Code Breakers: Beta

by Colin F. Barnes

  The gun juddered and transferred the impact to Petal’s hands.

  A thrilling jolt shivered through her body. She finally started to feel like her old self again. Except she was now, for the first time in years, free of rogue AIs and bad code crawling around inside her. She was free of the dependence on NanoStem. Was this what she really was? A killer? Was she made, or altered, to be a super-soldier? It made sense in that moment. But she knew that wasn’t the truth, that she was something else, not just a robotic kill-drone. She felt, she dreamed, she craved.

  Thinking about her creation reminded her again why she was here. She forced herself out of the kill lust, thought logically. A strategy formed in her mind: Blast the doors with the ATV’s huge gun. Hide the body. Steal the clothes. Get to Criborg.

  There was one thing missing on that list: find Gerry. But right now she had no leads other than a vague indication from Gabe that he may or may not be alive and perhaps up there in The Family’s space station. She had no way of really knowing. No way of contacting him. That hurt more than losing her implant and access to her full suite of internal equipment. In the short time she had spent with Gerry, she knew she loved him, at least on some level.

  “Dammit, Gez!”

  She approached the ATV, which still hovered a meter or so above the ground, and jumped into the driver’s side. Petal considered the possibility of heading straight for the Dome. But Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—UAV drones circled the crystalline orb like eagles around a nest and would soon spot her.

  There’s no way she’d get anywhere near the place, not in a Red Widow vehicle anyway, and especially after what had gone down in Cemprom. The president would have the place on lock-down, and The Family would have surely upgraded their security protocols.

  Petal closed her eyes and thought of a solution. The options were slim. Not having their virtual private network—VPN running there was no chance of contacting him directly. Perhaps the Meshwork, she thought, but then remembered Gabe saying it was somehow offline, repressed.

  Given the demon AI had used the Meshwork as a way into City Earth, she doubted The Family still allowed it to exist. And even if they did, she had no terminal or connection.

  She looked at the wound on her wrist and realised how cut off she felt without it. She felt useless and weak. The body on the ground, however, told her otherwise. Gritting her teeth she looked at the control panel on the vehicle and tried to figure out how to fire that great weapon on the front.

  The dashboard was a long, thin touch-screen. Foreign symbols were labelled with a language she couldn’t understand, an alphabet, which might as well have come from aliens.

  Petal reached out a hand and gently touched a symbol resembling a spark. The engine whined-up and the vehicle jittered and vibrated like a boat. She pressed another symbol that looked like a pane of glass with a cross through it. A holographic targeting window popped up in front of her.

  That’s more like it.

  She touched a map-like icon, thinking it would be the navigation controls, but a pulse of laser shot from the hood-mounted cannon, missing the building’s door by a number of metres and flying off into the distance.

  Her entire body convulsed with the shockwave, and her mohican stood on end.

  Petal screamed and whooped, but soon realised that the laser bolt probably wouldn’t stop until it hit something or someone. Crap, crap, crap!

  She frantically swept her hand across the symbols and the vehicle lurched and pitched. She eventually discovered the navigation and propulsion controls. Steering the vehicle so that the door lined up with the holographic targeting overlay, she hit the fire button and rocked back with another blast of laser. The door didn’t stand a chance. It exploded on impact and hung off its hinges, swinging wildly open.

  “That’s what I’m talking about!”

  Behind the settling dust and smoke, the hangar appeared dark inside. Within the gloom, however, she could make out the shape of a pristine h-core powered dune buggy. Much like the ones the Bachians at GeoCity-1 drove about in. “That’s more my style,” she said jumping out of the Widow’s vehicle. She dragged the body inside the building.

  She shivered in the chilled air inside the hangar. Besides the seemingly brand-new buggy, it contained little else of value. It contained a workbench, a rack of tools, and a smaller room to the back of the building. She quickly got out of her prison clothes, and dressed in the dead Widow’s robes. They fitted surprisingly well, and were reasonably warm. She expected them to be tight, and rough. She felt like a ninja in the light cloth and the flat, comfortable shoes.

  Taking her precious chip with CRIBORG stamped onto its surface and the slate given to her by Gabe, she placed them within the numerous internal pockets of the under-robe that fitted like a body suit. The whole thing was comfortably loose fitting on her, being much smaller and petite than her assailant, but it was a huge improvement over the chaffing and harsh fabric of her prison-issue outfit.

  Something was inside one of the pockets. She fished out a small leather-bound book, no larger than her hand that featured a hundred pages of intelligible script: the same alphabet as the vehicle’s control panel. A curious symbol of a sickle-like blade surrounding a cross embossed the cover.

  Must be a kind of religious prayer book or something. She pocketed it thinking it might be useful at some point. Even though she couldn’t understand it, books were so rare she quite liked having it around. She thought she might translate it one day.

  She didn’t want to leave the body in such an open place, considering the doors had no chance of being repaired, so she dragged it across the Polymar™ floor to the smaller room at the back. Inside she found a desk, a computer terminal that had rust on its ancient metal frame, and a large humming cylinder. She dumped the body under the desk and checked the computer. Nothing. Dead like the Widow.

  Petal considered taking the woman’s communicator: a small bud within her ear, but couldn’t trust that it wasn’t transmitting GPS data as well as receiving radio communications, so she removed it and crushed it underfoot. Her comrades would likely be on Petal’s trail soon enough, but that might slow them down for a few minutes.

  She inspected the large metal cylinder attached to the rear wall. It was essentially a huge upside-down cone. Pipes snaked into it from the ceiling. Next to it a metal ladder protruded from the wall. She climbed up, poked her head out of a trap door, and noticed that a secret level half a metre high ran the length of the building, beneath its flat ceiling. Water gathered from gullies in the roof and filled the space. It flowed down the pipes into the cylinder below.

  Climbing back down, she inspected the curious machinery closer. Towards the bottom of it, around knee-height, it had a wheel, a quarter metre in diameter, and beneath that a pair of tubes. She found thick, rubberised hoses wound up on the opposite wall.

  When Petal inspected the buggy she realised what it was: A hydrogen splitter. The system was designed to separate the hydrogen gas from water. So that’s how the Bachians fuelled some of their vehicles. The building must have been a reserve, a getaway contingency.

  She checked the buggy’s hydrogen tank: a thick metalled cylinder that ran the length of the vehicle. It was certainly big enough to hold a large capacity. A small dial on its side indicated a full tank. She didn’t know how far she’d get in it, but certainly with a full tank, it’d be far enough away to make any search for her difficult. And however far she’d get, it’d be a good way to start her journey to Criborg, as Gabe advised.

  An old-fashioned ignition system still had the key in it. She checked the transmission for neutral and fired up the engine. A belch of water vapour came from the twin tailpipes. The engines hummed with electricity.

  Taking out the slate, she entered the coordinates given to her by Gabe into the buggy’s navigation computer. A 3D image of her destination glowed within the holographic display. It’s an Island? What the hell?

  Chapter 4

  Gerry counted at least eight
of them between floors one and twenty-one. Eight highly trained and augmented security operatives disguised as residents, cleaners, and maintenance people going about their morning business. Despite their attempts at looking normal it was the small things that gave them away: the way they looked at him, their eyes filled with recognition; the way they held their gaze a fraction too long; the false smiles and casual nod of the head that was a little too eager; the tell-tale EM traffic that surrounded them. They weren’t even cloaking it.

  Regular people don’t process that much data going about their daily lives.

  There was one, however, in the vicinity that he knew wasn’t part of this cabal.

  Courtesy of the ID lookup he discovered Kaden Willis: seventeen, smart, super-smart in fact, and in an apartment two floors down from Gerry’s assigned room. He was running a secure, or so he thought, game of Aliencraft from his bedroom. There were currently nine other kids from the building hooked into the gaming server. The only other thing worth noting from his ID record was the expulsion from his last two schools, and his unusually high IQ. He was now being home-schooled by his mother, Loane Willis, an environmental policy advisor, and not very well by the looks of it. She was nowhere in the range of the building. Probably had no clue as to what her son was up to.

  Bran, Malik, and Elaine waited in the hall as Gerry poked his head through the door and checked out his apartment. “Everything to your satisfaction?” Elaine said.

  Without even looking at her, Gerry sensed a sneer. She had that kind of voice.

  “It’s fine.” He didn’t even bother to look beyond the basic aesthetics of the room: glass, ceramics, ergonomic desk, sofa, kitchen area, and a bedroom with mood lighting. He had no plans to stay there. “Are you three going to stand out there all day, or are you going to leave me alone?”

  Bran shook his head, smiled, “We’re all done here, Mr Cardle. Just wanted to make sure you arrived safely and were happy with your new lodgings.”

  Gerry didn’t answer. Just nodded and waited for them to leave.

  A few seconds passed. “You’re still here,” he said.

  The three goons finally left. Gerry walked to his door, turned, and made sure they were actually leaving. He traced their IDs and plotted their route across a 3D overlay map. They left the tower and headed back toward to the park. When it was clear they weren’t coming back, Gerry entered his apartment and closed the door behind him.

  His prosthetic eye and on-board microphone system recorded everything he saw and transmitted it back to The Family on their space station via his direct, and secure, feed. He didn’t want them knowing all his plans. If he did find Petal alive, he didn’t want to put her in more trouble.

  The Family, and his mother, Amma, talked a friendly game, but he’d seen and heard enough to suspect their intentions. Connecting with his AIA, Gerry created a series of low-level software patches that intercepted the signals from his on-board microphone and scrambled them into incomprehensible junk data. With the attack from the digital entity, getting through the layers of security became a trivial task, but he still had to devise it so The Family received a signal, so he made sure that they received a distorted, garbled version of the truth: something to resemble regular EM interference. That should buy him time to do what he needed to do.

  After spinning the code with his mind and altering the software, he rebooted the system’s core files and confirmed The Family received a feed with interference.

  Satisfied his feeds back to The Family were scrambled, and their communication channel blocked, he made his way down to the nineteenth level. While a suspicious cleaner finished up his various tasks within the corridor Gerry paused for a moment and took the opportunity to scan for any available networks outside of the Dome in the hopes of tracking Petal.

  Nothing came up. No Meshwork, no non-City Earth traffic at all. It was as if there were no networks at all outside of the Dome. He presumed the internal security within the city had blocked access. He’d have to find a way of getting beyond it.

  The cleaner had turned out of the corridor and entered the elevator. Wasting no time, Gerry arrived outside Kaden’s door and rapped against its surface. On the third knock the boy opened the door.

  “Yeah?” Kaden said. His hair was shaved through the middle, sides spiked up, dyed green. He wore various glass rings through his nose, lips, and ears. Each one no doubt filled with dopamine receptor regulators. The kid wore a sharp suit over a tatty t-shirt with the words Black Sabbath scrawled in patchy white text. He spooned breakfast cereal from a white china bowl.

  “Kaden Willis, right?” Gerry said.

  “Who wants to know? You got something to do with the school, or my mom? I’ve already—”

  Gerry pushed the kid back, entered the room, and closed the door behind him.

  “Look, kid, I’m just a guy, okay? Listen up. You pretty much live in this apartment twenty-four-seven what with your home-schooling and Aliencraft obsession, right?”

  The boy backed away, held his arms out, tried not to look at the pile of contraband in his room. He failed. Gerry picked up on it before the kid even realised he signalled his guilt by shifting his eyes to an open room off the main living area. “What the hell is this about?” Kaden said.

  Gerry stepped forward, sensed an opportunity. “What you got in there? Illegal upgrades, software patches? Wait, don’t tell me you’ve got some hot-chips to get you out of the D-Lottery.”

  “Um, no?” Kaden’s face said it all as he blushed with guilt.

  Gerry pushed past him and stood at the doorway to what looked like Kaden’s room, what with the Aliencraft poster hanging on his wall amid various band photos. A bag of computer chips sat haphazardly on the boy’s bed. Definitely hot-chips.

  When Gerry managed the D-Lottery algorithm at Cemprom, he had worked on a system to seek out these kinds of chips, but wherever they were coming from, the makers always seemed one step ahead. “We can work something out. If I forget about what you’ve got in here—”

  “You some kind of pervert?” Kaden said, looking Gerry up and down.

  Gerry wore a basic, nondescript suit of grey wool. Certainly nothing to give the idea that he was a sex pest. “No. You really don’t know who I am?” Gerry said, slightly disappointed that news of his daring act of saving the City, his death, and subsequent resurrection didn’t seem to have had any effect on the citizens so far. But then he doubted The Family let any of it get out. Can’t have the public knowing they were all nearly turned to gibbering zombies controlled by an evil AI.

  Kaden shook his head. “Look, about that. I can explain. I was just holding—”

  Gerry held up his palm, “Don’t say another word, kid. Hear me out first before I’m forced to take you to The Family for your crimes. I have a direct line these days.”

  “Dammit. I knew this would blow up in my face.” Kaden slumped to the sofa, sat on his hands, probably to hide that they were shaking. “You can’t tell my mom about any of this. I’ve caused her so much trouble these last few months already.”

  “Well, you can redeem yourself. I’d like you to do me a favour.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’re going to be me.”

  Kaden took the offer immediately. Gerry hacked City Earth’s ID database and hooked Kaden up with his credentials. The fact he could do that impressed the kid so much that by the time Gerry had told him he wanted him to walk in and out of the building a few times and hang around in his apartment during the day and some evenings when his mother was on business, he jumped at the chance.

  Gerry recognised impressive hacking skills in Kaden. The fact he administered an Aliencraft server under the nose of the building’s security got Gerry’s attention. Those kinds of games generated a lot of traffic. The kid must have scripted some brilliant traffic shaping protocols to hide the source allowing him to get away with it undetected.

  He wondered if that’s how Gabe and Petal got started: Gabe the mentor, she the student
. Although there was a difference: Gerry had no plans to take on an understudy. He preferred to do his work alone. Even at Cemprom he preferred to keep most of his code and research away from his colleagues. He quickly learned information was power, and by giving it away, you weakened your own position. While Gerry accessed City Earth’s ID database, he procured a new identity for himself, allowing him to walk about the City with relative freedom. He chose a government official, one whose job it was to work with the various districts under the Dome. It meant that for a while at least his travels wouldn’t be questioned.

  ***

  It took about an hour for him to walk from his apartment building to his old house. He took the scenic route rather than one of the trains or city shuttles. Fewer eyes and scanners out in the open, and besides, the Dome was in spring mode to reflect what should have been spring outside, although with the climate still struggling to recover from the forty-year nuclear winter, it was difficult to spot what season it was out there in the abandoned lands.

  He enjoyed breathing the cool breeze created by the Dome’s systems, the bright sunlight, the bloom of the plants and trees. Outside of the poorer areas and the governmental zones, like Cemprom, City Earth had plenty to offer in terms of scenery.

  It was a shame so few took advantage. But then it wasn’t their fault. They all had roles and responsibilities, and the curfews trained people to spend their spare time inside with their families, watching the various tightly-controlled media outlets.

  The sun crested the Dome towards its zenith. Gerry checked his internal clock, run by his AIA: 11:30. Once through the parks, Gerry looped around, followed the river, and ended up in his old neighbourhood. It brought back a flood of memories of his old, fake family.

  While on the station, he learned the woman pretending to be his wife was executed for her crimes against the City after colluding with Jasper. His kids were re-assimilated with a new family. When he eventually walked out of the alley and faced his old house a mixture of relief, guilt, and anger washed over him, threatened to paralyse him.