Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones (32 page)

“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.”

 

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. Every 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.”

“That tells me she isn't sure. The thing that worries me, Jess? We're messing around inside people's heads here. We've got no idea what might happen. We could really screw something up badly.”

“Ashley wouldn't do anything to hurt any of us. Especially Reggie.”

Micah gives me a weak smile. “You know, I always suspected they'd hook up someday. Seriously, I mean. You could always tell. They had this…”

“Chemistry?”

“Chemistry, right. Like hydrogen and oxygen. Mix in a spark and—
bam!
”

“What? Water?”

He laughs and rocks his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. “Maybe I'm just being overly cautious.”

“That'd be a first. I don't think the word cautious has ever been used to describe you.”

He studies his hands, frowning as if they've somehow betrayed him. “Yeah, and I don't like feeling this way, either.”

†
†
†

Ashley pings us both after nearly an hour and a half has passed. Micah and I exchange glances, neither of us wanting to be the first to connect. Finally, Micah taps his Link.

“I take it by your silence that you didn't come up with anything,” Ash says. She looks disappointed.

Micah shakes his head. “I tried. May actually have knocked a few cobwebs loose inside my head. Things do seem clearer to me now.
Some
things. But I didn't come up with a better fix than what you did.” He looks over at me. “Even Jessie had a look at it.”

I nod. “It's definitely a strange little program,” I tell her. “Doesn't look anything like what we're used to seeing from Arc. But then again, I don't think Stephen is your usual Arc employee, either.”

“It doesn't need to be complicated,” Ash replies. “Just effective.”

“The problem is that we don't know what the factory settings are,” Micah adds. “If we had those, it'd be smooth sailing.”

Ashley coughs uncertainly. “I was really hoping you wouldn't say that. We've been sitting here with our fingers crossed that you guys would come up with something better.”

“So…you don't think it's going to help?” I ask. I glance over at Micah.

“I wouldn't have written it,” she snaps, “if I thought it was going to hurt!”

I take in a sharp breath. She immediately apologizes. “I'm sorry, Jess. I'm just a little on edge. We had a little incident while we were waiting.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's Jake.” She sighs. “He's been trying to get the zombies to fry themselves.”

“Yeah, Kelly told us. What happened?”

“We're not sure. Kelly had gone back down to check out the rest of the underground complex and Reggie was looking through the upper levels. I was just sitting here staring at the programming. You know how different coders have their own little quirks? Like how they do line returns and spaces and how they sequence certain commands and prompts?”

I nod.

“Well, it's the strangest thing. I kept getting this feeling of déjà vu, like I've seen some of this work before, but I can't figure out where.”

“The ArcWare codex,” I tell her. “Stephen probably pirated some of it to build the failsafe.”

“What happened with Jake and the zombies,” Micah interrupts.

To me,
Jake and the zombies
sounds like a band.

Ashley blinks. “Oh, right. So, I was just sitting here when all of a sudden I hear this loud
pop!
And then the floodlights flickered and everything went dark for a couple seconds. I got up and, just as they came back on again, I heard someone running toward me.”

“A zombie?”

“I said they were running. No, it was Jake. But, okay, this IU was chasing him. Like, not full-out running, but a hell of a fast shuffle. Faster than I've seen them go before.”

“I guess you don't remember how fast they were that first day,” I tell her.

“It was inside the fence?” Micah asks.

Ash nods.

“How the hell did it get in?”

“We don't know. We checked. The fence is still intact all the way around. No holes. And it's electrified. I mean, it could've been when the lights flickered. Maybe there was a power surge or a short or something, but it was only a couple seconds. There's no way it could've climbed the fence so quickly.”

I think back to what Kelly said about the IUs charging the fence. But Ashley just said it was still intact.

“Maybe it was already in there from years back. Did you get rid of it?”

Ashley looks nervously around. “That's the weird thing. We don't know where it went. After Jake reached me, we ran to find Reg. But when we went to go find it again, it had disappeared.”

Nobody says anything for a moment. Nobody wants to say IUs can't hide because we all know otherwise. But even this seems like strange behavior.

Olly olly oxen free
, my mind whispers.

“We've barricaded ourselves inside. It's the building with the elevator. The boys blocked the entrance and are keeping an eye on it.”

“You checked inside the building already?” Micah asks.

Ash nods. “There are only six doors up here, four rooms. One door is a set of stairs that look like they go down to the basement where Kelly is. The rooms are filled with junk, old furniture and machines. The lights in one didn't work, so instead of checking it, we just jammed some metal bars into the handle and managed to wedge the door shut.”

“What about the elevator?”

She shakes her head. “The car wasn't up here at the time, so unless the IU came in and called for the elevator, waited for it, got in and pushed the button to go down, it's not in there.”