The Reborn

by Ray Mazza

  Allison also found it strange that she couldn’t see her face like this. Before, she could see portions of her nose, eyelashes, and cheeks in her peripheral vision of each eye. Now that was replaced by the emptiness of the lab around her. It didn’t feel right. It made her feel even more like she was swimming, disembodied. A fragment of a spirit.

  She told Damon that she wanted to go back. “Daddy, I don’t like it here anymore. Please put me back. I’m ready to go back.”

  “I know, Darling. I want to put you back, too. It’s going to take time,” Damon said.

  “But it hurts.”

  “It hurts me, too.” Damon’s throat choked up. He pinched himself, hard, with a hand in his pocket, trying not to cry. He didn’t want to let her see him cry. To comfort her, he read her stories. She usually chose her favorite book, Where the Wild Things Are.

  Fourteen years ago, before Allison died from the fire, it had been her favorite book, too. He could still hear her asking – in the very same voice he now heard from the simulation speakers: “Daddy, read it again! Max and the wild things! Rarr!” How could he resist? Sometimes he read it to her four or five times before she would fall asleep at night. She didn’t even need him to read it – she’d memorized it long ago – but she liked the way he acted it out, and she giggled when he pretended to swing from the trees.

  And then, as Damon sat there reading a children’s book to a computer simulation of his daughter – a daughter he could not hold or hug or even touch – he wished more than ever to have the real thing back.

  ~

  Weeks passed, and things got worse. Having not been helped by her father, Allison turned to Kane.

  Kane turned her speaker off so she couldn’t say anything at all. If she spoke, she only heard herself in her head. She’d had nightmares that were like this.

  Allison hadn’t felt the touch of anything in longer than she could remember. They’d disconnected her haptic sheet and taken it elsewhere.

  She knew what they were doing to the other simulants. She heard the men in the lab coats talking. She knew that they had much more advanced systems than what she had connected to her senses. Yet they ignored her. What did she do wrong?

  “Why am I being punished?” she asked Kane.

  “I’m sorry sweetheart, but we just don’t have time for you kids anymore,” he said.

  She cried.

  She continued to cry into the darkness as the lab coats left to go home for the night where they’d sit on their comfortable couches and relax in front of a TV. The lab coats had gotten into a habit of forgetting to pause her, but remembering to turn her speaker off. So she cried herself hoarse, weeping for long nights – but nobody could hear.

  Damon thought they were neglecting her on purpose, thought that they were instructed to do this to get to him. And it did get to him. One night, Damon finally decided to reprogram her interface by himself, no matter the consequences.

  After a long night, he’d made significant progress – her initial world was primed for her senses again, and her ears and vocal chords were straddling both worlds. Although her voice coming out of the speakers was garbled, he could tell that she was talking to her friend Oscar again. Even just this was somewhat of a relief.

  Damon was working on her other senses (she was currently blind) when Kane arrived and tore him away from the programming console.

  “Damon, this is your last chance,” Kane said. “You can’t let your emotions get in the way of our progress.”

  “You call this progress?” Damon said, holding up the cheap optical input by its cord. “Emotions are vital to this... to everything!”

  “No, Damon, emotions cloud judgment. They start wars. They cause death.” Kane walked over to the simulation computer – a metal box slightly larger than a fridge with flashing LEDs and covered in odd-shaped slots and sockets. He thrust an electronic key into a panel, and a plate retracted, revealing a menacingly large switch. “And if you don’t want to cause Allison’s termination, you’ll consider your actions and correct them.”

  Kane hovered his hand over the switch, threatening to purge the simulation computer, to wipe Allison clean from it. Damon walked over to him, and without hesitating, punched him right in the face. Kane bounced off the simulation machine, stumbled backward and fell over.

  “You will do no such thing,” Damon said, standing over him. “You’re fired.”

  Kane stood up slowly, momentarily dazed. “Ass. You know you don’t have that sort of authority over me any longer!” Then he lunged at Damon and they wrestled like high school kids, throwing punches, flailing, and swearing. Kane choked Damon with his tie. Damon yanked it loose with one hand and pressed Kane’s face into the floor with his other.

  Allison could no longer see in this world, but she could hear the struggle and the sound made her start yelling.

  In moments, lab coats rushed in and pried them apart.

  Kane glared at the speakers that carried Allison’s howls of garbled, trembling sobs. He reached over to the panel on the simulation computer, and before Damon could stop him, he flipped the “purge simulation” switch with a clack! The computer chirped in response.

  Damon stood in horror as Allison’s voice died from the speakers.

  ~

  When they’d calmed down after the fight, Kane explained that he was only trying to make a point. He hadn’t actually flushed Allison’s simulation computer, but only put it to sleep. He’d rewired the purge switch just so he could make this very point.

  Although firm, Kane had apologized. And Damon had been given a mandated week away from work to mull over what had happened. “Remember,” said Kane, “ultimately she’s just a bunch of electrical charges stored in a metal box. She’s not flesh and blood. Don’t let it control your life.”

  When Damon returned from hiatus, he found Allison up and running again, and reconnected to the input devices. She still wasn’t happy, and Damon had been warned not to interfere with important experiments. Kane had fixed the wiring of the purge switch, and threatened to use it for real if he had to.

  If Damon stayed out of line, he would have to answer to Stonefield, himself.

  As the CEO of Day Eight, Stonefield was a tower of a man with a buzz cut, like an older, corporate version of an army general. He’d stopped by Damon’s house – unannounced – and said very little. It felt to Damon as if he was trying to get a read on Damon’s stability.

  “We don’t want to lose you, Damon,” Stonefield said. “I didn’t think anything like this was going to happen again. Must I remind you that it never had to be this way to begin with? This is your final chance.”

  “What we’re doing to Allison isn’t right,” Damon said. “And why am I not being told the meaning of these tests?”

  “There are some things that are best for you not to know yet. If it makes you feel better, Kane is the only specialist in your branch that knows the bigger picture, and that’s because he’s never defied an order. You have a straighter conscience, Damon, and that’s why I like you – but that also makes you unstable. We will involve you, but you must prove yourself.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better. It’s still wrong.”

  “Damon, you have to keep in mind, morals don’t apply to computer programs, no matter how good a simulation they are. We do these tests to many simulants now, yet you only complain about Allison.”

  Damon couldn’t argue. He just showed Stonefield to the door.

  “By the way,” Stonefield said, “nice place.” And he left.

  ~

  During the brief time when Damon was attempting to swap Allison’s interface back to normal, she was able to talk to her friend Oscar again.

  Oscar hadn’t known what happened to Allison, but she was in hysterics. She told him what the lab coats were doing to her and that they refused to help her. Oscar said he would help, and had Allison dictate a note that he would try to send out so people could hear her. She didn’t have any idea what he meant about
sending it out, but she followed his instructions.

  “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, Eileithyia... My name is Allison Winters.”

  She had just finished when she heard commotion, and could tell something bad was happening to her father. She yelled for help, then began to cry.

  Then she felt the slightest shiver in her spine right before everything blinked. Kane had put her simulation to sleep.

  ~

  A few weeks later, when the internet surge occurred, originating from their building, Kane had found Allison’s note. He reported it to Damon.

  “This is your mess, I suggest you clean it up,” said Kane.

  Immediately, Damon knew what must have happened. Oscar, somehow, had taken advantage of their internet connection... he was the only simulant that had contact with Allison.

  He also knew why Kane wasn’t being obnoxious – because both Allison and Oscar would be destroyed, and there was nothing he could do to stop it this time.

  Damon had given Oscar limited access to the internet. There were a series of hardware units and intelligences in place to inhibit the sending out of anything that wasn’t a request for a web page. They didn’t want Oscar – or any of the others that were allowed internet access – to send mail, voice over IP, upload web pages, fill out forms, or anything else that could draw attention. These checks were in place specifically to prevent the sort of letter Oscar had sent. They even parsed HTML requests and other protocols for hidden messages that might be embedded in them.

  But Oscar had found a loophole. Two, actually. He had scoured the internet for information on networking and the history of its development. He absorbed network hardware manuals and diagnostics routines. He had sent thousands of web requests, and scrutinized their behavior and timing as they traversed the web and returned with responses. He built a fundamental understanding of the intricacies of networking. And then he understood a way to communicate with the world en-masse. All he had to do was wait for the moment to be right.

  Trevor created that moment when he’d given his machine unrestricted access through the firewall. Oscar had noticed and taken advantage. Trevor’s computer became Oscar’s lawless gateway to the outside world.

  From Trevor’s machine, Oscar sent a very specific set of protocol messages to nearby routers in the network with the exact timing and data to exploit a rare, yet very effective, bug that made the routers reset themselves. Then, for only a few hundred milliseconds, while the routers were preparing to power down for reboot, they were vulnerable and could be manipulated through subsequent messages. Oscar had other, equally effective hacks to induce other network hardware to become just as susceptible. After a series of repeated and cascading resets and vulnerabilities from one piece of hardware to the next, the flood of data containing Allison’s note created a feedback loop that resonated, replicated, then overloaded and overheated the lines – not just internally, but externally. It worked so well, in fact, that it had crashed four internet backbones from overcapacity loads before the surge petered out.

  Although Oscar had complete confidence in himself, he hadn’t accounted for the special form of simulant intelligence Day Eight installed between the building and internet. It was as a failsafe to monitor for attempted simulant communications with the outside, and that’s just what it did. It found Allison’s note and replaced all language with random data. So although the document made it beyond the confines of Day Eight, it hadn’t made it in any understandable form.

  ~

  In response to the surge, Damon Winters took charge and did what he knew Kane would have done anyway: he had all the office machines that had any trace of the note destroyed. The note could have been hidden in obscure places, even deep enough that formatting the computers wouldn’t ensure their removal. But it wasn’t the thought of an employee finding the note that was off-putting – it was the thought of plants at the company, or the feds confiscating their computers for an investigation that terrified him… and if the computers wound up back in Fort Meade, someone would recognize the phrase Project Eileithyia in Allison’s note and then Day Eight would lose everything.

  Damon had Allison and Oscar loaded onto trucks with all the other hardware slated for destruction. They had a total of eleven trucks full of equipment. The trucks would drive forty miles outside New York City to a private manufacturing plant owned by Day Eight where the equipment would be promptly dismantled, magnetically wiped, and scrapped for parts.

  Damon, however, surreptitiously arranged for the driver of Allison’s truck to make a drop at a different location – Damon’s house – and have it replaced in the convoy with a duplicate truck containing similar parts.

  When Trevor told Damon he saw the truck turning a different way out of the building on the news, Damon ground his teeth. The truck driver hadn’t listened to his instructions – to stay with the convoy until the bridge toll, at which point it would have easily slipped behind without notice.

  There was no telling who’d seen it.

  Chapter 16

  Alone in The Sanctuary

  Trevor hopped out of bed at 6:00 am with excitement and renewed vigor. Yesterday had been the most exciting and unexpected day of his life. A driver would be outside waiting to pick him up at 6:45. He showered, ate a breakfast of Pop-Tarts and orange juice, and decided to do some more push-ups.

  Continuing a work-out routine he began in a holding cell at the police department served as a reminder that he still had the question of a resisting arrest charge hanging over his head. On the brighter side of things, the push-ups already made him feel stronger.

  The car dropped him off on Damon’s doorstep. He stood there for a few moments after the car sped away down the long drive. He took out the spare set of keys that Damon had given him, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The security panel on the wall beeped twice in response to a radio-frequency ID chip dangling from the keychain, then displayed comforting green lights.

  He shut the door, and felt like he was pushing out a viscous air of sounds from the natural world. Then there was silence. He couldn’t hear the chef, the groundskeepers, or the maid – if there was one – and wasn’t sure if they were around. Trevor didn’t know if the chef, Fredo, lived there. Come to think of it, there was a lot he didn’t know.

  He listened, and thought he could hear the distant ticking of a clock. A funny feeling of tickled nerves fluttered in his stomach and spread up and down his body, like he was on a roller coaster.

  It reminded him of a time when he’d snuck into his high school late one weekend night. A window had been open to a ground-level classroom, and he was able to squeeze through it. He had done it spur of the moment when driving home from a party and was passing the school. Once he got inside, he decided to go to his locker for lack of anything better to do. Walking around the darkened and deserted halls that were normally filled with meandering students and noisy banter, he’d gotten the same strange feeling. The feeling had something to do with being in a place where he wasn’t used to being alone, and where he suddenly felt like he had complete control and could do anything.

  It remained with him as he found his way into Damon’s kitchen pantry, shut the inner and outer door, and activated the lift using the keychain. The downward movement amplified the feeling in his stomach, and at the bottom floor he decided to check out the bathroom.

  Trevor couldn’t remember if it was the door on the left or the right at the beginning of the hallway, so he tried both. The one on the left was locked. He opened the one on the right and walked in. It was a surprisingly normal bath
room for being fifty feet below ground. He half expected it to have a cement floor, a bare light bulb dangling from exposed wiring, and an ancient rusty toilet. Or maybe just a hole in the ground. But everything looked brand new, and much nicer than the bathroom in his own apartment.

  He flushed the toilet, then ran the water in the sink, casually inspecting everything. He was satisfied, and slightly more comfortable now that he was getting used to some of his surroundings.

  Trevor walked down the hall and into the room on the end, Damon’s sanctuary. The lights came on automatically. Neat.

  ~

  At Day Eight, Damon Winters sat at his office desk on the top floor of the building. The floor had no research equipment whatsoever. It was purely for executives and important business meetings. They liked to hold meetings up top because the stretching walls of glass afforded an exhilarating view of the city.

  The executive PR manager now sat in Damon’s office, and they were discussing how to handle the bad publicity from the internet surge. The internet service providers were filing hefty lawsuits against Day Eight and the news media wouldn’t shut up about it.

  Frankly, Damon didn’t care. He felt his time at the company running out quickly, a pinch of sand in an hourglass. It was strange, but he hadn’t been reprimanded by anyone at headquarters for the network incident. He could offer up Trevor as a scapegoat, but then what? He needed Trevor. And then the news would say the company is full of hackers and created the surge on purpose.

  Stonefield held a teleconference to discuss the surge, and it was eerily calm. No fingers were pointed. No blame taken. Everyone just wanted the mess cleaned up and the damage assessed, and verification that no trade secrets were in the open. But it didn’t seem like anyone was worried.