Shift

by Robert Lenz, Jacob Hunter

  This time I had the searchbot find all references to the Collapse. It hesitated and asked me its first follow-up question.

  '' it chirped.

  "The first, give me all you've got." I replied.

  It went away and came back with only two results. The first was a short article found in children's history textbooks that discussed the downfall of that generation. Again, it was intended to frighten the children who had not yet learned about both fusion and fission bombs. Sadly, it was one that I knew already and was of no interest to me. The second, however, piqued my curiosity. The preview showed me the ancient logo of the CIA, a case number, and large black [redacted] strips all throughout.

  I took it from Sputnik's wavering field of results and tore it open, as one would when opening a somewhat ethereal birthday present.

  '' thundered from all around me. I looked around and saw nothing but myself, Sputnik, and the file in front of me, its wrapper having vanished into the ether.

  "Wha?" I stammered, taken aback by the thundering voice.

  '' boomed.

  A man appeared in front of me, dressed in an early 20th-century period suit, complete with fedora and a long chain connecting to what could only be a pocket watch. He was completely translucent and parts of him would fade in and out of static as though whatever generated him was on the decline.

  '' he said cheerily.

  "I...I don't have any." I replied.

  '' he said, still in that uncanny, yet robotic voice, reaching towards the file I now had pressed against my chest.

  "I don't think so." I stated, "I'm pretty sure I need this. Plus, it’s on the public network. You can't take it."

  '' he mused.

  He completely froze for a moment, digital eyebrow raised in a somewhat speculative glance, and then he melted. It was as though a balloon filled with water had been punctured. He simply plooshed down onto the representation of the floor. Droplets of digital goo sprayed all over, coating both the floor and my arms. I attempted to shake them off in revulsion but they appeared to be stuck fast, as though droplets of glue.

  Sickened, I turned to my searchbot and asked for a handkerchief and felt a sickening, crawling motion on my arm. The goo had begun to wriggle downwards, ending at my fingertips and then leaping (they leapt, oh dear god they leapt) off of my extended middle finger and landed next to my shoe. I looked down and saw the rest of him oozing towards me, puddling around my feet.

  I tried to back up and nearly toppled over. I couldn’t move; the goo had entrenched me. A Cheshire grinning mouth formed in the puddle at my feet and chortled slightly.

  '.'

  "What? Hell? What’s going on here?"

  ''

  "N...no. I didn't want to read that shit. It was far too long." I stammered.

  '' it retorted. '.'

  I didn't have to wait long. A dim glow had begun to pulse through the floor, turning into a bright red and orange backdrop and expanded into a surrounding ring of fire. I'm not sure if I’d felt or imagined the heat, but I winced anyway. In front of me, a horned demon materialized, roughly 20 feet away. It had hooves for feet, human arms, and a cone shaped head. The horns ended in points that spouted a thin trickle of dark green, sizzling ichor.

  The floor had changed while I’d focused on the appearance of the demon. Prior to its arrival, a rocky pattern had represented the superficial plane that I could walk over. Now, however, the textures didn’t seem to quite match. I also noticed seams where the textures met up but weren't properly blended together. The demon also had a strange quirk: he wasn't synced correctly. His limbs moved strangely and not uniformly, as though out of time with his intended movements. The demon started to pace back and forth, keeping one eye on me, appearing to glide rather than walk as a result of his glitch.

  Then it came to me in a flash. This was a joke. An amateur, a script kiddie. Someone to be pitied.

  This was an attempt to hack me or at least cause me grief on the network. I'm guessing it was some kid who learned early on he could sucker new Persistence users into giving him information with which he would use to steal or at least use for blackmail. The oldest trick in the book; just an updated form of it.

  My physical jack tingled a bit. The demon was preparing his assaults. Persistence had the ability to transfer feelings and emotions to the user, making it extremely popular for the adult industry. It also could transmit forms of pain, usually by way of an electric shock. Users could bully other users with this technique, as long as they controlled how much they were hurting the other person. Naturally there were limits to how much was transferred, but as with anything, there were ways to get around the limits. You could also harm your own jack or yourself if you pushed too hard.

  A little pressure here and there was enough for some punk to get his way with ignorant users. They could scare people with the small amount of pain and the dark imagery of a demon out of cyber hell.

  However, he was obviously clueless. The newer jacks were reinforced against hard shocks. They were well grounded, sending any threats directly into the earth, harming nobody. The tingle wasn't actually the demon harming me, it was the jack redirecting the energy it had sent flowing towards me.

  “Bring it on, motherfucker,” I thought. He probably assumed I was fresh off the boat, knowledgeless in the ways of Persistence. Sadly, it was knowledge without experience, but I’d never let that stop me before. I first tried summoning a shield to further block his attacks, asking Sputnik nicely for some protection. Without being able to directly see the stream of data he was throwing at me, I couldn't really turn it back against him. Instead, I envisioned myself in a hazy blue bubble, and was pleasantly surprised to see it appear in front of me. Well, envelop me anyway. The tingle faded to nothingness, and I saw the demon's face screw up in anger. It roared, and I smiled.

  Good, I had his attention.

  I asked Sputnik for some help, and it summoned my familiar, well the digital representation of mine anyway. This was one of the neat tricks that not many people in Persistence knew about. Every user came with built-in protection against the torrent of viruses that streamed through the network. Every so often one would pop off a data line and latch directly onto a user's head, sucking it dry and causing serious harm to your data jack. Some people even woke to find electrical burns on their necks. There was even talk of fatalities, but none mentioned in the popular news feeds.

  My familiar arose out of wash of pixels and voxels and stared at me, awaiting a command. It was a small, fluffy bunny, with a little puffball tail and ears that shot straight up off its head. To be honest, I didn't know what to expect the first time I called it up, but a bunny could hopefully best the glitchy demon in front of me.
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  '' faded into existence above its head.

  "Umm...Earl?" I said, right off the top of my head. I didn't have time to properly name it, but I could probably change it later if I wanted. As long as there was a later.

  '' it said.

  "Earl, attack the demon." I instructed.

  Earl did so with stunning slowness. It hopped over to the demon, who looked surprised more than anything. I heard a tittering laughter from my feet and saw that the puddle which enveloped my shoes was wavering in hilarity.

  "," I heard it whisper.

  I didn't really care. I knew I was better than this amateur, whoever it was. Earl, happily, did not glitch. His form remained true, and a soft blue glow began to emanate from his fluffy white fur. He sat back on his hind legs and appeared to screw himself down, as though a spring were being tightened, and then launched himself at the demon's head. His teeth were a whirl of fury, biting and slashing at its neck. The demon continued to glitch, parts of it were warbling into and out of existence. Earl's mouth clamped down on the side of the demon's neck, and with his powerful hindquarters, he pushed off the demon's shoulders and tore its head from its glitchy body. Its headless corpse fell to the floor with a simulated thump, and Earl cheerfully brought the head to my feet.

  The puddle at my feet de-coagulated and reformed into a person. Not the smooth, zoot-suit wearing man, but a teenage boy with long matted hair and opaque glasses. "Screw you," he said, as he fizzled away into nothingness.

  Damned kids.

  The ring of fire and poorly-rendered floor faded away to blackness, leaving me alone with Sputnik and Earl. The query still requested my identification. Apparently this particular piece of information was owned by someone who actually did want to protect its contents. A voice interrupted my thoughts, "Why do you want access to this information?"

  I responded, "Are you the owner?"

  "I am more its maintainer. Nobody really owns anything in here. I came along much as you did, however I achieved my goal through less-than-savory means.”

  "Ah", I mused. A very open ended interface, just zero documentation. You want to be a jacker, you gotta learn the system the old fashion way: try until it works.

  "Why can't I have access to this information?" I asked the maintainer. He ignored me, "Did you like my son's blocking program? It needs some work but for a young kid, pretty darn good I think!"

  What? That had been intentional? "You do know it caused my jack to tingle. Your kid is causing intentional harm. That is dangerous." I was getting frustrated. This conversation was going nowhere.

  "Oh yea, I need to remind him about that. You're right, of course. Why would we ever want to harm somebody who tries to brute force their way into protected information? We locked it for a reason. You can’t have it."

  Prick. I don't think I was getting past this guy. He hadn't even shown himself within Persistence, but was just a voice that seemed to be everywhere. I needed to see what was under the redactions. I had a feeling that due to it being guarded so obnoxiously, it must be useful.

  "Have a nice day", I said. "You as well", came the reply. What a prick.

  Well then. It was spider time.

  I pulled a small matte-black pellet out of my fanny pack and touched the reactive surface on its side. It immediately sprouted 8 shiny legs and bounced up and down on my hand.

  It didn't interact with me directly, and simply angled its oblong body towards me. It continued to hop and chirped questioningly.

  "Play with this," I whispered to it, handing it the protected file. It immediately jumped onto its surface and scurried back and forth, front to back quickly enough that I could barely track it with my sight. After a few seconds of this whirling motion it stopped, its pincer-legs hovering over various points of the digital file. A red light blinked once at its "head," and I nodded.

  It chirped enthusiastically once more, then gored the file at each point where its legs had stopped. It then began to rhythmically slash at the file, seeming to wantonly shred it. A few more seconds and the ethereal shimmer began to fade, and a filmy cloud dropped away from the file. The red light on the spider turned green, and it hopped back into my hand, its legs retreating. Satisfied, I put it back into my pack and picked up the now-unprotected file.

  Having a pack of handy gadgets is a good thing. I learned this from the old re-runs of Batman that sometimes came on late at night. I’d always admired that utility belt.

  Opening the file proved to be effortless. I found it odd that the file wasn't encrypted. Many items of sensitive information require a special key code or need to be run against a piece of software or hardware to become human readable; this document was in plain English. As I opened the document, the letters "MISCONDUCT RECORDED" floated by me in bright red text before fading away a short distance ahead.

  Probably another bluff. I ignored it and began looking at the file. It was a text document with the words CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY in a big bold font sprawled on the title page. TOP SECRET appeared both on the top and bottom of the page in red text of similar boldness to CIA. I'll admit, I got a little giddy at this point. Looking at private information seems to have that effect on me.

  I began to sift through the pages, looking for keywords like "Persistence" and "Investigation". I stumbled upon a quick blip of exchanging work between foreign nationals: "All work must be reviewed by an official security agent. Failure to comply with this direction will be considered a federal offense". It went on describing some of the violations, and listed another document. I guess that one probably had the full listing of violations. It sounds like a great toilet-reading.

  Rimer's disappearance had been rumored to be the result of an investigation that ended poorly for Rimer. It is a possibility that he committed a federal offense, but for the protection of him, his family, Persistence and actually the country, they didn't publicly release any information. It is also a possibility that Rimer had simply sprouted wings and flew away, according to one recent study. I wish I was joking.

  I continued scanning the document. "Must correspond with document....", "All development will be in accordance to....", "All users must sign document...." This was getting annoying. It was an aggregate of other documents that made up the whole of the CIA's requirements for working on Persistence. I flipped to the back and found an appendix. A list of contacts under general headings appeared like "Document Control" and "Security Accordance". One of them caught my eye: "Foreign Exchanges". It listed two people and their respective identification numbers. Everyone was issued an IDN and you could reach someone by simply plugging the IDN into Persistence. I decided that, if they were still around, these two people may have some information for me.

  As I tasked Sputnik with copying the information for me, the document began to warp and shift. The text floated up and down as if it were riding a particularly turbulent wave. It then began to melt and distort, as if the document was made of wax and subjected to high heat. I tried closing the document but it refused any user interaction.

  Suddenly, I heard a loud buzzing noise. It ended with a loud pop that originated from my physical data jack. Everything went black. Not Persistence black, but unconscious black.

  Chapter 5

  I awoke to light scouring my eyes and a pain in my neck so fierce that it hurt to move. Shit, I had passed out, and left the jack in my head for several hours. They warned you against doing such things. I, in my typical fashion, had only cared about the information I needed. ‘They’ can screw off.

  Time flows differently while jacked into Persistence. I had only accomplished a few things that I needed to do; yet, time in real life had coursed by me as water does down a stream. My port had been open for several hours, and my overworked brain couldn’t handle the data-flow. Well it couldn't yet with most things, it took time, and I hadn’t jacked in in years.

  Oh well, I could still move on. I had things to do in the r
eal world. Thank god none of the fedbots had caught up with me while I was snooping around...they could have taught me a whole new world of hurt.

  The clock read 605, digital LEDs blazing red in the last dark corner of the room. The sun had just risen and no longer was peeking over the horizon; it was blasting full force through the open windows and frying my retinas. I clapped my hands and the blinds obediently shuttered themselves against the early morning sun. Plus one for old technology! I had found the clapper in a dumpster behind a flea market and even they thought it was useless. And why not? All homes now, even the poorer ones, could respond to voice commands. Mine was off the grid. With smart homes came smart tracking and I did not want anybody to know I was even alive.

  Well, except the boy who brought me steaming piles of food a few evenings every week. I couldn't go so far as to call it Lo Mein, but at least it was real.