Chapter 9 #2
I turned back to the door and hurriedly knocked three times. When it didn’t open, I turned back to him.
“Knock thrice, once you knock, you say the word. Only then will you be heard.”
“What word?”
He wagged his finger.
I clenched my jaw and turned back to the door. “Uh, please?” Nothing. “Open sesame?” For fuck’s sake. “Just let me in already. Grandmother sent me.”
A ping reverberated through my head.
No, no, no.
The emergency update is prepared. I am installing it now. Please be patient.
And just like that, I slammed into a figurative brick wall.
I slumped against the door and slid to my knees.
I struggled to find my breath. I was worse off than I ever had been before I got Byte.
My entire body felt like I’d been run over by a dozen barrels of acid.
I managed to knock three times despite my hand feeling heavier than a sledgehammer.
The door opened, which I never would’ve noticed in my current state except that my entire weight was propped against it, so I fell forward. My head bounced off the floor—it hurt.
“Grandmother, huh?” It was a woman’s voice, but I didn’t have the energy to look up. “What’s wrong with you? Listen, buddy, if you got something contagious?—”
“It’s my amp,” I managed to say.
I felt her eyes on me for what seemed like twenty minutes even though it was probably only one before she said, “C’mon, Jacob. He’s too big for me to move him.”
“I got a bad feeling about him, Andra. I say we leave him.”
“Just help me already,” she said.
I felt two pairs of hands grab me by my arms, and I was dragged inside.
It was dark and cool, and I must’ve drifted off for a minute or two because when I came back, I was sitting in a chair, my hands tied behind my back.
Byte still wasn’t back, and I didn’t have the energy to lift my head even though I tried.
“What’s wrong with you?” The woman’s voice again.
“Amp… upgrading,” I managed to say. With my head leaning forward, I might’ve drooled.
“Don’t be stupid. Amps don’t upgrade,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Mine does.” If she’d been anyone else, I never would’ve mentioned that I had an amp, but Grandmother had sent me here, and if Grandmother trusted this individual, I trusted her… assuming this woman was even the person I was sent to find.
I struggled weakly at my restraints, but it only made me cough.
“He’s a lunger. Let’s hope that’s the only disease he brought with him. I’m running low on penicillin.”
I recognized the voice of the crazy bum. He didn’t sound so crazy now.
The woman lifted my head by my hair, and I saw that she was pale with short, spiky, bright orange hair. She lightly slapped my face. “C’mon, stay with me. You got my attention if that amp of yours can really upgrade. So how about we start with you telling me exactly how you found me.”
“Grandmother sent me,” I managed.
There was a pause. “Well, I guess she’s calling in my mark. It’d been long enough, I wondered if she forgot. All right, fella. What’s your name?”
“Cal.”
“Cal who? I need a full name,” she said.
“Bennett… Cal Bennet.”
I heard typing on a keyboard. Several seconds passed and then she cursed. “You’re on the watchdog list, you know that, Callum Bennett? They say you killed a high-towner.”
I tried to shake my head, but I couldn’t. “Enforcers… killed her.”
“Well, the truth is whatever the enforcers say it is, and they’re great at saying whatever gets them what they want.
In your case, someone must want to find you—or shut you up—pretty bad.
With that kind of warrant on your head, every drone in a hundred miles will be on the alert to find you, so you’d best stay underground.
Is that why Grandmother sent you to me, to delete your record? ”
I managed to shake my head again. “The woman they killed—she stuck this amp in my head.” It was a struggle to speak, and I had to take a couple of breaths to recover.
“You mean the doctor who implanted the amp right after you were born?”
“Just got it last night.”
She laughed and then roughly checked my head and neck. “All right, I’ll bite. Maybe they have finally figured out how to implant amps into fully developed brains. It’d be a goldmine for whoever owns the tech. I’ve heard rumors they were trying to figure it out. But I don’t see any incision sites.”
“Through… my ear,” I said.
She in no way looked like she believed me. She did look like she thought I was high on some kind of drug. “If you say so. So tell me about this woman who implanted the amp. If she’s on TerraSoft-11, she’s obviously a Softbiotics engineer, then. What’s her name?”
“No idea.”
“Some help you are. Did you sign up for some kind of test procedure? Why’d she implant an amp in your head?”
It took too much energy to tell her the story, so I simply replied, “Dunno.”
“All right, an adult—low-towner at that—was given an amp, but not just any amp—a really freaking special amp if it’s capable of upgrading. None of that makes any sense.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I managed to get out.
“All right, I’m not buying your story, but color me intrigued. If you don’t mind, I’m going to plug you in so I can take a look at that amp of yours.”
I managed a weak nod. “You’re Skeleton Key?”
She smiled. “That’s my handle; don’t wear it out. And if you tell anyone you talked to me, I will see that the rest of your life will be extremely miserable. If you try to screw me over, I have no qualms in turning you over to the enforcers myself. Got it?”
I noticed Jacob sitting backward in a chair, watching me. His hands were propped on the back of the chair, and they had dried paint on them. I wondered if he had anything to do with the graffiti on the walls.
“And since I’m the hacker in this room, I’m going to find out everything there is to know about that lil ole amp currently frying in that brainpan of yours and separate fact from fiction. Go ahead and untie him, Jacob.”
“We don’t know him,” the crazy bum said.
“But Grandmother does, and besides, look at him. He’s not going anywhere. That amp’s killing him. Untie him.”
Jacob grumbled, then shoved out of his seat and eyed me suspiciously before untying my hands.
I almost fell out of my chair since the restraints had helped keep me in place.
I gripped the armrests to hold myself up while Andra attached patches to my temples.
Thin cables draped from them. Then she took a seat at a desk lined with gray computer cubes and at least six monitors on the wall in front of her.
One of the monitors showed the hallway outside her door.
Another hallway was in a second video feed, but I didn’t recognize the graffiti.
The rest of the monitors displayed text—or code, more likely—that seemed to stream down the screens.
One of the screens changed to a pixelated display of gray soup that was constantly changing, like she was zooming in on something. Soon, I could make out tiny tendrils of blue light in the gray.
She leaned forward, blocking some of the screen.
“Whoa. I’ve never seen an amp like this before.
See those strings? Regular amps are basically glued to the cerebral cortex, but this amp—I haven’t even found the amp’s ‘body’ yet—this thing has these tendrils weaving into every part of your brain.
At least, I assume that’s the amp unless there’s something else going on in your head that you’re not telling me. ”
I shook my head. “Just an amp.”
“Well, there’s nothing ‘just’ about it. This is like nothing out there. Bionanites shoot out little pods like sperm. But amps—they don’t do this. It reminds me more like a fungus, if the fungus was biotech rather than natural.”
I grew uneasier as the images moved—the strands were everywhere . There must’ve been thousands of them inside my head, and they seemed to be growing longer by the second. Were they in the rest of my body, too?
“There we go. Found it.” Andra zoomed in on a sphere of blue light that seemed to shift and move like a drop of gel.
As she zoomed, I noticed the orb wasn’t solid blue—only the outer “shell” was.
Inside were pinks and reds of what made me think of a beating heart, if that heart was artificial and wildly unsettling.
She whistled. “It’s a form of liquitech. At least that’s what I think it is. I’ve only read about it on the nets. To see it in real life… it’s incredible.”
Yeah, incredibly unnerving.
She typed, and the blue of Byte’s outer shell grew darker. “Interesting. It has some decent firewall protection. I didn’t expect that for it being offline. You said it goes offline to upgrade?”
“Told me it goes into standby.” I closed my eyes, struggling to stay focused, not that it felt like it made any difference.
“Standby. That’s makes more sense—that’s why the firewalls are still active.
So it still has some baseline processes running then.
Good thing, too. With those strings everywhere, it’s no wonder you crash when it goes into standby mode.
I’d bet you wouldn’t even be conscious, maybe not even alive, if it dropped fully offline.
I’m hoping you weren’t here to ask me to take it out because that’s not happening.
This amp is one hundred percent weaved into you.
But calling it an amp is like calling a human some single-cell organism.
It’s light-years ahead of any amp on the market.
It’s not even designed like an amp. It’s living technology, maybe even a true bioengineered cybernetic system.
I don’t know what I’m looking at, but it’s no amp. ”
“Great,” I muttered dryly.
“Look at the bright side. You’ve got a piece of incredibly awesome liquitech inside you that no one can take.”
“They could kill me,” I pointed out.