Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones

by Saul Tanpepper

  “Why does that make him a headcase?”

  “Because everyone knows there’s no cure.” He stops and blushes, remembering Kelly. “Sorry. What I meant is—”

  “But what if there is one?” I press.

  He doesn’t answer.

  I have to believe there is a cure. It’s the only thing keeping me sane right now. I just can’t think about the possibility of losing Kelly right now.

  I reach into my back pocket and feel the old ID card still there. I hesitate a moment before drawing it out and flipping it over to him.

  “I found this in a drawer in your house.”

  He picks it up and stares at it for a moment, and I can almost see the change come over him. His eyes darken and the line of his lips tightens. His jaw clenches. His body goes rigid.

  But then it all disappears in an instant. He hands the card back to me and says, “Are you sure? Because I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

  I’m just about to challenge him when both our links begin to ping.

  Micah jumps to his feet, looking relieved. “Kelly,” he says, glancing at the ID, “that was a lot quicker than I expected.” He activates the Link and asks, “Are you in?”

  I see Kelly nod. “Yeah. But we’ve hit a few snags.”

  Chapter 13

  “Why is it so light there?” Kelly asks.

  “We found a house with solar,” Micah explains. He stares hard at the image on his Link, purposefully avoiding looking at me.

  As soon as I brought Professor Halliwell’s card out, his whole demeanor had changed. I can’t decide if it was surprise or confusion, but a definite wall came up between us. The sight of Halliwell’s face must’ve triggered a memory. He’d denied it, so maybe he’s not even aware he knows something.

  Then again…

  “The lights still work,” Micah continues. “Some of them, anyway. Speaking of lights, why is it so dark where you are?”

  “I’m back topside with Ash and Reg,” Kelly answers. “Outside. The mainframe is down an elevator shaft in the smallest of the buildings in the enclosure. There’s a whole underground complex here—computers and meeting rooms, bathrooms, storage. Even running water, though it’s pretty grungy coming out of the faucets. Everything is climate controlled. Looks like the elevator is the only way up and down. Not sure, though. Still a few more doors I haven’t checked.”

  “What are the snags?” I ask, barely managing to croak out the words.

  Kelly frowns. “What’s wrong with your voice, Jess? You sound funny. ”He stares through his screen. “And what’s that wrapped around your neck?”

  “Stephen,” I say, in lieu of a full explanation. And then, before Micah can say anything more about the attack, I add, “But he’s not a problem anymore.”

  “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  “Bruised is all. Stephen’s dead. Micah made sure of that. Just tell us what’s going on there.”

  “You know how I was supposed to go down and send the programs up to Ash and Reg to work out the new code?”

  We nod.

  “Well, I couldn’t connect to a sub-stream. It’s too far underground and there’s no signal.”

  I grimace. Without a stream, the Links are useless.

  “We should have thought about that,” I murmur. Micah nods, though he still won’t look at me.

  “It’s not that big of a deal,” Kelly continues. “Just taking a little longer than we expected, and the elevator is slow. But we’re stuck here till morning anyway.”

  “Any problems getting hooked up?”

  “Your interface worked like a charm, Micah. And Ash gave me a heads up on what to look for. Took me a bit longer to find the actual failsafe programs. I had to write a new command-line search app and instruct it to look for bits of the programs’ outputs, since we don’t know what the application files are called. It’s crude and buggy. Plus, I had to narrow the search parameters so it wouldn’t bog the system down, which meant limiting myself to only about a hundred parallel streams at a time.”

  “How many sub-streams are there on the mainframe?” Micah asks. He has that distant look in his eyes, the one he gets when he’s hacking. I hope it mean he’s remembering.

  “Over twenty-seven million. They’re partitioned into about a dozen main bundles. No dynamic switching, which is nice. Fortunately we got lucky and hit pay dirt on about the six thousandth search iteration. All the root applications and registry files were in a packet called PROJECT REWIRE.”

  Micah types this into the tablet. I give him a quizzical look and he shrugs and whispers that it’s so he won’t forget.

  “I got all the files uploaded onto the tablet,” Kelly goes on, “and then I hand-carried it all back up for Ash and Reg to work on.” He hesitates and the look on his face grows serious. “I’ll be honest, guys. I’m not sure we’ll be able to pull this off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I took a look at the coding. The apps themselves are fairly rudimentary, not even close to the level of sophistication we saw with The Game. Or even Zpocalypto.”

  “So, it should be a piece of cake,” I say, trying to make my voice not sound so hoarse. “You or I could probably do it, if we had to.”

  Micah nods. “The apps wouldn’t need to be very complex.”

  “From what Stephen told us,” Kelly says, “the failsafe is just a simple override. Unfortunately, simple doesn’t always translate to easy. Reprogramming the implant might be nothing more complicated than flipping a switch back and forth, as long as we know how to do each of those flips. Or it might be irreversible, like picking an apple. Once it’s off the tree, you can’t put it back on.”

  “Luckily, we’re not talking about apples,” Micah contends. “We’re talking about programs. If you can code something, and then recode it, you should be able to reverse it back to its native state.”

  We’d been taught in school that the neural implant is designed to remain quiescent as long as it receives a neurological signal generated by the cerebral cortex of the brain, the center where higher cognitive functions reside. Upon death, as this part of the brain dies, the signal wanes, and the implant becomes active. During outbreaks, the implants give the government a way to incapacitate Infecteds. Of course, the implants weren’t created to be a preventative measure. That just happened to be a side benefit. They were created to fix spinal damage. Then they were adapted for use in the Undead, to fight our wars.

  Since then, the uses for the Undead have expanded. Now they guard our borders and clean our sewers and mine for our precious metals and coal. More recently, they’ve become avatars in live action survival games.

  Stephen’s failsafe program—or programs, rather, since there’s a slightly different version to match each implant’s identifier code—generates a set of instructions that do two things. First, it reprograms the implant so that it’s no longer responsive to the neurelectric signal generated in the brain. The second is that it replaces that impulse with its own. As long as the implant receives it, it remains inactive. Cut the new signal off—like when we went underground during our escape attempt—and the implant activates, triggering a nociceptive response: excruciating pain, nausea and, if allowed to continue long enough, coma and death.

  And after that, if the host has been infected, Reanimation.

  The programs run within the mainframe under Jayne’s Hill and the instructions are sent, in coded form, to the transmission tower via a wired connection. The tower broadcasts the instructions to any number of relay towers scattered about the island, which receive and decode the program’s output into a language that our implants can understand.

  Simply deleting the failsafe program or the signal or sabotaging the transmission tower to prevent the program from transmitting won’t work. The only way we can defeat it is by instructing the implants to return to their default states.

  “We know which lines of the failsafe program encode the actual override,” Kelly continues. “What we
don’t know is the original code it replaced. Right now, Ash and Reg are taking guesses at how they can reconfigure it to its nascent programming. That part’s over my head, so all I can do is sit here and wait.”

  “And where’s Jake?” I ask. “What’s he doing to make himself useful?”

  Kelly’s eye twitches. I doubt any of the others would even notice it, but I know him better than anyone else, except maybe his family. What I can’t understand is why he’d agree to let Jake lead the group if the guy bugs him so much.

  “Reg sent him to go patrol around the perimeter to make sure the IUs don’t get in.”

  “But…?”

  “Nothing. It’s cool. At least he’s out of my hair for the moment.”

  “Have there been very many IUs?”

  “Couple dozen, I think. I haven’t checked lately. Saw a few on our way here—not many, and they didn’t follow us. The place was clear when we arrived, but once we started making noise digging, and then trying to break in, that’s when things started getting a little hairy.”

  “What do you mean ‘hairy’?”

  “They started trying to get through the fence. The first few pretty much exploded electrocuting themselves. The noise really started to draw them out of the woods.”

  “Exploded?”

  Kelly nods. “They’d try to grab the fence. There’d be this loud bang and a flash and a puff of smoke. The stink was terrible, like burning rubber. But after about ten minutes, it stopped.”

  “Is the fence losing voltage?”

  Kelly shakes his head. “No, they just stopped touching the fence. It was like they’d…”

  He shakes his head.

  “Jake had this idea that if we got them all riled up, they’d go crazy and throw themselves into the fence. Easy way to get rid of them. I disagreed, but you know how stubborn he can be. He actually went out there to taunt them. They got riled up all right, but they still wouldn’t attack the fence.” He pauses again, looking dismayed. “It’s like they’re learning.”

  Micah lets out a snort. “They can’t learn. They’re not cognizant.”

  “Even slime molds ‘learn,’ Micah,” Kelly replies. “They encounter a negative stimulus once and afterwards they avoid it. And we know they aren’t cognizant.”

  “Slime molds are massive single-celled organisms, zombies aren’t,” Micah argues. “And slime molds won’t chase you down to try and eat you.”

  “Then, how would you explain it?”

  Micah shrugs dismissively. “They can’t climb trees, so stop worrying.”

  “No, I know. But I worry what a dozen or so of those things could do as a group. They could easily knock the fence over.”

  “Never going to happen,” Micah says.

  “Just stay out of sight,” I say. “That includes Jake. They’ll lose interest and go away.”

  Kelly’s frown deepens. “Jake’s beyond listening to me.” He looks off to the side again, then turns back after a moment shaking his head. “Anyway, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. And we can always barricade ourselves in one of the buildings here.”

  “Well, sounds like we’ve had better luck than you,” Micah chimes in. He sounds positively cheerful. “Jessie’s figured out a way to get over the wall.”

  “Already? You’re kidding me. What is it, a catapult?”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I reply. “Micah found a crane and some rope. All we need is for you to jumpstart it so we can get it close enough to reach over the wall.”

  Kelly shakes his head. “The old cranes ran off diesel.”

  This means nothing to either of us.

  “Diesel engines are totally different from the old gas engines,” Kelly explains. “There are a lot more things that could go wrong, like water in the fuel, lost pressure in the lines, bacterial growth in the diesel. Even assuming all that’s fine—doubtful after so many years—the fuel itself might’ve gelled up by now. All it’d take is one cold winter, one good, hard freeze.”

  No one says anything for a moment.

  Kelly turns and nods to someone off-screen. “Looks like they’ve put something together. They want me to upload the new program and give it a test.”

  “Before you go,” Micah says, “let me talk with Ash real quick.”

  Kelly hands over his Link and Ash’s face appears out of the darkness. Micah asks her what they did.

  “We broke Stephen’s program down into its various components,” Ashley says. “Would’ve been faster with you here, since you’re the program architecture expert.” I expect Micah’s face to flush, but it remains as impassive as before. “One interesting thing we found was these timestamps embedded in Tanya’s program registry.”

  “Timestamps?”

  Ash nods. “Turns out the instructions her implant was receiving changed at least twice in the past week. The last one coincided with yesterday morning, right before we left LaGuardia.”

  “That’s when her body rejected her implant,” I exclaim.

  Ash nods. “Except now we think maybe she didn’t reject it. We think Arc shut it off.”

  “Damn it,” I mutter. “Stephen was telling the truth.”

  Ash frowns a moment before brightening. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to say. Using the timestamps, we traced back the programming changes. By reversing the process, we think we’ve recovered the code to return the implants to their factory settings.”

  “Think?”

  Ashley shrugs. “As sure as we can be.”

  I think about this, then say, “Give it a try, but just on one person. There are risks. If there’s no ill effect after the new instructions have had a chance to propagate through the network—say, ten minutes—then send that person down the elevator. That should tell us if the implants are back to latency control.”

  Ashley nods. “Good idea.”

  “Yeah, but who?” Micah asks. “Or maybe you should draw straws.”

  “No need,” Reggie says in the background. “I’ll do it. I’ll go first.”

  “No, Reg,” Ashley says, turning away.

  “It has to be Jake,” I say, interrupting them. “He wanted to be your leader. He needs to show some incentive and take the risk.”

  “Jessie,” Reggie says, and his face appears next to Ash. “Even if you were right, he’d never listen to you.”

  “Doesn’t have to come from me,” I reply.

  “He’s still out at the fence. Besides…” Reggie pauses. “I think you know it can’t be him, Jess. You know how screwed up he got the last time we tried. A third failure could kill him. I’ll take the risk this time.”

  I turn to Micah. “What do you think?”

  He doesn’t answer right away, just sits there thinking for a while before nodding grimly. “Send me a copy of the programs and your fix,” he tells them. “The entire PROJECT REWIRE packet. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make any sense of it. But who knows? Maybe something’ll jog my memory, dislodge whatever is blocking me from remembering. Sit tight for an hour before starting anything. One hour. Understand?”

  Ashley nods and I can hear the others agree. Nobody wants to take an unnecessary risk, especially since they’re messing with someone’s head.

  “Okay, Micah. Unless we hear from you first, we’ll ping you when Kelly’s ready to swap the programs.”

  Micah nods, but after we disconnect, his hopeful look turns into a scowl. “Shame on you for setting Jake up to be the guinea pig,” he tells me.

  I feel my face flush. “I didn’t set him up! Why would you even say a thing like that?”

  “Because you and I both know—and I suspect Ashley does, too.” He holds up his Link with the new programs. “It’s not going to work.”

  Chapter 14

  I sit and wait in silence for the next forty minutes, the tension building like the heat inside a closed car on a typical August afternoon. Micah stares at the failsafe base code Ash sent him. He’s transferred it from his Link to the tablet computer. Ever
y once in a while, he taps something or swipes the screen, mumbling incoherently or sighing with frustration. Finally he sets the tablet aside and buries his head in his hands, combing his hair back.

  I’ve been sitting here thinking about what he said. I want to believe that the fix will work. I haven’t even allowed myself to think it won’t. So, what he said about me setting Jake up is wrong. He’s wrong. I would never do something like that.

  Micah had shrugged off my protests, saying, “In an hour it won’t matter. I’ll either be able to explain why I knew it wouldn’t—in which case, I’ll have come up with a fix that does—or I won’t and Reggie’s going to have to be the guinea pig. Truth be told, I’d also rather it was Jake, but we both know that can’t happen. Reggie’s right: one more trigger could kill him.”

  “Just remembered that school starts in six days,” I say to him, because I don’t know what else to talk about, yet feel like I have to fill the silence with something.

  He looks over, surprised. “Is it Tuesday already? I’ve lost track of the days.”

  “Dude, you lost track of the days last week when you woke up and thought you were supposed to be at school.”

  He gives me a chagrined smile. “Everything’s whacked. Everything.”

  “The programming isn’t coming back?” I ask.

  “Actually…yes,” he says, surprising me. “I mean, I guess it must be. I’ve been checking out Ash’s work and my intuition is telling me that she’s done a nice clean job of recoding, carefully extracting the bits that look like the override code and splicing in the earlier lines from Tanya’s programming. It’s exactly what I’d do. Exactly.”

  “But…?”

  “But then little alarm bells keep ringing inside my head and that little voice says that it’s all wrong.”

  “You said you thought she knew.” It’s the closest I want to come to probing why he thinks I would know. How could I know if I haven’t even looked at the code?

  “Yes, I think she knows. You saw how she resisted letting Reggie be the first.”

  “Because it’s Reggie.”