Motherland

by Russ Linton

  "Who released the code?" I ask, my hand near the bank of power supply switches. "Who wants his hipster-islamo revolution to engulf the planet?"

  He screws up his lips and mumbles an answer, "Shortwave."

  "You didn't need a hardware diagnostic on the Beetle's stuff," I say, cutting power to the first bank and watching Eric squirm. "You needed a hardware diagnostic on your hobby over here."

  "Come on, we're making more bank than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet's laboratory-grown love child!"

  I drill into Eric with a stare and without looking, kill the next bank. He groans.

  "Do you know what's happening?" Mom asks Danger.

  "Somebody got played."

  "Not just somebody," I say. "Everybody. There's something wrong with the firmware in these machines." Another bank dies, and the vibration of the miners through the cooling immersion tank weakens to a dull tickle. "We need to isolate and test."

  "What does this have to do with Shortwave?" asks Mom.

  "His AI army. It's already been deployed."

  Chapter 22

  WE WORK LONG INTO THE night. Danger slunk off to his bunk hours ago. With Time Slip on the loose, nobody is relying on his powers, an arrangement he seems perfectly fine with. Before he dozed off, he spent some time outside with Hound. They met up in the parking lot and wandered out of view, maybe for a lap or two around the tenuous perimeter. They carried guns and bug sweepers, searching for weak points.

  Ember checks in, asks how the geeking is going, and jets out before the question has been fully answered. She's already burned the bandages off her leg and gone back on patrol, against Hound's orders. As for the old dog himself, he hasn't shown up inside at the comcen all day. He's been camped outside with Aurora, both running round the clock shifts. Aside from hourly radio check-ins, I can only guess he's the de facto Augment-in-charge.

  Having the base exposed shook the old soldier up. Can't say he's on edge, but he is different somehow. More vigilant than ever, if that's possible. Looking at the list of Augments who've passed through here and who might now either be remembering where this place is or be able to simply ask Shortwave for the coordinates, anyone would be terrified. Regardless of how Eric wants to classify Augments, some real weapons of mass destruction are roaming the wild. There'll be no catching them in a neat little ball. Especially not with our starting pitcher in the infirmary.

  Then there's Mom. I see her on the security feed in the infirmary alongside Dad. They're in separate beds—thankfully, the weirdness of this arrangement has not returned everything to normal—but they've pulled the beds close, arms locked together.

  Since we started our initial briefing, I haven't been to check on Dad. He of all people should understand the need to be lost in work right now: threats ready to converge on our location, an unknown timetable for who knows what sort of Armageddon, and a million different IP addresses to sort through. We have to figure out what Shortwave is planning, and fast.

  "Dammit."

  "Got something?" asks Eric.

  "Nothing yet." Nothing other than the fact that I was doing it again. Being like him.

  I've disassembled a miner, sifting through the entrails for our fortune. A full deck of circuit boards spread across the table we dragged in from the break room and an isolated laptop humming beside them has yielded few clues.

  "Telling you," I say. "Gotta be in the firmware."

  "Wasting your time there, man," says Eric. "People have already been tweaking the specs and issuing their own hacks. Somebody would've seen anything suspicious."

  "What about you?"

  "I have tracked down the main chipsets to a couple factories in China. If they're being modified for anything, it would be in one of those sweat shops."

  "Good for you," I mutter, and I dive back into my time wasting.

  Sensing my annoyance, Eric tries to play nice. "I can dig the theory. These pro rigs got popular about the same time Shortwave was released and Salarium really took off then. Before that, he'd kept it a fringe novelty under strictly nefarious use."

  "They did spread quick." Quick being relative. Miss nearly four years in the bleeding-edge world of computer tech and you may as well be Rip Van Winkle.

  "People were jonesing to set up dedicated mining farms," says Eric. "These aren't hobbyists running apps on their desktops anymore. The difficulty on the hashing made that impossible. Dude, you remember Kiwi666?" I nod at the former D3dm4n$ Ch3$t member's handle. "We called him an idiot for backing out of that Haboo raid because he didn't want to impact his hashing performance. He banked hundreds of Salarium back when all it took was a desktop and a weak ass 32-bit Pentium. We thought he was rolling pennies. Cashed them in for millions," Eric says forcefully, a touch of bitterness to his claim.

  If only we could all predict the future. Ground floor entry for every opportunity. Buy stock in Google back when Yahoo was supposedly the shit, or even play the market on Facebook, that giant time sink for whiny grandparents. Hell, place a bet on the Cubs breaking a 108-year-old curse. Or go on a road trip knowing your mom truly is possessing the body of a psychic that makes River Tam look tame and choose not to be a dick and bitch slap her. If only.

  "Wait a minute." I bust open my aircrack-ng hacking suite. Hammering out the necessary commands, I set my little narc on promiscuous and head over to the miner hot tub.

  "Just one, right? That was the deal?" Eric calls after me, concerned. "When we figure out nothing's wrong, we want those puppies plugged right back in, makin' it rain!"

  "Jesus, Eric," I say as I yank the data cables to the first group and put a hand over the power supply. "Forget your mad money scheme. I'm going to re-boot these with factory settings and you're going to keep an eye on the logs."

  "Uh, Spence, remember, no Wi-Fi here. Nada. It's totally compromised, as you pointed out. And we use the pipe because the Wi-Fi got filtered out with the Charlotte cloak."

  "Got filtered." I stress the past tense. "Who knows now? I've set the laptop up as an evil twin access point. I want to know what happens the second these miners go live."

  "Okay, okay." Eric exits the Captain's chair and stretches with a series of pops and creaks. "No way the Federation didn't have some Vulcan enforcing ergonomics." A few more cracks of his neck, and he's at the table with my gear. "Anyway, it's called a log, Spence. Instead of making your own, you can just come read the..." My palm sends him backing away. "Aye, aye."

  I hit the switch. It's more interesting to watch his reaction than to stare at the scrolling text. By the raised eyebrows, I'm on to something with all the presumed time wasting.

  "Oh! Look at you, my precioussss." Eric presses toward the screen, scrolling text cascading down his glasses. I saunter toward him ready to accept victory, and he jabs a finger in the air with a demand. "Cycle them!" I flick the switch and they power down. One more time through, and his interest deepens. "Now factory default."

  I hit the hard reset on the miner to restore the defaults, bringing up only those settings which were loaded directly from the ROM. "And?"

  Eric gropes for my folding chair, an abomination on his bridge, and sits in front of the laptop. His eyes wander to the pile of cards before he's even done typing and he pulls one out, examining the circuitry. "Virus. Only running on the initial boot."

  "Where's that virus?" I ask.

  Eric's eyes dart to the screen and he drowns a couple of syllables in a dramatic cough.

  "Where?"

  "Firmware," he mumbles. "But, in my defense, it's hiding itself after the initial boot! Another chip must be tasked with deploying the virus before it sends a clean version of the settings to cover its tracks. It explains why nobody, and I mean nobody, tweaking the firmware has found it. What are you emulating with your little evil twin here?"

  "Your standard router. They sport different company names on the outside, but they share a lot of the same guts."

  "Uh huh," he replies, half listening to the answer he already knew. "It's compromising
the access point and searching for any vulnerable devices in range. If this works..."

  "It means everyone with a miner unleashed a virus which takes up residence on their router."

  "Fucking sexy," Eric breathes. "And then it infects every device that comes within range. Christ, that was the traffic we overlaid earlier."

  We're drawn to the main console and the miner heat map. Expanding red pins towering from the holographic globe display the miner activity in every country. And that's just the miners. The hardware.

  From these little toasters made to mint money, Shortwave's spreading a virus to the rest of the world's wireless tech through the equivalent of a digital sneeze. Shortwave doesn't just own these miners, but he's pwned the entire internet of things. As in all the things. Millions of devices which have strayed into the range of whatever access point these miners are on have been infected only to carry the same virus to the next access point. From your cable modem at home, to your smartphone, straight to your local venti mocha frappe provider.

  "It's sooo beautiful," sniffs Eric. He tips his glasses and swipes a finger under his eye.

  "Sure, if I'd have done it. Or you." I consider Eric's damp admiration. "On second thought, not you. We've got to stop this."

  "How? You'd have better luck convincing the state of California to vaccinate."

  "You might be onto something. I've got an in with a former employee of the CDC."

  "How can she help?"

  "This map," I point to the miner distribution map, "can only help so much. We can get a general location, like you said. Using her expertise, maybe we can get a better idea of the scope or trace the virus back to the first pool. That's not going to be some guy who placed an order online, it'll be somebody who knows Shortwave. Maybe the man himself."

  "Could be at one of those factories I mentioned."

  "You're right," I say. "Maybe I'll go check them out."

  "Whoa, hold on now." Eric's on his feet. "You can't just, just assign yourself to your own mission. There are protocols for these things. Parameters. Briefings!" Chest swelled, he's left our casual discussion. We're a long way from his basement, torrenting warez and hacking satellite television, we're at his J-O-B.

  "All right, Captain Pike. Who do I ask for the forms and the permission slip? Do we raise Hound on the radio?"

  "Hound?" he asks.

  I check the room to make sure nobody else is there. "I mean, I could bug Dad, but he's not liable to agree even though he already put me on away team status. Danger's checked out. Ember's well, Ember. And I don't know if Aurora is here most of the time."

  "Dude! You ask me," he says, his voice shrinking.

  I'm laughing before I catch the hurt in his glare as he swivels back toward the laptop and begins shutting down the test environment. He jumps up and stalks toward our test miners, shutting the rest of them down as well with a vicious swipe.

  "I work hard here. Do you have any idea?" A sideways glance and he's huffing toward his perch. "That's right, of course you do. You're Spencer f'ing Harrington, son of an Augment."

  "Watch it." Sure, I feel like a dick but he's heading into extremely unsafe territory.

  "I'm not gonna watch it," he grumbles. "Watch this." The main screen flares to black and a message scrolls across it: Permission Denied. He leans awkwardly over the arm of his chair, his face twisted. "You abandoned me after all the time I spent trying to find you. We finally get this chance to make something of ourselves, work together, and you start pissing around here like you own the place! And all those damn Augments going on and on about how you saved them. Chip off the 'ol block. Your Dad constantly talking about how you could be such a fucking leader, God! Me, the glorified secretary punching keys to save their asses and you off in some lecture hall pretending to save your mom."

  "Eric—"

  "You didn't even need to save her. She came back to you and why? So I could lose..."

  He slumps into his digital life, his controls, and maybe the only ones he has, and I'm glad because too much of what he said rang true. Shame, rage, I don't know what to feel but it all sucks.

  "I'm sorry. I never meant to dismiss what you do here."

  He backhands a one finger salute and then swings it down to hit the comms button on the arm of his chair. "Base to Hound."

  "Go 'head."

  "Golden Boy here wants a new assignment."

  "10-9?"

  "Spencer. He wants to go play Augment. He's got a plan that'll save the universe or some shit."

  "Ummm... 10-4. Tell him to meet me in the infirmary."

  I leave without even trying to calm Eric down. It took everything I had to keep from pitching my own heat. Hallways quiet, their sanitary scent now spoiled by the taint of brimstone venting from the volcanic floor blister, I can't say for sure what's going on here anymore. He's right. I left once and never wanted to come back. I abandoned him here. And now, I can't say I'll be ready to leave again anytime soon.

  Chapter 23

  I'LL GO," SAYS THE Crimson Mask.

  Dad moves before the protests start. I know he's gotta be in some serious pain but that's not what registers. It's surprise. When was the last time he felt physical pain? He'd come home banged up before. Like the time he'd fended off Djinn's plasma blasts. Those burns, as nasty as they were, he wore with his characteristic tough guy attitude. But you could almost watch them heal.

  Now, Crimson Mask leans heavily on his ninety-pound spouse as he staggers off the bed.

  "Honey, you can't get up."

  "Soldier, get yer ass back in that bunk," Hound orders.

  Dad stumbles and forces Mom against the adjacent bed. Leaning on his good arm, he creeps upright and mumbles apologies. Augments were engineered for zero downtime. Always mission ready. Accepting this new state is going to be near impossible for him.

  "They're right, and you know it," I say.

  "I've just been on my back too long. I'll be fine. Give me a minute."

  I cross to help him stand and to dislodge Mom who could snap in half at any moment. She's rediscovered the unique worry I spent my childhood trying to distract her from.

  "I could give you three months, and you wouldn't be ready, Dad. You need more rest."

  His massive chest expands and he sends a sharp breath toward the ceiling. "I was a soldier before being picked for the program and still am. I'll manage."

  Hound offers no argument, just scrunches those wispy brows. At ninety-something, he's been playing field medic and perimeter patrol. A man's man who boils his coffee and smokes his Lucky Strikes because that's what they gave him during "the war." He's not going to try and derail this machismo train but knows enough to stay off the tracks.

  "You need rest," I grumble, shifting his weight against me. "You need surgery. You don't need to be going on missions."

  "And you do?" asks Mom. She's not happy with any of the ideas being floated. Can't say I blame her.

  "I'm your technical expert, right?" Dad's relented somewhat by sitting on the edge of his bed and I take a breather. "Well, one of them anyway. And we're going to a factory with technical stuff."

  The guy who refuses to use the microwave pipes up. "I can go. At least scout it out."

  "Me, Aurora, and Danger," I repeat my earlier plan. "Transport, early warning system, and we're all good. That leaves you with Hound, Ember, and Eric to secure the base, something I have zero skills with. Unless you want to send Eric. He seems eager."

  "Can't happen." Hound's quick on the response. A little too quick. Since when does he want quality time with Eric? "We need him to stay 'round here."

  "Looks like it has to be me then," I say.

  The veteran goes back to keeping clear of the tracks. He's tried to shut me down once before, and I went on to bust open the Killcreek conspiracy. Dad's silently weighing me with that intense stare I got used to as a toddler. I think I'm nearly in the clear until Mom interrupts.

  "I've already almost lost one of you." She leaves it at that and doe
sn't make any demands. She has to understand, we've both suffered through losing her. That's just the way this messed up family operates.

  "Go," Dad says. I feel a surge of excitement probably as mundane as if any other kid asked his parents to borrow the car. Yeah, this is definitely how we operate. "Take comms and check in every half hour—"

  Mom takes his hand. "Fifteen minutes."

  "—fifteen minutes. Remember this will be recon only. We're looking for intel on Shortwave's plans and to get the lay of the land for a rescue operation. Polybius is not our objective on this run. Not being detected is our objective. If Danger so much as feels his nose itch, you get out, understood? See any heavies, you're out. Weapons fire—"

  "We're out." I give a half-assed salute which draws Hound's ire. "Copy, 10-4, whatever. Running away. My other super power."

  Mom's in my space before the lecture completely ends.

  "Be safe," she says.

  I just smile. For the first time in maybe forever, I feel like we're all three on the same page.

  ACCORDING TO PROTOCOL, we have our briefing. Eric has prepared a nice little presentation which he walked us through on a tablet. He's done a good — no, amazing — job putting together a profile of the area and even pronouncing the names in what sounded to my wuxia-trained ear as traditional Mandarin.

  We're headed to a mountainside factory in far north China near the border of Russia and one of the "stans." He's identified a daily supply shipment and timed our arrival to coincide with its schedule. Otherwise, we'll need to sneak in, probably after sunset.

  There’s a warehouse sucking enough juice to light a city and Eric figures that’s where the miners are. But there’s one building onsite which he couldn’t access. No data link to the outside world which he found strange because the rest of the place was wired up everywhere. It’s our main target.

  At least Eric nixed the every-fifteen-minute check-in idea. With Shortwave's power profile having undergone some tweaks, he smugly reminds us we don't want to risk compromising our location. He reports everything with an air of indifference, unwilling to acknowledge me. That is, until he shoves a messenger bag my way. I begin to check the contents, and he slaps my hand.