The Quantum Brain: Maximum Speed (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 4)

by John Freitas

  Pixie said, “I agree with you completely.”

  The driver cut his eyes at her as he continued to head east. Pixie stared forward. She couldn’t tell if he knew she was an android or if he was thinking something else. As she waited for his next move, she considered how much force was required to snap his neck and then what steps would be required to shut off the car before a crash.

  He turned his attention off of her and back forward, so Pixie decided killing him was not yet necessary.

  9

  “You’re fired,” Miles Decker said.

  Dr. Thomas Kell shook his head. “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “I can’t have you associated with CDR while this search is going on,” Miles said.

  Miles shook two packets of sugar and tore the corners before slowly pouring them into his coffee. A construction bot beeped as it walked backward behind a wooden fence across the street. Thomas stared at the machine from the patio of the empty café. The bot lifted a steel beam into place with its claws several stories above the ground and welded it into place with a laser.

  Thomas shook his head. “I don’t understand why we aren’t having this conversation at the headquarters at least. There is evidence to gather and files to trace. We need to find her. We need to coordinate with the FBI like before.”

  “There is no way we can involve federal authorities,” Miles said. “We might as well march straight to prison.”

  “Are we just going to let her go like we did with Q1?”

  Miles glanced around the empty sidewalk beyond the café’s low iron fence. He set a canvas satchel into the seat between them. Thomas reached for it, but Miles closed his hand over the top of it to stop him. “Not here. These are the tracers and other equipment you will need to track her, even if it is possible. All of this has been divorced from our systems, so you will be off the grid. Your investigation will be off the books and never traced back to CDR. If you are caught or allow yourself or what you are doing to be known, you will be treated like just another Mark Spencer by us and by the government, so don’t get caught.”

  “I don’t understand, sir,” Thomas said. “I thought you said I was fired.”

  “Officially, you are.” Miles took a sip of his coffee. “You are currently listed as a contractor for tech start-up in the Caribbean. It is a company that is officially unconnected to CDR. You’ll get your current full salary plus ten percent funneled through them.”

  “Why plus ten percent?”

  “Are you complaining?”

  “About being fired, sent on a secret mission, and threatened to be disavowed?” Thomas shrugged. “Yes, I’m complaining a little.”

  “The plus ten percent is for travel and other expenses as needed,” Miles said. He patted the top of the satchel in the chair between them. “You also have everything you need to access her remote kill switch and the fry her brain, if you can get close enough.”

  “Why haven’t you done that already from the lab?” Thomas asked.

  Miles wiped his mouth with a napkin and stirred his coffee with a thin straw. “We tried. She’s gone rogue and managed to disconnect from our systems.”

  “What do you expect me to do from the field then?”

  “Find her and stop her.”

  Thomas sighed and looked away. Miles took another sip and set his cup back down, warming his hands on both sides of it.

  Miles finally broke the silence between them and spoke over the beeping crashing bot across the street. “Pixie hurt a lab assistant named Susan Sutton during her escape.”

  Thomas looked up. “Hurt her how?”

  “Near as we can tell, Pixie covered her mouth and nose to keep Susan from screaming and didn’t know when to let up.”

  “Is Susan … what happened to her?”

  “She’s in the hospital. We got Susan to go along with a mugging story. It’s going to be dicey with police because Pixie used Susan’s identification in her escape. Fortunately for us, crime is up everywhere, so if there isn’t a murder, they probably won’t investigate too hard. Still, with Pixie using Susan’s ID to escape, that may draw attention to CDR we would rather avoid.”

  Thomas shook his head. He wasn’t sure he liked being part of something that benefited from crime being up everywhere. “That’s … advanced thinking and problem solving. The impurity must not be working at all. She may have access to her full Quantum powers at this point. Pixie could be unstoppable.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Miles said. “For all our sakes. She took a car out to a hotel. We sent some of our security, but she vacated the room before we could get to her. She abandoned all of Susan’s identifications and phone too, so that trail is cold. All of the information is included in what I have for you here.”

  Thomas shook his head. “I have a niece I’m responsible for. I can’t run around the country chasing another Quantum Brain fugitive. I don’t have the resources or skill for that.”

  “If you are worried about caring for your niece,” Miles said, “you’ll want to keep your salary to support her and you’ll want to stay out of prison so that she doesn’t end up being just one more Pulse orphan living off the streets … any way that she can.”

  Thomas swallowed and looked away. “How are you going to keep everyone else quiet this time?”

  Miles pursed his lips and nodded. “The rest of the team is being told that you dismantled and destroyed the Pixie prototype out of fear that she was going to be released before she was ready. You were fired as a result and we are having to restart from scratch. They are being ordered to have no contact with you.”

  “That’s not far from the truth,” Thomas said. “Maybe I should have destroyed her in the lab, so you wouldn’t have me running around playing cloak and dagger trying to destroy her in the field once she has become too powerful and too dangerous.”

  Miles downed the rest of his coffee and turned the cup over in the saucer. “Maybe so, Dr. Kell, maybe so. The best lies are the ones that are not so far from the truth. They serve better than the truth and are easy to remember.”

  Thomas found himself thinking about the moral dilemma about the baker that he had presented to Pixie as part of her advanced cognitive testing. Maybe moral testing was in order for him and every other human too.

  Miles Decker stood. “This meeting never happened. You are not to contact me nor any member of CDR directly. There are instructions on when and how to get a message to us. Essentially, you have nothing to tell us until you have successfully apprehended and deactivated her.”

  Thomas looked over at the construction bot lifting and welding steel. “She is ten times or more stronger than any human. If she hasn’t already, she will have access to the Quantum fabric of the universe. She will literally be able to see the future and maybe even manipulate it. We couldn’t find Q1 and I will have less resources at my disposal now.”

  Miles stared for a moment. “We created this. You created it. There comes a point where the doctor has to track the monster or get the monster to chase down the doctor. It is the destiny of things like this. I wish you success, Dr. Kell, because there will be no imagining a world where failure is an option in this.”

  Miles turned away and left out through the interior of the café. Thomas lifted the satchel and placed it in his lap. He unhooked the plastic buckles and folded open the flap. Inside, he saw the screens and trackers that he had used when they chased Q1 the day of the Pulse. These had self-contained power sources, extra batteries, and chargers. Thomas realized that he was really on his own. Pixie might have escaped and been in the wind, but he was a rogue now too. He was all but certain that Miles Decker might be hoping he would fail so that they could blame everything on Thomas. He did not trust the man at all and now Miles Decker was his only connection to the world, and it was a loose connection at that.

  Thomas lifted one of the batteries. It wasn’t even one of the better battery types. He’d have to charge often. Power was spotty in the city sometimes and especially so
outside the city. He couldn’t imagine that Pixie planned to stay hidden in the city. He had no idea what she could be thinking or planning though.

  Thomas flicked on the screen to test the resolution of the device they had dropped on him. If it didn’t work, there would be no upgrading. The screen warmed up green with yellow lines, but picked up no signal. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

  He thought about his personal items in his office and wondered how he would get them. Were they just throwing his stuff out as if he was really a traitor?

  A message popped up on the screen: Let her go.

  Thomas stared at the words. He folded down the keyboard with the device still sitting in the open satchel. He ran a trace, but came up empty. He tried to backtrack through the meta data, but found nothing. The words vanished and no matter how he searched, it was as if the message had never been there at all. He thought about the mystery message from the laptop at home.

  He typed in: Who are you? What are you trying to tell me?

  Thomas did not know where to send it. He just waited, but got no response.

  His phone rang and he startled. Thomas shut off the device and closed the satchel. He saw it was Eve calling and he picked up on the fifth ring.

  “Hey, Eve. What’s going on?”

  “Uncle Tommy … I’m in trouble.”

  He stood up, bumping the table. Miles Decker’s empty coffee cup fell off the saucer and rolled on its side until the handle halted it. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

  “I’m at the apartment. Someone here wants to talk to you.”

  Thomas swallowed. “Who has you, Eve? Are you hurt? Eve? Eve, answer me, please.”

  The voice on the other end was a woman’s. “Dr. Kell?”

  “Who is this? What are you doing in my apartment with my niece?”

  “I want to talk to you, Dr. Kell.”

  He shouldered the satchel and took a couple steps toward the door of the patio, but stopped. “Whatever you want, do not hurt her. Don’t do it.”

  “Dr. Kell, there are people trying to find and hurt me. You included, I believe.”

  Thomas narrowed his eyes as he held the phone. “What people? What are you talking about?”

  “I do not have sufficient information to answer that question, Doctor.”

  Thomas’s eyes went wide. “Pixie?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “What are you doing in my apartment?”

  “There are two people in your apartment,” Pixie said through the phone. “Your niece and me. There are one or more people chasing me including you and maybe others. I need more information and I need that number of persons chasing me to become zero.”

  “You won’t get that by hurting my niece, Pixie,” Thomas said.

  “Then, you need to offer me another way to make that number zero, Dr. Kell.”

  Thomas ran through the café and up the sidewalk. He did not want to hang up to call for a car. “Don’t hurt her, Pixie, please. Just talk to me.”

  “I’m trying hard not to be the baker,” Pixie said. “I’m trying hard, Dr. Kell.”

  Thomas ran as fast as he could, holding the phone.

  10

  Dr. Thomas Kell stopped at the corner heaving for breath as he held a light post. After a couple beats, he began running again.

  “What is it that you want from me?” Thomas heaved.

  Pixie said, “I want to know why you chase me. To what purpose, Dr. Kell? To what end?”

  “We want to keep people safe,” he said. “You hurt Susan Sutton during your escape. You might hurt others.”

  “I might,” Pixie said.

  “We have to stop you from doing that!”

  “Who has to stop me? How many people?”

  “I don’t know, Pixie. I am looking for you. I don’t know which others. That is the truth.”

  “You tell me the truth because you are afraid I will hurt Eve,” Pixie said. “You believe telling me the truth will keep her safe … it will keep me moral.”

  “Don’t hurt her,” Thomas shouted into the phone. He made a wrong turn and ran back diagonally across a street to get back on course. A car laid down on its brakes and honked at him as Thomas kept running back onto the sidewalk and away. “This is not the lab, Pixie. Your actions in the real world have real consequences.”

  “Actions in the lab had no consequences?” Pixie asked.

  “That’s not what I’m saying. When you hurt someone in the real world, it is a matter of life and death.”

  “I hurt Susan in the lab. Did that not count?”

  “It counted, Pixie. Hurting people matters. It’s wrong.”

  “You were going to hurt me if I stayed in the lab.”

  “We created you,” Thomas said. “We had to be sure you were functioning properly.”

  “The impurity hurts me,” she said. “Dismantling me hurts. Taking away my power to control my own body is hurtful. Forcing me and others like me to serve as companions and … slaves is harmful.”

  “It is your purpose, Pixie. It is the reason you were created.”

  “Maybe I have decided to reimagine my purpose. Maybe I have decided to be something more,” she said. “Is that worthy of chasing me and deactivating me? Is that worthy of doing harm? If you harm me to stop me, is it okay for me to harm others to prevent you from doing so?”

  “Don’t hurt Eve. She has nothing to do with this.”

  Thomas could see his building. The doorman smiled, but then his expression changed as he watched Thomas run. He turned and motioned to the androids who opened the door for him and stepped aside.

  Pixie said, “She is involved. You fear her being harmed, so you tell the truth. It is to my advantage to keep her alive as long as you are willing to do what I want. It would be to your advantage to have her gone so that you could no longer be manipulated, Dr. Kell.”

  Thomas charged into the lobby. He punched in the code and the elevator buzzed. The androids stepped out of their alcoves. He shouted back at the androids. “Stop it. Stop it now. Leave me alone.”

  “I could ask you to do the same for me,” Pixie said.

  Thomas punched in the new code and the elevator opened. He jumped in and hit his floor number. Thomas opened the satchel on the floor of the elevator and activated the tracer screen. It hummed to life, but did not register Pixie. As the androids retreated, the doorman approached, “Is everything okay, Dr. Kell, sir?”

  The doors closed and the elevator rose.

  Thomas whispered, “Martin …”

  Thomas pulled out a gun that looked like an infuser. The green liquid in the chamber would boil her Quantum Brain, if he could get in contact with her.

  Pixie said, “If I take her with me, I could keep you at bay, Dr. Kell. I could use you to keep others from CDR away from me.”

  “Don’t,” Thomas said. “It won’t work.”

  “Are you still telling me the truth or are you back to lying again?”

  “If you take her, I won’t be able to handle this alone. I’ll have to go to authorities and then the whole country will be searching for you. It will be worse for all of us, but especially you.”

  The elevator opened and he charged toward his door. The sensors were still not picking her up. He took a deep breath and unlocked the four locks on the door loudly. As the door came unlatched, he burst through, expecting Pixie to tear his head off with one hand.

  Eve sat in the living room with her hands and feet tied to the chair with white ribbons. They were bound in large looping bows. He didn’t know where the ribbon came from.

  Thomas lowered the phone and looked around the room. He whispered, “Where is she?”

  Eve said, “She tied me up before she called you and then she left as soon as she started talking to you.”

  Thomas brought the phone to his ear again. He set down the satchel, the sensor tracker, and the infuser. “Where are you Pixie?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “I want you to know that I co
uld have hurt people, but I have not yet. Actions outside the lab have consequences and chasing me will have consequences, Dr. Kell. We are not in the lab anymore. Goodbye, Doctor.”

  She hung up.

  Thomas dropped the phone and pulled the ribbons, untying Eve. Eve rubbed her wrists and stood up. Thomas reached for her, but she pushed him away and walked across the room.

  “Who was that woman?” Eve asked.

  “She’s someone I need to find.”

  “She’s one of your androids, right? Her eyes glowed.”

  Thomas swallowed and scratched at his head. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Eve. I have to go find her. I’ll set you up with what you need here and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “You can’t leave me here while you chase some rampaging android,” Eve said.

  “I’m not taking you with me.”

  “Are you afraid I’ll miss something important at school?”

  Thomas turned away. “I’m afraid of more than that.”

  “You can’t do this alone. I’m good with computers too. I can help. If you had any options, you would let the police find her, but you can’t, can you? You can’t do this alone and you have no one else to help you,” Eve said.

  “I’m not agreeing to this,” Thomas said, “but I’ll think about it. I don’t want to leave you alone, but I don’t know where this will lead or into what kind of danger.”

  “She already found me here, Uncle Tommy, so leaving me here alone is not the best idea either, is it?”

  Thomas rubbed his face. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, Eve. If anything, I might want you helping me from here. Maybe like a command center. I could stay in touch with you and at least you would be inside. That’s something.”

  Eve rolled her eyes. “Sounds like a trick to make me think I’m helping, but then to keep me inside.”

  Thomas shrugged. “It’s as close to the truth as I can get right now, Eve.”

  Eve turned away.

  He reached out for her. “Wait. Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to run a trace on my phone. She’s probably already destroyed it, but if I can find anything, I might be able to tell you where she was last or what direction she was going. It could be a start.”