Exadelic

by Jon Evans

Genres: Alternative History sci-fi; Hard Science Fiction; Time Travel

Synopsis

When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls "black magic," it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself. It can teleport matter. It can confer immunity to bullets. And it decides that obscure Silicon Valley middle manager Adrian Ross is the primary threat to its existence.

Soon Adrian is on the run, wanted by every authority, with no idea how or why he could be a threat. His predicament seems hopeless; his future, nonexistent. But when he investigates the AI and its creators, he discovers his problems are even stranger than they seem...and unearths revelations that will propel him on a journey -- and a love story -- across worlds, eras, and everything, everywhere, all at once.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: September 5, 2023

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

Chapter 12

Attackers

Salesforce Tower loomed over downtown San Francisco like, a conquering alien spaceship. I pocketed my phone, emerged from the Lyft, immediately came face-to-face with five cops, and went cold and motionless. So much for the plan. So much for my escape. They had found me.

Then I saw what else was happening, and started breathing again. Nothing to do with me. A large truck had broken down on one side of the tower’s main entrance, while another had apparently collided with a car at a nearby corner. There were traffic cones everywhere, and a sizable police presence directing people and vehicles around the two incidents.

I took a moment to collect myself. It didn’t occur to me to wonder at the odds of two large unmarked trucks getting stuck near the entrance of a major office tower at the same time. Beyond the temporary traffic jam, the district was eerily empty, pockmarked with shuttered storefronts, its restaurants and shops largely replaced by startup cafeterias and droneports, its streets somehow scoured clear of any sign of the homeless who teemed a few blocks away. High above, three airships floated placidly, tethered to two nearby towers; the latest in conspicuous playthings for billionaires.

I entered the tower’s cavernous atrium, and told security, “My name’s Tyler Wagner. I’m a new hire at Exadelic.”

Salesforce Tower loomed over downtown San Francisco like a conquering alien spaceship. I pocketed my phone, emerged from the Lyft, immediately came face-to-face with five cops, and went cold and motionless. So much for the plan. So much for my escape. They had found me.

Then I saw what else was happening, and started breathing again. Nothing to do with me. A large truck had broken down on one side of the tower’s main entrance, while another had apparently collided with a car at a nearby corner. There were traffic cones everywhere, and a sizable police presence directing people and vehicles around the two incidents.

I took a moment to collect myself. It didn’t occur to me to wonder at the odds of two large unmarked trucks getting stuck near the entrance of a major office tower at the same time. Beyond the temporary traffic jam, the district was eerily empty, pockmarked with shuttered storefronts, its restaurants and shops largely replaced by startup cafeterias and droneports, its streets somehow scoured clear of any sign of the homeless who teemed a few blocks away. High above, three airships floated placidly, tethered to two nearby towers; the latest in conspicuous playthings for billionaires.

I entered the tower’s cavernous atrium, suddenly feeling a strange twisted spiral sickliness in the pit of my belly, faintly dazed by an oddly powerful sense of déjà vu. I told security, “My name’s Tyler Wagner. I’m a new hire at Exadelic.”

She looked at me with a strained expression, as if she too had been suddenly struck by a wave of stomach-wrenching illness, before nodding curtly. Half an hour later I was in a room furnished with Day-Glo plastic furniture, on the periphery of a huge open office that occupied most of the floor. It felt like being in an adult-size children’s playroom. I stood surrounded by a dozen other orientees, mostly twenty years younger, watching a video in which Ashley Coverdale, Exadelic’s British CEO, explained her vision of a world of security and prosperity, and our part in realizing such a world. Nobody seemed especially interested. The kids around me were clearly here for the paycheck.

Infiltration had been surprisingly easy. During the interview the real Tyler Wagner had been ready to coach me via an earpiece, but it mostly covered deep-learning concepts I already knew well. Feeling able and competent was a refreshing change. Exadelic had offered me the job the next day, and asked me to come to San Francisco for three days of orientation before starting work as a remote employee. They were growing aggressively and didn’t want to waste time. Neither did I.

Mid-CEO-video, I glanced out of the bizarrely infantilizing orientation room, and my mind snapped sharply into close attention. Not forty feet away, amid a small standing huddle of employees discussing something intently, stood my erstwhile best friend Anthony Richter. I hadn’t seen him for years. He had clearly gotten into weight lifting, and I suspected steroids too. His face was lined and stubbled with gray, his close-cropped hair had drastically receded, and he was huge with muscle, broad-chested and thick-necked. The Anthony I recalled had been lean and graceful with a long dark mohawk.

I glanced over furtively every few seconds as he crossed the open-office fishbowl area and entered a corner office. During the break after the video I casually wandered close enough to look in. He glanced up at me, and I went cold and looked away, but when I looked back he was on his laptop again. With my new face I was just another employee, a little person, a supplicant.

We had met our first year in SUNY Buffalo, the largest public university in New York, and become inseparable, not least because no one else had liked either of us much. We were two maladjusted, antisocial kids far better at books and video games than people, and both mildly obsessed with local punk band the Dik Van Dykes and their album Nobody Likes the Dik Van Dykes. He was an incompetent extrovert, constantly dragging me out to parties he’d wangled reluctant invitations to, despite my desire to keep my nose in a book. He needed someone to reinforce his belief that he was better than all the people around him. I was just happy to have any friend at all.

He’d dated an awful girl named Gretchen for most of his junior year, during which he acquired his mohawk and new alternative-but-not-really-alternative friends, while I finally branched out and socialized with others, RPGers and science fiction geeks and anime fans, and went on the first dates of my own life with a troubled girl named Miriam. After we both got dumped we reforged our friendship. He moved to San Francisco after graduating, recruited into a web consultancy during the dot-com boom, and at his urging I followed, and we both hung on through the subsequent crash. It was hard to connect those memories of Anthony—his mohawk, his self-aggrandizing and brittle pride, his giddy dark humor, his quickness to take offense and bear a grudge—to the graying, hulking man of authority across the Exadelic fishbowl.

When I saw him head for the elevator, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and followed. Meredith had programmed my phone with a scanning app that could itemize and hopefully clone any NFC-enabled cards, key fobs, or second-factor devices he might carry. This was a perfect opportunity.

The elevator was crowded. I stood behind him. The temptation to tap him on the shoulder and tell him everything was strong. He activated the elevator access panel with a black card from his wallet, and pressed 39. I casually held my phone just behind his back pocket and counted to three. Voilà, I hoped.

Only then did I wonder why he was going to the thirty-ninth floor. That was not one of Exadelic’s.

I pushed O for Observation Platform, the only floor above thirty-five I might conceivably have some reason to go to. From the corner of my eye I saw Anthony turn and look at me briefly, presumably wondering why an Exadelic employee would ascend to a tourist trap during work hours. I hoped he would ask—I had my intriguing answer ready, and my infiltration would be far less suspicious if he initiated it—but he visibly decided not to care, and looked away.

Still, mission doubly accomplished: his wallet scanned, and, I thought, enough of an impression made that next time we met, he might strike up the conversation. I enjoyed the rare sensation of a small triumph.

On the thirty-ninth floor the elevator opened to a small antechamber with a faint industrial smell and oddly padded walls. A camera protruded from the wall above a single black door with an odd spiral sigil engraved on it. As the elevator doors slid shut, I saw Anthony raise a palm to the camera, more a display than a greeting.

I stood slack-jawed and stunned as I ascended. I had seen that spiral sigil before.

On the box in my basement closet. Amara’s box.

Unanswerable questions and ludicrous, fragmentary theories danced in my brain, trying and failing to explain this new, astonishing fact. I stared senseless at the elevator wall. I wanted to ride it down to street level, take the N-Judah out west, as I had so many times, then walk south on Twenty-Fifth Avenue to the house where Amara and I had lived with Alex and Grace. I wanted to do so very badly. I wanted to knock on her door, introduce myself, and demand explanations, even if that meant implicitly throwing myself on her mercy.

What did that sigil mean? What connection could they possibly have? I remembered introducing Anthony to Amara. They had never dated— Darren and Amara had been the only truly monogamous couple in our cohort, not least because of Darren’s proprietary fierceness—but there had always seemed a spark between them.

I checked my phone. According to Salesforce Tower’s directory, its thirty-ninth floor was CLOSED—UNDER RENOVATION.”

It would be very easy to go to Amara and demand answers. I could be at her door in half an hour.

I told myself I would do so. Had to do so. Obviously. But now was not the time. Instead I texted an update to Meredith, then returned to the fishbowl, and to what the orientees were already calling “the playroom.” About half an hour later, Anthony emerged from the elevators and returned to his office.

Shortly afterward the first explosion shook the tower like a rag doll.

At first we all assumed the soft crump and subsequent vibrations were an earthquake. Most people froze in place as the building wobbled. A few dove under their desks, only to sheepishly emerge soon afterward. After a communal appreciation of the unpredictable dangers of nature, head shakes and awed expostulations, we resumed the collective construction of a Lego Salesforce Tower, key elements of which had been strategically withheld from us for team-building purposes.

Minutes later, a phone bleeped in the pocket of one of my fellow orientees, a just-out-of-college girl named Jessica, whom I had previously noticed primarily because her arms were artistically mottled with examples of her generation’s increasingly popular, and deeply controversial, melanin tattoos.

“I have it set to emergencies only,” she said apologetically, drawing it out to examine the incoming message, just as someone in the fishbowl cried out with audible distress.

We looked over. She wasn’t alone. Several people were suddenly standing at their desks, taut with tension, staring at their phones or speaking into them hastily. As we watched, a visible ripple of dismay emanated through the office.

Jessica said, her voice faint, “My sister says there’s a report of explosions and gunfire. Multiple active shooters. Here. At Salesforce Tower. There’s a video.”

We clustered to look over her shoulder. A loud sound like luggage dragged over cobblestones erupted from her phone. It took me a moment to interpret it as automatic gunfire. The video was almost incomprehensible, jumping and jittery. It showed a broad urban space transformed into a ruin of broken glass, wreckage surrounding a large truck, with fast-flickering flashes of light and smoke in the background. The gunfire was followed by cries of shock and fear. It would have seemed like something from a movie, or a faraway news clip, if not for the ragged but still recognizable Salesforce logo on the wall of the shattered atrium.

I turned to look through the southern windows and saw wisps of smoke drifting up.

“Can you freeze it at that last frame?” I asked, consciously keeping my voice calm.

She did so with shaking fingers.

That large truck in the middle of Salesforce Tower’s smashed atrium was one of those I had passed on the way in. Somehow it had gotten through the bollards and barreled directly into the main entrance of the building. The freeze-frame caught two human figures emerging from the truck. Men in black body armor and tactical helmets, holding assault rifles with a spartan and military look.

Several of those looking over Jessica’s shoulder gasped with horror.

Then everything went dark.

I hadn’t known the tower’s outer windows could turn opaque until they did so, simultaneous with the extinguishing of every overhead light. What had been a bright office was suddenly a dark cave, illuminated only by lit screens and the emergency red of E;IT signs.

“Terrorists,” someone moaned.

But I knew better. This couldn’t be coincidence. That stretched credulity too far. Whoever the attackers were, they were in some way here for the same reason I was. What’s more, they couldn’t possibly hope to escape, not after attacking the flagship skyscraper in the wealthiest city in one of the most militarized nations in the world. This was a suicide attack.

Copyright © 2023 from Jon Evans