There was never any jealousy among us, neither because of this, nor for his attentions. We all idolized him. Just being in his company was enough. He helped us achieve more than we ever could have without him. Always so passionate and willing to experiment, to take risks. More intelligent. More capable. More…
Well, he was just more.
But now that’s all changed. The only way I can explain it is like when you look at a beautiful scene and realize that what you’re viewing is about as close to perfection as you’ll ever get to experience. And then to suddenly see it marred.
I can’t help but feel a little disappointed.
I get up stiffly and remove the IV needle from his arm and throw the setup away. The bag is empty anyway and there isn’t another to replace it. He doesn’t even wake. As for the urinary catheter, I leave it in for now.
I silently pray that his body heals soon, at least enough to take the strain of moving him.
Even more than that, I worry about his mind. I fear the reality of our situation might just break him, possibly irreparably.
I fear it might be too late. He might already be broken. Just like the rest of us seem to be.
Chapter 12
“I know you’re out there, Kelly,” I say. It’s the next morning, shortly before ten. After a long, restless night, I’d finally managed to sleep. I’ve been up now for less than an hour after crashing hard for almost six following my midnight-to-three watch. “Come on in.”
He sticks his head tentatively around the doorway. “How’d you know it was me?”
“Been tracking you.”
He comes in and flops down next to me, bouncing the thin mattress where I’d spent the night, and glances over at Micah’s old computer tablet in my hands. “Keeping tabs on me, eh?” he says, trying for lightness but not quite managing. There are circles under his eyes, and his unshaved face is stubbly with whiskers. “Not even married yet and you’ve already got me on a short leash.”
I frown, but don’t bite at the all-too-obvious bait.
A week ago, in sort of a round-about way, he’d asked me to marry him. He’d sent me a picture, a giant marriage proposal spray-painted onto the side of a building in downtown Long Island City. But I couldn’t answer him then. Even before I realized we were being attacked by IUs, I’d already been paralyzed with fear.
A month ago, there wouldn’t have been any waffling. It would’ve been an unequivocal no. There were a million reasons not to get married, the very least of which was our ages. Yes, people get married sooner now than their parents did, partially because of the shorter life expectancies, but seventeen is still too young.
Besides, he was supposed to go to college in a year. I would’ve just dragged him down.
Then came the post on his Link from Arc and his strange reaction to me asking about it. Suddenly it seemed like I might be losing him, and not to some out-of-state school, but to something far more sinister and irrevocable.
But now…
Now, marriage seems like the least important thing in the world, a non-issue, a fantasy that happens to other people.
So why am I so afraid of facing it?
And why do I want it so badly that I can almost taste it?
“I just checked on Micah,” he says, shifting the subject when it becomes clear I won’t talk about his proposal. “He’s asleep. What are you doing?”
I’d been scouring the tablet, hoping to find something—anything—that might help us figure how to break the failsafe. I’d stumbled across the tracking app Micah created before we came to LI the first time. It was buried deep inside what can be described as some kind of incomprehensible organizational system of files and programs, either completely insane, or arcane, or absolutely brilliant. How he finds anything on this thing—or his Link, for that matter, since it’s the same way—is beyond my puny powers to comprehend.
Not that the tracker app is of much use to me. Now that all of our old L.I.N.C. implants have been replaced, it can’t see any of the rest of us other than Kelly, who still has his original. Now, without the new identity codes, we’re as invisible to the tracker as the island’s thousands of un-implanted Infected Undead.
“Looking for the hack of the ArcWare codex that Micah came up with,” I answer, and then, realizing nobody ever told Kelly about it, I explain: “After you took off alone to save Jake, he finished it using Ashley’s self-learning algorithm. But you would’ve known that if you weren’t off gallivanting around here with Jake.”
“You’re not going to let me off the hook for that, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Well, as I recall, I wasn’t gallivanting. I was rescuing.”
“And I was worried sick.”
He sighs. “What do you need the hack for?”
“I figure if Arc developed a failsafe, then it’s got to have a code, right?” He nods and waits for me to go on. “And code can be hacked, which means we might be able to block the failsafe using software.”
“How do we get the hack into the implants?”
I shrug. “I doesn’t matter. I can’t find a damn thing on here anyway.”
“Reg and Ash are working on the servers. Maybe they’ll come up with something.”
He stands up, offering his hand. I take it and let him pull me up. But instead of leaving, he wraps me up in his arms. I can feel the tension inside his body, like it’s a herculean effort to touch me. He still doesn’t know if I’m sick or not. I feel fine, but who knows how long it might take for me to start showing symptoms.
I yield to his touch, suddenly realizing how much I’ve missed it. I lean into him and close my eyes and pretend we’re not here in this hellhole, that we’re somewhere else, anywhere, home, school.
After a few moments, I lift my face. There’s only a couple inches difference between our heights. He leans down and our noses nearly touch. His eyes flick between mine. Then he surprises me with a quick, dry peck to the forehead before releasing me. “I’m going to check on Jake.”
I’m still standing there, hurt and stunned, when Reggie finds me. “There you are. Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Server room. Looks like we finally caught a break.”
Chapter 13
I follow Reggie down the hall and through the smashed doorway and find Ashley sitting on the floor, her legs crossed beneath her. She’s huddled over her Link. When she looks up, her face brightens. “You’ve got it!” She gestures for the tablet. “Gimme! I’ve been looking for that. I was afraid we’d lost it.”
“What’s going on?”
She hurriedly connects some wires to the tablet and scrolls through a bunch of screens, cursing under her breath about how she can never find anything on it.
Finally she holds it up and shows us streaming code.
“They’re Arc’s machines, all right, just as you suspected. I recognize some of the code from when we hacked into The Game. It’s not the only thing coming through here, though. There are several thousand individual streams passing through these machines, maybe forty or fifty thousand at any given time.”
I lean over and shrug as I watch the code flash by. “Data streams. So what?” How Ash could possibly see distinct patterns in it is beyond me.
“So, what we’re looking at is The Game.”
“Raw code?” I say. “We already have a hack for it.”
She shakes her head. “Not the base program. Still haven’t located the root files yet. It might be that these servers just annotate the raw data coming in and deliver it to Arc Entertainment for editing. Looks like everything coming out of Gameland, though. But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Look here.”
She swipes the screen and it clears. Then she taps it a few times and a schematic pops up with several red dots.
“Micah’s tracker? I was just looking at it. But what are all those dots?”
“It’s actually not his tracker, though it’s very similar.” She points. “These dots are us, our new impl
ants. Well, most of us, anyway. Kelly’s not here, obviously, because he didn’t get one.” She expands a section of the schematic and the dots separate and gain alphanumeric labels. “This cluster here is the three of us. And…this one over here is Tanya. Jake’s way over here, down near the baggage claim.”
“Well, at least we know he’s doing his job,” I murmur. Of course, it doesn’t tell us if he’s awake or not. “What’s that one?”
“That’s Stephen.”
“They’re tracking him, too, then.”
“Looks like it. But that’s what I wanted to show you. See, there’s no one else in the entire airport.”
“Our mystery missing person is really missing,” I say.
Ash nods and taps the screen again with a flourish. “That was me sending our new identifier codes to our Links so Micah’s tracker app on them can be updated.”
I stare at the six dots on the tablet screen. There should be seven. “Where’s Micah? He should be there, too.”
Ash shakes her head. “We looked. He’s not in the system.”
“I’m not understanding.”
Reggie holds up Micah’s Link. “We can still see him on the app on his Link, so we know his implant is functional. It looks like he never got the new implant.”
“Maybe because he was so badly hurt?” I suggest.
“Maybe.”
“So, you’re telling me the failsafe shouldn’t affect him then, either?”
They both nod. “You just didn’t know because he was passed out on the tram from all the drugs you gave him.”
I wince. Definitely my fault.
“But the big, big news is this,” Ash goes on. She swipes the screen again and points. “See this bit of code here? And this one here? There are several hundred of these separate streams in here. They’re quite distinct from either the tracking app code or The Game’s codex. They’re nearly identical: each made up of a sequence of roughly four million bits.”
“Four million. Is that all?”
Ash nods, not realizing I’m being sarcastic. Or ignoring it. “They all repeat every two and half milliseconds, like a beacon—well, several hundred nearly identical beacons.”
“A virus?”
“We think they’re the tracking programs for all the Players inside The Game. All of them carry a unique identifier code.” She looks up. “And the strange thing is, a handful of them are streaming outside of the main game stream. They’re not embedded. Guess which ones.”
“Ours.”
She nods. “We think the program they’re embedded in is the failsafe.”
“Clever. So the program doesn’t reside inside our implants, but in here. They must communicate to our L.I.N.C.s through Arc’s towers.”
But as soon as I say this, I realize the deeper implications. We now have a way of defeating Arc’s failsafe. Crack the program and we’ll be free to leave. But then I have another thought. “What if we just shut the servers down? No beacon, no failsafe.”
“You read our minds.”
“There’s a problem with doing that, though,” Reggie cautions. “Arc will know almost immediately what we’re doing. They’re probably not monitoring each individual sub-stream—I mean, how could they, right?—but they’d sure as hell know if all of them suddenly stopped transmitting. I don’t think it’ll make them very happy.”
“And don’t forget,” Ashley adds, “this is their connection to The Game. Without it, they can’t stream Survivalist on Media. No Survivalist, no advertising. That’s a lot of money they’ll lose.”
Reggie nods. “That’ll really piss them off.”
“After what we’ve done to their people—to their experiment—I doubt they’re very happy as it is. So why haven’t they come?”
It’s been bugging me that no one has tried. We know of at least one person who was planning on coming through the tunnel and he never showed up. When the tram didn’t arrive back on the Foxhurst side, they had to have figured something went wrong. But they never sent anyone to investigate. Why not?
As if reading my thoughts, Reggie says, “They’re in no hurry. Remember, they can easily track us. They know we’re here. As long as we don’t try to leave, they’re not going to panic. My bet is they’re working on a plan right now to fix what we broke. But if we shut down the servers, that’ll just force them to come get us that much sooner.”
“Sooner than what?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Okay, so we just have to make sure we take them by surprise. As soon as we’re ready, we slam all the servers down and go. That means Micah needs to be as strong as possible. Think Arc will wait one more day?”
They shrug.
“Keep working on that program. See what else you can find out about these servers. See if you can reconfigure those sub-streams so we won’t have to shut everything down.”
“What are you going to do?”
“First, I’m going to check on Micah. Not sure if there’s anything I can do to hasten his recovery, but I can try. The quicker we can get him ready, the sooner we’ll be able to ditch this place.”
“And what about Stephen?” Reggie asks.
“Screw him. He had his chance. We leave him for Arc to deal with.”
Chapter 14
“We should skedaddle tonight,” Kelly says, after he finds me later that afternoon. “Even that might be waiting too long.”
“Not till Micah’s strong enough to walk,” I tell him. “If someone has to push him around in a wheelchair, that’s just going to slow us down. That’s two less people available to fight.”
“I’d rather not fight. In fact, I’d rather just slip out and go home.”
“Unfortunately, with them tracking us, that’s not possible.”
“And what about Tanya? Has she snapped out of it yet? Kind of a long time to be in shock.”
“I don’t think it’s shock.”
“Drugs? Brain damage?”
“Not drugs. Too much time has passed. Her system would’ve cleared anything by now. “I think Arc did something to her.”
“Well, I still think our best chance is to hightail it as soon as we can.”
“Now I know you’ve been hanging around with Micah too long,” I say. “You’re beginning to sound like him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Skedaddle, hightail.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
I give the cardboard carton sitting on the floor a vicious kick. It flies into the corner and a couple dozen unwrapped granola bars spill out. They weren’t any good to eat anyway. “Yes, I am changing the subject, Kelly, because I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve made up my mind. We’ll leave when Micah’s ready. Not a moment sooner.”
“Okay.”
He digs a couple fingers into the Vlassic jar he brought in with him and fishes out a pickle and holds it up in front of him. It’s gray-green and limp and probably tasteless, which will make it the perfect complement to the leathery Cool Ranch Doritos he brought with him from the stash in Tanya’s room. Reggie found several cases of assorted snacks in one of the upstairs restaurants. The Cheetos were the first to go, naturally. They were the only things that still had some flavor and texture left to them after being expired nearly a dozen years.
“Nice dinner,” I remark.
Pickle juice runs down his arm. He gives it a sour look, then takes a bite.
We’ve been eating canned and bottled and processed packaged foods for only a day and already I’m starting to fantasize about fresh fruit and vegetables. This morning I woke up with the taste of Eric’s meatloaf in my mouth. I even smelled fresh-baked bread and my stomach grumbled so loudly that I was sure someone else might’ve heard it. But then I realized what I was smelling wasn’t meatloaf and bread but the coppery stench of the dried up blood out in the hallway. A week ago I probably would have puked at the thought, but today it just makes me shake my head.
Kelly cracks open a beer and swirls it. He holds the bott
le up to the light and watches the floaties spin around in it before downing half of the bottle in one gulp. He lets out a long burp.
“Pig.”
“Better a pig than a sitting duck.”
“I get it. You’ve made your point.”
“I’m not the only one itching to leave. Jake was telling me this morning that he’s getting a really bad feeling in his stomach. He thinks something big is going to happen soon.”
If he’s only just now getting that feeling, he’s days late.
“So Jake’s a fortuneteller now?” I grumble. “He can predict the future? Christ! Reggie and Ash are working as hard as they can on figuring out how to beat the failsafe and Jake’s making decisions based on…feelings?”
“We all are, Jess. Even you. Admit it.”
He puts his hand on my arm. It’s meant to be warm and reassuring. I want so badly for it to be. I want him to wrap me up. I just want to sink into his being. But I don’t feel any of that.
“The sooner we leave, the better,” he tells me. Then he stands up and stretches and yawns. His hands are red, his palms blistered. He’d spent all morning mopping the floors after I mentioned my meatloaf dream to him. And when I told him he didn’t need to clean, that he should get some rest instead, he’d answered, “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
“If that’s supposed to be funny, it’s not.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
He leaves. A few minutes later I hear him out in the hallway. It sounds like he’s washing the walls now.
I get up from the cot and go out. Kelly’s dunking a mop into the bucket of water and bleach, using the water from the cistern.
“Missed a spot,” I tease, hoping for a smile. The rinse water is already dark. He raises the mop and swipes at the wall until it stops bleeding and turns a rusty brown.
He sighs unhappily and turns back to the gruesome mural on the wall.
Chapter 15
I find Reggie sitting in Micah’s room, fighting to stay awake. When he sees me, he rubs the fatigue from his face.
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 37
