The Phoenix Project (The Liberty Box Book 3)

by C. A. Gray

  I glanced at Jackson again, now hovering just over Alec’s shoulder, restraining him on one side while Nick protected Joe on the other.

  “Why didn’t you, then?” Alec railed. “Why didn’t you die, rather than helping Voltolini?”

  “Do you think I’d have helped him if I’d had a choice?” Joe shot back. “He’d never kill me, not until I made myself redundant! Dying would be preferable to decades of the slow torture that Chief Executioner Hurst is so fond of! Voltolini probably knew I might kill myself if I got my hands on anything I might conceivably use as a weapon, and I’m much too important for him to take that chance.” Joe gave a bitter laugh. “No. I should have died by firing squad with Heath, but I was too much of a coward then. The irony was, in the decades since, I’d have given anything for such a quick and painless end!”

  Silence followed this pronouncement. Then Jackson said, “Who’s Heath?” As he said it, he nodded to Nick to pry Alec away.

  Joe sighed, running a hand through his limp graying hair, leaning his head against the wall with resignation. “My business partner. We developed the technology together.”

  Roger, the only former agent in the group, narrowed his eyes. “Why would you ever create such an abomination?”

  “Because we thought we’d be doing humanity a favor at the time!” Joe shot back. “Hell, we thought we’d win a Nobel Peace Prize eventually for curing all psychological human suffering!”

  Jean ventured, “So… you didn’t intend it for its current purpose, then?”

  “Of course not!” Joe cried, “how could we have foreseen this?” At last he sat, and the rest of the story felt as though it gushed out of him, unburdening himself of the secrets he’d harbored for decades. One by one, everyone else sat too.

  “Twenty-five years ago, the Republic was still the United States. I was a young man, a few years out of college. I had a dual degree in computer science and entrepreneurship. I met Heath in one of our college classes. He was a programmer and engineer, and we both had an interest in human psychology—specifically the science of happiness. There was a lot of research coming out at the time linking happiness to gratitude. But the human mind is inherently wired to dwell on problems, which makes sense, from a survival standpoint. Why spend precious mental resources focusing on what you already have, when you could reallocate those resources toward solving an outstanding problem? We figured that was why humans are and would always be problem-oriented. In primitive societies, this would of course confer a survival advantage. But in modern society, Heath and I speculated that a problem focus was no longer useful—in fact, it was actively harmful, since depression and anxiety and mental disorders were so prevalent at the time, despite the fact that most of us had everything we needed to survive, and then some.

  “One night we were at the bar, the two of us—just after getting shot down by a couple of girls actually,” Joe gave a hollow laugh. “Computer nerds, right? We rarely got the girls. I was feeling sorry for myself, but then Heath said to me, kind of as a joke, you’re only unhappy right now because you’re focusing on the fact that you just got rejected. But what if—what if you had a program that could automatically reframe your thoughts for you, to make that into a good thing? ‘You got rejected, so now you don’t have to waste the rest of your night wondering what would have happened if you’d tried to talk to that girl!’ Or, ‘now you can cross that corny pickup line off your list and you’ll be that much more successful the next time.’ Imagine, he said, you’d never have to be upset again!

  “We laughed about the idea at first, but a few drinks later, we’d birthed a new startup idea: what if we could write a program that output a carrier wave tuned to the frequency of human brainwaves—but stronger, so that it forced them to conform? We could revolutionize the self-help industry.” His expression cracked. “We were so naive.”

  “But how did Voltolini get hold of it?” Jackson asked.

  Joe looked at the filthy concrete floor. “We needed funding, or it never would have made it past the prototype. That was when Heath mentioned personal ties to a VC he’d grown up with—that’s Venture Capitalist, for those of you who don’t know the lingo. Ben Voltolini. Of course I knew the name, everybody in the entrepreneurial world did, but I thought Heath was bluffing at first. Then he told me how they’d grown up together on ‘the wrong side of the tracks,’ as it were, and Voltolini was the reason he’d had the money to go to college in the first place. He told me he’d worked for him in one of his first companies, a financial investment firm that sounded shady as hell—big surprise, right?” He chuckled, his voice empty. “Heath made about a hundred grand and then cut and ran before the firm got raided by the feds, and one of Voltolini’s guys went to prison for it… but not Voltolini, and not Heath. Voltolini made sure none of it traced back to him.

  “I should have known when Heath told me that story that you can’t benefit society by making a deal with the devil. But, what can I say? We were young and stupid, and we wanted his money.”

  Jackson let out a breath in a long, slow whoosh. I felt myself exhale too. “And then?” he asked.

  “He funded us, obviously,” Joe went on. “We built the prototype, and had time to go through a couple of clinical trials proving it worked before the United States crashed. Then Voltolini saw the opportunity to use our technology on a mass scale, and in a way that we’d never intended. I’m ashamed to say that we helped him, at first. It seemed like a good idea. Everyone was so miserable, and solving all the economic and political problems was way outside our scope, or really anybody’s scope, in the short term. But what we could do was make people believe everything was okay, even if it wasn’t. Just for a little while. That’s what Voltolini told us: he’d just make the people think they had enough to eat even though they didn’t, and give them a sense of security while he rebuilt the country, until the messages became reality.

  “But after the first six months, Heath and I both became increasingly uncomfortable with what he wanted us to program the brainwaves to say. It wasn’t just about security and comfort anymore—then he wanted us to make the messages about him personally. About how he was their savior. Since Heath knew Voltolini better than I did, he offered to be the one to confront him about misuse of our technology. I told him he was an idiot to try to reason with Voltolini as if he had any kind of moral compass, but Heath told me that wasn’t what he planned to do. He already knew that approach wouldn’t work. What he could do, though, was threaten to reprogram the control centers to broadcast the opposite messages: that he was an evil dictator and he’d been brainwashing them all into submission and they should revolt. Heath told me he planned to threaten him with that, unless Voltolini allowed us to go back to the more benign messages of peace that we’d been sending before.”

  “That’s when Voltolini had him killed,” Jackson murmured.

  Joe nodded at him. “That’s right. Which Heath anticipated. So before he confronted him, we added one last change to the system: we encrypted a piece of the code. I don’t know if any of you know programming here—”

  “I do,” Will raised a hand, and Jean nodded too.

  “Okay,” Joe acknowledged them, “so for the rest of you, that just means there’s a little critical piece of the program that you have to decrypt in order to execute anything new. It was intended to be our failsafe so that Voltolini could never use the technology without our help.”

  “Why didn’t Voltolini have you killed too, then?” Alec demanded.

  Joe closed his eyes for a long moment, as if what he was about to say next pained him. He opened them again at last, and addressed Alec. “Because I fled when I knew what Heath was about to do. I figured he’d die. So did he. But the agents captured me anyway, and without Heath, I was the only one left who knew how to program the signals. Voltolini needed me alive and easily accessible. He also needed me to transfer my knowledge to others, and not to go public with what I knew. So as soon as Heath was executed, he
threw me in prison. He fed me on a steady diet of threats, and only carted me to the IT wing and back again to teach his people how to program the messages, so they wouldn’t need me anymore. But I never told them about the encrypted code. So whenever they tried to execute a new message, it broke. They could never figure out why. They had to cart me out of prison to fix it every time. I could have fixed it in five minutes, because I always knew exactly what the problem was, but that would have looked fishy. So I pretended it took me hours and hours.” He shrugged, defeated. “Plus I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get back to my cell.”

  “If you were gonna program what Voltolini wanted anyway, why not just tell them?” Will demanded, disgusted. “What did you gain by keeping the encryption a secret? Other than your own sorry life?”

  “One thing,” Joe held up a finger. “The hope that the knowledge of how to use the Liberty Box technology would die with me.”

  Nobody replied to this for a long moment. Perhaps I ought to hate him—after all, his program had destroyed all of our lives. It had turned me against Jackson. But for all that, I couldn’t help pitying Joe. I knew what it felt like to loathe myself. There was nothing worse.

  “Okay,” seethed Alec, pointing at Joe but looking at the rest of us. He nodded at Jackson. “Good call on breaking him out of prison, but we can’t take the risk that this guy falls back into agent hands. Like he said—without him, the technology dies! All in favor of killing him?” He raised his hand, to a generalized uproar.

  “No!” I cried, just as Jackson leapt to his feet to shield Joe and Molly shouted, “We’re not murderers!”

  “SILENCE!” Nick roared, and the whole room quieted down. He whirled on Alec, his eyes like steel. “Cold blooded murder is not on the table! Sit down!”

  “He killed Maggie!” Alec screamed, the vessels in his forehead popping out as he lunged at Nick. “What if Molly had died in Beckenshire, huh? How would you feel then?”

  “I would feel like all I had left was my humanity, and if I became a murderer, I’d lose even that!” Nick shouted back.

  “Okay,” said Jackson, wide-eyed as he stood between Joe and Alec, his arms outstretched as if waiting to break up a fight. Alec and Nick stared each other down. “Okay,” Jackson went on, “We’ve heard Joe’s story now, and we can keep it in mind as we discuss options of what to do next. The first order of business is still how to tell the other rebels to quit trying to break repeaters, right? Who’s got an idea?”

  After a long pause, I ventured softly, “I do.”

  Jackson’s eyes met mine, searching. I blushed again, looking at my feet.

  “Okay,” he said to me, as Alec and Nick resentfully backed away from each other. “What is it, Kate?”

  I took a deep breath. “What if I send a tip to Jillian?”

  Alec shook his head, and snapped, still angry, “Won’t work. The Potentate doesn’t want her broadcasting how the rebels are getting caught and killed, because he wants them to keep doing it!”

  “But Jillian won’t know that,” I insisted. “I’m sure the Potentate hasn’t told the News Syndicate what specifically not to report—he’s probably just controlling the information they get, and they go live with whatever comes down the pipeline. That’s how it usually works. If she hears this, all she’ll know is that it’s a good story. She’ll investigate just enough to find out it’s true, and then she’ll put it on the air.”

  Nick frowned. “Should Jillian even know there are such things as control centers, though? Let alone repeaters? I mean, yes of course she should know, but it just seems to me she wouldn’t go live with the information that rebels are breaking repeaters without knowing what the repeaters are or why they’re important, and then that becomes a rabbit hole, as we all know.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t know Jillian. She really…” I tried to think of a nice way to say this, “…doesn’t think too critically. If she doesn’t know what they are, she won’t investigate, she’ll just say they’re part of government security. She goes for sensationalism and human interest, not depth of understanding.”

  Nick seemed to consider this. “Okay, fair enough—but how do we get a tip to her? Do you need a net screen?”

  I nodded. “Yes, but we don’t have to hack into anything, because the hotline is available to everyone in the Republic.”

  Nick nodded his approval. “Sounds like a reasonable plan to me. Any objections?” He looked around the room. Jacob and Roger and Jean all nodded. I could still feel Jackson’s eyes on me, but didn’t look back.

  “Okay, next problem,” said Alec loudly. “Since we can’t break the repeaters anymore, I say we blow up the control centers. Or the palace.”

  The room erupted in protests at this, and Alec shouted over them, “I know it’s risky, but what isn’t at this point?” and, “I don’t know where we’ll get the bombs. We’ll just have to make them! Charlie can figure that out, right?”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows and repeated, “Me? Why me?” But nobody was really listening in the pandemonium. Then Charlie shouted, “Hold on, what about Joe?”

  Joe shrank back in his massively oversized t-shirt at this, wide-eyed. Charlie went on, “Joe told Jackson and me that the control center signals all come from the IT wing in the palace. That is the central control center, and without it, all the rest of them would be worthless. Isn’t that right, Joe?”

  Joe nodded, clearing his throat. “Yes. Yes, that’s true. Signals get sent from the IT wing via the net to all the other control centers, and then propagated through each district via the repeaters.”

  “So okay, blow up the palace, then!” cried Alec again, and the room erupted once more.

  “Do you know how heavily guarded the palace is?” shouted Will over the din, “It’s a miracle any of us got out alive!”

  “No it isn’t. The agents are idiots,” Charlie said.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying!” Alec pointed at Charlie, triumphant. “Five of you got out alive! Who’s to say five of us couldn’t get in and out again, enough to set a bomb?”

  “If we had a bomb!” yelled Jacob, “let alone one that powerful!”

  “Well, we can make one—!”

  “—suicide mission!”

  “—get the supplies—?”

  Will stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, and the room quieted down. “I have a different idea, one that is significantly less suicidal.” He shot a cold look at Alec. “When I was working for Voltolini, I sent a private message to New Estonia letting them know that he was in process of building at least one control center on their soil. I don’t know if they got the message or not, and if they did, I don’t know whether they investigated or just dismissed it. But let’s face it—we are not an army.” He swept his finger in a circle around our tiny little group. “We need someone big and powerful to back us, and that’s New Estonia, because they’ve got some skin in the game, too. If they only knew it.”

  In his pause, Nick prompted, “So what do you propose?”

  Will glanced at me. “Kate and I will go to New Estonia to tell them in person what I told them online. We can even help them locate the control centers so they can see the proof.”

  My mouth fell open, but before I could protest, the room erupted again.

  Alec shouted, “You just want to run away from the fight, you coward!”

  Will leapt to his feet, and so did Alec, followed by Nick and Charlie who forced them apart before they could come to blows.

  I started to feel Jackson’s eyes boring a hole into the side of my face.

  “Sit down!” Nick ordered both Alec and Will, to their respective places. “There will be no name-calling, no threats, and no in-fighting; we’re a team here!”

  “I have an idea,” said Joe, bringing a hush to the group. He turned to Will. “You said you’d need to go over in person to help New Estonia locate the control centers on their soil. You don’t have to do that. I can tell you
where they are. All we’d have to do is get another message through to them and tell them to go investigate for themselves.”

  Will stared at him for a minute. “You know where they are?”

  He nodded. “They sheltered me from specifics as much as possible, but I was still part of the team that programmed them, and I needed their IP addresses to know where to send the signals. That’s all they intended to tell me, but while I stalled for time fixing the control center encryption problems, I snooped around a little and found where all those IP addresses were located.”

  “And you remember them all?” Will prodded.

  Joe nodded and tapped his forehead. “Photographic memory.”

  “What about Liberty Boxes—to catalog everyone’s brainwaves?” asked Jacob. “Are they building those in New Estonia too?”

  Joe shook his head. “Not yet. Voltolini’s plan was to release the engineered Epstein Barr virus on the population first, make them docile, and then program them en masse with the control centers. At first we’d push the same signals to them that I coded in the IT wing of the palace. Exact same messages. Once the people believed and would show up voluntarily, then he wanted to set up the Liberty Boxes to track everyone there. Then he’d build a central control center on their turf too, so that he could get more specific with his signals. I guess he thought he was gonna send me over there to build it,” Joe added dryly, “since nobody else would know how to do it.”

  Will bit his lip. “Well—okay then. We should send New Estonia a message with all the information before we go, but I still say we should go in person too. It’ll be more persuasive.”

  “We can’t just rely on New Estonia!” Alec growled, “We have to do something here! Or aren’t you man enough to stick around and fight?”

  “Why don’t you come up with an idea,” snarled Jacob, “instead of just shooting down everybody else’s?”

  “You want me to have an idea?” Alec retorted. “Fine, here’s an idea!” He pointed at Joe. “We use this guy to reprogram the control center signals to turn the people against Voltolini, like his business partner suggested in the first place. Then he programs them to follow one of us instead. Hear me out, hear me out!” He put up a hand as the protests began to sound, “Haven’t we been saying all along that we have to wake the people up slowly, or we’ll just have anarchy again? Don’t you all remember the fall of the United States? Most of these people are already a couple steps above starvation—they’d never survive that again!”