Static

by Will MacGregor

  Static

  Will MacGregor

  Copyright © 2020 Will MacGregor

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

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  www.willmacgregorwrites.com

  1

  Tinh Diên

  The walls were dark. Years of tobacco smoke and carbonised cooking oil had bonded with the original pigments so that the walls appeared mottled dark browns and greens, all shot through with glistening black where carbon fibre webbing kept the earthquake damage and concrete decay from spreading through the reinforced tilt-slab. The only ambient light came from the cinderblock bar that ran almost the full length of the room, lit from beneath by buzzing neon and topped with a heavy slab of grimy industrial resin the bile yellow of ballistics gel. Booths with cracked black vinyl seating ran along the wall opposite. Suspended over the fake redwood veneer of each booth were incandescent fixtures, shuttered so they illuminated a splash of light no larger than a dinner plate. Twangy Vietnamese rockabilly boiled out from a pair of decrepit TEAC speakers, blown mid-frequency drivers muffling the crooning singer’s appropriation of Americana. Mekong Delta Blues. A shitty dive like Tihn Diên was not a place people went to be seen. It was a place people went to do business they wanted unseen.

  He sat in the third booth from the rear, non-descript in Malaysian knockoff Armani. From her vantage point in the shadow of the sickly green exit light, Kira had seen him enter, precisely fifteen minutes early. He looked like a tired corporate foot soldier; lean Eurasian features under short black hair cut conservatively with a side-part, and with a sprinkling of salt at the temples. Just as the broker described. She watched as he ordered an Ichiban Shibori, ignored the accompanying glass and drank from the bottle, then worried the edge of the gold foil label with a manicured thumb.

  Minutes passed. He angled his head slightly, looking towards the entrance. Waiting. For her. She took a deep breath to steady herself. No need to let her nerves betray how desperate she was; the fact she was meeting him at all said volumes about how badly she needed this.

  With a rustle of black ripstop overcoat she slipped into the open seat opposite him.

  “Kira?”

  “Spencer.” A statement, not a question. “Been waiting long?” Her small hand, dwarfed in the overcoat, entered the pool of light and indicated the half empty bottle sitting in a thick puddle of condensation.

  “Not that long. I just made good time. You gonna take that thing off? Overkill for a bit of second hand smoke.”

  She shrugged, slipping perishing rubber straps over her head and dropping a nanopore filter onto the water-warped Laminex; a perennial sign that whilst industry was booming, air quality was not, especially in the lower districts. She watched him regard her, eyes calculating.

  “So… going to buy me a drink?”

  “Do you drink? Are you old enough?”

  She let the jibe sail.

  “I don’t drink on the job, if that’s what you’re asking. I guess that’s up to you.”

  “No work tonight. But before you liquor up, I think we’d better make sure that you’re up to the task. This job needs steady hands.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve got, it’s steady hands.” She paused a moment. “Got a smoke?”

  Spencer produced a crumpled pack of counterfeit Castors and tossed it across the table. Kira extracted one, deftly slit the cigarette along its length with a grimy thumb nail and dumped the filter and contents into an ashtray. Precisely, she folded the paper in half lengthwise and then in half again. Moving almost imperceptibly she made a small tear before unfolding and refolding the paper; again, the barely noticeable movement. She began to talk, reciting specifications in well-practiced patter.

  “Yehuan bio-ceramic servos with feedback sensors from Guangzhong Light Industry. Zeiss optics and Series 9 Hyundai interface with Sony 1031 controller, accessible by dermal contact. EMI hardened and RF shielded – less detectable emission than the radium in a watch face.”

  She continued to fold and refold the cigarette paper, her movements now blurry with speed, the paper taking on a rough furry appearance as though covered in lice.

  “Impressive. Stable? I was under the impression that the Yehuan gear didn’t play nice with other manufacturer’s kit.”

  “Older models perhaps. Or if you get your work done by those butchers in Colombo. Me, Taipei. Insurance coin.”

  “Car accident?”

  She shook her head, and continued folding, tearing, and refolding, her eyes focused on her work.

  “Few years back, when they demolished Yung Tae Tower. My Grandmother’s house was hit by a chunk of support column that blew out sideways. Crushed the house, me, and Grandmother. Demolition crew was hungover, botched the charges. They got put against a wall, I got to walk and talk and see again.” She shrugged. “Least I can walk to Grandmother’s grave – wheelchair access is for shit. And I can do this. Stable enough for you?”

  She unfolded the paper and blew gently through it, causing a flurry of paper snowflakes as numerous pinprick sized holes appeared. In immaculate calligraphic Hangul, flanked by dragons, a miniature paper cut banner spelled out ‘Soju, straight’. He ordered two.

  She pulled another cigarette from the pack and held it between her lips waiting. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment and produced an electronic lighter. He clicked the ignitor to the end of her cigarette. In the brief flare of light as the paper caught, he saw a rough fringe, lighter than black, low above green Asian eyes. Just before she sat back into the darkness, he thought he caught a shimmer of synthetic violet in the centre of each black iris.

  She inhaled, cigarette tip glowing red. Smoke drifted lazily up, passing out of the light. She slid the pack back across the table. He lit one of his own and sat, waiting. She smoked it halfway to the filter, and then spoke.

  “So what’s the gig?”

  “Stiff the Kay Pee.” Silence. Her cigarette continued to burn. Ash fell to the table. He slid the ashtray closer to her. She lowered her voice and leant forward. In the small light her face was urgent, tight with distress.

  “You want to try to steal from the Korean mob?”

  “Not try. Do.”

  “I was told that you were a professional, not some nutjob with a death wish,” she hissed. The Kkangpae were ruthless, far more so than any of their Asian counterparts had ever been. Unlike the Yakuza or the Triads, the KP didn’t threaten or intimidate to effect their goals; they simply eliminated obstacles. Brutally. And publicly.

  “Who says I can’t be both?” He stubbed out his cigarette. She sat back into the darkness, regarding him across the table.

  “How?”

  “Pachinko.”

  Pachinko was a Japanese portmanteau of a game; a clattering hybrid of pinball machine and slot machine. Players pumped the machine full of money, got a bucket full of ball bearings, like chips at a roulette table. The machine shot the balls to the top of a game board at a rate controlled by the player with a hand wheel. Spinning obstacles and stationary pins obstructed the ball’s fall down the board – the goal was to aim the balls into various lucky holes that paid out in extra balls. At the end of play, the player collected the balls, took them back to the counter and received a payout. In the original incarnation, because of Japanese laws prohibiting gambling, the payout was in goods; cologne, designer handbag, luxury watch. Then developed buy-back shops, where you could take your
prize and receive cash for it. The Yakuza had been bullish on Pachinko for the money laundering opportunities. Later, North Korean sympathisers used pachinko chains to funnel money to Pyongyang. Nowadays, the machines paid out directly to your account.

  When the Chinese economic bubble burst in the early-twenties the Middle Kingdom went back to the Middle Ages, and the Japanese economy collapsed as the greying population reached critical mass. Without Chinese support, North Korean peasants revolted, and a recently re-unified Korea remained as the last country standing, poised for economic and cultural dominance. As corporate manoeuvring took place, another hostile takeover occurred in the shadows; the Kkangpae annexed the Japanese mob, assimilated the Triads and Tong and brought Pachinko back to the mainland. The Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was alive and well in the form of small shiny steel balls.

  Kira laughed, scornful.

  “How you gonna do that? Stick up an armoured car?”

  “I have a system.”

  “A system? Then try cards. You can’t game pachinko – the payout’s set. Electro-mechanical zombies, working for the house.” Kira had never been into a pachinko hall – she’d never had enough to gamble – but she had heard enough about them and seen them on feeds.

  “I have a system,” he said emphatically. “But it doesn’t rely on the machine – it relies on the player’s… skill.”

  “Well I don’t have any ‘skill’. Go and grab some pachipro burnout and bankroll him,” she said, annoyed at Spencer’s obtuseness. She took one last angry draw on the cigarette and crushed it out. The drinks arrived and she drank half in one go. It burned as it hit her empty stomach. He sipped his and continued his pitch, coolly.

  “You’re built to be a pachinko professional. And I’m going to give you the skill.”

  “You’re going to teach me to play pachinko? Why me? Why not some other patsy? You don’t need this,” she gestured at the crumpled remnants of the cigarette paper art she’d torn earlier. “You need a math genius. Or maybe a headshrinker.”

  He leaned in, exasperated. This was not going the way he needed it to. He spoke quickly, voice sharp and low.

  “I need someone Augmented, and someone Augmented the right way. Do you even know what all that tech in your body is for? The reason they originally invented those servos and bio-computers? Viagra was hypertension medication before they discovered it had… broader applications. Your kit was designed so surgeons could perform complex operations without extra equipment; hack the central nervous system, every gesture can be scaled down, every movement smoothed, consistently and safely. Enhance visual perception, put a heads-up display inside the head, software controlling the hardware, every suture always perfectly placed and perfectly formed. Fly-by-wire for the human body. It was only later when they were trying to monetise it that they figured out they could make a killing using it to make cripples dance.” His eyes flashed malevolently at the last bit.

  “Spare me the history lesson,” spat Kira. She finished the rest of her drink. “I’m no surgeon and I puke when I see blood. You got a minute to answer three questions; why me, what’s in it for me, and why should I even trust you?”

  “Like I said: you’re built for this job. And you got everything installed on a severe trauma ticket, so nobody will suspect a thing. We pull this off and I will get you across the Line with enough money to do whatever you want. Unless you’d rather stay here and breathe toxic soup for the rest of your life, which will then be considerably shorter than the one you could have in the Green Zone.” Spencer picked up his glass. “You’re out of money, otherwise you wouldn’t have even been on the radar for a meet like this. Anyway, our mutual acquaintance tells me that you’re now… a ‘free agent’. As for trusting me…” Spencer drank, letting gravity underscore his words. He put the glass back down. “…you got another option?”

  2

  The Wet Market

  Spencer worked out of the upper floor of a former textile storehouse, built on waterfront before the wars. The ground level was now given over to a wet market where tasteless farmed eel and mealy grey engineered salmon were hawked alive from industrial-sized buckets on slick concrete under greenish strip lighting. Porters in hip-waders wheeled handcarts piled high with crushed ice and sea urchin whilst on a raised platform buyers and sellers swapped secret handshakes in a bag, bidding and outbidding each other for massive corpses of blue-fin tuna. Alongside the seafood were vast mounds of Korean pickled cabbage and bean sprouts, and metallic stacks of Japanese-style dried bonito. The pre-dawn humidity on the water-front was already oppressive. Kira wrinkled her nose against the overpowering smell as he led her on a weaving path through shoulder high bales of dried kelp towards a blockwork staircase stained with rust from a rickety looking handrail.

  Suddenly, she was jerked forward as he wrenched her arm. A wet squeal was followed by a sloshing sound as salty water cascaded into her boots. She blinked as the grizzled driver of the forklift stood and cursed her in a fluid mixture of Tagalog peppered with the occasional English obscenity. Spencer said something placating and the wiry man retorted, shooting her a dirty look. He got back into the driver’s seat, deep bucket still sloshing noisily, and casting a final withering glance, took off again at breakneck speed.

  “You should watch where you’re going.”

  “Thanks for the heads up, guy.” Dick.

  “This way,” he indicated, turning back towards the stairway. As they climbed the slippery steps, dawn broke, and the red petrochemical sunrise shot through the open sides of the warehouse. The brilliant light cast laser etched shadow patterns off the geometric stacks of cartons and plastic pallets and illuminated tendrils of chill vapours rising from the various seafood. As they ascended, the stairwell became darker, the humidity more stifling. When her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw pale blue light from a bioluminescent safety strip on the stairs. After a second flight, the stairs came to an abrupt stop at a green roller door. Spencer fiddled with the knot of padlocks at the base of the door. The dented metal rattled up to reveal a large space, derelict but immaculate.

  Scuffed and faded linoleum tiles in institutional green and white checkerboard stretched across a wide room, punctuated regularly by mammoth cement columns pocked with concrete decay, and reinforced against the inevitable temblors with the ubiquitous carbon webbing. On three sides of the room ran floor to ceiling mullioned windows, set with mesh reinforced frosted glass. A large elevated platform enclosed entirely by what looked to be the skeleton of a yurt, sat in the centre of the room. In the neon sunrise the large angular dome bloomed and twinkled metallically along the vertices. Inside, sheets of milky plastic covered various large indistinct objects.

  “Frame’s bamboo and resin with a copper mesh skin. Basically a jumbo Faraday cage to shield against EM and RF – nothing gets in, nothing gets out” he explained as he dropped the roller door and bent to re-secure the locks. “Bathroom through there,” he indicated as he crossed the floor. He stopped at the edge of the cage and, with a tear of Velcro, folded back a panel like the hatch on a battleship. “Welcome to my office,” he said, standing to the side like a posh hotel doorman.

  Kira walked slowly across the scuffed floor, leaving salty wet boot prints. Suddenly chill, she drew the overcoat more tightly around her thin shoulders. She felt like a condemned woman, stumbling towards the gallows.

  Spencer watched her walk towards the cage. She seemed a lot smaller, without the decrepit intimacy of Static. In the dawn light, he could see how small, pale and dirty she was, clad in the black army surplus greatcoat many sizes too big, eight-hole skinhead boots laced loosely with cable-ties, and too-short skinny jeans and a faded black t-shirt; in semi-darkness she could pass as an operator of sorts, a look cultivated for the technical black market. In the light of day, she looked tired, run-down, and run out. She’d need to be fresh for programming. It was a pragmatic decision; he couldn’t afford to jeopardise the success of the job for lack of a few hours of sleep. Time wa
s tight, but his backers had waited for years – they could wait another day.

  “Start tonight,” he said. “First, sleep.” He came alongside her and wrinkled his nose. “Correction: first, shower. Then sleep.”

  ✽✽✽

  Kira awoke with a start. A fog-horn sounded, distant and vague. She was lying on a cot-bed inside the Cage. Looking at the ceiling through the even triangular geometry, she saw faint pink-orange light spilling in as night fell and sodium lamps warmed up, lighting the market surrounds below. Cryptic shadows morphed as vehicles whined by outside. She pressed a button on her wristwatch; green numerals told her it was early evening. She’d slept for fourteen hours. Kira stretched, warm under her coat and grateful to be clean but wishing she’d been able to dry her hair properly before falling asleep. She’d washed using dish soap and she could feel tangles in the mat that had formed in her short black hair while she’d slept. Idly she wondered if Spencer had a brush lying around somewhere, but the thought of him reminded her why she was there. ‘It’s not too late,’ she told herself. ‘You can always just leave. Let him find some other Aug patsy.’ But then the logician chimed in, ‘Yeah, and go back to the street? You got no other options. You’re already walking dead. At least this gives you a chance of dying in the Zone.’ She lay in the semi-dark, arguments playing out in her head.

  Just as she was resolving to make a run for it, the thundering of the roller door announced Spencer’s return. A moment later the lights came on. Spencer appeared at the polygonal void that formed the gate to the hi-tech yurt. He was wearing the same suit he’d been wearing earlier, but now he was juggling a number of plastic carry bags and a brown paper bag from which interesting smells were emanating. Kira’s stomach gurgled and she realized with a flood of saliva that she hadn’t eaten since long before the previous night’s meeting.