by Lee Bond
“Shit.” Garth had no problems taking risks against his own hide, but now Jimmy was involved. There was a slim chance he could repay the Brothers Grimm for their time and lost revenue, but it barely mattered; where they’d once ignored their commanding officers, they’d definitely find reason to play nasty now.
Garth settled into his chair. If he was going to hand himself over willingly to the very same people who’d been after him since day one, it was a good idea to learn everything he could about the Portsiders. Since there was plenty of time before Jimmy showed up, info-gathering and MilInt prote-familiarization was just the ticket for keeping occupied.
Remembering one of his oft written, constantly forgotten mental notes, Garth first decided to check the underside of his proteus. He popped the locks open and flipped it over so he could look at the inner brace. Along the longest portion of the prote that came in direct contact with skin was a series of ten discolored dots. It took only a matter of seconds to discover their purpose; dots generated a minute pulse against the skin. The dots could create a variety of codes as complex as any encrypted cypher. The wearer could receive warning of imminent danger, compromised data, anything that the code-writer deemed important, all without using the netLINKs. Brilliant.
Wondering what other tricks his proteus could do, Garth picked a random menu.
One of the more interesting features was a visual modification program that came with an array of preset faces that he could use as ‘real life’ avatars. It was mostly for nerds and other shy people and you could obviously tell you were talking to a remote-controlled avatar, but the agency Garth was ‘working for’ had taken it one step further by constructing a hardware add-on. If an agent felt like going out of pocket, a portable scanner that fit onto the proteus was available from an intelligence service store. With it, he could digitally map his own face –including all the various twitches, squints, and whatever his face got up to without his permission- into the prote. From there, the software could tweak his phizz into any mold he wanted and no one would be the wiser. The hardware add-on bolstered the façade a great deal, rendering the new face so perfectly that very few people could catch on.
Seeing limitless uses for a tool like that, Garth eagerly ordered one of the devices. Smug, he resumed noodling around in the MilInt prote’s deeper functions.
Hospitalis was a world laden with relay systems that transmitted both endless volumes of data and encrypted verbal communications between people and groups, but he discovered –in his own prote, no less- a log program that stored all his conversations. A program that would, if his own prote wasn’t fully under his own control, transmit said data through to the nearest relay and from thence to who-knew-where. His log program was more flexible; a bit of finagling and he was able to remote-access any relay station on the planet.
Within minutes, he was staring at a list ten million lines long, each one representing a Latelian man, woman or child who’d used his or her prote to talk to someone in the last six hours. Clicking on a name revealed the form of encryption used, clicking on that data ran a cypher program and voila! Transcribed notes of the conversation, along with hypertextual examination of key elements and words. And that was just in Central.
Obviously, should two prote-wearers be sitting in the same room less than four or five feet apart, their conversation and data transmitted wouldn’t pass through local routers or relay stations –instead relying on in-built wireless transceivers- but still. The staggering violation of privacy surprised the hell out of Garth. Despite being in a Regimist technocracy under the direct control of a ‘friendly’ dictator, it was fucking hard to imagine even the staunchest government supporters sitting idly on the fence if a whiff of how much of their daily lives were monitored reached their noses. He couldn’t pick out a politico’s name out of the list off the top of his head and neither did he want to noodle around in exterior systems; if someone was watching, they’d’ve seen his entrance into the local relay station’s primary and could be waiting for him to fool around.
No thanks.
Garth decided he was going to be miserly with his conversations, even with Lady Ha’s protective programming.
Concluding that he could spend the rest of the night goofing around with his brand new toy, Garth switched gears and got down to business.
Regardless of intent, it took the better part of an hour before fidning a hack-avatar that could rip and strip a target proteus clean of everything. Similar to the log-bot, the hack could remote-access a civilian proteus, tearing all prote-signs, prote-site addresses, personally entered data, everything from the hard drives, erasing said machine in the process or leaving it untouched. You could even burn the system if you were of a mind, melting a geek’s prote right there on his arm. The avatar scanned recovered data for signatures earmarked by whatever agency you worked for, whereupon the process was repeated as it leapfrogged from prote to prote. None of the ‘stolen’ data was admissible as evidence because that fragile illusion of utter privacy would be shattered. The only thing that effort could do for an agent –or a crazy-ass foreigner looking to stir up some shit- was point him or her in the right direction so they could accumulate legitimate information.
Since Garth didn’t give a rat’s ass about legality or legitimacy, he was going to burn his way through the Portsiders’ protes like napalm. The only problem was the program’s protocols; he couldn’t hack those and they restricted the avatar’s ‘speed’ because it’d been built to protect undercover agents. Its relative speed was like a three year old crawling across a floor covered in broken glass. Still, it was a start.
While the avatar started chewing its way through Jimmy’s contact list, Garth started noodling through his prote again, looking for secrets. In no time at all, the secrets of a technocratic tyranny were illuminated.
There were agents authorized to summon God soldier airstrikes; right that moment in geosynchronous orbit above Hospitalis, forty thousand soldiers locked into stasis in gigantic OIPS, silently dreamed of crushing and killing. The Orbital Insertion Pods could put hundreds of the crazed cybernetic soldiers anywhere on the planet in under five minutes.
Other agents had permission to use missile plateaus or to activate the rail cannons embankments, all at their own discretion. It was appalling that a society as pro-loyalty as the Latelians should unwittingly invest a lone person operating outside a normal, ordered environment with such authorities. Garth understood the idea behind a ‘tyranny’ or a despotic leader well; tyrannies, regimes and dictatorships were the rule du jour on the other side of the Cordon and he knew the smell all too well. What disturbed him was everyone’s adherence to the belief that everything was fine when it obviously wasn’t.
Chairwoman Doans’ thrust to bring Latelyspace under the Trinity AI’s relatively ‘lax’ method of rule was beginning to make an awful lot of sense, even if her methods were inscrutable.
Worse than all of that combined were lists of blacked-out software programs available for use only by agents referred to as ‘BCU operatives’; Garth couldn’t decipher the acronym and didn’t need to. Just reading over the types of things these operatives were able to do explained exactly what they were, and it was … disgusting. There were ‘men’ and ‘women’ abroad in Latelyspace capable of manipulating implants under their skin to essentially change their bodies and faces at will. Aided by a vastly more complex form of facial recognition software they could literally change their height, shape, and, if given enough time even their sex. They were chameleons, their sole task rooting out internal corruption or disloyalty, their target, anyone at all. A five-year-old kid, a ninety-year-old gaffer. Politicians and dockworkers, cops and robbers.
Garth disagreed with –no, hated with extreme abhorrence- almost every decision the Trinity AI had made over the last thirty thousand years, specifically those concerning radical sciences like nanotechnology, the prohibition of engine tech, and the violation of the machine/mind interface, but Latelians…. They were using thei
r sovereign status to do whatever the hell they wanted to one another, and were apathetic over the tragedies and sorrows their meddling created. Ordinarily he wasn’t one to give a shit either way what people wanted to do to themselves or others, but if even one of the agents plugged into an orbital array decided he didn’t like the skyline or if a BCU decided they wanted to play Chairperson, Latelyspace would be in troubled waters.
Without Huey, treading in the espionage-thick waters of Hospitalis called for skill and patience. Two things he might not have enough of if he wanted to survive.
Swallowing a burst of panicky nausea, Garth bent himself back to his own task.
xxx
An hour later, Garth saw the pattern he’d known was there all along. He finally understood how -on a world where people were tracked and monitored and identified in a million different ways by their neighbors and best friends- a gang like the Portsiders could take on the shape they had; Corporate sponsorship.
It was the only answer that made sense, and now he had ‘proof’.
A telecommunications system as overburdened as the one the in place on Hospitalis would always be prey to random data loss, rolling node brownouts, data corruption and a hundred other things he probably couldn’t even think of so there’d been a slender chance that the Portsider’s relative invisibility had been nothing more than a cunning manipulation of those problems.
But it wasn’t that.
Further aiding their camouflage could’ve been miscommunication between departments and rivalry between agents.
But it wasn’t that either.
Even if all you took all that and a million other random possibilities into consideration, you could not ignore the fact that everyone in the Portsider gang wore no-stick Underoos. They had the Teflon Don beat for flying under the radar and brushing off arrest warrants.
Random arrests and sacrificial lambs were tossed onto agency laps whenever officials started to get antsy in the pants, and on paper, it looked good. Really good. A dozen arrests here, a major pile of drugs confiscated there, a few murders solved … it was enough to let everyone think they were doing a damn fine job, but the reality was very different indeed. Garth had spent a lot of time dealing with seriously organized crime across the Cordon, systemic badasses with hardcore skills, so he knew it’d was going to make more than a few hundred arrests a year to break the Portsiders down.
Before going extra-planetary and then systemic, there simply wasn’t a gang in the Universe that could remain untouched as long as the Portsiders had without someone very high up on the food chain keeping them out of jail. It just didn’t happen any other way.
Chairwoman Doans’ frequent use of her God soldier army was making more and more sense. Hog-tied by the invisible kingpin’s ability to make people or evidence vanish, she was doing the only thing that made any sense. When the God soldiers waded in to dispense their blood-intensive method of peacekeeping, Doans was sending a message to anyone and everyone who thought they were in control: she was no longer interested in prisoners. Human nature being what it was, eventually one of the invisible hands would panic or get pissed off and make a mistake and then that would be that.
If Trinity really was sniffing around the edges of friendly absorption, a group like the Portsiders could make things turn sour in a hurry, quicker still if it looked as though Doans couldn’t handle her own problems. Further, she’d adopted or enforced current policing methods in an effort to prove that she could run things on a decidedly non-totalitarian platform, making for hard going indeed; law enforcement in Latelyspace had become severely hampered with the introduction of democratic ideals.
The prote binged its completion of the chore. The first, most obvious was Jimmy’s innocence; the cabbie’s prote had probably the lowest number of gangster prote-sigs of anyone living in Porttown. Since Jimmy’s good guy persona wasn’t an act, he was going to become very wealthy when everything settled. Garth felt horrible about manipulating the happy-go-lucky guy and didn’t know any other way to make things right.
Jimmy’s wife Vernita, on the other hand, was a different story.
Her prote ran chapter and verse like a Portsider charter. Every time the hack avatar came across a flagged sig, a three-dee holo popped up with the criminal’s face and a list of outstanding warrants. It got to the point where Garth had to suspend that particular function in order to get through the rest of the info before the end of the millennium. She might not be in the Portsiders, but she was in regular contact with dozens of them.
Vernita’s brothers Jamal and Aaron were lieutenants in the Portsider Army. Through careful examination of their comm-logs, Garth was able to piece together a pretty decent travelogue the two men took. From that, he came up with a reasonable location for the Portsider main hangout. Since now was not the time to beard the lions in their den, Garth petitioned one of the many geosynchronous satellites for a six-month old chunk of surveillance footage from that area, irately going through the process of dealing with the ‘warn-bot’ that had started showing its face the moment the search hit deep waters. The sole purpose of the smiling, cheery-faced hunk of code was to inform him that the data he required would require a legally issued warrant if anything he learned was to be admissible as evidence. Since he was asking for a veritable ton of ‘unwarranted’ material, it popped up every few minutes.
Clicking patiently through the half-dozen ‘are you sures’ that popped up, Garth downloaded the slice of footage then jumped off the server. If stronger measures were called for, surveillance data would go a long way towards making the assault difficult to stop. Agents and God soldiers might not be able to use the information they had at their disposal because it was too weak, but Garth didn’t care. This shit with the Portsiders was going to stop before it took up any more of his time.
Thankfully, his proteus was up-to-date –an oversight on Terrance’s part but a beneficial one-, so reading up on the Brothers Grimm didn’t require logging on to any other servers. He was about to settle in for some light reading when yet another warn-bot appeared. This one asked if he wanted to check for updates, which meant routine pings back to the home servers had detected new activity for Jamal and Aaron. The temptation was strong to see how effective Lady Ha’s work was, but then again, there was foolish and then there was foolish. A quick ‘no’ and he was on his way.
The two brothers were nasty and intelligent. Their suspected crimes dossier read like a lurid crime novel from the 20th century. There was nothing new in that –every Portsider was part homicidal maniac-, but unlike most of the other suspected looeys in the employ of the Portsider Grand Poobah, Aaron and Jamal had free reign over their territory. Given this relative freedom, they enjoyed the luxury of their own small group of fiendishly devoted goons, a lower rate of incidental retaliation and the right to decide what their area ran; beyond the usual drug slinging, Aaron was heavily into boutique prostitution while Jamal was into good old protection. The two of them worked over one of the suburbs and a smallish portion of Port City itself with ruthless efficiency, kicking back roughly half of their income to Portsider central. Owing to the nature and location of their crimes, surveillance on them was better than other gang members, but again, agency charts had big question marks by Jamal and Aaron. They were slick shit, to be sure. From the way their history ran and the way they avoided not just jail time but even petty arrests and the usual harassments cops got up to when they had nothing else going for them, Garth suspected Shadowy Bossman was grooming them both for their own Port Side Boys franchise sometime in the near future. And why not? They were smart, young, dedicated and utterly amoral.
Their liberties neatly explained their disinterest in killing him outright; they were far more fascinated in their own schemes than helping the current leader maintain his post. Now they’d lost a bucketful of cash on a wager. They needed to not only save face in front of their own men but recover the trust of their invisible backer, who had probably heard of the either the money issue or their will
ful ignorance. This meant doing as they were asked and quickly. With Jamal and Aaron eager to get back in the good graces of the main Portsider Branch, Jimmy was most definitely living on borrowed time. When gangsters were in trouble with The Man, they lashed out at anyone and anything and the two thugs would definitely blame their brother-in-law for their problems.
This put Garth in a very difficult situation.
The natural thing to do was hook Jimmish up right away and get the poor guy off-planet soonest. Unfortunately, this would be like strangling Jimmy right there in the cab; without knowing the exact method the Portsiders used to get on and off the port, the safest thing to assume was that they did have a person on the inside, a person who could recognize the cabbie from his relations to Jamal and Aaron. Not only would Jimmy get the knife, trying to get him safe would alienate Aaron and Jamal. No more meeting, no more freeing Huey. If that was even on the table any longer.
The only possible chance to save Jimmy’s life was to convince the lieutenants to leave him alone. Garth was willing to go so far as to use the footage he’d downloaded from agency servers as a bribe for safe passage off-planet. Hell, if it came right down to it, he’d offer his endless coffers to finance an internal rebellion. As it stood, though, the intense loyalties that the Portsiders had for one another made either possibility slimmer than a Bishop’s moral character. He had to try. Letting one of the nicest guys on Hospitalis die without making an effort at prevention was just plain wrong.
Garth saved his progress and massaged his eyes with the heels of his hands. Doing Intel on his own was not only a pain in the ass, it was tiring and he was constantly plagued with feelings he was missing something basic. It didn’t help that as Captain of Armageddon Troop One, he’d relied on people far more capable of acquiring the right information. Being so damned out of practice meant his eyes felt like poached eggs, his brain ached with that special kind of pain from reading too many files, and his legs were numb from the hips down. A quick check on the time told him there was several hours to go before Jimmy showed up. Spidey-sense or not, he was going to try and catch a nap.