Walls

17

They had only one hour to get to Angelora - and Angelora was more than an hour away. Elias was not happy.

"Fuck!"

Abbie had settled down to try and re-engineer most of what she could reverse.

"So the good part is, both our chips short-circuited-"

Elias turned to her with a horror-filled face. He desperately wanted to keep his eyes on the road. But Abbie was not helping when she kept spewing out randomly horrifying facts that were always worse than a gunman trying to kill them.

Abbie looked at his face, gesturing for him to keep his eyes on the road.

"What do you mean short-circuited?" Elias glared at the road.

"Well, not exactly short-circuited, but more like rebooted. This is probably why we can't remember anything. Whoever hacked into the system added a memory block and then placed a zombie loop back in its position-"

"Zombie loop?"

"I don't know, okay? I'm not an engineer, but that is what it says here in the documentation - a zombie loop. I assume it loops back a standard memory in the brain - more like virtual reality. At least that is what it says here."

"Okay- makes no sense, but go on"

"So in our case, I'm assuming the car wreck kind of made the chip reboot, and since the zombie loop is in place something weird happened to erase our memories"

"You make it sound like our brains are computers. Erase our memories?"

"Well technically, not erase. The memories are probably there, but we just can't recall them until the zombie loop thing is removed."

Elias raised a brow, "Still sounds like a computer to me."

Abbie heaved a tired sigh, "Okay, I don't know the medical term for that - Amnesia? I think it is called amnesia. But the chip has the actual capability to enhance memories, according to Suresh, so the chip does meddle with memories."

Elias felt his stomach do a very not-so-glamorous flip and he felt a little like throwing up. Did he own a company that did all this? Who the heck authorized putting one of those chips in his head?

"So, we're not gonna die in an hour?" he asked.

"That I am not sure. But what I do know is that a bunch of other people with a chip that is not rebooted is definitely gonna die."

"Oh fuck!"

The road ahead of him was slowly transforming into the smooth roads that were around Angelora. But they still had miles ahead of them and less than an hour to get to the place.

"This is not gonna work. If the engineering crew is out, you are the only person who can re-engineer the whole program and save these people."

"I'm not superwoman, okay. It's not easy- altering the code is just not enough. We have to install it back to the original server, which is probably at Acute Inc." Abbie sighed.

"Fuck!"

"Wait- the call block is gone. I can call Suresh. He'll know what to do about this." Abbie pulled her phone up, holding it up at Elias.

He nodded, hoping that calling Suresh is worth their while. Abbie dialed the call and put the device on speaker, placing it on the dashboard.

The phone rang for a couple seconds and then Suresh's voice rolled on through the device, "Oh my Gosh! Abbie and Elias! The two of you are going to give me major cardiac arrest and then throw me in a shitty bed at one of these fancy hospitals in Angelora that I don't even have the money to pay for!"

"Suresh, we're sorry. Oh gosh, we had to run from the motel," Abbie went into story-mode relating the details of their little escapade to Suresh.

Elias waited patiently for her to get to the details of them possibly being dead in an hour. She finally arrived at the place about how they discovered the whole zombie thing and couldn't fix it without accessing the servers at Acute Inc.

Suresh let out a frustrated sigh.

"This is the only reason why I told you guys to have someone outside of the projects who knew about it. I'm just the security guy here - I only monitor the markers and call in when there is something funky to make sure that everything is alright. I don't know how to access the servers - heck, I don't even know who can access them."

"So, no one outside of the team knows how to access the servers?" Elias cleared his throat, unable to believe that he made these silly business decisions.

"Nope, not one."

"And all those who can access the servers have a brain-chip thing in their head and are hacked?"

"Yup, every one of them. And also, the name is Acute-X06. It's weird when you guys keep calling it 'brain chip'."

Abbie rolled her eyes at Suresh's theatrics, "Do you think we should call the police?"

"That could get you in a lot of trouble, but also, if it's a malfunction in the Acute-X06, there is nothing that those guys can do. I mean, we can't remove the chips without the engineers."

"Fuck!"

Elias pushed his feet harder on the gas, driving way above the speed limit. He did not believe that things had gotten so out of hand in a company that he did not even remember owning.

"Okay, so...I think I have a solution here," Abbie bit her lip, "Maybe I could just try to hack into the server and install the version that I can try to re-engineer. But also, hacking is like not ethical and stuff."

"Well, you were a penetration tester here before you were promoted. And it was basically your job to get into the system," Suresh said.

Elias gave Abbie a brief glance, "Do it!"

"Alright then, talk to you later, Suresh."

"Wait, tell me where the hell you are-"

Abbie ended the call, cutting off Suresh mid-sentence, and propped the laptop over her knees.