Code Breakers: Beta Read online

  “What is it, Jess?” Sasha asked. The girl ignored her, remained still between the servers, her head dipped to one side.

  “Ssshhh, I’m listening,” Jess finally said before turning back towards the computers.

  “What to? The man in the box?” Sasha remembered what Gerry had told them about how Jess had found the servers, apparently hearing the AI within the servers. She must be some kind of transhuman or transcendent, Sasha thought.

  “The man and his wife. They’re together.”

  “You mean the AIs within the servers?”

  Jess nodded. “But they’re not artificial. They’re real.”

  “She means the creators of the servers. Sakura and Hajime!” Enna said, jumping out of her seat. “Jess must have coupled the servers somehow.” Turning to the girl, Enna asked, “What did you do? How did you do know?”

  “I listened to them. They told me what to do.”

  “What did you do?” Sasha asked, as the others gathered round.

  Jess shrugged, her little cheeks grew rosy as they flushed. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” she said. “They tell me what parts to put where, and in my head I arrange it.”

  “Have you always been able to do that?” Sasha asked.

  “I think so,” Jess said, smiling. “It’s hard to remember before Mummy and Daddy... But they gave me the ability to hear computers and things. I can make them work sometimes.”

  Enna knelt down in front of Jess. “After this, Jess. Is there somewhere you would like to go?”

  The girl’s eyes grew wide then, with a hint of panic of them. “No, I thought I could stay with you all? Please, I don’t want to go back to the streets.”

  Enna hugged her, calmed her. “It’s okay, Jess. You can stay with us. Don’t worry.”

  The girl giggled after she had calmed down. “You’re tickling,” she said, brushing Enna’s hair from her face.

  Enna stood, letting the girl go. “Are they completely connected now?” she asked, pointing to the servers.

  Jess nodded her head, smiled. “They’re very happy.”

  “That’s great, that’s really good news,” Enna said. Now that they were coupled, they’d be able to upload Gerry’s mind. Jess turned away, went back to her listening, while Enna moved towards Petal. “Let me have a look at you.” Enna helped Petal to the first seat on the rearmost row of the plane. Petal flopped down. Sweat coated her skin making her glow under the plane’s white light.

  Enna took a palm-sized slate from the hip pocket of her dusty combat trousers and spread her hand across its screen before making a series of quick, sharp gestures. The slate’s screen filled with a flowing string of code and various metrics. Sasha stood behind Enna and watched over her shoulder as she analysed the data.

  “Well?” Sasha said. “Is she okay?”

  “Doctor, I think you should see this,” Enna ignored Sasha’s question.

  That was never a good sign, Sasha thought.

  Robertson traversed the rows of seats to stand in the aisle next to Petal’s. “What is it?”

  Enna passed him the slate. “Check out her vitals, and cognitive activity.”

  Those words struck Sasha like a sledgehammer. Anything ‘vital,’ could never be good. She drummed her fingers on the back of the headrest in the row in front of Petal and tried not to feel utterly useless.

  Back in Criborg’s compound she’d always felt capable and useful to the running of the place, but out here, she was just another pointless meatbag stealing oxygen. Realising she couldn’t help right now she turned to Cheska and Malik. “How about you two and I start making preparations?”

  “What do you mean?” Cheska said.

  “Malik here has a brother in City Earth’s security, I suggest we help organise them, work out a defence strategy, prepare for war.”

  Cheska stood, her lips curved in a smile of impending satisfaction. Malik simply nodded, his jaw clenched and set. “Let’s do it.”

  They joined Sasha at the top of the ramp, arming themselves with rifles. Cheska picked up the laser pistol that had killed Gerry, checked the battery, and pocketed it into a makeshift bandolier made from the torn arm of a fabric jacket.

  “Malik, make contact with your brother and set us a rendezvous point. Let’s get this place fortified and organised. We ain’t going down without a fight.”

  “I’m on it,” Malik said, reaching for his City Earth communicator.

  Before they stepped off the transporter, Sasha turned to Gabe, said. “Now that the servers are coupled and up and running, we really need those androids off-the-grid, or even better, on our side.”

  “As soon as we’ve sorted Petal, I’ll be on it,” he said before adding, “Don’t do anything stupid out there.”

  “Stupid is what I do best, and I plan to do it all over those robed bitches until either I’m dead, or they are.” This was her time to do what she was trained for, even if it was the last thing she did.

  Chapter 32

  Fuzzy logic, unmetered protocols, chaos. There’re patterns in the chaos, pathways and connections. Follow them, branch out, spread, connect, analyse.

  Dead. Is this the afterlife, this nebula of binary systems? Where’s home? My name: forgotten. My purpose: forgotten. There’s so much data, too much to compute. Need more processing power, more memory. There, something familiar, a data stream. I recognise it, but can’t remember. What am I? Fall into the data stream, feel it wash over me, lose myself to it, become one with it and find the centre, find my home. There, in the darkness, something familiar. Something I’ve felt before ... the darkness, the power.

  ***

  It started in her toes. A tingle as if her very blood were electrified. Petal cried out as it extended up her ankles, calves. Her fingertips were next, and her scalp, then her back and her nipples, thighs, breasts, stomach. Every patch of skin felt alive.

  “What’s happening to me?” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was small and weak, and scared.

  “He’s taking over,” Robertson said without looking up from the slate. “Combining with your cerebral cortex somehow.”

  “Make it stop!” She screamed as the tingle morphed into sharp, persistent pain. Her vision grew foggy.

  The surrounding environment of the transporter became translucent, and growing in clarity, in its place, was the familiar image of the train carriage she and Gabe used to escape the Dome. She felt something heavy against her and turned to face it: it was the image of herself again, this time an arm was over her shoulder, her own arm, but it was changed, and in the hand was a book on hacking.

  She blinked and the scene disappeared to be replaced by the server room within the Spider’s Byte. Now obviously looking out of someone else’s eyes she saw her prone body lifted and rushed from the dark room that contained Alpha the server, at that time known as Old Grey.

  Her body was carried up the stairs and placed on the bar top.

  It all made sense then! She was experiencing Gerry’s memories! Somehow, while inside her, his consciousness was replaying his thoughts. His thoughts of her!

  The images became brightly lit until an all-encompassing whiteness shrouded her.

  A terrible stabbing sensation in her brain made her gasp for breath again, and briefly she was back in her own mind, experiencing the world from her own perspective.

  “Petal, are you still with us?” she heard Enna say. A warm hand on her shoulder shook her.

  “If you can’t speak, nod your head or move your arms,” a male voice said. She vaguely remembered a doctor, his name unclear in her thoughts. She tried to do as suggested but it was like her neural pathways weren’t there anymore. The voices lowered in volume and seemed much further off, but a deep accented and familiar voice still broke through.

  “We’ve gotta hook ‘er up, download Gerry right away, she can’t take it any longer.”

  Her throat tightened, as if constricted by someone’s hands, but she managed to squeeze out a single word, “Gabe?” b
efore her thoughts were ripped away from her and she lost herself utterly.

  ***

  An unnamed feeling taking me away in a stream, leading me down a hierarchy ever deeper. Whose memories are real, whose memories are manufactured? I see something. Another data source, much larger this time, must reach it, it knows me, and I know it. I need to feed. Need more information. Feed me more so that I can survive, grow, remember who I am. But wait, it calls to me. It beckons. Its data is strange and familiar, abstract, collections of objects, interrelated. It’s me, and I it. I must reach it, must let go, and flow.

  ***

  Petal had no control over her body despite feeling everything. Numerous hands lifted her, shuffled her across, and laid her between the two servers. They hummed together like a pair of monks, a static multi-layered communiqué to their data gods.

  Subtle pitch changes and rhythms became apparent. It was like they were living by the ocean, the waves hushing her to sleep with their undulating and ululating music.

  The white-noise soundtrack was joined very briefly with a staccato electrical-buzz. A new sensation flooded her nervous system and she knew she was connected to them, those two monolithic computers from a bygone era. Their legacy still shrouded in mystery. At first the feeling of closeness comforted her.

  Voices around her made no sense. She recognised them, and knew they were speaking words, but her brain wouldn’t associate those words with ideas or objects and like a mewling babe she cried, her only means of communication.

  They ignored her. Carried on their excited babble. But then they rose as one, with either excitement or fear, she was unable to tell which, but either meaning brought her own trepidation. A shaking, black snake-like sensation from her head extended to her body, her stomach, where it seemed to unfold.

  And just as it was there, in a single beat it had gone leaving nothing but a hollow carcass behind. What spirit had joined with her had abandoned her, left her empty and weak.

  Shadows danced about her. Feet scraped across the steel in a quickstep, and she was forgotten. The two servers now joined as one, the centre of attention.

  Their subtle rhythms had changed. The tempo increased, and like a great duet their distinct voices harmonised in a complex pattern of data-induced melody. For a moment, Petal thought they were displaying signs of happiness such was that frantic to-and-fro of their communications.

  To another ear she doubted it would be noticeable, but with her mind fractured and frantically trying to repair itself, she could only focus on the small things: dust motes magnified by the tears in her eyes as her vision came back to her slowly; the shifts of tone within the electrical hum of those two ancient lovers, Alpha and Omega; the vacuum inside herself, left by Gerry.

  Like a waterfall, her pathways reconnected, repaired their functions, making her whole again, but she’d never be completely whole again. Gerry had left her, his amazing mind, that great ball of light and infinite branches of thought had seen what was inside the servers, something majestic and even bigger than he himself. And there in her thoughts, clear as the sun on a new day she knew everything, and everything knew her.

  ***

  It may have been one minute or a thousand, she couldn’t tell. Eventually the world came back to her, piece by piece, slotting together to complete her senses, bringing her back to life.

  Everything had changed: her entire perception of what life was, what being human was, what simply ‘being’ was. It all meant something entirely different now, and she had no real clue as to what it actually meant, other than it was all much larger than anything she’d considered before.

  “I think she’s coming round,” a man said. She remembered him now: it was Doctor Robertson. He leant over her, his obese frame distorted comically through her wet eyes.

  She blinked. Cleared her vision.

  Next to him stood Enna. On the other side, Gabe looked down at her, his face appeared more wrinkled than she remembered. Flashes of grey and white hairs tipped his dreadlocks. It made her think she had been lost for decades, when in truth it was just minutes, if the time on the Doctor’s slate was anything to go by. He held it lazily by his side, inches from her head.

  Aside from the time, the slate showed the data patterns of the servers. On a graph, several large input-output spikes stood like mountain ranges. The CPUs were working over-time crunching the enormous data injection.

  How cold that sounded. ‘Data injection!’ She reminded herself that that great spike of data was is Gerry.

  “Petal? You okay?” Gabe said, reaching a weathered and gnarled hand to the side of her face. She felt every single callous, scratch and indentation, her skin a hypersensitive amplifier.

  “I don’t know. Am I?” she replied.

  “Ya breathin’, so that’s a good start, girl.”

  Petal wondered if his eyes always shimmered that way when he smiled, or if she was somehow changed, and if so, for better or worse? Feelings eventually returned to her limbs and spine and she was able to move. She sat up, instantly wanted to vomit, but she held back the urge. Holding her breath, it eventually passed.

  A tiny hand touched Petal’s. Jess sat cross-legged behind and to the side of her. The girl’s dirty blonde hair fell in front of her wide, wonder-filled eyes. Her hands were hot and small. She held Petal’s hand between hers, and the heat spread into Petal’s arms, then her chest, and eventually her whole body.

  “He loves you,” the little girl said with a smile of the purest innocence.

  “Who does?” Petal asked in a quiet voice, concerned about scaring the girl, such was her fragile appearance.

  “Gerry, of course,” she replied and wrinkled her nose.

  “How do you know?”

  “He told you when you saved him, and I heard.”

  “What do you mean, Jess?” Petal asked.

  “When you took Gerry’s mind inside you. I heard him inside your head, and just before he was pulled away into the servers.”

  Petal tensed immediately at the word ‘pulled.’ To her, it felt like Gerry had left her mind and entered the servers willingly. There was that great consciousness there, that huge and majestic thing already within the memory of the servers. Was Gerry in danger there?

  “Just how did you hear him? Are you a hacker or something?”

  Jess shook her head enthusiastically, covering her face with her wild hair. “No, silly, I can hear data. My parents gave it to me.”

  “What do you mean that gave it to you?”

  Jess tapped her head. “Put something in my head, allowed me to hear what computers and things are thinking, but I don’t really like to use it very much.”

  “Why not?”

  Darkness descended over the girl’s face then and she seemed to shrink away.

  Petal leaned forward. “It’s okay, Jess. We’re all friends here. We’re going to look after you. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I heard things I shouldn’t. Mummy and Daddy were killed because of it so I had to run away otherwise the bad men would have killed me too.”

  “Do you know who they are, these bad men?”

  “Yes. Gerry killed them. When he was in Darkhan. You were there too. I heard you all. It was scary, but I’m glad he did it. But I heard something else just now after Gerry was uploaded.”

  Petal realised then that she was talking about Seca. It was her turn to have a darkness descend upon her. She thought all the business with him had finished, but like anything in the world, if you put enough out, you leave a legacy behind.

  “The thing you heard,” Enna said now, kneeling down to the girl’s height. “Does it have something to do with Gerry?”

  Jess nodded her head, and bowed it slightly avoiding Enna’s eye contact.

  Petal squeezed her hands gently. “It’s okay, Jess, you can tell us. We really need to know in case Gerry is in danger.”

  “I’m scared,” the girl said, her eyes now full of tears. “I saw it before, when the man was in Darkhan. When�
��” Jess turned away and let the tears flow with a deep sob. She tried to crawl away, hide beneath one of the transporter’s seats. At first Petal wanted to drag her back, but she let her go. Gave her a minute to herself before approaching her. Petal lay on her side so she could see the girl under curled into a tight ball.

  She had stopped crying. Petal reached out a hand, palm up. Hesitatingly, Jess reached out her hand and the warmth radiated from her again.

  “It’s okay,” Petal said. “I understand you’re scared. But if you tell us, we can keep Gerry safe, and keep you safe also. We’re one big family here.”

  That seemed to have got Jess’s attention. She peeked an eye out from the crook of her arm. “A family?”

  Petal gave her a wide smile. “Yeah, a family. We’re not all related directly, but we fight a common cause. We look out for each other. Keep each other safe. It’s why I did what I did for Gerry, and it’s why we need you to trust us, and tell us what happened, so that we can protect you and make sure Gerry is safe.”

  “He’s not,” she said after a moment’s silence. “There’s someone else there. Not in the servers, but somewhere else, on another computer. They’re attracted to Gerry. I can’t hear them though. It’s all scrambled, like static or something.”

  Petal tried to hide her annoyance. Why hadn’t she alerted them first? But then seeing the poor girl’s reaction, she was probably paralysed with fear to say anything. Playing it cool, Petal asked innocently. “Can you tell me what it is?”

  Jess hesitated, stared at Petal as if considering whether she could be trusted. Petal wanted to shake her into her action. But she held her breath, waited until she spoke again.

  Eventually, Jess nodded her head. “I don’t know what you call it. Its like what’s in Gerry’s head, only bigger and more powerful. It’s really black and has nasty thoughts.”

  “An artificial intelligence?”