Skyway Angel

by James K. Douglas

  “What was up with that name?” Cassdan asked, as we slipped through the crowd.

  “I know, right?” I answered. “Free Information Resistance Network. Are they a network that resists free information or do they use free information to resist networking?”

  He chuckled. “FIRN. Nothing like naming yourself after a houseplant to show people you’re serious about investigative journalism.”

  On the corner of Moreland and Sanders, Cassdan stopped in front of a cafe sitting under an apartment building. Perhaps “cafe” wasn’t the right word. From what I could see through the large front windows, it was more like an arcade and restaurant. The name “Rey’s” was displayed in large neon calligraphy above the front door, the sign rattling gently with the heavy beat of the wordless music vibrating from within.

  We stepped out of the drizzling rain onto a carpeted floor. Streaks of purple and blue dye ran across the tufted flooring in jagged lines, glowing under the blacklight bulbs. Along the left wall, a throng of patrons waited impatiently to step into one of the six protective ring enclosure platforms and strap on one of the most oversized virtual reality headsets I had ever seen. Not one of them were wearing an electro-haptic suit, nor even walking on the oddly flat surface beneath their feet. As they swung around a single gun-like controller, squeezing the trigger at invisible enemies, I realized that these were not modern VR systems. They were much older, practically vintage.

  Along the back wall, a row of simulator pods sat, sixteen in total, each one light grey in color and damaged around the edges from repeated use. Warning labels and bomber girls decorated the exteriors, while the word “BattleTech” was painted in immense metallic letters across the wall behind them. Nearly in unison, the pod doors all slid forward and the occupants began climbing out. I had expected to see young gamers getting a taste of the retro technology, but instead, the smiling faces that emerged were mostly in their forties or fifties.

  The younger crowd was mostly to our right, feeding tokens into Virtua Fighter or firing light-guns into Area 51. A young girl, no more than nine years old, stood on a stepstool, rapidly mashing buttons to make a red masked turtle kick the stuffing out of brightly colored Foot Soldiers. Her father covered her flank as the enemies tried to get behind her. Beside them, a teenage boy controlled a holographic cowboy in an old machine labeled “Time Traveler.” Roughly three dozen classic arcade cabinets filled that side of the room, everyone of them occupied.

  The dining area stretched out in front of us, the four rows of booths being tended to by fast moving wait staff in loose fitting hot pink tee-shirts. Some of them had their shirt bottoms tied in a side knot to show off their fit midriffs.

  “Find a seat where you like,” one of the women called out as she set a bottle of Coca-cola in front of a customer. “We’ll be right with you.”

  I smiled politely. Cassdan grumbled and led me to a red and black booth near the center of the room, taking a seat opposite a leather jacketed man with platinum blonde hair. He barely acknowledged us until Cassdan spoke.

  “It’s raining ones and zeros out there,” my client said.

  The Billy Idol impersonator swallowed his bite of burger and asked, “Do you need to borrow my umbrella?”

  “No, but I could use a good grey hat.”

  Billy sat back in his seat, sizing up my client, and then me. The drowsy look in his eyes said that he wasn’t very impressed with what he was seeing. From the booth behind him, a lithe figure with short grey hair slid out of her booth and turned to face our table. Creases formed at the corners of her lips when she smiled down at us. Billy slid over to make room for her.

  “It’s been a while, Cass,” she said, taking her seat. “I see you’ve been making some friends.”

  “Jackson, this is Rey,” Cassdan said, “one of my oldest friends.” I reached out a hand to shake hers as he continued. “Some people know her as the Zombie Queen.”

  Her delicate fingers took my hand as the words of a polite greeting caught in my throat. Rumors of an elite hacker for hire going by the alias “Zombie Queen” had been circulating around the city for the better part of three decades. The claim was that she was the best of the best, an expert at both subtlety and brutality, capable of taking down any system put in front of her but only willing to take jobs that offered unique challenges.

  The first rumor of her existence started circulating when I was just a kid. Air Tomorrow and Jetway, two competing airlines, let their squabble get a little too dirty, at which point one of them hired a hacker to send a message. At exactly five minutes after noon, over five hundred passenger jets, every plane Air Tomorrow had in the sky, suddenly and simultaneously dropped a thousand feet. There were no casualties, but Air Tomorrow was never able to pull out of the nosedive the hacker had sent the company into.

  Over the next decade, the Zombie Queen’s reputation grew so remarkable that Gibs Corp., a computer security firm, tried to claim that she had retired from mercenary work and was now on their payroll. Apparently, she didn’t care for them trying to capitalize on her notoriety, so she overloaded their systems, causing electrical fires all over their corporate headquarters. The fire was put out, but it had caused so much damage that the building had to be torn down. That was the last time anyone told a lie about the Zombie Queen.

  With renown like that, it was just a matter of time before the wrong kind of people came knocking on her door. A branch of the Zhejiang Autonomous Combine tried to hire her for a particular job. They didn’t take it well when she turned them down, so they sent some of their best enforcers after her. They spent three weeks trying to track her down while she led them on a wild goose chase of forged financial information and fake identities. Eventually, she must have gotten bored, because she opted to just invade their systems and wipe out the local Combine’s debt ledger, freeing a lot of people from the predatory loans of the organization.

  In the years since that incident, most people had come to the conclusion that the Zombie Queen was either a hacker collective or a title that was passed on. No one really believed it had been just one person all these years, and yet here I was, shaking her hand like a dumbstruck fanboy.

  “Oh my, that’s quite a bit of muscle you’ve got there,” she said. “Cassdan are you in some trouble? Are you here looking for a quick escape or a little retaliation?”

  “Well, yes, I am in a bit of trouble, but I’ve got that part handled. What I need is a bit of information.”

  “I doubt there’s anything I can get that you can’t just get yourself.”

  “Unless it’s about a job you did.”

  “Ah, I see,” she said. “You know that’s not how the game is played. A contract is a contract.”

  “Yeah, a contract is a contract. We do our work and we keep our mouths shut. Rules protect the lives and incomes of every mercenary hacker in the city, but since when do you do assassination jobs?”

  Her eyes narrowed as her upper lip peeled back in a snarl. “I did no such thing. I’ve never taken a kill order.”

  He returned the snarl. “Angela Vidales. You sent a hoard after her building’s computer so large that its security systems shut down, letting a killer into her apartment. You might as well have killed her with your own hands. You’re responsible for her death.”

  The Zombie Queen sat back in the booth, crossing her arms. She never broke eye contact, but her gaze did soften. After a moment, she let out a heavy breath and began talking.

  “That wasn’t the job.”

  Cassdan placed his elbows on the table and knitted his fingers. “Then what was the job?”

  “A certain corporation had reason to believe that Ms. Vidales had recordings that could potentially be compromising. The job was to wipe them out and locate any potential backups.”

  “Was that corporation Ultramarine Tech?” I asked.

  She shot me a sharp look. “Infer whatever you like, but I can’t name names without violating my contract.”

  Respecting her rule
s, I adjusted tactics. “So, asking who your contact in the company was wouldn’t do me any good?”

  “I can tell you that security concerns of this caliber are usually handled by the corporate security chief,” she said, raising an eyebrow to make her point.

  “Patel,” I said, glancing at Cassdan, “he would have known when the horde was going to hit the computer. He could have sent someone to take out the witness, or even done it himself.”

  “He certainly has access to ME-Slim armor,” Cassdan responded. “And Angela wasn’t a fighter. Catching her by surprise, he could have made short work of her.”

  Rey reached across the table to take his hand. “I’m sorry about your friend, Cass.”

  He pulled back from her. “Why did you take this job?”

  “The computer,” she said, as if it should be obvious. “An experimental, highly advanced algorithmic intelligence, how could I pass that up? I had to see what it could take. This kind of opportunity doesn’t present itself every day.”

  “It’s not every day you get bested, either.”

  Her brow lowered as her head pulled back slightly. “What are you talking about?”

  “You weren’t able to get through. The system had to redirect power to protect itself, but the defenses were never breached. I checked them myself.”

  She allowed herself a small smile. “Cass, don’t forget who you’re dealing with. The system was good, but I’ve beat better. What I actually found most interesting was that the personality systems were basically a separate computer. The apartment’s computer treats the A.I. like it’s a user. It’s a complete entity, separate from the core system. I suppose with it being a prototype, no one wanted to risk it corrupting the basic systems or writing it in so tightly that it couldn’t be removed.”

  “I know how the system works,” Cassdan interrupted. “How did you get in?”

  “Well, I used the horde to brute-force the outer security, then sent it after the A.I. to keep it busy, cutting it off from the rest of the computer. Then, I used the parameters the client gave me in a few ferret programs to locate the data and extract it for me. Once the zombies breached the Ap.R.I.L. program, I went in by hand to erase any footprints or evidence that it had been breached. It was a complex system. It took me a good ten minutes to do everything and get out.”

  “What were the parameters for the ferrets?”

  “The client gave me the parameters already programmed, so I didn’t look too deep into them, but from what I glanced at, I’d say it was probably security camera footage.”

  “What about the backups?”

  “If there ever were any backups, the computer didn’t know about them. I didn’t find a single trace.”

  “Who forgets to make a backup for something that important?” I asked.

  “An amateur investigative journalist,” Cassdan answered.

  I had to agree. Angela seemed clever enough, but she hadn’t had any experience with anything like this. Investigating corporations is dangerous work, definitely not for rookies. She got in way over her head, and the waves took her down.

  I turned my attention back to the Zombie Queen. “Is it possible that we could hire you to hack Ultramarine Tech, to find whatever it was that Angela was after? You can do it a lot quicker than Cassdan can.”

  “Sorry, but there’s a two year grace period built into every contract, and I won’t violate the contract, which means I think we’ve come to the end of what I’m allowed to tell you.” She was already starting to get out of the booth. “I have other projects that need my attention, but you two feel free to stay and eat, or play some games.”

  I wasn’t sure if Cassdan would do it, so I stood and thanked her for her time. To my surprise, my client said, “Take it easy, Rey, and watch your back. This thing might get ugly before it’s over.’

  She gave him a nod and a polite smile and disappeared beyond a hidden door next to the pods along the back wall. Billy soon joined her, leaving us alone at the table. I looked Cassdan over, trying to figure out what he was thinking about, but he was as unreadable as a broken phone with a dead battery.

  “You hungry?” I asked, knowing I hadn't yet replaced the breakfast I had lost earlier.

  “Sure,” he said, “but I’m not eating here.”

  Chapter 7

  Halfway back to Angela’s apartment, we made a stop in the open courtyard of the Banner Street Apartment complex. Like many other open spaces in the city, the locals had found a use for it, another way to scrape out a living. On the bare pavement, residents of the complex had constructed market stalls and storefronts from discarded shipping pallets and scrap cloth.

  Three aisles of tables stretched up the center of the courtyard, displaying an array of fruits, vegetables, and second hand items. Next to each table stood its owner, making conversation with the customers and answering their questions. The four tables closest to the sidewalk were watched over by a young couple that seemed to have ambitions of taking over the fresh tomato market. On the far end, an elderly woman selected an old toy from her table to show to a young girl.

  Around the outer edge of courtyard, ground level residents had constructed small food stalls outside their front doors. Powered by extension cords, most of the stalls had cooktops for frying rice and meats, or perhaps something that passed for meat. Cassdan and I stopped at a small place specializing in Peking duck.

  The young woman running the eatery took our orders with a smile and picked up her cleaver. We found seats under her awning, taking shelter from the light rain while she cut crispy edge bits off of a printed loaf of cooked meat. I took the moment to try to understand the case better.

  “Your friend,” I began the conversation, “she seems like she has a pretty strict code of ethics.”

  “I don’t think any sane person would call it ethics, but she does have rules.”

  The chef set steamed buns on paper plates in front of us. The meat went on first, followed by spring onions. A dark sauce topped it, squeezed from a repurposed ketchup bottle across the food in a swirling pattern. A final bow from the woman told us it was ready to eat.

  While I took a bite of my meal, Cassdan continued. “She’s a traditionalist. She does the work, takes her pay, never gets involved or takes anything personally.”

  “She never kills?”

  “No. She’s always said that our arena is information. The best way to stay safe is to stay out of the fight. People who don’t pick up guns rarely get shot.”

  Down the road, a police drone passively scanned the faces of pedestrians, its fan blades kicking off sprinkles of rain. Its handler stood beside a parked police car, blue lights silently flashing. Two young girls ran by, their raincoats flaring out around them as they splashed through the puddles. The shorter of the two picked up a crushed soda can and chucked it at the drone, hitting it in the left rotor, causing it to bounce off the nearest building. The officer drew his weapon, but the girls had already disappeared off down the nearest alley.

  “She did seem genuinely offended,” I said, returning my attention to my meal and conversation, “when you suggested she might be responsible for Angela’s death.”

  “She is responsible for Angela’s death,” he said between bites, “at least partially.”

  “Is it possible that her responsibility is more than partial?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Ultramarine gave her the parameters for the ferret program. I’m no hacker, but isn’t it possible there was something else included, something that could make April behave in a dangerous way?”

  “Rey would never be that irresponsible, but April’s pretty complex. All that rooting around in her memories could have caused some damage, but still, that’s more like the kind of damage that creates a Max Headroom, not a HAL 9000.”

  I chuckled at the thought. “If she starts running around waxing poetic about television ratings, we’ll revisit the concept.” I finished the last bite of my meal before asking, “How long have you kn
own Rey?”

  He stared off into the distance for a long moment, slowly chewing. When he was finished, he asked, “Is this related to the case?”

  “You never really know what’s related to a case, until you ask the right questions.”

  He tossed his plate in the trashcan at the end of the counter. “I’ve known her most of my life. My sister raised me and they were good friends.” He cleared his throat. “Rey kind of looked after me when my sister passed.”

  “Oh,” was all I could manage.

  “Rey taught me pretty much everything I know, but not everything she knows, obviously. She’s meticulous. Very little slips past her, but there was no way for her to insure the safety of every person in that building while simultaneously going after its computer. She’s not exactly a victim in this, but someone took advantage of her. I have a feeling that when we find that person, she’s going to make them suffer.”

  The red light of a setting sun diffused through the heavy clouds overhead, casting the sky in a purple hue. The factory shift change had carried away one crowd and brought in another. All around us, tired bodies moved at a leisurely pace, in no hurry to get home. Two stalls down the line, a group of women holding umbrellas clinked the necks of beer bottles together before turning them up.

  I wasn’t sure if our visit with the Zombie Queen had turned up anything useful. We hadn’t even been able to directly confirm that it was Ultramarine Tech that had hired her, and we certainly didn’t know if they had sent someone after Angela directly. Still, I was glad Cassdan had decided to open up a bit. Loved ones should be remembered, and talked about.

  “Your sister,” I asked, “what was her name?”

  He pulled up the rain hood of his long leather jacket and stepped away from the counter. Water droplets collected on his shoulders, turning into rivulets that ran down his back and arms, reflecting the blues and reds of the small neon signs hanging in the market. I pulled up my own hood and joined him.