MINDFRACK

by S G King

  “What are these round things with … legs?”

  “Salvatore said they were maintenance drones. Harmless unless you’re a rat or something else – warm-blooded … Crap, why did I let you talk me into this?”

  “I didn’t. Maybe it was Shala’s influence.”

  Wanda made a sound like a sarcastic laugh.

  “Just stay put – I’m sure Salvatore will be back.”

  The same time that Logan had cabbed it to the GNG Tower, Wanda and Carrie had begun their less comfortable journey. Salvatore had sourced the central GNG supply depot, just outside East Brunswick, on Route 18. It was the collection and loading point for fresh foods that supplied the restaurants within the GNG Tower. He’d got them into a stainless-steel food container that was then loaded onto the back of a delivery lorry.

  From there it was a straightforward journey to the GNG Tower in Manhattan.

  During the planning they’d examined the GNG Tower delivery warehouse, situated directly under the GNG main tower, and the conveyor and sorting systems, via the security cams. The warehouse was vast, about half the size of an indoor football stadium. This was the primary delivery area for the entire building and dealt with every manner of incoming goods including post and other deliverables for the condominium owners and tenants, consumables and laundry for the hotels, restaurant supplies, a GNG vehicle fleet, and so on. From there they had entered a maintenance riser via a wall hatch. A ladder descent and a couple of hatches would get them into the R and D level, where Salvatore was being held. Of course, there was surveillance everywhere in the warehouse, and the simplicity of the hatches belied their security features. It was only because of Salvatore that they’d got so far – until now.

  The plan?

  Wanda was to locate Salvatore while Logan was to bring Grist down to the R and D level to meet up with Carrie and unlock the 6thgen’s mind with the maintenance key – assuming Grist cooperated. If not, Xeno chemists had given them a new cocktail of drugs to deal with that.

  They’d tried to anticipate for all contingencies, but losing Salvatore’s input was something that they knew would be impossible to account for. He’d assured them that he was rarely interrupted by Ade at night. But Pic? That was pure bad timing. The hacker hadn’t bothered him since their last encounter. Logan reminded himself that Salvatore had dispatched Pic’s avatar on each occasion they had met.

  He pushed his concerns aside and decided to move on.

  The inner lobby to Grist’s penthouse was empty but had too many doors for his liking, so he paced across quickly, glancing left and right as he went. A cloakroom, a storage room, toilets, other nondescript doors. He reached the main penthouse entrance, the one he and Dorsey had stepped through not so long ago but under very different circumstances. He placed his hand on one of the massive doors and pushed. It opened with little resistance: Salvatore’s work.

  Inside was the expansive boardroom with the long, granite-like table, but this time without those giant holographic GNG logos spinning above.

  “Crap.” Wanda’s breathing suddenly became laboured.

  Logan reopened her iSense window. Her view was darting around, and then it shot upwards, into darkness.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Shhh. Listen.”

  Sharing her iSense input, he heard a faint click. Metallic.

  Then another ... and another.

  Wanda used iSense to zoom into the gloom.

  Logan saw what concerned her. A pair of red dots, moving about. It had to be a maintenance drone. Without Salvatore’s intervention they had come back to life. “They won’t bother you, will they?”

  “Mark, I’m scared – just keep talking to me, will you?”

  “All right, but I’m just about to –”

  As he took a second step into GNG’s boardroom, the lights went out. In the same instant, the unmistakeable roaring sound of water surrounded him. He braced himself against being swept away, but then straightened his stance as he realised such a notion was absurd.

  When his smartlenses adapted to the meagre light straying in through the vast windows, they revealed the source of the noise. Those cherub faces atop the walls, which now looked shadowy and evil, were gushing water – or at least something that resembled H2O – that plummeted down to outlets in the floor. He sidled over to one of the spouts and reached out. The flow felt less dense than water though it flowed around his fingers realistically enough. He guessed clever nano technology was at work.

  He edged back towards the door, trying to ignore the din and focus on the room itself. His peripheral vision caught an outline of something streaking across the room. He lost track of it, his eyes hunting the shadows urgently. It couldn’t have been Grist even with his exo.

  Without warning the shadow charged at him, like a nocturnal beast. There was no time to react or flee and he took the full force of the impact. He was propelled backwards in a flurry of arms and legs, and landed on his butt, gasping. Before he had a chance to recover, it was upon him. Logan glanced up and saw a familiar face.

  It was Einstein, Grist’s manservant. His attack was far from in character, since there was nothing old or sloth-like in the way he was moving, though his face continued to project a facade of serene weariness, like it was pondering the finer points of relativistic math. The paradox was insanely creepy.

  Normally, pound for pound, 6thgens were stronger than a human. But this? Einstein lifted him up like he was a wicker man, way above his head, and threw him effortlessly.

  Logan smashed into a window, and, for a horrifying instant, thought he’d go through it and disappear out into the mile-high night. But of course the window was terrorist and projectile proof, and it flexed, absorbing much of the impact, saving his bones but rebounding him unceremoniously onto the floor.

  Before Logan could draw breath, Einstein was back, lifting him up and pushing him against the window by his neck. Their faces passed each other, Einstein’s with that same platonic indifference, Logan’s, animated, eyes bulging, mouth wrestling for air.

  He kicked out as his feet left the floor. Spots formed around the periphery of his vision.

  “Mr Grist doesn’t want me to kill you,” said Einstein calmly, his thick German accent adding to the absurdity of the situation.

  “Shame ... I’m … going to … kill you …” Logan hissed.

  Above the thunder of the water spouts was a familiar whining sound, and a CLACK!

  It was, perhaps, a rash action, and Logan yelped at the painful kick of the discharge through Einstein’s grip, but with his feet off the floor and backed by glass, a good insulator, he’d received a much smaller and distributed shock.

  Einstein’s hands released their grip and Logan’s feet reconnected with the floor. The 6thgen continued to look at him in that same enigmatic manner, before he fell backwards, as straight as a falling tree, and thumped to the floor.

  At its highest setting the puncher’s plasma discharge was tens of thousands of volts. Delivered in a concentrated area, point-blank, it had seared a hole in Einstein’s chest and fried the robot’s internal systems.

  Logan gave Einstein another blast to the head for good measure. The discharge only seared the 6thgen’s skin. He checked the puncher’s display. It was flashing: recharge–fault. He prayed there weren’t any other robots still active and lurking around the penthouse.

  Without Salvatore, he worried that his efforts to find Grist would prove fruitless, as the mansion in the sky was vast. If Grist knew that he’d dropped Einstein, then he could have hidden himself anywhere – maybe within an impregnable safe room.

  Before he had a chance to begin his search, the lights came back on, the water spouts froze, and there, to his surprise, standing across the other side of the conference room, was George Grist.

  In that same moment he heard Wanda scream.

  52

  All had been going well until Salvatore
took notice of a proximity alarm vying urgently for his attention. This time it wasn’t Ade.

  Whatever was coming, it was internal to the GNG cloud. He’d left Mark and Wanda briefly to check upon the intrusion.

  His attention froze. The electronic signature was unmistakeable.

  Pic.

  The troublesome hacker had not shown his digital face for days.

  The timing could not have been worse.

  He sensed Pic’s feral-like probing and sniffing, his pawing at databases, turning them over, looking at their contents, checking for possible linkages … negotiating local micro-clouds, hacking through internal barriers … coming closer… He knew without a doubt that on this occasion Pic was coming directly to him, and that he had entered the GNG cloud, surreptitiously, via a route that was evidently hidden to Salvatore. How ingenious this Pic was.

  Another alarm alerted him.

  Oh no ...

  Pic had followed his trail all the way back to GNG’s Medical Institute, floors above him. This was one of the preferred routes Salvatore used to leave GNG and exit out into the Internet proper or the Cloud. Like a seasoned hunter, Pic was tracking his digital footprints all the way back to their origin.

  It wouldn’t be long before Pic would find a link to the secretive R and D laboratories. Getting into the R and D cloud would take longer since it had the most sophisticated electronic defences within GNG. But despite this extra layer of security, Salvatore knew it would only hold off Pic for a short while. Probably minutes …

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  Salvatore withdrew back into the R and D laboratory, avoiding a direct confrontation with Pic, before taking an alternative route out into the external Cloud. He skirted around several New York peripheral networks before finding what he required. From a local city network-hub, he came back through GNG’s outermost barrier and made for the GNG Medical Institute’s cloud. Effectively, he had sneaked up behind Pic, hoping his ruse would throw him off the trail and inwards to the R and D laboratory itself.

  He pulled up short, startled by the scene before him.

  A giant rendition of Pic’s spy-bot Goku appeared to be tending to a local cloud router; Salvatore’s mind’s eye interpreted it as a vast, floating, multi-faceted object with thousands of strange protrusions like arms. It continued to move swiftly across the surface of the router-entity while prodding and poking at its network ports.

  Pic – I’m here.

  The spy-bot turned and regarded him with invisible eyes. It emitted a staccato string of light pulses that receded into dots before disappearing into the infinite blue ocean that was the external Cloud. Salvatore knew what the activity meant.

  Light pulses came back. More pulsing. Information packets fed directly into Goku. Further two-way comms activity followed. A face formed, as before, during their first meeting: it was Pic’s. It looked grotesque, mounted upon the front of the multi-armed Goku, like a behemoth-sized millipede, Salvatore thought.

  Pisswit! I knew I’d find you here.

  Yes, it’s me – what do you want?

  You know what I want. You and your secrets!

  That’s not possible, Pic.

  Here we go again – the mysterious Pisswit. I want you to tell me who you are – and I want your hacking methods!

  I don’t have any methods, Pic.

  Who the fuck are you, Pisswit? Why aren’t you registered as a blackhat – unless you’re moonlighting as this pathetic avatar. Is that it? Tell me now.

  Salvatore hadn’t consciously constructed an avatar for his excursions into the Cloud, except recently, when meeting with his friends. How do I look to you?

  Like a stick man with a large potato head. Ha ha. You’re a joke, Pisswit.

  Salvatore decided he’d spent enough precious seconds away from Mark and Wanda. Moving swiftly, he headed straight into the spybot, as before, when he’d punctured the entity and destroyed it from within.

  Not so fast, Pisswit.

  The spy-bot grabbed him in a couple of its spidery arms. Salvatore tried to reverse out of the grip but found he couldn’t move. He mentally grabbed at the spybot’s appendages, but they refused to yield.

  So you aren’t invincible. I made a few upgrades to Goku since our last encounter.

  What’s it doing?

  You’re a blackhat, you go figure.

  I don’t understand.

  You’re kidding me. Get ready, ’cause I’m coming now …

  Salvatore struggled, but it was no use; he was caught like a fly in a web.

  A snake-like appendage protruded from the right eye of the Pic-faced spybot. Salvatore knew it was his imagination interpreting the app’s functionality, in the same way that he saw Goku as a giant Pic-millipede, but it didn’t stop him recoiling in disgust at the progress of the tentacle. He closed his mind’s eye, hoping the spybot would cease to exist.

  Something moved through his itch and into the periphery of his brain, like a beetle burrowing through fruit. He wanted to shake and scratch at his head, gnash his teeth and most of all howl at the discomfort, but all fight-or-flight physical reactions were denied him. Instead, he could only endure the ongoing invasion.

  A wave of light and heat rolled through his mind and then, just as quickly, subsided.

  The probing tendrils exited his itch and he knew the violation of his mind-space hadn’t been successful. He looked out again to find himself still in the clutches of the grotesque spybot. Pic’s face glowered at him.

  Ha. Now I know where you are ... “Little man”? Is that what you are called by … Ade? Or is it “John Six” – what sort of shitty name is that? Think I prefer the first one. Or better, I think I’ll call you “Little Pisswit” … But tell me this, what sort of friggin’ system are you using? I’ve never seen anything like it before.

  Can’t tell you, Pic.

  Huh. And how the fuck are you keeping me out of your core processor? No matter, I will try again – and again, until I figure a way to beat you. And I will, Pisswit …

  53

  Pic was frustrated and excited by what he’d found.

  He’d instructed Goku to use its probe app to follow the trail from Pisswit’s local avatar to its source. Goku had got as far as a tablet owned by the scientist called Adrian Conrad or “Ade”. An IP address, yes, but not the true source of Pisswit’s unique e-signature. It was more like a virtual address or proxy. He’d then detected the link from the tablet to the true source, which must have been nearby, but when he tried to acquire access to Pisswit’s source he couldn’t make sense out of the interface or the data flow. That wasn’t possible, unless this was a top-secret research programme run by DARPA, say. He sat up, his eyes twitching and aflame with the possibility. Could they be developing a new communications protocol? He sat back shaking his head, discounting the idea. Unlikely, he thought; certainly not within the GNG building.

  All very mysterious.

  Pic watched Pisswit’s avatar closely as it hung before his, or rather Goku’s, point of view. The avatar behaved oddly, unlike any other he’d seen before. Why didn’t Pisswit simply drop his link? He’d lose this incarnation of his avatar, but so what? One minute he was doing things that were off the blackhat scale, the next he was behaving like a newbie hacker dork.

  He accessed the surveillance cam to the laboratory where Ade’s tablet was housed. His eyes widened when he saw the plastic form and the brain it contained. As he studied it more closely, he pulled back and talked excitedly to himself. “You’ve got to be shitting me …”

  He dipped in and out of the laboratories near to Ade’s, and gasped in wonder and delight as his disturbed mind resonated with the horror of his discoveries.

  “No … friggin … way …”

  He paused in his exploration and reminded himself what he was here for, though there was no indication of where Pisswit’s e-source was likely to be.

  He would try and locate it again, through Goku; perhaps making a few adjustments to the interf
ace code would do it. Make it more flexible and work around the standard network constraints.

  And if he was successful, he decided, he wouldn’t tell Emmett about anything he’d found here.

  This discovery was his little secret.

  54

  Salvatore couldn’t understand why he couldn’t break off his attention from the spybot and this place outside of his brain. He told himself again, it was only his mind’s eye that was present here; not him. And yet he was being held hostage in a nightmare he couldn’t awaken from. Why couldn’t his mind realise that and detach itself?

  Perhaps only unconsciousness or death could release him from Pic’s clutches.

  He closed his mind’s eye once more and tried to imagine himself back at his head.

  A voice, distant, was calling his name. He focused upon it and it became louder.

  It was Ade’s and he was shouting at him.

  If he could hear Ade, perhaps he could talk back to him. He thought-spoke through the speech app.

  “Ade – are you there?”

  “Thank God, yes, I came straight here. We’re experiencing a cyber-attack.” Ade’s voice was verging on hysterical. “Do you know what is happening to you?

  Another voice intruded.

  He opened his mind’s eye. He was still being held by the Pic-millipede.

  “Pisswit. Why didn’t you drop your link?”

  “Drop my link?”

  “Duh? This is too fucking weird. Are you Ade? Tell me.”

  “I’m not Ade. Let me go, Pic.”

  “Not until I have answers. Who’s John Six? You? What sort of name is that?”

  Salvatore decided not to speak to him anymore.

  “Well, if you won’t drop your link, I’m going to try again. And this time I have a few surprises …”

  A new growth erupted from the spybot-Pic eye and weaved its way menacingly towards him. This time it had strange appendages attached to its end, like drills, he thought. The idea of what the new probe might be capable of made him think harder.