Lauren Miller - Free to Fall

“But?”

“But then I heard the voice. ‘It’s there’ was all it said.” He shook his head in amazement. “And at that moment, I saw it. A very slight variation in the way the algorithm treated certain categories of threats. And I realized if I could isolate these categories and come up with a way to treat them as a sort of preferred opportunity, a trump card almost, I could essentially override the formula instead of just reversing it. It meant I had to create an additional command string within the algorithm, which made the whole thing about nine thousand times harder, but I think it’ll work.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and climbed into his chair, sliding my knees in next to his hips. He laid his hands on my thighs, sending a ripple up my spine. “You,” I said, “are a genius.”

He let me kiss him, but then he pulled back and shook his head. “No. I can’t take credit for this. If it were up to me, I would’ve given up.”

I started to argue with him but thought better of it. The Few needed the credit for their victories. The boy I loved didn’t. That’s why I loved him.

“So can we get out of here now?” I asked.

“Almost,” North said. “I just have to copy all these changes to the versioned control system and deploy the code to the servers, then wait for Gnosis to initiate the reboot.” I glanced at the clock on his screen. It was 11:53.

“Is seven minutes enough time to do whatever you need to do?” I asked.

“Should be,” North said. “Then, once the system reboots, I’ll run a script to hide my tracks and deploy the worm. Then we can get out of here.”

“The worm?”

“It’s our diversion,” North explained. “In case someone at Gnosis figures out that we were inside the network. They’ll see the worm and think they got us.”

“So crafty. Did the voice tell you to do that, too?”

North grinned and kissed my nose. “Nah. That one was mostly me.”

He leaned around me to type on the touchpad on the desk. I kept my eyes on his face, watching him work. All the fatigue I’d seen before had vanished.

I nuzzled his ear with my nose. “You’re amazing,” I whispered, and went to kiss his cheek.

“Shit,” he said, his whole body tensing.

I jerked back. “What?”

“I tripped an alarm,” he said, cursing under his breath. He was typing furiously.

“What kind of alarm?” I asked as I tried to slide off his lap without touching either of his arms. My heart was pounding in my chest and my legs felt like jelly beneath me. At what point did we run?

“I don’t know.”

I looked at the center screen. At first I thought it was strings of computer code, but then I realized that it was rows of Greek characters. “Wait,” I told North, touching his arm. “I think it’s a riddle.”

“A riddle ?”

“Yes,” I said, not as certain as I sounded. “Just give it a second.” Just as North lifted his fingers from the touchpad, six lines at the center of the screen morphed into English.

I formd them free, and free they must remain,

Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change

Thir nature, and revoke the high decree

Unchangeable, eternal, which ordain’d

Thir freedom, they themselves ordain’d thir fall.

PRESS THE NECESSARY KEY TO PROCEED.

In my peripheral vision, I saw North’s eyes go wide with surprise. “These are lines from Paradise Lost . The ones your mom left you.” He looked over at me. “The Greek, that’s how you knew what it was?”

I nodded. “Not what it said, just that it was a puzzle. The ones we had to answer during the evaluation process, they all started as red Greek text. But those were—” I was about to say timed , but right then my eyes caught the little clock at the bottom right corner of the screen, racing down from sixty. One minute. That’s all we had. “Hurry,” I said urgently. “We have only sixty seconds.”

“Rory, there’s no way I can crack the code that fast.”

“So we’ll solve it. ‘Press the necessary key to proceed.’ The answer has to be in the quotation. That’s why it’s there.”

For several seconds we were quiet, both of us just staring at the screen. “Rory, there are one hundred and one keys on this keyboard,” North said finally, tugging on his Mohawk in frustration. “And we’ve got thirty-two seconds left. I don’t think—”

“Could it be the letter e ?” I asked. “There are a bunch of them missing. Formd, thir. Maybe we’re supposed to complete the words.”

North shook his head. “I don’t think so. Milton wrote those words without the e ’s. That’s how they look in the original.”

“Okay, so it’s got to be something in the meaning, then. What does—?”

With a start, North bolted upright in his chair. “Milton is talking about man’s imprisonment here,” he said excitedly. “So the ‘necessary’ key is the escape key.”

I considered this. It made sense. And it was clever, which made me think it had to be right. North’s finger was hovering over the ESC key, waiting for my cue. There were only twenty seconds left. Heart racing, I squeezed my eyes shut. It was time to decide.

Free they must remain. Suddenly I remembered what the serpent had said during initiation. The fool will always seek a master.

“No,” I said abruptly, my eyes popping open. “There’s nothing to escape from. That was Milton’s whole point, right? ‘Till they enthrall themselves.’ It’s only a trap if we let it be. To proceed, all we need to do is enter .”

North didn’t hesitate or question me. He hit the enter key and instantly, all the words disappeared. All but one.

PROCEED.

Almost immediately, a new window opened and the words COMMAND_COMPLETED appeared on screen.

“Thank you,” I heard North murmur as his body went slack against the chair. He looked back at me. “I thought we were screwed.”

“But we’re not?” I asked, just to make sure.

“Not so far,” he said, laying his forehead on my stomach. “Now we wait.”

I stared at the clock at the bottom of the screen as it ticked from 11:58 to 11:59 to 12:00. When nothing happened, I tapped North’s head.

“It’s midnight,” I told him. “Nothing’s happening.”

“It could take a couple of minutes,” North said, his voice muffled against my sweatshirt. “Someone at Gnosis has to initiate the reboot, and he’ll want to be sure everyone is logged out of the internal network before he does.”

“And the new algorithm will go into effect when the servers come back on?” I asked him.

“It should.” He sat back in his chair. “Although I’m not sure how the solar storm will affect Lux generally. But as long as the app is working, the algorithm should too.”

“And what about us? Will we be okay?”

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” he said, pulling me back down into his lap. “We’ll hole up in my apartment and play battery-operated electronics and eat cold SpaghettiOs from the can.”

At 12:02, there was a wave of whew sounds as the rows and rows of machines around us began to power down. The terminal was the last to shut off, and when it did, the room was completely quiet. The emergency lights gave the room an eerie green glow.

“What happens if someone comes down here?” I whispered.

North didn’t look up. “We run.”

But no one came. A few minutes later the servers turned back on again in a ripple of beeps and whirls. After the quiet, the noise was unnerving. I felt uneasy now.

A loud clang behind me made me jerk so violently, North’s head snapped back. “What was that?” I whispered.