I PAUSE OUTSIDE DAD’S office and double-check the lock. Bypassing the door wouldn’t be a challenge. I’ve disassembled and reassembled the keypads around here so often I’m surprised he bothers to lock anything. After last night, though, I don’t know what he’d do if he came home and found me in there, and I’m not ready to die today. Not until I’ve done what he can’t. Not until I’ve found her. Besides, I have a more elegant solution to the problem.
The library lights up that pale fluorescent blue, my sun- shine. My own office of sorts. School room, game room, hobby closet. This cramped space contains a desk, computer terminal, and a wall of metal shelves covered in scavenged parts. A worn paperback sits on the shelf, bookended by a box filled with interface cards and a spool of coaxial cable.
I reach for the one item that transforms this room, the book, a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson.
Bullshit family values, a treatise on being resourceful, con- stant prayers and adulation to a higher power: pure old-school propaganda. Despite that, I used to think it was the best book ever written and I’ve read quite a few. Being lost in an exotic location and left to live on wit and sheer determination sounded fun. Jesus, I was such a dumbass.
I open it to the handwritten note on the inside cover:
“Happy Birthday to my adventurous teenager! Love, Mom.”
Mom was a “glass is half full and the faucet is nearby” sort of person. Even her handwriting in the note bubbles on the page. Moving around became our “adventure”; our ever-changing identities, part of some grand quest. By the time she gifted the book, we’d read it together, over and over. I knew the rose- colored interpretation of our life through that book was all an act. Constantly getting shipwrecked sucks ass.
At least then, I was being marooned in the civilized world.
I pull the book close to my face and breathe in deeply. It’s got the scent of a real library. A smell of knowledge and learning. That musty, pulpy odor that speaks to the millions of printed pages filling those brick walls.
When every public library across the U.S. finally seemed to get internet access, my life was complete. We moved so much, we only rarely had our own service at home. The library became a lifeline to my real friends. We’d hook up online in chat rooms and forums, all hosted on hijacked servers, where we’d talk about everything from baseball to the latest tech.
This place is too quiet to be a library.
Goddamn memory lane. Dead end. Who knows, maybe I’ll see a real library again soon?
I flick on the terminal, and underneath the metal floor, the server hums, sparking out of its sleep cycle. An awkward place to put a server, but heat rises and that dinosaur creates plenty. Of course, crawling around under the floor to do maintenance is a pain in the ass, but it offered challenge and exploration. In one particularly grueling month of boredom, I familiarized myself with every scrap of hardware under the floor and traced every cable to its source.
All the tech here is old-school stuff that’s been re-purposed. A lot of the hardware is stamped with Russian characters, another little mystery I have yet to be informed about. I do know there’s absolutely no way Dad assembled this stuff alone. He can’t tell RJ45 from co-ax. Lucky me; he’ll never notice a few modifications.
The entry hall is dark. Through the open safe room door, the monitors stare back, cold and empty. I should have plenty of time—Dad hasn’t exactly raced off to the convenience store. And if he walks in? I could care less.
I lift up an access hatch and shimmy into the crawlspace with one particular cable in mind. My multi-tool, some patch, a switch I cobbled together out of junk parts, and I’m done. As I work in the checkered darkness, Mom’s curious face watches in some corner of my mind.
Sweat clings like droplets of ice as I emerge from the server’s crawlspace. I switch the library terminal over to the new cable and stuff the old through the floor grating, out of sight. The screen flickers, and a login prompt blinks impatiently. No different than the library terminal login where I can access the equivalent of the bunker owner’s manual and chess. However, the top of the screen displays the network address reserved for Dad’s office.
Username:
There’s a code I’ve seen on the pentagon-shaped necklace Dad wears. I try that first.
CM10288
I wish Eric were here. Hacking is not my forte. Sure, downloading programs and tiptoeing through the “how-to’s” of hacking on virus-laden websites, I can do that. But my man, Eric, well, he takes it to a whole new level. He’s Yoda and I’m the whiny farm boy.
We didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Eric used to say most people use stupid passwords they can easily remember. Names of loved ones, dates. Of course, most people don’t anticipate that kids who share their haunted memories will be hacking their account.
Password:
The password isn’t hard to guess, but getting the order and format for the date is the tricky part. Actually, I have two dates in mind, but the least painful one goes first; Mom’s yearly disappointment etched it into my brain—their anniversary.
Connie081287
Welcome, Crimson Mask. Please enter search phrase or file number.
“Jesus, even your computer calls you Crimson Mask.”
I type in the first name that comes to mind: Connie Harrington.
Accessing…
0 records.
Staring again at the blinking cursor, I’m not quite ready to type the next name that pops into my head. I go with the guts of the Augment program, “Project Peacemaker”.
Accessing…
1264 records. Sort by?
I sort the records by date and skim the titles. Most of it’s stuff you’d hear on the news, or read in magazines and newspapers, but this is unfiltered, raw data. I check reality against what I already know, or think I know. There’s always a gap between those. One file called “Peacemaker: A History” from a military journal catches my eye.
So far, nothing I didn’t read about in Mr. Hutton’s history class. During World War I, Germany tried to make soldiers that could breathe mustard gas. World War II saw America field the first Augment team. B-52, Minuteman, Fat Boy, Tomahawk, Hurricane; Augment Force Zero, the guys credited with ending the war with Japan. These were guys that had real powers, not just enhancements to stave off trench rot or keep their dicks from falling off from adding Europe’s brothels to their tour.
Russia launched their Augment program, and tensions escalated. Downtown Havana got turned into a parking lot. Chernobyl, where that mental patient Red Scourge left a trail of radioactive destruction across Eastern Europe. The world demanded change.
Didn’t happen.
How do you end a program of that magnitude? That was the billion-dollar question. They said it was over, but it really wasn’t. Some people thought of watching the Augments as a spectator sport, with property damage. Not until that day in September did everyone know the truth.
I was home sick, right after Dad had pulled his typical disappearing act. Convincing Mom I needed to stay home came easy those days. I’d complain about vague aches and pains. Stomach issues were good—not even your mother wants to confirm a raging case of diarrhea.
I remember having the TV remote in pieces. Watching the IR light flash as the buttons clicked had mesmerized me. I had started on a cartoon channel, but eventually settled on a local station in the middle of the “Good Morning” wherever-it-was- we-lived-then show. We might have been outside Dallas, I’m not sure. We weren’t there long. Suddenly, the anchors veered off the petting-zoo script. Monitors behind them showed a sky- scraper billowing smoke into a cloudless sky.
Mom came to check on me, and when she entered the room I flipped the remote’s battery upside-down. I was only twelve, but even then I had grown tired of being protected. She never tried to change the channel, though. Not this time.
We stared in horror as the news played a clip of an Augment named the Djinn firing a molten ball of plasma from his palms clean through a smoking skyscraper. Dad beat the Air Force jets, but he didn’t get there right away. By then, the unbelievable heat had melted through the supports on the building. It broke in half, spilling girders, concrete and people into the streets below even as the base collapsed into a cloud of dust.
Mom had never cried in front of me. But her facade of optimism collapsed with the buildings. Tears flowed when the cameras caught Dad flying amid the massive wall of dust that rode the New York streets like a white tsunami. She frantically searched the corners of the screen when the view panned to the towers’ naked wreckage, jutting from the roiling debris cloud.
This was different than any other Augment attack. The Djinn came out of a program outside the normal government spheres. Secrets had been sold, or maybe a rogue group had gotten lucky with their own experimentation. He flew—not many of them do. And the destructive force behind his blasts was unheard of. Many of the shots the Djinn fired penetrated building after building and kept going. Missed shots cooked a flock of birds somewhere over the Atlantic, blinded an airline pilot, changed the temperature of the New York skies during the battle.
Talking heads speculated in the aftermath. But even though the Djinn disappeared into the clouds before the day ended, the media persisted, uncovering the use of Augments as proxy soldiers in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South America. Cuba hadn’t prompted any real change. The connections to governments had simply been erased. In that brave new cloak-and- dagger world, secrets were lost. At some point the invisible wars outside had boiled over and rained down on a quiet New York skyline.
Not even the media knew exactly what happened in the dense smoke and confusion that day. Dad never spoke about it either. When he’d gotten home, he’d been burned. Everywhere I could see, his skin was pink with patches of brownish blisters. One hand was mummified in cotton gauze. No one could find whatever remained of the Djinn.
Please enter search phrase or file number.
Djinn
Accessing…
Subject security level: Declassified.
1 record.
The enter key clicks.
Asset: Abdel Khalid Mustafa. Status: Terminated
Playing beneath the text is a video. Vomit rises in my throat and looking away isn’t voluntary. It must be the Djinn. Or what used to be. His face is missing. As if punched into his skull.
Another one of Dad’s “wax on, wax off” sayings comes to mind—in a war, which is what any conflict between two Augments is, you never pull your punches. You attack with overwhelming force.
A white sheet inches up over the face and several men hoist the body onto a flat board near the edge of a ship railing. Five men stand by in Navy whites, Dad’s there too, his burns fresh and more gruesome than I recall.
The view pans out, and an aircraft carrier deck fills the screen. Planes arranged in tight lines crowd the space. A fade to black begins, and as darkness replaces the clear blue sky and neat rows of jets, one particular spot on the screen comes to life. Rocket flares hold back the blackness.
I stop the playback. Rewind. Playback. Rewind. Third time, I let it fade and the file closes. Twin rockets blasting into the sky. The Black Beetle soars upward from the carrier deck, only yards away from Dad.
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