Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (9 page)

“How will I know when that happens?”

He grinned. “Trust me, you’ll know.” He stood upright and produced two waterproof in-ear headphones from his pocket. He handed them to her. “Put these in. Your ears will be below the water’s surface. I’ll talk to you through these and coach you along. There’s an ambient microphone in the pod: talk and I’ll hear you.”

She pressed one into each ear.

“Lie back and relax. The water’s extremely dense, so floating is effortless if you let go of muscle tension.”

Nyah eased back, rippling the glowing water. The tank was wide enough that she would never come in contact with its sides, no matter how her arms and legs drifted. Eyes closed, she heaved a loud exhale and let her arms relax at her sides. Like a leaf on a still lake, she floated motionlessly.

“You’re a natural,” Austin whispered and pushed a button, shutting the tank’s lid.

He left the room and secured the door behind him. He slid behind the control panel. Everything was ready. Toggling a switch, he opened the communication channel. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Nyah’s voice came through speakers angled toward him.

“Comfortable?” His fingers flew across the computer’s keyboard and queued up the hack protocol, which would synchronize the test sequence. Instantly, the seven flat-screen monitors that arched around the control panel came to life.

“Very relaxed. Almost feels like my body’s part of the water.”

“That’s the idea.” He watched the monitors as night-vision images of Nyah filled four of them, and biofeedback data streamed to the others. “I’ve got eyes on you now. Just focus on your breathing for a few minutes while I bring you online.”

A flood of data streamed across the monitors—EEG readings, core and surface body temperature, breathing rate, blood oxygen level, and system diagnostics—all meticulously recorded for later analysis. If all went well, this would be the first of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of sessions.

It was real now and the air was thick with excitement for both of them. And fear too, because so much was unsure. But they were moving forward. More than that, they were sprinting ahead.

He flipped between camera angles until Nyah’s face filled the screen directly in front of him. The light meter confirmed that the tank was void of all illumination. She lay in utter darkness.

“The system checks are good,” he said. “Now the real fun begins. In a few seconds, I’ll stop talking and you won’t hear my voice until the end.”

“Promise?”

“Hacking requires multiple phases. We’ll start with a binaural acoustics sequence. You’ll hear a deep, pulsing sound through your earpieces. The vibration will also be released into the water via embedded speakers. The purpose of the sound is to synchronize your brain waves, transition them from the quick-moving beta-wave function to the longer, slower theta-wave state that’s more conducive to enhanced cognitive states. All you need to do is relax and allow your mind to go silent. Surrender.”

“Deditio, right?”

“That’s right. Surrender. Let go. In order for the Kick to activate, your brain waves need to come down to an optimal level. That’s when the real party begins. So relax, focus on the darkness in front of you, the patterns on the backs of your eyelids. Be mindful of your breathing. When a thought comes in, let it pass by without holding onto it. Imagine yourself as a leaf floating on a stream. Hacking is all about surrender, letting go of the sensory input that locks us in time-space.”

“Surrender,” she whispered. “Deditio.”

“Just relax.”

“I would if you’d stop talking,” she said.

“Sorry.”

Austin fed the sound loop into her earpieces, then opened the in-tank sound channel. He leaned closer to the monitor displaying her brain-wave activity. As expected, the digital readout drew a virtual mountain range of short, saw-toothed peaks, indicating the significant neural activity of a frantic mind. It was no surprise, judging by her spike in breathing and heart rate, which was pegged at ninety-three.

Apart from introducing a mild sedative to her airflow there was no way to induce a state of relaxation for her. The risks of additional sedation were too high, especially if she reached the Kick, which he doubted she would. It had taken him dozens of trials before he could relax enough for the Kick to initiate.

Letting go was far easier in theory than in practice. Still, he couldn’t figure out how to consistently surrender to the hack. His incessant thoughts always got in the way, making it nearly impossible to quiet his mind enough to fully let go. But he knew surrender—
deditio
—was the key.

At thirty-three minutes in the tank, Nyah’s heart rate had slowed to fifty-eight beats per minutes and her EEG indicated a steady, slow transition from a beta-wave frequency—a range experienced when people were fully awake and alert—to an alpha frequency. Most people experienced alpha frequency right after waking or just before sleep; it was the doorway to theta, the low-level brain activity experienced during sleep and deep meditation.

Theta frequencies were the key to hacking the mind, and the optimal gateway was 4.44 Hz. Nyah’s EEG continually nudged lower toward theta range. It would sporadically spike higher before edging down again. At forty-seven minutes, the monitor recorded a dip to 4.44.

An alarm window appeared on-screen:

D
ARKNESS
—thick and fluid like the kind I imagine exists at the bottom of the ocean. It swirled around me and swallowed everything as I floated inside the water tank, eyes wide but completely blinded to the world. Nothing had happened yet.

Austin’s voice had gone silent and now I was left with the darkness and my own thoughts. How long had it been?

At first, floating in the water was more disorienting than I’d expected. With nothing to ground me, my body was robbed of even the sense of up, down, above, and below. I’d taken for granted how the simplest things like having the floor beneath my feet or feeling air colder than I was or seeing something across the room formed my reality and divided the world into
here
and
there, up
and
down, me
and
not me.

Now I was simply . . .
here
.

Everything was
here,
but it felt like nowhere. A trick of the mind, Austin had said. Neural sleight of hand. Yet, nothing felt like an illusion or a trick.

I drew long, deep breaths and tried to let my mind drift.

Deditio,
I’d say in my mind, but the more I tried, the faster my thoughts came. At first all I could hear was my heart, which fluttered against my rib cage like a bird trying to escape, and the deep thrumming frequency filtering through the earpieces. But it wasn’t long before my thoughts overtook all of them and rumbled relentlessly into my mind like people—an angry mob of them—screaming to be heard.

Bad idea, Nyah. What have you done?

Holes in your head? Nuts! This won’t do anything but kill you.

What if Austin dies while you’re in here and you get trapped? What then? No one knows you’re here.

Then, like a TV screen clicking off, my mind went back to the darkness and everything was calm, peaceful. But only a moment later, without any conscious effort, the TV came on again and began channel surfing; a string of images flashed through my mind: my mother, Lettie, Pixel, me. I saw myself in the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing my scarred, shaved head.

Ugly girl. Now everyone will see, won’t they?

See how unfair life is?

A quick flash of an extreme close-up of Lettie’s face: Everything happens for a reason.

And a chorus of voices, saying: Lie! She lies! Nothing happens for a reason. The universe is cruel and unfair! It’s an uncaring machine grinding you to dust.

Bad things happen to good people because we’re just cosmic playthings.

Then nothing again. No images, no commentaries. This went on, it seemed, forever—the cycles of thoughts and no thoughts. It was like the worst night I’d ever had lying in bed, unable to shut off my mind’s obsessive loop of uncontrollable madness.

Was my mind always like this and I simply hadn’t realized it, too busy to pay attention?

Another thought, this one quieter:
Let go.

So I did, or at least tried. I imagined my body suspended beneath the ocean’s surface, weightless and surrounded by profound silence and peace. I saw the ocean clearly. The more I gave myself to that image, the more I forgot about my racing heart or the fear bursting through my mind, telling me this was all a very bad idea. Of course it was a bad idea, but so what?

Surrender.

Soon, the darkness resolved into a single image and I was drifting in a void, dark and warm. The nothingness seemed much larger than the tiny tank I was in. There was nothing to judge distances: I was adrift beneath the surface of an endless ocean. I didn’t need air, because I just was; I was there without form or need, a part of the void around me.

New thoughts pushed in, but I breathed them out into the water. Each one curled into the sea like black oil and vanished.

Deditio . . .

Instantly, a deep sense of relaxation washed through me. For the briefest moment, I thought,
This must be the Kick Austin told me about
, but then even this thought drifted away and was gone.

A
USTIN LIFTED
his finger from the button that released an atomized dose of synthesized neuro-compound into Nyah’s airflow—the Kick. He watched her on-screen face closely. The cocktail would almost instantly plunge her into an enhanced state that the mind wasn’t easily capable of achieving on its own. After that, the computer would record the momentary electrical pattern caused by her firing neurons and, using laser pulses, extend them.

“Amazing,” he whispered to himself. It had taken him months to so easily attain the level of relaxation she had done in under an hour.

An on-screen indicator lit green, verifying the delivery of the compound.

Nyah’s eyes drifted open, staring into the camera. Her pupils expanded and her eyes began flitting side to side uncontrollably. She sighed once, loudly, mouth stretched wide. Her body tensed, arching in the water. Yet none of her vital signs spiked.

She was beyond the threshold now.

She was inside.

E
LECTRICITY CRACKLED
all around me as I sank deeper into the dark ocean. It was accompanied by a blinding flash like an exploding star, illuminating the water all around me. It formed in the distance, a single point of light, then expanded in all directions at once, all in an instant. It filled the world faster than a thought and, simultaneously, took longer than a lifetime.

And the ocean disappeared; it instantaneously evaporated and I was no longer suspended in pristine waters, but floating in a vast white space. Or was I standing? The electric crackling became a roaring wind that I could hear, but not feel.

I felt no fear as I looked around. A rip in the white space appeared in front of me. It also floated in that vast nothingness, a tear in the white void: jagged edges, color shining through it.

Curiosity seized me. I walked closer—or
thought
about walking, about moving my legs—and I drew closer to it. Warm air drifted through, buffeting my skin.

I moved sideways and it was still directly before me. I went the other way. No matter how I moved, the rip was always right in front of me, as if moving with me, but so instantly and subtly, I couldn’t discern its movement.

Where does it lead? What’s beyond the rip?

I had to know.

Reaching out, I lightly pressed my fingers against it. The edges of the tear were frigid and made a sound like a frozen river cracking underfoot—loud enough to hear over the howling wind.

When I pulled my fingers away, the white space clung to them and stretched before breaking off and snapping back into place. The air rippled all around me, like the surface of a pond disturbed by a stone.

I reached forward again, this time sliding my hand through the narrow gap until it disappeared through the opening. Prickles of electricity pulsed through my arm, and a gentle breeze caressed my fingers on the other side.

A step forward, reaching farther, until my entire arm was through. I squeezed my eyes closed and took another step—going right into tear and passing through it as if it possessed no more substance than a cloud.

The bellowing gale stopped; silence engulfed me.

When I opened my eyes I was standing in the sensory-deprivation room of Austin’s loft. Everything seemed sharper, the textures more detailed, the colors more vivid. I remembered that Austin said hacking was like going from standard definition to high-def. Now I knew what he meant. Everything was crisp and energized.

To my left was the tank, its lid closed. I didn’t remember ending my first session in it, didn’t remember climbing out.

Am I still inside it?

The thought had barely touched my mind and I was inside the tank, hovering over the water, nose to nose with myself. That it was dark didn’t matter. I could see my motionless body floating face up, as if it were all happening in the noonday sun. My eyes stared back at me, unmoving.

A thought jolted me:
Am I dead?

No, not dead. I knew that somehow. I was something else. Something in-between, like Austin had described the first time I came to his apartment. What had he said?
Untethered
. I’d hacked my mind and become untethered. I was having an out-of-body experience.

I watched myself for a long time. It felt like meeting a stranger on the street only to discover she was an old friend who didn’t look like I remembered. It was more than my missing hair. Like everyone, I’d only ever seen myself in a mirror, in two dimensions. Seeing myself from the outside, the way others witnessed me every day, startled me. There I lay, bald and scarred, thin and frail.

This is how I look? This is how Austin sees me?

An image of his face came to mind, and I was suddenly standing beside him, watching him as he sat at the control panel, dividing his attention between writing notes on a yellow legal pad and checking a panel of monitors and sensors. Camera feeds from inside the deprivation tank displayed my image on four screens, and a heart monitor beeped rhythmically.

I was very much alive.

“Austin,” I said.

No response. He kept writing on his legal pad, unaware of my presence. As I watched him the rapid murmur of his thoughts entered my awareness as if he were talking out loud, which he wasn’t. I was hearing his interior monologue just as he had heard mine. He was silently repeating a long string of numbers that he was jotting down along with fragments of ideas and observations as he watched me on-screen.

“I’m right here. Can you hear me?”

I reached out to place my hand on his shoulder, but it passed through him as though he were made of smoke. Or as though I was.

Held in front of me, my hand appeared solid and substantial. I glanced at the watch then. The second hand rotated sluggishly, as if straining against an unseen force. Only five seconds of clock time had passed. Austin was right, that five seconds had felt like five minutes. He’d said my hack would last fifteen seconds.

I looked toward the isolation room. How had I gotten out here? I hadn’t walked, I was sure of that. I simply thought about Austin, and I was beside him.
I looked across the room, toward the large picture windows in Austin’s kitchen, and immediately found myself standing inches from them.

Amazing.

Austin was now on the far side of the apartment, still working at the control panel. An electric current of excitement flowed through me. The sense of liberation and freedom was intoxicating.

How far could I go? I looked out the window, toward the Bay Bridge and wondered what it would be like to be there, on the highest point of the bridge’s support structure. And then I was there, atop the steel frame, gazing over San Francisco.

I wobbled wildly and flung my arms out, grasping for something to hold onto, but I was simply
there
. I wasn’t going to fall.

Turning around slowly, I looked between my feet at the stretch of pavement far below and the steady stream of cars traversing the bridge, their drivers oblivious to my watching them from high above.

In the morning light, the dark waters of the San Francisco Bay looked like slate, and in the distance was the pale outline of Alcatraz Island. The world was waking up, and in a way so was I. My body was somewhere else while I was up here, free to move around however and wherever I wanted. It all seemed like a dream, and maybe it was—all just a dream, an illusion.

Mom would love this.

I closed my eyes and saw her smiling face.

A blink and the Bay vista vanished. There was no sense of movement; I was simply no longer on the bridge. Instead, I was standing at the end of a cramped, dark room. It was long and narrow, two walls lined with tall metal shelving. A thread of light outlined a door straight ahead.

I walked toward it, scanning the shelves as I passed them: Boxes of bandages, syringes, latex gloves, a stack of metal bedpans. I was in a medical-supply closet.

But why?

I came to the door and instinctively reached for the door handle. My hand passed through it and my first thought was,
I’m locked in!
It dawned on me: the same reason I couldn’t turn the handle made the handle unnecessary. It was unnatural to simply walk
into
the door, but I did and passed right through it.

There was a well-lit hallway across from a large reception area. A nurse’s station. I was in a hospital then. Four women dressed in colorful scrubs stood there, chatting and writing on clipboards. A buzzer sounded and a fifth nurse jumped up from a chair behind the counter and pointed down the hall. “302’s crashing,” she said, snatching up a phone. “Code blue. Page Doctor Morgan.”

The four nurses rushed past me and I watched as they disappeared into one of the patient rooms midway down the hall. Two doctors wearing white lab coats sprinted from the other end of the hall and darted into the room. Someone followed them, pushing a cart loaded with machines.

A sense of dread boiled inside of me as I started down the hall, mind blank. Loud, urgent voices drifted out of the room and rushed down the corridor at me. I stepped forward and found myself standing outside the open doorway.

The handwritten nameplate beside the door read:
Parks, Elizabeth.

Mom?
My heart sank. How was this possible? She was at Cedar Ridge, not here.

I stepped into the room’s chaos. It was filled with medical staff, all gathered around a form in the bed. Moonlight shone through the window and angled across the room.

Nighttime? That didn’t make sense. It was still morning. There was no way I’d been in the hack that long.

I stepped to the foot of the bed. There, in front of me, lay my mother. She was ashen, color draining from her face as I watched. Her eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling. On both sides of the bed, doctors and nurses worked to save her, compressing her chest with their palms, jabbing syringes into her, getting paddles ready to—I hoped—jump-start her heart.

“Hurry!” I screamed, but no one heard. “Mom!”

She was already dead. I knew it from the flatline tone of the heart-rate monitor and the way her mouth hung open as though gasping for breath, but there were no gasps coming from her.

“Mom!” I said again. “Please don’t leave me. Please!”

The doctors and nurses blurred around me. A nurse passed through me as she rounded the bed. The entire scene seemed to slow down, then speed up, as if it were all a movie and someone was manipulating it with a remote control, speeding it up then dialing it back.

Soon the medical team stopped their frantic movements. The lead doctor, a man with white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, snapped off his latex gloves. He looked at his watch. “Time of death: 2:37 a.m. Marsha, notify Dr. Benton, please. Tell him it looks like the blood clot shifted. Let’s schedule an autopsy to verify. We also need to notify the family.”

Blood clot? Mom didn’t have a blood clot.

The scene around me sped up as if someone had pressed a fast-forward button. All but one nurse filed quietly out of the room. The remaining nurse pulled the sheet over my mother’s face, turned off the medical equipment, and left.

I was alone with her.

There I stood at her bedside, staring down at the lifeless form beneath the sheets. I reached out my hand to pull the sheet away from her face, but my fingers slipped through it.

“Mom?” It came as little more than a whisper. I needed her to hear me, but it was too late.

The world felt like it had fallen out from beneath me. How was this even possible? She was supposed to be in her apartment, sleeping in her bed. I was at Austin’s, in the tank. And the moon—it was 2:37 in the morning, the doctor had said—completely baffled me. No way I could still be in the hack.

I scanned the room for anything to indicate that this was a dream. My attention locked on the date on a wall-mounted clock: two weeks from the day I’d climbed into the deprivation chamber for the first time.

What? How?

This had to be a dream.

The hospital trembled underfoot and the ground groaned long and loud. It was the twisting-steel sound of a ship before it collapses under the ocean’s crushing pressure. It came again and the air thickened and grew heavy as it pressed against me.

I looked at my mom’s bed. Everything—the bed, the blankets, my mom—was disintegrating, breaking into millions of tiny pixels that swirled into the air, joined by particles from the medical equipment, the tiles, the floor, the walls. All of it was coming apart, being carried away by a terrible, howling wind that now overtook the groaning.

Desperately, I reached for my mother’s hand, but she disintegrated along with the rest of the room. I tried to scream, tried to find something to hold on to, but there was nothing to grab and nowhere to go. The world was peeling away, leaving only the white void I’d seen before. I spun around, searching for the rip I’d gone through earlier, but it was gone too.

I looked down at my hands and they too were starting to break apart and blow away in the fierce wind: my fingertips first—pixelating and flying away—then my palms, wrists, forearms . . . the destruction climbing my arm until my entire body collapsed into nothing.

Everything was stark black and I was back in the tank.