American Omens

by Travis Thrasher

  “These will get you to the 118th floor atrium,” Lucia said. “Look for the man who gave you your father’s note.”

  “You’re not coming up with us?” Cheyenne asked.

  Lucia shook her head. “I have to act as if this is any ordinary Monday. Did you hear from the Reckoner yet?”

  “No,” Malek said. “But the plan only changes if we hear from him to stop everything.”

  “What if you don’t hear from him at all?”

  Malek shook his head. “We will.”

  Without a “Good luck” or “Farewell,” the woman walked off and disappeared into the crowd. Malek and Cheyenne looked at each other for a second.

  “Really charming woman,” Malek joked.

  “Think she’s maybe a tad bit—oh, I don’t know—freaked out?” Cheyenne asked, whispering the last two words.

  “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  She thought of the Parschauers and wished Malek hadn’t asked that question.

  “Come on,” she said, leading the way this time.

  2.

  The awesome grandeur of the Incen Tower once felt like the place of her dreams. Now it represented the enemy hovering over her. An epic, evil darkness right out of The Lord of the Rings. The first elevator took them up to the familiar 118th floor, where all the businessmen and businesswomen spilled out into the flooded space. For a moment Cheyenne thought about getting a coffee from Henry for old times’ sake. Then she realized he wouldn’t recognize her without her SYNAPSYS. Plus, if he did, that would even be worse.

  My old life here is dead.

  She wished she could talk to Dina one more time, not to tell her everything but to tell her enough. To simply say an official goodbye. Life doesn’t often allow proper goodbyes or the chance to say the things you want to say to those you love the most.

  As she was walking down one of the walkways, a businessman stepped in front of her much as he had done almost a month and a half ago.

  “Good afternoon,” Hoon said, smiling.

  “Hello,” Cheyenne responded, relieved to see a slightly familiar face.

  They walked out of the flow of human traffic as Malek shook Hoon’s hand.

  “I trust all is going well,” Hoon said.

  “Thank you,” Cheyenne told him.

  “For what?”

  “For my father’s note. For letting me— For helping me find him.”

  Hoon grinned. “I believe he found you.”

  “You’re right.”

  He reached into his suit and pulled out two more cards, similar in size to the gold oval. Except these were clear.

  “These are for you,” Hoon said as he handed them over.

  “I thought you didn’t have clearance for things like this,” Cheyenne said.

  “I don’t. But there are always powerful people behind the scenes trying to maintain some control,” Hoon said.

  She wanted to know where he got these, but she didn’t even know exactly who this man was. Did he work in the tower? Probably. And surely he lived here too. But how was he involved with the Reckoner and Jazz and especially her father? Perhaps—hopefully—she would find that out after this was over.

  If this, in fact, will be over.

  “Good luck,” Hoon said.

  “Thank you,” she told him again.

  3.

  First they rode an escalator. Then they headed down a long hallway to another small atrium that housed an elevator made of glass. This wasn’t a top-secret, VIP-only elevator like some of the others Cheyenne knew about in this building. Guests still could ride this, allowing them to go to one of the two exclusive restaurants near the top of the building or to visit the even more exclusive nightclub/lounge. It felt strange to ride this in order to go to a data room, but this building contained numerous mysteries and secrets.

  There weren’t suspicious security guards scanning their cards or bored workers at desks checking their data while they walked by. Having a card on you allowed you to pass freely and opened the doors to the elevator if you had sufficient access. Something somewhere, most certainly a machine, watched. But just like algorithms, artificial intelligence couldn’t always detect what was right there in clear sight.

  Cheyenne held her breath as she stepped onto the glass. The elevator was entirely transparent—the bottom, the sides, and the top. She didn’t look down the 124 stories below her or out to the sprawling Lake Michigan they faced.

  Malek swore. “Excuse my language, but…wow.”

  The doors shut, and they began to shoot upward in a steady, gentle manner. Not as if they were soaring, but as if they were calmly floating over the hundred stories below them.

  “You look pale as a ghost,” Malek said. “You don’t like heights, huh?”

  Cheyenne felt her body shake as she couldn’t help staring straight ahead in the elevator. Malek stood at her side facing the other way, looking up and around in wonder.

  “I don’t like glass elevators.”

  “You know this is safer than riding in a regular one, right?” he asked.

  “Sure. I took the tour and heard about it.”

  She wanted to close her eyes but also didn’t want to seem so frightened. She looked at him and couldn’t help letting out a slight chuckle. “You look like it’s your birthday.”

  “I hope not. I never got presents.”

  “I’ll admit I always wondered what it’d be like to ride one of these. Now I know. The grass isn’t greener.”

  Even with her arms folded and her body tightened, her shaking was noticeable. Cheyenne could see Malek looking at her. He moved next to her, facing the doors himself, and put a solid arm around her.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “You’re missing the view,” Cheyenne said, looking into eyes that seemed to reflect the clear sky above them.

  “No, I’m not.”

  4.

  Other than the security guard looking bored outside the elevator doors, they hadn’t seen anybody. Malek led the way through one long hallway along the wall of glass and then through a doorway leading into offices and away from the fancy restaurant and club.

  “How do you know where you’re going?” Cheyenne asked him.

  “I know the plans to this building well. I got them off Acatour’s network the first week I was here.”

  “Why isn’t there more security up here?”

  “There’s nothing of value in these offices. This floor is for those splurging on dinners and drinks. Ninety-nine percent of the people who could get up here wouldn’t be able to do a thing with the servers they have.”

  “And why were you looking up the plans to this building?” she asked.

  “You know me. Curiosity.”

  A third door slid open as they approached and closed once they went through it. Malek looked at his palm where he’d written something down. Then he began to count the number of offices they passed.

  “Seven. Okay. This should be it.”

  Malek opened the door, apparently not surprised that it was unlocked. In some ways this particular room reminded her of the PASK offices. Bare walls, average size, big enough for a desk and chair. She felt a chill in this space, as if the temperature had dropped ten degrees. On three of the four walls were black shelving units that went all the way to the ceiling. The dim fluorescent light above them made the room feel unusually bleak.

  “All the data boxes are in these,” Malek said, pulling one of the six-foot-wide drawers out to show racks of thin white metal boxes about the size of a compact disc. “People don’t realize Jackson Heyford made most of his money on these microservers. He spent so much on technology when the SYNAPSYS was invented, and most of that money came from these.”

  Cheyenne knew what microservers were, but she had never seen so many of them. Several hun
dred were in this drawer alone.

  “Acatour—well, before the big merge, when Apple existed—used to have massive data center servers all over the world. These massive warehouses were full of walls and walls of servers. This drawer contains the data that an entire Apple facility contained.”

  As always when talking about his favorite subject, Malek lit up with energy and excitement. Nobody would have ever guessed they were breaking the law in multiple ways, including getting ready to break into people’s minds.

  If that’s what we’re, in fact, doing.

  They were trespassing, and that was enough. Especially for two people fired by the company they were hacking.

  Malek sat down at the square table in the middle of the room and turned on the computer linked to the desk. Cheyenne sat next to him as a series of screens became visible in front of them. He worked for a few minutes to get into the main system they used in PASK and then began filling in password after password. All of this looked very familiar to Cheyenne.

  “It looks like you’re going into my emorithms files,” she said, using her coined word only Malek had heard.

  He looked at her and nodded. “I am.”

  She laughed. “That’s great. Hacking my work.”

  “Remember when we used to argue about the algorithms we were creating, about their uses in people’s SYNAPSYSes?”

  “I’ve changed my mind on the work we were doing. Or at least who we were doing it for.”

  “Yeah. But the truth is worse than you might imagine. You believed we were building technology to improve the world. But those controlling the technology don’t care about the world or its population. They’re corrupting people’s souls, not through a virus or spam but with subtle and secret messages.”

  “But how? I don’t get it.”

  As pages began to load on the projected monitors in front of them, he turned in the swivel chair to face Cheyenne. “Remember my role at PASK? I was the one working on delivery systems for algorithms. You were tapping into their emotional capabilities. Both of these made us temporary rock stars when it came to cracking the almighty code of the SYNAPSYS. They don’t realize I was keeping some of my work from them.”

  “You mean tapping into SYNAPSYSes?”

  Malek nodded, looking like a teenager who had just sneaked out of his parents’ house at midnight. He seemed to have a rebellious sort of glee about him.

  “What exactly happened to you?” Cheyenne asked. “How’d you suddenly go from PASK genius to…this?”

  “Good question. I guess I can blame it all on you.”

  “On me?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Remember our last date?”

  “That wasn’t a date.”

  “Exactly. The time we went out on what I thought was a date and you didn’t. My wake-up call.”

  “Malek, look, I wasn’t sure—”

  “It’s fine. It happened. Just let me continue. After that one of my friends mentioned a girl to me, and then the next thing I knew, she called me. She was—nice, I guess. But once my SYNAPSYS connected with hers, it seemed like— I don’t know. It was scary, Chy.”

  “Why?”

  “It began to feel like fate was telling me I needed to be with this woman,” Malek said. “Out of the blue a photo of her would pop up on my network connection. She was…quite attractive, and suddenly like the best photo ever taken of her would be right there to remind me. And she didn’t send it. I didn’t ask for it. It was little things like this all day long. Connecting when I didn’t plan to connect. My SYNAPSYS would remind me and prompt me and encourage me, as if it was playing matchmaker or something.”

  Cheyenne began to see where this was headed.

  “But none of that bothered me. We’re used to that sort of stuff, right? I know the history of advertising. The background music that used to play in stores. The commercials that used to be on televisions. Pop-up ads on the internet. The feed people would see on their Facebook pages before the uproar over social media exploded. I get all that. But it was something else, something that really freaked me out.”

  Cheyenne looked at him carefully, holding her breath, waiting for him to say it.

  “I started to— You’re going to laugh at this, but this is what I felt at the time. I started to think I was falling in love with this woman.”

  “I thought you were incapable of such an emotion,” Cheyenne joked.

  “Me too. And I’m being serious. It was…these feelings inside me, not based on physical things. These were emotional. And I realized they were—”

  “Algorithms,” she answered. “They were coming from algorithms.”

  Malek nodded. “What are algorithms used for?”

  “To influence people.”

  “I’d argue and use the word control,” he said. “So who are the people behind them? The people influencing or controlling. What’s their message? That is what I started to try to wrap my brain around.”

  The data on the screen in front of them went off for a second. Then it lit back up and resumed. Malek continued talking without seeming worried.

  “I went a week without using my SYNAPSYS. Remember that? A few months before I got fired?”

  “You told me you were doing a digital detox or something like that,” Cheyenne said.

  “I needed to know. And I was right. By day two I had no overwhelming feelings for this woman. It’s not as if I didn’t like her. She was nice and totally hot and a perfect match, but I just wasn’t into her. You know. And that’s when I felt a bit like the girl from the movie The Exorcist. Except this sort of demon…Chy, this demon was created by us. By people like you and me.”

  None of this completely surprised her, yet she had no way to respond to his statement. She’d always known the work they were doing wasn’t perfect, but she hadn’t believed it could be as harmful or as dire as he was putting it. Now she didn’t know.

  Something else suddenly dawned on her. “Do you think…Could the same thing have been happening with me?”

  “What do you mean?” Malek asked.

  “That maybe my algorithms were telling me not to be with you?”

  A look of genuine surprise filled his face. His eyes searched hers, and then he nodded. “The last thing PASK would have wanted was for us to be a couple,” Malek told her. “I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow they were manipulating us. See what I’m talking about? There are so many public violations here. People’s privacy being shredded big-time. And this is exactly why we’re here. What we’re going to tell people. Personally.”

  A progress bar on the screen was nearly full.

  “How are you able to do it?” she asked. “Every test has said that SYNAPSYSes can’t be broken into.”

  “What nobody realizes is that every SYNAPSYS has receptors for these emotional algorithms, the ones you’ve been working on, the systems I’ve been manipulating and trying to get into. The public doesn’t know about your emorithms, do they? They’ve been specifically designed for them to be received. That’s how you can directly communicate to people.”

  “Our message isn’t going to be subtle, right?” Cheyenne asked.

  “No. That’s the beauty. People are going to wonder how in the world they’re getting this personal message delivered to their SYNAPSYS. Both spoken and written out. And even if they don’t think another second about the Reckoner’s message, they’ll be trying to figure out how someone didn’t just invade their privacy but pried into their very soul.”

  The screen went black for a second. Then a blinking orange word popped up.

  READY

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Ready to do what?”

  “I can only get so far inside all these files. You’re the one who knows what to do with everything.”

  “What do you mean? I have no idea wha
t I’m supposed to do.”

  “Instead of putting in a complex algorithm for an emotion, you’re going to substitute our message.”

  Cheyenne looked at him and shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I still don’t think…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “What? You think everything the Reckoner has been saying is a lie?”

  “I know what Acatour is doing is wrong. But God’s judgment and people’s salvation and all of that? I’m not there yet.”

  “Then consider this to be a great prank we’re playing,” Malek said with a smile.

  Cheyenne tapped the desk for a keyboard and typed for a few seconds. She pointed to the file on the screen.

  “Is it this?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay what?”

  “I sent it.”

  Malek looked at her with wide eyes and his mouth slightly open. “Are you serious? That quickly? What’d you do?”

  She gave a knowing, calm, it’s-my-secret-not-yours grin. They waited for a minute, then two. Then a bubble popped up.

  Jazz received. Good to go.

  Both of them remained silent, looking at the screens in front of them to see if anything was going to show a problem and sound an alarm. But nothing abnormal happened.

  “So we just, like, sent out a message heading to three hundred and eighty million people,” Malek said.

  Cheyenne looked at him and nodded. Something about this was exhilarating.

  “We should probably get out of here, right?” he asked.

  Another calm nod.

  Malek jumped up and then pulled her up off her chair. “Come on.”

  As they hurried down the narrow white hallway, Jazz’s voice spoke to both of them. “We have a problem.”

  The only time they were to verbally talk was in an emergency.