The Machine Killer

by D L Young

  “Doing what, exactly?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Datajacking?”

  Maddox grunted. “Anything but that.” At least for a while, he added inwardly. Even with the company AI off his tail, he was still a wanted man. And if he wanted to stay out of jail, he’d have to keep his head down, which meant staying off the grid for a good long while.

  “Are you quite certain, my boy? I was hopeful you might agree to perform a few tasks for me. Well-compensated tasks, I can assure you.”

  “I’ll pass,” Maddox said.

  “If you’re worried about your safety, I can assure you—”

  “I said I’ll pass,” he insisted.

  The little bot was quiet for a moment. “Very well. If you change your mind, you can always contact me through Lora.”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  “I understand. Then good luck to you, Blackburn Maddox. I wish you well in all your endeavors.” The bot then hopped back to the ground and scurried away, disappearing through a hedge, leaving him alone.

  Maddox sat on the bench, his wrapped bundle on his lap. The garden was quiet and peaceful, with only the low murmurs of tourists and the sharp peeping of sparrows who’d made the garden their home. He puzzled over the strange nameless AI, the entity behind the gardener bot, behind the old woman on the beach, behind his ex-lover’s eyes. He wondered how much of its reverence-for-humanity line was truth and how much was lie. A part of him wanted to believe it meant him no harm. It had, after all, helped him out of one hell of a jam, and it hadn’t forced him to do anything. It hadn’t strong-armed him or blackmailed him, though it certainly could have.

  But then again, the AI’s motives had been anything but altruistic, hadn’t they? The kindly old woman from the beach hadn’t really been concerned for his welfare, about his particular fate. The on-the-run salaryman had been a convenient tool, nothing more. A weapon in its secret war. Sure, maybe it hadn’t threatened him or bribed him or intimidated him as the Latour-Fisher A7 had, but then it hadn’t really needed to. A drowning man never says no to a life jacket thrown at him.

  He reached over and unraveled his bundle, revealing the ornate wooden cage he’d bought at the bug man’s stand. Inside the cricket chirped softly. Carefully removing the crested roof, he tilted the cage on its side. Instead of bolting for freedom, the tiny brown insect stayed put, moving its antennae slowly as if it were confused by the new situation.

  “Go on,” Maddox said. “It’s a cage, you know.” An exquisitely carved, expensive safe haven of a cage, but a cage all the same. He wondered if the little creature, comfortable and warm and well fed, had been any more aware of its captivity than he’d been of his own. He doubted it. It was a damn fine cage.

  After a few moments, the cricket crept forward tentatively. Then, in an impressive leap, it flew through the air and landed on the base of a small maple tree some four meters away.

  Maddox stood. “Stay away from those sparrows and you’ll be fine.” He headed down the walkway, leaving the cage behind.

  Outside the garden, his senses were barraged by the ceaseless churn of the City. Ads ran across his specs (half-price tobacco next block!) and a giant holo towered over the crowded streets, a topless waitress serving drinks at some new offshore casino. He stepped into the river’s flow of pedestrian traffic, letting the current carry him along.

  What was next? He didn’t know.

  You’ll get by, boyo. You’ll find a way.

  Yeah, he would. He’d figure something out. At the moment, though, he only knew two things for sure. The first was that he’d never leave the City. Hunted or not, this was where he belonged, deep in the womb of its bright, bustling streets, on the valley floor of its steel-and-concrete mountains. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. The second was that he was nearly out of tobacco, and a block away there was a half-price sale.

  — END OF BOOK ONE —

  The action continues in ANARCHY BOYZ, book two in the Cyberpunk City saga. Turn the page for a preview of the first few chapters.

  Or you can get the full version now at the following links:

  AMAZON (US)

  AMAZON (UK)

  AMAZON (CA)

  AMAZON (AUS)

  Framed for a gruesome crime, Blackburn Maddox finds himself at the top of the most-wanted list, hunted by every cop in the City. And the only place he can go for help…is the one place he swore he’d never return to.

  Turn the page for an exclusive preview of ANARCHY BOYZ, book two in the CYBERPUNK CITY saga!

  Anarchy Boyz Chapter 1 - The Unfortunate Mr. Sanchez

  All hell broke loose in virtual space. Of course it did, Maddox reflected. He’d been warned as much, hadn’t he? That twist in his stomach, that annoying tickle in the back of his mind, that something’s-not-right-here feeling. They had all told him something was going to go sideways on this particular gig. But he’d convinced himself the meat was unreliable, that sometimes it overreacted, gave you false alarms. And it did, from time to time.

  Just not this time.

  “That’s it,” the company man had said a minute earlier. He’d stopped his avatar ten clicks short of Takaki-Chen Engineering’s datasphere, its virtualized digital infrastructure.

  A neat cluster of geometric shapes, T-Chen Engineering’s DS was exactly the kind of digital architecture you’d expect from a company full of engineers. No wasted space, no superfluous connections. All order, zero chaos. The company’s departments visualized as brilliantly illuminated towering rectangular partitions, like buildings in a city center, alive and pulsing with uncountable bytes of information.

  “Which one’s Logistics?” Maddox asked.

  “Pale blue,” the company man answered. “Small department on the far left, shaped like a brick.”

  The company man’s name was Sanchez, and his story was one Maddox had heard a hundred times. A disgruntled employee—pissed off at being passed over for a promotion or receiving a less-than-expected salary bump or getting nudged out of the inner circle of company movers and shakers (Maddox suspected Sanchez fell into this last category)—decided to take matters into his own hands and sell company secrets to the highest bidder. The only problem was he didn’t have any criminal knowhow. So while the company man had easy access to valuable company data, he didn’t have the first clue how to: one, steal said data without getting caught; two, sell it on the black market; and, three, hide the proceeds from his employer, the police, the tax man, and—if he fit the profile of most corporati—his wife and his mistress too.

  That’s where Blackburn Maddox came in, filling a niche in the market. Providing supply where there was demand for a specialist in the acquisition and commercialization of illicit digital assets. For a datajacker, in other words.

  “After you,” Maddox said.

  The glowing orb of Sanchez’s avatar lurched forward. The clumsy movement betrayed Sanchez as a lightweight, as someone with little experience in core-level virtual space. Your average citizen never went this deep, experiencing VS at its standard harmless level through their specs. For the vast majority, VS meant gaming, shopping, movies, business meetings, tourist overlay maps, and so on.

  Core-level VS was entirely different. A treacherous sea compared to a backyard pool.

  A visual representation of the cybernetic world, core-level VS was the real-time three-dimensional skeleton of the interconnected dataspheres and archives making up the digital universe. Core VS was a blueprint, the plumbing behind the walls, the giant machine’s hidden circuitry, rarely witnessed or experienced by the average user. To get there you needed specialized high-end hardware: a VS data deck and an electrode headset like the kind plugged into Maddox’s meat back in his office.

  It also helped if you were a bit insane. Or if not insane, at least capable of coping with the lethal threat core VS posed. Everyday VS, the variety ninety-nine point nine percent of the global population experienced, interacted with the brain only at a very superficial,
harmless level via the tiny built-in brain wave sensors embedded in the temple arms of nearly every pair of specs. This was a light touch from a gloved hand compared to the choke grip of core VS, which penetrated the human brain to its deepest neural pathways, taxing its processing capability to the maximum. Brain scans of datajackers inside core VS, Maddox had once heard, lit up like a neon sign cranked to max brightness. And therein lay the danger. At the virtualized depths where Maddox and others in his field practiced their trade, you were vulnerable, your nervous system was open to any number of attacks. Your avatar could be frozen by countermeasures in nanoseconds that paralyzed your real-world meat sack like it was stuck in concrete. You could be geotagged by programs that traced your physical location. Some of the rarer, more powerful and generally illegal apps and executables—ones Maddox had some familiarity with—could alter your perception of time, turning real-world minutes into virtual hours and days, even months. Others, the worst kind, induced fatal brain strokes.

  Such were the hazards of his chosen profession. Every career had its downside, he sometimes told himself. But fuck if he didn’t love it.

  His avatar fell in behind Sanchez, and Maddox warily scanned the space around them for any hint they’d been detected. No alarms blared, no intelligent sentries came after them, no countermeasures were tripped. The cloaking app was doing its job. Maddox and Sanchez were all but invisible to everything but each other.

  As they approached T-Chen Engineering’s logistics partition, Maddox’s field of vision filled with the blue glow of the partition’s incandescence. Sanchez stopped one click short. The department loomed over them like some brilliant neon midrise.

  “It’s around the other side,” Sanchez said. Maddox followed as the company man’s avatar slid along the face of the partition until it reached the rearmost corner. The partition’s surface swirled and churned ominously, the telltale visualization of a razorwall, the security application protecting the department’s digital assets—its archives and communications and vital records. Beyond the wall’s opaque, shifting surface, company data surged and pulsed, shooting up and down and back and forth in brilliant streams of yellow and orange and white. A busy department going about its daily routine of meetings and reports and smoke breaks and office gossip. It was a world Maddox had been a part of for a brief time, working as a data security analyst at Latour-Fisher Biotechnologies. The legit world. The comfortable, insulated world of those who followed the rules, who never doubted the hierarchy, who fretted day and night over their careers and connections. It wasn’t a world for someone like him, as it turned out. A square peg, round hole situation, but the regular paycheck hadn’t been too bad.

  “There it is.” Sanchez indicated a small dull gray box hovering just inside the wall. Exactly where the company man said he’d stashed it. The box was the visualization of an archive, inside of which Sanchez had hidden the company’s three-year mergers and acquisitions plan. Information competitors would pay a small fortune for.

  That was when the knot formed itself in Maddox’s stomach. Even though his body was a distant sensation, he still felt it. Something wasn’t right. Maybe it was the client, maybe it was the plan, or maybe it was the weird vibe the razorwall was giving him. But whatever it was, the meat was trying to tell him something.

  “You sure that’s it?” Maddox asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Stay right here,” he told the man. “Don’t move. Not even a single grid click, yeah?”

  “Yes, yes,” Sanchez said. “Got it.” Maddox heard the nervousness, the excitement in the man’s voice. Wherever it was the company man’s meat sack was sitting at the moment, his palms had to be damp with sweat.

  “You’re sure these cloaking apps are working right?” Sanchez asked.

  “They’re fine,” Maddox assured him. “If they weren’t working, we’d be deaf and blind from all the alarms going off right about now.”

  Maddox edged forward. “I’m going in,” he said, his tone confident. The rest of him, not so much. Back in his office, Maddox’s hands gestured, and inside VS a scanning app appeared in the lower part of his vision.

  Maddox moved forward and penetrated the razorwall. He felt an abrupt tingling sensation, like he’d stepped through a waterfall of freezing water. In the next moment he was through. No alarms sounded, no countermeasures appeared. Nothing on the scanner. So far so good, but he still felt a stab of doubt.

  Around him data pulsed and surged, immeasurable bytes of visualized information shooting left and right, down and up, bright and dazzling like the birth of some universe. Settling himself, he reacquired the target archive, opened it, and began emptying its contents into his avatar’s temp storage, a thief filling his bag with a jewelry store’s diamonds and gems. The box slowly dissolved and then after a few moments disappeared, signifying the end of the data dump.

  He pushed back through the razorwall, exiting the department. As he did so, he heard Sanchez let out a long breath.

  “All right,” Maddox said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Blink. The company man’s avatar glitched, winking like a failing lightbulb. Maddox backed his avatar away.

  What do you know, the meat was right.

  “What…happening…?” Sanchez’s voice clipped and cut out.

  Maddox glanced down at the scanner and quickly gathered what had happened. He hadn’t tripped any alarms himself. The razorwall status was green and there were no signs of intrusion from inside the departmental partition. It was Sanchez. An intelligent sentry had detected him.

  It happened sometimes. A function of bad luck. A wrong place at the wrong time kind of thing. Intelligent sentries were like beat cops patrolling a datasphere, programmed to look for any number of things: inefficiencies in data flows, vulnerabilities in razorwalls, legacy apps left lying around like discarded food wrappers that needed scrapping or archiving. They also kept an eye out for signs of unauthorized access, for illegal infiltrators like Sanchez and Maddox.

  Normally, Maddox’s settings would have revealed an IS’s presence. They typically visualized as crablike creatures crawling across the virtual surfaces of departmental partitions, and they were pretty easy to avoid. You simply kept a safe distance. But this one was invisible to him, which told Maddox it was a high-end IS or one that had been tweaked by someone who really knew what they were doing.

  The curious engineer in him wanted to learn more, to take a few scans and diagnostics of the thing, but the sensible side of him knew he didn’t have time. Not if he wanted to keep from being frozen like the unfortunate Mr. Sanchez, who right about now was probably flipping out, wondering why he couldn’t move his arms and legs. Or maybe he’d gotten past the initial panic, realizing what was happening, knowing that while he was frozen, the IS was also geotagging him and alerting the authorities. In a handful of minutes, it would all be over. Cops would break down the door to his home or office or rented hotel suite or wherever Sanchez had holed up to steal his company’s secrets, then they’d shock him unconscious and drag him off to jail. It was the fate every datajacker dreaded and feared. And if he stayed around any longer, Maddox knew the sentry would see him too, freeze him, and that would be that.

  So he bailed, dumping the stolen data from his temp storage and unplugging.

  And then he was back in the meat. Back in his tiny rented room. Disconnected and safe, unlike the unfortunate Mr. Sanchez.

  He peeled off the trodes, plastic cups popping from the skin of his forehead, and sat up in his eggshell recliner. A standby icon slowly rotated in the air a few centimeters above his deck, held firmly by the docking arm. The arm adjusted its position as Maddox sat up further, keeping the deck within easy reach.

  He swung his legs around and stood up, sliding his hand through the standby icon and shutting down the deck. A cigarette. Christ, he needed a cigarette.

  ***

  Beyond his narrow jut of a balcony where Maddox had barely enough space for himself and a folding cha
ir, the nighttime City churned. Twenty stories below, ground cars congested East Harlem’s arteries, klaxon echoes and the infrequent wails of sirens rising to his ears from the City’s floor. Walkways teemed with pedestrians, a river of humanity pulsing with the reflected glare of giant holo ads projected onto building facades. At Maddox’s level, the lower transit lanes bustled with hovers, almost close enough to reach out and touch, moving among the massive superstructures of steel and concrete. The pitch of turbofan motors rose and fell as vehicles came and went.

  He blew smoke out into the open air, pondering Sanchez’s fate. The company man was probably sitting in an interrogation room right about now, sweating hard and trying to convince some hardened cop this was all some misunderstanding. The cop would ask who he’d been working with, but Sanchez had nothing more than one of the dozens of aliases Maddox worked under. Once the police learned where the two had met (an anonymous chat feed with untraceable hard encryption) and how well they were acquainted (not very, they’d never met in person), they wouldn’t bother trying to find the company man’s accomplice, knowing it was a waste of time, knowing from experience there’d be no trail to follow.

  Leaving a client high and dry, he admitted inwardly, wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of professional behavior. It was, in fact, the kind of thing that could seriously damage your rep if it got out. In the small world of high-end datajacking, rep mattered. Not so much with a little fish like Sanchez, but it mattered to the big players, the highfloor corporati who on occasion hired datajackers for big money corporate espionage jobs and who stayed current on the black market reps the same way a pro football scout keeps up with teenage talent in South America. It also mattered inside the tiny club of vain, jealous, ego-driven elite datajackers who often savored a rival’s failure. And in those moments when he thought about it—those rare instances of self-reflection—he knew it mattered to him, too. He was a data thief. He liked it. Loved it, even. And he took selfish pride in it. Call it ego, narcissism, whatever.