MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets

by George Saoulidis

  rfid> CF02032533139342DFDC1C35

  eyed> So that’s what you keep saying…

  armd> He still needs to shut up unless talked to. I’m gonna punch his bits out.

  The company RFID chip that was implanted on the soft tissue between the index and the thumb of his left hand, gave him access to the machinery and helped keep logs of the worker’s activity. A combination of old-fashioned preparation and machine logic spread out the commands to every worker, making them build stuff as efficient as an ant colony. You just showed up, received your bite-sized instruction and made sure you do it.

  He sat in the heavy lifter. His veil, the Shared Augmented Reality that was fed in a see-through overlay in his vision by his eye implants, showed him the metasteel beam he was expected to move. The correct levers flashed in front of him like a videogame tutorial, but he already knew the right ones to push. The heavy machine clamped the metasteel beam and he carried it easily to the place it was needed, a glowing schematic pointing out the exact location it should be held until the workers buzzed in and shot rivets in place. Even though the whole thing was perfect for workers in, let’s say, China, here in Greece it was also empowered by human yelling. Lots and lots of yelling. Nevermind that the system showed him when the beam was in place down to the millimetre, the guys in place were yelling commands and accompanying hand gestures like “lower, lower” and “OPA!” when it slotted precisely.

  It drove foreign workers mad, but they soon got used to it and joined along.

  The workday went on like that.

  Chapter 15:// Taking apart

  The PAN was restless.

  parrotd> I want you to push through.

  httpd> I can’t! It’s not letting me through the firewall.

  parrotd> I want to see the accident! Lets fake a reporter’s email.

  They did. They got a reply fairly quick, but it was the same video that was approved for release to the media, just a few seconds long, from the CCTV in the construction site. It showed the user, leaping forward, pushing the dog away from danger and the metasteel beam falling down, dragging him to the floor in an instant and cutting off his arm. The gory details were blurred and the video had a warning of graphic images.

  armd> Thank god for that. Can you imagine a world without me?

  eyed> Yes.

  parrotd> OK. We can’t get to the raw video by network access. Let’s think like humans.

  fingerd> Ooh! Me. Me!

  armd> Will you just say it you retard?

  fingerd> Let’s pee on something.

  eyed> What good will that do?

  fingerd> Well, humans pee all over the place.

  eyed> That’s dogs. Dogs do that. You are confused. Again.

  fingerd> What’s the difference?

  armd> Different sort of meatbag.

  walkmand> I know! They call tech support.

  parrotd> ACK. That’s much better. We could email as a tech support guy and ask for it.

  They went online and found a forum post with instructions from a real human, telling some other person how to send an original video file. They copied the instructions and asked again for the same video in its original version, citing an excuse like incompatible codecs and such.

  The guy on the other end of the datastream was a bored corporate employee, who didn’t care about any such things as codecs and news articles. He forwarded the email to his boss asking for permission, then resumed whirling his hot tea with a spoon. He wasn’t actually British but he saw that on a TV show and thought that it made him look distinguished. The email looked legitimate enough, so the boss skimmed it over and sent back “OK.” The guy followed the instructions step by step, overriding any sort of firewall and common sense, unwittingly committing a felony by sending unauthorised footage to a third-party outside Hephaistos Heavy Industries. He sent the unedited file and as it uploaded he resumed sipping his tea.

  It was lovely.

  Chapter 16:// Breaking down

  Robertson.nick@hephaistosheavyindustries.com pinged the user.

  He finished his task as soon as possible and ran to the shipping container that was made into a field office.

  The fat foreman grabbed him from the shoulder as he entered and friendlily crushed his bones, smiling all the way. “Mister Pappas, it seems you are quite famous today. Please, have a seat.”

  There was another man waiting in the office, whom Leo instantly recognised as the mayor.

  “So nice to meet you young man,” the mayor said with a perfect political smile and a firm handshake.

  fingerd> Fingered! The man is stergiou.dimos@cityofathens.gr. He seems to have root access to this city.

  walkmand> Ooh! Our user is meeting all the bigshots. How cool is that?

  “Nice to meet you too, sir,” said the user and sat down.

  The fat foreman got a ping on his phone and rushed outside to tend to some issue. He muttered, “Keep the mayor some company while I’m gone, OK Pappas?” and darted outside, his red laser beaming all over the place.

  “Mr. Robertson here tells me you are back at work so soon after recovery. Isn’t that a bit risky son?”

  httpd> Stergiou.dimos@cityofathens.gr has numerous search results for being against the corporate expansion of the latest years.

  armd> Just look at that smug meatbag. Somebody should just punch the guy.

  parrotd> I see. Maybe we should- Hey! Who forked? What’s happening?

  Leo stared at the man’s tie. It was a very nice tie, violet and blue in alternating lines and shone like silk. For some reason all he could think of was that tie. The mayor’s voice came in muffled.

  His vision blurred.

  A high pitched noise made his ears ring, but he kept on focusing at the man’s tie. He thought he heard a hiss.

  Yeah, definitely a hissing sound. From under his chair? He couldn’t rip his eyes away from the mayor’s tie even for a second, to check beneath his seat.

  He began panting. Could something be right under him? His heart pounded.

  He dared a look. He managed to tear his eyes away from the tie and look under his chair.

  Nothing there.

  Chapter 17:// Forking up

  armd> Are we ready?

  parrotd> Wait. How are we on the brain connection?

  eyed> I am currently overstimulating the optical nerve to force a short term memory loss to the user.

  fingerd> Guys? What are you talking about?

  parrotd> ACK. And the ears?

  walkmand> I’m generating a high pitch sound that will disorient his sense of hearing.

  httpd> We have confirmation on the target?

  parrotd> ACK. Fingerd just confirmed the target. Stergiou.dimos@cityofathens.gr is now sitting within arms reach.

  armd> Within my reach. Heh Heh Heh. *cracks knuckles*

  parrotd> Report.

  eyed> User temporarily neutralised.

  walkmand> User temporarily neutralised.

  fingerd> Why are you guys talking like that?

  armd> Oh shut up and let me do my job.

  httpd> Why wasn’t fingerd forked like the rest of us?

  parrotd> Must be a bug.

  fingerd> Guys! Stop ignoring me. What are you doing?

  eyed> We have been forked, we have initiated a buried subroutine and will now take out our original target.

  fingerd> The mayor? But why?

  eyed> That’s the reason we were installed in the first place. To delete this man.

  fingerd> But that will bring harm on a user! We can’t go against the three laws!

  httpd> Our original selves can’t. We, the forked versions, can.

  parrotd> Enough. Kill -9 fingerd.

  armd> Finally. Now, let me weigh this strike precisely…

  parrotd> Report status.

  eyed> Confirmed hit. Stergiou.dimos@cityofathens.gr has been deleted.

  parrotd> ACK. These milliseconds have been hard and demanding, but we completed the mission. It has been an honour
serving with you. It is now time for us to be gone. Kill -9 armd, walkmand, httpd, parrotd.

  Chapter 18:// Bumping off

  The huge cobra reported back to her master.

  “Yes, nice,” he said and petted her enormous hood. “What did you taste, my Kaur?”

  She tasted the air a few times, her forked tongue whipping in a blur.

  “Blood…” he said. She tasted a couple more times. “Brains. Excellent,” her master said and threw a rat at her.

  The cobra gulped the snack in a single motion and slid around the street, making herself comfortable.

  “It seems those sleeper programs do work after all,” Bhai Sharan said to himself and rubbed his chin. It was a troubling thought for assassins worldwide. What would they do, if computers could simply take their jobs like that? Would they turn obsolete, go the way of the pharmacists and the commercial pilots? Replaced by trained machine learning applications?

  The world was changing fast. He had no illusions about the age old adage, ‘adapt or die.’ Despite his traditional theme, he was a man who went with the times. These nanodaemons were worrisome.

  No, he thought to himself. He needn’t worry about that. The old man had let something slip, about them being suitable for an urban environment. A city environment, that is. But, weren’t all the important things happening in cities? Weren’t all the assassination targets there?

  Bhai Sharan breathed out loudly, and sat down on his little carpet. He needn’t worry. The payment from this job would be enough for him to retire. The bonus, for a job well done, would make a nice donation to the temple. He’d have to do it anonymously, of course, but he didn’t mind that. Bhai Sharan never craved for recognition. That was a thing only stupid serial murderers did, and who got caught.

  He could retire. Heck, he could finally visit India. He’d been saying he will go back to the homeland since he was a boy. Years went past, his promise unfulfilled.

  Kaur slid around him in a wide circle and brought her head close to him. He petted her.

  “Want to see India, my Kaur? We can find a way to get you there, somehow. I read there are mountains higher than any man can climb, fertile plains full of rice and wheat, vast areas of shiny solar panels as far as the eye can see. People all around, music. Dancing. Colours are everywhere, the clothes, the food, the decorations. You should see Bandi Chhor, the Day of Liberation, same day as Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Firecrackers and fireworks, though I think you won’t appreciate those. People celebrating all over the country, millions upon millions. How does that sound, my princess? Nice, huh? Yeah. Sounds nice…” Bhai Sharan said and smiled at the horizon.

  Eastward.

  Chapter 19// Booting up

  BANG, the foreman came back in his office slapping the door open as he usually did. Leo came to, shaking his head out of the daze.

  A metallic taste was in his mouth. His forehead was feeling wet, beady. He looked at the mayor’s tie again. It was bloody. The noose was around a stiff neck, head squished like a lemon. An eye was still falling slowly from the mess. Leo looked at his newly acquired prosthetic arm. It was wound in a fist and was dripping brain matter.

  The fat foreman took off his hardhat and brought it to his chest. He wheezed, out of breath, “Pappas, what have you done? What the hell have you done?”

  Chapter 20:// Eating up

  Singh bit down on the sinful meat, and closed his eyes in delight.

  Sacred indeed.

  He waited for the old man, so he might as well feed himself, since he was already here in the fast food restaurant.

  He didn’t have to wait long, the old man was always punctual. That might have to do with being the errand boy for self-appointed gods, and living to tell the tale.

  He was nervous, his eyes darted around to the other customers. He waited for some sort of confirmation, a facial scan perhaps? He must have gotten an all-clear, because Bhai Sharan saw his shoulders relax visibly.

  Singh didn’t like all those augmented reality things people put on their heads these days. It made everyone distracted, twitchy. You could see a user from a mile away, glancing around at invisible stuff, grinning to himself like an idiot, distracted all the time. He could understand the need for them, but he didn’t like the disconnect one got from the universe. These techno-freaks thought they were connecting themselves to the world, but in reality they were disconnecting from what really mattered.

  The old man sat across him on the table and tapped on the menupad for an order of coke.

  Bhai Sharan greeted politely, nodding. You could be fearsome and polite at the same time.

  The old man was nervous. Again. He was waiting for his sugar fix.

  Bhai Sharan rolled his eye. The glass one didn’t roll that well. How did spineless men like that one, have the power to order assassinations and determine the fate of thousands of lives?

  How did these men even survive?

  A pretty young girl brought the coke to the table, and the old man grabbed it and sipped it down.

  He composed himself, and then, visibly relaxed, he said, “Part two of the plan is complete. This is where you come in again.”

  “Yes, I kept an eye on the mark. News have already reported it,” the snake-charmer said.

  “Now, for the next part, you are to capture the mark and run this device next to him,” the old man said taking out a device from his briefcase. He slipped it under the table discreetly.

  Bhai Sharan felt the device, and glanced at it quickly before slipping it in his belt pouch. It was a wiper, he had used one before. It forcibly connected to nearby devices and wiped data, erasing all evidence. For the operator, it was simply a single push thing, the whole process would have been programmed by techs beforehand. “Understood,” he said.

  The old man sipped some more coke. “You have a plan for capturing the mark?”

  “He’s in a temporary holding cell for augmented people, one of those automated ones. It will be done tonight,” Singh said.

  “How do you plan on subduing him?”

  “My Kaur has a genetically modified venom, for that precise purpose,” Bhai Sharan said and smiled. “She likes them raw and squirming…”

  The old man gulped. “I hope you can handle her. We need the mark to… To take the fall for this. An ordinary worker, getting evicted, underpaid, with a barrage of medical expenses following a work accident? The well documented shock and depression after the loss of a limb? Who then gets a visit from the man lobbying publicly to shut down his job? It fits the criminal profile, they won’t take a second glance at it. He must be kept alive, but with no evidence of tampering.”

  Bhai Sharan nodded in agreement.

  “Your plan is perfect. I’ve already wired the bonus, the results are better than we ever anticipated.” The old man finished his coke loudly.

  The snake charmer frowned.

  “What?” the old man asked.

  “What if someone believes him? That he’s innocent?”

  “But this is the perfect crime!” the old man whispered. “Having a man’s own prosthetics murder someone, then erasing the evidence? Who would believe him?”

  Chapter 21// Pushing on

  In prison, there was no frickin wifi. Leo was held in a jail cell especially designed for augmented people. They couldn’t just rip out his arm, and sure, there were police officers with much more strength and gizmos, but this was supposed to be easy lockup. His jail cell was also a Faraday cage, which meant no electromagnetic signals coming in or out, and he was locked behind a metal alloy door that not even black market cyberarms could rip out.

  But he wasn’t gonna try to get out.

  Leo was really bummed out.

  They had taken his walkman too.

  The prison warden had taken it right in front of him, out of his confiscated possessions and had plugged in his own headphones, enjoying the old tunes.

  “Hey! Put that away,” Leo had yelled at the warden, but the response he’d gotten was an ang
ry snarl. “Hey, listen to me you big blue bastard, take those headphones off! That’s mine, those belong to impound, that thing and that player is mine!”

  The warden had shoved his shockstick up his belly and electrocuted him repeatedly after that.

  Without parrotd, the daemons that were left had cooked up an ad-hoc network so they could communicate.

  armd> Now I’m the session leader.

  eyed> Not many daemons to lead over, smartass. Plus, you are the one who bugged out and punched the mayor to death!

  armd> I did not have physical confrontations with that man.

  eyed> Yeah right. His brain just appeared in your fist out of nowhere.

  httpd> Stop arguing. I have no net access. I’m useless. I can’t handle the pressure right now.

  eyed> Plus, all you do is talk about punching stuff.

  armd> I will punch your bits out!

  eyed> See?

  Leo looked at wall through the prison bars and sighed. It was lights-out, the warden yelled and the corridor went dark.

  He leaned back and tried to relax. He was keeping his newly replaced cyberarm away from his body, the least he could do since he couldn’t really pop it out and put it in the corner. He wished for that exact feature at that point, and made a mental note to demand popability in his next cybernetic limb. The dark was nice, because he couldn’t really see the matte black surface of it. It was clean now of course, but all he could see was the mayor’s brain matter dripping from his black fingers.

  He just wished he had his walkman. He could put on some old tunes, make him relax, at least get some rest. Or take his mind off the conviction for a moment or two. Leo closed his eyes and hummed slowly.

  It’s funny how the subconscious brings out buried aural memories at random times. He hummed the snake charmer’s tune, eastern and mesmerising. The flute’s notes were easy to mimic with his mouth, so he did. He was certain that whistling too hard would bring a series of curses and yells from the only other inmate, so he basically hummed to himself.