I embraced her.
After a moment, we came apart.
She looked up into my eyes. I saw compassion. Pity. Mostly fear. But that was natural in her position—seeing me for the first time in over a year, wondering what I’d become. Wasn’t it?
“You look different.”
“Made a few changes.”
Edwin said, “Shall we?”
“I’ve got everything ready,” she said. “Just what you asked for, Logan.”
We climbed the stairs to the second floor, which housed the MYSTIC servers. The corridors were silent. Lights, on motion-activated sensors, flickered on above us as we moved down an empty hallway.
“I’ve got you set up in here,” Nadine said, opening the door to a small, sterile office. The walls were bare. No personal flourishes. It had been empty for some time. The desk was clear except for the two desktops and keyboards I’d requested.
Because of the threat of cyberattacks and the ultra-sensitive data sets at play, MYSTIC could only be accessed via the stand-alone terminals deep within Constitution Center.
“You’re logged in on my credentials,” Nadine said. “What else do you need?”
“How long do I have?”
“You should probably be out of the building before six A.M.,” Edwin said. “We’ll keep an eye on the corridor. I don’t think anyone will recognize you, but it’d be ideal if as few people as possible know you’re back.”
“Want me to stay in here with you?” Nadine asked. “Second set of hands.”
“Thanks, but probably better if I work alone on this part.”
They left, closing the door after them.
Before my second upgrade, I would’ve been overwhelmed at the prospect of finding Kara with MYSTIC—so many potential avenues of exploration. I wasn’t so much looking for her now as confirming that my theory was right. I suspected that Kara was working out of either New York City or Miami. I would know momentarily.
I set to work, dividing my consciousness so I could type on each keyboard simultaneously.
At my fingertips, I now had one of the most powerful search engines ever created, and if I could cross-reference a handful of curated data groups, I would find her.
First things first—she would need a virologist. I had more of a background in genetics and virology than Kara did. Even now, as I was approaching her second-upgrade threshold, I would still need a virologist to engineer the perfect virus to carry the upgrade.
The database returned 378 names. I filtered the group down to 24 ranked candidates based on contributing factors that could lead to criminality. Since they were already in the system, they all had recent photos I could use to scrape the CCTV databases. I labeled the images from the likely-to-be-involved virologist data group “Block A.”
At the same time, on the other computer, I was building my second group. In Glasgow, the man I’d performed an emergency tracheotomy on had told me he’d been a friend of Kara’s from her military days. And while Kara and I were staying at the motel in West Virginia, I’d asked if she was still in touch with the people who rescued her in Myanmar. She’d answered, “They’re some of my best friends.”
She had upgraded Andrew, and I suspected she’d done the same for at least some of her other military cohorts. I could see now, looking back, that these were the only people in the world she really trusted.
Andrew had been on the team that freed her from the Myanmar militants. His full name was Andrew Kegan. There had been seven other Green Berets on Kara’s rescue mission. Two were KIA during the op, but I ran checks on the remaining five with the clearance Edwin had gotten me for the DoD servers.
Nathaniel Jacks. Alexis Hurley. Rodney Viana. Deshawn Brown. And Madeline Ortega. All still alive.
Nathaniel Jacks was presently stationed in Pyongyang. Alexis Hurley was in jail in Arizona （again） following a drunk and disorderly arrest.
Madeline, Deshawn, and Rodney had all been honorably discharged.
Deshawn Brown’s social media posts suggested he was recently divorced and living in Pensacola, Florida.
Rodney Viana was happily married and in his tenth year of law enforcement with the Columbus, Ohio, PD.
Madeline Ortega drove trucks for Freightliner.
I ripped as many photos as I could find of Ortega, Viana, Kegan, and Brown, and labeled this data group “Block B.”
Reaching into my backpack, I pulled out the photo-realistic pencil sketch I’d made of Kara yesterday. This was exactly how she’d looked at our mother’s house in Colorado, with her updated facial modifications. Kara was “Block C.”
To finalize her transmissible upgrade, Kara would have to design a synthetic viral vector and transfect it into helper cells, which would then produce a packaged and potentially infectious virus, purified by column. She would then need to test it to make sure it performed as intended, with a high level of virulence and transmissibility in humans. Arguably, this was the hardest step, and one that would require a willing test group.
“Block D” comprised return targets on former scientists in our system who had contributing factors （terminal illness, debt, markers for radicalization, hard-line environmentalist leanings） that might lead them to risk their lives by becoming Kara’s guinea pigs. Or her super-spreaders—her frontline fighters she would send to the ends of the earth. I got a ranked list of 291 candidates and uploaded their most recent photos.
I wrote my master query: Return target = any surveillance camera that has captured images of any element of Block A + any element of Block B + Block C + any element of Block D, within time range T—twelve months.
I also wanted to know if a ticket had been purchased for anyone in Block D （the potential test group and super-spreaders）。
I wrote a subquery: Return target = airline; hyperloop; bus; train tickets purchased by or on behalf of Block D, within time range T—twelve months.
The left screen flashed up my master query results. It was a list of CCTV cameras’ serial numbers. I called up a satellite map of America and overlaid the serial numbers on their corresponding locations.
While there were a few returns sprinkled around the country, an inordinate number were clustered around the edges of New York City. There were none in Miami.
I stripped all fields except for my virologists in Block A. Out of twenty-four possible virologist candidates, two had been captured on multiple cameras and occasions in and around New York City.
I did the same for Kara’s special forces crew in Block B and got multiple hits for Madeline Ortega, Deshawn Brown, and Rodney Viana, in and around New York City.
Now for my sketch of Kara. Five days ago, her face had been captured in Durango, Colorado. After that, nothing. There was a regional hyperloop station there. She had probably stayed in a motel and augmented her features before hopping a pod out of Colorado. And the face I’d seen in our mother’s lodge had probably been modified there, which would explain why there were no hits on that image prior to Colorado.
For Block D, the viral test group and super-spreaders, out of 291 possible candidates, I saw multiple camera hits in and around New York City on 38 people. The number seemed low. Was this because the super-spreaders had yet to arrive in New York to receive their transmissible upgrades? Maybe those 38 were her test group.