Ganymede

by Jason Taylor

  Jill watched as Tros’s forehead wrinkled in consternation. She could tell that Tros was talking to someone outside the node, so she waited until the conversation was over.

  “What’s going on Tros?”

  “We might have a problem. The feed is starting to break up. Tom thinks someone is interfering with the signal. I’m afraid we may have another spy in the building. If someone is blocking the signal, it can only mean one thing.”

  “They’re trying to break her out?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too. I’ve got to go.” Tros shimmered and disappeared, leaving Jill sitting stunned and alone.

  Elizabeth was getting bored. She’d already figured out what each combination of bits did. It was obviously a video feed of some sort. Since it was minimally encoded and compressed, it must be a high definition signal to somewhere physically proximate. That meant someone was watching her. She decided it was time to put on a show.

  Tom was monitoring the feed when it happened. Elizabeth turned her back to the feed and walked to the middle of the room. She pivoted slowly on one foot, like a ballerina, graceful and lithe. She smiled at Tom and then she winked. Tom sat back with a gasp, totally unprepared for what was about to happen next.

  Elizabeth exploded. The unraveling started at her head, then it ripped her apart, leaving a mess of gore on the floor and walls. Tom jumped up and screamed, pure shock and disbelief. He probed with his interface, looking for vitals, knowing he’d find nothing. He could see it with his own eyes. There was literally nothing left, the little girl was gone. He sent the query for vital signs, knowing without a doubt that it would come back reporting that the girl was flat dead.

  That’s when the carrier signal reached up through the connection and into his brainstem. With a quick pulse, it fried his neurons. He slumped back into his chair, slack-jawed and twitching.

  In her cell Elizabeth smiled, one finger twirling lazily through her dark brown hair.

  Chapter 15

  Jill was the first to figure it out. She tapped into the feed and watched as Elizabeth seemed to explode. She was just as shocked by the sudden violence as Tom had been, but she immediately started analyzing the data. Within a minute her analysis-bot told her that the feed had been doctored. A minute later the feed reverted to show Elizabeth sitting calmly in the middle of the cell, legs crossed.

  “Did you see that?” Tros asked over a private connection to Jill. She sounded out of breath, like she had been running.

  “Yes, that was … unexpected,” Jill said.

  “You can say that again. Who do you think is behind it?” Tros asked.

  Jill thought about the moments leading up to the incident. She thought about the look on Elizabeth’s face. She thought about that wink. It was as if Elizabeth had known what was about to happen and was taunting them.

  “You’re going to think I'm crazy, but I think Elizabeth was in on it.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. I need to perform additional analysis on the feed. I’ll get back to you.”

  When Tros arrived at the control room, she found Tom unresponsive – no breath, no pulse. She triggered a med-bot and got it started on medical analysis. It was quite clear that Tom was dead, but Tros couldn’t imagine what possibly could have happened to him. She stood over his body, trying to put her thoughts in order. The situation was spiraling out of control.

  She triggered her interface and gave the command to lock down the lab. Nothing physical or virtual would be allowed to exit the building until she figured out what was going on. She took another look at the monitor. Elizabeth was sitting peacefully in the center of her cell, eyes closed, perfectly still. Tros tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress a shudder.

  Jill dug deep into the recorded data stream from the feed. What she saw was concerning. She watched it repeatedly, trying to uncover its secrets. First, she watched the visuals. Then she studied the bot analysis. Finally, she reviewed the raw data. The first thing she noticed in the recording was the interference. It appeared random at first, but by the third time through she could tell there was a pattern. It was as if someone was tampering with the stream, touching a few data-bits here, moving a few data-bits there. The result was a pattern of visual static as the feed protocols worked around the resulting errors.

  The degradation in the feed had led Tros to assume that someone was interfering with the signal. After further review, it seemed more like someone was trying to figure out how the video protocol worked. Over the course of several minutes, the interference became targeted, focusing on control parameters and data structures. Then it stopped suddenly, never having caused enough of a problem to break the feed entirely. As an attempt at interference, it was incompetent. As an attempt to reverse engineer the protocol, it was brilliant.

  It was not possible for Elizabeth to know that there was an aperture in the cell watching her, and she shouldn’t have been able to tamper with the video feed. But the data Jill was looking at was leading her toward a very different conclusion.

  The cell was certified to hold cyber-terrorists. Elizabeth was a seven-year-old girl. The analytical part of Jill’s brain was finding all of this incredibly fascinating. The rest of her was seriously freaking out.

  Tros stood in the control room, six members of her counter-intelligence team working around her, focused on reviewing the forensic data, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. So far, they were just as stumped as she was. Tros watched them at work, remaining deep in thought until she was interrupted by a chime from the med-bot, indicating it was done with its examination and ready to provide an analysis.

  She gave the med-bot permission to push the data directly to her node, and then triggered her interface so she could review it. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the representation of Tom’s body floating in front of her.

  “Start analysis,” Tros commanded.

  The image of Tom zoomed in until she could only see his upper body, the lower body cut off at the waist, apparently unimportant for this analysis. The representation showed his vitals floating above his head, biological monitors nominal, all in the green. His heart-rate was high but within the normal range for someone under stress. Brain patterns were all within range, and so were the blood markers. This part of the recording was from moments before the feed interference had started, before Tom had mysteriously died.

  The timer started to tick down. Tom’s heart-rate and blood pressure jumped sharply upward, followed closely by a spike in blood levels of cortisol and adrenaline. It was a classic shock reaction. This must have been the moment when Elizabeth had appeared to explode.

  Tros watched as Tom’s brain pattern re-organized itself. He was accessing his interface, the neurons around his implant synchronized into the unique pattern that occurred whenever someone tapped into the network. Tom made a vital-sign query for Elizabeth. It exited his interface, flowing through Elizabeth’s holding cell firewall where it was translated into a command querying her implant for an array of medical information. Tom was reflexively checking on the health of the clone after seeing her explode. The firewall interpreted the results from Elizabeth’s interface and then routed them back to Tom. That’s when it all went to shit.

  Shortly after Tom’s interface received the response, there was a massive spike of activity in the neurons around the implant in his brainstem. In a deadly chain reaction, over-excited neurons spread the signal to the rest of his brain, flowing from one neuron to the next, unstoppable. Tros watched as the signal continued to ramp up, until it passed a critical threshold, overwhelming the neurons. Sections of Tom’s brain began to die off. First, the neurons closest to the implant were affected, the visualization changing from bright red, representing overload, to black, representing a complete absence of brain activity. The waves of red and black spread rapidly outward, and within a few seconds every neuron in Tom’s brain was dead. Neural overload.

  Tros was stunned. She took a steadying breat
h as she accepted an incoming communication request from Jill.

  “Jill, what do you have for me?” she asked.

  “Tros, it’s worse than I thought. Not only did Elizabeth know what was going to happen with the feed, she was the one manipulating it. I’m having a hard time believing it, but the data is incontrovertible. She hacked the feed.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “I’m still trying to understand that. The hack showed up as interference at first, but once she reverse-engineered the protocol, Elizabeth was able to replace the real video with the fake images of her death. I don’t know what to make of it, but it’s alarming.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Tros said. “Tom’s dead.”

  “What do you mean, Tom’s dead? What happened?” Jill asked, a slight tremor in her voice.

  “I’m looking at the med-bot data, and it appears someone attacked his implant, causing a neural overload. Please tell me that Elizabeth isn’t responsible for that too.”

  “Send me the data and I’ll see what I can find. Boss, I don’t like where this is going.”

  “You and me both,” Tros said, pushing the med-bot analysis to Jill’s node. “In the meantime, no-one, and I mean no-one, is allowed to communicate with that clone.”

  After an hour, Jill was sure of what the data was telling her, but she still couldn’t believe it. After two hours she was convinced. Elizabeth had killed Tom. She’d attempted to hack his brain through his interface, but it hadn’t worked. The mistakes Elizabeth had made in her hijack attempt had killed Tom as surely as if she’d put a needle-gun slug through his head. What Elizabeth had done shouldn’t have been possible. No one had ever attempted what she was doing, much less achieved it. Sure, with a neural probe directly interfaced to an implant, you could do all kinds of nasty stuff. But remotely hacking someone’s implant through a vital-sign query? That should not have been possible.

  Jill let her head droop, hand on forehead. She was going to have to rethink what was impossible now. They all were.

  She opened a connection to Tros. “I have some bad news, boss. You were right. Elizabeth is responsible for Tom’s death. I don’t know if she intended to kill him, but it was definitely her. It looks like a brain-hacking attempt gone wrong.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Elizabeth sent a carrier signal over the top of the vital-sign query. I think she was trying to take control of Tom through his implant. When the attempt failed, it killed him.”

  “I didn’t think that was possible.”

  ”Me neither, but it happened.”

  There was silence on the line for two long seconds and then Tros came back, loud and clear. “We need to recall every single one of those clones.”

  “I agree.”

  “I’ll get on it.” Tros cut the connection.

  Chapter 16

  Jill rode with the extraction squad to the park in East Seattle where they expected to find Suki and her mom. According to the node logs, Gurata had left her apartment on Capitol Hill at 14:07, arriving at the park at 14:33. Jill would have preferred to retrieve Suki from her home, but Tros had pushed the mission ahead, feeling that the situation was too volatile to wait for the clone and her mother to return.

  Jill had never been involved in a military mission and she was nervous. In an attempt to break the ice, she turned to the squad leader and introduced herself.

  “Hi, I’m Jill.” They had sat together during the mission planning meeting, but they hadn’t actually exchanged names.

  The soldier turned to Jill, a serious expression on her face. “Hello Jill, you can call me Alpha.”

  “You’re name is Alpha?”

  “I’m Raven squad leader. My tag is Alpha. We use tags for ease of communication.”

  “Oh. Do the others have tags too?”

  “Bravo, Charlie, and Delta,” she said, pointing at each soldier. Bravo was rolling a copper coin through his knuckles. The coin’s motion paused for a moment as he grunted in Jill’s direction. Charlie wore a baseball cap, dark brown hair pulled into a ponytail, her face impassive. She gave a slight nod. Delta grinned at Jill and gave her a wink. “Nice to meet you, Jill. We got you covered, don’t worry.”

  “Listen up team, there are some things you’ve got to hear before we hit the target. Jill’s got intel to share on the situation with the clones,” Alpha said.

  Jill took a deep breath, folding her hands in her lap so she’d stop fidgeting, hoping they wouldn’t notice her nerves. “We don’t know exactly what’s happening with the clones, but the situation is um… unstable. Elizabeth, one of the other clones, had some sort of a mental break and stabbed her mother. We managed to sedate her and secure her in a level 1 security cell, but… well… something happened.” Jill paused. The members of Raven squad were watching her intently, waiting for her to explain. They were sitting in the vehicle on two benches running lengthwise, three sitting on one side, including Jill, the other two sitting across from her. Jill leaned forward so everyone could hear her as the vehicle bumped and swayed through the grey, broken streets of Seattle.

  “Elizabeth figured out how to hack through the cell’s firewall and into the brain of one of our security officers. It killed him instantly.”

  Alpha raised her eyebrows, looking surprised. Bravo grunted, he looked impressed. Charlie remained inscrutable. Delta’s smile disappeared, replaced by a scowl.

  Jill continued, “We don't think all the clones have this capability, at least not yet. But we don’t really know what they can do. Suki will look like a normal seven-year-old girl, but don’t be fooled. She is unpredictable and potentially very dangerous.”

  “Kinda like you Charlie,” Delta said, breaking the mood.

  “Listen up, Delta. Don’t interrupt,” Alpha barked.

  Jill started up again. “Once we’re at the park, we should transmit as little information between us as possible. We don’t know if Suki can listen in. Probably not, but I think it would be best to play it safe.”

  “Radio discipline people,” Alpha said. “You know the drill. Only transmit when necessary, and keep it short.”

  The rest of the team nodded.

  “Anything else, Jill?” Alpha asked.

  “Thank you for helping me apprehend Suki. I hope it all goes smoothly,” Jill said.

  “Ok people, this is a standard tag and bag mission. You know what to do. Jill will attempt to bring the target in willingly. Our job is to maintain the safety of the mother and any bystanders. If things get hot, we will sedate both the girl and the mother and pull them from the location immediately. Any questions?”

  Alpha waited for a moment and then nodded, leaning back on the bench satisfied. “Let’s get this done.”

  Jill endured the rest of the ride in silence, watching the city flow past the windows. She wondered what it had been like when the buildings had been whole and the streets had been lined with trees. Real trees, not the virtual ones that her implant tricked her brain into seeing when she turned on a filter.

  They arrived two blocks from the target location and the team, plus Jill, exited the vehicle. Alpha took command. The park was located in an underground structure that had once been used to store cars but was now repurposed as a covered, open space for children and families. It was laid out on multiple levels, each filled with simulated vegetation as well as projections of trees and green-space to create a feeling of outdoor spaciousness. As was standard practice for an indoor park, the ceiling was masked with a realistic projection of the outdoor weather, currently a partly-cloudy sky, storm clouds threatening rain on the western horizon.

  Alpha entered first. She was dressed in citizen-casual and she felt naked without her tactical armor, but the mission required stealth and subterfuge more than raw combat power. If all went well, her team would be superfluous.

  Bravo followed close behind, dressed similarly and acting as if he was her husband. She took his hand and they began to stroll, playing the part of lovers, surveill
ing as they walked. Charlie and Delta entered next, taking a different route to extend the search radius as quickly as possible. Jill entered last. She sat on a park bench and pretended to read, waiting for the moment when Suki was found.

  After the team finished a combined circuit of the entrance level, Alpha and Bravo moved to the upper level while Charlie and Delta moved to the lower. The risks of splitting up were outweighed by the need to find the clone as quickly as possible.

  Alpha paused, Bravo by her side. She pulled him into a close embrace, pretending to whisper something into his ear. She used the moment to scan behind him, passing her gaze over several groups of parents and children. Suki wasn’t in any of them. She kept Bravo in her embrace and accessed the park-node, confirming that Suki and her mother were still here. Unfortunately, she couldn’t achieve better location resolution. The thick concrete walls of the structure impeded location signals, reducing their accuracy considerably.

  “Target located,” Charlie’s voice crackled through Alpha’s interface. “I have a visual.”

  “Roger. Moving,” Alpha responded.

  Alpha and Bravo continued their stroll, angling for the ramp to the lower levels, careful not to hurry or look like anything other than a couple enjoying an afternoon in the park.

  “Jill?” Alpha transmitted.

  “On my way,” Jill responded.

  Alpha and Bravo used a downward sloping ramp to drop to the entrance level and another ramp to reach the level below. Due to the circular nature of the route, it took them a little over three minutes to arrive where Jill, Charlie, and Delta were waiting for them. Once the squad was in position, Alpha nodded to Jill. It was up to her now. This was the riskiest and most dangerous phase of the mission. Success or failure hinged on how well Jill could play her part. If she got it right, Alpha and her team would be unnecessary. If Jill got it wrong, Alpha would have to take action, and it could get ugly fast.

  Jill walked calmly to where Suki’s mother was sitting on a bench. “Hello, are you Mrs. Choy? Mrs. Gurata Choy?”