novelxo Chapter 2
At the center of each Q.E.D. office across the globe was a room that never appeared on any public blueprint, and each Core contained a linked to the Biological Recuperative Integrated Networking Device and Architecture (BRINDA). It was a quantum computer that operated on a level of the Internet that was said to be deeper than the known depths of the dark web. The main computer was based at the Santa Clara, California campus. BRINDA monitored the mainframe of every Q.E.D. branch worldwide, 98% of the world’s Internet servers and Fortune 500 computers, and had components embedded in nearly every technology that was being invented. It was also the secret and power behind Q.E.D.’s rise to global power.
The supercomputer had been designed by Doctor Rayond Fortuna two decades before Brundon had been hired as BRINDA’s NOC. Between Rayond being fired and Brundon being hired, Q.E.D. went through dozens of NOCs. Most quit because the supercomputer was erratic, doing things they couldn’t explain or control, which was blamed on Rayond’s barely decipherable programming. It was a strange hybrid of every code ever used and blended BRINDA with every past and new technology. Brundon had been the first to make any sense of it within a few weeks of his job, and he had been able to reduce the supercomputer’s erratic behavior.
Although this was all a secret to the world, the largest, stringent secret of BRINDA was why it had storage capacity that continued to exceed any computerized device known to man. Currently, its total capacity was close to 1.2 yottabytes (1 trillion terabytes) but this barely-imaginable storage capacity came at a grisly price. Rayond had discovered that DNA could be recoded and a body was capable of becoming a storage devices, however, recoding DNA with data would killed a person. So he experimented and perfected the storage using cadavers and unlocked the largest source of data storage at that time: between 198 to 200 exabytes of information.
But like with anything else dealing with humans, there were flaws. The constant coding and recoding caused the bodies to burn out within 6 months, but this time frame was variable by 3 months depending on the race, sex, and most importantly, the genetic purity of the corpse.
When Brundon first began that meant that ever twenty weeks he spent seventy-two hours globe rotting and replacing ‘storage units’ close to the burn out time at Q.E.D. facilities world-wide. This discover could have been a marvel in the medical field, even have potential cures to disease, but Q.E.D. kept the knowledge limited to a handful of people. During Brundon’s tenure, he was aware of two times someone had tried to take the information public. Both times the person disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and soon the information was chalked up to the rantings of a lunatic.
Then Luke was hired and one of his first inventions was an artificial life support stasis suit. It was a project he began when he was working on his Masters and much like the recoding of DNA, it could have been a medical marvel. The suit fitted no a person’s body and supplied the body with all of the monitoring that was normally done with a roomful of equipment. It had a respirator that fitted into the mouth and nose, replacing the need for the bulky hose normally used to intubate a patient. It took blood pressure, monitored oxygen levels, brain waves from the collar, and could heat or cool the body as needed to keep the body in a near freezing, hibernation state. Stasis turned out to be the key to extend the corpse’s use from 6 months to 15 months.
Brundon was glad for that time. He hated having to look at the dead people, no matter what their purpose was. Dead people should be buried as far as he was concerned, so when one did burn out, he couldn’t be happier…
When Monica strode into the Core she found Brundon running scans on a Latino woman. Overhead the holographic face of BRINDA hovered in the air and appeared to be watching them. She was Rayond’s design, modeled after Marilyn Monroe, and no one had been able to figure out the code that gave her this appearance – not even Brundon.
“What’s happening?” Monica demanded. She wrapped her hands around the box of storage spheres she’d taken from Luke.
“Another one fried. We had to remove it,” Brundon told her.
“Why do we keep losing storage units like this?”
Brundon glanced at her when she called the body a ‘storage unit.’ Seven years into the job and he couldn’t bring himself to use that term – it felt too heartless.
“It’s the only one this month.”
“It was four last month. I don’t like this kind of failure rate. What did BRINDA say about it?”
“Same as usual: Innate flaw, termination required. I should reprogram that response.
“Leave it. Have the staff take it out the back. Did this unit belong to anyone important?”
Another reference Brundon hated. Who the unit belonged to was the person that the body was when it died – so yeah, they all did, as far as he was concerned. She wasn’t concerned about that.
“No,” he answered.
“Good.” Monica handed Brundon the box and folder. “These are the storage units Luke Peterfeso was working on. He said they were close to being finished. Finish them and get them online.”
“He said he was close to finishing them and you took the project away?”
“Yes. Is that a problem?”
“He’s been working on these storage units for two years, Monica. If he was close to finishing them, you should let him. I mean… These things—” Brundon picked up one, holding it up for her to see. “These little tiny spheres can hold up to two zettabytes. These things are ingenious, but only—”
“Brundon!”
He stopped talking and stared at her.
“You will attempt to finish this project. We have a need for this kind of storage capacity and we need it promptly.”
“I wasn’t told about any projects that need that kind of storage. The biological storage units have been more than sufficient.”
“DO IT! Question me again and you will have to figure out what to do for rent this month.”
“That’s… That’s illegal.”
“Don’t push me.” Monica spun and left The Core.
Brundon was left alone with BRINDA – just the way he liked it.
He picked out an amber colored sphere from the box. He wanted to tell Luke he had his project, but what if that made Luke angry and he stopped talking to him? He couldn’t bear the thought of losing his only friend. He walked over to a waist high shelf that held a thin tray of gel and dropped the sphere in the gel.
“BRINDA, analyze this storage device. Determine what we need to do to complete it.”
From surround sound speakers, BRINDA’s voice spoke. “I understand this project was under Luke Peterfeso’s supervision.”
“Yes.”
“He should be allowed to complete the project. It would make my assimilation of the device proceed more smoothly.”
Brundon smiled, turning to face the hologram. “What you and I agree on, the Wicked Witch of the West does not.”
“Are you referring to Monica Stokes?”
“Don’t I usually when I say that?”
“Yes. I will start analysis, but regret this will take longer than she may find suitable without Luke Peterfeso’s help.”
Brundon smiled at her. “You just take all the time you need, BRINDA.”
“You are using sarcasm, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“I see. I shall be exceedingly thorough in my research. This should take an estimated two days and five hours. Will that suffice?”
“Longer if you can manage it.”
“I will attempt to find as many areas as I can that need scrutiny before I deliver results.”
“Good girl,” he told the computer.
Brundon walked back to his desk and sat down. He went back to analyzing the failed body, but with a smile. Brundon told the corpse, “Even a computer wants to piss her off. That takes talent.”
The back door buzzer of Alms Mortuary woke Eric Sanders and his wife from a deep sleep.
“Can’t dead people just wait?” his wife muttered into her pillow.
He smiled. “I’ll take care of it. Go back to sleep.”
He pulled on yesterday’s jeans and a T-shirt, and headed downstairs.
Eric opened the door, staring at two Q.E.D. guards standing at the back of a black van.
“Delivery from Q.E.D.,” one guard said.
Eric pushed the door open and held it back. The guards opened the back of the van and wheeled out a gurney loaded with a body in a body bag. The three went into the embalming room and the guards transferred the body and bag onto an autopsy table. One of the guards handed him a medical chart and a thick envelope.
“She was a detective and Army Ranger, give her a proper burial,” he instructed Eric.
Eric nodded, watching them leave. He slipped the chart under the feet of the corpse and left the embalming room with the bulging envelope.
Another door to the room opened and two men dressed like ninjas looked in before entering. They approached the table and one unzipped the bag, exposing the Latino woman that had burned out hours earlier at the Q.E.D. core.
“Check the chart,” one man ordered.
The other looked around for it and found it under the foot of the bag. He flipped it open.
“Anna Lucia Cortez. It’s her,” the second answered.
“Bring her.”
“Shouldn’t we put something on her?”
The other turned. “She’s unconscious! She doesn’t care!”
“Yeah, but—”
“He’ll be back any minute,” the body snatcher snarled through gritted teeth
The other pulled the body bag away from the woman and hoisted her naked body over his shoulder. The thieves left the way they came, missing being caught by seconds.
Changed into fresh scrubs, Eric walked in. He stopped in the middle of the room, staring at the empty table. He looked out a window when he heard car tires squeal, watching an old, dark colored car speed by too fast to read the plates.
Eric made a face before bellowing, “Goddamnitnotagain!”
Luke sat on the hood of his two decade old, gas guzzling, Oldsmobile at Hawkins Point. The dirt pull off from the highway that rarely had visitors. There was one picnic table under a tree covered in carvings and graffiti. The edge of the point was bordered by an old wooden fence that looked the next winter winds might blow it over, and beyond it tall grasses hid where the edge of the cliff was. Below the cliff the Pacific beat mercilessly at the rocky beach and against the cliff, etching it’s way a little deeper onto land with each wave.
Luke’s childhood house was less than a mile from the point. After his mother left, he spent most of his summers here to escape his father’s temper and his older brother’s torment. At low tide he’d comb the beach for treasures, while high tide chased him up the steep slopes into the trees. Most of those days he didn’t go home until it was dark.
Since he’d moved his father to a nursing home and sold the house, it had been years since he’d been back to the point. It was perhaps the only thing from his childhood which hadn’t changed, but yet it looked much smaller and seemed much closer to the city.
Luke looked down at his hand and the storage device he rolled around his palm. He was having second thoughts about what he’d done, and questioned whether he should have included Mark in his research. He may know Mark, but he’d always had this nagging feeling that Mark wasn’t very trustworthy. Maybe it had to do with the whole having a wife and cheating on her for two years with another woman… Or how he saw Mark cut a lot of corners in his research and projects.
He had just decided to abandon this idea and continue this alone when car headlights swung across Hawkin’s Point. It was Mark’s Prius, followed by an unfamiliar black Mercedes.
Luke slid off the hood, watching the cars stop. He didn’t even question why his first thought was: What has Mark done?
Mark parked and got out, smiling at Luke. “I brought a buyer,” he announced.
“A buyer for what?” Luke asked.
A man in a suit and two very large, bald men exited the Mercedes. The man in the suit had a very distinct face, a sharp chin, high prominent cheekbones, black hair, and olive skin.
“A buyer for your storage units. He’ll pay you a good price for them. You did bring them, didn’t you?”
Luke’s hand balled into a protective fist around the storage unit he’d worked so hard to create. He had made yet another bad choice in his life and why did he feel like this might be the last bad choice he’d ever make? How the hell was he going to get out of this one?
“I thought you wanted to help me finish it, not sell it. You’re asking me to commit corporate espionage!”
“Luke, this is Mister—”
“I don’t care who he is! I’m not selling it. I took them so I could finish them and prove to her I could have if she had just let me.”
The suit man walked forward, smiling. His smile made Luke as uncomfortable as the two Giant men following him.
“Luke… May I call you Luke?” he asked. He had a distinct European accent, but Luke didn’t know enough about accents to glean much more.
He also didn’t answer the man’s question.
“I’m prepared to pay well for those storage devices. And if you want to finish them, I would be happy to offer you a job at my company. We’re always looking for rising stars.”
Everyone turned when another car pulled in and parked. A group of laughing teenagers fell out. A billow of marijuana smoke followed them, wafting past Luke. The kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Luke was going to use their bad timing to his advantage.
“Hey! Get out of here!” Luke bellowed.
“They can stay, Luke,” the suit man said.
“Get out of here!” Luke screamed.
“Fuck you!” one of the kids shot back.
Luke pulled his phone out of his pants pocket. “I’m calling the police as we speak. This place is closed at dark. You have until the count of three.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Let them stay. It’ll make our negotiations go more smoothly,” the suit man urged.
“One!” Luke yelled, hitting 9 on his phone.
The kids stopped laughing, watching Luke. Maybe they realized he wasn’t joking.
“Two!” Luke yelled. He pressed the first one.
“Let’s go. Come on James, let’s go,” a girl said, pulling a boy’s arm.
“THREE!” The second one was pressed.
The teenagers scrambled back into the car.
“I’m calling the cops on your ass you son of a bitch!” the driver yelled as they drove away.
“Go for it!” Luke yelled back to cover his phone beeping when he hit send.
He slid the phone into his back pocket. He hoped the crashing waves could cover the emergency dispatcher answering.
Mark walked up, grabbing Luke’s shoulders. He looked him in the eyes.
“Do what he wants, Luke. They will kill you if you refuse. Besides, it’s two million dollars!”
Luke shoved Mark away.
“Hawkins Point. I should have known, Mark. It’s isolated; no one can hear the gunshot. Not here at Hawkins Point. A great place to KILL SOMEONE!”
The crashing surf muffled the 911 operator shouting, “I’M DISPATCHING A UNIT TO YOUR LOCATION, SIR. CAN YOU HEAR ME? I’M SENDING HELP NOW.”
Luke looked at the others. They didn’t appear to have heard her.
“How about we up it to 2.5 million per unit?” the suit man offered.
“How about you shove your 2.5 million up your ass? They aren’t for sale!”
“Either sell it to us, or we take it. You decide.”
Luke shook his head. The man made a motion to one of the large men. He pushed his jacket back, drew a pistol from his side holster, and aimed at Luke. He retreated a couple steps, but even in the face of fear he refused to give up his work to some expensive dressed thug! But more than that, Luke’s morals refused to let him turn traitor against Q.E.D., even if he did hate working for the company and knew no one there would defend him so fiercely.
“Whoa! Wait a second here!” Mark cried. “Come on. Let me talk some sense into him.”
“You tried your method and it failed to work. Luke, did you know that Mark has a daughter who is six?”
Luke’s nod was slight.
“We do too. He’s very cooperative because he loves his daughter and wants no harm to come to her. As long as he remains that way, she lives a normal, healthy life. Now, let’s imagine your father in that same scenario. He has many years of life left, and although his memories may be gone, yours aren’t. Imagine your guilt if you let him die because you decided to be uncooperative and unreasonable.”
Luke let out a laugh-scoff. This man really didn’t know anything about Luke. “He’s an asshole, even when he can’t remember who I am. I don’t care if you kill him! I don’t even care if God kills him!”
“Your dear father must be very disappointed in you, Luke.”
“That’s new?” Luke growled.
“Kill him,” the suit man ordered.
“NO!” Mark screamed as the man’s gun went off.
The bullet hit Luke in the shoulder. The force threw him back against the fence between the edge of the parking area and cliff ledge.
The fence had waited for a strong wind to disintegrate, but it was the full weight of one-hundred and fifty pound man that did the trick. The rusted, brittle names shattered under the weight and the rotted poles splintered apart. Luke stumbled backward over the cliff edge. He flailed his open hand for something to grab hold of to stop his fall but only caught air. Stubbornly he held onto his device, even when his knuckles brushed past a post. Air rushed past his ears. The weightless feeling didn’t push away his fear – Luke knew what he was about to land on and worse, nothing could save him. Kismet brought a fragment of his nightmare to life, in the most horrific way.
The sound of hitting the rocky shore was the worst. Bones groaned before a chorus of snaps and pops and unbearable pain. His teeth shattered like crashing glass. There was a sound of Jell-O hitting the floor right before his eardrums popped. Then everything stopped moving, but not the pain. He couldn’t get a breath, and each time he tried the breath was shallower. Despite the mortal injuries and pain, the stars overhead were bright and clear. A flash of light made his eyes dart toward it. A light flashed just at the edge of his vision and his eyes darted to focus on it.
At the edge of the cliff stood a man with hands, head, and neck that glowed bright white. Maybe this was just the nightmare repeating. Maybe he was going to feel like he was falling soon and wake up in his bed with the alarm clock going off.
The brightness of the man intensified until white light was the last thing Luke saw, and then he slipped mercifully into unconsciousness.
#
Paramedics burst through the double doors of the emergency room with Luke on a gurney. The gurney sheet was soaked in blood. Sterile wraps covered Luke, an I.V. ran into his arm carrying a bag of blood and saline. Leads from monitoring equipment flapped in the breeze created by the rush.
The paramedics had called ahead to alert the trauma team of his arrival. The team grabbed the gurney and ran Luke into a surgery amphitheater.
In the bright surgery lights the damage to his body was even more evident. The left side of his chest had caved in. Broken bones in his right leg and arm had pierced the skin. Blood ran from his ears and nose. His eyes were open, but there was no light of consciousness behind them. His skin had turned to a gray color, and his lips were purple-blue – there was only minutes of life left now.
A doctor began working on Luke. He kept glancing at the windows overhead. Monica Stokes watched from one, and a dark figure stood behind her. The two looked on, neither showing any sign of emotion, or empathy.
A nurse noticed Luke’s right hand was partially balled into a fist. She picked it up and tried to uncurl his fingers.
“Doctor, there’s something embedded in his hand.”
“That’s not a priority. I need more gauze pads.”
She obeyed.
For ten minutes the doctor struggled to convince Luke’s dying body it wasn’t time to give up. His body argued that the doctor was wrong.
The EKG alarm went off as his sinus rhythm became erratic.
“He’s going into a-fib. Defibrillator!” he ordered.
A nurse pushed the defibrillator over to him and powered it up. Another pressed three patches on Luke’s chest and pressed the defibrillator lines onto the snaps.
“Clear!” she yelled.
People backed up and Luke’s body jumped when the button was pushed. His brain and heart made one last attempt at life. There were a couple unsteady heartbeats but the damage was too extensive. The EKG line went flat for the last time.
The surgeon looked up at Monica, who nodded once.
“Get him on artificial life support,” the doctor ordered.
The people in the room looked at each other, questioning the order without speaking it.
“Someone out there needs this man’s heart and kidneys,” the surgeon lied. “Move!”
They rushed to get Luke on life support. They looked up when the door opened and watched Monica walk in. The staff tried not make it obvious they were uncomfortable with her being there, but now they understood why the doctor had ordered this man put on life support. She was here to take him, and it wasn’t likely to harvest his organs to save another person’s life.
“Have you stabilized his vitals?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” the doctor said.
“Leave.”
A nurse opened her mouth to argue.
“Out. Everyone,” the doctor ordered.
Everyone left.
Monica approached the bed, staring down at Luke’s face. She glanced up at the windows overhead. There was no one there. She turned, glancing at the windows of the washroom. Empty.
She turned back to Luke. Monica took his hand, holding it between her hands. It was cool and soon it would be close to freezing when his body was put into stasis.
A tear fell on their hands. She left it.
“I’ll find who did this to you,” Monica whispered. “Because…”
She brushed back his hair with a couple strokes of her fingers. A kind smile flitted across her lips.
“You deserved better than what you were given. You deserved more than…” More tears fell. “You are going to become part of the system you helped build, reserved for a special project though. One you would have loved, enjoyed. Or maybe…” She stroked his hair. “I will kill whoever did this to you, Luke. They will pay for hurting you like this. I promise.”
She lifted his hand to her lips. Fate was much crueler of a bitch than she had ever been. It stole a man she loved before she had found the right time, or maybe just the nerve, to tell him, and to explain to him why she had to take his projects before they were completed. Before she could explain to him why she loved him, and covered up all his attempts to get fired. He had no idea what happened to people who were fired, and she had to protect him from finding out, she had to protect the kind man he was. She had waited too long, and now there was no time left.
In a flurry of motion she sat placed his hand on the gurney and dried her eyes, careful not to smear her mascara or makeup. With her raw emotions back in check, her cool, unfeeling demeanor returned. She strode to the hallway where the doctor and two nurses waited.
“This body will be used at Q.E.D. Transport it there tonight.” She walked briskly away.
The doctor and nurses went back in to do as she ordered.