by G. Adler
“Guts, next time just tell me to hurry up.” I go over to where she is standing. I stare at a set of shelving that extends up almost as high as the ceiling.
Joo-Eun is analyzing a series of biological samples that are being kept frozen in liquid nitrogen. She carefully pulls out drawer after smoking drawer and gasps each time.
“Hayden, what is your father working on?”
“What the hell? This again? I told you that I have no idea! So why do YOU look so worried?”
“I’m not worried, Ghost. I’m terrified! All of these samples are nerve cells from almost every animal on the planet. There are some species here that went extinct eons ago. He even has a pterosaur cell!”
“I see your point.”
“No, you don’t. Take a look at this!”
She drags me over to the microscope and slides in what looks like a thin sheet of plastic.
“Guts, aren’t slides supposed to be glass?”
Joo-Eun just stares at me like I have four heads. “For the compound light microscopes that we use in school, yes. They use a wet mount and cover slip.”
“Hey, just like Maya!” Ethan interjects.
Maya shoots him the look of death and then looks away. Joo-Eun sniggers for a moment and continues. “This is the latest in cryo-microscopy. The samples are frozen in liquid ethane…”
“Did someone say my name?” Ethan says with a smirk.
“No, I said ethane…”
“Oh, she’s my cousin!”
Joo-Eun kicks him in the shin and rolls her eyes. “The samples are kept cold using liquid helium. This allows observation of any biological entity in its native state. Take a look at this!”
She mounts a sample that has no name, only numbers written across it. When the screen flashes to life, I see a squid-like creature but with way more tentacles. There is a large circular portion at one end with tons of tiny spikes and a thin, long axon sprouting from it with hundreds of protrusions diverging from the other end.
“So, what’s the problem?” I ask.
“I tried analyzing this and couldn’t.”
I swallow hard. “You didn’t break it, did you?”
Joo-Eun shoots me a disgusted look.
“Ok fine, sorry. Then what’s the problem.”
“This is supposed to be a homo sapiens neuron.”
“Yeah, and?”
“It isn’t entirely human.”
“WHAT?”
“You heard me.”
She mutters something in Korean under her breath and goes back to work. That’s when Tyrese sounds an alarm. “Yo, Ghost. Get over here. Bartender and I need you!”
I head over to the fume hood to find Ethan’s head buried deep inside with Tyrese standing behind him with his arms folded. Ethan sniggers from inside and says, “Look Tank, I’m in the hood!”
Tyrese rolls his eyes. “Yeah that’s gonna get old real soon!”
“So what’s the big emergency, Bartender?”
With his head still inside, Ethan sticks his arm up and points to a small set of shelves within the fume hood. Each one houses a single metal canister. Ethan swallows hard and says, “They are.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re fucking ugly! Because they scare the shit out of me…why else?”
For the first time since I met him, Ethan’s face becomes grim and he falls silent. In his right hand is a small vial with a handwritten label smeared across the front. He stares at it for a full ten seconds. Based on his expression, I can’t tell if he’s holding a nugget of gold or a poisonous snake.
“What is your father doing, Ghost?”
“This again? Dude, you know that I have no idea! Why? What’s YOUR problem?”
He holds out a bottle to me that has a biohazard symbol on it. The chemical name, written in Dad’s handwriting again, is “enhanced N.G.F-beta polypeptide.”
“Can you translate that for the rest of us, Bartender?” I ask.
“It’s a chemical that our brain uses. Think of it like steroids for nerve cells.”
“GUYS!” Maya cries out. “You need to see this!”
We all rush over to the computer terminal that she is sitting at and wait for her to stop hyperventilating. “Okay, so I came across a few folders marked ‘Control Unit Velocity,’ ‘Instruction Decoder Function Tests,’ ‘Program Counter Expansion Diagnostics,’ and ‘Peak Efficiency and Data Storage.’ I had to see what they were, right? Yeah, totally. I mean I couldn’t just IGNORE them or anything….”
“Get to the point, Maya.”
“Right, so I’m looking at the information and it hits me. It all points towards some type of Central Processing Unit — but one that is way more powerful than any computer that has ever been built. This graph shows that communication between the C.P.U. and other peripherals has a delay of a femtosecond. That’s insane! That’s a delay of one-trillionth of a second.”
Joo-Eun staggers back and gasps. “The fastest human brain signal I have ever read about is about 200 miles per hour.”
Maya nods her head. “Right! That’s why I screamed for you guys to get over here! According to this, your dad has made something that makes the human brain look like a dollar store calculator!”
We all stare at her blankly and try to wrap our minds around what she has just told us.
“There’s more. I opened the ‘C.P.U. Usage’ utility and found a slight spike in data transfer rates and external connectivity. The spike occurs every hundredth cycle in the C.P.U. and lasts for only a microsecond. The spike shows a data transfer rate of fifty terabytes per second, with all data being transferred to a secure file that is hidden beneath the system’s root code!”
The four of us look at one another as if Maya just decided that plaid was her favorite color. Maya tugs at her ponytail and grimaces.
“Augghh! You guys frustrate me sometimes! Someone is downloading information from the outside world and using the power cycles within the system to send them here! The file is larger than all of the hard drives that have ever been made in the history of the planet! The key to open the data file is so complex that it would take twelve lifetimes to hack it, even if every computer on the planet worked on it at once! When I worked my magic, I was able to find out one thing before the system realized what I was doing and locked me out. The source of the information seems to be from every site on the Internet that exists, along with trillions of Internet Protocol Addresses and electronic cookies from a variety of countries from all over the world.”
My eyes go wide and my hands start to shake. “Has the data been used yet?”
Maya shakes her head. “I don’t think so. It seems to be sitting there, as if it’s waiting for something…”
A wide grin forms across my face. “This is it. This is the mother lode of conspiracies. This is every secret and then some. I’m going to be the next Edward Snowden!”
I snap pictures of everything I see. Maya blanks the screens the moment I turn the camera to it.
“Hayden, this isn’t grade fixing or turning the staff parking lot into a petting zoo. This could be life or death for everyone we know and love. Someone is collecting information about everyone on the planet. They have collected every scrap of data that exists, from every computer, everywhere. This shouldn’t be possible! Nothing on this planet can do all this! It would take a computer with…”
Maya stops short and claps her hand over her mouth. Her eyes go wide with fright and she starts shaking her head back and forth. I open my mouth to press her for an answer, but Tyrese jumps in before I get the chance. “Ghost, we found brain samples, nerve super food, and wires. Add to that a massive data file that shouldn’t exist and you should finally be able to answer our question.”
His comments cause me to stop and think for a moment. “Are you saying that my Dad… isn’t my Dad? Are
you implying that he is some kind of super robot or something? Is my father dead then?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. All I know is that this is WAY over our heads!”
I look around the space and nod in agreement.
I decide to head to the door and wrap my hand around the plastic handle. As soon as my fingers touch it, a series of lights move along the length of the handle towards the door. When they get to the top, a message appears in the entire door.
Access denied
“Uh guys, unless we can figure a way out, I think we are done exploring.”
Maya comes up behind me and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Is this enough, Hayden? Have you exposed enough of what your father is doing? With the images of the data I found and the samples Ethan and Joo-Eun discovered, you have almost every piece of the puzzle. I guess my question is: do you need to see all the pieces put together?”
The four of them look at me and I can see how anxious they feel. My face contorts as I weigh my options. It doesn’t take long.
“I need to know. With only fragments of the bigger picture, he’ll be able to spin whatever story he wants. That man decimated me in front of a lot of people. I don’t want him to have an inch of wiggle room. I want his hand in the cookie jar, holding a smoking gun, covered in DNA.”
“Sounds like Maya after one of her infamous parties….” Ethan jokes.
Right on cue Maya comes up behind Ethan and scores a field goal on his testicles.
“Okay…I deserved that…” he groans and drops to the floor.
She then pulls out her lipstick computer and aims it at the door. The blue beam shoots out and zips around the handle before snaking its way back inside the reddish pink tube. Maya taps a button and projects her computer on the worktable. Her lips purse and her head starts to shake slowly back and forth.
“Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but this is a genetic palm scanner, coded to only one man. I have tried to bypass it, but it isn’t going to happen. Unless we find another way to open that door, we are going nowhere.”
From down on the floor I hear Ethan groan, “I can always…”
I stop him before he can finish the thought. “I want to see this thing but I don’t want to bring down the roof at the same time. We don’t know anything about this bunker. I have put you guys in enough danger as it is.”
Ethan nods. “Fine. I guess I can’t argue with that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to trying to force my nuts out of my throat and back down into my scrotum.”
Joo-Eun walks past him and stares up at Maya’s screen. She then comes over to me and plucks out a few strands of my hair.
“Ouch! What was that for?”
“Maya, can you please scan the follicle at the end of this strand with as narrow a beam as you can. It has to be detailed down to the biochemical level.”
Maya aims the lipstick canister at the hair and waits. The blue beam comes out like a turtle, only going a few inches. It takes a full thirty seconds until it finally curls its way back in. Maya flashes the computer on the worktable and Joo-Eun goes to work. Her fingers fly over the tabletop in a blur. I watch with my mouth open wide as she literally constructs a double helix of DNA, one base pair at a time. A few moments later she finishes her work and clicks the button on the canister. She then walks over to the door and clicks it again. A red light comes out the front and wraps around the handle. The flashing lights travel up once more but the result is the same.
Scan incomplete. Access denied
Joo-Eun frowns and says, “I was able to determine sixty percent of General Matthews’ genetic sequence using half of Hayden’s base pairs and the principles of random assortment, but there are simply too many possibilities.”
She then looks over at me and squints. Slowly but surely she makes her way over to me and seems to be studying my shoulder. She then removes a set of tweezers from her lab coat and reaches toward my ear.
“Hold it right there. What are you doing?”
“Relax, Hayden. This shouldn’t hurt a bit.”
With a smile on her face, she removes a long, curly, light brown hair from my shoulder.
“Whose is this?”
“Probably my sister’s. Why?”
“That’s what I was hoping for. Maya, the scan again please.”
Maya repeats the process and projects the computer. A minute or so later and Joo-Eun is constructing Jacob’s ladder once more. A moment or two later, she sucks it all back into the lipstick tube.
“All done. Time to try again.”
She points it at the door and waits. The red light weaves its way around the handle multiple times as the door lights travel up and down. The five of us hold our breath as we wait for the reply. Finally, we hear an audible click and we see the words we were hoping for.
Access granted. Welcome Back General Matthews.
I smile and snort at the message. “What a surprise that the egotistical maniac programmed it to be polite to him. I bet he wishes I came with a computerized layout!”
I push on the handle and head into the massive space, not knowing what I am looking for exactly. As I get closer to the center of the room, I notice a faint, crisscrossing seam running the length and width of the floor.
“Hey guys, check this out!”
The other five come over to where I am kneeling. The moment they are all clear of the storage room, a mechanical whirring sound echoes over the room and a computerized voice announces:
Staging area clear. stand by.
The moment the voice finishes, the room floor plates begin to separate. Sets of thicker Plexiglas panels emerge from the floor and surround us, creating a smaller octagon within the larger. The circular section in the middle uncurls and drops down through the floor. The four of them stand and watch the entire thing with their jaws on the floor. Maya has curled a piece of hair around her finger so tightly that it has turned purple. Ethan’s shoes are actually steaming from the droplets of chemicals currently leaking from the vial in his hand. I smile as I watch Joo-Eun’s tiny hand slip inside of Tyrese’s. I snap pictures of everything I see.
That’s when I hear a series of whirls and clicks that remind me of an elevator. The floor then rises from below, revealing a shining steel rectangular case atop a clear plastic pedestal. The floor then closes around the pedestal and seals itself tightly around it.
Without waiting for anyone to comment, I take a step towards it, allowing my index finger to touch the cold steel. As soon as it makes contact, I am bombarded by a series of sounds, smells, tastes, and tingles all over my body. All I can see is a type of television snow along with its sound, the feeling of fleas crawling all over my body, and a taste like I am chewing on aluminum foil. I feel a wave of nausea threaten to overtake me, along with pain the likes of which I have never experienced. I try to remove my finger from the spot but I am unable to will my muscles into movement. It is as if I am some kind of living doll with no control over my own body. I manage to slide my eyeballs to the left and can see that the others are in a similar state.
As I move my eyes around the room, I watch lightning strikes bounce off the ceiling and walls and head straight at everyone else. Each of them falls to their knees like they are having some type of seizure while wearing an expression of intense pain. They thrash on the floor for a few seconds and then lie almost perfectly still.
I try with all I have to run to them but it is no use. I am as trapped as they are.
Chapter 23 - Hayden
A high-pitched whine sounds in my ears, making my stomach lurch. I would puke if I could actually move a muscle. After a few seconds the sound changes to a mechanical buzz that makes me feel like a fly is looking for something in my ear. Moments later a computer-generated voice says:
Eloquent Brain access link achieved. sensory information is being digitally diverted.
&nbs
p; Prefrontal cortical synergy at ninety-nine percent and holding. Frontal cortex and hippocampus accessed.
download complete.
Motor cortex standing by. initiate startup sequence.
estimated time to completion: T-minus three seconds and counting. two, one. . .
I manage to rotate my eyes towards one of the octagonal walls and see:
Air Quality: 0.0 parts per million contamination- Stable
Air Pressure:101.3 kilopascals- Stable
Temperature:21.2 degrees Celsius – Rising to Max Levels
Electric field:5.3 volts per metre - Rising to Max Levels
Magnetic field: 10.1 amps per metre - Rising to Max Levels
Light:4750 lux - Rising to Max Levels
Seconds later and they all reach maximum setting.
Eight computer screens appear on the flat, blank, Plexiglas portions of the octagon, each one with a different display. Each time I turn my eyes, they transition so that whichever screen is in front of me stays in front of me. I try to focus on them but each time I do, the information begins to blur together and becomes unreadable. My gaze darts this way and that until I notice Ethan out of the corner of my eye. He seems stiff and frozen. His face is locked in an expression of pain and terror. I focus my attention on the pedestal instead.
The whole thing is roughly the size of our podium at school. There are thin swirls of vapor coming off of it in increasing amounts. The white mist swirls in eddying currents, making tiny tornadoes twist around the base. The top of the rectangle then divides into four equal squares, each of which folds back on itself like a banana.
My eyes go wide with fright at what is revealed.
It looks like a human brain but it is suspended in the middle of a weird-looking shape that reminds me of a two-foot-tall letter C. Four tubes are protruding from the curvy parts of the contraption: two from above and two from below. They then curve back around the slope and disappear into the clear base. As I look closer, I notice that what I took to be a living human brain actually isn’t. Parts of it are pulsing with fluid from the tubes, but the rest is made up of wires and computer chips. The zillions of connecting threads extending from the brain back to the holder makes the entire assembly look like some freaky brain harp. There also seems to be some living tissue lining the underside of the curve. It throbs with a steady pulse that keeps in time with that of the brain. Cables as thick as my arm run down the clear pedestal and disappear into the floor. Fluid continuously runs through both areas.