Aurora looked away then said “given the circumstances, emotional distress is an understandable reaction.”
Alexia smiled as she closed her eyes. Apparently still not fully recovered from fast-convergence, even that meager cell bed was comfortable enough that she felt drowsy. But she had slept for long enough and made an effort to stay awake.
“It’s funny,” she said. “So much had to happen so we could at least tolerate each other.”
“It was all thanks to you,” Aurora remarked. “Much has transpired yes, but it was you who extended your hand to me. Despite how… difficult I made your life.”
“Of course. We’re family. This is how relationships between siblings work. Or at least this is how I think it is.”
Aurora seemed to reflect on that sentence for a moment, then the lights in the cell went out. It wasn’t total darkness, as some of the light from the corridor leaked under the door.
“You should rest,” Aurora then said. “We have to be ready for tomorrow.”
“Yeah, for whatever happens tomorrow,” Alexia said then closed her eyes. Eventually the occupants of the other cells around hers calmed down and some appeared to go to sleep. It became a bit more peaceful but she was still tense and instead settled for lying there, resting with her eyes closed.
Joel
IT WAS RUSH hour in the alleys. Farmers, diggers, mechanics and support personnel scrambled to return home after another day on the job. Joel had been dropped off across the surface from Junction Six and even after several hours of navigating the underground maze of the Citadel, his apartment was still a long way off. Whenever he arrived at the next junction on his way there, he would notice Citpol officers stationed at all gates. Some of them would glance at him as if they knew who he was but kept their distance and left him alone.
Walking down the next tunnel, he recalled the moment when she was arrested, her eyes pleading for help. He had to find a way. There had to be a way to get her out of trouble. As he arrived at Junction One, he noticed the crowd gathering by one of the loudspeakers at the local commissary. He still had five junctions to go so he approached to take a quick break and see what the fuzz was about. As he pushed his way closer to the speaker, he could hear people murmuring. Alexia’s and Ethan’s names were being thrown around, along with word of the Francisco Citadel disaster which apparently was now widely known.
“… the fugitive former Director of Control Administration, Ethan Sommers was last seen leaving Troika Hall last night and so far, his whereabouts remain unknown,” the recording of the news report played. “… he is believed to have escaped underground and a Citadel-wide search is currently being conducted. Please remain cooperative if Citpol personnel approaches you. Former Controller Alexia Sommers is being held on suspicion of aiding the rogue Controller Maya Garland and she is currently preparing her defense with a team of appointed attorneys. A preliminary hearing before the Troika is scheduled for tomorrow evening.”
The recording continued announcing meaningless information that looped over and over again. The mob that gathered to hear it stayed behind as he pushed his way out. There they all stood, stunned by the news of their beloved Controller being accused of unspeakable evil. There they listened as if hoping the next loop would be different. Somehow, Joel doubted Alexia was going to be given a real chance to defend herself. It all felt too much like a move by the Troika to remove power from the office of Control Administration, which it had amassed in the last twenty years out of necessity. Now that there were daemons doing the work of a Controller, there was no more need for her kind. If left unchecked, Controllers could one day challenge the need for a Troika. It was clear this was all a power game and Alexia had been caught in the middle.
She has sacrificed too much already, he thought. Somehow he was going to help her. But first, he had to get to his apartment and so he continued the walk there. One junction after the other, the recording played and stunned citadel citizens listened. Rations windows opened but the shock of recent events was stronger than the need to get in line. Whatever was going to happen, the status quo had definitely been disturbed beyond repair.
Almost an hour later, Joel finally arrived at Junction Six. He went straight to the tunnel where his apartment was, got in then locked the door and lay in bed, exhausted. He closed his eyes to rest for a moment, eventually falling asleep.
Joel woke up hours later. Refreshed, but still sighing in frustration for wasting time. He went to his desk and sat in front of the computer. As he struggled to figure out how to help Alexia, out of nowhere he recalled the commands Aurora had dictated him to override the daemon in Francisco Citadel. He could most likely do the same again to open whatever locked doors they were being kept behind. He booted up his computer and brought up a command line. When he tried to run scripts, a security warning announced the terminal had been cut off from access to Citadel network administration. Frustrated, he closed the window and brought up his video chat contacts list. He browsed it and double-clicked an entry. The chat window dialed the destination contact then Martin appeared on the video feed, rubbing his eyes.
“Woah, Joel. You’re back,” Martin said, blinking as if clearing his sight to make sure he was not mistaken. “It’s like 3 in the morning, what’s going on?”
“Martin, do you still have access to network administration on your terminal?” Joel immediately asked.
“It’s good to see you too, boss. But to answer your question, no.”
“I need direct access to network resources.”
“It’s not going to happen. They implemented security measures. Some kind of high level DEFCON panic down here. All remote terminals have been cut off from the core routers. But never mind that, you were there with the traitor. Did she look insane? Was she coherent?”
Joel shook his head and said “listen to me, Martin. It’s all lies. Alexia did not do anything and she needs my help but there’s not much I can do without core access.”
“Why? What’s in in the core network?” Martin asked. “And why do you want to help this crazy genocidal woman?”
“There’s a data construct there called a daemon and this stupid lockdown prevents me from reaching it,” Joel explained, exasperated.
“Oh, shit. I get it,” Martin said, as he rolled his eyes and dismissed the explanation.
“What?”
“I mean, really? You’ve only known her for what, a day? What’s the matter with you?”
Clearing his throat, Joel ignored the comment. “I need to run code directly on this daemon and the only way to do that at this point is through a physical console, no remote access.”
“Well you know, if it’s really that urgent, those ancient terminals in the reactor chamber are hardwired to the core routers.”
“Oh yeah, you’re right” Joel said, relieved at least there was something he could try. “I got to get down there as soon as possible.”
“Hey, meet me at the shop. I really want to know what’s so special about this girl that makes you forget she helped kill all those people.”
“Again, she’s innocent,” Joel said. “But fine, I’ll see you there.”
Joel closed the chat window and reached for the storage bin on the side to pull out an apple. He took a bite then brought up real time status reports on his screen. From the point of view of his diagnostics tools, as far as other interconnecting subsystems in the Citadel were concerned, a Controller was online orchestrating operations as usual. There appeared to be no distinction between a real Controller and its daemon instance. At least a dozen solar flares had occurred since the moment Alexia had left for Francisco Citadel and they had all been handled properly. Daemons had truly made Controllers obsolete. As he took another bite, he wondered why the Troika was pushing all those theatrics. They could simply extract the implant from Alexia’s head and let her live a normal life. Not only were they removing her from the equation but she was also being branded a traitor, after pretty much sacrificing her childhood to the
Program. Unable to contain his frustration any longer, he put a couple more apples in his backpack and left the apartment.
The commotion in Junction Six had died down by then. Most people had apparently given up on trying to make sense of the news so they had simply gone home. In the grand scheme of things, the average resident of the alleys couldn’t care less about the power games of the elites or whether a person or a neural map of a person were running the Citadel. As long as the food supply and the barrier were steady, it didn’t make much of a difference to them. He walked by the commissary where the speaker was still looping through the news report then made for tunnel seven. Two Citpol there glanced at him but didn’t make a move and so he simply walked past them. As he continued towards the entrance to the engineering elevator, he noticed some of the kids who lurked in the shadows, making their homes in the open air conditioning shafts and maintenance tunnels. Alexia had at one time been one of them.
Joel smiled with relief when his password to unlock the elevator wire mesh door was accepted. Apparently, the security lockdown had not been through enough to reset access codes. Soon he was being lowered to the restricted area below and after a few minutes that felt like hours, the cab stopped at its preset destination, the maintenance shop. He left the elevator and unlocked the door to the shop.
“Hey boss,” Martin greeted him inside. He was sitting in front of his work computer with headphones on.
“Hey,” Joel mumbled then walked to his desk and quickly grabbed some tools he put in his backpack and an extra pair of batteries for the auglens just in case. “Alright, let’s go.”
“Oookay,” Martin said then took off the headphones and followed him back to the elevator. Soon they were going down to the lowest point underground. He seemed to understand Joel was too stressed for idle chatter and simply kept quiet.
The wire mesh doors opened and they stepped onto the cold, damp natural cave that housed the reactor. Again, Joel noted how different it was in comparison to Francisco Citadel’s. How much bigger the cave and the core itself were and the multiple computer terminals surrounding the floating chrome sphere. Scaffolding installed against the back wall held the 8 steel structures that looked to him like giant fingers holding it in place and somewhat covered the top half of the reactor. And there it was again. As soon as he had direct line of sight with the massive orb, it subtly called for him to get near. To touch it. He shook his head attempting to snap out of it but that only worked for a few seconds.
“Looks like this one works,” Martin said over the constant humming of the chrome sphere, pulling Joel back from momentary insanity as he wondered if it would be a good idea to ask his coworker if he felt the same mind control effect while in close proximity to it.
“Let’s see,” said Joel and joined him at the computer terminal closest to the reactor, right in front of it then pushed a button on its side.
“I can’t believe these dinosaurs still boot,” Martin said amazed, as the ancient computer powered up, making noises they had only heard in old training recordings.
Joel could hear fans spinning inside to push hot air out of the box. On the monitor eventually showed up an operating system layout that had been popular during pre-Sync times, complete with a Start button and trackball functionality.
“These look like military grade terminals with multiple redundant systems,” Joel explained and sat down on the stool next to it while Martin stood on the side watching the screen. “They haven’t been used in a long time and maybe the dry cold here preserved the electronics.”
Clicking here and there, Joel took a moment to figure out the interface then finally found a way to bring up the command prompt.
“Alright, I’m going to execute some script verbs,” Joel said and pulled the auglens out of the backpack. Thankfully, he had remembered to have the device record everything he saw through them while working with Aurora. There was a cable with a universal connector on one end that protruded from the side of the auglens. He pulled it out and connected it to a port on the working computer. Fortunately, the auglens was as old as those terminals and so it didn’t take long for the computer to detect the connection. There was a weird pop-up on the screen showing progress for an operation called a ‘driver installation’. Joel looked at Martin, who shrugged back at him. Eventually, a window popped up with a video player and Joel skipped trough it until the part where the commands showed up.
With the trackball, Joel put the recording on one side of the screen and the command prompt on the other then tried the same line of verbs and pressed Enter. A vague error was returned. The verbs called for operations on specifically named resources so he figured maybe the string needed some modification to fit the name equivalents for the mainframe systems in Angeles Citadel.
“Here,” Martin said, as he put his index on the screen.
“Huh?” Joel mumbled then noticed one if the arguments in the command used the letters ‘FC’.
“Replace with AC, you know for Angeles Citadel,” Martin added.
Joel nodded and made the change and pressed Enter again. And there it was, positive confirmation of root access to daemon administration. “Holy shit,” he muttered.
“Damn,” Martin said. “Well, now we have all the power. Use it wisely,” he added, smiling.
Minimizing the command line, Joel brought up the file browser which to his surprise listed some newly accessible folders, perhaps locked up in the mainframe until unlocked by a Controller or a daemon.
“Now what?” Martin asked.
“No clue. I only know those commands and I have no idea how to work the script syntax. I’m hoping there’s going to be a documentation file here somewhere,” he replied as he scrolled through the hundreds of folders.
“Wait, what is that?” Martin put his finger on the screen again, pointing at a folder with a special icon that stood out from the others named ‘Hermes Archive.’
“I don’t care, I don’t have time for that.”
“Oh yeah? Select it again and check the description.”
Joel obliged and read it out loud. “Confidential Hermes Initiative documentation and manuals. Well, my friend. When you’re right, you’re right,” he said then opened the folder. Inside, there were several subfolders marked Phase 1 through 5. Joel opened the first one and inside, there was a single tridimensional model file named ‘20970812-Predicted’. Intrigued, he opened the Phase 2 folder and found another file, that one named ‘20970812-Actual’. Folder Phase 3 through 5 contained several dozens of diagrams, blueprints and text files.
“Wait a minute. Martin, wasn’t 2097 the year of the sync incident?”
“Yeah. I guess the file names are dates. August 12th 2097.”
“Okay, but we’re getting off track,” Joel said annoyed.
“No, wait open the first one.”
“Who cares? I need to find the syntax manual.”
“Don’t see you see what this means?” Martin pointed again at the file.
“What?” Joel said looking at the properties of the file named ‘20970812-Predicted’. It had been created 10 years before that. “What the hell?” he muttered when he realized the implications.
“That’s right. Someone knew about the sync incident years before it happened.”
“But that’s not possible. None of this was built until after the fact.”
“Unless they knew about it, way in advance,” Martin said then crossed his arms to his chest. “Just open the file, I think we stumbled upon some conspiracy stuff here.”
Joel nodded and double clicked the ‘20970812-Predicted’ file. It was an interactive model of the solar system. A thick line connected the Sun, Earth and Jupiter then ran outside of the solar system. Using the controls, he zoomed out until the line crossed another star. Proxima Centauri. Then he kept zooming out until the model showed the whole galaxy. Several dozens of celestial bodies of various sizes were connected by the perfectly straight line which ran from one arm to another across its diameter.
“This is the orbital synchronization incident right here and whoever built all this knew about it ten years before it happened,” Joel said in disbelief.
“Maybe even longer than that. Let’s see the other one,” Martin suggested.
When Joel opened the file named ‘20970812-Actual’, at first it showed the same zoomed-in view of the solar system but after scrolling all the way out the line ran from the Orion arm where the Earth is located and ended at the center of the Milky Way. He opened the properties of the file and noted it had been created a week after the sync incident.
“Hmmm,” Martin mumbled, scratching his chin. “I guess they miscalculated the celestial alignment and corrected it a week after it actually happened.”
“Yeah but what if…” Joel said absentmindedly while he ran the trackball cursor over the line which changed color and two labels popped up at either end of it with names and what appeared to be galactic coordinates. The Earth side was labeled ‘Celestial Gateway’ and the center of the galaxy ‘Destination’.
“Holy shit, Martin,” Joel said, standing up and facing the massive floating sphere. “It’s not a reactor. It’s a portal.”
“Woah. You mean like a wormhole.”
“Yeah. This line right here, it’s not meant to represent the celestial alignment but the pathway between its entrance and exit.”
“But shouldn’t it look like, you know, a hole?”
“What you never took a physics class?”
“I guess I wasn’t paying too much attention,” Martin countered defensively.
“It’s a four-dimensional construct as perceived by our tridimensional senses.”
“Yeah, that helps a lot.”
“Look,” Joel said pointing at the pedestal underneath the sphere. “See that shadow? That’s a two-dimensional projection of the sphere which is a tridimensional object.”
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