The Rebel

by Gerald Brandt

  The receptionist peered over her desk as the door closed, a quizzical expression on her face.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any packages to pick up.”

  “I’m here to see Doc Searls,” I said.

  “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. What’s your name?”

  “Kris Merrill.”

  The receptionist read the display in front of her, scrolling through whatever she saw there. “Did you have an appointment?”

  “Oh, no. Sorry. I thought I could . . .”

  She smiled. “We don’t take walk-ins. There’s a clinic down Clint Drive. They’re not usually too busy.”

  “He wanted me to come by.”

  She gave me another look, this one starting at my face and moving to my feet, then back up again. “What was your name again?”

  “Kris Merrill.”

  Another reading of the display. “You’re not listed as a patient.”

  “No, this is—”

  “Kris!” Doc Searls walked around the corner, a pad in his hand. “I wasn’t expecting you. Please come into the back.” He handed the pad to the receptionist and led the way. Once we were in his office, he made me sit on the examination table. “Let’s take a quick peek at that rib, before we get on to other things. Lift your shirt for me?”

  I did as he asked and his fingers probed where the rib had fractured.

  “No pain?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. Good.” He sat and pulled his glasses off, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I had a conversation with Kai recently. He wants me to join the insurgents. Do for them what I did for ACE. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  Why would he ask me? I was a nobody in the insurgents’ organization. “I dunno. On one hand they seem unorganized, on the other way too corporate. But I think their heart is in the right place. I hope it is.”

  “Hmm. I know you do things for them. Can you see yourself doing it long term?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure. They seem to be getting more corporate all the time, I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “I’ve been thinking about saying yes. I’ll have to consider it some more now. Thanks, your opinion helped.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “But that’s not why I called you in. Kai didn’t know you were pregnant—”

  I jumped off the table. “You told him?”

  He was obviously surprised by the question. “No, of course not. That would be unethical.”

  “Then how?”

  “It’s amazing what people will talk to a doctor about, especially when it concerns someone they care deeply for.” He paused. “It’s your choice whether to tell your friends or not, but single mothers usually need all the help they can get.”

  “I’ll tell them. Just not yet.”

  “Okay. Best guess is you’re right around the two-month mark now and hardly showing. It’ll get more noticeable as things move further along.”

  “I know. I’m not ready yet. I thought it was smart to wait until three months, anyway.”

  “Sometimes.” Doc Searls stood. “We’ll take a urine sample today and weigh you, and I want you to book an appointment for next week. We’ll make sure mom and baby are healthy, and see if we can’t predict a due date. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. You’re getting enough to eat?”

  Another nod.

  “Okay. You look a little thin, so try to get more. If you’re having issues finding food, come and see me. Or better yet, talk to your friends. They’ll want to help.”

  Before I could answer, he handed me a cup and pointed me down the hall. When I was done, he weighed and measured me before bringing up Bryson.

  “I wanted to thank you for helping my son. When I found he’d left your care I had some friends hunt him down. Besides you, I mean. They heard of a project being headed up by a physicist. They didn’t get a name, but the description sounds like him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “SoCal Sat City 2.” His voice lowered and I could hear sadness creep in. “Out of our reach.” It looked like he was trying to hold back the tears and I struggled to contain my own.

  “The insurgents are keeping me out of everything, but I can talk to the people I know, try to find out for sure if it’s him or not.” Doc Searls’ face brightened with hope.

  “Would you? You won’t get in trouble?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He nodded, the look on his face expressing gratitude more than words could. “Thank you. I’ll try to do the same from my end.” The tone of his voice changed back to that of a professional as he stood. “Remember to book an appointment.”

  SOCAL SAT CITY 2—TUESDAY, JULY 4, 2141 1:57 P.M.

  Bryson shifted in his chair again. He hadn’t gotten anything done since his call to Ms. Peters this morning. Now he was considering calling her again. It was after lunch, and he still didn’t have the memory chip, as she had promised. He picked up the comm unit on his desk and started making the connection. The swish of the opening airlock followed by the sudden hush of voices around him made him stop midconnect and close the link.

  He watched her approach. When she had caved in, deciding to give him the memory chip, something had changed, like a switch had been flicked in his head.

  Gone was the constant background burr of fear, gone was the urge to never cause trouble, to do as he was told. He wasn’t sure how long his sudden sense of courage would last, but it had passed the first test. Her approach didn’t send him into a panic, didn’t make him feel like he was about to spew his lunch all over the floor.

  Ms. Peters got closer, the ever-present guards right behind her.

  “Here is the chip.” She handed it to him.

  Bryson let her lay it in the palm of his hand and looked at it. This one was SoCal branded. “It’s not the original.”

  “We made a copy. The original stays with us.”

  “So, you can’t read it, but you figure you can copy it cleanly?” He shocked himself with the quick retort.

  “It’s a bit-for-bit duplicate.”

  Was that surprise in her voice? Bryson rewarded himself with an imaginary pat on the back and sat straighter in the chair. “And if part of the encryption is the onboard controller? If it is, you’ve handed me garbage.”

  “Don’t you think we thought of that?”

  She turned harsh and defensive. The guards took a step closer. Bryson’s heart skipped a beat and his face flushed with heat. Had he pushed too far? He didn’t care. His newfound control overrode the fear that threatened to creep up and grab him and he drove forward.

  “Maybe. But then again, maybe you missed it.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Mr. Searls. You caught me in a good mood this morning, and I agreed to give you the chip.” She sidled closer and whispered into his ear. “You don’t want to get on my bad side. I keep telling people we don’t really need you. We already have a weapon that can drop a bomb anywhere.”

  The words sent a chill up his spine, but he knew he couldn’t back down now. Besides, he’d learned something new. Ms. Peters had a boss, and that boss didn’t want him dead. “I’m already on your bad side.” He rotated his chair to face the desk and picked up the chip from his palm with two fingers, pretending to examine it as if it was somehow tainted. All of his attention was focused on what was happening behind him. He could feel the heat of her anger on his back, half expecting the guards to haul him from the chair and drag him from the lab.

  After what felt like an hour but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, he heard the tapping of her heels as she walked away. The airlock door swished again, and he relaxed, slouching forward and cradling his head in his hands. He let out a slow, ragged breath. The chattering in the lab increased beyond the regular background noise. It
seemed he had made an impression on more than Ms. Peters.

  Despite his attempt at courage, he still fought the compulsion to run after her, to apologize for his attitude, how he had acted. When the urge finally dissipated, he realized he actually felt pretty good. In fact, he was proud of how he’d handled the situation. His first step into retaining at least a semblance of control had been a huge one, but it had worked. As long as they needed him, he would continue to push at the boundaries they had set, and he figured he would most likely get away with it.

  He examined the chip in his hands again. It hadn’t been a joke when he’d suggested the controller may have been modified. It could have been something simple, like having the computer request a sequential read, and the controller randomizing it instead. That would have been a fairly easy one to find, though. There were ways to hack a controller so it appeared to be doing what was asked, but in reality it did something completely different. If it had been hacked that way, there was a chance it was too subtle for Ms. Peters and her people.

  It didn’t matter anyway. This memory chip was a copy, and wouldn’t have a hacked controller. If there was one. Either the data on it was a duplicate of the original, or it wasn’t. He’d still have to run the same tests.

  Back in Meridian and Kadokawa, his computers had been some of the most powerful on the Sat City; superfast optical backplanes and memory, available online storage in the petabyte range, and a few hundred processors to bring it all together. They were even better here. Back then, he’d developed algorithms that would find patterns in mass quantities of data, a must when dealing with the quantum information of the engines. Applying those algorithms to the chip would require some changes, but they weren’t insurmountable.

  He inserted the blue square into the reader on his computer and took a preliminary glance at what it contained. As Ms. Peters had said, it was garbage. Certainly not what he had written to it a few weeks ago. Whatever had scrambled the data, it had done a good job. He cracked his knuckles. Time to get to work.

  Modifying the code took him longer than expected. He’d done some quick work and had the software parse the data, but it was still too messed up for it to make sense of what it saw. That’s when he got serious, and the changed code flew from his brain to his fingertips to the computer in front of him. Even the noise of the lab disappeared. It was the first time since he’d been brought here that he lost himself in a problem.

  When he was finished, an exact copy of the chip was in his computer’s memory, and the new software began its job of making sense of the garbage he saw. It would take a while. He left his station and grabbed a cup of tea. The algorithms didn’t work any faster if he was watching them.

  He’d already finished his second cup and started working with one of the other people in the lab on the alignment on the nanofilaments in the shielding when the lights flickered. At first he thought he’d imagined it. Someone in the far corner gave a little shriek and everyone stopped what they were doing, staring upward at the embedded fixtures. When it didn’t happen again, they continued their work.

  Bryson had spent most of his life after university on a Sat City, and he had never seen something like that before. Individual lights burned out, but never a room-wide failure. No matter how short. It was as though the entire grid had lost power for a split second.

  He was still uneasy by the time he got back to his station. To his surprise, the software had finished running. The vid screen was blank except for a single line of text at the top, the cursor blinking lazily behind it.

  Information retrieval aborted by ACE. Have a nice day.

  He drew in a sharp breath as he focused on the words.

  Fingers flying over the keyboard again, he modified the code and reran it. Since the computer had the basic patterns of the data already stored, the algorithms ran significantly faster. He did it three more times, with each result showing the same single line of text on the screen. Each pass deepened the hollow pit in his stomach. There was a small chance if he cleared the data and started the tests from scratch, it would come up with a different result, but each time he changed the code and tested again, the chance grew smaller and smaller. He tried it anyway, with the same results.

  Somehow, ACE had gotten hold of his chip.

  His hands were shaking as he picked up the comm unit and called Ms. Peters.

  It wasn’t until he closed the link that he realized what he had done. She knew everything that had happened after he’d left Kadokawa, and there were only two places the chip could have been switched. The mugger outside the crappy hotel, or when that girl, Kris, had rescued him and brought him to the old man’s restaurant. He had no way to warn her. Ms. Peters had said they’d already ruled out both of them, especially the mugger. What if the girl and the old Chinese guy had done it?

  That meant they had everything they needed to build a quantum jump ship. Once they had that they could travel almost anywhere instantaneously. All they needed was a corporation to fund them.

  He may have just gotten her killed. Or worse.

  four

  LOS ANGELES LEVEL 5—TUESDAY, JULY 4, 2141 2:14 P.M.

  THE BLUE COMPACT car was nowhere to be seen when I left Doc Searls, and none of the other cars had anyone in them that looked like the woman driver. I hadn’t seen the passenger—the man on the comm unit—too clearly, but if the driver wasn’t around, he wouldn’t be either. That’s what I hoped anyway.

  I shook my head. Nerves were making me see things where there wasn’t anything to see.

  Ian had always been vigilant, always been aware of what was going on around him. Was this what it was like for him? Constantly second guessing yourself? Trying to find possible patterns where none existed? I didn’t think so, but if it was, I had no idea how he hadn’t gone fucking crazy from it. It’s how I was starting to feel, jumping at shadows that had probably been there my whole life. If I had bothered to take notice.

  A small voice in the back of my mind started talking, the one ACE had cultivated in me during training. That didn’t mean no one was following me. I tried to shut it up. Turning into a paranoid freak wasn’t on my to-do list. I rolled my shoulders in an attempt to get the tense muscles to relax.

  The only person who had reason to look for me would have been Janice, and I only knew that because she’d almost gotten me. That had ended with her going over the handlebars of her motorcycle. There was no way she’d walked away from that. So really, there was no reason for anyone to follow me. Right?

  Despite trying to convince myself, I kept up the standard rotation of left mirror, right mirror, and straight ahead. Knowing I was about to be home helped me relax, but I didn’t ease off on the vigilance.

  In between the scans, I thought of Doc Searls and Bryson. It was obvious Doc wished his relationship with Bryson was better. Stronger. The look on his face when he talked about his son was one of sadness and remorse mixed with hope and pride. The effect his jumbled emotions had on me was immediate and powerful. I was barely hanging on as it was, and Doc had pushed me even closer to the edge. I opened the helmet’s visor and let the wind dry off my new onset of tears. At least he still had a chance to reunite his family. I didn’t.

  The down-ramp back to Level 4 was virtually unprotected. A couple of SoCal soldiers patrolled at the entrance to the ramp, scanning me as I went down, but that was about it. They were treating the ramp the same as they did the Level 6 access ones, making it tough to get up, but easy to get down.

  I passed a small bunch of skateboarders lounging at the top of the down-ramp to Level 2. Most of the buckles on their armor were undone and they were sitting on the barrier by the ramp entrance. By the look of it, they’d either missed a group going down or were waiting for more of their friends to join them.

  The boarders had become more aggressive since last year. Almost as if the constant threat of SoCal military drafts had given them even more of a reason t
o be assholes. I couldn’t blame them, really.

  If a bunch were heading down, I could probably stay behind them until they reached the bottom. If I met them on their way up instead, my best bet was to ride back up against traffic and pick a different ramp to go down. I figured it was worth the risk and entered the down-ramp, passing a few slow-moving cars.

  I caught up with the boarders about halfway down. There were two dozen at least, hitting speeds of fifty kilometers an hour as they zigzagged down the ramp between the dark fibercrete walls. I was pretty sure that if they had decided to ride the center line, they would’ve hit speeds of ninety or more. But then they couldn’t have bothered any vehicles coming down after them, and bothering people was always their goal.

  I slowed down and stayed a good couple hundred meters back, giving me enough space to turn around if they decided to stop. A car hugged the wall on my right and passed me, looking for a gap to get through the boarders. It was a stupid move. As it got close to them, one boarder swerved, leaving an opening for the car to take. I dropped farther back. I’d seen this ploy before. It wasn’t going to end well.

  The car nosed into the opening and the boarders gave it more room. As it pushed in deeper, a few of them fell back and rode in behind it. Before the driver knew what was happening, the car couldn’t go forward without running someone over, and couldn’t slow down without one of them running into it. The brake lights flickered with indecision. That was when the boarders moved in.

  Two of them ollied, jumping their boards and grabbing them with one hand while placing the other one on the front of the car. The car’s forward speed popped them right onto its hood. They landed on their feet with their boards in hand and at the ready. Both of them swung at the windshield at the same time and the glass cracked in a spiderweb of lines.