Victoria read it slowly, then again, then looked up. “Okay, when the others come back — if they come back — I’ll have them help me with this.”
“Others?” The priest shook his head. “Oh, nobody’s left. In fact, I just came from downstairs. They’re all looking really busy, drawing away, working nicely with each other, if I do say so myself. Although what you’ve got them doing is beyond me.”
Victoria took a second to process this and then smiled. She headed for the door. “Nothing the Lord wouldn’t be upset about,” she said. “At least I hope not…”
At the top of the stairs, she took a breath, and re-read the note, wondering about it just as much as the priest.
NEW OBJECTIVE: NIKOLA TESLA. FIND HIM…
17
Accessing another subroutine, Orlando went deeper into the nest of code.
It was liberating, totally lacking in sensation and discomfort — just complete freedom. Like a spirit set free, he found this ‘vision’ was like his typical remote vision, except utterly controllable and limited in a directed way. Where regular remote vision had no constraints and because of that caused him a strange backward sense of claustrophobia, not knowing where to look with so many variables and times and questions and vying objectives, this experience essentially had a roadmap.
Once he ‘opened’ one door (in reality a subroutine of folders and network access), his choices were much more limited. Data nodes appeared as glowing green cylinders, instructional code as blue lances, and security hubs as pulsing red shields.
It’s like a damn awesome video game! He thought, giddily. A hacker’s delight.
He had already spent some time, after Nina left, exploring the system, testing the limits of his sight — but not only his sight. He had found that with the exploration, he was actually part in parcel of the system. In their effort to plumb his secrets and find out what made him tick, they had to gain access to his brain, his thoughts; but in so doing, as they had hooked into him, by necessity he had hooked into them.
Did they not understand that? Or they did and didn’t see an issue with it? Maybe any other subject would have freaked and curled up into a mental ball at the thought of wandering away from their bodies.
Not Orlando.
He loved his body, sure enough, or at least a lot more than he used to once he got with Phoebe who certainly enjoyed it (or acted like she did), and that had given him confidence. But still, he had always been drawn to games and computers, and was a master of coding and hacking. He loved to enter the role-playing environment and change the parameters. Game-breaking. Weakening the enemies, giving himself stronger weapons and better armor. He had always joked with his friends that the campaign setting was just a ‘guideline’, like a stop sign in a deserted mall parking lot. Far more fun to follow no rules, make up new ones and go wherever you liked.
If his body, back in the lab, connected to all those monitors, feeding tubes and machines, could smile, it would be doing it right now.
They set me free, and I’m loving it.
At some point in his exploration — which felt like it had been taking hours or even approaching days but was probably only a few minutes — Orlando had the notion that of all the subjects to probe and poke and prod, they could and should have picked someone else for this experiment, or whatever it was they were doing. They could have, and would not have been in the threat they now faced.
So…why did they choose me?
He paused outside of another data store, what he knew contained a map of monitoring devices in the United States — traffic cameras, ATM and store surveillance, satellites…
Was there a reason? Or just his luck? Maybe some benefactor in the organization? Because really, they couldn’t have made a worse choice.
I’m going with that, he thought as he decrypted the security around the node and then slipped inside. As he started to access the maps and the locations, he activated the codes and found he could choose multiple locations at once and ride along on the feeds, translating the code into visuals himself, seeing what was seen by these remote eyes in the field.
Montross and Nina, wearing standard suits and badges, calmly walking out the front door while high alerts went out across the building.
I could shut those off, Orlando realized, recalling the alarm functionality nodes he passed on his way here. But it looks like they’re doing fine.
Simultaneously he had looked in on the other rooms — cells and lab experimentation rooms where he was held, along with several other newer members of the Initiative.
Fine in there as well. At least for now. Sleep tight, other me.
Watching from a great height, he then zoomed in on Nina and Xavier (now hooded), as they entered a non-descript car and drove off. Next, he had to try his luck — and test the effectiveness of this Big Brother program — and try to locate his wife.
Phoebe…
More difficult, but he knew how to find her. Ripping part of himself back out and up several layers, across investigative services and into facial recognition programming, he linked the search functions into the camera spying service, along well-used transmission corridors, and accessed her likeness. They had already had it — along with all of his friends and coworkers, in the Morpheus subfolder, which he had downloaded and read immediately.
They had everything, every scrap of available intelligence on each and every one of them, going back to their first book reports and grade evaluations in grammar school. He shuddered at the sheer volume of information these guys had on every single person, but in a way, understood it all too.
Knowledge was power. The power to control, as well as the power to keep others safe from those who meant harm (or at least tended in that direction).
A hit. The program had found her.
That was fast.
Here in Washington. Not far, near the Georgetown campus.
First, making sure no record of his searches would exist (don’t want to do the bad guys’ work for them), he zoomed in from the camera at a bank across the street from an alley between two apartment complexes.
Behind a dumpster, someone in a green army coat stood in the shadows and, motionless, seemed to command Phoebe’s full attention. Pigeons were fluttering around, obscuring the visuals slightly. The scanning software had still managed to isolate her face, however, with hundreds of grid points and mapping angles.
He zoomed in farther until could see her lips moving, reading her words…
“There’s not enough time. You have to help us…”
Who? Orlando strained to enhance the image, or to see around the corner of the dumpster, but the man stayed out of the full sightline.
“Please,” Phoebe continued. “These others, they’ve broken their restrictions, so…”
Who the hell was this?
Trying another gambit, Orlando accessed the GPS satellite above, hacked the camera and moved it. Risky to be sure, since that would certainly leave a trail, if not set off some alerts to whoever else maintained the imagery status, but it had to be done.
Found it. Narrowed down the scope of the visual, then enhanced. Again and again. The city block, then the apartments, the tiny forms of Phoebe, the dumpster and the other man.
One more time — and the figure moved slightly forward.