He was just trying to fix the code, which would have been hard enough had he been home alone or in the quiet of the Lonely Tree Tavern. But right now, he was locked in the mammoth programming room with bots zinging around the air.
And still, he wasn’t unnoticed.
In fact, everybody was watching Charlie, staring over his shoulder and analyzing every single piece of work he did, their lips pressed together and eyes narrowed. Even the programmers in the farthest corner of the room were squinting towards his monitor, many looking as if they were going to ask him any moment for his autograph.
Good thing for Charlie he didn’t give a damn. Well, except for the fact they might try to steal his ideas. He shook the thought off. They had been using this code for three hundred years. If anyone wanted to steal anything in it, they could’ve done it a long time ago. In fact, they must have. How else did they get a hold of it? Charlie certainly didn’t give it to them. Jade had said something about Blake buying the company that had bought the company that had bought the company, etc.…
Dustin tumbled two metal spheres around and around in his hand, producing an annoying clinking sound. He eyed Charlie with the contempt he felt whenever looking at someone with inferior intelligence (virtually everyone in this city, from his point of view.)
Except for Warren.
He even had to hide his contempt when looking at Blake, because you don't want to look with contempt at a man who can make you disappear forever. Intelligent thinking on Dustin's part.
“Can you help, Mr. Richards, or not?” Of course, Dustin knew Charlie couldn't help. He was a man from simpler days. Still, he had been given orders. “I certainly don't mean to rush you.” He did. “But I have important work to do.”
“Shhh.” Charlie’s eyes scanned the screens without looking at Dustin. If he had, he would have seen murder in the man's (kid's, he was just a kid) eyes. Charlie was lost in the numbers and symbols in front of him. He had agreed to fix the code and he was going to do his best. But he wasn’t an idiot. When he finished fixing the code and went back to his time, he was going to watch his code a lot more carefully and he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to give it over to the company who had him slated at the very bottom of a team of programmers.
Charlie’s face pulled up into a tight-lipped grin as his eyes scanned the dark screen looking for the corrupted strings of numbers and letters.
Here was the problem with Charlie trying to fix the code.
Ho-ly shit!
His conceptual code was two hundred and forty-eight letters long. What he saw in front of him was seemingly infinite. The main screen displaying the master code was the size of the USS Enterprise. Beneath that was thousands of smaller screens, each showing one specific part of the code and controlled by the eyes of one of the programmers. Charlie was given control of the main screen. These monitors were like clear boards floating two-inches above a silver background that looked like it was made of something like mercury. Everything ran in black on top of the glass screen and was controlled by the eyes. If you look to the corners of the screen you could control scrolling. Double blinking moved the entire page up. Apparently, this floating glass screen over the moving backdrop of mercury was supposed to be easier on the eyes.
Honestly, it just put Charlie to sleep.
Charlie had been looking at this code for the past eight hours and was completely lost. It wasn’t just the vast size of the code, but its complexity that was astounding. The code was like looking out at the universe, complete with all its galaxies and internal solar systems. The Big Bang (Charlie's original code as it apparently came to be known) may be easy to identify, but how everything was connected became murky. Every little solar system was living in a pocket, but the rules of the galaxy applied to that pocket. While there were similarities in different solar systems, they all really functioned on their own. Yet they were completely connected by the universe. To further complicate matters, the planets in each solar system had different races speaking different languages.
This code had all that and more.
The complex hierarchy, the odd exceptions to the rules, the different programming languages. It was impossible to navigate ten galaxies looking for the problem. And this universe had over two hundred.
To top it off, it was constantly evolving right before Charlie's eyes. He just wanted to sleep.
Maybe that was what everybody was watching for. Charlie could feel Dustin’s eyes on him and knew without a doubt that was what he was waiting for. The moment the great creator, the hero from the future, just face-planted the keyboard. Fast asleep while trying to save the world.
Charlie couldn’t even blink himself awake. Blink too much, you get hopelessly lost in the code as the connected solar systems moved all over the place.
This learning curve sucked.
He had learned that to move his eyes away from the screen, he had to gently close them and then turn his head so the computer stopped tracking his eye movement. He did so now to look up at Dustin. His slick look gave Charlie the heebie-jeebies.
“Can we take a break?” Charlie asked, his voice low, but he couldn’t stop his eyes from sweeping around the room for a moment at all the people still staring at him. Like they have nothing better to do all day? “Or maybe I should say, can I take a break? Because none of the rest of you are really doing anything. Did you notice that?” He asked.
But his glance around the room wasn’t met with any hostility or judgment. In fact, everyone other than Dustin was staring at him like he was the guy who created everything. Charlie was still trying to get used to which ones were hybrids and which were just humans, but the easiest way for him to tell is the hybrids looked at him like he was God. Like he was the guy who invented the iPhone or the Microsoft Office suite or Facebook. Only, Facebook and the iPhone and Microsoft Office are vague blips in history to these people. Some point on a timeline of technological progression.
It’s amazing, Charlie thought. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg... they’re like Galileo and Newton to these people. Shit. I am, for that matter.
There was no way Charlie could stop the face-splitting grin erupting across his face. Bigger than Zuckerberg. When he got home, he was going to have T-shirts made for sure. It would be his little inside joke. No one back in 2017 was ever going to know what he was talking about, but it was good enough for him.
“No,” Dustin said. “You cannot take a break.” Charlie’s attention was jolted back. Dustin snapped his fingers. They gave a strange metallic click that rang hollowly in Charlie’s ears. Charlie glanced over. Of course, Dustin was a Gamma hybrid. That should have been obvious. Sleek, simple, yet crushing. “I’ll have some food and drink brought to you.”
“Well, could you at least clear the room a little bit?” Charlie asked.
The corner of Dustin’s mouth lifted in the tiniest hint of a smile, or maybe it was a sneer. “A little nervous?” Dustin asked.
Charlie’s brows knit together. Dustin knew who Zuckerberg was. He knew Jobs and Gates. And he sure as shit didn’t think Charlie was bigger than them.
Always callous, even though Charlie wrote the code to save human life. What have the other three ever done? Zuckerberg created a marketing website where people could share photos of lasagna. Gates created something people could type into then spent his career shutting down small start-ups. If you can’t beat them, buy them. And okay, Jobs was cool. But still, his company developed a new system of communication so we could hail a cab with a single finger. How is that impressive, having to use a finger? You could order pizza at the touch the button and check the weather in Chesapeake. Seriously, how important was all that stuff? Charlie had written code to save lives. But from the look on Dustin’s face, well, Dustin really didn’t give a damn.
“Fine,” Charlie said. “I don’t need a break. I need some space.”
“Fine,” Dustin deadpanned back. “Team, get yourselves the hell out of here.” Dustin circled his pointer finger in the
air, encompassing all the other programmers who were standing around and then pointed at the door. They all filed out in a single row, throwing frowns at Charlie.
Charlie looked at Dustin expectantly.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Dustin, sitting himself comfortably in a chair and putting his feet up on the desk. “I know there’s nothing special about you. And I’m going to sit here and watch you prove it.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. This isn’t exactly what he had had in mind when he heard he was going to the future to be a hero. He took a deep breath. Every hero has an enemy. Every hero must battle against a naysayer, a jerk face. Dustin was just Charlie’s jerk face. Charlie turned back towards the machine.
He needed to simplify things. When looking at a complex structure, the first rule was to simplify. He needed to get back to what he knew. What he knew was the Big Bang, because the big bang was his code. Charlie zoomed in on what most closely resembled his original code. It had been edited and had evolved, but he recognized it. As Jade had once told him in a tavern, the most important two hundred and forty-eight characters in human history, and they were thanks to him. In there, he could recognize Charlie, because he knew Charlie's code when he saw it (being Charlie.)
Dustin began to cough uncontrollably. He grabbed his stomach. Charlie stood up thinking it might be useful to pat Dustin on the back. It sounded like he was choking. But Dustin waved him off. “It's nothing.” He hacked out the words.
Charlie could see a different side of Dustin, though. His eyes were losing color, literally becoming transparent, and they portrayed fear.
“Did...did you find anything yet?” Dustin murmured.
Charlie returned to the screen and his portion of the code. In there, maybe he could find a solution.
Chapter 19
A clock ticked quietly on the wall as MediBots whizzed around Robin’s room. Blake thought of it as Robin’s now. It was no longer his room. Robin almost never left it. This was her place and he desperately wanted her out of here. As desperately as he had ever wanted anything before.
“I feel like I am a desert,” Robin moaned. “I can’t stand it. I hate the desert, I hate the heat. But I can’t get away from it! It’s inside me, it’s drying me up and turning me onto parchment.”
“Your skin is holding up well,” Blake said. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“It already did,” she said.
“Don’t worry. We’re going to solve the hybrid problem,” Blake said, turning her face towards him. He hated looking into those dark and hollow eyes, but if there was any way she could see him, she had to see his face. She had to know he believed there was a cure and he was doing everything in his power to cure the disease.
“I don’t think you get it, Blake,” she said. “The hybrids don’t have a problem.” Her eyes were dark and blind, but her lips trembled as she spoke the words that she’d clearly been pondering for a while. “Blake, the hybrids are the problem. We shouldn’t exist. We are an affront to the order of things, where people get sick and die; but we have re-engineered them, you have re-engineered us into this.” Her fingers clawed mechanically in the air, motioning towards her eyes.
“Don’t say that,” Blake said, bowing until his broad forehead pressed against her bony shoulder. “Don’t say hybrids are the problem.” His voice was tense, straining against the cords in his throat.
His body began to shake. And the little metal wires inside his wife’s eyes whirled in circles as she tried to tilt her head towards him. Her hand grappling, their fingers uncontrollably clutching at nothing. “I’m dying, Blake,” she said. “And I don’t mind.”
“You will not die,” Blake said, his words muffled against the white linen of her nightgown.
Monfils stood with Jade in command central watching the lights as they moved through the complicated fields floating in the air before them. He pressed his fingers against his temple. “They are breaching the barricade by the Northern Wall.”
Jade pressed her lips together. What the hell were the Lowsmiths thinking? Just because they’d had a bit of success, they thought it was a good idea to try and break into Crowley. Were they idiots? Had they no idea what they were up against?
“It looks like they’re heading towards Trenchtown,” Monfils glanced sideways at Jade. He didn’t want her to go, but telling Jade what to do was the last thing that had ever worked in his life.
Jade frowned at the dots moving across the map. “Why the hell would they want to go to Trenchtown,” she muttered. “Angelo?”
The giant red monster ran the data. “They have prisoners in Roedwane Tower,” he said moments later.
“That’s their target,” Jade said, already heading towards the door.
“Jade,” Monfils said. “You don’t have to be the first responder to every tiny issue.” But he knew his word were falling on deaf ears. Jade always did what she wanted, which was rarely what Monfils would have liked. It was one of the things he loved about her. One of the things that made her such a challenge. “Keep an eye on her,” he muttered at Angelo, who dutifully followed Jade out of the room.
Tallahassee and Zeke ran through the streets trying to get out of the way of the HEL blasts that kept coming for them. They were outmanned and outgunned. The Lowsmith efforts to infiltrate Trenchtown had gone alright, except they were nowhere near getting into the tower that housed Frank. Their squad had been separated, and now Zeke and Tallahassee were on the run on the edge of Trenchtown with no backup. They turned a corner and came to a screeching halt. A dead end. They dove behind a metal air vent rising out of the ground. Three Delta hybrids were hot on their trail. A HEL blasted the metal they were hiding behind.
“We’re never going to make it out,” Zeke said.
“Just keep firing,” Tallahassee growled, sweat beading across his furrowed brow as he threw himself out from behind the shelter and fired at the three hybrids who had them cornered like rats in the cellar.
“I’m telling you, we got to come up with another plan. My HEL is giving out and they’re going to keep coming.” Zeke’s eyes flew wildly around the dead-end where he and Tallahassee had ended up. How could they have been so stupid as to not divert their location before they ended up so completely and utterly trapped?
Novitza, a young Delta hybrid, stared down the dead end. “I think we have them,” she said, her HELs trained towards where the rebels were hiding. One of her eyes was going a bit blurry, but the scanner in her other was still doing okay. She wiped sweat off her brow and glanced over at Goran. “Do you see them?” she asked shakily.
Goran didn’t respond.
“Goran?” Novitza turned her head, trying to locate Goran with her good eye. She gasped when she saw him lying out in the alley, out of cover and twitching. “Manya?” she hissed. Manya was supposed to be behind her. Manya was Goran’s fiancée. Novitza’s eye was going dark, but she could just make out the dark figure of Manya crawling along the alley, her breath coming in deep sharp squeaks until it stopped as she threw herself on Goran’s body and both lay still.
Novitza crouched low and felt her way out to the bodies of her partners. Each breath she took felt like her body was being ripped in two, like her innards were being torn apart.
She was supposed to live forever. They all were. All the hybrids were going to be the future gods of the planet. That’s what they’d been told.
Her hands fumbled in the dark world. It was all that was left to her now that her eyes had gone. Novitza’s cold fingers pressed against Manya’s wrist, but there was no pulse. Novitza gasped as she slumped forward. Even if she’d wanted to check Goran’s pulse, she wasn’t able to. Her body was growing cold as Novitza rolled onto her back, blind face to the heavens, her last breath sliced through her body and left her dead.
“What do you want to do? Attack them?” Tallahassee asked.
“Maybe we should,” Zeke said, hitting his laser gun against the wall trying to reboot the generator. “It’s got to be b
etter than waiting here to get picked off.
“You’re an asshole,” Tallahassee spat the words out. “Who the hell thinks they can take an 80% hybrid? We’re only human, dumbass.”
“Just cover me, shithead.” Zeke said. Before Tallahassee could do anything else, Zeke ran out from their cover. screaming into the air and getting ready to wreak havoc on the three hybrids who were…
Lying on a pile on the ground?
“What the fuck?” Tallahassee stood up from behind the rusty metal barrel where they had been hiding.
“Take this,” Zeke said, kicking the hybrid nearest him.
“You didn’t do that,” Tallahassee said.
“They were so scared of me they just fell over dead,” Zeke said.
“That’s not what I saw.”
“How the hell do you know? You were hiding like a little bitch behind the barrel.” Zeke gloated.
Tallahassee shook his head. “Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.” Without a backward glance as to whether Zeke was following him or not, he ducked out into the shadows of the burning city and headed back to safety of the rebel lines.
Jade pushed open the door and stepped into the alley. She’d just been about to break up the fight between the hybrids and the rebels when the hybrids started falling over. The rebels had escaped, mostly because Jade had let them. She had a soft spot for the Lowsmiths and had often wondered if she just shouldn’t get her parents to join them and live as humans off the grid, out of Crowley. She’d even gone so far as to research their location, something she’d been uber careful to not share with Blake or Warren. She didn’t like killing humans because they were human, even if they were fighting against Blake.
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