The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (4 page)

Dissemination

D
amon Winters took a hit of his inhaler and then stashed it in his suit pocket. When the elevator doors opened, Damon stepped onto the 16
^th
floor of the Winters building, the floor on which Trevor’s cube was situated. Some journalists listed Damon’s net worth as three hundred million dollars, while others valued him at closer to four.

Damon was in charge of this branch of the company, “Day Eight,” a private maker of research software and equipment. This building held over fifteen-hundred of its employees. Day Eight had other branches in Seattle, the Silicon Valley, Switzerland, and Japan. But that didn’t matter at the moment, because right now, this office was going to shit.

~

Trevor had only seen Damon a few times, speaking at conferences or striding through the lobby of the building. Damon had a peculiar habit of never getting in the same elevator as anyone he didn’t mean to be with. On the occasions Trevor had been waiting for an elevator at the same time, Damon had let everyone get on and stepped back to wait for another. That didn’t happen often, though, because Damon liked to arrive when it was still dark out, leave when it became dark again in the evening, and have his meals delivered to him.

Trevor remembered being particularly stirred by one of Damon’s conference speeches, titled
Why the Human Race Will Become Redundant
. Damon opened by explaining that the rate of technological advance was increasing more and more quickly every day. He described how progress in the technology sector over the past thirty years alone was comparatively more than all the technological advances made in the history of the world prior to that, and was accelerating.

Damon hinted at a looming technology that would change the entire structure of business, science, economics, politics, both home and work life, and the very process of invention. It was some form of artificial intelligence that diverged from the standard approaches. Unfortunately, the talk had been vague and left important details up to the imagination – such as how this new form of intelligence was implemented, when it would be realized, or exactly what it could do.

But, he said, how it would come to pass didn’t matter – it was provable that it would exist simply because the rate of technological progression must continue along its perpetually-increasing curve, and that humans alone couldn’t contain such intelligence required to continue the trend, so the gap must be filled primarily by AI. If we accepted that fact now and thought about the changes it would bring, as a country, as corporations, as a world, and as individuals, we would be better prepared to face both the challenges and opportunities that would arise.

Trevor was excited that his company might be working on world-changing technology – even if he didn’t get to contribute first-hand.

And now Damon Winters was here. He’d come down from the top floor to his level, a place Trevor had never seen him. Something must be very wrong.

Six men accompanied Damon clad in white lab coats and safety glasses, ID badges on their chests, half of them carrying brushed chrome toolboxes. They were lab technicians from the top of the building where Damon kept his brightest prodigies, working on generously-funded and highly-secretive projects. Like the world-changing technology, perhaps. At least those were the rumors.

Damon’s team surveyed the floor with a sweep of penetrating gazes. Trevor and his co-workers always referred to them as “lab coats” because regardless of their positions, that’s what they all sported – white lab coats – all except Damon, who lived in a charcoal-gray suit.

Trevor didn’t know for sure what their actual jobs were. You needed a special badge to get above the 25
^th
floor, and he was not special.

The lab coats dispersed. A particularly chiseled lab coat with thin silver-frame glasses came up to Trevor’s cube and addressed the IT guy.

“Mr. Marken, excellent job so far. Load Mr. Leighton’s machine on this and please come with me,” he said, handing the IT guy an aluminum, telescoping dolly.

The IT guy stood wide-eyed and wrung his trembling hands.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” said the lab coat, “but there’s a rather large problem to deal with, so please do make haste.” He patted the IT guy on the back, which seemed to snap him out of his shock. The IT guy unfolded the dolly, sat Trevor’s machine on the frame, then headed off to the elevator with the lab coat. Then they were gone.

Trevor had gotten a creepy vibe, and half-wondered if he’d ever see the IT guy again… maybe there would be a “terrible accident” and the IT guy would “fall” off the roof of the building while checking their satellite power transformers. But no – office life was never as interesting as one might hope.

Trevor’s manager stood on a chair and announced that everyone should go home for the day. Some muted cheers. Someone yelled, “Snow day!” followed by more audible cheers. Then a secretary called out, “Let’s hit the bars!” That brought on full applause. His manager bowed and stepped down.

Trevor headed for the elevator. Nearby, Damon stood silently and watched the office clear out. As Trevor passed, Damon casually smiled and nodded to him. Hands in his pockets, he nervously fidgeted with his memory stick, looking forward to some fresh air. He left the building wondering why he was in no apparent trouble.

~

All the regular employees had left. Damon Winters stood, arms folded, and watched his team of men run tests on all the computers. Two were moving among fax machines, printers, phones, and various other electrical equipment that had been plugged into the company’s network.

Despite the situation, Damon smiled to himself – something he hadn’t had reason to do recently. His men worked with speed and efficiency – no missteps, no wasted keystrokes – like clockwork. With their white lab coats and brilliant minds, they were his core team: nearly one hundred and twenty specialists. Right now a third of them were spread across all the lower floors, surveying the damage. The rest were in their usual area on the six restricted upper floors with their most valuable equipment.

He had hand-picked every one of them. Some had been researchers at schools like Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and Stanford. He also went abroad, snatching up graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, and Tokyo University. Others had worked for companies and organizations specializing in anything from biology and medicine to chemistry, physics, psychology, education, and even social work. Except in rare cases, Damon had made sure they all had computer science or engineering in their backgrounds, as that was the connective tissue of Day Eight. Programming and engineering weren’t just skills, they were a way of thinking about problems, a method of analyzing situations, a common language that could unite the most disparate subjects and produce wondrous tangible results. Even his lawyers were cross-discipline.

After a few more minutes, the lab coats headed back to Damon, as if on cue. A technician with broad shoulders, blond hair, and glasses stepped forward. His badge read:

Kane Fletcher

Chemistry

Sociology

He spoke: “The computers are critically damaged, and anything in the building connected to the network is likely to have traces of the surge data.”

Damon nodded. “What sort of traces?”

“Some of the computers have files scattered on them created during the network overload. They could be extremely compromising.”

“Like the ones from the Silicon Valley event?”

“More revealing,” Kane replied.

Damon waited, expecting to hear more.

Kane continued, cautious. “The files are all signed
Allison
.”

Damon’s eyes widened. “Oh God.”

A Plea for Help

T
revor glanced up at the building he worked in. It seemed oddly taller than it should be.

He moved out of the building’s shadow, and headed south down 3
^rd
Ave on his usual path home, his eyes watering in the brisk autumn wind. Businessmen wore long coats and scarves as they trudged down the sidewalk. The women dressed lighter. Trevor was always surprised by how many still wore skirts in this weather. Skirts were nice, but he always seemed to glance a split second longer at the women wearing full business suits.

He pushed through a cloud of thick steam from a pretzel cart, and would have stopped to get one, but its line snaked abnormally far for three in the afternoon.

Having worn a light shirt, Trevor tried to hop on a nearby bus only to find it packed. An old lady as knobby as a diseased tree hobbled up the steps behind Trevor, but wasn’t going to fit over the white line. Before the bus driver could turn her away, Trevor squeezed past and jumped out. “She can have my fare,”  he called back to the driver, who gave Trevor a two-finger salute and pulled away.

Trevor continued on foot. Slowly, he began to notice that traffic jammed the streets and people were steadily streaming out of the commercial buildings.

What’s going on?

There was a supermarket just ahead, and he needed to pick up a few things. It always felt like he needed to pick up a few things.

Something he loved about New York were the little delis, pharmacies, mom-and-pop grocers, hardware retailers, smoke shops, and take-out restaurants peppered everywhere. Many open all hours, and close enough that he could run out in his bathrobe at 3:00 am if he felt like it. Sometimes he felt safer that way. Nobody ever robs a guy in a bathrobe.

He found the supermarket entrance locked with a
Closed
sign taped to the glass. Trevor pressed his forehead to the cold window and stared in. Nobody was shopping. There were just lines at the registers.

He could see the check-out clerks writing on pads of paper and a few of them on phones, holding up credit cards, punching digits on keypads.

This was definitely not normal. The uneasy feeling crept back into Trevor’s stomach.

~

Trevor Leighton’s apartment was a one bedroom with a kitchenette so small he had to stand to the side of the stove to open the oven door.
But the upside was that it was a corner unit that caught extra light from grand windows.

A framed childhood photo of him and his sister, Amy, warmed up the windowsill. She sat on his shoulders with her arms out like a plane, and he smiled up at her with a half-painful grimace. He remembered that moment, barely being able to hold her up, their parents looking on with concern, but he loved how much fun she’d been having. That was when he was nine years old, and she was six, just a year before she died. Trevor smiled from the bottom of his heart, then cursed God with the whole of it.

He tossed his keys on the coffee table next to his brittle bonsai tree and frowned. They were impossible to keep alive. Maybe they were committing tree suicide from depression in his lonely apartment.

Trevor flopped onto his blue couch and wondered how to spend his day off. A poster on the wall behind him read, “What would Einstein do?” with a picture of Albert Einstein shrugging.

Einstein would listen to music. Trevor queued up some MP3s and decided to change the ones on his memory stick for work. When he connected it he was surprised to find all his music gone. In its place sat text files…
lots
of text files. He scrolled down. There were tens of thousands, all with the same nonsensical name suffixed with a number:

ciioodllnrsw_000000.txt

ciioodllnrsw_000001.txt

ciioodllnrsw_000002.txt

ciioodllnrsw_000003.txt

…

He double-clicked a few random ones to open them. Nothing inside but garbled data.

Trevor scrolled quickly to the bottom of the list and shuddered.

…

ciioodllnrsw_078556.txt

ciioodllnrsw_078557.txt

helpme.txt

Trevor looked over his shoulder; he wasn’t sure why he did this; he hadn’t expected to see someone there. He was just creeped out.

He opened the “helpme.txt” file and read it.

Is anyone out there? I’m not sure if this will work. I’m trapped and they won’t let me leave. The men in white coats won’t listen to me. There are times when I can’t feel anything. I’m scared.