Rune Zero: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Rune Universe)

by Hugo Huesca

  He suspected the answer to that, already. But John was CIA, even if he was just a grunt. Perhaps he knew something he didn’t.

  But, like any CIA grunt, John deflected the question. “Del Rio’s suspects aren’t any corporations, actually. We have extremist groups, hacker covens, activists. Some of them are probably friends of yours.”

  That didn’t sound like the modus operandi of any of those. John kept going:

  “Some called the Accountability Act a smokescreen. Several papers were written about it, see. People like these —like you— suspected the Act would allow the corporations to loophole their way around the ban on AI-directed Wall Street. The ‘advanced accountability software’ could mean many things, after all.”

  David winced. The Wall Street AI had been the great scandal of the last administration.

  It wasn’t really true AI —no one was even close to that—, but software built to predict and cash-in on the trends of the stock market. A bunch of banks and other financial institutions had tried to come together to design that software and trout it out all quiet-like, as the best new moneymaking scheme. Smart people had pointed out the software would basically wall off any new competition who couldn’t afford to pay or program their own. Banks wouldn’t predict the market anymore, they would control it like puppet masters.

  Wall Street had paid the newspapers and propaganda corps to run lip service for them, hide the outrage.

  Activist raised a ruckus. Hackers got involved. Massive protests started and things got ugly. The whole thing came to a close when the director of a prominent bank was captured by a crowd in front of his office and… Well.

  Government got involved, some laws were passed. The project was shelved, for now. Lobbyists were still trying to get those laws overturned, or backdoored, without much luck so far.

  But it would only take one success, and they could keep trying and trying.

  David realized this was but another manifestation of the same shit the States had already been through.

  “Well… is it? A loophole, I mean.”

  “It doesn’t matter. But… no. An accountant can make or break a company, not the whole State’s economy.”

  The former hacker eyed John with suspicion. He was born with a healthy mistrust of anyone with authority.

  “If you say so,” he said, finally.

  “You’re an FMA, Terrance?”

  Free-Market Activist was the name the papers had given to all the group against software-controlled markets. It was an ironic name. As many experts had pointed out, the stock market had already been controlled by software for more than a decade.

  David shook his head. “I don’t mess with politics. I’m a hacker.”

  “A virtuoso, then?” John snorted. “Fair enough. See this suspect list?”

  John displayed a long list of names on the screens. Some of them were people and others were groups. The list went on and on, into the hundreds.

  “All those people are FMA?” asked David.

  “Some of them. They’re all against the new Accountability act.”

  “There are hundreds of names.”

  “You thought detective duty was fun? This is what Sherlock Holmes’ real work looks like, Terrance. Lots and lots of paperwork. Now, help me sift through them.”

  John Derry dove into the psychological profiles and background checks of the first names on the list with a determined glee. David watched him work with a growing feeling of dread.

  A man once said. “If you want something done well, make a responsible man do it. If you want something automated, give it to a lazy programmer. He’ll find a way to take it off his plate.” At least, that was the version the mail-chain had brought to him.

  David Terrance was a lazy programmer. Don’t write two lines of code where one would suffice. In his opinion, the other word for “lazy” was simply “smart.”

  “Have you heard of Occam’s Razor?” he asked the agent.

  John turned back to face him. “You think I’m dumb? Everyone knows about it. ‘The simplest explanation is the correct one.’ It’s just drivel. Anyone trying to use it simply thinks the explanation they agreed with from the beginning is the simplest. Gets you nowhere. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  “That’s the popular version, yeah,” David ignored John’s irritated glare and kept going, “but Occam’s Razor is not a logical axiom, it’s just a research tool.”

  “So?”

  “It actually goes: ‘to find an unknown factor, begin looking at those explanations which are the easiest to disprove.’ See? Never claims those are real. In most cases, they actually are, but you should do your research anyway. Since they’re the simplest to disprove, they are also the fastest to prove, if they’re correct. Occam’s Razor is just a time-saving tool.”

  He would know. It had saved him entire days of work when he was teaching himself code from pirated books. To find a vulnerability, begin searching at the places where a vulnerability is more likely to be. Then work your way downward.

  It applied here, too. He explained his point to John. Truth be told, he got the idea. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll see which one of these names have been involved in crimes before. Priority to violent ones.”

  “Filter geographically, too,” David said. “There’s a limit to how far you can get a quadcopter-drone to carry a dead body.”

  The list began to shrink, but there were still several dozen names in there. David recognized a couple of famous terrorist organizations.

  “Still too many,” David said. “Filter for tech-expertise. You need to be very good at code to get access to both a private security network and a city drone.”

  “Give me a minute, that’s a bit tougher to sort.”

  It took John about two minutes, but at the end, the terrorist organizations were gone. Which left David with more questions than before.

  “Can you filter for social distance to Senator Morrow? I mean, who on that list directly contacted him. Remember, he was missing his head. The drones didn’t do that to him, that’s a bit more extreme.”

  David wasn’t a detective, but he suspected a person had to be really angry at a person to decapitate him, rather than just shooting him.

  “That’s already an option,” said John. “Good thinking.”

  At the end, they were left with a list of only three suspects. The first was an eco-activism group that had released an artificial plague into farms owned by bio-engineering corporations. The second was a local hacking group that had spent a couple of years trying to get famous on the Internet. The third was a journalist named Dugall Tull. Of the three, he was the one who hated Morrow the most.

  “The police would’ve started with Mister Tull,” John said as they examined the three suspects’ files, “since he’s the one with a personal motive. That’s the easiest to disprove.”

  “He’s just a journalist,” David mumbled, reading over John’s shoulder.

  “Yes, but he knew the Senator from college. See all those paragraphs? It’s legalese for ‘they just hated each other’s guts.’ Tull ran a series of articles against the Senator in a critical moment of his career. Morrow got him fired from his last job as an editor. Pretty boring stuff, but men have killed each other over less.”

  I bet you know, David thought to himself.

  “Doesn’t convince me. I don’t think Tull has the physical strength to cut a man’s head off like we saw in the video.”

  “You don’t need to hack them away, nowadays you have tools that…”

  But David wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes drifted to the other two files. The eco-warriors were daring, used to take the law into their own hands, and thought they were doing the right thing. A dangerous combination. Perhaps they weren’t above murder. They hated Wall Street, after all… But then he saw the third suspect files. The local hacker group. He recognized a name from the list of members and cursed under his breath.

  “What?” John turned to him. “You see
anything?”

  “No, I’m just nervous…”

  John Derry turned to him. “Terrance. Your face just paled and your eyes are dilated. I don’t like when people lie to me, Terrance. I’ll ask you again. Did you see something? Remember, I can send you back to jail anytime.”

  God damn it, David thought, swallowing hard. No point in hiding it now.

  “Vicente Duran? I worked with him a couple times.”

  “K-Sec leader? I thought you worked alone.” Of course, the agent had read David’s file, too.

  “Yup. We did a collaboration and then went our separate ways. We never even met in real life.”

  John said nothing for a second. David knew what he was thinking, even if David wasn’t a trained agent. Was his consultant associated with the killers? Was David compromised? Hell, was he a suspect?

  “This happened a long time ago,” David reminded the man responsible for his freedom. “I haven’t had contact with him since then. I had never even heard of K-Sec before.”

  John nodded. “I’ll make someone confirm this.”

  Then a pause. Neither of them said anything. They stared at each other, thinking.

  If John Derry suspected David just a little bit, he’d put him in jail again until the investigation was over.

  Then he’d go back to the Virtual Purgatory.

  Maybe I should make a run for it, David thought.

  Last time he had tried that, he’d ended up in locked tight in a max-sec jail. John Derry had read his face perfectly just a moment ago and John was obviously stronger than him. The hacker knew he’d lose if he tried to fight John. Running, then? To David, walking anything farther than a few hundred feet felt like an odyssey. He wasn’t yet brave enough to try running.

  Let’s try holding my ground this time, he told himself. Surely, the CIA wouldn’t be so quick to discard him if he proved his usefulness.

  “Terrance—” John began.

  “Look, man,” interrupted David, “I’ve been in that psychotic vat-tank of yours for over a year. I’ve had no contact with anyone during that time. I work solo. How about you give me a chance before pulling me off the case?”

  John Derry, to David’s surprise, dismissed his pleading with a wave of his hand. “If you had any ties to K-Sec, I’d know it, Terrance. Your entire life can be found in the files in my tablet. Do your job, and we’ll be happy to keep the CIA’s part of the bargain.”

  “Got it. Do my job. I’ll do that.” David looked at K-Sec’s file on the van’s screens. Most of those names he didn’t recognize. Others, he had seen only in passing.

  They were good, he remembered. But he used to be better. K-Sec was mostly vandals and criminals playing at cyber-anarchism, eager to think they were changing the world. Perhaps he could get the drop on them and get into their servers, save the CIA a bunch of time. But in the end, David decided not to try his luck and ask John for computer access yet.

  “We should pay them a visit first. Some of those guys had a criminal record,” he said, “and they definitely have the skills to hijack a city’s drone.”

  John nodded. “We’re on our way.”

  The van started moving without any input from the agent. David looked around, surprised. Was this a self-driven car? They’d become more common lately, but they were still far from becoming a common sight in the USA. Too easy to break into.

  No, there were more people involved in this operation, David realized, than the single agent he had in front of him. They just had no reason to show themselves to him. Perhaps an entire room filled with technicians and operators, hidden in a cheap motel nearby. Plus, the driver and god-knows how many others dressed as civilians.

  “Just so we are clear,” John said after the van had reached a consistent speed. “You may not be a suspect, Terrance, but I’m still watching you. Try anything on me, stand in the way of my investigation in any way, and you’re getting back into your can.”

  “What a nice thing to say,” David mumbled, pretending he wasn’t scared of the bulky —and heavily armed— agent.

  “I’m not your friend,” added John, “I’m your handler. My job is not to ‘be nice’ to you. Keep it in mind and we’ll coast along.”

  “Sure. I’ll do that,” said David. So, this is what being on a leash felt like.

  Most of the hacking covens that David had briefly frequented in his youth lacked a physical base of operations. They resided entirely in the net and liked it that way. Contrary to what movies and videogames showed, there was no mystical lair of evil masterminds. More like a virtual hive with a couple dozen amateurs trying to convince each other of how skilled they were. Fighting for social validation while at the same time, leeching off the two or three actually skilled veterans in their ranks. Those guys stayed mostly because the others treated them like rockstars.

  No one hacked any governments if they could help it (otherwise they disappeared mysteriously nights after), and days frequently passed in arguments about comic books and obscure cyberpunk movies.

  Like David Terrance, most of the hackers that actually made any money at all from their hobby worked alone and kept quiet. It let them live longer.

  K-Sec was unlike either of those options. They were a group of about ten men and women from all over the USA. They were an organization in their own right. K-Sec had revenue reports. It paid salaries. Helped its members remain under the blind eye of the law, by a mixture of blackmailing and bribes to the right functionaries.

  Some of the renowned personalities in the Intelligence bizz talked about them as the new generation of freelance digital security.

  David gave both those personalities and K-Sec less than a year of operation.

  You don’t strut around with a gun in a building where only the owners are allowed to carry firepower.

  “We’re here,” announced John after a long, uncomfortable silence. Hearing him speak of things he had no way of knowing —by virtue of his transparent earplug, which David managed to find now that he was looking for it— was eerie.

  The van stopped and the doors opened automatically.

  “Let’s get to business, then,” muttered David.

  They stepped out of the van and into gang territory.

  David Terrance was —had been— a freelance entrepreneur. He hadn’t set a foot in a gang District in his life. All he knew from them was what he’d seen in his Virtual Reality glasses. He had connected them to a Maps software and used them to explore his city in a much better way than on foot. See, you couldn’t get stabbed by wandering around glorified pictures.

  A rusted sign announced the name of the street. Jewel Route. Perhaps the city’s developers had a sense of humor. All around, David could see telltale symbols of urban decay. Spilled trash bags, burned-up cans, abandoned cars from a decade ago, broken glass, sewers with their caps stolen.

  Those symbols never changed. They had been present in cities since the Industrial Revolution, and would remain until the collapse of civilization as David knew it.

  The street was empty save for two or three junkies in the distance, dressed in rags. One of them saw the van and waddled away, either by survival instinct or hoping the gangs would pay him for the information. Everyone knew what black vans meant in this kind of neighborhood. Never a good omen. The modern equivalent of a crow flying over your head.

  He followed John Derry as the agent walked with the confidence of someone who owned the street, moving past gang-signs and graffiti depicting obscenely detailed sexual scenarios all over the walls. He stopped by the boarded-up entrance to a former Ramen restaurant. “We’re here.”

  David looked the dead building up and down. It was a miracle it was still standing. “You hungry? Because I don’t think they still serve anything here.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t recognize this place at all?”

  “I already told you, I never met with K-Sec.”

  John face revealed nothing at all. He probably didn’t care enough to believe him, anyway.


  “We’ll see.” The agent reached at the boarded door and pulled. To David’s surprise, the door opened without any trouble. Those boards were only there for show.

  It’s not even covered in dust, he realized. He rubbed his eyes and vowed to pay more attention.

  John gestured for him to go in first. The interior was dark and even if the door was just for show, David could see the silhouettes of trash and broken furniture all over the place.

  “Shouldn’t we get back-up, or something?” he asked his handler.

  John made a vague gesture towards the surrounding buildings. “We already have back-up, they arrived before us and set everything up. Now, get in.”

  David got in. After he took two steps, John followed him with a pocket lantern pointed straight ahead. He had a pistol drawn.

  “This place is empty,” said David. There were only the remains of the restaurant to keep them company. He could even pierce together what had killed the place. A fight. A gang came in to ask for protection money. The owner must’ve refused. Perhaps they couldn’t pay anymore. David could see some bullet holes on the walls. Even spent, dust-covered ammo on the floor.

  But he could also see the heavy grime covering everything parted in the floor towards the back of the building. It was a road. Whoever used this place wasn’t very good at hiding their traces.

  He pointed it out to John and the agent nodded. They walked towards the back.

  They found the kitchen. It had been stripped clean of anything useful by junkies and street-rats years before. But the steel door in the back-end was new. It wasn’t rusted like everything else.

  It may as well have a giant “look at me” sign painted over it, thought David.

  John gestured for him to step aside and the agent followed suit. When both of them were at the door’s sides, John knocked hard on the metal surface. “Police! Open up, Vicente!”

  No one answered the door. John sighed and knocked again. “We know you’re there. Don’t make it any harder than it has to be.”

  David could hear some shuffling behind the door. A thin, metal panel slid open and he could see a man with olive skin and black eyes staring at them.