by Michael Conn
“Just curious , Max, just curious. Can I get you anything? Food?”
Max shakes his head and keeps coding.
Walker leaves the room.
Max opens his tablet and pulls up another Midge blog entry.
2001/02/19 00:42
The following video was taken from the video camera in the main operating room of the school.
Midge lies unconscious on an operating table. Several doctors attend to her. As they begin treating her wound s , a doctor says, “She has four broken ribs, a broken right femur, a gunshot wound, a stab wound from a tree branch, blunt trauma to her face, and multiple cuts that require sti t ches. How did the guards manage to do this to her? No wonder the kids call the guards gorillas.”
“The guards are only responsible for the gunshot wound, and even then it was a rubber bullet, j ust bad luck that it penetrated. I t’s all on video,” another doctor responds. “The rest she did to herself. She jumped off the main wall, crashed a snowmobile into a tree, and was finally shot, falling rather ungracefully out of a tree. A twenty metre fall , and she’s still alive. What I wonder is why is she stil l at this facility, she’s what . . . sixteen?”
“Sometimes the experimental ones stay longer,” the first doctor says. “And more often if MGA is trying to avoid processing them. This one almost never gets let out of the sub-basements.”
Another doctor enters and looks down at Midge. “It going to be a long night guys. And there’s one extra task for this one. It’s time to harvest her .”
Midge moves an d mumbles. “More anaesthetic!” The lead doctor turns on the anaesthesiologist. “Are you new here? You know these kids take higher doses . . .”
Max watches the video over and over. Sixteen? Sub-basements? I thought I knew more. Maybe they used to keep older kids. Forget it, code. Go code. This isn’t important now.
Max closes the tablet and hunches over the laptop again.
---
Walker returns hours later and finds Max asleep in front of the laptop. Walker pick s him up and puts him to bed.
Suddenly unable to hold back a wave of sadness , Wal ker sits on the edge of the bed . “How could they kill her ?” h e whispers . He trembles, then cries with giant wracking sobs .
After he recovers and w hile Max sleeps, Walker p acks their belongings . It’s time to move on. We’ve been in one place long enough. While he was out, Walker made a new key and reservation across town. Unfortunately, h e’s going to have to drag Max onto the Sky Train to get there.
---
Walker lies down in one of the bed s in the room, h is head spinning , wondering what it must be like for Max when he says his head starts going too fast. When he says he gets stuck in fast forward. What are we doing next? Why don’t I know? Walker dozes off then wakes with a start. Max is up and pacing the room.
“Where is it? Where’s the laptop , where’s the laptop, where’s the laptop ?” Max chants. He has his eyes on Walker, harsh and insistent.
Walker gathers everything up. “Come on Max, we need to leave. We need a new room. We’ve been here too long. Eat this.” Walker hands Max a banana.
“Wait,” Max says barely audib le. “I need this stuff.” He hands Walker a list of electronics.
“I’ll get your stuff, but Max, when are you going to be like the Max wh o made the phone call to Isaac. That’s the Max I need. Please come back.”
Walker helps Max , and they leave the room.
---
Walker looks after Max this way for more than a month ; m oving through a blur of hotels, coding, and electronics. Fall comes to Vancouver , and the rain start s . He falls into a pattern. Get up , get food, c ome back , check on Max; day after day. This is how time passes . Walker starts to see a pattern to what Max is coding and researching. He review s Max’s code , and soon enough, add s to it. He creates m o re elements , proceeding across and down the periodic table.
Max is working on audio, video, image recognition, and language processing while he gathers information about nanotechnology. Walker can’t better what Max is doing but he can add to it. He can complete it. Walker sits down and starts to seriously concentrate on RNA , DNA , and communication models.
“Max , what DNA should I use?”
Max hands Walker a data stick. “What you need is on there.”
Walker hates that this is the only relationship he has with Max now. Hates that this is all he can do. He feels useless; he can’t fix Max. All he can do is provide some basic things and hope that Max comes back.
At least coding like this beside Max is better than the misery of watching Max get thinner.
---
One day, Walker wakes and Max has had a shower and is packing their stuff .
“Time to go , Walker,” Max says , looking like a different person than he was yesterday. “What do you think about Mexico?”
“Mexico sounds great if we don’t have to stay in any crappy hotels anymore.”
“I’m sorry , Walker.” Max stops packing. “I could see you here , but I couldn’t surface to talk to you.”
“S’all right .” Walker spends some time finishing the packing with Max. Then glad to be out of the smelly hotel room, he waits in the hallway for Max.
Max puts on his new trench coat, picks up his cane, and walks to the door. “Ready? It’s going to be fun now.”
Chapter 16 –Tricks
Pirelli is sitting at a desk, pouring over maps of Vancouver. His desk is central in the temporary field office for the Canadian Incident . Hastings is probably at a bar again, waiting for a tactical response call. He looks around at the room of analysts. Ten people all working to track two boys , and all we have to report is that they are probably in North Vancouver somewhere around Lonsdale Quay. The d amn banks are so slow to report the data we need . So ten people here and six agents on the ground in North Vancouver.
Hastings comes into the office .
I hate that stupid hat of his.
“Hey analyst man, ” Hastings says loudly. “Got anything better than—t hey’re in Canada ?”
“Maybe you have a phone call from him you can track down, ” Pirelli snaps back at his partner .
Hastings turn s a chair around backward and sits facing Pirelli. “We need another idea. Using t he bank machines , we found the haystack . We’re still not going to find the needle .”
Connor walks up. Pirelli is a mazed by how tall Connor is now. He still think s of him as the other baby that played games with Max. “Excuse me , Pirelli, I think you might want to look at this?” Pirelli and Hastings move o ver to his workstation and look at his screen. “I have a program monitoring flight booking in North America looking for patterns. This just came up. Two unaccompanied minors traveling from Vancouver to Toronto. I looked deeper , and they are both boys and registered as ten-year -old s . The names don’t match, but it might be worth putting someone at the airport gate.”
“What gate and when?” Hastings asks .
“C30, boarding time is 1:52PM today.”
“That gives us about four hours; I’ll get over there with two agents, ” Hasting says.
“You go if you want to , Hastings, ” Pirelli says as he moves back to his desk. “You’re wasting your time. That’s not a real booking. What, suddenly four hours before boarding time some one books their kids f rom here to Toronto. Not l ikely . . . more likely Max is playing games with us.”
“What are you saying, Pirelli?” Hastings asks.
“I’m saying you ’r e an idiot. I’m saying you don’t know Max. I’m saying I’m getting tired of Max making fools of us.”
“We ll , we have to put someone on this, ” Hastings replies. “We can’t just sit around reading bank machine exception reports all day .”
“Agreed, you go,” Pirelli launches back at Hastings.
“I’ll send someone to the airport. If you’re looking for me,” Hastings says over his sh oulder, heading toward the door, “I’ll be driving around East Hastings Str
eet. Seems like the kind of place I might bump in to Max. Unfortunate name for a street like that . . . don’t they re-paint things in this country . . . making my name look bad . . . maybe I should buy the city a broom , they could clean up a bit . . . how do they expect anyone—” The elevator door close s and cut s off his stream of complaints .
Minutes after Hastings is gone another analyst raises his hand and signals Pirelli over. “I have a flight booked from Kelowna to Vancouver, Max Huxley and Walker Northrop. Wait a second; I also have them on a flight from Vancouver to Victoria.”
Pirelli watches the monitoring program start to produce hits. Hundreds scroll by, all with Max and Walker booked on flight s around North America. “Connor , now is your chance to prove yourself.”
“Max just booked about a thousand flights, some stay book ed , some of the booking s only last a short time before disappearing.”
“Anal yse the flights and give me ten flights that are most likely real . I need an answer in a half hour.”
Pirelli sees Keith watching them and walks over to him. “And you? What will you do for me? If the answer is nothing , then you’re going straight back into that little solitary cell you call home .”
After a long pause, Keith sa ys, “Get me permission to examine the airline computer systems. I’ll steal what Max and Walker used to hack in . They might re-use the same code pattern s in the future. If they do, we could track their movement that way.”
---
As those words are spoken, Max and Walker sit back in their first class seats , landing in Mexico City. Max puts his reader away while they taxi to the terminal. The flight they took left no record of any kind and didn’t require a pre-booking . What they hacked into the airline booking systems can now produce a boarding pass that self-aut horizes . The booking only lasts from checkin until take-off and is e asily lost in the thousands of other fak e bookings. MGA might know Max is o n the move, but they won’t know where to .
Max track s MGA activity on his tablet and sees that MGA had gorillas in the Vancouver Airport, the Abbotsford Airport, the Seattle Airport, the ferry terminal s, train stations, and the bus stations .
“So, Walker.” Max laughs out loud. “Agents were looking for us at all the major transportation terminals around Vancouver while we took a cab to Kelowna and then flew to Mexico. If MGA had stuck to basics and expanded their net as far as possible given the resources they had, they might have caught us . So now we know what they are—lazy .”
---
Pirelli watches a little green bug crawl up the side of his laptop screen. Stay away from the light . He looks across the conference room table at Hastings .
Hastings has a finger firmly crammed up his nose. “So, when does the rest of the team get here?”
“Five minutes . . . I see that you’ve mastered the art of talking and picking your nose at the same time.”
A few minutes after Hastings deposits his findings on the u nder side of the table, the door opens. Connor enters followed by a teen aged girl. Hastings rises.
Connor stand s by the table. “Pirelli, Hastings, this is Sarah . . .” She shakes both their hands. Connor and Sarah both look like there were just dragged out of the beatnik era. Both of them wearing black turtlenecks and skinny jeans.
“Pl ease tell me,” Hastings says, “t hey’re not here to play bo n gos and recite bad poetry.”
“Sit everyone,” Pirelli says. “So as I understand it , Connor and Sarah are now on the search team. Connor knew Max at school . Sarah is Naomi’s sister and has some talent with patterns. I ’ll direct all field activities , and Hastings here knows how to break things—Any questions?”
Connor and Sarah exchange a look but say nothing.
“. . . Connor or Sarah , tell me how you’re going to find Max ?”
“Well, for one thing we will continue to monitor b ank machines for audit failures. That will help get us roughly near him ,” Sarah starts. “Beyon d that, I’m adding stricter OS level monitoring o n our systems and ally systems. If Max is breaking in , th en he has to leave a footprint. When I find that footprint it wi ll lead back to a source. So I’m coun ter hacking. I have a snippet of code f rom Dr. Concilian’s cell phone. I’m hoping that will give me a leg up on finding Max’s electronic footprint s .”
“Thank you . . . Connor?” Pirelli looks at him.
“I know where Max is going already. He talked about it all the time. I mean he never said he was going to escape or anything. But he always talked about his mother. He’s going to find her.” Connor shifts in his s eat , uncomfortable with the look he is getting from Pirelli , but continues . “We know who his mother is; the problem is we don’t know where she is. Her name is Emma Huxley.”
Hastings stares at Connor. “Why a re you only telling us this now ? There is nothing in the file about it.” He tosses a paper file across the table at Connor.
“You weren’t clear ed to know, ” Connor says.
Hasting leans way back in his chair, puts his feet on the table, smiles , folds his hands over his belly , and looks at Pirelli . “This is gonna be good.”
“He wasn’t cleared to know , ” Pirelli says. “. . . something that you know , he wasn’t allowed to know . . . I also didn’t know this . . . So I wasn’t cleared to know either . . . who reports to who here?”
Connor speaks quietly . “We all report to Frank individually. You guys are field operatives. I’m sure you guys are good , in the field , but you can’t help here.”
Silence. Pirelli stands up , looking back and forth between Sarah and Connor. “We can’t h elp here . . .” The words trail off , and he stares at Hastings.
Hastings removes his little finger from his ear, inspects the newly found wax, smiles, and stands . “Well, sounds good to me, come on , Pirelli, first round is on you.” He pulls Pirelli out of the room .
Connor and Sarah spend an uncomfortable moment together, then Sarah a sks , “Are you sure that was wise?”
“I have no idea, but it was true , and I’m not going to let him treat me like I work for him just because I’m a kid.” Not wanting to think about it anymore, Connor changes the subject. “How is Naomi ?”
“She ’s furious. They still have her in the south wing.” Sarah recalls her meeting with Naomi. Naomi screamed and spat at her. It’s hard to see my sister in a cage.
“I’m sorry, ” Connor says, knowing that being in the south wing means being in solitary confinement. “Max has a way of getting people to follow him without even trying. Let’s find his mother then, OK?”
Sarah nods.
---
Yesterday, Sarah walked into the south wing. A guard checked her visitor authorization, then scanned her in and escorted her to a meeting room. She sat at a stainless steel table and waited. I remember how hard it was turning ten.
The guards brought Naomi in. She jerked out of their arms and sat down, glaring at Sarah .
Sarah reached across the table and placed a hand on the table palm up and open. The universal sign for hold my hand please.
“What?” Naomi said.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said simply.
“Sorry?” Naomi said. “You knew!”
“You have to believe me that I did not know. I knew you were being tested , but I didn’t know what was planned.” Sarah reach ed farther over the table with both hands. “Please take my hands.” Sarah ‘saw’ Naomi’s usually green aura turn dark red .
Naomi didn’t move .
“I know what you must be feeling ,” Sarah said.
“YOU HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT ANYTHING I FEEL; YOU CAN’T PLAY MY OWN TRICKS ON ME.” Naomi stood up and spat at Sarah . “Take me out of here,” she said to the guards.
“I’ll be here when you need me,” Sarah said.
The guards took Naomi away.
---
Connor takes a mental inventory. So on this team we have a drunk, a demoted field agent, and the sister of one of the es caped. I don’t think any of them are re
ally motivated to find Max. That means there is another reason for putting this team together. Connor work s on this problem in the back of his mind while he and Sarah get started.
Chapter 17 –Button Factory
Max sits on a conveyor belt in a massive room within an abandoned factory . Grimy windows cover the walls , many of them broken or cracked. Disused industrial sewing equipment covers t he old assembly line floor . Max stares out a window at the smog rolling over Mexico City’s skyline.
Max ’s leg bones are knitted together well enough for slow walking , but he has a pronounced limp and leans heavily on his cane as he shuffles between the rows of abandoned equipment . His black eye is gone, however the cut on his c heek left an ugly scar from chin to ear.
Max hits record on his tablet and says. “Most things have an upside. The upside of injury is pain. Pain distracts my mind, draws me back into my body, keeps my feet on the ground . These days , I occasionally feel the familiar lurches , like my other mind is testing the waters, seeing how stable I am, and then backing off. The whispering is quiet right now. I’m grateful for that.”
Now that we have the platform injected into more than half of the worldwide processing spaces and good e xamples of invisible intrusion, Walk er has been hugely productive. He adds hacked sites and I work on language processing. Walker also takes care of the shopping, a lmost every day he come s back with more electronics and chemical supplies.
Max sits in ‘t he o ffice’, which is merely a small room off of the factory floor with a couple desks and a few chairs in it. Max fires up his tablet and surveys wh at his trolls have brought in. Max has ‘trolls ’ monitoring various nanotechnology labs . The trolls alert Max if certain types of activity are detected, mainly alerting him of successful nanotechnology results. Max is hacked into nanotechnology labs and is altering experiments by updating test run s and documentation. His troll s let him know when something works. They can take the credit, I just want the bots. Sometimes he finds out experiment re sults before the host lab does.