Freedom Incorporated

by Peter Tylee

  Dan was sitting in the single-seater and Jen leant forward to understandingly touch his forearm.

  The warmth of her touch surprised him.It scalded his skin and he nearly flinched away until he realised it was pleasurable. He focussed on her fingers. Her hands looked like Katherine’s and he had to suffocate a sigh.

  Just as Jen’s warmth had startled Dan, the chill of his skin had startled her. It felt dead.

  “You don’t need to stay at UniForce, do you?” Jen asked in a low voice, wondering whether Dan was beyond salvation.

  “I suppose not, but I can’t think of anything else to do. I couldn’t return to the nine to five slog, I’m not cut out for it.” He faked a smile. “That probably sounds lame, eh?”

  She shook her head. “No, not lame.” The thought of spending 30 years working for a multinational sent a spasm of revulsion through Jen’s body. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for it either. I admire people who can do it though.”

  “Maybe if I-”

  “Hey you guys!” Cookie’s shrill voice sliced through the air and severed their touch, leaving them with a spark of remorse and a pang of guilt.

  “What?” Jen vaulted the couch and resumed in her usual position next to his chair, gazing at the monitor. Dan remained seated and wondered why they bothered, nothing on that screen made sense to him and he was tired of pretending it did. He watched from the relative comfort of the single-seater.

  “I found your record.” Something in Cookie’s tone forewarned that it wasn’t all joyous news. “And this is your current status field.”

  “And?” Jen prompted impatiently.

  “They’re using encryption that I can’t reproduce from here. If we change any of the data, we’ll trip an alarm. They already know we’re sniffing their doorstep but modifying anything in the database would totally give us away. They might even discover where we are.”

  “You mean track us here?”

  “Right.” Cookie pouted, wondering what they’d want him to do next.

  “There’s no way around it?” Jen asked despondently.

  “Not unless you get me a copy of their front end. Maybe then I could reverse engineer it and forge a seal, but that’s a very big maybe.” He sighed resignedly. “They’ve protected all the keys. There’s absolutely no way we can change that field from here. At least, not unless we give ourselves away… and that would kinda negate the point, wouldn’t it?”

  “Hmm.” Jen frowned. “Maybe we should go for plan-B.”

  “What’s plan-B?” Samantha didn’t like the tone of Jen’s voice, it frightened her.

  “We order you all a new identity and you disappear,” Dan answered from the corner. “We’ll set you up with a new life.”

  “Or I turn myself over to UniForce,” Jen said, providing her teammates with an alternative. She was willing to sacrifice herself for their wellbeing if that’s what they voted.

  “No.” Samantha flatly refused.

  “Hang on a minute,” Cookie said. “I’ve got another idea.”

  Something tingled on the edge of Dan’s mind and the hairs on the back of his neck stood upright. And he knew: Something’s wrong.

  *

  He fawned at the glorious orb, basking in the light and sulphurous fumes that billowed from its gluey skin. Give me the sign,he urged. I need it now… give me the sign.The Raven was on his knees, begging for a taste of freedom, even if it were temporary.

  The vibration buzzing at his temples was nearly unbearable and, as usual, it spread to his back teeth. Then the omen said what the Raven wanted to hear before fading to black with a final splutter of jelly. The Raven recovered quickly and got to his feet, flexing his fingers around his Redback before trekking stealthily to Jennifer Cameron’s apartment.

  *

  “We’re out of time.” Dan drew the curtain back an inch to get a better look outside. “We can’t wait – he’s coming now.”

  “How do you know?” Jen wished she knew what to do, she wished she had a weapon.

  “I just do,” Dan snapped. “Cookie! Forget whatever you’re doing, can you find where they store their mail?”

  He nodded. “Yeah man, it’s right here.”

  “Can you find a mailbox for Roche? Michele Roche?” Dan never took his eyes from the window. The Raven was stalking them; he could feel it.

  The tapping of keys continued for lengthy seconds while Cookie muttered and wove his programs through the network. On top of finding the mailbox, he also had to evade the system administrator who was attempting to uproot him. He doubted the administrator yet knew he’d breached the final defence and gained proper access to the network – he’d been very careful to mask his tracks. But the more he tinkered, the greater the risk that the administrator would notice him and sever his connection.

  “Okay, here we go. Roche, Michele. What do you want with her?”

  “She’s the bounty co-ordinator for UniForce,” Dan said succinctly.

  How does he know that?Samantha and Cookie both wondered. Their curiosity culminated in a questioning look at Jen, who looked away, worried that the answer was scrawled across her face.

  “Can you write an e-mail from her account?” Dan was making it up as he went along, half expecting the Raven to crash through the front door at any moment. He’d prepared for that contingency, he knew precisely where to shoot for his .45 calibre rounds to puncture the wall and riddle the intruder. Standing by the balcony window was smarter than guarding the door; he had better visibility where he was.

  “I think I can arrange that,” Cookie added a few seconds later. “What do you want to say?”

  Dan paused, trying to remember the e-mails he’d received from Michele Roche and copy her distinctive style. “Hi Raven.”

  Cookie took the dictation in his stride, typing it around his endless prop- the-file-and-evade-detection parade.

  “Their’s,” Dan spelt it for him, “T-h-e-i-r-apostrophe-s” – he needed to replicate Roche’s mistakes to make it look genuine – “a new assingment I want you too do 4 me.”

  Samantha arched an eyebrow. “You realise that’s not how you spell-”

  “I know,” Dan replied before resuming his dictation. “This has the highest priority. I need u to start on this rite away.” Dan’s words were slow and deliberate. “This is contract I’m offering to u alone, because of the good stuff u done.”

  Samantha gave him a quizzical look. No co-ordinator writes that poorly,she thought.

  Every nerve in Dan’s body tingled with dread and he scoured the scene from the balcony window with ever-increasing ferocity.

  *

  The Raven skirted the rat-infested townhouse, the only abandoned building in the suburb. A plastic sign proudly heralded the beginning of a new development on the highly prized block. In a year, the two-story weatherboard Queenslander would live only in memories and aging photographs, reduced to rouble and rebuilt as a multi-million dollar investment that did nothing to bridge the housing disparity between rich and poor.

  The Raven’s multiprocessing mind was feeding off no fewer than 60 information streams, digesting the data and presenting him with the best approach. His black clothing melded perfectly with the shadows and he passed as just another puff of breeze. The target was tantalisingly close. Targets,he corrected himself. Now there are two.Jennifer Margaret Cameron and Dan Sutherland were standing with one foot firmly planted in the grave.

  An alarm beckoned him to water, screaming for him to appease his body’s need for fluids. It made him hesitate and he recalculated his success quotient, figuring he was operating at a bleak 72 percent of optimum physical capacity. Only water and rest could rectify the problem.

  Regardless, he pressed on, deciding upon a 20 percent safety margin. Fear wasn’t about to degrade his self-evaluation and he knewhe could take Dan out if he could just surprise him. He calculated the best approach to his targets was via a roof-access hatch at the front. He would position himself above the living room, step onto the in
sulation batts, fall through the jip-rock ceiling in a perfect firing position, and shoot them all before they understood that death was raining from above. The house plans he’d retrieved from the Tweed Shire Council’s database depicted meagre security for Jennifer Cameron’s building and he’d previously stored the necessary information to thwart such a primitive alarm.

  He approached on light feet, carefully selecting every step and nimbly avoiding the pitfalls that less experienced hunters would fail to discern.

  Standing in front of the security screen, he eyed the electronic lock and inwardly laughed at how easy it was going to be. From deep within the wraith-like folds of his coat, he withdrew a screwdriver set and multi-charge Pulse Stick. With practiced precision, he prised the cover off the lock and selected a 12-volt pulse at 0.5 amps, giving the Pulse Stick a total power of 6 watts. He carefully applied the pencil-like device to the switching circuit and pulled the trigger, gratified to see the ‘armed’ LED flicker out.

  An evil grin licked the Raven’s face when he snuck inside, splendidly pleased with his progress.

  Death doesn’t knock.

  *

  “I said I don’t know!” Dan was getting irritated by the barrage of questions, especially now that time had run out.

  “A criminal maybe?” Samantha offered helpfully.

  Dan shook his head. “No, we’d be signing the death warrant of anybody we mention – that is if he falls for it.”

  Jen’s mind traced through the list of possibilities. How do we get rid of him?She couldn’t think of anything other than Dan’s proposal. But who’s so evil I’d want to set a crazed cyborg on them?

  “Are you sure it’ll look authentic coming from Michele Roche’s account?”

  Cookie nodded, bristling at having his work questioned. “Yes. It’ll appear to originate from her computer. It will have an unusual time-stamp.” He checked his watch and added, “Unless she usually gets to work at six in the morning. But we can’t do anything about that. It’ll have all the correct encoding and encryption applied, we are writing this from inside the UniForce network, remember?”

  “Good.” Dan’s left calf cramped from the tension. “Look in her address book for a contact called ‘the Raven’.”

  Cookie swivelled in his chair to face the computer again, his breathing rapid and shallow. “Okay, got it. Just give me the command and this’ll shoot strait to the Raven.”

  “Now if we could just finishthe message…” Jen piped in, cringing at her pessimistic sarcasm.

  The silence in the room was so profound it seemed to stretch to infinity, and beyond.

  “Ah.” Dan snapped his fingers. “I have an idea.”

  “Fire away, man. My fingers are at your service.”

  “Write: It’s worth a million Credits if you accept the assignment immediately.” Dan felt an ill-ease crawl across his skin. He knew the Raven was close. And he’s not coming through the balcony.He raised his Colt, nerves wound tight enough to snap at anything. And now for the target…“The order has been warranted for…” He went to the keyboard and typed the name in himself – index finger after index finger – before quickly clicking the icon marked ‘send’.

  Jen inhaled sharply. “No…”

  *

  The Raven flinched when the message arrived, it was ill timed and he nearly ignored it until after the swoop. But it was marked with the highest priority and it came straight from the bounty co-ordinator so he quietly placed his foot back on the supporting beam. Another two seconds and he’d have placed a black boot firmly through the ceiling and gone crashing into Jennifer Cameron’s living room.

  A scowl of irritation ploughed across his usually expressionless face, but it evaporated when he read the message. Greed wasn’t something he allowed to seep into his mind. And today was no exception, but he did want the money, he needed it. The Raven licked his dry lips with a dry tongue, his viscous saliva only chapping them more. It was tempting to accept. One million Credits was more than enough to cover the upgrade he so desperately desired. Upgrades for cyborgs weren’t easy to get, being illegal. It was a lengthy procedure even though it no longer required open-skull surgery. He had to place his head in a vice and wait while strong magnets and electrical currents rearranged the putty-like molecules in his computer. Engineers had specifically designed cyborg computers for those types of upgrades. There were no wires or silicon in the core of his computer; it was PermaGel, the same substance that made the nano-net possible. As computer scientists and engineers made advances in computer architecture, they could rewire the nano-circuits in the Raven’s mind to keep pace with technology. They would plunge a needle into his temple and inject a solution to liquidify a portion of his computer, readying it for something more sophisticated, more erudite. But the torturous upgrade was a small price to pay for the resulting boost in performance. Already massively multi-parallelled, in many ways it resembled an accurate version of the human brain, encapsulating the best technology that sprung from the neuron-net experiments with the leaps and bounds made in super-pipelining. It made the earlier models pale by comparison. He’d had two upgrades since his becoming and each had cost a fortune. Global Integrated Systems were secretly sponsoring the back-alley operator that did the upgrades, but they couldn’t openly advertise for clientele because of the backlash in public support – people didn’t want cyborgs to access upgrade resources.

  He wanted that upgrade, and Roche’s offer would make it possible. A glimmer of suspicion crossed his mind at the time the message had been sent, but he meticulously scanned the credentials and they all checked out. The message even fit her pattern of sloppy English, which he confirmed by running a quick scan through her previous e-mails. It’s her all right. He shrugged. If she wants to work early then that’s her prerogative.He slunk out of the roof-space, taking the demands of the message seriously. ‘Immediately’ meant he shouldn’t create more corpses before tackling the new assignment. So, Jennifer Margaret Cameron, today is your lucky day. And as for you, Mr Sutherland, I’ll be back for you.

  *

  “Dude!” Cookie looked aghast. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

  “That wasn’t a good idea,” Samantha admitted.

  “No,” Jen agreed. “You should’ve chosen someone else. Anybody else.”

  Dan didn’t think so, though he would find it difficult to convince them of his viewpoint. The itchy feeling that portended bad things had passed, leaving him to believe he’d averted an imminent strike. “That’s the only person he definitely won’tkill. He’ll likely do one of two things: verify the offer’s correctness, or apprehend him alive. The Raven might be determined, but he’s not stupid.” At least I hope he’s not.

  All three looked at him with dubious expressions.

  “Trust me, will you?” He appealed to Jen.

  She nodded, but hesitantly. “Okay, I just hope you know what you’re doing. You should’ve told us before doing something like that; we deserve veto rights when it impacts us directly.”

  “Okay, in future I will.” Inwardly, given the chance, he doubted he would have done anything differently. He alone knew just how horrifyingly close the Raven had come, and while he felt sure of his ability to deal with the threat, he didn’t know how much of his confidence he should attribute to Zyclone.

  The computer beeped, snaring Cookie’s attention. He returned to jabbing the keyboard.

  “Can you erase every indication that our message was ever written?”

  Cookie cocked his head to one side. “Every?” He wasn’t sure anybody but the system administrator could do that. “I’ll give it a shot. I can erase the obvious, but if they have a backup log, and maybe a backup-backup in an obscure location, I might overlook it.”

  Dan nodded, accepting it on face value. “Either way, we’ve bought ourselves a few hours at most. We have to get out of here, now.”

  “Where do you propose we go?” Jen asked, mentally cataloguing the things she’d want to take in prep
aration for a new beginning.

  “We’ll go to my place until we can find more permanent accommodation for you.” Dan again peeked out the balcony window;it was the only outward sign that he was still nervous with the Raven in the vicinity. He knew the cyborg had probably portaled to America by now, but his presence lingered. “Get your stuff.” Dan motioned with his head. “Pack bare essentials only, enough for a couple of days. You’ll want to travel light.”

  Samantha obeyed without further comment, trundling into the master bedroom to pack a duffle bag for herself and another for Cookie. Jen hovered for long enough to smile bravely at the man who was risking his own safety to protect a bunch of criminals. She’d returned to wondering why he was doing so much for them. What’s in it for him?That question continued to pester her while she gathered her personal effects. She also changed clothes and neatly folded the skirt and top that belonged to Dan’s sister. Christine wasn’t it?She placed them on top of her brimming overnight bag. That’s it, she thought, looking sadly around her bedroom. If I’ve forgotten anything, I’ll have to buy it or do without.

  She heard exasperated curses coming from the master bedroom so she dumped her bag in the living room and went to help Samantha. “You need a hand?”

  Samantha’s nerves were fraying and the stress of the evening was showing clearly in her eyes. They looked seconds away from brimming with tears. “No, I’m just fine.” She was fighting with an age-stiffened strap on the duffel bag.

  “Hey, leave that,” Jen said, protectingSamantha from the source of her immediate frustration. She rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder before pulling her into a supportive embrace. Jen was surprised to feel her shiver. “It’s going to be okay,” she cooed, soothingly rubbing her hands up and down Samantha’s back. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jen inhaled deeply, squirming to think of an answer. “I can just feel it. Dan’s a good man,” – more doubt tugged at the cautious part of her mind – “…I think. He’s going to help us settle somewhere new.”