Virtual Sabotage

by Julie Hyzy

  “Another subject coming out.” Aaron’s fingers flew at the controls. He focused on the monitor but called over his shoulder. “Maya?”

  “On it,” she answered. “Have to reload the program.”

  “Shut the system down cold,” Kenna said. “He won’t know what hit him.”

  “Too late,” Maya said.

  A moment later, the door of another capsule opened and a young, muscular guy emerged. Dark-haired, formidable, and wearing an expression of biting fury, he grasped his left bicep with his right hand. “What the hell?” he asked. “Nobody told me I’d be getting shot at in there.” A moment later, he seemed to comprehend that those surrounding him were not the people he’d expected to see.

  Kenna jumped to her feet, pulling her scissors out again. Why didn’t Maya and Aaron draw their guns?

  “Almost there,” Maya said.

  With a growl of fury, the young guy lunged. Kenna skipped out of his reach but not far enough. He snagged her by the arm, throwing her to the floor.

  “Hurry,” Aaron shouted.

  “One more second.” Maya’s voice was confident, though strained. “Now.” She twisted to watch.

  When the guy lunged again, he stopped mid-motion like a windup toy at its final click. Mouth open, he grunted as he took a lurching step to regain his balance. His eyes rolled white. He attempted one more step, but his knees bent and he collapsed to the floor as Kenna tried to get up. He landed hard on Kenna’s twisted right leg. She stifled a scream as she heard something pop.

  “You okay?” Maya asked.

  “Ah, ah.” Kenna extricated her leg from beneath the man. Her knee began to swell almost instantly.

  “Anything broken?”

  Kenna didn’t think so. She worked the joint. Excruciating but not immobile. She shook her head, in too much pain to speak.

  “Good. Take your time.” Aaron blew out a breath. “That’s what I meant by Maya’s magic,” he said. “She wrote a program that temporarily disables a person’s implant—and the brain it’s attached to. They’ll come around in about a half hour. By then we should be gone.” He pointed. “That’s Nick Rejar, by the way. Celia’s right-hand man. Her golden boy.”

  Kenna nodded acknowledgment as she worked to beat back the searing pain in her knee. She could get through this. She’d been through worse. “What about…the firefighters?” she asked, finding her voice. “How are we going to get past them? How did you get past them?”

  “That’s Aaron’s superpower,” Maya answered from her perch at the monitor. “They haven’t invented a security system he can’t breach.”

  “Usually I need more time to study it,” he said with a shake of his head, though he seemed pleased by the compliment. “We were supposed to have another month. I had to circumvent this system with almost no warning and nothing but instinct to guide me.” He waved away Kenna’s other question. “By manipulating the sensors in the operations office, we managed to convince the fire department that a team had already cleared this floor. We’re good.” He tilted his head. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I will be,” Kenna said. The sharp pain had begun to subside but the swelling continued to grow. “We should call paramedics for Patrick.”

  Aaron made a noise of disapproval. “Sure, and then we get kicked out before the job is done.”

  Wincing, Kenna lowered herself to the floor next to Patrick again. “Patrick.” She laid a hand against his cheek. “It’s okay. You’re going to be all right.”

  “Tell him I need help,” Maya called from across the room.

  “With what?”

  Aaron had moved to the last VR capsule—the only one they hadn’t examined. They opened it to find Tate lying on his back. When Kenna had left him, he’d been on his side.

  “That one.” Kenna pointed. “Is he still alive?”

  “Barely.”

  “He killed Charlie. Fry his brain so hard we hear the sizzle.”

  Aaron sucked in a hard breath. “Ah, Kenna,” he said. “No.”

  Kenna struggled to get to her feet. “I’ll do it myself then.”

  “Don’t.” Aaron moved to intercept her. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “You don’t know what I want.”

  Aaron placed a hand on Kenna’s forearm. “But you don’t want to be one of them, do you?”

  Kenna worked her jaw. Frustrated and furious, she tugged out of Aaron’s hold and hobbled back to Patrick’s side.

  “Come on, buddy,” she coaxed. “Wake up.”

  Patrick’s eyes fluttered again but didn’t open. Instead, they clenched shut. His mouth flatlined white. Still shivering, he shook his head. Moments later, his lips began to move. “‘Everything,’” he whispered, slurring, “‘is perfectly safe.’”

  From his position at the monitor, Maya swore. “We’re not going to get anywhere with him. He’s too far gone.”

  “Patrick,” Kenna tried again, “we don’t have much time. Please come back to us.” When he didn’t respond, Kenna looked over to Maya. “What did you need?” she asked. “Maybe I can help?”

  “Only if you can escalate my privileges from here.” Her fingers never stopped moving. Her focus never shifted from the monitor. “I need to execute the payload Patrick installed, but we’re screwed because I was supposed to have access to the security engineer’s workstation. It’s offline. I’ve been trying other stations but none of them have high enough clearance. Patrick would know the best attack vector, but unless he regains consciousness soon, my capacity to corrupt will be limited.”

  “How much damage can you cause?”

  “Enough so that they’ll have to scramble to recover. But that’s not good enough. I’m blowing stuff up as I go, creating chaos,” she said. “Patrick dropped the program into the system weeks ago. It’s been copying itself across the network waiting for the command to execute the payload.” At this, she turned to Kenna. “If I could do that,” she said with a frustrated nod toward Patrick, “we could take down Virtu-Tech permanently.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  Kenna held Patrick’s hand, hoping that physical contact would help restore his mind-body connection. “You’re out. Your family is safe. You made it.” She and Aaron exchanged an anxious glance. “Maya is here, too. She needs you. We need you.”

  “‘Nothing,’” Patrick said, slurring again, “‘is real.’”

  “Maya needs escalated privileges,” Kenna went on. “She can’t get there without you.”

  Aaron took up a position next to Maya’s. “What can I do?”

  “Scan as much as you can. See if anything pops. Looks familiar,” she said. “Knowing Patrick, he would have dropped the program in more than one location—” She stopped at the unmistakable sounds of employees returning to work. “Damn,” she said quietly. “Door’s locked, right?”

  “It is,” Kenna said. “But what’s to stop an authorized person from coming in?”

  “Not a darned thing,” Maya said as she scanned the data before her.

  “Wait,” Kenna said, clumsily clambering to her feet. She ran over to Celia’s lifeless form and reached around the back of the woman’s neck. “Would logging in from Celia’s machine help?”

  “If I could find hers, yeah,” Maya said without turning. “But from here I don’t have visibility.”

  “Celia’s office is on the fifth floor.” Kenna turned around with a flourish. She held the woman’s security badge aloft. “And this will get us in.”

  ◊

  Minutes later, Maya and Kenna stole out of chamber number two with Celia’s badge around Kenna’s neck and Nick’s around Maya’s. Aaron stayed back to keep watch over Patrick and ensure their Virtu-Tech captives didn’t cause trouble. Kenna’s scissors and wire had finally come in handy. When Celia, Nick, and Tate regained consciousness, they’d find themselves bound and unable to
move.

  “And if Celia’s machine is password-protected?” Maya asked under her breath as the two made their way along the corridor. “Then what?”

  “Then we’re no worse off than we were before.” Kenna tried hard not to limp. “Aaron is doing his best to continue ‘blowing stuff up’ as you put it. We have to hope that Celia is so supremely confident in the strength of this pass”—Kenna grabbed it by a corner—“that she doesn’t log out every time she steps away.”

  “That’s a whole lot of hope you got there,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, what else have we got?”

  On their way to and up the stairwell, they passed a handful of employees returning to work after the impromptu evacuation. Not one of them paid Kenna or Maya any attention.

  As they stepped out onto the fifth floor, Kenna headed to the right, striding with purpose, ignoring the pain in her leg, and scanning the area for clues. Maya followed. “This is the way to her office?”

  “I have no idea,” she whispered. “But if we look lost it’ll be obvious we don’t belong here.”

  “We got lucky,” Maya said. “It doesn’t seem as though anyone has gotten back up here yet.”

  She was right. The entire level appeared deserted.

  Across the atrium, Kenna spotted a set of ornate double doors with an unoccupied desk set outside of them. She gestured with her chin. “There.”

  “Yes. That’s got to be it,” Maya said. Picking up their pace even though every step made Kenna flinch, they made their way around the balcony. Gold raised letters spelled out Celia’s name and title on the dark carved door. The empty desk, with papers strewn across the blotter and a half-empty water bottle next to the computer monitor, made it look as though its occupant—nameplate: Drew—had been unexpectedly called away.

  Kenna pulled her badge up.

  From their left came the distinctive sound of an ascending elevator.

  “Hurry,” Maya whispered.

  Like she didn’t know that.

  As the elevator slid into place, dinging with its arrival, Kenna swiped.

  With a click and push, they were in.

  Shutting the door quickly, Maya started for the giant desk across the room. Her pace slowed slightly as she made her way around. “This is crazy,” she said. “How much room does one person need?”

  This was the first time Kenna had ever been in Celia’s office, too. “I don’t know, but talk about intimidating.” She stared up at the portraits on the wall. Vefa Noonan and Simon Huntington watched them from above. The two geniuses who had brought VR to the masses. They’d envisioned a better, stronger society. A happier world. Not at all what Virtu-Tech had planned. And if she and Maya were successful, everything the two men had ever worked for would be destroyed.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to them. “But there’s no alternative.”

  Maya settled herself in Celia’s chair.

  Kenna made her way across the room to stand next to her. She held her breath.

  A moment later, the desk phone’s intercom sounded. “Celia, I’m back.” The voice was youthful, masculine. This must be Drew from the messy desk outside. “Is there anything you need?”

  Maya and Kenna turned to each other shrugging helplessly. Kenna leaned forward, pressed the button, then grunted a negative, “Nnnn-nnn.”

  She disconnected. “Hurry.”

  “Celia wasn’t logged in,” Maya said. “Give me her badge.”

  Kenna complied.

  Maya examined it and smiled as she set to work. “Let me in, pretty baby. Let me in. Let me in.” She whispered it like a mantra. A moment later, she smiled in victory. “A lot of people record their passwords on their ID badges. Tsk, tsk. Very unsafe.”

  “You’re in?” Kenna asked.

  “Yup,” Maya answered, feverishly tapping keys. “Should be a simple matter of double-clicking.” Scanning the display, she said, “Yassssss,” then double-clicked.

  Instead of executing, a box opened, presenting more choices. Reminding Kenna of a zip file, it expanded to offer a host of options. There had to be two hundred of them.

  The intercom sounded again. “Glen is on his way over,” the young man at the outer desk said. “He said he’s having trouble accessing the inventory files.”

  “No surprise there.” Maya said to Kenna. “One of the things I blew up.”

  Kenna pressed the button again. “Mmm-hmm,” she said. She hoped that would be enough to keep the kid happy. With any luck they’d be long gone before this Glen guy showed up.

  Maya ran a finger along the row of files. “I know what Patrick did here. He played it safe by installing it on as many privileged machines as he could.”

  “No one noticed it?”

  “Not if he hid it in a slew of innocuous-looking files. Hiding it in plain sight so that an IT manager wouldn’t notice it. So that Celia wouldn’t notice it.”

  “But he didn’t tell you the name?”

  “He never got the chance. We had to accelerate our timeline, remember? Patrick was convinced Celia suspected Trutenko. He thought he was safe. None of us could have anticipated what she had in mind for Patrick down there.”

  “What can we do?” Kenna asked with a glance at the door.

  “Try them one by one,” Maya said. “What else can we do?” She clicked.

  Nothing.

  “Scroll down,” Kenna said.

  “Why?”

  “Like you said to Aaron downstairs. Something may pop.”

  “Could be a waste of time.”

  “Could save time.” Kenna pounded the heel of her hand against the desk. “Scroll.”

  The icons slid by alphabetically: Adams, Autonomy, Bartlett, Democracy, Franklin, Freedom, Gwinnett, Jefferson…Names and words having to do with the founding fathers, the Revolutionary War, the heroes…

  “That’s it!”

  “What?” Maya asked.

  “Liberty.” She pointed. “Right there. Patrick’s nickname. And he said it to me before I came out. He said it.”

  “Got it,” Maya said as she double-clicked. “Patrick has a nickname?”

  “Yeah, Liberty. Because of Patrick Henry. Remember from grammar school? ‘Give me liberty—’”

  With an exultant shout, Maya thrust two fists in the air. “Oh yeah! Payload!”

  The intercom voice came back. “Are you all right, Celia?”

  Kenna clicked the machine again. “Mmm-hmm.”

  Maya studied the program’s progression, her smile growing wider by the second. “Oh yeah. That’s what we want to see. Right here.”

  “You designed this virus?” Kenna asked.

  “Team effort,” she said. “Simon’s the one who gave us the idea. He saw where things were going and decided to come up with a fail-safe. Charlie knew we were working on it. A couple of the others—Aaron, Sabra, Edgar—helped brainstorm, too. I brought the final version home. And Patrick dropped it where it needed to be.”

  Kenna blew out a breath of relief. Her shoulders relaxed. Even her leg felt better. She stood next to Maya and the monitor with a sense of serenity she hadn’t expected. Patrick was still in danger. Jason, too. But they’d at least accomplished what Charlie had originally set out to do.

  “We need to get medical help for Patrick,” she said.

  Maya nodded. “I’ll call Aaron.”

  As she did, Kenna phoned Stewart to give him an update and get help. “We’re stuck in Celia’s office right now. Aaron is on the third floor with Patrick. There’s no way any of us are getting out of here without being noticed.”

  “Got it,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The intercom again: “Glen is here. Should I send him in?”

  Kenna pressed the button. “No,” she said in her best impression of Celia. After disconnecting, she tu
rned to Maya. “We can’t stay here. What now?”

  “Back door,” she said pointing.

  “Excellent,” Kenna said. “But what if they shut Celia’s computer down?”

  “There’s no stopping the program now,” she said, grinning. “Boom! All their data, all their technological research, all their ability to control VR globally is about to disappear forever.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Hard to say,” she said. “Give me a couple of seconds to delete our footprints here, and we’ll sneak out the back way.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Two men stood in the doorway. The younger one wore an expression of pure panic. “I didn’t let them in,” he said to his companion. “I swear.”

  Kenna recognized the voice from the intercom. Drew. The other one must be Glen.

  He strode forward, Drew in his wake. “Who are you?”

  “Security,” Maya said, waving Nick’s badge. “We heard there was trouble up here with the alarms.”

  Drew stepped closer. “Where’s Celia? Does she know you’re here?”

  “Of course,” Kenna said as she eased around the desk, pretending she felt no pain. “She’s tied up with a delicate matter on the third floor, so she sent us up here to check.”

  “Let me see that ID again,” Glen said. He turned to Drew. “Call security, I want them up here just in case.”

  Without a thought of her injuries, Kenna sprinted at the two men. Grunting with effort, she swung at Drew’s back, knocking him face-first into the ground, hard. Breath shot out of him with a whoosh. “Sorry, kid,” she said as she hobbled around to face the other guy.

  “Glen, I assume?” she asked through shallow breaths. Older than Drew, he was taller, too, with shiny dark hair and a soft paunch.

  “Who are you?” he asked. Pointing at Maya, he said, “Get away from the computer. Now.”

  Kenna stood between Glen and the door. She might not be at full strength, but she wasn’t about to back down from this guy. “Why should she?” Kenna asked, spinning the man to face her. “Because you’re afraid you won’t sell enough Flaxibars or soap to keep investors happy?”