The Mainframe (The New Agenda Series Book 3)

by Simone Pond

  “I’m pleased that you’re pleased,” Morray said.

  “So, where exactly are we?” she asked.

  “A holding room of sorts.”

  “No—I mean, where is my physical body?”

  “Somewhere safe.”

  “And what’s your plan? You’ve got me trapped inside the mainframe. What’s the endgame, Morray? To keep me locked inside this program indefinitely?”

  With a wide grin he offered her a new glass of champagne, which she refused. He sipped and smiled with pleasure, as though he were actually drinking it.

  “I’ll find a way out,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m quite sure you’ll try.” Morray walked over to the windows, observing the last rays of sunlight filtering through the basin.

  “What do you want?” Ava asked.

  “I want you to go into my archive files and get my son.”

  “I knew this was about Phoenix,” she said.

  “It’s always been about Phoenix. I want you to bring him back to where he belongs.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “We’ve made it possible.”

  “Why don’t you go back and do it yourself? Why do you need me?”

  “We’ve tried, Dickson and I, for years. Unfortunately, we can only observe the files. We are still working on how to fully interact with the files.”

  “But Phoenix only exists in coding. How can I get him back?”

  “We’ve managed to grow in our body banks a new biological version of Phoenix, but I need you to go back and extract his identity matrix so I can recreate him in the real world. A resurrection from the dead, if you will.”

  Ava thought about that first day at the academy and how she was able to go back to the village three hundred years earlier and interact with the coding, the same way Grace had done during tryouts. But after her imposed probation period had ended, she was no longer able to engage. Something had changed inside the mainframe, and she could only observe the files.

  “What makes you think I can?” she asked.

  “You already have. I know you went back and had a conversation with Lillian.”

  “That was a fluke,” she said.

  “No, it wasn’t. The program wasn’t entirely finished, and there were some glitches that needed to be worked out. Dickson took it offline for a couple of weeks. But it’s ready now, and you’re here, so I say we make the most of this fortunate situation.”

  “What makes you think I’d even consider helping you?”

  He moved away from the window and approached Ava. He grinned wickedly as he stroked her arm. “I have an infallible insurance policy.”

  Ava’s heart tightened. There was only one thing Morray could use as leverage to get her on board with his plan—Grace.

  He had the advantage, knowing Ava would do anything to keep Grace safe. She wanted to slap the smugness right off of his face. But she needed to remain calm and play along—at least until she found a loophole out of the program. There was still one trump card she held—his obsession with her. Moving closer toward him, with bile burning in her throat, Ava conjured up her best acting skills. She flirtatiously touched the arm of his jacket. “Why not just write a program and live inside of that? That way you can control all of it—everything.”

  “What’s the fun in that?” He took her hand and held it in his crushing grip, then brought it to his lips and kissed her fingers.

  Her nerves cringed, but on the surface she stayed cool and alluring. She reached for his glass of champagne and took a small sip. The bubbles tickled her nose. She couldn’t believe how real everything felt—the programming was flawless. Dickson had really outdone himself.

  “What’s the point?” she asked. “It won’t change what really happened.”

  “I want my son back.” Morray grabbed her arm and bore into her eyes. “I want you to go back and get to him before my men do. Then we can start over.” He touched her cheek.

  “We?” Ava laughed and laughed, though she found nothing about this humorous. “I’m not sticking around.”

  “If you want your daughter to live, you will.”

  Ava paused and collected herself. The slightest miscalculation could affect her daughter’s fate. “What if I can’t extract him?”

  “Dickson will make sure you can.”

  “Let’s say I pull this off. You really expect me to live with you, Morray? I won’t.”

  “Seems as though you’ve already been doing just that all these years. Only, this time it won’t be in my archive files. It will be real and indefinite.”

  Ava was getting sicker by the minute. “If I can control the coding inside the mainframe, why wouldn’t I just reprogram it and escape?”

  Morray smiled. “Always the determined beauty, you are. Dickson has firewalls, and as I mentioned, I have my insurance policy.”

  She thought about the boy Morray had been before he became the monster. Was there anything good remaining? He had lived so many lives, and time after time he chose the darkness. Breeding humans. Giving continuous life to his group of evil elites. Conducting tests at Ret-Hav on countless innocent victims. Terminating lives. Morray was devious and he had a deep-seated desire to control everyone and everything. Given the opportunity to start fresh, he’d probably do everything the exact same way.

  For the moment, Ava felt like a fox caught in a snare, but she had no doubt she’d find a work-around to outsmart Morray and Dickson. She’d come up with an exit strategy. For now, she’d falsely concede to his plan.

  “Fine, Morray. You got me.”

  A genuine look of relief settled over his face, and he took her hands into his. “You belong with me, Ava. You always have.” He bent down and kissed her neck. “I created you, and you are mine.”

  “Never,” she whispered.

  “Never say never.” His breath warmed her ear, or what felt like her ear. He took her hands and held her closely, stroking her long auburn hair, or what felt like her hair.

  Her synapses began crashing into one another, and she shoved him away. “Never,” she shouted.

  Morray grabbed her and dragged her over to the enormous canopy bed. She tried digging her heels into the floor, but it was no use. He shoved her onto the bed and pinned her down. She squirmed under him, but the long gown cocooned around her. He held her face and pressed his lips against hers until she could taste blood. The pain was unbearable. She wriggled around, but couldn’t get her legs free.

  “Fighting will only make it worse.”

  “You make me sick . . .” She elbowed him in the ribs, then his jaw. He rolled to the side, and she pounded his chest repeatedly.

  He laughed and grabbed her wrists. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.” He yanked her down and kissed her neck . . . her face . . . her lips.

  “Never. Never. Never!” she screamed, twisting herself away. She used the sharp point of her shoe to rip through the chiffon gown, and yanking her leg free, she kicked Morray in his kidneys a few times until he was gasping for air. “Try something like that again, and I won’t help you. That means both your son and my daughter will die by your filthy hand.”

  He stood up and smoothed back his hair and adjusted his suit. “Stubborn then, stubborn now.”

  “It’s not a matter of stubbornness, but principle. You can never have me, Morray. I’ve fought too hard for my freedom.”

  “Remember: it always comes with a price.”

  He stormed toward the door, leaving Ava alone on the bed. Tears of frustration burned down her cheeks, or what felt like her cheeks. She ran to the windows, pounding the glass with her fists, or what felt like her fists.

  19

  After Morray left the chambers, Ava showered. She scrubbed herself down until every ounce of makeup and glitter enhancement had been rinsed away. She pulled her hair back and went to the wardrobe where she found a pair of camouflage pants, a gray sweater, and black combat boots. Much more her style. As she finished tying up her boots, the door slid op
en and revealed a suited guard standing at attention.

  “Miss Rhodes,” he said.

  Ava wished they’d stop calling her that. She had been Mrs. Strader for a long time now. Hearing her old name brought up past memories, the way a song does when it hasn’t been played in a while.

  “I’m ready,” she told the guard.

  The tall man nodded and escorted her down the corridor toward Morray’s wing of the Royal Palace. She hadn’t seen the interior of this place in years, but the program captured every detail—down to the flecks in marble tile and ornate molding. She passed by the same alcove where Joseph had pulled her aside just before the Graduation ceremony many years ago. That’s where he had kissed her and inconspicuously transferred the microchip containing footage of Ret-Hav. That footage revealed the truth and opened the eyes of the city center residents, which precipitated the revolt. The uprising freed thousands of people from Morray’s prison and changed the world forever. She knew this time around Morray wouldn’t be so easily duped. He knew exactly what he was doing. Dickson would have a tight network security and code-blockers set up within the architecture of the program. Getting out would require some serious calculating.

  She entered Morray’s office, where he was sitting behind his desk observing one of his monitors. The footage showed images of Ava from her days inside the city center during one of her ballet competitions. Though she had no desire to go back to her old life, she felt a jab of remorse, seeing what she left behind to move to the village.

  “Feeling more comfortable in your Outsider attire?” he asked, swiping away the monitor and peering into Ava’s eyes. A chill rippled up her neck.

  “I’d like to get this over with and return to my real life in the real world.”

  He smirked and leaned back in his chair. “Ava, dear, this is your life. This moment. The two of us, right here, right now.”

  “Can we get on with it? I’m sensing there’s a ticking clock of sorts.”

  “Have you always been so impatient?”

  “When it comes to you, yes. I can’t stand to be in your presence. Real or programmed.”

  “That hurts, Ava.”

  He walked around the desk and sat next to her, pulling up another monitor. It displayed an aerial shot of a forest east of the Pacific Ocean.

  “This is the area where Lillian’s people settled—the lower part of Ojai, near the lake. It won’t look the same to you, since it’s over three hundred years before your time.” He paused a moment and reflected. “I would have done anything for my son. Anything. I would have given him the world, which was free game at the time. His mother took him from me, and because of some ill-fated miscommunication he was killed. It was supposed to be a simple mission to retrieve him. In and out. But as you know, nothing is simple. Now that I understand the capacity of the mainframe, I can go back and fix this mistake.”

  “I know all about your tragic life,” she said. “But those tragedies didn’t entitle you to become a tyrant. Three hundred years of oppressing humans, killing them off at the age of thirty-six, or worse—experimenting on them. You can’t go back and fix that. It all happened, whether or not you bring your son back.”

  He ignored her and continued. “Once you infiltrate the camp, you must find his mother, Sarah. You’ll need to explain to her what happens when he’s older. And you need to convince her to let you remove him from the woods. At that point, Dickson will work with you to harness Phoenix’s identity matrix, bringing him back to our location. We’ll pull you up from the mainframe as well.”

  “And the three of us are supposed to live unhappily ever after?”

  “It is all a matter of perspective.”

  Ava knew there was no reasoning with the mad man. “I’ll find a way out. I did before, I’ll do it again.”

  He touched her lips. “This time, my dear, there is no escape. Let’s not forget about my insurance policy.”

  “You touch Grace or involve her in any of this, and it’s over. I’ll find a way to destroy the program, your archive files, and the entire mainframe. You’ll be nothing.”

  Morray was unfazed by Ava. “We know that’s not true.”

  “What if I can’t convince Sarah?” she asked.

  “Once you’re inside the archive file, you get one chance to make it work. One life to live, so to speak. If you fail, you die in there. Your consciousness will evaporate into the mainframe and your physical body will die. Dickson has very tight security, so I highly recommend sticking to the plan and completing the mission.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” she stood up and walked over to the lounger.

  Morray strapped her down and placed her hand on the connector panel.

  “This will only hurt for a few seconds.” He smiled. “Maybe more.”

  “Screw . . . ”

  The pain jolted through her cortex like a million flames. Hot lava rushed through the lobes of her brain. She shot through beams of white light, twisting and gyrating as though she were going into cardiac arrest. The pain was unbearable, and it lasted much longer than a few seconds . . .

  When Ava opened her eyes, she was sitting in the passenger seat of a Jeep that was bumping along some windy back road.

  “Where are we?” she asked the driver, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. He wore a black military uniform and had a shaved head.

  The kid adjusted his sunglasses and eyed himself in the rearview mirror. “Pacific Palisades. Used to be mansions. Now look at it. All gone. Rich bastards had it coming.”

  “What year is it?”

  The driver tipped his shades and looked at Ava, laughing. “You okay, miss?”

  “Just tell me what year it is. Please.”

  “It’s 2043.”

  “So fifteen years after the Repatterning . . .”

  “Did you hit your head or something?” he joked.

  “Is Morray running the Los Angeles City Center?”

  “Hell yes, he is. You handed him the note yourself.”

  “What note?”

  “The one saying you could get Phoenix back.”

  Ava didn’t remember that interaction and assumed it was part of Dickson’s programming. She couldn’t wait to find Dickson and give him a proper slap.

  “Chief Morray’s been running the show for five years now. Building up armies to fight off these outside terrorists.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Dropping you off in Temescal Canyon. From there, you move north to their camp in the Los Padres Mountains.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What do you mean, that’s it? I got my orders to take you as close to the perimeter as possible without getting spotted by the Outsiders. You having doubts?”

  “No,” she said, knowing the conversation was pointless. He’d never in a million years understand he wasn’t a real human. Or that they were stuck in Morray’s memory files that Dickson had recoded. She barely understood the profundity of the circumstances herself.

  The Jeep drove down a dirt path that led to a thicket of trees next to a hillside. The empty spot looked eerily familiar. Years later, it would become checkpoint one. And centuries later she and Joseph would stop there after trekking through the tunnels they used to escape the Los Angeles City Center. She remembered those early moments with Joseph—when the scruffy Outsider came from around the statue of Chief Morray after the alarms had sounded—almost more afraid of her than she was of him. As far as the city was concerned, he was a terrorist. But she saw something in Joseph’s eyes—something warm and kind. Some people dismiss the notion of love at first sight, but Ava knew she loved Joseph right from the start. She listened to her instincts and trusted him. Because of her willingness, everything changed. And for that, they were given the gift of Grace.

  “This is as far as I go.” He jumped out of the Jeep and tossed her a backpack. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I will be, once this is over.”

  “Whatever you say. Go
od luck out there,” he said, tipping his shades and winking.

  Ava watched the young driver pull away, leaving her alone in the thicket of trees in the middle of nowhere. She hoped to find some additional information inside the backpack. She dumped its contents: blanket, change of socks, two full water canteens, a fire sparker, and some silver snack packets. Essential survival provisions for the seventy plus miles hike to Ojai, but no weapon of any kind. She flipped the backpack inside out to make sure there was nothing else. She found only a hand-drawn map tucked in the side pocket. Not very helpful.

  “If you can hear me, Morray,” she said, looking around to the trees, not sure if he was monitoring her activity, “you’re an asshole.”

  In the woods, she gathered a couple of sturdy branches to use for spears and found a rock to file down the ends into sharp points. She did the same thing with some shorter branches. The rock was turning out to be a good makeshift knife. She searched for some dead plants and cut down strips to weave into a rope. This exercise took a couple of hours, and by the time she was finished her fingers were bleeding, but she had a good amount of rope and weapons. She bundled together the shorter spears and fastened them to the backpack. She’d carry the two larger spears for a quick defense. The knife-rock, along with some companion rocks, went into her side pockets.

  The sun was making its way up over the mountains in the east. She studied the map again, looking at the small dots zigzagging toward the approximate location of Lillian’s camp. First, she’d head west toward the Pacific Ocean where she’d pick up a trail through Topanga Canyon, and then she’d go north through the valley. Averaging three miles an hour, it might take about twenty-two hours to get to the camp. Her feet hurt just thinking about it. Maybe along the way she could find another mode of transportation—an abandoned car or even a rusty bike—anything would be better than going on foot.

  As she hiked through the woods, she thought about her years on the Outside and how she had spent the majority of her time inside the mainframe, or teaching technology to the other villagers. She regretted not being more present for her family. Maybe she really had just exchanged one prison for another. Her relentless pursuit for maintaining freedom had kept her chained to the mainframe; she had spent too much time studying Morray’s memories instead of making her own. No wonder Grace had such strong resentments. As she walked along, breathing in the cool air coming in off the ocean, she wondered how she could have missed this simple truth. She also wondered how the air could seem so fresh. It wasn’t real. This was just a program. Nothing was real. She was just wandering around inside Morray’s world again. Was he watching her now, smiling with satisfaction as she struggled up the steep canyon trail?