Digital Venous

by Richard Gohl

  One morning, while she and her housemate, Sylvana, were home, Alia went to check on her two-year-old daughter, Wanda. It was unusual for her to sleep so late. To her horror she found the room empty and the front door ajar. The precocious child had recently worked out how to open the front door and had even ridden her little trike out onto the street. Today, however, the tricycle was still in the hallway.

  Alia started yelling, “No! No! No!” as she tore from room to room, looking under and behind every single object, calling out “Wanda! Wanda! Wanda!” Sylvana, who had just woken up, stood helpless, watching the chaos. For Alia, the terror in the shadow of her mind came crashing through into the light of reality and she screamed, “They’ve taken my baby! I’m getting her back—they’ve taken her! Let me go!” Sylvana tried to calm Alia, grabbing her shoulders, but in the struggle, Sylvana slipped and fell. Alia ran out of the house into the underground street, up to the surface to the Blackwood gate. As she passed from the transdome under the walkway canopy to the gate, she saw a group of a hundred or so local men moving in through the gate. She had no skin ID but in desperation hoped to enter Napea by blending in with them. The closer she got to the front of the queue, the more she realized the insanity of what she was doing. She looked back toward the transdome and saw Sylvana come barging through the double doors. Guards’ and workers heads’ turned to look towards the commotion.

  Sylvana had spotted her. “Alia!” she called. “Alia!” Guards walked straight passed Alia, guns raised towards Sylvana, ready for an attack. Alia, sensing her moment, broke and ran in pursuit of the first group of workers who were now disappearing down the road into Napea. She made it about thirty paces before she was dropped by a paralysis dart.

  A stunt like that would normally see a Sub taken to the life center. Napeans looked for any excuse to reduce to the population; they were obsessed by it. Most people couldn’t believe they didn’t just shoot to kill, as per normal. But today she was lucky—there were far too many witnesses, and by the look of it, she was a well-known lady. Fearing a revenge attack, the guards allowed two male workers and, with Sylvana, they took her home.

  Sylvana and Alia’s relationship soon ended; Alia’s grief was insurmountable. She became impossible to live with. Her personal habits deteriorated. Her spark and sense of humor vanished. The old Alia was gone. Sylvana left to be with family in Greenhill.

  For Alia, the obsession to find her child became intertwined with the struggle against the Napeans. It became the central focus of her life. Naturally, in time, she met others suffering the same affliction, and together they thought about ways of wreaking havoc in the world above.

  Bes Zini, a twenty-two-year-old Blackwood woman, had been looking for her child for forty hours when she was found by friends curled up next to a Stirling gate skylight. Suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, they couldn’t get her to talk. Her baby had gone missing on a Tuesday and they had found her Thursday morning.

  There were no police in the real world. No one to go to for help. People had to fend for themselves.

  Bes lived and worked as part of a growers’ cooperative, which meant that she shared housing and food and the hard work in the hydroponic gardens. She had struggled at night to maintain her sanity, looking after the baby on her own.

  When her boyfriend died in an accident while working in Napea, Bes was numb with shock. Her friends at the co-op talked her through it, but in between looking after the baby and working, there was no time to grieve.

  Then her child went missing. Bes had nothing left to hold onto and nothing left in her emotional tank.

  She had a breakdown and went wandering, searching for her child. She was eventually found and transported back to the commune—now just another statistic. In fact, the third baby in as many weeks. Everyone knew where the children were going, but there never seemed to be any witnesses. There never seemed to be any proof. And in any case, there was no one to tell.

  It was twelve months before she could talk about it to anyone. But when she met Alia and her small group of friends, she drew strength from their desire for justice and retribution. Joining them may not have been the healthiest option for the recovery of her mental health, but in reality, as they all found out, one doesn’t recover from that kind of loss.

  Big, bold, blonde, and brash, Madi Johnson was the last one anybody ever thought would be the maternal type, but when she suddenly became pregnant, the excitement and joy seemed magnified by the unlikely nature of the whole situation. The fact that there didn’t seem to be a man involved at all was not surprising, nor was the fact that she gave birth to a big and brash baby boy.

  Like all the real people, as they called themselves, she lived on a subsistence level, underground, where survival was a full time occupation. The average life expectancy was fifty.

  As a young girl Madi was seen as being highly intelligent—she was quick-witted and bright, but as she grew older her intelligence was wasted, and she grew bored, often taking out her frustration on others. Although she could be fun and funny, her bitterness manifested in a cycle of cruelty and guilt, both conditions being aggravated by drugs and alcohol.

  Her aggressive “attitude” was sometimes euphemized by friends in terms of her being “the wild one.” She was not unusual in her sexual proclivities or her drug or alcohol intake. That’s what people did in the real world, especially at twenty-two years old.

  Real people tended to live in growing communes; underground hydroponic food production was labor intensive, and the work was claustrophobic and exhausting. They didn’t work set days or hours; they just worked when they had to—and it was often.

  Whatever the activity, people spent their free time doing it in pubs, and often the children followed. Childhood was no longer a magical fantasy constructed by adults. They worked from a young age and went to school one or two days a week.

  When Madi’s baby arrived, there wasn’t room for it. The child spent each day in the communal crèche. She would pick him up after work—sometimes not until after she’d been “out” first.

  Madi had never felt “needed” by anyone or vice versa. Her parents had passed away when she was young, so the language of intimacy was never learned. Male behavior associated with attachment was seen as “creepy,” and such characters were quickly dispatched.

  With the baby there had not been any powerful bonding at birth; she had simply been too exhausted. The relationship between mother and child started to grow more through an intellectual process. But just as this understanding began to blossom, the baby disappeared from the crèche. Madi had been working only fifty meters away.

  Her grief was her own private black hole. Like Bes, she never spoke about the loss until she met other women who had been through the same thing.

  Claire had been teaching the day the gas was dropped. The school rooms, under a northern transdome in Blackwood, were well-ventilated. But her house, where her small son had been looked after by her parents, was in a lower section of the street, where the gas seemed to concentrate. She lost all three of them and still carried the guilt with her everywhere. The horrors that had unfolded that afternoon, the chaos and the body count, was payback from the Napeans, in retaliation for the anxiety bug introduced months earlier.

  Prior to the gas drop, Alia had been a friend of Claire’s. They knew each other socially but, as a pacifist, she often argued with Alia about how to deal with the Napeans; Alia was for resistance in any form, whereas Claire always advocated non-violence.

  Claire never wanted to know the full extent of Alia’s role in the sabotage of the Napean network that had caused the reprisals leading to the death of her family. She knew her friends targeted Napeans in ways that were morally questionable. But they were still her friends.

  Alia and Madi had known Wez for years. Although he wasn’t always around, he was an important member of the group. Alia and Madi had taken a shine to him after finding out that he had a kid that he’d never seen. When the kid was abducted, f
or some reason the mother decided it was a good time to tell Wez that he was a dad—to a little girl that he’d probably never see. Emotionally he was a broken guy, awkward and shy, but a victim of the same injustice as they were. Although he was a listener rather than a talker, one didn’t have to know him long to see that the desire for revenge burned within him.

  It was only later that they found out what he was capable of.

  Alia met Wez at her work and discovered that he had an amazing double life. He could write in any digital language, and understood the coding behind synapse imaging and the Napean network. Such pursuits were an anathema to the real lifestyle. Wez didn’t talk about it much, but when he and Alia began to see more and more of each other, it was difficult for his “hobby” to go unnoticed.

  Wez’s achievements were all the more remarkable because real people had minimal technological resources. They had a primitive, hardwire computer network, but not everyone had access to it. Many of their computers were of the desktop variety. Some had later handheld or wrist-bound devices, but these were for storage only and could not be used on the real network. They did not have their own subcutaneous implants or remote, wireless connectivity.

  Real people who worked up in Napea had mandatory sub-dermal ID tracking devices inserted.

  Wez was not the only one in the real world to have acquired the hardware and the know-how to externally run a Napean-style machine. The only problem was that their “Iris Navigation” (IN) system could only be accessed through a Napean eyeball.

  To hack out an eyeball and hack into the network was possible but, once there, time was limited—a dead Napean’s ID was usually good for just a few hours, if you were lucky. At the suspected capture of a Napean, his or her ID would be deactivated.

  To make it even more difficult, a pirate user had to be within three hundred meters of a T-dock. The Iris navigation system would pick up the T-dock, and a number of different pathways became available.

  Alia had been the first guinea pig to wear a Napean lens and, with the help of Wez and Madi, they had developed the anxiety bug. It wasn’t designed to be lethal, but for many regular users of ETP in Napea, it proved to be the end.

  Although the three of them were never caught, when they found out the huge damage they had caused, they didn’t see each other for months. The real world turned into a place consumed with death. But when the child abductions started up again, they began to meet and discuss what might be done.

  Chapter 14

  Hunt

  SHANE HEARD ABOUT the escape, and it was minutes before he saw his boss’ name, Magellan, flashing on his eye. Magellan liked to use Electro Telepathy when talking tactics. It was silent, secure, and left no room for misunderstanding.

  Shane breathed deeply before responding to Magellan: Of course I know about it. They went missing from a building site—from a ten-story building.

  Magellan was uncharacteristically hostile: This is the fourth breach in as many months. How does this happen, again?

  Shane: There were three guards. The couple just vanished. But there’s no problem—there’s nowhere for them to go.

  Magellan: I’m aware there is a good deal of trade on your watch.

  Shane: A little bit of healthcare stuff is all I allow.

  Magellan: I know. That’s fair; it acts as an equalizer. But this is different, Shane. These workers have been missing for nearly forty-eight hours, loose in the northern precinct. Do I have to remind you what this means?

  Magellan was referring to the fact that this was the most important area in Napea, adjacent to the lofty mountain laboratories containing all N.E.T. production materials and facilities, various mortet funnels for processing dark matter and creating axion—and it was less than a kilometer from the space elevator, a hundred miles above which, sat Magellan himself.

  Shane: No, sir. No ,you don’t. The fact is there was a bungle with SCID. Those two workers officially left yesterday—they were scanned out, yet our head count was down two. But the whole crew was released before anything was done about it.

  Magellan: How do you explain that?

  Shane: We’re having trouble with some of our guards—we just can’t get the quality. There are too many distractions for them, too much else for them to do up here… there’s no commitment to the vocation anymore.

  Magellan: Shane I’ve been tolerant. Far more tolerant than other Service officials ever would have been. I’ve asked you all the logical questions I can. Now I report to my colleagues, and the answers you’ve given me will not satisfy. You will be asked to retire.

  Shane: But I’ve kept security tight in the south since we started laser building! I’ve cleaned up sixty serious security breaches in the last year! I know how it all works.

  Magellan was measured, even suave: Exactly, Shane. You know a little too much. So when I say retirement, I mean from everything. The Service will want you.

  Shane: I’ll deal with it. I’ll see to them personally—tonight.

  Magellan: Please do.

  Shane knew that he would be impossible to replace and, as had happened before, the Service were in panic mode as they worried about their facilities. They wouldn’t force him to retire. They couldn’t. Shane had maintained a trade relationship with one of the escapees, an Evan Wilson. But now, rather than being motivated by purely mercenary concerns, Wilson had moved into a bigger league. The other person was someone with the surname Bokovski—not a name he was familiar with.

  Shane explained that he had been called into work, left home straight away, and made the high-speed journey through the heart of the Napean metropolis and up to the modernist precinct. He didn’t like giving explanations about the nature of his work. It drove Mia crazy. Yes, she knew his body could be repaired in case of injury, but it was nonetheless a painful and drawn out experience. Best not go into detail, thought Shane.

  Using the network, he sourced more information on the escape. The two workers had disappeared from the top of the building. That was a new one. In his hundred-plus years of security experience, he had never heard of that before. There had to be one of two possible explanations: abseiling or base jumping, and neither were particularly plausible; where did they get the equipment?

  Shane’s advantage was a combination of experience, instinct, and superior technology. All he had to do was get to the area and do what he’d done a thousand times before.

  Buildings were so easy to produce and Napeans had few other demands on their resources; architecture was booming. Architectural design fashion went from sublime to ridiculous, and that was within five hundred meters. But it meant that buildings were often abandoned for a period, providing ample protection for those wishing to elude the law.

  Shane was well-armed. He had a heat, magnetic density, CO2 and movement sensitive applications, all available through his Iris Navigation system. Shane also had a device that measured organic material at a distance. It was a scanner that sent out a signal and pinpointed living organic material. Napeans showed up as a silver shimmer. Plants tended to light it up a little, but a human body glowed orange.

  It was now dark and, although it was a full moon, only a small amount of its brightness filtered through the tinted Napean roof. Will they be blending in or hiding out? he wondered.

  Occasionally Subs tried to hide out in Napea indefinitely. If they could master “the look,” they could go unnoticed for as long as they had their own food supply.

  Shane assumed these people, like many before them, were aiming for the medical facilities near the Greenhill gate. Stealing N.E.T. was the usual motivation. No one had ever reached the elevator—not even him.

  On the street Shane passed several nightclubs. Some of them operated twenty-four hours; Napeans were good at partying. They could take drugs, yet be free of adverse physical reactions. A group of bohemian individuals alighted from a private magna-car. Three couples slid out of the vehicle and made their way toward the door of a club obscurely called “Lakeside.” The women were a
ll in black latex of varying cuts. Their hairstyles were huge; their jewelry itself must have weighed twenty kilograms. They moved as one, like the limbs on the shadow of a black cat.

  The men were decked out in tight-fitting dark suits, short in the arm and leg. They wore no shirts and either had Cuban heel boots or gym shoes. They all looked intent on having a seriously good time—or maybe it was day three of a seriously good week.

  Some “fashionistas” came out of the club; there were two of them—a male and a female. They stood at the corner waiting for two other females approaching from further down the street. The four greeted each other as Shane passed them on the street. Their physical alterations were so pronounced that Shane’s suspicions were aroused. Were they actually Napean? He was an expert eavesdropper.

  “Love your button nose,” said the male to one of the approaching women.

  She replied, “Hey! Thank you!” They all kissed. “Crazy beak!” said Button Nose. She was referring to the nose job he must have had done. Fashionistas were characterized by their surgical alteration to bones, skin, and cartilage. Shane could see obviously that the male with the “beak” had also had major surgery on his chin and nose, the latter now being so large and aquiline as to resemble the hooked beak of one of any number of now extinct parrots. The male was also well over one hundred and ninety-five centimeters tall and extremely angular, indicating thigh extensions and subcutaneous elbow and shoulder caps.

  Shane also noticed the “button nose” woman had no fingers. Her hands had been sculpted; even the stubs of her fingers had been taken so that her hands looked like fleshy paws. Her protruding cheekbones and enlarged eyes gave her the look of some nocturnal creature. Shane thought her very cute. The other female from the club had the vampira look which also spiked his interest. They—the blood sucking sect—were one of a number of groups who hunted Subterraneans. If news escaped that a Sub or Subs were at large in Napea, Shane had to rush to get there first, or there would likely be little left of the intruder. They had a network; if anyone knew about the presence of Subs, it would be her. Shane pretended to be involved in some ETP conversation so that he could keep listening.