The Amazon Code

The Amazon Code

Turtleshell Press (www.turtleshellpress.com)

Copyright © 2016 by Nick Thacker, Turtleshell Press

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2016

Nick Thacker
Colorado Springs, CO

www.WriteHacked.com
www.NickThacker.com
 

F
REE
B
OOKS
!

DON’T CLICK, SWIPE, OR POKE that Kindle page!

Thanks for taking a chance on me. I’m a new author, and I really hope you enjoy this book!

To thank you for reading, I want to give you three FREE books.
 

That’s right, FREE. Three of them — my first three standalone thrillers. Full-length, action/adventure, fast-paced fiction. For free.
 

How?
 

Just head over to my website —
www.nickthacker.com/free-books
. You can click that link directly on a Kindle device, or you can type it into a web browser.
 

Again, the link is
www.nickthacker.com/free-books
. Hope to see you on the other side!

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK MARKS NOT ONLY the fifth year of writing for me but also marks an accomplishment that’s much closer to my heart: since I picked up a copy of James Rollins’
Amazonia
, I’ve longed to write a book set in the Amazon. But not just any book would do. It had to be worthy of the “thriller” name, and by extension James Rollins’ name: action, adventure, sweeping plots invoking a broad spectrum of human emotion... and lots of guns. I wanted a book that the armchair traveler and the closet historian could equally be comfortable with.
 

I used to call the types of books I write (and what Rollins writes) “airport books,” because they’re the type of fast-paced fiction that one might read on an extended plane ride. The typical definition of “airport book” adds that these books are often discarded afterward, forgotten and doomed to collect dust in a suitcase or enjoy a long life on a used-bookstore shelf.
 

But this genre as a whole, and most certainly James Rollins’ work, has always been more than that to me. He somehow weaves threads of science, conspiracy, myth and folklore, and military subjects together into a tapestry of awesomeness in every one of his books that makes me stop and think, and then think some more long after I put the book down. He creates characters that live in my mind, make me hungry for more, and, above all, make me want to emulate in my own books.
 

I don’t know if I’ll ever get there, and I certainly don’t want to put forward the idea that
this
book -
The Amazon Code
- is worthy of standing next to Rollins’ Amazonia. But it’s important to note as an author where our inspirations come from, and I don’t think it’s a secret anymore that he is at the top of the list.
 

I remember meeting James in Denver at the
Tattered Cover
bookstore, and asking him to sign a copy of his newest release. I had a copy of my own newest release with me, and I offered it to him. He only accepted mine if I would sign it at the same time he signed his book. For a young new author, that moment was more important to me than any bestseller status could have been, and to this day it’s what I think of when I pick up the latest James Rollins from the bookstore shelf.
 

So, Jim, this one’s for you!

Nick Thacker

Colorado Springs, Colorado

May 23, 2016

P
ROLOGUE

1

THE WORLD ISN’T READY FOR a breakthrough like this.
I’m
not ready for a breakthrough like this.

Dr. Amanda Meron raced through the hallways of the small center, dodging metal carts full of trays of test equipment, computers and displays flashing and blinking. She lived for these moments, had dedicated her life to these moments, and she would not let them slip through her fingers.
 

For Amanda, it wasn’t even about the research. Sure, she was fascinated by it, but it was the sense of
living
that accompanied the moments of pure scientific breakthrough.
 

How they must have felt,
she wondered,
Einstein, Newton, Bohr.
Her childhood heroes, whom she now considered her friendly competition.
 

“Dr. Meron, in here. Just in time,” she heard a voice call out from a room she almost ran past.
 

She knew this place better than anyone and yet her excitement caused her to momentarily lose her place. She slowed, turning into the glass-walled room, and took a look around. The faces of her peers, all smiling back at her, were assembled around the large computer monitor in the center of the room.
 

“We’re ready when you are, Dr. Meron,” the voice said. Dr. Henry Wu, the transplant from Stanford, stepped lightly to the side to allow room for their boss.
 

Amanda caught her breath and took her place next to Wu. She nodded. The screen flickered, and colors began to swirl around a central area of bursting light.
 

“We’ve transcribed over 10,000 more locations since our last neural bridge,” Dr. Wu explained. “The map is now nearing 40% relational accuracy.”
 

40%.
 

She almost couldn’t believe it. Almost.
 

For the last few years — not to mention the years of schooling before that — she had been working toward this moment. Many in her field thought it couldn’t be done, but the theoretical projections she’d used as a model in her doctoral thesis were more than just
whims
.
 

She knew it could be done.
 

She knew
she
could do it. If anyone could,
she
could.
 

“Data is now being transferred.” All eyes remained on the screen. “Subject is nearing REMS, electrical impulses from the stem are now appearing in irregular rapid succession.”
 

Amanda watched with confident delight.
This is it.
She reached out for something to hold on to, her hand finding the cold steel of a thick desk protruding out from beneath the computer monitor.
 

The subject, a Mr. Ricardo Herrera, was asleep in the room next door. A 67-year-old man from the nearby village, he had volunteered for a week of testing in the state-of-the-art facility Amanda had built. He and his family would be paid handsomely for his time, and with no expected side effects besides feeling wonderfully refreshed and well-rested, it would likely be the easiest money he would ever make.
 

“Are we recording?” she asked.
 

A younger technician answered. “Yes, of course. Digital and analog.” He pointed to a rectangular box sitting to the side of the computer.

A VCR.

She smiled.
Haven’t seen one of those in years.

After a scare from a computer virus a few months ago, she’d decided to “go old school,” as the techs called it: use analog recording technology in addition to their digital setup. The analog devices were slower, a
lot
bulkier, and plenty annoying to use in everyday situations, but they were almost completely hacker-proof. Someone wanting to tamper with their data would need to be physically present to do so.
 

“Subject is entering REM sleep.” A dialog box on a separate, smaller monitor flashed a small message:
REM-S POSITIVE.

The larger monitor flashed in the center of the screen again, and the colors began swirling the opposite direction. Tiny sparks of light, like miniature shooting stars, danced around the edges of the swirling vortex.
 

“It looks like something from a science-fiction movie,” one of the techs whispered.

“It
is
something from a sci-fi movie,” another responded.
 

The stars began to grow, then shrink, then grow again, before they died out, replaced by blackness, then a burst of color.
 

“Is this a dream?” someone asked.
 

“No,” Dr. Wu replied, “our subject has only just entered REM sleep, but is currently dreamless. He is sleeping soundly, though, and we should see something soon enough.”
 

“How will we know?”
 

Dr. Wu just smiled.
 

They all watched for another minute, then the swirling vortex of color shifted and faded. The blank screen stared back at them for a full thirty seconds. Amanda gripped the side of the desk until her knuckles were white, then released it.
 

Did they lose the connection?

She thought through the possibilities, trying to remember their hypothetical timeframes for these initial tests…

And the screen exploded to life again.
 

Blurry forms shifted around in front of her, some recognizable as people. They moved and interacted, melting into one another and changing shape.
 

Oh my God.

She swallowed, trying not to blink. Trying not to miss a moment.
 

“We’ve entered a dreamstate. Subject appears to be relatively lucid, attempting to focus on one of the bodies.”
 

Her excitement almost got the best of her. Amanda’s mind didn’t even need to flash back to her papers and research to know what that meant; the answer was already at the tip of her tongue. If every single person in the room around her hadn’t already been trained by her, she might have even begun a mini-lecture.
Dreamstate
was their term for mid-REM sleep during a subject’s dream, and
bodies
referred to any “physical” noun — a typical person, place, or thing — conjured up by the subject’s subconscious during a dreamstate.
 

It had taken two years to get here from their first attempt at viewing a subject’s dream.
 

And now it was working.
 

The subject, Mr. Herrera, was trying to focus on one of the
bodies
in the dream. It was smaller than the rest, but more sharply silhouetted against the backdrop of swirling colors.
 

A person.

“Subject appears to be focusing on the memory of a child-body.”
 

The narration confirmed what Amanda was watching onscreen. The image become a bit more focused still, and she could now see more of the “setting” body of this particular memory.
 

Herrera was in a “room” body, or at least it appeared so, as streaming rays of light glanced down diagonally from the top-right of the video. He was also moving, working around objects that were too blurry to make out.
 

Amanda forced her eyes out of focus, trying to break any of the involuntary paradigmatic functions they were attempting to use to make sense of the image. Forcing her eyes to make what she was seeing “blurry,” the image might make more sense.
 

And it did.
 

She could now better understand what it was Herrera was remembering. He was walking through a house; a living room, then a dining room, passed by. The colors and shadows on the walls in the background established where in the image they were, and she could tell Herrera was moving quickly.
 

Chasing the small shadow.
 

Herrera was chasing a laughing child through the house.
 

The child stopped and turned to Herrera, and Amanda’s eyes focused again on the image. Having now established a visual “baseline,” she could now interpret the smears and blurry lines of the images, and in the picture recreated in her mind, she could almost see the child’s face.
 

It was Herrera’s oldest son, now in his twenties, somewhere between the ages of three and eight in the video.
 

She held a hand up to her mouth.
It’s really happening.
 

The blurriness could be fixed, as could the awkward lighting, through the use of more specific mapping techniques and — eventually — far more electrodes on the brain. After that, image manipulation and video effects rendering could sharpen it a bit more. She immediately considered the repercussions of this discovery, and tried to project how long her team might take to deliver a finished, test-worthy product.
 

“I — I can’t believe this,” Dr. Wu said from beside her. “The image is so… vivid. I never thought…” His voice trailed off as the first-person point-of-view Herrera again began following the child into another room.
 

“We’re…
there
. Inside his head,” one of the technicians said. “And we can improve the image quality by increasing the output of each of the electrodes, as well quadrupling the number of —“