Beautiful Red

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Once the encryption was loaded, Jack reloaded the channel.

  >Hey Adrian?

  >>I'm here. So, spill the goodies!

  >I got embroiled in something at the office which started off being a not so run of the mill intruder and has ended up with a missing woman who may be in physical danger. The trouble is, pretty much none of it is any of my official business and I have shit for authorization for any of it.

  >>Cool.

  >Kind of. Mostly it's just wacky now. I'm trying to figure out what happened to this woman and all I've got is a live log from her consciousness. I ran a search of the code from the log and came up with some classified documents from the ESA.

  >>A ha!

  >Yeah.

  >>So you were wondering if I had any inside poop for you.

  >Yup. I know you have access to that stuff from some of your posts on the blinking twelves. I don't need to see the docs, I just want to know how this girl's brain patterns connect with their stuff. It could just be references to comas, which is the only other stuff I could find that matched.

  >>…

  >>Were you planning on telling me about this little adventure if you hadn't needed my help?

  >(sigh)I'm sorry, A. It started off being just work, you know, and I didn't want to share it, really. It was fun and I hadn't had an adventure in so long. And then, next thing I know it's a day later and I'm in some chick's brain and it's just totally out of control, and…

  >>Whoa, J. It's cool. Just be cool.

  >Sorry. It's been a fucked up…

  Jack glanced at the time and nearly had a fit. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since she got up and that was after only a few hours sleep.

  >Sorry. It's been a fucked up 40 hours or so.

  >>Jesus, you sound like a wreck.

  >I am a wreck. I need sleep.

  >>Okay. Send me the code and I'll see what I can do.

  >Thanks, A. Really, I mean I really appreciate…

  >>Aw, can the crap, J. Just get some zees and I'll talk to you in nine or ten hours. Same channel, okay?

  >Sounds great, A. Thanks.

  >>No worries. Catch you later.

  Adrian broke the connection and Jack went offline. She ran her hands over her face and realized that she had been running on nothing but adrenaline. She shucked her clothes on the floor, not even bothering to stuff them in the autoclave. She had a quick shower, blew off and clambered into bed. She fell asleep to fitful dreams of being alternately trapped under the corpse of Estella Rowan and being chased through the glowing green corridors of the network by an unseen force, and through it all she kept seeing the recurring image of the dazed face of the man in the streeters' alley.

  Chapter 10

  00011

  The upgrade salon was worse than useless. Those idiots don’t know their asses from holes in the ground. I start to describe my symptoms and the animated mannequin that works the front counter just cocks his cute little head and says, "gee, I've never heard of that. Maybe you should visit a psi doctor," then goes back to talking with his stupid co-idiot about their fingernails or something.

  Fuck him and his fashionable little nails. A psi doctor. As if those quacks are going to help me. I'm not suffering from delusions of insignificance or something, I'm fucking losing my memory for chrissakes. Now I don’t know what to do. Son of a bitch.

  Chapter 11

  Jack woke on her own sometime near noon the next day. She felt like crap, and was sure she looked like it too. She fired up the coffee machine and dug out a breakfast bar. She stirred her coffee with the bar, trying to get some moisture and extra caffeine into the nutrient laden brick. She cracked her neck and picked up her clothes from where she had dropped them the previous night. She put them on, even though there were clean clothes in the autoclave. She just couldn't be bothered to open up the hatch and she didn't think she would be leaving the apartment any time soon.

  She idly ate her breakfast and drank her coffee, thinking about the events of the past couple of days. In the hazy light of midday, she thought she could see similarities between the man in the alley and the representation of Estella Rowan she had encountered in her system. Jack realized that systemic representations were flawed in many ways - she knew it better than most, having written several - but she couldn't help but think that the look on Estella's face when Jack found her in the closet was eerily similar to that of the man in the alley. She called up the video from the alley and zoomed in on his face as he was coming toward her when he left the alley. The lack of expression, the muscles so completely slack, was identical to the way Estella Rowan looked before Jack left the representation. She found it hard to believe that the two events could be unrelated.

  She fired up her interface and saw that she had a message from Adrian asking her to get in contact. Jack opened up the double encrypted messenger and, using the same key as the day before, sent a request to Adrian. Shortly she received a response.

  >Hey, J. Good news. Switch to 17?

  >>17. Okay.

  Jack broke the connection and established a new one using her eleventh key. Adrian soon joined the channel.

  >You get some sleep, there?

  >>Yeah, finally. I just got up.

  >Good deal. I've got some info for you.

  >>Thanks. What's the scoop?

  >I got a perfect match between your sample and the ESA docs.

  >>Now that's interesting. I was sort of hoping for and against that. What else can you tell me?

  >The docs in question were reports of experiments done about remote control of cybernetic bio-organisms.

  >>Uh, okay. Sounds disturbing.

  >The subjects in this project were bonobo chimpanzees, if that makes you feel better.

  >>Not really, but at least the mental image is different. Can you give me some specifics?

  >I guess. I shouldn't, really. These are classified docs… but what the hell. I read the docs and your matching sample comes from analysis of the brainwaves of the bonobos after the programmed instructions had been sent.

  >>Can you be more specific about these programmed instructions?

  >Looks like they were trying to see if you could use your typical wetware brain/machine interface to make a bio-organism do things, as opposed to just receive data. You know, force our chimp cousins to walk in a circle, not eat the food, whatever.

  >>Okay. Sort of high tech, specialized brainwashing.

  >Pretty much. The sample you sent me matched the measure of brain patterns when the subjects were being fully controlled by the programming.

  >>Yikes.

  >Oh yeah, the experiments were wildly successful. The trouble was that the subjects became entirely dependent on the programs, so there was no going back to a natural state after.

  >>Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.

  >…

  >>…

  >So, you said you found this pattern in a human, is that right?

  >>Yup. I took a copy of it out of her personal system myself.

  >God. This report ended with recommendations to ban the use of this technology on any bio-organism, human or other.

  >>I can see why. It was pretty horrible in there.

  >I'm not surprised. The docs were pretty explicit. It seems that the bonobos all tried to fight the program as it was making its way into their consciousnesses.

  >>When I was in her system, it was such a mess that it looked like a fight had occurred in there. I couldn't figure out how that would happen, but this makes sense.

  >Yeah. They all fought, and they all lost. And the really horrible part is that it took days.

  >>Oh, god.

  >Days of fighting and this slow inevitable descent into a stupor. They were slavering automatons at the end, Jack. They all had to be killed.

  >>Christ.

  >It was one of the worst things I've seen. The docs had video of the whole ordeal. Be thankful I'm not passing that on.

  >>God, I am. Thanks for finding it for me, A. I'm
really sorry you had to see it all, though.

  >Me, too. I just feel for that woman. And I have to wonder who is doing this. The ESA docs claim they destroyed all copies of the program they used.

  >>For fuck's sake, everyone knows you can't destroy code. Someone will have made a backup somewhere, someone always does. And then it's in the nets and it's in the world forever.

  >I know. No one ever learns. But that doesn't answer the next question.

  >>Which is?

  >What are you going to do now?

  >>God, A., I dunno. Track down whoever's doing this, I guess.

  >She had a job didn't she? Why not go to the authorities?

  >>… You're kidding, right?

  >Yeah. I guess. After what you've done, they're more likely to lock you up than look into this.

  >>I know. Crap, I never should have pursued this.

  >Hey, you were whining about things being boring.

  >>I know.

  >There's an old saying where I'm from: Be careful what you wish for, it might be a goat.

  >>(laughter) Thanks for the advice, A.

  >Hey, better late than never. You flash if you need any more help, okay?

  >>Thanks.

  >Be careful.

  >>Will do. Later.

  >Later.

  Jack disconnected and shook her head in shock. She was afraid that Estella had been violated in some way, but was leaning more toward the idea that it was a physical assault which had led to a mental breakdown of some sort. That there was some way to fix it if she could just find her physical whereabouts. Now she wasn't even sure if it was worth trying to track down her body. This was all getting to be too much. She was just a Security Officer Class 5. She wasn't really equipped for this.

  She lay down on her bed, still wearing yesterday's clothes, and thought about crying. She wasn't much of a weeper, and the tears didn't come, even though she thought it might make her feel better. Some kind of release of the tension. She thought about sex. One of her usual partners would certainly be available if Jack just went online and asked, but she couldn't bring herself to find someone when she was in the midst of all this horror. She finally just screamed into her pillow, beating it with her fists and tearing at her sheets.

  She finished beating up her bed after about two or three minutes, and collapsed among the rumpled sheets. Without even thinking about it, she fell asleep. When she woke, only a few minutes had passed, but Jack felt more able to cope with the situation. She got up, and sheepishly straightened her bed. She changed into clean clothes and decided to get ready to do something. She still had a day and a half before she had to be back at work, and she was filled with a sense of obligation to solve this problem. She owed it to Adrian who had risked serious trouble with several versions of the cops to get the information Jack needed, and she owed it to Estella Rowan. Jack got down to work.

  She meticulously picked apart the code left behind by the intruders at Buyside, running every individual line through the nets looking for possible authors. She followed the path of the intrusion back to the other end, the originating end, hypothesizing and guessing where there were gaps in the information. She cross referenced, indexed, filled in the blanks and made progress. Eventually she narrowed it down to a shadowy group called variously the Red, the Society for Creative Anarchicism and nowherenet, depending on the part of the world. They had been blamed for various incidents in many municipalities and corporations, many of which were illegal in some jurisdictions, but there didn't seem to be any coherent understanding of their goals.

  They were generally not perceived as a significant threat since most of their actions were harmless to property and people other than themselves. They were really more like pranksters, although a few of their actions had spiraled out of control and caused damage or injury. They were, however, mocked and vilified by the corporate press, since their mandate seemed to be to do whatever fucked up the status quo. They picketed offices, staged performance art installations at upgrade salons, subverted networking with frivolous messages. When they had a message, it was vaguely anti-technology and pro-physicality, but more often than not they seemed to be causing trouble for the sheer bloody mindedness of it all.

  Jack had to admit that she couldn't recall having heard of them before. She had never personally encountered one of their "actions", and she was not a good consumer of the corporate press. She deleted the Bellis propaganda email unread and she rarely sought out any of the big corporate boards. She preferred to get her news from real people, whose agendas were obvious and whose pockets were shallow. Since this group tended to converge on the large firms, their shenanigans didn't make the news outlets Jack frequented.

  She hit all the big corp boards now, though, running searches for all the monikers she had found for the group. There wasn't a lot to report, and most of it was so full of vitriol and ideology that it left Jack with more sympathy for the perpetrators than the so-called victims. Then she thought of Estella, and the sympathy died in her heart. She turned to the opposite side, the underground cracker boards. She had always participated in these boards, the ones that drew those people who skirted and sometimes bodily crossed the line between legality and illegality. At one time she was a heavy contributor to the community, and she had built up enough of reputation under her first net handle that she was regarded as an insider. She could nose around without arousing too much suspicion.

  She switched identities and brought up one of the more edgy communities. She made small talk for some time, catching up old acquaintances and getting current with the gossip. She spent almost three quarters of an hour just chatting with the group before dropping hints about the SCA, nowherenet and the Red. Mostly, the group found them to be at best a humorous diversion and at worst a problem for serious crackers in the image department. But after a few hours of conversation, she came away with a real live lead. An address in a nearby city.

  Jack paged out of the cracker boards and disconnected. A physical address. They might not be the exact people she was looking for, but they would have to do. Jack fired up her system again and booked a ticket out of town. She packed a small bag with essentials - her toothbrush, a fresh pair of underpants, a handful of micro recorders and a sonic self-defender she had acquired through another impulse purchase from one of the streeters by her apartment. She left a notice in her apartment's systems that if she had not returned within twenty-four hours, to notify Adrian and Gilles simultaneously but separately.

  She left specific messages for each of them. She didn't really think that either of them could help her if she got into real trouble and she certainly didn't expect them to finish off her mission, as that was what it had now become. She just realized that they were the only ones who had any idea what she was up to and that they might care what happened to her. So they ought to know if something happened.

  She stepped out of her apartment, and stood on the threshold looking back. It really was a pitiful little room. The window looked over the street into the window of an identical little room in an identical building. The occupant of that room was rarely in, and when she was, she kept the windows darkened. Jack had watched for signs of life for a few weeks before giving up on the woman across the street. Jack had no great love for her apartment, but now as she looked at it she feared she might not see it again, and the fear almost consumed her.

  Who was she trying to kid? She was no action hero. Sure, she could break into corporate networks and personal systems, but that was entirely differently than going to some other city, sneaking down alleys and darkened doorways to confront some band of rogue crackers. She was a desk monkey for god's sake! She squinted when she saw an unshaded light bulb. She essentially lived entirely online - she didn't even know what her best friend looked like and until this moment she hadn't even thought that this was strange. She wasn't equipped to be fighting weirdoes with brainwashing programs. She couldn't possibly succeed.

  Aw, fuck it, she thought, and turned and walked out of the
apartment and headed to the train stop.

  Chapter 12

  It was a ninety minute train ride, and Jack was having trouble filling the time. Her nerves were jangling and every few minutes she would decide to catch a return train as soon as they stopped. But, deep down, she knew that she'd end up following through with her plan. She had gone too far to stop now. And when she thought about it, this was the most exhilarating experience she'd had since she decided to play on the right side of the rules. Hell, she had never really been much of a cracker anyway; she was always more interested in how things worked than causing problems. Her break and enter career was entirely motivated by a need to see what was on the other side, and she was very good at making sure she wouldn't be caught. This was probably the most exciting thing she had ever done in her entire life. There was no way she was going to wimp out now.

  She fired up her system and logged in under her old handle. She hopped onto the boards where she had originally found the information about the group she was following. According to the posting, she was currently on her way to a sort of open house for the local chapter of the Red. It was fairly well advertised among the underground anarchicracker scene, so Jack guessed that it was probably a pretty low level bunch - the kind who might stage a reenactment of the first wetware upgrade outside a high end salon. She didn't really believe that anyone at this event would be part of the sick experiment that Jack was convinced had destroyed Estella Rowan and the man in the streeters alley. But it was a start, an entrance into this underworld that Jack now felt compelled to destroy.

  Now that she had decided that she was going through with it, damn the consequences, she felt a wave of calm come over her. If she believed in such things, she may have felt that she was destined for this, but Jack was not one of the handful of people who clung to the ancient ideas of a single life having a special meaning. She knew that life was random, both the events of a life and the existence of it. She knew that it didn't matter to the universe if anyone lived or died. But it mattered to her, and she felt herself warming to this new role she was taking on.