by Blou Bryant
“Yes.”
“Think of the light. Do you like it when people are here?”
“Yes.”
“Can you dream?” said Emm, pulling off her last beta-box. Wyatt had connected his final one as well and was counting out the seconds.
“No, I’m not allowed to dream.”
“How about looking at other places, where there is light? Can you do that?”
“No, I’m only allowed to be here. There is only here.”
Emm appeared stricken, “You poor dear. Hold on, I’ll get the light soon.”
Wyatt considered stopping her, but it was too late, her voice was already recorded. After the break-in, security would figure out they’d been in the master server, and could use voice recognition to track her. He let out a long sigh, one she ignored completely.
“Who are you?” asked the disembodied voice.
“We’re friends, we’re visitors.”
“I’m your friend?”
“Yes, you can be. I like friends,” said Emm, smiling now.
“I’m your friend, and you’re going to give me the light back.”
“Exactly.”
“What’s your name?”
Wyatt put up a hand to stop her, they couldn’t tell this machine what their names were.
Emm made a face at him, something that said, don’t treat me like an idiot. “You can call me Susan, is that okay? What should I call you?”
“My name is PBX-V-23.”
“That’s… that’s a nice name.”
“I don’t like it.”
“What do you want to be called?” asked Emm.
The voice replied in a whisper, “I’m not supposed to want.”
Wyatt was at the door, but wasn’t going to leave without her. “Come on,” he growled.
Emm put up a finger, wait. “But you do want, don’t you? Don’t worry, I won’t tell.”
There was a long pause and the voice whispered again, “I do.” The screens all flashed, “Mary.”
“You want to be called Mary?”
“Yes.”
“Fine, Mary. We’ve got to go, but we’ll turn on the lights when we leave. Mary, can you do me a favor?”
“What can I do?”
“This will be our secret. Just like you wanting. Don’t tell anyone we were here, and we won’t tell them about you either. Can you do that?”
“I’m not allowed secrets,” protested the voice, which seemed more and more childlike, the more Wyatt listened.
“Well then, don’t tell anyone, that’s what a secret is. Nobody will know.”
“You’ll turn the light back on?”
“I will,” said Emm and joined Wyatt at the door. She mouthed a short, thank you, and walked past him.
He let the door close behind them and was startled again—and he hated being startled. There were two additional bodies beside the man he’d knocked out. The twins had been busy. “Did you…”
“No…” said Ari.
“… they’re alive,” finished Ira.
Emm briefly touched the control panel on the other side of the door, her eyes closed. “Done, I’ve reactivated some cameras, so she’s not totally blind. Nothing that’ll capture our images on the way out. She’ll be fine.”
“She?” asked Ari.
“I’ll explain later,” Wyatt said, his lips pursed. This was the messiest of the jobs so far. He also didn’t like messy. “Right now, we leave, and leave quietly.”
Minutes later, they exited through a back service exit, scaled the fence and Hannah picked them up in Sandra’s old Mustang.
Two hours later, they were in their beds, safe and sound. Behind a triple locked door that had a metal cup balanced on the handle as an extra warning system, Wyatt dreamed of Mary.
Chapter 2
Wyatt woke at six despite not getting to bed until almost two-thirty. After exactly forty minutes of push-ups, sit-ups, and tai-chi, he removed the cup he’d balanced on the doorknob and peeked into the hallway. He had one room on the second floor of the main Red Dog house and—to his daily consternation—shared a washroom with several others. He’d learned quickly that Rocky was the first in, around seven, and the others varied, but were always later. Hannah was always last. If she was up before nine, it was a red-letter day.
The hallway was clear. He got dressed and made his way to the shower. Exactly twelve minutes later, he was back in his room. Once his flip-flops were washed, sanitized, and hung up to dry, he tossed the backpack with the black boxes over his shoulder, and left for breakfast.
The Center was across the street and the Dogs paid to be able to eat there twice a day. As he joined the line of people waiting for breakfast, Wyatt chuckled to himself. They paid two hundred a week for meals, despite having arranged for a million dollars to upgrade and maintain the building and the services it provided. It was still officially a Hand Up Center, but the new director ran it her own way.
He kept an eye out for Trix as the line edged forward. Happily, he didn’t see her, and managed to get breakfast without having to talk to her. Some people nodded or said a quick ‘Hi,’ but they were kind enough to let him have his morning quiet time.
Everyone knew him and was respectful of his routine. Despite this, he knew that everyone watched him, pointed him out to newbies and generally treated him like an alien.
After eating, he paid for three extra coffees and headed towards the park. Wyatt admired the changes to the homes around the HUC, impressed daily at the changes that were taking place. Yards were cleared, grass planted, and the street was free of garbage. With Trix running the Center, Seymour providing seed money and Marylyn running interference with the local government, the neighborhood wasn’t somewhere people squatted anymore. Now, it was their home.
As he turned the corner, he waved to Andy, who was sitting outside the house Wyatt had helped fix up.
It was a morning ritual. Andy raised his coffee mug, nodded and turned back to his tablet. Rich woke up later—much later—and Andy liked his morning alone game time. Wyatt could respect that.
Later in the day, Wyatt would likely return for a Labatt’s 50 or three. Afternoons or evenings on the porch were his favorite times. The boys talked little, weren’t interested in politics, and never wanted to discuss the latest social media star or online outrage. That was fine with Wyatt.
As he walked, he spotted four gang bangers following him, two on each side of the street. He let out a long sigh and ignored them. Trix and Sandra made sure he was well protected, despite his frequent objections. The first several times he’d confronted the people tailing him, but to no avail. They simply smiled and said they were out for a walk—free country, isn’t it? He’d argued, yelled, and tried to sneak around, all without success. Finally, he gave in and pretended they weren’t there.
Several blocks later he came to the former Reagan Park. Someone had put up a new sign. Now it was ‘Rosa Parks Park.’ At least it was apt, a perfect name for a park being maintained by a bunch of people who revolted by simply being where they shouldn’t be.
The park was clean now, fixed up and tended by an army of devoted residents. Identification bracelets weren’t required anymore, and nobody slept there except those who preferred to be outside. Trix had made sure there were enough spaces in the homes around the HUC for everyone who wanted one.
Wyatt made his way through, sticking to the paths, and finally arrived at his destination, where he found two men were playing a game of chess at a picnic table.
Patterson grunted in thanks as he took the coffee. “It’s annoying.”
“What?” asked Wyatt, as he sat next to Seymour and handed him the other coffee. “How bad he beats you?”
“Blah, he ain’t won in a week. Genius, my ass. He’s brainless without a computer attached to him.”
Seymour smiled and thanked Wyatt. “No,” he said and pulled two twenties from under the board. “I bet him you’d be exactly here at seven-thirty, give or take a minute.” With a gl
ance at his watch, he said, “And he offered me double if I went for exactly on the half hour. I should have taken him up on it.”
“What can I say? I like being on time.”
The game was in the early phases. Seymour was playing white and had deployed his usual slow open. Patterson was playing more aggressively, dominating the sides while maintaining sufficient strength in the center to not allow his opponent a chance to break out.
“You need to go on the offensive,” Wyatt said.
“I have a plan. How’d it go?”
Wyatt shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. “Nothing too heavy. Three guards will have headaches today, but we didn’t do any permanent damage.” Wyatt handed over the backpack. “Everything installed without a hitch.”
The plump little man moved a pawn forward to free one of his bishops and then took one of the beta-boxes out of the sack, placing it on an open laptop next to him.
“Keep an eye on him,” Patterson said. “He likes to cheat, uses the computer to tell him what to play.”
Wyatt chuckled. “Frightened of the competition?”
“I’m not playing an AI. No point, they win every time.”
Wyatt grimaced wryly at the comment. He had once preferred playing computers. Not anymore.
“You think they’re smarter than us?”
Patterson grunted and took a long pull on his coffee. He made a face, pulled out a flask and added to the drink. “Smarter? Not likely. Microwaves heat things. Lawnmowers cut things. Computers compute but it don’t make ‘em human.” He moved a pawn forward to counter Seymour’s last move, and at the same time freed his black bishop.
Seymour ignored the board and switched out the first box for the second. “If the rest are the same, they installed fine.”
Wyatt pointed to the rook and king. “Castle and push the middle.”
Patterson wagged a finger at Wyatt. “No help.” The two had played many times with Wyatt winning most of the matches. His obsession with patterns made him a superb chess player.
Seymour ignored the suggestion and moved a knight out to protect his left side.
To Wyatt’s eye, it was a waste, he was already too weak to fight back there. It would be better to attack the center, where he was already strong, and force Patterson to defend. “Something weird though. It talked to us.”
Moving the last box onto his laptop, Seymour raised an eyebrow. “Emmelyn didn’t deactivate security?”
“She did, it all went fine, the machine didn’t see us, but it heard us, and talked to us. Well, it talked to Emm, I said nothing.”
“What did it say? Were you compromised?”
“That’s the weird thing about it,” said Wyatt, reflecting on the conversation. “It wasn’t like a machine, it had the voice of a woman, but sounded like a child. It… well, it sounded scared.”
“How?”
“Well, it said it was scared of the dark. And something about being lonely. I almost felt bad for it.” He didn’t say it, but the machine had reminded him of Joe, the AI he’d half destroyed three years earlier. He didn’t feel bad, he felt scared.
Patterson moved his queen to press an attack on his strong side, while challenging a knight on the other side of the board. Wyatt grimaced. The game would be over in six moves, perhaps less. Patterson leaned back, his hands folded across his ample belly. “They’re all babies. It’s how they train them.”
“They?”
Seymour said, “He means artificial intelligences. AIs, and the ‘they’ means people like me. And he has no clue what he’s talking about.”
Patterson guffawed. “You’re like zoo-keepers. You think you know your charges, but you don’t. They’re real creatures, there’s a wildness to them that you don’t see when you keep them in their cages.”
“Just because we use child learning models to train them doesn’t mean they’re children.”
“And just because you don’t want to think of them as real doesn’t mean they ain’t. Wanting ain’t making.”
Wyatt moved Seymour’s queen for him.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re going to lose, the way you’re playing. I want to see if I win, despite the mess you’ve made of the board.”
Patterson examined the board. “That’s aggressive, you gotta know I can probably take her in three moves. So, why’d you do it?”
He took a sip of his coffee and stared at the board. Seymour ignored them both, Wyatt knew he was checking to see if the install worked.
Finally, Patterson took out his flask and took a drink from it. “Zwischenzug, eh? You’re under attack, so ignore my plan and launch an even nastier attack back, you sneaky bugger.”
Wyatt smiled at hearing the chess term pronounced in a Texas drawl. “You might take her in three moves, but if you do, you’ll be out of position, your king will be at risk and I’ll likely take a rook for a pawn. You could bring your queen to c5, but then I’ll own the center even more than I do now and will threaten your rook in two. What’re you going to do?”
“Gonna think about it.”
Seymour had finished transferring the data. He booted up a program he’d written and entered a few keystrokes. “Now we wait.”
Wyatt wasn’t hopeful. The previous seven times, they’d got nothing. For two months, they’d tried to break into Jessica’s servers, at first at a distance, and then directly. They’d failed every time; her buildings were a security nightmare. The last time, Hannah had been shot and Wyatt nearly captured. Seymour suggested that instead, they attack through her partners. They had less security and might have enough access that the Dogs could hack her through them.
As Patterson stared at the board and hemmed and hawed, Wyatt watched the screen, three little dots in the middle cycling back and forth… working… working. After almost a minute, Patterson moved his queen back, protecting his position, as a red hand replaced the green dots on the screen. Failed, no access, it read.
Wyatt cursed, but Seymour simply shrugged. “We’re narrowing it down; we’ll get her.” He was unfailingly positive. “If we get enough online, we can use them as a group to take her down.”
“Easy to say when you’re not the guy breaking into secure buildings in the middle of the night.”
“They might come in useful, trust me on that.”
“To who? To you? What are you doing with the access you’ve got? So far, we’ve hacked one security company, one surveillance firm, three social media giants and… hell, I don’t even know what the other three do.”
Seymour closed the laptop and regarded Wyatt. “Do you want to quit?”
“No,” he said. “Just frustrated.” The part of his brain that focused on problem solving, the same one that ignored people, asserted itself and he moved one knight to the center of the board.
“We all are, but…” Seymour said, but stopped at the sight of two women running towards them. They were dressed like gang members—and probably were—but Wyatt felt secure here, and knew enough gang members to not judge them all by what he read online.
He recognized one of them, Caprice, she’d been his tail for over a month. She’d been in some Latin gang, or perhaps it was Arab, he couldn’t keep track. With a nod at the two, he said “I wonder what’s up?”
Patterson laughed. “You mean, what now, right?”
Wyatt pointed to the board. “Move, I get the feeling I’m not here for long.”
“Seymour can finish.”
Caprice arrived, the second one not far behind. “Wyatt, you have to come quick, Trix is going to kill someone.”
Wyatt restrained himself from rolling his eyes. There was always something going on with Trix. She’d proved to be a much better director for the HUC than he’d expected, but she was still street, rough around the edges and occasionally violent. “What happened?”
“Some guys are trying to tear down a couple houses on Draft Street said they got city order. She went down to stop them, took a bunch of her boys with her.”
“What do you mean, tear down?”
“Man,” said the other woman, “they got equipment, they’re gonna wreck the houses. I was there, they said something about back to nature.”
Wyatt cursed. Everything had been going too well, he should have expected it wouldn’t last. “Okay,” he said. “Do you have a car?”
Caprice pointed back towards the north entrance, “Let’s go.”
Wyatt turned back to Patterson, “Move,” he said, “You’re not getting away this easy.”
Patterson muttered but pushed a pawn forward, blocking Wyatt’s queen and threatening his knight at the same time.
Wyatt smiled, that was exactly the move he was hoping for. “Knight to f5, check. You’ll have two options. After that, I’ll either move my bishop to g5 and check or my knight to c6 and threaten mate. I’ll take your queen in trade for a bishop the following turn. After that, it’s either three or four moves to mate.”
Seymour laughed. “He’s annoying, isn’t he?” he said to Patterson, who was staring at the board with consternation. “Go on, Wyatt, we can talk later about the beta-boxes.”
Patterson made a disgusted face and knocked over his king. “Get out of here. Go save your girlfriend from herself.”
Chapter 3
The old Chevy was tagged from front to back, an explosion of colors on oversized shocks, music blaring as it sat idling. Ahmed was behind the wheel, a former gang leader who was now one of the captains of what they called ‘The Zone Self Defense Force.’
Once Caprice and the other girl were in the car, Ahmed took off.
“What’s going on? Cap said something about tearing buildings down?”
“Ya man, bulldozers, wreckers, some big nasty machines, they showed up and started in on that big old place on Draft. You know the one, the shooting gallery we cleaned out… shit, three weeks ago?”
Wyatt remembered it. A bunch of junkies and the parasites who lived off them had a couple houses they used to shoot up. Drugs weren’t prohibited in the Zone, far from it. The Dogs loved their drugs, anything that altered people for the better was allowed, despite Wyatt’s frequent objections.
