Rune Zero: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Rune Universe)

by Hugo Huesca

  “You have an ID?”

  John had a pristine Police ID in his hand, propped up at eye level before the man had finished speaking. “Happy now?”

  “We pay all our bribes,” complained the man, “why the hell are you here?”

  “We just want to talk.”

  “You won’t arrest anyone?”

  “I don’t like making promises. But if you don’t open up, I’ll start thinking about making some arrests.”

  The door opened. The man was in his early twenties. He was dressed in a boring t-shirt, white-washed jeans, and dirty running shoes. He stepped away to let John inside. The agent holstered his gun and smiled a cold, fake smile.

  “See? That wasn’t so hard.”

  The room had formerly been a storage cellar. K-Sec had refurbished it into an honest-to-God hacker lair. A red light filled the place and gave it a punk —and clichéd— feel. Computers more expensive than a sports car were strewn around in every corner and monitors of all sizes filled the walls.

  That’s why they got the steel door, thought David as he gave the place a look-over. K-Sec didn’t want any junkie or lowly gang-member to get any ideas.

  Four people, besides the man in front of them, were in the room. A girl not older than seventeen, a fat man in an undersized black shirt, and a lanky guy with Virtual Reality glasses that hadn’t realized they had visitors.

  “Cozy place,” David said. Half the computers had more value than his own —before the police confiscated and disassembled it— and they were, of course, a year newer. “I could do nice work around here.”

  “Right?” said the man in front of him. “I call it our ‘full-immersion’ workplace. No distractions here, only bizz.”

  David nodded in appreciation. The girl and the fat guy were staring at them with curiosity, but without fear. Not their first run in with the “police,” then.

  “You’re Vicente Duran, I presume?” John asked the man.

  No help could come from David in this case. He had only talked to Vicente through the Internet.

  The guy looked at John like he had gone insane. “Uh… no? I’m Rufus.”

  John was looking straight at him, seeing if Rufus was lying to him in any way. That’s why he missed the others’ reactions. The guy in the undersized shirt looked away and stifled a cough, while the girl paled and grasped at her jeans with both her hands.

  Hackers mostly dated among themselves, since it wasn’t a very social group. David had met his wife like that.

  K-Sec was an illegal organization, and their members were outcasts. Perhaps their leader wouldn’t care about dating a seventeen-year-old. And with the way the girl had reacted to Vicente’s name…

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” David asked aloud.

  Everyone in the room turned to look at him, except for the kid with the VR glasses. Anyone could probably walk right up to him and steal his pants from under him and he wouldn’t realize it: his earplugs blared so hard his ears looked like biological drums.

  “Yeah,” confirmed Rufus. “He got mugged a couple days ago. He tried to fight back—”

  “Rufus…” the other guy warned him, looking pointedly at the girl, who had her eyes fixated on the floor.

  Instead of pretending to be sorry, like a normal human being, John stared at nothing for several seconds. David could almost see the CIA team behind him striking at their keyboards, furiously trying to confirm the new intel.

  How dated are the files you got us, John? thought David scornfully. He could do a better job than any of those dweebs any day of the week.

  If only he could get his hands on a keyboard. One of those K-Sec had laying around would do the trick.

  He took a deep breath. That way of thinking would get him back in jail if he wasn’t careful.

  “Sorry for your loss,” he said, instead.

  “Sure. Thanks,” said Rufus. He took another look at David. “Do I know you, man?”

  “You spent the last couple days by his hospital bed, right?” John said. “There’s security tapes with you in the hospital.”

  “I mean… yeah, we were. Why would you—”

  John turned to David. “I think we just crossed out a list of suspects. That Occam’s Razor of yours doesn’t seem to be helping too much, is it? Let’s go, we’re done here.”

  “What do you mean ‘a suspect list?’” asked the girl. She had finally looked up and was staring straight at them with a tear-stricken face.

  “Nothing that concerns you—” began John. David took the biggest risk of his life so far and gestured violently at him to shut up.

  Something had changed in the girl’s eyes. He had seen that expression once before, last time he saw his wife. A mix of desperation, exhaustion, and fury.

  “A man was murdered yesterday,” David explained. “Whoever did it, they used a supply drone to carry the body to his home and had the security network clean all the evidence.”

  “Jean…” warned her the fat guy. “Take it easy.”

  That got John’s attention. He forgot —or pretended to forget— about David’s disobedience and focused on the girl. Yes, her expression had changed. She knew something. “What do you know?”

  “She’s tired, man, she’s not thinking straight!” Rufus tried to intervene, but Jean cut him off.

  “Stuff it, Rufus.” She walked up to them. She was trembling. “Yeah, something is weird. After the… funeral… me and Orville,” she gestured at the kid in the VR gear, “were surfing the net. You know. Needed a distraction. To take our minds off Vicente for a bit. I did some routine maintenance of our networks and updated some of our signature software. I worked late. Until midnight, even… Then…”

  “Jean, they’ll think you’re crazy!” warned her friend.

  Jean looked at Rufus and sighed. “I know what happened. It wasn’t the grief making me hallucinate, I’m not some old lady. I saw Vicente connected to our network.”

  “What do you mean? Someone stole his password?” I asked.

  “That’s exactly what happened,” said Rufus, crossing his arms, “someone stole his password. See, Jean?”

  She shook her head. “He was the only one that knew his password and username. And he went straight to his own personal software and files, even the ones he had hidden from us.”

  Hackers sometimes kept their best work hidden even from their closest friends, in much the same way an artist worked in secret over a painting until it was done.

  Jean walked closer to David. “Get it? Only he knew where those files were. It could only be him. He’s alive, somehow. They wouldn’t believe me… So yesterday, I logged in again.”

  David knew what she was going to say before she said it. He felt a wave of cold pass over him. “He was there again, at midnight. I saw the records on the server’s history before he had a chance to delete it. He had hacked a city’s supply drone. An apartment’s security network, too. Other things, but I didn’t have a change to read them…” She looked like she was about to break. Only, she didn’t. She was staring straight at David like she could pierce the truth out of his head. He had to look away.

  “Aaand we’re going to jail,” whispered Rufus.

  On a corner of the room, a woman with jet-black hair and pale skin caught David’s attention. She was as beautiful as ever.

  “Oh, dear,” sang Leonor with that musical voice of hers. She had a smile from ear to ear. “What a mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  Chapter 4

  David blinked hard. Leonor was standing right there, smiling mischievously at him. Just like she had when she’d broken into her college network for the first time.

  His mind may be broken, but David held on to rationality like he had done a hundred times before. He knew Leonor wasn’t really in that room. He knew it because everyone else acted like she wasn’t there. Because she hadn’t been there one minute ago; he’d have noticed her the very same instant he stepped inside. He had always noticed her first. Even if his brain wa
s screaming at him “this is real, look at her, this is really happening,” he refused to believe it. Leonor was far away and she wouldn’t talk to him.

  None of that mattered when he could’ve sworn he could smell her perfume right there. The way her green eyes sparkled was exactly like he remembered. Better. Memory could fail.

  He did the only thing he could. “Can you give me a minute?”

  “Are you running away from me, my darling?” Leonor asked him with a pout. “I can come with you, I know you’ve missed me.”

  He ignored her as best as he could. John was staring at him like David had gone crazy. “What?”

  Jean had just admitted K-Sec was related to the murder David had been released from jail to help solve. If there was a time to excuse himself, it wasn’t this one.

  “I gotta take a leak, I’m very sorry.” David could feel his face flushing with shame. Not at his lie, but at how bad it was. He shared a nugget of truth with John. “My meds,” he whispered.

  “Uh. There’s a service bathroom outside, by the kitchen,” Rufus said.

  John turned his full attention towards Jean without saying a word to David. “You saw a person stealing Vicente’s identity yesterday night? Why didn’t you report this?”

  Jean looked at him like he was insane. “Report it? Man, your Department is always searching for an excuse to frisk us. With the bribes we pay you and the ones we pay to the gangs it’s a miracle we make any money at all…”

  David left them to their own devices and walked out, trembling. Leonor followed him.

  “You thought you’d rid yourself of me that easily?”

  If he talked back to the hallucination, then he’d be crazy. That was his line. He pretended she wasn’t there, with him, as he walked to a corner of the kitchen and fumbled over his pockets for his pills.

  Way too soon. The pills always had lasted longer, even in jail.

  He had difficulty even focusing on the sensation of his hands. Like they had a mind of their own and they weren’t sure what they were touching. Could be ice. Could be the fabric of his jeans. Could be a row of broken glass.

  His arms were covered in blood. Leonor laughed. She walked over to him and pressed her tiny hands around his neck. Cold and slimy fingers, crushing his throat.

  “You never deserved me, you pathetic fool. It was your fault you got caught. You’ll never get to see me again. Just kneel down and die—”

  David closed his eyes and found the pills. The sensation of the plastic was more real than anything else. He took a single pill and put it in his mouth with trembling hands. His shirt was covered in sweat. He swallowed it and a rasping pain made him groan when the pill passed through his sore throat.

  Yes, the pills weren’t lasting as long. Or were they? The jail had provided him with their own meds while he was on their VR hellhole. Perhaps, they used different dosage. Perhaps, he had built an immunity.

  Perhaps, the trauma of realizing he had spent an entire year in a fake world had accelerated the deterioration of his grip on reality.

  Leonor dropped her grip on his throat. Her smile was sweet again. “Goodbye, love. Until the next time.”

  “Until the next time,” David whispered. He was alone in the kitchen.

  Slowly, his hands stopped trembling.

  He checked his PKD bottle. It was less than a third full. He remembered it with more. Perhaps that was a lie of his brain, too?

  Can’t stay here much longer.

  Stress triggered the disease. A bunch of other stuff did, too. It may as well be called entropy. To David, that’s what it was. Entropy of the brain.

  He took a deep breath and walked back to the K-Sec hideout. He was his own man. He wouldn’t budge to the exigencies of a disease.

  Even if it stole his wife’s face.

  The kid with the VR glasses had tossed them to the side and was reclined on his chair, typing furiously on a keyboard when David came back in.

  “Feeling better?” asked John with just enough sarcasm in his voice to point out he doesn’t really care. David didn’t deign to answer that. Instead, he watched the monitor as the kid typed.

  “You trying to trace Vicente’s signal?” he asked him.

  “Yeah,” said the kid. David realized he was even younger than he thought. Maybe eleven years old? Perhaps less.

  Jeez, what do they feed kids these days?

  “Vicente —or whoever he was— erased all traces of his presence, but our ISP’s registry is harder to delete.”

  To check the ISP’s registry, the kid must hack into it, which is, of course, illegal. John was at David’s side, but was very poignantly looking at the ceiling with polite interest. After all, just getting in and taking whatever info they needed was much faster than asking for permission. Even for the CIA.

  The other members of K-Sec were poring through their own servers with a fiery determination. David realized this case was personal for them, now. Whoever used Vicente’s identity used them, too. Perhaps his murder hadn’t been an accident, either.

  Whoever was behind this was colder than David had thought before. Sure, he had killed a man. But Senator Morrow had been an enemy of K-Sec. Perhaps even of Vicente.

  His death muddied things. David wasn’t sure what to think of it. He was no detective.

  “You’re working with kids now?” he asked Jean. “Doesn’t seem very professional to me.”

  “He’s not working with us,” she said without looking at him, “he’s our intern. But Orville is very talented. If he keeps working hard we may hire him full time in a couple of years.”

  David raised an eyebrow and walked back to John’s side. He didn’t expect to find corporate culture in a mud-hole like K-Sec’s offices.

  “What do you think?” he asked John. It wasn’t just idle chitchat. To David, his natural reaction to not knowing something was to investigate it. That’s how he had taught himself to program. Over a long time, with a lot of ebooks and a lot of Internet searching.

  “Vicente’s dead and buried,” this time, John had enough tact to whisper this to David, making sure K-Sec didn’t hear him. “My team confirmed it. He didn’t fake his own death. I don’t believe in coincidences. Whoever killed him is involved in Morrow’s murder.”

  “Why kill Vicente, then? He hated Morrow, didn’t he? He may have helped.”

  “There’s a difference between hating someone and actually cutting his head off. None of these kids strike me as killers.”

  David wasn’t sure. People could surprise you. Especially when you thought you understood them.

  “The killer used K-Sec’s resources to hack into Morrow’s home network. Vicente must’ve tried to stop him. The killer attacked Vicente and stole his credentials. I think, if we find the man who killed Vicente, we’ll find the killer.”

  John shook his head. “That guy is in jail. Police found him after less than an hour, covered in Vicente’s blood. He took his wallet and used it to buy Akz. The drug that fries your brain if you overdose? Guess what happened to him.”

  David could guess. Akz was cheap and, according to the street rats who injected it, “felt like God pissing sweet ambrosia down your throat.” It also came with a few side-effects. David had avoided it like the plague, his brain was in enough trouble already, thank you very much.

  “That’ll take us nowhere, then.”

  “Not exactly. The junkie could’ve been just a smokescreen,” said John, his eyes glued to K-Sec’s screens —probably for the benefit of the team he was streaming video to. “Someone finds him in the streets, promises to sell him Akz if he kills Vicente. Somehow, they steal Vicente’s credentials from the body. Police focuses on the junkie, who is too messed up to talk.

  “That’s not the only option. Anyone could’ve killed Vicente, picked a junkie at random from the street, drugged him out of his mind on Akz, and then delivered him to the police.”

  Smokescreens. Murders to get to a murder. David was out of his depth. He was comfortable behind a
computer, where he was the true king and master over a domain of ones and zeroes. This was something else.

  Besides, Orville had just made a mistake in the ISP’s archives. He’d need to start over again, or get a letter from some very angry lawyers.

  “Let me do it,” David whispered to John. “I can save us hours of work.”

  John didn’t turn to David, but he knew what he meant. “You’re banned from using, or even getting near any computer system.”

  “I know. But you hired me as a consultant, right? I can help you more with a computer than walking around looking confused. These kids are good, but they have been playing at being a corporation for too long. They lack killing instinct. Let me handle it.”

  “We can hear you guys, you know?” said Rufus. He raised his nose in indignation. He turned to David and his eyes flared in recognition. “Wait a second. I thought I knew you from somewhere, but I’d never seen your face in real life before. You’re David Terrance, aren’t you?”

  That got the other K-Sec members’ attention. The clack of the keyboards stopped.

  “Terrance? The hacker who had a nervous breakdown?”

  “I got busted.” This time it was David’s turn to be indignant. “I made a mistake and got caught.”

  “Now you’re with the police?” asked Orville with a scowl on his face, like he suddenly smelled something rotten. “Pathetic.”

  “Everyone makes a mistake, sooner or later,” David said. He was on the defensive now.

  “A mistake is one way of calling it,” said Jean. “You put all the community under heavy scrutiny, you know? FMA’s all around the world are still recovering from the bad publicity.”

  David winced and stared at the floor. Thankfully, John came to his rescue, probably without intending it:

  “Mind getting back to your search? A murderer is on the loose. Every minute it passes, another person could share Vicente’s fate.”

  That made Jean wince. She turned back to her keyboard and slowly, the typing resumed, albeit a tad slower than before.