The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Mila grabbed Nina by the throat and shook her. “Ricky, who is this bitch, huh? You’re cheating on me, I know it!”

  “You should put those two in the ring,” said Finch.

  Ricky shook his head. “Nah, the blonde can’t fight for shit. Look at her, she’s like four seconds behind the clock.”

  “Put ’em in the ring naked,” said the bodyguard. “Don’t matter who wins then.”

  Mila whirled around to glare at him, and exploded in a tirade of Spanish about what his forbearers must have done with farm animals to have created him.

  Ricky’s face paled until the men seemed to find her amusing.

  “Stop hitting me,” muttered Nina.

  “I ain’t hittin’ you, you dumb, strung out whore.” Mila punched her in the cheek again. She grimaced and shook her hand afterward. “Ow, damn, bitch you got some bones in you.”

  “And mine ain’t one of ’em.” Ricky waved at Mila to calm down. “I ain’t fuckin’ her. She just buyin’ some Sandman. Will you just hang on a minute?”

  “We are on a schedule, Mr. Barron,” said Finch. “Do you have the payment ready?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Ricky swiped the credstick from its port on the terminal and handed it over. “Hundred and fifty grand, as promised.”

  “Excellent.” The man held the stick up to the light, examining its display screen before tucking it into his inner jacket pocket. “Your people may unload the product. A pleasure doing business with you. See you in two weeks? Same amount?”

  “Shit be pickin’ up,” said Ricky. “You do forty cases ’stead of thirty?”

  “Done.” Finch tugged at his sleeves one after the next. “Until next time then.”

  Ricky waved. “Later, man.”

  Finch and his associate left.

  “Get offa me,” yelled Nina, before tossing Mila face-first into the couch. “Ricky, why’s your girl on me?”

  “She’s possessive.” Ricky winked at the growling Mila. “And that’s her couch.”

  Mila sprang upright and gave it to Ricky in rapid-fire Spanish. Nina lost some of the words, but followed enough to grasp the woman didn’t appreciate being talked about like a pet dog with a favorite sofa. And she continued demanding to know why he let ‘that bitch’ get high in his private office.

  The whispercraft panel gave Nina a clear view of Ricky’s people swarming the van and offloading a procession of cube-shaped plastiboard cartons. Finch got in the passenger side door while the bodyguard observed the unloading.

  “And you!” Mila stormed back toward Nina, pointing. “Who the fuck are you, and why are you after my man?”

  Nina tossed the inhaler on the end table and stood. “Ricky, I can see why she’s so insecure about you possibly cheating on her. I wouldn’t put up with this crazy bitch, either.” 「Eleven, keep eyes on that van when it leaves. Benitez, your team should be good to head home once the targets leave the area.」

  Ricky cringed.

  「Copy, lieutenant, said Benitez.」

  Mila gasped. “You stupid whore!”

  The woman cocked her arm back to swing again. Nina stood rigid and let the woman punch what amounted to a metal statue shrouded in a quarter-inch thick coating of rubber. A faint snap gave away at least one cracked bone. Ricky’s girlfriend screamed and backpedaled, favoring her right hand. Her confusion deepened as the realization Nina no longer appeared to be the least bit high finally dawned on her.

  “Ricky?” asked Mila in a mousy voice. “What’s going on? Who is this woman?”

  “No one you need to worry about.” Nina frowned at her before nodding to Ricky. “Appreciate the help. I’ll see what I can do about that reward.”

  “Ricky?” Mila sounded even more like a child. “Talk to me, Ricky.”

  Nina walked out and jogged down the stairs to the ground floor. The view from Whisper 11 showed the van gliding down the street, one among thousands of innocuous vehicles. 「Okay, Benitez, pack it in. Thanks everyone. Nice clean work, all.」

  ace after face scrolled by on Joey’s ‘god-terminal’ in the underbelly of the Police Administrative Center. His octopusine arrangement of holo-panels regaled him with everything from financial activities to the porn habits of Laughlin-Reed Innovation employees. One of them even had a mark on his file for exploitative manipulation of auction markets in the Monwyn MMO, not that scamming gamers out of virtual money broke the law.

  Guess the dragons must’ve been bored and looking for patterns.

  A redline popped up, a stripe in a job queue indicating someone wanted something done yesterday. Joey reacted fastest. He grinned at the sight of ‹O2-C3 Duchenne, N› as the requestor. He brought the data up, hoping for a change of pace from staring at office drones. Joey blinked at yet another employee of Laughlin-Reed Innovation.

  “Motherfucker!” he roared, and slammed a fist on his desk.

  “Abby shoot you down again?” asked Mindy, behind him, earning a glare from Abby.

  “Naw.” Joey rubbed his hand. “My plans with Simon’s sister fell through.”

  “Oh, very funny, Dillon.” Dan Simon didn’t even do him the courtesy of sliding back in his chair to glower at him. “Besides, I think Abby’s more interested in Mindy.”

  Joey’s entire team froze, except for Simon, evidenced by the continuous soft pips of typing on a holographic keyboard.

  DeWinter leaned back and gawked. “Did Simon just crack a joke?”

  “I don’t see any intercontinental weapons inbound,” said Abby. “Negative on imminent ending of the world.”

  “Wow.” Joey leaned around, grinning. The zinger at the tip of his tongue stalled.

  Mindy Wu stared at her terminal with the intensity of someone trying to pretend the universe didn’t exist. She snuck a peek at Abby, and seemed to deflate a little at not catching her staring. Joey turned back to face his terminal, not quite able to bring himself to pick on Mindy.

  He sent Abby a direct text. ‹No BS. I think Mindy’s got it for you.›

  ‹Never really thought about girls that way, but if it’ll get Simon to stop sending me dick pics, maybe I’ll try it.›

  Joey snorted. And covered a laugh with choking. ‹Go easy on her. Either she’s really crushing on you, or she’s a master at fuckin’ with us.›

  ‹What happened?›

  ‹The way she looked at you. Disappointed you weren’t checking her out after my jab. Didn’t even comment on Simon lobbing one into the fray.›

  ‹I know! What the fuck is up with that? Did Simon develop emotions? Or did he have the P&P surgically removed from his ass finally?›

  Joey snickered. ‹Nice. Okay… gotta do this work thing.› “So… Nina wants to know who you are.”

  He settled into his chair, reclined, and waited for the little mechanical arms to insert the dual M3 plugs behind his ears. Connection hit him as though he’d fallen through a webbing of diaphanous shadows, embraced with the invigorating chill of a clear early-winter day. He landed on his feet in the blue-on-black octagon of his programming environment room, which melted away with his command to teleport, shifting into the Laughlin-Reed Innovation network lobby. Imaginary sunlight bathed the vast expanse of an imaginary room with every detail replicated to the real world, including the security desk, faux-marble columns, and potted plants.

  Joey’s ‘shadow-ninja,’ a black ghostly silhouette, hovered in the midst of a crowd, unnoticed by seventy-two users and 192 program constructs. Since most of the time his official hardware made infiltrating so easy, he didn’t bother with fancy, and decided to head straight to the Human Resources data node. His wraith figure glided past the virtual lobby doors, into the elevator shaft, and up to the second floor. He whistled while slaloming other users and data-fetching constructs that couldn’t see him, and hooked a left at the end into a small security buffer that cyberspace rendered as a little guard station.

  A security guard (program) gazed glassily into nowhere as Joey floated across the room while doing a traditio
nal Russian dance. The door offered no resistance to his ethereal body, and he waltzed in among endless rows of data storage devices rendered in the image of ancient black filing cabinets.

  His desire to find Neal Finch sent glowing blue lines out from his feet, racing along the floor in rapid zigzag trails. In nine seconds, one of them flared bright while the rest disappeared. The luminous path led to cabinet 53. While following it, a glint of silver caught his eye on the left. He approached another drawer, tucked closed against a data tile sticking out.

  He plucked the file free and held it up. Upon the surface of an eight-inch square slab, a familiar woman stared at him with the eager face of a girl who’d gotten her first job. Despite the brown skin and shading adjustments to shave off a few years, he recognized Katya. The system log showed an HR staffer created the employee record, though the file ID token pinged an exact match for another employee. She cloned and edited a tile. Guess she only needed access for a few hours. Quick, but easily found by anyone who knows how to look. He tapped the tile against his hand while thinking.

  According to the access list, Zack Martin had been the last to read this file. Oh, hello Anders. No wonder they haven’t found it yet, you covered it up to go on your hunt for ass. Joey’s shadow figure looked left and right while whistling innocently, and crushed the tile into dust, deleting the record.

  I’m not helping her get away with stealing; I’m deleting an illegal file that shouldn’t have been here.

  “Right…” He headed over to the result of his search, following the blue line to a file cabinet, which he peeled open.

  The line shrank from a ribbon to a thread once it entered the drawer, and pointed him at a data tile bearing the same face he’d seen in meatspace on his holo-panel: Neal Finch, an outside sales manager. The employee record looked plain and unremarkable. A cross check convinced him Finch had gone through the normal channels to get hired, as he couldn’t find any oddities with the data. The man had been employed at LRI since July 2, 2419, which put his hire date at a week over four months ago.

  “Okay Neal Bland. Looks like you’re a model employee. Straight threes down the performance evaluations. You’re not shining, but you’re not operating at the level of ‘bare minimum not to get fired’ either.”

  He sent spiders streaming into the LRI network, simultaneously adoring and grumbling at the Division 9 search tool. With the shadow access his position gave him, he could request files without having to worry about being detected or forcing his way in. While as easy as being an authorized user, it offered no challenge. He longed for the day he got a chance to go up against a company that broke the law, and put real effort into trying to keep him out.

  Spiders returned with copies of data tiles they’d found wherever Neal’s identity came up. Joey sifted among hundreds of purchase orders, none of which stood out as illegal. He might be an ACC spy, but he appeared to be performing the duties of a sales manager quite well as his cover. He’d sold a lot of diagnostic and treatment machines, as well as meds to local hospitals.

  An email record grabbed his attention, and he opened the tile to read the string. One Darius Reed, CEO of LRI had received some reports of tampering with a product in the pharma division. A crosslink to Darius popped up in a new window, displaying records of an emergency call from Reed’s home a few weeks ago, but as soon as Joey read enough to understand some woman who appeared to conjure fire out of thin air had broken into his apartment, he threw the data tile away like a loaded diaper. Bah. That’s for the Zeroes.

  Finch wound up copied on the thread since he had a managerial position within the pharma sales group. The SVP of production, Daniel Stirling, initiated an in-house investigation, sending off a number of firebrand emails to division managers trying to understand how tampering could’ve occurred.

  A month later, LRI’s people determined that unknown contaminants responsible for sporadic aggression and disregard for authority had been introduced in several lot numbers of Placinil. The final product QA sensors showed signs of tampering that allowed the faulty pills to pass without red flags. At the end of the investigation, Stirling ordered it kept quiet to minimize liability and informed the CEO he would personally oversee the production process, yet despite another hour of combing over files, Joey couldn’t find any evidence to suggest Stirling had done a damn thing but keep everything quiet.

  This guy knew about it and shut it right down. Why did he start the investigation in the first place? Joey’s eyebrows scrunched together. Maybe to keep up his cover? He went on a hunt for Daniel Stirling. The man had enough files going back forty-seven years to his birthdate, including school records, that it seemed quite unlikely he could be an ACC spy… unless they’d sent him into the country as an embryo. Stirling had a wife and son, but neither of them linked to any recent reports of suspicious activity.

  Hmm. Either this guy is easily bribed, or they’ve got something on him.

  Joey stared at the data tile holding Neal Finch’s employee record.

  He duplicated it, kept the copy, and teleported to the National Police Force’s primary data reserve. Despite his Division 9 hardware, the load on the NPF database made the shiny gunmetal blue hallway feel like a lake of molasses. Since he had official access here, he walked down the entrance passage to an enormous lobby, and approached an interface construct, which had an ever-shifting appearance of indeterminate gender. As soon as Joey reached the counter and made himself detectable to the program, the randomization ceased, leaving him face to face with a digital representation of a woman. Light brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes, and the general set of her features made him think they used an algorithm based on the average citizen of the UCF.

  “Can I help you?” asked the program.

  Joey handed it the tile. “I need this guy’s info.”

  “Right away, Tech Dillon.”

  Though ‘Tech 1’ was his official rank, it still felt strange to be called that. No shit I’m a technician.

  The construct held the tile in both hands for a few seconds before another tile materialized on top of it, and the false woman handed both back to him. “Anything else, tech?”

  “Not sure yet. Thanks.”

  The program resumed its ever-shifting appearance as he stepped away.

  Joey perused the municipal records for Neal Finch. His DOB showed as May 11, 2384, at a public medical facility in Sector 721, near the southeast corner of West City, about twenty miles north of a sizeable grey zone and a nasty pair of disavowed sectors. Most black zones only took up one five-mile-square sector, but 721 sat within reasonable driving distance of a five-by-ten-mile rectangle of badness. Sectors 356 and 304, both blacked out of the Navcon system, formed the heart of an enormous grey zone.

  It took him fifteen cyberspace minutes, about two in reality, to hit the hospital’s systems and find a falsified file. Neal’s parents had never existed, and the manufactured parents were listed as conveniently deceased due to gang violence. Further digging in the Citycam system yielded nothing older than five months. He targeted a period from two weeks before the date of the first time the Citycams got a recognizable shot of Neal’s face to one week after, and re-ran the search with a lowered match threshold set to eighty percent. It took another sixteen minutes, even with the narrow parameter, to come back with several thousand possible hits.

  After a sort by highest probability to lowest, he ‘did the nasty’―looked at each image manually one after the next. The sixty-fourth one struck pay dirt. A man with much darker brown skin and black hair sat in a waiting area of the Division 1 checkpoint by Ramp 4, the southeastern most entry point to the raised city. Joey zoomed in on the face, edited the image to make the skin as pale as Neal’s, and shaded out what had to be makeup or CamNano contouring to fool the observer into seeing a different shape. After a few minutes of editing, he grinned at the same man.

  “Gotcha, Finchy.”

  The date/location of the image corresponded to a truck of Mexican refugees who had
fled the ACC across the Badlands. One Ernesto Cordova passed vetting and got into the UCF, only to die as the victim of a mugging nine days later. A coroner’s photo of the body came close enough to the man on the transport for a reasonable person to blame death for the subtle changes. I bet the real Ernesto Cordova also defected from Mexico―in Neal’s luggage. Or maybe his buddies who’d gotten in already had a dead guy picked out for him so he knew what to make himself look like.

  The report Nina had sent with Neal’s list of augmentations sounded a lot like Katya’s hardware. It all but shouted, ‘I’m a spy.’ This guy’s gotta be Corporate.

  Joey teleported to the front room of CENTCOM, the primary network presence representing the UCF military. Virtual daylight streamed in from a hexagonal-paneled dome over hundreds of silver orb planters holding dangling vines bedecked with white, red, and blue flowers. Behind another gargantuan reception counter, a four-story wall of burnished steel bore two banners that stretched from floor to ceiling. Mostly blue, each had a white circle at the midpoint bearing a red star. A faint memory from grade school history said it had been derived from the flags of two former nations that combined to form the UCF. Making the star red was a concession to Canada instead of some leaf. The lesson stood out in his memory due to a video he’d been forced to watch in school, where someone being interviewed admitted that the Canadians had wanted the primary color of the flag to be red, with a blue star, but the decision-makers felt that much red on the flag looked like the ‘bad guys in a video game.’

  A hallway to the left beckoned, as he’d come here a few times before for ‘across-the-hall’ cooperation. His non-presence on the net worked on most people and programs, except for C-Branch. Soldiers, teens hoping to become soldiers, curious citizens, and programs in the lobby disregarded him. A silver strip over the entrance to the corridor bore the tame-sounding moniker: Military Intelligence Command.

  He strolled past two rooms where military public relations interacted with curious citizens. Another held people trying to pass the aptitude test to apply for jobs within C-Branch. Joey proceeded to the end of the hallway where two men in blue military dress uniforms guarded a blank wall. Both stared at him. Though they looked like the honor guard stationed around various government buildings, he knew these two avatars belonged to C-Branch personnel rather than soldiers.