by Brandt Legg
“Exactly, so I need to know if Ray is still Ray, or if she’s progressed past the point of no return.”
Chase clicked the key to send his message, and they shared another agonized glance as tension stole the oxygen from the plane’s cabin. The longer it took to get a return ping, the less likely one would come.
Seventy-Three
The two CHIPs, who Franco knew from before their implants, escorted their handcuffed former security chief onto the elevator. 0628 pressed the button to the top floor. Although his own cuffs were in a jacket left in the car, Franco worked a handcuff key that he always carried out of a side pocket as he stood in a corner. With expert fingers, he managed to unlock them. Now, he had to figure out a way to overpower both of them. He knew their training, but with the RAIN implant, any advantage that gave was certainly lost.
The best chance will be up on the roof, he thought. Or, maybe when the elevator doors open. He looked up to watch the floors progressing. Eighth floor, past the invisible fifth floor where that coward Sliske is. Ninth, tenth, I should do it here. Eleventh, the confined space could work in my favor. Twelfth . . .
0008 looked at him as if reading his mind. “Turn around let me see your hands.”
Decision made. “What if I refuse?”
“I’ll shoot you,” 0008 said coolly, pointing a silencer equipped Smith & Wesson at him.
“Fine, makes no difference to me how I die,” Franco said, smiling. “But it might bother Sliske.”
“Just turn around,” 0628 said, grabbing Franco’s shoulder and jerking him.
Suddenly, both CHIPs grabbed their heads and dropped to their knees, whining in obvious pain.
Franco kicked 0628 so hard in the face that cracking vertebrae in his neck made a sickening crunch as his head snapped back violently and hit the shiny elevator wall. Franco didn’t see 0628’s body fold to the floor because in that instant he’d grabbed 0008’s gun as it slipped from his hands and shot the CHIP point blank in the heart.
Franco immediately opened a small panel on the wall and typed in the special access code which would send the elevator back to the “invisible” floor. “Damn it!” he said when it didn’t work.
He pushed the button to get off at the next floor, then headed for the stairs. In the hall, he plowed into a man wearing a white coat who’d just run out of one of the offices. The man, a doctor, recognized Franco as the head of security and didn’t seem to know he no longer held the role.
“What’s going on?” Franco demanded as he helped the doctor off the floor.
“We’ve had a complete RAI system crash. I’ve got to check on the patients.”
“Sliske is still in recovery,” Franco said. “Is he all right?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said, running for the elevators. “I’m going down now.”
Franco, glad the elevator with the two dead CHIPs was now climbing toward the roof, followed the doctor into another elevator. The doctor keyed in an access code and a minute later the doors opened on the “invisible” fifth floor. When they came to another barrier, the doctor pressed his palm into the biosensor pad and Franco pushed through after him. Inside “Central,” the core space opened to a hall of lasers where AI sensors identified Franco as unauthorized. The final gate remained locked, and a security guard spoke to him through a speaker while the doctor was allowed to proceed.
“Mr. Madden, please place your weapon in the drawer.”
Franco complied, understanding the system well enough to know his gun would be of no use. The drawer, similar to a drive-in bank teller’s, took the gun—the second one he’d lost in less than thirty minutes.
The guard spoke into his wrist while Franco remained trapped in an electronic gate surrounded by lasers and reinforced blast-proof concrete walls. A long minute later, a man Franco recognized as Sliske’s assistant appeared next to the guard. Franco had never liked or trusted the Japanese man with the strange “s” shaped scar on his face.
Franco could see the guard argue with Sliske’s assistant through the lasers and thick bulletproof glass. Probably ordering the guard to execute me, Franco thought.
Then the lasers went dark and the gate lifted.
Franco walked forward toward the final door. The assistant opened it and stood waiting for Franco.
“Sliske is in room twenty-six,” the assistant said, motioning down the hall.
Franco looked in that direction, then back at the assistant.
The assistant made eye contact. “The disruption in RAI has passed. An unknown outside signal seems to have caused some kind of anomaly, a resource drain. They’re trying to run it down.”
“And the CHIPs?”
“They were down momentarily, but appear to be functioning normally again, but Sliske was still in recovery . . . so he is still restrained.”
Franco stared into the assistant’s eyes and nodded. He made his way across the spacious open area, past the large, glass enclosed maze, and into the corridor.
Unsure if the assistant had sent him into a trap, he opened the door to room twenty-six slowly, wishing he had a weapon.
“Hello Irvin,” Franco said, seeing Sliske strapped to a hospital bed with an IV connected at his wrist.
“What the hell?” Sliske frantically pushed the call button in his hand.
“You don’t look very smart,” Franco said, pulling the call box away from him. “You do look scared though.” He kneeled next to the bed. “It could have worked. You might have been able to blame the Chairman and me for the deaths, and then you would have been the natural choice to replace him, but—”
“Listen, Franco, you have no idea what RAIN can do. Let me make you a CHIP, and then decide whose side you want to be on. It’s everything . . . You’ll know everything that has ever been, the power of your mind—”
Franco put his hands around Sliske’s neck.
“No!” Sliske cried.
“Have you read The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft?” Franco asked, without waiting for an answer, while he squeezed his neck. “It begins, ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.’”
Sliske gasped and stared at Franco with pleading eyes while his body made a final struggle.
“Shhh,” Franco said. “Shhh.”
Travis looked around, waiting for Tess to get on the line.
“Apparently I’m a few minutes too late,” Travis said to Tess as he looked at the body.
“Who’s dead? Sliske or Chase?”
“Sliske.”
She smiled briefly. “Hell, our job just got a whole lot tougher.”
“Yeah, and more complicated. This place is far more advanced than we thought.”
“Any sign of Chase?”
“None. It looks like Franco killed Sliske.”
“The Chairman and his cronies must be worried,” Tess said, pacing in her office. “That’s good, means they’re still vulnerable.”
“But for how long?” Travis asked, scanning the high-tech equipment and monitors in the adjoining glass-enclosed cleanrooms.
“Get to San Francisco now. I’ll divert the two IT-Squads who were heading to Seattle. They’ll be in San Francisco before you.”
“What about Franco?”
“If you haven’t seen him by now, there’s no doubt he’s on his way to San Francisco, too. Let’s not be late this time—we don’t need another body to explain.”
Seventy-Four
Rong Lo landed in San Francisco an hour before Chase and Wen arrived, but he hadn’t bothered waiting around. Instead, the MSS agent left a team of “hired guns” in place, although it seemed unlikely they’d apprehend them at the airport. Contractors didn’t have the same drive as the agents he’d trained, and anyway, as Rong Lo always told his subordinates, “Luck is how you win battles, intelligence is how you win wars.
”
The ping came from Ray twenty minutes before Chase and Wen arrived at the San Francisco airport. They had no idea that their intrusion into the depths of RAI had caused the disruption that allowed their nemesis, Franco Madden, to escape, resulting in the death of Irvin Sliske. None of that mattered at the moment because they had only one mission—to stop RAIN for good.
“Then we have a chance,” Wen said, after the ping came back.
“If I can get into the servers and fully engage Ray, yes. But there are a lot of ‘ifs’ between now and accomplishing that. Everything needs to go perfectly, which means no gun fights with CHIPs or MSS agents.”
“Maybe we lost them,” Wen said. “I just checked with the Astronaut, and there have been sightings of you all over the world in the past twelve hours, but nothing close to us.”
“Interesting,” Chase said, wondering who was helping him and how.
“If we shut down RAI, we have one more objective.”
“Rong Lo,” Chase said as the plane touched down. He knew they had to find him and then find a way to kill him or they would be constantly hunted until he found and killed them.
Rhino, a massive man that made his boss, the sizable Flint, look average, met them, and before they knew it, the three of them were driving toward the Financial district of San Francisco. The Cadillac Escalade seemed barely able to contain Rhino as the 6’7” - 290-pounds-of-solid-muscle giant seemed to defy physics in fitting behind the wheel. Chase continued coding during the half-hour drive. Wen continued to use the Antimatter Machine to look for clues about their pursuers and see if their profiles were still present on MSS systems. Both fugitives compulsively kept checking the road behind them. Rhino, a true professional, said little during the drive. Finally, he dropped them at the Salesforce Transit Center, a transportation hub with a five acre park on its roof featuring thousands of specially chosen plants and hundreds of trees.
Wen and Chase found a couple of chairs under a low palm tree and pushed through the final coding for the AI anecdote they hoped would take out RAI. Rhino said he’d be close by, and Boone was expected in an hour.
They sat in the shadow of the Salesforce Tower, where the final stage of their plan would happen. One of the tenants in the tallest building west of Chicago was a contractor who maintained the ultra-secret over-web known as “Heaven.” When Boone arrived, there were quick introductions between Wen and his brother before Chase reviewed the plan one last time.
“You get us into the building, Wen gets us into the contractor’s server room, the Antimatter Machine connects us to the servers, which get us into Heaven, and then straight into the center of Ray’s heart. I inject the AI anecdote into her stream, and she crashes.”
“Wow,” Boone said. “Sounds crazy. Can it work?”
“It has to.”
They entered the SalesForce Tower through the rear lobby just after sunset. Boone’s credentials got them easily past the secure areas. Soon they were on the forty-sixth floor, where Wen’s MSS skills got them into the server room. Inside, they encountered two guards and two other “over-night” employees who were all quickly and expertly subdued, bound, and gagged single-handedly by Wen. Chase connected the Antimatter Machine and his laptop to access the various secure databases and networks needed to make the link to Ray. He’d only finished the AI Anecdote ten minutes before they’d entered the building. It took nearly half an hour to navigate the dark and murky world of Heaven.
“We’re in,” he finally whispered triumphantly once he could see the TruNeural portal. “Here we go.”
He wasted no time hitting the enter key, unleashing a seemingly endless string of code that enabled the backdoor into the most complex AI system ever devised.
“Yes!” he said as it opened.
“She let you in?” Wen asked, also whispering.
Chase nodded as he keyed in the password that would unleash the anecdote on his creation. “Good luck, baby,” he said, hitting send.
“What now?” Boone asked.
“We wait.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Boone blurted out, shattering the library-like quiet of the server room. “Are we talking minutes, hours . . . days?”
“Hopefully seconds,” Chase said. His screen lit up in a fireworks display of characters rolling across like an army of letters and numbers set to invade. “Damn it!”
“What?” Wen asked.
“It didn’t work.”
“What do we do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t keep saying that!” Boone snapped.
Chase looked at the screen, thought about the incredible stakes that no one would believe until it was too late, before realizing there might be one final chance. “SEER!” he said. “I’ve got to get into my network.”
“At Balance Engineering?” Wen asked. “Too risky.”
“Not to physically go there,” Chase said.
“Even to bring up the network here, the MSS, NSA, Franco—they’ll all see you instantly.”
“What about the Antimatter Machine?”
“If we had direct satellite line of sight, we could do it blind, but we’d have to keep the link under nine minutes twenty-nine seconds.”
“It’ll be close,” Chase said, disconnecting the machines. “Boone, can you get us on the roof?”
“Of course, but—”
“Let’s go!”
Seventy-Five
The roof of the Salesforce Tower, more than a thousand feet above the busy streets, felt to Chase like being on the top of a rocket ship as the city stretched out in all directions below like stars in a strangely compressed galaxy. Nothing about the building was normal. The roof—actually a complex multi-storied equipment and maintenance center of catwalks, compartments, and miles of wiring, cable, girders, and railings—was no exception. A cold wind swept through the gleaming grated façade that crowned the building, concealing two colossal custom-made cranes standing parked on tracks.
“What are those?” Chase asked Boone while Wen set up the Antimatter Machine in an area out of the wind.
“Those beauties are BMUs—Building Maintenance Units,” Boone said. “Custom made in Germany. See those openings in the façade?”
“Yeah, looks dangerous.” Chase said, moving toward Wen’s set-up. “I wouldn’t want to get too close.”
“It’s part of the system to clean the windows. Telescoping booms, all moving on drive wheels around rooftop tracks—”
“Why?”
“The building curves in, starting around the twenty-seventh floor, making conventional rigs impossible to use to clean all that glass. I’m here all the time. As soon as we finish cleaning the windows, we have to start all over again. Job security.”
“Maybe when all this is over, I’ll get a chance to ride that rig with you,” Chase said.
“You haven’t been on a scaffold in what, six or seven years?” Boone asked.
“Something like that,” Chase said, remembering the summers he spent working for his older brother, hanging from the sides of tall buildings all over the bay area. “I still miss it.”
“Being a billionaire is better,” Boone said, smiling.
“We’re ready!” Wen yelled above the wind.
“Can the satellites see us?” Chase asked. “I mean the ones we need?”
“Always,” Wen shot back.
Their ambitious plan required her to access Ghost Dragon, the MSS cloud system—or overweb—via satellite. From there, they’d use that connection to jump onto the US Heaven system and then down into Chase’s own BE network. A simultaneous link would be reestablished to Ray using the channel opened minutes earlier in the contractor’s server.
“Remember, once we’re live, we’ve got nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds before they have us.”
Chase nodded. “Do it.”
Wen hit a timer on her phone, and then clicked enter on the Machine.
<
br /> The monitor of the Antimatter Machine filled with a matrix of data moving too fast to read while Chase’s laptop screen remained empty.
Two minutes went by, then three.
“What’s taking so long?” Boone asked.
“I don’t know!” Chase said.
“I told you to quit saying that.”
Suddenly the space around them filled with lights of swirling patterns and infinite colors.
“What’s going on?” Wen shouted, thinking helicopters were surrounding them.
“Light show!” Boone yelled. “Every night, eleven thousand LED lights make fresh art visible for twenty miles.”
“She’s answering!” Chase said, typing madly as the lights of the crown went from a spectrum of purples to a million shades of green.
After two long minutes of Chase’s nonstop typing, Wen tapped him. “We’re past six minutes. We’ve only got three-ten left.”
“Ray has questions. It’s a conversation,” he said, never slowing his fingers.
As Chase and Ray conversed across his laptop, a small window popped up on the Antimatter Machine’s screen.
“It’s confirmed,” Wen announced after reading the message. “We are erased.”
“What’s that mean?” Boone asked, hoping RAI was done.
“The MSS no longer has a kill order on us.”
“Wow,” Boone said, surprised. “But can’t they just put out another one?”
“Difficult to do when, according to the MSS computers, neither Chase nor I exist.”
“You can do that?”
Wen smiled. “Anything is possible in the digital realm.”
“Rong Lo is still out there though, right?” Boone asked.
Wen didn’t answer. She could feel his presence like a cancer, slowly killing her. “Two minutes!”
“Almost there,” Chase said, distracted. His fingertips were numb from the cold and endless pounding keystrokes.
Three figures emerged from the shifting lights.