by Ramona Finn
“No,” I responded instantly. “Nothing.”
He looked taken aback for a second and his mouth opened. I imagined he was about to ask me why the hell I was skulking around the landing pad then.
I spoke before he could. “You should probably go visit Datapoint Europa now.”
“Now?” he asked, and I could see he understood what I was really saying. Scram, kid.
“Now.”
“Yeah.” He nodded and didn’t look half as slick as he obviously thought he did. “Right. I think I’ll go now.”
“Good idea.”
He dipped his head to me and headed back to the other mechanics working on the skips closest to me. He called out something to them that I didn’t hear and they looked back at him. The kid gestured again to a different skip, in the other corner of the landing pad, and the three other mechanics rose up. The kid led them over to the skip and the mechanics set up shop over there while he slipped off in the direction of the medical wing.
Smart kid.
He’d pulled the other mechanics away from my corner, and he was good enough friends with Cast to visit him. I liked him.
Good to know I had a technician with a little common sense up my sleeve.
I slid around to the computer in the farthest corner and woke it up. I was just about to sync up my hacking keyboard when my new tech tickled at me. I’d become used to this over the last few days. My new integrated tech had this way of notifying me that it had all these skills I didn’t know anything about. And I paused now as, in the corner of my vision, a small symbol appeared. My new tech was showing me a symbol I could have recognized in my sleep.
It was asking if I wanted to sync with the landing pad’s mainframe.
Just like that.
No hacking keyboard necessary.
I could sync and just stroll right in to all this information, like the system was exclaiming: The front door’s unlocked! Turkey on the table if you want it! Please, have a seat in front of the fire! I paused for all of about half a second before I took my tech up on its bombastic offer.
I started the wireless sync between my tech and the landing mainframe. Glancing around the darkened landing pad, I saw that no one was even glancing my way. The mechanics were still working on that distant skip and there was another group of techs on the other end, listening to a lecture of some kind or another. But I was alone. With all this information at my fingertips.
I felt a rush of adrenaline and power start in my gut and race all the way to my fingertips. Finally. Finally. Finally. This must have been how some Datapoints felt when they aced their simulations. Like they were doing what they were born to do. Finally, I was going to get some answers to my questions.
In a weird way, I was feeling almost grateful to the sinister-looking tech on my arm and face. I mean, I still didn’t like that it had been surgically implanted while I’d been sleeping. But, I had to admit, as I instantly started navigating the landing pad mainframe, it was still pretty useful.
I opted out of my tech’s suggestion that I observe the information in my mind’s eye. I didn’t want all this in my head. I wanted to see it on the screen, with my eyes. And, there it was. A logged record of the day that I’d brought the one-man Ferryman ship in. The exact hour, minute, and second that it had become Authority property. They’d immediately begun diagnostic testing, and started dissecting the Ferrymen tech. I knew the Authority wanted their hands on every bit of innovation the Ferrymen conceived.
I scrolled through the logs. Yup. A few days after I’d brought it in, and when all the standard diagnostic testing had been finished, they’d moved the ship to another room on the Station. And there it had sat, untouched, for forty-eight hours.
I squinted, selected an option that my tech suggested, and pulled up a blueprint of the Station. Yup. There that room was. It was on the sublevel of the Station, in a wing I’d never before been. But as I studied the specs on the blueprint, I saw that the room didn’t have any sort of mechanical capabilities. It wasn’t more than a holding cell. And, yup, I could see that there were security features in the room to keep anyone from going in and anything from getting out.
My tech pinged some sort of indication to me as I continued scrolling through the log, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. I wasn’t sure what my tech was telling me at this point. I kept scrolling and the log abruptly stopped. Allegedly, the ship was still downstairs. In that secured room.
But my tech pinged me again and I realized it was leading me toward a hardwired, closed-circuit security feed. Normally, it would have taken me more than a minute to hack into the feed without leaving any traces behind me, but my new tech had me moonwalking through the firewall like I was born to do it. Maybe I was.
I verified the time stamp, saw that I was looking at a live feed of the sublevel, and realized instantly that the room where the Ferrymen’s ship was allegedly being held was currently empty. There was absolutely no ship in there.
Even though the logs indicated that there was.
I backtracked through the logs, trying to look for any indication as to when the ship might have been moved, and then my tech pinged me again.
Four days into the ship’s stay in the sublevel, the digital log of the ship had been altered. There was a small loop in the information that suggested that something had happened that had been smoothed over by someone.
I backtracked quickly, through the feed, knowing that there were recordings hidden somewhere in the database, and sure enough, four days in, there were images of the ship being moved from the room.
Okay. So whoever might be checking in on this was supposed to think that the ship was in the sublevel of the Station. But this ship was definitely NOT in the sublevel of this basement.
On a guess, I ran a quick history on the log, checking to see both who had updated it and who had checked it.
All of the updates came from technicians on the landing pad, the mechanics and supervisors who were in charge of all the spacecraft here on the Station. That made sense. And those checking in on the data were, for the most part, here on the landing pad, as well. Either they were updating themselves on the progress of the ship’s diagnostic tests, or they had some sort of double-checking system of checks and balances for log keeping. Which also made sense to me.
But there was one person who’d been checking the status of the ship who wasn’t a mechanic or a tech—an anonymous IP address. A computer that had intentionally gone dark. My tech pinged me, but I didn’t even need it to. I followed the wormhole of the address, hacking into that computer’s system, and saw exactly what I’d expected to see. Haven’s cloud.
He’d been checking on the ship and, as soon as it had been moved, altering the log to reflect whatever the hell he wanted it to reflect.
Using the date and time of the ship’s movement, I searched Haven’s system for any messages he might have sent or received. Bingo.
Triumph sizzled through my veins like hot sauce. But in a good way. I’d found it.
The triumph abruptly fizzled out when I realized exactly what I’d found.
Someone had sent Haven coordinates. I knew, without having to use my tech, that this was on the other side of the asteroid belt. But I used my tech to find exactly where. Yup. This was a satellite currently orbiting Earth’s moon. The satellite was listed as a remnant from Earth’s former space program, but as my tech provided me with grainy images, I could spot that as a lie. I could only guess that this was an auxiliary lab of some kind. The Authority had them sprinkled around the solar system in case there was ever an attack on the Station. They didn’t want their most sensitive projects and data to be lost. So, there were many of these hidden labs strewn around.
And I’d just found one of them.
I had no doubt that the ship was there. After the message with the coordinates, there was an outgoing message from Haven that was heavily encrypted. My fingers practically itched to use the hacking keyboard now, and I was almost disappointed at how easily
my tech destroyed the firewall around the message.
I already guessed what I might find in the message. I’d retrieved this information already in another way. And there it was. The blueprints for the bomb that Haven had wanted put into the ship. Blueprints and orders and diagnostics and—God. He’d planned this thing from the top to the bottom.
I wanted to upload all the messages onto the memory stick in my hacking keyboard, but pretty much as soon as I’d had the thought, my tech blinked red. Extraction will be detectable, the message read in the corner of my vision.
Fine. I couldn’t take this information out. I had enough on my tablet already. I didn’t need to get greedy here. I left the encrypted messages behind and instead set out to do what I’d come down here to do. I spent the next half hour attempting to hack into the computer system on the auxiliary lab where the ship was being held. If I could disable the bomb from here, or knock the satellite out of commission, then it wouldn’t matter whether or not the Ferrymen knew the bomb was coming. Charon would still be safe.
Pretty much all the skin on my bottom lip was damn near chewed off by the time I had to admit that the satellite’s system wasn’t wireless for a reason. So that no one could freaking hack their system from a distance. It had to be done manually, from the lab.
Cool, cool, cool. I’d just hack it the next time I happened to be taking a stroll around the moon. No prob. Hopefully, Haven wouldn’t have exploded Charon yet. I swallowed against the sear of frustration rising in my throat. I hadn’t lost ground. I was back where I’d been when I’d started this hack. At least I knew that the bomb existed. I just wished I could freaking dismantle it.
The mechanics on the other end of the landing pad were starting to clear out, and I realized that it must be nearing lunchtime already. I’d been at this for two hours without even breaking a sweat. Well, my legs were shaking from the strain of interfacing with my own wildly powerful tech, but beyond that…
I took a deep breath, knowing I should probably quit while I was ahead and hadn’t yet gotten caught hacking. But I found that my feet wouldn’t take me away from the dock of computers.
When I walked away from here, I was going to be in the exact same situation as before. I would have no way of finding my mother without drawing attention to the both of us. I wouldn’t have any way of notifying the Ferrymen that Charon was in imminent danger. And I wouldn’t have any way of stopping the bomb. Oh. Yeah. Also, I’d still be a weapon of genocide that was being wielded by a certain silver-haired psychopath.
I tossed my black hair back and pulled the horse figurine from my pocket. I placed it on top of the monitor and stared at the defiant mane in the wind, the front feet scrapping off the ground. I cracked my fingers.
My tech had warned me when I was getting close to being detected, right? So that meant that I could stretch out a little, poke around a bit, and pull back when it warned me to, right? Made sense to me.
But I was also the one who was willingly poking around in classified information, so maybe I wasn’t the best person to ask.
Eff it.
I entered through the landing pad database because, at this point, I was as comfortable with that interface as I was with the pillows on my bed.
And there was one thing that I really needed to see with my own eyes. I’d spent the last months in simulation after simulation, interfacing with the Authority Database as a user, that being the only option available for me. It had been my only way to comb the system for any indication of a virus laid out by Haven. One that would make Datapoints cull… well, anyone who Haven wanted them to cull. Not just the violent and the murderous. Kupier had insisted to me that it was real. He’d shown me some circumstantial evidence, too, but I’d never actually found the virus.
Had he lied about this, too? The temptation to find out once and for all was too strong to resist. The landing pad was clear enough and I was going in. I was finally getting these questions answered.
I combed through the information coming at me, looking for any loopholed entries into the Authority Database. It would be highly protected because the Station access points were technically auxiliary. No one knew where the mainframe actually was, though Kupier insisted that it was hidden on Earth. I wouldn’t be able to alter anything from here without the full force of the Authority’s security coming down on my little old head. But I could definitely find a way to stealthily view some of their info.
I spent about ten minutes scrolling through old Authority messages to one another before I realized that I was just playing chicken with myself. This wasn’t what I was actually wanting to find out.
I needed to do what I feared the most. Even though I was an incredibly skilled hacker, I never in a million years would have been able to get so far into the system as my new tech had allowed me to. I would have been caught and punished in about seven seconds.
But here I was, two hours into stealthily hacking my brains out, and not a wire had been tripped, not a hair raised.
Later, I’d take a precious second to appreciate the irony that the integrated tech which Haven had forced on me while I was unconscious would be the eventual key to learning his secrets. For now, though? I kept my smugness to a minimum as I hacked the hell out of the Database. In less than half an hour, I was inside the program.
I saw exactly how the virus was integrated into the simulators. I navigated my way through the syncing part of the program. The way it compressed and translated itself to work with a Datapoint’s brain. It was a genius program, universally compatible with humans while still pushing its individual user more and more.
It wasn’t a single program, either—not really. The Culling program was about a hundred different processes that were all synchronized and chugging along like gears inside of a grandfather clock.
I combed through them meticulously, searching for any sign of a virus or any incongruity or loophole that might lead me to believe that someone had tampered with the integrity of the original program.
An hour passed. And then another. I knew I’d be exhausted beyond belief when this was all said and done, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this energized. Each piece of this program was like a grain of sand, and I interrogated it with enough heat to turn it into glass. This thing was melting and shifting in my hands, showing me every one of its delicate bellies. I was the master of this program as I finally, finally understood it on a DNA level. I felt as if I were witnessing a birth.
I finally understood it, too. This goddamn program that had taken me by the tech and forced me to cull. This series of zeros and ones that thought it could tell me who lived and who died. Who was worth becoming a murderer for.
I had half expected to hack this program and find some horrible, bodyless gray matter. A brain with no human attached, trained to mine the humanity from images of citizens’ brainwaves.
It was both a relief and a horror to realize that our entire system of government relied solely on some piece of artificially-thinking, logic-using program that we’d taught how to live.
It wasn’t until I got to the sight-based part of the program that I found it. The tiny glitch. It was one silver hair in a head of jet black. It was the single grain of salt mixed in with a bowl of sugar.
I opened the loop in the programming, this small inserted virus. I had Kupier to thank for the fact that I didn’t have to cope with shock as the virus unrolled before my eyes.
It was exactly as he’d said. We were trained to recognize the brainwaves of the violent and the murderous. And, of course, the Culling program still did that.
But this virus had it doing something else, as well.
There were thousands of different patterns of brainwaves that looked completely different from those of the violent. These brainwaves had swooping patterns, activity focused in a hundred different areas. These brainwaves were unique and intricate. But the second this virus touched them, they were instantaneously morphed into looking like the brainwaves of the violent and murder
ous.
This virus would make us think we were culling dangerous minds. But really, we had no idea who we were culling. All these brainwaves were just morphed so that they’d look the same to a Datapoint. All these people, to be culled in the name of justice.
I’d suspected this, and even come to believe it since Kupier had first suggested it to me. But, God, to see it, the proof of it here in front of me. It was too much. My stomach tightened and my eyes pinched.
This virus made Datapoints murder innocent people. And for what? To what end?
And, the virus was designed to hide. Even as I exposed it, it wiggled back into its hidey hole. Like the snake it was. It was hidden so well that I knew, with utter certainty, that I might never have found it if I hadn’t particularly been looking for it. I’d found it before my tech had, though. In fact, even staring right at it, my tech didn’t see it. And that’s how I knew… whatever it was, Haven had put it there.
The man who’d had this tech surgically implanted had made certain that this tech made me only the second most powerful person in the solar system. For all it could do, it still couldn’t sense his secrets.
Something in my gut hardened and sharpened, and I knew it was only for so long that I could keep it locked inside of me. This thing was going to stab its way out, one way or another. It would kill me if it had to.
This was the part of me that was human. This was the part of me that wouldn’t murder. The part of me that lay still on a bed and let my sisters weep into my shoulders. The part of me that realized Dahn’s eyes were green. The part of me that grinned at a flirty message from Kupier.
This was the part of me that Haven wanted to extinguish.
The part of me that was fighting back.
Chapter Eleven
Somehow, I ended up in my bed. Staring at the closed curtain, my eyes barely blinking.
Dahn had culled innocent people. All the Datapoints had.
