by Kyle Harris
“I have seen your future, and you won’t believe it.”
Chaz had taken five or six steps, impersonating someone who had someplace to be, before she turned to the source of the voice.
“Enjoy five nights at the Blue Paradise. Our heated pools offer the stunning backdrop of the Great Ocean. In-room entertainment booths are available if you do not desire the water. And our adult package is included for the first night, free of charge.”
The android, which had matched Chaz’s pace and walked beside her, was modeled after a teenage girl. At the rib cage, skin faded into sandy beaches and waves crashing ashore, seamless around the circumference of the android’s body like an animated bath towel. The insignia on its shoulder said: VANCOM CA-2BL. Advertisement model, second fleet, blonde edition.
Chaz avoided eye contact.
In her periphery, the android steered closer. “Blue Paradise features premium jills found nowhere else in the city. Kiko is a pregnant Japanese woman whose husband left her; she doesn’t wish to be alone. And Riya is an eighteen-year-old runaway with nowhere else to go; she’ll believe just about anything she hears. If these do not suit you, the rest of our fleet come with thousands of customizable personali—”
“That’s a neat fucking trick you did there,” interrupted Chaz. “I bet this resort has a lot more than just female sexbots, but that’s what you tried to bait me with. Why is that?”
“If you seek total relaxation with a view, our expert masseuses will do just about anything to—”
“You just did it again.” Chaz looked at the android’s face, not caring that retinal scanners could get a bead on her identity in nanoseconds. And hell, it probably already knew if it was loaded with facial-rec. “You said ‘masseuse.’ Ain’t that fucking interesting?”
“Blue Paradise only hires the highest quality—”
“Why not a masseur? How about you get the fuck away from me, huh? And don’t talk to me again.”
There was something naive in that android’s smile, a kind of childish amusement. Didn’t match the age that the rest of its body was meant to resemble. “If you act quickly, I can offer a twenty-five percent discount on—”
Chaz stuck out her leg and tripped the VanCom slut. Its hands flew forward in a programmed safeguard action, but the face made a nasty crunch.
Its body flashed yellow. “Oops! I require assistance to stand up. Can anyone help me?”
Chaz laughed. How’s that concrete taste?
The interruption had left her with ground to gain, but the tether was still tight. She picked up her pace until the distance was down around ten meters and holding.
On her tasker, Letts bumped his way out of the crowd and toward a large building, then up some steps. Chaz swiped her finger until she got a vantage of the facade: the Amadeus hotel. Room rates, lunch menus, and service reviews crammed onto the screen.
So, Patrick Letts had come all the way here—after a 2.6-kilometer train ride and twenty-minute walk—just for a hotel. Might be an empty bed in a quiet room, an escape from family life, but that didn’t smell right. Why the hike?
These not being the cleanest of streets, the Amadeus had a terminal by the front doors; you wouldn’t be getting in there without a verified reservation and prepayment.
This had just gotten a lot trickier.
Next to the hotel was an alley. Chaz threaded her way through the bodies and the civvy vendors and the situated-but-not-showing-it beggars and out of the neon canopy to find a little more privacy. An advertisement terminal flashed a picture of a missing person: Jake Wurman—student, friend, son.
The char kway teow was starting to go cold, so she dropped the leftovers and chops into a blue chute marked for plastic recyclables.
Her eyes adjusted to the alley. Paper lanterns were strung up above her, shifting between purples and blues and greens, tied off between second- and third-floor balconies. Club music filled in when the buzz of the crowd fell away behind her.
Chaz kept an eye out. Alleyway commerce in this part of Crystal City usually consisted of synthetic off-planet dopes and virus-loaded gambling chips. Nine times out of ten, the peddlers were running in the same operation, catching late-night drunks from the nearby clubs. And maybe they had some guys on the inside serving out free drinks to a mark who’d lost all his money at rigged slots. Close up the front entrance early, open a side exit, have the bait waiting. Professional scamwork.
A little way down the alley, past a trio of red-lace-wearing escorts and a bouncer stationed outside a cardroom, Chaz sat down on a low brick wall. It was some kind of perimeter for a series of potted plants, but nobody had been along to water them, and they all looked dead or near enough.
On her tasker, she relegated the tether-feed to the background.
Now, how do I get eyes in there?
Before examining the Amadeus’s network, Chaz did a quick internet search to check whether the place even had interior surveillance. The query returned a news article from two years ago—some government official, Mr. Blah Blah, had allegedly been caught on camera while in secret meetings with Mr. So On and Mr. So Forth, and the footage was floating around in the dark crevices of the web. Mr. Blah Blah denied such meetings, of course.
So, the Amadeus had in-room cameras. Seemed illegal, but it played in her favor. But tapping directly in to the hotel’s private security network was off the table anyway—alarms and countermeasures would trigger at the first sign of intrusion, especially if she was pulling a lot of traffic.
She’d have to go behind enemy lines, then.
Running a scan of wireless networks revealed more than a hundred access points—designated AMADEUS101, AMADEUS102, and so on—and more than eight hundred connected devices in or around the hotel. Employing a little program called SNIFF_OUT!, she was able to see that 148 of those devices were running on some iteration of the Sphinx OS software. Good. Sphinx was the cheapest operating system on the market, and it had been a hacker’s wet dream for years. One of its most notorious flaws involved a bug with the wireless-networking control subsystem: when connected, a rogue device disguising itself as an access point could commandeer the connection by simply using the same name as the real access point.
Chaz uncollapsed the network hierarchy in SNIFF_OUT! to display the 148 Sphinx-operated devices. With a script—written by herself for a job six months ago—she cloned all access points that were linked to a Sphinx device. Many had more than one, so the final total was sixty-two. After waiting for green lights across the board, she transmitted a small file—a trivial text document no bigger than a couple kilobytes—to each device. The essence was to find which ones, if any, were running capable antivirus protection.
Most of the time, this method wouldn’t get her a single hook, but with such a large sample size…
Her script finished. There were three unprotected devices.
Next, phishing.
Time was a concern. It had been twelve minutes since Patrick Letts had entered the Amadeus. Chaz had set the tether program to notify her of facial-rec confirmation; it hadn’t done so, which meant he was still inside. If Letts was boning a mistress, good. That usually meant more time. Usually.
Now for the cross-your-fucking-fingers part. With the cloned access points, the three unprotected devices were now hers. She could’ve made them blast gay porn videos at max volume with a few instructions. But the goal was to connect to the hotel’s complimentary guest network through a virtual profile, and for that she needed someone on the other end who could type.
The packet was textbook phishing: a window pop-up saying the device had suffered a catastrophic error and needed to restart, a script to destroy all cookies and temporarily freeze all network access, and a keylogger to record the username and password for the Amadeus complimentary network.
She pushed the packet to all three. Then waited.
The first device, listed as Reynolds19a_work, was idle. Chaz gave it three minutes, but the keylogger remained blank. The second, O
Gkushmeister23, began generating output almost right away. Device login info, then the Amadeus internet specifics.
Bait, and catch.
She created a virtual profile with a clone of OGkushmeister23’s network address and supplied the Amadeus internet website’s login with the info in the keylogger, and she was in.
In the alley, a woman screamed.
Chaz looked up and saw a man tearing after a girl no older than herself. She wore a dress like a glittery disco ball; her face streamed with tears. One of her stilettos caught in a crack, and that’s all it took. Then the man was turning her over amid her cries for help, squeezing a red liquid out of a dropper into both her eyes, telling her to shut up or he’d go get his friends too.
The red-lace escorts only looked the slightest bit horrified, while that might’ve been genuine curiosity on the bouncer’s face. Entertainment to brighten the dull night.
With the disco-ball dress hiked up and the lady’s defiance now just gurgling noises and twitches in her limbs, the man looked back and saw Chaz watching. He stuck out his tongue and gave her the devil horns like they were at some fucking rave.
Whatever, guy. You do you.
She watched for longer than she needed to, maybe to accept it as some integral, cultural feature of the place, like the local architecture. Crystal City, with its glass-and-ceramic modernism, neon pizzazz, and comfy rape alcoves—a nice postcard to send back to Earth, sunset over the skyline and WISH YOU WERE HERE and all that. Might give the would-be migrators some second thoughts about shipping out to another star system in search of a new job and a fresh start. Or maybe they’d still come. Never mind that half the city sucked on the dole, that the homeless population was higher every time the sun rose, or that living on a new planet introduced previously-unheard-of psychological disorders. They came because, probably like that girl in the disco-ball dress, they didn’t think their lives could get any worse.
Chaz disregarded the grunting and panting and went back to work.
With a direct channel to the hotel network, the job was nearly done. She employed SNIFF_OUT! a second time to uncover the main security network and all the devices bound to it. Now, deciding which one to arrogate. She ignored all devices with a numbered suffix—fortified security terminals were usually electronic suicide. But amadeus_lobby looked interesting.
Network credentials affirmed it was running Mononoke v2.51—the same as Chaz’s tasker, although behind on a few updates. All Mononoke systems came preloaded with OVERLOOK-CE. It was some stupid social-construct experiment that ran in the background and collected user data, such as shopping preferences and media-watching habits. As compensation, OVERLOOK-CE also provided a free and automatic backup storage service. Chaz always made sure to block the permissions for that shit. But she was grinning, because the rat in her head had just found the cheese at the center of the maze.
She copied amadeus_lobby’s network and device info from SNIFF_OUT! and transferred it to CLONEZOID, which would allow her to connect to the OVERLOOK-CE servers. Doing so with the proper credentials would automatically give her tasker the permission to access the entire backup storage library for amadeus_lobby.
All Chaz had to do was send out a request for the latest capture—8.5 hours ago—and wait for the download to finish on a new drive partition, which took all of thirty seconds. Now about the means of accessing the security network…
She typed in the simplest search query that came to mind: “security password.” A chain of locally stored emails from two months ago referred to an update regarding all hotel passwords. The new ones were listed in the email body, including security. Chaz swiped back to OGkushmeister23, brought up a web browser, typed in the security hyperlink from amadeus_lobby’s email, and logged in with the password.
The main security hub popped up.
Now, who’s that lucky lady?
She would have to be quick. Somebody named OGkushmeister23 snooping around in hotel security was going to raise alarms, but at least it wouldn’t be her they’d be coming after. With facial-rec software running in conjunction, she swiped through arrays of hundreds of in-room surveillance cameras, profiles flashing up along the side.
Bottom floor, nothing. Second floor, same. Third floor—
Balcony suite. King-sized bed. Male and female clothes strewn on the furniture. A woman moaning. A sweaty Patrick Letts thrusting. Then finishing, rolling off, reaching for his glasses. The woman sitting up, the sheet pooling in her lap. Small, perky tits.
She looked familiar. Chaz swiped over to her files on Letts. There she was: Barbara Martins, his sixteen-year-old niece.
Huh. Well, ain’t that neat.
Job done. Time for a well-earned smoke.
CHAPTER TWO
The furnace had kicked off prematurely—typical when the landlord was trying to pinch pennies, which meant the hot water was probably not working too. Along with a few wall outlets she had learned long ago to never use. Normally she would get up and turn on the portable electric heater in the corner, but the afterglow was too good to disrupt.
That, and her reservoir wasn’t tapped out yet.
Gina’s mouth was glued in a permanent smile like she was holding back a naughty secret. “Tell me about yourself,” she said, one finger tracing laps around her areola.
The fifth-gen jills had been heralded as the most lifelike yet, their skin a high-quality silicone-and-collagen composite producing the same thermal radiation as that of an adult woman. Subcutaneous threads on a miniaturized sprocket system mimicked the steady vibrations of blood-vessel heartbeats. The hair was lab-grown keratin that could be programmed to curl by inducing tension into microscopic filaments. Adipocytes provided authentic jiggle and bounce. Even the fucking sweat was chemically indistinguishable from the real thing.
Receiving no reply, the jill repeated, “Tell me about yourself.” Then: “I am all yours for thirty-seven more minutes, and I want to know everything there is to know about Charlene McCune.”
Chaz glared at her. “That’s not my name.”
“It is the name—”
“When I tell you my fucking name, that’s my fucking name,” she blurted, raising her voice. “Does acting like a stupid smartass get you off or something?”
The jill started, “What does get me off—”
“Never mind. Shut your fucking mouth. Lie there like you’re dead.”
Gina obliged, though she retained a dirty smile like she welcomed any and all verbal abuse.
Chaz noticed the flatness in the sheet. “Great. There went my fucking hard-on. Good fucking job.”
She rubbed behind her eyes. Doing it with a robot was as no-strings-attached as you could possibly get, and still this smiling bitch had to kill the fucking mood. But jills still had a couple of advantages on their emotional, whiny counterparts: they didn’t drone on about wanting to be veterinarians or cry over having less father-daughter time because Daddy’s job was making him work late shifts.
The chilly room temperature was starting to set in. Chaz selected a half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray and lit it. Then she pulled the sheet up over her breasts. Ever since they’d grown in, she’d thought of them more as tumors. Better if they shriveled up and fell off. She wouldn’t miss them.
The jill, meanwhile, continued to stare with an air of perverse indecision.
“You can talk again,” said Chaz. She held out the cigarette, offering it to Gina.
“I am incapable of benefiting from the effects,” said the jill.
“You can fucking pretend, can’t you?”
Gina took the cigarette, sucked on it, and dabbed it on the rim of the ashtray as if she’d been doing such things her entire life. She was even courteous enough to blow the smoke to the side.
“Tell you about myself,” said Chaz. “That’s what you want?”
“We can talk about whatever pleases you.”
“But that’s what your question was.”
“I will not be hurt if you don’t
answer it, but it excites my entire body to get to know my companions.” The hand that had been tracing circles around her areola now slid between her legs to demonstrate how much the idea supposedly turned her on.
“I’d tell you a fairy tale if I could think of a good one, but that’d be a lie anyway.” Chaz stared into the jill’s unmoving eyes. “That’s what I did when I was younger, you know? When people asked about me. I spun them some fucking fairy tale about how good my life was, how fortunate I was. My father was a big shot, had his own private spaceship or whatever. He’d come out here to Trident and gotten rich from gold. Or diamonds.”
“And in real life?” asked the jill, continuing to massage herself. “Who was your father?”
Chaz shook her head.
“What about your mother?”
“I never knew my mother,” she said. “All I heard was that she was a drug addict, back on Earth. Narcotics and painkillers and that shit. My aunt—who I came here with—said my mother was in prison mostly. She’d get out, last about eight or ten days, go right back in. I guess she met my father inside, but she never told me for sure. My aunt and her didn’t get along.”
“I imagine not,” said Gina. “I also understand why you told people falsehoods.”
“It gets worse.” Chaz took the cigarette back and puffed on it. “Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re both dead by now, my mother and father. I didn’t come out of the womb addicted to anything, so that’s a good start. And my aunt was all right. About the earliest thing I remember was coming here on some huge ship. Big open areas, curving walls, and no outside except these rooms that had sunrises and sunsets in them. They were just videos.”
“To cope with interstellar habitation.”
Chaz nodded. “Anyway, I lived with my aunt on Akerman for a few years before coming down to the mainland. It was supposed to be better here in the city, but it wasn’t. That’s also about the time I got sick.”
The jill raised an eyebrow. “Sick?”
“Gangrene. It was in both legs. Some kind of infection, but I don’t remember what it was. The skin got really dark, and they both swelled up. And they smelled awful. The only way to make sure the infection didn’t spread was to get them chopped off.” Chaz pantomimed a cleaver slice with her hand. “I don’t recall much about the surgery.”