The Harmony Paradox

by Matthew S. Cox

  Her approach meant one of three things: a casual conversation about everything and nothing that would drain two hours out of one’s day, an official verbal butt-reaming for whatever the person had done wrong, or a ‘special’ assignment that scored somewhere on the fun-o-meter between pouring bleach into one’s eyes and sitting on a hibachi grill.

  No one had warned Joey when he started here, and he had made no effort to flee the break room once when she’d walked in… and wound up talking to him for a good fifty minutes. Fifty minutes that he’d stayed late to finish up his assignments for the day.

  Today, however, she had that ‘special assignment’ glint in her eyes, accented by a bit of red in her cheeks that she only got after being on the losing end of a discussion. Somewhere, someone had overruled her, and she didn’t look happy.

  “Good afternoon, Preema.” He smiled.

  She set a small black fob on his desk, an inch long, quarter inch thick, with an M3 interface prong sticking out of one end. “I have a special project for you. I need someone capable on this one, Dillon. That is a hardware key that will give you access to storage node 0E:49. Field Ops is looking for a kill order on a CFO who is suspected of financing gangs he uses as enforcers for numerous enterprises such as cyberware harvesting, Lace trafficking, illegal arms trading and several other things. So far, no Division 2 investigation has come up with enough evidence for charges to stick. His accountants and lawyers are too slick.”

  “So, they can’t put this guy in jail… they’re gonna put him in the ground.” Joey picked up the ‘key’ and spun it around in his fingers.

  “That is correct, but not without proof. Analyze the financial transaction records in that node, and look for anything anomalous.”

  Joey plugged in the hardware key and checked out the data node. It contained copies of InterTrust Commerce Facilitation Corporation logs of every credit transaction associated to one Mr. George E. Avalon, chief financial officer of ComTec Corporation. Records included his personal accounts (all six of them) every family member old enough to have an adult account, and seventy-four additional accounts belonging to ComTec that he had access to. The request would keep Joey working until midnight every day for the better part of the next two weeks.

  He looked back up at her. “So, what did Nina do to piss you off?”

  “Make sure you follow the credits deep.” Preema’s expression brightened with a hint of smug retribution, and she walked off.

  A few minutes after she left, Simon leaned around the cube wall. “This thing we’re doing with the cam-net around LRI? That came from your girl. Heard Preema tried to flush it because it was so much work, but someone over her head said it needed to happen.”

  Joey scrunched his eyebrows. “Nina couldn’t do that. She’s only a lieutenant. Preema’s a major.”

  “No,” said Abby, “but Commander Hardin outranks her.”

  Joey snickered.

  “You’re twelve, aren’t you?” asked Mindy.

  “Yep,” said Joey. “Or did you not mean inches?”

  “Bullshit,” said Abby.

  He stood and grabbed his belt. “Suppose I need to prove everything around here.”

  Abby laughed. Simon peered around the cube wall.

  “Hah!” Joey pointed at him. “I knew it.”

  Simon shook his head. “I was merely curious if you were trying to get terminated.”

  “Nah.” He laughed let go of his belt, and locked his terminal. “But I gotta grab a bio. I’m gonna be here all damn night.”

  oriko launched a tiny drone from a pod on the back of her armor, which zipped off into the air, heading in a graceful circle toward the building where the hovercar had disappeared. After about a minute, it returned to its docking port, and the small hatch closed. Masaru figured by the glare on her face that whatever killed their NetMini signals also interfered with her aerial recon unit.

  Undeterred, she navigated the crumbling remains of the building they’d taken cover in. Moldy drywall broke at the slightest touch. Masaru grumbled to himself about the filthiness surrounding him. Every step through this place made him want to return to his world of Ͼ30,000 suits, Ͼ8,000 a plate meals, and long, hot baths. Yet, despite his growing contempt for this ruined city, he could not push Shuji’s last seconds out of his memory, nor could he tolerate the notion of letting Noriko enter that building alone.

  In the future, I shall make it a point to bring a pistol to negotiations. Having a Kurotai laser on him would make things much easier. Had he such a weapon, he would have insisted on taking the lead.

  She reached the end of their current building and crouched by a window. After a momentary look around, she hefted herself up and over the sill. Masaru gave her a second to get clear, and jumped it, landing with a crunch on a sidewalk coated in a thick layer of dust and fragmentary debris.

  Noriko cringed at the sound. She gave him an annoyed glance before sprinting across the street, heading for an empty doorway that lead into the adjacent building. The ground floor appeared to have housed a variety of medical offices: dentist, a walk-in clinic, a dermatologist’s practice, and a facial reconstruction (both cosmetic and medical) outfit. None of the equipment looked recognizable, the most ‘cutting edge’ hunk of debris in the room dated from the 2090s. The sight of such massive medical machines floored Masaru, and got him staring. Aside from the immersion gel tanks in hospitals, the biggest medical device he could remember ever seeing approached suitcase size.

  “Pssst,” whispered Noriko.

  He looked up, and she beckoned him with a wave from the end of a corridor. Masaru hurried out of the waiting area, past two bathrooms and four elevators. Concrete chunks and frayed wires had long-ago smashed their doors outward. Noriko hooked a right at a four-way intersection and went into a stairwell a short distance later on the left.

  A great burst of dust covered them when she pushed the door open. Masaru managed to get his sleeve over his mouth and nose before he inhaled enough to choke, though he gagged on the flavor of plaster. Stifling a sneeze, Noriko went up at a brisk stride. Her boots tamped clear spots on the steps, displacing silt and sediment that had collected inches deep. Masaru held his breath as much as possible while trying to follow and swat at his suit to clean it.

  On the fourth floor, she darted down a narrow corridor full of angled alcoves where wooden doors rotted. Most had doctor’s names on them, or the suggestions thereof. She kicked down the aluminum-framed door of a pediatrician’s practice, and headed as straight as the architecture allowed. Where a small employee break room stood at the outer edge, she crept up to the window and looked.

  Masaru edged up alongside her.

  The building across the street had a significant amount of damage: missing chunks of wall big enough to accommodate hovercars, as well as cavernous gaps in the floors. The devastation gave them a clear view of the hovercar that had flown in and landed at the ground level. From this angle, the inner face of the holographic false wall looked like a rectangular patch of neat, new drywall about as big as a one-car garage door.

  Next to the hovercar stood five cargo pallets of cube-shaped boxes marked with the logo of Nikkatsu Corporation. A small delivery hover-van had been parked nearby, rear door open, showing off its empty cargo space. Men in un-tattered civilian clothing, all black or dark grey, collected near the nose end of the car. Their conversation included handshakes and arm patting, and a fair amount of laughing. Again, Masaru’s augmented hearing picked up snippets of what he guessed to be Russian.

  Noriko elbowed him twice and pointed at a rusted dumpster along the side. “We can climb there, and go in a window.”

  He nodded.

  They observed the men for several minutes. Eventually, the group migrated deeper into the building out of sight. Noriko spun away from the window and jogged back to the stairwell, running faster when the lack of junk in the way allowed. She lost her footing in the dust after three turns, and stair-surfed half a story before smacking into the wal
l at the landing.

  He hurried up behind her. “Are you hurt? Is your leg bothering you?”

  “No. I stepped on something that rolled.” She pulled herself upright. “I didn’t feel a thing through the armor. Come on.”

  She took the last two stories with greater care, before racing down the hall, across the lobby, and around the corner. Masaru, moving slower in an effort to minimize touching filth, made it to the dumpster she’d indicated as she pulled herself into the hole in the wall above it. Concrete dust and tiny pebbles fell from where her armor abraded the edge. Grimacing at what such a move would do to his suit, he leapt up onto the dumpster, grabbed the wall, and navigated the opening as carefully as his arm strength allowed. In addition to the taste of dust, the pungent slap of dried urine assailed him.

  While he perched atop the wall, squatting in the hole, Noriko dropped to the ground level and crept up to a crude table made of stacked concrete nuggets and a board, upon which a terminal sat. She took a knee and poked at the plain black bar. A holo-panel appeared in front of her, tinting the beige plates of her JSDF armor green.

  Masaru lowered himself with care, his shoes scraping at the wall. He pushed off with a leg and landed a step away, his foot striking soft (and silent) dirt. After a quick check to make sure his suit hadn’t torn anywhere, he did his best ‘ninja walk’ to her side.

  “I don’t understand this,” whispered Noriko.

  The screen depicted a 3D wireframe model of some kind of robotic crab with eight legs and two pincer-like limbs, only they had boxy extensions rather than claws, loaded with an array of microscopic needles, snippers, rods, and so on.

  “Nanobots?” whispered Masaru. “Nikkatsu makes medical technology, but why would these people be interested in them, or bring them to this ruin?”

  She tapped a few buttons and brought up another screen of Cyrillic text. After scrolling for a moment, confusion knotted her eyebrows. “According to this, these nanobots are destined for Wiesbaden… Some kind of stealth boat is supposed to meet them near Hirayama.”

  Masaru eased upward, trying to see past a crumbling interior wall to where the foreigners had gone. “The NSK will not be pleased that Nikkatsu is selling their products directly to an external entity, however, that is not our immediate concern. Can you connect to the outside or does that terminal have access to the signal scrambler?”

  “No. It’s linked to a satellite unit. Direct point-to-point with no connection to the GlobeNet.” Noriko glanced at the cracked ceiling. “Probably a dish on the roof or at least close to it. Nothing on the jammer. Let’s find a better position.”

  She headed west, closer to where they’d entered from, avoiding the ‘room’ full of men and turned sideways to squeeze between the van and a bare concrete wall. A ripple of laughter came from the foreigners, along with a momentary raised voice in a tone that suggested a bawdy joke. Stacks of black rectangular crates with red-stenciled writing in Cyrillic and German filled a relatively clean area on the other side. Noriko lifted the lid on the nearest box, exposing four portable anti-aircraft missile launchers in packing foam.

  “Moto-san,” she whispered. “Streyla-4 missiles. These are probably the same type that hit my aircraft.” The confusion and surprise in her expression hardened to a vengeful glower.

  Masaru peeked in another crate, shorter, and with different markings, finding an assortment of rifles and ammunition. “They are providing weapons to the Etamura.”

  “That or being careless to let them get stolen.” Noriko scowled at the stockpile before she pointed ahead and left. “There… stairs.”

  “Why do I think you are planning something reckless?” Masaru took one of the rifles, packed his suit jacket’s pockets with magazines, keeping one in hand as he hurried after her.

  Noriko stopped short and thrust an arm out behind her that almost hit Masaru in the chin. She gestured at a black box on the wall resembling a dinner plate sized spider, with a glinting lens in the middle of its back. The device clung to the wall about a foot off the ground.

  She lifted her left leg and took a huge step over the spot, shifted her weight, and brought her other leg over in the same exaggerated manner. Once she had both boots on the ground, she pointed at the air. “Infrared laser trip line. Spiderbomb.”

  Masaru smiled. “I have seen them before.”

  He followed, avoiding the beam.

  Noriko crept into the stairway, looking around at the floor and walls for more surprises. She ascended a tight switchback to the third floor―where the stairs ceased to exist. While she stood there gazing up at the decaying building, Masaru examined his new rifle. The weapon had a similar feel to the laser rifles his company made, light and plastic. For a ballistic weapon, that implied it ranked low on the quality scale. The magazine well sat in the stock, inserted from the top. He loaded one and patted it down until a click indicated he’d seated it properly. A small counter on the side lit up showing thirty-seven.

  “This way,” whispered Noriko, as she stepped over a hole large enough to swallow her a few strides past where the stairs met floor. “I see the jammer.”

  Masaru’s head snapped up, interest in studying the rifle gone. “Where?”

  “It is in the room beyond where they are all sitting and drinking.” She walked about nine steps and looked around at a hallway intersection containing the wreckage of a few long fluorescent light wells that had fallen from a no-longer-existing ceiling. “This place is home only to the dead now. The sky is so peaceful, I could stare at it and forget what is around me, but even the birds know not to come here, for the spirits would never let a trace of beauty leave.”

  Masaru gazed at her face while she stared at the sky, a momentary change from soldier to innocent woman. Were it not for her armor and weapon, or the miles of destruction around them, she could have been a village girl from the countryside. “What shall they do if I refuse to allow them to keep you?”

  She glanced back at him with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. “Nice try.”

  “Your words were poetic.” He admired tiger-stripes of sunlight painting her armor. “The dove does not land in a place of such sorrow, for it could not fly away with a burdened heart.”

  Noriko lowered her head and sighed. “I see a good spot up ahead. A room along the outside wall, only two ways in and both on the same side.”

  He gripped the rifle in both hands. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” She crept down the corridor, stepping around the smashed trappings of offices. Ancient computer pieces, telephones, chairs, and even bits of desk lamps had become part of the sediment layer. With each agonizing step, she eased her weight down to minimize crunching.

  The corridor ended at a drop off about two feet away from the more distant of two doorways on the right side. She entered via the nearer one and continued to the second door inside an empty room that offered more visual cover from below. The outer wall had five holes, once windows, with yellowed papers hanging between them, each bearing large kanji characters for various family names. Iffy brushwork, and the presence of a perfect thumbnail-sized version of the same character in the corner suggested this place had once housed a calligraphy school.

  Any traces of desks or materials had long since been blown out onto the street.

  “Third floor isn’t too bad a jump if we have no other choice.” Noriko nodded at the windows before kneeling and crawling up to the doorway.

  The elevated perch offered a clean view of a ground floor area containing a ten-foot collapsible antenna standing next to a gloss-black box the size of a large suitcase. Two thick wires connected the case to the bottom of the antenna. A freestanding wall separated the antenna chamber from a larger room where men sat around on a mixture of folding chairs and concrete chunks. All had rifles either draped across their laps or propped against the wall nearby. They seemed in high spirits, and slugged drink after drink from plain silver canisters often used for synthbeer.

  “They’re talking abou
t how much trouble the Etamura are causing,” whispered Noriko. “They are happy to have brought violence and chaos here, but I don’t think it is their primary objective.” She took up a firing position, using a slab of concrete and part of the wall for cover. Her rifle seemed to be aimed at the box connected to the antenna. “Moto-san. Thank you for the stimpaks. You should leave before I hit the hornet’s nest. I’m the one who swore an oath.”

  “What is your plan?” He examined the area; she’d taken the only cover spot. Between the section of corridor by the break-off, and the wall to her left, she’d present a difficult target to anyone downstairs. If he tried to move anywhere he could engage the men below, he’d wind up out in the open.

  “I’m going to take out the jammer and then try to stay alive long enough for reinforcements to show up.” Noriko glanced up at him. “Either run or get the hell down. You don’t have to die with me.”

  “You don’t have to die.” He crouched and shifted left, out of sight behind the wall. “Once you start shooting, they will come up the stairs.” Masaru raised his rifle and duck-walked to the door they’d entered from. “I will cover the hallway from this side.”

  Noriko sighted over her rifle, a square patch of green lit up over her right eye. “Those bastards might not have killed my crew directly, but they armed the savages who did. I wouldn’t deserve to wear this armor if I didn’t do this.”

  Masaru smiled. “Didn’t you say you thought the old ways foolish?”

  “This isn’t old traditions; this is soldier’s honor.” She waited a second before tightening her posture, aiming downward. “I’m about to fire, Mr. Kurotai negotiator. Last chance.”

  “Hmm.” Masaru examined his rifle, located the safety, and turned it off. “Proceed.”