Freedom Incorporated

by Peter Tylee

  “Not everything they do is right,” he said, gracing her with a chagrined smile. “I like you,” – which was the truth, though he wasn’t going to tell her why – “and I don’t want to see you incarcerated for what you’re doing. You believe something strongly enough to risk your freedom and even your life fighting for it – regardless of how slim your chances may be. I admire that, it reminds me of… someone I used to know.”

  Jen saw the hurt that underpinned his words but decided it was private and didn’t want to pry. She watched the stream of moonlight, admitted to the room by a crack in the drawn curtains, play across his face. It was like a finger from the outside world intruding on their private domain.

  Dan finally lowered his eyes, no longer capable of holding her gaze. And Jen shivered. Forcing herself to look at him had consumed much of her energy and she felt exhausted, drained. She took three casual steps to peek outside and looked across the sleepy Tweed, out toward the heads. It was breathtakingly pretty, bathed in silvery light. A whimsical smile tugged at her lips when she realised she’d been chatting with a handsome man by moonlight. How often have I dreamed of that?Of course, she’d imagined a slightly different conversation, but her dream hadcome true. It made her wonder whether her other dreams would also come true, and if so, what unintended twists they might take.

  “He’s out there, isn’t he?” Jen asked tiredly, her voice hoarse.

  “I think so. It would surprise me if he wasn’t. He’s probably watching the apartment even now.” He touched his Colt for reassurance, gratified when his fingers brushed the eerily cold stock.

  “So what did you have in mind? For our protection I mean.” A puff of moist air escaped with her words, fogging the glass and obscuring her view. She turned back to Dan. Ready for another duel of wills, she wassurprised to find him staring at the floor.

  “There are two possibilities,” Dan admitted uneasily. He wasn’t yet convinced either would work. “My original idea was to move you all, take up new identities, split with your current life and recommend you don’t do anything outrageous – nothing to get you back on the corporate hit list. I know it can be done; it’s not even that difficult. The hardest part is never looking back.” He shrugged nonchalantly and added, “Of course Samantha and Cookie would have to agree… unless they want to stay here. But I suspect it won’t be long before they’re on a bounty hunter’s list too.”

  Jen paled and thought, At least it’s preferable to death and prison. “What’s the other idea?”

  “If Cookie really can get us into the UniForce network, we might be able to find the bounty hunter records. If we can do that,we canset your status as apprehended. Hopefully the Raven will lose interest at that point and you’ll slip through the cracks, at least until someone notices the disparity.”

  A tiny glimmer of hope sparkled in Jen’s eyes and she looked to where Cookie was working with renewed incentive.

  A twitch irritated the corner of Cookie’seye and he rubbed it with the heel of his palm. His eyes were darting across the monitor, completely unaware of thesweatbuildingup on his brow. His mind was racing, as if he’d consumed five times his personal limit of caffeine.And that wasn’t an achievement to scoff at. Cookie’s normal daily intake of the drug was enough to corrode a rookiecoffee-drinker’s stomach lining. He was desperate to evade the spotlight of detection. Three separate versions of his detection algorithm were crawling spider-like through the network to warn him of everything the system administrator did. Damn he’s fast.Cookie’s knuckles were starting to ache, the way they did when he failed to take his regulatory breaks, scheduled at predetermined intervals. His RSI was officially cured, praise going to a Xantex prescription stuffed in his top drawer. But he didn’t have time to take it now and the tendons pulling his fingers were swollen and throbbing all the way to his elbows. This must be why people get implants.It was at times like these that temptation reared its ugly head.

  He was working simultaneously on three separate and equally vital problems. One application was busy backfilling a punctured file, one of the files he’d used to seed his first entry into the network. Another was in the final states of repairing a checksum. And he was using a third to penetrate the final bulwark of the UniForce net. A warning buzzed on his speakers and he shattered protocol by turning off his chat software, disconnecting himself from the distracting world of cyber-chatting. A friend in Peru would be pissed when he came back online, but if that were the worst he suffered, he’d consider himself lucky.

  Another alarm flashed on his screen. The UniForce system administrator was close, sniffing at all the customary places that Cookie might have used to gain access. He’d systematically locked down every weak point on the UG7-rated network. He knows his stuff,Cookie thought, irritably blinking the stinging sweat from his eyes. Where’s Samantha?He didn’t have time to turn his head and chastised himself for the lapse in concentration as he redoubled his efforts to assault the bulwark. I’ve worked too hard to have some arsehole fuck me now.

  With a flutter of excitement, he found a weakened node and slipped his tiny program into the core of the host file. Then he socketed the file and recalculated the checksum so that his dastardly opponent, as Cookie now thought of the UniForce system administrator, wouldn’t suspect that he’d altered it. There was a tiny window of opportunity when his entire campaign was vulnerable to detection but a few seconds later the checksum was in place and he’d altered the ‘modified date’ to erase all evidence of his tampering.

  Cookie’s heart started thumping in his ears and his breathing was shallow. Now… just these two files…He worked even more furiously, his fingers slipping twice onto the wrong keys because of the rush. But thirty seconds later, he was done, and the air he’d been hoarding in his lungs came explosively from his nose and mouth in a triumphant gasp.

  “I’m in!” Cookie slapped his hands together and massaged his aching joints. “I’m in, I’m in, I’m in! Did you hear me? I’m in!”

  Jen’s head snapped around, her jaw slack. What?Deep down she’d wrestled with a reservoir of doubts. Although she’d never said anything, she’d never wholeheartedly believed Cookie could do it.

  Samantha came bolting from the kitchen, leapt into Cookie’s lap, and shrieked in delight. She entwined Cookie’s tongue in a passionate kiss and massaged his shoulders before ordering him to stand up and walk the stiffness out of his legs.

  “Is it secure?” Jen was still gaping, scarcely able to believe her eyes.

  Cookie nodded exultantly. “I’ve gotta maintain it, but she’s as tight as a CEO’s puckered little arse.”

  *

  The Raven appealed to the sky, begging for the omen that would free him from his shackles of restraint. He sneered at the muted light coming from the curtain cracks. A monitor? A television?Somehow he doubted they’d kick up their feet, open a bud, and watch their favourite sitcom. A computer, it must be.But it flickered quickly, casting doubt on his assessment.

  Now that he possessed the full details of Dan’s colourful life, he didn’t intend to rush foolhardily toward the house, PX7 blazing. No.His time for rushed approaches was over, now it was time for caution and perseverance. Time would prove his ally, generating opportunities for a silent approach and a clean kill. One shot.That was all he intended to need. Of course, he would riddle Dan’s body with a full clip, but one bullet would seal his death. He couldn’t in good conscience leave Dan alive, at least not for long. He needed elimination, without a doubt. Fear was beyond the programming the Raven had written into his electronic mind, though so far he believed it was coping well. Emotions could spark a crash – love, hate, fear, guilt, he personally believed they drove the other cyborgs to self-destruction. The years between the ages of 18 and 22 were tumultuous for humans, and a cyborg brain only amplified the chaos. No wonder we lost so many,the Raven sneered. Now, aged 28, he felt safe. He knew how to beat the system, how to stay calm. He prided himself on his lack of emotion. And now this.It made him angry until h
is programming reminded him to relax, at which point he overcame the wave of unwanted aggression with a chilling tranquillity.

  Sutherland must die.It was the first time in years he’d given himself a non-UniForce assignment. Cameron too.He’d never expected to apprehend anything but her spine. It didn’t even matter which vertebrae since there was no chip, they’d just have to lift her identify from the DNA.

  He turned to the sky once more and mouthed, “Hurry up.” He wanted it over with.

  *

  “Right. Now what do we do?” Samantha was first to recover from their collective shock.

  “Now we hunt. Echelon,” Cookie said, savouring his analogy.

  “No, first we have to find my record in the bounty hunter database.” Jen paled to say the words, “He’s still tracking me, you know.”

  Samantha copied her pasty pallor. “The cyborg from the mall?”

  Jen nodded solemnly.

  “Righto then.” Cookie was about to crack his knuckles but stopped himself just in time. Instead, he gently applied the pads of his fingers to the grooves they’d worn into his keys. “We have a choice between saving our skins and smashing the shit out of a computer, metaphorically speaking.” He winced through a smile. “I don’t know about you lot, but I rather like my skin.”

  “Where will we find it?” Samantha asked nobody in particular.

  Dan chipped into the ensuing silence, “They have a three-tiered data repository, each housed separately to protect against data loss in the event of a disaster.”

  “But that’s just how it’s physically aligned,” Cookie said, taking the tone of a patient teacher explaining something simple to a particularly dim-witted student. “I need to know where it is logically, in the realm of electrons.” He started battering his keys, hard enough to explain why he wore out two keyboards per year. “Hang on a minute; let me take a look around.”

  After a frustrating pause he pointed at the jungle of lines he’d been assembling on the screen. He’d built a mind-map of the UniForce network based on the information his various applications were feeding him. It’s fairly standard, not what I would’ve expected behind a UG7,he thought. “Here, you see this?” They could see what he was wiggling his finger at, but had only a vague idea of the concept behind it. “This is the way they’ve set things up.” He tapped on his keyboard for another few minutes before drawing a blue circle in the middle of his diagram. But the colourful shapes weren’t just for his audience’s benefit; Cookie was embedding code behind them. “This circle’s their main data store.”

  Another ten minutes and he’d decoded the data structures UniForce used in their self-replicating databases. They had a mutual-master relationship, which meant that a change to one database would replicate to the others, so it wouldn’t matter which one they modified.An intra-nano-net connection linked each database server to its piers. It was essentially a single database copied three times, split into a complex array of sub nodes and highly sophisticated reference and record structures. UniForce had implemented it so that the database engine could retrieve information in nanoseconds. Even the complex searches, which had taken minutes to complete on older systems, took mere microseconds on the latest generation technology UniForce had used.

  Cookie found it enthralling. The others were just impatient, but they knew better than to hassle him while he was working.

  “Okay, I think I know what we’re looking at.” He squinted in concentration. Only his subconscious mind was enjoying the tender strokes that Samantha was lavishing on the nape of his neck. After a flurry of keystrokes, he triumphantly slammed the enter-key. “I see it. This is it, here.” He tapped a finger to the bird’s nest on the screen. “It’s not so much wherewe can find the bounty hunter records, that part’s easy. It’s a question of which search terms we need to feed to the engine to get the records we want.”

  Silence.

  Jen ventured into the hush with an intrepid question. “So you’ve got my record then?”

  “Not a chance,” Cookie replied cheerfully. “But now I know how difficult it’s going to be to find. It’ll be trial and error until I can construct something similar to the front end they’re using to access the data. From there it’ll all be smooth sailing.”

  Dan stifled a yawn, the first indication that his developing pattern of poor sleep was catching up with him. “And how longis that going to take?”

  Cookie shrugged. “Could be twenty minutes if I get lucky, maybe a day or two if I’m not.”

  “So are you feeling lucky?” Jen asked. She definitely wasn’t.

  He slipped back into his semi-trance and fired a series of simple requests at the database to see what sort of garbage it would return. A delighted frown unfolded on his forehead – Cookie loved a challenge. Besides, he was still euphoric over single-handedly surmounting the barriers to the UG7-rated network.

  Samantha preferred to stay close to her lover while he worked; she enjoyed feeling the warmth of his body. She’d spent many evenings with him this way, while he worked on various projects. Prior to the hack he’d been constructing the tools required for the billboard jam. She still hadn’t fully recovered from that, and the repeated late nights weren’t helping. Samantha didn’t understand how Cookie could keep going when his buttocks were numb and his fingers and wrists ached so much.She knew they were sore, she could tell by the way he flinched with each keystroke. She’d seen him pop an anti-inflammatory pill during their short interlude and hoped for his sake it’d kick in soon. Is he that motivated?Sometimes she wondered where he drew his strength.She knew she could never endure the physical demands or the psychological strain of pitting herself against a seemingly insurmountable foe. Maybe the challenge really does turn him on. He’s always joking about it, but…Personally, she preferred it when he was doing something in the workshop, which was really just an extra desk they’d squeezed into their room.Samantha and Cookie slept in the master bedroom because they paid two-thirds of the rent, but it still wasn’t huge – the extra desk barely fit.

  The exhaustion was catching up with her and the lines on Cookie’s monitor were blurring. A yawn escaped and it triggered a yawn-wave that spread around the room. Yawns are like that.She smiled, her bubbly outlook shining through her fatigue. Then she gently lowered her head to Cookie’s shoulder, not heavily enough to prove a burden, just enough to let him know she was there. She looked forward to a time when they didn’t have to hide their thoughts or political ideology. And when Cookie and I can be alone again.They hadn’t truly been alone for weeks. Sure, they’d frequently been the only people in the room, but that wasn’t the same as being alone, not when she had to share her lover’s attention with a computer.

  Cookie, for his part, was only semi-conscious that Samantha was even there. He did love her, and he regretted that he couldn’t pay her more attention, but he knew she understood the importance of what he was doing. A few more days, then I’ll take you out for a romantic celebratory dinner.He lamented their lost time and wished their lifestyle was more conducive toward a relationship. But hacking was a bit like the ocean, he would’ve been unwise to turn his back to it. Once he started a hack, he had to stick with it until the end, which meant days if not weeks when he was tackling something as complex as a UG7.

  His thoughts soon spun to marriage. When? How?He knew Samantha was the only one he wanted but he’d never plucked the courage to ask her how she felt about it. Not while we’re at uni.He wanted to wait a year or two, so he had plenty of time to worry about that later. Or so he thought.

  Focus, focus!He berated himself unnecessarily for the momentary lapse in concentration and delved deeper into his meditation-like state. He’d isolated the first part of the fetch-command structure with a lucky guess. Well, it wasn’t so much lucky as educated, but Cookie enjoyed thinking himself lucky. He whittled away at the rear of the problem with as much gusto as he’d attacked the front, but UniForce had customised it so much it was barely recognisable as a mainstream structure.
Damn.

  Jen sat nervously on the couch, uneasy with the silence but unable to think of anything to say.

  Dan came to her rescue by saying, “I failed a psych evaluation.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You asked how I could go from a cop to a-”

  “So I did,” Jen said, briskly cutting him off. She wanted to shield her friends from his true profession. Then, when she looked closer at his eyes, she realised he was allowing her a peek into his tormented soul. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Dan shrugged. “Something happened to me that…” Even cryptically he had difficulty talking about Katherine’s death. “It really disturbed me.” He spread his hands, palms up. “I was on distress leave when they called me in for an interview with the shrink. I’m not surprised I flunked. After that theyturfed me.” Images of the interview flashed through his mind and along with them came details of his wife’s death. It angered him, though he hid it well.

  “You don’t have to tell me this if you don’t want to,” Jen said gently, without the earlier snappiness in her voice.

  “Yes.” He forced a smile. “I think I do. You deserve to know how I ended up working for the devil.” The jest was too close to the mark to elicit a smile from either of them. “I suddenly found myself without a job, nothing to do, and far too much time to think about what’d happened.”

  Jen was curious to know what had reduced such a proud man to this, but she dared not ask. She didn’t believe she had the right to an answer, and besides, she thought she might prefer never to know.

  “I was a good cop,” Dan said, his eyes drifting out of focus. “I never took bribes, although plenty of people offered them.” He grunted. “I never wanted to do anything else.”

  Jen waited in silence.

  “I accepted UniForce’s standing offer because I needed something to take my mind off my problems.” Dan felt profoundly depressed and his confession wasn’t helping. He distantly wondered why the Zyclone wasn’t proppinghis mood above a lethargic flat-line. “It’s intense work, it keeps me occupied and keeps my mind busy.”