The Blayze War

by D L Young

  Dezmund leaned close to Maddox. “Your boy’s in big trouble.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Maddox watched as Tommy egged the crowd on, cupping his hand behind his ear and squinting like he could hardly hear them, like their cheers weren’t nearly loud enough for someone of his awesome talent. The bar’s customers responded, their chants growing louder as they clapped and whistled and stomped their feet. Tommy Park had the spotlight, and he was loving every moment of it. Maddox couldn’t help but smile at the kid’s bravado. It was an utterly misguided confidence, of course, but that didn’t diminish its entertainment value. The kid was a born ham.

  The contest rules were simple: two datajackers plugged into an offline digital environment, a simulated datasphere or some other purpose-built domain designed to test their skills. Once the clock started, whoever completed the designated task first was the winner. Most often, the objective was to find a simulated datasphere’s vulnerability, exploit it, and steal some predetermined dataset. All without getting detected, of course. A short-range wireless broadcast allowed spectators to watch each avatar’s perspective on their specs.

  As the two datajackers readied themselves, adjusting their trodebands and firing up their decks, the crowd of onlookers donned their specs and toggled over to the broadcast feed. Maddox and Dezmund scrolled through a menu of DS simulations on a small holo monitor projected above the table, finally agreeing on a recent submission to the library by a game designer known for his tough, realistic creations.

  The simulation was loaded into the shared environment, and a timer counted down on every pair of specs in the bar. When it reached five seconds, the crowd shouted out the numbers, each one louder than the last.

  “THREE…TWO…ONE…GO!!!”

  In less than a minute it was over. And it went pretty much as Maddox had expected.

  The ham got schooled.

  ***

  “I told you she was good,” Dezmund said, still basking in the glow of his victory. He sipped his free shot of whiskey, savoring it a moment before swallowing.

  “You didn’t lie,” Maddox said.

  They sat alone in Maddox’s small office in the back of the bar. Through the closed door came muffled tones of conversation and the low, thudding beat of technopop.

  “So how’s business?” Dezmund asked.

  “Not bad. Not getting rich running a saloon, mind you, but I can’t complain.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your side hustle,” Dezmund clarified.

  “Ah,” Maddox said, lighting a cigarette. “Same thing. No complaints.”

  “How many do you have on the payroll these days? It’s not really just you and the kid, is it?”

  Maddox blew smoke. “It is, actually. Just the two of us.”

  Dezmund shook his head as if he was disappointed to hear it. “Blackburn, Blackburn. You gotta think about the future. Our business is no different from any other. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

  “More crew means more headaches.” Maddox shrugged. “And who needs that?”

  Dezmund nodded in agreement. “Won’t disagree with you there. You’d be amazed how much time I spend breaking up melodramas.” He lifted the glass, finished off the whiskey. “Price of success, I suppose.”

  Maddox took a long drag, resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the humble-bragging. Yes, yes, you’re the big shot in the room, he was tempted to say. You have a bigger crew, you live on a higher floor, blah blah blah. Could this guy’s dick be any smaller?

  “Still,” Dezmund went on, “maybe if you had a bigger crew you could quote more bids and not have to steal business from me.”

  Maddox blew smoke. He didn’t bother to deny what they both knew was true. He had indeed won business by undercutting Dezmund, and he’d done it on more than one occasion. After he’d bought Winner Take Nothing and reopened its doors to the public, those first several months had been shaky ones, financially speaking. Running a bar was expensive, as Maddox had learned, and the place wasn’t coming close to breaking even. Desperate for cash, Maddox lowballed a few deals, snatching them from Dezmund’s grasp. More than a few deals, if he was being honest.

  So, yes, the man sitting in front of him had every right to be righteously angry at his competitor, but at the moment, for whatever reason, he didn’t appear to be.

  “Just want you know I’m not here to give you hell about all that,” Dezmund said, then added, “though I probably should.”

  “You seemed pretty pissed about it earlier,” Maddox pointed out.

  Dezmund shrugged. “Just playing to the crowd. Can’t let my crew think I’ve gone soft, can I?”

  “God forbid.”

  “I’m here about an opportunity, something we can both profit from. A once-in-a-lifetime job. I’m talking really good money, Blackburn.”

  “Interesting,” Maddox said, though he wasn’t moved. Every datajacker he’d ever known occasionally—and some more often than others—fell victim to a kind of criminal overoptimism. A misguided conviction that their next job would be the best one ever, the Big One, the impossibly lucrative windfall they’d been waiting for their entire crooked life. Even Maddox, sober and skeptical by nature, had fallen into the same trap once or twice, overestimating some gig’s upside while looking past the downside.

  “Why do you need my help?” Maddox asked. He lifted his chin toward the door. “Looks like you have plenty in-house talent.”

  “I do,” Dezmund agreed. “They’re very good. But this gig needs…specific experience.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s a brokerage house.”

  Maddox took a long, contemplative draw. “Which one?”

  “BNO Commerz.”

  Maddox blew smoke and fought back the urge to laugh. There was overly ambitious, and then there was just plain stupid. For Maddox, the idea of robbing a company like BNO fit squarely into the latter category.

  BNO Commerz was the largest financial brokerage firm in the world. And like every large global company involved in banking or investment trading, they spent billions on data security. Banks and brokerage firms and other financial institutions were in the trust business, and if customers were going to let them manage huge sums of their money, they needed to be one hundred percent sure there was zero possibility of some data thief sneaking in and emptying their accounts.

  “You’re joking,” Maddox said.

  “I’m not.”

  “Come on,” Maddox scoffed. “BNO’s a top-five bank. You know how tight they lock down their DSes. They spend a fortune to keep our dirty little hands out of their cookie jar. Those places have the biggest, meanest AIs around.” Financial firms’ dataspheres were the most secure, most impenetrable virtual environments that existed. Maddox had never heard of anyone breaching the DS of a top financial company like BNO. The very idea was lunacy. Like thinking you could break through a bank’s vault door with a carpenter’s hammer.

  Dezmund sat there silently, a hint of a smile on his face. Then it hit Maddox.

  “You’ve got an in,” he said.

  “I’ve got an in,” Dezmund repeated.

  That might make things different, Maddox reflected. Might.

  “I’m listening,” he said, tapping his cigarette over the ashtray.

  Dezmund leaned forward. “I’ve had a plant in their data security department for a year.”

  “A plant?” Maddox said in disbelief. “How’d you get someone from your crew past an employment screen?”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Dezmund said. “We didn’t have to clean her history at all. She came to us, right out of college. Zero criminal background. She just didn’t want to work in the legit world. Wanted to run with a datajacking crew.” He chuckled. “Kids today. Go figure.”

  “Sounds too good to be true.”

  “Exactly what I thought, until we checked her out. She was clean and pristine. Top grades, even. So I think to myself, what’s the best way to use
someone with a spotless record, right out of school with a degree in cybersecurity?”

  “Plant her in a big firm,” Maddox said, finishing the thought.

  “Exactly. And she’s spent the past year getting herself into a spot where she can help me.” He leaned in closer. “Now, BNO announces its earning results in four days. And anyone who knows those results before they’re public stands to clean up in the markets.”

  Maddox smoked thoughtfully as he listened. Stealing earnings results before they went public wasn’t a new scam. Dealing in inside information had probably been around as long as publicly traded markets had. And while Maddox rarely invested in stocks and bonds—like most criminals, he preferred the liquidity of hard cash and cash-based accounts—he knew enough about the markets to be skeptical. He reminded Dezmund how government agencies had AIs watching for unusual buying and selling activity before earnings calls, and how highfloor traders and executives—people with far more market sophistication than datajackers—got busted all the time for insider trading.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Dezmund said. “I’m not going to buy or sell a single share. I’ve got a hedge fund manager on the line. I come through with the goods, he’ll pay.” He went on, explaining how he’d invested months setting the whole thing up. He’d profiled dozens of hedge fund managers, narrowing them down to a single potential customer: a Swiss national with the perfect mix of moral flexibility and an impeccable reputation.

  Dezmund had carefully approached the fund manager, and once the man had been convinced the datajacker wasn’t some scam artist, he’d seized the opportunity to earn an easy billion or two.

  “I got the feeling,” Dezmund said, “it wasn’t the first time he’d dealt in inside info.”

  “Does he know who you are?” Maddox asked.

  Dezmund gave him a disdainful look. “Please, Blackburn. You think I’d show my face on something this big?”

  “People take risks when there’s a lot of money involved.”

  “Well, I’m not one of them, and you ought to know that. Crooks like us don’t make it this long in this business if we show our faces to the clients, do we? It was all set up with blind go-betweens and quantum-encrypted calls, same as always.”

  Maddox didn’t sense Dezmund was lying. He reminded himself the man sitting across from him might be a strutting peacock who shamelessly basked in his infamy, but when it came down to business, he wasn’t the kind to cut corners or take unnecessary risks. Dez was a top pro. Vain and show-offy as fuck, but still a top pro.

  He gazed at Maddox for a long moment, as if he was trying to gauge his colleague’s interest. “So are you in?”

  A ribbon of bluish smoke rose from the tip of Maddox’s cigarette. He couldn’t deny he was intrigued. The man had done his homework, and it was clearly going to be a lucrative job.

  Still, banks were risky. Life-and-death kind of risky. Even if you had someone holding the door open for you or distracting the company’s guard dog AI while you snuck in, there were still lots of other nasty defensive apps and countermeasures waiting to jump on you.

  And then there was the obvious question, which Maddox went ahead and voiced.

  “You’ve been setting this up for a year,” he said. “Why bring me in at the eleventh hour?”

  A sheepish look came over Dezmund’s features. It was a rare crack in the man’s unwavering confidence.

  “This is the biggest job I’ve ever taken on,” he admitted. “And I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t worried about it. You’re the only one I know who’s ever breached a bank or taken on an AI. And even though I’ve got my insider, it’s still a bank, and I’d feel a lot better about things if I had you on the crew for this one.”

  Maddox turned it over. The bar wasn’t an anchor around his neck anymore. The place was making money these days, though only by the thinnest of margins. He wasn’t the desperate cash-strapped Maddox he’d been a few months ago. Still, the opportunist in him hated to let a big payday slip away.

  “I don’t know if I can take some teenager telling me what to do,” he said.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Dezmund said. “I’ll keep them in line.”

  Maddox blew smoke. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  Dezmund’s features dropped in disappointment. “You’ll have to think about it.” He nodded slowly. “You do that, Blackburn. You think about it. And I’ll think about whether or not I care about those jobs you stole from me.”

  Maddox winced inwardly. He had known at some point Dezmund would play that card, and he had no counter for it.

  There were unwritten rules among datajackers. Things you did and didn’t do. Undercutting a competitor once or twice, for example, was no big deal. Everybody did that kind of thing once in a while. But if you did it too often, and to the wrong party, you could end up in a trash dumpster with a bullet in your head. Maddox had assumed Dezmund’s operation was so large, so lucrative, that the man wouldn’t care about a few lost deals. But apparently he’d hitched a ride on Dezmund’s coattails one too many times, and now he was expected to make amends, to repay the debt.

  Maddox cursed himself for being lazy, for stealing deals instead of putting in the time and effort to drum up his own business. For giving Dezmund leverage over him. He could almost see Rooney shaking his head at him, telling him he’d made his bed, and now he had to sleep in it.

  Mashing out his cigarette, he sighed. He owed the man sitting across from him. Whether he liked it or not.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m in.”

  3 - Hello, Salaryman

  Well past midnight, Winner Take Nothing’s throbbing technopop had been silenced, and the place had cleared out except for one last customer, drunk and passed out in a corner booth. The suited corporati, who’d apparently had two or three too many, snored deeply. The man’s mouth gaped open and his cheek was pressed against the tabletop.

  Sitting on a barstool, Maddox pondered what exactly he’d signed up for, debating whether or not he should try to get out of it. Dezmund had assured him there would be a nice payout, and for his efforts Maddox would receive a generous portion. He’d also made sure Maddox understood that helping with this job would balance the ledger between them. That whatever bad blood Maddox’s deal-stealing had caused, all would be forgiven. Still, with all the upsides, Maddox couldn’t help dwelling on the downsides. The risk to life and limb, the risk of getting busted. And beyond all that, there was something else, some intangible thing poking at his gut. Something about this job that felt wrong.

  The unconscious corporati’s snoring finally grew loud enough to interrupt Maddox’s second-guessing. The datajacker lit a cigarette and gestured to Feng, the massive bouncer who was halfway through his closing duties, wiping down tables with a rag and a bottle of spray cleaner.

  “Got it, boss,” Feng said, setting down the bottle and tossing the rag over his shoulder. Maddox subvocalized a command in his specs, calling a cab to take the man home. Feng lifted the drunken man gingerly and half-walked, half-carried the suit to the front door. Someone from outside opened the door and held it for them, entering the bar after the pair exited.

  “We’re closed,” Maddox said to the silhouette standing in the entryway. Whoever it was didn’t move.

  The datajacker swiveled away from the bar and slid off the stool. “I said we’re closed,” he called, a bit louder.

  As the woman stepped forward out of the shadow, a smile touched Maddox’s lips. Apparently, this was his night for surprise visitors.

  “Hello, salaryman,” Beatrice said.

  ***

  The next morning, in her rented suite on the sixty-second floor of the Royal Belmond, Beatrice lay next to him, propped up on an elbow, the sheets bunched around her waist. Below his own waist Maddox was sore. She’d worn him out in the best possible way: three exhausting rounds last night and another, gentler one this morning.

  Her hair was different now, short-cropped and dyed bl
ue, but the rest of her was the same as he remembered. Pale skin and lean, muscled limbs. Bright brown eyes that missed nothing. The small telltale iris flicker that gave them away as artificial implants. The softness of her breasts pressed against his side.

  She was still based in Canada, she’d told him, and she was in town on a job. A freelance security gig for some trade official negotiating import tariffs with his American counterparts. Two nights, maybe three, depending on how the talks played out.

  “It’s not a law, you know,” she said. “You don’t have to do it.” Last night she’d sensed he was preoccupied about something, and he’d told her about his first surprise visitor of the evening, and about what he’d agreed to.

  “It’s a street thing,” he said, but from her eye-roll reaction he could see that wasn’t nearly enough of an explanation. He gave her the wider context, recounting how he’d undercut Dezmund, stealing jobs out from under him at the last minute.

  “So what’s the big deal?” she said. “Isn’t that how a free market’s supposed to work?”

  “Free market, right,” Maddox said. “No market I’ve ever seen is free. And in the black market where I make a living, when you undercut another jacker, it makes for bad blood. And when there’s enough bad blood, people get hurt.”

  “So why’d you steal from him in the first place?” she asked.

  Why indeed. He reached over to the nightstand for a cigarette.

  “Ah, ah, ah. Nonsmoking suite,” Beatrice scolded, stopping him. Then she returned to her question. “So tell me.”

  “I needed quick cash,” he explained. “When I bought the bar, the doors had been shut for a while. It took some time for people to find it again after we opened back up. It’s doing fine now, but between buying it and keeping it afloat for a few months, things were tight for a while. Dezmund has the biggest operation around. At any given moment they’re working three or four jobs at the same time, so I guess I figured—”