dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Well, this is all very exciting,” Abernathy said. “I want to hear about it all, of course, but Joe—you should have told me who you were bringing in with you.”

  “I think I might be missing something.” Joe looked a little embarrassed. “Why doesn’t someone fill me in?”

  Abernathy smiled, looking at Ani the whole time. “Ms. Lee here is kind of a legend,” he said, and Ani felt half filled with pride, half sick with fear. “Under the hacker name ‘AniQui’ she has been behind some of the most audacious pieces of computer activism that this country has seen in the last few years. Facebook, McDonald’s, the British Nationalist Party, Abercrombie & Fitch … it’s quite a portfolio, young lady. While the Facebook Farms thing is the most elegant implementation of your skills, I have a real fondness for the Abercrombie & Fitch assault.”

  Ani felt like she had stepped through the looking glass into the weird world on the other side. She’d thought that all her exploits had been secret. That no one could possibly know.

  “You’re a computer hacker?” Joe asked in a small voice. “Like a famous one?”

  “Apparently,” Ani said. “I thought I was anonymous rather than famous, but there you go.”

  “Well that’s … weird—” Joe began, only to be cut off by Abernathy.

  “So, Ms. Lee, why are you caught up in this X-Core madness?” he asked. “Are you a fan?”

  “Definitely not. You got time for a little story?”

  “Always.”

  Ani thought about it, decided it couldn’t get her in any more trouble than she was already in, and told Joe and Abernathy her tale.

  When Ani was done Joe puffed up his cheeks, exhaled a gust of air, and then turned to Abernathy. “She’s good.”

  Abernathy shook his head. “No, Joe, she is exceptional. Absolutely exceptional. She has managed to learn more about this whole business than we have, and on her own. And with resources she pretty much put together on the fly.” He turned to Ani. “These … soundforms, did you call them? You think that they’re what led to the scene at the Warhouse?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “And you perceived these soundforms as threatening? You felt that they meant you harm?”

  “Absolutely. It was as if they were trying to overwrite me, to replace who I am with something new.”

  “And it is precisely the same sensation you had when you played this .wav file?”

  “Similar, but not identical. I was thinking maybe the .wav is more concentrated.”

  Abernathy nodded. “Well, then,” he said. “I’m very interested in hearing your theory… .”

  Ani looked shocked. Joe knew what she was thinking: she had only mentioned the existence of a theory to Joe, and she knew that he hadn’t told anyone about it.

  Abernathy pointed to Joe. “He’s wired for sound. So how do you put these pieces of information together to form a pattern?”

  Ani hesitated.“You’ll think that I’m insane… .”

  “I doubt that.”

  Joe was stunned by the difference he was seeing in Abernathy’s whole demeanor. All his rough, irritating, pompous edges had been rubbed off and he almost seemed human.

  “I authorize Joe’s expense claims, so I’ll believe anything.”

  Joe grinned but felt a little peeved that Abernathy was making a joke at his expense in front of this total stranger. The feeling lasted only a couple of seconds though, because suddenly he understood what was happening here.

  Even if Ani didn’t know it, she was being interviewed.

  Abernathy was being sweet and flattering and tolerant because he was recruiting.

  Ani fixed Abernathy with a level glare. “I think the .wav file that’s threaded through X-Core music is more than just a threat to teens,” she said confidently. “And its relationship to the false first contact story seems clear to me. They both have a person in common: Imogen Bell. An astronomer who heard a message from space and decided to become a musician.”

  Ani paused and waited for that to sink in. Joe saw that she was studying Abernathy’s face, waiting to see some kind of response in his features. Abernathy must have obliged because she continued on.

  “It’s too coincidental. I know that humanity has a problem with seeing causal links where there are none: if a man does a dance and then it rains, it’s possible for him to say that it rained because he did the dance, but that doesn’t mean that there’s cause and effect—just that event followed event. But here, the two strands I’ve been following seem connected.

  “Imogen Bell leads to the .wav file that leads to X-Core, and X-Core leads back to Imogen Bell. She’s where you should go next.” Ani shrugged. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I think I’d like to offer you a job,” Abernathy said.

  Ani handed over the flash drive containing the .wav file, and Abernathy hurried it through to his tech guys, and then he sent Joe off for a debrief, before asking her more questions.

  “These people with guns that came looking for you,” he said in a concerned voice. ”Who do you think they are?”

  “I was thinking government. Or some branch of the police.” She remembered what Gretchen had said about the behavior of the men. “Now I think it’s more likely that they were freelancers, maybe mercenaries, but how they link up with the scenario I outlined, I don’t know.”

  “We’re running an inquiry of our own on that as I speak,” Abernathy said. “Now I have a huge favor to ask you. Feel free to say no, but please say yes.”

  Ani raised an eyebrow.

  “I want you to accompany Joe on a trip to the Pabody/Reich radio telescope in Shropshire. And I want you to have a look at the setup there. If I give you something that is guaranteed to hack into their computers, do you think you can have a little poke around and see if they’re hiding anything?”

  “Of course. You were serious about the job offer?”

  “I would have tracked you down eventually. I’m always on the lookout for fresh talent to increase our skill set here at YETI, and at first glance I’d say you definitely qualify. But I have to ask, would you be interested in joining us?”

  Ani took a couple of seconds to think about it, knowing that she was on one side of a line that, once crossed, would change her life forever. She had always looked for something to turn her talents to, and now she was being offered an opportunity to make that dream a reality.

  “How did you know who I was? I mean, how could you possibly know that I’m AniQui just from a surveillance photo?”

  Abernathy smiled. “I’m in the intelligence business. Have you heard of PRISM?”

  “The electronic communications monitoring system,” Ani said. “It’s been in the news.”

  “It’s the very small tip of a gigantic iceberg. PRISM is nothing more than a piece of technology that it was decided the public was ready to find out about. It was outdated years ago. SPECTRUM, on the other hand, is PRISM evolved: a heuristic network that runs by itself, monitoring communications in a proactive fashion. Your communications were tagged over a year ago, and whenever you type your hacker name into IM, email, or IRC, SPECTRUM logs every detail, and takes a snapshot from your webcam. You have never been flagged as a high priority target—just a person it might be worth keeping an eye on.”

  “You’re not going to prosecute me for hacking?”

  “Certainly not. A talent like yours is too useful, too rare.”

  “I’m in. For the record, you had me at ‘big fan of your work.’”

  “Then how about we make this trip your job interview? A field exercise. Pass it and you’re a YETI operative. Wheels go up in ten minutes. I’ll make sure that there’s someone from the observatory on-site by the time you arrive. Find out everything you can. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help save the world.”

  “So where’s this hardware that’s guaranteed to hack into their system? I really want to get a look at it.”

  Abernathy smiled, stood up, and gestured
toward the door. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: PERIHELION

  Joe requisitioned a vehicle—a midnight blue SUV—and proceeded to sling it through the city traffic with the comfortable familiarity of a London taxi driver. There was very little mirror, signal, maneuver to his driving, but there were occasions when he’d use two of the three. Most of the time he just seemed to trust his skill and the two-ton bulk of the vehicle.

  Ani sat in the passenger seat, one eye on Joe’s driving, the other on investigating the tablet that Abernathy had just given her. She’d genuinely never seen anything like it.

  “This is one sweet piece of tech,” Ani said, her voice betraying her wonder. “It’s like an iPad from the future. On steroids. It’s lightning fast. There are three operating systems accessible with the press of a button. Dual desktops in Windows and Mac OSX flavors; and then there’s a Linux command line OS …”

  “Yeah, but can you play Angry Birds on it?” Joe asked.

  “Play it? With this, you can hack the app and make them a whole lot less angry. I can’t believe that I just got handed a tablet computer that’s better than any laptop I’ve ever used.”

  “Abernathy loves his toys.” Joe braked abruptly and gave an apologetic smile.

  Ani waited until they were moving again and then asked, “So what’s the deal, anyway?”

  Joe needed to slow down again, but this time he feathered the brakes, swung the steering wheel, accelerated, and then threaded the SUV through a clump of traffic.

  “The deal?”

  “Yeah.” Ani put the tablet down on her lap and turned to look at Joe. “I can understand law enforcement using kids to infiltrate groups of other kids. It makes a lot of sense. I can even see YETI using someone from across the pond as an asset. But sending us to interview adults—what’s that about? Is this really just an interview for a job?”

  Joe laughed.

  “Abernathy is patched into levels of government the rest of us don’t know exist, and has resources beyond measure. The fact that he’s not using them tells me he has something else in mind. Three things, probably, because that’s the kind of game Abernathy is always playing. Every move he makes tends to accomplish more than one goal. And he thinks many, many moves ahead.

  “First thing: I’ve been off active duty for a while, and this is my first operation back. I think that he needs to see that I can still handle things—any things—that get thrown at me. Second: the interview. You are an unknown quantity. Computer savvy, obviously, but how will that translate into street smarts? Investigative fieldwork is a good way to test your temperament and abilities in relative safety.

  “Finally, by sending us instead of some seasoned investigators, I suspect he’s seeing how we work together. Seeing if we can work together.”

  “So you really think that if I do okay here, I get the job?”

  “Yep.”

  “He does know that I’m still in school?” Ani said, her brow wrinkling. “I mean, hello!”

  “If you make it onto the YETI payroll, they’ll educate you as well. It’s just that surveillance techniques, interrogation tips and tricks, and hand-to-hand combat will also be on your syllabus.”

  “And you’re basically a spy …?”

  “You, too, now. But ‘spy’ is just one part of the job. It’s much more useful to think of YETI as a network of undercover teen operatives. Kids. People forget to take us seriously. They have no idea how serious we are.”

  Ani shook her head.

  “It’s all too much, you know? I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Two days ago I was just a normal kid… .”

  “A normal kid who brought those stupid farms on Facebook to their knees,” Joe reminded her.

  “And now it seems I’m running from one insane scenario to the next. In Brixton, back there, you saw those kids, what they were becoming. There’s something in that .wav file, Joe. Something dark and dangerous and very, very scary.”

  “That’s why we have to stop it from happening.”

  “But how do we stop a sound? A file can travel in cyberspace, can be in a million in-boxes with the click of a mouse button… .”

  “One click?”

  “Sequence shortened.” Ani laughed. “For demonstration purposes.”

  “An i-Gag?” Joe said. “Are you a real, actual computer nerd?”

  “Virtually. And here I had almost given up hope.”

  “About what?”

  “About finding kids who actually stood for something. About young people who care enough to want to make a difference. Whole blocks of our generation are getting a little forgetful about their responsibilities, and a little too dependent upon what they think of as their rights.”

  “Is that what the whole hacker thing is about?” Joe asked. “That’s not sarcasm or rudeness or irony. I am genuinely interested.” He did a comic double take out the car’s windshield.

  “Did that sign just say A406?” he asked.

  “I think so. Why?”

  “Hang on.” Joe grinned, then floored the accelerator and swung the wheel so far over to the left that they leapt across two lanes of traffic, only just making it through two of the tiniest gaps in traffic before hurtling down the exit ramp they needed.

  Ani had just managed to grab hold of the tablet and was trying not to look too traumatized.

  Which was quite the job.

  “I should have said don’t worry,” Joe said apologetically. “That maneuver was calculated and executed by computer.”

  Ani tilted her head.

  Joe waited until they were off the ramp before explaining.

  They’d been in the car for about an hour when Joe realized again just how much he had missed this: the simple act of discussing the job, YETI, his hardware, a case.

  Ever since Andy died, Joe had had no one to just chat and banter with.

  To talk about the job with.

  Or to impress with his secret hardware.

  Explaining his onboard computer to Ani was better than explaining it to anyone else because she not only got it, but she really got it. Joe could tell by the way her eyes widened and her voice became sort of breathy.

  “Wow. A computer integrated into your brain? That is just …”

  “Awesome?” Joe tried to finish the thought.

  “Uh-unh,” Ani said, shaking her head. “Ben & Jerry’s is awesome. Skrillex. Vans. The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Large Hadron Collider. Dropbox, and this tablet computer, and Wil Wheaton’s TableTop. They’re all awesome. A brain computer? That is so far beyond awesome that it deserves a new superlative.”

  Joe actually felt his cheeks redden a little.

  “It’s a prototype. A tool that offers me a little edge in the field.”

  “It’s a science fiction movie idea,” Ani said. “I’d love to get a look at the specs.”

  Joe nodded. “Me, too,” he confessed. “You know when you download the latest iTunes and get a bunch of those terms and conditions to agree to?”

  “Sure.”

  “I never read them. And I have no idea what I’ve actually got implanted in my head. I just click ‘agree’ every time.”

  Ani smiled, and Joe went quiet and watched the road.

  Ani grew tired of watching the night scenery rushing past the windows, so she took out her phone—which Joe had been impressed that Abernathy had let her keep—changed the SIM, and dialed Gretchen.

  “Hey Ani,” Gretchen answered after the first ring. “You had me worried. Is everything okay?”

  “My day is getting weirder by the minute. So same old, same old, I guess.”

  “But you’re all right?” Gretchen sounded worried and Ani felt guilty for not contacting her sooner. Of course she was worried. When they’d parted, Ani had been on her way to a gig where it was likely she’d run into the sound from the .wav file again. That hadn’t gone well the first time.

  “I’m absolutely fine. I’ll explain everything that’s been happening as soon as
I can. Have you heard from my uncle?”

  “Alex has called several times. I’ve reassured him that he has nothing to worry about, and he’d said he’d pass that on to your dad.”

  “Thank you. Do you think it’s true?”

  “Do I think what’s true?”

  “That he has nothing to worry about?”

  Gretchen laughed. “One hundred percent true. You’ve got my number if you need any help, so use it, okay?”

  “I will.” Ani was about to hang up when a thought struck her. “Actually, I could use help with something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Imogen Bell. Anything else you can tell me. She feels like the key to this whole thing.”

  “There’s not much to find. Every reference to her is about her academic career, and then her fall from grace. Past that …”

  “… past that is the challenge. Ideally, I’d like an address.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll get back to you if I find anything. You could call your dad, you know? Put his mind at ease.”

  “I know. I just don’t want him getting into trouble because of me. He gets himself in enough of it without my help.”

  “Still …”

  “Message received,” Ani said and hung up.

  She dialed her father’s cell number and let it ring twice. Then she called back and let it ring three rings. Once more: five rings. Dad’s code when he was out doing some shady deal; it meant I’m okay.

  Joe turned to her. “It’s good that you’ve got people you can trust. But you have resources beyond imagination at your fingertips now.”

  “I have a feeling that we’re going to need them.”

  Sometimes driving through the dark was an act of faith: at seventy miles an hour, you needed to just believe that the road continued ahead. Driving up a slight incline, Joe had a sudden thought: what if I reach the top and there’s no road behind the brow of the slope? Just a drop?

  Stupid, sure.

  But he was kind of glad when a car overtook him and he could follow behind it.

  He studied the road in front of him, keeping just below the speed limit and making sure he had plenty of time to react if the car ahead decided to do something stupid. It was a good policy. People always did something stupid on the roads if you gave them long enough.