Black Jack (21 page)

She looked behind her into the empty corridor. Then she took two steps back and jumped into the room, calm, cool, and fearless. To land on the floor like a cat. Alert, precise and aware that the only way she would leave that room was badly. She straightened quickly and scanned her surroundings. There was no danger inside the room. Her eyes met Black’s. He was watching her with dismay.

You should not have come, he said in her head. This room is a trap.

She moved forward and stopped about four feet away from the bed. ‘I know.’ The incomprehensibly marvelous eggs had said, ‘When the time comes give her to him.’ That time was now. The eggs were waiting to hatch.

Why are you here?

‘I have very little time. Let’s not waste it with chit-chat. I am giving her to you now.’

What are you talking about?

‘It is my duty to protect her, but the eggs are more important than any of us. I have disobeyed my masters and will sacrifice myself for the eggs.’ She looked fierce and fearless. She seemed not to be a young girl but a woman of great magical powers.

He saw her become very still and a change came over her features. The boldness fled from her eyes, and softness fell about the contours of her mouth. A drop in her shoulders made her appear almost smaller. Suddenly it was his Dakota - not the pale thing he had found crouched over the hourglass but a brighter, more vivid version. He felt a flutter in his chest. A shame that she should see him in his helpless form. He had been a hero in her world and now he was nothing.

‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Your beautiful hair. It’s all gone,’ and with childlike innocence ran to comfort him. But when she tried to put her hand on his shoulder, it went right through. ‘Ugh,’ she cried in shock. ‘What’s happening to me?’ She was so unschooled in the ways of her other alters that she did not even realize that she was an astral projection. His eyes moved to the computer screen and her eyes automatically followed. He made the words.

You are traveling in spirit. It’s OK, don’t worry. I do it all the time. But it is dangerous for you here. You must leave now.

‘I don’t know how I got here. How can I leave?’ she whispered fearfully.

It’s all right, don’t worry. One of the others will come back soon and all will be well again. How are you?

‘I’m fine, but what’s happened to you? Are you ill?’

I’m not ill. This is what I am like in the real world.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, greatly surprised. She hugged her arms around her thin body, and looked around the room. ‘But why are you imprisoned in this windowless room?’

It is supposed to be a game. The world will decide whether I live or die.

She turned to him quickly. ‘That’s a horrid game. I don’t want you to die.’ She stopped, puzzled. But she never wanted anything. She looked into his eyes. The thought of his death actually caused her hurt.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

There is nothing you can do. This is something I agreed to do. Never mind that now. The story of Milarepa, did it have any significance for you?

At first, she looked as if she was about to say something else, but then she allowed him to distract her. ‘Our demons are our fears. To defeat them we must invite them to stay, and integrate ourselves with them,’ she said woodenly.

He wrote on the screen. What do you fear, Dakota?

‘The others.’

So you know what to do.

She began to shake her head at the prospect. ‘No, I can’t do that.’ She was still shaking her head, when her face began to change and Shekina fought her way through. Her eyes were stormy with some great effort. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘but I can’t hold on anymore.’

Then her beautiful face contorted and she was sucked out of the room as if she was no more than a thin rag in the path of a powerful vacuum cleaner. It was as Green had shown him: the world was not as the TV had led him to believe. The powers that should not be had the technology not only to net, but to store the electromagnetic part of humans.

Shekina was flung violently back into the trip chair. There were new electrodes placed on different points on her body to record her nerve impulses. The theme song of Dakota’s favorite movie came through her earphones,
Somewhere over the Rainbow...And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.
" But it was through a device on her head, through the mastoid bone inside her head, that she heard Schooner Klaus’s voice.

‘Hello, kitty, it’s your programmer here. Click your heels, it’s time to go over the rainbow and look into the white light.’

Shekina fought hard not to look, sweat poured from her chilled skin, but she was no match for the tritone, two specific notes that when played together could alter her brainwave activity to cause her severe pain or put her in ecstasy. This time it was ecstasy and, against her will, her eyes, unnaturally blue with drugs and intense emotions, opened wide to the excruciatingly bright light.

They were getting rid of her and bringing Dakota back. Poor Dakota. The pain was always for her. Then it all went black.

‘Who’s been a naughty little kitty, then?’

With a heavy load and a long journey

 -
Confucius,
Lunyu
(475BC- AD220)

Bumi knocked briefly, pushed open her neighbor’s back door, and entered it. Renuka, the lady of the house, was standing by her stove. Something was bubbling in a pot.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, concerned. She had known Bumi for many years now and she had never seen her so disheveled and distracted.

‘Have you got a computer?’ Bumi asked.

‘Yes, Anand has one upstairs. But I don’t know how it works.’

‘Please, you must help me. This one favor is all I ask. If I open it for you, could you please vote on it for me?’

‘Vote for what?’

‘You see, a little boy’s life is on the line. He is very dear to me. I know it sounds odd and it is the most unbelievable thing, but there is a barbarous plan to kill him according to how many people vote to save him on the net.’

‘A barbarous plan to kill someone?’ Renuka said, perplexed. ‘This makes no sense, Bumi.’

‘Please, you have to believe me.’

Renuka looked worried. She didn’t want to get involved in anything that could endanger her own family. They were quiet people who kept themselves to themselves. Her husband would be very annoyed with her if she brought trouble upon their family. She wondered if it was even safe to allow Bumi to use Anand’s computer.

‘I promise you it won’t get you or your family in trouble and it won’t cost you anything. I’ve voted too. Come on, I will show you.’

Against her better judgment Renuka agreed and the two hurried up the stairs and into Anand’s untidy room. Immediately, she began to apologize but Bumi shook her head impatiently. ‘He is a teenager. It would be unhealthy if his room were clean.

‘We need your passport number.’

‘Why?’ Renuka asked, already regretting her decision to allow her friend to use her computer.

‘Because each person is only allowed to vote once.’

Renuka went to her bedroom, opened a locked cupboard, and from a rubber-banded bundle of all her family’s passports extracted hers.

They switched on the computer, got connected to the Internet the way Ashan had shown her, and went to the Play God site. She was shocked to see that the yes figure had already risen to 390 and the no figure was only 3. Silently, she thanked Ashan; he must have voted for him and his mother.

When prompted at the right time, she hit the no button. Renuka read out her passport number and Bumi carefully keyed the numbers in. The screen flashed the ‘Thank you for voting’ message and filled once more with the live feed of Black. Bumi’s shoulders slumped. Seeing three hundred and ninety yes votes had frightened her. She had only a few friends left so there was no way she could even hope to reach that figure. She thought of David Icke and prayed that he could help.

She would have liked to stay and utilize the other passports in Renuka’s hand but, Renuka’s husband, Ashok, had come in from work and was calling out to his wife.

Immediately Bumi sprang up. She pressed her friend’s hand. ‘I’d better go, but thank you so much, Renuka. I’ll never forget this.’

Renuka accompanied her friend only to the top of the stairs, then went back to sit at the computer and watch the live feed. When her husband called out to her again she shouted him upstairs. ‘Come and look at this,’ she said. ‘Can you believe they are asking the public to vote whether this boy lives or not?’

Ashok shook his head at his wife’s naivety. ‘What utter nonsense,’ he dismissed, and sat on the chair his wife had vacated. He clicked out of the website, went back in afresh, and he stared at the screen in disbelief. Then he looked up at his wife. ‘They are offering a hundred US dollars if we vote yes.

‘Really? Bumi didn’t tell me that. Anyway, it’s one vote per person and I have already voted, no.’

‘You have, but I haven’t. And if I vote yes we will have a hundred dollars, and we will not have affected the outcome. We have to take care of our situation. We are not responsible for this boy. Who knows what karma he has come with to end up in this situation? We have nothing to feel guilty for. And anyway,
who is
this boy?’

‘I don’t know. Apparently someone that Bumi knows.’

‘Go get all our passports.’

Renuka picked up the bundle of passports that were lying on the table. ‘Why?’

‘We are going to use Anand’s and Meera’s passports too. Anand will vote yes and Meera will vote no. Which means we will not be changing the outcome for this boy, but our family will still be better off by two hundred dollars.’

‘I don’t know: Bumi did come to me for help. This is not helping, is it?’

‘Hey, if we wanted to be selfish, we could make four hundred dollars.’

Renuka folded her arms across her ample chest.

‘If it makes you feel better I will tell everyone at my office to vote, no.

‘What if they vote, yes?’

‘How would that be our fault? Besides, I don’t understand why you’re making such a fuss. Look at that boy, for God’s sake. He looks more dead than alive. We are probably doing him a favor. What kind of life is that, hooked up to all those machines? And I think it was rather sly of your friend not to tell you that voting yes was worth a hundred dollars. Surely that was your decision to make. I should be annoyed with her if I were you.’

‘Yes, I suppose that was not very trusting of her. I will phone my sister in Pondicherry and tell her to do the same as us.’

‘Good, and while you are at it, call all my relatives too.’

His wife made a face. She didn’t like Ashok’s people.

Renuka sat beside him and together they did the deed. Nevertheless, Ashok went up to bed peeved that Bumi had taken advantage of his wife and there was no way to change one’s vote. As he brushed his teeth vigorously he decided he would tell all his relatives in India to vote in the morning. A hundred dollars in India was big money. There was no doubt in his mind that the powers that be would shut down this facility very quickly.

The Investigation
Portland Cybercrime Unit, FBI

Dan Wells, head of the FBI’s Cybercrime Unit in Portland, Oregon was a tall, spare man with thinking hazel eyes and a cautious mouth. A man who took extraordinary pride in his work. Forty successful prosecutions in less than seven years. The rest of his life could be characterized as a failure of monumental proportions; messy divorce, kids who wouldn’t speak to him, a cold apartment, a bare fridge, and a lonely, unmade bed. He knocked briefly on his superior’s office door and walked in.

‘Sir?’

Robert Kilton sat behind his desk; thinning hair, cotton shirt, unbuttoned camel waistcoat, and a belligerent look that Dan knew well. He grunted, and nodded toward the chair in front of his desk. Dan sat. Kilton turned his computer screen to face Dan. ‘Seen this yet?’ he asked glumly.

Dan’s eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell?’

‘Kinda creepy, huh?’

‘It came online eight hours ago. Some sick fuck is streaming it live from somewhere on planet Earth. But by a strange coincidence, and you know how I feel about coincidences, our offices had two phone booth tips minutes apart about six hours after it came online. So it’s either local or someone wants us to think it is.’

‘Jesus, what is wrong with people? Eight hours ago and already two thousand people want this kid dead.’

Kilton leaned back into the comfort of his ergonomic leather chair and said nothing.

‘Obviously, we can’t shut it down?’

‘Yep. The site is being hosted by thousands of servers around the world.’

Dan looked at Kilton, his eyes narrowed. ‘Who’s the kid?’

‘No idea.’

Dan frowned. ‘A kid that sick must have a medical history. Where are his relatives? He didn’t get to be that age without carers, relatives, friends, doctors, nurses, social workers. Someone must know or miss him.’

‘None of the two thousand have come forward,’ Robert said dryly. ‘Get your team on it. See what you can do.’

Dan left the office frowning. Something very strange about the whole thing. Nobody ever in his experience would pay out hundreds of thousands to complete strangers for nothing. He stopped by the vending machine and returned to his department with coffee and a chocolate bar.

Mary Manning, a charmingly freckled, young thing looked up from her screen. She scowled at him playfully. ‘What did
he
want?’

Dan stopped by her desk. Silently he went around to where she was sitting and, leaning forward, typed in the website’s address. The others crowded around to watch.

Their eyes widened. ‘
Untraceable
,’ Mary declared.

‘Yep, it’s right out of it,’ agreed Kim Meers, easily the best mind in his team.

Dan turned toward them with a frown. ‘Catch me up. What are you two on about?’

‘It’s a Hollywood movie,’ explained Mary.

‘Diane Lane,’ said Kim, flicking her raven black hair away from her neck.