The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Afternoon.” He waved. “I’m curious if you boys have any intel on a possible Corporate agent.”

  The expected query of his rig came and went. Once they identified his login point and hardware as valid Division 9 assets, the blank wall changed to be somewhat transparent. Joey tipped his nonexistent cowboy hat to the sentries and walked through the wall. The room beyond had a plain white finish, no doors or windows, and no furniture.

  At the center stood a thirty-something man in a black suit and sunglasses. “Good afternoon, Tech Dillon.” He showed a hint of a smile. “Why would Division 9 be worrying about a Corporate asset?”

  Joey’s wraith-form sported a bright white grin. “Because you guys missed one. He’s inside the city now, and that’s our sandbox. You had your chance when he was overseas.”

  “Mmm.” The C-Branch agent showed little facial reaction.

  “Please tell me you have a file on him?” Joey winked and handed over the data tile.

  The C-Branch agent took it, held it up, and stared at it for a long minute. “We do not have this individual on file. If he is a Corporate asset, he is either new or in possession of a new face. Do you have any DNA samples?”

  “Nope. Just a visual ID.” Joey cracked his knuckles. “Guess I’m going on a trip.” He bowed to the C-Branch agent. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Anytime,” said the man in a flat tone.

  As an ordinary deck jockey, Joey had one route into or out of the ACC-controlled portion of the GlobeNet. It mystified him how the Sages still managed to remain neutral. Before the Corporate War, the heart of the net had resided in Silicon Valley, but amid the chaos, it migrated to a titanic underground server vault in Bern, Switzerland. Rumor had it the keepers of the GlobeNet lived in a temple-like structure and even wore blue-violet robes with black velvet bands at the sleeves to denote their ranks. He had strong doubts; the Sages did have a reputation for taking their role to new extremes of seriousness, but the level of melodrama involved in robes and monk temples went too far.

  His new position within Division 9, which basically made him a member of the military, afforded him another way in: stealth aircraft constructs. The Sages begrudgingly permitted the government to use ‘net teleportation’ within regions of the GlobeNet that geographically corresponded to their borders. Outside of the UCF territory, the teleportation commands didn’t work―even in the Badlands, or at least the virtual space on the map that lined up with it. As far as anyone knew, the area had no branching networks off the Bern main net, so only a rough approximation of terrain existed there. Dozens of games made use of the ‘post apocalyptic’ feel of the area, but everything happened within neural memory somewhere underground in Switzerland.

  Joey relaxed and envisioned the Net as a whole, a hollow bubble representing the Sages’ GlobeNet, connected by millions of threads inwards to little pockets dangling beneath the surface like potatoes―private networks. Some of the pockets had threads connecting their bottom ends together. These subnets allowed a user to travel from one private network to another without touching the surface GlobeNet. Joey hadn’t fully grasped the sheer number of direct network connections until he’d gotten access from Division 9.

  The Sages probably hated it, but they couldn’t do much about it aside from levy additional charges or fees to companies or individuals requesting to have their private network connected to the GlobeNet. In this day and age, any business entity that didn’t connect to the GlobeNet committed virtual suicide. However, some places preferred such obscurity: hangouts for black hats trading in stolen data, the Syndicate, governments, the list could be endless.

  Someone could walk into a virtual Cyberburger, go into the bathroom, pull open a secret door, and climb down a ladder into another entire world the size of which depended purely on the hardware available. One of the more famous sites in the ‘secret but not really’ camp contained an interplanetary space trading/pirate/flight simulator game that stored something on the order of eighteen billion planets’ worth of space inside a locker at a PubTran maglev terminal. To log into the game, a user simply strolled into the virtual tram station, opened locker 13-37, and rode an elevator down to a starport on some other planet.

  One thing about a virtual Earth―it didn’t have a fiery hot ball of molten death in the middle. C-Branch coming up empty had left him thinking he’d probably need to travel to the ACC network again, though he’d have an easier time of it than his old trip to hunt down data on Anatoly Nemksy. Joey ‘liberated’ some code for a tunnel borer machine out of someone’s Mars simulation. Rather than write software the GlobeNet understood as tunneling under the ground, he’d simply modified an existing program that already did that, saving a few weeks of development time.

  Joey strolled into his favorite Cyberburger franchise and spent an idle few seconds wondering whatever became of those protestors he’d sent the cops after. With a shrug, he went past the counter of the virtual restaurant and into the men’s bathroom, grinning at himself for the little trick he’d put in place to protect against unintended discovery. Joey faced the mirror over the sink, and reached behind himself for the doorknob. Despite the door opening in to the bathroom, he pushed. The door in the reflection opened. He stuck two fingers into the mirror, and the world blurred as the tiny reflected doorway sucked up his shadow ninja avatar.

  He reappeared in a space resembling the entrance of an old silver mine in the Wild West. Rather than iron rails, the mammoth tread marks of a Mars drilling machine led into the hole in the side of a mountain.

  Above his outstretched hand, a crystalline ball appeared, hollow, and full of tiny sacs dangling on hair-thin threads from the outer surface. Socket scanning software had been around for centuries, but on data channels available to the general public, it couldn’t do much but identify all active machines, users, and programs running within a current network. They had no ability to see out into the GlobeNet, nor would they do much if run while out in the open. Joey had found a loophole in the teleport permissions the Sages had given the government within UCF territory. The same access, with a little alteration to packet headers, allowed his modified scanner program to go out and essentially create a three-dimensional bubble map of the entire GlobeNet, and everything connected to it. The use of that shadow channel had tricked foreign servers into thinking the ‘ls –a’ command had come from the Sages.

  And so, Joey possessed the only full map of the GlobeNet not stored in Bern, at least as far as he knew.

  Now I know how Proscion must’ve felt breaching The Silver. A feat that would’ve made him the God of Hacking, but if he told anyone he did it, glory wouldn’t have lasted long. He’d have been killed. Heh. No one will ever find him now. He sighed. ’Course, ‘Proscion’ is dead. Wouldn’t surprise me if the dude genuinely forgot.

  Joey raised the 3D map to his face and zoomed in. His current location, the Cyberburger franchise’s private network flashed yellow. It’s ‘sac’ looked puny, as the local network consisted of a single server and a handful of processing cores in industrial-sized food assemblers.

  The drilling machine he’d sent off weeks ago had created a tunnel from the bottom point of the sac representing the Cyberburger servers, across the interior of the ‘planet,’ to a hidden network pocket he’d found that contained a simple chatroom interface set up like a bar. It appeared to connect to a TransCorp train platform located in virtual Munich, accessed by walking square into the wall between the mens’ and ladies’ bathrooms. Why do they bother rendering bathrooms in the GlobeNet anyway? He chuckled at the odd habit of the human body to urinate or defecate for real if one attempted to do so in the virtual world. As a teen, his custom viruses had made rather hilarious use of that effect.

  Security on the hidden node looked respectable, with the wall remaining solid if anyone (including the person trying to enter) looked at it. Only when the server detected it had zero clients rendering that patch of wall, did it become a doorway down into the hidden bar. Joey ran a Rocket
Bike soft, straddled a missile with handlebars, and shot down the tunnel.

  Thousands of miles of underground tunnel raced by at an approximate speed of Mach 11 or so. As ridiculous as it struck him to be able to remain on such a vehicle at that speed, he laughed. The trip gave him almost the same thrill as when he rode his e-bike down The Highway at over 200 mph.

  Eventually, he slowed as his position dot neared the endpoint. While the Cyberburger private network directly spoke to the secret Russian bar node, they did so over the same tightly-regulated channels that normal users had to take to enter the ACC areas of the GlobeNet. Due to the nature of his connection, everything looked like passive background traffic on the network. Billions of ident requests, ident acks, GBP (GlobeNet Base Protocol) register pings, and network verification packets masked his user traffic. Almost no one short of the best hacker in the world (whoever that might be) could’ve found him, and only if they had specifically been looking for someone doing what he did at that moment. The odds of anyone stumbling upon him by chance made winning the UCF Lottery ten times in a row feel like a reasonable life goal.

  Joey shifted his avatar to look like a suit of ACC Mars Operations armor, the ubiquitous ‘bad guy’ used on all the UCF Mars recruitment posters. Dull brick-red armor covered every inch of him except for a dark-tinted visor over the face. He went for the smiling big-chinned look with a wisp of blond hair visible above the eyes.

  The tunnel ended in a rounded chamber formed by the drilling machine spinning in place, swinging its nose end around in a ring. Joey stopped; the rocket bike disintegrated into pixels. He strolled where the driller had broken a hole in the wall that opened a path to a concrete hallway lined with pipes. A short walk brought him to a ladder that led up through a hatch to another corridor between two bathrooms. A quick mental poke activated a German language translator. Division 9 had the good ones that even caught the slang.

  From the snippets of conversation drifting in, it sounded like this top secret chatroom had been established to give off-the-grid psionics access to others dealing with the same pressures: stay hidden or die.

  He followed the corridor out to the main bar room, where a small crowd stopped dead in their tracks and stared at him.

  Shit.

  “Uhh, don’t mind the suit. I’m just trying to hide by looking obvious.” He waved and headed for the door.

  “Who the fuck are you?” bellowed a deep voice.

  Joey glanced at the bar, behind which a white-haired man in a tank top, jeans, and combat boots brandished a fiery battle-axe at him. “I suppose you wouldn’t believe I’m selling Girl Scout cookies?”

  The terror on the faces of everyone other than the bartender notched down to guarded confusion.

  “What?” The man with the axe used it to scratch his head. “You better start making sense.” The fire on the axe changed to blacklight. The neo-Viking leapt the bar, flew across the room, and landed in front of Joey. “You have two seconds before I cook your brain.”

  “Hold on.” Joey raised a hand. “Since I’m standing in a room full of people looking at a bullet between the eyes if the Citizen Management Office found out about you, I’ll assume you all can keep secrets.”

  “One second,” said the Viking.

  Joey flashed a cheesy smile. “I’m from the UCF. Just a hacker looking for a back door.”

  “Bullshit,” said the Viking.

  “Fine.” Joey sighed. “I am in a bit of a hurry, but follow me.”

  He did a 180 on his heel, and walked back to the tunnel. The Viking stomped after him all the way to the drilling machine.

  Joey pointed down the shaft he’d drilled, which extended into dark infinity. “See? That goes back to a fast food joint in West City.”

  The man lowered the axe. “How is it you have done this? I thought altering dark matter impossible.”

  He couldn’t help himself, and shifted his avatar to the ancient gunslinger before grasping the lapels of his duster coat. “I’m just that good.”

  “Geoff Grimm.” The man took a step back, eyebrows climbing.

  “Name’s Joey.” Oh, shit. He disabled the fear manipulation software. “Sorry for that odd feeling.”

  “Ahh. That was most unusual.” Geoff offered a hand.

  Joey shook. “Didn’t mean to cause trouble by just walking in, but your net looked like the most secure option. Obviously, I can’t have every deck jockey and their mother finding this little tunnel.”

  Geoff nodded while stroking his short beard. “I understand. I will keep your secret, but I ask that you do something for us.”

  “I’d have to hear what first, but I’ll keep an open mind.” Joey smiled, at least as much as the old gunslinger avatar could.

  “If you’re good enough to get here, perhaps you are good enough to delete records from the Otdel Neobyasnimii Yavlenii, specifically, records of wanted psionics? Some of those who come to my place are exposed, and being hunted.”

  The old cowboy’s face turned grim. “Yeah. I can do that. Where’s the nearest CMO network presence?”

  “CMO?” The Viking raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah. The ONY doesn’t have the numbers or the inclination to handle the grunt work. There’s always a direct connection between the two. I can hop on a CMO node and skate right into the ONY system through their back door.”

  “Six blocks north of here, go left through the plaza and three more west to the giant white column building. It’s got statues of a happy family in front on the lawn, you can’t miss it.”

  Joey walked back to the tunnel.

  “Wait, don’t you want the information about the psionics?” Geoff raised an eyebrow.

  “I figured I’d just wipe everything.” He winked. “But, I suppose I’ll take it just in case.”

  Once again in the guise of Mars-red armor, Joey emerged from the train station and headed off down the street in the direction Geoff indicated. The virtual representation of Munich, at least in the part where he walked, looked nigh paradisiacal. Everything gleamed, all the people seemed happy, and the whole scene almost reminded him of the prewar US, at least what little he’d seen of it in history classes.

  Anyone logged into the net here is in the upper classes. Of course, they’re happy.

  Knights, a faerie or two, superheroes, dozens of ‘normal people,’ and a couple who looked like they were either supposed to be boxy robots or power armor operators walked by. Everyone either waved at him or disregarded him. The plaza up ahead had parked cars, but he didn’t see anyone driving around, which likely meant the vehicles were simple scenery and probably couldn’t even move.

  He veered left, heading west out of the plaza, and sure enough, a gaudy building behind a verdant lawn all but glowed. Joey couldn’t tell if the programmers made the building glow, or if it existed as an impossibly pure shade of white. A cadre of schoolchildren assembled outside, awaiting a tour.

  Sensing opportunity, Joey took a page out of Proscion’s playbook and changed his avatar into a nine-year-old girl. He copied one kid’s dress, another’s shoes, a third child’s backpack, stole another kid’s hairstyle―but made it blonde―and generated a composite face based on six of them. In his new pint-sized form, he fell in step at the back end of the class and put on an innocent smile. While waiting for the group to move forward, he spoofed a network address coming from the same block of IPv12s as the other students and created a false identity token with the name Inge Mueller.

  The instructor blathered on and on about how capitalism is the only true form of government beneficial to the people, and how the Corporate Council strives to provide everyone the same chance to pursue success. Joey wanted to spit out a wiseass remark when a boy asked why so many commoners seemed to live in poverty and the teacher replied with ‘they are too lazy to work hard enough.’

  Amid a continuous stream of propaganda, the third-grade class moved into the government building for a tour of the Citizen Management Office headquarters. The CMO function
ed much like the National Police Force did in the UCF, only rather than being government employees, the CMO operated as a for-profit corporate entity. Officers got paid by the hour with bonuses for ‘stick rate’ – what percentage of their detainees got convicted rather than set loose on technicalities. Citizens had to pay a per-month ‘policing fee’ if they wanted the CMO to show up if called.

  The teacher continued droning on and on about how fortunate the children were to live in the greatest nation in the world.

  “This is boring,” whispered another girl to Joey.

  “Yeah,” muttered Inge/Joey. “I don’t think I have enough room in my ass for any more sunshine.”

  “What?” The girl gasped, then got the giggles. “Did you just say ass?”

  “Greta? Do you have something to add?” said the teacher in a raised voice.

  The child faced forward like a tiny soldier and shook her head. “No, Mrs. Edelstein. I was just agreeing with you.”

  Once the teacher lost interest in Greta, the girl stared at Joey and whispered, “You tried to get me in trouble.”

  Inge/Joey glanced at her, but said nothing, continuing to feign interest in the glass display cases full of older uniforms.

  “Greta…” Mrs. Edelstein frowned.

  The girl bowed her head. “Sorry.”

  Class walked around the central atrium of the Citizen Management Offices for an unbearable twenty minutes. Greta occasionally gave ‘Inge’ looks of annoyance, curiosity, or confusion. Joey grinned at her when they neared an area with a door marked ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’ He dug up an old Netßunny soft that spawned cosmetic rabbits in netspace. The rabbits did little more than exist, wandering around acting like rabbits. Joey tinkered with the soft, adding an endless recursive loop as well as changing a few parameters to make the rabbits move a little faster than normal. Once run, the soft would continue spewing bunnies into the world until someone found and killed the master construct. He swapped out the standard data tile graphic for a case of lipstick to make it harder to recognize as a program.