by John Conroe
“It’s him…”
“That’s Ajaya Gurung!”
“The Zone Sniper really does shop here.”
“He’s smaller than I thought.”
Suddenly Egan himself was bustling out from behind the main counter, moving his stocky body in a direct line for me.
“Yo, Ajaya. Good to see you, my friend,” he said, much louder than necessary. Or perhaps just exactly as loud as he intended.
“Hey Egan, can we talk… somewhere?” I asked, eyeing the crowd that was starting to circle around.
He nodded, grabbed my elbow, and spun me toward the back wall, hustling me past a campsite display that included a full field tent, outdoor shower, and a fake fire pit with flickering LED lights. Behind the pop-up shower cubicle was a door in the wall that said PRIVATE: MINEFIELD BEYOND and featured a large graphic skull and crossbones decal.
Egan punched a code into the lock and popped the door open, dragging me through after him.
He shut the door almost in the face of a curious shopper who had tried to follow us.
“Pushy creeps,” he said with a growl, turning and leading me down a hallway to what had to be his office.
“Aren’t they your customers?” I asked mildly as I looked around. He didn’t bother to answer.
The wall behind his desk was almost completely occupied by a full-size US flag with a plaque underneath that indicated that it had been flown over Zone Defense headquarters on Roosevelt Island for Egan Christopoulos.
Mounted on a swiveling rod, suspended over a wooden board on one corner of his big government-issue wooden desk was an empty AT-4 anti-armor missile tube. The open muzzle of the disposable rocket launcher had the words Smile–wait for flash stenciled around the arc of its gaping maw.
A reproduction Greek-style xiphos sword occupied a stand on top of the bookshelf to my right as I sat across from Egan, who settled in behind his surprisingly neat and tidy desk.
“They’re still weirdos,” he said, and it took me a second to realize he was finally answering my question. “Now Ajaya, what can I do for the man who single-handedly gave me the best sales month ever? Do you know I made more money in the last month than I did over all of last year? It’s crazy!”
“Ah, that’s great, Egan. I had no idea that would happen. I didn’t think anyone was paying attention to what I said. Most of my emails these days are hate mail.”
“Well, that’s because the believers are all too busy rushing around getting ready for the world to end to take the time to send you messages. Although I have to think that there are at least a few good ones buried in your inbox somewhere,” Egan said. “But you came down for a reason. What do you need?”
“Weapons. I’ve been blocked from all my personal stuff,” I said.
“And you need at least the basics to make it to your stashes in the Zone,” Egan finished as he leaned back in his chair. “What are you looking for?”
“I’m not super choosy at this point. I need a light rifle to get me through the first stage of entry. Semi-auto at the very least, intermediate cartridge, high capacity, and reliable. No electronic sights. Also, some explosives would be useful.”
“Ajaya, I don’t generally sell firearms… just ammo and accessories. And I’ve never dealt in more dangerous stuff.”
“Yeah, but didn’t you tell me your friend Tony could get stuff?” Tony was a hard case, ex-military with connections.
He nodded slowly, not speaking, eyes locked on me but his mind still elsewhere.
“Yeah… he can. Wait! You’ve got that thing in your neck! It’s listening right now!”
I held up a hand. “No, it’s not. Right now… and for the next…” I glanced at the time in my contact lens, “seventeen minutes, it won’t be.”
“You’ve found a way to block it?”
I held up one hand, palm down and waggled it in a so-so motion.
“A little. I’m able to program a block of time in order for it to be out of commission.”
“Cutting it pretty close, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Traffic was a bitch getting here. Glad you were available,” I said.
“Me too. So this puts a kink in things. We’ll have to see if there’s any help to be had and then work out a way to get that help to you,” he said, emphasizing his code word help despite my assurance that we were still safe from listeners.
“I’m sure we can work something out.”
Fifteen minutes later, I left the building by a back door that led out into an employee parking lot, a small bag of seemingly innocuous purchases under my arm. Keeping my head down to avoid the customers, I headed out to finish the rest of my errands. A glance behind and above me showed a black dot in the sky, one of many drones on errands, although this one seemed to be keeping pace with me.
My next stop was the Brooklyn Public Library. The black dot in the sky got closer, but it couldn’t come inside with me as I entered. With everything being digital these days, most people forget about all the resources in a good old regular library. Lots of annual government reports filed away on dusty shelves. My mother has always been a fan of libraries, and she made sure that her children were familiar with this old style of research. The best part is that unless someone is watching your every move, there is no record of what you look at inside the walls of a library, especially if you just browse the stacks and don’t search the computerized index.
My neck bomb could listen in but it couldn’t see what I was looking at. The looped program of sounds that Rikki had programmed into it for my visit to Egan’s Army-Navy had long since run out and the device had switched back to real-time audio. Between the looped background sounds and now the quiet library, it must have made for some seriously boring surveillance duty.
Once inside, I didn’t even have to ask a librarian for assistance, instead going right into the stacks, as I already knew where my information was kept.
Every year, the MTA (that’s Metropolitan Transport Authority for those of you not familiar with the Big Apple) files reports on the subways. When Drone Night went down and the government sealed off Manhattan, the subways were a major issue. All of the tunnels into the island had to be sealed and protected and the subway lines rerouted in new directions. It took five years for most of the rerouting to get done, and the result was that there were lots of new maps, old maps, and boring reports from those years.
And I needed all this because the only way I could see to get into Manhattan was through the last place I wanted to go—a subway tunnel.
See, at first Zone Defense was very active in monitoring the tunnels, and there was some drone activity underground. But within a few years, the drones had largely left the underground spaces behind as they needed every photon of sunlight to keep charged. Which left the abandoned lines to new management—rats. Fed by the thousands of dead bodies left from the attack, the already formidable New York City brown rat became almost a new species. Bigger, stronger, and seriously carnivorous, they bred into the millions, all with a newly honed taste for human flesh, all with an overload of aggression.
Ironic that aggressive New York humans were replaced by another mammal with maybe even more of a New York attitude. I’ve seen big hordes take on small packs of feral dogs and win. Frankly, between the two, I’d rather tangle with dogs because there’s a chance, however slim, that I can maybe drive them off. Zone rats? Not a chance. The more you kill, the more enraged the rest become.
So if I was going to get into the Zone, I’d have to get through one of the subway lines and make it past whatever rat colonies lived there. That meant coming up with ways to get past the tunnels’ new owners, and that added a whole new layer of preparation to my list.
Three and a half hours later, I left the library, notes written in an old-school notepad, all the words in my personal code. I stopped at a pizza place and downed a couple of big slices, watching the watcher drone hovering near the second-floor corner of an apartment building across the street as, in turn, it watch
ed me. While I ate, I ran through my daily intake of email, using my personal AI to help sort through them. I discarded almost all of them but there was one I’ve been waiting for. Maybe today would be the day.
Turns out Egan was right. There were a few positive messages among the hundreds of nasty, angry comments. But it was the worst of the worst emails that I concentrated on, my AI narrowing the list down to about fourteen of the most heinous. Right in the middle of these, I found one that began You are a horrible, appalling, repulsive peon. Perfect. I ignored the rest and read through that one carefully.
Ajaya Gurung,
You are a horrible, appalling, repulsive peon. Only the lowest level of human would seek fame by scaring the rest of humanity with your made-up stories of mastermind drones lurking in government buildings, attempting to create the apocalypse. You disgust me, and I know you live in Brooklyn. If I find you, you will pay.
With Hate.
That was it. Pretty similar to most of the other real bad ones, if a bit lighter on the curse words and the improbable bodily maneuvers that some of those commanded me to attempt. Maybe a little shorter than most, maybe somewhat minimalist in its message, at least if you didn’t know who it was from.
The four words describing me in the first sentence provided the author’s identity. Horrible, Appalling, Repulsive, Peon. HARP.
Backtracking the email through servers to try to find an originating IP address would be a study in complete frustration. Harper was a master’s master with AI, web functionality, and computer systems. I had no doubt that my emails were being read, reread, and tracked by the government’s best web wizards. Good luck. Harper was raised with artificial intelligences for playmates, interacting at a level that bypassed normal visual and verbal interfaces. Maybe the NSA had other people like that, but if they did, they’d failed to find any sign of her in the weeks since she’d walked out of Zone Defense.
Now, if I read this right, she was telling me to hang out on the ground floor of the Brooklyn Municipal building and she’d find me. At least that’s what I got out of it. The phrase lowest level bothered me a bit because that could indicate the tunnels under the building, but I didn’t think she would attempt those, nor try to get me to go into those, not with my aerial watchdog following my every move.
As it was, I was likely being followed by more observers, both man and machine, than I could count on both hands. My father had been trained in spycraft, at least to some extent, as part of his SAS training. But most of my lessons at his hands had been about sniping and staying alive in the Zone. Still, he had talked a little about such things when he told me stories, so I knew enough to feel like I had watchers all around me, all the time.
It would therefore be weird if I walked into the public area of the muni building, let alone tried to descend into the locked, government-personnel-only portions. In fact, I needed an excuse for visiting the building in the first place. And after a minute or two of thinking about it, I had one.
I took a human-driven taxi to the building, as I don’t trust any AI-operated system anymore. Human operated anything is getting harder and harder to find, but there are still a few. My driver dropped me right at the front doors and in I went.
Staying on the ground floor, I made my way to the Department of Buildings, where I requested a list of the open service orders for the west side of Brooklyn, which is where our apartment is, and more importantly, where some of the biggest potholes in the City lurk. The clerk explained that it was all available online. I insisted on getting a printed copy. I then pointed to the public notification on the wall that said it was the policy of the DCAS (Department of Citywide Administrative Services) that all open orders were available in writing to the public. We argued a bit about the definition of in writing, with her feeling that online counted and me taking the stand that it meant on paper. Eventually, in a surprise capitulation, she gave in but told me it would take quite some time to compile and print. I said I’d wait.
Frankly I didn’t give a big rat’s butt about the info. Just an excuse to be there and a false lead for any of Major Yoshida or Agents Black and White’s people who were undoubtedly lurking about the building.
My clerical friend left me to cool my jets, which was perfect. Sitting on a marble bench, I activated my AI and accessed the ongoing search results for AI accidents.
At first I was just half-heartedly reading through the list, the other half of my awareness on trying to spot Harper.
But ten minutes into my wait, I found a new incident that captured all of my attention. Hidden among the car crashes, shipping errors, and construction accidents was a blip that only just made the cut. It was a small article from a Midwestern news blog about a recall on pesticides. The chemical company had made an error that added an additional component to the pesticide just before shipments went out to corn, wheat, and soy farmers throughout the country’s bread basket. When I looked up the long string of numbers and chlorates and methyl words that named the chemical, it turned out to be a broad use herbicide. The recall was a solid two weeks after the pesticide went out.
I don’t know when Midwestern farmers sprayed, but I had a bad feeling that more than a few had gotten their work done in the last ten days. “AI, flag story and search for follow-ups,” I directed. Too many of those kinds of errors and thousands would begin to die.
Then a body crashed into me and almost knocked me out of my chair.
Chapter 5
“Hey…” I got out as a lanky teen girl smashed into me, knocking me sideways, her skateboard zooming off unmanned across the lobby.
“Oops, sorry,” she said with no real regret or feeling in her voice. She had drone impellers strapped to each wrist, which propelled her at truly dangerous speeds along on her board, moving her arms to change speed or direction. The latest teenage fad.
A few seconds later, she was back on her feet and rushing off to recover her board. A security guard approached her and quickly escorted her out of the building.
Me, I was fine, just bumped around a bit. I checked all my pockets to make sure she wasn’t a pickpocket and found that, in fact, she was. Although this kid put stuff into my pocket rather than relieving me of any. A tiny little data chip was now in my right front pants pocket.
Clever Harper. I put myself back in order and waited another ten minutes before marching over to my clerk.
“That list ready?” I asked.
“Oh, no dear. No, I’m afraid the printer is on a big job for the mayor at the moment. It’s going to be quite a while before it’s done. At least a few hours,” she informed me with a nasty little smile.
“Fine, I’ll come back.”
Well, no, actually, I wouldn’t, but at least I had a good excuse for storming out and heading back home.
At the apartment, after a few more stops along the way, I loaded the chip into an old model reader that my sister Gabby hadn’t bothered to pack when the fam left town. It had no Bluetooth or wireless connection to anything and after putting it under a makeshift Faraday cage made from copper netting, I opened the chip. A single page of text appeared, along with the number sixty in the upper right corner. The sixty changed immediately to fifty-nine then fifty-eight, and I got busy reading.
Yo Gunner Kid,
How’s house arrest going? By now I think you must have discovered my little gift to you from our mutual trip. Not sure exactly how that will work out but early signs looked good before I had to check out of Club ZD.
I’m fine, thanks for asking. Actually it’s fascinating to observe all of this firsthand. Travel is so fun. And all my hotels have great television, so I’ve been able to see your interviews and watch the news coverage. Entertaining stuff.
But getting down to business, you’re no doubt itching to get back to your favorite line of work. But where to begin? Where to look? Not the old digs, as those became too hazardous for everything when Uncle Z got interested in it. All those loud noises and flashes of light, mixed with tumbling chunks of bric
k and concrete, are harmful to habitation, even for drones. Especially for drones.
