S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (25 page)

“Your father didn't die then, Jessica. He died two weeks ago.”

Jessie froze, her arm still over her head.

“I know about Professor Halliwell— the man you know as Father Heall. I know he was your real father. That's who I was working with.”

Jessie pulled her arm down, and that's when she saw it, the word
Sister
on the wooden block.

“You were bitten?”

Doctor White shook her head. “I was never infected. My husband—”

“This says you were! Father Heall called the ones who'd been infected Brother or Sister. Where were you bitten?”

The woman just stared, one eyebrow raised, as if to say things weren't as simple as that.

“Then you're lying,” Jessie said. “How could you be working with him? He was completely cut off from the rest of the world.”

“No, he wasn't.”

“Arc put him on that island. They walled him in, controlled him. They monitored his activities.”

“To control him, yes. To exploit any useful knowledge he created and prevent the release of any that might damage their interests. That was what they
tried
to do, anyway.”

“Excuse me for being skeptical, but how did you communicate, using smoke signals?” Jessie's eyes drifted to the old telephone on the desk, but Doctor White shook her head.

“At first, yes, we used telephones, but once Arc tore down the existing towers and disabled the telecommunication satellites shortly after the outbreak, both landline and cellular infrastructure became essentially useless. They were already in the process of switching us all over to stream technology, which was supposed to be more secure, more efficient, cheaper, but then they put up the barrier, isolating the island. The dirty little secret about stream technology was that it gave Arc complete access and control to every single byte of information created and transmitted through the streams. And the government was a party to the deception because they were promised unfettered access to monitor it all, which was, of course, a lie.”

“So, how did you two communicate, then?”

“The old fashioned way, using hand carried messages. Letters. We had a person inside Arc, someone who had access to one of the entry points to Long Island. His job was to transport new Players from the processing facility in New Jersey to a portal on the south coast of the island. For years, we relied on him to ferry messages back and forth, hidden on the bodies of Players.”

Jessie distinctly remembered thinking how pitiful it all seemed, this ragtag band of people, nothing in common except their involuntary exile, most of them dependent upon Heall's blood to stay alive. It was pitiful, actually, because they believed they could fight the all-powerful Arc, outsmart it. But Arc controlled everything, even information.

We may be isolated,
Brother Matthew had told her,
but it doesn't mean we're out of touch.

“A couple years ago,” White said, “we discovered that Arc's streaming network could be used to transfer encrypted data. We were able to obtain and modify a gaming system to embed packets of information directly within the game's data stream without affecting the system's performance. It was a very effective means of communication.”

“And Arc wasn't aware?”

“The communiqués were miniscule in comparison with the terabytes of data that stream across their towers every millisecond. Even so, if Arc somehow managed to detect the extra code, they still wouldn't have been able to extract the information. We had developed a proprietary algorithm which would dynamically encrypt data. It's impossible to crack without the right key.”

Nothing's impossible
, Jessie very nearly said.

“We were content to communicate this way for years,” the woman continued. “But then, about a year ago, everything changed— our timeline, everything we'd been working toward.”

“Which was?”

“A cure, of course.”

“And is there one?”

Doctor White shook her head. “We're close, though.”

“What changed?”

“Two things. First, Professor Halliwell discovered something that shattered all of our understanding about reanimation: our consciousness remains largely intact.”

Jessie gasped in surprise.

White nodded. “We'd always considered Reanimates as dead, and therefore there was no self-awareness. It turns out that may not be true. The connection between awareness and the physical body has only been severed.”

Jessie remembered the feeling she'd had of being trapped inside the Player's body, aware of another presence there with her — not the Deceiver, but another, older presence. It had to have been the man who had become the Player.

“All of a sudden,” White continued, “a cure seemed like a stepping stone to something much greater: a way to reconnect the mind and body in Reanimates. Someday, we'll be able to bring them all back.”

“And the second thing?” Jessie asked, her mind buzzing.

“Professor Halliwell discovered that he was—” She frowned and looked away.

“Dying?” Jessie guessed. “Was he dying?”

“Not exactly,” the woman replied. “But close. The discovery of the mind-body connection came about as a consequence of his own deteriorating condition. He was losing himself, losing control of himself. His connection was slipping away.”

“I don't understand.”

“He was becoming Undead. Again.”

“Again? But he was immune! How—?”

“Fifteen years ago, when he tried to cure Reanimation, he died. When he revived, it was in some in-between state, neither fully alive, yet also not Undead. He still breathed, his heart still pumped. His body still aged, albeit in a much different way than our bodies age. For all intents and purposes, he was alive. But over time, he began to be consumed by hunger, the same maddening hunger that drives Reanimates.”

“The tea,” Jessie said. “He said it dulled his appetite.”

“In his earlier work, he had discovered that an herbal preparation could partially suppress the urge in true Reanimates. He started drinking it himself. But it began to lose efficacy. The urges returned, so he was forced to make it stronger. But he was deteriorating. He knew he'd have less than a year before his mind would be completely severed from his body, and he'd no longer have control over himself. That's when he decided that it was time to assemble his results.”

“We looked for it,” Jessie said. “When we were on the island. We couldn't find any records.”

“They were all destroyed. All except the one copy, which he sent to me.”

“Using my Link.”

The object itself pinged in Jessie's hands, but she could only blink stupidly at it, as if it were completely foreign to her. This new information was almost too much to take in all at once. The questions it raised piled up in her mind:

How did he know I was coming?

Why did he want me to have the file?

How far can I trust what she's telling me?

Another ping. This time she managed to bring it to her eyes and squint at the screen. She half expected to see Father Heall's face there, as if the mention of his name out loud had somehow conjured the man back from the dead. But it wasn't Heall. It was her brother. And two new questions were added to the list:
Does Eric know about White? Does Mom?

Back when Jessie first met Heall, she hadn't cared about the war he said he was fighting. She just wanted to get the treatment he had supposedly developed so she could save Jake's life. So they could all go home. So they could put the nightmare behind them.

The war wasn't between him and Arc and the government. It wasn't with the Coalition. The war had been with himself.

A third ping. The insistent buzz of the device this time almost felt angry to her. She fumbled to connect. “Eric?”

“Where are you?” he asked. “The nurses up here have been looking everywhere for you.”

“T-talking to one of the doctors.” Jessie felt terribly confused at the moment, frightened and yet—

optimistic

—unsure. It was hard for her to think straight.

“Jess? Everything alright?”

She blinked at the miniature image of her brother. “Is Kelly there?”

Eric turned his head to the side, then back again, nodding. “Yeah, he's right here next to me.”

She glanced up at Doctor White, but the woman only pursed her lips and waited to see what Jessie would do.

“Eric—” She squeezed her eyes shut and hoped she wasn't making another mistake. “What I said in the car. I want you to sit on that for now. You two go on home. Be civil. I'm going to stick around here for awhile. And don't— Just wait till I get home. We'll talk when I get there.”

Eric tilted his head, frowning. “Any news on Reg?”

Jessie sucked in a deep breath and let it out. She knew no more about Reggie's condition than when she'd first arrived, and yet . . . .

“I  I'm not sure. It's too early to tell. But go on home. I'll see you in a little while.”

She disconnected before she could change her mind, or he could question her more about Reggie.

When she turned back, there was an expectant look on Doctor White's face. And concern.

“My friend is going to be okay, right?” Jessie asked her. “You know what happened to him, don't you?”

But the woman's eyes betrayed her. The lines around her mouth shrunk as her lips pressed tightly, as if she would rather not let the truth spill out. And Jessie's heart sank before she could utter a single word. “I honestly can't say, Jessica.”

“Jessie. Please. It's Jessie.”

The doctor sighed, nodded. “Jessie. I'm just being honest with you. I won't know anything about his condition until his doctors can run a full set of neurological and cybernetic tests tomorrow morning. He might be awake before then.” She shrugged.

Reggie has to get better. He has to!

Jessie stared back down at her Link still in her hands, stared at the photo Kelly had sent her:
Will you marry me, Jessica Daniels?
spray painted on the side of an abandoned building. She shook her head. Why would anyone think giving her something this sensitive was a good idea? It wasn't like she had any use for it. She wasn't a scientist. She had no specialized training and couldn't possibly know how to use the information. If anything, her understanding about Reanimate physiology and behavior was terribly misinformed by what she'd been taught in school.

“I tried to open it,” she mumbled. She looked back up, suddenly numb, suddenly very tired. “The file on here. I tried to figure out what it was, but I couldn't open it. I couldn't copy it or download it or delete it, either.” She tossed her Link onto the desk. “Take it.”

“I wish I could.”

Jessie looked up, startled.

“Accessing the packet requires two keys, one to unlock your device, the other to decrypt the file. I only have the second key.” Her eyes flicked over to her own Link, as if she was expecting it to ping, and suddenly Jessie knew that it held the decryption key.

“It wasn't supposed to be you at all, Jessica— Jessie. The arrangement to transfer the full packet to me was made long before you went to Long Island. You were actually never a part of the original plan.”

“Then how—”

She was interrupted by a voice coming over the hospital intercom. Doctor White held up her hand to listen as a woman named Alice Becker was requested to report to Radiology. Jessie took the opportunity to drink some of the water from the bottle in her hand.

“How did it end up on my Link?” Jessie asked.

“The packet was too large and too important to risk sending over the gaming streams, so we arranged for it to be picked up and carried by hand. Halliwell's people —
Heall's
people — carefully hid it away deep inside Arc's mainframe computer on Jayne's Hill.”

“That's how Brother Matthew and Brother Nicholas knew the security code to get inside,” Jessie exclaimed.

Doctor White nodded. “Yes, they were able to access the computer there. They made sure the file could only be obtained if certain conditions were met. I coordinated the pickup from here. We attempted twice to retrieve the packet by sending someone into the arcade under the guise of a Live Player.”

“Arc's new twist on
The Game
,” Jessie said, remembering what Brother Matthew had told her about the gamers who went in to fight the Undead hand-to-tooth. “But I didn't know it was available to the public yet.”

Doctor White shook her head. “It's still in beta. They had just started testing it. We knew it was risky trying to pass off someone as a gamer, but it was the quickest and surest way we had of actually getting someone onto the island.”

“Why not your ferryman?”

Doctor White shook her head. “He had access to the portals but was forbidden from entering the arcade. Arc would immediately know something was going on if he deviated from procedure.”

“What about the tunnels then? That's how we got in.”

“They'd been blocked a decade ago. Our information at the time was that they were still blocked.”

“So, what happened to the Live Players?”

“Killed. Or so we assume. Or captured.”

“So Arc knows.”

White shook her head. “We knew interrogation was a possibility. The agents never knew the details of their mission. They were simply told to go in, execute a couple simple tasks which would trigger the release of the packet from the server onto a Link device, then to return after their two-week game session was completed.”

“How long ago?”

“The first, about four months ago. The second was a month after that. After the second failed to return, we pulled back. That's when we learned what you were doing.”

Jessie's eyes narrowed. “You suspected your people had died, and yet were perfectly willing to send in a bunch of kids?”