by D L Young
As much as he loathed the idea of being indebted to an AI—for a second time in his life—under the circumstances he didn’t see a lot of options. Like it or not, he needed this machine’s help.
“Fine,” he said.
“Excellent,” the entity replied, perhaps a bit too happily.
“So what is it you have for me?” he asked. “Keys to their jail cells?”
The AI’s avatar grinned. “That’s actually not a bad guess, my dear boy.”
17 - Fuse Switch
“I don’t like it, Blackburn,” Lora said. She sat on the sofa across from him, the deck and trode set he’d just borrowed on the cushion next to her.
He hadn’t given her any details she could divulge to the cops, should they come calling. Still, she’d surmised pretty quickly that the AI, the one to whom she was connected, had agreed to help. She’d always been adept at reading him. Apparently the brain jacks hadn’t robbed her of this particular talent.
“I don’t like it either,” he said truthfully. The plan he and the AI had concocted was a risky one. Risky for him, he reminded himself. The AI had zero skin in the game. She wouldn’t be along for the ride. She’d merely provided the tech, which he had serious doubts about.
He figured his odds of pulling it off were around ten-to-one, and that was probably optimistic. If it ended up working, it would be only because of the sheer audacity of the maneuver, the seeming impossibility of it. Gideon and the police would never expect what was coming. Wouldn’t even be capable of imagining the scenario. Until a few minutes ago, Maddox couldn’t have either.
“It’s not like I have a lot of options,” he added.
Her cup and saucer sat on the table, the tea long gone cold. A furrow of worry appeared between her eyebrows. “I really don’t like her being involved.”
He felt a twinge of the old pain, a bruise he’d nearly forgotten was there, suddenly jabbed with a finger. Lora’s concern for her beloved AI far outweighed whatever worry she had for him. It shouldn’t have bothered him after all this time, but there it was. Old wounds.
“She’s not involved,” he said. Then pointedly: “I’ll be fine, thanks for your concern.”
She caught the sarcasm and said, “I’m worried about you, too, of course, but our movement…it’s bigger than a handful of people’s problems. It’s important.”
The movement. Her movement. It was like he’d been transported back in time, back to one of the arguments that had led to their estrangement. The movement was important, nothing short of a revolution. The one with whom she was connected had helped so many attain happiness, fulfillment, and couldn’t he understand that? And blah blah blah.
“The general public’s not ready—”
“Not ready to take the next step in human evolution,” he interrupted. “I know, I know. I don’t need to hear your machine god’s talking points. I heard them a thousand times, remember?”
Maddox took a breath, composed himself. “I guess I ought to keep my mouth shut. I’m sure she’s watching me right now, listening to every word I say through your eyes and ears.”
Lora shook her head. “She’s not here. I’ve told you so many times it doesn’t work like that. She only comes when called, only sees what I want her to see. She doesn’t violate my free will. It would go against her principles.”
Maddox smoked. He wasn’t going to argue, wasn’t going to relive the past. There was no point. He’d gone down that road many times, and he knew it was a dead end. Lora was a true believer, and you couldn’t reason with a true believer. He peered into her face, searching for a clue. Was the entity there, lurking behind her eyes? He couldn’t be sure.
“Like I said, she’s not involved. All she did was give me something, that’s it. A tool I can use.”
Lora didn’t seem convinced, but she didn’t take it any further. “If she’s willing to help you,” she sighed, “then I suppose it’s the right thing to do.”
He removed a small archive from his pocket. Lora’s gaze dropped to the wafer-thin square in his hand. “Is that what she gave you?”
He shook his head. “No, this is something I put together. If I get in trouble, I might need you to slot it.”
She frowned at the archive like it was a piece of moldy bread. “Slot it? Did you discuss this with her?”
“Of course I didn’t. She wouldn’t want you getting involved.”
“Maybe I don’t want me getting involved either,” she said.
He stared at her without speaking, letting a long, quiet moment drag on. “What does it do?” she finally asked.
“It’s a shielded kickoff routine.”
“And what exactly does it kick off?”
“A cloned avatar, a very good one. If things get tight and I need to throw the police off my trail, this should do the trick. For a few seconds, anyway, before they figure out it’s a clone.”
“So it’s a distraction.”
“Basically,” he said. “It’s a program that’s a passable replica of my data signature. It’s sitting dormant right now, near a storage hub where the Anarchy Boyz’ personal histories are backed up. If they see it there, they’ll think I’m looking for alibi evidence and they’ll come running.” He tapped the archive with his fingertip. “And this is the trigger that’ll boot up the clone. Think of it as a fuse switch.”
“Like to a bomb?” She lifted an eyebrow. “Not the best analogy under the circumstances, Blackburn.”
He managed a chuckle. “All you have to do,” he went on, “is turn on your deck and slot this behind your ear. It’ll run the routine automatically.”
“Why can’t you trigger it?”
“Because when I go where I’m going, I need to have as thin a data signature as possible. Which means the fewer apps I have loaded, the better. Carrying this thing around with me would be like trying to sneak into someone’s house with bells tied around my ankles. Understand?”
Her brow furrowed. “So what if they tag me?”
“They won’t. The trigger looks like a call made from Long Island, on a tourist’s rented specs. It’s a needle in a haystack of everyday calls. It won’t raise any red flags.”
“I don’t know, Blackburn,” she said slowly, her mouth twisting the way it always did when she wrestled with uncertainty.
“It’s safe,” he assured her. “I promise. And I might not even need you to use it.”
She shifted her gaze from the archive to his face, held it there for a moment. “All right,” she said, taking it from his hand. “But how will I know when to slot it? Or even if I need to?”
“I’ll set off the fire alarm in your building.”
“That’s subtle.”
“I know,” he said, shrugging. “But I can’t risk calling your specs. The fire alarm’s the easiest way to reach out anonymously. Things are going to be moving pretty fast.”
He told her it would go down tomorrow morning, between eight and nine. He handed her the archive. “Make sure you’re ready to slot this if you hear the fire alarm.”
She looked down at the small device in her palm. “And what if it doesn’t go off? How will I know what happened to you?”
How would she know if he’d been arrested or shot, in other words. This time the worry in her voice wasn’t directed toward herself or her precious AI. She was concerned for him. He heard it as much as he felt it. Maybe the old Lora wasn’t completely gone after all.
“That’s easy,” he answered. “If you don’t see me on the news feeds, you’ll know I’m okay.”
***
“I don’t like it, salaryman,” Beatrice said, echoing the exact words his ex had uttered an hour earlier. And with pretty much the same skepticism. Some people had yes-men. He had no-women.
Beatrice stood at the window of her highfloor rental, her back to him and arms crossed, staring out at the hover traffic.
“I don’t like it either,” Maddox said, repeating the same response he’d given Lora. “But you have to admit, they
won’t be expecting something like this.”
She laughed without humor. “That doesn’t mean it’s a good plan.”
Beatrice mulled over the details he’d laid out for her moments earlier. He watched her as she gazed out from the condo, deep in thought. She was lean and muscled and augmented. Eye implants, neurochem enhancers, adrenal gland boosters, to name three mods he knew about. There were undoubtedly more he didn’t know about. Just like there was much about her, Beatrice the person, he didn’t know.
But despite the unknowns, despite her insistence on calling him salaryman instead of his name, and despite her constant bitching about his smoking, he nevertheless found himself strangely fond of her. Had from the time they’d met, in fact. Odd that this thought would come to him now, of all times.
She turned and looked at him, her gaze steady. “You think you can pull this off?”
“If the tech she gave me works like she says it does, it’s possible.”
“Possible or likely?”
“The first one.” He shrugged. “But hey, if you’ve got a plan B or C up your sleeve, I’d be happy to hear it.”
Beatrice stared at him for a long moment, then let out a slow breath. “All right, salaryman, let’s give it a shot.”
Then she walked past him, pulling her shirt over her head and tossing it to the floor. As she passed through the bedroom doorway, naked from the waist up, she called back to him.
“This might be our only chance, you know. So come on.”
Maddox stared at the empty doorway, realizing after a few seconds that his mouth was hanging open. He closed it and followed after her, grinning like a kid who’d just spotted an ice cream stand.
Every gig had its unexpected moments, and most of the time unexpected was bad. Most of the time, but not all the time.
18 - Belly of the Beast
Condensation dripped from the walls of the cave at the bottom of the sea. Tiny rivulets twisting downward paths through dark, jagged lava rock. Maddox’s avatar stood and waited, bare feet in the soft sand of the cave’s floor. Above him, the impossible entryway sloshed gently. Sunlight filtered through the crystal blue water and warmed his face. He smiled inwardly, giving a nod of approval to his teenage self. He’d done a decent job, designing this place. It was still here, still undetected after all this time. And it felt as real as anywhere else in the game. He even felt a sticky dampness under his arms. It was little things like that that mattered. Attention to detail. Not a bad piece of work for a beginner.
He watched the entryway and waited, longing for a smoke as his thoughts turned again to the plan. If the tech actually worked—and he’d find that out soon enough—he had to keep Gideon talking as long as possible.
Maddox started as a creature poked its head through the entryway above him. A shark dropped through the opening, its body transforming to its human shape in mid-fall, then landing two-footed in the sand.
Gideon’s avatar straightened his back. “Good morning, Blackburn.”
Maddox emerged from the shadows of a narrow alley, stepping onto the walkway. Rush-hour ground traffic crept through the streets and hovers whined high overhead. A steady current of pedestrians flowed around him like water around a river rock. Towering holos advertised a new anime series, the latest Matushida luxury hover, and the soon-to-be-released Ulysses Crash action movie. Food kiosks steamed and sizzled, their proprietors hurriedly serving a steady press of customers. Morning in the City.
The police precinct building stood a block away.
He carried a small gear bag and wore the veil specs that concealed his identity from street cams. A minimized window at the bottom of his right lens displayed the game connection, the undersea cave with the Mantis logo superimposed over it. Stepping off the curb, he crossed the avenue. The columned front of the precinct building stood above street level, atop a short rise of limestone steps. Maddox paused as he reached them, pulling up the app the AI had given him. Breathing out, he fired it up.
A moment later, an icon blinked green. The AI’s app was up and running. All right, then, time to test it. He spotted a rhino-armored beat cop descending the steps. Still not quite believing what he was about to do, he approached the officer.
“Excuse me,” Maddox said, gesturing toward the building. “Do you know where I can pay my parking tickets?”
Holding his rifle across his torso, the cop regarded him from behind a closed, darkened helmet visor. Maddox waited for an answer, self-consciously aware of the cop’s autoscan invisibly painting his face.
There were two ways a face scan could ID you. The first and most common keyed on your specs’ serial number. By law, every pair of specs had a short-range beacon that broadcast its unique serial number, identifying the registered owner like a ground car’s license plate had in a previous era. Also by law, the beacon was always on and couldn’t be toggled off. The vast majority of cams and scanners you came across—on streets, in restaurants, in hotels and condo buildings and subway cars, pretty much everywhere—IDed you via your specs’ serial number. If you wanted your identity hidden, you could take your specs off, of course, but this was almost unthinkable to a populace who’d made the wearable tech a cybernetic extension of their flesh and blood self, an almost biological necessity like water or oxygen, as their forebears had done with cell phones. Nakedfaced citizens were also conspicuous, suspiciously so, nearly always inviting the close scrutiny of a police bumblebee drone.
A decent pair of veil specs could fool serial number detection by using a stolen ID or distorting the beacon’s signal just enough to fool the software into thinking it had glitched out or taken an incomplete scan. Veils—which earned you a felony rap if you got caught making, selling, or possessing them—worked well in most places, but against the second kind of ID tech—the lesser-used but far more precise kind only cops and maybe a few wealthy crime bosses had access to—they were all but useless. A close-proximity scan from an armored cop standing a meter in front of you didn’t bother with serial numbers. Instead it recorded a hyperdetailed map of your facial features and sampled your voice’s audio signature, instantly matching them up against a citizen data archive. CP scans were insanely accurate, upwards of ninety-nine percent. So accurate, in fact, they were used as often as DNA samples in court cases to condemn the guilty.
Maddox had never heard of anyone who’d managed to spoof a CP scan. But here he was, attempting to pull off that very trick.
He tried to keep his expression calm as the cop’s visor gave a barely visible flash-blink, the telltale of a close-proximity scan. The datajacker readied himself to make a run for the nearest alleyway if the cop made the slightest threatening move.
After a moment the cop’s mic clicked, and a sound that might have been a snorting laugh came out. “Hell, buddy, you work here and you don’t know where it is?”
Maddox blinked. Then he feigned embarrassment, grinning sheepishly and shrugging. “Yeah, I know. Sad, right?”
“Second floor,” the cop said. “Turn left out of the elevator. Just look for the line.”
Maddox thanked him and turned away. Amazing. Freaking amazing. It worked. It actually worked. The cop’s CP scan had IDed him as a City employee, just like the AI had said it would. It was like some magic spell, like he was wearing a completely different body.
“Wait a minute,” the cop blurted, laying a heavy gauntleted hand on Maddox’s shoulder.
Maddox winced, his confidence instantly collapsing. He slowly turned back to the rhino. The cop leaned close to him, then popped open his visor. A ruddy face with a broom mustache flashed Maddox a knowing smile. “Wanda’s the redhead with the big tits. Works behind the counter. Tell her Jackie says hi.”
“Sure, no problem,” Maddox said. He then turned away again, relief washing over him, and started up the steps.
“You going to say anything or just stand there and stare?” Gideon said.
“Sorry,” Maddox said, “glitchy connection.” He looked down at his virtual se
lf, shrugged critically, and said: “Piece of crap freeplay avatar.” Maddox was rusty at simultasking, the datajacking art of splitting his attention equally between the real and virtual worlds, of having two conversations at the same time, speaking through his meat sack’s mouth while subvocalizing through his avatar. If this was going to work, Gideon had to believe Maddox’s full attention was here in Mantis, in the undersea cave.
“Connection from where?” Gideon asked.
“Like I’d tell you that.”
Gideon laughed. “I guess you wouldn’t, right?” He gestured around the cave. “Smart move, asking me to come here, where I can’t trace you or freeze you. If we were in core, though…” He snapped his fingers, meaning that if they’d been in core-level vs, Maddox’s avatar—and his meat sack connected to it—would have already been frozen stiff and helpless.
“I was a bit surprised by your call, to be honest,” the lieutenant said, referring to the message Maddox had left him to meet here. “Figured you’d try to drop off the radar, not the other way around.”
“I’m ready to come in,” Maddox said.
“Are you now?” Gideon said, lifting an eyebrow.
At the top of the precinct building’s steps, a glass-paned revolving door slowly turned. A constant flow of people entered and exited. A lot of them cops. Far more than Maddox was comfortable being around. Some in full body armor, others in simple black uniforms with badges sewn onto the shirt. Thrown into the mix were lawyer types with expensive suits and briefcases, muttering through their specs, already busy with morning calls, and smartly dressed staff workers coming and going. Everyone had their specs on, and no one gave Maddox a second glance. He wondered if it would be the same inside. Wondered if, as soon as he stepped through the door, the AI’s tech would work the same way it had with the beat cop, or if he’d be greeted with flashing red lights, blaring klaxons, and drawn weapons.
Belly of the beast, he thought, then slipped into an open slot in the door and entered the building.
