Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  “Why can’t you just stay here and put the videos in the sky and in the SycaStars’ vistas? I thought that was the plan,” Ernesto said.

  “It was,” Kurt replied, “but we only get one shot at this. I’m going to be wearing my Lenses and you or Minter are going to be nearby with your computer, receiving my vista and streaming it live to Adeline Lemarchand and however many news networks she can persuade to run the story. Minter’s clips will be playing in the sky for everyone wearing Lenses, but my Lenses will let the whole world see Amos for who he really is. Whatever he says to me, whatever he does to me, his game’s over.”

  Ernesto didn’t say anything at first.

  “If you don’t want to come, we’ll at least need your computer.”

  “You really think I’d miss seeing the look on his face when he sees you?” Ernesto said, smiling for the first time all night. “I’m there.”

  ~

  Mary was the first of the group in the food court that morning, along with Sabrina, who helped her prepare breakfast. Sabrina came to sit with Kurt and Ernesto for a while and asked what they were doing.

  Kurt told Sabrina about the lock-in, which meant that he wouldn’t be able to see her much for the next two days. She didn’t seem to mind. In the eyes of a child, La Plethora was a giant playground, and Sabrina had Julian and Mary and Lisa and Ty to explore it with. She was still overjoyed that Kurt was alive and okay, but she didn’t need to be by his side every second.

  The others arrived in ones and twos until everyone was there. Kurt stood up to make an announcement.

  “As you all know, the timelock on the ECI log-in is about to expire. If Minter is successful this time, which he will be, we’ll be inside Sycamore’s systems today.”

  Ty cheered and applauded Kurt’s words, disappointed that no one else followed. Kurt appreciated his effort.

  “Once we begin our work, the door to the workstation will be locked from the inside,” Kurt continued. “I’ll have my phone for emergencies, but emergencies means emergencies. We’re working to a strict deadline, so there can be no unnecessary interruptions. Is that clear?”

  Everyone nodded.

  The workstation door opened and Minter emerged.

  “Are you in?” Ernesto asked

  “I just came to get Kurt,” Minter said. “I haven’t tried yet.”

  Kurt looked at the time on his phone. By his reckoning, and evidently by Minter’s too, the timelock had just expired.

  They both walked into the workstation, confident that Sycamore’s Emergency Control Interface was just minutes from their grasp.

  Minter had already navigated to the log-in page and now sat down to type his username in the box: “MM_001273816MM-relay.”

  He pressed return.

  As it had eight days earlier, a blue progress bar began to inch along the URL. It stuttered and stopped, jumped forward, inched forward, paused, jumped forward again, and eventually reached the end.

  The browser window turned black. Green text appeared above an empty password field: “User MM: requesting.”

  “Green,” Minter said. “Tell me that’s green.”

  “It’s green,” Kurt confirmed.

  Minter lifted his sheet of paper and looked at the four lines of sixteen digits underneath the word GREEN.

  He read the digits aloud as he pressed them, still rhythmically but much more slowly than last time. Kurt made sure that Minter was pressing the correct keys for the digits he was calling out. Two laborious minutes later, the password was complete.

  “Press it,” Minter said.

  Kurt didn’t argue. He leaned down and pressed return.

  Nothing happened at first, but then the blue bar appeared again and started moving, now on top of a new and seemingly gibberish URL.

  “Is that good?” Kurt asked.

  Minter didn’t turn around or bother with a full shrug, he just momentarily lifted his hands from the keyboard in impatience. “I’ve done this as many times as you have, man,” he said. “But I’d say it’s better than last time.”

  The screen flashed white and returned to black.

  “User MM: correct.”

  Minter turned to face Kurt right away, as though he didn’t trust his own eyes. Kurt leaned in and pressed return again.

  Kurt could make little sense of the ECI; with so many menus and no focal point, his eyes didn’t know where to start.

  “How does it look?” he asked, hoping everything was as it should be.

  In lieu of answering, Minter moved the cursor up to a search bar in the top right corner of the page. He typed: “vista:Amos_Isaiah.”

  Three headshots appeared. Kurt and Minter didn’t recognise two of the men, but the third was the Isaiah Amos they were looking for.

  Minter clicked on Amos’s picture. “Pick a date and a time,” he said.

  Kurt smiled and patted Minter on the shoulder. He recalled the time when Amos had shown him the vista recordings database on a desktop at HQ. Amos said that he could access any vista from his Seed but that no one else could be trusted with such remote access, hence the monitored desktops.

  The power granted to Minter via the ECI, however, went far beyond remote access to vista recordings. As he had explained to Kurt, the ECI gave him the combined powers of every department head. He could place videos in the sky for everyone to see; he could target individual users; he could disable RealU.

  “Go to 9am on launch day,” Kurt said.

  Minter entered the date and time then clicked play. He was presented with the option to either save a specified amount of the video or to stream it from the selected time. He chose to stream. Amos’s vista appeared, showing the multiple news reporters he was talking to at 9am on the day the Seed launched. Kurt had been by his side that day at Sycamore’s flagship Liberty Street branch, and he remembered the scene well. The audio came through in perfect quality, too.

  “Where should we start?” Minter said, hovering over the date and time.

  “Get the main stuff first,” Kurt said, walking to the door. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Kurt had been working on a list of incidents from which he wanted Amos’s vista footage. The list included the biggest things, like Stacy’s murder, but also various comments Amos had made to Kurt in passing which would show the world what kind of man he really was. This list was in Kurt’s room on his computer, which he needed anyway, so he went to get it.

  In his focus Kurt had almost forgotten that the rest of the group were standing on the other side of the doorway, waiting for news. He met them as he stepped through it.

  “Well?” Ernesto said.

  Everyone else just waited for Kurt to speak.

  “He did it,” Kurt said, not stopping to chat as he went to get his list. “We’re in.”

  24

  Minter worked through the incidents on Kurt’s list, downloading only the most incriminating footage from Amos’s vista. The downloads were quick enough but Minter couldn’t navigate away from one piece of footage and on to the next until the first had fully downloaded. This delayed things and meant that he couldn’t queue the downloads and work on something else in the meantime.

  Kurt asked Minter how many leaked videos he would be able to schedule to appear in the sky, and the answer was as many as they wanted. No scheduled changes would be visible to anyone else at Sycamore, Minter insisted, since the secret log-in he used for the Emergency Control Interface was a ghost log-in which left no tracks. He would be able to see the list of scheduled placements and amend them if necessary, he said, but no one else would know anything about the videos until they were watching them in the sky.

  A third of the way through Kurt’s list, they both decided to put the downloading on hold and explore the rest of the ECI. To the left of the screen there was a menu option to review active No Share Zones. Minter clicked on it. A map appeared. At Kurt’s request he zoomed all the way in to street level at Sycamore HQ. A red ring encircled the building.

  �
��Can you take that away?” Kurt asked.

  “Yeah,” Minter said, knowing it would take only a few clicks. “But why would we want to?”

  Kurt wanted everyone who would be at HQ on Tuesday — everyone who would see him confront Amos — to be able to share their vistas with everyone else. Minter didn’t know about this plan to leave the mall for the city, so Kurt explained it to him now.

  He explained that they would do it when Trixilicious and her millions of followers were watching. He explained that Adeline Lemarchand would be watching through his eyes and sharing the stream live on news networks in Europe and beyond. And he explained, most importantly, that Amos’s gloating commentary from the moment of Stacy’s murder would be playing through everyone’s in-earphones.

  The whole country and the whole world would see the truth come crashing down on Amos from all angles at once.

  Minter pictured the scene. He liked it, but he had concerns.

  “How will you get into HQ?” he asked.

  “They’re doing it outside,“ Kurt said.

  “Near enough the entrance to still be in the No Share Zone?”

  Kurt nodded. “And either you or Ernesto will be parked across the street, working the computer. I think he wants to be outside with me, though, so we’ll probably need you to come.”

  Minter knew that Ernesto wouldn’t have been able to do everything that was required to manage Kurt’s vista-streaming while making sure that the leaked videos appeared when and where they were supposed to, anyway, so he didn’t try to get out of going. “What time does the event start?” he asked.

  “10am.”

  Minter changed Sycamore HQ’s No Share Zone status from permanent to timed, ensuring there would be no blocks on vista sharing from 9:55 on Tuesday. After changing it, he sat back in his chair and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” Kurt asked him.

  “It’s just the idea of you standing right in front of him, man. I dunno how you can think that this ends well. What if he tries something?”

  “Then the whole world will see it,” Kurt said, defiant. “We can’t know that it’ll end well but at least we know it’ll end. Whatever happens to me, this all ends on Tuesday.”

  ~

  They continued to gather evidence of Amos’s many wrongdoings for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon. It was much more footage than they would actually use, but both were keen to get everything they might need.

  The next task, which Minter wasn’t sure he would be able to complete, was recovering footage from Kurt’s vista.

  Minter typed: “vista:Jacobs_Kurt.”

  There were a lot of consumers called Kurt Jacobs, but one of the thumbnails immediately jumped out from the crowd. It was greyed out, with the word “TERMINATED” written across the middle in red letters. Minter clicked into Kurt’s vista recordings.

  But where there had been an option on Amos’s page to select a time and date, the only option on Kurt’s was a button which said “REINSTATE”.

  They couldn’t click this.

  The risk-reward balance tipped the wrong way; there was just no value in making this particular play.

  Because unlike downloading vista footage and scheduling future changes, reinstating Kurt’s account would have had an immediate and noticeable real-world impact. A supposedly dead man’s account would have returned to the top of Forest’s popularity chart, for one thing, letting Amos know that something was going on. Randy and the kids taking out their Seeds meant that he probably already knew that Kurt and Minter were alive, but he currently had no way of knowing and no reason to suspect that they had breached the ECI. It had to stay that way.

  This was a blow. Amos’s vista provided his taunting commentary of Stacy’s murder, but Kurt’s would have provided the video. He would have been able to show the world the limo being blown to pieces as he tried to free himself from the goons and run acro—

  “The goons,” Kurt said, cutting off his own thought. “That’s it! Do you know either of their names? The big idiot bodyguards who are usually at HQ. The same ones from the funeral.”

  Minter started typing before Kurt finished speaking: “vista:Poole_Mike.”

  They both looked through the long list of Mike Pooles. “There,” Minter said, “near the bottom.” Kurt recognised him, too.

  Minter pulled up Mike ‘The Goon’ Poole’s vista and typed in the date of Stacy’s death. “What time was it?” he asked.

  “Try 8:30.”

  Minter entered 8:30, but the footage that appeared was of Mike in a car of his own.

  “Go later,” Kurt said.

  Mike was now standing on a street corner across from the Sycaplex, which was still intact. “Here?”

  “Yeah,” Kurt said.

  Minter fast-forwarded until a limousine pulled up across the street. Mike Poole, whose Lenses had recorded this footage, stepped back around the corner to remain unseen. Kurt’s voice was audible as he answered a call from Amos. Mike then stepped out along with his colleague and grabbed Kurt.

  Real-time Kurt looked away from the screen, knowing what came next. Minter hadn’t been there to witness it, so he watched to see exactly what happened. He saw Stacy step out of the car as Kurt screamed to warn her. And then came the explosion. Mike recoiled slightly but kept his eyes open, which was extremely helpful.

  Minter clicked to download the footage and told Kurt it was over. “I think this is everything we need, man,” he said. “Unless you can think of anything else?”

  Kurt tried to remember exactly what had happened after the explosion. He remembered being disguised by Amos and resultantly punched by a stranger who thought he was crazy for insisting that he really was Kurt Jacobs. After that he had run to HQ. Minter had been there, and Amos had said something about the explosion.

  “Go back to Amos,” Kurt said. “Five minutes later.”

  “We have to wait until this one finishes downloading,” Minter said.

  “How long?”

  “Not long,” Minter said. “What are we looking for, anyway? You grabbing him by the throat?”

  Kurt shook his head, although that did happen. “I’m sure Amos says something about planting the bomb. Can you remember?”

  “Not really. So much has happened, man, I dunno who said what when. We’ll check, though.”

  As soon as Mike Poole’s vista recording had downloaded, Minter moved to Amos’s vista footage from five minutes later.

  Minter himself appeared on the screen, just inside the entrance of Sycamore HQ. He was arguing with Amos about what had happened to Stacy, saying things like “the girl was never the target” as Amos stood unmoved.

  “He admits it,” Kurt said. “He explicitly admits the whole thing right now, as soon as I come in. I remember it! Do you know that other security guy there?” Kurt pointed to the man sitting at a desk in the corner of the picture. “Can you switch to him?”

  “His name’s Henry something,” Minter said. “Everyone called him Gaz. I think it’s Henry Gardiner. But why do we need him? We’ll be able to hear Amos admitting it through his own vista.”

  “It’s way better if people can see him admitting it,” Kurt said. “It’s more of a spectacle.”

  Minter tried: “vista:Gardiner_Henry.”

  It was right. He clicked into Henry’s vista recordings and entered the same date and time.

  Kurt watched as Amos now appeared beside Minter from Henry’s point of view. As the footage played, the glass front of the building shattered. Kurt couldn’t remember throwing the rock, but the footage didn’t lie.

  In the footage, Kurt tried to fight his way upstairs to the computers to see who planted the bomb.

  And then, exactly as Kurt remembered, Amos said it: “My orders planted the bomb, hotshot, but your actions forced my hand. Your deceit and your lies and your scheming little scheme. What did you think would happen?”

  Minter turned to face Kurt. “Check… and… mate.”

  Kurt couldn’t hel
p but smile. He smiled even more as his past-tense counterpart grabbed Amos by the throat when he threatened Sabrina. Henry then stepped in and dumped Kurt at the door, but Kurt could forgive him for that given the priceless and pivotal evidence his vista had just provided.

  Good old Henry Gardiner.

  ~

  With even more and even better footage than they set out to secure, Kurt and Minter began trimming some of it down. The plan was to compile it into a series of short, impactful videos which would then be displayed in the sky like giant ads or emergency SycaNews bulletins.

  While trying to find the right effects and transitions in the unfamiliar menus of Ernesto’s computer’s video-editing software, Kurt had an idea.

  “Why isn’t Ty doing this?” he said. “Making videos is what he does in real life.”

  Minter agreed straight away. “Go and get him.”

  Kurt unlocked the workstation door and walked into the food court. He was surprised to find out from Ernesto and Michael, the only two people there, that dinner had been a full two hours ago. Gathering the footage had taken a lot longer than expected thanks to the ECI’s one-download-at-a-time rule.

  Ernesto told Kurt that, as far as he knew, Ty was in the cinema. “How’s it going, anyway?” he asked.

  “Good,” Kurt said. “We’ve got all the footage we need of Amos and we’ve set the No Share Zone around HQ to turn off on Tuesday morning. We just need Ty to edit different bits of the footage together to make it snappy and powerful. His skill-set is perfect for this.”

  “I knew we’d find a use for him one day,” Ernesto grinned.

  Kurt made a Chifi video call to Ty. “I thought you were busy?” Ty said when he answered. He was in the cinema, with Randy and the kids and what looked like most of the others. Everyone crowded around Ty’s phone to see Kurt.

  “How would you feel about making some videos for us?” Kurt asked. “We’ve got the footage, we just need someone to make it snappy. Maybe three or four different videos in different parts of the screen, like a collage.”