Chrysalis

55

In the tense silence that followed, the sharp warnings Asperton and Peyton had exchanged over temporarily freezing the Helix echoed in Logan’s head.

It could crash the entire architecture. It’s never been tried. You’ll be yanking a hatch off a jet in midflight.

There are protocols for shutting it down — but with all the data streaming into the Helix, all needing to be processed and stored in real time… there’s no mechanism for pausing.

His sixth sense — which had saved him so often in the past — whispered there was something else buried in that rush of conversations.

What am I missing, Kit? he asked his wife across the barrier that separated the living from the dead. I know there’s something.

“Omega,” he abruptly said out loud.

Everyone was deep in their own thoughts, and there was no response. Wrigley was standing in a far corner and speaking animatedly into his Sentinel, consumed with how the rollout — now a full hour in — was progressing.

“Omega,” Logan repeated, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Peyton looked up. “What about it?”

Logan turned to Wrigley. “What’s the status of the rollout?”

Wrigley took a moment to respond. “Thank God for all the unit testing. So far, so good: just normal hiccups. This ‘go slow’ business is making it difficult for my PR and customer support teams.”

“ ‘Difficult,’ ” Purchase muttered. “Wait until noon.”

Logan turned back to Peyton, more animated now. “Hear that? We’re overlooking something — the Voyager rollout is under way.”

“Yes, we know — and we have roughly two hours to celebrate before the shitstorm starts.”

“No, no… you’re missing the point!” Logan turned to Snow. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you remember what you said in security control, when you suggested freezing the Helix? Asperton asked: What about Omega? And you said—”

“I said it was indirectly integrated, so I could put a moat around it, but nothing more.”

“Yes, put a moat around it — and sequester the data. Call me an idiot, but to me that implies the Omega portion of the Helix is still undamaged and operational. If it wasn’t, the rollout would be stalled. Nonfunctional.”

“So? That rogue code has nothing to do with Omega or the Helix. It’s already in place, set to go off at noon. Stopping it is the problem.”

“Jesus, will you listen? This Helix can do almost anything except cure cancer. You would have been able to locate and emasculate the malware, like Mossby suggested, if it was running. So if Omega’s portion is still intact, why not leverage that to backtrack through the system and disable the coding?”

Peyton shook his head. “The whole blockchain structure is shut down. Even if it wasn’t, the consensus algorithms would prevent us moving from Omega to the rest of the Helix system. They were built to be compartmentalized — that’s why Snow was able to put a moat around it in the first place.”

“What I’m saying is, your new Omega technology might be able to defeat that.”

“The problem is access, Logan. The system is effectively brain-dead.” Peyton paused. “Can I call you an idiot now?”

“No,” someone said from across the room. It was Roz Madrigal — who’d hardly said two words since they’d hidden themselves away in this control room hours before. “I see where Logan is going with this. And he may be right.”

“All right, Roz,” said Wrigley, suddenly paying attention. “Tell us how Logan is going to part the Red Sea.”

“Well…” She looked around nervously. “I know a little about the structure of the Helix. I mean, we rubbed shoulders with those Arc X techs practically the whole time we were retrofitting BioCertain’s synaptichrons.”

She stopped abruptly, aware the subject was verboten.

“Oh, go on,” Peyton said. “You’ve dipped a toe in the dog shit — you might as well jam your foot all the way in.”

This caustic remark seemed to stiffen her spine. “Omega technology uses fiber optics for pushing video fast enough to mimic HD-quality immersion. The Helix uses photonic — optical — computing for data transmission.” When nobody spoke, she continued. “It’s like Logan said. You might be able to find a way in with Omega’s network, which is still functional, to access what you need from the Helix… without bringing it online.”

“Can’t be done,” Peyton snapped. “Different systems, different architectures — and different interfaces.”

Roz glanced at Logan with a knowing smile. “I don’t think Jeremy is talking about accessing the Helix through a standard interface.”

“No, I’m not,” Logan said.

Now everyone in the room was listening intently. Roz raised her finger. “You’re forgetting this,” she told Peyton, and, very deliberately, she gently tapped the Sentinel unit cradled around her ear: once, twice.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Peyton asked.

“It means,” said Logan, “if we can’t access the software bomb that’s ticking somewhere in the Helix by any normal way, we’ll try it the virtual way — with Wrigley’s VR technology.”

Twenty minutes later, after giving Mossby time to run a few diagnostics, everyone was standing by the exit of the dimly lit soundstage.

“All right,” Wrigley said to the assembled group. He seemed to be thriving on the adrenaline of the morning. “We’ve been live for ninety minutes, and our tech support teams are in panic mode dealing with typical rollout shit: they won’t pay any attention to us.”

“Where are we going?” Peyton asked.

“The cage.”

“Why the hell are we leaving—”

“It’s the only place we’ll have the necessary equipment and computing extensibility. Come on, let’s hurry the hell up.”

“Hold on,” Purchase said, nodding at Dafna. “What about her ‘cleanup man’? If she’s right, and he’s roaming the Complex with unfinished business, that means we’re the business.”

“What, then?” Logan asked. “Let those thousand people die? We’ve already kept our heads down for hours trying to figure out an answer, and now we just might have one. We can’t worry about unknown variables.”

“Time to move,” said Wrigley, checking his watch. “I’ll lead, and you follow like you’re bigwigs, here to check on how the rollout’s going.” He turned to Mossby. “Tuck in your goddamned shirt. And hide the damn machine guns!” he told Dafna.

He glanced around a few more seconds, then pushed open the door.

They were confronted by a babel of voices, almost deafening after hours in the soundproofed control room. Logan walked quickly down the tech corridor behind Peyton, trying to look both curious and important at the same time. Dozens of workers were talking into their Sentinels, typing on keyboards, huddling in groups around screens.

“Roz,” Wrigley said over his shoulder, “Mossby’s going to need a shitload of equipment to complete this VR linkage — we’ve never done anything like this before. Can you gather it for him?” She nodded. “You, Snow — we’ll need your Helix expertise if this is to have any chance of working. You, and you” — he looked back at Peyton and Dafna — “are going to cover our asses. If somebody is really still out there, you’d better drop him fast, before he shoots us, too.”

“I’ll loop in somebody stationed down at the Helix,” Snow said to Peyton. “Someone who can access the right linear block.”

Peyton nodded. “Loop away. We already have a date and time stamp — September 5. And we know who pushed out the malware.”

“And from where,” added Purchase. “Those implant updates can only be sent from one console in BioCertain.”

They rounded a corner, walking faster now, and Wrigley spoke again. “Karel, my old ex-friend, you’re now officially the pilot. If you need any help and Roz or myself aren’t around, ask Purchase. Or Logan. They’re just spectators, anyway.”

He pushed open the door to a large room all too familiar to Logan: plain beige walls, a scattering of wheeled devices… and the grid-like cage, sitting alone in the middle with only cameras and action dollies for company.

Wrigley waited for the door to shut behind them. Logan, however, kept walking — across the concrete floor toward the cage.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Wrigley demanded.

“Just what you requested. I’m going to part the Red Sea.”

“You?” Wrigley said. “Roz should go.”

“Roz is needed here. As are you.”

“You don’t know the first thing about this,” Wrigley snapped.

“I’ve been inside. I know as much as anybody. Fact is, nobody can say whether this will work or not, because it’s never been done. Using VR to leverage the common architecture of Omega and the Helix? It’s unknown territory. It’s also our only option.”

Wrigley started to object, but Logan cut him off. “And I’ve got Christie’s carte blanche — remember? With authorization to give any order, or take any action, to fix this mess. We’ll need everyone here, sharing their expertise. And that means all of you outside the cage, monitoring the simulacrum. My job is to be guinea pig.”

All eyes turned to Wrigley. After an excruciatingly long moment, he gave a slight nod.

With that, Logan took a seat and glanced at Roz. “Ms. Madrigal, would you do the honors, please?”

Roz quickly ducked into the cage, removed Logan’s Voyager unit, and began arranging the equipment as she’d done once before.

“Wait,” Wrigley said abruptly. “Give him the phase three prototype.”

She paused. “We’re still alpha-testing some of its—”

“We’re likely to encounter problems at the air gap, and it’s got a better chance of navigating those than the enhanced Voyagers.”

After a hesitation, Roz left the cage, then returned with an unfamiliar device in her hand. It had two seams closed imperfectly by torx screws — all too obviously a prototype, advanced or not. He felt a momentary, almost undetectable pinch of discomfort as she set it in place. Then, after a quick check of the hardware, she backed out and closed the cage, hurrying toward Mossby, who was sitting at a control console near the far wall.

Logan looked around for a second. Peyton and Dafna were guarding the room’s main door, submachine guns in hand. Wrigley had settled behind a large center console. Snow was at Mossby’s side, talking into his two-way radio.

“Ready, Jeremy?” Roz’s voice sounded in his ear.

Logan glanced at the clock: twelve noon exactly. Then he took a deep breath. “Go ahead, Alice,” he told her. “Send me down the rabbit hole.”