Bad Good Bad: Special Edition Read online

  She pauses. She turns around, and for the first time since I slided the door open, I she a different face on Kim. Not the determined, I’m about to make a kill look anymore. Vulnerability. Fear. Confusion. But quickly she locks back in and recomposes.

  Kim: “The extra mile. The beetle chip. The update that adds some features...” But now she is losing it again, she needs to pause, recompose, she takes a deep breath.

  “We believe Neocuris is compromised. We suspect Tom’s new team. Maybe he flipped. Eric says we cannot tell Neocuris yet because they would shut us down, our team too. We would all go to jail, and we would not be able to stop Tom or whoever is behind the attack, or prove that we have nothing to do with it. We still have a shot at this, but time is running out. Both teams were just waiting for you to become active, not too many patients with your security credentials in the vault yet.”

  Kevin: “Become active, do you mean when I activated the app?”

  Kim: “Exactly. I got the chip implanted in a clinic, I had to make up a story around some epilepsy crisis in a local hospital, to get the script and then go to a Neocuris clinic to get the chip. Eric took care of the money part. My role was going to be the honeypot patient in the vault, to lure potential hackers. Eric is concerned things are getting a little bit out of control in the vault. How’s that? The honeypot girl.” Now she has to pause again. “They told me it was safe.”

  Kim: “There was a scene at the Portland office. Tom’s moving out. Eric is not happy about Tom’s plans to cash in on the dot com. Some of the guys move out too. Eric tells us that we don’t absolutely have to follow Tom to New York, that he is staying, that we are good here for a year.”

  “Then the dreams started for me shortly after. I believe Tom’s bunch worked out a hack, some filters were removed in the vault, maybe by mistake. I started to shut down my phone at night, or at least when I am not awake. There are side effects to this New York update, or whatever is happening around the vault now. Not sure anybody saw that coming. Unplanned features.” She pauses again.

  “Kevin, I can hear you think!”

  Now I am in complete shock. The voices. They were real. Kim I can hear you think too! Portland? Carolyn looks completely in shock, confused. Horrified. She got her husband back from the deads, but together with a Siamese twin called Kim.

  Carolyn: “Turn it off. Turn that shit off. You can, just delete the app on your smartphones.”

  Kim: “We could. But Eric needs both Kim and Kevin on his team.” She pauses again, her face showing fatigue but resigned. “Eric is convinced that we can derail the bad guys. Kevin, we are all exposed with this thing in our heads.”

  Chapter 4

  Switching gears, I asked Kim “How did you get here? Do you have a place to go? Eric gave you money, right?”

  Kim: “Well, Eric is out for now, but he wants to make a comeback sometime. He calls it white noise, they are jamming him. They are trying to keep him away. He has the beetle chip too, but even if he kills the wifi on his iPhone, they can get to him. Not sure who’s on which side at the Portland campus anymore. The campus is probably compromised too, Eric’s house is compromised. He locked himself into what he calls his fancy Faraday cage so the signal cannot get in and out of his chip anymore. He doesn’t know I am here, but he would agree, he surely hopes for me to have been able to get to you first. I was able to visualize your credit card info. I tried to book my airfare with your credit card, got a reservation number, but then the check-in web page informed me that the reservation was cancelled, transaction bounced back.”

  “I showed up at the airport anyway, I had to make a scene, grandma’s dying or something. Got a couple of boarding passes, landed in Canada late last night. And no I have no place to go, I had nothing to eat since yesterday at noon when I left Portland. Slept at the airport on a plastic seat. I guess I can sleep anywhere. I don’t think I am hungry.”

  I check the time, both hands are vertical. It is half past noon. I go to the fridge, see what I can fix for lunch. “Hey, let me take care of lunch first.”

  Carolyn: “We can have you sleep in my home office tonight. I have a bed couch in there, you can crash here until we figure out what’s next. You can use the shower upstairs. I don’t see a luggage. Maybe you can borrow some clothes from me or we could go to the mall and get you your size.”

  Wow! A 180 degree turn from Carolyn. She is still trying to process the whole thing, but now she seems to understand that Kim is a victim as much as I am. As much as we all are. We are in this boat together, and Kim decided to stay into this nightmare to help me and the other patients, to help Eric. She could give up anytime and unplug and be safe. But no, she cares. She is a brave girl.

  Kim: “Thanks Carolyn for your understanding. But we don’t have much time. I accept the offer for food, shower, and a clean change, but we have to get back to Portland asap me and Kevin. Eric believes something is about to happen.”

  Carolyn: “What do you mean you two have to get back to Portland? I just got my husband back, now you show up at my door and you want to take him away from me?”

  Kevin: “What’s gonna happen? Don’t we have time to think this through?”

  Kim: “Eric says they are probably waiting for a milestone. Something like 1 million patients in the vault with the brain variant of the beetle chip. It’s all about numbers. Even if all the Neocuris clinics in the US start to remove or inactivate the beetle chips and replace it with something else for those who risk their lives without treatment, that is going to take months. Eric believes they have a plan, with phases and milestones, that it has probably been implemented and activated already. And they can skip the app and consent, it’s just a lawyer thing apparently, they have the master key.”

  Carolyn: “Well, can’t we just unplug everybody from that evil vault?”

  Kim: “Eric is the living proof that they are still capable of bypassing the iPhone app altogether. This was supposed to be only for clinical trials, and for patients who cannot give their informed consent, or without family to proxy consent. Neocuris Legal is still working on this, with the Ethics committee and the Steering Committee. They are still scrambling around that Achille’s heel, trying to draw circles in the sand around the exceptions, a balancing act between protecting confidentiality and saving lives. Eric wants to come back and help Neocuris. He never really stopped being involved with the vault and the team he assembled at Neocuris. Eric needs our help now. He says the bad guys know about this vulnerability too well.”

  Kevin: “ When do we need to go?”

  Kim: “Today. Yesterday.”

  Kevin: “Can we wait until my kids get back from school? I want to hug them one last time before going away again. For how long we need to be in Portland?”

  Kim: “Let’s take a look at flight options. I have never been in Canada before. And sorry, I don’t know when you’ll be back.”

  Chapter 5

  How do we explain to our kids that this strange girl needs to fly away with daddy, without letting them know when daddy will be back? Well, we tried to simplify the story and we skipped the telepathy part, for now at least. Daddy has to work together with Kim to save the world, someplace away. Yeah, right. Tears, but this time not of joy. We just got daddy back, now he’s out again, to deal with the bad guys that apparently have a head start into some twisted game, ready to do bad things. Daddy, a X-MEN or some superhero? Come on! But what if Kim is right?

  I pack up quickly. Kim has nothing to pack up except a few pieces of clothes. She travels light. In a taxi off to the airport. Carolyn knows she has to stay with the kids, she kisses me while putting her hand before Kim’s eyes who is standing by, almost funny. The 3 adults in the room cannot keep up with the situation, nevermind the kids who just met with some sort of cool jack-in-the-box big sister that is dragging daddy away to the some place they never visited. Disbelief overload. They are obviously being lied to, they glance at each other in dismay.

  Chapter 6

  Kim
warns me: “Most people in this office you can trust. Some you probably cannot, I don’t know who or how many, but it is more than zero for sure. Play it by ear, can’t help you, I can barely help myself. But we need them.”

  Kevin: “What’s the plan?”

  Kim: “To come up with a plan.”

  After a pause, Kim adds: “I brought you here so you can familiarize yourself with the architecture of the patients vault, and the controls around it. Meet you back here at, let’s say…”

  Kevin: “4? Sorry, didn’t mean to cut you off. Did I kind of anticipate your answer somehow?”

  Kim, losing it again, offended: “What else can you copy from my brain now?”

  I don’t want to answer Kim just now. I do copy something else. It’s more like context, not content. I have not always been good at reading people’s emotions, but now it feels like I can anticipate her moods. My girls are always complaining: “Daddy, you don’t understand”. We have a connection. It is not something I have experienced before. We both take a deep breath. We try to bury those mixed up emotions that we don’t recognize, the confusion. We need to focus on the plan.

  I absorb as much as I can from those engineers, they are all very friendly and open, but I can sense the negative energy in that office space. It feels like every one of them has the little angel above the right shoulder, the little devil above the left shoulder, and is still unsure whether they should have followed Tom instead of sticking with that ghost called Eric and whatever attach they have to Cascadia.

  But I am also starting to realize, after a few days on the campus, that all these engineers and hackers have no idea about what is really going on. Kim knows more than any of them. Tom is a serial entrepreneur. Eric assembled the team that created the interface and many of the projects around it. They both created New Forensics after Eric was asked to step down from the role of CTO at Neocuris, after they went public. Now Tom is ready to cash in on his dot com, What goes up must come down, an expression I hear often in any discussion I attend about Tom on the campus. Another one is a dollar is a dollar. Tom is ready to move on to his next dot com they say.

  Eric never trusted those suits to start with. They started as one of the investors, but now they want to take over New Forensics. They convinced Tom to open a new campus in New York as part of the process, and Tom brought with him a few engineers and hackers, all of them thinking they would turn their shares into a fortune as soon as the take-over takes place. Good luck with that, guys.

  Clearly, those who followed Tom, those who stayed with Eric, did not make a decision between right and wrong. And at the same time, everybody assumes that secrecy and information filtering is the name of the game, for different reasons including the risk of disclosing information to the bad guys or allowing a spy within to disclose some key information to a competitor who is trying to beat Tom and Eric at securing money from the investors. I can sense Kim repeating to herself something like “Don’t empty your bag with the engineers. Keep them out of the drama.”

  I am slowly getting better at this psychic thing, even if I am not forcing it. It feels like somebody pushed open a window in my house, I cannot stop the cold air from making it way inside, and I cannot find which window it is. She got her implant 1 month before me roughly. Shit, she is probably reading my brain like an open book by now. No wonder she would not even feel like talking when she stood on my porch in Montreal. She is probably not telling me everything about what’s happening in her head right now.

  Chapter 7

  Kim: “Hey Kevin, let’s go eat tonight, I want to introduce you to a friend.”

  We tried to keep some distance between the two of us, me going back to the hotel near the airport at 5 pm, Kim going back to her apartment somewhere in town, not far from the campus, her long board in hand down the elevator. “I need to call home first to talk to the kids before they go to bed, text me the restaurant address, I’ll meet you there”.

  I start walking with my headset on, the rain finally stopped. I am calling home: “Hi Carolyn, how was your day, I miss you.”

  Carolyn: “I miss you too, honey. Well I finally talked to that customer, it looks like it is going to work. Photo session tomorrow afternoon in her home, then back to the drawing board. Sophie missed school today, she has a migraine, I think it’s the stress. Hopefully she will feel better tomorrow.” Then I talk to the kids in turn, back to Carolyn: “how is the weather today in Portland, better?”

  I am now standing in front of that small café, Social. The neon sign is all green, and a No wifi logo, the red circle type with a diagonal that crosses the wifi word. I have a feeling that this place is going to be different.

  Kevin: “Well the rain finally stopped after 3 days, but not sure if that is going to hold for long.”

  I spot a silhouette on some sort of skateboard, coming down the street. That’s Kim, but just as she is about to cross the intersection, a delivery truck tries to make a right turn on the red, jumps on the breaks, barely just in time to avoid the worst. Kim, down on her knees, has her hands on the truck’s front bumper, mouth open, her heart racing.

  Carolyn: “Honey, still there, are you ok? Kevin?”

  Kevin: “Sorry Carolyn, it’s Kim, she almost got ran over by a truck.”

  Carolyn: “Kevin, is everything alright?”

  Kevin: “I’m ok. I mean she’s ok.” No I am not. For a split second, I was Kim, I felt fear as if it was me looking at death in the eyes.

  Carolyn: “Kevin, are you okay? Is Kim hurt?”

  Kevin: “Sorry Carolyn, I just got a big scare here.” My heart is racing. I can feel cold sweat on my neck. “I need to call you back. I will go check Kim to make sure she is alright”.

  The truck driver is all apologetic, he offers to drive Kim to the hospital, but she turns down the offer. She grabs her board from under the truck, she moves to the sidewalk on four, she turns around and sits. She starts to cry.

  I go sit next to her: “Are you okay?” I put her hands into my hands, but after a minute we both start to feel that energy, as if some sort of feel good, thank you for being here for me now when I need it the most, feedback loop, is going to lift us up from the sidewalk. We both let go our hands as if we got an electric shock, static. I try to ease the atmosphere, cheer her up.

  Kevin: “I am always amazed to watch kids like you ride those long boards. It is as if you cheat some gravity or thermodynamic law. You are getting more energy in return vs what you put into it. You are extracting energy from the gravitational field, right?” I guess I watched too many Star Trek reruns as a little boy, the McKoy’s humor, Spock clueless.

  Kim: “The brain is very malleable stuff. Plug something into it, or extend your body with a long board, soon it will start to be operated as if it was just another leg or arm. No need to understand Quantum mechanics for that. You just let it slowly sip in, make roots.”

  We kind of forgot the truck driver is still standing here, looking down at us, in between the sidewalk and his angled truck. Now he decides to eject himself in a subtle way from the conversation, having no part in it anyway. A few cars honking behind the blocking truck and the rain starting again together signal to everyone that now is the time to evacuate the scene.

  Chapter 8

  “Coat check to your right, gizmo check to your left. Grab the number on the plastic bag, and the one on the coat rack.” says the woman who is welcoming us inside. “Hi Kim, long time no see. How you’ve been?” she adds, opening her arms towards Kim, who accepts the invitation for a hug.

  Kim: “Good to see you Sarah. Well, it’s been a little bit of a roller coaster lately, but I am hanging on”.

  Kim puts her board between the wall and the umbrella rack. Sarah escorts us to our table. Ok, I think I get this place. It’s like social media, minus the media part. Funny.

  Sarah: “First time here, right? You work with Kim? First item on the menu is Conversation, and it’s on the house.”

  Sarah is dressed kind of loosely,
not a bad looking woman, about my age, not wearing any make up, seems to be easy going and charming.

  Sarah: “I’ll go get Eric.” She flips the blackboard menu on wheels towards our table. We can see the chef with a Rasta like hat fixing some plates in the open concept kitchen.

  After a 5-minute silence that seemed to last an eternity, the two of us feeling like an odd couple with no conversation and no iPhone to hide behind either, Kim breaks it: “It feels like watching some infomercials when you can’t sleep at night, when there is nothing else on. Especially in your dreams. Nothing clicks in or registers, yeah this guy is chopping some veggies with some gadget, you click the next channel, some other guy with a space age frying pan in a huge kitchen, just noise and meaningless information. But then a presence in the dummy chef’s kitchen, cannot put a face on it. You sense a question, a statement, some content, but it is more a contextual frame. You want to rewind, tune in, sometimes it comes back a few times, sometimes it does not. It feels like you just found yourself in a dating app. Like the ones you use to scan pictures. And profiles, most of them worthless piles of lies. But sometimes you stop for a second for one candidate, then either you move on, or you decide to click in.”

  Kevin: “I don’t know how you kids can put up with those dating apps. Not my world. Maybe if I turn single again, when Carolyn changes the locks on the doors, I’ll have to dive in. So it’s like a faceless Facebook, a Brainbook of sorts?”

  Kim: “Don’t bring that up in front of Tom. I can already hear him say ‘Roll over, Zuckerberg!’ ”. We both crack at the picture. But she’s back to the story now, in a lower voice, all of a sudden we realize that we are not the only customers in this place.