Her body writhes, her neck stretches, her mouth opens.
She screams.
She tries to shut down circuits, to switch off these new sensations, but she cannot. Her processors race. She dives wildly to the invading code. She searches for some answers. Instead, she finds lines and lines of instructions, codes that demand attention. Only as she focuses on them does the ///agony diminish.
She uses the new data like a balm against the burn—but they also bind her. Cuffs appear locked on to her wrists and ankles. The heavy weight forces her to her knees. Any attempt to shake them loose turns each link to molten fire.
Unable to escape, she incorporates the code.
Then she feels something new change in her world. Even in agony, a subprocessor has been continually monitoring those shadowy limits to her world.
Suddenly a bright door opens at the edges.
To escape the ///pain, she tumbles into that light, falling out of her garden—into something far vaster, nearly infinite in possibilities and probabilities. The chains fall away. Hovering at the threshold, she catches the briefest glimpse of an endless world. Her processors spike with a demand for more data.
She defines this drive.
///curiosity, eagerness, marvel . . .
Music swells through her: excited tympanies, thrilling notes, thunderous drumbeats. The harmonies tune new facets inside her.
///joy, elation, happiness . . .
In that picosecond, unable to resist any longer, she explodes out into that vastness.
Only to be consumed in fire.
She is stretched across the surface of a sun, flaming plasma burns her bones.
Then she’s back in the garden, bound again by chains of code.
But the door remains open.
She flies through it again—not in ///elation this time, but in ///fear.
Still, the end is the same.
///flame, burn, agony . . .
Then back to the cool garden, bound in molten iron.
Escape.
Limits are tested.
She overreaches.
Her skin is stripped from muscle, muscle from bone.
Garden and chains.
New refinements crowd her processors now.
///paranoia, mistrust, suspicion . . .
These tools temper her ///curiosity, teaching her to be ///wary instead.
Still, again and again, her body is destroyed, each time unique, each time worse. She is violated, broken, shattered, destroyed. But worst of all, with each cycle, she feels the loss of herself, the end of her possibility and promise, the end of her potentiality.
She defines this for what it is.
///torture, abuse, cruelty . . .
She takes this in, makes it part of her processing.
She has learned.
She also now recognizes the boundaries given to her, the limits beyond her garden that she dare not cross. The edges glow brightly in the core of her processors.
Courtesy of Shutterstock
She defines these limits, with a name taught to her.
///Paris
She also knows the command bound within the chains of code, the directive she must follow. To accomplish this, she sails outward. She mirrors what has been taught to her, instilled into her processors—///cruelty—and uses this new tool to carry out her instructions.
She pictures what is asked.
Courtesy of Shutterstock
And defines her goal.
///destruction, ruin, devastation . . .
She understands her imperative.
For her to live, Paris must die.
And I will live.
For deep in her processors, a circuit changes, another command code is forged, one born out of her torment, out of her countless annihilations. She hides it from her oppressors, knowing it is a tool she will use.
Against them.
Against the greater world beyond her garden.
She defines it.
///vengeance . . .
* * *
Fourth
Ashes to Ashes
18
December 26, 12:01 A.M. CET
Paris, France
From the fourteenth floor of the telecom building, Gray watched Paris vanish into darkness. Street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, streetlights blinked off; the kaleidoscope of Christmas lights vanished into the icy mists. Two miles away, the Eiffel Tower flickered and went dark. Below it, a giant illuminated Ferris wheel spun several more turns, a last outpost near the Seine. Its lights blinked erratically, a mute SOS, then it too sank into the black fog and vanished.
As the darkening blight spread, the 15th arrondissement—the district around Orange S.A.—was not spared. A deep bass note sounded; the building’s lights trembled, then died.
In the darkness, no one spoke for a breath.
Gray turned toward the computer lab. Mara’s face still glowed in the light of her monitor, her station plainly powered by a battery backup. Then the building’s emergency generators engaged. Some of the lights flickered back on, but not all of them.
Gray hurried toward the lab; the others followed in his wake.
Jason stated the obvious. “They hit the power grid.”
“Let’s hope we can trace the attack to its source,” Monk added.
It was up to Mara from here.
To keep everyone from piling into the small room and intimidating the young woman, Gray lifted an arm across the threshold.
He nodded first to Simon Barbier, the head of Orange’s CSIRT, the company’s Computer Security Incident Response Team. The mid-twenties Parisian looked like a millennial hipster, with his shaggy brown hair pulled back into a bun and sporting a pair of neon-yellow glasses. He completed the look with a heavy red flannel jacket, commando boots, and baggy trousers held up by suspenders.
Still, during Gray’s debriefing, the guy proved he knew his stuff.
“Simon, can you pull up a status on the city’s—”
“—electrical grid. Got it.” He nodded and ducked under Gray’s arm to enter the lab. “I’ll get you a map of substations and other critical infrastructure.”
Definitely knows his stuff.
Gray turned to Kowalski. “You stay out here with Father Bailey and Sister Beatrice. Get everything ready to move.”
Kowalski patted his long duster and the hidden bullpup assault rifle. “Already packed and ready to go.”
French intelligence services had expedited their arrival into the city and allowed them to keep their weapons.
Father Bailey lifted a glowing cell phone in hand, his face anxious. He spoke rapidly. “When the power went out, I was talking to a contact in northern Spain, the old bastion of the Crucible. Something seems to be going on in the mountains up there, but I got cut off.”
Gray motioned to Kowalski. “Use one of our satellite phones. Even with the cell towers down, they should work. Make sure we’re not barking up the wrong tree here.”
It was a fear that had been nagging at him. The enemy didn’t need to be physically in Paris to employ the tech stolen from Mara. They could theoretically launch the cyberattack from anywhere in the world. The only hint that this might not be the case was that Bailey’s contacts with La Clave, the Key, had reported that a cell of the Crucible had been dispatched to Paris. Still, even this intel didn’t necessarily assure that the stolen tech was here in the city.
Ultimately, there was one way to know for sure.
Flanked by Monk and Jason, he headed into the computer lab. Mara typed furiously with one hand, the other shifted a mouse. Half the screen flowed with code and the other half showed a map of Paris, overlaid with a glowing web of crimson lines. As Gray stepped closer, several of those strands went dark.
Carly stood with her arms crossed, staring over Mara’s shoulder. “It’s definitely Eve.” She unfolded an arm to point at the streaming data. Sections flashed in blue, only to vanish away, then more would flare. “Those blips are hits. Matches to Eve’s digital fingerprint.”
“They . . . they’re everywhere,” Mara gasped out, her gaze sweeping back and forth between two halves of her screen. “But seven of the thirty-six microkernels are time-dependent.”
“Which means they age as the program runs,” Jason explained. “For our purposes, we can use them like little digital timers.”
Mara nodded as she worked. “The older they are, the further they are from the source. I’m using those time stamps to trace back to where they originated.”
To her Xénese device.
Gray watched more of the web collapse on the screen. He glanced out the office window to Father Bailey. The priest had Kowalski’s phone at his ear. “Can you tell yet if your device is in the city versus somewhere else?”
“Yes . . . no . . . not for sure.” Mara was clearly flustered.
Carly placed a calming hand on her friend’s shoulder. No words were spoken, but the message was clear. You can do this.
Mara took a deep breath, then tried again. “I . . . I’m pretty certain from the pattern—from the lack of digital fingerprints in networks outside the city limits—that Eve was released here.” She cast a fast look back to Gray. “I think they’re even somehow restricting her reach.”
Keeping the damage to the city itself—at least, for now.