by C. A. Gray
“Then you go!” thundered Nick. “Find your own way, and maybe we’ll see you when we get there!”
That shut him up.
I trembled hard, watching the trees, and begging. Come back, come back, come back…
Alec suddenly emerged, Jackson behind him.
“That was all of them,” Jackson announced. “Let’s get going. The others won’t be too far behind. The sooner we can get to Beckenshire, the better.”
Chapter 14: Jackson
The first pink rays of morning streaked across the sky when Alec and I rejoined the company. I fell into step beside Will and Jean this time.
“We counted five shots,” said Jean, her voice quivering.
I nodded but didn’t say anything. Alec and I had picked them off one by one long before they’d ever spotted us. If I’d been able to think of any way I could have accomplished the same end without killing them, I’d have done so… but at this point, I couldn’t. This was war.
“Were there more?” she asked quietly.
“Not nearby. But if you heard the gunshots, I wonder who else did, too.”
“That’s why we’re all still moving even though we’re dead on our feet, I’m sure,” said Will, his eyes bloodshot.
“So we get to Beckenshire,” I said, “and we make the jammers. Then what? That only helps to protect us from detection, and from government influence. But it won’t wake anybody else up.”
“I’d been thinking about that,” Will murmured, running a hand through his hair. “We still have to come up with a way to wake up the public slowly.”
Alec grunted. “I don’t see why we don’t just blow up the control centers, like Kate suggested at first. Might not be as elegant as your ‘disruptive code,’ but it’ll work.”
“It’s suicide,” Will argued. “Might as well send out an announcement, ‘Here we are! Come and get us!’”
“Plus, then we’d have anarchy on our hands,” I said. “Will’s right, we need something slower, something that gives people some semblance of choice.”
“What if we destroy the repeaters?” said Jean.
We all looked at her.
“Repeaters are devices that basically amplify government signals,” she said. “That way we wouldn’t have to destroy the signals from the source, just prevent them from broadcasting to a particular area.”
Alec narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you suggesting we break into a heavily-guarded building with a pair of wire-cutters?”
Jean shook her head. “Repeaters and other network equipment should be housed in smaller buildings throughout the districts. I think they’re labelled ‘JSTRs’ on the schematics, but I haven’t seen the diagrams for a long time. Hopefully they will have few if any guards, though, because the Potentate wouldn’t think they’d be in any danger.”
Will said slowly, “I’ve seen them on schematic diagrams too, and you’re right, they’re JSTRs.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know where they all are, but if I can get to a netscreen, I should be able to locate the schematics for the various networks… I know where to look.”
“Fantastic, just what we need,” muttered Alec. “A repeat of the last fiasco.”
I thought Will might punch him for a second. “Start coming up with some of your own ideas, and then you can criticize, all right?”
I asked, “What are the chances that there might be working netscreens in Beckenshire?”
“Slim to none,” Will said. “We’re probably looking at another raid on the grid once we get the jammers built. But anything’s possible, I guess.”
“And once we find them,” Jean cut in, “we break into the JSTRs and cut the cables. Simple as that.”
“Once a repeater is destroyed,” I asked, “how long before they repair it and resume sending the brain control signals?”
“That’s anybody’s guess,” Will said. “I don’t think they monitor the downstream signals very carefully, though. Near as I could figure, the attention is focused mainly on the source broadcast systems. Once the signals are propagated to the districts, the local agents tend toward laziness. They may not notice the disruption until the population begins to show signs of independence. That could be minutes or days.”
“Unless they discover us cutting the cables,” Alec muttered.
“What if we make it look like an accident?” I suggested. “We can fray the wires and put some dead rats right near the damage to make it look like it was a rat that did it. That way we could break them without announcing our presence.”
“Good idea,” Will nodded. “That should accomplish the ‘slow’ approach, too—for a few days until the government manages to fix the repeaters, the entire sector that that repeater services will begin to wake up. Then if we do that systematically in every sector…”
Jean nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly!”
“Um, one more problem?” said Alec.
“Of course,” Will muttered.
“How do we get to these repeaters that are scattered all over the Republic? Even with the jammers, we obviously can’t go on foot. And even the Crone pointed out that there’s no way the Potentate hasn’t tightened security on the bullet trains yet.”
“We might have a small window of time in which that won’t matter, though,” said Will.
“What’s the window?” I asked.
“The Potentate’s security before was pretty lax—all you needed was a government ID chip to board, but it didn’t have to be your own. My guess is, he’s gonna fix that as fast as he can: the ID chip will have to correspond to the brainwaves of the carrier after that. That’s a big job though—essentially it means they’ll have to match up two sets of data: the ID chip and the brainwaves of the person carrying it. Even once the technology is in place, that’s a massive amount of data for the entire Republic. It’ll take some time to correlate it all. Until that happens, in theory we should still be okay. But I have no idea how long that’ll take.”
“And once it’s all correlated?” asked Alec.
“If we’re using jammers, it’ll mean scanning an ID card will trigger a search that will come back with an error, because there won’t be a corresponding brainwave to go with it at all. But at least initially, there will be enough bugs in their new system that they’ll probably assume it’s just a system glitch and wave us on board anyway. Remember, most of the agents are your average lethargic, brainwashed citizens. We have time, but not a lot of it.”
The sun rose fully, and started to feel warm. Still we did not stop.
I hadn’t slept in about thirty-six hours, hadn’t eaten in about twenty-four, and had been on my feet for maybe twenty.
That was okay in and of itself. I could do that. I’d gone up to seventy-two hours without sleep once, and fasted for up to a week as an exercise with Grandfather, so that he could teach me not to allow myself to become dependent upon anything. I’d hiked through the night plenty of times before this. I knew what my body was capable of.
Still, this felt harder somehow, if only because I was carrying food on my back and simply couldn’t stop to eat it. Not without everyone stopping for a full meal anyway, which would waste precious time… and if we all stopped, I wasn’t sure some of us would be able to get back up again.
“Hey,” said Will, falling into step beside me again. “Keep me awake, will ya? I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
I glanced at him sideways, smiling to myself. So we were friends now. That was unexpected.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Well, you backed off from Kate yesterday, even though she was all—” he stopped himself. “Well. That was pretty okay of you. So on top of everything else, apparently you’re a saint too.”
I laughed.
“So come on, for real. Tell me a flaw. Just give me something.”
I knew what Uncle Patrick would say to this, or at least the general gist of it.
“Yo
u’re thinking of something,” Will accused. “What?”
I thought for a minute, trying to decide where to start. “I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Iceland. My aunt and uncle were missionaries out there, so they didn’t have a lot of money. I learned how to fish professionally and started selling when I was nine, just to help out. My aunt home schooled me, and my Grandfather taught me everything she didn’t.
“When I was fourteen, I unexpectedly won a scholarship to go to a private school in Reykjavik, the capitol of Iceland. But I turned it down at first.”
Will snorted. “I ask him for a flaw, and he has to go back to when he was fourteen…”
“Heh, I’m getting there. I told my aunt and uncle and my Grandfather I didn’t want to go. I had no interest in Reykjavik or fancy private schools. I didn’t want to be a spoiled little city kid, and blah blah blah.
“But my uncle called me out for lying—to everyone else, but mostly to myself. I’d convinced myself that I didn’t want to go to school, because deep down I was worried that my aunt and uncle needed my income to help support them. Not a lot of money was coming in at the time, and I thought if I left…” I shrugged. “Anyway, my uncle accused me of lying to myself about what I really wanted. He sent me to Reykjavik in spite of me, and I went practically kicking and screaming… but, he was right. As soon as the decision was made and I couldn’t turn back, I realized that was what I’d wanted all along, from the very beginning. I’d just buried it so deep I didn’t know it. I never would have chosen to go, if he hadn’t forced me into it.”
Will stared at me for a moment. Finally he said, “That is the lamest flaw I’ve ever heard.”
I laughed. “Really? The poster child for seeing truth, lies to himself? I thought that was a pretty good one.”
Chapter 15: Kate
I shifted on my bed of concrete, cushioned by an old bedspread that smelled of mothballs from one of the nearby abandoned houses. I was disoriented for a moment when I blinked my eyes open—the sun was already high in the sky, and I was sweating under the blankets.
Beckenshire.
My location came back to me at last. We’d arrived in the late afternoon, however many days ago that was. Most of us could barely stand at that point. We ate what little food we’d carried on our backs, and most of the group just crashed on the concrete of what once must’ve been a parking lot.
How long did I sleep? I sat up, stretched, and looked around. About half of the makeshift beds were still occupied. At least I wasn’t the only one.
I heard footsteps and turned to see Will approach behind me.
“Good afternoon. Feel better?”
I nodded, but noted that his eyes were still bloodshot. “How long have you been up?”
“Couple hours.” He produced a small electronic circuitboard, and handed it to me. “It works.”
I gasped. “Is this the jammer? You built it already?”
He nodded. “Jackson and I did. He got up at the crack of dawn and gathered food for the rest of us too. I came to see if anybody else was up and hungry.”
“He got up at dawn?” I groaned. “How is that possible?”
Will shook his head. “No idea. The guy’s a machine.”
I noted the admiration in Will’s voice, and my heart sank for some reason I could not identify.
Why should I want him to be jealous of Jackson?
Aloud, I said, “Well, I’m definitely hungry.” I stood up and brushed myself off, prepared to follow him.
Only Molly, Brenda, and Nelson stood around a little makeshift stove: sticks and fire with a pot of oatmeal suspended above it from a chain. Presumably old camping gear scavenged from the houses. Molly served me in a real ceramic bowl, albeit chipped, and sprinkled in some fresh berries from the forest, and cinnamon powder from a shaker.
“Today, we feast!” Molly said, winking at me as she gave me an actual spoon.
The other three were deep in conversation when we approached, so I chose a seat further off to the side so as not to interrupt them.
Will sat beside me, and volunteered, “So on the way here, Jean had a great idea. The control center sends out signals in their district, but the districts are too big for the signal to reach to its outskirts. They use repeaters to amplify the signals. So instead of destroying the control centers directly, we can break the repeaters—all it’ll take is cutting some wires.”
“Really?” I didn’t know anything about this, so wasn’t sure what else to say.
Will nodded. “But first we have to find out where the repeaters are located. Which means going on the grid yet again to access a netscreen and collect the information. As soon as we have enough of these babies,” he turned the jammer over in his palm, “that’ll be the next step.”
I sat up straighter. “Oh yeah? Who’s going with you, and when?”
“The usual,” Will said, “Jackson, Nick, Alec, and Jean. We’ll go as soon as we’ve found the parts and built five jammers. In case we’re not all standing right next to each other, each of us will need our own.”
“So you need a team to go look for supplies to build more jammers then?”
He shook his head. “Jackson, Jacob, and Alec are already off looking for them, and then Jackson and I made the first one together, so he knows how to do it and can show the other two. Nick wanted me to stay here with him and strategize the best path to get to Friedrichsburg, the nearest inhabited town from here. It’s still a few days away, though.”
I shoved the last spoon of oatmeal into my mouth and stood up. “I’m going to find the others and help build jammers, then.”
Will seemed almost confused by this announcement. “Why? They don’t need any help—”
“Because I’m useless just sitting here. I want to do something. Which way did they go?”
He looked a little hurt, but Will pointed. “They headed off in that direction.”
I returned my bowl to Molly, who set it in a pile of dishes and smiled at me. I turned back to Will. “Great, thanks. And thanks for telling me about breakfast.”
I set out in the direction that Will had indicated—it was an entire subdivision of houses, but the hunters weren’t bothering to keep their volume down. I spotted the house they’d entered pretty quickly, as the door was wide open and all the windows, too.
“Ugh,” I gagged as I entered, pulling my shirt up over my nose. My shirt at this point was none too clean either, but the house smelled intensely of mildew. The walls were rotted, and floorboards warped.
I rounded a corner in the hall and ran into Alec. He scowled at me, as usual.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to help you guys look for parts,” I told him.
“Well, we don’t need you. You’ll just get in the way.”
“Let her help if she wants to help,” I heard Jackson’s voice from another room. “The jammers were her idea in the first place.”
I gave Alec a superior look, and he huffed as he ducked away.
I followed Jackson’s voice into what must’ve once been a living room, and found him sitting on the floor with parts strewn around him and a textbook open. He used the blunt edge of a knife to scrape a circuitboard clean.
“Where did you get that from?” I pointed at a tiny metal object, and consulted the textbook. “That’s… the trimmer capacitor, right?”
He nodded. “Right. Got it from the inside of a watch. You just pry them open with this.” He indicated a tiny set of screwdrivers they must’ve found too.
I scrutinized the text and the supplies. “Mmm-kay. I can find this stuff.”
“Why don’t I just show you how to make this one? I think Alec and Jacob will have enough for five soon anyway.”
I shrugged, and said as casually as I could, “I know. But it’s always good to have an extra, right? I mean we’ll probably all need one eventually.”
Jackson shrugged. “I guess you’re right. That’s fine, g
o for it.”
I turned away from him to hide my smile. I actually just lied to Jackson and got away with it!
Around forty minutes and two houses later, I’d returned with all the supplies I needed. Jackson and Jacob had moved outside, presumably because they couldn’t stand the smell anymore, and Jackson was showing Jacob how to solder the connections together.
“So the soldering iron doesn’t need power?” I asked, pointing at it.
Jacob shook his head and grinned at me. “Nope, solar powered, how neat is that?”
“Ok,” Jackson told him, “let it cool and then go test it. Just use a screwdriver to turn it to the right frequency.” He handed the jammer to Jacob carefully. I sat down beside Jackson once Jacob wandered off, and dumped my supplies on the ground next to him.
“Go on and build yours,” I said, gesturing at the next set of parts strewn around where Jackson sat. “I’ll just watch what you do and copy you.”
“Ok. Scrape your circuitboard clean first,” he said, handing me a blunt knife as he took one for himself. I obeyed, cringing with the noise. I watched as he extracted his FM transmitter chip from an old radio and mounted it on the circuitboard. I copied him. He extracted a trimmer capacitor from his old watch and mounted it beside the transmitter chip; I did the same. I watched as he connected the battery leads…
Suddenly he stopped working, looking up and around. The movement alarmed me, even though I couldn’t hear anything. “What is it?”
A few minutes later I heard a distant rumble. It grew louder, and then it faded away.
Alec poked his head out of the house. Frowning, he called to Jackson, “That’s not good.”
“What was it?” asked Jacob from somewhere else inside the house.
“A plane again,” Alec called back, his tone ominous. “Pretty sure.” He looked at Jackson and said, “What do you think the chances are that the Potentate suspects we’re here?”
Jackson breathed out slowly. “Slim, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”