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  I wouldn’t let go. “I never stopped loving you. I couldn’t.”

  His eyes found mine, hopeful for the first time since he’d come in the room.

  “What’re we going to do?”

  I had no answers, yet my heart soared when he said we.

  “I don’t know.”

  He sighed and rested his forehead against mine, and eventually we drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE DOOR flung open after a couple of knocks. Eddie and I jerked upright, and he threw his legs over the side of the bed as he sat up.

  I hadn’t heard the bolt unlock because I’d been dead asleep. It was the soundest sleep I’d had in days. Eddie and I relaxed each other like we always did. The small clock on the desk across the room read six thirty-three.

  “Winger, you’re needed in the work room immediately.”

  The guard wasn’t one I recognized. He looked stern, almost annoyed that he had to provide this information. “Relay, I’ve been asked to keep you here until your father comes for you.”

  What was going on?

  Eddie stood, which allowed me to get out of bed. I ignored the hard-on in my boxers, giving it one adjustment to make sure it stayed out of sight.

  I pulled on jeans and one of the black long-sleeved shirts I’d been provided. Eddie, who’d sat back on the bed, watched silently. At least he looked calmer. He was either ready to accept whatever came next, or he had a plan.

  I wanted to know which, but I couldn’t ask.

  The guard looked more impatient as I got into socks and sneakers, but I wasn’t going to let him push me to go faster. I crossed back to Eddie, pulled him up, and leaned into him with my head planted in its usual spot on his right shoulder. He wrapped his arms around me. I looked up, and he leaned down and planted a kiss on my lips. We hadn’t done more than snuggle last night so the energy of this kiss vibrated through me all the way to my toes.

  The guard cleared his throat as it continued. “They’re waiting, Winger. The longer they wait, the less happy they’ll be.”

  We let the kiss run its course. Our connection seemed as strong as ever as we pulled back at the same time.

  “Take care of yourself,” I said, looking into his eyes.

  “You too,” he said before giving me another quick kiss. “This is just a ‘see ya later.’”

  I nodded. If I said anything, I’d explode into a million pieces, and this wasn’t the time.

  Knowing that Eddie was trying to stay positive even after what he’d said last night overwhelmed me but gave me faith too. He said it with the confidence that I loved. I needed that since I still wasn’t seeing a good resolution.

  “You should go,” he finally said with a slight smirk, as I still held on.

  I nodded and backed my way to the door, not taking my eyes off him until I entered the hallway and the guard closed the door.

  The guard was silent as he trailed behind me.

  Inside, the room buzzed with activity. I was glad to be summoned so I could keep up with what was going on.

  The whiteboards I’d worked on yesterday had new annotations and had spilled over to new boards that had been wheeled into place alongside the ones mounted to the wall. Half a dozen people were on computers furiously typing away. Westside was here too, talking with Cobb, Wildcat, and Split Screen—I couldn’t bear to call her Quarterflash.

  The energy was intense but also purposeful. Something had changed the vibe in the room from yesterday.

  “Winger, join us.” Westside was ridiculously happy, and I cringed. He’d figured something out. I braced for the worst.

  “After we chatted a few hours ago, I couldn’t get back to sleep because you’d sparked so many ideas,” he said as he broke away from the group. He went to the whiteboard and grabbed a marker. “Here, let me show you.”

  I joined him as Split Screen and the others filled in around us.

  “I’ve already been through this a little with these guys, but now that you’re here, I’ll step through all of it.”

  He talked—a lot. Some of it was what we’d talked about earlier but there were new concepts. I stayed silent, but some others, including Split Screen, weighed in with additional ideas or called out where the logic was wonky. At least they weren’t all yes-men. As the suggestions and input came, he adjusted what was on the board.

  After how volatile he was in Denver, it surprised me he could work in a team like this.

  The concepts looked solid, and he’d proposed a structure for the code—so it could learn from mistakes—and not just for the individual bots but the entire network we’d deploy so it would get stronger as it spread out.

  “Winger?”

  Split Screen snapped me out of my thoughts. I looked between her, the board, and Westside, who was looking expectantly at me.

  “I asked for your opinion,” Westside said with a tinge of annoyance.

  “Sorry, I was considering what would be needed to create this while keeping it small enough to travel easily.” I scribbled on the boards in a different color to keep my notes separate. “We always knew the AI would have to learn fast and this logic makes sense. I’d make some adjustments here.” As always, I looked for ways to bring this all down. With so many working on the project, I’d have to be careful to keep my work hidden.

  “How soon?” Westside asked, focusing his attention on Split Screen, Wildcat, and Cobb. No one spoke. “Come on. The specs are all here, maybe even more than we need.”

  Continued silence led his smile to become more of a frown.

  “I’d say it’s at least a couple of days to get even something preliminary ready to test,” Split Screen finally said after she studied it further. “This logic makes it even more important to have a well-controlled test to make sure we can actually turn connections on and off rather than breaking them.”

  “We need good targets to test,” Cobb continued, “yet ones that won’t raise too much suspicion. It’ll need to be more than one too, since we want to make sure these scripts learn from each other.”

  Flashes of Star Wars came to mind—the scenes where they decided to test the Death Star on Alderaan. Depending on the test, so many could be affected. It wouldn’t be a planet blowing up, but the results could still be disastrous.

  A smirky smile returned to Westside’s face.

  “How much computing power is there to support this?” The question had just popped into my head, so I asked it.

  “Terra?” Westside looked behind me, and I followed his gaze to a woman at the back of the assembled group.

  “All this AI is going to need a supporting infrastructure. I’ll need specs to make sure there’s more than we need. With the cloud services we have access to, capacity, in theory, shouldn’t be a problem as long as we’re networked right. We also have to make sure we don’t block our own servers.”

  That might be an area to exploit. It’d depend entirely on how Terra ensured that wouldn’t happen.

  “Make sure we’re ready for it,” Westside said, and Terra acknowledged the request. “I want a test ready within forty-eight hours using at least a midsize bank, a hospital, and a media company. Wildcat, I want a target list in twelve hours, so we know what we’re hitting.”

  “On it,” he said.

  “I’ll update Odeon, and then I’ll be back to check in.”

  As the people dispersed, I stayed behind taking in all the information. Westside had good ideas—good enough that they scared me. What Blackbird wanted would happen if we wrote the code correctly.

  I had two days or less to permanently end this.

  And who was Odeon? That was a new name. Was Odeon their director? In the same capacity as Raptor for TOS?

  Split Screen came up beside me. “Do you see anything wrong? You’re studying this very closely.”

  “Not wrong. It’s just a lot to make a lightweight bot do. The amount of computing power will be crucial to off-load some of the computations. Terra has a lot to prepa
re for.”

  “Are you able to build the framework?” Split Screen and I turned to face each other. Her tone was snide and demeaning. I’d never seen this side of her. “I’ve got others who want to prove themselves, but Westside is obsessed with you doing it.”

  “I guess you’ll find out.” All the confidence I could muster went into the words.

  “You’ve got twelve hours to present a working concept.”

  “Isn’t that rather arbitrary?”

  “Not at all. If you fail, we need time to recover from that.”

  “I need my phone,” I blurted out. “I’ve got stuff on it that will help this go faster and let me do some testing as I go.”

  She eyed me suspiciously.

  “I’ll see what I can do. I’m all for speeding up the work. We’ll need to check the device to make sure you can’t do anything harmful.” I nodded. “I suggest you get started.”

  She spun around and went to talk to Wildcat and Cobb while I went to my workstation. Opening one of the notebooks I’d used yesterday, I wrote out the basic structure of what I needed to build.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE LONGER I sat in front of the computer and Dean remained silent, the more worry tugged on me. I’d been handwriting notes on the requirements for some twenty minutes, and he’d said nothing.

  I typed a single character: ?

  Returning to the notebook, I burned another ten or so minutes and still nothing from the outside world.

  Something was wrong.

  Dean and Coach had been on for hours, and it didn’t make since for them to suddenly go dark, unless they were booted out of the system or captured.

  No one here acted like the system has been compromised.

  Disturbing.

  Suddenly a green dot appeared in the upper right corner of my vision. The contacts returned to transmission mode. Split Screen had stepped out while I’d been spec’ing out my code. She must’ve talked to Westside about the phone and someone had plugged it in.

  She knew TOS phones as well as I did, so she’d be able to keep them out of the sensitive areas while validating there were code snippets and test programs to help the project. Plus, as far as Blackbird knew, my computer wasn’t online, but if the hole Dean had punched was still there, the phone should be able to find it and act as a beacon for Dean or anyone else from TOS.

  There wasn’t much I could do but proceed, so I started coding. As I typed an additional letter flashed next to each character. It barely stayed on screen long enough for me to see. If I was a typist who looked at the keys, or somewhere else, I’d have missed it.

  Without being able to write it down, I had to keep track of what I saw. I typed slow, so I wouldn’t miss the letter that flashed on the screen. As usual, Dean was smart. He’d started with Winger Message and repeated it three times to ensure I’d catch on before he got to the important part.

  D-man says we’re compromised and must move. Got most of network mapped. It’s on your computer as hidden part of IP directory. Password is bully. Back online asap.

  Jesus.

  If they found Dean and Coach, would they go for Mitch again or Iris or….

  I shoved that out of my head. My focus had to on ending this project.

  The network diagram Dean made would wait. There were too many people in here to risk looking at it now. I got back to my task and split time between writing the real code and adding hidden destructive routines.

  After an hour or so, I ended up at the whiteboards again writing some high-level information the other teams needed to know so they could integrate into my framework. I also got exact details on what each group worked on.

  Split Screen finally turned up with my phone and beckoned me back to my workstation. Nothing had changed with the feed transmitting from the lenses, so if she knew they were working she didn’t tamper with that app. That meant the phone was still online too.

  “Westside, myself, and two other techs have examined the phone, and we’ve disabled its ability to get online.” She sounded utterly convincing. I’d have to ask her sometime how she unlocked it because it shouldn’t have been that easy. “You can use whatever files are here on your terminal only. The rest of the team knows not to allow this to be connected to their machines.”

  “Understood.”

  Having the phone so close gave me the jitters because it opened up more options to end this. I just had to be smart on how I used it.

  “Based on our analysis, it looks you want to use what’s in this folder.” She put the phone on the desk, already opened to a set of apps—exactly the apps I’d been refining for years to help me write new bots quickly. Many were in the TOS library, but some, ones I hadn’t released yet because they weren’t ready for general use, were also there.

  Something new sat alongside everything else.

  Beta 5

  We discussed several of the apps, including two of the betas, but she skipped five. She’d matched my naming convention, so it looked like it belonged. It turned out to be a good thing that I’d only numbered these, which I’d done because I didn’t want to be bothered with coming up with more descriptive names.

  Before she left, I updated her on what I’d done in the past couple of hours and what my next tasks were. It’d give her something to report back.

  Her facade didn’t crack even a millimeter. She was good at this undercover thing. I wondered if I ever would be, or if I’d even get the chance.

  “Looks good, Winger. I’ll have Westside review this, so he can see the good work you’re doing.”

  I gave a simple nod.

  Going back and forth between my coding and occasionally consulting on other components of the project, I kept a running list of ideas on sabotage.

  Six hours passed at turbo speed, and I hadn’t had the chance to do two key things—check out what I’d gotten from Dean and Split Screen.

  How to test my schemes troubled me. I had no way to prove anything would work. With Dean unresponsive, I couldn’t even talk it through with him.

  I’d written in a backdoor that would destroy the system. Everyone would know I did it, but I couldn’t let that stop me from executing it if I needed to. I built the trigger into the contact lenses so that I’d be able to engage it in almost any circumstance.

  Even with the deadline, it finally got to the point where most people left for the day. I could finally check Dean’s data.

  Dean took great precautions to shield the work he provided from anybody else. He’d structured the reports to look like the IP directory that Blackbird had already assembled.

  The Blackbird network was quite similar to TOS with a few central hubs and a lot of dispersed networking relying heavily on cloud resources. They also followed the TOS standard of not having a clear top of the hierarchy. Since they were trying to safeguard the network, Split Screen might be able provide information that I could compare to Dean’s info. Nothing would make me happier than knocking out the entire operation.

  The best plan would seek out everything on the network and wipe it out. Destruction poised a problem, though—that would likely wipe out the Blackbird agent list. Saving the internet and taking out the primary threat was important, but they’d gone after TOS people and they had to answer for that too.

  I put away everything I’d looked at related to the network and cleaned up my tracks.

  Moving over to Split Screen’s file, I discovered it wasn’t an app at all but a carefully disguised file with a message.

  Winger, good call getting your phone back. I hadn’t realized you had it here or I would’ve gotten it back a while ago because this gives us a secure way to communicate. I’m here undercover. They think they recruited me out of Norton because of the networking projects I’d done. I know you must be working on a way to shut this down. TOS orders have been that if we can’t shut it down reasonably that we must cause mass destruction of their infrastructure. Raptor says either is acceptable. I’ve got the agent list
to TOS because of the network issue.

  The details for keeping the Blackbird network safe, I think, is the key to stopping this, and I think you do too. I’m looking at the network diagrams this evening, and I’ll upload them here too. We’ll have to write to each other here. Everything is mic’d, so we can’t talk.

  I know we can do this. We took care of business with Glenwood. Write me back when you can. I’ve got a notification built-in, so I’ll know when you do.

  Before I called it a night, I wrote back that the diagrams were exactly what I needed.

  There was finally a tiny beacon of light at the end of this dark tunnel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I SAT up with a scream—actually I wasn’t sure if it was out loud or only in my head.

  My legs were tangled, and the sheet had come untucked from the foot of the bed.

  Catching my breath proved difficult and painful. It felt like I’d done suicide sprints on the ice for hours.

  Once I focused I realized my location—the cell Blackbird kept me in.

  After I’d turned in my initial framework to Split Screen just under the twelve-hour mark, she recommended I rest while they reviewed. I’d eaten some pizza and took the opportunity to grab some sleep.

  I’d been more tired than I thought. Drifting off had been easy.

  But the dream—confused, crazy snatches of things.

  John bleeding on the floor….

  Eddie looking down at me after he’d drugged me….

  Mitch held captive….

  Finding Coach on the roof before that rescue….

  Dad with his gun on me….

  There were things I didn’t recognize too.

  Scenes of me working alongside people I didn’t know….

  The chaos of a world without the internet….

  Banks messed up….

  Blackouts because energy networks fail….