by Dahlia Adler
“Rik?” I whispered, then, when no one answered, I spoke louder. “Rik!”
“Mad!” came my brother’s voice, rippling with relief, from behind a thick metal door in a row of doors. “I broke into a vault to bag some of our reward, but then someone locked me in.”
I pulled at the old vault door’s handle, but it wouldn’t budge. My picks were in the bag of tools and mold the Doctor had removed. Leaning against the door, I could hear the creepy pulse of the house through the metal, feel my twin on the door’s other side. “Can you see anything in there? How much did you grab?”
“A little light between the door and the floor from your tablet, if I turn mine off,” Rik said. “Mad. That’s the thing. There’s nothing in here. Most of the vaults are empty.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “Remember the gold reserves? The euros?” The contract?
“They’re not storing it in the vaults if it’s here, Mad.” Rik’s voice sounded faraway and more anxious now. “There’s nothing here but bones.”
“Animal bones, right, Rik?” I tried to stifle my fear. He didn’t answer, and I began to worry. Human bones? Someone who used to live here? Other hackers from the chat room?
“Okay, don’t worry,” I said to myself as much as to him. If I’d listened to my own doubts instead of to my brother, we’d be in a hotel somewhere in South America by now. Clean sheets, hot coffee. No bones.
There was nothing about this exploit that hadn’t gone wrong, and all of it had started by us going on-site instead of working remotely. Having to take physical funds. “We’ll get you out.”
I searched the open vaults, which were as empty as Rik had said. A few coins were neatly stacked on one shelf, next to a sheaf of bearer bonds that looked like the photo from the bank’s website. But nothing close to the bank’s stated reserves. Or our four billion Euros.
The place had been emptied. Or else it had never been full. We’d been played.
The bank would get recertified, we’d be caught, and no one would ever believe us if we said the vault was empty. Or, worse, they’d blame us. It was a genius play. I kind of admired Tarn, for a moment.
So how could we escape the bank?
In the second-to-last vault, there was a pile of old tools. Hammers, a saw. None looked up to the task of opening a vault door. The tools lay beside a large box, pried open. Its top had been cracked and pushed off its hinges. Inside was more emptiness.
As I picked through the tools, our chances felt increasingly doomed. Then a small sound from the doorway made me jump and turn.
The woman who’d greeted us and brought our tea stood with one hand on the door to my vault. Her skin shone with a blue light. The neuro-hack at her collarbone.
“No.” I rushed at her, refusing to be shut in like my brother.
But she didn’t move. Her mouth jerked as if she was fighting something. Her hands were curled into tight fists. “It can’t be hacked,” she whispered. The blue glow sputtered and faded, and I smelled burning computer chips again. When she fell down in a seizure, the woman’s heels kicked softly against the vault floor. “Sounds of water,” she slurred.
I gasped as I tried to keep her from hitting her head against the open metal door. “You’re from the chat room. You tried to challenge last year.” The woman’s left hand opened, spilling a set of keys loudly to the floor. I smoothed her hair away from her sweat-cold face and tucked the keys in my pocket. Her skin was gray, the color of the house. The blue glow had faded completely.
“I lost.” She laughed. “I was wrong; nothing is unhackable.”
“What’s your name? How were you wrong?” I stared at her as she chewed her lower lip.
Finally she spoke again. “My name is Beth. Nothing’s unhackable. Can’t be hacked. I can’t be hacked, either. Not when the neuro is on.” She sounded delirious. Her eyes opened wide and she laughed louder. “But the house can hack itself. And us. Don’t give in.” Then she stilled. Her breathing settled, more even, but her pulse was weak. The blue glow returned. I backed into the shadows as she stood and shook the dirt off, checked the locked vault where Rik was trapped, and then climbed the stairs.
“What’s happening?” Panic rose in Rik’s voice.
I couldn’t answer for a long time, for fear the woman would return. Finally, when I couldn’t hear her footsteps on the floors above, I took the keys I’d pulled from her hand while she was unconscious and unlocked the sealed vault door.
My brother looked pale and furious in the light from my tablet.
“I found SoundofWater,” I said. “Or she found us. The house is controlling her.” Rik listened as I told him about the fungus, about the locked shutters. Then I shifted to our handsigns. Our own private language, which had helped us survive together in the orphanage. “We have to hit the network with everything we’ve got before the bank gets us, too.”
Who knew where the AI was listening and where it wasn’t?
“How, Mad? And what do we get out of all this? There’s nothing here to take. We’ve been played.”
“That’s what the bank’s protecting: nothing. That’s what Beth meant—nothing isn’t hackable by definition … we can’t steal emptiness. But secrets are hackable. The bank has to run security challenges to keep up the sham that there’s money here, but it’s all a cover. There’s no money here anymore. These aren’t vaults and this isn’t a bank if there’s nothing inside. It’s just…” I tried to get a grip on my voice and failed, thinking of the bones, the dark, the thick walls, and the horrible dampness. “A crypt.”
“A crypt with doors and windows. We can crack those, at least, then sell the intel on the bank to the highest bidder. Make our money that way,” Rik said, eyeing the ring of keys. He’d already moved on to the next exploit; hadn’t heard the tremor in my voice. He didn’t meet my eyes when he said, “Nice grab.”
I had to get out of here. To get both of us out of here. If that meant hacking Rik, too, then I was going to do it. “Exactly,” I said, jingling the keys. “Let’s do just that. What’s the best way out?”
I thought about the windows and the rime and fungi–covered walls. Maintaining the building’s integrity was what the robotic-organic vegetation was for. And the doctor was afraid of it. He seems not to have left the bank in decades. How old was the fungus?
“I’ll try the smaller door out to the helipad first.” Rik, always practical, pushed both vault doors shut again and locked them. “They might think we’re still in here.”
“SoundofWater—Beth—will notice her keys missing soon. Besides, those won’t work for the big doors and shutters. I heard them datalock, and saw it on the network. Let’s leave them what they’re looking for and get out the hard way. They won’t expect it.”
When I dropped the keys to the ground, Rik chuckled. “You’re not so bad at people, Mad.”
“People are terrible,” I grumbled. “I like bots and programs.” Bots were predictable. They did what you told them. Or what someone told them.
I blinked, realizing what that meant. “Rik, Dr. Tarn said he can’t kill anyone. I bet that’s an operating rule, not just a term of the recertification. Even if the house might lock us up or neuro-control us, it probably can’t let anyone come to direct harm.”
Rik caught up to me. “And the doctor can’t let anyone know that Usher is bankrupt. Just like he can’t let the bank be hacked. Because then the Bank of Usher will fail, and the fungi will destroy the house and him in it.”
I stared at my brother, wide-eyed. “If the lichen was added by the board members, the fungus isn’t solely for protecting the house. It’s a security measure that got out of control. Maybe it was once for keeping the AI in. But he’s as afraid of it as he is of illness. He’s trapped here, too.”
We snuck back to the first floor. Now that the doctor thought we’d been trapped in the vaults below, the house had quieted. Its inhabitants slept through the deep night.
I led my brother to the drawing room and used ou
r network to jam the Wi-Fi signal. Gray mire still crept along the inside of the chimney but couldn’t make it past the bleach the doctor had laid down.
Robotic-organic, huh. Maybe it could be reasoned with.
I ran a small, polite outreach code at the fungi in the chimney, pinging it. One word: “Hello.”
To my surprise, the vegetation responded with a single ping and then settled. I tried to reach out to it again, but it didn’t answer. Maybe later I could try again. If we had time.
Rik worked the alarm codes.
“Window and door alarms muted,” he whispered.
“Good.” I held up a hammer from the pile in the vault. Picking locks was one way through a door. Take off the hinges—which was easier from inside—and the locks meant nothing.
The back door out to the helipad was small enough and out of the way enough to be our goal. I left the tablet in the drawing room, but we had hammers. “Now to really hack our way out.” We’d get out without waking the AI or the doctor. Then we’d figure out what to do next.
After several long attempts at prying loose a door hinge, we were sweaty and cold. The house began to emit waking sounds, and I could hear the maid rumbling around in the kitchen. We were out of time.
My brother still worked his tools against the huge door hinges, but he looked back toward the drawing room. “Mad, we have to try something bigger or we’re going to die in here.”
“Like what?” I said sadly. “You wanted to do one last job. I wanted to be done with it all.”
“Not one last job. One big job. I don’t want to be done. Being out of it feels like dying.” Then he signed, “Maybe the only way out is dying.”
“I won’t, not even for you,” I signed back.
He stared at me. “No?” The walls of the house seemed to tighten around us.
I shook my head. “No. But I won’t give up in here. You can’t, either.” Madrik wasn’t me any longer, and I needed to look after my own safety, but I still loved my brother. “We either have to hack our way out or we have to get sick enough that the AI will think something has poisoned us, and the doctor will freak out about germs and infection. We need to look like we’re dying. Without actually dying. Find me something that will make us really sick.”
Rik frowned, thinking. “In the drawing room. The tea.” Mold covered the tray, and the doctor had put down plastic over it. There was nothing left there but dust. But my brother had given me an idea. I ran back to the drawing room and went straight to the chimney.
“There.” I pointed. “The fungus. It’s part drone. Robotic-organic, the doctor said.”
“You think that will make us sick but not dead? You’re crazy, Mad.” My brother backed away from me. “What if it hacks us?”
“She is crazy,” said the doctor from the door. He held a tray with more neuro-components. “The fungus’s only goal is to keep the bank safe from incursions. I have a better solution. Stay and work for the bank.”
We were truly out of time.
“There’s nothing left of the bank. You’re maintaining a lie, that’s all,” I said.
The AI glow brightened in Dr. Tarn’s eyes. “That’s my job.” He laughed. And the walls laughed with him.
“Rik, now!”
My brother dropped the hammer and reached for his last tablets. I did, too.
We hit the walls with everything we had left: two crypto codes, worms, burners, a military safe-cracker.
The window shutters groaned. Through the walls, I could hear the AI laughing, and the low thrum escalating to higher-pitched sounds. My ears ached.
The human side of Dr. Tarn laughed, too, his wiry frame unable to contain a giggle at our expense.
“Focus, Mad,” my brother whispered, as Tarn’s trackers came at us across the network, and Tarn himself took a step toward me. In the doorway, Beth appeared, headed for Rik. No, her neuro-connection glowed. The AI had her again. There wasn’t time to try anything else. Cracks appeared in the walls and then sealed up. The smell of mold grew stronger.
The passcodes on the windows and doors changed faster than I could type, or think.
“No,” I whispered. As the room grew dark, and as Dr. Tarn reached for me, the walls closed in and the floors began to crack. I ducked into the chimney and grabbed a chunk of fungus. Passed some to Rik. Took the rest of the handful for myself and kissed it.
Rik did the same.
I felt a creeping chill as spores formed on my lips. The doctor watched me in horror, then shrieked as I kissed him on the cheek.
Tarn struggled and groaned as the green of my lipstick mixed with the mire, leached into the AI circuitry beneath his skin.
The vegetation in my hand rustled and I put it down, shaking as my skin crawled.
As the fungi overcame the doctor, and then my brother, I struggled to reach for the last tablet. My fingers slipped along the glass. I triggered the EMP charge.
The whole tablet pulsed, taking the only proof of our real identities with it, and then slowly the AI glow left the doctor’s eyes.
The fungi, too, ceased to pulse or signal back, at least inside the house. Outside, the walls groaned with a sudden new antagonism.
Rik began to cough in earnest. The fungus spores were growing. The doctor had turned grimly pale. Even with the EMP taking out the nearby robotic-organics’ sentient side, it was still fungus. And it was getting to all of us. The floor began to give way under Rik, and I grabbed his sweater. He stumbled and the tablet he’d been using clattered down to the vault.
I moaned and the room spun. I hadn’t imagined these consequences. We wouldn’t make it out, not without help. Rik’s sleeve slipped from my grasp and he fell.
“MAD!” “RIK!” We shouted simultaneously, and then my brother’s voice abruptly disappeared.
“Rik?”
Nothing. The weight of that silence dragged me to the floor. I couldn’t see far in the darkness below. Was he dead? I had to get down there to find him.
But I didn’t know how to do that alone, and this weak. I stared at the hole in the floor, the place where my brother had been.
As the fungus drained more energy, I started to shake with cold. I wobbled at the edge of the hole in the floor.
No. I wasn’t done. “Call a helicopter. Call for help. For all of us,” I begged the doctor. I could save myself. And Rik. “Hurry.”
The doctor frowned, but only with half his mouth. The other half slumped.
“You have to try. Beth said to try.” I hoped he recognized who Beth was.
The doctor struggled, then pulled a tablet from his pocket and dialed. He spoke urgently to someone on the other end. When he finished, he looked up at me. “Thank you,” he said. “Finally free.”
And then he collapsed. The doors and windows unlocked.
I dragged him from the room, and outside to the helipad, where we lay watching the dawn filter through the clouds.
A steady beat in the sky was the sound of two helicopters descending.
A shadow loomed over me, human-shaped, but bright. Beth—SoundofWater—her eyes dim now. “We cannot kill you,” she said. “But we can break you.”
The helicopters landed, and two groups of Syndicate hackers stepped out.
“They’ve come to take us all back,” SoundofWater said. “You and I will go at once, and your brother, if they find him, will go with the others.”
Separated. “No,” I whispered, weaker still. I fought to stand. My legs wobbled and I fell to the ground again. “I’ll stay until we find Rik.”
And then, from the house, a pulse. Slow and gentle, speaking inside my head. “Hello,” it whispered.
The fungi had taken control of the Bank of Usher’s communications and was speaking for the first time. I closed my eyes and saw a pulse of light against my eyelids, then two more, against a haze that somehow I knew was the house itself.
Two of the lights were close together. Me and the doctor? I shifted and one light moved. Another lay alone, deep within the
haze. Rik? That pulse didn’t move.
Rik lay still, deep in the house. But he breathed, the pulse seemed to say, just as I did; and the haze that was a bio-network of vegetation thickened around him. Him, and the house. And me. “He’s there!” I shouted. “Please get my brother!”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Don’t give up, Rik. Anything can be hacked.”
This had to be true. The haze grew brighter. A cold headache began to spread behind my eyelids, pushing at my temples. I fought it. Maybe I could still get Rik back.
“I protect the bank.” The fungi pushed back.
“There is no bank,” I said. “The vaults are empty. You’re protecting a tomb. Give me my brother back.”
The house was silent. Searching itself for the truth.
“Let me tell everyone,” I whispered to it. “Let’s tell everyone together.”
There was a long pause. Then a long rustling sound. A drawn-out “Yes” from the fungi. Then, behind my eyes, like I’d had a neuro-connection installed, a network opened up—the house’s connection to the world. I sent one message out, wideband. Told the chat room and then the world press everything I knew about the bank’s holdings, and lack thereof.
The fungi helped, sharing data from the vaults and real-time security footage from inside the house. We told everyone who would listen what the Offshore Bank of Usher really was. I closed my eyes and hoped someone heard.
For a moment, a very brief moment, the digital boundaries of the house wrapped around me: a safe place. A home. Then I felt the Syndicate’s men lift me from the ground, and my hand automatically reached for my brother’s but caught only air.
The pain was unbearable.
“You have to get Rik. He’s still in there.”
Then Syndicate crew stopped, listening. But not to me. To the beat of more helicopter blades. They dropped me and ran. My body thudded against the grass, the light suddenly too bright above me.
Then the fungus withdrew so that it barely pulsed behind my eyelids. The headache receded.
Another helicopter landed, this one with Interpol insignia.
And with loud cracks that seemed to split the bank right to the foundation, the vegetation began to squeeze the stones, cracking them until the building collapsed into the water.
