The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (5 page)
Read The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) Online
Authors: Ray Mazza
Tags: #Technological Fiction
Oscar said he would try to send this for me, he’s the only one that understands. I don’t know what to do. My daddy... he’s kept me here for so long... weeks, months. He says I can’t go, but I want to leave. I want to be free again.
If anyone can hear me, my address is
NIC2114B70057763095426,
Eileithyia.
My name is Allison Winters.
Trevor read it, then read it again. Then he read it two more times, slowly. He glanced over his shoulder again.
Trevor hadn’t heard of Allison Winters. He knew Damon Winters had been married years ago, but his wife’s name was... what was it? Trevor had read about her in the paper. She’d gotten into politics when she was with Damon, and continued with politics after their split. Did they have a child?
Trevor brought up a web browser to search the name. The search page took abnormally long to load. He typed in search terms for
Allison Winters
and
Damon
as a cross-reference. It was an excruciatingly painful four-minute wait. What the hell was wrong with his connection?
The search yielded only a few hits. One of them was a page with a photo of a 2
nd
grade field trip to a beach. In the scene, children paraded along the shore with buckets. The caption listed the names of the children, among them, Allison Winters. The source of the photo was the Glenville Elementary School’s web page, an upper-class school in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Greenwich
. That was where Damon lived: a wealthy suburban town forty-five minutes outside the city. The date on the photo read
April, 1998
– nearly fourteen years ago. If that really were Damon’s child, she would be twenty or twenty-one now... older than the captive in the letter sounded.
The rest of the search results were useless. He couldn’t find anything about an Oscar, either. A search on Eileithyia
revealed that it wasn’t a place, but rather the Greek goddess of birth, which meant nothing to Trevor.
He snatched up the phone and punched the number for Lola, one of the HR reps from work who lunched with him from time to time. Lola had a penchant for gossip, and a talent for knowing twice as much about people as they even knew about themselves.
“Lola?”
“Trevor, is that you?”
“Yeah, hey—”
“Hi-i-i-i!” Lola hit five notes with her greeting. “You never call me! You always say you’re not a phone person.”
“I’m not. But I’ve got a question and I thought you might know the answer.”
“Oh, waddya want?” She said in her sing-song voice.
“Does Damon Winters have any children?”
“Hah! After all the different women I see him with at charity events, I bet he has, like, eight by now!”
Trevor forced a chuckle. Ordinarily, he would have found the remark funny. “Seriously, though?”
“Um,” there was silence broken only by what sounded like her fingernail tapping on the receiver. “I always felt like he had a kid. I think I remember he mentioned being a father or raising a child or something during a recruiting speech at Oxford. But that was a long time ago.”
“Don’t you have access to his personnel files or something?”
“Damon’s? No, no-no-no-no-no-no. Not a chance.”
“Okay, thanks. Do you know what his ex-wife’s name is?”
“Yeah, Valerie Winters. She kept the last name because of all the connections she had accrued from social climbing.” Lola sounded excited. “She’s mainly involved with grassroots female rights organizations. Saw it on the news just yesterday.”
“Yeah, I thought she was involved with something like that.” He hadn’t, actually, he just knew it was political. For some reason it seemed about the same to him.
“And the internet is broken,” she added.
“Yeah, no kidding. It’s taking forever just to do some searches.”
“Wow, you’re lucky it even works for you. You should turn on the news, because, I mean, the internet is
really
broken.”
Trevor thanked her, and Lola made him promise to call again sometime.
Just for fun
, she said.
He clicked on the TV, paused briefly on the sci-fi channel to watch some people slide through an inter-dimensional portal to another version of Earth, and then found the local news.
Lola was right.
“...four major internet service providers experienced crashes all over the eastern seaboard just an hour ago.” A female newscaster caked with makeup spoke with an air of urgency. “Extremely high levels of traffic, hundreds of times the normal peak amounts, overloaded routers and switches at these major hubs, bringing them to a grinding halt. Security experts are blaming computer hackers, saying it looks like they exploited an extremely obscure vulnerability in network hardware that caused rapid duplication of outbound data in what might be considered the world’s fastest-replicating, yet shortest-lived computer virus – it was apparently manufactured to die off a mere twelve seconds after being unleashed. Unfortunately, that was more than ample time to wreak catastrophic mayhem in the system.
“If you’re just joining us, I’m Jackie Tristram with Lynx News, and we’re covering the breaking story of the internet outage.
“Many businesses have been left without internet access, which knocked retail outlets back to the stone age sans automated credit card verification. Turning to Wall Street, the Dow and Nasdaq have taken a nose-dive over the past hour. And just minutes ago, blood spilled in a fist-fight turned all-out brawl on the trading room floor. More on that as our reporter on the scene investigates.
“Now, officials say the network is slowly coming back online, and the internet providers have requested our patience while they sort out the problems. Many areas already have service restored at full speed, while others are still at a crawl.”
Trevor had never heard of anything this major happening to the network before, even so briefly.
Parts of four internet service providers going down at once?
Those were the major backbones of the internet. Why would hackers possibly want to bring down the internet? They’d be putting themselves out of a hobby.
The newscaster continued talking, then stopped mid-sentence to pay attention to her earpiece. “I’ve just been informed of the origin of the network flood.” When she announced where it came from, Trevor fumbled the remote. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. If Lola was still watching, she’d probably passed out.
I
nternally, Damon panicked. It was fleeting.
He worked out his thoughts and then addressed his men: “We don’t have much of a choice. On floors two through twenty-four, wipe the computers, then replace them along with the rest of the equipment. No one leaves until this is done, I don’t care if it takes all night. This is of the utmost importance; a few of you know our history with the NSA. I still believe they have a plant posing as a regular employee, and if the file falls into their hands, we’re through. Any rogue files that you
do
find, make a copy and bring them directly to me. Understand?”
Single nods all around.
“Kane, I need you to find out if our network’s firewalls lasted through the surge and if anything intelligible crossed them. Prep PR if you need to. I’m going upstairs to check on her.”
Kane nodded with a vaguely saccharine smile, and Damon thought he heard him muttering under his breath. Damon turned back and cut into him with sharp eyes, arms crossed. Kane nodded again, then began radioing commands to the team on all floors. The others began loading computers onto carts.
Damon punched the call button for the elevator and as he waited, he became acutely aware of how tight his tie felt cinched around his neck. He loosened it and wondered if he should confront Kane. He knew Kane blamed this on him.
When the elevator arrived, the thought left him. He swiped his badge, pressed the button for floor twenty-eight, and was gone.
~
Trevor pressed the rewind button on his DVR. He had to hear it again.
The reporter replayed: “... just been informed of the origin of the network flood. Officials are saying it has been traced back to a building in Manhattan, the offices of a company called Day Eight, a provider of research equipment and simulation software. As of right now it appears to have been an accident, but technicians are investigating the exact cause with cooperation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ll have more on this in a few minutes. And now, it’s time for a look at the weather.”
Trevor sat in stunned silence. Was there a disgruntled employee at Day Eight? Or perhaps a secret project gone wrong? A networked doomsday device? People must be filing lawsuits already. Should he start looking for a new job?
After fielding a shocked call from Lola, he printed out a copy of the letter from “Allison.” The letter must have had to do with the network surge somehow, but the news had no mention of anyone getting similar notes.
Trevor dialed the operator. At first he got one of the computerized operators, but it didn’t understand his full request. Computers were so stupid sometimes. Well, he knew it wasn’t the computers – it was the people that programmed them. Regardless, computers always fell short of talking to a live person, so he pressed “0” to get a human.
Trevor asked for the address and phone number of the closest police department. He wrote the info down on the back of the letter, then shoved it in his pocket.
After having talked on the phone to Lola he felt a bit more social, and on an awkward whim asked the operator what her favorite flavor of ice cream was.
“Excuse me?” the operator sounded befuddled.
“I know it’s random, but I was just wondering what your favorite ice cream flavor was.”
“It’s peppermint stick. Why?”
“Well, I’m hungry, and I want to try something new,” said Trevor, shrugging as he talked into the receiver.
“Oh. It’s a good thing I don’t like vanilla then.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I’ve got to go, sir. Good luck with the police.”
~
He took a deep breath of fresh air, its coolness amplified by the peppermint as it swept over his tongue and past the back of his throat. It was almost uncomfortably cold.
A mother walked down the sidewalk, holding the hand of a small girl, who wore a hat with some kind of wings on it. They looked like butterfly wings. The girl noticed Trevor’s ice cream and pointed, then reached for it.
The mother pulled her child along. “No, we don’t take the nice man’s ice cream. We haven’t eaten dinner yet.”
Trevor grinned at the unintended meaning, imagining a scenario where they
had
eaten dinner.
As they passed him, the kid turned around, still reaching toward the ice cream, then started crying. Trevor didn’t want the rest, so without thinking, tossed it into a trash can next to the bench. When it hit the bottom, a metallic echo reverberated through the chilly air. The kid’s eyes widened. She screamed louder and her knees gave way and she refused to walk. The mother tugged on her fruitlessly. Finally the mother picked her up and walked quickly away, giving a short, embarrassed glance in Trevor’s direction. Trevor mouthed, “I’m sorry,” and forced a weak smile.
I hope to God that when I have kids, they never behave like that
, he thought, then he tried to tell himself that if he
did
have kids like that, he would still love them. He had no experience with children, yet they were one of life’s biggest adventures – one he knew he should look forward to. He wasn’t convinced.
And now, he had to figure out what was going on with Damon Winters’ kid.
Trevor set out, frail autumn leaves crackling underfoot. When he reached the police station, he lingered at the front doors. What was his plan? Walk in and just give them the letter? Explain he worked for Day Eight, the source of the network attack, and that this plea for help had appeared on his computer?
They would probably take the letter, make the necessary inquiries, and quickly get to the bottom of things. Would they think he had something to do with it himself?
He read the note again. The part about men in white coats definitely sounded like Damon’s team. Could they really be holding someone hostage? Even in the building on the restricted upper floors? It sounded crazy.
There was one piece of the letter that still didn’t make any sense at all. The address.
If anyone can hear me, my address is
NIC2114B70057763095426,
Eileithyia.
Some kind of code. Maybe it got garbled like the web page he’d been looking at during the surge. And it would have made more sense if she’d said it was the address where she
was
, but she didn’t. She said it was
her
address. As if she were captive in her own home.
