Read The Bridge Chronicles Trilogy Online
Authors: Gary Ballard
Tags: #noir, #speculative fiction, #hard boiled, #science fiction, #cybernetics, #scifi, #cyberpunk, #near future, #urban fantasy
His next client made Bridge frown. It was Sid Tobin, a wannabe DJ with pretensions of pop greatness. Bridge knew this meeting’s script by heart, as they had gone through its motions again and again. Sid wanted a GlobalNet publishing deal and he had no scruples about how it was acquired. Sid’s problem was that he was a walking stereotype, the kind that turned off A&R guys. The talent acquisition suits didn’t want someone already packaged, they wanted something genuine and authentic that they could then sterilize, commoditize and package as the next big thing. Sid was always trying to cash in on the last big thing a week after it had been abandoned.
By the look of his outfit, Sid was on a Japanese anime hip-hop kick, his features accentuated by makeup to make his eyes look bigger with pointy brows, baggy neon glitter pants and a green glowing jacket festooned with brand labels, gold chains and Nipponese thug slogans. Sid walked with an exaggerated swagger, tossing gang signs as greetings. Before the poseur could even sit, Bridge had already cut him off. “Sid, before you get started, no A&R is going to touch you looking like that. What are those, Hammer Pants?”
“I know a guy,” Bridge repeated almost unconsciously.
“Yo, check it, we throw this blackmail scheme on his ass, right? We get some dirt and throw it in the guy’s face and then he’s gotta give me a pub deal, yo!” Sid’s face was a beaming icon of stupidity, the bullheaded desire overriding any sort of common sense. Bridge just shook his head.
“Do you even know how a blackmail scam is run, you mental midget? First, you actually need to have some dirt on your target. I can assume that since you are coming to me, you don’t have any such dirt?” Sid shook his head. “So you’d need to hire someone to find some dirt, a hacker or a PI or something. Then, you’d need a go-between, which I suppose you think is going to be me.”
Bridge cut off Sid’s excited head nodding. “No, it sure as fuck would not be. That violates my most important rule, I don’t touch nothing illegal. Not one fucking thing. And finally, you’d need an A&R guy with such a shitty crop of skeletons in his closet that he’d rather risk his job to sign a complete retard like you than let his dirt get out in the open. You ever met an A&R guy? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Well, let me enlighten you. They spend their entire professional careers searching for guys they can sign to the shittiest deals possible, stuffing them full of drugs, hookers and booze until the acts don’t know their own fucking names. Once that act is all used up and no good to him anymore, Mr. A&R moves on to the next fucking target. He’s a predator with less morals than me. Do you really think he’s going to give one shit about his dirty laundry getting aired? They are expected to be shitheels, it’s in their job description. He’s more likely to kill you than sign you. Use your fucking head, you moron. Did you get a manager like I told you to last time?”
“Shit, Bridge, I don’t need no fucking manager. All he’s gon’ do is take fit’een percent to book me here, and I already got booked here.”
“That’s because your mom is Twiggs’ cousin. Get a manager and let him deal with your fucking ideas. Do you really think I’m going to piss off one of the few A&R guys I know in some half-assed blackmail scam? You can’t afford the fee on that sort of shit.” Sid whined for a few more minutes before being ushered off. It took the physical presence of Aristotle to get Sid moving on.
Once Sid was gone, Bridge exclaimed, “Aristotle, I swear that kid is going to get himself killed one of these days. He’s a dumbass at the genetic level.”
“The Buddhists say that all suffering is born of desire,” Aristotle began. “By that measure, that little muppet has got lifetimes of suffering to burn off.” Bridge grinned at the bodyguard.
“I think he’d literally give up a body part to get signed. You ever hear him?” Aristotle nodded, a pained expression marring his features. “I’d rather listen to two rhinos fucking. Check with Stonewall about Kira when I’m not occupied. I really wanna get that shit tass that saken care of.” Aristotle nodded and strode off to find the bouncer.
Bridge’s night was business as usual. He met with three other clients in two hours, all routine jobs with minimal payouts. They’d keep the lights on and not much else. With each meeting completed without an appearance from Kira, Bridge’s nervousness grew. As small-time as he was, Nicky would be all too happy to follow through on his threats. The quicker he could set Nicky up with the hacker, the quicker he could relax. Finally, around midnight, Aristotle came to his table.
“Kira’s outside,” he said.
“Well tell him to get his ass in here.”
“He won’t come in.”
“What do you mean he won’t come in?”
“Exactly that. He refuses to go around the front. He’s waiting in the alley across the street. He was exceptionally squirrelly.”
“Goddamnit, Angie, can you not give me one clean hacker? Shit, I bet he’s hopped up on Trip, all paranoid and shit.”
“He didn’t look to be speeding so much as genuinely nervous.”
Bridge sighed. “Fuck it, I’m done here.” He slugged back the last vestiges of his drink. “Let’s go meet him. You sure this ain’t a setup or something?” Aristotle nodded. “Last thing I need is another beatdown.” Bridge stalked out with his bodyguard in tow. He waved to Stonewall as he exited, the Mexican waving back jovially. The asshole bouncer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Twiggs had fired him for being a cunt to the patrons.
Bridge crossed the street quickly, leaving Aristotle at the alley entrance to cover his back. The alley was deserted, nothing but dumpsters, grime and filth to greet him. “I thought you said he was in here?” Aristotle shrugged. Bridge began walking down the alley, avoiding the puddles of dumpster juice and piles of garbage. The alley smelled of fried rice from the Chinese restaurant.
“PSST. Here.” Bridge’s head snapped up at the strained whisper. It came from the restaurant’s kitchen entrance. “Over here!” Bridge walked slowly to the doorway, his body tensing into some semblance of a fighting stance. His one karate class years earlier had not yielded much beyond embarrassment, but he tried to recall something of the defensive techniques he’d been taught. A head peeked out of the doorway, darting quick glances up and down the alley. “Did anybody follow you?”
“Just Aristotle,” Bridge replied, indicating the bodyguard at the other end. “You wanna tell me why I’m standing ankle deep in shit instead of having a civilized conversation surrounded by hotties in the club?”
“I got people after me,” Kira said. Bridge finally got a good look at the kid, and kid he was. He might have been eighteen, but he sure didn’t look it. Bridge guessed he had not been shaving too long, a000 too lond not well at that. His upper lip was covered by a thin wisp of a mustache. Kira’s dark hair was tousled, in typical hacker fashion. Even his sideburns were messy. Sweat covered the kid’s face, a nervous sweat that seemed to soak his shabby clothes.
‘Surely Angie didn’t send me one of these homeless squatter hackers,’ Bridge thought. The clothes Kira wore weren’t cheap, just badly maintained. Brand names were all over his slept in attire. Every movement, every nuance of the kid’s body language was nervous paranoia, but an examination of his green eyes told Bridge the kid wasn’t tripping. “What are they after you for? Who is they?”
“I found something, something I shouldn’t have.”
“Ok, well that’s nothing to me, kid,” Bridge replied, raising his hands to fend off whatever bad mojo the kid had acquired. “I just need you to do a couple of jobs for some clients of mine and…”
“No, Bridge man, you gotta see this, it’s… you gotta see who it is!”
“Whoa, I don’t see nothing. I don’t touch nothing. Whatever you got going on, you keep it to your damn self. All I do is hook you up with someone that wants to buy or sell. I’m the Bridge, not the warehouse, dig?”
Kira’s agitation spilled over, his hands grabbing Bridge’s coat in a death grip. “You have to see it! Please, I gotta get rid of this! I don’t want nothing to do with it! You gotta take it off my hands!”
Bridge pushed the hacker away forcefully. Aristotle strode two steps into the alley. “No, I don’t. Sell it to Angie, she can find you a buyer.” A red light blinded Bridge for a second. Raising his hand to cover his eyes, he saw three pinpricks of red at the end of the alley. His mind processed the image in slow-motion.
Silhouettes, armed. Three armed men coming down the alleyway towards him from the darkness.
“They’ll kill me, Bridge, you gotta take this off my hands,” were the last words Bridge heard before the shots rang out. He was thrown to the ground by the force of the body hitting him, his vision blurring with pain.
*****
Chapter 5
August 30, 2028
12:02 a.m.
The dead weight of Kira’s falling body crushed the wind out of Bridge’s lungs. Kira was a skinny stick figure but the force of the shots had thrown his full weight into Bridge. He clattered to the ground gasping fe sor air, flailing to grasp the reality of the situation. Warm blood quickly soaked his hands as he tried to push Kira’s body away. His back was soaked through to the skin underneath by the wet pavement. Flitting thoughts jetted through his mind. ‘Getting this suit clean is going to be a bitch,’ and ‘I have to find another hacker for Nicky’ and other equally unimportant truisms passed through his mind. As footsteps echoed towards him, panic set in. ‘I’m still alive and they’re coming to finish me off.’
The pressure on his chest was suddenly removed, replaced by the tramp of a boot heel. One quick stomp on the sternum, then the boot rested on his chest with enough force to push what little air remained in his lungs out again. “Oi, cuntface, where is it?” Bridge gasped wordlessly. “I’m talking to you, you tosser.” The bouncer Paulie stood on top of Bridge firing staccato questions into his face with that thick English accent. Two others dressed in black with cybershade implants were searching Kira’s body with all the finesse of rampaging bison. Kira coughed a wad of blood into one of the men’s faces and was rewarded with a vicious punch. Kira’s breathing became a loud wet gurgling, a sound Bridge had heard before. The hacker didn’t have long left.
A hard slap across the face brought Bridge back to the man towering over him. “Look here, Polly. I got no time to fuck about. That little turd over there gave you something, didn’t he? Where is it?”
Bridge struggled for breath, but managed a weak, “He didn’t give me nothing. I don’t even know him.”
“We know he was coming to meet you.” Kick to the ribs. “If I start breaking bits off you, you think you’d remember better?” Bridge didn’t respond and took another kick to the ribs. “I ain’t got all night. Convince me I shouldn’t put a fucking bullet in your head and go have a pint, or I swear I will fucking murder you, Polly.”
Bridge coughed hard, raising a hand to forestall the beating. “Hey, hey, I’m a talker, not a fighter. Let me just catch my breath and we can figure this out. You need something and he has… had it. I know a guy can find things for you. I won’t even charge a fee.”
Paulie grabbed Bridge’s left arm and began to twist, digging his foot into Bridge’s chest to maximize the painful leverage. He glanced over to his companions and said, “You lot find anything?” They shook their heads. “Right, well that does you then, don’t it? We’ll go toss his place after we take care of this cunt.” He reached into his coat, retrieving a gigantic pistol from its holster.
A trashcan slammed into his forehead loudly, sending the gun and its owner flying. Bridge rolled over and sucked in precious, stinking air, his face caked with alley mud. At first, the sounds of scuffle barely penetrated the veil of pain, but his head finally cleared enough to comprehend the scene. The two gunmen were being beaten down by a combination of Aristotle’s pummeling fists and Stonewall’s flying feet. Surprise had given them the edge, and they were taking full advantage of it. Stonewall quickly finished off his opponent with a knee to the bridge of the nose, the metal of Stonewall’s cybernetic leg making a sickening crunching sound. Aristotle chose a more direct elbow and fist combination that was equally effective. Bridge spot wo Bridgeted Paulie crawling towards his gun, a gash in the forehead pouring blood. Bridge kicked out, catching the cockney enforcer in the ribs. He struggled to his feet, landing another staggered kick into Paulie’s midsection. “How you like that, huh!? You like that, bitch? Who are you working for?” Bridge stammered as he continued to dropkick the groaning figure.
“Fuck off,” was the only answer given, so Bridge planted another kick to the ribs. Stonewall, having finished his man, walked over and stomped Paulie’s gun hand. The resulting shrieks of pain gave Bridge no small amount of satisfaction. Stonewall used the gun to clock Paulie across the back of the skull, rendering him unconscious.
Aristotle put a hand on Bridge’s shoulder. “How bad are you hurt?” he asked.
“I’m ok,” Bridge replied, though he wasn’t. He felt like hell. His ribs were on fire though thankfully not broken, his lungs were bursting with each breath, and he could still feel the impression of a boot on his chest. Paulie knew how to hurt a man. His mouth filled with the coppery saltiness of a bloody lip, and he spat to clear it. “What the hell are you doing wading in there like that? I’m not paying for that.”
“It’s hard to extract payment from a coffin,” was Aristotle’s bemused reply. His grin was ear to ear, the sort of smile that could cheer up any situation. “Consider it an advance.”
“Well, my cash flow just got perforated.” Bridge indicated Kira’s prone body. “You kill those guys?”
Stonewall shook his head. “Not yet, amigo, though I’m betting that one don’t have long,” he said, pointing at the one he’d kneed in the face. The unconscious tough guy’s breathing was a raspy burble. Stonewall’s tone indicated that theirs would be a temporary reprieve. “This cabrón is getting it last. He gets to watch what I’m gonna do to these two. I told Twiggs, I told him there was something not right about that guy. What’d they want?”
“Don’t know. Kira was scared shitless, kept talking about me having to take something from him. Then they shot him.”
“Maybe he has whatever it is on him,” Aristotle said.
The three men looked at each other uneasily. None relished the idea of searching a dead body. “Don’t look at me, I don’t want whatever it is anyway!” Bridge exclaimed.
“You don’t pay me enough,” Aristotle replied flatly.
Stonewall deferred as well. “Hey, I gotta take care of these assholes.” Bridge resigned himself to the task and bent down to examine the corpse gingerly with a scowl. He touched Kira’s shirt with his fingertips, as if the body was on fire. A bloody, wet cough caused Bridge to throw himself back on his hands. Kira moved, rolling over on his side and opening his mouth to release a gigantic gob of blood.
“FUCK! He’s still alive.” Bridge crawled quickly over to Kira. “Call aw. a. “Cn ambulance or the cops or something.”
“Twiggs wouldn’t appreciate the cops on his doorstep.”
“We can’t just let him die here!”
“Look at him, Bridge. He ain’t making it.”
Bridge cursed loudly. “Kira, Kira, it’s Bridge. Can you hear me?” The hacker nodded his head weakly. “Kira, what were they after?” The punk’s lips were moving, weakly attempting to mouth words that were drowned by the blood. Bridge knelt closer until he could finally make it out.
“You… you’ll find… out, bro. I… sent it… man, I can’t… I can’t feel… my legs. I’m… dying, ain’t I? Don’t… don’t let me…” With that, Kira breathed one final wet gurgle and fell silent.
“What? What the fuck does that…” Bridge began, his jaw snapping shut as he realized what the dead hacker meant. Moving his hands to the base of Kira’s skull, he searched for the thing he feared he’d find. Pulling back Kira’s hair, he saw the kid’s interface jack, the silvery metal flush with the skin of the neck. Poking out of the jack was a wireless adapter.
Bridge was familiar with the hardware, though he had rarely used it. Jacking into a crèche or a street term took a wired connection. The wireless adapter allowed the hacker to access the GlobalNet without a jack from anywhere a hot spot existed, which was just about everywhere in the country outside of rural areas. Kira had been connected the whole time, and that meant he could have sent Bridge any kind of digital file in existence. Whatever Kira had been trying to pawn off, he’d probably succeeded. “Fuck. He sent me something.”
“What?”
“Don’t know and I really don’t want to find out. Goddamnit! I do not want to be in whatever this is. That is not my goddamn business. My business is bullshit. You want your shit, you go to the guy I tell you to. That’s it. Simple. Don’t involve me, just pay me your fucking money, you festering pack of idiots, and leave me the fuck alone. And what does this little bastard do? He gets this all over me!” Bridge indicated the blood on his hands before wiping them off as best he could on Kira’s pants. Bridge ceased ranting and stood, buried in thought.
“Stoney, can you deal with this body for me?” Stonewall nodded. “And take these bastards, find out what they were looking for, who they told, who they’re working for. Anything you can.” The ex-footballer nodded again. “If I’m going to be in this, damnit, I’m not doing it without knowing all the particulars. Do what you gotta do. You won’t hear me crying, got it?”
“What do you want me to do, boss?” Aristotle asked with earnest concern.
“Go home. Your bill is already past due.” Aristotle started to protest. “If I need you, I know where to find you. But these guys aren’t going to be scared off by a big black man, which means you stick around, you’ll have nt u’ll to do a lot more of this.” The bodyguard looked hurt but agreed. “Help Stoney move these guys out of sight, then get home and stay there.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I do best. Cover my ass.” His confident smile was anything but.
Bridge caught a passing cab a few blocks over, took it three blocks in one direction, hopped out and caught another cab going the opposite direction for eight blocks. He got out of the cab at a corner terminal. Called street terms, these kiosks were found every few blocks in LA, offering cheap GlobalNet access, banking, news sheets, driving directions, tourist information and food delivery services. Bridge used an old backup hacker ID to access the GlobalNet and called Angela. He crouched low beside the term, the cord to his interface jack stretched perilously. Memories of teenage street hacking came flooding back, years of nickel and dime hacks riding the Net while keeping meat vision lookouts for the cops. He constantly searched for pursuit. His paranoia was likely misplaced, since the ID he’d signed in with wasn’t tied to the Bridge name at all, but he hadn’t survived this long by being careless. And if the Bridge ID was already hot as he suspected, this one would be burned once he was done.
Angela returned the request with a physical presence, projecting her avatar onto his vision. She appeared as a wispy ghost, beautiful blonde angel with demon horns and gossamer wings floating in mid-air on the street in front of him. “What’s wrong?”
“Why do you think something’s wrong?” Bridge put on his best fake smile.
“Because you haven’t used B#rTman in ages, which means you don’t want somebody following your trail. Now what’s wrong?”
“Kira’s dead.” The ghost chewed on that for a moment. “He was trying to give me something, said somebody was after him for it. Bunch of guys shot him and tried to shake me down for something Kira had. We took care of the guys…”
“Who’s we?”
“Never mind that. I’m alive, he’s dead and I need to know what he was working.”
“Nothing major.” Bridge frowned doubtfully. “No really, nothing big. We were messing with some pedofarms, but nothing that would get him killed. These guys, they look like organized muscle?”
“They weren’t cheap. Good clothes, cybershades, laser-sights, big guns and the like.”
“As far as I know, nobody he was working on was connected like that. Where’s the body?”
“It’s being taken care of.”
“So I shouldn’t tell his mom, then?”
“Not unless you want it tied to you.” She shook her
“Here it comes.”
“Look, I just need a place to crash for a few days, ‘til I can get this sorted.”
“Don’t you have any friends?”
“When did I ever have friends I could impose on like you?”
She sighed angrily. “Few days tops. And I better not get any heat over this, or it’s your ass.”
“The first sign of heat, I’m gone. I promise.”
Her scowl was an accusation. “Save it. I know what your promise is worth. You owe me. AGAIN.”
He cut off the connection, muttering under his breath, “More than you know.” With creeping dread, he switched Net ID’s, accessing the Bridge mailbox. Buried among the assorted spam offers and regular mail was a message from Kira, bloated with an attachment. Kira must have been good to float an attachment past Bridge’s filtering system. He sighed and jacked out without reading the message. He’d wait to get to Angela’s, where he could open it from the detached safety of a clean room. He called another cab, beginning an hour merry-go-round of cab switching, route retracing and obfuscation. By the time he reached Angela’s place exhausted and bruised, it was almost two a.m.
*****
Chapter 6
August 30, 2028
2:07 a.m.
“You look like shit, Artie. Is that blood?”
The crackling static of Angela’s disembodied voice was a painfully welcome reminder of past days. Bridge stood at her door, disheveled and battered, staring up at the camera above the door, which was no doubt displaying his sorry self on a window in Angela’s crèche. “You should see the other guys,” Bridge quipped. “They look like a million bucks.”
“You always were a cream puff. Door’s open.” Bridge heard the latch on the door click and pushed through quickly, keeping an eye out until the door closed. The latches and bolts slammed back into place automatically as soon as the door was shut. Even so, Bridge flattened against the wall and edged up to the front window overlooking the apartment complex’s deserted pool. A pricey place like this likely attracted a 9-5 cont>rporate clientele that would rarely be up this late on a work night. Angela had done well since ditching him.
“Nice place you got here.”
“Business is good.” Angela’s voice came from all around Bridge. Her wispy body materialized out of thin air, the perfect holographic representation of one of her avatars. Her real body looked almost nothing like this. Seven feet tall, bleached-bone white skin and jet hair flowing to her knees, with fingernails just short of being claws, this was Santhariya, the queen of the night realm, Orphonus.
Bridge raised an eyebrow. “Very good, apparently. Those holo projectors aren’t cheap.”
“Kim got me a got a good deal on them. This guy wanted me to steal some prototype designs, so he gave me the old models for like half price. I can’t resist a bargain.”
“Especially when it involves a run, right?” Her avatar nodded quickly, that cute mischievous smile Bridge was so familiar with in the flesh transferred to this apparition perfectly.
“So where are you?”
“Back in the bedroom,” she said, indicating a room past the open kitchen. The apartment itself was so sparsely furnished Bridge could barely tell it was occupied. An expensive, barely creased couch was a deserted island in the middle of a desolate living area, positioned directly in front of the wall screen. The kitchen was the only area that appeared used, and badly used at that. Dishes caked with crusted food piled in the sink, used cardboard food containers left torn on the filthy counters. He’d seen this type of thing in so many different hackers’ homes that it might have been its own interior design style for the cyberpunk set. Most of the dedicated hackers spent more time in the crèche than the flesh, and as a result, they needed little furniture and cared even less for homemaking.
“Can I at least talk to your face?”
A tiny frown creased her lips. “I’m hardly decent,” she joked. “I’m deep in, Bridge, I don’t have time to swab off and be a hostess. There’s food in the fridge if you want, the couch is as good as a bed. Now what the fuck happened to my hacker?”
“I told you, something he found got him killed. You said he was hitting pedofarms. What did you do?” His accusatory tone sounded harsher than he intended.
She put her balled fists on her hips, the first signs of her obstinate attitude emerging. “I didn’t do anything. I sent a few guys on some fun runs, a little harmless griefing.” Bridge’s frown caused Angela to point her finger accusingly. “You used to enjoy that.”
“That’s the kind of shit got Margie killed.”
“Margie got sloppy. You don’t shack up with the guys you’re griefing. Look, all we did was put some recorders on these ageplay sims. Find a few pervs paying for cybersex anfor cyb with underage avatars, record their escapades then send it to their wives. We didn’t even ask for blackmail money. We just wanted to fuck with them.”
Bridge sighed and rubbed his forehead. “And if one of those guys happened to be connected, he’d damn sure not hesitate to pop a cap in Kira’s ass.” Bridge’s mind raced despite his exhaustion. “Kira sent me an attachment, but I’m not looking at it without a clean room and a backup ID. Can I borrow a crèche?”
Angela frowned. “I have an old one, but it’s slow.” To Angela, if it wasn’t built last week with firmware upgraded last night, it was a decrepit dinosaur slogging through a primordial swamp.
“How old?”
“May? April? I kind of lost track after I got this one.” Bridge was impressed, and a little bit proud. Angela really was doing quite well, as none of the stuff she was purchasing was cheap. Holo projectors and a new crèche every season cost major cash. Of course, never leaving the apartment meant she didn’t need a car, and the crèche’s nutrient drips meant she probably ate one meal a day if she was lucky. A hacker’s life was a series of tradeoffs normal schlubs never made. “It should do for watching a run replay. Just don’t use an ID that could connect with me.”
“Got it. Now, where is this thing?”
“Bedroom. Come on back.” Bridge shuffled hesitantly down the apartment’s central hallway. Angela wouldn’t come out of the crèche to greet him, and he was certainly unsure he wanted to walk around in the room while she lay unmoving in the little pillbox. Even proximity to her avatar was enough to bring back painful memories.
The bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the rest of the place, and just as messy. A few takeout boxes lay on the floor. The bed was simply a mattress thrown haphazardly on the floor, sheets tousled and unkempt. The low hum of the crèche’s cooling unit filled the room. The shiny black surface of the coffin-like device was decorated with lines of neon green LED strips, a sign of heavy modification both on the exterior and the interior. “It’s that one over there,” Angela said, pointing in the corner at a dusty plain crèche. Bridge wiped his finger through the thick layer of dust. “The maid is off this year,” Angela joked.
“Has it got the basics? Security package, mail, etc.?”
“Do I ever work with the basics? Hell, no, that thing has custom warez. I think the defense package even has your codebase. I abandoned that tack when Freeman put out his Plat Series.” Bridge was postponing the jack in, running his hands over the console at the base of the device. He powered the crèche on, looking at the lights for entirely too long in an effort to forestall the inevitable.
He didn’t want to jack in. He’d sworn off the whole life. Like a recovering alcoholic, he marked each day without a jack in as an accomplishment. It was an exciting life, cutting through databank security and pilfering whatever he could, battling live Net security agents in some liquid mercury duel with programs he built from the groeoufrom thund up. The full-on speed of a crèche run was so different from just jacking into the front of the crèche. If a regular jack run was a sprint, a crèche run was a drag race, an intense compression of time and speed and data folded into every erg of consciousness. That kind of intensity couldn’t be easily put down, and once Bridge had removed himself from those runs, he’d felt their absence every goddamn day.
“What are you waiting for? Get naked!”
Bridge scowled back at the avatar and began to strip off his clothes. “It might help a bit if I didn’t have the Virtual Voyeur watching me.”
“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.” That didn’t help Bridge’s nervousness much.
“It’s cold in here,” Bridge joked as he dropped his shorts, turning quickly to lift the lid.
“That’s what you always say.” The bubbling, mischievous giggle brought a flush to Bridge’s cheek, and a pang of nostalgia to his heart. The crèche’s soft plastic interior was chilly, its flesh-like embrace surrounding him with a womblike familiarity. Fitting the urine catch caused more jokes at his genitals’ expense. The nutrient drip into his arm was a bit more difficult than usual. It had been a while since he’d tapped that vein, and he’d had the easy-access cap removed. He closed the lid firmly, cutting off the teasing and encasing him in the silence of a tomb. The breathing apparatus covered his face and eyes as the saline solution flooded the chamber, a brief cold snap before the internal warmers kicked in. Within seconds, the interior of the coffin was a dimly-lit liquid paradise, his body covered with a slick fluid as his senses were one by one deprived of input. The jack began to do its magic, booting up the interface sequence. The last physical sound he heard was the beep signifying the bootup sequence’s completion.
And then he flew headlong into a wall of white, a bright onrush of euphoric experience that seemed to permeate every cell in his body. That one instant of elation was what the real hacker lived for, that sensation of flying warp speed into the great overmind, the digitization of consciousness that signaled immersion in the waters of the collected knowledge of humankind. The feeling was as close to being God as Bridge had ever thought his frail human mind could experience. The process was instantaneous, but it stretched the mind so hard that time elongated, eternity compressed into a single intense moment.
His NetBody rezzed into the crèche’s foyer, and the sensation was gone like gossamer on the wind. It was replaced with the liquid motion of his NetBody, a shiny slick humanoid-shape with the properties of liquid mercury. The programs he chose to carry with him would reshape the NetBody in various ways, some offensive, others defensive.
Accessing one of his backup ID’s had equipped the NetBody with his favored weapon, a dual-edged spear and his personal defense, a buckler-shaped shield. He tested the programs, swinging the weapons and running through a few Net-fu forms, a kind of martial arts based fighting style that hackers had adapted to Net combat. He hoped not to see any Net combat, but his paranoia about the situation caused him to prepare. Checking a few of his data gathering and analysis programs, holo prograe proceeded out of the foyer. The inky black space between data nodes was an infinite expanse of beauty, an empty void filled with the twinkling stars of billions of data nodes, web sites, chat rooms and virtual worlds.
His first steps were to hide the trail of his NetBody, sending the packets bouncing around the world in the blink of an eye, leaving traces of its passing in hundreds of random locations around the globe. Someone trying to backtrack to his physical location would need to unravel the mass of dead-end IP addresses and false trails before finding his vulnerable body, and their detection would alarm Bridge in enough time to allow him to jack out safely. Once assured his trail was sufficiently obscured, he rented a “clean room,” an off-the-shelf data location on the GlobalNet that contained no previous data, no programs, and only one entrance. He could control data access to the room, making sure that whatever he brought in could not leave without his knowledge, as well as ensuring that someone attempting to find him would have only one avenue of attack.
He marveled at the speed with which he worked. Not for the first time did Bridge consider dropping his work in the meat world and going back to hacking. The rush of adrenaline was real, an ever present euphoric call.
Putting aside the desire to backslide into his previous life, he sent out a request, a backdoor call to his Bridge ID’s mailbox. The request grabbed the email from Kira and sent it flying around the Net, obscuring it’s destination as surely as he’d done for his NetBody. The message appeared in the clean room as a blinking envelope icon, vaguely three-dimensional floating in mid-air. Bridge sighed and opened the message.
The body of the message was brief. Kira had sent it with his last breath, and all it contained was the plaintive cry, “Watch me!” Bridge felt like kicking Kira square in the junk. The attachment was large. Bridge extracted it from the message, analyzing it with one of his data-sniffing programs. It was dense, likely a room recorder. Much like a hidden camera placed in a physical room, a room recorder captured all the data of a NetRoom, creating an exact duplicate of the room, its occupants and their actions that could be experienced again. Viewing the recorder’s contents in the proper program would give the viewer a voyeuristic experience from any angle but without the ability to alter the proceedings. The viewer could even take the place of one of the participants, hitching a passive ride in the participant’s mind, feeling every sensation the person felt during that time. Such recordings were popular on the Net, most being pornographic.
Bridge dropped himself into the recording as a spectator. The room was not surprising, given the nature of Kira’s targets. Bridge could only describe it as a stereotypical little girl’s room, posters of teenage heartthrobs on the wall, stuffed animals neatly placed in a parade around the walls. The single bed was festooned in pink and puffy lace, the walls even painted a girly pink. Fake sunlight flickered through a window, and one door led out of the room. The room’s occupant rezzed in, and Bridge’s gorge rose.
A little girl, no older than twelve years had appeared, sitting on the bed, chewing gum and blowing bubbles while twisting her finger through her pigtails. It was a painfully stereotypical scene. Bridge immediately accessed information on the avatar. According to the room, sheikehe room was actually a twenty-six year old virtual escort who worked out of Colorado. Despite knowing that this underage avatar was a consenting adult, he still felt queasy about what he knew was coming next. The door to the bedroom opened slowly, an adult male sneaking into the room like a thief.
The accompanying rape fantasy was by the numbers, the adult forcing himself upon the child in a disgusting display of oedipal dominance. Even though it was an act that didn’t involve an actual child, it still made Bridge’s stomach turn. This kind of ageplay sold well on the porn market. It wasn’t illegal, though most courts frowned on virtual escort services as well as the disgusting implications of virtual child rape. It would be extremely damaging for anyone caught partaking, causing divorces and firings at the least. Bridge felt no remorse for closet pedophiles like this one whose life would be upended by the revelation of such predilections.