by Nels Wadycki
"Jrue is wondering if he's going to get laid," she said and he accepted it even though he hadn't quite made it that far in his thought process. "Not so fast, buddy," she continued, "I just brought you a little sleepy time medicine."
She thrust a bag out at him. He took it and peered inside. A small bottle lay inside with a white label stuck to the side. It must have been what the doctor had given him before to knock him out. Was he going to have to down this amalgam of drugs anytime he wanted to sleep, in order to stave off further bouts of hallucination, dysfunction, incapacitation, and borderline madness? And what if it stopped working? Would they have to tailor a new recipe to satisfy his neuroses? And where had Ana gotten this dose?
"Where did you pick this up?"
"Same guy. I told him what you went through with Alando and he agreed that it could trigger another bout of insomnia."
"Did he also say you probably shouldn't rush me into situations like that so soon after what was clearly only a temporary recovery?"
"He did say you should take it easy for a while. He wanted to see you again, though, and thought he could arrange for a paid leave, provided your activity was monitored."
"How about monitoring my sleep, or lack thereof? This doesn't feel like another bout of insomnia. It feels like a chronic disease."
"It's probably just the fallout from your grief for Alando combined with a fear that you won't be able to sleep. You're psyching yourself out."
Jrue could not accept that as the truth even if it made for a perfectly logical argument. He knew the lack of sleep had turned him irritable and made him cranky, though, so he let it go and popped the cap on the small bottle of liquid Ana had brought him.
Noxious fumes leapt from the bottle, assaulting both of their olfactory senses, so Jrue threw the contents to the back of his throat to save them from having to take another breath filled with the pungent odor.
"That smells a lot worse than when he gave it to you downtown," Ana said, her face screwed up in disgust.
Jrue considered trying to hack the stuff up, but he'd swallowed it as fast as he'd tossed it back, and only a full-scale upchuck would bring it back. Instead he sputtered, "Was that the same stuff? I don't remember what it smelled like!"
"I got it straight from the same doc who just treated you. It's got to be the same."
Jrue wanted to press the issue but a sudden drowsiness overtook him and he dropped the idea of arguing for the thought of idyllic sleep. The strange, sweet comfort of sleep.
Jrue fled across his apartment and the Valkyrie followed.
The trip back to his bedroom felt far longer than it had when he had come out to greet Ana. Jrue caught himself on the door frame in a moment of dizziness; the world seemed to disappear around him, leaving him clutching the door while everything else faded. It passed, and he stumbled to his bed and collapsed for the second time since coming home.
As he sank into a dark chemical fog, Ana's soft fingers touched the side of his face and her warm body curled around him. He heard her voice, almost in his ear, say, "You won't need the medicine forever. We'll make you right."
7.
BRAIN TRUST
Retina scanners made for good security, but no matter how advanced biosecurity technology got, it could not infer intention. Ana keyed in a passcode sequence after glancing briefly into the device that hung outside the elevator disguised as part of the building's sprinkler system.
The elevator knew its destination before the heavy metal doors parted and would only make the journey if the weight sensors came up with a figure that matched the one that the Airlock had stored when she'd gone into the Valkyrie Project that morning. There was some leeway for meals eaten as well as the minor weight loss that could take place in the bathroom. Ana would not be surprised to come across a table that recorded the volume of those bowel movements in the database that stored the employees' biometric data.
Ms. Callif, you've only eliminated five hundred milliliters today. Are you sure you are hydrating properly?
The elevator dropped, and Ana's stomach fell with it, into the lower levels of the Agency building. It stopped and the doors opened on a floor unfamiliar to Ana. She knew the layout of the concise, constrained level though. If the Agency had taught her anything, the lesson was to never enter a mission environment without at least trying to gain some knowledge of the arena.
Ana's mission to the horseshoe-shaped floor did not exist in any of the systems that the Agency controlled—much as they would have liked to know everything that went on inside her head. Spying on your own organization as Ana was doing tended to be frowned upon and was not something you wanted to keep on book.
Ana had taken as direct a route as she could in going around the internal security systems to insinuate herself into the electronic access permission records. In order to reach the unfamiliar lower level, she could not just mosey on over to the restricted area, flip through a few menus and select "Government Experiments On Its Own People Database" and figure out if something besides a strong coincidence connected Jrue Gueye and the late Alando Piscina. So she stayed late, when the relative emptiness of the Valkyrie Project headquarters allowed her the time to follow clues and cover her tracks without the worry of someone passing by and looking over her shoulder.
Ana had done plenty of stalking and data-mining in the service of the Valkyrie Project, the experience making it almost too easy to find the information leading to her ultimate goal. The GEOIOP database did actually exist. Ana found it hiding out on a network with only a single connection to the outside world. The Agency ran many such isolated computing centers, so Ana considered herself lucky that the one she wanted lay several floors directly below her. The window for which she would have to grant herself access was smaller than if she'd had to fly to New York or Boston or Seattle to get on one of the systems there.
Ana walked out of the elevator with the poise and confidence she assumed anyone else visiting the classified area would have. The stark white hallway was empty, but she kept up the illusion just in case.
A few dark doors marred the clean white straightaway that led to a right-angle turn into the middle third of the squared-off U shape. Ana passed the other rooms without looking in and followed the turn, spotting the door to the computer lab exactly halfway between the two corners. She quickly entered the code that would only exist for another few minutes into the lock on the door and went in.
As she took a seat at a terminal angled away from the window set in the door, Ana became acutely aware of her heart pounding in her chest, her blood soaking with adrenaline, and her hands sweating. She took in a deep breath and blew out on her palms. She drew another breath, shaking her hands a bit to loosen them. The she placed them on the panel for the terminal and set them dancing across the interface in search of secrets.
Ana followed the canary in the coal mine she had uncovered from cross-referencing Jrue's files with Alando's, feeling more like she was following a dove into a house made of candy and gingerbread. As she sifted through the information stored in the lab, she added new bits and pieces to the tables she organized within the database of her mind. She found a project that indicated, though in the cryptic language of coded results, that Jrue and Alando had both undergone mind-altering treatments during their service for the Northern United States military. Aerin had said that the government researched anything related to mind-control abilities, and the project bearing the code name Sleepwalkers clearly substantiated that claim.
Ana continued to blaze through the electronic ones and zeroes that contorted and assembled themselves into information she did not technically have permission to see. The experiments had been logged in detail but were obfuscated by layers of technical jargon, agents referred to as Subjects Seven, Eight, Nine, etc., and deliberate transformations that cast square pegs into pieces that fit in round holes. Ana was familiar with government research reports though, and put together a decent hypothesis for what had been done to her colleagues. There was eve
n some evidence pointing to insomnia as one of the side effects. The irony of the name of the project and that side effect was not lost on the researchers. Then, in that same list of unintended consequences, something caught Ana's eye and she sucked in a sharp breath.
One of the listed after-effects of the Sleepwalkers treatments had been to make the subjects resistant to the sort of mind-controlling effects they were supposed to impart.
The report read: “This could prove useful when dealing with agents of the terrorist organization known as the Continuum, whose agents have displayed the ability to alter the thoughts of those with whom they come in contact.”
Ana checked the date on the report. Three years ago. The existence of the Continuum had been documented in the report by the Agency three years ago and yet the Valkyrie Project treated it as though it had simply sprung into being like Athena from the head of Zeus.
She tried to follow up on information linked to the Continuum, but the display pulsed red and flashed security warnings, cutting her off from every path she pursued. Once again, she had achieved her main mission objective, but was left wanting more. At least in this case, she could repeat her incursion efforts and give herself a different set of permissions that would grant her entrance to the hidden world of the Continuum. She would help rid Jrue of his insomnia as well as the resulting inevitable fallout inside his head. Then she would come back and figure out what the Agency already knew about the Continuum, as well as why the information had not been available to Ana and her fellow Valkyries. She and Marisol had walked into a potentially lethal situation lacking information that might have helped them bring in enemy agents as well as one of the Surgeon List targets. Ana was not going to let that happen again.
She logged off, put the terminal to sleep, and headed out the door of the lab.
Then she heard voices coming down the hall.
Ana froze. She remembered the door, grabbed it, and eased it shut without alerting the men around the corner to her presence.
"It would appear that they found him when he was eleven years old. Trained him from then on."
"At eleven? How did they know?"
"Their technology is years ahead of ours. Been that way for as far back as we can trace their existence."
"But technology to choose their leader fourteen years ahead of time? What kind of bioscanning or intelligence testing could do that?"
"It's more likely that they had several subjects in mind. I doubt they would have put all their eggs in one basket. They probably constructed an Easter egg hunt, if you'll pardon my butchering of the metaphor, figuring that one of the eggs would survive to give them what they wanted."
The voices and footsteps grew louder. Ana realized she was going to need somewhere to hide. She'd been so distracted by the conversation that she hadn't even looked around. She knew the area well, though. Sneaking around the Agency unnoticed required foresight and preparation.
Her best hiding spot would be back inside the lab, unless the two men decided to join her there, in which case she would be trapped. They were coming down the hallway she had used to get there, but she knew that around the corner at the opposite end was an emergency stairwell that would take her back up. She could duck around the corner and hope they went to one of the other rooms in the hall that held the lab. She would only have to deal with the security door to the stairs if they continued to follow her to the third side of the horseshoe. She moved down the hall at a speed calculated to allow her to remain silent, but also get out of sight before the men rounded the corner. The conversation continued while she did.
"It's easy if you're not a government obligated to make an entire country of eleven-year-olds succeed. Cherry-pick the best candidates and fund their training with probably only a fraction of the proceeds of the weapon sales."
"And whatever else they're selling. You don't get to be that big trading in arms alone."
"You might if you're selling the kind of stuff they produce."
A door swung open and Ana peeked around the corner. The two men were entering the lab. She'd made the right choice, but wanted desperately to hear the rest of what they said. They were talking about the leader of the Continuum, and Ana needed that information.
"We need to figure out how to get to this guy and take the whole thing down, 'cause if it's not just the tech but some sort of mind control, then we're playing a game that we don't even know the rules for."
The door closed and Ana scurried around the corner and peered through from the side of a window that cut through the wood exterior and steel core of the door.
One of the men was at the controls of the terminal, the image forwarded to the large screen at the front of the room. Ana double-checked that the terminal she had been using showed no signs of intrusion. The input surface pulsed with a soft, sleepy glow, just like the ones on either side.
She refocused on the large output up front and the files and images that jumped across it, appearing and disappearing. As the two men delved through security encryption, access points, and different connections, the array of mission logs, briefings, photographs, video clips grew into an ever larger map before Ana's eyes as the man moved his hands across the surface of the terminal. Everything linked together in ways that Ana could not fathom. There was no thread she could see to tie all the disparate information together. She saw pictures of people she recognized: some she had saved, some she had seen in other mission briefings, some she knew were enemies of the state. Titles of missions. Headlines of wire articles. Press conferences. Data piled upon more data, and somehow it all linked to the Continuum. The two men inside had their feet on the loom that would weave the tapestry together, but Ana could not make out the design. It was like five different puzzles mixed up together and she couldn't make any of the pieces fit. Yet Ana took in every bit of information she could, filing things away, linking them to events and records that she was familiar with, trying to construct a map in her own mind that would allow her to see the same thing that her two "colleagues" were able to.
The door lock beeped. The access code had changed. Any opportunity to get back inside the lab was gone. Ana was an observer only.
She continued to watch as photos of agents of the Continuum that she had faced in person and seen in other mission briefs started appearing in a row across the top of the screen. At the end of the line, in dramatic fashion, larger than the rest, appeared a picture of a man who was very familiar.
She had never seen him before. She didn't know who he was. Yet she did.
It was her brother.
Ana's breath stuck in her throat.
One of the men composed a memo. The words only appeared on his terminal screen, too small for Ana to make out what it said or who it was addressed to. She needed to get inside. She needed to figure out how she could view the contents of that memo. Her brother was in there. She needed to see. She needed to know.
The man finished typing and sent the document securely through the single pipe that connected that room to the rest of the floor, and through the single connection from that floor to the outside world. Electrons flowed down hard wires like a river throughout the building. Ana wondered for a moment which section of the Valkyrie Project floor was hot, knowing that the floors alternated on switches, making it more difficult to splice in and capture the bits as they streamed between the offices. It was too late for Ana to do anything like that now anyway. The chance had gone as soon as the memo was sent. She would have to find an artifact of it somewhere if she wanted to see the contents.
The two men stood abruptly and turned toward the door. Ana sprinted back to her corner hiding place. She heard the door open and the two men walk out. Their voices became loud again as they left the sound-proof lab. Ana wanted to rush forward and catch the door before it shut and locked her out, forcing her to retrieve and input another access code before she could re-enter. She did not look forward to that prospect. But the men took their time and there was no way for her to get to the door without b
eing seen.
So she waited and considered her alternatives. She thought about what the men had said and what she had seen, crystallizing it in her head, leaving behind a trail of pebbles so she could follow the path back on her own.
The door locked with the same loud click it had made after the men entered. It issued several loud electronic noises, the access code changing again. The level of their voices dropped as they rounded the corner, and Ana walked briskly back to the door of the lab. She tried her access code again. The lock showed no reaction.
Ana looked inside. The terminal had been shut off, the large display with the photograph of her brother was black. She looked around again. There was no one there. She continued after the men, stopping at the corner that turned into the hallway leading to the elevator. She could still hear the men's voices, conversing as they waited, but she could not make out the words.
Then the elevator came, the doors opened, the men stepped inside, and once again the hallway went quiet. Ana looked around the corner, and seeing no one, approached the elevator. She counted five seconds before she tapped the panel. It was another minute before it returned to pick her up. She stood sweating, trying to remember everything she'd seen, about Jrue, the Sleepwalkers project, the Continuum, all of its agents, and her brother. Going over it again and again while hoping that no one else would show up and question what she was doing there.
The door opened, baring its empty soul. Ana entered, filling it with revelations that crowded the four small walls, but outside of the confines of the little box they drowned in a lake of truth the size of the one to the east of the Agency building. She touched the panel to take her back to the floor that housed the Valkyrie Project. She exited there, trying to decide between going back to her desk and going to the Hotel to let her mind decompress. Her body cried out from the tension that had coiled within her and her brain fuzzed with the mass amounts of data it had absorbed from her lab research and watching the men working with their puzzle pieces.
