The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation (21 page)

“Keep working. It could be a random sweep.”

Zakariah had not stopped, of course, not with a countdown in progress. Seconds later, he successfully bypassed the retinal-scan subprogram and keyed a manual access. A door irised open in front of them.

“I don't know,” he warned Phillip as he followed him inside. “That sniffer has definitely locked onto something.” Was this the first inkling of trouble Jimmy had warned about?

A vast datafield floated in front of them, columns of numbers in linear streams like spaghetti. Money, financial reports, years of accumulated corporate evidence. They could rewrite history from here with a single nudge of an upraised middle finger. Or get lost for hours looking for trees in the forest. Without a map their alterations might be little more than graffiti.

Phillip zeroed in on his target without hesitation. He reached into a tangle of cyber-spaghetti and tweaked a relatively incidental bit of data.

A warning note hit Zakariah palpably like a pneumatic wave. “We are definitely on a hit list. One of us must be carrying something foreign.”

Phillip smiled with satisfaction and nodded. “Macpherson promised as much.”

“What are you talking about?”

Phillip gazed into unfocused distance, momentarily enraptured by his imagination. “The holy grail. The leash on the Beast.”

“You're crazy. That sniffer is going to hit any second and lock down this whole area.”

“We're done,” Phillip said, backing up quickly as though coming to his common senses. “Leave no trace of entry.”

“Are you kidding? We don't have that much time. There are too many parameters.”

“If you can't delete, then redirect. Any script kiddie could pull it off.”

Zakariah ground his teeth as he wiped out critical evidence. V-space did not give up her secrets easily. Every movement left a permanent record, every vibration a telltale sign. Even with his best efforts, he knew forensic testing would reveal blank spots, areas of programmed vacuum, missing clocktime. Nothing traceable, nothing noticeable. He stepped out and closed the portal behind them.

“Clear,” he said as a purple net of phosphorescence began to fall from the sky.

Phillip brandished his cybernetic arm like a medieval weapon and sprayed a rainbow of anti-scan encryption in a wide arc above them. Zakariah ducked instinctively, wondering if there might be a public zoomtube within a million miles. Not in Seventh Heaven.

A full alert sounded with a noisy barrage of digital sirens. Purple dust began to fall like snow from the ceiling of the crystal cathedral, sticking to their avatars like glue. Phillip brushed in vain at his shoulders, cursing.

“We're open targets now,” Zakariah told him. “Just dive for the portal.” He nodded upward with his chin to their entry point on the far side of the room, past cobwebs of red and white lasers. Distance in V-space could be deceptive, but it didn't look like more than a few hundred metres.

“Death to the Beast!” Phillip shouted. And they both dove for the opening with arms outstretched over their heads like superheroes. They sliced through laser tracking beams both red and white, setting off bursts of sparkling fireworks. They had but seconds now. Zakariah glanced at his father one last time.

Phillip grinned at him with manic pleasure, wide-eyed with adrenaline and a wild lust for danger. “I told you it would be fun,” he said.

The crystal cathedral telescoped around them as an egress filter kicked in. The exit portal shrank in the distance as prismatic walls stretched like elastic into oblivion. They were trapped on an exponential curve, always approaching their target but never quite able to reach it.

They stopped at the realization, hovering in a tangled web of light, and Zakariah searched desperately for any escape. An alternate route? A portable conduit? Could he program a temporary zoomtube up this high in Prime? He wished he knew his way around this strange uplevel architecture. Only the eminent worked here, the new royalty of V-space—billionaires, brokers, and financial figureheads. Is this where his illustrious career would end? Caught hacking joe-data with his pants down?

Phillip lifted his arms in exultation, or challenge perhaps, and yelled something unintelligible in a strange machine language, a talisman of raw code.

The Beast appeared above them in the form of a giant bearlike creature with the face of a dragon. Two long horns curled back from the top of its head and made a full circle of ribbed ivory bone. A snarling mouth gaped open with fangs exposed.

Phillip wielded his gauntlet of light like a small sword and shouted again. Zakariah backed away from his futile display, still hoping for a means of escape, a flaw in the source code around him, anything. He longed for the jumbled datastream of Sublevel Zero, the crowds of vulnerable users around him, the black patches of trapdoor access in which to hide. Prime Level Seven was firewalled shut at every avenue, sealed up like a coffin, the programming clean and sparse and sterile.

Zakariah looked up as the Beast approached. Every system had some inherent weakness, some governance that could be bent or broken. Data coming in always let data out somehow. Even a black hole spewed streams of antiparticles into space. Self-conscious or not, the Beast was a man-made program, a glorified cybertracker, a half-blind servant to all. Zakariah searched for deep harmonics and found a steady hum of infinite power, a cold and clinical perfection. No cracks, no crevices.

The Beast swooped down on them with cavernous jaws agape. Phillip stabbed with a weapon now puny in comparison, and Zakariah jumped to avoid gleaming teeth like javelins.

The Beast swallowed them whole and darkness enveloped them. The silence of negative data stretched infinite in all directions, an inky, eerie black. No sound, no smell, no programming on which to hang a frame of reference—the quarantine total and absolute.

Deep within the Beast a fire glowed bright orange in the distance and grew closer as the two hackers fell down the dark tunnel toward hell. Zakariah's panic settled into a calm and vacant dread. The fire burned cold, an all-consuming data incinerator. He knew the psychic backwash would fry them on an unfiltered cable.

Phillip screamed his resistance and turned back to Zakariah.

“Macpherson!” he yelled. “Activate System Intelligence!”

Macpherson? What the hell?

“Ground zero!” Phillip shouted.

“What are you talking about?”

“Zak, I couldn't put you in play before your time! Only you can understand that. Activate System Intelligence!”

The rushing wind began to calm, and Zakariah felt his movement slow to a halt as he watched Phillip windmill toward a burning abyss below him. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Helena Sharp staring at him with bright brown eyes.

“Where are we, Zak?”

He wondered if he was already dead, if he had slipped into psychosis. Helena was wearing a skirt suit similar to when they first met, expensive black jacket, black stockings, high heels. He wondered if the memory was being dredged up by the last spasm of dying neurons in his brain.

“What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on the other side of the Doorway.” She looked younger than he remembered, more vibrant. Her avatar was as detailed as real flesh, every hair, every mole, the slight flush on her high cheekbones, the subtle tilt of her nose.

“I'm back on Earth. I just got in. I was working on Prime Three when I heard you calling.” She gaped at the raging hellfire below them. “Where are we, Zak?” she asked again, her voice now quavery with fear.

“Prime Seven. We're inside the Beast.”

Helena blanched with alarm. “Impossible,” she whispered. “I don't have access.”

“I think someone in the Cromeus colonies must have been tinkering with our circuits. Some quantum connection. Either that or you're a complete delusion from my fragmenting consciousness, a digital deconstruction.”

“Are you screwing with me? Is this some sort of game?”

“Helena, we're about to be incinerated like bad data in a cybertracker unless we can find a way out of here.”

“We could crash the hardware. You said yourself we couldn't operate twin avatars in the same spot without crashing a system.”

Zakariah blinked with surprise. He stared at his hands, long feminine fingers that mirrored her own. Twin avatars in close proximity. “I love you, Helena.”

He reached to hug her with both arms. He melded with her and shared her essence. Their lips met and passed through each other as four arms entwined around a single frame. A feedback loop coiled like a venomous serpent within them and unleashed.

V-space exploded.

A bright white blast was followed by an angry red pulse of pain that left behind darkness in its wake. Silence seemed to tickle in the aftermath like a dream lost and forgotten.

Zakariah's forehead stabbed him as he squinted at his old friend Jimmy. He noted the acrid smell of a smoking V-net cable. “Can you hear me, Zak?”

“Yes.” His voice sounded foreign and distant.

“Can you move?”

“No.”

“You should be dead,” Jimmy said as he clipped away smoking remnants of cable from behind Zakariah's left ear. “Burned on an unfiltered plug from Prime Seven.” Jimmy shook his head. “You should be dead.”

“My father?” Zakariah asked, remembering now, slowly putting reality back together piece by broken piece.

“Burned. Totally fried. He's comatose, but he's breathing and his left pupil is responsive. We've got to get out of here.”

Zakariah nodded and tried to rise from his chair. A wave of nausea rushed through him and he retched a dry heave from his empty stomach. He tasted bile in the back of his throat.

“Easy, cowboy.” Jimmy grabbed under his shoulders and hoisted him up.

Zakariah wavered and found hesitant balance.

Together they wheeled Phillip to the service elevator. Zakariah held the door open while Jimmy went back for his black toolbox. He pushed a heavy dolly across the room and over the threshold. The only evidence left behind was an illegal shunt, one black office chair, and two twisted stumps of charred V-net cable. Nothing could be traced back downtown.

Zakariah braced himself against the wall of the elevator as Jimmy vibrated with nervous anxiety.

“Can all three of us fit in the air ambulance upstairs?” Jimmy asked.

“No, not with your toolkit also. I'll stay behind. Helena's back.”

“The real Director? Oh, that's just peachy. The jig is up, man. Time to clear out.”

“She was down there, in the belly of the Beast. I've got to make sure she's okay.”

Jimmy stared, his lips working around bitter questions on his tongue. He swallowed them down and looked away. The less he knew, the better. He fished around in an upper pocket of his coveralls and pulled up a dummy network plug. He offered it forward. “At least put this on your ear. You look like an escaped lab rat.”

“What do you know about System Intelligence, Jimmy?”

“System Intelligence, huh?” Jimmy squinted at Phillip's lolling head and turned back to Zakariah. “The soul in the machine. It's a technical concept. If you can upload consciousness into an
AI
, you can control it, reason with it, blackmail it, whatever.”

Zakariah nodded. “A new vulnerability.”

“Every system is weaker than the sum of its parts.”

“Phillip mentioned it. He called out to Colin Macpherson, the dead physicist.”

“Phillip's a psycho.”

“Could the program be carried in a wetware installation? By a human, I mean? Running unnoticed in the background?”

Jimmy winced. “I doubt it. The parameters would be fearsome. Think about it. The soul of a machine? How big is that? How would we measure it? I'm sure any workable configuration will require a hardware component. It's still just street chatter, as far as I know.”

The elevator opened onto a rooftop helipad where the air ambulance sat waiting. Zakariah stepped out and signalled to the pilot with a circular finger motion. Huge blades began to turn as they trundled Phillip across the tarmac in his black office chair. His head lolled and spittle dribbled from his chin.

A female pilot jumped out, young and slight in a neatly pressed flightsuit. “What happened?” she demanded.

“Ah, office accident,” Jimmy said. He looked at Zakariah and popped his eyebrows in signal.

“Right, office accident. Bad fumes. He'll be okay. Just needs some fresh air.”

The young pilot bent to examine Phillip. She rolled up his sleeve and fingered the burnt cable in the crook of his elbow. She swore under her breath and stood up. “This man needs medical care. Get him in the back. Who are you guys?”

“Zakariah Davis, Operations Director.” He flashed his laminate like a sheriff's badge. “Everything is under control.”

The girl stepped forward to challenge him. Her brow was furrowed above silver-rimmed, aviator sunglasses. Her thin hair tangled in limp curls to her shoulders. She was skinny as a rail but carried herself like a commando.

“How far in was he when the blast hit?”

“Are you a medic?”

“He's a close business associate.”

The girl's expression was intense, her lips grim, and Zakariah could think of no reason to shield her from the truth. “Unfiltered Seventh Heaven.”

“But you're still standing?”

Zakariah paused for a quick self-assessment, checking his physical and mental health, testing for surety. He could hear his neck creaking as he moved his head. He smelled a resin of asphalt from the tarmac. He stared at his open palms. “I think I may have deflected the damage. I think I may have hurt a good friend.”

The pilot's stance softened, and she looked back to Phillip. “Help me,” she said.

Together they lifted Phillip onto a backseat stretcher and strapped him into the harness. They stood outside while the pilot climbed aboard and grimly went through her checklist, sounding the ritual to herself as though addressing an imaginary copilot.