Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  Freida then signed a thumbs-up to her.

  A few years ago she might have said something smartass or dramatic. Now, she just felt tired when Freida called her by her hack handle. Kids playing kids’ games. she replied instead, and returned the thumbs-up just to keep esprit de corps.

  The doubling construct formed in the Grail’s home space, and as they slotted into it Bobbi had the Grail connect and do its thing. They were instantly aware of the connection, how the Grail simply merged with the security protocols like a hungry cancer – merged, infected, and then transformed the offending structures into bridge material. It was shocking how fast it worked, how complete and terrible the transformation. In the space of a few minutes it had completely homogenized the connection. No wonder they restricted this stuff to military use. It gave her a little more cheer to use it, both through sheer technological awe and the excitement in knowing that she was going the way that commandos had gone for years. Bobbi January, Commando Queen. Snort.

  They shuttled into the network beyond, and instantly knew they were in the right place. Arrival flags kicked in the moment they passed into the system – Welcome to Secure Data Nexus 216 / Genefex File System v.5.6 / Copyright 2079 Genefex Corporation, All Rights Reserved – and they hit the system directory straight away. Security programs remained dormant, and they could see that they were nasty; custom-designed software, their names simple hexadecimal codes and their functions cryptic, loomed around them like sleeping giants as they went through the directory log.

  Freida said as she worked; Bobbi kept an eye out on system activity, waiting for the slightest indication that things were going wrong.

  Bobbi said.

 

  Freida’s exasperation was, of course, shared – some stupid cowboy with a juvenile sense of humor created the damned thing – but Bobbi also found a lot of humor in that. Bobbi answered back, and signed Freida a grin which she returned.

  While Freida continued her work, Bobbi monitored server processes – though nothing seemed malicious, it was hard to tell with only a shifting sea of abstract filenames. There were no clues, no rhyme or reason, just anonymous letters and numbers. Though the Awakened mind sensed and made decisions with the light speed alacrity of thought, however, the weight of time did not abate. Bobbi still felt as if things were taking forever.

  Freida’s words flashed through her mind.

  A wave of anxiety rolled through her.

 

  Bobbi’s mind boggled at that.

  Freida replied.

  And then she was out, her eyes opening to the dark interior of the van and the small gray block of the Grail humming next to the router on the floor in front of them. Scalli was looking between the console and the office park outside.

  “Scalli,” Bobbi said.

  “Yo.”

  “Got an issue.”

  Freida opened her eyes as well. “Looks like we have to go in if we want to get access to the files,” she said.”

  Scalli turned bodily toward them, his enormous frame swallowing the entire driver’s side of the view. “Are you kidding me? You can’t access the data through the system?”

  “The only thing that system controls is security,” Bobbi said with a shrug. “It’s a weird setup, but there you are. We figure they access the data stores directly from inside, probably some kind of secure terminal. We’ll have to hack it directly from the inside.”

  “Can’t you use the Grail to do it?”

  “Maybe,” said Freida. “But we still have to have a system to plug into. We’ll have to take it inside if we can extricate it from the security system without setting it off.”

  “Good thing it’s portable,” Scalli muttered. “Well, Bobbi, what do you think?”

  Bobbi looked between the two. What did she think? She had doubts, of course, but far greater than those was the desire not to turn back. Maybe it was reckless, but there it was. “Well, we’ve already had a look at security,” she said. “And it’s nasty, but we’ve got control of it. There’s probably another layer inside that we haven’t had a look at. You two fancy a field trip?”

  “Absolutely.” Freida grinned at her.

  “You know I’m down,” said Scalli with a shrug. “’Especially if this is the only way to do it. I’ll get my iron.”

  “Well, all right,” said Bobbi, unplugging herself from the terminal. “Let’s get to it, I guess.”

  The doors to the office building whined loudly as they swung open on rusted hinges, making Bobbi wince. The lonely park, its concrete tiles dotted through with dead grass, carried the echo. They waited silently for a moment, craning to hear any reaction to the sound. But there came none that they could tell, and so they stepped inside.

  The lobby was as moldering as the city around it. It was a tall room and had two levels, a curving central staircase straight ahead rising up to a wide balcony that led to the second floor. Crumbling concrete walls, lined with ribbons of blotched chrome and stained with rain and worse, loomed around them. The carpet was dark and wet, and in many places brimmed with mushrooms; it didn’t take long to ruin a place once it was left to the elements – not in Seattle, with the constant cool and damp. There were no windows that remained intact on this level, and from the dripping water that fell from the vaulted ceiling, it appeared none did elsewhere either. And always the shadows hung, as thick as the mold, as thick as the damp, muffling everything. It was a cathedral of rot, slowly falling in on itself, until only the concrete shell remained.

  Bobbi took a palm-lamp out of her pocket and turned it on, sweeping the beam about. A rain-washed spot of chrome ribbing still kept its surface, and it reflected her image: the small, curvy girl with her violet hair and fierce eyes, swallowed up in the gray envelope of a surplus naval jumpsuit with the medical bag hanging from her shoulder. She realized how much she looked like a soldier, really, albeit a sloppy punk militiawoman. Her father might have been proud.

  “Look for the elevators,” Bobbi instructed the rest. Both Scalli and Freida had their guns out, Freida’s long-nosed brick of a semi-auto dwarfed by the enormous dragon of a battle rifle that Scalli carried. Even with its size, however, Scalli was plenty big enough that it looked more like one of the submachine guns that Civil Protection street cops carried. Its barrel was the size of a soda can, but with a narrow aperture – integrated tactical suppressor, some random voice in her mind told her. She picked things up, at least. Bobbi herself carried the router and the Grail in a backpack, which to her felt far more comforting than a gun ever could. “Whichever still has power is the one we want.”

  They swept the lobby, Bobbi and Freida throwing soft blue spots with their palmlights while Scalli’s combat visor cut through the darkness by virtue of science. Its single, baleful eye stared out from behind a slitted shield, making him look like some terrible gorgon; Bobbi shivered a bit to look at him. She’d always known he was bad business from the size of him, but to see him in his element made her wonder if she hadn’t always underestimated him. They searched for a few minutes, and Bobbi was halfway up the mouldering stairs when Freida called out, “I’ve got it!”

  “Great,” Bobbi called back, and the three of them converged on an elevator in the back by what had once been a conference room. T
hough the brass doors were heavily tarnished and spotted with verdigris, the single button set in their frame glowed with a faint light.

  “All right,” said Bobbi. “You two ready?”

  “As ready as we’ll ever be,” Scalli rumbled.

  “Ready,” Freida said, though her eyes did not entirely share the brightness of her face. Well, that’s all right, Bobbi thought to herself. I’m about scared shitless myself.

  Freida reached out and pushed the button with the end of her pistol, as if it were a living thing that might bite her. There was no hesitation; the doors hissed slowly open, revealing the peeling, rust-spattered steel cabinet of a freight elevator.

  “Looks cozy,” Scalli said. “I’ll go first.”

  He piled himself into the corner of the car, though he filled it almost entirely by default. Bobbi and Freida packed themselves in after. “Thank heaven for little girls,” Bobbi muttered, and pressed the only button on the elevator panel that was lit. Freida laughed. They moved – or assumed they did, because they certainly didn’t feel it; there was a long moment of silence, in which they did not feel even the slightest vibration, until the doors hissed open again. What lay beyond was so far removed from the corpse of a building above that Bobbi wondered for a moment if they might have been teleported elsewhere.

  Before them was a brief corridor, hexagonal in shape, the walls and floor made of dull gray metal. A door made of the same material was set into a recess at its other end. Soft white light spilled down from recessed lights in the upper angles, giving it a somber cast. It was only twenty feet long, but it seemed to stretch on forever. Bobbi shivered as she stared, aware of the precision of the angles all around her. It was almost as if the lines were more real than the flat planes around them, more real than or Freida or Scalli or her. It felt humbling, but she could not say why.

  Scalli summed it up nicely. “I don’t like this place,” he said. “It feels … strange.”

  Freida, however, stepped forward. “Oh, it’s just good engineering,” she said, looking about the corridor with appreciation. “Damned good. They must have one hell of a fabricator. C’mon, let’s go.” She marched ahead toward the door, which slid open like an obedient servant as she approached. Beyond more space yawned, dimly lit. She vanished through the doorway.

  Scalli and Bobbi looked at each other. “Keep good watch,” Bobbi said to him, shaking her head. She followed Freida, though not without great trepidation. Every step toward the end of the hallway and its impossible precision made anxiety bubble up higher and higher inside her gut. Her hindbrain seemed to scream at her not to go on, to stay, to run home and hide under her bed – but it was only a hallway, after all, and the conscious mind won out. Bobbi stepped through, with Scalli looming behind her.

  Stepped through, and immediately stopped.

  The building above had been a towering shrine of urban putrefaction. It had been dark and frightening in its way, but most people suffered uneasiness in the face of such rot. It was only natural. The room in which she had just stepped, however, had conjured a feeling in Bobbi that was very different, and as divorced from nature as one could imagine.

  The room beyond was hexagonal in shape, like the corridor behind them, only magnified; as wide as a factory floor, it was lit by channels of light that ran along the borders of the floor whilst the walls of the massive room climbed upwards into darkness. It had to be six, maybe seven stories tall. Six towers rose from the floor, each one a steel cylindrical monolith seamed with plates and panels. Lights strewn across their surfaces glowed softly, like luminous lichens growing on the face of black rock. At the base of each, affixed to a thick beveled collar, was a simple keyboard terminal with a large panel of clear glass or plastic as a display. From these collars heavy cables spilled across the floor, interconnecting the towers and a brief dais which stood in the center arrangement. Upon this dais squatted a bizarre machine that approximated the mating of an iron maiden and a throne. At this distance detail could not be seen.

  A dry chill hung heavily in the air, as if they had stumbled upon a tomb where ancient dead machines lay waiting for the day when they would rise again and conquer the warm life that crawled upon the world.

  Bobbi looked at it. She had no words, nothing to articulate her feelings upon seeing this place. “I don’t believe it,” she said, her voice empty of anything but awe.

  “Christ,” murmured Scalli.

  Freida was more upbeat. “This is amazing,” she whispered, but her face shone with new excitement – Bobbi wasn’t certain why, but she didn’t seem the least bit intimidated, the least bit afraid. Didn’t she know what these people had working for them, what they were capable of? Hadn’t she seen anything?

  “It’s definitely one for the books.” Oh, Bobbi had seen larger installations – server farms, that sort of thing – and she’d certainly seen larger equipment in the form of server batteries and the like, but there was something undeniably strange, almost malevolent, about the machinery which she saw in that room. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  “I have,” Freida said. “These are biocomputer towers. Enormous ones.” She strode toward the nearest one, utterly unafraid; she had no reason to be, after all, as they’d shut down the security. “These things come out of Wonderland, you know.”

  Bobbi flinched as if she’d been struck. Scalli said, “What, these things are spook machines?”

  Freida nodded. She hovered a few feet away from the terminal of the nearest tower now, her hands shoved into her jacket pockets as if trying to keep them from attacking the keys on their own. “They contain enormous networks of spliced nerves, and all the stuff needed to keep them alive – oxygenated fluid baths, nutrients, all that sort of thing. Harvested from corpses, usually, but we knew that they were taking them straight from organ shops overseas. You know, murder mills.”

  Bobbi and Scalli exchanged glances. “You seem … awfully excited,” Scalli said. Bobbi couldn’t see his eyes behind the combat visor, but she could imagine what was behind them.

  “Well, yeah,” said Freida, turning around to look at them with mild disbelief. “I mean sure, they’re fucking horrible, but they are marvels of modern science. That Bureau computer we buzzed is like an … an abacus compared to just one of these things.” She shook her head. “Jesus. These terminals aren’t used for access, though.”

  “They’re not?” Bobbi’s brows arched, and she tucked her hands into her pockets. This was very firmly Freida’s territory.

  “No,” said Freida with a shake of her head. “They’re just to monitor the towers, keep things regulated. You’ll need to use that access chair if you want to tap the system directly.”

  Bobbi stared at the machine for a moment. The chair crouched like a beast upon its dais. It was made entirely of the same gray metal as the walls and floor, and its back lurched over the head of whoever sat in it. Long cuffs were set into its arms and leg area to keep its occupant firmly secured. To sit in it meant that you were largely encased – Bobbi could see the hinges on the back where it would fold down over the front entirely. Once it was active, you were locked in. It was a bad idea, she thought to herself. A bad idea that they were forced to go with if they wanted to proceed. “So how do you … use it?”

  “Oh, it should have cables where it plugs into interface jacks,” Freida was saying, and she crossed to step up onto the dais; she began inspecting the chair, her lips pursed with concentration. “Yeah, I see where the leads are.” Freida grinned at her as she slid into the heavily padded confines of the chair, looking now like the Queen of Future Hell – and settling in, reached back to pull a long plug on a silver wire from a socket mounted behind her. “Bring the Grail over, Bobbi. I’ll see what I can do here.”

  With hesitation in her step, Bobbi brought the backpack with the Grail and router over to Freida, who took out the machine and put it in her lap beneath her portable terminal. “Glad this thing has a battery,” she said, giving Bobbi a wink as she connecte
d the Grail to the throne and started it up.

  Bobbi held Freida’s eyes with hers. Suddenly none of this seemed a good idea at all. They should go. They should just leave this place, and say nothing more about it. She could find something else, some other way. “We don’t have to do this,” she found herself saying, and was relieved to hear it.

  “We don’t have to,” Freida said as she removed the dustplug from behind her ear, “but this isn’t getting solved any other way.” She reached over to lay a hand on Bobbi’s arm. “Don’t worry, girl. This is what I do.”

  Used to do, Bobbi thought, but she nodded back at her. “All right,” she said. “If you’re sure.”

  Freida didn’t reply save to wink at Bobbi and plug herself into the terminal, and settle back into the chair. As she closed her eyes the chair closed up around her, sealing her away behind the blank gray metal like a gleaming shell. Locks clacked into place, and the hum of the machines around them grew slightly louder. Drive activity could be heard from deep within the towers, the soft clicking of ineffable innards. Bobbi wondered what it was like in there, all those nerves connected together, the spliced-together branches of hundreds of human trees, and shivered when she caught herself wondering if she might not benefit from something similar herself.

  Bobbi took two steps away from the dais as if it were going to bite her, then caught herself. Anxiety was boiling inside her now – she couldn’t log into the system, and she couldn’t help if Freida was in trouble while logged in. “Fuck, I hope she’s all right in there,” she said softly, looking on helpless as the towers loomed around her.

  “She’ll be fine.” Scalli was behind her now, his enormous hand resting on her shoulder. “And if she isn’t, I can carry you both out of here. A piece at a time if I have to.”

  “You know, Scalli, you have always been such a comfort to me in my times of need.” Bobbi gave him a weak smile; sarcasm was at least something of a balm for the uncertainty that gripped her heart with iron fingers. They stood there for what felt like ages, staring at the sealed shell of the chair, waiting for the walls to bleed. But nothing happened, nothing at all, and as time ticked by Bobbi found herself distracted by the humming of the great machines around her. What kind of people made things like this? Why biological components at all? She stared up at the faceless towers, at the jewels of light winking on and off as the stolen flesh within them did its ineffable work.