"Yeah, spending a bit too much time connected."
“Is it illegal?”
“Information isn’t illegal, it’s what you do with it. I’m not hurting anyone. I’m just trying to figure out this tech so I can go legit. Just like everyone else. Except that I don’t have a million-dollar budget. I need money, and lots of it, to fund this sort of research.”
“Well, that works out well. I want to share some of my wealth.”
“Hah, you're just as broke as the rest of us.” He turned back and flicked a switch on the wall. The tiny basement was filled with dirt and broken concrete. Ancient broken furniture piled on mounds of dirt lay on either side of the descending steps. It reminded her of a hedge or garbage. At the far end opposite the stairs, someone had gone to the effort of breaking up a concrete wall and digging into the soil beyond. A long tunnel exited out the basement for a number of meters before turning to the right.
Jack continued down the steps using the railing for support. Olivia was amazed at the tour he was giving her. She had never been allowed downstairs.
“I have a solid contract. A client who wants to know more about a kidnapped little girl I recovered out of the north slums. She had a box attached by a cable to her head. It looked kind of like the plug you have in yours. They were experimenting on her...” She suddenly had a bad feeling and was concerned that Jack might be mixed up in all of this. She stepped into the hand-dug tunnel and realized it only ran for a few short meters. Ahead was a perpendicular larger tunnel, built from brick and concrete.
In the dimly lit tunnel, he stopped and turned to her. “Someone put one in a kid?”
Olivia’s worries abated when she saw his face. It was a mask of disappointment and sadness mixed with a touch of horror. She didn’t need her ability to know he was genuinely concerned.
“Yeah. What do you know about it?”
“Nothing specific about your case, but the head jacks are kind of the new thing. They started cropping up in the last year, maybe a year and a half. Mostly only at tech companies. It's pretty fringe. There was some research being conducted a year ago on leveraging Neotech to let patients with spinal cord damage walk again. Or at least control external controls. The idea was to inject nanobots into the brain fluid and let them self-assemble. They basically lay a groundwork of a sort of technological nervous system.”
Jack stepped down a few wooden steps into the well-built brick tunnel. Olivia could see ancient rusted signs on the wall, with their lettering long peeled away. To her left was a bricked-up wall, the long-hardened mortar squeezed out between the bricks in hardened globules. Something told her that no one had been inside to clean it up when they bricked up the tunnel from the outside.
Jack turned to the right, and she followed. “I thought nanobot experimentation was illegal.”
“It is. Certain types of nanobots are really dangerous. The government is worried about them replicating infinitely. It’s literally end of the world level tech if weaponized.” Jack turned the corner. A heavy, sealed door with a worn radiation symbol was at the end of the tunnel.
“Is it safe in there?” she asked.
Jack turned to her and placed a friendly hand on her shoulder, “It’s safer in here than it is out there, Olivia.” Removing his hand, he knocked a pattern of beats on the hatch. A moment later, the large, featureless metal door swung open, filling the hallway with light.
Olivia blinked as her eyes adjusted. Inside, the dirt-filled hallway gave way to a room the size of a basketball court. It was filled with racks of servers, benches covered in materials, and a machine shop at the far end. A handful of people walking around paused for a moment to look up as they entered but then quickly resumed their work.
“Tell me more about the head jacks,” Olivia asked. She noticed another young, tattooed man with a submachine gun pushed the door behind them closed. This one smiled as she passed. For a moment she wondered how Jack was affording hired guns, let alone all the high-end tech that was installed.
“Sure.” Jack turned to the right and walked toward a cluster of couches and a dining table. “So the tech is in a grey zone now. Now you need a license to experiment with it. Which I have, by the way. The problem is that it's like saying that you need a license to be a computer programmer. The genie is out of the bottle. Everyone can do it once someone shows them how.”
“How did some spinal cord research become the thing you have in your head?”
He sighed. “The connection I have in my head is part of the new revolution. The government is trying to suppress this new wave of technology like a man standing in the middle of a river trying to stop it from flowing to the ocean. The corporation that was doing this research to help people—” he paused to point to his own head “—was shut down by the government. But the company had been successful; there are patients with severed spines out there walking around because of this tech. Right after the election, a year ago, the government passed a bill that made their research illegal until they could understand it. A lot of people suffered because of their fear. And a lot of people, such as myself, were out of a job.”
"I don’t get where you're going with this,” she stated. Her head hurt from all the information that was being thrown at her.
“There you are, Jack,” called a heavy baritone. An older dark-skinned man wearing an apron appeared from out of a side door near the couch. He tottered over with a tray. An ancient dented metal teapot and a chipped mug were balanced on top.
He placed the tray down on a coffee table near a couch pushed against the wall. Olivia caught the whiff of fresh-baked bread and vanilla. Her mouth began to water, and she had to swallow.
“Who’s your friend?” asked the large man. He wiped his hands on the white apron as he smiled at Olivia.
“Mom, this is Olivia. She is a good friend. Remember that story about how I almost got shot? Well, this is her in the flesh.”
“Olivia, I’m very pleased to meet you. He speaks highly of you. My name’s Momin, but everyone here just calls me Mom.” He extended a massive hand, and Olivia reached out to shake it. The man’s fingers fully wrapped around hers, making her feel like a child in comparison of size. This close to him, she was now sure it was the man who smelled of baking.
“Olivia Thorne. Nice to meet you, Mom.”
He turned to look at Jack. “Would you like some bread? It's cooling right now. Maybe another cup for Olivia?”
Jack nodded. “That would be nice, thanks, Mom.”
Before they sat on the sofa, Olivia watched Mom turn and walk away. Immediately, she could see an implant similar to Jack's but embedded lower in Mom's neck, just peeking over the collar of his white t-shirt.
Olivia lowered her voice and pointed to the side door Mom disappeared into. "He's got one of those things too. Like yours."
“He’s one of the first patients that had been helped by the research group,” Jack said and sighed.
“He looks healthy enough,” Olivia said, easing down into the couch after Jack sat down.
“He is. Very healthy. He used to be a cook before being hit by a car. But you can’t cook in a restaurant with a kitchen that's built for people to walk around in. He couldn’t find work. We spent months looking for ex-patients that had volunteered. I almost gave up when we found him homeless and in a wheelchair begging for change. He was lucky; we couldn’t find any of the other patients.”
“He was in a wheelchair?”
"Yeah. The government confiscated all their equipment, including all the controllers the volunteers were using. No one could stop them."
"So back to the wheelchair. Kind of cruel."
“Yeah. The problem was that the nanobots need to run on electricity, and they don't think, so they need a computer to interpret the impulses. It's some very special equipment. We offered to build him a small computer in exchange for some of his nanobots." Jack eased into the old couch before continuing. "It plugs into the port and runs his nanobots as they fill in the gap in his spine, passing info
rmation like the nervous tissue naturally would. Afterward, we offered him a job, and we make sure his equipment stays operational. It's his. We pay him to cook, and in turn, we make sure the tech keeps working. He helps us, and we help him.”
“So why do you have one?” Olivia asked.
Jack nodded. “Well. To tell you the truth, we needed Mom just as much as he needed us. We paid him for a few of his nanobots to reverse engineer them. In actual fact we had to spend a year or so figuring out how they worked. In the end we built a nanobot printer and made our own. They have the very distinct feature of not replicating. This gets around the illegal nanobot law.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question.”
Mom appeared again, and a plate of buttered, fresh-baked bread threatened to break Olivia’s concentration. The man smiled at her as he handed her an empty cup before returning to the unseen kitchen. She felt herself smile, realizing that the man’s happiness was almost infectious.
Jack continued, “We want to offer a service. It’s unique, and only a few people are doing it these days. Mostly for the rich. We want in on the ground floor. It’s called neural linking. The brain processes a massive amount of information. We wanted to be able to replace all of the sensory data that you would normally get from the world around you with a virtual composite. We had hoped that the human brain would be flexible enough to process information when hooked up.”
“And were you successful?”
He grinned like a Cheshire cat. “Wildly successful. Our platform outperforms anything on the market.”
“So you can hook up to computers? What does that do?”
“What doesn’t it do. With an interpreter, we can interact with data in ways I can’t ever describe. What feels like hours inside is only a few minutes out here. We’ve learned not to only create a virtual space that we can work in but also to interpret large amounts of data.”
Olivia finally broke and reached for the bread. Her stomach was physically hurting from lack of food. “So less nerd talk and more normal person speak. Translate that for me so I can understand.” She shoved half of the warm slice of bread in her mouth and closed her eyes in ecstasy.
“Imagine having someone dump a thousand-piece puzzle on the table. Let's call that a database. Now imagine someone saying that one of the pieces is a different shape or color or maybe doesn’t belong to the puzzle. If we were to have a computer try to sift through the data, it looks at each piece one at a time and does a comparison to the whole. It might even pick up that one piece that’s wrong, catalogue it with the others, and continue. A machine has to wait until all of the data is processed before it can compare all of the pieces. But human beings do that all the time. As animals we evolved to pick out predators who are camouflaged in the underbrush. We can pick out the color of bruised apple at the grocery store even before picking it up. We can smell bad milk before we taste it. All of these things are evolutionary tools. Once given the right data, we can solve puzzles faster than any computer on the planet. We just need to see it as a whole. Like a person looking at the table, we see all of the pieces at once and pick out the one piece that’s the wrong color.”
“Okay, so that’s what you are doing, but what do you think that this box that the girl was hooked up to was?”
“No idea. I would have to see it.”
“Take a wild guess.”
He poured some tea into the chipped mug in front of him, and then Olivia’s. “It could be anything. What did it look like?”
Olivia mimed the shape and size with her hands. “Just a box with some lights. Wasn’t plugged into anything else.”
“That’s weird. We need what we call a interpreter. The interpreter is connected to something, like a network, or a computer by a network cable. It’s kind of like the car you need to drive. It collects the data from whatever system you're plugged into. You can’t just plug into anything; it would just be a flow of data.”
“Their captors cut up some kids and installed it in their heads. One of them told me that they made the kids use it when they slept. One of the little girls called it a puzzle box."
"It looks a lot like someone sleeping when they are connected. But if it's only a box, it would have to be a standalone system. Sounds a little small, though."
"Do you think it could be wireless, maybe? Maybe they were using kids to hack into some network.”
Jack blinked, and his face dropped. “I doubt it. There's too much latency with a wireless connection. You'd need some pretty heavy-duty equipment for that to happen.” He thumbed over his shoulder to the rows of servers behind him.
Olivia nodded as she tucked the remaining bread in her mouth. She could see Jack was trying to figure it out. The gears were turning and shifting in his head.
“It’s the box itself, Olivia.” He put his teacup down. “I would have to see it myself, but if I were a betting man, I would say that they had them doing something in the box. It's probably an interpreter and tool all in one." He sat back into the couch then shook his head before leaning forward to pick up his cup.
"What?" Olivia said with a mouthful of bread. "You had a thought what was it?"
He shook his head. "It's just speculation, but there are some rumors on the net about the tech from the zone. "
"So..."
"It's a myth. Let's say that they are trying to solve one of these neopuzzles.”
“Neopuzzle?”
“Yeah. If the rumors are true, then there are huge server farms and AI dedicated to cracking it. It's supposed to be the holy grail of hacks."
"You're losing me."
"When the black arrived, and it brought all that alien tech, it brought something else.”
“Like what?”
“Pandora’s box.” He leaned back and sighed.
“Like plague and pestilence. Biblical stuff?”
“Maybe. It depends. There is a data compression algorithms that keeps appearing in most of the Neotech. Each time you figure out how the puzzle works and move the data around, it unlocks the next layer. Presumably, once the data compression algorithm is unlocked, they can use it to decode the alien operating system, and then tons of stuff related to whatever it runs becomes useful.”
“So why the kids?”
“I'd be guessing, but as adults, our brains have already fully developed. We’re hardwired. The concrete has set and isn’t malleable. But kids, their brains are fluid and dynamic when they are young. It’s why adults have a hard time with language learning, but kids can learn two at a time with no problem. They can speak Spanish to Grandma but speak English to their friends.”
“So they need kids? Do they have to be girls?”
“I doubt it. Maybe they are better at the puzzle than boys. Who knows. This is all speculation, though. I only think it’s someone trying to decode a neopuzzle. This is big, Olivia. If someone is kidnapping kids to solve it, they probably are pretty close. The tech in that box is likely some next-level stuff. There’s lots of people competing to be the first one to do it. Using kids is a pretty immoral short cut, but it might work.”
Olivia ran her hands through her hair and sat back on the couch. “Wow. I came to see if you could forge me a Neotech citizen pass, and now I feel like I’m over my head.”
“Like Neotech in one of the mega-block buildings? What are you involved in now?” Jack asked.
“I’m trying to track down who is trying to use the box. I need to get into Neotech to ask around about the box. I’ve got to figure out who did this to those girls and why. The box is the key to it all.”
“Well, I’ll get you the pass, but I’ll need a favor.”
“What’s the favor?”
“If you find out that someone cracked the puzzle, then I need to know. The world’s going to change really fast afterward, and I’d rather have my little startup surf ahead of that wave rather than have it roll over us.”
“Sure, if I hear anything you will be the first to know.”
“Awesome.
I’ll warn you, though, it won’t put you in their database, but it will let you use the elevator. You're going to have to get by the security at the front desk yourself, though, and that’s pretty much impossible.”
“Sounds like you have tried.”
“Oh, trust me, we have. We just can’t get past the front door. The last guy who tried got shot in the back when the clerk did a background check. He made a break for it when he realized he was made, and one of their private police shot him dead.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.
“Give me an hour or two. I think we have a template kicking around here.” With that, Jack stood and sauntered over to a few of his peers. As Olivia shoved another slice of cooling bread into her face, she watched as they turned to look at her suspiciously. With cheeks bulging, she waved at them, and they immediately looked back down at their work.
Digesting more than just the bread, she lay down on the couch and mentally reviewed what had just been told to her. It didn’t take long before deep thoughts became deep sleep.
Chapter 10
Olivia waited quietly in the darkness of the alleyway. After sleeping all night in the safety of Jack's couch, she had slipped away to do some shopping with what little money was left in her business account.
Calling in the ride that she was waiting for had put her funds exactly at zero.
For the most part she felt a bit nervous standing in the alley, overdressed in a long-sleeve high-necked black cocktail dress. The ankle-length hem fluttered in the gentle breeze. She didn’t want to get jumped by a local gang looking for easy prey. It wasn’t likely they would get far. The asp baton in her small purse had broken its fair share of arms and legs over the years.
Still, she would have preferred bringing a gun.
Olivia checked her watch. Jay’s pilot would be arriving soon, and the parking lot near Jack’s hideout was perfect. It usually was full of freight trucks, but today only one or two resided there, and there was no need for the pilot to worry about the wide rotor blades.
“Your ride get there yet?” came a buzz in her ear. Jack was still in his bunker, but his ability to pull and work intel quickly would be an asset on this outing.
Dark Crypto (Thorne Inc. Book 1) Page 10