“Jesus,” said Bomber, cradling his head. The worst hangover in history drummed in his skull and he hadn’t even drunk anything. street lights flashed pain onto his closed eyelids. He was definitely in a car, but when he finally dared to open his eyes, he only found the unpleasantly familiar sights of Bilbao. The Spanish sun seemed to mock him, still no closer to his goal.
But when he was passing out he’d felt something, an impression of Gina, however fleeting. She had to be trying to reach him.
The driver’s seat was empty. Bomber spotted a newspaper sticking out of the door and reached over to grab it. The headline read, Communication Blackouts Lifted!, and Bomber’s eyes went wide. Then, just below it, Spain, Portugal and Southern France Still Affected. He screamed in frustration and slammed his fist into the dashboard hard enough to leave a dent.
The rest of the article told the story in terse Spanish. The Fed Controllers in the region had hired every hacker in Europe to bring their systems back online. Country by country they went and restored communications, starting with the Hacker Nations themselves — Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. At the time of writing the entire north and east was hooked up again. Only the Iberian servers remained in quarantine. The story remained light on the technical details.
Bomber read on regardless, aching to find out what he could, until he arrived at the word that said it all. ‘Sabotage.’ A cyber-attack of unprecedented proportions, perpetrated by an unknown group with unknown methods. Nobody knew how it was possible for anyone to kick Europe in the head like this.
He crumpled the newspaper in his hands. He knew who was responsible. He had to get to Geneva and recruit some help.
The driver-side door flew open and Toledo landed at the wheel, throwing a black bin bag onto the back seat. He took one look at Bomber, then the newspaper, and nodded. “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Good. I don’t want to deal with you having another epileptic fit. Here.” He reached into his waistband and took out a length of matt black ceramic, a silenced pistol with magazine already in place. “Let’s cut to the chase, Cai– Bomber. Up ’till now I wasn’t too sure about you or your story. I thought you were, in all likelihood, fuck-nuts crazy and quite probably dangerous. Now . . . I believe you. I believe we need to get you out of Spain as fast as possible. Right?”
Bomber gave a tiny nod. “So you’re with me?”
“As long as your money’s good.”
“My money’s the best, Toledo,” Bomber chuckled darkly. “Get me to Geneva and I’ll make sure you get as much as your heart desires.”
“One last question, then,” hummed Toledo, glancing in his mirrors. “Do you know anything about a white van that’s been following me for the past two hours?” Bomber sat bolt upright at that, tried to find it in the mirrors, but the angle was wrong and the Ferrari itself blocked his view. Toledo continued, “One man and a woman. They never move, they just sit there and watch us.”
Bomber cursed under his breath. “Probably settin’ us up for an ambush. Any way we can shake ’em?”
“Can you handle going two hundred klicks an hour on a busy road?”
Bomber shrugged. “Sure.”
Smiling, Toledo turned to the steering wheel and said, “Autodrive. Destination Geneva, Switzerland. Maximum speed.”
The engine roared. In a heartbeat they were rocketing forward past one hundred kilometres per hour, past two hundred, pinned to their chairs by the terrible weight of acceleration. Bomber crunched all his muscles to force some blood back into his head. A look in the mirrors showed the white van desperately trying to give chase but it soon fell away behind and disappeared behind a corner. Within minutes they squealed onto the motorway, weaving left and right to dodge the traffic, and it was all Bomber could do not to throw up.
The traffic only just started to clear when Toledo signalled to look in the mirrors again. Bomber bared his teeth as he watched the same damned van — or whatever it was — pulling into the lane just behind them. No van in the world could catch up with Toledo’s Ferrari on a straight road, so it had to be something else in disguise, surrounded by cute little holograms.
“No way of losing it?” he shouted over the noise of the engine. Toledo looked again and shook his head. Calmly he grabbed his bag from the back and rummaged around until he found what he was looking for. It was a long grey tube no thicker than a spice jar, small enough to hold in one hand. Black and yellow warning stripes ran around the edges and identified it to Bomber; a state of the art anti-air missile in its own disposable launch tube. Just one of those could take out an airliner.
Bomber grabbed at Toledo’s arm as the Spaniard leaned out of his window and took aim, “You can’t!” he yelled. “There’s civilians all over the road!”
“They’ve got brakes,” Toledo barked and tried to shrug him off. Bomber’s fingers slipped away as the Ferrari hit a traffic-free stretch of road. It tore across the tarmac at insane speeds, but the van kept pace right behind it.
“We can’t be sure they’re hostile!”
“Do you know of anyone with stealth drones who likes us?!”
Bomber paused. Despite the presence of innocent people, a soldier’s first instinct was to make damn sure of his own survival. Protecting bystanders came second or third at best. In a situation like this, maybe sacrifices needed to be made.
While Bomber hesitated, Toledo locked on and pulled the trigger.
The next instant there was a flash of sun-bright fire and a smoking hole in the road, quickly fading into the distance. Flaming pieces of plastic and metal rained out of the sky, and chunks of ash pattered against the Ferrari’s roof. Traffic everywhere had all but stopped and people were getting out of their cars to look at the devastation. The autodrive swerved left and right in a vain attempt to find a way through the chaos without causing any damage or bodily harm. When it concluded that it couldn’t, it simply put on the brakes and screeched to a halt.
“Fuck this,” hissed Bomber, “I’ll drive.”
They switched places in a hurry, without protest from Toledo, and Bomber let the seatbelt wrap itself around his body as he put his foot down. The Ferrari roared through the narrow spaces between cars, scraping mirrors and scattering people left and right. Bomber steered it through turns and gaps that the autodrive would never have attempted.
“You’re paying for my paint job,” Toledo said as they passed the last few stationary cars, the road ahead of them now clear for miles. He flicked the on-board navigator in the middle of the dashboard, which sprang to life with a satellite map of the local area. The landscape grew more and more more mountainous and thickly-forested as they went along. With precise movements he drew several course corrections across the screen, leading them right into the thickest vegetation.
“Any more pursuit will have a tough time following us through the trees,” he pointed out. “Keep it as fast as you can without crashing.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Bomber, swallowing. He always thought he was a stone cold motherfucker, but after seeing the Spaniard fire that missile at a crowded motorway, he decided he might have some competition.
The next moment they skidded down the off ramp and zoomed into the trees. At this speed the autumn forest was nothing more than a red, yellow and brown blur to either side of them. The Ferrari’s tires squealed, their massive contact patches struggling to keep them on the road.
They raced into a long tunnel sloping gently up the Basque mountains. When they came into daylight again, Bomber could make out the shadows of the Pyrenees in the far distance. According to the computer this road would take them into France within the hour.
Not long now, he told himself calmly, sliding sideways around a corner while the speedometer tickled two hundred and eighty kilometres an hour.
Two press helicopters and a Spanish police pursuit vehicle followed the Ferrari as it cannoned across the French border. There was no way to avoid the attention anymore, only to keep evading them until they hit Switzerland. Ordinary police cars tried to join the chase but couldn’t keep up for more than a few minutes, outpaced by the Ferrari’s old-fashioned hydrogen-electric engine. It could drive from Bilbao to Russia at top speed without refuelling.
They were halfway to Geneva by the time the cops started throwing up roadblocks. However, the on-board navigator automatically updated the route to avoid choke points. This worked until they reached a long stretch of motorway a hundred kilometres north of Nice without any good exits, barricaded and littered with car-stopping technology. As the mass of traps and vehicles came into view on the horizon, Bomber gritted his teeth and prepared to run the blockade.
First he hit a field of caltrops and spike strips, and his knuckles turned white as he tried to keep hold of the wheel. It was like driving in an earthquake, the wheels jerking left and right with wrist-breaking force, but the Ferrari’s tires were reinforced with the same material as Federation body armour. They wouldn’t break.
Bright lights flashed outside the windows as EMP mines went off. The dashboard controls flickered from the electric violence, and the steering locked up for one heart-stopping instant before the car’s automatic safeties brought it back under control. Then, just as the road smoothed out again, Bomber ploughed into the traffic barriers at full speed.
The windscreen boomed as it hit the first bar of heavy plastic. With the second it made a frightening pop, and with the third a huge crack appeared across the driver’s side, showering Bomber’s face in tiny fragments of supposedly bulletproof perspex. He shut his eyes in pain and barked at the autodrive to take over. It didn’t respond.
“I’ve got it,” Toledo shouted, grabbing the wheel. “Just keep going! We’re through!”
Bomber blinked into his mirrors at the crowd of French policemen hopping about in shock and anger. Red blotches stained his vision, but they were already fading as his implant went to work. He took control again with a muttered thank-you to Toledo and whatever gods were watching over him.
More pursuit vehicles came up behind them. They tried to overtake and force the car to stop, but they soon stopped when Bomber steered sideways and knocked one through the guardrail. It tumbled end over end in mid-air for several seconds before coming down to plough a new trench into the French countryside. Its companions, little more than large robotic motorbikes with flashing police lights on them, kept a respectful distance after that. Even the press helicopters gave up, content to watch the action through a satellite feed.
The Swiss border was just a line across the road and a big sign to announce the change in jurisdiction. They passed it with a cheer and raced into a long mountain tunnel, finally free of pursuit.
From there the Ferrari made its way east towards Geneva, weaving across the mountain roads, until a Federal Police strike helicopter caught up with it. No car in the world was built to withstand a Federation machine gun. A sudden storm of molten metal and asphalt, then silence. The chase was over.
Bomber and Toledo climbed out of the tunnel’s emergency exit, hundreds of kilometres away from the carnage, and started to walk. The roads were empty now, but it was a far cry from being chased by the cops.
The sun slowly disappeared below the horizon as they walked into some nameless village. From there they caught a cross-country bus to Geneva, a smooth chunk of plastic covered in blue paint, its silent electric engine pushing it onwards without so much as a whisper. Not quite as glamorous as a red Ferrari, but it’d get them there eventually.
“We’ll have to rent a new vehicle,” said Toledo. He seemed a little bit put out by the loss of his car, but he’d recover. After all, he had three more of the bloody things.
“Sure,” Bomber agreed. “Anything I should know about Geneva before we get there?”
Toledo shrugged. “There’s a Fed headquarters in the city so I’d appreciate if we could keep a low profile. How were you planning on making contact with your Army friends?”
“No idea. They were supposed to find us when we landed at the airport, but that ain’t an option now, so I guess it’s up to our combined intelligence-gatherin’ skills.”
A wry smile twisted Toledo’s lips. “Ah, good. I was starting to worry that this would be easy.”
“It ain’t all bad, though,” said Bomber. “If I’m not mistaken, we’ve got comms again. Can I borrow your phone?” Toledo handed it over, and Bomber tapped in the number for Jock’s mobile. It’d be his first news of the outside world. Or rather, the only parts of the world that mattered to him.
After a minute of unanswered ringing, Bomber frowned at the phone, closed it and gave it back. “Nothing. That ain’t good.”
“He probably thinks you’re dead, my friend,” Toledo chuckled. “Or maybe he’s just busy.”
Bomber grunted and stepped off the bus. He’d spotted an automated AmeriBank branch across the road, went in, and described his needs to one of the helpful machines. After a simple biometrics scan it spat out replacements for all his old credit cards and ID, and Bomber secured the stack of plastic in his inside pocket. They’d need money. He still owed Toledo, would have to drill deep into his savings for that, but money was nothing if it led him to Gina. Right now, his best shot at that was through the Army.
They rode the early-morning bus to downtown. No driver to hassle them, no people to speak of — just the bus rolling around on its automated course, never tiring, never stopping. They stopped for some bland slabs of protein at a local burger place, then found themselves a hotel that asked no questions. The clerk took their money, handed them two keys, and that was that.
An hour later Bomber lay alone on his bed naked from the waist up. His head swam with fatigue. He didn’t really sleep much anymore, but every now and again his body needed to refuel. Of course, he was still human, and sleep refused to come no matter how much he tossed and turned.
On a whim he slapped on some clothes and went back out into the night, looking for anyone who could put him in touch with the local underground. Someone useful. At first glance the city seemed innocent, filled with the sickening, artificial cheerfulness of a genuine tourist trap. The local government had done a great job at covering up, moving or demolishing the sort of back-alley places where the darker segment of society liked to gather. However, you could never quite get rid of them all, and Bomber smiled to himself as he noticed the flickering neon sign of an all-night pawn shop.
It was located well off the main road, its windows stained with smoke and dust, and every breakable surface protected by wire mesh. Broken bottles and torn placards littered the street. Much of the walls were covered in violent graffiti, although some half-hearted attempts had been made to wash it off. Along with a few dark stains on the road, the acid residue of tear gas agent, these were the fading signs of the riots that had gone on during the comms blackout.
Two very thin people huddled together under the pawnshop’s porch sharing a joint, as pale as a pair of zombies. They shrank back when Bomber stepped up to the door and melted away to someplace darker.
The door opened with the jingle of electronic bells. A light went on somewhere but illuminated nothing. Bomber carefully walked past a parade of random items with unreadable price tags. A voice croaked from the darkness in badly-accented Conglom, “Make it quick. No diamonds, no leather, no plastic.”
“I need some information,” said Bomber. “Gotta get in touch with the right people.” He folded up a ten-thousand-dollar bill and flicked it at the counter.
“Might be able to help you, but it won’t be easy. People around here don’t like yanks.”
Bomber took out another bill and scribbled the name of his hotel and his room number in the margins. Next to it he wrote, underlined, ‘Grendel’. Then he crumpled it into a ball and slammed it on the counter. “And I don’t like being fucked about,” he growled, switching to English. “If you want more money, you get somebody to come and see me. I’ll be waiting.”
He walked away without another word and went back to the hotel, up the stairs and into his room. He yawned and threw himself down on the bed without bothering to take off his clothes.
The next thing he knew, morning light was seeping in through the blinds. A tattered piece of paper rustled as it slid under the door. Written on it in pencil was a place and a time.
Now we’re getting somewhere, he thought, reaching for his clothes.
Geneva shone in the daylight. Bomber stood in the middle of the city, looking out over the murky brown waters of the Rhone as it belched forth from Lake Geneva, mountains silhouetted against the blue-grey sky behind him. The city had kept most of its old architecture over the years, but it couldn’t stop the relentless march of progress. Towers of glass and steel surrounded and dominated the old core of the city, each one taller than the last as if competing to reach the clouds, shaped like pretty much anything the laws of physics would allow.
He unfolded the piece of paper and read it one more time. Then he glanced at his watch. The note definitely read ‘Mont Blanc bridge’, ten minutes ago.
An old copy of the local newspaper fluttered past on the wind. Bomber reached out and grabbed it, a single laminated sheet of digital paper, identifiable only by the bright Tribune logo glowing at the top. A little hologram in the corner flickered as it spelled out today’s headlines, and the more energy-intensive animated stories and advertisements were distorted across the page. The paper’s battery was already packing up. Bomber pulled up today’s articles, zoomed and scrolled his way through them with a few quick finger movements, but he couldn’t find much that wasn’t about the communications failure or the resulting massacre on the European stock market. Disgusted, he threw the paper in a waste bin and wiped his hands.
“You looking for something?” asked an androgynous voice from beside him, and a figure joined Bomber at the railing to enjoy the morning over the lake.
Bomber scratched his chin. The stubble there was quickly turning into a beard, and he couldn’t seem to bring himself to get rid of it. To the newcomer he said, “I might be. Need to get in touch with someone, quietly. It’s worth a lot to me.”
“Might be expensive, waste a lot of time on everyone’s part. Most people don’t like being found.”
“Then I guess you’ll be wantin’ payment up front,” Bomber concluded. He’d been here before.
The figure turned to smile at Bomber, eyes and the top half of the face still hidden under a thick hooded sweatshirt. “You catch on, I like that.” He or she glanced around to make sure the coast was clear. “Let’s go someplace more private. We can do business there.”
Bomber nodded and, at just the right time to look inconspicuous, peeled away from the railing to follow his new guide. Augmented senses drank in every detail, analysing and predicting everything. By now he was sure the figure was a man, from speech, smell and body language. He was rarely wrong. For one, he’d seen through Rat the second he’d met her. He just didn’t care.
And Gina . . . Well, she was definitely a woman. No question about that.
They walked a few streets away from the bridge before the hooded guy flagged down a robotic taxi. Bomber took a momentary glance around before getting in, confirming his suspicions. No CCTV cameras here to observe them getting in the taxi or catch its licence plate. Clever. Futile, but clever.
From the inside, Geneva rolled by him at a pleasant pace. He watched some nice architecture, enjoyed the cloud-filtered sunlight, and memorised every inch of the route so he could cross-reference it with the city map he’d bought and studied earlier that morning. At the back of his head another little part of him kept a running update on possible escape routes just in case they became necessary. It all fit with Bomber’s motto and private philosophy, It never hurts to have a battle plan.
“Stop here,” said the guide. The taxi faithfully rolled to a stop and asked for a credit card. Instead of money, though, he slotted in a card-sized circuit board, a scrambler designed to screw up the cab’s electronics. Sure enough an alarm started beeping and the doors popped open, accompanied by the taxi’s calm robotic voice declaring an emergency and requesting all passengers to please evacuate the vehicle.
They stepped out.
Bomber found himself in an ancient and abandoned industrial estate left to rot for an untold number of years. Most of the roofs had caved in and the ground was littered with shards of broken glass and crumbling chunks of concrete. He shrugged and followed the hoodie into the only warehouse in the neighbourhood that still had four walls and a ceiling. Meanwhile the taxi rolled away with its doors still open, swerving dangerously across the road.
On the inside the warehouse was like a teenagers’ secret clubhouse. The warehouse had been stripped down to a big tin-roofed hall, now divided up with paper screens and sheets of corrugated plastic. A big public area just inside the entrance offered a pair of mouldering old sofas to relax on. They were set close to the central attraction — flames crackling in the middle of a big firepit, cooking some form of meal. On the far side of the hall people slept on piles of rags, while the more well-off members of society stretched out on air beds inside their own paper cubicles.
What people Bomber could see were all dressed in the most outrageous crap they could find, spiked black faux-leather mixed with bright spandex and ripped denim without any rhyme or reason. Their hair was dyed and arranged into wild colours and shapes like nothing that could be found in nature. A few of them showed bruises left very recently by police batons and rubber bullets. Nobody looked older than twenty.
Neo-punks, Bomber thought bitterly. He wasn’t going to find any in-roads to Geneva’s criminal underground here. These were just kids. They had no idea what they were messing with.
The hoodie exchanged some ostentatious greetings with his pals, then introduced Bomber to them. The assembled people shot him looks of instant hostility. A handful stuck around to watch him, but the majority just went back to whatever it was they were doing, mostly nodding their heads to repetitive music. Sonic drugs, sequences of sound that induced a trance-like state filled with distorted hallucinations and heightened endorphin production, for the really frugal junkie.
“Maybe I wasn’t clear about what I need here,” Bomber said to the hoodie. “Reliable intel is what I need. Not some teenagers thinkin’ they can play super-spy.”
“You’re very hostile to our message,” said the hoodie, shaking his head. “How disappointing. It’s not very nice to insult the people you’re asking for help.”
“You’re plannin’ to rob me, not help me,” Bomber pointed out with dead calm. The possibility of violent confrontation had bubbled at the back of his mind since he walked in the door, and now he knew for certain. “Which would be a big mistake, especially if you’ve got anything that might be useful to me.”
The next moment a girl jumped onto his back. Her powerful legs clamped around his waist and cold steel touched his throat, a long knife held with elegance and strength.
“You know you walk like some fucking soldier boy, like you got boosts dans la cul,” her smoky voice whispered in his ear, speaking English with a rough and ready French accent. Her blade scraped the skin off his Adam’s apple. “But I bet I can cut you open quicker than you can get me off, hein?”
An endless moment passed in silence. Then the girl flew off Bomber’s back and smacked against the floor with a meaty thud, her head lolling at an unnatural angle due to the giant hole through her neck. The echoes of a gunshot rang through the warehouse like distant thunder while her knife clattered on the concrete. Suddenly everyone was pulling at weapons, looking for the shooter, but Bomber stepped forward into the chaos and raised his voice as loud as he could.
“Anyone who attacks me is fucking dead!” he boomed. The whole gang paused. Bomber took another step forward, ready to pull out his own piece if necessary. He continued, “I have snipers set up all around this building with infrared sights. Drop your weapons now and you’ll walk away unharmed. If you don’t do that, if anyone’s feelin’ like a big damn hero today, you better make peace with the Lord right now.”
The lead hoodie stared at Bomber, shaking in fear. An unopened butterfly knife slipped out of his slack fingers. “Please!” he whined. “We’ll tell you everything, just don’t kill anyone!”
“Good.” Bomber smiled, visibly relaxing. “Then we really are gettin’ somewhere.”
Sudden disconnect, reality switch. The world blinked out and the fantasy behind the goggles became real. Billions of dollars of equipment surrounded her, filling her with a godlike sense of power. She summoned up an avatar for herself and glanced down at it, watched the system render every detail with loving realism, her own body transferred into the virtual world.
With a thought the Chrome Rat materialised on Main Street and marvelled at its splendour. Until now she’d thought that all the structures and avatars were built at low resolution, optimised to demand as little power as possible to display them, since most people didn’t own the hardware necessary to show any further detail anyway. Now she saw that although some of the street was like that, she could instantly recognise where the builders had gone one step further. Everywhere she looked there were things of such beauty and craftsmanship that nothing in real life could live up to them. Places where the ‘Net’s elite did their work, or put up their feet.
Whoa, she thought. With this kind of hardware, I could do anything.
“The code we want is in a data vault in Ireland,” said Hideo. The voice in Rat’s ears had no point of origin — she couldn’t tell if he was right next to her or a thousand miles away. “You know how data vaults work?”
“Sort-of,” she admitted. “I’ve never seen one.”
“Okay, well, it pays to remember that data security is one of our biggest exports. There aren’t many facilities that can store top-secret data outside the reach of hackers. The Feds have their own, but even they rent vault space from us occasionally. We dominate the market.”
Rat tapped her virtual foot. “Is there a point to this?”
“Only if you don’t want to screw up the job,” Hideo admonished. “Now, these vaults are built to be completely inaccessible from the outside. They come online only on demand from the customer or to perform updates or backups. That’s the key element here.” He paused for breath. “Obviously we can’t just go to Ireland and break in. Nor can we hack into it from here. However, the vault protocol sends encrypted backups to randomly-chosen vaults in other Nations to protect against hardware failure. We have three vaults in Laputa, more than anyone else, so at least one local copy is bound to exist. Laputa and everything in it is mine. So, if you can find out where that local copy is being kept, we can go pay them a visit.”
“Right. Anything else?”
“The vault only takes ten minutes to perform its backups. You’ll have exactly that much time to get in, put a tracer on the outbound traffic, and attach a unique identifier so we can find the right data blocks once we get to the vault. And, of course, you can’t tip off anyone about what you’re doing or the whole mission is blown.”
“Right,” Rat said. Doable, she reckoned. Doable.
A flick of her mind brought out all the programming tools she would need and pinned them in the air in front of her. She made a few quick gestures and the tool windows spun like mad, dropping chunks of data into a semi-organised pile on the floor. Building the basics of a new program.
She asked, “How long before I have to be there?”
“About six minutes.”
“Right.” She sped up, bashing her program together without elegance, let the automated tools stitch things together and smooth the rough edges. Under normal circumstances that’d be unforgivable to the group of neurotic control freaks that made up hackerdom, but just for today, quality standards could get fucked as long as the job got done.
“Four minutes, Alex,” Jock chimed in. “Get ready.”
The last piece slotted into place with a click. The next moment she rocketed up Main Street with her program in hand. She went so fast that time stood still around her, the hardware on both sides unable to catch up. Vertigo tore at her brain, the meat struggling to process input from the machine, but she bit through it. Meat was just an object. The only body she needed was right here on the ‘Net.
She skidded to a stop in front of the Irish embassy, throwing up clouds of virtual dust and sending a few other avatars tumbling into the sky. Main Street enforced artificial speed limits, but those laws could be broken in all sorts of awesome ways.
Like all political establishments, the embassy’s doors were permanently open. Inside was a record of all the routing servers used by her target, and handy directions on how to reach them.
The Chrome Rat strode through the big doors like she owned the place.
On the inside it was a pretty basic affair of virtual glass and white tiles, all bathed in bright sunlight. A big white counter sat at the heart of it, surrounded by a collection of white round tables with matching white chairs. A few avatars sat ramrod-stiff in their chairs, waiting for an appointment, and the reception desk was manned by a helpful program in the shape of a woman with a fixed, ghoulish smile on her face. She spouted a greeting at Rat in her mechanically chipper voice.
The programmer had clearly designed this whole area to be light and welcoming but didn’t have much grasp of architecture or aesthetics. In the end it amounted to nothing more than a big uncomfortable lobby with one single corridor leading off towards the back.
Nobody paid her any mind as she went down the corridor and came face to face with a big metal door and a flashing red ‘NO ENTRY’ sign hovering in front of it. A voice said, “This is a VIP-only area. Please return to the lobby if you wish to be served.”
She walked through the sign with determination in her heart and a wicked smile on her face. She pulled out a little plastic card, slotted it into the wall without resistance, then whispered the code phrase. The flashing sign vanished and the doors flung open with a bang. She turned down the opacity on her goggles and glanced sideways at real-life Jock, who had gone pale.
“Where did you get that?!” he blurted.
“I had full access to your rig for two months, Jock,” she said. “Ain’t my fault you keep underestimating me.”
The dark corridors behind the security door went off in all directions, even up and down. Gravity had no meaning here. Rat simply thought about moving and her avatar would obey, guided to her destination by a little hovering arrow, courtesy of the embassy’s own friendly and helpful systems. They told her exactly where to go.
Big evil-looking robots passed her by without a second glance. Automated hunter-killers controlled by the embassy’s firewall software, covered in spines and blades and other useless decoration by bored programmers. They didn’t even know she was there.
She reached the end of the maze and slid her little card into the wall again. Then she stepped through, along miles and miles of fibreoptic connections, into the back end of the data vault.
Hideo chuckled in the background. “Very nice, Alex-han. Keep it up.”
Much as she might dislike him, his praise fanned a fierce spark of pride in her chest. She flicked back into existence near a river of light, a horizontal lightning bolt suspended in mid-air, flashing and crackling with power. The vault’s outgoing line. It was easy to forget that nothing here was what it seemed, just a simple visual representation of software packages that would take months to read and understand in their true form. She checked her time and set to work with six minutes left, summoning up new code by whispers and gestures, then packed it all into Jock’s little card and shoved the card straight into the river of light.
“Not exactly spectacular,” she remarked as she pulled herself back. She had to hurry as the wall began to unfold, releasing the data flow. The river of light ballooned out like a mushroom cloud, expanding to many times its normal size as it blasted huge pulses of power down the line, faster than anything that could be seen by human eyes. And, to Rat’s satisfaction, every packet of data bound for Laputa flashed green before disappearing down the beam.
Jock whooped, “It’s working! We’ve got a trace!”
That was Rat’s cue. She popped out of time and space, disconnecting from the embassy, then materialised at one of the gazebos leading onto Main Street. She hurried through a quick clean-up, erasing her tracks and throwing down a few false footprints to mislead anyone who came looking. No way to tell if it would work, but she couldn’t think of anything she could’ve done better.
At last she reached up and lifted the crown off her head. Real life came flooding back, a pale shadow of VR excitement, a kind of washed-out and colourless alternative to the unending pleasure of simulation. Limited. Confining, like a prison. The feeling lasted for a few seconds before she managed to shake it off.
“Round one to me,” she said to Jock and Hideo, daring either of them to argue. Jock beamed with pride. Hideo regarded her without expression, tapping two fingers against his cheek in thought.
“You cheated,” he said neutrally.
She started to spit venom, but then she realised she wasn’t even angry. So what if she cheated? She returned his implacable stare with a self-satisfied smirk and answered, “Only a little.”
He burst out laughing. Rat laughed too, and the next moment Jock swept her up and crushed her close to him.
“It’s not over yet, kid,” Jock whispered in her ear. “That was just the warm-up.”
She bared her teeth and nipped gently at his neck. “That ranking is mine, Jockey boy. No matter what.”
Rat wormed back into her clothes, her skin sticky with sweat, while Jock lay sprawled naked across the bed behind her. Not the prettiest sight in the world, but she couldn’t complain. Hot pleasure still coursed in her veins, and she smiled over her shoulder at him. “Ready to go?”
He snorted, “Life would be a lot less interesting without you in it, Alex.”
“I don’t do boring,” she said. Suddenly she burst out laughing, happy beyond words. She spun around on her toes and flung her arms out, dancing across rich carpets in a room kitted out with every comfort and convenience the twenty-first century had to offer. Hideo had lent them the room to relax in and it was perfect. Everything she ever wanted was around her, right within her grasp. Power. Glory. Respect. Love. She just needed to grab them and hang on like hell.
Suddenly Jock’s arms snaked around her and they were kissing. She held him close for a long time. Then they made their way out of Hideo’s castle and wandered through Cloud City, never looking down, until they arrived at the helipad where they were supposed to be.
Hideo stood waiting next to his private helicopter. It was an old troop carrier built by Hong Kong State Security, now painted up in silver and gold as befitting medieval royalty. Its doors slid open while Rat and Jock approached, showing it to be just as luxurious on the inside. Velvet cushions and solid gold candle holders. Rat couldn’t help but love it when she spotted the fake fireplace, clad in expensive stone just for the hell of it. That said it all.
“Ready to go?” asked Jock, shaking his friend’s hand.
Hideo smiled, “Oh yes.” Then he looked at Rat, who nodded.
“Let’s do it,” she said eagerly.
They climbed into the copter and made themselves comfortable while it lifted off. Two more transports joined them moments after pulling away from Cloud City, and took formation just behind Hideo’s. Rat shielded her eyes as she gazed at the newcomers, the first rays of the morning sun just peeking over the horizon.
She murmured, “Backup?”
“My personal bodyguard. I am a head of state, you know.” Hideo grinned, then did something under his clothes, and a holographic crown flickered into existence just above his head. “There’s plenty of people out there willing to bump Kensei off just for his ranking, much less the Kingship.”
“You must be living the fuckin’ dream.”
Hideo laughed and said, “You have no idea, Alex-han. There’s no job in the world that could beat this.”
They said nothing more as the bright cityscape grew below them. Laputa didn’t have the space to sprawl like the City did, confined to its own little island rather than thousands of miles of mainland. Laputa’s engineers had been forced to build upwards, creating structures taller than anything else in the world. Covered walkways connected them to each other, and to floating airship docks with helipads on the side. One level down from these so-called ‘starscrapers’ were the arcologies, whole city blocks condensed under one roof into huge, built-up boxes. Square man-made mountains squatting in the middle of the elegant city. On top of those boxes Rat could see the famous Laputan greenhouses, great glittering domes of glass which grew nearly half of Laputa’s food in their climate-controlled rooms.
It was hard to believe all this could have been built in just a matter of years. The rise of the Federation had changed the world in more ways than one.
The copters circled down into the gap between buildings, dropping perilously between the network of bridges and walkways. Rat kept her eyes pressed shut to avoid having to look at the rotor tips chopping mere inches short of concrete. The whoosh of air rushing past the fuselage told her just how fast they were falling. Jock squeezed her hand, and whimpered in pain as she squeezed back.
They landed in the middle of a narrow road, next to a service entrance to the massive arcology. Rat couldn’t see any end to the building from here. It took up the world and all but drowned out the sky, surpassed only by the endless starscrapers next to it.
Hideo led the way through the service entrance, disabling all the locks and alarms with a casual wave of an unmarked plastic card. The next minute they were in an elevator on the ground floor, and two of Hideo’s bodyguards were making absolutely sure that no audio or camera bugs were left working inside the carriage. Rat began to suspect that every security system in Laputa had a Kensei-shaped hole in it.
“We keep our vaults underground for security,” Hideo said to Rat. “Only a few people even know they’re there. Most Laputans I know haven’t set foot on the ground in years.”
“So how do we get in?”
“We go to the door. We knock. Then they open the door and give us anything we want.” He slotted his card into a little locked panel just below the elevator controls. It had a white button inside, which lit up when he pressed it. He gestured for her to watch the floor indicator as it dropped down below zero. It ticked to minus one, then minus two, and then it blanked out. The elevator continued down.
She smiled. “You must think I get impressed watching paint dry.”
Chuckling to himself, he said nothing more until the elevator doors opened and they walked into a room full of crab-shaped security robots and two people pointing tasers in a threatening fashion. Rat froze. Even Jock looked wary as he shuffled towards the nest of black barrels, but Hideo strode out of the elevator without a moment’s hesitation.
“I am Hideo Kagehisa,” he said. “I’ve come to audit some of your data. Please step aside.”
Rat watched uncertainty grow in the eyes of the human security guards, starting to wonder if this madman might be telling the truth, perhaps recognising Hideo’s face off the TV. Then, as one, the robots all lowered their weapons and powered down. There was a brief flash of panic among the human guards until they, too, lowered their weapons. The leader, a prune-faced Japanese man with a bearing as rigid as the stick up his arse, dropped to one knee.
“My Lord,” he mouthed in Japanese so fast Rat could barely follow it, “we are deeply honoured by your visit.”
“Show us your input room. We want to jack in.”
“Instantly, Lord.”
To Rat’s amazement the guard did exactly as told, and she found herself being led by the hand into the guts of the vault. Jock’s fingers interlaced with hers, and she felt a faint tremble of excitement. He was as worked up as she was.
They passed a huge glass wall frosted with condensation, showing only the black outlines of the server blocks inside. The whole computer room was climate-controlled and protected from any outside interference. A tiny staff room stood on the right, its door wedged unsafely open for convenience, and beyond that was a heavy security door controlled by a keypad. The guard opened it unquestioningly.
“How far do you trust him?” Rat whispered to Jock, indicating Hideo with her chin.
“I trust him with you,” Jock replied, and his smile made her glow inside. The next moment they followed Hideo into the input room.
Jock helped to strap her into the cramped VR rig inside the input room, letting his hands wander too much while he did it. As usual. She growled at him and he backed off with a sheepish grin on his face.
“This ain’t playtime,” she reminded him sternly. Then she pulled the crown down onto her forehead and snapped the goggles into place. Hideo had jacked two more crowns into the system, but without a full rig they wouldn’t be able to do much beyond simple movement. Nothing like the immediacy which Rat experienced as she sailed into the system.
The world was a flat, featureless grey plain while everything loaded up. The system took its time to check Rat for any suspicious hardware or software. She didn’t waste time, but immediately assembled her own body as her avatar. Then she decided to change it. The baggy sweatshirt and cargo trousers whisked off her, replaced by tight jeans and a form-fitting top. She needed to stop thinking like a boy with tits. If her body could make Jock drool like a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal then it ought to do same with every other smug bastard in the Nations. They would just have to learn to deal with it.
One by one the system controls popped up in front of her, mostly full of stuff she didn’t need. She grabbed the search function as it appeared and fed it the unique identifier she’d planted in the data from Ireland. Whole swathes of the system lit up, most of it completely irrelevant, but somewhere in there would be the stuff Hideo was after. Just a matter of sifting through.
She laid out her arsenal one piece at a time and left them hovering around her in case she needed them. There went the code analyser, and there her own customised information panel, made to look like a PDA. All the bits she could think of. Lastly she placed the borrowed security breaker with all the little bits she’d added to it. Jock had worked on it for years, refining it into a beautifully focused piece of software. Her own modifications stood out as crude and functional by comparison to something hand-crafted by the twelfth best hacker in the world. But, she reminded herself, he was her hacker now.
“Alex-han,” came Hideo’s voice out of nowhere. A new avatar materialised beside her, a Gothic knight in full plate armour, his face hidden behind a roaring lion-shaped helmet. He bowed in greeting. “I shall be observing you.”
Rat returned the bow stiffly. “I’m ready.”
She ran every single program in the stack, most of which asked for passwords before they’d do anything. She set Jock’s security breaker to work on them. Passwords were annoying but not exactly obstacles, not these days, if you had the right equipment. Program by program she eliminated them all until she was left with one, still stubbornly resisting the security breaker. It was only a matter of time.
She watched it until it exploded. A bright glowing doorway shimmered in front of her where the password panel had been.
Got you, thought the Chrome Rat, and stepped forward into light.
A warm golden sun cast its rays over a rough green sea. The waves whipped themselves into a froth against the shore, but without any wind to speak of. Rat’s feet stood on air a few metres above the waves, and when she looked down she could see jagged rocks just beneath the waves, sharp enough to tear the bottom out of a battleship. In the distance ahead she could see land rising out of the spray.
The air smelled of salt, algae and rotten fish. Every tiny droplet of mist prickled Rat’s skin in exactly the right place, down to the most minute detail. If she hadn’t been floating, it could just as well have been real.
“Fuck me,” she breathed. “What’s a detailed VR sim like this doing in a storage farm?”
Hideo’s voice echoed in her head. “Interesting. Perhaps there’s more to it than meets the eye?”
You know more than you’re telling me, she wanted to say, but thought better of it. What have you set me up for?
She shot off towards land at the speed of thought.
The shore rose up to greet her, mossy white cliffs topped with grass like fields of shining emeralds. Rat levitated up them and set down on a rock promontory, placing her under the simulation’s rules as soon as her feet touched the ground. Gravity and other physics imposed by the system would now take effect.
“Well, look at you! We don’t get many visitors of your kind here,” said a voice from the shade of a boulder, a thick Irish-accented slur. When Rat looked closer, she realised the voice was the boulder, speaking with no mouth. “It’s a dangerous crossing, you know. Anyone who makes it this far is welcome.”
“Welcome where exactly?” asked Rat. The boulder told her, but getting her tongue around it was a whole other challenge. “What the hell’s tear nah no?” she asked as she continued her investigation of the boulder. This was clearly some kind of greeting daemon, an automated program to welcome new logins.
“Not from around here, are ya?” the boulder laughed. Suddenly it stood up, unfurling into a wiry man with fierce red hair and blue eyes, now pink and naked as a baby. Rat resisted the urge to look down.
It continued, “This is the Otherworld, the land of green and plenty. I’m a faery. We came here in ages past, leaving Earth to the humans. I’ll take you to the gathering place.”
“Uh, sure,” said Rat. “Yeah, why don’t we do that? You can show me around.”
The boulder man swept her up in his arms and jumped before Rat could protest. She screamed as they soared over the hills, gliding through virtual air over virtual heights. She was too terrified to shut her eyes.
Every inch of land was covered in grass, forest or heather, or some combination thereof. Other faeries transformed out of the land just to wave up at them.
Hundreds of miles of countryside seemed to have gone past them by the time they landed. They touched down in front of an earthen mound with huge wooden doors leading inside, which looked sturdy enough to stop a nuclear blast. The faery set her down and then retreated, keeping his distance from the building.
“This is the only place where you can go but we cannot. No faeries allowed, you see.” He shrugged. “You’ll be alright, won’t ya?”
Still a little shaken, she blurted, “Fine, thanks. I’ll be fine.” Then she took the security breaker out of her pocket, ready to deal with the big door. “You’ve been great. See you later.”
If he spoke again, she didn’t hear it as she stalked forward, focused like a missile on the big bunker. Her insides tingled with almost sexual excitement as she slipped the breaker into the door. “Open sesame,” she whispered to it.
Something came to life inside the mound. The ground rumbled. Wood creaked as a crack appeared between the doors, slowly dragged open by an invisible force. It subsided when there was enough space for one person to pass through.
“You said this was some kind of meeting place,” she called over her shoulder. “Meeting place for who?”
“I don’t know,” replied the faery. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason, never mind.”
She shrugged and stepped into the black gap between the doors. The darkness seemed to swallow her up, coming out of the mound to engulf her, and she tried to peer through it to the inside. The walls were so far away as to be invisible, denying her any sense of scale. A small red light blinked somewhere ahead. She moved towards it.
“Alex, wait–” Hideo began, but it was already too late.
