Shyft

by Damien Boyes

  The scene flashes as her Cortex blows out, and then the virt cuts back to the empty Fāngzhōu.

  A shiver runs through me. That was him. Ankur's fragment somehow got inside Petra in the moments after I left her.

  It’s in Elder. He missed me by minutes.

  If the Mayor’s security hadn’t pulled me out of there, chances are very good I’d be the one full of holes.

  Instead more people are hurt. Petra, Vaelyn, the innocent bystanders. All because of me.

  I turn to Shelt. He’s watching, waiting for a reaction.

  “That wasn’t Petra,” I say, Ankur’s warning echoing in my head. “We need to find out how Elder got that fragment into her head. Run it again.”

  StatUS-ID

  [a646:d17e:8670:511f::Finsbury/D//GAGE]

  SysDate

  [18:58:12. Monday, April 22, 2058]

  I kill the next day—waiting for xYvYx to send me the ReCog or to be allowed back at work, whichever comes first—in a World War II virt, saving the world from the Nazis. My shift starts before I hear from xYvYx.

  I get to the evening standing rundown a few minutes early. Galvan’s already there. He glances up from his spekz as I walk in, but averts his eyes immediately and his face pinches into a scowl. His face is smudged by thick black stubble and his eyes are twitchy in their sockets. He doesn’t look like he’s stopped working since Chaddah promoted him, stimmed for sure. Hyporexin will keep the brain alert for days at a stretch, but eventually the body will give out—and from the looks of him, collapse can’t be far off.

  He stims for a few days and no one thinks twice about it. Nothing illegal about casual chemical enhancement. If I get caught shyfting, my career’d be over. Hardly seems fair.

  I know he’s angry at me and I want to say something to him, but I don’t know what. Does he want an apology? Our night at the arKade earned him a promotion. It got me bumped down to desk bunny. If anything, he owes me a ‘thank you’ for doing him a favour.

  If he wants to talk to me he knows where to find me: at a desk.

  I stay at the back of the room and let it fill up around me.

  Everyone’s here. Even dayshift. All the tables have been removed, but still we're packed wall-to-wall. The entire Psychorithm Crime Unit’s here. The detectives—Daar and Brewer, Sedat and Lawrence, Douthat and Aziz; Omondi and five other support techs; sixteen Service TAC Officers—Copeland and Pendelton I recognize, I haven’t learned the others’ names yet.

  Everyone’s tense. No one’s talking.

  Standards is in the building.

  Inspector Chaddah enters the room precisely fifteen seconds before nineteen hundred hours. Followed closely by a tall, broad-shouldered man with razor-parted silver hair, wearing a green nylon flight jacket and standard blue BDU cargo pants over a form-fitting stopsuit underlayer. He’ got a Janus on his hip and a smaller calibre strapped around his ankle. Military issue. Ready for action.

  I quietly flip up my tab and dox him, comes back Special Agent Marcus Doyle, Standards, previously a Ranger Captain. Professional hardass.

  The warbot at his heels sells the impression. It’s all black armour and corded pheneweave muscle and has to duck to get into the room. The Standards AMP will be controlling it, modelling the room with its sensors. Will know what each of us is doing at every second. Be tracking our heartbeats, listening to our breathing, modelling the optimal method to incapacitate any one of us, should it see the need.

  They’re followed in by four Service Agents hardwired into full-on see-ya suits—Combat Enhancement Armour connected directly to their nervous systems, designed for front-line infantry—visors down. Silent, neuro-linked, armoured-up exoskeletons. In a police station. Each one of them holds a gun that could kill everyone in the room in three or four seconds.

  Chaddah’s taking this seriously.

  Standards settles in. The air sucks out of the room, and Galvan begins the briefing.

  “Our jobs just got harder,” he says, addressing the room through his spekz. “We’ve finished examining the hybrid Cortexes we recovered from the arKade, and it’s as bad as we thought.” He taps his tab and an image of a psychorithm appears on the screen behind him. “A human psychorithm is bandwidth-intensive, and trying to distance-operate a skyn was thought impractical. Too much lag, too many forced disconnects.” He taps something on a screen in his hand. “Until yesterday.”

  A maze of colour concentrates in the centre of the rithm on the wall behind him, and solidifies into a sphere. Thick filaments of light spray out from the glowing ball and coalesce into a second, smaller ball. The new ball thickens, and as it does, pulses in time with its source. The filament connection between them cuts and both balls continue to pulse in synchronicity. Every few seconds a comet hurls itself between them.

  Galvan just showed us a visual of a mind transferring part of itself into a new Cortex. Remote consciousness.

  xYvYx must know what he’s doing.

  Galvan points to the screen. “Kade has devised a shyft to allow rithms to load only the active portion of their consciousness to a second Cortex, while leaving the long-term memories, regulating engrams and all extraneous muscle memory behind in the source. With intermittent syncs between the host skyn’s Cortex and the originating Cortex, the skyn’s response time is nearly instant. The genie is out of the bottle. We’ll be seeing this again.”

  A shyft that allows for perfect anonymity, security, and deniability?

  Yeah, we’ll be seeing this again.

  “With the assistance of Standards, we’ve also begun an investigation into the two cyphers that attacked Detective Gage. They’re unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

  Doyle steps forward, taking command from Galvan. “Standards is in the business of keeping humanity safe,” he barks out to the back of the room. “We have neutralized hundreds of non-organic minds who felt the laws keeping us all equal were beneath them, but we have never seen anything like this. If these cyphers truly originated with Xiao, then he and his outfit are now Standard’s number one priority.”

  A murmur runs through the room. I glance at Daar and Brewer, but their faces are stone. They’re wondering if Standards is going to take the Xiao case from them. Not that Standards could do any worse than they have at the job.

  Galvan wipes the screen, shows another rithm pattern. This one is different. Instead of a pulsing rainbow ball, this pattern is a dense rage of tangled filaments, twice as big and burning twice as bright as the Standard-compliant pattern did.

  “This isn’t a human rithm,” Galvan says, looking at the screen, a touch of awe in his voice. “Our simulators can’t contain it. None of our tools recognize it. No one’s ever seen a Cortex like this.”

  “Weird thing is,” Omondi pipes up from the middle of the room, “the skyn’s g-scans are showing completely off-the-shelf geneblocks. With Cortexes this advanced, it’s like putting a supercar engine in a Sküte. But it also means I can’t trace their source.”

  “What about the cypher sweep?” I ask. Doyle frowns at the sound of my voice. He must have heard the unofficial version of the events at the arKade. “The station is covered in cameras, the whole neighbourhood. Can it track their movement back to where they walked here from?”

  Galvan shakes his head at the front of the room, but doesn’t make eye contact with me. “They walked past three Service cameras that I know of and not only were they not they recognized by the sweep, they didn’t leave any record at all. It’s like they were edited from SecNet.”

  “Like the cypher in the Market,” I offer.

  “I don’t know how Xiao is doing it,” Galvan says, and I don’t bother to tell him he’s wrong. Xiao had nothing to do with these skyns. Galvan shrugs and nods. “But for some good news. In the time since we rolled out the cypher sweep to all active units, we’ve conclusively identified seventeen previously unknown cyphers and added their unique bio/kinetic data to SecNet. Today we tracked and apprehended three of them.”

  Sham
e tingles in my cheeks. Everyone was out doing real work today while I was hunting imaginary Germans.

  Galvan wipes the rithms from the screen and loads a line-up of SecNet stills. Fourteen are in colour, three greyed out.

  Galvan continues. “Detective Inspector Daar and Detective Brewer—your teams located and detained three cyphers from our list today, members of the Amigos gang. Great work. We’ve got three Cortexes worth of insight into the actions of two organized criminal operations. Two Marks on the run. Just from a cursory scan, we’ve identified direct evidence of a year’s worth of Standards offences that Detective Lawrence and Detective Sedat’s teams have already started to run down—and that doesn’t include the arms shipments, the human trafficking, the robberies, the unsolved murders.”

  Chaddah leads a round of applause. The Standards guys don’t join in. Agent Doyle frowns and shifts ever so slightly in his boots. Daar acts like the applause is for her.

  “Detective Douthat, you're leading team Echo,” Galvan says. “You’ll be on cypher patrol tonight, I want your team ready to move the second another SecNet hit comes though. Detective Aziz, you’re leading team Foxtrot—I want you following up on the skyns we found at the arKade. That’s custom tech. Someone has to be making it. Standards will be handling the investigation into these advanced rithms and Cortexes.”

  I haven't been assigned a team. Instead I'll be staying at the station, assisting where necessary, co-ordinating intel, handing out towels.

  I’ve been haggling with xYvYx and searching for ghosts on the link and playing video games while Galvan has been taking charge and getting shit done: organizing strike teams, prepping dox on targets, overseeing the techs analyzing the captured cyphers’ Cortexes and disseminating the findings to other Service departments.

  A half-dozen investigations spin out of the data he gathers with each arrest and I haven’t had anything to do with it. I’ve never felt so useless in my life.

  The Inspector steps forward. “You've got your targets. Bag one, move onto the next. Our detectives are in charge, the Standards agents are here strictly as back-up. But if they need to act you stand down and take your orders from them, understood?”

  There’s a rumbling of dissent centred around Brewer and Daar but Doyle’s voice silences the room. “We’re not dealing with your normal punks and low-reps here,” Doyle’s says, stepping forward. “A capabilities-enhanced skyn can be on you in a blink, rip your heart out before you know he’s there.” He points his fingers at the row of agents idling on the back wall. “You think they wear those suits because they like the way they chafe? These cyphers are dangerous. You don’t act like your life could end at any second, it will. If a Standards agent tells you to move, you move. Tells you to get down, you kiss the floor. Any hesitation could mean the lives of you and your team. We don’t get full co-operation, I won’t hesitate to take command of this entire operation.”

  That last is delivered straight at Chaddah, but she takes it without a twitch. Hell, I’m surprised Standards hasn’t taken over the station already.

  Chaddah closes the briefing. “We'll update the dox as SecNet reports back with more intel. Stay aware. Stay alert. Stay safe. Dismissed.”

  The room erupts into motion, trilling with energy: the night-shift teams group-up and start into planning their take-downs, coordinating leads; those coming off-shift stick around to swap stories; the Standards agents stalk off to fondle their weapons and plot.

  It’s been a big day, the first of many. Fifty-Seven now has the attention of the entire world—or so you’d think, anyway. I had to shoulder my way through a scrum of feed reporters to get inside, and from the way they were provisioned it looks like they plan on being here a while. We’ve been instructed to use the rear exit for the time being.

  The link has been lit up since the arKade press conference, and the wattage will only increase as the depth of the cypher problem is revealed. I’m at the centre of the biggest Reszo story since COPA, but I’m not allowed to participate.

  I have to sit at my desk and watch reports filter in and pretend like I don’t resent every second of it.

  We’ll see how long that lasts.

  ***

  SysDate

  [19:17:18. Monday, April 22, 2058]

  I duck my head, leave the briefing room to the people actually using it and scan the station for an unoccupied desk. I don’t get far before a sharp blow catches me in the side. I swirl around, fists tight, and see Karin Yellowbird smiling up at me. I haven’t seen her since she cleared me for duty my second day back to the flesh. Feels like a long time ago.

  “Hey soldier,” she says, jukes her head and gives me jab to my other side.

  “Fucking hell, Yellowbird,” I cringe, angling myself away from her. I don’t know whether to protect myself or run. I raise my guard and she backs away, feigning outrage.

  “You’re gonna hit a defenceless woman?”

  I can’t help but laugh and lower my arms. She dances in, gives me another shot. “You always this slow, Finsbury? I thought you Reszos were supposed to be pretty much superhuman.”

  She doesn’t know how I was feeling yesterday. I could have read a book while she finished her sentence. “Then that would make you my kryptonite.”

  She laughs. “How’ve ya been? Any more of those nerve surges?”

  “You were my first and only.”

  “Ohh, broke your cherry and left you high and dry? Sorry about that big boy.”

  “I’m getting over it.”

  “And other than that?”

  I raise my hand at the frenzy around us.

  “Hard to believe it’s been less than two weeks since I cleared you,” she says. “And look what you’ve already gotten us into. Why aren’t you leading a team?”

  “I’m in Chaddah’s shithouse.”

  “For what?” She purses her lips, puzzled. “Didn’t you and Detective Wiser just blow open a massive investigation?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t ask permission first.”

  She tsks me. “Shit, Finsbury, you went in there cold? Even I know where to draw the line. Insubordination doesn’t look good on a personnel file.”

  “There’s worse things than a black mark on your record,” I reply. “Speaking of which, what are you doing here?”

  “Wore out my welcome at Admin. When your Inspector put the call out for additional bodies they couldn’t offer me up fast enough. I’ve been assigned to Detective Wiser, helping him co-ordinate the strike teams.”

  “Then you’d better get back to him. He’s an important guy around here these days.”

  “Tell me about it. I told my roommate where I’d been transferred and she begged me to slip her into his Circle so she could send him a dick pic.”

  “What about me?” I ask, mock insulted.

  “She likes the nerds. Besides, she’s not into robot love.” Suddenly my head hurts. “Let’s get lunch later,” she says and bounds away, off to bruise someone else’s sense of self.

  There’s an empty desk in the corner and I settle in. All that time away from the station gave me a chance to think: these cyphers need to be coming from somewhere, and that means whoever’s making them will need raw materials. Cortexes. Bioprinting hardware. Basic bio-blocks and other raw materials. Whether buying them or stealing them, there’s a trail somewhere.

  Everyone else is out risking their lives, I might as well at least try to make myself useful while I’m grounded.

  StatUS-ID

  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [03:21:54. Saturday, January 18, 2059]

  I rewatch the shooting at the Fāngzhōu play out three more times, and the last time I shadow Petra, watch over her shoulder, try to imagine what her intentions were. Or if she had any at all.

  Why did she snap? Her firing didn’t look indiscriminate. She was shooting at someone. But who?

  Shelt finds a new livefeed and adds it on my third time through and it upscans the res
olution but doesn’t add new information, tells us nothing about what set Petra off or who she was trying to kill. It seems like everyone who was streaming kept their eyes on Petra and didn’t bother to look at where her bullets were going.

  Shelt promises to keep adding to the virt as new feeds pop up and I leave him to it.

  On the way home, I Sküte by Dora’s, but her building tells me she still isn’t there. I have no idea where she could be. Not that I know her enough to know where she’d go.

  Either way, I’m starting to get worried. If what Ankur said is true and some renegade superintelligence’s personality fragment is gunning for me, she could be the next one it goes through.

  I should have taken her more seriously, but how was I supposed to know? A stranger shows up at my door and says we’re in love and she’s in trouble, and I’m the only one who can help—Second Skyn devoted a half-day of the pre-restoration intake sessions to scams that work just like that.

  But this is no amateur extortion, this is something way bigger. I didn’t just stumble into it, I was pulled in. Maybe even started it. Who the fuck knows anymore?

  My leg’s twitching and my brain keeps pulling me to sleep but it actually listens when I tell it to piss off. The exhaustion fades. My Cortex delivers a fresh seam of energy that tingles through my whole body, like I just got eight solid hours, and I’m ready to go again.

  Back at the apartment, I pull a random box of food from the freezer and set it to heating. I’m on automatic pilot, not sure what I should be doing next. Too much has happened in the past three days. The accident. Connie’s death. The restoration. Dub attacking me and then killing himself. Dora. Dora. Petra killing a bunch of people and then herself. Then the man who killed me calling to let me know that part of him still holds a grudge.

  I need time to think. Need to get some distance, some perspective.