by Peter Tylee
He extended his search to include secondary sources, the flashing of data and routing of packets tickling something deep within his mind. He found Dan listed in no fewer than 17 of his 20 regular sources, though the mere fact that he was missing from three was remarkable enough. He examined each record in turn, discarding one after the other; his suspicion elevated a notch with every incomplete record. Someone cleared his history. Maybe Dan, maybe someone else.He pressed on, determined to find what he was looking for. Nobody can fully erase the past; everybody misses at least one database.It intrigued him that someone had bothered to erase Sutherland’s past at all. He wondered why.He or she had certainly done a good job. Normally it took a cyborg to scour the world’s databases that thoroughly, and even a cyborg couldn’t erase things completely.
He retrieved and discarded 50 records in his search for pieces to Dan’s jigsaw-puzzle history. Dan hadspent the past few months working for UniForce. That part was easy. Prior to that, as far as the Raven could tell, he’d been a detective working for the New South Wales Police Department. His records depicted nearly ten years of exemplary service before a psychological evaluation had rendered him unserviceable and the Department had discharged him from duty. From there the Raven had to work forward. Dan was born in 2030and he’d lived a normal life up until his eighteenth birthday. But it was the gap that bothered the Raven – the eight years spanning 2048 to 2056 where none of the databases could account for Dan’s existence. It’s as if he fell of the face of the planet.
It wasn’t for another hour of sweating through disused and chaotic databases that the Raven finally found an answer to plug the gap. He found it in a database located in Argentina, of all places, and it had taken him 20 minutes to puncture the database’s defences. His eyes snapped back into focus and he gripped the handle of his Redback, pulling further back into the shadows and peering cautiously toward Jennifer Cameron’s apartment. An alien emotion forced him to swallow, and his dry throat scraped on the way down. It took him a while to understand what the emotion was: Fear.
*
Thursday, September 16, 2066
UniForce Headquarters
03:01 San Francisco, USA
James Ellerman blinked to clear the sting from his exhausted eyes and slurped noisily on his cup of coffee. He’d been working without a break since eleven in the morning when his computer had first bleeped to warn him about a network breach. Yesterday morning,he reminded himself acrimoniously.
A quiet-spoken man, he knew his wife was going to kill him when he got home. But he couldn’t phone her now, not this early in the morning. He snorted and thought, If I ever do get home.He absently wondered whether she thought he was with another woman.Or another man?It wasn’t the first time he hadn’t come home without phoning to warn her. Last time she’d been hysterical when he finally had turned up, two days later. You’d think I’d learn. He snorted again. Snorting was his pet mannerism, which had always thoroughly irritated his colleagues. They called him Piggy behind his back because he frequently snorted at the end of every sentence.
In his first real lapse of concentration since embarking upon the tedious exercise of patching the network,he conjured an image of Susan, his wife, holding his three-month-old daughter, Lillian. His wife had a motherly smile and looked positively radiant. And the impish grin on Lillian’s chubby face made James smile too. Then his wife’s smile mutated into a snarl and she growled viciously at him, flaying him with her sharp nails while biting and screaming, “Why didn’t you call me?” James severed his daydream at that point and opened his eyes,though his daughter still pleasantly tickled his inner vision. In truth Lillian had been an accident, the result of afailure for Xantex’s Pill for Men.And while V.H.E.M.T, the Voluntary Human Extinction MovemenT, had in more recent years taken to promotingabortion for mistakes,James couldn’t imagine not having her. Sure, he was exhausted from feedings and midnight diaper changes, but Lillian Ellerman was the joy of his life. He loved to make her laugh and watch her make those cute little spit bubbles, which he found adorable and others found repulsive. Sure, he could see the world was overpopulated; he knew they didn’t have the resources to cope with more, but at least he was stopping at one. His brother hadn’t stopped until his cow of a wife had squeezed out her fourth and the puppet-government had forcibly tied her tubes. James could see their point. Why can’t they see mine?He was too engrossed with his own fatherly feelings to comprehend that the ‘other side’ didunderstand his feelings. It wasn’t illegal to reproduce, and the corporate rulers hadn’t yet been brave enough to mention mandatory licenses for pregnancy, but they frowned upon reproduction and discouraged it wherever possible. One child was still socially acceptable, two was the social limit, and more than two was selfish and deserved ostracism. Sixteen billion people crammed onto the small rock called Earth was approximately ten billion more than the planet could cope with. Space exploration with portal technology had come too late. If humans didn’t carefully control their spiralling population, they’d exhaust their resources before they found a new place to settle. What was the saying? Only after chopping down the last tree will you realise that you can’t eat money.James could never remember who had written that, but he intended to pay heed. Lillian was the first and the last child to spring from his loins. You see, I do care about the common wellbeing.
He diverted his thoughts before lingering guilt could consume what was left of his loving fatherly feelings.
James had no need of a monitor, though he left one on his desk anyway. Sometimes he used it, sometimes he didn’t. He piped the important information directly into his mind much faster than he could read it from a monitor. He had implants. They were quite simple really. A quick trip to the implant factory– as it was known– at company expense to have a small incision made just behind his right temple and a special plug inserted into his brain. They’d squirted somegrowth syrup in with it to encourage his nerve cells to bind with the fibrous ends of the device. They’d finished by drilling a neat hole in his skull and tucking his excess skin around the plastic plug. He had to keep dabbing it with ointment to stop infections and skin irritation, but since he’d had his operation, the implant geniuses had invented replaceable plugs that automatically seeped ointment into the surrounding tissue. With a special adaptor, the new plugs could recharge while the user was connecting to his or her computer. And that’s what James wanted – a replaceable, automatically recharging plug. A tiny, plastic, skin-coloured circle was the only visible sign that he had the implant. It had a miniature plastic cover that stopped dust and grit from getting into the hole. Whenever he inserted the leads, the cover retracted and the finely engineered wires made contact with their reciprocal pairs inside his skull, completing his connection to the computer. The doctors had refined the procedure to eliminate most of the training time, though James recalled that he’d been clumsy at the beginning. He’d accidentallyorderedthe computer to type ‘shit’ intomore than one business e-mail. It was like any brain function, he needed to practice if he wanted to be perfect.
Two types of implants were available: input for replacing the keyboard, and input/output for replacing the keyboard and monitor. Since UniForce was paying and therefore money was no object, James had opted for the latter. Ever since, he’d enjoyed boundless computer freedom, piping images and ideas directly into his mind, ordered there by mental commands.
He snorted.
The blip itched his mind again. Damn.He had to admit the hacker was good. Pity he’s not working for us. Maybe then I could get some sleep.He couldn’t follow his thoughts through the wires like a cyborg; he hadn’t completely integrated his mind with a machine. He could only send commands and wait for responses. But it was an infinite improvement over a time-wasting keyboard and monitor combination. Tonight he was using both. His fingers tappedaway at his favourite DataHand Qwerty. It was the tactile model, which pissed off his colleagues even more than his incessant snorting because of the constant clackety-clack when he typed. It
was little wonder management pushed for implants and silent keyboards. But nobody else was around at three in the morning so he was indulging himself, enjoyingthe feel of his keyboard for old times’ sake.
Everything appeared normal. But he knew better than to trust appearances, which was why UniForce had handed him the sought-after position of information technology co-ordinator. James didn’t take chances. Somebody was there, inside UniForce’s electronic defences, and he was gong to find out whom.
*
Thursday, September 16, 2066
23:21 Tweed Heads, Australia
“Oh fuck!” It started Cookie on a string of curses that ended in a climactic half-scream.
“What is it?” Jen’s asked, concerned and fretful.
Cookie’s fingers were a flurry of action. “Somebody knows I’m here.”
They flocked to his side despite being unable to fathom what was happening on his screen. A red cursor was flashing on an application that had ‘detection bot’ written at the top. It was a custom application, Cookie had written it himself.
A bead of sweat rolled off his forehead and trickled down his chin, at which point Samantha noticed it and dabbed it away with a tissue. “I’ve triggered some kind of alarm.” A scowl imprinted itself on the previously blank mould of his face. “I wouldn’t have the foggiest fuck of a clue where, or even when.” He scrolled through his activity log for the past few hours, shaking his head at each entry. “I haven’t done anything recently that would’ve tipped them off.” That was a particularly unnerving thought. “They could’ve been observing us for a while.”
“Can they track us?” Jen asked, tearing her eyes from the screen to look at Cookie.
He shook his head. “They haven’t tried, or if they have they didn’t get far because they didn’t trip the alarm on my tracking app.”
Jen hoped he knew what he was talking about. “What can we do?”
“Nothing.” Cookie shook his head irritably, trying to give 100 percent of his brain’s processing power to the problem. “Just leave me in peace for a while.”
They backed off respectfully, leaving the genius to work amid a muttering of curses.
Samantha and Jen retreated to the kitchen where they whispered in low voices, mostly about Dan. Samantha thought he was cute and was trying to prise any juicy details Jen might’ve left out of her official tale – such as why she hadn’t come home wearing her own clothes and why she wasn’t wearing a bra under her stretched white top. Dan knew they were talking about him but refused to leave the living room. He scoured the neighbourhood from the balcony windows, glad the moon had risen. It shone like a floodlight.
“Can’t you just drop it?” Jen whispered irritably, not in the mood to blather about the man who’d saved her life.
“You don’t think he’s cute?”
Jen answered with silence.
“That means yes,” Samantha said, chuckled softly. “So what’s the problem? It sounds like you’ve already cleared your first date.”
Yeah, and it was a real killer.Jen caught herself staring across the kitchen bench at Dan, her bounty hunter, who was prowling like a caged tiger and steadily wearing a track into the carpet. He is kind of cute.It was the first time she’d permitted herself to admire him in that way, in any way for that matter. She couldn’t explain the animosity she had for him. It must be what he represents,she mused. But hasn’t he now proven that he doesn’t stand for UniForce? I’d be dead or in chains if he did.Her dreamy expression betrayed her distant thoughts, but Dan snapped her from her daze when he swivelled in her direction and their eyes met. Jen hastily broke contact and looked at the linoleum floor.
Samantha saw it happen and was greatly amused. “Why don’t you just go and talk to him? You haven’t spoken more than three words to each other since you got back.”
Jen shrugged, not understanding it herself. It didn’t seem appropriate to gripe ‘he started it’.
“Go on. You know you want to.” Samantha knew she could cajole Jen into action; she knew her vulnerabilities. “What’ve you got to lose?”
How about our freedom?She wasn’t willing to risk such high stakes. But then,she thought,he’s had the chance to take that from us already.“Okay.”
“You want the usual outlet?”
“What do you think?” she replied rhetorically. They were referring to a predetermined signal Jen would give if she wanted Samantha to save her from the conversation. When – if – it came, Samantha would rescueher byoffering something benign such as coffee or biscuits and steer the conversation back into safe waters. Their signal was a sneeze since they could both fake authentic-sounding sneezes at will.
She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and preparing for what she thought may turn into a battle. With a precisely timed stroll, she cornered Dan as far as possible away from Cookie. Not that Cookie would bother eavesdropping.He was engrossed in his hack, trying to remain undetected behind UniForce lines.
“I wanted to thank you,” Jen started uneasily.
“You’ve already done that, remember?” Dan replied, holding her gaze until she looked away again.
It surprised him when she rallied her nerve and looked back into his eyes, and she surprised him more by holding his gaze for the remainder of the conversation. “I meant, thank you for helping us.”
Dan smiled cynically. “You should save that until I’ve actually done something.”
“Okay, can I thank you for trying to help us then?”
“You’re welcome.” Dan’s ensuing smile eased the tension and Jen started to relax, just a fraction.
“I noticed your enthusiasm for accessing the UniForce network.” It sounded like an accusation, though that was not how she intended it. “What do you expect to find?”
Dan carefully guarded his reply, saying, “You asked me whether a company has ever fucked me over.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well the biggest fuck-over of all was from UniForce, and if he” – he pointed at Cookie – “can get me inside their network, I think I can find the proof I would need to correct it.”
Jen nodded, pensively.
“Crippling Echelon won’t do you any good you know.”
It was the most unexpected thing she could have heard. “What? Why do you say that?”
“Don’t you see?” Dan sighed heavily. He felt more exhausted than ever in the presence of such youthful innocence. “Okay, so imagine you breach UniForce’s network. Then assume Cookie finds a way to pull the plug on Echelon. Both are tall orders, but for the sake of argument, we’ll presume he can achieve the impossible. Then-”
“I’d prefer improbable,” Jen snapped. “Nothing’simpossible. Impossible is a word people use until someone else does what they can’t imagine.”
Dan blinked at her. “Cute. Okay, improbable,better?”
She nodded.
“So Echelon’s down and you can send messages without UniForce listening. The problem is – nobody else will be listening either. Look outside, Jen. Look around you… people are happy. People haven’t been this happy for decades. I don’t think they wantto return to the chaos of times past.”
His logic was an affront to everything she believed and brought the bile to the back of her throat. “That’s crap. You’re the one who should open your eyes and take a look around. People aren’t happy, they’re asleep. They’re hypnotised into following exactly what the companies want. We’re like a race of robots marching in step. And do you know what happens when someone misses a beat? UniForce drags them away from this army-of-the-damned and flogs them to death as an example to keep the others firmly under control.”
He laughed. “Do you really believe this is all part of some diabolical scheme to beat humanity into submission?”
She held his gaze despite her mounting need to look away. “Yes.”
“Do you honestly believe things would be better with the return of activism? Do you really think it would be good to ‘wake’ these people
as you put it?”
“You missed the point. That’s not what we’re about. We want a world where people are free to choose. At the moment we’re not.”
And that struck a chord inside Dan unlike any of her other arguments. It planted a seed that had the potential to germinate and flourish into a tree that might one day bear fruit of its own. He wasn’t sure how to balance the conflicting points of view and he envied Jen’s resoluteness. She knew exactly what she stood for and had the courage to do something about it. Am I free?The silence stretched heavily on while he thought about it. No, not free. I’m free to do whatever I want within the system, but the system itself is restrictive.Then a voice came to battle for the doctrine of society. But rules are the platform of civilization. Without them, we have chaos. This set of rules permits peace, which is especially important with the planet so overcrowded.Dan couldn’t draw a conclusion to the debate raging in his mind. Not tonight. Possibly never. And that made him unpredictable. Capable of digesting both sides of the argument, he could act on behalf of either the ruling corporations or the downtrodden protestors.
But the quandary left one very important question begging: Am I really doing society a favour as a bounty hunter?His inner flame of hatred burned and he resented whatever spiteful force kept placing him in these situations. Or am I just a prop for corrupt companies?Jen and her band of wishful warriors, classified as activists – as terrorists! – were fighting oppression. They aspired to free the world of… Of what?Dan didn’t know anymore. He was too confused to arrange his thoughts into a coherent stream. But then, he didn’t have to. His motivation in the short term was simple – there was no need for Jen to die by the Raven’s hand, so for now he woulddo his best to keep her alive.
Jen’s thoughts were tumultuous too, though for vastly different reasons. They culminated into the question, “So if you believe what you’re saying,why are you here? Why not turn me over to UniForce?”
