The Valkyrie_Genesis

by LK Walker

  Maree is sitting in her office. Her usual flawless image is skewed this morning. She hasn’t put on makeup and her appearance is washed out. Rubbing her forehead, she blows out a heavy breath. Whatever she is looking at, it’s stressing her out.

  She hasn’t heard my approach—I don’t suppose she’s expecting me to show up. I tap lightly on the door to get her attention. Her office smells strongly of coffee. There’s a fresh brew next to her on the desk, waves of steam rolling off its surface. An empty cup, with a hardened brown ring in the bottom and lipstick marks on the rim, sits next to it. I wonder if she’s been here all night.

  “Why’d you come in today?” Her tone is clipped. There are definite bags under her eyes.

  “Eli wanted me to get his things from the lab, if the Police are all done in there.”

  “They’ve finished,” she says, although her tone suggests she disagrees they are.

  “Did they find anything?”

  “Nothing. We have no idea who did this”. She shakes her head. “This is not to leave this office, understood?” I give her a stiff nod to show my ascent. She trusts me enough to share secrets and I feel grateful for it. “Have you heard of P & C Technology Corporation? They make smart phones, computer hardware. All our computers are P & C Tech.”

  As she says this I can picture the logo on my computer. “Right. Of course,” I say.

  “They are funding this enterprise of ours,” she discloses, without ceremony.

  P & C is the dreaded corporation Eli despises so much. She assumes I know so I don’t act dumb.

  “I had a call from one it’s directors. They have credible information that it was a rival company that broke in.”

  “Who?” I haven’t the first clue about technology rivalries. I wouldn’t even be able to wade in with a good guess.

  “They won’t say. All they’ve said is that it is their problem and they’ll manage the police investigation from their end. And told me not to worry.” Maree doesn’t sound pleased.

  “Was it one of their swipe cards that was taken?” I ask.

  “They wouldn’t say that outright, but that was the implication.”

  “I guess that’s good. It means we don’t have to go around accusing the people who work here.”

  “It’s about the only good news. Eli said he had two S.I. chips on his desk and I couldn’t find either of them. P & C think their rivals will use them to reverse engineer the technology and produce their own model before ours get to market.”

  That is bad news. Eli is going to be livid. This is what he’s been worried about all along. At least he had a chance of managing the corporation. He has no control over someone who has stolen the tech.

  “I’ve got the security firm coming in in half an hour. P & C have authorized an increase in the security budget. It might be too late, but the chances of it happening again are going to be slim.”

  There’s nothing else to say. I pull the door closed behind me and leave her to all the paperwork that she will no doubt be required to complete.

  I slip out the door to the stairwell, without seeing anyone else and head up one more flight of stairs to the lab. Its empty, not a soul in sight. That’s standard for this time of day. The lab staff have a meeting at 0800 hours and I imagine there’s a lot to talk about today.

  It looks like someone has been through and cleaned Eli’s desk. The wireless keyboard is sitting in front of the monitor as if it had never been used as a weapon. I flip it over and see the dent where it connected with Eli’s skull. Even if it’s still working, I’d guess he’ll want a new one.

  To the left of the desk is a high workbench. I’ve visited Eli here enough to know where his equipment usually sits. Nothing is broken, only out of place. A necklace has been balled up and placed off to one side. When Eli said stones, I was expecting painted rocks. He meant gemstones, light blue, and square cut gemstones, held together by a gold chain, a couple of gray stones are interspersed amongst them. It’s a lovely necklace. I slide it into my pocket, careful not to damage it.

  Everyone will have already searched for the missing S.I. chips. I shuffle around his desk anyway, just in case they’ve been missed. They haven’t. I’m already apprehensive about telling Eli both have been stolen, but worse still, who has taken them.

  His wallet and phone sit in the top drawer of his computer desk. I slide them into my handbag. Nothing else here belongs to Eli. Leaving his desk as I found it, I walk back down the stairs and out the front door. I don’t make eye contact with the guard on the way out and thankfully he says nothing more to me. I’m back at the hospital at 0915, ready to tell Eli his worst nightmare has begun.

  Chapter 35

  When I walk into the room, a doctor is giving Eli a speech about coming back if he starts having any untoward symptoms. Eli’s legs are dangling over the side of the bed, they’re nearly long enough to reach the ground. He’s already dressed, shoes on. He sticks a hand out for the doctor to shake and says, “thank you”.

  “Right on time, sis.”

  The doctor scribbles something on his chart, and tells Eli to rest, before leaving us. Eli hops down onto the ground, the spring still in his step. His bed is made in tight tucks. I give him an eye roll.

  “Nothing wrong with being neat.” He tells me.

  “As long as it’s not catching, I’ll give you a ride home.”

  I hold off telling him Maree’s news until we get back to his place, mostly so I can see his expression when I tell him. It’s the only way of gauging how badly he takes it.

  “I’m seated,” he prompts me from his spot in a dark brown armchair. His house is as neat and tidy as the hospital bed. He’s renting this place until his house back in San Francisco sells. Because that might take a while, he’s unpacked his life. It’s a little more cramped than the house he came from, but it is still a leap up from Jack’s and my place. For starters, it’s near new, there is no damp smell and the curtains are fashionable.

  “Both S.I. chips have gone. There’s no sign of them.” I break the worst of the news. He doesn’t seem surprised. I guess he expected as much since the man who beat him asked for them directly.

  “And the necklace?” he asks.

  “What’s so special about it?” I lean back in my seat and pull it from my jeans pocket. Eli grabs it from my hand. He inspects the clasp.

  “They only took one chip.” He gives a childlike grin. “This was the project I was working on.” He holds up the necklace for me to inspect.

  “You’re going to have to explain.”

  “When you were kidnapped, I didn’t know how to find you. There was nothing I could do and I couldn’t sleep. Jack told me to keep busy. Since I had spare time and you were so adamant that you won’t ever have an S.I. chip injected, I thought I would make you another option.”

  “It’s very pretty Eli.”

  “Give me your phone.” I obediently pull it out and hand it over before following him out of the room and into his study. He attaches it to the mini HDMI cable hanging out of his tower case and starts tapping away on his keyboard. “You have to remember that this is only the prototype. I’ll be able to upgrade it as we go.”

  I’m getting a little impatient waiting to find out what I’m looking at. “So, what does it do?” I ask.

  “It’s an S.I. chip that doesn’t need to be implanted. Put the necklace on.”

  “It’s a phone?” I ask, clipping it on behind my neck.

  “The chip is located in the necklace, here.” He points to one of the small squares, off to the right of the clasp. “It will sit in a similar location to where the implanted ones do. The chip will be able to recharge off your body heat, but not as efficiently as if it was sitting under the skin. You’ll still have to plug it in to an external power point.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m always happy to receive presents from you, but I’m not understanding what’s so special about it?”

  “This is what you haven’t seen yet.” He twists the
lid off a small, round container and inside is a clear liquid. “It’s a contact lens,” he says. I have to look closer to see anything. He gives the liquid a gentle swirl and few gray lines are discernable. “I need to sync them first. Then you should get video on your phone.”

  It’s strange when the penny drops. This must be the first version of the contact lens used for the comms unit I’ve seen Zander and Ryan use. I desperately want to tell Eli how successful these will become. It takes all my willpower to keep my mouth shut. This is why Zander wanted to show me as little as possible, in case I blab about it in the past.

  “I haven’t perfected the earpiece yet. That’s what I was trying to do when those morons came and smashed my head in. It’s not far off. Another week and it should be operational.”

  “Why are you doing all this?” I ask.

  Eli looks away from me and back at the screen, his movements become clumsy. “So I can get hold of you if I need to.”

  “You mean if I’m kidnapped again and you can’t reach me?”

  “It sounds stupid when you say it. We’re going to begin testing the S.I. chips on live subjects next week. In a few years, they will come on to the market. It’d be nice if you had a part in it too.”

  “Can I try the contact lens?” He’s gone to a lot of trouble to make this work for me, even with my stubbornness as a hurdle. The least I can do is show some enthusiasm.

  “Use the bathroom mirror. The lens is going to feel a little heavy at first, but it should come right after a few minutes. I’m working on a material that will last longer. This one will only have a six-month life span.”

  “You might have to fuse it to my eye, so I don’t lose it before the six months is up.”

  “I’m working on that too.” Eli waves me out of the room. “I’ve nearly reformatted your phone with the new software.” It’s not the first time he’s reformatted something without asking. When he was at College, he reformatted my computer so it ran on a Linux platform. I had grizzled for a couple of weeks until I found it made my life a whole lot easier. That was the first of many “upgrades” as he calls them. Beneficial or not, I wish he’d ask before he did it.

  I walk back into the room five minutes later, with a red, watery eye. Poking my finger in my eye on purpose is not as easy as I’d expected. Every time I was close, I blinked, knocking the lens off my finger. But it’s in. When I looked in the mirror, to my surprise, I can’t see anything out of the ordinary. There are no gray patterns across my pupil, where they might have shown up. They have blended in with my iris and the lens is practically invisible.

  When I return to Eli, the blinds in his study have been dipped and only a small amount of light comes through the brown slats. The computer monitor is giving off enough of a glow to be able to see.

  “Right, let’s sync this bad boy,” he says, turning his back on me.

  It takes a minute for anything to happen. I’m about to complain about the lack of activity when a little cross appears in the center of my vision, right before an insipid looking projection of Eli’s smiling face takes its place, with me standing in the background.

  “How is it?” Eli asks. He’s looking at the webcam that sits on the top of his monitor.

  “Weird.” I hear his voice beside me and watch his lips move in the video streaming on my eyeball. Oddly the two seem out of time with each other.

  “The visual is impaired if there is too much light around. I’m working on ways to clear it up.”

  I try holding my hand up to the eye with the lens and immediately see what he means. With the light gone, so is his translucency. “Will all S.I. chips work like this?”

  “Yes. But we’re getting close to creating a link with the visual cortex which will help you decipher what you’re viewing on the contact, without the need to move your eye around.” I hadn’t noticed I was swiveling my eye to make sense of what I was seeing until he mentions it. The more I do, the queasier I feel. My brain isn’t enjoying deciphering two images at once.

  “Good idea, otherwise I might lose my lunch.”

  “That’s the snag we’ve hit—how to hook it up so that the visual cortex will effectively run with two images without causing distress. It’s a whole other problem. We’ll get there eventually.”

  “Time might be running out.” I take a deep breath, I hate delivering bad news. “They think another company orchestrated the break-in. A director from the P & C Corporation thinks they’ll try to reverse engineer it.”

  “Shit.” That word doesn’t come out of Eli’s mouth often and when it has, it’s never sounded so aggressive. He fists his hand in his hair and then smacks it down on his desk. “They’ll push us into supplying the chips before full testing is completed.”

  “It’ll all be fine,” I reassure him.

  I’ve seen it in the future. People will be walking round without any problems. His technology works out amazingly. Except…I struggle to think back to being in Vera. My memories of the future still fade when I return to the present time, just enough so I can’t grasp them properly. I vaguely recall Zander saying that I never have one, no surprises there. And Vera didn’t have one either. Perhaps they aren’t as wide spread as I had considered.

  “Remember the worst-case scenario, Cara? Screwing with unsuspecting minds?”

  “It won’t be that bad. Promise.”

  “Not a promise you can make.”

  “But I am anyway.” I give him a pat on the back. His strained expression doesn’t improve. I leave him by himself for a while, using the excuse that I need to remove the contact lens. He has forgotten about the feed that is going into it from the webcam. When he thinks I’m no longer watching, I catch a rare glimpse of him losing his cool, only for a minute, smashing the desk and throwing everything but the computer against the far wall, before he collects himself again.

  By the time I walk back into the room he is calm, not smiling, but in control and the room is tidy. I give him back the container, with the contact lens safely nestled inside. He writes my initials on the top with a black marker and puts it on the corner of his desk.

  “It’s so strange seeing through the lens. I can’t believe you made that.” My skills are much less exciting, and while I’m not jealous of Eli for developing those sorts of talents, I wish I’d been endowed with something moderately spectacular too. The necklace design he’s chosen is amazing. I’m more surprised by how cool it looks on, rather than his ability to turn it into a communication device. Style is not his forte. He’s never thought it important. I often tease him that ‘fatigues are not fashion’, but he keeps on wearing them like they are.

  My fingers fumble with the latch on the necklace amid strands of hair that have fallen down over the chain.

  “Leave it.” Eli pulls one of my arms down. “Leave it on. Once the other components are ready, I’ll sync the lot and you can have the whole set. Think of it as an early birthday present.”

  “Thank you.” My hand dances along the gemstones. I’m no gemologist, but I think they might be real. He’s spent a bit of money on it. That nearly makes up for the fact that he’s now able to track me wherever I am. No doubt that’s his reason for letting me keep it.

  “It looks nice on you,” he says.

  “Thanks, Eli. Now bring up the tracking software so I have an idea of what you can see.”

  “I’m that obvious?”

  “My birthday’s not for another five months.”

  “Please wear it. Just for a while, until the whole kidnapping fiasco is out of my head. I need to keep you safe and this is the only way I know how.”

  “You said it needs recharging. It’ll be as useful as my phone was.”

  “While it’s not being actively used as a communication device or anything else the power usage is minimal, it should last a hell of a lot longer than your phone battery, maybe even indefinitely.”

  “You know it’s creepy to want to track your sister, right?”

  “There’s a fine line between c
aring and creepy.”

  There’s a loud resounding knock at the door. The police have turned up to question Eli about the break-in. They want a play-by-play of what he can remember from last night. I’ve heard it all before so I make my excuses and leave.

  Chapter 36

  Maree calls a meeting of all the staff at 0900 hours and outlines the upgrade to security. I study the plans she has tacked to the white board. They’ll start the install of a numerical entry keypad into the lab in the next week, as well as adding security cameras and sensors throughout the building. What’s the point of it all? The two thugs who robbed us had full access. They hadn’t needed to break their way in. And they knew the layout of this place. No doubt, if they wanted to do it again, they could procure the number for the keypad. As far as I’m concerned, they must’ve had inside help. I feel like a conspiracy theorist.

  What’s troubling me, even more, is that they don’t appear to have tampered with the safe in any way. Perhaps if there wasn’t an S.I. chip lying around for them to take they would have. But if they’d taken all the prototypes it would have put Eli back months, so my mind goes around again—why didn’t they crack the safe and take the rest of the chips.

  I'm starting to change my mind. Perhaps someone who works here could be involved. I look around the faces of everyone crammed into the meeting room. These are my workmates, some of them friends. I need to stop dwelling on my crazy theories. It’s someone else’s job to find out who was involved. If I start villainizing everyone here, it’s going to make it an unsatisfying place to work. The best I can do is promise myself, if someone here helped wound my brother, there will be hell to pay.