by A. G. Taylor
“Someone’s in trouble,” she said. “A boy – just a little older than you. His life’s in danger.”
Robert crouched and held up his own torch so he could see her eyes amidst the darkness. “Do we know him? What kind of danger?”
Sarah frowned. “Unclear. We don’t know him yet, but he’s one of us.”
Robert took his sister’s hand in his. Whenever she was like this – alone in the dark, so distant, almost alien – it worried him desperately. He squeezed her fingers, trying to bring her back to him somehow.
“It’s okay,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
“You have to find him,” Sarah replied. In the light of the torch, her eyes snapped into focus, like a sleeper awaking from a dream. “I’ll try to guide you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one who can save him from dying.”
PART ONE
1
In the last week of the school holidays, when Hong Kong’s summer was at its most oppressively hot and humid, Hack developed the unshakeable feeling he was being followed.
First there was the guy wearing the ankle-length coat (even though it was over thirty degrees outside) waiting for the MTR train at Tung Chung station and again when he changed to the Tsuen Wan line. Later, after trawling the electronics stalls in the city all afternoon, Hack spotted him again – sitting on the train back to Lantau Island, head buried in a book. Probably just a coincidence.
Or so he thought at that point.
On Tuesday he spent the day fishing with his friend Danny and wandering the narrow alleyways of Tai-O, the fishing village where he lived with his grandfather. It was high season and by midday the place was bustling with tourists, but there was one thin woman who seemed to follow wherever they went. Every time he looked round, she had her camera pointed in their direction. Why would she be taking a picture of us? Danny laughed when Hack voiced his suspicions.
He let it go at that.
On Thursday the guy with the coat was back. Hack caught a glimpse of him in the crowd as he ascended the steps into the IFC mall on another city trip. Their eyes met and the man melted into the throng of lunchtime shoppers like a ghost.
By Friday, Hack was looking over his shoulder constantly, attempting to work out who was a tail and who was not. He tried staying in the house, but found himself checking the blinds every five minutes to see who was passing by outside. School wasn’t back for two weeks and for the first time in his life, Hack actually found himself wishing he was there, just to take his mind off things. Sick of watching him pace the floor, Grandfather sent Hack on an errand to the market stalls by the bay, where he became convinced that everyone was eyeballing him: housewives, pensioners, even little kids.
Had his secret finally been discovered?
Hack thought he’d been careful enough: he never used his power in public and had only told a few trusted friends. But had one of them ratted him out? And to who?
These questions whirled through his mind like a tornado until he finally fled back to the city and the place where he felt most at home: the Golden Chip. He needed to talk to someone, and Jonesey, one of the few people who knew about his secret, was the obvious choice.
The Golden Chip, or GC as it was known to the regulars, was a computer and software market that sprawled across six floors of a high-rise in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong.
Two basement levels bustled with stalls selling every imaginable piece of junk. If you were looking for a component for a thirty-year-old games console or wanted to buy a box of motherboards for five dollars (some of which might actually work), the basement was the place for you. On Levels 1, 2 and 3, pushy sellers touted laptops, PCs, fake iPhones, real iPads and just about any gadget you could name (and a few that you couldn’t) at half the price of the malls. Levels 4 and 5 were the place for Nintendo cartridges loaded with fifty games, PS3 and X-Box titles selling for cents and copies of any operating system you wanted – complete with fake seals of authenticity. Nothing had a price tag, everything was up for negotiation, and the air buzzed from dawn to dusk with the sound of haggling.
Hack rode the escalators past all the noise, casting his eyes over LCD screens showing a cornucopia of images and messages written in Cantonese, English, Mandarin, and often a mix of all three. He breathed a sigh of relief. For most people, the incessant chatter, computer noise and harsh lighting would have been headache-inducing, but not to him.
This was home.
Level 6 was his ultimate destination – the repairs and upgrades area of the GC. A customer could start at the bottom of the building and ride the escalators to the top, picking up components on the way, and have them assembled into any machine he or she desired. Level 6 was markedly less noisy than the other levels and divided up into little cubicles like an office building. Some of these cubicles contained little more than a workbench and a few tools. Others were crammed with spare components, discs, and shelves groaning with manuals. Each cubicle had a technician, and to get a space here you had to be a kind of magician at building, repairing or upgrading computers – a master of your craft.
Hack’s friend, Jonesey, had a cubicle at the far corner of the floor and it was one of the untidy ones. This was Jonesey’s work and sometimes living space (mainly when he’d had an argument with his mum and she threw him out of her flat). He was a pudgy kid (and getting pudgier by the day, due to a diet that consisted mainly of McDonald’s and chocolate bars) whose long, greasy black hair wasn’t made any better by the fact he cut it himself with a pair of paper-scissors. Jonesey wasn’t a big one for personal appearance.
“Ni hao,” Hack said as he pushed a stack of magazines off a swivel chair, flopped down and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The air con on the sixth floor just never seemed to work well enough in the summer.
“Speak English,” Jonesey replied. He spoke with a thick American accent although, as with Hack, Cantonese was his first language and he’d never set foot outside Hong Kong. Jonesey was only a year older than Hack, but he’d dropped out of school at the age of fourteen – he was making too much money building and selling his own computer systems to waste time away from the GC. That Friday afternoon, he had a laptop balanced on his knees and was working at its exposed innards with a tiny screwdriver.
Hack noticed a brand-new LCD TV hanging from the back wall of the cubicle. It was playing a Blu-ray: some blockbuster that wouldn’t be released in the cinema for another month.
“What’s wrong with the picture?” Hack asked, squinting at the distorted colours.
Jonesey grabbed a pair of plastic glasses from the bench and tossed them over. “3D version.”
Hack looked at the TV through the specs as a spaceship seemed to fly off the screen at him with perfect clarity. “Cool.”
With a groan, Jonesey threw the laptop on the desk. “I can’t get this piece of junk to work.”
Hack got up and walked over to the machine. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Someone spilled a glass of Coke over the keyboard.”
“That will cause issues.”
Jonesey smiled persuasively. “Think you could…you know…use the magic on it?”
Hack frowned and looked back at the cubicle entrance. “I don’t know. This place is too public. I’ve been seeing people following me. I think someone has found out about…the thing...”
Jonesey punched him on the arm. “Getting paranoid, man! Have you been playing too much Left 4 Dead again? Survival horror always freaks you out.”
“I know what I saw, Jonesey.”
“Come on! No one is watching! Look at this place No one cares!” He put his hands together like he was praying. “It’s for that girl who works at the Asus stall on 3. She is going to be soooo grateful if I fix it.”
Hack pointed to a sauce stain on his friend’s T-shirt. “Maybe you’d have more luck if you washed your clothes for once.”
“Who has the time? Pleeeeease!”
Hack groaned.
“You owe me.”
Taking a final look back at the walkway, Hack crouched and placed his right hand on the exposed innards of the laptop. Jonesey leaned in, fascinated.
“This is my favourite bit.”
“Shut up!”
“Sorry.”
Focusing all his attention, Hack pressed his hand against the motherboard. Blue electricity leaped around his fingertips and licked the components. Hack closed his eyes…
...and became one with the machine. He sensed the data stored in the hard drive, the dormant operating system, damaged chips. Mentally flying through the computer, Hack visualized its processors healing, repairing and becoming healthy again – like a body mending itself.
He opened his eyes, removed his hand and pressed the on button. The screen flickered into life and Windows started to boot. Jonesey threw an arm around him.
“You’re a genius! A complete freak, but a genius!”
Hack shushed him. “Keep it down!”
“Sorry, Tony Stark!” Jonesey said as he closed the laptop. “Forgot it has to be a big secret!”
“Have you looked at the net recently? Beijing is talking about registering kids with virus-related powers. So is Washington. I think that’s who’s been watching me. Some government organization.”
“Chinese? American?”
Hack shrugged. “Who knows?”
Jonesey snapped his fingers and turned to his desktop PC. “Check this out,” he said, and brought up a series of saved images and web grabs. “Been doing some research for you.”
Hack leaned in as his friend flicked through the pages in rapid succession: images of military personnel walking alongside a group of teenagers, a grainy photograph of an aircraft carrier, satellite photos of a base in a desert, and endless blog entries on the subject of the fall virus, kids with superhuman powers and an organization calling itself HIDRA.
“HIDRA,” he read aloud. “What’s that?”
Jonesey sniggered. “Stands for Hyper-Infectious Disease Response Agency. Can you believe it? The UN created it ten years ago to investigate virus outbreaks. It was intended as a scientific operation, but it got taken over by the military pretty fast. This guy’s name keeps coming up.” Jonesey flicked to an image of a hard-faced man with a crew cut so short he was practically bald. The man looked directly at the camera – blue eyes flashing with a kind of fury. “Major Bright. He used to work for HIDRA but went rogue – sounds like a real lunatic. HIDRA arrested him for crimes against humanity or something, but he disappeared six months ago, presumed dead. Word is he’s alive but in hiding. There’s, like, a gazillion conspiracy blogs about this guy and HIDRA.”
Now Hack laughed. “Yeah. All rumour, hearsay and pure fiction.”
“No smoke without fire,” Jonesey said. “In fact—”
He stopped as a commotion broke out near the escalators. One of the stallholders was screaming at a stranger dressed like an American tourist. The stallholder had snatched a pair of sunglasses from the man’s head and brandished them in the air. There was some kind of micro-device attached to one arm – a camera? The stallholder thought so.
“You like to take pictures, huh? You spying on me? Who you from?”
The tourist held up his hands and backed towards the escalators. The stallholder and his friends had other ideas, however, moving in to block his escape route.
“I said, who you from?” the little man said, jabbing a finger in the tall American’s chest.
Hack and Jonesey watched this from the cubicle opening. “Another corporate spy,” Jonesey said with a shake of his head. “We speed up their systems, fix glitches in their software, then they come down here and try to steal our tricks. Goddamned big business. And they call us pirates!”
“I don’t think that’s what this guy is after.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve seen him before.” Hack hadn’t been sure at first because the clothes and haircut were different, but now he was: the “tourist” was the coat guy he’d seen four times on the MTR underground system. “I’m out of here.”
He moved to the back of the stall, planning to jump the cubicle wall and exit via the emergency stairwell just a few metres away. If he was lucky, the fake tourist wouldn’t even notice him leave.
“Wait!” Jonesey said, grabbing his arm. “What about tomorrow night? The IFC infiltration, remember?”
IFC infiltration – typical Jonesey, making everything sound like a stealth mission. Hack had almost forgotten his promise to help with the Goodware Inc. issue.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I should be laying low. I’m going to keep my head down in Tai-O for the rest of the holidays. Give it a month, okay?”
“Aw, come on!” Jonesey pleaded. “Goodware stole my game and now they’re shutting up shop and shipping out to Europe! If we don’t hit them this weekend, there won’t be any evidence left by next week!”
Hack looked back at his tail – the stallholders were still keeping him occupied. Jonesey got down on his knees and did the praying thing again.
“Okay, okay,” Hack relented. “But if I see anyone following me, we abort. Right?”
“Right!” Jonesey said as he went over the wall. “8.30 p.m. tomorrow at the usual place...”
But Hack was already through the fire escape door and two flights down...
2
Hack’s “power” was a result of the meteor shower six months before. Or, at least, that was his explanation.
It had been an unusually warm March night, so he and Danny had run down to the beach after a day’s fishing and plunged into the sea, screaming and hollering against the water’s coldness. They swam for a while and then floated on their backs in the stillness, bodies quickly adjusting to the temperature. A shooting star (in fact a meteor burning up as it hit the earth’s upper atmosphere, Hack knew from his science classes) streaked across the sky from east to west. This sight, although spectacular, was quite common.
What happened next was not.
A multitude of shooting stars lit up the night in the full spectrum of colours: whites, reds, oranges, even blues. Sometimes the paths of the exploding meteor fragments would intersect at a point, creating a larger dot of light that quickly extinguished.
“It’s like the stars are falling,” Danny said, floating by Hack’s side.
“Yeah,” he agreed, although he well knew that the light show was merely debris from a larger meteor storm that had destroyed itself several days before. There’d been panic that the storm was headed straight for earth, a possible extinction level event. Then the storm simply collided with itself – the result of a lucky burst of solar radiation, both NASA and the Chinese National Space Administration claimed. There were plenty of other explanations buzzing around online, however: from nuclear missiles being fired into the storm, to stories of kids with superhuman powers being used to deflect its course.
It was hard to know what to believe.
Hack didn’t mention any of this to Danny, however. He could talk to Jonesey and the guys at GC about all of that, but Danny was different. He was a village kid who knew the alleyways through the seafood markets and the best fishing holes like Jonesey knew his way around the innards of a PC. Danny would go to work on the fishing boats, settle down with one of the girls from the market and probably stay in Tai-O for the rest of his life. Hack, in contrast, was already on the move. Increasingly he spent his free time at the GC or the other tech-dens in the city. In a couple of years there would be exams, university and opportunities that would take him far from the sleepy village. They lay on their backs in the sea that night, watching the light show above them, each processing the event differently.
Eventually, the cold got the better of them and they moved their numb arms and legs back to shore where a crowd of people had gathered to stare at the sky.
“You boys ought to be careful,” one old man called after them as they pushed their way through and went to their piles of clothes. “It’s t
oo cold for swimming.”
Picking up his jeans, Hack turned to say something smart, but he didn’t get a word out. Pins and needles shot up his arm, as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. Looking down, he saw blue veins of electricity shooting from the iPhone in the pocket of his jeans, along his fingers and up to his shoulder. For a brief moment Hack’s mind flooded with an unstoppable gibberish flow of data.
Then he hit the sand...
He was vaguely aware of being carried from the beach back to his grandfather’s house… Of being laid on his bed and a doctor standing over him… Of noticing the hairs along his forearm standing on end…
He awoke just before dawn, feeling thirstier than he ever had in his life. After staggering to the kitchen and downing three glasses of water in quick succession, he returned to the bedroom and found his iPhone (in fact a pretty good copy he’d bought six months before) lying by the reading light. The white back casing was blackened, as if it had been plugged into a power supply with too much voltage. Wiping the carbon residue away with his thumb, he sat on the side of the bed and tried holding the buttons in the reset sequence, to no effect. Then he recalled the final seconds before he collapsed at the beach: the data that burst through his mind, almost as if he had been linked to the machine.
Feeling just a little silly, Hack held the iPhone in both hands and closed his eyes. He concentrated on making some kind of connection; on plugging into the machine somehow.
For a moment nothing happened…
Then images began to form behind his eyelids, just flashes at first, growing in complexity. He sensed the internal flash drive, practically burned out by the earlier power surge. He imagined it coming to life again, and sure enough the process began. Within a few seconds the machine felt warm in his hands and he opened his eyes. The screen was illuminated and the usual apps were present.
He’d repaired it.
Over the next few days Hack excitedly experimented with other pieces of electronic equipment around the house. In terms of computing power, it didn’t come much smaller than a phone, but Hack was mindful that his first experience of connection with the machine had knocked him off his feet. Therefore, he took it slowly, trying to connect with simpler items such as the television and the Blu-ray player before he moved onto more complex things.