Mandy shakes her head. “He’s in it for the money.”
Thug disagrees. “He’s in it for the showbiz. Money won’t be enough.”
JoJo says, “We show him how to get on TV and say something that makes sense for a change. I’m sure that most of us have something to say on the position of the old.”
Mandy says, “How you gonna do that?”
JoJo says, “I used to make TV shows.”
Thug says. “All we gotta do is find who Silhouette is.”
And I get this real weird, sick feeling, and I don’t know why.
Mandy jerks like she’s laughing to herself. She flicks cigarette ash like it’s going all over their pretty little dream. “You better get hacking,” she says.
The next day my dear Dr. Curtis runs in to tell me we’re all about to get a visit from the cops.
Curtis looks terrified. He looks sick. He leans against my door like they’re going to hammer it down. Plump smooth-skinned pretty little doctor, he’s got so much to lose.
“How’s your system?” he asks, smiling like he’s relearning how to use his facial muscles. He’s got something he doesn’t want to say in front of the ordnance.
I don’t get it. “What’s it to you?”
He makes a noise like someone’s jammed a pin in his butt. His eyes start doing a belly dance toward the window. I look out and see that the front drive of the Happy Farm is stuffed like a turkey with police cars.
I just say, “A shape outlined against the light?”
I mean a silhouette. Curtis sorta settles with relief and nods yes. “You’ve been following the news.”
I get it. The cops are here to find out if any of us nice old folks are funding Silhouette’s reign of terror. That means that they’ll be going through our accounts. For once Curtis and I have exactly the same self-interest.
I’m a thief and I’ve never been caught and that’s not because I’m smart, but because I know I’m not. So I worry. So I prepare.
I got about ten minutes and that’s all I need. I start running my emergency program. It looks like a rerun of pro golf. Curtis hangs around. He wants to see how I do this. I need to put on my specs, but I don’t want him to know about the transcoder.
“Curtis, maybe you should go talk to our guests.” I mean slow them down. I mean get out of here.
Then there’s a knock. In comes the Kid. Maybe he’s come to tell me about the cops, too. He sees Curtis, and I swear his eyes switch on with hate like lightbulbs.
“Joao, maybe you could take Dr. Curtis out to greet our guests.” And that means: Joao help me get him out of here.
That Kid is sussed. “You,” he says to Curtis, and punches the palm of his hand. Curtis understands that, too. Note. Not one of us has said anything that would sound bad in court.
I hear the door shut. Finally I put on my specs and the transcoder shows me data download on one eye lens and data upload on the other.
It’s a fake I’ve had worked out for years. It’ll cover my whole account and make it look like I’m some kind of gaga spendthrift, that I gamble a lot on a Korean site, lose my dosh, win some dosh. It matches, transaction for transaction, money in, money out.
That’s what’s uploading. On the other lens, I’m encrypting my old data. I got maybe five minutes now.
Just having some encrypted data on my system will be enough to make trouble. I’m ghosting the encrypted file, and then I go to get it off my disk. It starts to squirt into my transcoder.
I hear big heavy boots. I hear Dr. Curtis babbling happily. I hear a knock on the front door. Mine? No next door.
Six … five … four … stuff is still downloading. Three two one zero. Right, off comes the transcoder. It looks like one of the arms from my glasses. On my hard drive, iron molecules are being permanently scrambled. Sorry, Officer, I’m just this old guy and I’ve been having these terrible problems with my system.
I go take a shower. They monitor your heartbeat and video your keystrokes, but the law says they can’t perve you in the shower.
And while I’m in the shower I take the transcoder and like I rehearsed a hundred times, I push it up the head of my penis.
The transcoder’s long, it’s thin. In an X-ray, it’ll look like a sexual prosthetic.
When the knock on my door comes, I’m out, I’m dry, and I’m in my nice baggy shiny blue suit. I am the picture of a callipered, monitored neurobic modern Noughties Boy. With money of his own.
The Armament comes in. He looks like somebody who divides his time between weightlifting and V-games, hairy golden biceps, a smile like a rodent’s and heavy-duty multipurpose specs. His manner is unfriendly. “You’re Alistair Brewster. Hello. We’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“I don’t see what’s stopping you.” I don’t do polite even with Armament.
“Fine.” He sits down without being asked. His specs have a little blinking light. Smile, you’re on candid camera. “Mr. Brewster, you used to work for SecureIT Inc.”
“Was that a question or a statement?”
He blinks. “You worked on the design of security systems.”
There is no lie as effective as the truth. “That’s how I made my money. I came up with some of the recognition software, the stuff that means the ordnance knows who it’s dealing with.” I try to make it sound rich.
He nods and pretends to be impressed. “I was wondering if you could help us understand some of the ways in which these safety checks could be subverted. During the recent spate of thefts.”
Now, this is trouble. It’s coming from an angle I was not expecting. They don’t think I’m a thief. They don’t think I’m a donor.
They think maybe I’m part of Silhouette’s crew.
I stall for time. “Can I confirm your ID?”
“Sure.”
“I’m not talking security until I know who you are.”
“Very wise, Mr. Brewster.”
“Not wisdom. Habit. You get by on habit at my age Mr. …”
Secret Squirrel here won’t give me his name, just a look at his dental work. So he leans forward, and my TV checks out his retinas. We share a polite, stone-cold silence as it chews over this for a while. Then out comes his stuff.
Secret Squirrel is thirty-six years old, has a tattoo on his right knee which sounds real romantic and is validated as Armament, Security Status Amber … oh, it takes me back to the good old days. It still won’t give me his name. Psychological advantage.
I always hated Armament, for the same reason I hate Silhouette. They shoot people. Also, they never once gave SecureIT a clear brief. “OK, Secret Squirrel, shoot. I don’t mean that literally, by the way. Feel free to make a few more statements you already know the answers to.”
“Smart ass,” says the Armament.
“Look, Squirrel, I’m rich, I’m happy, I don’t have to take anything from anybody, and it was difficult getting to the point that I can say that with confidence. I didn’t ask you in here, and I don’t have to cooperate. In fact, I signed a nondisclosure agreement with SecureIT when I left. What they would prefer and what I would prefer is that you go talk to them instead of me. So. You want me to be nice to you, you start thinking nice thoughts about what a sweet old guy I am and how much you respect me.”
“Age Rage,” he says sweetly, calmly. “You’re a suspect, Mr. Brewster, not an information source.” He keeps smiling and waits for me to fall over in shock.
I just do Mr. Rich Disgusted. I roll my eyes. And hold up my hands like, I live in this place, so why would I have Age Rage?
He keeps his poker smile. “So, Mr. Brewster, it is in your own interests to cooperate fully. In the first place, Mr. Brewster, it is true that you came up with a lot of this stuff, and it is also true that it is all patented in the name of SecureIT and that you didn’t get a bean. Isn’t that so.”
“I got paid,” I say. “A lot. A lot more than you. And I’m smart with my money.”
“Eighty percent, Mr. Brewster. Eigh
ty percent of online crime is by employees or former employees. You fit the profile like a glove. Your profile is in neon lights all around your head.”
I don’t like his attitude. “First thing, I got nothing to do with all this crap. My own granddaughter just got her face burned off, so don’t come here with some fairy tale about how I’m a big Age Rage freak.”
He blinks. And I think: gotcha. I have no problems pressing my advantages. I go for it. “You dumb fuck, you didn’t come here and not know that Elizabeth Angstrom Brewster is my granddaughter, did you? I mean you have read the files, I take it? Victims? Try 13705 Grande Mesa Outlook, apartment forty-one, Loma Linda, CA.”
And for once Dr. Curtis does something smart. “It would be very difficult indeed for any of our guests to be involved in something unsavoury. You have to understand that for their own protection, our guests are monitored 24-7-365. We know every keystroke on their computers.”
I play along. “Damn right. I can’t even download any porn.”
The Armament’s face settles and his eyes narrow. He’s mad. Somebody he relies on didn’t add up Brewster and Brewster and come up with four. He coughs and blanks out his face. “How did they circumvent the recognition software?”
I answer him like I’m talking to a baby. “They … turned … it … off.”
It was easy after that. I cooperated fully. I didn’t know how it was done. You guys have been on the scene, what did you find there? He didn’t wanna say, so I speculated, and I speculated for real. Infra red input, transcoding images? Not EMP, the stuff is hardened against that. Maybe they just broke the box and put their own software in. Maybe, yeah, it was an inside job.
When the Armament left he looked like there was some poor guy back in research was going to get a full-body electrolysis for free. We all shook hands.
I’d lucked out. That was all. I was one dumb fuck who’d lucked out. All this VAO uses my stuff. I should have known they’d think maybe I was part of it. I just didn’t see it coming,
I’m getting old.
And something else.
It was very far from a dumb idea to check out SecureIT staff. I should have thought about it myself. Remember how I said I took one look at Silhouette and thought I knew him?
Well suddenly I realized that I did. I knew who he was, I could think how he used to talk, I knew he still had all his own hair.
I just couldn’t for the life of me remember who he was or where I knew him from. So I’m gaga, too. I sat there and ran through every single face in my address book. Nothing. Who?
I am clearly going to spend much of my declining years with people’s names on the tip of my tongue and no idea whether or not I’ve turned off the gas.
What I’m thinking is: I need something to get the Armament looking somewhere else. The best way to do that would be to ID Silhouette.
That night we’re back in the bar, licking our wounds.
None of the Neurobics Crew got stung. But. The Armament got one old dear for illegal arms trading. She and her son on the outside were dealing in illicit ordnance. That lady had the biggest, highest, roundest widow’s hump I’d ever seen, and I swear she was even more out of it than Jazza. It’s kind of sad and sick and funny at the same time.
Mandy has no time for sympathy. “We’re next.”
Gus is reading the paper, and suddenly he drops it and says, “Holy shit. Have you seen this?”
He lays the paper out on the table. “It’s another job,” Gus says.
AGE RAGE ATTACK. VAOs use VAO again.
The CCTV rerun shows the whole thing. The little label says:
Chase Manhattan Bank NYC, 1:00 a.m. this morning.
You’re looking at the inside of a vault and suddenly this iron door starts to rip. You see this claw widen the gap and then nip off some of the raggedy bits, and then they duck inside. This time my jaw drops.
This time they’re wearing fireman’s suits.
Walking exoskeletons that respond to movement pressure from the guys inside them. With training you can wear those things and walk through fire. You can lift up automobiles or concrete girders. You wear those things, you’re Superman for the day.
The old codgers don’t lurch anymore. Those suits weigh tons, but they dance. They duck and dive and ripple and flow. They shimmy, they hop, they look like giant trained fleas.
I’m saying over and over. “It’s brilliant. It’s fucking brilliant.”
I worked on those things. You see, you can’t send in rescue workers carrying hydrocarbon fuel or nuclear power on their backs, and even those suits can’t carry enough ordinary batteries. So you beam the power at them. You beam microwaves. All you do if there is a disaster is you turn on your VAO, and the microwaves fuel the suits.
About the only people my software is programmed never to zap are rescue workers in exoskeletons.
Carte Blanche. We’ve given them Carte fucking Blanche and her sister Sadie, too.
All four of them move like fingers playing piano. They scamper up to rows of strong boxes and just haul them out of the wall.
The suits already have these huge blue tubs on their backs. Nobody likes to say, but they’re for the body bags. The crew just dumps everything into them—heirloom jewellry and bearer bonds and old passports for new identities. Bullion or rare stamps. For the suits, it all just weighs a feather.
I say, “They’re not going for virtual. They’re going for atoms.”
Mandy turns and looks at me like I’m a lizard. “Well, duh! That’s why they call it burglary.”
Just then the bank’s security guards come running in. They’re covered head to toe in foil, so they can’t be area-denied. They start shooting.
You’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the movement in those mechanical arms. The old guys inside don’t have to do a thing. The arms just weave magic carpets in the air. And they go ping ping ping like harps as the bullets hit off them, and they flash like fireworks.
Then the suits coil and spring, and one of them grabs a guard by his head and throws him three yards straight into the wall. The guard kinda hangs there for a second and starts to slide down it. Through the back of the silver suit, blood gets sprayed in a pattern like a butterfly. The guard hits the ground and stays sitting, his head dumped forward. He looks like the bridegroom after a stag party.
I don’t see what happened to other guard, but it looked messier. He’s nothing but a shape in the corner.
And then these beautiful suits turn to the cameras and wave like astronauts. They put a hand on each other’s shoulders. And they dance off in line, like Dorothy and her tin men.
And Jazza is still staring at the strip lights.
I say, “This is one problem we gotta own.”
Mandy barks a laugh. “Hell, I was thinking of running off and joining them. That looked like a lotta fun.”
“Those guards got kids,” says Gus. From the look on his face, I don’t think he likes Mandy much right now.
I cut in. “We gotta get information, and we gotta get it to the cops. We all got to start hacking. I can get into SecureIT.”
Gus is still in pain. He can’t get the guards out of his head. “You reckon the company that sold that video will use any of the money to help their families?”
Thug says, “What do we hack?”
I got this one sussed. “They either bought those suits or they stole them. Either way there’ll be a transaction or a report. The manufacturers are called…”
Great, I draw a blank. I hate this, I really hate this. Just before despair comes, I remember the name. “XOsafe. XOsafe Ltd. They’re in Portland.”
Mandy cuts in. “The first thing I’m doing is taking care of my own business so I have some money. That’ll take a while.” Suddenly she looks down and says in lower voice, “Then maybe I can look at who the guys in the crews are, OK?”
It’s probably as close to an apology as Mandy can get. Since nobody ever apologised to her.
“Don’t get your
hopes up,” she tells me and goes off.
I go and give Bessie a call. “How ya doing, babe?”
“Aw, Grandad,” she says soft and faraway and grateful. She tries to sound like it’s all covered, skin grafts, etc., but it can’t be covered, it can never be covered. You see she was confident, she was sussed, and I’m scared. I’m scared it will make her timid and when she used to be so up front.
All I can say is, “Baby, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, you’re the Brewster. Nothing gets you down.”
“We’re going to get him for you, babe,” I promise.
I retrieve my transcoder, which is a more delicate operation than sticking it was. I get my glasses back and go to Jazza’s room because I want to use his station to hack. Never put an old hack back from the same place. I go to his room, but he’s not there. I keep the lights low and make like I’m loading my pro golf program onto his machine. Money starts flowing back into my account but from a different source this time.
After a while I ask: Where is Jazza?
I go back to the bar. My crew’s not there. Neither is Jazza. Oh god, he’s wandered again.
I get worried; I turn on his terminal to trace his bracelet. It’s pumping out signals. It’s coming from the shower. But there’s no shower running.
At our age, you’re always thinking in the back of your head: Who’s going to go next? And I’m thinking maybe this time it’s Jazza. I can just about see him crumpled up on the floor. So I go to that shower with everything in my chest all shrivelled shut like a fist. I turn on the light, and there’s no Jazza there.
Just his bracelet on the shower floor.
Oh fuck. I push the buzzer. It seems to take an age. They’ve done these experiments that show why we always think a second is longer than it really is. The brain is always anticipating. It starts measuring time from the thought, not the vision. So I cling on to the buzzer, saying come on, come on.
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