Solar Singularity

by Peter J. Wacks

  Hiding a smirk, Nova glanced back. “Okay, if you say so. I’m taking us somewhere safe so we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “Why do you even want me around?” He stepped back, cocking his head to the side. “I get the truce, but why trust me?”

  She got the feeling that he was being genuine with her … which was not acceptable. Nova didn’t want a friendship; she wanted a free bodyguard. Sighing, she went over to the dead merc, searching for useful items while he pulled a flask from his pocket and took a sip. “Save me from the stupidity, if that’s in the realm of possibility. I’m your target; ergo, I’m worth money to you. You’re going to be following me anyways, so I might as well put your carcass to good use, seeing you’re such a gentleman for saving me from those goons.”

  Nova pocketed a Ravenlocke badge, a bitcoin card, an antique but still sharp SOG Seal tactical knife, an old non-functional Zippo, and a 5.56 slug thrower. “I’m sure you can protect me until we get clear from this sector. I’ll put in a good word with whoever hired you, but only after we contact my bosses. Besides, I want you nearby in case you get a little future flash again. And you … you said it yourself. You don’t know what to do next. I do.”

  Chapter Six

  Bob

  Bob sipped on a cheap plastic disposable cup of thin bitter coffee and watched the world descend into beautiful chaos. Bob was a simple man, with a simple name, who lived in a world of complex names and people who cared everything for style and flash. He didn’t, and as a result, the world didn’t watch back. Which suited him just fine.

  As vehicles fell from the sky, as people shot and decapitated one another in the streets, as explosions and fires started lighting up Chicagoland from one end to the other …

  … nobody paid attention to the middle-aged man in a suit and tie, standing under the awning of a burnt-out chop shop. He carefully nibbled at his plain bagel, watching, then sipped his coffee again. The madness of the streets left him well alone, in a pocket of calmness.

  His two marks, Chicken Fingers and Nova, remained just in sight. They crept along, about half a block down from where he stood calmly, trying to steer clear of the heavy fighting that had broken out almost everywhere. The two had passed right by him, never seeing the plain man standing calmly against the wall.

  Possibly because roving bands of violent citizens were everywhere else, lashing out at anything that moved. People were clawing their own eyes out in the middle of the road, bashing each other’s skulls in, and flinging themselves from windows and rooftops. The really dangerous idiots were engaged in shootouts, screaming nonsense as they riddled one another with homing bullets and railguns.

  It was a glorious sort of madness, and Bob felt privileged to be able to witness it without having to partake. Of course, it wouldn’t be this bad everywhere. This part of town was the truly magical place where middle-class lack of funds for better cybernetic technology met with lots of drugs and drunkenness. The widespread TAP filter crash of GENIE going down was hitting harder with a population that was already too chemical-ed up.

  Finishing his coffee, Bob tossed the cup aside, where it would biodegrade and be washed away in the next acid rainstorm to hit Chitown. Normal people might’ve used a TAP app to create the hyper-focused buzz he sought by directly manipulating their brain chemistry. He preferred exercise and coffee.

  However, despite his name and appearance, Bob was anything but normal. Subnormal, he’d been called, given the fact that he had no TAP. Unlike most of the world’s population that were practically born with the neural interface surgically injected before the birthing mucus was wiped away, Bob’s parents had belonged to a religious sect that saw technology as evil. They refused to let their son become “possessed by the Deep.” Growing up, he hated them for this. But by the time he’d reached his teen years and completed his fifth assassination, he’d realized what a boon being TAP-less really was.

  People tended to overlook him because he didn’t automatically show up on their HUDs. He wore clothing that didn’t have HR triggering stitching. He couldn’t be targeted by mindhacks and memes. He didn’t have to worry about upgrading his firewalls every few weeks and being paranoid of the countless viruses released into the network. Nobody could target his location, access his credit account just by walking by him, or listen in on his communication whispers.

  He was a ghost, and ghosts could get jobs done that others didn’t even think were possible.

  His current client—he had to think of her that way right now—had implied that Bob had been picked for this job almost solely because of his lack of a TAP. It provided an innate defense against the invisible assault that he didn’t doubt was being experienced across the world. Actually, it made his client the most likely suspect for the carnage and chaos around him. Didn’t matter. She paid in advance, and Bob was a man of his word.

  As Chicken Fingers and Nova turned a corner further ahead, Bob sauntered after them. The two were working together, just as his client had said they would. He honestly hadn’t thought they would bridge their differences initially. When Chicken Fingers had first extracted Nova, it had been tense. But his client had been correct, just as she had been correct about the solar flare that the feeds had said would be “a minor astronomical anomaly” being intense enough to disrupt global wifi. This client was … well-informed.

  Strange to be playing the role of a protector rather than a killer, he mused as he walked, carefully finishing the last bite of his bagel. Over the years, he’d slipped in and out of countless systems, corporate or otherwise, with the singular intent of leaving bodies in his wake. Those who knew of his existence had never sought him out for anything beyond that purpose. Blood for credits.

  In time, his repetition had dulled the joy of the work, though the challenge of circumventing increasingly complex security systems never completely lost its appeal. The killing, it was secondary. He hired out to be invisible in a world with countless eyes. Sadly, killing was the main purpose people thought of for that skillset. Perhaps that’s why he agreed to take on this order. It offered similar obstacles to his usual work, but also provided a unique outcome. Life instead of death. It was refreshing. Keeping bullets out of bodies was a far more difficult job than installing them, of course, but the unique challenge—and enough creds to retire—was too good an offer to refuse.

  He turned the same corner his quarries had disappeared around, avoiding the overturned chairs and large polycotton umbrellas of a French-themed café he had dined at several times, and glimpsed his targets almost at the end of the next street. His keen green eyes were drawn to them by hunter’s instinct rather than any sort of TAP sprite or motion sensor system. Though he would never liken himself to a hawk, and in looks he resembled an aged terrier more than anything else, a hawk’s movements matched how he moved.

  A brisk wind picked up, redolent with the smells of sweet beignets, sewage, and … oddly … the disinfectant that cleaning crews sprayed all over public buildings on a monthly basis. He smoothed down his maroon silk tie as he stepped out to follow the strange couple.

  Just as he did, a band of civilians burst from the doorway of a low-income housing complex and proceeded to block off half the street, shouting at each other with weapons drawn. Bob would have to get through them to stay on his marks’ trail.

  Pausing, Bob smiled to himself. He was a ghost. This was exactly his element. He watched their patterns, their movements, briefly gauging the gap in their combat.

  He began to walk towards the impromptu roadblock with an easy gait. Invisible to the crowd’s TAPs, which were igniting their senses with false information, he calmly walked through the mass melee, carefully sidestepping flailing combatants.

  A wild blow came swinging at his face and he gently tipped the baseball bat in an upward arc, away from his head, and stepped behind the crazed assailant. With a quick movement, he put the woman in a choke hold. Six seconds later she collapsed, unconscious. She would wake up with a hell of a headache,
but she would wake up. He could have simply killed them all and removed the obstacle, but this was better—though it did require more effort …

  He wasn’t a monster after all.

  Chapter Seven

  Gyro

  Gyro slapped her hand against the door and scowled as she squinted at it. The outdated bioscanner confirmed her identity with a retina peek and her palm print on the cool glass sensor. The cube door slid open reluctantly, dripping acrid-smelling, red hydraulic fluid, and admitted her to the humble abode. Her digs weren’t flashy or anything, but they were hers, which she was proud of.

  At least the electric systems in this fraggin’ cube complex are still working. She couldn’t access anything wireless with her TAP, but she was hopeful the hard-wired networks would still be purring. Damn, I bet the wired nets are like ghost towns. My download bandwidth should be atmospheric … I should be able to download whole band discographies in milliseconds.

  After the encounter with Prophet, Gyro had high-tailed it down into the grav-train subway and had taken the first tube to the little rundown sprawl she called home under a stretch of the I-88 superhighway.

  She’d ridden the packed car for almost twenty minutes, stuck between a grizzled, gray-haired businesswoman in a bulletproof dress suit and a guy with two run-down cybernetic legs who kept mumbling to himself that the Lord was coming. Might’ve been a slick chrome job years ago, but now his metal limbs were rusted in spots and leaking a trickle of green-tinted lubrication oil from the joints.

  Since she was sort of short—sweaty-armpit height, her sister used to say—Gyro had to deal with the various stomach-churning essences of eau de cologne and bodies that hadn’t been washed in weeks. She’d emerged from the reeking cloud of the subway car just as the overhead fluorescent lights flickered in the station and all external TAP connections cut out.

  That had never happened before, and it was freaktastic.

  Ever since she could remember, Gyro had felt the comfort of being linked to GENIE—her invisible friend who was always there when she was bored or just wanted to listen to pirated tunes. The sudden harsh absence of connectivity frightened her—though she’d never admit it out loud.

  Everyone in the station started acting bizarro too; jerking around, freaking out, and the like. She started recording people who were talking to invisible people, tripping over everything as if they couldn’t see a foot in front of them, and being all kinds of stupid.

  Is everybody’s TAP acting wonkier than mine? Did someone drop some kind of virus that passed from TAP to wetware? The thoughts were good, so she added them for commentary on the footage later. While Gyro was happy her brain wasn’t affected, being surrounded by psycho-zombies didn’t make her feel any better.

  By the time she had reached her cube complex, breathless and barely keeping a bubbling panic under control, she knew something had gone terribly wrong—and it was widespread. But dear gods, the footage she had gotten! Everything was freaktastic and it was like she was the only one who wasn’t crashing. Which meant she would make a mint once she edited and cut the footage … people outside Chicago would want the scoop, and she was confident she was the only tagger that would have it. Which also meant she needed a damned connection!

  She scanned the footage as she entered her cube. Stand-alone systems were still in place, automated and electronic devices were still working … but the people themselves were acting broken and erratic. It wasn’t abnormal to see acts of violence on a daily basis in her neighborhood, with gangers popping up on street corners to deal narcotics or brazenly breaking into shops for some quick snatch-and-grab action. Almost everyone in the area went armed, at least to some extent, and it only took one loonie with a gun to instigate a neighborhood war. Like a mile over were all the junkie clubs, so she was also used to stupid people who were doped up doing even stupider things.

  This was different. Way different.

  The really scary thing was she kept seeing random civilians, completely normal, breaking out into spasms, lashing out at one another, and going nuts. Just before she reached her block, she saw one group of completely naked civvies going after a heavily armored squad of Ravenlocke security soldiers on patrol—they were gunned down by the mercs in cold blood moments later. It wasn’t like everyone was killing or dying, but there was a lot more bloodshed than normal, and even though she had it all, it was still freaking her calm.

  She could still hear gunfire rattling and energy weapons cracking up and down the street, with the occasional basso boom of an exploding rocket or mortar. Fortunately, her cube complex was filled with people as destitute as she was and held little of value, so she prayed whoever was behind the attack would pass it by without causing further damage.

  She felt her shoulders shaking and realized that her breath was catching every time she tried to inhale. She was frozen in place, door cracked open. Slightly detached from her own mind, she quizzically analyzed the sensation. It felt like she was looking over her own shoulder. “Come on, Gyro. You’re a teenager now! Stop freaking out like a kid.” The words actually came out of her mouth and helped her regain control of her limbs.

  Sealing the metal door behind her, she took a few minutes to catch her breath and let herself be scared. “Very mature. So adult, Gyro,” she mumbled, barbing herself. It worked, keeping her angry instead of terrified.

  She was safe. This was her cube. All hundred square feet of it. Hundred and fifteen square feet, if you counted the bathroom. She looked around at her stuff. The J-pop band posters plastered over every wall took on a sinister look, and it took Gyro a few seconds to realize the HR tags she had encoded on them were not showing up on her TAP. Oh, just my fragging luck. If my TAP is toast, it takes major credits for the surgery to replace it. Ain’t got that sitting in a tin can.

  She went to one corner, peeled back a super collectable, retro Puffy AmiYumi poster that was like eighty years old and located a flush-mounted panel behind it. She had spent a lot on that thing, but she loved some of the retro stuff. And now she was damaging her favorite poster because of the freak show outside! Anger at nothing in particular fueled her and shielded her from herself.

  Unscrewing the six bolts that held the wall panel in place, she dug through the maze of bundled wires and fiber-optic cables that connected the building’s brain to the city infrastructure until she found the set of lines she was searching for. The panel was the real selling point for getting the hovel in the first place. If she couldn’t get into GENIE by wireless TAP, then she would jack herself straight into the system here. People might look at her like she was a little kid, but damned if she couldn’t plan circles around most of the adults she knew. Hell, she had hacked her own “fakies and papers”, kept herself out of the system.

  She dug through her belt and a couple of drawers until she had assembled a number of tools—wire snips, inline vampire taps, port adaptors, access mimics, and more—and set to work. Within minutes, she had an interface cord running from the main trunk line of the building’s GENIE feeder network, normally used to interface with the myriad wireless routers located throughout the bland architecture, snaking out of the wall to a metal shielded data socket. It took a bit to dig up a working patch cable.

  With trembling hands, Gyro plugged one end of the patch cord to the socket she had cobbled together. She sat down on one of her rickety three-legged wooden stools, staring at the other end of the patch cable, willing herself to make the connection to her head. Finally, holding her breath, she connected it to the direct TAP port behind her earlobe, making sure to put the surgical silicon plug she plied out of her skull into a shot glass filled with cheap vodka from a bottle that was left under the sink after her last party. She tweaked the stream alignment to run in real-time and then called up a HUD interface on her TAP. Squinting and muttering a hacker’s prayer, she opened a channel.

  A split second, or a thousand years later, the connection broke because her body had locked up. Muscles spasming, she fell ass over teakettle
off the stool. Due to sheer luck, the fall yanked the cord out from her skull as she toppled over. She felt the left side of her face smash into a metal box filled with junk electronic parts. A harsh buzzing filled her head, needles of agony prickled down her spine, and her jaw throbbed in time with each heartbeat. She curled into a fetal position on the floor until the pain subsided enough to move without wanting to puke.

  When her thoughts finally unscrambled, she found herself shaking and sweating while simultaneously feeling chilled to her core. Cursing her procrastination when it came to cleaning the apartment, Gyro pushed up from the reeking trash-strewn floor. She stared at the thick bundles of cables in the wall as if they were live venomous snakes. Stupidest goddamned thing you ever did to yourself, Gyro. Should have known that was gonna happen to your wetware, trying to push that much bandwidth through your own ware.

  Retrieving the silicon plug from the tipped-over shot glass, she tentatively prodded it back into the port in her head. Withdrawing her hand, she was taken aback by how much blood was on her fingers. Running into the bathroom, she pushed the long brown hair pooled on her shoulder to the side and tried to angle herself to see if her cranium was leaking blood through the TAP connection. With a sigh of relief, she discovered a long scratch from where the metal patch cord connector had scraped along her skin as she fell, but her wetware was mostly intact. Too much lucky for one day, Gyro. No hole in your soul.

  She searched around for a sterile alcohol pad, finding one in the cabinet over the toilet. As she treated her wounds, she contemplated what she had found out so far. That hadn’t been any sort of malicious attack; there had been no mind or purpose behind the surge of data that had tried to sear her neurons into so much petroleum jelly. It was just a high-pressure virtual firehose cramming too much pure information at once, trying to fill her brain with the entirety of the Deep. If the patch cable hadn’t disconnected when she fell, it would have turned her whole nervous system to ash and reduced what was left of her to a drooling, brainless fool.