The Reborn

by Ray Mazza

  Trevor had gotten a creepy vibe, and half-wondered if he’d ever see the IT guy again… maybe there would be a “terrible accident” and the IT guy would “fall” off the roof of the building while checking their satellite power transformers. But no – office life was never as interesting as one might hope.

  Trevor’s manager stood on a chair and announced that everyone should go home for the day. Some muted cheers. Someone yelled, “Snow day!” followed by more audible cheers. Then a secretary called out, “Let’s hit the bars!” That brought on full applause. His manager bowed and stepped down.

  Trevor headed for the elevator. Nearby, Damon stood silently and watched the office clear out. As Trevor passed, Damon casually smiled and nodded to him. Hands in his pockets, he nervously fidgeted with his memory stick, looking forward to some fresh air. He left the building wondering why he was in no apparent trouble.

  ~

  All the regular employees had left. Damon Winters stood, arms folded, and watched his team of men run tests on all the computers. Two were moving among fax machines, printers, phones, and various other electrical equipment that had been plugged into the company’s network.

  Despite the situation, Damon smiled to himself – something he hadn’t had reason to do recently. His men worked with speed and efficiency – no missteps, no wasted keystrokes – like clockwork. With their white lab coats and brilliant minds, they were his core team: nearly one hundred and twenty specialists. Right now a third of them were spread across all the lower floors, surveying the damage. The rest were in their usual area on the six restricted upper floors with their most valuable equipment.

  He had hand-picked every one of them. Some had been researchers at schools like Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and Stanford. He also went abroad, snatching up graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, and Tokyo University. Others had worked for companies and organizations specializing in anything from biology and medicine to chemistry, physics, psychology, education, and even social work. Except in rare cases, Damon had made sure they all had computer science or engineering in their backgrounds, as that was the connective tissue of Day Eight. Programming and engineering weren’t just skills, they were a way of thinking about problems, a method of analyzing situations, a common language that could unite the most disparate subjects and produce wondrous tangible results. Even his lawyers were cross-discipline.

  After a few more minutes, the lab coats headed back to Damon, as if on cue. A technician with broad shoulders, blond hair, and glasses stepped forward. His badge read:

  Kane Fletcher

  Chemistry

  Sociology

  He spoke: “The computers are critically damaged, and anything in the building connected to the network is likely to have traces of the surge data.”

  Damon nodded. “What sort of traces?”

  “Some of the computers have files scattered on them created during the network overload. They could be extremely compromising.”

  “Like the ones from the Silicon Valley event?”

  “More revealing,” Kane replied.

  Damon waited, expecting to hear more.

  Kane continued, cautious. “The files are all signed Allison.”

  Damon’s eyes widened. “Oh God.”

  Chapter 4

  A Plea for Help

  Trevor glanced up at the building he worked in. It seemed oddly taller than it should be.

  He moved out of the building’s shadow, and headed south down 3rd Ave on his usual path home, his eyes watering in the brisk autumn wind. Businessmen wore long coats and scarves as they trudged down the sidewalk. The women dressed lighter. Trevor was always surprised by how many still wore skirts in this weather. Skirts were nice, but he always seemed to glance a split second longer at the women wearing full business suits.

  He pushed through a cloud of thick steam from a pretzel cart, and would have stopped to get one, but its line snaked abnormally far for three in the afternoon.

  Having worn a light shirt, Trevor tried to hop on a nearby bus only to find it packed. An old lady as knobby as a diseased tree hobbled up the steps behind Trevor, but wasn’t going to fit over the white line. Before the bus driver could turn her away, Trevor squeezed past and jumped out. “She can have my fare,” he called back to the driver, who gave Trevor a two-finger salute and pulled away.

  Trevor continued on foot. Slowly, he began to notice that traffic jammed the streets and people were steadily streaming out of the commercial buildings.

  What’s going on?

  There was a supermarket just ahead, and he needed to pick up a few things. It always felt like he needed to pick up a few things.

  Something he loved about New York were the little delis, pharmacies, mom-and-pop grocers, hardware retailers, smoke shops, and take-out restaurants peppered everywhere. Many open all hours, and close enough that he could run out in his bathrobe at 3:00 am if he felt like it. Sometimes he felt safer that way. Nobody ever robs a guy in a bathrobe.

  He found the supermarket entrance locked with a Closed sign taped to the glass. Trevor pressed his forehead to the cold window and stared in. Nobody was shopping. There were just lines at the registers.

  He could see the check-out clerks writing on pads of paper and a few of them on phones, holding up credit cards, punching digits on keypads.

  This was definitely not normal. The uneasy feeling crept back into Trevor’s stomach.

  ~

  Trevor Leighton’s apartment was a one bedroom with a kitchenette so small he had to stand to the side of the stove to open the oven door. But the upside was that it was a corner unit that caught extra light from grand windows.

  A framed childhood photo of him and his sister, Amy, warmed up the windowsill. She sat on his shoulders with her arms out like a plane, and he smiled up at her with a half-painful grimace. He remembered that moment, barely being able to hold her up, their parents looking on with concern, but he loved how much fun she’d been having. That was when he was nine years old, and she was six, just a year before she died. Trevor smiled from the bottom of his heart, then cursed God with the whole of it.

  He tossed his keys on the coffee table next to his brittle bonsai tree and frowned. They were impossible to keep alive. Maybe they were committing tree suicide from depression in his lonely apartment.

  Trevor flopped onto his blue couch and wondered how to spend his day off. A poster on the wall behind him read, “What would Einstein do?” with a picture of Albert Einstein shrugging.

  Einstein would listen to music. Trevor queued up some MP3s and decided to change the ones on his memory stick for work. When he connected it he was surprised to find all his music gone. In its place sat text files… lots of text files. He scrolled down. There were tens of thousands, all with the same nonsensical name suffixed with a number:

  ciioodllnrsw_000000.txt

  ciioodllnrsw_000001.txt

  ciioodllnrsw_000002.txt

  ciioodllnrsw_000003.txt

  …

  He double-clicked a few random ones to open them. Nothing inside but garbled data.

  Trevor scrolled quickly to the bottom of the list and shuddered.

  …

  ciioodllnrsw_078556.txt

  ciioodllnrsw_078557.txt

  helpme.txt

  Trevor looked over his shoulder; he wasn’t sure why he did this; he hadn’t expected to see someone there. He was just creeped out.

  He opened the “helpme.txt” file and read it.

  Is anyone out there? I’m not sure if this will work. I’m trapped and they won’t let me leave. The men in white coats won’t listen to me. There are times when I can’t feel anything. I’m scared.

  Oscar said he would try to send this for me, he’s the only one that understands. I don’t know what to do. My daddy... he’s kept me here for so long... weeks, months. He says I can’t go, but I want to leave. I want to be free again.

  If anyone can hear me, my address is NIC2114B70057763095426, Eileithyi
a.

  My name is Allison Winters.

  Trevor read it, then read it again. Then he read it two more times, slowly. He glanced over his shoulder again.

  Trevor hadn’t heard of Allison Winters. He knew Damon Winters had been married years ago, but his wife’s name was... what was it? Trevor had read about her in the paper. She’d gotten into politics when she was with Damon, and continued with politics after their split. Did they have a child?

  Trevor brought up a web browser to search the name. The search page took abnormally long to load. He typed in search terms for Allison Winters and Damon as a cross-reference. It was an excruciatingly painful four-minute wait. What the hell was wrong with his connection?

  The search yielded only a few hits. One of them was a page with a photo of a 2nd grade field trip to a beach. In the scene, children paraded along the shore with buckets. The caption listed the names of the children, among them, Allison Winters. The source of the photo was the Glenville Elementary School’s web page, an upper-class school in Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich. That was where Damon lived: a wealthy suburban town forty-five minutes outside the city. The date on the photo read April, 1998 – nearly fourteen years ago. If that really were Damon’s child, she would be twenty or twenty-one now... older than the captive in the letter sounded.

  The rest of the search results were useless. He couldn’t find anything about an Oscar, either. A search on Eileithyia revealed that it wasn’t a place, but rather the Greek goddess of birth, which meant nothing to Trevor.

  He snatched up the phone and punched the number for Lola, one of the HR reps from work who lunched with him from time to time. Lola had a penchant for gossip, and a talent for knowing twice as much about people as they even knew about themselves.

  “Lola?”

  “Trevor, is that you?”

  “Yeah, hey—”

  “Hi-i-i-i!” Lola hit five notes with her greeting. “You never call me! You always say you’re not a phone person.”

  “I’m not. But I’ve got a question and I thought you might know the answer.”

  “Oh, waddya want?” She said in her sing-song voice.

  “Does Damon Winters have any children?”

  “Hah! After all the different women I see him with at charity events, I bet he has, like, eight by now!”

  Trevor forced a chuckle. Ordinarily, he would have found the remark funny. “Seriously, though?”

  “Um,” there was silence broken only by what sounded like her fingernail tapping on the receiver. “I always felt like he had a kid. I think I remember he mentioned being a father or raising a child or something during a recruiting speech at Oxford. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Don’t you have access to his personnel files or something?”

  “Damon’s? No, no-no-no-no-no-no. Not a chance.”

  “Okay, thanks. Do you know what his ex-wife’s name is?”

  “Yeah, Valerie Winters. She kept the last name because of all the connections she had accrued from social climbing.” Lola sounded excited. “She’s mainly involved with grassroots female rights organizations. Saw it on the news just yesterday.”

  “Yeah, I thought she was involved with something like that.” He hadn’t, actually, he just knew it was political. For some reason it seemed about the same to him.

  “And the internet is broken,” she added.

  “Yeah, no kidding. It’s taking forever just to do some searches.”

  “Wow, you’re lucky it even works for you. You should turn on the news, because, I mean, the internet is really broken.”

  Trevor thanked her, and Lola made him promise to call again sometime. Just for fun, she said.

  He clicked on the TV, paused briefly on the sci-fi channel to watch some people slide through an inter-dimensional portal to another version of Earth, and then found the local news.

  Lola was right.

  “...four major internet service providers experienced crashes all over the eastern seaboard just an hour ago.” A female newscaster caked with makeup spoke with an air of urgency. “Extremely high levels of traffic, hundreds of times the normal peak amounts, overloaded routers and switches at these major hubs, bringing them to a grinding halt. Security experts are blaming computer hackers, saying it looks like they exploited an extremely obscure vulnerability in network hardware that caused rapid duplication of outbound data in what might be considered the world’s fastest-replicating, yet shortest-lived computer virus – it was apparently manufactured to die off a mere twelve seconds after being unleashed. Unfortunately, that was more than ample time to wreak catastrophic mayhem in the system.

  “If you’re just joining us, I’m Jackie Tristram with Lynx News, and we’re covering the breaking story of the internet outage.

  “Many businesses have been left without internet access, which knocked retail outlets back to the stone age sans automated credit card verification. Turning to Wall Street, the Dow and Nasdaq have taken a nose-dive over the past hour. And just minutes ago, blood spilled in a fist-fight turned all-out brawl on the trading room floor. More on that as our reporter on the scene investigates.

  “Now, officials say the network is slowly coming back online, and the internet providers have requested our patience while they sort out the problems. Many areas already have service restored at full speed, while others are still at a crawl.”

  Trevor had never heard of anything this major happening to the network before, even so briefly. Parts of four internet service providers going down at once? Those were the major backbones of the internet. Why would hackers possibly want to bring down the internet? They’d be putting themselves out of a hobby.

  The newscaster continued talking, then stopped mid-sentence to pay attention to her earpiece. “I’ve just been informed of the origin of the network flood.” When she announced where it came from, Trevor fumbled the remote. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. If Lola was still watching, she’d probably passed out.

  Chapter 5

  To Serve and Protect

  Internally, Damon panicked. It was fleeting.

  He worked out his thoughts and then addressed his men: “We don’t have much of a choice. On floors two through twenty-four, wipe the computers, then replace them along with the rest of the equipment. No one leaves until this is done, I don’t care if it takes all night. This is of the utmost importance; a few of you know our history with the NSA. I still believe they have a plant posing as a regular employee, and if the file falls into their hands, we’re through. Any rogue files that you do find, make a copy and bring them directly to me. Understand?”

  Single nods all around.

  “Kane, I need you to find out if our network’s firewalls lasted through the surge and if anything intelligible crossed them. Prep PR if you need to. I’m going upstairs to check on her.”

  Kane nodded with a vaguely saccharine smile, and Damon thought he heard him muttering under his breath. Damon turned back and cut into him with sharp eyes, arms crossed. Kane nodded again, then began radioing commands to the team on all floors. The others began loading computers onto carts.

  Damon punched the call button for the elevator and as he waited, he became acutely aware of how tight his tie felt cinched around his neck. He loosened it and wondered if he should confront Kane. He knew Kane blamed this on him.

  When the elevator arrived, the thought left him. He swiped his badge, pressed the button for floor twenty-eight, and was gone.

  ~

  Trevor pressed the rewind button on his DVR. He had to hear it again.

  The reporter replayed: “... just been informed of the origin of the network flood. Officials are saying it has been traced back to a building in Manhattan, the offices of a company called Day Eight, a provider of research equipment and simulation software. As of right now it appears to have been an accident, but technicians are investigating the exact cause with cooperation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ll have more on this in a few minutes. And
now, it’s time for a look at the weather.”

  Trevor sat in stunned silence. Was there a disgruntled employee at Day Eight? Or perhaps a secret project gone wrong? A networked doomsday device? People must be filing lawsuits already. Should he start looking for a new job?

  After fielding a shocked call from Lola, he printed out a copy of the letter from “Allison.” The letter must have had to do with the network surge somehow, but the news had no mention of anyone getting similar notes.

  Trevor dialed the operator. At first he got one of the computerized operators, but it didn’t understand his full request. Computers were so stupid sometimes. Well, he knew it wasn’t the computers – it was the people that programmed them. Regardless, computers always fell short of talking to a live person, so he pressed “0” to get a human.

  Trevor asked for the address and phone number of the closest police department. He wrote the info down on the back of the letter, then shoved it in his pocket.

  After having talked on the phone to Lola he felt a bit more social, and on an awkward whim asked the operator what her favorite flavor of ice cream was.

  “Excuse me?” the operator sounded befuddled.

  “I know it’s random, but I was just wondering what your favorite ice cream flavor was.”