by D L Young
Contents
BONUS CONTENT
1 - Catching Fireflies
2 - Caged Cricket
3 - Drinks in the Chatter Bubble
4 - Gravy Train
5 - Tailing the Salaryman
6 - Target Practice
7 - Paradise
8 - Gear Man
9 - Sunset Park
10 - Meatriding
11 - Condo 2814
12 - The IP That Wasn't
13 - Edward
14 - Nowheresville
15 - Lora
16 - Two Mile Hollow
17 - Last Cigarette
18 - Alcatraz
19 - Poison Pill
20 - Bait
21 - The Pile
22 - Cobra Bite
23 - Traitor
24 - Jailbreak
25 - Anarchy Boyz
26 - Payback
27 - Elizabeth Street Meetup
28 - Uncaged
BONUS PREVIEW Cyberpunk City Book Two - Anarchy Boyz
Anarchy Boyz Chapter 1 - The Unfortunate Mr. Sanchez
Anarchy Boyz Chapter 2 - Natural Jack
Anarchy Boyz Chapter 3 - Lexington Avenue Raid
Acknowledgments
Copyright and Dedication
BONUS CONTENT
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The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.
— Banksy
1 - Catching Fireflies
They had no idea he was stalking them.
Blackburn Maddox watched the three intruders from a distance, the zoom on his avatar maxed out. They looked like a trio of fireflies buzzing next to some enormous block of light, seduced by its luminosity, ignorant of the approaching danger. He closed the distance slowly, careful to avoid detection. A predator creeping up on unaware prey.
They were newbies—probably just kids. Wannabe data thieves. Two of them seemed pretty clueless at first glance, their avatars bouncing off each other and jerking about, barely under the control of their users. The third was a bit less clueless, though still far from skilled. Just a bit less twitchy than his buddies. Maddox would have to keep his eye on that one.
He’d have to nail them quickly, before they got any farther or, God forbid, managed to make a critical breach. Even wannabe datajackers got lucky sometimes.
“Christ, man, are you just going to sit there and watch them break into R&D?” Maddox started at the disembodied voice of one of the directors. Reflexively, he glanced around, but of course there was no one there. The two directors weren’t plugged into virtual space with him. They were sitting next to him in the conference room, sipping coffee from cups and watching his avatar’s POV on a holo monitor.
He’d already forgotten their names, referring to them inwardly as dickhead one and dickhead two.
“Just so we’re clear,” dickhead one said, “you fuck this up and it’s your ass, not ours. You understand that, right?” The executive uttered the warning with the same indifferent tone Maddox imagined the man had used when ordering his latte.
“Yeah, I got it,” Maddox answered. Shit flowed downhill at Latour-Fisher Biotechnologies, just like it did everywhere else.
But it was a good job, he reminded himself, and he was lucky to have it. The last thing he wanted to do was mess it up.
Still, he couldn’t help picturing the kids on the other end of those avatars. Dumb and reckless, full of hormones and teen bravado, ready to take on the world. He’d been there, half a lifetime ago, pulling his share of stupid stunts in his early datajacking days. Okay, maybe more than his share.
But even back then, as green and naive as he was, he’d known the consequences of getting busted, known the price he’d have to pay. And these three little fireflies surely knew it too.
Sorry, kids. You picked the wrong house to rob today.
Maddox breathed in deeply and focused on his task, letting his body, his meat sack, slip further away, immersing his awareness into virtual space. He pulled up the sniffer trace he’d tagged the three intruders with earlier. An image appeared, hovering beside him, visible only to him and the two dickheads watching on the monitor. At first it visualized as a softly glowing orb, displaying the whole of the world, then as it sped through its routines, narrowing the search, the orb flattened into a 2D map. The western hemisphere zoomed into the Americas, then North America. A moment later it focused on the Northeastern US, on the wide swath of the City at the center of the image.
So they were local boys.
He turned his attention back to the firefly avatars, still darting back and forth anxiously. Boys, definitely. Most likely early teens. He could tell by the way they moved about. To anyone else they looked like jittery, bobbing pinpoints of light, but he knew better.
“They’re picking the lock,” dickhead two blurted, his voice cracking with urgency. “Another minute and they’ll breach. You better move your ass.”
Maddox ignored the comment, drawing closer to the intruders at a measured pace. The two corporati might know how to navigate the highfloor circles of power and influence, but they didn’t know a thing about operating in VS. Even though his avatar was invisible to the intruders, concealed by a cloaking algorithm, if he came up on them too fast, their gear might detect his presence, and then they’d scatter like a flock of pigeons. But he couldn’t move too slow, either. Every extra second he gave them was more time they had to get lucky and breach R&D.
Closer still. The fireflies darted back and forth next to the tall phosphorescent tower of brilliant white, the visual representation of R&D’s digital self. Research and Development was one of two dozen similar building-like partitions, all clustered together like the downtown of some massive city, connected by an intricate latticework of pulsating data streams. Latour-Fisher Biotechnologies’ datasphere—its digital skeleton and circulatory system, its brain, lungs, and heart—had become as familiar to Maddox over the past year as the lines of his own hand.
Closer. The spire of R&D now towered over him like a skyscraper, its ivory incandescence dominating his field of vision. The fireflies, still blissfully ignorant of his approach, bounced against R&D’s outer wall. Trying and failing to breach the partition’s protective barrier.
Two things would happen next. First, the sniffer would finish its trace and give up the trio’s physical location, which he’d pass along to an emergency police feed, and the nearest on-duty cops would be dispatched to arrest the trio. And to make sure they didn’t go anywhere, once Maddox was close enough, he’d hit all three with an envenomed algorithm, a program that would freeze their avatars in virtual space and paralyze their real-world meat sacks from wherever it was they were operating. Getting frozen was no fun, as they’d soon find out. They’d lose all motor control, going as stiff as day-old corpses, wide awake but helpless until the cops arrived and manually unplugged them by removing the trodebands around their heads. After that came handcuffs and a courtesy ride in a police hover, then fingerprinting and delousing, then formal charges in front of a judge. A chain of events leading inexorably to a long prison sentence.
Shit flowed downhill.
Maddox was almost close enough to unleash the algorithm. If the kids had been care
ful, they would have asked a standby to keep an eye on them while they were plugged in, someone who’d pull off their trodebands at the first sign of them being frozen. Though he knew such a precaution was unlikely. When he’d been a green datajacker, young and spirited and ignorant of his own vulnerability, he and his friends had made fun of suckers who used standbys, who needed a mommy or a daddy to watch over them. Things hadn’t changed much since then, and these kids were probably doing the same dumb thing he’d done, operating without a safety net.
A chime tinkled in his ear—the sniffer completing its trace. He checked the map. The kids were in Queens, one of his old stomping grounds. He noted all three tags shared the same geo vector. Amateur hour, he thought, vaguely disappointed. They didn’t even had the good sense to plug in from separate physical locations. They were making it easy for the cops.
Back in the conference room dickhead one spoke. “All three in the same place,” he chirped, delighted. “Fish in a bloody barrel. Tag ’em.”
Maddox hesitated. He hated this part of his job.
“Did you hear me?” the executive said, louder. “Tag those fuckers.”
It’s a good job, he told himself again. Don’t fuck it up.
His hands gestured a command, and above each firefly a series of numbers appeared, their geographic location in longitude, latitude, and altitude. Maddox subvocalized another command, and the three geotags blinked red a few times, then went solid green as their locations were registered in the emergency police feed. A moment latera time estimate appeared, visualizing as a stopwatch shaped like a police badge.
“ETA’s ninety seconds,” Maddox said.
“That’s more like it,” dickhead one said, then slurped his latte. Maddox imagined the lid coming off, hot coffee spilling all over the man’s crotch.
Ninety seconds. In less than two minutes, somewhere in Queens a door would be kicked in by a squad of local cops, and three pimple-faced kids with cobbled-together street gear and cheap trodebands around their heads would learn more than they ever wanted to about datajacking’s downside.
Maddox stopped two grid clicks short of the quivering little fireflies, now the size of ping-pong balls. All three were still utterly unaware of his presence. Unsurprising, since Maddox had mastered data shielding and concealed approaches long before these kids had ever touched a set of trodes. He was thirty-one, and he could easily imagine the kids on the other end of those avatars being half his age or less. He’d started datajacking at fifteen, flirting with disaster at first just like these three. Plugging in with no standby and zero precautions, so eager to become a hotshot datajacker. Back before Rooney had taken him in and taught him how to plan a robbery like a professional. He wondered what Rooney would think of him if his old mentor could see him now.
“The hell you waiting for?” dickhead one sneered. “Freeze those cocksuckers.”
He had to get on with it. Subvocalizing a command, he released the algorithm. Appropriately, its appearance mimicked a trio of snakes, deep violet in color, winding a menacing path through virtual space toward the intruders. Two wrapped themselves around their targets immediately, bringing the avatars’ movements to an abrupt stop. The fireflies hung frozen in space, totally immobilized. The third snake darted back and forth as if confused, searching for a target that was no longer there.
No…way…
The third firefly was inside R&D, just beyond the partition’s wall. The impossible had happened: a critical breach. And it had happened right under Maddox’s nose. With executives watching him.
No vocabulary he had on quick recall could express the shock and dread that shot through him. Oh, fuck! and oh shit! fell far short. Oh my God! was nowhere in the neighborhood. He’d once heard a little Asian girl scream shitfuck over and over after burning her finger on a food stand’s hotplate. After a stupefied moment, shitfuck was the word that sprang forth.
Shitfuck, shitfuck, shitfuck!
Maddox bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from saying it out loud. “Cops get there yet?” he asked the executives, neither of whom had yet noticed the disaster.
A pause as they checked the police feed. Dickhead two answered. “Three more flights of stairs, they’re saying. Twenty seconds, maybe fifteen.”
No elevator, naturally. It just had to be a walk-up, didn’t it? Twenty seconds was an eternity. If you knew what you were doing, you only needed five to jack a sizable chunk of R&D’s intellectual property.
“Wait? What the hell just happened in there?” dickhead one said. “Where’s the third one?”
Already scrambling into an improvised Plan B, Maddox didn’t answer.
“Jesus,” dickhead two whined, as if he’d just spilled something on his shirt. “He breached R&D.”
Yes, Maddox agreed silently, he did. The one who wasn’t totally clueless somehow pulled it off. And the cops in Queens wouldn’t get there soon enough. The kid could scoop up a nice chunk of company IP and shoot it up to an orbital data haven, where an AI would gladly arbitrage it and place the proceeds in an untraceable account. And that would be that. The kids would still get busted seconds later, of course, but by then Maddox’s career in the corporate world would already be over.
Back in the conference room, his hands made urgent gestures. Sharp movements he hoped the directors wouldn’t recognize. In virtual space, white lines drew themselves in front of him, mirroring the paths of his flesh-and-bone fingertips.
“What are you executing in there?” dickhead one demanded. “That doesn’t look proprietary.”
“It’s not,” the other one cut in angrily. “Looks like street tech.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” dickhead one warned, his voice rising. “Don’t even think about pulling up some unapproved app in there. You’re liable to crash the whole system.”
Maddox finished calling up the program, a slammer executable. He’d modded it himself in his spare time, recoding the defaults and removing the fail-safes, but he hadn’t tested it yet. It was a less-than-ideal moment for a trial run, admittedly, but it was the only tool he had on hand that might work.
“Shut that thing down, NOW!” A finger poked him in the back, hard. Maddox felt his own hand slap it away.
“If you want to come in here and help,” he snapped, “be my guest. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and let me do my job.”
He pictured the directors back in the conference room staring at him, having their own shitfuck moment. Two sets of corporati eyes wide with surprise, two executive mouths hanging open. No one ever talked to them like that. Certainly not some entry-level analyst. But Maddox was out of time, and he needed them off his back so he could concentrate. If the kid managed to jack company IP, a few harsh words to some higher-ups would be the least of his worries.
Deep…breaths. He concentrated, letting his awareness slip further into VS. The meat-and-bone machine of his body faded away completely, as did the panicked voices of the directors, now shouting at him to stop. His consciousness untethered, a euphoria settled over him, a warm feeling of invulnerability, of limitless capability, a jolt far better than any drug.
The slammer floated in virtual space, between him and the partition’s outer wall, pulsing alternately red and blue, its bulbous head and trailing tentacles like some kind of ethereal jellyfish. Moving forward, Maddox projected himself onto the program, gasping as he adjusted to his new way of seeing. The exterior of the R&D partition was no longer solid like a building’s exterior. It was opaque like frosted glass, and he could see the restless bustle of data coursing throughout its interior. Multicolored shapes of all sizes, zipping up and down and sideways. Uncountable bytes of information flowing through the structure like some circulatory system on hyperspeed overdrive.
And one virtual meter away from him, barely inside, he spied the third firefly.
The kid would be overwhelmed at first, Maddox knew. When you landed inside a data structure of this size and density, it felt like stepping out of a calm, quiet house into a rag
ing thunderstorm. For a newbie, it would feel more like a tornado. The kid would need a few moments to get his bearings.
Still, he had to move quickly. He had no time for stealth, no time to shut down R&D’s automated countermeasures. A smash-and-grab was his only chance.
Lunging forward, he crashed through the outer wall, sending shards of blinding light flying through space. Intruder alarms filled his ears. The partition’s countermeasures would be on top of him in milliseconds, freezing him the same way he’d frozen the two newbies. He had to get to the third kid before that happened. Extending his tentacled arms, he reached out for the firefly, missing it entirely. Now aware of Maddox’s presence, the intruder’s avatar shot upward and away, hitching a ride on a large cylindrical data stream. Maddox rushed after him, barely able to track the avatar, so small and insignificant in the dense chaos of pulsing lights. He bared down, closing the distance, shooting the slammer’s appendages at the intruder. He’d nearly reached it when he felt his body shudder, a jolt of cold hitting him. The countermeasures had him, wrapping him in their frigid grasp. For an instant, he pictured Rooney shaking his head at him, a rueful smile stretched across his face.
Now or never, he could almost hear Roon say.
A second, more powerful shudder blurred Maddox’s vision, and a painful freezing cold overwhelmed him. He summoned all his energy and thrust forward, reaching through the narrowing tunnel of his perception toward the little firefly. Grabbing it and, finally, immobilizing it.
***
Minutes later, dickhead one stared at him, fuming. “It could have easily gone the other way.”
“Very easily,” two echoed, his stare equally harsh. In the stale fluorescent light of the conference room, the acne scars covering the man’s cheeks looked like a scattering of craters on a dead moon.
“But it didn’t,” Maddox replied, rubbing his temples, still woozy from the encounter. His trodeband lay on the tabletop, the rounded plastic attachments shiny with sweat. The skin of his forearms prickled with goose bumps. Aftereffects of the countermeasures.