Deep Core

by F X Holden

  9. TAILWIND

  Leon called back and told AJ he was about to get a crash course in anti-surveillance. And Leon didn’t like it because the only way he could see it working was if Leon exposed himself, but he couldn’t see any other way. He told AJ to finish up his food, and then at exactly 24 minutes, leave the diner, keep going down Penn about one more block to the Eastern Market Metro station, go down and get the first train that came along, any direction, didn’t matter. Stay on the train until Leon called him again. That was it. Now do it.

  At exactly a minute before his next drift, AJ stood, swiped a few creds to the table for the food and made his way to the door. He nearly jumped as he stepped outside and saw Leon standing there, but Leon didn’t look at him, Leon was acting like he was looking at his comms view, sending a message. AJ did a quick double take, then looked down the Avenue and saw the sign for the Metro and started walking, fast. Don’t look back, he told himself. That would be strange. But then he heard shouting, turned his head and saw Leon arguing with the guy who had been following him. He and the woman had come out of the diner right behind AJ, and Leon was standing in their way, arguing with them and not letting them out of the diner.

  “Do I look invisible to you?” AJ could hear Leon yelling. “You try to walk straight through me?” AJ looked quickly for the other two people Leon had said had been parked up in a car a couple of blocks away, but he couldn’t see anyone.

  It only took a minute to reach the metro station, but once he made it through the facial recognition barrier that read his ID and charged his account, it was maybe another three minutes to the first transit. It occurred to him that depending on how deep their surveillance went, he had also just given them his location when he paid for his metro ticket with his face. Five minutes since he left the diner. How long could Leon keep the couple hung up on the street above? Two people came down the stairs as a transit car finally pulled up to the platform, another young couple, so maybe that was their backup team? Damn, he was getting as paranoid as Leon. The train pulled in and he got in a carriage and sat down, realizing he was panting, tried to slow his breathing. The doors closed and it pulled away. He tried looking up and down the open carriages, to see if the other couple had taken the same train. It didn’t look like it.

  Was Leon just being crazy? Maybe it was a total coincidence, some inner city couple were really just out for a nice walk, happened to go to the same diner as AJ?

  He looked for a clue as to what transit he was on, where it was going. He worked out he’d got on at Eastern Market Station, was headed across the Anacadia River to Lago. Had no idea was that good or bad but from what little he knew of the Capitol, east of the river was not a place for tourists. He’d heard that was where the Floehopper tenements were. Not that he had anything against the itinerant fisherfolk who lived outside the Skycap, dragging a living up from the depths of the Shifting Sea. But he’d heard that a few years out on the ice floes, even if you loaded up on Blues to near-lethal doses, you soaked up enough rads to fry your brain. Pretty much any murder you saw in the news these days, it seemed there was a Floehopper involved. He’d also heard they were old school – they didn’t regard killing a cyber as murder at all.

  His comms buzzed, “You there my friend?” said the voice in his ear. Then it was gone as they went into a dead zone. He got Leon back as they pulled into Capitol Hill station. Some pretty heavy looking young guys got on, but he wasn’t alone in the carriage, and they seemed happy just talking shit with each other, didn’t even look at him. He relaxed a little, “Hey, Ma, yeah I’m here now. I think I’m alone.”

  “OK, I think you’re safe until your next drift. They think they can’t lose you ‘cause you’re a cyber. Makes you predictable. Makes them lazy. But you are about to really mess them up.”

  “What are you talking about Leon?”

  “You’ll find out. Where you at? I should be able to see you on my comms here but you’re underground.”

  AJ looked at the map over the door, “Blue line, on the way to Alson Road.”

  “OK, cool, you ride that all the way to Lago, but don’t leave the station. You just get off, go to the other platform and catch the transit out to the drone port. I booked you a flight home tonight on the redeye.”

  “What about my personal VIP guided tour of the Capitol?”

  “Take the VR tour instead.”

  “They’re going to be pissed.”

  “Good. How was them pancakes?” Leon asked.

  “What?”

  “At that café where I saw you. I’m looking at the menu. Thinking I might get me some pancakes. They OK?”

  “Yeah, a bit dry. But the bacon tasted like bacon.”

  “Extra bacon, extra syrup it is. OK, you can drift now,” Leon said. “We want them to think you’re going in the opposite direction from the drone port. Next time you drift, you going to be way over the other side of town, they’re going to be all confused and you can just call me when you get on your flight.”

  Leon didn’t sound to AJ like he was having any kind of anxiety attack. In fact, he sounded to AJ like he was having fun.

  As AJ climbed up the steps back up onto the Penn Avenue side of Lago station for the drone port, he was looking at a transit map in comms view and nearly walked into a small, skinny Floehopper who was definitely tripping on something.

  “Hey. Mother…” the guy said, throwing his hands in the air. He was about half AJ’s size, but that just made him faster than AJ.

  “Sorry,” AJ said and kept walking.

  The guy kept staring at AJ’s back but then mumbled to himself and started back down the stairs, so AJ got over to the other platform without being knifed. Put that down as a plus.

  The people hanging around at the other platform didn’t seem much of an improvement on his friend on the stairs, and AJ didn’t want to look like he didn’t know where he was, so he put his head down. The train came, an express to the airport with only three stops. He drifted, resetting his status, and took a seat. Three stops, fifteen minutes. Much faster than the ride in here in the limo, but AJ guess most people who used limo services weren’t in a hurry. They expected everyone else to wait for them.

  As he got off the train at the airport he got Leon on his earbud, “OK I’m here. About to drift again.”

  “I know you’re here. I’m right here on the platform too. Where you going?”

  AJ tried to look around without looking, but couldn’t see Leon anywhere.

  “I don’t know where I’m going Leon, you tell me.”

  “You going the wrong way is where you going. Slow it down, this aint no speed walking race OK? Turn around and go back the other way - you’re going to terminus 2, gate 2. You’re nearly home AJ, relax.”

  “OK, gate 2,” he hefted his pack, walked through a couple of scanners that read his backpack contents and his face, and checked him into his flight. He kept expecting to set off an alarm, Leon had him so spooked now. But he made his gate and sat down, still not having seen Leon anywhere. He got onto comms, “OK, now what?”

  “Now you call your friends in the Capitol, tell them where you are,” Leon said.

  “I just drifted again. You said they’ll know where I am now,” AJ pointed out.

  “Yeah, but you don’t want them to know that you know they know, right?”

  AJ sighed, “And what do I tell them?”

  “Change of plans, personal emergency, keep it simple. Thanks for everything, have a good night,” Leon said. “Nothing creative.”

  “And what if Winter has ordered them to pick me up?” AJ asked. “They’re going to just let me cruise onto a drone and get out of town?”

  “You got self-defense protocols right?”

  Cybers had protocol restraints which were supposed to prevent them instigating violence, but since the Cyber Bill of Rights came in, they were loosened up to allow them to defend themselves if physically attacked, up to and including inflicting bodily harm. AJ wasn’t combat trained or
optimized, so his self-defense skills and reflexes weren’t much above those of the average six foot, 176lb guy. Still, he was a six foot, 176lb guy, and used to hard manual work. He wasn’t too worried if someone came at him with their fists, even a knife. They’d have to know cyber anatomy to know where to stick him if they wanted to put him down. But against someone with a gun, his best defense was to run like hell.

  But it all felt just a little bit over the top, “Yeah. And then what?”

  Leon laughed, “Then I got a plan B. But we won’t need it. These guys are C graders. You should have seen it outside the diner, when they realized you were hot-footing it for the Metro. I let the guy walk straight into me and he was like ‘sorry’ and I was like ‘sorry don’t cut it man, you didn’t see me here’? I start yelling at the guy, he gets this impatient look, and his woman? She tries to go around me so I grab her arm, hey, I say, I’m talking to both of you. Then the guy gets all uptight, tells me to let go of the woman, so I’m like, alright, calm down, we all friends here, aint we friends? And he’s saying yeah, we’re friends, trying to start walking again and I’m like, aw, you aint acting like you friends, maybe you should be careful in this part of town, walking around here without no friends. He’s like, was that a threat? And I’m like, no mano, that was a fact, and I show him my knife.”

  “Where did you get a knife?” AJ asks. “You took a knife on the drone?”

  “No I didn’t take a knife on the drone. You were in with your Senator, I was at a hunting store buying me a nice little dolphin filleting knife I could put in my sock.”

  “Leon, this feels a little out of control,” AJ admitted. “I didn’t want you getting into this kind of trouble.”

  “Wasn’t me in trouble. I was cool. It was the goofballs following you was in trouble. Maybe they were carrying weapons, but I figured they got protocols say they can’t get in a fight over nothing, so I was pretty safe. Sure enough, the woman says, ‘Hey, sorry, we don’t want any trouble here’ so I say ‘OK then, why don’t you just get on back to Upper Crudberg where you belong’. They didn’t like it, but they had to turn around, go back the other way. I went inside and got the pancakes, double syrup, double bacon, to go.”

  “Damn, they really were following me?”

  “You were hoping I was just paranoid, I get that. But I’m not. I’m schooled in this game AJ. And they were rookies. They bailed too easy.”

  “So what do you think?” AJ looked around himself again. The gate was pretty empty. Not good, this was not good.

  “I think they are worried about you,” Leon said. “That they had anyone follow you at all, tells me they are worried. But what we don’t know is are they just a little bit worried, or big time worried.”

  “So what’s the difference between a ‘little bit worried’, and ‘big time worried’?” AJ asked, frowning.

  “A little bit worried means they just think this is some kind of shakedown. That team was probably just supposed to keep close, in case Winter wanted to do something to scare you off. Rough you up a bit, say.”

  “And ‘big time worried’, that would mean…”

  “More than just rough you up.”

  AJ laughed nervously.

  “Yeah, you can laugh mano. If I’m Winter, and I think you’re trying some sort of shakedown, I’m pulling you in and putting you under a heat lamp. Sure.”

  “But if I make it back to South Coast City, I’m somehow safer? You sure?”

  “Maybe, if you get back there and don’t hit him up for a big chunk of credits. AJ, nothing about this is sure. I just sound confident. That’s how I get you to do what I think you should do, right?”

  “OK, that makes me feel real secure.”

  “I’m ragging you again - lighten up now. I’m two rows behind you. Call me if you get freaked out by anything, OK?”

  “OK.” AJ twisted his head to see Leon sitting where he said, head down, cap over his eyes like he was sleeping.

  “Oh come on, now he’s looking right at me,” Leon said. “Relax will you?”

  “Relax? You’re saying Winter is having me followed so maybe I can be kidnapped or assaulted, and I should relax?”

  “Yeah surfer guy. Shifting Sea is where you happiest, right? Well this is my ocean, AJ. This is where I swim.”

  “I get you.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I don’t think so. Now, you got a call to make to Winter’s people, don’t you? Make the call, then make out I don’t exist. Don’t even talk to me when we land, alright?”

  “Alright. Bye Ma.”

  He dropped the call to Leon and pulled up the ID for Winter’s assistant.

  “Hello, William?”

  “Oh hi, is this AJ?” Did he sound like he was expecting the call? Not really. But he was just a junior aide, maybe he wasn’t in on anything.

  “Yeah, hi, look something came up,” he lied. “Personal business back home, so I have to go back early. I’m out at the drone port now.”

  William was trying not to sound happy, but AJ could tell he was, “Oh, dang. So you miss out on my custom made Capitol tour.”

  “Yeah, bummer. I hope you didn’t already get museum tickets or anything?”

  “Nothing major,” he said. “You have a nice flight back.”

  “I will,” he said. “Oh, yeah. I totally forgot to cancel that hotel too. Bit rushed. Can you…”

  “I’ll call them and cancel,” he said.

  “That’s all good then. OK, well. Have a nice Sunday, I guess…”

  “Well you just cleared half my diary, so I just might. Bye…”

  They made the flight without being intercepted. He used the in-flight comms to call Cassie, see if she could pick him up in a few hours, instead of the following night. She said, what? She had nothing better to do than be his personal chauffeur? But she was just playing. She said she’d pick him up.

  Then he spent the rest of flight running scenarios. Most were bad, on the AJ Flow-erometer. Top of the probability tree, if he really was being followed, was the one that said Winter was indeed worried the whole thing was a shakedown by AJ trying to use the Warnecke situation for a quick buck. That scenario had multiple outcomes. A low fourth on the probability tree was the idea that Winter and Warnecke would just fix things between themselves without involving AJ any more. He did a quick review of the scenarios again and made a decision. He needed to reconfigure. How he moved through the environment around him was part innate capability and part configuration. In his chosen job, with his current lifestyle, he was using just eight percent of his data and analytical capacity, the rest he sold to the Core. But he had the freedom to decide the ratio and he decided straight away to requisition seventy percent capacity. It would take a few hours for the bandwidth to clear, but he had a feeling he would need it once he landed so that he wasn’t relying so much on his bio-brain.

  There was also a scenario, somewhere in the middle there, that said Winter was really worried about whatever revelations Warnecke had up his sleeve, that Warnecke really had found a way to dive the Deep Core, and AJ was now a pawn in the middle of all that. AJ decided he’d allocate a part of his new bandwidth to chasing down anything that Farley O’Halloran had published or publicly cached before he died, then compare and contrast Farley’s research with other black-hat discussions and accepted theories on how to hack the Deep Core. He didn’t want to go to Warnecke and ask him, though it might have been easier. He didn’t want to open that pandora’s box.

  He was also facing heightened physical threats now and spent some time thinking about his options there too. He had no special combat abilities. Since the Bill of Rights, Tatsensui did not mass produce ‘special purpose’ cybers, designed for dedicated tasks like mining, low gravity transport or combat – the only mining or combat cybers on Tatsensui were volunteers doing it for the salary, who got body mods once they signed up. PRC had the same policy, though New Syberia wasn’t bound by the same treaty, so it churned out cybers who were bred for combat, and sent most of
them to Orkutsk. Which neither TS or PRC was happy about, hence the political tension.

  AJ could however reconfigure elements of his metabolism for short periods – boost adrenaline, growth hormone, adjust insulin and dopamine – at a cost. For example he could adjust hormone levels to ensure he stayed awake and alert for 48 hours without sleep, but then he would crash afterward and need days to recover. He could boost production of the klotho enzyme, expressed by the KL gene to enhance his ability to multitask, so he didn’t have to hand off all complex calculations to the Core. But long exposure to heightened levels of klotho led to unwanted hypervigilance and anxiety. He decided to cue up some preconfigured boosts for use if needed.

  Then there was his emotional state. Not much he could do about that. His very biological heart was very emotionally conflicted. He had dragged Cassie into this mess and the best thing to do, the logical thing, was to back her right back out again. Cool the new friendship down, put it on a back burner, all the usual clichés. AJ lay back, thinking ok, I call her from the drone port, she picks me up about 11 p.m., we can grab a late night snack at Lean and Green … then sleep took him.

  “OK, I have my head in the game but my stomach is totally confused,” Cassie said as they stood looking at the menu outside Lean and Green. It was a ‘creative coop café’ – a business run by local foodies who loved experimenting with food. “I skipped supper after you called. But is this supper or breakfast?”

  AJ looked at his watch, “Nearly midnight, for you, so I don’t know. Suppertime for me.”

  “I’m calling it breakfast, then I can sleep longer tomorrow … which is the only reason I’m still talking to you,” she said, frowning at the menu. “Tell me you’re not actually going to eat any of this weirdo food.”

  “Power rice sashimi bowl,” he said, pointing. “Brown rice, kale, farmed dolphin fin, quinoa, beans, salsa.”

  “You know that apart from the dolphin, those are all just trendy names for the same factory produced protein, right? There’s no way a place like this imports it from outside the system.”