Author’s note: This chapter deals with mental health issues, as a character seems to deal with paranoia and possibly delusions. It also has more graphic descriptions of implants which may difficult to read, though it is not overly graphic. Reader discretion is advised if science fiction themes like this are difficult to read.

If you are new to Shutdown Syntax, go back and start from the beginning.

«««Chapter 1

Tim

Tim succumbed and screamed again, though he wasn't particularly proud of it. But when he blinked, in that split second where his eyes were closed… BAM! All he saw was the lifeless version of his father on the rollout table, and then when his eyes opened…

The man before him, claiming to be his father, let go of his chest and knelt at Tim's feet. The sudden proximity startled and stifled off Tim’s scream.

“It is you." Harold Griffin choked back tears, touching Tim's face and checking that he was actually there. "What are you doing here?"

Swallowing a lump in his throat, Tim slapped his father’s hand away. “Why am I here? Because your friend called me and told me you died!”

Harold's eyes flitted around, never landing on Tim. Frantic, Harold kept moving. With the increased pace, Tim’s heart sank. Gram always said that Tim could hyperfocus like his father and also become distracted. Did he drift like Harold, desperately latching to whatever he was searching for?

Tim swallowed a lump in his throat. "I'm closing out your estate," he continued, softly this time. Almost pleading for his father to hear him.

But Harold seemed lost in another thought and moved to the corner and delved into a box. "Two years ago?” Harold’s voice cracked, panic edging into his voice. “No, two months ago. I need the files…" He turned in an unsteady circle, searching the room.

Tim stepped into his father's path, his breath catching.

"What?" Harold asked, confused.

"Dad," Tim's voice shook. Please, just look at me. He struggled to keep calm. "People think you're dead. Do you understand? They called me. To close out your... life."

Gaze flicking over Tim, but with no recognition, Harold touched the bandage on the side of his head. “I feel like I should be dead.” Without another word, Harold sidestepped Tim, moving on as if Tim weren’t even there.

“Helpful. Where’s the gown from? A hospital?” Tim added under his breath, “Maybe a mental hospital?” His jaw clenched, and a small twitch at the corner of his mouth betrayed his frustration.

As his father paced the room, moving quickly from box to box, he grabbed the side of his head again, pressing at the bandage. “It was not part of the first investigation. The second, no… I went three weeks… months… it was…”

“Acting more like a mental patient, too…” Tim added. A sharp pang shot through his chest. Had he honestly expected much of a warm reunion? Even if he had ever gotten the chance to see his father again (although when someone gets a call that says their father died, they don’t tend to assume they ever will see them alive again)? When he was a teenager, he might have dreamed about his father crying and hugging him… being elated to actually see the son he left.

That was a long time ago, though.

Tim's patience frayed. Why was he following his father? The man wasn't there—not really. He seemed to be a shell of a man, unable to recognize his own son.

Yet, Tim caught his father’s shoulder at the third box. “Dad—" The box Harold had searched slid off another, crashing onto Tim's foot.

Pain shot up Tim's leg. Not that it mattered compared to the sharp ache of being invisible. His father didn't even flinch. Tim's chest constricted, and a lump hardened in his throat.

But when Harold seemingly returned momentarily with, "Why are you here, Tim? You've never…" The recognition — not the recognition Tim wanted — constricted around Tim's heart further.

Foot throbbing in time with a forming migraine, Tim gritted out, “Never came here to see you? I wonder why, considering how fantastic of a father you’ve been. Kind of questioning how good any of your friends are if they thought you were dead!”

“But you’re here. Safe.” Harold’s voice turned cryptic again. “That’s… There’s no way they don’t know. Security breaches, the patchwork… a lattice…”

"It's a city," Tim sat on the desk's edge, defeated. "Not a steel tomb of corruption." Or whatever insult Gram had come up with that week for Vanguard.

His father suddenly gripped Tim’s shoulders. “You were a target. You weren’t hidden. Your work was too good.”

"I'm not a child, dad. I can take care of myself." Why was he even bothering?

Harold continued ignoring what Tim said in favor of awkwardly prodding his son's cheeks and chin, even moving up to the small scar on Tim's eyebrow from when he'd tripped as a toddler and hit his head on a dresser. "No, but you… they were searching…"

“Get off me!” Tim batted his father back, only for his father to return immediately to the boxes.

"They mentioned you. But not you. The other you."

Great. The return of incoherent muttering.

"Dad," Tim said, lifting his glasses and rubbing his eyes. His mom always said there are things in life that no amount of preparation will prepare you for. Those redundant words made sense now. "Let's take you to the hospital. Get you checked out."

Two folders clutched tightly in his hand, Harold stared through the gap they made, studying Tim. “You still call me dad?”

Looking away, Tim focused on the hallway light flickering. He sunk onto the desk, relishing the support.

"Maybe it's faulty programming," Harold continued as if Tim wasn't even there—or part of the conversation.

Tim folded his arms and took some long breaths before he snapped. With his father scrounging through folders again, Tim assumed his father wouldn’t hear him say, “Yes. I still call you dad.”

Harold showed no sign of slowing down. Hell, Tim couldn't even tell if anything he said got through. "Let's get you to a hospital." Again, Harold made no sign he heard Tim, so Tim walked behind his father, picking up his phone to search for the nearest hospital. "Where's your jacket?" he asked absently.

“I don’t need a jacket. I need answers.”

So the man did hear Tim when he spoke.

"The implants are talking faster than I can think. They called you. Someone called you. It's all connected."

“And you're talking a mile a minute…" Like someone had overclocked his brain. "Ok,” he mumbled, finding the closest hospital, Vanguard Central, was a half-hour walk, or 13-minute drive, but cab rates… that wasn’t happening. “We're going."

On his way to the next random box, Harold crossed by Tim, grabbed Tim’s phone, and smashed it on the edge of the coffee table.

Stunned, Tim gaped. When what happened registered, he screeched, “What the fuck, dad?”

“They track you,” Harold replied, his nose already buried in a box of musty folders again. “They… this case was related. Related by time… not…”

Tim growled. "What the hell am I supposed to do with you and your paranoid delusions now? Do you have a phone?"

“Ditched my phones weeks ago. Even the burners.”

What. The. Fuck?

Tim noticed a small closet door he had missed before hidden in the peeling wallpaper. He couldn’t do this any longer. There was no way to keep fighting these stupid delusions and nonexistent issues. Tim opened the door to search for a jacket. Immediately, Harold let out a piercing scream. High and shrill.

Tim froze, clutching the doorknob, unsure of what to do.

Clawing at his face, Harold ripped off the bandage. A freshly installed IrisLink, raw red skin in the early stages of healing. Dried blood was clinging to the skin, to an IrisLink external neural peripheral, and the bandage dangling off his cheek.

Tim's stupor broke. "Shit! Why didn't you say you had an IrisLink installed? God! Who the hell botched this? Dad, hospital, now!"

He'd finally let go of the door, and it closed on its own. Oddly and rather suddenly, Harold's apparent pain dulled.

"NO!" he choked out, eyes watering, and though fresh blood streaked his face, he wiped it and the sweat along his hairline back into his hair.

Tim tried catching his father before he started pacing and searching. Stomach churning, he inspected the crude, laughably inept IrisLink install. A true violation of flesh, jagged and swollen, like a butcher performed the install on his lunch break. The unit seemed jammed in. Tim fought the urge to recoil and bit back bile.

"This is a shitty install." Professional installs he'd watched of the first-generation IrisLink neural interface models were cleaner than this hack job. This bruising and swelling around the implant was fresh and oozing. Almost bad enough, his father's body might reject the implant. "Really, Dad. We need to go. Major hospitals have IrisLink diagnostics and… antibiotics… and real surgeons…"

Eyes bloodshot and welling with tears, his father gingerly touched a new scratch he’d made on his cheek. “No! If I leave… they’ll…”

His father studied Tim’s face, and like that… an idea formed right there in his father’s eyes. A bad idea. An idea that Tim could already feel involved him! “No,” Tim said preemptively.

"You rebuild bots…" The box searching was abandoned for cords and cables. Harold shuffled around the room, shoving every conceivable free cord into his arms.

"You know that about me, but you never… you know what…" Tim kicked at the remains of his phone. "IrisLink is different than barely functioning ancient bots. I could screw you up more than you already seem to be! You're going a professional!"

Blood dripped faster now, leaving slick trails as Harold buzzed around the apartment, not listening to Tim and gathering. Happily, he dumped the mass of cords into Tim’s arms, and then… it was back to the boxes. “The files. Bioforge… B is for…”

"Dad," Tim continued warningly, "I've read about IrisLink. But I don't work on anything that complicated. Plus, that machine of yours ain't gonna cut it." Not to mention you broke my phone… which was more powerful than that piece of crap…

Harold stopped. Unbridled wonder lifted Harold Griffin’s bruised, bleeding face. He cupped Tim’s cheeks in his hands. “You’re my brilliant little wizard, Tim,” he said with the same awe and wonder as when Tim was five and wrote his first line of code. But it was gone in a flash. “If I leave… they’ll find me. And find you.”

Every time Tim thought there was a lucid thought left in his father’s brain…

"God! Dad! Please!" Tim begged, his voice cracking as panic clawed at him. "Please, you need help. Let me..."

"I CAN'T LEAVE!" Harold shouted stunningly loud. "I need to find the files. Find the files, find the answer. And the answer keeps you safe."

"Dad…" What else could he say? "This is beyond me. Bots are..." Safe. Cybernetic implants were... messy. He couldn't do... messy. It was part of why he'd never taken the job offers from Bioforge or Cybergen. Even a diagnostic was… out of his wheelhouse.

Harold rushed to the closet door, opening it even as he recoiled in pain. More God damned boxes had been piled along the wall.

"Damn it!" arms full of cables, Tim shouldered the closet door shut. "One diagnostic! One!"

Harold glanced at the door, then Tim.

“One,” Tim repeated and nodded at the desk chair.

Easing into his desk chair, Harold relaxed and sighed. The familiar creak of his father’s worn-out chair groaning gave Tim a small glimmer of hope that his father might slow down. The holo screen flickered back to life, recognizing Harold and unlocked automatically. Its glow cast cold, harsh light, contrasting with the neon signs outside, making Harold’s wrinkles deepen and seem harsher than they were.

What's the worst he could do? Tim dropped the cables and inspected the module in his father's temple. Low end… bigger than he expected. Easy access port. Didn't look the newest. Bulky. Bulkier than it should be. Someone had added components that he didn’t recognize.

Tim crouched, crawling under the desk to find a data port. But he hesitated, feeling the back of the case. Could he wire in the same way as a bot? IrisLinks after gen one were supposed to be relatively plug-and-play. Dummy proof. But mods… Modded bots always fell into one of two categories. Easy to diagnose/fix (the user had no idea how to put the mods into place) or impossible (the user or builder had just enough knowledge to do most things but not everything right).

SynCheck Pro, Tim’s preferred bot diagnostic tool, released an IrisLink diagnostic recently. Back home, though, he had his modded NeuroPad, higher speed data link ports… stuff that would have been more useful than a desktop as old as Tim. Not that he hadn’t run the SynCheck bot “Cognet Diagnostics” on older computers before in the workshop, but Tim couldn’t stand their snail’s pace or timing out during the diagnostic. SynCheck Pro’s “EyeNet Analysis” was more robust. Theoretically, the brick of a computer should be able to run it… but it felt like a flimsy theory.

When he crawled back out, the data cable connected to the computer, Harold stared into his desktop’s holo. The image of Tim and his mother had also been set as his home image.

Tim coughed, avoiding the gut-wrenching image from years ago, and stood. He reached for his father’s head, touching the newly installed hardware carefully. There were several ports, access to various Cortical Nodes, a Neural Link Chipset, an interface to the Synaptic Mesh, and more. The cranial port… looked different from the ports on bots.

“Dad…?” Tim’s voice was tentative. Again unsure if this was really the best idea and concerned that this was the first time his father had been relatively still and quiet.

Then he saw it. Harold blinked. His pupils dilating and darting left and right, likely scanning the IrisLink projections on the contact lens.

What the hell is he seeing? Nevermind.

Just get it over with, Tim told himself.

Touching flesh while connecting for a diagnostic churned Tim’s stomach. And blood… Ugh! He felt queasy.

His father blinked rapidly. “Can you mirror what I see?” A tinge of panic entered his voice.

The tone that made Tim’s chest tighten.

Tim drew back and watched his father’s eyes move faster, reading as rapidly as possible, and he answered, “Yeah. Probably.”

Harold’s lips moved, silently reading what the IrisLink displayed. “Hurry. I don’t know what this means.”

Pulse quickening, Tim connected the data link cable, swiped at the holo screen on his dad’s computer for a virtual keyboard, and went into autopilot as he pulled up a command prompt. By the time he mirrored what his father was seeing, error messages flooded the screen. Overlapping and blinking.

Critical Error: Security Protocols Compromised

Unrecognized Process Running: Execute Shutdow? [Yes/No]

Before Tim could ask anything, Harold went still.

His father didn’t blink. And he said nothing. Tim's heart pounded in his ears as the silence pressed on. "Dad?" he whispered.

Harold stared ahead, glassy-eyed, past the holo project at the closet door. Tim snapped his fingers near his ear and shook his shoulder, but Harold Griffin didn’t respond. Throwing open desk drawers, Tim found a flashlight and shined it in his father’s eyes, hoping for pupil dilation.

But nothing happened.

More errors and more text filled the holo projection faster than Tim could read. It blurred together as tears filled his eyes.

Something was very wrong. But he didn’t know what was wrong.

Chapter 4 →

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