Seneca Rebel
31

REBA WAS THE only one I had left, and our relationship was hanging on by a thread. But it was all I needed. One human connection was all it took to believe I could get the others back. I couldn’t believe I’d be disconnected from my mom, and from Dom, forever. A strong, loving, lifelong bond and a fresh new one, overflowing with possibility. I wanted them both so badly.

I sat in first session, daydreaming, and it hit me. This was a sickness of the soul I was feeling. I was love sick. Dominic Ambrosia had intercepted my heart in these golden halls, and having him ripped away from me had spun my world out of control, in complete disarray. It was one thing to accept the progress of life and technology, but it was quite another to give in to the man-made dictate that Dom and I were to be separated. If Reba could fight for our friendship, and not let me give up, then I could fight for everything I had that was right.

My session leader said my name at least three times before I heard it and it registered that my brain had checked out of there long ago. Everyone was staring. I blamed colitis. I didn’t have colitis, but it seemed like the best excuse in the moment. Unlike school back in LA, where Mr. Malin always thought I was up to something, my session leaders in Seneca respected me. I had proven myself here. I don’t mean to be creepily boastful, but my math and tech capabilities made my session leader’s own abilities look elementary. I was lucky that far from crushing his ego, it garnered me a certain level of respect from him. So when I complained about a stomach problem he simply believed me and dismissed me from session.

I knew my time to act would be limited. There would be a point when they would catch on to me, no telling when that might be.

I charged through the doorway to my room that opened as I approached, and immediately threw on a record. I needed to get in the zone. I popped a square of cacao into my mouth and dove headfirst into my flexer screen.

I had to access my Veil– all of my online endeavors in offshore gambling and financial accounts were running there. I knew that S.O.I.L. had a trace on it because that’s how they noticed my mathematical skills to begin with, so first things first– I had to place an encryption there. I coded it so that they would only be retrieving randomized repetitions of what they had already seen, and not any new activity. That would keep me under the radar at least for a while, and it was simple to accomplish. Done.

Next was the hard part. I had to trace the flow of data transfer

Seneca Rebel

from Great Falls, which was directly above the main Seneca City hub of the region, to determine where the bulk of it was going. That would lead me to identify and enter the mainframe that all the nanobots flowing through the blood of Senecans were entangled with. I ran equations until my fingertips were completely numb, but just kept coming up with dead ends. My hands couldn’t keep up with my head, as if these two body parts were on two separate entities. I would go down one path that was seemingly effective, but then, bam, dead end again.

Time for a new approach. I had locked my entanglement to my flexer and had it under unbreakable encryption, by today’s standards. I bypassed the encryption and followed the entanglement to an IP, which contained map coordinates that placed me right at the physical Latitude, 37.057372. Longitude, -80.627394. Claytor Lake. I ran a test to measure the data input and output there. It was astronomical. This was it. The mainframe was located in the hub below the incredibly inconspicuous Claytor Lake.

I crept into the mainframe through my own entanglement, and now had remote access to every nanobot with which this system was entangled. My body buzzed. My fingers were dead. My eyes numbed by the data in front of them. It wasn’t just data, it was life. Identical versions of the neurological processes of every single citizen of Seneca were right there. I was blown away by the magnitude of what was at my fingertips. I paced circles around my square room, shook my hands to loosen them up for round two. The challenging part was over. I was in. Now I just needed to find Reba’s brain data in the mainframe and break his entanglement, so that any communication between us would be undetectable.

We were categorized by name, DNA and Senecan ID #. I ran a name match search. Bam! There he was. Timothy John Reba.

My next step was to remove the block on Dom’s memory and make sure his entanglement was also cut, but, before I had the chance to dive into that process, I received an incoming flex from Reba. S.O.I.L. was headed my way.

Even though I had blocked the data output from my blood and piggybacked off of another Seneca citizen’s data, I was not completely in the clear. S.O.I.L. had probably analyzed Reba’s data from our time in the hall at S.E.R.C., and determined that my thought process, which they got second hand as it was communicated to him, was a threat to the system. I wasn’t surprised that they had analysts on top of this data twenty-fourseven. I had to get outta the hot zone. I flipped the needle off the record and bailed.

As I jetted down the hall to catch the acoustic carrier back to S.E.R.C., I reprogrammed my flexer to appear as if I was in the restaurant district. They already thought I was skipping session, so I was going to try and send them on a wild goose chase. I needed to buy time. Judging by Reba’s flex, this wasn’t too serious, yet. They were just taking precautionary measures by monitoring me. Still, it was best I didn’t underestimate S.O.I.L.

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