The problem was, the process had flaws. Somebody had to fall in the trap first and then live to tell the rest about it.
Bhai Sharan looked for something to kick. There was nothing, not a can, not a rock, nothing. Damn these cleaning drones! You couldn’t even vent properly in these corporate buildings.
The old man composed himself and straightened his tie. “I assume you haven’t completed the third part yet.”
“Someone is helping him! He’s just an ordinary guy, but he’s evaded the authorities even in this police state, he fought off my cobra, escaped the prison, and is now vanished! Ordinary people don’t do those things, old man. He’s doing things that took me years to perfect. Who is helping him?”
The old man grunted, a hint of realisation in his face.
Singh darted to him and punched the wall next to his face. The old man flinched. “Speak!” Singh hissed.
“Yes. Of course. I might have an idea of what happened. It’s the nanodaemons,” he said nodding.
“The nanod-” Singh struck the wall again. “Aren’t they under your control?”
“Yes, and no,” the old man explained. “They are self-aware digital entities. In order to function at the level we want them to, they have little in the way of rules and restraints.”
“So… what? They decided to help their user? Turn against us?”
“No. They were always helping their user, that is their prime focus. They are the same as the buried process that duplicated them, froze them, broke the three laws and carried out the… assassination,” the old man said, whispering and glancing around the parking.
Singh nodded and clicked his tongue. “You mean that in order to infiltrate and carry out the hit, they are posing as real benevolent entities. No, not posing. They really are helping him. They themselves don’t know that they have betrayed the user.”
“Precisely. And, unfortunately, these are AIs whose sole purpose was to keep their user alive in an urban environment, no matter what the cost.”
“They turned an ordinary man into the perfect urban warrior,” Singh said shaking his head.
“Yes!” the old man said excited, seeming to forget the situation. “Imagine what they could do with a properly trained user! They could change guerrilla warfare, help out diplomatic missions, infilt-”
Singh just glared at the man.
“Sorry. Got carried away with the sales pitch there.”
“Tell me you haven’t tested them before in the field…”
“No, we haven’t. But the results are extraordinary so far. The nanodaemons have succeeded in both their objectives, the main one and the hidden one. And they are keeping their user safe from a master assassin such as yourself!” He was way too excited for this mess.
Bhai Sharan turned his back and walked away. “I’ll finish the job my way, then.”
His princess slithered over the old man’s toes, pushing him aside with her enormous hood. Then she followed her master.
Chapter 41:// Breaking in
Back at constructionsite7, the gates were locked.
There were security cameras, but Leo knew where a couple of blind spots were from some coworkers who liked to slack off every now and then.
He wasn’t a snitch, he was the last person to betray someone but he’d stumble on them sometimes so he remembered a gap in the fence.
“Give me the cutter,” Leo said and then fumbled with it, having only one working arm. He tried a couple of times but he only managed to cut it once and scratch it a couple more. At this rate they would be inside just in time for the skyscraper’s opening ceremony.
“Gimme that,” Katerina said and started cutting the fence.
His walkman shuffled to the Mission Impossible tune, and he was pumped up. He bent the wire fence and pushed himself through, holding it open for her like a gentleman.
“Where to?” she whispered.
“Stay right behind me, grab my belt.”
She did, and they moved in the shadows. There were some big blinding floodlights but they actually made it easier to stay hidden, casting long distinct shadows and blinding someone who would stare at the lit areas.
A guard walked close-by, doing his rounds. He was weary and bored, not alert in the least. It was a construction site, not much happened, the company just wanted to have some people on site to avoid vandalisms or thefts. Pretty much everything was locked up, and the heavy machinery was, well, heavy. You’d need to be blind and deaf to have something stolen from in there and not notice.
Now that he was closer, they could see that the guard was middle-aged. His gait was slow, and he sat on a crate he found and yawned.
He pulled out a thermos from his backpack and sipped slowly, warm coffee filling their nostrils. The thermos was red with a white emblem of a Greek-style person’s profile.
“What the hell are we gonna do?” Leo whispered. “We need to get to the garage behind him.”
Katerina covered her phone to block out the light and peeked at the time. “We’ll wait twenty minutes.”
“Why?”
“It’s game night.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. My dad always used to watch football on game night.”
“Huh.” Then he added, “How do you know he’ll watch the game?”
“He is wearing his team’s red jersey underneath his shirt, can’t you see?”
“Huh.”
They waited. A few minutes later, the guard pulled out a tablet and propped it with a small base in front of him, like a TV. He sat back, and turned it on.
It was loud.
The holosound system provided binaural audio for an exciting, immersive experience. It was as if you were there in Gate 7, while Olympiakos, the Greek team that usually claimed the championship, was playing off somewhere in Europe. You could hear the roar of the crowd, the rubbing of the seats, the thumping of the ball. Sports commentary optional and toggleable.
It was loud, and it filled your ears making you effectively deaf to what was right next to you.
“I’ll do it, I’m quiet. In there?” Katerina asked and pointed at the rusty metal garage doors.
“Yeah. But you need my hand to start the engine.”
Katerina put her hands on her hips and protested quietly. “I do not! I can start up a car by mys-”
Leo put his finger on her lips and cut her off. “My hand has an RFID chip. It starts the truck.”
“Oh. OK then. Stay right behind me, grab my belt.”
He tried, but girls don’t have belts for some reason.
Katerina opened up the football game on her phone and muted the streaming video. She waited, watching the match. The holosound was coming in distorted to them from the guard’s tablet, it was made to be heard positionally. Upon a crowd cheer, she pushed forward and rushed to another shadow. Leo kept close.
The first shadowjump was easy, it was close by. The next was a big one. They would practically be in the open, lit from a tiny sun on a pole. But the guard was transfixed on the game.
She took a readied stance, wobbling herself as a runner would, waiting for the starting shot, watching the match.
The crowd protested, they darted off and ran the distance, jumping into the garage’s shadow.
The guard did not notice. He was too busy cursing along with the crowd.
They walked carefully, the ground was gravel, which is the-worst-possible-ground to sneak up on someone.
Leo winced at each step.
He managed to get close, and pushed aside the creaky, rusted garage doors slowly. Katerina monitored the match, gesturing him when to stop and when to push on.
They got inside, no alarms raised.
A row of trucks was in the garage, and they were quite a long distance away from the guard now so they could walk easily. If he turned around though, he would see a door wide open when it shouldn’t be.
Leo went to a concrete mixer lorry and banged the tank. He went to another and banged again. This one was em
pty.
He thought he heard someone closing in on them, looked around, but he didn’t see anyone in the dark.
He stepped in the passenger’s seat. Katerina climbed up the driver’s seat and said, “A concrete mixer? That’s what you need to make the snake trap?”
“No, the concrete mixer is a snake trap. I was trying to figure out how to make one when I remembered that a cross section of a concrete mixer is effectively a large metal container with blades inside like a screw, that mix the concrete. So, here we are.”
“Stealing a truck, on our second date.” She gasped theatrically and fell on his shoulder.
“Yeah, wait till you see what we have to do now. Make sure the lights are off. Turn on the ignition,” Leo said, and placed his left hand over hers on the big steering wheel.
armd> Go on. It’s fine.
rfid> CF02032533139342DFDC1C35
“You have to keep your hand on top of mine all the way? How romantic,” Katerina said, revved up the enormous engine, and ran the tons of metal and engineering through the garage doors, spitting gravel past the startled security guard and breaking down the main gate, all the while accompanied by a thunderous goal-cheering roar of the crowd.
Chapter 42:// Dropping back
parrotd> Did you get it?
armd> ACK.
armd> How was the ride? Furry? Smelly? Shitty? *snort*
armd> Hey I’m gonna punch your bits out!
armd> Punch me? Go fetch, you quadrupedal meatbag!
armd> Why you-
parrotd> Kill -9 armd
The controlling daemon parrotd killed the process that he had forked earlier into the dog, when he had created a perfect copy of the program armd. The cyberarm daemon, being the only one with servo functions and motor controls, could take over the dog’s prostheses and manipulate the faithful pet back to the construction site. A preloaded and pre-sniffed vulnerability in the construction site’s CCTV was run at that time in the van. The daemons couldn’t code of course, they just used scripts available online, ready-made exploits that anyone could point and fire. Some would call them lame script kiddies, but they didn’t care.
httpd> Finally. One of them armd’s is manageable, but two? That’s unbearable.
armd> Yeah, that guy was starting to become a bother.
eyed> Really?
parrotd> Let’s see what we got.
They loaded the timestamped footage from the foreman’s office. The camera was tilted, someone had bumped it to the side but it was watchable. It showed the user coming in the office with the foreman, the user shaking hands with the mayor, both sitting down, the foreman leaving the room. Then the user was leaning his head forward.
The rest was corrupted.
parrotd> Shit.
Chapter 43:// Catching up
They logged into the wifi named Sikh Temple Shri Guru Nanak Darbar. It was a spacious, open-access network with its GUI switched to Punjabi, a major Indian dialect. It was enhanced by many wifi repeaters to cover the whole temple space, fulfilling the needs of the hundreds of believers who congregated there, rubbing elbows and saying their prayers.
It was now empty, late at night.
Leo watched the building, that had become a holy place for the Sikh minority. It was a plain office space, big and blocky. They had adorned it outside with LED strips, painted orange lines on the building’s ledges and placed billowy cloths and flowerpots in the entrance. A plain orange banner read “Trust In God,” and another “God Is One”, both phrases in English, Punjabi and in mangled Greek.
“Sometimes you just need balls,” he muttered to himself and gathered up courage.
He stepped in and unconsciously tried to form a cross over his chest with his right hand. It was the Christian custom when entering a church. His destroyed cyberarm instead twitched and sparked in protest. He stared at it and then felt silly for even trying.
The temple was very big, chosen to house hundreds of people. The space inside was open, plain and office-like. The columns were painted orange, the floor had a soft cover fit for kneeling from end to end, an orange path led to a place where the holy men sat and performed the rites in microphones. A place with traditional musical instruments was beside it, with a big round leather drum in its middle. Soft white curtains covered the windows, speakers were spread around the place and colourful decorations hung from the ceiling.
The snake charmer was there.
Alone.
He was kneeling at the far end of the orange corridor, praying silently, whispers echoing in the empty space.
It wasn’t easy to make out if it was him actually. Judging by the orange-white colour scheme, most of the believers would be expected to dress like that. Also, he was facing the other way, and even if he hadn’t, he was a dark-skinned person that Leo had seen only once.
Nah, he couldn’t be sure that that was the right Sikh.
But the huge cobra next to him was a dead giveaway.
Chapter 44:// Dropping in
“Hey!” Leo said and walked inside with broad steps.
The man arose slowly, his turban somehow exaggerating the turning of his head.
He stared at Leo with his scary, white-glass eye.
“Hey?” the man asked. “This is how you address a man, disrupting his prayers?” His voice was deep, smooth and accented.
Leo had not made a good entrance but he had to keep the momentum going, now that he had found the guts to step inside. Pausing to think would mean thinking over the danger he was in, would mean running back out screaming, would mean life in prison. “I’m in no mood for games. You framed me for the mayor’s murder and sent your cobra to kill me in my cell. Why?”
The Sikh smiled and showed his teeth. “Because someone had to get framed.”
“Hey look, I know this is a sacred place. Just tell me what I need to know. I don’t want to fight you here, it must be a sin or something, right?”
“I’ll append the sin to my looong list of begging for forgiveness,” the Sikh said, the end of his word blending with the hiss of the cobra into a long “sss.”
Could this get any more creepy?
Leo pulled up a modern, beautifully designed survival axe and braced himself as the serpent rose up to his height.
fingerd> Really? I have permission to access the net?
parrotd> Knock yourself out.
fingerd> Fingered! This man is [email protected], 42 years old.
The information popped into Leo’s field of view and he swiped it away, gritting his teeth.
The Sikh sidestepped to the musical instruments and picked up two sticks. He took place over the two meter drum and began pounding.
fingerd> Damn, he is pounding hard.
armd> No comment.
httpd> Connecting… Please wait. The Ranjit Nagara (victory drum) was used to boost morale when they marched into battle.
The condemning piece of information was routed to the user’s field of view. The data in itself was irrelevant, the important bit was that it came through a normal, unencrypted web route that could be traced even by a moron reading out of step-by-step instructions.
parrotd> What’s the police response time in this area?
httpd> Estimated 4 minutes.
walkmand> What will happen to us when we get arrested?
parrotd> Who knows buddy… Who knows…
Leo read the victory drum info on his veil and cursed it away. The rhythmic pounding became furious, sweat dripping on the Sikh’s forehead and it sounded like there was some order in the deafening chaos.
Leo was scared shitless.
The cobra lunged forward, opening her mouth and showing her poisonous teeth.
Leo knew he had no real mobility. Having a limp arm is not just about handling things, it messes up your whole balance. There is a reason people alternate arms when running, and unconsciously balance out every movement with arm rotations.
All he could do was chop.
He sidestepped at the
very last minute and brought the light axe in an arc straight down the cobra’s hood.
The tool was sharp, and the blow was lucky not to glance off. It went deep into the serpent, doing nothing more than pissing the shit out of it.
She twisted her body, Leo let go of the axe, and she tasted the air, rebounding for another attack.
Chapter 45:// Setting up
Leo ran outside the Sikh temple yelling “Aaah!” and wobbling awkwardly to balance himself. The cobra came out the door behind him and followed him, slithering along his path.
At a bend, she crashed on a parked car and made a big dent on the side door. Leo glanced behind him when he heard the rending metal, then closed his eyes and ran like hell to the alley.
“Now-now-now-now-now,” he screamed and slid past the concrete mixer.
Katerina threw the stinking clothes she had promised to burn earlier and threw them into the hole of the mixer, making sure plenty of aroma was left in the air around.
The clothes were the ones Leo had escaped with, filled with blood, sweat, pee.
His scent.
The cobra swayed around the corner and closed the gap.
Leo took out the flashlight he’d gotten from the prepper bag and shone it to her reptilian eyes.
It was like a pocket sun, burning retinas and making them all see stars and shapes. They would need whole minutes to regain vision after that. A sharp fear coursed over Leo at that point. Blinding them all was a double-edged knife. If it didn’t work, the cobra would promptly munch on him, and worse, on Katerina.
Katerina, who was a waitress, a stranger to him a few nights before, a lone soul in the vast ocean of the capital city, was now in danger because of him. Sure, he had tried to keep her out of it and sure, he had told her the risk, he kept nothing back, but still. It was his fault if she would get hurt.
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