Children of the Kradle (Trilogy Book 1)

by Alexa Hamilton

  “I’ve tried sir but nothing—“

  Villus turned around “Dismissed!”

  “Then if you would only permit me to move into an apartment with a balcony, I could—“

  “I said, dismissed!” Villus eyes were bulging, his breathing heavier. “Get back to work.”

  Eli’s face was burning. He clenched his fist, but then immediately released them. He couldn’t let Villus see he had him. Eli steadied himself and spoke in a stern voice. “Then I’ll go ask the Colonel for help.”

  Villus’ lips tightened until they were almost invisible, a vein bulged across his forehead. Eli was feeling cocky but then a chilling smile spread across the man’s pale face. “No you won’t.” Villus said with finality, as if it were a fact.

  For the first time that meeting, Eli was at a loss. His words were caught in his teeth.

  Villus’ smile widened. “No. You. Won’t,” he repeated and walked over until his was standing nearly toe to toe with Eli. In a low deliberate voice he spoke. “Because if you do, I will blow the top off on your little conversations with Eurasia.”

  Eli stiffened as if his entire body was encased in cement, even his brain, he couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Then Eli remembered something a hacker once told him. When in doubt: deny, deny, deny.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said flatly.

  Villus chuckled. Eli knew he had to gain control of this conversation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeated firmly. “And I’m going to go see the Colonel.” He hoped his voice sounded more firm to Villus than it did to him.

  Villus stared at him, saying nothing, only smiling. Eli wanted to crack his teeth in.

  Then Villus turned and walked back behind his desk. “Finish the Shield, Jackson. Stay off the roof. Keep your head down. You’re dismissed.”

  After Eli left he hustled down the hall with his head down, his breathing ragged. He walked to a wing on the other side of the building and went into the men’s room. He rushed into the last stall, shut the door and sat down.

  Eli held his head in his hands, trying to keep his thoughts together.

  Villus didn’t know. How could he? Eli had covered all of his tracks. There’s no way that bumbling fool who could barely type would have been able to find his exchanges with Lucifer.

  Besides, Lucifer wanted to keep their emails a secret just as much as he did. There was no way anyone found out.

  Then how did he know? And if he did, why wasn’t talking? He could go to the Colonel right now and state his suspicions.

  Eli lifted his head, finally understanding. Villus hadn’t gone to anyone yet, because all he had were suspicions. He had no evidence nor had he witnessed anything with his own eyes. He was testing Eli to see if he’d crack, expose himself.

  But, if he suspected dealings with the enemy, why was Eli allowed to work on such a secret project? Perhaps because he needed that shield and Eli was the only one in the world that was capable of doing it.

  And then Eli realized something that made him break into a sweat. Of course, everything was so clear now. Villus was going to keep a close eye on Eli and when he was about 98% done with Shield, Villus would either arrest him, or off him and have one of his cronies complete the project and then he would take all the glory for winning the war.

  “Fuck that,” his voice echoed against the tile walls, the sound of it repeating in his ears bolstering his resolve. Then again, if he didn’t find something to eat soon he wasn’t going to accomplish much of anything. And, he reminded himself, he would not allow Villus to get in the way of his search for Mevia. That was still the most important project of all.

  Eli pushed open the stall and went over to a sink. He splashed cold water on his face and studied the dripping wet reflection staring back at him. Life at CorMand was supposed to be easy. Wasn’t that what they promised the people when they beckoned the country to take refuge in the Kradle? Free food, clothing, shelter and medical. What happened?

  Chapter 12

  The first time Eli received a direct message from Lucifer, he wasn’t home to receive it. But Loose-y, his number one computer, had the encrypted message awaiting his return. He called her Loose-y because he used her to slip in and out of firewalls all loosey-goosey like. In a few months he would have to throw her away and build a new number one. That was how it was done when one was a hacker.

  Lucifer had messaged Eli while he was out visiting Mevia in jail, checking on her was more like it, not that there was anything he could do if she were suffering, but, they were orphans and they only had each other so when one was in trouble the other was always there. Only it went deeper than being just an emergency contact.

  Except when Eli got a peek of the forms Mevia had filled out when she was booked; he saw that next to the “in-case-of-emergency” section she had written PANIC! But it was crossed out and Eli’s name was inserted instead. Even until the bitter end she was fighting. Fighting the system. Fighting him. And fighting the drones. No, no it wouldn’t come to that. He’d make sure of it.

  They had a pleasant visit, chatting casually. Eli told her she looked good and asked if they were feeding her enough.

  “The food here is terrible,” she complained through the echoing glass partition. Her pupils were dilated larger than normal.

  “What’s it taste like?”

  She scrunched up her little bunny nose. “Like…less. Tasteless.”

  “Yuck.”

  “It’s not just that.” She placed a hand on the belly of her oversized florescent jumpsuit. “It just makes me feel…weird. Bad. Bleck!” She shook her head. “You should bring me some tomatoes from the garden next time you come. And some eggs. Tell the chickens hello for me.”

  “I will.”

  Then she got a careless look in her eyes, as if she were sleep walking. Her mouth cocked into a half smile. “I wonder if they’ll have better food at the Demos.”

  Eli knocked on the glass separation. “Hey. Stop it.” He looked into her eyes, like a pair of sweet chocolate drops. “It’s not going to come to that,” but his voice sounded thin, even to him.

  After that he was kicked out by an officer for staying too long.

  He walked home through the maze of city streets, pocked with lumpy, gravel-exposed potholes.

  It was hard to imagine now, but before the Rebuilding, before the Kradle was put over the city and the GovCorps banned motor vehicles, traffic would pack these streets like ants on a scent, or so he was told. Now, every avenue and intersection was just another footpath, and the only cars that passed were the occasional GovCorp vehicle or police drone.

  Today the streets were flocked with their usual busyness, drug dealers hustling down the pavement, pockets bulging, adolescents clustering in tight, breathy circles trading stolen goods: handheld phones, candy, shiny jewelry, cheap and tinny.

  Hugged against an old, decrepit building, a group of gamblers were throwing the dice, crouching low to the ground like a primitive tribe. Copper tokens tumbled between their rocking feet, barely settling before being snatched up by grease caked fingers.

  Their currency, of course, was worthless to outsiders but to them it represented hidden goods or favors.

  Eli turned down an alley between two other crumbling structures. The GovCorps had promised the old buildings would be updated, or torn down and rebuilt, but Eli had yet to see a construction crew.

  He took the corner and decided to go the long way to get around Flack Street and avoid Bongo Gang territory. He and Mevia had far too many run-ins with them.

  The breeze picked up and he zipped his jacket. Outside of the Kradle it was a cold February day. Inside, although it was climate controlled, they still felt the slight chill of winter seeping through the glass.

  Suddenly Eli heard voices and stopped. Pressing his back into the dank shadows of the alley walls, he listened. Whoever was there was talking fast, excited, high on uppers, but he picked out a few of words all distinctly Bongo
dialect.

  He waited until they passed at the end of the alley, not ten feet away. They were laughing and didn’t notice him. As their voices trailed off, Eli exhaled and then turned and went the opposite direction.

  He took a different route, not wanting to press his luck, but continued to watch over his shoulder the entire way home.

  By the time he made it in and logged on to Loose-y, the message had been sitting on his computer for hours.

  Eli nearly fainted with he saw Lucifer in the top right hand corner of the screen. The message was simple: We have a deal.

  Eli was so ruffled he didn’t know what to think. He scrolled up and re-read his previous message to Lucifer and the Eurasian superior officers where he laid out his terms of defection:

  1.Mevia Freestand and I will be transported out of the country and into Eurasia before the Demonstrations on May 15th.

  2. Mevia Freestand and I will be housed within your Corporation and taken care of (food, clothing, shelter, protection, money, entertainment etc.) Equivalent to what an Executive Programmer would be accustomed to in Eurasia. We will be granted full citizenship.

  3. I will be an Executive Drone programmer.

  None of these terms are negotiable.

  In exchange for the above I will guarantee that your Covert-Squad agents will be able to maintain their secret identities and therefore continue to be of service to your country. And since they’ve undergone years of training and possess certain skills that you will be strapped to find among your meager population, I’m sure you will be happy to keep their identities anonymous and therefore functional. And frankly, If you don’t like being blackmailed, then perhaps you should have built better firewalls that aren’t so easily broken down by a mere hacker.

  But most importantly you will gain: me and my programming skills. I know you’ve heard of me and have been fighting my infiltration into your databases under various screen names: Snakeinthegrasss, Holymoly, abracadabraX, to name a few. Therefore you know I am not exaggerating when I say: I know the programs and I can win this war for you.

  How? Currently I am working on an independent project that I know will be of interest to you. That is all I will tell you for now, but trust me, it will be the single most important program ever produced and it WILL WIN THE WAR.

  Just ask Lucifer aka Mr. Samuel Hangaar, aka DeltaM4 aka 5 year agent of Covert-Squad A…I know everything.

  This entire arrangement can be very beneficial to both parties if you allow it. But if anything should happen to Mevia or myself at ANY POINT in our lives, there will be dire consequences. I have a “time-bomb” virus that will explode upon my death, imprisonment, or any circumstance that would prevent me from checking into the program. It will leak information to your enemies including agents’ identities. It will implant viruses in your drones—from combat, to police, to anything that speaks binary.

  Eli had made a few more threats along those lines, but they were just a formality. The Eurasians would comply. Of course, if they really wanted to they could probably torture Eli into disarming the “time bomb,” but then why would they when the prospect of winning the war was so much sweeter? And all they had to do was provide two measly citizenships along with room and board. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain. So why had they taken so long to get back to him?

  At first after reading through the old messages, he was suspicious that they were planning something. Perhaps that was the reason for the delay in answering. But then again, they may have been fumbling around trying to tidy things up on their end: double bricking the firewalls (more like sandbagging after the flood), changing the locks, and drawing the curtains.

  In the end Eli decided that he was worth more to them alive than dead, and truth be told, he didn’t have much of a choice.

  He emailed back Lucifer, aka Agent DeltaM4, his old hacking rival:

  Good. When do we move? The sooner the better.

  A few minutes later Eli received a reply.

  We’ll contact you in the Training Center. That way she’ll be out of jail and out of the Kradle.

  Eli thought about this and decided he was right. A jailbreak from within the Kradle would be too messy. He was about to write a reply when he got another message.

  We’ll be in contact.

  And then Lucifer was gone.

  Eli fell back in his chair. His arms were like noodles. He’d done it. Thank God because he was getting nervous. He just hoped he could moderately trust these guys.

  For some reason he felt connected to Lucifer. Despite the fact that Eli exploited his identity and threatened his career, he still felt a sense of comradery with this faceless hacker.

  Maybe it was because, over the years, Eli gained a sense that the two of them were alike. He had first “bumped into” Lucifer in the Eurasian National Television database, a hack, just like many of his, done out of sheer curiosity. He then met him again while scavenging through some Eurasian music programs. The two of them became competitors and rivals and continued to bump into each other while rummaging around like rats in the darkest holes of the networks.

  But then after a while he stopped seeing Lucifer around so much. Eli became nervous that the guy was sneaking around under his nose, possibly breaking into his own databases. So, he decided to do some investigating.

  Finally, one day, he hacked into Lucifer’s personal account (by setting up a clever trap and lifting just enough credentials to manipulate a security hole). He rooted around in his databases and found some references to some government program called NE6T. So by using Lucifer’s references he did some snooping and after a good amount of blood sweat and tears was able to locate his old buddy along with all of his Covert friends.

  Bull’s-eye! So, what did Eli do? He played it smart, keeping his cards close to his chest. He took all the data and saved it for a rainy day. So when Mevia got sentenced to the Demos, his strategy had paid off. Big time.

  Eli logged off from his email conversation and began the process of clearing any traces of himself from the network, when finished he logged off of Loose-y. He then stood up and went outside to survey his balcony garden.

  The tomatoes were plump, ready to be picked and his chickens were clucking, ready to be fed. He went to work cleaning their cages, removing their soiled papers, discarding them, and replacing with fresh.

  As he fed, tossing the grain, he thought about how he wished he could tell Mevia about Eurasia. This idea brought about a metallic pang of nerves that ran through him like an electrical current. Damn it. She would never go for the plan. Just like the “in-case-of-emergency” contact, the girl didn’t know what or who was good for her. She needed Eli to take care of her. Yes she would be mad at him for lying and betraying their country, but she would learn to understand why he did it and she would learn to be happy in Eurasia.

  He finished with the chickens and went inside. He entered his dark room and shut the door, not bothering to turn on the lamp. The glow of his halo-screen cast a soft amber light. He sat down on his bed and thought.

  Mevia liked to make her own decisions and no one could sway her otherwise. But what if, he thought, what if I could persuade her, without her even knowing?

  What if he could make Mevia think that it was her decision to go to Eurasia? It would take some work, but it would be worth it.

  He lay back on his bed and shut his eyes. To someone else, it would appear he was sleeping, but behind those soft eyelids, his mind was racing.

  Chapter 13

  Eli lay in his condo on the couch, still in uniform except for his jacket which sat crumpled in the adjacent chair. He had turned on the T.V. hoping it would distract him so he might forget about the confrontation with Villus earlier that afternoon, but the sound was giving him a headache so he muted it and shut his eyes.

  It was just as well, he didn’t want to watch the Government History Hour program everyone was required to view. The officials checked the records to make sure every citizen’s television was turne
d on when it aired five nights a week, but if people didn’t want to listen to the talking heads droning on about the horrors of yester-year—unemployment, and healthcare, and homeless, oh my!—then all they’d have to do was turn the sound off.

  He almost never watched. The news often talked about Medusa but not nearly as much as they went on about the lost world from before, the people before the Rebuilding, before the nuclear war, before Medusa. The tone adopted by the narrators of the program was like when someone talked about their alcoholic cousin. The poor people of yester world just didn’t understand how terrible they had it! If only we could have helped them see the light.

  Eli glanced at the screen. The commentators were on, wearing their military uniforms.

  He moved on his side, facing the door. He was in no mood tonight to watch, listen, think or feel because he had never been so hungry in all his life.

  He wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight unless he got something in his stomach. And then where would that leave him tomorrow? There was no way he could even think about working, much less programming an intricate project like Shield.

  Eli remembered something. There was another option besides biting down and suffering. There were things one could take to deaden the endless varieties of pain, both physical and emotional.

  Rex was the one who had told Eli of this place. “Just mention my name, man,” he had said. “They’ll hook you up.”

  Eli had no doubt this was true, and he knew where the place was, but did he want to try it? Did he want to go down that path?

  His stomach grumbled and he nearly wretched on the acid. Alright, that’s it. Eli lifted his pounding head and went to his bedroom, changing into civilian clothes.

  He checked his wallet. Satisfied with its contents he pushed it deep into his back pocket. He left the television going, just in case there were any questions as to his whereabouts.

  Finally, he grabbed his jacket and stormed out the door.