Latency

by Blaze Ward

  The corridor was bleak. She couldn’t find a better word to describe it. Dingy with streaks of spilled something on the floor. The lights were almost yellow with age, instead of the pure white of the newer tech. She wondered if they were actual fluorescent bulbs, rather than LED or something exotic.

  How wild, to find something that old.

  Service elevator. Again, battered and scratched, like someone, or a whole bunch of someones had stood here and rammed the stainless steel door too many times with carts and such.

  Rachel calmed herself and took a deep sniff, just to fix the place in her memory.

  Industrial kind of smell. The oil from the floor. Rust. Unwashed bodies, but not that recently.

  Ozone.

  Really? Ozone?

  Greyson pushed the call button and they waited. The door opened quickly enough and they stepped in.

  This was where Liz’s instructions got hinky.

  Greyson waited for the doors to close, and then pressed the emergency contact button. The red one down in the corner.

  “Leigh and Asher,” he said conversationally. “We have an appointment.”

  She stood and waited, wondering at all the cloak and dagger stuff. But she supposed that these folks were career criminals who might not appreciate cops nosing around.

  Even Hunters like her.

  The lift started moving again, but down, not up.

  Right back down to the bottom-most level.

  Weirdly, there were two sets of doors in here. She’d noticed it, but not connected the dots.

  The back one opened now.

  She and Greyson turned.

  An even darker, dingier corridor stretching away.

  She wondered if someone had blocked up the elevator door behind her. The one back out into the real world, and not whatever Alice in Wonderland realm she had just entered.

  Greyson started to walk, so she followed, still back and to his right.

  The ozone smell was sharper here, but the smell of bodies less. Maybe a little incense, or a higher quality patchouli going.

  Felt like a steam tunnel. The sort of place where she and Greyson had killed that other Phrenic.

  How much of the terrain under-Boston was riddled with ancient tunnels like this that people had eventually forgotten about?

  There was a door down at the end of the corridor. Double, but metal. Big camera over the center, rather than the pinhole type that had probably been watching them for however long.

  She wondered if they trusted AIs with their security down here. Made a certain bit of sense, just because they were supposed to be electronic gearheads, but you had to program those things well to deal with all the sensory input.

  Too much risk of overload.

  Greyson reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out his badge and ID. She did the same.

  They held them up to the camera and let the machine take its own long sniff.

  Cop-smell, but more importantly, Hunter-smell.

  You boys don’t have anything to fear from us, unless one of you is an illegal alien serial killer. Then maybe the gloves have to come off.

  Rachel wondered if she could give off that kind of scent in a way that a camera could pick it up.

  Worth trying.

  She finally understood how serious these folks were when she heard four big bolts retract in the door. Two up. Two down. Probably stop anything short of military ordnance. At least give the folks on the other side a lot of lead time to get the hell out of Dodge.

  The door lock buzzed and Greyson pressed it in.

  The backside of that beast was a little nicer. Carpet now, on the floor and walls, even if it was mismatched. Like someone on one of the upper floors had redecorated and the scraps ended up down here instead of a recycling plant.

  Not the whole rainbow, but certainly the spectrum of colors Rachel liked to think of as Corporate. All the soft browns and greens, with some blues and quieter reds thrown in.

  It was another room, but this one had three doors leading off into wherever. Interior doors, but Rachel was willing to bet that those were just shells over old bank vaults someone had found in a dump or something.

  The place had that sort of a feel to it.

  “Scanner says you’re both armed,” a man’s voice came out of a speaker. “You’ll have to leave them here.”

  “No,” Greyson spoke up suddenly. “I don’t think so.”

  8

  Chiptech

  Greyson had been expecting some sort of power play. Kid’s games in a sandbox.

  Bullies were usually just the ones who’d been picked on as kids and wanted to return the favor. Mad at the world. Greyson had gotten most of that beaten out of him in the Army.

  Most.

  The bits that were left were generally the ones the Army had found useful as tools. Deliberate cruelty. Premeditated self-defense.

  He waited, feeling Rachel bristle a little next to him.

  She didn’t have enough years on this stupid planet to handle punks like this the right way.

  But gumbo is just ingredients for the first hour or so. The magic only happens later.

  He figured he’d given them enough time to sweat.

  “We’re Hunters, not cops,” he said, as if the guy was standing right here. “I’m looking for background information on someone who’s trying to make you folks look bad. Liz steered me this way, because she likes you and she trusts us.”

  Greyson let that hang in the air like a ripe fart for a few moments.

  “If that won’t work, let me know and we’ll head right back out,” he continued. “Your secrets will be safe with us, and I’ll find someone else to help me hunt alien assassins.”

  There. Remind them that Hunters are after more interesting, more dangerous, game.

  He felt like smiling, but worried that his face might break if he did. It had been that kind of a day.

  Week.

  Whatever it was.

  Longer pause this time, like maybe someone had muted the line at his end and was arguing with someone else.

  Greyson had never had a reason to engage with underground chip fabrication plants, so he had no idea how they worked. Or how big they might be.

  The Merchant’s Guild, those aliens that had catapulted humanity into the galactic age, embargoed certain tech as too destabilizing for the silly monkeys on Earth, but Greyson figured that there were always going to be smugglers out there, up to no good.

  Money talks and bullshit walks, as his grandfather would have said right now. Greyson missed the old man some days.

  “I’ve got a personal security system inside here,” the man’s voice came back now. “If you make any sudden or rash moves it is likely to start shooting, so consider yourself on notice.”

  Greyson nodded. About what he’d expected. Not like these were law-abiding people down here. They would need automated defense turrets to keep outsiders honest.

  The door on his right buzzed and Greyson moved to it. He pulled it open on the second try after pushing first and found himself in a white tiled corridor that reminded him of an old hospital. Or maybe what this place had been when it was first laid down as another underground tunnel connecting buildings. Back when winters had been so bad that the cost to dig was better than having people have to gear up to cross quads.

  He entered this new world, wondering if the door straight ahead had been a trap, or maybe just a fake added over a concrete wall to make real cops spend a lot of time blowing it open and giving people more time to flee.

  This whole place felt like a complex puzzle, but he was a Hunter because that sort of thing appealed to him.

  He noted the turret in the ceiling as it tracked them with a camera and a stunner, walking down the tunnel.

  Greyson hoped it was a stunner.

  There were doors down this hallway. One on the right was open and had a light on, so he set off in that direction.

  The space reminded him of a mad hacker lab from some vid. H
e wondered how much of the fiction was true and how much was something the people in the industry adopted.

  His favorite hacker had been having drinks with him one night when her comm beeped. When asked, she had told Greyson that she had just managed to access the old Federal Reserve system. While having a glass of wine and dressed up snazzy enough that he always felt a little grubby next to her.

  Greyson wondered if Melanie had finally retired, or just been forced to disappear on the run when the authorities who cared about those sorts of things got too close.

  The man behind the desk stood up and held out a hand as Greyson entered the large office.

  He was giant. Tall, tough-looking black guy. Greyson wasn’t sure what the accepted denomination was these days. It had been Negro once, then Black, then African-American.

  In a galaxy with that many alien species running around, Human had become the way Greyson categorized everyone.

  The stranger’s hair was shaved tight on the sides and faded up into a mohawk that had been picked straight at some point. About three inches tall and damned impressive.

  Greyson took the hand and waited for the man to squeeze. He had to be at least six foot ten, and built pretty normal, when most of them tended to be beanpoles.

  He did the obvious and went for the crush. A punk-ass bully.

  Greyson smiled after a moment and returned the favor. Ethen’s bones were more flexible than a human’s, underneath it all. Even if the DNA was Greyson Leigh.

  Tall Guy’s eyes popped a little. Greyson stopped short of doing permanent damage. The man needed his hands for his keyboards.

  “Hell of a grip you got there,” the man said as he got his hand back.

  “Sometimes aliens don’t want to come willingly,” Greyson offered as a distraction, not mentioning that those generally just got shot and dragged home.

  “Quinton Laux,” the tall man introduced himself, gesturing to a pair of chairs on Greyson’s side of the messy desk with at least three monitors facing inward to Laux.

  “Greyson Leigh,” he said, taking an old chair that looked like someone had stolen it from a dentist’s front office.

  You know the kind: square tubes bent into legs and back, with enough padding to be called that, but not enough to be comfortable. The cloth was an ugly mustard these days, but it probably hadn’t faded too much. Greyson remembered one from when he was a kid.

  “Rachel Asher,” she growled, not offering to play games with the guy.

  That tall, she’d probably go after one of his knees if she got angry enough. They were high enough to reach easily. And Rachel was that mean.

  He noted another turret overhead. Probably fast enough to get both of them if they got stupid. Laux had nothing to fear.

  At least so far.

  “Liz told me about you,” the man began, sounding like an insurance salesman all of a sudden. “What brings you thus, Detective/Hunter Leigh?”

  “There was a mass shooting on the surface a week ago,” Greyson replied simply.

  “Heard about that,” the man offered vaguely.

  “The shooter had a Synth Chip in his data-jack when he went down,” Greyson continued, watching Laux’s face for emotions.

  He got most of them. Surprise, concern, fear, anger, even maybe a little joy. Hard to tell.

  “You can’t do that,” he said after a moment in a shocked awe. “But I suppose that’s why you wanted to talk to me, isn’t it?”

  “Partly,” Greyson agreed. “The design is not human, according to my forensics folks, but they’ve never seen anything like it, either. According to them, any competent fab could turn the product out, though.”

  That last bit was a lie, but only a little one. They hadn’t had time to tell, but he didn’t have to give Laux anything to work with.

  Laux started typing, but it was on his side of the desk. Screens faced away. Greyson waited. He was in no particular hurry, especially if Liz thought that this man was good enough to answer some of Greyson’s questions.

  Might make a useful contact for the two of them later.

  “So I see him shooting,” Laux said. “Old revolver like a cowboy vid. No useful security cameras in the area saw him put the chip in, so we presume he did that at home or something?”

  Greyson wondered what camera feeds the man had tapped or if he had recorded it off some network when it happened.

  Who knew how these folks worked or thought?

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” Laux said suddenly, looking up now. Studying both of them like maybe he just realized that Rachel was a woman, and not just Greyson’s vindictive shadow. “You took him down. Both of you.”

  Might be a little respect and maybe some awe in that voice now. Hard to tell. Certainly a breakthrough emotionally.

  Greyson turned to Rachel to continue the story. Might be worth seeing how the man reacted to a really pretty woman he knew had a nerve scrambler nestled next to her breast.

  “He was in the middle of a scenario called Killer, according to what we know right now,” she took up the thread. “You get to play a madman with a gun, randomly walking into a crowd and shooting people.”

  Greyson watched Laux’s eyes get a little bigger, but couldn’t tell if the man was accessing something via a data-jack. He presumed it, since being able to get data straight to your brain would give anyone one hell of an edge against mere humans.

  AIs were still going to think faster, but they had to be programmed to handle all the craziness a human could come up with, so organics still had an edge there.

  “Any chance I could look at the encoding on the chip?” the man asked, suddenly a lot more friendly than he had been.

  Greyson wondered how much of a technological revolution such a thing might be. Not for most tasks, but Greyson could see the possibilities in a chip that completely overlaid your reality with tourist information in real time and let you still walk and talk instead of cutting you out for safety.

  Datachips were just electronic guide books right now. You had to look something up and read about it, only in your head instead of your hands. If you wanted immersion, you had to wear a pair of goggles.

  What if you could just socket a chip and everything around you changed?

  Did the aliens have any idea what that might be worth to humans? It had only been sixteen years since they landed, after watching for a short time before that.

  They might not yet fully get humans.

  “Dunno on the Synth Chip,” Greyson spoke up when Rachel looked over at him. “Not my case. I’m just trying to understand how they work, so I can figure out why someone did it. I want the who, not the how. But I’ll ask.”

  “How a Synth Chip works is that it overrides all your sensory input channels,” Laux said, leaning back and looking more like a middle-aged professor now than a punk.

  Greyson upped his original estimation of the man’s age to maybe thirty-five, wondering if he’d been forced underground or walked there himself.

  This hidden vault would have still required money to pull off.

  “That’s all just electrical signals by the way, so it’s not that hard to do, once you grow in all the neural circuitry around a data-jack,” Laux continued lecturing. “Except that you need one of the newer, more expensive models to do full immersion. You think you are turning your head and the chip plays the scenery like you did. Think you’re walking, and the system moves you in the fantasy.”

  “But you’re cut out,” Rachel pointed out. “Unable to actually interact.”

  “Correct,” Laux nodded. “Because there is an artificial reality going on around you, you can walk into traffic without realizing it and get hit by a bus. Sounds like this one did a half-job, which is damned impressive code work. Keep most of reality, but probably filter it differently.”

  “Filter?” Greyson asked.

  “Sure,” Laux turned that smile his way. “Looks like they stopped being people and became targets to your shooter. He was interacting with a false reali
ty that looked just like the normal one, and probably didn’t know it. That’s what a Synth Chip does. Gives you a fantasy so real you can’t see the seams.”

  “How would you disable the cut-outs?” Greyson asked, waving away when the man started to object. “Yes, I know that’s illegal, et cetera. Someone did it. I need to know how so I can go after the who.”

  “Because you already know the why?” he asked. “Liz said you were a pretty good cop, for not being one.”

  “I’m a Hunter, Laux,” Greyson retorted. “The only time I get called in is to deal with aliens gone rogue.”

  “I can only guess about the overrides, Detective,” Laux replied. “At least without studying the chip itself. All the sensory stuff coming in is normally just dumped. A legal Synth Chip has medical monitors and stuff so that it can turn itself off if something suddenly starts going wrong, but this thing sounds like it kept that data and did an overlay and didn’t cut out all the voluntary muscles, which means it must have been beyond the cutting edge for chiptech. At least as humans know. Like you said, this is probably alien tech right now.”

  “Experimental?” Rachel spoke up now.

  “And then some,” Laux replied. “I’m pretty damned good at coding those sorts of scenarios, but I’m not even sure how I’d go about rerouting everything. Unless—...”

  “Unless?” Greyson asked after the men paused for too long, his eyes on some distant horizon.

  “I was going to say unless he had a second chip somehow soldered onto the first internally,” Laux said. “Put all the killer stuff on the outside one, but keep a medical-type monitor in place and route all your input through it. Wouldn’t probably work in a fantasy setting, turning everyone into orcs or robots, but just adjusting your Setting, might be possible.”

  “Setting?”

  “So in one of my other lives, I am also a writer,” Laux puffed up a little with pride.

  Must be pretty good. Greyson wondered what penname he wrote under, if Quinton Laux was a notorious hacker living in underBoston.

  “Go on,” Greyson prodded.

  “A character exists in a setting,” the man explained. “Not just a description of what you see, hear, and smell, but how you feel about it. How you interpret it.”