Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  “What about you? Are you against it?” Kurt asked.

  Mary hesitated.

  “Don’t worry about offending me,” Kurt said. “I hate it all, too.”

  “What were you even thinking?” Mary asked. Her expression changed into one that came as close to anger as anything Kurt had seen from her. “Why would you make a microchip and put it inside children’s hands? There are plenty of ways to make money without corrupting children.”

  “I didn’t actually make any money out of it,” Kurt said. This was his automatic defence mechanism against any accusation of selling out, whether it came from someone else or from his own mind. “And I didn’t know they would put the Seed in kids. My niece Sabrina had to get one for school. Had to. Amos was the one who struck the deal with the education department to make it compulsory, not me. I had a fight with him about that, but nothing I said ever mattered.”

  “Where is she now?” Mary asked. “Sabrina.”

  “At home, with my brother and my nephew.”

  “Are they safe?”

  Kurt felt water forming in the corner of his eyes. He had wrestled with this question every second of every day since getting in the car with Minter, but hearing it so directly from someone else really made it hit home that he had no idea. He blinked very hard to remind his eyes who was in charge.

  “There’s no weakness in sadness,” Mary said.

  Kurt chuckled. Mary meant well and her kind words cheered him up, but he wasn’t typically one for sentiment and the phrase sounded like something that should have been written on a balloon held by a teddy bear.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I think they’re okay. As long as Amos keeps thinking I’m dead, they should be okay. Amos threatened Sabrina before he killed Stacy but part of me thinks that even he wouldn’t actually, you know…”

  “Yeah. But what’s going to happen to them when you go through with this plan that you’re working on? Because if Amos knows that Minter is the only person who can do any of the technical stuff, he’ll know he’s alive. Which means he’ll know you’re alive. Do you have a way of contacting your family without anyone at Sycamore knowing?”

  “No,” Kurt said. “But we could contact them right before we do it. We could send a message to my brother’s profile telling him to get the kids and cut out their Seeds and get them as far away from the city as he can. Even if someone at Sycamore saw our message, they probably wouldn’t be able to react quickly enough.”

  Mary thought about what Kurt said. “I hope it works,” she replied.

  This was an obvious thing to say, but Mary said it with a genuine kindness that Kurt appreciated.

  She left after that.

  Kurt didn’t feel like going back on Dot Truth. He looked around the room for the printer Ty had mentioned. He found it in the corner and made a note to ask Ernesto if it was okay to print something. Kurt didn’t want to feed Ernesto’s ego by deferring to him in such matters, but by the same token he didn’t want to print forty-some photographs only to later find out that the mall had a strictly limited supply of paper and/or ink.

  Kurt was in the corner looking at the printer when the door opened again. With no warning knock from Anthony and with it being so soon after Mary had left, Kurt assumed it would be her again. It wasn’t.

  It was Minter.

  “Ready to do this thing?” he said, more amped up than Kurt had ever seen him.

  Kurt pointed to the computer. “It’s all yours.”

  ~

  Sycamore’s Emergency Control Interface was just moments away from Minter’s reach. Kurt asked what security mechanisms stood in the way, and Minter explained that he had to enter a 64-digit password. If correct — when correct — another password prompt would appear. Depending on the colour of the text in this prompt, Minter would then have to enter another one of four 64-digit passwords.

  “So you have to remember five 64-digit codes?” Kurt asked.

  “It’s a lot easier than it sounds,” Minter said. “They’re all based on a code that makes sense when you know it.”

  Kurt shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Minter sat down. As far as anyone else knew, only two users had the super admin rights required to access the ECI: Amos and Minter. Inevitably, Minter’s own Sycamore credentials would have been disabled days ago. This was where the third log-in he had secretly created in case Amos ever turned against him would come in handy.

  From Sycamore’s main corporate landing page, Minter followed a few links and ended up at a prompt for a username. Kurt leaned in close.

  Minter typed into the username box: “MM_001273816MM-relay.”

  He pressed return.

  A blue progress bar began to inch along the URL bar at the top of the browser, which had been lightning fast in handling everything Kurt had thrown at it so far. The bar paused around a third of the way along.

  “Come on,” Minter said.

  The bar stuttered back to life in fits and spurts, then suddenly jumped almost to the end.

  “It’s going to work,” he said.

  …

  “It’s going to work.”

  The blue bar reached the end. In a flash, the browser window turned black. White text appeared above an empty password field: “User MM: requesting.”

  “White,” Minter said. “It can be white, green, red, or yellow. Confirm that the writing on the screen is white.” He spoke with a trance-like focus.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s white,” Kurt said.

  Minter took a deep breath and began to enter his password, counting out loud as he rhythmically pressed each key like a metronome. Kurt followed the first ten or so keys but could sense no pattern and soon forgot what had been pressed.

  Kurt stood as quietly as he could, trying hard to not even breathe in case it would distract Minter.

  “Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four.” Minter exhaled deeply. “Do you want to press return?” he smiled at Kurt.

  Kurt pulled his hands up to his chest. “I don’t want to touch anything.”

  “Okay,” Minter said. “Well at least cross your fingers.” Minter did a drum roll on the desk with the fingers of his left hand then pressed return.

  White text appeared: “User MM: incorrect.”

  There was absolute silence.

  “No it’s not,” Minter said to the screen. He turned to Kurt, as if convincing him would convince the system. “It’s not, man. It’s not incorrect.”

  “It’s a long password,” Kurt said. “Maybe you should write it down before you try again and I’ll watch you putting it in, to make sure all the digits match.”

  Minter put his head in his hands. “I put in the white password for my real log-in,” he said. “What an idiot.”

  Kurt laughed. “Idiot,” he parroted. “Go again.”

  Minter closed the tab and opened a new one. He navigated through the website and typed in his secret username name again: “MM_001273816MM-relay.”

  The blue progress bar went through its familiar stop-and-go pattern until it reached the end and the window changed to the same shade of black as before. The writing was white, again, but the text was different.

  The text was worse.

  “User MM: timelock.”

  There was no password field this time, just a narrow button that said “ACTIVATE”.

  Minter slowly pushed his chair backwards, stood up without speaking, and walked away.

  “What’s going on?” Kurt asked.

  “Don’t follow me,” Minter said. “Seriously, just don’t.”

  Kurt stood alone in the workspace with very little idea of what had just happened. He leaned over the computer Minter had abandoned and moved the cursor over the ACTIVATE button. After letting it hover for a few seconds, Kurt clicked on the trackpad. The button vanished and a new piece of text appeared in its place. It was red.

  By the time Kurt’s eyes adjusted to the red-on-black contrast, he understood why Minter was so upset.

 
; “User MM: timelock,” it read. “Expires in: 7 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes.”

  14

  Kurt stared at the screen, hardly believing his eyes.

  In the context, eight days might as well have been eight years.

  He switched the computer off and ignored Minter’s request not to follow him.

  Anthony was still sitting right outside the door. “What happened?” he said when Kurt rushed through it.

  “Where’s Minter?” Kurt asked. “Did you see where he went?”

  Anthony pointed straight up to the monorail station above their heads. Kurt ran to the stairway at the edge of the food court and went up to find him.

  Minter was sitting on one of the airport-style chairs that Kurt had been chained to in the corresponding station at the south of the mall. His eyes were open, but they were blank.

  “You can get around it,” Kurt said. “You always leave two ways out and three ways back in, right? That’s what you always used to say.”

  Minter slowly turned his head to Kurt. “Not this time.”

  “What the hell kind of time is eight days?” Kurt snapped at him, barely controlling his voice enough to avoid being heard by Anthony or anyone else. “Eight minutes, maybe. An hour at most. What kind of security lockout lasts over a week? Why would you even think to write something like that into the log-in system? Anyone else could have put in a wrong password and you would have been locked out just the same!”

  “It only locks you out if you get the second password wrong,” Minter said. “So no one would get that far.”

  Kurt didn’t really care about any of that; his question about why the ECI’s log-in was set up in such a way reflected anger, not interest. Minter explained anyway, saying that Amos had always favoured long lockouts in case he was ever taken hostage and forced to access a high-value system. Amos’s logic, if you could call it that, was that eight days was long enough to be rescued but not too long for the hostage-takers to lose patience.

  “That makes less than no sense,” Kurt said.

  Minter shrugged. “You’ve met the guy.”

  “So why eight days instead of seven? And why did you apply the stupid rules to your secret log-in?” Kurt asked.

  “It wouldn’t have been a straightforward change to make, man. I added the third log-in way after I set the rest of it up, so if I’d gone back in and messed around too much he might have noticed.”

  Kurt couldn’t put his frustration into words. He believed that Minter had made a genuine mistake — he had to believe that — and what was done was done. But all the same, at that moment, he hated Minter for doing it.

  “We have to keep this quiet,” Minter said. “Or they would want to try something else.”

  “I want to try something else! We can’t wait for eight days. Amos will find a hole in our story.”

  “No he won’t,” Minter insisted. “He bought it. I didn’t want this to happen either, man, but we’re still in the game here. We’re in a safe location, we have the internet, and Amos bought the story. That’s all we wanted when we left. You know the funeral was too soon, anyway. And your brother and the kids would have been right there in the same place as Amos. If you step back and breathe, you might see that this just saved us from making a huge mistake.”

  Kurt’s eyebrows lowered. He studied Minter’ face.

  “I didn’t mean to do this!” Minter said quickly, reading Kurt’s thoughts quite well. “Oh, man… you have to believe me. You have to. You do. Right, man? You believe me.”

  “Just don’t tell anyone,” Kurt said, knowing that Michael and Ernesto would have no trouble believing that Minter had meant to throw a boulder-sized pebble in the works. “If someone asks, tell them it’s not as simple as in or out. It’s an ongoing process.”

  Minter nodded. “I’m sorry, man.”

  Kurt walked down the stairs and back towards the workstation.

  “Do you need back on?” Anthony asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Anthony led him inside. “So did you guys manage to get into the control system thing?”

  “It’s not as simple as in or out,” Kurt said. “It’s an ongoing process.” Anthony didn’t push any further. He typed the password and left Kurt to it.

  The computer took twice as long as normal to boot up. It was still fast, but the SSD had been positively rapid on every previous occasion. Even once the desktop loaded, none of the shortcuts responded when Kurt clicked on them. Everything was back to normal within around thirty seconds, but Kurt’s curiosity was piqued.

  He checked to see what background processes were running. This wasn’t a great deal of help since he didn’t have a list from previous startups to use for comparison. Still wondering which of these processes had caused the slow startup, he opened an explorer window and sorted all of the computer’s files, first by date modified and then by date created. Nothing notable had been recently modified and nothing other than temporary internet files had been created since the previous morning. For the sake of thoroughness, Kurt opened the System Preferences menu and clicked the box to show hidden files.

  Several system files were being constantly modified by his usage, as was always the case, but a suspicious looking file had been created fifteen hours earlier. The filename was a meaningless string of characters, so Kurt copied and pasted it into the browser’s search bar. The title of the top result provided the answer: “Known process for Ninja Net Nanny 4400 [keylogger, commercial, malware free].”

  Kurt ran to the door and called Minter down without turning off the computer. Anthony urged him to keep his voice down, but Kurt wasn’t listening.

  Minter arrived back at the door as quickly as he could.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  Kurt looked at Minter and then at Anthony, deciding that Anthony should know what his dad and Ernesto were up to. “They’re spying on us,” he said.

  After a brief explanation from Kurt, Minter went inside and set about removing the keylogger, which functioned by recording every single keystroke made by anyone using the computer. He quickly found the logs and purged everything. He was better than Kurt at things like this, so found other hidden nasties lurking inside the computer, too.

  Minter came back out to Kurt and Anthony, who had been discussing the implications of the keylogger. Anthony knew that it would have led to Michael and Ernesto learning that the others were using the computer early in the mornings, which couldn’t have ended well for anyone. Kurt appreciated that Anthony was in a difficult position, torn between his father’s side and the rest of the group, but it was growing more and more apparent that Anthony was getting tired of Michael’s lies.

  “There was more,” Minter said.

  “What?” Kurt asked.

  “The webcam was recording everything. Michael had it set to come on at startup and had disabled the green light that tells you it’s on.”

  Kurt remembered what Anthony had said earlier on about searching for a camera. Neither of them had considered that it was staring them in the face.

  “So what now?” Kurt said. “They’re obviously going to find out we found out. Do we confront them?”

  Anthony spoke up. “What if I say I found the spying thing? Because you two aren’t even supposed to have been on. I’ll talk to my dad and make sure he doesn’t do it again.”

  Kurt and Minter looked at each other briefly and agreed that this was a sensible course of action.

  It would soon be time for breakfast, so Anthony suggested that Kurt and Minter sit down in the food court to make it look like they hadn’t been waiting long.

  “Nah, I’m going to go back to bed,” Kurt said. In normal circumstances he would still have been asleep at this time, and the day had already included more drama than he could handle. It started well enough with Lisa introducing Star’s Eye View as a potential tool, Kurt seeing his own name all over the front page of Dot Truth, and then Mary opening up for the first time. It was round about then that the morning had
gone south, first with the eight-day timelock and then the revelation that Ernesto and Michael were carrying out their own Sycamore-lite spying campaign.

  Minter went with Kurt, too. He wasn’t tired, he just didn’t want to see Michael’s face.

  ~

  Minter spent the rest of the morning sitting quietly with his own thoughts while Kurt slept. Stress typically stopped Kurt from sleeping, but in this instance exhaustion won the day.

  When Kurt eventually woke up he went to find Minter, who was still doing nothing, and asked him what he thought about the idea of opening-up the phones Ernesto mentioned during the meeting on their first day in La Plethora.

  Kurt’s intention was to give a phone to each of his friends in the mall: Minter, Ty and Lisa, Harry and Joyce, Anthony, and Mary. He had nothing against Val, but she was on the wrong side.

  Opening-up the phones was a necessary step to enable Kurt to sideload a user-created app for chatting via wifi, which would allow them all to keep in contact wherever they were. Ernesto had said that Kurt could see the phones whenever he wanted, but Kurt had forgotten about them while focusing on more important things. Now that those more important things had run into a roadblock, he wanted to do something constructive at least.

  Minter said it was a good idea but that he still didn’t want to go back into the main part of the mall. Kurt accepted this and went without him.

  It happened to be lunchtime, so Ty and the others were in the food court. Kurt greeted them briefly but went straight over to Ernesto to ask about the phones. Michael continued to eat as if Kurt wasn’t there.

  Ernesto led Kurt back across the mall into Home. The phones were in a box underneath the table where everyone kept their bags and cases. Ernesto gave the box to Kurt.

  “Thanks,” Kurt said flatly. It was the first word either had spoken since leaving the food court.

  Ernesto sighed. “Did Anthony say something to you?”