A live video feed dinged up in a box at the top right of her vision. It was a first person view from Terri.
“You dick! How could you?” The drink flew into a surprised Rodolfo’s face.
Nice job, Natalya thought. Even the timbre of her voice had an emotional crack to it. I can always count on Terri.
Terri ran off into the crowd.
Ok, everyone will be searching on Rodolfo and Terri now. Fine. But what to do about the B-Twins?
Raj had dated Kimbra over a year ago. It had even gotten a little serious.
Ok, time to get creative.
A few moments passed. Natalya could feel her anger rising. She started thinking of the various ways she could destroy Kimbra.
Good. She can be reasoned with.
Kimbra was boy-crazy blind over Tristan. She thought of him as charming and sensitive, but Natalya knew he was a financial opportunist and would give Kimbra the best month of her life for two-hundred grand. It would clear out her petty-change account, but she was desperate.
Natalya checked the clock. Eight minutes to eleven. She viewed Kimbra from an overhead cam, she was already in character, stumbling through the crowd like a drunk—she picked up a random drink off a table and brought it clumsily to her mouth, spilling half of it down the front of her white dress.
Raj and Rushi were standing about ten meters apart from each other, talking to different groups of people, both in visual range of the ladies’ room door. Kimbra came up from behind Rushi and pushed him. He turned away from the ladies’ room to face her.
“Hey my big brown beautiful man,” Kimbra said. “How ‘bout I give you a real howdy hello?” She started pulling her dress up, revealing her white lace thong and bra. The dress got caught on her head and she struggled with it, mumbling through the cloth, “Grab it! Off my head!”
Rushi was just watching and laughing. Raj ran over and tried to push the dress back down on her.
Time to move.
Natalya opened the door to the stall and went calmly to the marble sink, dispensing the soap, washing her hands, going to the paper towel dispenser and taking a towel, and then carefully drying her hands completely. She checked herself in the mirror, gave herself an approving nod and smile, and went out the ladies’ room door.
Raj and Rushi were now in a shouting match with Kimbra wobbling in between them. Perfect. Natalya’s target was the stage. Raquelsha was singing one of her older ballads. Boooring. Natalya had wanted to get the Fine Fools, a Brazilian boy band and the hottest group in the world, to come play at her party, but her father wouldn’t pay for them. He had said he paid enough just to get the Helix. All he could get to perform for her was this has-been, who from his antiquated sense of taste was probably ‘wicked cool’. But what very few people knew, and what Natalya wasn’t supposed to know, was that Marjaana’s uncle Ragnar had gotten the Fine Fools and was secretly bringing them in. They were supposed to get on the stage at eleven o’clock, and Marja was supposed to dance with them during their first song. Natalya was not going to get upstaged like that at her own party. Nope, it wasn’t Marja who was going to introduce the Fine Fools—it was going to be Natalya. When she had first heard about the Fine Fools appearance she had been frantic to come up with a way to distract Marja from going to the stage before the Fools came on. For that, Natalya had her hacker, who she only knew by the handle Metronome, provide the key. Metronome was a scary good hacker who seemed to be two steps ahead of all other hackers and security experts Natalya knew, and she was one of his very small, very select group of clients. The best thing about him was that he never asked for money. All he ever wanted from her was information, and it was never information about her, so she considered it a deal.
Metronome had provided her with a zero-day exploit of the peeper program. When he had explained it to her she could hardly believe it. These kinds of exploits just didn’t exist anymore. But Metronome had found it, and he had given it to her. It was installed and ready to go. All she had to do was press the shiny red button. Literally—in front of her floated a button labeled, “Shiny Red Button”. Natalya brought up a live feed of Marja—she was approaching the stage from the other side of the dance floor. She looked so smug and sure of herself. If Natalya just turned her head she would see the red-headed Finnish bean-pole with her own eyes, but that would be a sign of weakness. She reached for the shiny red button.
Time to rustle some jimmies.
She pressed the shiny red button.
On her heads-up display Natalya saw Marja stop in her tracks. Of course she did. The exploit of peeper enabled the temporary change of someone’s status. Natalya knew that Marja had peeper set up so that she would get a pop-up when there were major status changes for certain people.
The exploit had just changed Marja’s father’s status to deceased.
Marja’s eyes widened as she turned around toward the dining area, the area she last saw her father. She started running back, weaving between the clumps of people in the crowd.
Perfect.
Natalya nodded to the bouncer at the steps leading up to the stage. He nodded back. She strode up the steps and walked toward Raquelsha as she was finishing her song. Natalya clicked on some virtual buttons and connected herself into the concert sound system. She stopped, put her arms akimbo, and said, “Okay Raquelsha, I think we’ve all heard that song enough times. More than enough times. I think it’s time we heard something . . .” she turned toward the audience, “. . . fresh!”
The first few strains of the Fine Fool’s latest hit, Something Fresh, started playing over the sound system. Suddenly the attention of the crowd was now fully on the stage. Natalya gave Raquelsha’s shoulder a dismissive little shove as she loudly announced, “It is my utter pleasure to present to you those hunky Brazilian sensations—you might have heard of them—the Fine Fools!”
The crowd rushed forward to the stage, to her feet, their faces filled with excitement. There were hoots and howls. She raised her arms up. She did not turn to look at the Fine Fools behind her—she just drank in the eyes of the crowd. Then she felt four hands grab at her—two of the Fools, probably Rikki and Paulo, had come up from behind her to lift her by her arms into the air. She relinquished herself to them. They spun her around as they started singing, and Natalya had the most complete, most ecstatic sensation of the purest victory she had ever felt, her hair in the wind, her own laughter beyond her control.
Chapter 5
Conrad followed a middle-aged man wearing dirty olive-green coveralls down a wide corridor that extended both forward and back into a distant gray gloom of flickering florescence. The concrete floor sharply echoed their footsteps, and although the sign at the front of the building had boasted of “climate control calibrated to preserve your valuables”, Conrad felt dampness in the air and could detect beads of condensation on the walls between the storage container doors.
Griffy’s MegaStorage had been one of the earliest multi-story storage facilities to be built during the Great Urban Suck thirty years ago when it became ridiculously expensive for people to own their own homes. As people got sucked into the cities, many moved into ecoloplexes, massive apartment facilities that tried their best to be ecologically self-sufficient, recycling water and waste and generating power from the wind, sun, and incinerated trash. Focusing on economy, ecoloplexes did not have the kind of living space to accommodate all the belongings of your typic
al early Twenty-First Century suburban house. So as ecoloplexes popped up in the crowded cities, so did megastorage facilities.
Next to Conrad walked Fred Warkowsky, a burly kid with a mop of unruly brown hair, a black t-shirt, and jeans cut off at the knees. Despite being two years younger than Conrad he was at least a head taller and twenty kilos heavier. Fred was there for the heavy lifting.
Trailing the humans were several large plastic bins on wheels that propelled themselves along using electric motors, lumbering and placid like obedient water buffalo.
The man in the green coveralls stopped in front of the horizontal metal slats of a large storage door. Using heavy-duty bolt cutters, he cut the padlocks, one on each side, letting them drop to the floor.
He gave a bored look to Conrad and Fred and said, “Give it a good cleaning when you’re done,” and then chuckled like he said a joke. Swinging the bolt cutters onto his shoulder he began the long walk back to the front offices.
Conrad grabbed the handle near the floor and gave a grunt as he tried to roll up the door—but it only moved a few centimeters. He gave another pull and it didn’t budge at all. Fred moved in close and curled his fingers under the door.
“Careful,” Conrad said. “Sometimes stuff falls—”
Fred flung the door upward and it slid up its tracks, ending with a loud bang. Conrad stepped back, but nothing toppled out. This was only Fred’s second storage unit; Conrad was still showing him the ropes.
“Time to put on the work glasses.” Conrad took off his new smart glasses, hung them on his belt, and took a battered faux leather case from his back pocket. Opening it he took out the utilitarian and considerably less fashionable work glasses, putting them on. Fred did the same with his own pair of glasses. From his other back pocket Conrad grabbed some canvas work gloves and put them on.
The front of the unit was mostly big stuff—two beds, couch, love seat, chest of drawers. With some sweat they were able to move these into the two larger bins. They worked silently, Conrad preoccupied by the fact that his father hadn’t returned home last night and Fred apparently content to simply listen to the pop music provided by the work glasses. Conrad couldn’t hear it, but he could see Fred occasionally mouthing words to a song and his body bouncing to a beat as he moved between the unit and the mobile bins. The work glasses were locked into a virtual private network over the internet so they were restricted to work accounts. While the glasses prevented users from going to the usual entertainment sites, they did at least provide free music as an amenity.
Conrad worked for Good Ole’ Roz, the consignment/pawn/antique queen of The Rocks. It was irregular work, but she was one of the few people who still paid in cash.
After removing the large pieces, Conrad scanned the remaining plastic bags and crates in the back, flanked by some floor lamps. Here was the potential payoff. His glasses had already cataloged the visible containers; he would have to open each one so Roz would have a visual record for an initial inventory. She was extremely meticulous about such things.
The plastic bags (garbage bags really) were mainly filled with clothes—both women’s and men’s—but mostly women’s. Clothes were a crap-shoot for profitability, all fashion comes back eventually; you just had to have the right retro at the right time. Roz had a couple of fashion experts who would go over each scrap for marketability. Conrad cared about the marketability of the contents because Roz paid a percentage—Conrad got eight percent of the gross. Fred only got four percent since he was just starting out.
Nestled between the bags he found something extremely interesting—an old Sony camcorder—in its original cardboard box (worse for wear) along with power and data cables.
“Take a look at this,” Conrad said, pulling out the camcorder and holding it up. Fred glanced at it, grunted, and went back to tossing bags into a bin.
An analog recording device. No Wi-Fi connection. Allowing you to record while detached from the internet. Completely anonymous. He tried to look into the old-fashioned eye-piece while still wearing his glasses (he wasn’t allowed to remove his glasses while actively loading merchandise to make sure all activities were recorded). He then noticed that the hard plastic lens-cover was in place. He fiddled around with it for a few seconds before figuring out how to remove it, revealing the ridiculously large lens. He took another look into the eye-piece but still couldn’t see anything. He supposed the power needed to be on, and the battery was most definitely dead.
Dad would love this, Conrad thought, and immediately got a sourness in his stomach, regretting how they had last parted.
Conrad put the camcorder back into its box. A camcorder meant that one of these plastic crates could contain some OAIP, Original Amateur Intellectual Property. Depending upon the content, and how it was edited and marketed, OAIP could make you some real money. Conrad pulled down the first crate from a stack and opened it up. It was filled with commercial VHS tapes, old movies like Back to the Future and The Little Mermaid. The covers were in fairly decent shape; they could be used as decorative elements. Conrad remembered one of Roz’s more wealthy customers had wanted to wallpaper his entire 3000 square meter condo with classic comic book covers. For several weeks she had him searching high and low for vintage comics. He had made some good money on that deal. The comics had no value as IP though. Just about all commercial entertainment made in the last hundred and fifty years was claimed by one media conglomerate or another and could be streamed to your glasses for pennies.
The next crate was full of CDs and DVDs. A quick look revealed some had been burned at home with hand written titles like “Anniversary Mix, 2002” and “Drive Songs”. Commercial discs would be cataloged at the warehouse, but Roz liked all unknown quantities to be cataloged on site.
“Hey Fred! Fred!”
Fred looked at Conrad.
“Could you take what’s loaded already down to the truck? I’ve got to catalog stuff. It could take a while.”
Fred nodded and whistled to the bins as he started walking down the corridor. Those that were full followed him, some backing up a little first to get out of each other’s way.
Conrad sat on the crate of VHS tapes and positioned the disc crate in front of him. Then, methodically, he took out each disc one by one, opened the case so he got a good look at the label, and put it on the floor in a pile. As he looked at each label his glasses would flash a green GOOD when it had recorded the item. If the disc had no label or text written on it he would have to use his pocket printer—his glasses would give it a unique ID number to print.
Near the bottom of the container he struck gold, a cluster of Hi8 analog tapes that used to go with the camcorder. On the yellowed paper labels under the clear cases were titles written in pen, like “Beach vaycay summer 1998” and “Christmas morning 2002”. Original IP from the turn of the century had its market value—it probably wouldn’t go viral or anything, but people had an interest in any media that was both old and completely new to the internet. After all, the internet was being flooded with more new IP every minute than had been created in the entire twentieth century. If any one of these had amateur porn there would definitely be a big payoff.
Of course, it was possible that the previous owner of this stash might have digitized it and uploaded it at some point. After recovering the data and digitizing it herself, Roz would have to Vu it by uploading it to VuDyne so they could search their database for a match. If the Vu returned negative, Roz would be free to post it with ads and start collecting. And Conrad would get his eight percent cut.
Conrad and Fred sat in the cab of the cargo truck as it backed itself up to the loading bay of Roz’s warehouse. On the side of the truck was written “Good Ole’ Roz” in old timey American Western script. When it stopped Conrad and Fred hopped out of the cab and walked up the ramp to the door of the warehouse.
Ahmed, Roz’s head engineer, was already opening the cargo bay door. The twenty-meter-high warehouse stretched off into a maze of industrial shelving filled
with every conceivable type of bric-a-brac that could be scavenged from the first half of the Twenty-First century. Ahmed was a stocky man in a grease-covered white button-down shirt, the first few buttons undone revealing a generous tuft of gray-black chest hair. As usual he was wearing industrial smart-goggles strapped to his head, along with an LED lamp strapped to his forehead, giving him the alien appearance of having a triangle of three short circular eye-stalks.
“Nice Hi8 cassettes,” Ahmed said, now lifting the sliding truck door. All the data that Conrad had recorded was first sent to Ahmed. “I love recovering stuff like that. It’s like I’m an archeologist peering into the past, uncovering sights people haven’t seen for decades. “
A forklift with an empty plastic pallet drove itself behind them, waiting patiently for something to be loaded.
“Once you get the furniture put away come to my office,” Ahmed said. “You’re still just taking cash, right?”
“Yeah, right,” Conrad said.
“What about me?” Fred said.
“Didn’t you give us your PayPal?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you’re all set.”
“Yeah but I haven’t gotten anything yet.”
Girl in a Fishbowl (Crowbar Book 1) Page 3