NEON Calico, page 5
By the time I am finally back to full functionality and on my feet again, Pixie has been under for about seven hours. She’s still zoned out on her mattress, headset still hooked up, swimming those digital seas. There is a readout on one of the monitors next to her that displays her vitals. She’s still going strong, heart-rate normal and brain-waves looking solid. The system is set to automatically alert my N-link if things start looking hairy, but I still like to check on her. Speaking of, its way past time I did that. Link Pixie.
[[ESTABLISHING LINK... LINK ESTABLISHED]]
How’s it going, Pix? I ask her, watching as her reply comes scrolling across my field of vision even as I pick it up audibly through the link.
[[PIXIE: I’VE GOT SOMETHING. MAYBE. CONFIRMING WITH DAD NOW. IT LOOKS LIKE IT’S AN R&D LAB OF SOME KIND. CAN’T DIG IN TOO FAR. THEIR FIREWALL IS CRAZY GOOD AND THEIR RESPONSE IS PRETTY BRUTAL. THIS ISN’T GOING TO BE A ONE-SLICER HACK, CALLY. IF THIS IS IT, WE’RE GONNA NEED HELP.]]
I cringe. Bringing in help always has its own set of problems, but I trust her. If she says she needs help, she needs help. How many? I ask.
She’s quiet. Looking down at her, I can see her fingers twitching just a little bit. In the virtual space, I’m sure she’s rockin’ out, flying like a super-hero across the digital sky, but here her body is little more than an anchor to that free-flowing mind. It’s why she doesn’t sling that well in the real. She feels too weighed down. Too restricted. It makes her nervous. I can scan that. That’s another reason I handle the meat-side of our operations. Dealing in the real just makes her anxious. A lot of slicers are like that. Gods in the machine but wrecks in the real, not able to cope with situations they can’t just drop-link out of and uncomfortable around people that can actually see their faces and not just their icons.
It takes her a while to reply. She’s doing the mental math of trying to figure out how large a team we’ll need without making it too large. Too few and the job can’t get done but drag in too many and the job is a bust from the get go. Not only do you have to deal with that whole “too many cooks in the kitchen” deal, but the more slicers you have cut their way into a system at once, the more likely all of them are to get scanned. Once a slicer is scanned in a corp archive, all they can do is get gone or get dead. Corp matrix protocol is nasty like that.
[[PIXIE: ONE MORE AT LEAST. I’D PREFER TWO, THOUGH.]]
She’s playing cautious. Two more. We can do two more. Okay, I tell her, I’ll see who I can dig up. I already have a couple guys in mind. Finally, this is something I can do.
- - -
First stop: the Brownstone.
The Brownstone is an old-fashioned, real-wood counter-top pub just outside of the city limits of the Chicago Metropolis. The lights are kept dim, there is retro-jazz music playing over the relic of a player they have hooked up, and they serve on-site distilled micro-brews that cost as much as full night on the town for a single glass. The whole place smells of hardwood, cigarette smoke, and hops. I’ve heard the term “hipster” used to describe it, but only by hipsters who don’t want to admit that they’re hipsters. It’s a nice place if you like things chill. It’s a bit too chill for my liking, too laid back. Calling a place “chill” is a nice way of saying “boring,” and I really don’t do boring. Nothing ever happens, but then I guess that’s the point. Some people need that sort of stability in their lives I guess.
I’m here for one of their regulars. He’s one of the old guard among troubleshooter slicers, one who – as far as I know – has kept his skills up to date. Here’s hoping. It’s murder to get rusty in this business, especially for slicers. Gear that is top of the line today is antiquated in a month, if not sooner, and the skills needed to make that tech sing for you are no different.
I see the man as soon as I walk into the bar. Hard to miss. He’s built like a football player, only he’s shorter than me, with slicked back hair, a dark Santa Clause beard that is starting to turn gray, and an eye-patch over his lefty. No obvious augs, but I know he’s packing a top-of-the-line N-link, there is a cybernetic prosthetic eye under that patch, and he’s got some heavy neural enhancements going on in his brain-space. That’s Cobol.
The bartender sees me come in and recognizes me. I used to be something of a regular of this place too when Cobol and I were part of the same crew. Not my choice. This is just where Cobol always wanted to meet and talk jobs, ordering his expensive-ass beer and overpriced steak-sandwiches. He claims they’re made of real meat, but I don’t believe it. Doctored up soy sold to chumps, if I were to guess. The bartender – I used to know his name, but can’t remember it now – sees me come in and taps on Cobol’s shoulder, motioning my way. This makes Cobol finally notice me. I’m probably one of the last people he’d expect to come around here anymore, given that we stopped working together, and judging by the dumbfounded look on his face I am probably one of the last people he expected to see today, period. Though, to be fair, he’s right. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t need him.
“Cally?” he exclaims, rising up from his bar-stool – the wood groaning with appreciation as he lifts himself off of it. Seriously, for a matrix-jockey Cobol is built like a truck.
“Hey, old man,” I say, putting on my friendliest face. “It’s been a while.” Cobol was part of the first crew Pixie and I ever ran with, but we weren’t his first. He’s been riding the waves, cracking firewalls, and making a name for himself since I was still trapped in my gilded cage back in Hong Kong as a kid. His first crew got geeked, all but him, and far as I can tell it took him a good few years to build up his confidence to get back in the game again. When he did, it was with us, but after Zak bit it and I lost my arm he didn’t have the heart for the life anymore and “retired.” The thing is, you never really get out of this kinda work. Case-in-point, “I need you’re help,” I tell him.
He shakes his head, already knowing full well why I’m here. “You know I’m retired, Cally.”
“Sure,” I say. “I also know you promised Pix and me that if we ever needed you, you’d be there for us. Well, I’m calling in that claim. We need you, Cobe.”
I hear him scoff as he turns back to the bar and downs that expensive beer he cherishes so much, ordering up another with glance at the bartender and a tap on the rim of his glass. “I’d hoped you had come to your senses after what happened, Cally. Get outta this life before it ends you.”
“Not happening,” I tell him. “I guess not,” he says as another beer is set in front of him.
“A bit early in the day to be hitting those back, isn’t it, old man?” I ask as he takes a long swig of his newest brew. “That can’t be good for someone of your years or, hell, anybody.” He’s pushing fifty at this point, which means he’s still got a good fifty or so years left in him most likely, assuming he doesn’t go for life extension gene-therapy which could easily buy him another fifty on top of that. Still, Pix and I were always the “young blood” of the crew while he was the “old man.”
“I’m retired,” he reminds me again. “Doesn’t really matter when I drink now, does it?”
“I guess not,” I admit. I move over to the seat next to him and have a seat, ordering one of whatever the heck he’s having. I’m not much for beer, but it’s what they serve here and it gives me the excuse I need to both stick around and not have to say another word. I’ll just let the silence hang in the air between old Cobol and me and see where that takes us. If he’s still the jazz slicer I know he is, he’ll cave.
…
…
…
He lets out a sigh. “Okay, what’s the gig?”
Score! There’s one.
- - -
Next stop: Ground ZERO!
With a name like Ground ZERO! you’d think that the place would be jumpin’ but nothing could be further from the truth. A morgue would be more lively. Ground ZERO! is a matrix club, meaning that all that is going down out here in the real is a bunch of tech-head wannabes plugging themselves into off-the-shelf, old-school matrix pods, and strolling the ‘trix looking for some digital tail or playing the latest VR sim game to hit the no longer existing shelves. When you walk in you get scanned for any sort of virus you might be bringing into the joint. If you’re a cyborg like me, that means you gotta let them plug in and run a quick sweep of your systems. Invasion of privacy much?
Yanking the cord out of my N-link port I pull it taught before letting it go, causing it to spool back into the hand-held virus scanner the buzzed out matrix junkie working the front held out for me. Girls don’t dig places like this very often – which is why his nothing-going-on-inside gaze hasn’t lifted from my chest since I first walked in – since your body goes all into dream when you ride the digital waves. I know I wouldn’t trust these tech-heads with my unconscious body.
“I’m looking for Gadget,” I tell guy. “I hear he hangs here.” The awkward silence that follows makes my skin crawl. Seriously, guy, blink or something! “Yo!” I say as I snap my ceramic fingers in front of the guy’s face. “Gadget. Is he here?” This guy is totally riding some heavy doses of dream or something. He’s totally zoned.
Not all that eager to waste any more of my time I head on in to the sea of matrix pods that fill this place like the cabinets in an old, retro arcade. There are close to fifty of them here, lining the walls, and only about five or so of them are currently listed occupado by the holo-notices floating next to them. Places like this are a rarity anymore. Most people who want to experience full VR can do so from the comfort of their own home these days. Hell, if you’ve got an N-link, all you need is Matrix access and a place to lay down. Even for virgins like Pixie, the gear needed to go VR isn’t that expensive or hard to come by. It’s like how people stopped going out to trid-shows once it became more reasonable to set up a trid-projector in your house. Even so, there are some people who just dig the whole pod experience, I guess. These things are old-school matrix ‘ware. First gen VR tanks. Top of the line about thirty years ago, back when VR was still a new wave. Now they are little more than relics. Hell, I’m surprised half of these things still work. I’d be afraid of fritzing my brain out plugging into one of these. You’d never catch me dead in one.
Law-jockeys like to claim places like this are hacker dens, that troubleshooter slicers come together, working out of these old tubes, to pull off big jobs against the various corps. Nothing could be further from the truth. No slicer in their right mind would work out of a place like this. It’s too obvious and the tech is too outdated. Note: I said any slicer “in their right mind.” Gadget ain’t quite that.
Making my way past the procession of pods, I head into the back. There is a sign that says “Employees Only” but there is nobody to stop me. Word is that if you want to find Gadget, this is where he’ll be.
Good to see my intel is solid.
Gadget is a true pretty-boy slicer. Seriously, he’s got that whole “teen-pop star” look going for him even though he’s likely in his mid-to-late twenties by now. He could easily play a teen heartthrob in a trid, but that would just be a waste of his talents. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by all sorts of disassembled tech. I can identify part of one of those matrix tubes, a couple of monitors, some head-ware, and a whole bunch of other junk. He’s so into whatever the hell he’s trying to piece together that he doesn’t even seem to hear me come in.
“Hey, Calico,” he says all of a sudden without even looking up.
Or not.
“Hey, Gaj,” I say, doing my best not to seem surprised. “Been good?”
“Mostly. Fried out the CPU of my rig trying to... do a thing. What brings you to Ground ZERO!?”
“You do,” I tell him.
He stops what he’s doing, glancing up as though trying to remember something. “Do I owe you cred?” he asks.
Oh, the temptation to lie is so real. “Not that I know,” I tell him, brushing that devil off my shoulder.
“Did we have a job planned?”
“We don’t run together,” I remind him. He and I are acquaintances within the trade, not partners. We’ve never run on the same team before, and that is likely a good thing for me. His crew tends to get into a lot more trouble than mine ever did and they tend to take bigger jobs. Sure, they get paid more, but that also means bullets fly at them more often. Of course, given my luck of late...
“So what are you doing here?” he asks, seeming to run out of other possibilities for my being here.
“I need your help,” I say, launching into my pitch. “I need slicers to hack into a Dynast Group facility to see what’s being housed there and then to run over-watch while I go in and get it. Got most of a crew set up already, but could really use someone with your skills, man. What do you say?”
“Dynast Group,” he repeats as he goes back to work on his tech-toy. “That’s a heavy run, Calico. Big risk. What’s the reward?”
“Cred,” I tell him, “and for me, it’s personal. Family stuff.”
He chuckles. “I always forget you are a corp-born.” He’s one to talk. From what I hear, Gadget was a rich kid who just got bored. Not that I’d hold that against him. The guy’s got skill and that’s really all that matters. “Who’s on the team?”
“My girl, Pixie, knowing her, probably also her dad, Arc. I’ve also got Cobol, plus you,” I tell him.
“Quite the local slicer dream team,” he says, pulling out a couple of wires with a rather intense grunt of effort. “That’s a lot of matrix muscle. What do you expect to find?”
I shake my head, letting my color-changing hair wave in front of my face a bit. “No idea,” I admit. “Pix said the firewall on that place is hardcore though, so whatever it is it’s gotta be big.”
“Snatch-and-grab or smash?”
“Snatch, most likely. Don’t know quite yet. Depends on what it is.”
“Counter hacks?”
“No idea,” I say.
“Not a lot to go on, Calico,” he says. “You’re asking me to take a pretty big risk here.” He’s not wrong. Slicing a high-grade corp firewall is dangerous. Their firewalls are more “fire” than “wall,” and will fry a slicer’s brain if they aren’t careful. Not only that, but even once they are past the firewall, a corp host is going to be loaded up with ice. That’s I.C., Intrusion Countermeasures, nasty seek-and-destroy programs that are meant to look for anyone who might have slipped by the firewall and do really, really bad things to their brains by overloading their neural connections. The more a slicer pushes, the more info they try to swipe or crash, the higher the risk that they’ll get burned. In the matrix the only thing you have to burn is your brain.
I sit down on the floor outside of his little circle of gadgets and gizmos and come clean. “Look, man, I know I’m asking a lot here and you don’t owe me drek, but here I am. You do this for me and I’ll make sure you get paid. Not only that, I’ll owe you big. Real big.” Favors. Favors are the real currency in this gig. When a troubleshooter calls on another troubleshooter for help the biggest exchange between them isn’t a cred swap, it’s who owes who a favor. It’s bad biz to welch on a favor owed, nothing ruins your rep faster, and it’s also a risk to owe someone a favor as they can call you in on that for whatever they want. It may sound stupid and even kind of old fashioned, but that’s the way things work. Call it honor amongst thieves and, for what it is worth, it’s enough to make Gadget consider my proposal.
He chuckles. “Why the heck not. Sounds fun. I’m in, Cally.”
There’s two. I am so grinning like an idiot right now. I’d hug him, but he’s looking like he’s way more into his toys than he is me.
- - -
Come evening I’m back at the Brownstone. Lucky me. Cobol insisted we meet up there to talk the job. He’s already there when Pixie, Arc, and I arrive and Gadget shows up a few minutes later. Cobol takes us into the back of the tavern where there is a private room that Pix and I are all too familiar with, being no strangers to planning sessions with Cobol. It’s just like old times for us. I don’t quite know if that’s a good thing or not.
Everyone takes a seat. We all have a beer put in front of us, again at Cobol’s insistence, and we decide its time to get this little club meeting started.
“The Dynast Group firewall is top of the line,” Arc, Pixie’s dad, explains. “It is going to take us a lot of time to slip through it and hammering it down isn’t an option. We’ll all fry long before we even put a dent in the thing.” Arc has a real classic bad-boy look to him. Messy hair, a constant five o’clock shadow, dark clothes, and a real “I don’t care” attitude, only he can really pull off. He was probably hot as hell back in his prime, but now he just looks sort of run down and tired, like he’s carried the world for a while and it’s finally time to hand it off to someone else. He’s a good guy but a bit out of his league. A decade ago he was high end, one of the best of the best, but now his skills aren’t quite up to par. What this means is that he’s good to have on standby, acting as support and helping coordinate things, but the real matrix-muscle in the room are the three other slicers sitting across from him; his daughter, Cobol, and Gadget. Everyone knows that, even him, and that can’t be an easy thing to admit.
