Forged(45)

“During my time at the Compound, as I worked on creating a limitless Forgery, or as the Order’s been calling it, an F-GenX, this function always stood out as odd. It was sloppy. Nested in too many conditionals. It seemed almost unnecessary, but I never deleted it. I was worried removing it might break the Forgery’s loyalty. And any time I tried to truly understand the function’s purpose, the logic surrounding it would get all fuzzy, like I was trying to read the code without my glasses. But after Mozart brought all my memories back, I knew I had to take a second look at it. And this one little function . . .” He taps the screen again. “I know what it means now.”

“It’s like how Jackson’s mind cleared once he broke,” Clipper says. “Harvey couldn’t understand this bit of code because his greater programming was telling him to ignore it, that it was nothing but lazy coding and he shouldn’t overthink things. But now . . .”

“This is a fail-safe,” Harvey says. “Frank didn’t want one, but you should always have a way to pull the plug, no matter what you’re building. I wrote this in secretly, hiding it in the code, and once I started doubting my work for Frank, I was glad I did.”

“And this helps us how?” I ask, staring at the screen.

“The fail-safe function exists in every version of the Forgeries today, and it will run when they hear a certain audible phrase.”

“Like a verbal order?”

“Not exactly. More like a very precise string of sounds,” Harvey says. “Emit them in the right order, for the appropriate duration, and this function will be tripped, and the Forgeries’ programming aborted.”

“Which means they break down like you and Jackson?”

“No, when I wrote the fail-safe, it was with the intention of no loose ends, no room for second chances. This function will initiate an endless loop of conflicting orders, to the point that it will fry everything—the Forgeries’ programming, their minds. It’s sort of like inducing a massive stroke. Their brains will hemorrhage.”

“So Harvey and I were thinking,” Clipper says, “that if we played the right bit of audio somehow—say over the alarm system in Taem—every Forgery in that city would be disabled.”

Disabled. That’s a nicer word for it.

Is that how Frank justified his massacre of Burg’s people when he feared them too volatile to benefit the Laicos Project? And does every Forgery truly deserve to be disabled? Jackson once helped us. Harvey is helping us now. Does this solution mean killing—murdering—thousands of innocent people?

I picture my own Forgery holding a gun to Blaine’s head, and know the hard truth: Unless they malfunction, the Forgeries are the enemy, working against innocent people on Frank’s behalf. We can’t wait around hoping they cross paths with something that will cause their programming to flicker, not to mention that the Gen5s can’t be tripped at all.

“You’re sure this will work?” I ask.

“If the right audio is played, it should,” Clipper says. “We’ve checked the function a couple dozen times.”

“Well, shouldn’t we tell the others? This is huge.”

“There’s just one problem,” Harvey says. “I can’t remember the audio combo. All I know is it’s obscure, something random a Forgery wouldn’t come across unless we meant to pull the plug.”

“So how do we find it?”

“That brings us to what I do remember: I hid the answer in the code.”

Harvey scrolls through it. I watch for a few minutes, and still the lines don’t stop. It might as well be endless.





TWENTY-TWO


I SPEND THE NEXT FEW hours combing through what Clipper and Harvey refer to as the code’s comments. They show me how to spot these—they are preceded by certain symbols—but the true giveaway is the fact that what follows is a legible, coherent sentence or two, rather than numbers and symbols and fragments of words. I work on one screen, Clipper and Harvey on another.

I’m not really sure what I’m looking for, but copying down suspicious comments into a notebook seems far more productive than being upstairs in a debriefing meeting.

While I work, Harvey and Clipper see to the code itself—the variables and functions and parameters, as they call them. I’m moving much faster through the endless lines than the two of them, but only because there are far fewer comments than code.

Much later, Harvey calls it a night. “If you’re willing, we’d love some more help tomorrow,” he says to me, and takes off his glasses to rub his eyes.

“Of course.”

“Clip! You’ll hurt your neck sleeping like that.” The boy jerks upright. The shape of the keyboard is imprinted in his cheek. Harvey points at the couch against the far wall. “Go get a proper night’s sleep, won’t you?”

I duck upstairs, eager to do the same. Aiden’s still asleep on the couch with Rusty, and besides their exhales, the floor is dead silent. I cut through the living room and into the small hall that leads to the bedrooms.

“Where’d you disappear to all night?” Bree is sitting just outside her room, her back against the wall and her legs stretched out in a V. I put a finger to my lips.

“Sammy’s downstairs with the team still,” she says. “And even if he wasn’t, he sleeps like a deaf man. You could shout if you wanted.”