Nate Kenyon - Day One

There . Hawke’s fumbling fingers found the heavy metal body, and he flicked it on. The beam cut a path through the gloom, the dust whirling within it. He coughed again, holding his sleeve against his mouth. He peered at threatening shapes waiting to leap out, girders and pillars and concrete unfamiliar to him through the dusty haze. The light flashed across a blue and green tiled 68TH STREET HUNTER COLLEGE sign on the wall; several tiles had dropped, looking like holes in a Scrabble board.

Hawke felt like the last man alive, and to ease the feeling he played the light around until he found Vasco, who sat touching his head.

“This is sick shit,” Vasco said. He was rambling, not making much sense. “It’s not a fair fight, nothing like it. Who would turn the power on like that? Jesus Christ. Sadistic motherfuckers.” He was sitting in a pile of broken tiles, blood glistening on his forehead. He looked up at Hawke, squinting, eyes watery and red rimmed. “Or was it you, huh? Pretty clever, made it look close. Almost got yourself killed. You’re upping the stakes.”

“Get a grip,” Hawke said. Adrenaline flooded through him. “This entire thing was set up from the beginning, don’t you see that? We’ve been three steps behind all day. Someone is fucking with us, playing some kind of sick game, and it’s just getting started.”

Vasco stared at him, wiped his face with a palm. It came away bloody. “This is your fault,” he said. “Another train comes through here, I should throw you back on those tracks.”

Hawke heard Young stirring and put the light on her. She sat up and blinked back at him, concrete dust in her hair and the familiar guarded look on her face, and he was overwhelmed with rage. She knew more, much more about Weller and Doe and Eclipse and the server farm in North Carolina, and he was going to get it out of her.

The overhead lights blinked back on, buzzing softly, washing the platform with light. Hawke glanced up and stuck the flashlight in his back pocket. He had been wasting time, but no more. Nothing would stop him, nothing. His anger was spilling over now, coursing through him. He grabbed Young by the arm and yanked her to her feet. Her arm was like a child’s, small and delicate. She was not much more than half his size, and he wasn’t a large man. His grip was too hard. She winced and tried to get away, but he pulled her in closer. He was gritting his teeth.

“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted as she tried to turn her face away from him. “What is it about Jim? What else wasn’t he telling me? ”

The shaking began in Young’s legs and moved up her body until she began to hunch against him like someone who had been gut punched. “He made me promise… I can’t say any more—”

“He brought me in for a reason. I want to know why. He lied to you, lied to all of us. He never gave a damn about you, Anne, and you let him use you and then throw you away. You think he’s trying to find you right now? Searching the city for you? I doubt it.”

The look on Young’s face was fear mixed with shame; she was crying hard, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No.” Vasco had gotten to his feet and was saying something, but Hawke barely listened; the need for answers was burning through him.

“He’s a part of this, isn’t he? It’s some kind of fucked-up revenge? Is that it?” He pushed harder, a torturer pressing on the wound. “Maybe you’re still working for Eclipse; maybe you’re a part of this, too. Did they put you at Conn.ect as a mole, Anne? Keep an eye on Jim, report on his every move?”

“You have no idea, no idea what you’re talking about.”

“But you fell in love with him. They didn’t know that, did they? That baby was his, wasn’t it? Was he even with you when you lost it? Did he know? He slept with you when he felt like it, ignored you when he didn’t, and he didn’t even care enough to let you in on his biggest secret?”

“He was protecting me!” she screamed suddenly, yanking her arm free and shoving Hawke away. “He thought they’d come after me, too, if they knew.”

Young looked between him and Vasco, blinking against the light, her porcelain shell shattered now, and what was left was raw and glistening. Hawke was breathing hard. He felt dirty from what he had just done.

“Jim’s the cause of all this,” Hawke said. “He set it off somehow. He was trying to get her back. Through any means necessary.”

Young shook her head. “No,” she said. “He brought you in because he wanted you to tell the world about it, about what they’ve done and what it could mean. He wanted to expose them, shut them down, and he thought your connections to Anonymous and your work as a journalist would help.”

“That’s not all he wanted, is it? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He didn’t trust you enough to let you all the way in. He was suspicious of everyone. At first, I thought he was paranoid, seeing signs of being followed online, through the streets. He thought it was Eclipse monitoring his every move. He thought they were going to make him disappear, destroy the evidence. He was wrong. Eclipse wasn’t after Jim then, and they aren’t after him now. It’s nobody you can see doing this, nothing physical. It’s not even human. I think she’s tracking him. She’s tracking all of us. Doe. She wants us all dead. She wants everyone dead.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Young said. “I swear, I don’t. But she could get into everything: city networks, police response, emergency services alerts, military weaponry, cameras, building security and systems. Even medical and property records. Anything with an Internet connection and a chip can be hacked and controlled. Even the police could have shoot-to-kill instructions fed to them. Nobody would have a clue what’s really going on. She could fake records, recordings, even voices. She controls the message.”

People’s entire lives were accessible through their devices: where they were every moment of the day, where they lived, their passwords, bank accounts, personal files. New York was the worst place to be, Hawke thought, a city like this, confined, full of technology, full of machines, advanced networks all working together, millions of people crammed into a few city blocks. It would be easy to cause a panic. Panic was a human emotion, driven by fear. It would be useful to an emotionless enemy that wanted to eliminate the herd, like wolves running circles around sheep, driving them into close quarters before moving in for the kill.

All this, from a program? It still seemed too incredible to believe. But it wasn’t possible that a terrorist group had pulled off such a coordinated attack, no matter how organized or well funded they were. Anonymous couldn’t have done it, either. Nobody could have, unless they had literally unlimited resources, unlimited manpower. Hawke had known that from the beginning; he just hadn’t wanted to face it.

The rumors had already been swirling around Eclipse. It was only a matter of time before an effective artificial intelligence was developed, all the experts agreed on that. Computers had to be more adaptable; they had to become more human if the world continued to evolve. Eventually, they’d learn in the same way humans did, make complex decisions based on judgment of many variable inputs, and multiple paths to the answer, and the processing power would be nearly infinite.

“Hey,” Vasco said. He pushed his way in between them, grabbed Hawke and turned him roughly. Vasco’s eyes were unfocused and blood was trickling down his face again, smeared on his skin. “You’re making a mistake. You’re not gonna get away with it.”

“Back off, Jason. I’m not involved; I told you.”