Zero echo shadow prime, p.9
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 9
Yuri turned back to Charlie. “I sense you’re a little behind the curve, so I’ll pardon the accusation. I didn’t do anything with your Shadow. Rivir stripped your smart cells.”
“Rivir?” Charlie whispered. Liana Ling’s soulful voice carried a tide of memories from the Rivir gala. Charlie recalled Jude’s crow’s-nest office, with its transparent, unidirectional walls. That’s where her stomach seized. But what had she been doing there?
“We saved you,” Yuri continued. “You were en route to Control-Z, a.k.a. purgatory, a.k.a. the soul stockade, where you would have spent eternity in a box like some forgotten time capsule. But we intercepted your van.”
Charlie nodded, understanding the gravity of the situation. Control-Z was a death sentence. If she was indeed being sent there, it meant her condition was beyond hope. “I have cancer,” she explained.
“Yes, I almost forgot.” Yuri zipped open a duffel bag by his feet. He pulled out a sports bottle and tossed it onto Charlie’s lap. “You’ll be drinking a lot of that. Go easy on it now, though. We might not see a bathroom for a while.”
Charlie examined the bottle. It was filled with a murky green liquid. “What is it?”
“For your information, I also went to Caltech,” Yuri said, sidestepping Charlie’s question. “Pre-med. Quickly saw through the bullshit, though. Dropped out once I realized I’d have to play puppet to Big Pharma.” He pointed to the bottle. “That’s a special mixture of mine. Various juices, B12, potassium, liver extracts, some enzymes. It’ll melt your tumor like butter.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Couldn’t be more serious. Chemo is the worst thing you can take for cancer. The underlying cause is an electrolyte imbalance. Of course, they don’t want you to know that.” Yuri dived back into his duffel bag and fished out a bag of ground coffee beans. “You’ll also need to take this…as a rectal suppository. Nicola can help you with that later.”
Charlie’s mouth contorted into a grimace-smile. She needed Alan. She needed her father. Each second she stayed in this car reduced her chances of ever seeing them again. “Well, I appreciate you ‘rescuing’ me from Control-Z, but I think I can take care of myself now. Can you stop the car?”
“You do realize this is a getaway? We just did something highly illegal.”
“Who are you people?”
Yuri’s eyes brightened and he perked up in his seat. “I was starting to think you’d never ask. We’re students of Bob Sapio.”
“That’s just great,” Charlie blurted, though she instantly regretted it.
“What? Do you have something against the Movement?” His caterpillar mustache stretched above his salesman smile.
Charlie knew better than to take the bait. She had run into this Sapien Movement cult a couple times before—they liked to organize just outside the Caltech campus. To argue with them meant getting pulled into a long lecture brimming with conspiracy theory, self-righteous delusions of grandeur, and pretty much every other form of delusion. “What do you want from me?” she demanded.
“What do we want? You should be asking yourself what you want? As in, do you want your life back?”
“Yes, very much. So please let me out.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
“But you just said—”
“Alright, look,” Yuri huffed, “as much as it pains me to say this, you’re a very important person. Maybe more than you realize. You’re going to be the face of humanity in our fight against Jude Adler.”
The fight against Jude Adler made sense. Bob Sapio, their leader, was a well-known Luddite. He decried the accelerating pace of technology, calling it an extinction-level threat to the human race. And he was wanted by the FBI for the mail bomb murders of several important scientists and engineers. But Charlie didn’t understand why she, herself, had been selected as an ally. “I don’t get it. I make robots. I make Shadows. You don’t consider me the enemy?”
“That depends on whether or not you cooperate. The real enemy, however, is your zombie surrogate.”
“My what?”
“Your robotic facsimile, the perversion of nature…”
Charlie searched inward. A robot on a gurney. Bridget on a gurney. In Charlie’s foggy mind, those two thoughts were lumped together. Bridget was the robot. But that didn’t make any sense. Pieces of the puzzle were still missing.
“You don’t remember signing your identity away?” Yuri asked. He turned to Nicola. “Should I show her?”
Nicola gave a slight nod.
Yuri pulled two pairs of AR glasses out of his duffel bag. He put on one pair and tossed the other to Charlie.
Charlie examined the glasses. She hadn’t seen such an archaic specimen in years—not since smart cells went public. They instantly felt heavy on her face. She pressed the power button on the edge of the frame, and the freeway lit up with virtual signs and advertisements, though some of the ad spaces displayed missing plug-in icons.
“Benji,” Yuri addressed his unseen Shadow, “please display the Vantage clip from the twenty-third. All eyes.”
A virtual display materialized in front of Charlie’s face.
Charlie’s high school yearbook photo filled the frame. Underneath, the headline read: “Adler’s Monster?” Vantage correspondent Carmella Casella provided the narration.
“On Monday, September nineteenth, Charlotte Nobunaga, Caltech student and daughter to Lotus CEO Andrew Nobunaga, passed away at UCSF Medical Center after losing her battle with pancreatic cancer. Two days later on September twenty-first, Molly Higgins, nanoengineer at Rivir Tower, died while performing her job. Rivir claimed in a written statement that Mrs. Higgins’s death, while regrettable, was the result of her own negligence. She had failed to follow safety protocols, and her hair was caught in an industrial machine.
“At first, the tragic stories of these two women seemed unconnected. However, talk of a secret Rivir project, code-named PRIME, quickly spread across the web when the infamous Sapien Movement published a series of stolen documents. The apparent cause of Molly Higgins’s death shifted from industrial accident to homicide as an unlikely suspect emerged—a next-generation robot modeled after the late Charlotte Nobunaga.”
Charlie’s yearbook photo crossfaded to a low-angle snapshot of a three-story nanoengineering facility. In the center of the room sat an enormous tank of water, with wires and hoses extending in every direction.
“Infamous Sapien Movement.” Yuri shook his head. “I can’t wait until I never have to hear that phrase again.”
Charlie stared at the snapshot on display, and all of her memories came rushing back. Jude’s facility tour, PRIME in the nanobath, Alan’s last-minute betrayal…everything. She felt dizzy. Sick. Violated. “They actually did it,” she whispered.
“You’re the one who signed your identity away.”
“I didn’t—” Charlie was about to tell him that she hadn’t signed anything. Her Shadow had betrayed her, and Rivir had scanned her brain without permission. But she didn’t want to give the Sapiens any reason to believe she was on their side.
“What?”
Charlie scrambled to change to subject. Molly Higgins. Wasn’t she the Bethea engineer Charlie met in the nanobath room? “I killed a person?”
“You didn’t. Your zombie surrogate did. Flattened a woman’s head like a pancake.” Yuri skipped ahead in the video. “This next part’s boring. A lot of ‘Charlie was such a nice, quiet person; she wouldn’t hurt a fly’ kind of bullshit.” When he resumed the clip, the scenery had changed.
Carmella Casella was at her desk, video-conferencing with a stout man in his 50s. According to an ID graphic, his name was Darius Little, a representative for the Sapien Movement.
“A woman dies in a most horrible way, and all we get from Rivir is a curt written statement,” Darius railed. “Why haven’t we heard from Jude? She needs to answer for her crimes.”
“Of which you have no proof,” Carmella replied, maintaining a calm reporter’s poise.
Darius laughed. “I know what passes for journalism at Vantage. But even you can’t ignore the truth. We’ve put it on a silver platter. Engineering documents, internal e-mails, pictures—”
“But nothing explicitly tying the robot to Molly Higgins’s death.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about what we do know. We know the zombie surrogate exists. We know it’s inherently unstable. With their PRIME Project, Rivir intends to replicate the brain’s neural code, but what they don’t understand is consciousness is not in the code. Consciousness manifests from a deeper, subatomic level. Our founder, Bob Sapio, has written extensively on this subject. He has warned of the dangers of biotech augmentation. If Jude Adler had only listened to him, Molly Higgins would still be alive today—”
At a certain point, Charlie stopped listening to the broadcast. Her body trembled as she fought back the rush of old hope. This is not Bridge, she repeated to herself. Bridge is dead. And as she pushed Bridge from her mind, she allowed a new hope to sneak in. “Where is my sister?” she blurted. Sister. The word jumped off her tongue, and Charlie instantly recognized what the robot meant to her. PRIME was her sister, and she was in trouble.
Yuri chuckled. “Your ‘sister’ should be melted down into ball bearings. But our source on the inside says they’re running tests on it in their R&D lab.”
Charlie had to see her father immediately. He would know the story with PRIME. He would know how to get her out of there. “Stop the car!”
“I told you, that’s not gonna happen.”
“I don’t want to be your stupid mascot.”
“Why are you angry at us? Rivir stole your life.”
Charlie’s eyes darted for an exit strategy. The San Francisco Bay stretched along the right side of the freeway. Hovering high above the bay were a few white spheres—Pollys, the region’s ubiquitous police drones. Why hadn’t any of them locked onto the Sapien getaway car? Charlie checked the dashboard and saw a gaping hole where the nav computer used to be. Shit. So, that’s why they were driving manually.
The Pollys couldn’t detect their digital footprint, but perhaps they might notice a sudden collision. Charlie reached over the driver’s seat and tugged hard on the wheel. The Sapien car veered past the lane divider and clipped a taxi. The taxi skidded out and collided into another car, creating a pileup.
The Sapien driver elbowed Charlie in the face as he struggled to pull the car out of a fishtail. Charlie’s fingers slipped from the wheel, and she fell on top of Nicola.
Nicola grabbed Charlie by the neck and pinned her to the seat. She pulled a handgun from behind her back and placed the cold barrel against Charlie’s forehead. “I don’t care how much Bob wants you,” Nicola said. “If you ever do anything like that again, I will not hesitate to pull the trigger.”
Charlie found it impossible to speak through Nicola’s stranglehold. She could only plead with her eyes, but Nicola’s face was an impenetrable wall—it betrayed no anger, even as her fingertips threatened to puncture right through Charlie’s throat.
“Polly!” the driver screamed.
Nicola released Charlie’s neck.
Charlie gasped. She rolled onto her stomach to ease her hacking fit. Tears spilled from her eyes. When she finally regained control of her lungs, she discovered that the rest of the car was in a panic.
“What do I do? What do I do?” The driver rode the gas and brake pedals like a seesaw, forcing everyone into a stomach-churning sway. “We’re going to jail!”
“Jesse! We’re not going to jail,” Yuri said, though he didn’t sound too sure himself. He turned to Nicola. “Where the hell is your brother? It’s his job to handle the Pollys.”
“On his way,” Nicola replied.
Charlie caught a glance of the drone as it zipped above the Sapien getaway car. Like all Pollys, it looked like a giant floating golf ball—a three-foot-wide polyhedron comprised of about a hundred interlocking plates.
“It can’t stop us, can it?” Jesse fretted. “I mean, we ripped out the computer.”
“Not directly,” Charlie chimed in. She already knew how this scenario would play out.
Apparently, so did Nicola, who put on a pair of AR glasses and summoned her Shadow, “Jefferson, spin, all eyes.”
Yuri nodded and summoned his own Shadow, “Franklin, spin, all eyes.” Suddenly, the car was crowded with US founding fathers.
“Shit, they’re closing in on us,” Jesse said. Brake lights flashed from the car ahead of them. Jesse tried to maneuver around it, but the car blocked him at every turn. Other cars approached from the sides and rear. Just as Charlie predicted, the Polly had gained control of the surrounding traffic and was attempting to corral the Sapien getaway vehicle. After a few hits to the fender, Jesse was forced to stop the car.
“We should run now,” Jesse said. “It’s only one Polly. We should run. We can outrun it, right? We should run before the cops come. Right?”
“Jesse!” Nicola shouted. Her patience had reached its limit.
“It’s a bad idea,” Yuri explained. “Even if we all run in separate directions, the Polly will still zap one of us. It could easily be you. My Uncle Fedor got zapped a few months ago. I was there. Every single muscle in his body seized and his eyes popped out of their sockets. When the police finally dragged him to the car, his face was caked with blood and pus. To this day, he still gets tremors. Says he wishes he had just taken an old-fashioned bullet.”
Jesse’s mouth gaped open in horror, much to Yuri’s amusement.
Traffic slowed to a halt, and the highway fell silent. With cautious uncertainty, the nearby motorists got out of their cars and ran for the edge of the road. For those who weren’t familiar with the drill, the Polly issued a command in its booming, authoritative voice: “CITIZENS, THIS IS NOW A POLICE QUARANTINE ZONE. PLEASE EXIT YOUR VEHICLES AND WALK QUICKLY TO A SAFE DISTANCE AWAY FROM THE AREA.”
The Sapiens were trapped on all sides by four other cars. “We are fully committed now,” Yuri said. He placed a hand on Jesse’s shoulder. “Remember, today we may be criminals. But history will look kindly on us.” His attempt to comfort the kid was dashed by the approaching sirens. A fleet of cop cars rushed to the scene. In a highly orchestrated fashion, both the Polly and the cops got to work setting up a large roadblock consisting of civilian and police vehicles.
“TO THE PASSENGERS OF THE BLUE FORD, LICENSE PLATE NUMBER 627GAT3: PLEASE EXIT YOUR VEHICLE SLOWLY WITH YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEADS.”
Yuri cracked his window open and shouted, “We’ve pulled a hostage from the Control-Z truck. Do not come any closer, or we will kill her.”
Charlie threw a sharp glare in Yuri’s direction.
“Okay, Jefferson, Franklin, initialize plan B,” Nicola said. “I want the six.”
“Target acquired,” Thomas Jefferson droned. “Beginning decryption.”
Charlie stared at Nicola incredulously. “You’re not gonna try to hack a Polly with a Shadow?”
Yuri snorted. “Please. Who do you take us for? The Moonies? Even with Tom and Benji combined, it would take longer than the entire lifespan of the universe to hack a Polly.”
“Then what are you doing?”
Yuri was about to answer, but Benjamin Franklin interrupted, “The six is a tough one. The three has much lighter encryption.”
“Yuri, tell your Shadow to shut up and do its job,” Nicola said.
“Shut up, Benji,” Yuri said. “We want the six.”
A policeman’s voice resonated from a loudspeaker behind the barricade: “This is Captain Lance Reid with the California Highway Patrol. We want confirmation that you indeed have a hostage.”
“Ignore him,” Nicola said.
“Are you sure?” Charlie grinned. “I can go out there and make his confirmation—it really wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Hush, you,” Yuri snapped. He turned to Nicola and said, “We still have a couple minutes to go. Do you think it’s wise to stall them for that long?”
“I’ll call my brother,” Nicola said. “Jefferson, patch me through.”
“Calling,” Thomas Jefferson said as he placed his index finger against his ear. A few seconds later, he pointed that same finger at Nicola. “You have audio with Liam Byrne.”
“We’re crunched for time,” Nicola told her brother. “You need to get here in…” She glanced up to Yuri.
“About two and a half minutes,” Yuri responded.
“About two and half minutes…Okay…End call.”
“He’s coming?” Yuri asked.
“Yes, and we’d better be ready for him. Otherwise, he’s a sitting duck.”
The two Sapiens continued to work their Shadows, ignoring all police requests. Charlie had to admit she was getting caught up in the excitement, torn between wanting to see them fail and wanting to see the operation play out.
Finally, Thomas Jefferson announced, “We have the six.”
“Good,” Nicola said. “Roll it over to the nine position.”
The car behind them rolled out of the wagon circle and reparked next to the vehicle in the nine o’clock position.
Just then, a sonic boom shook the Sapien car from above. Everyone jumped as high-velocity Polly shards battered the roof and cracked the windshield. In the wake of the explosion, a motorcycle approached the car. “Liam’s here,” Nicola said. For the first time, Charlie detected emotion in the young woman’s face: pride.
Nicola yanked the AR glasses off Charlie’s face and slapped a helmet on her head. “I’d tell you it’s for your safety,” she said, “but really, it’s so nobody finds out who you are.”
“Alright, Jesse,” Yuri said to the petrified kid. “This is your big moment. You remember what to do?”
“Um…yeah.” Jesse’s tight auburn curls bounced with each nervous nod. He swallowed hard and muttered, “I’m gonna die,” as he exited the vehicle. He opened Charlie’s door from the outside and leaned in. “Is it okay if I pick you up?”
