by Russ Linton
A half-hearted smile and she nods. I can only guess by the mixture of exasperation and pride that the reply she withholds is something she's afraid might set me off.
I get it. I'm doing it again. Acting like him. Maybe I am trying to fill those size fifteens.
She keeps it to a simple, "Sure."
"Thanks. Love you, Mom."
It's still on the verge of terrifying to see Mom's smile on Charlotte. I make my way toward the comcen, lost in thought. At the other end of the base, I clamber over the kaiju gopher mound where Vulkan blazed his trail. Passing up Danger's room, I have to backtrack. He's packing.
"So...uh...seen Hound?" I ask.
"Perimeter duty," he says, stuffing a wad of clothes into a duffel bag.
"What about Aurora?"
"Trippin' round outer space. Who knows?"
"You going somewhere?"
"Ain't safe here no more." He punctuates this with a snap and click of a loaded magazine into a gun which he stuffs in his waistband. "Place got ears. Leaky ship."
"Is it safe anywhere?" I ask, still stumbling for the right thing to say.
He snatches the zipper shut, tosses the bag over his shoulder, and comes at the door with enough conviction I quickly step to the side to avoid a collision. "Gonna find out."
"Look," I say to the duffel bag as he strides away. "Don't go. Not yet."
"Been real." He says, not stopping.
"I need your help," I call after him. "I get that my Dad's kind of a dick, I really do. I get that this is some crazy, crazy shit going on here and that you've got no reason to put yourself at risk."
He shifts the bag and turns. "Why are you here?"
Family. Friends. That's why I'm here, right? I had to. No choice.
I stare at the molten ridge of charred foundation and the goopy furrows where tile has pooled. Blackened masses, a sulfurous ice cream dropped on a summer street, I recall the dinette in Emily's old apartment where one of those death machines hovered, ready to kill us. I relive the surge as I led it away. I remember a selfie with a battle droid. Riding a death machine. The power in my hands when I shattered Killcreek's conventional defenses while wearing Black Beetle's armor. Only yesterday, working desperately to rig a signal while enough firepower to arm a small nation held us in their sights.
All those times, I felt...I felt alive.
"I'm here because it's dangerous. I might enjoy this."
I can't believe I just said that.
I can hear the thoughts swimming in my head it’s so quiet. Voices from the comcen drift into the eddies. The twenty-four-hour news cycle tuned to reports of death, violence, the precipice where we all at once teeter and watch the others fall. We watch and say we're glad it wasn't us. Only, it is us. Because we're all in danger of losing our footing. Our only real choice is to take the leap. Admit we never had control to begin with and embrace it.
Maybe that's the real reason Dad volunteered for the Augment program. It had nothing to do with patriotism or even helping others. He volunteered because he knew once the offer was made, he had to take it or he was just pretending he had control. Simple as that.
Danger kicks his way through the rubble toward me. I don't look up until he's right there.
"What you gonna do about it then?"
"I don't know. Find this dude's base and fuck it up."
"Yeah. You need help. Otherwise, you gonna get yourself killed."
DANGER AND I ARRIVE at the comcen and he takes up his normal haunt at the back. He's an observer, not a leader, not a doer. Makes sense with his skill set. Always waiting to see where the next bullet will be coming from before it’s been fired.
Eric's absorbed in his own world. He maybe even completely forgot why we were coming here, not sure.
"Sup?" I say. He jumps and a screen goes blank. No telling what he was watching. I consider asking him to show me his hands. A joke I suppress in order to maintain the ungainly sense of command I might have uncovered in front of Danger. "Brief me on this Shortwave guy."
"Right! Figured you went to drop a deuce or something." Eric's working the keys like a maestro once more. Our list of suspects fans out in a bubble map. There are strong links with Shortwave, of course, and the rest of the post-Soviet crew we encountered in Crimea. There's also a new collection of bubbles filled with bearded guys in turbans, skullcaps, and drab vests. Next to this are pictures of crypto-currency miners.
"Gennady Sergei Kransnoperov," Eric announces in a well-practiced briefing voice. "Lost in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion went south. Your dad was tearing up Spetsnaz left and right along with a bunch of rowdy locals. Sergei was sent in to clean up a Soviet-specific problem before the pullout. It went bad. And it went bad partly because of this guy." The face of the Black Beetle, William Drake, flashes on the screen. "It was all part of the early Augment liquidation. Nothing fancy, Sergei was handed over to the Mujahideen and they figured he'd be involuntarily decommissioned. What they didn't know is that he converted to Islam, got friendly with his captors, then warned a few of his buddies about the USSR's lack of appreciation. Over the years, he's built up quite the following."
Eric launches a new assault on the keys and another window opens overlaying the bubble map. There's a string of Unicode symbols there and one I've seen around the 'net, but never dug deep enough to figure out the meaning. Script kiddies. Seasoned hackers, who knew? The combined symbols are a Latin “c” with a tail facing an asterisk framed by an inverted “c”:
Ç*Ɔ
"My guess is Cyrus and Shortwave founded this little organization."
"What organization?"
"This," he says, emphatically motioning at the screen.
"What's it called?"
"It isn't called anything."
"You mean like when Prince went all media hermit?" So much for my air of command.
"Too soon, man. Too soon." Eric signs a cross.
"It's called The Collective." Charlotte. Or Mom. She's joined the briefing. "And it was all Sergei's doing."
Chapter 21
I GET MORE ACCUSTOMED to the scarred figure of Charlotte and thinking "Mom" as she speaks. Slight frame, knotted flesh along her scalp, and a wispy suggestion of hair, she's so obviously a wounded girl close to my own age that the transition shouldn't make sense. But the way she moves, she speaks, the words she uses, and those persistent self-consciousness attempts to find her non-existent dark hair make it undeniable.
The little voice which says all this could simply be Charlotte reading what I want and making it happen has quieted from a deafening shout to an uncertain whisper. Charlotte's power was unmistakable. She could be dampening that little voice of reason too.
Was I forced to believe this? Did I choose to? Or is it true?
Mom relays her conversation with Shortwave. Apparently, the entire time he was held in Charlotte's psychic stasis at Killcreek, he retained consciousness. This is news to Eric and me. Every other Augment was thoroughly debriefed by Crimson Mask himself. None reported remembering anything but confusion and a dark, horrific confinement.
"Shortwave says he tapped into his abilities even more deeply during this sawm, as he called it. A spiritual fasting." says Mom.
"Sounds like bullshit to me," I say. Mom scowls and I shrug helplessly.
"No, no." Eric removes his headset, suddenly interested. "Crimson wanted psych evals, fitness tests, even power diagnostics. He hadn't been in there as long as the others, but he knew the whole experience had messed with him. And Shortwave was in there for years."
"Let me guess," I say. "Nobody agreed to his tests."
"Hard to convince a bunch of freed lab rats to go back into anything resembling a maze," says Eric. "Plus, word got around we just wanted to catalog them. Learn their weaknesses."
"Maybe add them to a highly-detailed database?"
"Hey, this database lead to their freedom," Eric huffs, finding a reason to examine his screens. "Some concrete stats woulda been dope."
"What else did he say, Mom?"
"Well, he's incredibly intelligent. Or at least sounds that way. He believes his power is an art. He kept comparing it to symphonies—him as the conductor."
"What do you think, Eric? Back me up here. Bullshit, right?"
He stretches and hops out of the Captain's chair. "Heard stranger things. Charlotte, on the systems...I mean, when she was plugged in I told you we'd see crazy spikes all across the net nobody could explain. Then there's our techno-memory cloak." He's scratching his ass now, deep in thought. "You're the one who hooked up Beetle's helmet and knocked on her psychic door. You think he's full of shit about the effects she could’ve had on her prisoners?"
I can't dismiss it. Trapped in stasis, plugged into the Beetle tech, and wired to a psychic powerhouse, Shortwave could've picked up the frequencies connecting the hive. Plucked a few. Seen where they went.
"I'm sorry if I'm not making sense," Mom says, wringing her hands. "The details were confusing and I was trying to pretend I was her. He talked a lot about his life, his faith, his beliefs in the fundamentals of Communism. Everything gelled somehow in the years he spent with her."
"That's this Collective?" I ask.
Mom nods. Eric is half-listening while he digs around the darker corners of the web for any mention, any sign, of this group. We've both been preoccupied and away from our former haunts. Showing up after a long leave of absence can draw suspicion.
Danger comes forward, twirling another cigarette between his fingers. "And here I was thinking you guys had the first private Augment team. Sounds like Shortwave beat you to it." He says it like a truth, an already known variable. I wonder, exactly how much he can see?
"This isn't only about Augments," Mom says. "It's a social movement."
Eric plants his elbows on the back of the captain's chair, his knees in the seat. "Well, it's about as popular a social movement as Myspace. There's nothing out there but this symbol." Eric sighs. "I've been away from my people for too long. All this chasing Augments and ignoring my Torrent quotas."
"Where are you seeing the Collective's symbol?" I ask.
"Deep, deep web. Marianas Trench deep. A few have files attached, but the encryption is dope. Any kind of attempt to crack it before the heat death of the universe would require—"
"Polybius," says Danger.
We nod in agreement, waiting for more from the silent Augment but he settles into a nearby chair and continues to run the cigarette along his fingertips.
"Pretty convenient that right before we uncover all this, Polybius is gone," I say. "Did they kidnap him just to keep us from decrypting their communications?"
"If so, Shortwave's always been several steps ahead," says Eric.
"Nearly two years," Mom reminds us. "All of this was ready to be acted on as soon as he was freed from that horrible prison."
"What else did he say?" I ask.
"He talked the entire drive. He really believed I was Charlotte. Since he'd been under her control, he was certain I already knew and understood everything he was describing. Another reason I couldn't keep up or ask many questions.”
She moves closer and takes my hand. Upset, frustrated, I want to comfort her, but her touch nearly dispels the illusion. Hotter than it should be, almost feverish. This close and those eyes, narrow and a golden chestnut sort of color—not even close to Mom's green. I give her a squeeze and pull away.
"Why did he let you go then?"
She watches where my hand once was. "He believed he couldn't hide anything from me even if he wanted to. Since I hadn't already stopped him, he felt he could trust me."
"Returning a favor for not using his skull as a pudding cup?" I ask. Eric squints. Danger doesn't seem fazed by the out of place desert reference.
"I guess." Mom blushes.
"It was a pretty genius plan. Maybe the only reason we're alive," I say and the eyes which aren't hers, light up. "Only, I still don't get why he felt indebted to Charlotte."
"The whole idea of this Collective he feels he owes in part to her," Mom replies. "Do you remember when at Killcreek she spoke about a family?"
"Do I." I involuntarily shiver. A creepy ass treehouse festooned with spidery eggs holding Dad and Emily. Me on a metal framed bed, squirming away from a naked, teenage version of Shelob. She either wanted me to give her a family, or offer my torso up as fertilizer for a few egg sacks. You don't forget that level of fucked up. Ever.
"Sergei understood her longing, but in a different way. He didn't just want a family of Augments, he wanted to unite the whole of the human race. He kept referring to something called the Ummah and his own communist roots."
"Ummah?" asks Eric.
Once more, our silent sentry exercises his vocal chords. "The community of believers. It's an Islam thing."
"Okay...okay" I say. "What else?"
Mom does it again and reaches for that missing strand of hair, catching herself and folding her arms. "He was creating a family which everyone, whether they knew it or not, would soon belong to. And not just everyone, everything."
"Say whaaaat?" Eric perches like some bespectacled gargoyle. "Everything? Animals and shit? Furries?"
"No, computers. Digital augmentations, he called them. Foot soldiers for what he referred to as a transcendent nation."
"So we're fighting Islamic Communism with the power of distributed networks?" I ask. "This could be the plot of Team America 2."
"Maybe I'm not explaining it right," Mom says, her face scrunching in thought. "You know technology wasn't ever my thing. He's convinced the world governments are ideologically bankrupt, all of them, and people desire drastic change. Technology is how he believes it can be done."
More than a few disturbing thoughts come to mind and the first place my eyes wander are to Eric. His expression almost a mirror image of mine, he's doing the same math, coming to a similar conclusion, as he sinks into his chair and takes up the keyboard.
"Shortwave is Sayrafi," I say, repeating Eric's earlier claim as I approach the control panel. Eric nods excitably and sensing a change in the room, Danger and Mom gather closer. I answer their questions before they can ask. "If you're trying to start your own government, it helps to have an economy."
"A digital, shared economy outside the big banks and government reserves," adds Eric. He's pulled up his files on the Salarium phenomenon. "I tracked him to it because for the longest time, everyone thought he died in Afghanistan. He didn't, he just joined the locals. Converted, opened a radio repair shop. Mundane shit until beetle found him again and shipped him to Killcreek. But where did Salarium originate, Padawan?"
He's asking rhetorically because Eric, myself, and any self-respecting geek knows the answer.
"Afghanistan," I say, mostly for the spectators. "Originally a shadow economy for terrorists, opium dealers."
Eric pulls up several tabs loaded with investigative articles and forum posts focused on identifying the real Sayrafi, the anonymous creator of Salarium. Confirming the country of origin was as far as anyone else ever got.
"This is what I've been trying to tell you all along," says Eric. "Once we located a Russian dude operating within the Mujahideen, it didn't take much to connect the dots."
The leap seems to be missing a few steps. "But when he was here at Whispering Pines, Sergei didn't volunteer anything about his past, right?" I reach over Eric's arm and pull up Shortwave's dossier. There's a big blank between his last reported in-service date to when he was found by Beetle. "You have a decent working theory, but tell me, how do you know for certain?"
"Trust me," says Eric. "I'm the guy with all the answers, right?" He spreads his arms above the console in a fawning embrace. "She speaks to me." The forced laugh at his own joke feels somehow off.
"Whatever, Krieger," I say.
"Sayrafi? Salarium?" asks Mom. "What are you guys talking about?"
Eric jumps in. "Two thousand eight, Shortwave, going by the handle ‘Sayrafi,’ outlined the plans for a cryptocurre
ncy called Salarium..." He stops, checking for support. Mom jokes about being technologically impaired but practically nobody understands the underlying fundamentals behind block chains and cryptocurrencies, especially on an Eric level of technobabble. I shake my head and taking the cue, he spares her an early nap. "It's a digital currency anybody can use and anybody can mine."
"Mine?" she asks.
"Mine, sorta like gold but virtually," I say, not helping the confusion. "There are no banks, no credit cards. Every time somebody spends Salarium, the miners," I gesture toward Eric's cooling tank. "Make sure the transactions are legit. To do that, they have to solve complex math problems and their reward is more Salarium." My own dusty processor bridges gaps between the flood of information, searching for a solution to our own encrypted problem. More pieces fall into place. "Eric, any way you can apply your algorithm on a wider scale? The one you used to uncover our internal mystery signals? Check it against outgoing internet traffic on some of the key exchanges?”
“Sure.” I expected hesitation at such a monumental task. He mashes a few keys and drums his fingers. A sharp, impatient exhale and he rolls his eyes. With an elapsed time of thirty-three point seventy-two seconds later, according to a near-instantaneously filled progress bar, a heat map fills the central monitor.
"Overlay a Salarium miner activity map," I add. "You've got one of those, right?"
"Damn straight," he exclaims. "Gotta keep an eye on the pools." He wilts as the two maps arrange themselves side by side.
It isn't a perfect match, but...
I'm partway to the miner hot tub when Eric shouts, "No wait! Don't!"
"You're compromised. This whole system. The Miners are the infection point."
"But that doesn't make sense," he says. "The code is open source. I can tell you exactly what it does down to each individual line. A hashcash proof of work function..."
Our audience is left mutely observing as though they'd joined a landing party to initiate first contact and their universal translator cut out.