Fede couldn't find Cass, and her comm wasn't responding to his pings. He'd gotten what he thought must be a private address for her off the server, but she wasn't responding to that either. Eventually he swore and scrambled into his adjacket, tabbed a security lock onto the OLED and his connection and crawled out of the tent. This wasn't his gig; he didn't do meatspace. Tonx had said something about Boers, which was serious shit. If Boers were involved someone was going to get killed. He swore again as he wandered, blind, through the dark of the dojo. He wasn't supposed to be doing this; he was here to code, not run around finding people. But Tonx was in trouble. He stumbled over his shoes, sat down and fumbled with their ties in the dark. He wasn't used to tying them on; at home he just left them on and took his legs off.
He got the shoes on and went through the door. He wandered through the shop but it was empty, the front locked down tight. The metal grating had a padlock on it, and he wasn't going to waste time searching for a key. Instead he hustled to the private exit and down the long white hall. The door shut behind him with the jangling click-click of wired locks.
He followed the curve of the building, nervous now, unsure what he was going to do or how he would do it. His stomach had started to ache. He'd walked almost a full city block when he came to a turn, recognized a familiar side street and broke into a jog. Seconds later he was banging on the faded blue metal fire door next to the corrugated gate they'd taken the scooter through. It opened a moment later, the tiny Asian guy that'd taken Cass's keys appearing, his face seamed into a scowl. One eye widened when he saw Fed, and he stepped back a little. "Yeah?" he asked.
"I need the bike" said Fed.
The man took off his cap, scratched the back of his head, and studied Fed.
"Anata no baka desu ka?" he asked.
"Shit" breathed Fed. He peered over the man's head into the garage. There in the back of the room was Cass's bike, half-lit under a desk lamp jacked together with duct tape. He pointed.
"That. I need to get a ride on that" he said.
The guy looked back at Fede from where he'd followed the direction of his arm, smiled a crooked smile. Shadows emerged from under some kind of car over to the left, oil-resistant soles scuffing against the concrete. The man turned towards the dark of the garage, called out a string of words Fede would never understand. Fede swore again and pushed his way inside.
The little guy didn't like that, but he didn't touch Fed. A suddenly flurry of voices rang through the garage as he walked quickly towards the bike. He'd almost reached it when a loud pop smacked the air and Fede got the odd feeling that he'd just been shot at. He looked the poster board over the workbench on his right, next to the scooter, and watched a three-inch drill bit droop, then fall clattering to the bench. He turned slowly away from the bench, his hands jumping to his ears.
Two of the little men were standing nearby with a two-foot crowbar and a three-foot wrench, respectively. Over towards the car one of them had just fitted another drill bit into the compressor he'd shot the first one from. He was smiling broadly, clearly pleased at his shot. He'd done this before. The guy Fede had pushed by stood over to Fed's left, out of reach. He held a dented tin can in one hand, and when Fede looked at him he turned his head slightly away and smiled broadly, thick eyebrows rising into a mass of wrinkled forehead. "Yeah?" he asked again.
"Cass. I need to get a hold of Cass" Fede said.
"Cass?" asked the man. He held up his free hand to his head, thumb towards his ear, pinky finger jutting out towards his mouth in a gesture Fed's parents would have made, a sign for old-school voice comm. Fede tapped his ear, shook his head.
"No. No answer. Cass. no. answer."
The guy held his hand out and pretended to type on a computer. Fede gritted his teeth.
"No. No answer that way either." Didn't these guys understand? She'd shut off her comm lines, period.
"Listen, it's im-por-tant. Muy importante. Very important. I need to talk to Cass!"
The Asian guy adjusted his cap and walked a large semicircle around Fed, towards the scooter. He nodded at the guy with the compressor drill and set his cup onto the counter, reached out and gently shook one of the scooter's handlebars.
For a second nothing happened, and then a high-pitched siren howl burst out of the scooter. Fede jumped, scrambling backwards against the counter, his heart in his throat. The little man squinted and shook his head at the noise. It split off a moment later, the guy with the drill yelling and waving his hand at the one who'd touched the scooter. He staggered backwards and started swearing in fluent English as a pale grey smoke came up from the floor where the fluid from the cup had spilled. The counter was obviously immune; the yellow liquid had pooled slightly there, but a charred black smudge was growing where it was dropping onto the floor. Cass's voice came from the belly of the scooter:
"You're fucking with my bike and I'm about half a minute away. I suggest you get the fuck out of there before I show up and cut your head off." Her voice rang with authority and anger, and it took a second for Fede to realize she didn't have a visual.
"Cass, you there?" he asked. There was a pause.
"Feed? Who's fucking with my bike?"
"Me. I couldn't reach you and Tonx needs help ASAP. I need to get to Cessus and was going to borrow your bike."
"Idiot" she said, her voice breaking slightly. "I thought someone was fucking with my fucking bike. Is Wang there?" Fede looked at the four men standing around him, two of them scattering cat litter across the counter and the floor.
"Um, yeah."
She spoke for a minute or two in Chinese, punctuated twice when the guy who'd opened the door made agreeable noises in the bike's direction. She switched to English. "Feed? You know how to drive a scooter?"
"Yeah, of course" he said. He'd ridden scooters before. Old ones. A couple times.
"I'll meet you there, just give me a chance to get some clothes on. Cessus's address is loaded into the helmet. And Feed, don't fuck up my bike. It runs hot, so don't granny it."
The background buzz of the connection clicked off and Wang (Fede assumed it was Wang) handed him the keys. It took him a few moments to figure out how to disconnect the lock, longer to get the helmet off the hook and onto his head. It was tight, crushing his ears, but Fede was grateful to discover a familiar interface appear on the inside of the helmet's faceplate. He wheeled it out the door, turned it on, and saddled up. He managed to get the helmet synced to his map data, the route charting itself to the address Cass had listed under Cessus's name. He slowly twisted the throttle. The bike screamed at him as he edged on the clutch, vibrating angrily. Fed ground his teeth under the helmet, rolled out onto the mostly empty road, tried to take it up to speed. He never got there; the bike wasn't happy at less than full bore, and even at halfway open Fede was lucky not to take out a lamppost. By the time he arrived at Marcus's the bike's heat readout was approaching redline, the aftermarket pipes hazy in the heat radiation. It stank of frying plastic, but he'd made it.
Fede dismounted, turned to see Marcus filling the doorway, arms folded, eyes glinting in the deep folds of his face.
"Welcome back, Feed" he said, his voice deep. "Cass called. What's the problem?"
"Tell you inside" said Fed, jogging up the stairs and past Marcus. "The bike okay there?"
"It's fine" called a voice from inside. It was the voice Fede had heard when he was here last, from upstairs.
"Cessus" said Fede as he walked in, entered the broad, couch-filled living room. At the far end was a tall black man sprawled out in a gleaming white terrycloth bathrobe, legs spread out in front of him. He had tiny round spectacles perched on the bridge of his long, sharp nose, a huge mane of thick dreadlocks sprouting from his head. In the fingers of one hand he held a tall blue bong, gently considering its gleam in the light. The room was rank with the smell of hash. Fede looked closer, realized his glasses weren't glasses, they were implants. There was nothing connecting the lenses over his nose, and the arms disappeared into the side of his head. As he watched Cessus smiled and revealed a neat row of clean white teeth. The small round lenses in front of his eyes rotated away from his nose, flipping towards the side of his head, sliding slowly into place alongside his temples. He released a huge cloud of smoke, choked, started giggling, stamping his feet as he struggled for breath.
"None other" he choked out, laughing, red eyes peering fiendishly at Fed. "What I can do you for?"
"Shit" breathed Fed.
"Take a seat" said Marcus, guiding him with one huge paw into a couch next to Cessus. He turned to the other man. "We secure here?"
"Sure" said Cessus. "I plugged the holes when you got me up. Costs, but what price liberty?" He smiled again at Fed, winked.
"Okay. Feed, why don't you tell us what Tonx needs. Cass mentioned Boers, which is bad news. What's the situation?"
Fede told them what he knew. Tonx had said to trust them, and he didn't see that he had any other choice.
"Tonx told me to tell you our man used to work for the mouse" he said to Cessus when he was done. "He said that'd mean something to you."
Up until then Cessus had been basically horizontal, taking the occasional toke but otherwise looking bored. As soon as Fed mentioned the mouse he sat bolt upright, turned a snarling jeer at Fed.
"Booyah!" he screamed, hurling the bong across the room. It shattered against the opposite wall, glass shards raining on an unused couch. "Fucking stealing from Disney, are we? Booyah!" he jumped at Fed, arms waving, his bleary red eyes wide. Marcus sighed gently and reached up with one huge arm, grasped Cessus's shoulder with his hand and shoved him back onto the couch. "Christ" he cursed softly, getting up and fetching a broom and bucket.
"Disney?" asked Fed.
"That's the mouse, man. Your Bro knows. Booyah!" said Cessus, disentangling himself from the couch and the tie on his robe. "You got stats on their local?"
"Yeah, of course. What are we going to do?" said Fed.
"We gonna lock 'em down, my friend. Easy-cheesy." Cessus peered carefully at Fed, "Marcus says you know comps. What's your specialty?"
"Code, I guess" said Fede self-consciously.
"You a script kiddie?" Cessus asked, squinting at him from one eye.
"Fuck no" frowned Fed. "I write my own scripts."
"You understand networking protocols? Mostly?"
"Mostly" agreed Fede "I can read log files and make sense out of them."
"Good enough" smiled Cessus. "We'll invoke Pan and drop them after Alice. But first!" he stood up, his robe falling open to reveal two long halves of a flaccid, split penis, "we get dressed!"
Cessus tore out of the room, the sound of his heels hammering against the stairs as he took them two at a time. Marcus grunted, rising from where he had been sweeping up the remnants of the bong. "He's crazy, but he's good" he said.
"That's your brother?" asked Fed. He didn't know what to think; Cessus's bizarre performance had left him reeling.
"We're all brothers here" said Marcus. "Cessus and I go way back."
He turned and walked into the kitchen, emptied the broken pieces of glass into the trashcan. He reemerged carrying an unmarked spray bottle full of green cleaning fluid. The room stank of bong water, a long brown stain fresh against others, Fede noticed. Marcus nudged the couch with his foot, causing it to jump towards Fed, bunching up carpet as it went. "Ignore what he says and watch what he does" Marcus advised. "He really is brilliant. You could learn a lot from him."
He finished spraying down the wall and splashed a liberal dose of the fluid on the floor behind the couch, hooked its edge with his foot and pulled it back into place. "You want some tea?"
Cass had arrived twenty minutes later, five minutes after Cessus had strolled downstairs in black slacks and neat black suit shirt. He had a silver tie neatly knotted around his neck, thin black lines patterned after silicon circuit boards. He disregarded their invitation to tea in favor of fetching a metal briefcase and disappearing to fill it. Cass stormed in eyes blazing, and went straight towards Fed.
"You blued my fucking pipes, asshole. Had to ride it hot, didn't you?"
"It ran hot naturally" he said.
"No shit it runs hot naturally. The things fucking well air-cooled, isn't it? What'd you do, stop-n-go through traffic the whole way here?"
"Perhaps we can deal with the matter at hand?" asked Marcus. He was drinking a protein shake from a BiggestGulp mug, 48 ounces of chocolate sludge that he had promised Fede did not taste like it looked.
"Fede tells us your man has been captured by Boers and is being held in a small cabin in rural Florida. We downloaded some satellite prints and it is, indeed, the middle of nowhere."
"Where's Tonx?" asked Cass.
"We're waiting to hear from him" said Marcus.
"He's in Chicago" interrupted Cessus from the doorway. "I got him a secure line through a kids terminal. He doesn't like competing with the children, but it's more secure than your hack." He smiled at Fed. Some of his dreads had been replaced with tapered vinyl tubes. "You left your end of the connection open; not likely they would've found you backwards from the proxy, but not safe either."
"How'd you know?" demanded Fed.
"Traced your hack from Tonx's end. Got to do your homework, my boy." He strolled into the kitchen and winked at Cass. "Care to go for a ride? I'd love to do some more reconnaissance, but don't see any reason to advertise our work from here."
Five minutes later they were all piled into Marcus's Pinto, Fede tucked into the center of the back seat. The driver's seat was remounted almost into the trunk to fit Marcus.
"Where'd you find this car?" asked Fed. "You must have had to shop around."
"Cass made a few changes for me" said Marcus. "At my size it's hard to find a car that really fits."
"Do you mod everything?" Fede asked Cass.
"Everything I can get my hands on" said Cass. She gave him that same sweet dangerous smile, "But don't worry. I'm strictly into mechanics."
As they swung onto the road Cessus pulled an ancient grey laptop out of his briefcase and seated it on his lap.
"A laptop?" asked Fede in disbelief.
"Marcus said you might want to learn something. To that end I've brought this screen; as an illustrative aid. Why don't you watch and tell me what I'm doing?"
"Okay" said Fed, shuffling forward to peer over Cessus's shoulder as the system booted up. Cessus put a little grey plug into its USB port, thumbed a switch on it. A yellow LED on the plug began to glow. There was a transparent plastic shield fitted over the keys. He gently rubbed each of his fingernails. They were black, thick plastic press-ons glued in place.
"Those shells?" Fede asked, excited.
"Oh yeah" smiled Cessus. "They got them as implants now, you know that? This shit is the only way to work, and the implants are supposed to be way more sensitive. Got to get me some of that, we make any money off this run."
He ran a config program, quickly pressed each of his fingers forward, back, side to side, the shells calibrating against the movement of the blood under his fingernails as he pressed his fingers down. The LED on the plug flashed, his fingernails synching up. Then he started setting up daemons.
"Okay, you're splitting all our comm channels to reassign themselves through a proxy list. Am I right?"
Cessus smiled again. "Go on."
"That's… that's an encryption module? You're swapping channels for the remodulated packets. For the proxy list, yeah? You're making voice packets look like text packets, basic stenography… okay, what's that?"
The conversation continued while Marcus drove aimlessly around town. Cass was clearly bored out of her mind and tried to make some calls until Cessus told her she was violating the ether.
"You're making too much noise for us to monitor the cell traffic" Fede explained. He was impressed. The security protocols Cessus was using were extremely complex, but elegantly arranged. He wove their data streams according to some logic Fed couldn't understand until they were stacked next to each other. Once they sat together it made perfect sense. It was wonderful to watch, like beautiful code but real-time, reactive. Cessus was dancing with the data, arranging a set where they were invisible, the data turning inside itself.
Suddenly he was done, shuttled his work to a half-screen graph view, nine columns of traffic gently streaming up the screen, each representing a different data type or path. It didn't look like anything, anymore, or rather it looked just like the data streams had before he started. It would look like that whatever they did. They were hidden.
"Fuck" said Fed. He was grinning like an idiot.
"You got your gogs on?" asked Cessus.
"Yeah" said Fed.
"Okay, look for a music device in your PAN."
"PAN?" asked Cass.
"Personal Area Network. Old-school term for short-range devices; for a while they wanted to market everything by range. You know, WAN for stuff like cell networks, LAN for wired networks or WiFi networks in your house, PAN for your MP3 or OGG player and your watch and gogs and stuff. But once the wireless technologies started getting cross-compatible nobody thought of it like that anymore."
"Fucking marketese bullshit" said Cass. "Why can't they just let people call it what it is?"
Marcus grunted, bored. "How about some music?" he asked. He had an old-fashioned single-purpose music player mounted in the dash, text display only.
"Please" said Cass.
Marcus spun through a long list of artists, his huge fingers moving deftly until he settled on something called Astrid Gilberto. The faint strains of cocktail lounge settled through the car, a woman's soft voice da-da-dading along with it. Marcus hummed quietly along, turning down streets at random.
"You find the music device?" asked Cessus.
"Yeah" said Fed. "But why?"
"Sync it" said Cessus. "And run the visualization option."
Fede did as he was told. All music devices came with little apps to make random shape and color shows, but Fede wasn't sure Marcus's would provide anything useful.
Instead the nine columns he had seen on Cessus's screen appeared in rippling rainbow colors, rendered in swirling hypnogogic pixels. Fede snorted. "Clever" he said.
"Thank you, kind sir" said Cessus. "Marcus's stereo is disconnected from the networks for security reasons, but anybody watching could only reasonably expect that his car would have one and that it would be broadcasting. I've only synced the text patterns - the colors are modulating as expected. The difference between what you're seeing and what anyone else would see is attributable to lag on your comp's end and the packet loss inherent in syncing on such a weak connection over any further distance. So. I think you can watch those packets for any sign of trouble, if you please."
"Excellent" said Fed. "What now?"
"Now we find out what to listen to" said Cessus. "They're in a little house in the middle of nowhere. We have an address and GPS coordinates. Nothing else. How do we figure out their comms?"
"Uh, can we trace the address to an owner, figure out the data line that way?"
"Good thinking, but I would expect the owner's name is faked, or at least nonassociated. But that far out there I'll bet they're running wires only. Probably copper, probably owned by an ex-Baby Bell. All those wirelines are leased, and the Bells had them divided and subgrouped geographically."
"So we just need to find… " Fed's voice faded as Cessus began tabbing through maps, geometric shapes etched on them in brilliant red. "Where did you get those?" he asked.
"Bells were busted long time ago. Tracing their maps against ISPs and traffic owners is a good basic practice for seeing the patterns. Got to understand the beast's bones before you eat the meat. Now, here. There's only this one main trunk near their location. It's leased out to Gaterville Countryside ISP, LLC. Let's see what their security looks like, shall we?"
Fede watched as Cessus dissected the ISP's firewall, set agents to gather traffic in and out of their open ports, diagnosed their operating system, detection countermeasures, their security's weaknesses and flaws. Cessus eventually found a mail session started through an unencrypted link to a public server from an account at the ISP and sucked out the password and login. Then he set up some filters to watch for the same login being used elsewhere. Sure enough, not ten minutes later the login was used with any encrypted handshake to run a shell to the same server the mail session had connected to. Thirty seconds and Cessus had logged in and discovered root access.
"Okay" said Cessus. "Now that we've got full admin privileges over here, how to we get back to the ISP?"
"Log files" said Fed. Check for when this guy went the other direction and connect in some believable way."
"Good idea. How about we assure that we can get back here again some other time, first?"
Cessus installed three separate root kits, backdoors hidden in four different places in case any one of them was found and deactivated. Then he scanned the log files for a secure shell connection to the ISP's primary servers, found one and discovered it provided a root connection straight to the ISP.
He logged out and erased the connection from the log, backed out from the mail server entirely.
"What are you doing?" asked Fed. "We had access!"
"You know what it is if it smells like shit?" asked Cessus. "It probably IS shit. That was easy, too easy. I didn't like how it smelled."
"I don't like how this car smells" said Cass. "You want to drop me off downtown so I can do some biz? My boyfriend's gone missing and sitting here listening you two hackers babble on is making me nuts."
"I agree" added Marcus. "Is there a safe connection I can leave you guys at for a little while? I would also like to do some business."
Cessus sighed. "It's not as safe if we don't keep moving, but we could do an hour on the tower. Is that cool?"
"Sure" said Marcus. "Let me drop Cass off first."
He headed downtown towards the banking district, down to where a long strip of restaurants and tourist joints jostled for space. They said goodbye to Cass, who promptly turned and disappeared into the crowd, and then headed north towards Cartoff Tower. Cessus pulled a discreet corporate-cut dread bag, matt black, over his dreads.
"Are your dreads wired into your brain?" asked Fed. Cessus smiled, a glint of gold in his teeth.
"No. They monitor temperature, electrical activity and such - for meditational purposes. But they don't jolt my brain. I don't need that kind of feedback fucking up my senses."
Marcus dropped them off in front of the tower, waved goodbye.
"They are spiked with memory metal, though" Cessus said. "For heat diffusion."
Fede grunted as they turned towards the tower entrance, huge glass doors spanned by bronze touchpads, fountains flanking each entrance in gaudy laser-lit gushes.
"Memory metal?" asked Fed, more for conversation than any real curiosity. The hotel made him nervous - too many suits, too many people looking down their noses at him, wondering about why this kid was here with this dreadlocked weirdo.
"Nitinol. Flexible wire, returns to its original form when my head gets above resting temperature. It's pretty weak, but it can lift some hair. I came up with the idea and Cass wired everything in. Thought the patent would do me some good, but it looks like folks haven't caught on to the trend yet."
Cessus nodded at the doorman, his briefcase held casually at his side. Fede felt suddenly out of place, the sound of the street cut off abruptly as the doors sealed shut behind them. They approached a bank of elevators, got inside.
"The Nitinol wires I use were formed straight, bonded to rubberized inserts implanted in my skull. Osseointegration, bonding gold/titanium amalgam plugs with bone. Your brother's a wizard at it - he's reinforced almost half of Marcus's skeleton that way."
He glanced at Fed, and added, "It takes a lot of skill, otherwise you get Heterotopic Ossification."
"Hetero what?" asked Fed, his eyebrows meeting as he tried to decide if Cessus was making stuff up.
"Heterotopic Ossification. It's a condition that sometimes happens with major implants. Used to be hip replacements were most vulnerable - basically the body starts trying to re-form the replaced skeletal tissue. You get pieces of bone forming inside the muscles around what you replaced. It hurts."
"Are you joking?" asked Fed. "Has it happened to Marcus?"
"Nope. Like I said, your brother's good. One of the best."
Cessus punched the top floor and stood back, hands folded over the handle of the briefcase.
"Anyway, the end result of my dreadlock design is that the hotter my head gets, the straighter the Nitinol gets. The straighter the wires get, the less my dreads cover my head and the more heat escapes." He smiled widely, "It lets me overclock my brain."
Fede stared at the line of illuminated elevator buttons and tried hard to pretend he wasn't listening. He knew Cessus was good at security - he'd seen that much already. But he didn't want to hear about how he thought he was overclocking his brain. Tonx had been right when he'd said Cessus was crazy.
They exited the elevator, turned sharply and came to a tall wooden stand behind which a maitre d' stood at attention. He and Cessus stared at each other for a moment, evaluating. The man opened his mouth to speak, was cut off by Cessus.
"A window seat will do nicely. My nephew has yet to truly see the city" he said, gesturing at Fede without looking.
The maitre d' nodded, mumbled something unintelligible and led them into the restaurant. It was shaped like a disc, the bar and kitchen in the center. They descended some steps to a booth by the edge. From their seat Fede could see tourists on a walkway just below, children's pink fingers wrapped around rubber-coated chicken wire. Cessus put his briefcase on the windowsill, blocking his own view of the scenery below, and plugged a small black wire into its base. He draped his napkin discreetly over the wire. Then he pulled a splitter from his pocket and put his hands under the table, leaned forward towards Fed.