The Lightcap (20 page)

“I know many people with those initials,” Pavel said thoughtfully.  He sat with his fist against his chin, his elbow on his knee, the classic pose of a thinker.  “Several companies, too.  As far as I know, none of them is involved with Adaptech, Metra Corp, or the Lightcap in any way.  If we’re able to decrypt LaMont’s datafile, it might contain information about this MS person.”

“Do you remember the day you ran into me on the subway?”  Adam asked.  At this point, he wasn’t sure if he had made the entire thing up, if it was some sort of false memory stemming from his cryptic dream.

“Of course.  I made sure you didn’t miss your stop,” Pavel answered.  Adam felt relieved his memory of the event was at least partly rooted in reality.

“Did you slip anything in my pocket?”

“No.  At least, not that I recall.”

“That’s what I thought.  I was having such strange dreams.  Some things I knew were memories, but others seemed more like symbolism, or subconscious interpretations of what had happened in my life recently.  Does the name ‘Mnemosyne’ mean anything to you?”

Pavel furrowed his brows in frustration.  “Not really.  I know it’s a name from Greek mythology, but it doesn’t bring up any specific memories or lead me down any particular course of thought.  With a name like that, I’d be remiss to forget anything referencing it.”

“What did you say?”  Adam said, his attention heightened by Pavel’s words.

“That I don’t know the name, other than from Greek myth—”

“No, no,” Adam broke in.  “The last part.  About being remiss to forget something referencing such an uncommon name,” Adam said.  His words spilled out rapidly, measured speech overruled by his excitement.  “Remiss.  MS.  What if the first part of the letters on the windowsill weren’t initials but a title?  I seem to recall Claudia the HR drone and LaMont both referring to Velim as Miss, not Doctor.  She had a Lightcap on but must not have been under direct control, because she looked annoyed at LaMont and even made a point of correcting Claudia.  Maybe Damen learned something he shouldn’t have?”

Pavel was quiet for several moments, eventually responding, “I don’t think so, Adam.  After Aria and Dej told me about Damen, I checked up on him.  I found that he had been arrested as a juvenile for a number of things, including drug use.  His father spent the family’s life savings having this fact expunged from the public record so his son wouldn’t be blacklisted and could get into college.  Damen stayed out of trouble after that, but if I had to guess, he was back to using Cloud and that caused problems with his Lightcap.”

“So how did he know about Velim not being an enemy?”  Adam asked.

“I would imagine he did not.  Aria didn’t see those letters, and she spent hours scouring Damen’s apartment, looking for anything that might be a clue.  She found nothing.  Adam, I don’t mean any offense by this, and I feel it necessary to apologize because my actions may be partly to blame, but do you think it’s possible you imagined the letters, just as you imagined me slipping you the note on the subway?  My intent of giving you low doses of Cloud was to counteract the havoc Lightcap was wreaking on your brain, but there may have been unintended side effects.  The things you remember might be actual memories mixed with artifacts from your unconscious mind.  Things you worry about, things from your past, anything.  Even something you overheard once without realizing it.”

For a moment, Adam considered that Pavel might be right, that it might all be some kind of figment of his imagination, his mind playing tricks, or dementia brought on by Lightcap, despite how real it all felt to him.  Adam had spent days trying to crack the passkey LaMont used to encrypt his datafile.  He had read hundreds of different articles on LaMont, glowing pieces describing his deep respect for capitalism, his business prowess, his keen sense of negotiation and acquisition, even his love of history, his favorite book being the biography of the founder of the Region, Preston Pennington.

Something occurred to Adam.  He asked Pavel, “Do you think there’s a possibility of the Lightcap misfiring?  I mean, if LaMont is directly controlling someone, is it possible he could pass through more than just intentional commands, such as stray thoughts or subconscious fears and desires?”

Troyka scratched his head, pondering Adam’s suggestion.  He replied, “Well, it’s
possible
, I suppose, but not the most likely answer.  Occam’s Razor suggests the least convoluted explanation is likely the most plausible.  I know it’s hard to think of yourself as someone with a compromised mind, but I’d like you to consider that at least part of these dreams, visions, whatever they are, may be rooted in physiological damage to your brain caused by the Lightcap, Cloud, or both.  I am sorry to have to say that, of course, because I may be partially responsible.”

“No, I
know
the most reasonable assumption is that I’ve lost, or am losing, my mind.  I know it sounds ridiculous, but there’s more to it.  I don’t know how I know,” Adam said, embarrassed to resort to emotional pleas since his logic had failed him, “but I need you to trust me.  I’d never heard the name Mnemosyne before that dream, I know that for a fact.  It didn’t even register with me, not until I looked it up on the mesh.”

“Well,” Pavel said, “if you really feel that way, what do you think it means?  Mnemosyne, a name on a piece of paper slipped into your pocket during a dream.  Your dream about company named Ensyn, memos and boxes of paperwork that may or may not exist.  Then a phrase, ‘ms = no enemy’, which you think refers to Sera for no reason at all, etched into a windowsill but gone the next day.  Visions?  Hallucinations?  Prophecy?  This is the real world, not some loony cult or vid node drama,” said Pavel.  His voice raised a little by the end, his breath grabbed in gulps.  He turned around in his chair, grabbed his notetab and said, “I can’t believe I’m even entertaining this thought.  Preposterous.”  His fingers flew over the keys.  “See?  No luck with Mnemosyne as the passkey.  LaMont’s datafile remains encrypted.”

Adam hung his head and said, “I know.  I already tried it.  Spent hours just sitting here trying different things, anything that came to mind.  I looked up everything I could find on LaMont.  I tried his ex-wife’s name, kid’s name, alma mater, nicknames, pretty much any mesh trace of him I could find.  Nothing.  Hey, let’s try ‘ms = no enemy’, or ‘Ensyn memo’, some variations of those.”

The sounds of spring-loaded keys bounced against walls as they tried all the permutations they could conceive of the letters—different capitalizations, arrangements, character substitutions, but it was no use.  LaMont’s datafile would not open.  For all they knew the passkey was a hundred characters long, random and impossible to guess.  Pavel turned and said, “See?  I hate to break it to you, Adam, but the dreams and things you saw weren’t real.  They didn’t actually happen.  Just because you see a random assortment of let—” Pavel stopped short and a perplexed look spread across his face as he poked his finger against the air as if spelling something out. He continued: “Letters.  They’re all the same letters, just in different arrangement.  It would appear,” his eyes jumped to Adam, “there is an anagrammatic aspect to your visions, something we were not aware of until now.  The mind is powerful, but I don’t think this can be attributed to randomness. 
If
what you say is correct, and that’s a very big ‘if’, then a misfire from LaMont could come across as scrambled.  An unintended side effect.  Hmm.”  He paused.  “I might owe you an apology.”

Adam took in what Pavel said and contrasted it with what he knew of LaMont, his family life, the schools he attended, the kinds of things that might inspire or drive him.  There was a moment when everything fell into place, his memory brought into sharp focus by an article titled “Titans of Capitalism” he had read about LaMont’s meteoric rise to the upper echelons of business, following and surpassing the footsteps of his father and the generations before him. 

“I have an idea,” Adam said, spinning around to face his notetab.  Pavel watched curiously as the younger man’s fingers slowly tapped against the keyboard.  “Our conversation about what motivates people like LaMont got me thinking, along with an article about his family being leaders of capitalism.  Titans.  Mnemosyne was a Titan too, but none of the variations of her name worked.  There was a part of the article that described LaMont’s family as ‘belonging to money’. Let me see . . . ” His hands finished their slow dance across the keyboard and then stopped, one finger held perilously above the enter key.  He held his breath, then pushed down against the plastic, its click echoing against the walls.  His eyes rose to meet Pavel’s, a smile on his face.  “Got it! ‘Money’s Men’ was the passkey.  He could’ve chosen something more difficult to guess.  His hubris was his undoing.”

Pavel’s eyes were bright, elated, as his notetab screen was filled with the information contained in LaMont’s datafile, sent from the decrypted file on Adam’s machine.  “Adam,” he said, “there are terabytes of data here.  Who knows what it contains?  It could be useless, or it could have the schematics of the Lightcap control unit itself.  This should keep us busy for some time.”  Pavel pressed his lips together and wheeled around to look at Adam.  “There are also, ah, implications about what this means—your receiving the anagrams, I mean.  There might be
more
information in your head, whispers of LaMont’s wandering mind sent across the mesh to yours.  More importantly, I now agree with you that we need to obtain Sera.  The things she might know could prove to be invaluable.”

When Dej and Aria came over after work that night, Adam and Pavel shared the contents of the decrypted datafile with them, explaining how they had happened upon the passkey.  The couple up to then had not been pleased by the idea of rescuing Velim, unconvinced as they were that she was trustworthy or worth saving.  When Adam told them his theory of how he knew LaMont’s passkey, and that he had never seen Sera without a Lightcap, they agreed to help rescue her. 

“We are now twice as likely to succeed,” Pavel joked.  “Of course, the likelihood was only a fraction of a percent before.”

We’re still statistically screwed
, Adam thought wryly.

The quartet spent the next several days wading through LaMont’s data.  He was a digital hoarder who would have had stacks of papers to the ceiling had he not been born in the electronic age.  While the enormous amount of information may have proved useful if they had had time to sort through it all, for now it just made their task daunting, all the more because they didn’t dare sending the data over the mesh, even encrypted, for fear of interception along the way.  Fortunately, between Pavel and Adam, along with Aria and Dej in the evenings, they were able to find some useful information.  There were login credentials for the Adaptech and Metra Corp networks, blueprints, meeting notes, helicopter schedules, Lightcap schematics, and a lot of source code. 

Aria found some information on the JMR-Heavy choppers used by Metra Corp.  They’d been purchased at a bargain price from the US government, which divested itself of much of its former military might as a last-ditch effort to avert bankruptcy while losing several States around the borders.  The United States subsequently sold additional land rights to Cascadia and Metra Corp, then lacked the manpower and force required to quash the secession of several of the Southern cities to the Confederacy.  This military clearance sale worked out well for Metra Corp, netting the Corporation several acquisitions to bolster its air, land, and sea fleets, necessary for protecting the border and its domestic interests, at least that was the story from the media. 

The choppers used for the daily trip between the two skyscrapers had several cargo holds, just as Pavel said, and Aria also found files to confirm that the flight plan never took them above five thousand feet—along with the schedules of the guards and pilots.  Even more helpful were the diagrams for the Lightcap, complete specs for the outside measurements, with some information about the internal components such as the mesh radio and neural interfaces.  LaMont’s datafile allowed Pavel, Adam, Dej, and Aria to start planning. 

Four runs each day carried supplies back and forth between the Adaptech and Metra Corp headquarters.  Aria and Dej would go over in the passenger hold during the first run, along with the rest of the v6 team.  The second run, the lightest, would allow Adam and Pavel to go over in a relatively empty cargo hold, but it wouldn’t get them there until two hours after the first run—two hours during which Dej and Aria would have to hope not to be discovered while figuring out just what had been happening for the past year. 

The Lightcap Adam took from Hana proved to be a worthy challenge for Pavel.  The old man spent over a day trying to figure out how to open it, his micro-spudger poking along hidden seams until he found the proper sequence to release the internal clamps.  The plastic halves of the Lightcap’s front bubble separated with a click.  “Eureka!” Pavel cried, his fist struck against the air, a boyish grin on his face.  Dej was excited to do a complete code dump of the device, to start looking for potential weaknesses or hidden functions.  More things to keep them busy.

Several days later, Dej said he had an announcement to make.  He seemed to be trying to suppress a grin or keep a secret.  The others turned their attention to him.  “So, I’ve been looking through the Lightcap code, working with the Doc on some of the hardware, and I think we might have found something really big,” he said, nodding to Pavel.

The old man jumped up as if on cue.  He said, “Right, so I found the radio module that allows the Lightcap to connect to the mesh and receive commands.  More importantly, after I found it, Dej here found a way to shut it down.”

Dej’s smile flashed brilliantly against the dim light of the room, seeming brighter than the lamp.  Pavel looked as if he wanted to high five himself or give himself a few hearty pats on the back.  Adam, glad to see his friends joyful, regretted having to break their reverie of self congratulation, but he had to ask one question.