Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  The car was slick and expensive looking. Not Prendicco expensive, but certainly not cheap. The darkness made it difficult to tell whether the car was jet black or a very dark blue. It had four doors rather than two, but Kurt took the marijuana leaf air-freshener to mean that it belonged to an individual rather than a family. This distinction, though trivial in the scheme of things, helped to ease his conscience.

  “Do you need me to get down on one knee?” Minter yelled from the driver’s seat. “Load the bags and get in the damn car!”

  Kurt placed most of the bags on the passenger seat and put the rest in the back. He climbed in to the seat behind Minter, soaking wet and glad of the shelter.

  Minter beamed from ear to ear as they sped away. “This is it,” he said over the purr of the engine. “Next stop: Ernesto.”

  3

  As the fastest route out of the city took Kurt and Minter safely away from the main shopping streets, the emptiness of the residential areas they drove through grew more uncanny by the minute.

  It wasn’t the lack of traffic and pedestrians which seemed particularly odd — weather conditions and the time of day explained that — but rather the overall dullness of the streets and houses.

  A ubiquitous and affordable Sycamore app called Spruce had recently made keeping up with the Joneses easier than ever by allowing consumers to decorate the outside of their homes with just a few clicks. Once the desired features were selected, Spruce maintained everything automatically.

  Kurt knew all about Spruce. “Spruce up your nest,” the annoying ad had chirped in his ears almost every morning for the last few weeks. “It’s cheap, cheap, cheap!”

  He had no interest in such things but had quickly grown accustomed to the changing landscape. But now, as if erased in a single stroke, it was all gone.

  Houses which a few days earlier had sparkled with decorative lighting now lay bare. The roof-based advertising which so many homeowners displayed to earn some extra money was nowhere to be seen. There were no glittering archways, no ornamental fountains, no koi ponds. Everything was blank. Even when Kurt looked right at someone’s door, no residents’ photos or profiles popped up.

  These things were still visible to everyone else, of course, but, without his Lenses, Kurt found himself hurtling through an old world which somehow felt familiar and unnerving at the same time.

  Kurt looked out of his window until the blank houses gave way to an even blanker stretch of road. At this point he felt comfortable enough to turn on the small light above his seat.

  “What are you doing?” Minter asked, breaking a long but natural silence.

  “Turning the light on,” Kurt replied. When he looked forward into the rear-view mirror he saw that Minter still had his hood up and was now wearing a pair of large sunglasses. “Why? Do you think I should cover the window?”

  “Too suspicious looking,” Minter said. “How about you just don’t use the light?”

  Kurt quietly conceded Minter’s point; illuminating the inside of the car was a chump move he would never have contemplated had his thinking not been impaired by a drowsiness brought on by too many painkillers. He re-raised his hood to match Minter, cursing himself for being foolish enough to have ever lowered it.

  Thankfully, Minter’s focus remained sharp. When the car’s pre-Sycamore navigation system had beeped shortly after Kurt got in to inform them that traffic updates were unavailable due to an inability to connect to the internet, Minter had thrown the unit out of the window and driven over it. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. Kurt didn’t disagree. The car would soon be reported stolen, they both figured, and even the remotest possibility of being tracked was unacceptable.

  Kurt was also thankful that his ageing laptop had no GPS functionality and was thus safe to use in the car. He removed it from its carry case and waited for the operating system to load.

  “What are you doing now?” Minter asked, his tone more curious than disapproving.

  “Just passing the time,” Kurt lied. “Do you want me to put some music on?”

  Minter shook his head. This didn’t surprise Kurt. He had known Minter for a long time and found it difficult to imagine him enjoying anything as normal as listening to music. “Don’t waste the battery on stupid games, though,” Minter said. “You never know what we might need it for before we arrive.”

  “Yeah,” Kurt said. But he did know what he needed it for, and that was the whole point.

  ~

  Safely out of Minter’s view, Kurt opened his miniature briefcase and removed the device he lovingly knew as his magic sphere. It was a tiny hinged sphere, no larger than a table-tennis ball.

  Using the dim light from his computer’s screen to see, Kurt carefully opened the sphere. He took his UltraLenses out of his pocket and placed them inside the sphere so that each lay tightly against one side.

  A standard micro USB cable ran from the centre of the sphere. Kurt closed the sphere, connected this cable to his laptop, and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  Kurt fiddled with the cable. Still, nothing happened. He reopened the sphere and repositioned the Lenses. Satisfied that they were securely in place, he closed the sphere again. It instantly shone red.

  A pop-up window simultaneously appeared on Kurt’s computer to announce that a pair of fully activated UltraLenses had been detected. As soon as he read this notification, Kurt remembered the part about having to connect the sphere to his computer before securing the Lenses in place. In any event, he got there in the end. The sphere still worked. Nothing else mattered.

  Kurt followed the on-screen prompts to deactivate his Lenses. The sphere flashed blue for around twenty seconds and then turned green.

  A new message appeared on the computer’s screen: “UltraLenses successfully deactivated. External connectivity successfully disabled. Enable local substitute?”

  Kurt clicked yes.

  “Enabling local substitute.”

  The sphere flashed blue again before returning to a steady green.

  “Local substitute successfully enabled. Run tutorial?”

  Kurt clicked no; he had written this tutorial, along with the rest of the Lens-hacking wizard, so felt confident in proceeding without it. He disconnected the cable and waited for the sphere’s light to fade. As soon as it did, he opened the hinge and carefully removed his Lenses.

  Kurt held the UltraLenses in his hand. He crouched slightly so that the driver’s seat shielded his eyes from Minter’s mirrored view. And then, without a shred of doubt that it was safe to do so, Kurt placed the Lenses in his eyes.

  Despite everything that had happened, Kurt didn’t hate the Lenses. The Lenses themselves weren’t the problem. The problems began when Sycamore decided to scan everyone’s visual input for data to enable highly targeted advertising placements; when Sycamore decided to indefinitely store everyone’s communication data for spurious security reasons; and when Sycamore succeeded in making the Lenses a genuinely necessary part of modern life. But in and of themselves, the Lenses were a great idea. Kurt would argue that with anyone.

  Perhaps because he was so used to wearing them, Kurt barely felt the Lenses against his eyes. That consumers were able to wear their Lenses indefinitely without discomfort or side effects was an unequivocal triumph of modern technology. This had been the driving force behind Kurt’s idea to combine the Lenses with an implanted microchip to create a holistic human-computer system. A large part of him still believed that The Seed — his Seed — wasn’t necessarily harmful, either, and that it too was a good piece of tech which had been hijacked and ruined by a mega corporation’s ulterior motives.

  The great irony was that Kurt understood the inner workings of the UltraLenses far more than those of his own invention. His proposal for the Seed had been just that — a proposal. He may have designed the operating system, proven that vista recording was possible, and popularised the idea of a sub-dermal processor-cum-trackpad, but the actual functioning of the Seed was as a
lien to Kurt as it was to Minter or the average consumer on the street.

  Now, as he had on stage at the Talent Search, Kurt used his laptop’s trackpad to control his Lenses. The first test he performed was to confirm that vista recording was operational. It was, but his computer only had enough free space for a few hours of footage. The ability to rewind to any point in the past was impossible without cloud storage.

  After this, Kurt tested some gestures. First he focused on a streetlight and spread five fingers to zoom in and out. Next, he moved three fingers upwards to increase the brightness. Third, he triple-tapped with three fingers to activate the Lenses’ night-vision mode. All of this worked perfectly. Finally, Kurt swiped right with four fingers. This gesture transformed his vision into a full-screen view of his computer’s desktop, bright and vivid in all of its HD glory.

  This was all well and good, but Kurt cursed his lack of a wireless trackpad. He had never had the need to buy one and now regretted this greatly as even the most basic model would have enabled him to control his UltraLenses without being tethered to a reliable but bulky laptop.

  Kurt’s smartphone was of no help in this regard. There was an official Sycamore app for his Systelonik XK6, but it required an internet connection to operate. Each time the app launched, the user had to look directly into the phone’s camera to validate the session. This was to prevent a user’s vision from being hijacked should someone else pick up their phone.

  Writing an app to control a pair of hacked UltraLenses via the XK6 would be a trivial task for someone used to working on the platform, but Kurt didn’t fit that bill. Someone who might have was Trikk_Stikk, the developer behind most of the XK6’s best unofficial apps. Unfortunately, Trikk_Stikk had openly blogged about his prior efforts and failures to open-up the UltraLenses for use with third party apps. Kurt had great respect for Trikk_Stikk’s work and knew that if he couldn’t do it without the sphere, it was unlikely that anyone ever would.

  Trikk_Stikk was famous in the same way that a champion javelin-thrower might be famous; known and respected by everyone at all interested in his line of work, but utterly unknown to the masses. Under the moniker of Kurtonite, Kurt had once been like this. He and Trikk_Stikk had discussed projects in the past, helping each other out when they could, and they always got on well enough. But Kurt kept his UltraLenses hack private for good reason: the element of surprise was central to his pitch at the Talent Search. Success that night had catapulted Kurt into a new world and his fame now lay at a level more akin to a billionaire CEO than an amateur hobbyist. Sometimes he wondered what Trikk_Stikk would make of it all.

  Minter’s voice took Kurt’s attention as the car pulled up at a red light. No other cars were in sight. Minter took his eyes from the road and looked at Kurt in the mirror. “How’s your hand holding up?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Kurt said, sensing an opportunity. “But one of my eyes is kind of sore. Is there something in it?” He leaned forward.

  Minter turned around to look at Kurt directly. “Doesn’t look like it,” he replied.

  “Look closer,” Kurt said. He fought a grin.

  Minter did look closer, and he saw what was there. In an instant he unbuckled his seatbelt and lunged towards Kurt’s eyes. “What the hell are you doing? Get them out!”

  “No!” Kurt yelled, holding Minter off with his one good hand. “Wait! I fixed them. It’s safe. Listen to me! I fixed them.”

  Minter eased back. “What do you mean you fixed them?”

  “I did the same thing I did before the Talent Search. Remember when I hacked the Lenses so they would send my vista to my computer instead of Sycamore’s servers? I just did that again.”

  “So there’s no external connection at all?” Minter asked. “Just a link to your computer?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So nothing you see is augmented?”

  “Exactly.”

  The traffic light turned green. Minter buckled his seatbelt and drove. “So what’s the point? Why even wear them if everything looks the same?” he asked.

  “I can still zoom,” Kurt said. “I can still record. I can still rewind. And once I’ve fixed your Lenses, we’ll be able to see each other’s vistas as long as we stay in range. That might be useful.”

  Minter nodded in agreement. “And you’re sure this is safe?”

  “Surer than sure,” Kurt said. “Ten thousand per cent.”

  Minter took his Lenses from his pocket and handed them to Kurt. “Will audio work, too? Because the in-earphones don’t connect directly to the servers. It all goes through the Lenses. That means your computer should pick up the audio, right?”

  Kurt hadn’t considered this. “I think it might,” he said. “The in-earphones didn’t even exist when I developed this hack, though, so I’ve never tried.”

  Kurt clicked the record button on his computer and spoke into the air: “Testing, testing, one two three.” He then covered his left ear and spoke again: “Covering left ear, four five six.” Finally, he covered his right ear: “Covering right ear, seven eight nine.”

  He raised his computer’s volume and clicked play. The video was an ugly mess caused by Kurt looking at the screen while recording, but right now he was only focused on the audio. It played clearly: “Testing, testing, one two three. Covering left ear, four five six.”

  “What happened to seven eight nine?” Minter asked.

  “I ripped out my left in-earphone on Friday,” Kurt reminded him.

  “Oh yeah. At least you kept one, I guess. And at least it works. Good work, man.”

  “Thanks,” Kurt said. He opened the sphere and placed Minter’s Lenses inside.

  “What hardware are you using, anyway?”

  “A little sphere,” Kurt said. “I think Sycamore use them to diagnose problems with broken Lenses.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Kurt raised the sphere.

  “Closer,” Minter said. Kurt handed it to him. Minter saw a white tag on the micro USB cable. One side said “SC: 5”. Minter knew that this stood for Security Clearance Level 5, which in turn meant that only a handful of individuals were authorised to use the sphere and that none of them were ever allowed to remove it from HQ under any circumstances. He looked at the other side of the tag and saw a barcode with “00MR04” printed underneath. His expression changed.

  “What?” Kurt said.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It doesn’t matter where I got it. What matters is it works.”

  Minter handed the sphere back to Kurt and returned his full focus to the road. “Maybe. But I still need to know where you got it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know who stole it from HQ,” Minter said. “You see that code on the tag? 00MR04 was Michael Richardson’s employee number.”

  “Michael Richardson? As in the guy you put on the list?”

  “Right,” Minter said. “Him and Amos go way back, but they fell out last year and Richardson disappeared.”

  “What happened? Did Amos kill him?”

  “Tell me where you got this and I’ll tell you the story,” Minter said.

  “Fine.” Kurt quickly explained that he had purchased the sphere from an online auction site. The seller claimed to have purchased it from a Sycamore employee and been disappointed by its lack of functionality. Kurt refused to tell Minter how much he had paid for it. The price was so low that Minter probably wouldn’t have believed him, anyway.

  “So Richardson sold it to someone who then sold it to you?” Minter said, seeking confirmation.

  “Correct. Now tell me the thing about Amos and Richardson.”

  “Okay,” Minter said, on this occasion as good as his word. “It’s a long story, but basically Richardson’s son was some big-shot lawyer. And one day this bright spark of a guy decided it would be a good idea to represent someone in a suit against Sycamore. Amos already had a problem with Richardson, but this was just too much. So we had a meeting and Amos told Richard
son to get his son under control. Richardson said he would try. Now, I don’t know if he actually did, but either way, his son kept up with the suit.”

  “Then what?” Kurt asked.

  “The next day, Amos ordered Sycamore’s legal team to settle the case. He made me tell Richardson that we never wanted to see him or his bloodsucking son ever again.”

  “So he left? Just like that?”

  Minter hesitated. “Look, man, if you’d known Amos for as long as Richardson had, you would know that he doesn’t ask twice. So yeah, he left. Just like that.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know,” Minter said. “And believe me, I’ve looked. His son vanished, too. All I know for sure is that neither of them has been seeded and neither has left the country. Not legally, at least.”

  “Do you think they’re with Ernesto?” Kurt asked. The thought just popped into his head and he thought it was worth considering.

  There was a long pause.

  “Well?” Kurt said.

  “I hope not,” Minter said.

  “Why? He must know Sycamore inside out, and he has a grudge against Amos. That’s exactly the kind of guy we need on our side.”

  “No, he’s a rat. I know for a fact that he gave his son sensitive info which they used in the case against us. There’s no way they could have had the evidence they did without Richardson handing it over. Then there’s this sphere that he stole and sold on. Okay, it’s worked out for us this time. But it’s like what they say about love rats: if they do it with you, they’ll do it to you. And he’s a big, gruff, aggressive guy. A big, gruff guy who hates me. Trust me, man: a guy like Michael Richardson is the last thing we need on our side.”

  Kurt sensed unusual passion in Minter’s tone. It was as though he had taken Michael’s betrayal personally. This made Kurt wonder what the lawsuit had been about. He asked Minter.

  “Do you always ask this many questions?” Minter replied, clearly irritated. “It’s like driving a damn kid to school! Gimme a break, man.”