Edge of Darkness

by Vikki Romano

  There had been a gravel drive here once. He remembered it from years ago, but it hadn’t been used much or at all since then. He began to wonder if this was a wise move, but it wasn’t like he had a whole lot of options.

  Weaving his way through downed trees and large boulders, he spied the small structure in a clearing ahead and turned in its direction, only to bring himself to a sliding halt in the muddy earth.

  There, off in the distance, he saw it. A tiny red light. Surveillance of some kind. Or automatic weaponry. Either way, it wasn’t good news. It was dark, he was on someone else’s property, and they had every right to kill him for being there.

  He parked the bike and stepped away from it, inching through the brush, making sure he didn’t trip any wires or other remote devices that may have been placed out there to throw off trespassers. Branches cracked underfoot and his ears and eyes began to focus on every slight noise or movement around him.

  Then he heard it.

  The distinct whir of a pulse gun amping up. It wasn’t close, but pulse guns had range.

  He crouched and pulled his own pulse gun from an inside pocket. Moving his thumb slowly against the mech to crank up the amps, he gripped the gun and held it close to his chest as he searched the area around him. His eyes focused suddenly, and as they did, a bright flash of light washed over his vision… and then the pain started.

  Excruciating pain.

  Not now! he thought, and he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to shake off the surge of vertigo that came over him. His hand began to tremble as he gripped the gun. He reached out with the other hand to brace himself against a tree. Whatever was happening, it was going to get him killed out here.

  He tried to focus, concentrate on the task at hand and ignore the pain, but it spread to his spine, and a wave of heat, like oozing lava, poured out into every limb. Then he shuddered. Violently.

  Breaking into a cold sweat, Calder let out a long, slow breath. The fog of it fanned over his face in the cold night air. When he tried to focus, it was as if he had put on a pair of IR shades. He could see, not as if it were daylight, but low lights were intensified and lines were crisp. Eerily sharp. This was definitely not normal. His ears were also picking up much more than he felt they should be. Bugs skittering up trees, owls hooting in the distance. And the low hum of an idle pulse gun some thirty yards away from him. Off and to the right.

  Calder saw movement there, but could not make out the person, so he backtracked, made a broad sweep around, and came out on the far side of the clearing, closer to the structure he was trying to reach. But the figure had disappeared. No movement, no noise pinpointing where his enemy lay, just dark open space.

  Gritting his teeth, Calder crept closer to the structure, a small cabin that had been fortified with barbed wire and mobile surveillance. It was painted black and was nearly invisible in the darkness of the woods.

  With his back against the side of the structure, he snaked toward the door, his heart hammering in his ears. When he finally set foot on the small cement porch, he faced the door. A laugh almost escaped his lips as he looked up at the foreboding steel obstacle.

  Should he knock? Offer a cheerful greeting? It was all too surreal.

  As he reached out to grab the knob, he heard the loud hum of the pulse gun behind him and dove out of range, bringing his own gun up to target his stalker.

  “Jimmy?” Calder squinted in the low light. The man was wearing a bush hat pulled down low. Just as quickly, the man lowered his weapon and holstered it at his hip.

  “McKenna? Jesus H, what the fuck are you doing out here?”

  Calder put his own weapon back in his jacket and stood to give the man a bear hug and clap on the back. The welcome was returned in kind, and for a moment, he felt saved. Safe. Not so alone.

  “What are you doing out here?” Jimmy asked again as he released his hug and directed Calder back to the porch.

  “I don’t know where to start, but I need your help. You were the only person I could think of that would be able to… help me.”

  Jimmy cocked his head and gave him a knowing smirk, as if this was something they did all the time, and then opened the door and invited Calder inside.

  The structure wasn’t really a house, though it was for Jimmy. It was once a hunting lodge of sorts, a camp where the men in his family would go in the winter and stay during hunting season--when hunting was still legal. Once the ban was enacted against sport hunting in this zone, the lodge went unused for many years. That was until Jimmy took it and began living there.

  “How long have you been out here?” Calder asked, eyeing the contents of the large, open room. It resembled an armory more than a home, but there was something comforting about that too.

  “Full-time? Maybe twelve years. I think you were here right after I moved in.”

  “Yeah, I think I was. Right after you got out of ops.”

  Ops. That one word between them that brought on so many memories, both good and bad. Mention of it silenced their conversation, and Calder took in the rest of the room. The mounted weapons on the walls. The awards and medals on dusty shelves. The old American flag tacked to a door. He hadn’t seen one of those since he was a kid.

  “You want something to drink? Beer?”

  “Sure, that’d be great,” Calder said, settling himself on the old, blanket-covered couch in the middle of the room. The coffee table was an old ammo trunk, still painted with its identifying numbers. The vid screen on the wall was muted, but was running surveillance feedback on one side and scrolls of local news on the other.

  After a few minutes, Jimmy came back into the room and handed Calder a beer. An old-style beer… in a glass bottle. Calder looked at it oddly, as if it were something he had never seen, and took a sip. The beer was bitter, but cold and refreshing.

  “Rebel…” Calder smirked.

  Jimmy took a sip of his own with a grin and sat on a leather chair that had seen better days.

  “So,” he said, shrugging one shoulder, “how’ve you been? How’s the family?”

  Calder took another sip as his mind scrambled with answers. He hadn’t seen his family in years, though his sister popped in and out of his life pretty frequently. And how he was, well, that was a loaded question.

  “Honestly?” he said, sitting back in the couch. “I’m pretty shitty. That’s why I’m here.”

  Jimmy shook his head and set his beer on the table as he leaned forward.

  “Nice to know you think I’m some sort of savior that you can come to me for help like this,” he said sternly, and then squeezed Calder’s knee with a smile when Calder’s brow furrowed at his response. “I’m busting your balls, asshole! I’m glad you came to me when you needed help. Would be nice if there was less time between visits, though.”

  “About that. I’m sorry, really, for losing touch. Things just got too…”

  “Too real?”

  “Yeah. You know how it is. All the docs in the clinic think you’re cured after a couple weeks and a handful of injections, and they thrust you out into the world and expect you to act like a normal human being--”

  “When you don’t feel human at all? Yeah, I get it.”

  “Is that why you came out here? Stayed here?” Calder asked.

  “I came out here because the world didn’t have anything left to offer me that seemed a good payback for what I lost out there. All that bullshit about sacrifice and commitment? Yeah, that’s all it was. Bullshit.”

  Calder hung his head. He knew exactly what Jimmy meant, and if anyone had lost more than he had, it was Jimmy.

  He had been in service for three years already when Calder signed up. A veteran at twenty-three with a tour already under his belt before Calder even passed training. He took him under his wing on Calder’s first tour, made sure he got out alive, which was pretty heroic, considering he had to keep himself alive in the process. And when Calder was asked to join special ops, Jimmy was the
one who stood there, proud and tearful.

  He would never know the hell Calder would be put through once he got in, though.

  Or the things that they did to him.

  Calder looked down at Jimmy’s leg then.

  “Does it still bother you?” he asked, and took another sip of his beer.

  Jimmy smirked and slapped his thigh.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “I get that itch that makes it feel like it’s still there. I mean, the mechanics of it are wet-wired, so it is actually there, but…”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “No, it never will be. I mean, I could drop a few thousand and get one of the new bio-grown models, have it printed right onto my hip, but what’s the point? Not like I’m going to need it for anything important anymore.”

  Calder grimaced, understanding immediately.

  “Did you get any other upgrades while you were still in?” Calder asked, fishing for an in. The brain augmentations were classified for the special ops soldiers, but he was sure it was well known amongst the others inside.

  “To my leg? No,” Jimmy said, and Calder nodded absently.

  “To anything else?” he asked.

  Jimmy looked at him oddly, as if he’d asked him if he’d sold his soul. Lord knew Calder felt he’d sold his.

  “No, I mean, what do you mean? Did they do something to you?”

  Calder hung his head again, pursed his lips skeptically, then tapped the back of his head.

  “All the special ops were required to get brain augments.”

  Jimmy sat back from him, his mouth gaping.

  “Did it fuck you up? I mean, did it change you?”

  You have no idea.

  Calder drank the rest of his beer then stood and paced the room. Jimmy came up behind him and took the empty bottle from his hand.

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Yeah. Well, sort of.”

  A knowing look crossed Jimmy’s face as he headed into the kitchen. It was an old country room, like the rest of the place, the cupboards all knotty pine with wrought iron handles. Calder always felt like he was in a museum when he came here. There wasn’t an inch of polypropylene or stainless steel anywhere. It was kind of refreshing.

  “You hungry? I was about to have dinner when you… arrived.”

  “Sure,” Calder answered with an apologetic shrug, and he took a seat at the table in the corner.

  “And you’re more than welcome to bunk here for a bit, until we figure you out.”

  “Thanks Jimmy, really. You don’t know how much I appreciate this… appreciate you.”

  “Ah.” He waved him off. “No skin off my teeth. Not like I’m spending time throwing parties with the neighbors out here. Besides, what kind of friend would I be if I kicked you out?”

  “A smart one?”

  Jimmy beamed as he opened the old stove. “You’re still an asshole…”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Now this is interesting…” Cooper tapped a few lines of code that spewed onto the screen in front of him and leaned in to focus on the information. Sierra searched feeds at a desk across the room, checking to see if Calder had tripped any alarms. She stood at Cooper’s words.

  “Find something?” She went to Cooper, leaned against the high counter, checking the screen. To her it was a jumble of numbers, letters, and symbols. Pure gibberish, but to Cooper it was an epic masterpiece.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this. Normal viruses, at least in the basic sense, are a sort of algorithm. You know, it finds a pattern, sneaks its way in, and plants itself. This doesn’t do that at all.”

  Sierra looked at him blankly and he chuckled.

  “OK, consider a traffic light. You have lanes going north-south and east-west, and in the center is a signal, like a valve. There are algorithms that tell the signals when to change based on traffic patterns and volume. Code is just like traffic. It flows at different rates of speed, and there are algorithms that act like the valves, turn things off and on. Viruses just fuck with the valves, reroute the traffic to roads it shouldn’t be on.”

  “Ah, OK, that I understand. So this thing that Calder uploaded, it works like that?”

  “No, and I don’t understand what some of these pathways are trying to accomplish. The strings don’t make any sense. There’s no quantifier. No actionary code.”

  “That’s because it’s not a virus.” Steven came in from a back room where he had been doing his own research. He set his tablet on the counter, leaned over Cooper’s shoulder, and pointed to a line on the screen. “There are no actionary codes because it’s a boot log, not a virus sequence. See, if you look at these few lines here, it’s calling out sectors. Lining them up. It’s a reset program.”

  Cooper leaned back, his face suddenly blanching as he looked up at Sierra. Her heart skipped a beat.

  “What do you mean a reset program? What could this do to him, like… erase his brain?”

  “No--well, not exactly. I’m assuming that’s why his grid is blinking--not because he fried it, but because he reset it and didn’t finish the process.” He grabbed a stool and dragged it over to where they were working. Sierra did the same.

  “Jeez, why didn’t I see that?” Cooper said, grabbing his forehead.

  “It was easy to miss,” Steven said, picking up his tablet to point something out to him. “They buried the executing code. The subscript is almost nonexistent. Look…” His finger ran along a long line of characters, and Cooper leaned back again.

  “Man, whoever wrote this is--”

  “Genius? Yeah, I thought so too. Until I did some poking. While we still had Calder hooked up for diagnostics, I managed to pull his identifiers. Model number, serial number, and batch code of his augment.” He turned to them then, a look of caution on his face. “It isn’t military grade. It’s private sector. I mean real private sector.”

  “Private sector?” Sierra was getting that bad feeling again, like all the horrible shit that’d been happening was about to get a whole lot worse.

  “Tsendai.”

  “Jesus,” Cooper said, shaking his head. Sierra looked to them both.

  “What the hell is Tsendai?”

  “Tsendai was a microtech company back in the twenty forties. They dealt with prosthetic technology,” Steven said, holding out his arms. “Bionic limbs and such for amputees.”

  “OK?” She still didn’t understand where the problem was. If Tsendai was a medical company, it made perfect sense to her that they’d manufacture augmentations.

  “In fifty, there was a bidding war and lots of nasty things went down. CEOs turned up dead or went missing.”

  “In the tech world, especially down in our ranks,” Cooper added, “information poured in pretty fast. We could taste the bitter truth. We knew what was happening.”

  Sierra’s mind raced with possibilities. She had no idea what the hell they were talking about.

  “Wait… What?”

  “GenMed, Sierra,” Cooper said, turning to her. “GenMed took over Tsendai, ran it from inside, hoping that no one would notice they were there, but then they started pumping out these seriously fucked-up bio-guns and viruses, and it was only a matter of time before the military tried to get in on the action.”

  “So this thing in Calder’s head, Tsendai built it, but GenMed sold it to the military?”

  “You got it. The technology they were putting out simply didn’t exist. It was extreme stuff. This Cortex system that Calder thinks he has isn’t a Cortex at all, even though they gave it Cortex overlays to fool techs if he had to go for upgrades.”

  Sierra offered yet another confused look, and Steven grinned evilly, patted her on the shoulder.

  “They wanted the military and everyone else to think it was a typical Cortex system. They installed ghost IDs to make it look like it was, no matter who scanned it.”

  “So how did you find it if it was hidden?” she a
sked.

  Steven nodded knowingly and sat back, crossing his arms. His lean face had that smug look only a hacker would have.

  “I had my suspicions, so I ran a few diagnostics of my own. I knew what to look for. Suspicion has its benefits.” He swiped through a few screens until he came to one that looked like a blueprint and he put his finger right in the middle.

  “Holy fuck,” Cooper said, leaning down to look more closely. “Is that…?”

  “Yup. An Omega core.”

  “I take it that’s bad?” Sierra asked cautiously.

  Cooper puffed out his cheeks then blew out a breath.

  “The Omega cores came out of a very high-level security project. Something the military was working on before Tsendai came into the picture. We have a couple of guys on our team here who knew about the project, worked on it in its infancy.”

  “It was nothing more than storage for a battle sequencer,” Steven added, swiping through the screens on his tablet. “A program that was being added to the drones and frontline robotics to amp up their aggression, sharpen their logistics.”

  Sierra sat back then, nearly falling off her stool.

  “Oh God, it’s turning him into a killing drone?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s serious shit. Based on the data I was able to skim off him, it looked to me like his core was never functional like that before he uploaded the program. I’m assuming it was like an upgrade.”

  “Who would send something like that to him? He’s not in the military anymore!” she said, her voice tight in her throat.

  “That’s the other thing,” Steven said, shutting off his tablet, looking up at her. “The coding on the new data was private sector, not Tsendai. Like civilian sector. No idea who it was.”

  “So let me get this straight,” she said, stepping off the stool to pace the room. “His augment was just kind of a dead unit, but some civilian, for whatever reason, sent him an update that could possibly turn him into a killing machine?”