by A J McKeep
Whoever he was, this youth was not what Garrison was expecting as the subject of a close protection mission. This kid looked like he needed protection from himself. As soon as Garrison stepped into the pod the kid shut the door. Garrison was uncomfortably cramped. The pod was only high enough for his frame to crouch in the exo. He should probably have clambered out of the exo first. When he crouched to sit, though, the exo frame supported him as comfortably as a high-end ergonomic chair.
Inside, the sparsely furnished pod was dark and the warm, thick air smelled of occupation without the comfort of ventilation. The space was like a student dorm or a convenience motel room. There was a bed, a chair, a screen, a sink, a fridge, and a bathroom and shower cabinet. Garrison wondered how long the kid had kept himself cooped up in here.
He asked the kid, “So, you’re my client for bodyguarding.”
“Hell, no,” the kid laughed nervously. “I will be, or at least my body will be the one that you guard.” He laughed again. “But not with me in it. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” So, he thought, I have a close-protection bodyguarding mission for a deranged and hysterical agoraphobic teenager. Deep in enemy territory. In Great China. What could possibly go wrong?
“So, do you have an itinerary, or should I just follow you around, or is there somewhere you would like me to take you now?”
“No!” the kid said. “I won’t be in charge of any of that.”
“Okay,” That’s a relief, at least, Garrison thought. “So, who will be in charge?”
The kid laughed again. “You don’t know? You really don’t know who’s coming? Seriously?”
“No.”
“Oh. Get ready for a surprise.”
“I think I’m adapting to an even state of surprise more than a series of surprise events.”
The kid nodded. The haunted look on his face made Garrison nervous. He said, “I have a pretty neat high-security vehicle to transport you in. You want to see it?”
The kid clung to a wall. “I’ll wait in here.”
Takes all kinds. “Well, I should spend a little while familiarizing myself with it.” Anything to get out of there. And, if the kid’s going to stay here, well then maybe I could spend a while investigating Shades or Backchannel and the subnet.
The kid reluctantly opened the door again, but hung back in the shadows. He hadn’t even told Garrison his name. It was a relief to Garrison to step back out into the hazy light. He made and attempt at introduction.
“I’m Garrison Caine and I’ll be your close-protection bodyguard.” The kid just shut the door. Garrison turned back and banged hard on the door. He could barely hear the kid inside, even though from the tone of his voice he knew the kid was shouting, “What?”
“Tell me your fucking name.” Garrison yelled back and banged on the door again. Nothing. So, he hammered the metal roller another five or six times. The door slid open. The kid was still hunched over and hung back in the shadows.
“Why? Why do you want to know?”
Garrison leaned down. Gently he said, “I’m going to be taking care of you. I want to know who I’m caring for.”
The kid blinked. Then his mouth twisted.
The shutter started to close again. Before it shut, Garrison heard him say, “Dean.”
Back in the container, Garrison stepped out of the exo. The suit told him, “The GLAPEEM is designed to be operated while the exo frame is on.”
“It’s the inside I’m going to familiarize myself with.”
“The pod’s interior is a highly secure environment for the maximum protection of the subject.” He wondered if the exo was being passive aggressive. Do they do that? he wondered.
Garrison took out the earbuds as he put his hand on the GLAPEEM’s door panel.
Inside was a snug pod, tailor made around a reclining couch. A lightweight simsuit hung at the rear. Garrison figured that could be primarily for diagnostics and medaid. One large screen and one smaller were folded into the walls, along with a high-end data crown. He slipped into the couch. It rolled and slid to adapt its contours to his frame. He hoped it would re-adjust for the kid. If indeed that’s who would be occupying it. He activated the main screen and looked for intranet communicators.
A link connection icon animated in the center of the screen. Along the bottom he saw icons for regular browsers, movie, games and music browsers, mail and communication browsers. Then there were three unfamiliar icons. Shades, Backchannel, and Specter1.
He clicked on the first one. That took him to a version of the infranet that was completely unfamiliar. Like a wireframe, like everything was in development. A lot of hypertext. Links were sometimes colored, sometimes not. Then finding a link could mean exploring whole pages of text. The text was descriptive. Some was concise and well written, some had spelling and grammar so bad it had to have been deliberate.
He stumbled into a zone called ‘Open Spaces.’ Many flashing links, short, blocky animations. Flat, 2D videos that played on sight at deafening volume. Everything unfamiliar. He couldn’t easily tell when he left one domain and moved to another. He wondered if it would be easier if he used the datacrown. There didn’t appear to be much virtu, if any, so it wouldn’t be likely to immerse him or help him travel faster. Maybe he’d be able to search more intuitively, but he wasn’t sure.
Then dimly his instinct from covert ops training kicked in. Instead of being confused by what was in front of him, he started looking for what wasn’t there. Social nets. There were games of sorts, entertainment in odd forms, there was information, data, and crude but obviously business promotions. He didn’t see many strands or webs of connection for unstructured social contact.
Hunting around he looked for places where people chatted. He found some boards about games, some about code engineering, and a bot-swap exchange. All of the places that he discovered were text chat. No virtu, no video, not even voice. Only text. That surprised him. People talked behind usernames, many with numerals and punctuation characters in, and users’ avatars were almost all abstract symbols.
Garrison recognized marks that were like Celtic runes. A squiggle that resembled a combination of the male / female symbols that he thought he knew from a pre-reset pop star.
A strand got his attention where people discussed adapting and customizing AI agents, little software bots. Any software adaptation without some official supervision would be making unCert code. That was super illegal. The punishment was instant recovery, no questions. Not even an upGrade. No chance of iMortality, no salvage compensation. UnCert code could get you vaporized.
Instinct told him he was on the track to the darker zones. He followed a few commenters, hunting for posts they made on different forums. This would be easier with the datacrown, he’d be able to read source and IP addresses easily. But now, he didn’t think he’d have time to stop, start up the crown and adapt it to his neural patterns, and then find his way all the way back in to these boards. He’d continue with his old-fashioned, nuts and bolts, bare metal methods. It was crude, but he was getting results.
Users he was looking for would be serious and probably say very little. Scouring message boards, he pursued comments that were very short and tagged by many other users. He was sure some of them would use multiple names and identities, but he didn’t have time to sniff for that. Then he noticed three identities in different forums all used the same slang, saying, Back her up.
Kr1$$, Ba11d00r, and x44x01110x.
Their comments were all very short. And very direct. He was sure they were one person. There was probably a way for him to tag and make a list of locations, but in these unfamiliar environments, he didn’t know how, so he photographed the screens on his phone. He was looking for keywords now, and then he saw ‘Hope’s.’ And there was a link.
At the same instant a roaring sound began outside. It was so perfectly in synch, he actually wondered if clicking the link had started up the massive engine noise. But that was ridiculous. The noise came from outside the pod, o
utside the container. Out in the clearing.
He photographed the screen and shut it down. Slipping quickly out of the pod and heading for the rear door, he tried just asking the exo to follow him. He was almost spooked when it did.
The noise was deafening. Outside, a wide circle of grass and reeds vibrated, flattened. He’d seen a stealth engine in operation before. All of the noise was concentrated into a narrow channel in the direction of thrust. Theoretically, that made it hard to detect the engine from anywhere outside its direct path.
It also funneled an ear-reaming hail of noise at anyone in the path. He stepped into the exo, hoping its headset would defend his ears. From the shadow outside, a massive, circular craft had descended, but then it had stopped. He couldn’t see how far it was from the ground without stepping out, and he wasn’t going to do that without protection. Fifty feet away, the pod with the kid inside remained closed up.
The noise was reducing somewhat, and the exo had put protective covers over his ears and was effecting noise cancellation. Garrison was still wary. Then he was addressed by a voice in his earbuds. It was not like the voice of the exo’s AI.
It spoke in a lazy, British tone with a weary edge of sarcasm.
“You’re the protection, are you?”
Surprised he said, “What are you?” without thinking.
“I’m what you’re here to protect. To stand in front of the bullets. To haul me out of burning vehicles or buildings.” There was a smile in the voice. Not a nice smile. A hard, cruel, lip curler.
Was he going to be expected to protect two people? There was only room for one in the pod at a time. With each minute that passed his mission was getting more complicated and he knew less about it.
The voice said, “You can come up into the ship, or you can wait down there. I don’t mind either way. There won’t be any traveling to do for a couple of hours yet, so you can relax a while if you want to.”
“Who are you?” The cold silence made Garrison regret asking immediately. The cold pause left him certain that he had jammed his foot right into where it shouldn’t have gone. Asking questions was never a good part of any military duty. Officers had words with him about it on a number of occasions.
“I’m your mission, Garrison Caine. I’m your sacred charge, your most precious treasure. Your prize beyond life itself.”
Garrison knew he had to say something. “Okay,” was all that he had.
Outside, across the clearing, the door in the gray pod slid open and the gangly youth stepped out. In the hazy sunshine, his complexion was so drained he almost looked dead. Sullen and resentful, he slumped to the center of the flattened grass that flapped in the circular shadow. A black box on four rails slid down in front of him. He stepped into the box, and it rose again, above the doorway.
Garrison moved forward. Looking up, the huge round craft looked like a hole in the sky. Along with the sound stealth, the outside of the ship was coated in light-stealing black. Nano-tubes or super-pigment. Something that absorbed light and smothered it. In his last posting, the Mech & Tech unit used deflection camo like that for forward drones and some insurgent shields. It was impossible to even judge how high it was off the ground. It could have been fifty yards up, it could just as easily have been an immense disc, half a mile away.
Mech & Tech 282’s forward drones were nowhere near the stealth effectiveness of the dish above. Garrison couldn’t make out any thickness, no ridges, no lines or bulges. He could see no shape at all except for the outline. Peering hard, he saw one tiny blue light. The way it appeared, that little blue spark could have travelled for half a galaxy. Standing closer the air thrummed with a beating vibration at a low pitch, strong enough to make him anxious.
The voice from the ship above told him, “A destination and itinerary have been uploaded to your exo with supporting documentation on threats routes, alarm and danger points and evasion options. There are a list of protocols for calling in support but, frankly, I’m expecting you to be able to handle whatever comes at us.”
He wondered if he was being given a tribute of confidence or if it was a simple statement of fact. If he was simply being delegated that responsibility. “In brief, we will travel, you will drive us, twenty-two point six miles, mostly over rough country, to a high security meeting. Unreliable actors will be sending delegates as well as contributing military and security agencies. Complex and fast-moving situations are high probabilities. The files will brief you about as much as it’s possible to do.”
“Okay. Got it.”
In the visor, he saw the icons for new documents. He flipped through them but trying to read on the visor was uncomfortable; there was too much distraction. He asked the exo, “Can I read these in the pod?”
It told him that he could, but a tablet screen was also provided in the left sleeve.
The British drawl cut in to tell him, “Be ready to move at short notice.”
He paused. There was no for him to know whether the owner of that voice was watching him, listening, monitoring his activities, or whether they had disconnected and gone to get on with something else. The feeling of being watched was a discomfort he had gotten used to in the Corps, but it was the uncertainty of being observed by the chain of command or a team. Now, the possibility of being under close watch by an individual, especially not having any idea who the individual was, brought him a whole new level of unease.
As he skimmed through the documents, bold lines under the titles and headings caught his eye. Words like, ‘extreme,’ ‘severe,’ and ‘grave,’ appeared in almost all of them. His plan was to take in the briefings then snatch a little time to look around the subnet, see what he could find. Maybe look of a place called ‘Hope’s.’ The more of the briefing he read, the more alarmed he was. A meeting was set with warlords from two hostile tribes, a powerful drugs baron, a group called the Dhiagilev Cabal and a representative of Great China’s official government. In each case it said, ‘plus entourage.’
Looking at the potential risks, Garrison thought he should have had a whole Mech & Tech division. The fact that the protection force was solely him, coupled with the meeting being in hostile territory, meant that it was a covert operation. Which made it even more dangerous.
And who the hell was he supposed to be protecting?
He was still reading and taking notes when the voice from above came into his ear. “Think you’ll be able to cope, Specialist Caine?”
“Ask me when I’ve read the briefings.” Thoughtful, he asked, “If I say no, what’s plan B?”
“Plan A is non-negotiable. When I ask you, ‘Can you cope?’ there is a right answer to the question.”
Pod life
GARRISON SAT IN THE pod. He was deep in the briefing notes. A oneline buzzed his phone. It could only be Murphy, unless Si had a sudden change of heart. Before he got out the phone he heard the voice of his client. “Change of plan. We’re heading to a new destination first, I’ve sent you the details and the route. And we’re leaving right away.”
Wearily he climbed out of the pod onto the echoing floor of the container and stepped up into the waiting exo. Outside, in front of the container’s doorway, the rails slid down from the craft above to convey the black box to the ground. When he stepped out, Dean looked like a completely different person. Garrison was astonished to realize that the boy hadn’t changed at all, it was only a transformation in only his demeanor and his posture made him look like another man.
He stood tall. His eyes locked on Garrison. “Ready?” His voice was deeper. Stronger. Lethal. It cut with sarcasm. He marched into the container and straight to the pod. “We need to move.” His walk had strengthened. He was commanding. It was like watching a master actor make the switch from whispering to a pet rat as Ron Weasley to rise up and stand, tall, broad-chested, and emerge all-powerful as Thor.
He climbed into the pod and closed the door. Garrison clambered up to grasp the control bars, swing his leg over the control column and settle onto the sad
dle. He fired the ignition and the whole machine awoke with a smooth hum and it rose.
The seat and footrests were adjusting to his form and his posture, but he didn’t wait. He swung the handlebars to point at the door and the machine lifted as it leaned and shot forward. He asked the exo, “Do you have the destination plotted?”
“Yes. I can take us there. You only need to indicate your preferred speed. Any variation you want, simply steer. I’m displaying a map with our course on the handlebar screen.“ Without thinking he thanked the AI. His head shook, and he smiled to himself as he accelerated, hard.
The pod shot forward. The speed was thrilling, especially as he was high and in the open air. Garrison hadn’t felt such a sense of freedom and power in so long, he couldn’t recall. He asked, “Do we have any reconnaissance drones we could send out to give us a view ahead?”
“We have five drones, all of them are fast enough to preview our route.”
“Send two. One to scout a hundred and fifty yards ahead, another to keep half a mile forward.”
From behind him, tiny black drones were blasted ahead like rockets, one behind the other. He kept those images on his visor as he reviewed the weapon systems again, on the suit and on the pod.
The pod wove rapidly through a damp woodland and burst out onto a steep upward slope. In the misty distance more forest, more hills. Apart from some columns of smoke, he saw no sign of human habitation. The landscape seemed greener than any of the world he’d seen.
All that he knew of USCorps was the post-industrial wreckage of survivor cities and the dead, contaminated wastelands outside. He knew there were enclaves, but he didn’t know much about them and he hadn’t ever seen one.
His tours of duty had been in the Mid-East Fed, in places that were either sand and rocks, or towns and villages that were made up of piles of sandy blocks. He’d never seen expanses of greens, browns, yellows, and reds like these misty slopes.
He set the images from the drones on either side of his visor.