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Nila sat at a coffee shop on some umpteenth floor overlooking the sprawling urban encrustations of Metropolitan Londbridge sipping her somewhat burnt-tasting coffee concoction, relishing only the caffeine that it imparted. Smeared windows looked out at grey skies and grey skyscrapers, at the same time, reflecting the ghost-images of mostly grey customers behind her. Looming heavily, barely beneath the leaden clouds, hanging as if by magic—because even now, after several hundred years, the anti-grav of the Naskovich drives still seems quite unnatural to human eyes and minds—hung the Skyship Western Aquacorp, her sleek rounded surface bristling with turreted cannons, and lower conning tower hanging a hundred meters below her keel. The upper tower was lost in the clouds, though it’s shadow within the cloud bank was visible.
The other customers came and went and Nila lost track of time staring at the hovering bulk in distance, casting more of a gloom than a shadow on the crumbling housing blocks below. Diffuse cloud-light spreading the shadow and softening it’s edges. Kind of a metaphor, really, for the corporatocratic of the World Congress of Commerce and all of the industries it represented. Western Aquacorp, was just one of hundreds of corporations, but one of only a few dozen to have a modern, up to date Skyship named after it. It probably cost them several billion credits. A lot of cups of coffee. Even coffee grown in the misty mountains of Locomoc across the sea. Most of the coffee available to the riff-raff of Londbridge was vat-grown from biochemical slurry anyway.
The corporate Skyships didn’t usually bother hanging over Londbridge given this city’s rather docile population and more pressing circumstances elsewhere. Londbridge was fairly comfortable, even with income-disparities being what they were. Londbridge and it’s sister cities of the former Brethmanic Empire had a head start. When the WCC beat out the last of the nation states, the southern and wester hemisphere’s hold-outs, Londbridge had been part of the WCC for a hundred years, as had the Sinesian cities in East Asia.
In the shadow, despite the shadow, a thousand lights glimmered and pulsed. The ground below was alive with life. People moved about. Tiny, cheap imitations of the great Skyship, two- or four- passenger cabs darted to and fro below, avoiding, of course, the restricted airspace around the SS Western Aquacorp, as if any of them would pose a threat to it’s heavy armor and fields.
As she looked out the window, a triple flash of directed light reflected off the window from a point of origin behind her. She didn’t turn around, but instead opened a channel on her internal coms. Part pretension, part function, part aesthetic, her bio-interface occupied a space beneath and behind the bindi in the space between and slightly above her brows. The outward appearance of the bindi was—today at least—a slightly yellowed silver. The chips it contained were minute and interfaced with her neurons. Focused thoughts gave its system commands and those commands returned focused thoughts of a slightly different flavor.
Open-coms
In her mind, suddenly, she became aware of numerous other minds, rather the bio-interfaces of dozens of other individuals, most of them sloppy and unshielded, blathering away on public networks and, in several instances, at each other.
One, however, offered her a kind of secret handshake, encrypted so that only she could even know that it was a handshake that was being received, then slipped her a tiny data package. It took her longer to process the thoughts than it did to receive the package, and then the sender was gone. Turned off his or her bio-interface, as she quickly did also.
Close-coms
Open-DataPackage
It was a net address.
Close-DataPackage
Encrypt-DataPackage
She’d look at that later, away from crowds and network-sniffing corporate bots. The data package consisted only of an address and a key.
…
The elevator to ground level was slow and smelled like curry, halitosis and cheap perfume. It was crowded with office workers on their lunch breaks. She fingered the breather mask hanging around her neck hesitantly. There were others wearing masks in the crowd, two men and a woman. She pulled it up over her nose and mouth as the doors opened, spilling its passengers out into the foyer. Unfortunately, many of them walked to the nearest elevator going down even farther, to the underground. This Nila did also, again packing in to the crowded box and dropping another thirty meters.
The platform was long and ancient, half of the light nodes along the ceiling were out and detritus lined the walls, in some places so deep it spilled out over the platform and up against the plastiglass cylinder through which the lev trains traveled, leaving only foot paths where the doors slid open to allow access to the train.
Two minutes later the doors of the underground closed behind her, making a dull his as the pressure seal disconnected from the station doors.
Crammed into the third class car, the press of other passengers was unpleasant. She could afford to have boarded a second class car, or even first class, and been charged respectively more when the cabin’s wireless ID scanners identified her and her fellow travelers, charging everyone’s personal credit accounts, but she would have looked out of place and unnecessarily risked red flags, traveling above the official income level of her fabricated identity. She could bear it for the short few minutes.
A cacophony of advertisements called out passengers by name, pulling from the same ID scans used to charge the fares, Nila tuned it out as much as she could, only barely registering when she heard her own alias being offered a great deal on product X.
The doors opened three stops later at von Schmidt Station and she writhed her way out as passengers exiting pressed through those trying to board.
Moments later she was on street level. Light drizzle fell from the sky. Nila kept the mask on even though the air was somewhat clean today. She had seen somewhere earlier that the air quality warning level was only set to yellow today.
She was closer to the Skyship high above, and rather glad that was all. Skyships tend to shed rain in a way that can turn a drizzle into a downpour for anyone unlucky enough to be beneath the perimeter of the hull, causing a deluge below. The Western Aquacorp was parked over a different low-end neighborhood today, however. She laughed sardonically at the ship’s name and the idea of it channeling all of that rain into a narrow band below it’s hull. She also become suddenly self-conscious of the known fact that the lower conning tower bristled with countless cameras in addition to its array of military weaponry. She flipped up the wide hood of her grey raincoat to shield her face out of habit, mostly, despite the fact that she was wearing a mask covering her mouth and nose, and even though it was a gloomy late afternoon she donned her sunglasses. Really only a half-measure; there were cameras everywhere. The ship’s cameras would be better quality than the ubiquitous ones on the street. I really need to get off the street, she thought, though the drizzle may even cut down on the overall visibility.
Hmm, she wondered. Safer to walk or catch a cab? She wasn’t being physically followed, but the algorithms of the Metropolitan Security Force would notice unusual behavior, especially for the thinly crafted identity she was using. Years keeping odd hours and wandering almost randomly around the city certainly got her onto somebody’s list, along with semi-illicit “official” work as, among other things, a database wrangler, but as her fake office worker persona’s identity was pinged by wireless nodes that she passed, MetSec might come to realize that she had never been to this part of town before, and then realize that she hadn’t even existed two weeks ago.
She turned down a side street and for the duration of her walk to her destination, she kept to the sides of the streets and lanes that put the Skyship out of sight. She dropped her office worker ID in a street corner rubbish bin, keeping her head down under her hood. She deleted the corresponding ID from her internal as well.
Here and there taller buildings rose from amidst the three and four story structures, casting shadows that were cut with bright multi-colored lights and garish billboards that flashed from every angle, saturating the rain with color. The effect made it seem later in the day then it actually was. The rain started to pick up just as she reached her destination, through a narrow dead-end alley and up a flight of rusting metal stairs.
The heavy reinforced door at the top of the stairs had an iris scanner mounted on the brick wall next to it, retrofitted by appearances decades ago. That’s convenient, she thought. (She had not actually been to this location before and was navigating solely by memory of the virtual tour she’d given herself.)
She lowered her sunglasses, then pocketed them, aware that the alley had no known cameras. Nor did the interior of the rat-warren of a building. She chose a preselected pattern and looked into the iris-reader. The indicator light changed from red to green and the mechanism of the lock clicked. She pulled the handle and entered.
The interior was cramped and full of junk. A couple old drums. Bundles of wires. Spools of data-cables. There was enough light emitted by ceiling fixtures that she could move without tripping, but just barely. She flipped her dripping hood off and unzipped the front of her raincoat. She made here way through the junk storage, down a narrow hallway—one that almost certainly was the result of subdividing some sort of larger space—then down some stairs, across the edge of a larger area that held four cars in various states of disrepair. Here, Nila followed some socketed wires and data cables down another hallway with a low ceiling that smelled of mineral oils and ozone.
The room had been arranged by her contact. Nila opened the door to find herself alone. Unseen sensors detected her presence and silently lit the room. On a table there was a console, hardwired to the data-cables she followed in from the garage. Somewhat more secure than wireless, she thought, at least as far as eavesdropping goes. Anonymity was still better security, and so she hoped that this network-node was enough nodes-removed from the data. She thought that she wouldn’t be traceable.
From her pocket she removed an external storage unit—this data isn’t the sort of thing one puts in one’s own head. It was small and black, consisting only of a jack and a chip. A clean unit, never before used and untraceable. She wired it to the node’s console with a short cable from her pocket.
Nila pulled another wire from her pocket and jacked herself to the console using the bio-port behind her ear.
Decrypt-DataPackage | Go-NetworkAddress -DataPackage
She followed the results scrolling by in her head. Merely reading the data for the time being. Looking. The parent folder was tagged with “WCC High Security Clearance Required.” Not a surprise, she thought.
There. Huge image files. Blueprints.
Copy-Folder 67286 | Write-Folder -encrypt “External Unit”
As folder 67286 copied over to her external, she curiously poked around at adjacent folders.
There was one folder that appeared to be from the Archives of the Londbridge Historical Society, which were absorbed, along with the Londbridge Imperial Museum and the Londbridge Archeological Museum into the Londbridge Antiquities Library and Museum. Definitely out of place, she thought. Probably sloppy copying on the part of some librarian somewhere…one with access to top secret military folders.
Some documents having to do with archeology or the account of some police constable from three hundred years ago. Odd.
After an excruciating wait the copy completed. Paranoid, she kept listening for distant sounds of approaching authorities. Thankfully, there were none.
Nila’s attention kept returning to those other files. She checked the write-dates. They were old. Really old. She was surprised that the file formats were still readable, but then, her own personal system was designed to be as versatile as possible, so as to avoid having to have hardware upgrades.
On a hunch she drew out her own, second external, and quickly began copying over the bizarre old documents out of sheer curiosity. History always fascinated her and she found it completely unusual to find the sitting there in proximity to what she had been led to believe were high value top secret military blueprints, of which she made a second copy, along with some short video file.
Then—before her eyes, so to speak, since her attention to the data was entirely in her head—one of them was showing current access. Shit! She quickly backed out of the folder and disconnected.
Nila was out of the room in seconds, depositing the external units in an inner pocket. Might need to ditch the raincoat, though she’d rather not do that. Shit!
She took the preplanned exit route. Opened a door at the end of a nearby hallway. Startled some kitchen staff who hadn’t seen that door ever opened before. She then walked, with the bearing of someone who knew what she was doing, who had authority, through the steaming kitchen, ducking under some hanging pots and pans, and then out through the restaurant’s seating area.
Standing briefly under the awning of the restaurant, Nick’s Hash, Mash and Whiskey Bistro, Nila considered her options. If, she had been compromised, she could absolutely not make her drop, because that would mean she’d be followed, retroactively, thanks to the damned security cameras everywhere. Even with the node-jumping, government security agents would find the location and then review local security footage. I have to get, without being seen by anyone, to a secure location, she thought.
She put the externals in her pants pocket, then checked the raincoat’s pockets for anything that could identify her. There was nothing other than her sunglasses. She had swept it beforehand anyway.
The rain having let up a little, she dropped the raincoat, putting on the sunglasses, even though it was now a dreary, very wet dusk. Evening, shopfront lights made it bright as day, so it wouldn’t be an issue seeing where she was going.
Leaving the raincoat on the street in front of Nick’s didn’t seem like the best idea, so she kicked it into a shadow by the inset doorway under the awning before heading up the street. She ducked into the first alley she came to.
Less light. Smell of piss, even through the filters studding the sides of the mask.
Fortunately, the alley was not a dead end. It spewed her out a moment later onto at different, less vibrant, but still dreary street. She thought there was an Underground station nearby…something Square…or Circle. She found it by guessing right instead of left.
Down the stairs, then down the escalator, creaking with age. This thing was practically wrought iron. Rusty, refurbished decades ago and ignored since
Still with the sunglasses on, she combed her dyed-blue hair forward as much as possible with her hands. When she got to the platform, she ignored the waiting train behind the plastiglass wall and the mob of awaiting passengers and jumped the “no passengers beyond this point” sign hanging from a chain between the tunnel wall and the beginning edge of the metal tube. As the train flew by in the low pressure interior, she jumped the chain and skittered into the dark.
The service path was only just wide enough to walk on, and only practical in an escape with your life scenario like this, she thought, and maybe maintenance. It provided access to the inner tube passing high velocity passengers along to the next station.
On the other hand, she could hear the rats and the automated extermination devices that rolled around in the dark up ahead. On her trek to the next station she stepped over several of the machines, happily registering as a human and not a rat, although she certainly did register. She could see it in the reaction of the rat-bots. They hunted in the infrared and were loosely networked: autonomous, but still connected enough to record their kills…and probably also unauthorized tunnel access. Only once, during the thankfully short hike down the dark tunnel, did she have to step over a dead rat.
She exited the tunnel onto the next station’s platform into jarring light and noise. Waiting passengers pretended to ignore her. As luck would have it, the MetSec thug, armed and armored, was facing the other direction. Her matte-black body armor and helmet giving an imposing impression of protection and safety to the docile crowd.
Flickering saffron adverts blared from the platform’s walls, suggesting a warm bowl of curried noodles was what she needed. She fell in with the departing passengers of the 18:44 train and returned to the still wet surface.
Cabs flitted silently overhead. She connected to the network with her internal wireless and, using what amounted to a fake ID, hailed a cab. The grimy white pod descended a moment later. It settled to the ground and opened its door automatically. The passenger compartment was designed for up to four occupants, and was tapered aerodynamically both fore and aft. Two nacelles containing Naskovich drives flanked the front of the three meter craft and one slightly larger elongated egg-shaped nacelle hung over the slender back end. The door folded down sensing she was in and properly belted.
“2599 Issengaard,” she told the autopilot. When she was deposited at that destination, the second cab she had arranged en route was waiting to take her next fake ID to her final destination.
Once back on the ground, Nila, looking over her should without obviously looking over her shoulder, checked to see if she was being followed by any actual bodies in the street. The other pedestrians where scattered, moving around like ants, lost in their own activities. There were three cameras that she could see, probably several others that she had missed. Somebody, somewhere was watching.
Her heart raced as paranoia turned to anxiety and the slim, but palpable weight and blocky structures of the externals made themselves known in her pocket, as if they were five times their actual sizes and glowing through her otherwise opaque black pants.
Just around the corner into the alley on the left. Her boot steps echoed off the wet pavement and crumbling ancient brick walls. She turned left into the empty alley with relief. It was known to have no cameras and was a dead end, reducing the likelihood of encountering others. Three of the five buildings abutting the alley were currently unoccupied. Fifty meters in and on the right side was the prearranged drop location.
Nila extracted a loose brick with her finger tips and held it in her left hand. The mortar remained in place leaving a fairly neat rectangular hole, the back of which was shrouded in shadow. She slid her hand into the opening. At the back was a tiny external unit, placed as a decoy or bait. She had been told not to take it or connect with it, with the implication that any connection to a network or standalone system would be “catastrophic”.
She took that comment seriously, despite it being relayed by a person she only had communicated with in the most basic coded language anonymously. She drew out the external from her right pocket, distinguishing it from her own by touch, momentarily surprised at it’s actual slimness and lack of pulsing light. With barely a glance she quickly placed it at the very back of the hole. Even without the brick being replaced, no one would know it was there, matte black at the back of a black hole in shadow in a dead-end alley. She quickly but gently slid the brick back into the hole, so that it was embedded as deeply in the wall as the surrounding bricks. If she hadn’t known of it’s exact location, she wouldn’t have known it was even loose, let alone removable.
Even though she was alone in the alley, and had seen no one pass by the entrance in the 45 seconds since she had turned the corner, she still took another 15 seconds to squat and pee, giving herself an alibi for being there at all. In and out in a minute. She needed a drink.
Twenty minutes later while in an unexpectedly clean cab, paid for by one of her cover identities that had been created for a one time use, Nila received a notification that one of her other cover identities had received payment for such and such contract work on some restaurant chains customer database. Get home, she thought. Wash both sets of funds and burn the ids. Then go play.
She still was well aware that she had the second external. It was small, barely big enough to jack into, and not wire-less capable, so it couldn’t be remotely pinged, at least not easily. She didn’t want to be carrying it around though, at least not until she knew for sure that she hadn’t been made during her breach of the system.
It was small, ovoid in cross-section and about 15 mm long and 3 mm wide, with a wire-jack on each end (each supporting a different standard), yet possessed massive capacity. Matte black.
While still far enough away from her flat and out of camera shot, she looked for a place to safely deposit it so she could come back and retrieve it after some time had passed.
About two and a half blocks from her flat there was a network kiosk that had several view screens. Sometime a couple years back some drunk goon had tried and failed to rip away one of the screens. It was still attached and still functional, but had a slim gap along the top and side edge.
Nila went to that enclosure—there were four at right angles to each other with an egg-shaped rain-shield protecting the occupant from the weather and giving some measure of privacy. People hardly ever used these things anymore, but the city was slow to remove them.
She entered the enclosure of the damaged screen. A pinkish white light illuminated her from above and the screen became active. She quickly put her hand over the screen’s camera, not sure at what point it would become active—some of them were just passively recording everything. Then she switched hands so she could retrieve the external from her pocket. She paused as a cab glided over above the street. It paid her no attention.
She forced the external into the crack between the screen and the casing. It wouldn’t be visible to any normal user. She’d probably need a tool to get it back out. It was wedged far enough in that she couldn’t get her fingers in any further. Now she just had to hope that the kiosk wasn’t removed until she could get back to retrieve it.
Keeping her hand on the camera until she had completely turned to face away, she headed out. She breathed a sigh of relief when the enclosure’s pinkish white light flicked off behind her. She still kept her back to it until she was out of line-of sight range. Blinking and flashing points of light moved in chaos above her. Thousands of vehicles flowing between enormous columns of light like fish in a school. The Skyship was mostly obscured like a waiting shark, behind a reef of arcologies rising up from downtown Londbridge. It’s upper conning tower veiled in the darkening clouds.
Showered, with her her still wet hair looking more black than blue, Nila dressed, grabbed her slick, black raincoat that stretched almost to the floor. She pocketed her sunglasses, mask and her scroll. She checked her flat’s security system to make sure that neither physical nor digital intruders had been there while she was out, at the same time, setting her local system to show “activity” as if she were on the net, when in fact she is somewhere else. Security set, she headed back out.
It was raining again, harder this time, pregnant drops exploding noisily over her large hood. The multicolored lights of the street level shops and brash advertisements overhead reflected of the gloss of her coat. She purchased some gyros and a pack of beer from a food stall lit by bright yellow light-nodes and then walked two blocks to a low, rundown building owned by meat-space friends.
Yamblic and Luc, both coder-hacker types, had been living in the rooms off of an old machine shop. Unused metal lathes and drill presses collected dust off to one side. They had talked for years about getting rid of the outdated equipment. (Advances in metal-working technology had made the old mechanical manipulation unnecessary decades ago.) One idea was to crate it all up and ship it to some poorer region of the world, like Albaria or Locomoc.
The entry door to the building had an unsophisticated mechanical combination lock. I supposed it doesn’t matter, she thought. Anyone that wanted to get in isn’t going to be held back any more by a door with a iris- or palm-scanner. A metal latch is still a metal latch.
Nila turned the three alpha numeric tumblers to the combination and let herself in, spinning the tumblers randomly before shutting the door. Antiquated, she thought. Inside, the building was dry and well lit. Like a messy home, the entry opened onto a dusty, rather large space with a half dozen large, heavy, decades old metal working machines shoved against a far wall. Dozens of unused power cables hung from the high ceiling, bunched together into three bundles, pulled toward the same wall with the machines and tied off on a yellow striped safety rail.
If Luc and Yamblic ever got around to their pipe-dream plans and fixed the place up, it could be a hip space. There had been talk of cutting out and shipping off all of the fading machine shop refuse and repacking it with something smooth and sleek and clean, some posh furniture. Mood lighting. Instead, years passed and the young men moved deeper and deeper into their own little, monitor encrusted caves, sleeping and working without really moving.
She found them in Yamblic’s room, a 4 meter by 7 meter space, which resembled a nest of some fucked up robot bird. Wires and glinting screens covered the walls. A bed of sorts sat in the middle.
The two were engrossed in a military combat recruitment game from a few years ago, flinching as virtual projectiles soared by them in the form of illusory projections. The air vibrated heavily with synthetic, thunderous explosions, mostly from the wall behind her as she stood in Yamblic’s doorway.
“Pause, mate. Blue’s here,” said Yamblic as the backdrop depicting some exotic stereotyped war-zone on the wall froze. Both men turned, Luc, ducking under the projected three-dimensional image of a passing shell that would have blown his in-game avi to constituent virtual particles had they not paused. It hung in the center of the room about a meter and a half off the floor, a globular mass of pretend rail-gun launched steel existing in an equally pretend molten state. “…and she’s brought food….and beer!!! Lovely”
Yamblic had a dark brown beard and blue-black stubble on his shaved skull and had a build that remained scrawny-looking despite his high-caloric appetite and overall fitness. She had always assumed that he was part Hellic, from southern Europa, but it had never come up. Luc was tall and lanky, with a Teutonic face shrouded in a mane of dirty-blonde long hair and an equally long beard, both reaching below his shoulders. Both men were average-looking, albeit somewhat slovenly. She had known them since they were all kids running around the debris fields before they had been cleared for the new waterfront business towers.
“We were discussing the fundamentals of Neoplatonic theory, but got into a heated argument about whether or not only Atticans, or any other of the world’s religions approach a reasonable approximations of Plotinus’s descriptions of the portrayal of the gods as being…a means for the more base people to understand…the nature of the gods.”
“What are you even talking about? She’s not going to be impressed by your bullshit. You don’t even believe all of that shit you dad preaches.” Says Yamblic smirking. “We were going to die anyway.” The virtual terrain along with the hanging blob of pretend molten metal abruptly evaporated into dull charcoal grey static. “She brings food. Welcome, friend Nila.”
Beers were passed and gyros consumed. Yamblic kept the conversation from turning to religio-philosophy as strongly as Luc tried pushing it that direction, though he lost some ground after the 3rd of his beers.
“How ya been?” Luc asked. “You look burnt.”
“Work was….stressful today. I just wanna chill with m’mates. Let’s not talk about ‘work’ (as some would have it).” Speaking to them, and after several beers, for they already had several packs in their space, was pushing her into her “let’s use grandad’s accent” mode, subcontinental Sinti lilt. She hated when she did that. It seemed pretentious and like it catered to the ethnophobes’ wet-dreams of pushing people back into pre-global molds. Cracked another beer. “Munchies…need snacks.”
“…the advent of the net generations ago and the virtual is clearly proof of this world’s nature, just another step removed. We make our own shadows now, with the light we shine.”
“Thanks, man. That was profound.”
As Nila stood in the “kitchen” part of the main large room, staring into a cupboard looking for something with crunch and salt, and maybe some vinegar. Unexpectedly, the lights, those which drew power from external sources, went out. Holding her beer in her left hand and the cupboard door handle in the right, standing almost on top of her glistening raincoat, on the concrete floor beneath her, she did not move. She barely noticed the shutting off of the lights in the room behind her, as the node-lights in the cupboard were bright enough on their own.
Bang.
The door, secured against intruders with a three part mechanical lock flew across the room, crumbling the opposite brick wall and causing parts of the drop-ceiling to break free.
As she turned—she shouldn’t have turned—she was knocked over, into the cupboard, into oblivion, onto the floor. Brilliant flash and a piercing silence. Acrid smell. Smoke. Countless, black-clad, armed and armored people, personnel, troops, MetSec—what words describe them best?—poured like hyenas into the room, into the messy but loved space.
In the dim light, emanating from the cupboard and miscellaneous technological encrustations of the large former machine shop, Luc emerged from Yamblic’s doorway, bleeding from his mouth or nose, possibly both.
Crack, crack, crack. Muzzle flares lit the blood spray from his chest. Two or three of the black-clad ones, stepped over his collapsing body and sprayed the nest with several bursts. The remaining lights in that room died.
It all went dark.
#cyberpunk #steampunk #sci-fi #fantasy #science fiction #cyanide blue
http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1468979185
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Ion Fyr 