One
The caustic fog of street level Londbridge in the winter was something. Nila pushed her breather a little upwards to get a better seal around the sides of her nose, so the tip of the plastic nose cover touched the bridge of her goggles, the latter’s lenses unshaded for the dim evening, though still mirrored from the outside. The glistening black oversized hood of her long raincoat amplified the sound of the otherwise minor drizzle.
The street was busy with a throng of people, many dressed like her, but the few unlucky ones lacking eye protection, stared bleary-eyed as if they had been pepper-sprayed, and the maskless ones, gasped through rag-like scarves.
The center of the street and the doorways of the shops were mostly clear of debris and the [glass-crete] glistened with rain and rivulets of stygian fluids of unknown provenance.
Out of the ether, as if emanating from the flickering and buzzing neon and the cacaphony of vying dubtracks, her internal impossibly chirped. It was silent of course, merely a stimulation of her auditory nerve by the wirelessly connected (albeit shielded and anonymized) server embedded in her skull, drilled into the mastoid process, behind her right ear, showing only two visible jacks protruding from the narrow band of skin between her ear and adjacent hairline. No one she new was supposed to be here and everyone she didn’t know didn’t know she was here.
She had slipped in incognito and was crashing at one of her friend Luc’s safehouses, if it could be called that. Transport Authority tech was laughably easy to spoof, relying on third-rate biometrics and long-hacked ID databases.
>UNKNOWN: ?
>KCN: who is this?
Nila turned her head, but only slightly, so as to not give a sign that she had been contacted. Blue neon from the food stall nearby bathed her in monochromatic light. Her hair brushed against the inside of her hood. The goggles hid her roving eyes.
>UNKNOWN: you don’t know me
>KCN: no shit?
>KCN: i don’t use this tag anymore how’d you get it
There was no obvious watcher in the crowd. 200 faces 200 silhouettes. Nobody was looking at her except for that sleaze monkeyboy at the pasty stall, and he certainly wasn’t hitting her neurallink.
>trace-incoming -internal -local
>…
After a delay shorter than the blink of her searching eyes:
>relay node -PriorJumpOffPoint: 52.42654° N, 17.04080° W
>: | -VisualOverlay -highlight -local
A bright, pinpoint pink-purple dot came into being three meters up, in a window above the churning crowd.
Her holographic map, floating transparently in her vision drew a line from the window to the left and another dot in the ocean hundreds of klicks out to sea to the west.
Hmm? The dot in the window that’s speaking to me is jumping from a point in the middle of the ocean. Curious, she thought.
Suddenly, it occurred to her that what her map was showing shouldn’t be possible. Long-range comms had to be either wired or line-of-sight optical. As far as wireless was concerned, most maxed out at a 100 meters, maybe 500 for high-end military spec.
She had to investigate now.
The Watcher had remained silent.
Work in progress. Mistakes and misspellings are present. This is a very rough draft. Copyright 2021 Ion Fyr ionfyr.net
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Ion Fyr 