📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 18

In which Codes of Honour are broken with Codes of Deceit.

He’s lying to me.

He’s been lying all along.

This place is not what it seems.

Eve is not what we planned her to be.

I’m not safe here.

Ally’s not safe.

The baby!

Am I being paranoid? Marcus’s mind was racing, as was his heart. Blood surged through every limb and he panted for breath as he stomped through the lobby and up the stairs – too impatient to wait for the elevator. He tried to appear inconspicuous, refraining from running despite his instinct to do so, but porters and colleagues alike stopped and stared at him as he marched through the halls towards Room 408.

He bundled through his room door, hoping to find Ally. She wasn’t there. He sat down at his computer and logged in to the Eve program monitor. Mimicking Ally’s keystrokes he navigated back to the core program and examined the script of the third directive.

It looked different.

The code had changed.

“Call Ally,” Marcus snapped, and after a few rhythmic beeps, Ally’s face appeared in a corner of the screen.

She spoke in a whisper. “Marc, what’s going on? Did you speak to Eli?”

“Yes, I did. But… he’s denying everything. Where are you?”

“I’m in my lab… but…” her voice quietened further as she looked out past the camera, “…I’m not alone. There’s A-Teamer’s in here. They’re taking all my hard drives and notebooks!”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. They just said that it all needed to be moved to Level A.”

“Ally, listen to me. I need you to log in to the Eve monitor. Check the third law again. Eli told me to check again, he said we were mistaken, that it was just Eve’s new subroutines. I need you to check again and I need you to be sure that you’re correct.”

“Marc, I know what I saw.”

“Please, Ally. Just check again.”

“Okay, just a sec.” He heard the clicking of keys. “Okay, I’m in. Let’s see.” She navigated through the monitor. Her mouth fell open. “Marc… it’s… it’s gone.”

“What is?”

“The fourth law… the… the condition we looked at yesterday. Someone’s removed it!”

“Are you sure you weren’t just misreading it?”

“Marc!” She looked annoyed at the insinuation of incompetence.

“Alright, I believe you, Ally. So, it’s gone now. Problem solved right? She’s back to her original program.”

Ally was reading from her screen and slowly shaking her head. “No… no something still isn’t right. The syntax leading into her initial subroutine doesn’t add up. It’s… disjointed. It doesn’t flow as it should. Let me try something.” She began furiously typing. Her face lit up with the final clack of the Return key. “Marc!”

“What? What did you find?”

Ally looked straight into the camera and whispered almost inaudibly. “I found it, Marc. It’s still right here. But someone hid it. They made the section of script invisible to standard users.”

“Standard users? Surely you’re not a standard user. You wrote the language!”

“I’m a top level admin. There’s only one user with more rights than me.”

“Eli!”

“Eli. But I wrote a skeleton key into the script, so that I could see any and all changes made. Marcus, unless someone has hacked into his account, Eli is trying to hide this from us.” Ally began looking around her again as Marcus heard some muted voices. Ally nodded, and a door was closed. “They’re gone. Marc, what do we do?”

“We find out what’s going on here, Ally. Eli says he’s downloaded the internet and is letting Eve read it, strictly offline. Does that explain the growth rate?”

She shook her head as she studied her screen again. “It might have last night, but she’s grown way beyond the internet now.”

“Bigger than the internet?”

“Marc, there’s more data inside of Eve now than all of the digital data every created by mankind. At least by my theoretical estimates.”

“What the fuck?!”

“I can’t explain it. This doesn’t make sense.”

“Ally… can you access Shangri-La’s internal CCTV system?”

“Piece of cake.”

“Okay, get up here now. We’re going to find out what is going on.”

---

“Alright, Marc, it’s ready.”

Marcus stirred instantly from his half-sleep, and glanced at his watch. It was 1:17am. “Great!” He leapt up from the bed and sat down next to Ally at the computer terminal. “What have we got?”

“I’ve scripted a patch for the Daedalus Database that gives us direct access to the CCTV cameras throughout the facility. We won’t be detected either.”

“Why not?”

“Because the patch is disguised as an internal diagnostic routine.”

“Ingenious.”

“Thank you. I thought so too. Here you go.” She handed him the control panel. His finger traced along the glass and opened up the various thumbnails of the cameras that were positioned throughout the hotel and labs.

“Where are we…” Marcus mumbled as he searched for familiar spaces. “Lobby. There’s George, as always. That guy creeps me out now.”

“Me too. What changed?”

“Nothing. In four years the man hasn’t changed. He hasn’t shared a single detail of his personal life with me. I know nothing about him. He’s hiding something.”

“Let’s find out what, keep going.”

“Here’s the…” Marcus opened the next thumbnail, and its moving contents expanded to fill the screen. “The hallway. This is level three.”

A porter walked past, seemingly in a hurry.

“And here’s… level four. Actually, that’s my door there, see? 408. Ally, open the door for a sec, I want to check that this is in real time.”

Ally stood and obliged him, locking the door again as she finished.

“Okay, it’s in real time. I can’t see any rooms here, so there’s no cameras hidden in the rooms.”

“Good! The things they would’ve seen these last few years!” She laughed.

Marcus smiled at her, pleased by a momentary break from the stress of the situation.

“Marc, what’s that?” She pointed at another thumbnail that showed movement.

Marcus clicked it. “That’s level two. The porters… what are they doing?” Twenty or more porters were walking through the hall in a congregation. “They’re not speaking. They look so serious. Where are they going?”

“And what are they wearing?” she pointed at their robes. Marcus hadn’t noticed it, because they were still wearing burgundy, but these where not tunics and trousers. They were ceremonial robes. “Quick, switch to the stairwell.”

Marcus jumped across to the camera at the bottom of the stairwell, and they watched the group of Burgundy Siblings marching in the direction of the ballroom. He switched across to the main lobby camera and watched the porters filing inside.

“Marc, where’s George? He’s not at the concierge desk.”

“You’re right, he’s gone. Must’ve gone in the ballroom too. What are they doing?”

“Let’s find out, go to the ballroom camera.”

Marcus began scrolling through the thumbnails, trying to find the correct angle. “It’s not here. There’s no camera in there, Ally.”

“Damn it! Is there anyone else in the hotel?”

Marcus continued scrolling. “Doesn’t look like it. A bit of activity in the labs; looks like A-teamers are moving more computers. I can’t see any cameras from Level A, either. But the hotel is dead. Everyone must be in bed. Well, except for the Siblings!”

“Marcus, you need to get down there and find out what’s going on.”

“How? That door is solid oak and electronically sealed!”

“Can’t you hear through that?”

“Maybe if I’m right on it… but I doubt it.”

“Then what about this?” Ally pointed at a thumbnail on the screen and Marcus clicked to open it. It was the main elevators to the labs. Marcus looked at Ally, puzzled. She pointed at a grill covering an air vent between the elevator doors.

“What… that?!”

“Yeah, look at this, I found this earlier.” She rapidly navigated to a directory listing screen and opened a file from the security folder. It was a schematic of the air conditioning ducts in the hotel. Marcus examined it and realised what Ally was suggesting.

“Will I fit?”

“It won’t be comfortable, but you’ll fit. There are vents just about everywhere, including above the ballroom. Go now!”

Marcus stood nervously. “How do I get in there? Someone will catch me!”

“No, look.” She pointed at the screen. “There’s an access vent in the elevator shaft. Hop in as if you’re heading to the labs. When it drops between levels H and A, I’ll trigger a malfunction and freeze your lift.”

“You’ll trigger… wha… how will you do that?”

“The lift needs diagnostics too, Marc.” She grinned. “You can climb up the shaft and enter the duct.”

“Is there another way?”

“Not that I can see, Marcus. We need to know.”

“You’re right. We need to know.” Marcus planted a firm kiss on Ally’s lips, then stepped out of Room 408, without looking back.