A few net minutes later, he stared at a data object with video of Nina’s surgery, twirling it through his fingers. Joey read enough to learn she had been mangled to the point where a doll body was necessary to keep her alive.
He almost dropped the tile.
As odd as it had been for a little woman to throw him around, he had not suspected it. Enough bad martial arts vids made him think she had some super-secret training. He remembered wondering what kind of awful shape she was in after hearing the audio of their attack. The first nightmare his brain had given him was a twisted wretch in a hover-chair that spoke through a voice box. Nina’s doll body was an order of magnitude more pleasant, so much so that he failed to even consider it a possibility.
He gazed at the surgery file, thinking about the way she looked at New Hope. He drew a heavy breath and put it back in the data construct that it came from. He did not need to see that. Those images were the kind of thing he would never get out of his head as long as he lived. The next file contained information about Vincent as well as the Division 5 interdiction team that saved her life.
Some men might have been put off by the thought of a doll, but something about her made it not matter. Joey rationalized it. She was not the same as one of those sex parlor toys; they were just computers with no emotions. Nina still had a soul and a brain, and Joey was not too big on the idea of having kids anyway. She would never gain weight, get old, or get sick. Ever since he had seen Avril that night, every idle thought he had went back to her.
The dark one chuckled. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
He grinned, daydreaming about sharing living space with such a lethal being. It would be like playing tennis with a live hand grenade; how could he resist? The beeping timer reminded him, and he warped outside to the public net.
A sparkling square of light opened in front of him, chiming in a melodic wave of sound like crystals in the wind. An incoming vid from Alex beckoned, no doubt with a job offer. Joey thought about the Neko-girl at the cybershop; a little more money and he could get the Janus. He shrugged as he accepted. Maybe he could try his luck with the cyberware merchant if Nina did not work out.
“What?” Joey looked at the sanctimonious frown that stared back at him.
Alex spoke for a few minutes in French at Joey’s middle finger.
“Are you done?” He waved the finger back and forth.
Alex switched to English. “When are you going to learn a real language?”
“As soon as you admit you’re a fancy boy.”
“You just refuse to better yourself.”
“You fool yourself into thinking you’re superior to everyone around you. People that know they are don’t have to act.” The dark cowboy tipped his hat to Alex.
Alex waved and made a patronizing eye roll. “I don’t know why I even bother.”
“Because you need me.” The old gunslinger held his arms wide as if waiting for a hug. “What’cha got this time?” Joey adored watching Alex cringe at the sound of his voice.
“Nothing grandiose. You’ll probably fall asleep but it’s a rush job so the pay is respectable. Thirty grand to get two years of health insurance claim information from Triton Manufacturing Corp.”
Joey rubbed his chin. “So, someone wants to see who’s getting hurt at TMC?”
“All claim information for the past two years. They want everything from payee data to a list of who was on the plan and at what level. Also, all communications related to health benefits. Thirty grand for the lot.”
Joey sighed, shaking his head. “Yeah you’re right, that sounds boring as hell. But I suppose I can do it for you; for forty. Boredom tax.”
With a sigh and a nod, Alex disconnected.
TMC manufactured mostly consumer goods and electronics. Their output included holo-bars, datapads, toys, e-razors, NetMinis, and just about every little bit of consumer gadgetry out there. All the things they produced were long established items devoid of innovation or anything requiring great amounts of security. The company was so large and produced so much they did not need to make great leaps forward; just supplying their existing customer base with replacement parts and small upgrades kept them profitable.
The side effect of having little to hide took the form of skimping on network security. Much to Joey’s dismay, he got in with such ease that he almost thought the network public. He walked in through the simulated office and past the workers as if he belonged there, going all the way to the data nodes without so much as a “good evening.” He chuckled at the featureless blue-lined walls of shining black glass. The company had not even bothered to build up the network past the basic grid of cyberspace. He paced in a circle, stared at the roof, and sang off-key while his deck copied files. The expansive data would not fit on his deck’s internal memory. He had to burn it out to a holodisk, a process that would take over an hour of cyberspace time.
With nothing better to do, he examined the network map, playing mental games plotting efficient routes between nodes, factoring interlink speed and hop count until something caught his eye. One hallway, tucked away at the edge of the network, seemed to run around the far northeast on a path to nowhere. That needled at his curiosity and made the waiting even harder to endure.
As soon as the copy was complete, he ran out of the room and sprinted. He left the unfinished gloss-walled interior behind, entering drab white and blue office corridors. Joey jogged past a game room where some employees were winding down, past a video presentation on Korean market share, and through a long hallway full of control nodes for manufacturing equipment. No one bothered to question his presence.
The anomaly took the form of a plain office hallway with no doors that ended at a blank beige wall with a single water cooler propped up against it. The sight bothered him and he stared at the path to nowhere for several minutes until he spotted a tiny crack of light leaking through. The Teradyne Silver ran analysis soft after analysis soft, chewing on one algorithm after another in an effort to scan for any hidden data. In cyberspace, this process animated as the dark cowboy picking at the crack and eventually peeling open a doorway that led to an extravagant corridor covered in pure white marble. Behind him, a door of dark polished wood clicked shut.
The opulence reminded him of the approach to the executive bathrooms in a high-end corporate headquarters. His boots echoed as he walked down the length of fanciness, folding his hands behind him in a mimic of a corporate fat cat. His stride ended with an abrupt bang that reverberated as his chin led the way into an invisible barrier. Nanoseconds later, red letters appeared in front of him in midair: “Access Denied.”
“Fucking hate security interconnects.” Joey rubbed his nose as he sent mental commands to his deck to begin attacking the protections.
To Joey’s delight, the hallway was a bit on the difficult side. Whatever waited at the end was something not meant to be seen by anyone but whoever put it there.
A silver revolver flew up from the dark cowboy’s hip and spun into firing position. Joey’s mind called on a Cryptomancer soft; thousands of gossamer silver threads stretched from the old one’s hair as the program reached into the unrefreshed memory buffers of every terminal on the net, searching for fragments of passwords. He sighted down the barrel. A single bullet in the shape of a vaporous black skull flew into the air and froze in space. Subconsciously, Joey combined the results with another routine to spoof credentials or fake out the detection algorithm. When he found one that worked, the bullet streaked forward and shattered the glass wall. Strewn bits of broken glass shimmered from red to green, as fragmented letters attempted to spell “Access Granted.”
He ducked under spinning shards of false glass that reintegrated into a solid barrier behind him. At the end of the corridor, a heavy chrome door seemed out of place against the marble and wood. It looked like a bank vault, a translation of its security. He grabbed the frame and forced himself at it. Pixilation happened at his fingertips as solid steel gave way to green grid lin
es and flickering text. Flashes of light washed over the old man’s face as he strained, tracing circuit paths beneath thin venous cheeks. The door did not yield, but a distant noise alerted him to a fast approaching network trace.
Trace constructs ran from the nearest security node towards the location of an unexpected event. One was on their way here. His knowledge that the network would go into alarm mode if it saw him turned into fear. If he remained inside when that happened, the company’s security men would know where he was in the real world; and then he would need a new apartment.
He threw a pair of brute force constructs at the door, manifesting as overweight ranch hands with lever-action rifles. They ‘shot’ it, attempting to overload the security routines with random codes that changed based on how the system reacted. Red glowing light welled up from the other side of hall. The dark one sank his fingers into the steel, roaring at it. It did not yield. The light intensified as the trace rounded the corner. A mass formed the approximation of a human form, made of swirling strands of glowing text. It floated closer, tinting the white marble with castoff light.
Joey screamed with anger and slammed himself into the door one last time. His skin melted and stuck to the metal, a plastic man on a hot plate. One of the dozen infiltration routines slipped through the crypto and his body phased through it. Liquid flesh seeped through steel like a sponge, exuding on the other side and dumping him in a heap.
The riflemen evaporated.
The trace slid up to the empty space where he once stood, head swiveling left and right. Sensing nothing awry, it de-spawned. Threads of crimson letters unwound and dissipated.
The old one dusted himself off, lifting an eyebrow at a row of ordinary-looking file cabinets. It appeared to contain data, but had a partition node attribute. Most network designers used partition nodes to store purposeless things such as hobby rooms or games, not data.
The temptation to look through them was irresistible.
Joey opened the nearest one and sifted through tiles. The more he read, the wider his eyes became. Thousands of records showed TMC had engaged in a clandestine business relationship with another company, Naturahealth Pharmaceuticals. From the looks of it, TMC would schedule its employees for routine competency tests or computer based training sessions during which they would be knocked out with gas. Once unconscious, NatPhar borrowed them for use as human test subjects involving all manner of experimental medical technology. Hours later, they would wake up back at their desk, unaware of what happened.
Joey froze. He remembered Kenny’s wife had worked for TMC before she went crazy. He fired off a DataMole with the order to search for the name Cathy Marlon. As soon as it returned with a file in its mouth, Joey’s heart sank. He took the tile, holding it limp at his side for a moment until he found the urge to look.
Her experiment involved a developmental anti-addiction treatment. They conditioned her to crave E-14 and then tried the test procedure. A lot of the medical jargon and stats went right over Joey’s head, but he could at least get out of it that their test backfired and made the addiction worse, making E-14 as addictive as Lace.
It was anyone’s guess how many of these unwilling test subjects suffered mystery ailments. Once again, he held data that could make him a lot of money if he could make himself mercenary enough to sell it.
“Dammit, Dad.”
He would feel guilty for not exposing them. Now he understood why someone had hired him to get the claim data; someone else, probably a PI or a lawyer, was looking to build a lawsuit.
Joey’s brain told his deck to place a vid call.
Kenny’s head appeared in front of him. “Yo? What’s up?”
“Hey man. It’s time for me to repay all the favors you do for me.”
“Are you okay?” Kenny leaned in, offering a concerned expression at Joey’s absent mirth.
Joey threw the data tile at Kenny’s head, sending the file over the line to Kenny’s NetMini. It hung there for a moment and then boomeranged back to his hand.
“I know what happened to Cathy. Read that. There’s a lot of medical bullshit in there, maybe someone can use it to help her.”
“What?” Kenny’s face flushed. “What are you talking about?”
Joey sighed. “Her old employer rented her to a pharma corp to be used as a guinea pig without her knowledge. They made her addicted to E-14 on purpose and fucked it up bad when they tested a cure.”
A loud smash preceded Alyssa’s startled shriek in the background.
The digital Kenny reintegrated as he walked back over to the VidPhone. “Thanks… I gotta go.”
“I’ll stop by soo”―the line dropped.
He opened another panel, which rang for a long time and ended without answer. He tried again; this time an attractive young blonde appeared and almost shrieked at the sight of the old gunslinger.
“Who the hell are you?”
Letting his avatar shift back to his real face, he smiled. “Remember me?”
Kimberly Brightman stared. She knew the face but could not remember why. “No… How did you get my number?”
“I have my ways.” He smiled. “Let’s just say that I gave you a ride home.”
“Oh!” Her composure faltered; red tinted around her eyes as she sank into a nearby chair. “I never got your name…”
“Joey. Hey, I found some stuff you might be interested in putting on the bots. About time you one upped that dried up old bitch.” He explained what he knew about her trip to the Badlands being Donna’s idea.
Kimberly broke down in tears. “That’s true? I saw it on the tabloids, but you know…”
“Once you get your face on this story, no one will remember her.” He hurled the entire file cabinet into her image.
Her crying abated as she paged through the data. “Oh my god… Is this for real?”
Joey tipped his hat. “I trust you know what to do with it?”
Kimberly scrambled at her terminal. “I have to meet you. What’s your PID, where can I find you?”
“Sure, we’ll figure out a―”
With a concussive explosion, the door to the secret room disintegrated in a rain of steel fragments as a cloud of digital smoke billowed from the space it once stood. A man in a black tank top and grey-on-white camo pants walked in with a fatalistic glare. Joey knew the face; he had spent an hour talking about him with Nina.
Itai Korin.
“Something tells me you’re not here for this.” Joey waved the data. “Kim, let me call you back.”
Itai clenched his fists as muscular arms bulged. “I know you talked to the police. I can’t have you helping them.”
Baggy pants obscured the exact position of Itai’s legs as he circled. He had no visible weapons but that meant nothing here.
“Guess you’re not too creative a guy… no special avatar?” Joey leaned back and flung his coat off his holsters.
Itai’s head tilted down. “Time to grow up, boy. No more cowboys and Indians.”
The laugh that Joey summoned in response never came out of his mouth. Itai turned into a blur of color led by a fist. Joey scraped out of the path by a split second. Red hexagons flashed in the corner of his eye, warning him of CPU heat. Joey had not expected such a dangerous attack from an ex-commando. Itai landed, shattering the file cabinet and filling the air with a snow of white fragments and scattering data tiles. Joey felt a spider of pain pick through his mind as wiring overloaded with his deck’s attempt to arrest the incoming harmful data.
Itai stood up from the crater, spinning on his heels with a military pivot. Joey fired, but the commando swatted the smoking skull away as if it was a child’s toy. Fragments of filing cabinet snowed, pausing in time as the dark cowboy raised the silver pistol again. Itai vanished and appeared to the gunslinger’s left. The backhand strike caught him across the face and smeared the old man into a long stripe of color on the wall, fringed with sparks and disintegrating pixels. Error text burned into Joey’s retinas as the scent
of burned silicon flooded his nostrils. Blue cartoon microchips with bug eyes danced in the upper right of his vision; warning that much of his buffer space had just physically burned out.
Only once had Joey been hit like that before―on Mars. Itai must be using one mother of a deck to hit that hard. The piece of shit Teradyne Silver, Grade 3, would not withstand another barrage that potent. He peeled himself away from the wall and the flat cowboy condensed back to normal. He tried to disconnect but something Itai had done prevented the logout. A trace of panic rose in the back of Joey’s mind; he had not seen Itai use a Flypaper soft, and the running programs list did not show one active on him.
Joey hated not understanding things.
If Itai caught him again, he would wake up in the real world break-dancing with a fried deck. Of course, as damaged as his deck was, he had become vulnerable to Black ICE, which could kill him for real. He had no idea if Itai had that capability, but it was not a risk he wanted to take. He ran out of the room, sending a few more shots Itai’s way, but the Israeli just walked through them like smoke rings.
It made sense how angry and confused Nina had been at not being able to find him. The list of hackers that could bitch slap him like this was a short one. He assumed that Proscion could, if reputation was to be believed, but he had previously operated under the hope that anyone that made the list would have the courtesy to be a career hacker, not a part time soldier. The mere thought that a “dabbler” was a serious threat made his blood boil.
This had to be someone else just making himself look like the Israeli.
Itai followed him into the hallway, the slow plodding walk of a killer from a horror vid. Despite Joey’s sprinting, Itai’s deliberate pace never seemed to be any farther away. The third time he looked over his shoulder, a massive sniper rifle phased into existence in Itai’s hands; appearing first as a blue wireframe before it became indistinguishable from reality. Joey leapt, calling a Bunnyrabbit soft to boost his leap. The program lag-spiked the network segment, except for Joey, creating a short burst of net speed that threw him around the next corner, in a hail of slow motion environment fragments from Itai’s shot.
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