Section-9-Agent looked around the shabby, dirty apartment and considered real cleaning, but it had been a long night and it could wait. She dumped her bag on the cluttered floor and flopped into her tattered hammock. The space was only an apartment in the loosest sense of the word. It was a simple cube of space holding piles of salvaged components and a few bits of serviceable urban gear. In another more gentle time it might have been considered a prison cell. The walls contain no windows. The toilet, while probably the cleanest thing in the room, was exposed in one corner. A utility bench that was desk, cooking surface, kitchen, and work bench ran along one wall. Communal showers were down the deserted hall. This squat-plex had been mostly abandoned for as long as the tired “free-lance” contractor had lived here. But then that had been only six months give or take.
She called up her internal operating system menus. Various options were presented against her closed eyes. When the computer was in your head, the interface became your own optic nerves. Navigation of options was entirely mental. Her interface contained a number of customizations and lacked the more typical easy-AI that gave less gifted “users” more help at running the hardware in their head. Section-9-Agent issued a command to her cube’s server.
[Command: init Tranquilty-script-114>
The dirty walls flashed and became lush hanging gardens on a sunny day in a light breeze. The image of these things was painted over the reality. The apartment now seemed to be an open atrium with the ocean rolling over white sand beaches on all four sides. Three suns set on the horizon in a spectacular rainbow sunset. Small exotic birds flitted silently between branches. She breathed in the flower scents and reached out from her comfortable hammock to touch the virtual controls on her mini-nano to order strong cappuccino. A steaming cup appeared on the decorative white table which was really just a wooden box. The images were far from perfect. No one would wake up in a hyper-real environment confused about what it was—at least, no one with her out-of-date, squat-plex hardware. Still, the virtual environment was far more pleasant than the reality.
A similar bit of reality had been left behind long ago when she picked up the moniker, Section-9-Agent. Her real name belonged to a system of control she had managed to escape. Section-9-Agent was free, strong, and someone to be carefully dealt with. Her old name had belonged to frightened orphaned girl. She had left it behind when the last person who knew that name had died. But a name like Section-9-Agent sounded so formal. Friends (she did have a few) began to call her Nine-A and from there it was a short hop to Nina. She reserved her full sig for formal posts. Sometimes to her friends she was just Nine. Some of her deebees (Deep buddies) liked to call her Sexy-9, but that generally got them a meme bomb. If she was feeling particularly rushed or the transmission was charged, she would simply sign S9A. Then there were the jobs like last night that you just didn’t sign your name to. Still, as the golden oldie said, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Nina had the clothes on her back, the hardware in her bag, a few nearly empty anonymous bank accounts, and little else. Even the apartment was just an empty squat-plex. The cherished mini-nano had been a lucky find and saved her from having to hit the public depots for food and clothing.
She was still subconsciously aware of the clutter around the apartment, but it was cleverly masked by potted plants or vines. Her real clothes were frayed, but sturdy. Her virtual clothing was near the same style although sharper and not frayed. Lean, hard living kept her reasonably physically fit, but her avatar definitely had enhanced feminine curves without tipping in to silliness. Her many real scars were smoothed over. Casually she selected a few color and accessory options. Her eyes were piercing blue with black eyeliner. A few tribal tattoos appeared around her upper arms. Her hair was coppery and straight. Her face was least altered. Other than the make-up effects, her nose, lips and jaw line was original. Most would call her beautiful, but then the streets were full of genetically modified beautiful people now. In a crowd she would not stand out from the throngs of other desperate, poor, flawless people. Her real scars marked her as a survivor and fighter.
The stimulant mixed with painkillers and masked as a cappuccino was finally having effect. She felt nearly human again. A virtual dragonfly hummed just outside the apartment as she opened a pipe for a new command.
[Command: init news-daemon>
Blue text faded in to view all around her. She scanned various headlines, feeds, logs, IMs, short-texts, mail accounts, and forums for traces of what she had done just last night. There were two forum posts on underworld blogs about rumored data break-in at Shinjo, but no one could confirm it. She smiled. “Good… if you didn’t see me… I didn’t do it.” She thought. She kept a few of the main feeds visible while shutting down the minor feeds. Two of these churned the daily shock and gloom.
The Indian-Pakistan war which had all be destroyed both nations was now spilling over in to neighboring states. Small nuclear exchanges we occurring more often. Various Corporate Alliances were denouncing the chaos as crippling profits in the region. Several cities were announced as being under digital siege—firewalled off from the world. Super-flu 49-alpha-10 was wiping out unprotected populations throughout
The third feed was a string of humorous memes that had been circulating. Cats remained endlessly amusing. Humanity seemed to never tire of moronic mishaps and drug induced bravado gone wrong. Nina would snork occasionally as she forwarded her favorites out to friends. Between sends she tweaked her hyper-environment. The vines became more organic. The suns radiant colors changed hues slightly. The dragonfly was troublesome and buzzed over her shoulder.
It had taken Nina about three days to fully code Tranquility version 1.14. It wasn’t a proper SPORE (Small Purpose Online Reality Engine) that would force its code on a visitor, but it was a nice USE (User Specific Environment)—a world just for her eyes. She had stolen an old copy of Tranquility beta 0.7 and made all the usual custom modifications. She liked her version better than the market version. But as she finished off her cappuccino a nagging thought crept in to her computer aided brain… Her version of Tranquility didn’t have dragonflies.
She kept calm and keyed another cappuccino with more stimulants but no painkillers. She carefully considered her options. She had to assume that someone had taken an interest in her and sent the bug to find her, but who? That was the 64 KLOC question… Given her recent activity, it was probably safest to assume it was Shinjo. But Shinjo was a military contractor. If it was them, then it was time to leave this hideout and find a new home. But Shinjo wouldn’t be the type to only send bugs to tap her feeds. There would be a physical team as well.
Just then her proximity monitor triggered. A four man squad had entered the building through the restricted shafts. They were descending to her level. It was definitely time to go.
She grabbed her bag and kicked a “plant” that was actually her apartment’s firewall and server. Her version of Tranquility melted as a crash of background net noise flooded in to the virtual space. Thousands of messages flooded the space from the Deep. Ads for everything mundane to ridiculous, viruses vectoring for an open host, meme clips, emotes, banners, contests, news, and more seemed to fill the air of the room. Her personal firewall flared blocking out the worst of it all. But the full force of gigapulses of spurious data instapopped the dragonfly. The input overload would cram down the surveillance pipe. She hoped that whoever ghosted the bug in had not thought to firewall the connection. That would teach some n00b Shinjo system slave to blip in to her cube in lowtown. Satchel in hand fled in to the hallway and down the stairs. At this level of the city infrastructure all was concrete, exposed duct work and steel. The stairwell only had two comatose bums in it—a record low. On the way she mentally triggered more “one-click” defenses. These would hopefully do some damage to the jarhead team on its way.
The real street was a haze of fumes and smog. She had to pull a breather over her face as she signaled her eyes to drop their protective lenses. Most Upside folks didn’t consider the anti-irritant lenses worth the investment, but most of them didn’t drop below the 100 meter line in a versicar, let alone get out and walk around. Despite being an unlivable fume, the street still contained the usual breed of predators. Nina pulled her shiny, double-barreled, “scatter and shatter” shotgun and swept it around. That would keep the shadows in the alleys. She paused in the doorway to case the street.
Without the Deep a body would be lost without a clue in the lower city sprawl. The ever present smog cut real vision down to only a dozen meters. Even if you could see, real signs had been abandoned long ago. But digital signals radiated at every corner to her blended vision. You could completely navigate in the dark with just the Deep enhanced tags and icons. Buildings with Upside access blinked with civic tagged red entry markers. The nearest was three blocks away.
She set off at a medium jog with the shotgun prominently displayed. Her TAP picked up other people near by, but none of them exposed themselves enough for her to shoot at them She spiked a mental query in to the traffic database to see if any heavy machinery had logged flight plans in to lowtown. That would take a few seconds to process. She focused on smooth navigation of the alley ways avoiding obvious ambush spots. When she got to the last block a subroutine from city AI responded “No records found”. She swore. They had probably already jammed the civic systems down here. No one would have a record of the strike team or their quarry tonight.
When she reached the relative safety of the street elevator she put the shotgun away. The air inside the building was filtered and theoretically non-harmful. But she kept the breather on anyway. The lower levels of public access buildings were generally more secure, but only in a rudimentary way. There was a single sec-cam with an unshielded access interface. It was locked of course, but locks only kept honest people out. Nina reached out with her TAP and manipulated the virtual lock software. In seconds she had it bypassed. Five seconds later the sec-cam was looping last week’s visual access file.
She needed a safe place to reboot. She tried the janitor closet, but (wouldn’t ya know?) it was an all physical lock—no software. Nina never had time for things that didn’t have an interface. The lobby would have to do. She mentally loaded her “get away clean” Avatar and keyed reboot. The next 6 seconds felt long with no input from the Deep. Being disconnected was like being dead and without the Deep, it wouldn’t take long. Life was easy when you could always order up what you wanted and pipe the charges to some dweeb middle manager or faceless corp expense account. But if she had to work for a living… with stuff that didn’t need RAM or CPU’s? She’d be a goner.
[Initializing WetWare ADBIOS GenTech 0.92alpha…>
[UltraTAP GT9100.03 5.9KGHz Cluster 512>
[RAM check…… OK>
[CPU Matrix…. OK>
[Comm beacon… diabled>
[Hardware test… skipped>
[Boot avatar (1, 2, 3)… ? 3>
[Modules loading…………OK>
[Initializing netcomd>
Twelve seconds later and she was in the lift feeling pretty fine. This Avatar was packed with “don’t look at me” mods. It was as tight and light as she could make it. Of course if it really was a Shinjo cleaning crew she ran in to, it wouldn’t be enough. She hoped that the booby traps she left back at her ex-home worked as well as she’d been told they would by her deebees. They were typical black-market log sweepers, virus bombs and meme scramblers. Nothing fancy, but also nothing traceable. She just needed to put some distance in and hopefully even Shinjo would be left with nothing.
She mulled over the idea that maybe she was just being paranoid. It was only one spy bug. But she knew what happened when you decided you didn’t need to freak out and they really were coming for you. She had a file of names—all contacts that now didn’t answer messages anywhere—dead contacts. The list was long. She kept it on the corner of her visual workspace all the time.
The lift chimed its cheerful arrival to midcity and Nina pulled her hood over her head and stepped out in to the aerial streets. The lights of MC advertised happiness, bliss, easy loans, and cures for loneliness in all its forms. Whether your solution was pills, bang up, VR derailment or just straight up sex, it was here for you. Nina looked up and down the busy streets where only customers and hook-ups made eye contact and before anyone could really take note she stepped in to an alley and disappeared.
[Command: init Seek –F@Section-9-Agent –ndr>
[Command: object not found…>
“Sir? She’s not in midcity. She stepped in to the
The Captain looked at the Backup Technician in a disturbingly unemotional way. This made the BT uncomfortable—usually upper level stiffs got upset when they lost an “objective”. The Captain nodded slowly and then glanced over at the Primary Tech. He was spinning in his chair chanting an advertisement for Chinese food over and over while both hands were jammed down his pants. Viruses and memes had overrun the techs TAP. It would be relatively simple to repair him, but why bother? That’s what backups were for.
“Take him to Bio-Labs 3 and have him slated for genetic development.” The Captain said calmly without malice. The Backup Technician paled.
The Captain stared in to the weakling tech hoping for some sign of backbone. But the man was only afraid for himself. The Captain knew in an instant the BT wouldn’t speak up for his ex-superior.
“Yeh… Yes, sir…” The BT stammered while nodding to two security men to drag the babbling Primary Tech away.
The Captain held the BT’s gaze, “You are now the Primary Tech in charge of finding our mysterious hacker. I expect report of your success at your earliest convenience.”
The new PT nodded and looked away. The Captain turned and strode off. Truth be told, he found the whole situation rather funny. The USE bomb had been brilliant. He had to suppress laughter when the Primary Tech popped. This ghost had better instincts than most. Hackers had a tendency to believe they really were Gods of the Deep. They almost always overestimated their abilities to counter-code against attackers. But this hacker was probably nothing. Another no-name burn-out hired to do a one-time job for which she certainly had no clue about. He doubted she would even remember exactly who hired her. She would discover, just like the other hackers had discovered, that the account which had looked full of cash was really empty and their contact ID for the buyer would be replaced with only the phrase, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was…” and nothing. But each new lead had to be pursued. He felt no malice for Section-9-Agent, but he would kill her and data dive her deep memory for the few clues it might offer. He had no choice.
Nice I like the attention to details - makes the world feel dense enough to be plausible.
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