Escapology (17 page)

What the fuck and who the fuck? Nearly made me chuck my lunch on the damn floor. Nearly made me breathe my last over goddamn udon. Not cool. Not. Cool. That’s a loud-arse chime you have. Dim it.

S’Johnny. Johnny Sez.

Shock makes a face. Catches sight of it in the window and twists his face harder, gurning at himself. If he were any less mature he’d stick a finger down his throat and make gagging noises.

Am I up?

Yup.

That was quick.

Yeah, well, she had good intel.
Johnny sniffs. Through his IM link it sounds like a gale-force wind. Shock winces. Makes a two-finger gun at his lobes BAM as Johnny says,
Now uh… this info Mim needs you t’grab, s’got a barcode lock innit, so remember to lock it back up.

Shock gawps at himself in the window. What. The. Fuck. No way. No. Not again. He is not getting dicked
again
.

Now you hear me clear, Johnny.
Shock turns his finger gun into a knife, stabbing the shiny red surface of the noodle bar hard enough to hurt. People stare. He ignores them.
Mim didn’t say shit about barcodes. This was supposed to be a cruise. Easy money. Fucking sleep walking!
He stabs the table extra hard, nearly taking off the end of his finger.
And if it’s not exactly
classified,
by the bye, not that I’m interested but I have to ask because
what the fuck
—what’s it doing barcoded?

Hey, you know Mim, honesty isn’t exactly her forte, so if you were sucker enough to say yes then I don’ give a shit about what you did n’ didn’t agree to. Besides, I don’ think it’s top-level barcode.

Shock laughs.
No such thing as
levels
in barcode. Depends on what types of bar they’re using. As neither Mim nor you would know one bar-type from another, I’m going to make a wild guess that she has no idea whether or not the damn thing she wants is classified or no. And thus my answer is as follows: get it yourself or get fucked.

There’s another wind down his IM. More like a hurricane this time. Shock grinds his teeth. When does a lowlife like Sez get to sigh at him?

Man, dude,
bro.
Look, I’m gonna do ya a favour. I got some visitors the other day. Uninvited you might say. Go by the names Li n’ Ho. You might know ’em? Upshot is they’re after knowing who Mim was working with, n’ I might’ve given them your name.
Johnny actually sounds sorry, the shitty little coward.
You might need this flim to get out of dodge, because they’re after killing you n’ they don’ mess around. This may be the last job you c’n take someone won’t immediately rat you out on.

Cardinal rule, Sez, you never give names! Especially not to the fucking Harmonys! And I call bullshit. They’ve wanted me for ages and haven’t looked that hard. What’s changed?

Reckon our Mim’s neck deep in somethin’ as per, cos them crazy Harmonys were all over getting’ info about who was cracking this job. Your name made for an interestin’ response. Just sayin’.

Hit by the overwhelming desire to lob his noodle bowl through the window, Shock has to sit there breathing it out for a while. This is typical Mim, one hundred percent proof pure malice. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d schemed this whole scenario trying to get him to do a barcode on the cheap, because she sure as hell hasn’t paid enough for that. Fifty/fifty his arse. Eight K is probably less than twenty percent. Dicked on flim and Li Harmony back on his tail. What a fucking bargain. Mim’s such a bitch she’ll get animus poisoning and die one of these days. Can’t come too soon.

Shock surveys his options. They make flim rates for the bottom ten percent look generous. He could run now, but the flim he has won’t last long enough, and living on nothing is scientifically impossible. You can breathe air for sure, but you can’t eat it. That crap is not nourishing. All he can do is take his piss-ant pay with gritted teeth and be a good Haunt; get this done quick, clean and quiet as possible and then get the hell gone.

Fine. Fine. I’ll do it. But I better have my flim pronto.

It’s a done deal. I’m sendin’ you the info n’ addy for delivery now. Only use that. It’s a P.O. but don’t peek for ownership history or you’ll be.

Don’t threaten me, Sez. Next to Li you’re not exactly scary, dig?

Sez sniffs, wounded.
IM me back on this line when you’re done n’ I’ll arrange delivery of the flim. Mim said no e-T.

Nope. I want my flim physical.

It will be.

And he’s gone, leaving an eerie echo down Shock’s connection, disruptive as static down a radio-link. He grimaces and slams it shut. Li’s definitely not above hacking Sez’s IM and listening in. There’s a pool of miso at the bottom of his bowl, sitting there looking all delicious, but Shock’s appetite’s flatlined. Matter of fact, his whole day’s dive-bombed. Nothing for it but to get his sorry self to a Slip shop.

“Sooner you work, sooner you get your flim,” he reminds himself, as if he ever needed reminding about the vital correlations between work and money. Hand to mouth is a swift tutor. Imminent murder even more so.

Closest Slip shop is four doors away. Fancy joint called Slip-matic. Slip-matic is a chainstore brand, like the Kendo Noodle House where he’s left the dregs of his lunch, and where everything is always a combo of shiny red and puke yellow. In Slip-matic the pods are uniform black; the attendants wear uniforms, and are generally uninformed pretty faces, too dumb for office work. Makes these places the perfect base for a bit of snatch and grab hackage.

Shock pays for nine standards. He’s got a barcode to wrestle of unknown classification, which is dandy if you’re in the mood for a challenge and a pisser if you’re not, and not anything any hack could achieve in under eight standards even if it’s lower level. There’s no manual interface here, thank fuck, he just jumps in his pod and jacks in, sliding direct into the Slip as Octopus.

The path to Paraderm is quiet but Shock doesn’t find it reassuring, there’s no paranoid like a hack. Freaked out, he wants to use the nodes but Puss does that thing again, acting autonomous. This time actively leading him astray and squeezing acrobatic coils into Paraderm proper, showing him there’s nothing to be nervous of. All is well. Okay then, smartass.

Company grids resemble tube mazes built for smart rodents, or smarter cephalopods, re-imagined in ever more bewildering complication and glowing in various eye-watering hues. Back in control and amazed he lost it to an
avi
of all things, Shock slinks through with liquid haste, hunting for the storage server in Mim’s info packet. She was right about one thing—the server’s not classified.

He gets in easy as walking. It’s some kind of janitorial server with no connections to the main servers and therefore no need for further VA. Here’s a mystery then, because no server of this unclassified nature ever held, nor holds, a classified data packet. So why does this one? He’s beginning to suspect the chasing of wild geese here. An amusing skit at the expense of one Shock Pao, idiot supreme. Maybe the beginning of Li’s cat-and-mouse game, or some such unpleasantry. Then he sees the barcode, nestling in a small nook halfway up the server, and rage stops him in his tracks.

What in the
hell
?

Barcodes take their name from the fact they’re reminiscent of codes once used on products, with each section of a twelve-digit-long security code represented by four bands of black and white, two of each colour, varying in widths from one to four units to a total of seven. But that’s where the resemblance ends. These bars are virtual, and alive. They come in different forms, each with its own challenges, some less so than others. The most complex is the Gordian. Which is what he has here. So far from good it’s on another goddamn planet.

The black and white lines coil up and around one another in a nausea-inducing pattern of repetitive movement, like a nest of snakes—and these suckers have venom all right. All manner of nasty surprises lurk in those hallucinatory, shifting coils. If you lack skills, you best not approach this sucker. Death in the Slip is never pretty.

As history would suggest, Gordians have to be cut at exactly the right point, and there’s an algorithm in the code that translates to an equation for that location. Which means you have to figure out the code first, and as it works back to front but reads front to back, that’s no mean feat. Crack it, reverse it, extract the algorithm, extrapolate the equation and snip.

Now he gets what this information is. Company secrets. An inside job. Hidden here in plain sight to keep out curious eyes, with the expense of a Gordian shackled over it to prevent accidental stumblers from being able to access its contents. And Mim is undercutting. This job is worth
thousands
more than he’s getting. His eight K just shrank from under twenty percent to under five. He’s worth so much more, fifty/fifty for reals even in his current condition and with all the trouble at his back—if only he had the pride and wherewithal to tell her where to shove it.

Shock stretches his tentacles, the Octopus equivalent of cracking tension out of a neck. However much he wants to throw the world’s biggest hissy fit at Mim, or walk away, preferably both, he’s stuck with doing his job, getting his
insulting
payment of flim and forgetting all about it. That’s his life skill, and a good life skill is incapable of being over-utilized.

Shoulda bought fifty units,
he mutters to himself, and gets to work, thanking all the quirks of a random system that he ended up in an avi with eight fully malleable limbs and a habit of augmenting his ability to think, so he didn’t have to drop unnecessary flim on upgrades. Talk about serendipity.

Still, it takes nearly an hour of playing shuffle with the knot, working fast enough to blur tentacles, to get the code. Somewhere up there, IRL, his body is slicked with sweat, the greasy kind you get in the Slip from nerves, feels like you just bathed in luke-warm stir-fry oil. Shock grimaces, his beak tucking in.

Waking’s gonna be a bitch
.

With the code worked out, the rest is simple, but only because he aced advanced mathematics and somehow remembers all of it when he’s Puss down here. If that wasn’t the case… well… Gordians have time restrictions on top of their other tricks, and they tend to count down to explosion. From Slip to IRL the damage from such an explosion is all cerebral. He might get out of Slip, considering this shop has rudimentary safety precautions, but he wouldn’t wake up. They’d have to carry him, drooling, to the nearest ICU. Probability of waking there? Maybe three to one, which is not so bad. Probability of waking with his faculties intact? Those are odds he never wants to calculate.

Ten mins later he’s got the cut point and the data-packet. Shock regards it with disgust through Puss’s square pupils.

Just so we’re clear
, he snaps at it.
I should be getting paid way more for plucking you out, you bastard.

Copying the info into his drive, Shock resets the Gordian and heads out of the server. In about as bad a mood as he can muster, he locates the P.O. at a reef a good distance away, and heads off to deliver. The second he opens the P.O. to upload, something gross and sticky lands in his drive. It’s heavy. Slick. And
moving
. Sliding about like mercury, giving him that odd floaty head you get after drinking one too many on an empty stomach and not the fun one either, the one where you really wish you’d bothered to eat.

What the
fuck
!

Slamming the package into the P.O., Shock takes a second to scrape at his drive with some anti-virals. They do nothing except make him feel instantly sick, tasting copper, magnesium burn, ashes slicked with grease, which freaks him out good and proper. Tasting in the Slip is
so
not good—means the whole funny head shit is having a physical effect on his body IRL. He could already have tossed his noodles and be choking his last.

Caught between sickness and panic, he ejects from Slip, leaving Puss where it is, knowing it’ll be there when he needs it again no matter what. Finding himself alive and vomit-free is a plus, but Shock’s not in the least reassured, shit is badly wrong here in his head. This makes tofu brain look like fun times. Calls in fact for a trip to a drive clinic, a virtual colonic for the head, but joy of joys he hasn’t flim for that until Sez IMs and he can acknowledge delivery, so he’s going to have to improvise.

Only two ways to do that, good drugs or good tea. Guess which one he hasn’t got flim for? Dragging himself out of the pod, he clamps his hands to his belly and makes his way on unsteady feet back onto Plaza into the cool wash of evening, under over-bright lights, on the hunt for a temporary liquid solution to his woes.

* * *

Moving lights from shop signs slide across grey concrete like water reflections, dragging shadows behind them.

Plaza’s too quiet for a Monday
, thinks Ko-Ren, peering out at a night sky bled to deep purple by the bright glare of Shin district.

Somewhere up there floats Tokyo City Hub. If he squints through the sea of neon and street lights, the spotlights on ’scraper roofs, he should be able to see it; a dark shadow sliding through purple night like a sea monster, menacing in its sheer size and breadth. Not tonight though, tonight his eyes are tired. Double shifts to make ends meet mean late nights, early mornings. Costs too much to live these days and he’s an old man, getting older every day. One day they’ll find him dead in this booth, a smile stuck to his face, kabuki-like, warped and disingenuous.

Old Rin, from the same ’rise Ko-Ren reluctantly calls home, walks on by down the Plaza dragging his wife’s ugly dog, shaggy as a bear with scabies, on a thin plastic leash. Rin’s wife is long dead and he hates the dog, but always walks it. Half eight every evening, the same route he used to take with her. Maybe he thinks she’s waiting down the Plaza somewhere. Maybe he thinks she’ll brush the damned dog. Ko-Ren winces, clutching a grumbling stomach. No option but long hours, and he can’t leave the booth in case he misses a sale. If he forgets to cook rice for the day, he has to graze on what he sells.