After shoveling down some food, I take a shower. I am coated with days-old sweat, salt from my swim in the Gulf yesterday, and grime from the tunnel beneath the bookshop. To wash it all away feels like shedding a layer of skin.
Aiden and Rusty are asleep on the couch when I come out of the bathroom, but otherwise, the top floor is empty. I pull on my hooded shirt and head downstairs, where I find the team huddled in the sitting room with Garrett and his siblings. September is running some sort of debriefing meeting, but Harvey and Clipper are not in attendance. Downstairs, Bree mouths when she catches my eye.
I make my way to the basement. They look like father and son at the computers, both staring intently at the screens.
“Gray!” Clipper says, waving me over. “You won’t believe this. It’s amazing. It’s—” He waves more frantically, and then grabs my wrist and tugs me toward the computer. The screen is filled with line after line of code. A forefinger against the screen, he says, “See?”
“Clip, you know I have no clue what I’m looking at.”
“This is the core program that runs in all Forgeries,” he explains. “It was on the stolen hard drives.” Harvey gives me a queasy sort of smile, like he’s moments away from being sick. “He’s not feeling too well,” Clipper adds in a hushed voice. “I think showing me all this is conflicting with his . . . internal orders.”
“What’s so special about having this code?” I ask.
“It’s the building blocks of the Forgery,” Clipper says. “It’s what makes them loyal to Frank, what gives them purpose.”
“And we can change it somehow?”
“Sure, we can rewrite this however we want but that doesn’t do us any good. It’s not like what we do here is tied to all the Forgeries already in existence. This is just a backup.”
“What’s important is this function,” Harvey says, motioning to a section of the code. “I wrote it—well, the original me wrote it—ages ago, when I was working on the earliest versions of the Forgeries. This function is buried within a bunch of other functions, all of which make a Forgery loyal. It’s been used in every model since the first.
“During my time at the Compound, as I worked on creating a limitless Forgery, or as the Order’s been calling it, an F-GenX, this function always stood out as odd. It was sloppy. Nested in too many conditionals. It seemed almost unnecessary, but I never deleted it. I was worried removing it might break the Forgery’s loyalty. And any time I tried to truly understand the function’s purpose, the logic surrounding it would get all fuzzy, like I was trying to read the code without my glasses. But after Mozart brought all my memories back, I knew I had to take a second look at it. And this one little function . . .” He taps the screen again. “I know what it means now.”
“It’s like how Jackson’s mind cleared once he broke,” Clipper says. “Harvey couldn’t understand this bit of code because his greater programming was telling him to ignore it, that it was nothing but lazy coding and he shouldn’t overthink things. But now . . .”
“This is a fail-safe,” Harvey says. “Frank didn’t want one, but you should always have a way to pull the plug, no matter what you’re building. I wrote this in secretly, hiding it in the code, and once I started doubting my work for Frank, I was glad I did.”
“And this helps us how?” I ask, staring at the screen.
“The fail-safe function exists in every version of the Forgeries today, and it will run when they hear a certain audible phrase.”
“Like a verbal order?”
“Not exactly. More like a very precise string of sounds,” Harvey says. “Emit them in the right order, for the appropriate duration, and this function will be tripped, and the Forgeries’ programming aborted.”
“Which means they break down like you and Jackson?”
“No, when I wrote the fail-safe, it was with the intention of no loose ends, no room for second chances. This function will initiate an endless loop of conflicting orders, to the point that it will fry everything—the Forgeries’ programming, their minds. It’s sort of like inducing a massive stroke. Their brains will hemorrhage.”
“So Harvey and I were thinking,” Clipper says, “that if we played the right bit of audio somehow—say over the alarm system in Taem—every Forgery in that city would be disabled.”
Disabled. That’s a nicer word for it.
Is that how Frank justified his massacre of Burg’s people when he feared them too volatile to benefit the Laicos Project? And does every Forgery truly deserve to be disabled? Jackson once helped us. Harvey is helping us now. Does this solution mean killing—murdering—thousands of innocent people?
I picture my own Forgery holding a gun to Blaine’s head, and know the hard truth: Unless they malfunction, the Forgeries are the enemy, working against innocent people on Frank’s behalf. We can’t wait around hoping they cross paths with something that will cause their programming to flicker, not to mention that the Gen5s can’t be tripped at all.
“You’re sure this will work?” I ask.
“If the right audio is played, it should,” Clipper says. “We’ve checked the function a couple dozen times.”
“Well, shouldn’t we tell the others? This is huge.”
“There’s just one problem,” Harvey says. “I can’t remember the audio combo. All I know is it’s obscure, something random a Forgery wouldn’t come across unless we meant to pull the plug.”
“So how do we find it?”
“That brings us to what I do remember: I hid the answer in the code.”
Harvey scrolls through it. I watch for a few minutes, and still the lines don’t stop. It might as well be endless.
TWENTY-TWO