Tether Unseen
Lullaby's Echo: Chapter 22
The screen flickered to life, the familiar interface blooming in the dim light. Gabe navigated to his secure comms channel, his fingers moving with a practiced speed that felt alien to the trembling uncertainty in his gut. He pulled up the cryptic sender ID from his last exchange with Lena.
//context.trace--NULL
He stared at it for a moment, the memory of her pulling him through the collapsing ruins of Sector 9 a fresh, raw wound. She had saved his life, yet she had also been instrumental in leading him into a trap where his deepest grief was put under a microscope. He had to trust her skill; he had to assume her motives were poison.
He sat before the console, the cool, sterile light of the interface a stark contrast to the hot, dirty rage coiling inside him. His hands hovered over the virtual keys, but they felt like lead weights. Every instinct, every frayed nerve, screamed at him to close the channel, to smash the console, to burn the whole goddamn plan to the ground rather than do this—to ask her for help.
Her face materialised in his mind’s eye, unbidden and sharp as a shard of glass. The calm, analytical curiosity. The way her expression hadn’t shifted as he’d laid bare his sister’s deepest, most secret grief. ‘A variable,’ she had called it. Not a child, not a tragedy, but merely a variable. He could feel the phantom sensation of her clinical gaze on him even now, a psychic vivisection that left him feeling flayed and exposed. The thought of willingly opening a line of communication, of inviting that gaze back in, was a physical violation.
His fingers trembled, a fine, uncontrollable tremor. He clenched his hands into fists, pressing his knuckles into his eyes until sparks of light danced in the darkness. He had to do it. The rage was a fire, but the image of Alice’s serene, empty face in the pod was a bucket of ice water, extinguishing everything but the cold, hard calculus of desperation. He was out of moves. This wasn’t a choice. It was the only square left on the board.
He took a ragged breath and forced his fingers to uncurl. He began to type, each keystroke a small act of self-immolation. He couldn’t be direct. He had to assume every word was being logged, parsed, analysed. This message had to be a ghost, a whisper in the code that only she would understand. A private language between two people who now shared nothing but a profound, mutual mistrust.
Lena—
Another locked door. Not inside this time. It’s a hardware issue.
Gideon’s proposal. Risky. Requires a key we don’t have.
Need you to create a window. A brief one. You’ll know what I mean.
Can you make the system blink?
He read the words, his stomach churning. Each line was a capitulation. A surrender. He wasn’t just asking for technical help. He was admitting his own failure, his own powerlessness, and handing the keys to his fate over to the woman who had treated his soul like a data set. His finger hovered over the ‘send’ icon, a single, glowing point of no return. He closed his eyes, swallowed the bile that rose in his throat, and pressed it.
The message dissolved into the void. And with it, a piece of his own defiant, stubborn pride.
He stared at the blank screen, the silence in the room stretching thin. One second. Two. Ten. Nothing. He let out a shaky breath, the emptiness of the screen a new kind of mockery. Of course. Why would she answer? He had been a data point, an experiment. The experiment was over. The data collected. He was of no further use. A cold, hollow despair began to settle in his gut, a feeling worse than the rage. The fury had been a fire. This was just... ash.
He was about to turn away from the console, to tell Gideon the plan had failed before it had even begun, when the screen chimed.
He looked back, his heart giving a painful lurch. The message was a single, stark word.
Coordinates
Gabe stared at it. Just that. Coordinates. Not a question, not an agreement, but a command. A demand for the first piece of the puzzle. It was a test. A power play. She was forcing him to commit, to send her the target information before she had even agreed to help. To hand over a piece of leverage. He could feel Gideon’s silent, analytical presence behind him, processing this new, calculated risk. He hesitated for only a second, the choice already made by the sheer, crushing weight of his desperation. He sent the hardware signature of Alice’s pod, the data a cold, sterile string of characters that felt like a betrayal in itself.
The moment the data was sent, the console chimed again. Instantly. No pause this time. The second message appeared beneath the first.
And a timeframe
Not a yes, not a no, but a demand for the final necessary data. It was the most Lena response imaginable.
Gabe let out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding. A cold mix of relief and dread washed over him. He had his hacker.
‘She has agreed,’ Gideon announced. ‘The window will be tomorrow, 1400 hours. It will last for precisely four seconds.’
‘Right,’ Gabe said, his voice laced with a bitter, cynical sarcasm. ‘And I suppose you’re just going to... what? Send her a text on your secret droid hotline to make sure she’s ready?’
‘A text is an inefficient analogy,’ Gideon stated, his tone as placid as ever. ‘But yes. I will now coordinate with Alma via our secure, encrypted channel to ensure the maintenance port will be accessible.’
Gabe just shook his head, a humourless laugh catching in his throat. It wasn’t the shock of the new. It was the profound, weary frustration of the known. The secret he’d had to drag out of Gideon weeks ago was now being presented as a simple, logical step in a plan he had no control over.
‘It has to be right, doesn’t it?’ Gabe muttered, turning from the console. ‘Everything. Your perfect logic. You sat on that connection for weeks, let me chase ghosts and bargain with monsters, and now you just... use it. Because the parameters have changed.’ He spat the last words like a curse.
‘That is correct,’ Gideon said, his head tilting a fraction. ‘My primary directive is your care. Inter-unit socialisation was not relevant to that directive until now. The parameters have, indeed, changed.’
The cold, clinical confirmation sent a shiver down Gabe’s spine. He looked from the impassive face of his carer to the sleek, obsidian form of the bio-pod. Tomorrow, he would dive into a pocket of chaos, relying on a ghost and a machine that had been keeping secrets from him since the beginning.
‘Right,’ he said again, the word feeling small and inadequate in the heavy silence. He ran a hand through his hair, turning his gaze to the pod. ‘What adjustments need to be made? On my end.’
Gideon’s ocular sensors flashed once. A soft hiss, like a pressure release, came from the base of the bio-pod, followed by the low whir of servos. A seamless panel on the pod’s metal stand retracted, revealing a compartment Gabe had never known existed.
He crouched down for a closer look. Inside, it wasn’t the neat, organised circuitry of standard system tech. It was a dense, chaotic tangle of wires that pulsed with a faint, violet light—some were thick and insulated, others as fine as hair. They twisted and wove around each other like veins, all converging on a small, secondary port protected by a slide-away cover.
‘The pod’s standard immersion signal is routed through the primary processor,’ Gideon explained, his voice coming from just over Gabe’s shoulder. ‘To create the ghost signal, we must bypass it. That requires removing the three primary regulator chips and replacing them with a custom-built signal rerouter.’
Gabe stared at the complex tangle of wires, then looked around his own cluttered room, his gaze frantic. A custom rerouter? It was impossible. He was a prisoner. He couldn’t order parts. He couldn’t—
His eyes landed on the desk. On the carcass of the drone he’d dismantled weeks ago. On a salvaged data-chip from a scavenged music player. On a spool of copper wire. On his soldering iron. The pieces weren’t a plan. They were a prayer. A desperate, long-shot, back-of-the-envelope prayer.
‘I can make one,’ Gabe said, his voice a low rasp of dawning, desperate hope. ‘I think I can make one.’
‘My analysis reached the same conclusion,’ Gideon stated. ‘Your manual dexterity and technical knowledge make you the optimal choice for this task.’
‘The job’s just too manual for you, Giddy.’
‘It is below my station, Sir. But I may offer assistance by way of illumination.’ At that, Gideon’s eyes lit up like the headlights of cars that didn’t drive along London’s roads anymore.
With a chuckle Gabe got down on his hands and knees, the cool floor a stark contrast to the low, warm hum of the exposed machinery. He slid the protective cover from the port, revealing the delicate connection points. The air smelled faintly of ozone and warm polymer. This was a language he understood. He worked, the world shrinking to the tip of the soldering iron and the glint of copper wire. The acrid smell of burning flux filled the air. Time ceased to be a measure of minutes and became a sequence of desperate, precise actions: stripping a wire, tinning a contact, seating the chip. Each movement was a battle against the tremor in his hands, a war against the ghosts vying for space in his head. The phantom chill of Lena’s clinical gaze made his fingers slip. And the echo of Alice’s voice, a memory from a different, happier time—’You can fix anything, Gabe’—was a fresh, sharp twist of the knife. He worked until his back ached and the smell of ozone was seared into his nostrils.
Then, finally, it was done. He held it up in the beam of Gideon’s light—a clumsy, ugly, beautiful thing.
With a pair of fine-tipped pliers, he gently unseated the three primary regulator chips. They were flawless, their surfaces smooth and perfect, masterpieces of sterile mass production. He set them carefully aside and pushed his own ugly, handmade creation into the empty slot. It clicked into place with a satisfying, solid sound—a note of human imperfection introduced into the heart of the flawless machine.
He sat back on his heels for a moment, wiping a smear of grease from his knuckles with the sleeve of his robe. He looked at Gideon, whose optics had dimmed back to their neutral state.
‘So,’ Gabe said, his voice a low rasp. ‘Is this actually going to work?’
‘Based on the available data, factoring in Lena’s established capabilities and the integrity of your hardware modification,’ Gideon stated, his voice a flat line of pure calculation, ‘there is a 98.57% probability of successfully establishing the ghost signal.’
Gabe blinked. The precision of the number was somehow more terrifying than any vague warning. He let out a short, sharp laugh that held no humour at all. ‘Great. So only a 1.43% chance of my brain getting fried and my location broadcast to every seeker drone in London.’
‘The probability of catastrophic neural failure is marginally higher,’ Gideon corrected, without a hint of irony. ‘But yes. Your summary is functionally accurate.’
Gabe’s gaze flicked back to the now-sealed panel on his pod. ‘Wait. What about at Alice’s end? Who makes the adjustments there?’
‘There is no need,’ Gideon said. ‘All modifications are made at the point of transmission. This pod will be pushing the signal, and this pod is responsible for pulling you back. The receiving unit merely acts as a passive conduit. Alma’s only task is to open the maintenance port to allow the connection.’
‘And how is she supposed to do that?’ Gabe asked, a new unease settling in. ‘Connect to it, I mean.’
Gideon’s head tilted a fraction of a degree. His voice remained perfectly flat, devoid of any emotional inflection.
‘The same way I connect to your pod to perform maintenance.’
The statement hung in the air, so simple and so revealing. Gabe hadn’t known. Of course, he hadn’t. Why would he? He looked at Gideon, a new question forming. ‘You can connect to my pod... remotely?’
Gideon’s optics pulsed once, a soft acknowledgement. ‘Not remotely, no, but by using my own inbuilt tether, similar to what plugs into your neural implant. It is a standard feature for our model designation. Routine diagnostics and firmware updates require access.’ He paused, then added, his tone perfectly patient. ‘Did you expect a team of worker droids to be dispatched to your apartment to perform the necessary maintenance while you slept?’
The image was absurd, but a cold shiver still traced its way down Gabe’s spine. The thought of unknown, faceless machines entering his home at night, tending to his equipment while he was vulnerable... It was a violation he hadn’t even known to be afraid of. His apartment, his sanctuary, was just another node on a network he couldn’t see.
He just shook his head, a wry, tired smile touching his lips. ‘Right. Of course not.’
Click the Lullaby’s Echo: Index to read all published chapters.
