by H. J. Pang
Cases that bore the Explosives Hazard symbol.
“Get to cover!” yelled Greg, already swinging behind the edge of the entrance. A loud explosion rang out, followed by the whistling of hundreds upon hundreds of metal shards directed in a conical arc. Being right at the front, Zari and Captain Ping were caught by the blast of several Claymores, falling backwards in sprays of blood. Ignoring the sting of the fragments as they bounced off the sides of walls and showered him, Greg stuck his head out quickly, eyeing the catwalk. Already the 418 soldier was discarding his detonator, whipping out a familiar egg- shaped object as he remained behind a crate for cover. One of the newer SAF-standard issue grenades, the five-metre blast radius would easily eliminate them before they had a chance to break cover. Without taking the time to think, Greg levelled his SAW’s underbarrel launcher at him and fired, the characteristic “phunk” resounding through the air.
The blast that came immediately rivalled the Claymores. A segment of the catwalk came crashing down, the 418 soldier following it with a scream. Greg advanced quickly into the room with Wesley.
“Sector clear,” Wesley reported calmly, AV-2 held by his hip.
“Room clear!” Greg confirmed. They were in a crossroads of the entire compound, with passageways leading to the front, left, and right. Greg was rather surprised there weren’t more men guarding this area, but those might have been the ones he and the Old Guard shot down earlier. Caught in a bind, the last 49er must have tried holding the line by himself. “What’s the status of the wounded, Major?”
“Zari’s dead,” said Major Shang, his voice breaking. “Ping’s alive, but I’m not sure if he’s going to make it.”
Greg dashed back to where the two motionless figures lay. There wasn’t much of Zari’s face left, and judging by the amount of blood, he had taken the brunt of the blasts. A standard Claymore mine had a lethal range of over 50 metres, but the blasts had been less than 10 metres away. Major Shang hadn’t got away unscathed, with one of his cheeks marked with red. Captain Ping lay on his back, wheezing hard as he clutched his chest. Crimson rivulets rolled down his forehead. Major Shang had pulled out a roll of makeshift bandages, but the Captain was refusing to let him remove his ILBV.
“Ping, your wound—”
“Save it. You guys are going to need it later,” gasped the Captain. “There’s no hope left for me. Go. Go before it’s too late.”
“We’re not going to leave you,” said Greg. “Wesley, can you do anything for Ping?”
Wesley shook his head. “Not through Calibration, no. It doesn’t heal open wounds quickly enough. Besides, the shrapnel’s still inside and we don’t have a safe and clean place to remove that.” Infection set in easily in the wasteland, except in the cleanest environments.
“I’m not going to let you suffer, Ping,” said Major Shang, pulling out a pistol.
A soft laughter resounded in the chamber. For a moment, Greg thought it was coming from the Captain, his mind breaking under stress. When the next sentence came, however, he realised it was coming from the far corner of the room. The 418 soldier he had brought down had spoken where he lay, head tilted towards them.
“Pain is but a sign of the end, the suffering that precedes quest’s end.” Despite looking little more than a corpse himself, the 49er still carried some life yet within him. “Oh, you think you have suffered, but no, suffering is what the others were undergoing before you came.” He broke down in a fit of the giggles, blood pooling around his lips in a ghastly grin.
Greg walked up to him. “You have a nerve opening your fat mouth after blasting us.”
“Merely warning you of what lies ahead. The kids must be in so much pain, twitching, screaming … ”
Greg slammed the heel of his boot upon the 49er’s abdomen, eliciting a gasp, and then the butt of his weapon against his open fingers. As the thug made to crawl away, Greg held him still with a boot, barrel of the gun shoved against his temple.
“What are you fucks doing to them?” yelled Greg. “Where are they now?”
“The programmers … are decrypting … the Allspace …Machine,” gasped the 49er, his speech impeded by the pressure exerted upon him. “Kids connected to it … so much twitching …”
“Where?” The boot pressed harder. The gasp turned into a croak, and Greg eased his pressure just a little.
“Straight … ahead …” The 49er pointed with a finger, then turned still. His sightless eyes remained open, never to close again.
Greg walked back to where Major Shang stood with Wesley. What he saw there was worth more than any words. Captain Ping looked tiredly back at them, as relaxed as anyone could be.
“I’ve just given him a neurorelaxant,” said Wesley, showing Greg a small plastic packet, a needle affixed atop it. “It’s normally reserved for disciples of the Code to better connect to the divinities, but I have discretion. He won’t be in any pain for the next three hours. It was that, or a bullet through the head.”
“Major Shang, perhaps you can bring Captain Ping—” began Greg.
“We’ll get him out when all this is fought and done,” affirmed Major Shang. “At this point, you’ll going to need all the help you can get.”
“What about Guo Li?” asked Greg. “He needs you.”
“What about Jin? He needs us to save him.”
Greg afforded himself a pained smile. “When all this is done, Colonel Beng had better give you a medal.”
“I’d rather have a month’s worth of three meals, thank you very much. Colonel Beng always was a stingy fuck.” Major Shang gave his weapon one last check. “Shall we?”
The 418 was at the forefront of technology, in wasteland terms. They continuously researched sustenance living, military technology and renewable energies. Those who didn’t know any better would say the 418 were just a community of thugs who saw their chance to take over the moment society broke down.
Research Master La-Zu was one of the longest-serving members of the 418. One of the few professors considered skilled enough by the 418 for developmental research, he had been working in Fusionopolis long before The Storm. Each time he made a new discovery, the computer infrastructure company he worked for took the developmental rights and credit instead of him. Naturally, when the one he would eventually know as Dragon Ho took over, and asked who was willing to serve him, La-Zu was the first to jump at the chance. He served the 418 well too, modifying salvaged electronics into working communications devices. He set up the interconnected radio network that formed the bulk of communications in the 418, with his designs used as far away as the mines in Johor. Granted, there were 418 territories further north, but he had yet to find out where. The 418 may seem ruthless in their task, but to La-Zu, their goals were just. They sought to rebuild a society from the ashes of what once was, recovering technology and salvageable computers. With much of the knowledge of how things were designed and made since been lost, a cache of digital data was most welcome. With the 418 being the closest thing to a government, La-Zu figured their existence was justified. They needed to expand, and if people had to be brought to their knees for that to happen, so be it. Finding the last remaining technology took priority over a false sense of freedom.
Then, about a year ago, the 418 made a discovery. The name of a location kept showing up on a number of classified documents originating from different governmental organisations. Based on the associated resources and computer terminology referring to it, it was believed a complete data centre existed beneath the Marina Bay area. With Singapore being a regional hub for many fields of technology, it would have made perfect sense.
An expedition was undertaken with the support of 1 Motors, a motor company of the 418.
La-Zu accompanied them as a senior researcher, along with his team. A couple of them were part of his original team before The Storm, with the rest new hires by the 418. The purported defenders of Marina Bay didn’t give them any resistance, so it was as easy as the company splitting up into teams, and sea
rching the depths of the tunnels beneath the city. And did they hit the motherlode.
The Allspace Server, or AS for short, dwarfed the capabilities of any other data centre in the world. Rather than simply relying upon rows upon rows of server cabinets to make up its processing power, the bulk of the AS’s capability came from the hundreds of supercomputers and mainframes networked together, each running on multiple threads and quantum processors to maximise their capabilities. Supercomputers and mainframes had a high reliability rate, and afforded no more than a few minutes of downtime each year. And with so many networked together, it was a machine that could delegate its processes efficiently and quickly. Large amounts of stored data could be transferred quickly by any means, even wirelessly within the space of several minutes.
This would have been a turning point in the 418’s technological capabilities, but yet there lay one problem. Having been designed as a store of not just commercial, but military and law enforcement data, the encryption built into its firmware was practically unbreakable. It took months to estimate the hardware and software requirements to even begin the process of decrypting what lay within. La-Zu even had several salvaged supercomputers from MINDEF and the National University of Singapore work on decryption subroutines, but it would still take years for it to happen.
The Dragon Head didn’t want to wait a year. He wanted results in a matter of months. For all the manpower they had, the 418 leader was pissed La-Zu and the other PhDs didn’t have what it took. If they were really so smart, what was so difficult about decrypting code created by another person just like them? Perhaps the 418 should have La-Zu and his guys replaced with 10-year-olds instead?
The Dragon Head didn’t know it then, but he had given La-Zu an idea. He had heard about how the brains of children are more adaptive, and how much quicker it learns when set upon a task. The 418 didn’t have a shortage of people they could make use of, so he relayed his request to the Red Pole of the Laboratories.
The response was better than expected. Every week, a total of five children were sent to him. They were chosen for their abilities in mathematics or problem-solving, and only a limited number were taken from each territory to reduce the chance for revolt and population decline. A relatively happy community was a productive one. It was only a matter of installing the necessary analogue-to-digital implants for the subjects to be able to connect with the server’s input interface. When connected, the subjects’ implants would automatically run a decryption protocol, using their minds as a processor speed multiplier. He referred to them as Decryption Catalysts, or DCs.
For about a month now, he had put the minds of the DCs against the access mainframe, starting off with just one, then three. When the subjects started shaking and screaming, with their brains scrambled beyond the point of recovery, it was apparent that not enough decrypting power was used. More interfaces were set up, and more subjects brought in. There was even a kid who seemed to express interest in low-level programming of Android phones, no less, making him all the more suited to the task. La-Zu had found it a great waste of the kid’s potential, having been locked in a mine for five years. Now he would serve the greater good, along with the rest of the subjects. All of them were strapped onto portable beds, set around the main I/O interface, high- latency fibre-optic cables wired into their implants. The last 24 hours had seen 76 percent of the encryption routine broken down. Which meant they only needed eight hours more.
A distant explosion could be heard, with gunfire following soon after. It sounded like the Allspace compound had been breached. La-Zu didn’t see the need to worry then. The 418 had spared much expense in ensuring no one interfered with the decryption. Surely their men could handle it.
But when a series of explosions erupted near enough to shake the very foundations of the compound, La-Zu wasn’t so sure. During his experiments, he had discovered the optimal perimeters to ensure that the minds of the DCs remained relaxed, and yet give an acceptable decryption bandwidth. This meant that the DCs were less likely to become brain-dead, and would require less frequent replacement. But now, time was of the essence. He could not have those ignorant attackers put a stop to this important operation, not when they were so close!
He would have to overclock the process by a magnitude of 16. These were the only DCs he had left, but there was no choice. The transfer of decrypted data would take but a few minutes. As La-Zu thumped the keyboard on the glowing interface, screams started emitting from the DCs. The 418 guards positioned around the Control Room cringed, but even non-intellectuals knew this had to be done. Despite the Dragon Head’s orders to cease wireless communications except for field radios, La-Zu reopened a data transfer connection back to The Mountain’s network server. Once decrypted, he had to transfer as much data as possible back to HQ.
The fate of the world depended on it. Lives could be replaced. Data could not.
This wasn’t the movies, where a lone hero could take on the might of an entire army. This was real life, where every foe was almost as skilled as the hero was, where a stroke of misfortune could result in a stray bullet finding its way through a gap of the best NIJ-certified armour. Greg knew there was no way three men could fight against scores of similarly-armed and trained foes. But the many innovations of mankind included those meant for the military. And such innovations involved gaining an unfair advantage over each other.
The 418 storage area had a huge array of explosives, mainly anti-personnel weapons such as Claymores and fragmentation grenades. It also included less-than-lethal flashbangs, grenades intended to disorientate rather than kill, used when collateral damage is to be kept to a minimum. Greg would have gone for the lethal explosives alone, but there was too much at stake to risk collateral damage.
Loud bangs and flashes erupted throughout the room just like their namesakes. The large Control Room was lit up sporadically with a cacophony of noise and light, and there was nothing the 418 soldiers could do to stop it, eyes blinking hard as their hands clutched uselessly over their ears.
418 fell left and right without understanding why, the guns of the advancing intruders blazing decisively towards their skulls.
Greg yanked an earplug out with his free hand, as did his two companions. “Major Shang, cover that door!” he ordered. An electronic door stood closed at the far end of the room. Wesley had made a circuit around the room once before tapping away on a console set into the side of a large mainframe in the middle of the room. Four other rectangular structures were positioned around the wide space, but Greg couldn’t see anything that would distinguish them from other subprocessor units. The floor here was of stainless steel grill, with pipes and wires visible beneath, indicator lights illuminating their snaking outlines.
The beds set around the central console like the dials of a clock caught his attention. Upon each and every one of them were children, their eyes glazed over as they shook as if from fits. Next to each of them was a display showing heart-rate, along with other variables that Greg didn’t understand. One of the kids caught his attention.
“Jin!” yelled Greg, dashing over to the child lying on the side of the console opposite from the door. Finally up close to his son, Greg almost wept. Despite all his efforts, he never expected to come this far. The odds were stacked against him far too often: countless 418 guards, feral humans that wouldn’t think twice about dismembering him for a meal, even a cult that could have zapped him with modified Super Soakers.
Greg held back a breath as his eyes drew over Jin. He was dressed in a plain white hospital gown, stained in places with the dark brown of dried blood. His face was much as Greg remembered it, only that his once gaunt cheeks were now more full, suggesting the 418 laboratories had fed him better. But what took Greg’s breath away was the mess of wires connected to his head, an almost bizarre image seen only in science-fiction comics or movies.
The back and sides of his son’s head were now a mess of connector ports, and Jin was jerking sporadically in his … trance.
“Still your hand!” called Wesley, and Greg turned. The acolyte’s eyes were stern. “Would you be instrumental to the death of a youngster?”
“The server’s killing him!”
“Interrupting the process prematurely will result in descrambling of his brain. Just imagine the state of a corrupted hard drive.”
“What can we do, then?” yelled Greg, stepping up towards the acolyte. “Can’t you … I don’t know, shut down the process with that console, or something?”
“I already tried that. But the decryption progress is locked through an Administrator password, and it’ll take too long to hack it manually,” said Wesley. “However, I can access the root processes through my own neural stream, and try disconnecting the link between the subjects. I’ll need you to cover me till then. With me connected to the brain network of the kids, a slight disturbance could prove dangerous.” The acolyte reached at the back of his head, pulling forth a cable. “Can you do that, Greg?”
Greg knew that Wesley had come along for a reason. Not merely to save his son, or anyone else, for that matter. The data in the server meant more to the Brotherhood than anyone else. But he realised he had no choice.
“Do it fast.” said Greg, and he dashed up to support Major Shang.
La-Zu shook in mingled anger and fear, peering from under the floor grille he was hiding beneath. All three interlopers wore the full battle armour of the Old Guard, yet they seemed to lack the characteristics of a fighting force. The one that seemed to be calling the shots appeared to recognise one of the DCs as his own. He and a near-emotionless soldier exchanged words—words that chilled La-Zu to the heart.