Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (121 page)

It definitely sounded like him, but gone was his confidence and innocence. Now there was only confusion. His question struck Petal, a knife blade to the heart. Her panic was in full flow now. She let go of him and stumbled back.
 

“Gez, you know me… I’m Petal… god, don’t do this to me, please. Remember! Remember me… you—”

“Jachz?” Gerry said, ignoring Petal and focusing on the self-aware robot next to her. Now she could see recognition in his face. Yet another stab in the heart. How could he remember Jachz, someone—something—he’d seen just once, and not remember her?

Enna stepped forward, catching his attention. He turned his head and smiled. “Enna! What’s going on? Where am I?”

“You’re back with us, Gerry. You have a new body. You’re in Libertas… I mean City Earth. Your home, remember?”

Gerry nodded his head slowly as he took it all in. He held his hands up to his face and moved each finger independently before clenching them into fists and releasing them. He then moved his hands to his face, running them over his eyes and nose, like a blind person feeling how someone looked.

“My eye… it’s normal.”

“Yes,” Enna said. “You’ve been on quite the journey, Gerry. You’re in a clone of your body before you had the upgrades.”

“Before I died,” he said. “Amma… Jasper… it’s all coming back now. Elliot!” He shouted the last name, his face twisted with hate and fear. He lost control of his limbs and slipped off the operating table. Petal dashed forward and caught him under the arms to stop him from hitting the deck.

His legs and feet slipped uselessly against the lab’s tiled floor. Petal lifted him up and pushed him backwards until he rested against the table.
 

He threw Petal off him and lashed out. “No more, get out of my mind!”
 

Petal ducked under his attack and staggered back, her mouth agape with shock.
 

Jachz stepped in and caught his flailing limbs. “It’s okay, Gerry. Elliot has gone. It’s just a memory. You’re safe from that now.”
 

Petal’s systems detected a spike in network traffic between Jachz and Gerry. She didn’t know what the former was doing, but it calmed Gerry down. He dropped his head into his hands and cried. While Jachz and Enna continued to fill Gerry in on the situation, Holly joined Petal by her side.
 

“Hey, girl, you okay?”
 

“No,” Petal said. “He doesn’t remember me. I can tell by the way he looked at me. It’s like we’ve never seen each other before, which is nuts, you know? We loved each other… all those months he was in my mind, I knew… How could he just forget?”

“I’m sure we’ll figure it out,” Holly said.
 

Petal wasn’t so sure. Jachz turned round to look at her. His face was impassive, but Petal was sure she could detect some kind of subterfuge from him. Had he done this on purpose? During the transfer, was it him that picked out those memories of Petal and Gerry together so they didn’t go across with the rest of Gerry’s consciousness?
 

He had come from the Family, and there was still this issue of a second person, or thing, that had come down with him. Petal stared back, her nostrils flaring. She just knew he was up to something. But what?

—
We’ll make this right,
Jachz sent to her via the VPN. She hadn’t even given him credentials to connect with her. She looked away from him and cut him out of the network, running a defence program she had learned to code-weave from Gerry.
 

Between Enna and Jachz, who were stood in front of Gerry, she caught his eye.

She willed him to see her. Really see her, remember what they had.
 

There was nothing. No recognition.

He looked at her as though she were a stranger.
 

And it broke her heart.

Chapter 13

Jess closed her eyes and listened to Cemprom’s newly installed servers. Although the AIs weren’t as advanced as Hajime and Sakura, they seemed happy with their tasks.
 

She had worked with Enna’s new team of programmers to get Cemprom back up and running again, but not for evil and nasty reasons like the Family and Fuentes. This new system was to help the businesses become functional so the citizens could work their jobs and the city could get back to normal.
 

Jess was especially happy with the fun programs Enna had let her make. There was the new citywide intranet that allowed people to connect with their AIAs and access cool sites for games and communication. And then there was the virtual vacation program.

That was her favourite. She used some of the books that her parents had given her as a child as the source for those. There was one based on a tropical island where Libertas citizens could build sandcastles with talking dolphins and monkeys.
 

The space vacation was fun too.
 

You would be able to pilot a spaceship and explore new planets. She based that one on a game she had found running on a server. A young boy had run it before he died at the hands of Elliot Robertson. She felt it important to honour him by keeping it running and open to everyone to play.
 

Jess propelled herself on her newly designed wheeled board through the tall racks of servers. She hummed along with the frequency of the fans, making her own music in her head. Her parents never thought she’d create art with the upgrades they had put inside her, but over time she had come to learn that every computer was like its own musical instrument with its own unique sounds and tones.
 

These new Cemprom servers were like an old-fashioned concerto with a mix of percussion and strings.
 

When she reached the end of the racks in the server room, she reached out with her mind and connected with the video server. She opened her eyes and pulled down a keyboard to her lap. She tapped in her login credentials and carried out Franklin’s request.
 

Apparently the city had a new quest.
 

A ghost they had said.
 

Jess didn’t believe in ghosts, but she did believe in computer spirits. She heard and saw them in computers and networks. Little glitched pieces of software and code that hadn’t been deleted properly. They floated about like lost children unable to find their way home.
 

This thing that Petal and Holly said they saw could just be a network artifact like that, seeing as both women were on the new network.
 

While Jess was typing out instructions to set the parameters for the video search, she heard the door open. Franklin entered. “Hey, Frank,” Jess said. “I’m just doing as you asked.”

“Thanks, Jess, I appreciate it. I know they keep you busy down here, so I thought you might like a break from all that tedious work.”

She smiled at him as he gave her a wink. She liked Frank, he was one of the nicest people in security she’d met. Most of the others were too serious, but Frank always had a joke or something nice to say. She was pleased Enna had taken to him too and gave him extra responsibilities. It meant Jess would get to see him more often.
 

He knelt down beside her. “Hey,” he said. “Got a new joke for you.”

“Is it the one about the hacker?”
 

“Nah, I heard this one today.”

“Go on, then,” Jess said. “But if you don’t make me laugh, you owe me a cake.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, do I now? I didn’t realise there was such a high price for comedy these days.”

“I just like to keep you on your game,” Jess said. “And besides, your evening round takes you past the new baker’s. The woman in there likes you. You can probably get an extra portion.”

“I like the way you think.”

“So go on, then, make me laugh.”

While Franklin cleared his throat and began his joke, Jess activated the search program on the video servers. It would take at least a couple of minutes to run.
 

“Right,” Franklin began, “a hacker, a pirate, and an AI all walk into a bar—”

“Wait,” Jess said. “AIs can’t walk.”
 

“Have you not seen Jachz?”

“Well, he’s not strictly an AI anymore. He’s his own species.”

“Huh, okay, let me start again. A hacker, a pirate, and a cyborg walk into a bar—”

Franklin stopped his joke short as the video search program freeze-framed an image of a dark figure standing in the hallway outside of Holly’s room.
 

“There it is,” he said, leaning closer in. “She was right after all.”

“What is it?” Jess asked. She rolled herself forward to take a closer look. The whole thing was in darkness and looked like a shadow. But even with the lack of light and detail, Jess knew it wasn’t a ghost. The thing was whole and real. A person.
 

“I best go tell Enna,” Franklin said. “See what she wants me to do. Let me know if the system picks it up on any other frame.”

“What about the punchline?”

“It’ll have to wait for later, I’m afraid, Jess.”

Franklin ruffled her hair and gave her a wink before dashing out of the server room. The door swung closed, wafting air into Jess’s face. She noticed the faint smell of smoke. She checked the servers’ diagnostics to make sure one of the server fans hadn’t busted, or one of the processor cores overheated.
 

The display showed no warning signs. Everything was fine and within tolerances.
 

Jess turned away from the screen and propelled herself down the corridor of servers to visually inspect them. Even though the servers sounded fine, still creating their unique music, she didn’t rule out a problem.
 

Before she got to the end of the corridor, she heard the door creak open. Had Franklin returned already? She started to turn around when a dark figure loomed over her. She made to scream, but the figure moved too fast, clasping a cold hand around her mouth. With its other arm, it lifted her up off her board and dashed out of the server room, its considerable strength holding Jess tight beneath its arm.
 

She tried to squeeze and squirm out of its grip, but it continued to hold her in place as it raced down the hallway that led away from the server room to an emergency exit. Bursting through the doors, the figure turned left and headed down a narrow access way.
 

It turned into an alley and pushed Jess up against the wall, still holding a hand over her mouth. She tried to bite the hand, but her teeth clenched against a hard surface beneath the flesh.
 

Her mind raced: robot, cyborg, transcendent? She tried to listen in, hear what was going on in its mind. A low-level hum came from beneath the street. Whatever it was, it was biological or had exceptional dampening on its processors.
 

But she did detect, albeit briefly, a node on the network. It disappeared the moment she noticed. Before Jess could inspect further, the figure jabbed a needle into her neck. She became light, weightless. Her vision swirled, and her mind closed in around her. The final image of a shadowy figure staring at her with black eyes haunted her consciousness.

Chapter 14

Gerry sat back in the chair. His muscles were slow to react and ached. Just like his mind. A foggy headache made his thoughts slow and fragmented like bits of code floating in a mist of information. The others around him stared on silently.
 

He knew and recognised both Enna and Jachz, but the other two weren’t instantly familiar. The girl called Holly wouldn’t hold his eye contact, turning away when he tried to look at her. The other girl, Petal, couldn’t stop looking at him.
 

Her gaze made him feel self-conscious. All he wanted was some time alone to gather his memories and whereabouts. Although Enna had explained all the things he was supposed to have done, the images for those events were indistinct.
 

“My family?” Gerry asked Enna as she fussed with her slate, presumably checking his vitals. “Oh,” he said as his AIA, Mags, delivered his backstory to him. Gerry stood up, stretched and walked unsteadily across the lab to stand before the large window.
 

From his position he could see the rows of subdivided houses in the distance and knew he lived in one of them. Mags replayed a number of scenes of him with his wife and children around a breakfast table… yes, he knew this scene!

The numbers… those damned lottery numbers.
 

Despite knowing all this had already happened, he couldn’t help but feel that same gut-wrenching sensation of panic of facing the very death lottery his algorithms controlled. And then the rage of not being allowed back into his employer’s building to sort things out.
 

Mags continued to replay his life like a film.
 

He watched as he fell into the street, his body jerking with the electrical shock of the guard’s stun baton. And then the weird guy with the dreadlocks and padre hat, helping Gerry up from the gutter and taking him through the streets until they came to an old door.
 

Golden light rimmed the edge of the doorway and illuminated the street as the light spilled out when the door opened a crack.
 

There, watching him from behind a pair of goggles… the girl with the pink hair.
 

Gerry spun around in the lab.
 

It was her.

“Petal?” Gerry said, the name falling out, trembling across his lips. He knew her now, knew there was more to her than just the image his AIA was showing him. “I know you. You were behind the door with the man with the dreadlocks.” Gerry sought to find his name.
 

And there, it came to him in a burst of memories. Gabriel!

A section of his brain, previously locked away, activated. Neurons fired, bringing the memories, and the pain.
 

Collapsing to his knees, Gerry grabbed the side of his head and screamed. The mad rushing data flowed too fast. He couldn’t take it, but image after image and sound after sound, the stream brought an entire life’s experiences to him in a few seconds of agonising replay.