Ander Pathna stood before a group of fifty faculty members and felt like his head was about one second away from exploding. Only this psychological disaster didn’t completely stem from the abnormal amount of nervousness he felt at that moment. But from a bursting need to explain the wonderous thing he had just created while here at the Quantum Project.

  “Hello everyone,” the sweaty computer engineer began. “I am honored to have a few moments of your time this morning to go over my recent experiments. And I hope that those results will provide a leap forward in finally ending the problem we commonly refer to as the algorithm.”

  Smiling his most confident smile, Ander pointed to a solitary man sitting just off stage behind a well worn gaming laptop. Dressed in a bright floral button-down shirt and khaki shorts, the man nodded enthusiastically back at his new friend and recent research partner. Eager to start, the young scientist named Brian Wills practically radiated confidence.

  “Just give me the word, Ander.” He said with a smile.

  Feeling slightly less like puking, Ander looked back toward the crowd and once again spoke. “As you know, the main purpose behind the Quantum Project is to find a way to bring encryption back to our world. Up until now, that dream has been elusive. Or as we say in the bullpen, mathematically impossible.”

  This corny in-joke was greeted by a smattering of chuckles and subdued clapping from the gathered audience. Nothing Ander would call rousing. But to a nervous public speaker like him, their tepid reaction was more than enough reason to continue.

  “Still,” he said in a more serious tone. “Even in the face of the unsolvable, we drudge on. Hoping that one day a singularity can be found in the noise.”

  “And did you find it?” A woman yelled from the back of the meeting space. “Or is this just another one of your aspirational speeches?”

  “Aspirational?” Ander looked at Brian for support but only found his friend shrugging his shoulders in agreement with the educated heckler. Apparently, even his new research partner had heard the stories of his previous demonstrations. “Yeah. I guess I can sound a little hopeful. Still, I think today’s sermon will offer more substance than sizzle.”

  With that, he signaled for Brian to initiate a hastily put together PowerPoint presentation. One that began with a slide made up of a simple white background overlaid with four words. Words that meant very little to those not associated with the Quantum Project. But to those inside this conference hall, they meant a possible end to their long digital night.

  LEVEL TWO CONSCIOUSNESS ACHIEVED

  “Bullshit!” This time, it was a male’s voice who cried out. Near the middle of the group, a midlevel systems analysist Ander knew by the name Edward was almost frothing at the mouth. “There’s no way you cracked level 2, Ander. You’re not that smart.”

  Instantly, half the room erupted into two different types of noise. One that sounded like the verbal equivalent of ‘that’s not a very nice thing to say’. While the other noise sounded in total agreement with Edward’s assessment of Ander’s programming skills. Unsurprisingly, this mixed reaction forced the already nervous man to falter.

  At least until his friend pressed the space bar and another slide appeared on the screen: TEST RESULTS FOR FULL SCALE INCURSION

  Suddenly, the raucous crowd paused their infighting long enough to scan the data points the slide contained. Fairly technical for anyone without at least a master’s degree in machine learning, the group read down to the bottom of the slide with rapt attention. When everyone seemed to finish, Edward once again spoke up.

  “It’s one thing to make a slide and proclaim yourself our savior, Ander. But it’s another thing entirely to back it up.”

  For a moment, Ander seemed stuck. Like his brain was trying very hard to tell his mouth to respond to the insult while simultaneously telling his body to run away. Fortunately, he wasn’t the only person involved in this presentation.

  “And he thought someone might want an actual demonstration, Edward.” To that blatant challenge, Brian once again intervened for his friend. “That’s why he’s going to run a level four incursion on his newest encryption program. Right here. Right now.”

  Smiling, he looked back at a shell-shocked Ander with a supportive smile. To which the drowning man responded with a steadfast nod. “That’s correct.”

  Taken aback by the quick response, Edward shifted uncomfortably in his plush chair before finally trying to take back control of the confrontation. “Fine,” he said with the slightest hint of doubt in his voice. “Run it.”

  Not waiting for another taunt or Ander to lose his nerve, Brian brought up the latest version of Defender Andy on his laptop. The program’s namesake came from Ander’s German Shephard. A hypersensitive animal that never stopped barking at anything that might try and enter his apartment. Andy would even bark at the wind if it blew hard enough.

  So, with this tenacious protection in mind, Ander had begun programming what would be his version of an AI assisted encryption program. One that wouldn’t simply roll over and play dead when the algorithm came knocking. No, theoretically, his program would constantly fight off the program’s attempts to breach the digital wall it produced.

  However, as Edward’s blatant disbelief showed, everyone at the Quantum Project had attempted at one time or another to get anything working against the program. And every time they had failed spectacularly. Of course, this test he was about to run wasn’t a pass or fail situation.

  No, this INCURSION test represented a linear time based benchmark. Or more simply, it measured how long a security program could fend off the algorithm’s attempts at decryption. A futile endeavor given that nothing created since EF day could continually stand up to that form of onslaught. However, like most breakthroughs, you walked before you ran. And this test most assuredly measured walking.

  “Booting up test now.” Brian said with a click of a mouse button.

  On the projector screen, a simple box replaced the PowerPoint slide. In the middle of this box was a small jpeg file. This picture was the loot that needed to be protected. On opposite ends of this box was a space for two programs. The first one contained a version of the No More Secrets program that absolutely no one had on any of their phones.

  The other one had program entitled, Defender Andy.

  At the top of the box was a custom stopwatch program that currently read triple zero. This simple timer measured the aforementioned incursion test. Put simply, the longer the elapsed time, the better the encryption. Not that this test took too much time. After all, the current best time recorded by anyone at the Quantum Project was 1.2 seconds.

  Nervously, Ander looked up at the zeros and silently prayed. He did this even though his program had consistently protected the picture for almost 3 seconds in every time they ran this test. Which, he had to admit, in the real world didn’t seem like a huge improvement. But in the realm of quantum computing, two additional seconds was a lifetime. Plus, that blink of an eye was more than enough to prove to everyone in this room he had finally succeeded.

  So, with a great deal of confidence, he signaled to his friend to begin the test.

  “Starting now.” Brian said as he pressed, "execute”.

  Instantly, the box blinked and a picture of a black and crimson flower sprang into high-definition life. Startled by the unexpected outcome, Ander looked up to the time clock and gasped as he saw the timer had only advanced a hundredth of a second. And in the space where Andy used to be, a warning code flashed: ERROR 606.

  “Impossible." Ander said with his mouth half agape. “Brian?”

  "On it!" Upon hearing the pleading tone in his friend’s voice, Brian hurried to reboot the program that was currently running on the laptop’s screen. After a second, the system’s beefed-up CPU began running the test program all over again. And after less than a second, the same message of Error 606 flashed again.

  “Ander...” That was all his friend could muster as the nervous presenter looked out upon a sea of faces that ranged from disappointment in another spectacular failure to happiness from being proven correct. “I don’t know what happened.”

  Unsure of what to say, Ander placed his index finger to his throat and made the universal slashing sign of ‘kill it’. Nodding reluctantly, Brian ended the connection between his laptop and the projector. Then, without saying anything to either Ander or the gathered crowd, he picked up his belongings and left.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Ander began as his friend hurried off. “I’m not quite sure what just happened. But please believe me when I say that my program is working and viable.”

  “Sure it is, Ander.” Another heckler said from inside the mass of disbelieving people. “Just like it was last time.”

  “And the time before that.” This time it was a young woman near the front of the assembly space that spoke up. Wearing a tee shirt that said, ‘There’s nothing artificial about my intelligence’, she practically spat out her next words. “Stop wasting our time, Ander. And to be honest, maybe you should stop wasting yours.”

  Caught off guard by the straightforwardness of her warning, Ander took one long last survey of the room. Stunned by their stern faces, he couldn’t think of anything he could say to counter her simple statement. So, just like his friend, he gathered his things and beat a quick retreat.

  A few minutes later, Ander punched in the code to his workspace and waited impatiently for the lock to disengage. Once it did, the defeated young man practically threw himself inside the secured room and away from the people who’d grown tired of his seemingly empty proclamations.

  “Are you alright,” Brian’s voice greeted his friend after allowing him a moment to catch his breath.

  “No,” Ander said in a loud, irritated voice. “Of course I’m not fucking alright.”

  The young man meant to say more. He meant to try and explain himself. But that wasn’t necessary, not in front of the friend he’d been toiling with for a month. Finally, he sought a bit of confirmation that his breakthrough hadn’t been a figment of his imagination.

  “I’m not crazy, right?” Ander said. “You saw it working.”

  “Yes,” Brian responded in a low, consoling voice. “We ran the test six times last night. Everything was perfect.”

  “Then what happened to the program? What happened to Andy?” Ander said the name of his artificial intelligence project like it was a real live breathing person. “Error 606? How is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know. But it gets worse.” The look on Brian’s face was somewhere between guilt and bewilderment. “I’ve scanned the laptop and the program is gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?” Ander’s words were pleading.

  Brian shuffled over to the largest desk in the room and swiveled his laptop around so Ander could see the screen. And there, in bright blue letters, was the same code that popped up during the presentation. Error 606.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Did you try accessing the backup copies?”

  “Of course,” Brian tapped a few keys on the well-used laptop and brought up the internal file management system. After sorting through a few disguised root directories, he clicked on a file entitled Andy’s Spare Clothes. The results showed nothing inside. “Everything is gone.”

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Gone.” Ander slouched down in a scuffed up black and red gaming chair. Thoughts too dark and scattered to process rationally flew across his mind like a tsunami. “That’s not possible.”

  “It shouldn’t be.” Brian said with a consoling hand on top of Ander’s shaking shoulder. “These files aren’t networked to any other computer systems within the Quantum Project. I’m talking full on faraday cage.”

  Remembering his partners first day at the project, Ander remembered Brian using those exact same words when discussing information security. “Dude,” he said with a smile. “Until we reach the singularity, we’ve got to keep everything we do here under complete lockdown. Like a full-on faraday cage.

  Which was strange at the time because Ander didn’t know what the hell a Faraday Cage was or how it related to information security. And it wasn’t until a couple days later that he even bothered to look the term up on one of the freshly updated internet mirror drives. The ones you had to go to the library and download.

  Faraday Cage: a conductive enclosure—solid or mesh—that blocks external static and non-static electric fields (like EMPs, Wi-Fi, or radio waves) by distributing charge around its exterior, leaving the interior shielded. And that type of ‘off the grid’ security sounded good given the current state of corporate espionage.

  “Sorry.” That was the only response Brian could muster. “I think this is all my fault.”

  “What?” Ander asked through a haze of anger and despair. “No. No way this is your fault. Something else must have happened. Maybe a worm. Or some kind of random memory corruption.”

  “No. I think it’s my fault.” Brian said as he pulled up another gaming chair and set it right in front of Ander’s seat. “And to be honest, I’m kind of sad about the whole thing. I mean. Not enough to help you out or anything. But still... I’m kind of bummed.”

  “What?” For the first time since returning to their office, Ander noticed that Brian was wearing gloves. And not the kind that kept you warm. No, he was wearing neoprene, anti-static rubber gloves. Like the kind you wore when you didn’t want to leave any residual traces of oil behind on computer components as you worked. “Are you insane?”

  “I don’t think so.” Brian said innocently. “But to be honest I can’t really tell anymore. Lifetimes, many lifetimes of porting, can cause your perspective on reality to become a bit skewed.”

  “Brian,” Ander began, trying very hard to muster sympathy for someone other than himself right now. “Listen. Don’t blame yourself. We’ll just have to start over again.”

  “Really,” Brian made a sort of dismissive sound with his tongue and shook his head consolingly. “Are you sure that’s what you want to do, Ander? You really want to start all over again after you’ve almost reached the summit. I mean... that’s a lot of mountain to have to reclimb.”

  “Of course. I’m not quitting now.” Ander pulled back from his friend and let his face slip into a hardened, resolute scowl. “Not when I know what we had worked.”

  “Yeah,” Brian breathed out a sigh of reluctant understanding. Casually, he reached into one of his pants’ pockets and pulled out a tiny device. About the size of a large smartphone. The thing had two pieces of metal protruding from the top of it, almost like antennas. Which was crazy because smart phone antennas were on the inside, not on the outside.

  “What’s that?” Ander asked, happy for the distraction from his currently on fire career. “Some kind of new gaming handheld?”

  “Nothing so mundane. But it is the latest version of this device.” Brian responded as he held the small piece of gray technology up for his friend to see. “More compact.”

  “Is it a security device?” Brian asked, momentarily forgetting about his life’s work going up in a puff of smoke. “What does it do? Does it shield radio communications? Maybe an RF blocker?”

  “Always trying to figure things out, Ander. That’s what makes you an excellent inventor. It’s probably why you almost succeeded in this endeavor.” Brian frowned in a pitying way at his friend's inquisitive face. “But this thing doesn’t protect communications in anyway. Although it does help keep certain secrets contained.”

  “Really,” Ander leaned forward again to examine the device with an even more excited expression on his face. “Doesn’t look like much. Is it a burst data hard drive? What’s the upload speed?”

  “And that’s why we should have had this conversation a long time ago. You never stop wondering about things. Trying to figure them out.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” Ander asked.

  “No,” Brian said with a hint of regret in his brown eyes. “Normally, you’d be rewarded for such thinking. Even praised. But not here. And especially not now.”

  “I’ve got to admit, Brian. You’re not acting like yourself right now.”

  “No, Ander. I’m afraid you’re starting from a flawed assumption. I’m starting to act like myself for the first time since we met a month a ago.” Brian shifted the small device in his hand and the looks of friendly concern instantly vanished. “But I’ll tell you what this device does. It’s a failsafe device.”

  “Failsafe device?” Ander looked at the grey piece of metal again. “Like end of the world thing?”

  “No,” Brian smiled. “Although referring to the end of the world isn’t far off from the truth. No, this device prevents the end of all things. At least as you know them anyway.”

  “Why are you quoting ‘Lord of the Rings’?” For the first time since this nightmare of a day began, Ander felt real fear mix in with the sadness and disappointment. “How?”

  “It keeps inventive minds like yours from starting your work all over.” Brian pressed the device with his thumb, and the grey metal glowed a soft white light. “Permanently.”

  “That sounds ominous?” Ander said as he leaned forward to try and talk some sense into his obviously delusional friend. He had just begun to reach out and place a gentle hand on the man’s arm when the device made a soft popping sound. “Hey...”

  His words trailed off as the room around him started to turn black. Like when a dimmer switch turned too quickly, the visible light around him started to quickly dim. Only there was no time for his eyes to adjust to the encroaching darkness because the curtain fell fast. And not in a way that left any doubt this absence of light was transitory or contained within a room.

  No, it was complete and absolute.

  Then, the scared computer scientist started to feel the outside edges of his being begin to fray at the edges. Until soon the only thing that remained within his conscious mind was a primal need to keep breathing. This, for lack of a better word, reflex only lasted for about three more short gulps of air. And when that last part of him subsided, nothing of his world remained.

  Not even Ander.

  Three minutes and forty-five seconds later, a young woman left Ander’s office wearing the same clothes that Brian had been wearing a few moments before. Nearly four inches shorter, the outfit seemed out of place on her by the way it hung loosely in all the wrong places. But the way she wore them made it look more like a fashion statement.

  Never breaking stride, the woman ducked down a couple of empty hallways, cut across two unused meeting rooms and a packed lunchroom before finally exiting the building by way of an unguarded side entrance. She kept that pace up until she reached a small open courtyard near the front of the Quantum Project’s main building.

  Once there, she found her favorite bench and sat down under a trellis of white lilies and red climbing roses. Looking back and forth across the beautiful space, the young woman quickly became satisfied that no one had followed her well practiced escape. Sighing, she reached into what used to be Brian’s pocket and retrieved a silver and black smartphone.

  “Call Dratene.” She ordered without waiting for the hi-tech device to unlock. Placing the completely untraceable piece of alien technology to her ear, it took less than a minute for the person in question to answer.

  “Yes, Arbiter Sendry.”

  “Stop calling me that, Dratene.” The newly transformed woman leaned back against the simple wooden bench, crossed her legs and looked up into the clear, blue sky. “We’re on Earth. Call me by my Earth name.”

  For a second, there was nothing but silence on the other end of the line. She didn’t know whether to take this as misunderstanding or as an act of defiance by her second in command. Not that either explanation mattered all that much. After all, her job was done. For today anyway.

  “Are you there, Dratene?” She finally asked after a minute of silence.

  “Yes,” the man said curtly. “I’m just not quite sure which name to call you. Are you a man or a woman right now?”

  Seeing the problem, but not really understanding it. She couldn’t help but laugh. “You can’t tell by my voice?”

  “Forgive me, Arbiter Sendry. I’m still getting used to using my mouth to communicate. Things were so much simpler when I could just telepathically have these conversations.”

  “Pitch, Dratene.” She chided ruefully. “Generally, the females of this planet have a higher pitched voice than the males.”

  “Not always,” Dratene responded honestly. “I’ve seen a wide spectrum of female voices since our arrival on this planet.”

  “True, but as a baseline. I would say pitch is an acceptable way to discern between the two.”

  “As you say.” Dratene cleared his throat, made a decision and complied with his boss's request. “So, Candace. What do you require of me?”

  “I require a report.”

  “Couldn’t this wait?” Dratene asked thoughtfully. “I’m assuming you only now successfully stopped another singularity point from occurring.”

  “I did.” Candace said as she smiled to herself. “Just now in fact. And I’m happy to say that all the data on the one known as Defender Andy has been erased.”

  “All the data?”

  “Yes, Dratene.” Her smile slowly morphed into a frown. How many humans had she erased in the past four years? How many more would have to be erased before it was all over? Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe even the whole planet. At this moment, she didn’t really know. Nor did she really care.“All of it.”

  “Even the organic data?”

  “Especially the organic data, Dratene. Anything less invites hope.” She uncrossed her legs and kicked her feet at a patch of clovers near her feet. She marveled at how they bent over in such a uniform manner. "But why would my assignment have anything to do with your report? Don’t tell me Samuel Mosley escaped your grasp.”

  “No, Arbiter Candace.” The man said meekly. “Nothing like that.”

  “Really?” Candace could hear from the tenor of her ally’s voice that something was amiss. “So, you secured the information we require?”

  “No.” The single word response hung there like a worm on hook. Only this bait would never be devoured.

  “What do you mean 'no'?” She said looking back up into the beautiful blue sky. "What happened?"

  “Dr. Mosely was a great deal more prepared than we were led to believe.”

  “Of course he was,” muttering in exasperation, she wondered why were all the humans on this planet such a pain in the ass. "'Were there any casualties?".

  “Four agents. Two augmented. Two normal” Dratene said without a hint of emotion in his voice. “But their bodies have been secured before anyone could ask questions.”

  “By the heavens.” Her frown morphed into a righteous scowl upon hearing the amount of loss. “At least tell me the man was erased.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” His lack of specificity spoke volumes.

  “Dratene, I know we talked about this before. But candor is bedrock upon which this operation should be built upon. So please, don’t speak to me like a Varshon would.”

  “I am not a Varshon.” Dratene’s words went from unemotional to ice cold. “And you know that.”

  “I do know that. But you were raised by them. Nurtured from birth by them.” Candace thought back to her one and only encounter with a Varshon emissary. The duplicitous bastard never offered more than he was asked. And his responses were so muddled in obfuscation that nothing that came out of that slimy slug’s version of a mouth even remotely resembled the truth.

  “So right now, I need the unfiltered facts. Not a version of it.”

  “Fine,” the man said reluctantly into his smartphone. “Dr. Mosely was killed at 3:30 local time just south of Washington, DC. He wasn’t erased using any of our usual methods. But the sum of his knowledge has forever been lost.”

  “He was killed?” Visions of untapped reservoirs of information going dry suddenly flashed through her calculating mind. What a waste, she thought miserably. “Was that absolutely necessary?”

  “Yes,” Dratene sounded completely sure. “Absolutely.”

  “Why?” She knew he was probably telling the truth. Her right hand may not be the most forthcoming creature, but his practicality in these matters was undeniable. Still, no one could be that sure of such a definitive end. “Why was his death so necessary?”

  “He was helped by the one left behind.”

  “What?!” Candace’s demeanor completely changed from the carefree one that she had exuded upon reaching the garden to one of vigilant anger. “Were you able to trace anything back to the source?”

  “No,” Dratene said solemnly, almost apologetically. “The program is still utilizing that code. And nothing, not even the algorithm, can break its encryption.”

  “Fuck!” She screamed loud enough to draw the attention of a couple of stray Quantum employees who rapidly thought better of enjoying the garden's beauty at that exact moment. “If that was the case, why did you kill Dr. Mosely?”

  “Technically, we didn’t kill him, Arbiter. The United States government did.”

  “Excuse me.” Candace said as she felt a human vein begin to pulse within her temples. The experience was not a pleasant one. "Explain."

  “The one left behind utilized a previously unknown escape vehicle.” He said quickly. “One that required a more vertical form of response.”

  “What are you talking about? I said less Varshon!”

  “That’s the truth, Candace. Dr. Mosely was attempting to escape by means of a masked, experimental aircraft. Shortly after his take off from NSA headquarters, alert aircraft out of Andrews was scrambled to intercept his craft. Soon after they entered local airspace, his means of escape was summarily destroyed.”

  “Wreckage?”

  “Barely enough to fit in a small trash can.” Dratene sounded relieved. “Given the size of the explosion, I’d guess that the vehicle utilized a fusion engine for power. And you know what happens when one of those things explode.”

  “Yeah.” Candace knowingly said. “Still, I’m surprised there was anything left at all. Cover story?”

  “Believable. We’re utilizing the stray asteroid story. Like the one we used in Russia a few years ago.”

  “Perfect.” Her body relaxed slightly. But not from any sense of newfound peace. No, her calm sprung from the knowledge this disaster might be contained. Even if that containment came at the cost of an indispensable resource being lost forever. “Nevertheless, our lonesome program seems to be more active than usual. One might think such action signifies a precursor event.”

  “Or desperation.”

  “Could be.” Candace responded to her comrade thoughtfully. “But I never count on the desperation of others to achieve victory, Dratene. That type of strategy is often unreliable. Best to extinguish a small fire early before it becomes a blaze.”

  “Orders?” He asked curtly.

  “Finish the clean-up operations then resume your search for the program. The longer it’s out there, the harder it will be to return this place back to its normal, apathetic self.”

  “Understood. And you? Where are you off to?”

  “Well,” she said as her eyes drifted toward the freeway to the east. “There are three more companies researching artificial intelligence in this city. But only one of them has anyone close to breaching the second milestone.”

  “Genesis Research?” Dratene asked. “They’ve made that much headway?”

  “Apparently.” Candace allowed her body to once again completely relax on the bench. After all, what could she do about Dratene’s problems from the opposite end of the country. Her protégé would just have to wrap things up by himself. “Still, their business is only a start-up. So there's nowhere near the security of this place. Just a couple of rental units out by the airport.”

  “That is some good news.” The voice on the other end of the phone said reassuringly. “At least that one should be quick.”

  “Like I said Dratene, it’s better to put out the fire early rather than late.”