Frankie headed inside and quickly made her way to the lifts, which would bring her out closest to Dion’s apartment. She hoped this would be easy, and she would find Dion sat in the apartment downstairs, but she had a sneaking suspicion that this might not be the case.
When she lived here, Frankie had heard about Dion and his friends from some of the other residents. He was a well-known delinquent and was thought to be a hacker by many. He spent his days hanging around the building with his mates, harassing people and just generally being a trouble maker. By all accounts, his mother wasn’t around much, working several jobs and doing her best to remain afloat. She was always apologising to people in the building about her son’s behaviour, but frankly, she wasn’t around enough to do much about it.
All of which meant she knew their surname, but not the exact apartment where they lived.
She hoped that his mother, Mira, wasn’t in, but she would deal with her if she were.
The lift opened up and Frankie stepped out into a fairly quiet corridor. She made her way through the maze of hallways and soon found Dion’s apartment. Frankie didn’t want to just barge in there if his mother was in, that would no doubt lead to more complications; so, she knocked and waited. Her enhanced hearing couldn’t make out any sounds from within the apartment, so she knocked again to be sure, but she heard nothing. Checking her peripheral vision, she made sure everything was clear before she took hold of the handle and forced it with her cybernetic strength. The sound of something breaking came from within.
She then rammed her shoulder into the door, and with a cracking of wood she would have preferred to have been a bit quieter, she was in.
The apartment was dark, and Frankie didn’t want to attract too much attention, so she left the lights off as she stepped into the main living space and dialled up the sensitivity on her vision, bringing the whole room into view. The apartment was a touch bigger than hers had been, with two bedrooms adjoining the open plan living room and kitchenette. It was immediately clear which one was Dion’s, based on the music poster on the outside of the door. Frankie picked her way through the room, which was in something of a mess with food cartons standing open, clothes on the floor and other bits of mess. She paused as she passed the coffee table in the lounge, noting that there were loads of printed off photos of Dion on top of it, along with a half-filled in missing person’s report and some homemade posters asking if anyone had seen Dion.
It seemed he was missing.
Frankie frowned. Why was he missing? She looked up at his room and walked over to it. Might there be some clues in here? She opened the door into what appeared to be a fairly typical boy’s bedroom, although, it had obviously been cleaned and left untouched for a while. The bed was made, there were no clothes on the floor, and everything was neat and tidy. But the walls were still covered with posters of bands, film posters, and several images of women not wearing an awful lot - all relatively normal.
She spotted a terminal on a desk and sat herself down in the chair before it. He had quite the set up with several screens and a very stylish looking housing for the CPU. She noticed that the lights were flickering on the terminal, meaning it was in standby mode. She tapped a key on the keyboard and the screen flared into life.
Frankie’s vision adjusted for the new light so as not to blind her, and she found herself staring at a log in screen. She had guessed as much, so she scanned the local area and immediately found the terminals wireless port and sent in a cracking algorithm. The screen flickered, went black, and then code went streaming up the screen at quite some speed.
Suddenly, it stopped and the words, “Access Granted”, appeared at the bottom. The screen went to black again before it booted up and she found herself looking at a huge image of a music starlet wearing basically nothing, crawling about on a beach somewhere.
Frankie sighed. Boys will be boys, she guessed.
Frankie still had access to the terminal, so she ran a search through the registry, looking for anything suspicious. It only took her a few seconds to find that this terminal had repeatedly been accessed from another location. Someone was logging in from outside this apartment to access data and files stored on its quantum drives. Frankie thought this was too much of a coincidence, and guessed this would likely be Dion. Frankie sent a tracker into the terminal and let it do its thing. But moments later, it reported back with inconclusive results.
Frankie frowned. That was strange, she thought. So she sent it again, and sure enough, it came back again with no leads. Curious, Frankie went through the tracker's logs, and it soon became apparent that Dion had bounced his signal around the Net so much that the tracker was losing him. Frankie smiled.
‘Clever boy,’ she said. ‘I think we have found our hacker.’
Well, it looked like she would have to do this the boring way, and after a quick hunt, she soon found Dion’s email address in the system. Frankie opened up her messaging system and crafted a quick email to him.
Dion.
It’s Frankie. I last saw you on the roof, where you had survived an attack by agents, and I sent you to get your arm fixed.
I need to speak to you. Today. Where can I meet you?
Frankie.
She sent it to the email address she had found and logged out of the terminal, putting it back in standby mode.
This was the best, and from the looks of it, the only lead she had. She looked around the room once more but found nothing of any great interest, so she quickly left the apartment and headed for the roof again. She was still in the lift when a “New Message” icon appeared in her vision with the tag listing it as coming from Dion’s email address.
That was quick, she thought and opened up the message after a quick automatic virus scan.
Frankie.
Great to hear from you. How did you get my email?
Sure, I’d be happy to meet you. Be on the B3846 under the EM47 flyover in forty minutes.
Dion.
Short and sweet, but she wasn’t expecting him to be conversational over email. She had the result she wanted, though, and sent a message to the flyer to pick her up from the roof in one minute’s time.
She wondered what had happened to Dion. Why had he left home and not told his mother, who was clearly worried about him, where he was or what he was doing? The only thing she could think of was that he was scared, and given what had happened to his friends, she didn’t really blame him. They had been killed. Cut down mercilessly by Corporate agents and somehow he had survived.
She wasn’t sure which would be worse, to be honest: to be the sole survivor left with the memories and maybe the guilt that he had been spared, or to be killed along with your friends.
It was the only reason she could come up with that he’d gone on the run, but it was an entirely valid one, and she wouldn’t blame him for it at all. She would probably do the same in his position.
As she walked out onto the rooftop, the flyer lowered itself to the landing pad, allowing Frankie to walk up the rear hatch as she opened the link to the doll once more.
‘I have a location for you, land as close as you can to it,’ she said and sent over the codes for the roads.
As she sat down, she felt the flyer lift off and descend deeper into the mid-levels of the city. The flyover was deep down, close to the lowest levels, which made sense to her. He’d want to hide amongst the masses of humanity, to blend in and disappear.
A short while later, the flyer slowed to a hover.
‘There’s not many places to land around here. How about I drop you on a rooftop close to the intersection you requested?’ the doll asked.
‘Works for me,’ she said, and thirty seconds later she stepped out of the flyer onto the top of a rundown apartment tower only a few roads from the meeting point with plenty of time to spare.
She watched the aircraft rise up, deftly flying around the various tall buildings and other obstacles down here. She moved to the edge of the rooftop and took in the vista be
fore her.
The buildings were packed in tightly with what looked like blocks built atop blocks. There were roads and other platforms above and below her with metal catwalks and gantries linking things together, while power and data cables hung between buildings.
All about her, above and below, on the various platforms that had shops and streets and cars were hundreds of people, going about their business, swarming almost like ants. The city was huge, but also somewhat overcrowded. She remembered learning about the climate change refugees in school that had moved north from the equator where many parts of the world were basically too hot to live in anymore. The need for growth had led to relaxed planning laws and the crazy architecture that now surrounded her.
Skyscrapers were built on top of apartments which were built on top of housing blocks. which sat above commercial districts and so on.
It had started to rain on the flight over here, with the sky having clouded over, turning the day murky and grey, although, it wasn’t cold. Frankie zipped up her coat, turning the collar up, and stuffed her hands into her jacket pockets. The changeable weather in the UK had always been a very British preoccupation. Climate change had just made it worse and even more unpredictable.
She could see the meeting point from here, where the elevated motorway passed above the back street on a platform a little below her.
She could get there with time to spare, so she walked to the fire escape and made her way down to street level.
She walked casually, slowly making her way to the rendezvous, keeping an eye out for anything suspicious, but saw nothing at all that would suggest she was being watched or monitored. She’d already turned her hair back to its usual black and had removed her shades. They didn’t really look good in the rain, and she wanted Dion to recognise her.
Reaching the section of back road where the motorway passed above, Frankie stood under the flyover and gave her jacket a quick shake now she was out of the rain. She’d been getting drenched.
She didn’t mind, though, and leant up against a concrete pillar and enjoyed the view of the city; its lights twinkling in the dull rain filled greyness of the day. She wasn’t in a rush and wanted to make sure that Dion felt safe in approaching her, so she didn’t mind if it took him a while. But, sure enough, about forty minutes from the time the email had appeared in her messages, she spotted Dion walking through the rain and finally step under the flyover, giving his own black coat a shake off as well.
‘You came,’ Frankie said to him.
‘Of course, I came. It’s because of you I’m in this mess, really,’ he said.
‘How so?’ Frankie asked quizzically.
‘Well, obviously, I couldn’t go back to my apartment; not after what the Corporations did to my friends, and from what I hear, your apartment. I had to go on the run. I didn’t want them coming after me as well.’
‘I think you’re overestimating your importance a touch, but, sure. I’ll take that. I’m sorry,’ she said. Dion was already coming across as somewhat confrontational, which, again, was understandable, but she didn’t want to argue with him, quite the opposite. She wanted to recruit him. So, taking some blame for his going on the run seemed like a small thing to do.
‘Aaah, it's fine. I’m sure you didn’t want any of this to happen,’ he said.
‘Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, I didn’t. I never thought that you would get dragged into this mess, or that your friends would suffer the fate that they did. I do feel terrible about it, and I also want to make these Corporate bastards pay for it, too.’
‘You do?’ he said, looking up at her. ‘But, I thought… Aren't you working with the police or something?’
Frankie thought about that for a moment. The last time she had seen him, she had been with Gibson, and the story he had told Dion and his friends was that Gibson had caught her trespassing in the Undercity. Then later, when his friends had been killed, he saw her leave the building, again with Gibson, using the Corporate flyer.
‘Look, it’s a bit of a long and complicated story,’ she said, ‘but suffice to say, the Corporations want me dead, and I, along with a team of like-minded people, have come together to try and fight back against them. And we might need your help.’
Dion looked a little surprised by this revelation. ‘My help? What can I do?’
‘Probably more than you know. Look, where are you staying? Is there somewhere better we can talk?’ Frankie asked.
Dion frowned for a moment. ‘There is, but I shouldn’t… Ah, fuck it, sure, it should be okay. I’ll deal with it. Come with me,’ he said and pulled his coat tighter about him and ran from the cover of the flyover, back into the rain.
Frankie followed him, jogging through the cascading water and splashing through puddles, getting wetter every moment.
A few minutes and a couple of streets later, Dion turned into an alleyway, which provided a little cover from the rain. Part way down, they reached a chain link fence that looked to have seen better days. Dion pulled open one side of it and squeezed through, holding it open for Frankie.
‘Thanks,’ she said. He led her to a door at the base of a complex of buildings that had been added to and built on top of over the years. It was dark down here, and, finally, they were out of the rain as he knocked on a door.
An intercom buzzed for a moment.
‘Who’s that with you, Dion?’
Dion looked back at Frankie and then returned his attention back to the intercom. ‘She… she’s a friend, I trust her. She’s cool,’ he said.
Frankie was careful not to react too much, but it felt nice, if a little surprising, to hear this kid, who had only ever scowled at her and cat-called her back when she lived in the apartment, say he thought she was cool.
‘I never knew you cared, Dion,’ she whispered.
Dion looked back at her with a bit of an incredulous frown, but she just smiled back.
‘If you say so. You’re responsible for her, though. She fucks up, it’s on you. Got it?’ said the intercom.
‘Got it,’ Dion said.
The intercom then buzzed a different and louder noise and Dion pushed open the door.
‘Follow me,’ he said and walked inside. Frankie followed him in and found herself in a smallish room where a large man sat in front of a desk with a terminal on it. There were several screens displaying security camera views of the outside courtyard. They had seen them coming from a long way off.
The man sat back in his chair and nodded at Dion, and then gave Frankie a long, hard stare. Frankie couldn’t help but notice the shotgun on the table and the knife attached to the man’s belt.
‘You sure about this, Dion? We don’t like unannounced visitors.’
‘Yeah, we’re cool,’ Dion said.
‘You gonna be any trouble, babe?’
‘Babe? Wow,’ Frankie said.
‘Well, are ya?’ the man insisted.
‘No, I’m not,’ she said, wanting to get past this interruption.
‘You know she’s a cyborg, right, Dion?’
‘Huh? Oh, yeah, sure,’ Dion said.
To Frankie, Dion’s reaction sounded fake, but she wasn’t the one he had to convince. She glanced over at the screens again, wondering how he knew she had an artificial body, and noticed that some of the cameras were showing alternate views, such as one showing heat signatures and other spectrums of light. She could also see a screen of code and such, so it looked like they were more advanced security wise than she had suspected.
‘Go on, get out of here, and if she’s any trouble, I’ll own your ass, Dion,’ the man said.
Dion merely nodded and led Frankie through the next door and along a corridor.
‘He seemed nice,’ Frankie commented sarcastically. Dion ignored her.
Frankie peered into the side rooms as they walked, seeing groups of people talking or standing over terminals, all of them engrossed in what they were doing. In the first large room they stepped into, Frankie suddenly got a
much better idea of what was going on here. There were tables and desks everywhere with countless terminals squeezed into any space they would fit. Cables and wires snaked up to the ceiling where they crossed the room in all directions and hung back down to attach to other workstations. People sat or stood about, their faces lit by the light from the screens they were staring at.
This was a hacker den. Frankie had seen one of these before, on a much smaller scale back in University. She couldn’t help the memories of her friend Mallory that rose to the surface again on seeing this and remembering her ultimate fate. She shook her head and pushed those thoughts back, focusing on what she was seeing now. Dion continued on into the room, so Frankie followed and noticed that someone, a girl, had stood up and was now making her way through the room to them. Dion saw her too and slowed up, allowing her to stride over to him with a face like thunder.
‘Who the shit is this?’ she hissed, keeping her voice low. The whole room hummed with cooling fans, which tried to keep the CPU’s in here from overheating, so her voice wouldn’t travel far anyway.
‘A friend,’ Dion said to her.
‘Oh, that’s okay, then. Let’s all just bring our mates over, shall we? Show them where this place is and hope none of them causes us any trouble?’ This girl had an attitude. She also had a shock of neon pink hair and some obvious sockets on the side of her head where it had been shaved.
She sported jeans and a few layers of tops that looked to have seen better days and showed off some of her intricate tattoos.
‘Don’t worry, she’s cool. She won’t cause any trouble, I promise,’ he said.
Promethean Files 2: The Prometheus Gambit Page 6