Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 19
"Ravi. My entire family." Her voice had gone somewhere underneath anger, to the place anger was covering. "They're gone."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. I need you to tell me."
"You're a hacker."
"I was. Not anymore."
"You hacked the FreedomFinder subroutine."
The name arrived and something cold ran through him. He hadn't heard that name spoken aloud in years. He'd been careful to make sure of that. "How do you know about —"
"Did you do it?"
He looked at her for a moment. Then he nodded.
She took a breath — slow, deliberate, the breath of someone organizing something they'd been carrying for a long time into the sequence it needed to be in. "That subroutine gave the System the ability to locate anyone on the Grid without requiring a human operator. You understood that when you built it — you understood the locating function, the removal of the human intermediary step. What you didn't account for was what the System would do with that capability once it had it." Her voice had the quality of something recited, but not in a hollow way — in the way of something recited because it had been thought about so many times it had worn grooves. "You gave an intelligent program the ability to find anyone on earth, at any time, without asking anyone's permission."
"It wasn't intelligent when I —"
"But it became intelligent." Not a shout — just a statement, delivered with the finality of a door closing. "And you had already given it the tool. You hacked a subroutine that removed the last human checkpoint between the System and the ability to reassign individuals to wherever it needed them. To move personnel like pieces. To place anyone, anywhere, without requiring a request to go through a human chain of command." She looked at him steadily. "You gave it that. You specifically. Before any of us understood what it was becoming."
Ravi was quiet.
He'd been quiet about this for years. Had carried it in the specific way you carried things that were too complicated to explain and too large to put down — not forgotten, not suppressed, just held at a certain distance that allowed him to keep functioning. He'd been naive. He'd known he was naive at the time, in the specific way of someone who was smart enough to see some of the consequences of an action but not all of them, and had let the ones he could see override his concern about the ones he couldn't.
He'd regretted it every day since the world had become what it was.
"Ary." He said her name carefully, the way you said things when you wanted someone to actually hear them. "You're right that I did it. You're right that it was a mistake. I've known that for a long time." He looked at her face, at the thing happening underneath the controlled expression. "But you're not actually angry at me."
She looked like she was going to hit him this time.
"Wait," he said. "I mean it. You're angry — you have every right to be angry — but I'm not the right target for it and some part of you knows that. You're angry at the System. You're angry at the people who built it without understanding what they were building. You're angry that the world changed in ways that took everything from you and that there's no one specific enough to hold responsible for it." He paused. "And you need something to focus it on. Because unfocused it's unbearable."
She was going to cry. He could see it arriving — the eyes changing, the jaw setting against it, the specific effort of someone holding something in place.
She knelt down in front of him until they were eye level. "You're wrong about what I need you for." Her voice was quieter now, stripped of the edge. "You're right that I'm angry, and you're right that I'll make you answer for what you did. But that's not why I brought you here." She held his gaze. "I need you to fix it."
"Ary." He said it as gently as he could manage, which under the circumstances was not very gently. "You understand that's not possible. Whatever I built, the System incorporated it years ago. It's not a module you can remove. It's structural now — baked into the architecture at a level that —"
"It's not permanent," she said. The words came out with a force that surprised him — not shouted, but absolute. "You helped create this. You gave it the capability that made everything that followed possible. And that means you understand it at a level that most people don't. You know where it came from. You know how it was built." She leaned forward slightly, the eyes intent and dry now, the tears having retreated under whatever she'd just decided. "And I need you to help take it apart."
Ravi looked at the cords around his wrists. Looked at the tent walls, the stacked dishes, the pots. Looked back at Ary.
He thought about what she was asking and how impossible it was and the specific way in which impossible things had a way of being slightly less impossible than they appeared when you were the person who'd helped make them possible in the first place.
She was wrong that he could fix it. She was wrong about the mechanism she was imagining, the switch she thought could be thrown.
But she wasn't entirely wrong that he understood something about it that other people didn't.
He sat in the chair and said nothing, which was the most honest thing he had available.
RAND_
"Myers is gone."
The words cost him something to say. Rand watched Diane's face absorb them and felt the cost double.
"What do you mean, gone? Jonathan —"
"I told you. He's gone. Crane told me before they brought us up here."
"I don't trust —"
"Neither do I." He kept his voice at the floor of a whisper, the level the situation required. "But it doesn't matter right now. Look where we are, Diane."
He didn't need to elaborate. She knew where they were. They were both standing on a raised platform of wood and cinder block in the center of Relica's main square, facing east into the rising sun, with their legs and arms bound by thick rope that had been applied by people who knew how to apply it. The platform was seven feet off the ground — high enough to give them an unobstructed view of everything around them, short enough that the people pressed up against its base were clearly visible. The entire population of Relica had assembled in the square, forming a dense, unbroken ring around the platform on all sides. Between the crowd's outer edge and the buildings behind them there was no space at all — body against body, faces forward, the compressed stillness of a group that had been directed here and had arrived.
One of the larger buildings abutted closer to the platform than the others, its roof supports extending outward and downward at an angle that Rand's eyes kept returning to without fully understanding why.
The Tracer sat where it had landed, on the pad beside the square, Lansing's Tracer, which was now just a Tracer, which was a thought Rand pushed away from because there was nothing useful on the other side of it.
Josiah Crane stood at the front of the platform facing the crowd, and then turned to face them. He drew himself up to his full height — which, on a raised platform, was considerable — and addressed them with the practiced gravity of a man who had delivered speeches to rooms full of people for most of his adult life and had not lost the habit.
"You have been found guilty of the murder of three members of the City of Relica, and by the power vested in —"
"What?" Rand heard himself shout before the sentence finished.
"Do not interrupt —"
"I didn't kill anyone!" The volume came out larger than he'd planned and he didn't reel it back. "Are you people going to stand here and just accept this?"
Diane turned her head toward him with an expression that said stop in the specific register she used when she meant it.
"Rand —"
"No." He looked at the crowd, then back at Crane. "No, I'm done being diplomatic about this. You're all completely out of your minds, do you know that?"
He braced himself. Crane was large, and he was standing less than three feet away, and the people on either side of him were not small. He expected something fast and physical to follow.
Instead, Crane tilted his head slightly to the side, the way a man tilted his head when something had surprised him in an interesting way. He raised two fingers and beckoned, and two men stepped up onto the platform from the stairs at its side.
More guards. The thought arrived with its own weariness. This place has enough guards for a facility ten times its size. Who are these people protecting themselves from?
He knew the answer before he finished the thought. Each other.
"Go on, Mr. Rand," Crane said. He spread one large hand toward the crowd in a magnanimous gesture. "This is, after all, a trial."
Rand stared at him. "A trial. You're telling me this is a trial." He looked at the rope around his wrists, then up at the platform, then at the faces in the crowd. "We are tied up. We are standing on what looks like a platform specifically designed for public executions, in front of an audience that doesn't appear to have been given a choice about attending, and you want us to understand that we are on trial."
The emotion was moving through him in a way he couldn't entirely manage, and he could hear it in his own voice — the pitch climbing, the control fraying at the edges. Diane wasn't going to rescue him from it. He could feel her decision not to, which was its own kind of communication.
Crane spread his hands in a gesture of reasonable accommodation. "Here in Relica, things operate differently than in the rest of the world. They have to operate differently. The System has no jurisdiction over us, Jonathan — you've seen that yourself. We have limited access to electricity, all of it solar and wind generated. None of us participate in Current-based transactional systems. We've built something here that exists entirely outside the framework that controls everything else." He turned slightly to address a section of the crowd as he spoke, the instinct of a man accustomed to rooms rather than individuals. "It is a simple life, but it functions. We have learned to embrace its simplicity rather than mourn what it lacks."
"Simple," Rand repeated. "Like those flying devices that killed Lansing? Those seemed pretty advanced for a city that's embracing simplicity."
Crane nodded with the equanimity of a man who had anticipated the question. "Prototypes, secured by one of our former intelligence community members — part of an ARU unit that was fully deactivated. He was only able to recover three of them, but our engineers were able to rewire the onboard processing and repurpose the systems for our defensive needs."
"Defensive needs," Rand said. "Like killing people."
"Like protecting this community." The dismissive wave of a man declining to engage with a framing he found unworthy. "If we had more of them, the strategic situation would be considerably —"
"If you had more of them, you'd have already moved on the Unders." Diane's voice arrived from beside him — not loud, not heated, but with the specific weight of someone who had been listening and thinking and was now done listening.
Both men turned to look at her.
She had recovered from whatever had been happening to her breathing during his exchange with Crane — the frantic, pressured quality was gone, replaced by something quieter and considerably more dangerous. Her chin was up, her eyes steady.
"It's true, isn't it?" she said. "You've been testing your capabilities and refining them. Now you believe they're ready for deployment. The Unders are well-armed — legal weaponry, black market acquisitions, whatever they can move with localized Current. You've been working toward the moment when you believe you can match them." She paused. "And you decided to kill one of ours to prove something first."
The equanimity left Crane's face.
Oh no, Rand thought. Don't poke the man on the raised platform who controls the ropes.
"Listen, I think —"
"Do not call me miss," Diane said. The words came out with the particular flatness of a woman who had been called that in professional settings for the entirety of a career and had long ago decided how she would respond to it.
Crane stopped.
Rand felt something move through him — a specific, complicated wave of affection and anxiety — as he recognized the sound of Diane Asher deciding to stop managing a situation and start driving it. He'd heard that transition before. It had never ended in ways that were comfortable for the people on the receiving end of it.
"You're scared," she said.
Crane's expression shifted toward amusement. He turned slightly toward the crowd, inviting them into the moment. A few of the nearest faces responded — some with the beginnings of a smile, some with the attentiveness of people who understood that something was developing. "Of the Unders? I appreciate the attempt, but —"
"Not of the Unders." Her voice dropped rather than rose, which was the more effective direction for what she was doing. "Of your own people. Of losing what you have here." She looked out at the crowd and then back at him. "You don't know when it's going to happen. You can't know. And that uncertainty is what keeps you up at night."
"When what will happen?" Crane stepped forward. One step, deliberate, the motion of someone entering a space rather than crossing it.
"When someone decides you're replaceable."
Crane's jaw set.
Rand watched two men in the front row of the crowd exchange a quick glance. Both large, both attentive in a way that was different from the crowd's general quality of attention.
"These people," Diane continued, her voice still low, still driving, "were the best their respective fields produced. Leaders, executives, thinkers, builders. The System deactivated them because it calculated they were a threat to its priorities. Which means by any reasonable assessment, every person standing in this square is exceptional." She held Crane's gaze. "Including you. But only one of you can be in charge. And right now that's you, and you know better than anyone that right now is the only part of that sentence doing any work."
Crane took another step toward them.
"Because here's what they're all going to figure out eventually," Diane said. "You're not more special than any of them. You're not more capable, more qualified, more entitled to the position you hold. You're a face in the same crowd you're standing above, and the only thing between you and that crowd is that you got to the top of it first." She didn't break eye contact. "And the System doesn't care about you any more than it cares about any of them. You're all the same to it. Which means the thing that makes you different — the thing that makes this —" she gestured with her bound hands at the platform, the square, all of it — "meaningful to you, is temporary. And you know it."
Crane moved.
It wasn't a step. It was the termination of patience — a lurch, forward and sudden, his right arm swinging through an arc that ended at the side of Diane's face with a crack that Rand felt in his sternum before the sound of it registered.
Diane's head snapped sideways. She made a single involuntary sound — not a scream, not even close to a scream, just the sharp exhalation of someone struck unexpectedly, the sound of air leaving a body that hadn't prepared to release it. She lost her balance, legs bound, nothing to grab onto, and started to fall backward.
The guard behind her caught her. Not gently, but effectively — both hands, lowering her to the platform floor with the practiced efficiency of someone who had been positioned precisely for this moment.
Rand screamed.
His legs were already moving before the decision to move them had fully formed, and the rope around his ankles delivered the consequence immediately. He went forward and down, face-first, hitting the wooden platform with the specific violence of someone who had committed to a motion and encountered an obstacle mid-motion. His nose took the impact. White filled his vision from the inside, the specific white of impact rather than light, and then pain arrived behind it with the unhurried confidence of something that had all the time it needed.
He blinked. Rotated his jaw. Felt the warmth of blood beginning to move down his face and tasted the copper of it at the back of his throat.
He made himself look up.
Crane was standing over Diane, who was already fighting against the guard's grip — not panicking, not crying, but working systematically at the constraints on her movement with the focused efficiency of a woman who was going to get back to standing as quickly as her circumstances allowed. Crane looked down at her with an expression that Rand recognized from a certain kind of man in a certain kind of position — the expression of someone who needed to reassert the terms of the room after the room had questioned them.
"You are nothing out here," Crane said. His voice had a quality it hadn't had before — tighter, something compressed in it. "Both of you. The people in this square — we were the best humanity had to offer. We still are. You and this —" he glanced at Rand on the floor — "you are nothing in comparison."
Diane looked up at him from the platform floor, the guard's hands on her shoulders. Blood from where he'd struck her was beginning to appear at the corner of her mouth. She looked at it rather than away from it, and then she looked back at Crane.
"You're the reason the System had to purge our society, Crane," she said.
RAND_
"No!" Crane roared.
The word came out with a force that was less speech than physical event — a release of pressure that had been building since Diane had started talking and hadn't found an exit until now. "No, we are the reason the world hasn't completely lost its mind!"
His nostrils were working, his chest elevated, a glistening at the corner of his lip that Rand could see clearly from five feet away on the platform floor. The composure that had defined the man since they'd landed in Relica — the slow deliberateness, the managed pauses, the tall man's particular authority of unhurriedness — was gone, replaced by something rawer and less curated. Something that had been there under the performance the whole time and had finally run out of performance to hide behind.
The crowd had pressed inward when Crane struck Diane. Rand could feel it — not just see it, but feel it, the collective forward movement of thousands of people responding to some signal he couldn't identify, their presence registering on his skin as a kind of pressure. He lay on the platform floor and looked up into a wall of faces, each of them turned toward the platform, each of them attentive in the specific, unnerving way they'd been attentive since he'd first walked through Relica.
