Chapter 4
Clockwork Armageddon
Riley could hear Gabriel speaking softly. Maybe she could get him to come back to bed. She wasn't ready to get up. She caught a whiff of coffee and stretched. Why did her leg hurt so much? Her eyes opened and she saw Gabriel standing there with a breakfast tray. She smiled at him drowsily and said, "Breakfast in bed?"
Then she remembered!
"Michael!" she shrieked, sitting upright with a start.
"He's fine. He's fine," Gabriel says.
"Where is he?" she asks.
"He's downstairs playing chess with my Mom. Don't worry. There isn't a scratch on him. He's just a little worried about you," Gabriel says.
"Are you sure he's alright?" she asks.
"I'm sure. I've been showing him around and teaching him a few tricks. He's a cute kid," Gabriel says.
"How did I get here?" she asks.
"Do you remember being shot?" he asks.
She thought back. The last thing she remembered was being at Cyber Com with Michael. Wait, she had gotten the B2B protocol message, then … it all came back to her.
"Yes, the security guard shot me in the leg and I got in the drone and then…" she trails off.
"Then you passed out. You lost a lot of blood and went into shock. We got to the drone as soon as we could, but your blood pressure was very low. Mac removed the bullet and he's been giving you blood and fluids since then. There shouldn't be any lasting damage, but you're going to need some time to rest and recover," he says.
"Wait, what day is this?" Riley asks.
"It's Wednesday night," he says.
When she had taken off in the drone it has been Tuesday afternoon.
"What's wrong, Gabriel? Why did Lillian send us here? Is Michael in danger?" she asks.
"She sent you here because she knows I can keep you and Michael safe, and that's what I'm going to do so just get some rest and stop worrying," Gabriel says.
She took a good look at him. She had thought about him every day for the last seven year and here he was right in front of her. He hadn't changed much. He was a little more polished than she remembered. His haircut incorporated his colic rather than working against it. His usual T-shirt had been replaced with an expensive dress shirt that fit both his broad shoulders and trim waist. His skin looked fresh and healthy. His eyes were what had changed the most. She used to see love and trust in those eyes. Now all she saw was wariness.
"I'm getting up," Riley says.
She pulls the covers away from her legs and notices that she is dressed only in a large T-shirt and she has a bandage on one leg.
"What happened to my clothes," she asks.
"Uh, we had to cut them off of you," Gabriel says looking embarrassed, "It was an emergency and my T-shirt was handy so…"
She looks away hoping he won't notice her blushing and tries to put her feet on the floor. Gabriel moves closer.
"Give me a hand, will you?" she asks.
"No, you need to stay in bed," he says moving closer and sitting the tray down beside the bed.
"Fine, I'll do it myself," she pushes herself up on one leg, but when she tries to take a step on her hurt leg she crumples.
Gabriel, poised and ready, catches her neatly. She feels the heat of his hard arms through the thin T-shirt. The scent of him sparks a riot of memories and she feels her body reacting. She hopes he doesn't notice how flustered she is as he gently helps her back into bed, pulls her T-shirt down and draws the blankets back up over her legs.
"You know that I have the utmost respect for you Riley, but let's assess your situation a minute. You almost died yesterday. You can't walk. The pain killer in your IV is the only thing keeping your leg from hurting like hell and you can barely remember what happened to you yesterday. Just this once, can't you lie back and let me take care of things?" he asks.
She smiles. This was her old Gabriel, the Gabriel from before their break up and before their relationship turned physical.
"No," Riley says, " G2G was our 'the house is burning down' protocol. I've got to know what happened."
"If you promise to stay in your bed until Mac gives you the go ahead to get up, and eat your breakfast like a good girl, then I will tell you what I know," he says.
"Alright, I'll stay in bed and eat," she says.
Gabriel puts the breakfast tray in her lap, but takes away the coffee
"Hey!" she says, "I wanted that."
"I only brought that for the smell. I knew it would wake you up, but I don't want it keeping you awake," he says taking a drink from the cup, "Now eat your eggs and toasts."
She picks at her eggs.
"Yesterday there was a cyber attack at a meeting of the United Nations of Augmented Human Intelligence Representatives. All the representatives were downloading a report from the Secretary himself when a huge power surge essentially electrocuted them. All eighty three representatives died within seconds," Gabriel says quietly.
It took a moment for Riley to absorb the enormity of the tragedy. Every representative? That was going to throw the world into chaos. Most countries, including the United States, had dissolved their governments in favor of being governed by the United Nations of Augmented Human Intelligence. When the climate catastrophes and the bio-engineered viruses hit the world at the same time, traditional governments like theirs had proven far too slow in their reaction times to address the dual threats. Now the world depended on the Intelligents for everything from running the economy to protecting the rain forest. Without the Intelligents in charge, who knew what might happen.
She started thinking about the representatives she knew, had known, Yolanda Robinson, the US Representative, Marco Rialdi, the Italian Representative, Pan Hwang, the Japanese Representative. The loss was too great. She couldn't bear to think of them all dead. It must be much worse for Gabriel. He had trained so many of them.
"I'm sorry Gabriel. I know a lot of them were friends of yours, and you and Representative Robinson were close." she says, wondering if the tabloid rumors that they were lovers were true.
"I'm going to get the bastards who did it," he says.
"What do we know about the attack?" she asks.
"I can't figure out how they breached our security. Either the security code Nelson and I created wasn't really unbreakable or someone got help from the inside. Getting the malware that activated that power surge through our fire walls should have been impossible," he says.
Dr. Cassidy's son Nelson had left Cyber Com when the United States government started implanting micro-chips in the brains of the children on the Athens list, a list of the world's children who had the gene mutation necessary to support computer augmented intelligence. Nelson believed that only adults should be allowed to augment their intelligence and that chipping children was child abuse.
After leaving Cyber Com, Nelson went into business for himself, creating a new cyber security company. He recruited his old friend Gabriel for a special project, an unbreakable cyber security code. He and Gabriel tried to create a code that Gabriel couldn't hack. After years of disappointments, they finally succeeded with the Catalyst Code. The governments of the world flocked to buy the code because cyber security had become the number one priority of defense departments world-wide. As a result Nelson and Gabriel had become two of the richest and most powerful men on the planet, but if their code had been broken they had just become two of the most suspected men on the planet.
"Are you and Michael in danger? What if you download something that causes you to be electrocuted?" Riley says.
"I've already put safety protocols in place to keep it from happening again, but what concerns me is how they hacked the United Nations secure server. It is completely separate from the rest of the Internet," he says.
"What concerns me is keeping Michael safe. Can we keep him off the Internet completely," she asks.
"I've got him limited to my secure server with shut down fail safes initiating if he tries to leave it," Gabriel says.
"Gabriel there's something you need to know. Michael isn't a normal Intelligent. When he gets distressed emotionally, he can do things without realizing it," she says, "On the way here he unconsciously over rode Cyber Com's perimeter shut down because he was afraid I might hurt his friend Bud to get him clear," she says.
"What's normal anyway? There's nothing normal about having a chip in your head. How old was Michael when they implanted it? I can't imagine a baby dealing with the data overload," he says.
"He was only about 30 months old. Lillian put them off as long as she could, but he's a genius, and he learned to talk very early. As soon as they realized they could communicate with him, they insisted," she says.
"But Lillian adopted him, right? Couldn't she just have refused to give her consent as his mother?" Gabriel asks.
"That was about the time the Apex virus was released and heavy metal shortages were at their worst. When Lillian refused to consent to the procedure the last time the US government threatened to pull Michael's protection. Without it, the Chinese or the Russians would have kidnapped him within days," she said.
"How ironic, the only way Lillian could protect Michael was to give him a potentially life threatening operation. I still don't understand why they couldn't wait until he was older," Gabriel says.
"Michael's gene mutation is slightly different. They don't know why, but his mutation is more advanced. It has the capability to adapt when certain conditions exist," she says.
"What conditions?" he asks.
"Conditions that are created by having a micro-chip implanted in your brain. The chip changes the way his brain works and that triggers other genetic changes. He uses his brain differently than other Intelligents when he interacts with the information grid. He has already mastered skills other Intelligents weren't able to do until their teens. He's exceptional and that makes him more vulnerable. Gabriel, are you sure you can keep Michael safe here?" Riley asks.
"Riley, could you stop being the protection detail for one minute," he says.
"No, I'm Michael's only protection. Are we secured here?" she asks.
"Yes. This is my mother's ranch in South Dakota. I created this place to be a bunker back during the catastrophe years. It's a burm home that doesn't look like much of anything from the air, but buried underneath it has state of the art security facilities including radar. There's a bomb shelter on the lowest floor stocked with a two year's worth of supplies. I've run extensive background checks on my staff and I consider them completely trustworthy. Besides why would anyone look for you here? Everyone knows you broke my heart and we don't speak anymore," he says.
And there it was out in the open. She had hoped somehow that they could ignore that part of their past and fall back into the easy habit of just being co-workers, but Gabriel had never been one to hide from conflict.
"Gabriel I…" she begins.
"Save it Riley. You're getting white around the mouth again and I need to bring Michael up so he can see for himself that you're okay before I put you back to bed," he says.
"You haven't given me your threat assessment. Has anyone claimed responsibility?
"Riley, you're just going to have to trust me. You're in no shape for a staff meeting and I'm doing everything I can to figure out who's behind this. Now finish you eggs. I'll be right back with Michael. And Riley …" he says.
"What?" she asks.
"Michael is safer here than he would be anywhere else. Even though you didn't want to marry a man who's 'three quarters machine', he's a hell of a guy to have on your side in a fight."
