by D. L. Denham
“What do you make of this?” Thursday asked Gibson.
“It’s their headquarters. I never imagined they had this kind of equipment, though.”
Blaster led them into an office in the back. A short wall divided a desk and a few chairs from the rest of the room.
“Wait here,” Blaster said. “Slater won’t be long.”
The desk was empty except for a single monitor and keyboard.
“I am so tired,” Rainne said, dropping into one of the chairs. Thursday took the other.
Ends pointed to Reho’s AIM. Reho tapped its scrambled screen and then held down several buttons in a sequence that would reset it. Once it came back online, the screen scrambled again.
“High security here,” Gibson whispered.
Part of the wall popped out and slid open, revealing a startling presence. His skin was black, every visible inch of it inked with sequences of blue zeroes and ones. The numbers wrapped around his arms, snaked about his neck, and crisscrossed his face. He wore a spotless, black hat similar to the ones Reho had seen in Darksteam, the brim round and short. The blue numbers glowed on his skin, like neon or the glow sticks that Ends had used on the tracks in the jungle. No one said anything and none would confess to staring. The man broke his own awkward silence.
“I usually give whoever I meet time to adjust before I speak,” he said.
Ends moved in front of the others, asserting himself as the group’s leader. Sola’s hands trembled and danced behind her back.
Was it her nerves or was it withdrawal?
“Our employer sent us to see you,” Ends said. Slater didn’t respond. Instead, he leaned back in the chair, placed his hands behind his head, and stared.
“And this supposed employer of yours says that I am to show you how to use these access codes to connect to Phoenix and the Mainframe?” Slater asked. “Perhaps your employer is confusing me with a white hat or even a grey.” He popped out of his chair, sending it slapping back against the wall. “But if you look on my damn head you’ll see that I’m not wearing a white or a grey hat.” He straightened his suit and removed his hat, gently setting it on the desk.
Gibson jumped to his feet and Thursday followed, his hands clenched.
“More magic,” Gibson said.
“Gibson sit down,” Thursday said.
“No. No, I want to hear what he has to say,” Slater said, returning to his seat.
“You have codes to access Omega and can help us get the codes to access the Phoenix but Kawasaki has those codes. And I know you can’t enter Omega without us. You need a crew. And you need someone to who can write a code to block access to the satellite long enough for us to send our immersant in. And you know the story about the last crew member who tried to immerse into the Mainframe,” Gibson said, pointing at Slater’s arms. “I can see the scars under the binary ink.”
Ends leaned closer to the desk and peered at his scars.
“That was years ago. Most who know of it are already dead. How do you know of it?” Slater asked.
“Because our employer was there,” Ends replied. He removed his coat and pressed his fists against the desk, exposing his hands and arms. Reho had noticed the scars before but hadn’t thought much of it.
Slater leaned across the table and studied Ends’ arms and then Ends’ face.
Reho looked at Rainne, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with him. Why would Ends and the others keep something so important from him? It made no sense for all of them to agree to the lie just to keep him in the dark. Reho searched Sola’s face for any sign of shock or surprise. Nothing. Everyone was playing along, playing their part except for him and Rainne. And she was too tired to piece it together. There was no employer. Only Ends.
“I knew every man on the crew that infiltrated. We lost everyone except for three of us and four women we found locked up and experimented on like animals!” Slater slammed his fist next to Ends’ and met him eye-to-eye and smiled. “You haven’t aged gracefully, old buddy.”
“Like yours, my arms remind me every day!” Ends said. “We risked the entire mission to save more than just those women. We lost Blade and Dallas to gain access to those codes that you have hung onto all these years.”
Slater’s hysterical laughter spilled over the half-wall and attracted workers away from their monitors. A handful got up and made their way toward the office. Slater waved them off and returned to his chair.
“Ends?” Slater asked, switching the subject. “Why the name change?”
“When you make enough enemies, sometimes it’s best to lose a name,” Ends replied. “Graven.”
Slater let out another frenzied laugh. “I see what you mean. I was never too fond of Graven anyway. Not sure what my mother was thinking.” He cleared his throat and placed the hat back on his head. “The codes won’t help. Without an immersant who can actually live long enough to make it to the reactor room inside the Mainframe . . . It. Means. Nothing.”
“I know. That’s why we’re here,” Ends said.
“More magic,” Slater said, laughing as he took them past the pop-out door through a private hallway only accessible to the Black Hats.
***
As they walked, Gibson explained the phrase more magic to the crew. There was a story about a hacker who had found a switch labeled Magic and More Magic. At the time, the switch was in the More Magic position and had only a single wire connected to it; any workable switch requires two wires. He flipped the switch from More Magic to Magic, and it shut down the entire workstation where the guy had been writing code. He flipped the switch back into its original position and everything powered back up. According to the story, his employer came in later that day, examined the switch, and said it had nothing to do with the power outage. So he flips the switch and the power goes out. He flips it back to the More Magic position and the power comes back on.
“This is your confession to believing in wizards and elves?” Thursday asked.
Before Gibson could reply and explain the point to the story, a door opened.
Slater turned around. “Welcome to The Black Hats.”
The room resembled Kawasaki’s workshop. Tables were stacked with hardware, and monitors filled every other available surface. Six door-sized towers that resembled OldWorld CPUs lined the back of the room. In the middle, three chairs were suspended from cables with dozens of wires dangling from them. Monitors were docked near them, their black screens filled with horizontal blue lines of binary code.
Two men and a woman sat at their desks. The woman was the first to get up. She glared at Slater as she walked up to Gibson.
Gibson stepped back from her. She stood a foot shorter than he and wore her hair in a ponytail that rested across her shoulder and down her chest. Her arms were thin, and the more Reho examined her face the more gaunt she appeared. She and Gibson stared until Slater interrupted.
“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,” Slater said.
Coder. It was Reho who spoke first.
“How did you survive? What happened to Kawasaki?” Reho asked. The shock of seeing her caused him to reconsider just how real Arcade was.
“I’m used to people trying to kill me. Just not used to them killing my family. Plus, I told you some of those inked codes were lucky.” She lifted her shirt, revealing burns along her stomach near her hips. The black ink was mostly indecipherable beneath three circular chars.
“What happened with Kawasaki?” Sola asked.
“I don’t know. He just started . . . He mumbled about tracking your crew since Darksteam and that he was going to stop whatever you and the Black Hats were planning. Then he fired at Reho and me.” She looked at Reho. “You tried to stop him from shooting me. You faded between me and the blasts.” She fought back tears. “I couldn’t even think. He fired and then was gone. I stayed there for several minutes until Finch was able to bring me out.” She nodded to the black-skinned, robust man with crew-cut hair.
“Her vitals had drop
ped low,” Finch said, concern filled his words. “We can’t monitor location anymore when we immerse into Arcade. Since Log’s latest updates, we—”
“We’ll bypass that update in another day or two,” the other man said, popping up from his chair. His skin was pale, and his dreadlocks were as long as Coder’s hair. A patch covered one eye; the other was red. He looked at the newcomers, waiting for someone to respond.
“Ignore Reeves. He is openly antagonistic,” Slater said. He chuckled then gazed at Rainne. “You’re about to fall asleep,” Slater said as he rested his hand on Rainne’s shoulder. “There are two rooms we use for resting. I encourage everyone to get a few hours of sleep before we go any farther.”
“Thank you so much,” Rainne replied.
“Follow me,” Coder said. “You, too, Thursday. You look like hell.”
“It’s complicated,” Gibson said, smirking and mimicking Thursday’s tough-guy attitude. He dropped into the closest desk chair and slipped on a set of headphones before Thursday could respond.
“You have a room where we can talk?” Ends said, looking around. “All of us.”
***
An hour later, everyone was gathered around a table in a midsize room where Rainne and Thursday had been resting. Ends had spread out the equipment from the taxi and the GPS briefcase.
Slater formally introduced Coder and the two male Black Hats, Reeves and Finch. Slater explained that no one outside this room would ever know what was about to happen.
Everyone peered around the table. Whatever was to happen next, its success or failure rested in their hands. Coder, Finch, Reeves, and Slater: the Black Hats Gibson had heard about since he was a child. None was old enough to have hacked into the Hegemon’s system in the early days though. Reho imagined there had been more of them, some older, at one time.
“Ends, why don’t you catch us up? I have a feeling even your own crew has some questions,” Slater said. “And maybe it’s time for confessions.”
Reho sipped the hot coffee Coder had made them. The night had been long, and there would be little sleep until all the cards were on the table.
“I met Slater more than thirty years ago when he went by the name Graven,” Ends said. “We worked for years as merchants—”
“We were smugglers. Don’t downplay it. We ran guns and even plutonium in the early days.”
“We worked for Kibo II. We ran guns for him until his death. Then the Hegemon appeared around Killa-jaro, and his daughter-in-law was abducted along with a housemaid, both pregnant,” Ends said.
Rainne sat up, her eyes wide.
“My mother. Pregnant with Mar?” she asked.
“Yes. We had heard reports of other pregnant women being taken throughout New Afrika,” Ends said. “Kibo hired us to assemble a crew. Slater and I, along with seven other gunners and an immersant, planned what we all said would be our suicides. But we had to try.”
“You see. No one had ever done what we tried,” Slater said.
“How did you immerse?” Gibson asked.
Slater cleared his throat. “I knew a guy who introduced me to the Black Hats, the ones that were here before us. He had a program that could train an immersant to navigate and fight—not in Arcade or some lesser program, but in a program that mirrored Omega’s mainframe. He called it the Emulator.”
“A training program?” Gibson asked.
“Yes. Its code was scripted by the Hegemon and had been intercepted by accident. He filled in a few missing pieces to make it work, and we trained with it.”
“We planned it out, a way to take out the only domain for the Hegemon,” Ends said. “Without it, they couldn’t remain in our world. They could live for a while in their suits but would be forced to leave or die.” He paused to gather his thoughts. “So we trained our immersant, Blade. He successfully entered the Mainframe while the rest of us stormed Omega’s physical facility in south New Afrika. We blasted our way through the complex. They never anticipated a direct assault, especially one by land. Without their suits, they’re vulnerable to whatever we hit them with; our weapons, modified to work in zero oxygen, ripped through their flesh as though they were animals. We killed more than thirty Hegemon that day. We located the seven prisoners. They were from all over: New Afrika, Eastern Bloc and one from Usona. We tried, but we couldn’t get them all out.”
“We saved four though, each pregnant like Kibo’s wife,” Slater said.
Reho knew the words before Ends spoke them. The woman from Usona, she was his mother. Ends’ attendance that night in the RT hadn’t been a coincidence. It had always felt wrong to Reho. Ends had known Reho’s mother. He and his crew had watched his uncle, waiting for Reho to return to Virginia Bloc.
There was a long pause as everyone waited for Reho to respond.
“How did you know I would return home that night?” Reho asked.
“My job is to gather information and acquire items,” Ends said. “Your arrest in Red Denver was the first bit of information I’d seen since you left Virginia Bloc. We left our job in Brasil early and waited.”
“We know it’s a lot to take in,” Sola said. “But none of this would work without you. Kibo gave up on Mar years ago, and knew we had to—”
“Gave up?” Rainne asked.
“Depression destroyed your sister long before he made that decision,” Slater replied.
Rainne scrunched into a ball. Reho felt her fingers dig into his arm.
“What do you need me for?” Reho asked. But he already knew.
“We need you to train and then immerse. The codes we acquired from the previous mission solved the problems with the Emulator,” Slater said.
“The Hegemon have been taking out major cities in New Afrika for two years now,” Ends said. “You understand that we couldn’t just tell you? We needed you to see it for yourself. What happened in Jaro will happen again. Unless we stop them.”
***
Most had not so much chosen to sleep as succumbed to it. Reho joined the Black Hats and Ends in what Reeves and Finch kept calling the Cockpit.
“You still have the externals?” Reeves asked.
“I do,” Ends said, taking out both devices from a compartment in his case. Finch examined them.
“Kawasaki is out there somewhere,” Reeves said.
“Chances are he knows you're here. But luck is on our side.”
“Why is that?” Reho asked.
“Because he doesn’t know where here is, exactly. And he thinks he is the only one with the codes to access Phoenix. But Slater failed to mention that Coder hacked them a day ago. ” Finch replied, chipping off part of the device and inserted a thin plug into it. The cord connected to one of the devices and monitors near the dangling chairs.
“He won’t be able to track anything here though. Our systems are secure, firewalls that Log can’t even get around,” Reeves said. “So that leaves us with some options.” He grabbed a handful of CD-ROMS and shuffled between them.
“We should do Stalingrad or Verdun. Anything else is going to bore this guy,” Finch said. “How did you get those scars?”
“The Blastlands,” Reho replied. “Where’s Coder?”
“Jesus! I knew you were going to be a real knock-down-drag-out,” Reeves said.
“Coder left to go check on her family. Her mother has been sick with the shakes for several months now,” Finch replied.
“The shakes?” Reho asked.
“Unfortunately, it’s common with our elderly. Living underground comes with its consequences.”
Ends and Slater crouched over a monitor across the room. The plan could work; they all believed that. But it depended on one of them being able to enter the Mainframe and survive long enough to reach the reactor.
“All right, you can sit now,” Reeves said.
Reho took a seat in one of the suspended chairs Reeves had been adjusting. Wires had been laid across the armrest, connected to a medical IV.
“In our practice, the better h
ydrated you are, the better the experience.” Reeves handed Reho a cup of water and two white pills.
“Don't give him that junk,” Finch said.
“You know as well as I do that it increases focus while you’re in there.”
“Yeah, but not on the first run. He needs to see what he can do on his own.”
“This will be different from Arcade. At first you won’t notice it, but when you walk, you’ll feel it,” Reeves said.
“He’s ready!” Finch said.
Ends and Slater looked down at Reho. Wires connected to his head and chest, sending signals to a machine. He could see the rhythm of his heart, his blood pressure, and blood oxygen levels on the monitor. The IV needle rested in his arm, along with a second needle connected to two bags of colored solution, one blue and the other green. Reeves had called one the suppressor and the other the waker.
“It’s like Arcade in that you can injure yourself. Just remember, it’s real,” Slater said, pointing to one of the monitors. Its blue screen now displayed what appeared to be live video footage. On it, a war-torn town burned. A figure lay on the ground, motionless, in the center of the screen.
“This is the Emulator. It’s constructed from programming built by the first generation Black Hats and has been tweaked over the years with coding that Slater pulled out of Omega. It isn’t a perfect simulation mirroring the Mainframe, but its murkin’ close,” Reeves said. “You’ll wake up and be you, but this is what we’ll see.” He pointed to the display with the live video footage. “We can communicate with you through—”
“But we won’t,” Slater said. “We need this to be just as real as it will be when he immerses.”
“Maybe someone should immerse with him,” Finch said.
“No. He needs to do this alone,” Ends replied.
For a moment Reho felt angry over decisions being made without his input, but he did want to go in alone. He wanted to enter the Mainframe and destroy every last Hegemon. He’d never been asked to participate, but if he had, he’d have said yes anyway. He knew that his destiny hadn’t been to race gasolines in Red Denver or start a family somewhere out in the Blastlands. Years wandering Usona had toughened him and prepared him for what was ahead. What seemed to be another man’s war was his own. His mother’s abduction, his own freakish abilities, and then there were the nightmares. There was Jimmy. Whatever purpose he might find, it hadn’t been chosen for him by Ends or Slater. It had called him years before, while he was still in his mother’s womb.