The Wake Up Call (part 1.18)
Chapter 1.18: Reflection
The heavy security door hung more heavy and secure than ever. Its fingers of bolts returning into cold frame of the technician's lab. The faint drone from holograms seemed to boom like over-amp'd whale song during a heavy metal concert. Dust and thoughts filled the room with an uneasy presence. It was an atmosphere of sorrow, of regret and loss. The bulky hi-tech benches and sprawling wigs of colour-coded cables had now given up their company and their magic of entertainment, of being a being; or at least a virtual substitute for one.
Footsteps pounded from the hard floor as a dark, slouching figure crossed it. It threw off its damp outer trench coat and left a trail of mud prints behind. The rays of coloured light traced out the silhouette of a tall, long haired man cradling his head in his hand. He watched the auto droid draw a polygon round the room. It's motors whirled at each turning point before accelerating at an angle.
* BEEP * INCOMING TRANSMISSION *
The figure looked up with an expression of fatigue.
"Vid: Ident." he muttered.
The main view screen awoke into action. Over a background of trance-inducing images and movement a tracer overlay window popped up and begin its semi-auto procedure. A myriad of nodes, of trees and of domain hashing searches began.
The figure sat there impatiently, drumming his old, blistered fingers on the arm-rest of his favourite chair. A glance above and to both sides of the main screen gave him all the information he needed.
"Vid: Bandwidth split. Reconnect and init quant-decipher."
The keyboard chatted away like an army of irate beetles beneath his ash fingers, chewing away in a well rehearsed scheme at the almost blank lettered keys. Their aged micro springs barely managing to pop back into place before another digit struck them.
* BEEP * INCOMING TRANSMISSION *
He had to work fast. The caller would either bail out of the connection or flood it with erroneous noise in an attempt to play hardball. The lines of data cascaded down to be refilled with route maps, EQ graphs and a home-brew sniffer matrix.
* BEEP * CALLER POLYMORPH AGENT DETECTED
"Fuck!"
The figure shifted position in the chair, perching on the edge like an expectant hen, ready to lay a golden data egg. Who ever the caller was, he had some cutting edge hardware and was eager to show it off.
"Vid: Reduce line gain. Com: Geo-trace using sat-1 tap."
* BEEP * CONNECTION REFUSED.
The long, damp hair danced along the spacebar as the figure's body twisted and crouched over the keyboard. The multi-screen display now seemed to be ambushing him. The data traffic was becoming unusable. It was an avalanche of input that was proving too much for the custom filters.
* BEEP * SECURE LATCH CORRUPT. ACCESS DENIED.
Sub-window after sub-window froze its visual assault. The system was collapsing and nothing could be done. The figure looked in horror as tasks failed, firewalls were bombarded with malformed packets, protection schemes locked up and tracer bots fell over. A few heavy sighs and repeated hits to the application launch hot-keys produced nothing.
"Oh fuck it!"
* BEEP * You have 23 million, 817 thousand and 5 new messages.
The large, red 'panic' button on the side of the desk was hit hard with his fist.
"System: burn core-dump and connection logs."
The main video screen lit up with a vertical progress cylinder which charted the progress of the storage devices. At least he would have a report of this overwhelming attack, something for later, something to digest and to analyse in minute detail. For the time being he could only wait. Wait for the system to reboot.
He stood upright, stretched him spine and snapped his neck in circles. The painful clicks from his bones only helped to reinforced his defeat at the keyboard. A small, glass capsule appeared from his pocket. After a twist, its strong narcotics were sucked up each nostril with a violent snatch of breath. The room span in a defocused tornado for a second or more before re-phazing into a sharp, stable image.
* BEEP * Storage limit exceeded.
"How the hell can you exceed a limit? Crap-hole system."
The sharp rain outside drove against the windows like a washing line full of doors all slamming shut. Nature itself, aroused by the technologic storm inside, now continued the attack from outside. The clouds of pollution fumbled between the rotating advertisement board giving them a ghostly veil of grey dust and coloured hologram stitching. It was a bizarre, unreal and unnerving apparition beyond the thick, vertical window recesses of the lab wall. The noise from the frantic pedestrians and a thousand taxi-pods could now be heard for the first time over the quietened network system. Shuttles raced overhead with V.I.P. passengers all desperate to arrive for an important business meeting before the acidic rain could have chance to burn a hole in their transport-pods and their designer suits.
The figure walked around. Only pausing to step over the automatic droid he looked through the thick protective glass and watched the chaotic scenes around him. Flickering neon signs and floating street vendor delivery barges intertwined their own paths through the weather, the giant skyscrapers and the troop juggernauts. Each one avoiding a collision with what seemed like only millimeters to spare. He wondered how many of those onboard navigation networks he had hacked or repaired over the years. But like the amount of traffic, and data traffic, he had to admit defeat, the numbers where simply too big to be either memorable or interesting.
He pressed his head against the cool glass. The vibrations from the rain and sound waves outside felt like a cheap massage, something he could get 24-7 from any sleazy club on every block of the city. His eyes wandered. He scanned the streams of taxi-pods and wondered how many executives were either on their way to a high-class prostitute or on their way back from a high-class prostitute.
It was a fact that every business 'employed' the services of both and male and female 'pleasers' for their important, deal-makers. It was marked on most expensive accounts as 'office stationary' or some other non-descript item. 'Accidental damages' was another favourite. A cocktail of drugs, sex, corruption and power-games featured heavy in most offices. The real 'go-getter' individuals were highly prized and highly paid for their often ruthless methods. Bribery, exorcism, violence and black-mail weren't so much regarded as crimes, but more of useful additions to an individual's skill-set, something to improved their career chances of quick promotion.
* BEEP * SYSTEM BACK ON-LINE
The figure watched the rain tumble down the thick, prisms of glass in front of past his pale, chemical marked face. A sweeping light beam of an approaching fast-food barge caught his face. It was Splice. The drugs in his system made his pupils slow to react to the white light. The blood stained eyes pushed his eyelids out of the way as he looked up at the barge. Its long, metal frame hung heavy in the air like a helium filled family of elephants all running away to join the circus. The customers and staff inside this floating dinner were too engrossed in their food or in their own lives to notice the stoned figure standing in the window only a few metres away from them.
He talked to himself about recent events. Not only about his defeat, but the McKaff brothers and his dead partner-in-crime, Trimble, whose corpse was probably face down into some toxic pond, or half buried in some industrial dumpster. Death is a fact of life. The McKaffs made this fact all too apparent. Live life for the moment. Take what you can and hide the rest for rainy day; and that day had arrived. He thought he had become oblivious to pain, to those random acts of brutality, to greed and all the bullshit of everyday life on the block. But he was wrong. That crazy, steroid-filled skin-head punk Trimble had been a loyal friend. How many others would have stood by his side when the shit hit the fan? Splice looked over his shoulder and glanced at the large coffin-shaped box in the corner, the one Trimble had managed to drag all the way across town by himself. Its metal and polymer skin glistened in the reflected light from the main video screen. They had to pay. One way or another, the McKaffs had to pay.
"You owe me, big time and I aim to collect.. soon!" he swore to himself.
That tall, mysterious crate would have been a well timed delivery of credits. With Trimble's help it would have netted them both a few thousand credits each, but now it was near worthless. Time wasn't on his side. Soon his talents would be outdated by some younger, quicker and better skilled tech. Retirement was a vile sounding word. He made him feel old, much older than he wanted. Fewer and fewer illegal jobs had come his way over the past few months and he feared this was due to someone muscling in on his regular trade in banned hardware and other smart hacking toys. The Tek Emporium had endured an higher than average number of attacks by both security forces and other gangs wanting to snatch a piece of the profit pie for themselves.
* BEEP * SYSTEM READY
He felt the red beam of laser light through his eyelid and his cheek. He turned back to see the unmistakable line of a sniper's targeting beam. The red dot bounced up and down across his face. It would only be a fraction of a second before something hard, metal, hot and deadly would replace its unsteady glow.
Across the street, through the curtains of dull, seagull rain, stood an assassin standing on a wall ledge. His head cocked to one side, balanced on his shoulder and the rifle's sights. The water fell from the barrel like the tears from a lost child.
ZIP, ZIP, ZIP....
A magazine of shells tore through the hazardous air, piercing the weather and far window with an accurate punch. This waterfall of spent ammo overflowed from the rifle and arranged itself into a lethal bonfire of emptiness. The long, heavy coat of the assassin dripped with the evidence of his action, of gun oil and rust promoting rain. A flick of a thumb was the sign to release the empty magazine and to make ready his escape into the near, vacant city streets below him. A few seconds of watery silence passed while the rifle was concealed in the coat. Floating barges and taxi-pods drifted by, unaware of the primed killer. He watched emotion-less as a small child looked at him from the back of a transit bus. His face washed with dirty, pollutant soaked water and the expression of the little girl. There was a matter-of-fact coldness to this task, this act of murder which occupied the girl's attention, at least until the bus passed a brightly animated advertisement board. The sight of seeing an assassination couldn't compare against the latest hologramic cartoon. For this he was thankful. He stooped down, grabbed the slippery shells and pocketed them. This was more of a trophy than a desire to destroy any evidence.
This gun carrying man was a 'capper', the slang term for a shadowy person who carries out Capital execution-like tasks in public for large amounts of credits. Their true skill is not in the actual killing but in the aftermath, making it look like another gang-land shooting or freakish accident. Often these ghostly killers fade into the background leaving a plausible situation instead of a crime-scene. A gang of mercenaries trained in the art of deception and confusion could easily take down entire blocks in a matter of hours. And there were plenty of business men who knew this. These assassins were equal-opportunity employees, no matter what the race, religion, gender or status a target was they would snuff out a life without questions, so long as the credits were right.
The sprawling city streets descended into darkness. The heavy rain clouds pre-fetched nightfall. What little of the natural sunlight there was in the autumn sector of the year was now being extinguished by the smog invoked atmosphere. Waves of artificial lighting broke out across the city. Grimy walkways glowed with vomit hued yellow from a hundred light boxes. Reflections from the wet surfaces helped to hide the bleakness of the city blocks. They took on a false, amusement arcade facade with every component of the spectrum played out in a thousand puddles of rain. The neon signs and constantly evolving adverts made it into a gigantic pinball game in which pimps and prostitutes were the pinballs, bouncing from taxi-pod to taxi-pod in search of a new client and credits. The driving springs on these human pucks were the need of greed, or the draw of drugs.
The assassin pushed his way through a crowded night-club. It was another clone of another cloned structure which occupied every other city block. A mass designed and mass produced building whose only purpose was one of making maximum profit out of its customers. The shabby decor hid its money making potential. Crime lords control 90% of these entertainment places and the other 10% have been burnt down the previous week for non-payment of protection money. The clients in this meeting places could be broken into buyers, sellers, users or abusers, sometimes a mixture of all four. No-one asked too many questions in drinking places like these and for good reason. The walls were baked in dry blood and bullet holes. Questions meant enforcement officers. And these rarely seen individuals were hated by many citizens more than the drug pushers. At least with pushers you could forget about your current situation. You could lose yourself from the existence of day-to-day hardship and taste some pill-paradise, so long as you had enough credits.
Credits. That's what it was all about. Gaining just enough to survive without gaining too many that for someone wants to 'tax' you for them in a dark alleyway.
The killer entered a claustrophobic maze at the back of the night-club. Amongst the vandalised communications boxes, the spaced out narcos, the hard-men beating the shit out of some unfortunate person and the old sleazy men looking for cheap sex was a working vid-phone. The sides of the box plastered with obscene drawings, pornographic hologram calling cards and broken hypos stuck in the wall like a badly injured porcupine. The vid-screen had long since been wreaked by either some violent pimp or someone traveller on a bad drugs trip. The assassin inserted a credit into the scratched metal slot. The sound of a recently emptied collection tray greeted it with a hollow thud. Another small fight broke out behind him. One of the narcos was attempting to steal some boots of a sleeping customer, only to be stopped by a volatile bouncer.
"It's done."
A narco interrupted the conversation.
"Hey man. I want some credits. I want some credits now!"
The assassin turned, head-butted the junkie in the face and continued talking as if nothing had happened.
"I've done my side of the bargain, now do yours."
The narco squirmed around on the floor until the assassin pressed his boot across his neck causing the addict to gasp out for breath.
* BEEP * TRANSACTION COMPLETE.
"Good. Real Good."
The assassin's hand hovered near the disconnect pad, ready to strike out and kill the com link.
"Interested in some more work?"
"Depends."
The voice on the vid-phone laughed.
"Don't worry, you will be rewarded."
"So, who is the bunny?"
A crowd of drunken customers pushed their way through the small, badly-lit room and into a side room filled with more dodgy looking characters. No doubt another shady deal was going down in there, some illegal barter in human trade or drugs.
"When and where?"
"Now, how fast can you reach junction 58?"
"Depends."
"You fucking mercenaries are all the same."
"You know a better way to solve your 'little' problem? You still haven't told me who the bunny is? Don't tell me the 'employee of the month' ran away with your piggy bank?"
"Don't get cute."
"It will take close to an hour to reach the bridge."
"Better move your lazy ass then. You've got a date with destiny. The Destiny Bridge that is. And a word of warning."
"Yeah, what?"
"The sleazy individual you're standing on has all the details. Messengers aren't what they used to be. I thought you might like the human-touch of a real person rather than an anonymous text on a vid-screen."
The killer punched the disconnect pad.
"Asshole."
he uttered, before turning his attention to the unconscious narco under his boot. Each pocket was systematically raided for it's contents. After a few moments of searching a small, brown, paper envelope was recovered. The vid-link closed down and the assassin kicked the junkie before disappearing into the night-club and then beyond it, back into the gloomy city streets outside. The temperature, like the cold-blooded killer, quickly evaporated into the darkness, to seek out some secret corner until invoked once again.
TO BE CONTINUED...