“That’s the one.” Joey shoved the door open as if it was his office.
Old cups piled high on the desk while the left side of the room drowned in an ocean of old Chibi-San containers, some of which still leaked soy sauce. A waterfall of holodisk cases ran over the right side, and shelves full of random disassembled electronics sagged against the wall. The air hinted at the cloying smell of rotting food swirled with the after-presence of someone who wears far too much cologne. Joey’s brain ground to an abrupt halt as he noticed a large composite alloy broadsword against the wall just by the door.
“What the fuck?” He chuckled.
Masaru pointed at animated holograms of wizards, trolls, and dragons shimmering in a hazy mixture of floating dust particles and weak lighting over the desk. They exchanged a nod of understanding as Joey swung his deck off his back and set it down, causing a cascade of empty plastic cups to flow to the ground. After connecting the secondary lead to the terminal, he flopped in the seat and pulled the interface wire out to a comfortable length.
“Wow, this guy has a nice chair.” The tiny switchblade snapped out of the housing with a squeeze. “Alright, here I go. If anything happens, hit that.” Joey pointed to a holographic button on the display panel.
“Could I not just pull out the wire?” Masaru grinned. He knew that would work, but it would knock Joey loopy like a mule-kick to the head.
“Bite me.”
Joey slid the connector into the socket behind his right ear. The soft click that echoed through his skull became thunder across his brain as the door of reality slammed closed. Weightlessness followed, and he spiraled down a tunnel of shimmering color. The end passed with an electric whoosh and he found himself in a room lifted from the set of a medieval fantasy holo. Large irregular stones somewhere between grey and brown formed the walls of the chamber. Coated with a reflective sheen of moist slime, they caught the wavering light from several virtual torches that sent shadows flitting about in the spaces between the raised stones.
It was time to get to work.
n unimpressed sneer spread over the face of the dark cowboy, exposing yellow teeth. His eyes narrowed into slits that vanished behind the gossamer frizz of old-man eyebrows as Joey’s alter ego threw a condescending grunt at the décor. The silver discs that ringed his black hat shimmered with reflected virtual torchlight.
The room had one exit; a heavy wooden door reinforced with several iron straps. He figured the network administrator for a fantasy geek. That he had taken the time to program the fragrance of burning torches gave it away. Boots rang heavy across the stone floor as he walked, wooden heels on stone accented with the metallic clatter of spurs. A strange noise came from the right as a pair of two-foot blobs of jelly appeared in a flash of magic sparkles. For several seconds, a green line appeared above them and then disappeared. The slimes proceeded to slide about at random, apparently non-aggressive.
Past the door, the atmosphere changed to one of blinding light and immaculate floors. Joey squinted. Despite this place existing only as data fed into his brain, the sudden dramatic change in lighting still made his eyes hurt. He flung his long black coat to the rear, exposing his belt and the silver revolvers. His hands hovered over his guns as he glanced from side to side.
His deck constructed a network map as it analyzed local traffic, and a wireframe model of the interconnect pathways and nodes drew itself out in front of him as an expanding cobweb of boxes and lines.
Joey’s target, a data node, lay nestled within a triangle of security sub-processors behind a barrier node.
The overall defense level of this network seemed quite a bit lower than the reputation of the place would suggest. He figured they overestimated their physical security and did not count on someone sneaking into the building to plug in to the private network. In a way that made sense, the portion of their system that was accessible from the GlobeNet likely got more attention from their security team. Despite the danger, he felt a twinge of disappointment at the prospect of an easy job.
He turned left and plodded down the corridor, doing his best impression of the stalking drift of a horror-vid villain. Despite his gait, the environment flew past him as though he ran at sixty miles per hour. The bandwidth of a local terminal connection allowed him to move at great speed, another reason he adored the risk of sneaking in.
At the barrier node entry, he found a large white airlock door that one would expect to see on the outer hull of a starship; complete with black and yellow caution stripes around the edges and a pair of flashing red lights on the wall. In the center, someone had tacked an anachronistic piece of yellowing parchment paper in place with a rusty nail. Upon it, words written in red ink.
Unauthorized intruders will be smited until dead.
Joey looked at the ceiling. He could not wait to see what lay beyond it. He muttered at the redundancy, an intruder is by definition unauthorized. One trait from his father that he wished he had not inherited; sometimes, picayune things like that just stuck in his mind and made him angry at stupid people.
It did not take long for his tinkering to fool the door. Then again, barrier nodes were easier to enter than leave.
A rush of white fog billowed into the hall as the immense portal slid to the side. The room beyond resembled a medieval tavern, complete with fireplace, old tables and a bar. The half-elf girl strumming a mandolin by a fireplace, wearing a skimpy green skirt and top might have caused a lifted eyebrow if he didn’t know she was just a program construct. In flagrant disregard of the fantasy motif, a silver elevator door clung to the center of the ceiling. It was as out of place here as a cowboy in black.
He looked up at it with a half grin. Barrier nodes often played visual games with their exit portals, using tricks like moving stairs, impossible doors that slide around the walls, and invisible pathways. All of it was a representation of the additional difficulty of exiting a node designed to trap intruders. Joey knew better than to try to climb to it; the passage out of this node was not really on the ceiling, and the door would just run away.
He raised his arms. Thin green lines reminiscent of circuitry wiring flashed into the air like lightning as his deck hammered the network with algorithms designed to simulate an authorized user at a damaged terminal. The routines detected the network’s response and formed an accepted set of credentials based on thousands of rejected attempts within the span of a few seconds.
The elevator door shimmered and melted away to a green wireframe model, then slid across the ceiling and down onto the wall like a square patch of liquid. It stopped sideways, halfway down as its steel covering returned.
“Halt.” A deep male voice echoed from behind as if from inside a metal tube.
A gothic knight in full plate armor materialized out of thin air a few feet away as he turned toward the sound. The construct drew a large broadsword from a scabbard on its belt.
“Prepare to be smited, intruder.”
The armor amused Joey. From the looks of it, Milton modified a troll to be more defensive. Not waiting for it to make the first move, he flipped his guns up and fired.
The knight lunged through the attack, deflecting the bullets with a shield that formed around its arm. Joey lunged back as the blade hissed past his face. He continued to float to the rear, firing, but the knight held its shield in the path of the onslaught.
For several minutes, the dark cowboy vanished and reappeared around the room in various places as the sentry pursued him over the virtual furniture. Bottles of liquor behind the bar exploded from deflected shots and several tables fell, cleaved in two from near-miss broadsword strokes. The half elf girl continued to strum, as if oblivious to the battle. The Knight proved to be far from the pushover he expected, and it took all his concentration to counteract the program’s efforts to invade and corrupt his deck.
He could not trick a construct into flinching or making an error. They just ran through a set of coded instructions, lacking true understanding of what went on a
round it. The knight was not an AI, so their duel became a question of finding the pattern. He studied it through several more exchanges and predicted its next move. When the I/O channel opened to transmit an attack, he slipped a virus packet through its firewall. Cyberspace rendered the exchange as a sidestepped sword stroke and a pistol whip that crushed a pronounced dent into its helmet. The satisfying clunk knocked the thing back a step.
Shaking it off, it lunged again.
The sword came in a little faster than Joey prepared for, and it sliced a fourteen-inch gash down his left leg. In cyberspace, the cut felt real. The old cowboy let out a polyphonic roar that reverberated with supernatural energy. Black blood sprayed the floor as he stumbled. His wail of pain became one of anger.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know that tune,” said the half-elf. “Would you like to make another request?”
In the real world, Masaru turned at the sight of smoke rising up from the grille on the back of the deck. He lifted an eyebrow, unsure which was more disturbing―that Joey’s deck appeared to be burning or the sick grin on his friend’s face.
The door opened and a pasty man in his middle forties waddled in, carrying coffee in one hand and a silver-wrapped lump in the other. A thick moustache and fluffy eyebrows sprouted from a round face covered by unkempt brown hair. His white button-down shirt looked a size too small and was blotched with many years’ worth of coffee stains. A dull plop broke the silence as his egg sandwich hit the floor when he saw Joey slumped over his desk.
Masaru edged into the shadows by the wall, a hand on his katana.
Milton broke out in a cold sweat, already pasty face growing paler. The panic left his eyes as soon as he remembered the sword leaning against the wall. He kept it more because it reminded him of his favorite pastime than for its practical use as a weapon, but a weapon it was nonetheless. He moved with a lunging step, grabbing it as he set the coffee down on a nearby shelf. He turned, holding the blade up with wild fear in his eyes. Masaru suppressed the urge to laugh at his posture.
Milton clutched it as if he had just pulled Excalibur from the stone. He crept toward Joey, and held the blade over his head. As little knowledge that the unconscious Joey had of Milton’s approach, Milton had less idea than that of Masaru’s presence behind him.
The administrator lifted his weapon higher. Trembles rattled his arms as he appeared to debate if he should hit Joey or tap him with it to wake him up. Masaru made a small whistle, three descending notes. Milton whirled, his startled shriek at seeing another man behind him cut off when the sheathed katana cracked him across the head. The sword fell from his grip, sticking into the concrete behind him as he spun and fell unconscious. Masaru reattached the katana to his belt and retrieved the coffee. He tilted it in toast to the unconscious man.
“Your décor may be trite, but at least, my friend, you have good taste in coffee.”
Joey had been studying the knight’s changed pattern, firing just as he anticipated vulnerability. This time, his attack bypassed the countermeasures and tricked it into running a “diagnostic” that was in actuality a disassembler. In cyberspace, smoking bullets struck it in the chest, causing a series of deep dents. Bright white light shone out from the eye slits in the helmet, spraying into random pixels of data that faded away.
The knight attacked again, but Joey ducked. The program weakened, and its strikes became ever more slow and predictable. Efficiency lost in an attempt to recompile itself to repair the damage. Joey fired twice more, shattering the knight into a dozen pieces of armor and light that soon melted into the ground, trailing to oblivion in cyan smears and cycling numbers.
The cowboy rubbed his lip with the back of his hand, eyeing the droplet of blood on the ridge. A sneer crossed his lips as he shoved his guns back in their holsters with a guttural sound of contempt in his throat. The aged gunslinger acted angrier than Joey was, but he loved every minute of it. Turning his attention once more to the barrier node’s exit, he held his hand up as smoky wraiths slid off his arm and into the wall.
This time it worked. The liquid portal slithered along until it took a normal place at about the height one would expect a door to be. It opened with a faint squeak, revealing a dim cobalt blue hallway with an indigo floor and ceiling that led to several data nodes. He triggered a DataMole soft, summoning a furry creature the size of a medium dog. A few degrees shy of cute, it trundled off in search of a match for the file. It went right; Joey started a manual search from the other side.
Twenty minutes later, perhaps two minutes in real time, he found something that piqued his interest. One of the data tiles had a face on it that he recognized. Only a day or two old, the security footage showed Donna George, a reporter for NewsNet. Her image flooded the city from an uncountable number of bots that swarmed at all hours. She had to be in her late fifties now, but had so much work done she still looked twenty.
The video showed her by the entrance to some convention room in the hotel, being drooled over by two men in expensive suits. From the sound of her speech, she’d downed more than a few drinks, but her companions were both quite happy to be in her presence.
“That little bitch isn’t taking my job.” She grinned as she shook her finger back and forth. “Oh no no no. I took care of that.”
One man took her arm to help her avoid falling, but she pulled back.
“I’m fine.” She sipped from a glass in her left hand and glared at him. “Doing better than that little whore, who the hell does she think she is, trying to replace me, Donna George!”
She tilted forward. Both men helped her to a nearby chair against the wall. They sat on either side and muttered too low for the audio to pick up.
“No… No… I’m not worrying. I offered her that job in Sector 12.” She laughed the haughty laugh of an entitlement-bitch that never doubted she would get her way.
“Sector 12? But… isn’t that a black zone?” One of the men raised his voice.
Donna cackled. “That’s the point. You didn’t think I would interview the worthless drek that live there, did you?” She drained the last of the glass in one gulp. “That little ass-kissing priss wasn’t supposed to come back.” She cracked up into fits of giggling.
The two men looked at each other in dismay. Joey had enough and stopped the video. He tucked it away for later use, copying the file to his deck. If he ever got hard up for cash, he could always try to get some credits out of her to keep that quiet.
Something warm and wet snuffled against his leg. His gaze fell upon the source with a paralyzing dourness that could have shocked an average person to immediate silence. Alas, the DataMole had no sense of fear and stood there wagging its stumpy little tail in simulated pleasure as it held the sought after file in its mouth.
Joey patted it on the head without thinking as he took the file, leaving the creature to disintegrate into a puddle of swirling pixels that seeped into the floor. The outer shell of the tile was so black it reflected no light, like a hole in reality. Small panels of metal folded out and closed around it; armored doors caught in an endless cycle of continual closing. He recognized the effect; serious crypto he did not have the hardware to touch.
The file sent a twinge of fear and exhilaration through him at what he must have just gotten involved with.
cloying smell, the presence of weeks-old remains of Chinese take-out, greeted Joey as his eyes opened into the real world. The pile of trash blurred into focus as he became aware of a new player in the game of fragrances: coffee. Masaru stood by the door with his back to the wall, in a position that would allow him to ambush anyone that came in. The beige cup with the fancy Imperial logo on it made him think Masaru had gone out to grab a cup while he lay there, logged in and defenseless.
Joey stood, gathering his deck. “Dammit, you left―”
His voice cut off to a startled wail as he tripped over the unconscious Milton and landed in a heap. Masaru hauled Joey to his feet with one arm, saluting him with the cup once he was upright.
/>
“This man brought me coffee, very respectful.”
Betrayal changed to gratitude at the sight of the broadsword stuck in the floor.
“Thanks. I’m not into body piercing. I got the file, let’s get outta here.” He paused to swipe the egg sandwich off the floor. “Ooh. Bonus.”
He kicked the door closed behind him, and stuffed the discovered breakfast into his mouth. Masaru touched his fingers to the side of his head, opening a communication link to Katya.
“Kat, please provide a distraction. We are ready to exit.”
Katya’s hair had become bright red and she had changed into a plain green strapless dress that clung around her armpits; her cyberware adjusted the complexion of her face, adding freckles.
She held her NetMini up to her head, faking a call with no video feed, and walked around the lobby. Her voice held no trace of an accent, increasing in volume and desperation, as if she was being tele-dumped by a man she had been expecting to marry. As she grew louder, her argument absorbed the entire room. The two men slipped into the lobby and crossed to the main doors, which hissed out of their way. Across the courtyard, they jogged down a few steps to the sidewalk. No sooner had they set foot upon the metal walkway than the sound of a heavy sliding door drew their attention to the left.
About forty yards away, two huge men in ankle length black coats emerged from the side of a black van. Their boots thudded like lead into the road and both stared at him with emotionless silver orbs. Each man’s right eye lit up with a faint orange crosshair. An octopus of wires ran into the collar of their coats, connected to metal plates that wrapped around their skull―military combat implants. They appeared almost identical, as if the same machine produced both men. The barrels of a rotary gun spun up in the hands of the one on the left while his partner trained a shoulder-fired “soda can” rocket on Joey.
He got a good look at the folding fins of the stubby blunt-nosed missile as it leapt out of the lower tube of a two-shot launcher and became a dark spot amidst a sea of white fumes heading right at him.
Virtual Immortality Page 16
