Chasing a Familiar Shadow

by Aman Gupta

  “Should we go there before they move?” asked Emily.

  “We only have one shot. I can’t risk going unprepared. I will need to make some arrangements before we leave,” said Vik.

  “Let me know if I can help,” said Kate.

  “I will,” said Vik. “Don’t tell anyone. I get a feeling we’re being watched at all times.”

  “By whom?” asked Kate, confused.

  “Not sure yet,” said Vik, as he looked out the glass panel at a man standing across the street, dressed in a red raincoat amidst heavy rain. The man soon started walking before disappearing. Or maybe it was just his imagination, Vik thought.

  Vik told her that he would keep her updated. Kate left at midnight when it stopped raining.

  “Did you tell her everything?” asked Emily.

  “You know the answer to that,” said Vik.

  “So what are we not telling her?” asked Emily.

  “Someone traced the tracker to my server. They’re good, and they disabled the firewall in less than an hour,” said Vik.

  “Doesn’t that change things?” asked Emily.

  “Not the important things,” said Vik.

  “So they have the upper hand now. How are you planning to reverse that?” asked Emily.

  “I already have. They just don’t know that,” said Vik as he looked at his laptop.

  Vik left shortly after. Emily asked if he trusted Kate. He didn’t reply but gestured with his hands that he didn’t have an option.

  The next day, Vik showed up early at the precinct to have some quiet time in his office. He saw the lab was unlocked, and Karen was already there, working on something.

  “Hey,” said Vik.

  “Hey, where have you been these past few days?” asked Karen.

  “Just been a little busy,” said Vik. “You look surprised to see me.”

  “The way you left, I felt like you weren’t planning on coming back,” said Karen.

  “And yet, I felt compelled to be back here,” said Vik.

  “So should we start where we left off?” asked Karen.

  Vik dropped a glass slab he had just grabbed. He and Karen were on different pages. Karen was talking about the hand that Vik had procured. Vik was thinking about the moment they almost kissed each other. Vik knew he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about it, but he was confused as to why. He wasn’t interested in her romantically, yet felt drawn towards her, now more than ever. Karen chuckled when Vik stumbled to grab hold of the glass slab as it touched the ground.

  It was the first time he saw her for who she was. A strong, confident woman who probably hadn’t lost a battle in her life. Sure, she must have gifted some wins to the enemy, just to keep it entertaining.

  She had a certain glow in her eyes, which Vik hadn’t seen before. Almost as if she had accomplished her mission.

  “You look good,” said Vik.

  “And?” asked Karen.

  “Why?” asked Vik. “I mean, why is that?”

  “No particular reason,” said Karen.

  “She said while trying to hide her eyes with her brown hair,” said Vik.

  “Nothing. I just thought we could work together to solve the mystery,” said Karen.

  “What mystery?” asked Vik.

  “Why we’re drawn to each other,” said Karen, before laughing a few seconds later. “I meant about Alphas and Betas.”

  “Right,” said Vik.

  She sashayed along in her leather jacket towards him. Vik stood his ground. As she was standing next to him, she took his hand in hers. Vik felt her pulse. It was racing. Her pupils didn’t dilate until Vik looked in her eyes. And they dilated again. If he weren’t attracted to her, he would’ve freaked out.

  He pulled his hand away, trying to regain his composure.

  “What did you learn about the hand?” asked Vik as he walked past her.

  “Lots of things. Take a look,” said Karen as she handed over a file to Vik.

  He studied it for the next ten minutes. He couldn’t put it down, though forensics wasn’t his favorite area of study. He only pretended to like it so that he could control every investigation in case he felt curious. He couldn’t understand the technical jargons that Karen had used in her report but could make sense of the report in general. The pictures zoomed to the microscopic level helped him a lot.

  “As you can probably see in the report, I’ve almost discovered the structure of their cell. It’s not dissimilar to a human cell, yet different in terms of functions,” said Karen.

  “Which cells? All of them?” asked Vik.

  “Nope, only 1 out of 20,000 different types of cells. Humans have around 200,” said Karen.

  “20000? How can you tell by just looking at the hand?” asked Vik.

  “Just a guess. You can see the math on the next page,” said Karen. “But if my calculations are correct and they always are, 20,000 is a safe number.”

  “What are you trying to accomplish with this?” asked Vik.

  “I want to know everything about them. We must if we have to beat them. Their strengths, their weaknesses. Can they die, or are they immortal? If they can die, which cells to target? If they’re immortal, then how? Can they regenerate body organs? Do they have body organs? Do they bleed blood? I mean, they are literally a thousand questions in my mind,” said Karen.

  “Okay, so what’s next?” asked Vik. “How are you planning to go about finding 19,999 cells?”

  “I don’t know. This is exquisite work. The complexity is astounding,” said Karen.

  “Can we track them somehow?” asked Vik.

  “I have no idea,” said Karen.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” said Vik. “Just need to grab a few things.”

  “Okay,” said Karen.

  Vik went to the tech room through the door and came back out a few minutes later with a bag. As he was leaving, Karen interrupted.

  “Will you have lunch with me today?” asked Karen.

  “Yeah, I’ll be back in a few hours,” said Vik. “Will be here the rest of the day.”

  “I meant somewhere else,” said Karen. “Someplace where no one can disturb us.”

  “Where?” asked Vik. “Do you have a place in mind?”

  “Actually, I do,” said Karen. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot at 1 PM.”

  “Okay,” said Vik.

  He could sense Karen wanted something but couldn’t figure it out. It must be important, he thought, since she was focused on privacy. The lab wasn’t the most public place, either. He couldn’t help but wonder if the lunch wasn’t about work, but something else. She was a mystery that he wanted to solve sooner rather than later.

  Chapter 20: Hydra

  The helicopter ride was smooth as silk. Perhaps it felt that way to Anton, as he felt he had won the battle. Katie was gagged and tied up in the back, placed in a small cage. Four men were guarding her. Anton was sitting behind the pilot who took the chopper to its destination, an abandoned airport. Anton was holding a small box in his hand, as he got down from the chopper. Victor Daulton was standing a hundred yards away. The wind generated by the propellers was blowing his grey hair as he stood smiling at the sight of Anton coming towards him with a box in his hand.

  It felt like a victory when Victor opened the box and looked at the chip in his hand. The chip expanded a little as he touched it. He was mesmerized. He asked the men standing behind him to take Katie to the facility. They covered her face before they brought her out of the chopper. As she walked past Victor, she could smell his perfume, but didn’t utter a word. Jay had told Katie about Victor’s favorite perfume. She liked the smell too. She used to, anyway.

  Victor didn’t want Katie to know he was the brains of the entire operation. In the initial days, he would pretend to be captured as well, whenever he would meet Katie. Once when Anton asked the reason behind it, Victor dismissed it as a smart-strategy rather than love. Katie didn’t let Victor know that she had realized after
a few meetings that Victor had been lying to her. She was playing him since then when he was playing her. She was trying to understand Victor’s plans. He had subtly broken the news of her mother’s death to her. Initially, he tried to blame it on Jay to steal Katie’s allegiance. He saw through her face that she didn’t believe a word he had said ever since. Then he pretended to oversee evidence on their captors’ computer that her father was actually innocent and still alive. Katie believed the latter part of it.

  She wasn’t kept in prison behind bars. Rather, she was always kept in a place that felt like home. It was a deal that Victor mentioned that he had managed to strike with their captors. But Katie knew all those houses where she moved around, were really prisons owned by Victor. She felt she was like Alice, her favorite doll, in her doll house. They could move anywhere inside the doll house, but could never leave it.

  Now with the second chip in his hand, Victor felt he was ahead in the game. He knew Katie had knowledge that was critical to finding Josh’s location, while the three chips were the keys to Josh’s backdoor. He just didn’t know in what form or nature the information existed in Katie’s mind. The only other person who might know about that information was Jay himself. There was only one problem. Katie didn’t know what Jay had told her in a moment of passing, was a secret worth the lives of billions of people.

  Victor and Anton got into the car and drove out of the airfield towards Sierra, a couple of miles away. It was supposed to be Verati’s new headquarters, but 1/1 changed that. The project was abandoned for the next six months before Anthony found Victor. They hatched a plan to finish what they had started. However, Victor and Anthony had different ambitions when laid out on a spectrum, which they hid from each other.

  Sierra was nearly the size of Atlantis in terms of architecture above the ground but lacked the resources when it came to talent. Anthony made sure he kept the original research with him and recruited Olivia, the brains behind the research. With the world struggling to breathe and feed itself, there were only so many places to look. He found Olivia using Victor’s resources. She took some convincing, but Anthony managed to turn her against Jay.

  However, over the period of time, Victor compelled Anthony to build Sierra as the new source of power that could run in parallel to Atlantis. Victor spared no expense in building Sierra into the most sophisticated place in the new world.

  As Victor’s fleet made its way through the one road, named Devil’s Tongue, that connected the world to Sierra, Victor admired the blue chip held firmly between his thumb and index finger. Their car stopped in front of 30 feet wide and 20 feet high iron gate with reinforced alloy. The gate itself had heavy ammunition panels hidden in its exterior. It was smart enough to see and retaliate an attack on its own. Sierra was built like a fortress. It was surrounded by an electromagnetic fence that could destroy any aircraft that entered its airspace. Not that the aircraft would know that it had entered Sierra’s airspace. The gate itself was part of a fence similar to the ones used by TS colonies. Sierra was surrounded by massive fence lines, not that it needed it.

  Millions of state-of-the-art reflectors made out of nanotech fabric were seamlessly fused to create a dome that enclosed Sierra. The dome’s primary objective was to act as a cloaking device in the shape of a hemisphere. A flip of a switch could turn the place invisible to the naked eye. Ground infantry heading towards Sierra would only see the forests that lied beyond Sierra. Drones flying above would see the dusty ground that was once the barren land on which Sierra had been built. Sierra was known only to the people who had been there. If someone happened to stumble on the road, they wouldn’t see a thing out of place but barren land in the middle of a forest. The road that led to Sierra, would take them uphill, for one last time, over a steep slope for about fifty meters, blinding them to what lied ahead. On the other side, they would see a huge canyon three hundred meters ahead.

  The canyon was a hundred meters long and deep and spread east through west as far as the eye could see. The canyon wasn’t real, of course. It was just powerful hologram technology activated by the Gate’s AI on sensing a foreign vehicle a mile away from Sierra’s perimeter through the sensors planted on the road around hundred meters before the final uphill climb. The powerful holographic plates, spread evenly like land mines, popped out of the ground half feet above the surface and, and created a mesh-like structure of a quarter million holographic projections coalesced into a 3D illusion of a deep canyon. Each plate created and maintained its own unique, specific projected area of the canyon with dual symmetry.

  Every plate spawned a virtual spherical area of 4 meters in diameter, half of which could be deemed to be above the surface. These advanced plates, synchronized by the Gate’s AI, not only gave the canyon its depth, but also the air above it, as well as its acoustics in terms of echoes. If someone were to throw a rock into the canyon while standing outside, the rock would mysteriously disappear, as most of these projections were static and constant. The rock would be lying on the ground but hidden in plain sight due to the projections created by the nearest plates. Once inside the canyon area, two individuals could see each other only if there were standing inside the same virtual sphere. If a person took a couple of steps in either direction to enter the area generated by a different plate, neither of them would be able to see each other.

  Short of damaging one of the plates, the projection would never change, once activated. It helped sell the illusion that there was nothing ahead. The powerful vibrations of the area scared away the birds. The purpose of the canyon was to scare away an intruder. A common traveler would turn the car around. A depressed, suicidal idiot who would try to jump into the canyon or hope to jump his car a hundred meters, would find himself levitating in the air and dying a few seconds later via a small blast initiated by the drones flying above him.

  The dome itself was divided into various sectors as small as 120 sq. yards. These sectors could retract and extend by will, as per the defense team’s directions, who could monitor the dome from their station, and could retract any sector to make way for missiles released from the ground. The dome could intercept radio waves and alter them by inducing a delay, changing the frequency and their wavelengths, to make it seem like the radio waves had reached the ground before returning to the source, to throw off the radars deployed on airplanes and fighter jets. The dome itself wasn’t protected. It relied on the drones deployed in the sky and the weapons on the ground, to promptly destroy the target before it hit the surface of the dome. The fiber could withstand falling debris and a small fire, but series of missiles or bombs dropped on the dome’s surface would destroy it within seconds.

  But none of it was as impressive to Victor as Sierra’s real assets that lied below the ground. Sierra’s location wasn’t chosen for its pleasant surroundings, but primarily due to its strategic appeal. Sierra was built on top of a classified military base abandoned in the late ’20s. Going five miles deep into the earth’s surface, and spread over a radius of 3 miles, surrounded by forests and mountains, the hexagonal base within Earth’s crust was used by the military for its ambitious projects as well as hiding the world’s biggest inventions. It existed in the top secret files as a safe bunker. However, few knew it for what it really was. President Thomas Clifford was one of them. Victor had learnt from him about its existence and was already working on it behind Verati’s back. Sierra was built on top of this mysterious facility.

  After passing through the Devil’s Tongue, their fleet of four limousines entered the iron gate and drove to Sierra’s tallest skyscraper, at the far end. Victor got out of the car and entered the building with a huge smile on his face. The official name for the building was ‘Tech One.’ It was the technological hub of Sierra. For the past one year, 1500 people spread across 79 floors had only one mission – Recreate Josh. It was Victor’s failsafe if he never got to the real Josh.

  Victor made his way to the 59th floor. A 20 feet tall and 45 feet wide display screen awaited him, as t
he elevator opened. Between the screen and Victor were hundreds of rows of consoles on each side manned by researchers and technical experts, he had ‘acquired’ over the years.

  As he walked towards the screen, the researchers stood on their feet and awaited his arrival. He might’ve had lost his hair a bit, but not his aura since 1/1. He approached Jason Compton, his first-line contact, and one of the few in the building allowed to talk to Victor directly.

  Victor handed him the chip.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Jason, admiring it.

  “Thought I would deliver it personally this time. The last one turned out to be fake when Anton gave it to you,” said Victor.

  “It’s got a hologram. That’s a promising sign. Let’s check this one,” said Jason, caressing his heavy, blonde hair off his forehead.

  He inserted the chip into a reader compatible to read EZ145 chips. Josh itself created EZ145 chips while Josh and Jay were engaged in a competition to create the world’s most secure microchips powered by a biotech engine coupled with nanotech circuits. Josh won that battle. It created them in 17 minutes, including the prototype. Jay was busy making his sandwich before thinking of going on an overnight bender to prepare the blueprints.

  Jason kept staring at the big screen. The reader was connected to a mainframe that had only one program – translate EZ145’s information into a human-readable format. It was on a separate network, to prevent any virus or concealed program to take a crack at the main servers.

  “What would it say if it’s successful?” asked Victor.

  “Based on the chip that you had with you, I’ve created the program to tell us if the chip has the same configuration or not. If the format is the same, then the program would be able to read the sectors and display the data. If not, the chip is fake,” said Jason.

  “Sorry, you need to dumb it down for me,” said Anton.

  “That was the dumb version,” said Jason.

  “Oh,” said Anton.

  “The screen will go blue if the chip is real,” said Jason.