Code Breakers: Alpha

by Colin F. Barnes

  “Out where? Code can’t just float about in the air.”

  “The Meshwork,” Petal said. “You government types don’t know about that, do you?” Petal gave him a sly grin. “It’s all around us, Gez. We act as nodes. You do too, now. You’re basically an Internet switch. A hyperintelligent, bad-ass switch. You just don’t know it yet. But you will.”

  Gerry ignored the dig and minor revelation. He’d enough to think about without digging into yet more underground tech. He’d figure it all out eventually. “If this demon AI did get ‘out’, can’t you just recontain it?”

  “Not really, and we’re risking all the other stuff escaping. We’re talking about a mass prison break of biblical proportions here, Gez, and there’s some bad mojo in me right now that we really would prefer stayed tightly locked away. Besides, it took a crap-load of effort to win those contracts and get payment. If we lose ’em now, all our bins won’t be worth a damn.”

  “Bins?”

  “Currency. Digital coinage,” Gabe said. “Outside of ya fancy little utopia, the rest of us have to have something to use to exchange resources. Those of us off-the-grid don’t get nothing for free. Besides, ya gonna earn us a pretty penny with your skills. Ya just need to trust in ’em. So, ya ready?”

  Gerry couldn’t find the words. He tried to remember how to use his real brain to sort through all these new terms, data sets, and ramifications. It would take a while to not be able to manipulate an AIA, but he felt excited, and worried, and anxious. Like being a teenager learning the rules and boundaries the hard way.

  “Don’t think I’ve got much choice, then, do I?”

  “Sure ya’ve got a choice, man. Ya can join us and do something good. Put your skills to use. Or ya can walk out that door and let the security deal with ya.”

  Petal looked at the thick watch on her wrist. “Shake a leg, princess. I meant it when I said seriously bad mojo will go down if I don’t dump these demons.”

  “I just want to do one more thing before we go.”

  Before Gabe and Petal had a chance to say anything, Gerry walked through the kitchen and approached the mewling, zombie Mike.

  “I’m sorry, pal. Take care in the afterlife. If there is one.”

  Gerry jumped at the surprisingly loud crack from the gunshot. The head exploded as if it were a ripe pumpkin. Brains and blood smothered the back wall of the nook, and the lumpy body slumped forward. This time it remained still.

  Gerry looked back at Petal and Gabe. Petal flashed him another wolfish grin. Gabe’s eyes grew wide with surprise. They clearly underestimated him. Good. It was best to keep them from knowing too much. They’d have to wait to find out what he was really capable of.

  “Let’s go flush these demons, then. The quicker we get out, the quicker I can get back to my family.” He wasn’t sure if that was entirely possible. But right now, he’d cling to anything to avoid admitting it was completely hopeless.

  Petal and Gabe glanced at each other briefly, sharing an unspoken message, before filling a backpack with bottles of water and food rations sealed in vacuum graphene foil from the kitchen cabinets. Gabe took the pack and headed to a section of the wall inside an alcove opposite Mike’s corpse.

  Pushing against a particular area, Gabe stood back as the wall moved inwards, revealing a dark gap.

  Petal took Gerry’s elbow and beckoned him to follow Gabe down a flight of stairs.

  As they descended, it occurred to Gerry that these weren’t regular stairs. They were motionless escalators. They were heading into an old, disused subway station. The smell of carbon dust and body odour clung to the air still.

  The three of them stood on the platform, waiting.

  Gerry was about to ask how they would leave the City when a rush of air and whirr of electric motors answered it for him.

  “A train? Are you guys for real?”

  Gabe grinned at him. “Man, there’s so much you don’t know.”

  “Tell me about it,” Gerry said, trying to stop his mind from spinning as each perception of the world was stripped away like an onion skin. “How is this even possible? I thought all these kinds of vehicles were out of action since the Cataclysm?”

  “The Family like you to believe that everything was destroyed,” Petal said. “They wanna make you think it all begins and ends with the Dome, but it don’t. There’s a world out there, Gez. It’s messed up, dangerous, exciting and a hundred other things, but it ain’t empty.”

  “How do they even allow this to run?”

  “What makes ya think they even know about it?” Gabe said. “Listen, man, they built this city on top of an existing town. An old traditional Mongolian town that was on the up-and-up. A few transport links here, a few developments there. You get the idea. But when the war finished and they built the Dome, they left a few relics here, like this train and the tunnel.”

  “But how is it running?”

  “Hackers, engineers, people with a vested interest in staying off the grid,” Petal said. “This old train line was still connected to the power grid. It took just a little bit of modification on our part to reroute the signals so that they wouldn’t notice the power usage.”

  Gerry looked at the fuse box on the side of the stairwell. The case hung open, and various wires rose from the electronics and snaked up into the ceiling, where a number of tiles hung loose. “They must know,” Gerry said, not believing this could be going on under the Family’s nose.

  “Not this, they don’t,” Petal added. “But don’t think they don’t necessarily know that some of this stuff goes on, Gez. It suits them to have something else going on outside the Dome.”

  “Suits them?”

  “Yeah, think about it. This Dome is one great big test lab. You need stuff to test against, right?”

  Gerry shook his head, still unsure what to believe. He couldn’t believe that the Family would deceive them that far. With the control over the population, they didn’t need to. But then need and want weren’t necessarily the same thing.

  Gabe approached the train, pressed a button on the outside of the carriage, and the door slid back. Gabe stood aside with his arms open. “Welcome to Salvation Train Service,” he said with a grin. “Please mind the step.”

  Petal took Gerry by the elbow and led him in. They took a seat, and Petal slid in next to him.

  “Read up, code monkey,” Petal said. “We got a lot of evil to dump.” Petal sat next to Gerry on the plastic seat and looped her arm around his. “This is gonna be fun,” she said with a wicked smile.

  Gerry returned her smile, though his was pained and lopsided. Anxiety grew within him like hungry, urgent bacteria.

  “What the hell have I got myself into?”

  “The salvation business, man,” Gabe said.

  “The pay’s crap, but the satisfaction is good for the soul,” Petal said with a wink.

  “Okay, let’s do this. But once you’re sorted, I want you guys to help me reach my family.”

  Petal and Gabe remained silent as the door to the train slid shut and the electric motors whined up to speed. They headed deeper into the disused tunnels. Gerry turned his head and watched the light of the platform shrink to the size of a pinhead before finally disappearing, taking his old life with it.

  A new light shone in the far distance: a light beyond the city, into uncharted territory, into a land that no one he’d ever known had ventured since the rebuild. It was forbidden. The penalty was death—like almost every misdemeanour against the Family—and he, along with two people he’d known for just a few hours, were hurtling towards it in a train that should have been mothballed with all the others over fifty years ago.

  There was a name for the place he was going: Purgatory. All his life he was told there was nothing out there. The Cataclysm had wiped out everything, and yet despite that, despite the evidence to the contrary, here he was rolling to a frightening new phase of his life with two anomalies, outliers, freaks.

  When he saw his reflectio
n in the window, he realised he looked just like them.

  His new life was starting. A man reborn.

  Chapter 5

  The train came to a stop at a decrepit platform a few minutes later. Old posters peeled from tiled walls. Mould colonised the paper, creating a map of its own organic tracks. Dark shapes skittered along the platform in the angle where the wall met the floor. Rats. Living creatures. Something Gerry hadn’t seen in City Earth. There were pets and animals, sure, but certainly not living, just constructs to make people feel comfortable. It worked, of course. Not that he knew any different. A cat running on a Cemprom chipset and AI logic was enough for most people, but Gerry could tell there was something missing there: a lack of a spark, real randomness. But that was to be expected. The degree of AI in those things was barely above children’s toys. Still, most people were happy with them, happy to settle for a close approximation.

  “What do they eat?” he asked.

  “Sometimes people try to escape, find these old tunnels, and well… not many make it. Don’t have a train like us, see,” Petal said. “We’re getting off here, Gez. Need to get you kitted out.”

  Petal and Gabriel alighted from the train and headed towards one of the mould-covered posters.

  “Wait here a sec, Gez,” Petal said, as she approached the wall with Gabe.

  A simple hand gesture from her elicited a red LED beam from the wall. It scanned her eye, and the poster, attached to a door, opened. Petal waited for Gabriel to crawl up into the dark gap before turning back, beckoning to Gerry.

  He barely squeezed his large frame into the tunnel. Only the sliding of Petal’s and Gabriel’s shoes against the stone surfaces gave him any sense of direction. For hundreds of metres he crawled on hands and knees, occasionally scraping the crown of his head against the rough, low surface.

  “How long does this go on for?” He tried to hide the strain in his voice, but the tremble was still evident. His breath became shallow, the confines of the small space crushing down on his psyche, making his chest feel as if someone stood on it, squeezing the air from his lungs.

  His elbows and knees burned as they rubbed against the concrete. All he wanted to do was stretch out, but the tunnel remained unforgiving.

  “Breathe, Gez. We’ll be out in a bit.”

  How long was a bit? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? It felt like he’d been stuck in there for years already. He focused on the rhythm of shuffles ahead of him, counted his movements, listened to his breathing. Anything to not think about the mass that surrounded him like a tomb.

  Up ahead, the pitch-black void took on a slate grey aura, and as he neared, its luminosity increased until finally Gabe pushed open another door. Artificial sunlight flooded the tunnel, covering Gerry as if it were a cleansing shower of healing water. He scrambled faster, wanting to reach the light before it went out.

  Stretching his cramped legs, Gerry breathed a deep sigh of relief, letting out all the pent-up, trapped anxiety. Resting his hands on his knees, he waited for his back muscles to relax. All around him, the light beamed down from a solid OLED panel in the low ceiling of the room. The room itself was nothing more than a concrete cupboard. A vertical tomb this time. At least he could actually stand here.

  Petal tapped him on the shoulder. “Just through here.”

  Gabe took out his HackSlate, punched a series of finger gestures across its surface and waited. Two long seconds later, another door opened.

  “I take it no one else knows this place is here?” Gerry asked as he followed Petal and Gabe into a larger room.

  His answer came not from Gabe or Petal but from the unwelcome crackling of electricity from a stun-baton.

  A black-masked figure shifted like a shadow and struck out with the baton, catching a bobbing Gabe on the shoulder. The force threw him back, knocking Petal to the ground and collapsing into Gerry’s arms.

  The shadow phased closer, and the baton arced through the air again. Gerry twitched away, closed his eyes, and involuntarily tensed up, fully expecting to feel that surge of power through his nervous system for the second time that day.

  It didn’t come.

  All he heard was a low guttural choke and then the clatter as the baton crashed to the floor.

  “Damned rat-bag. A breach? How the hell did she break our security?”

  Petal stood wide-legged over the rumpled body of a woman in a black fabric suit. It no longer shifted in and out of the visual spectrum. It, like the woman wearing it, was no longer operational. Blood pooled from a twenty-millimetre hole created by a chromed spike extruding from the inside of Petal’s right forearm. She lifted it into the air, flicked back her wrist, and the spike telescopically shot back within a hidden subdermal sheath. Very clever. It made Gerry wonder what other tricks Petal hid under her sleeves—literally.

  “Who, or what, is that?” Gerry asked.

  “Ninjas, man. This is gettin’ serious.”

  “You okay, Gabe?”

  The hacker rubbed his shoulder, squinted. “Been better.”

  “This ninja, who would have sent her, and why here?”

  “We know why, man. That ain’t the problem. It’s by who that’s the issue.”

  Gabe stepped over the corpse and motioned for Gerry to follow.

  Racks standing over head height and extending five metres wide were filled with computers, cables, and more of that meshlike fibre-optic cabling. It looped from the top of the rack and ran across the ceiling and down the sides. Lights pulsed like fat pills through the cables as data flowed through the gas-filled tubes.

  “Another secure network, I assume? Like your home?”

  “Yeah, something like that, man.”

  “It’s actually a Meshwork hub. The only one in City Earth, or I should say under it. No Family members can trace this. Like infiltrating from the inside. It’s how we track the AIs and stuff. Anyway, let’s see what the thief was after.”

  Petal withdrew a HackSlate from her leather coat’s breast pocket. “Crap a doodle-do. Seems your pals from Cemprom have been tracking you, Gez.”

  Gerry and Gabe huddled around Petal’s HackSlate. It streamed video, presumably from a hidden camera in their home. So much for it being secure.

  “That’s Jasper!”

  The white-haired man, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit, led a team of heavily armed security.

  “Is this live?”

  “Nah, about five minutes ago.”

  The video showed Jasper entering Gabe and Petal’s home through the smouldering remains of the front door. The haze of smoke marred the high-definition video. Jasper and his team systematically tore through the place, ripping out wires, scanning each nook and cranny.

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Traffic. They must’ve bugged you or had at least some kind of surveillance to have found our place. It’s secure as a gnat’s chuff on a winter’s day, but they ain’t blind. They can see our mesh protection. I don’t think this Jasper is the wet-behind-the-ears kid you think he is. That dude’s got some serious game face. He knows what’s going down.”

  Jasper followed two wiry security women into the kitchen and approached the dead body of Mike. He crouched and lifted what was left of Mike’s head and stuck his fingers right into the eye socket, pulling out a wire. Taking a thinner slate, he attached the wire from Mike’s head and plugged it in. After a few seconds, Jasper disconnected, stood, and nodded to his team.

  One of the members carrying a smouldering large shoulder-mounted weapon stepped forward and doused the body with steaming liquid, turning Mike into nothing more than soggy pulp.

  “Poor Mike… this is… just…”

  “Work of the devil, man. Ya pal Jasper ain’t no good. No good at all,” Gabe said.

  “What the hell does all this mean?”

  “You know as much as we do,” Petal said, closing the video and gesturing across the surface of her slate again. A string of numbers flowed down before coming to a stop. “Log files say the n
inja didn’t change a thing. She managed to get into our system, but didn’t touch a damn thing.”

  “Maybe she was just doing some reconnaissance?” Gerry was clutching at straws and had no clue as to what was going on. Why would Jasper connect to Mike’s… what exactly? His brain? Some kind of internal storage system? He’d known Mike since they were toddlers. He’d have known if he had any kind of cybernetic implants.

  “You might be onto something there, Gez. I know one thing. She ain’t working for Jasper or the Family. Look at this.” Petal played another video. “This must have been just before we found her going by the time code.”

  Jasper, seemingly satisfied with his business with Mike, approached the secret door leading to the old escalator when he suddenly turned his head. Piercing screams sounded from outside the kitchen. The video switched to the camera in the living room. Jasper’s entire security squad collapsed to the floor, simultaneously holding their ears. Their eyes distended, and veins popped from their foreheads. With a unified, horrific scream, the squad fled from the house.

  Jasper ran into the shot, ran his hands through his hair, and spun away from the scene. Clenching a fist, he screamed at the walls before chasing after his squad.

  “Ninja here must’ve set off our local EMP. Wow, it actually worked. Though this tells us something about your pal Jasper,” Petal said.

  “It does?”

  “Yeah, it tells us he ain’t on any network. The boy’s all flesh. No implants for him, otherwise he’d have been as fried as his little security detail there—unless he’s got some kind of internal dampener…” Petal pursed her lips, thinking.

  “So this woman was helping us?” Gerry said.

  Gabe shook his head. “No. This is what they want. The Family. This Jasper’s a fine actor—he knew what was gonna happen. With the EMP activated, our security’s blasted to the great hard drive in the sky. Our Meshwork hub here and node up there are the only ways into City Earth’s wider network. It’s how we make our money, ya see. We use our tech to track these AIs that are trying to do bad stuff, and we exorcise ’em. Only now, it seems we’ve been found out, and someone is using our gear to crack the network.”