by Andrew Ives
She stood up as high as the lid's cover allowed, held the flap upright and pushed the hand rail with all her strength. As it slowly accelerated, building in momentum, she began to run with it.
The cart weighed about five hundred pounds with the batteries, the electric motors and rubbish combined. It was a struggle to even get it moving, but soon it was rolling, sliding, skidding, with the inertia of a charging bull.
Sedgwick had just begun to approach the lift and was bewildered to find the usually slow-moving cart, suddenly careering towards him with such a force.
He fired in desperation at the lid, hoping to hit Karen beyond it.
The bullet whistled through the soft plastic, missing her shoulder and head by a fraction of an inch. She ducked down lower and pushed harder, now using her shoulder too.
Pushing was almost unnecessary now - the cart was already destined for the windows.
The cart connected with Sedgwick and Karen felt the sudden increase in weight. She pushed for only a moment longer and, as the cart began to pull away from her, she let go.
Karen fell headlong onto her front, looking upwards just as the cart was about to crush Sedgwick. The yellow cart careered sideways and slid diagonally towards the plexiglass windows. It almost looked as though Sedgwick might escape uncrushed, being arched over the front as he was.
Within moments Karen's anguish found a new direction. She could see how the corner of the cart struck the window along its vertex, the robust edge acting like a giant chisel to split the pane down its length.
Her heightened senses made everything seem like slow motion as the two sides of glass fell from their housing and slowly plummetted into the darkness outside. Chilled wind instantly rushed in and it was then that she knew the safety plastic in the windows wasn't quite as safe as it was purported to be. The front of the cart crashed through the opening, lodging itself in the surrounding frame by jammed wheels alone.
Sedgwick clung onto the bin's rim. He had dropped the disks in the bin the moment the cart first hit him and was now hanging on by his right hand alone. He could not bring himself to drop the gun, but at the same time he had to hold on to survive. He edged in slightly further, getting his whole forearm over the bin and shouted, pleaded, for Karen to help him.
"Pull me in! You've got to pull me in! I have the disks in my pocket. You can't let..." his voice faded and Karen suspected he might have fallen.
She clambered to her feet, standing up to get a better view. She could see his hand was still over the cart's rim, but he had stopped calling.
Cautiously, she crept over to the windows, hardly eager to look out over a four hundred feet drop herself. She looked around the cart through the neighbouring windows to see that Sedgwick had truly disappeared.
More wary than ever of leaning against the windows, she looked downwards. A barely recognisable outline, an imprint of a person, was dented into the roof of a white van parked outside. The predominantly black figure against the white metal. It was at last fait accompli.
She pulled the cart back inside and found the arm hanging over the rim was an artificial arm. It had come away above the elbow and torn itself off from the remainder of Sedgwick's real limb. The fingertips glistened where once over-zealous use had caused the tungsten alloy skeleton to pierce the organic skin. She turned the cart and parked it so that it filled the breezy opening.
Avoiding the arm, she took the dusty disks out from the bin and walked towards her door. It looked as though the data was intact.
As she turned her door key, the mangled frame brought home to her how the Herculean arm had once been so forcibly used.
Behind her, the arm fell from the cart; its eerily-realistic fingers wriggled as its sensors hit the floor.
* * *
Guesswork
Night was closing in. One by one fluorescent lights darkened and previously industrious employees departed. Dreamland's hardware R & D department had been tidying up loose ends after another slightly more fruitful day's work than they had grown accustomed to in recent times - they were progressing once more.
The senior software engineer sat alone, isolated in the sole remaining brightness. Colleagues waved him goodbye and to each he briefly held up his hand in silent acknowledgement. His immediate superior emerged from the nearby office behind, pulled his jacket on around his shoulders and interrupted as inconsiderately as ever. Keeping fingers on the mouse buttons, the engineer turned around, carefully marking his whereabouts in the program and listened.
"I've heard news that we shan't be receiving any further input from our enigmatic donor. We've already got all the information he could muster and frankly he understands less about this gadget's internal workings than we do. I don't know where he got it from, but he was never perfectly straight with us about it. Still, gift horses and all that." The software engineer half-turned to interrupt, but now crouched beside him, his superior continued.
"Between you and me, he's served his purpose. He's not exactly the most trustworthy customer we could hope to take into our confidence with such a sensitive project, his asking price was rather steep and I would rather we had as little to do with him as possible. If we can get by without any further help, I would prefer we did so. He did mention that it worked perfectly 99.9% of the time, but I wouldn't be so sure about that either. Double check everything over." The project leader had adequately emphasised the fact that there was to be no more help forthcoming.
"I was just about to say, for one of the more vital routines we need we've only managed to extract as a 'black box' routine. We understand what it calculates from its inputs and what outputs to expect." The engineer turned back and demonstrated, waving the mouse pointer around on the screen, scrolling back and forth as if his project leader was paying any attention to the nigh-incomprehensible code on his monitor.
"It does occasionally gives some strange output, flags really, but apart from that we understand pretty much what it does if not quite how it achieves it. At the moment, we ignore these other outputs as our equipment needn't be as sophisticated as the original hardware. The main trouble is that the original had massive parallel processing and used it everywhere. This code ran in tandem with some other code (which we don't have) and this part was synchronised with the others, so that they 'spoon-fed' each other blocks of data. Without these others we can only guess what the overall effect was. It must have been something pretty special - no wonder the donor couldn't get it all to work perfectly. It's a nightmare."
"Even this code we can't go into in too much detail, it's taking ages and the competition will get ahead if we ponder on it much longer." The software engineer knew the moment the words left his lips that this sounded like an excuse to avoid disassembling the awesome code, but he gave himself a migraine once just looking it over and was rightly unwilling to probe into it any deeper.
"I wouldn't put it past this donor to have sold other information onto our rivals, playing us off against each other, so it is imperative to us that we get the software side organised if not finished as soon as possible. It's even possible that it came from our rivals." the leader speculated.
The engineer was pleased that his earlier remark escaped unquestioned, his apparent laziness unchallenged and so was quick to change the conversation's direction while he remained ahead.
"Our hardware department issued a memo yesterday saying that the original donated hardware was too complex and too badly damaged for them to copy entirely; they've only been able to guess at the finer details from the architecture. They also pointed out that our own custom-designed circuitry would be cheaper and quicker to build to our new spec rather than rebuild the original circuitry, parts of which would go unused by us. Our spec need not be as high as the original and the resulting cards should be lighter, smaller and cheaper to mass produce. If the hardware was anything like the software, I can well believe they had difficulties."
Seeing the leader was not visibly appreciating the trouble they had all been through,
the programmer elaborated further:
"We've even had to reluctantly abolish our usual compartmental access approach with this (it's had to be a team effort throughout) and so they've been following our progress and we've been following theirs. They are waiting for us to finish our software and blow the first ROMs, before they can complete their cards." The engineer was hoping for the nod from his superior, the moment when the whole project's responsibility left his hands and became the hardware division's burden.
"When you're happy with the finalised code, I am. Get the hardware under way; we can always update ROMs later if need be." Trelheaven stood up again, patted JJ's shoulder and began walking away.
"I'm as happy with them as I'll ever be. I'll gather all the pieces together tomorrow, join them together, optimise the code and we'll be ready for blowing the ROMs by the end of the week easy." JJ called after him.
As JJ said this, he realised he had moved the mouse pointer losing his place, and so leaned forward around the monitor and switched the power off. The screen blackened - work was over for today.
Expired
Karen made herself comfortable, slouched on her black, leather-look armchair in the room's semidarkness. The light from her widescreen television illuminated her face as she sipped the remains of her chocolate drink. She cupped her hands around it, absorbing the heat into her injured palm.
Tuesday nights were premiere nights on CL1 and she was particularly intent on watching this week's offering - a film about the hacking underworld. She always found them amusing, finding fault with all the implausible and impossible shortcomings they inevitably contain. She was expecting a phone call anyway and reasoned this was a good enough excuse to have a 'lazy' evening. She was tired after a night spoiled by reliving yesterday's events again and again, a nuit blanche as she called them.
The opening titles were moody and promising; but as the actual film started the screen became a multicoloured flicker of scrambled data. This was shortly followed by a sampled message saying over and over again that her card had expired. This was all too familiar to Karen and she knew that it signalled the end of tonight's viewing.
For a split second she instinctively thought of getting Eric to crack her a new copy and then slowly it brought home to her what must have happened on the night of the fire.
She had grown used to the idea that Eric had murdered Sedgwick in the fire and was the guilty party in this incident. Having now seen Sedgwick since, it was obvious that he escaped the fire and that the police found someone else dead. Eric hadn't been seen since (previously thought to be on the run from the police) and it all began to add up.
Karen stared into the ever-changing flicker, her eyes glazed over and watered as she grew saddened by the tragic loss of a rare friend.
Later that same night, Harry knocked on her tattered door. He had called to return her video minidisk and also to ask her to solve some simple computing questions, apparently about his computer, but in reality they were from his computer science homework. He hoped she wouldn't realise this as she was unlikely to help if she knew his real reason for asking. He brought along his newest magazine to help him disguise his motive.
After Karen answered the door, Harry entered, stepping over the burnt-out shell of a monitor and the other junk that sat in the gloomy hall awaiting recycling and then followed Karen into the lounge.
She turned the lights on and quickly tidied up leaving Harry to sit down and contemplate how best to put his questions across; for a twelve-year-old kid he could be as manipulative as anyone, if usually rather transparent.
He started by asking Karen if she would like to have a copy of the minidisks on the cover of the magazine. He was a pirate and thought nothing of doing this, although Karen came across as overly 'holy' about his wrongdoings. Deimos was, to him anyway, an attractive game and he was surprised when she declined. She said her computer was "very broken" and he saw his attempt come to nothing.
He decided to peel off the tape affixing the disk to the magazine while considering his next course of action. Karen returned having cleared up and saw him carefully, slowly, peeling the tape off. It started to tear the cover, so he began peeling from the other end. He tore it as slowly as he could, still tearing away the whole picture with it. This annoyed Harry intensely as this always happened with every magazine he ever bought. Karen knew the feeling well and had given up buying them long ago.
Seeing the game was called Deimos, this prompted Karen to say 'they think they can terraform Mars when they still can't even make tape you can peel off properly!' Harry just held up his hand with screwed-up tape sticking around his knuckles.
Karen sat opposite him inattentively; she placed the returned video minidisk on the translucent glass coffee table between them and her interest wandered back towards the scrambled film. Although it had become scrambled, the sound was unaffected apart from the "Your card has expired. Contact your dealer..." message repeated over it. She had reduced this to a whisper by altering the stereo balance so she could still hear the film, albeit in French.
It was obvious Harry thought she had gone insane watching a scrambled film in a foreign language, so she soon changed channels to something more acceptable.
At Harry's school, his CompSci class had just touched upon three-dimensional arrays and he was unable think of a way to adequately disguise his questions, phrasing them so that they seemed natural. Karen asked him about Deimos before he uttered a word.
He mumbled that this was some forthcoming Christmas release that was reputed to be a major breakthrough in immersion technology. Being such a hackneyed cliche frequently bandied about by the videogame industry, she ignored this comment and probed further.
Harry recited all the usual waffle about the moon Deimos being hollowed out into some giant orbiting space station and that you play someone who wanders around inside attempting to board a shuttle back to Earth. It sounded like the usual farfetched premise for another rehashed old clone, but what he said later intrigued her.
This magazine version was only a cutdown of a massive game; the full version was purported to have intelligent opponents. Intelligent in the real sense of the word - not some mini AI algorithm that simulated intelligence, but the real thing. Every different character exhibited personality traits of their own, had different ideas of how to prevent you from escaping - different ideas every time you played. It was as if they knew what the player was trying to do - as if they were reading your mind.
Coincidentally, you needed to buy a helmet accessory to play this new wonder game. The helmet being sold at a 'once-in-a-lifetime price... until Christmas only'.
It was as if they were selling these helmets on the back of this blockbuster game. A 'brand new invention' which bore such resemblance to the ill-fated PsiNapse, she really did wonder whether PsiNapse had truly gone onto new defence development or had it (like Sedgwick) reappeared in another guise.
Karen questioned Harry for some time longer, making certain she had learned everything useful she could from him. She momentarily left the lounge, shortly to return carrying her computer keyboard and modem. As she assembled them, she told Harry about the burglar and how he had damaged her monitor, disks and hard drive. She had brought all the working remainder into the lounge to use on her main television. She asked Harry if he could fetch his external disk drive and some comms software; he soon returned from his next door flat with these replacement items, completing the set-up once more.
Harry was forbidden to use his own modem for any length of time as he became easily engrossed, tending to hog the phone for hours on end. Calls were costly and his computer-illiterate mother rightly viewed the hacking underworld as a bad influence on her dear cherub.
Karen hardly asked for Harry to help her embark on an online information trek, and he instantly accepted. (In doing so, deliberately neglecting his homework. Harry's student teacher was no ogre and he would just guess the answers and see how it went. This was miles better than schoolwork any day.)
Karen was reluctant to include Harry in her subterfuge, but he owned peripherals she urgently needed and she could hardly tell him to leave her alone after borrowing them. She also wanted his comms software, primarily for the phone book stored within it.
Harry frequently copied pirated games. Many pirates were crackers and in turn, many crackers were hackers. Hackers interested in learning inside-knowledge on videogame coding were the kind of people she wanted to meet, and Harry had the handles to enable her to access such haunts.
Migraine
Karen had forced herself to give up the Internet several years ago. Towards the end of her stints at school/university, Karen became addicted to the Net - eventually so much so that it frightened her. Her schoolwork went into decline and she was becoming permanently consumed by the Net's very existence even whilst physically away from it. She just couldn't wait for her next fix, her next shot of intravenous prattle.
That was long ago, when there were a mere fifty million or so Net users. Even in those days, it had already become like one giant multi-million-guest party; a party where everyone wanted to get to know you, ask you questions and small-talk endlessly on every topic under the sun.
The Net had become a headache, a headache which had since grown exponentially until it spanned the world, had filled all available space everywhere.
Stateside there was talk of how all-consuming the Net had become, a country where there was barely anyone left who never used it. Governments were growing worried just what the populace were getting up to behind their collective backs. Net junkies were everywhere while education and productivity dropped to a new low - only the strongest survive a night on the Net and still manage to work the next day.
In Europe, the Net was even more chaotic. Serious users had to master several languages. Karen was already fluent in French, but German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch were thrust on her by her myriad European counterparts. Pidgin English and innumerable colloquialisms growing on her without a single language lesson. It was too unbearable to find the path to a promising bulletin board blocked by the language barrier; she had to rectify this. Transatlantic phone calls were far too expensive, leaving Europe the only way forward.