Martin"s Secret

Just being underground was frightening to Jessica. Her tunnel-phobia had nothing to do with stories about torture dungeons or watching too many zombie movies – it was the earned apprehension of having once been left to die in an underground tomb.

Her fear of caverns hearkened back to a misadventure inside a Colorado mine when she was nine. She could still hear the giggles of her friends when they disappeared into one of the dark catacombs tangling out from the hub cavern they had been exploring. It was a hide-and-seek prank gone awry that left her to wander haplessly that night through a maze of dark, stifling mine shafts. Her friends’ mischief turned into a terrifying ordeal for Jessica when the older playmates were unable to find her.

She wound up spending the night huddled against a cave wall a half-mile inside the labyrinth when the batteries in her flashlight waned. She had cried a while and ran, then ran a while and cried until she was too exhausted to go on.

“So how’d you get out of there?” asked Martin after she told him about the harrowing experience.

“One of my friends told her parents. They called the police and eventually Joe Collinsworth, a volunteer firefighter from the village, found me sitting in the dark, shivering and hysterical.”

“Thank you, Joe,” said Martin.

“Yep. My Dad and I stayed in touch with him,” Jessica reminisced. “It was his dream-come-true to join the New York City Fire Department, but he died in the 2001 terrorist attack on the twin towers.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Martin empathized. “What towers?” he asked with a genuinely puzzled expression.

“The twin towers at the World Trade Center!” she exclaimed with a hint of vexation.

“I should know about that, right?”

When it struck her why he didn’t remember the terrorist attack on New York City that killed her friend, she felt anger for the people that severely damaged Martin’s mind and anger toward the government for employing them.

“I’m sorry,” she said, after realizing he simply didn’t recall the massacre. “Where Joe died is not important. Besides, it was a long time ago.”

Jessica’s sympathetic demeanor belied the angst she was feeling. In truth, the foreboding import of his deteriorating condition quickened her heartbeat. Aside from the circumstances she would be left to explain to authorities, she cared deeply for him and he was disappearing before her eyes. She wondered if she would even be found should Martin’s memory continue to fade. Facing death alone in an underground passageway was an excruciatingly torturous scenario. She managed a smile, hoping that he wouldn’t realize she was actually terrified. Hoping he wouldn’t realize that any moment she might panic and charge through the dungeon flailing her arms and screaming at the top of her lungs.

They turned down another corridor, its walls plastered with ominous LED warning signs sporting messages like Caution, No Admittance and No Trespassing posted in three languages. That’s when Martin spotted it.

“Up ahead!” he whispered exuberantly, pointing to an eight-foot-wide, steel-gated cubicle built into a wall.

An olive-drab, battery-powered service cart branded with the letters A-C-R printed on a gold shield was parked with its front-end facing the rod-iron gate.

Martin approached the cubicle and knelt to retrieve a miniature, cordless rotary saw from his knapsack. He pressed a button on the high-RPM tool and its tiny disc-blade buzzed no louder than an electric razor. Its tiny carbide-tipped blade sliced through the gate’s steel lock-bolt as though it was plastic. After gaining access to the cart, Martin sat behind its steering wheel and pulled color-coded wires from under the dash to hot-wire the battery switch. When finished, he motioned to Jessica and she approached from the other side of the cart as he leaned over the seat and held his hand out.

Jessica playfully extended her hand.

“It’s not the Pumpkin Coach but I’m not Cinderella either,” she joked. That’s when she saw the upside-down words “YOU LOVE JESSICA” neatly printed across his palm.

He wrote the memo earlier in case he couldn’t remember her name or what she meant to him. At that moment, he felt more like a high-school-senior picking up his prom date than a secret agent breaching an underground spy nest.

“I love you too,” she mumbled stealthily.

“What’d you say?”

“I said take me to your leader so can give him a piece of my mind,” she said.

“Indeed, maybe we can exchange it for a piece of mine,” he volleyed.

She loved the message he wrote on his palm but was terrified that he had to write it. Martin’s biological memory was dissipating at an increasing rate as the AI dominated more of his thought processes, but she couldn’t cry as neither could afford to be distracted by raw emotions. She promised herself a good cry on a beautiful secluded beach somewhere if they made it out of there. They would be tears of happiness if Martin was with her; she couldn’t bare the thought of a different outcome. As apprehension welled, she struggled to block the tsunami of emotions. Martin’s most intimate secrets had belonged to him before ACR stole them in a botched experiment. Now the company was trying to murder him to cover that blunder. Now Jessica had skin in the game and there would no turning back.

Martin had busied himself unlocking encrypted codes and hacking passwords with the device he had removed from the briefcase. After a few tense moments, he sighed with relief.

“The advanced dielectric elastomer actuators used to power artificial muscles and skeletal assemblies are manufactured in a laboratory a short distance ahead.”

“You lost me at “dialectric”, said Jessica.

“They’re developing androids that appear to be human. They have standard AI, it’s going to be a difficult zone to penetrate, a real high-value target.” Martin offered her a peek at the device’s screen.

“And I thought the new computer system at work was complicated,” she wisecracked.

“I’ve got exactly two minutes to deploy the paused images of that sector because that’s when I programmed the cameras and sensors in this sector to reactivate.”

Jessica nodded but had paid little attention to the device. She was relieved to see Martin hadn’t lost his edge when it came to electronics but she was scouting the long hall for security guards, or anything else that moved.

After rendering the camera and other surveillance apparatuses in the next zone dormant, Martin put the device away, removed his Glock45ACP from the briefcase and tucked it under his belt. He drove the cart onto the corridor past red-lettered warnings about radioactive isotopes in use and the level of clearance required of visitors. The two mostly stared ahead, each lost in their thoughts.

At half the distance of the corridor, Jessica snagged a glance at Martin. Both were bleary from straining their eyes and wearied by stress, but she hadn’t detected any change in his aptitude for electronics and his mood was relatively upbeat. Still, he hadn’t said a word in ten minutes as he eased the cart through the tunnel.

“Did I mention you’re a great lover,” she asked with a promiscuous glance.

“I’m not sure, but thanks,” he replied.

“Wait, that’s it? I tell you what a great lover you are and you thank me?”

Their eyes met but he broke it off and braked carefully to a stop. He wanted to kiss this woman whose face was so beautiful and familiar but he was afraid she would balk, so he spoke with his hands resting on the steering wheel.

“You saying that makes me feel really good.”

“Martin, you’re scaring me. What do you remember about us?”

He glanced at his palm before speaking. “Your name is Jessica and you’re very important to me.”

She took his hand, turned it palm up, and gently opened his fingers to expose the note.

“We came here together to get your life back,” Martin.

He read the small words inked neatly across his hand in capital letters.

“Does this offend you?”

Jessica stroked his hair and pecked his chiseled jaw.

“No. It makes me happy.”

“I’m glad” - he looked at his hand with an eyebrow arched as he rubbed the letters with his thumb - “because this is permanent ink.”

Jessica made a pretend-mad face and pointed at him like Leah Remini points at Kevin James. “Don’t spoil the moment, Buster - we don’t know how many we’ve got left.”

“There’s something else,” he said, tilting his head.

A thin tree of worry lines instantly formed between Jessica’s brows.

“What, Martin. What is it?”

“I seem to have forgotten why we came here. I know it’s important. Could you fill me in?”

Jessica’s heart skipped a beat. His memory was being systematically wiped clean by something or someone and she was powerless to stop or even slow the process. In frustration, she reached out and pressed on the scar behind Martin’s ear with an index finger.

“We’re here because of this. Someone at ACR has surgically altered your consciousness. Someone evil who wants you dead because their project failed and now they’re afraid of you, of what you know.”

Martin’s head snapped back as though her pressing the scar had delivered an electric charge.

“Damn! What just happened?” he yowled.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” she said, confused by the outburst.

Suddenly Martin had clarity. He remembered her, from their chance meeting to making love in the jet and later on the ground. He remembered every moment they had shared.

“No, it wasn’t pain; it was a surge, like you turned me on.”

“Turned you on? This is no time for flattery.”

“Not that way. When you touched my head it jolted my memory. I remember the biker, I remember the last few days.”

“Do you remember last year, or the year before?” Jessica wanted him to be whole again but realized it might mean losing him to another life, another woman.

“No, but at least I know my memory loss is reversible, and I remember ACR. This place is a top-secret research facility that does classified work for the Pentagon. ACR is a major, CIA contractor for covert operations and a supplier of classified arms and equipment.”

“Oh my God,” said Jessica in reaction to the obvious implications. “We are literally inside an espionage laboratory.”

“Yes, and it’s not an accident that U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command is headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa,” said Martin.

“They surgically implanted artificial intelligence in my head and fused it to my neurons” - he turned and looked at her in wide-eyed astonishment - “I remember.”

“What else?” she pressed.

“I remember that the experimental surgery was officially deemed a failure and a consequential attempt to temporarily block me from accessing classified intelligence files also failed. They decide to eliminate the project, which is me.”

“So you got out of Dodge before they could do more damage,” she surmised.

“Exactly. Only the facility was in Colorado, not Kansas. Wait, I remember, ‘out-of-Dodge’ is just a figure of speech, a metaphor.”

Jessica leaned in and kissed him full on the lips then giggled her excitement, cupping his cheeks in her hands.

“I brought you back. Score one for me, even if it was an accident.”

Martin put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her excited eyes.

“I owe you big time.”

She swayed her head from side to side and danced in place.

“So the implant was conjured, designed and assembled by an exascale system with a three-D micro printer. The computer is so powerful that it is measured in exaFLOPS and is capable of doing a billion calculations per second,” Martin explained.

“I don’t know what that means, Martin” - she softly traced his scar with her index finger the way she had that first night they were together - “can we fix it?”

“I’m not sure. The implant seems to displace or ignore biological thoughts the way random-access-memory ignores permanent computer files when it’s active.”

“Are you saying the implant may have deleted your long term memories, the ones that matter?”

“Something like that. Hopefully they’re not deleted but only walled off by intrusive fusion software. If not, this is all an exercise in futility.”

After traveling fifteen city blocks along two passageways they came upon a wide lobby with twin stainless-steel elevator doors, one on either side; each unit had an LED sign that designated the lift as an “emergency” exit.

“I’ll bet the top floor is the basement of a downtown federal building,” said Jessica.

“One of the elevators connects to the basement of a three-story redbrick owned by ACR, a front building.”

“How do you know? Is this the real Martin speaking or the artificial one?”

“It’s me. I’m just not sure what information comes from my alter ego and what comes from me. Guess it doesn’t matter as long as it’s good intel.”

“So, now that we’re here, what’s the plan?”

“This is one of four emergency exits located in the facility,” said Martin. That wall between the lifts includes a one-inch shell of hardened steel.”

“So we would need an Army tank or something to break in, right?”

“Maybe not. I’m going to hack the system the emergency-exit elevators are assigned to and try to open them.”

Martin stopped the cart just short of the elevators, retrieved a back-up pistol from the ACR briefcase and handed it to Jessica.

“Do you know how to use this?” he asked.

“I grew up in rural Colorado and I’ve won two county skeet-shooting competitions. You don’t want to cross me, buddy,” She turned the gun from side to side to assess its functionality before racking the slide to chamber a round.

Martin loved her sense of humor under pressure and that she was unpredictable and could be incredibly bold when required.

“I hope you never stop surprising me,” he said. “I love it!”

Jessica set the safety, leaned forward and slid it under her belt behind her right hip.

“You’re not exactly boring yourself, Mr. Harbach. A gal could get into a lot of trouble hanging out with you.”

“Let’s hope not,” he responded with a smile and went back at work on the ACR portable decoder to access the sector’s security system. That’s when he heard the mosquito-like buzz of multiple drones.

Martin put the device on the seat and was about to draw his weapon when he heard a pop from Jessica’s Glock. As he spun around to take aim with his own gun he saw Jessica take a second bead on a dodging drone and let fly three more rounds, one of which pierced the battery of the quad-rotor drone.

Martin yelled for her to take cover beside the cart as a third mechanical warrior buzzed them. The drone weaved skillfully through the tunnel’s limited space, dodging and diving as it attempted to focus its camera on them. On the third dive, Martin stood beside the cart and emptied his Glock’s magazine at the drone before it crashed into a wall and bounced across the floor like an over-priced, battered toy.

“Get in, we have to put some distance between us and these drones.”

Jessica did not require a second warning. She ran alongside to match its speed before leaping into the cart. They drove further into the maze, unsure whether the drones had time to message their master.