Coding Isis (16 page)

Michelle pulled over a chair so she could sit by his side and she laid her head on his shoulder and reached her arm over him. She hugged him and let the tears flow. The world outside this tiny room didn’t exist to her anymore; there was only Michelle and her dad. She cried until there was nothing left to cry and then she fell asleep, still clinging to her father’s side. 

Joshua sat at his desk, reading from his computer screen. There were no windows in his office and the glow from the screen lit his face casting shadows in all the wrong places. He looked angry. He was angry. A timid knock at the door told him there was more bad news on the way.

‘Come,’ he said.

The messenger entered the room and stood, shifted his weight, trying to gauge the situation. Was he going to get shouted at or have his head ripped off? You never could tell with Joshua.

‘Sir, we have a problem,’ he said.

Joshua looked up. And the look told the messenger it was head-ripping time. ‘What now?’ he said.

‘Sir, our patsy seems to be off the hook.’

Joshua stared. His cold blue eyes penetrated his subordinate and he thought he saw him shiver. ‘Our patsy,’ he said, ‘is supposed to be dead.’

‘It’s worse now sir. I’m afraid there are some loose ends.’

‘Mr. Sanders is proving to be more of a problem than I had anticipated.’ Joshua didn’t need the briefing. In fact he’d known about the failed killing, he’d known about the alibi and Chris’s release long before his underlings had gotten the balls to come and deliver the bad news. It was time to try something different. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘I’ll deal with Mr. Sanders personally.’

Joshua decided it was time to get rid of Chris Sanders by using the thing he cared about most. If he was smart, he could even get Chris to help him get through some of the problems he was having with his own little project. After all, it would be a shame to remove such a brilliant mind from the world without squeezing it a little first.

Michelle woke with a stiff neck. She’d fallen asleep with her arm draped over her dad. She blinked and rubbed her eyes and sat upright, moving slowly so as not to pull her neck any more. Her mouth was dry and tasted bad. The voice from behind made her jump.

‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ said Chris.

Michelle jumped up, pushing the chair back and threw her arms around him. He held her tightly and they kissed. Small kisses full of love. She forgot all about her aches and she clung to Chris and kissed him over and over. Finally, she stopped and put her head against Chris’s shoulder.

‘How’s the old man?’ asked Chris.

‘He’s sick Chris. Really sick, but he’s going to live.’

Chris pushed Michelle back with his hands on her shoulders and looked at her. He saw a world of hurt in those tired eyes. ‘How are you?’ he asked.

She didn’t need to answer to tell him how she was, he could see her pain. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said. ‘Thank you for not giving up on me. I don’t know where I’d be right now without you.’

Michelle hugged him. She didn’t want to let go ever again.

They found the doctor and talked about Bob’s condition and then decided they should go and eat breakfast. Chris bought coffee and english muffins and a fruit salad for Michelle. He told her what had happened to him and what Naylor had said, but decided to leave out the attempt on his life. He didn’t want to scare her any more right now.

‘Naylor thinks this isn’t over,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand. Is he still trying to pin this on you?’

Chris decided that it was better if she knew. ‘He thinks I’m in danger, that we’re both in danger,’ he said.

‘In danger? The only danger you were in was getting locked up by that asshole Naylor.’

Chris smiled. Michelle was cute when she was angry but she could also be a formidable force. ‘Hey, go easy on him,’ he said. ‘He was just doing his job.’

He watched Michelle nibble her fruit and took a long drink of coffee.

‘Naylor thinks the evidence against me was too strong to be coincidental. He thinks I was set up.’

‘What do you think?’ asked Michelle.

‘I don’t know what to think. Some of the emails on my computer were fakes. I thought that maybe Jasmine had planted them there, you know to try and break up our marriage or something.’

‘Why would she do that?’ asked Michelle. Chris thought he saw a look of anger cross her face, just fleetingly. He wondered just how damaging this whole thing had been to her faith in him.

‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ he asked.

Michelle didn’t answer straight away but took her time and thought about it. Chris was OK with that. He’d rather she gave an honest answer, carefully considered, than fire off some platitude. Michelle reached for Chris’s hand and looked at him.

‘Chris,’ she said, ‘I love you. I believe in you and that’s why you’re here. Everyone else thought you were a lying murdering bastard.’

Chris smiled. ‘I love you too honey,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that Jasmine had somehow gotten mixed up in something very dangerous and it got her killed.’

‘Whatever’s going on here Chris, you need to leave this to the police to sort out. Promise me?’

‘Don’t worry, I’ve had enough attention from the police to last a lifetime.’ 

Chris and Michelle finished their breakfasts and went back to check on Bob. He was still asleep.

‘I’m going back to work,’ said Chris. ‘I need to check on something. Are you going to be OK?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Michelle. ‘Hurry back.’

Michelle went back to her dad’s room and waited. There was still no change in his condition, but the doctor had said that he should be waking any time now. She knew he’d been lucky. The paramedics had gotten to him within twenty minutes of his heart attack and were able to stop his heart and restore a normal rhythm. An injection of a clot-dissolving agent was administered on the scene and when he’d arrived at the hospital, he’d been given an angioplasty procedure where a stent was left in his coronary artery, increasing the blood flow and hopefully preventing future blockages. She looked at the bandage that covered the tiny incision made in his wrist. It wasn’t clear whether any lasting damage had been done or how serious it would be. Time would tell and Michelle knew that she needed to take things one step at a time. He’d probably need to take blood-thinning drugs for the rest of his life. She was just happy to have him around.

A nurse came in to the room to take some readings and she wrote some notes on a chart. ‘He’s going to be fine you know,’ she said. She looked up briefly from her work and smiled.

‘Thanks,’ said Michelle. ‘I just want to be here when he wakes up.’

‘Hey can you ladies keep the noise down? I’m trying to get some sleep here.’

Michelle spun round to see her dad with his eyes open. He was smiling and looked better than he had last night.

‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Thank God.’ She went over and kissed him.

‘Easy, easy,’ said Bob. ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily. So how bad is it?’

‘I’ll fetch the doctor,’ said Michelle.

‘No. It’ll wait. Let me look at you.’ Bob stared at Michelle. He remembered that feeling of when he was lying in the street and he thought he would never see his family again.

‘Where’s Susan?’ he asked.

‘She’s on her way. She caught the first flight back from Heathrow, should be arriving at Dulles in an hour.’

‘Damn, I’m such a fool.’

‘Don’t worry Dad, I’m just happy you’re OK. How do you feel?’

‘Like shit.’

Michelle laughed and kissed her dad again.

‘I could sure use a cheeseburger,’ he said.

Michelle was about to lambast her father and then realized he was teasing. She gave him a hard stare and Bob’s smile faded and was replaced with a sheepish look.

‘I know honey,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m going to be living on rabbit food from now on.’

‘Better than not living at all.’

Chris figured his first port of call should be Frank’s office. It had been a long week and from what Michelle had told him, he owed him some thanks. Chris parked in his usual spot and nothing seemed to have changed. He got a few odd looks in the corridors but it was good to be back. Chris didn’t want to burst in on Frank so stopped by the reception desk outside his office.

‘Hi Maisy, is he in?’

Maisy looked up from her paperwork, her face stunned and Chris could see her mind working, trying to figure out if she was really seeing what she thought she was. Chris liked Maisy, she was a sweet lady in her fifties from Alabama. He loved her strong Southern accent.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be in jail?’ she asked. That was Maisy, calling it like she saw it.

‘I escaped,’ said Chris.

‘That figures,’ she said.

They exchanged grins and Maisy stood up and hugged him.

‘It’s good to see you Chris. I’m sorry but Frank’s out, can I help?’

‘I just need to get into my office, you got my keys?’

Maisy pulled one of the drawers open on the reception counter. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘take this master key and I’ll get Frank to call by when he gets in.’

Chris took the key and thanked Maisy again. His office was a bit of mess. Well actually it was the tidiest it had been for a long time—no pizza boxes or soda cans, but some of his equipment was unplugged and strewn about. Chris figured the hard drives of the computers had been searched for incriminating evidence and this made him smile to himself. He knew he’d done no wrong but if there had been any evidence, it was in the cloud. Those poor saps were just taking away his local copy of his emails but everything that was important to Chris was stored somewhere near Texas. For Chris the cloud was used for the overnight processing of imagery and the archiving of the terabytes of data generated by capturing live video and audio feeds. The real-time processing for his Isis system was handled by a massively parallel processing super computer which was on campus. He was sure that with such an incredible array of computing power at his disposal, he’d be able to find what had happened to Jasmine.

He needed to understand what she’d been working on prior to her death. Who had she met with? Who had she talked to? It was time to process some of that archived data that had been collected by a system he’d invented to compensate for his own lousy memory. Isis was there to record a user’s life. The brain was fantastic at this real-time processing but as a result we often miss things that are right before our eyes. Through developing prototypes, Chris had soon realized that Isis could offer far more than a perfect memory. His computer could be programmed not to miss a thing, and better yet, it could make links between events that most people never realized. He dreamed of a day when images and audio from hundreds of users could be combined and processed together. He imagined a time when like-minded people could be drawn together because there was something, like his system, making the connection between their individual interests. Michelle called it “Big Brother”, and told him he was realizing Orwell’s nightmare. She worried that if every waking action was recorded then the state would somehow be able to control people. Chris had always laughed about Michelle’s conspiracy theories, but maybe she was right. Maybe someone was watching their feeds and Jasmine had seen something she shouldn’t have.

Chris had figured that as well as the audio and visual feeds, he should record more information, and so he had installed key loggers on all of the PCs in his office. A key logger could be a physical device, but for him it was a simple program that recorded every key stroke and mouse movement and also recorded the screen. Even if the audio and video feed was off, if Jasmine had been working, Chris would be able to replay everything she had done. He needed to write a special program to replay it but that shouldn’t take long. He decided he would synchronize any computer activity with a live feed from the headset if there was any. He grabbed a soda from the fridge and set to work. It was good to be back.

Programming computers was something that came naturally to Chris, like a second language. When he thought of problems and how to solve them, he automatically broke the solution down into the parts he would need to implement in order to get a computer to carry it out. He’d been doing it for so long now, he couldn’t stop himself from pulling apart the logic of every situation, and he knew that it drove Michelle nuts. He felt as though the computer was an extension of his own consciousness and was sometimes frustrated at how long it took to translate his thoughts into programming code but the end result was always rewarding. Chris had been working for two hours straight and had hardly looked up. With his Jasmine memory program, he would be able to replay all her activity, whether it was using a computer or using the headset. He wondered what would be a good starting point. She had died on the previous Monday, so he would start a week before then. He didn’t want to be too close to the actual event in case he missed anything important. If he found nothing, he’d move back another week. He figured, even with the ability to fast-forward, it was going to take him a couple of days to scan through all the footage. He took a deep breath as he thought about replaying the final days of a person’s life. He ran the program.