Under the Flickering Light

by Russ Linton

  He’d stopped, face pressed against the glass. When the guard pushed him, M@ti watched a feverish intensity come over her friend. Any doubt she’d had about Knuckles starting the fight earlier was erased.

  He’d hesitated in Times Square. Soon after, he’d laid into Livingstone with little pause. The way he looked now, she could envision him barreling from the trunk like a savage dog.

  He wasn’t so much glowering at the guard, however. More at the guard’s sword. She was getting worried.

  “Come on,” M@ti said, tensing as she put an arm around him and led him away.

  Lembas hadn’t so much as paused and they rushed to catch up, guards on their heels. He’d started talking again, and M@ti tried to latch on to his train of thought.

  “...that’s why you’re here,” Lembas said. “We want you to help us figure out the latest piece of the puzzle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This Loadi entity. He’s the key.”

  Wonderful. One more piece of leverage she’d had stripped away. These guys must’ve gotten more information from the Smaug dump than they’d told everybody. They pushed through a set of doors at the end of the long corridor and M@ti’s stride slowed.

  She’d thought maybe that dizzying sense she used to get when she stood in the concrete canyons of Manhattan had been lost forever, but she was wrong. She strained her neck to take in the massive cavern.

  Lights strung above and below ran for more stories than she cared to count. A metal gantry extended out toward a suspended platform. There, an odd collection of circular pedestals spiraled toward a central workspace. White-jacketed figures worked there.

  Drawn forward, M@ti stepped toward the gantry.

  Lembas lightly touched her shoulder and drew her back. He indicated the railing. “We only allow a certain number of personnel there at a time.”

  Sections of railing were completely missing. The structure itself, she noticed, had been twisted and only roughly placed on girders embedded in the rock wall. Joints securing it were messy globs of metal and rust.

  “What’s it for? Did you make all this?”

  “Like I said, this was her home. That piece of it used to be halfway across the country. Took quite a few generations of Enigma’s earlier followers to get this back here, piece by piece.”

  “What does it do?”

  Lembas sighed. “From all of our research, this was a crucial part of her transcendence.”

  “And Loadi? You think he transcended or whatever?” M@ti didn’t want to help the guy who’d just drugged and kidnapped her, but whatever happened to Chroma could help her make sense of the highly sophisticated environment the last Loadi encounter had pulled her into.

  “I’ll need you to tell us that.”

  As they left the chamber, M@ti caught a glimpse of crimson robes in the group working near the platform’s center. Daemon. As almost disarmingly friendly as Lembas was, whatever that zealot was doing over there couldn’t be good.

  35

  Lembas led them toward the windowed lab and Knuckles seemed more than happy to be once again close to a pair of specs. Once there, Lembas waved his guards away. The one with the sword that Knuckles had been eyeing appeared reluctant to leave.

  “What are they gonna do? Where are they gonna go?” Lembas asked, spreading his arms to indicate the dismal underground bunker. “Right?” He gave M@ti a pleading look.

  “Sure. Whatever,” M@ti said.

  Knuckles kept his face to the glass and condensation collected near his mouth. A jaw clench was the only response she saw. Lembas seemed satisfied, and he shooed the guard away who gave Knuckles a final scowl before leaving.

  The hacker king had been too eager to accept her weak response, too quick to assume he had them at his mercy. While M@ti figured he was probably right, she’d keep her options open. She checked her background script still probing the bunker’s connection. Not much longer, she’d be in.

  “Listen. I need something only you have,” Lembas said.

  M@ti watched the guards stroll away. She checked the hackers at work behind the glass. Glanced into an open dorm. Not another woman in sight.

  “If you’re looking for a hacker queen for your little underground empire, you’re doing a shitty job of courting.”

  “Not that. No, nothing like that. We’re celibate. I just—”

  “Celibate?” Even Knuckles turned as M@ti laughed loud enough that the departing guards stopped in their tracks. “And you’re not the religious fanatics?”

  Lembas pinched the bridge of his nose. “There’s a history. None of us has...well...since our founder made the declaration.”

  “Explains a lot.” Knuckles stared after the guards until they finally disappeared. He’d peeled himself away from admiring the Nexus gear and stood leaning against the glass, his arms folded.

  “Here’s the deal,” Lembas said. “I might think Kraken and Clarity are nuts, but they’re right that something big is about to go down. Bigger than just the space launch. Something big right here on earth and soon. This Loadi has been the only variable we can’t quite make sense of.”

  “What makes you think I know more?”

  “That Smaug infiltration.” He gave a low, appreciative whistle. “The data alone, well, that’s pretty much all we have on him. The tool he wields...”

  “You mean the cane?”

  “That thing is a direct instance of the very root system we’re trying so hard to gain control over.”

  This was good to know. A piece of that underlying architecture Kraken had been going on about. What wasn’t good to know was that Lembas perhaps knew everything about that particular encounter. No sense in pretending otherwise.

  “Why didn’t you try to take the cane from me in the Nexus?”

  “Aside from being busy running for our lives, nobody could reach you. All we got were the logs which came pouring out after you’d been shunted from his quarantine room. That place was off server. Offline completely. Loadi seems to exist there and only there but can manifest in the Nexus worlds at will.”

  M@ti thought it over. Loadi was clearly doing things which simple hacks couldn’t explain. More than entering the Nexus at will, he could log from anywhere and from any time — that one, she didn’t understand.

  She checked her display. The probe she’d set in motion had reported back. She’d be through the encryption on the bunker’s signal in the next fifteen minutes, then she’d be in a better position to bargain.

  “You ever hack your way into the core?” Lembas shook his head at her question. “You said that’s your plan. Hack in there and control the whole Collective. Let me use the cane and find a way in. I’ll take a Smaug and you can have all the data you ever wanted.”

  “Two problems. This Loadi is watching you. He appears to be something on an entirely different level. Look, if you’re Sauron, all you gotta do is leave the Nazgul at Mount Doom. The ring, the hobbit, it all comes to you. This Loadi dude, he gets that. It’s dangerous.”

  “Sargul what?” M@ti asked.

  “The former human kings enslaved to Sauron,” Knuckles said. “They go off in search for the One Ring to secure their demon master’s power and that ring is taken by a hobbit who wants to drop it into the volcano where it was forged.” Lembas’ face lit up with excitement and he readied a fist bump which Knuckles completely ignored. “I thought you read books, M@ti.”

  “Sure, my magic ring book was right next to the hardbound copy of Acta Astronautica.”

  “Right, because those stupid fantasies couldn’t possibly teach you anything useful.”

  M@ti sighed. She’d fucked up, she got it. But she was starting to miss the happy-go-lucky Knuckles she used to know.

  She turned back to Lembas. Thirteen minutes remained on her display for the connection hack. They’d already wasted two of those talking about magic bullshit. “If the cane is so important, why not show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” She tapped on the glass to the lab where much
of their work seemed to be taking place. “We can plan something together.”

  Lembas shrugged. “A tour? Fine. Keep in mind though, I can only accept one answer from you.” He paused in the doorway. “Also, I’ve already calculated how long it will take for you to break the current encryption. I’ve set it to change every ten minutes.”

  M@ti twisted her lip.

  Knuckles bowed and swept his arm toward the laboratory door. “After you, Boromir.”

  The lab extended farther than M@ti first imagined. The ceiling was normal height, but the rows of computer equipment stretched into a shroud of darkness blinking with status lights. Hidden exhaust fans roared as they struggled to displace the heat and force it up the long trip to the surface.

  This wasn’t Collective gear, not even close. M@ti was so used to having to switch on an app or tweak her interface to find the technology which had been invisibly embedded in the streets, the hovs, and the citizens. Here though, in this cave of lost wonders, the computers spat warmth and gales of exhaust. Visceral. Real.

  “Quite a sight, huh?” Lembas shouted. The grin on his face indicated her fascination hadn’t escaped his attention.

  M@ti checked her enthusiasm. “I suppose. I mean, I was a trash collector, so I can appreciate it.”

  “This is the most raw computing power that exists outside the Collective. Used to be fun to brag about the hash rates and processing metrics until we started having to make them up. Then it just became a joke.”

  “Can you log into Fivefold Bushido?” Knuckles shouted, fixated now on a hacker strapped into a stolen Nexus rig.

  Lembas stopped, mid-tour guide mode. “What’s that?”

  “Nexus game,” M@ti said.

  “We’ve got more important work to do here, but we do have a few games. There’s an instance of Dwarf Fortress which has been running for about a century now!”

  A hacker looked up from his work at a terminal. “Ninety-five years, six months, fifteen days.” He seamlessly switched from a screen full of code to an infinitely more cluttered screen full of random characters, some of which appeared to be moving.

  Knuckles crowded close. “That’s not a game. That’s a crash screen.”

  “Gaming isn’t the point of any of this equipment. We’ve got over a million zettabytes of data hodled here.”

  “That much can’t all be about Chroma,” M@ti said, keeping an eye on Knuckles whose disappointment had morphed into a barely corked rage. He looked like he might want to shove the hacker worker face first into the dwarf game and see if he could log him in Nexus style.

  “Well, you could say the Collective is her,” Lembas continued. “We’ve sucked up everything we can and we’re still just scratching at the surface.” He handed his own tablet to the seated worker who accepted it with pure reverence.

  “Smaug’s horde?” the worker asked, his fingers trembling.

  Lembas grinned and nodded.

  M@ti had never tried to so much as guess at the size of the Nexus. Individual user account data alone had to be absurd. A million zettabytes only scratching the surface?

  “Where does the Collective store it all?”

  “You’ve seen the main feeds.” Lembas moved to a terminal and picked up an antique QWERTY keyboard. His fingers clacked across the keys. “There are repositories located all over the world. Quite a few are underwater for venting heat and making them impossible to get to without a pressurized submersible. They have entire space stations exchanging and collecting data. She realized a long time ago that her ‘people’ didn’t need to live in oxygen-rich environments.”

  “Or this planet,” M@ti added.

  Lembas entered a second string of commands. Cameras from the Mars feed filled the lab’s monitors. “That leads to the second problem with your plan and why we’ve never hacked the core.”

  “Why?” M@ti asked.

  “Hacking the core requires a direct cable connection.” Lembas raised his eyebrows and waited. “As such, it’s always been kept in those inhospitable places squishy humans can’t go.”

  “Damn,” she whispered. Lembas acknowledged her realization with a rueful smile. “The core’s been relocated to Mars.”

  “Only Chroma herself could access it remotely or, maybe, that cane.”

  “When did you find out about the Mars base?”

  “We hitched a ride on your hitched ride, M@ti.” She started to ask how they even knew she’d done it and his answer was too obvious. “TrueSight’s completely open source. We generally monitor all usage pretty closely. You, closer than most. Your encounters with Loadi though, those are nothing but gubbish.”

  “Gubbish,” said the seated hacker. He switched from the program they were calling a game to another screen of random characters which didn’t look all that different.

  “So before you started spying on me, you didn’t know they were on Mars?”

  “We suspected. She kept shifting her processing power toward the orbital stations, and of course we knew about the asteroid mining. It all pointed to a mission off planet.”

  “You just said earlier that the big event was going down right here on Earth though.”

  “They’re connected. All the data points that direction.”

  “I thought you didn’t try to read the future?”

  “The past, M@ti. That tells us why Chroma does what she does. She started focusing on the space program about the same time we detected an unexplained anomaly roaming the Nexus.”

  “Loadi,” M@ti said.

  “Bingo,” Lembas said.

  M@ti tried to take it all in. She looked toward Knuckles for help, but he’d moved to fawn over the Nexus rig, his foot tapping madly. Loadi was clearly a strain on the system. He was complex beyond any coder’s wildest dreams. The hunter himself had dreams, ambitions. He wanted to see the stars. He wanted to pursue a function he’d never been assigned. Why, if Chroma was responsible for all AI which came after her, why would she have made him?

  Lembas had the right idea with his examination of the past. M@ti could tell she was close. A few more pieces needed to fall into place. Once she’d figured things out, she’d need a way for her and Knuckles to get out of this hole because trusting her kidnapper seemed like a fundamental mistake.

  She wandered toward the server racks and ran a finger along the shelf, feeling the internal vibrations. Power supply, heat sinks, something was off, but it still ran. “I’ve been collecting junk for a while. Sometimes, I’ll come across an old relic, but they’re never operational.”

  “Much of it was already here,” Lembas stammered, annoyed at the shift in conversation. “The rest? Salvaged. Look, if you want a job, I’ll make room. It breaks our rules, but this cane is a game changer. We need it.”

  “How do you power all this?”

  Chatty Lembas was gone and she felt the impatience crank up a notch in his answer. “Turns out the Spencer guy who flew the original Black Beetle wasn’t useless. He rigged the original suit’s fusion core as a power source. This base, that old helicopter, they function on a similar design. But that isn’t important,” Lembas said.

  “The helicopter? The one used to carry parts here to reconstruct this little time capsule?”

  Lembas let the keyboard hang and tapped it impatiently on his thigh. “That last flew decades ago. Hell, I’m not even sure it still works. We’ve been meaning to salvage its power source for when this reactor dies, but it hasn’t yet. Let’s get back to Loadi. The cane.”

  “You said my encounters with Loadi were blocked. What about Times Square? Did you know he was there?”

  Lembas appeared intrigued. “Dead zone. There’s a significant air gap around several blocks. Nothing there worth trying to hack.”

  “There’s at least one connection,” she said.

  “Okay, so there’s a system or two we haven’t explored. Wardens make that place a bitch to access. Though, if we had the cane we could get into anywhere.”

  “Show me this Eric guy.”
>
  Lembas’ jaw flapped uselessly. Another argument died in a strangled curse. He jabbed at the keyboard with fierce purpose and when he was done, held it up to her as if to ask if her curiosity had finally been satisfied. This would be her final question.

  A man appeared on screen. Or boy, maybe, M@ti couldn’t say. Smooth cheeks gave him a cherubic appearance and his blue eyes looked both shrewd and innocent behind thin-framed glasses. This was definitely not somebody the Collective had ever taught any history about. She’d never seen him lurking in the background of the carefully edited lessons. Yet, she recognized him.

  “Is that him?” M@ti flailed at the air trying to get Knuckles’ attention. He peeled himself away from the Nexus rig and came over to her. “The kid from Times Square.”

  At the mention of Times Square, M@ti saw Knuckles’ arms tighten. He didn't’ speak, just slowly nodded.

  “What do you mean?” Lembas asked, his eyes tight lines behind his glasses.

  M@ti started to feel uncomfortable. “We saw him on screen. There was a party of some kind and that guy was kissing a robot.”

  Lembas’ gaze drifted to the ground and he placed the keyboard on a nearby table. The hacker at his station froze, already half-swiveled in his chair. Lembas walked ever so slowly toward M@ti, brushing a hand against the worker’s chair as he went by. Wordlessly, the hacker rose to his feet.

  Knuckles let his arms drop, hands ready. M@ti stepped closer to him. She remembered Deva badgering Lembas, calling him an AI lover and traitor. She’d step right into that sore spot and ground her boot.

  Lembas rubbed his chin and walked a tight circle.

  “M@ti, I need you to transfer this cane to me.” His pacing stopped, and he stared at her as if daring her to say the words on her lips.

  It was her last bargaining chip. Now that she understood it better, she didn't’ trust it in anyone’s hands.

  “No,” she said.

  His gaze dropped again, and he nodded rapidly. “All that data I mentioned the Collective has? Even all the known repositories combined can’t account for every bit of it. There are other storage facilities. Ones we don’t have direct access to without, well, ethical issues.” Lembas leaned forward and keyed a button on the workstation. “Tell Daemon to prep and send back the guards.”