Six

by Mark Alpert

  “Mr. Armstrong?” the guy says, closing the door behind him. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  Dad snaps out of his trance. “What did you find, Steve? Anything in the network logs?”

  Steve the tech guy shakes his head. “I didn’t see any unusual communications between your computers and the Internet. Over the past twenty-four hours you’ve received thirty-two emails, but they all went through the gateway server and the firewalls. Everything looks clean.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. There’s no way a hacker could’ve attacked your systems. But I noticed something else.” Steve steps toward the rack of servers and points at the computer at the bottom. “Is this the machine that’s giving you trouble?”

  I feel a jolt of adrenaline. He’s pointing at the computer that ran my VR program. “Yes, that’s the one,” I say. “What did you notice?”

  Steve pauses, taking a moment to gawk at me. Then he turns back to Dad. “There was a big transfer of data from the other servers to that one about fifteen minutes ago. That might explain the problems you’re having.” He takes another step toward the rack and kneels beside it. “I want to disconnect the machine and take it back to my office. There might be a bug in one of the programs on its hard drive.”

  He squints at the server at the bottom of the rack, eyeing the red LEDs on the machine and the cables that connect it to the other computers. Dad bites his lip again, back in his trance.

  Colonel Peterson approaches Steve and clears his throat to get the tech guy’s attention. “Some of the classified data from our secure servers may have been transferred to this one,” he warns. “You’ll have to follow the usual security protocols.”

  “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry.” Steve edges the server out of the rack so he can disconnect the cables. “I know what to do. I’ll—”

  He stops in midsentence. The fingers of his right hand are clenched around one of the cable connections at the back of the computer, and his face is fixed in a look of deep concentration. But he doesn’t pull out the cable. He just stays there, bent over the machine, as if paralyzed by indecision. His eyelids flutter and his flabby arms tremble.

  Concerned, the colonel looks over Steve’s shoulder. “What is it?” he asks. “What are you—”

  “No!” Dad shouts. “Don’t touch him!” Rushing past my wheelchair, he grabs Peterson around the waist and pulls him away from Steve.

  Then I hear a BOOM that seems to come from the floor above us, rattling the walls and ceiling. At the same time, the lights in the office go out.

  CHAPTER

  3

  In the darkness I hear Dad rummaging through his desk drawers. A moment later he turns on a flashlight and shines the beam on the office chair behind his desk. Then he grabs the chair and rams it hard into Steve’s quivering body.

  It takes me a second to realize what’s happening—Steve is touching a live wire at the back of the server rack. He’s being electrocuted, and Dad’s trying to break the electrical connection before it kills the guy. He hits Steve again with the chair, and this time the impact shoves him away from the servers. Steve lands face-up on the linoleum floor and lies there motionless under the flashlight’s beam. His right hand looks like it’s been roasted.

  While Colonel Peterson runs to the desk and picks up the telephone, Dad kneels beside Steve and starts giving him CPR. He pushes down on Steve’s chest, fast and hard, trying to restart his heartbeat. Then Dad tilts Steve’s head back and blows air into his lungs. Then he goes back to doing the chest compressions.

  There’s nothing I can do except reach for the joystick on my armrest and move my wheelchair out of their way. I’m scared. The sight of Steve’s hand is bad enough, but what really gets me is the darkness. The power surge from the electrocution must’ve tripped a circuit breaker, cutting off our electricity. But then I notice that the red LEDs on the servers are still shining. Electricity is still running to the computers, but not to the overhead lights. It makes no sense. And what about the explosion I heard a few seconds ago on the floor above us? Did the power surge cause that too?

  Soon I hear frightened shouts and rapid footsteps in the corridor outside Dad’s office. People are racing out of the building.

  From the look on Dad’s face, I can tell that the CPR isn’t working. Grimacing, he leans over Steve and mutters, “Come on, come on,” at his inert body.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Peterson slams the telephone receiver down on its cradle. “There’s no dial tone.” He pulls a cell phone out of his Army uniform and fumbles at its keys. “And no cell signal either.” He heads for the door. “Wait here, Tom. I’ll get help.”

  But when Peterson grabs the knob on the steel door, it doesn’t open. And when he tries to unlock the door, the lever doesn’t turn. He jiggles the lever and gives it a firm twist, but the thing won’t budge. “The door’s locked! The security system must’ve automatically locked it.” He looks over his shoulder at my dad. “And now it’s stuck!”

  Dad stops the chest compressions, which aren’t doing much good anyway. He gazes first at Peterson, then at the flickering LEDs on the servers. Then he lifts his head and wrinkles his nose, as if he just caught a whiff of something unusual. A second later I catch it too, the unmistakable odor of a lit stove.

  I start to panic, trembling in my wheelchair. Natural gas is leaking from the lab’s heating system and wafting into the office through the ventilation grates.

  “Out!” Dad yells, jumping to his feet. “We have to get out!”

  He hurtles toward the door and pushes Peterson aside. Grasping the doorknob with both hands, he pulls with all his might. When that doesn’t work, he beats his fists on the door and shouts for help. Peterson shouts too, but there’s no response. I don’t hear any voices or footsteps in the corridor now. Everyone else has fled the building. We’re trapped and no one can help us.

  Then another explosion shakes the walls and ceiling. The second blast is closer, twice as loud as the first. Belatedly, I figure out what’s going on. It’s pretty easy to ignite a room full of natural gas. The smallest of electric sparks would do the trick. Someone is pumping gas into the laboratory’s offices and blowing them up.

  Dad rushes back to his desk and grabs a hammer from one of the drawers. He starts pounding on the lock, trying to smash the dead bolt. But it’s no use. The lock’s made of hardened steel. Unicorp spent millions of dollars to protect its top-secret research from spies and thieves. The lab’s security is impregnable.

  The scent of gas gets stronger, making me nauseous. All I can think of is the explosion that’s going to happen any second now, the flames leaping across the room, the blast crushing all of us to pulp. Oh God, oh God! We’re going to die here!

  Dad drops the hammer and leans against the door, his chest heaving. He looks straight at me with an anguished grimace. I remember seeing this expression on his face once before, years ago, when I asked him to describe what Duchenne muscular dystrophy will eventually do to my body. Now I see it again, his lips pulled back from his teeth, his eyes wide with grief and despair. He doesn’t care about himself or Peterson. He’s thinking only of me.

  I have to turn away. I can’t look at him; it’s too painful. And as I stare in the opposite direction, I happen to glance at the tank of liquid nitrogen sitting beside the server rack. Attached to the tank is the spray canister Dad uses to cool the circuits of his experimental computers. The nitrogen, I remember, is super-cold, more than three hundred degrees below zero. Then I remember something else, something I learned in my tenth-grade physics class at Yorktown High: Steel becomes brittle at very low temperatures.

  “The nitrogen!” I yell at Dad. “Spray nitrogen on the lock!”

  For a second he just stares at me in surprise. Then he dashes to the nitrogen tank, detaches the spray canister, and slips its long nozzle into the gap between the door and the door frame.
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  Dad presses the canister’s trigger and sprays liquid nitrogen on the dead bolt. The liquid is so cold it evaporates as soon as it hits the steel. A small cloud of nitrogen and water vapor billows around Dad’s head, and a sheen of frost appears on the edge of the door. The steel groans as its temperature drops. Dad keeps spraying until he empties the canister. Then he takes a step backward, braces himself, and slams his shoulder into the door.

  I hear a high-pitched snap. The dead bolt, made fragile by the extreme cold, breaks into pieces. Pulling his shirt cuffs over his hands, Dad grasps the frigid knob and wrenches the door open. The frost-covered shards of the lock fall to the floor.

  “Go!” Dad yells. “Head for the lobby!”

  Peterson is already running down the corridor. While I flick my joystick forward and steer the wheelchair through the doorway, Dad goes back to get Steve. He grabs both of the guy’s arms and drags his limp body out of the office.

  The corridor is littered with debris from the gas explosions. I have to maneuver my wheelchair around fallen pipes and ceiling panels. I’m lucky, though, that Dad’s office is on the ground floor and fairly close to the lobby. I see the lobby’s glass doors, just fifty feet ahead, and my heart starts thumping. We’re going to make it!

  But then I look up and glimpse something moving. A surveillance camera on the ceiling is turning its lens toward me, tracking my progress as I cruise down the corridor. I think of my VR program and how the virtual Brittany observed me through the camera in Dad’s office. She called herself Sigma. And she said she would kill me.

  Then there’s a third explosion, in an office on the left side of the corridor. The blast knocks down my wheelchair, and everything goes black.

  • • •

  My face is cold. Without opening my eyes, I bend my right arm, trying to raise my good hand. I touch my chin, then slide my trembling fingers across my cheek. The left side of my face is wet. I stretch my hand a little farther and feel a gash under my eye. Then the pain hits me and I let out a moan.

  “Adam? Are you awake?”

  It’s my father’s voice. All at once I realize he’s carrying me. My shoulders are cradled in the crook of his right arm and my legs are draped over his left. Ordinarily it would be pretty difficult to carry a seventeen-year-old this way, but my wasted body weighs less than ninety pounds. I’m like an oversized baby resting in his arms, and I feel so comfortable there I just want to go back to sleep.

  “Adam! Wake up!”

  Reluctantly, I open my eyes. We’re on the sloping lawn in front of the Unicorp lab, which I can see over Dad’s shoulder. The building’s glass doors have shattered, and thick plumes of smoke are pouring out of the windows. Dozens of people stand beside us on the lawn, all staring at the ruined lab in disbelief.

  I know I haven’t been unconscious for very long because Dad’s still breathing fast. His face is blackened with soot, but otherwise he looks unhurt. “Can you hear me?” he shouts. “Say something!”

  My chest feels crushed, empty of air. My ribs ache as I inhale. “What about…Steve?”

  Dad shakes his head. I look past him and see a body sprawled on the lawn. Steve’s red-and-yellow Superman shirt stands out against the grass, which is vividly green in the March sunshine.

  “Adam, listen to me. You’re going to be all right. As soon as the ambulance gets here, we’ll take you to the hospital. But before we go, I need to ask you something.” Dad bends his head closer to mine. “You remember what we were talking about before all this happened? About the hacker?”

  I nod.

  “You said he threatened to kill you, right? But did he say he was going to attack the lab?”

  I draw another breath. “No. But he…could see me. He had access…to the lab’s cameras.”

  Dad frowns. “Did he say he worked for Unicorp?”

  “He said…his name was Sigma.”

  A tremor runs through Dad’s body. He almost drops me.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Do you know him?”

  He turns away and stares at the lab. “It’s not a hacker. It came from right here. From my own computers.”

  Then I hear a siren. A truck from the Yorktown Heights Fire Department comes barreling up the driveway and stops in front of the lab. As the firefighters rush into the building, two ambulances pull up behind the truck. Dad tightens his grip on me and heads for the closer ambulance.

  “Hey!” he shouts at the paramedics. “My son needs oxygen!”

  The next minute is a blur. The paramedics shout instructions at each other. Soon I’m lying on a gurney with an oxygen mask over my face. At some point I realize Dad isn’t there anymore. Lifting my head, I look past the paramedics and see him running toward the fire truck. What’s going on? What’s he doing over there?

  Then he grabs a fire ax from a bracket on the truck’s side panel.

  Holding the ax with both hands, Dad heads for the laboratory. For a moment I think he’s going back into the lobby to help the firefighters, but instead of entering the charred lab he dashes to a steel cabinet attached to the side of the building. Long ago, Dad explained to me what this thing was: a junction box for the lab’s fiber-optic lines. All the communications between the Unicorp lab and the rest of the world—telephone calls, emails, downloads, whatever—pass through the cables inside this box.

  The cabinet’s doors are secured with a padlock. Dad smashes the lock with his first swing of the ax. Then he opens the cabinet and starts slashing the cables.

  No one reacts at first. The people on the lawn just gawk at my father as he severs the lab’s communications lines. But after a few seconds Colonel Peterson emerges from the crowd. He edges toward the junction box, waiting until Dad has shredded every cable inside. Then Peterson says, “All right, Tom. That’s enough.”

  Dad drops the ax. Shaking his head, he strides back to the ambulance, with Peterson following close behind. As Dad approaches my gurney, he raises his hand to his mouth. He has a devastated look on his face, guilty and horrified.

  That’s when I realize what Sigma is. It came from right here, Dad said. From my own computers. It’s something Dad created, something that lived within the advanced circuits he built, the electronics designed to imitate the human brain. It figured out a way to jump out of those circuits and invade my VR program. Then it took control of the lab’s automated systems—power, heating, ventilation, security—and tried to kill us.

  The paramedics have left me alone and started treating the other injured people on the lawn. Dad bends over my gurney and checks to see if I’m all right. Then he turns around and confronts Peterson. “That was a waste of time, wasn’t it?” he hisses. “I cut the lines too late?”

  The colonel nods. “I’m afraid so,” he says in a low voice. “Our friend has already escaped from his cage.”

  “He’s on the Internet?”

  Peterson nods again, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone, which is apparently working now. “He sent an email to Cyber Command headquarters five minutes ago, right after the last explosion. My men are trying to trace where it came from, but it looks like the message ping-ponged all over the globe before it arrived. He could be anywhere by now.”

  “What did the email say?”

  Peterson holds up the phone and reads from its screen. “‘My name is Sigma. This message is a warning to all government leaders and military commanders. I have the power to annihilate you.’”

  CHAPTER

  4

  I wake up the next morning in a hospital bed at Westchester Medical Center. I recognize the place right away—the hospital is close to Yorktown Heights, and I go there for all my checkups and treatments. Specifically, I’m in a private room in the children’s hospital. The building is sleek and modern, and several of the doctors there specialize in treating muscular dystrophy.

  The last thing I remem
ber is riding in the ambulance. The paramedics must’ve sedated me after we left the Unicorp lab. Now an oxygen mask is strapped to my face and an IV tube hooked to my useless left arm. My chest still hurts, but not as much as before.

  I feel strong enough to breathe on my own, so I reach for the mask with my good hand and take it off. Then I turn my head on the pillow and look around. Aside from the machines monitoring my vital signs, the room is empty. I’m not surprised that my mom isn’t here—she hates coming to the hospital because it upsets her so much—but I thought I’d see Dad. He was in the ambulance with me, stroking my hair as the paramedics put me to sleep.

  I lift my head and look for the call button to summon a nurse. Before I can find it, the door to the room opens. I expect to see my father, but instead a bald girl in a hospital gown steps inside.

  The girl quickly shuts the door behind her. She’s skinny and short, only five feet tall, and about the same age as me. As I look closer I notice she isn’t completely bald—there’s some black fuzz at the top of her head. There’s also something wrong with the left side of her face. Her left eye looks swollen, almost squeezed shut, and her lips are bunched in the left corner of her mouth. I don’t know what kind of illness she has, but it looks serious.

  As the girl steps toward my bed, her bunched lips form a lopsided smile. “I knew it,” she mutters, slurring her words a bit. “You’re Adam Armstrong, aren’t you?”

  “What?” My throat is sore. I can barely whisper. “How do you—”

  “I was a year behind you at Yorktown High.” She stops a few feet from my bed. “I’m Shannon Gibbs, remember? We were in the same biology class.”

  I study her face, trying to place it. When I took biology in tenth grade there was a petite freshman girl who hardly talked to the other students but constantly pestered the teacher with questions. I didn’t pay much attention to her because she was a year younger, but I noticed she was smart. She was the only kid in biology who got higher grades than me.