“Let me get this straight,” Zeke chimed in. “The hybrids are being controlled by a program that makes them rampaging killing machines. They’re destroying and killing all the humans in Crowley and you want a few humans to go in there and solve the problem.”
“You don’t have to battle them,” Charlie said.
“We just have to get Charlie into the CompuVerse so he can alter the code.”
“It’ll stop the hybrids,” Charlie said. “Once we update the code, we’ll be safe.”
“Dustin and Warren will just go back in there and replace the code again,” a burly guy at the front of the room said.
Charlie shook his head. “No, they won’t. I wrote new code. I used it on Jade. It’s in front of all her ops code. It creates a failsafe trap. They won’t be able to touch a single hybrid ever again. And they won’t be able to create another hybrid, not with that code. They’ll never be able to access it.”
“You think she’ll do it, Charlie?” Zeke asked.
Charlie glanced over at Jade. “Yes,” he said loudly. “She doesn’t need to be here right now. Even without guns she could take almost all of us out and get out of here.”
“All of us except for the big red guy,” Tallahassee said grudgingly.
“And he is her ProtectoBot,” Charlie said. “Face it, we don’t need to be standing here talking to you at all.”
“We kind of do,” Jade hissed at Charlie. “We need a ride.”
“Right,” Charlie said. “However, we do need a ride.” He looked around the room seeing if anyone would volunteer to help.
“You can’t trust a hybrid,” Tallahassee said.
“Seriously?” Charlie asked. “This is the 24th century and humans haven’t gotten over bigotry?”
“They’re not human,” Tallahassee argued.
“She is human,” Charlie said. He hadn’t even really thought about the fact that they may not be.
“You didn’t see any humans out there tearing at each other when Blake’s boy flipped the switch,” Zeke said.
“We don’t make a habit of helping hybrids,” Tallahassee said.
“How about helping humans?” Jade snarled. “Because last time I checked, all the humans are going to die if we don’t go in and do something about the code that’s chewing up the hybrids’ brains.”
“We’re not fighting against the hybrids,” Charlie said. “We’re fighting against control. We’re fighting for equality. Human and hybrid. We’re fighting for a future where everybody can live together in peace. Where one man isn’t turned against another man because somebody can get inside his brain and twist the way he thinks and sees things. I’ve written the code to do that. All we need is a ride back to Crowley.”
“It’s a dangerous mission,” Jade said. “I don’t think anybody should come with us because there’s little to no chance we will even survive. But we need to get to the city.”
“Where is the CompuVerse?” Tallahassee asked.
“In the heart of headquarters,” Jade said. “Past all the hybrids, past all the bots, and if they know they’ve been breached, the whole place will shut down and the bots will sweep through killing everything that isn’t legally there.”
“Sounds impossible,” Tallahassee muttered.
“I’ll go with you,” Zeke said.
Tallahassee rounded on him with a snort. “You’re going with them?”
“Yeah,” Zeke shrugged. “Impossible odds. Little chance of survival. But the opportunity to save the world. I’m in.”
“Well shit. You’re useless without me,” Tallahassee said. “And someone is going to have to keep an eye on her.”
Jade smiled. “We could use anyone. But do either one of you have a vehicle?”
“I do,” said Gunk, stepping forward out of the crowd.
“Who the hell are you?” Jade asked, looking him up and down. “You’re not from around here.”
“No, but I do drive the garbage lorry and I can take you into Crowley,” he smiled.
“That’s all we need,” Jade said. She turned to Trekon. “Do I have your permission to leave to stop the slaughter?”
“Bring Jade her guns,” Trekon said. “It will be of great use to us if she survives.”
Chapter 37
“Where is she?” Warren glowered, staring at the images of the streets of Crowley. “Why can’t you find her?”
Dustin blinked ferociously at the CodeSwarm that showed the map of Crowley. Where the hell was Jade? She’d completely disappeared off the map and try as he might he hadn’t been able to find her. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone drinking the night before, but it had seemed like such a good evening to take a victory lap through The Cross. High five the regulars in all his haunts and grab a few of the girls’ asses just to remind them that he was the man.
Shit.
How could he have forgotten Jade and Warren’s fear of her? And why the hell didn’t Warren keep track of the bitch himself if she was such a nemesis. He sighed as he realized the truth in the code. Warren wasn’t going to take this well.
“She’s gone dark,” he said quietly.
Warren heard every word. “What do you mean, dark?” he asked, even more softly.
“We lost her,” Dustin said.
“She’s out of our control or you don’t know where she is?” Warren asked in the same deadly low tone.
“Both,” Dustin said, his voice ringing out too loudly in the quite control center.
Warren’s metal fist slammed down against a consol. Sparks flew as metal crumbled. “Genesis, go and find her,” he said. “I will tell you one thing. If she is not in this city now, she will be and she’ll be headed for the CompuVerse.”
“Perhaps she’s dead,” Dustin said hopefully.
“She would register in the system if she were dead,” Warren muttered. What the hell was wrong with Dustin? He was being an idiot. Some men couldn’t handle when they came close to greatness. Warren was pretty sure Dustin was one of those men.
Dustin scowled back at the CodeSwarm in front of him. He was going to show Warren and all of them how you stop a rogue Delta. His fingers worked the code furiously as he rerouted all the Deltas so their primary objective was to discover and annihilate Jadyn of Crowley. His frown tipped towards a smirk as he added the zinger code. The discovery of the unique scent of every being on the planet had only happened because of the invention of hybrids and the enhanced olfactory capabilities. Dustin pushed Jade’s unique scent out to all the Deltas in Crowley so they would be able to smell her and they would swarm all over her, HELs blazing.
“We are going in this?” Jade looked at the hunk of metal. They had taken the transport back to about thirty minutes out of Crowley, not noticing the BSA that had streaked past them at the same time.
The garbage incinerator they now stood in front of was the height of a three-story building and almost as wide. It looked like a great big metal box with floating pods around its base and some sort of a glass dome at the top. The sides, which at one point might’ve been shiny metal, were now tarnished black with stains. But what was worse was the stench. It stank like nothing Charlie had ever smelled before. It reeked, not like yesterday’s garbage, but like a landfill of all the city’s rubbish had been dumped in it for a week a left under the burning sun and rapidly decomposing.
“There’s no way,” Charlie said. “Does it even fly?”
Angelo walked towards the big black box and clanged his metal fingers along the side. “Did you know, my fine man,” he said, “bots do not have a sense of smell? We have sensors to allow us to know something might smell, but we can’t actually smell. I can see this is an F398 garbage incinerator, so I know it will be,” he paused as he searched for a word, “horrific to the human nostrils.”
Jade shrugged and started walking up the gangway into the big black box. “I’ve never had a good sense of smell. Been punched in the nose a few too many times. My septum is off.”
Angelo followed Jade into the
vehicle.
“It can’t seriously fly,” Charlie murmured again. “Why can’t we use the transport from before?”
“It’s in the shop for repairs.” Gunk patted Charlie on the shoulder as he moved past him. “Besides, we have to get close to headquarters and the transport can only take us just outside the city walls.” He gave a wheezing, twittering chuckle through his gills.
“Come on,” Tallahassee said following Gunk. “It’s the only way we’re going to get in there.”
“You guys run garbage collection for Crowley?” Charlie asked.
“There was a major malfunction with the city’s SaniBots a few years ago,” Zeke explained. “Garbage piled up for weeks. So, the head dog insisted on a human collection group to service key areas. Apparently when humans malfunction, they’re easier to get back online than bots.”
Gunk walked up and handed Charlie a small white tablet. “You may want to take this. It’ll help with the smell. “
Charlie swallowed the tablet without even thinking about it. The stench was so horrid it left an acrid taste in his mouth that made him want to puke. The effect of the pill was almost instantaneous.
“Okay,” he said, nodding as the sharp, fragrant scent of oranges filled his nostrils. “I think I can work with this.” Charlie inhaled deeply and followed Tallahassee and Gunk up the gangway.
Gunk took the helm as Tallahassee, Zeke, Jade, and Angelo sat in the cramped space right behind the driver’s seat in the glass dome at the top of the collector.
“Our only objective is,” Jade said, pointing at Charlie, “to get him into the CompuVerse room.”
“I don’t think that’s going to do it,” Charlie said. “There’s too much risk. I’m a marked man. Everyone knows exactly who I am. When we get in there, if there’s one of us that has a target on his back, it’s me.”
“That’s why we’re going to escort you like a prisoner towards the dungeon and then veer towards Grand Central,” Jade said.
“Hm, not a bad plan,” Charlie said. “But I think it’s only going to work so far. You need someone better or more resilient than me to make sure the code gets into the system.” His eyes were on the giant red bot sitting casually next to Jade.
“You’ve given him the code?” Jade us.
Charlie nodded. “I also have it here.” He held up his wrist. There was a small metal band placed around his wrist with a black shiny strip on it. “It’s a Maverick invention. Apparently, if I press my wrist against the ports, the code will go straight into the system.” Charlie shook his head. He had no idea how it even worked but from everything he saw, Maverick’s stuff worked pretty well.
“In case Charlie doesn’t make it to the CompuVerse,” Angelo said, “I will step in.”
Jade’s eyes widened as she glanced between Angelo and Charlie. “He’s going to make it.”
“There’s also one for you, Jade.” Charlie handed her a bracelet, but couldn’t make eye contact. He was under no delusions. This was a suicide mission, not a Star Wars film. Well, except for Rogue One. That was a suicide mission, too. But they were going into the heart of enemy headquarters, and even though they had Jade and Angelo on their side, they were grossly outgunned. “This will give us three chances to get past Warren and Blake.”
“You’re going to make it,” Jade said, not touching the bracelet. “I’m going to make sure of that.”
“We don’t know what’s going to happen.” Charlie looked Jade straight in her right eye as he shoved the band holding the code in her hand. “Take the bracelet. We need to override Warren’s control.”
“And then what?” Jade asked, her human eye strangely soft.
Charlie took a deep breath, but he wasn’t about to hide the answer. “And then I want to go home,” he said.
He didn’t look at Jade when he said that. He didn’t want to know what she thought. Jade was a hybrid from the 24th century. She was bad-ass, she was beautiful, and there was no way she would ever be interested in a coding nerd like Charlie Richards. He wasn’t even going to pretend to hope there might be a chance. No, he was going to go back to the 21st century and get on with his life and see if there was some way he could change the future. That was where he belonged; in the past. Maybe if he simply never invented the code, none of this would ever happen.
“You know, there is empirical evidence thoughts are transient things,” Jade said. “And by transient, I don’t just mean they go in and out of your own head, but they go from your head to somebody else’s to another person. They say that a single thought can be shared by at least thirty-two people at the same time and it expands exponentially until it finds root in one person’s brain and they make it happen. This may not be common knowledge in the 21st century, but it is known here.”
Charlie raised his gaze to Jade, his eyebrows lifting quizzically.
“You’re not the only one to think of that code,” she stated.
“Great,” Charlie said.
“My point is, if you go back and, let’s say, uninvent the code or don’t share it with the right people at the right time or don’t write it down or burn the piece of paper or whatever it is you think you’re going to do that’s going to change the world, you have to understand your actions don’t matter. Somebody else will invent the code.”
“Like just anyone can invent it,” Charlie scoffed.
“Geniuses are not the people that are smarter than other people. Successful people aren’t better than anybody else. The people that have an idea… Everybody has an idea. Everybody has genius thoughts. Everybody has a great story, a great invention, a great solution, a great master plan. They can’t help it. These things exist outside of the individual. What makes someone unique is not what they think. What makes people unique is what they do about it.”
Chapter 38
The sanitation incinerator got to the gates of Crowley at twilight. The sun was setting on the desert horizon, but Crowley itself was still lit up. They been gone over twenty-four hours, and while the explosions had died down, the remnants of the burning fires had not.
Getting through the checkpoint was surprisingly easy. It seems like each garbage transport had a regular routine of collecting the garbage in the city and bringing it out, and right now was exactly the right time for Gunk’s garbage truck to get back into Crowley. So, although they were stopped briefly at the gate, no one hindered them. Apparently, sanitation liked to keep a schedule, riots, rebellion, or not.
Charlie watched the lines of Jade’s face tense, her eyes fixed on some random point on the other side of the cabin. Jade lived for her parents. Every choice she ever made was to protect them, to ensure their long life, to afford for them to become hybrids. And maybe some miracle allowed her parents to escape the demolition of their quadrant. Maybe they wouldn’t be dead.
“We approach headquarters,” Gunk said.
Jade gazed up at Charlie. “Are you ready for this?”
“If I’m going to be honest,” Charlie said, a smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “It’s a little out of my comfort zone.”
Jade smiled in response. “Just remember, you are prisoners until something happens.”
“Check,” Charlie said, but trembles ran through his fingers.
“It’s go time,” Tallahassee said, opening the side of the garbage incinerator.
They stepped onto the burning streets of Crowley.
Katerina had always loved to bake when she was human. Her parents had owned a bakery in Trenchtown and she’d woken every morning to the fresh scent of bread and cupcakes filling the air and wafting up to her tiny bedroom at the top of the steep stairs. They never had much money, but she’d always felt rich. People lined up around the block every morning to fill up on their pastries. Had she not been the daughter of the baker, she would have lined up, too.
But she didn’t have to.
Every morning her father set her muffin and glass of milk out on the tiny kitchen table where she would eat and fill her senses with the
soft sweet smells of her father’s baking.
When her father had grown sick, Katerina had been too young to take over the bakery, but he had written an air-tight will. Although she was being taken care of by her second cousin once removed, when she finally reached eighteen years of age, the entire cash value of the bakery was, in trust, to turn her into a hybrid.
The surgery however, had not gone well and before it was done, Katerina had been turned not into a Gamma, but a Delta.
Now, she stood in the streets of Crowley sniffing at the night air. Something was wafting towards her. Something that smelled almost as good as her father’s baking. It was the scent of her primary target.
Jadyn of Crowley.
Katerina let out a blood curdling howl that filled the evening sky and, thanks to the great acoustics that were the streets of Crowley, drew the attention of every Delta within a two-mile radius. The lifted their noses in the air, caught the scent of Jade and turned their full, blood-thirsty attention towards Headquarters, where Jade was entering the complex.
“You guys are going to have to wear these.” Jade held up three pairs of H-con cuffs. Zeke, Tallahassee, and Charlie all look down at the black cuffs with glowing green lights. None reached out to take them.
“That’s going to be a little hard to do,” Tallahassee said.
“They won’t be bound,” Jade said. She could see the fear in Tallahassee’s eyes and for a moment, she wondered what had happened to him, but now wasn’t the time to figure that out. Now they needed to get in the building. “You just need to hold one in one hand and one in the other. Like so.” She demonstrated holding her hands behind her back. “If you hold these wires together, they’ll conduct a small wave so it’ll look like they’re actually working, but if you open your hand it’ll fizzle out.”
Zeke grabbed a set of cuffs. “Okay.”
Tallahassee frowned and nodded, grabbing the other two pairs and handing one to Charlie. The three of them put on the cuffs and wrapped the buzzing live wire around their wrists, squeezed them in their fingers, and felt them light up. They then let go to make sure they could lose the cuffs at a moment’s notice.
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