Invictus

Chapter 21: Santiago

The conversation from Chicago to Antioch was engaging. The conversation from Antioch to Milwaukee... not so much. Trenton and Kya did all the talking, and all of it was way over my head.

Apparently, driving on the freeway without an AI, or Artificially Intelligent driver, was illegal since it almost always led to accidents or traffic congestion. Machines just did the whole driving thing better than humans did. This was news to me, as I had never driven a car before.

Trenton however, was a machine. He could see all car accidents, road construction, traffic congestion, and every cop and police camera. Needless to say, we made good time on our way up.

I made a comment about Trenton's GLH along the way. Something about how ugly it was, which I immediately regretted seconds after saying it. He responded with a long winded lecture on the dangers of having a connected car and how his vehicle was exactly what we needed for the trip. Had we taken a newer vehicle, one with the fancy gadgets and CPU's of our day, it would have made us vulnerable to Ori-gen's "Freak finding algorithm", as Trenton had called it.

So yeah, thus began the theoretical explanation of Ori-gen's algorithm. From what I could remember, it was some kind of software program that compiled data from everything connected to the "Internet of Things" —  or IoT for short — Trenton's words, not mine. Smart cars, smart houses, cell phones, Google search history, YouTube videos, public and private security cameras, synthetic organs like hearts and lungs, social media, and pretty much anything else that left a digital footprint fell into that "IoT" umbrella.

According to Trenton, the algorithm was how Ori-gen had found the other Freaks, and whether legally acquired or not, all that "Big Data" — another one of Trenton's words  — had given the organization a direct location to their whereabouts.

When I asked him how he knew all this he simply responded with, "Dude. It's me."

Ori-gen's algorithm was the very reason why Trenton and Kya had been using burner phones for years. I still had Baldy's phone, so I was in the clear in that department.

Being a loner I realized had its perks. Because I'd never really had much of an interest in social media and had no friends, except for Donnie, it made it nearly impossible for Ori-gen to find me. Obviously, that changed with the video of me killing Jacob.

The same was also true with Kya I discovered. She had no social media presence whatsoever, which surprised me since the girl looked like an Instagram sensation... she may have caught me staring at her once or twice on our ride up.

The reason why both Trenton and Kya were absent from the digital world was made clear in light of the revelation of the algorithm.

I had never considered the possibility that my powers could be sought out by a dark seedy organization like Ori-gen. Trenton, Kya, and Jacob all had, and so they took precautions accordingly. They stayed far away from social media. If they did go online they masked their IP addresses, used fake names with falsified GPS locations, or used a written form of code that Trenton, Kya, and Jacob had developed. Snail mail was one of their favorite ways to talk because it couldn't be tracked.

In short, I was incredibly lucky that I hadn't been picked up by the organization months earlier.

If automation and IoT was Ori-gen's hero, then Santiago was their greatest villain. His Freak ability allowed him to control and manipulate electrical currents, which meant he could speak with machines. A.K.A. he could make us invisible to Ori-gen and pull whatever information from them he wanted. The trick was getting him to see our side.

Santiago's hideout was right outside an affluent suburb on the western side of Milwaukee. It had a long drive and what seemed like an even longer wooded underpass that lead to it. No house was visible from the road and there were no numbers on the mailbox.