by Lee Bond
“Okay. Fuckbag, get your ass in that ship with the doohickey and get that brainbox.” Sorenson smacked Fuckbag’s head hard enough to make stars appear. “And don’t fuck this up.”
Antony ‘Fuckbag’ Fubagsi gripped the oddly shaped case nervously. Sorenson had gone over how to use it what felt like a thousand times. It seemed pretty easy; find the brainbox, and, holding onto the elongated neck, fit the spheroid-shaped case at the other end onto the ‘box and press a button. The servo-mech in the contraption would slam shut, severing all of the computer connections with a loud clatter and that was that. The device was supposed to do something else all on its own, something to do with keeping the AI inside from being noticed, but Fubagsi didn’t know nothing about how that was supposed to work. “Don’t wanna.”
“Fuck you mean ‘don’t wanna’?” Sorenson demanded, feeling a dark surge of anger burn through his gut.
“Guy’s a bloody maniac.” Fubagsi let go of the brainbox-catcher. It clattered noisily. “He’ll kill me.”
Sorenson drew a long army-issue dur-knife from its sheath at his waist and slit Fubagsi neck from side to side, kicking the body out of the truck before it bled all over the interior. He sheathed his knife, picked up the brainbox-catcher and handed it to Stickler. Sorenson pointed imperiously at the Offworld ship.
Cradling the device clumsily in his arms, Stickler looked back and forth between everyone in the truck. “I’m not going in alone.” He said firmly. He’d been friends with the first group of four assassins sent to take care of the Offworlder, and they’d all died within minutes of one another. Stickler was no fool.
Sorenson bit his lower lip to keep from screaming. He didn’t have anyone else who knew how to use the brainbox catcher, he didn’t want to take the time to show someone else how to use it, and he sure as hell wasn’t going into the ship himself. From what they knew of Garth Nickels, there was every chance that the murderous Offworlder was in there sharpening knives and just waiting to kill helpless Portsiders. Hawking up a gob of bloody spittle, Sorenson spat out the window. He tabbed his all-points. “Scurry and Markinni, get your fucking asses out of your trucks and meet Stickler by the ship. We don’t got all day. Fuck.”
Sorenson turned to stare at Stickler, his right eye twitching. “If you don’t get out of this truck now, I will eat you alive. Literally.”
Sensing that he had used up all of his good luck for the remainder of his most likely already short life, Stickler hastily climbed out of the truck, stepped gingerly over Fubagsi’s corpse and made his way hurriedly over to Scurry and Markinni. They didn’t look very happy at being volunteered.
Scurry took a drag on his cigarette as they walked over to the ship. “You’re gonna die, Sticks. Fuck with us, you’re gonna die.” He handed the smoke to Markinni.
“Nope,” Markinni said around a mouthful of cigarette smoke, “he’s gonna die anyways, Scurry. Don’t care we got us an army of brothers behind us, this Offworlder geek’s for sure gonna kill some of us real, real dead. And since this pussy,” he smacked Stickler on the side of the head hard enough to make the frightened Portsider drop the brainbox catcher, “volunteered us to go inside the fucking spaceship, he’s gonna die first.” He handed the cigarette back to Scurry.
Stickler picked the device up and closed his eyes. The moment he freed the AI brainbox from its housing, Scurry and Markinni were going to kill him. There was no way around that. If he didn’t get the mind free, Sorenson was going to kill him. If Scurry and Markinni, the freakiest people in the Portsiders, didn’t kill him, the Offworlder would. “This sucks.” He said to no one in particular. “This really fucking sucks.”
“I bet,” Scurry fired the cigarette butt over his shoulder, “when you woke up this morning you wasn’t thinking nothing about dying today, was you?”
Stickler didn’t respond because they’d made it to the gantry steps leading into the ship. Showing some basic concern for their lives, Scurry and Markinni took up positions on either side of the doorway and peeked in quickly. When they didn’t see anything immediately life threatening, they moved inside the ship, weapons drawn, Stickler right behind them; thankfully he was the only person left other than Sorenson who knew how to use the machine, giving him a small modicum of safety. For the time being.
Stickler, taller and thinner than either of his ‘escorts’, found it easier to move through the Trinity-sized corridors; Scurry and Markinni –like most Portsiders- were washed-out soldiers, and had to walk down the hall at an.
“You are so dead, Sticks, you can’t even imagine how dead you are.” Markinni grunted angrily when he saw the size of the bridge. It was too small to support even one Latelian, let alone three. After some rude shuffling and difficult posturing, the Portsiders managed to get Stickler into the bridge so he could perform the one thing keeping him from getting shot in the head.
Scurry flashed Sorenson. “He ain’t here, boss.” The Portsider listened to Sorenson curse a blue streak for a few seconds, rolling his eyes and making faces. Both Markinni and Stickler chuckled quietly, sobering when Sorenson told them to proceed regardless, adding that they were going to wait in the fucking ship until the asshole came back from the lobby.
Stickler, who was unfortunate in that he’d managed to get all the way through middle school, began hastily working towards removing the covers hiding the AIs brainbox; not for the first time since joining the Port Side Boys, he regretted having stuck to his books for those extra years. It had certainly made for some very unhappy times. To Scurry and Markinni, the act of stealing the artificial intelligence was nothing more than another heist in a long string of jobs. Stickler, though, had just enough going on upstairs to realize how deadly serious the job was; there was no telling what kind of repercussions an artificial mind would have on everyone’s way of life.
Stickler stared at the shiny silver ball with something akin to awe. As far as he knew, he was the first Latelian in history to see an AI. He grabbed hold of the device and started the procedure…
xxx
From his spot inside the maintenance ducts of Meadowlark Lemon, Garth’s ears pricked up when he heard the Latelians clattering towards the bridge. So far, so good. From the sounds, there were three, and none of them wanted to be stealing something from a crazy Offworlder who tortured people.
Garth grinned into the darkness. Things were shaping up exactly as he’d hoped. He made to call Devildong to find out what the fuck was taking them so long when a long stream of automatic fire ripped through the silence of the port.
“Awesome.” Garth shimmied his way back to the opening and dropped down just in time to see Markinni and Scurry galumph out of the ship, bewildered concern on their thuggish faces.
Garth drew his weapon and slid silently down the hall towards the bridge.
Devildong howled happily as the auto-cannons mounted on his cheap jeeps shredded through one of the trucks, killing everyone inside and detonating whatever explosives had been on board; the loitering idiots nearby were cut in half from the chattering weapons.
Devildong had to admit that at first, he’d doubted Harry Bosch’s sincerity, especially considering the proposed location for the conflict. Regardless, he’d followed through with the disgruntled Portsider’s suggestion by sending a low-totem Devil Nut down the road alone. The crying, skinny fuck had come back without being dead, so now everything was a fucking walk in the park.
And now, war.
The other members of his gang, outnumbered by the Portsiders two to one, rapidly corrected the unfair ratio by sending a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades into the mix, destroying two more trucks and crippling at least a dozen more Portsider gangsters. Their weapons might be less effective than the Portsiders too, but nothing but nothing beat surprise.
Devildong saw the bastard Sorenson shouting to his driver to get the fuck gone, but there was no way it was going to happen any time soon; the burning chassis of the trucks and the bodies formed an effective barrier against the Portsid
er trucks, which weren’t built for all-terrain driving. The Devil Nuts leader shouted orders into his proteus, telling his men to emulate the Portsiders’ fortification by using their trucks as shields.
Now that the odds were even, it wasn’t going to be as easy as it had been a few minutes ago. The size of each force was relatively equal, and without the power of surprise, Devildong knew he was going to have to find some luck somewhere real soon –it was unlikely either side would walk away as the clear victor- but he had done something real smart; there were forty Nuts sitting back at home base. One of them was a lieutenant who had enough going on to become leader if things went badly.
Because after all, it wasn’t about leadership, but brotherhood. So long as the Devil’s Left Testicle Gang survived in some way, shape, or form, that was all that mattered, right? And these Portsider fucks, it looked like they were all there.
Devildong dived out the back of his truck to take up position behind one of the right tires, automatic rifle at the ready. He smiled and nodded to his men, who were doing pretty much the same thing, their faces flushed with the excitement at finally being able to give as good as they’d gotten down through the years. The war against the Portsiders was definitely finished. Their names were going down in the history books.
xxx
Sorenson couldn’t believe what the fuck was happening. He couldn’t even believe his own bloody eyes. The Devil Nuts were mounting an all-out assault against his gang, and they were doing so without triggering any alarms.
They’d been sold out by The Man. Worse yet, The Man had lost faith in them. Garth motherfucking Nickels was a blight on Latelian soil that needed getting got, that much became absolutely clear to Sorenson. The leader of the Portsiders tossed a grenade with decent accuracy towards an attacking truck, wondering how life had gotten so terribly unfair so quickly.
The shrapnel grenade, produced and distributed by Guillfoyle Enterprises, bounced underneath the truck and exploded, ripping the vehicle to pieces and filling the air with shrieks and moans that sounded loudly above the chatter-chatter-chatter of rifles and guns.
Even counting their superior weapons and greater numbers, the Portsiders were having a hard time recovering from the shock to mount an efficient defense. Seeing best friends, brothers, girlfriends and even sisters killed without warning in a place that was supposed to be theirs and theirs alone had thrown many of them into catatonic shock. Sorenson, who’d weathered his fair share of gang wars, some of them Pyrrhic victories and some of them bloody routs, started shouting into his prote, threatening and cajoling his soldiers into something resembling cohesion.
He couldn’t believe it. The motherfucking Devil Nuts.
Fucking hell.
xxx
Every ‘city’ on Hospitalis had their own central data processing units, gigantic warehouses packed with monitoring equipment connected to every single netLINK line, every relay node, and more often than not, individual proteii as well. Nine times out of ten, the feeds went in one side of these warehouses and out the other, automatically checked and rechecked hundreds of times by extremely sophisticated avatars designed to ferret out brewing trouble. By sifting each iota through data models trillions of lines of code long, the avatars were sometimes capable of identifying a hotspot before it began heating up, reducing the complexity of life to numbers. Regardless of avatar perfection, it was still the job of men and women to filter through a certain percentage of data on their own, adding human instinct and that indefinable quality that made people better than mere machines.
The human element worked on emergency calls, propagandist materials, and other illogical, random occurrences that the avatars themselves couldn’t ‘understand’. Their mandate was not to respond to these crises, but to log them and then monitor how the situation was handled by appropriate sectors within the governmental hierarchy. They meticulously recorded each notable situation, the response time of the assigned group, the results, and the aftermath. The belief was that, through the medium of secret examination, their society could strengthen weakness, weed out rot.
They were spies, but of a special sort. They spied on everyone and everything, including other spies and made no distinctions between right and wrong. They’d been trained to reduce everything around them into abstract data to be plugged into their continually evolving model of Latelian society, not to do, say, or think of what they did. They lived to accumulate data, to project possibilities, nothing more.
The Game was a difficult time for these people. Emotions ran high during the festival of mayhem. Data flow experienced a spike up to ten times greater than normal, requiring the addition of hundreds of relay nodes to ensure integrity was maintained at all times. The avatars riding the waves of data were normally more than adequately suited to monitor the netLINKs and assign items of note to specific categories as per their unit’s mandate, but during The Game –when everyone was at least partially crazed- it became a very tricky prospect. Death threats, small mobs of unhappy losers, fanatically loyal fans, looting, riots and worse were a common feature of the torrential flow of data raging around the planet. It became virtually impossible for the avatars to determine what was actually worth recording because from their unintelligent point of view, everything at that moment was worth recording.
When control buffers were flooded with instances from the avatars, it fell to the human components of these units to wade into the mess; it was their unhappy job to double-check the avatars’ work, always with the understanding that even as they worked, the programs were still doing theirs, kicking up the usual percentage. It was endless.
“This is very strange.” Julius looked over some of the data sent to his screen. At first glance, the report kicked to him showed no reason for making it to his desk. Reading further into the report, he discovered why the data had been upped to his monitor: conflicting data sources. According to port avatars, nothing untoward was going on at all, but remote audio/visual spEyes were detecting a massive disturbance in one of the furthest areas of the port.
Commander Paulson made her way over to Julius’ desk to look over the report herself, nodding when Julius outlined the most vital portions of the mystery with precision. “Log onto the port servers and check the spEyes, please.”
Julius navigated through to the spaceport servers, flashed his ultra-high security clearance to the avatars there, and began a detailed sweep of the spEyes, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Audio filters finally broke the distorted sounds –the nearest recording station showing signs of the disturbance was well over three kilometers away- into recognizable patterns; weapons fire and explosions. Unsure why the Port security systems hadn’t gone off immediately, Julius continued deeper into the spEye-feeds in search of anything that would support the remote station’s audio capture.
Nothing. Other than an Offworlder visiting his ship, the port was barren; Gametime made the place one of the quietest zones on the planet. Julius looked up at his commanding officer. “I … I don’t know what to say.” He was excited, to say the least; he had the feeling they were moving into uncharted waters. There was a good chance he’d get to do things not traditionally covered by their charter because if they were having a difficult time detecting something, local and Regimist agencies didn’t know anything at all.
“Is it possible someone’s hacked our recording station?” Paulson asked, staring at the data screens intently. “That this is all a game?”
Julius shook his head. “That was one of the first things I checked on, si.” He showed her the all-clear report from the diag-avatar. “And the analysis of the audio feed shows it’s real-time. Acoustic filters tell me that the sounds are coming from the port where this ship is parked, and there is absolutely no way to fake that.”
Commander Paulson nodded to herself. There was no doubt about it; the situation was strange. She was going to take full advantage of the situation, using it as an opportunity to move her group out of the darkness.
By making
such a political move now, when there was something going on at the spaceport, Paulson would be able to prove once and for all that the Bureau of Examination was better suited to handle crises than any other local arm of government. If she could prove herself and her team capable, their new mandate would be to dispatch teams instead of simply writing everything down.
“Launch a few flEyes.” She said calmly, though her heart beat spastically. “Send them through the Port. I’ll file the necessary paperwork with the government for violating the no-fly zones.”
Similar to spEyes only in the way that a pocketknife shares a similarity to a laser cannon, flEyes were the end-all be-all of surveillance equipment. Each flEye was roughly the size and shape of an ICBM, capable of traversing hundreds of kilometers in a few seconds, and was built to record everything it passed by, detailing everything larger than one square inch in high definition, flawless three-dimensional glory. Data recordings from a single flEye were sufficient enough for perusal by both humans and avatars, but for the sake of expediency and cross-referencing, a second of the behemoth cameras was always launched on a different vector for comparative purposes.
Launching a duo, for any purpose at any time, required written approval backed up by visual confirmation from someone in the stratosphere of the government. Sending them into a no-fly zone like the spaceport -where the likelihood of the high velocity missile-cams colliding with vessels landing or taking off was certain- required approval from both the Chairwoman and the OverCommander. Beyond the possibility of lawsuits from anxious pilots, flEyes had a devastating effect on planetary netLINK traffic. In order for the footage to be captured and digested with all due process, flEyes automatically co-opted all relay nodes along the trajectory for compiling. The hash this created during normal times was barely tolerable. During Game, it could be a career killer. There were going to be brown outs for much of Port City while those flEyes ripped their way through the skies.
