The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  ‘Inge’ tapped Greta on the arm. When the child looked at him, he held up the lipstick. “Revenge time.”

  Before Greta could ask what he meant, Joey hurled it at the teacher and sent a run command chasing it. The small, black cylinder disappeared into Mrs. Edelstein’s purse. A couple of plain white rabbits popped into being around her and dropped to the floor, at which point they began zipping in random directions at paranormal speed.

  The kids laughed.

  More rabbits appeared. Every three seconds, another six to eight bunnies popped into being and got to racing about. One climbed out of the teacher’s coat and leapt to freedom; another landed on her head and seemed content to remain.

  “Oh, my!” said Mrs. Edelstein, arms raised, backing away from the creatures with terror in her eyes despite them being only program code.

  Laughing kids scrambled in all directions trying to catch rabbits.

  CMO network people ran in from a side room as the rabbit-splosion grew to epic proportions. They all wore the same plain blue cloth uniforms with white ID badges on the breast, about what he’d imagine Division 1 officers might dress like if they didn’t need armor.

  The children, and Greta, could barely stay on their feet, they laughed so hard at the spectacle. Amid the chaos, Joey darted over to the restricted door, giggling like a playing child, pretending to chase a rabbit. His first attempt to breach the security on the network got him in. As soon as the darkness of the subsequent hallway fell over him, he switched his avatar to a direct copy of one of the CMO network men. Little Inge Mueller grew to an adult man over the course of four strides. Once the change finished, Joey sprinted for the data room door at the far end.

  Chaos increased out in the public space, drawing additional network people away from other duties. Oops. I forgot about loops running in systems designed by lazy, cheap bastards… He snickered. I gotta get out of here before I crash this whole place.

  It took him a few cyberspace minutes searching the data room full of the same dent-ridden black 400-year-old metal filing cabinets before he found the uplink to the ONY fileserver. Their ‘Department of Unexplained Phenomena’ went after psionics the way ancient FSB agents hunted capitalists, assuming anyone with a mental gift was either a danger to the country or a valuable commodity to be owned.

  Joey twisted a file drawer handle rather than pulling on it, which caused the front of the cabinet to open like a door. He stepped in to another chamber full of data storage constructs. These file cabinets seemed somewhat newer and less battered, though it still looked like he’d walked into the basement of a pre-computer-age accounting firm where they had one elderly man as a clerk. Cabinets and loose data tiles stacked to the ceiling as far as he could see. A single desk, also littered with data tiles, sat in the corner, empty.

  Without the hardware here being compliant to Division 9 protocols, he had to let loose a few DataMoles to hunt down the records of known individual psionics. Fortunately, it didn’t take them too long, and he ran over to where the dog-sized moles congregated.

  Joey ran purge commands on whole cabinets, wiping out 20,000 records at a shot and effectively causing individuals known or suspected of being psionic to cease to exist in the eyes of the law. Once he’d cleared out five cabinets, his lips curled with a wicked grin. He modified a copy command with a loop and search function and linked DMS personnel records on the back end. Nine seconds later, he finished filling the ‘suspected psionics’ files with randomly selected people employed by the Department of Motherland Security―the ACC’s version of the Military―in order of rank downward.

  Hopefully, that’ll keep the little people from getting stepped on. He cackled. The CEO of the DMS is now suspected of being psionic. I almost want to fly here in meatspace to watch that shitshow.

  With the favor done, he returned via the secret door to the CMO network and headed to the back of the room where a metal bar on the ground projected a door-sized energy field upward. It appeared as a hole in reality, leading to another server room tinged dark blue―right into the Office of Operational Intelligence. The Corporates were nothing if not predictable.

  Already, the pale linoleum tiles underfoot took on the mushiness of walking on sponges. CPU cycles normally devoted to maintaining the reality of this building went to tracking hundreds of thousands of toy animals, and counting. The rabbits are going to crash this server. He got the giggles imagining the children, the teacher, and everyone else in the building riding a tidal wave of virtual rabbits out the front doors and spilling onto the lawn.

  The instant Joey stepped into the portal, the lag faded. He wasted a few seconds wondering if the rabbits would behave like floodwaters and come down the hallway, spill into the portal, and affect this node too. No, they’re constantly spawning from the teacher’s location. Unless someone finds that lipstick… He cackled again.

  As luck would have it, the tendency of the ACC to be cheap paid off. It seemed as though they never expected infiltration from the secure CMO network, so the peer-to-peer link let him into an empty data cluster. Here, the storage units had the look of modern server towers, beige boxes brimming with small blue LEDs that flickered in time with activity. Each box reported a capacity of fifty exabytes.

  Joey ran ten instances of DataMole. Ten huge, brown, furry moles appeared in front of him. “Sorry to do this to you boys, but, find this guy.” He held up the data tile showing Neal Finch.

  The moles, being programs, didn’t complain at their titanic task, and zipped off to root among the data.

  One of the server cabinets reconfigured itself into a ten-foot-tall robot with a six-tube missile pod on its left shoulder, a giant cannon for a right arm, and a single red spot for an eye.

  “Oh. That doesn’t look happy to see me.” Joey brought up his defense programs, adding another three layers of data scrubbing between his hardware and brain. If his old net deck had been a personal terminal, he stood behind the equivalent of a mainframe. Individually, the four decks wired into his desk would have been a little more powerful than his Nishihama Necromancer; when linked for parallel processing, their capabilities almost scared him.

  The robot pointed its right arm at him and projected a blast of blue energy that resembled a fireball riding a laser beam. Joey spread his hands apart, creating a mirrored plane, which deflected the attack into the ceiling as it knocked him flat.

  “Bad form. Aren’t you even going to tell me I’m an ‘unauthorized user?’”

  It fired again.

  Joey rolled out of the way; his connection forcibly shifted his session’s active network port, causing the construct’s attack to go nowhere. Cyberspace rendered a glowing crater in the floor where he’d been lying.

  “Now that’s just plain rude.” He missed his silver six-gun, but the need to conceal his identity overpowered his hacker ego. His break/execute command took the form of a standard ACC battle rifle and a barrage of gunfire that left small dark dents all over the beige robot.

  It fired its energy cannon again, which got him worrying that the ‘missiles’ might be Black ICE, or perhaps less alarming, merely some other routine designed to attack multiple entities at once. Joey dove for cover by a sever cabinet and emerged from another about thirty towers away behind the robot as the particle beam scorched the floor.

  Okay. Since this happy fun bot isn’t falling for delete commands… Joey called on a virus program designed to infect a targeted construct and make it appear like an outside invader to its own network. His rifle morphed into an over-the-shoulder missile launcher.

  The robot took a step toward where Joey had disappeared, unaware that he’d teleported to the other side of the room. He lined up the glowing red crosshairs with the robot, an act that his deck interpreted as a command to target that construct for the virus. With a slight smile, he pulled the trigger.

  Foom!

  The missile hit the robot in the center of its back, blasting it into a loose confederation of spinning chunks. Beige melted to
black as the virus altered the defense construct’s program code. Spinning pieces of robot hovered in the air, gliding back together in excruciating slow motion. Joey peppered it with more bullets (attempts to get it to accept a delete command), which seemed only to delay reassembly.

  When the black creep covered about half the robot, the mass of parts shuddered and collapsed to the floor with a deafening jangle of steel. Seconds later, the pieces melted into mercury blobs.

  Hah! Poor defense construct, your network doesn’t know you anymore.

  “Bwoof!” said a DataMole.

  Joey turned to the left.

  One of the giant moles stood on its hind legs, paws on a server box, and bounced merrily.

  “Awesome.” Joey trotted over. “I might actually get to go home tonight before the fuckin’ sun goes down.”

  The DataMole handed him two tiles.

  Neal Finch appeared to have been born Bernd Huber, an employee of OOI, the Office of Operational Intelligence. The OOI ran itself a bit like C-Branch might if C-Branch didn’t trust synthetics, dolls, or AIs―and had a major paranoia problem with psionics. It, too, had the Corporate habit of searching for the lowest cost option, but it didn’t suffer the crippling effort to maximize profit at all costs, since they didn’t operate in any capacity capable of generating profit. In a sense, they represented the closest thing the ACC had to a true government (as opposed to private enterprise). All corporations within the ACC paid into a fund for their mutual defense, and one such expenditure of those credits sustained the OOI.

  Joey copied the information on Huber and tucked it into his coat. “I can read this later… Someone’s going to notice that program shut down.”

  ina tapped a finger on her desk. Once again back to her normal black hair color and lily-white skin, she stared at four holo-panels worth of uselessness about Neal Finch. In addition to his off-the-books drop-offs of Harmony to chem dealers, he’d been going around to hospitals, clinics, and schools selling medical equipment and medicines. She knew he’d only been in the UCF for around five months, but couldn’t tie him to Nikkatsu Corporation, Anders Becker, or any of the three dead men removed from the apartment of Katya Wolf―formerly Volkov.

  She still didn’t totally trust that woman, but Joey seemed to, so she’d let it go for now. That, plus Operatives Espinosa and Carroll mentioning she’d invited them to send a telepath into her brain made her either reckless, or truthful.

  Joey’s name appeared on a fifth panel, an incoming vid call.

  Her mood improved in an instant as she waved her hand at it to answer. “Hey, cowboy.”

  “Ma belle poupée.” He grinned, then raised both eyebrows. “I mean that in the sense of the enchanting beautiful creature I first laid eyes on… uhh, not the… you know.”

  Nina laughed. “It’s okay. I know what you meant.” She couldn’t help but smile at the face he’d made at her in New Hope, the first time they’d met, albeit in cyberspace. He’d become enchanted by her ‘Avril’ persona, and called her a hauntingly beautiful porcelain doll before he had any clue who she was. “I’m flattered I get you to speak French but you never humored that Alex Hunter.”

  Joey rolled his eyes. “That guy is such an overstuffed, pompous fuckweasel.”

  She laughed.

  “I got some information for you.” He grinned. “Neal’s name isn’t Neal.”

  Nina smirked. “I’m shocked.”

  “Bernd Huber, born in Koblenz, Germany. Age thirty-five. His record with the DMS and OOI looks pretty basic. He’s been involved in a few small-scale operations, two in Nicaragua, one in India where he more or less did the same thing he’s doing at LRI. He might be special operations.”

  “His augments don’t fit that profile. He’s a ghost.”

  Joey blinked. “You killed him already?”

  She shook her head, chuckling. “No, ghost like your friend Katya. A spy.”

  “Duh. Right. I’m a little tired.” He yawned.

  A message in orange letters scrolled along the underside of all five of her holo-panels: ‹Unknown parties have perpetrated a cyberattack on the CMO primary facility in Munich that took down the network with an as-yet-unidentified lag bomb. In the real world, traffic control and law enforcement were affected, leading to widespread confusion, numerous accidents, and several scattered outbursts of rioting and looting. ACC netspace is currently bogged down by over two quintillion Netßunny cosmetic pets. A secondary attack took down the file system at a grade school in East Munich, and also flooded its netspace with rabbits. All personnel, especially NetOps, are advised to be on high alert for attack. We believe the symbolism of rabbits suggests a chaos motive, which may not be limited to the ACC.›

  Joey’s face turned red and he howled with laughter.

  Nina tapped her finger on the desk until he recovered enough to look at her again. “Why do I have a feeling that you know more about bun-ma-geddon than you’re letting on?”

  “Bwah!” He collapsed into peals of laughter again.

  “Joey? You went to Munich didn’t you? That’s where you found this info on Huber.”

  He held up a hand, gasped for breath, and collected himself. “Maybe… Maybe I snuck in with a bunch of grade schoolers on field trip, and needed a distraction to slip into the restricted spots. How should I know their systems ran on such shit code they couldn’t trap an endless loop?”

  “Really? I know they’re cheap, but that seems like it would almost take effort to simplify basic operating system code.”

  “Okay, maybe I obfuscated the spawner program to make it a little harder to find.” He grinned.

  She chuckled. “You should tell Preema you’re the mad rabitteer so she’s not foaming at the mouth waiting for some hacker to set off a bunny bomb in the PAC.”

  “Okay, okay…” He winked. “Love ya.”

  Nina leaned forward and kissed the hologram. “I love you too, Joey, but if you bring a live rabbit to the apartment, and Elizaveta gets attached to it, I will hold you personally responsible for any emotional trauma that results when something happens to the rabbit.”

  “Live rabbit? I’m not spending that much on a prank. Maybe a synthetic one.” He winked. “Synthetic one won’t die on her either.”

  She laughed.

  “’Kay, let me go explain this.”

  Nina waved. His panel went dark and disappeared. She pored over the files he’d sent. With confirmation of Huber’s status as an OOI infiltrator, that brought the count up to nine. Anders Becker, the four he’d given up, the three they scraped off Katya’s living room carpet, and now Bernd Huber.

  “This is a total mess. Nine infiltrators slip into the same company, and no one notices.” She rubbed her eyes and grumbled at the memory of chasing AIs. At least these spies really exist. If we missed these, we might’ve missed more.

  She opened a vid to NetOps, and a man around her age in a tech uniform appeared on a new holo-panel.

  “Net Ops. Good afternoon, lieutenant. What can I do for you?”

  Nina nodded in acknowledgement. “Afternoon, Tech Meade. I need a full analysis of any Citycam feeds with a view within a 300-meter radius around the Laughlin-Reed Innovation building. Run facial recognition patterns on anyone who appears within that radius more than three times in a one-week period. Compare it to the LRI personnel files and flag anyone who’s been there six months or less or who doesn’t show up at all in the LRI records. Also cross check any hits with starport cams around the time of arriving Mars flights dating back five months, and West City checkpoints that could be likely for entry from Mexico.”

  “Oh, so a small job.” Meade smiled. “One second, lieutenant. Let me get that all entered in the system and queued. This one will probably draw a whole team… or two. What’s the urgency level?”

  “The sooner the better. I’d prefer not to watch the country fall into anarchy.”

  “Right, so fast.” Meade nodded. “I’m afraid I haven’t the first clue what to give you as an
estimate for this. I’ve only been here a month and I’ve never seen an order this, uhh, far reaching. I’ll get back to you as soon as they give me some idea when to expect it back.”

  “Fair enough. Thanks.”

  Nina dropped off the line with NetOps and leaned back. Her estimation of that request fell between two or three days depending on how many people shared the load. She continued going over Joey’s files until she hit mention of Laughlin-Reed’s whistleblower reporting tampering to the CEO. She read over an email thread Joey highlighted with Daniel Sterling, SVP of production chewing out a handful of people at first only to flush the investigation into nowheresville when it finished.

  Dammit. How many ACC spies are there in Laughlin-Reed Innovation? Stirling has to be… Her frown deepened as she continued into the data Joey had already pulled on him. The man’s records looked pristine. Everything from his birth to present day accounted for in UCF systems. Joey had even found some old Citycam stills of Stirling as a grade-schooler.

  “This doesn’t make any damned sense.”

  “Duchenne?” asked Hardin.

  “Yeah?” She looked up over the panels at him.

  He chuckled and walked in. “I’m still trying to get used to you having the lights on. It’s a good change.”

  “Different outlook.” She leaned back, lacing her fingers over her stomach. “What’s the occasion?”

  He pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. “Can you explain to me why I just had Preema on my vid griping about you monopolizing her people’s time?”

  “Finch is confirmed ACC. That brings us up to nine foreign operatives in Laughlin-Reed who managed to get in undetected until now. We still wouldn’t have known the full scope of this if not for Becker mistaking that Volkov woman for an operator. We got nine. Where there’s one, there’s ten. I’m trying to find the rest of them. I’m convinced they’re using LRI’s production facilities to manufacture Harmony directly. Nanobots are responsible for both the espionage component as well as the behavior modification. I want to find everyone possibly associated with this before we move, so we have the best chance of getting actionable intelligence we can use to track this back to its origin point, which I am confident is in Mexico.”