The Lightcap (21 page)

“That’s really great guys, but doesn’t the Lightcap just make them go into a docile mode or follow pre-defined commands in the event of a connection loss?  I’m not trying to take away your moment of glory, but won’t it just mean a bunch of office workers just sitting there, or at worst writing code?”

Pavel jerked his thumb at Dej, who clapped his hands together and said, “Adam, so glad you asked!” He had clearly walked right into a set up, a way to allow them to draw out their presentation and build suspense.  Dej continued: “The Doc was a huge help.  As you said, what’s the point of shutting down the mesh link if they’re just going to zone out or follow some sort of commands given in advance?  So we looked at different sections of code, and it seems there are different emotion calls that are made.  The AI software translates that to physical areas in the brain, which are then agitated by the Lightcap to induce the desired response. 

“I’m fairly certain I isolated the call for utter panic.  Sheer emotional mayhem.  We’re going to hit them twice.  Send the command to make them all lose their minds, hopefully causing complete chaos, and then send another command to disable the mesh radio.  I think the device will still control the worker in chaos, going off the last order received.  The effect will last as long as the device is worn.  It’s not ready yet.  Maybe in another day or two,” Dej concluded, hands in his pockets.  He seemed to glow with pride at his success.

The group felt renewed vigor and exchanged hugs as Aria and Dej left for the night.  After their departure, Adam and Pavel retired to their respective rooms.  Adam lay awake and stared at the ceiling, his thoughts halfway across the city with Adaptech, and then beyond the outskirts of New Metra City to the larger headquarters of Metra Corp.  Would LaMont even be at the headquarters when they attacked?  They wanted to move quickly, but they had just started to scratch the surface of the information contained in the datafile.  Adam felt a deep, anxious pressure against his chest that they wouldn’t be returning, that this was surely a suicide mission, the last bad decision he’d ever make.  Maybe he’d get lucky and live to make more, but that didn’t seem likely.  They were going into the headquarters for the two most powerful companies in the Region.  The last thought Adam had before drifting off to restless sleep was that this may be one of the last times he’d ever dream.

Adam awoke the next morning with the weight gone from his chest, replaced by an exhaustion that had seeped into his bones.  He struggled sluggishly against an unseen current from the moment he swung his legs out of bed.  He couldn’t remember dreaming during the night. 
Figures,
thought Adam, noting that it was almost noon. 

Pavel made Adam a breakfast of powdered eggs, smoked protein sticks, and coffee that gave a jolt along with a headache.  The eggs looked like white folded cheesecloth, with no yolks, of near uniform consistency.  The coffee offered Adam a vague aftertaste of burnt sand.  However, the food woke him up, even if only a little.  Pavel apologized, as he had at almost every meal, for the poor quality of the food.  “I’m sorry, Adam.  You know I can’t venture too far from the house.  The corner market isn’t exactly overflowing with selections.  You wouldn’t believe how expensive it is, too.  I won’t tell you, because it would just make you angry.” 

“It’s fine, Pavel.  Thank you for the food,” Adam said, as he had several times before.  The food really was terrible, but it was better than some alternatives.  Such as starving.

That afternoon, several hours passed in silence, Pavel hunched over the Lightcap formerly worn by Hana while Adam sorted through the mountains of information in LaMont’s datafile.  He found there was just as much, if not more, random junk as there was useful data.  The man had digital receipts for dry cleaning from five years before, a hotel receipt from a year and a half prior, file after file of unimportant data.  Despite the hunt for digital needles in virtual haystacks, Adam did find useful information. 

It appeared to Adam that the Brain Sync acquisition was just for show, a formality, a way to add to the Adaptech balance sheet and increase its clout in the world market.  He found notes going back over a decade showing LaMont had an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Brain Sync, and access to its confidential intellectual property.  At the very least, LaMont had someone on the inside.  He found files suggesting the Mind Drive v5 had incorporated elements of Lightcap tech, specifically the components which helped to create a sense of docility, making the wearer more open to suggestion and less likely to experience intense emotions, even suppressing the capacity for self-reflection.  The files explained a great deal, especially why no one seemed to mind that things kept getting worse.  Between the mesh vid nodes, the lack of personal connections in daily life, and the high adoption rate of Mind Drive v5, people were too entertained to think and too preoccupied to care.

Adam found additional information suggesting LaMont had controlled Doctor Velim for quite some time.  Daily log files going back more than five years, observations on his attempts to break her spirit while she wasn’t wearing the Lightcap, which led to lower inhibitions during future Lightcap sessions.  Adam was horrified to learn that after several years of almost daily use Sera Velim now sat quietly, awaiting commands, even when she wasn’t wearing the Lightcap.  LaMont noted Velim did occasionally resist commands against her personal moral code, such that he found her unreliable.  LaMont had forced Velim to wear the Lightcap nonstop for the past ten months.

As Adam read through hundreds of pages of LaMont’s notes, he found one recurring theme: LaMont trusted no one.  Adam had sometimes thought he himself suffered from paranoia, a byproduct of an overly analytical mind and a tendency to see every potential point of failure or weakness in a given system.  LaMont made Adam appear a careless exhibitionist.  There were dozens of pages of rants—long, rambling pieces casting nearly every person within his social and professional circles as a potential spy or saboteur, including Adam.  He found pages of data about himself; LaMont had compiled dossiers on each member of the programming team. 

Adam came across a file simply labeled DT. 
Damen!
thought Adam, immediately opening it.  The file started out with the same background and biographical data the other dossiers contained.  About three months into the project LaMont started making notes suggesting Damen was the subject of several tests, both physical and psychological.  Nothing gave any specifics on what tests had been performed.  Vague notes from LaMont indicated recovery times, brain inflammation, and cognitive abilities while carrying out different types of tasks.  Adam could see clearly they were a team of lab rats, but it appeared Damen was chosen to be tested more thoroughly than the others.  There were repeated references to Damen’s young age, enough that Adam believed it was one of the main reasons Damen had been selected as a test subject over other people on the team.  The last entry in the file was from the day Damen disappeared, input by LaMont.  A single line read, “Terminated.”

Adam passed the rest of the afternoon and early evening searching through the datafile, trying to find information about the types of tests performed on Damen and whether or not anyone else on the team had been subjected to similar testing.  Despite Adam’s efforts, nothing indicated what had been done to Damen.  Eventually, Adam found a file for Dej, which he also immediately opened.  It was the same as all the other biographical information on the rest of the team.  Two things stood out.  One brief notation read, “Secret messages”.  Another read, “Physical test: see RH”.  Adam needed to know more.  He set out to find the file for RH, which he assumed was the dossier for Rosaria “Aria” Hines.              

Just then, the front door erupted in a series of booms—three fast, two slow, the secret knock they created.  Pavel lifted himself from the chair, took four steps across the room, and stopped to look through the door’s peephole.  He looked at Adam, his expression unreadable, and opened the door.  Aria nearly jumped through.  The sudden movement caused Adam to flinch.  Her eyes and nose were red and inflamed.  She had clearly been crying.  Pavel closed the door quickly behind her, concern on her face.

Adam couldn’t contain his impatience and asked, “Where’s Dej?”

Aria shot him an angry look, her eyes full of pain, and replied, “He’s gone.  Same as Damen, although they at least had the foresight to have a message waiting for us when we got back from our Lightcap shift.  The story this time is he was transferred to a new Adaptech field office in the Confederacy to head up a project for the next-gen autonomous car.  Total bullshit.  He would have said something to me—or at least to one of us.  Right?” She turned pleading eyes at Pavel, who nodded his head sympathetically.  She looked at Adam, who wasn’t sure what to say.  He couldn’t remove the nagging idea things weren’t as bad as they seemed to be.  He didn’t want it to be true, and the past several days had been a process of not only learning but persuading himself it was all as bad as it seemed.  As a result, though he wanted to believe Dej was committed to doing what was right, there was also a part of Adam that felt a little envy at the idea of being able to get away, to start over, his slate wiped clean. 

Dej was a talented programmer, as was Adam, probably enough so that either of them could have leveraged that skill as a way to be granted clemency for his crimes.  As tempted as he was to confess and move on, Adam knew there was no going back, not with what he had seen, not with the Lightcap in the hands of a lunatic like LaMont and good people like Velim under his control.  Adam was pretty sure Dej was the same type of person, though Adam also realized he had idolized Dej for years.  The media portrayed Dej as a selfless genius passing hundreds of hours slumped over a notetab, racking his brain, trying to make the world a better place.  Dej’s was one of the few media stories praising altruism over vested self interest.  How could they not portray him that way?  By improving the autocar collision rate, Dej had prevented thousands of deaths.

Aria still looked at Adam expectantly.  “I’m sure he’s safe, Aria,” Adam finally said.  “He’s too damned valuable.  We should just assume we’ve got two people to rescue now, instead of one.”

“
You
might have two people to rescue,” hissed Aria.  “I have one: Dej.  I’ll worry about him, you worry about the airhead who’s probably in LaMont’s pocket anyway—with or without the brain hugger.” 

Adam couldn’t blame Aria for her anger.  He was upset and he and Dej weren’t even an item.  Adam was afraid of making her mood worse, but he also had to tell her what he’d found in LaMont’s datafile.  “Aria, Pavel, I need to tell you both something,” he said, as he turned his chair to face them both.  “I’ve spent most of today trying to sort through LaMont’s notes, and I found some troubling things.  They’ve been experimenting on some of us.”

“Yeah, no shit, Adam,” Aria said.  “We’re all just rats in cages.  We know.”  She seemed to be alternating between rage and fear.

“I think this is beyond what we thought,” Adam said, trying to sound calm.  “This isn’t just testing the Lightcap but
us. 
How we respond to different commands, or different levels of intensity.  Damen was definitely a test subject to a greater degree than the rest of us, I think due to his young age.  I wasn’t able to figure out just what the hell they were doing to him, but I’m pretty sure it had a part in his death, whatever it was.  Before I saw him get shot, there was already blood coming out of his ears and nose, as if he was experiencing an aneur—”

“Stop.  Just fucking stop,” Aria interjected, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes.

“Sorry.  I wasn’t trying to upset you.  I need to tell you this, though.  It’s important.  I found a file for Dej, and it looks as if they might have done some kind of testing on him too.  And you.  There was a note in his file that said something about physical tests, and it referenced a file for someone named RH,” Adam finished, relieved to get it all out.  They all knew she was the only one with those initials on the team.

Aria turned to look at Pavel and asked, “Can we be ready to do this by tomorrow?  I don’t want to wait.  If we take too much time, it might be too late for Dej.  We need to do this tomorrow, if at all possible.”

Adam cut Pavel off before he had a chance to answer, exclaiming, “Did you hear me?  I said they’ve been doing who knows what to you and me and Dej and Damen, and you don’t even seem to care.”

Aria snapped her head to look at him, then took three steps across the room and reached behind her back with her right hand.  Adam forced himself not to cringe.  There was a quick sound of metal scraping metal,
shiiink,
as Aria extended her hand upwards in a sweeping arc to draw a katana from its spot behind her left shoulder.  The sword glinted in the light, the orb on the ceiling reflected against its folded steel.  “Do you want to say that again?  Tell me I don’t care one more time.  I am going to go get Dej tomorrow or die trying.  You are welcome to come, but I’m going either way.”