Contents
Title Page
Copyright
CHAPTER 1 Cam Surfing
CHAPTER 2 At Home
CHAPTER 3 Tintown
CHAPTER 4 Breaking In
CHAPTER 5 The Prize
CHAPTER 6 The Quarters
CHAPTER 7 Appraisal
CHAPTER 8 A Prisoner
CHAPTER 9 Walter
CHAPTER 10 Escape
CHAPTER 11 On the Run
CHAPTER 12 Cindy
CHAPTER 13 Getting Money
CHAPTER 14 The Crypted Phone
CHAPTER 15 Into the Unknown
CHAPTER 16 Benny
CHAPTER 17 The Gang
CHAPTER 18 The Rebels
CHAPTER 19 Reunion
CHAPTER 20 Reappearance
CHAPTER 21 A Dilemma
CHAPTER 22 Revelations
CHAPTER 23 A Run
CHAPTER 24 At the AMP
CHAPTER 25 The Dead Shift
CHAPTER 26 Uncle Zack
CHAPTER 27 Betrayal
CHAPTER 28 The Hand Off
CHAPTER 29 A Mission
CHAPTER 30 Laura
CHAPTER 31 A Visitor
CHAPTER 32 Cutting the Cord
CHAPTER 33 Train Hopping
CHAPTER 34 Stakeout
CHAPTER 35 The Meeting
CHAPTER 36 A Friend
CHAPTER 37 Wickham
CHAPTER 38 The Final Solution
CHAPTER 39 Two Battles
CHAPTER 40 Escape from the First Circle
CHAPTER 41 Assault on the Factory
CHAPTER 42 Dead Again
Author's Note
About the Author
Also from Jay Allan Storey
Vita Aeterna
Jay Allan Storey
Copyright © 2018 by Jay Allan Storey.
January 5, 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Jay Allan Storey/Non-Sequitur Publishing
190 - 1027 Davie Street
Vancouver, BC V6E 4L2
[email protected]
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
- 2 -
Vita Aeterna/Jay Allan Storey. -- 1st ed.
ISBN: 978-0-9917912-4-8
CHAPTER 1
Cam Surfing
“Ten seconds, Alex,” Richie’s voice nearly blew out my eardrum. I put a foot out to stop my board, and turned down the volume on the earpiece.
“Do you have to yell?” I whispered into the mic of the controller on my wrist.
“Fifteen,” he said, ignoring me, though his voice sounded a bit more normal this time. He always put on this stupid, serious tone like he was counting down a space launch or something.
I scanned the walls and rooftops with one eye, and watched the blinking light in my HUD, the ‘Heads Up Display’ implanted in my head, with the other. The tiny glow that showed I was in the clear was still green. So far, so good.
The cameras are usually easy to spot. SecureCorp want them visible so everybody will know there’s eyes watching them. But sometimes they get sneaky and toss in a hidden one. It can be anything: a part of a light fixture, a fake electrical insulator, even just a tiny hole in the wall. But the cameras have a footprint, like the circle from a spotlight. There’s a hack that shows the camera footprints like a bunch of intersecting ovals.
Whatever’s on the display of your HUD sort of floats half-transparent in the space in front of you. The trick is translating what you see to the 3D space you’re in. The footprints cover a lot, but not everything. With practice, you can visualize where they are, and avoid them. There’s usually big enough gaps between them to squeeze through.
“One minute,” Richie said. “You’re doin’ great. Keep it up.”
That’s how the game was played. ‘Cam-surfing’, we called it — seeing how far you could go without being tracked by one of SecureCorp’s monitoring cameras. A lot of the kids played it. It really pissed SecureCorp off, which I guess was kind of the point. The hack we used also showed when a camera detected your presence. An indicator in the upper right of the display changed from green to red. It wasn’t easy; the cameras are everywhere. You can’t walk a block without being in range of at least one.
Cam-surfing was lots of fun, and I was really good at it.
We called ourselves the ‘Lost Souls’. The name didn’t mean anything, we just thought it sounded cool. We weren’t really a gang, not like the Killer Dragons, or Death’s Heads. We didn’t commit crimes for money like they did, and we weren’t into violence like they were. We just liked to take chances, and have fun (which are more or less the same thing).
Usually it was Richie, Jake, Spiro, and me.
Most of the time we just played against the clock, seeing how long we could go without being spotted. That’s what I was doing now.
“Two minutes,” Richie said in my ear.
I coasted on my board through the narrow gap between two camera footprints, standing up straight and pulling in my ass to clear them. Anything moving in the center of an alley or an intersection is toast — the cameras will pick it up right away. The most effective way to stay ‘invisible’ is to stick close to the walls. But you still have to look out for the wild card cameras. They point in weird-ass, random directions, and unless you spot them they’ll screw you every time.
Just to make things more interesting, sometimes we’d find a way to bypass security for a building or an office, sneak in, and steal something. It was never much: a badge, a coaster, or a pen with the company crest — anything that would make a good trophy, that would prove you got inside wherever you were going.
The trophies were usually pretty much worthless, but the status for getting them was huge, and the penalties for getting caught were pretty steep. A friend of ours, Robbie, disappeared during a break-in about a year ago. The official line was that he was sent up to Juvenile Detention, but I don’t know if I believe that — we never heard from him again.
So why did we do it? The excitement, the danger, the prestige, status, whatever. I guess it was kind of pointless, but hey, when you’re sixteen years old in Tintown, the place where I live, and you’ve got nothing better to do…
Later tonight I was going to do something no kid had ever done before: I was going to break into a SecureCorp building. Since policing and security are SecureCorp’s business, getting past their defenses was the ultimate challenge — and the ultimate risk.
“Four minutes,” Richie said.
I jumped off my board and tried to look casual as a vehicle, a rare sight for Tintown, crawled up the street and passed me. It wasn’t a RoboTaxi — it had a driver. There were no Corp markings, but who else would be driving something like that? Even most Corp don’t pay much attention to what we do, but there was no point taking any chances.
My Cam-surfing record, and as far as I know the all-time record, is ten kilometers, more than a hundred blocks, in thirty minutes — half an hour. There’s another hack that confuses the HUD’s GPS locator, so for half an hour, SecureCorp didn’t have a
clue where I was. Half an hour being anonymous, invisible. That was probably longer than anybody in the city, even a Corp exec, ever had out of range of some kind of monitoring system.
The SecureCorp ads on HoloTV are always telling us that being monitored shouldn’t matter if we we’re not doing anything wrong. But it does matter. It was an incredible rush to know that for some period of time nobody, not SecureCorp, not my dad — not even Richie — could say for sure where Alex Barret was. For some short stretch of time I had something rare and priceless: privacy.
I’d gone around seventy blocks in just over twenty minutes when it happened. It almost always went that way — a hidden camera that I didn’t spot until it was too late. A light on my HUD started flashing red.
“Shit!” I said.
“Busted!” Richie laughed into my earpiece.
I boarded back to the ‘Center’, the place we usually hooked up, in an abandoned warehouse on the outermost edge of Tintown. Richie and Jake were already there. I pushed aside the loose plank that blocks our secret entrance and squeezed through. As always, the place smelled like mold and rotting cardboard.
“Not bad,” Richie said, standing near a beaten up old couch in one corner and tapping the HUD controller on his wrist. He was a foot taller than me, and built like a wrestler. You’d never guess that he knows more about hacking the system than almost any other kid in the city. “Not your best,” he said, “but still better than anybody else I know.”
A cloud of dust poofed up from the couch as I flopped down beside him.
“Practice makes perfect,” I said.
Jake lounged nearby, in an armchair with all the stuffing coming out. “It helps that you can squeeze through every rat-hole in Tintown,” he laughed, with another dig about what a runt I was.
“Screw you,” I said.
“You still feel up to going for the big one?” Richie asked.
I shrugged. “You only live once, right?”
“You are one crazy dude,” Jake said, shaking his head as he pushed himself to his feet and grabbed the board leaning against the chair arm. He stepped toward the exit opening. “Back here at nine?”
For something as dangerous as what I was planning, we had to wait. City security slackened off after nine PM.
Richie and I both nodded.
Jake smiled at me. “It’s nuts, but hey, if you get away with it, you’ll be a legend.”
CHAPTER 2
At Home
I boarded home to our apartment, on the fifth floor of one of the thousands of dumpy, disintegrating high-rises that were standard issue for Tintown. The building loomed over my head as I climbed the outside steps. Twisted, dripping pipes dangled at intervals from walls stained with alternating splotches of bleached white and mildew black, like some giant had been wiping his feet on them for a few thousand years.
You could tell which places were occupied. The mostly broken windows were blocked off with makeshift security bars made from chunks of scrap metal, or had drying laundry flapping from them, and spider-webs of wires spun out, gathering into bundles at the nearest standing power pole.
When I walked into the living room Dad was leaning forward in his chair watching HoloTV, like always — another stupid Safety Show. At least the electricity, off when I left in the morning, had come back on. Somebody must have climbed up again and re-jigged the rats-nest of cables that siphoned off power from the electrical grid in the Corp Ring. There were brown-outs five or six times a day in Tintown, and complete black-outs at least once a day.
Dad’s chair was only a meter away from the HoloTV pedestal. He didn’t see so good, and he couldn’t afford glasses. He didn’t look up. On the pedestal display, some loser dressed in a clown suit bent down, grabbed a big heavy box with both hands, tried to stand up with it, and clutched his back in pain. A serious-sounding narrator warned: ‘Remember — always lift with your legs’.
The TV was blaring, as usual. Dad also needed a hearing enhancer for his HUD, but we couldn’t afford that either.
“Dad,” I yelled out to him.
He heard me, but didn’t turn around. I went to the kitchen, grabbed a couple of food packets from the cupboard, and tossed them in the microwave. The packets were produced by FoodCorp, who just called them ‘food’ — we figured that was because it was never clear what the ingredients were.
Each packet was a thin plastic tray with an opaque film on top. You didn’t know what you were getting until you heated one up and opened it. It didn’t matter anyway. They almost always looked exactly the same — a dark brown mash. Nobody in Tintown could afford a pet, but my girlfriend Cindy’s rich, and she’s got a cat. She showed me once what she fed it, and it looked exactly like what we eat most of the time.
Once they were heated, I carried both packets to the living room, set one beside my dad, sat down on the couch, and opened my own. Yep, no surprises there. I attacked it anyway. Cam-surfing always made me hungry.
“Your dinner’s there,” I said to him.
He nodded and continued staring at the TV. That was his response to everything.
I guess I couldn’t blame him. He’d gotten a raw deal on his Appraisal. His body was shriveled and bent, his skin mottled and wrinkled, and his wispy white hair almost gone from his head. He looked ancient, but in fact he was only forty-five years old. He’d ‘negged out’. That is, the result of his Appraisal had been negative, less than one.
The way it was told to me at the co-op school, every species on earth’s got an expiration date, like the food packet on my lap. Their metabolisms all run at different speeds, which means that some have a long lifespan, some not. The lifespan of a typical human is around eighty years. The lifespan of a dog is less than fifteen. I hear the lifespan of some trees can be more than one thousand.
About sixty years ago, long before I was born, scientists came up with this process, Appraisal, that ‘resets’ the metabolism of the person it’s applied to. Appraisal can slow the aging process, so the affected person will live up to X number of years for every year of an ‘average’ human.
In Appraisal jargon, X is called the Life Extension Factor, or LEF. The LEF is a fraction, usually between one and two, based on an average age of 80. If you’ve got a LEF of 1.1, your life expectancy is 80 X 1.1 = 88 years. A LEF of 1.5 (I wish) would give you a life expectancy of 80 X 1.5 = 120.
But this is the bizarre part: people don’t just live longer, their entire metabolism is affected. So, just like a fifteen-year-old human is way younger in real terms than a fifteen-year-old dog, a seventy-year-old with a high LEF is like a thirty-year-old with a low one. That’s why on HoloTV you see seventy-year-olds playing squash, competing in Ironman races (and winning), and all kinds of other stuff that used to only be done by the young.
But, like most of the scientists’ brilliant discoveries, Appraisal comes with some serious hitches. The effect is different for everyone it’s applied to. Person A could have their lifespan doubled while Person B had almost no change. Even worse, in rare cases, like my dad, one in one hundred thousand they say, the LEF is less than one. Not only did Appraisal not lengthen his life, it actually shortened it. My dad’s LEF was 0.6, which means his life expectancy is 80 X 0.6 = 48. We call this ‘negging out’.
Over the years I’ve heard of a few people with LEFs over two. They say that only happens for about one in a hundred thousand, like negging out. The highest I’ve ever heard of is two point five, but that might be bullshit.
And the killer is, Appraisal can only be done once. Doing it a second, third, or whatever time has no effect. The result is irreversible, and there’s no way to predict what it will be. They say it’s not dependent on genetics or any other known biological factor. No matter who you are or how much money you have, once it’s done, Appraisal can’t be undone; you’ve just got to live with the result. Even so, almost nobody ever refuses it.
Seems like the Barret family is cursed. My mother’s Appraisal was negative too, though just barely. It didn’
t matter anyway, because she died of cancer eight years ago. You could have a LEF of three and still die early, from disease or an accident. I guess it’s always been tragic when somebody dies before their time, but I think it’s worse now, ‘cause in most cases your ‘time’ can be so much longer.
Dad’s depression about his Appraisal, and then my mom’s death, turned him into some kind of zombie. I don’t think he’d even bother feeding himself if I wasn’t around. What makes it so sad is that if he’d just chosen not to have the Appraisal in the first place, which he could have done, he probably would have lived to be something like eighty. But, like I said, there was no way to know ahead of time.
Travis, my teacher at the co-op school, says Appraisal has had a major impact on society. Knowing they’re going to live longer, people are a lot more in tune with taking care of themselves. Nobody wants to get some chronic injury they’re going to have to live with for the next hundred and twenty years.
I guess that’s why the Safety Shows are so popular. People can’t seem to get enough of hearing how to properly lift heavy objects, climb stairs, step off curbs, etc. Sound boring? You bet it is, but they’re the most watched shows on HoloTV.
Even Dad watches them, which is a joke; there’s no point unless you’re going to live to a hundred or something. What does he care if he throws out his shoulder lifting a box the wrong way. He’ll be dead in a couple of years. It’s just something to do, I guess. He’s got nothing else.
CHAPTER 3
Tintown
Like I said, the place I live is called Tintown (don’t ask me why — nobody seems to know). Tintown is a ‘Quarter’ — an area of about five hundred square blocks. It’s one of thousands of tiny self-governing knots of people that make up The Quarters — part of a huge urban center. They say it used to be a great city, but now most of it’s falling apart, and a lot of it’s abandoned. A long time ago they moved everything that counts somewhere else — to the southwest. I wouldn’t know about any of that — it all happened before I was born.
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