Code Breakers: Beta Read online

  Pietor led Gerry up ten flights of stairs, and it seemed like he had climbed all the way to space by the time they reached the top.

  “Elevator’s out, huh?” Gerry said about half way to break the tension. Pietor, clearly not a fan of idle humour, shrugged once more and carried on marching up the stairs.

  Pietor stopped outside a metal door with ‘L’ scratched into its surface. He knocked, and a spy-hole opened. A green eye peered out, blinked, and then the door unlocked, creaking on old hinges.

  “Gerry Cardle. What the hell are you doing out here?” Liza-Marie said, sitting on an old wooden chair, her back to the window that overlooked the bridge and dried-up river. Her compatriot, Ghanus, prowled to the side of the door, gave Gerry a respectful nod of acknowledgement.

  The door locked behind him. Pietor stood sentry with his arms crossed and his laser pistol in hand.

  “Fancied a stroll,” Gerry said. “How’s tricks?”

  “Tricks are tricky.” Liza-Marie placed her rifle on the floor and walked over to Gerry with her hand out. “Let’s get off on the right foot this time,” she said.

  “Good shooting, by the way.” He nodded out the window. “Nice work.”

  “We were kinda pushed into that. Ideally, we’d have let them be, but we couldn’t let them stay there and give our position away.”

  “Someone did,” Gerry said. “A small girl, crippled legs.”

  Liza-Marie shrugged. “Is that meant to mean something?”

  “I don’t know, you tell me. She told me she could hear me and that the man in the box was up here.”

  The Upsider’s face scrunched. “What does that mean?”

  “I’m assuming the server. You have Omega here, right?” Already Gerry could hear the familiar whine of the Jaguar’s VTOL rotors. It seemed they had got the message already and weren’t wasting any time.

  “Yeah, we have it,” Liza-Marie said, staring at Gerry as if trying to divine his intentions.

  “I’m not here for trouble,” he said. “Things have got out of control. We need to secure it.”

  “That’s what we’ve been doing here.”

  Gerry shuffled his weight, eager to get moving. “I’m not sure taking out a checkpoint is a good way to remain secure.”

  “We had little choice,” Liza-Marie said, wiping the sweat from her exposed forehead. “You see, Red Widow have been securing all buildings with power, and those in strategic positions without, and with this being fairly securable and overlooking the bridge. It’s the reason why we set up here. They thought they’d take it for themselves.”

  “Given their firepower I don’t think that’s going to be too difficult for them.”

  “We were fine until they expanded their control on the city. But we were making plans.”

  She cocked her head to one side towards a door at the end of the room. The rotten wood, covered with fungus, hung from its hinges like a drunk from a lamppost.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Come see.”

  She led the way, held the door open. The darkness beyond invited Gerry inside. He hesitated for a second, felt a tingle on his arms as a wisp of cool air flowed out. Coolant gas.

  He stepped forward into the room. Liza-Marie followed, closing the door behind.

  It was a regular hotel bedroom, sans furniture. In the middle of the room, humming quietly, sat the server Omega: the man in the box. Two half-masked men sat on wooden chairs either side of it.

  Gerry’s heart jumped. He quickly sent a text message across his VPN to Malik:

  —I’ve found the server. Things are about to escalate. Await my instructions. Stay where you are.

  Malik sent back:

  —What the hell’s going on? What do you mean?

  — Give me a few minutes. I’ll update you shortly.

  “You know they’re looking for this?” Gerry said pointing to the server.

  “Everyone is.”

  “You realise what it is, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean really what it is. Not just the backbone for the Meshwork.” He didn’t want to say too much in case she didn’t know, in fact from the glazed-over expression he knew she didn’t realise its significance. That was a good thing, but also a tricky thing. How could he get them onside and give up the server? They’d spent most of their lifetime protecting it as if it were some spiritual oracle. They were on some divine quest like the Templars of old.

  “What are you getting at, Gerry?”

  “Look, we need to talk about the server, and this whole situation.”

  “Well? Talk.”

  “I need the server.”

  “That’s what all this is gonna come down to ain’t it?” Liza-Marie said, leaning nonchalantly up against the filthy and paper-torn wall.

  “What do you mean?” Gerry asked.

  “You want the server, we want to keep it safe. Red Widows are crawling all over the place. Are you a friend or enemy in this scenario?”

  “There’s, what? Four of you?” Gerry said.

  When Liza-Marie didn’t respond, he knew the truth of it. “You can’t last against the Red Widows. You think you can get the server out of here without someone noticing? You hear that Jaguar getting closer? This place is going to be rubble in no time. You want to be buried under the stone and debris protecting a server you have no use for?”

  “What are you suggesting, Gerry?”

  He knew he had the upper hand. She hadn’t the same leadership skills as Len. She was out of her depth in these circumstances.

  “We could use someone like you and your boys,” Gerry said, putting an emphasis on ‘we’.

  Hey eyebrows rose at that. It indicated a number of people on Gerry’s side, and for the purposes of the discussion, it could be any number as big as she could imagine.

  “We, huh? Who are we talking about here? Some a-holes from The Family?”

  “Absolutely not. Look, I can help you and your boys out of this mess. I can help you keep the server safe. Come with me, join with us, and fulfil the legacy Len left.”

  Liza-Marie pushed herself away from the wall, came close to Gerry, and for a moment he thought he might have invoked the guilt too soon.

  “How did he die?” she finally said after a long, lingering pause. Her eyes were softer now. Her whole body language had collapsed in on itself. Even the two men guarding the server had turned to look at him, all desperate to hear about their leader, their father, protector.

  “Valiantly,” Gerry said. “Without Len, the Dome would have fallen and hundreds of thousands of innocent people would have died. Without him, I would have died.” And, secretly hating himself for the manipulation added, “And before he died, I promised I’d look out for you. I’d protect the server. That’s why I’m here. To carry out his wishes.”

  Even he wanted to choke on his bullshit, but with the sound of the Jaguar getting closer, he had to appeal to them quickly. He’d atone for his lies another day. All that mattered was securing the server and getting these people out of the tower before it was levelled.

  “He really asked you to do that?” she said, now standing so close to him he could feel her breath through the cloth mask.

  “I swear it. What can I do to gain your trust?”

  “Tell me the damned truth.”

  Gerry sighed, “Look, I have transportation less than a kilometre away from here. If you come with me, we can get out of this godforsaken city. I have food, water, and safety.”

  “Why are you so desperate to get the server?” Liza-Marie said, her eyes now scanning his, trying to prognosticate meaning from his face.

  “I need the Meshwork back on. Red Widow have taken GeoCity-1 and are working their way across the abandoned lands killing anyone who isn’t pure of technology. I want to save lives, and for that we need to keep the server away from them, and get the Meshwork back up so we can communicate with the various towns that are cut off. We can’t let them all die.”

  She
sighed and then went tense. She walked past him and peered out of a gap in the window boards. “They’re already here.”

  Gerry followed, peered out. Down below, dozens of fanatics stormed across the bridge, and above them, two Jaguars dropped down out of the clouds barely a hundred metres away. The barrels of their machines gun were already spinning.

  “Come with me. It’s time people like us banded together. One thing the Red Widows have taught me is that united we stand a chance of survival. You don’t want to die up in this old dead tower like some crazy martyr.”

  Liza-Marie strode away from the window, approached the two guards either side of the server, and whispered something to them.

  All three turned to look at Gerry.

  “You get us out of here alive, and then we’ll consider joining you.”

  “It’s a deal,” Gerry said before crashing to the floor in a heap at the force of the first shell that struck the tower.

  The wooden boards on the windows splintered and flew into the room.

  Dust and debris littered the place, obscuring his vision.

  A further explosion came, rocking the building from its foundations, sending up reverberations that made the whole place sway as if on a fault-line. Gerry crawled to his feet, staggered to the side of the destroyed window, and peered out. There hovering, no more than twenty metres away, the familiar shape of a Jaguar, its guns aimed on the now great open wound of the tower.

  Everything seemed to slow down as the bullets started to fly.

  Chapter 22

  Petal stepped up to the pods, inspected the human figures floating in the cloudy yellow liquid. Their heads hung down on their chests. Their limbs floated idly by their sides. She tapped the glass, expecting them to open their eyes and look at her, but nothing stirred. They did look like her, and Sasha, but seemed slightly less evolved.

  “Old models,” Robertson said, standing beside her. “They weren’t entirely successful. But with each iteration I got closer.”

  “Did they suffer?” Petal asked feeling strangely connected to these failed corpses.

  “No, they didn’t feel anything. Number Two was your direct forebear.” He pointed to the pod on the right. This one had short chrome spikes coming out of her forearms, just like Petal’s.

  “Are they really human? Android?” She didn’t look away, fascinated, mesmerised by her prototype.

  “They’re one hundred-percent human, just as you and Sasha are. However, one thing you all have in common is your extra abilities. I’m afraid, with these first two, it didn’t quite work out so well.”

  She didn’t really want to know, but felt compelled to ask. “What happened to them?”

  He took a deep breath. She could see the pain in his eyes as they stared off into the past. A lifetime of regret and grief seem to wash over his face then. “I failed them,” he finally said.

  He turned his back, walked to the computer station. “The additions and upgrades I added didn’t integrate well with their subconscious. They unfortunately lost a lot of what it meant to be human. They were killers, indiscriminate killers.”

  “I’m a killer, too.” Petal said, thinking of all the fights she’d been involved in over the years, the numbers of people she’d had to kill, and how deep down she enjoyed some aspect of it. How much of it was she and how much of it was Robertson’s doing she couldn’t know. “Did you make us like this for a reason?”

  “I had to,” he said.

  “We were just tools to be used then?”

  He suddenly spun round, flapping his lab coat wide. “Absolutely not. You were all children to me. I regret what happened to the first two, but you and Sasha have proven—”

  “Proven what? That you could create efficient killers? Killers with a conscience?”

  “No, that’s not it at all. You have to understand we were at war. We didn’t know if we would survive. We still don’t. We’re trapped here underground, while The Family rule over the planet. We had to defend ourselves, carve out a future.”

  “Then what happened to me? You sent me out there to do what exactly? Why can’t I remember anything before five years ago? Before I was found in the desert on the verge of death? Why didn’t you come and get me?”

  Tears welled up in her eyes as she poured it all out, letting go of years of anger and confusion.

  Robertson stepped close, held out his arms, his eyes shiny with tears. “I’m sorry. I have no excuse. I’m a weak man. I thought you had died. I thought I had lost you. A day hasn’t gone by where I—”

  “Screw you!” Petal said, shoving him in the chest, pushing him away. “You could have come and looked for me, but you left me out there on my own to die!”

  “No, that’s not how it was, please.”

  He slumped his shoulders, ran his hands through his hair, face red with frustration.

  Petal grabbed him by the jacket, moved her face close to his.

  “Tell me what I am, who I am!”

  Robertson turned away and closed his eyes. “You’re my daughter. A clone of my daughter.”

  ***

  It took a few minutes to sink in, formulate in her mind. She always knew she wasn’t like others, but a clone? What did that actually mean for her? She thought she was still her own person, but the fact she was actually a copy of someone else, did that matter? She obviously suspected after seeing Sasha, but having it confirmed made it an entirely different situation.

  “This is messed up,” Petal finally said.

  Robertson leaned up against the wall, his face tired.

  “What happened to her? Your daughter?”

  Robertson grimaced, inhaled, and waited. “She was killed.”

  “Can I ask how?”

  He let out his breath in a long pain-laden exhale “You’re going to have to know all this sooner rather than later, and it will go some length to explaining why I did what I did with you and the others, and Sasha.”

  “She’s a clone too then, I take it?” It was obvious now.

  “Yes. She’s slightly different, however, but you both come from the same source.”

  “And those? What happened to them?” Petal pointed to the naked bodies floating in the tubes. Four pipes attached to their necks spiralled off into the gloomy solution, presumably to some computer system. They were bald with orange-coloured skin. They resembled mosquitoes trapped inside amber.

  “They were the precursors. Prototypes, if you will, they—” Robertson walked up to them, cocked his face, and peered at them with an expression of pity and sadness.

  “Are they dead?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not quite. They’re in a kind of stasis. I couldn’t bring myself to end them. I could perhaps in the future still find a way.” He turned to her, his face focused and steeled. “Okay, look, I’m going to tell you everything right from the beginning, and after that we have something to do, but I want to know I can count on you.”

  “Well, that kinda depends on what you’re gonna tell me, don’t it, Doc?”

  “Fine, here we are then, the truth of it all.”

  They both sat at the bench by the computer station. Petal waited.

  At first he hesitated. Petal fidgeted, wanted him to get on with it, but like an animal she didn’t want to spook him, so she resisted the urge, waited patiently for him to start. And when he did, he barely stopped as he let the words flow.

  “Right,” he said. “It all started way before the war and the Cataclysm. It started with my grandfather Elliot Robertson. In the early 2000s when Elliot was a young man in his thirties, he was, at the time, the leading AI specialist in Britain. Just before he had my father in 2013, Elliot bought a pair of radically advanced computer systems from a Japanese company called Old Grey Network Systems. With those he—”

  “Wait, what? Old Grey? I know that. There was this server in GeoCity-1. I—”

  Robertson broke from his soft-focus to concentrate on Petal. “You found it?”

  “Well, I used it. I don’
t know if it’s still there, but what’s that got to do with your grandfather?”

  “We’ll get to that.” Robertson adjusted himself on the bench and started his tale again.

  “At the time before WWIII really kicked off, there was an arms race in the field of artificial intelligence systems. The British were the leading exponents of it and Elliot the leader of most of the usable technologies that came out of a hotbed of research.

  “That’s when Criborg came in. Elliot wanted to go further, but the British being the conservative kind refused to fund his research. He wasn’t just happy at developing artificial intelligences, he wanted to create human intelligence within computer systems, or more specifically he wanted to upload a human consciousness.

  “The Brits were having none of it, so he splintered off, created an international and independent company. The USA owned Wake Island, having used it in various past wars. Along with a core of British and Canadian scientists, he set up Criborg within Wake Island’s labs.”

  Petal focused on Robertson with the attention of a cat stalking a mouse. This was incredible information and she tried to remember everything. Robertson stopped, took a breath.

  “Go on,” she urged.

  “The Family at the time weren’t the problem they are now. They were mostly an environmental tech company, and to their credit their technologies and infrastructure greatly reduced global warming. But when the war happened they found themselves in a difficult situation: their tech had become irrelevant as the world descended into chaos. But they were still the biggest company on and off the planet.

  “At the same time, Elliot’s research led him to a position where he believed that it was possible to upload his brain to those servers. You have to understand that things were getting desperate by that stage. Criborg were a small company within a military compound, so there was some over-bleed of motivations. Elliot found himself working more and more on military applications for his tech. That’s when the accident happened and set all this in motion.”

  Robertson stood, took a breath, stretched his legs. He turned and continued.

  “He managed it,” he said.