Susan's Plague

Chapter 10 - Dream Catcher

Beneath Meta's central megalith, home to the oligarchs, bastion of their technological might, a river flowed cold and fast. Massive culverts expelled the arcology's treated effluent into the river, while upstream a network of pipes and pumps drew water into the Centreon's vast internal reservoirs to be processed and purified.

Part of this network had a special purpose. It was a closed-loop cooling system for the Cortex, presently being taxed due to Wagner's herculean efforts to bring his plan to fruition.

Wagner fussed over a last bit of code he planned on injecting into Nic's Netpod. He had made some minor changes to Nic's code while surreptiously adding a separate piece of his own. The code needed to be small, simple, elegant and effective. It was very difficult to design in all the features Wagner wanted his code to have considering the size and time constraints. The Netpod technology also had it's limitations, there was only so much he could do.

He endeavoured to craft the code in such a fashion that it would be able to leverage other systems in order to complete it's goals, but what he put most of his faith in was the author of the original code. Unbeknownst to Nic, his long time desire to break into the secure inner network of the Meta systems was only hours away.

Wagner's thoughts drifted, vivid memories of a home in a neighbourhood devoid of neighbours, empty houses, some boarded up, some burned out, lining the deserted street. It was so long ago, but frozen in memory, it felt like yesterday.

At one time it was a beautiful, bustling area full of life and happiness. Summer barbecues, manicured lawns and the noise of children playing outside. That had been life in the neighbourhood. His child, Erik, was invariably one of the kids running through the streets and yards, day in, day out. But that was before Erik grew sick. The home inside was cluttered with books, binders, research papers and other evidence of Wagner's current obsession. The cure.

Clocks on the walls sat dormant, unwound, their hands frozen at some arbitrary point in time, they had been collecting dust for months, their purpose seemingly irrelevant in these difficult days. The sickness in the house seemingly mirrored by the malaise of the world outside.

The main floor master bedroom was closed off from the rest of the house, the rarely-entered room now used for storage and little else. Two sofas in the great room provided sleeping quarters, one sofa currently occupied with his sleeping child. A shotgun leaned against the wall by the front door, a revolver on the coffee table, testaments to the changing times. Wagner had no use for such implements his entire life, now he kept them close. Always.

Visible from the front window, dark smoke rose high to the west...

Wagner was jarred from his thoughts as the door locks cycled and the positive pressure fans spooled up to counteract the pending decompression. He quickly verified all his work was in order and initiated his own secure wipe of several files he had open. The doors completed opening and Niles walked in scowling, apparently he had not recovered from his earlier disappointment.

"Wagner, I trust you have good news for me."  He said.

"On both accounts I feel that I can offer you some positive news. I have done all I can do with the Netpod, the wipe routine that was run on it was very effective, I recovered a second small fragment and managed to decrypt both of them, but the resulting data is nonsense, I do not see how it could be of any use."

"What kind of data?" Niles inquired.

"I could not say, my guess is that it is corrupted or something proprietary. I have never seen anything like it, I cannot debug it or reverse engineer it without knowing more about the architecture it runs on, which I suspect could be a virtual machine of some kind. I just don't have those kinds of resources, especially with the current lockdown in place."