Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Read online

  He slid the center desk drawer closed and scooped the mem chips and e-papers toward the edge of the desktop, dumping them all into the plastic bag he’d brought from the kitchen. Having physical backups would make data sorting easier in the immediate, while his crew spent valuable man-hours hacking the Everitts’ cloud storage. Chips were becoming a rarity, but he knew many mem addicts and memorialists preferred the hardware and the process of preparing their high. His crew would have time to sift through the data and glean whatever might be of importance.

  Standing in the hallway, Kaften debated going through Jonah’s room. After a moment’s indecision, he decided to let sleeping dogs lie. He wanted primary sources of information. If they got some stuff out of the man’s brain, then great. The last time he’d rooted around Jonah’s skull, he’d learned some very interesting things. Lightning rarely struck twice in the same spot, though, and the chips in the bag he carried were probably his best bet.

  “You done?” he asked Crassen.

  “Yeah, I think. The frags scrambled his noggin, but we might be able to get something out of him.”

  Crassen wound the data cord around his fingers, pocketed it, then stuffed the tablet into a pocket on the opposite thigh.

  Kaften wasn’t looking forward to another conversation with the suit. The higher-ups were expecting a status report in an hour. Grimly, he wondered if he would be out of a job before breakfast time. He shrugged off the thought, took a deep breath, and convinced himself to be unconcerned. His skill sets were always marketable, suits be damned.

  Chapter 6

  Jonah had once told Mesa that a good defense was a good offense. She had questioned the need for all her training, including the months on end of firearm safety courses, practicing at various target ranges. Although she had enjoyed the martial arts courses, she doubted it was a practical necessity. Jonah had been right, though. And it still hadn’t been enough.

  Sitting on a scarred wooden bench at the periphery of Nicklesville, she’d spent much of the morning hatching a plan with Rameez and Kaizhou. She wanted both of them to lie low, and both had refused. She worried less about Rameez, who had boarded a ship headed to a seastead community in the Pacific.

  “I’ve got safeguards in place,” Rameez said. “You do not need to worry about me.”

  Thinking he would be safely hidden in an independent oceanic nation-state, he was only too happy to help from afar and provide technical support. He assured Mesa that he could roam the netscape freely, using a collection of false idents and ping bots that would obscure his online trails.

  “I spent all night coding,” he said, a grim smile on his face and large black circles beneath both bloodshot eyes.

  A few seconds later, she and Kaizhou both received data packets filled with custom security apps: a personal firewall, private IP masks, and geotag clones that would randomly synch with any one of the world’s billion-plus users and obscure both their digital footprints and mask their real-world trails.

  That was the first layer of security. Higher-level masks hid all three of them behind backstopped false identities carrying composite hacks from various bank accounts and bitcoins, each further encoded with its own unique set of personal IPs that would shield both Mesa and Kaizhou’s current IP assignments.

  “You’ve muddled the waters nicely,” Kaizhou said, sounding impressed.

  Rameez smiled and gave them a mock salute. “Thank me after I’ve wreaked havoc with the city cams.”

  “Can you find out if anybody else has been rooting around in there?” Kaizhou asked.

  “Of course,” Rameez said bluntly.

  An hour later, he was able to determine that local authorities were unaware of the attack on the Everitt’s apartment and that they were not actively searching for Mesa.

  “But,” he said, the word pregnant with peril, “there is a passive search in place.”

  “Can you disable it?” Mesa asked.

  “Whoever coded it has some high kung-fu. He’s got self-replicating backdoors and tripwires all over the place.”

  “So you can’t disable it,” Mesa said, thinking, It’s a good thing I changed my look.

  “If I tried, it’d probably make a dozen more doors as a deterrent.”

  “Awesome,” Kaizhou said, sounding defeated.

  “The good news is, it’s all sourced to the same batch of images. They found some pretty pictures of you, Mesa.”

  “Terrific,” she said, lobbing him a smile.

  “I thought you said this was good news,” Kaizhou said.

  “It is,” he said. “Because I can go into the sources and make subtle changes, enough to force the filters to re-project and develop an altered image of you. Raise your cheekbones, curve your nostrils a bit. Nothing that would be too obvious unless they did a direct side-by-side comparison, but enough to make the computer think it’s a non-match to your actual appearance.”

  “Awesome,” Kaizhou said, perking up a bit.

  “I sense another but,” Mesa said.

  “To be sure it works, you need to field-test it.”

  “No,” Kaizhou said immediately.

  Mesa’s “Yes” overpowered his objection. She glared at him and said, “It’s the only way to be sure.”

  “And if Rameez is wrong and this doesn’t work, you end up dead.”

  “If I stay here, I’ll wind up equally dead. Kai,” she said, gripping his hand, “I have to do this. I can’t hide forever.”

  Kaizhou rolled his eyes and frowned, but the determination in her eyes was plain. He knew arguing was a lost cause and threw his weight into supporting her instead.

  “What can I do?” he asked. He squeezed her hand reassuringly, letting her know he was still on her side, no matter what.

  They left Nicklesville and headed for an underground parking garage. She was wearing one of his hoodies, the hood pulled up and hanging loose around her face. Her eyes were hidden behind large, dark sunglasses that gave her a bug-like appearance. Casually, she turned away from the cameras before their car rolled across the sloping drive, pausing for the ticket. Once inside, Kaizhou parked in the cameras’ blind spot, and Mesa hopped out. She joined a cluster of businessmen and their female coworkers, keeping her head covered and slung down, her shoulders slumped forward.

  She crowded into the elevator with them, rudely pushing her way into the center, trying to hide herself among their collective mass and consciously hiding her face from the overhead security sensors. When the door parted at street level, she saw no police were waiting to arrest her. So she steeled her nerves and stepped out, forcing herself to be casual.

  Walking the rolling hills of downtown, she let the hood fall back and pocketed the glasses. She spent hours on foot, blending in with tourists and worker bees, letting herself be seen.

  “You’re doing good,” Rameez assured her over the commNet. “No spikes in the image captures, nothing unusual.”

  Kaizhou maintained a roving patrol, driving aimlessly around the city streets and circling blocks. After a half hour, he parked and went into a convenience store for bottled water. Another half hour later, Rameez rejoined them via conference.

  “I’m pulling some randomized images from your walk and running them against the sourced image on this surveillance alert.”

  “Do it,” Mesa said.

  “If the authorities didn’t set up the alert,” Kaizhou said, the sound of his fingers tapping against the steering wheel piping in across the CommNet and into each of their heads, “then who did?”

  “Well, the people trying to kill her,” Rameez said.

  “No shit,” Kaizhou said. “But who are they? Any way to tell?”

  Mesa and Kaizhou watched Rameez tap his fingers against his lap, lost in thought. “OK, so, some simple deductions. They had to hac
k into the cityweb and build backdoors. Obviously, they’re somebody without legitimate access, and they don’t want any official agencies interfering. I think, then, we can rule out police or government, yeah? Their clothing and artillery and training seems to indicate some kind of military background, either a corporate or maybe a covert government entity. Or private security.”

  “Awesome. My girlfriend has trained military assassins after her. Great.”

  “It does make me pretty damn desirable,” she said.

  “The images are running clean. I think you’re free to roam without any worries,” Rameez said.

  She crossed with the pedestrian traffic at the light then spotted the white front and the rust-colored sign with orange lettering of Wild Ginger. “I need a drink.”

  The Kickin’ Mango Martini lived up to its name. Heat spread through Mesa’s mouth, opening her taste buds with a delightful burn. The slender, bright-red Thai chili sat at the base of the glass, providing a vibrant splash of color against the sunny-orange concoction. She’d watched the bartender muddle two other chilis among the mango, wearing rubber gloves as he prepped the drink to keep the chili’s burning oils off his fingers. Then he’d tossed it all in an ice shaker to infuse the rum.

  The bar was crowded. A throng of people pressed against one another. The main dining area was filled to the brim, and the waitstaff shuffled carefully and rapidly between the shifting clientele. Waiters spun with balletic grace away from an impending collision, raising heavy trays above their heads with ease.

  Nobody paid much attention to Mesa, and that was fine with her. The buzz from the drink was loosening her up, but she knew not to get too comfortable, or too drunk. She was on a trial run, after all.

  The cosmetic changes she’d made at the auto body shop should have been enough to fool the dummy filters of Seattle’s basic surveillance efforts, and Rameez’s additional hacks spoofed the filters even further. The security grid was largely a deterrent, rather than an active, preventative measure.

  Conceptually, people were meant to be instilled with the knowledge that they were being observed and to act accordingly. If crimes were committed, investigators would eventually unravel the footage back to the point of time in question. The recorders were simplistic capture devices that could be filtered, but they were limited to superficial facial matches.

  If the recorders had skin-penetration efforts, it would have been hard to fool the smarter bone-deep levels of authentication. Though there were ways to physically alter her bone structures, she couldn’t afford the redrafting. So despite the superficial efforts she’d taken, if roving security bots that relied on unique hard-structure mappings captured her image, she would be hard pressed to avoid detection.

  From her spot at the bar, she was able to keep an eye on the main entrance. She hoped the thick crowd would deter any threats from reaching her long enough for her to disappear into the crowd and haul ass to an emergency exit.

  The plan wasn’t ideal, but, then again, nothing about her current situation was. Her dad was dead; his killers were on the loose and chasing her, apparently hell-bent on killing memorialists. And she was getting drunk and flippant. Shape up, kiddo. Then she wished the drink wasn’t quite as harsh against her tongue so she could throw one back and let the dizzy spins hit. But she had to keep her cool, take her time, and try to relax.

  She ordered a second martini and decided to stretch her luck by ordering the Rama Setu for dinner. She wondered if she would live long enough for dessert, keeping the chocolate torte in the back of her mind.

  Twenty minutes later, she was picking her way through the red curry dish and the heady aroma of lemongrass. The eggplant had a nice bite, but some of the flavor had been drained by the heat of the martini. Still, she couldn’t complain.

  And nobody had tried to kill her, yet.

  Halfway through the meal, she realized she was too full for dessert, and she’d probably risked her safety enough for the day.

  Stuffed, she pushed the plate away but continued to nurse the martini. In short order, probably eager to free up her spot at the bar, the bartender swiped her plate.

  “Would you care for dessert, miss?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The bartender quickly wiped the counter and put down a fresh napkin for her drink.

  “Mesa?” Rameez said, pinging her gently across the commNet.

  Oh no. “Yeah?”

  “I think you need to see this. Keep your safety filters on.” With the A/V protocols running, Rameez’s face and voice were broadcast into her skull. Furtively, he looked around, and she could make out his troubled expression. She tried to prepare herself for the worst. “They got another one.”

  Oh no, her brain repeated. The Rama Setu made a hot lump in her belly. A DRMR file transmission blinked into the air before her, and she gave it a tap.

  I don’t want to watch this.

  She swallowed a cool drink of the spice-infused rum. The chili seared her mouth, sending flames tap-dancing across her tongue.

  She clicked Play and found herself standing in the center of a deserted, ruined cityscape. The buildings were blackened and half-leveled. Jagged broken spires rose from crusty, heat-glazed earth. She knew the city was Los Angeles because the recorder of this memory, Lisa Kessler, had known that, and she recognized the destruction from other, similar mem files.

  A hand tugged hers along. Its owner screamed, “Let’s go!”

  She recognized the boy—a nicely muscled Caucasian with a lantern jaw and crisp, neatly combed hair—as Jacob Kessler. The high school dropout turned memorialist.

  Her own dread of this memory’s inevitable outcome ran parallel to Lisa’s high-strung fear in the moments before her death.

  Lisa ran, lungs burning, dry throat aching, clinging to her brother’s sweaty hand.

  “C’mon,” Jacob said over and over, his voice strained with panic.

  The hollowed corpses of shattered buildings around them offered little protection. The air was still, and the sky was a rich blue, dotted with puffy white clouds. A low whine from above interrupted the disparate tranquility. Mesa’s POV shifted as Lisa glanced up, spotting the gray body in the sky. Slim wings flanked the slender rounded spine of the drone, which tapered off to the pointed shell of the long aircraft’s head. It turned with precision, angling down toward them, then launched its payload.

  “Move,” Jacob screamed, pulling painfully at her arm. She jerked with surprise, tripping over her feet. She fell to the ground but in hurried fear, Jacob dragged her along. The rocky ground dug into her thigh, and a rock tore through her nylon stocking, biting roughly into the skin beneath.

  Her yelp was lost to the shrieking noise of artillery cutting through the air. The missile hit the ground, exploding where they’d been standing. A hot blast of air pushed over her. The inside of her skull compressed against the shockwave, which ruptured her eardrums. Jacob was pushed down, and she saw in his face a mirror of how she felt: bloodied nose and ears, a dazed expression, and unfocused eyes. His feet worked at the earth while his arms weakly tried to push himself back up. Both of them were covered in a thick layer of dust. The impact crater smoked, and she thanked God they were still alive. Lisa could not hear the drone retracing its trajectory above them, locking in on their new positions.

  She thought it a miracle they hadn’t been in the data center. She and Jacob had received warning of the attack from their fellow memorialists, some of whom were in their death throes, struggling to sound the alarm in their final moments. They had watched as the state-run news covered the aftermath of the assault, speculating on the possibility of an attack by Liberty’s Children, although the terror-militia had yet to claim responsibility. Lisa and her brother had disregarded that idea—if LC had been responsible, they would not have kept quiet about it.

  The
attack was something else. The drone proved that. Who had sent it, though, they had no idea.

  They’d fled into the ruins, scared but intent on staying low and off the grid. Mesa absorbed the surface level details etched into the mem, understanding Lisa’s fears all too well. Being in the city meant being under constant surveillance from PRC security forces and random checkpoints. Their decision to flee had been easier once their faces started appearing on television, where the news labeled her, Jacob, and three others as persons of interest who were wanted for questioning.

  That had sealed it.

  Two hours later, they had passed the limits of the reclamation zones and were in the wild, mostly through sheer force of luck. They hadn’t even thought of the drones.

  Mesa closed her eyes as the power of that realization jolted Lisa. Shutting her eyes did nothing to block out the mem sequence unraveling in Mesa’s brain, imprinting her neurons.

  Walking side-by-side, Lisa and Jacob picked their way through the ruins, trying to find a safe place to hide. They found a suitable campsite far enough away from the homeless that hid in the ruins and tried to settle their nerves.

  Then she saw it—a grayish speck flying above them, slowly turning for another pass.