by A. Omukai
The elevator stopped three times and emptied out before it reached her floor.
The doors opened and she stepped out. The corridor was nice and clean. A dark red carpet, cream coloured walls and indirect lighting were a stark contrast to their old place. It smelled clean, too. An aroma of flowers hung in the air, synthetic, but still way better than the dirt hole she had picked first, in an attempt to hide. That hadn’t turned out so well.
Before she even reached her room, the door popped open. Collins was on top of his game it seemed, and she wondered how he had known she was coming. She hadn’t announced her return, the elevator hadn’t made any sounds on arrival, and the carpet had swallowed her footsteps. Everyone had tricks of their trade, she supposed.
“That was a long shopping tour.”
“The area around the station is a battlefield. There’s an anti-war demonstration going on, people are going crazy.”
“What’s up?” He didn’t seem very interested in the topic, but she continued anyway.
“It seems China is blaming you guys for the AI theft. There’s lots of talk about a war on the horizon.”
He made a dismissing gesture. “Talk is cheap.”
“That might be true, but the news is full of demonstrations going on all over the world.”
“I’m not worried about that. Even if there’s truth to it, that’s a problem for someone else to solve.”
He flinched, as if he had a headache.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it.”
He stood up and headed for the bathroom.
“I have painkillers here, if you need some.”
“Nah, I’m good.”
She put down her bag on the table, took off the jacket and sat down. The simple table made of a sort of plastic that felt like wood stood in front of the one window in this room, facing the station. A main street and a large plaza separated them from it. They didn’t hear much of the noise, the building was well insulated, and the room was on the seventh floor, but the area was busy. A steady stream of capsules lined up and moved through the streets, and the plaza was filled with people. No wonder, everyone would go home around this time. Masses of protesters coming in from both sides added to the congestion and stopped the traffic almost completely.
To the left of the plaza, a historic museum went from the ground all the way up to the ceiling. A big fountain on the right side made the frame complete.
They had taken two connected rooms again, with the second one being smaller and only a bedroom. This bigger one was more spacious, with the table at the window, the bed at the wall and generous space to move around. Everything was made of the same fake wood in dark brown, with walls, carpets and even bed cloth in pastel colours. It had cost a lot more, too, but that wasn’t her problem. She grinned. She was still angry at the American for killing that gangster earlier, but in the end, he had been right. Nobody would be considerate of them when the time came. The ones best suited to protect them were themselves.
A suppressed moan came through the bathroom door.
“Are you all right?”
She didn’t expect an answer. The American wasn’t the chatty type. He hadn’t spoken about himself at all, and only revealed what he needed to about his mission. Probably not even that.
A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts.
“Room service,” a voice said.
She walked to the bathroom door and asked in a low voice: “Did you order anything?”
“Yeah” The answer was muffled. She didn’t want to imagine what caused it and opened the room door.
Just when she opened her mouth to speak, another very audible moan came from the bathroom. Sounded like someone was suffering in there. She suppressed a giggle but couldn’t hold back the grin completely.
“Can I help you with anything?” the young man in the red uniform of the hotel staff asked, his face expressionless and his eyes bored.
“Not really. Put it next to the door please.”
While she returned to the table, the boy pushed a cart into the room. It contained a rather big teapot and cups, also a meal under a sizable metallic cover. She couldn’t smell what it was, it was hermetically sealed, but the size indicated it contained enough for two.
Again a moan, this one sounding more like a whimper. The boy frowned.
“Are you sure you don’t need help?”
“No, really. We’re fine. Thank you.”
She knew that was a lie, and she’d get to the bottom of this.
He closed the door behind him without further comment, and the bathroom door opened. Collins’ eyes were almost black, his pupils wide, as if he stood in complete darkness. The white of his eyes was pink, his skin as pale as when he had fought the infection, and he moved like a robot.
“Lay down and get a rest. You sure you don’t need help?”
He looked at her as if he was about to tell her he was fed up with her shit, but he didn’t. He let out a weary sigh and walked into the other room.
“Give me just five minutes.” he said instead and closed the door.
“Take your time.”
She’d been with him for quite a while now. He had been more of a burden than help, ever since they left Frankfurt, but he had also saved her life at least once, possibly twice. Nadya had witnessed him killing in cold blood, but she’d also seen him vulnerable, which only made her more curious, and now this new problem. This now didn’t seem to have anything to do with his wounds on wrist and calf. What had he kept secret from her?
There were ways to find out.
Nadya had never connected to an American system. Their devices were not compatible, but that wasn’t a problem. The hardware must be based on the same principles. If anything, Gilead was a bit backwards technologically, unlike their more progressive Cascadian brethren, at least if she could trust word on the street, and the streets she walked used to be a well of credible information.
She connected to his network, tested for ways to break in and was surprised it was bilingual — or rather, schizophrenic.
There were two waves reacting to her request, and one spoke the language her own system was familiar with. The other was alien, and the encryption didn’t make sense at first glance. While she didn’t mind a good challenge, walking down the easy path was faster and more likely to lead to results before he’d get up and come back.
She probed for the usual ways past the system security. He ran an old version. In fact, it hadn’t been updated for months. Neural implants usually did that automatically, and keeping them from doing so was not only difficult, it was also risky, because it allowed people like her to exploit weaknesses that had been found and fixed in later versions. She grinned. A small version history lookup brought her up to speed. The very function that kept the system updated would be her ticket.
She ran through her database of little tools and found what she was looking for. The override would reprogram the security routines that performed access checks and allow her to get in without announcing herself. The system would basically be blind to her presence, and what it didn’t see, it couldn’t check.
Now she needed to find out how he had disabled the updater, then she could send him her package, disguised as bugfix, and open the door from inside.
She traced the flow of signals and visualized them with a display of his brain. She tracked down connections between two physical points. There was the familiar source, which seemed to be sitting somewhere towards the back of his head. He didn’t wear earrings, maybe it sat inside the ear, or behind it. That was not unusual, her own chip was disguised as an earring. Few people wanted hardware directly inside their bodies, although lately, there was an opposite trend also. Then there was the alien device, located in his head. Inside his skull, sitting directly on top of his frontal lobe.
She reran the trace, but the results didn’t change.
Collins was literally running around with a chip in his head. She couldn’t imagine allowin
g that herself. People depended enough on hardware already, no need to become one with it and turn into a goddamn cyborg. This made things even more mysterious. Weren’t those cultists against mixing with tech to become something they weren’t from birth? Her companion was a special case in many ways.
The system she had managed to connect with listened for signals from the alien source, one of them being the update function. Isolating the stream was a small victory. Analysing the nature of this connection would tell her how to proceed.
She heard him move around in his bed and moan again. The door was thin and had no insulation at all. She herself sat in silence, only partially paying attention to her surroundings.
The alien device was extremely active. So active, in fact, it flooded him with a stream of data he couldn’t possibly process. The destination for all that data appeared to be the other system, which must be overwhelmed, sifting through what would look to it as garbage. The two devices seemed to be running in a sort of broken master-slave relationship, where the instructions of the master sounded like gibberish, and all it ended up as was a load of extra work for no benefit at all.
Each of his moans or sounds of threshing coincided with a large packet coming down the stream. No, this wasn’t a coincidence. Whoever had set up this configuration had done a shitty job, and using his neural pathways as data transmitter would do damage sooner or later.
She couldn’t fix that, but she hooked into that particular stream and inserted her little tool. She was just in time. The alien device stopped sending, the stream slowed to a trickle, then expired. Her tool had made it in. She couldn’t test it right now, but she knew. It would need some time to do its job, and from the looks of it, Collins was about to get his act together. Her time was up, but now she had an easy way in and could continue at her own pace, at a time of her choosing. Just a little life insurance.
***
Collins came out of his room, walked over to the toilet, and she heard the sound of running water. He came back with his hair still wet and shadows under his eyes, but his complexion looked a lot better.
“I know you’re keeping things from me. I guess there’s good reasons for that, but if it affects me, I’d like to know.”
She had tried her sternest voice, but that had never worked with anyone. Something about her must have a soothing effect on people, so they had a hard time taking her anger seriously. His nod took her by surprise.
“You’re right, I’m not telling you everything about me. The same goes for you, by the way. And I guess you didn’t think I’d know you were trying to sniff around in my head. Did you get in though?”
He turned his head towards her and eyed her with an interrogative look.
She smiled despite being surprised he had gotten this far. How much did he know? Surely not much.
“Your system speaks in a language mine doesn’t understand. Not surprising, with that retro equipment in your head. I have somewhat of an idea what plagues you, but I can’t tell the exact cause. I shouldn’t be forced to look into your head anyway. You should tell me from the start.”
She knew better than to turn accusations on the accuser under normal circumstances, but he was pissing her off with his secretiveness.
He cocked his head.
“What is it that plagues me?”
“The thing they planted in your head spams you with data and overloads your synapses. Kinda surprising you’re not a drooling idiot yet. Won’t surprise me if you end up as one though.”
Maybe ‘when’ would have been more appropriate.
He put his hands on the table and looked at them.
“I’ll need to get this fixed, but it will have to wait until I’m home. I don’t appreciate you poking around in my head.”
“And I don’t appreciate you hiding a problem from me that can get me killed just because the timing is bad. I might be able to do something about it, you know. Not a cure, but a band aid fix.”
“What would that be?”
“I can send that system into an endless loop and keep it from doing whatever causes it to spam you to death.”
He looked up and shook his head.
“I can’t work without it. You should understand that, your job is to work in that space all the time.”
“There’s no telling when it will fry your brain. I wouldn’t risk it. Better to run around blind for a while than to die a pathetic death at a random moment, for no reason.”
“No, seriously, I’m good. If god wanted me dead, I’d already be. And Nadya…”
His eyes looked frosty now, she could almost feel icy breath on her skin.
“What?”
“Next time I find you trying to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, there’s going to be consequences you won’t like.”
The cold she had just felt melted in a surge of fury and turned into magma.
“Get out of my room, you stubborn idiot!”
“I’m telling you this for your own safety. I’m working for the church’s inquisition agency, and where there is an agent, there’s usually an inquisitor. We don’t work with outsiders either. The less you get involved, the better for you.”
She didn’t want to hear any of that. Ever since Frankfurt, every day had been stressful, a long series of fights and struggle. Maybe teaming up with him had been a bad idea, but they still had the same goal. How they would handle their conflict when they eventually reached it - if they reached it - was a different problem.
She calmed down. Now that she had her little backdoor into his head, she would find ways to get what she wanted. More information about him, his background and his true goals, that would be a good start. And unlike the first time, he wouldn’t see her coming now.
26
Makoto
I checked the time, almost four in the morning. Work would have started in four more hours. Well, tomorrow in four hours.
This area’s environmental cycle was still set to night, and it would stay dark until roughly six o’clock.
I hadn’t decided how to go forward yet. For starters, I’d get some things from home, and then go into hiding. Where and how, I’d decide spontaneously.
The taxi capsule Daisuke had called for me when I told him of my plan had saved me. No train ran anymore at this time of the day.
I walked over to the apartment building, mentally bidding farewell, at least for the time being. I reached for the door to my room and stopped in the middle of the motion. A barely visible slit told me that it was unlocked. I was pretty sure I had locked it, in fact, I could check the logs in my system to make sure, but this was not the time. I felt tempted to open it and see for myself, but my instinct warned me. Better to err on the side of caution. I turned on the spot and sneaked back to the taxi, which had not departed yet. My heart hammered against my throat, but I forced myself to move slowly. To not make noise. I remembered the file entries about Ishida, and that gave me all the motivation I needed, and kept me from thinking myself paranoid.
The doors of the taxi opened with a metallic clank, which made my heart skip a beat. The palms of my hands were sweaty, and I wiped them off on my pants. My left leg was already inside the capsule when the house door flew open. I couldn’t see the figure well in the twilight, I had no door lighting, and the next street lamp was too far away, but the person started off in my direction.
I threw myself into the seat and slammed the door shut, then flew through the menu of the navigation unit. My whole body shook. It took me several attempts to open up a map. The figure turned out to be a man in a black suit, not unlike what I had been wearing these last years, working in corporate, only that this guy was not an engineer of any sort.
He hammered against the window when he found out I had locked the vehicle from inside, and pulled out a gun. Were capsules bulletproof?
I selected a random place somewhere further away than a few streets and confirmed. I wouldn’t wait for the results of the bullet experiment. I threw myself down to the ground and th
e seat gave me decent cover. Wump, wump, wump, several shots hit the door and window, but they held out, for now. Would it trigger an alarm, though? The police wouldn’t be helpful here. Quite the opposite. No time to think about this right now.
The capsule accelerated quickly, as more shots hit it from behind without penetrating it, then it quickly gained distance and left the assassin behind.
***
I hadn’t kept track of time. All I wanted was to keep moving for now, so I programmed several waypoints all over the city and switched vehicles twice. My thoughts didn’t stop racing, and I had already been tired before this mad escape. My life was in danger now, nowhere was safe. I had to find a place where nobody would search for me, and several options shot through my head.
I recalled Ishida’s file. They had had a complete psychological profile of the man, they’d have one of me as well. My mind was blank, and I stared through the window at the cityscape flying past me. All a blur, lights dragged out to bright stripes in the dark. Low traffic. This was the best time for an escape, or for a chase. My pulse went up again, and I looked into the back mirror. The road behind me was empty, and it stretched back over a considerable distance. Seemed like I had been lucky and gotten out of there for now.