Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 6-1

Drayden - Chapter 6

I get to the coffee shop and head directly to the restroom and into the stall to get the laptop out of the ceiling. Thank god it’s still there along with the power cord, the strange auxiliary cord, and the little brown book, which I’m pretty sure I no longer need because I already memorized everything inside it. I put the lid down on the toilet and sit and quickly flip through the pages of the little brown book and retake mental pictures of everything, just to be entirely sure I didn’t miss something the first time. I didn’t. Once I get to the end of the book, I’m confident that I had imprinted everything correctly. Every image, every notation, and every password is locked inside my head. I pop open the briefcase, put the brown book on top of the cash, and leave with everything.

I find an open table that conveniently is next to a wall with an outlet. I take out the laptop and plug it into the wall and toy with the auxiliary cord and listen to the buzz of talk in the coffee shop. Some of the buzz is about Italy and the crash of the market. I key in on one conversation across the room between a male and female student and hear the guy say the market is down nearly a thousand points and sinking fast. The girl says the President has to close the New York Stock Exchange for the rest of the day. I look at a digital atomic clock on the coffee shop wall: one-thirty in the afternoon. That leaves two-and-a-half hours of trading if it doesn’t close sooner. Usually I’d focus on the negative energy and learn more and think of what the outcome could be, but I have much more pressing matters and much more important things to figure out, like who killed my brother, and where I can find the steel box.

The auxiliary cord has a plug that clearly slots into the Thunderbolt port of the computer, but the other end is something I’ve never seen before. It has six long plugs as long as inflating needles for sports balls. I look at the needles closely and feel their smooth metal and then pull up the sleeve of my left arm and look at the rows of black dots the gray steel box made in my arm. What the hell, I think to myself. It looks like the needles could fit into the holes.

I scan the room, but nobody’s paying me even the slightest bit of attention. I hear an update from a table nearby confirming the President closed the stock market. “Thank god,” somebody says behind me. “Took him long enough,” says another.

I put my left arm under the table and take the grouping of six needle-points in my right hand and feel them with my thumb and index finger. Each needle is at least an inch and a half long. I move the six needle tips under the table and against the dots on my arm and then stop. I’m suddenly worried about what might happen if I insert these six metal pins into my arm, even though bullets hadn’t hurt me and neither had falling off a building. The computer monitor asks for a password. I take a deep breath and carefully put the first needle in. Nothing happens. There’s no pain, and it definitely fits. I peek under the table and see the entire needle is in my arm and wonder how it’s possible. I put the other five pins in more quickly and look around the shop again. No one cares what I’m up to.

I’m literally plugged into my brother’s computer. I can sense the micro-pulses of electricity that bind it to me, and I like the way it feels. It feels like they belong. I pull my sleeve down to cover the plugs in my arm and type ‘DRayDEn’ into the password field of the computer and hit ‘Return,’ and this time the computer does not greet me with my brother’s voice. It opens to the gray desktop, bare, boring, and empty of information. I take a deep and unnecessary breath, and then go full throttle on the keyboard and the track pad, getting into the main guts of the computer, swiping and typing as fast as the keys can operate. At first, I’m not looking for anything specific. I’m looking at file hierarchy and file dates and file sizes and repeated nomenclature throughout my brother’s filing architecture. A young male student sits down at an open table next to me, and I wonder if he will notice the strange cord coming out from within the sleeve of my left arm.

I’m in the central files scrolling down as fast as the computer can manage and catch sight of a few things that interest me. First, there are more image files than I’ve ever seen in any personal computer system. My initial thinking is that maybe Reginald had never removed cookies from his internet searches, but that’s a ridiculous and fleeting thought because the files are far too large. Also, the developer scripts are too many. I want to make sure they are what I think they are so I open up one of the zipped files — ‘frgmnt17899alt’ — to analyze the code. By the time it unzips completely, it’s a huge file — easily the largest single file I’ve ever seen — programmed in a combination of computer languages. Had Reginald done this? He had always been computer savvy — we both were — but he had never been at my level, and this is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. The code is beautiful. I immediately recognize a series of coordinates layered on top of a mapping program and remember that I had seen this signature of code while messing around with the idea of creating an avatar in a simulated online world. This reminds me of that because it looks like it would allow something to land in random places around a pre-designed land. But as I look more closely at the code and scroll through the scripts, I pick out numerous lat/long numbers that my brain somehow recognizes as points on the earth. I’m confused by this, so I scroll down further and see in the code that there’s a connection and linking system, but then the only thing it links to is ‘external,’ but what the heck is ‘external’? I close the file to look at its properties. The date of creation is Tuesday, February 22nd, of this year. There are other ‘frgmnt’ files with successive numbers along with either ‘elv,’ ‘lat,’ or ‘long’ or ‘cell’ at the end. Elevation, latitude, and longitude. I don’t understand what ‘cell’ means, so I open one of those files. The code is intricate and contains surface- and internal-based DNA computational formulas that combine towards a form of algorithm I’ve never seen before. It links the DNA coding to that of the elevation, latitude, and longitude.

I go back to the files and see that most of the programming had been done throughout a four-month time span. The coding files had been saved with updates throughout the day as if little or no sleep had interfered. That part makes sense because ever since I put my arm in the gray box, I haven’t slept, and I’m not tired at all. Not in the slightest. I haven’t even thought about Adderall and wonder if I’ll ever need to sleep again, and if not, just how productive I could be with my life. There are close to a thousand other files I’m assuming are as large as the one I had just gone through. I don’t have time to unzip them all, and I’m worried about the storage limitations on the laptop in case the file sizes are more significant than it can tolerate. Unzipping them would have to wait.

Most of the files are saved with names that look like code, with dates and abbreviations and maybe even acronyms. I’m just not sure. But there are two named clearly, and they’re right next to each other. The first is ‘ResearchUniv’; the second is ‘RineInternational.’ I double-click on ‘ResearchUniv.’ It opens to four document files: ‘nano_theory’; ‘Bio_DNA_computational’; ‘biomicromolecular_burn_synthesis_rejection’; ‘biological_proteomicsP53’. The first file tells me what I’m dealing with — nanos — but the third was the most interesting to me. ‘Burn_synthesis’ reminds me of the pain from the steel box — the most excruciating pain I could have ever imagined, and one I certainly never want to experience again. I click on that one first. The file that opens is a rigidly structured research presentation titled “Cellular Burn Synthesis Theory,” by Reginald Routton. It’s addressed to Professor Radu Dmitriu at the university and is dated a year and a half ago. It begins by explaining the current general uses of nanotechnology and then discusses the possibilities that exist if the nanos can be melded with the P53 protein. He explains that, in theory, the combining of the two could be done with a rewriting of the cellular structure. He argues that the nanos could be programmed with code to invade the cells like a virus and multiply and become part of the proteins. The paper is a live animal request. He wanted to create a single nano that could be injected into a single cell of one rat, but clearly needed permission from the university to test on the rat. He explains in the paper that the rat would endure pain, but that the pain would pass, at which time their instruments could study the progress of the singular nano within the rat’s system. Such experimentation, he argued, was a necessity for the advancement of biological and material testing. At the bottom was the word ‘RESULT’ followed by a colon, and then the words ‘REQUEST DENIED.’

The other three files contain more of the same information on nano-technology and the theories behind including those into biological studies. The P53 paper is interesting because it focuses more directly on the singular protein necessary for synthesis to happen.

Nanos. So now I know I have nanos in me. Tiny little nanos. Little computers. Too small for the eye to see. I feel the new patterned markings on my left forearm. The flesh surrounding it is so human to my touch, but then pressing on the dots feels so machined, so metallic, and yet so much a part of me — like they were never not with me. Reginald had somehow figured out a way to insert them using that heavy gray box and then bond them with the cells in the human body without killing the host cells. Or then again, maybe the nanos had killed the cells? Perhaps I'm a full-fledged computer? Am I a dead man walking? That would explain me not dying when I fell from the building, and might also explain my new mental speed and memory, but it doesn’t exactly explain the Russian’s bullets not penetrating me, and it also doesn’t explain the natural feeling of my skin. The possibilities are endless. Nothing is any clearer. Knowing about the nanos still leaves so many questions, the most important ones being who had killed Reginald and why?

I open the file titled ‘Rine_International.’ Only one file is inside. It’s a document titled ‘EmploymentAcceptance.’ The corporate logo at the top of the page is familiar because I had seen it recently and recall it immediately: it’s the same logo etched onto the small button inside the windshield of my brother’s SUV. The logo on the acceptance letter is in full color, but that’s the only difference. The lower-case ‘r’ on the acceptance letter appears over a blue circular image containing clouds and land, meant to look like the earth. The letter is dated a year ago and is from the human resources department of Rine International to Reginald Routton announcing his hire date, his approved salary of $225,000 per year, and his title of Research Fellow. Reginald was also awarded a $2,500 per month car allowance, full health benefits, and stock options. I think about the date. Reginald had just turned twenty-years-old and had already been at the university for two years, while I had just turned sixteen and was on the verge of getting expelled from school and arrested by the FBI. He had hidden his successes as I had buried my failures, which made us even? Ours was a family of secrets, and it didn’t surprise me that Reginald had some of his own, but these were good things in his life, so then why hide them? At that moment I realized I hadn’t known my brother at all.