Tomasso just laughed at him and slapped his cheek. “Not bad, not bad. Most new guys piss themselves before they even make it to the door.” He flicked the bloodied transmitter into his shirt pocket and the knife disappeared as well.
Ray sucked at the wound, cursing some more. He took in Tomasso’s relaxed expression and judged that he might have earned the right to ask a few questions now. “What did we even do in there?”
“Vampire exploit.” Tomasso gestured for them to go back to their private pod, parked some metres away down the dark flow. “The transaction traffic here will be parsed and a small fraction of every purchase will be shaved off and deposited with us instead of the manufacturer. We have hundreds, maybe thousands of these going.”
“Why did we have to go into the building? Why not just hack it remotely?”
Tomasso shook his head. “Easier to get inside and pretend to be a device on the internal network than to crash it from the outside. Besides, it gives us something to use for hazing.” He clamped a hand on the back of Ray’s neck and pulled him in for a rough hug. “You got nerve, I’ll say that. You might stick.”
Ray clapped him on the shoulder, acknowledging the compliment, wincing as his thumb twinged and bled some more. Two days in and he was a thief who was missing a chunk of his thumb.
He wondered just how much finding Mick’s killer was going to cost him.
SETH
As it turned out, Seth’s job interview at the Xperience Centre, nestled in the tech park in Toronto’s waterfront, was first thing in the morning on the Ides of March. He tried not to read too much into that.
He stepped into the foyer that was painted all black and illuminated with ultraviolet light. His tan shirt glowed in the semi-gloom. It struck him as a bit tacky, but then again, he wasn’t sure what he had expected. A virtual assistant materialised.
“Hello!” it said brightly. “May I please read your ID?”
Seth raised his hand so the VA could scan his wrist.
“Seth Bacchi,” the VA said. “Welcome. Your interview will take place on the second floor, in the conference room. Please proceed to the left and use the lift.”
“Thank you,” said Seth. It was hard not to be reflexively polite when the assistants took on corporeal form.
He went up to the second floor and walked down the corridor until he found the right room. Even though he was early, someone was waiting for him already, seated in one of many chairs around a large table. She stood up when he came in.
“You must be Mr Bacchi,” the woman said, standing and bowing slightly. He bowed back, glad she wasn’t one of these old-fashioned types that still insisted on handshakes.
“Just Seth is fine,” he replied.
She directed him to a chair opposite her. “I’m Selena.”
Once they were settled, she said, “I’d like to take a moment to thank you for your application to become a Dragon Slayer Farmer. Now, I know you have put what I’m about to ask you into the application form, but, can you tell me again if you’ve played DS before?”
Seth knew now, as he’d known when he had filled out the form, there was no point in trying to fib his way through the interview. This conference room would be loaded with sensors to detect his heart rate, his respiration, the moisture appearing on his skin, his eye movements, and gestures. “Not really, no. I’m interested in being a Farmer for a few reasons. First, because it would allow me to set my own hours. As a creative, this is important.” She gave the thin, somewhat insincere smile of someone who has heard this response, or one very much like it, hundreds of times. “Second, because doing something in VR would disconnect me from my work for a while, and that will ultimately help me in my writing, keep me fresh. And of course, I want the money.”
“You’ve had VR experience before, though?” she asked.
“Oh yes. Games-wise, I did the complete King’s Quest series when it was ported to VR, for example. I’ve also done the tours of places like Chernobyl and McMurdo Station,” Seth replied.
“That matches what you said. Thank you for verifying your ownership of your application in real time. Now, I’m pleased to tell you your personality testing shows you’re a good fit for the job.”
Seth raised one eyebrow. “What do you look for, anyway? I’d have thought you’d test for more physical traits, like stamina and hand-eye coordination.”
Selena laughed. “Well, you need to have a bit of that, and be fit, but honestly, we’re far more interested in the mental aspects. For this job, at least, we like to screen for attitudes. For example, we don’t want obsessives or bullies. We have enough trouble with that sort of thing with our paying customers, and it costs us a lot to police it. We want to make sure it’s a safe and pleasant experience for all of our players, so we do not want to hire people who will cause problems.”
“That makes sense, I suppose.”
“Good,” Selena said. “Now, how much do you know about our Farmer program?”
“I’m not clear on what they do, except play the game for pay,” Seth replied.
“Okay then,” Selena said. “A Farmer plays the game for someone else.”
“Eh?” Seth said. “How does that work?”
Selena shifted in her seat. “Let’s say you had already played Dragon Slayer as a Mage character, but then wanted to play again it as a Warrior, but you didn’t want to go through all the tutorial quests and the skills-acquisition quests. These things take time. A Farmer plays the game to create a customised starter character, and then the buyer takes it over.”
“Why doesn’t Xperience just generate these for sale?”
“Human psychology,” Selena sighed, as though it was the bane of her existence. “Game purists — our hard-core fans — would melt the discussion forums down if we offered preset characters. They say it allows rich players an edge, and it’s cheating. And they’re right, to a degree.”
“But…?”
“But,” Selena continued, “game farmers would exist anyway. Purists or not, there’s a huge market for this kind of thing. There are other games in the industry where the farming companies for it set up in unregulated countries overseas, especially where there isn’t a basic income yet. They hire players to farm, pay the workers a pittance, and keep them in the VR for much longer than is safe.”
“So you set up your own farmers,” Seth suddenly understood. “That explains why the application was to Dragon Rush, but I reported for the interview here.”
“That’s right,” Selena said. “Dragon Rush is the ‘officially tolerated’ farm company, yes. It’s our subsidiary. We don’t hide that, but we don’t advertise the fact either. People who want to level up fast, can, while Dragon Slayer doesn’t look like it’s allowing paid accounts a leg up and gamers aren’t worked to death in the process.”
“A polite fiction,” Seth said, thinking it would make a great title for a book. “That’s fascinating. I did not realise there was that kind of illicit ecosystem around the game.” Ideas for plots flitted through his mind. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“You would be surprised how creative people can be when it comes to hacking the system,” Selena said, standing up. “Let’s get you to a VR room and let you play an introductory round.”
Seth followed her out of the conference room, and into a lift. “Gaming rooms start on the third floor,” she said. “Support, design, management is all on the second floor. IT and all the primary servers are in the underground levels where it’s cooler. We also use the heat from the servers to help warm the building in the winter.”
They arrived on the third floor and stepped out into a nondescript hallway. There were doors every ten metres on either side. Most of the doors had red lights on them. She stopped next to one that had a green light, and they went in.
The room was empty and barren, save for an omnidirectional treadmill that took up most of the floor, and a clothes rack on the back of the door. Selena eyeballed him, measuring, and then selected a ligh
tweight exoskeleton and haptic feedback jumpsuit from the rack. He put it on over his regular clothes, and then she handed him a pair of wraparound goggles that had blackout cuffs around the eyes. She showed him how to bring the earbuds out of the goggles.
Seth put the goggles on and popped the earbuds into his ears. He couldn’t see anything, and Selena’s voice was muted now. Selena guided him to the centre of the room, gave him the controller gloves, and wished him luck. He thought he heard the door close behind her.
Suddenly, his suit vibrated all over and he was transported… to a grassy meadow, set on a gentle hill on a beautiful, sunny day. He touched his head in wonder as he felt a gust of wind in his hair. A herd of sheep was running past him, bumping into his legs, bleating loudly. He looked in the direction they were running and saw there was a mediaeval-era village below, in a little valley. Smoke curled up from the chimney of one of the huts. It seemed rather quiet; he saw no one walking around the village although he would have expected people out and about, doing their chores for the day, especially since the sun was high in the sky. But overall, it seemed peaceful, even bucolic.
Then something made him turn around and look up.
A giant blue dragon was bearing down on him, fast.
He could hear its massive wings beating, thumping the air to keep its gigantic body aloft. Seth felt the wind again, this time against his face. It looked so real.
He saw it opening its mouth and drawing breath to expel flame.
It had very large teeth.
“Aw jeeze,” he said, and ran.
KEL
Bao-Yu surprised her and gave her a hug when she returned to work. Robert shook her hand. Even Padraig allowed her a gruff nod to welcome her back.
Meike, however, was nowhere to be seen.
“She quit,” Robert said. “Two days ago. No reason given. I’ve had a vet tech from the zoo doing cursory check-ins on your critters and she’s on call if there’s an injury or something. But we must get someone new in.”
“Do we have the funding?” asked Kel. “Or could they could chalk that position up to our budget cut?” She didn’t need the extra work, but she wouldn’t mind not having to micromanage another assistant.
Robert astonished her by grinning. “Oh! I forgot you hadn’t heard. No cuts needed. In fact, we’ve gotten confirmation we’ll be getting an increase this year.”
“But…” Kel couldn’t help but think of all the time they’d squandered arguing about what to slash. “How did they go from wanting to cut to giving us more?”
“Politics,” Robert said. “The opposition released their post-convention interim platform, and the government repositioned itself as the more progressive, pro-science party.”
“You mean had the opposition come out with an aggressively progressive — is that even a phrase? — policy, the government would have cut even deeper?”
“Wow,” Robert laughed. “That knock on the head must have turned on the proper cynical circuits up there. Now you’re getting it.”
He left her to her work. She popped into the hab with a bag of fruit, and was mobbed by the macaques almost immediately; if she hadn’t known better, she would have said it seemed like they had missed her. Aadi climbed up to get a hug, so she laughed and cuddled him while she stroked another one clinging to her leg. After a while, they got too rough and inquisitive with her cast, so she tossed the remaining fruit a distance away and let them run after it. She returned to her desk to check on her datastreams and spent the next few hours polishing the final draft of the paper Robert was still expecting. It wasn’t likely to be substantive, but she hoped being assaulted might at least give her leeway on that score.
After she sent it off, she pushed back from her desk to do some gentle stretching. For some reason, today her mind kept going over the conversation she’d had with the cop in the hospital. He had asked something about other people having access to her computer. She knew she hadn’t talked to anyone about her project, so was hacking a possibility? Just how secure were the facility’s machines?
Kel rolled her chair to her desk and checked the background processes of her computer. Nothing obviously wrong or out of place there. No software she didn’t recognise. She shut down all the programs on her computer and checked again, this time watching for data traffic to and from her workstation. All seemed as quiet as it ought to be.
Could there be something elsewhere in the system? She would have to have a chat with the IT manager, Dan, if only to rule out the possibility of a hack. She got up and put on her coat, heading out the lab’s back door to the little corner office across the quad that represented the entire IT department. Kel wondered how she would phrase her questions so she didn’t sound paranoid or give away details of her project too early.
She found the office empty.
“You literally just missed him,” someone said, behind her. One of the vet techs, walking by. “He said he was going out for a walk and a lunch break. Be back by one.”
“Ah, thanks,” Kel smiled. “I’ll leave him a note.”
She ducked into the office. Kel had only missed him by a minute or so, as his screen hadn’t yet gone dark and locked down.
And that gave her an idea.
Kel poked her head out of the office to look in the hallway. It was empty. She went back in and closed the door.
She sat at the desk. His screen had an array of utilities running, all to automatically check for and run software updates, monitor traffic, performance, and log events. For the most part, the system administrated itself. Actually, it seemed to administer itself quite well, because there were also quite a few retro video games available on Dan’s station. Kel wondered how often he manually looked at things.
She clicked open each tool one by one, scrutinising them for anything unusual. Although she’d never been interested enough to take it up as a career, she’d gone through a hacker-fascination phase as a teenager, reading up on the exploits of groups like NoSec and HackW0rmz, and getting involved in some hacking herself. The tools had evolved since then, there was enough that was familiar that she knew what she was looking at.
Kel checked the time. Ten minutes had elapsed already.
She reviewed the server monitors, the registries, and a few random logs. Nothing jumped out at her as unusual. Another fifteen minutes gone.
Kel found the network analyser and poked around. There was too much to get a handle on.
There were voices in the hallway. She froze, unsure how she’d explain what she was doing if Dan came in.
The voices faded away, and she let out the breath she was holding. Working quickly, Kel set up a profile for herself in the analyser that she could access from her desk. She picked a nondescript name for it, memorised the address for the utility on the network and shut everything she’d opened. Then she checked the hallway. Seeing no one, she beat it back to her office.
~
Kel poured herself another coffee and cursed. She rubbed her port and implant. Maybe she should make use of her new brainjack and buy additional augments for her memory.
She sat at her desk and tried logging into the analyser again. It told her no such profile existed. She restarted her computer. When it came back up, she entered the address for the analyser and logged in one last time.
It worked. Kel did a yes fist-pumping motion, then stopped and frowned at her screen. It had worked… but… the address for the analyser looked different. She copied the one she had open, popped open another command screen and put the address in there. Then Kel went back to her original screen and checked the history of her login attempts.
It was different. By a single keystroke.
She flipped back and forth between the two screens. There were two network analysers in the system, with nearly identical configurations. One was the version she’d accessed in Dan’s office, to which she’d added her profile. The other was sending data outside the network.
But where? It took Kel another couple of hours to trace it b
ack through a complicated set of proxies, forking paths and dead ends before she found the end point: a company named EduTain. She tried to get into the receiving port, but the connection was abruptly terminated. Apparently, they had better security there than they did here.
Kel didn’t know what EduTain was, but it obviously wouldn’t be a good idea to look it up while she was in her office. But now she had more questions than answers. Was this company monitoring this facility or was this somehow a clumsy misconfiguration issue? If it was watching, whatever for? The name of the company didn’t sound like it would be interested in Alzheimer’s research.
And the biggest question of all: had it been scanning her computer?
Kel sipped the dregs her cold coffee. Maybe it was time for a company tour.
RAY
He was rich.
Ray blinked and looked at the balance again. He’d never seen that much money in his whole life.
“Here,” Dominic said, handing him the small black fob. “Cryptowallet. Keep it on you at all times. Get a chain or something around your neck, like. Use your thumb and forefinger to squeeze the end to get the balance to display again. That thing is keyed to work only for you — and me — but don’t be stupid enough to lose it anyway. Use it to buy what you need from other members of the organisation. In this place…” Dominic used both hands to indicate his office, and by extension, his mini-empire. “In here, you got everything. Out there, you got nothing. Remember that.”
Ray nodded. He was getting a small fraction of the cash being syphoned off the place he’d help hit the other day, after it had been laundered and converted into the mob’s own currency. He couldn’t imagine how much must be coming into the organisation overall.
Dominic’s office, which served as the organisation’s headquarters, was in the basement of the plaza. In his personal space, at the centre of the area, he had an antique oak desk he liked to prop his feet on when he leaned back in a soft leather chair. There was a fully loaded bar in one corner, a large wardrobe in the other, filled with pristine white shirts. Dominic’s desk faced the descending stairwell; no one could enter or exit without him seeing it. To his left, were the rooms for his lieutenants; further on from that, a room for low-level rookies like himself. They all had access to a full beer fridge, a vintage pool table, and a large bank of restored video arcade games. To his right, there was a door that always remained closed. Ray had only seen one person go in there: a ‘guest’ of the organisation, who went in accompanied by Tomasso and someone else Ray hadn’t met yet. The guest had needed help walking out and looked ashen.
Echoes of Another Page 14
