“Why aren’t we all getting them then?”
“I have no idea. Personally, though, emotionally, I’ve been feeling even worse that I usually do.”
“In what way?”
“Ready to give up. Throw in the towel. Say goodbye to this cruel world.”
“Don’t start with that shit again. I need you here.”
“You’re always free to join me,” Michael said.
“I get out in five years.”
“And when you do, you’ve got something to look forward to.” He was referring to Bill’s wife and kids.
“True.”
“So you’ll be fine. Even without me.”
Bill dropped his head down and went quiet.
Just then, one of the nurses called Michael over.
“See you later on.”
“Don’t do anything stupid. Talk to me.” Bill pointed a finger at him.
Michael nodded and turned to follow the nurse.
Michael sat in his cell later that evening, holding his only photo of his wife in his hands. This image of her, standing in their old kitchen and smiling, not at him but at some unknown photographer, was branded so deeply on his mind that it was almost the only visual memory he had of her face.
Five years ago today, Annie had been killed. She’d been living the de-reg zone, no longer allowed access to the city, but close enough to him that she could visit every day. She’d apparently been working late at the clinic the night it had happened. As she was leaving, the last to leave, some unknown assailant had attacked her. She had been shot, at close range, and the clinic had been ransacked.
For two days she was still alive. Michael wasn’t allowed to see her. But on the third day she had died. The funeral was held at the clinic itself, where her remains were cremated in the cremation chamber out the back, which had once been used for animals when the clinic had been a vet. Michael had done everything he could to attend, but the authorities wouldn’t let him out.
The pain of those few days, and of the weeks and months of emptiness afterwards, ripped through him again, leaving him curled up in a fetal position on his bed, with his face in his hands, crying. For a few moments he felt his breathing stop and he wondered if it was going to start up again or if his body had decided to take it upon itself to do what he still hadn’t had the courage to do. He closed his eyes and wished it were so.
Michael put the picture on his bedside table and removed the razor blade from under his bed. He turned it over and over in his fingers, feeling along its sharp edge. It wasn’t a new one, and he would have to push hard and deep to get the desired effect, but it would do.
How important was life, when all that he’d ever lived for was gone, and all he’d ever believed himself to be could be extinguished with a well-placed cut?
He suddenly heard voices in the corridor outside. Lights were being turned on. He put the razor blade back under his bed again and lay down on his mattress as if asleep. His door was opened. Two of the guards, James and Nigel, came in, and behind them two men in suits pushed through.
“Mr. Khan. My name is agent Brown, and this is agent Murkott. We’re from the Department of Defense. We’d like you to come with us, please.”
“Come on Khan,” James said, holding out his hand.
“What do you want?” Michael said.
“We have a few questions we need to ask you.”
“What about?”
“Just come with us, please.”
“Go and fuck yourselves.”
“Come on, Michael. Be reasonable. Please.” Nigel took hold of Michael’s arm but Michael shook him free.
“You can do whatever you like to me, but there’s no way I’m going anywhere with these fucking assholes.” Michael curled up into a tighter ball, gripping tightly on to his pillow.
“Is he usually like this?” one of the agents said to the guards.
“He gets pretty bad sometimes. But today is the anniversary of his wife’s death. Surely you knew that?”
“Go away go away go away go away go away,” Michael started shouting, then he grabbed his head in his hands and let out a long, low howl.
“He’s hardly going to be much use to us like this,” one of the agents said. “We’re going to need to get a shrink in here. Are they sure this is the guy?”
“Apparently,” the other guy replied.
Michael got onto all fours on his bed then and started barking at them like a rabid dog.
“Okay, let’s report this. Let’s see what they say,” the agent called Murkott said.
“I think that might be a good idea,” Brown replied.
A few seconds later the two were gone.
Michael lay back down on his bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“That one was for you, my love,” he said, almost smiling to himself for a moment.
CHAPTER FIVE
LATER THAT NIGHT, from his bedroom in the hotel, Shy logged into the virtual lounge at Youtopia. A few hours earlier, he had received a message from Billy, one of the other Youtopia Inner Circle members, calling an urgent meeting at 6 pm GMT—twenty minutes away.
The virtual lounge had a glass floor and floated over a coral reef populated with fish, plant life, dolphins, turtles and coral. Soxy was already waiting there. He greeted her as he entered.
“How’s Guatemala?” Soxy said.
“Great.”
“And Salina? What’s it like meeting her in real life?”
“Awesome.” Shy grinned.
Soxy was wearing a black latex jumpsuit and had her hair pulled back tightly. Her long, muscular legs stretched out in front of her from the lounge chair she was sitting in. Shy couldn’t help but follow them up to where they met with her shapely hips. Although she claimed she was completely natural, that didn’t mean she hadn’t been genetically modified in the first place. He sat down at her feet and started gently massaging them.
“Any idea what this meeting’s about?” Soxy said.
“None whatsoever,” Shy replied.
Just then, the others came into the room. They sat around on the rugs or on the couches, touching each other’s hands, rubbing each other’s backs, or kneading each other’s shoulders. Kissing, sex or anything in between was prohibited during a meeting—a rule which had been established after one too many meetings had been completely side-tracked by orgies—but touching and affection were allowed and even encouraged. If there were ever a dispute, once it was over the people involved would go and sit next to one another and hug.
“What is it you wanted to meet for, Billy?” Dave said.
While Soxy, Suzi and Gretel were the matriarchs of the Youtopian Inner Circle, Dave took care of a lot of the day to day running of things.
“I came across an interesting bit of information while scanning through some emails of The Corp employees today,” Billy said, his shoulders being simultaneously rubbed by Catherine and Greta. “Apparently The Corp is thinking of making a bid to buy out Melbourne.”
Shy felt a shock running through him. Soxy put her hand on the back of his neck.
“Isn’t that where you’re from, Shy?” she said.
In v-space it was all too easy to forget that everyone had a real body somewhere, and that that real body lived at a fixed address.
“Yes. It is. What did you read, Billy?”
“It wasn’t much. Just a side note in an email. I’ll send it to you if you like. I copied it.”
“Send it to everyone,” Soxy said.
A second later, Shy received a copy of the message in his inbox. He read it through. It was from one Corp exec to another. The last line contained the ominous words, highlighted by Billy: By the way, how’s everything looking on the Melbourne deal?
The Corp was one of the most powerful companies in the world. It ran the virtual world known as KEA—aka Kill ‘Em All. Like many corporations these days, especially those whose main line of business was a virtual world, the company kept itself in business by taking over cities from
their governments. These weren’t violent takeovers—the governments, often unable to continue to pay to run their cities, were generally more than happy to pass them along—at a reasonable price, of course. And once The Corp had established dominance there, with a small display of force if necessary, one of the first things it did was “economic rationalism”, which meant kicking out everyone who wasn’t obviously profitable. The Corp's next line of business was to limit the access the remaining citizens had to v-space, making sure they only accessed worlds controlled by either The Corp or its trade partners. Because KEA was now the world’s largest economy, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to Shy that it was interested in taking over Melbourne—one of the few cities in the world that still ran under a “democratic” government.
“We have to do something,” Shy said.
“I don’t see what we can do,” Dave replied, sitting behind Suzi with his arms around her waist.
“I think we should bring those fuckers down once and for all,” Patterson said.
Out of all the members of the Youtopian Inner Circle, Patterson was the most aggressive. When he spoke, Soxy and Catherine put their hands out to touch him, trying to calm him down. Patterson’s parents had both been killed in a violent corp takeover. Understandably he harbored a lot of anger against all corporations.
“Like how?” Soxy said.
“If we created the right virus, we could destroy the corp's infrastructure,” Patterson said, clasping onto her hand and staring at her in that intense way he he had of looking at you—as if he thought it might be the last time he would ever see you and he was trying to imprint your face into his memory.
Creating a virtual virus to bring down the corps was a possibility that had been discussed before, but nobody had ever really taken it seriously. The Youtopia philosophy had always been one of peace.
Soxy pushed up her bottom lip and nodded. “Maybe it really is time we started to consider that possibility,” she said slowly, obviously not wanting to give Patterson too much confidence.
“It’s the only thing to do.” Patterson shook his hands in the air. “Just imagine. We could bring down this whole goddamn system.”
“I’m not having anything to do with that,” Suzi said. “What we’re doing is bad enough. If we try to bring down their infrastructure, we’ll have every God damn corp in the world after us. They won’t even bother arresting us. They’ll just send SecBots after us with kill orders.” SecBots were roboticized security forces.
“I’m inclined to agree,” Dealer said. “As much as I hate them.”
“Me too,” Gretel said, and a couple of the others followed suit.
“Okay, okay, for the moment why don’t we just keep doing what we’re doing?” Dave said. “Let’s all try to find out what’s going on with this Melbourne thing and meet back here when we have some more information.”
“I’ll follow up on the email,” Shy said. “See if I can get some more information from the sender or the receiver.”
“Thanks Shy,” Soxy said.
As the meeting disbanded, Shy watched as Soxy, Patterson and Catherine went off to one of the side rooms. He felt a slight twinge of jealousy, but then it was gone as he thought about Salina again.
Shy logged out of Youtopia. He considered telling his mother about the takeover, but she already seemed stressed enough. There wasn’t much she could do anyway. Besides, he never wanted to expose too much of his Youtopia activities to her—partly because she was already prone to unnecessary worry when it came to him, and partly because he didn’t want her ever to be implicated in case something went wrong. The less she knew the better. And if he told her about this, she would almost certainly want to know where he had gotten his information. And if he didn’t tell her, she might start investigating on her own, which could set off alarm bells in all sorts of places.
The name of the person whom the email had been sent to was Edward James. Shy decided he might give him a call and see if he couldn’t get hold of his password. Although Shy wasn’t one of the best hackers in Youtopia by a long shot, he was definitely one of the best tricksters.
Since it was only 6 am in Melbourne, while he waited for Edward to start work, Shy logged into Youtopia and visited one of his favorite sex clubs. First choosing a girl who looked just like Soxy, he then chose another who looked like Salina. Finally, he amped up the amount of acetylcholine in his body, which put him into a lucid dreaming state perfect for v-sex. Then the three of them went into one of the rooms upstairs. It wasn’t long before they were all naked on the bed. Shy didn’t usually come in these sessions, as he preferred practicing a tantric sex technique that allowed him to orgasm without ejaculating. A few hours later he was feeling as refreshed and energized as he usually did after this practice.
When it was 8:30 am in Melbourne, Shy decided to give Edward a call and see if he was at his desk yet. First, he logged into The Corp’s internal messaging system using a username/password combination that Dealer had created, and he set up a new ID for himself. The result was that when Edward received the call, it would look as though the call were coming from an internal Corp number.
“Edward James speaking,” the voice came clearly over the line when Shy called it.
“Edward, this is Frank over at central networking here. We’re just doing a little upgrade to our security software and I need to check that everything’s working for you. We’ve had a little trouble with some unauthorized access on your system.”
“Okay, no problem, Frank. How can I help you?”
“Are you able to log out of your account for me?”
“Sure, no problem. There. All done.”
“Great. Now, I just need you to verify some details for me. Your ID number is 04928134, right?” Shy had gotten Edward’s number when he had logged in a few minutes beforehand. The account Dealer had created had managerial privileges, although it lacked the administrator privileges which would have enabled Shy to change the password himself.
“That’s right.”
“And your username is ejames44?” This Shy had also gotten from the database.
“That’s the one.”
“And your password is xL94U38?”
“No, that’s not right. It should be F8ps933VR5.”
“Those Russian bastards. Excuse my language, Ed. We’ve had more trouble from them this week than you can imagine.” As he was saying this, Shy was rapidly logging into Edward’s account using the details that he had just been given.
“You sure it’s the Russians and not some competing corp?” Edward said.
“That’s where all the traffic’s coming from, but they could just as easily be using proxy servers to make it look like the Russians.” Shy was into Edward’s email now, transferring all his messages across to a churn and burn proxy server.
“Are we all done, then?” Edward said.
“Just a minute. I’m going to have to reset your password for you. I’ll put it back to what it was.”
“That password worked fine for me this morning.”
“We’ve just had the attack and found a few small flaws in our code. They were able to change your password and login using your details without logging you out.”
“Those sneaky bastards.”
“Okay, you should be all good to go, Edward. Make sure you change your password.”
“Thanks Frank. Have a good one.”
“You too.”
Shy smiled to himself. He had managed to get passwords and other information from many of the major companies in this exact same way. Since he treated people with a casual nonchalance as if what he were doing was perfectly routine, people didn't bat an eyelid.
After spending the next half hour running searches on the emails that he had collected, Shy came to the very disturbing realization that The Corp was planning a full takeover of Melbourne within the next three months.
A few hours later, Shy sat again in the boardroom of Youtopia.
“What the hell do we
do now?” Shy said, after he’d explained to the others what he’d learnt.
“There’s not much we can do,” Soxy said. “It’s almost a given that once they take over Melbourne they’re going to cut off Youtopia access. They’ve done it in every other city.”
“There has to be something we can do,” Shy said. “I mean, I can always use a proxy and a compromised machine on their network, but what about all those other Youtopia users in Melbourne? I don’t know about you lot , but I would go crazy, if it weren't for access to Youtopia.”
There was agreement around the room.
“I’ve heard of Homo novus kids starting to suicide once their Youtopia access gets cut off,” Gretel said.
“Is that true?” Soxy said. “Because I’ve heard similar stories.”
“I think we need to conduct an investigation into that,” Dave said. “The problem is that once their Youtopia access gets cut off, then how do we contact them?”
“We need to get our own satellites up and running as soon as possible,” Patterson said.
The Inner Circle had worked out that the only way to continue to give everyone in the world unlimited free access to Youtopia was by operating its own wireless satellite network. The group had tried to make deals with some of the VSPs providing this service, but they were all either owned or controlled by the larger corps, which weren’t interested in giving anyone free access to anything. If Youtopia had its own satellites, it could broadcast day and night the world over.
“What we do now is start making money,” Dave said. “Serious money.”
“And how are we going to do that?” asked Soxy.
“Well, we could all go out and get a job for a living. Or alternatively, we can try to pull off some serious cybercrime.”
While a lot of Youtopia had been built on donations and volunteer work, quite a number of things couldn’t be paid for in that way and had been paid for instead by the proceeds of cybercrime. Dave, Dealer and Patterson, the three best hackers in the Inner Circle, were usually the ones responsible. They had all set some ground rules from the beginning—only hack corp accounts, only certain corps, never too much at a time, only what was needed, never hurt an individual, make it untraceable, etc. And despite the fact that many of them were uncomfortable with this necessity, they did realize that it was in fact a necessity if they wished to continue to keep Youtopia alive. Which all of them did.
Connection Part I: A Dystopian Novel (Perfectible Animals Book 2) Page 4