by D L Young
In another minute the avatars would reach a small partition, the visualization of GloboEspaña, a fifty-employee entertainment network based in Madrid. The network’s partition was notoriously fallible, as their inside connection had discovered, thanks to a local technical manager who resisted every corporate-mandated security standard until he personally tested it himself, which he rarely, if ever, seemed to get around to. As a very small fish in BNO’s sea of companies, the Spaniard’s pushback was largely ignored, a low-priority task that was perpetually the last open item on executive to-do lists. From a datajacker’s standpoint, GloboEspaña’s legacy security apps, left un-updated for years with well-known security bugs, were akin to a hole in the wall of a bank vault. A very tiny hole, to be sure, and one they never would have been able to find without the mole’s guidance, but a hole all the same. And once they’d passed through, they could find their way through to BNO’s corporate headquarters’ partition, again thanks to their insider. With a slide of her hand across her workstation, the insider had kicked off a kill switch, temporarily disabling security protocols between the Spanish subsidiary and the headquarters’ partition, opening a virtual door for the crew to pass through undetected. Once inside HQ, the infiltrators would locate the target dataset, dupe it, and then get out the same way they’d come in.
That was how it was supposed to work, anyway. Maddox felt his meat blow out a long breath back in the suite. Five layers of redundancy, he reminded himself. That ought to be enough to take care of any surprises. If Blayze’s avatar glitched out or got frozen and she needed to unplug, they had five more jackers in line behind her, ready to take over the lead spot.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Dezmund said. “Watching and not being able to do anything.” He must have sensed Maddox’s unease.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Maddox commented. He’d always been a hands-on thief, always doing the job himself. This management-from-afar approach felt alien to him, even with all the prep he’d done. It managed to have all the stress and anxiety of a regular gig, but with none of the thrill of the action. No heady buzz of self-confidence, no addictive sense of his own invincibility, no sensation of being freed from the flesh and blood limits of his meat sack. Stationed far away in the CM, he experienced none of the things he enjoyed the most about his profession. It was like being some military drone pilot, stoically watching a battlefield feed from two thousand miles away, feeling none of the rush of combat.
The six avatars thinned out their formation, putting distance between themselves as they penetrated deeper into the DS. Clustered together, they’d run the risk of being taken out by a single defensive action, like a truckful of soldiers driving over a land mine.
Maddox checked their position. Half a minute out.
“So how much longer you plan on staying in the game?” Dezmund asked, using the personal feed only he and Maddox shared.
“What?” Maddox was caught off guard by the question. It wasn’t exactly the best time for small talk.
“We’re not young men, you know,” Dezmund said. “At least not in our profession. You and me, we’re ancient, my friend. Dinosaurs. I can count on one hand the jackers I know who made it past thirty without getting busted or brain-dead, and two of those fingers are you and me. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about an exit strategy.”
“Honestly, I hadn’t given it much thought,” Maddox answered truthfully. He’d been too busy lately worrying about his present. Pondering the future was a luxury he hadn’t had time for. “You’ve got one, I take it?”
“You’re looking at it.”
“What? This gig?”
“Biggest payday I’ll ever have. Enough to pack it up and call it quits. I’ve had my eye on a little beach house in Bermuda for a while now.”
“Christ,” Maddox grumbled. Dezmund hadn’t mentioned this detail until now. Maddox had known the gig would be a lucrative one, but not that lucrative. “I knew I should have held out for more.”
Dezmund laughed. “Tell you what, I’ll let you stay at the beach house sometime.”
“How generous of you,” Maddox muttered. “So what, you’re just going to bail on those kids?”
“Blayze can run things,” Dezmund said. “She’ll do just fine without me.” Maddox caught what sounded like resentment in the man’s voice. Lots more there, he gathered, but he didn’t pursue it.
A proximity alert beeped in his ear. Blayze had reached the first marker, GloboEspaña’s partition. And if the insider’s information was accurate, she’d make quick work of the Spanish subsidiary’s hopelessly outdated razorwall and breach the partition with ease.
“All right,” Maddox said, switching to the crew’s comm feed and pulling up the razorwall’s config. “We’re good on time, so there’s no need to rush—”
Two of the crew flatlined. Maddox stared at the feeds in disbelief.
No way. It wasn’t possible. Had to be a glitch. There’d hadn’t been the slightest indication…
“Jesus H. Christ!” Tommy shouted in his ear, the kid’s voice tweaked with panic.
“What is it, kid? I got nothing on my monitors.”
“What the fuck is that thing?” another voice cried.
A shock of adrenaline shot through Maddox. Something had hit the crew, and hit them hard. Something huge. In the blink of an eye, the gig’s priorities had changed. This was no longer a heist.
Now it was a scramble to get out alive.
10 - Bailed On
A flatline could mean one of two things. Either you were dead or you’d fallen off your egg recliner (or been yanked off, a third possibility) and disconnected from the unit’s bio-sensors. In his early datajacking days, Maddox had once played a mean joke on his mentor while the two were plugged in, making a gurgling noise then sliding off his recliner. At the time Rooney hadn’t thought it was very funny.
Maddox stared at the row of HUDs, trying to process what was happening. Two flatlines out of nowhere. But how?
“Tommy,” he said, “we’re going to get you out—”
“C-c-c-cold,” the kid stammered. Something had hold of him, freezing him. Every panel in the CM erupted into flashing red. Warning sirens blared in Maddox’s ears. A moment later he felt a strong chill pass through his own body. Whatever had Tommy was now reaching out across virtual space for him too.
“Standbys,” Maddox groaned, the freezing pain already overwhelming him. “Pull us out. Pull all of us out now!”
He gritted his teeth against the cold and waited, but nothing happened. Then he realized he was alone in the CM. Dezmund was gone. They were all gone. Only he and Tommy were still plugged in.
Dread shot through him. They’d bailed on him!
His body back in the suite felt as if it weighed thousands of pounds. He was cold, freezing cold. Gathering his strength, he lifted his arm to his head. At least he thought he’d lifted it. He was so numb, so disconnected from his meat, he couldn’t be sure if his body was obeying his commands. Working his fingers under the trodeband, he began to black out, his consciousness succumbing to whatever had his mind in its icy grip.
Then, in a jolt that felt like he’d hit the ground from a five-story fall, the suite materialized around him. He sat up in the recliner, breathing heavily, his clothes damp with sweat. In his gnarled, still-freezing hand dangled the trodeband. He tossed it to the floor.
Around him several recliners—including Dezmund’s—were empty, rocking gently back and forth, abandoned only moments before. Four were still occupied: his, Tommy’s, and two of Dezmund’s crew, Renn and Jaylene.
His legs felt as if they were full of lead as he flopped them over the edge of the recliner. Pushing down on the edge, he lifted himself into a standing position, then hobbled over and yanked Tommy’s trodes off. The kid’s eyes shot open and he sat up quickly, shaking his hands as if he’d just pulled them out of a bucket of ice water.
“What the f-f-f-fuck?” he stammered. “What the fuck was that?”
The kid looked around the suite, confused.
“They bailed on us,” Maddox explained, the cold finally beginning to ebb from his bones. He looked over at the two other occupied recliners. Renn and Jaylene lay motionless on the padding, their trodebands still in place. Neither of them was breathing.
Tommy looked at them with horror. “Are they…?”
Maddox checked them in turn, found no pulse on either. He shook his head. “They’re gone.”
“Are they the ones you…?”
“Yeah, they are,” Maddox answered, averting his eyes from the bodies.
***
He’d have plenty of time to feel guilty about what had happened, but right now they needed to get out of there. As he helped the kid off the recliner, the light in the suite changed. In the corner of his eye, Maddox caught a police hover’s red-and-blue strobe outside the window. In the quiet he could just make out the hover’s engine whine as it floated beyond the thick glass. Then from the hallway came heavy footsteps and the clipped metallic murmurs of microphone-amplified voices. A sound profile Maddox had heard a thousand times in the hiverise of his youth. Rhino-armored cops.
“Come on,” he urged, pulling Tommy toward the back of the suite, forcing his aching legs to run. As they scrambled into the dining room, the door in the front room burst into splinters. Rhino cops poured into the suite, their bulky arms brandishing automatic rifles.
“Closet,” Maddox said, and they ran, sprinting into the suite’s back bedroom and ducking into its large walk-in closet. Maddox removed an empty gear box from the back wall and began to stomp on the floor where the box had been sitting. On the third try the floor gave away, revealing a square-meter hole leading to the suite below. The escape route he’d cut out with a handsaw two days earlier, when he’d secretly rented the lower suite. It had been an act of caution bordering on paranoia, he’d thought at the time. He’d never imagined he might have to actually use it.
Tommy jumped down and Maddox followed, his weakened legs nearly giving out from the long drop down. They ran for the front door, the heavy thudding of rhino footsteps above their heads.
Maddox opened the door a crack, saw no one outside in the corridor, then signaled for Tommy to follow him. By the time the cops discovered the escape hole in the closet, Maddox and Tommy were five floors below, racing down the stairwell and then out an emergency exit on the ground floor. They donned their specs, toggling up a fresh set of fake IDs to fool the street cams, and lost themselves in the teeming crowd.
It was fifteen minutes before Tommy spoke again, the longest stretch Maddox could remember the kid had gone without saying a word. The kid was shaken to the core. Not that Maddox wasn’t rattled himself, but he’d been on jobs that had ended in disaster before. This was the kid’s first catastrophic fail. And what a nightmare of a first fail it had been.
“What happened?” the kid finally asked, keeping his voice low.
They knifed their way through the crowded walkways near Midtown. “I don’t know,” Maddox answered truthfully. “I’ve never seen anything hit a crew like that before.”
“Was it an AI?”
“If it was,” Maddox said, “it was the stealthiest one I’ve ever seen.”
“There wasn’t supposed to be an AI on this job,” the kid said, his voice shaking. “That insider person said so. She said so.”
“I don’t know what it was. Could have been an AI or maybe just some new tech we’ve never run across before.”
“But she said there wasn’t one. She said it.” The kid was babbling, still badly shaken up.
Maddox placed his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “Kid, calm down. We’re all right. We made it out.”
After a long moment, the kid muttered, “Not all of us did.”
Though the kid hadn’t meant to, the comment triggered a tremor of remorse inside Maddox. The two young datajackers had been sacrificed so he and Tommy could make it out. They’d taken the bullets meant for him and Tommy.
Maddox tried not to think about it as they passed under the red neon glare of Radio City. He blinked up an encrypted line and made a call, hoping she wouldn’t reject the unknown ID he was using.
“Hello,” Beatrice answered.
“Hi,” Maddox said, then: “By any chance are you still in the City?”
11 - Shock Wand Relief
Reina made a good living, doing what she did. And it was no wonder, Blayze reflected, watching her longtime friend and occasional lover perform her work. Reina was good at her job. Maybe as good as Blayze was at hers. At least on most nights, she thought sourly, thinking back on the disaster in BNO’s datasphere a couple hours earlier.
“You’re upset, I can tell,” Reina said without looking over, her attention focused on the customer, gagged and stripped naked and spread eagle against the far wall, his wrists and ankles bound with intricate knots of white rope. Covering his eyes and ears were specialized specs, the kind used for gaming or, in this customer’s case, sensory deprivation. The small, dimly lit space was empty of furnishings unless you counted sex benches and masturbation saddles.
“How bad was it?” Reina asked, reaching down and flicking the customer’s plastic chastity cage with her fingernail, smiling at his helpless yelp. Her outfits varied, from traditional black leather dominatrix to barefoot surfer girl to Chanel-suited corporati. Sometimes the customers chose, but most of the time she did. This particular early-morning customer, one of her longtime regulars, had a manga fetish, so she was the Japanese schoolgirl, sporting a plaid skirt with knee-high white socks and braided pigtails.
“I screwed up,” Blayze confessed. The opaqued window began to glow with the first light of the day.
“Bad?” Reina asked, flicking the plastic cage again, harder this time. The customer gasped and begged her not to hurt him.
“Pretty bad.”
Reina lifted an eyebrow. “Are we talking perfectionist disappointment bad, or cops raiding my parlor at any second looking for you kind of bad?”
“You don’t have to worry,” Blayze answered.
“I hope not,” Reina said, then turned back to her work.
The sex parlor was off the grid, and as a favorite establishment of a highly placed police lieutenant, it enjoyed immunity from cop harassment. In the aftermath of her datajacking fiasco, it was the nearest safe spot Blayze could come up with, a place where she could duck out of public view for a few hours and gather her thoughts. She’d left Dez, still stunned and reeling from what had happened, down the hallway in Reina’s office. She had no idea where her other crewmates had run off to.
Everything had happened so fast. Renn and Jaylene were dead. Dead and gone and it should have been Maddox instead. They’d all panicked, the entire crew, when things had gone sideways. Dezmund had been the first one out the door, which didn’t surprise her. He’d been lukewarm on the whole thing from the beginning, so it had been no shock when he’d bailed first. But she was most surprised, and most disappointed, by the way she’d handled herself. You had to expect things to go wrong, and deal with them when they did. That was what a pro did, a real pro. Unplugging and hustling out of the suite hadn’t been dealing with it. That had been panic, and now hours later, she was still raging at herself over it. Why the hell hadn’t she taken a moment and slit Maddox’s throat on her way out? He was there, still plugged in, as vulnerable as this poor sod Reina had tied up in knots. And what had she done instead? She’d run right past him like a frightened child. Fucking amateur hour.
“You look like you could spit nails right about now,” Reina said, standing next to a table, opening a black case with brass clasps. She removed a meter-long rod that looked like an oversized magician’s wand, then approached her friend.
The tip of the wand began to glow red, buzzing faintly with electricity. It was a shock wand, Blayze realized, a tool of Reina’s trade. Same general design as a cop’s shockstick, only with f
ar lower voltage. Painful, yes, but a shock wand wouldn’t make you collapse in a writhing fit or cause you to shit yourself like a cop’s device would.
“Make sure you don’t touch the hot end,” Reina warned, then tilted her head toward the customer. “Go ahead, take over for a bit. You’ll feel better after, I promise.”
Blayze took the wand by the handle, felt its weight in her hand. She looked over at the customer, his pale, skinny body trembling. He looked around sixty, all saggy skin and white tufts of hair. “Who is he?” she asked.
“Does it matter?” Reina said. “He’s a regular. Some highfloor corporati. One of those stressed-out, go go go types. Comes here twice a week before work.”
Blayze stepped forward, gripping the wand’s handle. She was still furious with herself, furious at what had gone down. What had she done to herself? To her livelihood? To her future? Everything she’d so carefully built up since she’d joined Dez’s crew felt as if it were crumbling around her.
She reached out, touched the wand’s glowing end to the man’s belly. Sparks flew as he shrieked like a child and his body jerked. The smell of singed body hair filled the room.
Pleased and vaguely aroused by his reaction, Blayze felt her anger wane, losing a bit of its hold on her.
Damn, Reina really knew her stuff. This was exactly what she’d needed.
***
Half an hour later, calmed and once again in control of herself, Blayze sat across from Dezmund in Reina’s office. The cramped space was tidy and organized, with no traces of their host’s profession visible anywhere. Framed pictures of Reina’s three children adorned the walls: a beach vacation, Disney World, primary school graduation.
“We fucked up,” Dezmund said.
“We did,” Blayze agreed. Then she asked, “How do you think he did it?”
“Had to be some kind of clone tag,” Dezmund said. “They’re not easy to make, and they’re notorious for falling apart under a DS’s countermeasures. But Maddox…” He sighed, shook his head. “He’s good at that kind of thing. His builds are solid. Always have been.”