by D A Rice
Rei knew the reasons her dad had for wanting this from her, and she found herself softening towards him. After her mom had died, he had needed his own break and his own person to talk to. It had made him better, she thought. She could see why he was determined to find someone who could do the same for her.
She wasn’t sure when she had first started having delusions. It could have been after her mom died, but she had a feeling that she had always been like this. Her mom’s death, and the strain it put on them both, likely just broke the gates in her mind. Her psychiatrist diagnosed her with acute Schizophrenia.
However, Rei wasn’t convinced he knew if that was an accurate diagnosis. He was inconsistent in how he treated her, as if unsure what to think about her mental breakdowns. Rei thought maybe he’d just diagnosed her with the closest thing he could to her unique situation.
Even with the diagnosis, however, the doctor had claimed her to be functional. He hadn’t required her to be under twenty-four-hour supervision as long as she took her medications and talked to him. Doctor Heek hadn’t known that she would stop taking her medications and still be functional enough that he didn’t notice. Maybe her mind was telling her she needed a new doctor. She didn’t know, but she was willing to try anything that kept her off the medications he gave her.
Rei smiled, leaning forward on her arms and nodded once to her dad, agreeing to his compromise. She would try, but not with Doctor Heek. Eli’s words tumbled through her mind again. Rei would see the doctor until her dad found someone better, but she was ready for a change. Her dad smiled back in satisfaction, and they ordered their food.
…
She stood unmoving in the darkness without a name. She had no idea where she was, and she found she didn’t care. It was as if she had been stripped down of everything that made her unique. All she knew now was the voice that whispered in her head and that she was compelled to obey. It told her to wait, so she did.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood where she was. Time was unrecognizable to her, a continuous state that circled around her in a daze. Her head only felt numb emptiness even as her body felt something else entirely. Her legs screamed at her that she was going to collapse soon, and her stomach ached with hunger. None of the pain she felt made it to her conscious brain. It was taken over by something else that told her she did not care. She stood where she was on its command.
When the lights began flashing around her, she didn’t react. When the voices outside her mind told her to put her hands up, she didn’t. She only heard the one voice. When the officers cautiously approached her, she didn’t register their horror when they saw the human waste that soiled her pants and shoes. She didn’t see the way they looked at her buckling knees, which told them just how long she had been standing there. They tried to talk to her gently; she didn’t respond, just stared blankly ahead with the occasional blink.
“How long has she been here?” someone asked.
“We need to get her to the hospital. She’s very dehydrated.”
“She’s not responding. Her pupils are dilated drugs?”
“Maybe, let’s get her in the ambulance.”
Then she was moving, too weak to resist them. Her mind began to scream, and she buckled underneath the weight of it. She barely registered someone catching her. She barely registered being strapped to the bed. She barely registered her own flailing limbs. All she heard was the screaming in her head that refused to let her go. Whose voice was screaming, she could not tell.
Then the darkness finally claimed her as its own, and the cold numbness returned.
6
The Recluse wasn’t his handle; it was just a code name they’d come up with because he didn’t leave one for them. He’d had a handle once, back when Arachnid had originally recruited him: B3oW0lf. At the time, Eli had been trying to provide for himself and his little brother. It made him desperate enough to fall for Arachnid’s lies.
He’d been arrogant when he was the prodigy no one could beat. His way around binary code was unheard of, and he could hack into almost anything without assistance. He’d tested this and been tested by others many times. Arachnid tracked Eli down because they needed the skills he had. However, it soon became obvious to the group that he was too good of a blackhat to be left alone. When he’d had his first run-in with Arachnid, his mom had still been healthy, and his dad absent from their lives for years.
To Eli, Arachnid was just another goal, an exclusive club every young hacker wanted in on. They were the best of the best, and at the time they’d been known as the virtual Robin Hood of the modern world. Once, their goal had been to take down the corrupt and make the world a better place. It didn’t matter if the method was through illegal means, their intentions had been pure. Once the Wolf took over, however, the group soon shifted their focus to systematically taking out the cyber world. Arachnid wouldn’t stop until nothing was left but a dismantled government and chaos. They’d become just as corrupt as those they were trying to stop.
Eli had unwittingly come to them when the Wolf had only just begun to use and change them. They’d found Eli by watching his handle with meticulous attention. The way he coded and overcame every challenge sent his way had intrigued them. Arachnid started sending him small tasks, calling them tests of his skills. When his ability surpassed their expectations, they began to send him more advanced programs to code. Eli aced every test. His ability to quickly adapt their coding to his own had only made Arachnid covet him more.
When his mom got sick, and the bills kept piling up, Eli knew he needed what Arachnid had. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he leapt on it without hesitation, becoming one of the eight. He was 16 at the time.
A few years later, his mother passed. In exchange for Arachnid helping to keep his brother Austin in his custody, Eli designed a program for them. The program could take over any government database, and if necessary, shut it down from the inside.
It was a program that Eli had been working on for years, so advanced that it learned to adapt on its own, allowing it to breach almost any firewall. What Arachnid didn’t know, however, was that Eli had also put a fail-safe into his program. While the group could use it, Eli was the only one who could activate it, and he was the only one who could shut it down.
Eli didn’t understand why he’d done it at the time. He just remembered having an overwhelming need to have that fail-safe in place. In Eli’s mind, he’d placed it there just in case something happened that Arachnid couldn’t control. Why he didn’t tell them about it, or the rootkit, he didn’t understand until later.
The rootkit was a program Eli had installed into Arachnid’s network to test it out, linking multiple backdoors to Eli’s tech. He’d wanted to know if the best hackers in the world could find it. They never had. He’d meant to delete it, but his predictive side warned him not to. That was how his predictions often worked, warning him of things to come without him knowing what they were. He didn’t always understand why he did things, but he always did them anyway.
After Arachnid had launched Eli’s program, it’d allowed them to exploit the many backdoors it found, giving them access to the FBI, the CIA, and the military. The Wolf, Arachnid’s mysterious backer, had taken an unhealthy interest in Eli then. At first, Eli was honored that this man would try to take him under his wing. The leader of the group didn’t take much interest in individual hackers. He only came when he needed to meet with them as a group, his mask firmly in place. The honored feeling didn’t last long.
When the Wolf tried to make Eli code something that made him sick to his stomach, he knew he needed to find a way out of Arachnid. It had been a program that could implant suggestive conditioning into the human brain. A program that could bend the human mind into something else entirely, almost like hypnotism on an epic scale.
All it would need to do was run while people were sleeping, otherwise occupied, or even underneath another program they would already be looking at. Subliminal messaging had many forms
, and it all depended on subtlety. The Wolf claimed to have all the knowledge Eli would need to make the program effective. It would take a long time, extensive knowledge of the human brain, vast experimentation, and intricate coding.
The best one for the job with his almost superhuman ability to learn and adapt, Eli had refused. He didn’t want to be a part of something that could potentially destroy the human brain. The Wolf had convinced the rest of the eight that he was too risky to keep around. Arachnid betrayed him soon after, alerting the FBI to his existence with files upon files of blackmail. Austin was taken from him and placed into foster care, and Eli was arrested on his own front lawn.
The explosion had happened during transport. They had been in the mountains, far enough away from any cities that no one was on the road but the three armored Explorers. When the first car exploded, Eli’s guards stopped the other two to assess the damage. Eli knew there was only one thing it could be; Arachnid. He had no doubt they had hired a terrorist group to attack the convoy and take credit for the destruction.
Law enforcement assumed later that Arachnid attacked because of Eli’s full cooperation. He’d been completely honest during his interrogation. He knew he was a dead man walking, so he’d given the FBI much of the information they had now. Eli knew there was a mole present among them and he liked the idea of rubbing the betrayal back in Arachnid’s face. He had no doubt that same mole had laid the FBI’s transport plans at Arachnid’s feet. Only someone with the inside knowledge would have been able to tell Arachnid where to strike and when.
The second car exploded behind them, causing agents everywhere to duck and cover. Eli knew what was coming next, and he acted fast. Without second-guessing himself, he hit the agent next to him in the face with a well-placed head butt, knocking the guard out. Searching quickly, he found the key to unlock the chains on his hands and feet, throwing them to the floor. Before anyone could stop him, Eli was out the door and rolling on impact as the final car exploded behind him. He flew forward with its force.
When Eli woke up, his head was ringing, and his body ached. As he took stock of his injuries, he could account for at least a few broken ribs and some massive burning on his neck and arms It was luck alone the flames had missed his face. He hissed in pain as he realized belatedly that he’d barely escaped with his life. He sat up, assessing his situation. He had to move fast if he wanted to escape before anyone got there to investigate. He pulled himself into a crawl and made his way over to the side of the road before rolling into the ditch.
Eli remembered taking a moment to breathe. He knew, even then, the explosions had killed everyone else; he could feel it. Eli closed his eyes for a moment before pulling himself up and forcing himself to move. If he didn’t get away from the scene soon, he wouldn’t.
When he was far enough away, he looked back to see the destruction Arachnid had wrought. For a moment it overwhelmed him, bringing him to his knees. The thought that no one could have survived crossed his mind again. Any bodies left inside the vehicles would be unrecognizable. It was likely that whoever did the investigations would not think twice about him dying alongside the others. The explosion was too much of a mess. He had to hope whoever came next would have more important things on their mind than doing a proper body count. Eli turned and fled into the forest.
Finding a cabin out here that wasn’t being used was not hard. Many people used them as vacation homes and the season for that was mostly over. Winter was coming, so many of the houses nearby were empty as well as spaced out from one another. Eli could not have asked for a better means of escape. He found one with a computer and a change of clothes.
Eli utilized both. He was officially dead. He used his skills to check in on his brother, then he disappeared. Now, after seven years, his running was coming to an end. He had spent the first two years planning his subtle entrance back into the hacking world. He changed his style and his signatures, becoming a completely different person.
B3oW0lf was dead, but the Recluse had risen from his grave. Eli had checked in on his brother a lot at first, using his abilities to make sure Austin was well-cared-for. Sometimes he even wondered what Austin would think if he knew that his brother was alive. Would he be ashamed of the criminal his brother had become? Eli didn’t know.
All he knew now was that he had to finish what he started. Arachnid and its leader needed to be brought down. Eli didn’t know the whole scope of the Wolf’s plans. He didn’t know why Arachnid was bent on a twisted form of anarchy under the Wolf’s influence. Eli’s predictive ability had only foreseen destruction.
But he hadn’t been able to do anything about it except test and push Arachnid’s influence. If Eli had done more without knowing what he knew now, Arachnid would have found him. Then he wouldn’t have been able to stop them. He knew he needed to have patience. So he found it in the two years before he’d come back. Eli waited, hiding in their shadows, watching them. Now he knew why his predictive instinct had told him to wait. He needed to meet Rei.
The time to make a move had come. Soon everyone would know Eli was alive. He had taken something and destroyed it. Something that Arachnid thought they needed. Something that Eli, himself, had been tracking since its early stages. Something the government had been working on in secret.
The Genesis Project was gone. There was no getting it back, and the ripple effect that would have was bound to bring him into the spotlight. Eli just hoped, instinct or not, that he was ready for it. He would have to be if he wanted to protect his new friend, for she was in deeper than she knew.
7
“This is all you have on this guy?” Agent Montoya rubbed a hand down her face before tossing the folder back onto the commissioner’s desk. They were in his private office, the commissioner having pulled him and Denbrook in for a private meeting. The FBI had finally come to take over Jackson’s case. “You’ve been able to trace his activity back five years, in multiple states, but all we have is that he’s very good at what he does?”
Jackson leaned back in the chair as he studied the small Puerto Rican in front of him. She was young for the field, not more than thirty years old yet. She was the best at what she did, though, and had a whole team of programmers behind her. Jackson had his team, many well-versed on terrorist takedowns, but he only had Denbrook to translate binary. They were limited on how much information they could gather and how fast. “We may have made better progress had your agency taken more of an interest in this kid before now.” Jackson pointed out as the commissioner pulled the file Montoya had thrown on his desk towards him.
“He made an experiment, that no one was supposed to know about, disappear.” She was pacing now, clearly agitated, “and in under thirty minutes?” She glanced at Denbrook, who nodded in confirmation from the other side of the room. Minus the desk and the windows behind the small grey couch, on which Denbrook sat with his hands on his knees, everything was silver. The blinds were drawn over the windows behind the forensic scientist, and the door was closed.
“I’ve never heard of someone getting through that many levels of clearance in that amount of time.” Montoya continued, “I’m sure that if we had known it was possible, we would have cut this ‘kid’ off a long time ago. How did he even get his program-eating hack in there in the first place? It should have been impossible!”
“Well it’s too late for that now,” Denbrook stood, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Although I do have a theory on how he accomplished this so quickly.”
“It took years for them to come up with that research!” Agent Montoya turned her icy glare on Denbrook, “it will take years to rebuild it.” She sighed, closing her eyes before visibly relaxing with a deep breath in, then out. The agent had fingers on her forehead and a hand on her hips.
Jackson studied Montoya from his seat thoughtfully. The detective had worked with her before; he knew she was a spitfire. Whenever they needed an FBI consultant, she was the one he called. He was very relieved she was the one they had sent. Mon
toya was, after all, his protege. He was proud of her accomplishments, even if she was here to take over his own.
“Agent Montoya, it’s an unfortunate loss. However, unless you can find a way to recover the project, which I doubt, all we can do is find the Recluse. He is probably the only one who can restore what was lost.” Denbrook watched the agent, pulling the sleeves of his lab coat down. She looked up at him from beneath her hand. If looks could kill, Jackson thought. He glanced over at the commissioner, a man just a few years his senior, who grinned in amusement.
The commissioner nodded in agreement, leaning forward. “He’s right, however crass,” he said dryly, giving Denbrook a look. “Whatever we may have- whatever has been done by the Recluse since- we have to work together now. This guy clearly needs to be caught.”
Jackson agreed. He also wanted to shake the guy's hand. The Recluse had avoided the FBI and CIA skillfully, staying just below what could be considered a national threat. Jackson also assumed that the Recluse had just as skillfully stayed out of the bulk of Arachnid’s attention. The hacker had come across as the naive programmer trying to prove himself, fooling almost all of them.
Detective Jackson was the only one; it seemed, he hadn’t fooled. The detective had a feeling, however, that even Arachnid would be looking for the Recluse now. This last attack from him had been intentionally pointed, and Jackson had a feeling it wasn’t for his benefit. It had to have been for Arachnid; it was the only thing that made sense.
A storm was coming, clear in the Recluse’s sudden change of MO and the signatures left in his binary code. All the messages had an undertone of genius to them. Jackson had always felt that the Recluse was testing and prodding, now there was the Genesis Project. Why delete it if not to take it away from someone else? And if that was the case, what did Arachnid want it for in the first place?
There were still so many questions the detective had and so few answers he’d gotten. Glancing at Agent Montoya, Jackson had the overwhelming feeling that she had many of the missing puzzle pieces he couldn’t see yet. Now to convince her to do a joint investigation, he thought.
