Kenji Da Silva was not from Singapore, but his parents were.  After spending two years in the Israeli Defense Force, he was lucky to settle in a city as advanced as Singapore.  Following a stint as a cyber-warfare programmer in Tel Aviv, he landed a lucrative internship in the States at Source Point Industries, working on proprietary new computer A.I. tech and virtual interfaces.

But his internship expired after only a year and he was forced to find work at Telecom, a phone service provider, doing mostly data storage and maintaining their online presence and security protocols at their warehouse location in Singapore.

Tossing his backpack behind the front desk, Kenji sat behind the computer, keying the microphone.

“Hey Akiba, is Chu taking over soon?  You looking kinda winded.”

“Nah, that lazy swine Johnny is too hungover,” Akiba, the single factory security guard for the weekend, replied. “Can’t make it; now, I’m stuck with his shift.”

Kenji checked all the active alarms and cameras before keying in.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?  We’re all set up here in the control room.”

“Thank God, I’m heading home.  Thanks to you as well.  See you on Monday Kenji.”

Kenji smiled and leaned back in his chair.

Telecom, preferring anti-thievery, had purposely constructed this facility to resemble a dilapidated warehouse, far from the prying eyes of potential burglars and only allowing loading hours at obscure times of the night and day.

It also made this security detail a joke.  Closing his eyes, Kenji could almost imagine her wearing that striped bikini…

An alarm went off.

Bolting up from his chair, he hit the camera switch to the alarm’s origin. Nothing.  Shutting off the alarm, he concluded, it was probably just some kid kicking the fence. The motion tracker was showing nothing, so he hit the reset button.

The computer screen flashed, and in a brief instant, Kenji saw a woman’s face, ethereal and glowing.  She was smiling, and then he vanished.

Kenji suddenly felt nervous.  To add to his distress, all the motion trackers began wailing.  Activating his virtua interface and putting on his gloves, Kenji decided to investigate the problem.  Diving into the virtual cyberspace of Telecom’s security system, it quickly became clear—they had been hacked.

The deep black expanse filled with Telecom’s inventory and functions changed from their normal turquoise to a purple hue.  Taking a step forward, he nearly fell over.  Some gooey substance, no doubt a part of a virus employed by the hacker was—

A woman’s laugh broke up his thought process.  His hacker was reducing his bandwidth and slowing his speed. Turning around Kenji could make her out in the distance, walking away.

Time to try a little something he learned back at Source Point.

There was no way to catch the woman at his speed.  But what if she wasn’t moving?

Pressing his hand to the floor, Kenji sent a completely automated public Turing test, used to tell computers and humans apart at the A.I. The captcha would minimally affect the hacker’s subroutines. Operating it alone would dismiss this particular hacking A.I. at first, but the captcha would inevitably engulf the program, slowing its bandwidth to the point of complete immobilization.  The pulse, disguised as a simple request command, snaked its way around the woman, first grabbing her leg.  With a cry, she attempted to pull away.

Buffering his processing speed, Kenji was now able to stride forward toward the woman, who was yelling and trying to push the captcha off.

“Ever heard of Latin, honey?  It’s a dead language.  No one speaks it anymore.  You can’t fight this program because you don’t speak its language.  Why?” he queried, approaching her off to the side.

“Because you’ve never even seen it.”

The woman was seizing every second, her profile blurring and then reforming as she attempted to escape.  Placing himself in front of her, Kenji was surprised to see an unexpected emotion: smugness.

Unable to speak, she was typing out a message that appeared before him.

“Behind you.”

Kenji was still processing the command when he felt a strong arm grab his shoulder and wrench him wholly out of the virtua and back into the real world.  Crashing against the wall, he tried throwing an elbow into his attacker, who countered by smashing his knee into Kenji’s gut.  Momentarily stunned, he tried to rise.  A gun cocked and a voice spoke Mandarin.

“Armed?”

Kenji coughed and shook his head.

“I speak English.”

He heard the sound of the gun being holstered as the man squatted before him and hunched forward.

“Nice captcha.  My A.I. didn’t expect that.  She’ll have to be retrofitted, but in the meantime I’m sure she’ll just have to deal with the shame of being outdone by a human, Mr. Silva.”

Kenji glanced up.

“It can’t be, I heard you died…”

Damon Wade grinned devilishly.

“Who said ghosts can’t come back from the dead?”

Rising up, Damon held out his hand to Kenji.

“Enough small talk.  Kenji, I need your help.”

“What is it you had in mind?”

“I’m going to do what David Faust could never do.”

Kenji accepted the hand up and stood.

“Well?”

“I’m going to destroy Source Point.”

Read part 10 here.

Read part 12 here.