Cassandra Kresnov 5: Operation Shield

by Joel Shepherd

  The gravity of the moment was interrupted by a small, attractive woman in a swimsuit, dripping wet and carrying her fins and mask. “Rishi!” she said brightly, and went to the GI and hugged her.

  They'd talked a little over coms while Vanessa was in orbit over Pantala, Ibrahim recalled. Rishi looked surprised at the embrace, which was also making her clothes wet. Vanessa repeated it with Kiet, even though their relations, Ibrahim guessed, would be significantly less.

  “You have to come and look at the coral!” Vanessa continued. “It's amazing; there's so many fish, and it's so close to the surface the colours are so bright!”

  “Coral?” asked Rishi. “In the water?”

  “You've never swam in the ocean?”

  Rishi blinked. “I've never swam at all. And I've no equipment.”

  Vanessa waved a dismissive hand. “You're a GI, you don't need equipment. Just wear your underwear, hold your breath, and open your eyes underwater …you do wear underwear, don't you? Not that that would matter either, but you're pretty hot and I don't want my husband getting ideas.”

  Rishi blinked at the men. Ballan waved his arm toward the ocean. “Go!” he announced. “A great adventure. I envy you being able to do these things for the first time.”

  Vanessa put an arm around Rishi's shoulders and led her down the steps toward the beach. “You ever heard a real violinist before? Phillippe's a professional musician. He brought his violin and we're staying a few days, so he'll play you some things too, all of you.”

  “It would be so seductive, wouldn't it?” said Kiet, watching them go. “To live a good life, to forget that there are any other people in the universe but yourself? But they suffer even now. Even Kresnov, with her three new children. Does she recall how many poor street children are left in Droze? All just as sweet and deserving as her three.”

  “And so she should have left her three behind?” asked Ibrahim. “Forget her life's duty to care for those dear to her and dissolve all purpose in guilt because those few are not many?”

  “She has a duty to her kind,” Kiet said stubbornly. “All synthetics are bound by a common fate, whether she accepts it or not.”

  “She has argued precisely that in high Federation councils for longer than the concept has occurred to you,” Ibrahim said coolly.

  “And yet now she abandons us.”

  “Only in your imagination. She exhorts you not to lean on her so much and frees herself from the burdens of a leadership that you have already once rejected.” Kiet's nostrils flared. “And she follows her own duty to care for those she loves. If that does not currently include you, Kiet, then I suggest that that is more your problem than hers.”

  “I saw the Education Department PACs for all three of you,” said Ari. “Hope you don't mind, Sandy let me look.”

  “That's okay, she asked us first,” said Danya. “Seemed like a good idea.”

  They were walking from a small suburban parking spot, one Danya suspected was reserved for apartment dwellers, but Ari had hacked it and made the system park his cruiser, something about not trusting the main city grids. Now they were walking across a small bridge, the river gleaming in the light of towers beyond, a tourist barge churning slowly below.

  “The first thing you need to know,” said Ari, “is that the Tanushan Education Department's a bunch of fascist thugs who'd brain wipe every child into a mindless little automaton if they could get away with it. So if you don't like their action report, you don't have to implement it. Tell them to go fuck themselves.”

  Danya knew there was a reason he'd been looking forward to hanging out with Ari. Sandy had told him much the same thing but without the direct personal experience to back it up. Ari had actually been a child once, had been through this system, and was very clear on what he didn't like and why. The Education Department's Psych Active Construct was one of those things.

  “The department guy said not taking the tape could limit our opportunities to get an education,” Danya said.

  “Look, every child in Tanusha's got a right to an education, the department can't stop that though I'm sure they'd like to, and whatever the active construct tells them of a kid's defective personality, they can't order corrective tape if you don't want it. Even guardians are limited in what they can order their kids to take; kids have rights too.”

  “Is the construct right?”

  Ari made a face, hands in pockets, looking up at the towers that loomed above. “Right in what? Right in defining distinct tendencies in certain personality types? Sure, but the construct's just a tool, it can say this person has a tendency for violence in certain situations, this person gets claustrophobic in crowds, this person struggles to tell the truth…but so what? The real problem is how institutions interpret that data, I mean, do we go about neutralising every off-center personality to the point that we lose the advantages of social diversity? I mean, shit, look at me, I'm a paranoid little fuck and a screwup in relationships, but I'd say those qualities are a large part of my success. Maybe if they'd tape-corrected my personality flaws at an early age I'd be some fucking drone in a bank somewhere who gets a hard-on from currency fluctuation predictive constructs.”

  Danya thought about it, looking at the reflections on the river. A cluster of pretty girls walked by, all legs, heels, and giggles. Ari walked backward to look a bit longer. “The construct predictives say I've got borderline post-traumatic stress disorder. Svet too.”

  “Well, CSA runs a dozen routines that take the edge off without doing the complete unbuttoning the department's recommending.”

  “I don't know that I even want to take the edge off,” said Danya. “I mean, sure, I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night sweating. And I get nightmares and stuff. But a few times in Droze I woke up for no real reason and found we really did have to move, that something dangerous was happening and if I hadn't woken up, we might not have moved in time.”

  Ari frowned. “Look, I'm sure we can get rid of the nightmares without you losing your edge.”

  “But what if I get the tape, and then it's too late? I mean, they can't predict exactly what it'll do, right?”

  “Deep reflex is hard to bury,” said Ari, shaking his head. “You grow up with something, you take light corrective tape, it'll smooth it over for a week or two, but then the old reflexes will come back. Light tape's just for recent events, formative events get into structural memory, even the stuff the department wants you to take won't erase it.”

  “But it'll make it weaker.”

  Ari nodded. “Yeah. A lot weaker.”

  “Well, fuck that,” said Danya. “Those reflexes have kept me alive the last five years. If I can't panic anymore, I'll panic.”

  Ari shook his head, smiling. And grasped Danya's shoulder. “You're completely screwed up, kid. Knew there was a reason I liked you.”

  “Sandy says it's not the trigger reflexes they should be worried about anyway,” Danya added. “It's people. She said the biggest problem the department would have with us wasn't that we might get angry and hit someone, but that our…our collective survival instincts overrode any respect for authority. She said…what was it? She said the thing with us was that we had attitude, and corrective tape couldn't change an attitude.”

  “Well, shit, she's walking proof of that. She's the most dangerous collection of hair-trigger reflexes ever assembled, attitude's what holds it all together.”

  “Guy like you must reckon she'd make an awesome girlfriend,” Danya suggested.

  “Umm…yeah. Sure.”

  “So why'd you leave her?”

  Ari smiled. “You get me drunk one night, I might tell you.”

  “How can I get you drunk? I can't buy alcohol for years.”

  “Exactly.”

  Ari took him to the Harihan hardware market, a collection of stalls in display-lit alleys where people who knew their stuff bought and assembled their electronics. Ari had spent a lot of time here as a kid, he explained, once he discovered how much
more fun customisation was. And if you knew where to ask, you could get non-civilian parts too, for all kinds of stuff, largely illegal, but there were basement labs where Tanushan techs reverse-engineered everything up to Fleet military processors and micro-nets.

  “It's a good place to start for investigators,” he told Danya, ducking through open stalls of interlocking holographics that fed the images of passing shoppers back at them, to disorienting effect. “People up to no good usually need customised hardware. You know the right people, get them in your little black book, you can trace down all kinds of stuff.”

  “The smart ones only tell you ninety percent though,” said Danya, looking over a row of wearable opti-cam vests, edging past the steady stream of customers. Volume from nearby entertainment units boomed and crashed. “Droze didn't make stuff like this; we had shitty civilian tech, but the military stuff was good and there was lots of it. The arms markets guys were all informing to the corporations on ninety percent of their customers but made the real money off the top ten percent, those they didn't inform on. Home Guard and big Rimtown bosses, usually.”

  Ari nodded, looking at him thoughtfully. “Here it's more like five percent…but yeah, they run like double agents, they pretend to inform but let the big fish slip through. So you have to know who the big fish are.”

  “Then you catch your informant dealers lying to you and they'll owe you, or else you can charge them.” Danya picked some acti-gloves that went with a vest, tried one on.

  “Exactly. Christ, a thirteen-year-old who knows this stuff better than most cops.”

  “Not really. I mean, I'm only guessing about what happens when you charge people. In Droze an informant caught out just turned up dead.” He made shapes with the acti-glove, and a opti-cam vest's display activated, changing shape and colour like a chameleon. “What did you do here as a civilian kid?”

  “Oh, all kinds of stuff.”

  “What kinds of stuff?”

  “Well…as a young kid I got kicks making surveillance stuff, bugs, drones, that kind of thing.”

  Danya looked up at him. “You made surveillance drones?”

  Ari scratched his jaw and glanced around. “Um, yeah…you know the little micros, buzz through windows, up drainpipes.”

  “I hate those.”

  “Come on.” Ari kept him moving, putting the glove back. Danya wondered how many people around here knew him on sight, and how fast that word would spread. But then again, Ari wouldn't have so many friends in these places if being his friend wasn't valuable. “So that caught a few people's attention, and I made some money on that.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Maybe twelve. Don't get any ideas, kid, Sandy would kill me.”

  “I'm not the tech, that's Kiril.” The shelves of product, displays, sound and visuals were nearly overwhelming. But with Ari here, his nerves were holding fine, and he didn't jump at every new distraction. Ari knew this place and would know if anything was wrong. Besides, everyone seemed to be having so much fun, gangs of techno-buffs oohing and aahing over the latest gear. “What else did you make?”

  “Oh, I got bored with making stuff; I'm not much of a tech either. But selling to a few of these people made me realise what's really valuable in Tanusha—information. And for that you need the net, and net access…which you're not legal for until you're eighteen.”

  “When did you get yours?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “What did your parents say?”

  “After I started making monthly deposits into their accounts of about half their annual salary, not a lot.”

  Next, Ari took Danya to the Doha District main maglev station. That was surprising, Danya hadn't thought a transit hub would be a great hangout for Tanusha's techno underground, but Ari got them a table at an upper-level café beneath the massive open atrium with retail and walkways on all sides, where they watched the flowing streams of thousands, tens of thousands of people, up and down the travelators, flowing in and streaming out, from the maglev line below to the underground metro lines beneath that, to the adjoining light monorail lines, the auto-taxi ranks, and up to the cruiser ranks above.

  “Any place like this on Droze?” Ari asked as they drank coffee, and Danya looked down into the artificial canyon, then above to the transparent ceiling and night sky, all alive with light and motion. Cruisers were leaving off the rank one level above, beyond glass walls, engines thrumming, people queuing to climb in, others climbing out. Shops everywhere up and down the multiple levels, restaurants, cafés like this one, and the constant roar of a thousand conversations above the hum of departing trains, the electronic chime of announcements, the clatter of footsteps, and the clink of nearby cups.

  “Fuck no,” said Danya. “It's amazing.”

  Ari studied his face, a glint in his eyes. “You love it, yeah? All this stuff?” Danya repressed a smile, but denying it wouldn't work. Ari saw. “There's nothing like a great city, Danya. Nothing in all the universe. People think I'm a tech head or a net geek or whatever they want to call it, but I'm not really. Mostly I just love this.” He nodded to the great artificial construction before them. “Cities. This one in particular. I just want to dive into it and bury myself in it. Always have.”

  Danya nodded to himself, sipping coffee. Looking around. A level below them, the entire side walkway was casino entry, a big glass front with inbuilt water features reflecting hyper-colourful displays showing all the excitement within.

  “The tower above us is a casino, yeah?” he asked.

  Ari nodded. “First five floors. The rest is a five-star hotel, lots of casino guests stay there.”

  “I don't know why you've brought me here, but I'm guessing it's got something to do with the casino.” Ari smiled, encouragement for him to continue. “Lots of people passing through, this would be a major info hub, lots of signal IDs, lots of constructs on the net.”

  “And?”

  “Casinos would have massive net barriers. I mean…with all these net hackers like you in this city, the potential for them to lose money to fraud is just…”

  “Huge, yes. Though just quietly, they used to pay guys like me as additional security too. Do you think a high-traffic place like this would be safer or more dangerous? If someone was after you?”

  Danya thought about it. Hiding in plain sight? That sometimes worked in Droze…but rarely, because kids got noticed just for being kids. It would be nice to think you could lose yourself in a crowd like this, but…“More dangerous,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I just reckon that if everyone's after information, places like this would be where you'd get it. And that casino would be keeping tabs on everyone who passes by or monitors the traffic.”

  Ari nodded “Yep. I can't show you because you need uplinks to see it, but the casinos run intercepts on every passerby, just a precaution. But anyone transitioning from the casino matrix to the main grid leaves an imprint; there's a government intermediary program that traces everyone because individuals can ID switch behind the casino barriers, they're that powerful, and all these shady characters getting tailed by cops or government agents go up to casinos, switch IDs, and come out again as someone else. So with that many handoffs between different grids, different systems, if you're a clever little observer like me, places like this are great to run programs that leech off one or another barrier system, you can pick up all kinds of traces of ID imprints from constructs moving between grids.”

  “No idea what any of that means,” Danya told him.

  “Doesn't matter. Just know that if you're ever in trouble, stay away from places like this. Crowds won't hide you, they'll amplify any signal you make into an echo that can be heard across the city.”

  “How could I make a signal? I'm not uplinked.”

  “AR glasses.” Ari pointed, Danya had them in his pocket. “Anything that interfaces with the net, even if you don't think it's active, there's programs that can query it, make it respond even if it's
turned off. I'll show you how to make it run silent. One signal here can multiply a thousand times off all these query programs.”

  “I know why you guys come here,” said Danya, watching the passing human streams. “You come here to steal IDs. I mean, look, if you can get imprints of net constructs, and I remember Sandy said visual ID was still hard, it wasn't published on most net constructs so even if you take over someone's construct you still don't know what they look like…”

  “That's the basic security measure, yeah,” Ari agreed.

  “But here, with good vision or a minicam, you can match the person's location off the net from their transmissions, see their face, eye colour, height, race, everything. Run a high-intensity laser scan from the right spot you could probably even get a fingerprint. And then with all the biometric stuff to go with the net constructs, you've got everything to take over someone's life completely.”

  Ari sighed and sat back in his chair with a smile. “Wow. You're a natural, you're either going to become the hottest CSA agent since me or the biggest crime kingpin this city's ever seen. Either way I'll be so proud.”

  Danya had never thought about joining the CSA. A security agency? Security agencies meant authority over ordinary people, and that made them scary in ways only someone who'd been on the other end could appreciate. But Sandy worked for them, and Ari, and Vanessa. And it would be the obvious way to protect everyone he cared about. Although joining would mean he had to protect everyone, not just the few that really mattered. It seemed a hell of a leap.

  “I'm beginning to think uplinks are overrated,” he said. “I'm glad we're not on the net yet.”

  “Well, it's only a problem if you can't defend your connection, which most civvies can only do a little, but security and underground do really well.”

  Danya shook his head. “If I was ever in trouble, I'd stay well off the net. I know other ways to get by.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”