Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016

by John Joseph Adams [Ed. ]

  A directory. Finally. Aedo hit the organize by name button with her knuckle, and there was Cadares, in the second column and the fifth floor.

  Deeper into the belly of the beast. She just prayed there wasn’t a security checkpoint between the lobby and there.

  … which of course there wasn’t. Just a lift with a camera, and she kept her head down, because of course everyone put their cameras in the ceiling even when you could buy ones small enough to hide behind a screwhole anywhere. Same reason people still worked at places like Abacus Lunch Delivery even when everyone searched for food by reputation instead of flipping through an alphabetized paper directory: culture was absolute shit at keeping up with technology. But she could complain about that on a day when it wasn’t working to her advantage. She got out on the fifth floor.

  Cadares’ office responded to Cadares’ datapad, and so did her computer, and Aedo sat down and tried to look bored and put-upon like she was there to clean up the harddrive after one too many unwise downloads. She wasn’t actually sure that was something interns did at places like this; most of her exposure to office culture came through comedy vids and Virtual Liberation memes. But the screens lit up, and she was in, and then there was a lot more to pay attention to than whether or not she played the social role well.

  Like a blinking icon in the corner of the screen.

  One urgent message came up when she clicked on it. Half a page of official business header, and then the message began In light of recent security threats, all Energy Division employees are advised to take the following security measures:

  • Generate a new password

  • Use Secure Logoff on all accounts and devices when you leave your desk

  • Restrict all work to approved Division computers and devices—never log into your Energy Division accounts on a personal or shared device

  … and on like that. Aedo was about to close the window when her eyes skimmed down the notice on instinct, and caught something.

  —expected to endure more security threats, both frivolous and serious, while data terrorist Aedo Liang’s release from prison is in the news cycle. Historically, short-term incarceration has not been an effective deterrent to hacker and terrorist groups. Therefore, it’s the position of this committee that all data espionage from or against a Government office be regarded as treason, and tried as such to the fullest extent prosecutable. We also recommend seeking special dispensation from Justice to try as many infractions as possible retroactively.

  Aedo’s heartbeat spiked. She froze. Still sitting at the desk in Cadares’ office, still staring at the screen, still (hopefully, hopefully) camouflaged as well as she could be, but.

  Treason.

  Her name. Right there in the internal memo. Sure, they’d buried the lede, but—

  Without thinking, she found a messenger program and hopped into the config. Aimed it toward one of the anonymizing proxies. Hoped the Energy Building used a net address blacklist and not a whitelist; hoped the connection wouldn’t be flagged. Then she forwarded the memo direct to LogicalOR.

  They are gunning for your kind, my friend.

  Deep breaths. Aedo risked a glance up, out into the hall where people went about their business without much thought for whether or not they had infiltrators in their midst. She had to wonder how many of them thought their jobs should be taken this seriously.

  Treason.

  Of course, that made this a whole new game. All the goals she’d had— get in, learn what you can, get out, get the word out —took a hard right into something much more active, because if they had zero tolerance on offer, it didn’t much matter if she’d broken in to take gloating selfies or if she planned on taking the whole network down with her. She might not be a computer cracker, but she had her own damn datapad with its own connection to the net and she had the best collection of computer resources in the world at her fingertips. Long live the Liberation.

  If she was going to do one thing here, she was going to find out what the hell Cadares was after and what Energy District One East wanted so badly to hide. If she could do two, she was going to blast the whole thing wide, wide open.

  And if she was very, very lucky, and got to do three? She would get out of here before they arrested her.

  Again.

  • • • •

  She had to move quickly. Not just because if she waited too long, the adrenaline would catch up to her and make her a quivering mess.

  Cadares had requested the energy distribution records for One East, and it was a simple matter to find the message in her email and open the attached data. Of course, Aedo could open it, and read it, but she didn’t know what she was looking for or how to make sense of it. As for whether or not it was being doctored, well, she didn’t know how Cadares had known—or suspected—and she definitely didn’t know what kind of tests you ran on energy reports to determine data sanity.

  There was one good thing: the entire report looked machine-generated, not human-compiled and forwarded. Which meant that she could delve into the mail routing information and get the server it originated from, which meant a server that had access—in theory, at least—to the data she needed.

  She was just copying that information into a new bot template when her own datapad warbled.

  She cursed, then cursed herself silently for cursing out loud, and snatched it up to silence it. At least that still worked; it had been set to buzz or silent already, but whoever was trying to get her attention obviously didn’t care.

  New messages from LogicalOR. Of course.

  LogicalOR: remote gov gps backdoor

  LogicalOR: in ALL the new opsys upgrades

  LogicalOR: you IDIOT

  She almost dropped the pad. She might have, if her response to panic these days hadn’t been to clutch her datapad tighter.

  Maybe too little, too late, but she opened up the network config with a hotkey, hunted down and killed the GPS process, shuffled the encryptions, disconnected and reconnected and opened a log to see if there were any sniffers, any ping attempts, any data transfers that weren’t coming in over the approved chat lines. And yes: there. Could be nothing, could be automatic data monitoring on the government network, could be security, and she wasn’t interested in taking the risk.

  She swiped the log aside and hit the voice call button in LogicalOR’s chat.

  Fast as her typing was, it wasn’t as fast as voice. It was the one drawback.

  She’d half-expected the call to go ignored—hell, she ignored her own calls unless the call was negotiated first—but LogicalOR must have been expecting this one, and picked up on the first ring. “Ja?”

  Aedo startled at the voice. Sounded like a woman her age or a younger boy—or anyone, using a really good speech synthesizer. One without the rockiness and tonal skips of the commercial ones.

  She didn’t have time to wonder. “What do I—”

  “Grab the Keyhole worm, ” LogicalOR said. “Leave it there. I’ll get the thing. ”

  “One East network,” Aedo said, and returned her attention to the computer to get its data address and read that off, too. The VL servers would have a Keyhole download—one with a new compression, a checksum that might not be blacklisted yet. And maybe in a minute or three she could get around to the shrieking in the back of her head—the one pointing out that she was installing a backdoor on a government computer and giving the code to an anarchist.

  She was rapidly getting the feeling that she was burning every bridge in sight.

  Not that it mattered; they’d been lit the moment she stepped outside the prison.

  “You freaked?” LogicalOR asked. “Breathing hard there, kiddy. ”

  Aedo bit off a sharp retort. LogicalOR could mock. LogicalOR probably sat at a desk somewhere where nobody in the real world knew their virtual name and no one on the net knew who they were, and could go outside and walk past the neighbors and the security cameras and buy the latest and greatest computer components and take them home a
nd not have their accounts monitored or the media picking at the story of their life. LogicalOR could damn well excuse Aedo for breathing hard.

  “Need to get out,” she said.

  LogicalOR huffed. Sounded amused. “Go Undercity, ” they said, and Aedo’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Never been.” She didn’t add that the thought of it terrified her.

  “Panic much? It’s not that scary. I live there. ”

  That brought her up short, as her brain threw an input error. She hadn’t thought you could get data in the Undercity good enough to support the kinds of activities LogicalOR enjoyed. Then again, she’d never actually checked. And she definitely didn’t have time right now to grill LogicalOR on the data infrastructure of the Undercity.

  “Patterway Dist entrance?” she asked.

  “For you? NorEast Crossing. Meet you there. ”

  “Please don’t DC,” Aedo said. Ordinarily, she’d avoid having an audio line demanding her attention while she worked. But right now, if LogicalOR disconnected, she’d be back to being on her own, in the middle of a government building, facing down all her bad decisions. There were more of them than there were of her.

  “Still here, ” LogicalOR said. “Trauma counseling available upon request. ” LogicalOR laughed.

  Sure, it was an annoying kind of comfort, but there they were.

  The Keyhole finished its download and began decompressing, and Aedo slid her chair back and killed her connections to the network.

  “Need credit for an autocab,” Aedo said. She didn’t add, I blew it all on the makeover to get in here. She could call attention to her terrible planning-ahead skills, another time.

  “I’ll transfer, ” LogicalOR said. “Get yourself a pretty one. ”

  Aedo gathered up her datapad and Cadares’, and stood. “Okay,” she said. “Gotta go.”

  “DCing now?”

  Aedo closed her eyes for a moment. She didn’t want to kill this audio lifeline, but she knew better than to walk out with it open. Even if LogicalOR didn’t say something and draw attention to her, when they were reviewing the security footage after her great escape, they could still follow the transmission location. She wasn’t bouncing it at all.

  “Yeah,” she said, and winced. “NorEast Crossing?”

  “Be there with bells on, ” LogicalOR said, and the line went dead.

  Deep breaths.

  She put her pad into lockdown; put everything on Cadares’ pad into lockdown except the local wireless it might need to open doors or sign her out. Then she went: down, back by the same path she’d come in on, every breath focused on looking like the same bored intern who had walked in here, every heartbeat shivering.

  She made it down to the lobby with out a problem, but there, Crap, crap, crap, one of the bored uniforms was looking her way, pinched brow and drawn-out frown like he’d be a lot happier if nothing was going on, if no one was going to make his eight-to-five any more interesting than any other day of undifferentiated tedium. People didn’t go into bureaucrat-building security for the excitement, after all.

  Too bad, Aedo had to think. She hadn’t gone into hacking for the excitement either. It had just come around and found her.

  She turned away, not quite fast enough that she couldn’t see him getting up from his desk in the corner of her eye. “Excuse me, miss–”

  Not excused. Not excused. She picked up her pace, then realized a second too late that that was the opposite of acting like she hadn’t heard him, then broke into a run.

  “Miss!”

  Too late. She shoved Cadares’ datapad into the sensor by the door, which checked her out and opened the door automatically. Then she was darting onto the sidewalk, running up along the street until she could find and tag an autocab to come get her.

  The door of the Energy Division offices slid open again behind her and she took a corner, and then another one, and then slowed to a walk and looked for another turn to take just to be sure. At least here, once she was walking, she wasn’t drawing glances; no one really looked at each other on the sidewalks, which made her much happier, as a rule. She tagged a cab as she walked, but she didn’t stop walking: she was more worried about getting caught on the sidewalk waiting than about anything else.

  NorEast Crossing.

  She got in the cab that stopped by, and keyed a destination. Outside the window, the view devolved from office towers to office-worker flats to smatterings of generic commercial buildings to the bric-a-brac of neighborhoods which hadn’t yet been caught up in the big Standardization and Modernization pushes. Little bits of undercity here in the city proper. The autocab came to a stop and let her out in front of one of those doorways you could walk past and quietly edit out of your awareness—a blocked-off alleyway leading off into disrepaired territory, all but yelling out, Heya! Don’t want to get involved with this, here! And Aedo didn’t. She really, really didn’t.

  Which meant that when the cab rolled away, she stood in front of the door, breathing in and out to the bottom of her lungs, just like she’d learned to in prison to keep the walls from clapping in on her or the sound of voices from drowning her. Here, it was nothing so straightforward or small as claustrophobia, demophobia. It was fear of an entire future: waking up tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, every day greeted by the question What do I do now?

  Now, though, there was only one option.

  She went down the narrow corridor—just a gap between buildings—to a place where the industrial ground had been breached, and an access ladder could be glimpsed through it. Then, securing her pad and Cadares’, hand over hand down into this district of the undercity, where halogen lights stood in for the sun, and where freedom—after a fashion—might await.

  • • • •

  The sky receded above her, blocked out by buildings and raised streets, and the shadows of the Undercity seemed to gather themselves up to sniff out the newcomer. Aedo hugged the datapads to her chest, taking in the sights.

  The light of day only cut through to the ground here in patches and slices, carving vertical roads of dust motes through the air. The whole place looked makeshift—oh, there were permanent buildings, but old ones, built long before the algorithmically-perfected districts above had been built over them. And over time, they’d collected all sorts of unofficial additions, from new rooms to balconies to sheds to lectric and data links to masses of reinforcements like scar tissue as the original infrastructure failed. And the disorder was replicated on the street below: crates and boxes and dumpsters and trash, here and there, though less than Aedo had been expecting; ancient cracked pavement and walkways and alleyways at odd angles, and dark patches between buildings that might have been walkways or might not.

  Not a lot of foot traffic here, she guessed. She thought she could hear people moving; could hear voices, though distant, and she didn’t see anyone until her thoughts were interrupted by a quiet snerk.

  She spun around to see … someone, just now emerging from one of those dark patches between walls. Someone just a touch taller than her, of indeterminate age and sex, hair bleached white and frizzing despite what looked like a lot of effort to get it to hang flat, wearing a jacket and combat trousers with too many pockets bulking up their frame. They were watching her with what looked like incredulity. Then they whistled.

  “You,” said LogicalOR, “look nothing like your press photos.”

  Aedo was startled into a laugh. “Yeah,” she said, and then fished after something witty to say. It’d be easy to find one if she was sitting with her datapad out. “ … um, hi.”

  Her hand shifted on the datapads and LogicalOR’s gaze went straight to them, pale eyes looking even paler in the undercity dark.

  “They can still track those,” LogicalOR said. “Not like there’s some magical shield that zaps a trace as soon as you get down here. Lemme root ’em for you.”

  There was something viscerally wrong about handing over her datapad to someone else to muck about
with. But Aedo didn’t much want to be caught and tried for treason, so she ignored the sick feeling at the pit of her stomach and handed both pads over.

  LogicalOR snatched them up, then turned and walked to a nearby crate to sit down. Their eyes hadn’t left the pads, and Aedo had to blink twice—this whole environment felt like a mass of object disorder, somehow different to the disorder in any of the districts up above.

  But maybe that was an illusion. Maybe it was just because she knew this was the undercity now, and all the rumors and clickbait and creepy on the net was clouding her judgment. LogicalOR’s familiarity with the place was probably no different than her easy familiarity with—

  —well, with places she might or might not ever get to see again, now.

  That realization settled on her stomach, and she went to sit down by LogicalOR. They’d turned over both datapads to read model and series numbers, and raised an eyebrow.

  “The off-the-shelf is Cadares’,” Aedo said.

  LogicalOR broke into a ferocious grin. “I like it,” they pronounced. “You go in for illegal access and come out plotting treason. Like, clearly the Upcity justice system has no effect on this one.”

  “I didn’t come out plotting treason,” Aedo protested.

  “Ja,” LogicalOR said, clearly unimpressed. “Like, this just kinda happens, you know.” They turned back to the datapad. “If you need a place to crash, I’ve got room. Long live the Liberation. Gotta have each others’ backs.”

  Aedo closed her eyes, and counted her breaths. She did need a place to crash. The fact that this was her option was a damn sight better than not having one.

  She’d just keep telling herself that.

  “What do you do down here?”

  LogicalOR laughed. “Maybe, you know, don’t fetishize the whole Upcity everything-at-your-fingertips thing. People do live down here.” They were quiet for a moment, and Aedo counted a few more breaths. “I do data,” they said. “Utilities. You could help.”

  “Utilities?” Aedo asked.

  “Yeah. You know. Data is life.” LogicalOR pulled a thin strip of datafilm out of one pocket—then fished out an adapter and plugged it into one datapad. A reboot, three keystrokes, and the screen went black—then went to a progress bar, non-system-standard and adorned with little dancing masks. “And your data is about to go poof. Wave bye-bye to your digital trail today.” Then, as if to cement it, LogicalOR actually did wave. “Bye-bye!”