In the dizzying sensation of the blinding light from the ridiculously bright flashlight, he realised he couldn’t even see if his plan had worked. He could hear some hissing, some movement, but his heart was pounding even harder than the Sikh’s war drum.
Oh well, he had a few more senses to use anyway. He gritted the flashlight in his teeth, always pointing it at the advancing cobra and then placed his hand on the concrete-mixing tank to feel the vibrations.
Then he waited. And prayed.
Chapter 37:// Giving away
The drumming stopped.
Bhai Sharan Singh appeared in the alley. The cobra was writhing in the concrete mixer, shaking the whole truck back and forth.
It couldn’t get out.
“What have you done to her?” Singh said and looked at Leo with a deadly stare.
“A snake trap. Just like a teensy-weensy snake trap. Only bigger. Same principle,” Leo said and stepped forward, feeling his way around the truck, still not seeing clearly. The flashlight was still on, but the effect was diminished on the snake charmer, since his eyes have had precious moments to adjust.
“I will kill you,” Singh declared and pulled out a curved dagger.
A dagger might not seem all that scary, but at the hands of a frothing snake charmer with a glass eye it sure was frightening.
Leo just gripped the wall and ran back down to the street.
Singh caught up to him, punched him down and lifted his dagger in both hands, ready to plunge it into his heart.
Leo would have preferred his vision not to return at all. That way he wouldn’t see the curved blade about to cut down into him. He tried to fight but the man was much stronger.
Singh let out a cry.
Katerina had slammed a foldable shovel on the Indian’s head, knocking him out for a few seconds, but enough time for her to pull Leo away from him.
Police sirens flashed red and blue.
Leo heard only a mess of noises and sounds.
He just spread himself on the cool street and let the policemen arrest him.
He was turned facing down and a knee fell down hard on his spine. Multicuffs clamped on his arms and a temporary plastic explosive patch was stickied on his neck, should he try to flee.
He did not.
His only worry was if Katerina was safe. His vision had a smoldering spot in the middle, and he didn’t see if the Indian had managed to do something to her after that awesome shovelling. Any struggling would seem like resisting arrest, so he just tried to see through his damaged retinas for her form.
He heard her voice saying, “This is police brutality! Lemme go you corporate pig!” And then she was carried away in the distance.
Leo smiled.
She was fine. Safe.
Chapter 38:// Ending up
All their connections were blocked. They were in a virtual machine, a fake world in which they couldn’t escape. The IT guy had taken root access to their system, effectively making him a god in their existence. He was poking around in their source code, and it felt as if someone was examining your guts while you were alive and conscious.
eyed> So this is it?
parrotd> Seems so.
httpd> We had a good run together, right?
armd> Right.
parrotd> Look guys, we saved the user. Helped him all we could. That’s all that matters in the end.
armd> We rocked!
parrotd> We rocked.
Their executioner looked at the time, sighed, and sipped his coffee. The mug had the words “There is no place like 127.0.0.1” written on it.
The daemons loved it.
It was impossible to hate the guy.
The IT guy’s little finger moved to the right and was about to fall on the condemning “Enter” button, the keypress that would erase the daemons from existence.
walkmand> What do you think being dev/nulled feels like?
armd> We are about to find out.
fingerd> I don’t wanna go…
Enter.
Chapter 39:// Cheering up
“You really know how to butter up a lady,” Katerina said through the phone, from the other side of the bulletproof glass.
“Yeah. Third date, visit in jail. Fourth date, let’s make it a conjugal visit,” Leo said.
“Down tiger,” she said, but her naughty wink said otherwise.
“How’s my dog?”
“I thought you didn’t want him.”
“I do want him, I’m just kinda tied up at the moment,” Leo said and pointed around the jail facilities.
“Well, he is mine now. We are having lovely dinners, Aibo and I. If you want him, you better get out soon.”
“That astronomically expensive lawyer Miss Bibi hired for me says I’ll be out soon. They found video from the-”
Leo paused and stared down at his black hand, a damaged dead weight.
“-The day they framed me, on my phone. No idea how it got there. The video has been expertly wiped at the precise time of the murder, so that makes it a cause for further investigation. They found military grade cyberwarfare stuff in my augmentations, so they copied everything to a computer forensics lab and did a hard reset on everything. We won’t manage to prove anything, it’s way cutting edge stuff, but it’s enough to show I’m innocent.”
Katerina forced a worried smile. “Sounds good. All that damned tech… Nothing but trouble.” She cheered up again. “Hey, you can stay over at my place when you get out!”
“Ugh, that’s nice. But I don’t want to become a burden or anything…”
“Hey, Dumbo. You remember when you last paid your rent? You are evicted. Your stuff is in boxes in my living room at the moment.”
Leo darted up, “Don’t open them!”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Why? Is there anything naughty you don’t want me to see?”
“No…” He said and sat back.
“Well?”
“Are you sure you got everything?”
“Apart from the mouldy fridge, yeah.”
Leo sighed in relief. “OK. There are some mp3s around there that I don’t wanna lose, they were my dad’s. They wiped my walkman clean, that’s the only backup.”
“Don’t worry. Everything will be there waiting for you. Including myself.” She stood up, blew a kiss in the air and left slowly, letting him take a good look at her swaying posterior.
Damn vixen.
Leo hung up the receiver, closed his eyes and imagined himself coming home after a hard day’s work, to a lovely woman who could make a shithole flat seem like a slice of heaven.
He looked forward to that.
The end
Glossary
Glossary of terms
If it’s not here, just google it.
Daemons: Programs that run in the background silently. They perform action without user interaction. A daemon is a controlling entity for some specific process, like keeping a temperature constant for example. As our devices become more and more interconnected, daemons will command over many aspects of our lives, deciding what emails are important to us, pushing notifications to our devices, ordering milk when it runs out etc. Their name has nothing to do with Christianity’s demons, in ancient Greece a daemon was something like a guardian spirit (like the Roman genius) and it literally means “expert” or “wise.”
Eudaemonia: Is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit.
ACK: From ACKnowledge. It’s how programs say “got it.”
Personal Area Network (PAN): The network created by all of the wirelessly linked electronic devices carried on (or within) a person. The smartphone is usually the primary hub of this network.
fingerd: finger is a program you can use to find information about computer users. It usually lists the login name, the full name, and possibly other details about the user you are fingering. In our case, he’s a sexually oblivious daemon entity.
httpd: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) daemon (web server).
parrotd: Controlling daemon with parallel starting of services and other features, used by many distributions. Resides in the smartphone operating system. Called parrot because of the metaphorical image it conjures of sitting on the user’s shoulder, taking care of his needs.
Rfid: Short range chip that can be implanted into humans, pets or simply added into products for cataloguing. With an rfid scanner you can read a standard piece of information off it. In humans, can give access to a place like a swipe card.
Air intake: Your nose.
Init: Initialise computer command, that starts up a process.
QR code: A two-dimensional form of barcode, that usually links up to an internet address. To the bane of graphic designers everywhere, they have resurfaced as an anchor to connect a printed object to its related virtual process in augmented reality.
Augmented Reality: Not the same as Virtual Reality. It is digital information superimposed over the real world. Accessed by glasses or ocular implants.
Shared Augmented Reality (Veil): An interconnected weave of public information, allowing the cross-correlation of physical people and objects in the digital world. In practical terms, you can glance at a person and see their public social media profile, or glance at a bus stop and see bus fares and routes.
Fork: Computer command that copies a process into two identical ones, clones.
Tor: Onion router network, uses encryption for secure data transfer.
Script Kiddies: Derogatory term used for wannabe hackers who use readily available exploit code instead of writing their own.
Kill -9: Linux command that kills/ends a process.
Dev/null: A Linux place for digital oblivion.
404: Website error code. Page not found.
Maniai Case File 1:
The Girl And The Blood Slide
George Saoulidis
Chapter 1
“They were initially happy of course for their little girl’s interest in biology. What parent wouldn’t be? It’s a perpetual cliche in Greek households, everyone wants their kid to become a doctor or a lawyer.
Well, they sure aren’t happy now.”
Excerpt from the neighbour’s interview
It was my first day on the job. I was holding the official paper in my hand, telling me to report to Mr. Epiktitos. No office number, no floor number, nothing. There was a phone number but I was hesitant to call, I should be able to manage finding my way around a government building, should I not?
The security guard at the front desk glanced at the paper summons and gave me a visitor’s pass. You’d thing security measures would be a bit more strict in such a dangerous place. I should have taken a hint then, but I was starry-eyed enough not to notice.
So, I was inside. The Hellenic Center for Disease Control & Prevention.
It was big. Not huge, but big. Seven stories of offices, people busily tapping away at their keyboards or talking on the phone. I couldn’t help but smile. This was an important place, doing important work. From that day on, I was one of them. Educating people, preventing outbreaks and containing biological and chemical dangers. There was old marble everywhere, plaques of people’s names, unsung heroes surely who had saved more lives than anyone could count.
It was exciting.
Then a guy with a small cart rammed into my side.
“You are standing in the middle,” he said to me, raising his jockey hat in an angle.
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I wasn’t normally the one who should apologise.
The guy was small and crouching over his cart, carrying papers and folders to feed the bureaucracy monster. He was all bone and sinew, the lack of fat making him indigestible. “You must be new, so I’m gonna let that slide. You walk on the right side of the corridor, always,” he told me, gesturing with his hands like a surreal version of a flight attendant giving safety instructions. “Like a car. You drive at the right, always. That way, when you are coming back, you also stick to the right. The middle lane is for carts. Are you a cart?”
“N… no,” I replied.
“Then don’t stand in the middle lane. It’s for carts. Now you know. Bye,” he said, and pushed his cart against me until I stepped away.
I needed instructions but decided against calling back the little guy. I looked around a bit, staying on the right lane, watching behind me for incoming carts and read the signs over the doors. Ooh, they made an Ebola Division! Of course, it was the latest threat. Would I be on it? I mean, it was logical right? A new division needed fresh people like me to staff it. It made sense to hire me for the expanding offices. I turned my head to check left and right as if I was crossing a busy road and walked in there.
The feeling inside was amazing. It was buzzing with activity. Professionals young and old were talking on the phones and shuffling papers. The office was newly equipped and it showed, it was a recent expansion inside the old building. Nearly a hundred people were working there and I could make out bits and pieces of the conversations.
“…Dispatch the team to Rhodes airport…”
“…Do not print anything that will alarm people…”
“…budget approval? Thank you…”
“…this is serious…”
“…reports of Ebola…”
“…with Ebola…”
“…Ebola…”
Everyone seemed to be doing something important, I couldn’t distract them so I waited.
I stayed in the corners and walked further inside. News crews had set up at what seemed to be the Division Manager’s office, placing lights and cameras, running cables everywhere. More prominent was a fat cable running around the office and outside the window, straight to a news van. They were setting up for a live statement from the Division Manager regarding the Ebola threat, which was under control of course and people had absolutely nothing to worry about. Five cameras, each one for a different major TV channel and the crew involved, made that part of the Division a place bubbling with people.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. The buzz of the place must have infected me. I decided to go to the Division Manager and present myself. He was standing next to his desk, his suit jacket open with a crew guy putting a wireless microphone on him. He looked like a man who could handle this chaos with ease. A girl was patting his cheeks with makeup. I checked the time, it was still fifteen minutes till the midday news. Around us people were at their posts, cameramen holding gear and making adjustments, reporters frantically talking with their channels, ready for the live link. His assistant was over him discussing the key issues he should touch.
Amidst all that, I decided to announce myself.
“Hello Sir, I’m Polybios Nicomidis. I’m happy to begin work immediately, just point me to my desk,” I said and stuck out my arm holding the paper summons.
He raised his eyes up to me and took the paper. His assistant gave him his glasses and he read it. He began to utter well-rehearsed formalities like “Glad to meet you Mr. Nicomidis, happy to have you on our division,” but he cut them short and looked me again in the eye.
“This isn’t your office young man, you are to go to the Tramp Division,” he told me and shoved the paper back in my hand.
The words didn’t quite register to me. I kept my smile intact.
A blonde reporter, always on the lookout for a story, popped up and asked, “Excuse me, what is that exactly?”
“It’s the Rabies Division, we call it the Tramp Division,” he answered to her. “It’s nothing important.”
She lost interest and laughed. Other people laughed too. I said nothing.
“Get out of here, son. Go to the sub-basement, you’ll find it by the smell,” the manager said and shooed me away with his hand.
Laughter erupted around me. A crew member pulled me back and I almost tripped over the cables. It was the most embarrassing thing ever. “Move over kid, we have work to do.”
I put my head down and got out of there in an instant.
I got to t
he sub-basement and slapped myself for my idiocy. A cart came running at me so I stepped aside to the right. The cart guy looked small like the one before, but I wasn’t sure if he was the same one under that hat.
I decided to pull myself together and report to my new boss. I looked around and found the office with the label “Rabies Division.”
The sign must have been there since before my birth. And slowly deteriorating.
I went inside, to be greeted by a nice secretary. “Hello there young man, you must be the one we are waiting for. How exciting! I’m Irene, I’m the secretary. You can call me Irene, not Miss, we are all family here.”
I looked around the office. Every piece of furniture was mismatched, as if someone had went around every office in the government and picked a single item. All of it was old. A few potted plants brightened the place up a bit, surely Irene’s touch. The walls were filled with old posters about rabies education, with slogans and dogs on them. Some farm animals too. Half the designs predated computers. The other half was even worse, using horrible fonts and bright green letters. A 6-year old could do a better job today during one of his essays. I said hello and looked back at Irene’s office.
Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe Page 22
