Silicon override, p.1
Silicon Override, page 1
Shawn Ketcherside
Silicon Override
Copyright © 2021 by Shawn Ketcherside
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
First edition
To my wonderful wife and my amazing daughter who bring my joy every day.
And…
To my friends & family – who supported me, believed in me, and occasionally pushed me when I needed it.
Thank you for everything.
Chapter 1
Chase knew the silence would kill him.
The white noise of the turbines had faded minutes ago, replaced by near silence as the submersible switched to air-independent propulsion (AIP) for its final approach. With the diesel turbines off, nothing remained to buffer the creaks, pops, and errant groans of the ocean as it attempted to crush the fifty-passenger craft.
The silence left his mind free to dredge up the same thought that had plagued him since he had set foot on the vessel—I’ve made a terrible mistake.
A ping sounded from the front of the passenger cabin, grabbing the attention of the weary travelers.
“Afternoon, folks. Looks like we’ve got some news. On the good side, we’re about to start our final approach into ArcSIS. On the less-than-good side of things, control says we’re about to pass through a thermal cline. The temperature differential is set at—”
The entire craft shuddered. Then the shaking grew worse. The internal lights flickered off, and darkness rushed through the passenger cabin. The once disconcerting silence gave way to a turbulent roar and the gasps of every passenger on board.
Chase shut his eyes and buried his fingers into his armrests. I’ve made a terrible mistake.
He did his best to tune out the whimpers that erupted around him as he struggled to focus, to breathe.
Then, to his disbelief, the craft shook harder.
The whimpers amped up to screams as fifty of the most brilliant scientific and technological minds on the planet, confined in a contoured metal tube, bellowed in primal panic.
Chase had no idea how long the shaking continued. In his terror, his sense of time expanded and contracted at once. It could have been a fraction of a second. It felt like weeks.
Then it stopped.
This time Chase welcomed the silence, a respite of profound quiet as the population of the craft took a bare moment to recover.
A tone sounded from the front of the cabin again.
“Sorry about that, folks. The currents are a little unpredictable this time of year. Latest models we’ve got coming in from ArcSIS show we’re through the worst of it, and at our current trajectory, we’re set to make dockside in just under thirty-five minutes. In the meantime, just sit back and take it easy. We’ll get you there nice and dry.”
The messaging system shut off, leaving the cabin in silence once again.
A beat later, the shuffles and murmurs of humanity returned and filled the void.
Chase ignored the bustling and activity, turning his attention out the starboard window. Powerful lights blasted out from the sub, fighting back the darkness outside. Despite their power, at their current depth, they only illuminated a small sphere stretching out four or five feet. Beyond that, only darkness.
As Chase’s pulse returned to normal, his mind spun back up and locked right back onto the doubts he’d carried for more than six months.
A school of black-tipped fusiliers darted into the small envelope of light that surrounded the sub, just outside his window. Their bodies reflected back the pale glow for a moment before the school shifted and fell back into darkness.
Invisible. Gone.
For the thousandth time, Chase debated the personal costs versus the opportunity ArcSIS presented.
The opportunity…
He knew little of what they were doing. He’d gleaned enough from reports, interviews, and his own digging to understand their mission was to push the edge of modern research. That was why he was there. That was the core of it, the push that drove him through the unease, the resentment, and the apprehension. It pushed him through the tests. The interviews. All of it.
In a little more than a half-hour, he’d be setting foot on the most technologically advanced research facility on Earth.
And back into a shadow he’d spent the last eight years trying to outrun.
Chase shifted in his seat and accidentally bumped the woman next to him. He mumbled an apology and turned his attention to the screen mounted in the seat in front of him. A hypnotic screensaver rippled along its pixels. The local time was displayed in the upper right, undulating and shifting along with the screensaver’s animated display.
Looking for anything to take his mind off his worries, Chase reached out and touched the screen. The screensaver rippled away at the contact point, revealing a media menu beneath. He put in his earbuds and scrolled through a small selection of movies and TV shows, eventually settling on a cop drama-comedy he remembered watching while procrastinating on his doctoral thesis. The televised melodrama had proved more fascinating than slogging away on the merits of memory indexing in DNA-based processors.
Far more fascinating.
He made it through the cold open and the credits, when the screen flickered, turned black, then came back to life in a blazing white, with the blue Meridian Biotech logo front and center.
A wave of annoyance swept through him. But as he moved to touch the screen, he noticed the same visual on the displays of the passengers around him.
He grimaced, leaned back into his seat, and swallowed a sigh.
Mandated corporate propaganda. Fantastic.
The blue logo shrank to a blip, and the white faded to black, then returned. This time, the screen featured a congenial-looking elder statesman, for some reason wearing a lab coat, standing awkwardly and grinning at the camera with the most uncomfortably forced smile Chase had ever seen.
With the money Meridian already sunk into ArcSIS, you’d they could fork over some cash for production values.
The man in the lab coat leaned forward and mimed tapping at the camera. A loud overproduced tapping sound followed, not quite aligned with the faux scientist’s movements.
“You. Excuse me. You there?” He stopped tapping. “Ah, great. Glad to have your attention.”
Chase rolled his eyes.
“My name is Jared Rector, Meridian Biotech’s director of human resources. I’ll be your tour guide for the next bit while you learn about the wonders of ArcSIS. Please allow me to be the first to welcome you to your new home and the first to show you all it has to offer.”
Chase pulled his earbuds out and nudged the woman next to him. She glanced his way but didn’t bother to turn away from the screen.
“Can you believe this?”
“Shush. I’m trying to watch.”
Chased managed, just barely, to look away before rolling his eyes. He swallowed a sigh and looked back at the screen in front of him, glancing at the upper right corner, where the clock display still held position, superimposed over the video.
A little less than thirty minutes remaining.
With a stifled groan, he put his earbuds back in.
“…facility is the crown jewel of Meridian Biotech. With more than a thousand of the most brilliant scientists and staff housed together with the most technologically advanced resources available. Life at ArcSIS truly is science without limits. Imagine a world with no more disease. A world with no more pain. That’s our mandate here—to shape the very future of humanity.”
Jared, the lab-coated HR director, strolled to a white desk. He typed a few keystrokes, and a moment later a holographic display of the ArcSIS facility flared into existence.
Chase couldn’t judge its scale. But the display showed a facility far larger than he had imagined. Two vast blue orb-like masses sat on top of each other. The orbs’ beautiful flowing forms connected to an equally contoured shaft that ran down the middle. Large support struts spanned the gap between the colossal orbs, set in place to hold the massive weight and protect against current shifts. The entire structure looked like a piece of art.
Jared spun the hologram model around and lifted it. Three smaller half-orbs, their flat sides flush with the ground, were connected to the bottom orb with elegantly crafted shafts. Each of the half-orbs was connected to one another by a ringed tunnel.
The camera pulled back, and the holographic model scaled-down, giving Chase a chance to marvel at the facility in its entirety. It looked like it belonged in the sea—its shape and lines were crafted like a submarine hull, but smoother, almost organic. Outside the main body, hydrodynamic spires swept down and flared out, forming channels around the structure, presumably to help funnel water currents around the facility.
Jared flicked his wrist, and the hologram shifted again, scaling up as the camera zoomed in on an outcropping in the upper orb.
“You’ll begin your journey here. At the transport dock…”
Chase tuned out, his gaze still locked on the holographic model, until it wandered back up to the clock.
Still a little more than sixteen minutes.
Felt like six eons multiplied by an eternity.
He turned his attention back to the hologram, which was now much smaller as Jared pointed to a display screen that showcased a myriad of details Chase knew he should be looking at, but he simply couldn’t muster the effort. Instead, he studied the form of the facility itself. Bewildered by the scope of its construction, Chase attempted to calculate the cost of a research station located just a hair over a thousand feet underwater. With some quick mental arithmetic, he ended up with something just south of staggering.
Back on screen, the camera tracked Jared as he moved across the white stage, passing the display panel and the holographic projector. The holographic image of ArcSIS fell out of the camera’s view.
Bored now, Chase reached out to turn off the screen, when Jared spoke again.
“Well, now that you’ve seen what ArcSIS can provide, we’d like to extend a personal thank you for what you and your dedication will be providing to ArcSIS.” The smile that lit up Jared’s face would make any politician proud. “And for that, allow me to introduce someone very special here at the facility.” He glanced and gestured off-screen. “Esteemed colleagues-to-be…Doctor Caroline Edwards.”
The camera shifted, and a regal woman strode into view, her statuesque form and fiery eyes belying her age. Not quite fifty-five, by Chase’s calculations.
Dr. Edwards spun to face the camera. She opened her mouth to speak. But Chase heard none of it. He tore out his earbuds and jammed a finger onto the touchscreen, returning it to its screensaver. He suppressed a shiver and fought back the roiling emotions in his gut.
Chase glanced at the clock on the screen, and it all came crashing home. What he’d chosen. What he faced. Everything.
Twelve minutes.
Not enough time. Not enough at all.
Chapter 2
Abbey Reed sat in her workstation chair, careful to keep from spilling her oatmeal. She set down the bowl, then leaned across her desk to adjust her clock. It showed she was twenty minutes early—a significant improvement. Today marked the start of her twelfth day at ArcSIS, and her boss had already a little chat with her regarding her punctuality.
Three times.
She still didn’t understand the problem. She’d only been ninety minutes early on her first day. Or, you know, the first week…
…and a half.
She’d waited the entirety of her life for this. Twenty-six years…all leading up to this opportunity. How could she prove herself if she couldn’t get in and do the work? Her group—the analytics division—certainly had more than enough to do, especially with the deadline looming.
Abbey adjusted her desk clock one last time, positioning it to avoid the glare from the hellfire halogen sitting above her. She grabbed her mouse and gave it a double-click to wake her system.
A few furious keystrokes later, she was ripping through her morning e-mail.
She only made it through six messages before she stopped.
Damn it.
This had to be a joke.
Right?
They couldn’t want her to waste her time on this. They were days from the biggest experiment in the history of the facility. Years of planning. Months of preparation. They stood less than a hundred hours before the culmination of all that effort, and they wanted her off playing tour guide?
Abbey huffed and read the email again, despite knowing it would infuriate her further.
She managed to stop herself halfway through and glance up at the To field, finding a flicker of relief and hope at the empty field. It hadn’t been sent directly to her. The blank To field meant the missive had been fired off to a blind e-mail list. Most likely everyone with less than a month at ArcSIS had received the same thing. They’d have enough people—they wouldn’t need her. She had more important things to do.
Executive call—she wasn’t going. Not when she was staring at a solid four hours of debugging.
Abbey got up to check that with her boss. She hurried down the gulf formed between two cubicle rows, jogging to the end of the line. There, she slid around the opening to her boss’s monster-sized cubicle. The space damn near needed its own zip code.
She hated stopping by there. Every time she went back to her own desk, the tiny dimensions of her cubicle felt oppressive. For a half-hour, she’d feel like she was trying to do her programming in a dollhouse.
As Abbey brushed a stubborn brown lock of hair from her eyes and waited at the opening. Maxine, her boss, ignored her presence, continuing to pound away at her keyboard. Maxine’s hair, jet black and highlighted with a few streaks of vibrant blue, draped down to her jaw, but the style did little to hide the fatigue in her face. Being a single mother dealing with the endless demands of a toddler, and her grueling work schedule had taken their toll. She looked nearly forty-five. But Abbey knew the woman was just a few years north of thirty.
Abbey waited a moment longer, watching Maxine as she studied a single graph that spanned across four monitors, the image distorted and reflecting in the woman’s eyeglasses.
Abbey cleared her throat. “Maxine. You…you got a second?”
Maxine blinked twice and shook her head.
She spun on her stool to face Abbey. “Any way this can this wait?”
“Oh…I mean. It could. It’s just that—I mean, it’ll only take—”
“All right, fine. What is it?”
Abbey swallowed hard. “I know we all have a lot on our plates right now, and I was wondering if there was anything else I can help out with?”
“Nope.”
“Nope, as in, We don’t have a lot on our plate? Or nope, as in, There’s nothing you need me to do right now?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure you know exactly what nope meant.”
Abbey sighed, her face drooped and body deflated. “The orientation thing?”
“The orientation thing.”
Damn it. “Sure. I mean, I was just thinking that I—”
“Oh, honey, I know exactly what you were thinking.” Maxine shrugged. “I realize it’s not what you’re looking to do today, but I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna cause you to spontaneously combust. At least, like, not a lot.”
“Yeah. I mean, no. It’s just that with everything we have to do, I thought you could pull a few strings and get me out of it.”
“I could totally do that.”
Abbey waited.
“I’m not gonna. But I could. Thing is, I actually pulled some strings to get you on that duty.”
What the hell?
Maxine stood and pulled out a guest chair, and gestured for Abbey to sit. Abbey just stood at the opening to the cubicle with her arms crossed.
Maxine shrugged again. “Abbey, you’ve been here almost two weeks. All you do is work.”
“That’s not true. I just ate breakfast.”
“At your desk.”
Abbey sighed.
“I get where you’re coming from.” Maxine gestured around to the entire analytics group. “I get it more than most. You’re a bright girl. You’re going to do fine here, provided you get a support network. This isn’t like a normal job, Abbey. There’s no getting away from it. We work here. We eat here. We live here. All of us. You’re going to have to form some real bonds if you want to survive. You’re bright, Abbey. But this place will break you if you let it.”
“So you want me to spend the day up at the transport dock, wasting hours and hours, while you all toil away down here?”
Maxine grabbed her Diet Coke and finished off the last few sips. “That’s about it, yeah.”
“That sucks.”
“Not for me. Which, really, is the most important thing.”
Abbey groaned. “Fine. I’m going.”
She’d just left Maxine’s office when she stopped and leaned back in. “You know, I hate you a little bit right now.”
“And yet I’m okay with it.”
Abbey fumed as she went back to her desk. The database work she’d planned would have to wait. So would all the debugging. The unfinished work would gnaw at her—she knew it. She could feel it already.
With a sigh, she grabbed her tablet, cast one last wistful look at her monitor, then headed off to the elevator.
