by Toby Weston
The kidnap was a crime committed on the high seas outside the jurisdiction of any government. Insurance had already paid for the lost tuna and, as far as they were concerned, the incident was over. It had been a similar story in the morning; he had hoped the Sultan of Kuala Lumpur might want to assist, just for the publicity, maybe putting a SpecOps team on standby for an exciting, telegenic hostage rescue, but it seemed the PR capital from a bunch of orphan whores was not significant enough to justify the expense. Chris was on his own. Although they had been helpful so far, he couldn’t count on the two kids or their gaming club; this was the real world, not MinxyMouse!
***
The room was pitch dark and stank of diesel and faeces. Stella could tell by the way the sobbing echoed that they were in a small space. The air was hot, but the walls were cold. Water vapour was permanently condensing onto them and running down to join the filthy slop she found herself sitting in. Raw, welded metal seams ran down the walls and across the floor, adding to the general discomfort. The only positive point she could think of after a prolonged search for a bright side was that it was so filthy and cramped that it was unlikely there would be any raping in the girls’ immediate future.
She must have slept because she woke. The door was being opened and a flickering blue light highlighted its elliptical edges before flooding into the cell. The other girls were waking and cringing away from this change in their circumstance. The sobbing started again. Stella realised that one of the voices was her own and immediately stopped the pathetic mewling.
They were ushered out of the two-by-two metre cell and up a ladder towards a blinding light, which turned out to be the afternoon sunlight diffusing through an overcast sky. Stella was disorientated. She remembered being led down into the belly of a traditional Çin junk before being locked into the cell; but now, she had climbed back up the same steps and was standing on a convex deck floating only a few centimetres above the waves. It appeared that most of the boat was lurking below the surface like an iceberg.
A rusty but sleek modern vessel was moored alongside, and it was from a hose attached to this new arrival that a sudden jet of frigid water erupted, blasting into the knot of cringing girls. Stella expected jeers and leers, but the crew was preoccupied with transferring an endless succession of sleek, partially frozen tuna from a hatch at the front of the sunken vessel to the new ship and seemed too busy to be interested in the girls.
Stella’s mind took the disinterest as a further positive component term in the complex rape likelihood equation that her mind was running. They were unceremoniously hosed down, and then guns were waved, indicating they should cross a wooden plank and join the frozen tuna on the new vessel.
Across the plank, the atmosphere changed. The new crew looked Hispanic, rather than Çin, and very unsavoury. There was also significantly more leering, which was not a good sign. The girls were ushered aft by a big man with an eyepatch and scarred face, to a cabin with two bunk beds and a small en-suite toilet and shower.
The door shut with a clank. Stella and the others were too listless to confirm it had been locked. Slumped down onto the floor, or sitting on the edges of the bed, a thin sobbing started again. Nobody seemed able to talk. Stella had taken a perch on the end of the bottom bunk and, after an indeterminate period of staring out of the porthole, she saw the submarine drift away and sink even lower into the water, until only the tip of its tower projected above the waves.
That night, the door flew open and three girls were dragged out. Later, faint cries muffled by heavy metal bulkheads and a distant rhythmic percussion confirmed Stella’s worst fears. This time, she didn’t try to stop herself as she became part of the choir of desperate sobbing that, once more, spread around their little room.
Chapter 7 – BugNet
Water slashed from the sky, drilling against the glass skins of skyscrapers packed so densely that they jutted from the earth like the bristles on a brush. The water slid in sheets across slanting surfaces. As it neared the ground, it splashed off neon signs, throwing out garish halos that hung in the misty spray. At street level, it washed the grime off bamboo shelters. On the tarpaulin roofs of street stalls, it gathered in stretched pools that hung like huge pendulous breasts. The rain-washed debris, collected from the city, along streets and gutters and into the labyrinth of drains below.
Her little mind knew it was a good time to forage in the newly deposited flotsam, but there was another reason she waited here. Long ago, while she lay, her eyes newly opened, her mother had brought food. Although small and hard, impossible to chew and difficult to swallow, it was delicious. Something in its taste and smell made the tiny grub of a rat she had been, persevere. Finally, she had managed to gulp it down. Now, standing slightly out of the torrent that crashed through the grating above, with her whiskers twitching in anticipation, she felt a nagging compulsion to find more.
She waited. She knew food would come soon; she could taste it in the water. She waited with two of her sisters and a stranger from another litter. They all felt the same urge. The knowledge of imminent food was becoming more intense, stronger, nearer, when suddenly the smell she remembered from long ago was all around her. One of her sisters darted forward, disappearing into the wall of water; lost for a few seconds, she came back holding something small and hard in her mouth and immediately ran off.
Her own sharp eyes focused on a second dot in the riot of water, and she leapt into the cataract to retrieve it. Disappointment; her teeth bit into spongy nicotine-soaked paper, and she let the stub wash out of her mouth. But now, in the water, she could taste it near. Diving to the bottom, she nosed around on the slick concrete. A small collection of debris was gathered together by the swirling currents, and, in the middle, a small ball surrounded by an intoxicating taste.
Seconds later, she was out of the water and dashing back along the tunnel to where her own babies waited, wriggling against each other in the dark. She shivered, shaking the water off her fur before squeezing through into the crack where she had made her nest. She dropped the capsule and nudged what she had already decided was the strongest of her offspring towards it. She watched and mewed, encouraging the little mite as its misplaced suckle reflex fixed the object in its toothless mouth. It tried to suck on the capsule, but seemed to find it rough and unpleasant. The mother patiently nudged it back to its mouth and, after several failed attempts, a random push rotated the black lozenge. On the next attempt, the tiny scales on its surface caught in the soft tissue of the little rat’s mouth. The capsule was big and difficult to swallow, but tasted good. After nearly exhausting itself gulping down the food, the little creature nudged around blindly, looking for its mother, but she had already gone compulsively back to the drain and the promise of more beads.
Over the next few days, the mucus shell slowly dissolved in the juices of the baby’s stomach, revealing glass barbs that lodged in the epithelial lining of the baby’s intestine. It held it fast and, soon, the strange little glass ball began to ooze a haze of enzymes and hormones. These biological urgings tricked its host’s body into encysting it and drawing it through the stomach lining. As months passed, the little baby grew into an inquisitive young rodent. The thing in its belly called forth blood vessels to encircle it and sent out fibrous ganglia into the young rat’s spine. Through these new nerves, it began sending signals, which the developing brain learnt to interpret. The stimuli hijacking its nervous system was soon accepted as sensory input, and it would eventually recognise the foreign desires and intentions as its own.
‘Danger near; movement behind wall; enemy approaching’
***
Conflict is the natural state of man and nature. Every creature fighting against all others for its right to live and breed. Nature is war; all against all.
Only the tight bonds of kin align individuals into groups: clans, packs or nests.
The development of complex human societies compartmentalised this violence. Specialised warrior castes and standing ar
mies came to fight the battles. War was limited. Murder and hardship may follow defeat, but for most of written history, war would leave the agrarian life of the peasants untouched.
Industrialisation bought a third development, the concept of “Total War”. An entire country or empire mobilised and focused on the single goal of obliterating the enemy. Nothing was sacred from Total War. No one was safe from firebombs or atomic destruction.
By the end of the twentieth century, global webs of interdependencies had made these grand, world-spanning conflagrations inefficient. The country your hard-line generals were urging you to nuke was probably the ancestral home of a significant percentage of your citizens, or your prime supplier of labour, oil, or any of the hundreds of other strategically critical resources within the Gordian knot of global trade.
Fourth-generation warfare was about asymmetry: partisans, terrorists, and plausibly deniable special operators.
By the third decade of the twenty-first century, the fifth generation of warfare had arrived. No dense treatise was required to unravel its principles; it was simply that the majority of combatants were now non-human.
***
Zaki had uploaded the DNA swept from the abandoned pirate boat. Chris had already dispatched it to the Cartel botnets, and had bid as much as he could afford for the location of the nameless individuals the DNA encoded. Yet, the boys knew that Russ factory ships, stolen submarines, and large-scale tuna rustling painted a picture with Cartel prints all over it and that, however distributed and chaotic, the Cartel was hardly likely to deliver intel on its own operations.
Fortunately, the Cartel was only one of the leviathans sliding beneath the surface of the dark-net sea. The Clans were powerful, too. Fragments of their open source code, riddled with backdoor vulnerabilities, were scattered like buckshot through the world’s computer networks.
Few people knew the reach of the Mesh or suspected its weakly omnipotent capabilities. Less were aware that huge orders for cryptic hardware were regularly placed at medical chip fabricators across the globe. Coin changed hands, records were modified. Factories, built to fabricate DNA-sequencing chips, or cognitive prosthetics, spent long, undocumented maintenance cycles turning out endless batches of small glass beads stuffed with obscure configurations of radios and processors. Secrecy surrounding these unusual, ingestible neuro-interface chips was maintained with threats, favours, or straight up bribery. Even at the top of the Clans, there was heated speculation; somebody must be funding the massive ongoing expense needed to research, design and manufacture each new design iteration…
Thousands of the small glass beads ended up flushed down toilets, scattered into drains, or cast onto rubbish tips every day. Every bead eaten by a compatible host added another nervous system to the BugNet.
The newest versions could sniff traces of DNA from the contents of a host’s stomach, snap faces from the traffic passing through its optic nerves, or detect hundreds of compounds by monitoring the host animal’s olfactory lobes. The information was shared across the BugNet, wirelessly bouncing between cybernetically enhanced vermin, until it was picked up by a MeshNode.
Typical to the hacker win-win ethic, the relationship was symbiotic; the selective advantage of being able to sense the beating of a cat’s heart through a brick wall, or ‘smell’ which wires carried power, or squeak a warning that a similarly endowed nest mate hundreds of metres away could hear, ensured there was an ever-growing number of hosts who actively sought the helpful little glass beads. It also didn’t hurt that they tasted delicious.
Most end users would never know where their sought-after intelligence came from, but the Kinfolk’s ability to find a missing body buried under tons of rotting fish on a dump, or a fugitive hiding in a filthy hut in an off-grid slum, gave them an almost supernatural reputation in the underworld.
To the brothers, growing up physically isolated from eligible female representation, Stella had always been more than a node in the Clan’s web of useful contacts. Since their first incorporeal meeting, she had been a fascination to both adolescent boys.
When–like now–Zaki closed his eyes, he could see hers. Vast and sorrowful; pulling at his insides, like a swallowed hook pulling him down into their deep, dark pools.
They could also transform within a blink into bright exclamation points for her dazzling, incapacitating, smile–filling his form with transcendent light, lifting his soul above the clouds...
He knew she preferred Segi. He wasn’t surprised. He had come to accept it. Anyway, she made Zaki uncomfortable to the point that he behaved like a dick around her most of the time. It didn’t matter. It only mattered that they found her.
He blinked and spammed another message to the SOS thread on the Silicium forums. He was trying to wheedle altruism from benevolent SuperUsers, persuading them to donate identity and reputation to Zaki’s BugNet search.
***
Pedro took the beer from the tray, while eyeing the ass of their curvaceous waitress. He winked across the table to another of his crew, almost the stereotypical pirate; a huge man with a scar, eyepatch, tied-back hair and, beneath the table, a vicious knife strapped to his ankle. They were vaguely drunk. They had stopped here, in this desperately poor part of New Guinea, to pick up the last of the new meat before setting out for the West Coast of the US, where young Asian flesh pulled in punters bored with a staple diet of small-town runaway white trash.
The new girls waited, tied together with hemp rope, in a small shack half a dozen metres away from where Pedro and his two shipmates were sitting, drinking their beers. Out over the bamboo rail, two hundred metres offshore, the lights of his boat glittered reassuringly. They had cruised for a week from the last pickup and would lie up for a few more days, sorting out fuel and food for the next, much longer, leg of their journey.
Once they had the new cargo safely locked in with the previous batch, Pedro’s unsavoury band would settle in for an evening of heavy drinking, followed by a bit of recreational raping.
The door banged open and a stocky, dark-skinned tribal came barrelling in. He wore a tattered pair of tourist’s safari shorts and a flowery shirt, but his face was symmetrically scarred in a very un-tourist-like way. A bone pierced his nose. In his hand, a short axe hung from loosely clenched fingers. His eyes darted across the room, skipping from table to table, ignoring farmers and thugs, but stopping on Pedro. A look of livid recognition crossing his face, the newcomer barged past protesting customers and headed directly for the pirates.
He was a powerful man, but Pedro didn’t feel threatened. There were three of them, and the man didn’t seem armed with anything that would trump the Uzi hanging from a strap under Pedro’s stained canvas jacket. The man reached them and, while they were still calmly getting to their feet, he grabbed the rim of their table and violently hurled it towards them. Glasses and bottles, sent flying as the table was assaulted, rained down on the startled pirates. They had to jump back to avoid debris and were now pressed against the hut’s wall. Usually a bar fight would take a while to warm up, leaving plenty of time to humiliate and slowly kill whoever had been stupid enough to try them, but this time the ferocity of the attack had caught them by surprise.
Fragments of broken glass had showered Pedro’s face. He tasted blood as it dripped down over his lip from a deep cut in the side of his nose. Even while the glass was tinkling onto the wooden floor, Pedro was drawing his machine pistol. Before any follow-up attack could be launched, and with the gun still on the upswing, he opened up with an appalling flaming roar. Bullets walked up the man’s chest, from left thigh to right shoulder, smashing him back. Some lodged in the floor or smashed glasses on the tables behind the black-skinned local.
Miraculously, nobody else was hit. The sounds of broken glass and spent shells clattering to the floor faded, leaving the room in a stunned silence. The unused axe slid impotently from between relaxing fingers.
The three pirates looked around menacingly, but the man seemed to have been
alone; nobody showed any interest in helping him as he lay, bubbling and gasping, on the floor. Pedro put his hand to his own face, then took out a nasty serrated blade from its sheath in the small of his back. He inspected the damage to his nose in its reflection and, satisfied it was nothing serious, grinned at his shipmates.
“We fight, and then we fuck! Let me look at this pig. I wish to recognise his daughter later!”
The two returned his massive roar of laughter. Cold eyes looked to the overturned chairs and broken bottles and then towards a neighbouring table. The panicked group at the unaffected table quickly cleared away and generously offered their seats. Soon, fresh beers had arrived. The body was dragged out and dumped onto the sand for the dogs or the tide.
Around midnight they left, dragging the human chain of whimpering cargo with them. None of the locals raised a finger as they ferried them out to their boat floating in the bay.
Feeling sick, despite years of numbness, the owner watched the boat’s lights recede. He told the waitress to go home, then pulled a full bottle of rum from under the bar and sat with a couple of the regulars to drink thought away.
In silence they drank. At 4 am, the last of the customers staggered out and down the rough-hewn wooden steps. Already barely conscious, the owner let his head fall onto the bar and passed out. The waitress, who was also the maid, accountant, and cook, was long gone. There was nobody to sweep up the fallen nuts and broken glass.
