.

  “Wraith,” she said, “I think Rachel’s still alive.”

  • • •

  As the leader of a vast corporation Bob Tarrell was used to working fast. It had been Wednesday afternoon when he had his conversation with the Belgravia Complex’s new resident. By Thursday morning he had informed the staff of the Mirage vidchannel that he would be changing its entire format. By midday the same day, six different program proposals lay on his desk and the wheels were in motion for announcing the launch of a radical new rock channel that weekend at his party.

  Although prior commitments had prevented him from meeting Elizabeth Black at his offices, he had contacted her via her vidcom. The image on his screen had looked tired and overworked but when he told her of his plans for an alternative rock channel she had agreed to download all the information she had on rock music through the net. It had arrived within the hour. The speed had impressed the media magnate and he was seriously considering offering the young researcher a job. He had attempted to call the management of AdAstra as well but their line had been engaged consistently. However, one of his assistants had linked up with their computer database which, although small, had provided the information about channel ratings which he had wanted.

  The board of directors had voted unanimously in favor of Bob’s proposal to alter Mirage’s format, and the shareholders, concerned about its consistently dropping ratings, had welcomed the chance to revive its fortunes. Already several well-known presenters had been wooed away from other music channels with the promise of larger salaries and the hope of achieving cult status. Mirage’s logo had vanished from holoscreen billboards and the channel’s main studios. Already artists had submitted graphic designs for the logo of CultRock.

  Personally Bob Tarrell considered twentieth-century rock music to be the most horrific din, but the initial reactions from his company had confirmed his belief that there was money in it. Therefore he had let it be known that he had a great admiration for the genre. As interest in the new channel grew steadily, Bob Tarrell had visions of revitalizing the entire music scene.

  • • •

  While her father was pretending an interest in alternative rock music his daughter had made the decision to despise it. This considered judgment had been the result of sitting through three hours of it with Caitlin and Zircarda. All three would have been perfectly willing to hail it as the most exciting thing they had ever heard. But when the final track had eventually screeched to an end, Zircarda, lifting a cautious hand to her ringing ears, had said deliberately:

  “I don’t think it’s really us, do you?”

  Sighing with relief, Ali and Caitlin had concurred willingly. Although all three had congratulated Bob Tarrell on his wild idea and assured him that it would be the latest craze, within an hou
r the word had discreetly been spread to the rest of the clique that CultRock was not for them. Naturally this made no difference to the group’s plans to come to Tarrell’s glitzfest that weekend. Rubbing shoulders with celebrities was worth pretending an interest in alternative rock for an evening.

  • • •

  In any other situation Raven would have been ready and willing to help Bob Tarrell with the launch of his new channel. But ever since she had discovered the puzzle within the CPS’s database she had been hacking through the net in the attempt to gain more information. She had only halted her search twice. Once to speak to Bob Tarrell over the vidcom and send him information on alternative rock music and once to set up a system for the nonexistent company AdAstra, complete with a faulty vidcom line. Interest in Raven’s preferred musical genre had been snowballing and the only reason Wraith had not been warning her about unnecessary exposure was that he was so wrapped up in the possibility that Rachel was still alive.

  The information she had found about the Hex laboratory was scarce. The only addition to the scraps of data she had already discovered was the issue of the lab’s connection to Dr. Kalden. The date when all references to the disused lab became confidential was the same as the date given for Kalden, then twenty-three, leaving a highly lucrative research post. After that all references to him seemed to cease. He stopped publishing in the scientific and medical journals where he had once been an authority on experimental neural psychology. He broke all contact with the remaining members of his family and hadn’t registered to vote in forty-seven years.

  Raven found this suspicious enough to center her research on Kalden. But her probing of the net yielded nothing more concrete. The last picture of Kalden showed him as a young man whereas now he must be seventy years old. It showed an anonymous scientist, dressed plainly in white, the only distinguishing mark a pair of piercing blue eyes. In or out of the net Kalden was a shadow. Anyone but Raven might have believed him dead. But the datapaths only she could trace, the information hidden to any other eyes, and her own instinct convinced her he was still alive. As she stared at the scientist’s unreadable eyes she was certain there would be some way to find out where he was.

  • • •

  Many miles away Luciel stared into the same pair of cold blue eyes. He was still weak from the ravages of the last drugs to pass through his body but he tried to keep upright as the scientists examined him. There was no way to conceal his weakness from them but he was scared to collapse in front of Kalden. The doctor rarely participated in the experimentation, although he devised most of it. The only reasons for him to attend a session were if a subject was yielding especially rewarding results or was providing particularly useless data. In the latter case his presence would mean Luciel was scheduled for extermination since no more use could be made of him.

  Luciel couldn’t believe Kalden could be there because the experiments had shown anything positive. Day after day he was pumped full of drugs and wired up to machinery he couldn’t begin to understand. Scanners measured electrical impulses in his brain and the machinery but he couldn’t imagine what the scientists could be learning from him. They went through the motions of the experiments with mechanical precision but they seemed uninterested in the findings. Luciel suspected he rarely provided them with any usable results. Half the experiments they performed seemed futile and some seemed to have no reason other than to break his spirit.

  As well as the bruises from the injections, his skin was covered in faded scars and burns. His dreams when delirious were nightmares, but even through the clouds of hallucination he knew that some of what he remembered was true. The metal chair they strapped him in, the electric current that raced through his body a hundred times as fast as the flutters of his beating heart, and the smell of his own skin burning when the power was turned up too high. These were things he believed in and when Kalden fixed him with that considering stare Luciel felt as frightened as a laboratory rat with as little hope of saving himself.

  • • •

  Raven had been unable to prove her suppositions. Theoretically if a laboratory was performing secret experiments on Hexes, a computer database of their results should exist. But Raven could find no system that corresponded to that of the laboratory. She searched consistently for two whole days before finally detaching herself from the terminal and smashing her fist against the keypad with frustration.

  “Nothing!” she seethed. “I swear, if there was anything there I’d have found it by now.”

  “Maybe your hypothesis was incorrect,” Wraith said and Kez flashed him a warning look. But Raven seemed too angry with the terminal to care.

  “I’m not wrong,” she told him. “The laboratory exists. I could even make a guess as to where it is. But I can’t find the computer system.” She massaged the back of her neck, her movements heavy with exhaustion.

  “Maybe you should get some sleep,” Kez suggested cautiously.

  “Not until I’ve worked this out,” Raven replied firmly. Crossing over to the Nutromac she ordered tea and carried the cup over to the couch, sitting beside Wraith and stretching her legs out in front of her. Kez sat opposite, watching as she sank into the cushions.

  “Perhaps the CPS hid the system so that it couldn’t be found by a Hex,” Kez said.

  “That’s what I would have thought,” Raven replied. “But you haven’t seen their main system. It was pitifully easy to hack into. Even a regular hacker could have cracked it in time.”

  There was a pause. Raven had closed her eyes and was beginning to drift off into sleep before Wraith suddenly spoke.

  “Raven,” he said, frowning.

  “What?” She opened one eye, apparently wondering if it was worth her while to listen to him.

  “Do the CPS know that you’re more than just a regular hacker?” he asked.

  “The CPS don’t even know I exist,” Raven replied. “And I intend to keep it that way.”

  “You’re missing the point.” Wraith shook his head. “What I meant was, do they know what any Hex can do?”

  “Explain,” Raven said, both eyes open now.

  “I’ve never known another Hex apart from you,” Wraith told her, “so I don’t know if this is right. But all of your mutant abilities are connected to computers, are they not?”

  “More or less.” Raven sat up. “There are other aspects, but the basic bent is clearly technological.”

  “Does the CPS know that?”

  “I don’t know.” Raven frowned. “At least, I’m not certain, because I haven’t found the results of any recent experiments.” Then she shook her head. “No, Wraith, you’re wrong. They must know, that’s how the Hex gene was created in the first place.”

  “How?” Kez asked. He hadn’t really expected Raven to answer but she turned to look at him with a sudden interest.

  “Kez, what do you know about Hexes?” she asked. “I mean, what did you know before you met me?”

  “I figured it was like magic,” he said slowly, a little embarrassed. “Or aliens, something like that. I had no idea it involved computers.”

  Raven nodded slowly, glancing at Wraith, who was watching her intently. Then she began to speak, thinking out loud.

  “Most people don’t know anything about Hexes, except that they’re illegal,” she said. “The genetics experiments and the extermination laws are ancient history now.”

  “That was when the Hex gene was created?” Wraith asked.

  “Don’t you know any history either?” Raven raised her eyebrows.

  “Gangers generally have their minds on other things,” Wraith pointed out dryly.

  “OK.” Raven shrugged. “There’s not much to tell.” She looked at Kez. “But it’s connected to what I was telling you the other day about the rush to create more advanced technology during the twenty-first century. One of the areas that was affected was genetic research. A lot of mutated genes were grafted on to human DNA. They were designed to make the human race more efficient
and adaptable. Most of the mutations didn’t have much effect so in the end the experimentation was abandoned. But the Hex gene which was created was widely adopted until 2098 when Hexes were made illegal.”

  “Why was it widely adopted?” Wraith asked.

  “It was designed to increase computer literacy,” Raven told him. “They were trying to improve programming skills, things like that.”

  “So, why are Hexes exterminated?” Kez asked. “I would have thought that computer literacy was a good thing.”

  “Something must have gone wrong,” Wraith mused.

  “The extermination laws were passed in 2098,” Raven said.

  “And you don’t know why?” Kez asked.

  “The whole thing was shrouded in secrecy,” Raven told him. “Sanctioning the murder of a whole sub-strain of mutated humans is a controversial thing to do.”

  “Do you think they found out about what you can do?” Kez asked.

  “They must have guessed that a Hex could become the ultimate hacker,” Raven said. “But I’m more than just a hacker—nothing I’ve found in the CPS’s system indicates that they know about the way I enter the net.”

  “Raven, an intelligent hacker would be bad enough,” Wraith said. “Computers are used all over the world. International government and finance depend on those systems being secure.”

  “So they started exterminating,” Raven agreed. “Maybe before they had the chance to work out exactly how far the Hex abilities extend. That would explain why they reopened that lab—to investigate what we can actually do.” Then she slammed a hand onto the arm of the couch. “But none of this is helping me find that system.”

  “If it exists, it’s meant to be secret,” Wraith pointed out. “Experimenting on humans is illegal, even Hexes.”

  “Raven, how would you set up a secret system?” Kez asked shyly. Raven grinned at his admiring tone of voice, then narrowed her eyes as she thought.