S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (107 page)

She made it only halfway to the front door before the foundation began to collapse, pulling the roof with it. Fluorescent light fixtures crashed, bulbs exploded. Darkness swept through the building.

Jessie turned and ran for the emergency exit at the other end of the hall. But when she got there, she found it was chained shut. Both exits were blocked and the building was coming down.

A cell phone rings in a darkened room. It's a newer model device with satellite connectivity, four terabytes of storage, and a high resolution camera, though the owner has never found any need for pictures. Yet nearly every single spare byte has been used up. The memory contains a partial set of decryption keys to Arc Ware's iVZ codex and supporting applications. Only two other people know of the phone's existence and what it holds. One is the owner's wife. The second is the man at the other end of the call.

As for the room, it's rundown, unimaginatively furnished, and smells distinctly of dirty socks. There are battered suitcases at the foot of the bed, already packed, toothbrushes on the cracked bathroom sink. The faucet drips. In the motel's forty-year history, it has always dripped.

The phone rings a second time, a harsh jangle, nothing fancy or jaunty or cute. It's just a ring, like the old landlines used to do. The man often wishes he could go back to that time, when phones actually rang instead of sang, or chirped, or buzzed. When they were called telephones instead of Links and they talked to each other through wires and didn't tap into a device implanted inside your brain. A time when corporations didn't secretly monitor the traffic through those devices, and governments were impotent to stop them.

He answers before it can ring again: “Yeah?”

His voice is gruff, gravelly as much from age as the lack of a good night's sleep. From a good many such sleepless nights, in fact. He sounds resigned. It's three-thirty in the morning and, to be perfectly frank, the call doesn't come as much of a surprise.

“You okay to talk?”

No name, no self-identification. Not just yet.

The man sits up in his bed and swings an arm around and rests it gently on his wife's bare shoulder as she begins to stir. “
Shh
,” he tells her, pressing a thumb against the microphone hole on his phone. “It's just Constipole. Go back to sleep.”

He turns back, shifts the thumb to the side, and asks what's changed. He doesn't expect it to be much — it rarely is — but his instructions are explicitly clear: notify him first if anything happens, no matter what. Ninety-nine percent of the time it's nothing.

So, convinced that this is just another one of those calls, he's already halfway back asleep himself. “Go ahead,” he murmurs.

“Senator,” the voice on the other end of the line begins. After all these years and contrary to the man's requests not to call him that anymore, the caller occasionally slips. “We just intercepted a transmission on one of the black streams.”

Lawrence Abrams, the former three-term senator from Ohio, is still not alarmed. He's been monitoring those streams for years now, ever since his ouster from the government, indeed from the very country he so faithfully served. Very little surprises him anymore, especially not when it comes to things people say on the black streams. He grunts noncommittally.

Most of the chatter is just self-masturbatory banter, bands of conspiracy theorists playing one-upmanship for their mutual entertainment. It amuses him that they're right sometimes and don't even realize it; most of the time, however, they're dead wrong.

Other times the chatter is from known anarchists pledging to blow things up, to disrupt “life as we know it.” They're the ones who make his life difficult. They don't even get the irony of their own words. Life as it currently is could surely benefit from being disrupted.

“What is it this time?” he asks. He hopes the news isn't about some new ploy to take down the Stream. As much as he wants to do the same himself, it would be disastrous if anyone were to actually succeed. At least in the chaotic manner those people fantasize about.

His thoughts shift and he thinks for a moment that maybe it's a group finally owning up to the recent spat of network outages. Curiously, nobody has taken responsibility for any of them, nobody credible, anyway. For the past week, the anarchists have all been playing a game of
Guess Who
.

There have been three major metropolitan outbreaks in the last ten days, plus at least a dozen smaller ones in rural areas. All were quickly contained, yet he has no doubt that scores of people have been infected. It's difficult to get actual figures, since Arc controls Media, and the coverage has been tightly restricted.

“Is it about the girl? Have they caught her?” he asks. He still doesn't know what to think about this latest development.

“Maybe. But that's not why I'm calling.”

“Then what is it?”

“It's the contingency, sir,” Constipole says. “It looks like someone might've triggered it.”

Abrams's body jolts at the word. He gets to his feet without thinking. The sheet covering him falls away, exposing his middle-aged body, the whiteness of his belly, and the ripples of cellulite on his thighs. The filtered Santa Fe moonlight coming in through the flimsy motel curtains does his naked torso no favors. Had he woken with a nocturnal erection (he hadn't), it would be completely gone already. That's how badly the words affect him.

Of course, he's not aware of his body at the moment, neither its flaccidness nor the hasty retreat of his testicles into his abdominal cavity. “What did you say?” he hisses. He's wide awake now, electric.

He glances anxiously over his shoulder at his wife, but she's back to snoring in the delicate way that he finds both adorable and annoying. A breeze from the window stirs the air, causes her wispy hair to flutter like ancient cobwebs. He notices that the shadows on her cheeks are especially dark tonight. The cancer has worn her body away, though not as badly as the years of running and hiding he's subjected her to.

“On purpose, sir. It looks intentional.”

For Abrams, the elaboration is completely unnecessary. He knows exactly what Constipole meant the first time.

He takes a moment longer before responding. He lets the news rattle around inside his head while he composes himself, composes a reply that doesn't show how much the news has thrown him. Ever since his team uncovered the countermeasure Arc developed to prevent anyone from stealing the codex, he's been living in fear of those words. The Contingency, if allowed to run to completion would threaten years of hard work and leave them with nothing to show for it.

He passes his fingers through his hair and exhales through lips drawn tight against his teeth. “Okay,” he says, trying to keep his voice from shaking. He's not just scared, he's terrified. Shitless. “How do we know? There've been a lot of disruptions lately. Maybe Arc is just reconfiguring the codex in response to the hacking.”

“Unlikely, sir. We've analyzed the pattern of outages, and it has all the characteristics of being programmed. We're seeing non-essential towers being taken offline, and the signal strength is being heavily modulated over the heaviest usage areas.”

“Why would Arc—?”

“It may not be them,” Constipole cuts in. “From the chatter we've gathered, none of it is coming from their headquarters. They've gone totally dark, which suggests this may have taken them by surprise, too.”

Abrams needs more time to think, so he asks a question he doesn't really need an answer for: “What's the latest damage?”

Constipole obliges: “Several rural communities are currently under quarantine. Arc has sent civilian subcontractors to contain their assets, but they're just going through the motions. Nebraska's been hit especially hard. They've got a lot of mining operations and at-risk assets. Our man inside the governor's mansion says they're about to declare a state of emergency.”

“If not Arc, then who triggered it? And how?”

“We still don't know yet. All we can say is that a codex access request was traced to somewhere inside the arcade.”

“The girl? The hacker?”

“We don't know who, sir.”

“Well, how long before we do know?”

“That depends on how the response progresses. The contingency was built to give Arc time to identify and isolate the breach and eliminate the threat if necessary. Non-essential and remote functions are the weak points in the system, which is why they've been shut down first. We expect their diagnostics to run over the next few days. There's a lot of code to wade through.”

“And if they can't remove the threat?”

“Shutdowns will accelerate and spread into increasingly larger and more vital functions. A week, maybe.”

“How much access have we lost so far?”

“About five percent.”

Abrams sucks in a sharp breath. He's been working for years for just the right moment to usurp control of the entire network, and now he senses it's about to slip right through his fingers. “Damn it!”

His wife rolls over. She's awake now. Her worried eyes are dark pools that make him feel cold and alone. Dead eyes. Eyes that resurrect memories of the first Omegas. He shivers, as if to shake off the way they feel on his skin.

“Honey?” Janey whispers. She holds her head in that way that tells him she's worried about him, and this makes him feel terrible. She's given herself selflessly to his cause, while he has been helpless to reciprocate. “Everything okay?”

He doesn't answer, only sighs. There will be time to comfort her in a moment. He already knows that nobody will be getting any more sleep tonight.

“We need to get inside,” he says into the Link. “Do whatever it takes.”

He can almost sense Constipole nodding hundreds of miles away. “I thought you might say that. One of our sleepers is already there, sir. I took the liberty of activating them.”

“Make sure Arc doesn't catch a single whiff of our involvement. And once they figure out the trigger, take it out. We can't risk anything at this point. We're too close.”

“Are you sanctioning lethal force?”

“If it's necessary to stop this, then yes.”

 

Jessie woke from a dead sleep to the sound of splashing water, like someone was pouring it out of a bottomless pitcher onto the floor.

She realized she was thirsty, which made her lick her lips. Which made her wince and reminded her of how close she'd come to being buried beneath the walls of a collapsing building. She'd barely escaped, but not before almost knocking herself out.

She raised her fingers to the bruises on her face and groaned at how tender everything felt.

The storm last night had been like nothing she'd ever seen in her life. She'd been in downpours before, some much heavier than this one had been, but the wind—

It was like the inside of a hurricane.

With the building practically disintegrating around her and with one door inaccessible and the other one chained shut, she did the only thing she could think of at the time, which was to go out the window.

As she jumped, the duffel on her back caught on the frame and threw her off balance. Her instinct was to roll as she fell, but her foot slipped and caught at an awkward angle beneath her. She got a mouthful of knee as a result, and she collapsed to the ground.

The hit should've knocked her unconscious, and under normal circumstances it probably would have except that she had too much adrenaline pumping through her.

Fighting the squall for every inch, she'd barely made it twenty feet with only her pack and bo staff before the walls of the building folded in on themselves and the whole thing came crashing down behind her.

Caught out in the open courtyard, she was bombarded by flying debris. The wind had the flood lamps vibrating on their posts. Branches whipped past her. Gravel and leaves pelted the bare skin on her face and arms.

The door to the sturdier mainframe building was still a hundred feet away, somewhere ahead and around a corner through the stormy night. But finally she managed to reach it and was safely inside once again. Only then did she realize how badly she was bleeding from her mouth.

She took stock of the injury with her fingertips. The inside of her lip was shredded, raw and sore, and it felt as if her front top teeth were loose.

She groaned again, this time from the stiffness in her shoulder.

You're a wreck, Jessie.

A wreck, sure, but least she was alive. And safe. And warm. Her clothes were still damp, and they were beginning to stink, but it was much better than being out there in that hell.

She wondered if it was still going on. It was impossible to tell from where she'd taken shelter in the basement.

The lights were off. She waved her arm, but it failed to trigger the sensor to turn them on, which told her that the main power was out. The red emergency globes in the hallway and above the elevator still glowed, however. Whether they were running off the generator or a battery backup she couldn't say. She wondered if the mainframe was even still running.

She sat up and stared into the gloom. The watery sound was coming from the direction of the elevator.

Her feet splashed as she climbed down off the table. An inch, maybe two, of standing water reached just above the tread on her shoes. It seemed to be draining into the shaft, but where did it go from there? And where was it coming from?

It was possible that a water pipe had broken in the bathroom, but the thought of checking that part of the building didn't appeal to her. The bathroom was where Jake had attacked her after becoming infected.

She still had nightmares of that day, standing in the doorway and calling his name. She could still remember what it felt like as she imagined the worse, that he'd died and turned. But he hadn't been waiting for her inside, he'd been standing right behind her in the hallway.