Static

by Will MacGregor

  “Four hours, mate,” said a rough voice, broad with strine.

  “Four? The agreement was six.” Spencer, annoyed.

  “Even four is pushin’ it. This is supposed to be delivered tonight, untouched, unopened, un-fucked with. Whole consignment is tagged and timed. My guys are shitting bricks about faking a mechanical to buy that much time. I still have to get this reloaded back on the main transport. Four hours.”

  “You and yours are being compensated more than fairly. Fine. Four hours. But not a minute less. You accepted the risk when you accepted the deal.”

  “Yeah, whatever. I'll see you in three hours and fifty-six minutes.” With that curt farewell, the creak of a trolley and distant banging told Kira that the voice behind the delivery had left, along with the body that housed it. She heard Spencer muttering ominously before he raised his voice, “How long is that going to take?”

  “Not very long. If this is what passes for a tracking encoder these days, I wonder why they even bother,” replied The Doctor.

  She peered around the privacy screen to see Spencer pacing impatiently whilst The Doctor stood on a step ladder, peering at a tablet that was connected to a device on the side of the crate.

  “Good of you to join us,” Spencer said to her, before turning back to observe the Doctor. She jabbed her raised middle finger squarely at his back before sitting on a wheeled stool next to the work bench. Satisfied, The Doctor unplugged the tablet and began wrestling with a crowbar to prise the top off a plywood shipping crate.

  Standing about two-metres high and covered in Japanese and English stencils that read Dai Ichi Mechanical Amusements Co Ltd, the slim wooden crate looked like a double-width coffin standing on its end. With a splintering crack and a long moaning creak, the top seam gave. In short order the crate lay opened like a weirdly angular flower around a bubble-wrapped obelisk. Stripping off the bubble wrap revealed a slick looking tower, edged in chrome with inline neon, dark now for lack of power. Fully half of the front was taken up with the game board, curved at the top with a glass shield designed to contain the shiny steel balls as they dropped down through the pins and wheels. Above the game board was video screen and underneath it, a set of simple controls. Below those was the ball hopper.

  “Bring that stool over here,” Spencer gestured to where Kira was sitting. “We’ll power up and then see if everything works.”

  The Doctor fiddled around at the back of the pachinko machine.

  “Oh dear. This does not look promising.”

  “What is it?” Spencer joined him.

  “This connection here. It is different to the schematics you furnished me with. I can supply the machine with power, but this one for the network controls seems proprietary. It will take some time.”

  “God-fucking-dammit!” Spencer kicked The Doctor’s toolkit across the floor where it exploded in a shower of tools and components. In complete contrast to the detached calm he had previously displayed, Spencer ripped off his necktie and stalked up and down the length of the workshop, spewing forth a multilingual string of obscenities as he kicked furniture and pounded the walls. Kira flinched each time he drew near. The Doctor frowned and shook his head.

  “Perhaps it will take a little longer now that you have taken it upon yourself to reorganise my tools.”

  With a murderous glare at the Doctor, Spencer stopped pacing, took a deep breath and composed himself. He smoothed his hair down and turned to face the other two. As he carefully retied his perfect Windsor knot, he spoke in a measured tone of voice, completely at odds with the wild shouting of moments earlier.

  “Forty-five minutes. I’ll be back then. It needs to be powered up and patched into the dummy server.” He buttoned his jacket and walked towards the door.

  “And where are you going?”

  “I paid for a complete set of documentation for this machine. I feel entitled to a partial refund at least.” Spencer bent and retrieved a set of bolt-cutters from the scattered contents of the toolbox. “I’m sure my supplier will be amenable to some renegotiation of our agreement.” He left, shutting the door behind him.

  The Doctor let out a long slow sigh, then turned to Kira. He gave a small wry smile.

  “I would apologise for his behaviour, but I do not feel obligated nor willing to do so. He is clearly under some stress, but that is no excuse for a demonstration of such poor self-control. Come. Let us see if, together, we can’t resolve this issue with the mystery connector.”

  4

  Calibration

  An hour later Spencer returned to find Kira trying to avoid choking as she laughed through a mouth full of tea.

  “And the gentleman replied, ‘Perhaps, Madame, but at least I shall be sober in the morning,” finished The Doctor.

  “Well, isn’t this a charming domestic scene,” said Spencer with a bitter smile. His face was tight and pale, and something shone wet and dark on the toes of his black dress shoes. Kira fell silent as she felt his hand, cold, on the back of her neck. She grasped her cup with suddenly white knuckles.

  “Ah, you’re just in time for tea. We have only but finished jury-rigging the server connection. Barring any other unforeseen difficulties, it should be finishing the checksum run any moment now.” The Doctor extended an arm to indicate the pachinko machine, now flanked by racks of humming equipment. He turned back to the tea service. “Darjeeling. An excellent blend, although I’m afraid the water here does not do it justice.” He raised his cup and took another sip, closing his eyes as he savoured the fragrant brew.

  “Fuck the Darjeeling. We have,” Spencer looked at his watch, “less than three hours to test, debug and re-crate the machine before pickup. How much longer for the checksum?”

  As if in response a series of tones sounded from one of the racks by the machine. The Doctor placed his cup and saucer on the wicker coffee table.

  “It appears to be done. Flying colours. The machine believes it is attached to the main accounting computer.” Spencer took a long, controlled breath.

  “Good.” He turned to Kira. “Let’s get started.” He gestured towards the machine. She downed the rest of her tea, stood and moved over towards the machine.

  In comparison to its sleeping form, now that the machine was awake and active, it looked like a miniature firework show within a box. Neon rainbows chased around the edges of an endless supernova that shone out from the game board. Now fully illuminated, Kira could see clearly the pins and toggle-wheels that would impede the ball’s fall, and holographic imagery floated across the inside of the glass, throbbing in time to the hyper-cheerful music that began to emanate from concealed speakers.

  Spencer pointed towards the work stool. Kira sat in front of the machine. She could feel her irises twitch as their tiny bio-mechanical servos compensated for the miniature sun that now shone into her eyes.

  “Okay,” said Spencer. “Here’s what should happen, providing that the code I flashed you with works: there’s a subroutine that tracks the balls with the feed from your optics and does a few quick calculations to time and measure the twitch in your hand servos so you can land as many balls in the sweet spot as possible. We need to make sure that it works consistently without crashing. Any questions?”

  “Yeah, one,” said Kira. “Seems like an awful lot of trouble just to get a pachinko machine. Why is this one so important? Why not use just any old machine? Hell, the Doctor could probably build one from all that junk outside.” Spencer sighed and rolled his eyes.

  “Because,” he said with obvious impatience, “this is an unreleased series. When they release a new machine the payouts are higher because they haven’t figured out the human factor; how the public will interact with them. New series get hit hard – you’ve seen the line ups on release days, right? Right around the block. After the first day, they set the handicap on the machines to barely comply with the legal minimum payout and from that point any really large wins get scrutinised as anomalous. Because of the way they usually rig the machine
s, a jackpot shouldn’t be possible, so they review security footage and streams of gameplay data to figure out how they’ve been ripped off. And once they figure that out, they come looking to get their money back. We have to calibrate you to this machine to hit them on release day when they’ll just write it off as the cost of doing business. Anything else?” Something in his tone told Kira that there had better not be, so she shook her head. “Good.”

  The Doctor produced an IC card with ‘Compliance & Maintenance’ etched across its face.

  “Normally you would use a regular bank chip, but then the machine will record a transaction in its permanent memory to facilitate transfer of payout. It is heavily encrypted, and we have not the time to reset it. This will release a set of balls for our purposes.” He touched the card to a reader on the side of the machine and with a metallic slushing sound, the play hopper began to fill up with tiny metal spheres as a counter ticked up on the display above it. Once the machine had finished spitting out the balls, Kira took a deep breath and reached for the launch wheel.

  She turned the wheel and watched as bolts of silver shot up into the game board. The balls flew around the curve at the top of the board and clattered down through the various pins and play wheels before dropping out of sight. As they bounced off the various obstacles, the holographic imagery inside the game board bloomed with brilliant sparks and hyper coloured shards of light. She let go of the wheel.

  “Rubbish,” announced Spencer. “See the two pins near the top of the curve, around the eleven o’clock mark? The balls need to fall through there to begin the payout sequence. Again.”

  Kira put her hand on the wheel and slowly inched it up again, watching as the trajectory of the balls crept towards the two pins. There was barely enough space for one ball to fit between them, and the balls literally had to drop directly down to avoid impacting the pins. After a minute of trial and error, she’d mastered a pattern of minute adjustments to perfectly allow the balls to consistently drop into the sweet spot between the two pins.

  Spencer was rubbing his hands with glee.

  “Excellent. Now, do you see the first toggle the balls hit? Cross shaped, about a third of the way down the board.” Every time a ball hit, the toggle would spin wildly, randomly altering the trajectory of the ball to careen across the game board. “You need to hit on the back swing so the ball drops into the bonus zone here,” he pointed to another part of the game board.

  “How the fuck am I supposed to do that? Every time I hit the damn thing it spins a different way.”

  “Focus on the toggle and try to match the timing of the ball release – the software should do the rest.”

  Muttering under her breath, Kira turned back to the machine and focused on the movement of the cruciform toggle. She didn’t even notice that her right hand had automatically returned to its perfect rhythm on the launch wheel to drop the balls through the two top pins. After a few moment’s study, she began to experiment to see if she could time the launch of new balls to control the swing of the toggle, trying to take advantage of its movement to flick the balls into the area indicated. With some experimentation, she mastered the knack of landing the balls through the bonus zone. Once the bonus zone was triggered, the screen in the centre of the game board came to life, wheels spinning like a virtual slot machine. Spencer leaned over her, his breath hot in her ear as he stared at the screen.

  “Here’s where we make serious money. You need to send a ball into this hole,” he tapped the glass over the game board to indicate, “in order to stop the spin of each on-screen wheel. You lock them in the right combination and it pays out. You get multiple payouts in a row, and they jackpot exponentially. It’s supposed to be impossible, a carrot to get punters to keep pumping credit into the machine.” Kira blinked and pursed her lips in concentration as she tried to integrate this new goal into her routine, whilst still controlling the swing of the cross-toggle and triggering the video wheels. At one point she came perilously close to everything, but then suddenly everything seemed to slow down. It was as though the balls were tracing a line in space and she could easily figure out the adjustments to the launch wheel to send the balls wherever she wanted. She felt the back of her neck getting warm, prickling with static electricity. It was like she had a predictive targeting system inside her head. She felt the movement of her fingers, the resistance of the spring mechanism inside the launch wheel, but she wasn’t actually conscious of moving it. It was as though her hand was on autopilot. The machine set up a steady ringing sound as the balls trickled down, consistently releasing extra balls and bonus points.

  “It works! It fucking works!” crowed Spencer, knuckles writhing furiously as he rubbed his hands together.

  “Impressive,” agreed the Doctor. Kira continued to shoot balls into the bonus zone, her hand automatically twitching to retrigger the cross-shaped toggle and perfectly time the release of the balls that were needed to lock the jackpot wheels. In her peripheral vision, she watched as the credit counter on the display increased steadily, as more and more balls ricocheted around the game board.

  “How long does this go on for?” she asked, not taking her eyes off the game board.

  “Theoretically, forever,” said Spencer gleefully. “If the machine runs out of balls to pay out, it’ll just reuse the ones in your hopper and continue to award you credit.”

  “We need to reset and retest,” the Doctor interrupted. “We have less than two hours now before it is picked up.”

  “Alright, alright,” said Spencer. To Kira he said “Stop playing. We’re going to make sure that you can beat the machine, no matter what settings they have it on. It took you just over fourteen minutes of play to get the machine to jackpot exponentially – we need to get that down to under two.” He turned back to the Doctor. “Change the tension on the launch wheel, tweak the dynamics on the first toggle and lower the payout rate to the minimum.” He looked at Kira. “These motherfuckers aren’t going to know what hit them.”

  ✽✽✽

  In the end she had been able to trip the pachinko machine into a constant jackpot within ninety seconds, regardless of the sensitivity of the launch wheel, settings of the machine’s mechanical elements or any number of other variables in the software. Each time it had become easier as Spencer’s custom software learned the vagaries of her augmentations. Because the jackpots were exponential, it took only four minutes before the machine seized and the Doctor’s computers detected a simulated payout transfer of an amount that had drawn the colour from both his and Spencer’s faces. The machine had been reset and repackaged with careful attention paid to the tracking encoder. She had listened from behind the privacy screen as the deliveryman breathed an audible sigh of relief that the device showed no signs of tampering.

  “Happy days! The boys’ll be pleased to get moving again. And ten minutes early too.”

  “Lucky that I don’t dock that from their fee,” Spencer replied darkly.

  “Whatever,” said the deliveryman with a snort. “Least now you can tell those pricks you work for that we’re square. I swear, I don’t ever want to see another bloody pony as long as…” his voice faded into the distance before the outer door slammed.

  “The coast is clear,” called the Doctor. Kira came out from behind the screen. The Doctor stood there staring at her with an odd look on his face. Warily she sat down on the stool.

  “What?”

  The Doctor continued to look at her with what she suddenly realised was concern.

  “What?” she asked again, nervously. He pursed his lips.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yeah. I trip the machine, jackpot until it seizes and then leave.”

  “Not that. Do you know what you’re doing? With him?” The Doctor indicated the door through which Spencer had recently passed. Kira sighed.

  “I guess. It’s not like I have a choice.”

  “What did he promise you?”

  “The Green Zone. And eno
ugh to set me up once I’m there.”

  “That must seem very tempting. I understand it’s very nice there. Clean. Open. I do hope that he delivers.” He paused, deciding. “I should warn you; you are not the first, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have assisted Spencer with the… disposal of some previous partners. Those whose augmentations weren’t up to the task.”

  “Bricked?”

  “At best. At worst… well, the inevitable result when neural implants overheat in the confined space of the cranium. Very messy.” Kira swallowed, suddenly nauseous. “But you are the first to have successfully taken to the software. He is pleased. But desperate. His backers are not patient men, and he is running on borrowed time.”

  “What has that got to do with me?”

  “Desperate men become unpredictable, unreliable. I hope you have a back-up plan in case—” the Doctor was interrupted as the door swung open.

  “Back-up plan in case of what?” Spencer asked, eyes narrowing.

  “In case she draws too much attention, too quickly,” replied the Doctor smoothly. “We were just discussing options of how to handle the notice she will draw with such successful play on an opening day machine.”

  “Smile, say ‘I can’t believe it! I never win anything!’ and disappear,” growled Spencer.

  “I can’t believe it! I never win anything!” echoed Kira with fake enthusiasm. She hoped Spencer couldn’t see the unease in her eyes. He looked at her with disdain.

  “Good enough.” He looked at his watch. “Time to say goodbye. Our ride should be here.”

  5

  The Ride Out

  The Doctor had been cordial as they departed, nodding coolly to Spencer but favouring Kira with a deeper bow.

  “Good luck. I do hope to see you again,” said the Doctor.

  “I would like that,” she said. Spencer just grunted and slouched into the sleek black electric town car that had waited at the curb. The suited driver held the scissored door for her as she turned to look at the Doctor a final time. His eyes spoke to hers, but she wasn’t sure she took his meaning. She got into the back seat next to Spencer and the driver lowered the door. She looked back to the Doctor but he was gone, the door already closed, another non-descript slab of weathered paint flaking into the street.