March City: Rebellion of the Gifted [Book 2 | Complete | Fantasy/Sci-fi]

Chapter 17: Project Lunation

Rale busied himself playing the dual roles for the next few days. The quiet, humble Rale kept himself occupied, eating at his desk and arriving early, leaving late, to maintain the facade of a keen, unassuming, and enthusiastic boy only too happy to be in his elements. The map recovery finished after another day, showing the multiple outposts scattered in the surrounding area, all downed and no longer populated by any significant numbers of people. He then delved into recovering the instruction manuals and old data for the scanners, purifiers, and generators in the hospital database sections. It was pretty dry stuff, really, and if he'd really worked hard, he could have fixed them all within a day or two, but to facilitate the gifted, mistrustful, conspiratorial other Rale, demure Rale worked slow but steady. It didn't matter how quickly he progressed anyway; Jenny was quite happy with him appearing to toe the line and nodding to everything she said.

He couldn't say the same about Kar-Lai and Grayson, the other two computer engineers who shared his room, though. Although they were careful to wipe down the surfaces and revert everything back to how he'd left it the day before, when Rale sat down again at the computer desk, the electric signals that flowed into his fingertips were different, disturbed, to how they were at the end of the day prior. He pretended to not notice, but the two pairs of eyes remained on him for at least thirty minutes as he checked for updates on the recovery program, deliberately not bringing up his backdoor program until they'd been satisfied he didn't notice they had snooped on his database. The signals that pinged back when he sent out a search showed wiped traces, but nothing was truly wiped on electronic devices. They'd tried to gain access to his already-recovered mapping files, probably to sabotage it, but he'd locked it to make it visible only and not alterable. They'd then tried to analyse the program he used to repair the files with such ease, but, as the actual tool was Rale himself, they found nothing of note. And, of course, they had no idea the second, hidden program was still running. They couldn't touch it.

The most innocent reason they would have for creeping on his stuff would be to see his secret in being so good at his job. The most sinister would be to sabotage his work or even to frame him for being in places he shouldn't be. It was likely the former, but Rale would be lying if this didn't make him irritated. He struggled not to wrinkle his nose in disgust or wipe down his desktop. There was nothing he hated more than people sticking their dirty fingers in where they didn't belong.

Demure Rale wouldn't be fixated on how he'd get revenge on the nosy buggers. Demure Rale wouldn't notice the trespassers and just get on with his work. So Demure Rale took over for the next few hours, but when the two adults had forgotten to be careful, Clever Rale took over. Going via the main database, Rale spied on the peripheries where the two adults continued to struggle. They barely made any progress over the past few weeks, judging by the pauses and failed attempts at deciphering their paths, but their goal was close. Possibly in about three or four days, they would reach it, and those files seemed to hold biological weaponry information. Likely stuff too important and confidential for someone like Rale. They seemed to hold encrypted old audio and video feeds, too, with a running recording of every hour of the day. It would be helpful if he needed quick access to this at a later date. He removed the encryption with ease. It wasn't like there was anybody out there who had the technology, means, or time to listen in anyway.

A smirk curling at his lips, he returned to the adults' destination and loaded the wall encrypting the information with a defensive response that, when breached, would trigger a reaction wiping the offending device's data and make recovery appear impossible. Revenge was a dish best served cold. Cracking his knuckles in anticipation for the next few days, Rale settled down and continued with his second, backdoor program. There was no power outage overnight and his second program had wormed its way into the corrupted, encrypted Project Lunation file under Daniel Suarez's name. He tapped on his screen, maintaining the veil of unravelling old instruction manuals on the abandoned energy generators downstairs, and opened the recovered file.