She tested the sink in the kitchen. At least the water was still working. “Wouldn’t that be the suck?” she said to no one in particular.
Filling up a used fast-food tumbler with cool water, she cleared off a section of her tiny combination desk and dinner table. Digging through her stash of electronic crap turned up an old but functional holo-screen. She repeated the patch process and tried to see if she could filter the data with a buffer interface she found under her sleeping futon. A minute later, the screen died an inglorious death, completely burnt out with twin tendrils of caustic smoke spiraling up, a wispy ghost. She threw it aside in disgust.
Nothing. Useless. The lines were so jam-packed with random data, nothing else could slip in. If she jacked in again, her cerebral cortex would get burnt out by the amount of raw code forced through it. How the hell had this happened?
It was like … like every single filter and firewall that kept different stratum sections of the net from mingling had broken down or disappeared altogether. Every sim and feed and datatube that comprised the Deep ran on numerous channels that kept the data from crossing over from one interface to another. It kept each protocol running in the most efficient manner, such as messaging running with checksums and guaranteed packet delivery, while videocasts streamed with no guarantee that each packet would be delivered in the right sequence. If a single pixel from a half-hour show was lost in delivery, nobody cared. If a message about a medical device went AWOL, it meant someone’s life was in jeopardy. This was what kept the net functional and protected people from being inundated with a tsunami of machine data that would overwhelm their wetware, which had almost just happened to her.
If what I found is really happening, it would explain why people were acting bizarro. If intrinsic TAP filters weren’t working properly, they were getting bombarded with every possible sim overlay, digi-meme, holo-projection, and all other Hyper Real broadcasts currently running on the net. That must be it … nobody can handle that much digital crap getting funneled into their brainpan … it would drive anyone insane. Their friends suddenly morph into monsters, rooftops are suddenly poolside diving boards, and maybe even Chitown turns into a flaming hellhole on the sun. The more Gyro thought about it, the more things made sense. Civvies would be forced to endure endless sales pitches, have to listen to a bunch’a celebrity voices screaming in their ears.
She sat up and her eyes went wide as she realized the extent of it. People’s optics wouldn’t just be hit with HR adware and salesware. They would be hit with everything. Real tags that were filtered out normally. Ancient QR, malware, artware … their optics and TAPs were being hit by all of it—and all at the same time! “Holy … But wait, Gyro. Why didn’t it hit you? What makes you so special?”
Could any of this have to do with what Prophet was blabbing about? Minds and souls being purged by fire, or whatever bullshit that avatar had been spouting? She thought, switching between out-loud and internal voices as she talked herself through the problem.
She hunkered down to think. Prophet … Prophet … She’d heard that name before. Where? Maybe she should’ve taken her rooftop encounter a little more seriously. Screw it, can’t do anything about that now, can I? She could only worry about the present moment and how to survive it. She started to stand up to see what was not sprouting fungus in her fridge when she froze for a moment, then slowly sunk back down onto the stool by the tiny table.
Prophet. Oh hell, now I remember! It was a name brought up on a few black feeds she slipped into every so often, the kinds frequented by conspiracy nuts, code-burnt loners, and other people in serious need of medication. One of the main feed members, a kind of brilliant code wizard by the name of Billy Black Eyes, brought it up every now and then. He’d point out certain global events—an earthquake here, an assassination there, an orbital platform explosion—and say Prophet had predicted it.
No fragging way. That was livewire legend and nothing more. A myth as unrealistic as dial-up modems. Nobody actually believed in Prophet, did they? It was just a convenient excuse so nutters like old Billy could spin out crazy theories without having to offer any proof. If only she had access to the feeds so she could dig in further. She eyed the hole in her wall, then shook her head. No way would she repeat that level of stupid.
Still … who had she talked to on the Malmart rooftop? Who had slipped into her TAP like walking through an open door and dropped data on her out of nowhere? Could she have really talked with a living legend? The epitome of a hacker’s wet dream? Frag it all. What’s more likely, a conspiracy wet dream hacked me, or someone like Billy Black Eyes was mucking around in my head before some terrorists set off their mind-bombs?
Something was unusual and creepy about the weird avatar she had talked to on the Malmart rooftop. She couldn’t shake it loose. Her logical mind said it was someone pranking her, while her womanly intuition—that would have made Nova laugh if Gyro said that out loud—told her that the avatar came from something that was never really … human.
Something wet started to crawl down her face, and Gyro realized with a start that she was crying. The salty tracks only refueled her earlier anger.
“What the frag? Really? Shit happens and suddenly you’re a kid?” Using the backs of her hands, she knuckled the tears until they were smeared across her face, along with the cheap mascara she forgot to clean off before she went to bed last night.
She needed … she needed to get in touch with Nova. Her big sis always knew what to do, even when things were grim and Gyro was absolutely convinced the universe was ending within the next sixty seconds.
Thinking her sister’s name made her optic flash a warning at her. A file was highlighted on her heads-up. Nova’s name had just appeared in the datadump Prophet had forced into her TAP. She pulled up her HUD to verify she wasn’t dreaming, and the little white circular icon with the name PROPHET was just where her brain had left it. Something was wrong there; she could feel her ghost whispering in her ear. Does Big Sis have something to do with this craziness?
Nova wasn’t her real sister. Gyro had no blood relatives that she had been able to trace. Nothing genetic linked them, but ever since Nova had rescued Gyro from a street slaver the two had become inseparable, and family you chose was stronger than blood could ever be, in her opinion.
Gyro was only nine years old then, living in the gutters and sewers for a year after her parents had been cut down during a corporate espionage operation gone wrong. Nova gave Gyro a safe place to call home, taught her how to survive in the shadows of society, and how to thrive by taking advantage of other people’s misfortunes. Even after Gyro moved into a cube of her own at the tender age of thirteen, the two saw each other every week, keeping tabs and regaling each other with stories of their latest exploits and hacks.
Nova said she’d actually met Billy Black Eyes once, and knew how to contact him if she needed to. If that was true, maybe he could explain more about Prophet and whatever craziness was ruling Chitown’s streets. Nova had a little place over in Naperville, a few miles west. She’d told Gyro to head there if a situation ever got out of hand and she needed a bolt hole. Well, if I could get connected to the Deep and look up the definition of “dire situation,” this would be what I’d find.
Energized, and finally having been whacked by a clue-bat as to what to do next, Gyro ran around her cube, throwing basic gear and goods into a backpack. Food bars and tubes were tossed haphazardly in alongside her hardwire TAP tools, all her remaining bitcoins, since her credits on the Deep weren’t accessible, and a few tech toys. Lastly, she tucked a ferroplastic 3D-printed pistol under her shirt and a well-worn switchblade into the pocket of her hoodie. Nova had given her the weapons to use as a last resort, and for self-defense only.
Gyro preferred surviving by her wits and TAP-tricks rather than violence—but she had long ago accepted the reality that sometimes the only way to make a person back off was by putting holes in them and making them leak fluids they’d rather keep on the insi
de.
Armed and ready, she headed back out onto the street, sealing the cube behind her for what she hoped wasn’t the last time.
Chapter Eight
Chicken Fingers
“Fuck fuck FUCK!” With each curse, Nova pounded the projector panel harder until a crack spider-webbed across the screen. It went black, a final rebuttal of her attempts to access the Deep via a direct port.
Chicken Fingers watched her from a few paces back, empathizing with the projector and remaining wary of her bony little elbows and knees slamming into his soft spots again. She sure had surprised him with that.
He mused on the night so far while she cursed at the data terminal. Strange messages in his TAP, snag-and-bag gigs going sideways, a target who was an operative herself. What next? Aliens from outer space?
Nova walked a quick circle, running fingers through her spiky black hair and muttering to herself. Chicken Fingers smiled to himself, as he recognized the behavior as similar to his own, but kept scanning the street as people raced past in all directions.
A full-on riot was exploding around them, with folks smashing windows, stomping down doors, running off with anything they could grab, and otherwise reveling in the bedlam. The little lingerie shop they were in front of had been trashed before they arrived. The nutjobs had walked off with worthless crap like mannequin heads and hangers, leaving the overpriced undies and a couple of bitcoin sticks on the counter in plain view. Chicken Fingers had snapped those up without even thinking, but the sexy undergarments were giving him uncomfortable thoughts as he looked between them and Nova’s lithe figure doing her spiral pacing.
He thought about steering the night in another direction once they were somewhere private, but he wasn’t really that desperate. Hybrid and gene splices were his kink, and she was more friend zone than one-night-stand zone, at least to his tastes. Besides, she’d probably beat him silly for even suggesting they blow off some steam, and he wasn’t sure they’d be able to find somewhere away from the crazy flooding the street.
No one else appeared immune to the random insanity, and it was weird being one of two sane people in a sea of mental breakdowns—especially since Chicken Fingers didn’t actually think he was all that sane. Corporate employees in custom-tailored three-piece designer suits jumped on top of cars, hollering like caged monkeys in a lab fire. A tall woman with reptilian scales down her face and arms sashayed down the middle of the road, singing electro-jazz tunes at the top of her lungs—until a pizza delivery driver ripped off his t-shirt and bear-hugged her and they both went down, entwining themselves around each other as they got frisky in full view of everyone. An obese man wearing nothing but stained underwear ran by, flapping his arms and cawing like a giant bird.
For the time being at least, no one was taking notice of him or Nova, and he hoped it stayed that way. He just had to concentrate and keep an eye on the freak show going on around him for actual danger.
At long last, Nova stopped trying to carve a trench in the sidewalk with her feet and came to a decision. “I need to find someone.”
Chicken Fingers spread his arms wide. “In the middle of all this? Not like I have any ideas, that’s all your department, but it might be a little difficult. And what makes you think they haven’t gone nutso like everyone else?”
She shook her head in and balled up her hands into fists. “I just have to hope she’s okay. And crap, sorry Chicken, there’s two people we need to find.”
“It’s Chicken Fingers.” He waggled his digits. “And I’m in. You’re the one with the plan. Just note my earlier reservations.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got nothing else. We have to find my kid sister, then a coder I know. Step one, find somewhere calm so I can figure out what’s going on. From there we can figure out if there is anything we can do.”
“All of this sounds very reasonable. Um. Not to be an ass, but won’t a kid slow us down?” He continued to study the streets.
“No. She won’t.” She stepped up next to him, the borrowed bolter at the ready. “She’s tough. A street kid.”
“All right,” he replied, “what about this code guy you know?”
“He’s got … well, basically, an underground bunker. I can’t think of anywhere safer for us. And, frankly, he’s—”
Chicken Fingers winced. His mind did a flip-flop and then righted itself with an extra bit of information attached to his awareness. Like before, nothing preceded it. No clue or signal. Just a sudden certainty that something nasty was about to go down, and it would be best if they weren’t visible when it happened. “We need to hide. Now,” he interrupted her abruptly.
“What’re you—” She blinked. “Oh. Yeah.” They both retreated to the shelter of the lingerie storefront without another word. Once through the broken glass façade, they moved back through the racks of skimpy outfits till they were cloaked in the shadows at the back of the store.
A siren wailed in the distance, then two. Spotlights speared up into the night sky and several thooms shook the neighborhood. Chicken Fingers gave Nova a hand signal to remain where she was and slunk out to get a better view of the situation. She nodded and took up a shooter’s crouch, covering him as he ventured forward.
He crouched behind a taxi that had smashed into a light pole a mere two meters from the front door of the shop. The driver’s corpse sat in the front seat, held upright by the deployed emergency impact foam.
A Chicago Militia squad raced into view on one end of the street, all dressed in gray and red riot gear, weapons lit. He motioned for Nova to move forward.
She crept up to the shattered storefront, carrying the bolter in a low crouch shooter stance.
He pointed to direct Nova’s attention to the newcomers. “Friends of yours?”
She poked her head through the missing glass of the front door to get a clear view. “Nope. Yours?”
He huffed. “Militia? No way.”
“Everyone works for someone,” she muttered. “Everyone has their debts.”
“Yeah, I know. I just don’t like ’em.” He turned his attention back to the end of the road. The squad took a minute to scope out the scene … and then took aim and started mowing down civilians where they stood. Chicken Fingers sputtered in shock.
A family of four that had been huddling under an awning went down in sprays of blood. The corporate monkeys tumbled off the cars like ragdolls, while it took a dozen shots to his prodigious gut before the obese underwear-birdman smacked face down on the concrete. A few of the less brain-fried civvies who survived the initial attack stampeded for safety, but most of the people kept roaming randomly around the block, looking lost until they too fell under the gunfire.
He clenched his jaw and turned away, leaning against his cover car and tilting his head back to stare at the sky.
Nova’s eyes narrowed to slits but she kept watching, making sure no one noticed them.
“Sorry,” Chicken Fingers spoke quietly. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
The militia slowly swept down the street, leaving bodies in their wake. When a man and woman holed up in an apartment building started taking potshots at the soldiers with semi-automatic rifles, one squad member shouldered a rocket launcher.
Chicken Fingers gasped. “No fucking way … go! Get inside.” Though urgent, he kept his voice low. The two bolted back into the depths of the shop, hiding in the shadowy recesses.
With a hiss of ignition, the rocket roared from the tube and obliterated the shooters, the adjacent apartments on both sides, and the upper three floors of the complex. Bodies and flaming furniture, mixed together with chunks of brick and steel, rained down outside. Black smoke rolled out of the destroyed architecture, obscuring everything on the ground level from potential aircraft or rooftop snipers.
As the operation progressed, the street cleared out through death or desertion, and the militia squad tromped on. They loosed quick bursts of gunfire as they advanced, to the orchestral accompaniment of explosions and screams.
It was everywhere, and neither of them could wrap their heads around the carnage.
“Even if this is contained to the bad neighborhoods,” Nova said, “there’s going to be a death toll in the thousands. This is asinine.”
Chicken Fingers had felt off all night. Something in his mind was … he didn’t know what it was doing, other than changing. This wasn’t right—which was not something that had particularly mattered to him before. “More than thousands. They are killing indiscriminately.” His voice was soft, but hard.
Nova spoke, numb, “God, we are so fucked.”
Chicken Fingers kept swiveling his head to watch both where the squad originally appeared and the direction they had left. “So what’s the plan? How do we get to your kid sister?”
Nova nodded. “We’re going to have to be careful. Hopefully she made it to my place, which was the direction I was taking us. We can re-gear there. We’ll just have to be careful not to run into those roving militia people.”
“All right. You take lead, I’ll watch our six.”
As they started to move, a loud noise startled them and they ducked simultaneously. A large section of the façade from the damaged building the militia had fired on crashed down, crushing two parked vehicles. The noise didn’t attract the attention of the armed troops, and the street stayed empty.
They started moving again.
As Chicken Fingers carefully monitored the path behind them, Nova spoke, careful to keep her voice low. “I’ve been watching how people were acting. We can’t connect to anything outside our own TAPs, and I think they can’t either. I’ve even tried to ping you with a few override sprites and it’s like your TAP isn’t there at all. I think everything is just raw for them. Disconnected.”
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