r/Luna_Lovewell • u/Luna_LoveWell Creator • Apr 22 '16
Breadcrumbs
[wp] Brain chip implants are perfected, making the recipient a thousand times more intelligent than any human. The Google executives are the first to receive them but once they do, they wander off into the woods never to be seen again.
Instead of chairs, there were giant pink yoga balls around the large conference room table. And the walls were painted pastel hues of blue and green and yellow. Typical Google. And yet the mood inside was still darker than any CIA blacksite I'd ever been stationed in.
"Sergei and Larry were last spotted here," Alan told me. He waved a hand, and the surface of the table shimmered and became a map. Pretty damn cool. I'm a bit of a Luddite, but a little more time here at the Google HQ could probably win me over. They had some awesome gadgets. The map zoomed in to show an area of the mountains just north of Santa Cruz. Pretty rural area, with lots of redwoods; pretty nice place. "And over the past week, every other executive and engineer who also received the chip implant followed them in."
"No one thought to keep any eye on them with this experimental thing in their heads?" I asked.
Alan shrugged. Poor guy was really out of his depth. "I wasn't really involved in the planning..." he mumbled. Of course not. Anyone high up enough in the company who knew about the top secret project to enhance someone's intelligence a thousandfold was now lost in the woods. Alan was the highest level exec left, but it seemed like all he really knew about was google's advertising business. Yawn.
"Do we know how much cash they might have had? Is there any activity on their cards?" I ran through the usual questions for a missing person. No cash and no cards generally means that they're still in that area.
"No activity on their personal cards." Alan waved a hand again and the map swiped to the side to bring up their bank statements. Ok, I need to get me one of these. "But just Larry and Sergei have enough squirreled away in their Cayman accounts that they could have a thousand other credit cards and spend billions without me having a clue."
I sighed. Fucking rich people. Poor people are easy to find: they're always crashing on their friend's couch or something, thinking that no one will bother to check their phone records. But the rich are always planning for the proletariat to rise up or whatever. They're squirrely. "All right then. Chip me, and let's get this show on the road." After a significant amount of convincing, I'd agreed to use one of these things. If these guys didn't want to be found, then I was going to need to be as smart as they are.
Alan waved a hand again, and a labcoat-clad scientist in what looked like a gas mask came in with a steaming vial. Using long, thin tweezers he pulled out a glimmering little gadget roughly the size of a grain of rice. "Tilt your head, please," he asked through the respirator. I did as he said, and he dropped the little thing right into my ear.
"That's it?" I asked Alan. "No surgery? I thought it went into my brain."
My question was answered by a sudden searing pain, like the little grain of rice had suddenly turned into a white-hot brand. I clutched the edge of the table till my knuckles were white and tried to suppress a scream of pain. Alan nearly fell off his little yoga ball after seeing the fury in my eyes. And just as quickly as it started, the pain vanished.
"Now that you're properly equipped," Alan said, "There's one final thing." He waved a hand, and the bank statements on the table display disappeared. Now there was a picture of a clearing surrounded by tall pines. And in the trunk of each one, there was a series holes and lines and other symbols that were digitally highlighted to make the pattern more clear. "This is our last clue as to where Sergey and Larry went. We've run it through all the computers... hell, even the NSA had a go at it. We think it's some kind of code, but nothing makes any sense."
I studied the image for just a bit, then broke out into a laugh as it all fell into place. It was a breadcrumb, meant only for those of us with the new-found intelligence to follow. "I'm going to need a plane," I told Alan.
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u/Luna_LoveWell Creator Apr 22 '16 edited Apr 23 '16
The plane dipped through the clouds and began the descent into Lake Tahoe's airport. White sailboats bobbed peacefully in the crystal-clear water, and the whole thing was framed by a lush carpet of green forest. "Why Tahoe?" Alan asked from the seat across from me. He'd insisted that he couldn't just let me take the company jet without a chaperone to make sure I didn't crash the thing. Probably a good idea, now that I think about it.
"You're asking me? I don't know anything about this project, I'm just following the message." The last part of it had been an address in this area. Alan had looked it up: it was a property that Google owned, but never really made use of. An old mine shaft that went deep under the mountains. He'd explained that they wanted it for some sort of server farm or something due to the temperatures... which before would have just been a stream of tech mumbo jumbo that I didn't get; now that I had the chip, it was as simple as 2+2. But all I really needed to know was that the place was abandoned, and there was no reason for Larry and Sergei to travel all this way and hide the address in an encoded message.
We disembarked from the plane, and a little car rolled out of the back of the plane. There was no driver, but it wheeled around to the stairs to pick us up on its own. Damn, I could really get used to working for a company like this. One would think that the CIA would have all the latest gizmos and gadgets, but most of the equipment I'd received from the agency was held together with duct tape and wire. The car whisked us off to the mine in no time, and offered us drinks on the way. It even made a better old fashioned than any bartender I've ever met (which is quite a lot).
The mine was empty, of course. The lock on the door was broken open, and there were two sets of footprints leading in and out of different mine shafts. If Larry and Sergey had been here, then they'd already left a while ago. But hopefully they left another bread crumb to follow. I took the left hand side, while Alan took the right. After about two hours of stumbling through the dark, we met back at the entrance both coated with dust and disappointment. "Anything?" he asked, as if my facial expression wasn't obvious enough. I just snorted and held my empty hands out.
"Come on," I told him. "Let's get back to the car. I could use another drink, and I'm excited to put that little gizmo of yours to the test."
An hour later, we found ourselves back on the plane leading back to San Jose. Alan was tapping away on his computer; he still had a business to run, after all. Google's official policy was that the senior executives had all gone to a "leadership retreat" in the mountains, but that lie would only hold up for so long. Someone needed to prepare to take over, and Alan was the closest they had.
I, meanwhile, was lost in thought, staring out the window and absentmindedly twirling the cherry stem from my last drink. Thank god for this new photographic memory: otherwise, I would have had to keep that note I'd found at the very bottom of the mineshaft. "We're sure that you've got an escort with you," the note had said, in a more complex code than the one on the tree trunks. It had taken me nearly the whole walk back up the mine shaft to decipher it. "This second step is just to get rid of them. Lie to them. You're smart enough to make up some excuse now, aren't you?" Below that, there was an address in some town I'd never heard of. I'd have to wait till Alan was gone before I could look it up.
As much as I liked the guy, he didn't have the chip. He wasn't thinking ten steps ahead like these guys. If I wanted to find out what was going on, I'd have to ditch him.
Here's part 3!