The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  Violet was stunned. “You love to paint. You need to paint.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So when you say ‘I’ve decided’—what you mean is that your parents decided, right?”

  “No. I mean—yes. It’s what they want.” Shura paused. “But it’s what I want, too.”

  “Your work makes people feel. It makes me feel. I can look at this painting and it’s like opening the door to another world,” Violet said. “A world that exists outside what happened to my mom. It’s all about the moment. Not about what happened after the moment. Or before the moment. It’s about the now. And now is all we have. Your work tells me that. It shows me that. It proves it to me, over and over again. So I want you to keep painting. I want you to—”

  Her friend’s voice was sharp. “Just stop it, Violet, okay? Lay off. It’s my decision. Not yours. It’s my family. And my life. With everything my mom’s going through—I just thought it was something I could do for her. To make her happy. And anyway—what’s wrong with being a doctor? Your mother was a doctor.”

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. Not if it’s what you want to do. It was definitely my mom’s calling. But is it yours?”

  Shura did not answer.

  Violet reached out toward the portrait of her mother. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t need to. The act of reaching out to be closer to it gave her a sense of peace, one she’d not felt in a long, long time.

  “You’re right,” Violet finally said. “It’s none of my business. Thanks for this gift. I’ll cherish it. I know my father will, too.”

  She felt a deep crater of sadness opening up inside her. She was losing Shura—the old Shura, that is, the best friend she’d had for all these years. The old Shura was slipping away. Violet would have to get used to the new Shura. The one who wasn’t a painter.

  “I guess I better go,” Shura said.

  Violet nodded. “Yeah. Me too. My shift’s coming up. Everybody’s supposed to stay where they are—except for those of us who work in Protocol Hall. Breach or no breach, there’s still a job to do.” It was early for her to be leaving, and so Violet added: “I’ve got to return something to Rez.”

  Shura didn’t ask her what it was. There was a distance between them now. It wasn’t a cold distance, but they didn’t walk out the door side by side, the way they would have done before. Shura kept herself a few steps ahead.

  All at once she spun around.

  “It’s too much, Violet,” Shura said, her voice strained, ragged. “The emotions. All the feelings. I’d be stirring them up inside people. My paintings would, I mean. I’d just be giving the Intercept more to work with. I don’t want to do that. I mean, I know the Intercept is a good thing and it keeps us all safe and your dad only wants the best for New Earth—but my paintings—they make me feel. My mother says it’s too risky. I can’t—” She cut herself off.

  Violet had so much she wanted to say at this moment. She wanted to tell Shura to keep on painting. She wanted to tell her friend that tons of people could be doctors but only she could be a painter. This painter. She wanted to tell Shura that safety couldn’t be the goal of life, that safety was a terrible thing to desire, that seeking safety was, in fact, the most dangerous thing you could ever do.

  Violet hadn’t known she felt that way. Not until the words to describe it had flared up in her, hot and true. She didn’t even bother to check the crook of her elbow for a blue flash. She didn’t care what the Intercept did with this feeling. She wanted to tell Shura to ignore her parents and just keep on painting, no matter what.

  Violet’s emotions kept spinning and bumping and crowding and crashing inside her—and so she did what she always did when there was too much to say. She said nothing.

  13

  Chip-jack

  Reznik was already in their workstation. He was hunched over his keyboard, slamming the keys, glaring at a screen filled with spazzing code, frowning a frown so harsh that it made new dents and fresh creases in his chubby face. His hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed since the First Mineral War. It stuck up in wheat-colored tufts. There was a wide stripe of grime on the back of his neck.

  “Been here all night,” he said. He didn’t look up, only acknowledging her arrival with a vigorous head-bobble. “Running my own back trace. Trying to track down those jerks who hacked the system. Gonna find ’em. Gonna get ’em. Guaranteed.”

  Violet dumped her bag on the floor. She pulled out her own chair and sat down.

  “Any luck so far?” she said.

  Another head-bobble. “Near as I can figure,” he said, still not ripping his eyes away from the screen, “something blocked the Intercept signal.”

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t know. The signal is fine when it leaves Protocol Hall. But by the time it tries to reload the memory into the brains of the bad guys, something gets in the way. Like a shield. A shield that comes between the Intercept and the target. The block doesn’t last long—but while it’s on, it completely shuts down the signal.”

  “I thought that couldn’t happen.”

  Reznik looked up from his screen. “Lots of things can’t happen that somehow do happen. I’m just telling you what the numbers say. I didn’t claim that it made any sense.”

  He coughed, a long, rattling cough that seemed to go along with pulling an all-nighter. He looked terrible, she thought. He looked like an old overcoat that had been stuffed in a garbage sack and left in a ditch for days. But that was one of the things she admired about Rez: He stuck with a problem until he solved it—no matter what he ended up looking like. Or smelling like.

  “Can you take a break?” she said.

  “Got to work.”

  “I know. But I wanted to give you back the chip-jack.”

  Rez sprang up from his seat. His eyes were round and huge.

  “Not so loud!” he said in a fierce, appalled whisper. “Come on, Violet—you know better than that.”

  “Sorry.” She was still so upset by Shura’s decision to abandon her art that she’d forgotten her promise to Rez—that if he loaned her the homemade device he called a chip-jack, she would be discreet when talking about it.

  Reznik risked a quick 360-degree glimpse around Protocol Hall. The workstations were all occupied. The glass walls meant that you could see what everyone else was doing—if you cared to look, which most people didn’t. Their colleagues were sitting at their computers, trying to dig out a clue about last night’s intruder. These investigations were on top of their usual work of monitoring the Intercept feeds. Orange code twisted across every screen; the atmosphere in Protocol Hall this afternoon was one of intense, almost robotic preoccupation. Violet had never seen everyone so focused. It was eerie. But it was also totally understandable. The breach had rattled New Earth right down to its shimmering core.

  No one seemed to have heard what she’d said. Nobody had heard her refer to the chip-jack.

  Rez’s shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh of relief. He plopped back down in his chair.

  “Okay,” he said. “But be cool, okay? Just give it to me slowly. I mean slowly. Don’t make a big deal.”

  Pinching the tiny device between her thumb and index finger, Violet handed it back to him, placing it in his grubby palm. The black metal dot looked totally harmless.

  It wasn’t. In fact, it was the opposite of harmless: It was so dangerous that Violet was glad to be rid of it—almost as glad as she’d been to be able to use it.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I got it all set up.”

  “Did it work okay?”

  Reznik’s eyes were bright with eagerness. He was afraid to raise his voice—he was whispering again, which sounded weird to Violet, because usually Rez’s voice was so loud the people at adjacent workstations complained about it—but he needed feedback. He craved compliments the way other people craved snacks. They were his fuel. As smart as he was, he was desperate for validation.

  And not from just anybody. Fr
om her.

  “I haven’t initiated it yet,” she said. “I did a preliminary test, though. Just a small one. Seems fine.”

  Reznik waited. He was wildly curious about why she’d asked him to borrow the chip-jack. But he didn’t want to ask her outright. He wanted her to want to tell him.

  She knew that, but she couldn’t do it. Because it was related to Danny. And Rez would be jealous—jealous of her feelings for him. The jealousy was always there in the background when Danny’s name came up, but it needed to stay in the background. As long as it was a low-level hum and not a crazy roar, Violet could handle it.

  “So you’ll let me know, right?” he said. “Once you try it?”

  “Yeah.”

  He switched back to his usual self. “Wanna know how I did it? How I came up with the chip-jack?”

  No, she didn’t. Not really. But she owed him.

  “Sure, Rez,” Violet said.

  Once again his eyes flew all around the vast hall, checking to make sure nobody was paying attention to them.

  Nobody was.

  He leaned forward. His voice was cautious, but there was a smugness in it, too. “I may not have invented the Intercept like your friend’s brother,” he said, “and I may not be able to figure out how those creeps are getting around it, but I do know pretty much every inch of it, okay? I know how the Intercept thinks. I’ve mapped its brain. I know its code protocol like I know my own name.” Now he leaned back and crossed his arms. “That’s how I came up with the chip-jack. It piggybacks onto the feed. If you touch the chip-jack to the skin over the Intercept chip you can sync both chips—and then you can access that person’s feed. Spy on them.” He pumped his fuzzy eyebrows up and down in triumph. Violet could’ve sworn she saw some lint tumble out. “It’s like you’re right there beside them, wherever they go,” Rez said with a giant smirk. “Seeing what they see. Hearing what they hear.”

  Violet had a vivid memory of running the chip-jack against Danny’s sleeve outside Protocol Hall the day she staged her won’t-you-please-finish-my-coffee tactic. She had felt a little guilty about the trick, and a little queasy—but only a little.

  The chip-jack was just for emergencies. She didn’t really want to use it. It was altogether too sneaky, and too sinister.

  But if she had to—she would.

  “It only works temporarily, right?” Violet asked.

  “Right. Once it’s activated, the hijacked feed doesn’t hold up for long. Just an hour or so. Sometimes a lot less. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, the feed will pop back up again. Again—just for a few minutes. Depends on the air quality and the density of signal interference.”

  Violet nodded. No matter how obnoxious he was, Rez was also a friend. The chip-jack was illegal. Or at least it would be if the authorities knew about it. He had risked a lot to let her borrow it. And he hadn’t even asked her what she wanted it for.

  She decided to pay him back with the only currency he really cared about: her admiration. She didn’t have to fake it.

  “You really do know the Intercept, don’t you?” Violet said. “I mean, you don’t just monitor it, like the rest of us do. You know it. You can practically read its mind.”

  “Oh, yeah. I can do whatever I want to with it.” With a flick of his thumb he gestured toward his screen, where the orange code waited for his next command. “I’ve got this baby down cold. If somebody gets hold of something they’re not supposed to have, if somebody’s not where they’re supposed to be, if somebody’s not who they say they are—I’m going to find out. First the Intercept knows and then I know. Okay? Simple as that. Like I told you, the chip-jack is like a back door into the Intercept. Nobody else could’ve figured that out. Nobody else knows the ins and outs of the Intercept like me. I know its moods. I know its secrets.”

  He leaned over and touched his computer, stroking its black plastic side with a couple of fingertips. It almost looked like someone touching the cheek of his beloved.

  Had anybody but Steve Reznick done that, Violet would have been totally creeped out. But this was Rez. It was hard for him to reach outside himself and his own supercharged brain, she knew. The only human being he had ever really cared about—which happened to be her—didn’t care about him in the same way. She never would.

  And so he’d forged a link where he could. He’d found one that satisfied him. Sure, it was with the Intercept, and not a woman or a man, but it spoke to his soul. It made him feel whole. Part of the world.

  Nothing creepy about that, Violet thought. We all do what we have to do to feel human. To feel a real human connection.

  Which was a strange thing to say about somebody who’d fallen in love with a computer program. But then again, the world was full of strange things these days.

  14

  Prisoner No. 49878104-12-XHVB

  “Why do they call you Tin Man?”

  Tin Man laughed. “You come all this way—and that’s the question you wanna ask me?”

  “One of them, yeah.”

  Danny and Tin Man faced each other across the cold, bare space. Tin Man appeared to be thinner and even scragglier than he’d been the last time Violet saw him, back in that rain-ruined, garbage-stacked alley.

  That was barely a week ago, and so the transformation was surprising. Old Earth prison must be even worse than she’d imagined it would be.

  Violet twisted the dial on her console up and down, and up and down again, trying to bring the scene into better focus. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her elbows perched on her upraised knees. She had been home from her shift for several hours. She hadn’t heard from her father, which didn’t surprise her; he would not rest until he had explored every last means of finding the intruders who had shut down the Intercept for a few scary seconds.

  But the trouble was, she hadn’t heard from Danny, either. And he hadn’t answered his console. She knew his schedule, and she knew he wasn’t on duty.

  And so his silence could mean only one thing: He had gone to Old Earth.

  Again.

  So as soon as she arrived home, Violet had plugged in the password Reznik gave her. The password linked her to the chip-jack signal, the one that continued transmitting to her console even though she had returned the device.

  A grainy, misty-looking picture wavered slowly into focus.

  It was a small pocket of space chopped and gouged out of the depths of a mountain. Violet recognized the dimensions right away, from her criminal justice class: This was a prison cell. Carved into one of the craggy sides was the identity of the person assigned to it:

  Prisoner No. 49878104-12-XHVB.

  Violet knew him by another name:

  Tin Man Tolliver.

  But why was Danny visiting the drug dealer who had almost melted his face off with a slab gun?

  She squinted at her console. She turned up the volume control.

  “Okay,” Tin Man was saying. “I steal tin. I mean—I stole tin, before they threw me in this stinking place. You know what metal’s worth down here, right? I steal copper sometimes, too. But tin’s my specialty. So I’m the Tin Man.”

  “Tell me the rest,” Danny said. “There’s got to be more.”

  Violet could hear their voices clearly, but the visuals continued to be distorted. She knew why. Reznik had explained to her that the chip-jack would work great everywhere—except on Old Earth, where the radiation lingering in the atmosphere from the last Mineral War might partially block the signal.

  “Okay,” Tin Man said. “So you want to know how I really got this nickname? It’s simple. She liked the movie. It’s a million years old, give or take, but it was still her favorite.”

  “Who? And what movie?”

  “You know who,” Tin Man scoffed. “And you know which movie. I’m not stupid, okay? I’ve got a good idea about how the Intercept works. I’m aware of the fact that you’ve seen my feed. All of you. All of you New Earth snobs and hypocrites.” He sneered. “In The Wizard of Oz, he’s the best
character. Only one that works hard. Only one that’s got a real tool. Carries an ax. Most little girls, they’d go for Dorothy or that candy-ass lion. Not Molly. She liked the Tin Man. So she started calling me that. Long time ago.” He shrugged again, as if pronouncing his sister’s name no longer pierced him.

  Violet knew better. She remembered that alley, when the moment of Molly Tolliver’s death had been fed back into Tin Man’s brain. It had completely incapacitated him. It had turned him into jelly.

  “Who are you, anyway?” Tin Man said. “And how’d you get here? Travel’s restricted from New Earth.”

  “I’ve got my ways.”

  “So you’re not going to tell me.”

  “No. I’m not going to tell you.” Danny took a few steps around the space, looking left and right, up and down.

  “What’re you doing? Measuring for drapes?” Tin Man said, adding a cackle of laughter. With a dirty fingernail, he scratched vigorously in the crook of his left elbow.

  Violet recognized the gesture, but it looked different when Tin Man did it. It wasn’t a casual habit, like pushing your bangs out of your eyes. A lot of people on Old Earth, she knew, had tried repeatedly to dig out their Intercept chips with pocketknives, or sticks, or the sharpened edges of spoons—anything they could find. It was impossible. And you could do a lot of damage to yourself by trying. Tin Man had an ugly twisting scar there. When he dug at the spot, it was like he hoped to open up the wound all over again.

  “Hell,” Tin Man went on, staring scornfully at Danny. “You’re just a kid. Like me. Didn’t get a good look at you while you were chasing me—but now I see. I didn’t need to run. I could’ve taken you, easy.”

  A column of dingy muted light dropped from an ancient bulb fitted into a metal socket chained to the craggy wall. Violet recalled the descriptions she had read. In Old Earth prisons, the light was never turned off. The prisoners couldn’t see one another, but each knew that all the others were there, thousands of them, breathing, shuffling, moving around, moaning in their fevered sleep, slotted into identical pockets gouged out of the rock.