Killswitch, page 21
“Wait,” I said. “Pallburg must have known the others were dead. Wouldn’t he try to hide me?”
“He did,” the Kernel said.
“By getting me suspected of his murder?”
“I don’t know because I’m not complete. I don’t have all of Pallburg’s thoughts. But I speculate that he wanted to get you on the run and have you join the Realists.”
“What?” Rin said. “That’s insane. You’re saying Pallburg manipulated the Realists into grabbing Mavo? Why?”
“Again, speculation,” the Kernel said. “Mavo has thought of this himself: How could a pack of— forgive me, Rin— bumbling clowns manage to pull off intricate sabotage?”
“Well, we—” Rin began and stopped. “Not all of us were—” She stopped again. She looked at me. I looked at her, then we both said, “Anchorage.”
“Precisely,” the Kernel said. “That was one reason I began to suspect the AI was using the group. It could take over Unity computing nodes. It used the Anchorage node as cover and mimicked human interaction.”
“So,” I said. “There was never a human contact in Anchorage?”
“No,” the Kernel replied. “But it did need a physical presence to take down, for instance, the stored memories that would show there had been anomalies in some of those units. Hard drives, for instance, that are kept on a satellite.”
Rin turned pale. “The AI used us to cover its tracks?”
“I’d say that’s a non-trivial possibility,” the Kernel said. ”And Pallburg— the flesh Pallburg, I mean— wanted to use you as a spy, Mavo, so I could get inside the group. Also, you’d be hiding in plain sight, not as a fugitive but as a hero of the revolution.”
“Risky,” I said.
“Genius,” the Kernel replied.
“And the explosion at the cow factory?” Rin asked. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” the Kernel admitted. “But Mavo said the power went off before the blast. What if the sentience wanted to use the sabotage as a cover for what it really was doing? The factory, after all, links to the main Unity agricultural node. Maybe it was an infiltration effort that went bad. The news feeds said the other meat factory wasn’t online yet so it piggybacked on the cow factory’s existing security and maintenance systems. Those changes might not have been recorded in Unity blueprints.”
I got it. “Maybe when it shut down the cow factory, the AI damaged the other system without even knowing they were linked.”
“It’s not omniscient,” the Kernel said. “At least, not yet.”
“So what now?” I asked.
“Now,” the Kernel said. “We go somewhere, we do something, I’m inserted, I kill the thing, and it’s all good.”
“That sounds pretty vague,” Rin said.
“That’s because I don’t have my full mission set,” the Kernel snapped. “I’ve got big holes in my memories and my programming. All I know is that the other Killswitches are dead. Mavo and I are the last hope. Even Pallburg’s wife didn’t know about me.”
I looked over at Rin and felt a lump in my throat.
“Be careful what you say,” I mentally hissed to the Kernel. “She doesn’t know.”
“That I’m— he— was her father?” the Kernel replied. “Why would she? She was an infant when they left. Alleea broke off all contact and Pallburg couldn’t risk sharing any information that would get back to his wife. And I, I mean he, was focused on his work.”
“That seems like a pretty cold-hearted decision,” I said. “To choose never to see your only daughter again.”
For the first time, the Kernel paused. I felt in it something like a vague pain or a shadow of regret but all it replied was: “I did it for her. I had no choice.”
MY THROAT HURT. TALKING to myself was exhausting. Everyone was sitting around, trying to digest what they’d heard. Rin looked stunned. It must have been hard to realize she was a pawn and that everything she’d believed in had been a lie.
I knew that feeling.
Nobody said anything. Maybe they were each waiting for somebody else to speak. There was tension in the air, as if everyone had sucked in a breath and hadn’t let it out.
I looked at Rin again. I realized I’d begun to count on her to come up with plans. But she seemed to be in shock. Mom and the Pallburg Kernel seemed to be at a loss, too.
That left me. But I had nothing. I didn’t have any idea what to do next.
But I couldn’t let anyone know that. It was like being back with the Realists. They’d believed I was somebody I wasn’t, somebody courageous and capable. So I became that person. I lied to them and lied to myself.
So now, I lied to myself that I knew what to do.
“Okay,” I said. “First question: How do we get that missing information? Mom, can we reuse the crystal? Try to download more memories?”
“It won’t work,” the Kernel answered. “We downloaded everything we could. Your probe damage blocked some of it. You’re like a corrupted hard drive. If we try it again, all we’ll get are error codes.”
“Then we’re screwed,” Jola said. “Can we can get lunch now?”
Mom and Rin looked at her in exasperation. She gave them an impish smile. They began to laugh. The gloomy tension of the moment eased.
Jola stood up. “I am so hungry,” she said. “Rin, do you have any more blueberry bars?”
“No, sorry,” Rin said.
“Really? Because when I was little, Mavo used to hide my favorite rations and make me play hide-and-seek with them.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said.
“You did,” Jola said. “But I always found them. Did you let me?”
“I really don’t remember,” I said.
“Probably not,” she said. “I was always smarter than you. Jerk. Anyway, maybe this is just the same. I had to look for clues. Sometimes you drew them in the dirt.”
“Oh,” I said. “Like a sort of treasure map?”
“Sort of,” she repeated sarcastically, imitating my voice. “So, Mom, thing in my brother’s head, what clues would Pallburg leave?”
“He wouldn’t have to,” I said. “There was the crystal.”
The Kernel interjected. “No, your sister is right. I would have had a backup plan. A fail-safe.”
“Oh, yeah, he’s a genius. I forgot,” I said. I thought about it. “Not another crystal. Whatever made the crystal fail the first time would just make it fail again. Maybe Jola’s right. Maybe there’s a treasure map.” I looked at Mom. “Did Pallburg give you anything else besides the crystal?”
Mom shook her head. “No.”
Faces dropped.
“But there’s something we shared,” Mom added.
She looked embarrassed. Then she turned her head, lifted up her hair and pulled down the back of her blouse below her shoulders. An intricate tattoo was there, sweeping across her upper back. Red waves dashing against black shores. It was a sea at sunset, or maybe an ocean of flames. A gold heart rose from the waves.
I’d seen it many times. “That’s your surf clan tattoo.”
“Yes,” Mom said. “We all got one on the day when we had to leave Malibu forever.”
“After Unity ordered everyone away,” Jola said. She’d heard the story innumerable times, too.
“Yes,” Mom said. “But what you don’t know is that Pallburg got one, too.”
“Pallburg?” Rin said. “But he created Unity!”
“Before that, he was our neighbor and my parents’ best friend,” Mom said. “He lived in a mansion on top of the hill. His folks were old money. We lived down below. He used to come down and barbecue with us in the backyard. He was twenty years older than me but I thought he was cool. After he left to work on Unity, he kept in touch. When Unity destroyed the Malibu enclave, he got my parents jobs with his company in Silicon Valley 2.0.”
“And the tattoo?” I asked.
“Before Unity took down the Malibu Wall, it sent in robotic vessels to clean up offshore. There were decades of toxic waste on the sea floor. Unity said changing the currents from the wall would move it ashore. So they grabbed what they could and they burned the rest.” Mom’s eyes got a far-off look. “The sea burned for two days.”
She hugged herself. “Anyway, that’s what this tattoo means.”
“So Pallburg was with you?” Rin asked. “That’s when he got the tattoo?”
“No, that was long after,” Mom said. “When Pallburg came to me, years later, and asked me to make you, Mavo, he showed it to me. It was his way of showing solidarity, and sorrow at what we’d lost. That his heart was still in Malibu. I couldn’t hate him after that.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “That’s an interesting story but it doesn’t get us anywhere.”
Jola rolled her eyes and Rin shook her head.
“What?” I asked.
“His heart was still in Malibu!” Jola said, speaking each word loudly and slowly as if I were brain-damaged. Which, to be fair, I was.
“Yes, he missed Malibu,” I said. “I get it. He loved Malibu.”
“No!” Rin said. “Mavo, think. His heart was still in Malibu.”
“Oh!” Mom said.
At the same time, the Pallburg Kernel said. “Of course.”
I was getting annoyed. Everybody seemed to be in on the joke but me.
“All right,” I said. “Will somebody please explain it to me?” Then all of a sudden it hit me.
“Oh!” I said.
“About time!” the Kernel exclaimed. “I hope everybody sees why I’m annoyed to be working with you.”
“You’re going to save the world?” Jola scoffed, rolling her eyes so deliberately that her head circled.
“There’s a backdoor somewhere in Malibu!” I said.
“The house where Pallburg grew up,” the Kernel said. “That’s where my heart was.”
“No,” I said. “Too obvious. Anyone who knows his history would look there.”
That brought the conversation to a halt.
I cast a mental eye on the Kernel. “Feel free to chip in here,” I said.
“That period isn’t part of my memories,” the Kernel said. “Clearly if my flesh doppelgänger had installed a backdoor, it must have been before he came up with the idea of Killswitches. Possibly a discarded attempt at a fail-safe.”
“Or a last last resort,” I said. “At least it is for us now. So, where would he put it?”
“Well,” Rin said. “There are a couple of requirements.”
“All ears,” I said.
“First, obviously, there has to be Unity access. But also, it has to be safe from Unity surveillance. So nothing on dry land. Malibu has islands that used to be mountaintops, but Pallburg wouldn’t hide it there because Unity satellites would spot it.”
“But the water shields it,” I broke in.
“Right,” Rin said. “I think it’s probably underwater. But it still needs to be near a Unity connection so Pallburg could interface and take down the sentient AI. That means it also needs to be near a power source, or have its own shielded source.”
“It also means the site has to be within easy reach of Pallburg,” Mom said. “He might have to move fast.”
“All right, so good transportation links,” Rin said.
“One more thing,” I said. “Pallburg likes to hide things in plain sight, like me.”
“So?” Jola asked.
“So why not choose a popular tourist site,” I said. “Someplace crowded, yet with access to all the facilities he needs?”
“The Thirty-Three!” Mom said.
“The what?” I asked.
“The Thirty-Three,” Mom repeated. “It’s the underwater hiking trail from Downtown LA to Malibu. A big glassed-in tube. Thirty-three miles long in pre-Collapse units. You follow the old Coast Highway from the skyscrapers to the Great Malibu Reef.”
I knew about the reef. It was a bioengineering marvel of plastic-eating coral.
“I was there once,” Rin said. “Got my dive certification there. It’s connected to a string of tourist domes and camping globes and dive stations and even the ruins of the Getty Roman Villa.”
“That’s a long way to search,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” Mom said. “Because I think Rin is right. Pallburg would choose someplace meaningful to him.” She looked meaningfully at me. I was quicker on the uptake this time.
“Your house?” I asked. “Mom, are you saying Pallburg came back and built a backdoor at your old house?”
“Where his heart was,” she said. “At least, where my heart was.”
The Kernel chipped in. “A high probability,” it said. “Nothing need be written down to be discovered. Pallburg would probably have the coordinates in his head and so would your mother.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what do we do when we get there? How do we access the backdoor?”
“Leave that to me,” the Kernel said smugly. “Pallburg clearly intended to access the Unity system and he didn’t have my capabilities. I was specifically designed to infiltrate it. I don’t think there’ll be a problem.”
“How do we get there?” I asked. “Boat, train, balloon?”
Mom said, “My house is within the Reef Reserve, and that’s off-limits to all surface vessels and submersibles. You’ll have to take the train to Drowned LA and hike from there.”
She paused a moment, and then added, “I’ve never been back.”
I looked at the loss on her face. For just a moment, a terrible thought hit me: Pallburg had needed a backdoor. How far would he have gone to create it? He’d cut off all contact with Rin because he thought it was necessary. Could he have arranged to drown Malibu, destroyed his home and Mom’s, just to create a safe spot?
I put that thought aside. There was no way of knowing and even if it were true, what difference did it make now? We had one chance.
It was almost a forlorn hope. We would have to somehow get to Drowned LA without being caught, then walk through a tube of air where we could easily be trapped. And then when we found the backdoor— if there even was one— we had to hope it was still working. Anything could have destroyed it: time, decay, a sea slide. And could the Kernel crack it? And finally, could the Kernel actually stop the sentient AI? Would it be too powerful? Would we get there too late?
Meanwhile, Unity would be hunting us.
The Kernel gave me a mental nudge. “You seem to have a problem with suicide missions,” it said. “I just want you to know, I’m voting for survival. But my mission comes first.”
“That’s not comforting,” I said.
“Pallburg was never good at comforting,” the Kernel replied.
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“But he knew what he was doing,” the Kernel said. “And we’ve got to do it.”
I drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah,” I said at last. “We do. We’ve got to go to Drowned LA.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Everything we needed was at the volcano. We traded for hiking gear, much of it used or handmade but tough and practical, and when we couldn’t trade we used some of the funds on Rin’s prepaid chip. Outsiders frequently used them because they refused to have Unity accounts.
But the most important find was the Nederlanders. A group of tourists from the Netherlands had stopped to take in the festival. Mom had met them already, and took us to their tent. We introduced ourselves as Max and Amber. Mom presented them with her homemade Dreamstones and they gave us a gingery treat called ontbijtkoek. It was pretty good.
I learned so much about Nederlander history, which was fascinating. They were among the wealthiest citizens in Unity but their homeland was all underwater. For a generation, they’d lived on immense floating islands of metal, refusing to leave their country while they struggled to reclaim it. They even had forests growing on huge barges.
The group had something I hadn’t seen for a long time: a sense of natural innocence. They were cheerful, not suspicious or cynical despite all that they had lost, and endlessly adventurous. Also, they were all taller than me.
This group was heading on to Drowned LA and had brought its own diving gear. We’d hoped to barter for some but after an evening of singing and swapping stories and adventures— I made mine up, of course, based on books I’d read— they invited us to come with them.
THE LAST NIGHT OF THE festival ended with the Fire Ceremony. Thousands of people gathered in a circle around the volcano. They spread blankets over the rough lava. There was a sort of gentle electricity in the air that made us feel as if we were all connected. Just after dark, the cinder cone erupted with a blast of flame and holograms of lava poured down its sides in glowing orange-red streams. Hidden steam vents poured scented smoke into the starry sky. People sang and then released fire balloons that flew up into the darkness like newborn stars.
I was sitting with Mom and Jola and their group when I noticed Rin get up and walk away. Everyone else was mesmerized by the show. Without a word, I rose and followed her. I found her a short distance away, sitting on a low hill, arms folded around her knees. She looked somber.
“Hi, Rin,” I said. “Can I join you?”
She didn’t object so I sat down. We watched the balloons floating gently away into the night.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
Rin didn’t answer but put her chin on her knees.
“What is it?”
She shook her head.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just that I hate to leave. It was so great here.” She turned to me. “Now I have to go back to my real life. And my real life sucks. Everything I believed in was false. How do I even know this mission is real? Maybe it’s just another trap.”
“The Kernel doesn’t think so,” I replied. “And he may be a prick, but he’s not stupid. But if you don’t want to come, I’ll understand.”
“No!” she said. “I have to protect you.”
“I can take care of myself,” I replied. I was a little offended.
“Sure,” she said. “But Brian told me to guard you, and—” She paused and gulped. “—and that was the last thing he said to me. So I will do it.”
