dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  Now that they were on the road, it all felt like a strange dream receding as the vehicle put distance between them and the village. Ani wanted to tell everyone the things she had started to put together back in Poiana Mazik, but the more she thought about it all, the more insane it all sounded. So she focused on making it sound more reasonable in her own mind.

  And the night rolled by outside, oblivious.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ERMAHGERD

  The factory was lit up and locked up. It was like someone inside was waiting for them, but just didn’t want to make things too easy for them. Joe knew how crazy that sounded, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling. He felt like he’d been led around by the nose ever since touching down in Bucharest.

  Maybe even before that.

  Since leaving London?

  He wondered if he was suffering from some kind of intelligence service burn-out, a kind of paranoia that was unique to people in his line of work. He spent so much of his time trying to manipulate people into doing his own bidding, that maybe he’d started to feel like someone was enacting the same set of tricks upon him. Or it could just be the way he’d felt like he’d been forced over the fence the last time he was here, and once in the woods, had been pursued—and perhaps herded—toward the village.

  The mental thread didn’t offer much help or enlightenment, so he filed it away for later. To be honest, he was probably jet-lagged and tired.

  The APC had come to a stop outside the Dorian factory gates, and the YETI personnel—plus armed bodyguards—were getting themselves ready for breaching the building. Which made for a tense atmosphere and an introspective silence.

  Ani was frowning over her tablet, like she had been pretty much the entire journey, and was so absorbed in her screen that she didn’t seem to even notice that they were about to enter the place that was at the center of a lot of the weirdness. Dr. Ghoti and Mina Desai were radiating calm in the face of danger. They were good at their individual jobs, but Joe was worried that fieldwork was a rather big ask for them. Still, they were handling things pretty well at the moment, so maybe Abernathy knew exactly what he was doing sending them along.

  The soldiers, they looked ready for just about anything.

  Joe got out of the vehicle and approached the gates. The place had a whole different atmosphere at night. By day it had looked … well, like a factory. Innocuous. Bland. A huge building, sure, but so featureless that the eye kind of skipped over it. At night, that same building looked stark and sinister, an illusion that the arc-lights illuminating the façade seemed to actively encourage.

  The security post was empty. The guard had either gone home or was patrolling the inside of the factory. The gate was locked to make a point, but it didn’t provide a particularly difficult problem for someone who actually wanted in.

  The gate had a five-pin tumbler lock, the kind that people thought were secure, but really weren’t.

  Because the Internet.

  Joe had a key ring in his pocket—an “I ♣ LONDON” fob that Ellie had found hilarious enough to buy for him—with his London apartment key and three other keys on it. The other three were bump keys; easily purchased online for not much money at all. Joe’s wasn’t an exhaustive selection—that would take ten or so, and such a collection started getting unwieldy for a pocket—but good enough for a high percentage of the most common locks. He reached into his pocket and took out the keys, selecting one and trying it in the lock. When he found it didn’t quite fit, he moved on to the next, and got it right on the second try. The tooth pattern of the key was composed of five equal triangles, and Joe inserted the key fully into the lock, then pulled it back a notch so it sat in the lock’s barrel to the fourth tooth. Then he put the fob across the top of the key and used it as a plate to hammer in the last notch with the flat of his hand. The force of the bump was transferred to the teeth of the key and they knocked the pins of the lock so they were outside the lock’s cylinder. The actual key wasn’t needed. The bump key had done the same job, just in a different way.

  One turn and the lock opened.

  Before the others had even descended from the APC.

  He pried the bump key from the lock and opened the gate.

  “What do you know? It’s open,” he said, and they slipped through into the grounds of the factory.

  Ani had put the tablet away into her jacket pocket (you knew you were a tech addict when you chose your clothing based on whether their pockets were deep enough to hold your gadgets), but the things she’d been researching online were still buzzing in her head.

  She was trying to follow a logical thread through the things she’d discovered, but there were still pieces missing and the connections were tenuous and unsatisfying without them. The factory seemed like a good place to fill in the blanks.

  She followed Joe, Furness, and Dr. Ghoti through, with Gilman and Mina behind her. The APC driver was on orders to stay with the vehicle and summon help if needed. Five was a big enough team to infiltrate Dorian Europe, especially as three of them were armed and freshly stocked up with ammo.

  Ani still felt nervous.

  There was every chance they were walking into a trap, but it was still the best chance for answers. Or confirmation of some things Ani already suspected.

  Chief of those was the identity of emet.

  The way things were panning out made her sure that she knew who emet was, but it was also the reason she felt so nervous. She couldn’t share her theory yet, because it sounded insane even to her, but if she was right, the threat was a lot more serious than anyone here could guess.

  If Richard Dorian was truly on-site, then they had to find him.

  Because if anyone on earth could stop a catastrophe of epic proportions, then it was him.

  And, quite possibly, only him.

  They followed Joe across the grounds as he headed for the far side of the building, leading them back toward the loading bays. Joe held back a little to allow Ani to catch up. He was worried about her, mainly because he wasn’t used to her being so quiet. She was always so full of ideas, but she’d stopped sharing them and had spent most of the time since they’d met up on her tablet or staring into space.

  “Are you okay, Ani?” he asked when she came to his side.

  “I’m sorry, Joe. I know I’ve been a bit distracted.” She looked a little shame-faced. “I’ve just been trying to make sense of things. It is good to see you.”

  “I wasn’t expecting help, let alone the cavalry,” he said. “I’m really glad to see you, too.”

  She pointed to the building. “I hope that I’ll be able to shed some light on what goes on in there. I’ll need to get a look at things for myself, though.”

  Joe realized that Ani was holding something back. There was a guardedness about her that he really hadn’t seen before. He didn’t like it. “You know what’s happening here, don’t you?”

  Ani shook her head. “No. Not quite. But I do know this: it’s nothing like what we’ve been thinking it is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’ll let you know as soon as I do.” Ani reached out and squeezed his arm. “I know I’m probably coming across as evasive and maybe even a bit strange, but this whole thing has me feeling awkward. Wrong-footed. I worry I’m taking it all a little personally.”

  “Personally?”

  “Hackers have made whatever this is possible. My tribe, Joe. They helped set monsters loose, while hiding behind their screen names and their overinflated beliefs in their own rightness. There were kids in that village. Without YETI, there would have been casualties. There might have been deaths. And here’s the part that makes me feel sick to my stomach: without YETI, I’d probably be a guilty party in this.”

  Joe thought about what she’d said, but he couldn’t agree. “You’re fighting on the right side, and I don’t think you ever had it in you to do otherwise.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But I could still get drawn into thin
gs when the weight of numbers, my peers, convinced me that it was right. Maybe I’d have been suckered into this, too.”

  “Who knows?” Joe said. “It doesn’t matter. If I hadn’t joined YETI, then my temper would have gotten me into big trouble by now. But I did join YETI. And so did you. What we were before doesn’t matter. It’s what we do now that matters. And I know what that is.”

  “What?”

  “We stop it. It’s as simple as that. And those skills that your tribe are using to help Dorian and victorious? They’re the skills that you’re going to use to beat them. Now, pep talk over, I hope?”

  “Pep talk over and very much appreciated.” Ani said.

  The loading bays were locked, and with padlocks that were more difficult to break into than the gate had been. That wasn’t really saying that much. The bump keys wouldn’t work in padlocks, which meant Joe needed to pick one of them instead. But that’s why lots of intelligence agents carried some very specialized tools for just such an occasion.

  Paper clips.

  Two of them.

  Joe’s were in the small jeans pocket that had been invented by Levi’s for the sole purpose of keeping pocket watches safe. Then people invented watches with straps, and later cell phones, and people had needed to think of new things to put in those pockets.

  Joe took the first paperclip, opened it out into a straight piece of wire, doubled it over and squeezed it flat against the ground, then bent the doubled end at a 90-degree angle. He straightened the other paperclip, then bent the very end a couple of times. A homemade tension wrench, and a homemade lock rake. Joe kept torque with the tension wrench and jostled the rake against the lock’s tumblers. It took less than a minute before the lock bar popped open. He took the padlock out of its hasp and rolled the loading bay gate open.

  It was bright inside, though there were no workers present, and the group climbed up and into the loading bay, giving Joe a feeling of déjà vu. Although, was repetition really déjà vu? Probably not. Now wasn’t the time for semantics.

  “This way.” Joe said, and they moved deeper into the factory.

  The factory floor was deserted, just as it had been the first time Joe walked through it. There was no sign of the workers, but all the lights were still on as if they’d be back soon. Where did they go? Joe thought that maybe they’d find out as they looked through the place. Because the YETI team was going to search everywhere. It was time to get answers.

  Without the workforce pursuit creating the urgency of his first visit, he had time to find the stairs that led to the upper floor. It was a good place to start. He led the group up and found another door to try, but only after he’d shown everyone the rooms he had already been through.

  The computer room door hadn’t been repaired yet, and swung open easily.

  “This one’s for you, Ani,” he said, pointing through the door.

  She gave him an odd look and went past him into the room.

  Ani walked along the rows of computer processors and felt her fears deepen. You expected to find computers in a high-tech environment like Dorian Europe. What you didn’t expect to find was a state-of-the-art supercomputer. Nor did you expect to find a supercomputer that operated so quietly. It was uncanny just how silent it was.

  She flipped a panel to get a good look at the tech inside. It took her a few seconds to figure out what she was actually seeing.

  It wasn’t state-of-the-art.

  It was beyond state-of-the-art.

  She was looking at the insides of a supercomputer from … from where? The future? The circuitry was utterly remarkable. There were so few things in there that she actually recognized. It had an almost organic look. Not that it was made of organic matter or that the chips were alive or anything science fiction like that, but that the way the boards and circuits were organized seemed more in keeping with the organization of biological units rather than a computer system. It was like someone had approached the problem of building a computer, but had come at it from a completely different direction to the one everyone else took. The only thing in there that she did recognize didn’t make her feel any better: those same chips that had started Joe’s investigation into Dorian and that were responsible for making victorious’s computers so much more than the sum of their parts.

  The supercomputer was working very busily on something, performing billions, maybe quadrillions, of calculations per second. She wondered what kinds of tasks it had been built to accomplish. You could pretty much run a whole country with this amount of processing power.

  So what was it processing? What binary tasks was it working so hard on?

  To find out, she needed to look at its output, and the only way to do that was with a screen. There had to be a user interface around here somewhere. She needed to find it if she was going to get a look at the sort of things that a computer like this one thought about.

  Or, she thought, darkly, what it dreamed about.

  Joe had kept possession of the tuning fork from his previous visit, and he freed it from the pocket it had been languishing in, then made sure everyone was watching when he used it to open the door. It seemed important, because it was such a strange detail. It wasn’t a sane management decision to replace door keys or keypads with tuning forks. It was a flamboyant touch that he could see no real practical purpose for.

  Ani looked puzzled as he lifted the fork up to the door, but when he flicked it to make it ring, and then used the vibrations to open the door, she looked a little … What was that expression that crossed her face? Was it anger? Confusion? A little of each? Joe didn’t know, but again he had the feeling that Ani was making connections and formulating ideas that he just couldn’t see yet. She had admitted as much, but it was getting a little frustrating that she didn’t seem to want to share her suspicions.

  Still, two could play at the secretive assembly of theories. And so Joe was busy formulating a few suspicions of his own, the first, and most pressing, of which was that he felt like he was being played. And not just him. YETI. All of them. That the whole Dorian Europe Experience had been constructed for him, that his escape and subsequent arrival at Poiana Mazik had been stage-managed, and that it was all heading toward some cryptic endgame that he could neither see the shape of, nor guess the purpose of.

  Ani walked into the room and looked around at the rows of booths and felt two conflicting emotions. First, obviously, was disquiet. On Joe’s phone screen, they had been less dramatic, less grand. Just less, really. So she felt a touch of what poets called the sublime, an odd mix of awe and terror that allowed the darkest thoughts to grow within her. Second, she felt something less poetic, less profound, but just as intense.

  The feeling was best summed up in the single word response: cool!

  At her heart, Ani was a tech geek. She loved the new, the shiny, the upgraded, the microprocessor this and the floating point that. She loved real-life applications of binary calculations, she loved new display technologies and the latest force-cracking software.

  As a result, she loved science fiction movies, although maybe her love of computers came as a result of the kind of films she liked.

  The booths looked like something out of one of those science fiction movies she loved. Maybe matter transporters like they’d used in The Fly, time machines like the one in Primer, or suspended animation devices from films like Alien or TV shows like Futurama.

  She walked over to inspect one, marveling at its construction, but oddly disturbed by it, too. It didn’t look like contemporary technology, which was why she’d been thinking about science fiction reference points. Instead, it looked more advanced, futuristic even. And that was without examining the technology that made the machine work. The aesthetic—the styling, the way it was constructed according to visual considerations that seemed to deviate from those she was used to—were what made her uneasy.

  The design or look of technology, was dictated, largely, by two factors: the technology that the design contained, and the prevai
ling human aesthetic of the time.

  If you compared the crude, original 1980s incarnation of the mobile phone with the latest model of iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, you could still see very distinct similarities. Of course, there was a vast difference in their screen size, in having touchscreens instead of physical buttons, but you could trace a direct line of evolution of form dictated by function, in conjunction with the latest developments in materials. The actual aesthetic differences were in making the phone thinner, curvier, as much to do with ergonomics—how the device felt and operated in the human hand—as actual stylistic choices. Very few phones deviated from the standard rectangular shape. There was a Nokia 7600 leaf-shaped phone from the early 2000s, and a couple of circular designs, but they did, on the whole, stick to the same rectangle.

  It was all about shrinking the size of the bezel, of rounding the edges, of utilizing different materials, of tinkering with the interface.

  These machines, these booths, seemed to come from a whole new aesthetic. There was something brutal about them, something that seemed to ignore the rules that modern technology seemed to follow. They were odd, with an almost inhuman disregard for beauty. As if the designer was completely ignoring the aspects of design that made people feel warmth or attachment to a device. There were no pleasing curves. Where surfaces met, the joins were logical, but not pretty. Just necessary transitions between materials. It appeared to be all about the function—whatever that function might be.

  Dr. Ghoti was also studying one of the booths, though she seemed focused on the potential function, rather than the aesthetic form. She was trying to open the booth to gain access to its interior.

  “These must open, somehow,” she said, “but I can’t find a button or handle.”

  Ani inspected the booth before her. It was true. The booth obviously was meant to open somehow, but she couldn’t see the mechanism that would make it happen. It had to be controlled by the panel on the front of the booth. She touched the screen and a display woke up, with digital dials and buttons and sliders. But none of them did anything when she touched them. They appeared to be cosmetic, or needed to be altered with another interface.