Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 7-1

Drayden - Chapter 7

The excitement boils inside me. I know Russian! I need to download the rest of it as soon as possible, and then everything else that he had finished. I remember seeing a fighting program! Fighting? Oh yeah, bring it on!

Knowing Russian is absolutely fantastic! Since leaving the coffee shop, I had translated different words and phrases within my head, and am amazed at how easily everything comes. что это возможно? What is possible?

What I know is that my brother was studying biological nanotechnology, and had somehow figured out a way to put nanos inside a human being. I know the nanos had somehow already made me impervious to bullets and had also made me stronger than twenty men, but this new revelation of being programmable is a new realm beyond anything I could have dreamed. I had downloaded a computer program — well, half of one, anyway — into my body. My mind races as I think about the possibilities. I remember what my brother had said in his final recording: “I meant to get you involved sooner than this in a different way entirely because with your skills and mine combined the result would have been beyond this world.” Of course. I’m the programmer in the family. Hell, I’m sure I’m one of the best programmers in the world, and now with this capability, I see no limitations to my powers, because, with enough time and a lot of code, I can conceivably make a computer do anything I want.

I long to download the remaining part of the Russian program, and I absolutely need to download all the other programs he had already completed. I have a renewed urgency to my cause because somebody had killed Reginald, as impossible as that seems with these abilities. It had happened. And if it could happen to him, it could happen to me, mainly because he understood everything about these nanos and their abilities, while I’m just trying to get my bearings and figure out multiple mysteries.

I wish he had gotten me involved sooner. If my thinking is right, and these nanos respond to directional code, then I know I could have helped him. I could have written code that would have enabled him to get out of whatever situation he had found himself in, I’m sure of it.

I need a private place to download, preferably somewhere that I can fall into an electricity-caused epileptic seizure and be left entirely alone, and where I can plug the computer directly into an ethernet port. I stop on the corner of a sidewalk stressed and rushed, but not knowing where to go. A police car passes in the opposite direction but doesn’t notice me. I look back and watch it turn the corner, and then a city bus stops in front of me and blocks my view with an advertisement on its side promoting the Carnegie Museum and Carnegie Library. I smile because a library would be perfect! A closed library that is.

I board the bus.

“This bus going near the Carnegie Library?” I ask the bus driver.

“Three stops,” he says.

I pay the fare and look to the half-open seats and sit next to an older woman who looks like she might speak Russian. I control the urge to talk to her in my newly learned language for the three stops it takes to get to the library and then exit the bus and run up to the library entrance with an urgency reserved for the wanted. I go inside where a mid-twenties security guard with pale skin and greasy hair informs me that the library would close in seventeen minutes.

“No problem,” I say as I continue by. “Time me.”

This is exactly perfect. Just what I need. A place that’s all mine where I can get work done in solitude. Now I need to find a hiding spot. I look back to the security guard and wish I hadn’t said what I said. I might have had a bit of a superior tone when I told him to time me, and now he’s watching me. I go up the marble steps and round the corner out of his view and then quicken my pace until I get to the other side of the room. I see the guard enter the room and look around left and right. He doesn’t see me, but he’s looking. Just great, I think to myself. I had let loose a bloodhound. He finally locks in on me across the room. Dammit, it’s definitely me he’s after. This is the last thing I need. Oh well, this is either going to be fun or incredibly annoying, and I’m betting on the latter.

I find hiding to be nearly impossible. There are still too many patrons, and the small cameras hidden in the ceiling would catch me unless I could move fast. I slow down to let the guard catch up, then find an open computer on the bridge leading to the large print area where I stop and try to log in for an internet search. The guard shows up four seconds later out of breath and annoyed.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He says.

“Just sitting here looking up a book. You said I had seventeen minutes, right?” He’s not buying it. He looks at his watch.

“Fourteen minutes,” he says.

“Are you just going to stand there?” I ask. He hovers a few seconds more just looking at me, waiting and hoping for some kind of confrontation.

“Tick, tock,” he finally says, which is enough for me to decide that I absolutely hate him.

He leaves and goes to stand by the entrance near the large print area where he has a direct line of sight to continue to watch me like a hawk.

I’m so annoyed with myself. Why couldn’t I have just come in anonymously, found a hiding spot, and waited until the coast was clear? That’s what any reasonable person would have done. Instead, I had drawn attention to myself, and now had this power-hungry fool waiting for me to leave. Typical, Drayden. Nice work.

I log onto the internet from the library’s computer and do a local news search. The coroner’s death is the top story, but neither my name nor Reginald’s is mentioned. The article says the police were identifying a possible suspect, but are not ready to release that information at this time. It also says the motive behind the murder is theft, but they wouldn’t comment to the journalists as to what had been stolen, like my brother’s body; yeah, good luck explaining that to the local news. The next story is similar and gives a little more information. It includes a picture of the coroner. A different local news station’s website has a story on the chase that had happened outside of the police station. The article is short but says sources inside the police department reported a disturbance within the city’s main precinct after which a chase and apprehension later occurred. An arrest? I don’t think so. I guess they couldn’t have it out there that people could actually escape from the police. That could start anarchy.

They had neglected to mention my brother’s death and hadn’t released my name yet. Something is screwy. It’s a cover-up, as far as I can tell. But who’s covering it up? Is it Dietrich? Somebody higher than him?

“Time to go,” the guard says, snapping me out of my trance. I look up at the clock. It’s five minutes until closing.

“Five minutes,” I say.

“Not for you,” he says. “Your time is up.”

I exit out of the browser and shut down the windows on the computer. “Push the elevator button,” I say. “I’ll be right there.” I stare at him, and he stares back. Finally, he turns and heads to the elevator. I take the opportunity while his back is turned to get up and rush behind a pillar. I listen as he realizes I’m not where he left me and hear him run in the opposite direction from where I am. The elevator door opens. I run inside.

“See you down there!” I say loudly enough for him to hear. The elevator door is halfway closed as he comes back into view. He runs toward me but isn’t fast enough to make it, and I can’t resist giving him the finger.

When the elevator is halfway between floors, I pry open the doors, and the elevator stops immediately. I slip through the narrow opening, hold onto an inner support beam inside the shaft, toss my briefcase onto the top of the elevator, and push the doors shut. The elevator restarts its descent without me inside it. When seeing the elevator is empty, I know the security guard will eventually come back to look for me, but by then I’ll be well hidden.

I jump onto the top of the elevator, grab my briefcase, leap to the doors above me, pry them open, and exit the shaft. I run as quickly as I can through the hallway — hopefully too quickly for the security cameras — and then make another small leap onto a bookcase, move a ceiling tile out of the way, climb up inside, hold onto a pipe, close the ceiling tile and wait for the time to pass.

Several times I heard the security guard’s rushed footsteps and heavy panting. He’d leave and then come back. This went on for about twenty minutes, during which I thought about the languages and why Reginald might have needed them. Had he really traveled to all the different countries of all the languages in his laptop, or were they just easy programs to code and download? He had recorded the last message to me from what appeared to be the Swiss plains only five hours before he had supposedly been found inside his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. No plane is that fast. That told me he had used his powers, but I still didn’t know how anything like that was possible. How had he gotten from the Swiss plains to his apartment in such a short amount of time?

When I can no longer hear the security guard, and I’m sure I’m alone, I lower myself out of the ceiling and into the darkened room, and walk around until I find exactly what I’m looking for: a small cubby in the back corner of the second floor. Above me is a small camera hidden in the ceiling pointing fifteen degrees away from me, but I’m sure I’m in its path. Another camera ten feet behind me overlaps my location. There’s no doubt I’m being recorded, but I don’t care. I’ll be long gone by the time anybody watches it.

In the back of the cubby is an outlet. I get the laptop out of the briefcase, plug it in, turn it on, and then plug one end of the syncing cord into my arm. As I wait for the computer to boot up, I feel the outline of the little brown book in the inner-left pocket of my jacket. Reginald had changed the passwords frequently, which meant he had been living with fear for a while. It also said he had been thinking of getting me involved for a while. I didn’t need the book anymore because I had it all memorized, so I made another mental note to destroy it properly at the soonest opportunity.

I enter the password into the computer and log into www.externalsync.com. As soon as I do, the site recognizes me and prompts me with the following question: “Would you like to continue to download Russian?” There are options for ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ I look around to make sure I’m alone and then eagerly click ‘Yes.’ The download begins immediately and causes the same uncontrollable convulsions that took over me in the coffee shop. Time becomes something different. I’m unable to discern a second from a minute. I’m outside of myself and at the same time am inside my head and my body as the nanos within me accept the code. My vision fragments as I attempt to watch the download progress bar complete its shading. It goes from 93% complete to 89% complete, and then up to 95%. After what seems like an hour, the download finally ends, and I’m free. I look at the clock on the top-right of the laptop monitor: two minutes had passed.

Hungry for more, I click on the ‘choose ability’ option. The following languages remain: Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Japanese, French, German, Farsi, Italian, Dutch, Swahili, Malay, Vietnamese, Korean, Turkish, Thai, Cantonese, and Polish. I opt for Mandarin. Just as with Russian, the download immediately warps my eyes, fragmenting everything around me, and seems to skip over linear time. While the program downloads into me, it’s as if I can’t wake from a dream that’s within another dream. I lose the mind control to tell my arm to lift, or my body to do anything but wait for it to end. Hours seem to pass as the Mandarin downloads, and when it’s finished, I look at the clock and see that only three minutes of my life have passed.