Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 2
SCRAPE PREPARATION.
RAND_
Present Day
"What do you mean they're coming? Who? Another Tracer?"
Rand was practically yelling, trying to be heard over the increasing drone of their Tracer's engine as it picked up speed and banked hard over the city gates. The craft shuddered with the acceleration, the hull vibrating at a frequency he felt in his back teeth.
People were streaming out into the desert now, pouring through gaps in the perimeter wall like water finding its level, screaming as explosions rocked the buildings and homes in Umutsuz. He'd never seen such chaos — not in person, not at this scale — and it only made him want to yell louder, as if volume could impose some order on what was happening outside.
"No, not a Tracer at all," Diane yelled back.
She was standing next to him, crouching into the open cockpit where their pilot was stationed, working the controls with a focused efficiency that made the chaos around him feel slightly less total. The pilot had rotated the display module — normally positioned for a copilot — toward the doorway, angling it so Diane could read it from where she stood.
"What then? How are there Unders following us?"
"They're not Unders, Rand," Diane said. "They're — I don't know. Smaller. Faster, too. Look —" She held up one finger and pointed at the screen.
It was a top-down display, pulled from a dedicated regional satellite Diane had synced with their Tracer. The feed followed their flightpath in immaculate detail, rendering with almost instantaneous updates an extreme-definition view of the terrain outside — rock and sand and the receding edge of Umutsuz falling away behind them. He watched their machine flying low over the endless expanse below, alone at the center of the screen, a single moving point in a vast stillness.
"We weren't sure what they were when they entered imaging space," Diane said, "but we placed a tracker on them. Seems like they've used that tracker to track us back."
The view shifted to a wider angle, pulling back automatically and clicking between zoom settings, and Rand saw what she was talking about. Their Tracer sat roughly a kilometer from the city now, and coming in fast from the northern edge of the screen were three smaller streaks — thin, purposeful lines cutting across the sand. The objects moved with a directness and speed that screamed explosive projectiles, but Rand had spent enough time in rooms where assumptions got people killed to hold off on the obvious conclusion.
"How fast are they moving?" he asked. "And why haven't we started evading? What about defense systems?"
Diane shook her head. "We're not sure exactly, but they're moving fast enough that they'll probably be on us in under a minute." She paused, watching the screen. "We can't just start shooting at things out here, Rand. This is no-man's land as far as we're concerned — even a simple flare drop can read as overt aggression to the wrong set of eyes."
"Any ideas?"
"As to what they are, or what we're going to do about them?"
"Yeah."
Diane shook her head again, then turned toward the cockpit. "Lansing, can you take us closer to the ground?"
Rand saw the back of the pilot's head nod once — a single, unhurried dip, the motion of a man who had heard worse requests. He felt a slight tilt ripple through the deck beneath his feet as the craft angled down toward the desert floor.
"Locked on horizon positioning," Lansing called back. "Ten meters."
"Good," Diane said. "Keep getting it lower until we're at five. Intervals of thirty seconds."
"Ma'am."
Diane turned to look at Rand, and something in her expression shifted — the operational composure was still there, but underneath it was something else. Something she was managing. "Jon. We've got other problems." She held out a small headset. He took it and fitted it over his right ear, the earpiece settling into place with a soft click.
Apparently she wants me to hear this. Rand swallowed. "Yeah, I —"
"Keep an eye on the screen for me," she said. "Let me know when they get close enough to fire on us. Assuming that's what they're trying to do."
He turned back to the display and fixed his attention on it, tracking the three incoming objects while tuning his other ear to the conversation beginning behind him in the belly of the Tracer.
Diane's voice came through the headset, small and tinny, stripped of the room it usually occupied. "Myers. Hey. How are you?"
He couldn't hear the response — just the shape of it, the cadence, not the words.
"Yes, there's a lot to talk about, and we're — yes, I assure you you're going to be brought up to speed. But these wounds. Your sunburn." A pause as she waited. "Yes, I will explain that too. I —" Another pause, longer this time. "I'm sorry, Myers."
Rand thought he heard her voice shake on those last three words. Damn, he thought. Damn you, Myers.
"No, I swear to God, no. Listen — we don't have time for this right now. I need to know what you remember. Can you talk to me about it? About the last three days?"
On the screen, the three objects reached the outer edge of their Tracer's air wake. Each of the three lines shifted slightly in response, adjusting course with a precision that wasn't random, wasn't ballistic — and then fell in behind one another, forming a tight single-file formation trailing the Tracer's path. Rand frowned.
Too small to have anyone inside them, he thought. But they're not going to fire on us with a formation like that.
He was wrong.
The first object, viewed from directly above, seemed to simply explode and disappear in midair — there one frame, gone the next. A second later a thinner line appeared where it had been, bright and deliberate, and Rand watched it advance and reach the Tracer. The second of the three objects accelerated smoothly into the gap, taking the position where the first had been. Everything about it was precise. Coordinated. Nothing about it was accidental.
Weird.
There was no impact. No sudden jolt or change in their flightpath, no shudder through the hull. Rand looked away from the display to the pilot. Lansing was clearly struggling with something — his hands working the controls, his body language shifting from competent to careful to something closer to alarmed.
"Control, I'm zero systems up." His voice was flat and professional, the way pilots got when they were working hard not to sound like what they were feeling. "Repeat — zero systems up."
Rand turned to see if Diane had heard the distress call. She was already beside him, one hand on his shoulder as she leaned past to point at the screen.
The second object disappeared the same way the first had. Another white line advanced on their position. Diane was already shouting at the pilot before the line finished its approach. "It's a tandem charge! Mechanical first, comm second, and —"
"Control, I'm zero comm. Do you read me?"
"Lansing!" The pilot turned around. His face was steady, waiting. "Comms are down," Diane said. "They're targeting us in stages — there's no defense architecture for a sequenced attack like this."
He nodded once, absorbing it. "Unders?" He reached up and adjusted the baseball cap that was a permanent fixture on the top of his head, tugging the brim down a fraction further. Rand still wasn't entirely sure how the man could see with the thing pulled that far over his face, but he'd never seen Lansing miss anything.
"No, not this time," Diane said. "This is still supposed to be prototype tech. There's no way it's in Under camps yet — another year at minimum before field deployment."
"Well, whatever it is," Lansing said, "they've taken us completely offline. I can't steer, accelerate, decelerate — nothing. We're locked onto this vector."
Rand was watching the third and final object on the screen. It had settled into a position directly behind them and was holding it — not gaining, not falling back, just pacing them with an uncanny steadiness. "What's the last one do?"
Diane looked at him, then at the screen. She frowned — not the frown of someone frightened, but of someone genuinely uncertain, working a problem she hadn't encountered outside of documentation. "I'm not sure. I thought they were designed as roving satellites. Mobile network generators, essentially — they throw up a localized field and move with whatever they're assigned to. I've only read about the concept. Never seen one in —"
The Tracer jolted.
Rand felt himself slide sideways across the deck. Diane slid into him and he grabbed her by the waist, bracing his legs wide and pulling her weight against him as they both fought to find their footing.
"Vector's changed." Lansing's voice was tight but controlled. "Velocity and direction. We're heading —" He read off a string of numbers from the analog compass mounted low in the dashboard, the old-fashioned dial face a deliberate redundancy for exactly this kind of moment.
The Tracer groaned and shifted again beneath them, shuddering as it accelerated into its new heading with a force that didn't feel like any of their own engines.
"Is that thing doing what I think it's doing?" Rand asked.
They were both watching the screen now, Diane still steadied against his side.
"I believe it is," she said quietly. "I think it's driving us somewhere."
RAVI_
"What is that?"
Ravi's voice cracked as he tried to sit up and look at the woman standing over him. She was passing something slowly above his body, holding it about a foot from his chest, moving it with the practiced patience of someone who had done this thousands of times and no longer needed to think about the motion. She paused the device above his head, tilting it slightly to read something on the opposite face of it. He watched her eyes track across the readout.
His elbow found purchase beneath him and he pushed down, trying to force himself to a sitting position.
He yelped in pain and fell back.
The bed? He turned his head — the only part of his body that wasn't screaming — left and right, and realized he was lying on a stiff cot. He was inside a tent, a large one, and the air inside was thick and hot in the way of enclosed spaces baking in direct sun, the kind of heat that had no circulation to it and settled into everything it touched. Rows of cots lined each side of the long sand-brown tent. A few individuals dressed like the woman standing over him shuffled up and down the rows, each administering their own version of the same slow, scanning motion with the same device. The rhythm of it was almost meditative — wave, pause, read, move on.
He recognized the devices now that he could see what they were being used for. The "magic wand" was really a miniaturized multipurpose diagnosis machine, capable of basic internal examination and advanced handheld MRI scanning. They were all colloquially referred to as MediLathes, after the brand that had reached the market first, and as a decade-old invention each new iteration of the wand had grown smaller and packed in more features useful for field work — tissue density mapping, fluid analysis, fracture detection, neural response indexing. Things that used to require a room full of equipment could now be done with something that fit in a coat pocket.
"Where am I?"
He asked the second question after arriving at his own answer to the first. His caretaker passed the MediLathe over him once more, checked the readout on its reverse face with the same expression she'd used every other time — neutral, professional, giving nothing back — and moved on to the next cot.
"Alright then," Ravi muttered. "Thanks for the help."
He waited until she had moved two beds down, putting enough distance between them that she wouldn't notice, and then slowly swung his legs over the edge of the cot. The pain that followed was excruciating — a deep, structural complaint from somewhere in his midsection that radiated outward — but the distance to the floor was closer than he'd expected. The dirt hit his feet and felt cool against his soles, which surprised him. He knew it was baking outside. Everything in here suggested baking outside. But the ground held its own temperature.
He was sideways on the cot now, his upper body still roughly aligned with the bed while his feet rested flat on the floor at an angle, stretched away from him. He stayed like that for a moment, breathing. He wiggled experimentally, trying to take inventory of the stiffness and determine whether the injuries were as bad as they felt or whether pain was lying to him the way it sometimes did when you first woke up.
What happened?
He couldn't remember at first — the events that had brought him here were absent, the way things sometimes were in the moments after waking, before the brain assembled itself back into sequence. But as the grogginess lifted, the scenes returned in pieces. Myers Asher was there — that much surfaced first, the image arriving before any context for it. And then a little later other people, and there were Tracers — a Tracer — somewhere behind them.
He remembered gunshots. He remembered falling. Myers screamed and tried to put up a fight, or — did he? He wasn't sure. There were no images attached to that part of the memory. Just sound, and flashes of light, and pain. A lot of pain.
Am I being scraped again?
He remembered that feeling all too well. It had been only a week after he'd received the Biological Storage Enhancement — the BSE that everyone on his team was getting fitted for. He'd held off for as long as he could manage, watching the others absorb the advantage it gave them, watching the gap between what they could do and what he could do widen session by session. Eventually he couldn't keep up. The other hackers and programmers he ran with were operating at a level the unenhanced human brain simply couldn't match without help.
So he submitted. He got the enhancement.
The procedure itself was quick and largely painless — cleaner than he'd expected — but he knew what was really happening underneath it. The System was fitting him. Running its assessment. Determining whether Ravi warranted integration into its ecosystem or whether he belonged on the discard pile with everything else the System had decided wasn't worth maintaining.
He got his answer a week later.
His terminal blinked an urgent message — his pID, followed by a single word: REASSIGNMENT.
Shit.
He'd immediately set up a camera to document what would happen next, the way his team had been instructed. Anyone who received a reassignment notification had a duty to the rest of the group: document the process so the others could learn from it, could prepare, could understand what the System actually did and how it did it. The camera he owned had a tracking feature built into a small adhesive disk. He stuck the disk to the collar of his shirt, aimed the camera at the area of the room where he typically sat, and waited.
He found the video capture on his desktop the following day.
The deactivation drone had entered his home sometime in the night and begun the mobile scraping process while he slept. The extraction had taken roughly an hour — the BSE removed one millimeter at a time, drawn back through whatever pathway it had arrived by, leaving no mark he could see afterward. Ravi watched the footage in stunned silence, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, barely breathing.
He watched himself get up. Walk into the kitchen. Make a frozen pizza — removing it from the packaging, reading the instructions on the back, waiting the correct number of minutes, plating it with the kind of automatic tidiness that said habit rather than intention. He watched himself carry it back to the couch and sit down and turn on a rerun of his favorite show, the one he'd probably seen a dozen times. He watched himself eat the pizza and laugh at the right moments and set the empty plate on the cushion beside him.
All while the drone did its work.
He couldn't remember a single moment of it.
RAVI_
But he did remember watching the video. And he remembered the way he felt after.
He'd woken up a day later, drooling onto his shirt, and stumbled over to his station to start working. The muscle memory of it was still intact — sit down, open the terminal, start typing — but when he got there, he'd realized he'd already watched the video. Already forwarded it to the team. Already done the thing he'd set out to do, and he had no memory of doing it.
After that, the pressure started.
It built inside his head slowly at first, then with a momentum that outpaced anything he had a word for. It was worse than any migraine he'd ever had — worse by an order of magnitude that made the comparison feel insulting to the new thing — and any medication he took only amplified it, as if his brain were rejecting the interference. He spent the day on the couch, too awake to sleep and too dizzy to accomplish anything, the pain sitting behind his eyes like something with weight to it, something physical that shouldn't have been there.
The headache lasted another full day. He spent most of it stumbling between rooms, one hand on the wall, trying to navigate his own apartment like a man learning a new space. Simple tasks became negotiations. The distance between his bedroom and the kitchen felt variable in a way that had nothing to do with the floor plan.
Then, on the third day after the scraping, the headache lifted.
It didn't fade gradually. It simply stopped, the way a sound stops — there, and then not there — and he found he could walk in a straight line again, could track objects with his eyes without the world sliding away from him. He felt different. Slightly more aware of his surroundings than he was used to being, as if someone had adjusted the resolution on the world and forgotten to tell him. Like a high, but cleaner than any high he'd experienced. More architectural.
The feeling didn't recede the way the headache had. After a few more days, Ravi understood that this was his new normal. A slightly altered state of mind — not impaired, not enhanced in any way he could quantify, just different. Shifted. And with it came the realization that he no longer had any real desire to sit in front of a terminal and type back and forth with his team all day.
He wanted more. He wasn't sure more of what, exactly, but the certainty of it was absolute.
He'd never been someone who longed for change — change had always been something that happened to him rather than something he sought. But he found himself standing in his apartment one afternoon staring at the door, and then he was walking through it, and then he didn't look back.
