SF in The City Anthology (9 page)

Springer Street was an unusually large path that cut just around the Nest. It had been designed for old fashioned automobile use, but too many people had their vehicles “appropriated” when they passed through this neighborhood. A large open street would be the perfect place for a brawl. 

“Well, looky here gents,” Addanc Teivel, leader of the Leyaks, pointed across the divide. “A band of pavement kissers has seen fit to cut in on our business.”

What followed was a brutal battle that lasted for several minutes. The Leyaks only had four members, one of which had a missing eye, and they lacked a long range weapon. Probably hung back out of the fight, ready to shoot if matters got out of hand. Of course he couldn’t have stopped the terrible accident, even if he tried.

As a complete shock to both gangs, a speeding Tahitita XV bullet car spun around the street’s corner at 250 kilometers per hour. Most of the boys had been fighting outside of the approaching vehicle’s path, but Vox and the Leyak with whom he brawled, Druthers Lancet, did not fare so well. As a manually driven machine, the Tahitita could only avoid an accident as well as its driver. Given the speed with which he was traveling in an antique vehicle, the motorist was probably a wealthy, thrill seeking adventurer from outside the Gorse. He did not even stop after hitting the “Abscess trash.”

Two of the Leyak’s already lied unconscious on the ground and Addanc had run for his life, so the rest of the Dingoneks ran to Vox’s side, with the exception of Probably. With a spirited cry, he shot through the back window of the escaping bullet car, a blood splatter signaling that he had hit his target. Norn put his ear down to the fallen Dingonek’s chest, listening for a heartbeat. He didn’t find one.

“He’s dead,” the leader said to the rest of the gang.

“You could have told me that before I stepped in this crap,” Nettles wiped the blood off of his shoes. Druthers had absorbed most of the impact during the accident, and what was left of him surrounded Vox’s body.

“Probably,” Norn turned to the group’s sniper, “go see what’s left of our friend in the car. Charlisle, you go with him.”

“What do you want me to do?” Nettles asked.

“Pick their pockets,” Norn motioned at the beaten Leyaks.

Both Charlisle and Probably’s eyes widened when the pulled open the passenger’s side door of the bullet car. Strewn across the inside of the transport where dozens of cred and identity cards. Whoever this guy was, he had lots of aliases, and hopefully just as much money.

“Hartmut Pekkanen,” Probably read off of the closest identity card. “I’ve heard of him. Isn’t he a flesh jockey in Prefecture 44?”

“Was,” Charlisle corrected. “Let’s see if his cred cards prove him a winner or loser.”

Now both the boys’ mouths dropped open. With a little hacking, Charlisle transferred a 100,000 ECUs from what cards he could. The rest had security even he couldn’t handle. Throwing the rest back into the crashed car, the boys returned to find a green tinted cigarette, apparently the reward of pickpocketing, lit and dangling from Nettles mouth. Norn had already wrapped Vox up in a sheet he stole from a nearby resident’s clothesline.

“I hope you boys found more than we did,” Nettles muttered as he took a drag on his new cigarette. 

“I’m sure we did,” Charlisle showed the others the transferred funds on his currency exchanger’s display screen.

“Holy cannoli,” Nettles put his hands on his head in shock.

“We’ll have to divide the money appropriately,” Norn said authoritatively. “Probably shot the bugger, so he should get most of the funds. At least we only have to split it four ways.”

The
boys remained silent, staring at their deceased comrade. How did the smartest of them die first? He had never seemed well suited to the gang trade anyway.

“What’ll we do with him?” Probably pointed at the corpse.

“He deserves a street warrior’s burial,” Norn said with a tear running down his face. 

The rest of the boys knew what he meant by that. Using the blanket to drag him to the nearest manhole cover, its plastic resin surface painted to look like the jaws of a shark, the prepared him for “burial.” With the congestion of The City, graveyards were an archaic solution to honoring the dead. Now the poor were cremated, while the rich had their bodies frozen with the hopes of one day cheating death. With all the research into the brain and what constituted “consciousness,” scientists still hadn’t found the path to immortality.

Anyone with street cred knew that cremation was a dishonorable way for a fighter to be remembered. Central Authority decided what was done with the ashes, and they never disclosed to anyone for what purpose they used it. Good old fashion dirt was hard to come by, unless one lived near a construction site, so sewers were the best places to leave bodies to naturally decay.

None of the Dingoneks said a word as Nettles pried off the manhole cover with the crow bar he normally used for other purposes. Vox had always been the eloquent one. The boys had never grown up seeing religious rites performed around death, not even in the movies. No one said a word, as Charlisle and Probably each took a corner of the sheet upon which the dead youth lied and raising it dropped him in the sewer.

“I’m going to donate my portion of today’s haul to Vox’s family,” Charlisle said to the astonishment of his peers. “I’ll be making enough ECUs off of that gig with the CA, I won’t need it.”

“That’s a very honorable position to take,” Probably said.

“Or a really stupid one,” Nettles commented.

“If you’re really going to be prepared to catch a
gray hat hacker
, you had better start doing your homework,” Norn tossed Charlisle his bag.

“I’m sorry to leave you guys at a time like this,” Charlisle looked at the manhole cover. “And this guy is technically a black hat hacker.” 

“There are only four of us left,” Norn pointed out less tactfully than usual. “We’ll all walk back to our turf together. We can each mourn for Vox, while you get to work. You aren’t leaving us until we are back,
safely
.”

“Do you really think we won’t be safe to walk around on our own outside of Dingonek turf anymore?” Probably directed his question at the leader.

“If some losers hear that we were brought down a member, I wouldn’t put it past them.” Norn watched Charlisle push the manhole cover back into place.

“Just let them try,” Nettles formed a clenched fist.

***

By the time Charlisle reclined in his apartment’s bubble chair, the sun had already begun to set on this part of The City. He had smugly dropped by Kim’s room to deliver all the ECU’s she wanted. “I can donate what’s left to Vox’s family,” the hacker told himself, though he still felt guilty for giving his friends the impression that he had provided more money.

For two hours he wracked his brain, trying to understand the secret of the grey box hack. When he was most exhausted and least attentive, an idea suddenly struck him that he foolishly ignored before. He had approached the problem from the point of view that the hacker would try to bypass systems’ protective measures with brute-force attack or dictionary attack programs, but the fact was that grey boxes were part of a larger network. To handle all the thought data in the Gorse; the CA would need a very, very powerful “siren server.” If that hacker had gotten a Rootkit inside of the network, who knew what kind of chaos he could create.

Charlisle decided to sneak into Elegance’s neighborhood that night. It would be unlikely that he could even access the network on a first attempt, but he could get a good idea of what he was up against. He secretly had to admit that the desire to see Elegance’s thoughts motivated him even more than the prospect of his new job. Finding her thought data amidst hundreds would surely be really…fun.

Automobile taxis were a thing of the past. There just wasn’t enough room for them. Wealthier individuals could afford air taxis, while those at street level had to make due with other, more creative methods. Going out into the Gorse alone after dark wasn’t the wisest decision Charlisle ever made, so he decided having another body near his would add extra protection. Motorbike taxis were popular for the sleek designs, and he found a nice one traveling through his neighborhood that evening. While the blue skinned driver had a repellant stench, his bike had few scratches on it, meaning he probably didn’t risk the life of his customers…too often. The hacker slid his cred card through the man’s currency exchanger and hopped on the back.

As they weaved in and out of rude human traffic, the bike let out a consistently refreshing purr. Maybe Charlisle would buy his own motorcycle, after he had paid off all his debts of course. While his driver wasn’t the most gregarious character, the hacker gathered that his blue skinned acquaintance went by the name Polyamide Arroyo. He felt even closer to the fellow after they involved themselves in a
fight
.

A loan shark (seriously, the large man had a bod mod that gave him the appearance of an anthropomorphic great white) had been throwing a smaller gentleman around the street, and the bike taxi’s driver decided to help out the victim. Pulling a shillelagh out of a holster, Polyamide rode up and used his momentum to get a good whack on the side of the attacker’s scaly head. Charlisle just laughed as he looked back at the giant, unconscious body sprawled outside Dado’s Diner.

The Dingonek included a tip for the “exciting service,” after Polyamide dropped him off at the end of the alley where his targeted grey box was located. Charlisle knew that the greatest problem wouldn’t be accessing the grey box’s network, but rather appeasing the nice doggie that guarded it. Having sprayed a can of Feint Fog all over his body and clothes, the hacker would now appear invisible, to security cameras anyway.

Turning the corner, he could already see the Cane Corso down the alleyway, growling and guarding the grey box to which it was chained. Charlisle had considered using sleeping gas to incapacitate the brute, but he knew from research that chemical tests were performed on their blood every day. It wouldn’t do to raise suspicions. Instead he pulled a partially meat covered bone from his bag and tossed it to the animal. As he suspected, the creature was lazy from never having to actually protect the box from a real threat, and it didn’t raise a paw except to grasp its new treat.

A person had to be within five feet of a gray box to access its data, and if Charlisle was honest with himself, he would have liked to put a greater distance between himself and the dog. As he accessed the network, music started playing in the micro liners of his ears. His playlist activated according to his mood, and “I Wonder Why” by Dion and the Belmonts seemed to be the song he was supposedly ready to listen to at the moment. With a thought, he shut off the micro liners. His nerves were too on edge for music.

Surprisingly, he hacked the system in only a few minutes. He used a custom program called “PERVeyance” to sift through their data. It didn’t take him long to realize that he wasn’t the only one who had accessed Central Authority’s network through this particular grey box. The black hat hacker had been here before!

Charlisle started caring less about the other hacker when he looked through CA’s information. They had a program called NeoWetware Optimization (NWO) that accessed all of the allegedly “private” information passing through peoples’ minds and routed it to Central Authority’s local headquarters. Despite assurances from the corporations that created and ran the “thought net” and the government with which they cooperated, mass surveillance was being performed on the minds of people in The City.

It was then that Charlisle felt a slender hand tap him on the shoulder. Turning around, the hacker’s face was met with a strong uppercut, breaking his nose.

“Would you like to explain yourself?” Elegance stood over the whimpering boy.

“You…you hit me,” he squeaked.

“And I will again if you don’t mind,” Elegance’s actions always aligned with her words.

“Please stop! I’m trying to catch a hacker,” Charlisle put his arms above his face in a defensive posture.

“I’m the hacker baka!”

“Really? I thought Prep was your group’s hacker?”

Elegance chuckled with her contagious laugh, “Prep’s an idiot! We always said she was the group’s hacker, but I am the one with the real computer skills. I’ve been hacking this gray box to prove CA’s surveillance program to the public. I thought I could make some cash selling this as a story to a news chain.”

“It didn’t seem that hard to hack their system,” Charlisle put his nose back into place with a grotesque snap.

“Getting in isn’t as hard as doing something when you’re in,” Elegance ran her fingers through her hair. “I’ve accessed their system three times, and I still don’t know how to get information out. Which reminds me, how long have you been in?”

“I don’t know, maybe five minutes,” a flash of understanding crossed Charlisle’s face.

A bright light suddenly engulfed both the hackers, as a police VTOL appeared overhead. Four troopers, two for each side of the alleyway, repelled down into the space from the hovering vehicle. They all carried SERs (sentient electron rifles), and they didn’t look happy. Elegance cast Charlisle a strange glance and then pulled a gravity knife from her back pocket.

“Son of a…” Charlisle never expected this side of Elegance to be so, ferocious.

Leaping forward and pushing the closest trooper’s gun aside, the female hacker punched the man in the throat with her knife’s handle. Rolling into him, she pointed his arm at the two troopers on the opposite end of the alley, his finger still pulling the trigger. Needles too say, those attackers wouldn’t be getting up again.

As the remaining officer turned to aim at Elegance, she dropped the first incapacitated man and stabbed the next assailant in the thigh, uncomfortably close to the crotch. She quickly pulled out the blade and caught the man’s gun arm between both of her forearms. With one arm close to his wrist and the other behind his elbow, she broke the man’s appendage with a hissing snap.

Feeling as if he had just exited a trance, Charlisle took hold of Elegance’s waist when she yelled, “grab on,” at him. Having pulled the repelling belt off of her latest victim, the girl hacker had it already around her torso. As the VTOL tried to leave the two were suddenly jerked into the air, and Elegance decided to kick in the face of the recovering man who had been her human shield earlier.

Whoever flew the hovering vehicle decided to sling the hanging kids into the brick walls that lined the alleyway, but Elegance’s newly appropriated harness quickly ranked the two youth up into the VTOL when activated. Charlisle sat back panting after he had been flung into the ship. He hated heights.  Elegance quickly cut off her harness and stalked to the front of the vehicle. Charlisle could hear a fear punches, followed by the sight of the craft’s pilot falling into the alley below.

              “Do you know how to fly one of these?” Charlisle ran up to the cockpit and sat down in the empty copilot’s seat.

             
Elegance already had a hacking program out, and a second later, the doors to the repelling bay closed. “Sure how hard could it be,” she laughed.

             
As the streets zipped by, Charlisle felt his heart beat in his chest, but not from fear. Looking at Elegance he knew that his crush on her had not been a misplaced one. Even though his job with the CA was definitely shot, he found something even better – the girl of his dreams. Of course, his fantasy girl also kept a knife leveled at him as they flew out of the Gorse.

Episode 5: “
Dream Off”

              “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” – Albert Einstein

             
Turbulent weather had little effect on most of the structures located in the upper class areas of The City, yet years of decay had left the Sacco Sarcology Research Institute with its share of leaks and drafty hallways. Declan Ikelos could hardly believe that this aging school required 87,500 ECUs in student tuition annually. As he read about the process by which fibroblasts produced hyaluronan, the freshman felt even more put off by the archaic way in which he was expected to learn new material. For the past 40 years, people all over The City had the option of uploading information directly into their minds, yet some fields still stressed a degree received through traditional means.

             
The Sacco Sarcology Research Institute was one of five educational centers devoted to the study of sarcology, and it was also the cheapest one. For some reason Declan couldn’t even fathom, majors in sarcology were still forced to learn through the “textbook method.” Rainy conditions always caused migraines in this young man, so he decided to take the day off early and skip his Rheology 333 class. He would easily ace the course’s upcoming evaluations anyway.

On the way to the institute’s bicycle parking lot, Declan passed a vending machine that immediately pointed out recommended drinks for a “parched customer.” The small camera at the top of the machine had quickly identified him, and it possessed a lengthy list of drinks he had purchased previously. Bottled Oronamin C drink, Calpis and Apple Sidra received the greatest
endorsement on the vending machine’s digital projection screen. With a mental signal, Declan activated the payment chip located in his brain and purchased a bottle of Calpis. The bill would be included with the price for his monthly mental call, using up “telep. minutes” as a consequence.

Nanotubes in Declan’s skull activated his music playlist according to his mood, and "Kōjō no Tsuki" by Rentarō Taki began to play. The calming strains appeased his aching head to some degree. Of course, he would have much greater metaphorical mig
raines over the next few days.

Declan Ikelos experienced far more anxiety on a regular basis than was good for him. With his prefecture’s Dream Off slated for that Saturday, the student only had four more days to prepare for the meet. Climbing onto his Sturgmeister 7000 bicycle, Declan barely kept his attention on the road. He turned over in his mind the disturbing lack of creativity his REM sleep had produced as of late. Mr. Diop would not have good things to say at their evening’s s
ession.

Lost in his own troublesome thoughts, Declan nearly crashed into an automobile as it left the Prefecture 34 Community Hospital’s parking lot. The vehicle’s livid driver, a large man with a nice suit adorned with a holographic name tag, stepped out of his car long enough to give the bicyclist a tongue lashing. Declan gathered that the angry man’s name was Devon Globa, and he had just had a brother put i
n the
hospital by an accident
.

After listening to Devon’s several minute rant about safety, Declan made his way to his father’s hospital room, eager to see improvement in the aging man’s condition. As usual, his hopes were disappointed.

Prokofiev Ikelos had been in a coma for the past two years, after suffering from a VTOL crash in Prefecture 32. As was the usual custom in The City, the family’s insurance company found a loophole in their policy, saddling Declan with an exorbitant debt. Mrs. Ikelos had killed herself only five months before his dad’s accident, meaning that Declan was essentially an orphan, with a terrible reason to suspect that the recent crash had not been the result of bad luck. Without siblings or any close relatives to speak of, save an annoying cousin, Declan had to take care of himself and his father. As he mused on his unfortunate fate, the one person he disliked the most decided to show her face.

Vernice Schmaltz was only Declan’s second cousin, once removed, yet she took it upon herself to “cheer” him up whenever possible.

“Hello Dec,” Vernice said as she sauntered into his father’s room. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

“Yeah, about what?” Declan cast his gaze at the room’s well-polished floor, as if failing to make eye contact with the woman would give her reason to leave.

“I found this great Readj. Center in Prefecture 22’s mental calling list,” she shoved a brochure into the young man’s hands. “They could help you cope with the
problem
your father’s accident has caused you.”

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times,” Declan tossed the pamphlet aside in contempt, “I won’t let a computer play with my emotions!”

“For a science major, you certainly are behind the times,” Vernice only chuckled, oblivious to her cousin’s frustration.

“I won’t involve myself in that type of
science
,” Declan sighed. “Human emotions shouldn’t be altered by machines. How is a device supposed to tell me what does and does not constitute the proper emotional balance? The worst invention humankind could have possibly made is a machine that alters our emotions.”

“But my dear Declan,” Vernice pinched the student’s cheeks a little too forcefully; “All the elites go to Readj. Centers. Is it really so bad? Entertainment alters our emotions, substances change them, and even the food we eat plays a roll. Why is downloadi
ng happiness such a big deal?”

“I’m not about to sell my soul to the Devil, as it were, for your or anyone else’s benefit,” Declan pushed past the woman and made his way to the elevator just down the hallway, his cousin hot on his heels with another brochure.

“Please,
dear
” Declan called out to Vernice as the elevator doors began to close, “help some other guy.”

***

“Your dreams are as trite as the advertisements on Suerte Boulevard,” Mr. Diop gave Declan a half-hearted smack on the back of his head.

As far as dream coaches (also known as “droaches” by their students) went, Savant Diop was of the stricter sort. Already in his late nineties, the short, wiry man had incredible grip strength, so his student tried to hide a grimace as he was taken firmly by the hand and led to the nearby psychiatrist’s style couch.

Declan had chosen this aging man as his mentor for one simple reason – he knew exactly what he was talking about. Dream Off competitions didn’t even exist in Diop’s younger years, and he refused to enter them now. What he lacked in actual experience in the tournaments, he made up for with his own capacity for lucid dreaming and encyclopedic knowledge of past Dream Off champions. When Declan first found the elderly man, he was an impoverished Okichitaw instructor. It seemed that aspiring martial artists did not want to learn from a man who looked like he was knocking on death’s door. Declan’s training had been a mutually beneficial arrangement, lifting Diop out of poverty and giving the young man an edge he wouldn’t find elsewhere.

Champions of Dream Offs past were not always lucid dreamers. The real requirement for winning was the demonstration of the most unique and original dream, which normally meant those with the craziest mental imagery. Lucid dreaming was a skill that developed with practice. Declan would need all the help he could get to beat his rival Nyx Penumbra. She had bested him the year before, when her mind somehow conjured a landscape as haunting as paintings from Zdzisław Beksiński’s “fantastic period.” Declan still had suspicions that this young woman had used drugs to develop a habit for such nightmares, but her tests demonstrated a lack of substance abuse, just like the other contestants.

   “Give me ya money,” Diop’s pet Yellow-naped parrot, Prolix, snapped its beak at the reclining Declan. “No one needs to get hurt.”

“Sorry about that,” Diop moved the bird and his cage to another part of his small apartment. “He picked up some undesirable phrases on the street.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Declan cast a disapproving look at the parrot.

“Looking at the dreams you have recorded since our last session, you have had a significant reduction in interesting imagery,” the teacher flipped through the “illustrations” on an old-fashioned computer screen. He was so poor that he couldn’t even afford to have nanotubes placed in his brain.

“I’ve been keeping a dream journal, watching intense movies before bed, taking Galantamine pills, listening to meditation music…what more do I have to do?” Declan could afford to be openly frustrated with his droach. He was paying him after all.

“Have you allowed yourself to daydream regularly,” Mr. Diop asked calmly.

“Well yes, no…I don’t have time for daydreams.”

“The result of an education at that scientific institute of yours no doubt,” the old man shook his head.

“I can’t help it,” Declan sat upright; “I can’t drop out of school. I wouldn’t be good in a career other than the sciences.”

“The competition is in a few days,” Diop stroked his chin, a clear sign that he was thinking of a solution. “Well run through one sleeping session and see what comes up.”

Declan agreed and reclined fully on the couch, allowing his body to relax. He had enough experience falling asleep that he transitioned into a restful state quickly. Of course, that was when Prolix started crying from across the room.

“Fork it over, squawk, fork it over,” the infernal creature flapped about in its cage.

“Give me a moment,” Diop said as he walked over to the parrot.

Setting an empty fish bowl next to the bird’s cage, the man picked up his pet and turned him upside down in the aquarium. Prolix squirmed around, but his squawking was blocked out by the plastic walls around him.

“Can he breathe like that,” Declan stifled a chuckle.

“Don’t worry, I’ll only leave him in their long enough for you to get to sleep,” Mr. Diop handed his student a small plastic cup
with two sleeping pills in it.

About an hour and a half later, Declan was pulled out of the darkness of REM sleep by an alarm. He immediately took up a pencil and pad of paper, as archaic items as they were, and wrote down what he had just experienced.

“Something…about penguins,” the young man ran his fingers through his red hair with his free hand. “There was lots of ice…and penguins that had a primitive underground city.”

“Well, maybe you’ll win the award for the most
humorous dream,” Diop sighed.

“Why not?” Declan turned to his instructor. “Nyx has dark nightmares that impress people every year, and many champions of the past won with the weirdness of their dreams. Maybe some strange levity would win over the judges.”