Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe (30 page)

She
stepped aside and left a gap for him to come in.

“
Thank you,” Leo said and walked in.

He sat
down and said again, “Thank you, really. You’ve helped me so
much.”

She
accepted the thanks and shrugged.

“
I need to ask you something more. You mentioned your dad’s
survivalist gear, can I borrow some? Do you have anything I can
use?”

She
scoffed. “Of course I do. Dad had everything,” she said, and went
to pull down some duffel bags from the closet.

Leo
helped her bring it down from the high place, touched her body with
his and blushed.

She
cleared her throat and cleaned up the dust that fell. “What are you
going to do?”

Leo sat
on the floor, checking out the gear and sighed. “I’m not sure.
There’s this turban guy, a street peddler. His cobra took a bite
out of me, you know it, you treated it. I need to find him, figure
out if he had something to do with framing me for murder. I asked
George the bum, but his pals don’t really know where to find
him.”

Katerina
pursed her lips. “A turban guy? You mean a Sikh?”

“
Dunno. Bright red turban, orange shirt, loose pants. Very
dark skin.”

Katerina stood up and walked to her bookcase. “You Dumbo.
Sikh people have an organised religion in Athens since the 1950’s.”
She opened an encyclopedia, not a website, a
paper
one, and found a specific
page. “Their Sikh Temple is at Tavros, southern Athens. They are
very religious, if you are looking for a Sikh man, you are
definitely gonna find him here,” she said, and pointed at the
listing while passing the heavy tome to Leo.

He
frowned and read some stuff about them. Indian minority. Like to
play with snakes. Quite pacifistic, though they do have some wars
in their history.

Huh.

Offline
information that was useful. Imagine that.

She
looked at him jokingly and said, “It didn’t even occur to you to
find him through his beliefs, did it?”

Leo
shook the stuff around the bag with purpose. “It did.”

“
Sure it did.”

“
Hey, I’m in a bad shape right now, OK? I can gloss over major
details all I want,” he said, and cut the air with his left hand in
a firm gesture.

Katerina
laughed and came next to him. She hugged him and blew him a deep,
slobbery kiss.

He felt
great, head in the clouds. At that point, he noticed something and
picked it up.

“
Hey, does this actually work?”

“
I thought you said it was huge.”

“
Yeah, I mean the principle. Does it work?” He picked up a
small cagey tube, with something like an inward funnel at its end.
It said “SNAKE TRAP” in bold letters, followed by: “Warning: Live
snake may be inside.”

He spun
it around in his hand, taking note of the design. It was simple, an
easy entrance and an exit unreachable to someone without
limbs.

“
I can build something like this.”

“
Great! How?”

He
mumbled for a while, thinking his options through.

Leo
looked into her green eyes, kissed her softly on the lips and said,
“I know we just met and all, but I can’t drive with only one arm.
Will you help me steal a truck?”

Chapter 32:// Breaking in

Back at
constructionsite7,
the gates were
locked.

There
were security cameras, but Leo knew where a couple of blind spots
were from some coworkers who liked to slack off every now and
then.

He
wasn’t a snitch, he was the last person to betray someone but he’d
stumble on them sometimes so he remembered a gap in the
fence.

“
Give me the cutter,” Leo said and then fumbled with it having
only one arm. He tried a couple of times but he only managed to cut
it once and scratch a couple more. By this rate they would be
inside just before the skyscraper’s opening ceremony.

“
Gimme that,” Katerina said and started cutting the
fence.

His
walkman shuffled to the Mission Impossible tune, and he was pumped
up. He bent the wire fence and pushed himself through, holding it
open for her like a gentleman.

“
Where to?” she whispered.

“
Stay right behind me, grab my belt.”

She did,
and they moved in the shadows. There were some big blinding
floodlights but they actually made it easier to stay hidden,
casting long distinct shadows and blinding someone who would stare
at the lit areas.

A guard walked close-by, doing his rounds. He was weary and
bored, not alert in the least. It was a construction site, not much
happened, the company just wanted to have some people on site to
avoid vandalisms or thefts. Pretty much everything was locked up,
and the heavy machinery was, well,
heavy
. You’d need to be blind and
deaf for someone to steal something from in there and not
notice.

Now that
he was closer, they could see that the guard was middle-aged. His
gait was slow, and he sat on a crate he found and
yawned.

He
pulled out a thermos from his backpack and sipped slowly, warm
coffee filling their nostrils. The thermos was red with a white
emblem of a Greek-style person’s profile.

“
What the hell are we gonna do?” Leo whispered. “We need to
get to the garage behind him.”

Katerina
covered her phone to block out the light and peeked at the time.
“We’ll wait twenty minutes.”

“
Why?”

“
It’s game night.”

“
It is?”

“
Yeah. My dad always watched football on game
night.”

“
Huh.” Then he added, “How do you know he’ll watch the
game?”

“
He is wearing his team’s red jersey underneath his shirt,
can’t you see?”

“
Huh.”

They
waited. A few minutes later, the guard pulled out a tablet and
propped it with a small base in front of him, like a TV. He sat
back, and turned it on.

It was
loud.

The
holosound system provided binaural audio for an exciting, immersive
experience. It was as if you were there in Gate 7, while
Olympiakos, the Greek team that usually claimed the championship
was playing off somewhere in Europe. You could hear the roar of the
crowd, the rubbing of the seats, the thumping of the ball. Sports
commentary optional and toggleable.

It was
loud, and it filled your ears making you effectively deaf to what
was right next to you.

“
I’ll do it, I’m quiet. In there?” Katerina asked and pointed
at the rusty metal garage doors.

“
Yeah. But you need my hand to start the engine.”

Katerina
put her hands on her hips and protested quietly. “I do not! I can
start up a car by mys-”

Leo put
his finger on her lips and cut her off. “My hand has an RFID chip.
It starts the truck.”

“
Oh. OK then. Stay right behind me, grab my belt.”

He
tried, but girls don’t have belts for some reason.

Katerina
opened up the football game on her phone and muted the streaming
video. She waited, watching the match. The holosound was coming in
distorted to them from the guard’s tablet, it was made to be heard
positionally. Upon a crowd cheer, she pushed forward and rushed to
another shadow. Leo kept close.

The
first shadowjump was easy, was close. The next was a big one. They
would practically be in the open, lit from a tiny sun on a pole.
But the guard was transfixed on the game.

She took
a readied stance, wobbling herself as a runner would, waiting for
the starting shot, watching the match.

The
crowd protested, they darted off and ran the distance, jumping into
the garage’s shadow.

The
guard did not notice. He was too busy cursing along with the
crowd.

They
walked carefully, the ground was gravel, which is
the-worst-possible-ground to sneak up on someone.

Leo
winced in each step.

He
managed to get close, and pushed aside the creaky rusted garage
doors slowly. Katerina monitored the match, gesturing him when to
stop and when to push on.

They got
inside, no alarms raised.

A row of
trucks was in the garage, and they were quite a long distance away
from the guard now so they could walk easily. If he turned around
though, he would see a door wide open when it shouldn’t
be.

Leo went
to a concrete mixer lorry and banged the tank. He went to another
and banged again. This one was empty.

He
thought he heard someone closing in on them, but he didn’t see
anyone in the dark.

He
stepped in the passenger’s seat. Katerina climbed up the driver’s
seat and said, “A concrete mixer? That’s what you need to make the
snake trap?”

“
No, the concrete mixer
is
a snake trap. I was trying to figure out how to
make one when I remembered that a cross section of a concrete mixer
is effectively a large metal container with blades inside like a
screw, that mix the concrete. So, here we are.”

“
Stealing a truck, on our second date.” She gasped
theatrically and fell on his shoulder.

“
Yeah, wait till you see what we have to do now. Make sure the
lights are off. Turn on the ignition,” Leo said, and placed his
left hand over hers on the big steering wheel.

“
You have to keep your hand on top of mine all the way? How
romantic,” Katerina said, revved up the enormous engine, and ran
the tons of metal and engineering through the garage doors,
spitting gravel past the startled security guard and breaking down
the main gate accompanied by a thunderous goal-cheering roar of the
crowd.

Chapter 33:// Dropping back

parrotd> Did you get it?

armd>
ACK.

armd>
How was the ride? Furry? Smelly? Shitty? *snort*

armd>
Hey I’m gonna punch your bits out!

armd>
Punch me? Go fetch, you quadrupedal meatbag!

armd>
Why you-

parrotd>
Kill -9 armd

The controlling daemon
parrotd
killed the process that he
had forked earlier into the dog, when he had created a perfect copy
of the program
armd
. The cyberarm daemon, being the only one with servo
functions and motor controls, could take over the dog’s prostheses
and manipulate the faithful pet back to the construction site. A
preloaded and pre-sniffed vulnerability in the construction site’s
CCTV was run at that time in the van. The daemons couldn’t code of
course, they just used scripts available online, ready-made
exploits that anyone could point and fire. Some would call them
lame script kiddies, but they didn’t care.

httpd> Finally. One of them
armd’s
is manageable, but two?
That’s unbearable.

armd>
Yeah, that guy was starting to become a bother.

parrotd> Let’s see what we got.

They
loaded the timestamped footage from the foreman’s office. The
camera was tilted, someone had bumped it to the side but it was
watchable. It showed the user coming in the office with the
foreman, the user shaking hands with the mayor, both sitting down,
the foreman leaving the room. Then the user was leaning his head
forward.

The rest
was corrupted.

parrotd> Shit.

Chapter 34:// Catching up

They logged
into the wifi named
Sikh Temple Shri Guru
Nanak Darbar
. It was a spacious,
open-access network with its GUI switched to Punjabi, a major
Indian dialect. It was enhanced by many wifi repeaters to cover the
whole temple space, fulfilling the needs of the hundreds of
believers who congregated there, rubbing elbows and saying their
prayers.

It was
now empty, late at night.

Leo
watched the building, that had become a holy place for the Sikh
minority. It was a plain office space, big and blocky. They had
adorned it outside with LED strips, painted orange lines on the
building’s ledges and placed billowy cloths and flowerpots in the
entrance. A plain orange banner read “Trust In God,” and another
“God Is One”, both phrases in English, Punjabi and in mangled
Greek.

“
Sometimes you just need balls,” he muttered to himself and
gathered up courage.

He
stepped in and unconsciously tried to form a cross over his chest
with his right hand. It was the Christian custom when entering a
church. His destroyed cyberarm instead twitched and sparked in
protest. He stared at it and then felt silly for even
trying.

The
temple was very big, chosen to house hundreds of people. The space
inside was open, plain and office-like. The columns were painted
orange, the floor had a soft cover fit for kneeling from end to
end, an orange path led to a place where the holy men sat and
performed the rites in microphones. A place with traditional
musical instruments was beside it, with a big round leather drum in
its middle. Soft white curtains covered the windows, speakers were
spread around the place and colourful decorations hung from the
ceiling.