Code Breakers: Beta (27 page)

Chapter 41

Petal rushed into the data-centre. The place wasn’t in darkness like the rest of the building, indicating that it was running on a separate network. A low blue light, the drone of thousands of servers interconnected via racks, and a pervasive mist of coolant gas gave the room an ethereal feel.

A single person, dressed in a Libertas Security uniform, stood just inside the room with her back to Petal. Xian raised his weapon, ready to fire when the officer turned round. Shrouded by the coolant gas, Petal saw movement behind the woman.

Petal thrust out an arm, pushing Xian’s rifle away. “Jess?” Petal said, with one eye on the security officer. “Is that you?”

The young girl shuffled out into the open. “It’s me. Please don’t hurt Jasmine. She’s with me.”

The others joined Petal and Xian in the room and closed the door behind them.

“What the hell are you two doing here?” Enna asked.

“You know this woman?” Petal asked, referring to the woman called Jasmine.

“Yes,” Enna said. “She’s one of us.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jasmine said, her face contorted with fear and sincerity. She appeared completely out of her depth. Jess, however, seemed calm. She just sat there with a timid smile on her face.

“It’s my fault,” Jess said. “I made her bring me.”

“Why? I mean... how? How did you get here?” Enna said, exasperated. “Don’t tell me. You followed the voices, right?”

“Yes, I couldn’t just stay back at the safe house. I had to help. Hajime is really sad about Sakura.”

“Does he know exactly what happened with Sakura?” Petal asked.

“Uh huh.”

“So what did the voices say? How did it guide you here?” Petal asked.

“It wasn’t words as such,” Jess said. “I just kind of followed the signal. Hajime was trying to get onto the network, but something wouldn’t let him on. It caused a lot of noise that I could follow.”

“We came in through the fire exit,” Jasmine said. “Most of the fighting moved to the front of the building. We only came across a small amount of resistance, but we managed to slip by.”

“We need to find a port,” James said. “Something we can use to connect Omega—and you, Petal.”

“Here,” Jess said. “I’ll show you.”

They followed Jess as she shuffled on her crippled legs, propelling herself along with her hands. She led them through the racks of servers until they came to the rear of the room. A glass cabinet standing taller than Petal held a single server. Hundreds of wires snaked out from it. The server itself seemed to be made to a similar design as Omega: a glossy black case with vented sides. It stood a metre and a half tall. Petal traced the wires out of the computer. They split somewhere behind the cabinet into two bunches, each one feeding one side of the room, connecting all the racks together.

“What do I do?” Petal asked Jess. “Plug one of those into my neck port?” It felt crazy asking a young girl this. But one thing Petal had learned was that you always listened to what Jess had to say.

Jess shook her head, making her fringe sway. “No, silly. You plug Omega in, and you connect remotely.”

“Wait, Omega has a port? Where?”

Elaine placed Omega on the floor, and Jess shuffled over to it, running her hands across its surface before hugging it and pressing her cheek to its side.

“Erm, Jess?”

“Shhh, we’re talking,” she replied, closing her eyes.

James and Enna just shrugged their shoulders when Petal looked at them.

Xian, however, had put his rifle into the sling around his back and kneeled next to Jess, watching her with an intense curiosity.

Jess’s lips were moving, but no words came. Her eyes were flickering behind her lids.

Xian stepped around Omega, inspecting it, clearly in awe of the thing. He then smiled, placing his hand on top of it. A puff of smoke came from the case before a central square column rose out of the top.

“What the fuck!” Petal said.

The black column stood proud of the top of the server by ten centimetres. It featured a series of different kinds of ports.

“He’s agreed,” Jess said, opening her eyes. “Connect here.” She pointed to a port on the column. It matched the connection type to the cables currently in the server racks. Jess reached up to one of the racks and pulled out a cable, handing it to Petal.

“When Hajime is on the network, you’ll connect to him as you used to do with Sakura, but he says it won’t be the same.”

“How so?” Petal asked.

“He doesn’t have an interface like Sakura did. He was never designed for this. He was the logic behind the presentation. So things might be a bit strange. He said he’ll help present the network in a way that will be easy for you.”

“So what’s the plan?” James said. “Now we don’t have Sakura, we probably can’t attack Elliot head-on, even with Gerry’s help.”

“You could lure him in,” Jess said, sounding far older than her years. “Hajime can store a part of him in his memory. Not like Sakura, it’ll be more damaging.”

“That’s what we want,” James said.

“There’s one problem,” Jess said.

“What’s that?”

“Hajime’s mind can’t leave the server and go into the network, you’ll have to bring Elliot into the server, and... well... the destruction might affect you, too, while you’re connected. If we had Sakura, there’d be more control...”

“Fuck it,” Petal said. “I ain’t got much to live for anyway, might as well go down fighting.”

Petal connected Omega to the network and, via her transceiver, connected remotely to Omega. It appeared to her as a shadow of a man standing over an image of a desert landscape. Stretching out as far as she could see were interconnected trees, dry and devoid of vegetation: Hajime’s way of presenting the various server nodes on the data-centre’s network.

The silhouette approached her, reaching out a hand. She took it in hers, and she felt herself connect. A stream of data flowed from Hajime to her and vice versa. She found herself floating above the trees. The silhouette representing Hajime faded away, leaving her alone in a vast desert of data.

It overwhelmed her at first, and she felt herself lost without an idea of where to go or what to do. But then a light glinted on the horizon like a mirror reflecting the sunlight. She followed it, sending her mind out further in the reaches of the desert, the trees flying by beneath her.

The light grew bigger and formed a shape.

Petal came to a stop in front of the humanoid form. She couldn’t make out any specific features; Hajime’s graphical processing wasn’t able to draw such fine detail, but still, from the binary patterns that made up the image she recognised it as Gerry.

–
Gerry!
Is that you?

–
Petal, it’s me. You shouldn’t have come! It’s too—

– Dangerous? I don’t care about that. I just care about you, and us, and destroying that bastard Elliot for good.

She sensed Gerry sigh. His avatar faded slightly.

–
If it were that easy.

– Where are you? Where’s Elliot?
Although she had no visual representation of him, she could sense a mountainous cluster of computational power somewhere in the shadows of the system. Gerry’s faceless avatar flickered and split apart, the pixels tearing away to reveal a black void behind the illusion.

She reached out her mind, trying to reconnect with him, but the darkness grew from his splintered image, black pixels leaking out across her visualisation, consuming the desert and the trees until she appeared to be floating in space.

–
Gerry!
Petal screamed as she tried to find him in the void. She ran a search program via Omega.

Fragments of his familiar pattern, the code that now made up his unique consciousness, showed in the search results, but when she followed the file paths she found nothing—he was being deleted, one code segment at a time.

Using Omega’s suite of software tools, she analysed the network traffic, filtering out the regular day-to-day city data and any of the usual Cemprom processes. She discovered three distinct threads: one being used to control the ’droids and the other two chaotic and unpredictable—Gerry and Elliot’s digital minds.

Gerry’s was entwined with the ’droids, having gained control of them earlier. She used the data as a sample and ran a search to match the pattern from the other thread and realised that they were merging. Elliot, like a living organism, was melding his mind with Gerry’s.

It was at the point of realisation that the torrent of information seemed to suddenly stop, as though it were aware she was watching. The darkness around her shifted, coalesced, and took shape. Her mind froze. Her body started to disconnect as she, too, was pulled into the black hole of Elliot’s influence.

Somewhere far off she heard the half-mind of Hajime calling to her, some codelike warning, but the force was too strong, and she no longer had control as the black hole, now represented as a great hungry maw, drew her closer.

A voice came to her.

–
Ah, Leautia. I was hoping you’d come after your boyfriend. It’s quite the reunion. We’re like one little happy family, are we not?

The voice encompassed her brain. The feeling of violation took her back to the time when she’d first experienced the force of his will. Only then she had a fully functioning Gerry to drag her out of his influence. Now, looking at the data, she could see that Gerry was already more than halfway to full integration, his own will diminishing.

–
Why?
Petal said.
Why all this?

– We had this conversation already, did we not, dear girl? Power, remember?

As Elliot talked, Petal noticed a spike of input and output activity on the network. Not knowing if she could shield her intentions, she packaged a command to Hajime within Omega to record the code Elliot generated and their location within the network. If she couldn’t make it out alive, at least there’d be a log file of the activity. She used the same encryption method Gabe taught her. So far it’d never let them down, but Elliot was more than just a mortal hacker by now.

To distract him from her process, she responded to him:

–
Your plans have failed, Elliot. Sasha is dead; your insurgents were culled before they could grow. Your human-based network is nothing more now than a few ragtag, unwilling slaves. Face it; your time is coming to an end.

The black form twisted slightly at her response, and she saw a new, smaller, spike of data: Gerry. The data stream to and from the ’droids increased, diverting the network’s resources, diminishing Elliot’s access to the data-centre’s processing power. That gave her an idea. If she could...

Elliot responded by crashing Hajime’s graphical representation.

All Petal could detect now was the river of data. It had diverted from the myriad nodes on the network to focus on one node: her own internal system. It overwhelmed her, slammed into her internal transceiver. The sudden attack overloaded her safety circuits. Her processor controlling the transceiver ran too hot as it tried to cope with the malicious data.

–
You’re wrong, Leautia. My time is just starting.

A blinding white light flashed out before her. The ’droids data stream exploded into a thousand code fragments—all tiny parts of Gerry’s mind propagating in the far reaches of the network. Elliot’s will lashed out in a rage as it lost control over the melding of their two minds. He sent out a seemingly infinite number of threads in order to recover the parts of Gerry spread across the network.

As her processor continued to be overclocked by Elliot’s brute force attack, getting hotter and causing great pain in her far-off body, she felt Gerry’s presence briefly as one of the fragments rushed into her through the flood of Elliot’s code.

From somewhere outside herself, she heard a number of voices. There was an edge of panic to them, the words coming faster and faster, until a third voice, clear and directly inside her mind, spoke.

–
Destroy the servers. All of them. It’s the only way now.

– Gerry?

– Just do it! Elliot needs me; his code base is corrupted and degrading. I’ll lure him into the data-centre completely, but it has to be disconnected and the server destroyed.

– I... what if...
her mind wouldn’t work clearly under Elliot’s assault, but Gerry seemed to sense her fear.

–
You can do it. But remember, whatever happens, I love you.

Another white flash exploded in her digital reality, and her connection tore apart as Gerry forced her out of the system. She saw his data stream sink away as though someone had pulled a plug on a lake. When only the dry basin was left, she felt hands on her shoulders and back. Her real vision came to her, replacing the artificial interface.

“Oh God, what’s happened to her?” a voice said.

Sweat soaked her body. Her head felt like a bell as a red-hot clapper inside struck repeatedly against her skull. She could smell burning. Smoke stung her eyes. Panicked voices called out around her.

“Give her some room!”

“God, I think she’s dying. James, do something!”

“What? I don’t know what to do. What happened?”

“The server! Disconnect the server!”

Someone pulled the lead from Omega, and silence descended like a blanket.

She swallowed hard and choked out the words, “The servers... we have to destroy them,” she said, even though she knew what that meant for Gerry.

***

Petal got to her feet, resisting the urge to faint. She pointed to the slate in James’ hand. “Look in there, the logs for Omega. I recorded Elliot’s network location. He’s in here; Gerry disconnected him from the satellites. We have to shut this down. Now!”

She ran to the glass cabinet holding the central server. The door was locked and the glass thick. Hundreds of cables flowed out to connect the eighteen racks holding hundreds of servers each.

“Disconnect everything apart from Omega,” Petal shouted at the others.

James looked up at her and seemed to stand still for an eternity as he ran the situation through his brain. A few seconds ticked by; then he sparked to life, dropping the slate and running to the rear of the room where the cables connected the racks. One by one he began pulling them out. Petal started on the other side.