by Ted Weber
“That’s an idea,” Dingo said.
Waylee cut him off with a slash of the hand.
Fecthammer returned. “This is obviously not the work of amateurs, and even falls outside the capabilities and M.O. of organized crime, Baltimore’s drug gangs for instance. The culprits are as yet unidentified, but we believe they may belong to a terrorist cell, and freed Mr. Lee to assist an upcoming operation. Most likely, Mr. Lee was already a member of this group. As such, Homeland Security is assisting the investigation. We take this threat extremely seriously, and have posted a $100,000 reward for information leading to their capture.”
A link appeared where viewers could provide information and collect their $100,000.
“A hundred G’s,” Dingo said. “More than all of us put together make.”
“We’ve gotta find out more,” Pel said. “See what they’re doing. Charles and I can see what kind of chatter we can intercept from BPD.”
Charles nodded.
Excitement returned to Waylee, stomping the creeping fears into submission. Their mission was too important to fail. Nothing would ever change without tearing down MediaCorp’s propaganda machine. “Maybe check out other parts of the city. See if they’re being searched too.”
“I can upload my video of that Watcher over our ‘hood,” Kiyoko said, “and ask if anyone else’s seen one.”
“That would draw attention to yourself.”
Dingo jumped in. “Who’s less likely to be taken seriously by the Injustice League than Princess Kiyoko?”
Kiyoko scowled. “I’m trying to help, Dingus. You should go get an enema to clear all that shit out of your brain.”
“Only if you eat it afterward.”
M-pat threw up his hands. “What professionals!”
Waylee leapt out of her chair. She glared at Dingo and Kiyoko. “He’s right. Quit acting like two-year-olds.” She changed topics. “Kiyoko, would you mind running your message by me before you post it?”
Her sister tensed. “You don’t trust me?”
“Of course I trust you, but writing’s what I do, and we can’t take any chances.”
Shakti raised a hand.
Waylee locked eyes with her friend. Ever the believer in Robert’s Rules of Order.
“Yes?”
“So do you think we’re under surveillance now?”
Pel butted in. “Nothing since last night. But we should be careful.”
“Could they hear us talking?”
He shrugged. “Possibly.”
“I’d know if there was po-boys in the neighborhood,” M-pat said. “And there’s nothing flying around now.”
Waylee paced the wooden floor. “Well, we should figure out what to do if the drone returns. And where to go if we have to run.”
Charles poked his hand up to ear level. “Uh…”
“Yes?” Waylee said.
“Someone set a trap for me on BetterWorld and I had to jet.”
Waylee managed not to scream. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I thought I covered my ass well enough. Took the emergency exit. You know, switched the power off. Then I went back and deleted my accounts. But maybe someone got a sniff of my location.”
“Okay,” Pel said, still calm. “How would we know?”
“Not sure. I can look around.” Charles leaned forward. “And I could spoof myself over in Jersey or somewhere and throw them off.”
Pel nodded. “Nice.”
They seemed to have things under control. “Alright then,” Waylee said, “You boys hop in the net and do what you gotta do. M-pat and Dingo, make sure Authority isn’t skulking around the area.”
Dingo crossed his arms. “Since when are you my boss?”
“You’re right. I’m not anyone’s boss. Take it as a suggestion. You got a better one?”
He stood. “No, we on it.”
Shakti raised her hand again. “Maybe Charles should relocate? Just to be safe?”
She’s not being very helpful. “This is the safest place for him,” Waylee said. “Trust me.”
Pel leaned back in his chair. “I’ll put out more cameras. And prep our gear for emergency exit, if it comes to that.” He tilted his head, then smiled. “I’ll search the Comnet and see how to make caltrops. No shortage of scrap metal with all the junkyards nearby.”
“I’ll see where we could go,” Waylee said. She’d have to ask around without letting anyone know what was going on.
No way would Homeland Security stop her.
* * *
Charles
Charles returned to the game room. He hopped in the immersion suit, which he’d been using for a couple of days now. It smelled faintly of bleach from all the cleaning, but at least the dog spray was odorless.
The suit took some getting used to, and some coaching from Pel. But it added a lot, walking through virtual landscapes instead of just watching it happen. It was like he’d been confined to a wheelchair all his life, but some preacher cured him with the power of the Almighty. If he didn’t have so much scripting and poking around to do, and had more time for gaming or BetterWorld, maybe he could lose some weight with this suit, and look finer for Princess Kiyoko.
Once he got everything on and hooked up, he entered the Comnet. Maybe it was a little obvious, but he posted a message on /snarknet, one of the public boards popular with Collectivistas, seeming to originate from a wireless router along the New Jersey Turnpike. “On the run and free, they can’t stop me. Dr. Doom got the jump, Authority just a chump.” A spy would no doubt report it.
Next stop, the Baltimore Police Department. Homeland was too risky; they took hackers and pressed them into slavery. They’d be watching for someone like him.
Baltimore City Police Department—“to protect and serve.” Their public site made them seem helpful. Mostly it described how to prevent and report crime. They didn’t have enough money to do a lot of patrols or investigation, and even had a donations link where you could “Adopt a Cop.”
He couldn’t resist. Phineas K. Bottomstuffin promised $1 million to adopt the whole police force to perform at a private striptease party on New Year’s Eve. Then he set up a bot to email random “Yo mama” jokes to their complaints department.
After poking around some more, Charles set up sniffers and a traffic analyzer outside their site. He doubted that would help much, so he hunted for communications he could listen to.
Kickin’. The headquarters dispatchers used unencrypted radio. Not only that, the broadcasts were digital, easy to parse.
Charles set up a program to copy and forward all BPD radio traffic to servers he could access anonymously. If the po-boys said “Lee,” “breakout,” “manhunt,” or “Homeland,” the program would message him and play back the conversation.
He tested it out. One hit—someone stole a surveillance camera outside his gramma’s. The response from HQ, “Write it up, but feds have that location now.”
It sounded like he wouldn’t see his remaining family for a while. Not that they cared about him anyway.
Fuck it. Charles created a new BetterWorld avatar, this one a Zulu warrior named Iwisa, for the club they used. Thank you, Compendia. Their spear, the iklwa, was too hard to pronounce.
He wouldn’t hang out at clubs. He’d enter Princess Kiyoko’s realm, Yumekuni, and see how to fit in. He had briefly seen her fan site, and a portion of Yumekuni in game mode with a borrowed avatar. But he was still an outsider.
‘Course, it would be easier to talk to the living, breathing Kiyoko. She was one room away. He’d definitely do that.
Maybe he’d listen to her music first. And check out some ‘How to Game Women’ sites.
He wondered how much time he had.
11
Friday
Pelopidas
With Charles wearing the full immersion suit, Pel donned one of the partial game systems—3-D goggles, headset, and gloves—and hooked everything up to Big Red. He started an offline simulation program and
entered a featureless void as William Godwin. Charles materialized next, as a Zulu warrior he’d named Iwisa.
Pel spoke in his headset. “Load icons.” Dozens of 2-D and 3-D glyphs appeared. He touched one labeled “Map 1,” which would display output from Charles’s traffic analyzer.
A three dimensional map appeared, with “Celebrate the New Year with the President” in the center, connected to dozens of other Comnet site titles by lines of varying color and thickness. “Not a lot of sites.”
“No,” Charles/Iwisa said, his feathered headdress and cowhide shield making him hard to take seriously. “Guests probably visit the site once or twice, and most of them might have done that before I put the sniffers out.”
“Maybe they’ll send out a reminder or something and we’ll get all the names then.”
“Maybe.” Iwisa pointed a short spear at the map. “The thicker the lines, the more data’s gone between the sites in the past week. And the darker the color”—the lines ranged from light pink to dark red - “the more individual messages there’ve been.”
The White House Department of Scheduling and Advance had the darkest line to the gala site. They were probably coordinating the event. But V.I.P. Productions, a special events planning subsidiary of MediaCorp, had the thickest line. They must own the Comnet site. “Did you look at the communications from the White House and V.I.P. Productions?”
“I stay away from the White House. They caught too many Collectivistas there. But V.I.P…” He pointed his spear and a second constellation of sites appeared, connected to V.I.P. by lines ranging from pale to midnight blue.
Trouble was, there were hundreds of them. “Can we narrow it down?”
“Yeah. We know from the New Year’s site they’ll have a DJ.”
Pel examined the site. “And a catering company, MC, a string quartet, and a jazz ensemble.”
“You’re musicians.”
“Me and Waylee, anyway. And Kiyoko. But the band members will know each other, and we can’t play jazz. Maybe we can get someone to quit. Our former drummer, J-Jay, plays jazz now. Maybe he’d help, if he knows the band.”
They narrowed down the V.I.P. connections to caterers, DJs, and musicians near DC, but there were still a lot of connections left.
“So how do we know who got the gig?” Pel asked.
“Snoop around their sites I guess. And see if any of them visit the New Year’s site.”
Pel felt silly conversing via avatars when in real life, only a few feet separated them. He and Dingo played games without actual eye contact, but that was different. Immersion helped suspend disbelief when fighting invading hordes of zombie Canadians. “Let’s take a look at the other connections, and see who some of the guests are. Then I’m gonna have to leave you. Band’s playing at Bar Zar tonight, and it takes a good three or four hours to get everything loaded, moved, and set up, and do the sound check.”
“All this going on and you’re still playing music?” Charles seemed a lot more assertive cloaked in an avatar.
“Gotta buy food,” Pel said. Beer, really. “And it’s the closest we’ve got to careers. We’re playing tomorrow night too, just at a house party up in Towson, though.” They needed gigs at big venues opening for major bands, but MediaCorp controlled 93% of the music market, and their gatekeepers frowned on anything “political” or “inaccessible.” Dwarf Eats Hippo fell into both categories, plus the worse category of “unreliable.”
Iwisa waggled his spear. “I don’t understand why musicians would try to break into a presidential fundraiser and dig for secrets—”
“To broadcast them—”
He kept going. “I mean, I could see Tupac pulling some shit like that, but you more like Jay-Z.”
Pel made his avatar scowl. “I don’t think so.”
“I mean, could you see Jay-Z doing James Bond shit like you trying?” Iwisa doubled over laughing. “He’d be all, ‘Which jet should we take, and these shoes okay?’”
Pel didn’t wait for him to stop laughing. “Well, I wish I had money like him, and I wish people with money like that would put it to good use. But come on, Jay-Z’s twice our age and not our genre.” He pulled a card out of Godwin’s pocket and handed it to Iwisa. “Take a listen.” It contained a link to their band site and free samples.
“Music’s only part time for us,” Pel continued. “At least, unless we break through. It’s our outlet, our way to connect. I make my living on the Comnet, and Waylee, she’s a journalist, and she wants to change the world. Me too.”
Iwisa looked at the card. “I was just bustin’ you, no need to grief.”
“You know you’re talking to the chillest character in B’more.”
“Yeah, whatev. You sure a contrast with Waylee, though. I mean, I totally respect her, but she seems a little wired.”
Pel debated how much to tell him. “It’s just how she is. Part of it’s genetics—she’s got this incredible energy and brilliance, but with side effects. And part, well, she had a pretty rough childhood, the type you can never really escape.”
Iwisa didn’t respond at first. “I know how it is,” he finally said. “I was lucky ‘til moms passed. She was the greatest. But others, like some of my cousins, they had no one, just a house full of addicts.”
“Well, Waylee’s a fighter. She never took shit from anyone, her stepdad included. You know anger piles up, gets in your bones and festers there. But she channels hers—into her music, into making the world a better place, whatever she can do.”
Iwisa raised a fist. “Props. She sure can preach, that’s for sure.”
“That’s the singer in her. And reader. She’s been in the anarchist scene since high school.”
“Like throwing bombs and shit?”
Pel shook his avatar’s head. “No, that’s a media stereotype. Violence usually backfires. She helped Shakti and Bryan Cutler grow the People’s Party, behind the scenes so her paper wouldn’t find out. And helped bring the neighborhood together, to provide our own food and security. For her, it’s all about bottom-up activism, people working together on their own terms to replace greed and subjugation.”
Iwisa nodded. “Like the Code, free sharing.”
“Yeah. Creative free association improving lives and healing the planet.” He felt a familiar surge of admiration for his girlfriend. “And as long as MediaCorp controls information, few will even know they have that choice.”
Iwisa glanced at the Dwarf Eats Hippo card again. “She’s something on stage. I saw a video on BetterWorld.”
He must have visited Kiyoko’s site. “Which song?”
“Uh, don’t remember. But y’all risking a real future.”
“She’s been performing over ten years and hasn’t gotten anywhere. She doesn’t think she has a future in music.”
Iwisa stood for a moment. “I assume I can’t come see y’all play.”
“No, you can’t be seen. Dingo’ll be here if you have any problems.”
He frowned. “That dude’s psycho or something.”
Not the first time someone’s said that. “That’s my home skillet you’re talking about. He’s just a free spirit, that’s all.”
“’Kay, as long as he ain’t gonna come after me with a knife or some shit.”
“Don’t you remember? He put himself on the line to bust you out.”
Iwisa nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.” He looked at the card again. “You got videos here?”
“Some, yeah.”
“Kiyoko’s on them?”
“She is our bass player.” Charles seemed infatuated with her. What to say? “She has a lot of admirers, but she’s not the loose type, and not in the mood for romance these days. Shitty ex-boyfriend.”
Iwisa shuffled his feet. “She’s pretty set up in BetterWorld. Better than I ever was.”
“Yeah, she spends a lot of time there. It’s a point of contention.”
He frowned. “Why’s Waylee so down on BetterWorld?”
“She j
ust thinks it’s a distraction. You heard her the other day.”
“So? The real world sucks.”
“Exactly. But you can hide, or you can stand.” The sort of brave words Waylee liked to use. But now that they had Homeland Security on their ass, hiding didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
* * *
Sunday
Charles
Charles sat in one of the living room chairs, listening to everyone talk about the weekend’s shows. He didn’t really fit in here. Where would he go after New Year’s? Would he ever see his gramma and cousins again? Or would the po-boys watch them all the way to the grave?
Last he saw his gramma, she’d come to wish him a happy seventeenth birthday. They talked at one of them little tables while the other convicts sat with their one allowed visitor, and guards walked up and down, listening to everything they said. That was over a month ago, and she hadn’t come again. She must have had too much else to worry about.
He didn’t have any real friends in the hood to miss. Maybe at school, but Pel and the others were better. They looked up to him and gave him whatever he needed. ‘Cept money, they didn’t seem to have much of that.
And there was Princess Kiyoko, sitting on the couch with Waylee and Shakti, talking in her singsong voice. She posed her real hair today—brown with rainbow streaks, bound in silk bows. She looked more beautiful than ever. And from what Pel said, she was single.
“We need a new drummer,” Kiyoko told Waylee. “J-Jay had soul, not like those synth tracks that Pel programs.”
Across the room, Pel slapped his head with both hands. “Says the bass player. I got a thousand jobs to do. All you have to do is stand there in your cutesy little outfits and play single-note lines.”
Waylee put her beer down. “Shut the fuck up, the both of you.” She stared at Pel. “You’re supposed to be the level-headed one, and here you’re bickering like a child.”
