This is the seventh scene of Algorithmic Timestamp: Mara’s criminal friend Lex Twelvesixty had obscured Mara’s house to protect her son Elliot. Yet the neighbor’s cat broke the illusion and Elliot just about escaped Temperdu’s agents. Mara and Lex drive Elliot to Reset & Restore, a tech rehab center.
Failed to render LaTeX expression — no expression found
The benefit of a human-driven car is that it can take you where automated transport cannot. Lex Twelvesixty drove them directly to Reset & Restore, the tech rehab center where Elliot would be safe from Temperdu. At least, so Mara hoped. It was their best shot against an algorithm that had its tendrils everywhere in the city.
Still, Mara could not shake a sense of deep guilt as she dropped off her son at a place where otherwise only the borderline dysfunctional would stay. While tech played as big a role in Elliot’s life as it did for any other young adult, he wasn’t disconnected from reality as some of the people here were.
When they entered, one man was staring at a blank wall, tapping and swiping despite having no device nearby. There weren’t any devices anywhere in Reset & Restore, nor was there any signal that could penetrate the center’s powerful disruptor. That was good, because her son’s life depended on it. Without it, Temperdu would be able to figure out where he was.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she told him after he’d given her Jaxon’s address. He’d nodded and pursed his lips. This was where he’d had his date with that girl, she remembered, and the firehot ball of guilt sank a little deeper into her stomach. “We’ll get through this,” she said, words that sounded deeply inadequate and yet they were all she could come up with before leaving him behind.
As she and Lex drove back into the city, her guilt transformed into anger. At Temperdu, at the city, at Jaxon Kade who had thrown Elliot into this mess. Lex noticed and laid his hand on hers. At any other time, she would have slapped it away, but now she curled her fingers into his and squeezed. “The boy will talk,” she said, to which Lex replied, “He will. They always do.”
Jaxon lived in the Fringe, where a few decades ago the last human factories had been located. Over time, as the last vestiges of human production disappeared, those factories had been turned into apartment blocks that were connected with marbled skyways like a glistening spiderweb too high to reach for anyone but the ultra-rich. Baroque balconies jutting out in obscene displays of wealth, carpets the price of nations fluttering in the wind, a trillion dollar economy a square mile high. Some who lived in these towers who had never been below the twentieth floor.
They had reason not to. The ground floor of the Fringe was one of the most dangerous areas of the city, in large part because the danger wasn’t easily visible. As Lex drove through the district’s streets, Mara’s body tingled at the constant cyberattacks trying to infiltrate her body. Those who walked the pavements were dressed well, as if they belonged here, and smiled at Lex’s old car with mild curiosity. Appearances deceived. They were crooks, thieves, and hackers who would take them hostage the moment they stopped. The Fringe had one of the lowest murder rates in the city, but that was only because the criminals here were smart enough to do their killings elsewhere.
It seemed only natural that in such a district Mara succeeded to enter Jaxon’s apartment with an act of deceit. She had called him, sounding distressed, to talk about Elliot. Something had happened to Elliot, she’d said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. He’d sounded clumsy, confused, awkward that the mother of his friend had called him out of the blue. He hadn’t even considered it strange that she would be at his place in less than ten minutes when their house was an easy half hour away.
“You’ll figure things out?” she asked Lex before she rushed to the door of Jaxon’s apartment block.
“Just keep him busy,” Lex said.
Once inside Jaxon’s apartment, as they walked through the long hallway of his apartment, she said, “I never asked you, but what do you do for work that you can afford a place here?” Every few steps, a holo artwork of some Net artist on the walls, more like an arcade than a home.
Jaxon turned and walked backwards as he addressed her. “Elliot never told you? I break into things. Companies pay a lot of money for someone who will tell them where the entrypoints and attack vectors in their systems are.”
“Is that how you got to know about Temperdu?” she asked. Although Lex had asked to keep Jaxon busy, she also didn’t want to waste time with idle chatter. She heard sirens in the distance.
“Is that what this is about?” Jaxon asked as they stepped into an open plan space with more tasteless art on the walls, furniture sharp and strict, and a kitchen that bled into the living room surrounded by long windows that displayed in great splendor the city over which the sun was sinking.
When Jaxon bent down to sit into an angular chair that look more like a torture device than a chair, Mara pressed a cyberpatch against his neck. He jumped up, then fell down as his legs collapsed underneath him.
“Yes, that’s what this is about,” Mara said as she helped him up and put him down in the chair again. “How long did it say you have left?”
Evidently shocked that the mother of his friend has pressed a patch against his neck, he declined to answer and looked away. His reluctance activated the patch and triggered his pain receptors. He groaned. “Why are you doing this?” he said, rubbing his neck, trying and failing to pull the patch off. His voice was shrill. “I would have told you this. Seventy-three more years, it gave me.”
“How convenient,” Mara said and she almost grabbed his jaw in anger. She stopped herself just in time. He was Elliot’s age, thereabouts, and his friend too. Temperdu should be the subject of her anger, not Jaxon Klade. Yet the thought of her boy, her only child, being subject to a life away from the city was still so very hard to digest.
She didn’t know what to do with herself, sat down, and sighed. In the corner of her eye, she saw something move past one of the large windows. Lex was nearby. “Elliot had to flee the city,” she said. “Temperdu had given him a timestamp of a few years, but it changed that to yesterday. Had he not fled, it would have killed him.”
Jaxon’s mouth fell open. “Is that how it works?” he asked quietly.
He wasn’t pretending not to know, else the patch would have given him another zap. Mara’s anger toward him still bubbled, so she didn’t dignify him with an answer. “How did you know about it?” she asked.
Jaxon looked away. He waited a long time before answering. The patch on his neck glittered as it processed the signals traveling to and from his brain. It was an old patch and it wouldn’t catch every lie, but it caught enough to scare most people into the truth. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “And I don’t understand why I don’t know. I think… I think it has some control over my wetware. It erased some of my memories to protect itself. That would explain why I can’t find it installed anywhere. It has to be somewhere, but I can’t find it, no matter what I try.” He looked up at Mara. “I’m sorry, Mrs Sterling. I really am. I didn’t know it would be like this.”
“Sincere regret? How nice,” Lex said. He had appeared from upstairs and come down without making a sound. He was wearing a heavy tech sleeve over his forearm that he now held above Jaxon. When it connected, Jaxon groaned again and arched his back.
“Be gentle,” Mara said. While she had been touched by Jaxon’s apology, she also realized they had no other choice than to investigate him. He had an activated plugin somewhere inside him and was their only lead to Temperdu. In the corner of her eye, she saw something move again. She turned and saw nothing but Jaxon’s balcony. “Did you see anything on the way up?” she asked Lex.
“Besides the rich and dainty? No,” Lex said. His fingers moved mechanically over Jaxon’s head. “And there you are,” he said. “In plain sight, like I expected it to be. Temperdu overrides about everything it can to hide itself inside the victim’s mind, but otherwise it doesn’t seem to disturb anything biological.”
“That’s good,” Mara said.
He briefly looked at her. “Now for the bad. I can’t get rid of it. It’s everywhere. Kinda like how it’s embedded in all the city’s systems.”
“You can’t uninstall it?”
“I could, but it would turn this boy into an empty shell. He’d still be alive, I think, just not very conscious.” He looked at Mara again, longer this time. “It’s a real nasty thing.”
Mara fell back into the chair and closed her eyes. She couldn’t move. Emotion overwhelmed her as she thought of her boy, stuck with murderous malware that was out to get him every time he’d return to the city. They couldn’t uninstall it, nor could they remove Temperdu from the city’s systems. She now understood that it operated similarly in a biological body as it did in algorithms. It spread wherever it could, with as minimal of an impact as possible, just to progress its narrow goal of predicting people’s deaths and making sure its predictions were accurate. Lex hadn’t lied. Elliot would be rural for the rest of his life. He didn’t deserve this, nor did anyone else. “Make a copy of his wetware,” she told Lex.
“Mara?”
There was something wrong in Lex’s tone. She opened her eyes. On the balconies around the apartment stood several tactical police automatons. In unison, they broke the windows with their batons. Glass shattered everywhere.
Return to the first scene of the story: Temperdu in District Zero
Read the next scene of the story: Reset and Restore