One
First thing in the morning of that day I
clicked in. The abandoned office complex in Rotherhithe where I'd taken up
residence was sufficiently quiet and warm that I could just prop my back
against a wall and go virtual. I'd looked for somewhere like this north of the
Thames, but the ganglords that way had their marks up on all the walls. I was
scared, and headed over the river.
I had a feeling it wouldn't turn out to be a
quiet day. When she contacted me I already had a client in the e-office. He was
sitting on a gleaming fluff of cumulonimbus, looking down occasionally at the
view of the wild, sprawling valley and talking fast.
By the look of his muscle-bound viking avatar,
I was guessing my customer was actually an unimpressive warmbody without much
legal clout. Some people do that. Online, they try to make up for what they
lack in the real world. I told him I'd have to look into his case. He pressed
for immediate action. Our voices boomed across the silvery air between us. Said
his boss would fire him if I didn't find out who'd framed him, then he'd lose
the contract on his apartment. And all he'd done was complain about the
windowless cell in which he was forced to work. Of course I would have taken
the case on, if I could have, and if I'd known where to start. The way he
described his management made my blood boil. I've been there. He'd just done a
quick search for a cheap legal investigator, and he'd come up with me.
I tried to pay attention as he kept talking,
but I had so much else on my mind. My eye wandered. From my mountain-top seat I
could see the western ocean. A storm purpled the horizon, and some fanciful
serpents played in the deep water. I was getting to like the way I had
watermarked the default sky above the mountains with:
Ghamdan Shamiri
Private Investigator
in gleaming, golden,
five-kilometre-high Arial font.
Just as Viking was getting agitated,
the call came from Helena - I mean, from Miss Szychter. Am I saying that right?
Okay. A flashing puff of cloud with a green text tag emerged from the dormant
volcano to the south. I excused myself to the Viking guy, and rotated my view.
The new cloudlet swelled and approached, and there she was, regarding me
thoughtfully. She hadn't even chosen an avatar. It was just her head and
shoulders in a holocam: short auburn hair, discreet nose stud, pink lipstick on
a pursed mouth; a severe face, like stretched; maybe pretty if she ever smiled.
I decided I liked this view.
Before I could speak she asked me to examine
the contract. She was in the sharpest hurry. The contract doc soared across in
the form of a raven and landed next to me. Mr Dawson Jaar had only responded to
my proposal the day before, at 11.12pm, and shortly after that she'd sent her
persona to my cloudy office to set up this appointment. She had made it clear
at once that, as his agent, she had executive power to resolve any dispute as
we progressed. But she said it in the clipped tones of a professional, so it
didn't sound too much like a threat: more like a routine intimidation, an
implied message that put me down on the level of a poodle while she played the
bulldog. She also wanted to double-check my credentials, so I passed over my
P.I. certification.
She stressed that it was not a simple
missing-person contract, since the person we were looking for had managed to
run off and hide in a bid for his own safety. This was little more than I'd
read in Mr Jaar's original request. She wouldn't say more until I'd signed the
contract.
Of course, I wasn't about to turn the contract
down. I put on a show of reluctance, and fed the small-print conditions to my
Exec. All it could give me back were some pedantic warnings about lack of
sufficient waiver definitions and indemnity clauses. I can quote verbatim all
the contract and all the conditions if it's necessary: the Recaller I installed
up here in my cortex is short on dorsal pre-frontal control. It's one of those bargain apps where you need to pay
a monthly fee to get the full package. So I'm stuck with all these vivid
details pouring through my mind's eye like a mad chariot race, and it's all I
can do to keep on track. But I can always grab the files I need.
So I signed, and the raven
flapped back to her cloud. When I then asked her for the full details on her
escapee, she shook her head. She claimed that his safety would be compromised.
She thought the e-office wasn't secure. I couldn't blame her. The freelance
agency must keep records of what goes on in their domain.
So she told me to meet her in Canada Square at
the old Canary Wharf site in ten minutes. I said, "On V-Map?"
She said, "No, for real." I felt a
cold sweat breaking out.
Before I could reply, her cloud scudded away
and vanished over the snow-capped peaks to the north. I was left
wondering if there was anywhere left in the world that looked anything like
this place. You know how a change of view can alter your mood? But I finally
clicked out and got moving.
Two
From the Wharf, she led me at a brisk pace into
the sunlit squalor of Jubilee Park. In person she was much as I'd assessed from
the virtual connection, only her frame a little taller and the cut of her jaw
more angular. She didn't seem to wear strong perfume. Instead, I could smell
the fetid Thames and hear the swash of a barge passing. Every step I took I
felt impelled to glance around and had to restrain myself: I was that afraid of
Werth and his clan. A wino with spittle on his shaggy beard meandered across my
path and I swerved around him. I've had malware breach my BAN by skin touch
before now, a cheeky pop-up ad for an anti-spyware app, strangely enough, and
now I wasn't taking any chances... except that I'd forgotten to wear gloves.
Body Area Networks were said to be the height of convenience and
sophistication. Now everyone is terrified of shaking hands or touching metal
door handles or drinking from a cup that isn't theirs, and we call this normal.
And we all know the trouble with normal.
We picked our way around the broken paving
slabs and piles of broken glass through which weeds and small trees had long
since pushed, until we were totally alone. She was swinging a small case from
one finger, like it was her makeup bag or something.
First she set the bag down and did something to
it, and it began hissing white noise like a fountain. No doubt it was jamming
the airwaves too. She linked me our target's name and pertinent details,
head-to-head, staring at me in silence as if trying to hypnotise me. Her eyes
hung heavily in her eyelids like twin harvest moons setting. "Ali Hamdani.
So now you know about him. Find him," she said.
I sat on a fallen tree and
closed my eyes. I wrinkled my brows a great deal, tilted my head to and fro a
lot, and after twelve minutes I nodded and opened my eyes again. Through my
firewall I linked back to her that Ali Hamdani had taken over the identity of
convicted criminal Sabri Jek Nisr. Nisr was listed as having been transported
into the Penal System the morning before. I had the Portal number and his tag
code, as well as the digital evidence that someone had hacked his files,
changed his mugshots and infiltrated the Penal Authority as a delivery boy.
She nodded grimly, like a storm was stewing
inside her. She muttered about expecting as much as she glanced at the
head-and-shoulders that had been swapped into the Authority's files: the face
matched that of her quarry. Then we were off, and she marched me across Grime
Street and through the tall double doors of the Penal Authority office. Before
I realised what we were doing, she'd obtained a transit permit for both of us.
I was shocked at how easy it was to get into the system. All I had to do was
swipe my P.I. certificate and link them the details I'd just supplied her. I
couldn't have done it on my own, though: her client, Mr Jaar, obviously had
some leverage because of the court case. After all, it was his son, Junot, who
was murdered. Likewise, she couldn't have done it without me.
Two hours later we were sitting
in a corridor inside the Authority's hospital-like warren. We'd passed through
so many steel sphincter-hatches and barriers and all that metal started closing
in around me, shortening my breath. Along came Mr Paul Edgecomb, one of the
Authority's warders, and off we went. Edgecomb was to come along to guide us
into Branefold oh-oh-two-one. I got to feeling pretty tense, as you can
imagine. I'd sensed three attempts to hack my net, but nothing serious. Just
bots doing surveys and the like, although they might have been using them to
check up on me. I don't let anything put thoughts into my head.
I tried not to put my hand in my pocket to
check on my pen. Edgecomb had a nose like a hawk and looked at me with poker
eyes. But he spoke as calmly as the Serpentine on a windless day. He wore a
plain black uniform with a peaked cap to cover his bald head. He struck me as
the sort you'd want as your surgeon, but not as your confidant.
At the Portal we were all three checked over
for concealed weapons and so on. They weren't as thorough as I'd feared.
Edgecomb then put on his backpack. It was like a huge block of black rubber
with straps. He didn't explain what it was for. Helena just carried her little
case. I had no hardware at all except what was in my pockets and in my head,
all of which they'd gone over half a dozen times. At least London still has
those minimal thought-privacy laws.
The Portal itself looks like nothing much, you
know, just like a tall version of a radiotherapy machine, big enough to walk
into. So we walked in, and I was sweating so freely that I thought it must be
obvious to the other two. But they were pretty solemn. Edgecomb was all
business, having been inside hundreds of times before, and Helena just carried
herself like her own avatar.
Suddenly Edgecomb spoke, right as the heavy
door was swinging shut on silent hinges. It was like he was giving a lecture.
"This particular branefold," he said, "is one of the larger
ones, since it was established earlier on. The inmates have had time to
organise," he said, "to the extent that they are attempting a form of
secret self-government, all under our surveillance. With the limited resources
at their disposal they can't construct very much, but as their spacetime inflates
and stabilizes, they will be able to prospect and colonise all the more. Some
of them call it New Australia. No doubt your witness will be hiding himself
amongst the convicts."
Those were his exact words. I
hadn't realised it was like that in there.
Just like that, the door on the other side
opened and we were there. It's pretty surreal stepping out into another
universe. You get a mental discontinuity as it happens, as if the world just
blinked, or like when you're dozing on the train and something jogs you awake
from a three-second dream.
First of all the wind nearly blew me over. Then
the sky almost blinded me. The whole of it was a sharp white glare. The Portal
opened into a thickly-fenced enclosure jammed with security people and
machinery and defence towers. The enclosure was on a dry, round hill, and at
the foot of the hill were more fences and towers. Beyond that I could make out
a ragged jumble of rooftops and dusty tracks reaching away into the distance.
What a view. Talk about mood swings. I was like
a barometer plunging from low to rock-bottom, wondering if I was walking off
the edge into the deep end, with a 20-kilo weight tied to my neck.
We'd hardly stepped out when something whistled
overhead and slammed into the ground, kicking up dust and making everyone jump
ten feet. It was a bundle of leaflets which flew apart on impact, and several
thousand of them flew like leaves in the wind. Before we could grab one and
read it, Edgecomb pulled us in the opposite direction, claiming it was nothing
at all when we demanded to know what was going on.
Down at the bottom of the hill there were
people walking around, but I couldn't see much for the dust. Apart from the
glaring sky it could have been a refugee camp anywhere on Earth. They say that
it's mostly the unemployed, not proper criminals, who keep the branefolds
filling up. Even London would be a better home than that place. At least if you
live in London, you can dream of leaving occasionally. I fingered the pen-thing
in my pocket.
Three
It was just as we had been checked out of the
final gate and were about to follow Edgecomb and his tag code detector along
the dirt track that the ground started shaking. He yelled, "Run!" So
we ran along the track between the stone hovels until we reached a junction.
The section of road right behind us buckled and collapsed. The nearest two huts
slid and crashed into the newly-formed chasm. It was like an earthquake, only
very localised. Then it was quiet.
We pestered Edgecomb until he gave some
explanations. He wouldn't be flustered, but gave us one of his long, almost
pitying looks. He claimed that every branefold still linked to Earth was
inherently unstable, because of the way that gravitons can cross from one
branefold to another, and because the physical constants of these artificial
universes were neither stable nor accurately set. So now and again, a chunk of
matter inside New Australia's crust would crumble, or explode, or disappear.
But he claimed it was all settling down now.
He wouldn't tell us about the leaflet barrage.
He just glanced around at the gathering crowd of curious residents, wearing
that deadpan face that said nothing.
I was worried about him. Of
course, I had come to know more than I wanted to about Adam Werth, and how he
had done away with all the other possible witnesses to Junot Jaar's murder. I
knew enough about his mutation of the umrix software, the Mind Trojan, to keep
my abdominal muscles in an almost constant clench, just waiting for something
like that to breach my own defences and take over. No matter that I'd
downloaded all the security patches and neural scripts I could find. I fought
to keep my mind away from the warehouse scene. Every time I met someone odd -
Edgecomb, say - I would wonder. The stiff way he talked, his minimal body
language, that blank stare: it made me think of a puppet. Maybe Werth's puppet.
I glanced at Szychter, and that wasn't exactly reassuring either. Have you seen
those zombie movies? It felt like that. But I shook it off and got on with the
hunt for Sabri Jek Nisr for the time being.
He did ask us why we needed this Hamdani so
badly, as he tapped his tag detector with a quick frown that hinted of
frustration. It was Miss Szychter who replied, or almost spat, that he was the
only surviving witness to a bloody murder. Her vehemence raised Edgecomb's
eyebrow.
Most of the men and women coming forward didn't
seem like the homicidal thugs you hear about on Orient News. They looked
curious, bored and hungry, in that order. I asked one tall, pock-faced man where
the newcomers usually went, and he pointed us to a low, square building along
the left-hand track. Then he tried to sell us some roll-ups. I waved him off.
We pushed our way in through the door that was
set on jamming itself into the dirt as I opened it. Miss Szychter and Edgecomb
let me do the talking. I came up empty-handed. The volunteer reception staff
had not met Nisr, though they'd received a list of newcomers' names that
included his. So I told my two companions to wait and I went outside. Pock-face
was hanging around. I beckoned to him and squatted down by the wall to haggle
over the price of a few roll-ups.
I don't smoke anymore, since I downloaded that
Nico-Wipe patch, but I wanted to chat. After a while we got into talking about
how he had arrived there, a few months ago. I asked casual-but-intrigued
questions while rubbing a strand of his baccy between my fingers judiciously.
When the guards had pushed him out of the gates into the town, a couple of the
towners, that's what the convicts call themselves, had been waiting. They'd
stopped Pock-face, whose name I discovered was Jeff, and asked him if he'd be
interested in joining a social club. He'd joined, and discovered within it an
underground movement. All the towners knew about the movement, but only a few
dozen were members. It was a black market, a network of resistance, and an
embryonic governing body. Jeff hadn't joined, but he thought our Nisr man, aka
Ali Hamdani, might have been diverted that way and never reached the official
reception committee. It seemed to happen a lot, said Jeff. He gave me a vague
idea of how I could find this underground, but he was constantly peering about
nervously. His last comment was about how they were aiming to get their
branefold disconnected. Suddenly he jumped up and walked away without another
word, leaving me with all his thirty roll-ups I'd bought for one earring of the
gold that I'd heard was their main informal currency.
I squatted a while longer, pulling from my
pocket the pen, emptying the bits and pieces from it onto my palm, which I
noticed was shaking with a life of its own. I thought, this had better work.
Coming prepared was good; dropping a piece into the thick dust and losing it
would be teeth-grindingly bad.
Before I could assemble the pieces, though, I
heard someone emerging from the building. I jumped up and shoved the pieces
into my jacket pocket. I felt that much closer to my goal that I think I
actually smiled at Edgecomb.
I asked him where we'd find the water tower. He
turned and began striding along the track without a word. Helena fell into step
beside me. She wanted to know what I'd found out. I shrugged and told her, then
asked her if she smoked. It was like she hadn't even heard the question.
We stared at Edgecomb's back. I asked her what
she thought of him. She shrugged and wouldn't commit herself. I asked her what
she knew of Werth's Trojans. She gave me a sharp look, then glanced at Edgecomb
again, and shook her head, said she didn't think that very likely. Could Werth
do such a thing?
I muttered that she was pretty naïve.
"Pre-frontal cortex control is out there in the cloud. PFC has been a
known technology for a while," I said. "These days, the territory
between implants and neurons is blurred to blazes. There are tailor-scripted
pseudo-rootkits, they can hook the mind's control patterns, and the only way
out is to -"
But I caught myself. She scowled at me long and
hard anyway. I shouldn't have talked so much. P.I.s are meant to be smarter
than that, but not smart enough to know all that stuff.
She would have started grilling me over how I
knew so much, but right then as the water tower raised its head above the
rooftops, a percussion of small-arms fire erupted from the environs of the
hill, not far behind us.
Edgecomb stopped dead and ducked his head,
linking to his people back at the portal. Finally he looked back at us and
claimed the towners had slapped together some muzzle-loading firearms that were
no threat to anyone except their users. Now that he said it that way, I could
discern some single shots that sounded distinctly under-powered and gruff,
while the answering chatter had the efficient rippling crack of modern
automatic fire.
So we headed onwards to the base of the tower.
From ahead there came a repetitive, dull gonging.
I asked Miss Szychter more about Ali Hamdani,
as if I didn't know already. She went over the facts of Junot Jaar's abduction
and murder, and how Hamdani had apparently seen it all, being a clan member
himself, and his testimony in court could sink Werth and his network for good,
after so many years raising the finger at the Euro legal system, on a rampaging
campaign of blood-letting and racketeering. He more or less ruled London and
the outlying provinces, but with so little by way of saner alternatives,
perhaps Europol had shrugged it off until now.
She spoke with some heat. I couldn't get her to
divulge any personal interest in finding Hamdani and seeing Werth go down,
though, beyond her fee from Jaar.
I looked up and we'd reached the legs of a spindly,
rusty tower with a bulbous head. All the houses there leaned together in a
conspiracy of emptiness. Just seeing a tin door swinging open against a stone
wall, clanging, again and again, and the eddies of wind picking up the dust,
was enough to infect my mind with a viral uncertainty I couldn't shift. We'd
lost him. We checked inside each house: there wasn't a soul around.
Four
Edgecomb came up with something. He unearthed
five ID tags from a heap of dust and junk in the corner of a dormitory room. One
of them was Sabri Jek Nisr's. I took a look and told them in my best P.I.
manner: sidecutters, probably neutrite-edged. He said it was impossible; I
replied that maybe the toughness of his tag material or the cutters was
different in this brave new universe.
Helena didn't have time for
that. She nodded to herself and told us we had to make for where the shooting
was. We'd find our man there.
So we went. Wasn't any use
arguing with her - we tried.
On the way I managed to ask
Edgecomb what was in his backpack. He looked a little surprised, as if I was
dumb, and replied it was the branehook. "Oh of course," I said,
trying to look as dumb as he thought I was. I fingered the parts in my jacket
pocket. What the Penal Authority could procure was a blunt chainsaw to my
scalpel. That's one up for Werth's black market system, anyway. So Edgecomb was
prepared to abort our trip and tunnel us back to our home universe if things
got too sharp for him.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps, as Werth's
puppet, he was intending something else entirely. I noticed the man had drawn
his service automatic, I think a Steyr Compact, and was checking the action. I
broke out into a sweat all over again. Why exactly did he want to find
Nisr? Before the sun goes down today, I thought, at least one of us
is going to die: him, me, Helena or Nisr.
I caught up with Miss Szychter in a hurry to
try and pick her brains a bit more. I asked her if she was sure about Hamdani
being any use in convicting Werth. Until then it hadn't occurred to me that any
judge would dare slap a guilty verdict on Werth. Plus, he'll never really be
locked away, even in the securest brane, right? She insisted that Hamdani had
been hiding behind a forklift when Werth's thug had killed Junot Jaar, that
he'd linked to Junot's father all the details before he'd fled, hoping that
would be enough to convict Werth.
So why had Werth ordered Junot's
murder, along with all the witnesses who were clan members? That's what I
wanted to know. She told me, contemptuously, that Werth had run out of patience
waiting for the ransom, which he hadn't needed anyway. He was just playing. He
enjoyed the game, and took no chances. He knew his clan was big enough to
absorb the loss of a few hirelings.
That made sense to me, but it
turned my stomach like a sewage treatment plant.
We'd crept so close to the firefight that the
shooters' excited chatter was audible between volleys, and we had to keep well
behind the cover of crumbling walls and piles of fallen masonry. I wanted to
hang back and get working on my pocket branehook, but there was no opportunity.
With the fingers of one hand inside the pocket I managed to click the emanator
into the coder stub, but the modulating ring wouldn't go on.
After peering around a lot of corners and into
a number of unfamiliar sweaty faces, we had come to the back wall of a roofless
house from which five men were firing. The return fire alternated between
indifferent and murderous.
Something caught at my shoe. It was one of
those leaflets. From my brief scan of its text, I surmised that the inmates
here were appealling to the security staff to join with them in a
jointly-governed, egalitarian new world. No chance of that now, I
reflected.
Just when I thought it was
quietening down, a great whoosh roared from another building and something went
bang up on the hill. Like a big RPG round. Maybe if the Brane 0021 Portal is
still cut off, that's why. It certainly gave my gut a punch.
Through a loophole I spied our man. He was
feeding gunpowder charges and ball shot to an ogre of a man who yelled as he
fired. He yelled curses, mixed in with cries of "Freedom!"
Sabri Jek Nisr seemed dwarfish next to him, and
nervous like a hunted bird. His prison crewcut frizzed silvery-black and his
dappled cheeks plumped out like apples. His new grey convict overalls already
showed stains and rips.
From his face, he was obviously
a man out of his depth, close to drowning, caught up in a storm not of his
choosing. I knew that feeling.
Suddenly I knew none of this was his fault. It
was obvious. The sun came up in my head. It's like reaching a certain spot in a
hike from where you can see over the next ridge, and that changes everything.
Sabri was One Of Us.
I noticed that Edgecomb was busy linking to his
people again, so I grabbed Helena's arm and pulled her through a doorway
towards Nisr. "We've got to get him away from Edgecomb," I shouted
above the noise.
She asked, breathlessly, which one was Hamdani.
I pointed, while grabbing up my branehook with the other hand. She shook her
head. "That's not him!" she hissed. I ignored her, knowing what I
knew. At last I had the ring screwed down, and I popped the power button. Of
course I wasn't going to hook us all into my getaway brane. I had an alternate
setting for situations just like this. I just wish I'd been able to use it from
London, directly, but of course they can track you with ease.
The ogre had noticed us and
turned his homemade musket on us, demanding to know who we were. Helena
produced a tiny fingergun, a composite make, that obviously hadn't shown on the
Portal sensors. It slid on over her fingertip, extending back to her first
knuckle, looking like a grey toothpick mounted on a ring. So it was a standoff,
since the ogre recognised the toothpick for a weapon. I pulled an alarmed Nisr
over to us just as Edgecomb came into the room and a volley of automatic fire
from the hill made us all duck, even the ogre. Shards of stone flew off the
walls.
Then I twisted the ring left,
and we three found ourselves somewhere else entirely.
The pen-sized branehook wasn't
as smooth as the Penal Authority's portal. I was left with a slight headache,
as if my thoughts had suffered a shear fracture.
It was the rush of freefall skydiving, without
the slipstream. The noise of war ended abruptly and my ears were ringing in the
comparative silence. Miss Szychter and Sabri Jek Nisr hung with me in empty
air, motionless at first, surrounded by flocks of what looked like silvery
clouds that extended in every direction as far as we could see. The sky was a
hazed, pale blue everywhere we looked.
Sabri gaped down at his feet.
Beyond the dissipating cloud of dirt and rocks scooped up by the Hook's
spherical field from the floor of the house where we'd just stood, we saw no
reassuring dark disc spread to the horizon. That was all sky, too, up and down.
It was the kind of view to leave you breathless with wonder, if you could enjoy
it at leisure. In that instant, it came to me that everything was going to be
alright somehow, and it wasn't an incongruous idea as I looked around.
Already we were floating together, along with
that cloud of dirt. The backstreet guy who had programmed the Hook told me
about that: Gravity's stronger there, but there's no large mass, just
silicate clouds at a certain amorphous phase so you bounce off them. Just like
a million miles of kiddy play fun, he had said. Just a staging area for
you.
Nisr started yelling and bugging out his eyes. Where?
Why? Who? All the obvious questions. His voice dissipated into the huge
volume of air, with no reverberation. Our bodies attracted each other, but he
grabbed at my jacket and flung me away in his rage. Both of us floated apart. I
tried to placate him, saying that Edgecomb would catch up with us eventually.
He was outraged that he'd been singled out and cut off from the battle for New
Australia.
I was just fumbling with the ring of my Hook,
waiting for the device to recharge, when Szychter asked him if he was Ali
Hamdani. Her voice had changed to a gruff monotone, masculine somehow. I looked
up. He just stared at her in shock, tumbling slowly head over heels, as if he'd
only just noticed her, but she put up her fingergun, twisting her torso to
allow for her gradual rotation, and shot at him, aiming to kill.
Too late: I realised with a tsunamic fear that
I'd been wrong. This was not alright. The Elysian view had fooled me. I was
unarmed. Szychter was not, and she was the puppet, not Edgecomb.
Five
Following the fear came a rush of anger. I felt
I could kill Szychter if that would hurt Werth in some way.
I saw that Nisr was badly wounded. Whatever
speck-sized munition the fingergun carried, it had blown a big chunk out of his
hand which had been raised in front of his face at the time. Droplets of blood mingled
with the dirt around him as he thrashed in agony. But he was falling and slowly
spinning towards a silicate cloud which loomed behind like a pile of shaving
foam with the dimensions of a zeppelin.
Szychter, meanwhile, was falling towards
another cloud, even with the flea-strength recoil of her shot. Her weapon must
have been limited in range, for she held her fire. The recoil had set her
tumbling faster, too. I think the real Helena was struggling with the
Trojan-delivered program that had hijacked her decision-making processes. Her
left hand fought her right, and her face was a shock of twisting and snarling.
I know that each of us faces a daily contest with inner enemies, but this was
not natural. I'd like this courtroom to be assured that Ms Szychter had a
malware issue.
Me, I got busy setting up the branehook for my
escape. But when I interfaced through my BAN, it told me to wait. I didn't know
if it was still recharging or if its system had crashed.
Szychter's feet hit cloud and she rocketed
herself on an intercept course with Sabri, who had landed badly and was
drifting near his gleaming zeppelin. Its gleaming perfection had been
splattered in a scarlet spray. It seemed Helena was losing out to Werth, or
whatever possessed the woman's mind.
Then I knew I couldn't leave him
to be butchered. Werth inspired more hate in me than anyone I've ever met,
especially since what I saw in the warehouse and then in the den. But the
hatred was wrecking my thinking and turning me into a puppet. It was like
another piece of malware that I had to fight. So I fought it with this thought:
Sabri had turned out to be another blood-brother to me. All the others were
gone. I needed to help him.
I was still hanging somewhere near our entry
point. Another few moments and the Szychter-thing would be close enough to
shoot Sabri dead. What could I say?
I yelled out, "It's me you want!
I'm the real Ali Hamdani. He's nothing! Leave him alone!"
She turned her head as she floated by. "Really?
And you expect me to believe that? Convince me." Even the intonation was
like Werth's. So I had to explain, while Sabri got himself together and pulled
himself along the cloud, out of danger.
So I told her. I said that I knew I couldn't
get away from Werth unless I hid in a branefold. And I couldn't have taken
Nisr's identity - they had too many safeguards against that. So I entered by a
ruse. Setting up my freelance P.I. identity had been the hardest part. I
already knew to keep an ear open for Jaar's job posting. Downloading a
face-meld kit had been simple. I don't normally look this chubby.
She - or, as I tried to think, Werth - was engaging
me in conversation, playing for time. She fell softly to the zeppelin-cloud and
rebounded towards me. I had so little momentum. The cloud I was beginning to
fall towards was too far away. Her aim was good enough that she would get in
one or two good shots as she passed. I felt naked, staked out, almost jabbering
in panic. The pea-brained Hook was still not responding.
Tell me about what you saw, the Werth-thing asked. "You
didn't really witness a murder, did you?"
This was the point at which I'd
convince her. Perhaps she planned on shooting us both anyway. But I hadn't
spoken with anyone about this up to that point. It was like a confession, and
as I spoke, the killing tension in my chest eased off. I began to describe the
warehouse scene: the broken-down forklift I was working on, the five clan
members bringing Junot out of his freight-container cell. I waved, but they
didn't notice me. All five were my close friends and blood brothers, as was
young, blond and scar-faced Adrian Sculio, who appeared from Werth's office
swinging the usual Micro-Uzi with one finger through the trigger guard. The
night before that, we'd argued again, and I didn't want to talk to him, so I
kept my head down. Sculio and I had entered Werth's service together, as a way
of getting some status and earning our way out of a dark hole of debt. He and I
had drunk together, sweated out some long, nervous nights in the rain, sat
laughing on the roof with a bottle of cheap wine, fought and made up countless
times.
He walked up to Junot and shot him through the
head, twice. He didn’t see me and my dropped jaw. The other five almost jumped
Adrian, but he spoke with sudden power in a voice not his own. They knew
Werth's voice, though it was distorted, and cringed back.
So it was plainly Werth who
ordered the execution, and I got busy making sure that Mr Dawson Jaar knew it.
I'd been sickened by Werth over and over, and I'd come to the point where I'd
rather die than go on with it. But it wasn't until Werth was arrested a week
later on suspicion of the kidnapping that the rest of us attracted his
murderous attention.
We were in the suite of hotel
rooms we called our den one night, doing a little bit of this and that, nervous
because of what we saw on the web news. Suddenly, Adrian jumped up and grabbed
his Uzi. His eyes were strangely hooded, mere slits. He was muttering to
himself, arguing, but we couldn't make out what it was about. His muttering
turned to yelling, and he flung himself around the den. I know now that he must
have been fighting Werth's Trojan. He lost. He'd given it a home for too long,
and it had put down roots.
He suddenly snapped alert, looked us over with
a sneer, and walked up to each one of us in turn. He patted Nojo on the cheek,
he shook lovely Eliana by the hand, he touched each of them.
BANs are amazing things. The standard setup
assigns each small area of skin on the hands and face a different port code,
and allows simultaneous addressing of them all. It started with communication
aids to combat various disabilities, then after the games geeks caught on,
everyone found a new use: smart clothes, remote medical check-ups, office-less
data transfers, the lot.
I was getting a beer at that moment - that's
maybe what saved me. We started laughing, thinking he'd cracked, until Nojo
suddenly screamed and collapsed. Maybe his heart had stopped. Then Eliana said,
"Something's in my head!" She clutched her temples and keeled over.
She was fighting it, but losing. She had the best mindware of us all, I think.
Our muscle-man Rhino didn't have any. When
Adrian reached him, he just whipped up his Uzi and gave him a burst in the
chest. I don't remember the rest, but I dodged Adrian's hand as he tried to
grab me and I crashed straight through the big window, fell two floors, and
staggered away. It seems I was the only survivor because Adrian followed me
with the Uzi. But his bursts were wide, and I think even then that the real
Adrian, my blood brother, was fighting back. He tried to throw away his gun
with one hand, then the other hand would grab it back. He yelled, "You
won't kill me, Werth!"
Then a deeper voice came out: "Really?
Watch this."
I couldn't turn away. There was a shot. Then it
was all over. I lay in an alley weeping so long, the street sweepers almost
found me in the morning. I crawled away and fled into the dawn, shivering,
wondering if there was a Recaller that could edit that scene for me.
I didn't have time to tell Szychter all that,
of course. But I'll always miss Adrian's cocky grin. He wasn't a good man, but
he was like a brother, and I was never very saintly either.
There was a feral glint in the woman's eyes
that told me I'd convinced her. So, I thought, now I die. She drifted closer
and closer, fingergun outstretched towards my head. Behind her I glimpsed Sabri
launching himself off his cloud into the faraway. He might live.
"By the way," the
Werth-thing said, "you've wasted your efforts. My script is almost
identical to Sculio's."
I digested that, hating Werth
all the more because the coward wasn't really there himself. So Helena wouldn't
survive this either.
Six
I needed a way to get us both
out of this. I unfastened my jacket to use as some sort of shield, still
gripping the branehook tightly.
It seemed she must be within
range by now. I held the jacket in front of me, as if it would help block a
bullet. That's when I noticed the Werth-Trojan was linking to me. It was trying
to find a crack in my firewall, but I'd routinely blocked all possible ports
and protocols since what happened in the den. That gave me a desperate last
hope - I linked back. Her WLAN was also pretty impregnable, except that one
obscure port seemed to be fluttering. But there was no time for a concerted
attack. At last she let loose a shot, and the hammer-sting of it ignited my
left shoulder in ferocious pain. At least the jacket had obstructed her aim.
The tiny explosive pellet must have detonated in the jacket and the shrapnel
had just carried on. Now she was close enough to finish me off. I checked on my
Hook one last time and noticed from afar how tightly my teeth were clenched
against the pain.
That's when I saw Edgecomb hanging in thin air
behind Helena. I must have yelled my head off in a coherent fashion, for he
took a long, cold look at her. I don't know what I expected of him. "I
suspected as much," is what I heard him say. She glanced over her shoulder
as the distance between us narrowed, unwillingly granting me one more moment,
and she looked back just as I twisted the Hook's ring in desperation.
This time the transition was painful beyond
description. My body thumped down onto a solid surface and I collapsed with
Helena rolling off me. The inter-verse jump must have stunned her badly. For a
moment I couldn't remember who I was, or where, and merely stared at the
smooth, steak-coloured plain of rock stretching away in all directions from
where we lay. Boulders sat around, ranging in size from potato-sized to
house-sized.
Helena's eyes were wide open and staring at
nothing. Muscles twitched on her face. Maybe the jump had crashed the Trojan. I
stood up and tried to link her. That port was staying open for spaces of twenty
milliseconds or more. I prepared my own Trojan packet and sent it. The port had
already snapped closed, and stayed closed. I'd failed. My shoulder felt like it
had swollen to the size of a pineapple. I'd had enough. I almost wanted to die
at that point.
She was mumbling something. It sounded like her
own voice. It sounded like she was saying, "Get Out!" over and over.
I told her to fight it. Her eyes fixed on mine.
"Help me," she gasped, "he's coming back! He's waking up!"
I tried to slip the fingergun off, but the ring was sealed on.
I knew I only had the one
chance.
I pushed her hands onto my cheeks and held mine
on hers. In some popular configurations the lips are used to encrypt
confidential transfers. I pressed my lips to hers. Although it hardly qualified
as a kiss, her eyes seemed to blaze with indignation. All the while I was
battering her BAN with requests for access. Finally she must have managed to
force a port open against Werth's program, and in went my packet of tools. I
had picked it to disable the pseudo-rootkit that had hijacked her
decision-making centres.
Then she gasped and sat up. That very Helena
Szychter look was back, seriously pursed lips, but she was worried. She said
the Werth-thing was still running, trying to find a new handle on her
pre-frontal cortex. She said it would kill me, and then her.
So I had a choice, between loathsome and
terrifying. I could hit her hard enough to make sure that the malware in her
would never trouble either of us again, but she'd be dead too. At least then I
could escape, find the ravine and get on with my new life of exile. The
alternative was to throw away my freedom and try to save her life. And then
there was the question of testifying against Werth. I searched Helena's eyes
for an answer.
Seven
Seated in the witness stand, I felt as if I'd
just woken up. I gazed around at my rapt audience: Justice Myla Thyme, Chief
Prosecutor Allanson, defendant's attorney trying to burn me away with his
glare, and all the people in the balcony. My lightly bandaged shoulder caused
me some discomfort, and my right hand kept straying there, trying to find
something to scratch.
I cast a quick smile up to the spectator's area
and cleared my throat. "So that's about it. As a witness I have rambled
more than my share, but now everyone in this courtroom knows how I got to be
down here, and how she got to be sitting in the gallery up there, looking down
at me and smiling at last."
There was silence in the courtroom. The judge
cleared her throat suggestively.
"Oh, how did I get back with her,
right."
I rambled on. The light-headed euphoria of
victory. That tiny branehook had finally given up the ghost, but Edgecomb,
veteran of these crazy expeditions that he turned out to be, tracked us through
the branesphere or whatever you'd call it. That backpack of his was worth
carrying around after all. I'd linked repeatedly to Helena, trapping all the
malware's attempts to hijack her again. It was exhausting. I'd almost given up
hope when Edgecomb's hand gripped my shoulder. We were back at the Authority
building after a couple of the tensest minutes of my life.
The Penal Authority's lab did a fine job
detoxifying Miss Szychter's BAN. That was thanks to the encrypted, compressed
files they found that Werth had stashed in my own head while I was his
slave. I was a walking time-bomb and oblivious to it.
I looked around the courtroom with a scowl.
Unwanted words fouled my mouth: "The Penal Authority has my... my grudging
gratitude."
Across the courtroom a man sat very still
inside a steel cage. He had eyes for no one but me, Ali Hamdani. He did not
appear bitter or angry, but bored, except that a slight, ironic smile sat on
the corner of his mouth. He was a well-built man of middle years, a smoothly
shaven head complimenting his careful goatee. His modestly dark, slightly
Asiatic face might have come from any continent, any race. He might have
appeared handsome if his life story were not known.
The judge raised her eyebrow at me: Anything
more before I shut you up? I gabbled onwards. "I know very well that
the man over there might still reach me, however much you think you've
de-fanged him, whichever secure brane you transport him into, whatever
precautions I take, but that's just the price I pay for finally doing the right
thing for once in my life. I may soon be confined to a small room because of my
own past, but at least I'll have peace of mind."
Justice Myla Thyme nodded to someone, and I was
escorted from the room.
They told me later that the accused was found
guilty on all charges. Sentencing would take place the following day.
I was escorted from the court complex to an
armour-plated van, to a secure facility goodness knows where, and to an
electromagnetically shielded, doubly-locked, doubly-guarded cell with no
windows. My first and only action was to request the installation of a viewing
wall preloaded with wilderness landscapes. I was allowed no visitors, and no
incoming calls were permitted.
I may have appeared calm and composed, but I
insisted on wearing a pair of electrically insulated gloves at all times.
+ + +
About This Story
Future Shock: New
technology can often appear to us in the guise of a new toy. So now we can
shoot even more data about ourselves around the world to each other, ever
faster, weaving more and more complex relationships between ourselves and our
world. But what is this doing to our insides, our families, our communities?
Now imagine if you could connect
your very mind to the internet. What then?
Ali Hamdani's Body Area Network
may not be too far away from the shelves of your online stores. Even as we
speak, brave scientists and development engineers are devising ways for people
with physical disabilities to function in ways that they could not before. That
is a great leap forwards. One way to do it is to implant microprocessors and
circuits within the human body. And I wasn't the first to wonder whether a
hacker might see this as a challenge, or even as an opportunity for mischief.
Have a look at this paper
from McAfee on the dangers of malware in
networks that are integrated with the human body.
Then, in procession behind the
incorrigible hacker, come the all-conquering hordes of marketing men, but also
the politicians, probably some proselytisers of the religious and atheist
varieties... basically, anyone with an agenda will want a piece of the
neurological pie. Just look at the pop-ups you have to block on your browser.
If you want to see how mindware
and bodyware is approaching reality, have a look at these Wikipedia articles
just for starters:
But I'm not anxious - yet -
about Mindware Issues becoming science fact. The human brain is so
complex, and the mind it contains is so elusive, that it may still be a long
time before you'll need to subscribe to Norton Symantec in order to prevent
some teenager in Moscow or Madrid from turning you into a zombie with a few
keystrokes.
If you're also wondering where Brane Theory or Brane Cosmology come from,
or whether it's just a spelling mistake, you can check it out on Wikipedia too.
In this case, I've taken a huge and perhaps unjustifiable leap. I am 99%
certain that we won't be seeing a practical application of String Theory for a
good long time, if ever.
And maybe that's just as well.
About The Author
Originally an engineering graduate from the UK
keen to become an astronaut or at least a satellite designer, John Peace
mysteriously ended up working in community development in the Middle East for
some years. He recently settled with his Canadian wife and their two sons in
Ontario, where they enjoy blueberries with Finnish pancakes, the great outdoors
and saunas, preferably in that order. He confesses that he does not want to
upload his mind onto a computer or freeze his brain or body upon death. He
claims he has a better offer.
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