Dark Crypto (Thorne Inc. Book 1)

by Neil Mosspark

  Jack turned off the car and climbed out. He stood with his hands on the roof, watching the commotion of emergency services working to put out the fire and bring out bodies. “Nothing you do is straightforward, is it?”

  “We need your help getting our only witness out of that faraday cage thing. C’mon, he’s downstairs.”

  As Olivia guided him through the doors of Neotech's building, she filled him in on the recent events. She had to repeat herself each time Jack paused to stop and observe bodies being bagged and carted away by emergency services. Bodies of dead scientists and progressive thinkers like himself.

  Only after she told him that there were people still alive who needed his help did he continue moving. Descending the stairwell, she explained about the gun battle, the explosion, and the theft of equipment, along with the possible abduction of Dr. Sanders.

  The fact that the firefighters hadn’t turned off power to the building seemed like a positive. At least it wasn’t burning down around them.

  Stepping out into the downstairs lab, Olivia guided Jack to Gabriel.

  “This is your tech consultant,” Olivia said, pointing to the young man.

  Gabriel held out his hand. “We need to get our only witness out without killing him. The mercenaries who attacked the building set off some sort of device. It killed everyone in the building earlier today, but he survived by staying inside the chamber.”

  Olivia looked at the man pacing back and forth and noticed that his sweat-soaked clothes had dried.

  “It shouldn’t be a problem; I brought a first-gen transmitter.” He held up a laptop and a small, flat box the size of a small pizza box. “We should be able to turn them all off. He will feel a bit sick afterward as his body expels them, but he should be safe to remove. Won’t take me more than ten minutes.”

  Olivia pulled out Gabriel’s pad of paper again and wrote on it, “Tech is coming in to turn off your nanobots. Let him in.”

  The scientist stopped pacing long enough to read it and then moved to the airlock door. He punched the code, and the outer door hissed and a light panel next to it turned green.

  “Go ahead,” Olivia told Jack, and the young man stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  She watched as the scientist let him into the room. She could see Jack inspecting the chair, showing him his own brain implant. The scientist's face was unimpressed, despite Jack’s enthusiasm. It was like watching a conversation on mute. Frustrating.

  Olivia banged her fist on the glass, and when Jack looked at her, she motioned for him to hurry up.

  Jack nodded and placed his equipment on the counter. After a few tense minutes of watching Jack type away on his computer, she saw him close the laptop and nod at the man. Jack turned to her and gave her the thumbs up.

  Olivia motioned for them to leave.

  Hesitantly, the scientist made his way toward the airlock, stepping inside. He stood at the door for a moment.

  Everyone’s breath hung in their chest as the man pulled open the door and stood there, waiting for his death. Relief spread across his face, and he stepped out of the airlock toward them.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much. I thought I was a dead man. I’ve never been so scared.”

  “Jack’s the one you should be thanking,” Olivia stated. “My name is Olivia, and this is Detective Gabriel Turner. What’s your name?”

  “Jacob. Jacob Jones.”

  “Mr. Jones, can you tell us about what they took and your coworker, Dr. Sanders?”

  “They took her. I saw it through the gap in the cupboard doors. They took her and a lot of our collection too.”

  “What was in the collection?” Gabriel asked.

  “Everything. Practically all of the objects from the Quarantine Zone we had cataloged.”

  “Did they take a box? The puzzle box? The polyptych thing?” Olivia said.

  “Yes. That was here on a bench. We were working on setting it up for a connection. I was helping prep the chair for her when everyone outside fell down. Died." Jacob put his hands to his head. "Are they? All of them are dead?"

  Gabriel nodded somberly.

  "Oh God." His face contorted with a look of confusion as he realized that everyone he had worked with had been killed in a single wireless broadcast. "All of them. They're gone." His hands were held up to his sides of his head, and he clenched his eyes shut, as though trying to stop his head from exploding. "They're all dead."

  Olivia put her hand on his back. He flinched at the contact.

  "Not all of them," she said. "Dr. Sanders was inside with you when they came right? She survived."

  "She told me to hide when we heard gunfire. There was only room for one of us. She saved my life.” Jacob's hands dropped to his side.

  “Do you think she was part of it?” Gabriel asked.

  “No. Dr. Sanders wasn’t working with them. This work was everything to her. She was always producing exceptional results. She was put on the polyptych project because of the cerebral interface. She had it implanted. She was that dedicated."

  "What's the interface for?" Gabriel asked.

  Jacob touched the back of his own unmodified head as though pointing out where it would be installed. "It helps with the visualization of the data. It's just like the one your tech has."

  "Like the one Jack has," Olivia clarified. Jack turned his head and lifted his knit cap so that Gabriel could see the surgical stainless steel port.

  Jacob nodded. "She worked for months on it but couldn’t complete the decryption. She was obsessed with solving the puzzle. I think Dr. Gerrard might have gotten involved to help her, though. She had been working on it steadily for the last few days. My job was to monitor her vitals and shut things down if she had a seizure.”

  Olivia nodded. “We discovered that Dr. Gerrard took the polyptych offsite and was using kids. Did you know anything about that?”

  “No ... I didn’t know about that. But it makes sense from a solution perspective. Kids have a much more malleable brain and should be able to adapt quickly. It would be really unethical, though.”

  “Experimenting on kids is illegal, not just unethical,” Gabriel said.

  "No, it's not just that." Jacob sat down on a nearby chair and continued. “Nanobots in a child would permanently affect their brain chemistry and growth. We tried installing the cerebral connection in younger chimps, and they always ended up developmentally challenged. It would be a death sentence. Maybe six to ten months before they started having seizures. Another two after that before they became brain dead. It generates a feedback loop. The brain starts needing the interface. They go comatose, then die.”

  Anger boiled up in Olivia again, and she realized she was clenching her jaw. “What was the box decoding?”

  "Decrypting," Jack corrected.

  "Decrypting. What was it decrypting?" she asked again.

  Jacob shook his head. “That’s classified. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. I signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

  “Jacob, a lot of people died today. In fact, everyone in the building is dead. Everyone you ever worked with. Everyone who ever sat you down and had you sign contracts is dead. The company is liquidated. There's no one left alive. Everyone except you and Dr. Sanders, that is. I don't think that anyone will send a lawyer after you if tell us what it was for. All we are trying to do is get her back.”

  He leaned forward face in his hands. “I’m not allowed to tell you. I’ll go to jail.”

  “That won’t happen,” Gabriel stated. “No one will press charges.”

  He looked at the detective and then at Olivia. Taking a deep breath, he composed himself. “It’s a key. A doorway key.”

  “What does it unlock?” Jack asked.

  “Doors. Literally the doors inside the ship. At least that's what we think it does,” Jacob said. “The algorithm was probably coded on some sort of user’s implant. Inside the box, there is a piece of tech we dug out of a mummified alien corpse."

  "It's Xe
no-tech for sure then?" Jack prompted.

  Jacob nodded. "It was Xeno-tech alright, and still active. We figured that it was used like an implanted garage door opener coded to each individual. That’s what’s in the box. It’s what’s left of an implant. We have been trying to get around its crypto. That’s why it has to have a person hooked up to it to work. The person works as a proxy for who it was supposed to be implanted in. We don’t even know if we are using it right.”

  “What doors does it unlock?” Olivia repeated. “I don’t care about how it works. I want to know where they took Dr. Sanders. What door? Where?” Her voice was filled with anger and impatience.

  “Site 77B. We were trying to decode the lock using the tech. It was so advanced that we couldn't do it with our own level of..."

  Olivia held up her hand and stopped him. "Where's the site?"

  "It’s in the Quarantine Zone near the edge. We found it during out cataloging of the exploded ship. A lot of the debris is phased into the material of old Toronto. It’s a flat panel door phased into a gas station. The material is literally merged."

  "So if the ship exploded is in pieces, what use is the door? It wouldn't lead anywhere. It's just a door, right?"

  "It's not that simple. We started finding these doors among the debris. They’re everywhere. Buried in the dirt, buildings. Even the Quarantine Zone wall. We estimated that there were thousands of these things spread across the entire zone."

  "Doors? Thousands of doors? You're going to have to start making sense, Jacob." Olivia was beginning to get impatient.

  "They're doors ... but they're not doors in a house. More like portals. We think that they are like little pockets of space-time. We think that the doors from the ship are a way of storing goods, like inside a safe. Like a secure holding area. Based on the level of encryption on both the door and the Xeno implant in the polyptych, we figured that whatever was behind there was worth hiding and had value to it.”

  “Where is site 77B?” Gabriel asked.

  “I can show you.” Jacob stood and walked over to a computer. After a few taps of the keyboard, he had pulled up a map of the Quarantine Zone. Olivia's eyes scanned it. The streets and roads looked familiar from her childhood. It was similar, except for the concentric rings of missing buildings and streets. Even the lake had raised islands where none had existed prior to the arrival of the dark anomaly. It reminded her of ripples in a pond.

  “Here!” His finger touched a point on the north side of the map. A large, circular shape occupied the outer edges of the map.

  “What are the circles?” Jack asked.

  “Displaced matter caused by the original distortion waves,” Jacob said. “When the ship crashed here, it was using some sort of slip drive. Much of the local native material inside the Quarantine Zone has been replaced by some alien soil and plant life. That's why it's still quarantined. We're not sure where it came from. Much of the plant life hasn’t done well in our sunlight and died over time after the zero point field fell. We had a few eyewitness accounts from the refugees inside when the ship exploded. Most of the buildings that had survived the original impact were flattened from the blast. It’s just miles and miles of rubble. We were lucky the door was so close to the exterior, since the interior is very concentrated with the distortion effect. It was a first door that was found functioning and powered, but we just couldn’t open it. We didn't know how until years later, when we identified the Xeno implant.

  “It’s the only door we know of that still has power running to it. The ship was run by multiple power systems. When it exploded and phased into the surrounding material of the city, the power source remained intact. It’s a miracle, really.”

  “You think that it can open it?”

  “I know it can. The simulations we ran this week worked. Dr. Gerrard had headed up the confirmation research. The decryption equipment in the box has the completed polyptych solution. He wanted to use it, but the company was taking its time to get permission from the government to enter the quarantine area. They don’t like the idea that something is going to be opened. They consider it a risk. Specifically, the site we were researching for him.”

  “Are there any other sites?”

  “None that I’m aware of. There could be, but it's unlikely they are powered,” Jacob said.

  Olivia looked at Gabriel. “We need to get someone there.”

  “That’s going to take some time. We've lost a lot of people, and everyone's stuck here working on Neotech's mass murder scene. Let me work on seeing what I can pull together.” He stepped away to use his phone.

  “That’s all I know. I worked on the interface. I just helped. Dr. Sanders and Dr. Gerrard were the leads on the project.”

  “That’s what we needed. Thanks for your help,” Olivia said, stepping away from the desk. "Hang out for a bit while Gabriel figures out what to do."

  Olivia turned away, and her eyes met the multioptic face of the sitting biped drone. She looked at it for a moment then addressed Jacob again. "What is that for?" She pointed at the sitting metal form.

  "The drones?" he asked, turning in his chair.

  "Yeah, the robot things."

  "We use them to handle hazardous material. There's a sealed lead-lined room in the back. If anything off-gasses, is radioactive, or explodes, we don't lose anyone. It's safer to catalogue the more unstable items with a drone than with human hands. Why?"

  "I think your missing drone tried to kill me a few days ago. Who else other than Dr. Sanders has a head plug thing?"

  "A cerebral interface? Dr. Gerrard and some of the chimps. Why?"

  "Just trying to figure out who was trying to kill me. Thanks. Stay here for a second while we figure out what to do next."

  Jacob nodded and leaned back into the chair. She could see the exhaustion on his face.

  Jack piped up. “This is crazy. Why kill everyone? Why kill hundreds of people when they were going to eventually open the door?”

  Olivia shrugged. “It’s probably not that simple. It’s like you said before. It’s a race to get all the new tech. If there’s another company that’s paying for the tech, it’s possible that they would want it first.”

  “But killing everyone? Seems a bit over the top.” Jack leaned against a nearby bench, eying the workbenches in the room.

  “They likely don’t want anyone else knowing. You're looking at this like a good guy. If you’re a sociopath, you don’t want anyone else winning except you; there's a lot a motivated sociopath would do to get ahead. Someone is calling the shots, probably Dr. Gerrard.”

  “So what now?” Jack asked.

  “Let the cops deal with it. Send them the bill for your time. The feds are on this.”

  Gabriel massaged his forehead. The cellphone hung in his hand. “No, they're not.”

  “What?” Olivia asked.

  “They are looking into it. Since this is a mass murder investigation and related to the Quarantine Zone, it's a federal crime. It's off my plate. The feds are looking for the killers.”

  “We already know where they are going. Why wouldn’t they move forward on this?

  Gabriel rubbed his forehead. “They are. It’s just not going to be today. Or tomorrow.”

  “Or a month from now,” she stated. “What about the local police? You guys can’t send someone to track these guys down?”

  Gabriel continued rubbing his forehead. “No. We don’t have jurisdiction. It’s a government area. It's federal, like I said.”

  “Then call up the guards on the Quarantine Zone wall. Tell them about where it is. Tell them what’s happening!”

  “That’s the problem, Olivia!” Gabriel yelled. He rarely raised his voice. Softening his tone, he relaxed. “This is the issue I deal with every day. There’s no way to get them to take action. They have people sneaking in and raiding the zone every day. Every day a little more leaks out. There are hundreds and hundreds of miles of that wall. There are holes everywhere. What’s inside keeps coming out
. There’s no way the government can stop it. They don’t have the manpower.”

  “These guys murdered everyone in the building.” Olivia pointed toward the elevators. None of them needed to see the bodies to know that the dead mercenaries were still lying on the floor.

  “I can’t do anything,” he pleaded. “I’ll go up and talk to the feds that are here. Maybe they can allocate someone locally, but they're not going to budge. As soon as they get their act together, they are going to lock this place down. We are done here. This is a crime scene. No one’s going to come in or out.”

  Olivia could feel herself gritting her teeth again. It wasn’t the fact that Dr. Gerrard was getting away, but it was the fact that the police were hamstrung by red tape.

  “Mr. Jones, do you mind if we get your official statement upstairs?” Gabriel said. “Chuck, I’m going upstairs. Can you secure the scene?”

  Olivia knew that meant getting her and Jack out. Her friend was already packing his equipment.

  Obediently, Chuck stepped forward. “Sure.”

  Gabriel addressed his only remaining witness and beckoned him to stand and follow. “Mr. Jones, please come with me. Let’s get upstairs.”

  Jacob swallowed dryly. “Do you have any water or anything? I’m so dehydrated.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.” Gabe’s hand was on Jacob’s back, guiding him unsteadily to the door. The man turned around and looked at Jack. “Oh ... umm ... thanks, by the way. Thanks for saving me. I was sure I was a dead man the moment I stepped outside.”

  “No problem,” Jack said, smiling.

  The pair disappeared around the corner, and Olivia ran her fingers through her hair before repeatedly banging her fist angrily on the table. Jack jumped as expensive electronic devices bounced and clattered.

  Both Chuck and Jack hesitated for a moment.

  “It's too bad...” Jack said looking at the map on the screen. Olivia ignored him, but he continued anyway, lowering his voice so that only she could hear him, “77B is really close to the north wall. Less than a fifteen-minute walk inside.”