Code Breakers: Beta (16 page)

“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

P
etal 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.

“What? He uploaded his brain?”

Robertson nodded. “The very first one to do it, and as far as I know the last.”

“What happened?” Petal asked, eager to know what happened to Robertson’s grandfather.

“It worked, and the Cataclysm happened. Once he became, I don’t know what the term is really, but once he became a computer entity, his mind cracked, went mad, but he was inside the world’s networks by then. He effectively took over The Family, turning them from an environmental company to a transhuman company. You see; he couldn’t replicate what happened to him. Not successfully.

“The servers were decoupled after the Cataclysm and taken to various parts of the land. Elliot, now in binary format, existed within The Family’s servers. With their scientists, they setup their transhuman program and started their experiments, including the building of the Dome, which is essentially a giant lab.”

“This is all so much,” Petal said. “You’re saying that you, and I, are related to the one who instigated the Cataclysm? That’s really messed up.”

“That’s not the end of the story,” Robertson said. “Elliot went insane as a binary being, and the board members of The Family, rich off his technology and insight, found it difficult to control him. So they tried to suspend him, keep him firewalled, which they achieved for a while, but not having that genius level intellect on tap they began to slow down the pace of their technological advances.

“They referred to Elliot as the Patriarch. A group of ambitious scientists within The Family decided that since he was essentially a digital life form, they’d make a copy for their own use. They thought they could re-engineer this copy, and so they called it the Matriarch.

“Much like Elliot, this entity wasn’t what they expected. It refused to do what they wanted and released Elliot from his digital prison.

“The last I heard, the Matriarch had been debugged and is now in use up in their space station, while Elliot is out there somewhere.”

“Where?” Petal asked.

Robertson shrugged. “Who knows? He could be in a network, a server, anywhere. All we know is that he’s incredibly dangerous and not a little deranged. It’s why I made you and the others. To seek him and the servers out, keep them away from harm, and if possible recover them back here at Criborg so I can study them, reverse engineer them. Find a way of ending Elliot for good.”

“So that’s why I can hold AIs within me?”

“Yes. You were designed to be a temporary prison so that you could hold Elliot’s consciousness inside until you could get to the Old Grey servers.”

“So then what happened? I remember being in a desert, but nothing before that.”

Robertson swallowed. “That’s when I lost you.”

“Lost me how?”

“You had a lead on Elliot. You were en-route when you came across a resistance group. One of The Family’s experiments went wrong, set up on his own: a brilliant hacker. A descendent of one The Family’s earlier posthuman projects—”

“Seca,” Petal said clutching her hands. “That must have been him!”

“We never knew his name,” Robertson said. “We lost you before you could deliver a report. We were in full communication when you came across a bunker, the location of this hacker. You said you had found Elliot and were preparing the download, but something went wrong, and I lost contact. I couldn’t find you anywhere. Not even the Meshwork. Our VPN was fried. It was like you stopped existing. I thought—”

“You thought Elliot or Seca had killed me?”

Robertson dropped his chin. “Yes. I wanted to come and find you but we didn’t have the resources. The Family didn’t know we were still here, and I couldn’t afford to blow our cover. But I wanted to.” He stepped forward, held out his arms to grip by the shoulders.

She wanted to push him away, but she could see the guilt and sincerity in his eyes.

“I understand,” she finally said, not entirely believing it. His story sounded reasonable, and yet, if she really meant that much to him, he would have found a way.

“That’s why I created Sasha, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Whereas you were always the computer type, she was the martial type. I couldn’t live with the guilt or the knowledge of what might have happened to you, so I trained Sasha to come and find you, but—”

“You couldn’t bring yourself to lose another daughter?”

Tears dripped from his eyes, slid over his cheeks, splashed on the tiled floor. He shook his head before turning away to regard the tubes with the bodies floating inside.

“I’m so sorry. I was impotent with grief. Trapped in this damned compound, with hundreds of lives at risk, and with the General breathing down my neck. Sasha was the only thing that kept me sane. For a while she helped me forget my first daughter, and what happened to you. She was the only connection I had to you, I just couldn’t.”

Petal felt her own tears stream from her face now. All thoughts of anger had subsided at the sight of this giant of a man breakdown in front of her. She tried to put herself in his position and immediately felt the waves of loneliness and grief that he must have faced.

She stepped forward beside him, placed her hand on his arm.

“It’s okay,” she said in a whisper, her throat tight. “I’m back now. I survived.”

Robertson turned to her, and with a heavy sob, pulled her into his arms, hugging her tight, while his body racked with relief, and a million other emotions.

“I’m so sorry,” he said as he finally released her from his bear hug.

“We’re all sorry,” she said. “What matters now is what’s next? As you said, we can’t stay hidden forever, and what with being spotted by The Family’s drones while out there in the sub, it probably won’t be long before we’re discovered. And I have a friend I need to find.”