Chapter 6
The summer started moving fast, with Seb spending as much time as he could working.
Whether it was writing novels in order to start building his ‘fortunes’, or plotting with Al to…
do whatever the opposite of taking over the world was, he supposed.
Either way, he spent a lot of time on one computer or the other.
Not all of it, however.
Seb knew that his mother would probably worry herself sick if he just entirely cut off any outside activities, and honestly he needed to keep fit anyway, so he took some beach days with his friends and tried to enjoy himself, but more and more he was slipping away from them, or they from him.
He didn’t know which, but it didn’t matter all that much, he supposed. It was happening.
This time around won’t be the same, for better or worse.
Seb was focused. He had too much to do to maximize his ‘sims playthrough’ right now to worry about anything as minor as having friends during his second childhood.
He’d already sent out a dozen short stories, though those were never his best sort of work, and a single novel to a publisher.
The next book was in the can already, he just needed to get it printed out so he could mail it out to another house.
When they were rejected, he’d just swap addresses and send them out again…
probably with a third one by that point.
The 80s and 90s are the height of the big publishing houses, to get my foot in the door I need to get through the Gatekeepers. Never had much luck with that the first time around, though I admittedly didn’t try very hard.
He’d sold a couple shorts already, enough to make a few hundred bucks. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Along with his own bank account, co-signed by his mother of course, he’d also mailed out for a few catalogs to get himself started.
The Edmund Scientific book was a thick one, resting on the corner of his small desk now with the Radio Shack catalog open across it. On the other side his brand spanking new McMaster-Carr book was taking up a quarter of the space to his left.
The pieces he needed didn’t exactly exist, but there were older versions that would work for the most part. Unfortunately, a couple of the components weren’t going to do his bank account any favors.
Especially not if I have to justify every purchase through my mom, Seb thought with wry amusement.
He had time, though. About the only thing he had for now, but it was something he could work with.
Good thing, since not only do I have to get the money for these things… I also need to snail mail the order out and wait for it to come back the same way, Seb thought wryly.
There was nothing to it, though, but to get moving and just do it.
Still, there were other things that he could get some more immediate satisfaction out of, he knew as he leaned back and looked around surreptitiously to see if his mom was around. The coast being clear, Seb flicked open his interface to Al.
“Al, anything new from the transmissions.”
“Yes, Mein Herr. I have located three more numbers stations using the encoding method of the first.”
“Huh,” Seb said quietly to himself. “They don’t know we broke their code.”
“I believe that to be… incorrect, Mein Herr.”
Seb looked up sharply, “Wait. Why?”
“Of the three stations I am monitoring, the two later discoveries appear to be intentionally inviting a response.”
“What do you mean? How are they inviting anything?”
The VI took a moment to process before responding, “They appear to be attempting to recreate the scenario from Operation El Dorado, using secure data to mark each station.”
Seb frowned, “Mark it? So if someone moves on it, they’ll be able to narrow down the actor based on who had access?”
“Precisely, Mein Herr.”
“That means they have full access to… to what? NATO records?” Seb blinked, “ The American databases?”
“Yes.”
“Which?”
“Both, Mein Herr, at the very least. I have some indications that they’re fully infiltrated in the Soviet systems as well, but unfortunately the intelligence from those years rarely were digitized and thus were not part of my training data.”
Seb covered his eyes, rubbing at his temples and the bridge of his nose as he considered that. If the invaders were already that deep in the world governments he wasn’t sure that there was anything he could do.
He already knew that revealing himself was out. The only way the governments could be this badly compromised was if the invaders had humans working for them. Mere digital infiltration could never have pulled off what Al was describing.
Seb didn’t have a damned clue how that was even possible, every alien they’d ever seen… or that he knew of anyway, he supposed, were slathering beasts that killed easier than breathing.
That had always been an oddity, though. There was a lot of evidence that we were dealing with tool users. The inventory space alone always felt too damned coincidental, too much like manufactured tech when we examined the mechanism.
The aliens didn’t use silicone or factory mass produced equipment, but it didn’t feel like anything naturally evolved either.
It had been an old argument, and the one key thing that always derailed his belief that the aliens were a technological culture over an evolved one had been that no one had ever seen anything other than the slavering beasts.
But if those beasts were just the shock troops, did they have an infiltration corps too? Seb thought, his mouth dry. If they did… they would have been right with us, the whole time. I’d have worked with them!
His fitness tracking tech beeped as his heart rate spiked and he felt his chest tighten. Seb had to focus his breathing to slow everything down again, his brain racing a light second a minute.
The only thing he could be sure of now was that there was no one he could turn to.
He’d known it before, but now it sank in all the more real.
He was alone. Whatever else happened, there was nobody coming to bail him out. If he reached out, he’d either be treated like the kid he appeared or… much worse… he’d be believed and almost certainly killed out of hand the moment a whisper of it reached the wrong ear.
It was all on him.
*****
Eve was, as usual, caught between pride and worry as she smiled at her son while he worked on his latest story.
She’d been unsurprised when he decided he wanted to write.
Seb had always been a heavy reader, so it was natural at some point to want to tackle writing the sort of stories he’d spent so much of his life immersed in.
She had been surprised when he actually stuck to it, mind you.
Most of his previous interests had been flights of fantasy, but she had figured that was normal enough for a kid.
Not this time.
I can’t believe he’s already making money at it, She thought with genuine surprise still coloring her thoughts.
She put away the groceries as she paid attention to Seb out of the corner of her eyes. A few hundred dollars was nothing to sneeze at for a thirteen year old, for now it was some extra spending money and little else.
If he made much more, though, she would ensure that he placed a portion away for his future.
*****
Getting past a little crushing uncertainty was probably more impressive than it felt, but Seb didn’t have time to worry about the important stuff. He had a lot of small things to deal with before he could even start to tackle the big stuff.
That feels back asswards, but it is what it is I suppose.
He’d learned something useful in addition to important, though. It was important to know that the enemy had infiltrated world governments… but it was useful to know that they were willing, and able, to try and bait him into showing himself.
Might even have worked if I had better access to information than I do, Seb mused.
As it was, he had such a delay built into his actions that there was no point even pretending to rush.
He and Al could take all the time they needed to look for patterns.
In a decade, Seb knew well that time would compress on him.
Data would be coming faster, decisions would have to be made quickly…
and with faulty data more often than not.
The most useless knowledge anyone can have is the straight facts, two minutes after they would have done some good. The most useful knowledge is whatever you know when you need to make the decision.
If the enemy were trying to draw him out, that told him a lot more than he rather thought they would want him to know.
First, they’re more deeply entrenched than I ever would have believed.
They’re not working they’re way in, they’ve already made themselves at home, changed the locks, and forwarded their mail to the new address, Seb thought as he started working with some of the materials he’d grabbed from the local Radio Shack.
Soldering was a trick that he’d never picked up more than the basics of, but now it seemed like he would have plenty of time to master the technique. Using a breadboard Seb had prototyped the basic rig he would need to establish coordinates for his dimensional space rig.
The GPS constellation in orbit was enough for what he needed, but Seb would have to rig up his own military quality receiver to make it work. Not normally something that could be done, but with Al’s help he could bypass the Military degradation inflicted on civilian receivers at least.
That still limits me to not much better than a ten meter position gap, which isn’t great but I think it’s workable.
It was better than the civilian versions, which were currently sitting somewhere around a hundred meter diameter error margin. That would have been all but useless for his needs, requiring rather extreme efforts to safely secure the exit point.