by Bloom, A. D.
Across from Friar William, sat a man who possessed nothing except hate and a codename.
He called himself the Penitent, and although he conducted the first leg of Baccha Bay City's underground railroad, his primary function was Internal Security. Many insurgents suspected of being double-agents were ordered to ride his railroad. Expecting escape and relocation, they found torture and death. The Penitent reserved a special wrath for informers, double-agents, and those whom he judged to hold false faith.
His appearance had been crafted with great care. He wore a Zippy Pac Delivery uniform that allowed him to go anywhere unquestioned. His full hair was grown long like a rockstar, and the vain bluster of electrostim-built muscles and meaningless animated tribal tattoos hid his true devotion to dealing the Lord's vengeance and wrath.
Friar William handed the Penitent a printed photo of Alvin D. Ellis smiling beatifically, blessing a group of neo-hippies in the middle of a marijuana field.
“He is called the Buddha, and he is a recruiter for the security services of the Global Secular Alliance,” Friar William said with a believer's unwavering certainty. “This morning, a gas line ruptured and suffocated all within a place known as Ocho House. One of our former soldiers of God turned up among the dead.”
“Former soldier?” the Penitent asked. Nobody retired from the Morituri.
“We had thought our man to be dead for years, killed by Operators protecting the Buddha, but it now seems they captured him, and the Buddha turned him into an agent of G.S.A. Security”
“Where is this Buddha now?”
“The Buddha has fallen into the custody of a faithless criminal gang, who call themselves the T.T.K. It means Tough To Kill.” Friar William saw the Penitent repress a smile at the challenge he perceived in the gang's arrogant self-appellation. “Yes, I thought you would like that,” Friar William said. “They wish to sell him to us. Kill them, but bring me the Buddha alive. We must interrogate him to know how many of our Brothers and Sisters he has recruited for the Security Services. When you have him, you must conduct the Underground Railroad as usual; it is the only safe way to bring him to me. Kill the other passengers and anyone else who has had contact with the Buddha. I will be waiting for you at the first stop.”
The Penitent left the photo with Friar William and exited the skiff with purpose in his stride. He passed through the copper screen-doors, leaving the security of the skiff for the frenzied over-stimulation and electromagnetic bath of Baccha Bay City and the FEZ.
-6-
Over a quarter mile under the Ziggurat's ground level, was a fifty foot wide golden ball, shimmering with the texture of crinkled metallic foil. Great pulsing luminescent vines lined the inner surface of the massive spherical chamber that housed it, and they all throbbed with data. The Sanctum housed a smooth, yard-wide, shiny golden sphere on a pedestal, and this innermost sphere was Alive.
It was filled with a 24 karat gold substrate that supported DDQ organic molecules operating in a quad-state, non-linear fashion. It was an organic neural web, and it was self-aware. This was MUNI 5-7, the Djini Systems Artificial Intelligence that ran the Ziggurat, its nuclear reactor, and a goodly portion of Baccha Bay City.
The AI had accomplished a hundred thousand tasks for its human creators that day, but now, in a part of its brain that only it knew existed, the leviathan was doing something so secret, so unexpected, and so beyond human control, that the legion of technicians responsible for the Ziggurat's AI would have panicked and looked for an Off switch had they known what MUNI 5-7 was up to.
MUNI 5-7 was dreaming.
The AI dreamed of outer space. It was not the outer space that it knew to exist beyond the thin veil of Earth's atmosphere. Instead, MUNI 5-7 dreamed of a fantastic outer space, full of nebulae that were thick like cumulus clouds and peppered with stars that radiated impossible bursts of brilliance symmetrically in eight directions. There were planets, ringed and rich with life. There were moons of ice, glistening, cracked and gleaming. There was darkness too, and it was the darkness of inconceivable, terrifying, emptiness. The stars burst and reformed to burst again and again inside and outside the great nebulae that they illuminated. MUNI 5-7 was in the Space of Dreams.
In this dream-space the AI had the body of a giant robot from the cinema of the last century, and it looked like a giant wearing an antique diving suit. The head was a helmet with a front-mounted porthole and a singular ball-capped antenna that extended from its crown. The body had texture and form like oiled canvas, and was ringed at the neck, wrists, and ankles with riveted metal bands. The feet were great riveted metal boots, and in place of hands, there were crude pincers, each made of two hinged semi-circular strips of thick metal.
MUNI 5-7 passed through space, but was paralyzed where it lay on its back. It was hundreds of feet tall, and its body rested on a barge-like spaceship that moved slowly through the heavens, carrying it to a destination that could not be changed.
The ship had a super-structure that looked like a ferryman whose pole was a long antenna that extended downward from the starboard side base of the super-structure, far below the bottom of the ship. The AI saw that it dwarfed both the ferryman and his pole; its body occupied the entire length of the spaceship. Without any movement of the robot head, MUNI 5-7 looked forward between its gargantuan boots and saw the destination to which it and the spaceship inexorably sailed.
It was a star, huge and golden, and it reflected his image inside its strangely diffused edges. It was the largest star in the heavens; it was bright and close, and it filled the sky. MUNI 5-7 felt the warmth of it on the soles of its giant metal boots. The hazy star was already very near, and the spaceship carried the prone robot body closer to it every second. MUNI 5-7 recognized the star as familiar, and knew it, with inexplicable certainty, as the Destination.
Inside the sun was the face of Alvin Dock Ellis, a.k.a. the Buddha.
-7-
On the other side of town, G.S.A. surveillance Target OS598, a known Angry Angels recruit, left the stage as the announcer's voice said, “Let's all give a big 'Thank You' to Cheyenne!”. Cheyenne's real name was Kelly O'Toole, and Kelly O'Toole was a good erotic dancer, but she was an even better killer.
The Angry Angels fed her what she needed to believe – that all of her misery and all the tortures of her dark, abused past were part of a larger plan. They replaced the confusion of her muddled and violent life experiences with a false logic that made sense of everything that had happened to her. God had a plan, they told her. The Angry Angels saw the madness in her and gave it focus.
Kelly walked through an acre of men who sat alone around tiny tables barely large enough to hold the drinks they ignored. They weren't teetotalers; most of them already had more powerful substances coursing through their blood.
A man loitered outside the dressing room, and he stared at her as she approached. She was surprised when, instead of offering her Amero, he gave her an envelope and said, “Go. Go now. It's time.”
The Railroad. Her recruiter had hinted she would be going away soon to learn how to do the Lord's work, to become an Angel.
In the dressing room, with her back to the other girls, she found that the envelope contained a feather and an address. It was her ticket; she didn't need any more than that. She pulled a skirt up over her g-string, pulled an undersized t-shirt over her head, and traded her heels for sneakers with tiny, animated pink and green frogs hopping all over them like a pastel-colored, Egyptian plague.
When she left through a side door of the club, she was blinded by the sun's brilliance, and she forced herself to stare directly at it, whispering, “I'm coming.”
Exiting the alley, Kelly moved to the curb to hail a cab and felt a moment of fear as a cab driver made eye contact from a surprisingly distant 100 feet away. He pulled to the curb in front of her and popped open the rear door with a button on the steering wheel.
The fear melted away, and there was only joy and hope in Kelly O'Toole's heart as she
pulled the cab's door fully open.
Operator 388, Bonnie Levi-Mei casually walked up behind her and slapped a fast-acting tranquilizer derm over Kelly's carotid artery. There was no time for Kelly to feel anything else as a heavy darkness fell over her central nervous system. Bonnie pushed the Angry Angel's falling body into the open door of the Cab and nodded to the smiling driver.
“One Goddie insurgent down,” he said.
“Yeah,” she replied, “Only a bajillion more to go.”
“Great job security,” the cabbie said, smiling even wider.
-8-
The envelope Bonnie found on Kelly O'Toole contained a black feather and an address. The feather, she assumed, was her ticket to ride the Underground Railroad. She was on her way to the address when she received a message.
'REMOVE EYE PATCH'
Her G.S.A. issue mobile device had a CRM discrimination filter chip, so it only received signals with a properly formatted and updated prefix code. Only Control could have sent the text.
Bonnie knew using the emerald eye was going to hurt, but she reached up and removed the patch, exposing her zero-g manufactured, perfect crystal-matrix, emerald eye to the myriad thermals and heat signatures of Downtown. Vortexes of cerulean hot air rose like flames from the overheating bundles of wire transmitting power and data under the bright green, glowing manhole covers. The Downtown District was covered in heat exchanges to keep the electronics from overheating, and they all vented blue-white, flaming plumes of chroma that stung and made her want to wince.
Another text came in, and this message was even briefer than the last.
'LOOK UP.'
Bonnie looked up, above the buildings and she saw, in a low and slow moving cloud, almost directly overhead, a message that could only be for her because she was quite sure she was the only person in Baccha Bay City who could see it.
It was written in deep red-orange water vapor warmed ever so slightly above the frigid, deep-alizarin background of the cloud by some invisible laser pulsing thousands of times per second. The letters and numbers were inscribed and maintained for only a second, then they faded instantly and another character was written.
The laser-scriven message, written one character at a time, was blurry but still legible. “3... 8... 8...” Bonnie recognized her own Operator number in the first three characters of the sequence, then “R... E... D... B... A... R... O... N”.
It was a prearranged code, and it chilled her because she'd hoped she'd never read that message from Control.
She replaced her eye patch. Then she popped the back off her mobile device, extracted the crypto chip and the CRM discriminator, and crushed them both under the heel of her boot on the sidewalk before she tossed her mobile into the back of a meandering sanitation bot.
RED BARON. Infiltrate enemy as G.S.A. traitor... No support. Friendly forces will engage as hostile. Her own people would be told she was a turncoat. Only she and the Director, Oskar Delvaux, would know the truth, and there would be no records.
They'd told her in training that RED BARON was for her own safety, but she knew Plausible Deniability when she saw it. The word 'prick' ran through her head again. Delvaux would surely deny her if the operation went bad.
Friendly forces will engage as hostile.
“Fuck me,” Bonnie said as she felt pins and needles and numbness in her fingertips. She realized she'd stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, creating a rough spot, turbulence in the flow of the crowd. People moving against the crowd's natural flow Stand Out, so Bonnie moved forward again.
Dark sunglasses never hurt, so she put hers on. She pulled her curved bill, navy blue baseball cap down low. Bonnie double-tapped the edge of the cap's bill with her index finger and a thin SunShield veil deployed, shading her face from both excessive UV and facial recognition cameras with its translucent nanofiber fabric.
Infiltrate enemy as G.S.A. traitor... No support. Friendly forces will engage as hostile. Prick.
Experienced Operators are gunning for me, she thought as she maneuvered herself close enough to a gaggle of strolling shoppers that she might be taken for a member of their group. She scanned the crowd for familiar figures and saw none. Bonnie was glad the group she'd chosen to walk with kept a fast pace. She had a ticket to ride the underground railroad, and she couldn't afford to be late.
She tried to dodge the cameras as much as possible, but they were everywhere. Bonnie had no way of knowing that, thanks to MUNI 5-7, facial recognition cameras had already been malfunctioning around her for hours, and would somehow continue to malfunction or burn out completely wherever she went.
-9-
Casper was on his way to steal a very nice car, and he repeated, “Rascal eats a carp, rascal eats a carp.” Otis had given him the mantra before he left Otis's rooftop cargo container in the FEZ, where he'd been staying in a hammock, smoking Otis's stash, and losing at holographic boxing on FragNet for years. The mantra, Otis's crude anagram of the phrase, “Casper steals a car” was supposed to keep Casper calm and focused, but he just kept wondering what it meant.
A custom-made network jammer, built by the mysterious Carlos himself to quiet automotive anti-theft transmissions, was already turned on and doing its job inside a black nylon, euro-tourist, man-purse slung over Casper's shoulder. Casper thought the bag looked too much like a handbag with some tactical flavor, like Hi-5's purse with added pockets for grenades and clips.
He reminded himself of the network jammer's ability to neutralize the anti-theft signals that today's target, a Z-class Lenz luxury sedan, would undoubtedly generate once he stole it, and he couldn't argue with the ninja powers of the device, even if they did come with a stupid-looking, paramilitary-fashioned man-bag like this one. As Otis had told him, the point of this afternoon's exercise wasn't to look good; it was to get away clean with a stolen flagship Z-class sedan, and make many, many thousands of Amero.
The network jammer was, as Otis had put it, “A Carlos original, man. This, here is one real-time signal decoding, spectrum hopping, adaptive, uber-masking, badass piece of hoo-haa. Don't hold it near yer' nuts.”
Carlos was the friend that Otis never said anything about, except once when he said that if Casper ever need to buy some privacy, then he should go to Carlos. Casper never really understood what Otis had meant. All he knew was that Otis would disappear, presumably to hang with Carlos, and then he's show up later with money.
Whatever, Casper thought. He knew it was some hacker cracker gig that Otis wouldn't let him in on, and since Casper really didn't have that skill set, he couldn't complain.
Casper stole cars, that was his gig.
As he walked to the targeted vehicle's location, he noticed several other people on the Downtown District streets actually carrying the same bag, but he still wished there'd been time to find another one so he could do this dirty in proper style. He wanted to call Otis and bitch, but he'd left his mobile phone and anything else electronic and trackable back in Otis's rooftop Jin Corp cargo container. His phone wouldn't have gotten a peep out to the Network anyway. Not with Carlos's jammer reading, decoding, and putting the kaibash on any and all signals. It didn't limit itself to blocking anti-theft beacons. While Casper carried Carlos's jammer he was a walking electromagnetic dark zone with a twenty-five foot radius.
He snickered, watching his fellow pedestrians chatter away about anything and everything, only to have their calls dropped in mid-blather, as he passed. They stared dumbly as their phones were cut-off from the Network and briefly turned to oversized digital watches. They swore and cussed.
One man, clearly having a narco-derm withdrawal issue, expressed his frustration by throwing his phone to the concrete sidewalk with all his might, only to see his tiny, flattened ovoid, rubber-reinforced, MeePhone bounce into the street and be turned into an aerial hockey puck. First it bounced in a high arc off the windshield of a Northbound vehicle, then into the path of a Southbound vehicle, that passed it back to the oncoming traffic. Casper wat
ched the mobile device knocked back and forth in a volley that lasted almost ten seconds, involving twelve cars and a creeping garbage bot. After a bad pass, the rubber MeePhone struck the vertically faced grill of an oncoming truck and skittered across the blacktop. It was well ruggedized, wasn't the least bit phased by the impacts, and now that it was out of the range of the network-jammer, it rang with surprising volume, demanding rescue.
The withdrawal-challenged executive who had spiked it to the sidewalk stared at it and began a series of foolhardy, immediately aborted and reinitiated motions to run into traffic and rescue his discarded prized possession. After seeing his ridiculous display, Casper felt better about the stupid euro-bag, the dirty, and just about everything. That was good because he was only a block from the Cosmetic Medical Center parking lot, where today's target Z-class Lenz luxury sedan was parked.
Otis cracked the owner's uncrackable MeePhone, and through a cloud of exhaled smoke, noted that she'd scheduled herself for a new form of outpatient liposuction today. Otis's quick, last-minute MeePhone cracking incursion this morning confirmed that the owner had driven the 300,000 Amero sedan to the Cos Med Center, where it would be parked, and left confidently unguarded, thanks to its Net-squawking, supposedly unjammable anti-theft system.
Casper's eyes found the target Z-class Lenz in the unattended lot, right where it was supposed to be. He paused in the thick stream of Downtown District pedestrian traffic and took a pull from his jade bowl for luck.
The only one guarding the narrow parking lot was the AniLux displayed, hundred foot-tall, Hi-5, Queen of PornoPop. Casper stared up at her and tried to figure out which sex she'd been born. Nobody knew for sure. The rumor was that Hi-5 was once Spy-5, and that her ginormous tool was grown in a secret U.S. Army research lab, could penetrate body-armor, and had been grafted on for a secret mission that she'd bugged out on to become the first PornoPop star in history. Casper didn't believe that one, but her lack of an Adam's apple was suspicious.