The elevator drew to a halt in the terminal. A government-owned building, it was a banausic concrete box devoted largely to a cordoned-off space for two snaking queues: one for visitors and new residents, one for returning citizens. At the far end were the security checks, either to create or to confirm biometric records for the purposes of identification. In spite of the viral outbreak, the building was full of weary travellers wanting to get into the city and the queues to get past security were long. No doubt more than a few had funerals to attend. That it would not be a short wait suited Zala’s needs perfectly.
The timing of Zala’s visit was not entirely decided by the death of her childhood friend Chloe Kim, or the presence of the virus that had killed her.
Three months ago Zala had salvaged from a junkyard a large, rusty GeniSec Kowloon 310 full-body biometric scanner which had become redundant when Khartoum upgraded to newer models. After some quick research, she’d found that this model was still in use in New Cairo. Having dragged it back to her residence, she had powered it up and run a hacked version of the program for it. She’d then scanned in her own biometrics: her picture, her fingerprints, her iris, even traces of her DNA from her hair, and saved them as individual files, in formats identical to those the security in New Cairo used.
Zala now slid in one of her contact lenses and switched on her portable terminal. Instantly, the lens’s heads-up display turned on and the orange outline of a keyboard and a monitor sprang up in front of her. She closed the lensed eye, confirming that the image of the monitor was visible only to her, displaying in the lens and not projecting out in front of her. She then placed in the other lens. She had a large scar on her side from a previous misadventure, that served as a reminder of how important it was to check that her activities were private.
She typed in the address for the administrator’s access page within the New Cairo network page, and inserted a chain of code into all of the search and login areas. This code bypassed the website and gave commands directly to the network’s server itself. One of the search bars gave a response from the server – a vulnerability. She typed in different variations on the format of the same basic command: ‘Give me the username and password of an administrator’.
The server quickly spat out the information for one Jalia Furlekh. Username ‘JFurlekh9’, password ‘uQhRL9FX2’. Zala used these details to log in and then worked her way through a series of menus until she found what she was looking for. The biometric database of every registered person in New Cairo, of anyone who had ever come or gone.
Zala did love the feeling of a solved puzzle, even one as quick and easy as this.
She sent out a search throughout the database for a New Cairo citizen, currently out of town, clean criminal record, female, 26, 5 ft 7 in, black hair, brown eyes. Someone a close match to her. The portable terminal chugged through the millions of names until it found four potential candidates.
One was altogether no good – she’d had her skin pigments altered to make her skin much fairer than was naturally found in this day and age. This was popular among the more privileged of New Cairo’s citizens, to change the colour of their skin to unusually light or unusually dark. Ostensibly it was to make protecting the person easier for security personnel by making them stand out in a crowd, but it became a status symbol almost immediately. Either way, this would draw too much suspicion at Zala’s darker skin.
Of the remaining three, any of which would have worked, one stood out. Selina Mullur had no bio-mechanics or bio-augmentations. This was a value Zala could change easily enough in any of the other girls’ data, but Zala felt a curious sense of kinship towards Selina. She was like her.
Zala opened up Selina’s entry in the database and set to work. Identification photograph, genetic structure, fingerprint and iris scans were all replaced, with Selina’s original scans kept for later. Zala saved the entry, accessed administrative functions, deleted the record of Selina’s entry being changed and logged out.
Satisfied, she switched off her portable terminal and looked up. The crowd was still thick, and she could barely see the security section. The queue moved forwards over the course of the next hour, until Zala was the next in line.
Installed in front of her, shiny and new, was a GeniSec Kowloon 410 full-body biometric scanner.
Run.
Zala felt a knot in her stomach tighten. She didn’t know a lot about biometrics, or scanners thereof, but she knew that if the scans she’d input were different in any way from what this scanner expected – wrong resolution, wrong bit depth, even wrong format – she’d be handing herself over to the five bored-looking security personnel in front of her.
Run.
Sweat sprang from her brow. She focused on her breathing. She inhaled deeply, her stomach puffing out and her chest rising, and exhaled long. She crossed her fingers. And she hoped dearly that the developers of the Kowloon 410 had decided that the scan data was good enough the first time around.
Zala stepped forward, looking straight ahead.
Run.
An increasingly high-pitched whirring came from the scanner, followed by a sharp clicking sound. Zala stared blankly.
She kept her breathing deep and steady.
‘Ms Mullur?’
Zala’s eyes snapped to a tall, portly man in front of her, in a blue and grey Security Force uniform with black trousers.
Tall, fat and at least forty – probable joint issues. A heel to one of his knees might disable him.
Glasses. A punch could shatter them – that would bring with it blinding and pain.
Balding – no easily accessible hair to grab.
Nothing around his neck to use as a choke.
Weight advantage.
Height advantage.
And then there were the other four security guards, all in better shape than this guy.
His nametag said ‘Fernando Vinter’.
RUN.
‘Ms Mullur, you can come on through.’
The knot in Zala’s stomach unravelled all at once. She kept her face straight and she walked through the security area, out into the main commercial street of Alexandria, the most prosperous of New Cairo’s five districts.
Zala inhaled the night air and took in the scene around her. She’d never had a lot of business in the most affluent parts of the city, but she’d been here once or twice before. Just enough came back to her to drive home how much eight years had changed it. The old streetlamps, with their lazy orange glow, had been replaced with much brighter ones of a cold eggshell blue similar to the lights that illuminated the corporate buildings. This made sense to her, as enough GeniSec, New Delhi Lifestyle Technologies and Banach-Tarski Operations executives lived here that there would be a crossover in aesthetic tastes. The street was long, and branching off from it were palatial gardens in which grand houses stood. The houses took after the currently dominant architectural movement, which was mostly characterized by its reconciliation of nineteenth-century western imperial stateliness and modern adoption of geometric tidiness, preference for straight lines and fawning reverence of the right angle. They were broad and rectangular, made from concrete or breeze blocks and stuccoed to off-whites or pastel colours, so as to stand out without drawing accusation of vulgarity. Rain was not an issue, this city being as it was in the middle of the Sahara desert, but these houses all had gently sloping roofs as an aesthetic concession.
Zala opened her portable terminal, this time not needing to worry about her contact lenses. She ran down her contact list and found Polina Bousaid. A friend of both Zala and Chloe, Polina was, when Zala had last seen her anyway, a bookish student of history at the same college at which Zala studied. Even through her extended sabbatical from New Cairo, the two had kept in touch. Indeed, Polina was the only person who had known in advance that Zala would be coming; she’d made arrangements in the planning of the funeral on behalf of ‘an old out-of-town friend who’d hopefully be able to make it’.
Zala typed out a
message.
>I’m in the city. What’s been set up on your end?
A few moments later, a reply popped up.
>Great! I never understood that computer stuff like you but you have got to tell me how you swung that. I’m putting you up, the funeral is tomorrow. I’m living downtown now. 5393 Tani, apartment 7. I’ll meet you outside. See you soon!
Zala felt rather taken aback; first, by the lack of a certain funereal quality to the message and then by the fact that she didn’t really know that building. She put her lenses in and set her terminal’s GPS to the address. The lenses superimposed onto the ground before her a glowing yellow line, snaking off down the road and out of sight.
The suburbs of Alexandria began to give way to office buildings, shops and restaurants after about twenty minutes of walking. The central business district of New Cairo had barely changed. The skyscrapers evoked both a claustrophobic narrowness and an immeasurable, expansive scale. Although most of the city was hidden from view, the presence of it was thick in the air – a presence that would be oppressive were it not so exhilarating. Khartoum had nothing even close to this. New Cairo was, after all, the nervous system of the United African Democracies and, beyond that, one of the most vital cities in the world, on a par with New York or London, Tokyo or Istanbul. Even at such a late hour, almost every light in every building was on, be they offices, studios, apartments or stores. The Soucouyant virus had emerged weeks earlier, but to Zala it seemed as though it had barely touched this part of town. The yellow line leading the way contrasted with the blue and green and purple lights on the buildings in a miasma of colour.
Eventually the line disappeared and a glowing computerized flag appeared outside an elegant, expensive-looking tower block called The Ozymandias. Polina stood waving outside the front entrance. Zala’s initial reaction was that she had grown into adulthood spectacularly. Long, shiny black hair, a dazzling smile and deep blue eyes that Zala did not remember her having eight years ago. She wore a loosely knitted light brown cardigan, beneath which was a black vest top, and a short black skirt with an asymmetric hem. Her toned legs poured themselves into knee-high leather boots. Zala suddenly felt aware of how little her own wardrobe, or living situation for that matter, had changed since she was a teenager.
Polina strode over to Zala, arms outstretched, beaming, and drew her into a hug, which Zala awkwardly allowed. ‘It’s so good to see you,’ Polina cooed into her ear. ‘I just got back from the museum about two minutes ago, you picked the perfect time to arrive.’ She let Zala in through the entrance and went up to the doorman, a courteously smiling man in a royal blue blazer that had the building’s name monogrammed on it in silver.
‘This is the friend I was telling you about, Dane. She’ll be staying with me for a few days,’ Polina said. He looked with an unmistakably affected politeness at Zala’s appearance, and said, ‘It’s a pleasure to have you staying with us, Ms …?’
‘Selina Mullur.’
Zala noticed Polina’s eyes dart towards her. The doorman pulled up Selina’s altered records, compared Zala with the photograph that appeared, nodded and said, ‘Selina and Polina, eh?’
Polina forced a laugh. ‘Yeah, we were quite the double act back when we were kids.’
‘Everything seems to be in order. Welcome, Ms Mullur.’
Zala turned and followed Polina to an elevator opposite the doorman’s desk. The doors closed behind them and Polina burst out laughing. ‘Selina Mullur? Who’s that?’
‘Some woman close enough to me that I can replace her biometrics and use her identity,’ Zala replied.
‘You mean steal her identity.’
‘Hey, I’m gonna give it back. I’ve still got her files and everything.’
Polina sat back against the handrail of the elevator and looked at Zala, eyebrow raised. ‘Oh, I see. So whatever she might try and get into the city to deal with, it’s less important than you attending a funeral?’ Polina broke into a wry smile as her lips curled around the end of the sentence.
Zala searched desperately for words that would justify her actions – anything except that she cared more about getting back into the city and finding out about this virus than she did about this other woman – but found none. ‘That’s her problem,’ she said.
The elevator came to a halt and the doors opened into a lobby which, despite the size of the building, had only two apartment doors. Polina opened hers and led Zala through an elegant hallway to a large, luxuriously furnished room, where they sat down on the leather sofa that took up much of one wall. Only now did Zala realize how much her feet ached. She had been walking for hours.
‘So what’s your plan for while you’re here?’ Polina asked, turning herself to face Zala, her arms draped wide over the sofa’s arm and back.
‘I’m here for the funeral. You, me and Chloe, together again for the last time.’
‘Will you be sticking around afterwards?’
Zala paused for a moment. ‘I might, yeah. I’m thinking about it.’
‘Why?’
‘To be honest, I’m curious. I want to find out what this virus is. I want to know if I can stop it somehow. I was planning on hanging around for a little while longer and seeing what I can dig up. Play detective a bit.’
‘And what about your record?’ As if no time had passed at all, the anxious, hesitant tone Polina’s voice had always carried in Zala’s memories came through.
‘I don’t care any more,’ said Zala, shrugging. ‘My dad tried to steal his own artificial intelligence project back from the biggest company on the continent, he got me smeared as bait, he got us kicked out of the city and he died in a shack. It’s been eight years, no one’s looking for me any more, the only problem is if …?’
Polina sighed heavily. ‘You’re going to the funeral of the most loved ballerina in the United African Democracies. It’s going to be full of people who’ll probably recognize you from back in the day, not to mention all the press. You end up in the wrong photo, you could wind up in a jail cell. Now you’re thinking you’ll stay? What do you get out of this?’
Zala failed to find a convenient lie. ‘Honestly? I want to find out as much as I can about this Soucouyant virus, figure out where it came from or how to stop it, and I want to march into the CEO of GeniSec’s office and say, “Here, you get to be the saviour of the city, just get rid of the charges you made up. Let me go back to a normal life, where I can use my name without ‘Wanted in New Cairo for multiple murders’ getting dragged up. Let me live somewhere, get a real job, pay taxes, maybe find someone to settle down with.” This tomboy rogue hacker shit is something my goofy teenage self came up with and now it’s how I’m forced to live if I want to eat or put a roof over my head. I just don’t want to have to be this person any more. I want to be able to settle down and grow up and have my own life. Tarou is the head mechanic up at Waytower Seven. You’re deputy curator of one of the biggest museums in the United African Democracies. I hate that I could have had that. I could have had a chance at a life. But more than that, I just want to come back to New Cairo and not have to risk stealing someone else’s identity.’
Zala found herself worn out. She had never said all that out loud before. Polina had a look on her face she’d seen on other people’s mothers’ faces, one of concerned annoyance.
‘You shouldn’t want to come back. Christ, Zala, things are bad enough here—’ She stopped suddenly.
‘What?’
Polina shifted, grimacing. ‘I don’t know how much you’ve heard on the outside, but things aren’t good here. Not nice. Not safe.’
‘The virus?’ said Zala.
‘It started with the virus. Outbreaks here and there. Not many. No one knowing what caused it. Then as the weeks have gone by, more and more problems have surfaced. Well-to-dos like Chloe have died every so often, but the poor are getting hit way worse. I mean, the rich generally have better health, with less need of life-or-death technology, and they – well, we – can affor
d to replace our bio-augmentations when they get shut down. So the poor have lost their lives and livelihoods disproportionately.’
‘What does that have to do with things not being safe?’
‘They tried leaving. Half the Naj-Pur district and a substantial chunk of the Surja district upped sticks and streamed towards the big shuttle elevators in their area. The Council shut down the main exits, started forbidding people from the worst-hit neighbourhoods to leave. They said they were from “high-infection areas”, which in fairness they were, and presented a risk of spreading the virus to the outside world. They said that people were simply panicking and that things would be worse for them if they flooded en masse into the desert. So the workers got angry. There’ve been riots. Every night, there are fire-fights throughout the poor areas.’
Polina went on: ‘Word began to spread of an organization behind it. Arrests of purported leaders began. Violence prompts oppressive measures, which prompt more violence, and so on. Things were getting so much better, you know?’ She sighed. ‘It really seemed like we were headed to a great place. People were happy. The economy was doing great, the government felt like a friend of the people, a tool for betterment. We thought we’d left something dark and heavy behind. Then the virus struck, and it’s all gone backwards. The violence and the chaos are back and worse than ever.’
Polina walked over to the window and stared out at the city, the golden networks of vehicles streaking along the roads and the rows of monolithic skyscrapers. ‘You know the riots came right past here? The landlords did an admirable job of hiding it, but a bunch of the lower rooms were completely burnt out and windows were smashed all the way up. Once the rioters couldn’t reach with things they were throwing, they started shooting out the windows. Shooting right into people’s apartments. I was at the museum, watching on the TV and wondering if I’d come back to find my home destroyed. This revolution is still growing and it’s angry. I’m not sure you can figure out a way to stop the virus in time to defuse it.’
The Hive Construct Page 2