Apex Cypher (Prequel to The Techxorcist series)

by Barnes, Colin F.

  Combined with that, it allowed Gabe to search the place properly, find the servers.

  The apartment had three bedrooms; only one was used as such. The others were empty. The bathroom Gabe had already seen, which left just one other place.

  Holly and Petal arrived together in the corridor while Gabe was inspecting the attic hatch. He turned to look at the girl. She’d washed the blood from her face, but her eyes were still rimmed with redness.

  “Is it all up there?” Gabe asked?

  “Yes,” Holly said. “Be careful, it’s trapped. I’ll show you the way.”

  Gabe stepped back, watched Holly take a slate from her jacket pocket and gesture across its surface. The attic hatch slid open and a ladder dropped down. The stench of coolant gas wafted out: a dry, arid smell, the smell of a server room.

  Holly ascended the steps half way, reached a hand in slowly to one side pulling out a control pad. She entered a code, and a series of motors whined above in the darkness.

  “What was that?” Petal asked.

  “Guns,” Holly said.

  Gabe noticed the stains of blood on the edge of the attic hatch. He followed the trajectory and noticed a series of patched holes in the mock-wood floor of the hall. Clearly it had been activated more than once. How many people had died in order to get those servers he couldn’t guess.

  “Wait there,” Holly said as she scampered up the ladder and into the darkness.

  Gabe listened to her footsteps as she traversed the attic, flicking switches. The lights came on, and for the first time, Gabe got a view of what was up there. He stepped up a couple of rungs on the ladder until his head was level with the hatch. Inside the attic were a series or server racks running the length of the wall on the far side. The space was bigger than he expected, at least twenty metres by ten.

  To the right end of the attic, a glass wall sectioned off the space, beyond which lay a single server. He could tell it was an old design from the size and the case style. It had to be at least before the war, over fifty years old. And here it was, the centrepiece of an impressive system set up.

  Holly stood by it, after disabling the security protecting it: A series of laser beams, criss-crossing the room, briefly lit before extinguishing. She knelt to the server, reached behind it, pulled out a pair of cables with neck port plugs on the end.

  She looked back to the hatch, saw Gabe, and waved him in.

  “It’s safe,” she called out.

  Gabe climbed the ladder, stepped up into the attic. The flat ceiling was still a good metre taller than him. The walls were lined with white Polymar™ boards to provide a secure and climate-controllable environment for all the rack-mounted servers. The light came from a series of overhead OLED panels. The power requirements to run all this must have been huge.

  “How’s all this being powered?” He asked Holly as Petal joined him and they made their way to the glassed-off server room.

  “Jericho got a small reactor in town working, fed the power to here.”

  “And he didn’t want to share that with the rest of the town I take it?” Gabe said, passing through the door to stand next to Holly.

  “It’s everyone for themselves here,” she replied, handing Gabe and Petal a cable each.

  “What’s this?” Petal asked, pointing to the ancient server.

  Holly smiled then, stroking a hand across its surface. “Old Grey,” she said. “One of a kind. Its operating system is an AI of sorts. You should be able to dump your AIs and viruses in it. It’s got some kind of special storage zone for malicious code. Jericho thought it was an anti-cyber warfare device. It also survived the EMPs untouched. The rest of the servers here Jericho made himself—from parts that I sourced.”

  It came up to her waist, and was half the size wide. The case was a glossy black colour. The coolant gas billowed every few seconds from grills on its side, illuminated blue and red by a series of flashing LEDs on the side. Although not harmful to breathe in small quantities, the gas tickled the back of Gabe’s throat, making him cough.

  “Did Jericho have a central file server?” Petal asked. “We need to find something.”

  Holly tapped Old Grey again. “All in here.” She motioned to the cable in Petal’s hand. “Wanna go in?”

  Petal looked to Gabe, strains of uncertainty pulling at the muscles in her face. Her eyes were a torrent of activity now. The malicious code inside her wasn’t far from breaking out. He wasn’t sure he could trust Holly after turning on a man she had once loved.

  “Let me go first,” Gabe said.

  “It’s safe,” Holly said. “I’m not trying to trick you or anything.”

  Well, of course she would say that, he thought. “I trust you. I just want to look for the info first. I won’t take long.” He squeezed Petal gently on her arm; she would know he was just being cautious. One time she’d jacked into an unknown server, desperate to dump a particularly nasty AI they had techxorcised from one of their jobs. She nearly lost her mind to it. The server’s system was an anti-hacking machine, designed to overload the minds of those who connected with a neck port to allow direct cortex control of its systems. Petal had luckily managed to disconnect in time before there was any lasting damage. But it scared her witless so that for a while she refused to do anymore jobs. That wasn’t something they could afford again. Their ability to find and destroy dangerous AIs and viruses was the only thing they were willing to trade for food and shelter.

  “I’ll be right back,” Gabe said, plugging the cable into his neck port.

  The sensation of going into a system never failed to shock him, no matter how many times he had done this. The brain, being an electrical organ reacted in strange ways to new, direct, stimulation.

  It always took a minute or so to get over the shock of bypassing one’s regular senses and established a direct neural link.

  This one was different.

  Where a regular connection could sometimes make the brain feel like it was burning, about to burst until the link had formed properly, this one felt like a much more advanced process, smoother and pain free, and yet he felt himself connect much deeper.

  That scared him as much as the thought of his brain being boiled by an anti-hack unit.

  Once inside, the image of the operating system appeared in his mind. He controlled a curser with his thoughts, directing it over a number of icons depicting various programs available.

  In the corner of the image was the text: Old Grey Network Systems—Copyright 2025. So that’s where it got its name. But more impressive was the age. The server was far older than he would have imagined. Over a hundred and twenty-eight years.

  Gabe felt like an old-fashioned archaeologist digging into a perfectly preserved crypt, only here, the finds were bits and bytes as opposed to bones and artefacts, but they were no less valuable.

  Using a file explorer program he ran a number of searches on the information Shelley had wanted: the blueprints to the currently downed planes. Jericho had amassed a trove of information. There were data documents and files on hundreds of old military projects, systems, and vehicles. It took a few minutes but eventually he found what he was looking for and copied it across the connection to his internal memory.

  Before he left the server, he inspected the containment program. Clicking on the icon, a status table appeared, showing various statistics such as: memory used, processor power used, I/O channel bandwidth, and number of concurrent processes—those were the AIs that this system was containing.

  It appeared that this Old Grey system was performing some kind of calculation on the AIs and malicious code. It occurred to Gabe that the system was observing their behaviour. It got a sense of someone, or something, watching him. He felt like he’d been caught stealing, and quickly shut to the containment program down and logging out.


  When he pulled the cable from his neck port, he thought he heard a female voice whisper something over the connection, but put it down to his mind altering back to reality, but it left him with a distinctive feeling that there was more to the server than he, or anyone, could realise.

  Gabe was sweating, the sheen on his skin glossy from the overhead lights.

  “Well, Gabe? This bitch good to go or what, eh?”

  He hesitated, not sure how to explain. It seemed safe. The fact there were AIs and viruses currently safely held within its containment process told him that it should be fine, but how could he put into words that almost spiritual sense of there being someone in there.

  “I’m taking that as a yes,” Petal said, connecting her cable. “I can’t wait any longer.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Holly said. “This thing’s rock solid.”

  “Aye,” Gabe said distractedly as he scrutinised Petal for any signs of trouble.

  Petal closed her eyes and sat cross-legged in front of the server as if she was sitting in prayer to some deity. Her body jerked, as it usually did when she transferred the malicious code within her. Her face however looked serene. All tension had flowed away to leave an expression of bliss. Even her eyes were draining back to her usual crystal blue colour. A transfer like that had never been so quick, or pain free. Petal usually thrashed or yelled out during such an operation.

  She stayed that way for a further five minutes, the tension in the room growing ever thicker as Gabe and Holly looked at each other, then to the still form of Petal. Eventually Holly broke the revering silence.

  “Well? Is she okay?”

  Gabe could still detect Petal on their private network. The data traffic from her had slowed to a trickle. Everything seemed normal.

  “Yeah,” Gabe said. “I think she is.”

  Holly knelt down in front of Petal, waved her hand in front of her face. Petal didn’t react.

  “That’s freaky,” Holly said. “It’s like she’s looking right at me but can’t see anything.”

  “You’ve never connected in?” Gabe said.

  “Nah, man. I never want anything in me again.”

  Gabe winced a little, thinking back to Jericho and he’d damaged this poor girl. She’d forever go through life a wounded animal now, her views, and motivations shaped around the scar tissue of her psyche. He considered whether he should take her with him and Petal. Try and steer her away from a life of more violence and damage, but then he couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t expose her to things worse than this town.

  Petal stirred, a low moan coming from her lips as she closed her eyes and slowly removed the cable from her neck. She slumped forward, rubbed the back of her neck. Holly put her hands on Petal’s shoulders. “Are you okay?” she said.

  Petal raised her face, stared at the girl. “Yeah, Hol, I’m good. You did well bringing us here. Real well.”

  Holly hugged her, nearly knocking Petal to her back. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” Petal asked.

  “For trusting me. I just wanted to help.”

  “You did that,” Gabe said. “And we’re thankful—”

  Holly let go, stood, and helped Petal to her feet before looking back at Gabe. “I hear a but coming.”

  “I’m sorry, but we have to go,” Gabe said.

  A hush descended the room. Holly looked up at him expectantly.

  It was Petal who spoke. “You can’t come with us, Hol. We’re bad news. Trouble and violence follows us as surely as we follow it.”

  The girl dropped her chin, idly swung her foot across the floor, kicking at the dust. “I understand,” she said. “I guess I’ll stay here, look after the servers, but I want you to at least do something for me.”

  “What’s that?” Gabe asked.

  “Take Old Grey with you. Take it somewhere safe. It’s seriously special and I don’t think I’ll be able to protect it. One day, it’ll save the world.”

  Part 9 - The Handover II

  Gabe woke with a start. A sound had penetrated his fevered dream-state, dragged him from his past, dropping him cold into the present. The dream was the same as he always had: of entering the shelter, his home, finding the place nothing more than a ghost town.

  The sound roared again. Gabe pulled himself up from the bed—Jericho’s bed, and stumbled to the window over-looking the town. The place was even worse in the daylight. Half-eaten and rotten bodies littered the place, not just the central square.

  A plume of black smoke caught his attention. Directly below the apartment building, Petal and Holly stood over an old-fashioned motorcycle. It must have been as old the server. It looked like it had more rust on it than actual metal, but despite that, the internal combustion engine spluttered and coughed until it purred.

  Holly twisted the throttle, revved the engine. The exhaust smoke cleared from a thick black to a light grey. Within minutes of her tinkering with it, the bike sounded good. Solid. As inefficient as the old IC engines were, they couldn’t be beaten for raw excitement.

  Gabe had only ridden one motorcycle: a museum piece back in Hong Kong. A Hyabusa. He nearly killed himself on it, the power incredible. You didn’t get that with the sedate electric motors. And with the EMPs having taken out most vehicles, the old mechanical oil-burners were still going—if you could find one that hadn’t ceased completely, and if you could find the fuel.

  Putting his duster jacket on, and collecting the pistol, he made his way out of the building to meet with the girls below. He checked every shadow and nook as he went, convinced some nutter would jump him at any moment.

  “What we got here?” Gabe said, smiling wide as he got neared the bike, felt the roar of the engine. Petal was equally excited, sitting astride it, her arms out-stretched on the once-chrome handlebars. She revved the engine again, looked back at Gabe.

  “Fucking cool, eh?”

  Gabe knelt to the fuel tank, scrubbed at the old badge. He could just make out the name of an old maker from the USA: Harley Davidson. The front tyre had been patched crudely, and the rear suspension springs were welded in various places. It’d be a hard ride, but it beat walking.

  Attached to the rear was a makeshift trailer, on which Holly had firmly strapped Old Grey for transportation. She held a bag in her head. She passed it over to Gabe.

  “What’s this?”

  “A gift from me,” Holly said. “For taking the server, and for saving me. If you didn’t come into the station when you did, the Mayors would have killed me for sure—after doing whatever it is they were going to do to me.”

  “Where are the others?” Gabe asked, wondering where the feral nutters from the previous night had gone. No fires burned in the station and he heard no voices. There was certainly no sign of any occupation when he first came down and passed the building.

  “They go back to their holes during the day—holes beneath the buildings,” Holly said.

  “Why?” Petal asked.

  “Most of them have developed an aversion to UV rays—radiation poisoning. That’s why they fight over the soy crops. Those crops are the only thing around here they can eat that ain’t screwed up.”

  “What about you?” Gabe said, opening the bag.

  “I eat what Jericho provided. There’s enough for a few years yet.”

  Inside the bag, Gabe found a plastic box containing three vials of NanoStems, and a two-litre flask of water.

  “That should get you to your destination, as long as this old jalopy holds up,” Holly said, pointing to the bag.

  “Thanks,” Gabe said, giving her a wide smile. “That’s very kind of ya.”

  She shrugged. “Least I could do.”

  “How are you running this?” Petal asked. “They stopped making petroleum fuels decades ago.”

 
; “Soy oil. Jericho has a small distillery. He used it to extract the oil, but he mixed it with something else and managed to get a fuel. It’s the last I could find. I don’t know how to make it. I don’t know how far it’ll get you, but if you take it easy it should at least get you to Shelley’s. Personally, I’d suggest you just fucking kill the bitch and keep on ridin’.”

  “Don’t worry, Hol, we’ve got it sorted,” Petal said.

  A gunshot fired overhead, and took out a chunk of concrete from the apartment building.

  “Fuck. Sniper,” Holly said, running for cover. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Petal gunned the throttle as soon as Gabe swung his leg over the seat. She missed the clutch and the bike lurched, making Gabe drop the bag, but it was too late. Holly was running for cover while pointing to them a route through the soy crops and back out into the desolate lands.

  “Thanks for everything!” Gabe shouted back as a metallic screech from another shot split the air, and a piece of siding came away from the station. Petal gunned the engine, a thick black cloud of smoke erupted out of the exhaust pipe as she steered them through the rubble of the crops. Within a minute they were out of range, and heading back to Shelley’s.

  “You okay back there?” Petal sent across their private network, the message popping up in Gabe’s internal display.

  “Yeah, girl, all good, just keep ya eyes on the road.”

  “What road?”

  “Fair point. Crap! Watch out for that—”

  Petal swerved the bike violently, just missing a fissure in the ground. She whooped with delight as Gabe gripped onto her to prevent himself from sliding off.

  She was a worse rider than he was. He just hoped they’d get back to Shelley’s in one piece. He didn’t want to continue the journey on the bike. Not when there was a fully restored Ranger truck ready to go.