by D L Young
Was she overthinking? Obsessing? Letting the gig’s unknowns get the better of her? She tended to do that. No gig was perfect, she reminded herself. No gig was without its gaps and risks and blind spots. Still, better paranoid than dead. She’d keep a close eye on this salaryman.
She watched as he arranged his gear into orderly stacks. Total neat freak. At least he had that going for him.
10 - Meatriding
Maddox was on a beach, on his knees, the powdery sand soft against his skin, busily finishing a sandcastle. But it wasn’t really a sandcastle. It was a home for leaf-cutter ants. He was making an ant mound. But it wasn’t just any ant mound. It was the greatest ant colony structure ever created, with crisscrossing passageways and dozens of chambers for fungal gardens, egg storage, waste disposal. It had taken him hours, maybe days, and he was sure they’d like this one. Not like the dozen others he’d made before. This one was far better. This one had everything. This one they’d finally be happy with. Intelligent temperature controls throughout, tiny corridors lined with permeable resins that maintained optimal moisture levels. He’d even seeded the garden with leaves to jumpstart the fungus farming. It was unlike any ant colony ever created. Perfectly devised, flawlessly constructed. It had everything the colony could possibly need, now or ever. They had to like this one.
The absurdity of his surreal task, as often happened in dreams, didn’t occur to him until a touch on his shoulder roused him from his sleep.
Beatrice stood over him in a cotton tank top and workout shorts, the smell of bacon and coffee wafting into the room. “Big day, salaryman. You ready?”
He sat up, groggy. “Sure.” What the hell had he been dreaming?
“Good,” she said. “Then let’s get this done and get you back to your office before noon.”
“I like the sound of that.” He swung his legs onto the floor, the cement cold under his bare feet.
Over breakfast they rehashed everything they’d worked out the night before. There wasn’t much to it. Most brokers kept hot datasets stored on offline archives, and it was a safe assumption this Novak was no exception. Beatrice and Lozano would break into the broker’s condo, where they’d take the offline archive and put it online so Maddox could remotely access it. Once he had a connection, Maddox would copy the dataset and then spike the original, leaving the data broker with a worthless, irreparably damaged archive. And that was it. Less complex than a typical datajack, where you nicked something of value—IP or employee data or manufacturing specs—and then sold it or held it for ransom (the former being easier and less risky than the latter). Hahn-Parker’s task was straightforward. No selling what you stole. It wasn’t even stealing, really. Just recovering ill-gotten goods. Thieving from a thief.
Still, the jobs you thought were the easiest often didn’t go that way.
***
“You with me?” Beatrice asked.
“Loud and clear,” Maddox replied, seeing the world through her specs, his gut twittering with vertigo. Meatriding, it was called. Maddox had never been a fan. Physically, he was still in the Sunset Park rental, lying back in an eggshell recliner, a trodeband around his head, his newly acquired deck held in place by the chair’s docking arm. But his eyes and ears were with Beatrice, the two tethered together by an encrypted nanocast he’d set up in virtual space.
“Feel all right?” she asked, as if she’d read his thoughts.
He felt his other body’s hands, his hands, back in the rental raise a plastic bottle and squeeze water into his mouth. “I’m fine.” He took a couple deep breaths, his neck and shoulders stiff with tension. He hated meatriding. He found the intimacy unsettling, especially so with the high-end specs Beatrice was wearing.
Most specs had inbuilt software that responded to eye movements, blinks, taps on the frames, and vocalizations, but the more expensive ones also reacted to subvocalizations via light-touch brain sensors in the temple arms. You trained the software of such high-end specs by repeatedly thinking various commands—find a sushi restaurant, call my boss, and so forth—during a setup calibration, creating specific, easily detectable patterns of waves on the surface of your brain. Patterns the specs learned to recognize. When you were connected to someone else’s high-end specs through virtual space, meatriding, you sometimes perceived more than just what their specs saw and heard. The brain sensors sometimes gave you biofeedback on anything the wearer felt or sensed strongly. A food they really liked would be a taste in your mouth. A jump scare from a movie would also startle you. Many like Maddox found it off-putting, but some enjoyed the out-of-body thrill. The porn industry had long since adopted meatriding as one of its core technologies.
Novak’s neighborhood was a wealthy domed enclave on the Upper East Side, the air bright and clean. Luxury brands flickered across graffiti-free building facades. Ferrari. Hermes. Tiffany & Co. A skinny teenage model, ten stories tall and most of that legs, hiked a Louis Vuitton bag over her shoulder and smiled provocatively. With Lozano beside her, Beatrice strode down a wide walkway lined with lush trees and flowering shrubs and crowded with stylishly dressed pedestrians. Maddox noted the sparse flow of ground car traffic. If you somehow managed to miss all the other giveaways, that was how you knew it was a rich area. Most everyone here could afford hover transit.
Chinese characters popped to life in Beatrice’s specs, superimposed in red on the bottom third of the lenses. Something about a discount at a nearby restaurant.
“How do I turn these ads off?” Beatrice asked.
“Don’t mess with the settings,” Maddox warned.
“It’s distracting as hell.”
“Hey,” Lozano said defensively, “you want a veil with no ads, you give me more time. This is the best Chico could do on short notice.”
Maddox had inspected the veils—the illegally modded specs—earlier. The ads might be a small annoyance, but the veils were good ones and they did what they were supposed to, and that was all that mattered. Loaded with a stack of bootleg IDs and distortion tech that countered facial recognition algorithms, they fooled most cam software like the wolf in the fable wearing sheep’s wool. To any person or program reviewing the cam’s archives, Lozano and Beatrice would appear to be a pair of tourists from Beijing, both in physical appearance and digital signature.
The pair crossed East Seventy-Sixth. The target building came into view, a pink marble residential at Third Avenue and Seventy-Seventh.
Maddox jumped at a tap on his shoulder. “Can I plug in?” he heard the kid’s voice ask. “I’ll stay quiet, I promise.”
That made five times in ten minutes. The kid wouldn’t let it go. Maddox flipped back to the rental, his stomach lurching with the suddenness of the switch.
“Hey, where’d you go?” Beatrice chirped in his ears.
He turned and glared at Tommy. “Kid, get it through your head. It’s not going to happen. You’re the gopher on this gig, that’s it. Now get over there and keep an eye on those monitors like I told you.”
Tommy’s shoulders rounded in dejection. “Fine,” he muttered, slinking away.
Maddox flipped again, steeling himself against the sudden wave of disorientation. A uniformed doorman held open the lobby door for Beatrice and bowed his head courteously. “Back now,” Maddox told her as she entered the building. “Sorry.”
He blew out a breath. Get in, do the job, go back to your life. Forget about how you were arm-twisted into it, forget about the slapdash crew, forget about how you had almost no time to prep. Focus on the job, don’t screw it up, and in half an hour it’ll be done. In half an hour he’d be hovering back to his condo, none the richer but free from obligation. The EVP would be grateful, maybe enough to throw him a bonus or a salary bump or a promotion. Maddox wouldn’t say no to any of those, of course, but all he really wanted was for things to go back to the way they were before the Hahn-Parker’s office had called.
Beatrice and Lozano strolled through the lobby. The interior of the building was elegant an
d well-appointed. It looked more like a five-star hotel than a residential. Low-slung leather chairs dotted the well-lit high-ceilinged lobby, and against the back wall there was a reception desk manned by two fresh-faced staff wearing matching blue blazers and company-issue specs. They greeted Beatrice and the hustler with friendly nods and good mornings. A few people milled about, residents coming and going.
Most of Maddox’s scant, hardly adequate hours of preparation had been spent familiarizing himself with the building’s security, poking and prodding at it in virtual space with apps and analytic tools. Security on the ground floor was a garden-variety ID check. As you passed through the front door, you got face-scanned, and if your ID came back with an outstanding warrant or felony conviction or you were simply a stalker ex-husband on the building’s list of unwanted guests, you were tagged and building security would be on you in seconds. The door scan was easy enough to breach with a decent pair of veil specs, which Beatrice and Lozano both had.
Beyond the ground floor, though, security tightened up considerably. And for those questions the hustler had a pocketful of answers. Duped ID badges of maintenance workers would get them most of the way to the condo, and a forged master key would get them inside. Lozano had acquired both through a couple of well-placed bribes.
Lozano and Beatrice were halfway to the elevator bay and no one had given them a second glance. So far so good.
“Can’t they just take it?” Tommy’s disembodied voice asked. “Stick it in their pocket and leave? Why do they need to get you connected?”
Maddox answered only because he knew the kid wouldn’t stop asking if he didn’t. “Because if he’s like any other reseller, he’s got the data stashed in a lockbox archive, keyed to his fingerprint or his DNA. Anyone but Novak tries to take it out of there, they won’t even make it to the elevator before security’s all over them.”
“Mmm, right,” the kid said. “DNA keyed. Got it.” Then: “What if he made copies and hid them somewhere else?”
“He didn’t,” Maddox said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
Like most companies that created valuable intellectual property, Latour-Fisher had custom proprietary digital signatures that identified its data archives, a fingerprint of sorts. If datasets were duplicated, the signature changed, irreversibly stamping the original with properties any forensic tool could detect in about two seconds. No buyer would pay top dollar for something that had already been copied and sold to a hundred others, so data brokers religiously avoided duping stolen wares or datasets, since doing so transformed a valuable asset into a worthless commodity. Platinum into paper.
“Now, if it’s all right with you,” Maddox said, “I’d like to get some work done.” Beatrice and Lozano had arrived at the elevator bay.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Tommy replied. “Don’t mind me—”
The kid’s words cut out as Maddox muted the room’s ambient noise. In the lobby, through Beatrice’s specs he saw the indicator above the elevator count down: 3…2…1…
A bell’s ding. Doors slid open, and the two stepped inside.
11 - Condo 2814
They exited on the twenty-eighth floor to a long empty hallway carpeted in deep red and lit by shell-shaped sconces lining the walls. From the corner of Beatrice’s specs, Maddox glanced at Lozano. The hustler had tidied himself up for the upscale neighborhood, his bared inked chest now covered with a black button-down under a gray sports jacket. His face was empty of expression, and he strolled down the hallway as if he’d done it a thousand times. Novak’s condo was 2814. Seventh on the left.
Maddox flipped to virtual space. It was like falling into another world, the Alice of his consciousness plunged into digital Wonderland. Beatrice’s body was gone and his was also. The universe around him was a dense arrangement of luminescent shapes and lines, the geometry of countless of bytes of data. Odd, he pondered, that here he felt none of the switchover vertigo like he had when he flipped between the condo and the mercenary’s lenses. Or maybe it wasn’t so odd. Virtual space, from the first time he’d plugged in, had never felt alien to him. For most, the sensation of being bodiless in VS was a traumatic experience. First-timers, floating disembodied in blank space and looking down for hands that weren’t there, often panicked and had to be pulled out after only a few seconds. Even for veteran jackers with hundreds of runs under their belts, sweaty palms and an elevated heartbeat were the norm. Maddox had never felt any of these things. In VS, he felt…released. Liberated. Freed of the meat cage of his body and its disappointing limitations.
A ghostlike structure towered before him, the residential building’s datasphere, a digital skeleton nearly identical to its real-world granite-and-steel counterpart. Owned by a five-member partnership, the entity’s DS had very little geometric abstraction, which was typical among smaller businesses and organizations with low-density, relatively uncomplicated data environments. As you moved up in institutional complexity, however, things changed. For global companies, governmental bodies, international charities, and the like—organizations with large, complex, and ever-changing digital infrastructures—dataspheres were mostly collections of visualized data partitions, cubes and pyramids and spheres and so on. Three-dimensional metaphors analysts and engineers could arrange and rearrange as easily as a child with building blocks.
Data visualization had been around since long before Maddox was born, a previous era’s solution to the dilemma of a wildfire of exponential data expansion. Not long into the digital age, global data had begun to double annually, then semiannually, then monthly. The information technologists of the period, who managed computer networks, LANs, and WANs—digital infrastructures now referred to as dataspheres, or DSes for short—couldn’t cope with data’s Big Bang. They were fighting a losing battle, trying to catch a tidal wave in a drinking glass. The invention of data visualization offered a novel solution, simplifying large, complex datasets into easily manipulated three-dimensional structures.
And just as no two organizations were alike, each DS had its own topography, its own unique digital cityscape. Some were more secure than others. Some had highly organized structures, reflecting the fastidiousness of their architects, while others looked as if they’d been thrown together in five minutes. Some had design flourishes like gargoyles sitting atop the corners of building-like partitions or signature color schemes denoting a particular DS architect’s hand in the design. Others were simple unimaginative shapes laid out in optimal arrangements, designed with efficiency in mind, placing little or no importance on aesthetics.
The residential’s DS looming before Maddox seemed relatively straightforward. Low complexity, nothing out of the ordinary. At least that was his impression after the small window of time he’d had to do his homework.
The DS radiated a gentle blue hue, a colored indicator from the lookout algorithm he’d unleashed earlier in the morning. Blue meant no alarms had been tripped. Red meant get the hell out as quickly as possible. A visual wasn’t really necessary, since the lookout would chirp in his ear if anything went sideways, but out of cautious habit he’d put both visual and audio warnings in place. He floated up the side of the structure until he spotted Lozano and Beatrice, a pair of yellow globes with crowns of Chinese-lettered ID tags, moving about inside. Maddox shifted his gaze further inside, zooming in on unit 2814, the target condo. He was slightly surprised by what he saw.
For someone who traded in ill-gotten wares, this Novak had unusually light security. Off-the-shelf motion detectors with dated op systems and nothing more. Maddox called up a lockbot app he’d configured earlier. It visualized as a distorted smudge directly in front of him. Nearly invisible, it moved slowly toward the residential’s DS, then disappeared inside unit 2814 and made quick work of its seven motion detectors, switching them to standby mode.
“You’re good to go in,” he told Beatrice, then flipped back to her lenses.
“Got it,” she answered.
>
In the hallway, the door across from 2814 opened, and a miniature terrier on a leash rushed out. Its owner followed, an elderly woman in a black pantsuit and domed fedora. The tiny animal strained against its leash, barking angrily at Beatrice and Lozano. The woman held the dog back and stared at the two strangers, her brow furrowed.
Lozano bent down, the little beast still yipping and baring its teeth. “My friend, is this any way to treat your new neighbors?” He then looked at the woman and smiled warmly. “Good morning.” He introduced himself and Beatrice as a married couple new to the building.
The woman’s confusion melted into embarrassment. She tugged on the leash and shushed the dog. “Penny, hush now. Hush this instant.” The animal didn’t obey. “I’m terribly sorry,” the woman said. “Normally she’s quite well behaved.”
Lozano grinned. “I’m sure she is.” He stepped aside to let them pass.
