by D L Young
“Now,” she said, backing up a step, “tell me where you are.”
Through the mouth hole, he licked his lips. “I’m in the middle of the street, naked. There’s a crowd around me.”
“And what are they doing?”
“They’re pointing at me,” he said, his voice shaking. “Laughing at me.”
She unbuttoned her pants and slid her hand beneath her underwear. “Tell me again,” she commanded. “And talk slow.”
***
Blayze sat on the bed, propped up against the padded headboard, a pillow behind her head. Completely relaxed now, she let out a long, blissful breath. Her shirt hung on her loosely, and her bare legs were crossed at the ankles. Somewhere on the floor lay her discarded underwear. She’d find them in a minute.
God, she’d needed that. The small break from all the tension and stress had worked wonders. Her limbs felt loose and relaxed, her mind clear and unfettered by worry. You had to take care of yourself. Because no one else would. She’d read that somewhere, in some book about successful, driven types. Or maybe she’d seen it on a feed. If you didn’t have an escape from your troubles, if you didn’t have something that could take your mind off things, you’d end up burned out or your health would suffer or you’d be eaten alive by your problems.
The chains attached to the door frame swayed back and forth. The bathroom door opened and Dez appeared, now fully dressed and holding the mask he’d been wearing until a few minutes ago.
He placed the mask on an end table. “I’ve got to get back in there.”
“So do I,” she said. “I’m right behind you.” She smiled. “Just a couple more minutes of afterglow.”
He returned the smile, awkwardly. It was the expression someone gave you when they didn’t really share your happiness but didn’t want to be impolite.
As always, he’d wanted to touch her and she hadn’t let him. He’d never touched her before. She’d never allowed it. And she never would, of course. He had to know that by now, didn’t he? Had to know the way he begged and begged to touch her, and the way she always refused, was part of the game. Right? He had to know she’d never get off under his touch, that the only hands capable of satisfying her were her own. Or maybe he only knew this on some subconscious level, and his conscious mind hadn’t yet accepted it. If that was the case, she just had to be patient with him. He’d come around to her way of seeing things eventually. Come to accept her rules and boundaries. He always did.
“I’ll see you down there,” he said, then left the suite, closing the door behind him.
“Lock,” she said, the command followed by the hiss-clack of bolts moving into position. Placing her feet on the floor, she slid off the bed and found her underwear hanging down the side of the ottoman. She reached for them. Playtime was over.
A minute later she sat at the suite’s workstation in front of a holo screen, fingering a trodeband in her hand like a rosary. She had to call in. That had been part of the deal. She couldn’t just skip it. Steeling herself, she slipped the trodes over her head, then gestured.
“Hello,” she said. “Fine.…I’m fine, thank you.…Yes.…Yes, everything’s on schedule.…Just as we agreed.”
7 - Training the Crew
Maddox floated high above the scene like a god, watching them. But not like the god the religious types went on about, that disinterested watchmaker who wound up the universe and let it go, who hoped his smart little monkeys chose him above all other distractions. No, this was something more like the old Greek gods, who pulled the strings of mortal lives without hesitation, who moved them around the board like pieces in a game, free will be damned. The avatars he watched, those glowing little orbs darting about the datasphere’s luminous core, were doing exactly as he’d instructed them. The little orbs had come a long way in a short time, the god of virtual space noted with satisfaction.
It was the third and final day of prepping for the job, and the crew had almost finished their fourth dry run of the day. Maddox observed from a distance, hovering in empty VS. The simulated environment was an offline construct, identical in every way to the one they’d be running up against on the job. In every way they knew about, Maddox corrected himself. You could never simulate a datasphere entirely. Even with an insider feeding you specs like they had on this job, you never had perfect intelligence.
The crew was good. One of the best Maddox had ever seen. It was no wonder Dezmund was the top dog in the game these days. In less than five minutes, the orbs had moved beyond the DS’s outer perimeter and penetrated three separate data partitions. All this without making the slightest blip on any of the security apps. The countermeasures hadn’t detected them. The intelligent sentries hadn’t spotted them. They were a pack of invisible sharks, stealthy and deadly, hunting their prey without leaving a single ripple in the water.
Boiled down to its simplest explanation, the drill was a game of hide-and-seek. Maddox had placed the target dataset somewhere in one of the partitions, and it was the crew’s job to find it and extract it without being detected. And they had ten minutes to complete the task.
Maddox flipped back to the suite. He paced back and forth between the two rows of eggshell recliners where the young datajackers lay, their trodebands on, their hands gesturing above decks held by docking arms.
“Don’t get distracted,” he instructed them. “When you’re close, when you think you’ve beaten everything the DS can throw at you, that’s when you have to stay alert. It’s easy to let it go to your head, to fool yourself into thinking you’re too smart to get caught. Don’t fall into that trap.”
He reached Tommy’s recliner at the end of the row. “You have to stay focused,” Maddox said, reaching down and flicking the kid on the forehead.
“Bruh,” the kid blurted, wincing.
A chime tinkled in Maddox’s ear. The proximity alert he’d set. Someone was about to find the treasure he’d buried. He flipped back to VS.
Invisible to the crew, he hovered a couple clicks outside the Treasury Department, where he’d hidden the target dataset. The simulated DS was massive, its central cluster of data partitions towering over him like incandescent skyscrapers, pulsing with torrents of information. Adjusting his visual to see through Treasury’s razorwall, he spied a hole slowly opening on the partition’s outer layer. A moment later, the fissure grew large enough for one of the orbs to float through it.
Blayze, of course. Even without the name tag floating above her avatar, he would have known it was her. She operated with a confidence and skill inside VS that the others lacked. Not that the others were inexpert by any means. But she was different. She was in her element.
And right behind Blayze, following her through the opening, was Tommy. Maddox smiled inwardly. No dummy, this kid. He knew who to tag along with if he wanted to be among the first to find the prize.
“And just when you think the job is done,” Maddox announced, “bad things can happen, and you better be ready for them.”
He heard a chorus of groans from back in the suite as he subvocalized a command. Alarms blared and the entire DS began to flash red.
Throwing a spanner in the works. That was what Rooney used to call this kind of thing, back when they’d prep for jobs. The datajacker who’d taught Rooney his craft had been from Newcastle, and the expression had stuck with his apprentice. Maddox liked the sound of it more than throwing in a monkey wrench, the American version of the saying, so he too had adopted it. Throwing a spanner in the works when you were training kept you sharp, kept you from becoming overconfident. Weird shit could happen to you on a job, so weird shit had to be a part of your prep.
Maddox gestured up feeds from the recliners’ bio-sensors, toggled through them. Blood pressures shot up, respiration rates surged.
“Forget about your meat sack,” Maddox preached. “The meat always panics. The meat will always betray you. It’ll make you do things you shouldn’t, take shortcuts that’ll get you tagged and frozen. You have to leav
e the meat behind. Let go of it, let your awareness sink into the virtual.”
It was a thing easier said than done, he knew. The mere act of plugging into VS was something only a small fraction of the general population could do without their senses being overwhelmed. A datajacker’s brain came with preternatural gifts others lacked. Neural pathways predisposed for virtual space the same way a gifted athlete’s inborn hand-eye coordination predisposed them for professional-level cricket or tennis.
But even among those talented few who could handle the demands of VS, fewer still could completely leave behind the awareness of their physical selves. The meat was always there, and comfortingly so, the anchor of their consciousness, tethering them to reality. A flesh-and-blood security blanket, the meat was difficult to let go of entirely.
When Maddox checked Blayze’s stats, he wasn’t surprised to find her pulse had hardly moved beyond normal. Every time he’d thrown a spanner in the works over the past few days, she’d been able to handle it brilliantly, keeping calm, staying on task. She alone among her peers had that special talent, that rare ability to leave the physical behind. It was the first time Maddox had seen anyone—outside of himself—achieve such complete immersion.
Impressed, he watched her avatar closely, keeping an eye on her activity feed. She remained composed and collected despite the systemwide alarms, despite being detected by the countermeasures. Maddox had set the timer for ten seconds. When the timer reached zero, anyone detected would be frozen. Not really frozen like you would be in an actual DS, your muscles rigid, your body helplessly wrested from your control. In a simulation, an unpleasant little shock through the recliner served as a substitute.
She called up an analytic bot, which visualized as a manga girl’s head, its cartoon face smiling. “How can I help you today?” it asked in cheerful Japanese. As she subvocalized her reply, Blayze searched for the dataset. She found it a few seconds later, a loot bag icon hidden in the uppermost section of the partition, nearly obscured by a thick knot of data traffic. She loaded the dataset into her temp storage while she fed the bot different cloak configurations. Five seconds to go. Her companions, including Tommy, had already scattered, prudently exiting the DS at top speed rather than have the countermeasures freeze them and geotag them.
With less than three seconds on the counter, she found the right config and quickly made the changes to her cloak, disappearing from the countermeasures like a ghost vanishing into nothingness.
“Easy-peasy,” she said, snapping her fingers, knowing her companions, already unplugged, were watching her.
She exited the partition to awed murmurs of approval. Cruising beyond the security perimeter, she made a show of exiting the DS at a leisurely, unhurried pace.
She’s good, boyo.
No argument there, Roon. The kid knows what she’s doing.
Kind of makes you wonder why they need you, doesn’t it?
Maddox flipped back to the suite, Rooney’s words echoing in his head as he removed his trodeband. Blayze had already unplugged, and she sat with her legs over the side of her egg recliner, smiling triumphantly. Clad in tiny shorts and a snug T-shirt, she slid off the recliner, bare feet pressing against the floor. Tommy’s egg was next to hers; he and the others applauded as she did a little celebratory dance. She locked eyes with Tommy, her arms raised, hips wiggling, breasts teasingly close.
It was the more obvious of several intimacies Maddox had noticed between them over the last few days. Murmured conversations as they prepped their gear. Shared glances and secret smiles. He’d learned the two had grown up in the same hiverise, though they’d never met until their duel at Winner Take Nothing. Her sudden connection to him, however, had nothing to do with their shared background. She was clearly working the kid. And Tommy was either oblivious to it, or he knew and didn’t mind. Maddox guessed it was the latter. As with most his age, enslaved to raging hormones, there were few things as mesmerizing as a pair of tits shaking in your face. Even when those tits had an agenda.
When he was alone with the kid later, he asked Tommy straight out. “She recruiting you?”
“Kind of,” the kid said, his face reddening.
“What did she say?”
The kid avoided Maddox’s eyes. “Just asking me how happy I was being the only jacker on your crew. If I ever thought about ‘moving up.’”
Moving up. The words were at once an enticement to Tommy and a dig at Maddox. The devious little witch.
“And what did you tell her?”
Tommy shrugged. “Told her I was fine, but I’d call her if anything changed.” He said it without conviction, almost defensively. Maddox believed him, but he also wondered if the kid was giving him some sanitized version of the truth. Maybe he hadn’t been quite so definitive with Blayze.
It had to be tempting, of course. Big crew with a solid rep. And the eyelashes batted at him were surely persuasive. But he and Tommy went back, not a long way, but long enough to know they had each other’s back. And for them, that kind of thing mattered. The same way it had mattered with him and Rooney.
Still, the kid was restless by nature, and he’d shown Maddox his ambition more than a few times over these last months. At some point Maddox knew the kid would want to leave. A two-man operation would be too small, too limited for the kid’s aspirations. It seemed inevitable that day would come, sooner or later.
“So you think we’re ready?” the kid asked, anxious to change the subject.
Maddox lit a cigarette. He looked beyond the kid, gazing around the suite. The young datajackers fiddled with their gear, ate noodles and mini burgers from carryout boxes, watched holo replays of their successful dry runs. Anticipation and excitement hung in the air, like the last few moments before a soccer match or a car race. Their engines were revving; they looked ready to go. Readier than he felt, but then he always felt that way, like he was never quite ready. Like he needed more time, more intel, more gear. Blackburn Maddox, the obsessive planner. Maybe that was why he was still alive, still out of jail. Probably was.
He blew smoke. They were good, these kids. He couldn’t deny it, even as his worries, both the legitimate and the misplaced kind, tugged at him, trying to convince him otherwise. It was go time.
“Yeah, kid. I think we are.”
8 - Graveyard Shift
“Come on,” Boaz said, “you said you’d think about it.”
“That’s what you remember me saying,” Iris answered. “But it’s not what I said.”
Boaz had been on her for a week about it. Wouldn’t let it go. Iris knew working the graveyard shift would be different, but this wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting.
Everyone was expected to work the graveyard shift at some point. If you take your career at BNO Commerz seriously, her boss had said, then you’ll work graveyard for a few months. Pay your dues, get a feel for how things work after hours, blah blah blah. And so when Marco and his partner had a baby and a slot opened up, she’d raised her hand and volunteered. Iris was a dedicated employee, after all. A company woman, a serious professional. So she always made sure to do what a good company woman would do.
The graveyard shift had its upsides, for sure. In the hours between midnight and dawn, BNO’s data security department had a skeleton crew on hand, which meant her span of control was wider than it would be during normal business hours. She had access to more systems and had greater authority to make decisions. It was like being promoted, in a sense. More responsibility, more accountability. And they bumped her pay for working off-hours, which wasn’t bad, either.
Aside from the boredom and the unnatural hour—three months in and Iris still hadn’t adjusted to waking up at 7 p.m.—the biggest downside was Boaz, the only other datasec employee who worked the same shift at her location. Unlike Iris, he worked graveyard on a permanent basis. Also unlike Iris, he couldn’t take a hint. Which could be frustrating.
But it was also useful.
The two of them occupied a pair o
f workstations in an otherwise empty control room. Four holo displays covered one wall, projections of the company’s datasphere. The center pair toggled through visualizations of critical locations and partitions, like security cameras blinking through a building’s hallways and parking garages. The outermost displays had dozens of performance metrics and statistics, pulsing and scrolling and blinking. All green. All good.
Boaz glanced over at the leftmost display. Something had caught his attention.
“What?” Iris asked. “You see something?” She felt a twinge of worry.
Her coworker shook his head. “No, just checking the hourly throughput.”
“It’s not updated yet,” she said. “Ten more minutes.” It was two fifty in the morning. The refreshed throughput figures wouldn’t show on the display until three. On most nights Iris didn’t watch the clock because it made the time pass more slowly. Tonight was different, though. She’d been obsessively checking the time every minute for the past hour.
“Oh, right,” he said, frowning at the timepiece on his wrist. “This thing is an antique. You have to wind it up by hand. Keeps terrible time.”
“Then why do you wear it?” Iris asked.
“I like it,” he said, turning the little knob between his thumb and forefinger. “And Shasta gave it to me,” he said with a wink.
Back to Shasta. Always back to Shasta. No matter which direction the conversation turned, all roads led back to Shasta and Boaz’s obsession.
“She really likes you,” he said, shifting the conversation back to his favorite topic.
“She said that?” Iris asked, glancing furtively at the time. Eight minutes until three. “Or is this you embellishing again?”
He put his hand over his heart. “Swear to God,” he promised. “Her exact words were ‘I think she’s hot.’”
Iris pretended to mull this over for a long moment. “Even if I thought the same about her,” she teased, “it doesn’t mean she’d go through with it.”