Beautiful Red

by M. Darusha Wehm

Maybe she was just over analyzing everything, or maybe she really was getting paranoid. She checked the time and groaned when she saw that she had less than eight hours until she had to be back at Bellis. She double checked her report and saved it to an encrypted area in her system. She stripped off her clothes, and threw them in the autoclave on the way to the bathroom. She showered and sucked back a dose of SleepingJuice. She started thinking about what it might feel like to have an alien program in your mind when she fell into sleep. If she dreamed, she didn't remember it.

  The next few days were nearly clones of each other: work, home, research, then sleep. During the day, Jack was keeping half an eye on the logs and Gilles' reports and the rest of her attention was focussed on researching the Red. After her shift was over, she would return to her apartment, stuff food in her face, and continue her studies. She was like a brainy child with a learning compulsion, or maybe it was more like an addiction. She couldn't stop herself.

  She started with the boring stuff - history and news reports. The Red had been founded about a couple of decades previously, around the time that implants were becoming common. As integrated technology became more and more standard, the Red stepped up their operations. Jack was surprised to learn that their first taste of notoriety came when a small group of people in Asia got caught with a crate of stolen implants. They had been reprogramming them and distributing them in the community.

  The article Jack found implied that the thieves were claiming to be members of the Red as a justification for what the author believed to be outright theft for profit. Other members of the Red who hadn't been involved had come to their defense, though, and argued that it was a social justice operation to redistribute technology to the un- or under-employed. As she read further, Jack guessed that the author of this article got it wrong. She found reports of several examples of Red actions that were similar - refurbishing nodes salvaged from recyclatrons, leaving expensive gear in areas known to be frequented by streeters, a few other high profile thefts that mimicked that first incident.

  Eventually, Jack got tired of reading the same old reports about the Red. It seemed that only a handful of their activities got a lot of coverage on the mainstream news boards, and the same instances kept coming up over and over. Jack spent an hour or so scouring the boards and making clever small talk before she got a link to an internal Red board. She paged over, but as soon as she arrived at the new site she found that she wasn't able to authenticate to the board. She grinned, and set to work.

  It took a whole evening. The next night, though, she paged over to the Red board and could see it all: images, 2D video, 3D immersives and, of course, all the text she could hope to read. It was all one way, though; Jack had taken pains to make sure she didn't appear as a member on the board. She lurked in peace as she opened a few immersives detailing the recent projects in Paris and watched a video about a protest outside a nutrient block factory.

  After she had watched a few more, Jack realized there wasn't really anything in the videos that she hadn't seen at the event the previous weekend, so she started wading through the text content. The text archives were massive, and included everything from homegrown manifestos to articles on reprogramming implants to logs of chat sessions. Jack tried to focus on the policy documents, but she found herself gravitating toward the technical how-tos. After realizing that she had been reading a manual for an obsolete visual enhancer for over an hour, she refocussed on the physical world and poured another glass of water.

  She downloaded the manual and several others like it, then returned to the manifestoes and screeds. Like everything else she had learned about the Red, they were diverse and varied from so moderate even Jack held more unconventional opinions to the extreme. Jack started alphabetically.

  On the fourth day of her studies, she was interrupted by the program that responded to the micro recorders. She had long since given up on learning anything from them, there had been no activity since she had dropped them in the various basement rooms at Bellis. But now, all of a sudden, the small monitor began to chirp, indicating that one of the recorders had picked up some motion and begun recording and transmitting.

  It's probably just some malfunction, Jack thought, even as she switched away from the nets and brought up the recorder's visual images. At first she thought that it was, indeed, a problem with the recorder, as she could see nothing but an empty warehouse. She was about to switch back to the nets when a movement off to the right caught her eye. She switched to the full immersive view, and somewhat nauseously found herself seeming to stand in the middle of what looked like the equipment warehouse in the ninth sub basement.

  At first everything was still, then Jack saw a slight movement at what seemed to be the door. Because of the placement of the recorder, she couldn't see the door straight on; the recorder had landed off to the side of the entrance, so she was looking into the room from just to the left of the inside of the door. She instinctively craned her neck, but of course she couldn't adjust the angle of the view no matter how she moved her body. She saw a figure enter the room, its dark silhouette framed against the faint light coming from the open doorway. It moved into the room with a slow, shambling walk, headed straight for the racks of surplus or reserve servers.

  Jack held her breath, waiting to see what happened, when the door banged open and two more people lurched into the room. She had audio, but they made no sound except for a ragged breathing and the shuffling of their feet. The two newcomers followed the path of the first person in the room, and the three of them approached the servers. They seemed to stand there, as if they were waiting for something or someone else to arrive. Then, all of a sudden and in unison, they began to tear open the servers with their bare hands.

  Jack heard a small shriek of protest, then realized it was her own voice as she felt her body flinch from the view. The three of them were ripping open the servers, their hands and nails getting cut and torn from the metal of the cases, but even as they were clearly injuring themselves not one of them made a sound. It was as if they could not even feel their own bodies. They opened up the servers, and ripped out the disk inside, stuffing the memory into the many pockets of their clothes.

  At this point Jack noticed that they all wore Bellis uniforms. Thinking about it, this should have been no great surprise, as there was no way to access the sub basements other than with current security clearance, but Jack still found it shocking. Jack watched in horror as the three intruders methodically destroyed every server in the room and ripped out the disk inside. It seemed to go on forever, but in less than five minutes after they began the room was littered with cable, wires and bits of metal from the cases. They scoured the room for any dropped or missed bits of memory, and in the process one of them turned toward the recorder. It was no one Jack recognized, but she got a good look and would be able to run the image through a program to identify the employee. It was a man, who as he approached dropped a piece of metal on top of the micro recorder. Jack involuntarily ducked as the piece of the case seemed to grow exponentially larger and fall on her head.

  She switched the viewer off, and discovered that she was sweating. "Damn it," she said aloud. The look on that man's face was exactly the same as the man in streeters alley, exactly the same as Estella Rowan's. Jack thought fast, and sent a ping to Gilles to alert him to the goings on downstairs. Before she had even decided how to explain this situation to him, the ping came back with an error. There was some kind of malfunction on the receiving end. Jack frowned and tried again while running a remote diagnostic. The ping returned the same error, while she tried to log onto the Bellis system. Nada. They're fucking with the network, Jack thought, frustrated. Just like in all the other thefts. She checked the time, and realized that even if she got through to Gilles, they would be long gone.

  Chapter 19

  After a beer and a contraband cigarette, Jack finally got over the frustration at her inability to do anything, then spent the rest of the night finishing her report
for Gilles and Adrian. She would send it out to them before she left. With these new images from Bellis, as well as the information she had been gathering, she had a fairly complete report to send them. They had both been harassing her for updates, but she was afraid that one or both of them would try to stop her from going if she told them what was going on. She knew her fears about her friends were really her own sense of personal security trying to stop her from doing something foolish, but if she could keep anyone else from voicing those thoughts she would be able to ignore the voices in her head.

  As a quick break, she booked space on the TGV for herself and her scooter. She planned to drive to the complex, since she had never been to the capital of Cascadia before and figured she ought to see the sights while she was there. Sort of a working holiday, she thought. She finished off the report, filed it away in its encrypted directory, and went to bed for the last time in her own room before going into the den of the enemy. She was feeling melodramatic.

  The next day was Tuesday, Jack's last day at work before the weekend. She got up early, and pulled her scooter out of storage where it had been locked up for at least six months. She brought it up to her room, where it nearly filled the available space. She plugged it in to the electric socket to make sure that it would be well charged by the evening, and ensured that she had a couple of jugs of veg oil in the panniers as well. She stuffed a couple of changes of clothes in a bag and shoved it in the space under the seat. She left the scooter to charge as she headed to work.

  When Jack got to her cube, she saw that Gilles had left already. He left her a note reminding her to send him her report, which she trashed as soon as she'd read it, even though the Bellis system retained a log of all internal messages, trashed or kept. She spent the day so preoccupied by her weekend plans that she barely paid any attention to the new reports of another theft from the sub basements. She knew that the perpetrators had bigger problems that getting caught and fired by Bellis. They were not even really human any more, Jack figured.

  She ran the one decent image she had from the theft through the corporate employee records, looking for a match. She was unsurprised when the program came back with a name - Mario Keating. Jack checked the employee record, and saw that he was on weekend. In her gut she knew what the answer would be, but she pinged Keating's personal system anyway. Nothing. Jack wondered if she should break in, like she had with Estella Rowan, but she was sure she didn't want to go through that again.

  She sat back in her chair, took a sip of coffee, and paged over to the internal news board. This time there was a piece about the thefts and how there was going to be an investigation of all staff. Jack knew that eventually her recorders would be found and that she would have to share what she knew, and at that point it would be helpful for everyone if she could point to the culprit. But she also knew that the real perpetrator wasn't Mario Keating, the cafeteria worker, it was the Red's human control program.

  Aw, fuck it, she thought. She didn't want to have to go through the same experience she had with Rowan's system, so she decided to go old-school. She ran a terminal emulator and started typing in commands. She tunneled through to Keating's system, and when there was no response to her ping, she finessed her way inside. She quickly found her way to the inner sanctum, Keating's mind. It was just like with Rowan; a total mess. She finally found his consciousness, or what was left of it. She grabbed scans of his brain waves and got the hell out of there. Even in strings of characters on her viewer's screen, that was some creepy shit that Jack didn't want to be part of for long.

  Just as she had logged out of Keating's system and was cleaning out any traces of her visit, she heard a voice right next to hear ear say, "What's going on, Jack?" She jumped in spite of herself and focussed on the physical space around her. It was Tony, looking pale and disheveled.

  "What do you mean?" Jack asked, trying to calm both of them with a matter-of-fact demeanor.

  "There was another break-in," he said, "what does it mean? Are we all in trouble?"

  "I think we'll be okay," Jack said, "it's probably just streeters or someone taking stuff to sell on the black market." She knew it wasn't that believable a lie, but she figured that Tony was desperate for any kind of consolation.

  "But why did they come back," he whined, "why don't they just leave us alone?"

  "I don't know, Tony," Jack snapped, then as she saw his face crumble, she softened her voice, "but we're safe up here. Besides, they aren't really hurting anyone. They're just after things."

  Tony gasped, and said, "What do you mean, just things? What else is there? What kind of security do we have if strangers can just walk in here and make off with anything they want?"

  "That's not what I meant," Jack backpedalled, trying to come up with something that would allay Tony's concerns. Eventually she pulled out the big guns, the bureaucratic equivalent of the killer end move. "I just meant that it's not our job to deal with it. Management has assigned it to another department, so we should be fine."

  "Oh," he said, looking relieved. "That's good, then. So we shouldn't have to worry about it, then?"

  "No," Jack said, "we should be fine." He smiled at her and mopped his soggy forehead with a piece of white cloth which he stuffed back into the chest pocket of his strange jacket. He went back to his cube, and Jack wondered anew if he was having some kind of malfunction. She opened up her private report for Adrian and Gilles, and filled in the new details that she had learned about this most recent incident. She finished up the report about an hour before her shift ended. She spent the rest of her day doing up a quick and dirty version of the daily report she had to keep for Bellis, and trying to steel herself for the next three days.

  Jack's heart pounded when she thought about trying to infiltrate the Red complex in Vancouver. She had learned that the headquarters of the group wasn't another dingy room in the Dead Zone, like the studio used by mojo and lafayette's group. Rather, there was a fairly large complex where several people lived full time and many others visited. It was sort of like a tourist destination for Red members the world over. On the one hand, that gave Jack an excuse to be there. On the other hand, there were plenty of people who would expect that she had a modicum of a clue about the group.

  It was strange enough to pretend to be part of group at all; most net groups were pretty straightforward, so there was no such thing as pretending to belong. If you cared enough about the subject to be there, you were part of the group. The Red seemed different to Jack. In many ways they weren't a net group at all. They had plenty of boards and doubtlessly most of the members had only ever met online, but fundamentally they were a physical world organization. Their "actions", whether you called them crimes against society or art, were physical world events. And at their core they had beliefs that made it difficult to meet solely on the nets.

  Certainly the vast majority of their members were not hard core believers, and there were many levels of involvement. From the digging Jack had done, she came to realize that mojo, lafayette and the others she had met were at one end of the Red spectrum - the moderate artistic end. At the other end, among the hard core of the group, were beliefs that were counter to almost every normal opinion or way of life Jack could think of.

  Hard core Reds never used everywherenet; they logged into networks using a hardwired connection only. Jack wasn't sure how this was accomplished; the documents she had seen never described the process. It was one of the many things an adherent was supposed to learn in the flesh. That was another concept common among the hardliners. Doing things in the flesh. They advocated meeting in the physical world, and many a Red treatise was devoted to the concept that a physical experience was more "real" and therefore more intrinsically valuable than the same experience on the nets.

  If she was going to be honest with herself, Jack found the Reds to be a confusing bunch. On the one hand, they were very much like the typical anti-progress types - "the nets are bad, the physical world is good." But every Red Jack had seen h
ad at least some augmentations and cybernetics, and they used the nets as much as anyone else. She had learned enough to get a rudimentary grasp of the lingo and although she felt completely ill prepared, she knew this was as good as it was going to get before her pilgrimage to the Red complex in Vancouver.

  She finished her report and tidied up her cubicle. She logged out of the Bellis system, fought the nausea from the Everlock scan, and got her jacket from the coat rack. She headed out the door of the Security Room and rode the lift down to the main floor. She walked out of the Bellis building, already starting to feel her breath quicken. She rode the train back to her apartment, and barely noticed any of the other passengers even though she was offline. Her mind was buzzing so much that she almost felt as if she were online playing a high bandwidth game and reconciling her finances at the same time.

  Back at her apartment, she showered and changed clothes, choosing knee length dark brown pants with several pockets, a shirt with a slight green glow to it and a bulky sweater. She grabbed a couple of cold meal packets and stuck them in one of her many pockets, and loaded the others with a few essentials. She added a light silver windshell to her outfit, and logged into her personal system. She pulled out her private report, and prepared messages for Gilles and Adrian to envelop the report. She blind copied them both, with personalized introductions, then shut down her apartment for the next three days.

  She unplugged her scooter from the floor socket and stowed the cable back in its front compartment. She pushed the scooter forward and out the door of her room. Her apartment door shushed closed behind her, and she double locked it using the strong encryption key most people kept for those moments when they're paranoid. She flipped on the anti-grav chip on the scooter's chassis, and it hovered a few centimetres off the floor.

  Anti-grav was one of those marketing terms that sounded much cooler than it really was, since all the chips did was interact with the magnetism of the floor in such a way as to repel the object to which it was attached. Jack always found it funny when people tried to use anti-grav in places that weren't metallic. So few people bothered to find out how anything worked; they seemed to prefer to believe that everything was too complicated to possibly understand.