“This isn’t very good,” I said to Marine. “You were right.”
“Told you,” she said, biting into her burger.
Chapter
FOUR
So I’m not really self-conscious about my name, right? Charles is a perfectly fine name on the face of it. I understand that, you understand that. It’s really just more about being boring. It happened to have happened that telling children they’re special all the time when they’re growing up leaves certain psychological expectations and I wasn’t immune to them. Charles isn’t a special name and I don’t even really actively want to be special as an entity but it gnaws at me when I leave things in their default settings. Everything. Monitors, phones, names, whatever. It’s a sickness probably, but nobody can stop me and if I tell someone my name’s Laze, no one can do anything about it.
Also, it’s Laze like… like laze. To laze about. Not like… what a laser does. I mean, Jesus, can you imagine? Might as well be Ally then. Hiding Aloysius behind a girl name. But then what’s a girl name anymore? Boys used to be called Leslie. And Ashley. I saw a girl online named Charles once. Not short for anything. Just named Charles. See, if I hadn’t preemptively shed my name, I might have worried about myself. I have a strong masculine aura to project. Well, not strong in the… in the beefy, hunky sense of the word. More in the “definitely all about that puss” sort of a way. So the ladies know. Is what I tell myself. And if you doubt it’s working, well you can just ask Ally and Marine since we’re all headed to a very private room. See, out of context that works.
But we were. Headed into a very private room. It was down more stairs than it should have been. Like… six floors into a basement. None of that elevator shit. Not the right part of town for those sorts of fineries. And rightly so since apparently we were about to go get some “Vircore stuff.” Any nicer building would have been watched by drones and cameras and whatever. Sneaky stuff was something you went into the nice parts of town to do, not the other way around.
If I’m being honest the lights flickering seemed a bit much. Asshole seemed to be affecting more of a mysterious guy vibe the deeper we went into his, let’s say what we’re all thinking, super creepy basement. Seriously, old florescent lights don’t exist anymore. The oldest thing you’re looking at is… what? LEDs? Those dim on a half-life and presumably he is doing technology shit down here so the watt or so of extra power likely isn’t browning out. Yeah, puzzle pieces. Asshole has his stupid lights set to flicker and run sort of greenish.
“Why do you make the lights flicker? Do you do rapes? Is this a sex pervert thing?”
Marine swung back at me but my panicked flailing blocked the blow expertly.
Aloy. He could have called himself Aloy. That’s a cool name if… it’s not. But it’s better. I think. I’m talking myself out of it, honestly. I may have jumped the gun on it.
“It’s to keep people out, moron.”
I didn’t feel like we were familiar enough for that sort of disparaging nickname scheme. I’d been calling him Asshole in my head, sure, but whatever. Still, this wasn’t the time for that.
“To keep who out? TV shows about haunted basements? Particularly cowardly middle-schoolers? Just own your pervy sex dungeon, man. No one cares. I mean Marine might care, but you’re going to rape and kill us both so I doubt that really bums you out so much.”
He turned around, motioning past Marine but talking to her. “Is this motherfucker serious, Marine? I get called a lot of shit by better scum than this guy. But never a fucking rapist. It’s over the line.”
“Oh, now you’ve got standards of intellectual discussion. Where was all that when you were buying Halloween decorations to make yourself seem like a mysterious hacker boy?”
“F—” He came back up a step, kind of edging to the side of Marine to go around her. “Fuck you, man. What single fucking thing do you know about any of what I do?”
“I know you were hunching like you were mister fucking Hyde until I called you out on your creepy lights.”
Marine moved to the side and continued on down the stairs.
“Marine, get your friend.” He turned, complaining to her as she walked.
“The lights are weird, Ally. No one’s scared of them.”
For sake of the guy’s dignity, I decided it was probably better if I didn’t say anything else. I might have imagined it, but I felt like I heard a whimper.
We got to the landing at the bottom of the stairs and Ally got to work going through his little security procedure. A half dozen keypads, ten digits per, none of them done in accordance with any meaningful intuitive layout around the door. They beeped open a scanner. His arm went in it slowly, palm down, up to the wrist and then back out slowly. I heard metal sliding in the walls and the door, which looked like all the others, shifted. He pushed it open. A foot and a half of steel with bars into it at evenly spaced angles. I liked the door, but not the elaborate, old mechanism to it. If he asked, I’d tell him I liked neither. I’d won a crucial victory with the lights and I couldn’t go giving it back over a door.
The room was well-designed, surprisingly. Well, the first room. A comfortable little spot. He did the wall-screen thing. It was in vogue among people who didn’t like AR lenses and the like. Could be he was against modding entirely. I wasn’t. Rooted lenses were cheap enough, but they lacked for the processing power I preferred and rooted externals… well, they were much easier to spot by Virsec types. The name pretty much gives that one away, so I’ll skip explaining it. There was a fashionable desk and a bed with one of those Japanesey on-the-ground frames. A door on the right. Bathroom, maybe. The adjacent rooms were no joke. Servers. Hefty ones. The heat in the room told me they couldn’t have been quantum. Old. Weak. Symmetric.
“I thought there’d be more human skin.”
He walked away into the other room, scoffing as he went.
Marine leaned over when he was gone. “He’s probably going to hide the bodies.”
I did a half-assed laugh and so did she.
Honestly, I was getting a little pissed off. The hardware in his room belonged in a museum. I mean, there were purists, sure. People who swore not to use tech based on all sorts of idiotic theories, but there’s a limit. I thought. But then I spotted his trick.
A fucking hardline. A phone. An old one. I read they used to be able to trace them. Voltage differences. There were only a few hundred of them left. Or that was the rumor.
“You’re fucking kidding me.” I turned to Marine. “This fucking guy?” They were legendary. And Asshole was an asshole.
She shrugged, quelling a laugh. “His mom bought the building.” She quieted herself when she heard shifting from the far room. “He found all the equipment down here. Bought some fancy shit for this main room.”
I whispered back. “He found a fucking hardline? In his mom’s basement?”
She just laughed and walked away, toward one of two chairs in the room.
I should explain a few things. Firstly, I am not a notorious criminal. I am a poor person who is good enough at puzzling pieces that I can do things. Mostly for Marine. Mostly on hardware she has in hand. I know, very vaguely, that there is an upstream from Marine. She… she knows people. Probably. I think. We don’t talk about it. Or she doesn’t. I used to ask.
So that’s me. Hardlines. Whew. Okay. Phones, in the before time, went through the walls. They carried a low voltage electrical signal over a line. Slightly higher when a call was going on. You could send data over them. Crazy easy to tap into, but super easy to notice the tapping, since catching and reading the signal degraded it. Super predictable stuff. Decades ago, phreaking came alive again. A lost art that involved fucking phones to death and then playing with them in very dirty ways. Not… I should be clear. That was a metaphor. Mostly a metaphor. They were slow and shit and nobody liked them. Low resolution. Awful. But, forgotten. And things tha
t get forgotten become useful again.
I put myself in a seat at the desk and spun around. It is customary, in such situations, to say “wee” very loudly, but I didn’t want to end up in a very pathetic fight with Asshole if he was particularly sensitive about people enjoying themselves in his antique store.
“So does he charge for this shit or what?”
“Yeah.” Marine sighed like the question made her sad. “He always… you’ll see.”
“I knew he was a god damn pervert.”
“People who want to fuck me aren’t all perverts.”
“Agree to disagree. I bet he keeps fresh cucumbers and shit. I bet there’s a barrel of lube. Real specific lube.” I did my best Asshole voice. “I got the unscented because I want to smell you just like you are. Uhn, yeah. Little sexy fuckin’ cucumber sandwich bitch.”
“I can fucking hear you, shithead!” Uh oh.
Marine was probably going to die. Her hand went over her mouth and nose and she went red and writhed in the chair. Rather than laughter, she let out a squealing “huuuuu” sound. Tears were leaking from the edges of her eyes.
I called back to Asshole since he wanted in on the conversation. “You know you can’t use zucchini, right? They got that knobby end.”
Marine palmed around helplessly for something to throw at me. I threw her a pad of paper from the desk and she threw it back as hard as she could. She missed.
Asshole came back with a folder and Marine coughed, straightening up and standing up from her chair. He offered the folder.
“Best I got. They’re two weeks old.”
“Two weeks?” I spun in the chair. “Seems pretty old.”
He talked to Marine to address my question. “It’s Vircore. No one has anything newer.”
“It’ll have to do,” she said. “What do I owe you?”
His voice changed from man of mystery to romance novel cover model. “For you? You know it’s free. But maybe…”
“No.” She turned and walked past the desk. I stood as she went and Asshole ended up next to me.
“Dodged a bullet, really. I hear they’re brown.”
I walked off and he followed, hopefully to shut the door and maybe die in his mom’s basement.
Asshole chimed in one last time as we went out to the landing. “And don’t bring him again.” He shut the door behind us.
“Well, I thought it was a pleasant trip.”
We were walking up the stairs. Marine’s attention was on the papers she’d been given so she ignored me.
“Okay, I guess serious time. Two weeks is pretty old, Mar.”
“Mar?”
“That’s the part you want to discuss?”
“No. But yes. Sounds awful. Mar?”
“It’s either that or Rinny.”
“Or Marine. Which is my name.”
“Don’t be a cunt, Rinny. You don’t get to pick your nickname. Except out of those two.”
“Neither. And two weeks old will have to do.”
“I’ll shit an entire baby if those codes work for anything other than a trap door with alligators.”
She flipped through the papers, clearly not seeing anything she liked. “Ugh. Yeah. We’ll probably die.”
“We, though. It’ll be fun.”
Tubba gave us a look as we came back through the burger place. We went outside and Marine led me around the corner to an alleyway where she slung the backpack off her shoulders. I’d expected she was going to store the codes, but instead she pulled out a holographic engraver and a laptop. She handed them both to me.
“Do it.”
I deeply considered making the obvious joke. I was going to do a voice and cover myself and everything. Seemed too obvious, so I let it go. And beyond that, Marine had a really bothered look. She wasn’t the type to plead. I wanted to ask her. Was it the risk of jail? What bothered her about it? AI wasn’t really any more meaningfully illegal than anything she had me do. And if someone knew about it and wanted her snatched up by WorldGov, there wouldn’t have been a robbery.
I took the tools and the folder. It was an hour sitting in an alleyway, exploding the folded holographic pattern so the program on the laptop could make sense of them. Then the writer took another half hour. Marine paced the whole time. The engraver clicked open and gave back a small rectangle, now much shinier than the hazy lump of silicate glass that went in. I held it up, turning it back and forth in what little light there was in the alley.
“This what they use?”
Marine came and grabbed it, flipping it over in her hand. “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
I stuffed the tools back into the backpack and stood up, dusting my ass off.
“Well, let’s go be spies.”
Chapter
FIVE
So we were doing the part they normally skip in the movies. Getting on a bus to go break into Vircore. It still bothers me fairly deeply that people call them hoverbuses. It was a branding thing by the company who came up with the technology. Most roads were being retrofitted to assist self-driving cars when this New Mexico startup came out of nowhere and convinced the WorldGov to give them contracts for bus lanes using their magnetic tech. At the time, everyone was completely convinced that the whole deal was some sort of blackmail scam, but then they published the specs on the electromagnets. They were highly directional, insanely low power and, if the marketing was to be believed, eco-friendly. Everything was so minimal that eco-friendly hadn’t been a necessary issue for decades, but it still acted as a weird byword for good in people’s minds.
The buses were nice, though. No real sense in complaining about it. They were all polymer interiors, waterproof. That meant hobo piss wasn’t an issue even in the shitty parts of town. Every night, they noodled themselves back to their depots or whatever and did a whole cleaning cycle. If you were ever up early enough to get on a first run bus, they smelled like some sort of burning plastic and mint. Like someone was chewing gum at a tire fire. It tended to fade, but the bus we had gotten into still had the stink even in the late afternoon. There were private booths. Basically, toilet stalls you couldn’t shit in. They acted as premium seats and took up the back half of the bus. Greeting our impending death with niceties seemed like a waste of cash, so it was normal seats for us.
The row along the traffic side of the bus was empty, though nearly all the private booths had red lights glowing on the handles. A few people sat across from us. That really seemed to preclude talking about the task at hand. Marine mostly just stared down at the silicate card, looking sad and distracted.
It was on the brink of occurring to me that we were about to do something absolutely suicidal and that I had no perfectly good reason to go along with it when a woman came onto the bus with a goiter on her neck the size of a small moon. Medically speaking, I have no idea what a goiter is. Is it full of fluid? Is it just a bunch of gross cells? Is it one of those things that grows teeth and hairs like some sort of aborted fetus come back for revenge? No idea.
I nudged Marine and pointed and made a “Ewww, gross, right?” face and she just looked really disappointed with me. Ridiculous. Talking about gerbil ass physics one minute and the next she’s too good to be weirded out by a goiter. And… wait a minute.
No, no, no. She’s… don’t you fucking sit next to me lady. Oh god. She’s doing it. Right next to me? There’s like ten seats. The whole rest of the fucking row is open. And I’m on the goiter side. You can’t… look, I know this isn’t sensitive, but you can’t just put your goiter next to people, okay? But then, if you have a massive, disgusting neck lump that you’re just parading onto a bus like it’s a shitting trophy, I guess you’re probably beyond advice on the social contract best practices.
I looked to my left and it was right there. There were three of the thickest black hairs I’ve ever seen poking out of the mass. They weren�
�t natural. This woman was clearly turning into a fly and this meaty juice bag on her neck was going to pop and infect me with it and we were going to get turned into fly people. I squirmed and the goiter lady didn’t even blink a fucking eye. I mean, I was squirming crazy obvious. She was probably getting all cooch juicy. This was probably her thing. Fucking sickos, man. Public transport is a playground for her sort.
Marine would save me. “Trade with me.”
“What? No. Can you… please?” Marine would not save me.
I did everything but flail in the seat. I couldn’t stop looking at the thing. I swear to god I saw it move. Like a little hand print formed under the skin. And this weird old bitch was just sitting there breathing through her mouth, staring straight ahead. She didn’t even look around. Maybe I could just… I could go stand somewhere else. Or change seats. But no, she did this. This is what she wants. I won’t do it, god damnit. She doesn’t get to terrorize me from my seat with her oozy neck blob.
Well, two can play at that game.
“Why don’t you just get it removed?”
The beast turned. “Herh?”
She had maybe the blackest mole on the far cheek and I’m fairly sure I could both see and smell a dead tooth.
“The neck thing. Why don’t you go to the doctor and get your disgusting neck lump removed by a doctor? Like a sane person?”
“’Scuse me?”
“Oh, you’re offended I mentioned your giant neck lump? Oh, crazy. Crazy. Weird. Why would I do that? Why would I mention the giant fucking ball of nasty that practically needs a second seat that you put right next to my god damn face?”
It’s worth mentioning that the bus was driverless at this point. Everything was driverless. Unless the body trackers detected a physical altercation, the buses didn’t stop.
Grundle was mostly just sitting in open mouthed horror that anyone had called her on her disgusting bullshit.
“The bus is half fucking empty. Take your shit over there somewhere.” I motioned toward the empty part of the bus in the hopes that a visual aid would be of use.
Cyberpunk Trashcan Page 3
