Children of Gravity

by E. R. Jess

  “It's a start. And if it doesn't work, I have another idea. One I don't want to try,” Eight said as he began to leave. “Thank you.”

  Jenna slumped in the UA-Xs troop bench. “I'm just glad I can rest.”

  “After you do,” Eight began, “Perhaps I could borrow your mind. You're the only one I haven't delved, and any information we can gather will help us get out of the Free City. You grew up in a UPC facility.”

  Jenna raised her voice, “I was thrown away like medical waste then used as a prostitute until I was a teenager. Want to experience that?”

  Eight swallowed. “No, I guess I don't. I'm sorry.”

  Jenna didn't respond. She ignored him until he went away.

  Hour Fifteen

  Hour fifteen was close. It was the Outernet witching hour. Every fifteen hours UCM's security passwords reset, leaving a minute chance of hacking into them. Jenna had succeeded so many times she lost count. She slipped into a feedback harness. She took a long swig of water. Jenna put on her headphones.

  The needles in the feedback suit didn’t hurt her at first, but when she started to move around, and when her blood began to flow and sweat pooled on her skin, the usual stinging sensation gradually became a horrid, unbearable stabbing.

  Hour fifteen approached again and the needles enhanced her senses, nerve endings were wired into her portable mainframe. Instead of relying on her handheld computer; she surfed the Outernet by way of interpreting digital audio frequencies. Satellite feeds, fiber-optic light, any digital information was translated into her own language.

  A short in her hardware sent electricity through her body. Jenna grabbed at her left arm and half-fell to the floor. Her eyes were wide open just before they flooded with a clear bluish gel. It shocked her enough that she disconnected from the computer strapped to her lower back. She flung from her skin the array of needles that covered her naked body. The wire threw her hand up to the ceiling of the scaffolding-like structure that occupied most of her cramped room. Her hand came back down covered in the thick fluid.

  “Fuck.” She laughed at the stuff dripping down her arm. Jenna chuckled a little as her eyes traced the tube to where the viscous substance was pouring from, she followed it down to her main CPU next to her bed. It was a small device, covered with protruding circuitry, it held wildly blinking lights and a violent hum of activity. When her eyes fell on it from the conduit running along the length of the ceiling down into the machine along with several others, the servos running its multiple hard drives and processors had just began to strain and whimper. The abandoned building they used while they camped for the winter wasn't quite ready for Outernet use.

  “The freaking coolant.” She sighed in disbelief and then looked around the room for something to thoroughly destroy while flinging the goo from her. “Middle of a blizzard and I have a coolant problem.” At that moment the power flickered.

  Jenna stood absolutely still. Thoughts clogged her mind. The power flickered again. They had been found. It was the signal that Vorn came up with to use when they realized the place had working power. That was the signal to start running.

  The hallway was empty of people; it was occupied only by green fluorescent light and a cold wind moaning down from somewhere above. Their latest home was some kind of manufacturing plant at one time, not long abandoned to rot in the Free City. Jenna peeked around every corner before moving. She didn't dare call out for anyone. For all she knew, there could have been a UA strike team in the building.

  Tiny puncture wounds all about her tingled a little, as the salve she applied was taking effect and enhancing the healing process. One less thing for the wire to worry about, but at that point, she was doubting her wounds would have time to heal.

  Jenna's steps fell all too heavily for her comfort. She winced as each footfall invariably crushed broken pieces of concrete and sent amazing echoes throughout the complex. She was all but tip-toeing along the narrow passageway to the UA-X parked in a docking bay. She stopped.

  The hall that lead to the room she claimed had no other doors near it, by her choice. When she reached the first neighboring room, twenty meters away and unoccupied, the young woman entered and immediately leaned into an alcove by a blocked fire escape exit. She wanted some time to think things through. The space she entered was an old office, dark and utterly in ruin and decay; not one inch of the tile floor was uncovered by glass shards and/or stone chunks. There was one window, the source of the glass.

  Lighting flashed outside. Jenna released a breath that she had been holding for fifteen minutes. It was most likely that a passing electrical storm was enough to cause a good old-fashioned power surge. She felt it safe enough to use a comm-link.

  Jenna put in an ear piece from her backpack mainframe. The link had a thin plastic tube running near mouth; into it she spoke a few numbers, dialing up Kagan. While waiting for him to answer the handheld she had given him, she stood fully upright and dusted a good part of the building off of her. Still being careful, the Wire didn’t stray far from the safety of her spot in the room. The link rang, it was a rapid wave sound, it reminded Jenna of a melodic bumblebee. To her, and her profession, it was as common a sound as her own voice. She almost didn’t catch another sound, static, floating over and under the ringing handheld wave like a worm swimming through mud. It was so quiet that Jenna wouldn’t blink if someone told her that it was always there, that she of all people missed such an obvious thing. It was almost as if the lack of sound was the reason for its existence, something to fill the gaps between the audio, visual, and simulated sensory information. There was still no answer on Kagan's handheld. She tried for Vorn. Nothing.

  The young woman cast her eyes downward, and when she looked up again, the warmth of a targeting laser spilled over her hair covered forehead. It was a pleasant sapphire blue. Jenna didn’t even swallow. Her face allowed for a darkened smirk, an almost contemptuous smile, then she dove and rolled into a shadow.

  Sedation needles showered softly from the window. They were meant to incapacitate without harming, but they flew with enough force to protrude halfway through an overturned wooden desk that was closer to Jenna than she cared to accept. Instead, she pulled herself together and got to work. She put on her headphones as she ran for her room.

  Special tactical field officer 3400 went by the name Shit Brickhouse when protocol wasn’t an issue. He was a wall of human strength backed by a cybernetically enhanced musculature that may have seemed redundant if anyone had seen him before his surgeries. His massive hand barely reached up fast enough to clutch the side of his head, as the giant's inner ear processors sent feedback rippling throughout his heavily wired cerebellum. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  Jenna was stunned at first. She had forgotten the extent of her abilities for a moment. She used the sound waves fed to her ears to navigate the Outernet version of their building. It was in better shape all those years ago, but the layout hadn't changed much. She used her UCG connection to hack into the UCM soldiers comm-links and they stood out as deep pulsations in the Outernet building. Jenna turned on her feedback suit. No coolant, but she activated it anyway. She was able perceive the building by touch with it on.

  Jenna was in two fights; one in the Outernet, the other in the real building. Her audio perception of the building was superimposed over the real one. It was disorienting and taxing. She stumbled down the hall toward an exit.

  On the next Urban Assault agent, Jenna used the UCG to give false orders to fall back from his position near her. She didn't think it would work for long, but long enough for her to slip by. For the next officer, the young wire pulled her punches and sent the enhanced soldier to the pavement of a decayed shipping yard by turning off the servos in his power armor's legs, then cutting his communications.

  Jenna wrote a different program for each individual; a virus tailored to each humanoid computer. That program attacked the vulnerabilities of the UCM agents; the link between man and machine. Jenna coul
d lengthen the space the technological bridge had to cross in order to combine and integrate with the organic, if not sever the tenebrous connection thoroughly.

  Aside from the distracting flood of sounds begging for attention, physical interferences began to arise; the harness was heating up fast.

  Jenna fumbled suddenly while incapacitating another agent. She could hear a counter-attack coming, a flood of sound flowing down from the network like the sonic boom from a jet. The wire disconnected from the communication grid just in time and attempted to run down a dark hall. Anti-wires were sending feedback attacks against her.

  When she got back online, Jenna had to redirect all her programming to keeping the heavily armed field agents from pinpointing her. At the same time, she ducked under a stairwell. The soldiers were scattered, she was safe for that moment. Jenna tried to link with satellite data to get a better view of what was going on. No luck. There was nothing she could do to find everyone else. She instead tried to hack into a UCM officers handheld to find their orders.

  The harness and her portable mainframe were overheating badly, it kicked her offline, off the Outernet. She and looked around. She left the relative warmth of the building, climbed out of a window and put herself in an ashy snowbank in an alcove.

  She closed her eyes and rested in a shadow for a moment. She went from uncomfortably hot to to freezing in moments. Jenna thought back to when she was younger and she would close her eyes and pretend to not be there when she was growing up in the Free City. And she did the same thing when a similar group of UA officers came to raid her tenement not long into her teenage years. Just closed her eyes and wasn’t seen. Invisible.

  Light and sound exploded from an office window a dozen meters to Jenna’s right. She grabbed her computer instinctively. She crouched on her shivering arms and legs and breathed in deeply. She had to decide whether to run or see if her digital self could get to them before they got to her. To her back, the way she came, a window three meters up. On her left was a closed loading dock door. To the immediate right was the hall leading to the offices that were being stormed at that moment. A quick battery check as Jenna climbed up back the way she had come. The staccato of heavy footsteps were close behind.

  She jumped into the stairwell. She stayed in the shadows. Someone was closing in too fast for her to think straight. She looked up the stairs and feared that there were more of them waiting. She thought, I could log back on to the UCG and log off fast. That way she could pinpoint everyone again. Either way, anywhere that she could run was well within a UA officer's range. They knew someone was close and they would burn through every square millimeter of the complex until they were found. Leaving wasn’t an option yet either, the perimeter was sealed up tight.

  Lighting flashed outside again.

  Jenna paused. And as she began the startup sequence to log on to the UCG, a UA soldier almost bumped into her. He was too shocked to raise his compact needlegun. Jenna's eyes went wide and she put her hands up. She began programming. The UA soldier grabbed her wrist. He tapped the side of his head and spoke in code. Jenna typed out lines of a program as he hands were in the air. The soldier nodded in response to some command he received over his comm-link. He put the gun to her head. He was going to execute her right there. At that range a needlegun would do just as well as the real thing. Jenna closed her eyes.

  By then, the UA teams wires had updated the building on the Outernet. It was cross examining the blueprints of the original building and extrapolating new information taken in every spectrum at a high enough resolution as to duplicate true reality. Lighting, temperature, air pressure, every piece of attainable information was fed back to UCM for immediate investigation. Urban Citizen Monitor's best and brightest programmers had been walking around the building for ten minutes or so, via a hollowed out UA officer.

  Jenna could hear them suddenly, hundreds of human voices. So much raw information sounded massive and epic, like an orchestra warming up, like five orchestras. They were taking the building apart brick by brick, shipping it across the Outernet one by zero by one, and re-assembling it before the eyes of UCM employees. The scale was grand and more than Jenna had ever hacked into. There were anti-wires waiting everywhere There was wall after wall of protective programming. The officer fired his gun. Unfortunately for him, Jenna crossed his wires with her impromptu program. He had fired the gun into his foot and was falling to the ground, blissfully sedated. Jenna didn't pause, she knew time was running out. She ran back to her room and reached up into the ceiling ductwork. She coated herself in the gooey blue coolant. She filled a portable canister of it and attached it to her mainframe to keep it cool a little longer.

  The virtual representation of a UCM wire walked right past her. Walked right by and she closed her eyes and they walked on. Their visuals were affected by the storm and the coolant kept her at the room's temperature. Jenna opened her eyes wide as she went over everything in her mind again. She had some time. First, she decided, find everyone.

  Jenna was sliding along in the background, using the vector cameras for the same purpose as the UCM programmers, to find her friends. She tried the comm-link again, as surreptitiously as she could, and the sound was there again, the snaking sound, taunting her.

  No sign of them. UPC was all out in force for this one. Jenna was only one. There had to have been a thousand UCM personnel involved. All from across the globe. All in the safety of their corporate castles. Treating it like a video game. And Jenna was losing control, not of the situation, but of herself. They were laughing and confident. Just a few rusters or anti-citizens who can barely spell, much less hack a real mainframe.

  Where is everybody?

  She checked the custody records. She checked again.

  Darek, the newest pacifist, was dead and left in the upper levels. Alessa and Kagan were dead. Jenna checked again.

  They had Alessa, they had her body.

  The tiny noise in the comm system was getting louder. It was taking shape, but Jenna didn’t care. The young woman was slumped in her corner. Hiding and running as she had always done, had done until her hacking days. She was going to attack them head on, she knew it. Any moment one of the Urban Assault officers could have lifted his visor and used his one human eye and seen her there in a shadow. They had Alessa's body. If Alessa was dead, Jenna was dead.

  Jenna closed her eyes.

  The explosion rocked the entire complex. A hoverjet troop carrier that dropped twenty-four of the sixty UA officers down to terrorize a group of pacifists stalled and drifted down towards the ancient pavement as if its legs were kicked out from beneath it. That in turn hit a reactor truck and exploded one of three mobile power sources used by UA. It was not an accident.

  A row of seven armored officers advanced on Jenna’s army of one. Half the floor beneath her crumbled from explosive rounds. She ran and programmed at the same time. She pulled no punches. Jenna let loose all she had into each attacker and didn’t pause to watch them fall as she went on to the next.

  They retaliated with riot shell fire, high-velocity burst rifles, and digital feedback. Instead of logging off, she tried to re-route the incapacitating information back to its source. Her ears were bleeding.

  One officer stood less than a meter from her in a boiler room, then one behind him. The first raised his rifle and ran, firing. Jenna clung to a wall and screamed as she dropped a power overload program into the first. He stammered and Jenna stood taller and clenched her fist and the officer’s face burst inside of his helmet. The second ran towards her. He had no weapon and the wire stood her ground.

  Jenna detected from the UCG that there was a programmer in there. This one went to grab her but was only clutching air. Jenna ran away as fast as she could, and sent a malicious program behind her, infecting the programmer. The next thing he knew, the programmer was throwing his headset off three hundred and forty miles away and cursing and reeling back from a headache.

  More UA were being flown in, too many for
Jenna to handle. The tiny noise became a roar that blocked some of her important tasks. It was louder than the signal of some of the UCG transmissions. It was becoming a serious threat and Jenna wondered if there wasn’t another wire tracking her down, not including the seventeen anti-wires fumbling around and trying to stop her. The signal was almost like someone's voice, but it sounded too clean and mathematic, like a medical program.

  Her defensive walls slammed up and decreased functionality to one task at a time. Another solution came suddenly and was halfway programmed by the time she decided whether or not to use it.

  The officers were relying completely on the blueprints for navigation. It seemed sensible for a company-government that defined reality as something that it could re-design better to depend on its computers and users to tell them where to put their footsteps. In the next lightning flash, the programmers were walking around her version of reality, and the UA officers were running into walls and falling down elevator shafts. She had changed the entire complex by simply inverting it. A mirror image version of the entire Outernet representation of the building. It was an amazingly small feat that no one thought to plan for or protect against. Jenna turned off the eyes of those not relying on the Outernet projection, and the rest went down with exploded inner ears.

  Jenna reached the loading dock where the UA-X was supposed to be waiting, but it had already left. She cursed and began running away from the building.

  The complex was left in a far more advanced state of ruin than it had been before the officers arrived. A new pillar of smoke joining several others was the last Jenna saw of her latest former home.

  One half a kilometer below the MetroNet city center, a quintet of mammoth buildings, in a collapsed parking garage, Kagan and Alessa looked at each other emotionlessly. One was like a mirror to the other. Eye level and even. Faces serious and tired. Two people with bad news on the tips of their tongues. They had gotten out of their temporary home just in time, but a few were left behind.