Taylor put her head down on the dinner table and groaned. Her muscles ached. She wasn’t hungry. After she’d agreed to be on the QGP destruction team, Brother Hwan Choi, the head of security, had taken her and Joseph to a military-training virtual reality center. They’d been shown how to use gas masks, laser boxes, laser-box disrupters, laser cutters, boot speed boosters, comlink jammers, image scramblers, restorer boxes, and zip lines.
She and Joseph had gone through three different simulations of the mission to the Scicenter. He’d done fine. He already knew how to use most of the stuff. Despite having a “Joseph Box”—the laser-box disrupter Joseph had invented—Taylor had managed to get shot by Enforcers twice and killed by a gasbot the last time. The problem with the Joseph Box was you could use it only once. Its pulse was so strong that it not only disabled all laser boxes in a half-mile radius but also destroyed itself.
If more armed men arrived, you were toast. Granted, the laser boxes in the VR program didn’t actually cut through you or explode your organs, but they still stung. And today was only Taylor’s first day of training. She would have two more weeks of this.
Sheridan, who sat next to Taylor at the table, looked at Joseph with incredulous horror. “They can’t send you to the Scicenter. You’ll be captured.”
The three had taken their dinner trays out of the cafeteria to eat in the courtyard, where it was less crowded. None of them was eating, though. Taylor had barely touched her salad. “I was guilted into going. Guilted into sacrificing myself for the good of humanity. If I die, make sure Santa Fe erects a really big statue of me.”
Joseph ignored Taylor. “They’re sending a security team with us, and we’ll have help from their contacts in Traventon. We’ll be fine. At least I will. Taylor may die from an overdose of drama.”
Taylor pushed away a strand of her dark-purple hair. Sheridan kept her hair its natural color, red, but Taylor changed hers every time she got bored. “Make sure the city council inscribes something nice on my statue. And make sure they put it in Latin so no one vandalizes it.”
Joseph reached over and took Sheridan’s hand in his. “The longest part of the mission will be getting there and coming back. Two and a half days’ trip each way. Taylor and I will only be in the Scicenter for a little while, maybe an hour.”
He squeezed Sheridan’s hand. She didn’t squeeze his back. She was still staring at him in stunned disbelief. “It’s not just Traventon’s Enforcers who are looking for you. The Dakine are too.”
The Dakine were a mob-like group who had killed Joseph’s twin brother, Echo, nearly two months ago. Joseph was also on their hit list.
“Don’t be mad,” he murmured. “If the council asked you to risk your life to destroy a weapon like this, you’d do it. You’d be the first volunteer.”
Sheridan blinked, looking tearful. “They didn’t ask me, though. They asked the two people I care most about.”
“And another thing,” Taylor said, ignoring the love scene unfolding in front of her. “I want my statue to be facing Council Hall and flipping it off.”
“Taylor—” Sheridan started.
Taylor didn’t let her finish. “What? No one from this century knows what it means. You can tell the council I’m pointing upward to remind everyone of heavenly virtues.”
Joseph let go of Sheridan’s hand and turned to Taylor. “You don’t have to go. If you don’t trust Pascal with all the QGP information, you can tell it to me.”
Taylor groaned and put her head back on the table.
Joseph watched her for a moment, then picked up the roll from his plate. “You don’t trust me either?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” Taylor mumbled.
Joseph didn’t comment about that. He ate his dinner while murmuring assurances to Sheridan. He could have saved his breath. Taylor knew her sister well enough to know three things would happen by the end of the night. First, Sheridan would call President Mason to try and convince him not to send Taylor and Joseph. Second, Sheridan would cry when President Mason wouldn’t relent. And then, third, she would volunteer to go with the team.
While Taylor ate her salad, she messaged President Mason to let him know in no uncertain terms that Sheridan could not go on this mission.
Sheridan finished her dinner first, said she had things to do, and hurried off toward their apartment building. Countdown to comlink call.
Joseph didn’t follow her. Instead he stayed with Taylor. “While we’re in Traventon, there’s something else we should do.”
Something else? He wanted to add items to their to-do list? Taylor tilted her head. “Such as?”
“You know how we’re supposed to sabotage the QGP data?” The council had asked Taylor to create a program that changed the data in any existing QGP files so that anyone building new ones would incorporate false data into their designs.
“Right,” Taylor said, finishing the last bite of her salad. “While I was dead during the virtual reality programs, I wrote an algorithm for that and sent it to the council for approval. Everyone thought it was brilliant. Well, at least the two people who understood it did.”
“We could give the false data program more run time if we disabled the rank program beforehand.”
Taylor let out a slow whistle. The one thing Traventon citizens obsessed about was their rank. It was a number determined by a person’s bank balance, age, job status, family status, and friend ratings—a popularity badge that changed daily, and that people willingly wore on their shirts. It was also one of the city’s best-protected programs.
“If the rank numbers blink out,” Joseph went on, “officials will be so busy dealing with the chaos, there won’t be a programmer around who’s looking at anything else. It will make getting away from the Scicenter easier too.”
Taylor nodded in appreciation. “So simple in its utter diabolicalness.”
“Project Misdirect. We just need to find a way to bring the rank program down.”
Taylor considered the idea. “It won’t be possible from the Scicenter computers. They don’t have any way to connect to the rank computers.” Which was true of most computers in Traventon. During one of the centuries—Taylor couldn’t remember offhand which—countries had attacked other countries through the internet. They had wiped out each other’s computers, leaving the population disconnected and vulnerable to incoming physical attacks. Traventon had kept tight control on its computers ever since. Most people didn’t have access to computers with internet capabilities. Those who did were carefully monitored. It was the reason the team had to physically go to the Scicenter. The only computers that could give them access to the QGPs were a few high-security computers on the fourth floor.
The rank building had to be a veritable fortress.
Taylor took a sip of water while she thought it over. “As much as I hate the ranking system, we can’t risk breaking in somewhere else before we go to the Scicenter.”
“We won’t have to. Both computers systems are linked to a common place.”
“Then why not break in there instead of going to the trouble to break into the Scicenter?”
Joseph put his silverware on his plate, gathering his things together to take them back to the cafeteria. “Because that common place is the Dakine base.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well yes, that is a place we need to avoid.”
When they had been back in Traventon, Joseph used some Dakine contacts to free Taylor and Sheridan from Reilly. In return, Joseph had promised the base leader that Taylor and Sheridan would become operatives.
The Dakine were understandably unhappy when the group fled from the base instead.
“The Dakine,” Joseph went on, standing up from the table, “have paths to most government computer systems. That’s how they do their espionage. The Dakine also have a path to the rank system, because selling rank is their biggest business.”
Taylor picked up her salad bowl and stood up. “You think we can upload something from the Scicenter to the rank computer going through the Dakine base?”
“That won’t be the hard part,” Joseph said, heading slowly toward the cafeteria. “The hard part will be coming up with a virus that can get past the rank filters. We’ll need extra time to work on it.”
Taylor walked beside him, already going through possibilities in her mind. The rank program interfaced with the neurochips in people’s crystals. It kept track of over seven million people, each a potential source for a virus.
“If we tell the council what we’re doing,” Joseph went on, “they should give us an extra week to work on it.”
That meant they only had three weeks to find a weakness in a program Traventon had protected for decades. “You think we can do it that quickly?” Taylor asked.
“One of us should be able to.” Joseph’s voice curled off into a challenge. “Whichever of us is smarter . . .”
“You didn’t just say that.” She cocked her head at him. “How many machines did you invent that changed the world’s view on matter?”
“And that are currently being turned into weapons of mass destruction? None.” He smiled at her. “That’s why I’m smarter.”