Code Breakers: Delta

by Colin F. Barnes

  Gerry added, “Given the time delay between the pings, it looks like she’s moving fast. The viroborg must have had a vehicle of some kind set up and ready.”

  “And what about the surveillance?”

  “Nothing,” Holly said, tossing the slate onto a desktop. “Shortly after this fucker took Jess, the servers went down.”

  “Remotely?” Petal asked.

  “I’m already on it,” Gerry said. His eyelids fluttered.

  Through her internal systems, Petal saw him connect to the Libertas servers. Streams of familiar code flew out into the grid.

  “I’ve got a log entry,” Gerry said. “The timestamp is just seconds after the video capture. It crashed the servers while on the move. We can assume that it either has an AIA with sys-admin credentials or is adept at cracking high-end security.”

  “Probably both,” Jachz said.

  “So what do you know about this viroborg?” Petal asked.

  Enna answered for Jachz, re-entering the lab. “They were maverick technology. Wholly destructive and a last option. During the war, there were a number of high-profile enemies, and one of the simulations of the outcome had the Family as the weaker of three potential survivors. The ’borgs were designed to take them down from inside. Think of them as disposable code bombs.”

  “Code bombs?” Holly asked. “They’re designed to do what, exactly? Install viruses, that kind of thing?”

  “Exactly that,” Enna said.

  “So where’s this one going,” Petal asked. “Seeing as it was you lot who built these damned things, what’s south-east of here that would require a ’borgs abilities?”

  Enna pressed her lips together, subconsciously holding onto the truth, and turned away from the group. There she was, apart again, one of the Family, not one of them. And as usual, she held the power, the knowledge.

  Petal sighed inwardly. She was being too harsh. She did bring Gerry back, and that alone should be enough for Petal to give her the benefit of the doubt. For the first time in months Petal felt good again, whole, and had hope that she and Gerry would now finally have a chance to be together.

  “I’m sorry,” Petal said, stepping toward Enna, bridging the gap between the group and her, being the physical olive branch. “I’m just on edge. I don’t mean to take it out on you. We just need to know what you know so we can get Jess back.”

  “I know,” Enna said now, turning, smiling at Petal. She reached out, then pulled her hand back and balled it into a fist. “But this won’t be simple.”

  Gerry stepped forward, behind Petal. She felt his presence close, his warmth, his strength. He gripped her shoulder, sapping away her anxiety. There was a time when it was Petal’s job to assure Gerry, teach him the way of the world and look out for him, but now it was reversed. Even though he’d only been in his new cloned body for a short while, she could sense the strength of it and the control he exerted over it.

  Of all the versions of Gerry she had known, she felt this one was the best, the strongest, wisest. How much had he learned during his imprisonment with Elliot Robertson? Or his time inside Petal’s mind?

  “Nothing’s simple when the damned Family are involved,” Gerry said. The words unequivocally separating himself from that group. Gerry was his own man, and despite being the son of the Family, and Enna his aunt, he made it clear where his loyalties lie. “Now, just tell us, Enna, what’s the ’borg heading for?”

  They all waited, Holly, Petal, Jachz, and Gerry, as one, an alliance of oddballs. Waiting for Enna, one of them, to tell them the bad news, to send them off on yet another dangerous caper of the Family’s making. The silence stretched taut. Petal tapped her foot and thought about slapping the truth from Enna’s mouth.

  She finally spoke.

  Turning to face them, Enna brushed her hair behind her ears. “There’s a facility in the Korean Empire’s Northern Territory. It’s likely heading there.”

  “Wait,” Petal said. “The what now? Another facility. What exactly is this facility, and why are we only learning about it now?”

  “Don’t put all the responsibility on me,” Enna said. “Just because I was left behind, it doesn’t make me the official spokesperson of everything Family related. What do you expect from me? You want me to go through the entire goddamned history of the world, telling you what happened in every part of it? You want me to draw you a fucking map?”

  “Hey,” Holly said, stepping between them. “Enough’s enough. Let’s all just calm the hell down for a moment, shall we? Bickering like feral kids isn’t going to do us any favours. Now, I don’t really know Jess all that well, but I’m not so stupid to think that leaving this ’borg to its own devices is a good idea. We need to work together on this, formulate a plan and get to it.”

  “She’s right,” Jachz said from the back of the room.

  Petal turned to face him.

  He held his hands up. “I’m afraid this is my fault.” He held a slate in his hand. “When I left the Mars base in a hurry, I admit that I put my trust in Kabuki and followed her directions to get into the craft and head for Earth. I didn’t fully inspect it beforehand. In hindsight, I wish had the wisdom or foresight to predict something like this would happen. My calculations are—different now. It’s taking me considerable time to come to learn what I can and can’t do with this new consciousness.”

  “Great,” Petal said. “An emobot. That’s all we need.”

  “First things first,” Gerry said, shaking his head. “Let’s start with the facility, and then move onto whatever the hell this Kabuki thing is. There’s too much to cover here now. Enna, just tell us the important things regarding this facility and send us the rest of the information later while we’re en route.”

  “The base in the Korean Empire’s Northern Territory was essentially the prototype for City Earth,” Enna said, resting against the operating table, looking tired and weary. If Petal had the heart, she’d maybe have some sympathy. But she listened and waited for her to continue.

  “It was also one of the Family’s main production zones where many of its servers are located. From within that place they developed a lot of tech, much of it either now destroyed or still within the warehouses, mothballed and useless.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense why the viroborg would take Jess there,” Jachz said. “I’m not privy to the full details as you are, but if it’s old and mothballed, as you say, what motivation would the Family or Kabuki have for sending the ’borg there?”

  Enna dropped her head and sucked in a heavy breath. She visibly shook.

  “It was also the site of much of their weapons.”

  Petal’s stomach gripped with pre-bad-news tension. “What kind of weapons?” she asked, already knowing the answer from Enna’s body language, but wanting to hear it from her mouth regardless.

  Enna looked up at the others, her eyes offering a kind of an apology. “Nukes and EMPs—amongst other things.”

  ***

  Petal approached the sleek Libertas shuttle. Franklin led a squad of five security agents. They loaded up the shuttle with boxes of water and dehydrated food packs, rifles, pistols, grenades and spare ammo.

  Petal could still smell the smoke from Jachz’s earlier crash. Scorch marks burned parallel lines across the landing pad and out into the park, where a deep gouge exposed the earth. Jachz stood inside the shuttle’s loading bay, helping to fill it with supplies. Holly stood to the side, talking with Enna.

  Using this as an opportunity to speak with Gerry alone, Petal held his arm and pulled him back so they were standing just inside the alleyway between the presidential building and a business tower.

  “So,” Petal said, unsure of how to start things now she had Gerry alone. “How’s things?”

  “You know, just peachy. Been awake for an hour or so and preparing to hunt down a rampant cyborg. The usual.”

  She was glad he hadn’t lost any of his sense of humour. It felt so strange to see him standing there in a completely acc
urate facsimile of his real body. It was almost as if the whole dying and being rebuilt on the Family’s space station didn’t happen.

  “Seriously, Gez, are you doing okay? Up here?” She tapped her head.

  “Yeah, as good as before; in fact, probably better.”

  “Oh?”

  “When I was trapped in those servers with Elliot, I saw lots of… crazy stuff. Without getting all deep and philosophical about things, I realised how we’re all interconnected. Not in some metaphysical god-like way, but in a particle sense. Out there”—Gerry pointed to the sky—“is a great huge network. Binary is at the source of everything, Petal. It’s the building blocks of the universe. When we’re binary, we can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. All at once. It’s… frightening, but infinite.”

  “Is that why Elliot went mad?”

  “I think so. It’s inevitable. If it wasn’t for you saving me inside your mind, I’d have ended up the same way. We’re not meant to pass the singularity like that. Our minds are capable. Our consciousness needs a body to exist. At the cellular level there’s micro-networks that our soul, if you want to call it that, spreads out into. It’s why all the experiments of uploading our minds to processors fail. There’s nowhere for the soul to go. The mind can’t handle it. It gets lost, fragmented.”

  Petal stood there dumbfounded for a moment, letting the words sink in. The scope of Gerry’s experience overwhelmed her. She couldn’t quite take it all in. The ramifications, the insights, were too much to get her head around.

  “Then the Family’s quest for immortal posthumanism is doomed to fail?”

  “Yes,” Gerry said. “But there’s still a way—a way for us.”

  “The cloning?” Petal asked, seeing it clearly now. If the uploading of one’s mind to a processor-based state brought on certain insanity due to the lack of a biological body, then the obvious route was to regenerate the mind into a new, cloned body. Like Gerry’s.

  “Shit me,” Petal said, smiling and punching Gerry in the arm. “You’re like the genesis model, Gez. The first freaking one. Enna’s done it, hasn’t she? The thing her and the Family have been trying to do all this time, but they were looking in the wrong direction.”

  Gerry nodded, smiling. “The future is biology, not silicon. Posthuman doesn’t exist, will never exist. We’re human for a reason. The mind and body cannot be separated. Just like you and I won’t, not again.”

  Gerry wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in tight. They kissed, soft and tender at first, like the flutterings of butterfly wings, and then deeper, more passionate. Petal melted into Gerry, her one true love, and for that moment they became one again.

  — I love you, Gerry sent across their VPN.

  — I love you too.

  And despite the preparations for another conflict going on just a few hundred meters away, Petal was complete, happy, secure. There was a balance here she’d never thought she’d experience. Gabe was reunited with his family, and now Petal was reunited with hers. Reborn, Gerry was everything she wanted and more. Her life had meaning now.

  They broke away and stared into each other’s eyes.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” Petal said. “I don’t think I could have gone on for much longer without you.”

  Gerry ran a finger down her cheek and along her chin. “You underestimate yourself,” he said, his voice low and husky. “I’ve seen your soul, and it’s stronger than anything else I’ve seen. Stronger than Elliot’s, stronger than Hajime’s and Sakura’s, stronger even than my own.”

  Petal blushed and ran a hand down Gerry’s back. “Together, then, we should be unstoppable.” She glanced out of the alley to the shuttle. Franklin’s squad had finished loading the supplies. Holly broke away from Enna carrying a slate and stepped inside to join Jachz.

  “Totally,” Gerry said. “What say you and me go save the world again?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Gerry kissed her once more before he let her go and strode across to the shuttle. Petal followed behind, full of confidence, love, hope and a desire to smash the viroborg into a thousand tiny pieces. And when she was done with that, she’d come back and get some more answers from Enna. Petal couldn’t help but feel she was holding more back.

  That would wait, though.

  For now, they had to find Jess and the ’borg.

  Chapter 16

  Three hours later, they were approaching the border between China and the Korean Empire. Gerry was still processing the information Enna had provided on a slate. He had downloaded it to his AIA and was still thinking about the content when Holly, sitting in the copilot’s seat next to Jachz, made a short squealing noise.

  “Holy crap, look at all that,” she said, pointing at the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree OLED observation screen.

  Gerry leaned forward and instructed the system to zoom in by two hundred percent.

  Thousands of feet below them, through the wisps of cloud, were acres of lush greenery. The visual was almost unreal in the abrupt change from desert wasteland on the China side to the thriving jungle of Korea. Along the border between these two drastic climates, Gerry noticed a tall fence. It seemed that everything south of the fence had thrived and missed the worst effects of the radiation.

  Buried within the jungle were tall metal triangular structures. Around their bases were flat-roofed buildings. Great thick cables snaked between them. Perhaps some kind of generator system, he thought.

  Or a weapon of some kind.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Holly said. “Even when I went to the far West, it was all the same, just scrubland and devastation.”

  “I don’t think it’s any surprise that this was the Family’s main area of operations,” Petal said, poison dripping with every word. “Looks like they protected their own fairly well.”

  “You know anything about this, Jachz?” Gerry asked, suspicious of his silence.

  “I do not,” Jachz replied. “I was just an IT maintenance presence. I didn’t have access to everything relating to the Family’s operations, I’m afraid.”

  “Not even your friend Kabuki?” Gerry asked. During the flight, he had questioned Jachz about the AI. And to be fair to Jachz, there were no signs of subterfuge. But then Gerry had to remember he was dealing with a sentient AI—something that hadn’t happened before. He could be as skilled at withholding the truth as any of those bastards in the Family.

  Still, what he had said about her developing from the copy of Elliot did make sense to Gerry. During his time with the latter, he had seen how that could be possible. Even Jachz’s own development didn’t come as a huge surprise.

  The combination of biology and intelligence was the key, after all. For whatever reason, when they had uploaded Jachz after his mortal death on the planet’s surface, something changed when he awoke in his new body.

  Perhaps he and Gerry weren’t so different after all.

  “No,” Jachz said, “Kabuki was sandboxed. Whether she knows about this place now is immaterial. I have no contact with her. I can only go on the information Enna has provided and the little I already knew about the viroborgs.”

  “Are we still getting a signal?” Petal asked.

  “Yes,” Jachz replied, gesturing across the shuttle’s slate. A circular map, like radar, displayed on the OLED surface, overlaying the image of the jungle below. Two blips flashed: Jess’s signal and the shuttle’s position. According to the scale on the radar, they were about a hundred miles apart. It wouldn’t take long to—

  The shuttle rocked violently to the side, and alarms flashed on the OLED screen. Petal fell out of her seat, crashing to the deck. Smoke filled the cabin as another crash hit the shuttle somewhere behind them.

  Gerry reached out with his AIA and briefly detected a network presence.

  It could have been the viroborg or something else, but he was soon crashed out of the connection with a blast of white noise and junk data.

  He reached dow
n and helped Petal back to her seat.

  The shuttle’s nose dipped, and the broken image of the jungle on the screen grew larger, but not through any kind of magnification.

  They were losing altitude.

  Fast.

  Jachz frantically wrestled with the manual controls, but little was working.

  “Shit, Jachz, bring her up, we’re gonna crash,” Petal said.

  “I’m trying,” he said. “I’m locked out of the system.”

  Holly reached over and pulled the control slate round. The screen was dead. “Damn it, it’s on autopilot.”

  They kept falling.

  Flames burst through the gaps in the door behind them, the engine on fire.

  Gerry and the others coughed with the smoke.

  “We’ve got to do something quick, before we choke,” Petal said.

  They were just a few hundred meters from the tops of the trees. He scanned the internal network and found the pilot control node.

  Calming his mind, Gerry connected to the shuttle and shut down the emergency autopilot procedures, unlocking full access. He switched the power over to manual control and rerouted all power to the auxiliary H-core motors used for VTOL landing.

  It wouldn’t be enough to slow them greatly, but it was something.

  “You’ve got control, Jachz,” Gerry said through a series of coughs and holding onto Petal with one hand and his seat with the other.

  Jachz’s face sharpened and his eyes focused as he gripped the manual control sticks. His hands made micro-movements, adjusting their descent.

  The nose came up and the shuttle descended under control.

  Noises of branches and power cables scraping against the hull echoed throughout the cabin, drowning out the sounds of the powder jets extinguishing the fire in the engine compartment.

  A few seconds later the shuttle jolted heavily, hitting the ground with a clang and a thud.

  The momentum of the shuttle pushed it through the dense forest, smashing trees aside. Gerry thought a branch would come crashing through the screen at any moment and tensed his body to react. Petal gripped his arm and closed her eyes.