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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Valley Forge
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It was her second time in Appalachia in as many months, but Dagney felt more upbeat this time. That may have just been because they’d flown into Washington and rented a car, so she didn’t have that terrible déjà vu as they overflew.
She’d seen the inside of more gas station restrooms since DC than she’d probably seen the rest of her life. This one was cleaner than most, with “suck my cunt” only scratched into one of the stalls, and not permanent-markered across either mirror. She finished washing her hands and pulled a paper towel out of the dispenser, thankful it wasn’t one of those perennially moldering reusable towels. Dr. Piers was idling the engine in the car, trying to keep it warm inside. “Feel better?” he asked as she climbed in, and only then did she realize she’d been rubbing her breast. “Nelson bought me a breast-pump and I tried to bank the little cob some meals before we left. Now I feel like an overmilked cow- sore, but good in a way.” He put the car into reverse and pulled out of their spot. “I’m frankly astonished you’ve already begun creating milk.” “I seem to be dripping pretty regularly from all my orifices.” “Your body’s been through a great trauma. Even with the painkillers I’ve mixed for you, I’m surprised you’re upright.” Dagney picked up her now cold coffee and started sipping at it. “Well it isn’t like I have a whole lot of choice. The Coxes have more than crossed the line, and it’s not likely they’re going to be more gun-shy going forward. And now I have a family to worry about, too. So the sooner we do something the better.” The road inclined further, and only then did Dagney realize they’d been driving uphill for quite a while. Dr. Piers seemed not to notice her dizziness at the feeling, as he continued speaking. “I feel bad Doug started in on the Coxes without me there. I may not know the higher-end things, but I’ve been working with them since before they opened Fort Foxtrot on- or more accurately under- their cousin’s farm.” “I never knew they called it that.” “Well, they did and they didn’t. Never officially, mind you. They usually referred to the various project locations as “Site A” or “Site F,” but it was too much for us not to call our last facility Fort Foxtrot. Wasn’t the first time; we had unofficial nicknames for all of the sites- I started back at Compound Charlie back in the late seventies. Up until about a year ago I was looking forward to eventually transferring to Garrison Gamma once we’d finished up work on the terminators.” “What changed your mind?” “Man’s inhumanity to man, or to vegetable, I suppose. I think it was Weir. Testing protocol said I should have destroyed him, once we realized he was ‘defective.’ But he was the opposite of defective. He was… unique. We stamped all the individuality out of the terminators, at least as best as can be done by researchers more attuned to biogenetics and behavioral psychology than military discipline. But in a sea of boring perfectly spherical droplets of water, he was a snowflake. He was special. He was human, and his humanity brought me back in touch with my own.” “Though he was half corn.” “His cornmanity, then, if you must. I started contemplating the effects of my work, and perhaps just as explanatory, began caring more about what my work was being prepared for. I started reading all those files I’d been granted clearance for. Then I started getting hold of the ones I wasn’t given clearance for. Until one drunken night when I convinced one of the techies to hack the Coxes’ email. He died in a car accident a week later… and I assume it was retaliation.” “But we can travel memory lane at a later date; this road leads to Valley Forge. It was originally sites A through E, but as individual DARPA initiatives were phased out, and Cox Industries came to control more and more of the facilities, the complex became increasingly consolidated, until it was a single unit working on the predecessor to the Terminator project. Because we were forging scientific breakthroughs, and the facility was located in a valley, the name seemed obligatory.” “Years later, when it was closed down, Cox Industries abandoned the site to a dummy corporation that folded, and tried to get the area claimed by the government as a superfund site. When that didn’t work, they convinced the EPA to okay selling it to Masterson as a valley fill candidate. And there’s no reason to clean up industrial waste if you’re going to cover it in the toxic slurry byproduct of mountaintop removal.” “But in their attempt to avoid fines and the cost of cleaning up the waste from three decades of industrial research and development, the site was abandoned in haste. The hope- our goal- is that Valley Forge was evacuated so hastily that they left behind some kind of information that will be useful for confronting the Cox brothers. Your life, mine, Clara’s, Marco’s Nelson’s, Sharpe’s, are all being held hostage, now. The Coxes don’t know how much we know, or the particulars, or where all that information may have spread, and that’s the only thing keeping them from coming down on us. What we need is evidence to remove them as threats- but they’re very powerful businessmen. Just putting them into prison isn’t enough. We have to make sure that all of their assets are seized, and that no one in their former companies is willing to do their bidding.” “But if it’s all under a mountain- or at least what’s left of a mountain’s top- how do you plan on getting to it?” “A nearby Masterson mine blasted a little too far, and opened up a cavern. It was subsequently abandoned as unsafe- not because it was, but because of what the Coxes feared. The emails I saw indicated that the mine had accidentally opened up passageways to parts of the old research facility- including the old data center at site A.” “So we’re going to have to walk a long way, aren’t we?” “Only through a mile or so of tunnel. It should be fun. Like a Hardy Boys adventure.” “Oh boy.” Dr. Piers pulled the car over and opened his door. When she stepped out onto the gravel road, Dagney’s knees buckled beneath her, and she grabbed the car door to steady herself. Dr. Piers looked at her with concern. “I blame you- you destroyed my insides with science.” “Technically,” he started, and she could tell by the sing-songy quality of his tone that she wasn’t going to like where he was going, “I genetically engineered corn to have a penis which you then put inside yourself- without protection- and consequently destroyed your insides. With science.” “I hate you so much I think I have to pee again.” “You’d have to pee less if you drank less coffee.” “You’d think that, wouldn’t you, but instead it’s like my bladder dry-heaves. Which makes me dry-heave. And there are relatively few things in life worse than going to the bathroom for the twelfth time in a morning to pee only to end up horking again.” “Well, I’d suggest you pee or hork here, because once we get into the mine shaft it’s all downhill- which means whatever fluids you loose will be traveling with us for the foreseeable future.” Dagney looked over at a small, leafless bush- the only thing to squat behind- and decided she didn’t have to go that badly. Dr. Piers already had a headlamp attached to his forehead, and handed one to her. “We have an extra set of batteries, but that means when our lights start to dim, it’s time to head back out.” She nodded and her light bobbed, then followed him into the mineshaft. They walked for quite a long time on a steady decline. Dagney was starting to feel the chill, and spoke to warm her spirits. “A few years ago my dad and I were visiting my aunt in Portland, and he took me to see the Ape Caves. This is like that, only… way more boring- that and you aren’t pestering me about contaminating the bats.” “There are bats?” he asked, failing to hide the quaver in his voice. “Not that I’ve seen. But there’s a decent enough chance there’d be bats here. Why? Is that a problem?” “Bats… unnerve me.” “Well, then don’t turn around, because there’s about a dozen hanging about a foot to your left.” “Don’t be childish.” “Okay, but if you get bit, you’ll have to get a rabies shot. That’s like forty separate injections into your belly- which would be roughly as horrible as what your baby corn did to me.” Piers flicked his headlamp back at the mineshaft wall, which was empty. “That wasn’t kind.” “No, but I was hoping to lighten your mood, because smell that air wafting up from underground.” “Is that methane?” “Close… it’s guano. Batpoop. Hope you brought your booties, because I think we’ll be wading through it by the end.” He didn’t say anything, just puckered his face. Sure enough, at the lowest point in the shaft, they found the place where the bats had been nesting. The accumulation of feces was in places half an inch think. It made the rocks and earth slick, and stank. Dr. Piers became very jumpy, his eyes flickering across the cave like light from a candle flame, leaping at shadows his mind created. It was late enough that the bats were probably all out, hunting, but Dagney didn’t tell him that. Not far from there they discovered the collapse that stopped the mining. The cave opened up into the expanse of a large warehouse. “Bravo Base,” Dr. Piers said. “Mostly this was storage, old equipment and specimens that didn’t require refrigeration. Hmm… it’s all ordered roughly on the Library of Congress system, so the exit should be that way, towards the bibliographical references.” He produced an old set of keys on a giant ring, like her dad used when he was a janitor. He jangled them, reading worn numbers stamped into them, then slid one into the door lock and it clicked. The door opened up into a glass hallway. The windows were all cracked, and for the first time Dagney felt the claustrophobia of being underneath all that earth. One of the windows had shattered inward, and a mound of dirt and rock had piled up, but the hall was wide enough for them to walk over it. The hallway opened up into a sort of commons area, with a cafeteria and conference rooms. “They used these areas to mingle staff from different areas. A lot of us were working on different projects with different clearances, for different companies, way back when. But here we could meet without worrying about who had clearance to what. There’s one of these between all five buildings in the circle, and they connect to a spoke. But the miners reported that the central building, the admin, the lobby, wasn’t passable. So we go the long way round.” There was another glass hallway. This one had more broken windows, and the valley fill sludge had risen to within a foot of the ceiling. Dr. Piers began climbing, with some difficulty, up the pile. “I did remember to tell you to bring something you could soil irrevocably.” Dagney heaved a heavy sigh. “You did not. So remind me to soil you irrevocably later.” Even in her diminished state, she still found herself waiting on Piers to move; at one point he even kicked her in the cheek- not hard, just a slip of the foot- because she’d gotten too close as he slid. She didn’t say a word about it. On the far end of the hall the rush of valley fill had collapsed the wall into Site A inwards. Dr. Piers slid down the incline of rocks and soil, causing a cascade of pebbles and dust in his wake. “Wheeee!” he said, as came to a stop on the concrete floor. Piers turned around to help Dagney, and began “Now allow me to help you dow-” only to be mowed over as she came to a stop at exactly the spot he was standing. “Sorry about that,” she said, and helped him to his feet. “Hmm,” he said, and pulled off a thin backpack. In it there was a small laptop, and a far larger portable battery. “The most important records had all been digitized. The warehouse in Bravo existed almost entirely because of a group of researchers who hadn’t gotten used to the idea of trusting computers, but virtually everything is here. Data, communications.” “I’m sure the important information was also being backed-up elsewhere, which is why they didn’t even bother to take all of their servers with them- not that most of these dinosaurs would be worth the cost of moving, anyways.” “If memory serves, there’s a binder with diagrams of the servers at the end of this shelf… brilliant.” He opened it up, and on the first page was a color-coded map. “Now, as I understand it the RAID structure of the data redundancy is more complicated than this map, but it shows the basic areas where, say, the mail servers were, which is what I want. And here is where I need you to go. It’s a special server, only connected to the intranet, not to the outside, only accessible remotely from the Coxes’ on-site offices. Dig out the hard drives and we’ll see what we can find.” Dagney walked over to the corner of the room while Dr. Piers continued. He opened his laptop, and plugged the server into his UPS and several lights went from green to red. “I had a grey hat I knew create a boot sequence that gets around most protection mechanisms, you know, simple ones like passwords and- crap. Encrypted. Lovely. Well, unless you’ve got an IT guy I could blow in your disturbingly oversized purse, I think we’re SOL. Thought there is a spot of good news, in that it’s old cryptography, late 90s, 56-bit DES. So there are only 72 quadrillion possible keys.” “And that’s good?” “It is, as opposed to modern 128-bit AES encryption- yielding more keys than the number of bacterial cells on the planet.” “Kay.” Dagney pulled out her phone and dialed. “Nelson, do you have any useful skills whatsoever with computers?” “Beyond the ability to type ‘google’ into the address bar the right way about eighty percent of the time? You know, when I’m sober.” “Okay, do you know anybody with any kind of hacking, encrypting, using computers to punch overconfident assholes in their digital pricks-skills?” “I think I might know a couple guys in the NSA. I was liaising over there once on what they thought was a terrorist food tampering plot, and during some down time they were watching some bestiality videos and cackling like schoolgirls, and I was eating a donut in the corner reading the paper. Their sup came in early, and she was not amused. I took the wrap for it, and because of my reputation as a no-count schmuck got little more than a rap across the knuckles for it. I’m sure they have access to some of the old Deep Crackers. And they owe me.” “Cool. I’ll call with more details once we’re out of here.” Dagney unscrewed the computer case. There was only a single, IDE hard drive in it. It slid out, and she walked it over to Dr. Piers. He plugged it in to an external enclosure attached to his laptop, and mounted it. There was only a single file on the entire disk, a movie titled, “Do not open til Christmas.” Piers’ eyebrow went up, and he double-clicked on its icon. Bruce Cox popped onto the screen. He was close in, speaking softly to the camera. “Scott, if you’re watching this, then you’ve done something typically foolish. This is me, politely reminding you to step back into line. This is as close to a carrot as you’re getting, which is slightly and crudely ironic, since I’m about to give you the stick.” “If anyone else is watching, and more importantly continues to watch, I just want you drones to know that I’m going to have you killed. Your genitals will be torn from your body and then forced into either mouth or rectum, whichever seems more humiliating at the moment, until you die, either from hemorrhage or suffocation- though preferably both. Now, without further adieu, on with the show.” Bruce stepped away from the camera, revealing the fact that he was nude and oiled. “Scott, I’m ready,” he called out, and his brother, similarly attired, came into the room. Without any fanfare, the brothers began kissing and touching one another. “Urghk, who wants to see two sextuagenarians brothers going at it?” Both Coxes began grunting like apes on mescaline. “I think I’m going to be sick.” “Are you sure you don’t just have to pee?” Piers asked. “If instant pregnancy has taught me anything it’s that I can do bo-oolooarghdt” “You okay?” he asked, without getting any closer. “Don’t think I’m being callous for keeping my distance, but if I don’t I fear I’ll sympathy puke, likely on you. Can you manage to get up?” Dagney spat what she hoped was part of a bagel and very coffee heavy loogie out of her mouth. “It feels like a Denny’s died in mouth.” “Stop it,” he said, gagging; “I’m this close to,” he covered his mouth with his hand and suddenly his cheeks puffed out. He looked for some place to spit it out, then he had an after-gag, and reflexively swallowed. “Urgh, it went up my nose, and some of it’s stuck up there; it burns.” He tried snorting it back out. Suddenly a voice behind Dr. Piers barked out an order: “Hands against the console, d-bags.” A flashlight kicked on, and motioned from the place where he was sitting to a control console built into the wall. Dagney looked at the direction of the light, and saw three terminators, armed with submachine guns. “You too,” the one with the light said, pointing it at her, along with a pistol. She stopped beside Piers, and they both put their hands on the controls. “D-bags?” Dagney mouthed. Dr. Piers was preoccupied by their impending execution, but couldn’t stop himself from explaining, anyway. “The military was insistent that, for purposes of morale, the terminators be versed in swearing- but that it be cleaned up, significantly.” “You pork-effers can have a moment to pray.” Dagney shut her eyes, not certain what to say. Then she heard a gun go off, twice. She didn’t feel pain; she wondered if that meant she was dead, or if they’d just shot Dr. Piers. She was terrified of what she’d see if she opened her eyes. Until two of the terminators fell to the ground. Dagney whirled around, her fists bunching, prepared to strike out at whatever new threat had happened upon them. Standing with the light, a smoking pistol, and a shit-eating grin on his face, was Weir. But it couldn’t be Weir, not her Weir, anyway. They were all corn clones, so he just had to look like the Weir she knew, right? The maybe-Weir walked over to her, looking her up and down. “I really hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but… what happened to you? You look kind of like a deflated whoopee cushion.” “I gave birth to your oddly big-butted son.” “What? I’ve been gone like three weeks. Oh, God, the accelerated growth. Is everything okay? And forgive me if I’m fixating because I only partially mean down stairs, but have you been thoroughly wrecked for all men. Would sex be like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?” She collapsed into his arms, trying desperately not to cry. “Can you not just shut up for ten seconds and hold me?” He put his arms around her. “… has it been ten seconds yet?” |
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