•
After a few more blocks, I slow to a gentle jog, then finally just a brisk walk. I reach into my backpack and pull out my sunglasses, presumably a cheap imitation of some famous brand I haven’t heard of. My assailant’s probably long gone, deep in the bowels of K block, like anyone who wasn’t born there. No one can outrun a native, no matter how fast they are, because it isn’t about speed. It’s about direction.
It’s time to prepare for my next move. I already stick out more than I’d like in the city proper, not having the money needed to look the part. I make my way to the public showers, and spend a small fortune there, washing the congealed blood off my ear and neck, along with the odor of a dozen different eateries and factories. I even buy those little sachets of shampoo, conditioner and hair gel, re-spiking my short, black hair. Looking in the mirror, I’m finally satisfied that I won’t be thrown out of anywhere, even if I could do with a change of clothes.
Sophia’s place is the nicest out of the three of us. She works for a Kao Telecom authorized repair store on J block. The difference between her job and ours, between her apartment and ours, between her life and ours is night and day. Literally. Her place has such extravagant features as windows that overlook the apartment block across the street, even letting in a bit of sunlight; a much larger room, one you could actually call a studio apartment while keeping a straight face; her very own private shower; and elevators, so I’m not out of breath when she tentatively opens her door, pulling its chain taut.
“Rain!” she exclaims, her face lighting up. “Hey, listen, can we do this later? I’m just about to head off to work. How’s this evening for you?”
“Spark’s dead,” I say matter-of-factly. I feel a pang of pain in my head, but manage to hold the tears back.
Sophia drops the smile, her eyes widening ever so slightly, searching my face for a sign I’m playing some sort of trick on her. “For real?”
I nod solemnly.
“You’d better come in.” She closes the door, flicks off its chain and swings it wide open, stepping off to the side as I make my way past her and into that beautiful apartment of hers, bathed in natural sunlight. It smells faintly of potpourri, or perhaps incense, propagated by a small, quiet, battery-operated fan on the coffee table, blowing a gentle breeze around the room.
As much as I try to avoid it, my eyes always wander towards the artwork on the walls. Hand painted by Sophia herself, depicting beautiful women of all shapes and sizes in various types of erotic confinement. All strictly consensual, she always goes to great pains to assure me, making me wonder just how fictitious the encounters depicted actually are. Pain’s something she probably knows a lot about, connoisseur like. The paintings are good, from the vibrant colors that make them seem glossy and hyperreal and the perspectives that seem to reinforce the viewer’s dominance over the subjects, through to the symmetry of the pieces, and other signs of thoughtful balance. She says she sells them for a high three figures each, sometimes even more. Nice side business.
She certainly looks as well off as she is. Her taste is refined. Even dressing for technical back office work like I do, she’s wearing a fine wool sweater and designer jeans, not cheap knock-offs like everyone on K block. Golden colored bracelets adorn her wrists, making a pleasant jangling sound whenever she gestures with her hands, and subtle make-up emphasizes the beautiful contours of her eyes. Her curly, black hair falls gracefully down to her shoulders. When she hugs me, I can smell perfume, much fancier than the simple deodorant at the public showers. I want to say something comforting to cheer her up, but I can’t think of anything.
She makes us both a coffee, fresh from her own machine and as dark as her soft skin. I tell her everything. Well, almost everything. Finding Spark’s body. Searching his apartment. My plan.
•
Standing on the rooftop above my target’s apartment, waiting for Sophia’s signal, I can see the whole decaying city. Phone cables tether the buildings together like mooring lines, as if without them they might simply drift away. I let my gaze follow one of these cables from a neighboring building all the way to this one, raindrops dripping down from it onto the concrete floor beneath my feet. It’s peaceful up here. Just the groaning of the turbines, the clatter of the air conditioning, the rain on old concrete and metal.
In my line of work, repairing KT equipment, if you’re the curious type, you learn a lot of tricks. You learn how to make a logger board you splice between the catty—the cathode ray tube terminal—and the modem. This board intercepts and stores all the keystrokes going out and all the display characters coming in. Of course, with only a few K to play with, you can’t store them locally. You have to ship them out to another account on the net. We have a lot of customers. On the days you’re bored, you rack up a lot of usernames and passwords. A lot of accounts. A lot of secrets. And a lot of places to stash them.
You start trading them with acquaintances—”friends” wouldn’t really be the right term, people like Spark and Sophia and me don’t really have friends. It can become an obsession, like collecting schematics for boards you’re not supposed to know about, let alone access, or phone numbers for people who aren’t supposed to exist, and certainly aren’t supposed to be on the grid. Spies. Assassins. Ghosts in the machine. In my circles, we collect all of these.
The three of us know—knew—more about KT’s networks than KT themselves do, so whatever Spark was up to, they were probably the first people to object to it. Even if it wasn’t them who killed him, they’re likely spying on us all, so I can always see if they have any useful information. I already have the accounts of various people at KT. The only problem is that KT actually cares about its employees. Each person has certain designated places they like to log in from, and anywhere else is flagged up as suspicious. The target’s apartment is generally your best bet. Luxurious, forty meter squared apartments like Sophia’s, personal to just you and your optional spouse. It gets better. If you’re a city proper hacker like Sophia, you can afford your own KT seventy-two terminal, black market, serial number etched off. And if you’re a K block hacker like me, you know how to splice a line. Plug yourself right into the junction box, crocodile clips over his apartment number’s regular jack. You set up an umbrella on a tripod, you plug your catty into the juice the box has along with the spliced line. Now, as far as the grid’s concerned, you’re in his apartment. You have to wait for him to leave, so you know he’s not going to be logged in at the same time, from home or anywhere else, then, then you can log in as your target. It’s time consuming. It’s risky as hell being up there looking like some demented, high tech gargoyle squatting under the wind turbines. But it works.
My ratty receiver hooked into the back of the catty, tuned in to a disused frequency, I patiently watch the steady pulse of the bright phosphorous green cursor. Finally, a sliver of text appears, nudging the blinking cursor out of its way. Just a jumble of characters. A glitch in the system, as far as anyone else is concerned, if they happen to hear it. Just noise. But it’s my signal. It means Sophia’s seen the target, one Mr. Eugene Langford, leave his office building for lunch. I flick the switch on the back of the catty, switching it from the receiver back to the spliced line, and I’m greeted by the login prompt for Eugene’s apartment. I enter his details, my fingers flying along the keyboard with professional precision. Sure, it’s a risk, but some things are worth it. Some things, you just have to know.
And now, for the first time, I have everything. Access to the whole of KT. Something I’d never dared to see before, it being too risky. Hoards upon hoards of data, of raw information. Salaries. Bills. Patents. And real secrets. Information about potential rival companies. Things they aren’t supposed to know about. Things they wouldn’t know about if they weren’t spying on their customers, and a monopoly to boot. Other people’s inventions. Spark’s invention.
Once I see Spark’s files, I make my move. The idea is to copy them across to someone else’s account, then from there
to the next person’s, hopping across to five different people. People I’ve never heard of. People I’ve never hacked before. People I can’t be traced to.
I switch the terminal back to the receiver, the ghosts of countless alphanumerics fading into the abyss, replaced with Sophia’s message comprised of only a handful of random looking characters. Nothing else accompanying it yet. Good. I switch it back to the spliced line, and the text reappears. My fingers moving deftly over the board, I log into the first stranger’s account and make a hidden dot-directory to stash the files in, then switch back to Eugene’s account and perform a remote copy. One down, four more to go.
I switch, and for a split second I freeze. Staring me in the face is Sophia’s second signal, signifying that Eugene’s just walked back into the building. Shit. I make a mental note not to panic. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and open them again. I work quickly but methodically, careful not to make any spelling mistakes. I delete all my activity from Eugene’s shell history log, then log off. It can’t have taken me longer than twenty seconds after I first noticed the signal, and it can’t have been more than a minute since I last checked for it. So a minute and a half from getting the signal to logging out, tops. That’s cutting it uncomfortably close. I hope he took the stairs.
Then I’m back on the street, bulky machine under my arm, and no one’s any the wiser. I perform the other four hops from a public terminal where I feel slightly safer, but only once I’m back in Sophia’s apartment, the rain and police sirens a mere background noise, can I do something remotely approaching relaxing.
I’ve always felt that Sophia’s apartment is the perfect place for relaxing. There’s something comforting about someone who’s so open about her sexuality.
“It worked then?” Sophia looks down at my boots, and the trail of wet footprints behind me. Whoops.
I look around for somewhere to put down the heavy machine.
“Anywhere’s fine,” she suggests.
I put the catty down on an empty chair. “Yeah, it worked. I got out a minute and a half after your second signal, max.” I look Sophia in the eyes. “I saw things there, things they shouldn’t have had. Spark’s things.”
Sophia’s expression softens. “You look exhausted.”
“It’s been a rough day.” I still can’t bring myself to tell her about the shooting. I don’t want her to worry about me unnecessarily.
“No kidding.” Sophia gestures towards her bed, at the other end of the room. “You want to lie down for a bit, take a little nap?”
“Can’t. I have to work out what to do next.”
“Well you can’t do that if you’re tired. Trust me, you’ll be able to think better once you’re rested. Then you can strategize.”
“It does look kinda tempting…are you sure you don’t mind?”
“I insist.”
I take off my army boots and curl up on Sophia’s bed. That soft, cozy, luxurious bed. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll just have a little nap, just for five minutes.”
•
When I wake up, there’s a thin blanket over me. I open my eyes, glancing out the window at a ninety degree angle. It’s twilight, and the rain’s stopped. Inside, the soft wall lights are on, and the place is starting to look almost like home, only more spacious and opulent.
I blink a few times, eyes adjusting, and tentatively sit up on the bed. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
Sophia’s the other side of the room, behind a canvas, brush in one hand and palette in the other. Her black, curly hair’s tied back in a cute high-up ponytail. She talks to me, her voice softer than usual, but keeps her eyes focused on the canvas. “Sorry hon, you just looked so peaceful and calm like that. I didn’t have the heart to wake you up. You’ve been through a lot today, you earned some rest.”
I awkwardly amble towards her, unsure what to say. What comes out of my mouth is: “Thanks.”
She smiles at me briefly, finally looking away from the canvas. Her eyes are slightly puffy, her cheeks still drying. She misses Spark, just as I do, and she’s better at expressing it than I am. She searches my face for answers. She looks like she wants to know what to do next to fix this, but it can’t be fixed. Spark’s dead, and nothing will bring him back. The best we can do is ensure that whatever he was doing will live on. “So, what now?”
“Now?” I glance back at the bed, and next to it, the rack of jackets and dresses above the piles of neatly folded tops and jeans, at some of the rack’s more exotic outfits. They aren’t exactly proudly on display like the artwork, but they’re still something she simply refuses to be ashamed about. I smile, for the first time since I found Spark that morning, as the next part of my plan solidifies in my mind. “Now I go shopping.”
•
A short trip to the outer rim of K block later, where it’s cheap enough for me to afford but not overtly illegal enough for the store owners to get hassled by the cops, my purse is lighter but I have a new outfit and matching boots, not at all to my taste but something I can use to blend in, where I plan on going. It’s sticky on the inside and has a bullet hole in the back, lovingly patched with matching black PVC. Shops on K block, you don’t ask questions.
I’m back at Sophia’s apartment by nighttime. “Hi honey, I’m home.”
“I should make you a key,” suggests Sophia, her hair down again. She leads me inside once more, closing the door behind me.
I put my plain white plastic shopping bag down on the impeccably varnished wooden floor—stores on K block don’t exactly go out of their way to advertise themselves—and make my way to the canvas. Now that she’s finished, I can’t help but sneak a peek at what she was painting. When I see it, it catches me a little off guard. It’s just like her other artwork, and just as with the others, I can’t imagine who the freckled redhead depicted in this one might be. Maybe she really does make all these muses up out of thin air.
“You look disappointed.” Sophia pouts, mocking me. “Thought it would be you?”
“I know you better than to think you’d take advantage of a sleeping friend.”
Sophia grins playfully. “You’re awake now.”
“So there’s a chance yet.” I grin right back. “Is it OK if I change?”
Sophia raises an eyebrow. “Sure, go ahead.” Now it’s her turn to act nonchalant. She sits down on her couch and flicks through a glossy fashion magazine.
I take off my backpack and my regular clothes, little more than a sports bra, combat trousers and army boots, all plain black. They’re revealing in their own way, showing off my midriff, but not particularly sexy, merely functional in K block’s climate of constant heat, rain and sweat. Then I take out my new outfit and try it on. I’m sweating before I’ve even finished zipping it up.
Sophia glances up from her magazine. “Want a hand?”
“No, I got it.” It takes me a good few seconds of waving my hands behind my back, but eventually I manage to finish zipping up the outfit at the back of my neck. The boots are next, going almost all the way up to my knees, and they have impossibly high heels. I have to sit on the floor for a good five minutes while lacing them up, then I walk to the bed and back a few times, practicing walking without falling over.
“You come into my apartment unannounced, several times in one day, you get me to call in sick so I can tell you when some guy’s having his lunch break, and now you’re performing a little strip tease and dressing up game in front of me. What do you think this is, my reward? I mean, I know you must be feeling pretty shocked and all, but is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“Not yet.” I walk up to Sophia’s fan. The trickle of cool air is nice, but nowhere near as strong as I need right now.
“Alrighty then.” Sophia goes back to her magazine.
“May I?” I crank Sophia’s fan up to full tilt, its drone now drowning out the sirens outside.
“You might even get it to do something, you got some new batteries.” Sophia doesn’t even glance up from her maga
zine this time.
I swap out the fan’s batteries with the ones in my backpack, freshly charged ones I’d bought from Stu, a neighbor of mine with a cluster of solar cells perched on a little spot he rents on a K-block roof, where the top layer of iron and wood is sprouting up like so many trees.
I put the fan back on the coffee table, then get the bottle of water from my backpack and carefully pour a dribble of it into my hand. I rub the water into my face, make my way back over to the table, and bend over, hands on boots, my wet face taking the full brunt of the cool air. I close my eyes. The sensation of a cool breeze flying right into my wet skin is sheer bliss.
When I open my eyes again, Sophia’s standing over me, looking down at me. “Can I keep them?”
“Sure,” I say, looking back up at her, “you give me one of your paintings.”
She smiles. “I didn’t think they were to your taste.”
“They’re not,” I admit. “Not really. But fencing one of those, I could get us a few years’ worth of electricity.”
“You know,” says Sophia as she walks over to the kitchen part of the room and takes a bottled drink from the fridge, “it’s not really called fencing if it’s legal.”
“Ever the intellect.” I straighten back up and spread my arms, posing for her. “How do I look?”
Sophia takes a long swig from her cool drink, then looks me up and down. Her lips are wet. “Inspiring. But…”
I raise an eyebrow. “But…?”
“The look’s incomplete.” She walks over to her bed and sits down, picking up some dark eyeshadow and a brush from the bedside table. “May I?”
I think about this for a second. Growing up on K block, I hardly ever indulged in such luxuries as make-up. It felt almost odd to wear it, and letting someone else apply it would have felt stranger still. But this is my friend, and I trust her. I walk over to her and sit down on the bed beside her. “Sure, if you think it’ll help.”
Heiresses of Russ 2014 Page 13