Manipulator

by Thom Parsons

  “Do you know where you are?" the voice called out to him once again. Faint, but definitely there. It took a few blinks, but Owen managed to see what was happening. Looking down at him was a doctor of some sort. Middle aged, solid black hair and a terrifying gaze. "You’ve been in a car collision and have been slipping in and out of consciousness. You’re in an ambulance on route to hospital."

  Well. That answers that.

  "Can you see the light that I am holding up?" the man said to Owen, holding up a small flashlight and pointing it into his eyes.

  "I need you to follow this light with your eyes for me. To the left… and the right. Good. Looks like we have normal levels of brain function. Mr Archer I need you to keep as still as possible, we still don’t know what sort of internal injuries you may have, but we don’t want to take any chances.”

  Time jumped. Everything changed.

  “Mr Archer, how are you feeling?” a deep voice nearby asked him.

  Owen opened his mouth and tried to talk, but his entire body ached, right down to his vocal chords. He lay there with his eyes closed in a room filled with silence. Gradually, he summoned the strength from deep within him to say just one word.

  He moved his head to face the direction that the deep voice had spoken to him from. “Annie,” he whispered back, hurting all over as he said this one word. The vibration from his vocal chord sent a shockwave of pain which rippled through his body, forcing him to open his eyes.

  “Mr Archer? What do you remember?” the deep voice asked him. This time, Owen could see the man who was speaking to him. He was a forty year old man with a solid jawline and short cropped black hair. The eyes that were hidden behind the man’s thin glasses were terrifying, and were studying Owen intently from the foot of the bed. He wore a long white doctors coat and around his neck hung a stethoscope. He looked nothing like a Doctor, but Owen didn’t judge on appearances. Regardless of how this man looked, this was the guy that was trying to save his life.

  Mentally, he tried to will together his most recent memories, but even this caused him agony. “In the car,” Archer started to say, speaking in slow, short sentences, feeling pain every time he opened his mouth. “Annie was driving. There was a man. At the side of the road. He had a gun. A hostage. An Execution. I saw him. He had a black mask or bag over his head, and there was a man behind him, but he had his hood up… holding a gun…”

  Consciousness left him. He was pushing himself too far, too fast.

  Darkness surrounded Owen. How much time has passed now? His eyes flickered. Archer could feel himself slipping to and fro, in and out of consciousness, hearing voices talking around him echo in his head. He felt like he was floating, stuck inside a void in his own mind. He finally managed to open his eyes once again, only to see the same doctor that had been treating him earlier looking over some charts from the bottom of his hospital bed.

  “Mr Archer?” the doctor asked, assessing whether or not he was conscious. As Owen locked looked up, he locked his eyes with the doctor’s, giving the man the answer that he was looking for. He walked around the bed to Owen and then sat himself down at the side of him. Suddenly, Owen was aware for the first time that he was completely and fully conscious. His eyes were open, ears were wide, and brain was sharp. Owen was feeling a lot better than he could remember ever having felt whilst being stuck in this room, aside from the minor headache that was pulsing through the back of his brain.

  “I believe you have suffered some kind of… psychotic break from your accident,” the doctor explained to him slowly. “The police interviewed several people from the scene of the crash and not one of them report seeing a man with any sort of weapon. Do you understand me Mr Archer?”

  This time, Owen didn’t try and reply with words. Instead, he just nodded his head, attempting to save his own strength.

  “Now. I'm going to run some tests on you, to make sure that the crash didn’t cause any permanent brain damage. You’re going to be here for a while, Mr Archer, so get comfortable. We have a lot of questions we need to ask you.”

  Owen understood everything that he was hearing, but at the moment, all he could think about was Annie. Why haven't they told me how she's doing? Why are we not sharing a private room together?

  “Annie,” Owen managed to say, speaking just that one word, letting the doctor know that he desperate for an answer.

  “Mr Archer… Your wife…” the doctor said slowly, as he sat still at the side of Owen's bed. “I don’t know how to tell you this sir.” He started to shake his head from side to side slowly, before looking Owen dead in the eye. “She didn’t make it.”

  Chapter Forty

  Date: December 10th 2035

  Location: Owen’s Apartment, New York

  "Nobody’s ever done anything like this before. Ever,” Eli said, throwing the fact out there for everyone to hear. Owen smiled. He liked the way that Eli thought things out. Even if he was a criminal, he didn’t obviously come across as one. He was a new breed.

  “So let me just double check,” Nick asked, speaking up for the first time since the discussion into the PRoGRaM Prison System began. He was just the sort of man who liked to sit back and watch the dialogue play out in front of him rather than be a part of it, unless he absolutely had to get involved. “Even though the Prison System is on a different server to the main PRoGRaM world, it’s still possible for us to connect to it? Personally, I think that it's possible, but I’m not sure how yet.”

  “You know... I’m not too sure on the how either, but it must be possible," Eli said, thinking out loud. He was going over so many theories and hypotheses' in his head that he couldn't put them all into words. "It may take a little bit of research, but I'll tell you one thing for certain. We will make it work."

  Owen beamed with gratitude inside. Another step closer to Alex. Another step closer to the second piece of the puzzle. If only we could find out where Ethan Darkes is…

  “The only problem is, when we do get around to accessing their system, I know for a fact that we can’t be stationary whilst we’re doing it,” Eli explained as he looked around the room. Confused looks were on everyones faces, including Nick's, so he decided to elaborate. “As soon as we set foot in their PRoGRaM Prison System, alarm bells will ring. There’s nothing we can do about that."

  "So we need to be quick," Nick answered, realising the issue with their break-in plan after all.

  "Yes," Eli said from the couch as he pointed to Nick. "The team that runs the PRoGRaM Prison System is highly technical. They all know their coding. As soon as they see that they have a breach within their system, they’re going to be able to track us down. Their first countermeasure will be to track our wireless signal to a network point.”

  “And then they’ll shut it down remotely?” asked Nick, feeling as if he was the only other person in the conversation. The two of them were happy to let Owen and Kate listen in. Hopefully they would understand everything that they were talking about. After all, both of them were trying to lay out their plan as simply as possible.

  “Exactly," Eli said back to him. "It would be just like somebody far away turning the WiFi off in your home. This means that we'll have to be moving. Moving in a seemingly randomised pattern, connecting to different access points across New York so that they cannot shut us down.”

  “Bounce the signals around?” asked Owen, attempting to input into the conversation, feeling slightly left out of Eli's and Nick's geek-off. “We could manually force our system to connect to different network access points all over the world every few minutes or so? That’s possible right?”

  “It's possible," Eli replied. "But it's too risky. It will take us minutes to re-route the connections manually. The PRoGRaM Prison System team might shut us down before we could manually connect to a different network."

  "How fast are their security team Eli? Do you know for sure?" Nick asked.

  "I can't say for definite. But the PRoGRaM Prison System's security coders are bound to be
the best in the business. And that means they'll be fast. They can easily kick us out given a minute or so. And to make it worse, once we get in, they'll see the flaw in their system. We might not be able to get back in the same way after that.”

  The room fell deathly silent. Everyone looked slowly around at each other, the seriousness of their situation kicking in. “We’re only going to get one shot at this,” Owen said, breaking the tension in the atmosphere.

  “We can use my van,” Nick said excitedly, suddenly having an idea and springing to life. "We can drive around the city. We can have Owen and Kate within PRoGRaM from the back of the van. That way, we'd be constantly on the move, and we’ll automatically connect to the nearest network point. There are thousands of access points in this city alone. We just drive in a random pattern around the city, and the network will connect to a different point every few seconds. There’s no way that their security coders can shut us down that quickly. As long as we keep moving randomly that is.”

  “Yeah," Eli called back, filling in another piece of the plan. "That will work. No need to mess around with the system manually either. It will be much faster having it done automatically as we drive around. But still…" he continued, thinking it over. "We'll need to be quick. Whoever's working inside PRoGRaM will need to get in and out as fast as possible. The guys at the Prison System will have a final countermeasure that there’s absolutely nothing we can do to stop.”

  “What’s that?” Owen asked, confused as to why Eli hadn't mentioned this seemingly important point sooner.

  “Once they realise that we’re in the system, and they realise that there’s no way of kicking us out of it, they will wake all of the inmates up from PRoGRaM. There’s nothing we can do to stop that.”

  “Okay," Owen said, realising the stupidity of his question after he'd spoken. He attempted to redeem himself by summing up the plan that they had all come up with so far. "So we need to be quick. How long will it be before they admit defeat and start the process to wake the inmates up?”

  “We have a bit of an advantage there. Because these inmates inside the Prison System are in long term PRoGRaM machines, waking them up isn’t as simple as it is for us. It will take them at least 20 minutes to get any one of the people out of their self-induced coma.”

  “That’s more than enough time," Owen said, nodding as he looked back at Eli. "We'll only need minutes once we find Alex.”

  “Getting in should be pretty easy. It’s getting out that’s the problem. The White Room’s not going to be much help in that respect.” admitted Nick. “It’ll be no good for a fast exit. As soon as I attach the code to the Prison System for The White Room, I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to get it to detach. It all depends on whether the Prisons tech guys notice it. They could hold it there. We can’t take the risk of not getting you out.”

  “I don’t get it,” Kate said quietly and shyly, trying not to draw attention to herself.

  “The White Room works like a magnet,” Nick explained as he spoke to both Kate, and Eli as well, who wouldn't know exactly what their 'White Room' was. “It, or in this case, its code, attaches itself to something. A point in the world. It stays there until I detach it and then re-attach it somewhere else. That’s how I can move you around once you’re inside PRoGRaM. The only problem with attaching it to the Prison System will be detaching it. if their tech guys are as good as Eli says they are, they might be able to latch onto the code and keep us there.”

  “Can’t we just pull the plug if we get stuck?” Kate asked, genuinely oblivious to all of this information. There’s only so much that Ethan has told me about where Alex is.

  “No way,” Eli said, chipping into their conversation. “You absolutely cannot pull the plug when you’re in a foreign system. By that I mean a different system to the one in which you entered. The mind isn’t capable of recognising that change. It’s too dangerous. You might not wake up from it.”

  “I've got an idea,” Owen admitted, causing all eyes to look his way. "Something that I saw recently."

  If we can find a way in and out of the Prison System without the use of the White Room, it may make things easier for everyone. And I think I know just the thing.

  “What’s that?” asked Eli, interested in whatever concept Owen was about to sell him.

  “Portals.”

  Chapter Forty One

  Date: December 10th 2035

  Location: PRoGRaM

  “It’s going to take a little while for me to set this up,” Eli said to Owen as they walked though a hustling, bustling, PRoGRaM version of London’s Trafalgar Square. The place was incredible to see inside PRoGRaM, just like everything else in here. It was so amazingly lifelike with the noise and movement all around them that Owen wondered if there was actually any difference between this and what the place actually behaved like in reality. Probably not.

  The realism was up at full crank as Owen and Eli walked slowly through Trafalgar Square. The two of them were surrounded by tourists, businessmen, and teenagers all rushing around in the urban jungle that was modern day London. Somewhere nearby, Owen could hear somebody playing the guitar. Probably just a busker.

  The digital sun above them shone down, brightening the place up, but that was only because Nick had pre-programmed the weather to be like this. London was never usually sunny. The only thing that England had any guarantee of was rain all year round. But bad weather wasn’t going to help with what Owen and Eli were up to. They should at least be able to see what they were doing.

  Eli picked up his pace urgently, and jogged over towards the towering monument in front of him that was Nelsons Column, located right in the middle of Trafalgar Square.

  “This is the place where we’ll test it, right here,” Eli said out loud whilst pointing at the base of the Column which was up some of the huge concrete stairs. He spoke more for Nick’s benefit on the outside of PRoGRaM than he did for him or Owen. Eli turned his gaze away from the Column and looked directly at Archer “I have a theory for you,” he said as he turned. “About your wife’s car crash.”

  “Go on,” Owen replied slowly. The man had caught him slightly off guard, and he was unsure of where Eli was going with his trail of thought.

  “The three men that you’re going after, Marcus Ortega, Alex Morgan and Ethan Darkes?” he said, posing their names as a question rather than a statement.

  “What about them?” Owen asked curiously.

  “Well, that first name… the man that you’ve seen already. Marcus Ortega? He was there at the scene of your accident. Correct?”

  “Yes,” Owen said, still completely in the dark in how Eli was thinking.

  “So…” Eli continued. “You know what your second man, Alex Morgan looks like, yeah?”

  “Right…” Owen answered slowly again, wondering when Eli was going to get to the point.

  “Let me ask you this; have you thought to check if Alex Morgan was at the scene of your crash? Just like how Marcus Ortega was there? I know it may not give you any direct answers, but at least it shows that there is another connection in all of this.”

  “You know. I hadn’t thought of that,” Owen admitted. He was instantly rendered curious with the possibilities that this opened up to him. He suddenly wanted to explore the theory. Although, just like Eli had said, even if Alex was in fact at the scene of the accident, it didn’t change anything. There’s no harm in looking though, right?

  “Want to go there?” Eli asked, almost reading his mind. “To the site of the accident?”

  “Yeah,” Owen said, nodding enthusiastically, unafraid to go to Redford Avenue this time around. “Yeah. I do actually.”

  “Good,” Eli said, turning his gaze away from Owen and pointing one of his fingers at the base of Nelson’s Column. “Watch this.”

  Right in front of the two of them, a portal opened up. It was huge, at least three meters high and three meters wide. A perfect circle, set right in the centre of one of the four sides of the base of
Nelson’s Column. It looked slightly different to the portal that Owen had seen back at PRoGRaM Headquarters, but as long as the thing worked, he didn't care about the aesthetics.

  “And whilst we’re exploring this theory, we can check to see if these portals work as well!” Eli said excitedly with both of his eyebrows raised, impressed with himself as he marvelled at the portal he had just created.

  Owen looked up at the base of the column where the portal was situated. “It’s a little big,” he commented as he began to walk with Eli up the huge concrete steps that surrounded the column.

  “We can work on that,” Eli responded as the two of them reached the outside of the portal. The differences across the two sides were already incredible, like they were on the border between two completely separate worlds.

  On their current side, Owen and Eli were basked in glorious sunlight, surrounded by people who were completely oblivious to what they were doing at the top of the Column. Yet, on the other side, a completely different landscape befell them. Darkness and rain were the order of the day as Owen looked through the portal at Redford Avenue, which just seemed to be calling out to him from the other side. Best not to keep it waiting.

  Without further ado, he and Eli stepped through the portal. Instantaneously, the two of them walked straight out of London and were transported into the middle of Redford Avenue. Back in New York once again. Back to the place where our crash happened.

  “Well. I’ll be damned,” Owen said excitedly. “The portal works!”

  Eli silently appreciated what he had accomplished here, nodding his head to himself whilst feeling smug on the inside. “On that note. Wanna try and see if we can find Alex?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Owen said as he closed his eyes, knowing that this bit was coming.