Wednesday, April 13

There’s a quiet hour after dinner when no one seems to pay attention to where anyone else is. Most of my class is in the rec room or studying in their rooms. A few are taking a break in the dorm’s common room. I’m sure that Evan will come looking for me eventually for a game or a show, but for now I have a little time on my own.

I’m going to see if I can figure out if Father was lying about Mom or not. I always figured she’d supported us with her writing, but when I think back on it, she only ever had a few books published, and those hadn’t exactly been best-sellers. Maybe my childhood had been funded courtesy of regular deposits from Father. Or maybe he’s full of it and trying to make me feel like I owe him. Either way, I want to know for sure.

Plus, I’ve told a few lies since I arrived here, and pretty much all of them will unravel if she ever mentioned our extracurricular computer activities. I’m guessing Mom kept that to herself, since we committed more than a few felonies together. But she could have mentioned something about me learning coding, and that would be a discrepancy that I’d need to figure out a way to explain. I figure my best shot is to hack into the computer network. That’s less risky than trying a physical break-in, as long as I’m careful. What I’m looking for is probably on the computer network anyway.

I consider my options. I’ll need to hardwire Mom’s laptop somewhere where there are physical network ports, since the wireless doesn’t connect to anything besides a small and tightly walled off internal network. I’ve seen a few jacks in the Residence, so that might work, but it’s always crawling with people. The Research Center, where his office is, should have plenty of ports, but also has a bunch of security cameras all over it, so trying to set up in there doesn’t seem like a great idea.

The only other option I know of is the Learning Center. I jam Mom’s laptop into my backpack, then set an alarm for an hour on my tablet and throw that in too. That should give me enough time to do some useful snooping but not so long that anyone will notice I’m not around. I make my way into the building and down the long hallway toward the computer lab. The door is open and the lights are off. Excellent.

I take a quick detour past Janet and Roxanne’s office, keeping my feet as quiet as I can. Through the thick door, I can hear fast drums and an angry guitar riff. Roxanne must be on duty tonight, since it would be jazz playing if it was Janet in there. That’s fine by me. Roxanne seems like the less attentive of the two of them.

I slip back to the computer lab and settle in front of one of the workstations. I log in long enough to get the machine address of the network adapter, then open the laptop and spoof that address. I unplug the computer’s ethernet cable and quickly plug it into the port on the laptop. With the address spoofed, it should look like the same machine as far as the network knows. I still have Jeff’s password, so I use his credentials instead of my own to log in to the network. Mom’s first rule of hacking: never get caught. If anyone is going to take the blame for what I’m doing, I’d rather it be Jeff than me. It would be even better if I could have stolen Chad’s password, but that would have required me to sit next to him, which is definitely not worth it.

I think back to the last hack that Mom and I did. Carbonica. One of the few coal mining companies still running in the country. They faked their safety inspections for years and ended up with a collapse that killed a bunch of miners. They denied everything, of course, up until Mom and I hacked the proof from their servers and made their own website serve it all up on their front page. That was a great piece of work, and I had learned a lot helping Mom do it.

The important part of that hack right now is that we used one of her previous targets as a proxy to make it look like the attack was coming from one of Carbonica’s competitors. I poke around the network and choose a few public servers to use as proxies in the same way. Bouncing the network traffic around like that misdirects it and makes it less likely that anyone will trace it to me here in this lab.

If Roxanne were paying close attention to the network, or if she had automated tools that could pick up anything suspicious, this is about when I’d expect to hear the faint music from down the hall either stop or get suddenly loud as she opens the door to come down and investigate. I wait a minute and just listen. Neither happens. I think I’m clear.

I wish I had Mom’s email password. I asked Gramps on my Sunday call if they had it, but they didn’t. If I had that, I could just read her mail and see if she’d been talking to Father. But I don’t, and cracking that would take forever, so I have to dig into the Institute email system to see if I can get to the conversation from Father’s side. It’s a pretty standard mail server, easy to install, easy to administer, and not hard to hack. It’s not even patched to the latest version. I scan through Mom’s exploit toolkit for an attack that’ll work. Looks like there was a zero-day a few months back—after the date of this server’s latest update—that should let me skip authentication. That’ll do it. I trigger the exploit and use it to log in through the web client.

I try to get into Chad’s email first, just to test things out. Scanning through his mail, he’s got some messages to and from Phil and Stan in class two, and an occasional email to his teachers, but it’s mostly back and forths with Father. Chad emails him almost every single day to report on what a good boy he is and any rule-breaking my siblings have done. He gets replies maybe twice a week that basically all tell him good job and to focus on himself. What a suck-up. I’m glad he hasn’t had anything of substance to say about me yet. I log out.

Now that I know it works, I hold my breath and log back in as Tom Butler. The page loads and I’m good to go. It looks like he’s the kind of guy that doesn’t delete his email. He’s got so many messages in here, almost all of them read. He or someone on his staff must spend a good chunk of their day keeping up with this stuff. The archive goes back for years and years.

I filter my ill-gotten gains for mentions of me. I find plenty of messages dated since I arrived on campus. I don’t have time to worry about them right now, but I make a mental note to check on them later. I filter all of those out and start looking through the older messages. There she is. Mary Kimball. My mom.

Father has been straight with me. There’s correspondence with my mother going back for years. Definitely her writing style, I’d know that anywhere. Quarterly reports tell him all about my grades, health, attitude, and what a fine young man I’m becoming. She bragged to him about all my accomplishments: AP tests, honor roll, chess tournaments, math contests, even academic decathlon. I‘m pretty sure if I’d been an athlete, she’d have bragged on how I did in all my games. But there isn’t any mention of anything I’ve done with computers since I was really little. Good, but a little weird. Like she was hiding that from him. What did she think he would do if he knew I could code? Come and recruit me for the nanobot club?

My tablet’s alarm beeps quietly from my backpack. I reach in and shut it off. Time to get out of here before anyone notices I’ve been gone. Reluctantly, I close the window with Father’s email. I definitely need to get back in here sometime soon and read more. I tear down the misdirection tunnels and my connection to the proxies, then switch the cable so the workstation is plugged back into the network. I don’t think using Jeff’s account will leave any traces. Hopefully, Jeff won’t notice a thing when he logs in tomorrow.

I step out of the lab. The fast, muffled flow of beats and chords coming from down the hall tells me Roxanne is still in her office. Probably doesn’t suspect a thing. I head back to the dorms. I arrive just in time to see Evan get headshot by Andrea on one of the screens. He sees me and tosses his controller at me from the couch where they’re sitting. I catch it and settle in between them, ready for the next deathmatch. I still have a lot of homework to do before tomorrow, but I can squeeze in a couple of games before I start on that.

Friday, April 15

I check the computer lab after dinner and it’s empty again. Sweet. After finding some younger kids in here yesterday, I was worried that Wednesday night was a fluke, but maybe I can make this a regular thing. Roxanne’s angry girl rock drifts from down the hallway. Time to finish up what I started a couple of days ago.

Now that I know what I’m doing, it only takes me a couple of minutes to set things up again and get Father’s email back open. I search through his mountainous inbox for references to my name since I got here. The bulk of them are the daily progress reports from my teachers. I spot check a few, and they mostly say nice things about me. Mrs. Hastings sends Father an update a couple of times a week, telling him I’m adjusting well and seem happy. And it looks like the purchasing system sends him an automated message every time I buy something using the tablet app.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Hmm, who’s Alejandra Guerrero? She sent Father a message saying that me and five siblings were up fifteen minutes past curfew in the common room last Monday. I remember that night. Evan had started the movie late and we wanted to finish it. Alejandra must be the cleaner who came through right at curfew. Apparently, the staff all double as spies for Father. Maybe that’s why he didn’t bother with cameras in the dorm building like he has all over the Research Center. Good to know.

The search turns up a couple of calendar items too. The first one is that meeting we had a couple of days after I got here. The second one, set for three weeks from now, says Simulator Setup - Noah. Simulator? Maybe for the implant? Does this mean I’m on track to get inducted into the superpowers crew with my sibs? Of course, that’s a week after I’ll be out of here. Or should I stay? Part of me is excited at the prospect, though I have to admit I’m a little nervous about having anything installed inside my skull. It seems safe enough, and my sibs that have it seem fine.

Well, some of them seem fine, anyway.

While I have Father’s calendar open, I take a look at what else he’s got going on. What does a day in the life of a world-saving tech genius look like? Packed, apparently. Every day is stuffed full with meetings and phone calls. I see several with similar labels, like Potential Mother: Chau Nguyen, Potential Mother: Khadija Mwangi, Potential Mother: Maria Espinoza. He’s got a meeting like that scheduled most days. I guess he’s still growing the family. That makes sense with the regular cohorts of children I’ve seen here. He’s got every age group from mine on down to the babies, and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping any time soon.

Some of the other appointments look like they’re medical, with labels like Brain Tumor and then a person’s name. The calendar is peppered with phone calls scheduled with people I recognize from headlines as world leaders, CEOs of big companies, and famous celebrities. And that’s just in April. I idly flip back a month to see who else he’s been talking to lately.

Wait.

Now that’s weird.

March 16th is empty.

The day Mom died is empty.

It’s the only day of the whole month with nothing scheduled on it.

The paranoid part of my brain kicks into overdrive. There’s no way that could be a coincidence. I scroll back into February. Every day is full. I pop forward to next month. Not all packed yet, but there isn’t a single empty day. I flick back through February, January, back into last year. Same thing, there’s never an empty day.

There isn’t a single other empty day on his calendar. Just the day my life ended.

Did the hero who saved the world have something to do with my mother’s death?

Impossible. It was an accident!

I remember that day clearly. The cop, Sergeant Thompson, coming by not long after I got home from school. The way he looked at me. How he told me a pickup truck ran a red light and crashed into her driver side door. She and the other driver had both died before the ambulance arrived. He waited with me while I sat stunned on the porch step while Gramps came over to pick me up. Gramps was crying which I didn’t think he ever did. Then the blur of the next few days and the funeral and everyone saying everything would be OK and it was all a lie because nothing would ever be OK again because she was gone, gone, gone.

Where the hell had my father been that day?

The echo of footsteps down the hall pulls me back to my immediate reality. They’re coming this way. I wipe the tears from my eyes that I hadn’t realized were there a moment ago. I frantically switch the network cable back and jam the laptop into my backpack as I hear Chad’s voice from the hallway.

“Hey, someone in there?”

No. Chad is not the person I want to deal with right now.

“Just me, Chad,” I call back, trying to force my voice to sound normal. “Catching up on some assignments.”

He sticks his too-handsome, so-punchable face through the doorway and gives me a suspicious look. “Catching up? Weren’t you doing your history homework in the lab earlier? Why didn’t you do your lab work then?”

“Yeah, I was. I was trying to catch up on that too.”

He frowns disapprovingly. “Sounds like you need to spend more time working and less time goofing off with Evan.”

I bite my tongue to keep myself from laying into him. Like he’s got any room to talk with as much time as he and Phil spend in the rec room. But I know if I start arguing right now, I’m going to end up decking him. I could take him. He’s strong, but he’s never been in a real fight. I doubt he knows how to take a punch.

No. That’s stupid. Hitting him won’t help anything, even if it would be so, so satisfying.

Breathe. Calm. Breathe.

“You’re right, Chad,” I force out. “I’ll work harder.”

I shoulder my bag and move toward the door. Toward him.

“Good. We have an obligation to the world to prepare ourselves now for our mission,” he smugly lectures. “No one else can do what we can do, and we are the only ones that can accomplish Father’s plan. You remember the mission of the Institute?”

I feel my fists ball up. I force them back open. “Yeah. Preserve life, end suffering, and elevate humanity,” I recite as I brush past him. I stride down the hallway.

“Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you,” he demands.

It takes everything I have not to turn around and punch Father’s little helper right in the mouth. Instead, I keep walking.

“Like you said, I’ve got work to do,” I say without looking back at him. “I’m not going to get it done here talking to you. Have a good night, Chad.”

I don’t hear footsteps following behind me. Good, because I’m near my breaking point when I get to the Learning Center doors. I keep it together long enough to get myself through the doors and into the dorm common room.

“Hey, brother,” Evan calls to me. He’s over on one of the couches with Louise and Andrea. Louise smiles and waves me over.

I give them a curt nod and storm toward my room. I close the door and let the facade of control break down. I let it all go. My chest heaves as the sobs wrench their way out. My face melts into a mass of slimy goo. I stumble into my bathroom and blow my nose out over the sink.

Why, Mom?

Why did you have to die?

Did he kill you?

A soft knock taps at my door. I ignore it, trying to keep my breakdown quiet enough that whoever is there doesn’t hear me.

“You OK in there, Noah?” Evan’s voice says.

“I’m fine,” I call back, leaning against the wall for support.

He knocks again. “I’m coming in.”

I don’t answer. Instead, I turn on the water and wash my face. I don’t want anyone to see me like this. When I look up, I see him in the mirror behind me. I should have locked the door.

“It’s OK, Noah,” Evan says softly. “We all went through something like this.”

“Like what?” I ask, looking at his reflection through bleary eyes. “Like your mom dying?”

“I never met my mother,” he says. His usual jovial demeanor is gone, replaced by a solemnity that’s rare for him. “No idea who she is. But I was raised by Nanny Jenny and she left when I was six. She didn’t even die, and I still cried on and off for a couple of months. I don’t know how you’ve been holding up as well as you have. You don’t need to be embarrassed about it. We all understand loss here.”

I shake my head.

“I appreciate your concern, Evan. I really do. But I just need some time alone right now.”

He nods. “Do what you need to do, but most of us figured out a while back that it hurts less if you talk about it more. When you’re ready, I’m here. Or Louise. Or Andrea. Even Marc, though you know he talks more and listens less.”

I wish he were right. I wish it were still as simple as just working out my grief. If it were, maybe I could just talk to my sibs, get over it, move on. But what if Father killed her? He could have. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to make it look like a traffic accident. A little pressure from his nanobots on the gas pedal of an oncoming truck, or disconnecting its brakes, or a tweak to a switch on a traffic light making it green both ways. He’d said it himself. Someone with a cloud like his could kill someone without leaving evidence.

I need to know more about his cloud. I need to know what it can do. I need to know where he was that day. And I need to get Evan out of here so I can figure out how to do any of that.

“Thanks,” I tell him. “We can talk tomorrow, maybe. I’m just not up for it right now.”

“When you’re ready, brother. No pressure.”

“Thanks,” I say again.

He puts his hand on my shoulder for a moment. The warmth of it almost makes me break down again. After a long few seconds, he nods and withdraws without another word, shutting the door behind him and leaving me alone with my gut-twisting suspicions.