by Aies Jay
SWIMMING TIME
and the lionfish jumps and dives into the blue watery background of my desktop. I hook up, using all three jacks for once and hit “connect” as soon as I see it on my retinas, tapping the keys as I go along the commands on the screen.
DOT
DOT/
DOT />>
GATE FOUND
DOT///>PROCESSING///CONNECTING
I shove the last of the sweet and sour into my mouth, chew and swallow as the connection uploads fully and I feel my body becoming less and less important.
SYSTEM: BRAINWORM
USERNAME: LIONFISH
WELCOME HOME
-Thanks, babe.
I mutter, tapping away at the keys, vaguely remembering a time when I wanted those implants in my fingertips that made the key board redundant, Gate or no Gate. This is my church, my last place of worship. The doc won’t let me have Lychee’s remains In Physio? Well, boo-fucking-hoo. I know more than once dance and in the System, I’m more than a weightless intelligence. I’m a God.
the System
I enter my Avatar, the Lionfish, and dive in. The world seizes to be and all is information starting in my little bubble aquarium of my very own in the System, my Domain. All Domains are different, depending on their hacker’s fancies and most of them catering to the style of their Avatar. Mine is like a liquid desktop aquarium, filled with icons floating about, most of them slightly animated, with a backscreen of an ocean blue. Beyond it lays the System, the ocean of knowledge and information. To a wired hacker that’s hooked up it’s not a whole lot different than it is to a fleshie, or a virgin if you prefer that expression. The difference is essential, though. I don’t look at a screen of information, it’s all around me. My retina screens make the System my full vision, and a wired hacker can shuttle information and programming a lot faster than a virgin. Someone explained it like it’s the difference of making a sand castle with your hands instead of chop sticks. You’re faster, you have a greater sense of feeling for it and the end result is a lot better plus there are some things you just can’t do unless hooked up. That last one is up for debate, though, but I’ve never regretted it and I’d rather be inside the System, having it around me, and risk black ice and physical damage to sitting in front of an unfeeling Gate and safely clicking away. In the flesh world, I’m almost nobody. In the System, I’m a rather big lionfish. In my Domain, I’m the king of my castle. I think that about sums it up.
I start by constructing three info bots with different purposes. One will gather up anything about deaths in infants caused by suffocation by unknown cause in the time lap starting the date of the mail being sent by GF until today. The second will look for any dirt I can dig up on the doc on Prima Care, for blackmailing him to get my son’s tissues back. I scan the paper I got from the clinic using the ill-used paper slot in my Gate and put the hooks on the bots on his name as well as the clinic and the logotype of the clinic. Third info bot goes fishing for docs on S2 that have less than a proper reputation who’d probably be willing to help me once I get hold of the damned samples, looking for someone with a fancy but besmirched degree. I’ll sift through them once I’ve gotten a fair few to choose from, S2 is a haven for that type of doc but the bad ones that fuck up their patients are cheap as hell so I narrow the search by putting in a minimum pay of 10 000 creds per minor surgery, slightly above the standard fee, who all offer reasonable aftercare, hinting at some pride in their work.
The bots are prepared easily enough and I release them into the System like little pellets of caviar, protected by fire walls untraceable unless you really, really work for it. They’d have to do some serious sniping and deconstructing them, and recognize my work to be able to backtrack them to me. In other words, highly unlikely. Any hacker that could is more than likely living by the Codes as much as I do, and honour among hackers demands we don’t sell each other out to fleshies. If a hacker becomes offensive, he’s dealt with by his own Community. That can be bad enough, believe me. One guy I knew of was discovered to spread child pornos. He got Black Iced with major capital letters. He didn’t die but it still got him so hard he didn’t even recognized the nurses changing his diapers and when his money for hospital care ran out, hackers spat at him as he lay starving to death in the gutter, pooling assets to keep a body mod by his side to make sure no one showed him any mercy. S2 security did nothing, implying the President knew of the whole thing. As far as we know, the President knows everything. One of his by-names is after all Father of All Knowledge Worthy of Knowing.
As the last info bot leaves my Domain I sit back, dipping the spring rolls in hot sauce, waiting. The taste of the food is different every time, Wan’s relatives believe nothing should be ready made in batches larger than a regular tub, and that has pros as well as cons. Pro, never boring. Con, never as good as that one batch. I remember the one I ate on my twentieth birthday after way too much diving and waking up starving near death, grabbing only the half-sleeping Yun and a jacket before stuffing my face with chicken spring rolls and hot sauce, wearing the same clothes as I had for five days straight and then going to the Water Palace for the last time ever. As the last spring roll goes down my stomach my body reminds me I’m still made of flesh. I unhook carefully, leaving the System and go to the bathroom. A visit to the poo-stall becomes a shower and as I’m about to put on new clothes I realize I’m seeing double from fatigue. I was supposed to be asleep more than four hours ago. I don’t even hook up, I just tap in a mail by the com link to the QA of falling ill to my boss, pull underwear on and slump into the couch under the blanket I mostly keep there instead of a proper duvet. I blink three times before passing out.
nurse
I wake up on my own from having slept enough, something that usually wakes me up with a start. For a full five seconds I think I’ve overslept, then I remember. I get so disoriented from sleeping in full because it’s so rare these days. As I remember, I become fully awake. My stomach roars and I take care of the fleshy business first, bathroom and re-heating the leftovers from yesterday. The food is scalding hot as I hook up and I stir with the chopsticks in it to even the heat out, already halfway into the System, answering the WELCOME HOME with my lethargic “Thanks, babe” as per routine. My little caviar pellets have worked like a charm, as always, and a tired sense of pride makes me almost smile. It’s been eight and a half hours and they’ve returned, bursting with info. I carefully start filling my mouth with food, vaguely tasting the squid as I open them and process the info, starting with the one looking for cases with suffocating babies. I almost stop chewing as I read it.
-Fuck diggity damn.
I mutter. The info on death rate by disease on infants is just as scant as last I checked, but the info bot has picked something else up. Others than me has searched for diseases that causes swelling of the throat, suffocation and death in children. A lot more. I check the Gate System for search terms used in the last three years, comparing them to the number of hits over the last year. There’s a 300 percent increase. And that’s just local figures. That fucking means something or I’m not the only one who just happened to get paranoid in the last year about this in particular and that’s beyond hard to believe. 300 percent is not a fucking coincidence. More people have lost their kids to this disease or what the hell it is other than me.
-Sons of utter bitches.
The caviar pellet held mostly info on what people had been searching for but if I somehow can access the death certificates on the clinics I can find more proof, maybe. Or something. I empty it and send it out again after changing the search terms a little, making it dig deeper, and start writing a mail to send to the clinics all over S2, requesting statistics on their infant death record, trying to make it look like a case study, claiming I’m a Luna 3 med student. Maybe it’ll work. Probably won’t.
I open the second caviar, with docs holding shitty reps and high rates. There’s no less than six, a good number of
selections. I disregard the first two from knowing who they are. I don’t want to deal with someone who knows me that will want to talk me out of it and tell me to finish grieving instead or some shit like that. I want this to be a new acquaintance, someone who has no earlier knowledge of me. The third I scratch from reputation. He sent a body mod bone breaker after a kid that tried skipping the bill. The mod didn’t just break the kid’s bones, he hit him in the back of the head with a bat, fucking up his medulla oblongata, and left the kid a veg. Number four is too expensive, wham, bam, no thank you, ma’am. This leads me to the final two clinics. They seem equally qualified. The doc named Seizer of the Orion Clinic has a degree from Luna 3, no less, and has specialized in bioware and for a burnout, he’s expensive as fuck. The other choice is a pair of twins, with no grad papers, but with very fine rumour, excelling in synthetic body parts, everything from new arms and legs for the crippled to butterfly wings and webbed fingers for the transformation freaks, of the proud Full Moon Clinic. Expensive as well, like all good modifiers. I sigh and think. A pair of twins is two people that might talk but the old L3 doc may be too haughty to help and then I have to turn elsewhere anyway. I put up a finger in the air, bouncing it between logos.
-Eenie, meenie, miny, mo…
My finger does the random dance and as I add a fresh number of words in the end to truly randomize, I land on Seizer’s logo. It’s a faded blue circle with a sex neutral body inside, and the body looks like it’s made by wires except for the heart. It’s nice, actually.
-Luna 3 man it is. L3, babe. L3.
I conclude and zip off a mail to the Orion Clinic, saying I need a consulting job that involves a disease. To tickle his sense of competition, I make a point of the former doc not finding the answer despite extensive work. That ought to do it. I never met a snob that didn’t revel in proving his superiority to other snobs. I stretch afterwards, rather pleased, and shove the last of the food down before opening caviar number three, about the doc and Prima Care. At first it looks disappointing. Doctor Eugene Rookworth got his degree on Maxima where he has no criminal record. He has a minor gambling debt, but he’s slowly paying it off, he’s a non-offender, and he uses no chemical pleasures nor has any unhealthy hobbies. No major foul ups in his history I can use at all. Prima Care looks spot free, too, been on S2 for twenty-six years, no soiled rumour to use or covered up shit to throw at them. I almost clip the project in anger when my eyes fall to the complete list of employees of the clinic, current as well as former. I look a little more carefully. My eyes grow larger. Oh, mother of Bingo.
The list of employees is fairly short and all of them had a few tiles of info about them, being title, when they started and when they quit but also, hallelujah say it with me, why they quit. My little nosy caviar pellet has snooped up what a general search wouldn’t have. The nurse Nicola Teresian was fired and lost her licence due to theft of narcotics about three months after Lychee died. Two conclusions, she’s a drug addict and has a bone to pick with the clinic. A disgruntled employee, I couldn’t have prayed for anything better except perhaps for the doc being the druggie but this is a fine silver medal. I hook into the local Gate System of S2, my sweet Brainworm, searching for an address but no such luck. I look for a current employer but no, indeed.
-Fuck.
I look for a death certificate, but no again. So she lives but is hard to find.
-Where are you, darling…?
I tap my keys, looking deeper. I go out of the local System again and take a careful look, poking around the full GalactiNet, tracing her cred chit, one of the easiest ways to track flesh in my opinion. She has two, one high profile fucker. I take one look at the fire wall and decide it’s not worth it. She’s probably keeping a locked account with them since her better days that she can’t touch until some date ahead in time she was planning her retirement for. The other one, frequently used, is a trading funds company with low fees. I track her purchases, finding my way back to Brainworm. They’re all local, and I finally find what I’m looking for after triangulating the points: a coffin hotel, hole in the wall restaurant, a small shop and a black tec auto shop, one of those flesh to cyber surgeons with such a shitty rumour that even the tourists won’t go near it. Her transactions are erratic and few. But now I know where to look for her. The area is well narrowed down and she doesn’t leave it much, judging from her purchases. I make copies of it all and mail it to myself, well encrypted. I made that encryption myself when I was a teenager. Make the alphabet into a circle, then use the letters three steps to the left, leave no spaces between the words and start with the last word in the document minus the first letter, making it hard as fuck to unravel. I call it the Looper, and I still use it due to no one being able to crack it yet. As the task is done, I unhook and rub my face. Time to go out, it seems. Time to find me an ex-nurse.
streets of gold
Even a rogue deviant like me doesn’t come to this type of seedy neighbourhood often. Just peeking into the few establishments that you can walk into and take a seat of one kind or the other makes my home look sanitary, if you understand my jest. Hacker society isn’t exactly a bunch of neat freaks but this goes way beyond. It’s not the tattoos, the hoochie clothing, the never ending smell of booze and piss, the shoving, the foul language or even the gangbangers and the hookers making you think you took a wrong turn by the food market and ended up on the pirate station Taurus 2. It’s not even the more than shady establishments, the bars and the dives, where the music is loud enough to almost drown out the fighting and sounds of breaking things, but only almost. It’s the look in people’s eyes. They’ve all given up. I know, because that’s the same look I had in my eyes just two days ago. Everything has gone to hell but hey, it’s a living, right? Most of them are Stygian, the kind that look like evil goths, also known as the kind that challenges death to come get them every single day in every way they can think of. Hoodlums in black clothing carrying las guns in the open, hookers that look like they could head butt a unicorn to death and hackers so wired I can hear the hum of electricity in their bodies from across the street. All of them are ready to kill or be killed at a moment’s notice. I pass one door man, a slim looking fellow with a god honest katana by his side. He’s a body mod, like most paid ruffians on S2, and in most parts of the Universe these days, I guess. His look doesn’t say hard core Stygian, but when a guest tries to push his way past him, he bares his teeth at him and the pusher flinches. Fuck, so would I. They’re the teeth of a predator, it looks like they were transplanted from some big dog or cat, and the cocky man in his grip calms some fairly quickly at the sight of them. I give them all a wide birth. The few holes in the walls restaurants have deterring signs or have just given up and hired body mods to serve the food, just in case “the gun over the counter isn’t on the menu but the bullets are”-plaque won’t do the trick. For a moment I wonder what the food is like here. I’ve read that on Taurus 2, you can get a rat burger so delicious you’ll never want the regular kind again. On the other hand, most new people who come there don’t survive their first 3 hours without a guide. Yes, it’s that bad. Pirates stand waiting on the dock, guns drawn, and organ dealer’s errand boys stand in the wings next to their little haulers, waiting to pick up the leftovers. Needless to say, I have no desire to go there. It’s not nearly as bad as that here yet, not even in these parts, but for a moment I’m actually grateful my life isn’t as shitty as this. At least I had something once upon a time. These people look like they never had anything. Ever.
I click on my QA unit and check the picture of Nicola from her nurse’s licence again. She looks sweet, dark, short hair and a radiant smile with dimples, vaguely Asian, but not the kind Yun was. Her chin is pointier and her eyes are grey but that could be lenses. Maybe more Korean in her, but who gives a shit? She’s pretty. Something tells me she won’t be that pretty when I find her today. She hasn’t had a proper employer since Prima Care and she moves in this kind of a neighbourhood. I have a fair guess what h
er current occupation is, unfortunately. A waft of something that smells delicious hits me and my stomach growls. Might as well combine business with pleasure. I walk up to the small hole in the wall restaurant. The girl peddling the food has a long scar on her left cheek, other than that she’s quite cute but her eyes are made of black steel. Not literally, but like one of those girls whose father has a dojo and she’s kicked the asses of all her brothers at least twice.
-What you want, hack? Veggies or meat?
-Whatever’s making that smell.
-That’ll be all of it.
-Then give me a combo.