Manipulator (5 page)

“We need to leave PRoGRaM,” Owen said.

“But what about-“

“No,” he interrupted. “This is way above our pay grade. It’s not our call here. We need to get people higher up involved in this. It’s out of our jurisdiction.”

She reluctantly nodded as they broke away from each other and walked back over to Eli. “It’s your lucky day,” Owen called out to him as they approached. “We’re not taking any memories from you today.”

“Thanks,” Eli said sarcastically.

“Nick. It’s time to leave,” Owen called out. He proceeded to wait for the signal.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Owen’s digital watch began to chime. And that meant only one thing.

They were being evacuated out of PRoGRaM.

The entire world was shutting down and Owen and Kate were about to be pulled out and kicked back into the real world. Owen knew what came next. The world around them would begin to dissolve away to white. Firstly the in-scripted PRoGRaM world avatars would disappear, leaving just Owen and whoever was inside with him. Then the walls and the ceilings would go, leaving nothing but a soothing white light in their place. The floors would follow, dissolving out from beneath them, leaving any living person with a feeling as if they were floating into infinity. Finally, all living consciousness inside the PRoGRaM world would slip out, like falling into a dream. Then, and only then, would they wake up in the real world.

Right on cue, the entire world of PRoGRaM swallowed them in its bright white light, exactly the same as when they were born from it.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Chapter Seven

Date: December 15th 2035 (Present Day)

Location: Unknown

“And that’s it,” Owen said, reaching the end of his explanation. “That’s how things work on the inside of PRoGRaM.”

“What about on the outside?” Victoria asked, turning the conversation to the next logical theme.

“Well, you always need someone on the outside. Otherwise, how are you going to get out?”

She completely ignored Owen’s seemingly rhetorical question. “There’s no safety net in place?” she asked.

“No. But that’s no problem. Personally, I wouldn’t like the idea of working solo. Trusting a machine to wake you up? That’s just an accident waiting to happen. I’ll always believe that it’s best to have a man working on the outside. And Nick Sinclair was our man on the outside.”

Victoria, then satisfied that the timing was right, reached over to some of the files that she had brought in with her. She flicked through them until she found the one that she was looking for and pulled one of the pages out, holding it up for Owen to see.

“For the benefit of the tape, I am showing Mr. Archer a photograph of Nicholas Sinclair. Mr Archer, can you confirm that this man works with you?”

“That’s the man,” Owen said proudly.

“And he was a valuable asset to your team?” Victoria asked, trying to asses Owen’s and Nick’s professional relationship.

“There wouldn’t be a team without Nick,” Owen insisted. “You absolutely, have got to have somebody that you personally trust one hundred percent on the outside of PRoGRaM. It’s not safe to enter its digital world without them watching your back. More importantly, you’re going to need them to get out of there.”

Victoria let him talk, nodding every few seconds to show that she was still listening.

”Let me ask you,” Owen said, turning the interrogation around and firing the questions back at Victoria. “How do you wake your mind from an induced unconscious state?”

“I… I honestly don’t know,” she answered.

“The simple answer is, you can’t,” Owen said, shaking his head to emphasise his point. “That’s why people who use PRoGRaM always have a programmer on the outside. One that they can trust. One that looks after them, and also looks after the world that they are exploring.”

Victoria nodded her head in appreciation of all this new information. “Seems like your team had it all covered.”

“We did.” ‘
Did' being the key word there.
Owen thought.

They sat in silence, looking at each other for the moment before Owen broke in. “Lesson’s almost over,” he said, sensing Victoria’s agitation. He hadn’t even got started with his story yet, but he was slowly getting there.

“Please, continue,” Victoria gestured, before clasping her hands back together in front of her as she listened to him speak.

“Now that you know how PRoGRaM works, you need to know what it’s used for, because this is where I come in,” Owen explained. “There are many, many different uses for PRoGRaM, the main one being memory assassination, which I mentioned earlier. There’s also simulation, although due to the lack of PRoGRaM devices and the overshadowing of it’s other uses, this one is often overlooked, and it’s only really used for training new PRoGRaM users.”

“Like Katie Miles?” Victoria asked, finding another way to work her key questions in.

“Exactly,” Owen said, pointing non-threateningly at her.

Once again, Victoria started flicking through her files on the table until she found an image of Kate, which she held up in front of her for Owen to see. “For the tape, I am showing Mr Archer a photograph of Katie Miles. Mr Archer, I need you to-“

“That’s her,” Owen said, cutting her off mid-sentence. “You can cut the bureaucracy out. That’s the exact reason I quit being a detective.”

Victoria raised her eyebrows in surprise at Owen’s outburst, putting the photograph back into the file where it came from.

“Where was I?” Owen asked.

“Uses of PRoGRaM,” she answered as she straightened up the files on the table.

“Yes, that’s right. Well, there’s also a Prison System based on PRoGRaM, but we’ll get to that later. More recently thought, PRoGRaM is being used by the FBI's Special Projects Division in order to solve crimes.”

“How?” Victoria asked out of courtesy, even though she knew full well that Owen was going to tell her anyway.

“Well,” he started. “Your brain has the capacity to remember everything that you’ve ever seen or heard, regardless of whether or not you can recall it. All that the memory analysts need is to look inside your head using PRoGRaM. And do you know what we see?”

Victoria began to open her mouth to speak, but Owen answered his own question before she could speak out.

“We see everything.”

Chapter Eight

Date: December 8th 2035
 

Location: New York PRoGRaM Analytic Base

Owen, Kate and Eli left the digital wold behind, and came straight back into the physical one. Owen’s eyes flickered open in what seemed like seconds after the PRoGRaM world had bled out into a bright white light. But in reality, it had been over five minutes since Nick had killed PRoGRaM and began the wake-up process.

The first thing that Owen noticed was his own heavy breathing, followed by the feeling in his arms, hands and legs gradually coming back to him. He let the warmth of feeling spread back into all of his limbs before attempting to do anything else.

In time he managed to sit himself up, but his entire body still felt like a dead-weight. On his head, he could feel the Manipulator headset that he wore. It's weight was threatening to pull his entire body down to the floor unless he took it off soon. It wasn't even that heavy, but after the experience that he'd just been through, every little thing was being amplified to the maximum. Reaching up, Owen disconnected the metal headset that was wrapped around his brain, and placed it down on a small table next to his PRoGRaM chair.

He saw that Kate was just coming back around to consciousness. She was sat in her PRoGRaM chair next to him, hooked up to all the same equipment that he was. The chairs were nothing special, in fact, they looked more of less the same as the chairs that you sat in at the dentist. They were purely used to allow the user to be comfortable and perfectly still whilst PRoGRaM was active and their minds were inside it.

Like Owen, Kate woke up slowly, waiting patiently for the feeling to come back into the entity of her body before she detached all of the equipment that entangled her to the PRoGRaM device, albeit more slowly than Owen did. She was new to this game, so she took her time, taking everything off slowly and carefully. Only then did she allow herself to carefully stand up and stretch out her body, Owen gave her a small smile as she noticed him sitting up in his PRoGRaM chair, watching her.

“Wow,” Kate said with a genuine look of surprise on her face as she continued to stretch. The events of what had happened in the digital world were coming back to her. “There are more people out there with this technology?”

“No, there’s not. At least none like that guy,” Owen said slowly, thinking hard about his response and the questions that it raised as he pointed over to Eli. Kate took a seat on the PRoGRaM chair that she had just clambered out of and grabbed herself a drink of water. Owen followed suit and grabbed a drink from the table nearby, not realising just how dehydrated he was feeling. The exit from PRoGRaM could be pretty rough, just like being kicked out of a deep sleep in less than a second. The body just doesn’t know how to deal with something un-natural like that.

“There are only seven teams out there scattered across America that have access to this technology. That guy there,” Owen said, pointing to Eli on the bed across the room, still unconscious. “Is
not
a part of one of them, and
never
has been.”

The two of them sat in their PRoGRaM Team’s New York City Analytic Base, an underground high tech bunker at a classified location underneath an undisclosed building in the centre of New York City. They were in the central hub. A huge, bright, single room that was roughly the same size as a football stadium. With a white floor beneath them and long lights covering the entire floor as far as the eye could see, it was like they were living in a huge, furnished version of The White Room. In his immediate vicinity, Owen was surrounded by multiple PRoGRaM chairs, and a few different computer terminals dotted about, all linked together.

Although despite its magnificent size, most of the central hub was empty and unfurnished. They were still in PRoGRaM’s trial period. At some point in the future, Owen knew that this base would be full of agents coming and going, each of them working a different case, using their own PRoGRaM devices, but those days were a few years away yet. Right now, they had this entire space to themselves.
Better savour the calm atmosphere whilst we can.

Their central hub was secluded enough for Owen and his team to work peacefully in, without fear of being intruded upon. This was the place where his team spent almost all of their time, a place that they kept all of their PRoGRaM technology. It was like a second home to him.

The FBI’s Special Projects group kept the PRoGRaM teams under the radar and out of the eye of the major population. People just weren’t ready for the introduction of this technology into their lives yet. Usually, it was just Owen and Nick that worked here, but now, their team had expanded by one with the arrival of Kate.

This was a highly secured government facility, with state of the art security systems. No-one was getting near this place. After all, this building had some of the most advanced technology in the world inside it, hiding in plain sight.

Owen wasn’t sure what his next move was supposed to be now in relation to the situation that he was currently dealing with. He and his team had been contracted by some of the higher up’s at the NYPD to analyse Eli’s memory of the transaction that he brokered with the local gangs.
But somehow we stumbled across a guy that knows about PRoGRaM and how to use it? And actually claimed to have a working machine? Something’s not right here.
Owen knew it in his gut.

“We need to keep a hold of him,” he decided. “We have an obligation to follow up on some of the things that Eli was saying. We need to find out more about what he knows, who he knows, and where he found out all this information about PRoGRaM from. We need to put him in holding at a local precinct for the time being, and think on what we’re going to do with him. I’d love to keep him here, but we just don’t have anywhere to keep him securely.”

“Hey guys. How’re you feeling?” Nick said as he walked over to them from a computer station a little walk away across the central hub. He found the closest, most comfortable spot and then dropped himself down into it and put his feet up. Nick was the most easygoing guy that Owen had ever worked with. Although he often came across as relaxed, mentally, he was always ready to work. And there was no-one that knew computers, or the way that PRoGRaM worked like Nick did.

At thirty two years old, and clocking in at just under 6ft, Nick was a tall guy, but wasn’t exactly well built. Having never set foot inside a gym in his life, he was fairly scrawny for his height. But regardless, he still tried to keep himself in shape.

“Better than that guy,” Owen replied, pointing once again in the direction of Eli, who was still knocked out on a bed across the room from where he and Kate were sitting. The three of them looked over to the unconscious man.

His eyes were shut up tight, yet his body was slightly moving with every breath he took. His vitals seemed good, according to one of the machines that he was rigged up to at least. Owen and Kate had similar apparatus next to their PRoGRaM chairs, purely there for Nick to keep an eye on their heart rate and other vitals whilst they were inside PRoGRaM. They could never be too careful.