Chapter 20

 

"The message lacked context until you told me who you were supposed to give it to." Rob said. He was much calmer now, a bit more reserved, but in absolute control."So why won't you tell me exactly what's on it?" My eyebrows scrunched together in confusion as I looked at the card again. "What wording did he use to make you so mad so quickly?"

He eyed me momentarily, as if gauging what to say.

Taking in a breath, he opened his lips to speak, but, in my vision, his lips were suddenly blurred by the smudged oil paint look I recognized on the card. A pressurized bubble felt like it grew from within. My head squeezed. My inner ears itched.

There was a term for the sounds making up words: "phonem-something." It came up one or more of the countless times I'd had to research components for my Cortex Rig. Rob's voice was coming out in perceived gibberish; I was hearing noises but getting no comprehension of the words being said.

Phonemes. They were called phonemes.

It was a strange sensation: a foreign language, dubbed backwards and intermixed with other noises to make the phonemes indecipherable until I could finally catch something I understood.

"—censoring script." Rob's voice was a boom as the bubble popped. The bubble had lasted the exact amount of time he'd attempted to verbally relay the information, dissipating once he'd stopped.

I was stupefied.

A feeling of panic grew within my belly, becoming a cavernous and empty space. If the changes Rob showed me, the ones in our mods, actually go this far. What did this mean for everyone?

This was beyond the deterrence protocols. It wasn't just control for what we could see and hear, but also how we communicated. What we shared. For the umpteenth time since I'd arrived, I voiced quietly, "How?" I'd honestly lost count after the first two.

It was rolling over into that kind of morning.

"Censoring scripts," he repeated, a look of absolute disgust in his eyes, "aren't usually left in for too long. It's too obvious and requires a method of direct infusion. No one ever knows it's in place until they come across something it's meant to block. That means an inload to your mods. The real question is when."

He stopped as I felt my mouth gape open dumbly. A live inload was a horrifying thought.

One step up from "metal to chip" wipes, an inload required a full rewrite of an already implemented codebase. They were dangerous in a technicutical sense. If anything were to compromise or otherwise interrupt the loading process, bye-bye code. Depending on the mods in the person, it could include codescript for artificial functions ranging from renal, respiratory, and circulatory to even the nervous system. The only repair from a full bricking, or accidental invalidity by code error, required a full MC wipe.

If that happened? Good luck.

A full MC wipe for a non-spire individual almost never took place out here in the Stacks. I'd only ever heard of one—exactly one device capable of doing it and never personally met someone who was allowed its use in my entire time living here. The MC suite was housed in the Spires under lock and key.

Rob spoke. "Tell me, Price. You ever see something blurred like you said the card is? Before now, I mean." He tilted his chin downward at the tabletop. My eyes naturally swung to as we both looked at the card.

I gave his question serious thought.

"Outside of some old media? No. Never." Removing my right hand from my armpit, I partially covered my face and scrubbed twice rapidly across the cheek and chin. I scoffed at myself. "Then again? I also never questioned there being two COE's either."

Thoughts of failed inloads resurfaced. A sudden urge to start digging into my arms with my nails overcame me. Rob made a little "hmm" noise in response as I shivered, trying to ignore the wave of nausea and goose pimples spreading across my skin.

In my youth? Body mites had been a thing; the greenspaces were infested with them. It was so bad, it necessitated children being locked out for a time. We were constantly returning home with dirty knees, scabs, and random outbreaks of rashes and red spots, which required medical attention. It was the sensation I always thought about when I thought of the word 'invasive.'

Rob waved his hand in dismissal, raising an arm , hand extended as if guiding us toward a path. A portsign signal for 'moving forward' as he spoke. "Considering everything's so sloppy surrounding what's been going on, I doubt the inload would've been preplanned. It had to have been something recent, possibly even during the night before you got here." He lowered his arm and nestled his chin back into his hand as he sat back. "Walk me through the steps of what happened again if you can. Focus on anything you saw or touched."

I sat forward, collecting my thoughts before beginning a cut-down retelling. It started with leaving the port, skipping details of the empty Pod before flowing into the moment with the firing notice. My mind flashed to images of each event as I spoke about them in turn. My mind was actively searching for details. Opportunities. Vulnerabilities.

Honestly? Nothing seemed relevant there; I moved on.

The buzzing notice. The scramble to find anything to pack. Exiting the unit and coming across Ratface and the Goons. I froze, staring off into space as the next few recollections roared by like a blurry haze. A foot on the rail. The sensation of falling and landing onto the walkway—lost time. Haze. Blurriness.

No. No way!

I felt ill. Disgusted.

With a mental snick, Rob's anger at seeing the card snapped into context. It made absolute sense now.

"McCreed." I said in a shell-shocked whisper.

I stared over at the blurry card. A furnace ignited. The cold, empty feeling of my belly began to warm, burning as the anger grew in strength and volume.

"What?" Rob had been knocked out of his own introspection as his hand dropped and lay flat on the table. "What about him? He was on the walkway outside, right?" Rob's eyes were locked onto me. Still perfectly round. Expressive. Real-looking.

Eyes.

The same eyes with infrared scanning request modules. Scanning, which required line of sight. I had a sudden, hard-to-decipher, blurry mental image of McCreed's eyes—his oh-so-perfect eyes—as the pressure returned. It had been right before I'd lost sense of time. My mind churned, turning over facts and pieces of information like fresh milk to turn and solidify.

Moments streamed past my mental feed like holo snippets. They spun faster and faster, rotating and clicking as parts overlaid and collected. Interlinked.

A weird flash. A sudden case of vertigo. The feeling of discombobulation and wrongness followed by confusion. An inexplicable, overpowering urge to embrace the void.

No way.

"Rob," I said, trying not to vomit, "tell me. Could someone rig optical mods to inload? Like—" I paused, rolling my hands around, trying to think of a function, my movements frantic as I struggled to get the words out, "Uh...a pulse-code, like we'd use for state controllers?"

Rob's dawning comprehension and surprise was all the answer I needed.

McCreed! That bastard!

I'd been directly violated. Compromised. The deterrence protocols were bad enough since, by Rob's description, almost all Corpo-standard mods were rigged with them, but this? It made a bad situation even worse. So much worse. I was furious. He'd done it. He'd changed me.

Aloud I spoke at Rob, hands balled into fists. "He forced me to accept. Didn't he?" My voice was dangerous and steady. Almost too calm until the urge to shout—to scream—overtook me. I repeated my last words with the force of a kettle set to boil over.

"DIDN'T HE?!!!"

I was panting now. My biometrics feed went haywire as my interface flashed immediately into sight, written in Meditech red.

[!WARNING][Remain Calm. Biometric Levels Elevated Beyond Configuration Scale. Report to Corporation Sanctioned Medical Facility IMMEDIATELY][WARNING!]

It was blocking my view. Again!

I wanted to lash out. To hate. To scream at the injustice of not even being allowed to rage without interruptions. It made every fiber of my being demand restitution for being forced to read the words. Uninvited. Unwelcome.

Rob was sitting forward, a concerned look on his face. He wasn't angry, upset, or negatively reactive to the fact I'd yelled. He was serene and ready. A mountain waiting out the storm. My guess is he was watchful so I wouldn't hurt myself if I chose to do so. I was skidding toward the edge of a vast depression, a core of rage I could feel stirring in the embers at the base of the downward slide and an eventual eruption.

Instead? The opposite happened.

I calmed.

It wasn't like a switch had been thrown; that would've just been more proof of how deep the changes might lie and confirmation it was controlling everything.

No. It was more like coming to after standing in a room yelling into complete emptiness. Throat raw, hands bruised and bleeding from pounding into a formless wall, sweat dripping onto an unseen floor, but for what?

What was it all for? What would it accomplish? What COULD it accomplish?

The voice in the back of my mind said it in sequence, faster than a fiberline pulse. The voice was a calm and rational one, usually heard once the silence surrounded me and my emotions were too drained to continue.

"Nothing," I said quietly to myself.

Rob, in a soothing tone, said, "Owen. They can suggest. They can obfuscate. They can smudge the truth and possibly hide things from you, but they can't force you. You have to want the need in order to be coerced. If you accepted taking the card, it's because you wanted to. I think we both know the reason."

He was right.

I wanted to see Dora. I'd be fooling myself if I didn't admit to it. I was hoping taking the card would let me see her again.

A phantom hand, clawed and vice-like, gripped tight around a piece of cursed treasure was inside me. I felt a release. The hand uncurled, finally letting go. Letting the last piece tumble clear.

No longer in any danger of dancing on the razor's edge between upset and enraged, I was...functional again.

Functional is good.

Letting a breath out in a sudden whoosh, I breathed deeply, filling to the brim like a bellows, ready to pump. I let the air out slowly, like Rob had done only minutes before. It was nowhere near as mythical or noticeably effective as Rob's calming technique, but it was enough to make my vision clear.

At least the warnings went away.

I hadn't, and likely would NEVER, forget the crimes done against me. But I had to remind myself I had agency. I could make decisions, and right now? I was going to consciously decide to push my meager energy reserves toward something more productive, just like the time in the tunnels, and I had a lot more unknowns then than I do now.

"Alright." I said, initiating the age-old practice of saying a statement aloud to make it concrete. Actionable. "Looks like I'm moving on to acceptance."

Rob's voice made me open an eye. The pace and delivery were ones I recognized. "Focus on what you can control," he said in a wavering tone, "otherwise, they will control what you cannot."

I laughed. A single bark that echoed off the ceilings and walls of the Pod.

"You're seriously going to quote Rob-isms at me? Now?!" Rob fought not to smirk. He was very capable that way, preferring to use near-ancient quotes and jokes from holo archives to change the tone of a moment, sometimes outright breaking it unexpectedly. I bulk labeled sayings like he'd just done as "Rob-isms," and I owed a lot of my reference of knowledge, technical or otherwise, to many of them. You'd be stupid not to at least TRY to figure them out. They were often right on the scrit.

Between his usual cracked joke, the understanding I couldn't change what happened, and the nerve-settling reminder they couldn't have MADE me do anything. The situation was defused.

For now.

I gave a small smile to Rob: Rob the super-spy. Rob the situation defuser. Rob, the freakishly growing powerhouse capable of smashing small shipping containers between his hands if you made him too mad. If he was telling me this, it was a truth.

"So." I said, with a small huff, "How am I going to figure out what's actually on that card if I can't see, hear, or—so I'm assuming—feel the damn thing?"

Rob and I sat for a moment, thinking, when his voice suddenly barked out three words with slight pauses between them. "Looking. Turn. For."

I peered at him questioningly.

"Did you hear those?" He asked, eyebrows raised in hope.

I sat up. "Yes, actually!"

"How about this?" He began talking. The bubble of silence pressed inward on me until he stopped. It was a short section of three words. The sensation disappeared an instant before I heard his voice say, "Now?"

"No. What'd you do different?" I was leaning forward now. He seemed to be onto something.

"I put a few of the words together without skipping. The fact it only seems to do it if you apparently INTEND to say the message somehow applies." He looked around the Pod as if tallying inventory of what was in it before getting up and returning with a box.

He cleared the table, scooping up the blurred card and handing it to me so I could stash it in a pocket before sitting.

He opened the box. Inside was a thin, rod-like object with a pointed end, which almost looked like a stylus, and a square of what looked like filisheet. The square was opaque, pinkish-white, and not transparent, with a rough, fibrous texture I couldn't identify in the light.

"What," I asked, pointing to the box and the objects, "are those? Never seen them before."

"A pen and a piece of paper?" Rob asked quizzically, holding them up, "You're messing with me, right?"

"Oh," I said, "I thought it was some kind of crazy secret spy equipment or—" I trailed off, shriveling under the confusion and disapproval on Rob's face. He shook his head slowly as he scribbled words onto the square of paper, pushing it toward me once he'd finished.

"Can you read that?" he asked.

I tried. Seriously, I did. My head started to hurt trying to make sense of what might as well have been ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or base machine code for all the good it did. It was a jumble of lines and swirls, though I did manage to make out the shape of at least two 'O's.

"No," I said, shaking my head, "it's not blurry, but it's gibberish to me. Just a bunch of swirls and loops. Is that an O?" I asked, pointing to a spot. He didn't say a word, just stared at me as he reached out slowly.

His fingers pressed down, spinning the paper around. "It's upside down," he said in a deadpan voice as I tried not to look at him. My face was burning.

Kill me now. I thought as I tried to read it again.

The bubble returned. The square of paper blurred. A noise of dejection escaped my lips. Rob sighed, a really deep and cynical one this time.

"So it doesn't matter if it's handwritten either, then." He clicked his tongue on his teeth, looking around as he tapped his chin absentmindedly with a knuckle. "It's too bad I don't have a teaching tablet or something around here. Would've been useful. Maybe a flashcard routine or an open programming interface could do it."

I perked up at this. Now this was something I knew.

"What do you need it for? I'm assuming to randomize the words or something?"

He nodded, "I don't have enough paper to make this easy. I guess I could use a wall or the table, but that'd be messy and hard to hide later." He kept turning, looking at things. Weighing their writing ability with his eyes like a corporate appraiser, trying to find the best items to claim for a quarterly budget inflation.

"Hang on," I said, standing up to go to the multi-display. "How much of the stock software do you have on this thing? Did you ever do a lightload or remove the original deployment suite?"

Rob appeared by my side, leaning up against the wall. "Mostly stock, to make it seem untouched. There should still be the original configs in there somewhere; just don't do a wipe or remove anything. Okay?" I nodded, setting to work as he looked on.

When I was younger and under mite quarantine. We hadn't been allowed to leave for any reason. My learning system had been rendered inoperable; don't ask me how, but I'd needed to run something in such a way it wouldn't track as having been on the mandated device. I'd come to a bright idea while poking around the menus on the entry system; it was when I'd discovered the security bypass. My digging unveiled an underlying framework nearly identical to the mandated device. With a little finagling, a touch of finesse, and a dash of work, a side-load proved to be an effective means of adding functions to a relatively locked system. Education software was simple compared to a lot of others because they were already authenticated.

My hands remembered the routine once I'd gotten into the flow of it, calling up the menus to add scripts and functions. I pulled a copy of the code script for flashcard software I'd used plenty of times to study from a common code depot. I'd used it to sit in the kitchen so I wouldn't have to hold up the bulky school device with food on my hands. Guess it was going to turn into something new today. I quickly set up the necessary functions, making sure to use an old depot and relay trace I'd already gotten data from so it would be harder to track.

Just to be safe.

"Think this'll work?" I asked, stepping aside to make room as Rob eyed the software and smiled in recognition. "I think I see what you're thinking. Genius." He said, clapping me on the back. "Turn around for a sec; I'll modify it so we can test a few things."

It was short work to figure out the exact pattern and spacing for the words to not be blurred and the bubble to not activate, but we found it. For every word of the message, Rob added a sequence of three others of an unrelated subject to reference. After a few more tries, he was able to load an array of thirty-six words, each timed to flash in half-second increments on repeat.

"Well, that was way more work than I would've expected." Rob told me, as we stood in front of the screen, to try to finally relay the mystery of the card's message.

It took a few cycles, some of which were interrupted by the bubble, which set off a nasty headache, as I was finally able to comprehend the message.

He is the one you're looking for. Your turn.

It was short. Almost too short, but for me it had all the impact of a guillotine's split-second difference between being "up" or "down." I closed my eyes and breathed calmly. Ah. That's what he meant by context. I thought, rubbing my aching head to keep from getting angry.

From beside me, Rob spoke. He was tapping the screen again, shutting off the flashcard routine. "If McCreed marked you as the one Ruby was looking for, you were set up for a long, slow, lingering death. I'm not exaggerating here. It would've been nasty."

I only knew of Ruby's name because she was Dora's employer. Being told she was ruthless enough to torture someone to death sent a small trill of fear up my spine. I looked at Rob. "Is there any way to back out from my choice now?" I asked, only half joking.

He looked at me, mirth in his eyes at my unschooled expression. "She's not all that bad, Owen. She's ruthless, true, and you should never forget it." He tapped a few more commands, bringing up a messaging interface that was empty. "Just don't ever double-cross her. Ever." His face went serious. "She never punishes someone who doesn't deserve it, but if you do?"

He went silent. The trill of fear lessened but didn't go away as a shiver replaced it.

By this point? Finding out Ruby was a ruthless, possibly evil patron didn't surprise me. Being ruthless made a sort of sense when you were dealing with the likes of McCreed and Ratface, my only two references for the kinds of people who were involved. The fact Rob wasn't all that concerned put me at ease, just a little bit.

Can't swim with the sharks if you don't have teeth.

A notice blinked on the screen, and Rob toggled it up, letting the words glow for us to view:

[x15 - n]

Rob cleared the interface to show us the feed of the entryway outside. It was clear. No movement. No sound. He nodded once before turning and lifting one of the bags we'd already prepared near the door in one smooth motion.

"Time to go."