Evasion (20 page)

Scott stood at the back of the crowd and watched, in horror, as the train completed its stop at the station. The car he had been on stopped just on the other side of the stairwell entrance he was trying to get to. He considered bolting backwards and turned, but a throng of people that went on for more than a dozen feet had already moved in behind him, with more people heading his way, and the crowd, still at least twenty feet from the narrow stairwell entrance, was inching its way forward.

He debated whether it would be quicker to get into the stairwell or to fight his way backwards through the crowd, and figured his best move might be to keep going forward, see if he could lose himself in the crowd.

As the group of bodies shifted forward, Scott kept one eye on the train car the officer had been in and continued to glare warily at the people around him.

While most of them had the typical ten-foot commuter stare glaze, none of them appeared to have the zombie-glaze he had already gotten pretty good at identifying.

No, this crowd was tuned-out of most of their immediate surroundings, barely acknowledging the others around them – they were moving with a slow purpose, to their destination, most of them barely in the moment, with ear buds and noise-cancelling headphones on their heads. Several of them had taken up the familiar head down and glancing into their palm stance as they read email, checked the Facebook or Twitter stream, read text messages or were perhaps consulting their GPS to ensure they were heading in the right location.

The crowd poured out of the train Scott had arrived on, and several dozen people from the adjacent train car added to the molasses-like crowd that was slowly moving to the stairs.

About ten feet away, to the left of the stairwell entrance and on the other side of the wall that covered the stairway, Scott spotted the glazed face of the GO train bylaw officer.  She was focused on him and moving forward.

A quick calculation of Scott’s speed heading toward the stairway entrance and the distance left to go, compared with her distance from the entrance and the speed the crowd she was in was moving was favorable toward Scott winning. She was, after all, moving through a much narrower area, and the group she was with was merging into the mainstream crowd already there – so, though she was a third closer to the entrance, she was moving at about half the speed Rob was.

He would just make it, so long as things continued to move the way they were.

Scott kept a wary eye on her the whole time, and then noticed her right arm come up and, holding something that he couldn’t see in her hand, reached forward and pushed against the back of the neck of an older gentleman in front of her.  It was a syringe, Scott realized, based on the way in which she held her hand.

The old man exclaim in a surprised yelp of pain, and turned his head about, as if to see who had dared do that to him.

But after a couple of seconds, his head swiveled toward Scott.

His face, previously one that had worn the standard zombie commuter look, now bore the distinctive glassy-eyed glaze much like the bylaw officer.

So it wasn’t just an airborne agent. There was a way of injecting the toxin into someone’s bloodstream as well.

Scott continued to inch forward, watching as the bylaw officer deftly handed the syringe to the older man over his shoulder. He didn’t even look back to see where she was handing it – he obviously knew exact where she was handing the syringe and took it in a manner much more smooth than any pair of relay racers handing off a baton.

The older gentleman shifted the syringe from his left hand to his right and then proceeded to inject it into the neck of the woman in front of him.

“Dammit,” Scott said, realizing that, in such a crowd, so long as the fluid in the syringe didn’t run out, this entire mass of people could be converted, and he was in huge trouble.

Scott forced his way ahead of the young woman and the middle-aged man in front of him, rudely pushing them both aside. Then he muscled his way past an older lady. He couldn’t afford anything other than brute force to get through this crowd more quickly.

And he didn’t have time to look back to see who else had been converted.

He just kept shoving and moving forward.  People exclaimed and swore at him, but, so far, nobody shoved back or tried to stop him.  Best of all, no cold hand of one of the mob that was after him came down on his shoulder announcing that he was caught, announcing in no uncertain terms that he would not get away that he could not evade them.

Within a few more seconds, he was in the stairwell, and continued to shove past people, doing his best to get yet another body between himself and the growing group of people coming after him.  The only person on the stairs who shoved back was a white hippy college-aged young man with thick black dreadlocks.  “Chill, man!” the young man said, and gave Scott a rough shove back.

Scott moved quickly passed the hippy and heard him continue to curse at him.

When he finally got to the bottom of the stairwell, the crowd fanned out again into the basement hallway and Scott was able to bolt ahead, begin to actually walk with some speed.

He headed off to the left, darting around people, getting past them, and putting more bodies between himself and the pursuing group whose number he couldn’t be sure of now.

As he moved, he glanced back, noticed the distinctive glaze about fifteen feet back of the bylaw officer, the older gentleman, the middle-aged woman and one other person, the white hippy college student with thick black dreadlocks who had shoved back.  He now wore the glazed look on his face.  The student was at the front of the pack and he was moving more quickly than any of the others.

Scott pushed past a few more people and started to run.

He tore off down a hallway on the right, a direction that most of the crowd was not heading in, and proceeded to a set of double doors that led to a series of underground tunnels that ran under the city – figuring he might stand a better chance if he kept moving through the underground systems, considering the likeliness of security monitoring cameras on the street above.

He raced down several corridors, most of the crowd thinned out behind him. But the bylaw officer, the hippy and the middle-aged woman were all still just a few yards behind him, keeping at the same distance with every corner and short set of stairs that he ran.

The older man was no longer pursuing him – Scott figured he was somewhere behind but just couldn’t keep up with the rest of them.

Not that it mattered.  There were already three of them in pursuit. He only hoped he didn’t run into anyone coming back the other way.  After all, he had no idea where Herb or the Digi-Life security guard were, nor the man Scott had left behind at Exhibition station.

But there were all somehow connected; they knew what the others knew. It wouldn’t be hard, even if only a single one of them had eyes on Scott, for the others to know, and be able to intercept him.

When he spotted a pair of elevator doors in the basement of the hotel lobby ahead, he ran toward them, seeing that the call button, lit up, had already been pressed, even though nobody was standing there – it had likely been pushed by someone who, impatient, likely went over to the entrance to the stairway just a few feet away.  It was likely someone who wanted to move from this pathway and up to the lobby a single floor up.  Scott was continually fascinated with just how lazy the average person could be – although, in this case, the frustration with waiting had overtaken the inherit laziness.

But he wasn’t going to complain – because it could just work out for him.

If he could get inside and take it to another floor, he’d be out of eyeshot of them, at least for a few seconds. But that could be enough to finally allow him to slip away, try to prevent someone from intercepting him.

The timing was almost perfect as the elevator pinged that it had arrived at this basement floor just as Scott was running up to it.

He’d be able to slip inside, jab at the DOOR CLOSE button and be hidden.

As the elevator door slid open, Scott was shocked to suddenly be standing face to face with his father.

Standing quietly inside the elevator, Lionel Desmond glared at his son, a serious and stern look on his face, and raised his left arm to point a gun directly at Scott’s head.

Twenty-Seven Years Earlier
 

“
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies
,” Mr. Prescott said, standing in front of Scott’s desk.  “That’s a line from Shakespeare.
Hamlet
, in fact.”

Scott nodded, looking confusedly at his mentor.  The two had been working together for several weeks now. Scott spent many lunch hours in the computer lab, working on various programs and trying to solve particular issues related to running out of memory on the systems he was trying to program.

“It’s not behaving as expected,” Scott said. “It just doesn’t work this way.” Scott had said. “What does that have to do with
Hamlet
?”  Scott had no use for, no time for literature or fictional characters – they had no bearing on what was important to him, no bearing on computer programs.

“Prince Hamlet was expounding on the fact that, despite all of the things that we know, there are often things beyond that we can understand or even perceive.

“He spoke that line to his friend Horatio when they were speaking about the rumors of Hamlet’s father, the King, being spotted walking around, in ghost form, sometime after his death. They were debating the existence of ghosts when Hamlet suggested this.”

“Okay, sure,” Scott said. “Whatever. But what does that have to do with programming?”

“Do you remember the psychology program we worked on last week?”

Prescott was referring to the special intricacies of how to program a simple Artificial Intelligence subroutine that mimicked human conversation; in this particular case, the human question and answer rhythm of a therapist speaking with a patient.

The subroutine began with a statement introducing itself as a doctor and then asked the user to type in their name.

The user would type in their name, and the program would return with. “Pleased to meet you, X.” – inserting whatever the user typed as their name into the X variant.

Then, the computer would say: “So, X, tell me how you are feeling today?”

When they used typed in a phrase, the computer would repeat it back. For example, if the user types in “blue” then the computer’s response would be:  “What do you think might be making you feel blue today, X?”

The conversation went on in that similar fashion, with the program set to look for certain keywords in the response and, based on detection of particular phrases, it would respond with various lines.  It made it appear, to the average user that the computer was actually attending to what the user was saying and responding genuinely and in an unscripted fashion.

“Sure, I remember that.”

“What did you learn from working on a program like that?”

“That you could fake a real-life conversation using a set of pre-programmed routines, scripts, and keyword indicators.”

“Exactly. What else can you intuit from that?”

Scott caught on. “That some things aren’t exactly what they seem.”

“Bingo!” Mr. Prescott said, his index finger thrust into the air. “And that, my young friend, is precisely what is happening to you right now.”

“But there’s no program running,” Scott said. “I’ve stopped the program and I’ve run the script to see the lines of text; I’ve made modifications to particular lines and I’ve re-run it.”

“Yes,” Prescott said. “Or so you thought. Maybe this program was set to trick you into thinking that you
had
stopped the program, when, in fact, you had done no such thing. What if all of the commands you typed were within the still-running program, and not at the code level you thought? What if the program was designed to make you
think
that you had hacked into it when, in fact, you hadn’t and were still working through a pre-programmed routine?”

Scott slowly nodded his head and a giant grin spread on his face.

“That,” he said. “Is deceptively crafty; absolutely marvelous.”

And then he set about to try to actually stop the program itself. For real this time.

Today
 

“Dad!” Scott yelled.

“Hi Son,” Lionel replied, nodding his head. “Duck!”  He raised the gun a little bit higher as Scott instinctively followed his father’s advice and dipped his head down between his shoulder blades while bending his knees.

His father stepped forward, out of the elevator and produced, seemingly from nowhere, a thin plastic novelty clown mask that he slipped onto his face, while leveling gun in front of him with his left hand.

Scott stepped forward and to the side, turning to watch what his father was doing.

Lionel Desmond pulled the trigger and, instead of a gunshot, Scott heard a static-sounding electrical hiss and saw something shoot out of the front of the gun like Spider-Man’s webbing shooting from his palm, or, perhaps more accurately, some sort of wired hook from a gun on Batman’s utility belt.

The mechanism shot out and struck the hippy full in the chest and an additional electrical buzz shot through the air.  The hippy dropped to the floor, immediately unconscious. The wire shot back to the gun. Lionel quickly pocketed the gun with his left hand and switched hands that were holding the mask to his face while his right hand simultaneously pulled something out of his breast pocket that looked like a lipstick tube.

He aimed the lipstick tube at the bylaw officer, pressed a button, and a blue flash of light shot out from it, striking her in the chest. She reacted in the same way as the hippy, and, twitching on the spot for a second, dropped to the corridor floor.