Sycamore 2 Read online

  SYCAMORE 2

  by

  Craig A. Falconer

  Sycamore 2

  © 2015 Craig A. Falconer

  This edition published February 2015

  All rights reserved by the author.

  The characters and events herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Reader's note: Sycamore 2 was written, edited and produced in Scotland. As such, some spellings will differ from those found in the United States. Examples of British English include using colour rather than color, organise rather than organize, and centre rather then center.

  At the author's request, this book has been made available free of all DRM.

  For Anya,

  again.

  I

  1

  Kurt hurriedly packed his things, struggling to focus as it dawned on him that having a microchip cut from his palm with a kitchen knife had been the easy part.

  The ice had numbed Kurt’s hand and the pills had numbed everything else, but a dull kind of regret still engulfed him as the magnitude of his actions began to sink in. Rather than argue with this cloud of negativity, he tried to ignore it altogether.

  One thing at a time, he told himself. Don’t rush. We have to pack before we can leave…

  A cocktail of guilt, anger and hope had driven Kurt to remove his Seed a few minutes earlier, but a straight shot of urgency was just now hitting his bloodstream. He knew that removing a Seed deprived it of all biofeedback and that Amos would thus assume Kurt had made use of the cyanide pills he had so kindly gifted him. Knowing too that Amos hated to waste time, Kurt feared that someone might already be on the way to collect the body. Every second was crucial.

  He tried again to shake off the negative thoughts.

  We have to pack before we can leave.

  It was imperative for Kurt and Minter to bring everything they might need since there was no way of knowing how long it would take to help Ernesto’s resistance movement defeat Sycamore or even what kind of supplies the group would have. Kurt was equally unclear as to exactly where the group was based, but Minter seemed sure enough. Kurt managed to contain his curiosity for now.

  One thing at a time.

  The last item of clothing to go in was the old pair of jean shorts that Kurt had worn on stage at the end of Talent Search as he smiled and shook Amos’s hand, unwittingly condemning everyone he loved to the nightmarish realities of compulsory microchipping, CrimePrev and the Movement Tax.

  “Why are you bringing those stupid shorts?” Minter asked from the other side of the sofa. He sat patiently as Kurt packed.

  “Randy gave them to me,” Kurt said, and that was reason enough.

  Kurt had lost his T-shirt and espadrilles from that night, most likely during his hasty upgrade from his run-down student apartment to a sprawling Longhampton mansion, and he was surprised to find that he missed them. That laughably makeshift outfit had been symptomatic of just how little Kurt had before joining Sycamore and he would have taken comfort in bringing it with him for whatever challenges lay ahead.

  Six chaotic weeks had passed since the Talent Search but recent events had destroyed Kurt’s sense of time so much that it might as well have been yesterday. Meanwhile, the few days since Stacy’s death and everything that came with it had been an agonising crawl through time’s murkiest corridors.

  The guilt Kurt felt for Stacy and Professor Walker’s deaths was the kind that could never be shaken — he knew this — but Amos had somehow found a way to twist the knife even deeper. Sycamore’s show of strength at the vomit-inducing sham of a memorial service gave Kurt reason to fear for the world’s future, but the way that Amos pounced on Stacy’s death as an excuse to consolidate his own power crushed Kurt’s will to live. A world where one man controlled the agenda to the extent that he could kill an innocent woman and use her death to forward his own interests was quite simply a world that Kurt Jacobs could no longer face.

  This hopelessness had come to a head when Kurt caught sight of the cyanide pills Amos had left to tempt him, and he had stood at the very precipice of surrender before Minter arrived as the unlikeliest of saviours.

  At his lowest ebb, Kurt had accepted that he could do nothing to undo his mistakes or save his family from Sycamore’s sick vision for humanity’s future. But now that there was a sliver of hope, Kurt cursed himself for ever even contemplating leaving them to fend for themselves.

  What kind of future would he have been leaving them to fall into? What kind of world would Sabrina have been left to grow up in? RealU, sponsored clothing, the ads. The ever evolving forms of ads she would be subjected to; each deluge more invasive, pervasive and perverted than the last. And these were only the things Kurt knew about. What new methods of repression would Amos dream up for the Seed that Kurt had given him? It was hard enough for Julian to take care of Sabrina while their father Randy was injured, let alone with the added pressures that hyper-connectivity inflicted on each of them. Truly, a life under Sycamore would be no life at all.

  Amos had given his word, for all it was worth, that Kurt’s family would not be harmed as long as Kurt stayed away from them and everyone else. Kurt had been feebly willing to go along with this bargain until Minter arrived with promises of a new and better option.

  Years of experience made Terrance ‘Minter’ Minion a difficult man for Kurt to trust, but it was no exaggeration to say that he owed his life to Minter’s timely arrival. Really, he had no option but to believe him.

  After all, it was Minter who knew where the resistance was based; it was Minter who had known that Stacy’s brother was their leader; it was Minter who had tuned the radio to Ernesto Palamino’s call to arms; it was Minter who claimed to have a way into Sycamore’s systems.

  If Kurt’s victory in the Talent Search had set a runaway train in motion, it was fair to say that Minter had built the track. He knew more about Sycamore’s security systems and inner workings than anyone else in the world. Together with Kurt, he could blow the whole thing up.

  Minter had been disowned by Amos for voicing dissent at Stacy’s murder, and he had since been publicly blamed for that incident as well as Kurt’s supposed kidnapping. Minter was the only person in a situation remotely comparable to Kurt’s. All things considered, Kurt was glad to have him.

  Kurt had already asked if Minter had any clothes with him, or indeed anything at all, but the answer had been no. Though Minter had around five inches on Kurt, no short man himself, poor posture often effectively cost him most of them. Still, he was “80% limbs and 20% genius,” as Professor Walker once aptly put it, so Kurt’s clothes were of little use to him.

  Kurt had never seen Minter dressed in anything other than a suit, even in the most informal of classroom settings. No one ever knew whether Minter was being ironic, being himself, or deliberately opting out of the jeans-and-beard uniform that so many of his classmates embraced so readily.

  Kurt still didn’t know and still didn’t care. What he knew was that Minter would be wearing his current suit for the foreseeable future. But none of this mattered right now, so Kurt forced it out of his thinking and zipped up his backpack with the stupid shorts safely inside. “That’s all of my clothes,” he said.

  “Food next,” Minter ordered. “We don’t want to be outside of the car any more than we have to be, and we’d struggle to buy anything without a Seed anyway. We need to bring everything we’ll need.”

  Kurt looked back at Minter blankly. “I don’t have any food. I’ve gotten pretty used to ordering everything in.”

  “Then I guess we go without food,” Minter said. “What do you have for storing water? We can’t go without that.”

  Kurt opened doors and drawers he had never
opened before, hoping that some kind of watertight container might be lying undisturbed. He found none. Minter looked in Kurt’s refrigerator, finding it utterly empty but for a full shelf of Lexington Blue. Minter held a bottle in the air. “What about this? At least it’s liquid.”

  “More like rocket fuel,” Kurt said. “But I guess you could empty them and put water in. Just fill as many as you can carry.”

  Minter figured that six bottles would be the safe limit of the spare backpack that Kurt had given him. Six should also be enough for the drive, he thought, and one thing the resistance would surely have was a supply of fresh water.

  Minter proceeded to pour the blue liquid down the drain. It smelled sweet as it went, like bubblegum mixed with raspberry. “What’s this stuff actually like?” he asked.

  “Works like vodka, tastes like soda,” Kurt replied. “Seriously. There’s so much sweetener in there that the water you put in the bottles will still taste blue.”

  Minter took a sip and laughed. It did.

  Kurt surprised himself by laughing along. Solving the water problem felt like a victory; a small and fleeting respite from the gravity of their situation. If they could just keep focusing on one thing at a time…

  Clothes? Check.

  Food? Pass.

  Water? Check.

  Kurt consciously turned his attention to the next immediate step. He had always been good at distilling complex problems into individual action steps, but there had never been a problem like this one. There was no precedent for this situation and no easy way to frame it. Rather than one calm voice working through its options, Kurt’s mind felt like it was hosting a committee meeting with too many voices asking too many questions at once.

  “Where are you even going?”

  “How will you even get there?”

  “What will you even do when you arrive?”

  “What even makes you think it can possibly work?”

  A real voice rose above the others. “Don’t just stand there like an idiot,” Minter said. “Get your computer, your hard drives, your camera, whatever you have. And take that stupid look off your face.”

  Ordinarily Kurt would have been affronted by such talk, especially from Minter, but it was exactly what he needed to hear. He headed to his bedroom to get his computer.

  “At least I can take the stupid look off my face,” he smiled to Minter as he passed. “Yours is stuck.”

  “Funny as never,” Minter replied.

  Kurt would have remembered his computer before leaving, but Minter’s advice to bring “whatever he had” served to sharpen his mind and made him rifle through his box of old devices and parts. Most were useless, purchased years ago as spares and repairs for projects he never got around to, but in amongst the rubble he found a nugget of gold in the form of a two-year-old Systelonik XK6: the best smartphone Kurt had ever owned.

  No more powerful than most phones out of the box, the XK6 was in a class of its own thanks to the thriving homebrew community which sprung up after Systelonik publicly endorsed the work of a Russian developer whose hack allowed users to do things that the manufacturer had never even thought of. Rather than a more common term like jailbreaking or rooting, a quirk of the developer’s English had led to the process of hacking an XK6 becoming universally known simply as opening-up the device. Kurt’s XK6 was opened-up, and he was glad to have found it.

  This Russian developer, known only as Trikk_Stikk, had previously shared knowledge with Kurt on a popular forum he moderated. Of the handful of hackers who could be named by the average tech enthusiast, Kurt believed Trikk_Stikk to be the only one who hadn’t been successfully recruited by a major corporation. If Kurt could somehow make covert contact with Trikk_Stikk, he was confident he would find a willing ally in the fight against Sycamore.

  The XK6 had been Kurt’s phone of choice right up until the Seed rendered it and every other handheld device obsolete, so it still held just enough residual charge for the screen to light up and tell him that it needed to be charged. He grabbed its charging cable from the box and tucked it into the side of his laptop’s carry case.

  “Look what I found,” he said, holding the phone proudly in his hand.

  “An XK6? Why are you bringing that old thing?”

  “This old thing might just save our lives,” Kurt said.

  Minter didn’t follow. “How? Is it going to magically bring back the cellular network? Is it going to access the Icarus signal that only Seeds and Lenses can use? Bring it if you want, I guess, as long as you have your computer. What’s in that briefcase, anyway?”

  Kurt’s laptop was strapped across his shoulders in its case and in his hand he held a miniature silver briefcase which looked more likely to contain poker chips than anything useful. “Just something else. By the way, do you have your Lenses?”

  “Obviously,” Minter said. “We can’t leave them here.” Above all else, Minter felt overwhelming relief that he and Kurt had both removed their UltraLenses seconds before Kurt raised the idea of removing their Seeds.

  Kurt wasn’t sure why Minter didn’t want to leave his Lenses but he was glad of it, anyway; it saved him from having to convince Minter that they were worth bringing. The XK6 and the other thing would have their part to play either way, but Kurt knew it would be more fun to surprise him.

  ~

  “So is that everything?” Kurt asked. “No… wait. I still need to get you something with a hood, right?”

  “Ideally.”

  “Okay. You take these and I’ll find something.” Kurt handed Minter the mysterious briefcase then placed the retro-look carry case, which had been home to every laptop Kurt had ever owned, safely around his neck.

  Minter had already warned Kurt about how difficult it might prove to navigate the streets undetected, explaining that everyone else would see them with a red X floating above each of their heads. More positively, recent changes meant that they would not be visible to consumers using BeThere or Tranquility.

  A red X was noticeable, but not quite rare enough to arouse immediate suspicion. Seeding levels in the city were higher than anywhere at 99.3%, but that still left thousands of unseeded citizens. Fortunately for Kurt and Minter, Sycamore had succeeded in characterising the unseeded as the kind of jobless or homeless misfits that everyone else had a lifetime’s experience of ignoring by default.

  They would be safe as long as they covered their faces and kept themselves to themselves, Minter had said. With this in mind, Kurt, who was already wearing a hooded sweatshirt which would conceal most of his face, walked into his wardrobe and picked Minter a large hooded jacket to wear over his suit.

  He handed it to Minter. “Will we be covered enough?”

  “We should be fine like this,” Minter said. “As long as we don’t look at anyone. Because if you make eye contact with anyone, even for a second…”

  Minter didn’t have to finish the sentence. Kurt knew that it wouldn’t even matter whether the person recognised him; their Lenses would alert Sycamore to his location instantly and the whole thing would be over.

  “I know,” Kurt said, now absentmindedly filling the side pocket of his backpack with all of the charging cables he might need. As he held the pocket down with his right hand, Kurt attempted to grasp the zipper with his left. A sharp pain suddenly hit Kurt’s palm, accompanied by a sharper still inhalation of breath.

  “Throw me those pills,” he called to Minter, wincing.

  Minter picked up the tub and removed the lid.

  “What are you doing? Just throw it. I only need two.”

  “I’m counting them,” Minter said. After a few seconds he brought the tub to Kurt. “Just to make sure neither of us take too many. There are ten. Well, nine now.” He placed one pill on the counter.

  Kurt picked it up and swallowed it. “Now the other one.”

  Minter closed the tub and put it in his pocket.

  “I feel like you’re not hearing me,” Kurt said.

  “One is as go
od as two. Give it a minute to kick in.”

  Kurt stared into Minter’s eyes.

  “Do you know how quickly this kind of cut heals?” Minter asked. “Because I don’t. All I know is that we’re going to be driving for two or three days, so we can’t afford to use them all tonight.”

  “Two or three days?” Kurt asked.

  Minter nodded. There was silence.

  “You don’t even know many days it will take to get there? Do you really think traffic could cost us a whole day?”

  This time Minter didn’t nod.

  “Minter, tell me you know where they are,” Kurt said. He exhaled heavily. “Tell me right now that you know where we’re going.”

  “I know where we’re going,” Minter replied without hesitation.

  Kurt sighed and brought his hand to his forehead in relief.

  “But it’s not where they are.”

  Kurt’s hand froze in place. His eyes froze on Minter. “What did you say?”

  “I have an address,” Minter said. “But it’s not where they’re based. It’s, uh, kind of a stepping stone. It will lead us straight to them — I promise — but I don’t know exactly how far they’ll be from there. They’re good at hiding themselves. But that’s good for us in the long run, you know?”

  Kurt slung his backpack over one shoulder in preparation to leave, as though his body accepted that trusting Minter’s lead was the only way forward before his mind agreed, then turned to Minter. “What long run? You said you knew where they were. You stood there and told me you knew where they were!”

  “I do know,” Minter barked defensively. “At least one of them has visited this location to meet a new recruit. Ernesto put a guy there for three days of compulsory quarantine to make sure he hadn’t been followed. It’s like a safe house.”

  Kurt wondered how safe if could really be if someone like Minter knew about it, but he was more curious about the recruit who Ernesto had apparently contacted. “Who’s the guy?”