Chapter 17 #2
“I can pick a lock, but I can’t fake bio-scanners,” Lyra said.
I sighed and pressed my head against the door. “Don’t tell me we came all this way for nothing.”
Lyra examined the fingerprint screen. “Damn, the doctor was thorough. She even wiped away her fingerprints so I couldn’t even try to lift them.”
“And that would still leave the iris scanner,” I said.
I have a hypothesis. Try your credentials.
I shrugged. “Guess it won’t hurt.”
I pressed my thumb against the scanner, and it glowed red. The eye reader lit up. I held my eye close to the scanner as a thin blue line of light shone. Several seconds passed before the scanner turned green, and the door clicked.
Lyra stiffened. “How’d you do that?”
“I have no idea,” I said, grabbing the door handle and stepping inside.
The scanner was set to recognize my uniquely nonhuman energy in addition to Dr. Katz’s biosignature.
The lights came on automatically. The storage unit was only twenty feet wide, but it must’ve been a hundred feet deep, likely designed for storing mining equipment.
Every inch of wall for that hundred feet on both sides was lined with overflowing shelves.
There was a lot of stuff that looked technical in nature: tablets, computers, and scanners.
But there were just as many medical things.
At the far end was a lab, and I kid you not, it looked just like a mad scientist’s lab.
A gurney stood there—it looked unused at least—surrounded by monitors and glass coolers filled with syringes, among other things.
Before that sat the highest tech workstation I’d ever seen, but since the only other workstation I’d seen was Franklin’s, that’s not saying much.
This one was odd, however, in that it sat within a mesh cage.
Next to the other wall was another cot. I couldn’t tell if it’d been used since the blankets were tucked tightly in. The wall behind the cot had clothes, food, and other basic necessities. A portable bathroom stood off to the side, an obelisk inside the otherwise white lab.
“Welcome, Aether,” the computer system announced.
“Uh, who’s Aether?” I asked.
“This system recognizes Aether within the human carrier, Callum Bennett. The carrier has been added as a fully authorized user of all systems in this facility,” it answered.
It is speaking to me. Apparently, it knows me as Aether, although I have no memory of such nomenclature assigned to me. I prefer the name you gave me as my memory protocols retain all uses of it.
“Good, because I wasn’t going to call you that, anyway. It sounds like something a high-towner would come up with.”
Dr. Katz lived in Aberdeen. Though, she originated from TerraSoft Premier.
“Even worse.” Noticing a shelf with boxes of meal bars, I started walking toward them.
Lyra entered the lab right after me. “Wow, this is amazing.”
An alarm sounded. “Intruder Alert.”
I spun around to see a box of light grids tightly envelope Lyra.
She reached out to touch the light. Her skin sizzled, and she yanked her hand to her chest. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised Katz had good security based on everything she has in here.
I don’t suppose your amp can figure a way out of this, can you? ”
You can instruct the system to release her.
“Uh, system, release her. And shut off those alarms.”
The grids and alarms instantly disappeared. “User Lyra Thorne has been granted view-only access to systems in this facility.”
Lyra relaxed. “That was easier than I expected.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I said.
She strode past me and toward the workstation. “Even better, we won’t have to figure out how to hack her systems for information.”
As I walked toward the shelves of food, I glanced toward the screens, which had come online when the lights did. “System, how much access do I have?”
“Unlimited, with a narrow set of restrictions for Aether’s safety,” the system replied.
“That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.” Lyra opened the cage door and stepped inside. Before she closed the door, she asked, “Are you coming?”
I grabbed an entire box of bars—enough to feed someone for a month if they rationed them—and hustled over. She closed the gate behind me.
I eyed the mesh fencing that totally enveloped the workstation. “What’s up with this cage?” It creeped me out.
It is a Faraday cage.
“It’s a Faraday cage,” Lyra answered. “It means that the system is isolated from the outside network—it’s secure—and that’s a very good thing. We can play all we want here with no risk having our network activity trigger any alarms.”
“As long as it doesn’t lock us inside,” I added, still not comfortable in being inside a cage even if I did put myself in it.
“It’ll be fine,” she said, smirking, before turning to the workstation and rubbing her hands together.
“All right. Let’s get some answers, shall we?
” She took a seat at the workstation and tapped the keyboard.
Nothing happened. She tried it again, but the screens remained unchained, the Fabled Ventures logo displayed large in the center of each one.
She spun in her chair and glanced wryly at me.
I asked, “System, grant Lyra full system access.”
“I cannot do that. It is against my programming. My maker prevented any users beyond Ana Katz, Aether, and Aether’s carrier to be added to the system. User Lyra Thorne is not permitted.”
Lyra stood and dramatically gestured to the chair. “I guess that means you’ll have to run the queries.”
I took a seat, while Lyra watched over my shoulder. The screens morphed into pages of code without me pressing a key. “At least it looks like the system plays nice with me.”
“Ask it to pull all data that’s related to Softbiotics,” she said. “Also, Dr. Katz told Kynan once that she kept journals. Pull all those, too.”
Query it to access all data pertinent to me. Have the data scroll down a monitor. I need you to watch the monitors, so I can copy all the data.
I wanted to cup my ears. “Whoa, wait. One at a time.”
The system is a HS9900. It can handle up to twelve hundred data queries simultaneously.
However, we are restricted to the six monitors since the only manner for me to currently copy data is through your senses, and vision is the most efficient as I cannot physically connect to the system directly.
I will begin building that feature for our next upgrade.
I relayed the queries—all three of them—to the system, and data began to scroll down three of the screens.
Millions of lines of data scrolled, far too fast for any human to read…
not that I could read Byte’s queries, anyway—it had the data reported in machine language rather than in English to speed up the process.
Lyra stepped forward with a tiny memory drive and plugged it in.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Copying the data, of course. You don’t think I can actually read this fast, do you?”
Cal, please stay focused so I can copy all data being displayed.
I sighed, unwrapping the first meal bar—umami flavored, whatever that meant—and took a bite. It was kind of salty but also had an almost-meaty flavor to it. I liked it. I leaned back, blankly staring ahead. “This is going to take a while.”
Lyra found us drinks, and we ate as two screens displayed the query results Lyra asked for.
Byte, on the other hand, only cared to learn about itself, and had me ask queries that had all six screens scrolling data.
I wanted both sets of data: Softbiotics’ weaknesses that Lyra sought and exactly what it was about the amp inside my head that made it so special.
I tossed the empty wrapper from the meal bar into a mini incendiary trash can sitting on the desk—Dr. Katz was, if anything, a neat freak. The wrapper—my third one—was incinerated into nothing after the lid closed.
I leaned back, still staring at all the screens, trying to keep my eyes open, but now that I had food in my stomach, that cot behind me was becoming more and more enticing.
“Finding anything good?” I asked to no one in particular.
“I’m mostly just copying everything to review later,” Lyra began.
She’d had me get the data in English so humans could understand it and would randomly pause the scrolling by touching the screen to read a bit.
“But this is a gold mine. I swear Katz was planning on bringing down Softbiotics completely on her own. She copied anything and everything she could from Softbiotics’ internal systems. I mean, there are lists of all the key players, locations of all their facilities, even details on all their current projects, at least the ones she knew about. ”
“Wait, locations of all their facilities?” I blurted, leaning forward.
“It sure looks like it.”
“Even the ones where they send the people they disappear?”
She considered the question before answering, “Yes, I would think so. Her data includes what each facility is used for, so it might even include rosters.” She could tell I perked up because she added, “I brought an extra drive if you want to make a copy of this for yourself.”
I tapped my temple. “I brought an extra one, too.”
I have two hours, four minutes, and three seconds of data feeds yet to read. Then, I can begin processing and analyzing. That will require an additional nine hours for a first pass to identify additional queries to ask.
Two hours? Nine hours? “Why don’t you just copy everything the system has while you’re at it.” We’d already been at it for a couple of hours. I didn’t think I’d ever sat still this long in my life.