The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  “I didn’t make the drones,” Joby says irritably. “They’re mass-produced, with really simplistic flocking behaviors.”

  As he’s speaking, the three little drones form a line and withdraw, buzzing over his head to disappear into the back.

  Quiet descends. Joby looks at me, his pale eyebrows knit in a scowl under a fringe of white-blond hair. He’s only five three, but he’s got an athlete’s build, with health-club muscles. “Sorry about the hack,” he says.

  An apology is so unexpected I almost ask him to repeat it just to make sure I heard him right—but I catch myself, and try for something more diplomatic. “I didn’t know you had that kind of access to my overlay.”

  He shrugs. “That’s what we’re here to talk about.”

  He comes into the room, looks around, spots a folding chair, and carries it to the center of the carpet. “Sit here.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Just sit.”

  I sit because I want to get this over with.

  Jaynie stands a few steps away, her arms crossed, a comforting presence. She doesn’t trust Joby and she looks poised to intervene if she has to, while Delphi has gone into handler mode. She’s turning in a slow circle, scanning the lab for hazards, while every few seconds her restless gaze shifts to Joby to assess threats from that direction.

  From his pocket, Joby produces a small device—not something I’ve seen before. It’s a white plastic cylinder, two inches long and half an inch in diameter. At one end is a black, flared soft-plastic cup. “Every overlay is manufactured with a back door that can be opened if you have the right keys—”

  “Wait. What?” I’ve read the documentation on security vulnerabilities. “I never heard even a rumor of a standard back door.”

  Joby shrugs. “Not something the manufacturer wants to advertise.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “That’s a proprietary secret.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Dickhead. But anyway”—he holds up the device for me to see—“this is proof that Jasmine Harris knew.”

  Jasmine Harris? Oh, right: That was Shiloh’s real name.

  “This is called an optical trigger,” Joby says, holding the device upright like a white-stemmed, black-petaled flower. “It was recovered from the building where you were held. Illegal for Exalt Communications to possess it of course, but then it was illegal for them to possess you, and they didn’t give a shit about that.”

  “Yeah.” I’m not sure if Joby knows that Shiloh’s people gunned down half my squad just to make it easier to grab me, but it’s not something I want to bring up. “Thanks for helping to get me out of there.”

  Joby scoffs. “Like I was going to stand by and let someone fuck with one of my projects?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I reach for the optical trigger, not sure if he’ll give it to me, but he does. I turn it over in my hands. There’s a slider on the side of the cylinder and lenses at both ends, one of them nested at the bottom of the flared black plastic fitting, which I’m almost certain is an eyecup. I look up at Joby. “So what does this have to do with cracking an overlay?”

  Making a circle of his thumb and forefinger, he peers out through the loop. “Place it against your eye.”

  “No fucking way.” I hand the device back to him. “Put it on your eye. You’ve got an overlay.”

  He takes it back with a sly half smile that lets me know I’m not even close to escaping whatever he’s got in mind for me. He holds the optical trigger up to his eye. A flash of light leaks out around the edge of the cup. He lowers the device and shrugs. “Nothing—because it’s keyed for you.” He hands it back. “Try it, you dick. It’s not going to kill you.”

  It’s like I’m twelve years old. He dares me to do it, so I do. I put the device up to my eye. A light flashes for half a second, just long enough for me to perceive an image of a long string of letters, numbers, symbols, and bar codes projected in white on black. I yank it away, but it’s too late. All the latent icons are wiped from my overlay, replaced by a single icon that flowers in the center of my vision, expanding until I can’t see around it. “What the fuck?”

  Delphi moves in so close I can sense her gravity. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ve been unlocked,” Joby says.

  I feel Delphi’s hand grip my shoulder. “Shelley, tell me what’s happening.”

  “That thing, that optical trigger, it wiped my display and introduced a new icon, a red circle with three blunt arrows inside the ring, pointing outward. It’s sitting right in the center of my field of view and I can’t see through it.”

  “Don’t get up,” Joby advises. “You might fall down.”

  “Joby, what the fuck did that thing do to my overlay?”

  “Triggered the feds’ back door. It’s there in case some FBI agent wants to take a look at what you’ve got stored in your head. Now take it easy, okay? I’m going to put the trigger on your eye again. Don’t hit me.”

  “Fuck,” I whisper. Delphi’s hand tightens on my shoulder. But I sit quietly while Joby gently presses the device against my left eye. The red arrows turn green. “What’s going on?”

  “Upload. Everything in your overlay is being mirrored on the stick.”

  “Hey!” I pull away from the trigger and the arrows go red again. “That’s my data.”

  “I’ve seen it before and it’s not that interesting.”

  “Get these fucking arrows out of my face.”

  “Don’t hit me.” He covers my eye again with the device. I see the white-on-black character string flash past and then the alien icon is gone. My own display returns.

  “It would take a lot more time to mirror everything,” Joby says as he takes the optical trigger away. “But you can see how it works.”

  “So the idea is, I stick that thing in Semak’s face, and it’ll extract a copy of everything he’s got in his overlay?”

  “Fuck no. It won’t extract a thing.”

  “Nakagawa said it’s keyed to you,” Jaynie reminds me.

  “Right.” Joby twirls the optical trigger in his fingers. “Every overlay is manufactured with a unique access code that has to be scanned into the optical trigger before the connection can work.”

  Okay, I see where this is going. “And you don’t have Semak’s code?”

  “I don’t even have mine.”

  “Wait . . . then how come you have my access code? Where’d that come from?”

  Joby cracks a cynical smile. “Your army personnel file. When your new overlay was installed after Black Cross, someone decided to record your supposedly secret access code. I don’t know how they got it or why, but at least now we know it’s the right code and the system works.”

  Jaynie doesn’t have a lot of patience for bullshit. “So just to be clear,” she says in an icy voice. “No record of Semak’s access code was found in the intel retrieved during Black Phoenix?”

  “No. I’ve run searches through all of it and found nothing. If Jasmine Harris had the code, she probably kept it in her overlay.”

  “If she had it,” Delphi says thoughtfully. “Do you think that piece was missing?”

  “Evidence-free guess?” Joby asks. “No. Harris had it, and she had it early in the game. It would be stupid to take the risks she did if she wasn’t sure she could crack Semak’s overlay. She hit the federal courthouse and when that didn’t work, she gunned down the Apocalypse Squad—”

  So he does know.

  “—so she must have been sure.”

  “Then how do we get it?” Jaynie asks.

  Joby turns the question around. “How did Harris get it?”

  “Bribed somebody, I would guess.”

  “I think it’s more likely it was an inside job, that she had someone in her conspiracy who worked for the manufactur
er—someone with high-level access who could copy the code without being detected.”

  “We can reassess the recovered data,” Delphi says, moving around the room in her restless manner. “There might be hints about who that was. . . .”

  As they discuss it, I get up, fold the chair, and return it to the side of the room, silenced by an unsettling suspicion that all this was meant to be, that it was planned years ago.

  I interrupt their discussion. “Joby.” All three turn to look at me. “How high in the corporate hierarchy do you think you’d have to be to have access to those codes?”

  He hands the optical trigger to Jaynie. “Why? You know someone? Got a favor you can call in?”

  He’s joking, but in fact I do. “My cousin Mark Graham is a cybernetics engineer. He’s one of the company founders. Set me up with my first overlay a year before the product was officially released.”

  For maybe the first time ever, Joby looks impressed. “No shit?”

  We trade stares, like neither one of us can believe the coincidence. Adrenaline sprints through my system as I weigh the odds that I would know one of the few people in the world who can get the code we need—and I ask myself: Is this scheme coming together like puzzle pieces because the Red set it up to work that way when I was still a naïve kid, nineteen years old? Surely that’s impossible. We don’t live in a clockwork universe. No entity could look forward in time more than five years and predict that we would be here, now.

  “It’s not really a coincidence,” I decide.

  “It’s really fucking weird,” Joby says.

  “No, it’s not that weird.” I want it to be explainable, so I explain it. “It’s straight-up cause and effect. The only reason I have an overlay is because my cousin helped design them. He got me interested and he got me in early—”

  “Gave you what you needed to bring the cops down on you,” Jaynie says, looking thoughtful.

  “Hey, that wasn’t his fault.”

  She cocks an eyebrow. “That illegal video you made with your overlay is the only reason you ended up in the army.”

  “Yeah, but that was my doing. Not his.”

  “Geez,” Joby says. “She’s agreeing with you. It’s not some fucking one-in-a-billion coincidence that you know Graham. It’s because you know Graham that you’re here at all.”

  Delphi crosses her arms, looking impatient. “Shelley, can we just please set up a secure call with your cousin and get this done?”

  I’m grateful to her for the change of subject, but this isn’t going to be as easy as she hopes. “Mark won’t do this over the phone. This isn’t a little favor. The only way he’ll consider it is if he can look me in the eye, log my overlay’s serial number, and know that he’s not being spoofed and that no one is holding a gun to my head. So we have to go see him.”

  Jaynie looks resigned. “Back to New York?”

  “Back to DC. Mark lives in a Maryland suburb, just outside the capital.”

  • • • •

  Airline seats are rationed and booked up for months, so we take a train. Rawlings isn’t happy. He says we have too many enemies, we’re too vulnerable. But during the two days it takes to reach the Capitol, no one tries to kill or kidnap us. It’s kind of nice.

  On the way we watch the second episode of Against the Beast. It’s titled “Shadow Governments,” and Koi Reisman has put it together to look like a political drama. The story centers on the FBI agents, introduced during the first episode, as they pursue a relentless investigation of the DC nuke. Undaunted by power plays and stonewalling from above, they persist—until a credible informant whispers of an old and long-buried scandal linking the president to Carl Vanda and, by implication, to the Coma Day cover-up.

  It’s an association that could bring down the administration.

  As the senior agent contemplates her next best move, fresh intel arrives. Two more INDs have been tentatively located. Fearing a cover-up in her chain of command, the agent defies protocol and organizes her resources to back an illegal mission by a secret militia on its way to confirm the presence of the INDs aboard the Non-Negotiable.

  The bloody, tragic gun battle that follows consumes less than forty seconds of the show. It’s all blazing muzzle shots, heavy breathing, and first-person viewpoints—an anonymous militia to the end—but the nukes are recovered, with the promise that they will be removed to a secure facility and disassembled.

  Koi Reisman said it wasn’t my show anymore. She was right and I’m glad for it, but that doesn’t mean my story is over.

  • • • •

  My cousin Mark picks us up at the station in an electric sedan with tinted windows. He’s twelve years older than me and a few pounds heavier, with a neatly trimmed beard and dark brown hair already beginning to show a little gray. As I slide into the passenger seat beside him, he gives me a nervous smile.

  I introduce him to Jaynie and Delphi.

  “Let’s not talk until we get to the house,” he says.

  He’s had a shielded, soundproof room built into his basement to use when he’s working at home. There are monitors on the walls, a stand-up desk, a couple of sofas, and pillows on the carpeted floor. Mark closes the door, cutting off the faint hum of appliances running upstairs. He turns to me. “You are seriously scaring the fuck out of me, Jimmy.”

  “We need this, Mark. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t critical.”

  “I saw ‘Shadow Governments.’ It looks like fiction, but the rumor mill is buzzing. Chatter says the president is stitching his golden parachute. I don’t know if you meant to bring down the administration when you pulled off First Light, but it looks like you might do it.”

  “The president,” I say noncommittally, “is a complicated man.”

  “So are you, cousin. That battle at the end of the show? I had a feeling I was seeing part of it through your eyes.”

  “Good guess,” Jaynie says. She takes off her jacket to show him the livid, fresh scar from her bullet wound. She’s still wearing a brace on her arm.

  “Holy shit,” he whispers.

  She tells him, “There’s another mission in the planning stages, with a similar goal.”

  I sketch out the highlights. Mark, of course, has his own overlay and while he’s too polite to say so, I know he’s using emotional analysis to measure our truthfulness and our sincerity.

  Delphi sums things up. “If we can access Eduard Semak’s overlay, we’ll know the location of his rogue nukes, and we will turn that information over to an agency that can go after them.”

  Mark looks at me with real worry. “Why is it you, Jimmy? You’ve done your part. You’ve done enough. Someone else should go.”

  Jaynie answers for me. “It’s not our decision.”

  Mark studies her with a thoughtful expression, as if FaceValue is giving him mixed data, but then he shrugs. “Okay. I understand you can’t tell me everything.” He pulls a hand-size tablet out of his pocket. “You’ve got the optical trigger?”

  Jaynie hands it to him.

  He shows us how to use the slider switch to wipe the memory. Then he manipulates the tablet until it displays a long string of letters and numbers and symbols. “My company has reevaluated security, in light of the breach you uncovered, Jimmy.”

  “So you know who was working with Jasmine Harris?” I ask him.

  “Let’s just say I know how Harris got the code.” He taps the rim of the tablet. “We’ve closed the loophole that let it happen. I need you to understand that I will not be able to do this again.”

  “Mark, you know I wouldn’t ask for it this time, except—”

  “I know.” He scans the string with the optical trigger, which beeps in acknowledgment. Then he hands the device back to Jaynie. “That’ll let you do what you need to do.”

  “Mark . . .” I hesitate. I don’t want to compromise him
, but there’s another question he might be able to help me with. “Do you know of any other LCS soldiers who use an overlay?”

  Right away, he’s suspicious. “No, but we’ve sold close to two hundred thousand systems. So I guess it’s possible. Why?”

  “There are supposed to be others like me.” I asked Jones to look into it—more than once—but I got nothing back. “I want to know if it’s true. I want to know who they are.”

  It’s an awkward moment as his gaze darts away. When he looks at me again, it’s with narrowed eyes. “I’m not going to look that up for you.”

  “Mark—”

  “Leave it, Shelley,” Jaynie warns. “We got what we need to support the mission. Pushing for anything else is a security risk and it undermines our integrity.”

  All true. But I don’t want to let it go. Mark is my last, best resource. He has direct access to the names of everyone who has ever been fitted with an overlay. “Look, it’s not like I’m asking for more codes. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just need to know if . . .”

  I hesitate, wondering why this is so important to me.

  Jaynie wants to know the same thing. “If what, Shelley? Why does it matter?”

  I just want to know I’m not the only soldier on call in the Red’s network. If there are others, soldiers who’ve held on to their anonymity, I want to believe they have my back, that they’ll be in a position to step in and salvage things when I fuck up.

  “I’m just asking for names. Nothing else. I just want to know if other soldiers are wired with overlays—and if they’re still alive.”

  Mark crosses his arms. Puts on a stubborn expression. “If they do exist, if they’re still alive, I’m not going to compromise their safety or the future of my company by compiling that information. Sorry, Jimmy. But I’ve got integrity too.”

  • • • •

  We’re not due back at the train station until after midnight, so we order pizza and then sit in the living room and talk. Mark tells me that my dad’s doing okay, he’s got a new apartment, and he’s thinking of getting into city politics, which amazes me. He’s always been a private man, but he’s angry now, and determined to take back his world.