5
Nothing is Everything
Anticipation built to a point where Tris couldn’t make herself take a step forward into the baggage processing room. This place held pain. Here, she’d learned her entire mission had been a lie topped off with the cruelest of puns. Inside, Abby climbed up on an old conveyor belt and walked along still holding Kevin’s hand.
Tris took a deep breath. The last time she’d set foot inside this place, she’d been so crushed she lashed out at Kevin and almost lost him. How did I go from wanting to kill him to feeling like I’d be lost without him? Going through that door could potentially give Nathan another victory. Maybe he’d hidden some other useless thing in the music file, something he figured she’d find only to raise her hopes to once again dash them.
I’m not going to know if I keep standing here.
She walked in and let the door close behind her.
Abby twisted around at the abrupt change in light. As soon as she realized Tris had closed the door, she resumed walking. “Did those men wanna check that girl for bite marks?”
“Katie? No, they found her like that,” said Kevin.
Abby got down to crawl into the port of an x-ray machine, but Kevin plucked her from the conveyor. Giggling, she squirmed in playful protest. “Hey.”
“Don’t go in there. I don’t want you getting hurt.”
Abby stared at the machinery, the dead monitors, dark buttons, and boxy housing. “Who made her get undressed?”
“Her parents died years ago,” said Kevin. “Maybe she’s never had anything.”
“Like ever?” asked Abby, blinking. “Why did people just leave her alone?”
“Well, she did spend most of her life hiding. Sounded like she had more than one chance to be found, but decided to stay out of sight.” Tris jogged to catch up. “If she wasn’t so tired of those handcuffs, she probably would’ve grown old in that grocery store… at least until the canned food ran out.”
“That’s stupid.” Abby rolled her eyes. “It sucks being alone. If it was me, I’d have been screaming for help as loud as I could. How could she stand being locked up for so long?”
“No options,” muttered Kevin. “People do a lot of stupid crap out of fear. And, uhh, well, sometimes making a lot of noise isn’t a great idea.”
Infected have good hearing. Tris bit her lip.
Abby seemed to catch on from the look she must’ve given her. “Oh… right. They can hear.”
Kevin opened the door to the concourse, and slammed it. “Umm. After those raiders grabbed her, she probably figured all adults were dangerous. And it’s not like she could check them out and run away if they turned out bad.” He pointed at the door. “Maybe we should let Abby wait in the car.”
“Shit.” Tris rubbed her forehead. The airports full of skeletons.
“What? Why?” Abby’s voice took on a tone of nervousness. She grabbed Tris. “Don’t leave me alone.”
“There’s umm… dead people out there.” Kevin cringed. “From the war.”
Abby shook her head. “Don’t care. I don’t wanna be alone.” She glanced at the door. “Are they nasty?”
“Bones. Just bones at this point.”
“Oh.” Abby’s fear faded away. “I can deal with bones.”
“There’s a lot of them.” Kevin pulled the door open again. “If you wanna keep your eyes closed, I can carry you.”
“I’m eleven, not five, and―” Abby stared at the airport hallway.
The red tiled corridor remained packed with skeletons, swept against the walls like dead leaves lining the grave of a dried-up river. Most still wore the clothing they’d died in, stained in rotted gore. A few humanoid shapes, lighter than the wall, near the windows hinted at where some had been vaporized by the blast. Where the waiting area faced the tarmac, once-molten glass ran like a maple syrup spill onto the floor. Tris guessed that all these skeletons, those who hadn’t been near a window, had died in minutes from radiation.
Abby held on to Kevin’s right arm with both hands, taking cautious baby steps between spots where tile showed through dried, dark gunk. “Whoa. I am so happy you got me shoes.”
“We hadn’t exactly expected to be taking you on an expedition.” Tris patted her on the shoulder.
Kevin walked with a brisk stride past the security checkpoint and a few boarding areas before heading down the retractable ramp toward the 747 that Terminal9 made home. Tris followed close, eyeing the dead.
Kevin said not all the historical documentaries are real. They’re not going to get up.
The air grew hot and stagnant in the flexible tunnel, which tinted the world ochre from the sun beating on the plastic walls. What’s this guy going to do when his AC runs out?
Kevin approached the metal box beside the door and wiped dust off the small five-inch screen before jabbing at the largest (and only round) transparent button. It lit up in a few seconds, and a sallow face broken by scrolling raster lines appeared in monochromatic green.
“Got your message,” said Kevin.
Terminal9 leaned closer to the camera, filling the screen with eyes for a second. “Oh. Hey. Right.” The door emitted a heavy clank. “’Mon in… and close the door once you’re in.”
Kevin pulled the entryway open, releasing a blast of cool air into the stuffy boarding tunnel. Tris followed Abby inside, and both of them let off a gasp of relief at the same time. Tris pulled the door shut.
“How is it cold?” asked Abby.
“The man who lives here got the air conditioning working,” said Tris. “Used to be pretty common before the war, and it’s still used by the Enclave.”
“A winter machine? Or magic?” Abby looked around in awe at rows upon rows of empty seats. She touched a few. “I wish we had chairs like this at home. They’re so soft.”
“No, it isn’t magic.” Tris mumbled an explanation of air conditioning as they walked out of the first class cabin into the back, and to a spiral stairway.
Kevin kept his hand near his .45 as he led the way up the stairs. Abby shivered at the cascade of even colder air wafting down the metal corkscrew. She tried to tug the hem of her dust-hopper hide dress down farther than the middle of her thighs.
“It’s so cold…” Abby’s teeth chattered.
At the top of the stairs, Kevin took off his armored jacket and held it open for Abby. She eagerly thrust her arms into the sleeves and let him close it around her. It didn’t go much past the dress, but at least it covered her arms and shoulders.
“Heeeeeyyyy,” said Terminal9. He walked out from behind a blue curtain in a pair of Hawaiian shorts and flip-flops, no shirt. The man appeared even thinner, every rib showing clear beneath his skin. “Glad ta see you got the message. Wasn’t sure if that ’bot of yours would make it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Kevin.
“’Mon.” Terminal9 headed back through the curtain. “Means I heard some shit go down over the radio. Someone shot her… it… whatever.”
The room behind the curtain held even colder air.
Abby shivered, tucking her hands under her arms, and stared, open-mouthed at all the hentai posters on the walls. Tris wanted to cover her eyes, but after Amarillo, some cartoon tentacles seemed mild.
“Whoa,” said Abby. “This dude needs to stop living by himself.”
Terminal9 mumbled something too low to hear.
Tris slipped around past Kevin and Abby, avoided the end of the queen-sized bed, and followed him into the next room where he had all his gear set up.
“Uhh… Don’t leave me alone with this guy,” said Abby. “Those girls on the wall look my age.”
“They’re eighteen,” yelled Terminal9. “It’s the art style!”
“Uh, huh, sure.” Kevin smirked at him.
“I’m serious.” Terminal9 gestured at one with breasts the size of watermelons. “They either have too much or nothing.”
“If you think it’s stupid,” asked Kevin. “Why are the
y all over the walls?”
“A) it’s all I had, and B) you gotta take it in the context it was intended. It’s stylized and shit, man.”
“Is that tentacle going up her… Oh, god… it is.” Abby blushed, turned away from the wall, and buried her face in Kevin’s chest.
Terminal9 fidgeted, looking quite uncomfortable. “Never planned on no kids bein’ in here.”
“Yeah well.” Kevin put an arm around her. “Just as soon get out of your way. Hope your info’s worth the trip.”
“Well… I don’t really know how good it is, but I figured you’d want to see it.” He scurried past the curtain.
Kevin guided Abby along so she didn’t have to look at the walls. Mercifully, the former cockpit had little decoration beyond a mountain of tech. Duct tape and a couple of old trash bags sealed the window around the cable bundle snaking in from outside; thin plastic fluttered in the wind.
Tris flopped on the same chair she’d used last time. This guy better not ask for a tittie pic again. Her hands shook; she continued to sweat rivers despite the chill. She rubbed the front of her throat for a few seconds while the hacker ambled over to the pilot’s chair and got to work tapping on a few keyboards. Flat panel monitors arranged around him, some hung from the ceiling, flickered to life.
“So… what did you find?” Tris rasped.
Kevin put a hand on her shoulder.
She straightened. Resolve flooded into her from the spot where he touched her. I don’t care what it is. I will not let Nathan beat me down. Tris looked up at him with a grateful smile for a second before glaring at the back of Terminal9’s scraggly head. The way his light brown hair collected in cords reminded her of a poorly maintained fern.
“Okay so, I’m listenin’ to those tunes you had, right?”
She glared.
“Hey…” He raised a hand. “I know shit was a kick in the balls and stuff, but, free music is still free music. Anyway, I hear these pops, right? Turns out the first ten tracks have shitty audio quality for exactly the same portion of the file. The front 32k of each track had a different sample rate than the rest.”
“The hell language is that?” asked Kevin.
Abby giggled.
“There’s hidden data in the files…” Tris stared at him. “What was in it? Did Nathan make another bad joke?”
Terminal9 grinned. “I’m gettin’ there. Building up to it and stuff. So, I went into the code with a sector editor. Turns out the files are as big as they would be if the entire mp3 had been sampled at the same rate. There’s padding data in among the music that the player mostly ignores, but here and there, it had dead space. No data, which made the sound pop silent for a split second. Sounds like an old analog track snapping.”
“You are going somewhere with this, right?” asked Kevin.
Abby fiddled with a red plastic shroud on the desk, lifting it to expose a button.
“Hey!” yelled Terminal9. “Kid. Don’t touch that.”
She pulled her hand back as if burned. “Sorry. You don’t have to yell at me.”
“It’s wired to frag mines in the boarding tunnel.” He scratched at his head. “Defense system.”
Abby gasped.
“Against what?” asked Tris.
Terminal9 grinned as he shrugged. “Against anything that wants my ass for lunch. Anyway… So I spent a couple days mining that slush data for anything, but didn’t find a damn thing.”
Tris clenched her jeans tight about her knees and glared at him. “Look. I’m about to scream at you. Please just tell me what you found.”
“There’s a point to this.” Terminal9 made a finger gun to his temple before tapping an LCD monitor. “Whoever put this data in the file went way far beyond your run of the mill attempt to hide some shit. It drove me nuts for weeks. Why would someone pad bogus data at the front of the files? It finally hit me that the nothing was everything.”
Kevin pursed his lips. “You’ve been spending too much time in a sunbaked plane.”
“No.” Terminal9 raised both hands, fingers splayed. “The blank spaces. That was the data.”
“Blank?” Tris squinted. “The empty spots formed some kind of pattern?”
“Exactly!” He pointed up. “Wow. Took me two weeks to think of that. Yeah. I had to count the file marker positions for each set of zeroes, and that turned into Unicode character codes. Like the first letter in the message is ‘T’ ’cause it was fifty-four spaces after the file header. The next one occurred seventy-two spaces later… and so on.”
“Are you sure that message was even meant for her? How the hell would we have found that? It… would’ve been reckless for whoever sent it to assume she’d find it.”
“You’re here right now, aren’t you?” Terminal9 winked.
Tris’ heart hung in her chest like a lead weight. “How… do you know it was for me? Are you assuming that because you found it in the data I carried?”
“Well the file has your name in it.” He tapped a few keys, and a message appeared on the blank monitor:
Tris,
Contact me.
-Dad.
650-555-0447
She squeaked. What? Dad? Her gaze fell to the floor. She hadn’t noticed she’d been trembling until she looked at her legs. “No… that’s gotta be Nathan’s sick idea.”
Kevin wiggled his finger at the screen. “What do those numbers mean?”
Terminal9 flashed the smile of an ancient guru asked a most basic question on enlightenment. “It’s a PSTN number.”
“Oh, of course.” Kevin raised his arm a few inches and let it fall against his side. “Obviously.”
Abby took a step toward Tris and leaned into her.
“Okay. Ever hear of a phone?” asked Terminal9.
“Little things people used to carry around everywhere?” Kevin held up his hand. “’Bout the size of a, umm…” He traced a small rectangle in the air.
“Sort of. Close enough. Those things used to allow people to talk to each other over long distances. Each device had a specific number assigned to it. If you typed that number in on your phone, you’d connect to the other person and be able to talk.”
Tris shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s no phone network left. It all fried in the war from EMP.”
“I don’t think your asshole friend did this.” Terminal9 tapped the monitor, his fingernail clicking on the plastic. “People like that are too proud of their own cleverness. He’d want it to be found so you could appreciate his bastardry, and that was not damn easy to find. I think whoever sent you that message knew what that dude was up to, and wanted to sneak it past him.”
Could it be possible that my father’s gone into hiding somehow? She grabbed Abby like a big doll since she stood conveniently close. “I… never did see a body.”
“Like they’d have shown it to you.” Kevin moved closer and caressed her hair. “I dunno, Tris. This isn’t much to work with.”
“Okay.” Tris held her hands up. “Let’s play a theory game here and assume that my father wasn’t killed by the Council of Four, and is somehow still alive deep in the bowels of the Enclave, and managed to sneak an encoded message into the fake cure that Nathan uploaded to my implant. What the hell am I supposed to do with a phone number?”
Terminal9 smiled. “Now this might be worth that―” His stare moved away from her chest, to Abby, and back to Tris’ breasts. “Uhh, never mind.” He grinned. “I don’t have any way to connect to it from here, but I talked to a guy farther west who said the number looked like a Redwood City exchange. There’s still a fragment of the grid that survived over there on account of bein’ mostly underground. Accordin’ to Hec8-e, there’s at least one functional CO in that area you might be able to patch in from.”
“CO?” asked Tris.
“What the devil is heck eighty?” Kevin scratched his head.
“Central office, and Hec8-e is another person like me, a techie.” Terminal9 leaned back in his
chair. “A CO is a place where the telco had all their equipment that patched into the individual lines running to houses.”
“Wait, they ran wires to people’s houses?” Kevin blinked.
Terminal9 chuckled. “Yeah man. What do you think all them poles was for? Most of the wires either melted or got salvaged.”
Kevin rubbed his chin. “So, in order to contact this father of yours that may or may not still exist, we’d have to go basically into the Enclave’s backyard and hope we find a working phone, and hope he’s still around to answer it.”
“Yeah, basically.” Terminal9 nodded. “That’s about right.”
“Heh.” Kevin laughed. “What could go wrong?”
Everything. Tris exhaled. That sick gnawing feeling churned in her gut again. She couldn’t ignore the curiosity for long at all before the sleepless nights would get to her. On a rational level, it sounded so farfetched. So out there. Stupid. Foolish. Reckless. Run right back to the Enclave she’d escaped from. She looked left and up, into Abby’s wide, brown eyes. Nathan’s going to drop Virus on Nederland. The urge to do something about it took her with a full body tremor, as though she’d sucked down ten quadruple-shot lattes in ten minutes. She hadn’t had one of those since the day before they sent her to Detention. I just found out my father might still be alive, and I’m fiending for coffee. What is wrong with me?
“That it?” asked Kevin. “Nothing more encoded?”
Terminal9 pivoted his feet on the floor, making his chair swish side to side, and leaned his head against two fingers. “That’s all I’ve found so far. The rest of the files are uniform, without the extra data. I know it ain’t much.”
Kevin leaned his head back, eyes closed. “Sometimes the tiniest detail will kill you.”
“Your dad?” asked Terminal9.
“Nah. Wayne.” Kevin chuckled.
Did he really suggest we actually chase this down? Tris gawked at him.
“We’ll talk. Let’s round up those parts for Bee and get going. Be nice to make it back to Ben’s ’house before it gets too dark.”
“What do you think?” Tris stood, facing Terminal9. “Would someone go to all that trouble to mess with me?”
The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 93
