Infinity Base Page 3

  “Do you need the voice models?” Dani asked

  “Not at present, but we’ll have to have a story prepared.”

  “Of course,” Dani replied, giving Savannah a careful glance. “By the time I’m done, Savannah Fairchild’s mother won’t know the difference.”

  Savannah stiffened in her seat at the sound of her name.

  Dani cleared her throat. “Where is the cargo at present?”

  The cargo. She meant the pods. Dad and Nate and . . . us.

  “Out at the launch facility,” Elana said. “I told Anton I want no delay.”

  “I understand. I’ll have the models ready right away.” She clicked the phone off.

  Savannah pounced. “What was that all about? Why were you talking about me?”

  “Because I want Elana to think the reason I’m hiding away in my house is because I’m training your voice model applications.”

  “Our what?”

  “It’s an AI program that can mimic your presence on voice calls,” Dani said, as if she were still our official Eureka Cove tour guide.

  “Wait,” I cried. “You’re training an artificial intelligence program to use our voices?”

  “It’s not as interesting as it sounds. Just a standard conversation bot with an overlay using your individual voices to create a vocabulary gleaned from actual recordings of words as well as random syllable combination and personality inflections.”

  “Right,” Mom said slowly. “Standard.”

  I had no idea what Dani meant, either.

  Dani didn’t seem to hear my mother’s sarcasm. “Just in case anyone calls and wants to talk to you. We did it with your father yesterday.”

  I thought back to the phone conversation I’d had with my father on the island cliff, and how baffled I’d been at his sudden one-eighty on everything he’d taught me. He’d said, This isn’t about freedom. This is about being safe.

  I’d been so scared I’d tossed the phone off the cliff.

  But now the truth burst from my lips. “I never spoke to my father yesterday at all!”

  “Probably not,” Dani admitted. “I completed your father’s voice model the day he arrived here.”

  She sounded so calm. My fists clenched on the table. “Why did you do that?” I said, seething.

  Dani looked confused. “It’s my job? Or was my job.”

  “It still is,” Eric pointed out. “You just promised Elana you’d make voice bots of us.”

  “Eric,” Mom said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “This isn’t a good thing.”

  He shook it off and narrowed his eyes at Dani. “I know it isn’t good. If she can fake our voices, she can fake us saying anything she wants. She can have a fake Savannah call up her mother and say she’s running away from home and that will explain why none of us are ever heard from again.”

  Savannah let out an indignant cry.

  “Well, I’d probably not do that,” Dani said, still sounding bizarrely matter-of-fact. “That would trigger a manhunt. I’d just program the bot to have Savannah and Dr. Seagret, for instance, explain to her mother that they were extending your trip by a few days, until we could figure out a reasonable explanation for your disappearance. . . .” She trailed off. “You know what? Any way I describe this to you probably sounds terrible.”

  “Yes,” Mom said flatly. “Because it is terrible.”

  Dani looked a little sheepish, which was ironic, given that she was a Shepherd.

  “This is also a good cover story,” she said. “For any sounds coming from this house that might get picked up from recording devices in my neighbors’ houses or out on the street.”

  “How much of this place is bugged?” Mom asked, astonished.

  “All of it,” I grumbled. We’d checked ourselves into Shepherd central. Dr. Underberg had to hide away underground to get away from them. Dad had to take us all into the woods for a month. And now we thought we could hide out in their headquarters?

  I looked around Dani’s house again, at the books and the photos and the out-of-place furniture. There was nothing of Underberg’s here. We were entirely at Dani’s mercy, and I wasn’t entirely sure we could trust her. Even if she was telling the truth about who she was, she was also a Shepherd.

  Mom dropped into a seat and rubbed her temples in frustration. “So, what now? We make a run for it?”

  “We can’t do that until we have Dad and Nate!” I turned to Dani. “Where’s the launch facility? Can we go there and get them?”

  “What is the launch facility, you mean,” Eric corrected. “What are they launching?”

  Dani looked pained.

  “I know what it is,” said a voice from behind us. I turned. Howard leaned against the door to the bedroom, looking as pale and weak as I felt. He held some papers in his hands. “Or at least, I have a guess.”

  He held out a pile of photocopied sheets. The top one showed a diagram with so many shapes and arcs and parts that I could hardly tell what I was looking at.

  Neither, apparently, could Savannah. “What is it, Howard?”

  “This?” he said. “This is the plan for a space station. Whatever they’re launching, I think it’s going there.”

  “HOWARD,” MY MOTHER said kindly, as we all stared, “how are you feeling?”

  “Give me that.” Dani rounded the table, her hand outstretched to snatch the plans back.

  “Don’t touch me!” Howard yelped. He took off in the opposite direction.

  “If you’d just—” Dani took another step, and Howard jumped over the back of the couch and into the living room.

  “Stay away from me!” he shouted again, backing up stiffly. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Maybe he had the right idea.

  “Stay away from him!” I echoed, and shot out of my chair. As Dani approached, I vaulted over the back of the couch and planted my feet on the seat cushions. “Mom, help us.”

  Mom stepped in between Dani and the path to the living room. “Dani, you attacked this child. Don’t you think you should keep your distance?”

  Dani paused, her lips pursed. “I didn’t attack him. I—”

  “You tranquilized him,” Mom said, her voice calm, her hands held up, palm out, like a traffic guard.

  “I tranquilized all of you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But Howard fought back.”

  Mom cast a quick, warning glance at me. “Gillian”—I bristled, but then she finished her sentence—“is right. If we’re going to keep working together, I need your assurances that you will not hurt or attack these children again.”

  “I saved you,” Dani insisted. “And I’m giving up everything to do it. Do you have any idea where you’d be right now if I hadn’t risked everything?”

  With Dad and Nate, or possibly worse. I remembered again what Dani said just before I’d blacked out. We were lucky to be alive.

  “I’m sorry you don’t like my methods, but it’s not like we have many options.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Mom replied. “You want us to put our trust in you, and not call the cops right now, but you haven’t proved yourself very trustworthy.”

  Dani raised her arms in frustration. “You’re here, aren’t you? Not frozen or dead. Standing in my house? Eating my soup? Two minutes ago, that kid was asleep in my bed.”

  “And six hours before that you knocked him out against his will.” Mom remained firm.

  But so did Dani. “Dr. Seagret,” she said slowly, “may I speak to you privately?”

  “What?” I cried. “No fair. We promised.”

  Mom shot me another look, and this one was icy. Then she herded Dani into her office and shut the door.

  I turned to Howard. “Are you okay?”

  He looked down at the papers in his hand. “I don’t like her.”

  “I’m sorry she hurt you.” I guess I hadn’t realized he really wasn’t listening when we all agreed to let Dani knock us out and stick us in the pods.

  “Are you sur
e she’s really Dr. Underberg’s daughter?”

  I pressed my lips together. I was. At least, I was sure that Dani believed it. Nothing else made any sense.

  Eric and Savannah joined us in the living room. “So, what is this?”

  “I found it in her bedroom,” Howard said. “They look like schematics for a space station. Look at the date.” He pointed to a block of text near the key on the first page.

  Infinity Base—1979. Wow, these were ancient. My eyes scanned the rest of the text, then grew wide.

  “Howard! Look at the name!”

  Designed by Aloysius Underberg.

  He nodded vigorously. “Well, Dr. Underberg did design rocket ships. It stands to reason he’d design a space station, too.”

  “But the Shepherds didn’t build a space station,” Eric said.

  “No one thought they built Omega City, either,” I pointed out.

  “That’s different,” said Eric. “Omega City was underground. They were able to hide it. You can’t tell me there’s been a space station floating up there for forty years and no one has ever seen it. Dad’s friends would be all over something like that.”

  “I don’t think it’s been there for forty years.” Howard flipped to another page. “Look, this update is from 2013.”

  I looked down at the newer plan. It looked similar to Underberg’s original design, but sleeker. The key was marked Infinity Base (Capella).

  “Capella,” said Savannah. “That’s the name of the Guidant satellite. What if—what if they used launching the satellite as a cover to launch this into space?”

  Eric stared at her. “Don’t you turn into a conspiracy theorist now, too.”

  “I’m not.” Savannah’s voice was frantic. “Because this is no theory. Look around: we’re living it.”

  “But you can’t have something as big as a space station up there and no one notices it,” Eric argued. “Thousands of people have telescopes on their back porches. There are astronomers all over the world. Look at all those pictures we saw in the Capella lab back on Eureka Cove. Howard, tell them.”

  True. On the tour of the Guidant engineering labs the other day, they’d shown us wall-size images of the pictures the Capella telescope was sending back. “Well, they have to be hiding it somehow.”

  “No way,” said Eric.

  I whirled on him. “How can you say that, after everything you’ve seen? What about all that stuff we found on the island? All the tests they were doing on those space chimps? The research we found said they were in orbit, remember? Where do you think they were? Elana said they are launching Dad and Nate. Launching where?”

  Eric grimaced, and I suddenly realized—it was easier for him to believe there was no Infinity Base. Because if it didn’t exist, then Dad wasn’t going anywhere.

  But before I could say anything else, the door to Dani’s office opened, and she and Mom emerged. Dani’s mouth was set in a tight line, and Mom looked subdued and pale, her expression so much like Eric’s at this moment that my throat tightened around a sudden sob.

  They were terrified. Both of them. I wondered if I looked like that, too.

  Eric snatched the papers out of Howard’s hands and waved them in the air. “Is this thing real?” he asked Dani accusingly.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it where they’re sending my father?”

  “Yes.”

  The papers slipped from his fingers and scattered across the floor. Eric dropped onto the couch cushions.

  I blurted, “But they haven’t sent them yet, right? We can still stop it?”

  Dani hesitated. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe we can go out to the launch facility and try to get to their pods before they are loaded onto the shuttle, but—”

  “But what?” I exclaimed. “Let’s go. Let’s do that right now!”

  “Gillian, calm down,” Mom said. “We can’t go running off without a plan.”

  The plan was we stopped them from shooting Dad into space. Period.

  Howard bent to scoop up the Infinity Base papers. “I can’t believe Nate gets to go to space. He wouldn’t even let me go.”

  “Gets?” Savannah asked, incredulous. “He’s a prisoner! Also, he won’t even know. He’s frozen.”

  “Hypothermic torpor,” Howard grumbled, as if he didn’t think this made much of a difference. As if Nate was somehow lucky he’d been kidnapped and frozen, as long as it meant he got to go to space.

  “Why?” Eric asked softly. “Why would they do this?”

  “To get to Dr. Underberg,” Dani said.

  We all looked at her quizzically.

  Dani sighed. “Right now, Underberg is basically untouchable in his rocket ship. They can’t catch him. They can’t stop him.”

  “Good,” I said. At least there was one person on our side the Shepherds couldn’t mess with any longer.

  “Stop him from what?” Mom asked.

  “For the past few months, he’s been interfering with the operation of Infinity Base. Gathering information. Threatening to expose the Shepherds and their lies. Until recently, he was waiting between staff trips up there and even boarding himself, usually to steal our resources. In fact, that’s how he and I first got in touch.”

  “You’ve been in space?” Howard said, seeming to snap out of his reverie. “How many times?”

  “Enough,” Dani said. “And once as part of an investigative team to try to figure out some irregularities happening at the station. I figured out who was to blame, and was able to keep the truth hidden from the others for a little while.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Mom. “Your father is threatening to expose Elana Mero as a Shepherd.”

  “Yes, and reveal the truth about the Capella satellite.”

  “What truth?” Mom asked.

  Savannah looked down at the papers Howard was gathering. “That there is no Capella satellite,” she said, her voice flat.

  Dani nodded. “It’s a front for launching the space station.”

  Savannah’s eyebrows furrowed. “But then, where are all those pictures coming from?”

  “Thank you!” Eric cried from the couch. “And how are you hiding this space station from every telescope in the world?”

  “We don’t control every telescope, it’s true. But where does most image processing occur? On a Guidant computer, using a Guidant program. Guidant has access to vast caches of data. We very carefully monitor what astronomers are passing around. Then we . . . massage the data until we have hidden any images of the base, and get appropriate alternative pictures of our own.”

  “You’re hacking real astronomers and stealing their stuff?” I asked. “Just to hide the existence of your space station?”

  “That’s not the only reason.” Dani sounded a little contrite. “I’m sure you can figure out the other.”

  I thought about it for a second, about all the things Elana, Anton, and Dani had said at dinner the other day, about all the things we’d seen on the island, and my breath caught in my throat.

  “Because one day you might want to make it seem like an asteroid will strike the planet and kill everyone, like what happened to the dinosaurs.” I narrowed my eyes. “So you can cause a panic. So you can manipulate everyone on Earth into believing the world is coming to an end and they have to abandon the planet.”

  “Well, so the Shepherds have the ability to do so, yes,” Dani said. “If the need should arise.”

  I wanted to plop down on the couch next to Eric. This was big. Way bigger than Omega City and Dr. Underberg. Way bigger than the experiments on Eureka Cove. If the Shepherds could convince people the world was going to end, they could do anything they wanted.

  “But . . . Dr. Underberg. He’s trying to expose you.”

  Dani nodded. “It would be a disaster, not just for the Shepherd cause, but for Guidant Technologies. That’s why she needed you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Dr. Underberg knows the only way the Shepherds can
get to him is if he dares to go back to Infinity Base, so he’s been keeping his distance. But if someone he cares about is there . . .”

  “Like Dad,” I whispered. “And Nate.”

  “He’s the only one who can save them up there. He’ll have to go back for them. And, when he does, Elana will have him right where she wants him.”

  4

  THE WRONG STUFF

  “WE HAVE TO GO GET DAD!” I CRIED.

  “We have to go to the police,” Mom said at the same time.

  “Explain to me what you’d say in that phone call.” Dani folded her arms. “Hello, officer. I think the president and CEO of Guidant Technologies has kidnapped my ex-husband and his neighbor’s kid and are sending them to a secret space station. Something like that?”

  Mom frowned. “No, actually. More like how I was attacked by Guidant security, unjustly imprisoned, and how I haven’t seen the young man I was taking care of since that time—oh, and also, my ex-husband is missing on the campus, too. They’d have to account for them.”

  “Would they?” Dani looked annoyed. “I assure you, all the campus security logs say you and your family checked out yesterday and no one has seen you since.”

  I could believe that. If Guidant was hacking telescopes, they could fake whatever they wanted.

  “But you could back us up,” Mom argued.

  Dani shook her head. “The only card we have left is that no one at Guidant knows I’m working with you. I’d like to keep it that way as long as possible.”

  “Oh, really?” Mom crossed her arms. “Can’t you just tranquilize anyone who gets in your way?”

  “No,” Dani replied through gritted teeth. “You made me promise not to do that again, remember?”

  We all looked at Mom. Well, that was a relief. I wondered what else they’d talked about while they were shut away in Dani’s office.

  “Yes,” Mom said, “because apparently in Shepherd world, you are never taught that attacking children and drugging them against their will is generally frowned upon.”

  “Yes, and we’re also taught excellent methods of evading police and government interference to achieve our goals. Trust me, the cops are not going to help you.”