by Nels Wadycki
It would be good to let her brain settle; let it sort out the disparate pieces; let it find the connections for her while she rested, even in the relative discomfort of the Hotel.
But her heart still thumped hard against the cavity of her chest and adrenaline still coursed in her veins, shooting sparks into her muscles. She worried that she wouldn't be able to sleep. Especially in the Hotel. Especially without the usual warmth of Jrue's body next to hers.
No. She did not need to feel safe. She needed to feel in command again. She needed to know what she didn't know. She needed to figure out how the puzzle fit together.
Ana sat at her desk, reviewing again in her head to make sure she would not forget any clues, any potentially vital pieces of information, and a plan began to form, girders rising from the hole of missing information—the skeleton of a building that would hold the answers.
--
Midday sun glared in the reflection of the large windows that wrapped the front of the house like a glass belt, holding the bricks above and below in place. On top of the gleaming panels rose two stories ending in broad wooden shoulders and capped off with a smaller addition whose two round windows looked like pupil-less eyes. A piece of straight white trim stood out against the mossy green of the addition, putting a mouth on the face.
The address came courtesy of the information Ana had filed away while spying on the agents in the lab. She had inspected the property report for the address prior to her arrival. She knew the house contained four individual apartments, with the entrance to the first two stories in the front, and the upper floors accessed by a stairwell in the back.
Ana swung open the metal gate, which served no purpose but to make the residents feel like they had an extra line of defense against evildoers. The thin hollow-core bars would hardly stop a paring knife, let alone someone who knew what they were doing. The neighborhood that held the residence kept itself fairly crime-free, though, because upper-middle-class people didn't usually have much reason to steal from each other. But they also didn't have enough money to pay for real security.
Someone moved on the other side of the door at the top of the little whisper of a porch. Ana passed through the gate, thinking perhaps she could catch the door and slide in as they went out. As she mounted the steps up to the porch, she also hoped that they did not know their neighbors too well.
When the door opened, adrenaline exploded from every muscle in Ana's body. She stood staring at the face of a man with dark, heavy eyebrows and a familiar hook nose. Every adrenaline-soaked fiber in her body wanted to run before he could pounce on her, but she held herself in place ready to block, parry, and counter when he fell on her.
When the hook-nosed man did not attack, Ana recovered and launched into the fundraising speech she had planned for her cover, well-rehearsed enough to ramble on while studying the man who showed no sign of recognition.
After her nerves reduced from a boil to a simmer, and she compensated for the surprise of not being recognized, Ana found it curious that the man himself was not at all surprised to have a fundraiser at his door. It was not altogether unheard of, but with the city mostly divided into ultra-rich and extremely poor, people seeking funding tended to aim high instead of just in the middle.
The unsurprised man wore an outfit that barely resembled the one in which she'd previously seen him: jeans and a military green jacket with a graphic tee trying to make itself seen from underneath the jacket. His scar was gone, but not just healed; pale clean skin stretched across the cheek where the pink line should have been. His eyes showed no trace of the knowledge that he had stood opposite her on a rooftop not far away and traded bullets in the gusting wind. They bore a hint of irritation at having been interrupted, but nothing more. Could it be a different man? If so, he represented the most identical twin that Ana had ever seen. What did it say about her worldview that Ana thought it more likely that the Continuum had decided to forgo all morality and forge ahead with human cloning?
Ana needed to figure out a way to get inside this man's apartment. Unless this little place was a hotbed of espionage and high-class illegal activity, with each one- or two-bedroom living space home to another ion in the loosely coupled compound that was an underground criminal organization, the hook-nosed man had to be the reason this address had come up in the data pile the two men had created back at the Agency.
As Ana prattled on about the local vegetable garden for which she was raising funds, she wondered if she should just let the man go so she could get on with gaining access to the building. She wondered what secrets lay just beyond that door. She wondered if a man with a job like his suspected something amiss with this woman in front of him.
Ana looked again at the man's cheek. She had seen the scar there before chasing him up the elevator. Marisol had confirmed he had it when he caught up to her and Dr. Portofil. But now it was gone. Absolutely disappeared. And he didn't recognize her.
His eyes were clear, bright, and focused, a stark contrast from the haggard red outlined by dark circles so common of the other Continuum agents she'd encountered. Granted, it was a very limited sample size. Perhaps the others bore the stress of the job where the world could see it, while the hook-nosed man forced the tension and worry into a small space. Ana certainly knew it was a possibility. She did it every day.
Aerin had already put forth the theory of cloning after discovering the Continuum agent she had killed had been born three days later. It made sense now. This man was an identical copy of the one she had wrestled on the rooftop. Of course, as soon as she had that answer, other questions followed hard on its heels.
Had the Continuum cloned the man and raised him from birth? If so, they'd started the project a good thirty years ago. The biological technology necessary had theoretically been available for much longer than that, but no one had been organized enough, or so desperately lacking of a moral compass, to actually pull it off.
Or did they have some other growth hormone that sped up the aging process to where they could turn out clones faster than a normal human would grow? Ana could not discount the possibility given what she knew about the Continuum. Perhaps she would find out more inside the building that loomed behind the doppelganger.
He listened for far longer than anyone would have considered polite, and finally brushed his way past her to continue on his way. Ana remained on the small porch, feigned an attempt to contact the building's other front side tenant, and examined the entry for hidden security.
The unscarred duplicate's hovercar pulled away and Ana saw no signs of anything beyond standard security measures outside of his house. It did strike her as odd that such a valuable asset would not have extra safeguards in place, but then she had another, more chilling, thought. Perhaps the man was not a valuable asset. If there were two of him, maybe there were more. Ana imagined ranks of tall, marginally handsome men with pale skin lined up in rows, noses askew, ready to receive their diplomas, but in addition to a piece of paper they received a new set of clothes to put on before leaving in a new car that would lead them to their new lives. Disposable foot soldiers who you would pass on the street without even noticing they were there, enveloped in a shell of undetectable high-tech armor and a haze of indistinguishability, waiting to rip out the throat of the next Continuum target. She could only hope that she would find a clue inside the building that glinted in the sun in front of her.
Ana reached into the sack slung over her shoulder—a sack, not a purse, woven from organic fibers using a pattern and colors reminiscent of the old Third World and befitting of someone running an organic garden. She pulled a specially formatted key fob from the jumbled assortment of potentially useful items inside. The technogadget drapes did not match the Mother Earth-worshipping carpet, but only an astute passerby would notice, and on the peaceful little side street there were no passersby to be found.
Ana touched the little piece of plastic to the lock pad just above the handle of the door. While most key fobs contained read-
only mechanisms inside their little plastic bodies, this one would unfurl invisible hands from its tiny plastic torso and go to work reprogramming the lock to accept whatever code the fob felt like sending.
It took only a matter of seconds to work its technomagic, and then the lock slid open, and then another. So, not the absolute most basic security, but since she had cracked both locks in one try, it was certainly not the Continuum's best tech.
She opened the door and went in without a backward glance. Anyone looking behind themselves when entering a building couldn't help but look suspicious. Even though there hadn't been anyone outside, Ana didn't want to take the chance. Besides, if there wasn't anyone there to see her, then conversely, there was no one there for her to see.
The small room inside the door was dark despite the brightness of the day, but Ana did not need her eyes to adjust to know the layout inside. She'd had friends who lived in this exact model of late 70's-era prefab. The tiny foyer separated the first two floors with a door to the left leading to the first floor apartment and one more straight ahead that would lead to the second floor. The ones Ana had been in were upgraded with a few extra transparent windows to the outside so that the large panes of frosted, beveled glass embedded in the top half of each of the interior doors would have something to reflect into the apartment or stairwell, respectively. This version did not have the luxury of such a simple modification and the result was a dark, cramped little room.
The address Ana had stored from the lab at HQ provided no floor or apartment number, so Ana would have to spin a bit. She wasn't going to waste time actually generating a random number, and doing so would not make a difference. She just chose upstairs. Instinct.
The key fob worked its magic on the interior door, and again two locks opened. Not conclusive proof, but it made Ana feel good about the decision.
The darkness of the narrow stairwell closed in on Ana as she ascended. No bonus windows there either. The opening at the top of the stairs emptied into another dim, windowless room: the kitchen. It had been someone's particular notion that since people tended to congregate in the kitchen, the architecture should make it easily accessible. Ana still contended it made for an odd situation of people walking in from the dirt and grime of the outdoors to a place where food was being prepared.
This one, though, was as clean and clear as the unscarred man's face, the surfaces smooth and smelling of mild cleaning chemicals and perhaps some sort of smoked meat. The quiet of the room stitched itself together with the swollen dark brown that oozed from the stairwell, forming a quilt of motionless discomfort. Ana stepped her way across the soft white floor, guessing the big clues would lie beyond what the man ate—though there could be some insight to be had from that.
On the flip side of the kitchen wall, there was a bedroom even more spartan than hers, containing a small bed, though it did have a frame supporting the durofoam mattress, a stout three-drawer dresser, and a peculiar little desk. The particle board desk stood off to one side with a computer lying out in plain sight on top of it, a dark square standing out like an oyster washed up in beach sand. Ana approached, still wary of additional security that might protect the pearl inside the oyster. She surveyed the area around the terminal. She had not already set off any alarms—at least none that she was aware of—but it wasn't like the walls of the apartment were papered in classified documents for Scarface's eyes only. If there was information that required something stronger than a double lock on the door, the little black square on the desk would hold those secrets. Ana touched the power button gingerly, hoping it didn't have a bonus fingerprint reader underneath its glossy black surface. The holodisplay jumped to life in jittering neon blue and green and orange before calming to a soothing glow of thousands of colors in a meticulously crafted welcome display.
Unfortunately, that display asked Ana to scan her finger on the actual print reader just to the side of the power button. If she'd known she would need Scarface's fingerprint, she probably could have gotten it during their fight in the hospital. Of course, she would have to have loaded it into the Agency database and then into a print simulator before coming here and she wasn't supposed to have the intel that had led her here in the first place. She'd just have to see what sort of anti-hacking ware Scarface had running.
Ana spun the display, looking for signs of common open entry points. The easy holes were blocked, but when Ana tilted the display to the closest she could approximate thirty-eight degrees, a single black dot blinked near the bottom of the projection. The Thirty-Eight Special was a hole as hard to plug as to get through because of its proximity to the natural tilt point for the display at thirty-seven point five degrees. Ana had enough experience to keep the terminal balanced at the right angle, but was far less confident in her ability to work through any inner security while doing so. She'd done it before without an overwhelming amount of success. Her choices at this point narrowed to either break in or go home, so she took a deep breath and drew the tiny hole open.
The lack of biofeedback and resistance made Ana feel like she was trying to grab hold of a ghost. Her patience held, though, and she wrangled the ghost, wrapping it around her like a sheet with awkward, ragged holes for eyes, using it to obfuscate her entrance into the terminal system.
The information inside was dense and highly encrypted. It didn't take Ana long to find it, but opening the treasure chest and sifting through it all would strain her ghost shell to the point of at best loss of connection, at worst exposure to the system and any active security. Trying to lug the chest of information out through the tiny opening through which she'd come in would probably have similar outcomes. Ana began the painful process of breaking off pieces of the data bank and using the terminal’s own encryption routines to untangle the vines of the thorny briar plant that would be more than happy to burrow its way into her digital skin.
The first piece Ana decoded yielded nothing more than the location of the apartment, which she demonstrably already knew. The next few pieces appeared to be collections of distributions from various news outlets, scientific journals, and financial statements. Some of the internal groupings were linked by a common corporation or country, but the disparate collections carried no such common thread. It would have been nice to be able to offload the information for further analysis, but Ana continued to plow through to the newly decrypted sections, fearful of a shadowy reaper stalking her. She sensed the sentry that patrolled the terminal closing in on her spectral form.
Another few banks of data opened up before her to reveal something that looked more like mission documentation than had any of the previous information. Most of the files were tagged OVERWRITE AND MELT AFTER READING, but since Ana had accessed it, clearly that had not been done. The documents were as sparse as they could be in getting the point across. There seemed to be an outline of an information-gathering assignment, calling for logs of people's locations as specific dates and times. Ana recognized some of the names from the Surgeon List. That did not surprise her until she happened to glance at the timestamp in the footer of one of the documents. The month and day were any old month and day, but the year was not the current year, and not one in the past.
It was 2142: thirty-three years in the future.
Ana knew, somehow she knew, that it was not a mistake. She didn't need to do any math to check if somehow the terminal had flipped a bit and ended up with an incorrect timestamp. The pieces clicked into place even as her head started to fuzz with implication.
She spun back to the small heaps of news and financial data she had previously tossed aside. The timestamps matched. The publication dates on the news articles and scientific journals started several years past 2109. Everything in there was much more important than it had been just a minute before. Ana tried to calculate how much data from the future, encrypted and otherwise, she could dump through the opening before the digital sentinel uncovered her Trojan. The answer was: not much.
Ana's heart thumped hard and fast in her
chest, and her nerves, already straining to deal with mass amounts of adrenaline, kept trying to pull her mind away from its task. The Thirty-Eight Special tolerated very little in the way of deviation, and the idea of the Continuum somehow having information gathered from the future divided Ana's attention just enough that she lost focus for a split second. The mask of invisibility fell away. She regained it quickly, but not in time to prevent the protector of the digital fortress from spotting her. The program took the form of a large gladiator rushing toward her and even though she disappeared, it forced her from the terminal interface with a blow that might have cracked ribs had it been physical rather than virtual.
She drew her hand back, even though there was nothing left where the interface had been. The blank white wall stared listlessly back at her, a total lack of input. Yet she could almost hear the sirens wail from the alarm she knew she'd tripped. How long before the man who would become Scarface in his future and her past would be headed back to see who was snooping around his apartment?
Then a new and unsuspecting thought crawled like an insect into her veins: what if he already knew?
If he was from the future where the Continuum had figured out how to send people back—and presumably forward—in time, then the Scarface in the future, the Scarface who was actually scarred after their encounter, would know that she had broken into his computer. What if he was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, in the dark of the windowless stairwell, waiting for her to come back down?
And if he knew, the whole Continuum might know. They might have sent back an entire army to take her down. No. She backed away from thinking too highly of herself. She was a Valkyrie, indeed, but she could not yet have climbed the ranks to become a worthy target in the eyes of time-traveling terrorists.