by D L Young
“But I’ve got some conditions,” Maddox told Gideon. Above their heads the watery entrance to the cave sloshed.
“Of course you do,” Gideon said. “So tell me.”
“Drop the charges against those kids.”
“Oh, Christ, please. What are you trying to do, play the hero?”
“I’m not joking. You let them walk, I’ll come in.”
Gideon’s eyes narrowed and he scratched his chin. Making a show of considering it.
“I’d actually love to,” he finally said, “but…”
“But what?”
“Two of them signed confessions an hour ago. You know how these things work. One or two crack, the rest fall like dominoes. I can’t cut them loose now. Not exactly the best way to run an investigation, letting the suspects walk right after they confess.”
Maddox sighed. He’d known they weren’t going to hold out forever, known a confession would come sooner or later. Still, the news hit him like a sucker punch. Those kids came from the City’s roughest, poorest levels. From the Floor. They had to know they were being set up, had to know a false confession would all but seal their fate. They would have held out as long as they could stand it. What it must have taken to break them, he couldn’t imagine.
The lobby of the precinct building was noisy and crowded. Morning shift arriving, graveyard shift leaving, the flows converging like rivers, flooding the high-ceilinged lobby with eddies of slow-shuffling bodies. Maddox maneuvered his way through, keenly aware of the specs on nearly every face, of the lobby’s wall-mounted cams and weapon detection systems. He could almost feel the constant barrage of near-proximity scans, painting his face and body. He moved through the crowd, noting the location of the emergency exit door in case he needed to make a break for it.
He waited for something to happen, but nothing did. No flashing lights. No blaring sirens. No indication his cover was blown. He let out the breath he’d been holding.
Damn. The thing really did work. He was the fabled wolf in sheep’s clothing, stalking through the unsuspecting herd.
Still, he couldn’t let himself feel too relieved, or worse, overconfident. There was a long way to go, he reminded himself, and from here on things would only get trickier and more dangerous.
The holding cells were in an isolated part of the building, and the connecting corridor was on the fifth floor. An arrow appeared in the air over the heads of the crowd, a digital illusion superimposed on his lens, showing him the way to the elevators. He followed it, knifing his way through the press of bodies until he reached the bay behind a half-wall at the back of the lobby. Over each of the six doors was an old-school dial indicator. Needles moved left to right and right to left as the cars traveled up and down the building’s thirty floors. The doors in front of Maddox opened with a ding and the car disgorged a dozen people. Maddox joined a dozen others who took their place, squeezing shoulder to shoulder for the upward ride. On the way he kept his back to the wall and avoided eye contact.
The floating arrow reappeared when Maddox exited on the fifth floor. He paused, allowing a pair of chatty coworkers to pass by, then followed his digital guide down the corridor. Two turns later, he came to the narrow passageway that led to the holding area. At the end of the passageway two rhino-armored cops stood sentry, and a uniformed officer sat at a desk shoved against the wall, finger-swiping through a holo screen menu.
“You can throw out those confessions,” Maddox told Gideon. “It’s not like the press knows about it yet.”
“The press isn’t the problem,” the lieutenant said, “it’s my colleagues. News travels fast around here, and by now everybody knows those punks flipped. I can’t unring that bell, Blackburn. It’s too late.”
Around here, Maddox noted, latching onto the two words that gave away the lieutenant’s location. Gideon was plugged in from the precinct building. Maddox had expected it, planned for it. Still, the confirmation made him uneasy, knowing he and Gideon were physically in the same building at the same time.
“That’s your problem to work out,” Maddox said. “If you want me, you have to let them walk. Plain and simple.”
“Sign a full confession and I’ll think about it.”
Maddox snorted. “Sign a confession? I thought you were looking forward to beating one out of me like you did with those kids.”
“You wouldn’t believe how long they held out,” he said. “But I got them to come around eventually.” A satisfied smile stretched across his avatar’s face.
“Same old Gideon,” Maddox said. “Still as sick and twisted as when we used to play around in this game. I remember how much you loved messing with people in here, too.”
The smile turned nostalgic. “Yeah, we had a lot of fun, didn’t we?”
They had at that, Maddox recalled. At least they had at first. Early on, it had been all fun and games, and they’d played Mantis like other subscribers, grinding levels and taking on weekly challenges. Then when they’d discovered the cracks and flaws in the system, and their mutual talents at exploiting them, everything had changed. Maddox had reveled in his new gamer-gangster identity, creating invulnerable avatars and selling them on gamer feeds, or tweaking the game code to his advantage and defeating big bosses with nothing more than his bare virtual fists.
Gideon’s perversions of the game’s structure had gone in a decidedly less benign direction. He’d amuse himself by trapping avatars inside an inescapable box of his own making, then tease and laugh mercilessly at the connected gamer, who’d invariably go from pleading for release to screaming curses at him. He’d mess with players’ heads for hour after hour, reveling in their misery, enjoying their helpless frustration, trying different ways to break them down to tears or push them into fits of rage. Within weeks he had become Mantis’s most infamous griefer.
Maddox approached the table with the uniformed officer. Like a pair of stone columns blocking his path, the two rhino cops stood in front of the table, shoulder to shoulder, rifles in hand. Maddox was keenly aware of the distance between him and the rhinos. The moment he stepped within a three-meter radius, their gear would automatically hit him with a near-proximity scan. And despite his success with the cop outside, he felt a growing tension knot his neck muscles as he imagined his face being invisibly painted and run through their archives. Unlike outside, in here there was nowhere to run if his app failed or glitched out. In here, he couldn’t duck down an alleyway or lose himself in the crowd. Zero room for error.
Maddox patted the bag that hung next to his waist. “Cam upgrades for Block C,” he told the guards.
Beyond them, the officer at the table looked up, confusion on his face. Then he went back to his holo screen, flipping through a list. “I don’t see it on the schedule.”
Maddox shook his head and cursed under his breath.
The officer looked at him, narrowed his eyes. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Maddox said, playing annoyed. “If it’s not on the schedule, they don’t have to pay me overtime. Cheap highfloor sons of bitches.”
The officer glanced at one of the rhino guards, who didn’t move or say anything. Leaning back in his chair, the man nodded. “Tell me about it,” he said. “I put in fifty-five hours last week. Think I’m getting a penny extra for it?”
The guards pivoted, almost in unison, opening like a pair of doors to let him pass.
“Go ahead and get it done so you can get out of here,” the officer said.
“Thanks.” Maddox walked past the trio, the tension in his neck easing up a bit. They hadn’t bothered to check his bag.
As he followed the floating arrow past a series of office doors, the old familiar euphoria hit him. It was part giddiness, part adrenaline rush. The criminal high. The incomparable feeling of getting away with something, of grasping a piece of forbidden fruit, of going where you weren’t supposed to. It wasn’t quite the ethereal feeling he often experienced in VS, but it was close. He knew that for some, this feeling imparted
a false sense of invulnerability, making you feel like some untouchable, uncatchable badass. That was when most hustlers, drunk on their own delusions of greatness, screwed up and got caught. For Maddox, the feeling affected him differently, sharpening his focus, heightening his awareness. Like an artist deep into his work, his brush painting perfect strokes, or a boxer in the zone, landing every punch while easily dodging his opponent’s blows. Blackburn Maddox was in his element, in the zone, doing what he was born to do. A gangster to his marrow.
The feeling vanished abruptly, like it always did when something went wrong. A warning indicator began to blink in the lower part of his lens.
Every gig had its unknowns, its hidden surprises that revealed themselves at crucial moments, hitting you unexpectedly like a kick in the crotch. And this was a bad one.
Maddox frowned. A really bad one.
19 - Maddox Unmasked
The warning indicator kept flashing.
CLOAKING APP COMPROMISED. 90% INTEGRITY.
Maddox pulled up a diagnostic app, tried to understand what was happening, why the AI’s app was suddenly breaking down. He kept moving as the diagnostic went through its checks and routines. Even if it found something, he thought morbidly, there was no guarantee he’d be able to patch it. An AI had designed the freaking thing, after all.
Problem-free datajacking gigs. Did they even exist?
The holding cells were on the twentieth floor of the thirty-floor structure. When the elevator arrived, Maddox followed the green arrow around a corner, where he came upon a glass-framed vestibule. Three uniformed cops drank coffee inside, two of them standing, one behind a small desk. Beyond them, Maddox spied a long corridor stretching the length of the building. Iron-barred cells lined both sides of the corridor.
75% INTEGRITY.
Christ, the thing was going down fast. He had to stay cool, to work the job, step by step, as planned. Panic was the enemy. Panic made you rush. And when you rushed, you forgot things or took risks. Panic got you busted, got you shot.
He stepped inside the vestibule, patted his bag. “Cam upgrade for Block C.”
The standing cop closest to him paused in mid-sip. “What happened with Gonzalez?”
Daniel Gonzalez, Maddox guessed, recalling the name from the public personnel records he’d studied during his prep the night before. Security technician. One of a dozen with the same title who maintained, repaired, and upgraded the precinct’s security hardware.
“Got promoted,” Maddox said. “He’s the big boss man now.”
The cop nodded. Steam rose from his coffee cup. “Switching out cams below his pay grade, huh?”
Maddox shrugged. “Pretty much.”
70% INTEGRITY.
The cop at the desk tilted his head toward the door leading to the holding cells. “I’ll buzz you through.”
Maddox shot the man a worried look. “You still got those terrorists up here? Do I need an escort or anything?”
“They’re not down here,” the cop said.
Maddox felt his heart sink into his stomach. “No?”
“They took them up to interrogation ten minutes ago,” the cop said. He sipped his coffee distractedly. “Nobody down here but your everyday street thugs.”
“I have to take a leak,” Maddox said, setting down his bag.
The other standing cop gestured down the hallway Maddox had just come down. “Left side, halfway to the elevator,” he said.
“Be right back,” Maddox said, exiting the vestibule, his mind racing.
Inside the restroom he leaned over the basin, impatient for the diagnostics to finish. When they did moments later, he didn’t like what he saw.
As he’d suspected, it was a hardware problem. With his specs, specifically. His lenses were unable to keep up with the processing churn of the AI’s app. The app was a jet engine strapped to the rickety bicycle of his specs. Not an ideal match, in other words. A plane’s engine would sputter and fail if forced to operate at bicycle speeds, and pretty much the same thing was happening here. And there was nothing he could do to fix it.
His heart thudded in his chest. The interrogation rooms were on twenty-eight, eight floors up. That added time. Time it didn’t look like he had.
He looked at his reflection in the mirror. Cut and run, jacker. Make a beeline for the exit and hope you make it out the door before your cover was blown.
65% INTEGRITY.
Sixty-five and holding, he noted. There’d been no degradation in the last minute. So maybe that was it. Maybe the app had stabilized.
He cupped his hand under the faucet, swallowed a palmful of water, the dried his mouth with his sleeve. He would have killed for a smoke.
All right, then. Twenty-eighth floor.
***
When he reached the floor twenty-eight, disaster struck.
35% INTEGRITY.
Maddox read the number with a jolt. A thirty percent drop in the time it took to ride up on the elevator. This was bad. How long did he have before a CP scan could ID him? Minutes? Seconds?
He quickened his pace. How fast could he walk without attracting attention? Down the hallway, the arrow led him through a break room that smelled of coffee and body odor. Two rhino guards sat at a table, their helmets off, a half-empty box of donuts between them. He kept his eyes to the floor and didn’t say anything as he passed by.
25% INTEGRITY.
He felt the first stirrings of panic in his gut. A morbid sense of inevitability. He had no contingencies. No plan B or C or D. On some gigs fate smiled on you. On others it gave you the middle finger. Right now it was the finger.
Resisting a strong urge to break into a run, he hurried around a corner. A clerk sat at a desk in front of the gate leading to the interrogation suites. A holo hovered above the desktop, displaying a soccer game. Portuguese announcers babbled, their voices growing more excited as a player charged forward with the ball into open space. The clerk leaned closer to the image, showing Maddox his palm.
“One second,” the clerk said without looking away from the game, then muttered go, go, go under his breath.
10% INTEGRITY.
A cold sweat broke out under Maddox’s arms. He spied the holstered pistol on the clerk’s hip.
5% INTEGRITY.
A goal was scored. The crowd erupted, the announcer cried gol, gol, go-go goooool.
As the clerk pumped his fist in celebration, Maddox reached down and popped open the holster. Distracted by the game, the clerk failed to react in time as Maddox yanked the pistol free.
“What the—” was all the man could say before Maddox struck his head with a sharp blow from the gun’s metal grip. The clerk winced and made an animal groan, then his body went limp as he slid from the chair to the floor, unconscious.
CLOAKING APP DISABLED. CLOAKING APP DISABLED.
An alarm suddenly blared, a deafening wail filling the corridor. For an instant Maddox wondered what had triggered it. Maybe a CP scan from an unseen wall device had IDed his now-unmasked face. Or maybe someone had seen him on a security cam knocking out the clerk. The thought was a fleeting one, forced out of his head by images of cops sprinting up and down the stairways, coming after him.
Gideon’s menacing stare melted into confusion. His avatar moved its eyes away from Maddox, the gaze shifting down and to one side as he appeared to check another feed. Maddox didn’t have to guess at what the lieutenant saw, at what the man would piece together in the next second.
The lieutenant’s gaze snapped back to his old rival.
“On my turf,” he muttered, then smiled devilishly. “You cheeky fucking bastard. That’s one ballsy move, I’ll give you that. See you in a minute.”
Gideon’s avatar winked out, leaving Maddox alone in the cave. He looked up at the cave’s entrance, the dappled sunlight dancing in the rippling water. He took a last long draw on his cigarette, then dropped it to the sandy floor.
End game. He gestured up a comms interface and made the call.
Beatrice answered. “Let’s go,” he told her.
20 - View from the Twenty-Eighth Floor
Keys. Old-school metal keys with jagged teeth like tiny alligators. Maddox could hardly believe it as he grabbed the large ring lying on the clerk’s desk. There had to be a couple dozen of them.
He snatched them up, looked at them like they were some kind of puzzle. Who the hell used keys anymore?
With his free hand, he seized the unconscious clerk by the wrist and heaved him up enough to pass the man’s palm over the door control. The door to the interrogation suites opened, and Maddox let go of the clerk, who dropped heavily back to the floor.
The building-wide alarm blaring, Maddox rushed into the corridor lined with two dozen doors. Every goddamn one of them had a key lock. Fate’s middle finger, right in his face.
He fumbled with the keys, saw they were numbered to match the locks. A tiny victory. He unlocked the first door. Empty room. Second door, same thing.
Third door, Tommy.
The kid sat on the floor, his back to the wall, knees drawn up to his chest. He looked at Maddox, confused. His face was red and puffy, one eye blackened.
“Come on, kid,” Maddox shouted over the screaming klaxon, “we’re getting out of here.”
Suddenly energized, Tommy sprang to his feet as if yanked by an invisible string. “Fuck yeah, bruh, let’s get the f—”
The explosion from the end of the corridor shoved Maddox forward, knocking him into the kid. The two tangled and tumbled, the force of the blast sending them across the floor.
All sound disappeared under a sharp ringing in Maddox’s ears. Woozy, he stood, placing a hand against the wall to steady himself. Amazingly, his specs hadn’t come off. The kid was saying something, his beaten face twisted in panic, but Maddox couldn’t hear a word over the ringing. Beyond the doorway, chunks of concrete debris littered the corridor. A cloud of white smoke slowly billowed past.
