by D L Young
He then recounted how he’d been interrupted, describing his second encounter with the nameless AI on the beach. When he came around to the poison pill, Beatrice’s face wrinkled up as if she’d smelled something rotten.
“Jesus Christ, salaryman,” she said, shaking her head. “Now the other AI wants you to do its dirty work?”
***
After the meal, Maddox went up to the roof, where he sat in the dark, smoking and staring out at the City. The distant hovers were nothing more than pinpoints of light, clustering and moving through the City’s great canyons.
His life was not his own. It hadn’t been for years. He’d been prodded along a path like some herd animal, then locked into a cage until he might prove useful. And the cage had been so nice, so comfortable, that he hadn’t even known he was in it. His spacious condo, his nice clothes, his gourmet food. His easy life, high above the street, safe and cozy. Christ, he’d felt lucky, even grateful. Which was exactly how the machine wanted him to feel.
But all of that was long gone, and he felt none of those things now. Sitting there, he was only aware of the loss he still carried, aware of it more than ever. Though now it was different. It was no longer a depressing heaviness weighing on his soul, as it had been for so long. He was reliving the anger all over again, fresh and soul-crushing and hot for vengeance, exactly the way he’d felt in the days and weeks following his escape from the hell of that virtual prison. For so long he’d let himself believe what had happened was a tragic accident, an unlucky roll of the dice. But it hadn’t been chance or fate or anything of the sort. Rooney had been murdered in cold blood by a heartless machine. Maddox looked down at his deck, the device laid across his thighs. Pondering the weapon it held inside, he came to a decision.
Beatrice appeared and sat next to him. He gazed at the distant lights, lost in thought. “You should take off,” he muttered, taking a long drag. “You don’t want to be anywhere near what’s about to go down.”
Looking down at the deck, she said, “You’re going to try and use that thing? Take out that company AI?”
“It’s got some payback coming.”
“Thought you said that kind of thing was suicide.”
“Bring white tulips to the funeral. They’re my favorite.”
“Jesus, salaryman.”
They sat in silence for a while. Finally, Beatrice said, “All right, I’m in.”
At first he thought he’d misheard her. “Say again?”
“You heard me, jacker. I’m in.”
He stared at her, confused, the cigarette dangling comically between his lips.
She ran her eyes across the vast archipelago of the City and sighed. “A few years back, before I landed my cushy gig, I worked security for someone who made a lot of money in the rackets. Mostly off-grid gambling and fabbed narcotics, but a few legit businesses too. It was decent money, and not too risky. The man was careful by nature, not one of those live fast, die young types. Then one day I find out he’s trading in…” She paused a moment. “Little ones. Six, seven, eight years old, auctioned off to rich pervs.”
Beatrice swallowed. “I’m about as far as you can get from a righteous crusader, Maddox. I’ve looked the other way plenty of times when bad shit went down, but some things…” Her voice trailed off. She shook her head and grunted.
“So what happened?”
“A bullet was too good for that bastard,” she replied. “So I set him up, got him busted. Then I flipped on him. Cut a deal with the feds and testified against him in court. Son of a bitch went straight to Rikers, two life sentences.” She shrugged. “And then after that I was toxic. In the security biz, half the gig is keeping the boss’s secrets. You rat somebody out—even somebody as vile as a baby trafficker—and that’s it, you’re done. Nobody’ll hire you after that.”
“No good deed, huh?”
“Something like that. Anyway, six months after the trial I’m nearly tapped out. Rock fucking bottom. I was thinking about taking my last bit of cash and having a memwipe put in. You know, for…”
Maddox nodded knowingly. Prostitutes, the high-end ones who could afford such procedures, often had memwipes put in so they wouldn’t remember whatever depravities their johns had subjected them to.
“Then one day,” she went on, “right out of nowhere I get offered this gem of a gig. Dropped right out of the sky into my lap. A gig that was too —”
“Too good to be true,” Maddox said, finishing the thought.
“Exactly. So against all odds, I land the job of a lifetime after all my bridges are burned and I have nowhere else to go. Then after a year or so in my new dream gig, all fat and happy and comfortable, the company threatens to take it all away if I don’t play ball.”
Maddox understood. The parallels in their paths were impossibly similar. Only one explanation made sense. “Sounds kind of familiar.”
“Doesn’t it, though?” she said. “I got played by that machine the same way you did…for years. And I don’t need you to plug in to figure it out. Looking back on it now, I can see it, clear as day.” She stood. “So I guess what I’m saying is that you’re not the only one around here who’s got some payback to deliver.”
Maddox considered her for a moment. Even with the mother of all poison pills, taking down the Latour-Fisher AI was a long shot, but with Beatrice offering up her talents, it might be less of one.
“I could use the help, to be honest,” he said.
Behind them, the kid Tommy appeared at the top of the ladder. He stepped up onto the roof. “What’s going on up here?”
Maddox turned to him. “So, kid, you still want to learn to datajack?”
The kid’s face, illuminated by moonlight, stretched out into a wide grin. “Hells, yeah, bruh.”
20 - Bait
After a few hours of fitful sleep, Maddox spent much of the next morning scrounging up gear at pawn shops around Nowheresville. He was careful to avoid detection, sticking to the nearly abandoned zones well away from the City. When he arrived back at the room, the kid Tommy wrinkled his nose at the well-used console and trode set. He examined the beat-up deck skeptically, turning it over in his hands. “It’s got scratches all over it.”
“Gives it character,” Maddox replied, lighting a cigarette.
Next he set up the gear and configured the decks. It was detailed work, cracking programs apart and putting them back together again with his own custom scripts and code. And it would have gone faster if Tommy hadn’t interrupted constantly, asking question after question about what Maddox was doing. Had he been this annoyingly eager himself when he’d started out with Rooney? He couldn’t remember. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
A couple hours later, Maddox completed the last of his compiles. He slipped off the trodeband, rubbed his temples, and called Beatrice and the kid over.
“All right,” he said, “here’s what I’ve got in mind.”
For anyone unfamiliar with the world of digital countermeasures, vulnerability hacks, and data spikes, his plan would have been difficult to follow. The technical jargon and complex math it had taken him years to learn would only confuse Beatrice and the kid, so he tried to keep things simple.
Latour-Fisher Biotech was upgrading portions of its datasphere, he explained, and it had been slow going. The company’s DS was as large as it was complex, making a systemwide upgrade a painstaking effort wrought with accidental data deletions, system corruptions, and other unexpected side effects. At the moment, he told them, a few security systems were only partially working, and one was completely down. The company had vulnerabilities, in other words.
“You know what an intelligent sentry is?” he asked the kid.
“That’s like a hard-core bot, right?” Tommy answered tentatively.
“Sort of.”
Intelligent sentries, ISes, were autonomous entities that roamed the company’s datasphere, constantly scanning for vulnerabilities and signs of intrusion. At the first hint of an attempted dataj
ack, they were all over an invader like bees pouring out of a disturbed hive. But at the moment, with other security systems compromised, Latour-Fisher’s DS technicians had their ISes serving as stopgaps, keeping close to critical applications and data partitions like guard dogs instead of performing their normal routine, prowling the company’s vast digital landscape, looking for trouble.
If they could pull enough ISes off guard dog duty, he might be able to penetrate a partition deeply enough to set the poison pill close enough to the AI to fatally infect the entity. As Maddox explained what he needed the kid to do, Tommy’s eyes slowly grew wide.
“Wait a second. Bait? I’m supposed to be bait?” the kid asked.
“Distraction is the way I’d put it,” Maddox offered.
The kid swallowed. “Bruh, what’s the difference?”
“There isn’t one, really,” Maddox said. “Now, listen, the ISes are going to come after you hard and fast, so the longer you can keep away from them, the more time I have to do what I need to do. Got it?”
The kid nodded without enthusiasm.
“Think of it as a game,” Maddox said. “Don’t get caught and we win.”
“But what happens if I do get caught?”
Maddox nodded to Beatrice. “She’ll pull you out.”
“If I can,” Beatrice said.
“What do you mean, if you can?” Tommy asked.
“Latour-Fisher has world-class sniffer apps. It won’t take them long to geotag you,” Maddox explained. “As soon as they have your location, they’ll send cops after you.”
The kid gasped. “Rhinos?”
“Standard procedure,” Maddox answered. “Here”—he tossed Tommy a set of trodes—“slip this on and I’ll show you a few things.”
The kid was a quick study, which was good because time wasn’t on their side. The Latour-Fisher AI—with its virtually unlimited resources—would inevitably find out where they were holed up. Going off grid had kept them under the radar for a little while, but it wouldn’t keep them hidden forever. It might not even keep them hidden another day. And besides that, there was no way of knowing how long the company’s security apps would be down. Their window of opportunity was a small one that could shut at any moment.
Maddox walked Tommy through some tutorials, teaching him as much as he could as quickly as he could about evasive maneuvers. When the rushed training session was finished, the kid removed the trodeband, his face gleaming with sweat. He exhaled loudly like someone finishing an exercise routine. “Whoa, my heart’s beating like crazy.” The kid looked at Maddox with doubt in his eyes and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.
“You’ll do fine,” Maddox said, realizing how much more convincing Rooney’s voice had once been. He handed the kid a remote access link. “Go load up the hover.”
Tommy gathered up the rest of his gear. When he left the room, Beatrice turned to Maddox. “You sure about this?”
“All he has to do is keep away from them as long as he can.” Maddox lit a cigarette.
“How long will you need?”
“Five minutes. Maybe ten.” It sounded better than “I have no idea.” He had no way of knowing how long it might take to do what he needed to. Or if he could even get close enough to do it in the first place. He blew smoke. “Can you outrun them for that long?”
Beatrice shrugged. “Depends on how many they send. Two or three, I could run them in circles for hours. More than that, things start to get dicey.”
There would almost certainly be more than two or three police hovers. “This is a long shot, you know,” he said. “More could go wrong than right.” It was his way of offering her a last out, one final opportunity to bail.
The mercenary looked at him coolly. “I know.”
They walked out to the hover, where Tommy sat in the back seat with the deck on his lap, the trodeband already in place. The remote link sat on the seat next to him, its flexible antenna fully extended. Above the deck a connectivity icon floated, pulsing green. From here, Maddox would be on his own, as would Beatrice and Tommy. They couldn’t risk any digital communications, not even encrypted ones, that might give away his location.
“You ready?” Maddox asked.
The kid flashed him a forced, tight smile, failing to mask his nerves. He gave a thumbs-up. “All good, boss.”
Maddox leaned down toward him. “Just like a game, right?”
Tommy licked his lips, nodded. “Right.”
The driver’s door lifted open and Beatrice got in. Maddox locked eyes with her, nodded. She snorted in response.
“What’s so funny?” Maddox asked.
“This plan,” she replied. “I’m about to have who knows how many cops chasing me down, but in this crazy little scheme, you’ve still got the shittiest part of the job, going up against that thing.”
“Wanna trade?” he joked.
“Ask me again in a few minutes.” She tapped the dash and started the engine. “Good luck, salaryman.” The window raised shut as the hover’s motor revved to a high-pitched whine. Maddox backed away and the vehicle rose, its propwash sending dead leaves and litter flying in all directions. He returned to the room, picked up his gear, and sat down at the folding table.
He flicked his cigarette to the floor and fired up his deck.
Here we go.
21 - The Pile
Through the driver’s window, Beatrice watched the salaryman return to the room as the hover climbed. Nowheresville was the right name for the place, she reflected as they rose above dilapidated cluster of buildings. Even from close up, it looked abandoned and long forgotten with its encroaching overgrowth of weeds, most of its windows broken out, and its crumbling, age-yellowed brick facade. The hover’s turbofans tilted and they began to move forward. She turned to the kid in the back seat. He already had the trodeband on and the deck lying on his lap. The remote link blinked green.
“You ready?” she asked him.
He looked at her and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Zero hotdogging,” she reminded him. “You do exactly what he told you. No more, no less. Got it?”
The kid swallowed. “Got it.” She didn’t think the warning was really necessary. The kid looked too nervous to do anything but follow instructions.
“And remember,” she reminded him, “if you get caught or anything bad goes down, you just call out and I’ll—”
“You’ll pull me out,” Tommy said. “I know, I know.”
She barely heard his words, her attention diverted over his shoulder to a line of small shapes in the distance. The kid noticed where her gaze had shifted and he turned to look.
“No…fucking…way,” he muttered.
Beatrice whirled back around and cranked the throttle. The hover’s motor screamed and the vehicle lunged forward. She tapped the dash, maxing out the rearview cam’s resolution, frowning as red and blue lights began to flash.
“How did they find us already?” the kid blurted. “I’m not even plugged in yet.”
“I don’t know.”
“Plug in,” she barked, “and do what you’re supposed to.”
The kid was still turned around in the seat, staring wide-eyed at the police hovers bearing down on them.
“Kid, plug in!” she shouted.
“Right, right,” Tommy said, settling back into the seat, strapping the deck securely atop his thighs. He slid his palms together and blew out a breath. “Okay.” He made a final adjustment to the trodes and then gestured above the deck. A coin-shaped login icon appeared, slowly spinning. He gestured again and closed his eyes. The green icon blinked out. “All right, I’m in.”
Empty overgrown lots blurred by as she kept the hover a meter off the ground. They passed through shadows of old buildings, flashes of interrupted sunlight blinking across the windshield. She zoomed through the ruins of northern New Jersey, a wasteland of deserted houses and industrial parks. The rearview cam showed six pairs of flashing lights in pursuit, gaining quickly.
; How the hell had they found them so quickly? Then it hit her.
Fucking Lozano. The greasy bastard must have sold them out.
Again, she counted the pairs of lights behind her. All six were still on her tail; none of them had stopped at Nowheresville. Not yet, at least. Maybe they thought Maddox was in the hover with her, making his getaway. Or maybe she’d missed one of the hovers, and the cops were already there, kicking in the datajacker’s door. She couldn’t call him to find out. They’d agreed on radio silence, and if he wasn’t busted yet, calling him risked giving away his location.
She cursed under her breath. Not a minute in, and already things were unraveling. She had no choice but to go ahead as planned. If Maddox hadn’t been arrested yet, he’d need every distracting second she could buy him and the kid. And if he was busted already and she was leading the cops on a hover chase for nothing, no big deal. After the felonies she’d piled up in the past twenty-four hours, an evading arrest charge tacked on would matter about as much as a parking ticket.
Another check of the rearview. Christ, they’d already cut the distance in half.
The dash lit up, flashing the City’s police seal. “Stop your vehicle immediately,” a man’s voice blared. “Repeat, stop your—”
Beatrice swiped her thumb across the screen, cutting off the transmission. She steered northward, away from Nowheresville, and then began working her way back east, toward the City. If she could make it to the Hackensack River, she might be able to outmaneuver them.
“How’s it going back there?” she asked.
His eyes squeezed shut, the kid didn’t answer. His hands made hesitant, awkward movements in the air above the deck.
“Hey, kid,” she said louder, “what’s going on?”
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “Uh, I’m almost there. Boss said not to come up on them too fast or the cloak might not work right.” Then he said: “What about the cops?”