Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

holo-screen in front of her, her own mug held in mid-air, and Gonzalez followed her gaze.

‘What is it?’ he asked. They were reviewing Lieutenant Rivas’ recording from his overfly of Eloise’s residence, but so far it had been as boring and uneventful as his overflies above the slums. Using Eloise’s security codes, Rivas had been able to connect to the residence’s security system mid-flight, without crashing it this time, so the data they had to analyse was extensive.

Ingram keyed some instructions in and the recording went back a few seconds.

‘This.’ She used a thin pointer to highlight a section. ‘Computer, enlarge. Quarter speed. Play.’ The recording resumed slowly. ‘Do you see this, sir?’

Gonzalez strained his eyes. The magnification was extreme. Even 28th-century technology couldn’t provide more than a grainy image until a time-consuming edit could be run, frame by frame, to improve the quality.

‘Computer. Analysis. What am I looking at?’

There was, of course, nothing stopping them from asking the computer to analyse the entire recording, but centuries of interaction with computers had taught that human instinct couldn’t be replaced by circuits. And so they laboured in person, reviewing all recordings until they found something of interest, and then they asked the computer to analyse.

‘Four humans. Reliability of analysis: eighty-four per cent.’

‘Assumption: analysis confirmed valid. Follow the four humans.’

For a few minutes Gonzalez and Ingram watched four blobs move towards Eloise’s residence. Caught partially on the Stealthy’s recording device when Rivas was already moving away from the residence and partially on two separate external security cams, the image and the implications were clear.

‘They never entered,’ Ingram stated.

‘No, but they are probably monitoring the place.’

Gonzalez bent forward to further refine the data. Inputting algorithms, now that they knew what to look for, was easy. As the computer accepted his instructions and set to work, he changed one of the holo-screens to show him a feed from the VR lab where Eloise was working.

The woman was a hazard to their sanity. She was so addicted to and reliant on technology that she couldn’t cope in real life. Gonzalez had actually had to rig a connection between her BCC and his wrist-comp to make sure he would be instantly informed if she tried anything stupid.

With the VRPs, however, she was a true maestro. Even her nano-coding skills put Gonzalez’s decades of education and experience to shame. When he showed her to their VR lab, where she could work on retrieving the damaged adult VRP from her home network and analyse it, she grumbled something about a slow processor and limited space but set down to work with such an air of competence that Gonzalez had no qualms about leaving her alone to do it. If he had stayed, he would only have been in her way.

In fact, the woman seemed to have relaxed substantially when he left the room. He monitored her at first, seeing how she set up a secure link to her own network, but even then he could do nothing to improve the security of the connection. She was a good few steps ahead of him. Since then, she had been fast at work, fully focused on the task at hand.

Watching Gonzalez out of the corner of her eye, Ingram took a gulp of the hot, bitter liquid and made up her mind. She slammed the cup down and swivelled her chair to face Gonzalez.

‘Sir, about the chip Megan gave you.’

Gonzalez gave her a sharp look, but it did little to deter her. He was furious with himself for failing to decrypt it, and Rivas categorically refused to discuss the matter when Ingram suggested it. One of the computers was working full-time to decrypt it, but that was likely to take days, if not weeks. Unless, of course, Gonzalez could work out how Megan had encrypted it.

‘I had an idea,’ Ingram continued. ‘May I ask first, what did you try?’

‘Everything,’ Gonzalez growled, but then he took a deep breath. ‘I tried all her codes from the past. I tried standard MIS codes. The codes we used at the 4th. I spent hours trying to imagine what she would have done and got nowhere. I must have manually tried over a thousand possibilities.’

‘Why did you try to think like her?’ Ingram asked, gently leading him.

‘What do you mean?’ Gonzalez looked at her, puzzled. He couldn’t tell where she was going with this, but she obviously saw something he hadn’t. ‘I was trying to understand what she might have done,’ he said, explaining the obvious.

‘That’s not what I meant, sir. She didn’t encrypt it for herself. Or for the MIS. She encrypted it so that you could decrypt it.’

For a moment Gonzalez stared at her in confusion, and then realisation struck. He slapped himself on the forehead.

‘I might need to start drinking more of that coffee-sludge of yours,’ he said, laughing, as the computer began decrypting the chip. The password Megan had used was System.

CHAPTER 24

Roc de Chere

Lac d’Annecy

Afro-European Alliance

Sunday 26 April 2725

DAY 7

Time went fast as Gonzalez scanned through what Megan had managed to get out of Wagner’s computer. There was more there than he had suspected. So much more. If that constituted only the things Wagner had accessed from his account in the mere nineteen hours since taking over, Gonzalez would have been willing to give his left hand to see the rest. It truly was a goldmine.

Most of the messages exchanged between Wagner and other prominent Elite figures in the police and the military made little sense without the context of previous messages. That, however, didn’t stop a computer from scanning it all for clues and cross-referencing it with the vast database. Gonzalez really would have preferred human eyes to do the job, but he didn’t have any to spare.

What he did have was a single pair of eyes with a unique skill set.

And he had more than just messages. Commissioner Wagner had accessed the data from two VRPs produced by NanoC. He hadn’t played either of