Roo'd

by Joshua Klein

  They nodded at Mil as they entered, Fede following Cass towards the back of the store.

  "You made that bike?" Fede asked.

  "I modded it. The design is good, but when you bore out the pistons and amp up the carburetor you have to put in extra supports and… " she paused, glanced back at Fed.

  "You have to hack it a little" she summarized.

  "Who were those guys?" asked Fed.

  "They let me use their shop" said Cass. "I worked there originally until I started at Greener Pastures, after I came up from California. Just basic chop shop work."

  "You speak Japanese with them?" asked Fed.

  "They're Chinese. They speak Mandarin. Mandarin slang, really - folks around here come from a lot of places, so they drop a lot of weird verbiage in from other places" she said.

  "Where did you learn that? Are you Chinese?" he asked.

  "Swiss" she said without turning. Her voice was flat, a studious neutral. "Swiss French. From Sion." She stopped and turned to look at him. "You know where that is?"

  He'd kept his goggles on after the bike ride, not in small part because he felt nervous about not understanding what the guys at the garage were saying. His buffer had caught her comment, and now he keyed against the text string, chose a visual representation of the data. Suddenly he was staring at a map of Switzerland. "Yeah. About… two hours from Zurich?" No, four hours - his fingers fluttered against the chord in his pocket, saw a swarm of train schedules fly by, an agent resolve an answer. "No, sorry. Two hours twenty-five minutes by train from Zurich. Looks like they're not using the maglev there yet, huh?" Fede smirked.

  She smiled out of one corner of her mouth, turned and continued down the hallway.

  "We marked off part of the dojo for you. It's not very respectful to Sansei" - she jabbed a thumb towards the front of the store - "but he agreed that if we were doing it to fund a full dojo it was worth impinging a little. Just remember to take your shoes off, okay? You don't have to bow."

  She stepped into the Dojo, which was dark, and bent to take off her shoes. Fede was reminded again that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in person. There was something about the way she moved, her long limbs, the arc of her neck, the way she bent her arms. She stood and clapped her hands. A light went on inside a blue bubble out in the far corner of the room. "Shoes" she reminded him over her shoulder, and walked towards the light.

  He slipped out of his canvas converse - black, retro - and followed. The light soon resolved into a one-person camp tent, an OLED panel lashed inside the top of its arced roof. A thick yellow power cord fed from the shadows of the Dojo's edge to under the tent's. An ethernet cable was wrapped neatly around it, secured every couple feet with black electrical tape. It was tidy work, definitely not Tonx's. Cass kneeled and tightened a zip-tie securing the cord to a tent strut before crawling in, her slim figure turning to blue-tinged shadows. A moment later her head appeared.

  "You coming?" she asked.

  Inside the power cord was connecting to a translucent blue chest. The chest was empty other than a UPS (in case of power surges, Fede noted approvingly) and a power strip. One slot in the strip snaked up and out of the chest through a wire-clip mounting in a hole on the back of the chest, connecting to the OLED. The ethernet cable fed into a splitter, one lead feeding the OLED and the other taped against the side of the chest with several feet coiled loosely through the handle. The floor of the dojo was covered in thick soft mats, and as Fede sat back he saw that Cass was sitting on a tightly rolled sleeping bag in brilliant orange cameo.

  "Thought of everything" he said.

  "The cable's connected to the main server rack in Tonx's room" Cass said. "It's limited, but Tonx said you'd hack into it easy enough. I try to keep things neat around here, despite Tonx's best efforts."

  They sat quietly for a moment. Fede pushed his bag up next to the chest, looked around his new blue bubble.

  "Why do you like it dark?" Cass asked.

  "What?"

  "Tonx said you'd like the rest of the Dojo to be dark. Said that's how you liked to program. How come?"

  Fede thought a moment. "It helps me see what I'm doing" he said. "When I program, it's like I'm seeing the shape of the code, of the program. It's easier to do when I can't see anything else."

  Cass nodded, smiled slightly. Fede wondered if she thought he was crazy.

  "He thinks you're pretty good" she said. Her eyes reflected the glow of the OLED panel overhead. "Are you?"

  "I guess so" he said. "What's it to you?"

  "It's my ass on the line. Maybe Tonx didn't tell you, but this is a big fucking deal. He's pulling in a lot of favors to make this one go through. There's a lot of risk involved. Tonx has every confidence in you, but I don't know you from shit."

  She tilted her head and leaned forward, suddenly threatening, the muscles in her neck tight. "You going to let us down, Feed?"

  Fede didn't say anything. Cass watched him. When he'd been a kid Fed's Dad had held him by the chin for the better part of twenty minutes, yelling at him that he wasn't anything if he couldn't look him in the eye. Fede had almost pissed himself on the cheap carpeting of their second-rate flat, but he had ended up staring his Dad down, looking into where his Dad really was, looking there and not flinching. Fede and Tonx had talked about it later, agreed that it was important somehow. Fede didn't know where his Dad was now, but he knew he could keep his eyes pegged on this girl when it mattered. It mattered now.

  "I'll do it" he said.

  She smiled that same half-smile again. "We'll see. Just don't get us killed, okay?" Cass leaned forward to crawl past Fed.

  "Where is he?" he asked.

  "Who, Tonx? He's out making arrangements. Our man is coming in through Florida and Tonx's asked some colleagues to make the pickup. Tonx's pretty well known in the body-mod scene down there. He's done a lot of work, mostly on the Cuban edgers. They got some real hardcore shit. Tonx helped pioneer a lot of it." She stopped, half-in, half-out of the tent. "You don't know much about him, do you?"

  Fede pulled out some drives and a hub and started cabling them together. Cass was gone a moment later.

  Chapter 12

  Poulpe was feeling spectacular. He sat in the smooth, grey leather seats of SAS's first class front row, the slow, gentle red flashes of LED clusters on the wing tip outside accompanying his heartbeat. A gentle music, most likely Bach, played in his headphones, and a gorgeous young stewardess had just brought him a steaming towelette. It smelled of fresh lemons, and massaged his pores nicely.

  He'd known they'd have agents waiting for him at the airport, known that they couldn't cover all the terminals. The airport had been made a public building and security had been terminated and handed over to the public on the basis of repeated strikes - Parisians were famous for their strikes - and now the security personnel was Joe Everyman. The Charles d'Gaule had taken on the air of Grand Central Station. It was full of people bustling about, studying each other with a removed distance, ignoring each other with the mild paranoia of intense self-interest.

  His sponsor could not have known how things worked here; the intricate micro-politics of black market subsidies and megacorporation buy-ins to the newly publicly held facility made it a rat's nest of legal and illegal possibilities; the routes from the subway outside to the inside of an outbound plane were infinite. Shortly after he'd arrived at the airport's edges he'd located a Nigerian dope-dealer. Part of the cost of his purchase included a fresh passport and a ticket.

  He'd taken his ticket and the little aluminum-foil wrapped plug and gone directly through a service entrance. The Nigerian man had advised him it led to an unused bathroom with a good lock. The drug traffickers had worked a deal with the unions that maintained the airport facilities, and had regular access to "under repair" restrooms and service halls.

  Before he'd left his apartment he had manufactured a very pure mix of methamphetamines and antipsychotic to help control the urge to panic. It had made
him a bit jittery, he thought, and so now felt it worthwhile to make use of the heroin he had bought. He entered the all-green one-piece plastic bathroom, carefully stepping over the blue puddle of cleaning fluid pooling over its drain, and made his preparations. While he was there he carefully washed his hands and inserted the smallest finger of his left hand into his rectum.

  The remains of his work - approximately three ounces of medium separated into twenty-eight distinct, unpatented, and unique viral agents - were sealed in plastic and seated comfortably inside his anus. He had used a woman's prophylactic to mount it there, and was fairly confident that a probe would consider it an enlarged prostate. He smiled as he knelt in the stall with his pants around his ankles. His was a familiar paranoia, a friendly, jovial, I'm-your-mother-here-to-eat-you kind of paranoia, and it was helpful to him. He submitted to it with all the industry he had applied to the last three years of work.

  His dealer was gone when he emerged, which was to be expected. He pulled his suit coat on with a flourish and allowed the aluminum foil to fly from his hand and into an abandoned potted plant arrangement as he did so. It wasn't a safe thing to do, but he was feeling flashy - most likely an aftereffect of the amphetamine mix, he decided.

  Ten minutes later he had entered his terminal through the service entrance the Nigerian had sold him access to and was beginning to smile uncontrollably. A part of him, a sensible part, felt that perhaps he had been overgenerous with the Nigerian's products. Several times he became dizzy and had to check again to assure himself that he was in the right terminal.

  He blinked, and the flight was boarding. Blinked again, and was onboard. He'd upgraded himself, it seemed. He was pleased. He awoke some small time later, on the down slope of his buzz, very pleasantly surprised indeed to find himself both alive and experiencing the best part of his high in such lovely surroundings.

  He ordered a Bordeaux, noted that it was excellent.

  Some time later he arrived in Florida and was the first one out of the plane. The translucent panels in the boarding ramp's walls revealed a drizzly morning, dim grey light that must surely become hot and sticky later in the day. Poulpe resolved to do some shopping before allowing his contact's men to abscond him; thermoplast beige was certainly unsuitable for this climate.

  Poulpe wandered out of the ramp and down the aisle, noting with amusement the bright OLED panels flashing advertising across every available surface, the endless parade of American product shipped straight from China. He was pleased to see more Spanish than English, allowed his eye to accumulate information about the local styles. The third store he passed contained a number of quite nice Armani knock-offs, probably made locally. He picked out a pair of oversized cotton trousers in wheat color, matched it with a coat in exaggerated Cuban style, and waited patiently while the store owner scanned him for a shirt to match. He tried on the trousers while the shirt was spun up in the back, pleased with their fit and the way they breathed.

  A gentle knock on the door accompanied a flash of his shirt through the plastic panel. He hummed a tune and opened the door a crack, reached out to accept the shirt.

  He saw the black stub before it hit his hand, recognized the mean silvery tabs sticking out of each side before it dumped several thousand volts through his nervous system. His body convulsed, threw him back against the rear of the stall, made all the hairs across his pale bare torso fly upwards in angry arcs. The door was open before he landed, a short, ugly man in a hunting vest and cement-colored pants pulling his body over and plastering his hands flat against each other. Something cold and sticky enfolded his fingers before the man pulled him to his feet by his hair. Poulpe's eyes watered with pain, struggling to get his breath back, his chest sick and twitching with residual endomuscular electricity. He staggered against the side of the stall and a strong hand grabbed his neck, pulled a T-shirt over his head. He noticed another man visible through the doorway of the stall, this one speaking calmly through a head-mounted mic tucked over his ear. He was tanned and hard, this man, and as his lips moved his calm grey eyes tracked his, watching him.

  The first man was padding through Poulpe's pockets, sifting through his bag in a swift and orderly fashion. Poulpe began to babble; "I can pay you. Whatever they've offered you, let me assure you… "

  He stopped as the man stood up and said something short in a guttural tongue. It was clear he either didn't understand Poulpe or didn't care to, and to prove the point he slapped a strip of duct-tape hard over Poulpe's mouth. Poulpe felt his jacket pull over his shoulders as he stared in disbelief at the man across the hall, stared into the cold grey eyes. "De Boers" the man in the vest had said. Bounty hunters from Africa, disenfranchised mountain people who had modeled themselves after the Yakuza clans of Japan. They spoke only their own tongue and were known for never rescinding on their contracts. They were not kind people.

  Poulpe's legs began to tremble.

  Chapter 13

  Despite the circumstances Fed's new home was good as gold. After he'd finished taping together a stack of drives and arranged them in the case he'd rolled out the bag and plugged in. The OLED overhead had a good wide viewing angle, so he could see it pretty much anywhere from the inside of the tent, and after a few minutes of playing with it he'd set it up as a light. It cycled through some color patterns he'd pulled from an old UCLA psych lab, stuff designed to enhance productivity and encourage calm thinking. A short while later he found that Tonx had given him root on the cluster in his room, and that the cluster was heavy; his brother had scored some powerful machines. Fede grinned in the dim light of the tent, appreciating both that Tonx trusted him enough to let him have complete Admin privileges and that the boxes he was going to play with were respectably badass. He set up some background daemons and routed their output to run along the edge of the OLED. They would keep him informed of the cluster's resources and monitor other users, if any. Then he synced his goggles and chord to the OLED and set his gogs for medium opacity. Now when he looked at his workspace, floating over his field of vision, the OLED sat behind it, slowly pulsing and cycling through the color tests. His status charts were lined up neat, his buffers clear, ready to go. He set up a few compile jobs and keyed in a script to let him drop them onto the OLED instead of in his immediate vision, and went to work.

  His first task was homework. He'd already sketched out what he thought he wanted the virus's executable to look like, but he didn't know nearly enough about handling data sets of that size. A few search agents later he found that the National University of Laos was getting a lot of rep for their statistical analysis approach to genome-related data processing. Most first-world corporations were ignoring the actual number crunching in favor of predictive programming and fancy guesswork using chaos theory and quantum computing, but Laos was sufficiently backwards to be breaking new ground on the topic. Fortunately most of their scientists were from L.A., so he didn't have to worry about running the coursework and research papers through a translator. It was tough work, though; the math was way over his head and he had to cross-reference the pertinent parts of undergrad courses from other universities for most of the afternoon to get up to speed.

  Fortunately Universities were set up as huge reference corpuses. Since the work Laos was doing was based on fairly common math (albeit math deemed impractical for use due to the computational power required) Fede was able to find a bunch of FAQs and tutorials arranged by relevance to the learning methods he liked to use. They were highlighted in order so he could jump back to the example problems illustrated in the coursework. Fede knew it was incomplete knowledge at best, but it meant he could transfer it into code, which was the problem at hand. It was a delicate balance - if you ignored too much you were bound to misapply the formula and not know it, and if you didn't skim over enough you could spend the rest of your life researching. But figuring out what was important and how to apply it was what Fede did. It was what he was good at.

  Six hours later Fed's eyes were burning and his back
was sore, but he had the basis of the Laotian formulas he'd need. He'd completed the fifteen sample sets used in their quarterly exams and walked through at least eight introductory tutorials. He flipped up his goggles and rubbed his eyes, keyed off the OLED and crawled out of the tent.

  It was quiet, the only sound the gentle hum of the air intake ducts high in the walls overhead. Fede stretched into empty space, reaching for the ceiling and smiling. He bent and reached for his feet, wiggled his toes and his fingers, crawled back into the tent. He tore a single-serving sack of juice from its foil string and ripped open a nutraceutical bar. Old fashioned, yoghurt-coated. He pulled a stack of shirts out from his bag and piled them up under his lower back, flipped his gogs back down and went to work.

  The next part of the problem was figuring out how to build the actual virus itself. The D3$Troy virus author had used the libraries from the Nokia picture frames to protest the draconian licensing scheme they were using. While it was certainly funny to morph pictures of people's grandkids into penises tattooed with the name "Nokia", the virus wasn't quite broad enough in scope for Fed's purposes. He knew the libraries the D3$Troy virus had used could effect the contents of the program, but figuring out how to use them to drop a trojaned payload onto dozens of different platforms was something else. He had a good idea for how to incorporate the Laotian algorithms into code, and also how to redirect the calls for coordinating the recombinant matching, but not how to get the code to execute and propagate.