Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  And yet, as they drove along the freeway past the city, and Bobbi watched the Waters district rise like a glittering palatial complex from the New City’s neon heart, it seemed to her that history’s old patterns had given rise to something new and empty. She thought about how plastic the world had seemed to her, just after having met with Freida for the first time, how the towers they now passed appeared more like malevolent giants than mere structures. Humanity was a bad animal, she already knew – but there was Wonderland now, a whole goddamned parallel nation of black market laboratories and vice, built to bring out the worst in the species. And worse still, there was a goddamned corporation behind it. Bobbi had heard once that if you applied psychological standards to the corporation as an individual, as a person which corporations were still legally considered as being, they’d rack up as the worst of psychopaths every time. She’d never given that much credit, being a theory from over a hundred years ago, but it sure as hell seemed right on the bead to her now.

  Put psychopaths in charge of the world, and you get a world that’s eventually ruled by psychopathic behavior.

  And there she was, sipping a Coke in a society possibly dominated not just by corporate concerns, but possibly by a single corporate master in the most mustache-twirling way possible. Thinking like that made Bobbi’s head hurt – she couldn’t imagine how Tom must have felt, meditating on it the way he did. Jesus, it was no wonder that he was so goddamned grim; it had certainly sobered her up.

  She was roused from these deep, depressing thoughts by Scalli, who she realized was watching her from the rearview as they stopped at a traffic light. “Hey,” she said, looking up into the reflection of his large black eyes. “You look like you’re all kinds of serious.”

  “Speak for yourself, girl,” he said, his heavy brows arching. “You been looking out the window like you got the world on your shoulders since we left your man Pierre’s.”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking down at herself. “I guess I have been.”

  Scalli’s eyes turned back to the road, watching a line of pedestrians as they marched across the crosswalk. “More bad news about your boy?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, “just something about him. Pierre, I mean.” Bobbi pursed her lips. “Scalli? Do you think the world’s fucked?”

  He snorted. “You gotta ask?”

  “No, I’m serious.” Bobbi paused to take another sip; the light turned green and Scalli picked up speed again. “You ever think that we were kinda done for?”

  Scalli was quiet for a moment as he pulled the car beyond the light and onto the on-ramp toward the highway that led to the shore; in the distance the Field could be seen, and beyond its legion of gray warehouses the Temple loomed beyond. “I don’t know,” he finally said once they were on their way again. “I guess that you could say that at any time in history. If you’re asking me if I think we’re going to destroy ourselves? No. If we didn’t do it with nukes and we didn’t do it during the Eurowar, I don’t think we’re gonna. I’d like to think we’ve outgrown the concept of Apocalypse.”

  “Huh.” Bobbi wrinkled her nose and looked back out the window. “But there are fates worse than getting blown the fuck up.”

  He gave a bark of a laugh. “Spoken like a true child of the modern age,” he said as he muscled the car through traffic. “What do you think, girl? You seem to have an opinion on the subject.”

  Bobbi sighed and shook her head. Lunatics running the asylum, indeed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Tom always had a pretty dim view of people in general. I didn’t used to, but … ”

  “But your opinion’s changed since you’ve been with him.”

  “Pretty much.” Bobbi looked back to find him frowning at the road ahead of him. “It’s not because he’s gone, either. Just that … I’ve seen things, being with him.” Dead little girls, pale monsters tearing people apart. Sledgehammered reporters. Blood everywhere. “Changed my way of thinking I guess.”

  “Maybe you should tell me about what you’ve seen, then.”

  “Maybe.” Bobbi heaved another sigh. Moments like these made her feel about a million years old. “I guess I need to see how things are gonna go, Scalli. Gotta find out what Pierre has to say about Cagliostro and that other girl.”

  “Mmmm.” He shook his head, though the meaning of this gesture was vague to her. They drove on in silence.

  Bobbi let her dark thoughts settle until the two of them got back. When she arrived at the Temple she found Sandy tending bar and the nighttime crowd in full effect – and, since Scalli wasn’t there to dictate the musical selections, there was actually some modern tunes on the sound system. Aisha Nann was thumping out of the speakers from on high, Bobbi’s favorite hypno-jazz artist. She let the music enfold her like a warm bath. Home again, home again, and even though it had been made from the works of a dead man she felt all the better for it.

  She went straight upstairs and dropped into the chair behind her desk. Instantly the computer sprang to life, windows of data appearing everywhere. The contents of her mailbox manifested right in front of her, filled to the brim with the usual messages. Bills and invoices. Nothing from Freida or Pierre, though honestly she didn’t expect anything from the latter – but then Bobbi recalled her new comrade’s face when she went through Stadil’s archive, and sighed. Poor thing, she thought. I hope she’s doing all right.

  You mean you hope she hasn’t run off and left you, said a much smaller voice from the far back of her head, or gone off to wave this information at the Bureau and get you all shot in the face. Well, she couldn’t argue with that, but she still hoped that Freida was okay.

  Bobbi opened a new mail window and drafted a message, addressing it to the root account Freida’s slow-ass server. < Hey, girl, > she wrote, < checking up to see if you’re all right. Did you find that thing that you were looking for? Call me. > With that done, there was nothing else to do but get a drink and relax – or possibly do a lot more philosophizing, considering the roads that her mind had been traveling of late. But the dark thoughts didn’t come straight away; she had sat there for a solid hour behind Stadil’s desk, sipping Suntory and listening to the musical feed from downstairs, until the Worldbusters came on playing ‘The Other’. The words came coiling out of the speakers, Johnny Morley’s gruff, spoken-word lament laid over a slow pulsing beat:

  Now she won’t call my phone

  And she won’t be my lover

  Yeah, it’s a cold, black day

  ‘Cause she’s down with the Other

  Bobbi sighed, suddenly awash in nostalgia. She loved this song; it wasn’t very old, but it felt as if she had been listening to it for ages. She leaned way back in her chair, her bare feet up on the desk and her toenails winking purple at her. Her glass was balanced on her chest, her hands folded over her stomach. The case – she’d begun to think of it as one, which surprised her – began to creep back into her mind. So Freida was off finding out whatever the fuck she was looking for, and Pierre was digging up shit on Cagliostro and Redeye. Redeye … Bobbi thought of the girl again with her violent eye, how she had such a militant hate on for Genefex. Blowing up their shit and living to tell about it seemed a pretty radical little operation to have, Bobbi thought.

  And you know I’d praise the day

  When she breaks her cover

  But they never wanna go

  When they’re down with the Other

  Bobbi took a deep breath and let it out again, the glass rising and falling. She had always thought that the song was about someone’s girl that ran off with some other person. These days, though, she wondered it if it was something else. Like the way she felt, aware of strangeness lurking behind the world. Mysteries … so many of them. It was easy to get obsessed. Tom had been. She was certainly getting there herself. Maybe that girl had just gotten sucked in.

  But there was no point in brooding on it tonight. Bobbi got up and finished off her whiskey, letting it sizzle down her throat as she stretche
d. The floating warmth that spread through her made it easy for her to sleep, and this time dreams did not bother her.

  The next day Bobbi was roused by the insistent chiming of the mailbox alarm that she’d set the night before. She rose from her bed with a grunt and eyed the clock as she walked into the office, saw that it was eleven thirty in the morning, and wondered what evil spirits had conspired to summon her.

  The spirit in question, it turned out, was in fact Freida. < Call me, > the message read, and a number with a German country code followed. This didn’t alarm Bobbi, of course; hack artists used pirated numbers all of the time. That didn’t keep her from running a traceprog first, but finding that it eventually came straight back into the city, she gave it a shot.

  “Hey,” Freida said upon answering the call; her voice was a little garbled thanks to the number of different stops leading back to her. “How’s it going?”

  “All right,” said Bobbi. “Lots going on, you know. How are you feeling?”

  “More than a little torqued,” Freida said, “though much better than I was. After seeing all that shit, I had to go get smashed at home.”

  Bobbi snorted. “Yeah,” she said, “I know how that goes. Never really drank whiskey until after I met up with Tom.”

  Now it was Freida’s turn to snort. “Well, at least it wasn’t him that led you to drink.”

  “Jury’s still out on that.” Bobbi chuckled softly. “So anyway. What’s going on?”

  “Well,” Freida began, “I did some digging around after we talked, and after I got a good portion of vodka running through my system.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  A pause, then Freida’s slightly anxious reply. “I hit the Bureau net.”

  The wind momentarily vanished from Bobbi’s lungs. “You hit the Bureau net?” Bobbi’s own anxiety index skyrocketed; it was hard as fuck to hit a federal system on most occasions. They had tough counterintrusion software, and even without considering that, most had a miles-thick shell of digital armor in the form of codewalls and encryption. Military systems would try to kill you the moment they detected you, and the odds would be very long that they would fail in doing so. To hit the local node of the ISB, when it was clear that hostile entities were running the Bureau’s presence in the area, was something that Bobbi would never have attempted. She’d have to be stupid, or crazy, or reckless – or perhaps some combination of them all. It just begged discovery.

  “Yeah.” Another pause on Freida’s end before she spoke again, her voice conciliatory this time. “Look, it’s okay, this one time. I put in a back door ages ago.”

  Bobbi stared at the connection window floating in the air over her desktop as if it were Freida herself. “Oh, so you just hacked a federal system while you were still working there,” she said. “Well that’s no problem, right? You have some salt, girl.”

  Now Freida’s tone had taken on a faint sheen of pride. “I’ll take that as a compliment, then,” she said. “Look, d’you want to know what I learned or not?”

  “Pfft, of course.” Bobbi opened a desk drawer and started rummaging for some coffee. Or cola. Or whiskey. “Hit me.”

  “So it turns out that I was right about Orleans,” she continued. “As far as the official record goes, there was an accident that got triggered by squatters fucking around with the incinerators, trying to get them started for warmth. Blew up the hospital. They have a few Civil Protection cops listed as injured, but nothing like you have on tape. Certainly no record of Special Tactics being dispatched.”

  “So they just buried it, then.” Bobbi heaved a deep sign, coming up from her drawer-diving with a can of Red Kiss and smacking the bottom against the desk to get it cooling. “The fuckers.”

  “Yeah.” There was the faint sound of rummaging on Freida’s side, or maybe it was just static. “There something else, too. You know how you sent the contents of the archive, plus those videos you showed me, to the Bureau?”

  “Right,” Bobbi said. “We thought Exley clamped it down.”

  “Mmmhmm.” Freida sounded weirdly excited now. “Turns out it never even made it here. I don’t know how, but someone cut in and took the thing straight out of your hands before it got halfway across the network chain.”

  Bobbi pulled the tab on her newly-chilled Red Kiss and took a drink, conjuring up new windows: network configurations, access records, and other information appeared, panels of floating light that swarmed about her like familiar spirits. The ultrasweet cherry-flavored liquid washed over her tongue, highly caffeinated but not carbonated – blood binders in the chemical mix carried the stimulant to her system as fast as if she’d inhaled it. “Perfect,” she murmured as she began tracing back through two years of access logs.

  “What’s that?” Freida’s voice, curious.

  “Nothing,” Bobbi said, and reached up to touch the dustplug behind her ear – her fingers traced the ridge of the clear plastic as the big computer ran its search, a nervous habit she hadn’t caught herself doing in years. Must be the caffeine, she thought. C’mon, show up. Just don’t let it be from …

  “Fuck!” The words were a snarl that escaped her lips as her eyes locked on a panel which now flashed red in her periphery. Sure enough, the trace records in the computer’s system logs showed just what Freida had said. A ghost had apparently visited her system the very day she had sent the archive to the Bureau; there were server actions being logged, but no account attributed to them and no alarms being tripped.

  “Bobbi?” Freida sounded very cautious now. “You all right?”

  “Just a second, girl,” Bobbi replied, and her stern tone brooked no further protest. As Freida fell silent again, Bobbi read the record, scanning every line with rage bubbling higher and higher in the cauldron of her throat. That son of a bitch, whoever it was, had co-opted the data before it had even had a chance to leave the system; it had gone elsewhere, into a trash file that had been deleted even as a false success-of-transmission message had been displayed for Bobbi’s benefit. So not only had she been hacked, she had been well and truly fucked – and she had no warning. Some fucking cowgirl she had become. The anger was joined by a wave of self-hatred that only perfectionists like Bobbi could muster; she had been so fucking stupid. What the hell was wrong with her? Why hadn’t she been able to see an intrusion on her own system?

  What if the intruder was still there?

  “Well,” Bobbi said after a terrible pause, falling back against the heavy padding of her desk chair, “you were right. It looks like someone hit my system without my … ” She swallowed down a mouthful of self-hate. “… without my knowing. I didn’t even fucking see them there.”

  “Damn.” Freida took a deep breath; there wasn’t much you could say when a fellow datanaut took a hit like that – they were a family, however dysfunctional they could be, and when one of them suffered a home system intrusion it felt worse than a physical break-in. “I’m sorry, Bobbi … but wouldn’t they have to be pretty goddamned good to get past your security? I mean I’ve seen your work before, Brain Mother, it’s not like –”

  “I don’t know what the fuck they did!” Bobbi shouted, her green eyes flashing with the scattered sparks of rage and anguish. This was her system, her home, and she had already lost enough without one more mysterious motherfucker making things even worse. “I don’t know how they were able to even find my network node; it’s off record.”

  “That’s why I had to resort to that trick with your ghost-box, yeah,” Freida said. “I mean, you don’t have anything lethal in your security setup, but your encryption walls are miles fucking thick.”

  “Fortress January,” Bobbi rumbled, “Yes. Shit, maybe I should have put Brainwrecker or some shit in there, just to keep people away.”

  “Maybe, but it doesn’t sound like even lethal countersoft’s going to do anything in this situation. They leave any traces at all?”

  Bobbi shook her head, forgetting that the link wasn’t video. “No,” she said, “Tha
t’s the problem – it’s not that they hacked the box, it’s that they’re like … a fucking ghost, man! I mean there’s nothing there!”

  “What about a coverup?” Freida sounded a little spooked.

  “There’s nothing to cover up! It’s like it was a part of the goddamned operating system, that clean.” Bobbi took a deep breath and a long drag of Red Kiss, letting the caffeine wave crash over her in earnest. “I don’t even know what to think about this now. I’ve never seen anything … ” And then she fell silent, staring at the trace window. She had seen that kind of invisibility before. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “Cagliostro,” she breathed.

  “Who? Bobbi, what’s going on?”

  “I need you to do me a favor, Freida,” said Bobbi then, and her voice rang with a cold and hollow fury. “I want you to hit the Bureau net again, see if you can find something about someone named Cagliostro. Hacker handle, maybe, or an organized crime figure.”

  “I’d do better hitting up the FBI,” Freida said.

  “Well, do it.” Bobbi called up a new window, her finger flying across virtual keyboards conjured into being as she needed them. “I mean, if you can. I think I’ve found some solid new pieces to the puzzle.”

  There was a pause, at the end of which Freida sounded unsure as she made her reply. “I … could try, Bobbi. I mean the FBI doesn’t have the same resources as the Bureau when it comes to a hardened network, but … ”

  “Hey, girl, you’re the one who quit the Feds to play lady hacker. You’re the one hit me up and started all this shit over again. If you’re gonna bitch out on me over some potential jail time you’re in the wrong goddamned business.” Bobbi knew she sounded harsh, but she didn’t care – this was supposed to be the big leagues, and you didn’t let the idea of a cryopen keep you back. That is, not when you were on, and she was so very, very on.