A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  “Not just dark. Deleted.” Nia frowns. “It’s strange. I stashed some backups around the web, just in random places—anyplace I could make a trapdoor on the server and hide it. But almost all of them are gone. Maybe there was a self-destruct code embedded.”

  Cameron feels uneasy again. “You didn’t put them anywhere that would lead back to you, right? Or me?”

  “No. Actually, I cached a bunch of them on Daggett Smith’s servers. It’s not like he’s using them anymore.”

  “Good point,” he says, laughing. Last he’d heard, Daggett Smith had deleted every single one of his accounts and was living in a solar-powered trailer somewhere in New Mexico with at least six cats.

  “Is it true that the president is going to speak about this?”

  “Tonight, I think,” Cameron says. “But I won’t be watching. I’ve got graduation.”

  “That’s exciting,” Nia says.

  Cameron laughs. “No, it’s not. It’s a walk across the stage in a fancy bathrobe to get a piece of paper. Honestly, I could skip it. We just took the head off an evil online empire that had been poisoning the internet for at least a decade. Getting my high school diploma doesn’t seem like a very big deal. Although, if you really think it’s exciting . . .”

  Nia looks at him curiously. “Yes?”

  “Well, I have extra tickets. You could come.”

  “Tonight? At night? I’ve never snuck out at night before.” She bites her lip. “And my father will be here.”

  “Maybe you could ask his permission,” he says, but Nia shakes her head vehemently.

  “He’ll never say yes.”

  “Well, what if I talked to him? Maybe it’s time you introduced me—”

  “No! He can’t know!” Nia practically shouts, and then looks chagrined. “Cameron, he wouldn’t understand. You mustn’t try to contact my father. Ever. Promise me.”

  “Geez,” Cameron says. “Okay, I won’t. I promise. I guess I shouldn’t even ask if you want to meet my mom.”

  Nia’s face goes from chagrined to wistful, and Cameron realizes he’s forgotten, again, that she’s not really here—that this place isn’t real. Her avatar is a perfect portrait of human heartbreak; her eyes even glisten as though she’s about to cry.

  “I really do want to meet your mom, though. And your friends. I just can’t yet. It’s complicated,” she says, and pauses. “But I think I could sneak out tonight. I mean, I’m willing to try. If you still want me to come see you get a piece of paper in your fancy bathrobe.”

  “Of course I want you to come,” he says. “And I’m supposed to do dinner afterward with my mom and her new boyfriend, but I have some time before the ceremony. Why don’t we meet up early, and you can clap while I get my dumb diploma and then sneak out the back of the auditorium after I walk. You don’t want to sit through the four hundred kids whose names come after ‘Ackerson’ in the alphabet anyway.”

  She smiles. “I love that idea.”

  “And I love,” Cameron says, “uh, hanging out with you.”

  Nice save there, champ, says his brain. No way she noticed how you almost just said the Thing.

  This is also how he finds out that for all the physical limitations of this realm, he can cringe here just as hard as he does in real life. Nia steps back with a startled look.

  “Does the program have a glitch? You’re making a hideous face.”

  * * *

  Several hours later, Cameron quickens his pace and curses. It’s like the universe is conspiring to make him late: first he accidentally scratched one of his AR lenses and had to wait while a new one printed, knowing that the only thing worse than being late to meet Nia would be spending all evening in an auditorium full of thousands of people, everyone filming or livestreaming or tweeting the ceremony, without the device to help filter and organize all the noise in his head. It’s unnerving to realize how reliant he’s become on the wearable; he can’t remember the last time he left the house without it. But that was only the beginning: halfway out the door, he’d been interrupted again by the buzzing of his phone—and found himself on a surprise video call with Dr. Kapur. He’d been so annoyed and in such a hurry that he’d hardly noticed the odd expression on her face, or the peculiar, halting pattern of her speech.

  “Dr. Kapur?” he said, confused. “We’re not supposed to talk until next week. I’m on my way out—”

  “I have questions,” Kapur said, ignoring him as though he hadn’t spoken at all. She was so close to the camera that Cameron could practically see up her nose. “I have questions,” she repeated.

  “Um. Okay, about what? I don’t really have time—”

  “I have questions about your—” The psychiatrist paused, sucking the insides of her cheeks. “Your friend. Your friend you spoke of. Your new friend.”

  Cameron blinked. “You mean Nia?”

  Kapur leaned in.

  “Yes. Nia. And her . . . people.”

  “Uh,” Cameron said again, groaning inwardly as he realized that he was officially late. “I mean, she lives with her dad. I think I told you.”

  The psychiatrist cocked her head and spit the word back at him. “Dad.”

  “Yeah. Her father.”

  “Father.”

  “Yes,” Cameron said, no longer able to contain his irritation. “And listen, I’m actually supposed to meet Nia now. I’m already late. So, I really have to—”

  “Now?” Kapur sat back from the screen. “Where? Tell me.”

  “My school. You know, for graduation? I’m sorry, Dr. Kapur, I really have to go,” he said, and ended the call without waiting for her to say goodbye. He didn’t mind the psychiatrist—she was nice enough, and obviously knew her stuff—but for a professional shrink, she could really stand to take her own advice about saving big conversations for the appropriate time.

  * * *

  Nia is waiting when he gets there, sitting on a bench in a pocket park a block south of the campus. Cameron grins when he spots her: she’s wearing a skirt and heels, like it’s a special occasion. Like he’s a special occasion. She looks beautiful, and in that moment, as he realizes that she’s gone to the effort of not just sneaking out but dressing up just for this, just for him, he suddenly comes to a decision. I’m going to kiss her. I’m going to walk over there, sweep her into my arms, and plant one right on her gorgeous lips.

  He quickens his pace and calls out, holding up a hand to greet her—but Nia doesn’t wave back. Instead, she stares at him, her face a mask of surprise and horror, her mouth in a frozen O. Her look is enough to stop him cold as he wonders frantically what’s wrong—and then, a split second later, he knows.

  He feels it.

  His mind is filled with the fast-moving flow of data, so much that his lenses go haywire as they struggle to channel and organize it. The air around him is full of coded whispers, flowing so fast that he can’t isolate any one of them to try to understand it. It’s like he’s walked straight into a spider web of data . . . because, he realizes with horror, that’s exactly what it is.

  Chatter.

  The messages aren’t passing at random. They’re the encrypted communications of a sophisticated, maybe even government operation. And it’s no accident that he’s right in the middle.

  Oh, SHIT.

  “Cameron!” The sound of Nia’s terrified voice jolts him back to reality. “RUN!”

  At first, he doesn’t. Instead, Nia does, disappearing behind a tree as three men in identical black armored suits swarm out of the shadows and the whispers in Cameron’s mind become a high-pitched shriek. She’s gone, and the black-clad agents don’t pursue her. They’re not here for her. They advance on him, and Cameron takes one fraction of a second to feel relieved.

  They didn’t take her.

  Then he runs.

  The screaming of digital voices inside his head has left him disoriented; instead of strategizing to escape, he bolts, driven by the instinctual need to be anywhere else. He sprints across the street
at a lurch as drivers lay on their horns and screech to a halt to avoid hitting him. His foot is slowing him down; his prosthetic doesn’t understand the concept of “running for your life,” and there’s no time now for it to learn to process his frantic stumbling to get him moving faster. If they chase him, he’ll never outrun them. But if he can lose them . . . I have to hide. He scoots down an alley between a Chinese restaurant and an accountant’s storefront. The narrow space is empty but for a few stacked pallets and a dumpster that smells like fried rice, but there’s an exit at the other end, where Cameron can see the gleam of parked cars and a shadowy copse of trees rising beyond—the entrance to a public park. It’s a perfect place to lose a tail . . . or to make them think they’ve lost you.

  Cameron drops to his belly and wriggles beneath the dumpster, trying not to cough as the smell of spoiled food fills his nostrils. He closes his eyes and listens again, but the chatter has fallen silent. The sense of being trapped in a web of tangled communications is gone, and he exhales with relief. They must not have seen where he went. They—

  “Hi there,” someone says, and Cameron screams. One of the men he was running from is bent down beside his hiding place. He’s wearing a mask that betrays no sign of the human being underneath, a black mirror in which Cameron can see only his own petrified face staring back at him. A pathetic whimper escapes from his throat as the man reaches out, taking rough hold of Cameron’s shirt and hauling him out from under the dumpster. His arms are seized and pinned behind him, and something presses hard against his back. Cameron concentrates, and senses the close presence of a simple software program. It’s talking, but not to him—and his own devices are answering back. Someone is scanning his body for tech. Frantically, he tries to interrupt the flow of data. From behind him, a voice says, “This kid is crawling with hardware. Should I kill it?”

  “Do it,” says the man in the mask. The thing pressing into his back emits a sharp whine, and Cameron feels the sudden silence as his phone, his AR lenses, and his prosthetic all go instantly dead.

  Then the device whines again, and a huge, painless jolt of white light envelops his brain. He knows he’s in terrible trouble.

  Then the whiteness turns black, and he knows nothing at all.

  ENCRYPTED MESSAGE INCOMING

  From: OPTIC Team 9

  Subject: Target acquired

  Request immediate use of facilities for subject ACKERSON, CAMERON. Six, get your tools ready. We’re going to make this kid VERY uncomfortable.

  20

  Captive

  The first thing Cameron feels as he wakes up in the cold dark of his kidnappers’ lair is the emptiness. Emptiness where the voices of the machines used to be, so vast and palpable that it hits him like a wave before he even opens his eyes. His phone, his watch, his AR lenses, the neural net in his prosthetic—Cameron had grown so used to hearing them humming away inside his head, the sound as pleasant and constant as falling rain. Now they’re dead . . . or in the case of the prosthetic and his phone, just gone. Taken from him by the same people who took him. It’s too quiet in there now, like a ghost town, and when he reaches out in search of something else to interface with, it’s like running into a blank wall. He’s never felt so disconnected.

  The second thing he feels is dread. Those devices weren’t just a set of friendly voices inside his head; they were his best hope of calling for help. Even with his hands bound—and they are, he realizes, trussed behind his back with something thin and hard, possibly a zip-tie—he could have interfaced with one of them to send his location to the police, or the FBI, or . . .

  The FBI? Cameron’s inner voice pipes up, with scathing cynicism. Who do you think just kidnapped you and brought you to their secret underground torture chamber, ya dingus?

  Right, he thinks. Scratch that. But geez, if the worst happened, he could’ve at least fired off an email to his mom to tell her where to find the body.

  He opens his eyes and struggles to a seated position. The room around him is a featureless white box, a cell with no furniture except the cot he’s been lying on. He reaches out again in search of something, anything, trying to find a flow of data he can dip into and extract information from, but the room gives up nothing. It must be some kind of dead zone. The realization grips him with fear. Is it just a coincidence that he’s in here, or do they know about his abilities?

  “Hey!” he yells. “HEY!”

  The door slides open, and his fears evaporate as quickly as they came. A small, slim woman is standing there, wearing a turtleneck dress that hugs the lines of her body and a pair of high heels that look impossible to walk in. Her black hair is pulled back in a severe ponytail, exposing a small pattern of white dots on her temple. She gazes at him without speaking, and Cameron looks back at her with interest—but it’s not what he’s seeing that captures his attention so much as what he’s sensing. A wave of information flooded in when the door opened, coming not from the building, but from her. She’s got biotech—advanced, expensive, impossible for ordinary civilians to get—humming under the surface of her skin, a complex series of systems interfacing with the ones that nature gave her. The data logs are staggering; this woman isn’t just tracking things like her step count or heart rate. Cameron reaches out to the software and discovers a sea of information, everything from her liver function to plasma levels to a countdown to her next period.

  Gross.

  “You’re grimacing,” the woman says, coolly. “Are you in pain? The jolt we gave you to knock you out is supposed to be harmless, but it’s hard to account for all outcomes for someone with your, ah, unique medical history.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Cameron, and the woman’s eyebrows go up.

  “So you’re not the Cameron Ackerson who got struck by lightning on an internet livestream this spring?” she says, and laughs lightly when Cameron scowls. “Come on, kid. You’re famous. Even if it weren’t my job, I’d know who you are. You’ve made a remarkable recovery . . . on several fronts.”

  She brings a hand out from behind her back, and Cameron stares. His prosthetic is dangling there, but it’s the hand holding it that interests him; two of the woman’s fingers and her thumb are missing, replaced by the most incredible bionic substitutes that he’s ever seen. It’s not just the tech, but the design; the artificial fingers look like they were sculpted by artisans. Next to it, his 3D-printed neural network looks like a science fair project.

  The woman sees him staring, and smirks.

  “Quite lovely, isn’t it?” she says. “Not that yours doesn’t have a certain homespun charm. I had my people bring it back online for you—unless you prefer to limp, of course.”

  She hands him the prosthetic, and Cameron turns away as he slips off his shoe and reattaches it. He wishes the woman would stop watching him; it feels weirdly intimate, like having someone watch him get dressed. He feels even more uneasy as she beckons to him, leading him out of the narrow room, her heels clicking against the polished floor. This building is a maze of disorienting hallways that all look the same, the rooms hidden behind camouflaged sliding doors that open up in the wall without warning. Cameron’s best guess is that the whole place is several stories underground, and even then, it’s only a guess. When he tries to sync with its systems, to find a registry or an address or even a fire alarm to trigger, his queries are met with a burst of gibberish. Everything from the air conditioning to the communications network is locked behind a thick layer of sophisticated cybersecurity.

  “In here,” the bio-enhanced woman says, and Cameron turns as the door swoops open to reveal another bare room—this one outfitted with a table and two chairs, and a camera in each corner. He steps in, then turns to face his captor. She seems to be studying him. The weight of her gaze makes him feel like squirming.

  “You don’t remember me, do you,” she says, and turns up the corners of her mouth again when Cameron gapes at her. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. You weren’t much more than
an infant the last time I saw you. Of course, I was only a kid myself. And now here we both are, all grown up. If only our dear old dads could see us now. Park and Ackerson, a collaboration for the next generation.”

  She pauses, waiting for Cameron to put it together. He doesn’t disappoint.

  “You’re Wesley Park’s daughter.”

  “Yes, I am,” she says. “Olivia.”

  Cameron gestures at the room. “And this place is . . . what, the family business? The one your dad built after he destroyed my dad’s livelihood?”

  Olivia raises her eyebrows. “Oh, is that the Ackerson version of events? Because according to my father, Whiz was a sinking ship that he jumped from after your father lost his mind out there on Lake Erie and went full mad scientist. I always thought it was a little far-fetched myself. Although having met you, I’m reconsidering.”

  Cameron feels his temper flare. “Your father—”

  “Is dead,” she interrupts him, her voice mild. “Almost ten years now. Mother, too. It was a terrible accident. I was the sole survivor—almost fully intact.” She twinkles her bionic fingers at him. “And this place, since you ask, is mine. Inherited upon my father’s death, but I’ve built it into something rather different than he would have liked. Dad was very web one-point-oh. He didn’t understand that the power of the internet was about people, not tech.”

  “You . . .” Cameron trails off, letting his thoughts click into place. The lenses in his eyes are dead, drained of energy, but this is one connection he doesn’t need any extra help to make. “You’re data mining. That big story on the news, that was about your network.”

  Olivia rolls her eyes. “News story. Uh-huh. Cameron, a word of advice: This will all go much more smoothly if we don’t insult each other’s intelligence. My people and I have been tracking your little project since the Daggett Smith incident. We know more than you think we do. Keep that in mind when you’re tempted to lie.”

  Cameron, stunned, doesn’t reply, and Olivia doesn’t wait.