by Anh Do
He put all his parents’ money on the People’s Coalition, withdrew from the net and sat back in his chair with a grin.
‘You in there, son?’ came his dad’s voice through the door. ‘They’re about to announce the election results!’
Ethan joined his parents in front of the TV.
‘Who do they think will win?’ he asked, trying to sound nonchalant despite already knowing the answer.
‘Sounds like it’s the end for these United jerks,’ scowled Paul.
A polling official appeared on the television. She raised her hands for quiet and the large crowd fell into a hush.
‘I can tell you all,’ she said, ‘that I have received the results from our data polling centre. Winning with a clear majority is … the CU Party!’
Ethan stared, stunned, at the screen. This had to be a mistake.
‘That can’t be right,’ whispered Tracy. ‘Everyone I know was voting for the Coalition.’
‘All the polls said they’d win,’ muttered his dad. ‘Goes to show you can’t trust the media.’
Ethan felt a heat building within him. He had seen the vote count for himself. He knew the CU Party could not have won.
‘Excuse me,’ he said in a strangled voice, and slunk out of the room.
Ethan’s hands were shaking as he returned to his keyboard. He plunged into the net like a diver from a high platform, and raced back along the data streams. He smashed his way through the security surrounding the polling centre and wrenched open their servers as if they were flimsy cardboard boxes.
What has been going on here? he screamed in his mind.
The numbers he had seen only minutes ago had changed. He searched for evidence of another hacker and found a trail that led back to the data centre.
They had changed their own data. The Citizens had rigged the whole thing.
How do they think they’ll get away with this? Unless they’ve got away with it before?
Adding to Ethan’s anger was the fact that the last of his parents’ savings was now gone.
I’ll expose you! he screamed furiously, the words flying from him in bytes that sprang up on screens throughout the data centre. You won’t get away with this!
Something red flashed at his peripheral vision, and a tangle of tracking code ensnared him. Meanwhile, security programs were shoring up the shields he had broken through, cutting off his exits.
I will return, he vowed, and let the world know what you have done.
Ethan ripped off the red tangles of code and hurled them away, speeding out of the data centre and taking a winding route back to his computer. Despite his carelessness in the heat of the moment, he could cover his tracks like no hacker on earth.
Couldn’t he?
As Penny worked at her computer, Gemini stared at her with those chrome eyes of his.
‘You make people uncomfortable when you stare at them like that,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ he sighed, folding his arms and turning his gaze to the ceiling.
The recovery software she was running had returned fragments of Gemini’s deleted memories. They were just random moments, recorded through his eyes, which she could play like short movies. She opened the first file.
It showed a flash of Gemini bending down while a soldier howled and clutched a bullet wound in his leg. Gemini attended to him, medical instruments springing from his fingertips.
Penny was relieved to see Gemini helping people as she had intended. She began to open more files …
Gemini sitting in the back of a jeep racing through desert sands.
Gemini in a military hospital, stopping to check the dressing of a man with a bloody bandage around his head.
Gemini running with soldiers towards a smoking village.
Then she saw something that made her heart skip a beat.
A man with a gun running at Gemini. Gemini smacking the gun away, then slashing his laser scalpels across the man’s face. The man falling back, bloodied and screaming.
Well, Penny thought, trying to reassure herself, Gemini was built to enter dangerous situations. That’s why I gave him self-defence programming.
She opened the next file …
Gemini standing over a man asleep in bed, then reaching down and clamping a hand over the man’s mouth. The man’s eyes opening wide as he struggled for breath.
‘What is it, Doctor?’
Gemini was sitting up, watching her again.
‘Just … frustrated that I can’t find anything,’ she said unconvincingly.
‘Would you like me to help?’
‘No!’ Penny shouted. Then she took a deep breath. ‘If you could just sit there quietly, that would be excellent.’
More recovered fragments appeared and, with trepidation, Penny opened them. There were more scenes of violence – Gemini strangling a soldier, hitting another over the head with a rock, sneaking along a corridor with his laser scalpels at the ready …
This was how the military was using her invention? He was meant to be a healer, not some sort of … assassin.
The door banged opened and General Mawson walked in, flanked by his techs.
‘Found any malfunction?’ he asked curtly.
Penny tried to make it look like she was casually typing as she quickly closed and trashed the fragments.
‘There is some kind of … self-propagating code,’ she said, going back to her initial discovery to stall for time. ‘I can’t discover the source, but it’s possibly what is causing Gemini to behave in unpredictable ways.’
‘Hmm,’ said the General. As he walked towards her, she quickly dragged the last fragment into the trash and brought up the code.
‘Can you get rid of it?’ he asked.
‘Um …’
Penny scanned the code. She could restore Gemini’s original software from a backup and overwrite the new aberrations, but she could not bring herself to leave her creation in the hands of people who would use him with such evil intent.
‘I’d really like to examine him comprehensively in my lab,’ she said. ‘I need to run a whole bunch of tests and …’
‘That won’t be possible, Doctor Cook,’ said Mawson. ‘Every day Gemini is with us, more lives are saved. You can have him back once the conflict is over.’
Penny stared at Mawson flatly. ‘The conflict has been going for years.’
‘We are confident the enemy will be dealt with soon,’ said the General. ‘Now, I’m afraid we must prep Gemini for his next assignment.’
‘And what is this assignment?’ said Penny, trying not to sound too accusatory.
‘That’s classified,’ said Mawson. ‘I will continue to have my techs run diagnostics.’
‘But …’
‘Thank you for your help,’ said Mawson, guiding her to the door.
Penny glanced over at Gemini, watching on silently. What was going on in his head? Had the aberrant code been created when he had been ordered to carry out missions he wasn’t designed for? Or was it something else?
Mawson ushered her out into the corridor and closed the door behind them both, cutting off her view of Gemini.
‘General,’ said Penny. ‘I really must insist …’
General Mawson waved a soldier over. ‘See that Doctor Cook is on the next plane home.’
‘Yes, sir!’
The sergeant led Penny away.
This is not right, she thought. I will not let them get away with this.
Ethan replaced the money in his parents’ savings account with more money stolen from Helen Welling, then sat back in his chair.
Why couldn’t his parents have just accepted their mysterious financial gains? And how did the government think it would get away with such enormous fraud?
He felt so tightly wound that he knew he had to get out of the house.
As he headed for the front door, his mum called out to him. ‘Where are you off to?’
She was just curious, not overbearing or controlling, but it took a monument
al effort for Ethan not to yell, ‘Out!’ and storm off.
‘Just a quick walk around the block,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘Need to clear my head.’
‘Okay, well, dinner’s in an hour.’
As Ethan left the house, he cursed the banal regularity of dinner. How dare his parents consistently interrupt his life to feed him!
The thought was so ungrateful and ridiculous, it almost made him laugh.
He walked laps around the park until he felt more relaxed. When he noticed the sky darkening, he glanced at his phone. Oops! He’d lost track of time and was late for dinner.
Ethan ran home, figuring out the best way to apologise. For being late for dinner, for being angry, for being sick … If he started, he wasn’t sure he could stop before blurting out everything. He couldn’t let them know about his powers. Could he?
As Ethan turned the corner to his street, he saw four identical black cars parked outside his house. His heart began to pound as he scrambled for his phone. He barely stopped himself from calling his mum – a safer idea came to mind.
Ethan ducked behind a bush and reached into his phone, through the network, and into his mum’s phone, straight to the camera. What he saw made him jump.
A middle-aged man with big square glasses and clipped black hair was looking straight at him.
No, he thought, not at me. At the phone.
‘He hasn’t called?’ asked the man.
‘No. He’s only a little late.’ That was Mum’s voice.
Ethan needed to see more. He was in range of their neighbour’s wi-fi, so he leapt in and through the internet’s pathways to his parents’ house, and their home security system. As he moved from camera to camera, he couldn’t believe what he saw.
The house had been ransacked. Men in black suits were in every room. Two of them sat at his computer, trying to crack his password. In the living room, his parents were on the couch, frightened and holding each other. The black-haired man was still looking at Mum’s phone.
‘What is it you think he’s done?’ asked Ethan’s dad, angrily.
‘Just a little treason,’ said the black-haired man.
Tracy and Paul’s mouths fell open.
The black-haired man continued. ‘Someone in this house hacked into the vote-counting servers at the last election and left behind a threatening message. Your son attends Titan University on an IT scholarship, so naturally—’
‘It was me,’ said Paul, standing up.
‘What?’ shouted Tracy.
‘I … I was angry, we’d had our accounts frozen for d-doing the right thing, we thought there was going to be a change of government, the polls said there was going to be a change of government, and when … when there wasn’t …’ Ethan’s dad fidgeted with his hands.
The black-haired man said, ‘But your son—’
‘I taught him everything he knows. Okay, not quite, but I got him started.’
Ethan stopped breathing. Tracy and the black-haired man stared at Paul. No one was moving.
‘Agent Clark?’ said the black-haired man.
Another man in a suit dashed into the living room. ‘Yes, Agent Ferris?’
‘Take both Mr and Mrs Forrester into custody.’
‘NO!’ shouted Ethan. He watched as the two agents turned their heads to the front window.
Ferris pointed to the front door. ‘Get out there. Find out who that was!’
Three agents ran for the door as Ethan snapped back into his body from online. He hauled himself to his feet and bolted. Footsteps sounded behind him.
Ethan sprinted around a corner to the Farleys’ house. Mr Farley’s tow truck was in their front yard, and it was high enough that Ethan could slide under it quickly and quietly.
He lay on his belly and watched as two sets of legs ran into view and stopped. He watched the agents stop and look around until the radio one was carrying crackled. Ethan was too far away to hear clearly, and it was a walkie-talkie, not a phone. He couldn’t get in.
A few seconds later, the agents left. Ethan started breathing again, then remembered. He leapt into the Farleys’ wi-fi and back to his house, but no one was there. No agents. No parents.
He snuck back to his street and saw that two agents were getting into the one black car that was still there. The car was new, full of electronics, including seat pads linked to the seatbelt warning alarm. There were only two people in the car. The engine started and the car drove away. Ethan found the electronic power steering. He could crash this thing in a second … but that wouldn’t help him, and could make things worse for his parents.
They had been captured and taken away by the government! What could he do? Who could he turn to?
Then, as if by magic, a notification popped up on his phone.
Doctor Penny had arrived home.
As Ethan walked towards Doctor Cook’s apartment, he hacked all the surrounding security cameras and forced them to loop footage from the previous hour – ensuring none of them would film him.
He hacked the keypad to open the front door of the building, then hacked the elevator so it would take him to Penny’s floor. Once he was outside her door he thought about hacking her fingerprint scanner to let himself in, but decided that was going too far. Instead, he knocked like a normal person.
Penny’s eyes widened as she opened the door.
‘Ethan Forrester! How on earth did you get here?’
‘Can I come in? Please?’ said Ethan.
As he entered, Ethan’s heart quickened as he smelt Penny’s perfume. He forced himself to concentrate. There were more important things to worry about than a silly crush.
‘I have a lot to tell you,’ he said.
A short while later, Penny was staring at Ethan with undisguised wonder. At first she didn’t believe him about his new powers – that was, until he demonstrated them by hacking her phone, her computer and her toaster.
‘This is unprecedented,’ she said. ‘It’s like you have a neurological link with technology.’
‘Electronic telepathy,’ clarified Ethan casually. It was nice to show off to her.
‘And you’re sure it started that night when …’
‘You can say it,’ said Ethan. ‘When my brain got zapped by lightning.’
‘Maybe that created a permanent electrical field around you? You’ve become some sort of … e-boy.’
Ethan smiled. ‘That’s my online name.’
‘Well, it’s very apt,’ Penny said. ‘If we were in my lab I could run some tests.’
‘There’s no time,’ said Ethan. ‘I have more to tell you.’ He explained the polling centre and the rigged election.
This part of the story didn’t surprise Penny. ‘Rigging an election isn’t the only bad thing the CU have done,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
Penny’s expression was haunted. ‘You remember Gemini?’
‘The android that saved me from a deadly brain tumour? Yeah, I think I remember him.’
‘The military are using him to kill hostiles in Sharo.’
‘To kill them?’ said Ethan. ‘But …’
‘They’ve taken my creation and corrupted him. I’m so stupid – I should have known something like this would happen.’
Ethan almost reached out to pat her hand. ‘You’re not stupid,’ he said. ‘The government has fooled everyone.’
‘So, E-Boy,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do?’
Ethan blinked – she was asking him?
‘I can’t fight the government while they have my parents,’ he said. ‘It gives them too much leverage. I need to break them free.’
‘If they’re at the National Service Building,’ said Penny, ‘then they’ll be in the basement. That’s where they take prisoners for questioning. I could get us through the entrance, but after that I only have clearance for my lab.’
‘I’ll try to locate the building blueprints online,’ said Ethan, ‘and work out what we’re up against.’
<
br /> ‘Don’t forget the most important thing,’ said Penny.
‘What’s that?’
‘If you’re going to be some kind of day-saving superhero,’ she said, ‘you need a disguise!’
Ethan waited with some trepidation as Penny rustled around in her office.
‘Are you looking for a cape that can make me fly?’ he called out to her.
‘Not quite.’ She came out holding a metallic skullcap with a large monocle on the right side, and a blade-like antennae sticking out the top.
‘Um, kooky!’ said Ethan.
‘Try it on,’ said Penny.
He held his breath as she slipped the helmet onto his head. ‘How do I look?’
‘See for yourself,’ Penny said, gesturing to a mirror on the wall.
Ethan stared at himself. It was a strange sight. But he actually didn’t mind it.
‘What does it even do?’
‘I built it to boost Gemini’s internal communications system, so he could send and receive data from greater distances. The antenna is a multi-directional receiver and the monocle uses beam technology for directed output. I’m hoping it will work for you too. Try it!’
Ethan reached out, and was amazed by how many devices he could now sense! There were routers in every direction, in every room of the apartment building, all with streaming lines of data. And the monocle vastly reduced the effort required to tap in!
His perception expanded to the buildings around him, where he found floors and floors exploding with code …
‘Whoa,’ he said, opening his eyes. ‘This is next level.’