An Uncertain Past 12: Past leads for future deeds

The silence in the room was unnerving as they all stared at me with a mixture of disbelief and anger. Except Hammer, who simply smiled and toyed with the papers in front of him. "Why should we work with you Huntress? Give me a reason, we could kill you and simply vanish within the shadows without a problem."

I snorted and pointed at Bruno and Jazz. "Because some of you have the same goal as myself - vengeance.

"Tell me Hammer, do you remember the sixth of July 2053? You should, that’s the night you and your team had a retrieval mission in Everett."

All of them froze and stared at me. Hammer face contorted in sorrow before he managed to compose himself. Mother dropped her PalmComp with a clatter and Wizard slowly removed his shades, he looked quite shook up by what I said. "How did you know…it’s impossible, I erased that information myself?"

"How do I know, Wizard? That’s easy - digital information is hard to erase. It might be lost during the passage of time but there are far too many pockets of forgotten knowledge in the Matrix. You did a good job of removing any logs within the local server, but you forgot about the cameras."

Hammer choked, cleared his throat and stared at me. "Are you telling us that you have been there, at the actual site?"

"Yes. It was a bitch to get inside but once there it was a piece of cake. The camera was a special security model, and they all had a separate backup storage for each camera. A pain in the ass for the local security to check I’d wager.

"The complex is still there but it was shut down after the damage you caused, but it was never dismantled. According to the later computer logs it wasn’t cost effective to keep it running, nor to dismantle it. And you also proved that it wasn’t secure enough. They simply moved the project to a new location.

"It wasn’t fun to dig through each camera memory to see if I could find something useful but after awhile I found some snapshots, and after hearing some transmissions between you all I managed to piece together where the data was available.

"Unfortunately I picked up the wrong leads and started to figure out things a bit to close to home for my employe’s liking."

"Hold it-," Mother tapped the table with her fingernails in a systematic rhythm. "So, you found out things that you shouldn’t have, good for you, but how does that involve us? Why did they start to target us?"

"They weren’t really interested in any of you in the beginning, it was a fluke, some sick cosmic joke. They probably became interested in you after they had reviewed the data I had. What they wanted was me- in a coffin. The only reason they wanted me to do the job was for me to expose myself. And like a complete fool I fell for it."

Spider raised her hand and looked a bit unfocused for a moment as she consulted the datapad connected to her datajack. "That’s odd, according to your SIN you died two days before we found you. How is that possible? No one can deck that fast and erase their SIN - not to mention fake their death."

"I didn’t. It was part of an emergency program I designed over five years ago, during my running days. All I had to do was call 911 and ask for emergency dispatch twelve and security clearance delta nine five. It was basically a code for ten different dormant programs and bots that executed their duties when they got the password.

"It was designed to make sure that anyone trying to trace me would simply find out that I had died in some convenient way and was about to be buried after a few days."

Mother gave me a lopsided smile. "Clever of you girl, but it seems that you became too clever."

"That I did.

"After I had been at the meet I botched it. They had me followed to my temporary hideout with orders to find out a little more about me, they still weren’t entirely sure that I was the one they were looking for.

"I managed to kill the first one as he burst in through the door but the other one was faster and tagged me with a painful dose of stun rounds. Unfortunately for him I was almost unconscious and the stupid oaf didn’t even remove the gun from my hand. Needless to say, he died.

"After searching their bodies I came upon a small medical kit. It contained a bottle of Laés with complete instructions how it was supposed to be used. This is when I thought that I had come up with an excellent idea.

"I reasoned that if they should find me they would like to know how much I knew about them and if they could afford a bottle of Laés to use against a suspect they should probably have enough resources to buy another bottle and try again.

"I pre-recorded a message on my recorder with careful instructions about what I was supposed to forget and what was supposed to be unlocked when the correct phrase was spoken.

"I didn’t erase my memories as much as I put them behind bars.

"Final instructions were to be that the recorder was to be sent to an anonymous mailbox in Seattle, a team there was supposed to pick up the recorder and find me. With a bit of luck they would take me to a safe location before unlocking my memories. That’s when you showed up and dumped all the plans down the drain."

Hammer scratched his nose for a moment. "Say, we didn’t find any kind of message with instructions on the recorder, only the unlocking phrase, what would have stopped you from replaying the message when you awoke?"

"That’s simple, I had an instruction that forbade me to use the recorder, in fact. I had specific instructions as to what I was allowed to do with it.

"As for the instructions per se, it’s a programmable recorder so I just made sure that it deleted the message with the instructions after it had finished.

"Any more questions?"

Jazz raised her hand slowly. "Yea, just one. What data did you find that they are ready to kill so many for? We sure as hell didn’t find anything close to that."

I closed my eyes, and for a moment I was back in the nightmare that was the Arcology.

"It is quite simple really, they are trying to resurrect Deus."