System Seven

by Parks, Michael

  • • •

  Cathbad returned from the cellar and went to the screens.

  Sean pointed. “The Shiru team is at third basement. They’re attempting the physical connection.”

  “What’s it look like?” Cathbad asked.

  “All the Ethernet ports to the backbone are full, either in use or linked through a loopback to detect access. No open fiber switch ports, either. To add Bootstrap they’ll need to tap either the copper or fiber.”

  “Audio up, please.” Cathbad sat near the screens.

  A monotone narrative by the bràthair provided a running translation over the faint and chaotic audio interpretations of the shùil technology. “–requires physically splitting the cable open to touch the copper wires. Time consuming and messy. Yoshito is saying the fiber tap is less noticeable, faster, and everyone agrees. However, light loss is detectable if they are monitoring it–”

  “Use the fiber tap,” Sean urged.

  A close-up showed his message made it through. A clamping device went over the exposed fiber length and an intercept fiber was introduced to tap the light signals.

  The bràthair intoned, “Coupling is successful. The device is receiving encrypted data. Bootstrap will attempt to read it now.”

  Several moments later the Shiru team pumped the air with their fists.

  “That’s it,” Sean said, “Soldado did it. The game’s on. It’s finally on.”

  Cathbad leaned back and took in the other screen. “Johan hasn’t moved yet.” The weight of responsibility pulled at his bones, at his soul. The fate of Tokyo, the most populated city in the world, hung in the balance. They had to locate the nuke.

  He prayed to the Lord of the Wildwood, a most sincere and heartfelt prayer for success.

  • • •

  Marik arrived back from a long day spent at Toshiba replacing five server motherboards all fried from a power line fault. The extra hour to isolate a damaged CPU dragged right over his plans with Nomaai. If he hurried, the night might be salvageable. Gates to the building’s garage rolled open and he immediately noticed two blank parking spots – one too many.

  Inside the office, the missing van’s keys hung in the lockbox. The dispatch log showed nothing and a call to Bebe confirmed what he had feared: one of J.I. Technical’s vans had been stolen.

  • • •

  Colorful and complex, the user interface for Soldado’s Bootstrap program filled both laptop screens. The technicians mumbled quietly to each other, tapping madly one moment, frozen the next, deep into the screens.

  “They are stacked, modular. Look at the code groupings! Start with the H group, there. Route them to the filter.”

  “Keywords ready. We can only sample so much, though.”

  “Preview, open the preview window – good. There.”

  Both technicians gazed, a look of nearly religious awe on their faces.

  “Good God, look at the amount of data. He was right. It’s already building the parsing nodes.”

  Soldado’s retro-AI worm, Q, did exactly what it was designed to, recognizing and querying the constructs formed in the network stream, a passive mapping of content type and relationships. It was learning the form and method of Totem’s transport protocols in order to extract meaningful representation of the data. The results were served up to the Shiru team’s interface.

  “Try another group, this looks like diplomatic intelligence. Route B group.”

  Noboru grew increasingly nervous. He asked whether they were going to search the whole alphabet.

  “Relax, Noboru. We are within parameters.”

  “Of course, of course. But please, all possible haste!”

  They continued to pore over the screens. “These appear operational in nature. The series refer to notations on the J group, I’m almost certain. Switch to J.”

  Noboru walked to the wall and sat down. The team was good but now they seemed about to take a long, long time. If security came, he would fall over, as if knocked unconscious, an unwilling victim. If by some miracle they got out undetected, this would be the last job, the last risk. A familiar oath, but this time...

  • • •

  Director Tomov gazed at the storm closing in on Kaiya. Eden was in a stable approach, its intensity felt and gauged by rangers familiar with the force.

  “Prepare to grab them,” he ordered.

  “Signus Alpha is ready to grab. Safe estimate shows free zone ends in three minutes fifty.”

  No sign of their rescuer. Disappointment didn’t begin to describe it. Fourteen panels linked, ready to shut down the target, and Gerrit hadn’t made it. Not a ripple or a whiff of him.

  “Grab in three, then. Slide the time as necessary. Update and recap the bender’s status.”

  “No change, sir. He hasn’t been seen.”

  Comms312 interrupted. “Sir, Oscar has alerted to a probable breach to the VisCom network at the defense ministry in Ichigaya.”

  “Probable breach? What does it mean, a probable breach?”

  “Details on screen, sir.”

  A stolen IT services company van and a service call at the ministry communications building by the same company.

  “Send a panel out to investigate.”

  “Sir, we’re overextended with Signus Alpha. Shall I–”

  “Yes! Break out a panel from Alpha.” He remembered the gold dots glowing on his personal LCD. In a more controlled voice, he added, “It could be related.”

  No mistakes.

  “Panel dispatched. Grab updated to two minutes five seconds, sir.”

  He again eyed the three remaining gold dots, the minimum required to execute J86 in one city.

  “Confirm J86 is still enabled.”

  A moment later, confirmation came.

  • • •

  Only yards from shore, black storm clouds raced counterclockwise. Their bulk rose thousands of feet into the sky, lit with flashes of lightning. Thunder cracked the air. The eye of the hurricane had tightened to become a twister with a narrowing center.

  Kaiya stole a look up from their sand burrow. A single shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom, robbed of its warmth but not of its hope. Again she tried to force change, imagining a steel plate to shield them. Again nothing happened. Stuck in a nightmare with no way to wake up, she was finally helpless. What did I do to deserve this?

  She hunkered over the boy’s tiny frame and hugged him tighter. The thought of him being ripped from her arms was too much to bear.

  “Kaiya?”

  Her head whipped up in time to catch a flurry of windblown sand in the face. Who’d called her name?

  “Kaiya?”

  The voice cut through the roar of the storm, like a voice-over on an entirely different soundtrack. She ducked back down and listened intently. Long seconds passed with nothing more. It was a trick, a way of getting them out of the safety of their hole, the symbol of her defiance. If she held any power left at all, it had to be in maintaining their place.

  “Ryota!”

  The boy shifted in response. It wasn’t just her imagination.

  “Kaiya!”

  The voice seemed from beyond the dream, from the waking world – but she couldn’t wake up! Were they finally trying to save them? Intuition said yes. She couldn’t stand the thought of missing their help. She yelled into the squall, “Here! We’re here!”

  Thunder pealed and the wind tore at her hair. The storm wall toppled high overhead and converged to blot the sun. In the sudden darkness, lightning flickered. The island shifted, a small lurch at first, then as if starting to rise. Two of the palm trees rose like twigs to disappear into the streaming torrent of the twister. The boy screamed and tried to stand.

  “No Ryota! No–” She felt a groping hand against her knee and screamed also. It found her calf, then slid to her ankle and pulled her leg violently down into the sand. She kicked but the heavy, wet sand held her leg. Lightning flashed as Ryota slipped down to his hips. “Nooo!” She prayed then, as ha
rd as she’d ever prayed. God, please take us now, take our souls and lead us to peace. God, please take us now, take our souls right now and lead us to–

  “Kaiya! No! Stop praying for that! Live, girl, live! Stop resisting and come with me! Austin needs you!”

  A brilliant light split the darkness from above. The roar of the wind died off and the twisting storm slowed. Gone was the sun and blue sky, replaced by a heavenly downpour of white light that saturated the clouds and turned them gray-blue. Peace soaked in, numbing fear until it faded completely. Nothing would ever hurt her again, nothing could ever bring her pain again. She was going home – a home from a long, long time ago.

  Another tug almost tore Ryota from her grip. With an effort, she looked down into the boy’s terrified eyes. “No!” She screamed, splitting the silence. “Leave him to me!”

  The voice and grip would not relent. “Come–” another violent tug and the boy slipped completely under the sand, “–on!”

  The luring light forgotten, she began to scream but stopped when another voice, sharp and quick, filled the dream.

  “Copy that. Signus Alpha to grab now.”

  The clouds peeled back to reveal more of the brilliance above. From the retreating billows emerged black birds, thousands of them, all diving towards her little hole in the island. They grew larger as they neared, revealing shiny black claws amid a flurry of wings. Their wild cries pierced her soul.

  The hand on her leg released and instead surfaced from the sand.

  “Come with me, Kaiya, or you’ll never serve Austin sweet and sour pork again!”

  There was no time to analyze that. Riding instinct, she took hold of the outstretched hand and allowed it to tug her into the gritty darkness below, back towards Austin.

  God, she hoped back towards Austin.

  • • •

  “Signus Alpha in pursuit.”

  “Damn it!” Director Tomov pounded his armrest. “How did he do that?”

  He stood and pointed at the display. “Somebody tell me how he slipped past fourteen fucking panels! Forty of our best trained minds and no one saw him? Someone tell me!”

  No one dared speak. The panels sliced through the mesh, tracking residual energies of the three targets, maneuvering split-second switchbacks, morphing imagery – countering an endless stream of tricks as Gerrit barreled through bubble after bubble of unsuspecting dreamers. There was just no getting ahead of him. Two panels dropped off, casualties of the sudden alterations.

  “Keep the linkage together – communicate! Stay cohesive, damn it. Get into his stream!”

  The visuals grew more chaotic. Rapid shifts presented realties at mind-boggling speed. Three more panels fell off, unable to stay on the chase. Another gone, then another.

  “Nine panels. Eight. He’s wild. Hard to track.”

  “Get those panels reconnected. Shut him down!”

  Tomov tried not to panic. No one had ever been so dynamic and agile, so dimensional. No one had ever moved with such confidence so fast in the mesh. The control room began to swim. He planted a hand on a console to steady himself and looked away from the screens. “Patch me to AGT Ops. And get me double blues with Coke.”

  The AGT director came online. “Tomov, what’s happening?”

  He exhaled heavily and turned back to the screens. “He’s got the boy. I don’t know if we’ll stop him. Standby for the bender. I’m certain he’ll be there for the pick-up of the body. And J86 is still on the table.”

  “Understood. We’ll take care of him. Keep this line open.”

  “Right.” The panel count dropped by another two. Gerrit was wearing them out, plain and simple. The panels had trouble reconnecting – the speed made synchronization nearly impossible.

  The AGT director announced, “Heads up. There’s a mix of birds in the air out of Yokota. Seven Hueys and a C-130. Scrub of the base comms shows reference to a training sortie but no word on what the 130 is doing. The Hueys are spreading out all over Tokyo and the 130’s on its own circuit, outside our zone. No precedence for a night sortie of this design. I’ve got someone working on the roots. In the meantime, you might want to get in there and see if we have anything to worry about.”

  He directed his ops officer to coordinate rider teams to join the AGTs for intercept and inspection. He sat down, waiting for his blues.

  History was about to be made alright, and not the preferred version. In a way, the scenario was inevitable, had been for years. If not here, then Zurich or London or Malaysia or wherever the breakout occurred. The number of incidents unraveling in the past year alone... too many indications of subversion growing right under G2’s nose. He looked up at the incident map and couldn’t help wondering if Stan and Laura still lived in Tokyo.

  Overseer’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Answer ready.”

  “Answer to what?”

  “The answer to your last inquiry regarding target A2 and how he slipped past fourteen panels. The answer is apparent: target A2 has superior governance in the mesh.”

  “No shit, Oscar.” He looked at the gold dots and decided he didn’t care. “No shit.”

  Chapter 21

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,

  doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

  - Edgar Allan Poe

  Once Johan had Kaiya and Ryota securely in his keep, split-second leap-frogging proved to be almost fun. While the pair sat alone in a train car rolling through the Swiss Alps, he extended his reach farther than ever, pummeling through Saoghal like a god.

  There were mouse holes to crawl through and skies to disappear into, crowds to absorb him, and children to hopscotch over his chalk line form. Under the pews of a church in Luxembourg and out a stained glass window to become a bird that flew to a tree down the avenue before shrinking into a drop of rain blown by the wind. He struck a branch and split into two, curled around the curve of the drop and exited the dream only to join a nightmare in a house fully engulfed in flames.

  An old man, face streaked with tears, sat in a rusted wheelchair and listened to screams from family trapped upstairs. Caught off guard, Johan shrank and flew into the glowing embers of a door frame, emerged briefly in the openness of Saoghal, then slid down and away towards the billions of dreams that awaited.

  He kept the stints brief, morphing at every chance, shifting emotion to blend into the scenery. He was a young woman entering a doctor’s office one moment – the weathered door of a lighthouse facing a rising sun the next. Confidence grew by measures until it appeared inevitable he would completely lose them. He shook free of that feeling before it could be used against him, too. Leave nothing of your self behind.

  Vaguely, the notion of fatigue presented itself, a shocking first suggestion of limitation in the dream world. He didn’t slow and felt no different except for a gnawing realization that every snap of change that he affected became one more trick expended by his core – so that he would become that much more familiar to them if only they thought to pay attention. Someone would. He tried to set that aside but found it far more sticky a thought than anything he’d encountered so far. He was tiring and they had to feel it. Time once again became the enemy.

  Amanda. He would deliver Kaiya to safety first. To accomplish that he couldn’t have a posse trailing him. Creativity remained fluid, the playground of Saoghal still an ocean of possibility. An idea formed from that ocean, one that held promise of something truly ingenious if the realm operated like he imagined it did.

  In the smallest, most private molecules of his existence, he began to build a false world, a pseudo-dream of the most typical kind. He installed a simulation of his shifting meta engaged in some of the same tricks he’d already used. He added several “leaps”, ghostly paths of sim-meta to form a deceptive trail for them to follow. The process was slow and incredibly tedious, attended to between real dream jumps and morphs with great care and timing. They could not be allowed to see wha
t he was creating. For it to work, where it led could not appear familiar.

  If the idea of fatigue had surprised him before, its actual effects, felt now in the complex efforts of dream weaving, shot thin bolts of fear into his core.

  • • •

  “Sir, he’s slowing–”

  “I see that.” Director Tomov stood. The blues amplified the good news by factors. “Panels are up by four, now five. He’s wearing down. There’s no way he could keep up that pace, I knew it.” He hadn’t, but that wasn’t for them to know. “Signus Alpha, stay alert, your target’s weakening.”

  “Confirmed. He’s also leaking fear. Starting to unravel.”

  On screen, the target raced into another dream, a field of yellow wheat blowing in the wind under blue skies, lit like the afterlife. Signus Alpha shrank to the size of an ant and raced among the tall columns of wheat to follow A2. In a blink he shot into a light beam. They managed to follow, bouncing to the upper atmosphere before reflecting back against the eye of a man walking across the field towards his wife in a reunion dream. A2 shot into the darkness of the man’s iris and made exit from the dream. They tracked him into another, a school boy’s fantasy where a beautiful teacher unbuttoned her blouse.

  “He’s reaching his limits, sir. Back up to thirteen.”

  The director nodded. It was only a matter of time.

  • • •

  Johan clamped down on a feeling that threatened to get away from him – the feeling of pure joy and relief. Controlling his happiness proved almost as hard as managing the dream weaving. He was finally free, alone with his two charges in the placid blackness of Saoghal. He distanced himself from the cunning construct he’d made for his pursuers – proud of it but unsure how soon they would escape.

  He had slowed some, allowing them into his dream, and then masterfully transferred them into that, a cornucopian bubble of worlds inside worlds, like a Pandora’s box. With luck, he had time enough to secure Kaiya and the boy.

  • • •

  Snow laden mountains gave way to countryside similarly buried; an occasional stream, jutting trees, or farmhouse broke the blanket of white. Ryota sat at the window and gazed farther than his eyes could see, likely dreaming of things familiar.