A few blocks away Cass stepped out of an identical taxi, head bowed, studying her shoes rather than looking up at the crowd ahead. She wore a plain black skirt and slightly worn brown business jacket over a beige blouse, her makeup plain and poorly done. She pushed wire-rimmed glasses up her small nose with her forefinger and walked with tiny steps up the walk towards the fifth of eight huge buildings she and Tonx had scouted out the day before.
Nodding and bobbing, she slowly made her way through the crowd, just another Chinese housewife juggling work and home. Her neck bent and eyes lowered, elbows held close to her ribs, she pushed with excruciating slowness through the dozens of black-clad Gothic Lolitas clumped outside the building. "Granny" they said behind their fans, annoyed glances skewering her as she pushed by. "Old cunt" they said with mock sweetness as she passed, fingers blurring over their comms.
As she arrived at the front doors she nervously piled through pockets and her little purse. The guard stationed there watched, bored. Nodding and stammering more quietly than he could hear she presented her invitation with both hands. The guard rolled his eyes as he stepped away and comm'd the man on the 89th floor, apartment 3.
"That floor has very tight security right now, but go ahead" he said, waving her in. He returned his attention to the growing crowds outside. The sea of black petticoats ruffled in the breeze, multicolored heads of flossy hair curled and gelled into multi-layered anime styles. Little white- and black-gloved hands were comm'ing back and forth, moblog photos sprouting on the web like mold on bread. The network traffic spoke of an impending wave, a tsunami of flash mobbed pop-icon ecstasy.
Cass was in an elevator, her shoes very close together, tips aligned away slightly from the door. A group of three businessmen returning home from work stood shoulder-to shoulder in front of the door, murmuring rude jokes, ignoring her. They got out on floor 82. She stood motionless while the doors slid shut. Gravity pulled at her, let her go. She stepped out on floor 88.
Below, on the street, a rented miniature limousine pulled smoothly to a stop in front of the building. Three feed vans were already there, each a cluster of antennas, lenses, and electrified gridding. Reporters flew up, white polystyrene coffee cups bouncing on the ground behind them as the limousine arrived. The Lolitas swelled forward, estrogen-poisoned teenage throats screaming in waves. The crowd paused and the door of the car swung slowly upwards.
A hundred sets of tiny pink lungs inhaled, and Marcus stepped out of the car to the roar of voices so pure, so high, so fervent that he felt his nipples clench painfully against his chest in the face of it. He wore grey canvas pants, tiny scales welded onto metal strips woven into the cloth. The pants looped around his feet inside his oversized steel-toed Russian-Army issue size 52 (European) boots. He wore nothing else. His torso was a roadmap of overlapping scars detailing close to twelve years of closed-space fighting, his skin a curious grey color imbued by experimental (though now very popular) hardening therapies. He pulled his lips back in a wide smile, displaying his sharp metal teeth and thinking, for the millionth time, that if they knew how many times he'd sewn the tip of his tongue back on the crowd would vomit.
In one huge hand he held a two year old promo-sized can of Pokari Sweat, the product that had earned him acclaim across Asia. He'd recently learned that the Chinese company had re-issued his commercial as a resurgence marketing campaign, and was fairly sure that a lawyer he knew from L.A. could find a loophole in the contract that meant they owed him a great deal more money. He lifted his arms to embrace the crowd and sighed heavily as the five tiny Chinese guards in full riot gear locked their transparent shields in front of him.
Behind his head Xing had climbed to the roof of the car with a loudspeaker. It squealed and chirped and the crowd fell respectfully and abruptly silent. Xing read a short paragraph off a piece of paper, something about this visit being a bridge between their two nations, about The Shark's desire to spread love and harmony between their people. He summarized by explaining that Marcus had received an email chain letter about one special little boy who had terminal leukemia and who had always wanted to meet him. The boy's story had apparently so moved The Shark that he had resolved to come to China to make his wish come true.
Xing finished with a breathless read-through of Marcus's availability for speaking engagements and modified fighter closed-combat entertainment events please contact him via his website, etc. etc. Marcus caught the name of his site and nodded graciously to the cameras. Xing clicked off the loudspeaker and Marcus began to wade forward, his five guards pushing hard against the girls.
Upstairs, Cass stood by the door at the end of the hall one floor below her target. She was watching the parking lot over the smooth folds of her invitation, pretending to read the address again. 88 floors below her Marcus entered the building, his guards stopping at the entranceway to hold back a sea of Lolitas. Other cliques had joined now, including a thin line of boys with shell-hard hair, imitation leather jackets gleaming in the sudden sunlight. Another large crowd of boys wearing matte grey climbing jackets and a variety of blue jeans milled quietly outside the main crowd, admiring the Lolitas. Everybody's comms were streaming stuttered clips from their POV, hoping to catch something good. Online bots spun stitched-together video montages from the images, attention from a million separate eyes sculpted into a single democratically decided data stream of What Was Happening.
Car windows flashed brightly in the parking lot as three identical Chinese men climbed out of a van and unloaded an enormous white disk, like a sanitary wok, and mounted it on the roof of the van.
A tiny camera mounted in the middle of the hall tracked Cass according to an algorithm invented in France as she slowly minced her steps back towards the elevator bay, her hands quickly pulling out lipstick, applying it, stowing the glasses in the purse. Two sure thumb swipes pushed the tiny dots of eyeliner at the corner of her eyes, which had looked poorly applied, across the rims of her eyelids in perfect sweeps. Her cheeks flushed suddenly as she willed the capillaries in them to expand, her eyes glistening in a quick saline flood. She pulled her hair back in a saucy faux-professional two-part bun and let her chin settle level with the floor as she pressed the "up" button.
A moment later the bay dinged softly and she stepped to the next elevator door over just as it slid open. A full car of reporters and cameras were packed gut-to-ass in front of her, and they pulled back like a live thing as she stamped forward. Her chin was up, eyes blazing, shoulders back.
"Who here's a freelance camera?" she asked in crisp Mandarin, her voice crackling with authority. "I got up here early and my footage will double your video asking price." She slammed one palm against the elevator door as it tried to close. It dinged lightly in protest.
A stubble-haired man with bags under his eyes raised one hand, steadily ignoring the immaculately dressed reporter in a light blue business suit tucked under his elbow. Her eyes widened in shock and anger and she began to scream at him in a vitriolic stream.
"Shut up" said Cass loudly, slashing the air with her hand. The door dinged again and she slammed it again, harder. Everyone in the car winced.
"15 percent plus resale rights" said the cameraman.
"5 percent and I'll use you again if what you get is good. I'm here for a joint LMA A&E report and have three more days of footage to get this week." Three days of solid footage in a week was worth at least a month's wages and the cameraman knew it. So did everybody else in the car. He nodded, dumbly, but his eyes shone. The reporter under his elbow bit her lip, lipstick smearing against her teeth.
The car dinged again and closed smoothly in front of Cass, a bubble of space surrounding her and her new cameraman.
On the ground floor a long bay of carefully locked glass doors silently clicked open, their magnetic locks discharged by an unusual maintenance schedule put in place fifteen minutes before. A few short blocks away one of Xing's compatriots allowed himself a wry grin as he walked past the service box and bent to tie his shoe, slipping and pulling off the bottle-top shaped device Cessus had put in place, erasing the hack. One of the Cassicoos near the base of the building looked at his watch and swaggered towards one of the doors, pushing it open with the tip of his carefully shined shoe. He turned and yelled at the crowd before darting in.
Nearly a hundred Gothic Lolitas, forty Grays, fifteen Cassicoos, and a wide assortment of hangers-on burst through the bay of doors and overran the guards, heading for stairs and elevator bays. The Cassicoos were in front of everyone, and the guards grabbed for them first. Little single-shot disposable cameras were shoved against legs and arms, discharging capacitors in loud cracks. The guards disappeared, twitching, under the throng of frantic teenage legs.
In the parking lot the van hummed to life. The two-meter wide dish mounted on the roof shuddered and whined, saturating the 89th floor of the building overhead with carefully generated electromagnetic noise. If they had been looking anyone with a comm would have noticed they had no signal, would have seen that their access to police lines and panic buttons was suddenly cut off. But nobody did.
The reporters had arranged themselves in a line between the elevator bay at the end of the hall and the door to apartment three. Behind him the five black-suited guards who were the private employees of the resident of apartment one stood in a solid line, shock wands held horizontally in front of them slowly buzzing with blue light. Little red lights on the cameras winked at Marcus as he bent to press the doorbell with one big finger. The door opened and a poster child for cute Chinese children everywhere slowly shuffled out, a big floppy cap perched on his head. A slightly haggard, but clearly loving father appeared behind him, bowing compulsively. Marcus slowly bowed to the them both and presented the boy with a big red box with a yellow bow. The boy's hat slid off as he looked up, his bald head gleaming pinkly in the camera lights. A slow shy smile spread over his face and the reporters begin to drool as they saw their ratings start to spike.
The elevator bay dinged softly. A solid wall of media-mad teenage bodies erupted from them, pouring over the reporters and cameras alike. The cams had time to capture one long image of Marcus shuffling the boy and his father inside their apartment and turning, frowning slightly towards the oncoming wave. Then everything was chaos.
The reporters were more or less thrown past Marcus and into the guards, their carefully sculpted hair flying akimbo as they hit the shock wands. Cass kicked out one guard's leg and jabbed him in the ribs as he fell into the bitchy reporter whose cameraman she had stolen. She pulled off one shoe and smashed the sculpted LED array hanging like a fruit from the imported Cuban chandelier overhead. The camera's lights clicked on to cover the sudden dimming, dazzling everyone. She ran for door number one in the shadows at the end of the hall.
Meanwhile the guards were downing everybody, Marcus bellowing at the top of his lungs to stop hurting people. It was in English of course, so nobody understood it, but it played well on film. At least six Lolitas lay on the pile of reporters, mouths frothing, delicate limbs jiggling. Tiny beaded purses spilled jelly-colored cosmetics everywhere. Marcus waited until the crowd surged back enough for one of the cameramen to steady himself against the wall and aim. Then he reached to cover the girls with his arm.
Over three hundred pounds of grey muscle lunged towards the guards' line of defense. They did what anybody in their situation would do and shocked the fuck out of him.
Marcus knew it was coming and had already clenched his teeth, but enough volts to power an average microwave sputtering through his nervous system still threw him. He staggered, crushing a very small and very expensive tape recorder with the reporter's name in zirconium studded characters on one side, but he didn't fall.
He defended himself. With prejudice.
Cass had already misted the knob with superglue and flicked on a tiny black light by the time Marcus got shocked. She smoothed a thin piece of scotch tape over the best print she could find and pulled a two-inch plug of gummy plastic from where it had been stuck inside her bra. Nicely warmed it took the print quickly, the oils from the print etching away a negative on its surface. She waved it in the air, the constant screaming building to a crescendo as Marcus threw one guard into the doorway next to him, his long arm taking another shock as he covered a Lolita scrambling across the floor for her phone. The elevator dinged again and more fans poured out. Cass huddled by the doorknob and twisted the thumb in half, licking the half without the print and pressing it firmly against the negative. It resisted her saliva where the oils had coated it and dissolved away where they weren't, making a dummy print. A moment later she pressed the dummy against the scanner mounted in the wood paneling beside the door, and was in.
The door snicked shut behind her and she let her hair down. Her bangs slid in front of her face and she ran bent-backed as she ran through the foyer, shoes in hand, the pump's little heels held outwards. She's hammered nails through the heels the night before so they wouldn't break, so she could use them as weapons if she needed to. But there was no one there.
The living room gave way to a tiny kitchen, immaculate and unused. Beyond lay a bedroom. It had one futon, blankets folded at its head, and a long, solid-looking table holding a three-foot tall, six-inch wide, two-foot deep beige metal box next to a monitor. Cass stared. It was by far the biggest single-user computer she had ever seen.
Cass had come prepared, and pulled the slim black box from where it had been taped to her lower back. Scanning the room again she opened her little purse and retrieved the multi-headed set of cables that fit into it. She knew the box might be wired for movement, thermal or pressure changes or extremely minor electrical alterations. Assuming she could get past that the software was likely bleeding edge security, black ops code written by some of China's best. The little black box Xing had given her should connect directly with whatever the interface was and bypass those securities.
She shifted her weight between her feet, hands fluttering uselessly in the air. The keyboard was massive, a big metal and plastic affair, and there was a plastic paperweight on a stack of papers next to it. That was it. The little black box in her hand wasn't registering any wireless access, and she couldn't see any ports on the front of the box. There was nothing but a small slot a few inches wide. She unfolded a small mirror from her purse and held it over the back of the box.
There were wires running from it, big thick beige plastic wires like she hadn't seen since she was a kid. The black box had jacks for nearly eighteen different kinds of ports with software to execute appropriate attacks on each. There wasn't a single port on the thing that fit this box. Something stuck, buzzed around her mind. She looked at the front again. It had a floppy disk drive.
A disk drive. Her dad had had a computer when she was a kid, a 4GHz monstrosity with umpteen buzzing fans and cards the size of your hand you put inside to operate the graphics, or the sound, or whatever. It was ancient when he'd tried to pawn it off on her for schoolwork. This thing in front of her was just like that.
As she looked she saw actual plastic data disks, wide as her palm, in a neat pile next to the box. She stepped back, eyes wide, and as she did so jostled the desk. The paperweight on the papers slid and the screen made a loud oscillating hum, flickered dimly to life.
Two words: Name, and Password. The keyboard was the only interface. Cass held the very expensive, very useless thin black box in her right hand and stared.
Marcus's right leg wasn't moving any more. Things weren't going as planned. The guards hadn't all gone down yet. He'd managed to get one to stay down after he'd smashed his head through the fiberboard ceiling panels and looped him over a supporting rod, but that was it so far. A big group of boys in matching grey jackets had come out of the stairway on the far end of the hall, cutting off his fighting room even more. The elevator kept dinging, more voices screaming, trying to get in and out at once. The guards waved their rods in wide sweeps, the crowd roiling at bay.
His vision was misting over. Bile rose in his throat, fatigue riding him, gulping down hot dry breaths too fast. A guard rushed him and missed, Marcus's hand slapping the back of his head hard as it went by. But the feint had worked. Marcus had fallen for it, and the guard's rod followed as he fell, sliding up Marcus's arm. He pitched forward, bright colors angry in his eyes.
Fighting in close quarters requires two things: a good grip, and solid footing. As Marcus swung through a tight roll his size 52's planted themselves solidly on the ultra-fine hundred-weave 'arctic sand' colored carpeting. His surgically oversized torso carried through like a piano falling out a window, cannonballing him out of his roll. Three wide fingers on each hand clamped down on the tiny, delicate fingers of two of the remaining guards, closing over the rods along with them as he let his weight swing through them, their bodies slamming backwards into each other.
Marcus danced as the current dumped into the three of them. Cass came out of the apartment door just as the rods finished their discharge. The bright camera lights behind him turned Marcus into one huge silhouette, the guards flying like banners in front of him. They fell, twitching at his feet.
The remaining guard turned and ran, away from Marcus. He wasn't looking at her, ignored her as another helpless female. The slim black box in her hand took out three of his teeth and tore away the cheek from his gums before burying itself in his throat. Then Cass was gone, down the stairway, past the last few Gray boys standing staring. Behind her Marcus slowly twisted, and fell.