The Grid 3

by Paul Teague

  Linwood felt that things were coming to a crisis point inside The Grid. He’d had a very agitated Damien Hunter chasing him several times already and he was completely intrigued by the re-entry into The Grid of Hannah’s friends, Joe and Lucy. They were followed shortly afterwards by another two unscheduled entries. There were no announcements from the Law Lords, no profiles, no warnings even. Just two new Justice Seekers, a man and a woman, their identities as yet unknown to the Gridders.

  The drones had found them immediately, firing their needles directly into their spinal columns and accessing the cervical vertebrae. A direct line to the Psyche-Eval implants – he’d get an idea who they were soon enough.

  Linwood was distracted. Somebody had created a neutral area in The Grid. This was the same sort of zone that had been created to conceal the bot earlier. It was unseen and inaccessible by the Justice Seekers, but Linwood saw it.

  He surveyed his fellow Gridders. They were too terrified to do anything, they were just happy that as Head Gridder he’d taken the initiative and created the Psyche-Eval Mode. They were beginning to make preparations for the final part of the trial, Ascension. This would follow directly after the end of the third Mode.

  Linwood zoomed in on the area and took a look around. It was empty except for a rose. A pressed red rose. Linwood’s mother had worn a red rose at her joining. They were very hard to come by – flowers were seen as a vanity in The City, anything that grew in the ground was supposed to feed mouths, either human or animal. Linwood’s dad had managed to procure a red rose, and she’d always talked about it to them as children. She’d pressed it and would take it out on their anniversary.

  This either had to be a sick trick or it had to be Jacob. There was one way of checking. Linwood created a small object-rendering environment. He grabbed a framework for a book from his presets. He made the book brown leather, created some fading pages and placed the pressed rose inside.

  As children, Linwood and Jacob had found an old leather-bound notebook on the outskirts of Silk Road. They’d never seen books before, and their mother had been anxious to conceal it. She was angry with the boys at first, but when they got home she held it in her hands as if it were the most valuable thing inside The City.

  She placed her pressed rose in the book, and there it lived, carefully hidden, the Carley family’s secret.

  Linwood placed the book into the neutral area. Moments later, the image on his console refreshed. The book had a large stain spread across half of the cover. It had been damaged and soaked while lying in the wasteland on the border of Silk Road. Only Jacob could have known that. His brother had to be living. His brother was a good man, he knew that to be true, in spite of what he’d seen in The Grid. Whatever he was doing had to be under duress or for the good of The City. His brother was alive. They could communicate through The Grid. There had to be a way to work together to get them both out alive.

  Secrets

  Damien Hunter could not have dreamed of a better opportunity. President Josh Delman had just walked into the perfect trap. He’d been so caught up with his own escape plan, he hadn’t bothered to find out what he would be walking into in The Grid. He thought he’d had it all worked out but the minute he stepped in there, expecting Clay’s help, and assistance from Reevil96, he was caught by the drones and plugged directly into the Psyche-Eval units.

  When Hunter saw what had happened, he contacted the Gridder team immediately.

  ‘I don’t want this shown on the screens. Delman is kept off the screen feeds entirely, understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He’s not been seen on any public feeds. As Gridders we did not know it was the President. Might I ask who is his companion?’

  ‘That’s another traitor, Teanna Schaelles. She may be shown on the public screens so long as it is never with the President. You are forbidden to show the President under any circumstances.’

  ‘Understood, sir. What about their involvement in the Justice Trial? We can protect them from the events in The Grid if that is required.’

  ‘No, I want them to be subjected to the same conditions as everybody else. He knows what he’s doing in there, he wouldn’t have entered if not. I want him left to do as he pleases, but if he gets to the centre he must be blocked. I don’t know what’s there, but that’s where he’s heading, I’m certain. I should add, 97TRaider, that I am now invoking clause 6b of your contractual agreements. You are now working under military conditions, which means that failure to follow direct orders will result in instant court martial and is punishable by death. In addition, full confidentiality protocols are applied. You must not impart this knowledge to any of your team, but you must ensure my orders are followed without question.’

  ‘Understood, Mr Hunter.’

  ‘One final thing. I want you to send the direct feeds of Delman and Schaelles to the private port on my console. Do it now!’

  Hunter terminated the connection and waited for the data to be routed directly to him. At last he’d been handed the perfect opportunity. He’d been trying to work out what was going on in Delman’s head for many years. Now he would know. He had a direct link to the President’s thoughts. How could the man have been so careless?

  He sat at his desk waiting for the secure feeds to come through. Teanna’s was established first. He was anxious to know why she had betrayed him. Granted, they had a loose alliance but it was mutually advantageous. He scanned her thought clusters, looking first at those which indicated strong emotional reactions. On his screen they appeared as folders, simple units of storage for a lifetime of memories. Millions of electronic patterns had been scanned and assembled to achieve this simple interface which permitted him to dive in and out of her thoughts like a thief raiding in the night.

  Each folder was fronted by a visual thumbnail recreated from images that had passed through the retina. Often they were too vague, like the retelling of a dream which never quite conveys the emotion or engagement of the person who’d been immersed in it.

  Three folders were clear. One folder had an image of Delman on it, on another was a picture of himself and the last folder used a thumbnail of a middle-aged man. Hunter had never seen him before. He looked like Teanna, and he guessed it was her father or brother.

  Vanity took him to his own folder first. Emotional response readings showed hate, revulsion and discomfort as the key variables in Teanna’s relationship with him. Prime motivators were shown to be self-interest, self-preservation and strategic planning. In simple terms, she hated Damien Hunter and she was using him. The anger began to burn stronger in him as he cursed placing any trust in her. His own feelings had been exactly the same. He’d been using her for the same reasons, but he preferred not to be played, he liked to be in charge.

  Her pivotal images were dominated by Mitchell Cranshaw’s torture and her initial meeting with Hunter himself several years before. She’d immediately targeted him as a potential ally, but the torture of Mitchell was what had pushed her away from him. Hunter was angry with Teanna but not surprised. He was about to close that folder and move on to her knowledge of Delman when his eye was caught by a thumbnail of the Umbilica. He opened up the memory cluster to take a closer look. The folder had a date stamp of that day.

  She’d been at the Umbilica. It was she who had begun the process of destroying his family. She’d broken her bond with him and made the final betrayal. This pushed Hunter’s anger over the edge. He looked around the room for a weapon. His instinct was to go The Climbs and shoot it out. He stopped. That wasn’t possible, The Climbs was on lockdown.

  He went back to the file, struggling to calm his mind. There was a heightened emotional response to what she’d done at the Umbilica, and it was also highly ranked with strategic planning. She’d set it up so he could reverse the process. She’d intended to use it as a bargaining chip. Hunter could save his family, she hadn’t fully betrayed him, she’d kept her options open. He was torn between rushing over to the Umbilica to reverse the process of decline or
to continue looking at Teanna’s thought clusters. He chose his family and routed the data from his console to his tablet.

  He ran over to the Umbilica. The security guard was still undiscovered behind the desk where he’d left her. He rushed into his family’s room and started to follow the process he could see on his tablet. It was as easy as that. With direct access to Teanna’s mind, Hunter had all the information he needed. He could not revive his family entirely without Delman, but at least they were safe, he no longer had a loaded gun held to his head.

  He held his wife’s hand through the protective film and watched as the life-signs units began to return to normal. He was relieved but still anxious to close the circle. If he could access enough of Delman’s thoughts, he might have his family back with him before the night was out.

  As he scanned through the files, his impulse was to look at everything. How could he tell where the most useful information was stored? He’d seen another recent folder with a strong adrenalin rating connected to it. He figured these recent files would be linked with what was going on in The Grid. That made sense to him. He opened the file. He was astonished at what he saw. Teanna had got her hands on The Pact, she’d actually seen the final pages. She’d even broken into Delman’s safe to get hold of them. And she had images stored on Fortrillium servers.

  ‘I want a download of all files saved to Teanna Schaelles’ private encrypted area which have been saved in the past forty-eight hours.’

  Hunter had connected immediately with Fortrillium’s Head of Data. As Fortrillium’s leader, he could access these files and unlock them for viewing. Only he and Delman had that facility, it was passed on with the post. If he had suspected Teanna was hiding something like this, he could have got in there earlier.

  Delman’s file access arrived as Hunter finished running through Teanna’s key thought clusters. He was torn on whether to take a look through her other two primary folders or to move on to Delman. He decided on Delman, even though he was anxious for The Pact files to arrive. He didn’t know where to look first. He had so much information at his fingertips. Hunter was also mindful that these were live feeds and if the connections were broken in The Grid they would be lost. There had never been a man-made server built that could store all the complexity of the mind as the brain did. This was simply a feed of it, a visual representation. The storage system was the brain and his console merely interpreted it and assembled it in a way that was meaningful.

  He opened Delman’s files and was immediately confused. Within the single brain cluster, there were two primary folders. One was labelled ‘Josh Delman’ the other ‘James Morgan’. The second folder was completely locked, like a sealed box. There was no way in.

  Hunter was intrigued. He knew the rumours about Delman’s appearance in The Grid. Could this be a clue as to how it had happened?

  He opened the folder marked ‘Josh Delman’ and began to scan the memory clusters inside. The core clusters held the secrets. Everything he had ever wanted was there.

  The pivotal folders related to Damien Hunter, Teanna Schaelles, James Morgan, The Pact, Jacob Carley and something called Centrum. Some of this was what Hunter had expected, but there were other things there that were completely alien to him. What struck him most was that the key emotional readings for Delman were regret, guilt and resolution. That didn’t ring true at all. The Delman he knew was not like that. He looked at the prime motivators: restitution, justice and closure. He almost laughed aloud at ‘justice’. This was not Delman as he knew him, he’d thought him to be a controlling and obstructive man.

  Hunter began to work through the files. As he did so, he began to piece together Delman’s story. Everywhere the name Schaelles came up. He’d completely missed what was really going on. He’d thought they were fighting for control of The City, but the real battle had been bigger than he could ever have imagined. This was a battle for the human race.

  He scoured the files, hungry for the information which would give him the answers he craved. He pieced it together quickly.

  The man he’d known as Delman was not Delman. It was his mind, his memories, his thoughts, but he was in James Morgan’s body. He’d transferred bodies. Hunter hadn’t known this technology existed, it was almost unthinkable. Yet scientists could keep his own family alive in suspended animation in the Umbilica, so perhaps it was possible to transplant minds too.

  This technology was not of their world. There was something beyond The City, other life based around Centrum. Hunter struggled to comprehend the enormity of what he was seeing. They had all been deceived, every single citizen within The City had been deluded. And he had presided over all of it.

  While he had maintained the fabric which determined how life played out for the citizens every day, all the time Delman had had his eyes on the bigger goal. Survival.

  But there was guilt too. Delman’s motivation was not greed and power, as Hunter had always believed. His driving force was guilt and a need for atonement. Hunter struggled with the data to work out what had happened. The answers were contained in a huge file in which guilt and remorse were the dominating emotions.

  Delman had been driven by regret. He’d been implicated in a tragic error as a young man in the heat of the plague years, and it had resulted in the deaths of millions. He occupied his body of birth at that time. He’d been hunted down and punished by President James Morgan, but he was still driven by guilt and a burning desire to put things right. For a moment, Damien Hunter almost felt sympathy for his tormentor. But how could he ever forgive Delman for what he’d done to his family? He’d been denied years of access to his wife and children, and for what purpose? To keep him loyal? To ensure he did not overthrow the President?

  The story was gradually coming together – how Delman had made some discovery about President James Morgan and the true purpose of the cities. There were three of them. It took his breath away. Three cities? All built around a place called The TriPlex. How could that be true? He’d been born in The City, it was all he’d ever known. There were rumours and theories about what was beyond the walls, but they’d always believed they were the only ones. They’d felt lucky to live in The City, they’d never questioned if what was beyond the walls was better than what was inside.

  Hunter had perpetuated these ideas himself. He’d believed them. If that’s all you knew, why would you question it? Life worked in The City, the hierarchy kept them alive. He’d accepted his obligations to rid it of remnants of the old world. They created unrest and dissatisfaction, it was right that books and other relics were removed.

  But who was this President James Morgan? Why was Delman using his body? Hunter could barely comprehend that it was even possible but he had the facts before him. If Delman had told him to his face, he would have laughed. But there was no way this thought cloud could be cheated, it was a direct feed of his memories. It was the truth as Delman saw it.

  He saw how being in Morgan’s body had given Delman access to The City. He’d been on the run, he needed to hide. That made sense. But why had he colluded with the Schaelles family? What had driven him to The City?

  Hunter could see that President Josh Delman was well over 120 years old in his chronological age, but he could also see that he’d only been conscious for a fraction of that period. He’d spent a lot of time in Cryo before Edward Schaelles had activated the body transfer. That technology looked similar to the Umbilica, keeping people alive without any degradation of their brain or body. One day his own family would emerge from the Umbilica as if nothing had happened. The only question was, would he still be alive to greet them?

  Hunter wanted to know what was going on. It was difficult to believe, but he could accept that there was a place called The TriPlex. It accounted for how Delman had managed to exit from The Grid and it explained where Parsons and Slater had gone – maybe they were in on the President’s plot too? It was a struggle, but he could also see how there might be another two cities. Why not? They’d accepted the walls th
at contained them without question. The fear was that the plague was out there, and they were safe in The City.

  The secret seemed to lie in the motivations of the President. Delman had taken Morgan’s body for a reason. Two generations of the Schaelles family – three if you counted Teanna – had colluded to make it happen. What was Delman’s motivation? What was he trying to put right?

  There was a sound on his console. The files he’d requested from The Pact had arrived. He entered his private encryption codes and ran the DNA confirmation. He’d been after this information for years. Delman had always denied it. Damn him! He opened up Teanna’s files, making straight for the recently dated images of pages from The Pact.

  Hunter saw immediately they were the pages that had been torn from his own manual. Delman had ripped them out and kept them concealed. He rapidly scanned the words to get a sense of what was going on.

  Catharsis had begun. That’s why Delman was running. Teanna had to be part of some kind of a deal, she was crucial to it all. The City was going to be destroyed. Damien Hunter had thought he’d saved his family in the Umbilica, but they were all going to die anyway. Delman was abandoning them to their fate and seeking refuge in The TriPlex. Catharsis could happen at any time. When it began, the population of The City would be destroyed and the walls and tower blocks would collapse in on themselves. There would be nothing left of their world. The Pact had promised the preservation of humanity in a post-plague world. This would result in total destruction.

  It would be preceded by The Cleanse. This was the removal of all organic matter from The Grid. In other words, all humans would be cleared from the area. The only way out of The City was through the centre of The Grid, it had always been set up that way. One way out, controlled by – who knew? The Pact did not reveal that information. The exit would be closed. If Catharsis had begun and the President was making his escape, there would be no way for Hunter to flee when The Cleanse began. He had to get to Delman before he got out. He had to enter The Grid for the sake of his family. Delman would have to release his wife and children and let him take them safely through The Core to whatever protection there was beyond The City.