Chapter 4

The trip back from London seemed to take a lot longer than the trip there. There was just too much bouncing around my head.

Jeeves, with his instinctual understanding of my powers, had filled in a few of the blanks for me. The Conclave was similar to the mindscape; it wasn’t a physical place. The difference was that it was not in any one person’s mind. Instead, it was tied to specific geographical sources of energy around the globe in other places similar to the British Museum. These entry points served as a means of access to lower-powered Evos, but for more powerful minds like mine, I could enter the cathedral-like headquarters whenever and from wherever I wanted. Jeeves, however, was at as much of a loss about the nature of these focused energy locations as I was. I’m not sure why it stayed on my mind, but it was a thought I couldn’t seem to shake.

Much like the distinctiveness of Evie’s mind, it seemed like a very important detail. I just didn’t know why yet. And yes, it was annoying the hell out of me.

It took most of the day to travel home. It was November now, and the typical British weather was having an impact on the reliability of air travel. We were just beginning the distractingly turbulent descent to the airport when I managed to focus on the points I really needed to concentrate on.

“Malaga ... You should start your search in Malaga.”

I am not going to lie; those words and the possibility of there being an Inquisitor headquarters in Malaga were almost enough for me to raze the city to the ground. To hell with the consequences.

I swallowed hard, pushing myself back into my seat and consciously trying to calm myself, just as Charlotte had taught me. The unquantifiable levels of vengeful rage within me were just as strong now as they had been during the attack. The desire to slaughter each and every Inquisitor I could find was just as potent. That feeling of adrenaline coursing through my veins had barely abated since I had left the club; it was only an intentional and conscious effort that kept it from overwhelming me. Time, it would seem, does not calm a vengeful heart.

To my perception of time, it had been over a year since Faye’s murder. The feeling of debilitating grief had lessened with the passage of time; I could string together two coherent thoughts without the memory of her beautiful face interrupting them. But the vast majority of those conscious thoughts were about finding and punishing the people who killed her. That search, evidently, would begin in Malaga.

By the time I walked back into the Queen’s Head, the foundations of a plan were starting to come together. I had played enough strategy games in my time to know that going in, all guns blazing, was the easiest and quickest way to lose and to lose big. What I needed, above all other things, was information.

I made it up to my apartment just as Jimmy was stepping out of his. My closest friend still had no idea what had been happening. “Hey dude, how’s it going?” He asked with that beaming grin. Lori stepped out of the apartment behind him, linked her arm with his, and then greeted me as well.

“Hey man, yeah, all good. How are you guys? Heading out anywhere nice?”

Jimmy’s smile faltered a little, and his eyes narrowed at me. I was nowhere near ‘all good,’ and Jimmy wasn’t buying the lie for a moment. “You sure? Something seems wrong.”

Dammit, Jimmy. Why are you the one person who knows me well enough to see that?

“I...” I sighed heavily. Jeeves quickly came up with a suitably true lie, though. “Look, man, you know about my family.” Jimmy nodded, but Lori looked at him in confusion. Clearly, my friend had not passed on that information to his girlfriend. “There was one person who was different. She was nothing like the rest of them; she was...” It wasn’t a lie. Faye, in my mind, had grown into something akin to a lost wife rather than murdered crush. The bonding process had started, and there was no doubt in my mind that we would have made it that far. Part of the grief that swept back over me was mourning the loss of the life we should have had together. Faye was more like family to me than any real family I had ever known. “She was the one who gave me hope for the future. She was killed last week.”

Lori’s face dropped. “Oh my God, Pete, I am so sorry,” they both said almost as one. “What happened?” The last part was only from Jimmy.

“She was hit by a dru...” Jeeves clamped my mouth shut before I could say anymore. That part had been me, not him, and he instantly reminded me that Jimmy’s parents had been killed by a drunk driver. His face paled in a heartbeat.

“We can go out another time,” Jimmy said, clearing his throat, with Lori nodding vigorously. “We need to get a couple of drinks and...”

“No ... No man,” I sighed with a smile. “I appreciate the offer, I really do. And I may take you up on it later, but I just need to ... process.”

Jimmy was perhaps one of the few people who could properly understand that. “Are you sure? We don’t mind, do we?” He looked towards Lori.

“No, not at all. Friends are much more important.” She said, stepping forward, wrapping her arms around me, and hugging me tightly. “I can give Evelyn a call, and we can make an evening of it.”

Jesus, Evie. To my mind, and to my perception of the passage of time, it had been more than a year since her name had even crossed my mind. I knew it had only been a few weeks of real time, but to me, her name hit me like a blast from the past. It wouldn’t have mattered who it was or how long it had been, though; I simply wasn’t in the mood for company. At least not at that moment.

“No, honestly, I’m okay. I just need to get myself together and ... think. I promise I will take you up on the offer when I am ready, though.”

Lori started to argue, but Jimmy linked his arm back to hers and stopped her with a look. “I understand, mate. If you need me for anything at all, my phone is always on, and I’m just across the hall.”

“I appreciate that, Jim. You’ve got yourself a good man there, Lori” I smiled at the couple.

“Oh, I know,” she answered with a smile of her own. They both made their way towards the stairs that led back down into the bar, Jimmy resting a hand on my shoulder as he passed and offering a friendly, sympathetic smile before they disappeared from view. Only Lori’s whispered words echoed up behind them. “What was that about his family?”

“I’ll tell you later, babe,” Jimmy replied as I unlocked my door and stepped inside.

My college project was finished. After having spent the equivalent of 3 years working on it, I had developed it to the point where people would be suspicious that I’d had help with it if I advanced it any further. As a game engine, it was beyond revolutionary. The adaptive nature of the platform meant that once you had programmed in the graphics, the user interface, the story, and the general theme of a game, the engine could extend it and fill it out with content with very little developer input. In keeping with the explanation I had given to Jimmy all those months ago, I uploaded a copy of Fallout 4 onto it to give the engine a basic understanding of what I was trying to do, then let it get to work. The working model I would be using as my final college submission covered the entire US Eastern Seaboard and contained, roughly speaking, about six months of solid gameplay.

The developers of the game would be able to release this, even as a multiplayer enterprise in the vein of Fallout 76, and then just add new areas of the game as DLC over time. It would cut their development cost by about 80% and the production time by even more. If anything, they would have to program in restraints for the engine, otherwise, it would keep extending the gameplay indefinitely. That was a problem for another day.

What I realized very early on was that Microsoft and Sony would need to completely overhaul the operating systems on their game consoles to make the engine usable. Although I couldn’t rule out the idea that they would both use this as the basis of their next-gen platforms, I had dedicated a significant amount of time to programming ways that this new software could interface with the old systems as seamlessly as possible.

With games consoles, that had been fairly straightforward. With desktop PCs, though, it had been exponentially more complicated. The more I worked on it, the harder it became and the more dead ends I reached. It had gotten to the point where I had realized that the software being used in the game engine - the new computer language I had developed, with the help of my abilities - would actually make a better basis around which to build a totally new operating system, than any attempts to interface the old with the new. As an experiment, I completely reprogrammed my computer to do just that.

For the non-technically minded of you, let me explain. Computer language, when you boil it down to its bare bones, is binary. Every single task your computer, your phone, your game console, your anything performs is an extraordinarily fast process of your computer asking itself very simple yes or no questions. Ones and zeros. This new language did away with all of that, instead allowing it to process commands through an endless loop of ‘maybes.’ It didn’t quite give the computer the ability to think independently, but it did allow it to process information vastly more efficiently. More importantly, it gave the system the power to be a little creative. Let me be clear, we are not talking about artificial intelligence here, but in a computer world of black and white, this new language allowed a computer to appreciate the varying shades of grey between them and take that into account when performing its tasks.

What this meant was that the computer that sat by my feet as I dropped onto my desk chair was, by far, the most powerful single computer system on earth. That isn’t as impressive as it sounds. Computing technology has been advancing at breakneck speeds for generations. The first iPhone famously had more than 5000 times the processing power that was available to the entire Apollo 11 program. A modern store-bought laptop is more powerful than the best 80s-era supercomputer. I had no doubt that in a few decades, even my system would be rendered obsolete. I just happened to have developed the next big step.

As you may have guessed, even before my abilities were unlocked, I was a bit of a computer nerd, and like many computer nerds, I had dipped my hand into the world of hacking. Let me correct something for a moment; hacking is nothing like the shit you see on TV. Hollywood has even fucked the name of the activity. Hacking is the process of taking pre-existing computer code and hacking it together with stuff you have made yourself into a workable program that does ... something. Literally anything. Every computer programmer on earth is a hacker. Cracking ... yes, notice the spelling ... is using that program to break into a system you are not supposed to be in. You know, like safe cracking. Hence the name.

Look, if Hollywood makes something out to be true, especially if it is something technical, just assume they have fucked it up.

Anyway, the way that firewalls and anti-virus software work is that they are programmed to recognize pieces of code that have been used to infiltrate or harm computer systems in the past. Something malicious tries to get into your computer, the anti-virus recognizes it and slams the door closed. That is also the reason they are updated so often. Every time something new comes along, the company has to distribute the details of that new code to all the computers they are protecting. There is one major weakness in them, though, at least from my new standpoint. They were all designed to detect and block infiltration from programs using the old computer language.

But I wasn’t using the old computer language.

I had the most powerful and most creative computer on earth with unfettered, unrestricted access to the internet. I could access any computer system on earth, provided it was connected to a phone line. I could wander through NORAD at my pleasure, I could have a look to see what DARPA was working on, and I could look at the President’s porn history, and not only could I not be stopped, but because my computer was working in a language their systems didn’t recognize, they would never even know I was there.

“Alright,” I said to Jeeves as I got myself comfortable in my chair and nudged the mouse to deactivate the screensaver. Jeeves was my subconscious, he knew how my powers worked and what I was capable of, but at times like these, when my conscious mind was in the driving seat, I was telling him what to do. He was simply translating my commands through the Mind-Machine Interface to make the computer understand my intentions.

“I am listening, Sir,” Came the disembodied voice of my ever-present butler companion.

“The night I first awakened, I remember feeling the minds of people for thousands of miles in every direction. I specifically remember a little girl in Budapest...”

“That is correct, Sir.”

“So my ability to detect minds will easily reach as far as Malaga?”

“Yes, they will.”

“Excellent.”

“I’m sure you think so, Sir.”

“Shut up and pay attention.”

“Sorry, Sir.”

“Right, I want the computer to access every single camera in the entire city. Security cameras, ATM machines, laptops, cell phones, traffic cams, everything. I don’t want a single person in all of Malaga to be away from prying eyes.”

“Got it ... And done, Sir. Would you like to see the feeds?”

“No. Not yet. Now, I want you to extend my abilities to cover the city as well. If there is a person within view of a camera, any camera at all, I want to try to connect with their minds. If I can make a connection, we can rule them out, but what I want to see on the screen is the pictures of every single mind that I cannot connect to. That I cannot see.”

“Ah, yes, I understand, Sir. The ones that you can see on the screen and can connect to are normal humans, with no need to track them. But people who can be seen on the camera, but you cannot detect with your powers, are Inquisitors,” I could almost hear Jeeves nodding.

“Or Evos blocking my powers, yes. I want to see them all.”

“Working, Sir, this may take a while. I recommend you eat something, this will be using a sizable amount of energy.”

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I had a perfect image in my head of what I wanted to do; a literal person-by-person scan of an entire metropolitan area, Jeeves reaching out and touching the minds of every single person the computer system could find. I just had no idea at all how long ‘a while’ was going to take, nor did I have any idea if it would work.

As it turned out, it was a little shy of five hours, just long enough for the evening rush hour in the Spanish city to come to an end. With my mind and my computer occupied, I spent the time doing something I realized I hadn’t done in months. I watched TV.