NLI-10 (13 page)

When the light returned, their physical bodies were left behind. The two of them had no eyes of their own, sharing the sight of a thousand eyes across the facility.

'Where do we go from here?'
she asked, looking for him with the cameras. She couldn't see him in the pathways, and her thoughts echoed through the imagined Network space like a choir.

'Shit!'
said Micah.

She blinked away from the A-Eye feeds and found that she was once again surrounded by tunnels of digital light, signals whipping back and forth in the imagined space. She had no body, and nor did Micah.

'
We can go anywhere...'
he said, from somewhere nearby.

'I can't see you...' she said.

'We don't have forms here... Not unless we make them... We're going to have to project something.'

In front of her, light coalesced, took the form of a silhouette that was pulling up data from around the Network. He had no arms or legs, instead ten sets of tentacles emanated from his projected head, sorting through data at the speed of thought. He charted the positions of the cameras, and looked out through the A-Eyes to see how far they went.

'They've got the whole facility wired for cameras, audio recording, and there's something else...'
He said whilst tethering Sarah's much more mundane form to his with a stray tentacle as he followed whispersignals along the wireless spectrum, tracing the path to a single terminal. Turning the webcam on, the two of them looked out over the London skyline.

'I've seen that view before.'
said Sarah.

'Me too. it was Whark's office when I was recruited.'

'I thought you were recruited in Liverpool?'
she asked.

'And you in London...'
he replied, turning his projected head to her astral form.

'So which is this?'
asked Sarah.
Micah pulled up the camera's metadata, discerning their position and IP addresses
.

'It's in the facility
.
'
he said, projecting a map in front of their disembodied sight.

'She's taken this office around the country, and now set it up in the basement? That's fucking tragic.'
said Sarah.

'This is the only terminal with outside access.'
he said, his mind creating a doorway that represented the wider world, the global A-Eye NeuralNet. He walked towards it, and took a virtual step beyond the threshold. In an instant, he lost all control of his thoughts and actions.

Watching the world through billions of eyes, he was overwhelmed, couldn't process the sights and sounds, colours and light. Agony wrenched its way through his digital consciousness as he tried to wrestle free, pull himself back into the safety of the facility's NeuralNet, but his disembodied self wasn't responding. He felt something wrap around him, like a lasso grabbing hold of his projected form. Light overcame him.

A black and white blur stared up at him, slowly coming in to focus. A book. He looked around, and was back in the rec room, Sarah turned the handle and stepped into the toilet.

'Was that you?
' he asked.
'Did you pull me back?'

'You're not the only one who can make a tentacle...'
she said.

'Too much action the first time out I guess, huh?'

'We've got to go back.'
she said.

'I'm not sure I want to jump in with both feet right now.'
he said, putting a hand to his aching head, his body recreating sympathetic pains for the suffering his astral form went through.

'We don't have a choice.'
she said, sharing a projection of the thousand eyes, zooming in to one. Rob on a gurney, as Whark and the doctor stood over him.

“What the fuck happened to him?' said Whark.

“I've only just begun my examination...'  said the doctor, distracted as he configured consoles to monitor activity from the electrodes on Rob's head.

“Well hurry the fuck up.” she said, pacing around him.
The Doctor looked at the readings, then over to Rob.

“This isn't at all good.” he said.

“Fucking
what
isn't?!” she shrieked.

“His neural pathways are all over the show. He's rejecting the
s
onogeneti
c
switches we installed in regards to Subject8.”

“So fix it.” she spat.

“You can't just 'fix' it. We're going to need to wipe the firmware and start again.”

“Fine. Fucking fine. I'll have the numbfuck twins have the room set up for a wipe and re-program.”

“We can't be sure he won't regress like the others...” said the Doctor.

“I can't be sure you won't end up hung from the rafters by your own
fucking
entrails.” she said, storming out of the room.
The doctor started removing the electrodes and preparing his patient to be moved, when Rob started to stir.

“... Leah...” he said, groggily.

“Don't worry, my boy.” said the doctor, putting a mask over Rob's face and turning the valve on the sevoflurane. “You won't remember a thing soon enough.”

Sarah walked back out to the rec room, joining Micah at a couch and picking her book back up.

'We have to stop them.'
she said.

'Not alone we can't.'
he replied '
And not without giving ourselves away. We might have control over the system, but we have to learn how to loop camera feeds or delete entire logs...'

'Then we best learn. Don't you need to use the bathroom?'
she said, turning to him. 
Micah looked around the room at their peers, playing pool and watching TV, then glanced over to the camera. Nobody was any the wiser that they had been infiltrating the system. He put his book down and made his way across the room as Sarah sent him the memory of the automated connection process she had used. He touched the door handle, and once again, they were in darkness.

'Where do we find out about the camera feeds?'
asked Sarah.
Micah trawled through the data with his tentacles, following the pathways back to the servers that they were stored on. 

'We're in luck. Everything's logged in-house.
' he said, gleaming what he could as he swiped through the feeds. '
It only gets backed up to the cloud every six hours.
' He pulled up the clock. It was four forty-three. '
We don't have the time to do it before the next backup cycle'.

'So we let them go through with it?'
asked Sarah.
'Let them wipe him and fuck with his brain some more?
'
Micah moved away from the camera feeds and tried to find the audio controls for the facility.

'Not necessarily... maybe we can mess with the speaker system.'

'What did you say about deleting camera data?  What if one of us is on deletion duty as the other is going in and rescuing him?'

'How are you going to deal with the guards? Computers are easy to fuck up, people on the other hand...' he started making his way through the logs of the camera feeds.

'Maybe we can incapacitate them. If your tactile connection with me could fix my memories maybe we could, I don't know, send them to sleep or something?'

'Or something... But we'd need to test it out first.'

'So we test it out on each othe
r.'
she said.

'Are you volunteering?
'
he asked.

'To put you to sleep? Sure.'

'Fuck.'

'What?' she asked.

'This...' he said, pulling up a video feed.
The Doctor stood over Leah's body, her clothes removed, chest cut open. He dictated to the A-Eye monitoring from the corner of the room.

“Subject's heart appears to have a
n
enlarged left coronary artery...” he looked closer, staring through a screen that magnified the view. “Seems there's a narrowing at the most distal proportion, leading me to believe that the stress of the live fire test was, perhaps, the cause of an acute myocardial infarction. Of course, how such a physical abnormality could be present in a trial with such stringent health requirements, I am unable to say...” Sarah paused the projected video.

'What does that mean?'
asked Sarah. 

'A heart attack.'
Micah said.

'How could she have a heart attack?'

'I don't know... there's something not right here...'
he said, pulling all the metadata tagged with Leah's information, her FaceRecog profile, gait, mannerisms, it was all logged and categorised in the NeuralNet, all up in front of their virtual eyes.

'There's time missing.'
he said
'Here, as she walks to the memory-tagging room, and here, as she leaves.'

'What's happening outside the room at the time?'

Micah pulled up the feed from the A-Eye monitoring the doorway. Leah entered the room with the nurse. Spinning forward in the feed, Whark entered and the nurse left. The cameras watched the vacant hallway until Whark and Leah eventually walked out together.

'That doesn't match up with the time
inside
the room...'
said Micah.
'Give me a second...'
He started trawling through logs, piecing together scant bytes of information grabbing them with his tentacles, taking the code apart and putting them back together in the right order, like a billion piece jigsaw puzzle.

'
What are you doing?'
asked Sarah.

'Nothing's ever truly deleted...'
said Micah.
'Not unless you're very smart. And Whark is more arrogant than she is smart...
'

He continued to put the deleted files back together, finding segments scattered across the servers, building a picture of the room. Whark reached for her watch as Leah lay in the chair.

'Is that where I connected with the NeuralNet the first time?'
asked Sarah.

'Yeah. Same day, but looks like Leah got a different treatment...'
The video feed didn't have enough frames to play through in real time, but the audio he had reassembled was mostly complete. 

'See this?'
he said, bringing up the waveform.
'The tones in the room change.
' he compared them to the ones in his memory of sitting in the chair in the same room.
'This is doing something different... I don't know enough about the code they're transmitting through the sonics, but... what if it doesn't only fuck with our conscious and subconscious minds?'

'You think they can use them to send instructions for our bodies to... what, set us up for heart attacks?'
she asked.

'If you're going to make human robots, wouldn't you want to make a killswitch of some kind?' he said.

'What if they've been doing it all along? I don't think I'd have been strong enough to do that assault course when I first got here...'
Sarah said.
'What if they've been conditioning our brains to send out signals for, I don't know, muscle production or whatever.'

'We can make you better, stronger, faster...' said Micah.

'How long has it been back in... uh...what would you call it? The real world?' Sarah asked.

'Two and a half seconds...'
said Micah, looking his internal clock.
'Probably too long to just be holding a door handle, huh.'

'Let's go back. We can't draw suspicion... We've got 'til six to come up with a plan, right?'

'Til the backup starts, yeah. '

'Then let's get a fucking plan together.'

The group were taken through to the mess hall for dinner, and despite Liam's influence making them feel better about Rob's recovery, none of them were particularly hungry.

Micah and Sarah occasionally joined in with the Network chatter, to at least give the impression they were paying attention to the conversation, but spent the majority of the time on their VPN, putting the pieces together to save their friend.

Whark watched as Rob screamed in silent agony, tied to the gurney in the re-education room. The audio was muted on her terminal as the sonics tore his memories to shreds and replaced them with happier ones. Sonogenetic triggers installed to make every memory of Liam and the other five members of the group a happy one, everything else feel like a haze of ambivalence. She needed at least five viable subjects to prove her project was a success. The neurotypical with a 'pre-existing' medical condition was an easy write-off, but another with mental distress and seizures as a reaction to implanted memories was not something she wanted to have to report. She stared at his suffering and smiled, distracting herself with anticipation of tearing more of Sarah's memories apart.