Sleep State Interrupt

by Ted Weber

  “Everyone here cares,” Shakti said.

  Waylee kept talking. “Luxmore will be at the New Year’s gala. And the president, of course—it’s his fundraiser. I want to hear what they’re up to.”

  “We already know that,” Dingo said. “Privatize the world and enrich their cronies.”

  “But people need to know specifics, and hear it from their leaders’ own lips.” She stood tall and waved her hands around. “The elites are like anyone else. When they’re just among friends, their own kind, they let their guard down. We’ll get to hear them talk straight up, say what they really think. And even more important, copy what we can from their comlinks. It’ll be like a remote cam in a rattlesnake nest.”

  It sounded fun, but was probably more trouble than it was worth. How would they copy comlink data without the Secret Service noticing?

  Waylee’s eyes locked on to him like laser cannons. “Then, we’re gonna broadcast it everywhere. That’s where you come in, although we need your help with the first part too.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to this…

  “We’re gonna spread the truth. Expose the plutocrats for what they are.” Her voice pounded the air like B’more Club hip hop. “Destroy public support for their agenda. Wake people up, create a trigger event.”

  It sounded like she was done. “Uh, what’s a plutocrat anyway?”

  She moved closer. “Plutocrats are the super-rich elite—they decide who gets elected and what gets done. And not just here—their trade agreements shackle the whole world. They set the rules and I’m tired of playing by them.”

  Shakti started to say something, but Waylee kept going. His heart pounded to the tempo of her voice.

  “Did you know the richest fifty people on earth control more wealth than half the world’s population? Four billion people?”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Look it up. And the trend is accelerating. There’s plenty of money and resources to solve the world’s problems—lift people out of poverty, provide education and health care, stop global warming and the extinction crisis. Why isn’t this happening?”

  Charles shrugged.

  “Because the people who control wealth and power live in their own stratosphere and want to keep it that way. MediaCorp and their allies channel more money to political campaigns than the rest of the country combined.” She looked around. “Sure, some of the super-rich sympathize with the suffering masses, but on their own terms, terms that won’t challenge their position. And MediaCorp is their biggest mouthpiece, manufacturing pseudoreality and keeping people distracted and divided.”

  Soo-doo-what?

  “Information,” Pelopidas said, “should be open and shared.”

  The Code. “Know that.”

  Waylee spoke at the same time. “And accurate.”

  Shakti stood. “Can I talk?”

  Waylee shut up and stepped back. “Of course.”

  “You know I love you and I’m always there for you.”

  Waylee threw up her palms. “What is it?”

  “You and M-pat said today would be easy, but you got shot at. And it only gets harder from here.”

  Waylee huffed. “You’re not backing out, are you? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  Shakti shifted her feet. “Look, the People’s Party is accomplishing real things in Baltimore. Co-ops, labor exchanges, food gardens, volunteer doctors and lawyers…”

  Waylee fidgeted as Shakti continued. “And we won a seat on the city council last election. We’ll take over before long.”

  Waylee sliced the air with her hand. “Not likely. The two major parties are changing the laws state by state, including Maryland next year, to keep us off the ballot. Electoral politics is a dead end.”

  Shakti flinched. “But you were such a big supporter. As long as I’ve known you—”

  “Let’s focus on the mission, alright?”

  Charles stepped in. “So the People’s Party organized this breakout?”

  Waylee shook her head, waving cornrow ends the colors of the flag. “No, most of us are members, but this isn’t their operation. Direct action isn’t their thing.”

  “Not true,” Shakti said. “It’s just breaking the law that’s the issue. And I really don’t think you’ll accomplish much. I mean, trigger social change with a video? Come on.”

  “That’s because you haven’t studied journalism. The Watergate investigation. The Pentagon Papers. Wikileaks. Silent Spring. The Jungle. Das Kapital. The Rights of Man. I could stand here for hours listing stories and books that changed the world. Have some faith.”

  She fixed her eyes on Charles. “Things have to change and I’m done being irrelevant, preaching to the margins with no hope for the future.” Her teeth glittered white. “We need you to take over the MediaCorp broadcast at a peak viewing time. See, less than half a percent of Americans follow independent news, and that’s declining fast. But public opinion shifts require audiences between thirty and forty percent. So that’s the size we’re shooting for. We’ll replace their program with ours.”

  “Take over the whole broadcast?” Was that even possible?

  “Long enough to get our video out, to give people a dose of the truth. ‘Enlighten the people,’ Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.’”

  5

  Charles

  Waylee’s crew argued detail after detail about their plan and how to keep him hidden. At first, he worried that his rescuers were crazies, like the ones who slept under bridges and shouted gibberish to themselves.

  But the more he thought on it, the better Waylee’s idea sounded. It was the ultimate hack. If he could pull it off, he’d be famous forever. And they obviously had skills and connections of their own; it wouldn’t all be on him. Like his past ops where he tapped the Collective for cracks and tools.

  And he owed them. He’d never say it, but the others in juvie bullied him nonstop, shoving him around and calling him Chubby Charlie Thunderbutt, Dr. Chunkenstein, and a dozen other moronic names. ‘Cause he was a little out of shape and couldn’t fight.

  M-pat took off, then Waylee turned to Charles. “Ready to get started?”

  “Guess so.”

  “First thing we need to figure out is how to get in the fundraiser.” She wrote down a link that would take him to the event site. Then she led him and Pelopidas back upstairs to the game room. Pelopidas unlocked three deadbolts.

  Inside, sheet metal covered the window. He saw another Genki-san and wall skin, and some standard control boxes. A transparent red cube packed with chips and blinking lights sat on the floor next to a small pile of black data cubes and a rolled-up keyboard and screen.

  Best of all, a virtual reality system filled half the room. Not just a helmet and gloves like he used to have, but a full suit. It stood upright on a bowl-like treadmill, connected by strands to a cylindrical cage of arcing beams. Except for the shiny faceplate, the entire setup was matte-black. Probably the most stylish thing he’d ever seen. “Damn.”

  Pelopidas finished off his beer. “This was state of the art when I bought it.” He unhooked the sleek, almost featureless helmet and handed it to him. Fiber optic and power cables trailed behind. “It’s got stereoscopic and peripheral 3-D vision that follows your view, surround sound audio, and a microphone with real-time voice changing.”

  Charles started to say his helmet had all that, but Pelopidas kept talking. “Boots have minimal friction so you can run in place on the treadmill. Data gloves have inertial trackers and tactile feedback, and so does the rest of the suit. But the best part is the carbon nanotube muscles.” He waved a finger at the fibers holding it up. “They can change length almost instantly, and support your whole weight, so you can run, jump, even fly in place. There’s nanotubes inside the suit too. They stiffen when you sit down, and with the support fibers it’s just like having a chair. And they can apply pressure, so you c
an feel where you’ve been hit.”

  Hit? Oh, in a game… Charles had never been a big gamer but you definitely needed immersion gear for BetterWorld. “How much?”

  “Less than a grand now.”

  Really? The helmet felt smooth and a little warm in his hands.

  “Which is still a fortune for most people ’round here,” Pelopidas continued.

  “No doubt.” No way that frame would fit in his gramma’s house anyway. “I’m an early adopter, so this setup cost a mint. That is, it cost some insurance company a mint.”

  Charles tapped fists with his fellow Collectivista. “Know that.” He’d mostly bought on stolen credit cards but there were lots of ways.

  “Just to let you know, I only take what I need, from those who can afford it, and try to keep a low profile.”

  That’s bitch talk, but whatever. Charles pointed to the transparent red cube on the other side of the room. “What’s that?”

  Pelopidas smiled for the first time. “Supercomputer I built with an old classmate. Sixty-four processors. Cheap but it flies.” He grinned. “I call her Big Red.”

  “Now there’s a decryption tool.” Gotta respect someone who builds their own supercomputer.

  He nodded. “I’ve got a computer science degree. Hardware and operating systems are my specialty. Which is why we need you. I can do the basics online, but you’re at a whole other level there.”

  “I know my way around.” He had a knack for code and operating systems. He figured he knew Qualia, the BetterWorld programming language, better than English. Same for Edict, the language of the Comnet, and Unix/Linux, the ancient operating systems its servers still relied on. Sometimes he dreamed in Qualia or Edict, commands weaving together like songs.

  As Dr. Doom, he roamed the Comnet at will. Firewalls, locks, detection sensors, not a worry. Well, sometimes a worry, but if he wanted something, he found a way to get it. He traded passwords, account numbers, and back doors with other members of the Collective, or the buyers who’d been vetted into the Emporium.

  The secret to his success in BetterWorld was an army of AI bots that scoured the virtual clubs for him. They had different exteriors, but ran the same basic code, making them easy to replicate. You couldn’t tell them from humans without a Turing test administered by professionals. Basically his bots were vampires – if they touched your avatar, they’d transmit a packet of viruses that would infect your account and computer. He could transmit someone’s BetterWorld credits to a dropbox which he could empty at his leisure.

  Pelopidas pointed at the helmet. “Ready to get started?”

  Charles couldn’t wait to test everything out. “You know it.”

  Pelopidas held up a finger. “One last thing.” He handed Charles two plastic spray bottles numbered ‘1’ and ‘2’ with a Sharpie, and a box labeled ‘Kimwipes.’ “Spray and wipe everything you touch, including the immersion gear. Bottle 1 has a diluted bleach mix. Spray that first, let it sit, then wipe it up. Don’t spray it on colored fabric.”

  Charles nodded.

  Pelopidas grinned. “Bottle 2 has a solution of preserved DNA from our dog Laelaps. If you spray that on afterward, it will disguise what little DNA is left.”

  “Dog DNA?”

  His grin widened. “Yeah, I’d love to see a lab tech telling his superiors, ‘Sir, this VR gear was last used by a dog!’”

  Charles laughed. “Damn, you too much!”

  “I made a ton of it so we shouldn’t run out.”

  Charles set down the bottles for now. He sat in a swivel chair and put on the helmet and gloves, not bothering with the full suit. That could come later.

  He could see normally through the visor, although the room looked a little darker, like wearing sunglasses. See-through icons floated to the sides, and a keyboard filled most of the bottom.

  “You can give voice commands,” Pelopidas said. “Just like data glasses. Say VR first, then tell the helmet computer what you want to do.”

  “Yeah, mine worked the same way.”

  First thing was to get rid of the distractions. “VR, opaque.”

  The game room blinked out, leaving him in complete darkness except for the icons and keyboard. “VR, gloves.”

  A pair of solid-looking hands appeared in front of him, poking out of long black sleeves, like part of a funeral suit. The hands were a white man’s, and finely rendered, showing not only the main knuckle creases, but the webbing of creases between. “VR, hand transparency 50%.”

  The hands and arms lost some of their solidity, so he could see through them.

  “VR, give me black man hands.”

  They darkened to a chocolate color, still see through. Charles experimented with the gloves, waving them around until he got the hang of how the computer translated his movements. Then he clicked the Comnet icon.

  The familiar barebones interface of the Collective Router popped up and generated a fake Comnet address, computer ID, and geographic location. It then opened a portal into the Comnet, displaying a galaxy of new icons and pathways, and shoving the offline ones to the side. Unlike normal browsers, it would encrypt everything multiple times, then route the data through random relays controlled by the Collective. Each relay would decrypt one layer, so only the destination computer could see what he typed, and it would have no idea who or where he really was.

  He found another familiar program and created a new Comnet account. Using Dr. Doom would be a bad idea. He wasn’t feeling particularly imaginative, and so Joe34567 sprang into existence. Then he brought up a virtual keyboard and typed the link Waylee gave him.

  The link brought him to a 2D site administered by the Campaign to Reelect the President, titled “Celebrate the New Year with the President: An Exclusive Gala.” It would be held at the Smithsonian Institution Building (aka The Castle) from 8 pm to 2 am. Thank God it’s not in the White House.

  Charles explored the site. Samples of lame-ass music. Menu of fancy food. No price listed for admission, just a dropbox to return invitation responses.

  There didn’t seem to be any way to list the invitees, although he saw a link to contact the administrator. It being invite only, Waylee wouldn’t be able to get in. Unless she was a barmaid or something. Or musician; she could do that.

  Charles set up sniffers outside the target to copy any incoming or outgoing data. He ran a script to duplicate the entire site so he could examine the code at his leisure. Then he went on a virtual tour of the Smithsonian Castle. It did look like a castle. Built in the 1840’s… the first Smithsonian building… now housing various executive and law offices. The event would probably be in the Great Hall.

  He hoped he wouldn’t have to go.

  * * *

  Waylee

  Once Charles had settled in, Waylee grabbed Pel’s hand and marched him to their bedroom. She shut the door, and not bothering with words, pulled their clothes off as fast as she could.

  He didn’t look as enthusiastic as usual. He started to say something but she buried her tongue in his mouth and pulled him down on the bed.

  His instincts took over and she crashed against him like a tsunami. They varied positions and kept at it, each climax demanding another, until her lover was too spent to continue.

  Pel gazed at her with those sappy eyes he always got after a vigorous session. “I love you, Waylee.” Despite his tats and buzzcut and braided Jack Sparrow beard, Pel was about as fierce as a kitten.

  She kissed him, tasting her own salty musk on his lips, chased with stale beer. “You’re a godsend.”

  Indeed, Pel was an inestimable gift from a generally hostile universe. Her first years in Baltimore were rough, especially with Kiyoko to take care of. Waylee was sixteen, and her sister only seven, when they fled Philly and the drunken fists of her stepfather and mother. Baltimore, though only a two hour bus ride, was as far as the contents of her mother’s purse could take them. They squatted, stayed in shelters, or lived with her boyfriends or musician friends, never the same pl
ace for long.

  But Pel, just a bandmate at first, fell for her hard, and brought stability that none of her prior boyfriends managed. He didn’t have a drug habit, for starters. He convinced his parents to buy this house off foreclosure, a great investment he told them. Best of all, Pel stuck with her despite her past, despite her condition.

  “You’re the only one who’s been able to put up with me,” she said. Five years now.

  Pel lay back on the bed, still gazing at her. “You’ve been incredible ever since you saw that zombie message.”

  She looked him up and down. “You haven’t been bad yourself.”

  He smiled. “I meant in general.” He propped his head on an elbow. “It’s like you’re on a plateau. Some dips now and then, but barely noticeable.”

  She sat up. “Today was certainly spectacular.” She had finally graduated from a lifetime of futility. Her enemy, the people’s enemy, wasn’t invincible after all, and she’d bring them down.

  Pel’s glow disappeared.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He held his thumb and index finger a few inches apart. “I was this close to getting my brains blown out.”

  “Come on, it wasn’t that close.”

  He averted his eyes. “I just about crapped myself.”

  “Well it’s a good thing you kept your sphincter shut. Charles would have bailed for sure.”

  Pel pressed his lips together.

  She twined her fingers into his. “I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t funny.” She kissed him.

  It looked like he wasn’t ready for more sex yet, so her hand moved to the toy drawer in the night stand.

  He ran fingers along the curve of her hip. “Want some help?”

  “Nah, I got it.” But she put the vibrator down. It bored her anyway.

  He’s right. Someone could have been killed. “Pel, do you think I use you?”

  “You mean like a sex toy, or ‘cause I’m a master chef and do most of the cooking?”