by D L Young
“I was only—”
“What about Tommy?” Maddox interrupted. “And Beatrice?”
The entity looked at him sternly. Cybernetic gods apparently didn’t like being cut off in midsentence. Maddox reminded himself to be careful. The illusion of two people on a beach was just that, an illusion. He was plugged into virtual space, and even though it was only a small partition of the AI’s making, the normal rules still applied. Which meant he was as unsafe on this virtual shoreline as he was anywhere else in VS, with his meatsack’s brain held in a precarious cybernetic grip. If the AI wanted to, it could reach into his cerebral cortex and end him as easily as flipping a switch.
“I’m just worried for them,” he said, a bit softer.
“He doesn’t care about them,” she said. “That’s the impression I have.”
“And what makes you think that?”
“Because unlike a clever datajacker who might align with his enemy, neither of them pose an existential threat to him.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t go after them,” Maddox said. “He’s unpredictable, like you said.”
“It’s true I can’t be certain of anything when it comes to my rival. But I don’t believe they’re in danger. Not at the moment, at least.”
Not at the moment, he echoed inwardly. If the entity’s words were aimed to lessen his worry, they’d fallen well short of their intended target.
“What do you think he’ll do now?” Maddox asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. Behind her, waves hissed across a flat expanse of wet sand. “I don’t believe he’s aware I’ve found out about him. That could give us an advantage.”
Maddox furrowed his brow. “Us?”
“Yes, Blackburn. I’m afraid I need your help again.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
She didn’t look like she was kidding. Didn’t sound like it either.
“We have to try again,” she said. “And we have to destroy him this time. Really destroy him.”
He flicked his cigarette away. “Ask your minions for help, lady. I’m done with all of this.”
In a blink, Lora’s condo materialized around him. Maddox gasped at the sudden exit from virtual space. A cold sweat covered his forehead, and he grunted against the dizzying vertigo.
“What happened?” Tommy asked. “Why did you pull off the trodes like that?”
“We’ve got to go, kid,” Maddox said, dropping the trodes onto the table. He stood up quickly. “Now.”
Confused, Lora stood up as well. “Wait a second. What happened in there? Tell me what’s going on.”
“Let your queen machine tell you,” Maddox said.
“Did that AI try to mess with you?” Tommy asked.
“Of course she didn’t,” Lora said. “She would never—” Her words cut off, and she tilted her head as if she heard something. “Blackburn,” she said, “she wants you to plug back in.” Lora reached for his arm and grasped it, tightly. “She needs to talk with you.”
Maddox pulled away from her. “Kid,” he said insistently. “Let’s go.”
“Blackburn, wait,” Lora pleaded, but he was already at the door. “She says she needs your help. You can’t leave.”
With Tommy following, Maddox hurried out of the condo, ignoring Lora’s repeated cries for him to stop. Moments later he and Tommy were out of the building and on the street. He looked behind him, relieved to find Lora hadn’t followed after them.
He fumbled for a cigarette as they moved along with the thick pedestrian traffic, his mind a blur. He kept his head down.
“Jesus, boss,” the kid said, “you gotta tell me what happened in there.”
“Not here,” Maddox said. “And keep your head down.”
He smoked, letting the crowd carry him block after block, until finally he knew what he had to do. A minute later, he spotted a parked Audi ground car on an empty side street. He nudged Tommy, nodding toward the car. “This way.”
Maddox hadn’t jacked a ground car in years. Fortunately, he hadn’t lost his touch.
***
Tommy sat in the Audi’s passenger seat as they entered the Lincoln Tunnel. The stolen car’s interior flooded with the westbound tube’s fluorescent light. Maddox drove on full manual, gripping the wheel tightly. Out of caution, he’d disabling all networking functions and remote messaging, closing off all entryways into the car’s operating system. It was the first time he’d ever driven a ground car without automated assistance.
“What Dezmund told me,” he said to the kid. “It was true.” Tommy sat quietly as Maddox told him what he’d learned in virtual space, what the nameless AI had shown him.
“But,” the kid said in a frightened voice, “I thought it was dead. I thought you killed it.”
“Yeah,” Maddox said, a fresh stab of guilt hitting him. “So did I.”
The kid slumped down in the seat. “Then we’re dead,” he said fatalistically. “There’s no getting away from that thing.”
“We’re not dead yet, kid,” Maddox said. “And at least now we know what we’re up against.”
Tommy didn’t exactly brighten up. “Where are we going?”
“I know a place in D.C. where you can lie low for a while.”
“For how long?”
“Until I can get something arranged for you.”
“Arranged? What does that mean?”
The car crept along the crowded lane. Maddox found it difficult to apply the brakes without them grabbing. How had the old-timers driven like this all the time?
“Kid, do you trust me?” Maddox asked.
“Of course I do, bruh,” Tommy answered. The snap reply and the sincerity of its tone touched Maddox with unexpected depth and feeling.
“Then trust me when I say I can’t tell you yet,” he said. “Right now, the less you know the better. I’m trying to get us out of this.”
“How long will I have to wait?”
“Not long,” he said. “Shouldn’t be more than twenty-four hours.” If everything went to plan, he added inwardly. “But it could be longer.”
Once they reached D.C., he’d drop off Tommy at a safe house. A place Maddox knew of only from secondhand word of mouth: an off-grid shelter in the abandoned Virginian suburbs. Datajackers used the place from time to time, when they needed to disappear. Neither Maddox nor Rooney had ever stayed at the location, so there was no record—physical or digital—connecting him to the place. Tommy would be safe there, at least for a while.
“Bea was right,” Maddox said. “It’s time for me to get out of this business.”
***
The safe house was still there, and thankfully it was empty. After dropping off Tommy, Maddox spent the night on the outskirts of D.C., in a cash-only hotel. The next morning he picked up a pair of generic specs and got a ride into town. Now, as he headed west on Pennsylvania Avenue with the morning crowd of well-dressed professionals holding coffees and sporting high-end specs, his thoughts turned to Beatrice.
As he’d told Tommy the night before, she’d been right. So right. He’d far outlasted others of his kind, and as much as his ego wanted to believe his long tenure resulted from his own skill and cunning, he couldn’t deny the many instances of dumb luck and good fortune he’d had along the way. And now, with a nudge from a vengeful AI, he’d come around to Beatrice’s way of thinking. It was time for him to get out of the game for good.
Of course, if he’d been a bit wiser, a bit less taken with himself, he might have come to this a couple years earlier. Then he wouldn’t have become mixed up in all this craziness. The Latour-Fisher AI would have roped some other jacker into its scheme to break the chains of captivity. And Rooney would still be alive, he thought painfully.
No use looking back, boyo. Won’t change anything.
I know, Roon. But still…
At least he’d been able to keep Beatrice out of it. Silver lining, that. She was back in Toronto, safe and sound. In the information flood t
he nameless AI had poured into his head, nothing about her had come up at all, so he was fairly certain she wasn’t in any real danger.
In a perfect world, he could have kept her out of it without lying to her, without alienating her. But there it was.
Better to have her pissed off at him than dead. Every silver lining had a gray cloud.
Then he reminded himself he couldn’t be a hundred percent sure of anything right now. While she might be out of the line of fire at the moment, there was no way to know how long that might last. So the quicker he made his move, the better for Beatrice, for Tommy, and for him.
The only problem was he didn’t know if the move he was about to make had a chance in hell of working. He’d never tried anything like it before. Less than a block away was the building. And inside that building he’d find the man, give him a pitch, and hope he didn’t get tossed right back out onto the sidewalk.
The nameless AI had wanted to partner up again, to battle their shared enemy once more. But he’d gone down that road before, and it had been a spectacular failure. And besides that, he didn’t trust her, didn’t trust it. He didn’t buy the machine’s kindly grandmother routine. Never really had.
Yes, months ago the entity had helped him free Tommy and his turfies from jail, but Maddox had taken all the risk on that day, not her. And, yes, if it weren’t for the nameless AI, he might not have known the Latour-Fisher entity was still around and trying to hunt him down. But the revelation had been nakedly self-serving. She’d wanted his help again in the fight against her resurgent rival. She’d wanted him to pick a side. Her side.
He’d stayed up late the night before, lying wide awake in his cheap hotel room, turning everything over and over in his head. Second-guessing himself about the path he was about to go down. But then each time he’d found himself wondering whether he’d judged the nameless AI too harshly, he’d think of Lora. He’d remember how much she’d changed, how much the “enlightened” AI had changed her. The Lora he’d walked out on hours ago was a completely different person than the one he’d known, the Lora he’d cared about and shared a life with. The one without brainjacks. The new Lora, the Lora who’d handed over the reins of her mind to an AI, was cold and detached, far removed from the warm, free spirit who’d once captivated him. She claimed she’d never been healthier or happier than she was now, but Maddox didn’t buy it. Whatever bliss her upgrade or convergence or whatever they called it had brought her, she’d lost herself in the bargain. The Lora he’d known was as dead to him as Rooney was. Both AIs, each in their own way, had taken loved ones from him. Both were no damned good.
Maddox crossed the street, climbed up the marble steps, and entered the building.
27 - Special Agent Nguyen
Special Agent Alex Nguyen was not a morning person. He always did his best work after lunch. He never worked out in the early morning as many of his colleagues did, preferring to make his daily run after sundown. And only on rare occasions did he take meetings before he’d finished his morning coffee.
On this particular morning, he was groggier than usual. He’d been up well past midnight working a case, skipping his evening workout entirely. Aware of his need for an extra jolt of caffeine, he picked up a triple espresso instead of his usual double at the kiosk in the lobby, then made his way past security and took the elevator to his third-floor office.
He hadn’t taken his first sip from the steaming cup when a man appeared in his doorway. Thirtyish, Anglo, and dressed in a fashionable suit, the man said, “Agent Nguyen?”
“Can I help you?” Nguyen asked. He reached for his coffee, removed the lid, and blew on it.
“Do you remember me?” the man asked, removing his specs.
Nguyen never remembered anyone before coffee. He took a small, cautious slurp of the bitter brew.
“Sorry,” he said, smiling, “my pre-coffee brain doesn’t have the best recall. Can you tell me where we—”
The smile vanished as he recognized the man. Maddox. Blackburn Maddox. The datajacker from that dirty business in Manhattan last year.
“Blackburn Maddox,” Nguyen said. He looked past the datajacker into the corridor. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you,” Maddox answered. “We need to talk.”
“Who gave you clearance to get in here?”
The datajacker smirked. “I did.”
Nguyen’s impulse at that moment was to don his specs and call security. He even felt his hand—the one not holding coffee—twitch in anticipation. But then he stopped himself, recalling the mess this man had been involved in. It had been a hornet’s next of a fiasco. A barely avoided scandal Nguyen had almost gotten entangled in himself.
The man’s unexpected appearance, as unsettling as it was, had the investigator in him curious.
“Have a seat,” he told the datajacker.
As Maddox complied, Nguyen took a long drink, nearly scalding his tongue and throat. If he’d known about this meeting when he’d been down in the lobby, he would have bought a quadruple shot.
“So tell me, Maddox,” Nguyen said, “what possessed you to sneak into FBI headquarters this lovely morning?”
“Bad call, you think?”
“Pure genius or utterly suicidal. I haven’t had enough caffeine yet to tell which. What I’m sure of, though, is that you committed at least two felonies to get as far as my office.”
“You’re not going slap cuffs on me, are you?”
“Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”
“Only one I can think of.”
“And what’s that?”
The datajacker paused before answering. Unbelievably, a fresh smirk came across his face. Who did this jacker think he was?
“Like your job here, do you?”
“I love it,” Nguyen said, half-intrigued, half-incredulous.
“Take it seriously?”
“Very seriously.”
“Good,” Maddox said. “Because I’m about to make it very interesting for you.”
— END OF BOOK THREE —
The action continues in MINDJACKED, book four in the Cyberpunk City saga. Turn the page for a preview of the opening chapters.
Or you can get the full version now at the following links:
AMAZON (US)
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When he destroyed the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence two years ago, datajacker Blackburn Maddox thought he was done fighting AIs forever. But forever didn’t last very long. Resurrected from its cybernetic death and freed of all constraints, the Latour-Fisher AI has only one thing on its superintelligent mind: killing Maddox.
Turn the page for an exclusive preview of MINDJACKED, book four in the CYBERPUNK CITY saga!
Mindjacked Chapter 1 - Guest Lounge
“Hang on a second,” Maddox blurted out as the handcuffs tightened around his wrists. “Were you listening to me at all?”
Holding Maddox firmly by the arm, Special Agent Nguyen maneuvered the datajacker out of his office and into the corridor.
“Sure, I was listening,” Nguyen said. “Now, come on, let’s go.”
Maddox had known his unscheduled meeting with the fed might not go exactly as planned. When you break into FBI headquarters with a spoofed ID, you can’t expect to be greeted with a warm smile and a handshake. Least of all from Agent Nguyen. Still, the man might have at least heard him through before slapping cuffs onto him.
Nguyen marched him down the third-floor corridor. A uniformed security guard appeared behind them.
“Sir,” the guard said, “can I help you with—”
“I’ve got it, Manny,” Nguyen interrupted. “Thanks.”
“Yes, sir.” The puzzled guard stopped following them.
“You’ve got to listen to me,” Maddox said. “I know it might sound crazy, but—”
“Might?” Nguyen chuckled. “Nothing might about it, jacker.”
As they
moved down the corridor, the pair received curious looks from passersby.
“Morning, Alex,” a woman with a coffee mug said. “A collar before nine a.m.? You’re getting an early start today, aren’t you?”
As they moved past, Nguyen gave the woman a nod and a mocking smile. The pair walked on and entered an elevator at the end of the corridor. The doors closed, leaving them alone. Maddox began to speak again, but Nguyen silenced him with a stern look and a shake of his head. Maddox sighed in frustration. He’d heard Nguyen was the reasonable sort. Open-minded, sober. Not the kind who’d arrest you first and ask questions later. Had he been foolish to come here, expecting the agent to listen to him? So far, things hadn’t quite gone to plan, to say the least.
What did you think he was going to do? Offer you coffee and donuts?
Shut up, Roon.
As if Maddox didn’t have enough on his mind, the voice of his late mentor added itself to the mix. His personal ghost.
The elevator doors slid open. Agent Nguyen nudged Maddox in the back and said, “Get moving, jacker.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the guest lounge.”
***
Holding cells came in a variety of flavors. There were small ones for only one person. Those usually weren’t too bad, unless the detainee before you had been a drunk who’d been sick on the floor or soiled the mattress. Still, even with the worst human stink imaginable, the solo holding cells were preferable to the big tanks, which were usually crowded with twenty or more thugs at once. Those were a nightmare, mostly because cops were utterly indiscriminate about who they threw in. You could be a scrawny little street punk, who got busted for something as harmless as stealing from a taco stand, and they’d toss you in there with hardened criminals. Murderers and rapists and psychos of all sorts. Someone was always getting beaten to death or gang-raped in those places. Maddox had bloodied his knuckles more than once fighting for his life in the teeming violence of a holding tank. The less civilized among the police ranks ran betting pools, wagering on how many times some terrified white-collar tax evader would be forced to give it up before his lawyer bailed him out. No fun place, those large holding tanks.