by Ani Fox
Aidan looked at my shoulders and back. “Whoa, like I heard that. Did you just chiropractor your own vertebrae?”
“Sure. I’m Big Bear, I can do that.” They both laughed.
Declan leaned a little closer. “So there’s like a bad guy version of the SEALs?”
“They probably just think they are with the SEALs. If Minsie has been taking money from bad people, he will recruit special operations guys and tell them they’re doing it for America.”
Aidan frowned. “Dude, that’s sick. So these patriots are like killing their own people and don’t know they’re being used.” From the mouths of babes. It was the essence of The Web. Layered a hundredfold in complexity, the United States often didn’t act in the interest of itself when it moved internationally. Or any other country for that matter. Erosion of sovereignty represented the meat and drink of the Great Game.
Declan went to the freezer and pulled out pints of ice cream cartons with bright labels. “Gelato we have flown in from Florence.” He smiled. “Well, shipped by air freight on dry ice, but you know. It’s real Italian stuff and saying we flew it in sounds sexier.”
Aidan nodded. “You know, for the ladies. We’re practicing. Em says we need to take more credit, show off our money a little more. But not be, um, what’s the word? Gauche.”
They showed me their newer classier side by pulling out bowls and scooping several flavors for each of us. They’d used soup bowls and we had portions sufficiently massive to jumpstart a heart. Still, they offered me a dessert spoon and made coffee using a new Krups espresso monstrosity that steamed milk, made four shots, and potentially contacted Minsayeed to exchange bitcoins while it did so. It had some kind of blue digital computer interface. I caught myself wondering whether you could hack them. They’d be hold a camera, Wi-Fi scrambler or a small bomb.
As the coffee brewed, Declan came back to the conversation. “Okay, so Minsie is bad. Check. What about this dude Overlord?”
Aidan rolled his eyes. “Oh god, not this again. It’s a game Dec. It’s a frakkin game, not real life. Bear, tell him there is no Overlord.”
They continued arguing for a good three minutes. The gist of the fight was that Declan believed their new stolen game, something ominously titled World Domination, was really a political front and was trying to tell people about the world’s most dangerous man: Overlord. Aidan had countered with something along the lines of - you pay too much attention to those nerds in Anonymous, who all should leave their Mom’s basement and learn to work out. It being a religious certainty with both brothers that working out will save your life. I didn’t doubt that seeing me ram a man through a wall had influenced their world view. Both brothers spent a minimum of two hours a day in intense exercise, and then usually topped it off with some combat sport that rotated depending on what fascinated them. This week it was Krav Maga to judge by the flyer on the fridge.
In the end, Declan insisted we move our ice cream and coffee to the fort room (it was no longer a living room) and he be allowed to show me the sinister game that had Anonymous so atwitter. Aidan kept trying to go back to the evil SEALs but Dec had been absolutely certain that Overlord was Minsie’s boss—the current pet theory among their banker buddies, some revolutionary wing of the hacktivist group, who called themselves the Calvin & Hobbes Brigade. CHB had given the brothers some cheat codes to get to the back end profiles and that’s where you could review Overlord, his capabilities, his in game premise, and so on.
I had some spumoni and a vanilla custard with flecks of orange rind. Florentines made excellent gelato. The game came on and after some codes pushed in on a controller, the design team’s logo flashed, and my blood went cold. Oslo Intergraphics. They had a picture of the one eyed god Odin with a computer monitor behind him displaying a digital raven. Then it jumped to the profile of Overlord. Listed as the game’s prime antagonist, Overlord had a series of weapons of mass destruction at his disposal. Every game the servers randomly delivered a different attack plan with a different weapon and city. The game changed as people played it. It evolved and Overlord was designed to keep track of prior failures. He got harder.
Declan looked at me. He pointed to the computerized image of the supposedly most dangerous man in the world. “So? Was I right?”
Staring back at me was Hans Gutlicht. Digitized and made to look a little sinister with a ridiculous outfit that was part sartorial splendor cum Napoleon, part conquering warlord from Planet Jupiter. But the face was from a recent photograph.
“When did this game come out?”
Aidan smiled. “It hasn’t, yet. It might not. Most companies sell the engines to third parties. Really the main graphics stink. It’s like they built the profiles and the ay ai, then left it to go work other projects. One of the Calvin people found it while mucking around in some Social Security Administration servers. Somebody was playing it at work.” The last part seemed to draw his contempt.
“You’re against playing games at work?”
“Dude, he should have been doing his damned job. Little old ladies need their rent check and some fat geezer has time to dick around with a game? Not cool.”
Declan pointed his spoon at me. “C’mon, Bear. You know this guy or what? Is he Overlord?”
Fact: Oslo had allowed Anonymous to find and steal the game. Fact: the profile of the game engine resembled Jeeves systems, so this was likely the project where our hacker met Pina. Fact: Pina had put Hans Gutlicht’s face on a digital milk carton for every independent civilian hacker to see. These were people outside The Web, unaffiliated and unprotected. They were still dangerous, especially when they worked in groups.
“One more question. How long ago did this get taken?” I couldn’t bring myself to say steal. Oslo’s team must have tried to dump it on a few dozen systems before someone ran with the bait.
Aidan sighed. “Dec’s been on this rant for four months. We had the game like a month before that, and then the Anonymous guys have some kind of online convention, like a digital conclave thingee, and conspiracy nuts start trying to make it all about terrorism and Overlord and God, they have more stuff. Stuff about the one percent and the Republican theft of elections and then how you know, Big Oh here is really working for Mitt Romney.”
Declan gave his brother a wounded look. “Not Romney. He’s like the puppet, dude. The evil cabal behind Romney, the secret corporate dudes who fund him and his agenda.”
This needed to be heard. Romney ran a small espionage ring but he was known and trusted quantity, perhaps one of the most stable entities in The Web. “What does Calvin and Hobbes say about Romney and Overlord?” I looked at them both, kept my face pleasantly blank and shut up. As expected, they got into another argument, this one dragging on through seconds on gelato, more coffee, several screen shots of World Domination, and a quick peek at their online bitcoin portal, which now read 28.732 million coins. It made me wonder how much total currency was tied up with bitcoin and its clones. The total value had moved from billions to trillions quickly. It would become a place for The Web to assert authority and so I would need to put safeguards in place to protect them, especially given their wealth.
The various splinter factions of Anonymous had joined up with the Occupy people to overthrow the corporate yoke, save America from fascism, and protect freedom ala WikiLeaks and denial of service attacks. It didn’t make much sense given how real power worked but it did make for satisfying activity, and it kept a potentially deadly threat out of The Web’s business. The Syndicate had agitprop people who ensured that the best hackers were recruited or killed while the amateurs were given a big enough bone to gnaw upon so that they never penetrated important systems. They had the same thing set up for intelligence agencies and crime syndicates. It was a web of lies and deceit, hence the name.
CHB’s newest cause involved a supposedly heartless group of corporate thugs who were swapping human slaves for untraceable weapons and using the Republican Party to weaken border security while claimi
ng it was beefing it up. They had memos, vehicle traffic, smuggling arrests, and all sorts of behavior mapped. And they weren’t wrong. They had identified genuine operational activity, pinpointed several key border crossings where smugglers were swapping people for goods. I knew those points. They had been owned by the Bing Kong Tong when I’d gone into retirement. From the photos, it looked like the Tong had sold the checkpoints to the La Eme—the Mexican Mafia—because I recognized a picture of one its key enforcers in two surveillance photos.
That Anonymous had this data meant someone within The Web had leaked critical information to the outside world. It was full scale warfare and it had been done at least a year ago. The brothers kept flipping through pictures and reports as they argued. Anonymous had been suicidally indiscrete in their reports. If any legitimate operational directorate realized what they knew, the nerds would start dropping like flies. There were several close ups on the slaves and I suddenly put the pieces together. I was not surprised when Overlord entered the picture. Anonymous had five digital shots of Hans Gutlicht crossing in and out of the United States across controlled smuggler’s routes.
I sat there in the living room, drinking coffee, and trying to really put my mind to work. I’d been stumbling around for a while and it was obvious that my next misstep would get me killed. Over a year ago, Oslo had started fighting Section 22 using a proxy hacker. Likely the same one that broke into Jeeves and, with any luck, was now safely in Pina’s custody. Since Pina had then been the wetworks director for The Syndicate, the assault on Section 22 had been at Bernard’s behest. This had been his war all along.
Hans had bided his time and launched a decisive counteroffensive. Using the impostor Roger to infiltrate The Syndicate and, assuming I had not kicked over the apple cart, he would have killed Pina, framed someone else, and then assassinated Bernard. But Wickham and Zeus had been foiling his plans, continually screwing up what should have been a clean extermination of San Valentin.
So now, Section 22 had been put on the international stage, Hans face was splashing across public venues and Zeus had either stolen or gotten the bulk of the operatives killed. Cassandra was dead; Zeus was either comatose, or near it and not in fighting shape; Wickham had gone fully rogue and was trying to also kill San Valentin and Hans both. So Overlord was surrounded and outnumbered, his human resources diminished. He’d have seen the evidence I’d seen hundredfold and realized Zeus was breeding what he would term Untermenschen, subhumans, to serve as a new breed of cultist. He’d been exporting his minions as slaves globally and had embedded ruthless operatives in most illegal activities in North America. Zeus had a Trojan Horse poised to usurp The Web. In time, he’d breed enough to overtake the world.
This wasn’t Armageddon nor Ragnarok. This was the Titanomachy: Zeus versus Cronus with Pina playing Rhea, perhaps. Except that Cronus had Pandora’s Box and, when cornered, I did not doubt that he’d unleash it in retribution. I had been wrong to assume Hans wanted to take over the world. Given Zeus’ defection, it should have been obvious he wanted to destroy it. He come out and told me the nanites in our collective systems would make us immune to whatever weaponized version of the nerve agent Hans was planning to release. In his mind, he’d be sweeping the world clean. Zeus likely wanted to inherit the world as it was and, like Wickham, had turned on his master and was playing for all the marbles.
Truly starting over would likely require Hans to retool the agent to overcome the nanomeds Zeus had bestowed upon his followers by transfusion and sex. It would also require that he eliminate all undesirables. He didn’t know Hacker X existed. Which meant I was the last of his eugenics projects whom he deemed unfit. They’d already delayed killing the Syndicate at the hotel to lure me in. But why had he not killed me earlier? I’d been walking around unarmed, an easy target for even a novice sharpshooter all of last year.
Timing. Pina Karthago had been on the level about keeping tabs on me. More than that, just as I had employed CSS to protect my cousin and family, I’d left a number of insurance policies in data packets and mercenaries on retainer to avenge my death. Hans would have had to kill me only after launching a counterattack on The Syndicate or risk putting them on the defensive. Zeus had thrown me into the lion’s den, trusting in his arrogance that Section 22 could wipe me and Pina out on the same day at the same time. Hubris had kept me alive
Zeus’ blunder now offered me a chance to stop what would likely be an extinction level event for humanity. Hans would make no mistakes. Either San Valentin realized what had happened, and did not want to spook Hans before someone shot him, or The Syndicate remained blissfully unaware of how dire the situation was. Unless you’d spent time in his company, grown up with him, it would be unthinkable to The Web that anyone with Hans’ intelligence and capabilities would aim for annihilation of all but a few hundred people on Earth. Fanatic Aryanism had always been in search of a way to purify the master race. From what I’d seen in the hotel, the rigid corpse of ersatz Roger, Section 22 had the means to enact that dream. All they needed to do was splice it to something like influenza or the common cold, ship it out on airplanes, and four days later a global pandemic would erupt.
I laughed so hard I spilled my coffee. The brothers stopped mid-comment and looked at me. I had delayed the Apocalypse. They must have thought I was some kind of prescient genius constantly three steps ahead. Thunderball had been designed with such a scenario in mind but I’d not really given it thought when I pulled the plug. It had been a weapon in my arsenal, sufficiently disruptive to be game changer, to force all the players in The Web to scramble. I had meant to bring in the public, to sweepingly interdict not just the airspace but clandestine operations in general, to force the open war back into the shadows by taking all the big weapons and armies off the table, making it a fight like the one between Dieter and me; personal, direct and at close quarters. I had succeeded in also stopping Hans.
Which meant he’d be scrambling to find a way around my ploy. He’d need to ship the agent outside the Western Hemisphere, likely by cargo freighter or anything else large enough to brave open ocean. Then he’d need to wait until the North American airspace re-opened to ship the viral version of the weapon back into the USA on planes from Europe and Asia. It would be useless to wipe out most of the world but spare two continents. He had to take the whole system at once, which required either simultaneous release of an airborne agent in most every major world city or the unencumbered use of commercial airlines. After my last two encounters with Section 22, Hans didn’t have the manpower to kill hundreds of cities simultaneously. He needed planes back in the air.
“I know this guy.” A&D didn’t move. They just stared at me silently, their faces rapt. “But he’s not funding attacks. He’s a scientist.” I had to term this delicately and think through how to keep Anonymous from getting killed or starting Armageddon early. “The Iranians want him. He’s on a bunch of watch lists, to be rescued.”
Declan recovered first. “So why is he crossing borders?”
Aidan rolled his eyes again. “Dude, it’s like safe houses and stuff. He keeps moving so the Iranians don’t shoot him. Duh!”
I nodded in agreement. It was the conclusion I wanted them to come to. “Do you think Anonymous could find him?”
They considered it for a moment, then Aidan said, “Sure. But then what?”
“I’d like to know. The bad SEALs will be out to kill him. Maybe Minsie works for a Shia terror cell. I don’t know. But this guy is really in danger.” That part was true. “Pretty much everyone wants to kill him.”
“Why put him in the game?” Declan clearly felt let down that Overlord was on the side of good and decent men.
I sighed. “My guess, somebody stole a training scenario designed for the Pentagon and turned it into a game. They were working on a search and rescue mission for this dude, three… four years ago. Somebody smart took the engine and profiles and turned it upside down, added some game graphics, tweaked the plot a little…”
Declan sat down. “So it’s just a game?”
“Yes and no, Dec. Your guys just found the world’s most wanted scientist. That black ops group will kill him if they can.” Wickham absolutely would shoot Hans’ eyes out at the earliest opportunity. “If See Aych Bee can find him, I know some people who can help him. It’s not really my thing, saving people.” I shrugged and tried to look weak and afraid. “But my agency has, um, people who do that all the time.”
They gave me a look. If I had been forced to guess, it might have been pity. As if they thought I deserved better than being the kid no one picked to play dodgeball. Big Bear apparently had the chops to be the guy who did major rescues. Declan nodded. “Sure, Bear. We could ask. Might take a while.”
Aidan smiled. A wide broad gleeful smile. “That means we toooootally have time to play this cool new game we got hold of. And talk lady problems, amiright?”
Dec excused himself and tried to make a super-secret call using the flying squirrel phone. The acoustics in their home were such I heard him ask for someone named Evan and after many Dudes and I Know he got to brass tacks. Bottom line, they’d email A&D when they had some news. While we waited for the local chapter of Anonymous to spring into action, Aidan fired up some kind of combat simulator, also from our good friends at Oslo Intergraphics. It used motion capture to simulate shooting, running, and hand to hand attacks.
After I discovered I could attack from the lying on the ground or jumping from roof tops, I quickly advanced to the leaderboard. When the email came six hours later, I’d been introduced to General’s Shrimp Hoagies (which were that deep fried American Chinese dish, slathered over French bread with mayo, radishes, and escarole, along with a touch of dill pickle relish), helped demolish a bag of enchilada flavored chips, followed by something called BBQ Brisket nachos; drank some juice and vodka punch that made my face numb; talked smack to some teen game prodigies in Bethesda who’d been plaguing A&D with their top five finishes—after fragging them and stealing all their spots on the board; gotten lady skills advice from the lads; and laughed at a series of increasingly horrifying jokes that involved zombies, dead children, impossible sex acts, and blondes. To quote Aidan: My bro cred was now epic.