Jackie opened the door to the Lantern headquarters in Nevada. The dull hum of servers strummed through the air. Jackie held a white bag with takeout. The heavy door closed behind her. She wore a tight black cap over her short hair.
“Hello, Alex. How’re things?” She stepped inside. “I know you’re surprised to see me, just let me say something,” Jackie said. “First, at the risk of sounding insincere, it is good to see you. Really, it is. I owe you an apology. You were right, Alex, all along. So was Denny. I wasn’t being a team player. We weren’t on the same page, not aligned in our mission.”
It sounded clichéd, bordering on the glib.
“In my defense,” Jackie said, walking forward to Alex’s cubicle, “Denny never trusted me, as you rightly noted. Do you know that his distrust of me was so great, so profound, that he actually had a colleague attack me, feign an assault, a near-sexual assault. Ridiculous, right? Denny thought it would make me more beholden to him, trusting of him, so that I would follow his musty old sellout footsteps into another self-congratulatory, world-changing innovation he envisioned. Another liar, Alex, another fraud.” Jackie stopped and shook her head. “I’m rambling, I know it. I just thought I owed you some explanation.”
Alex sat in her cubicle. Her head hung to the left side. A dull smile held her catatonic face. Drool pooled beside her lip.
“Eh, who am I kidding,” Jackie said. “I don’t owe you shit.”
Jackie walked beside Alex’s swivel chair and kicked it a few feet to the left. The chair flew and Alex with it, eventually sliding off the edge and falling to the ground with her dumb, absent stare and pasted smile. Jackie reached into her pocket and pulled out a gray rectangular device that looked very much like a cell phone. “I think you’d be proud of me, Alex,” she said. “I can now change the electrical pulses on your device with this little thing. It’s a remote control—for your brain.”
She stared at Alex.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jackie said in a happy singsong voice. “Yes, yes, yes. I did the whole Steamboat thing, and I took over Lantern, and covered my tracks, blah, blah, blah. And yes, I hacked into your computer and changed the video so that it looked like you were getting on the plane. Do you take me for an idiot? No, of course not. You took me for a genius.” She leaned over Alex. “But you treated me like I was too much of a child to trust!” She kicked the grounded woman in the ribs. Still, Alex smiled dumbly. “You took me for a weak, indecisive, helpless fool. For the last time, I might add. Jackie Badger will have plenty of time now to make smart, thoughtful decisions.
“Thanks to Lantern.”
Jackie pulled a different chair to Alex’s computer. She started clacking away. A few minutes later, she had three windows open. One belonged to the Lantern dashboard. A second showed a list of major telecommunications towers.
Then she pulled out her phone and pursed her lips. Someone was looking at her LinkedIn picture. From the IP address, she could tell that whoever was scrutinizing her picture was located in the house belonging to Captain Eleanor Hall.
“Wrinkle,” she said. “I doubt you got there on your own.”
Eleanor Hall had had nothing to connect to Jackie Badger. Most certainly, Jackie thought, this is Lyle’s doing. But Lyle’s phone was still at his apartment. No, he must have left it there and he must be with her now.
Good man, Lyle, she thought. Rising to the occasion. Me too, Jackie thought. Me too. And soon to be together. She turned to a screen that showed a map of major radio towers around the world. She enlarged the map to focus on the western United States. She hovered her cursor over Northern California until it brought up a box with information for Sutro Radio Tower. It stood tall across Twin Peaks over San Francisco. It was a radio tower, true, but many of these were in the control of Lantern partners, so she had access. Just as powerful as cell towers, but with wider distribution. She clicked to open the box and inserted a string of code from a save key.
She sipped coffee. Tedious work. She looked down at Alex, whom she’d now put into a sitting position, fixing her eyes on her phone.
“Time to get you six billion fellow travelers.”
Jackie focused her attention on a small rectangular box within the larger box she’d been interacting with. She clicked onto a new window on the monitor and called up CNN. It was continuing wall-to-wall coverage of the impending Million Gun March. It was a little less than a day away. Gawkers and participants had begun gathering at the Washington Mall. So far, just one person had been seen with a gun and had been arrested by twenty members of the National Guard in a clip being shown again and again. Ominously, a growing number of mobile homes had streamed into the capital. Permitted gun owners in their “homes.” Would they march?
Jackie clicked away and then returned to the small rectangular box on the Lantern dashboard, inserting her cursor on a command line. She typed: 18:00, and then hit enter.
17:59:59 it read. Seventeen hours and fifty-nine minutes.
17:59:58
One day and counting. Lots of work to do. She clicked on the Mount Wilson radio tower in Los Angeles. The easier stuff she’d save until later, using the back door she’d created into the major telecom providers, like Verizon and Comcast, China Telecom, Vodafone, Nippon Telegraph, and on. New modems and routers for everyone or most people around the globe. All with the power to hit the human pause button.
17:59:56
17:59:55
17:59:54