This is the sixth scene of Algorithmic Timestamp: Mara Sterling has contacted her criminal acquaintance Lex Twelvesixty to protect her son Elliot from the Temperdu algorithm.
Return to the first scene of the story: Temperdu in District Zero
Read the previous scene of the story: Location Obscured
When the house went offline, Elliot knew that his mom had done something to protect him. The house is safe. Do not leave until I say so, she messaged immediately after. He wanted to reply, but found that he couldn’t. Nor could he access the Net or even interface with any of the house’s appliances. Everything was dim, dull, and disconnected.
It didn’t make Elliot feel much safer, because he didn’t understand how this would protect him against Temperdu. It had rescheduled his timestamp for today. He had just turned eighteen, still so young. He didn’t want to die. Perhaps nothing would happen, he tried to tell himself as he paced the living room. Perhaps Temperdu was just a wicked joke, and Rhea’s death a horrible accident at the wrong time. He hated that thinking of her brought tears to his eyes. People died all the time in the city and he’d only met her twice in his life. He had to stop thinking about her. Yet he hadn’t ever felt this strongly about anyone else in his life. Had it been love?
Elliot walked to the window and looked outside to try and think of something else. He spotted the neighbor’s cat, the blackness of her fur in sharp contrast with the white garden wall she was resting on. Not many people let their pets roam outside anymore. The algorithms that ran the city’s transport prioritized the comfort and convenience of humans over the lives of animals. A car wouldn’t swerve to avoid hitting a cat or dog, because such a swerve would inconvenience its passengers more than a small bump on the road would. There had been a public push for pet-friendlier transport a few years ago, but the exec algorithms hadn’t implemented it because it would have cost a few human lives every year in traffic-related incidents. People had grumbled and had begun keeping their pets inside. Except Elliot’s neighbors. Their cat seemed to do just fine.
The afternoon hours slowly ticked by. Elliot had noticed that the house’s shadows were off. The house would normally throw long shadows over its walkway as the sun crept down the sky, but those shadows weren’t there anymore. He pressed his nose against the window to look down and saw that the house didn’t seem to have any shadows at all.
Elliot realized what his mom had done. She’d obscured the house. Jaxon had told him about this. It took your house not just off the usual databases, but off the map entirely. As if it had never existed. The algorithms, automatons, and drones were tricked into believing that in its place stood something else entirely. Usually unbuilt space. And indeed, the street drones that floated by didn’t stop and scan the house as they otherwise would.
It was a decidedly illegal thing to do. Something the police would jail you for. And it wasn’t foolproof either. It was impossible to scrap a place in all databases. Eventually the algorithms figured out something was wrong. Guilt dripped into Elliot’s system. He and his mom didn’t always see eye to eye, but she’d taken a huge risk doing this. For something he wasn’t even sure was real. It was all a big mess. Jaxon was a bad influence. Deep down, he’d always known this, but now it had been made specific. Begrudgingly, he admitted that his mom had been right about his rogue friend.
More hours passed. The sun sank below the cityscape and the darkness of the sky became a canvas on which the city painted an abstract landscape of artificial light. With no access to the Net, Elliot had nothing to do except stare out of the window. He hadn’t been this bored in a long time. Illuminated by the pale yellow of a nearby streetlight, the neighbor’s cat stretched her legs, jumped down the wall on Elliot’s side, and sauntered in front of their house.
A street drone had taken note of her and was floating closer.
As it did, it scraped its metallic body against the side of their house. The drone turned to the wall, hovered for a moment trying to process what had happened, then stuck out a small, sharp appendage with which it pricked into the air. A gentle hum rose through the house as everything came back online. The lights were no longer dimmed, the shadows of the house shot back into existence, and several notifications flooded Elliot’s system. He swiped them all away and messaged his mom.
They figured it out. The house is online.
He had only just sent the message when a police car stopped in front of their door. A tall automaton stepped out and banged the door. “Open the door,” it said in its Police Male One voice. They couldn’t do anything, Elliot thought, even though he made sure the automaton couldn’t see him through the window. They don’t have permission.
It didn’t matter. The automaton didn’t issue a second warning, but instead banged open the door with one powerful leg kick. Chips of wood burst into the hallway. Elliot screamed and, in doing so, revealed his location. The automaton strode to him in a few steps and lifted its arm to punch.
Then, a loud pop. The automaton shuddered and froze, its arm still lifted.
“Stand up. We’re going,” his mother said. She stood in the doorway next to the broken door, holding a silenced pistol. Elliot shuffled around the still-frozen automaton and ran to his mom. They briefly hugged before they rushed to a car parked behind the police car, of a model Elliot had never seen. Old, with a driving wheel behind which sat a man he didn’t recognize. Elliot sat in the back, his mom in the front. The car drove off. His mom turned around and grabbed his knee. “We’re going to that center you’ve been to. Reset & Restore. You’ll be safe there,” she said.
Elliot grabbed a handle at the side of the car as the driver blitzed through traffic with little regard for the other cars. It was a miracle they hadn’t yet crashed. He looked through the rear window. At least nobody seemed to be chasing them. “So Temperdu is real? It’s coming for me?”
His mom threw him a smile that was meant to comfort, but didn’t. She was about to answer when Elliot caught the eyes of the driver, who was looking at him through a little mirror next to him. “It’s real and it’s coming for you, boy.”
“Lex,” Mara said.
“He deserves the truth,” Lex told Mara. Then, to Elliot again, “We’re getting you out of the city, where it won’t be able to reach you, as far as we know. But you’ll need to be careful with any technology from now on. That algorithm has got its nasty tendrils everywhere, apparently. And I don’t think you’ll ever be able to return to the city again. It’ll always aim to get you. It’ll be the rural life for you, my boy.”
Return to the first scene of the story: Temperdu in District Zero
Read the next scene of the story: The Fringe