Attlas, Chapter 2

*copyrighted material*

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    “This is so out-of-character of you. I need a tangible explanation, I can’t go back to the company without a proper excuse. I’ve been with them on the phone all this time, and this is what they wish from you. A step-by-step of what has caused this abnormal behavior on you.” 

    “Herb, I'm sixteen . . . Don't your children age too?” 

    “STOP THAT NOW! I'm not wasting another day on cheeky jokes. Destine’s investors are concerned about your expenses over the last couple of weeks. Just show me the damn bills!” Herbert, the lawyer, bucked all the empty and frankly now scuzzy cups of coffee he’d been served that week at the meeting room table, quaking in anger. Then gathered all of the bank account balance data scattered on the polished wood, papers on which the teenager had been ironically doodling on without any sort of distress with the man’s most expensive pen. He straightened all the documents to find the top page containing a stick figure of himself expelling a big fart. Easy to spot himself, this one had been drawn with a necktie.

    “What is concerning about some healthy partying?” The boy inquired, spinning his office chair from side to side. Rubbing sleep off his eyes with his hair undone, wearing a plain white shirt, sweatpants, and no socks. 

    “Neighbors ain't seen or heard of any party, Willard.”

    “It is pretty fucked up that you’ve been asking around the block. Rude of you.”

    “The electricity bills are too fucking high, you’ve been buying pizza every God damn day of the God damn fucking week for the last six weeks. You withdrew all of your funds and put them in an account unknown to us three weeks ago, but prior to that, your online purchases were sky-rocketing with

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engineering equipment, and last but not least, you fired your home’s serving staff in its entirety without an explanation!”

    “Not fired, I indemnified them for their long service.”

    “Yes, 600K on indemnisations only! If you are not going to take responsibility then give me a working phone number where I can contact Agatha directly!”

    “I already told you, she’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Or a month. I paid her a one-way ticket to her favorite destination.” The boy melted on his seat and then shrugged, “I’m here to take responsibility. Can’t you see? Why else would I have stayed?”

   Herbert organized everything inside his briefcase before getting up to button his brown, wool suit jacket. “You are still a kid, Willard,” He began. “You wouldn't like to pose a threat to the company once of age, or would you?”

    Willard grinned. “Did you just threaten to put me in a conservatorship?”

   Herbert Haller stammered. Then mumbled. Then fell silent with his two hands wrapped around the leather handle of his attaché.

    “Yeah, that’s what I thought . . .” Willard got up, pulled his phone out of his pocket, hit the voice recorder, and placed his hands flat on the table. “You know, I’ve changed my mind. I do have a message you can pass on to our investors. And I think it will be pretty useful to you too, Haller.” 

   The teenager took a deep breath. “Boone Armstrong had a special place in his heart for all of you, every single one of you. He grew your wealth as he promised and with them, your coming enterprises that came with the knowledge of technology in this very special niche. He got out of his way to help and please all of you as he might have thought you deserved. When Destine fell to its demise sixteen years ago, none of you picked up the Goddamn phone. If you want to take me to court in the next two years, go ahead. Take all of Boone’s work from the only family he had left after his only daughter—my mother—died giving birth during the greatest crisis of humanity ever to be seen, the only family that 

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took care of him while he suffered Parkison’s disease, during the roughest times of the entire branch, facing it alone.” He looked his lawyer dead in the eye. “Herbert, here, your go-to guy, has been coming here to my home on your behalf so I could sign your stupid permits. My home was full of employees no less than eight months and six weeks. Either of us, not my grandmother nor I, got a single flower or a letter from Destine at the moment of his passing. I could call any man or woman from our home-serving staff to confirm this. What did you do, you say? You sent this fucking flying monkey carrying Boone’s testament for me to sign, and ensure your piggy bank is safe! YOU CAN ALL CHOKE ON YOUR LEASHES, YOU WORTHLESS FLEABAGS!!”

    With that, he ended the voice message. Swiped here and there on his phone, and tucked the device back into his pocket. “There you go. The recording is now in your inbox.” Willard said icily, grabbed an empty porcelain cup, and smashed it into pieces against the wooden table. Pieces flew everywhere and Herbert jerked in place. “I expect to see you at the other side of the courtroom, pal. Now get out of my house.”

    Lawyer Haller got to the front door in a rush. Dug deep into his pockets to find his car keys. But then realized the sun was almost done setting in Washington D.C., and all the front porch lights of the neighborhood were flickering, almost losing all light. This phenomenon kept spreading until the flickering got inside every home. Including the Armstrongs’. Actually, the Armstrongs’ home did it with much more intensity. Yet, there was no commotion inside, not a single complaint which didn't seem to be the case for everyone else in the neighborhood. 

    Herbert Haller took three quiet steps back onto the porch and when his hand was on the doorknob, he couldn’t help but notice the way the handle vibrated under his touch. He placed a palm on the door, and the vibration was there too. Now he could hear the window panels of the house buzzing, just like the faint sound of a bee, imperceptible to the casual eye. Had the house been quivering like this when he got here a couple of hours ago? Had he seen anything strange inside? He could not recall

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doing so. He went down the staircase again, thinking about who he could possibly call first over this little discovery. Got into his comfortable car, started the machine, and rode away. Fighting with his seat belt, he frowned at why his car’s light wouldn’t stay put either. 

    Willard filled a stainless steel water bottle in the kitchen, looking at the damn lights going on and off again, he heard the smoke detector in the distance too, two rooms past the living room. He rolled his eyes, and closed the faucet extra hard. Left the thermos on the counter and went to his room to take a hot shower, scrubbing his skin so hard he left the bathroom looking red, the energy issues persisted throughout it. He slipped into some shorts, a Washington Nationals jersey, and black socks. Skipped wearing any flip flops and went straight into the backyard full of boxes that contained biohazard equipment, there was a clothesline with a couple of hazmat suits, rubber gloves, and gas masks hanging from it ready to use, plus several pairs of rubber boots, all had been left under the sun for 8 hours.

    The teenager snatched a suit quickly, put the rest of the equipment next, went back to the kitchen, and grabbed the steel bottle. He made his way to the theater room, the system had been disconnected and cardboard boxes had piled on in front of the big screen as well as protective plastic wraps of all sorts. There were cables everywhere, at least three different heavy-duty power strips in use, and the smell of welded aluminum was aggressive. The cinema seats had been unscrewed and removed, and what was left of good ol’ Boone’s entertainment room was a knobbly floored space with its stapled carpet still protecting the surface as it had originally been installed. Small orifices for the sound setup had been exposed, as well as a trap door that fit tons of these meticulously labeled wires needed. He found at least twelve equally suited people in the room. His home had become the secret checkpoint for students at Georgetown University. They came and went into the sewer tunnels of the neighborhood that also connected to a manhole in the humid basement of the Armstrongs’. Everyone who wanted to take a look at their ‘leviathan’ from the hardware and software collegians community

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had been welcomed to have a look around after acquiring their own incognito tools, clueless to what they’d find here before receiving them. Dean, Mac, Brock, and himself had begun this project by spending days putting together as many 3D printed devices as they could, Willard had spent thousands on 3D printers and kept them down there. Every student received their own earpiece, phone, and computer adapter, and as days went by students of all fields had begun to join too. More devices were now being manufactured in the basement, this time by these volunteers. Getting people involved had been easy. But as Dean and his colleagues studied the necessary steps to be taken to put this computer together, and began the process of assembling it after gathering the materials, they realized they were facing the creation of a machine that was composed of technology—they had, effectively, been educated to work with—yet applied differently. A new type of analog adhered to customary technology. This machine would be able to detect transmissions of signals coming from physical phenomena created by other computers, converting signals that make physical measurements. Manipulating the continuously changing information of voltage, current, and waves could potentially help them locate alien servers, and shut them down. But that would probably translate to months of scanning, and costly energy bills.

    Before any of this, the university mascot had been clear to Willard that the only way he was getting into all of these troubles to help him build the said computer was by letting himself be the only one to keep in contact with this stranger of the dark web. The thought of this sixteen-year-old doofus getting more than he had bargained for didn’t let him sleep soundly at night. And besides, the kid was freaking out the cheerleaders on training day calling him ‘dad’.

    Black Country Woman by Led Zeppelin was playing in the room on a Bluetooth speaker as Willard walked to the storage room saying hi to everyone. Some of them stayed overnight when there was no school to help build Attlas in their free time, that's what they had all agreed to call this monster machine that was showing the potential to be the first-ever counter-computer made by man. Dean,

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however, had pointed out a few weeks back that the final steps in the email Willard had received seemed to be half-done or something. But now, calculating that’d be done in just a few days, this was starting to distress him greatly. 

    Willard walked into the storage room, the machine had been predicted to take at least three walls worth of space, but they were now covering a quarter of the fourth wall. This space wasn’t even small, it had the shape of a trapezoid, walls that extended in opposite directions, and two uneven walls. Just like the theater room, this one was soundproof. But of course, that didn't stop the machine from sucking the energy of the entire block, worst of all, it did not stop it from creating physical disturbances that could potentially be a sign of concentrated energy being spilled, electric and magnetic fields they assumed. In simple words, everyone was worried that Attlas could somehow be spilling radioactivity. It was definitely producing something, they just didn’t know what. There was just no trace of it in their radiation detectors.   

    “Well? How did it go?” Dean asked, adjusting his gas mask to see the boy a little bit clearer between the fog screening his view. He was on the floor, welding a piece of rectangular aluminum to complete another module. There were another five people assembling motherboards and microprocessors for the last six compartments to complete the instructions. The computer simply contained no space for graphics cards, and it was modeled to be controlled with simple commands on a black screen. Having the issue that the computer could not process any kind of visuals, media, or any sort of computer graphics, the team had decided to process all that kind of stuff in a single, brand new smartphone with all incognito tools ready, that Dean would be in charge of. Commands could also be typed on the said phone, from any part of the country to manipulate Attlas in the worst of scenarios.

    Willard shrugged. “They won’t be depositing a check next month. That’s for sure.” His answer came a little too stiff and cut to the chase. Grandpa Boone had educated him for years to be pleasant and willing when it came to his company investors, and he’d tried so very hard to be ever since he was

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gone. To them, he was now flying off the handle though. Not bending to their needs anymore. Willard was now growing, and to be fair, the circumstances pleaded for a change. Thankfully, Boone’s legacy alone would be sufficient to keep Attlas running for some time, but Willard knew that by the end of it, his grandmother and he would have to lead a simpler life out of Washington. Hopefully, the world would be free by then.

    “Gotcha, no clowning tonight, huh?” Dean chuckled.

    “No clowning tonight.” The teen snorted. Then remembered he was holding the steel bottle, placed it next to the already working parts of Attlas, and said, “Brought another one of these, did Mac and Brock stop by?”

    “Yep, for a couple of hours. They brought another water sample from the lab.” 

    “So?” Willard waited as his friend seemed fixated on the welding.

    “Ph was completely fine as well as the rest of the testing done in it, just like every sample we have sent to the university.” Dean pointed at the only steel bottle—from the hundreds he had lying around—with a blank, bright pink post-it note on it.

    The teenager tiptoed around the room, and took a hold of it, then frowned. Looking around at the crammed walls that made out the computer, an overflow of color-coded cables inside aluminum boxes formed columns of them stacked over each other, reaching the ceiling, and screwed to the walls.

    “Does this mean I can literally drink this?”

    “Technically, you could.” The welder ripped the mask off his face, feeling done with it.

    “DEAN!! Put it back on!!”

    “Hey, chill!! OKAY?” He was breaking a sweat. Shutting his eyes, Dean braced for the worst. He was at least expecting an itch in the balls, but nothing happened. “HA! You were right! We are 75% water embodiments, if Attlas were detrimental to our health we would know it by now. We have enough proof that it doesn't in all of these containers. I mean, if Mac is alive—not to be rude but the kid looks

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like he needs some multivitamin gummies or a triple cheeseburger every morning—any of us can survive.” 

    “Okay, okay. I can’t debate that!” Willard nodded nervously. He filled his teenage lungs with as much air as he could before taking off his own mask, then releasing it. “SHUT! UP!” He laughed, trotting around knocking down water bottles and breathing like he was in an open space. The rest of the team gathered around them and laughed. They got rid of their own equipment shortly after, and finished the final modules with their respective cooling fans in the ten hours that followed. Willard’s Casio watch marked 2:46 A.M. at the time of finally assembling a single LED monitor in a free compartment after taking it to pieces to make it fit. There was space for more screens if needed, but they would have to borrow them from the University, or Willard would go broke much faster than anticipated. Besides, they couldn’t risk extra equipment in their first running performance test with a computer that hardly needed it without the graphics card access, to begin with. It was impressive that the unknown dark web user had engineered in detail this machine taking into consideration the shortage if not complete extinction of graphics cards sales worldwide with only two companies fabricating them, who had realized they had to focus solemnly on producing them only for complete CPUs and laptops to keep up with demands. Life spans for average PCs had dropped in the last sixteen years due to the abrasiveness of the engines run by the supercomputers since no personal computers were safe from their infection. That meant more needed to be mass-produced with fewer available replacements, and no graphics cards. Dean, and his classmates, however, had gotten their hands on present-day electronic components, as Georgetown University intended their students to learn how to apply the knowledge given. It was what Washington D.C. had to offer to their technies, compared to the impoverishment other states were in.

    Dean typed a code to shut down the already working modules to start from zero with the last six they had been working on the last few hours. He turned the power box switch off, and then back on. 

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The screen turned bright green, as the cooling fans began to work in unison. Willard studied each module carefully, the lights flickered, but there was no power blackout or pulses coming from it as there had been when testing module by module. The team looked at each other with expectancy. Ten minutes on the clock and yet nothing. They threw their arms on their sides and turned it off. It was too soon to deliberate what the hell went wrong. They'd have to check all the circuitry later today after school, but now everyone needed their fair share of sleep.

    As everyone left through the sewers, Dean sensed Willard's disillusionment. The teenager was going through the final steps on his email, checking the house's power generator and even the transformers. He was taking a look at the computer's ports when the college student grabbed him by the shoulder, snatched his car keys from Boone's crystal ashtray in the living room, and took him to Mcdonald's. They got to the empty 24-hour fast food restaurant and ate dinner silently. The teenager dipped his chicken in honey mustard while Dean peeked at him while scrolling on his phone, taking long sips from his large diet coke having devoured that triple cheeseburger he had been thinking about earlier that day. He felt pity for a multimillionaire boy, he realized, coming from Arizona where he’d wrestled for a scholarship in Georgetown Uni, and moved away by himself leaving mom and pops behind. He put his phone down as a figure entered the restaurant.

    “What’s good my man?!” Willard nearly choked on a piece of chicken as he got up to fist-bump an old pal. Benson Bauer. Fair skin, chestnut hair that nearly looked like a wig, and braces. The boy looked out to see Kimberly Choy texting on her phone in the passenger seat of his car, clearly too distracted to have seen him yet. The boy sank down on his seat.

    “Dean?! Brother, what the hell are you doing here?” Benson’s grin was overtaken by confusion upon seeing him curled beneath the window frame. “Huh? Willard Armstrong?”

    “You know lil Willy?”

    “DEAN!” The boy roared chin on his chest. Hunched on his seat.

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    “Ah, yeah! Kim’s baby brother Brock goes to school with him!”

    “WE ARE MEN!”

    “Oh! Good!” Dean snorted. “We are here working together on a secret Georgetown project, Willard has a brilliant mind to just be a high schooler. What about you?”

    “Kimberly couldn’t help the cravings. We were gonna use the drive-through but I need to use the toilet!”

    “By all means!” He stepped out of the way. Benson hee hawed on his way to the bathrooms.

    “What do you think you are doing?!” Willard slapped him on the elbow, hissing as softly as he could so tonight's unlucky employee wouldn't listen. “If we get more schools involved and the news breaks out I’m gonna end up in a juvenile detention center!”

    “Maybe, but I’d end up in Alcatraz for compromising the heart and mind of the United States of America.” He sat down.

    “Or maybe, we do involve more people, they can't put us ALL behind bars. Right?!” The boy gulped, “Right?”

    “Actually, YES! They can!” Dean huffed. Suddenly, the extra smartphone resting inside his jacket's pocket joggled in place. He took it out to realize the Attlas' app was functioning on its own. He watched, petrified as the next series of code were typed in:

    start_homework(1);

    world.add(new location (parallax));

    //create_command

   # define target

   # define ending target 4530

    “What? What's wrong? Hello?”

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    “Attlas is working! Look!” Dean's smile vanished when he caught a spark in the night sky from the corner of his eye.

    “Awww a shooting star!”

    “Willard . . . I think that's a missile.” The blackout they expected earlier that night when rebooting Attlas came after but the projectile continued its course in the sky as Benson squealed in the dark from inside the bathroom. They'd fail to know it came down five states away.

    Dean turned on the flashlight in his phone and met Willard’s spooked face right off the bat as Kimberly stepped out of the car mad at the lack of internet, and reception. “Okay, I think it’s time to get the fuck out.” The kid gulped and nodded. The boys made their way out the door, but Kim was on her way inside looking at her screen. 

    The high schooler jumped to the other side of the serving counter, heading for the establishment’s backdoor. Dean was following closely, but he decided to turn off the flashlight and rush to the men’s bathroom. “Hey, bro! I’ll text you tomorrow about our secret Georgetown project. BOYS STUFF, NOBODY ELSE CAN KNOW ABOUT IT! YOU DIDN'T SEE US HERE!”

    “G—gotcha!” Benson answered in the dark. The agile college student sneaked away from Kimberly—as she called for her boyfriend—now in the restaurant. He squatted away and took the front door. The pregnant girl looked back terrified at the sudden movement at the door illuminated only by moonlight, yet saw no one.

    “WELCOME TO FUCKING MCDONALDS! WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO FUCKING ORDER?!” Was the last thing Dean heard from the fast food employee as he stumbled between bushes and parking stops in complete obscurity. He heard the sound of tires screeching before Willard could see him with the headlights on, and pumped the brakes right next to him before running over his foot.

    “When did you grab my car keys?! Do you even know how to drive?!”

    “Does it matter right now?!” The kid barked back. “LOOK UP!!”

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    Dean raised his gaze to watch some of Destine’s metro-style carts rolling gently on their sides like rotisserie chicken, while the rest seemed to be working fine. “HO-OKAY . . . I’ll check the app! You drive!” He ran to the passenger’s seat and jumped in. Willard got them out of the parking lot fast and on the road even faster, but slowed down five blocks away from their former location, while his partner in crime’s eyes darted from his personal phone to Attlas’ designated control panel phone. Citizens stood out in the darkness watching the sky carrying anything to light their way as they talked to their neighbors. 

    In that quietude, the boy finally had the courage to tune in to D.C.'s scuffed, emergency radio station. The poor quality came from the fact that this station was working inside an old underground bunker somewhere in town, a military asset. The situation was bad. An intractable projectile had left one of Washington’s military bases, apparently on its own, and directed to a Destine server in Ainsworth, Nebraska. The news said there were no casualties as the technological warehouse worked on digital maintenance, and remote maintenance happened twice a year with a big team to clean up the gear in sections. The server was surrounded by cornfields, and everything caught fire instantly.

    The boys looked at each other as they wondered how the hell had they managed to shoot themselves in the foot so comically, and this led to the discussion of the probabilities of this being Attlas’ doing and not Ikarus’ response. In the hypothetical case, this was Ikarus’ warning attack. Was it safe to assume the alien supercomputer knew of Willard Amstrong’s involvement? Dean, however, having seen Attlas’ app in action came to believe their own Frankenstein had hacked the military and ordered the dogged missile launch. Its reasons were still unknown.

    “WHAT DO WE DO NOW?!” Willard gasped. “YOU’RE TOO QUIET! HAND ME THAT WICKED THING!!”

    “NO! NO WAY AM I GIVING THIS TO A DEPRESSED LITTLE RICH KID!” Dean proceeded to explain that the phone kept ‘scanning’ objects by itself, and found no way to shut down the app. He’d been looking at a coding manual he’d downloaded on his phone a while back for a class before the teenager had

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showed up at his store. This was supposed to be a generic guide to different coding languages but Attlas kept typing code lines despite his several tries at intervention. Willard then and there decided the best thing to do was race home and give Attlas his trusted bucket treatment as soon as possible. He questioned himself. Hadn't they turned the computer off? Was it working under the power generator?

    He pulled over with his grandfather's house in sight. Dean stood there holding his head as Willard rushed inside the home. The kid had just parked his car straight into the bushes ripping into the radiator and had left the car keys inside his vehicle without breaking a sweat. Regardless, he followed soon after.

    Willard ran to the kitchen to retrieve his always reliable bucket in complete darkness and somehow managed to fill it up in the sink, hurled it out, splashing everything on its way to the theater room. Bumped into every piece of furniture that got in his way. He smacked a narrow bookshelf with his shoulder which in turn, fell onto a glass table. A large piece of the said glass flew up and tore the ceiling, getting stuck. That same piece of board ceiling fell off taking down another two. Finally, the commotion created by the tipped bookshelf had Boone’s hard alloy bowling ball sculpture fall from its rest, leaving a massive hole in the wooden floorboards.

    Dean brushed the debris with the nose of his sneaker and made sure his legs were high up enough to not trip over anything, flashlight on again. He questioned every decision that had led to him helping this insane, little monster. He came to find the teen with a hand on his face and the other one against the door frame, back hunched. A green hue came out of the theater room and illuminated his skinny figure. He was speaking under his breath in an angry manner.

   “W—what?” The college student croaked.

    “ I said, ‘WHO COULD HAVE DONE THIS?!’”

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    He proceeded to push the kid out of the way and then gasped. Clapped a hand on his mouth, and crossed an arm underneath. He then bit his thumb. “How did none of us think about this? What the hell?”

    “DEAN!!”

    “NO! I—I mean, THEY are right! The team has reached burnout.”

    “SOMEONE IS LAUGHING AT OUR FACES, AND THIS IS WHAT YOU SAY?!” Willard grabbed and shook him. “WE ARE GOING TO PRISON!”

    “What if THEY are trying to help us?” Dean studied the lit theater screen. The green background and the phrase ‘USE THIS SCREEN, MORONS.’ bump around from corner to angle, and then to corner again.

    “Could it be?” Willard snatched Attlas’ control panel phone from him and looked through the first codes used by their machine. “Attlas camouflaged its location before attacking, but how? It's technically impossible for it to simply have performed on its own.” He huffed. “The ‘parallax’ command sounds familiar to me. Attlas hid our coordinates worldwide, I believe.”

    Dean looked through his coding manual, yet he found nothing. “Where did you hear that from again? Sounds pretty new to me.” The college student stumbled upon the—still halfway filled—water bucket and took a step back looking back at the traces of spilled liquid on the

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floor. “Okay, let me go grab a mop really fast. But YOU, YOU STAY HERE AND DON’T HURL ANYTHING OVER YOUR SILLY HEAD, LIKE A MONKEY!” So, he was gone.

    Willard’s phone rang with a new notification as soon as his friend was out of view, he could not fathom it as he scrolled down through this new email in his inbox. The unknown dark web user was back with a new set of instructions to follow, to his horror it demanded more gear and more gear demanded more space in his theater room, which upon inspections of the materials needed, he did not have the proper dimensions. In fact, as he read he came to learn that what this new email prescribed was two ‘hemispheres’ called receptor towers, and it was highly recommended to build them at least 2 kilometers away from Attlas. For the very first time, the unknown user signed the message by the name ‘Jules’.

    Jule’s first email had shown no email address to reply to, yet this time a sequence of zeros and nines showed up on his screen. No email server or domain, and read as ‘000@999.000’. Other sorts of descriptions were shown replaced with yet again more zeros. This second email contained an additional note at the end and said:

    “Attlas should never have a mind of its own and surely you know it doesn’t as it is now. Attlas is a mere shell compared to the supercomputers the Conquerors sent to earth,  therefore the nature of technology should be to remain a tool. It was I who booted up Attlas to work on its own and wrote that message on your screen. For now, our computer has an

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autonomous system within the boundaries we want to give it, but Ikaru’s individuality could lead to infection given the chance. Beware.”

    Willard’s first impulse was to scream his friend’s name until he came running with a clean mop in one hand, a power bank flashlight he found rummaging through the kitchen cabinets in the other, and a frightful face. Dean read through and processed the guide. The college student was determined to handle the situation himself and tried sending Jules an email hoping to get a quick response that same night, surprisingly, the email went through despite the bizarre address. Later that morning and unable to rest, a car crane picked him up while he made some calls to arrange for Georgetown University’s interior design students to take a look at the damages done to Boone’s home interior woodwork.

    That coming week the team gathered in the meeting room with Willard, Mac, and Brock after school to list all the materials needed, and place the orders. Dean was nowhere to be seen for the subsequent days, and when asked about it by his classmates simply said he had his head in the game. So, the kids spent that time building a drone from scratch in the backyard, Mac was in charge of keeping their school homework spicy. Brock struggled with their foreign language courses so a misspelling here and another one there made the trick. Willard’s essays needed to keep being bland like his interest in classic literature yet straight to the fact. It was literally impossible for him not to just read the beginning, middle, and last few pages or simply

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watch the films based on the books. Mac was just happy he was putting his theatrical skills to good use while saving humanity.

    Having a houseful of visitors every day, Willard locked himself in his room to call grandma Agatha at times, whom he’d paid a tourist class one-way plane ticket to Greece since she had always been a people person. She’d stay on the island of Crete for a few months as her first vacation without her husband, right where she’d met him for the very first time. Willard felt it was important that her grandmother had some closure to heal, and for now, she seemed to be enjoying it. Traveling abroad in the current state of the world was not impossible for the majority of people that seemed to mostly tolerate the supercomputers’ damaging frequencies. Still, the human body could only stand so much. Just like how the sun burned the skin if exposed to its rays for too long. These frequencies caused headaches that could be easily treated yet in other cases caused a wound like a tick-tock bomb that could obliterate the brain with a single deadly stroke while you took a piss. It was clear, however, that over time the magnitude of these psychic attacks could not resemble the first two waves that had taken the world by surprise.

    Another two weeks passed but then one morning he woke up to chaos at home with Dean at the other side of the sidewalk hopping off from the driver’s seat of a moving truck, guiding students around to drop boxes inside as fast as they could. Willard realized the shipment was

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finally here and his friend had planned this with anticipation. When he asked one of their college helpers where the gear was being sent to, they responded that the Georgetown shopping arcade had a large basement that nobody was using, and had been cleaned up, and emptied all this time.

    Dean looked at that peculiar smile from ear to ear. “There’s no way I’m letting you drive this one!” He chuckled.

    That very day they began working against the clock, their deadline being October 29th jotted down in the calendar. The mission would take place on the 31st during the thick of Halloween night. The kids finished the drone quite fast, a pretty sturdy thing. Five times bigger than their first toy drone, Mac kept pointing out it was slightly larger than a sushi boat. Brock and one-third of the team spent days at Boone’s home syncing the aircraft with Attlas. The goal was to make it just as undetectable as Attlas itself. Menoetes was the name given to it as the brother of Atlas, the mythological figure. After figuring out what Menoetes needed to function with precision under Attlas’ command, Brock became the team manager to make more of these drones. If Elias could be reached with the original Menoetes, then more of its replicas could be sent to other parts of the world with a copy of Attlas. The war could be won.

    Willard took the task to build Attlas’ hemispheres receptors with the other two-thirds of the team at the shopping arcade’s basement. Dean, in the meantime, had begun spreading the

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word about Attlas in other universities with the help of District of Columbia’s young football star and pal, Benson Bauer. Benson and Dean personally interviewed everyone to supply them with their own earpiece, phone, and laptop adapters before sitting down to discuss what they were getting into. A word of this couldn't come out to someone that did not know or everyone remotely involved would be left under Ikarus’ judgment.

    Then came the weekend in which Menoetes would be released into the wild, the place chosen? Portland. Willard, Dean, Mac, and two more team members casually took the Destine upway to Oregon as the sun was setting. The streets grew dark below, soon dotted with tiny moving lights. The drone had been stuffed inside a guitar case Dean volunteered to carry around—properly cushioned inside, of course—under Destine’s surveillance cameras. Once at Tillamook State Forest the next morning, Menoetes 0.0 was dispatched with the help of Brock and his management all the way from Washington. Menoetes carried proper solar panels which meant it would not overheat like their toy drone, and survive just fine being flown over the ocean. The plan was to fly it along the coast or at least a hundred yards inside the ocean despite the ‘parallax’ code embedded into the aircraft’s system. Once in flight, the machine was given its destination coordinates of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Attlas set it forward. Ikarus would be the first to enter a frenzy once it realized it would be impossible for it to pinpoint the exact source of energy crossing its territory. Followed by Ivy and Marshall. None 

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would be able to proceed with an attack without exact coordinates. The guys stayed in the park until around midday while they received information from Brock through a walkie-talkie app on their smartphones, after that, they returned to Washington D.C. the same way they came. 

    With only two well-prepared college students monitoring Menoetes’ progress 24/7, the rest of the team focused on Attlas’ hemispheres receptors. The activities at the shopping arcade remained constant and undisturbed like nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

    Willard dressed in a modern aviator costume having arrived October the 31st, a grayish green jumpsuit that was too tight for him at the elbows and knees, a white shirt underneath, CAT boots, and aviator shades. He looked at his reflection in his bathroom mirror, “Elias. Pick up. Please, would you pick up? Look at how ridiculous I look right now. Let's talk.” He murmured, half pleading. “I’m not Marshall. Meet me at the beach tonight, Elias. I’m already on my way.” He walked out of his room with people running around left and right in their Halloween costumes, grabbing their belongings to split up into their assigned groups at the undercover Halloween parties the students had prepared all around town. He locked the front door with everyone out of the house, Attlas would be working on autopilot until he took control later tonight, he encountered pats on the shoulder on his way out the porch as he would be flying Menoetes once reached Mar del Plata. Brock and Mac would meet him in a

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little bit, in the arranged location. District of Columbia’s on-campus dorms, where yet another party was also going to be hosted. This time by Benson’s closest friends.

 “Our friendly harvest game is about to start, folks,” Dean spoke into the walkie-talkie app in a group chat with everyone listening closely, his voice somewhat muffled as he wore his mascot suit in the middle of a crowded football stadium. He saw Benson give him a heads up, football gear on. “District of Columbia and Georgetown, ready. Copy.”

    “Jack the Bulldog, proceed with the mission. I’m arriving at our mission coordinates and will be ready in five minutes. Copy.” Willard replied, getting off the passenger seat after being driven to the dorms in a jam-packed sedan full of more Georgetown students. ‘Work Bitch’ by Britney Spears was booming inside the building when the first whistle of the game was given, and Dean began rubbing his nipples and quivering his legs in the direction of the referee.

    Willard found Brock and Mac at the party sitting on a couch and setting up an old, scratched laptop in front of them while everyone around them danced. Brock had been forced to dress as Charlie Brown for the third time in a row by his parents since they were having none with witchcraft, superheroes, or such things, yet. Mac was proud of his Naruto cosplay that he’d been working on by himself for weeks. But the other two boys agreed he just looked like an inmate.

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    Mac took out a tablet from his backpack that he’d bought two days ago on behalf of Willard. The tablet had the Attlas software installed in it and had also been paired with Menoetes to control the drone from the said device. Once ready, the boys gave Dean the green light. The college student looked around before typing a series of lines and hitting enter. His heart was pounding so fast against his chest.

     Attlas began the second attack. With the drone flying now above Buenos Aires all the way from the United States, the counter-computer had had weeks to scan servers during the trajectory without being located. Yet, it was recognized as a hazard by the supercomputers. Marshall was quick to take control of Menoetes having made contact with Attlas—having switched online to perpetrate the attack—and turned it east in a straight line just as it did with the first drone. Draining out Menoetes’ battery or crashing it to the ground was not an option this time as Marshall needed to review the machine to detect its source. Willard and Dean exchanged what each saw on their screen for half an hour. The mascot kept doing his dirty deeds with an unaware crowd. All he could think of was Jules never having replied to his email. He felt the stress was going to make him pass out.

    After a long wait, Menoetes’ camera—displayed in the new tablet—revealed a small and hovering, rotating flying cube coming out of nowhere to attach itself to the drone like a magnet. Attlas put on view a 4:07 minute countdown on which Attlas’ security would be

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completely trespassed. Dean and the boys had a quick back-and-forth about it. Finally, the mascot entered a target code, hitting the server hosting that small machine. The robot plummeted to the ground. Willard needed to take control now, he turned south again and realized the battery of their aircraft was being drained down by Marshall despite having ripped it from its hands. Willard didn’t think twice to activate the isolated, emergency battery they had installed this time, but he knew the clock was ticking. Menoetes flew another twenty minutes and the boys finally celebrated having found the shore. Everyone around them cheered and gathered around them to look. Just when they thought they had struck victory, the 4:07 minute countdown returned with no contact this time. Dean was on the edge of his seat the whole way through. If the countdown came to reach zero, Attlas would fall into the hands of Marshall. 

    Willar had two minutes left as he circled above the beach of Mar del Plata. His heart skipped a beat when he saw a figure down there, waving his arms frantically at him. He zoomed in with the camera and turned on the headlights. He went cold dead. 

    It was Elias, caked in sand. His thick beard and midsection were heavily powdered as if he’d been wrestling someone down there. Barefoot with a rifle by his feet with two limp bodies being washed by the shore. He was jumping, shouting something but the battery wouldn’t allow any sound. He had found Elias at 0:56 seconds remaining. Willard cursed and did the

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only thing he could have done to save everyone involved. Fly his drone directly into the water. The camera stopped working at 0:22 seconds, with Elias’ face frozen on the screen as he swam in to pick up Menoetes.

END OF CHAPTER #2