Raines shook her head, ignoring me, and said to Devers, "How did Diana get that code?"
"She wrote it," Devers said, dropping facts as if they were common knowledge.
"Diana worked for Cybercore on Independent Thought-Based Programming. Nothing like what you're showing here," I said, jabbing a finger at the morphing screen of code.
"Castle controls Cybercore."
"What the hell is Castle?" I asked.
"The resistance."
"Resistance to what? Aim for some clarity in your answers."
"To the ever-widening technological divide separating Uppers from the rest of the world, and to those who would abuse the system for their personal gain."
"You're talking about Unity like it's a couple of people sitting around a table divvying up the world's resources," Raines said.
"Isn't it?" Ash said. She sat quietly beside Devers, watching with those silver eyes, twin moons reflected in a puddle, that missed nothing.
"I don't care about any of that," I said. "Tell me about Diana and what she has to do with this."
"Malcolm controls the first half of the code which allows him to bypass the Safeguard in any individual nanocomp he has secured access too," Devers said, his words a slow drawl to ensure we grasped the importance of their message. "But the scope of that weapon is limited. Hacking a single nanocomp takes significant effort. The section of code written by Diana, however, truncates that process, allowing groups of nanocomps to be hacked simultaneously."
Devers poked holes in my memory of Diana, but shed light on a mystery that'd stumped me for a decade. He tossed the missing puzzle piece in my lap. Answers tumbled in and snapped into place.
"This is how he did it," I said. "This is how he killed them all."
The best and brightest minds at Time Vice never could figure out how Malcolm had committed the largest mass murder in human history. How he'd hacked the millions of accounts so quickly, without giving Time Keepers a chance to stop him.
This code was the answer.
"Can I interrupt?" Raines raised her hand like a child petitioning for an opportunity to speak. I figured it was an ironic gesture, but doubted Joseph realized.
Joseph nodded.
"Why the hell do you guys have this?" Raines asked, lowering her hand and smoothing a crease from her pant leg. "I mean, it's a weapon of mass destruction, right? So why build it in the first place? No bomb, no boom. Seems simple."
"Our ability to combat our enemy depended on our ability to generate this code," Devers said, pausing either for dramatic effect or to find his next line of thought. Either way, the silence grew until it became the fifth member of our conversation.
We sat quietly in anticipation of whatever the silence might say next. But it didn't seem to know more than anyone else, and I grew impatient.
Devers, and Ash by extension, were holding back. Sure, they were giving the broad strokes, but you can't go around painting landscapes all the time. At some point you gotta get down to the minutia and put a person or two on the scene, maybe a tree.
This picture lacked all the details that would make it come to life. Make it memorable. Or at minimum, help it make sense.
"Malcolm is a sociopath, so I understand what he'd use this code for," I said. "But if you're fighting Unity, its leadership, and whoever or whatever else, then the question becomes why do they want this Code?"
Ash's demeanor tightened. Her fists clenched in her lap. It was the first show of emotion I'd seen from her, and it looked all wrong on her tiny frame. Too contained for her twelve-year-old self. Too subdued.
"Malcolm is broken, yes. But he is not a sociopath," she said. "The two of you are more similar than you realize. You've both lost somebody you loved, and both turned away from the people you once were. You turned that anger inward, focused on destroying yourself. Malcolm turned his outward, onto the world."
That Malcolm had lost someone was news to me. It hadn't been mentioned in his files. How Ash knew this became a matter of interest I wanted to pursue to its natural conclusion, but Devers interjected.
"Let me ask you a question," Devers said, folding his hands in his lap. "What is the purpose behind the Life Tracker?"
An easy question, which told me Devers was maneuvering for a not so easy answer.
Unity's doctrine stated the Life Tracker kept the human population at the highest threshold of sustainability for the Earth's resources. Centuries earlier, we'd pushed the planet to the brink, and then like children lacking the ability to see past the consequences of their actions, we gave it a little shove.
The Dissolution came next. Billions of lives, along with much of the planet's inhabitable land, lost in a war for remaining resources. It hadn't been so bad at first. Countries tightened control of their borders, severely limiting, if not altogether restricting, the influx of travelers. In the beginning, the fighting took place on a small level, localized incidents, neighboring countries testing one another for access to the few resources afforded by their unique geographic locations.
The idea of a worldwide conflict wouldn't come until the first nuke exploded over Amsterdam. No country ever claimed credit for the attack. It didn't matter. The effect was cataclysmic. Whoever launched that fateful missile doomed humanity to the kind of zealous fighting that defied rationalization.
Radiation poisoning spread across the African and Eurasian continents, rendering most inhabitants dead or horribly mutated and wishing they were dead. The Lost, as they became known, lived in a different world than anything a Unity citizen had ever known.
Unity existed because of sound decision making and a healthy heaping of luck. The North American Union had the foresight at the time to combine forces into a single entity known as Unity. That, combined with the geographical distance from the majority of the fighting, made it easier to defend their borders from the floods of refugees seeking sanctuary.
But sanctuary didn't exist. Not for them. Not enough space.
So while the rest of the world tumbled down the evolutionary ladder, hitting every rung along the way, Unity thrived.
But we were reminded a few years later that humans are creatures of habit. If left to their own devices, we grow beyond control, a cancer replicating until it kills the host. The solution was meant to be a temporary one: build down. This gave way to the bottomless cities of Terminus and the other major Unity cities.
After much deliberation I gave an oversimplified answer to a complicated question. "Population control."
Devers gave a half-hearted shrug. "What if I told you the Life Tracker was no longer necessary? That we have the technology to reclaim the East, and that there is no need for two-thirds of the world's population to live underground?"
Memories of the endless underground maze came flooding back. The shit-stained halls carpeted with shattered glass, used needles, and abandoned dreams. Men with pockmarked cheeks and hollow eyes staring at shambling women covered in their own filth. Each wondering what they could cheat out of the other, all the while knowing they had nothing worth taking.
A perfect place for a man to commit some good old-fashioned self-destruction. But I'd been there by choice, which was not the same as the billions of people I shared wall space with. They were there because the world had no room for them except between the cracks.
The Class Wars had never ended. They simply became the status quo. We accepted it because the alternative was chaos. It'd been beaten into us since childhood: class distinction was the only way to make the system work. The only way humanity could survive.
That this reality had been manufactured by those in control made my pulse throb. The influx of fresh blood to muscles drew my attention to how sore they'd become since sitting down.
Despite the discomfort, my brain made new connections. The Uppers controlled everything. They could take back the land, but they didn't want to share it.
"We're not dying fast enough for them," I said, making the final leap to arrive at a conclusion that'd been
staring me in the face. "Seventy years from the day we're born isn't enough for them."
I wanted to punch something hard and unforgiving, to feel the crunch of bone and knuckle, but Raines was the closest thing in reach and she was too hard, too unforgiving.
I choked down the anger, an oversized pill stretching my esophagus as it grated down my throat.
The answers were there, all save the one that mattered.
"Why me?" I asked.
"We've shielded you by maintaining your ignorance," Devers said, "but the time has come for you to fulfill your purpose."
"You make it sound like you've had my entire life planned out."
Devers smiled. "Perhaps not far from the truth."
He held an ocular implant in his outstretched palm. Delicately I plucked it up as if the nanite upgrade hiding inside might explode if I moved too quickly.
"What's on here?" I said, unscrewing the cap and dipping a finger into the clear liquid. It came up with a thin slip of plastic. Faded yellow light filtered through the translucent lens with inky clarity.
"Answers," Devers said, his voice quivering.
"Memories," Ash said, her voice a rock.
"Whose memories?"
"Yours," Ash said.
That was just vague enough to be compelling. Years of Quick Sliver abuse had done irreparable damage to my brain, and by extension, my memories. I'd spent the past seven years in Terminus' sewers stealing from Lucky Lou and his cohorts so I could afford the expensive reconstructive nanites that would help me regain what I'd lost. I'd wanted to live in ignorance, but I wanted to die knowing.
Willing to do anything to recover what I'd destroyed, I drew a deep breath, retracted my eyelid, and inserted the lens. It scraped against the pupil before sliding into place like a suction cup.
The rush of data hit hard and fast. It crashed through the thin firewall afforded by my nanocomp, racing over and through the cracks of a crumbling dam.
Raw and unfiltered, the data plunged like a needle into my optic nerve. A liquid blaze raced into my occipital lobe, shattering upon arrival in a display of fireworks.
I sipped shallow breaths. Beads of sweat dove down my neck, tickling nerve endings flashing on and off under the control of a drunken switchboard operator.
Synapses and neurons fired beyond capacity.
The world came too quickly. A jumble of sights, sounds, and smells overwhelmed me.
The muscles in my back spasmed, arms flailed as lightning bolts flashed and popped. My brain fired as a single unit where the only task was to spread any and every message as quickly as possible.
And then it stopped. I gasped and doubled over in my chair before sliding onto my knees. All that remained was the awareness of a captive knowledge held prisoner in the narrow confines of my mind.
Nanobots flitted across gray matter, rewiring neural pathways to accommodate the influx of new information.
I opened my eyes and was only mildly surprised to find myself lying on the floor, looking up at Raines. Her hands were warm and comforting, smoothing back the clumps of hair clinging to my forehead.
"You okay?" she asked. "What happened?"
The questions tumbled out of her simultaneously.
"Maybe?" I sat up and the world swirled. Raines held me. I turned to Devers with a skull full of sloshing fluid. "You could have warned me it was gonna be so violent. I almost bit through my tongue and pissed my pants."
"We didn't know." Devers shrugged. "You're the first one to receive that upgrade."
"How do you feel?" Ash asked, leaning off the edge of her seat.
"What part of I almost pissed my pants didn't you understand?" I said.
"But do you remember?" Ash ignored my obvious discomfort.
"Is there something in particular I should be remembering?"
The little girl gave a frown that could break a father's heart.
"Give it time," she said, more to herself than me.
I scrambled into my chair with Raines' assistance. The colors of the room merged, creating new combinations I'd never imagined. It had the feel of a Quick fit, minus the writhing on the floor wishing I were dead part.
"I don't feel any different," I said, scanning my nanocomp for any sign of the nanites I'd accepted into my system. "What are they supposed to be doing, anyway?"
"They're repairing portions of your brain damaged by Malcolm's virus."
Raines and I exchanged glances with competing levels of incredulity.
"What?" Raines asked.
It felt like I should lend Raines support with my own words. "Yeah, what?"
"Years ago your nanocomp became infected with a nasty virus that wiped portions of your mind," Devers said. "It blocked some memories, replaced others, and deleted many more."
None of this made sense. That somebody could clear my memory was absurd by every definition of the word.
"Bullshit," was the only response I could muster. "Any damage to my memories is thanks to the Quick."
Raines echoed my sentiments with a bobbing head.
"No, you turned to the Quick because for a time it negated the effects of Malcolm's virus. It postponed the inevitable," Devers said, "but it was only temporary and came with many side-effects."
"If by side-effects you mean soul-crushing despair mixed with mind-numbing apathy, then yeah...side-effects," I said.
"We've never attempted to recover terminated memories. Honestly we still don't know if it will work, but we're out of time and options," Ash said. "We had to try."
"Glad to be the guinea pig."
Ash looked at me with pity.
I didn't want her pity. I wanted answers, but this conversation was leading nowhere but to the little town of Pissed Off with a population of me.
"I've known Tom since I was a rookie," Raines said. "He lost part of himself, but that was the Quick, which he didn't start hitting until after Diana's death."
"We placed Tom in Time Vice for a multitude of tactical reasons. His ability to operate in that environment without detection was paramount to his assignment," Devers said. "What you know of your partner is no more than what we have allowed you to know."
Raines crossed her arms and shook her head. She refused to purchase whatever Ash and Devers were selling.
Thoughts trawled the surface of my brain, burrowing at times into locations unknown. Memories slipped away the tighter I squeezed.
I couldn't lock onto the foreign memories, but they were there. Fluttering beneath a layer of consciousness. I felt them. Part of me wanted to see them, to believe what Joseph and Ash were saying because their words had a twisted sense about them. They framed the world, and the events of the last twelve hours, in a context I could understand.
But those answers came with questions.
Harder questions.
Questions about me, Diana, and the life I thought I knew. My world view would come into tighter focus at the expense of my personal reality.
Maybe I'm not the man I thought I was.
That left room for hope.
Perhaps even redemption.
I wanted to believe that was possible.
"So I worked for you?" I asked.
Devers nodded.
Ash said, "Yes."
It was odd hearing her answer the question. I'd assumed Ash was a glorified bodyguard or super assassin, but the dynamic between Devers and Ash felt different somehow. Whatever their relationship, the answer eluded me.
"Why did I stop?"
"Your memory became compromised," Devers said. "Keeping you around would have been dangerous. A liability."
"From the virus?"
"Correct."
"You couldn't fix me?"
"At the time it wasn't possible."
"And now?"
Ash shrugged. "We'll see."
Those words inspired zero confidence.
"What kind of work did I do for you?"
Ash and Devers paused before Ash said, "Security."
An in
tentionally evasive answer, but pressing the point wouldn't reveal more. I saved my breath and leaned back in my chair.
Silent with my thoughts and memories. All of them. Both remembered and forgotten.
I sifted through the mental dump of my mind, but only found the all too familiar memories that'd become broken and soiled by the passage of time. I didn't want to dig through those memories. They were too painful.
"So, Tom used to be a secret agent..." Raines' words were coated with a spoonful of sarcasm that dripped in heavy globs as she spoke. "Great. But where does that put us now? If what you're saying is true, then Malcolm's out there planning to murder billions of people and we're flying circles hoping Tom regains his memory. Shouldn't we be doing something, like trying to find the bad guys? Maybe stop him before he does more damage?"
Raines' cheeks burned redder than usual, giving her face the appearance of a bronzed statue in the orange glow of a setting sun. It was beautiful.
A flare went off somewhere deep in my brain. A flag stuck in the fleshy ravines that screamed for my attention.
A memory bobbed to the surface. Vague and distorted. Details blurred, but the contents conveyed.
I squeezed my eyes shut until white spots appeared on the back of my eyelids. Trying to wrestle the memory into focus.
"Lucky Lou," I blurted out. When I opened my eyes everybody was staring at me. Devers cocked an eyebrow that asked the question for the group. "I've got to go see Lucky Lou."
"Why?" Raines asked, carefully laying out the question as though it were a blood offering to a spiteful deity.
"Going to get something he took from me."
"And what would that be?"
"A key."
"A key to what?"
I shrugged and said, "Something locked?"
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Katabasis
"You are not a smart man, Tom," Bo said, shaking his head.
I stood a step below the giant, looking up into his muscular nostrils. He was not wrong.
The sign behind him read, Lucky Lou's. It spat a gauzy light into the street that blanketed everything in that corridor with a thin veneer of scum.
"We need to see Lou," I said, gesturing to Raines and Ash, who stared at me with expectant eyes as if I might perform sleight-of-hand magic. Unfortunately, there were no tricks hiding up my sleeve.
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