Code Breakers: Alpha Read Online Free PDF

criminal offence punishable by death…
    He mentally marked the agreement checkbox and clicked OK. Nothing would ever be okay again. Never seeing his family was not okay. Never working at Cemprom with his now dead buddy Mike was not okay.
    And then he was cut loose. Just a regular human again—whatever that meant.
    He held his breath, expecting something different, expecting to somehow feel strange, as though his previous life was lived vicariously through his AIA. But he was the same old Gerry.
    Then it hit him like a hammer: he could never return home. That’s what felt different: the detachment. A wave of loneliness coursed through him like a strong wind whipping through his clothes. He felt nauseous again and wanted to sleep, to dream, to pretend none of it happened.
    But the breathing, corporeal bodies of Gabe and Petal sitting next to him in their individual cubicles reminded him that he could dream all he wanted. He would never be the same again.
     

Chapter 4
     
    G abriel spun round in his chair. “Good job, man. We’ll do our bit next. Just relax for a bit, yeah?”
    “Yeah. Relax. I’ll crack a cold beer while I’m at it.” They weren’t listening. Gabe and Petal were chattering away about stuff Gerry had never heard of before. He just watched, fascinated, as they blended these old tools with current-day technology like modern-day alchemists.
    “Demon’s big,” Petal said.
    “I’m containing it now. Ya ready for download?” Gabe asked the girl, swirling round in his chair. The multitude of snakes plugged into his brain wrapped and tangled behind him.
    “Yeah, give it to me.”
    Petal typed furiously at a beige, retro QWERTY keyboard, and her screen monitor flashed with lines of computer code. It was real old. Gerry remembered something about that language in his college days. It was antiquated then, but now it was positively dead. Very low level, almost chip level, which was unheard of now. Outdated symbols: hashes, colons, dashes, dollar signs, and various brackets filled lines on the screen.
    Petal’s head thrashed side to side, and she stopped typing. Her goggles turned blood red. She screamed a piercing note of extreme agony.
    Gerry leapt out of his chair towards her, but the cables attached to his neck halted his movement with a crack. He crumpled to the floor.
    “Leave her, man. She’s containing it,” Gabe said from across the room.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Exorcising the AI.”
    Gerry turned to look at Gabe’s screen, expecting the same code, but instead he saw proper words, old words. He managed to read just a few before Petal screamed and thrashed violently again.
    From his limited knowledge of religion—he only had a part of an antique bible, which belonged to his mother—it seemed like a sermon of sorts. Gabe was actually typing biblical commands to the demon, a piece of code, albeit an artificially intelligent piece of code. That idea raised its head again: had someone coded evil?
    Minutes of frantic typing from Gabe and screaming from Petal stretched Gerry’s nerves to the snapping point. Sweat dripped from Gabe’s face as he hunched over the keyboard, banging out word after word after word. The screams reached a crescendo and finally died. Gabe collapsed into his chair, wiped the sweat from his brow, and turned to Gerry.
    “It’s done.” Gabe pulled the cables from the sockets in his head and rushed over to Petal, who slouched low in her chair.
    Gerry unwound himself from the snake nest of cables and moved quickly to the chair. He and Gabe stood either side and looked down at the fragile thing that was once the full-of-bravado Petal.
    Her goggles were opaque again, and blood dripped from her lip.
    Gerry moved his hand to her pale neck to check for a pulse. Her chest was still; she resembled a corpse.
    A delicate hand reached out, weak fingers encircled his wrist.
    “Don’t,” Petal said, her voice cracking.
    The tip of her tongue escaped the tight aperture of her