The Machine Killer

by D L Young

  He’d neutralized the third newbie before any IP had been stolen. But it hadn’t exactly been a textbook operation, and it was the means, not the end, that had the directors furious with him.

  Dickhead one stood up from his chair, buttoned his suit coat. “That street tech you opened up in there. Looks more like a virus than a legitimate program. Probably take the data architects a week to fix the hole you punched into R&D. And God knows what it corrupted.”

  “Sloppy,” his companion added, also standing. “Sloppy as hell. You should have known better than that.”

  Right. He should have known better. It took no small effort for Maddox not to argue back, not to blurt out the ugly truth: that none of this was his fault.

  The executives had known going in there was a risk of a critical breach. Not a large one—less than a fraction of a percent, Maddox guessed—but still, they knew damned well it was a possibility. Maybe that was why they were so pissed. They’d been looking for a diversion, a break from an otherwise monotonous day of meetings and calls, and instead they’d ended up having to deal with the unexpected mess of a breach. Executives hated few things more than unexpected messes.

  The whole thing was supposed to have been a bit of harmless spectator sport. The sport they’d heard about from their highfloor colleagues, probably over martinis in the executive lounge. What fun they could have when some clueless would-be infiltrators came along.

  The sport in question was as straightforward as it was cruel. When aspiring data thieves like the still-frozen trio—typically kids with good gear and bad judgment—were detected by the datasphere’s outermost monitoring apps, it was a dead giveaway the would-be datajackers were unskilled amateurs. It was something like a wannabe burglar scouting out a security fence with a pair of wire cutters in his hand…in broad daylight…right next to the security guard station. Zero threat level, in other words.

  On such occasions, highfloor corporati like the two dickheads would often delay the capture of such bumbling crooks intentionally, the same way a cat might toy with a maimed rat before finally killing it. Though the execs never did the maiming and killing themselves, of course. Highfloor corporati didn’t stoop to donning a trodeband and plugging into VS to nab datajackers. That was grunt work, far below their pay grade. Instead they’d call Blackburn Maddox, that security analyst they’d heard about who’d once been a datajacker himself, and summon him to a conference room where they’d watch him chase down the intruders, enjoying the spectacle of their corporate hound hunting down three helpless rabbits. A welcome bit of fun in an otherwise boring day of endless staff meetings and conference calls. And if by chance an intruder lucked out and managed to breach a critical partition, no big deal. Automated countermeasures would freeze his avatar before anything bad could happen.

  That was how it was supposed to work, anyway, from the executive point of view, from the black-and-white perspective of the floors far above Maddox’s head. The realities of virtual space, though, were far less cut-and-dry. Nothing was ever straightforward in VS. Beginners got lucky sometimes. Countermeasures could fail. Maddox had known this for the entirety of his datajacking career, and he was sure the executives knew it, too. Just like he was sure they’d never admit to as much, knowing that any such concession would imply their own guilt in this particular mess. In the remote possibility of a critical breach, it would be far easier—and from a career perspective, far more practical—to hang the blame, say, around the neck of a low-level analyst, who for some reason didn’t freeze those little fireflies as quickly as he should have.

  Maddox kept his eyes fixed on the table. There was no point in arguing back. Even though nothing had ultimately been stolen. Even though he knew the executable he’d released was sterile, and the damage he’d caused was so minimal an intern could patch it up in a single afternoon. The executives were in no mood to hear any of that. All they’d wanted was to sit there with their coffees and enjoy the cat-and-mouse spectacle, and instead this ex-datajacker some idiot recruiter had been stupid enough to hire had dropped a problem into their laps. A problem they could easily explain away, sure, but a problem nonetheless. Then he’d busted out some street tech in their datasphere and been insubordinate on top of it.

  To put it mildly, the two dickheads were not happy at the moment, and they glowered over Maddox like furious angels, determined to make this lowly mortal pay for his sins.

  The holo display, floating a half meter above the conference table, blinked over to a communication feed. A cop in rhino armor stood in the foreground, his helmet removed to reveal a pudgy, sweaty face. Behind him was an arrest scene: three teenage boys on their knees, staring dumbly at the floor, hands manacled behind their backs. A pair of rhino cops wielding stubby automatic rifles stood over them, their bulky armor a comically massive contrast to the cramped, tiny apartment. A dingy bedsheet hung as a window cover, and a mess of datajacking gear lay strewn about. Trodes and generic decks and holo projectors littered the floor—most of it off-the-shelf stuff—along with a scattering of pizza boxes and Chinese takeout containers.

  “All three targets secured, sir,” the cop huffed, still breathing heavy from the upstairs sprint. “I was about to call it in.”

  The directors exchanged glances. “Let’s not do that quite yet, Officer,” dickhead one said. “If you don’t mind, we’d like to…have a chat…with these intruders before you take them in.”

  “Understood,” the cop answered, his tone and expression unchanged, as if he’d been expecting this exact request, which of course he had. Because this was the final portion of the wicked little game, the part corporati always took great pleasure in. And after all this trouble, the two dickheads certainly weren’t going to let a minor breach get in the way of this, the best part of the game.

  The cop turned and nodded to his companions, who nodded knowingly back. Then they reached to their belts, removed their shocksticks, and waited for the executives’ instructions.

  The torture that followed, micromanaged by the two executives, lasted well over an hour.

  2 - Caged Cricket

  Maddox didn’t call a ground car to take him home, opting instead to walk the fifteen-block haul from the company’s HQ to his apartment. A spatter of rain fell, leaving a speckle of drops on his overcoat’s collar and shoulders. He stepped off the curb and crossed Canal Street, heading uptown, losing himself in the chaotic embrace of the City.

  It was night, a couple hours past sunset, a fact knowable only by the time readout superimposed on the lower corner of his specs. At street level, on the crowded floor of the City’s deep, ever-bustling canyons, the cycles of day and night had long since lost any significance. The unnoticed sky was a hazy smudge far overhead, a narrow strip of overcast gray between the colossal structures of the City. In the wealthier sections, atmospheric domes had usurped the sky, glowing a cheery blue during daylight hours, with billowy marshmallow clouds and a brilliant simulated sun mirroring the real one’s daily east-to-west journey.

  He ran a hand through his hair, fingers coming away wet. Before signing on at the company, he’d sported a shaved head, and the City’s frequent drizzle always felt like a cool, refreshing spray against his bare scalp. But a skin dome was too street for Latour-Fisher Biotech’s elegant hallways and offices, so these days he sported the stylish cut of the moment, his brown hair cropped close on the sides and longer on top. In the rain it felt like a wet mop lying on top of his head.

  Images from the torture session replayed in a constant churn, a movie in his head he couldn’t switch off. The executives had refilled their coffees and settled in, chuckling at the boys’ seizure-like contortions and vomiting. They singled out the one who’d breached R&D for special attention. A ginger kid, pale and freckled with a tangled mess of curly red hair. He got the worst of it, the cops drawing out his suffering until the kid finally shit himself. After five long minutes Maddox got up and walked out, ignoring the director, who shot him a stink-eyed look and asked him where the
hell did he think he was going.

  Now he walked the streets, the City’s teeming throb of bodies, its light-and-noise show enveloping him, welcoming him back as it always did, into its lively, unsleeping bosom of endless distraction. Ground cars crept through clogged streets, shuttling passengers uptown and downtown. Walkways overflowed with pedestrian traffic. Ads scrolled across the lower third of his lenses, targeting his profile—early thirties, male, Anglo, well-dressed, unaccompanied—with pitches for goods and services someone like him might be inclined to purchase on a whim at this hour in this part of the City.

  “Jizz on my face, salaryman?” A neon blue woman, naked except for a pair of pink high heels, blew him a kiss from a doorway of arched brickstone. Letters appeared on the wall above her, superimposing themselves in the same color as the woman’s skin. VIRTUAL FUN OR IN THE FLESH. WHATEVER YOU WANT, HOWEVER YOU WANT IT.

  “Come in out of the rain.” She crooked a provocative finger at him, her outstretched hand flickering as the drizzle passed through the holo, ruining the illusion. He walked on, and more offers came as he entered and exited the short-range broadcast cones emitted from storefronts and mobile vendors. Urgent whispers in his ear, transmitted through his spec’s temple arm. Wares and narcotics one block. Ramen and kimchi the next. In the near distance, enormous ads flashed across building facades. A twenty-story Belgian Honey beer can popped open, froth spraying ten stories higher. A succession of postcard shots from an orbital resort appeared and faded. Impossibly beautiful men and women, naked and tanned, lying on artificial beaches, snorkeling in low-g lagoons. Live your dream today. Interest-free financing.

  “Body mods, my friend? Half off retail.” Maddox ignored the heavily accented Eastern Euro voice. His specs, a midrange pair of Venturellis, blocked most pop-up advertisements, but the street barkers’ broadcasts still mostly managed to get through. He’d almost bought a higher-end pair, the kind that filtered out everything except the brands you preapproved, but then reconsidered when he saw the price.

  Continuing uptown, he removed his specs and put them away into a jacket pocket. He knew the way home. He didn’t need a glowing path superimposed over the sidewalk to lead him to his building. Didn’t need to see star ratings floating above taco stands. He didn’t need to make any calls. Didn’t want to receive any.

  Did he still have a job? He didn’t know. Were those kids in jail yet? He didn’t know that, either.

  They’d been dumb, those kids. Trying to jack a major corporation with no prep, no standbys. They had it coming. They were bound to get busted sooner or later. Whether it was by his hand or by some automated countermeasure or some watchdog AI, it was only a matter of time.

  Keep telling yourself that, boyo. Maybe it’ll help.

  Great. That was all he needed, Rooney’s ghost giving him stick. The voice of his old mentor asserted itself at unpredictable times, often telling Maddox what he least wanted to hear.

  I did what I had to, Roon, he replied inwardly.

  I know you did, but it still don’t feel right, does it?

  He wandered through thick knots of pedestrians, the City’s ambient thrum in his ears. A police siren wailed a few streets over. Beat cops in bulky rhino armor, rifles in hand, appeared every few blocks, their faces hidden by darkened helmet visors. High overhead, hover taxis and limos, their distinctive high-pitched whine barely audible beyond the ground-level din, ferried the wealthy from building to building like bees floating among enormous hives. At street level, ground cars, a less expensive but far slower means of transportation, crept by at a glacial pace. For most of the City’s residents, though, neither ground cars nor hovers were anywhere near affordable on their dole-based subsistence income. The ancient subway system, as it had for nearly three centuries, provided transportation for the largest, and poorest, portion of the City’s populace. Subway exits disgorged hundreds at regular intervals from its underground tunnels.

  Passersby noticed him, casting discreet, wary glances at the nakedfaced stranger. To be unspectacled in the City wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual, and somewhat conspicuous. The vibe he threw off was that of someone who wanted to be left alone. The street seemed to sense this, and recognizing it, gave him what he wanted. He moved through the crowded, bustling walkways, unmolested.

  Elizabeth Street Garden appeared on his left, a tiny oasis of greenery wedged between slate-gray megastructures. Lining the sidewalks near the garden’s entrance, pet vendors minded stacks of box-shaped cages. As Maddox approached, a cacophony of tweets and squawks rose above all other noises. Dozens of parakeets, parrots, and canaries shrieked and fluttered about inside cramped coops of wired metal.

  “Modeados cien por ciento libre de enfermedades. Perfecto para los niños,” a short, stubby-limbed vendor boomed. Modded one hundred percent disease-free, perfect for children. He repeated the phrase in Mandarin and Korean and Hindi, then after a short pause to let a fresh batch of potential customers come within earshot, he went back to Spanish and started the cycle again.

  Wrinkling his nose at the smell, Maddox slid past the birdcages, stepping around fresh deposits of bird shit on the sidewalk, making his way to the end of the row, where the enclosures were much smaller. Atop an improvised table of plastic crates sat a collection of miniature cages constructed of bamboo. Delicate structures with bars the same color and thickness of uncooked spaghetti noodles. They housed a variety of crickets, spiders, grasshoppers, and other small insects.

  Yoshi the bug man spotted him, flashing him a toothless grin as he pushed his wire-rimmed specs up his nose with a forefinger. He disappeared for a moment behind the crates, appearing again with a big smile and holding a lantern-shaped cage. Inside was a black-and-brown insect the size of Maddox’s palm with thick, hairy legs and a segmented shell.

  The bug man looked around furtively, then leaned forward and kept his voice low. “Hissing cockroach,” he said, holding the tiny cage close to his body, as if it were a treasure too valuable to be revealed on a street corner. “From Madagascar. Very rare. For you I make special price.”

  “No, thanks,” Maddox said, mildly amused he’d been tagged an easy mark by the little man. “Just need some cricket food.”

  “Very special price,” the man persisted, lifting the cage and swaying it slightly, trying to entice his customer. “This last one. You come back tomorrow, all gone.”

  “Just the cricket food,” Maddox replied, this time with a firmness the man couldn’t mistake. Deflated, the bug man set the cage down and rummaged around behind the crates.

  Next to Maddox, a child holding his mother’s hand gawked at the collection of insects. “Mami, look, they’re all in jail.”

  His mother chuckled. “What do you think they did to get in trouble, nene?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said. He thrust out his lower lip. “I feel sad for them, all locked up.”

  The bug man popped back up from behind the crates and grinned, shaking his head at the boy. “No, little sir. They happy in they houses. Very happy.”

  The boy looked skeptical. “Happy?”

  “Yes! They get best food. Taken care of. No have to worry get eat by cat or bird or get step on by shoe.”

  The boy tilted his head, pondering the cages, seeming to reconsider his opinion.

  Waving a crooked finger back and forth, the bug man said, “No jail, little sir. These no jails.” He spread his hands wide, grinning. “Best home for them, all these pretty cages. No place better.”

  ***

  Maddox sat on his tenth-floor balcony, a narrow concrete rectangle jutting out from his apartment, barely large enough for him, a chair, and the smallest side table the local furniture store had in stock. He rolled a cigarette, yellow rice paper crinkling around fresh pinches of Balkan Sobranie he’d picked up earlier at the first-floor tobacco shop. He lit it, the tip glowing bright orange as he inhaled, the soothing smoke drawn into his lungs, then blown out again into the cool night air.

  He flicked ash
into a plastic Sapporo-branded ashtray he’d pocketed from a bar, recalling how the small act of thievery gave him a disproportionate pleasure. A tiny bit of lawlessness in an otherwise straight existence. Atop the small circle of the tabletop sat a tiny bamboo cage. A perfect cube not much larger than the ashtray next to it, the cage had a roof of thin, delicate wood—he wasn’t sure what kind—with intricate carvings of flowers and leaves and gently curving, upturned pagoda-style corners. Maddox watched the box and the cricket inside, both purchased from Yoshi the bug man the week before. The cage was the priciest item at the stall, which was no doubt why the bug man had tried to sell him some high-end hissing cockroach earlier this night. If the silly white salaryman had picked up his most expensive item before, why not again?

  The cricket inside chirped a soft rhythmic song, its mottled black-and-brown body visible only in glimpses in the moving shadows thrown off by the City’s ceaseless animation of building-front ads and holos. From his balcony, the sound of the street was a steady, indistinct churn, like the murmur of a crowd, interspersed with the occasional siren’s wail and, more frequently, the sudden, impatient choruses of ground car horns. Maddox pinched off a portion of the gelatinous feed he’d picked up earlier from the bug man. The cricketsong stopped as the creature approached the pea-sized meal, pausing a moment as if considering the offering, then it thrust its head onto the food and began its late dinner.

  He smoked and gazed at the tiny caged creature. Would he have a job tomorrow? Did he have one now? Maybe the dickheads would let him off the hook. It had been a minor breach, after all, and nothing had been stolen. Still, the pair didn’t strike him as the no harm, no foul types.

  So if it was over, it was over. He’d never expected to end up in a salaryman’s life. Never imagined himself lasting a day in a legit job at a legit company, much less a year. The fact that any of it had happened in the first place was something of a minor miracle.