Anarchy- Another Burroughs Rice Mission

by Theo Cage

  “We’ll find you some Meclizine. You’ll be fine.” Meclizine was a powerful anti-nausea drug Hunter used when he had to fly.

  Grace gave him that look. Go ahead, I’m listening, but no bullshit.

  “I’ve found this program that turns the Internet into a physical world. I can walk there, run, jump. It’s incredible.”

  Grace smiled for the first time. Despite the voice synthesis, she could hear the joy in his voice. She hadn’t seen him this excited since they mounted an automatic weapon to his tracker frame in the Congolese jungle.

  “With the help of the program and the QUEST computer, I’ve tracked down all kinds of clues. I know where the satellite signal came from that caused Kennedy’s Osprey to leap over the guardrail.”

  “Who was it?” she asked, sitting up.

  “The hacking is coming from a remote city in Northern China. It has no name—”

  “Has no name?”

  “Yes. It’s what they call a ghost city. I’ll explain later. But here’s the weird part, the reason I asked you to close the door. I was worried Britt might walk by.”

  “Britt? Did something happen to Rice?”

  “No. That’s not it. When no matches came back from my search on Rice’s photograph or his ID, credit cards etc, I thought I’d try other relevant search data.”

  “Like what?” Grace asked.

  “He used to use fake passports when he was with the CIA. I ran those. No hits. I looked for former friends and other agents he’d worked with. Maybe one of them was helping him out or he used their names at some point.”

  Grace waited patiently, still holding on to the bulky tablet where she had received his request.

  “That’s why I tried Britt,” he said.

  “I don’t—”

  “Hey, I don’t know what made me include her. But I got a match. Not data, but an image.”

  “A video?”

  “No, a sonogram.”

  Grace knotted her forehead. “An ultrasound? How?”

  “Her personal files on our company server included an ultrasound scan she took during the second trimester. The image was in the database, so I just included it in the overall search. To be honest, I don’t even think I saw it at first. Ultrasound images are hard to read. Just an indistinguishable mush of light and dark to me, so I didn’t think it meant much. But a matching ultrasound appeared on a diagnostic screen that was sent by email attachment to a medical facility in China.”

  “China? Why would that happen?”

  “I checked. Hospitals in Phoenix do not send medical imaging to other countries for examination or analysis.”

  “How about a cloud? Maybe it was a backup for the hospital?” asked Grace.

  “That’s possible. But it would be encrypted if it was personal information. Which an ultrasound is. But there’s something else. The medical facility where I found the match in China was located in a prison. A notorious hellhole called Quinjang. Built in the fifties to hold and re-educate political enemies of the state.”

  Grace tapped her fingertips on the tablet, her jaw tightening. “You think they’re holding Rice there?” she asked, looking like she was ready to leap across the table.

  Hunter’s prosthetic hand gripped and released. “I can’t find a record of prisoner names. I can’t be certain.”

  “Hunter, why the hell would a prison have a copy of Britt’s ultrasound?”

  “Exactly,” said Hunter.

  山羊

  G O A T

  Ghost City

  ZERZY CALLED AN IMPROMPTU MEETING. The three of them sat around a small round table in an adjacent dining room they rarely used. Each member had a sealed cup of Meiji honey yogurt in front of them: lunch. Wey had already opened his and was scooping the sweet goop out with two fingers. Zerzy made a face.

  “People are pissed with the F35 hack,” she announced. Toshi crossed his arms.

  “You told them we did that?” he asked.

  “They’re not stupid. They figured it out.”

  “Because it was so goat?”

  “What’s goat?” she asked.

  “G-O-A-T. Greatest of all time, dude.”

  “No, not because it was goat. Because it was numb as a hake. Did you eat lead paint chips as a kid?”

  “No one else could have pulled that off.”

  “It helped that the control circuits in the planes computers were baked by Lutu so you could hip hop right into the backdoor of a freaking fighter jet.”

  “Still—”

  “No more flossing,” she barked. Flossing was hacker talk for showing off. The two guys said nothing, but they didn’t push back so she figured they got the point.

  “No more military targets. Too dangerous and makes too many waves.”

  “What’s the fun in that?” barked Wey. “We’ve got fake chipsets in every ship and plane and missile in the freakin’ free world and we can’t use ‘em?”

  “The boss want us to take down the stock markets in the US,” Zerzy answered, reading the ingredients on the yogurt cup, which was impossible, since they were written in Mandarin. Wey knew she was trying to figure out the calories. Toshi shrugged to show he was bored. Then he sat up straight and put his elbows on the wobbly table.

  “Just for an hour or two? Like the F35, run a test?”

  “No,” answered Zerzy. Wey noisily sucked yogurt off his fingers, making Toshi vibrate in disgust. “Longer”

  “How long do we need to shut down their stock market to make them feel the pain?” Zerzy asked.

  “Three days,” grunted Wey.

  “Why?”

  “One day just means an accidental network problem or a software upgrade. No one will freak out. Day two, everyone will start to worry. Day three is the apocalypse. They’ll be calling in the Marines.”

  “Done,” barked the blond.

  “Okay!”

  “But there’s one other problem: Godzilla.”

  Wey stopped sucking on the yogurt and peered over at Toshi. “No more VR,” he said. “Let’s do this old-fash. Fingers on the keyboard.”

  Toshi slapped the tabletop. “You don’t understand, girl. I’ve been keeping an eye on what’s been going down on the Net and that Godzilla is still out there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just because you can’t see the monster doesn’t mean the monster ain’t seeing you. He’s still out there. He’s waiting for us. The second you log on, he’ll be after you like a great white on chum.”

  “Then we’ll have to work on a counterattack.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Ten. Twelve hours max.”

  “Let me know when you’re done.”

  “I’m also going to find out who the hell Godzilla is! Then we can go wicked on his ass. Toss him around the room. See if he likes that.”

  Wey pointed at Toshi’s yogurt. “You going to eat that?” Toshi tossed the cup at him, then poked his index finger in Wey’s high forehead, like a gun barrel.

  “But go find a spoon, dickhead. All that slurping is about to make me hurl.”

  俘虏

  P R I S O N E R

  COLONEL TONG XI STOOD beside the black Range Rover, his driver patiently waiting behind the wheel. He cursed and slapped the roof of the SUV, making the new private jump in his seat. Incompetence. Always some minor pawn, some low life, uncommitted, distracted by a television screen or the next cheap cigarette.

  That’s why Tong was here, in the dead of the night, collecting prisoners that had already been arrested once before. A pathetic waste of time. And who slinks out with the rapists and the malingers and brain-dead student protestors? The American. The prize catch, of course. Everyone was awake now. Every party leader, every General, every General’s wife. You could almost hear them, mewling away like feral cats under a full moon.

  Tong slammed the roof deck again. His men were working the quadrants, checking the boxes. Wandering through rice paddies all night long under a partial
moon was for losers. They had re-captured one hundred and twenty-two. Who knew how many were left to drag back to their stinking cells? The warden should know, but the computers were down. He was likely sitting in the dark sliding beads around on his abacus. Caveman.

  They told him: find the American agent before dawn or you will regret your failure for years. His failure? He didn’t let prisoners maintain a slap dash electrical system in a seventy-year old facility.

  The warden should be out here, slopping through the marsh, being gnawed on by mosquitos.

  How far could the American go on foot? In a few hours, maybe ten kilos maximum. There were two villages within that perimeter. His soldiers had gone through both in detail. No one had seen anything of a tall white male in prison dress. He must be hiding in the corn fields, they said.

  Tong checked with the three platoons. One was circling a harvested field to the north.

  “Be careful. He is in the corn,” yelled Tong. Damn them. Find the man. The other prisoners be damned. Where can he go? No one would harbor dissidents. They know it would not be good for them. If the authorities find out their dereliction of duty to the state, which they surely will, their names go on a special list and when the new homes are ready for their families, they are passed by. It’s that simple. They become lost souls.

  If his soldiers didn’t find the US spy by morning, Tong would expand the perimeter. More troops will be trucked in from Beijing. As many as are needed.

  Important people want the American spy found. People at the very top. That means it will only be a matter of time.

  空手道

  K A R A T E

  WEY WAS STRUGGLING with building a security system robust enough to handle Godzilla. That’s what they were calling the team of hackers who had stormed into their lair and blew up their network.

  Zerzy wanted them to build a cyber weapon that wouldn’t leave any tracks behind that could be followed by military hacker teams. Actually, that was relatively easy today. What they really needed was an impenetrable wall to keep Godzilla out. Godzilla knew where they were; presumably he knew who they were. That gave Toshi the flop sweats. He was pretty sure that the minute they started their campaign on the US stock markets, Godzilla would show up. And sure, they could e-bomb the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ, but wouldn’t it be better if they could actually see the enemy coming, whoever that might be, instead of cringing like rabbits waiting for the big bad wolf.

  That’s what most modern Internet incursions were. You didn’t see a response from the site you were attacking until it was too late. There was too much fog of war. Toshi had built Wasteland so he would get a heads up. The AI in the program made predictions based on web traffic and activity and was relatively good at evaluating threats before they struck. That’s why they could see Godzilla coming before he pounced.

  If Zerzy wanted perfect security, they needed to know what was coming. She wasn’t thinking ahead. Toshi was convinced she was too emotional, too reactive. He was the strategist in the room.

  Toshi went into one of the back bedrooms, stripped out of his sweats and climbed into the haptic suit and grabbed a VR headset. He was plugged in and logged on before she returned from one of her many bathroom breaks.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled.

  Toshi ignored her; he was adjusting the diopter settings on his headset. He moved his hand through the air, modifying menu settings, giving her the finger at the same time. If she wanted to fight, he was ready. He had held back so far. He had never neck chopped a girl, but he would do it this time. All those karate classes he took as a kid taught him to not be afraid of bullies. Not that he had ever engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a grown woman, an opponent with breasts and hips and dark brown eyes—DAMN! He was getting an erection just thinking about wrestling with her. Not something he wanted everyone to see when wearing a tight latex suit over no clothing.

  “I need to see what Godzilla has done to my code,” he answered, noticing it sounded like whining.

  “You are risking this mission—”

  “No, I’m not. Those hackers are on to us already. We need to see what they can do so we can take them out.”

  “Are you a little excited about your meeting with Godzilla,” she joked. Toshi couldn’t see her face but he knew why she was smiling, maybe pointing out his obvious arousal. He tried to think of something else, which only made matters worse.

  “You want to see something? Turn on the big screen,” he yelled, surprise in his voice. Toshi was gob smacked.

  The programmers who had hacked Wasteland had upped the resolution on the imagery. Everything was more real, more colorful, more detailed. He could see individual grains of sand. He could pick up the granules, amazed by how they poured through his fingers, feeling their weight and grittiness in the palms of his hands. The sky was no longer a uniform blue: there were masses of cumulous clouds and they were drifting across the sun, changing the shadows on the dunes.

  He turned, scanning the horizon. He was standing outside their apartment building, copies upon copies fading off into the distance. The program was fully integrated with someone’s mapping system, maybe the Chinese military’s, because Google had no access in this country. How did they get satellite mapping data from the Chinese government?

  “You see the mapping?” he shouted. He heard no answer. He knew why. Wey and Zerzy were just as punched in the gut as him. When he looked down at the ground and concentrated, the sand became semi-transparent and he could see pipes underground, wires, cables sewage conduit. The wires and cables were coded: red for electrical, green for fiber; blue for phone routers and hubs were visible. All infrastructure was mapped out.

  Toshi looked up at the sky. A light trace appeared, then formed a web of lines. One layer was clearly flight paths—an icon of a passenger jet was approaching from the east, tracking along one of the spider threads. Another layer indicated the path of satellites as they passed over or hung in stationary orbit.

  By pushing up with his hands, Toshi’s perspective changed. He rose up, ascended over the apartment block, stared down at the virgin city. New information appeared: roads and streets, stores, a gas station, a distant military vehicle highlighted off near the edge of the city; small points of light indicating humans in motion. Toshi touched one of the points and a small screen unfolded, a video stream from a nearby security camera showing a soldier slumped against a brick wall, smoking a cigarette, looking bored.

  Is this what the government has on us, he thought? Every person, every vehicle, every cell call, every email—all available at the tips of our fingers?

  Toshi flew higher, then raced over the city. He wished it were populated. He wondered what he could hear, what he could see. Then a thought struck him. He swung his arms around and gestured back in the direction of their apartment. He hovered above the roof, then lowered himself down the side of the building. He counted the floors. The sixth. Wey’s idea—the number was significant to him in some way. Why not the second or the third floor? Toshi had argued. Wey just gave him that look, his poker face, emotionless.

  Toshi looked in the 6th floor window. Besides seeing through the blinds, which surprised him, he studied three bodies. The Three Sopranos. Not hidden. As visible as the giant Christmas tree in front of the Rockefeller Center in New York City in December.

  Zerzy had a tiny speech bubble suspended above her. Toshi clicked on the bubble with his right hand. Text unfolded.

  Maralenka Zerkolazinski.

  Age: 16

  Born: Moscow, Russia

  Occupation: Unknown, no work record

  Father: Vladimir Zerkolazinski; Russian Colonel

  Mother: Mary Durban, British

  Criminal record: None

  There was more. Details on her education, marks in University, places she’d lived, names of acquaintances.

  Zerzy shouted. “Shit!” She was reading the details on their big screen monitor, as surprised as Toshi was.

&nbs
p; Toshi wanted to comment but he imagined now that there was video and sound gathering going on everywhere. Even in their swept apartment, cleared by gear heads from Lutu, Asian techies in black jeans and hoodies who swarmed over their living space for hours.

  “Wey! What do you think about our security now?” he asked.

  “Can anyone see this? Is this your program or Godzilla’s hack? How do we know?”

  Toshi didn’t. He wrote the original program. Wasteland used readily available information off the Internet: vanilla stuff anyone could get, dark web and even deep roasted. The program was too fast, the resolution was too good, there was too much information available. Who was this Godzilla, anyway?

  Before he could unplug, Toshi felt the buildings shake around him. A virtual earthquake.

  Even his partners noticed the vibration on the screen, heard the low rumble.

  “What was that?” asked Zerzy.

  Toshi scanned the horizon. He was expecting Godzilla, ripping through the buildings, stomping houses into rubble. He could see nothing unusual. Even interesting.

  The tremor rolled over the landscape again. The tall buildings beneath him shook, bits of brick and stone breaking away and falling into the streets.

  This wasn’t real, Toshi kept telling himself. This is just a virtual invention. Someone was playing with his head, creating a disaster movie just for him.

  “It’s the whale,” hissed Zerzy, as if naming the thing too loudly would alert the force that was roiling the landscape.

  “It’s nothing—” started Toshi.

  “It’s not nothing. The whole Internet is—breaking. Signals are spiking, then falling. Maybe for only a few seconds but there are errors everywhere. Then everything is fine. Then it isn’t.”

  “How are they doing that?” asked Wey.

  Toshi had the video on his helmet blink out, then flash back on, the image breaking up like the picture on an old-fashioned television set. He didn't know how this could happen, how he might attempt to duplicate the experience, or how much sheer computing power would be required to duplicate a seismic event of this magnitude. To break the whole freaking Internet.