Caro screwed up her nose as she puzzled it out. “Lemme guess,” she said. “This organization thinks you might know all about this stuff your father was doing.”
“Correct.”
“Wow. Your life is starting to sound like an OTT thriller.”
“Perhaps. Regardless, it’s the truth.” Mostly.
“Would it be so bad if you just, like, gave them the research?” Caro asked.
Jay infused her tone with as much emotion as she could summon. “Yes. It would be bad.” And it wasn’t so difficult to inject fearfulness into her voice because she truly did not want to fall into the hands of the men who pursued her so relentlessly. They would use her as weapon if they could. And if they couldn’t discover how to control her, they would take her apart piece by piece to learn about her, and try to replicate her. She would destroy herself before she allowed that to happen.
“Not an option, then. Right. Gotcha.” Caro accepted the terse explanation without a qualm.
“I like Snapperton. And it’s tiresome moving from place to place. Which is why I prefer not to be too noticeable.”
Caro chewed her lip. “So, like, if you find out these guys are closing in, you have to take off?”
“Exactly.”
“Bummer,” Caro said. “That would majorly suck.”
Her brother’s eyes were round and shiny and envious. Doubtless Tyler found the idea of leaving everything behind and starting all over again exciting. It wasn’t. Even for a cyborg it was tedious.
“What about your mom?” Caro asked. “Bet she hates having to pack up and move all the time. Ours would have a cow.”
“I never met my mother.”
Caro’s eyes rounded. She appeared shocked to her core. “Crap. I’m sooo sorry.” And she followed up by lunging at Jay and giving her what would have been a rib-cracking hug for anyone remotely human.
Jay patted her awkwardly on the back until Caro released her to ask, “So who’s looking after you since your dad died?”
She noted Tyler listening intently, despite his apparent interest in the shaft of a tiny feather poking out from his comforter. He eased the feather out and twirled it between his fingertips.
She hadn’t anticipated being thoroughly questioned. Even by someone as ingenuous as Caro there was a potential risk. However, there was no time like the present to see if there were any holes in her cover story. “My uncle. Well, he’s not really my uncle, he’s a guardian my father appointed in his will. He’s out of town at the moment.”
“Outstanding! What I wouldn’t give—”
“To have to do all your own cooking and washing and housework,” Tyler interrupted. “Yeah, bet you’d looove that.”
Caro snort a wry laugh. “Not! Okay, so back to the video clip. Tyler’s personal problems might not be as huge as yours, Jay, but I don’t think he should take all the crap for coming to your rescue. It’d be a crying shame if he had to give up coaching the girls’ baseball team. They’re doing really well in the league since he took over as coach.”
Tyler’s eyebrows disappeared beneath his tousled fringe. “A compliment from my sister? I think I just died of shock.”
She sniffed. “I tell it like it is.”
“And I happen to agree with you, Caro,” Jay said. “Tyler should not have to take the blame. But I believe we can kill two birds with one stone. Remember the tracking program I mentioned? I assure you it will track all the users who’ve viewed the original clip, and decrypt their IP addresses so I can verify whether anyone who’s likely to cause us problems has viewed it.”
“You really are a computer geek!” Caro appeared totally unworried by the implications of a “normal” teenage girl possessing that degree of computer programming skills. Black and white. That was how Caro saw life. How restful it must be to live in such a simple, uncomplicated world.
And now for her brother. The one who hid his true self. The one who had secrets, like she did.
Tyler gnawed his lip. “Even presuming all the views have been local—kids from school, Mom’s work computer and the like—there’re still too many cell phones and laptops and home computers unaccounted for. Either Vanessa
or
Matt could have forwarded the original clips to anyone by now. It’s not gonna be possible to hack into everyone’s computer, or swipe everyone’s cell phone and delete this clip. Basically, we’re screwed.”
“In theory, it’s not impossible to overcome that problem but it’s far more likely I’d remain one step behind each new person sharing the video.” Jay briefly considered using the device hidden away in her apartment. She’d based it on the same principle as an electromagnetic pulse weapon. Power it up, and it’d affect all electronic devices within a hundred mile radius, rendering them permanently useless.
Of course it’d also bring the entire town and its surrounds to its knees, and more than likely telegraph her whereabouts to anyone who cared to monitor such things. She would not utilize anything so obvious unless forced to. First she would decrypt the IP addresses, calculate the odds she could be traced to Snapperton, and then decide her future. The problem of the video clip being viewed and then saved on a viewer’s personal computer could be neutralized using an IP address-targeted virus. It wasn’t a full-proof solution but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.
A mini version of The Pulse would be useful, too—one that would affect only a small, contained area, and was specific to certain devices such as cell phones. She wouldn’t need to render the devices unusable, merely corrupt specific data files stored on them. She commenced designing both the virus and the mini-pulse device while she listened to Tyler and his sister.
“So we just have to hope….” Tyler absently stroked the tiny white feather he’d pulled from his comforter. His eyes were shadowed with worries he was reluctant to voice.
“Hope what?” Caro asked.
“The clip hasn’t been emailed to anyone who really matters,” Tyler said. “Bottom line, if Vanessa’s already sent it to Principal Harris, and Ms. Harris decides I’m a bad influence and pulls me as coach, so what? I’ll deal with it. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing compared to Jay having to skip town because these guys have caught up with her.” He scrubbed his fingers through his hair, making it stand up in unruly, gel-assisted spikes. “Shit, Jay. I’m so sorry I’ve screwed things up for you. I’ll be gutted if you have to leave Snapperton because of me. If I hadn’t lost my temper—”
“Don’t blame yourself. I noticed Matt attempting to video the fight earlier on and merely asked him to put the phone away. I should have insisted he delete the video, and checked whether he’d taken another. It is unlike me to be so distracted.”
Tyler seemed more than just a little concerned at the implication Jay might be forced to leave Snapperton. She liked that he wanted her to stay. She liked it very much indeed.
“So what are we gonna do?” Caro asked.
Jay swiveled to face her. “Do the students carry their cell phones with them at all times?”
“Duh! What planet are you from? Teachers have hissy fits if they spot a cell phone in class, so everyone keeps them in their bags on silent mode. But during breaks it’s text city. Lunchtime in the cafeteria is chronic.”
“Good.” Jay allowed herself to smile as she explained her plan to Tyler and Caro, and contemplated what humans called “sweet revenge”.
~~~
Jay disarmed her security system and entered her apartment. She didn’t bother to turn on the lights—she could see perfectly well in the dark. She walked over to the table and powered up her computer. Given the tedium of the tasks she was about to perform, she instructed her neurological processor to shut down certain bodily functions, and entered a state similar to “downtime”, when she recharged and upgraded her systems.
But as with all downtime periods in recent months, while her fingers flew over the keyboard and she remained physically occupied, her mental processes played games. She was ensnared in recollection of the past. A
dream
.
The instant the first task was complete, she emerged from the dream. She shook her head in an attempt to clear the last vivid images from her mind before she began her next task.
Her dreams were yet another anomaly to add to the others affecting her. Cyborgs did not dream. At least, to her knowledge she’d not been programmed with the capacity to dream. But dream she did—recurring dreams about Father’s death, which left her questioning everything she understood about herself. Something was happening inside her. Something beyond the mere tangible aspects of her physical construction. Something profound.
A droplet of moisture plopped on to the tabletop. She stared at it, already knowing what it signified but strangely unwilling to confirm it absolutely.
Tears.
She was crying. Again. As she’d done when Father initiated the termination sequence and forced her to end his life.
She wiped her face. Tears. Such a human reaction to pain. But she was not programmed to feel physical pain. Ergo, the logical conclusion was that this reaction sprang from emotional distress—the kind of distress that, if she’d been human, might well occur from reliving a loved one’s death.
But being distressed over Father’s death was illogical. He had chosen to die, and his dying had served two purposes. It had prevented the old man from suffering a slow, painful death from an incurable cancer. And, by taking Jay’s command code with him to his grave, he had protected her as best he could. Now no living human possessed the code that would make Jay a servant to their will. She could not be compelled to harm others, or be used as a weapon. She was free to make her own decisions. If she felt anything at all, it should have been elation because no one would command her again. Ever.
So why did she feel something she could only identify as sadness whenever she recalled Alexander Durham?
What was happening to her?
She ran an internal diagnostic and found nothing untoward, nothing to explain this strange phenomenon. She practiced a shrug, such as humans used when confronted with things they could not change. As Father had been so fond of saying, all would be revealed in time.
She picked up the back-plate, screwed it on to the pocket-sized electronic device she’d been working on, and placed the device on the tabletop. It resembled a cell phone. If anyone saw her with it, no one would think it strange or unusual. She didn’t bother to test it. It would perform exactly as she’d designed it to.
She turned her attention to her monitor and the lines of data cascading down the screen. As she shifted, Tyler’s unique fragrance wafted from the shirt he’d loaned her. The shirt she should have removed the moment she got home from school, and returned to Tyler earlier in the evening. The shirt she was so very reluctant to relinquish because while she wore it, she could pretend that he was here, now, with her.
And then, an overwhelming urge to move cascaded over her, through her. She tried to ignore the twinges of her muscles, the prickling of her skin, as though her outer shell had become too small, too inadequate to contain what was within.
She was capable of sitting or standing motionless for hours on end, so this urge was yet another anomaly. Her brain constantly performed multiple tasks at once, so the part that insisted on dwelling upon Tyler was not causing the problem. That part happily analyzed every word he’d uttered in her presence, his every little nuance of tone and expression, while another part analyzed the data the program spat onto the screen.
She stuck it out for another three minutes before she gave in and pushed her chair away from the table. The program would alert her if it identified any data outside the parameters she’d set. There was no real need for her to scan the screeds of code.
She spent an hour running through tai chi forms but even that discipline failed to calm her body’s unnatural urges. When the harsh beep of the electronic alert shattered the smothering silence, she believed herself grateful, despite knowing the alert heralded unwelcome news. She quelled her brain’s bizarre desire for her body to be continually in motion and resumed her seat to analyze the search results.
The IP address the program had targeted and the accompanying data appeared innocuous enough, but something about it had triggered the alert.
Adrenaline thrummed through her system, causing a flush of an emotion akin to human excitement. She might be what Tyler and Caro termed a computer whiz, and as a cyborg she had a unique advantage, but she was dealing with an extremely talented human who was skilled in covering his tracks. If she was correct in her assumption, she’d encountered this particular human before. She smiled, anticipating a battle with a worthy opponent.
Shit
! The man known to his team as Michael White, whacked his fist on his desktop. Papers fluttered into the air and then settled. Luckily there was no one to witness his lack of control. The building was deserted, and the only light source in the darkened office was the greenish-hued glow of his laptop’s LCD screen. It illuminated his face, throwing gargoyle shadows up the bland grey walls.
He couldn’t believe his luck. First, the original clip he’d saved to his hard drive had been corrupted by a very sneaky little virus before he could back it up, and now
this
?