Galactic Energies

by Luca Rossi

  The hacker stands up and, without taking his eyes off of them, heads towards a cabinet. He takes out a little metal cylinder with two LEDs, a pocket knife and a pair of tweezers. “Quick, get inside!” he orders, motioning towards a door.

  “Eugenio, listen -” Mario says.

  “Do what I tell you!”

  They enter a room furnished with a pair of cabinets, a bed, a table and a chair.

  “Lie down on the bed, Isabella, face down! Mario, go to the cabinet: there are four pairs of handcuffs in there. Take them and attach her wrists and ankles to the bed,” Eugenio orders. “Now!” he yells at Mario, who's still frozen, watching him.

  Isabella lies on the bed. Mario secures her limbs with the handcuffs.

  “How bold, Eugenio! So you really do like S&M.” she taunts him.

  “Mario, leave the room!” the hacker orders, pointing the pistol at him.

  Even more surprised and afraid, Mario leaves the room. Eugenio locks the door, places the pistol on the desk and moves towards Isabella. He sits astride her back.

  “Well you're not one to waste time. I might even like this,” she posits.

  Eugenio moves her chestnut hair to one side.

  “Usually I'm on top. But this time a little change might do me some good,” the woman continues.

  The hacker slowly moves the metal cylinder over the base of Isabella's neck.

  After a few minutes the two LEDs start flickering. Eugenio takes the pocket knife and makes an incision at the point detected by the device.

  “Have you gone crazy?” she protests vehemently.

  Eugenio inserts the tweezers into the cut. “This is going to hurt.”

  With one hand he holds her head down on the bed. Isabella is unable to breath. Eugenio starts to pull a thin filament out of the wound. The woman's body is racked with terrible waves of pain; she manages to lift her head from the pillow and let out a scream that shakes the walls. Mario, in the adjacent room, beats his fists against the door: “Isabella, Isabella!” he calls. “What is that bastard doing to you?”

  Eugenio wraps the thin thread he pulled out around his index finger and continues to pull. Connected to the first, a myriad of filaments, up to a foot long, come out of the woman's head. After he's finished extracting them, the pain stops.

  “It's all over, Isabella.” He takes her face in his hands as she looks at him, terrified. “They're nanochip filaments,” he explains, showing them to her. He takes the handcuffs off her ankles and wrists, helps her sit down and opens the door.

  Mario rushes into the room towards his wife, still shaking with chills.

  “When Isabella started acting strange I realized that she could be controlled by cerebral nanochips. If only we had figured this out sooner!” laments the man as he sighs, trying in vain to stop thinking about his dead friend.

  “How long has she had this for?” Mario asks.

  “We can't know for sure. She was probably grafted when she started working for DataCom. Isabella, how do you feel?”

  “Oh my god. All these years,” she whispers, trembling. “The things I did...you...you have no idea. Mario, drugs...”

  “Drugs?”

  “Yes, we drugged you. The last day, at work, in the cafeteria. We knew that after you were fired you would try to flee and we had to be sure that you'd be a little...delayed. We used a strong dose of Narzis 457.”

  Eugenio murmurs: “Hmm, maybe we...I mean, maybe I have something for Mario. I'll go look. I'll explain the plan to you in a minute.”

  “Great, Eugenio, we're all really curious to know the details of your brilliant plan,” says John Dannington, entering through the door followed by his men.

  1/IX – Lost

  Turmoil, anxiety, terror, nausea. Insects spreading through his brain. It's hard to breathe. Deep down, something is still fighting. In an induced stupor, Mario wonders: Am I about to die?

  “No, no you aren't,” Isabella answers, holding his hand.

  Mario loses his balance. He tries to hold on to his wife. He falls into the darkness.

  “Isabella!” he yells. “I'm afraid! Help me!”

  “Mario, come towards me.”

  Mario runs through a desolate moor towards her voice. Isabella is sitting on a chair. She's smoking. Behind her, several people are clutching knives in their hands to slice their own throats, others are jumping off of bridges into an abyss, still others are letting the blood flow from the slit veins of their wrists. An interminable sequence of letters and numbers scrolls across the sky.

  “See what you did? My genius!” Isabella says. Roberto lies at her feet, bound to a leash.

  “He's dead!” Mario exclaims, horrified.

  “They're all dying. You're the one who's killing them!” She smiles, showing him a second collar: “This is for you. Do you want it, sweetie?”

  “Isabella, you're not...”

  Mario finds himself back home, in the kitchen. The smell of eggs and bacon makes his mouth water. Isabella is standing at the stove.

  “Isabella, are we back home?”

  “Yes, my love. It's all over. I'm making you breakfast.”

  She comes closer. He places his head on his wife's shoulder and closes his eyes, breathing the aroma in deeply. He starts to feel drunk with happiness. She turns, takes his head in her hands and kisses it.

  The woman's lips are frozen. Her tongue has a metallic taste. Her hands start to squeeze his head. Mario opens his eyes: instead of the Isabella's green pupils, two red LEDs stare back at him.

  He hears footsteps. Someone is entering the room where the walls, ceiling and floor are created from luminous displays. The bed seems to be on the shore of a lake. The sky is azure. In the distance, the gigantic mirror of water flows towards the slopes of snow-covered peaks.

  “Good morning, Mario. How do you feel?” John greets him, giving him a pat on the back.

  “Great!” Mario responds, convinced. He feels an itch at the base of his neck. He touches it with a finger. There's a tiny scab.

  John smiles: “Finally on our side! We've been wanting to bring you here for ages but we were afraid that if we took you from your company, your productivity would have dropped. Now, however, your software is ready and works brilliantly! Come with me! There's lots you need to know.”

  They leave the room. Mario feels confident and determined. Doubts, fear and anxiety have disappeared. His mind is clear. He smiles, pleased.

  John notices his expression. “That nanochip is something else, isn't it?”

  “Yes, it's fantastic. I never would have imagined. And Isabella? Eugenio?”

  “Oh, your friend told us about their plan. Thanks to him we're flushing out the others, even though we don't have all of the ones we want. Hackers all work independently. Isabella is already working on an operation to capture one of their cells.”

  “Did you redo her graft?” Mario asks.

  “No, why?” John responds, bewildered.

  Images of the capture run through Mario's mind: Eugenio hiding the nanochip in his pants pocket, then letting it fall down the sewer as they left the lab; Isabella lying to John, saying that Eugenio tried to torture her to get revenge for Lin's murder. Mario telling John everything. John's expression becomes more serious. They walk through a passageway suspended in a room with an infinite sequence of servers, all lined up. Every shape and size of robot moves through the air and across the floor.

  They reach John's office. He speaks to a voice recognition system: “Put me in communication with Isabella.” The woman can't be traced. John calls another team member.

  “Sir, Captain Orsini said she received new orders. She's already been away for several hours.”

  Mario and John look at one another. They know they've lost her!

  1/X – Game Over

  Isabella knows the DataCom search squads are nearby. “Here, kitty kitty.” A hungry black cat meows in an alley. She holds out some food to entice it: “Look at what I've got for you.”

 
; As she pets it, she puts a pretty little collar around its neck. Attached are the remains of her microphone; even if destroyed, DataCom can still trace the signal. She thinks again about their escape through the sewers. If Mario and the hackers had known...

  While the feline eats, Isabella pries open a manhole. She turns back to the kitty, which lets her pick it up and pet it. Holding it in her arms, she goes down the ladder into the sewers. The cat's nails penetrate her flesh. “You'll find a way out,” she reassures it, putting it on the ground. “And you'll drive them crazy while you try to find one.” After a last glance at the cat's pleading eyes, she climbs back to the surface and closes the manhole cover.

  On the main street, safe in her new disguise – blonde bob, black sunglasses and brown eyes – she passes a group of DataCom men. Their heads are bent over the maps on their smartphones. “But she's under us!” she hears one of them exclaim.

  She reaches the airport and passes the biometric scanner thanks to her new pupils. Isabella pauses to watch the news in the waiting room.

  “Let's hear the latest on the President's health from Anna in Washington.”

  “Thank you, Maddalena. After a serious fall, the American leader suffered extensive cerebral damage. DataCom promptly offered to cover his treatment in its neurology laboratory – one of the most advanced in the world. The operation took less than two hours and has been successfully completed. A press conference will be held at...”

  The most powerful man in the world! Isabella looks at the board with the flight information. There's not much time left.

  Back in his office, John is communicating with the search squad.

  “Boss, we can't stay behind her. The signal keeps disappearing.”

  “Use all men available. Her capture is a priority,” John responds, leaving the office to go see Mario.The programmer rubs his eyes with his fingers. His head hurts. He's been working nonstop to update the code.

  “Any news?” John asks.

  “We're at seventy-eight percent. Still a few weeks and we'll be finished,” Mario replies, referring to the suicide success rate. “Did you get her?”

  “Not yet. Two dozen men are patrolling through the sewers and that whore is still making us look like fools!”

  Whore? The epithet bounces around Mario's head without provoking any particular emotion. “And how's it going with the media?”

  John smiles, satisfied: “Have a look for yourself!” He waves his hands in the air and holographic images scroll across Mario's desk. “Here's a reporter with the news recap.”

  “It seems as if a wave of suicides has affected several prominent figures from the...” Behind the reporter, a fleet of ambulances is entering a hospital complex.

  “This is what the network is getting,” John continues.

  The previous images are replaced by the image of a stadium in complete chaos. A reporter's voice refers to the trouble at a soccer match.

  “Not bad, huh? Voices and scenes are modified in real time. And if the subject continues to cause problems, your code will take care of him. We're lucky that paper has been obsolete for a few years already.”

  “Only smart devices,” Mario smiles. Nanochips, real-time manipulation of communication, killer codes. He thinks for a moment: “Game over for humans.”

  Isabella parachutes off a small seaplane towards her objective, two thousand yards below: a green island surrounded by the blue sea. She leaves her parachute on the beach and heads straight towards the jungle.

  “Freeze!” says a man's voice behind her. Isabella feels the barrel of a gun press against her back. The voice continues: “What the hell is DataCom doing on our island?”

  Series 2

  2/I – Secondary intelligences

  “It's a long story,” Isabella tells the man pointing the gun at her back.

  “Too bad I don't have much time to stay here and listen!” he replies, slamming the butt of the rifle into the back of her neck.

  Isabella wakes up tied to a chair, drenched from head to toe: a man to her right is holding a bucket.

  “Excellent, the princess has awoken. Don't worry, nobody gets sick around here because of a little water. Now why don't you tell us how you got here?”

  Isabella looks up. Her vision is blurry. The pain in her head is unbearable. The voice of the man holding the bucket sounds like the voice of the man who had the gun. He's tall, muscular, with dark hair.

  “Come on sweetie, are you going to talk or do you need a little convincing?” asks a woman standing in front of her. Isabella tries to focus in on her. She has a dark complexion, her black hair is pulled back.

  “As I was trying to tell your friend,” Isabella begins, each word accompanied by a twinge of pain. “I have a lot of information you need to know.”

  “Wrong, you ugly bitch. We, on the other hand, already know plenty about you. And we're pretty pissed off,” interrupts the second man, who's short and stocky with a huge tattoo on his arm.

  They know about Lin's murder, Isabella thinks. “You have every reason not to be happy, but wait -”

  “Ugly bitch!” says the tall man standing next to her, chucking the bucket aside. He pounces on top of her: the chair turns over and both end up on the ground. He starts bombarding her with punches, until the woman and the second man pull him off. “Lin was my friend! He was one of us! You killed him in cold blood! You're going to pay for that, you goddamn ugly bitch,” the man continues, as the other struggles to restrain him

  Isabella's nose is bleeding. Things are even blurrier. The woman approaches. “My name is Lorena and now I want to know how the fuck you got to our island. And don't try any games, please.”

  “Listen, Lorena, for as crazy as this sounds, I got your location from DataCom. But believe me, you have nothing to fear.”

  Lorena and the two men turn pale. They instinctively look outside the window, as if expecting to see a DataCom intervention team fall out of the sky.

  The tattooed man leaves his friend, picks up his gun and points it towards Isabella. He puts his finger on the trigger and takes aim. Lorena raises her hand. “Hold on. Let's hear what she has to say.”

  If I say one wrong thing, I'm dead. “Listen. Whoever, or whatever gave me the information, is keeping it to itself. You're safe. No one is going to come find you.”

  The man with the gun speaks, his forehead dripping with sweat. “Lorena, we need to take her out. She told us DataCom only because she knows we saw her kill Lin. She was sent here to distract us. Let's kill her and escape. We can't put our lives in her hands.”

  Lorena bites her lip. She's obviously divided. “Tell me who gave you this information and why. And be clear about it or this time we'll really kill you.”

  Isabella tries again: “There's a lot you need to know. There's not just one form of artificial intelligence at DataCom. The human race selection project is the product of the main source. In other words, it's the outcome of the most probable scenario. There are, however, secondary independent intelligences that have developed other plans. It's hard to explain but, basically, humans don't necessarily have to be selected: there's still some hope that -”

  “Lorena, while this bitch is making shit up, they're coming to look for us. You have to decide. We need to go, now!” says the man with the gun, his finger starting to pull the trigger.

  “I'll kill this bitch!” The tall man lunges towards Isabella's throat with a knife in hand.

  2/II – Lorena

  The knife's blade sinks into Isabella's throat.

  “Stop!” Lorena screams.

  The man turns his wild eyes towards her. “With all that they have done -”

  to my family, Lorena finishes. Her heart cries out for vengeance, too.

  She had noticed that Paco, her husband, was getting more anxious every day. She felt him wake up once in the middle of the night. Lorena embraced him, snuggled into his arms and tried talking to him. But he laid with his eyes open, staring into the darkness.

 
His company had been hit by a ton of problems. The tax authorities had called for all sorts of audits and discovered several alleged irregularities. The attorneys hired to defend him asked for amounts much higher than what they could pay.

  They tried putting up a fight but, after the first defeat, the collection agency gave him a heavy penalty. The banks found out about the company's situation and asked for their loans back.

  They decided to sell the company headquarters to get more liquidity. They signed a lease with the new owner. They even sold all of the non-essential assets. But it wasn't enough.

  Lorena understood that her husband was not the real target: they were much more concerned about what she was doing. Until that moment they hadn't been able to unearth anything concrete; he was only a pawn they were trying to use against her, once the right moment came.

  One morning, after making breakfast, Lorena told her husband and son:

  “I need to go away for a few weeks on a business trip.” She explained that she needed to go abroad for an important project. Her son was used to not asking questions – his mother had never denied him love and affection – but her husband's eyes were those of a man who felt hurt and betrayed. They talked about it for several hours. Then, after hiding a micro-camera in a corner of a picture frame in the living room, she left.

  The next day four men came to their house. “Sir, we need some information about your wife.”

  Paco told them that she was abroad on business.

  “We have reason to believe that your wife is affiliated with a terrorist organization.”

  Paco turned white.

  One of them came closer to show him a video on his smartphone.

  “See? Your wife is interacting with a known terrorist.”

  The voices and images were from cameras in a bar and the cell phones of a few unsuspecting patrons. The video showed Lorena sitting at the bar next to a handsome boy who looked Asian. They spoke, their bodies close, his hand placed on her thigh. After leaving the bar, they called a taxi and a roadside camera framed the scene in the car: the man bending down to kiss her.