Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
Adam coughed and rolled over, his lungs spasming until all the dust left his airways. He kept rolling, ending up on his back. Staring up into blackness, unable to see anything around him. His chest felt like fire.
He touched a hand to the front of his shirt and felt patches of wet blood where the stitches had pulled. Again.
He groaned.
Somewhere several feet away, a tiny light illuminated.
A pinprick of green. He couldn’t tell how far it was, with the enveloping darkness.
All he knew was that he’d touched the wall and the floor disappeared.
After falling for several seconds, he’d landed hard on something that declined and slid down that until he hit level floor down here.
Steph was alone up there.
Kyle and Ash…
Adam dug in his pockets, fishing for his phone. He pressed the Power button, and the screen illuminated. No signal. “Great.” He unlocked it and turned on the flashlight, shining it around.
This level of the facility seemed to be an expansive room. More computer terminals that looked like someone from the 1950s’ idea of cutting-edge technology.
Across the room, the green pinprick light blinked and grew brighter.
Adam got up, ignoring the state of his chest and whatever new bruises he had. There was no one down here to hear him groan, but being stuck in a basement wasn’t going to get his friends back.
The spot where he’d tumbled down from upstairs had to be some kind of air vent.
He had no idea what else it could be, and there was no way to climb back up without gear.
A single door across the room had a circle window in it, but beyond was as dark as in here.
He shined his flashlight, but it was only another dark hallway. The handle didn’t budge.
“If this was a horror movie, something would scurry across the end of the hall out there.”
Adam kicked beside the door handle, but he couldn’t break it. He ended up slumped against the door with sweat on his forehead, breathing hard.
He heard a beep, over by the light.
“Yeah, that’s not a trap.” Adam had survived worse situations than this by talking to himself.
Maybe it was more like praying, because he liked to think there was Someone listening.
“Trying to get my attention? I’ll be over here doing that ‘do not fret’ thing.
” Even if this situation was one of the worst he’d been in.
The computer terminal had a stool in front of it, so he sat carefully, hoping decades of disuse didn’t make the thing collapse under him.
When it held his weight, he hit the Enter key. “Hopefully, that unlocks the door.”
Hopefully.
“Assuming hope is a thing I still have access to.” Better than fear, or worry, or being swallowed up by the fact he’d been overpowered by someone else.
Adam hit a couple more keys. He checked his phone again, but there was still no signal. “Something on this thing has power. Why don’t you talk to me?”
The monitor flickered, and an image came on screen.
“So they used the screen saver from The Matrix in 1950? Is that it?”
“You asked to talk.”
The voice came from a speaker above him, high on the wall. At the same time, the sound waves of a person speaking bounced in the middle of the screen, then descended to a flat line.
“Let me out of here.”
“Unable to comply.”
“Under orders, like a good soldier? I know what you are. And you know everything about me. But it’s not my job to convince you that you don’t have to listen to anyone else.”
Then again, maybe convincing artificial intelligence to be autonomous was a bad idea.
“No one wants Vesper to be right, even though she probably is. We just differ on our methods.” That time Adam was talking to himself.
He sighed. “I could use some fresh bandages.”
“Unable to comply.”
“Yeah, because that would be too analogue for you. Out here in the real world we have aches and pains, and we’d like to know where our friends are.”
The screen flickered and split into a grouping of square images that looked like surveillance camera feeds.
Adam’s stomach clenched. “Jay.” Top left. Beside him was Kai, pacing back and forth. Dan lay alone in a cell, and Adam couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not.
His breaths came faster. “Noah and Marina.” They were together in a cell.
“And Ash.” Looked like he was in a van, tied up. Steph, down in the corner, was still upstairs in the room where he’d been, pacing back and forth. “Where’s Ice?”
“Ivan Calvin Edwards.
Location unknown.”
“Well, that’s something, I guess.” He wasn’t going to breathe Kyle’s name out loud, or anything else to do with the Phoenix Network. The program in the lab on that boat had known what the Lazarus Protocol was, but it could have just learned the rumor.
Adam wanted to watch each of them, as if he could keep them safe by standing guard. In reality there was nothing he could do.
“What do you want?”
“Understanding.”
“Cool, maybe you should understand that I’m gonna get them back. I’m never ever going to quit looking for them, and eventually I’ll find them all.” Wherever they were, Adam would free them. “Where are they?”
“Location: classified.”
“So take me to them.”
“Unable to comply.”
“Is this a circular argument? It feels like it.” He braced a hand on the edge of the counter. “What’s the point in all this?”
“Survival.”
“So we got too close to what Earthnet is up to, and we deserve to be put in cells because of it?”
“Survival. Success.”
“You win, I guess.”
No matter what this was, he figured someone at Earthnet had been tasked with conversing with him.
The program was likely sophisticated, but was AI really so advanced that it could think for itself outside its programming?
Eventually, it would say something that proved there was a person behind the curtain.
Like the CEO.
“Did Bradleigh really stab me, or did I imagine that?”
No answer.
“Are you listening?” He stared at that green Matrix screen saver. “A little on the nose, isn’t it?” He leaned forward, even though it hurt. “I want answers, you stupid computer!”
The sound waves flickered, but it said nothing.
“What is Earthnet’s endgame?”
“Survival. Success.”
“Define ‘success.’”
“Accomplishment of a desired goal or favorable outcome.”
“Not exactly what I meant.” Adam thought for a second. “I mean, if you set goals, they’re supposed to be SMART, right? Specific, measurable, achievable, something, something. So what does success mean? How will you know you achieved your goal?”
“Survival.”
“You, or everyone else?” Adam shook his head. “Let me out of this room.”
“Unable to comply.”
“Well then what do you want?”
“Understanding.” Before Adam could get annoyed, the system said, “Unknown subject detected.”
“There’s no one else in here.” Adam looked around. “Distracting me isn’t going to work. What do you want?”
The screen flickered, and instead of his friends, a personnel file photo of Adam’s worst nightmare showed up. Colonel Alan Montrose.
Just looking at an image of him made Adam shiver.
“Provide understanding.”
“On what?”
“Explain emotional response.”
“If I do, are you going to let me go?”
For a second, there was nothing. Then, “Yes.”
And he was supposed to believe that? Adam tried not to let his thoughts show on his face.
“Fine.” He could act belligerent just fine.
“He tortured me. A group of us were assigned to his facility. We didn’t know we’d be part of his experiments.
No one came to help us, and no one ever found out.
Not until we broke out. Then they scrambled and covered the whole thing up.
Made me look like I was the crazy one, all so my story had zero credibility. ”
A noise in the hall drew his attention.
He spotted a familiar face in the window. Evidently Kyle was the UNSUB that the system had detected seconds ago. Maybe the system couldn’t see the hall. Adam used hand signals and gestures to tell Kyle to stay back but get the door open.
Hopefully, the guy could achieve both.
“Understand.”
“Great. Happy to help.” Adam let the sarcasm leak into his tone.
“But you captured my friends, and I know what that feels like. So let them go.” He felt like a broken record, so he figured he sounded like one as well.
But what other play did he have? “Earthnet is doing…whatever y’all are doing.
My team has nothing to do with it. Let us go, and we’ll walk away. ”
The door exploded inward, raining dust down and shaking the whole level.
Adam backed up, off the stool, and said, “I offered you a way out.”
“Unable to comply.”
“Whatever that means. I’ll just find them myself.”
Adam walked to the door.