Neural Web

by Dima Zales

  As I say the words, the theory that’s been hovering in the corners of my extended mind clicks into place, and I blurt out, “We never found the head of Mrs. Sanchez.”

  Mitya’s eyes gleam with understanding, but Muhomor looks confused, so I explain. “Mrs. Sanchez was the woman in that fateful Brainocyte study who was kidnapped together with Mom. She went into a diabetic coma and died before we met you in Russia, so maybe we never told you about her.”

  “Oh.” Recognition dawns on Muhomor’s face. “I think you did tell me, but I forgot her name and some of the details.”

  “The most important detail is that she was beheaded after her death,” I say, hoping that when I say all this out loud, it will still make sense. “Her head could’ve given someone a chance to study Brainocytes long before we released any Brainocyte information to the world.”

  “And thus plenty of time to learn about Brainocyte IDs by now,” Muhomor mutters. “Of course.”

  “You’re following my reasoning now.” My muscles involuntarily tense, because what I’m about to say next is, to a large extent, responsible for all the therapy I’ve needed over the years. “You were already with us at the end of that kidnapping disaster when we learned who was behind it all.”

  I surprise myself when I stop speaking, unable to continue.

  “His mom was kidnapped by his biological father,” Mitya tells Muhomor softly. “And I think Mike suspects that this new mess is because of those events—and now that I think about it, I tend to agree.”

  “But didn’t Joe kill everyone who had a hand in that?” Muhomor asks, his eyebrows pulling together.

  Images of Joe’s knife slicing my father’s throat intrude into my thoughts, and it takes slow breathing and an effort of will to say, “There were thousands of people involved in that operation. Joe only went after the leaders, and even so, I doubt he got everyone.”

  My friends wait expectantly, though I suspect Mitya has figured out where I’m going with this.

  “In any case,” I say after a pause. “I think I know who’s behind all this, and it’s a person Joe definitely did not kill.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Mitya and Muhomor don’t chastise me for taking my time with the next part of my revelation.

  Now that the theory is in my head, as so often happens in such situations, I don’t understand why I didn’t think of it sooner. Probably because I associate this person with painful memories. In fact, if I’m honest, I often try to forget he exists at all because of all the guilt I still carry over my father’s death. Also, I suspected him of evildoing once before and was wrong, because Alex Voynskiy (now definitively deceased) turned out to be the culprit. I guess being wrong once before has biased me this time around.

  “I think it’s Kostya,” I finally say. In the likely case that Muhomor doesn’t recall who I’m talking about, I add, “My father’s son with his wife in Russia. My half-brother.”

  I proceed to share all the research I did four and a half years ago on both Konstantin (Kostya for short) and my half-sister Masha. Kostya got rich from oil and became even richer when he invested in the right internet startup. As of four and a half years ago, he was still unmarried and a good brother to Masha, a poor soul who requires a lot of psychiatric care.

  “You hacked the computers at the clinic where my half-sister was,” I remind Muhomor. “You told me that Masha worries about poltergeists all the time.”

  “You can’t expect me to remember such minutiae,” Muhomor says. Noticing Mitya’s evil eye, he quickly adds, “But now that you mention it, it all rings a bell.”

  Mitya gives me a sympathetic look. “Is she still alive? I recall you saying that Masha attempted suicide a number of times.”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I haven’t looked up either of them in recent years.”

  “Well, let’s look them up now.” Muhomor rubs his hands together the way he does whenever hacking is about to commence.

  “We can start with public info,” Mitya says preemptively, though we both know it’s futile.

  “You two start with the boring public junk,” Muhomor says. “I’ll learn all the juicy details going on behind the scenes.”

  Mitya rolls his eyes but lets Muhomor do his thing. I search Yandex, the Russian search engine, for Kostya. Glad I can simultaneously read the thousands of hits I get back, I proceed to analyze them as fast as I can. It looks like my half-brother has become even richer in the last four and a half years and might now be on the Russian equivalent of the Forbes list of wealthiest people. Like me, a huge chunk of his new money was made thanks to Brainocytes. He owns companies that develop AROS apps of different varieties, plus a firm that turns out to be a third-party manufacturer that Human++ uses to produce Brainocyte patches for hard-to-reach corners of Russia. It’s amazing how many such locations are in that country and how expensive regular deliveries there would otherwise be.

  “Have you read this?” Mitya sends me a link to an article. “It’s pretty incriminating.”

  I marvel at Mitya’s newfound speed-reading skills; I haven’t made it to this article in my results yet, and have to scroll forward a couple of thousand hits to see where he got it.

  The first thing that catches my eye is an image of Kostya shaking the hand of the Russian president. This probably counts as a KGB connection. Kostya still has a scar on his cheek from when Masha scratched him after he broke the news of what happened to our father; clearly, she never heard the saying about killing the messenger.

  I peer more closely at the photo. I never noticed until now, but Kostya and I both have sharp cheekbones and the same strong chin. I keep scanning until I see what Mitya meant: a big contract Kostya’s company handled for the Russian military. Reading between the lines, I can see how brain manipulation might be something they would’ve experimented with.

  “I have something much better,” Muhomor says after he also reads Mitya’s findings. “Check this out.”

  Muhomor got his hands on the records from the psychiatric facility where my half-sister spent so many years. As it turns out, she’s no longer a resident there, and according to Dr. Ivanov, her shrink of many years, she was “miraculously cured using a therapy developed by her brother.” Dr. Ivanov mentions that she received Brainocytes three years ago to aid her treatment, but it was an app that Kostya used a year ago that led to her amazing breakthrough.

  “The patient was not herself,” Dr. Ivanov’s notes say. “It’s as though she became a different person.”

  “My guess is that he used some mind control app on her.” Muhomor drums his fingers against the glass of the conference room table. “If she starts to misbehave, he just takes over her mind and makes sure she behaves as a good sister should.”

  “Creepy, but sounds plausible,” Mitya mutters. “And get this: As soon as she was ‘cured,’ he finally got married. The wifey is a supermodel.”

  “It doesn’t fully make sense,” I say. “If Masha is merely being remotely controlled, she isn’t cured.”

  “My guess is that he wanted to get her out of that institution.” Muhomor stops the drumming and wraps his arms around his chest, as if trying to give himself a hug. “It’s where the Russian government would put political dissidents during the Soviet days, and it’s just as drab now as it was back then. Even some of the staff are the same sons of bitches who worked there during the good old days.”

  “I just checked out the place, and he’s right,” Mitya says. “Think Russian version of the insane asylum from Sucker Punch.”

  “More like Arkham Asylum from Batman, if you ask me,” Muhomor says. “Not a place you’d want your sister to stay long term, no matter how messed up she is.”

  “He must’ve hired a babysitter who takes over her body like a puppet when she misbehaves,” Mitya says. “This way, she can live a semi-normal life outside the institution—and probably for a fraction of the cost.”

  “But it must be terrible for her,” I say, frowning. “She h
as paranoid schizophrenia, and here Dr. Ivanov says she has delusions of control, which is a fear of being controlled by someone outside oneself. Now that’s her actual reality. It’s like sticking an arachnophobe into a cave filled with tarantulas.”

  “I’d choose her current fate to being in that facility,” Muhomor says. “But that doesn’t make your brother any less of an asshole if this whole thing is true.”

  “Have you been able to locate him?” I look at Muhomor as the likelier of the two to accomplish this feat.

  “I thought you didn’t want me to do any hacking,” Muhomor says, the sarcasm clearly lifting his mood. “To know where he is, I would’ve had to get into his secretary’s email—and that’s illegal and unethical.”

  “You are the mightiest and most powerful hacker, and your services are greatly appreciated by all,” Mitya says with his own flavor of sarcasm. “Now, can you spit it out? Mike doesn’t know where to drive.”

  “I don’t know where he should drive either,” Muhomor admits. “But I just confirmed that Kostya is in the United States, which I figure is convincing evidence that he’s our perp.”

  “Knowing the identity of our enemy is a great start, but we need more info,” I say. “The Catskills span 5,892 square miles.”

  “I’ll keep looking,” Muhomor says.

  “I will as well,” Mitya echoes.

  “Let me talk to our asset behind enemy lines,” I say. “Speaking of whom—Muhomor, did you crack the Wi-Fi around Mr. Spock?”

  “I would’ve said something if I had.” Muhomor looks down. “Whoever your half-brother hired to handle security is very good.”

  “Fine.” I make a mental connection to Mr. Spock. “Hey, bud.”

  “They took us somewhere,” Mr. Spock reports. “I was scared.”

  “Where are you now?” I ask, fighting to keep the urgency out of my Zik messages. “Are the men still in the room?”

  “I smell them. There are more now.”

  “When they took you someplace else, did you smell them also?”

  “Even more men and some women,” Mr. Spock says. I don’t ask how he could smell the difference between males and females. “And bad smell, like at the veterinarian.”

  “A medical facility?” I’m unable to keep the worry out of my message. “What did they do to Alan and Ada?”

  “Nothing with pain,” Mr. Spock says. “Or else I would bite them.”

  “I know you would. They probably scanned their heads, which doesn’t hurt.”

  What I leave unsaid is that scanning gives the bad guys Ada and Alan’s Brainocyte IDs. If that’s true, it means Kostya (or whoever) can now make my family do what he wants.

  “Guys, I want you to make that loophole in Brainocyte security a priority,” I say. “Not that it should’ve ever stopped being one.”

  “I never stopped working on it,” Mitya says. “But it’s a tricky problem.”

  “Same,” Muhomor says. “Don’t get your hopes up. I always look for loopholes in our security, and if this one was easy to find, I would’ve discovered it before.”

  “Just knowing it’s there should make it a little easier,” I say, more as a motivational tool than because I really believe it. “Just keep looking.”

  I open my eyes in the real world and look out the window at the glorious mountain landscape in the distance. Alan and Ada could be anywhere here. We might be passing them right now. It’s an infuriating idea.

  After all this evidence, do I think that Kostya is behind the kidnapping and the bombings? Could vengeance for our father’s death have motivated him to do something so heinous? If it is Kostya, given that we share DNA, does it mean I too could be pushed to do something like this?

  No. I mentally shake my head. I share DNA with Joe too, and I know I wouldn’t do some of the things Joe has done. Still, a small voice inside me tells me that if something happens to Ada or Alan today, my vengeance against the person responsible would be terrifying indeed.

  We drive for another ten minutes in silence. I want to know where Ada and Alan are so badly that I feel like screaming or punching someone—and if killing someone got me the information, I’d stoop to it despite how Ada might feel about it. When I’m just about to burst from the nerves, I’m shocked into alertness by an email arriving into my inbox.

  It’s from Alan.

  Marked as high priority, the email contains a video file attachment. The subject is the same as the single line of text inside: “Watch me.”

  My heart rate accelerates. I forward the email to Dominic and my friends and launch the video file.

  The video pans across a room where Alan and Ada lie unconscious, surrounded by armed men in Richard Nixon masks. One guy isn’t wearing a mask, and his face reminds me of a rabid bull terrier. The scary guy leans down slightly and takes an exaggerated sniff of the air near Ada, as though he’s trying to determine what perfume she’s wearing.

  My hands ball into tight fists. If I were in that room now, I’d break that flat nose into tiny pieces that would hopefully pierce what passes for a brain in that thick, egg-shaped skull.

  “I bet she’s as sweet as she looks,” says the abomination in a voice that sounds like gravestones rubbing together.

  Trying to stay rational, I run facial recognition. He’s a Russian citizen by the name of Boris Sobakin. The fact that he’s Russian further supports our ongoing theory, but the things this man did in Chechnya turn my blood cold. I truly hope he’s a zombie under Kostya’s control; at least what Kostya is doing is motivated by vengeance, not twisted sadism.

  “Now,” says a voice from behind the camera.

  The hair on the back of my neck stands up when all the men aim their guns at my wife and son in a rehearsed motion.

  In unison, the men click safeties off their weapons, and their fingers tighten on the triggers.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “That’s enough for the moment,” the voice behind the camera says.

  The men reengage their safeties one by one. The bull terrier Boris lowers his gun last. If I could, I’d punch his annoying face to wipe away that look of disappointment.

  “Hold the camera,” the speaker tells Boris, and there’s a dizzying maneuver where the room spins, ending with the viewpoint centered on a new face.

  Any doubts about my half-brother’s culpability are now gone. Though he looks slightly older than some of the recent images, it is without a doubt Kostya, a fact facial recognition needlessly confirms.

  “If you had just let the Georgian kill you, I would’ve let them go,” Kostya says in a falsetto voice. He gestures at the camera, but I understand he means Ada and Alan. “I will give you one more chance. Come here, alone, and your family can go. You have twenty minutes. Here are the GPS coordinates—”

  I frantically key them into my AROS GPS app. Einstein estimates it will take me a half hour to get there without traffic, meaning I’m already ten minutes late.

  “Stop the car.” I pop into VR conference room and look Mitya in the eye. “The guards need to get out.”

  “Is that wise?” Muhomor walks up to the big window. “If you go alone, as your half-brother insists, you’re as good as dead.”

  “If I don’t, Ada and Alan are going to get killed.” I stride to the window to join Muhomor. “I don’t think he was bluffing about that.”

  “Could the video be fake?” Muhomor drums his fingers against the glass.

  It’s a good question. Enhanced brains combined with some of the amazing hardware we’ve designed in recent years have led to a revolution in the cinematic effects industry. Particularly notorious are CGI VR porn and its cousin, political scandals based on fake video. It’s common for Brainocyte users to enjoy ultrarealistic VR experiences, such as sleeping with their favorite celebrities (who, unfortunately, don’t participate in the video at all and thus neither consent to the use of their likenesses nor make money). A good chunk of CGI VR porn originates in copyright-lax places like Russia, and I have no doubt
that Kostya owns a bunch of the necessary studios. Every oligarch probably does.

  Kostya could easily have faked that video and even created a virtual reality version of it to make me swear I was looking at the real Kostya, Ada, and Alan. The fact that Ada and Alan were sleeping would make that much easier to implement.

  “There’s no motive for someone to fake such a video,” I say after a moment of consideration.

  “Maybe to scare you or blame Kostya?” Muhomor asks without confidence.

  “I’m already scared. We already knew Alan and Ada are missing. We already suspected my half-brother before we got this video.”

  “I concur,” Mitya says. “I’ve researched tests for video authenticity, and I’m certain this was a real recording.”

  Muhomor and I exchange impressed glances. Mitya’s speed of thought is beginning to reach biologically impossible levels.

  “Relatedly,” Mitya says, “I’ve analyzed the video for microexpressions—the sort of detail that a fake wouldn’t bother recreating—and found no sign of deceit on Kostya’s face. In fact, his face was extremely emotionless. Your half-brother is either as cold as a lizard or has had major Botox done.”

  “Doesn’t that lack of expression point toward the video being fake?” Muhomor asks.

  “Microexpressions are just one of the points I used to determine the video is real,” Mitya says. “Plus, Boris has enough microexpressions for everyone in that video, and I can’t think of a reason why someone would bother with such subtle detail for a minor character in a fake.”

  “Moving on, then. If there was no deceit on his face, do you think Kostya would really let them go?” Muhomor turns from the faux Manhattan skyline outside the window and stares intently at each of us in turn.

  “Alan and Ada didn’t have anything to do with our father’s death,” I say. “After Kostya deals with me and Joe, he might not want the death of a woman and her child on his conscience. The fact that he’s kept them sedated is a good sign. It implies he doesn’t want them to be too uncomfortable.”