The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (14 page)

In response to the surge, Damon Winters took charge and did what he knew Kane would have done anyway: he had all the office machines that had any trace of the note destroyed. The note could have been hidden in obscure places, even deep enough that formatting the computers wouldn’t ensure their removal. But it wasn’t the thought of an employee finding the note that was off-putting – it was the thought of plants at the company, or the feds confiscating their computers for an investigation that terrified him… and if the computers wound up back in Fort Meade, someone would recognize the phrase
Project Eileithyia
in Allison’s note and then Day Eight would lose everything.

Damon had Allison and Oscar loaded onto trucks with all the other hardware slated for destruction. They had a total of eleven trucks full of equipment. The trucks would drive forty miles outside New York City to a private manufacturing plant owned by Day Eight where the equipment would be promptly dismantled, magnetically wiped, and scrapped for parts.

Damon, however, surreptitiously arranged for the driver of Allison’s truck to make a drop at a different location – Damon’s house – and have it replaced in the convoy with a duplicate truck containing similar parts.

When Trevor told Damon he saw the truck turning a different way out of the building on the news, Damon ground his teeth. The truck driver hadn’t listened to his instructions – to stay with the convoy until the bridge toll, at which point it would have easily slipped behind without notice.

There was no telling who’d seen it.

Alone in The Sanctuary

T
revor hopped out of bed at 6:00 am with excitement and renewed vigor. Yesterday had been the most exciting and unexpected day of his life. A driver would be outside waiting to pick him up at 6:45. He showered, ate a breakfast of Pop-Tarts and orange juice, and decided to do some more push-ups.

Continuing a work-out routine he began in a holding cell at the police department served as a reminder that he still had the question of a resisting arrest charge hanging over his head. On the brighter side of things, the push-ups already made him feel stronger.

The car dropped him off on Damon’s doorstep. He stood there for a few moments after the car sped away down the long drive. He took out the spare set of keys that Damon had given him, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The security panel on the wall beeped twice in response to a radio-frequency ID chip dangling from the keychain, then displayed comforting green lights.

He shut the door, and felt like he was pushing out a viscous air of sounds from the natural world. Then there was silence. He couldn’t hear the chef, the groundskeepers, or the maid – if there was one – and wasn’t sure if they were around. Trevor didn’t know if the chef, Fredo, lived there. Come to think of it, there was a lot he didn’t know.

He listened, and thought he could hear the distant ticking of a clock. A funny feeling of tickled nerves fluttered in his stomach and spread up and down his body, like he was on a roller coaster.

It reminded him of a time when he’d snuck into his high school late one weekend night. A window had been open to a ground-level classroom, and he was able to squeeze through it. He had done it spur of the moment when driving home from a party and was passing the school. Once he got inside, he decided to go to his locker for lack of anything better to do. Walking around the darkened and deserted halls that were normally filled with meandering students and noisy banter, he’d gotten the same strange feeling. The feeling had something to do with being in a place where he wasn’t used to being alone, and where he suddenly felt like he had complete control and could do anything.

It remained with him as he found his way into Damon’s kitchen pantry, shut the inner and outer door, and activated the lift using the keychain. The downward movement amplified the feeling in his stomach, and at the bottom floor he decided to check out the bathroom.

Trevor couldn’t remember if it was the door on the left or the right at the beginning of the hallway, so he tried both. The one on the left was locked. He opened the one on the right and walked in. It was a surprisingly normal bathroom for being fifty feet below ground. He half expected it to have a cement floor, a bare light bulb dangling from exposed wiring, and an ancient rusty toilet. Or maybe just a hole in the ground. But everything looked brand new, and much nicer than the bathroom in his own apartment.

He flushed the toilet, then ran the water in the sink, casually inspecting everything. He was satisfied, and slightly more comfortable now that he was getting used to some of his surroundings.

Trevor walked down the hall and into the room on the end, Damon’s sanctuary. The lights came on automatically. Neat.

~

At Day Eight, Damon Winters sat at his office desk on the top floor of the building. The floor had no research equipment whatsoever. It was purely for executives and important business meetings. They liked to hold meetings up top because the stretching walls of glass afforded an exhilarating view of the city.

The executive PR manager now sat in Damon’s office, and they were discussing how to handle the bad publicity from the internet surge. The internet service providers were filing hefty lawsuits against Day Eight and the news media wouldn’t shut up about it.

Frankly, Damon didn’t care. He felt his time at the company running out quickly, a pinch of sand in an hourglass. It was strange, but he hadn’t been reprimanded by anyone at headquarters for the network incident. He could offer up Trevor as a scapegoat, but then what? He needed Trevor. And then the news would say the company is full of hackers and created the surge on purpose.

Stonefield held a teleconference to discuss the surge, and it was eerily calm. No fingers were pointed. No blame taken. Everyone just wanted the mess cleaned up and the damage assessed, and verification that no trade secrets were in the open. But it didn’t seem like anyone was worried.

Something in Damon’s pocket chimed. He reached in and grabbed his iPhone.

“Would you excuse me, Jan?” Damon said to the PR executive. “We can continue this after lunch.”

She nodded, picked up her folder of case material, and trotted out of his office without shutting his door. He got up and shut it himself, then returned his attention to his phone.

Its screen displayed a hi-def video feed with a view from an elevated angle aimed down toward the entrance of a room. There stood Trevor. It was Damon’s sanctuary.

Damon watched Trevor Leighton stroll around the room, picking things up, turning them over indifferently, then putting them back. Damon dragged his finger around the surface of the screen to shift the view so it stayed centered on Trevor. Trevor walked over to a bookshelf and ran his hand along the books, then pulled one out, inspected it, and put it back.

Trevor returned his hands to his pockets, then moved over to the black velvet curtains. Damon watched as Trevor looked around, then disappeared through the curtains. The view on Damon’s phone popped to a new one, inside the equipment room.

~

Trevor stood on the other side of the velvet curtains, inside the equipment room, and gaped. It didn’t look so much like a room as the inside of a massive computer.

Stacks of equipment and shelves reached to the ceiling, full of metal boxes, presumably computers or computer components, all covered with flashing LEDs. Fridge-sized units and computer cabinets stretched fifteen feet high and looked as if they must have been painstakingly pieced together right here by Damon. Three cylinders thick around as tree-trunks rose floor to ceiling, full of wires. Every few feet, veins of smaller tubing shot out of the trunk and fed into a piece of equipment. One wall offered a table along most of its length with monitors and consoles, and a row of iPad-like devices – the same as the one he’d spoken to Allison on. The devices rested in sheaths, mounted on the wall. A loud hum from the fans and drives filled the air.

There was also a dull drone from a ventilation system that appeared to be pumping cool air in from the floor and siphoning hot air out near the ceiling.
If that weren’t on¸
Trevor thought,
this place would probably boil
.

And up in the corner of the room, concealed from Trevor’s view in the twist of one of the ventilation ducts, a tiny black camera silently adjusted its aim on him, watching.

Trevor had never seen the likes of such computers, even around the office. The only thing they resembled were pictures he’d seen of supercomputer arrays, like Japan’s “Earth Simulator” supercomputer.

The Earth Simulator was built in an attempt to better predict physical changes in the Earth, like climate and oceanic shifts, plate tectonics, and the movement of the inner core of the Earth and its resultant magnetic field. The Earth Simulator, however, had nearly enough computer cabinets to fill a football field, whereas this room had its equipment squeezed into a thirty foot by thirty foot area. If it took the Earth Simulator all that equipment to just guess at how the ocean might react to a climate change, how could far less equipment do a task many orders of magnitude more difficult, namely, simulating a human?

By Trevor’s quick and dirty calculations, the human body alone had many quadrillions (the next step after trillions) of times more atoms in it than a conventional computer could store in its memory… assuming a kilobyte of computer memory could store an atom and its state. Trevor had no idea how all the computers on Earth combined could store a human in memory, let alone a relatively small room of equipment, as advanced as it may be.

But... theoretically… humans exist in real life, so it must be possible to store a simulated human in a space nearly as small as an actual human itself. After all, the universe can do it, why can’t we copy it somehow?

The computers in this room must be the ones they used on the restricted floors at Day Eight. And there was no way this all could have fit in one truck;  he wondered how much of it had already been here, and which pieces were the ones with Allison in them that Damon had snuck here.

Damon had told him he could feel free to look around, but if he went into the equipment room, he was forbidden to touch anything. That wouldn’t be a problem. Even if Trevor saw something he wanted to touch, he was too scared that he might accidentally break it. He figured Damon was concerned about the same thing.

He walked over to one of the largest units. Up close, he noticed a readout that displayed
37440 Watts.

“Holy crap,” Trevor whispered to himself. That was a ridiculous amount of power for
anything
to be using. Damon’s power bill must be tens of thousands of dollars a month if all the equipment in the room used even close to this much energy. And he must have had special heavy-load power run to his house during construction.

Trevor left the room in awe, then plopped down in the same sofa chair he sat in the previous day. He grabbed Allison’s tablet off the coffee table where Damon had left it for him, and put his feet up.

~

After watching Trevor over the video feed for a few minutes, he nodded, satisfied that Trevor was doing as asked, and closed the remote monitor program.

The phone on his desk rang. He let it ring four times before lifting the receiver.

“Winters speaking.”

“Hello Mr. Winters, this is Lieutenant General Charles Warden, Director of the NSA.”

Charles’ renewed sense of formality was as unsettling as his voice. Damon had done business with Charles many times over the past fifteen years, and couldn’t remember the last time Charles referred to him as “Mr. Winters.”

“Ah, yes, Charles, it’s been a few months. What can I do for you?”

“Well, Mr. Winters, with the situation that you have on your hands, we are all deeply concerned over here.”

“I understand—”

“And we want to make sure that it remains
your
situation and doesn’t become
our
situation. Is there anything for us to worry about?” asked the man, in an unsettling toneless voice.

Damon began to take a deep breath, but stopped, not wanting Charles Warden to hear it. “I can assure you, Charles, that nothing leaked. Our technology remains confidential.” And Damon certainly hoped it did remain confidential. Day Eight had developed some of its technology hand-in-hand with the NSA over the past twenty-six years. Their relationship was classified, and so was the knowledge they shared. Damon wasn’t concerned about this shared technology falling into the public eye, though. It was the technology the NSA
didn’t
know about that worried him.

“You make sure that it
does
stay confidential, Mr. Winters,” Charles Warden said. “I’ve already spoken with Mr. Stonefield, and he told me the same thing. But I wanted to check with you directly, and let you know that we’ll be keeping a close eye on the situation as it develops.”

“Okay. See ya, Charles.”