Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow

by Lee Baldwin

  “I differ with that not-evolved bit,” Sami objects.

  “But wait. Whale brains have silent parietal and frontal lobes. In humans, those areas of the brain are for accessing the past and forecasting the future.”

  “Accessing the past and future? What if…”

  Silence. Looking from one to the other. Jerry stands, stretches his back, announces he’s going to eat. “Anyone coming with me?” Jerry gets no takers, but does get food requests from Carl and Gary.

  “So, I’m reduced to a gofer.” Jerry laughs as the door closes behind him.

  The team works on in silence. Jerry’s laptop utters a musical chime. Surprised at the swift completion, Strand reaches over to place Jerry’s machine in front of him. Whale message 5023, far along in the parade of blue whales, is complete. Strand frowns. While everyone else has been unpacking the number strings from groups of whales, Jerry has decoded the string from a single whale. Strand is irked at the digression from plan, but results matter. The message appears to be a technical article on the information-carrying capacity of certain molecules. Fascinated, head swimming with imponderable questions the team has raised, Strand begins to read from Jerry’s screen.

  The Water Spell

  In a large beachside home 20 miles up Pacific Coast Highway from a Los Angeles ‘burb called Santa Monica, sandwiched in among other long n’skinnies on Malibu Colony Road, a striking woman in a shorty bathrobe looks through broad windows at the silver Porsche 911 Turbo S that pulls into her drive below. The tall security gate closes behind the car. She watches tensely as two people get out, the man from the driver’s seat, a rather taller goddess type with a dancer’s body from the passenger side. Dressed flamboyantly and with big hair, they step toward the door.

  Katy relaxes, takes a deep breath. With the remote in her hand, unlocks the front door. In moments, the three are hugging at the top of the curved marble staircase. From this lofty perch, the south swell curving in off the Pacific is a wide and peaceful vista. The dancer-goddess Alicia pulls back, looks from Katy to Aaron.

  “What’s with the hyper hush-hush, is this for real?”

  “OMG Alli,” Katy breathes, her glorious lips make breathy love to each uttered syllable. “It’s all over the news.”

  “I’ve been in retreat with Swami Chamunanda-ji,” Alicia’s eyes dart from one to the other. “We’ve been in total silence. But tell me, Katy! Now you have me worried!”

  “You didn’t hear about Annetka?”

  “That flat-chested old hack. What has she done now?”

  Katy leads both by the hand, hurrying them along the bright pristine corridor into her small theatre. They take plush lounge seats in the front. The shorty robe slides into Katy’s lap. “Evian?” Katy asks, flashing her tawny eyes, “Something stronger?”

  “Fine,” Aaron says holding up a palm while eyeing Katy’s smooth thighs, hoping for a shot of superstar bush.

  “In a minute maybe,” Alicia says, “but what’s the deal with her?”

  Katy lets herself feel a moment of resentment for the luscious-bodied dance legend, who has to realize their kind must be on guard at all times. “Lian is here. He killed her.”

  “Dried-up old cunt.” Alicia’s first pouty-lipped response. “About time he nailed her. She was used up anyway.” The goddess face changes as Alicia’s brain catches up.

  Aaron sits up straight, expression serious. “Are you sure it’s Lian? Here? Why weren’t we told?”

  “Nothing on the phone, we all agreed, no email no text. Had to get you here. Annetka and her songwriter and two friends were murdered two days ago. In her New York apartment.”

  Alicia covers her chiseled features with both manicured hands, gets it now. “How awful. How? How was it done?”

  “Oh you’ll know it’s him.”

  “You better show us,” Aaron says, steeling himself. The fabulously rich music video producer and manager of a dozen top talents could be a throb himself, given his looks and his appetite for strange women. “We better see it.”

  Alicia nods agreement. Fear distorts her perfect features. Lovely eyes cast downward, Katy fingers her remote. Images flood the wall-size screen, clips from news releases, links to blogs, web pages full of tweets, scores of horrific images. Photos of the Pentagon with the enormous shadow draped across half an acre, gruesome images of Annetka’s facial skin oozing blood down her living room wall, reports of mass hallucinations in Virginia, California, rumors of mass hypnosis in meetings of military brass.

  Alicia shrieks, covers her mouth in terror. “It’s him! It is! Where is he? Where can we go?”

  “The Water Spell,” Aaron says quickly. “Do you have it?”

  “I have everything,” Katy gets up. The hot tub in my bathroom. Quickly.”

  Katy tows them through her private suite, past the enormous round bed, huge walk-in closets packed with expensive shoes and clothes, to a sculptured marble bath where a glorious circular tub holds center stage, filled with hot soapy water. Outside, the sun-glinted ocean.

  “How about the others?”

  “No time. We have to go now. I waited long enough for you two.” Katy drops her robe, tawny flesh revealed, perfect breasts bob as she busies herself collecting a silver tray of curious objects.

  “Clothes off, you guys. You know the drill. In. Hurry!” Katy’s voice is shrill.

  Soon all three are submerged in warm water, Katy handing them things to hold, candles and ritual objects.

  She’s flustered. “It’s not here! I know I brought it in. Dammit maybe I left it…”

  Katy leaps from the tub, glistening flanks as she rushes through her bedroom and out of view into the hallway. Aaron and Alicia, never the best of friends, nevertheless find themselves easing closer in Katy’s absence. Aaron puts a hand behind Alicia’s smooth neck and she throws both arms around him. Her full breasts sing a siren lullaby against his chest.

  “Oh, Aaron tell me this isn’t happening. It’s not it’s not not not.”

  “Hang tough, kid, we’ll get through this.” What Aaron is most focused on however is his stiffening penis, bobbing beneath the surface, ravenous shark rising to the scent. Eying the smooth curve of Alicia’s firm belly, the sensuous line that leads down to the join of her feminine thighs. It draws him in. He pulls her body closer. If Katy stays away for just a minute…

  From beyond the bedroom a muted gagging noise, ak-ak-ak, then a sharp crack. Silence.

  “Ooooh, no,” Alicia breathes, trembling against Aaron. “Katy?” Her voice is not loud enough to carry, a torn whisper.

  “I don’t think she can hear you,” Aaron says, turning her and positioning himself on his knees, a supplicant to polished hips of the eternal goddess.

  “Say it louder.”

  “K-Katy?” Alicia tries again. She scarcely has time to notice Aaron lining up to slip it in from behind, when a massive and grotesque winged lizard-form blocks all light in the doorway, bloody claws hold Katy’s naked dangling limbs.

  “Looking for something?” The voice booms from polished marble walls. “Maybe it was this?” A clawed hand the size of a mini-fridge throws something at them. It is bloody and lands in the water with a splash, trailing a mop of brown hair. It floats and rolls over, revealing Katy’s face, which regards them with maniacal gleam as it bobs in the tub.

  “Oopsie,” the grinning face says in the voice of a mechanized doll. The eyeballs roll in opposite directions as it begins to sink. Scarlet billows spread.

  Alicia and Aaron scream in chorus, shoot to their feet holding one another. The winged monster throws the headless body forcefully and both go down shrieking. In two steps he is on them, gripping the breath from their lungs with leathery hands.

  “This won’t be fun, but it must be done.”

  “Oh please no,” Alicia squeaks. Her eyes roll wildly. Her boobs ooze out between hard claw-tipped fingers.

  “It was you,” the leather-skinned dragon bellows, his head inches from their terrified eyes, “
who pursued my mate for centuries, who slew her and caused her body to be rendered into fragments. It is you who wrongly accused her, and with your cohorts brought her great pain and fear. It was you who caused her to hide in the one place I am forbidden to be. But now I am here and you shall feel my wrath and die like the scum you are. Yes, you foolishly descended among humans, wingless for your ego-rush, now comes your moment of penance!”

  The rest of the scene is neither quick nor pretty. Fearful voices rise in pleading anguish, begging for mercy and invoking many deities as perfect bodies are shredded into offal. They are not allowed to die until the very last.

  When all is silence and the hot tub resembles a festive party-size paella, the leathery beast throws three peeled skeletons onto the large circular bed, crashes through a panoramic ocean-view window, lifts its wings to the heavens, and blinks out of sight.

  Reaper Six

  “Stand down, Reaper Six.” The terse command from two thousand miles distant is clear in Exley’s headset.

  In an air-conditioned trailer at Creech Air Force Base in Clark County, Nevada, RPV pilot Maj. William Exley surveys a bank of video screens splashed with aerial views of the Pentagon complex and the bright Potomac. To the left in his view are the measured ranks of crosses and headstones of Arlington National Cemetery, where Exley’s father and more than a few fellow pilots lie in eternal silence. Colorful as a computer game, Exley’s video console lays out the MQ-9 Reaper’s full avionics, dials, readouts, directional vectors, a winking, rippling, ever-changing information stream he needs to keep his ship on mission. And everything required to bring down hell fire on a target anywhere on Earth with a few computer inputs.

  In a command chair at Exley’s right hand, Sensor Operator Veronica duLac uses her joystick to orient the distant drone’s camera turret. The system allows her to position cameras so powerful that from the current mission altitude of 23,000 feet she can tell if someone on the ground needs a haircut. Exley and duLac frequently work shifts together, through the exchange of words and gestures bring quiet competence to every mission. A single word, a turn of the head, the flick of a finger will do. While Exley is more talkative, Veronica says little during her rotation that is not directly related to tasks at hand. Among other aspects of each mission, her jobs are to control the Synthetic Aperture Radar and nose camera, Inertial and GPS nav systems, the Omni Antenna, the Ku-Band Satcom system.

  “Roger that, Reaper Six standing down.” Exley steps through the disarm checklist, brings the onboard missile back to Alert status. Although the warhead he’d carefully disarmed is a mere 13-pound anti-personnel bomb, Exley wills himself to relax. It doesn’t always come. Having flown RPV missions all over the world in the last eighteen months, he has never experienced anything like this, holding in Veronica’s bombsights the most sacrosanct citadel in all the world’s military, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, the United States Pentagon.

  To say that an RPV crew, able to be home with family after each rotation at the controls has it easy, is to mistake human nature. These remote-control vehicle jockeys who launch deadly missile attacks from the safety of stateside locations suffer the same psychological stresses as their comrades in fighter cockpits or battlefield positions. Exley and duLac are on this patrol detail specifically because of their remarkable coordination, and their ability to shake off stress.

  For Exley, ridding himself of stress usually comes with the help of a ten-mile run after he leaves the base. DuLac loves the game of racquetball, will spend two hours on the courts playing cutthroat, her favorite game. Often invincible against men, many call her ‘Ronnie Rollout’ to her face. Less-charitable males use the term ‘Ronnie Rollover’ when her sleek back is turned.

  In a way, remote piloting is tougher than the life of a fighter pilot, who releases potent munitions and clears the area, doesn’t see the consequences of his drop. But when an RPV fires on a target, the remote pilot must watch the device all the way to detonation. Pilots and sensor operators agree the experience is vivid and uncommonly personal. The small human forms in the fast-expanding image remain in the mind for a long time, humans completely unaware of the fate that hurries down from on high. Humans who cease to exist when the view goes blackscreen. Some crew remark it’s akin to living inside a video game, where the blood is real.

  It is no surprise that Exley, his bird’s monitors trained unblinking on the Pentagon, is first to call into his headset that the courtyard intruder is back. His curt description is repeated up and down the commlink. The size of a truck, with wings. Moments later he adds that another figure is present, a woman, small beside the dragon-like form. Exley and duLac allow the merest flicker of a glance between them.

  Exley’s job is not to question orders, he trusts his chain of command for that. His job is to carry them out. Though Exley is trained and prepared for it, he feels an overhang of dread when contemplating what his duty could now include: blowing an unarmed U.S. citizen to Kingdom come.

  He is also prepared, if and when so ordered, to arm and fire another of the missiles Reaper Six can carry. Although much more compact, Reaper’s B63G guided bomb in the most significant ways rivals the device detonated on the morning of August 6, 1945, over Hiroshima, Japan.

  Beside him in the dimly-lit operations cockpit, Veronica returns her MTS ball to target autotrac. Their eyes meet briefly, reach agreement. Exley sets the controls to maintain mission altitude, turns Reaper Six into a loiter orbit above the distant target, all systems nominal, awaiting orders.

  Faceprint

  FBI Special Agent Sonia Mhyro parks at a rest stop outside Ypsilanti, Michigan. Rain spatters her windshield, she turns the wipers off. Driving a Bureau vehicle to Ann Arbor to lead a training session on the latest rollouts of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification program, she’s in an emergency chat with field agents on priority assignment. Originally attached to the NGI system’s 2012 pilot program with the state of Michigan, Mhyro trains agents on proper use of the Universal Face Workstation, designed to enable law enforcement agencies to conduct automated photographic matches across mass databases.

  The NGI pilot program had spread quickly to Hawaii, Maryland, South Carolina, Ohio and New Mexico, now involves the entire country. Operational-grade results surfaced early in the trial, actionable tracking of persons of interest and key arrests are on record, included now as case studies in Mhyro’s instructional materials. The Facial Recognition component of the NGI pilot provided rapid searches of 13 million criminal mug shot photos. Now, databases accessible to NGI software include passport photos, state driver’s licenses, airport and population center security cameras, and social media sites numbering in the dozens.

  Mhyro pulls the swivel-mounted laptop toward her. Images of a young woman in the company of a hulking fugitive from a nightmare. The woman’s small body twists futilely in the creature’s grip, terror stamped on every move. Mhyro knows one of these agents socially, thinks for a moment that someone is messing with her. But careful, best to play it straight. If it’s a gag, she’ll have to put up with it. Duty and professionalism first, however macabre it seems.

  ch867: you should have the images

  mhymhy: I see them - is this a movie set?

  ch867: security camera, pentagon courtyard, see timestamp and camera id it’s on your list

  mhymhy: how old you think she is, 20?

  69vw: 16-23 start searching DMV records

  mhymhy: any particular state?

  ch867: all states - she came in through the bathroom window – then run passport office

  69vw: if no hits use school yearbooks, HS and university

  mhymhy: I’d start with california.

  ch867: ??

  mhymhy: cali girls have this look. what is this goddess culture thing on her shirt?

  69wv: k. start from calif

  ch867: check facebook twitter pinterest bridal registries, tweo, imvu, secondlife, farmville

  69vw: start checking public cameras in the no
rtheast, airports up here

  mhymhy: on it will get back to you – 30 -

  Mhyro minimizes the chat window. She opens her Universal Face Workstation, with image-editing software manipulates the six photos to create a flattened composite view of the woman’s face from ear to ear. The hair obscures ears and cheeks but there is enough information in the photos for the software to assemble the needed composite, looking like a face that was peeled off its skull and laid out flat. Too much like the real-life version that’s all over the Internet. Mhyro had seen the Annetka photo, so macabre. She shudders. This giant winged thing. She’d heard that a man materialized out of nowhere at the Pentagon. So what’s with this monster lizard?

  Agent Mhyro launches the match query. From the highway rest stop her laptop commands the searches on a mainframe computer at a remote location. There are 768 million searchable photographs in the NGI system, and she’s programmed the search to prioritize for driver’s licenses, Facebook, school yearbooks. In under half a minute, three images appear on Mhyro’s screen. A high school photo, from San Jose, California. A student ID taken at San Jose State University. A California driver’s license, the address in San Jose.

  A fourth image joins the list. Then more, a dozen photos from Facebook, one taken on the porch of a home. Address numerals in this photo match the driver’s license. Mhyro studies the images. The metrics look strong, and to her eye all photos represent the same person. A lovely girl in these photos, blonde and smiling, joyful. So different from this terrified white-haired wretch.

  Mhyro opens her chat.

  mhymhy: ID positive san jose california. Female age 19, address is solid. Dig into CA DMV to verify. complete workup posted to SPIRS server, team access. have fun