by Nick Thacker
But he hadn’t anticipated someone throwing the security alarm this early. It wasn’t part of the protocol. Not for a random explosion. The protocol dictated that they should methodically check each room in Sector 4 and then move on to this hallway. That should have given him at least 30 full minutes, maybe more. Instead, he’d barely gotten twelve.
Maybe I'm not so paranoid after all, he thought. They must have been watching me—they knew this was a setup.
Again Adam inhaled and exhaled slowly, controlled and measured breathes, and then stepped into the hallway, taking a final, casual look in each direction. He couldn't be certain that he was being watched, and until then the plan was to walk at a brisk and purposeful pace to the double doors at the end of the hall. He had the cooler slung over a shoulder, holding it in place with his right elbow on the lid to minimize jostling inside.
Progress to the doors seemed ridiculously slow—it felt as if he might never reach them. Despite this, however, he was already a little winded, and he felt sweat trickling from his temple to his chin and from his armpits to his waistline.
He was moving too fast. Someone would notice.
“Hey!”
It was all he could do to keep from turning around. Instead, he focused on not running. There was still a chance that whomever it was behind him might assume he was doing something “official.”
Adam heard the footsteps pounding behind him. He counted them.
Four steps. Two people.
Again, he fought the urge to look back.
Adam knew the stakes. He’d known them for some time now. This was more than just trying to stay out of trouble. This was life or death.
“Hey! Stop!” The voice was louder, more demanding. Gruff and deep. He thought he recognized it, but still refused to turn and look behind him.
Fifty more feet.
His feet hit the waxed floor, harder and harder—too hard to maintain the pretense that he was doing something “official.” He felt the sweat bead on his forehead, one drip running down the side of his nose.
He was nearly there—twenty-five feet now. They were gaining on him, unless it was a trick his ears were playing. He expected one of them to grab him any second now, to give his shoulder a hard squeeze, to forcefully turn him, slam him against the corridor wall. It would be over then—before it had even started. He’d be sunk. He’d be finished. Definitely be out of a job, maybe worse.
But he had prepared for that.
Or, at least, he thought he had prepared for it. Faced with the reality of it, he wondered now if this might have been a huge mistake. Over the past few months, as more of his people began acting strange, as his own family began acting strange, he had noticed that he was being watched closer. The tests and interviews—that man, the one who never left the mobile command unit in the parking lot. His insistence on weekly screenings had seemed, at first, to be an overzealous approach to preventing drug use or corporate espionage or any number of other infractions. It became clear, however, that Adam was one of only a couple of people being screened so frequently and thoroughly. After his third blood test, he'd started planning. All of this had something to do with these vials, and he had determined it was worth the risk to retrieve them.
Now he wondered if he'd let paranoia push him into making a huge mistake.
Maybe there was still time—maybe he could still get out of this?
Can’t let them see my face. There's still a chance if they don't know who I am.
At that moment he dropped the pretense altogether and broke into a dead run. He urged his body forward, leaning into it and pumping his legs as hard as possible. His work loafers, never meant to be running shoes, made an incongruous racket on the linoleum of the corridor.
Slap-slap-slap-slap!
Adam was in relatively decent shape, but at the moment he was wishing he’d spent just a little more time on the treadmill. The adrenaline he’d felt earlier betrayed him, abandoning him as he needed it most, and he was feeling the burn of fatigue starting to spread, rising from his legs to his lungs, closing his throat as he desperately urged his body to move faster.
He ignored the fatigue. He knew from experience that he’d eventually break through "the wall" and pick up a second wind. There’d be nothing but the sound of lightning-fast loafers slap-slap-slapping their way down the corridor. Maybe he'd leave a trail of fire in his wake.
Twenty more feet.
“Adam! Stop right there!” a man’s voice yelled from behind him. “I will shoot!”
Adam considered this—would they really shoot? Would they risk killing him, to keep him from taking these vials?
At least one of the men giving chase knew who he was, and could probably guess that the cooler slung over Adam’s shoulder had something in it that wasn’t—strictly speaking—supposed to leave the building. He might even know exactly what it was.
He clearly knew Adam, and therefore would know his position in this facility. He might even be one of the guards that Adam saw every day—one of the friendly ones Adam spoke to regularly.
So would he really shoot?
Suddenly there was a loud CRACK! followed by the whine of a bullet shot from a small handgun. The noise reverberated loudly down the hallway and made Adam hold his breath for a moment, skipping a step and causing him to to lose the rhythm of his run, to stumble a bit. He waited for his body to react; to fall face-forward in a growing pool of his own blood.
But he hadn’t been hit.
That answers my question.
Suddenly a massive amount of adrenaline coursed through his body again.
There you are, he thought. And, oddly, he felt like smiling and laughing. The moment was so surreal, he had to remind himself it wasn’t a dream. He was thinking so clearly now. And his body was moving like an Olympian’s.
Or, at least, that’s how it felt. It didn't matter if it was real or not.
He ran harder, faster, straight for the door.
The bullet missed, he thought. On purpose?
No way to tell, and no time to ask. It was escape time, and Adam’s focus was on placing one foot in front of the other until, finally, he reached the door.
He slammed into the horizontal push bar felt the door give—and then stop. His momentum crushed him against it, and he bounced back a bit, nearly stumbling and falling to the floor. In shock, he slammed a hand against the door’s surface, feeling the simian urge to scream and attack in frustration.
He breathed. He calmed.
His heart pounded like a piston in a high-performance engine, stuck at a stoplight.
The sound of footsteps raced closer—when they reached him, he'd be done.
Adam’s story would be over.
Alarms from the Colorado Springs facility.
They’d started about thirty minutes ago, and they drove David batty. This facility was just one of the five that David was actively monitoring. It was the one where he happened to have taken up residence, for the moment. The mobile command unit was stationary, in a cordoned-off segment of the facility’s grounds. David had decided that this place, out of the five, might give him the most peace and quiet.
The whole point of living in this God-forsaken corner of the country was the peace and fucking quiet. But now, alarms. Loud ones.
Everywhere.
Worse than the noise was the implication of disorder. Because that was the other reason David found himself here at a water treatment facility: interviewing employees, running genetic screenings, and doing background checks so thorough that he could tell his employer what someone’s mother had for breakfast on May 23, four years ago.
This sort of thing wasn’t in his job description. Not really. It was related, in its way, to the work that had brought David to this very point in time, to this condition. David had a mind for details.
The volume of detail, honestly, was both impressive and terrifying. Surveillance had really gotten quite an upward boost with the advent of near-quantum computing—something David
had contributed to on more than just a cursory level. His work had been foundational to the rise of artificial intelligence.
AI might not have been as powerful and efficient as science fiction had always hoped it would be, but it was sure as hell a lot better at dogging details from microscopic data sets than any human had ever been. It had its failings, true. For all their development in the field, AI still couldn’t be completely relied upon to make decisions, to act autonomously. It was still dependent on an ordered set of instructions—it needed guidance for a higher mind. It lacked the will to have initiative, to think outside of pre-determined parameters. It could perform nearly any task, if it knew the rules, but would return to a default “Lost/Return” mode if a scenario deviated too far from its programming.
That was something of a failing. Despite that limitation, however, AI had one shining virtue in David’s view—it was orderly.
The chaos erupting from Sector 4, however, was not orderly. People were everywhere, abandoning their posts and making their exits. They had, at least, gathered on the grounds, exactly where they were supposed to. That was pleasing. Protocol was being observed—which was to be expected, considering how many of the facilities’ staff had already succumbed to the suppression, their wills partially muted.
Still, there were stragglers—people who didn’t belong where they were, and should be somewhere else entirely. That caught David’s attention. Because in his time monitoring this and the other facilities, he had noted that even those who were somehow resistant to the suppression would generally follow the crowd, especially in emergency scenarios. But as the alarms and fire suppression systems activated, as people evacuated to the grounds and left the corridors of the facility empty, one of David’s “special interest” subjects appeared to be breaking from protocol.
Perhaps things were not as disorderly as they seemed.
The surveillance cameras were a little antiquated for David’s tastes, but at least they were digital and high definition. The corridor cameras could only operate at 4K, but it was enough to give him the ability to zoom and pan within a frame. He did so now, following the man—Adam Bolland— as he left the shuffling crowd and made his way quickly and quietly to the labs in Sector 1.
The man was one of the mid-level managers. Actually, David had quite admired this man’s management style. He knew protocol, followed it religiously, and was very good at ensuring that his team was briefed on a regular basis. David had cleared him on background as well, finding nothing in the man’s history to indicate he might be trouble.
It was his genetic profile that was most interesting to David.
Despite being a diligent worker and a strict follower of protocols, there was an ever-widening gap between Adam’s behavior and that of his co-workers. As the suppression spread, most of the facilities’ workers become more complacent and compliant. Adam, on the other hand, remained as lucid as ever, and at times even challenged directives. This was exactly the sort of pattern David was looking for. It characterized something the researchers had studied—a natural resistance.
David had the AI keep up with Adam as he moved through the facility. The explosion that had caused all this chaos had happened in an unoccupied lab, near a series of pipes and filters that had immediately ruptured, dousing much of the lab with water. Because of the prevailing heat, the water had been superheated, and steam had bellowed upward. The particulates were enough to trigger the smoke detectors, even when the smoke from the explosion had not.
As explosions go, this one could not have happened in a more fortunate space. No workers were harmed, and the chance of an uncontrolled fire was minimal.
This was planned.
Sector 1 was at more or less the center of the hub of this facility—a research area where samples were tested against baselines, and a bit of chemical engineering was often employed to find solutions for reducing contaminant levels, or implementing EPA-approved additives—designed by researchers working for David’s employer.
Since the Public Waters Act eight years ago, water treatment facilities nationwide had labs such as these, which helped to maintain the public water supply. Water was essential to life, of course, and for decades manufacturing and processing plants had contaminated it with abandon. EPA reprimands had been a joke, prior to the PWA.
Things had changed. As the suppression became the primary focus for researchers worldwide, the Environmental Protection Agency was empowered and funded in ways that most of the alphabet agencies drooled over.
Now there were penalties that went far beyond fines. Some offending plants were seized as a result of violations, costing shareholders billions and encouraging very public backlashes. Hitting investors in their wallets tended to make businesses fall in line quickly, and soon testing and development labs were mandatory in all water treatment facilities. As were strict security protocols. For some special facilities—usually those isolated from the rest of the nation’s populace—special operatives were assigned to carry out special missions in special ways.
David was special in this way.
Adam Bollard, however, was special in his own right. And at the moment, he was disrupting everything.
Protocol dictated the activation of the fire alarm, and the evacuation of the facility. It also dictated a room-by-room search of the affected section, followed by a full search of the rest of the facility. Bolland knew these protocols in and out, and was obviously counting on them to give him time to search for something specific in Section 1. He was counting on all of the attention being on Sector 4, allowing him to conduct his search unfettered and uninterrupted.
He had not, however, counted on David.
Since David was housed apart from the main facility, he was not required to evacuate to the grounds. He was perfectly protected in the mobile command unit that served as both his workplace and his home.
The AI system that saw to all of David’s physical needs, and guided the MCU from location to location, across the United States, was part of the same system that controlled the Unmanned Vehicle Force used by the police. The system used near-quantum computing and semi-artificial intelligence to pilot drone vehicles, and to help them make basic decisions and determinations. The AI also made them perfectly obedient and capable. They followed orders and assisted when needed—a trait that David had helped to develop, and which turned out to have applications far beyond artificial intelligence.
Also, David adored the system. It was his child, his progeny. He had contributed at least some of the DNA of the system—a very large contribution, actually, based on the most bizarre and tangential research anyone could have expected. To think that all those years ago, some tiny fragment of metal combined with the struggling economy of an island nation would lead to a series of events that fundamentally changed the world—it was inspiring in its complexity.
The AI controlling David’s mobile command unit knew to keep him at a safe distance from the facility while maintaining wireless contact with internal systems. And so it was no trouble for David to activate the security alarms in addition to the already blaring fire alarms and suppression systems.
He watched as Bolland reacted to the alarms. He could almost hear the man’s thoughts.
Too soon. Not enough time.
By now David was certain he knew what the man was after.
And he mustn’t be allowed to obtain it.
In and of themselves, the vials would be worthless. The chemical they contained was benign, according to all methods of analysis. It contained nothing that would be in the least bit incriminating. But in the right hands, it did something very dangerous—something that David’s employer had worked tirelessly to prevent.
It told a story.
Stories, as it turned out, could be wildly dangerous in the wrong hands. This story, in particular, could cause an uprising unequaled in the history of any nation the world had ever known. It was the most significant story of all time, known only to a few. David happened to be one of them, by ne
cessity. Even he didn’t know all of it. But he knew enough. He had pieced together the progression—studying the propagation of data in an intelligent system was, after all, his specialty.
Those vials contained clues to the origin of the suppression. It was unlikely that Bolland could uncover those clues on his own, but David knew from his background checks that Adam had friends who could help him. Some of those friends might not yet be suppressed enough to be complacent. Some might be naturally immune, as Bolland seemed to be. The most prudent course of action, then, was to keep Bolland from removing those vials in the first place.
However, rather than force Bolland to flee the lab, as David had hoped, the alarms seemed to energize the man’s search. Soon, Bolland put his hands on a padded cooler. By rights, it should not have contained anything of value. It certainly should not have contained the vials.
But David knew, even without seeing the evidence directly, that the vials would be in there. Because, as he had painfully learned over the years, screwups such as these were inevitable when humans were involved, especially as the suppression took a greater hold and an individual’s will became more fractured.
There are positives and negatives to account for, David thought. Adjustments will be necessary.
David watched as Bolland slung the cooler over his shoulder and started to make his escape from Sector 1. This could not be allowed. David called up a map of the facility and saw that two security guards were already methodically searching nearby corridors, as they had been instructed.
“Attention, security personnel,” David said aloud. The AI of the mobile command unit instantly determined whom David was speaking to, and channeled his voice to their portable communication units. “Intruder in Sector 1. Adam Bolland has violated protocol and perpetrated an illegal incursion into one of the secured lab facilities. Target has obtained a regulated substance, for unknown purpose. Apprehend.”
It was perhaps a bit more clinical than what the security guards were used to hearing, but David had long since chosen precision over social norms. The guards barely hesitated as the command registered, and they hurriedly made their way to Sector 1.