Chapter 16: Transmission

Becoming a member of our society means that our minds are and were never tied to our bodies. Our consciousness can transgress anything, travel and flow through anything just like the moving wind. How poetic can it be, yet it is true. Only those who are worthy get to live beyond their waning bodies, only the worthy.

Roger was sitting on a chair; a bandage was rolled around his torso and shoulder. He still struggling with the pain, but he was able to walk and talk without snarling. Tamara brought him some tea from the kitchen. His actual phone was vibrating its way across the table towards the edge before taking the fall. Tamara caught it before it hit the ground.

"Jeremy sent voicemails," Tamara said, remembering the gentle fellow from the time they both fell and had that awkward moment with her.

Roger nodded.

"You should talk to him," Tamara said, placing the plate and then facing Roger.

"I can't, I can't talk to him. I hurt him so bad and he doesn't even know it," Roger said, putting his hand on his bruised side.

"I thought you never cared whether you hurt people or not. Doesn't your AI consider it conceivable that you should respond to a friend? Was he actually your friend?" Tamara said, signs of blaming aggression were obvious in her tone. Roger looked down, his hair falling down and shading his eyes. Only his lips were revealed. His face was all darkish and bruised.

"Weird," he muttered, Tamara leaned towards him to hear what words escaped his lips. "Before the chip, I never cared about Jeremy. To me, he was a little above nothing, his existence and nonexistence were almost all the same to me. If one day I get news of his death, I would only pay my respects in regard to years of company, company not friendship. Then, because of my chip, because of what Owinson instructed me to do, I actually started to feel for him, for his family. The day when I had it in my heart to actually visit him was the day I watched the cops drag his father out of the house. Because of who? Because of me. So, as an answer to your question, yes I consider Jeremy a friend and because I am unable to face a friend I can't respond to his call."

Tamara was left speechless. There were quick instances when she thought of saying anything, but she would close he separate lips. Roger could not notice for he was busy scolding himself, wondering in a terror of his own making, his face devoured by his long hair and his body covered in bruises and patches. His bones ached, and his head kept on spinning. Tamara stood off the chair, walking towards the window with her hand on its upper rail. There was a skyscraper facing them with a satellite plate. It was almost dawn; Roger had slept earlier and Tamara remained a couple of hours before drifting off. Sleeping had never been harder with her father missing and her mother in the hospital.

"Where's our next location?" Tamara asked.

"There," Roger said. Tamara turned around to see that he was pointing at her direction, more specifically towards the sky scraper. He limped off the chair towards the window, his hand on his ribs this time with a short grunt with every step. His face muscles were twitching on a constant manner.

"Not just the building, the top of it. I don't know why but the tracker says he was at the top of the building," Roger said, finding a strange beauty in the redness of the heavens above as the sun was slowly rising.

"The files I found when I was at Brinkins' house, they all lead to the east of the city. We're at the center, I don't see how that helps," Tamara wondered.

Roger withdrew from the window, stretching his hand to grab a long coat. He was not even able to wear a shirt, a long coat was enough. "The city's empty at this time of the day, we need to get to the top right now. I'll use my hacking ability to override doors and security bots."

Tamara seemed to be hesitant. Roger was devastated. The sooner they finished their investigation, the more probable they could save the old man. As they walked, Roger connected his mind to his phone, selecting Jeremy's voicemails, both recent and old. Tamara noticed, yet she did not intend to bother him on their way to the top.

"Roger, something's happened, bro. Look, just pass by house or give me a call, I really need your help."

"Hey man, everything's alright? You didn't call, you didn't pass by me. It's my Dad, Roger, they took him. The cops came in and took him, they said he was involved with illegal fights, corruption in the auction house. The lawyer's doing everything she can, but they got a tight grip on him. This whole thing's… I don't know man, just give me a call, I swear my head's gonna explode."

"Roger, you alright? I'm getting worried, man. It's been a week, and I heard nothing from you."

"Bro, it seems there's no way he's getting out of this. They didn't pass the sentence yet, but I thing that's it for him. The Lawyer speculates ten to fifteen years if he could make a deal. You know, they started thinking of probable murder. Can you believe that? My dad killing someone? What the hell is wrong with people?!"

"Hey dude, it's been two weeks. You know I went by your home yesterday, I found your Uncle. The first time the old dog was actually enjoyable to talk to. He says you're changed, buddy. Are you going through something? You know, you can always tell me about it. I hope we meet real soon."

"Hey, looks like I won't be sending you voicemails much, bro. Both me and my mom found a job outside the city. Maybe your Uncle was right, you've changed and that's just inevitable sometimes. I'm not the same too too, I feel more responsible, more thoughtful of… my place within those I love, my family. I know I sound philosophical, I sound just like you sound or like you used to sound at least. Hah, my dad's final judgment will be two days after tomorrow, then we'll leave. If you're interested in saying goodbye, just give me a call. You'll always be my friend, always."

Each voicemail was more depressing than the other. Jeremy's voice began worried and energetic and ended up calm and desperate. There was little tone of hope in his last message but Roger was busy contemplating his mistake, his choice and the consequences. He sensed bitterness in his bowels while memories of their friendship flashed in front of his eyes. It was pity that the chip was directly linked to memory, and it enforced the nerves to actually bring up the feeling. He could smell it, hear it, touch it, taste it and eventually see it as it was in front of his eyes. During their time in the elevator, he and Tamara had not spoken a single word. She busy looking at how the tears were forced out of his eyes, but they were barely visible under that sprawling hair of his. He would sniff the air every few seconds, especially during the last message. Before he could realize it, they were already standing in front of a titanic plate rotated at the direction of a satellite up in space.

They walked around the place, roaming for evidence. There was nothing apart from the plate and the electric fences around it. Roger limped towards the ridge of the building, slowly lowering himself before letting both feet go and sitting on the edge. The wind played with his hair, revealing his bruised face behind it. He could sense his body shivering, that tempting shiver that would ask one to let go and take the fall. Tamara stood beside him.

"There's nothing here, Roger," she said.

"Was there anything else in your father's workshop?" he asked, almost figuring it out himself. Tamara took a step back, connecting what was in the workshop and what they had deduced so far. The only person they had not talked to was the whistleblower whose picture was hung on Bob's wall. Still, they had reached a dead end and there was nothing leading to him, nothing that they had realized at least.

"There was this one guy, Lester Hubbins, a whistleblower. I've already searched for him, he fled the city long ago. No one really knows where he is, no one apart from major intelligence and government institutions anyway. How is this plate supposed to help us find him?"

"The real question is how it is supposed to help me find him."

"I don't understand."

"Your father came here in attempt to connect his mind to a satellite up in space, use it to find the whistleblower, at least his computer. If he did, we wouldn't be here. Your father must have come here and tried it, he must have been desperate."

"If what you're saying is true, then why hadn't he done it?"

Roger turned to her with a hopeless look in his face. "Because he can't."

Silence, mixed with the whisper of the high and early wind of the morning, dominated for a few more seconds.

"He can't, Tamara," he said, this time he was calmer. "His chip is not that powerful. With his age and sickness, the jump into space would either kill him or damage his consciousness. He explained to me the system of walls before, that when one breaks enough walls, the chip will take control of his mind. Either that or kill him or kill him all together."

"You mean just like it happened to you, the day you broke your way out of the mob's warehouse?"

Roger withdrew from the edge, slowly rolling on the floor before he lifted himself up. "Yes, you see, it's not that chip will control me, but it will listen to my first order, usually second orders are the results of rational thought. The will to survive, to breed, to nurture oneself and so on and so forth, the chip listens to a deeper instructing state in my mind. When your father lost hope in tracking the member of the organization, he decided to give himself to them."

Tamara stood perplexed, raising her hand as Roger walked towards the plate. The young chip bearer stood facing the plate, sensing a sort of connection between his chip and the satellite. More like little sparks that craved fusion, intertwining. Tamara had slowly come to the realization to what her father intended.

"He didn't really come here to do it, he marked the location for you. He knew you'd come to find him, knew or hoped. The only one who could connect his mind to a sattelite and come out alive is--"

"Me," Roger said, nodding. "I don't intend to disappoint him."

Roger sensed something of tightness gripping his arm. He turned around, eyes both widely open as Tamara took hold of his wrist. The red rising sun shone upon her shimmering teary eyes. Roger stood numb; her tears numbed him.

"Don't," she said.

"I have no choice."

"There is always a choice."

"Well, this is the only one. This is your father, we're talking about."

Tamara's grip over his wrist was tightening, almost starting to dig her nails into his frail flesh. "We can find another way, please. This could kill you, you haven't tried it before. You'll get drifted into a space with no guarantee that you'd be able to transmit your consciousness to your body."

"I know, I did my calculations. But I don't intend to follow them. For the whole of my life, I have been following my heart, trusting that my soul will take me wherever I need to be. I broke the pattern in the last few weeks, I ratted on my friend's father, yelled at the true father I always had and became a pest as I would hear people's conversations for the sake of it. This is not something Roger Garaldson, the artist, would do. Whatever happens to me up there, at least I know I went there willingly."

He took a step back, intending to withdraw himself before her grip would pull him again. "It's okay," Roger said.

Tamara untied her grip over his hand pulling herself away. She kept to her silence while Roger turned, walking towards the plate as he sensed his mind shaking the closer he was to the giant thing. He clenched both of his fists, stood tall. His eyes both open, his feet planted into the floor. The contact was initiating. It sounded just like a departing air plane.

This is a clear evidence that Bob, just like my father, believed I was ready. The odds were against my father, Bob, and against me, yet they kept believing in me until the very end, ignoring the probabilities. Even if I fail, it will never be my intention to surrender. I will prove them right. At least, it is my genuine will to prove them right.

As he closed his eyes, he witnessed the explosion of a gigantic galactic light that resembled how a star die. Nothing but whiteness spreading across the dark borders of a world he could not understand. It went dark, small chips of deep darkness widened in a flat light before it spread like a hole in a burning cloth. Everything was dark, he sensed like he was moving and the voices in his head were no longer his own. Paths all met at the center of his head, videos, messages, voices, screams, calls, music, systems all met at a single dot. Still, he could not still make any sense of it, like a traveler going through a merry ferry. The blur started to clear, showing far lights embedded deep into the dark world of space. Lights were stronger with every passing second, brighter and seemingly more beautiful. More seconds passed and all the stars showed themselves to him, enveloping the whole of his spherical existence. There was no earth, no planets, nothing but a flat screen with bright dots, spread equally in a world of nothingness. His nerves were not his own, there was no sense as he could perceive everything with a single sense: his own mind. Both the stars and the satellites came to be. The blueness of the sea, the greenness of the aurora, the occurring of the lands, cities and lights. Everything was there, pulling each other into existence as if they were waiting for a single strand in time to be pulled, one last time. Roger sensed that his mind could not move anymore, as if he was hung to a tall tree from which he could see it all. Everything was set in its place, it was preparing for that moment.

A click!

Back in his body, Tamara noticed that Roger started shaking before he exploded with intense screams. His eyes were kept tightly closed, while his feet rumbled the ground. His fists rose and fell like a couple of hammers trying to kick a slice of wood into two nails. He would shriek harder. Tamara held him close, yet the scream could not stop. Blood descended off his eyes, nostrils, around his lips.

Up there in the satellite's system, seeing the whole world from one of its cameras, Roger's nervous system was replaced with the network that kept the whole world connected. Roger could not stop the flow of info into his own mind, he could see everything that was presented to him. It was all chaotic, the pulse was driving him to the bloody abyss. It seemed like someone twigged his brain in a constant manner, giving him the illusion that he would stop any time soon before resuming the play. That feeling was the constant arrival of a new info into his brain. He was being fried. Still, Tamara noticed that the shaking was starting to fall, to lessen as he would crumple and keep silent, stiffening each of his limbs.

Up in space, Roger started to stop shaking; he stopped receiving various signals from across that half of the globe. A familiar figure occurred, surrounding his arms with a warm cloak. Roger was only a mind, yet he could sense that his nerves were mingled with that of an artificial body that his chip created to help him control what could be controlled. Then, the figure hooked his hands on Roger's shoulders before climbing up to his face. His cheeks seemed warmer, and his heart beat faster.

"Roger, listen to me, you don't have to take it all. You can control the chip, you can use it to funnel how much info you want into your brain. Focus, you just need to focus," the figure said. Roger started shaking again, yet his agitation was smothered by both the figure and his attempt to funnel the info.

"Dad?"

"Only a version of him. I was programmed to help you in case one day you decided to link your mind to a satellite. Listen closely to my voice, Roger, the bits of info can be allowed to your brain, and they can be kept outside. Just focus, try to focus on what you're trying to find. This way, you can only focus on a single entity, a single piece of info. I will ask you this, what are you trying to find?"

Roger felt like his memory was snatched away from him, but he was still on the process of getting it back. His head danced, pulled like a double-edged cord before his mind agreed on a name. "Lester Hubbins, the whistleblower," Roger muttered, raising his voice with every syllable. Tamara heard him; she knew he was getting somewhere.

"Okay," the numeral figure said before he drifted away from the sattelite, raising both of his hands while pin points of Lester Hubbins went spreading across Europe. Roger managed to control the lenses of the satellite while looking for the whistleblower. All he had to find was the ID of his name either on his phone or in his computer. There were only two ID in the US with that same name, but it was known Hubbins left the country long ago. In order to access Europe's server, Roger had to transmit his consciousness into another satellite just half way across the earth rectangle which could portray more of eastern Europe than its western side.

Tamara saw how Roger's head was trembling like a ticking bomb. Tamara started to panic; his feet rose and fell as if he was clambering a hill. He rolled on his stomach before going back to the side of his back. The screams returned.

Focus!

A new sort of data stream was flooding into the pond of his mind.

Focus!

The screaming intensified; his eyes were open wide open like a patient who woke up during a surgery. His consciousness was not there yet; his eyes were closed again. Up in space, the last bit of his mind reached the European satellite, specifically the German. He had a look on eastern Europe, the name was less common than it was in western Europe. With a little background that Hubbins worked in various companies as a cyber defender, he sure knew how to cover his name. Still, not everyone had the ability to override systems like Roger. His eyes were set on a name in Poland up in the north. For the third time using the consciousness transmission, the pain lessened, either because had control of his perception or because he had been into so much pressure that his body went numb, motionless and senseless. In a blink, he opened his eyes to realize he was the computer, or the camera beside the computer. A couple faced him, writing something on the search engine.

Hubbins was not supposed to be accompanied, and the couple spoke Polish. Roger pulled his mind back like he was about to step out of a circle, finding himself back in the European satellite. Afterwards, He did nothing but cyber travels across Europe. The real Hubbins was nowhere to be found, there were emerging IPs as that time of the day more people connected to their devices. Roger could sense bits of his mind drifting away into an unknown matrix of space just like a missing astronaut. With every travel to a different part of the world, he sensed that his consciousness was being shaped by the hazardousness of the AI, his own sense of self was changing. Between each travel he would wonder whether there was a sense of self in the first place, whether what people consider as soul could just be the sum of their consciousness. Still, there was not time to be philosophical, he had to find Hubbins. With every search, the recommendation for the most likely being the real Lester Hubbins diverted Roger towards a location in Turkey, western Istanbul. Before he could dive into the location's IP, he saw a man swimming, stretching his hands and moving his feet like a frog. Roger focused, trying to make sense of it. His hair flowed despite the absence of wind in space, he then turned towards him. There he was, the one with the glowing eyes, the blind one.

"Owinson," he stuttered, barely able to finish before he was already in the Turkish IP, looking at the room from behind the laptop's upper webcam. The facial recognition seemed to be troubled, Hubbins seemed different. One could notice his jaw and his broken nose, yet he had a long mustache with a little beard under his lips. His face was freckled, and his hair was red. Even his voice was more strident and sharp than it was before during one of his press conferences. Roger pulled himself off the webcam into the computer's files, overriding the security without even intending to. He was already swimming in a sea of data, be it the storage or the activity history. There was a panel leading to the world web, which could subsequently pull him back into the satellite. He dug into the files, searching for anything that could help them find whoever held him. Behind the screen, Hubbins' left eyebrow climbed across his forehead, bewildered at the sight of the cursor moving on its own. He took hold of the mouse, pulling it away from the storage, yet the cursor did not seem to obey. Even after unplugging the mouse, the cursor obeyed Roger's will. He was already inside the main files of the whistleblower. Things that would usually be considered scandalous, assaults, misconduct, harassment, toxic work environment, were of no interest to Roger. Still, there was an encrypted file, one requiring a code of each faction: a letter, a number, a symbol and a punctuation mark.

Roger's numerical father took shape again, only that he could not see him. He could only hear his senseless, robotic voice.

There is something we the chip bearers know as the reversal ability. It can be used to retrieve lost data or reimagine real events.

The numbers in the simulation returned again, this time mixed with symbols and punctuation marks with two letters appearing every few seconds. The reason why he could only see numbers during his former time in the simulation was his potential to retrieve whatever data the system considered as corrupt or lost. He focused on the password, a four figure word with different variants, that they themselves had their own variants.

No need to panic, you just need to focus.

The counting, the reversal process started from the end. The decryption showed lesser variants, yet their order had mingled with their possible answer. Roger had to focus, had to funnel his attention to reverse the flow of the bits of info, the small cubic symbols that would be recovered and opened. The real password was mixed the different attempts, even from hackers or Hubbins when he had forgotten it. Bit by bit, cube by cube, box by box, only the reorder remained to be found. This time, it was a matter of probabilities. Four figures meant sixteen possibilities. Roger tried them all, no moment to blink at all. Hubbins started to smash the keyboard, his fist dug and keys rose in the air. Some of it were stuck in his palm.

1A:@

The file was opened. Roger duplicated a version of the computer like a screenshot, portraying that the file was not opened at all. It was more than a screenshot and more like a fake simulation a computer. Roger did not even blink. The file contained a few pictures of North Robotics, a tech company in partnership with Red Tech in Garlem. Its president, Mr. Liam Troddle, was the one under the spotlight. In a written file, every picture was accompanied with a paragraph. Only the last one was the evidence, the right evidence.

"I can't take it anymore, I can't work for that monster anymore. He made a big mistake assigning me as head of the cyber security, he would kill me if he knew I hacked into his accounts and knew the kind of twisted madness he and his little group therapy do. In case I die, this file contains the location of one of their underground lodges. It's just under the supermarket, near Red Tech's headquarters. The entrance requires you a fingerprint formula, it's down below use it! They're not willing to do anything good to Garlem."

Before Hubbins could realize it, his computer regained its initial state. The pest inside was no more, it was full clean. The pest was now floating in the open space, jumping from a satellite to the other in an endless motion, rotating the earth as if he was a satellite himself. On his course around the planet, his mind sent a message.

Standing next to his body back on earth, Tamara was looking at her phone. Someone with the contact tag "UNKNOWN SOURCE" sent her the file, the location and how to infiltrate the Future Dictators' lodge, which was the most probable place where they could find the old Bob. Tamara crawled closer to Roger, observing how his eyes had opened. Both of his eyes were blue, almost glassy as they had only reflected the blueness of the sky above. He was breathing, yet he was stiff and blind. He was not even inside his body anymore.

"Roger, wake up! Come on, wake up!" she yelled, nudging Roger a number of times, yet he was as dead as a breathless bird. She drew her phone again, her fingertips dancing on the keyboard before she hit send again, hoping that the message had reached the "UNKNOWN SOURCE". Still, an error occurred for no source existed in the first place. Tamara turned with fear embodied in her face, her mouth on her hand with teary eyes. How pale his face seemed, how dead his limbs were, sent shivers down the whole of her body. What use were his vitals if his body remained empty. She went down on both knees, desperate at the sight of his stillness.

With no way to bring his consciousness back to his body, Roger was no better than the dead.