Bridge / Claire Deluna
She hasn’t even place the tap yet and someone or something is pinging her, searching for a chink, a vulnerability in her code where a tracer can be attached. She tries to not let it bother her as she waits for Maxi to scan the server code for a vulnerable hook.
“Were in,” says Maxi, finally. “Here comes the flood, hon.”
The datastream flashes by on her VR overlay. It’s intermediate level code; she will have to get Stan to examine it more closely, but even with her relatively untrained eyes, she makes out some of the references: grid nodes for one; some she recognizes as high security government and corporate pipes; references to something called Sweetland; more references to Sweetland. A code word maybe?
“Tracer,” says Maxi with urgency.
Shit. She’s waited too long. As she shuts down the tap, she feels electricity shoot up her spine, a vague shock that ends at the base of her skull. Her head feels as though it’s about to burst, and pixels scatter into a rainbow of static. Without warning, she finds herself sitting on her virtual office floor, her real-life head throbbing.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Something trig’d your mods, hon—tried to boot you right out the back door, so I pulled you.”
Maxi speaks in a syrupy Appalachian drawl. The beautiful, middle-aged brunette with a no-nonsense demeanor stands in the doorway behind Claire’s desk. Claire’s assistant, Maxine Magnolia was programmed by KT Willow, one of the best hackers on the planet. She’s more sophisticated and trustworthy than your typical out-of-the-box concierge, and she’s specially coded for the PI biz, a package with access to a number of corporate, law enforcement, and DHS databases. If anyone can protect her butt, it’s Maxi.
“How deep did they go?”
“Might have compromised your alias.”
“Shit. Any data on its origins?”
“Negative, darlin’.”
“But we captured some good code?”
“Couple hundred k.”
“Okay, Maxi. I need you to trace those pipes. I also want to find out everything we can about Mitologías and Futures, LLC in connection with something called Sweetland. Do a level six matrix search. Any possible relationship at all to our investigation, I want to know what we’re looking at here.”
“I’ll get right on it, darlin’. You know Maxi never sleeps.” Maxi winks and disappears through her door.
—
It was supposed to be a quickie, a simple in and out, a parent corporation checking up on its kids; that’s what Bigshot told her, that’s what she knew how to do best. But Claire Deluna feared the job had transformed into something else, something more difficult and dangerous. The damn pipes passing through the Bolivarian firewalls had trig’d feelers before she was even close. Not by a mile.
The Mitologías SA backend connected to a complex maze of pipes carrying data between a number of discreet servers. Some or most of those servers were behind the so-called Jalapeño Firewall, a tricky gate to crash. She’d copied the node information for Maxi to google and decided to attempt a capture at the faucet. The faucet—the point where quantum encrypted data translated into readable code—is really the only option, unless you can find a leaky joint to exploit. These guys would have impeccable plumbing. Of course, they would have known about her presence the instant she intercepted the quantum encryption key and rerouted the datastream. That was a given. But how did they get that tracer on her so damned fast? And how the hell did they trig her mods to send a shockwave through her body?
She hadn’t even seen it coming. Was she was getting sloppy? She remembered when she had started out, a mere girl, she had expected backend snooping to be like the glamorous depictions in those cyber novels back at the Turn, but there were no whirling datastreams or fancy icons taking up unnecessary bandwidth here, no complex avatars slowing down your code; that was gamer fantasy, and this was the work world. Her simple toolkit displayed a VRO grid with nodes and gateways, labeled when the data was available, but mostly anonymous. She was no code expert, but she knew enough to access the proper gateways, recognize patterns, and eventually find the files she needed. It was the adrenalin factor, though, the excitement of waiting in the shadows watching, slipping in undetected to ferret out secrets, knowing you might be caught in a bad place, that’s what had made the game fun. But now she was no longer so sure of herself. She had been in hard places before, but her targets had been small players, not transnational corporations.
Now she would have to wait for Maxi to run the search. Claire made her way to her old, battered forties couch, with stuffing spilling from the tear in the cushion. She had spent hours getting every detail of her office just right, including stains, paper-strewn desk, overflowing ashtray, half-empty whiskey bottle. Her clients, those few who actually came to her, always got a good laugh from the decor. Reclining on the couch, she immersed herself in Red Harvest, a Dashiell Hammett novel she had recently begun, but she soon found her eyelids becoming unbearably heavy.
When she awoke, Maxi was insolently lounging in the client chair, eyeing Claire as she took a long sensual drag on her cigarette, releasing the smoke slowly, allowing it to billow out around her face. On some level the image of her sophisticated assistant, laying back in the comfortable overstuffed chair, a cigarette between her full red lips, gave her an almost sexual pleasure. A hundred years of advertising and popular culture had done its work. Yet, she despised real tobacco smoke. It occurred to her that if they ever started to program the smell of the stuff into the sims, it would force her to move somewhere enlightened enough to ban it. That was partially why she had resisted the host of new mods coming out lately. She could only imagine the so-called enhancements various misanthropic individuals would unleash. But, she knew she would have to submit eventually. It was part of her job to stay on top of the tech.
“Hey, hon,” drawled Maxi, as she exhaled a geyser of smoke up toward the ceiling. “I have that research you asked for.”
“Thanks, Maxi. Go on.”
“Two of those nodes are data servers based in the Alliance of Bolivarian States. Two other pipes terminate on a sim farm called New Patagonia. Lots of typical tourist stuff there; it’s a bit of a showcase for the Bolivarians. One of the nodes belongs to the Universidad de Simon Bolivar School of Science.”
“A research conduit?”
“Could be, hon. The other one seems to be something called the Temple of New Life. It’s sim address is 54 Calle Tierradulce, New Patagonia. Data flow analysis suggests this node may be connected to its own agricultural complex, bigger than the New Patagonia server farm itself. The address is evidently a public interface.”
“Where does the final pipe go?”
“A node belonging to D-Brane Technologies.”
That made sense. DBT was a Mitologías sister company, and the two had been the object of a months long bidding war between Futures, LLC, and the New America Corporation. Futures had paid the Bolivarians nearly twenty-five billion for controlling interest. D-Brane kept its products tightly under wraps, but they had two products on the market—both were citspecs mods which worked in tandem and used nano-neurostimulators to excite areas of the brain that triggered physical sensation. The tech had been out there for some time in the R & Ds, capable of engaging all of the senses in virtual reality, no longer just sight and sound, but smell, taste, touch, and programmable, synthetic drug-like experiences, some of it already actuated in the more affluent sims. The mods had become very popular among certain groups of young people over the past several months.
“What about Sweetland?”
“The term Sweetland came up a number of times,” said Maxi.
“Context?”
“All over the map, darlin’. The term has been in popular use over the past year, possibly the result of a guerilla marketing campaign. The name is also being used for a number of disparate product lines. Rumors began circulating about six months ago concerning the nature of the new Mitologías product, code-name Sweetland. There’s speculation that its a new sim technology or some sort of nanotech breakthrough. But the bulk of the Sweetland buzz seems to be around this Temple of New Life.”
“What is this temple thing? An RPG? A religious organization?”
“Maybe both—the religious element is definitely there.” Maxi examined her cuticles, then eyeballed Claire. “I found something else interesting. There seems to be an unusual correlation between the Temple of New Life and missing persons in the FBI database. There is talk that the Temple might be a cult of some kind.”
“No shit?” This was a complication she didn’t particularly care to hear. “Let’s take that Temple-Missing Persons correlation up to level seven. Compile a list of individuals correlating to temple references. Compare it to police logs, media reports, anything in the public records.”
Maxi disappeared for a moment before she was back leaning in the doorway, batting her big eyelashes. “I got very unusual hits on some of these Temple of New Life names, darlin’.”
“Yes?”
“We have clusters of recently missing or deceased. Over a thousand all together out of some ten thousand names. That’s a lot, hon; way outside statistical probability. Most of them are young—under thirty. You have about two dozen from Phoenix, most of them reported missing or at the morgue. You have nearly an equal number of missing in both Denver and Portland, but no correlations at all, nothing on reported deaths. That’s why I say clusters. And here’s the really interesting thing—I found this article in The Albuquerque Journal. I quote: Seven bodies were found today in an abandoned storage facility. All of the youths, between fourteen and twenty-one years of age, were wearing cyber immersion technology devices called citspecs. They appeared to have died of starvation and dehydration. Police are investigating a possible suicide cult. Hon…” Maxi hesitated.
“Yeah, Maxi?”
“Hon, four of the seven correlated with that Temple list, and all were wearing DBT mods according to F.B.I. memos.”
The feeling returned—the sinking fear that she might be onto something she was not prepared to handle.
“Make an appointment with Andy Stephens, would you? I’ll see Mickey Nines tomorrow morning, but[Duane Poncy, 06/25/11 10:21 AM] I’m out of here for today.”
—
Bridge Whitedeer transluced her ocs and sighed. Some cautionary tic in her neural pathways nagged at her—your in way over your head, girl. But sheer exhaustion quashed the nascent protest; it had been a hard day, and it was time to put Claire Deluna to bed. She always regretted leaving her avatar behind: that life for this. For this…what?
She gazed out her window over the darkening waters of what had once been the south edge of downtown Seattle. Most of the buildings south of Pioneer Square remained, rising like drowned ghosts from the sea. A few people still lived inside these doomed towers. At high tide, they exited through windows just above the waterline and rode one of the taxi dinghies or homemade rafts created from plastic bottles and other floating garbage. When the tide dropped low, some donned waders and slogged their way to higher ground. At night, you could see their dim lights flickering in the windows. Other buildings leaned and twisted, undermined by the rising water which had flooded the Seattle underground and eroded their footing. Many older brick structures were clearly crumbling, and the city engineers declared that Smith Tower would likely go within the next few years. The skyscrapers further north still stood untouched by the advancing shoreline. Seattle, protected by the Sound and the Olympic Peninsula from the worst effects of the rising ocean, had fared much better than other cities, such as San Francisco, where the strong tides pushed constantly at the western hillsides, pulling the old structures, and the hills themselves, into the sea.
A little over two decades ago, about the time she was born, scientists began to grow seriously alarmed about the melting ice. Still, when the Greenland glaciers began to collapse in earnest, only a few cities had adequately prepared. By then, the country was in perpetual war and deep depression brought on by the oil crash. The sea rose three meters between the time Bridge began high school and the time she would have graduated in ’21. Since then, it had risen another twelve meters, fed by the sudden, unexpected disintegration of Antarctica’s ice shelves.
Bridge hunched her thin shoulders and pushed her short black hair back from her eyes with scrawny fingers. She considered her reflection in the window, absentmindedly teasing the mods embedded like tiny jewels behind her right ear. She looked nothing like her alter ego, Claire Deluna. She imagined Claire was actually attractive, with her cute red hair, and breasts you could actually see. A girl with more moxie and flair than her real life puppet master. More suitable as a private eye. Bridge could never be an investigator in the real life world; who would possibly take her seriously? And yet, Claire was the best. Even someone like Mr. Bigshot knew that.
She continued to look out the window for a time, watching the lights and listening. The drumming had begun, its tribal rhythm calling out from the homeless enclaves and the drowned buildings, as it had every night since the beginning of summer. It seemed more insistent now as the weather grew wet and inhospitable. There was something indescribably comforting in it.
Finally, Bridge crossed the floor to her tiny refrigerator, grabbed a half-eaten sandwich. She sat at her little kitchen table and took a bite. Then she put her head down on the table and fell asleep.
©2008–2011, Duane Poncy
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