by David Archer
She glared at him. “This is a monstrous thing that you are doing,” she said, “but you have left me with no choice, of course. Very well.” She looked at the medical staff standing around her, waiting for her orders. “Prepare the patient for surgery,” she said. “And may God have mercy upon our souls.”
Joel smiled and clapped his hands, and began stripping out of his clothes. It took less than twenty minutes to get him prepped and on the table, with IV lines in place and ready for the administration of anesthesia. His head around where the incision would take place had been slathered with shampoo, to keep his hair from getting in the way.
Daphne, scrubbed, gowned, and masked, stood beside the operating table and looked down at him. “I ask you one last time to stop,” she said.
Joel smiled up at her. “Proceed, Doctor.”
She looked at the anesthesiologist and nodded once. A hypodermic was inserted into an IV line, and seconds later, Joel’s eyes closed as he succumbed to the medication.
Daphne looked down at him and briefly considered making a deliberate error that would end his life. She knew that it would also mean the deaths of the children who were being held hostage to his survival, but she wondered for a moment if it might be an acceptable sacrifice, considering the alternative.
Of course, it was only a fleeting thought. Daphne was a physician, who had taken an oath that she would do no harm. She picked up the scalpel and made the three-inch incision necessary to access the portion of the skull she would have to remove in order to remove his original chip and place the new one.
A nurse used clips to spread the incision open, and Daphne saw the original bone flap that had been removed from his skull during the first procedure. It had been secured back into place using small titanium plates and screws, which she removed. It had been almost 6 months since that original surgery, however, and the bone had grown back into the surrounding skull. This required her to use a special saw that would cut through the skull, and she followed the original markings perfectly.
The bone flap was lifted out and dropped into an antibiotic solution. It would remain there until the surgery was complete and she was ready to put it back.
Next, she made an incision in the three meningeal layers that protected the brain: the dura mater, the arachnoid mater and the pia mater. Each of these was a flexible sheath that offered varying levels of protection to the brain itself. Once they were opened and spread apart, Daphne saw the chip in its bio neutral packet and used a pair of tweezers to gently pick it up. It was also dropped into antibiotic solution, although she felt certain it would never be used again.
“Flush, please,” Daphne said. The nurse rinsed the open area with a saline solution, flushing away the blood so that Daphne could see better. She spent a couple of minutes inspecting the surface of Joel’s brain, looking for any sign of scarring or changes in the tissues. She half expected to find some, but there were none.
A nurse held out a plastic box that contained the new chip, while another nurse offered Daphne the new bio neutral packet. With extreme care, because she knew the chip was relatively fragile, she picked it up with rubber-tipped tweezers and then held the packet between two fingers and slipped it inside. When it was firmly seated in the packet, she removed the tweezers and carefully pressed the open end of the packet together. Tiny bubbles in the lips of the packet burst, sealing it permanently with a form of superglue that was non-toxic to the human body, just in case it were to leak and be exposed to surrounding tissues.
It was time to place the new chip, and thereby turn Joel Streeter into the master of his world.
39
Back home in Denver, Indie was frantically trying to trace the location of the server farm she had spotted while tracking the video feed. She wasn’t certain why, but something made her think it was important to locate it.
Unfortunately, for the first time she could remember, Herman was unable to track it down. It was the first time he had ever failed her, and the frustration was getting to her. After all, Herman was one of the most capable AI search programs there was, at least according to the U.S. government agencies who had been lucky enough to experience it. Only Harry Winslow’s intervention had prevented it from being forcibly seized when the CIA had first learned about it during Sam’s efforts with Kenneth Long to stop Grayson Chandler from taking over the world a couple of years earlier.
“Come on, Herman,” she mumbled as she made adjustments to his code that she hoped would tweak his tracking algorithms. “Mama needs you, buddy boy, don’t let me down.”
She’d been at it for a couple of hours, only leaving the computer when Bo made it clear that he needed her attention. At the moment, she was holding him in her left arm and typing one-handed as she tried to coax the program into doing slightly more of the impossible than he was already capable of.
Her phone rang, and she picked it up from the table beside the computer and thumbed the answer button.
“Hello?” she said.
“Indiana, it’s Mom,” she heard. “I hate to bother you, but Beauregard says to tell...”
“Mom,” Indie said, exasperated, “I really don’t have time to relay messages for Beauregard right now. If it’s something you really think is important, call Sam and…”
“Indiana! Excuse me, I was trying to tell you something. This isn’t for Sam, Beauregard wants me to tell you something.”
“Mom, he—what? Me?”
“Yes, you. I don’t know what it’s about, but he said to tell you that what you’re trying to do is like catching wild pigs. Now, are you ready to listen? It might help.”
Indie sighed. “Okay, go ahead. How is it like trying to catch wild pigs?”
“Beauregard says that if you want to catch wild pigs, you go out to where they live and drop a bunch of food every day for a week. Once the pigs get used to seeing the food there, then you go out and you drop some more food and build one section of fence along one side of it. You keep putting food there for another week, and the pigs will get used to the fence and keep coming for the food. The next week, you put up another piece of fence at right angles to that one, and keep dropping the food. In a few days, the pigs will get used to the fence again and keep eating the food, so then you do it again, put up another section of fence and keep bringing the food, and then you put up the last section of fence but leave the gate open. Keep dropping the food inside the fence and in a few days you could just walk up and close the gate with the pigs inside.”
Indie was looking at her computer screen with her mouth hanging slightly open. “Mom,” she said, “I think that makes the least sense of anything Beauregard has ever said. I’m trying to track down the physical location of a server farm that may make it possible for Sam to save the world from a madman, and I can’t see how that could have anything to do with…”
She stopped suddenly, staring at the computer monitor. Put up a section of fence, she thought. Well, I can’t put up a fence around a server, but I can run a tracing along every backbone server until I ping response time to the minimums. That would tell me what region of the world it is in, and then I can start working the bandwidth pathways in that region until I narrow it down even further, and then...
“Mom? Tell Beauregard he’s a genius. Gotta go, love you.”
Still using only one hand, Indie was bouncing around the keyboard, feeding Herman a whole new type of search parameter. Rather than try to follow the signal directly back to the server, all she wanted him to do was determine what regional backbone server could ping the server farm fastest. Once she had that, she could narrow the search down to sections within that region.
“It’s impossible to trace a server farm that’s bouncing through so many relays,” she said aloud to herself, “but the relays are dependent on where the ping is coming from. The shorter the number of relays, the closer the originating server is to the target server. Does that even make sense? I think it does, but at least it’s worth a shot.”
With a flourish,
she stabbed the enter key and gave Herman his new instructions. He was off like a flash, sending ping requests to servers all over the world, all of them targeting the host IP address she had identified as belonging to the server farm. The screen displayed dozens, perhaps hundreds of zigzagging lines of various colors all superimposed over a flat map of the world.
Some of the lines were crossing oceans into other countries, some were originating in China and ending up in Australia, then bouncing to Russia and then to Canada. It was almost like watching a digital fireworks play, and she was fascinated at how quickly entire sections of the map went dark. Lines faded out whenever the ping request took longer than one that followed it, and it was less than three minutes later when Herman triumphantly announced that the server farm she was seeking was located somewhere in the southwestern American desert.
She reset the search parameters, closing it in between the backbone servers that served most of the southwest U.S. When she turned him loose again, she watched the lines flash across the screen once more, though they were all concentrated within a lopsided squared-off area that contained parts of Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California.
Two more minutes passed, and Herman lit up one small section of the map. When Indie zoomed in, she was looking at Kingman, Arizona.
“Okay, Herman,” she said, tapping the keyboard. “Somewhere in all of our friendly government databases is the information we need about how to hack into that server farm. Go find it.”
She hit the enter key and Herman began working. The data scrolling on the screen told her that he was checking the NSA database for any reference to the base IP address of the farm, then the CIA, then FBI, DHS, and a dozen more databases run by governmental departments charged with maintaining national security.
Links began appearing on the screen, and she started clicking them. One by one, she eliminated them as only belonging to servers that were subordinate in the farm, while what she wanted was the controller server. She kept going through the links, diligently looking for the telltale signs of either the controller server or one of its primary servers. In most server farms, there would be a single controller and several primaries, followed up by a number of secondary servers. These units basically acted as traffic cops, directing traffic that came into the farm to the appropriate server.
“Holy crap,” she said suddenly. “Herman, do you see this? That’s got to be one of the biggest farms I’ve ever heard of. Find me that controller, boy.”
Links kept appearing, and she continued clicking them. She’d been going through them for almost 15 minutes, and suddenly Herman let out a loud chime and posted a link in bold.
“What is that?” She asked. She clicked the link and found herself looking at the administrative access login page of the controller server.
She stared at it for almost a minute, then entered some new instructions into Herman. She sat back, cuddling Bo and watching as Herman applied every hacking algorithm and technique she had given him to the problem of getting into that server’s main administration software.
It took him eight minutes, and he finally sounded off another triumphant chime. The administrative interface opened before her, and she sat forward carefully, her mouth hanging open once again as she began scrolling through the information Herman had presented to her.
According to what she was seeing, this particular server farm housed more than eighty racks, each of which held one thousand, four hundred and forty servers. Those would be blade servers, stripped-down computers that were designed to provide maximum computer power with minimum space requirements.
There were eleven other racks that held a bit over four hundred servers, and these would be the big ones. She scanned through the names they were given in the roster, and three of them suddenly caught her eye. They were placed close together in the racks, and each of them began with the letters BCI.
Her eyes wide, her mouth open, her baby boy staring up at her face, Indie grabbed her phone. Her thumb hit the speed dial button for Sam, and she waited breathlessly until he answered.
“Sam! Sam, I figured out, I think.”
“Indie? Figured out what?” Sam asked.
“Remember I told you some of the video feed was bouncing through a server farm somewhere? Well, I just had a feeling that server farm might be important, so I’ve had Herman hunting for it. Let me tell you something, that is the most secure server farm I've ever seen, because Herman almost couldn’t find it. Everything we tried seemed to be wasted energy, but then Beauregard told Mom to tell me about wild pigs. It didn’t make any sense at first, but when I thought about it, it gave me an idea on how to narrow down the physical location of the farm, and it worked. It’s in Kingman, Arizona, but then I had Herman dig into all of the intelligence service databases and we found IP addresses that were assigned to that farm, and then Herman hacked his way right into the admin section of the controller server. Isn’t that great?”
Sam, still in the brain lab at CerebroLink, turned and walked away from the rest of the team so that he could focus on what she was saying.
“Babe, this is your husband you’re talking to. Remember, when you talk to me, you have to pretend I don’t know anything about computers at all.”
“Oh, sorry, babe. I just get excited. Sam, there are three servers hidden in that farm that are labeled with the letters BCI in their names. Now, if that was a common designation to that server farm, I would expect to see a lot of servers using that prefix, but it’s only those three. Now, I don’t know a whole lot about BCI, but I’m sure that each of those chips must have a dedicated server that it works with. Am I right? Never mind, of course I am. Does this help any?”
Sam had caught on finally, and turned to motion for Doctor Prentiss to come closer. He quickly repeated the gist of what Indie had told him, and Prentiss asked for the complete names of the servers.
“I’m looking,” Indie said. “Okay, I’ve got BCI532, BCI419 and BCI-S569. Does that help anything?”
“Those are the three servers that Joel took from our server banks upstairs. How in the world did she find them? Those things are literally built to be untraceable, hidden behind other computers so that they can’t be hacked.”
Sam smiled. “You don’t know my Indie, or her pal Herman. Uncle Sam occasionally calls her for help with computer hacking problems.”
“Well, can she hack into them? BCI419 could tell you exactly where Joel is at this very moment!”
“Babe, did you hear that? Can you get into BCI419?”
“Turning Herman loose now,” she said. “Come on, boy, show us what you can do.”
Sam stood with the phone for an agonizing ninety seconds, and then he heard Indie shriek with excitement.
“I’m in! Sam, I’m in. What do I look for?”
Prentiss motioned for Ballard to come close. “This is Mrs. Prichard on the phone,” he said. “She has managed to locate and hack into BCI419. Can you tell her what to look for to pinpoint Joel’s location?”
“Oh, yes,” Ballard said, looking slightly perplexed. “How did she—never mind, let me talk to her.”
“She’s on speaker,” Sam said, looking at Ballard as if he were an idiot. “She can hear you.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Ballard said. “Mrs. Prichard? Look for a directory named GEO. That will have all of the GPS coordinates from which he has transmitted signals through his phone. The last entry will be his most recent location.”
“Okay, I’m looking. Found the directory, opening it up. Last entry, last entry, got it! Thirty-seven degrees, thirteen minutes, fifty-six point nine seconds north by one hundred twenty-one degrees, forty-six minutes, fifty-three point three seconds west. Just another moment, I’m checking where that is. Okay, the address is 155 Great Oaks Blvd, San Jose, California. And, hey, there’s a timestamp on the entry. It was recorded almost three hours ago.”
Ballard’s eyebrows scrunched downward. “Three hours ago? You’d think there would have been more activity in that timefra
me. Unless he’s sleeping or something, it’s unlikely the chip wouldn’t make contact with the server more recently than that.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Indie said. “That’s the last entry. Is there somewhere else I should look?”
Ballard thought for a moment, then looked at Prentiss. He raised his eyebrows and then said, “Yes. Take a look at BCI532. Can you get into that one?”
Indie chuckled. “Herman can get into anything,” she said. “This may take a few minutes, but I’ll tell him to hurry.”
Another minute and a half went by, and then Indie cried, “Yes. Okay, I’m in. Want me to check the GEO folder?”
“Yes, please do,” Ballard said. “That will tell us…”
“It’s empty,” Indie said. “The directory is there, but there’s nothing in it at all. What does that mean?”
Sam’s eyes suddenly went wide. “I’ll tell you exactly what it means,” he said. “It means the new chip hasn’t been implanted yet, it’s not been activated. And the reason the last entry is three hours ago is because Joel is probably still in surgery right this minute. How long does the operation take?”
“It’s normally about three hours,” Doctor Prentiss said. “Prichard, if you’re right, it’s probably getting close to being finished.”
“I’ve got to be right,” Sam said. “Indie, you saved the day again. I’ve got to go, babe, I’ll call you back when I can.” He ended the call instantly, dropping the phone into his pocket, and then looked at the team surrounding him. “Albertson, get your friends down there on the line again, and let’s get moving. The way it looks, we’ve got about an hour before Joel Streeter becomes absolutely invincible.”
Summer, Denny, Jade, Darren, and Pat all got to their feet. Becky rose as well, but Sam turned and held up a hand.
