The Origin Point: A Future Tech Cyber Novella

THE ORIGIN POINT

A Future Tech Cyber Novella

by Case Lane

Copyright 2016 Case Lane

Smashwords Edition

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All rights reserved. This is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or persons, living
or dead, is coincidental.

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Table of
Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE - THE DISCRIMINATION FILE

CHAPTER TWO - THE EDUCATION FILE

CHAPTER THREE - THE LAW ENFORCEMENT FILE

CHAPTER FOUR - THE CONSUMER FILE

EPILOGUE

The Contents on the
Mystery Flash
Drive

About Case Lane

Connect with Case Lane

Bonus Reading - Discover More Books by Case
Lane

Book Description

The Origin Point: A Future Tech Cyber Novella

Your Future is in Play

WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED two American
federal cabinet ministers join a secretive world-class alliance to
create a global surveillance and online tracking system of sweeping
control. But when an intrepid journalist discovers a flash drive
with shocking content destined to blow the scheme wide open, the
race for our cyber future begins. Thwarted by a determined
underground cyber technologist bent on fighting the power to stop
the plan, the government team launches its own counterattack in
pursuit of its opposite ends. Who will win a contest of wills and
intelligence when the only question asked is: do you want
individual privacy or do you want global security? This novella is
the first prequel novella to the Life Online book series of
speculative science fiction thrillers for thinking people. To find
out why we end up in a post-control world governed by the
sophisticated software of an omnipresent server network, start
here...

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The Origin Point: A Future Tech Cyber Novella

PROLOGUE

Easter Sunday morning, 2014

The glaring lights illuminating from the pedestrian
plaza in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. provided
Elmira Sanchez with a luminescent bath as she diligently finished
cleaning inside Infrared, one of the city's most exclusive
restaurants. D.C. was a power town and even at 3 am, the vivid
intensity of the streetlights marking the pedestrian pathways and
sidewalks around one of the world's most significant buildings,
enveloped the plush chairs and white table-clothed dining tables
around which she was maneuvering an industrial vacuum. In the past
year, the city's influence peddlers from brokers to senators to
lobbyists to lawyers to journalists to financiers to diplomats had
turned Fresno Tyler 's early American eatery into a go-to location
for intimate conversation. The low-walled booths lining the walls
around the restaurant were self-contained sanctuaries for a
discerning few who preferred to slurp through their cumin-infused
wheat flakes and cayenne chewy bacon, in splendid isolation from
the sight of their enemies.

Sanchez had no time to think of the guarded
discussions that had taken place hours before she arrived. Her crew
cleaned four restaurants around the neighborhood between midnight
and 8 am each night. For them, Infrared was a building space where
grease in the kitchen and tissues in the toilet had limited impact
on their senses. They learned to ignore the sights and smells
encircling their bodies while sweating through the late night
tasks. As overnight patrons occupying the restaurant space, the
cleaning crew were not engaged in billion-dollar policy
negotiations to change the laws of America, but were wiping away
the discarded food and human waste made unimpressive by indulgence
and decay within each location where they worked. The media-created
cachet linking the exclusivity of being inside Infrared to the
privileged few, failed to consider the $12-an-hour cleaners with
children to feed who were also among the restaurant's recurrent
guests. But the workers knew the five star menu did not reduce the
smell in the bathroom when a power broker decided to occupy a stall
as if he were at home. Nor could a reservation waitlist stretching
over ten months upgrade the chore of removing rotting animal flesh,
fruit and vegetable cast-offs and buckets of grease from the
premises each night. The vision of Infrared captured in its kitchen
and bathrooms revealed not a must-see destination of pounding
conversation and emotion, but a soiled, misused, crowded functional
space, requiring by law, a complete refreshment each night before
the cycle could begin again the next day.

Turning the vacuum around a corner,
Sanchez's eye caught a sparkle of silver shining from a ledge next
to a table. Normally, she would be indifferent to any item not in
her immediate cleaning area, but Tyler was meticulous about the
cleanliness of his restaurant, and had demanded the crew
immediately report any maintenance issues such as peeling paint or
torn carpet so he could address the problem before a dining guest
noticed the flaw. Since the cleaning service was outsourced to
another company, Tyler paid extra for the vigilance, and Sanchez's
supervisor enforced the additional attention.

Knowing Tyler would inspect the restaurant
as soon as their work was done, Sanchez reached for the object.
Picking the piece up, she realized only the end was silver, the
rest was a dark blue plastic. Looking at the item between her
fingers, she recognized the two-inch device, but could not recall
the object's common name. The silver end, she knew as 'the thing
you save computer files onto when you want to move them to another
computer.' A friend had once handed her a similar looking gadget
when she was giving her pictures of her daughter's birthday party.
'She called it a stick,' Sanchez remembered, amused. 'A memory
stick.' Briefly considering again if the name was correct, she put
the stick in her pocket, and continued with her rounds.

An hour later while preparing to leave,
Sanchez spotted Tyler in his office staring at his computer screen
and was prompted to recall she was carrying the memory stick. With
a slight nervousness, she lightly knocked on Tyler's open office
door. The restaurateur looked up.

"Yes?" Tyler asked without emotion.
Razor-thin with curly blond hair and bright green eyes, Fresno
Tyler had exited the tranquil rural New York state town where he
had been born and raised to change his name, learn to cook and
hustle his ambition up the ladder of restaurant success. Infrared
was his third location, the first in D.C., conveniently built in a
well-trafficked neighborhood, after an influential political party
backer tasted Tyler's signature beef pasta one evening at his first
New York City spot, and offered to buy him a retail space to
establish a franchise in the nation's capital.

"
Se
ñ
or
Fresno," Sanchez said removing the stick
from her pocket and holding the item up for Tyler to see. "I found
this." Lightly walking towards him, she reached out her hand to
offer him the memory stick.

Tyler furrowed his brow and stretched out
his palm, Sanchez dropped the piece onto his hand. "What's this?"
he asked to no one in particular.

"It was by a window, a table in section 3,"
Sanchez offered.

"A flash drive?" Tyler patiently inquired,
looking at the stick. Sanchez shrugged but did not respond. "Oh,
okay thanks." Sanchez nodded and walked out.

Without watching her depart, Tyler turned
the flash drive over in his hand. The device was unmarked, no name
or even a brand logo appeared on the plastic casing. Shrugging, he
placed the silver end in his laptop's USB slot and opened the
document view. He looked first for any sign of the owner's name,
but no identifiers were prominently displayed. The files, however,
were all visible, not encrypted, nor locked using a password. Each
file was named for a current issue facing the American people -
discrimination, public education, law enforcement, consumer
protection. Tyler clicked open the discrimination file. He checked
the 'properties' feature for an author's name, but the fields were
blank. Glancing back at the content of the file, he presumed the
information was a thought-piece. "Preventing the next Dr. King or
Ms. Steinem from gaining a foothold," Tyler read the document title
aloud. "Sounds sufficiently ominous." As he continued to read in
silence, he noted the scope of the document's ideas were laid out
as policy or planning instructions for the future.

In Washington, a policy document could
originate with anyone from the President's Chief of Staff to a
mid-level civil servant to a student summer intern at a think tank.
But even to Tyler's untrained eye, the document, with its detailed
strategy and references to senior government leaders was too
meticulously prepared to be a random discussion piece. The content
looked...like official federal government documents. Tyler opened
another file. Searching 'properties' again, he confirmed there was
no identifying information. But similar to the first document, the
content appeared to be laying out the parameters for the
organization of America's future.

'Where did this come from?' he wondered.
'Who was mapping out these ideas in such detail?' Knowing his
continued speculation would be fruitless, he sent a text to his
friend Dallas Winter, a journalist at the National Republic. 'If
anyone could uncover the source of these files,' he thought. 'She
could.'

A few blocks away, Dallas was asleep when
her subconscious picked up the chime for a message alert on her
mobile phone. Mechanically she reached for the device, and viewed
Tyler's request for her to look at the government documents he had
found. Immediately, she hit the 'call' icon.

"You found what?" Dallas asked the second
Tyler answered on his end.

"I'm so happy you stay up all night," Tyler
replied. "Especially when I cannot decipher mysterious government
files."

"I was not awake. Why do you think you found
government files?" Dallas yawned through the question. "This is
D.C. Everyone is writing about what they think the government
should do."

"The detail is intense, full of names of
real people who are actually in a position to do these things."