Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel

Chapter 42

I couldn't believe it. Taye was dead, Phillip was in a coma, and I was a fugitive. How could things have gotten so out of control? Somehow, Alex had stayed calm and covered my mouth to stifle my incessant screaming. When I finally was able to calm down some, we made our way back downstairs and escaped through one of the back doors. I called an Uber. Alex suggested we go to a hotel, but I insisted we go to my apartment. I wanted comfort so badly. I needed to be in a place where I could feel like things were normal again.

Alex relented, and the driver took us to my place in Menlo Park. In all my ten years at Ancien, I'd never once felt it necessary to buy a house or move out of my small apartment. It wasn't like I was married or had children. I didn't even own a dog. My company was my family, and I spent most of my time at the office or traveling, anyway. Though, it was painful to see the increase in housing prices.

Before he let me enter my apartment, Alex insisted on checking it out himself. I rolled my eyes but keyed in my passcode to turn off the alarm.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'll wait here."

Alex checked every room. I took a deep breath. It smelled a little stale—the way it does when a place hasn't been lived in for a while. The outline of a home without the color filled in yet.

"Clear," said Alex. "You don't have much stuff."

"I don't let stuff own me. I assume you saw the couch. Make yourself comfortable. Do you want some coffee?"

"Sounds good," said Alex.

I couldn't get the image of Taye's dead hand out of my head. I needed to distract myself. The memory was unbearable.

"We need to come up with a plan," I said. "Thor's been a step ahead of us at every turn. He kidnapped Taye from prison before we could talk to him. He knew when I was going to arrive at the airport—and which airport I was coming to—and kidnapped me. He knew you were trying to speak to Phillip."

"And shot him," added Alex.

"Right." I looked at the floor.

"Sorry," said Alex. "It's been a long day."

"We can't stop this nightmare until we get ahead of him. We need to get in front of this."

"Any ideas on how to do that?" Alex asked.

"There's only one thing Thor wants: Gaia."

"That's Taye's program?"

"Yes."

"The one that kills people."

"I still don't know what it does yet. I have no idea what Taye did to break it before crashing my party on Wall Street. Maybe he modified it so that it can't cause any more deaths. I'm not even sure that Gaia is causing these deaths. Maybe the last couple of years have just been a statistical anomaly. It seems a little out there that one computer program could kill so many people without anybody realizing it."

"So what are you proposing?"

"We turn Gaia on."

"I thought you didn't know how."

"I stumbled on something just before Thor's thugs interrupted me. I noticed a series of changes to the code that didn't seem to be affecting anything functional."

Alex looked at me as puzzled as ever.

"I wanted to know why those changes were being made, but the comments in the commit history didn't make any sense either."

"Commit history?"

"It's like a journal the programmer keeps while changing the code."

"Okay."

"Well, they didn't make sense until I took the first word from every commit and strung them together. Taye left me a clue. Took a while to stumble across it, but I found it. He told me how to get Gaia working again."

"And you're sure that you should?"

"No. But what else are we going to do? We have no evidence to take to the police. We just have a lot of speculation. I mean, you were a cop. What would you do if we came in with our story?"

"There's Taye's body," said Alex. "But they've probably already moved it. I'm sure the closet was a short-term solution."

"And if we tell them to look for Taye's body and they don't find it, the rest of our story will be written off, too. Turning on Gaia is the only thing we can do. At least then we'll have leverage. We'll have something Thor wants, and then he might finally make a mistake."

Alex thought about this for a long moment.

"And are you okay with risking people's lives if you turn this thing on? You would be responsible."

I thought about this. What else could I do? I had no other option. Maybe Taye had incapacitated Gaia's killing abilities. I had to believe that was what he had done. The kid had given his life to stop Gaia. He wouldn't have just given me the ability to turn a killing machine back on. There had to be a bigger plan.

"I don't think it will kill anybody," I said.

"If you're sure about it." said Alex.

I sat at my home computer and began typing. It only took a few minutes to download Gaia and make the modifications from Taye's hidden instructions.

"Here goes nothing," I said. I pressed return and the screen binged at me.

"What happened?" Alex asked.

"That's weird."

I set everything up again and pressed return. Another bing.

"Is everything okay?" asked Alex.

I ran a diagnostic scan and realized why it wasn't working.

"Well, I can't start Gaia," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because someone else already has."