RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (41 page)

Back at Toby’s house, he and his substitute parents were about to head out to the van for their trip to the compound.  Toby noticed that neither of them seemed to be very happy this evening.  Just as they were about to put the bag over his head Toby got up the nerve to speak to the woman. 

“Am I the only one that doesn’t want to be here?”  The woman stopped what she was doing and looked at Toby.     

“Do you think any of us really want to be here?  We’re all here because the boss man and his buddy put the things in our head and we all know what happens if we don’t do as we’re told.”  Toby saw an opportunity to continue the conversation. 

“Has anyone ever got away, you know, I mean in one piece?”
         “Well if they did we sure never have heard about it.”  Toby smiled a little and shook his head in disbelief.
         “So what’s your story young man?” She asked.
         “Well I’m actually a 68 year old man.  I never thought that I would end up in a boy’s body again that’s for sure.  It’s weird to be young again when you know what it’s like to be older.”

“Wow, I’ll bet that is strange; so what are the Kerrington’s like?” She asked.
         “Well they’re really nice, I guess Cyrus just wants at them for the knowledge that Dodge has about ESS.”  He noticed her demeanor changed suddenly.     

“Where did you hear the name Cyrus?”  Toby had accidently said his name.      

“Well, you guys were talking one night, you know, the night we stayed here because I was going to play basketball in the morning, so that I could meet Bobby, don’t you remember?” 

“Oh yeah” she nodded.
         “Well you and
         “DAD”, were talking in the other room there and the walls are pretty thin in this place.” Toby did the air quotes thing with his fingers when he said Dad.  It seemed likely to her that they probably did slip and say Cyrus’s name at some point.  She thought it was funny that Toby was joking about the
         “Dad” thing. 

“So you gonna call me Mom?” she asked, and she did the air quote thing with her fingers too.  Toby laughed.      

“Sure if you want a 68 year old man calling you Mom, then, yeah, I will.” 

Toby looked around at the man who was in the kitchen now gathering up a few things to take with them.      

“You know I don’t even know your names.”
         “Well” she said, I guess I could tell you my first name, no harm in that” she reached out her hand to Toby and they shook hands.     

“I’m Cheyenne and that’s Todd in there.” 

Todd looked up.     

“Hey Mom you’re not supposed to be giving out our names, jeeze.”
         “Oh just relax Todd, there’s no harm in telling our first names. Besides we know everything about Toby here and he doesn’t know anything about us.  It’s not like we have seniority on him, we’re all just gonna die anyways!”  Todd slammed a bottle down on the counter and shot Cheyenne dirty look.     

“Just get ready to go!  Man, I gotta do everything around
here, it’s startin to seem like a real marriage!”

Toby and Cheyenne looked at each other and grinned.
         “So Cheyenne what would you say if I told you that there might be a way out of this job without losing our heads?”  She smacked the table.      “Shut up! are you serious? Tell me, I gotta know.”  Toby had to think fast.      

“Well back in my days at MIT we did this experiment with radio frequency shielding.  You see if you put a radio antenna into an all metal enclosure and then you ground the enclosure to earth ground the radio waves can’t get out and none can get in either.  You see these things in our heads, they work on radio signals right?”
         “Well yeah, I guess” said Cheyenne.
         “So if we were to get inside of something completely metal, like a van, only it couldn’t have any windows, or even a metal building with no windows then Cyrus couldn’t kill us so long as we stayed in a place like that.”

“So wait, what you
’re saying is, we would have to stay in there for the rest of our lives?”
         “Well I don’t know,” Toby shrugged his shoulders, “Maybe, just for a while, until Cyrus gets killed or caught or something.  Maybe we could find someone that knows how to take these things out.  They put them in there so maybe they’re not all that hard to get out.”
         “Well let’s talk about it more when Todd’s not around.” 

Todd was just coming back in from the garage.     

“All right you two let’s go, we have to get back to the compound now.”  They went out to the  garage and got in the van and Cheyenne picked up the bag, but Toby took it from her and put it on his head himself.  Cheyenne laughed at him because of the way he did it.  He sighed from under the bag.      

“All right, I’m ready, let’s go.”

Cheyenne and Alice were pretty good friends.  They weren’t supposed to fraternize, but they did anyway.  They discovered the guards were terrible at their jobs on their floor.  They would leave their post frequently, sleep on the job, and take longer than necessary bathroom breaks.  Cyrus was so obsessed with John Calhoun and Dodge Kerrington that he was letting some of the details slip down to Glitch, and everyone knew that Glitch was only in it for the money; he didn’t care about what was going on in the dorms at night. 

Cheyenne and Alice would occasionally get together for a bowl of ice cream and watch TV together on Alice’s computer.  That night when they got together, Cheyenne told Alice about Toby and what he had said to her about the metal box and how it would keep you alive if you stayed in it.  This got Alice thinking, there were old ovens in the compound from back when it was a foundry.  One was especially large and the entire thing was made of metal.  She wondered how long they could stay in there if they had food and water.  Maybe they could just go live in the oven.  It was a silly thought and they laughed about it but in their situation it sounded like a form of freedom.  

In
Slades office, one floor above the dorms, he and Glitch were having a meeting. They were watching the Kerrington family  getting ready for bed.  Cyrus was still in a fairly good mood as his new found invasion of privacy was fueling his creativity.  He was trying to concoct his next malicious move.  He paced the floor with his hands behind his back.
         “Let’s see,” he said, “We have complete control of the systems in the house and we have a mole.  That is this Toby fellow that can get in there from time to time as Bobby’s friend.  How can we get more information about the systems that Dodge has developed at ESS?  Glitch, tell Toby that the next time he gets into the house I want him to spend some time in this room.”  Cyrus was pointing to one of the video squares on the large monitor in front of him.  The video feed was that of Dodge’s office.  Cyrus went on; every good engineer that is really bent on success brings his work home with him, even when it’s against company policy.  Tell Toby to poke around in Dodge’s desk and his computer files to see if he can come up with anything that Dodge might have brought home to work on.” 

The next morning Glitch called for Toby to be brought up to his office.  Toby was quite nervous about having to go up there, he had never been and he didn’t know what to expect.  He was escorted into Glitch’s office, the door was closed behind him and it sounded as though it was locked, he couldn’t help but to get a lump in his throat.  This situation reminded him of a time when he found himself in the principal’s office in grade school; lesson learned, don’t put snakes in Mrs. Johnson’s desk!  He was certainly hoping this situation ended better than the prior one.

Glitch was leafing through a document and looked up over it at Toby.
         “You did a good job at the Kerrington’s, if you keep doing as you’re told you will earn promotions and eventually your freedom.”  Toby wanted to laugh at him because he knew that was complete bull shit, but he didn’t, instead he acted interested by just nodding in agreement.          “Good, I will,” he said. 

“Now the next task at hand is to get into Mr. Kerrington’s office and obtain anything you can from the desk, files, or the computer regarding Kerrington’s work at ESS, are you up for it?”
         “Yes Sir, I’m confident that I can get something.  They trust me completely and after all they think I am just a harmless friend of their son’s, they’ll never suspect a thing.”

“Okay, good, go back to your room now, I’ll send the man that is acting as your Father to fetch you in the morning.  You will be going back to the house again with him and the woman.  You will be there for three or four days this time.”
         “Yes Sir.” 

He left Glitch’s office and couldn’t help but to smile on the inside, he already had the perfect plan to really screw things up for Slade and this idiot Glitch, what a moron, the scrawny little dude dressed like a pimp from the eighties, weird little geek, and his whole face was tattooed in little ones and zeros, what a freak! 

As he was walking back down to the dorms he continued to think about a plan. He had no doubt that John and Dodge could come up with a great trojan horse, all they had to do is copy some fairly useless data onto a microdrive in Dodges office, along with a virus capable of getting into Cyrus’s systems.  Toby would go into the office and get the microdrive while Cyrus and Glitch observed.  He would bring it back to them and when they plugged it in and copied it to their system they would be screwed.  He couldn’t wait to get outside the compound so that he could share this idea with Dodge and John.

Glitch worked late that night on his
PC in his office.  It took him several hours but he straightened out the mess with the switched DNA and lifefile caused by the buggy LifeTech serial number generator and facial recognition software.  What he didn’t know, was that John Calhoun was the real reason files were getting moved around, John also knew about the software problem and exploited it to fool Glitch.

Glitch downloaded Dodge’s lifefile again and double checked it against the DNA file to make sure everything matched.  He took the DNA signature and loaded it back into the other side of the software to do a search.  The results came back as Dodge Joseph Kerrington, of Noblesville Indiana; this time they had Dodge Kerrington’s correct files for sure. 

He put in a request for the actual physical DNA sample and then hacked the database to create a replacement clone request.  He changed a legitimate request form made out by a licensed technician, to request Dodge Kerrington’s file number and clone storage bin.  The change would result in Dodge’s file and sample being sent to the lab instead of those items for the original person.  Glitch had a man on the inside that he paid on a regular basis to do this for him.  He sent his man a message that consisted of a thirty two digit file name, and nothing more, it was the only information needed. 

The next morning Todd came to meet Toby at his room, they were heading out to the house again, they made some small talk as they walked down to the vehicle bay from the second floor dorm halls.  They got in the van and Todd handed Toby the bag.     

“You know the drill.”

Toby put the bag over his head and sighed.  The door went up and they drove out, heading to the house that they pretended to live in. 

This time they would be staying there for a full three days, minimum.  Toby was anxious to get there.  He planned to work on Cheyenne more during this stay.  He was hoping to convince her and Todd to work with him to get their freedom back.  He wasn’t sure yet if Todd could be trusted, but he had a good feeling about Cheyenne, she seemed all right.

When he realized that they had arrived at the house, he took the bag off his head.  Todd looked back and him.    

“What are you doing man? put that back on!”  Toby glared at him.

“Hey genius!
Don’t you realize that when Bobby and his family pick me up and drop me off, I don’t have a bag on my head!  God you moron, I know where the house is, it’s the compound that you’re protecting.” 

Todd hadn’t really thought about it, and felt pretty stupid
now, he didn’t know what to say.

“Just do what I say!” He said.
         “Fine DAD!  I’m sorry, you gonna ground me now, give me a break man, I’m old enough to be your grandfather!” 

As they walked in the back door Todd was muttering about getting stuck with the grumpy old man’s clone with a smart mouth.  Cheyenne stopped what she was doing in the kitchen and focused intently on what Todd was saying in an effort to catch up. 

“Hey guys, what’s going on?”  Todd sat down and began reading the digipaper without a word. 

“Oh, we were just discussing how I needed to work on my attitude a little, anyway, what-cha
doin in there?” 

“Well, I thought since we’re all going to be stuck here as a make shift family, maybe I would actually cook us a meal that we could sit here and eat together.” 

Todd looked over the top of the digipaper.    

“What are you,
freakin Mary Poppins?” 

“I think he meant more like June Cleaver,” added Toby.

Cheyenne still looked confused.
         “It’s from an old TV show where you would be the old fashioned house wife, home all day cooking and cleaning and planting flowers,” said Toby.
         “Oh, okay, I get it,” said Cheyenne, “Yes, I guess that’s who I am, or at least sometimes I wish.  It’s been so long since I felt like a person ya know, just always eating whatever we can get at the compound, not having a home, this might be nice.”
         “Sure why not, I’ll help you,” said Toby, as he pushed up his sleeves and went into the kitchen.