Code Breakers: Alpha

by Colin F. Barnes

  Gerry’s mind folded in on itself as questions about his life, his birth, his mortality, and even his species crashed together like a supercollider. Was he even human? Was he a kind of cyborg? Is that what Enna was getting at? The data from these questions flashed by in nanoseconds, discounting theories and branching into hundreds of lines of inquiries. It made so much sense now. Explained how he could analyse data in the way he could and build algorithms that no one else could.

  - Mags. We need to get off Seca’s network. We’re being watched.

  -It’s because of Seca’s network that I was able to free myself. But we do need to remove ourselves from here. There’s a multiple terabyte demon AI travelling about the network. It’s heading for City Earth. It’ll destroy everything. The one heading for the president was just a decoy, a lure. We need to get back to the Dome, to their internal systems.

  - Can’t we access a City Earth node from here? How’s their defences?

  - Assessing.

  “Not so strong. Not so much fight after all. It never ceases to surprise me how quickly your species gives up with the introduction of a little pain,” Seca said as another bolt of electricity blasted into Gerry’s nervous system. This time the attack was on his chest, and he bucked violently against his straps. He thought his spine would snap as his muscles involuntarily tensed towards the source of the pain. He bit down on the gag, refusing to give in, and retreated into his mind.

  Gerry analysed the flow of data as Mags pinged a cloaked query through the Meshwork to the Dome’s system. The request returned, bringing a log file with it: nothing. No firewall. It had been breached, leaving City Earth’s systems wide open to attack.

  - That must have been the work of Architeuthis or Jasper, Gerry said. We need to repair the damage, get some kind of defence up. Can we access their defence servers?

  - We can piggyback the demon AI, but the tunnel through the Meshwork is littered with scanners. We’ll be spotted. And City Earth’s internal systems aren’t on any network. They need direct access.

  - How is the demon going to get in, then… Of course! Jasper! He’s the inside man. Let me take a look at the AI.

  - Patching.

  Hot breath breezed across his ear. “I sense what you’re doing, Gerry. Frantically trying to understand. Trying to find a way of stopping me. But just look at it. Look at my creation.”

  Mags and Gerry, now together as one, dropped their consciousness into the river of Meshwork traffic within Seca’s network, and then Gerry saw it: Seca’s AI. It was elegant: infinite loops within infinite loops of self-executing programmes. All wrapped up into a single intelligent, and utterly malicious, software demon. It was as if it were a living thing. Myriad subroutines managed resources while others processed wildly complex simulations. The sheer amount of data it was getting through was unlike anything Gerry had seen before. It sat within the Meshwork in its entirety like a black hole. Nothing escaped its gravity pull—including Gerry and Mags. Seca must have seen everything they had done since the day his lottery numbers came through.

  This was it: the genesis, the nexus, the very thing behind the attacks and the subterfuge. But how to stop it? A flood of junk data filled Gerry’s mind, sending bolts of pain through his brain. He couldn’t stop the relentless torrent of images, audio, video.

  “That’s it. You’ve seen enough,” Seca said. Then Gerry heard the clink of metal tools.

  - Shut it out, Mags. Cut the traffic!

  - Activating firewalls. Disconnecting. Wait, there’s a problem.

  - What kind of problem?

  Gerry squeezed his eyes shut as the pain increased.

  - It knows… it knows what we are.

  - I don’t care. Disconnect.

  - I can’t. Seca has bridged the connection. I can’t stop it.

  With great effort, Gerry envisioned the network and flow of traffic, focused on the connection between him and the AI, and coded a routing program, sending the data back out to the Meshwork. The demon AI responded instantly, re-routing around Gerry’s roadblock, and so it went for minutes: Gerry spinning code, executing programs on-the-fly, the AI matching him, beating everything Gerry had. Then he realised. He and Mags might be as one, but they could work independently.

  - Mags. Funnel the AI to Old Grey. She’s on the Meshwork; I feel her.

  While Mags shut down the computers and overloaded the various routers on the network so that the AI could only go straight to Old Grey, Gerry coded a simulation of himself. A virtual avatar representing himself within the network. He dropped the avatar into the flow of traffic and lured the demon AI. He knew Old Grey wasn’t powerful enough to contain it, but she’d surely slow it down.

  - Route is clear, executing virtual Gerry.

  The demon AI knew what Gerry was trying to do, but wasn’t given any other option. As quick as it tried to reboot the systems and routers on the Meshwork to give itself alternative paths, Gerry closed them down.

  Sweat dripped from his forehead, covering his face. He tasted the salt on his lips and gripped his fists around the metal restraints as it took all his strength to concentrate and keep out the tendril-like programs of the AI.

  A familiar presence appeared on the network. Old Grey responded to Gerry’s request, and somehow he appealed to its curiosity, if such a thing existed within a computer being. It opened its ports and whatever it had in its systems, and the demon AI jumped at it entirely.

  The Meshwork was silent then. Just the usual hum of low-level hackers looking for exploits and being casually rebuffed by router firewalls.

  Outside of the network, and in real space, a clapping noise echoed around whatever room Gerry was in. He opened his eyes. Vision was returning to him, now that Mags was directing the NanoStems, but it wasn’t perfect. Large amorphous blobs surrounded by halos of light hovered about him. By the echoing, he guessed he was in a room with metal floors and walls. The chill from beneath and around his wrists told him he was on a metallic bed of some sort.

  The pain from his burned eye throbbed like a jackhammer into his skull.

  The clapping continued until he felt the force of the expelled air right next to his ear.

  “Who’s a clever little thing? You’re an intriguing man, Gerry. Some would say the Family’s finest creation, though I wouldn’t. You’re flawed. Like the rest of us.”

  “Who is us exactly?”

  A hand gripped his face, and a cloth wiped the sweat and tears from his good eye. After a few blinks, sharpness returned. Staring at him was something he could only describe as a robot’s face. Sure, there was skin and eyes and all the rest of it, but they weren’t human eyes, and behind the thin skin, bundles of wires and chips protruded from a brain. What human parts were there had been so spliced with technology that Gerry couldn’t tell where the person finished and the tech started.

  “You could consider me v1.0 Meta-human Beta. They called me Seca. Do you know why?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “My ‘parents’ once had a dog. They loved it very much. Until the day it got run over and broke all its legs and damaged its brain and central nervous system. He was the first to receive the groundbreaking technology that hybridised an animal brain and an intelligent computer program. The dog’s name was Case. When he died, they wanted a new experiment, and I was born shortly after—imperfectly. It’s an anagram. Just like I’m an anagram of a human and AI. Just like you are, Mr v2.0. Actually, that’s not accurate. You must be version 50 by now. You see, I was a massive failure. Psychotic, they said. Unstable. So they dumped me, but I built myself back up, improved my software. I was better than anything they could ever build, including you.”

  “So why, then, are you stuck out here, hiding underground like a louse?”

  The muscles in Seca’s mouth twitched, exposing sharpened canine teeth and rotten molars.

  “You think City Earth is a paradise? It’s a prison. Nothing more than an experiment. You’re all rats, running around to serve them. When they
completed the Cataclysm, when they rid the world of governments and regulations, they built the Dome and the people in their own vision. They think they’re gods!”

  “And you think bringing the world to its knees under another war is going to change anything? Are you so desperate for mummy and daddy’s approval you would kill thousands of innocent people?”

  “Hah!” Seca spat with incredulity and stepped back, allowing more light in the room. “Innocent! Nothing on this earth is innocent. We’re all just random collections of particles and energy. That was the secret to all of this. Understanding that information is just energy. Merging technology with the human consciousness was a trivial action once the mechanics were understood. Now, even street vendors are making their own. But the governments wouldn’t allow it. Transhumanism was outlawed, but they didn’t bank on the Family, and their resources, and their convictions. That’s at least one thing I got from them: conviction.”

  “You’re mad. Forgotten what it is to be human. Don’t you have any shred of empathy left in you?”

  “It died when they made me this.”

  Gerry squirmed and raised his head. He was alone in the room with Seca. The walls and floor were metal. A few metres to his left-hand side was a door. Seca’s body, although covered by a baggy suit, was that of a withered, hunched twig. His face—entirely artificial—showed no age, but his hands were twisted with arthritis and muscular degeneration. Why hadn’t he replaced those as well? Maybe he was clinging to his humanity after all. But the glaring, mechanised apertures of his eyes hid any compassion that might still be inside.

  Gerry looked at his restraints, then the door.

  Seca noticed and smiled with the sharp whirr of servos. As advanced as he was in terms of technology, he hadn’t quite managed to replicate a sincere smile. Instead it looked like a grimace, as if smiling was painful.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Gerry. You’ll die here. After I’ve opened you up and had a look at you more closely. You and your friends have played with things beyond your capability. But now you’re here, I’m sure I can make use of you and that clever little AIA of yours.”

  “What have you done with Petal? The girl I was with.”

  “She’s dead. As is that pathetic old man that sold you out for a software upgrade.”

  Gabe’s betrayal hurt like a dagger to the chest, but paled into insignificance at the thought of Petal dead. Gerry slumped against the metal bed and shook with rage.

  The anger built within Gerry like a high-pressured gas canister, squeezing everything else out, so all that remained was fury. He instructed Mags to overload the nearest node within Seca’s network. If he was as hooked in as he appeared, he’d need Seca’s network. Gerry could sense the flow of traffic from him, but couldn’t penetrate the encryption, no matter how hard he analysed it for weakness. This was one battle he’d have to do the hard way.

  - There’s a nexus beyond the firewall, scanning for weakness, Mags said.

  Gerry thrashed in his restraints, but they held firm. Then, as Seca removed a tray of medical tools from the side of the table, he noticed the restraints had no obvious mechanical fastening. They were electronic.

  Seca hovered over the tray of sharp, steel implements. They weren’t even clean. Dark brown stains and spots of rust covered their surfaces. He’d clearly done this kind of work before. A swell of panic added to Gerry’s rage, and focusing his mind on Mags, he let himself drop into the flow of code. He lost all feeling of his physical body and felt as if he and Mags were a single entity again. He spotted the node hosting the firewall and crashed it, overloading its security and breaching it through an open port.

  When he scanned it, he noticed it was the same port that Seca’s encrypted data was using. Once beyond the firewall, he closed the port behind him, shutting Seca out of his own network.

  Up ahead, four large AI-driven servers sorted data, processed billions of instructions and, on sensing him, sent out packets of malicious code. It stuck to him like a virus, the code mutating too fast for him to keep up with. Together, he and Mags coded a temporary shield. Held off the virus. Gerry then had an idea, but didn’t know if it would kill him, Mags, or both in the process. Only one way to kill systems like these—an EMP. He had to fry the CPUs physically, but his consciousness was in the network. What would happen to him? Would it kill him, leaving his physical body just an inanimate piece of meat?

  He was aware of something happening to his body. Skin being cut. Rough metal digging into bone. And laughing, Seca’s sick, self-satisfied laugh as he cut into Gerry’s skull.

  Knowing Petal was dead and the demon AI would soon be in Jasper’s possession, he didn’t have much to lose. Seca would carve him up like a dead animal in a lab anyway, so he decided.

  - Mags, bring up a schematic of the power grid.

  - Processing.

  A couple of seconds later, the image of the power layout was in Gerry’s mind. He sent himself through a series of switches and gateways until he was at the node controlling the power supply. Seca had been lazy. The encryption algorithm on the power supply was an old one. Gerry hacked it within seconds. He quickly coded a new set of instructions for the power supply, increasing both amperage and voltage to deadly levels, deadly for tech at least. The code spun out of his mind as natural as breathing; he passed the software to the power supply’s CPU and waited before executing the program.

  The scraping against his skull increased, and he felt a saw raking back and forth as Seca determined to reach his brain.

  Gerry could tell Seca was trying to figure out what he was doing as Seca breached his temporary barrier in the firewall, but unlike Gerry, it didn’t seem as if he was as adept at multitasking. Still, Seca’s code gained on him, battering against his shields.

  So close now, in both cyberspace and real space, Seca was hacking into him, taking him apart. The viruses mutated again and grew in strength, but before they could take him down, Gerry executed the program and waited as a massive dump of electricity flooded the physical circuits that ran the servers.

  An explosion blasted out. Waves of power vibrated through the walls of his room and into the board on which he was held.

  Then silence.

  Something hot trickled down his face and onto his lips: blood. Something slipped from his head and clattered onto the floor, followed by a heavy thud. Down to his right, the slumped body of Seca twitched in the dark gloom. Gerry pushed himself up on the table and managed to remove his wrists from the restraints that now lay open. He turned to his left; the door hung ajar. It seemed the EMP took out most of their security systems.

  Swinging his legs off the metal bed made him vomit onto the floor. It was mostly bile and spit. Within the pool he saw a number of the writhing, black blobs: NanoStems. When he stood up, he realised what a job they’d done, as there was no pain in his ankle, and he stumbled around the bed to Seca’s body. He was still, but his chest continued to rise and fall.

  It took a while for him to accurately judge distances now that his right eye was ruined. He tentatively touched it and winced as a stab of pain crashed into his head. The agony fuelled his vengeance. He leant down, picked up the serrated blade that had just seconds ago scraped against his skull, and sliced it across Seca’s throat until blood welled up in the wound.

  From an internal speaker, Seca spoke. “Carve me up all you like! My consciousness will live on. I’ll be one with the network.”

  “Screw you!”

  The rage bubbled over. He stabbed at Seca again, this time in the chest, then the heart, the lungs, the stomach, the kidneys. He kept stabbing until he screamed and the lactic acid in his arm muscles prevented him from slicing at the dead meat anymore.

  He slumped backwards, tears rushing down his face.

  The blade shook in his hand, now entirely covered in dark red blood. The room looked like a slaughterhouse. The stink made him retch over and over as he crawled away on hands and knees.

  When he reached the door, h
e pulled himself up on the handle and shuffled out into the corridor. He felt entirely alone—again. Mags wasn’t responding, and his brain felt like mush. Coherent thoughts were slow coming, and he even had trouble thinking of his name. How much had he lost in the EMP? It was too difficult to understand right now. All he could think of was escape. Had to find a way out, find a way of stopping… what was his name? It wouldn’t come, but he knew there was a man at home waiting for something, to deliver something, and it was up to him to stop it.

  Chapter 18

  For what seemed like hours or days, Gerry—for his brain managed to dredge his name up from the murky depths—shuffled through the dark corridors of Seca’s sanctuary. He didn’t recognise any of it. Even the way he’d come in was lost to his foggy memory.

  He knew he must be getting close, however. A rumble from above shook the metal walls, and he shuffled towards it as best he could, climbing access ladders to higher levels and walking down yet more corridors. Some were filled with the inanimate bodies of Seca’s guards. It seemed none were wholly human. It occurred to him that there were probably more cyborgs, robots and transcendents than human beings in the world now. Maybe even he didn’t count? And yet he was still walking.

  I must be human, then, he thought. I’m a human. I’m a human. He rumbled the thought around his head until it became a mantra, the rhythm of the syllables matching his lurching strides.

  A metallic grating noise, followed by a loud rush of air blasted down from above him. It was dusk out, but a strong white light flickered across the hole in the roof, blinding him in its brilliance. A shadow appeared in the glare and dropped down a rope.

  Gerry dived out of the way as a humanoid—for he couldn’t be sure what it was; nothing was sure anymore—landed with a thud. It was a female shape, with tall pink hair… so familiar. A word tried to form on his lips as he pressed them together.

  She spun, shining a torch in his eyes, and he scuttled back into the shadows.