Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Grey zone? Near Sector 12?” Nina wanted to wound someone. She was just there.

  “Affirmative, Ma’am.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as this site is secured. Stay on him and let me know if he does anything. If he so much as jerks off, I want to know about it.”

  “Um… I’ll assume you’re being figurative there Lieutenant.”

  espite sealed tanks, the wall of a truck, and two hours, the powerful chemical stench still permeated Joey’s senses. He was glad to be home again and hoping a little rest would take the red out of his eyes and the burn from his throat. It did not occur to him as strange to see Pinky face down on the ground by the bike. Even the little bit of blood around his nose seemed natural.

  Stumbling through the door of his apartment, he lamented the dead shower for a moment before he stopped and turned. He did not have to squeeze through a small gap. The sight of the wide-open door chased his fatigue away and brought his gun out.

  “Dammit. What the fuck do those WellTech shitheads want now?”

  Somehow, the scent of ballistic propellant pierced the chemical mask in his nose. A quick glance around showed no obvious quantities of blood or gore, though the condition of the VidPhone made him gaze at the ceiling. The screen had an enormous hole in the center, from which a V shaped absence of material spread upwards. The displaced matter was little more than silicon dust showered on the table below the unit.

  He sauntered over, shaking his head. “Aww… what the fuck. Why would someone do that?”

  This apartment grew more and more intolerable by the week. The senseless death of yet another piece of technology validated his habit of always carrying his deck. The crisp beep of his NetMini pierced the silence and made him jump. An incoming vid call turned out to be Cassidy Rivera; the fringer chick he met at New Hope. She looked more or less the same as her net avatar, a common thing for ‘utility’ users as he called them―scrubs that dwelled only at the outer surface of cyberspace, unaware of its true expanse.

  Green-purple smears of eyeliner ran down her cheeks and she trembled, huddled in a public VidPhone. Joey leaned back and let all the air out of his lungs while he continued trying to glare a hole in the ceiling. He swallowed the frustration and put on a concerned face as he reminded himself he offered to let her call him if she needed anything.

  “What’s wrong Cass?”

  “Mary! She just called me. I was just talking to her. She told me that The Russian is coming for me!” She appeared to be on the verge of vomiting from fear, and her voice was so shaky it made her difficult to understand.

  “Okay take a breath. Relax. Where are you?”

  She peeked behind her before whispering. “I’m at a PubTran on the corner of CR 1144 and Newsom Street.”

  “City road 1144… Okay, great. That’s a public place. Remember that The Russian always ambushes women in dark alleys near grey zones. It’s bullshit that he’s looking just for you. He’s an opportunistic predator.”

  She shrank into herself, shivering. “How can you be so sure?”

  “The police keep wonderfully detailed files. By the way, I have some news for you, but I don’t want to give it to you over the phone. Can you hold on till I get there?”

  “I guess.”

  “Stay there.” Joey hung up, grabbed his deck, and went out the door.

  A strange watched feeling came over him fifteen minutes later as he entered the PubTran terminal. He felt a presence staring at him from across the street, but nothing seemed to be there. Cassidy ran over, stopping short of grabbing him, and stood as close as she could get without touching.

  Frayed fingerless gloves rubbed up and down white and black striped sleeves. He put an arm around her and felt her tense at the contact. A copious helping of cheap perfume masked the truth that she had not known the inside of a shower in months. He walked with her into the café and ordered a pair of standard cheeseburger platters and an extra-large coffee for himself; reassembled OmniSoy ‘beef’ covered with sim-cheese, but at least it was edible. He tapped away on his NetMini for a moment as they found a table, smiling at her before putting it back in his pocket.

  “Go ahead, eat.” Joey nudged the plate at her.

  She shook her head. “Are you nuts? I’m too wound up to eat. Why were you looking back like that when you walked in? Is he out there?”

  Joey did not want to tell her that he felt like someone followed him or even that he just felt watched. “I always do that. I’m used to living in the shitty part of town and I often get mistaken for a girl from behind.” He chuckled.

  She laughed nervously. “Maybe cut your hair?”

  “Blasphemer!” He shouted with false indignation, pointing at her in a mockery of a priest.

  Several people looked at him.

  A hint of pink ran around the edge of her black lip gloss; he noticed it as she finally smiled a little.

  “So I did a little poking around Cyberspace on your behalf, but…”

  “But what?” She leaned forward and grabbed his hand, stalling his next bite.

  Joey made a few faces as he tried to think of a gentle way to say it, but gave up. “I won’t sugar coat it. You’re going to feel like a dumbass and cry like a five year old… and probably have a total meltdown.”

  “What is it?” She jumped out of the chair. “Stop fucking with me.” Her face shifted through fear, sadness, and anger to the point he thought she was about to pass out.

  A delivery bot interrupted the moment, whizzing around the room before floating up to him. It seemed to sniff at his NetMini before its hatch popped open. All the while, a tinny advert jingle warbled from a little speaker hanging on bare wires from its undercarriage. He took a blue autoinjector out of its compartment. He spun it over his fingers, flicking the safety cap off in one practiced move, and jabbed Cassidy in the thigh with it. The unexpected coldness in her leg knocked her back into the seat.

  “Ow!” She clamped her hands over the spot. “What the fuck?”

  Her face turned green and her eyes lost focus. A few mild convulsions rippled through her and she broke out in a cold sweat. Within a minute, she bent forward with her arm in her gut. When the convulsions ceased, he held up the empty autoinjector so she could see the label. It was a multi-cure for about four hundred and change known diseases―everything from the flu to Aids to the Q virus.

  “Fuck you, too.” She shoved herself standing.

  Guilt at needing it softened her resentment. Her body’s visible reaction proved it cured at least one malady.

  “Sometime within the next hour, you’re gonna melt a toilet bowl.”

  She kept glaring at him, in too much discomfort to move. “Yeah, more like now…”

  “Just helping you out. Those things are―”

  “A thousand credits, I know.” She cut him off and started to cry. “It would have been cheaper to just call me a worthless piece of shit.”

  Cassidy ambled off in a hybrid gait of pee dance mixed with drunken stagger. Joey leaned on his arm, nibbling at the food and laughing as a few other women scurried out of the bathroom with hands over their mouths. A few minutes later, the girl dragged herself back to the table, looking exhausted.

  “Oh just fuckin’ eat already. I really don’t give a rat’s ass that you were a working girl. We all gotta do what we gotta do to survive. I’d rather not catch whatever you had when I tell you what I have to tell you. Forget The Russian, he has no idea who you are.”

  He dodged her question about the news and made it a point to hold the information over her head until she ate; talking at length about The Russian’s hunting practices. When she finished the burger, he took her hand and held on.

  “Okay, this is gonna be hard to hear. I would have told you sooner, but I got distracted by a nice fat, easy job I couldn’t say no to.”

  She stared as a tremble of anticipation went through her.

  “Your mother has been searching for you for three years.”

  The color dra
ined from her face. “What?”

  “They got divorced about a week after your father kicked you out. She tried to get him charged with child abuse and has spent about twenty grand on private investigators looking for you.”

  Cassidy covered her mouth with both hands, shaking as she cried without sound for a minute before the words sank in enough to cause sobbing. The news that her mother still loved her had not been enough of a counterweight to how stupid she felt for assuming both parents hated her. The thought she could have avoided the last three years on the street bending over for anyone with a cred stick made the cheeseburger flip over in her gut.

  “I didn’t tell her what you were doing.”

  A middle-aged Hispanic woman appeared at the café entrance, so frantic in her attempt to enter that she pulled on a push door.

  “I called her on my way here.” Joey made a ‘push’ gesture at her.

  Cassidy shrank into herself, unable to look up as her mother swooped in and fell on her with apologies.

  Joey stood, slinging the deck over his shoulder. “Cassidy? One more thing.”

  They both looked at him.

  “The person calling you and claiming to be your dead friend is not her. Someone is dicking with us both. Ignore it. I will find the son of a bitch.”

  He felt pleased with himself the entire ride back to his shithole. He wondered if his bitch of a sister had ever once helped someone without being paid for it.

  A hand seized Joey’s coat as he walked through the door, accelerating his entry to the apartment. His scream continued until his back slammed into the wall and he slid to the ground. The shock stunned him silent. Nina stepped into his view, glaring.

  “I’m sorry, was I drunk? Did I forget to pay?” He rubbed the back of his head.

  Her eyes boiled with rage. This guy sure had a mouth on him. Now she knew how Donny and Alvin felt when they smacked a perp around. She reminded herself she could liquefy him if she lost control.

  “How long did you think it would take us to find you?”

  Joey’s heart stopped. Please don’t be Mars.

  “Mars?” He offered a cute whisper, trying to look as innocent as he could.

  Nina blinked. “Mars? No. This has nothing to do with Mars.”

  He relaxed, closing his eyes with a big dumb grin. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, dickhead. You might be a big man in cyberspace but your ass is all mine here.”

  “Well hey, all you had to do was ask.” Joey started to pull his coat off. “The place is a little messy, but the couch is big enough.”

  She flung him out of the coat into the sofa, which flipped onto its back as it sent an explosion of trash into the air. Joey slithered onto floor behind it, skidding on his chin. Nina dropped the coat, and stalked after him.

  “Ouch.” He pushed himself up to a kneeling position. “I usually don’t go for the rough stuff, but if you want me to tie you up… I could get into that.”

  His smile fell to a flat line as Nina leveled her gun at him. “Knock it off.” She took a step closer. “Tell me about the Silver hack. Ponder your words carefully; they may be your last.”

  Joey tried to wrap his brain around the size of the gun in this woman’s hand. His eyes flitted back and forth from the barrel to her face and back again. It hit him who this must be. “Nina?”

  “Well you aren’t as stupid as you look, are you?”

  Joey chuckled. “Nice hand-howitzer. If you were a man, I’d accuse you of compensating. How can you even fire that monster? You must have a shitload of recoil compensators on that fucker.”

  “Something like that.”

  Joey pushed the seat back on its legs, kneeling behind it. “Are you here to tell me why your voice came out of my deck?”

  “I’m here to ask you about some of your friends.”

  “Aww shit, what did Katya do now?”

  “I mean Anatoly Nemsky and Itai Korin.”

  Joey sat back on his heels and raised his hands in a gesture of confusion. “Who?”

  “Really?”

  Above Nina’s palm, a hologram appeared. Joey, Masaru, and Katya walked into Sector 12 and met Anatoly for a brief handshake.

  “Bullshit!” He waved. “That dude wasn’t there; it was just the three of us.”

  “We’ve already checked. The Karsson-Neimand passed.”

  Joey made a pained grimace. “That’s not possible. That giant meat wall was not there. Ask Masaru or Katya.”

  “I will, eventually.” She switched videos and showed footage of him dropping off the chemicals to Rafi. “What about this guy, was he not there either?”

  “Rafi, right?” He nodded. “He works for Green Dot Chemical. We pulled a contract job to recover stolen chems. Rafi was the company drop off man.” Joey brushed his hand over his shirt. “Damn that shit stank, I can still smell it.”

  Nina lost a little faith in her lie detection cyberware. “Rafi doesn’t work for Green Dot. You’re either an incredibly talented liar or…”

  “The job was a setup?” Joey climbed over the couch and sat on it. “Katya said something about this penthouse thing that Alex gave her. She said it paid a lot of money for something real stupid easy… just like the one at the dock.”

  Nina made a mental note that the unknown woman went by the name Katya. “We saw this woman meeting with both Korin as well as Nemsky.”

  He explained the peculiar instructions of that job, about how she was supposed to lean forward to blow out a candle.

  “Look at her, that doesn’t look like a very good kiss… if you were going to kiss someone why lean over the middle of the table to do it?” Joey paused for a breath and leaned back, putting a hand on his forehead. “Let me guess, the Karsson-Neimand checked out there too?” Something caught his eye, and he held up a hand. “Hey, play that again, and slow it down.”

  She did. He crept up to the hologram until it changed the color of his face.

  “Look at that, at the plates, more specifically at their shadows. They’re shifting like there’s a candle flame but there’s none on the table.” Joey puffed his chest with the indignation of being right.

  Nina grumbled. “Yes.” She had her doubts too, ever since the video from the diplomatic tower showed Itai but the Division 9 cameras did not. “Karsson-Neimand was supposed to be foolproof.”

  Joey paced. “Well, video files like this used to be only a few megabytes, not the dozens of terabytes they are now. Some of the increase is due to the extra data required for holograms but Karsson-Neimand makes them much bigger. Every pixel has a timestamp code that takes up about eight times the amount of data as the pixel definition. The frames are broken up in sets of twenty and every set is out of order in a precise way based on a random seed value generated with the time of recording. When the file is played back, the K-N encoding tells the player how to reorder the images and then compares a recalculated check number against the stored value for each pixel. If any pixels fail, it is a sign that the video was edited. It would be a whore and a half to fake it.”

  Nina slid her weapon back into its holster. “I know how Karsson-Neimand works. Doctor Neimand spoke at a lecture I attended once.”

  Joey laughed. “Just when people started to trust video again… Someone found a way around it. Are you ready for another wave of paranoia?”

  Nina looked around for something to destroy. She wanted to beat this guy to a pulp for murdering Vincent, as well as her dreams. It had all fit so well in her mind that she was inches away from killing him just because it made so much sense. Now that she talked to him, Hayley’s words rang true. Joey seemed like a pawn of something bigger.

  Nina grilled him for hours about everything it appeared that he had been doing for Nemsky or Korin. Joey’s explanations made her angrier, not because he lied, but because he destroyed her theory of events and it meant starting all over yet again.

  Joey enjoyed her presence. Aside from being a little taller and lot less innocent looking, N
ina and Avril were quite similar in appearance. He imagined her in that dress with longer hair, and her voice trailed off into an unrecognizable warble as he just stared.

  “Tell me about the god damn silver hack! Why was my patrol route changed?” She had slammed him into the wall again and held him nose to nose. “Are you even paying attention to me?” She looked angry and at the same time seemed on the verge of tears.

  Joey kissed her on the tip of the nose. “No, not really. I was just picturing you in that fancy dress you wore to New Hope. You are so beautiful my brain shut down.”

  She dropped him and looked away.

  “Before you break anything else, the Silver Hack wasn’t me. I don’t think I’m that good; especially not with this piece of shit Teradyne 3. Why would I change your patrol route, I don’t even know you.”

  She crossed her arms, and looked at him with a furrowed brow. No hacker she ever encountered liked admitting a challenge exceeded their ability, and that damned system told her he was being truthful.

  “I didn’t mean to bring Vincent up and piss you off that night. Sounds came out of my deck a few days ago. Someone lifted your comm chatter.” Joey glanced away at the wall. “My dead father has been talking to me too.”

  “He’s dead?” She gawked with incredulity. “I spoke to him just a little while ago.”

  “You could say the same for Vincent, I bet.” He tilted his head. “Where did you run into my dad?”

  Nina looked at the destroyed VidPhone. “I don’t remember… he just called me.”

  Joey held his arm out at the device. “What the hell did he say that made you shoot my phone?”

  “Some lies about Vincent. Did you talk to your father at all about him?”

  “No, I try not to talk to him too much. Our conversations are much the same as when I was fourteen. Mostly him rambling on endlessly with me saying “yeah” and “uh huh” often enough to trick him into thinking I’m listening. Someone is dicking with me through cyberspace. I’ve been trying to figure out who it is.”