Kill Switch: Chapter 23
Operation Digital Disruption
As Elijah widens the entry point, I fill in the earth around it. It’s hard work, and within seconds, I’m totally, exhausted. I lean against the shovel, heaving.
Elijah circles the hole. “The frustration is growing,” he says. “It was heartbreaking, the failure of Operation Digital Disruption. I’m not sure how many more failures the psyche of this village can sustain. Desperation is one thing. Hopelessness is another. At least, in desperation, there is the will to action.”
I scoop up some dirt. The sweat makes my bee stings itch. My stomach churns, and I drop the shovel and regurgitate the kabab goo I’d shared with Elijah. I think, this is what death must feel like.
“Take a break,” Elijah says. “This hole isn’t going anywhere.”
He climbs out of the crater, walks over to a plastic box, opens the box, and starts putting on a suit that looks like a jumpsuit without sensors. He takes a helmet out of the box, tosses the helmet to the side, and shuts the box. He reaches inside a pocket of the suit and comes up with a crinkled plastic bottle. Something clear swishes inside. He opens the cap and smells it. “Our lucky day.” He hands me the bottle. “Take a swig. You’ll feel better.”
I examine the liquid. “What is it?”
“H2O,” Elijah says.
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s the building block of life.”
I purse my lips. “Not a bad slogan.”
“It’s not a slogan. Just a fact.”
“Which is another good slogan,” I say, bringing the bottle to my lips. The liquid hits my dry mouth, and there’s this kind of nothing taste that gives me an instant headache. I hand the bottle back to Elijah.
“That’s vile,” I say.
Elijah twists the cap back on. “You’ll get used to it. Or you won’t. Either way, water is all we got up here.” He places the bottle back in his pocket. Then he walks over to a stack of rebar, which I recognize from Builder 14. I’ve passed many an hour building military bases out of rebar.
“Operation Digital Disruption,” I say. “What is it?”
Elijah starts fooling with some kind of welding machine. “Operation Digital Disruption is a plan to overhaul dNet. We’ve been compiling footage for years, some of which we’ve been able to siphon off of dNet’s servers, some of which we’ve captured on our own cameras. That footage of you playing Derrick 9, for instance, that was part of Operation Digital Disruption. It’s all on the device you brought me, and the plan was simple: plug in the device, override the dNet algo, and show people the connection between what they’re doing in The Within, and what’s actually happening in The Without. We wanted to force Withiners to stare into the eye of the storm they’re creating through their unquestioning devotion to dNet.”
Elijah puts on the helmet and descends into the hole. He starts welding the rebar into a ladder, and meanwhile, I work in silence, tossing dirt back in the hole, taking frequent breaks. I vomit a couple more times, until my stomach feels hollow as a bell. I long for Ope-A-Dope. After the ladder is built, Elijah helps with the remainder of the dirt.
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “Claudette was bringing you the device so you could plug it into a mainframe? But how did you know which mainframe to plug it into?”
Elijah heaves a shovelful of dirt. “I’ve been living in The Within for years, undercover, building up a profile as a software engineer at dNet. I climbed the corporate ladder. I got the keys to the kingdom. And meanwhile, I communicated with Claudette and her team in the vacuum. We worked like mad scientists, concocting the perfect formula for disruption, the perfect code, the perfect algorithm. And once I was confident that I could rewire the entire network in one fell swoop, I told Claudette to bring me the device. But as you know, the hand-off was sloppy. Claudette had burrowed into The Underworld through an entry point we’d been digging for months, but I wasn’t able to get down to The Underworld in time for our rendezvous, due to the shooting at High Times, because the cops were too busy cleaning up the mess, and they had the place cordoned off. That’s when the next shooting started. So Claudette left the way she came, and for whatever reason, you followed her.”
“I didn’t follow her,” I say. “She grabbed me. She saved my life. Which is ironic, because I killed her father. Did she know that?”
“Probably not,” Elijah says. “Just a coincidence.”
Elijah packs down the last bit of loose dirt, and then he places a manhole over the opening. “We were able to communicate that night, Claudette and I, through our encrypted app, and agree on a rendezvous point, but by the time she arrived, Bunnfield had let me know that Middle Management had picked up her trail. And not only that, they knew I was in the vicinity as well, and even though they didn’t know what we were saying to each other, they were able to triangulate our communication from the pings. The ruse was up, in other words. There was no way I was going to be able to walk into dNet the next day and access what I needed. So I waited for Claudette to arrive, and together we ascended to The Without, and I’ve been here ever since.” Elijah smiles sadly as he stares glossy-eyed into the distance.
He covers the manhole with some brush and nods toward the bonfire, the voices, the music. “What do you say we join the party?” He packs up all the gear. He lifts the plastic box. “Just carry these two shovels, would you?”
We walk through the woods, toward the Festival of Abzu.
I have so many questions, but I’m too tired to form a coherent thought. Instead, I listen to an owl hoot in the distance.
And, for once in my life, I’m no longer afraid of the dark.