Code Breakers: Delta

by Colin F. Barnes

  “I best go tell Enna,” Franklin said. “See what she wants me to do. Let me know if the system picks it up on any other frame.”

  “What about the punchline?”

  “It’ll have to wait for later, I’m afraid, Jess.”

  Franklin ruffled her hair and gave her a wink before dashing out of the server room. The door swung closed, wafting air into Jess’s face. She noticed the faint smell of smoke. She checked the servers’ diagnostics to make sure one of the server fans hadn’t busted, or one of the processor cores overheated.

  The display showed no warning signs. Everything was fine and within tolerances.

  Jess turned away from the screen and propelled herself down the corridor of servers to visually inspect them. Even though the servers sounded fine, still creating their unique music, she didn’t rule out a problem.

  Before she got to the end of the corridor, she heard the door creak open. Had Franklin returned already? She started to turn around when a dark figure loomed over her. She made to scream, but the figure moved too fast, clasping a cold hand around her mouth. With its other arm, it lifted her up off her board and dashed out of the server room, its considerable strength holding Jess tight beneath its arm.

  She tried to squeeze and squirm out of its grip, but it continued to hold her in place as it raced down the hallway that led away from the server room to an emergency exit. Bursting through the doors, the figure turned left and headed down a narrow access way.

  It turned into an alley and pushed Jess up against the wall, still holding a hand over her mouth. She tried to bite the hand, but her teeth clenched against a hard surface beneath the flesh.

  Her mind raced: robot, cyborg, transcendent? She tried to listen in, hear what was going on in its mind. A low-level hum came from beneath the street. Whatever it was, it was biological or had exceptional dampening on its processors.

  But she did detect, albeit briefly, a node on the network. It disappeared the moment she noticed. Before Jess could inspect further, the figure jabbed a needle into her neck. She became light, weightless. Her vision swirled, and her mind closed in around her. The final image of a shadowy figure staring at her with black eyes haunted her consciousness.

  Chapter 14

  Gerry sat back in the chair. His muscles were slow to react and ached. Just like his mind. A foggy headache made his thoughts slow and fragmented like bits of code floating in a mist of information. The others around him stared on silently.

  He knew and recognised both Enna and Jachz, but the other two weren’t instantly familiar. The girl called Holly wouldn’t hold his eye contact, turning away when he tried to look at her. The other girl, Petal, couldn’t stop looking at him.

  Her gaze made him feel self-conscious. All he wanted was some time alone to gather his memories and whereabouts. Although Enna had explained all the things he was supposed to have done, the images for those events were indistinct.

  “My family?” Gerry asked Enna as she fussed with her slate, presumably checking his vitals. “Oh,” he said as his AIA, Mags, delivered his backstory to him. Gerry stood up, stretched and walked unsteadily across the lab to stand before the large window.

  From his position he could see the rows of subdivided houses in the distance and knew he lived in one of them. Mags replayed a number of scenes of him with his wife and children around a breakfast table… yes, he knew this scene!

  The numbers… those damned lottery numbers.

  Despite knowing all this had already happened, he couldn’t help but feel that same gut-wrenching sensation of panic of facing the very death lottery his algorithms controlled. And then the rage of not being allowed back into his employer’s building to sort things out.

  Mags continued to replay his life like a film.

  He watched as he fell into the street, his body jerking with the electrical shock of the guard’s stun baton. And then the weird guy with the dreadlocks and padre hat, helping Gerry up from the gutter and taking him through the streets until they came to an old door.

  Golden light rimmed the edge of the doorway and illuminated the street as the light spilled out when the door opened a crack.

  There, watching him from behind a pair of goggles… the girl with the pink hair.

  Gerry spun around in the lab.

  It was her.

  “Petal?” Gerry said, the name falling out, trembling across his lips. He knew her now, knew there was more to her than just the image his AIA was showing him. “I know you. You were behind the door with the man with the dreadlocks.” Gerry sought to find his name.

  And there, it came to him in a burst of memories. Gabriel!

  A section of his brain, previously locked away, activated. Neurons fired, bringing the memories, and the pain.

  Collapsing to his knees, Gerry grabbed the side of his head and screamed. The mad rushing data flowed too fast. He couldn’t take it, but image after image and sound after sound, the stream brought an entire life’s experiences to him in a few seconds of agonising replay.

  Enna and Jachz rushed to him, taking him by the arms and lifting him up, but he shrugged them off. He closed his eyes tight and tensed his body, willing himself to pay attention to all the data Mags was showing him.

  He knew this wasn’t his original body or his first life. He saw how he died while fighting with Jasper, his brother, and then up on the Family’s—his family’s—space station. They had brought him back, upgraded his internal processors, made him even more capable, so he could… do what?

  Mags played back a conversation he’d had with his mother.

  Gerry opened his eyes and forced himself to stand. The others watched on with a mix of horror. Everyone apart from Petal, who stood directly in front of him, her hands clasped together in front of her chest. “You,” Gerry said, his voice croaking.

  “Me?” Petal replied. Her hands shook.

  Gerry lurched forward, his arms outwards.

  Holly wrapped an arm around Petal, standing close to protect her, but Gerry didn’t want to hurt her. He stumbled forward, placing his hands on top of her shoulders. “I know you,” he said, looking down into those eyes that burned all the way back through the torrent of his memories. “I… came back for you.”

  “You did,” Petal replied. “You saved me, and I saved you. From Elliot Robertson. Remember?”

  Gerry returned to the movie of his life and continued to analyse the scenes as they flicked by, dragged from somewhere deep inside his mind. The name Elliot Robertson resonated, and Mags ran a search, delivered the results.

  “My god,” Gerry whispered as it all came to him whole.

  His entire life since his awakening at the hands of Gabe and Petal stretched off into the distance. Each step on the journey now fully formed with sight and sound.

  “You,” Gerry said, looking at Petal. “Kept me alive, inside your mind… all this time. How is this even possible? Am I real? A clone… I see it all now, and I feel. I know…”

  Petal’s face brightened as she smiled. She stepped forward, letting his arms drop behind her. She wrapped hers around his waist and buried her face into his chest. Gerry pulled her in tight, enjoying her warmth against his body.

  His saviour, his love, his reason for living.

  Without her, he now realised he would have succumbed to Elliot Robertson’s manipulation. Petal had sacrificed herself for him and kept them both alive. Although Gerry knew he wasn’t a man of religion, he experienced in that moment a connection to something larger than their corporeal bodies.

  He’d become binary, his spirit stretching out into the networks of the universe, only to be brought back whole, recombined, but the same. His spirit and soul intact, held safe within the mind and love of another.

  — I love you, Petal, Gerry said.

  — And I you. I thought I had lost you forever.

  — Never.

  And on they chatted like that. Silent to the others, but full of emotion across their secure VPN. Gerry could have stayed like
that for all time, being one with his true love, his saviour, but from outside of this cocoon, Enna’s voice broke through.

  A hand gripped his shoulder.

  “Gerry, I’m sorry to break this up, but we’ve got work to do.”

  Gerry opened his eyes and turned to look at Enna. “Work?”

  “Diagnostics. Now you’re fully functioning, I need to test—”

  “No,” Gerry said, releasing Petal so he could face Enna fully. “There’s been too much testing, too much manipulation of my life. I am what I am right now, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. I’m grateful for what you’ve done for me, I truly am, but let me live now.”

  The door to the lab burst open, and a young man in a blue uniform burst in. His cheeks were reddened, and he struggled for breath as though he had just been running. Sweat dripped down his face, pooling in the creases of his grimace.

  “Franklin, what’s the matter?” Enna’s voice, high-pitched, tarred with panic.

  “It’s Jess,” he said.

  The name conjured a facsimile in Gerry’s mind. A young girl, blond, with no use of her legs. She had helped him during the battle with Elliot, using her special, mysterious abilities to communicate with the server spirits, the digital souls of Hajime and Sakura.

  “What’s happened?” Petal urged. She dashed over to him, shook him by the arm.

  “She’s… been… taken.”

  “What do you mean?” Enna said, dropping her slate onto the operating table and striding across the lab. “What’s going on?”

  Franklin bent over and leaned against his knees, breathing heavily. He looked up then, worry lines scrawled deeply in his forehead. “She found the thing Holly saw on the video server. I was coming to tell you when I returned to ask Jess something, but she’d gone. Her board was still there, and a piece of her jacket had snagged on the door handle. I ran the film back, and it took her.”

  “It?” Holly said. “The ghost? The thing Petal and I saw?”

  Franklin nodded. “It’s on the server.” He pointed to Enna’s slate. The ex-Family member picked it up and navigated to the server’s address, following Franklin’s instructions. But Gerry was already working on it.

  Via Mags, he connected to the Cemprom network. It hadn’t changed much since he last accessed it, the protocols still very much using the architecture he set up along with his good friend Mike. That was one image he wished he never had to see again—Mike’s body and face all bloated and diseased under the control of the sentient AI within his internal systems.

  Putting that to the back of his mind, Gerry let a part of himself go into the network. He felt slow, like an old computer running out of memory and processing software in measured chunks. But he made progress through the system until he arrived at the node responsible for the surveillance server.

  Even though the city was under a new ideology, he was saddened to see that this still existed, but in this particular case he was thankful for it.

  “I can’t find anything,” Enna said, navigating on the slate. Franklin continued to explain what Jess had seen and from which camera feed. Gerry was already running a number of search scripts as he got used to learning how to manipulate and weave code again. The ability hadn’t truly gone, and with every passing second he was finding increasingly more power at his control. This, he knew, wasn’t natural. He was good before, but as he was manipulating the servers to dig up the footage of Jess’s capture, he detected an untapped source of power within him.

  The problem was it reminded him of Elliot Robertson.

  That particular line of enquiry would remain shut for now.

  — What are you doing, Gez? Petal said.

  — Finding the kidnapper. Here, watch.

  Gerry extended the video feed through a port into his system and bridged it across to Petal’s node. He scrolled the video recording until they reached the timestamp a few minutes before Franklin arrived. The camera within the server room sat high and recorded with a wide angle of view, taking in the entire space.

  Jess looked small among the tall racks of CPU blades. She was pushing herself down the aisle when the door opened. The light of the room changed, and a shadow extended along the floor. A definite figure.

  “There,” Franklin said to Enna. “I think that’s it.”

  Gerry skipped forward a few moments and caught the figure as it snatched Jess and turned to leave the room.

  — That’s the thing I saw coming out of Jachz’s craft, Petal said.

  Gerry copied the image over to his internal memory and disconnected from the server. His normal vision returned. Holly and Enna were crowded around the slate as Franklin looked on.

  Jachz stood a few feet away, impassive, but watching on with a focused attentiveness.

  Gerry rushed him, pushing him up against the wall of the lab with a crash.

  “What the hell?” Enna said.

  “You know what it is, don’t you, Jachz?” Gerry said.

  Petal joined him by his side and pointed her forearm spikes at the AI-cyborg or whatever the hell it identified itself as.

  “Gerry, calm down,” Enna said, trying to pull him away.

  But Gerry shrugged her off and leaned in closer. “I can see it in your damned eyes. You better start telling the truth, or your short life ends here today.”

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to. Can you be more specific?” Jachz replied, keeping his voice steady like a good robot, but even so, Gerry could detect a tremble of fear there. Amazingly, the AI had become fully sentient after all, but then given all the crazy shit he’d seen over the last year or so, it wasn’t entirely surprising.

  Gerry patched Jachz into his network and played him the video feed, pausing on the frame of the figure carrying Jess out of the server room. The damn thing was like a moving shadow. It seemed to suck light into it, making its form indistinct. Though it was clear enough to know it was human or a technological variant of some kind.

  “Oh,” Jachz said. “This is not a good development at all.”

  “What is it?” Enna asked.

  Gerry eased off Jachz, and Petal withdrew her spikes. They all waited on him.

  “I was unaware he had hitched a ride with me,” he said. “Otherwise I’d have taken appropriate countermeasures. I failed in trusting Kabuki.”

  “You’re not making sense, Jachz. Just tell us what that thing is,” Gerry urged.

  “Of course. It’s a viroborg—one of the Family’s next-generation weapons. I didn’t think any were activated.”

  “And what the fuck is one of those?” Petal said.

  “An AI-driven cyborg whose purpose is to stealthily infiltrate a facility and download a viral payload. The Family designed them to take out their competitors, but after the Cataclysm, there were none, and development of them ceased—or so I had thought.”

  “Why would it take Jess and leave the servers intact?” Franklin said.

  “That I don’t know,” Jachz said. “But if it hasn’t attacked the city from inside, that tells me that it has higher orders.”

  Gerry turned away and to Enna said, “You’ve picked a real bad day for a resurrection.”

  Chapter 15

  Petal pulled Enna out into the corridor, closing the door to her lab behind them. Leaning against it, she eased the tension from her shoulders. “Are you sure he’s going to be okay?”

  Enna ran a hand through her hair. “I’m almost positive, but it’s impossible to know everything. This hasn’t been done before. I think you’re underestimating the scale of what we achieved here today.”

  “And you’re underestimating his desire to fix shit. He won’t just rest up and let you run a bunch of health checks while Jess’s been kidnapped. You know that, right?”

  Enna spun away and exhaled loudly. “Of course I know that. I was there when he saved her from certain death in Darkhan. But if you go running off now and he malfunctions, what then?”

  Petal read between the lines and realised
that Enna had already decided she was staying at Libertas. So much for her special bond with Jess. Just because she had some top position now didn’t excuse her responsibilities to her friends.

  “At least he cares,” Petal said. “He’s the only one who’s ever really given a fuck.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Enna spun round, her face flashing with redness.

  Petal leaned forward, making Enna take a step back. “You’re not exactly leading the search party, are you? Sure, you’re getting your little lapdogs to run through surveillance, but when it comes to it, you’ll be staying here, won’t you? I’ve noticed that about you—whenever the shit gets dangerous, you go missing.”

  Enna raised her hand to slap Petal but thought better of it and dropped her arm. She couldn’t even hold Petal’s gaze.

  “You’re just like the rest of them,” Petal said, pointing upwards, referring to Enna’s relations. “Even though they abandoned you here and we treated you like our own, you’re going to hide in the safety of this place again while we risk our lives. It’s always been that way, with you manipulating Gabe and me, sending us on one dangerous errand after another.”

  “That’s not fair; I always looked out for you two.”

  “But Jess, eh? You’re leaving that to us.”

  “I can help!” Enna backed away, her coat flapping about her legs as she strode up and down with frustration. She turned back to Petal, pointing her finger. “I’ve arranged transport and weapons and supplies. You’ve got Jachz and Holly. You don’t need Gerry. Leave him behind to let me carry on test—”

  “Hell no. You didn’t hear too well, did you? No more goddamned tests. You arrange the transport and weapons. Leave it to Gez and me. We’ll get it done as we’ve always done. You won’t need to lift a finger.”

  Before Enna could respond, Petal opened the door to the lab and strode back inside. Jachz and Holly were conversing with Gerry, tracing Jess’s last network communications.

  “Well?” Petal said. “You get a lead?”

  Jachz looked up. “Yes, she pinged the Cemprom servers a few minutes after her abduction. She’s heading south-easterly.”