Influx (12 page)

“Ah!” He squirmed around until the eye on its metallic post rolled off him and onto the floor.

“What’s wrong, Jon?”

Grady ignored the AI, looking back up at the tentacle where the snake was insinuating itself. And then suddenly the massive tentacle it clung to began to unwind from Grady’s leg, loosening and then finally releasing him.

“Oh God.”

“Your heart is racing again. Why? What are you thinking of?”

The massive tentacle then heaved upward and wrapped itself around a neighboring tentacle near its base. Grady stared, transfixed.

“It’s as though you’ve lost touch with reality.”

He spoke softly through cracked lips. “Yes . . .”

Before long the first tentacle seemed to have taken control of the second as well, and it slowly released its stranglehold on Grady’s throat, uncoiling smoothly. Now both tentacles reached outward for two others, coiling around their bases.

“Where are you, Jon?”

Minutes later, there remained only two tentacles, one holding Grady’s right arm in place and the other inserted into his umbilicus, draining his wound and managing his food and waste. Before long he heard a sucking sound, and suddenly the umbilicus hose rose to the ceiling along with the last restraining tentacle. All six of the tentacles now circled above him, eventually reconvening some ways off to the edge of the room, where they wrapped in a familiar shape—but this time around what appeared to be an invisible human captive. Holding an imaginary victim in place.

“There you are . . .”

Grady slowly and painfully leaned up on one elbow upon the examination table and stared for several minutes at the tentacles performing their shadow play without him. He finally sat all the way up, swinging his legs over the edge. There was a deep pain in his gut. A glance down and he could see the horrible bruises and some gelatinous substance wrapped around his feeding port. Obviously he’d done a lot of damage to himself, but he seemed to be patched up. No telling how long he’d been out. Days? Weeks?

A glance back up at the tentacles and he noticed that the snake seemed to be disentangling itself from the tip of one of them—growing out like a branch from a larger limb. After minutes of watching in rapt silence, the snake fell free and quickly righted itself. It then brachiated across the floor, now without its single human eye, and appeared to be heading . . . well, nowhere in particular. It wandered about for a time until it touched a wall.

He watched it closely—unafraid for the first time in ages. Just curious. The three-foot snake finally reared up like a cobra near the wall. Surprisingly bright lights glowed forth from its feelers—casting a projected image on the curved cell wall. Grady gazed up at the image in mute amazement:

Deep emotion gripped him as the message reached his visual cortex. The colors flooded in with them. The projection was a symbol he knew well from his work building electronics for his experiments.

It was an electronics schematic symbol.

The symbol for a resistor.

He wept as he felt the invisible touch of other humans reaching out. They had found him.

Grady looked down at the high-tech snake still propping itself up on the floor.

How had they done it? Someone had fashioned this device from the BTC’s own technology. Cannibalized it. Programmed it. He realized there had to be incredibly brilliant people in this prison. Intellectual giants. This place might be filled with others who refused to cooperate.

Badass Einsteins . . .

Then the projection changed. A screen filled with Asian characters, still with the symbol of the Resistors in the lower right corner.

No doubt Hibernity had an international inmate population. Unfortunately he didn’t know how to read Chinese. Or was that Japanese? But even as he contemplated what to do next, it flipped to another language—this time English. And a smile spread across his chapped lips, splitting them in several places painfully. He ignored the blood that oozed through the splits as he read the screen as quickly as he could:

Do not lose hope. You are not alone.

Hibernity is not entirely under their control. Neither are their machines.

It is in the nature of humanity to resist domination.

Resist.

He hugged himself and wept—having almost forgotten what hope was. Grady looked back down at the AI tentacles, still hovering and gyrating in the corner, as if still tormenting him. Tormenting a simulacrum. He was apparently now invisible to the AI. He shuddered to think what would happen if it suddenly figured out the ruse.

But by now the screen had changed to Russian. While he contemplated his next move, the projector cycled through German, French, and then Spanish, until finally circling back to Chinese, and then English again—this time with a different message.

This worm could only enter your cell because the electroactive polymer restraint system was deployed.

Because you resisted.

Your AI interrogator’s perception module has been subverted. You are now safe.

Grady then had to sit through several more languages before the screen circled back to English for the third slide:

This EAP worm is designed to detect and cooperate with humans. It has been fashioned from scavenged BTC technology. It has a biometric tool you can use to tap into the control system of your cell. It is vital that you do this as soon as possible to activate manual life support and waste removal. Otherwise, in the absence of umbilical service, you have approximately five to six days to live.

“Got it. I got it . . .” After gathering his strength, Grady lowered himself to the floor and looked for the human eye. It hadn’t rolled far. He crawled toward it and picked it up carefully by its metal post. It was like a small screwdriver—but with an eye for its business end. He examined the device. An uncannily real human eye. Even as he watched it, the eye’s pupil appeared to dilate. He gingerly touched it. It was as hard as glass—but somehow still changing.

The EAP worm was now projecting a new, simpler message on the curved cell wall:

Connect the communications line.

Grady looked around for some clue as to how to do that. The worm kept cycling the same message through multiple languages. Eventually Grady started to crawl toward the worm. As he drew near, it seemed to detect his movement and dropped into an inanimate coil on the floor. The projected message disappeared. The worm now looked like an inch-thick gray cable about three feet long, tapered on either end.

Grady hesitated for a moment but then ran his fingers along its body. As he did, the microscopic fibers changed color at his touch, becoming purple, red, green, and then fading back to gray.

He looked closely and could just barely discern minute strands in motion—clearly electrically or chemically reactive somehow. A galvanic response to human touch perhaps?

There was a
chirp
somewhere in the room, and he glanced around. A small port or service panel had opened at waist height on the far side of his circular cell along an otherwise featureless curving wall. The panel was near the pantomiming tentacle bundle, which still tormented its imaginary victim.

Grady gathered his strength and started crawling with the eye tool across the floor toward the opening in the wall—being careful not to touch the tentacles. As he got near the opening in the wall, he rested for a few moments. He must have lost a lot of blood because he still felt weak. After a few minutes he propped himself up against the wall and peered into the opening.

It was only a few inches deep with no hatch mechanism visible. It had just appeared somehow. At the back of the opening was a glowing green light, with a small square socket next to it.

Grady then examined the tool in his hand. Its thin end was round and too large for the socket. He then looked into the eye at the other end of the tool and drew a painful breath before raising it with a weak, trembling hand. He held the eye in front of the light like an iris scanner.

A series of tones sounded. The tentacles all withdrew into the ceiling, and the bench-like cot sank into the floor without a trace. The lights dimmed. Suddenly what looked like computer screens appeared arrayed along the entire length of his cell wall—the same place where he’d seen his thoughts replayed.

The nearest of the new screens bore the label “Cell R483 Console.
”
It listed several columns of stats apparently meant for maintenance personnel:

Elapsed Session Time: 1:87:61:78:392:303

Interrogatory Evolutions: 23,381

Parasagittal Valence: 210.9

Avg Trunk Voltage: 23.907kV

Hydrolyzer Ready State: 21ths

Barometric Pressure: 1.000123

Relative Humidity: 23.2%

Particulate Concentration: 0.00099ppm

. . .

There were hundreds of lines of similar stats arcing around the room, updating every few moments. None of it made immediate sense. But it did appear to be in English. As Grady lowered his quivering arm, he noticed that the motions of his hand made a pointer of some type move across the wall. He was apparently able to interact with the screen—and with the menus above them. He tapped at a menu labeled “Diagnostic Overrides” and noticed a series of submenus appear referring to “Life Support,” “Interrogatory Subsystems,” “Projection,” and much more.

Were the Resistors just assuming that the geniuses in these cells could figure all this shit out? Grady didn’t feel particularly ingenious at the moment.

He slumped back down and rested with his back against the wall. That’s when he noticed that the worm was once again projecting information onto the wall. He glanced up to see the following message waiting for him:

Nao waike taojian v3.8.80—Kuozhan zi xito ng jishu caozuo sho uce

Cerebral Interrogatory Enclosure v3.8.80—Extended Subsystem Technical Operations Manual

v3.8.80—

Cerebral Caja suite v3.8.80—Manual extendido Subsistema de Operaciones Técnicas

Boîtier cérébrale Suite v3.8.80—Manuel des opérations techniques du sous-système étendu

Grady let out a laugh—before catching himself from the pain in his abdomen.

Okay. Go slow.