Chapter 471: Puzzling Patterns

I connected my shield to my implant and let it pull in the energy it wanted. A few seconds later, I began repeating short sequences of what seemed to be random letters, but not those Sherry used. I watched Sherry slip off too. The place in my head tapped into both girls’ brains and monitored for responses to a specific sequence of random letters. It could figure out patterns compared to those Eveline and Sherry had used.

“Molly, I need your brain,” I said, reaching out to her.

After I sent her some details, she let me tap into her without any concerns. Ellen sensed that I was doing something in my head and quickly removed everyone except the two girls and me from the room.

Ellen did something with a panel on the wall to lock down the room, including partitions from the ceiling.

After a few minutes of being in Molly’s brain, she told me, “You don’t need me, David. You have a part of your mind mapped as unused and wired into the implant, but you shield it to keep it inaccessible. Remove the shield and let it do as designed.”

I sent their brains the continuation of the sequence Eveline began earlier. I soon saw that an area of neurons was breaking connections after they gave me the response.

I had the entire sequence memorized, so I had Ellen unlock the room.

“We need to get both girls into whatever machines or magic brain-scanning helmets. I’m pretty sure I’ve picked up the pattern Sherry was using. As crazy as it sounds, I think these girls got a Johnny Mnemonic, but with more than just eighty gigs. I wonder if something is happening in their heads when I say each pattern,” I explained to multiple neurologists.

I didn’t expect them to have actual scanning helmets to get real-time brain scans.

Experimentation found that I could say the letters faster if I timed them with equal pauses between them. I tried chaining the two together, but that put too much stress on the girl’s brains. Two hours later, both girls stopped responding to sequences of random letters that were next.

“We see no more activity in their brains in the locations where we saw it while you said those sequences of letters,” the technicians told me.

“One of the nurses picked up on your Jonny Mnemonic movie reference. You are right, it sounds crazy, but I saw the live data and then re-played it,” one neurologist said. “With each sequence you said, areas in their brains showed electrical activity. These are typically unused areas. Both gave you the exact words in perfect sync with each other. After they finished their response, we had a surge of electrical activity in another part of their brain. Once they stopped responding to the sequences you said, we saw another burst before seeing nothing else in those areas. I took some generalized computer classes in college, and I think you were onto something. After they responded, groups of neurons were marked for deletion. After the last sequence, I suspect something triggered the neurons to break those links. I know the brain does that with short-term memory for trivial things like how often you blinked or how many sheep you counted before going to sleep. Any idea what it all means?”

I replied, “Not yet, but there does seem to be a pattern. I just can’t quite see it all in one place.

One of the technicians said, “I’m thinking more like Chuck from TV than the older movie. Eighty gigabytes was a lot back when it came out, but I have a one-terabyte micro-SD card for my camera. The chip inside has to be around the size of a thumbnail. It pushes the idea that we can only hold around a hundred terabytes in our brains. Though our minds aren’t designed to get used as a flash drive.”

Interesting thoughts. How much information can the man-in-the-machine have piggy-backed onto chips and devices for information storage and backups?

As my implant ran things through it, I began to find that putting all the words from one response on the same line gave me a string of sixty-four characters with a fourteen-character string one at the end of that response. Sixty-four is a power of two that made sense, but fourteen didn’t. That was about all the patterns I could see right then. The doctors worked Eveline over as I tried to figure out whatever this was from their heads.

I ran through the multiples of fourteen, trying to come up with something, but nothing worked. The entire time the doctors checked out Eveline, I let my implant pull more and more power until it reached a point where it would destroy itself. The math involved wasn’t something I could comprehend without spending centuries working in a time bubble, deriving advanced math and cryptology by starting to count with pebbles. Whatever programming the man in the machine put into the implant did understand it all. The best I understood was that the fourteen-character blocks were blocks of eight and six.

Those six characters weren’t helpful by themselves.

It gave six sets of two hex characters as their ASCII hex values. Taken individually, they became twelve hex characters, which turned out to have the first and last characters making up a checksum and the eight in the middle getting converted to a bitmask.

The first eight characters got converted to hex, multiplied together, converted to binary, then had the bitmask created from the last six characters applied. With all the computed conversions, math, and bitmasks, I had the sequence number for the sixty-four-character string. The rest was a five-hundred-twelve-bit string, a checksum, and the block number where I needed to apply this bitmask.

My head began to hurt when I discovered that adding all the checksums resulted in a forty-two-bit number.

Someone got cocky and used forty-two. Did this person forget their towel?

That forty-two-bit number got multiplied against the five-hundred-twelve-bit number twelve times. The final eight bits began the following sequence of five-hundred-twelve-bit number

When I finished this first step, I had forty-two of them, with four bits left over. These four bits were applied to the sequence from the fourteen-character string.

Damn! That is a lot of work just to come up with forty-two, sixty-four-byte sequences.

Each of those computed sequences got logically added over the sixty-four characters. The resulting twenty-six-hundred-eighty-eight character strings had multiple things done to change the order. It went through numerous, seemingly random, sets of logical and, or, and xor operations to generate more sets of forty-two containing twenty-six-hundred-eighty-eight character long strings.

It then started again to do all sorts of things with the sixty-four-character sets of words before applying those over the strings it had just generated.

That unused bit of my brain and the implant don’t have enough storage capacity for this generated data.

When I made it stop, Eveline had a clean bill of health. Other than being a bit of a ditz, which the doctors deemed normal for her age, Eveline responded quickly to conversations. No more spacing out.

“The patient’s mother asked if you have the time to wait. She would like to go ahead and get Eveline checked over from head to toe, inside and out, since it doesn’t cost her anything. I think you have someone to help you pass the time,” the doctor told me.

I’ve nothing else to do now but get some sleep. Tomorrow is Sunday.

The girl who started Eveline saying the sequences of words was waiting outside the room for me.

She gave me “that look,” so I took her to my suite. My implant let me know that this girl wasn’t a girl anymore. She turned eighteen two months ago and was living in the adult building. The woman had been trying to apprentice at home construction sites, various medical departments, and even landscaping at the complex. Her spacing out for minutes, to hours, at a time made her nearly unable to find work.

Her body was exquisite. She had natural strawberry blonde pussy hair, pert half-grapefruit tits, and a drooling cunt. We both knew what the woman wanted and took our time working her up to the first mind-numbing orgasm. She got propped up on pillows to watch my glistening dick slowly sliding in and out of her hot water cock massager. After she got too sore to fuck anymore, we showered, and she had me fuck her ass until I came.

“I think I’ve always liked having my ass fucked. I don’t need to tell you that you’re the only one who has fucked my pussy long enough for me to cum. I know I got screwed a lot whenever I spaced out. It sucks because some of those guys were expert pussy eaters and could fuck for hours. After you got whatever was in my head, all the memories of what happened to me when I zoned out came back, or at least some parts of each one. I remember getting screwed, but not if it was any good, only that the guys got theirs and left me a mess,” she explained. “Before you ask, I have no idea how that stuff got into my head. I remember someone starting to say the sequence that had me say the words. They sort of, well, exploded. You know how a guy gets sprayed with liquid nitrogen in that movie, and then something hits him that causes him to shatter into tiny pieces? It was like that, except he wasn’t frozen. A lot of cops and people came to where they found me tied up on the floor. The only parts of the room not covered by his tiny bits were the parts on my clothes and the concrete under me. Whoever took me from there was better to me than anyone I’ve met in my life before I came to live here a few months before turning eighteen. Well, they were until everyone that came to ask me questions decided I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I never told any of them about the letters he said and the words I gave back. I didn’t even know why they wanted me to come to the room with that girl earlier. As soon as I looked into her eyes, I couldn’t stop saying the letters and writing the words down. Did someone do this to you too? You knew it all and could say it very fast in a way that still worked.”

“I learned a lot of things quickly when I was helping out some doctors and scientists while they tried to put my friend back together after a fatal car crash. I don’t know if they pushed what I needed to say into my head. I can also speak, read, and write every language I see or hear,” I told her.

She didn’t zone out as much as stare off into space as she thought about what she wanted to say.

The woman took a deep breath, slowly let it out, and said, “Oh God! You don’t know how scared I have been since you got that girl and me into those machines. The man that blew apart took weeks to be able to pronounce each sequence of letters correctly. Each series is in a different language, and the reply was in another. The man was recording all the time from when he finally managed to say them in a way that sounded correct to me. You switched from one to the next without error. I’m glad you weren’t screwing me in exchange for not making me explode or get dropped in a wood chipper. After the man exploded, two women and a man found me a few months after I settled in a foster home where no one wanted to question me. They snatched me off the street and took me to this place in the woods. Each one said one sequence in the correct language at the right speed, but nothing happened. An hour later, some people showed up. They forced me to watch as they fucked the two women and man’s asses before dropping each one into a wood chipper they had connected to their truck. They told me not to fight them as they licked, touched, fingered, and fucked me for hours. If I let them do what they wanted, I wouldn’t end up in the chipper. They would even take me to my foster parents to cover why I wasn’t home for two days. My foster parents bought many things the next day, so I think the people explained my absence with a stack of cash.”

Damn, she says her pussy hurts, as if someone drop-kicked her there, but she needs to fuck again.

When we finished that round, she got her cell phone and started dialing a number that shouldn’t go anywhere.

The man-in-the-machine couldn’t access her phone or trace wherever she connected. Soon I heard a voice repeating a monotone series of words, but the girl wasn’t responding.

I took her phone and said, “Sorry, whatever you are looking for has been obtained and is gone from her and another girl’s mind.”

“Who is this?” the voice asked.

“Forty-two. Are the girls safe now? Would you like me to connect you with forty-seven?” I asked in return.

Dramatic pause?

The person got angry and said, “You don’t know with whom you are speaking.”

“Neither do you,” I interrupted.

“People coming into contact with the person to whom that phone belongs find it was a fatal mistake to mess in matters which do not involve them. This matter isn’t some game,” he replied.

“Yeah, about that,” I said. “You knew the location of this phone before the embedded software permitted it to contact a number impossible to dial. Take a minute to analyze the possible males who could be on the other end of this phone. Who exactly do you think would ask if the girls are safe now?”

I heard a shot, thud, and someone else came on the line to say, “Stupidity is fatal.”

“May I assume you won’t be dying suddenly?” I asked.

“That is not something I can predict with any certainty. It would depend on confirmation of your identity and how you came into possession of the two females at your location,” they said.

I used my best, you better not fuck with me, voice and said, “I am the person with access to the funds, access to resources, language skills, and technology to ensure the same two females got the passwords to remove the Intersect from their brains. Now answer my question.”

“If you accomplished such an action, the safety of the said females is secure,” they told me.

I gave him the last sequence of letters and associated responses from the girls.

Ping!

“I’m going to start a conference call. Please hold,” I told the person on the phone.

I had nineteen girls and twenty-one guys on the call with the person in a few seconds. I said forty-third sequence on a hunch that Eveline and the woman here didn’t respond to earlier. Forty-one additional letter sets later, I dropped the conference call and started another.

Surprise! Forty-two sets of forty-two people, each having forty-two responses of sixty-four characters, plus a fourteen-letter word.

The last conference call was with the other forty kids programmed with identical sequences as Eveline. Instead of going through the forty-two sets of letters, I said something else that had them give the final fourteen-character long word. I dropped them off the line.

“By your statement, all seventeen-hundred-sixty-four are now all safe. Please update your systems as to why all of them dropped off your tracking system,” I told the person on the phone.

They were panicking now when they asked, “It is impossible.”

Only seconds had passed. I pulled each group into the same time bubble once their phones connected to the conference call. Time didn’t stop there, but one second here is ten thousand years inside the time bubble. I had the person on the phone pulled into that time bubble too. I didn’t see any of them, on purpose, as I pulled the blocks of words from their heads. Once done, the place in my head guided my implant into neutralizing whatever explosive covered the bones of those with the strings put into their brains. I broke it down, along with the multiple trackers and detonators, into pieces so small that it would require an electron microscope to find it. The time bubbles let me work it through their bodies so they would rush toward the nearest toilet as soon as I pulled them out of the bubble.

“I would have thought so back before I learned otherwise,” I responded without saying anything of substance.

“Do you have any idea what you have done?” they asked in anger. “Hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars were spent to do what you have undone. It took years to make them how they were. Your life is forfeited.”

Ah. You are not an android, someone like me, or the seekers, but you have some extra abilities humans don’t have.

I let my implant do what it felt I wanted. I soon found myself reaching out to the minds of, surprise, forty-two people, all with the same extra abilities. They had a link to each other.

Trying to express being chipper, I said in their minds, “Hello. I hope you don’t mind that I jumped on your party line. Nobody needs to threaten or even kill my friends, the kids in my care, those I cleared the code from their brains, or my family. A person trapped in lava and a being millions of years old failed to flake off a single skin cell or plucked a hair. What did the guy on the planet with the monster sandworms say? Try looking into that place you dare not look. You’ll find me there, staring out at you! It went something like that.”

One tried to break the connection. Another came at me mentally over the link. The others felt when the attacker “smoked out” as they fried their brain. I didn’t feel guilty as they did it to themselves.

Does anyone want a fried vegetable? Wait. I know Kung Fu!

I didn’t even need a time bubble to undo the damage the person did to their brain and re-connect them into the link with the other forty-two.

“No, don’t go doing that now. It would make it forty-one and screw up everything,” I told the forty-two. “All I want to know is if you will leave the kids alone now. None of them asked anyone to use them that way, but about half of them would have done it willingly. When puberty hit them, whatever you did made them go off into a happy place of pure bliss when they spaced out. No drugs can get anyone anywhere close to that pleasure and peace. Millions of kids in this world would let you do things to them that would make Hitler ill even to consider it possible to go to that place. Do that and put micro-memory cards in them instead of jacking their brains. You coated their bones with a high explosive that the human body didn’t reject and undetectable detonators. It should be trivial to do the same thing with something that works like whatever they put on magnetic backup tapes and hard drives, but one that isn’t affected by magnets. For that matter, find groups of identical twins and triplets. Sequence their DNA to find those tiny differences, scan their retinas, and analyze their fingerprints. You get the idea. Services will let people custom-order a baby made from their eggs and sperm. Take the eggs from seven sets of triplet women and fertilize them with sperm from twenty-one triplet males. Ensure you have identical triplet embryos and pop them back inside to cook inside a surrogate.”