Poulpe was feeling spectacular. He sat in the smooth, grey leather seats of SAS's first class front row, the slow, gentle red flashes of LED clusters on the wing tip outside accompanying his heartbeat. A gentle music, most likely Bach, played in his headphones, and a gorgeous young stewardess had just brought him a steaming towelette. It smelled of fresh lemons, and massaged his pores nicely.
He'd known they'd have agents waiting for him at the airport, known that they couldn't cover all the terminals. The airport had been made a public building and security had been terminated and handed over to the public on the basis of repeated strikes - Parisians were famous for their strikes - and now the security personnel was Joe Everyman. The Charles d'Gaule had taken on the air of Grand Central Station. It was full of people bustling about, studying each other with a removed distance, ignoring each other with the mild paranoia of intense self-interest.
His sponsor could not have known how things worked here; the intricate micro-politics of black market subsidies and megacorporation buy-ins to the newly publicly held facility made it a rat's nest of legal and illegal possibilities; the routes from the subway outside to the inside of an outbound plane were infinite. Shortly after he'd arrived at the airport's edges he'd located a Nigerian dope-dealer. Part of the cost of his purchase included a fresh passport and a ticket.
He'd taken his ticket and the little aluminum-foil wrapped plug and gone directly through a service entrance. The Nigerian man had advised him it led to an unused bathroom with a good lock. The drug traffickers had worked a deal with the unions that maintained the airport facilities, and had regular access to "under repair" restrooms and service halls.
Before he'd left his apartment he had manufactured a very pure mix of methamphetamines and antipsychotic to help control the urge to panic. It had made him a bit jittery, he thought, and so now felt it worthwhile to make use of the heroin he had bought. He entered the all-green one-piece plastic bathroom, carefully stepping over the blue puddle of cleaning fluid pooling over its drain, and made his preparations. While he was there he carefully washed his hands and inserted the smallest finger of his left hand into his rectum.
The remains of his work - approximately three ounces of medium separated into twenty-eight distinct, unpatented, and unique viral agents - were sealed in plastic and seated comfortably inside his anus. He had used a woman's prophylactic to mount it there, and was fairly confident that a probe would consider it an enlarged prostate. He smiled as he knelt in the stall with his pants around his ankles. His was a familiar paranoia, a friendly, jovial, I'm-your-mother-here-to-eat-you kind of paranoia, and it was helpful to him. He submitted to it with all the industry he had applied to the last three years of work.
His dealer was gone when he emerged, which was to be expected. He pulled his suit coat on with a flourish and allowed the aluminum foil to fly from his hand and into an abandoned potted plant arrangement as he did so. It wasn't a safe thing to do, but he was feeling flashy - most likely an aftereffect of the amphetamine mix, he decided.
Ten minutes later he had entered his terminal through the service entrance the Nigerian had sold him access to and was beginning to smile uncontrollably. A part of him, a sensible part, felt that perhaps he had been overgenerous with the Nigerian's products. Several times he became dizzy and had to check again to assure himself that he was in the right terminal.
He blinked, and the flight was boarding. Blinked again, and was onboard. He'd upgraded himself, it seemed. He was pleased. He awoke some small time later, on the down slope of his buzz, very pleasantly surprised indeed to find himself both alive and experiencing the best part of his high in such lovely surroundings.
He ordered a Bordeaux, noted that it was excellent.
Some time later he arrived in Florida and was the first one out of the plane. The translucent panels in the boarding ramp's walls revealed a drizzly morning, dim grey light that must surely become hot and sticky later in the day. Poulpe resolved to do some shopping before allowing his contact's men to abscond him; thermoplast beige was certainly unsuitable for this climate.
Poulpe wandered out of the ramp and down the aisle, noting with amusement the bright OLED panels flashing advertising across every available surface, the endless parade of American product shipped straight from China. He was pleased to see more Spanish than English, allowed his eye to accumulate information about the local styles. The third store he passed contained a number of quite nice Armani knock-offs, probably made locally. He picked out a pair of oversized cotton trousers in wheat color, matched it with a coat in exaggerated Cuban style, and waited patiently while the store owner scanned him for a shirt to match. He tried on the trousers while the shirt was spun up in the back, pleased with their fit and the way they breathed.
A gentle knock on the door accompanied a flash of his shirt through the plastic panel. He hummed a tune and opened the door a crack, reached out to accept the shirt.
He saw the black stub before it hit his hand, recognized the mean silvery tabs sticking out of each side before it dumped several thousand volts through his nervous system. His body convulsed, threw him back against the rear of the stall, made all the hairs across his pale bare torso fly upwards in angry arcs. The door was open before he landed, a short, ugly man in a hunting vest and cement-colored pants pulling his body over and plastering his hands flat against each other. Something cold and sticky enfolded his fingers before the man pulled him to his feet by his hair. Poulpe's eyes watered with pain, struggling to get his breath back, his chest sick and twitching with residual endomuscular electricity. He staggered against the side of the stall and a strong hand grabbed his neck, pulled a T-shirt over his head. He noticed another man visible through the doorway of the stall, this one speaking calmly through a head-mounted mic tucked over his ear. He was tanned and hard, this man, and as his lips moved his calm grey eyes tracked his, watching him.
The first man was padding through Poulpe's pockets, sifting through his bag in a swift and orderly fashion. Poulpe began to babble; "I can pay you. Whatever they've offered you, let me assure you… "
He stopped as the man stood up and said something short in a guttural tongue. It was clear he either didn't understand Poulpe or didn't care to, and to prove the point he slapped a strip of duct-tape hard over Poulpe's mouth. Poulpe felt his jacket pull over his shoulders as he stared in disbelief at the man across the hall, stared into the cold grey eyes. "De Boers" the man in the vest had said. Bounty hunters from Africa, disenfranchised mountain people who had modeled themselves after the Yakuza clans of Japan. They spoke only their own tongue and were known for never rescinding on their contracts. They were not kind people.
Poulpe's legs began to tremble.
Despite the circumstances Fed's new home was good as gold. After he'd finished taping together a stack of drives and arranged them in the case he'd rolled out the bag and plugged in. The OLED overhead had a good wide viewing angle, so he could see it pretty much anywhere from the inside of the tent, and after a few minutes of playing with it he'd set it up as a light. It cycled through some color patterns he'd pulled from an old UCLA psych lab, stuff designed to enhance productivity and encourage calm thinking. A short while later he found that Tonx had given him root on the cluster in his room, and that the cluster was heavy; his brother had scored some powerful machines. Fede grinned in the dim light of the tent, appreciating both that Tonx trusted him enough to let him have complete Admin privileges and that the boxes he was going to play with were respectably badass. He set up some background daemons and routed their output to run along the edge of the OLED. They would keep him informed of the cluster's resources and monitor other users, if any. Then he synced his goggles and chord to the OLED and set his gogs for medium opacity. Now when he looked at his workspace, floating over his field of vision, the OLED sat behind it, slowly pulsing and cycling through the color tests. His status charts were lined up neat, his buffers clear, ready to go. He set up a few compile jobs and keyed in a script to let him drop them onto the OLED instead of in his immediate vision, and went to work.
His first task was homework. He'd already sketched out what he thought he wanted the virus's executable to look like, but he didn't know nearly enough about handling data sets of that size. A few search agents later he found that the National University of Laos was getting a lot of rep for their statistical analysis approach to genome-related data processing. Most first-world corporations were ignoring the actual number crunching in favor of predictive programming and fancy guesswork using chaos theory and quantum computing, but Laos was sufficiently backwards to be breaking new ground on the topic. Fortunately most of their scientists were from L.A., so he didn't have to worry about running the coursework and research papers through a translator. It was tough work, though; the math was way over his head and he had to cross-reference the pertinent parts of undergrad courses from other universities for most of the afternoon to get up to speed.
Fortunately Universities were set up as huge reference corpuses. Since the work Laos was doing was based on fairly common math (albeit math deemed impractical for use due to the computational power required) Fede was able to find a bunch of FAQs and tutorials arranged by relevance to the learning methods he liked to use. They were highlighted in order so he could jump back to the example problems illustrated in the coursework. Fede knew it was incomplete knowledge at best, but it meant he could transfer it into code, which was the problem at hand. It was a delicate balance - if you ignored too much you were bound to misapply the formula and not know it, and if you didn't skim over enough you could spend the rest of your life researching. But figuring out what was important and how to apply it was what Fede did. It was what he was good at.
Six hours later Fed's eyes were burning and his back was sore, but he had the basis of the Laotian formulas he'd need. He'd completed the fifteen sample sets used in their quarterly exams and walked through at least eight introductory tutorials. He flipped up his goggles and rubbed his eyes, keyed off the OLED and crawled out of the tent.
It was quiet, the only sound the gentle hum of the air intake ducts high in the walls overhead. Fede stretched into empty space, reaching for the ceiling and smiling. He bent and reached for his feet, wiggled his toes and his fingers, crawled back into the tent. He tore a single-serving sack of juice from its foil string and ripped open a nutraceutical bar. Old fashioned, yoghurt-coated. He pulled a stack of shirts out from his bag and piled them up under his lower back, flipped his gogs back down and went to work.
The next part of the problem was figuring out how to build the actual virus itself. The D3$Troy virus author had used the libraries from the Nokia picture frames to protest the draconian licensing scheme they were using. While it was certainly funny to morph pictures of people's grandkids into penises tattooed with the name "Nokia", the virus wasn't quite broad enough in scope for Fed's purposes. He knew the libraries the D3$Troy virus had used could effect the contents of the program, but figuring out how to use them to drop a trojaned payload onto dozens of different platforms was something else. He had a good idea for how to incorporate the Laotian algorithms into code, and also how to redirect the calls for coordinating the recombinant matching, but not how to get the code to execute and propagate.
The Chinese had made it easy for him, in a lot of ways. Years ago they'd given Microsoft the finger and implemented a government-mandated OS based on Linux. In typical bureaucratic fashion they included required updates, and also in typical bureaucratic fashion they used an outdated, kludgy technology to do it, requiring that new software be downloaded on a regular basis. The general consensus among Chinese hackers was that it was a method for maintaining constant observation over the public, particularly because a lot of the code made calls back to centralized servers. It didn't matter to Fed. What mattered was that all the computers in China ran the leaked Chrysler-Daimler code in a picture display program that nobody used, but which was run as part of every software update. Picture show apps were a dime a dozen; that the Chinese government had endorsed a particular one for its people didn't mean it was the one they liked, and nobody was going to use an app that showed ads instead of every third picture.
The catch was that China had some heinous outbound/inbound net proxies. They wouldn't do much against his virus, but it would make getting the huge data set it would generate out of China difficult. For a start it would require knowing a whole lot more about their security systems and filters. And then there was the problem of deploying the damn thing…
Fede heaved a sigh and tabbed through his notes. It was there, all right. The virus he was after was there somewhere, nascent, unformed. But it was there.
Fede sighed again and started running agents to get him data on China's content filters.
Tonx sat in the Chicago O'Hare airport, fingers laced behind his head, bobbing slightly to the new trance tunes Cass had fed his comp before he left. He was excited to meet Poulpe in person; they'd collaborated together at least a dozen times and he had a lot of respect for him. The man was sharp and had consistently surprised him with his insights. That he had put his life in Tonx's hands didn't ease that weight much, Tonx was pleased to discover. He rolled the feeling around his head, took its measure. The next few weeks were going to be big. Tonx smiled, adjusted his sunglasses, watched the scrollbar roll across the bottom of the lenses' edge, and waited.
He'd just hit that alpha state of relaxed wakefulness, that edge of sleep, when the call from Pharoe brought him instantly to anxious consciousness. He wasn't supposed to be getting calls now, here. Something was wrong.
"Hey man, what's up?" he said in forced amicability.
"Oh, you know" said the cool voice on the other end of the line. "Just wondering when you're coming, what with your flight being delayed and all that."
This was bad. Pharoe was paranoid at the best of times; calling to say there was a delay, and on an unencrypted line, meant something had been seriously fucked up.
"As long as the plane's able to fly I'll be there, man. I'll check the schedules and drop you a message" he said.
"No worries, they make them planes tough. I'll be looking for your message. Adios, bro."
"Ciao" Tonx said.
He waited a moment, forced himself to take ten full breaths, cleared his head. First order of business was getting a clear comm channel. He hesitated, then dialed in a call to Fed.
His comm bleeped six times before his brother's sleepy voice fell onto the line. "Hello?" said Fed, "Tonx?"
"You betcha, bro" said Tonx. "Listen, I need you wakey-wakey ASAP, ok? I just realized I missed an important email but I can't get to it from here. Think you can access it for me?"
"What are you talking about?" asked Fed. "You're calling me, aren't you? What's the problem with your connection?"
Tonx cursed his brother's lack of guile, massaged his forehead with his thumb and forefinger.
"Oh, you know me!" he laughed. "I think I hozored my mail client. It's a message from Aunt Penny. Think you can help me out, Fed?"
There was silence on the line for a minute.
"Aunt Penny?" Fede asked.
Tonx pursed his lips, waited, hoped.
"Okay, Tonx. No problem. Ah, do you want me to fix your email client while I'm at it?"
Tonx smiled, closed his eyes. "Yeah, man, that'd be a huge fucking help. You think you can figure a way to get a good connection to me here? I'm at an airport and they don't let you initiate any outbounds except for web traffic."
"No problem" said Fed, his voice warming, the purr of a challenge in his words. "Sit tight. How recently did Aunt Penny message you do you think?"
"Real recently. I'd guess it's the only message I'd have gotten to that account in the last hour or so."
"Okay" said Fed, and hung up.
Tonx sat back, put his hands behind his head, and practiced breathing. Aunt Penny was a codeword they'd used when they were kids, a character from a Penny Arcade game mod they'd both liked. The mod had included some porn skins, and Aunt Penny was the code word they'd used in front of their mother to refer to anything in the game involving downloading or running the mods. It was ancient history, but Fede had remembered and caught on. The boy had promise, Tonx thought. Thank god.
Twenty minutes later Tonx's comm bleeped and he watched a web address scroll by. It was an Angelfire site, a free hosting provider that paid for itself through copious pop-up ads and flashing banners branded across whatever content you put up. The sites they hosted were about as temporary as anything you'd find on the Net, havens for porn and warez. Angelfire admins constantly worked through the content deleting sites that violated their terms of service, frequently enough that most folks ignored stuff hosted there entirely as it was likely gone by the time you'd found the URL. But it was a perfect place to host something like this.
Tonx clicked the link and watched a page expand. The colors were a little washed because his glasses were so lightweight, but it was clear enough for him to see the mauve background and tope ad text flashing across the top of the page. The design screamed amateur and violated every decent web page design rule out there, but before Tonx could read more an alert box appeared asking if he wanted to accept a security certificate from an unknown source. Tonx checked the cert and smiled at its owner, one Mrs. Gabriel Penny. He clicked OK and watched his browser initiate a secure handshake, encrypting the connection. The box disappeared and the page resolved itself. Tonx laughed; the page had two text boxes, one for him to type in and the other for text to appear in, and the boxes were flanked by pixilated topless women gyrating clumsily. It was ancient game art from the mod they'd played - Mrs. Penny at her finest. It also violated Anglefire's terms of service and guaranteed a half-life of about an hour for the page. The whole setup was primitive, but it fit the bill for what Tonx needed, and Fede had put it together fast. Words appeared in the top text box:
Sorry to force text, but the airport only allows secure web sessions. Still had to proxy it through a bank transaction traffic rebounder to get an acceptable route. It's crackable, but they'll need a big data set to do it. I'm limiting us to 11,000 bytes."
Tonx watched as the tiny counter at the bottom of the page iterated to 41, stopped as Fede stopped typing.
Excellent. You get the mail?
Yeah, only one account had a single email arrive in the last hour. Who setup your security? Your cluster's tighter than a pre-teen Moslem. Who said I didn't?
I did, you aren't that good. Here's the mail, from "Pharoe Munch."
The text Fede pasted in appeared in blue, indicated it was copied from another source. Tonx chewed his lip briefly, put his hands in his armpits.
I don't get all that, but it doesn't sound good. And is this shit babelfished? It reads like it's converted from something other than English. Yeah, its spanglish and street slang from down south. I need you to find Cass and get her to contact a guy named Cessus. That's who setup my box's security, he's fucking badass security guy. Watch him - he's crazy. Okay, what do I tell him?
Looks like the Boers got Poulpe locked up tight in some backwater in Florida. Pharoe's boys got a way to jack him, but we need to make sure no data leaks back to his sponsors. The GPS coordinates are in his email.
Tonx thought for a moment, added:
Tell Cessus our man worked for the mouse. He'll go for it. He hates the megacorps big fierce. ??
How long does this channel stay open for? I'd give it another half hour.
Can you relay a command line through this? I need to do some biz. We need a way out of here, assuming we turn up with a live person instead of a corpse. No prob. Call me if you run out of word count and I'll rerun this site somewhere else. Be quick, though - not too many folks transmit that much traffic to their bank, so the Airport will start looking soon. Thanks
The text box cleared and the login for Tonx's account scrolled past. A family of four, both parents wearing matching Coca-Cola corp suits, strolled by carrying an assortment of luggage. Their two boys towed behind in kids' versions of the outfits, the swirling coke label animated and swirling on their backs, laughing and poking at each other with tiny pistols. Tonx started typing.