New Sumer had twenty-nine minutes until something somewhere—people somewhere—suffered at the hands of the so-called Sub Terra.
Seething playbacks of the voiceover lingered, score to the citywide countdown. "A free Earth... Bb-be the resistance... Fight, humanity..." On and on.
"Might as well call me Jessica 'Trick' Leibniz!" she exclaimed with bravado. Her eyes fell, and her lips pinched together. "I know what you would do, dad." Her feet had already brought her back to Goliath HQ.
The white suits at the front desk were distracted, shouting into their ear-pieces. Therefore, she simply speed-walked up the stairs. To her luck, the security guard hadn't moved, somehow oblivious to the uproar.
"I hoped you would be gone," she muttered.
"You should not be in here, miss."
"Sorry about this!" She tapped his neck on the penultimate step, much to his shock—literally, fifty-thousand volts from her glove to his cardiovascular system. And out like a light, the guard collapsed.
***
The seventh floor was already scrambling, David's voice like a megaphone. "I want every system working on the source. Find out what's hacking the damn network. You're all on the clock!"
Busybodies and fast hands belonged to brains that failed to circumvent whatever mystery penetrated New Sumer's cyberinfrastructure. The pressure was on, coders motivated and inhibited by the countdown on the memo board. Alphanumeric passcodes, logic, the dissonance between computer and operator levied no answers.
"Signal is bouncing off IPs all over the world, director!" cried an employee.
"Then we need to be faster!" David growled..
Malvis stood in the middle of the chaos, stoic; the room might have thought him concerned from how he paced back and forth. They were too consumed by their task, however. Eventually, the agent himself beside David.
"Your subordinates do not lack for imperativeness, director," he began, "but do they hold the acuity to see this crisis through?"
David desperately wanted to answer yes. Enough stakes had transformed his coat into a sauna of anxiety. The discomfort sustained his sense of urgency, constantly turning him to the clock. Malvis only made it worse. As much as he wanted to shut the alien up, he wanted to humiliate him by succeeding. Unfortunately, he lacked confidence, the peculiar kind of confidence Malvis seemed to maintain even now.
Absorbed by desperation, the director, along with every employee on the seventh floor, was oblivious to the return of the Tacquizza girl.
For everyone's sake, Jessica hoped to escape notice. Not the hardest task, once she saw their ardent focus. None saw her creep through the washroom corridor, to the other side of the room. Along the way, she grabbed a hat on the employee rack, placing Tacquizza's in her pocket. Stealthily, she side-stepped to the director's office, relieved to find it was not a sliding door.
Quietly inching inward, her field of vision pinned David and Malvis by the memo board, both presiding over the sweaty workforce. Lip bit, she shut the door without the slightest hint of notoriety, then crept onto David's seat. His personal computer was already logged in, which saved some time. She pulled the head off of miniature R2-D2 and connected the USB. Everything essential popped onto the screen before her fingers unwove New Sumer's network.
"I'm going to have to take a guess and say TNN relied on SK-3." With her onslaught of console commands, Jessica confirmed her guess. Beyond the office window, meanwhile, helplessness embedded itself in the engineers, as if all their labor amounted to nothing. "Execute."
Streams of code passed the screen. Access Granted read the words. "'I'm just the woman in the middle of a complicated plan'," she mumbled. If only the song could stay the shivers.
TNN had suffered a break in its poor encryption algorithm. The peculiarity behind the hack, it seemed pre-installed. Lacking a rootkit, Jess thought. Weirdly enough, Spearhead's cyber-warfare program was present but disabled. As soon as she restored functionality, the system found traces of the virus from days earlier. Eventually, she used the files on her flash drive, specifically the one titled 'Ultimate Top Secret.'
"Do it, Babel."
A goliath employee shot upright. "TNN's regained control of their systems!"
"Did we get in?" stammered David.
"I don't know, but the entire network is being overridden! My access got denied!" Nearly every pair of eyes turned to the woman addressing David.
"What are you saying?" he interrogated.
"If another virus wasn't dormant, a new firmware has arrested control."
After unraveling the hidden data, Jessica observed the computer screen zoom into a top-down view of Earth, specific coordinates within the Anglo-alliance. The North American map shrunk until she saw the entire plan of New Sumer, its districts followed by scattered buildings individually marked by red dots. She automatically counted seven, pulling up and transmitting each unique address to whomever it concerned. Her fingers suddenly stiffened.
"No..."
An engineer's hand shot up in the next room. "I got something!"
"What did you find?" David jumped.
"Theoretical solutions, at best," Malvis said dismissively. Ignoring him, David tread to the man's terminal.
"It's a map!" the engineer clarified.
"Same here!" said another.
"Coordinates!"
Like a domino effect, hands across the silicon corridors lifted with voices and 3D holograms. Their terminals supplemented their excitement with new data. Thus, Malvis paced across the room, panning over the green lights in disbelief.
"Who is forwarding this data?" he said.
David nearly lost himself in the images. "A map... and locations, so—"
"Director!" interrupted another employee. "I think these are directly connected to the countdown!"
"Where are they?"
Quickly and independently, Goliath's people transmitted the addresses through every viable channel. If NSS, EMTs, or even rent-a-cops made use of it, the targeted domiciles could stand a chance. Against what? They had yet to piece that together.
"3534 West Poppy!"
"Alert emergency responders!" said David.
"I shall forward the data!" added Malvis, pulling up his holo-brace. "Asgard units can deploy without delay."
"9600 Lily Street. Sanctuary Apartments," another voice shouted.
"Don't stop!"
"1347 street; corner of Myrrh and Tundra: Pine Rim Hovels!"
"Exceptional, director," said Malvis. "At least one of your subordinates may have saved lives today. I look forward to their future within Goliath." The Azarean conceded the floor and departed with relative haste.
"'Saved lives'?" David muttered. He felt the faintest displeasure in Malvis' tone but figured the stress had sunk in. A glance at the timer showed 19 minutes left. "It's out of our hands at this point."
***
Jessica stormed out of Goliath HQ and found herself back on the streets of pandemonium. People scattered for lack of direction. No one knew what the end of the countdown would bring, but barred roads and authorities couldn't calm the clamor and the chaos. New Sumer had been a stranger to crisis, so handled calamity like an infant.
She peered skyward, east, away from the sun. Her legs shook with anticipation, board clenched against her hip. The hell with rules, the hell with traffic, the hell with it all, she thought. Impatience and frustration fired her nerves then combined with desperation to corrode rational thought. Some things demanded insanity, so she fastened her goggles.
"McFly!" She dropped the board. "Babel, engage!" A holo-brace materialized around her left arm, projected from her watch. A series of key taps on its violet interface and the board hissed with a green glow underneath. She set her feet on deck, one at a time, and let her soles magnetize.
"Hey, Jess! Long-time no see!" The high and metallic voice was coming from her watch.
"No time, Babel!"
"Awww. What do you need from me this time?"
She bent her knees. "I need you to jump!"
"Oooooooooo. Okay!"
Like a rocket, Jessica shot into the air. The pressure thrust down on her shoulders, but her center of gravity relieved some of the stress. A few seconds later, she was flying.
"Direction: Pine Rim Hovels!" she exclaimed. A highlighted trailer appeared within her goggle HUD.
"Best route found! Watch out for UFOs!"
"Go!"
Jessica bolted forward, against the wind and time, past skyscrapers of the inner-city sprawl, and above the highways of harrowing traffic. She coursed with an eagle eye; close buildings and objects blurred, herself steering as best able at the precipice of lethal speed.
The retention of balance required laborious sync of hands and feet. She was speed, leaning on the board's tail end while her hand tilted the deck. Acceleration, however, shook her grit and toned her muscles at every turn. Newton's Third Law's setting in. She could manage a considerable distance before the friction took its toll, but the toll didn't matter.
She slid in close proximity to vehicles and pedestrians, descending and arcing as a bird. Very few New Sumerians noted the anomaly that traveled faster than anything else. They gaped when they realized it was a person.
Haste as her ally, the sky beckoned Jessica with an angel's envy and a devil's angst. Almighty magnetism carried her now. The metal in her shoes adhered without fail, allowing fluid swerves. She was surfing, sun to her back, along imaginary waves. Even so, she felt painstakingly slow.
"Do you see the last skyscraper, Babel?"
"Jacomo Banking! Here it comes!" The surface of the sleek skyscraper flared as she rounded another tower. It broadened with her proximity, a vertical, white plane over the hot horizon. "Monorail," she said. Her HUD highlighted, in green, the nearest train in the eastern suburbs. It was relatively far from and below the skyscraper.
"O.768. Almost a kilometer," said Babel.
"We're gonna disengage and slingshot it!"
"Do you want to die, Miss Jessica?"
"Not an issue!"
"There's an eastbound locomotive that will intersect our route."
"Perfect!"
"The odds of—"
"Don't even!"
Babel optimistically screamed, "So you do wish to die!"
She neared the skyscraper, ready to collide. Her nerves either shook from fear or kinetic force if not both.
"When I say 'Jump'—"
"I say, 'How low?'"
"You boost!"
"Sure thing, Miss I-Want-To-Die!"
A second—an instant passed, Jessica ready to plaster the surface of the megastructure.
"Disengage!"
Her feet fell, weightless. Magnetization lost, the board propelled sideways and rode around the smooth, metal skyscraper at its normal speed. She clenched the deck and took advantage of its orbit around the surface. She glanced below her dangling feet, at the mesh of city sprawl, waiting for the right moment.
"Jump!"
The board thrust backward an immense distance, adrenaline beating Jessica's veins. It then folded in her arms. Her hands, in turn, folded inward and hugged the deck as she spiraled across the sky.
All but the wind touched her ears. Which way was up? It was hard to tell on the verge of losing consciousness. The most common place to fall was always in dreams, which would explain why her mind drifted.
ns 15.158.61.54da2
