2xs

by Nigel Findley

  "That's the report," Bent said, confirming what I'd already figured out. "It was encrypted, but I decoded it. Now look."

  Bent hit a key, and the report started to scroll up my screen. Too fast for me to read it, but I could see it was standard text. And then suddenly it wasn't. Instead of standard alphanumeric characters, I saw a great wad of weird, graphic-like characters, Greek letters, mathematical symbols, and so on. My telecom beeped arrhythmically as the mass of drek scrolled by. Then it was over, and we were back into standard text. Bent hit another key. The report vanished, and his earnest face filled the screen again.

  "What was that?" The words came out of my mouth even though I thought I already knew.

  "There's a section that's been encrypted using a different algorithm," Bent said, corroborating my guess. "I tried to break it, but not a chance. If the rest of the report is like a locked door, that section's like a vault."

  I thought for a moment. "Can you send it to me? Maybe I can find someone who can break it."

  He grinned. "I'm all ready to send. Ready to receive?" I entered the appropriate commands. "Go ahead," I said. The transfer took only seconds, and my telecom beeped to acknowledge receipt. "Received and verified," I announced. "Anything else I should know?"

  "That's it for now," Bent said with a chuckle.

  "But when you get it cracked, you'll probably need me to interpret it for you."

  "I kinda figured as much. Thanks, chummer."

  "De nada. Talk to you soon. Hang easy, Dirk." He broke the connection.

  I sat back. I felt like I'd tuned into a mystery vid after it was thirty minutes into the story, making me miss all the important background clues. Nothing seemed to connect in a logical and obvious way. But I felt a sick certainty that just about everything that had happened over the last week was somehow connected.

  It was paranoia in the extreme-like there was this Grand Plan that They had set up, and I was just a pawn unlucky enough to start to sense that I was just a pawn. I didn't like it at all.

  I did my best to shake off the feeling, to blot out the images of hideous truths behind the façade of reality. It would all make sense if I could put the pieces of the puzzle together in the right way, or so I told myself. And the biggest puzzle piece was the double-encrypted section of the Lone Star medical examiner's report.

  If Bent couldn't break it, there wasn't a hope in hell I could. I needed a pro-Buddy? But that would mean distracting her from the search for William Sutcliffe, which I still believed was the key lead. Buddy was the best there was, but maybe I didn't need such a heavy-hitter to bust the Lone Star encryption.

  Surely there were other deckers who were capable, available, and cheaper. I brought up my contacts database and started scanning.

  She called herself Rosebud, and she was a dwarf. We met at a bar called The Mad Woman on Northeast Fifty- first. Rosebud was squat and muscular, with short legs and arms. Her build reminded me of a fireplug. When I entered the bar, she was sitting in a shadowed booth toward the back. As she waved me over, I picked up a pitcher of beer and two glasses at the bar.

  She grinned at me from under her unruly thatch of chestnut hair and stuck out her hand. I took it, feeling fingers as thick as bratwurst grip mine painfully tight. I tried to give as good as I got, but not a chance. Rosebud poured herself a tall glass of beer, tossed off half of it, and refilled the glass, then filled mine as an afterthought. Then and only then did she speak.

  "Long time," she rumbled in a voice much too low and gravelly for anyone named Rosebud. "Biz is good. Manager now."

  I remembered my first run-in with Rosebud, which took place soon after I'd cut loose from the Star.

  After graduating in Matrix programming from U-Dub, she'd been suckered in by the urban folklore that running the shadows is an easy way to make major nuyen and get your rep splattered around the sprawl as some kind of hero. That may be true for the top echelon, but the income of most shadowrunners, when averaged out over the year, comes out to something like minimum hourly wage, with the added chance of getting geeked. As to the rep thing, unless a runner is tops, and unless his rep is limited to the right circles, the last thing he wants is to get a name for himself.

  Rosebud had found that out the hard way. Her first job should have been as straightforward as it gets:

  Matrix cover on a corporate lift-out. Rosebud never did figure out exactly what went wrong, which happens all the time. All she knew for sure was that the corp scientist stopped a few slugs before he could be pulled out. On top of that, his records were missing, and those records were the thing her employer wanted even more than the scientist. This put Rosebud in the unenviable position of being hunted by both sides: her employers and the corp who employed the scientist. She got my name from somewhere and hired me, pure and simple, to save her butt. Just a little matter of tracking down which one of her partners had double-crossed Rosebud's employer, then double-crossed the corp who'd turned him, proving to both sides that the scientist's records had been destroyed, with no copies made. Just a walk in the park. Yeah, right.

  Anyway, her close call was enough to convince Rosebud to turn away from the shadows. She applied for a SIN and rejoined the ranks of the working stiffs, but on her terms. She found herself a job at a computer store and decker hangout called Siliconnections, where she was apparently now a manager. But she also chummed around with a group of shadow technomancers who called themselves the Dead Deckers Society. That seemed to provide her the perfect balance of security and excitement. Rosebud was happy.

  "Glad to hear it's working out," I told her, and it was true.

  She nodded. "You?"

  "Keeping busy."

  She raised a bushy eyebrow. "Street buzz says you're in trouble."

  "Sukochi," I admitted. "Some trouble. I'm looking for technical talent if you're looking for work."

  "Matrix run?"

  I shook my head. "Just a simple decrypt job." I pulled out an optical chip. "I've got the file here. I give it to you encrypted, you give it back to me in clear. I transfer credit, that's it. If you had your deck with you and you had the time, you could do it now."

  "Don't need no deck," she said, taking the chip from me. "And time I got." She brushed her thick hair back from her forehead. For the first time I saw her hardware: two datajacks and some unusual kind of chip receptacle in her right temple. The skin around the chip socket was pink and looked very tender. "New toy?" I asked.

  Rosebud smiled broadly, and for the first time she looked almost pretty. "Got tired of depending on outboard hardware," she said, tapping her head with a knuckle. "Now I got what I need with me all the time." She socketed my chip into her receptacle. The faint click as it seated gave me a shiver. "You know what kind of encrypt?"

  "Not for sure," I told her. "Some kind of Lone Star secondary algorithm, I think."

  "No-brainer," she announced. "Back in a while."

  Her eyes closed and she settled back against the padded booth.

  I watched, fascinated. This was all new to me. I'd seen deckers jack in before, of course, it was freaky enough seeing them interface their brains directly with computers through plugs inserted into their datajacks, but this was one step further up the scale. Rosebud had apparently installed enough computing power right inside her skull that she could handle my decrypt job on her own. Intellectually, I understood that the interface was the same no matter where a decker's hardware was located. But as far as my emotions were concerned, Rosebud had virtually become a computer. It's a frightening world we live in.

  I drank beer and watched her as seconds stretched into minutes. My attention eventually drifted away to the rest of the bar, and I watched the comings and goings of the rough looking clientele. I must have watched one slag- an edgy-looking samurai wannabe-too long. He glared at me, and about fifteen centimeters of polished steel extended with a hiss from his forearm. I very obviously changed the focus of my attention to the wall beside me. "Not so easy," Rosebud said at last, startling
me. She extracted the chip from her head socket and tossed it on the table in front of me. "Lone Star seven-cycle code. Serious drek."

  She tapped the chip with a meaty finger. "Pretty hot, huh?"

  "Didn't you scan it?" I asked.

  The dwarf snorted. "Not my fragging business," she snapped.

  I poured her a beer to placate her. It seemed to work. She tipped it down her gullet and held her glass out for a refill. "Wizzer stuff, Rosebud," I told her. I pulled out my credstick. "What's the going rate?"

  "For a chummer, two hundred," she told me. She pulled out a pocket computer-a bargain-basement model-and opened the stick slot. (I was glad I wasn't going to have to shove my credstick into her head ...)

  "Slot it," she said with a smile, "then drink up. Or you in a hurry?"

  Actually, I was in a bit of a hurry, but it would have been rude to slot and run. Especially after Rosebud had charged me only two hundred when I'd been expecting about a K. So it was with a slightly foggy head and dry mouth that I drove on home.

  Bent answered immediately when I called him. "Did you get it?" he asked, then smiled broadly as I held the chip up to my video pickup. "That was quick work."

  I slotted the chip into the telecom and fired the decrypted file over the line to Bent's machine. "Take a look at it as soon as you can," I said.

  "First free cycle I get, chummer," he assured me. "Did you scan it yourself?"

  I shook my head. "I figured it wouldn't mean anything to me. Call me when you know something?"

  "Echo that," he smiled. "Later, Dirk."

  I broke the connection, leaned back in my chair and rubbed my aching eyes. Then I looked around the squalid little apartment. The last thing I wanted to do was sit around here, but I figured I'd better stay close to the phone. Frag it. Waiting is always the hardest part.

  Chapter 11.

  I ended up doing what I usually do when it's necessary to wait. I slept. Frag, I can even justify the habit. Back in Lone Star training, they used to tell us "Rest is a weapon"-a great line, and one I'm convinced they stole from somewhere else. So what I was doing that Wednesday evening was honing a weapon.

  In fact, I almost slept through the telecom's beep. When it finally penetrated my numb brain, I rolled over fuzzy-headed and blurry-eyed to check the time display. Oh-five-thirty. It had to be Bent.

  Right in one. Predictably, he looked disgustingly cheerful-fresh, well-rested, and ready to face the day.

  My mouth tasted like something had died in it, and for a moment I hated him. "Good morning, Dirk," he enthused.

  "Blaargh," said I, or something to that effect.

  "I thought you'd want to hear this as soon as possible," he continued. Then his smile faded a little as he noticed my remarkable lack of coherence. "Do you want to get a soykaf or something before we start?" he asked. I nodded wordlessly and stumbled into the apartment's kitchen nook. The process of nuking up a mug of soykaf gave me the time I needed to pull my mind back from the edge of sleep. And the first gulp of soykaf-too hot, on purpose-finished the job. By the time I sat back down at the telecom, I was feeling almost myself. "What have you got for me?" I asked.

  Bent's expression grew serious. "More than I think you want to hear," he said. "You're into something pretty deep and dark, chummer. No wonder Lone Star put a lid on it."

  From anyone else (Patrick Bambra, for example) I'd have written that off as melodrama or incipient paranoia. Bent isn't given to that kind of mental indulgence. I felt the acidic churning of anxiety in my belly as I told him, "Go-on."

  Bent's eyes flicked away from my face to look at a spot apparently over my right shoulder. For an instant I felt the urge to look behind me-true paranoia-but then I realized Bent must have split his screen so he could view the report while he was talking to me. I forced myself to relax as much as I could.

  "This is the dope that Lone Star locked up tight," Bent began. "You'll understand why. When Crashcart picked up Waters from the Hubbell Street park, he was messed up pretty bad. Entry wound left posterior, super to scapula..."

  I stopped him. "In English, Bent." He nodded. "In English, someone almost blew half his body away.

  Waters took a shotgun blast in the back of his left shoulder, up high over the shoulder blade. It tore out his clavicle-his collar bone-and basically pulverized much of the skeletal support for his left shoulder joint.

  Significant nerve trunk damage, massive blood loss, bone fragments driven into his lungs... He should have died then and there, from shock if not from blood loss."

  "But he didn't."

  Bent smiled. "He was a tough bugger, no doubt about that."

  "From what you say, he should still be in a hospital bed."

  "He should," Bent agreed, "and I'll get to that. Actually, though, the nature of the injury was such that the treatment was pretty clear-cut. Twenty years ago, there'd have been nothing anyone could do for him.

  But today-" " Cyber replacement."

  "You got it, chummer. An interesting job, too. They didn't give him a full arm, just part of a shoulder.

  The installation was easy enough, but the fact that there were two major interfaces ..."

  I held up a hand to stop him. "Sounds pretty fragging major. But he was up and around, what, three days later?"

  "He was up," Bent said. "But he shouldn't have been. They hadn't even fully enabled the cyberware.

  Even the partial activation they gave him was too much too soon."

  "Then why?"

  "You know as well as I do. Contractual obligations. KOMA Corporation needed him back on the air as soon as possible, and being a good little wage slave, he went, ready or not." Bent looked sour. "If I had anything to do with his case, he wouldn't be out of bed for another month."

  I refrained from pointing out that-officially-if Bent had anything to do with the case, it meant that Waters was already dead. "So what killed him?" I asked. "It sure wasn't post-operative shock or drek like that."

  "Of course not," Bent said, "and this is where it gets scary. Daniel Waters died of neurophysiological reaction to some circuitry in the cyber-replacement hardware."

  I shook my head, this didn't make sense. "Some kind of rejection, then?" I proposed. "But I thought you said . . ."

  "I know what I said," Bent interrupted. "Hear me out. He died because of a very negative reaction to some circuitry in the cyber hardware. But that circuitry had no business being there in the first place. It was a neurological link-up that had no connection to either motor functions or sensory nerves. It's like opening up your car's engine and finding a coffee grinder attached to the transmission. It simply shouldn't be there.

  And it was that"- he searched for the right word-"foreign circuitry that killed Waters. It fed some kind of signals into his brain stem that really fragged with his central nervous system. It's possible the effect might not have been lethal if they hadn't activated the hardware while he was in such a weakened condition. I tend to think not."

  "Just what the frag was this hardware?" I asked. "Part of what Lone Star wanted to cover up is that they didn't know," Bent said. "Their ME described the circuitry, but when it came to function, he used a politically acceptable phrase meaning 'Fragged if I know.' " I felt a chill work its insidious way up my spine. "But you know, don't you, Bent?"

  He nodded slowly. "Yes, but only because you had me look into the Juli Long case. The circuitry uses almost exactly the same technology as 2XS chips."

  I stared at the screen. I didn't know what to say. "So it was like he was perpetually slotting a 2XS chip?" I said.

  "Not exactly," Bent corrected. "The intensity would be much lower."

  "But in principle..."

  "In principle, yes," he allowed. I shook my head. Too much, too strange. "Who did the work?" I searched my memory for the name of the hospital to which Waters had been taken when he crashed. "Harborview?"

  "No hospital," Bent said. "Crashcart picked him up, so they took him to the Crashcart central clinic and body sh
op. That's who did the work."

  "So Crashcart installed the 2XS circuitry?"

  "If that's really what it was."

  "Look," I said, "if 2XS is that lethal, what are the symptoms?"

  "I'd only be guessing."

  "Well, guess," I snapped.

  He blinked, but nodded. "I'd guess"- he stressed the word-"you'd see disorientation, physical and mental. Memory lapses. Massive mood swings. Loss of motor control, apparent palsy. On the finer level, arrhythmia, maybe loss of homeostasis..."

  "And death would be caused by . .?"

  "Progressive cessation of neural functioning," he said.

  "Higher cerebral functions first, so probably irreversible coma, followed by eventual cessation of the entire autonomic nervous system."

  I fixed Bent with my hardest stare. "Chummer," I told him, "you know nothing about any of this, karimasu-ka? Maybe you pulled the files, but you never decrypted them, you never scanned them. You just passed them to me. You know nothing about this. Scan me, omae?"

  He nodded slowly. "I wish that was true," Bent said.

  How the frag did I get myself into this? I found myself wondering. I lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Not even six in the morning, and already it was one of those days.

  Something pretty bad was going down. (No surprise, this was the sprawl after all.) While looking for one conspiracy-our murderous X-I'd found something that sure as frag looked like another. Was there any connection?

  My first response was a resounding No, and a desire to purge Daniel Waters, Juli Long, and 2XS from my mind like erroneous data. But, on closer inspection, there did seem to be some tenuous connection-and it was none other than the elf biker. He seemed to be the pivotal figure at the moment. He was connected to whoever had phoned Jocasta with the claim of information about Lolly. It was simply too much of a coincidence for him and his ork lieutenant to come out shooting in the Westlake Center underground. He was also connected to Crashcart, which was the best explanation for his Executive Diamond contract with the company, something he shouldn't have been able to afford. And Crashcart was connected with 2XS, as illustrated by the premature demise of Daniel Waters.