The Significant

by Kyra Anderson

  Maki chuckled, turning over his shoulder to look at the other Bronze Elite.

  “She’s a Trid who can’t read or write, yet. Remember?” Maki chuckled. “You expect her to be able to delete a very specific area of security coding in a high-security NCB chair?”

  “It’s possible,” Chronus muttered, his eyes showing his concern.

  Maki shook his head, turning back to Chronus as he pulled out another file and a blank drive, transferring the data into the drive to be viewed on the NCB chair.

  “No, she wouldn’t do that,” Maki said gently. “She loves Isa.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You can see it in her eyes,” Maki answered, stopping in front of Chronus, his eyes locked with the other Elite’s. Chronus quickly averted his gaze to the file, pointing at it.

  “Where is the original drive?”

  “I think I left it at the Syndicate.”

  “Or it’s lost in here somewhere,” Chronus chuckled teasingly.

  “That’s a possibility.”

  Chronus was silent for a moment, watching the transfer complete and Maki put the drive into another port of the NCB chair.

  “You don’t think the Significant could have done this?”

  “Call her Kailynn,” Maki said. “That’s her name.” Maki pressed a button on the NCB chair so a secondary screen would unfold across the back of the chair. “And no, I do not believe she did it.”

  Maki and Chronus both tried different searches in the log, trying to find anything that would tell them how the chair’s security codes had been changed. Before they knew it, three hours had passed. Remus called Chronus when the Bronze Elite did not return to the Syndicate when expected and the other Elite told him that he and Maki were running tests and he would be there until all the scans were completed. Maki told Remus that they would submit anything they found to the Syndicate network to be reviewed.

  Chronus rubbed his eyes and turned away from the coding as the third hour wore on.

  “I didn’t realize that Isa used her home NCB chair so often. These logs are enormous.”

  “You don’t think it’s hilarious how many times she tried to contact Remus when she was on leave for a month?” Maki chuckled. “Isa never knows how to stop working, does she?”

  “None of us know how to stop working,” Chronus chuckled brokenly. “Speaking of which, I didn’t even ask if you were feeling better.”

  “I am,” Maki said with a nod, still glancing over the log. “I guess I scared a few of you.”

  “We found you passed out on the floor of your office,” Chronus said, his eyebrows high as he turned to face Maki. “It’s Isa who is expected to pass out and scare us all to death, not you.”

  “Dr. Busen said it was over exhaustion,” Maki said, distracted by the information he was reading.

  “You need to be careful,” Chronus said. “We can’t have you passing out on us all the time.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Chronus went back to Maki’s side and looked over the log.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “Three years back in the log, and the codes still aren’t there.” He sighed heavily. “Maybe it was faulty from manufacturing.”

  Maki stopped, blinking a few times before turning to Chronus.

  “Or maybe we haven’t gone back far enough.”

  “You want to go through all seven years of the log? Are you crazy?”

  “No,” Maki muttered. “Just the first six months from five years ago.”

  Chronus stopped immediately, understanding what Maki was thinking.

  “You don’t actually believe he got into her NCB chair, do you?”

  “After everything else he did?” Maki said, typing the query into the computer. “I think he did.”

  With the narrowed-down log, the two Bronze Elites began scanning the days of coding records.

  “Look here,” Chronus hissed, pointing. “Right here, the outgoing transmission to Fortunea has the proper security coding with a closed pathway.” He pointed to the next outgoing transmission. “Here, on the transmission to Corinne, the pathway is open. The codes are gone a month later.”

  “This is the entire month before Isa got sick,” Maki whispered. He sighed heavily, shaking his head. “He got into her level at Anon Tower and he destroyed the coding of the chair…”

  “How could he do that? Rayal was always there.”

  “I don’t know,” Maki murmured. “That might have been when he was sick.”

  “If this was done five years ago, why now? And why outgoing?”

  “Nothing was logged on the day of the Pulse, right?” Maki murmured.

  “Correct.”

  “A message was sent to Isa on the Altereye Distress Path, which is open to all planets in the Alliance. What if…” he trailed off, thinking. “What if that was just bait to get her into the chair? What if, with the open pathway, they could send the virus to the chair once she sent an outgoing transmission?”

  “But she would have received a transmission first.”

  “Which was the bait,” Maki said. “They might have routed the message. They might have had it recorded and then corrupted the data so it was impossible to discern the emergency. Once she was in the chair, they could cut off the transmission, and when she tried to reconnect, they use the open pathway to send the Pulse Virus.”

  “That would have to be specially programmed. I’ve never heard of an outgoing transmission causing a virus on the source chair.”

  “True,” Maki said. “But that could explain why they have not done this already. They were programming it, knowing what pathway was open.”

  Chronus looked at Maki seriously. “You think it was Gihron.”

  “Colonel Amori is the only one who could have destroyed the security coding. He was the only one outside of Isa’s inner circle that could have had access to the chair. The timeframe also matches. The codes disappeared during the month that everything started going to hell.” Maki took a deep breath, nervous. “What if Colonel Amori told Gihron what he had done? And they have been trying to get a Pulse Virus programmed just for this?”

  “Then it’s an assassination attempt,” Chronus stated. “It’s war.”

  “But they haven’t claimed responsibility for the attack. They probably think we don’t know.”

  “We have Gihron heavily monitored,” Chronus murmured.

  “I don’t think we will ever have them monitored enough,” Maki said, shaking his head. “I’m going to call Isa and tell her that she needs to build her own central processor for her work NCB chair. Who knows if anyone’s gotten to that one…”

  Maki tapped his ear and told the implanted phone to call Isa.

  “What time is it?” he murmured as Isa’s number was dialed. He glanced at the clock and his eyes went wide. “Oh…” he turned to Chronus. “Hey, can you see yourself out? I have a call in five minutes.”

  “A call?” Chronus asked.

  “Isa,” Maki said, motioning to his ear to tell Chronus that the Golden Elite had answered. He tried to motion with his hands, asking Chronus to leave, but the other Bronze Elite just looked at Maki, confused.

  “Chronus and I just went over the log for your chair to figure out what happened, and we have some information that you might want to know,” Maki said. He walked out of the room as Chronus stared after him. “Are you sitting down?” Maki’s voice said as he walked out of the office.

  Chronus waited until Maki’s voice was gone before he sighed heavily and started saving the information on the NCB chair to power it down. There was a lot about Maki’s behavior that was concerning. Even if he was expecting a call, he would not have asked Chronus to leave. The two Bronze Elites were very close—they always had been—but Maki had become surprisingly distant and distracted over the previous year. Chronus had noticed the changes more than anyone else in the Syndicate.

  He knew Maki was hiding something.

  However, he decided to respect Mak
i’s wishes.

  Once the NCB chair was properly powered down, Chronus placed the drives on the seat and started to walk to the front door. He did not know where Umana was, but he was relieved he would not have to deal with the nervous, shaky caretaker.

  He glanced around, trying to figure out where Maki had gone to talk to Isa. He knew that telling Isa the Pulse Virus was related to Gihron and facilitated by Colonel Amori would upset the Golden Elite. He figured he would stop by Anon Tower on his way home, since Isa was likely home, and check on her.

  He walked to the front door when a high-pitched whine came to his ears.

  The sound of the alarm was muffled, but Chronus recognized it immediately. It was the sound of an NCB chair fatal error—the same alarm that would occur if the person sitting in the chair was attached by a Pulse Virus.

  Chronus ran back to the office, knowing that that was the only NCB chair in the home. The chair was still and silent, powered down entirely.

  However, the alarm continued to sound.

  Chronus started walking through the hallways, following the sound of the alarm until he reached Maki’s bedroom. He knocked quietly and opened the door, even though he knew that Maki had gone elsewhere.

  The whine of the alarm was much louder in the bedroom. The room was also a horrible mess. There were clothes strewn across the floor with more files and parts of machines. The bed was a tangled mess of sheets, two of the pillows thrown to the floor.

  The site terrified and disturbed Chronus greatly. Seeing the office in such a state was shocking enough, but to see that Maki’s bedroom was also so disorderly caused Chronus’ stomach to flip. It was not uncommon to hear of Elites suffering severe, early-onset dementia and hallucinations. Seeing Maki’s room and office in the state they were in made Chronus believe the worst about his closest friend.

  What worried him further was the whining emanating from the wall behind Maki’s headboard.

  Chronus walked to the wall, following the sound, his eyes glancing over the various files and drives littering the floor. When he reached the headboard, he saw there was a very large gap between the headboard and the rest of the bed. Crouching, he found that the headboard had been completely removed from the frame and attached to the wall.

  He pushed the pillows aside and ran his hand along the smooth, flat headboard, searching for any sort of opening mechanism.

  Along the ridge where the bedframe had once been attached to the headboard, there was a release tab. Pulling it, Chronus saw a panel flip open with a number pad and a screen that was flashing green.

  Trying to keep himself from assuming the worst, he typed in the Syndicate passcode. When that was not accepted, he tried Maki’s other known passwords. None of the number combinations worked. Chronus stared at the numbers for several long moments, racking his brain for the passcode.

  He turned to look at the wall, listening to the NCB chair alarm. Being so close to the noise, there was no mistaking the alarm. He turned his head and glanced among the files around him. One stack of files was annotated as specification sheets for high-power generators.

  Chronus knew.

  He did not want to believe it, but somehow, he knew immediately what Maki was planning.

  For that reason, when he turned back to the number pad, he knew the passcode.

  1-7-3-6.

  When the light flashed twice and a loud click followed, Chronus felt his heart began to race.

  1736 was a very profound code for everyone in Isa’s Syndicate. It was the code they used whenever they discussed Aren, a former Elite Prototype who had died horrifically when they were all in school. Aren’s death had hit everyone who knew him very hard, but Isa had always blamed herself for his death. It was when Aren died that Isa truly became the leader everyone in the Syndicate knew her to be.

  But as Chronus pushed the headboard slowly into the wall to reveal the bunker, the name caused his stomach to tie itself in knots.

  Aren was synonymous with pain.

  Aren was synonymous with rebellion.

  Chronus walked the short distance to the ajar metal door, allowing the shrill whine of the alarm to echo in the hall. Chronus took a deep breath and pushed the door fully open.

  The cavernous bunker was lined with machines and computers, wires haphazardly strewn about the room, connecting different parts. There was an enormous column of hardware that nearly touched the ceiling. It was whirring loudly, the small screen plugged messily into the bottom flashing with the word “error.”

  In the middle of the mess of cables and hardware was an NCB chair—Isa’s NCB chair.

  Chronus stared, listening to the alarm, unable to process what he was seeing.

  He turned to one of the computers and looked at the screen, seeing the log of processes halted with the words “unknown fatal error” at the bottom. Above that line were lines of code about Venus’ main security mainframe and power supply.

  “Fuck…” Chronus barely managed to whisper.

  “Chronus?” Maki called. “Chronus?!” Maki’s voice got louder. “Shit!”

  Maki ran through his room, tipping over stacks of files, diving into the opening into the bunker and appearing at the door, breathing hard and looking frantically around. Chronus stared at him, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “What the fuck are you doing in here?” Maki snapped. “Did you touch anything?!”

  “No.”

  Maki ran to the NCB chair and unplugged one wire before punching a few codes into the back to stop the alarm.

  The silence was deafening and heavy.

  Maki looked at Chronus, his heart pounding against his ribs.

  “What the fuck were you doing in here?!” Maki snapped. “How did you get in?!”

  “The alarm was going off,” Chronus said, staring at Maki seriously. “How could I ignore it?”

  “I closed the door.”

  “1736,” Chronus said seriously. “Do you really think I would forget Aren’s code?”

  Maki ground his teeth together, walking around the NCB chair and storming over to Chronus.

  “You shouldn’t have come in here. I told you to leave.”

  “I knew something was wrong, Maki,” Chronus said strongly. “A neat freak like you leaving your office like that? Passing out at work? Tell me what is going on.”

  “I don’t owe you any explanation!” Maki snapped, shoving Chronus angrily backward. Chronus was shocked at the actions, tripping and finding himself on the ground. “You don’t know everything about me! You have no right to break into my room!”

  Maki pushed Chronus back to the ground, pinning him and grabbing his shoulders in a vice-grip.

  “Did you touch anything?” he snarled.

  Chronus stared at Maki, unable to speak.

  “Maki?” he breathed.

  Maki continued to glare at Chronus, his breathing labored through his nose, his eyes filled with something Chronus had never seen before.

  Suddenly, Maki’s face softened. He scrambled to his feet and backed away.

  “Chronus…I…”

  The other Elite got to his feet, staring at Maki in horror.

  “How long?”

  Maki lowered his eyes to his feet.

  “Three years,” he muttered. “I think when I got into that crash on Caroie, the head trauma changed things.”

  “And you never thought to say anything?” Chronus hissed. “That you could feel emotions? Not even to me?”

  Maki closed his eyes. “What was I supposed to say?” he hissed. “Don’t you understand? I’m a degenerate now. If Venus were to find out, she’d have me tested and killed.”

  It was not until Maki said those words that Chronus suddenly remembered what it meant to be degenerate. He glanced around the room.

  “So…all this…”

  “It’s not for me,” Maki whispered.

  “You’re trying to shut her down?”

  Maki did not speak. He merely looked at Chronus, his eyes speaking volumes.
>
  “I’m calling it the Aren System,” Maki murmured. “It’s a power generator that can operate outside of Venus’ control.”

  “But it doesn’t work,” Chronus said, nodding to the error messages around the room.

  “Uh, no…that’s not the generator,” he said. “This is the other process…the one that shuts Venus down.”

  “It can’t be done, Maki.”

  “Do you remember what Isa said in school? All those things that she said needed to change for the planet and the rest of the Altereye System to move forward? She said that Venus needed to be destroyed.”

  “Until she was made Golden Elite and she realized that we can’t shut her down.”

  “That’s not the reason she stopped trying,” Maki said quietly. “She realized that shutting her down came at a heavier price.”

  “Of course it does, that’s what I meant. Even if you manage to get power to the major cities, communications and defenses would remain down until we could reprogram everything, and that’s why we can’t shut her down. You know this already.”

  Maki shook his head.

  “We can shut her down.”

  “No, you can’t!” Chronus snapped. “She has power sources all over the planet and she can program herself off-planet as well.”

  “Not without her source coding.”

  “And you have her source coding?”

  “No, of course not,” Maki said, shaking his head. He glanced back at the NCB chair. “But I am working on something that will delete her source coding. A virus, actually. So far, nothing has worked.”

  “How can you test this without Venus noticing?”

  “It has taken me years to get to this point. Why do you think I’m so tired all the time? Why do you think my house is so disorganized that I barely find my clothes in the morning?”

  “You have to stop this,” Chronus said.

  “No.”

  “Maki, we’re on the brink of war. There are already enough secrets in the Syndicate with Isa and her Significant, we can’t—”

  “Kailynn,” Maki snapped. “Call her Kailynn.” Maki stared at Chronus seriously. “Isa was right all along. Venus must be shut down. She can’t keep up with the evolving society, that’s why the Elite generations are getting worse and worse. You remember what a fucking moron Gattriel was, but he was the best in that generation. Humans are changing, but Elites and Venus stay the same. On this track, everyone on this planet will die.”