The Blayze War

by D L Young

  “But she would,” he said quickly, edging forward in his chair. “We already talked about it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “We totally did,” Boaz assured her.

  Again Iris acted as if she was considering it. Boaz leaned forward, devouring her with his eyes. Christ, how badly did he want to watch his girlfriend screw another woman?

  Seven minutes to three. “And how do I know,” Iris said slowly, “you won’t be jealous?”

  “I won’t,” he blurted, suddenly hopeful. “I won’t, I won’t, I promise.”

  Iris looked at him skeptically. “But we’re coworkers. They always say you shouldn’t crap where you eat, you know.”

  “You’re going back to the day shift in a week, right?” he pointed out. “We’ll hardly see each other after that.”

  She pressed her lips into a tight line. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s not to know?”

  “It’s one thing to say another woman’s hot. That doesn’t mean she’ll do anything. You said she’s never done something like this before. So how do you know she won’t get cold feet?”

  “She won’t,” he insisted. “I know she won’t.”

  “Yeah, right.” Five minutes to three. “In your dirty little fantasies she won’t. Reality’s different.”

  He removed his specs from his shirt collar. “No, really. She wants to. Take a look at this.” He held out his lenses.

  She looked at the lenses dubiously. “At what?”

  “She wanted you to see some vids,” he said, smiling naughtily. “Of us. She said I could show you. In fact, she wanted me to show you.”

  Iris hesitantly reached for the specs, narrowing her eyes at him. “She really wants me to see her?”

  “She does,” he said, all but drooling, the pathetic loser. “She’s down for it, I’m telling you.”

  Iris turned the specs over in her hands. Three minutes to three.

  “Not here,” she said. “Not in the control room.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this is where I work,” she said. “Because it feels weird in here.”

  Boaz’s face dropped. Iris let him hang there on the brink of disappointment for a long moment. “The break room,” she said finally.

  “Sure,” Boaz said, visibly relieved. “Break room. Go ahead.”

  “No,” Iris said. “I want you to watch with me.”

  He glanced doubtfully up at the monitors. “But we’re not supposed to…” His voice trailed off.

  They weren’t supposed to leave the control room. She knew it as well as he did. It was company policy. Strict company policy. A minimum of two badged employees—and only certified data engineers—had to be in the control room at all times. The company’s datasphere had automated security in the form of intelligent sentries, secure razorwalls, and an array of the latest countermeasures, but human oversight and intervention were still vital to keeping things secure. Apps failed sometimes. False alarms happened. For all the advanced security a modern DS had, you still needed expert human eyes, ears, and problem-solving to manage the environment’s complexity. Some companies farmed out DS management to AI service providers, but BNO preferred the human touch. BNO was old-school.

  “I want you,” Iris repeated, slower this time, “to watch with me.” She fixed him with a fuck-me stare he wilted under so visibly, so completely that she almost felt sorry for him.

  “Okay,” he said, his face flushed. “But we can’t be gone more than five minutes.”

  As he rose from his chair and turned, Iris slid her finger across the surface of her workstation. A small gesture that went unnoticed by her coworker, it was the culmination of the longest con she’d ever been a part of.

  It had taken months getting to that gesture. Infiltrating the company, the first step, had been the hardest part. But she’d interviewed well and they’d hired her, and from one day to the next she’d become Dezmund’s plant in the operation, assuming the role of an entry-level employee. She’d eventually worked her way into the graveyard shift, where she had the access and opportunity to open a window into the DS, letting his crew slip in undetected. Months of acting, of pretending, of working the sex angle with Boaz so she could get him out of the control room for those critical handful of minutes. Boaz, as it turned out, had been the easiest part of the whole scam. Boaz was a sucker.

  And suckers got played.

  As they exited the control room, she donned her own specs and tapped a sequence on the frames, sending a tightly encrypted message.

  WINDOW’S OPEN.

  She checked the time. Two minutes to three, she noted with satisfaction. She’d told them the window would open around three o’clock, give or take a minute or two. Damn, she was good. Now all she had to do was watch some disgusting vids for five minutes, and then she’d walk out of the building and disappear into the City, leaving behind her short corporate career and an empty apartment rented under a false identity. And if the crew pulled off their end of the scam as well as she’d pulled off hers, in a few hours she’d be flush with cash.

  And Boaz, pitiful sex-crazed Boaz, who walked beside her on their way to the break room, grabbing a handful of her ass, would end up catching more hell than any employee in BNO’s history. He’d lose his job, and with his reputation shattered, he’d never find another job in data security.

  And that would be the icing on the cake.

  9 - Exit Strategy

  “There it is,” Dezmund said, pointing to a holo monitor floating above the suite’s dining table. The words WINDOW’S OPEN flashed white and large.

  “All right, people, ready up,” Maddox said. The crew scrambled into action, climbing onto their eggshell recliners and firing up their gear. Some had giddy smiles. Others had no expressions at all, stone-faced and all business. Docking arms clicked into position, all holding identical Yakashima decks, loaded with apps specially modded for the job. About half the young datajackers had personalized their gear, adding stickers and custom shells. Blayze had a large yellow smiley face on hers, identical to the one on her jacket.

  One by one, standby icons appeared above the decks. Maddox watched as everyone plugged in, and the standby icons blinked into connection symbols: a silhouetted head inside a green circle with waves emanating outward. Standbys took their places next to the recliners, one for each datajacker.

  “Don’t take your eyes off of them,” Maddox told the standbys. “You see the slightest twitch or if they sound like they’re in pain, you yank off those trodes. Don’t hesitate.”

  He turned to Dezmund. “Clock’s ticking. Let’s go.”

  Dezmund blew out a long breath and nodded. “Let’s do it.” Maddox had known him since the two were teenagers, and it was the first time he’d seen Dezmund this nervous. He’d almost bought into the idea that the man’s vanity and ego were made of impenetrable stuff. And though Maddox had never cared for the man’s showy self-absorption, right at that moment would have preferred the brash, confident version of Dezmund to this unsettled one. Self-doubt had a way of infecting a crew. A datasphere was full of dangers, even lethal ones, that could come out of nowhere at any time. If you let anxiety get the best of you, you were prone to hesitate or second-guess yourself, either of which could be disastrous. Virtual space was not a place for the timid or indecisive.

  Maddox climbed into his recliner, pushing the negative thoughts from his mind, refusing to let his companion’s worry become his own. Maddox wasn’t superstitious by nature, but every datajacker knew it was bad luck to plug in if you lacked the confidence required to pull off the job. The Doubter’s Curse, they called it. He reminded himself Dezmund didn’t have a crucial role in the operation. He was there to help Maddox supervise, to keep an eye on things. They would be the two generals watching their troops from afar. So if Dezmund needed to sweat bullets to get him through the next ten minutes, so be it.

  He glanced over at Blayze, lying on her recliner, already plugged in and gesturing.
r />   Kind of makes you wonder why they need you, doesn’t it?

  Rooney’s words came back to him. As did the inkling about the gig, the notion something wasn’t right. Nerves, he told himself. He always had nerves going in, even on small, uncomplicated jobs.

  Never do a job unless you have more than one way out, boyo. You remember that, don’t you?

  Of course I do, Roon. That’s one I never forget.

  Gesturing his deck to life, Maddox’s pulse quickened as he placed the trodeband around his head. His standby, a kid named Jonnie, took his position next to the recliner. As Maddox went to plug in, the kid grabbed his wrist, halting him in midgesture.

  “Your smoke,” the kid said.

  Maddox looked at the cigarette still in his hand. Jesus, he’d forgotten it was there. The kid held out an ashtray, and Maddox took a long last drag, then rubbed it out. “Thanks.”

  He lay back and gestured above his deck, and the suite blinked away.

  ***

  “You forgot your cigarette, seriously?” Dezmund needled him as soon as Maddox entered virtual space.

  “Can we focus on the job, please?”

  “I don’t know, can we?”

  “All right, all right, give me a break.” Maddox said, unbothered by the taunt. “Got a lot on my mind at the moment.” Good-natured takedowns, especially in stressful situations, were core to datajacking culture. His partner’s disembodied voice, Maddox was relieved to hear, sounded free of the anxiety visible on the man’s face moments before.

  The two hovered in blank, unstructured space at their prearranged location on the public grid, far from BNO Commerz’s datasphere. A few hundred grid clicks away, the company’s DS was still massive despite the distance, not unlike the City’s nighttime profile when viewed from inland New Jersey. Maddox had never seen such a large, complex cluster of data partitions. BNO’s core business was banking, but its holding company owned an immense, diversified portfolio of enterprises. The company employed some two hundred thousand around the world, and its countless commercial arms touched nearly every industry. Agribusiness, genomics, construction, aerospace, asteroid mining. Whatever business you could name, more than likely BNO had a financial interest there.

  A hundred grid clicks ahead of them, six avatar icons floated in two rows of three, speeding toward the datasphere. Maddox zoomed in, making out Blayze’s smiley face avatar and Tommy’s skull and crossbones. Moments later they reached the DS’s outermost perimeter—the legal boundary separating public virtual space and the company’s private DS, a felony-breaking point of no return datajackers referred to as “the fence.”

  “Calling up the CM,” Dezmund said.

  The command module app visualized around Maddox and Dezmund, flying into place like large tiles forming a three-sided wall around them. An array of virtual monitors and data feeds, the CM tracked the job’s progress and vital statistics in real time. There were six HUDs, each labeled with a datajacker’s handle, allowing Maddox and Dezmund to watch any of the crew’s POV and activity feed. Biometrics displayed for each jacker, supplied by sensors in the recliners: pulse rate, brain wave activity, and breaths per minute. The CM also showed data streams from scanner bots they’d placed outside the DS’s perimeter days earlier. While the bots were too far away to track intelligent sentry routes or take samples of the razorwalls protecting data partitions, they were close enough to monitor overall DS activity levels—data traffic, application utility, user counts, and so on—by detecting small, almost imperceptible variations in the DS’s visual signature. If Maddox and Dezmund were the generals in the command bunker, then the bots were their aerial reconnaissance, feeding them pictures of the battlefield.

  The CM and the scanner bots, like Maddox and Dezmund and the rest of the crew, were concealed by cloaking apps, making the entire operation invisible to anyone except their own team, each of whom shared the same masking encryption. Had anyone plugged into the public grid where Maddox and Dezmund had set up their command module, they wouldn’t have seen or detected anything but empty space.

  Inside the DS, though, things would be different. Even with the best cloak, detection was inevitably a matter of time, mainly because of passive countermeasures. PCs permeated most dataspheres like airborne toxins, eating away at any unapproved tech. Originally created to keep a DS free of accidentally introduced viruses, their application as an anti-datajacker measure had soon become widespread. Passive countermeasures were found to be especially effective at dissolving the cloaking apps most jackers employed to hide their presence. In Maddox’s time, neither side had yet claimed victory in this particular decades-long arms battle. When PCs evolved better, more effective algorithms, cloaking apps inevitably did the same. As the cat upped its game, so did the mouse. In practical terms, this meant that cloaking apps worked, and the best ones worked very well, but only to a point. Passive countermeasures would always melt a cloaking app, like an ice cube under a heating lamp. The thing was you never knew how long you really had: ten minutes or ten hours. It depended on how good your cloak was, how good the PCs were, and if the datajacking gods were smiling on you that day. Luck, as it did with most endeavors, played a large part. A DS administrator might happen to select a countermeasure configuration that closely matched your masking encryption, and your cloak would start dissolving the moment you got past the DS’s fence. In those cases, if your plan involved staying inside the DS more than a few minutes, you were pretty much screwed. Aware of this risk, Maddox never planned a job to last more than ten minutes. Get in quick, grab your target, get out quick. That was how you had to play the game.

  On this job, fortunately, he knew the likelihood of such bad luck was low. With months to plan and a mole employed at the company, Dezmund’s crew had an insider’s knowledge of nearly all BNO’s security measures. They knew what digital weapons BNO had at its disposal and how it used them. Maddox couldn’t remember when he’d gone into a job better prepared.

  Still, you could never account for randomness. The bad luck lady got more datajackers busted—not to mention killed or brain-damaged—than anything else. You could have perfect information going in, and still an intelligent sentry might unexpectedly change its patrol route and run right into you. A razorwall might alter its security profile and detect you the exact moment you were cutting a hole through it. All security apps had random elements in their design, intentionally built into their systems. Stuff you couldn’t plan for, only react to in the moment. And this was why Maddox believed he’d been brought on board. Dezmund knew his old colleague had seen and survived just about everything a DS could throw at you. And on this gig, the most important of his career—of both their careers—he’d wanted every advantage he could get.

  “They’re past the fence,” Dezmund said.

  Maddox checked the feeds. No cloaking app degradation yet. “Cloaks holding up,” he said. “All six still at a hundred percent.”

  “Jesus, it’s huge,” Tommy gasped. In the kid’s HUD, Maddox watched the DS grow, its crowded geometry of data partitions becoming larger and brighter.

  “You’re surprised?” Blayze chided. “It was huge in the simulations.”

  “Yeah,” the kid said, “but that was, like, a game or something. This is the real deal.”

  With real danger, Maddox added inwardly. Keep your head in the game, kid.

  As the six approached, details their offline function-over-form simulation had left out slowly began to emerge, design flourishes left behind by the DS’s architect. Or rather architects, plural, Maddox corrected himself. BNO’s digital self was too massive to have had any single creator. More likely, its current form had evolved, growing over time in waves of construction like some bustling virtual metropolis, each designer leaving stylistic fingerprints on their particular creations.

  There were several manufacturing partitions, the largest and newest of which towered like a skyscraper deep within the DS’s luminous core. On the partition’s outer wall, abstract art, the
kind that looked to Maddox’s eye like spilled paint, faded in and out, making the illusion of a real-world building nearly complete. It was the kind of thing you saw often in the City, holo projections displayed on museum facades to promote art exhibits. Another partition—this one pyramid-shaped—rotated through video captures of BNO employees from around the world, visual clichés of its workers in scientific labs (white-coated Asian carefully examining a beaker with blue liquid), manufacturing facilities (Indian woman in sari and hard hat, flashing a thumbs-up), and business offices (sharply dressed corporati around a conference table, improbably smiling at each other). Maddox laughed inwardly at this last image of suit-and-tied executives with warm, friendly expressions. He’d lived the corporate life for a year and never once seen anything like that. A video of a dog brushing its own teeth would have been less absurd.

  More details became visible. Razorwall facades with shifting honeycomb patterns. Spherical partitions of every color scattered about, their interiors cloudy and churning like magician’s globes. A squat granite-colored cube topped with an ornate cupola, resembling some building from ancient Greece or Rome, the kind you saw on travel feeds with tourists going in and out. There seemed to be every design element Maddox had ever seen in a DS present in this single, enormous landscape. Cornices with gargoyles at the corners. Friezes with bas-reliefs of business icons: hands shaking, pie charts, stick figure businesspeople giving presentations and carrying briefcases. The sheer variety and number of shapes and colors and patterns was overwhelming. And between everything ran thousands of weblike filaments, the connective latticework carrying data throughout the company like pulses through a nervous system.

  “We’re about a minute from the target partition,” Blayze said. “Cloaks still looking good.”

  Maddox confirmed the update, running his virtual eyes across the CM’s multiple feeds. Everything green. Green was good. Green meant no alarms had been tripped, no intelligent sentries had spotted the crew.