Fatal Exception

by Derek M. Dukes

  Chapter 23

  Concerning the Horrible Feeling of Being Stood Up

  EXACTLY AS PLANNED, PHINNAEUS ARRIVED at the Alamo Drafthouse on Colorado Street at precisely 11:15 p.m. This would give him enough time to get tickets (although he hoped that a movie that had been available on home video for years wouldn't attract too large a crowd) and find a good spot outside to wait for Tiffany to show up.

  The streets of Austin were surprisingly packed for a weeknight. The Alamo Drafthouse theater had enough of a cult following that all sorts of pierced, tattooed, drug-using fornicators showed up, a stark contrast to the “dressed to impress” high rolling singles waiting in line to get into the club next door.

  Phin wasn't a regular to downtown, but he'd been down there a few times to get used to the whole vibe it gave off. The bicycle taxis looped around the block endlessly, cars circled looking for free parking before eventually conceding and paying $6 for a spot in a garage on 4th Street. A loud and obviously inebriated group of girls stumbled by, leading a girl in a tiara on a leash. A bachelorette party en route to Sixth Street, no doubt.

  As the time grew closer to midnight, Phin started to get worried. He was fairly certain that she wasn't standing him up. She'd asked him out, why would she do such a thing? But that lingering doubt nagged at him from the back of his brain.

  She probably got caught on a long call, he thought to himself.

  She got you good.

  He tried to ignore the taunting of his insecurity.

  She got you to come out here all alone, buy her a ticket, now she's not going to show up. Tomorrow at work, she'll have told everyone in the call center.

  But what about the other night? he wondered.

  That was just a fluke. Girls do stuff like that — kiss a guy one minute, then forget he exists. If she really liked you, wouldn't she have given you her phone number?

  The Voice of Insecurity had a point — he didn't have her phone number. And she didn't have his — so if something had happened and she was running late, she couldn't contact him either.

  At half past midnight, Phin decided to give up. He walked down the street to an Irish-style pub, where he wrapped his sweaty palm around a pint of Guinness to relax.

  Drinking alone again, I see. That's a bad sign.

  Shut up, he told the voice. And after the third pint, the voice finally did.

  * * *

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  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, PHIN GOT up and went through the motions just as he had every other morning. Shower, brushed teeth, clothes. On his way out the door, he stopped by the computer to check — just in case.

  He wiggled the mouse to awaken his machine from sleep mode. Sure enough, just as he'd hoped and feared, there was an e-mail waiting for him from Tiffany.

  Hey Phinnaeus — you won't see me at work anymore. I decided to quit this place and go back home to Minneapolis. Steve is going with me. --Tiffany

  Phin's jaw dropped. Not only had she stood him up the night before, now she'd skipped town entirely — with Zook, no less — and he'd never see her again.

  “What — the — fuck?”

  “A kick in the balls” would be an apt comparison to the way Phin felt when he read the e-mail again. Just to be sure it wasn't someone playing a joke on him, he checked the e-mail headers. Sure enough, it came from on the Storm company network — but something was fishy. The timestamps appeared to have been altered. The local time on the computer that sent the message had been changed — it didn't match the timestamp left by the network servers.

  But if she didn't send the message, where did it come from?

  * * *

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  * * *

  WHEN PHIN ARRIVED IN THE call center, he was pulled into Isaac's office immediately.

  “Hi Phinnaeus, can I talk to you for a second?”

  Hell no, I have to find out what happened to my would-be girlfriend, Phin thought.

  “Sure.”

  “Steve quit last night.”

  “Zook?”

  “Yes. I wish it had been under better circumstances — he never came to talk to me or tell me he was unhappy here — but it seems that he just up and left.”

  “That's . . . odd.”

  “I'd prefer if you didn't talk about it to the other techs.”

  “So why are you telling me?”

  “Well, I need somebody to act as shift supervisor for a little while.”

  “Hmm . . . I haven't been here all that long.”

  “It wouldn't be permanent. I just need someone to answer questions from the other techs, and they all say you're one of the go-to guys around here anyway.”

  Phin didn't have time for this.

  “Have you thought about asking Reuben?”

  “Wow, you know, I didn't think of that. But I'm not sure he's right for the position.”

  “He knows a lot more than I do. Besides, he's also been here since the beginning.”

  Isaac frowned. “So are you saying no?”

  “I just . . . don't think I'd be comfortable in such a position when I'm still so new to the department.”

  “Alright. Well, let me know if you reconsider. The big guy seems to think you're a hell of a tech.”

  “The big guy?”

  “Elliot Storm. Somehow you ended up on his radar.”

  Great, Phin thought.

  “I know it's busy around here, but I like to get to know all my techs, so drop by from time to time.”

  “I will.”

  Phin took a seat at the most secluded desk he could find at the back of the call center and popped in the disk he'd gotten from Cecil Peabody, which he'd come to think of as Excalibur. Surely there had to be something in the network logs from the night before to tell him more about that e-mail. If Tiffany had really sent it, he'd be able to trace it back to her login — and if she hadn't, he could trace it back to its real composer and find some answers.

  * * *

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  * * *

  IN THE MAIN PROJECT LABORATORY, Dr. Reinhart was hard at work on the new crop of subjects. His new enhanced arms allowed him far greater dexterity — the kind of fine motor skills he hadn't had since he was a young man.

  Elliot stood by, watching the doctor at work.

  “Is this still the first one?”

  “Yes — it takes many hours to get everything hooked up just right. If I do not take my time, ze body vill reject ze implants, or ze brain vill shut down completely. Zen zhey vill be useless.”

  Elliot knew he was telling the truth. He'd seen enough bodies hauled out of the place to know the doctor had this procedure down to a science — although, to watch the man at work, one would swear it was an art. The tiny pincers on the ends of Dr. Reinhart's metal arms performed minuscule cuts, sewed tiny stitches, and cauterized blood vessels with a delicate grace.

  Around the room, there were three more temps awaiting the procedure, along with Zook and Tiffany. All of them were stuffed full of tubes, hooked up to machines keeping them alive but sedated.

  “Since we are running ahead of schedule, I would like to change the plans a bit,” Elliot said carefully.

  “Zat isn't like you, Herr Sturm.”

  “I know. But we have plenty of time, and I have a side project I'd like to devote some resources to for the present.”

  “I already know vhat you have in mind, and I am not sure it is possible. To control the brain directly, zat is something I have mastered. But to control the body, zat could take veeks more research.”

  “Of course — and I didn't mean we should stop the project. But I'd like to bring in another subject.”

  “I don't think zat is a good idea at zis phase . . . ”

  “It is not up for debate,” Elliot barked. “I will be bringing her here tomorrow night. Have Room 6 ready.

  Dr. Reinhart sighed. His benefactor's obsession was becoming unreasonable, and could be detrimenta
l to the ultimate goal of the project — but Reinhart was willing to humor him for now.

  “Jawohl, Herr Sturm.”

  Dr. Reinhart wheeled himself around to the top of the table and picked up his electric bone saw. Time to cut.

  After the finishing with the first new subject, Reinhart went into the control room. While Elliot Storm had always assured him that the project was secure, Reinhart didn't quite trust him and the little empire he'd built. He checked the security logs for the basement network and found that there had been an intruder.

  Some more digging revealed the source — Cecil Peabody. He was the network security administrator for the whole Storm campus — and he was a nuisance to Dr. Reinhart. Far too good at his job — Dr. Reinhart had to work extra hard to keep his part of the network hidden — and apparently Cecil had finally broken through and found their secret subnet.

  Soon it would be time to take care of that particular nuisance. Yes, very soon.

  Chapter 24

  Zen and the Art of Self-Reconstruction

  DR. KLAUS REINHART WAS, AS he always seemed to be, hard at work in the underground laboratory at Storm Computer Corporation. It was a sprawling maze of operating rooms, holding chambers, control rooms, and a massive server farm.

  For once, Elliot Storm had actually left the basement — he spent most of his time down there supervising Dr. Reinhart's evening work — leaving the doctor free to work on his own side-project. Deep in a back corner of the basement, Dr. Reinhart — with help from the robotic SpidR — had appropriated one of the operating rooms for his own purposes, completely unknown to Elliot Storm.

  When Dr. Reinhart was a young man, he'd been inducted into the brutal regime of the Nazis, and used that position to perform all manner of ghastly experiments that would be impossible under any kind of public scrutiny. Even the projects he was now carrying out for Storm were tame by comparison.

  The people around him — both the prisoners and the S.S. — called him Dr. Death. He sought to cheat mortality, so first he set out to understand the entire process of death. To that end, he was known to carry out procedures where he would take a prisoner, inject him with poison, and simply watch him die. He kept copious notes of each stage of the prisoners' deaths, from the initial fright, the loss of bladder and muscle control, and the eventual collapse.

  As the war grew to a close, however, Dr. Reinhart's experiments were deemed too risky even for the Nazis who sheltered him. He was relegated to a position of mere physician to the S.S. It was a job hardly worthy of what he saw as his natural advantages, his genius. But the S.S., quite frankly, were afraid of him. His brutality outweighed even their own. And so when the Allies swept across Germany to shut down the camps, the Nazis put a bullet through Dr. Reinhart's skull and left him to die next to a mass grave containing all the camp's prisoners.

  But he didn't die. He was left partially paralyzed, but somehow he survived. He managed to pull himself into a small subterranean shelter concealed in a barn, and he waited. When the Americans found him, he was barely conscious, babbling incessantly. At first, they thought he was the only surviving prisoner from the camp, but they soon realized he was far too well fed.

  Having no way of identifying him — the doctor certainly wasn't going to give them his name — he was placed in a medical facility in England. There he reached something approaching his former state, although he was confined to a wheelchair and claimed to have partial amnesia from the gunshot wound. Eventually he was discharged from the hospital. He knew what had happened to his former colleagues at Nuremberg. Dr. Reinhart went into hiding until he was found in a village in Venezuela by Elliot Storm in the early 1990s.

  Dr. Reinhart didn't have the slightest interest in computers — only what they could do for him. Unable to walk or use his left arm, the doctor saw his only chance in the field of robotics. It took some convincing, but Dr. Reinhart managed to get Elliot to build him a robotics lab in the basement of the Storm Computer Corporation campus. Storm's project would involve a large amount of robotics development, which Reinhart knew he could use for his own purposes as well.

  The condition for this was that Reinhart would have to live in the basement indefinitely. The impact of having the public find out that the former Nazi known as “Dr. Death” was working there would send Storm Computer Corporation stock plummeting.

  And so, for the last four years, Dr. Reinhart had been locked in the basement at the Storm campus. While he worked diligently on Storm's project for most of that time, this night, he would be working on his own.

  Deep in the basement, in a laboratory Elliot never entered, Dr. Reinhart hunched over an operating table. The bright lights illuminated a pair of robotic legs, each outfitted with full hydraulics and connecting to a non-invasive brain interface helmet. On the table next to the legs was a pair of arms, similar to the ones Dr. Reinhart used during his delicate operations, only these as well had wires running to the interface helmet.

  “Almost finished, my pet,” Dr. Reinhart muttered to the SpidR — his only companion and friend. “Zen I can finally leave zis place.”

  * * *

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  * * *

  PHINNAEUS HAD MADE BARELY IT through the door of his apartment before he pulled out the FBI cell phone and made the call.

  “Agent Wagner?”

  “Hello Phinnaeus.”

  “She's gone missing.”

  “Who?” Agent Wagner asked.

  “Tiffany Marks — one of my co-workers. She's gone missing. She was supposed to meet me last night, and she never made it, and the e-mail wasn't from her.”

  “Slow down, kid. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “She was at work last night, and she sent an e-mail to me saying that she was leaving town. Only the e-mail wasn't from her. I traced it back to another location on the Storm campus.”

  “Sounds like you're making progress. Have you managed to get any of the information we need?”

  “I don't have time for that right now. She's in danger, I just know it. I have to find her.”

  “Listen, Phinnaeus. The best thing you can do is get us the evidence we need. Once we know exactly what's going on there, we can kick down the doors like gangbusters.”

  “I can't. I have to find Tiffany.”

  He hung up the phone and tossed it onto the couch. Phin knew that there would be more information somewhere on the Storm network — but he didn't have time to follow all the FBI's instructions for getting exact locations, timestamps, all that crap. He just needed to dive into the network and find out everything he could.

  Phin dashed to the washer and pulled it away from the wall to extract his laptop. He inserted a fresh modem card, hooked up the wires to the outside phone line, then waited for the computer to boot up so he could insert the Excalibur disk.

  The first thing he would need to do is track down exactly where the e-mail came from. His fingers moving like lightning across the keyboard, Phin maneuvered through the network until he located a network topology map.

  “This — this can't be right.”

  But there was no mistaking it. The address that had sent the e-mail was in the building, but it was listed as being in the basement. But there wasn't a basement in the Storm campus. Was there?

  Phin had stumbled across a whole sub-network he'd never seen before. Massive amounts of data, huge processing power, all identified as being in the basement. There was no mistaking it — there was a hidden level he'd never known about, never heard of.

  If he was going to get in there, he'd need a lot more information. Wiping the sweat from his brow, Phin dived into the secret subnet and started looking for maps, anything.

  Reinhart? Who's that?

  The data all over the basement subnet had someone named Reinhart all over it. But there wasn't any record of a public user by that name. He had no e-mail address, no mailing address, no social security number, nothing.

  A query for all the files owned and edit
ed by Reinhart turned up a whole array of files having to do with the SpidR project, as well as something called “Project HYDRA.” He went for the SpidR files first, downloading the source code so he could examine it further.

  The first thing Phin noticed about the source code for the SpidR control code was that it was longer than it needed to be — a lot longer. This meant either that the programmer was extremely inefficient, or that the SpidR was designed to do a lot more than just walk around and surf the Internet.

  “Jesus Christ, this thing has an attack mode,” Phin muttered to himself. His mind swam through the ocean of code, mentally compiling it and running it almost in real-time as he read through it.

  Phin cracked his knuckles and started typing. He'd only have one chance at updating the SpidR's programming, and he wouldn't be able to test it out before deploying the code. He'd just have to recompile the changes, and then pray he hadn't made any typos.

  * * *

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  * * *

  AT TWO O'CLOCK IN THE morning, after four solid hours of coding, Phin uploaded his modifications to the SpidR control server and then went back to looking through the rest of the basement subnet. The next folder on the server he needed to check was “Project HYDRA” — which was encrypted and password protected. He clicked the on-screen trigger button for the Magic Disk, but nothing happened. He was locked out.

  “Shit on me.”

  He disconnected, ejected the disk, then started over and tried again. Still nothing. All he knew now was that there was something called Project HYDRA happening in a hidden basement on the Storm campus. Hardly the incriminating evidence the FBI needed, but it was better than nothing.

  He grabbed the cell phone off the couch and pressed the speed dial for Agent Wagner.