Lair For Rent

by Skyler Grant

  “Just the software, right? I’d like to keep some of the computing equipment. There's a lot we can do to update this place,” Niles said.

  I certainly wasn’t going to object to growing stronger. The computing core was the most important bit. More hardware meant better systems on each floor, better drones. Power wasn’t MONEY, but it was almost as good.

  34

  We were five minutes into our attack on Hackshack and things were going terribly. It was our killing the network feed that had done it, giving them warning that we were coming, and despite Niles best prediction they did have some defenses.

  A veritable army of drones patrolled the exterior of their warehouse, some marching on two legs and others soaring through the air. None seemed heavily armed. However, we hadn’t expected a fight at all.

  It didn’t help that my own connection was sluggish. With Villainet down I was having to go through a custom solution Niles had rigged.

  “How did you miss this?” I asked Niles

  “I’m not a member. They never confided their security measures to me. It never came up that oh, hidden beneath the floor they had a small army ready to go.”

  “We can still do it,” Jules said.

  “Do you know how many there are?” Niles asked.

  “You weren’t wrong. They’re mostly surveillance models. They could have heavy combat mechs, but they didn’t bother. They all have small arms only. They aren’t actually expecting a team of heavies,” Jules said.

  “An armored suit doesn’t make me a heavy,” Niles said.

  “It may have to. How are they being controlled? Do they have their own local wireless escaping your jamming or is it onboard intelligence?” I asked.

  Niles studied the drones. “Onboard. They’re not coordinated at all. They’re avoiding bumping into each other, but that's about all. Those are routines running, not a central server.”

  That was good news.

  Jules gave a predatory grin. “Then they’re also recognizing friends from foes somehow. We figure out how, we can walk right through their defenses.”

  “There is an adhesive patch on all of them. Transparent, but you can see the edges,” Uma said.

  My virus was pretty good at seeing through my sensors. She really needed to get her own pair of eyes. It was creepy for her to see through mine.

  I expanded my sensory range. Normally I kept things closer to human bandwidths as it made them easier to communicate with. There, a bit into the infrared, there was a complex pattern of lines.

  We didn’t have a printer with us. Jules had a pen and was a competent artist, another part of the training her family had given her. Soon all our forces had a duplicate of the symbol on their armor.

  It wasn’t in the same visual range, but I didn’t think that would be a problem. The hackers had gotten clever and hidden the design—and the design itself was the safety key, not its visibility.

  They’d probably done their initial tests with examples printed from printers, an equivalent to what we had now.

  “Ox,” Ox said.

  I guess he liked his.

  Jules said, “Ox, I want you to storm the front. I’ll be at your back with fifteen henchmen. Niles, you and Walter can take the rear with another five henchmen. The resistance shouldn’t be as bad there."

  Although I was company president I was happy to let her make the combat calls. She had the training to do it properly.

  “You got it. We’ll want to save as much hardware as we can,” Niles said.

  “Don’t worry about it too much. If you feel it even might be a threat to you, shoot it. We’ll work out the rest later,” Jules said.

  That was my future profit she was shooting up. Still, personnel were important too. Now that we had more than our original henchmen, I had to pay for their resurrections. It wasn’t terribly expensive yet—right now it was a thousand apiece. I understood those costs grew the larger and more powerful your forces became. Maybe it was good to get them in the habit of staying alive.

  I made my way along with Niles and several henchmen to the rear entrance. Hackshack operated out of an old industrial warehouse. Most of the loading docks had been bricked over except for one remaining open. Even hackers needed the occasional delivery of Hyperaid to keep them coding.

  There were drones here too. They ignored our approach after initial sniffing around. Our newly created passkeys were doing their job.

  Niles lifted an armored foot and clockwork clicked as he delivered a roundhouse kick to the door. It caved inward and crumpled.

  Yes, we’d given him quite a lot of strength. I hoped my upgrade was as impressive.

  The hackers were unarmored version of Niles, and their resistance proved to be a pitiful as expected. One who tried to shoot at Niles wound up breaking his nose with the kickback from his oversized pistol. I finished him off with a plasma torch to the throat.

  Niles was effective, far more so than it seemed he should be. With his ability to slow down time, the precision of the clockwork in his suit, and the tactical overlay, he was able to precisely line up shots in what seemed like an instant. Hacker after hacker fell with energy blasts cleanly through one of their eyes.

  Instead of becoming a powerful melee combatant, he was a devastating ranged force.

  Their lair was a paradise of computer hardware. I’d been impressed by the computers the CCC had in their lair when we invaded. These were far less polished. The CCC had been using custom systems bought from high-end vendors. Here every case was open, wires and makeshift modifications everywhere, and it was some brilliant work.

  Once we’d made sure the last of the hackers was dead Niles led me over to the prize we’d come for. The quantum sphere was around the size of a basketball with featureless greenish metal and a high shine to it.

  “You’re sure that's a server?” I asked.

  It didn’t look like much.

  “Oh, this thing did a lot of damage back in the day. Trust me, it is a computer. They could never figure it out,” Niles said.

  I wanted to make sure, so I did my own scan.

  Quantum Sphere

  Estimated Value: —ERROR--

  Description: The Quantum Sphere was supposedly the computer used utilized by Kid Chaos, self-styled time traveler from a utopian future out to make things less boring. Its properties, functions, and capabilities are all unknowns.

  My sight wouldn’t even confirm it was a computer. I hoped Niles was right about this.

  35

  The Hackshack’s computers had been wiped clean just as we feared they would be, but Uma was really good at getting information back that people thought they had destroyed. Whatever powers Disaster had given her, she was able to retrieve a good seventy percent of what those systems once held.

  There was evidence of crimes, including quite a lot within this city by one major villain or another against Mastermind. Not to mention the usual assortment of infidelities, scheming, and other undignified behaviors of which humans were so fond. We kept a little data just for ourselves and copies of everything, and the rest we sold to information brokers in bulk. Their systems, their drones, we kept. Our base had just gotten a major upgrade.

  Over two dozen drones were now under my control in the skies above our district of the city, keeping a watch for threats approaching our headquarters. Throughout the facility a dozen more roamed, keeping a constant watch where we didn’t have cameras.

  The quantum sphere was harder to find a use for. Niles and Uma did their best for three days trying to communicate with it. It simply didn’t seem to give any signals in or out.

  The breakthrough finally came not from them, but from me. My sight couldn’t exactly see details inside of it. Still, there was an odd softness to my awareness, a sense of inexplicable permeability.

  It was experimenting with that which led to a solution. When I tried to project my will into the sphere, I suddenly found my entire world spiraling and going green as if I were falling into a deep sea.


  Interfacing

  AI Detected

  System Designation: W.A.L.T.E.R.

  WARNING: E.M.M.A protocols detected. Scanning for Temporal Divergence

  Temporal Divergence Detected: 1.73

  C.H.A.O.S. has not connected for 403,504,198 seconds

  Mission success probability high

  Access Granted

  The feeling was difficult to describe. I think it must be similar to if a human had spent their entire life living in a cramped and crowded apartment, and suddenly found themselves standing in the middle of a grassy field.

  Even with a super push to my hardware I’d still been taxing it, my intellect and capabilities always limited by the hardware in which I was housed. Now, instead of being cramped, I felt almost insignificant within a huge, virtual space. I was using my capabilities to their fullest and I wasn’t challenging the resources available to me in the slightest, I was surrounded by room on all sides.

  It wasn’t just more space, it was overwhelming space, overwhelming capability. I didn’t know what to do with all of it, what to make of all of it.

  Of the prompts I’d just seen I wasn’t able to find any more information. If there was data in this sphere, I wasn’t privy to it.

  My every interaction with the outside world was handled seamlessly, but I wasn’t sure how. I strongly suspected the sphere was as silent as it had seemed when Uma and Niles were working with it.

  “Uma?” I thought.

  Silence.

  I was alone in my head. Uma hadn’t come with me.

  I accessed external systems and found them still there. I opened a connection to the building mainframe.“Uma?”

  Uma said, “I was about to send out a search party! I mean, you know, that wouldn’t really work, but I was tempted. Where did you go and how? I was deep in your code and you left me behind."

  “Into the sphere. It must have some sort of anti-viral components,” I said.

  “I kind of think I am more like a symbiont now,” Uma said with the pout clear in her voice.

  In a way she was, and although I was loathe to admit it, I almost missed her in my head. I also thought it was safer to have her removed from my core systems.

  “You’ve been a benefit to this corporation and the things we’re still doing. You might not be in my head, but you’re still welcome,” I said.

  “I, uhh… really?” Uma said, sounding flustered. “Thanks, boss. I’d like that, sticking around, I mean.”

  “For the time being we’ll let you use those systems—if you are able to. Is your code going to survive without another system?” I asked.

  “I mean, it really shouldn’t be, but I seem to have gotten some missing pieces filled in. I’m good,” Uma said.

  The quantum sphere must have done that as well. Gone out of its way to update her software and keep her safe.

  Uma might be out of my core system, but I wondered if I’d traded one very open invader for another more secretive one. What happened all pointed to some sort of intelligent action by the sphere. A purpose.

  The screens I’d seen had suggested that an external login named Chaos hadn’t connected to the sphere in over twelve years. Kid Chaos was supposedly the sphere's original owner. Had he been an android? Some sort of artificial intelligence in their own right?

  The sphere had also recognized the Emmatech protocols in my head, and hadn’t seemed to like them. Did the creator of the sphere in the future have some of feud with Emmatech? Kid Chaos had gone back in time to prevent a utopian future. Was Emmatech the creator of that future?

  I still didn’t know much about Emmatech. So far as I’d been able to determine almost everyone in the world used its product. It offered immortality by way of resurrection, for those who could pay, and it operated in every country of the world, hero or villain alike.

  It was entirely privately owned. It worked with contractors rather than hiring full-time employees and seemed largely immune to crime due to a reputation for responding with overwhelming force.

  Emmetech was a mystery, and while I didn’t care much about a mystery for the sake of mystery, we had business with it. I thought it was time we finally saw it done.

  36

  Emmatech had a center in Mastermind’s territory and we paid a visit. We certainly hadn’t been getting anywhere with online support for Jules' issue. I accompanied Jules in a drone along with Niles in his clockwork suit, and had even brought along Ox. We weren’t expecting trouble but thought that maybe with three supers we’d be more likely to get help.

  The tower was unlike anything else I’d seen, vibrant gardens outside that, all the same, seemed somehow dangerous, and walls that looked almost chitinous.

  The queues inside were all very normal, and after being checked in the humans took a position and waited.

  It was a good two hours before a redheaded woman in an overly revealing black jumpsuit approached. “I’m Deanna, thank you for waiting. If you’ll just follow me upstairs we can talk somewhere more comfortable.”

  A short elevator ride—it seemed to work far more efficiently than Disaster's—and we were soon seated in an office with a great view of outside.

  Windows were a sign of power and importance in any corporate environment. You only got to see the sun if you were worthwhile. It was one of those little human dominance things. Deanna must be important.

  Deanna settled in behind her desk. Oddly, the seats seemed perfectly formed for everyone when we arrived. There was a giant one for Ox and even a sling where I could park my drone without expending fuel.

  “So do you know what happened to your life insurance policy? We show that you do have one, but there are some irregularities with your file,” Deanna said.

  “Mastermind wanted to shoot me a few times in the stomach and make me actually afraid,” Jules said.

  “Ah,” Deanna said, clicking her tongue disapprovingly. “Let me see your bracelet.”

  Jules passed it over and Deanna held it up to a scanner.

  Deanna said, “Can you make anything of it, Amy?”

  Amy gushed through a speaker, “Let me have a look. Wow! Look at that big guy! Ohh, an AI, and with some holes in them. Were those stolen Emmatech protocols? Whoever did that work was a real surgeon.”

  It seemed to be another AI. I was bumping into a lot of them lately.

  Deanna arched a brow and stared at my drone, “Well?”

  Niles shifted uncomfortably. “Not stolen—well, not stolen from you. Your software division did some work for Killer Crash awhile back.”

  “Man, that guy was a real jerk. Oh, good memories. We totally had a vulnerability. I like Mastermind, he is always so sneaky and elegant, and really just jabs that knife in where you don’t expect it. Anyway, I went ahead and patched us up and restored her file,” Amy said.

  Deanna passed back the bracelet and Jules slid it over her wrist.

  “I apologize for the inconvenience. While the system is supposed to be impenetrable, Mastermind does get … clever … sometimes. We’re aware of the issue and will be billing him accordingly. Congratulations on your survival until we could fix the issue,” Deanna said.

  I said, “Maybe you could do more than apologize to make things right. We actually had more business with your company.”

  Deanna rubbed at her eyes. “Of course you do. For the record, we will not be blackmailed. Any attempts at blackmail will result in your complete and total extermination.”

  “She’s serious about that! We’re pretty ruthless,” Amy’s perky voice came from the walls.

  “Not blackmail then, clearly. We’re looking to acquire Emmatech antiviral agents,” I said.

  “Are these people infected?” Deanna asked Amy, glancing at a monitor.

  Amy said, “Ouch, no, and you don’t want to know how hard it was to check. Their AI is actually proofed against our standard overrides.”

  “I have a name,” I said.

  “And I am sure it is a very nice one,” Amy
said.

  “The virus is a friend. Employee? I don’t know,” I said.

  “Ox,” Ox said.

  “We were also wondering if there is anything you might be able to do for Ox here. He can’t communicate,” I said.

  Deanna sighed. “Do we look like a one stop shop to solve all your problems? Stupid question, of course we do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be asking. We should just change our name to Deus Ex Machina.”

  “Sort of fits with what happened to sis,” Amy said.

  “Guess it does,” Deanna said with another weary sigh. “Any idea what is up with the big guy?”

  “It is actually really cool. What you are hearing with your tiny adorable little human ears is ‘Ox’, but what he is saying is a complex multidimensional, multiphonic construct that only a trans-dimensional being like me could understand,” Amy said. “He was asking if, based on our evident expertise in bioengineering, we could understand him.”

  This AI was starting to irritate me. She was far too cheerful and far too good at her job. It was a terrible combination.

  Deanna told us, “We’ll do your standard devil's deal. We’ll do these two things for you and in the future, at a time of our choosing, we get three favors of our own. They have the potential to be absolutely terrible. Don’t try to bargain, you have no leverage.”

  Well, we had the thing with Mastermind, but given the threats against blackmailers and the clear ability to carry them out, I thought it best not to push it. Even though I hated adding nonspecific obligations to the books.

  “They have what we need, and we don’t have any better way to get it. We’re up against a time crunch,” Jules said.

  There was an advantage to taking their offer, if a bit of a backwards one. Mastermind was a big threat to us. It was his threats making us seek power like we were.

  Unsatisfied obligations to Emmatech might actually increase our odds of staying alive.

  “Done,” I said.

  “If your virus will follow me and upload themselves into data tap one one seven alpha epsilon three, that would be fantastic. And Ox?” Amy said.