“Someone snitched on a member of the resistance–a local money launderer. They raided his apartment. I don’t think there was much left of him when they were done.”
Jaq’s heart sank and her belly rumbled. “Money launderer? He wouldn’t happen to be named Remi?”
The hack-jacker nodded.
“Damn,” she groaned.
“You were here to see Remi too?”
Jaq didn’t answer, but that confirmed she was.
“What was he buying?” he asked.
She wasn’t about to admit to someone she didn’t know from Adam that she was running illegal code. He happened to open up to her first.
“The name’s Click. I was here to drop some code that only someone like Remi would want. I was looking for hard cash, but right now I’ll take anything. I’m not a seller. I’m just a freelance runner. I don’t have the right connections, but if someone did, this would be worth wads.”
Jaq’s eyes lit up at the prospect. Mom would be upset that she hadn’t been able to offload the Cow to Remi and even though it wasn’t Jaq’s fault, Mom might just shoot the messenger. If Jaq could work a better deal with someone else, all would be forgiven.
“Whatchya got? Maybe we can arrange a trade?” Click offered.
“I got Mom’s Cow.”
“Oh–sweet! I could use that. It would make running online a hell of a lot safer. I can only make quick runs right now, but one of these days the scouts are going to catch up to me. I’d give my left nut for a Cow.”
Jaq snorted, but shook her head nevertheless.
“I can’t give this to you without Mom’s permission,” she insisted. “She doesn’t want freelance runners on her own personal net. You’ll be robbing her of her cut for the jobs you get instead of her crew of runners. She won’t like that one bit.”
She turned to go, but Click grabbed her arm.
“Not so fast. The code I have here could earn her ten to twenty times what she’d lose in her cut because of you giving me Cow. There are several folks in the resistance with deep pockets who would pay a pretty penny for what I’ve got.” He held up a chip like no other Jaq had ever seen, sealed in a jeweled-finish case. “You’re looking at Magic Bean.”
Jaq scrunched up her nose. She had never heard of it.
“It’s some sort of sky-giant key code,” Click told her. “It’ll let you get through their security. I don’t know exactly how, Remi did, but what matters is the people who want it will know how to use it. The Magic Bean is an underground goldmine. All I’m asking for is a straight up trade, just so I can cover my losses. What do you say?”
Jaq was torn. They wouldn’t be able to eat this Magic Bean code, which meant unless Mom could come up with another new client, they’d go hungry again that night. But she couldn’t go home empty-handed and if this Magic Bean was as lucrative as Click suggested, Mom might be grateful for the trade.
“Alright…I’m in - my Cow for your Magic Bean. But if you’re screwing me over, I’ll find you on Mom’s net and you’ll pay. I mean it.”
Click shrugged and handed her the chip. “No worries.”
She pulled the Cow out of her carrier bag and made the exchange. Then they both made themselves scarce.
When Jaq arrived home she crept in quietly, hesitant to reveal her deal to Mom. On the way back, Jaq had decided that it might not have been such a good idea after all, but it was too late to change her mind. Hiding it from Mom was only postponing the inevitable.
Mom could sense something wrong the moment she laid eyes on Jaq.
“Where are my credits?” the stern woman demanded.
“Remi wasn’t available. He had been raided by sky-giant agents. They had already razed his place by the time I got there.”
Mom sighed and gestured for Jaq to hand over the carrier bag. She did so reluctantly. Without pause, Mom opened the flap. A frown settled over her face. She yanked out the jewelled-finish case.
“What the hell is this? Where’s my Cow?”
“That’s what I needed to tell you. The opportunity presented itself for profit. I traded for something better than Cow. That’s sky-giant code…Magic Bean. It can get you past their security. You can pawn that off to the resistance for a hell of a lot more than Remi would have given you for Cow. I know it won’t buy us supplies as is, but on the black market …”
“You do know the sky-giants have moles in the resistance? They’ll ignore things like Cow for bigger things, but they won’t ignore something like this. If I try to sell this, I may as well paint a target on my back that screams ‘I’m helping the resistance.’ No way. Mom and her crew stay neutral. Taking on the sky-giants, as much as I would like to take them down and reclaim our world, is too much of a risk for little folk like us. Let’s just stick to the underground.” Mom dropped the jeweled-finish case into a wastebasket and pointed at the door. “I don’t want to see your face for a few hours. Who knows how much money you just cost us by putting Cow into unvetted hands. You better hope I can find a replacement for Remi and get a new copy of Cow to them. More than likely, we’re going hungry tonight.”
“But…!” Jaq protested, but Mom raised a hand to silence the girl, shaking her head with the opposite hand on her hip.
“No ‘but’s. End of discussion. Make yourself scarce.”
Jaq knew better than to argue with Mom when she assumed that pose, her already grim perma-scowl darkening even more. The hack-jacker skulked around the alleyways until nightfall and then quietly slipped into bed, the grumbling ache of her empty belly now just a persistent numbness that made her realize she had gone beyond basic hunger to the beginnings of starvation. She hoped a good night’s sleep would help her shake some of the accompanying weakness.
She did not, however, manage to sleep in the next morning, awoken by a violent glare piercing the darkness of her room in the wee hours of dawn. It had entered the gloom of her tiny space through the tiny hole in her wall she liked to consider her window, and she wondered at first if Mom and her crew were to be the next victims of a sky-giant raid. The light was too blindingly bright to be the product of a sky-giant light stick, or even several, and it also glowed oddly opalescent. Since she couldn’t gauge the source from her room, she scrambled into the hallway beyond her door to investigate from some other viewpoint, almost colliding with Queue in the process. His face was white with fear.
“Did you see that?!” Jaq gasped.
“Yeah–I was coming to get you because of it. You’ll never believe what that is,” the ginger-haired boy said as he pointed up the hallway towards their running exit route.
The pair piled out of their cat-flap door and stood in the alleyway which had been invaded by an enormous tubular beam of light, ascending into the sky. Jaq gazed up at it with wide eyes, awestruck.
“A beam? Here? How?”
The beams were part of the sky-giant beam-stock, their transportation system allowing them to travel between their sky platforms and the human cities below them.
“Mom asked me to run a job for her online, but it was a quick jog and drop and then I had some extra time left on my monitor while I was jacked in. I noticed a chip in a fancy case in the trash and it had me curious, so I plugged it in. I wondered why Mom would be throwing anything like that away. The next thing I know I’m facing a complex key code that needed just a little manipulating to open an unknown pathway into the net. I hacked it like a pro, and then suddenly there’s a ‘flash!’ This beam opens up. I don’t know about you, but I think it calls for some exploring.”
Jaq smiled a wicked grin. She couldn’t agree more. Then she noticed Queue’s wrist monitor flickering.
“Queue, how long were you jacked in?”
He glanced down at his wrist, his face falling immediately. “I guess it was longer than I thought. I got so caught up in the hack, I lost track of time. Jeez, Jaq, I can’t go back in right now…”
“No kidding.” Jaq grabbed his arm and jostled him towards the direction of his room. “You’re going to ne
ed to stay offline for a couple of days. Go get some rest. I’ll have to handle this by myself.”
“By yourself?”
She shrugged the idea off and waved him towards his room again. Reluctantly, her friend did as he was told and left her to explore the beam on her own.
“Wow,” she murmured, once alone. “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be running the beam-stock.”
Mom would be fit to be tied if she knew one of her hack-jackers was about to take such a risk, but Jaq didn’t care. As far as she knew, only the sky-giants and their agents ever used the beams for transport. She would be a first.
She stepped tentatively into the beam and waited.
Two things that followed took her by surprise. The first was her sudden ascent, carried rapidly upwards by unseen forces. The second was an instant connection with the sky-giant network, online without being physically jacked in. Jaq hoped this wouldn’t be a problem. If she didn’t manage to go offline when she needed to, no longer a matter of simply jacking-out again, it could result in some negative long-term effects. She would have to watch her monitor closely.
Before she knew it, she was standing on a sky platform, surrounded by sky-giant structures of varying heights and widths. The sight took her breath away, seeing the sun for the very first time where it peeked in through the buildings looming over her. She also noticed the air was unusually clean, drawing in deep, satisfying breaths that left her feeling light-headed.
“Now that I’m here, what do I do?” she asked.
“What do you require?” a voice said in her head. It was a network guide. Jaq had heard of those. She immediately thought of her numb and empty belly.
“Food, I need food,” she responded.
“I’ll provide you with co-ordinates to the closest replicator,” the guide told her.
A map appeared before her online, directing her to one of the sky-giant structures. Jaq followed it, noting at how clean the streets were compared to those of the city below. The sky platform was a paradise in comparison.
As she approached the huge door, Jaq wondered how she would ever get through it, but the doors sensors had been reprogrammed to recognize humans to allow free passage for the servants they had claimed from below. Their ability to ride the beams had been restricted, so that only trusted sky-giant agents with security clearance could travel freely back and forth, but other than specifically sky-giant only areas, that was the extent of human limitation.
Thanks to the Magic Bean, Jaq had the desired clearance. The sky-giant network viewed her as a trusted agent, with the same freedoms and privileges. Mom really had missed the true potential of her trade. But Jaq wasn’t about to.
Once inside, she made her way to the replicator. When it requested her order, she decided on bacon and eggs along with a serving of juice. They rarely got those things as part of her rations and she craved protein and fat more than anything else. The smell of it, when the replicator opened, made her feel faint, her hunger then truly hitting home.
Jaq tried to pace herself, knowing if she ate too quickly, she would likely make herself sick. As she was eating, it occurred to her that she wasn’t well-groomed nor dressed in the neutral-colored clothing common to the human servants the sky-giants had taken to their lairs. That was why Jaq started when an actual servant came in behind her. The mousy looking woman jumped too.
“Before you call out the alarm, would you like to get back down to the city?” Jaq asked.
The woman nodded, but she still looked frightened.
“I have the code that can get you home, but only if you help me,” Jaq told her.
“I wasn’t planning on exposing you. There’s a sky-giant on his way, following behind me. If you don’t hide right away, he’ll catch you for sure…and you don’t want to know what he’ll do to you.” The servant glanced over her shoulder, trembling.
“Hide where?”
“Get in the replicator. I’ll keep him away from you. The sky-giants rarely use the replicators; they just order us to fetch things for them. They are three times our size, but they still expect us to do their heavy lifting.”
Jaq scurried into the replicator, peeking out under the bottom of the cover so she could get a glimpse of the sky-giant. She had never seen one before and her curiosity was too strong to ignore. The servant stood in front of the replicator to prevent detection but Jaq’s view wasn’t completely obscured by this gesture. She didn’t have to wait long.
Seconds after she had squeezed her way into the replicator, the door into the chamber opened and what Jaq could only assume was a sky-giant clicked in. It reminded her of some sort of bizarre splicing of a ridiculously huge praying mantis and a puffer fish. Despite its intimidatingly-large size it moved with grace and purpose, its elongated spiny limbs tasting the air as it went. When it spoke, breathy sounds passed into the translator it wore, aspirated noises sounding like “fee”s, “fi”s, “fo”s and the odd “fum”. The robotic voice of the translator shared the sky-giant’s thoughts with his servant so she could understand.
“I smell human food. Why? I did not give you leave to eat, slave.”
“You know I can’t access the replicator without your permission. One of the agents passed through here when I arrived. He had fabricated a meal. Some of the smell lingers,” she lied.
“Hmph–must have just come back from earth-side. There’s a stink like human city here too. I want you to get rid of the stench while I go cleanup for supper. I have another slave on his way with fresh meat. We caught ourselves a member of the resistance yesterday, so the meal’s going to be extra special.”
Jaq wondered if that meant what she thought it meant. She had heard rumors that if the humans the sky-giants took weren’t deemed suitable for servants, they became food for the invaders. Were they to catch her running around a lair uninvited, they might consider her fresh meat too–hence the servant’s warning.
As soon as he had clicked away again the servant who had hidden Jaq dragged her out of the replicator.
“You can’t stay. We’ll have to get you out the back way. If you’re here when he gets back, you’re done for. Whatever code you have won’t do you any good then.”
The servant grabbed Jaq by the hand and ran with her down the hallway. They hadn’t gotten very far when she stopped abruptly. A familiar clicking sound resonated from around the corner.
“He must have circled around,” she gasped. “We’ll have to hide in here.”
The frightened woman dove through an adjacent door, pulling Jaq along after her. It took the combined strength of two of them to swing it closed, it was that large and unwieldy, and unlike the main door, it did not open automatically at her prompting. While the servant caught her breath, Jaq scanned the room, accustomed to making quick breaks for sanctuary and unfazed by the whole ordeal.
“Where are we?” she asked. Although alien-looking in design, she recognized what was likely a computer in the room, but none of the other items scattered about seemed familiar in any way.
“We’re in my master’s tech room. This is where he does some of his work and communicates with others of his kind. He also stores his more valuable tech devices here. I’m not supposed to be in here. He won’t venture here until he’s done with his meal, so it’s safe for now.”
Jaq eyed the computer. It was far larger than anything she had jacked into before, but as long as she could access the port and had her key code, she could probably figure her way around the system, given enough time. Unfortunately, time was one thing that was limited.
“Slave!”
The sky-giant bellowed upon reaching his dining area and discovering his servant was no longer there.
“I have to go,” she insisted, a quaver in her voice.
“But the key code. I need to share it with you…” Jaq didn’t want to leave her savior without the promised Magic Bean.
The woman pushed her hair back to reveal a port. “You could transfer it, if you have a person to person jack
.”
“You’re a jacker too?” Jaq’s face fell. “I don’t have one on me. Damn–why can’t I have something like that around when I need one?”
“Perhaps I can be of service,” a robotic voice spoke from behind them, almost making Jaq jump out of her skin.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A mobile replicator,” her new friend replied. “They are rare and extremely valuable because of their AI programming. That’s why my master stores his in here, for safe keeping.”
“I am the AU-G00Z model, specifically,” it said with a beep. “Do you need me to replicate said person to person jack? I’ve accessed the schematics from the network.” It directed its question at Jaq, since the servant did not have the authority to use its functions.
“Yes…sure. If you can. Make me one of those.”
The robot shuddered for a few seconds and then spit up the double jacked cord requested. Jaq gaped at it for a moment before snatching up its offering. She looked over at the servant, her face betraying her amazement.
“What else can it make?” Jaq asked.
“Almost anything that already exists, as long as the schematics are available via the network.” the woman told her. “Can we hurry this up? If I don’t get back to my master, he’ll come looking for me and chances are he’ll find you this time.”
Jaq obliged her, jacking into her port as quickly as she could and sharing the code before jacking out again.
“This means you’re free,” Jaq said. “Do whatever you need to do to distract that sky-giant and then get this code to as many of the other humans on this platform as you can before you get lost.” She pressed the jack cord into the startled woman’s hand. “Then I suggest you scram from this platform while you still can. I have a plan, and if it works, this place is going to end up dangerously unstable before this day is through. You’ll be safer back in the city.”
“Be careful,” was the last thing the servant had to say before abandoning Jaq to her proposed work. She eyed the lofty computer, wondering how she was going to reach the jack for full access. She looked over at AU-G00Z as it beeped and whirred.
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