The Liberation Paradox

The Power of the Mind

Marcio

10:15

(10hrs, 53min until the last shuttle off of Distortion)

Marcio was not entirely happy with this plan. Though he was happy to have help, he didn't fully trust this guy, Sid Stone or Danny Jake or whatever his real name was. Still, Beau Tie had assured him that this con artist could be trusted. "Trustworthy con artist" seemed to be a contradiction in terms to Marcio. Beau Tie had worked with this guy in the past and insisted this Danny Jake could definitely get the job done. But how good could he really be? This whole mess only got started because Mr. Daniau caught this fool just last night. Come to think of it, Marcio wasn't even sure he trusted Beau Tie.

But what choice did he have? He was stuck and the clock was ticking away the minutes before he would be eventually and inevitably be found out. And now there was an even tighter timeline ticking away. They had to do everything that needed to be done and make it to the spaceport in time to catch the last shuttle off planet if they wanted make it aboard the starhopper. 21:08. That was the scheduled departure time of the last shuttle. In order to make it to the spaceport in time, they had to be out of the Paradox Hotel with the data no later than 19:00.

This Danny Jake idiot was the only lifeline Marcio had left. So, he followed Danny's instructions. What other choice did he have? He put Sid's—Danny's—phone on silent mode and paired it with his own QSP. The subatomic computer, made up of a network of quantumscale switches, was integrated with Marcio's central nervous system. The QSP only had very basic functionality, but it would allow Marcio to interface with the phone in a way which was somewhere between cybernetic and telepathic. It would allow Marcio to covertly send and receive text messages with Danny without arousing suspicion.

Next, with the silenced phone in his pocket, Marcio had returned to the server room. Ivan and Camilla were still working on the background checks for the hotel's guests. Their babysitter, Vice, had been replaced by another goon. This one, Marcio knew as Awl. He wasn't sure where these big, stupid men got their names, but he was pretty sure it wasn't from their mothers.

At his desk, Marcio pretended to work at the decryptor. What he was really working at was hacking into the hotel's power grid. He quickly cobbled together a simple program that would allow him to cut and restore power to the server room at will. The program, which he hid in the hotel maintenance control system, could be controlled from Sid Stone's cell phone, which Marcio could in turn control via his QSP. With a mere thought, Marcio could cut or restore power to the server room.

As they'd planned how to get Danny Jake into the secure zone, Danny had been dubious about Marcio's claim that he could control the power to the servers with his mind. But like most people, the dumb conman clearly didn't understand how good Marcio really was at what he did.

Setting up the ability to control the servers' power supply with his mind was the first step to getting Danny into the secure zone. The second step made Marcio sick to even think about it. He had to speed up Sky's decryptors. He knew a few tricks to speed up the decrypting programs, but doing so would use a tremendous amount of the server array's resources. The servers would have to draw much more power. The building's power supply could handle it, but Marcio's pseudo-telepathic control over the power supply would allow him to engineer some convenient brownouts.

With the decryptors now running at nearly twice the speed that even Sky himself had managed to get out of them, Marcio watched the server processor load spike. He could hear the slight increase in the fan speeds of the processor array near to his desk.

"My terminal's getting laggy," Camilla complained from the other side of the room.

"Mine too," Ivan affirmed.