The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  Joey took a few seconds to bask in his superiority.

  If anyone else had found that trick, they had done as he had―and kept it for themselves.

  After cracking his knuckles, Joey approached one of the six onyx slabs hanging in midair around the CPU crystal. Walking bogged down, making a knee-deep run in heavy mud seem easy by comparison. The actual effect of taking each step occurred four seconds after he desired to.

  Fuck lag. He grinned. If he could pull this off from Earth, not only would it save him a long flight, it would be bragging rights galore. Step by plodding step, he approached the first data node. The ancient gunslinger reached into his coat again, and withdrew a creature resembling a beaver the size of a large dog.

  “Grant Williams,” said the gunslinger in a low, deep voice.

  The DataMole nodded.

  Joey dropped it, and it scampered around the onyx slabs―data storage nodes―hunting for any and all occurrences of the words ‘Grant Williams.’ Since the DataMole soft ran locally in the network, the dutiful creature scurried about the nodes much faster than Joey could have. It turned up twenty-six hits.

  He went straight for Grant’s user account in the Bandau network, peeled the mirror-silver data tile open, and extracted the encrypted password. A wave of his hand brought up another terminal window (three seconds later), and he plugged the scrambled text into a decryption routine. Starting it took forever, but once the codebreaking software kicked in, it zipped along.

  After standing there for twelve minutes watching it grind, Joey grew impatient. He could open a back channel into his work terminal and have it hammer the crypto, but that added a layer of risk. What he planned to do to Grant crossed certain legal boundaries and could get him fired, or worse: complicate things with Nina. While she would probably understand his seeking revenge on the man who’d been ruining Katherine’s life, getting caught in a legal tangle would no doubt make it difficult for her to stay with him if she wanted to keep her job. And being that they literally owned her body, he wasn’t sure she could just quit… at least not without being stuck in some shitty Class 1 or 2 pity shell they gave her as a going away present.

  Nina was many things, and vain ranked somewhere in the top ten. She wouldn’t last long in a body that appeared obviously fake. She’d do something drastic. He couldn’t really call that vanity in the true sense, more her desperate fear of perceiving herself as no longer human.

  On that somber note, he decided against conscripting his Division 9 terminal into the encryption breaking, and resigned himself to keep waiting.

  “What are you doing in here?” asked a man.

  The old cowboy shifted in a slow turn, eyes peering over the lapel of his duster at a thirtyish man in a sharp suit, the same metallic-silicon hue as the walls. Joey recognized the face right away, one of the defensemen Grant had somehow talked into helping him go after Katherine.

  “Nothing you need concern yourself with, boy.” Joey turned to face him, making the lag appear to be a horror-holo slow walk. Strands of white hair trailed like cobwebs from his head, lofted in the non-wind of his motion.

  A second terminal screen opened, visible only to Joey. He adored danger, but he had no interest in being an idiot. Getting into net combat over a Mars-Earth uplink was worse than trying to take on a real deck cowboy while using a senshelmet. He’d rather do something with better odds, like try to kill a thirteen-foot-tall Class 5 cyborg with a ball been hammer.

  Time to roll the dice. He duplicated the teleport hole soft and renamed it ‘GoingDown.’

  The defenseman’s sneering scowl faded to a look of confusion as the mood-altering routine got to work on his brain. The old gunslinger’s lips parted in a sinister smile, exposing yellowed teeth.

  “I’ve been lookin’ for a soul just like yours, boy.” Joey leaned forward. He spliced the code in the window as fast as he could think it, pasting in route uplink information for an Earth network address used as a ‘testing room’ for Dreamcraft Entertainment. A subnetwork offset from the GlobeNet with an entire planet’s worth of space.

  “W-what the fuck is going on?” The man took a step back and grasped his suit jacket at the breast with his left hand.

  “Do you believe in demons, boy?” The old gunslinger stopped advancing and flicked his coat back off his guns. Katherine had been a miserable bitch to him for years, but hearing her say she’d done it only out of worry he’d get himself killed had taken some of the venom out of it. He tried to think of her as a little girl, back when they’d been close. Picturing this man picking on that innocent version of Katherine bled anger into his virtual persona. “I was hoping you’d do go for that little pop gun of yours.”

  For a second, the man seemed intimidated enough to freeze.

  Joey wasn’t about to let the guy run; he only wanted time to complete the routine. As soon as the compile finished, he stuffed the GoingDown soft into the local node’s memory. An upload bar crept across the lower edge of his vision.

  The old gunslinger teased at the handles of his pistols. He’d been moving creepy-slow, and so far it didn’t seem as though the defense operator had realized he’d logged in from Earth. The idea of someone even trying a hack over that link defied plausibility. No one would ever even think someone would be that stupid.

  “Shit.” The man pulled a coppery-colored pistol from his jacket with a large oval middle covered by an array of little pipes and tubes. A dish at the front complimented fish-fin shapes at the back end. It discharged a stream of dark green energy surrounded by five donuts of paler green light that struck Joey in the chest before he could even flinch.

  Fortunately, the barrage of harmful code the man attempted to send into Joey’s net presence had to go down the same Earth-Mars link that created the lag. As the Necromancer connected to Joey’s brain sat at the Earth-side end of that link, his countermeasure completed loading and had to wait two seconds for the incoming data stream to arrive.

  In cyberspace, the energy beam washed over the ancient cowboy with less effect than a water gun.

  “What the…” The man shook in fear. “What are you?”

  The old man laughed. “I am the darkness. You feel it, don’t you? That dread crawling up your spine.”

  Upload complete.

  “You…” The defenseman seemed to get over the preternatural fear effect and shot him a glower. “You’re on Earth! What the hell do you think―”

  Joey triggered the GoingDown soft. Both he and the defenseman floated into the air as if the room around them had become an elevator cab hurtling toward the ground. Time seemed to freeze. Please work. Please work. Please work. The hardware hosting the Bandau Group’s virtual HR server node accepted Joey’s command to redirect all processing to the earthbound location for two minutes. This flipped things on end, and gave Joey local freedom while the defenseman had to suffer under the interminable three-second lag.

  A thunderous crash filled the room as the walks buckled and cracked, leaking bright cyan energy fluid. The defenseman slammed into the floor while Joey remained hovering. His operating system spawned a virtual machine, running a copy of the Dreamcraft Entertainment sandbox. The old cowboy lunged at the frozen defenseman and pinned him against the wall, nose to nose.

  “Welcome to Earth, boy. You asked who I am?” The ancient gunslinger hurled the man into one of the data-storage slabs, a floating block of onyx that didn’t move on impact; the man slapped into it and slid downward, screaming and reacting to the charge only after he hit the floor. “I’m the thing that people don’t think is real. The demon in the net, the bogey man.” He pulled one of his engraved silver six-guns and levelled it off at the man’s head. “I’m friends with Death. We play cards sometimes. Alas, the bastard’s not a bad player. I owe him a soul.”

  Joey fired.

  With a sharp bang accompanied by a spectral wail, a smoking two-inch skull came careening out of the barrel and flew into the man’s face. The spot blackened in an instant, and a long trail o
f ectoplasmic energy exuded from the other side of the defenseman’s skull. Three seconds after being shot, the man flipped over onto his chest and screamed. The alien ray gun fell from his grip and disappeared in a flash of bright blue pixels. He grabbed his head in both hands, continuing to scream.

  Joey shot him again in the chest and stomped over. The defenseman screamed from the second bullet at the same time the old cowboy slammed him against the wall. “Your buddy Grant asked you to mess with someone.”

  Blood trickled out of the man’s nose.

  The old one grinned. “You feel that, don’t you? I bet you’ve got one hell of a headache right now. The next one reaches into meatspace and ends you for real.” He pulled the man close, letting him savor corpse-breath. “You’re alive for one reason only: to send a message to the others. I know who they are, and if any of you interfere with her again, I’ll drag you with me straight to Hell.”

  He raised the six-gun under the man’s chin and estimated how much of a data blast he’d need to send enough Black ICE down the line to render the man unconscious but not dead. He pivoted the gun to the side, and fired at a trajectory that sent a flap of cheek and several teeth flying. A malware module hidden in a wrapper of innocuous data flew to Mars and burrowed into the defenseman’s deck, causing it to electrify its M3 port, shocking his real-world brain.

  Joey cringed with the faintest trace of guilt, remembering the agony he’d experienced when the black dragon AI nailed him with a similar attack, only it hadn’t metered the jolt with care to cause a knockout… it had wanted to bake his cerebellum. In a paradox of bad being good, Joey lived only because his deck at the time had been so cheap it burned out before it could kill him.

  As the defenseman lost consciousness, his avatar disintegrated in a shower of spiraling white numbers and flakes of silicon grey. Joey twirled the gun over his finger and stuck it back in the holster. Amid the quiet room, he waited for GoingDown to stop running, and the node’s rendering to snap back to the hardware on Mars.

  Once the heavy blanket of lag came over him again, he tapped his boot. A few minutes later, the encryption routine stopped, exposing Grant’s authentication credentials. With a giant shit-eating grin, Joey opened a user-interface terminal as Grant, and went spelunking in the law firm’s network, viewing the files and storage folders as if sitting at a desk in the outside world. It didn’t take him too long to locate some current case records. He didn’t really know what would be the most sensitive parts, nor did he want to ask Katherine as it would make her complicit in some highly shady shit.

  He noticed a few files marked with red stars, and opened them. Two contained recorded interviews where Grant and some other Bandau lawyers interviewed clients. In the first, the client admitted his employers were ‘fully culpable’ in whatever had triggered a lawsuit against his company, and instructed the Bandau team to do whatever they could to make sure the case went in their favor, even if defending it cost more than settling as the company didn’t want the bad BR. He dug a little deeper on that file and discovered the client to be Nutri-Joy health products, and the lawsuit stemmed from a tainted batch of baby food. While the company had fixed the error, they feared a public backlash.

  Joey grabbed the recording and sent it, using Grant’s credentials, to the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. He found another few tidbits of evidence in unrelated court proceedings where Bandau’s attempts to collect usable evidence to exonerate their client had instead confirmed guilt, and they’d kept it buried. He, again using Grant’s login, sent several pieces of said evidence to the UCF Prosecutor’s Office in Primus City. He’d come here to skewer Grant, but he might take all of Bandau down. Fortunately, Katherine hadn’t worked for them, merely married this asshole.

  Figuring his work thus far would have a strong negative impact on Grant’s quality of life, he reached for the button to logout, but hesitated with a devilish smile.

  Grant, awesome guy he was, ordered high end vat-grown sashimi lunch for everyone in the office who wasn’t partnered. Workers from paralegals to executive assistants, to maintenance contractors got a Ͼ180 lunch on the company. Adding in a Ͼ200 bottle of sake each worked out to Ͼ42,560 on Grant’s expense account. Nah. Grant’s more generous than that. He repeated the order to all the client companies Grant had worked with, sending a thank you on behalf of the Bandau Group. Spending Ͼ715,590 as a thank you seemed like the magnanimous Grant he’d heard Katherine talking about before everything went to shit.

  Joey laughed.

  He pulled out the hole again, and teleported to a commerce node he’d made frequent use of before having to leave Mars. The hardware repeater sat somewhere underground in the real world, on a fiberoptic main linking Arcadia to Primus. From there, he got into the banking system and pried open Grant’s account.

  An hour or so of analyzing later, he found a series of withdrawals commented with smile emoticons. Tracing them led to the PID of one Lana Paris, a nineteen-year-old student at the Arts Academy of Arcadia. A brief search of her activity matched up use of their NetMinis to make payments at the same time and place in local restaurants and motels around the school. Joey glanced at the timestamps and fumed.

  Bastard’s been cheating on her for over a year. He gathered all that data together and shot it off to Katherine. That should tilt the divorce in her favor a little.

  For the cherry atop the revenge sundae, he used Grant’s PID to connect to Martian Fantasies, and ordered an eighteen-inch chocolate penis, accompanied by a card reading: ‘I’ve heard you’re about to have a bad day. Might want to use this to loosen up a bit before you meet your new roommates. Oh, and mess with her again, I will find you. When I do, it won’t be made out of chocolate.’

  Joey’s limp body in the real world grinned from ear-to-ear. The old gunslinger offered a grim stare at nothing in particular before bowing bowed his head.

  His Nishihama Necromancer processed a logout command, and the world faded to black.

  asaru stared at the business end of the JSDF soldier’s assault rifle for a silent moment. He shifted his gaze to her face; beneath the fear of him, and pain from her injuries, she seemed at once beautiful and… powerful. A confidence he had seldom seen in the eyes of a woman shone like the finish of a gem peeking out from beneath layers of dirt. All the women he’d associated with had fallen into one of two types: The first knew who he was and were willing to trade their dignity and bodies on the off chance he would take such a fancy to them they would marry into fabulous wealth. The second type thought him handsome and didn’t much care about anything more than a hook-up.

  Of course, a third type did exist―women who didn’t give him a second glance, but he never paid attention to them.

  Between those seeking financial security and those seeking a fun night, he couldn’t remember any of them being real. All of them played a character to get what they wanted. Of course, he understood the type of women given to showing up in his vicinity hardly represented a wide selection, but he hadn’t yet met a girl like this.

  Something else lurked beneath the desperation in her stare―anger. He got the sense she hated being at a disadvantage. Masaru could almost taste the resentment on her at being vulnerable. He caught himself tilting his head and smiling as if watching a wounded tiger defending its home.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” asked the woman. “Go away before I have to hurt you.”

  Masaru tugged at his suit jacket. “Do the locals here often roam about in a Yoshinori?”

  She lowered the rifle about an inch and her eyebrows moved closer together. “All right, I’ll give you that. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  “Moto, Masaru.” He rendered a slight bow. “I was on my way to a business meeting. We were shot down. I”―eyes closed, he offered a silent prayer to the Kami to watch over Shuji―”am the only survivor.”

  She let her rifle rest across her lap; relief at not having to hold its weight any longer showed clear in her expression. “
Abe Noriko. Sergeant, Japan State Defense Force.”

  “You are hurt.” Masaru stepped over rubble to approach her, and squatted by her side. “I saw your aircraft.”

  Noriko shook her head, seeming sad and angry at the same time. “We were looking for an air patrol that disappeared around this region. The pilot was new, so they thought he’d gone too low to sightsee the ruins and crashed. We sustained ground fire from multiple individuals with portable anti-aircraft missiles, and went down. They hit us before we could get ready. We’re just a medevac flight. The Herons don’t have onboard weapons.” She looked at the dirt between her boots. “I was the only one left after the firefight.”

  Masaru opened his stimpak case and removed three of the remaining six. “You’ve lost quite a bit of blood.”

  “Yeah. Kinda happens when you get shot.” She grimaced as he pulled the fabric of her jumpsuit away from her right thigh. “Ngh… ow.”

  The navy blue material had turned black around a bullet wound about a third the way down the length of her thigh. Offset to the outside, the trajectory appeared to have missed bone. She fought hard not to cry out as he prodded a finger around the site, testing for firmness before attempting a stimpak shot. It wouldn’t do any good to inject it into the open wound. Noriko stifled whimpers and looked away from him.

  “Yes, it hurts. Stop playing with it and give me the injection.”

  Masaru thanked the Kami Joey was not here to make a crass remark. Noriko appeared to catch the unintentional innuendo and blushed. A testament to his willpower, he showed no reaction. He flicked the safety cap off the narrow end of the stimpak and pressed it to her skin, two fingers’ width above the hole. As the four-inch red cylinder emitted a soft hiss, he reached under her leg and found the exit wound. Noriko let out a gasp of pain as his fingertip made contact with a hole similar in size to the entry wound.