Crash Flux 1: Welcome To The Machine (10 page)

She turned, displaying a tree made of circuitry, complex and beautiful, and said, “Run your fingers across my back…”  Raydin touched the tips of his fingers lightly to the pattern design on her back.  She shuddered, turned around, and kissed him again, deeply this time.  “Let’s get up there,” she said, pointing to the monitor block, then to a tiny, empty, circular platform.

Irule pressed her hand against the man she was dancing with, breaking off and chasing after them.  Xia saw her below them, smiled, and climbed up to the platform.  Something clicked, and there was a chemistry, a motion between them, a flow that moved back and forth, waves of fire that passed through their eyes and into their souls, and before they knew it, they were on top of the world, and had the eye of every camera in the club.

Raydin felt her relinquish herself into his arms, he couldn’t believe it.  Suddenly, he was knocked back, and Xia fell out of his grasp.  Irule pushed them again, and Xia let go.  There was barely enough room for the three of them to stand up on the platform, there were no railings, no safety net of any kind.  Irule pushed again, half-insane with jealousy, until she realized Xia had lost her balance and was struggling to stay upright.  Irule reached out at the last moment, missing her hand as she screamed and started to fall.

Raydin launched his snake with a flick of his wrist, the thin solid cable cutting into her arm as it wrapped around her.  They struggled to pull her up, and Raydin unwrapped the cable from around her arm.  She wiped some of the blood from her arm and yelled, half crying, “You people are insane, you know that?”  She stormed off, cradling her arm as she ran down the stairs.

Raydin looked at Irule, angry at her, angry at having been played, again.  “We don’t have any more time for games, Irule.”  He took off, turning his back to her as he raced down the stairs.  Irule called after him, but he just kept on going.

Raydin leaned up against a brick column, out of sight, keeping an eye on Adon in the corner booth.  He waited for him to finish up, watched him shake hands and walk past the column.  Raydin shadowed him, just long enough to watch Adon jump when he realized Raydin was behind him.

“I hate it when you do that.”

“Keeps you on your toes, Ace.”

“That guy I was talking to, he’s a coyote, from Void Gate.  He thinks he can get us to the Wheel.”

“Irule told me that part.”

“There is a catch.  We have to go up through the recycling tunnels.  It’s a total no-mans land.  The sludge is a bio-hazard, the chemicals they use to treat it are toxic, and the Wheel dumps a little more nuclear waste down the tubes every year.  What’s worse, there are slummers living there, and the Guard has a zero-tolerance policy regarding the Recycling tunnels.  Everyone not wearing a Guard uniform is shot on site, so anyone we expect to meet down there will be armed to the teeth.  To make it through alive, you need NBC gear, maps, safe house locations, and a whole host of other shit.”

“Beats waiting around for the Guard to come pick us up.”

“Where’s Irule?  I need to talk to her.”

Raydin looked cautiously up towards the dance platforms.  “Beats me.  Haven’t got a clue.”

Adon found a dark corner, and signaled to Raydin to follow.  “There is something I didn’t tell you about the payroll program.  To open an account, you need a government UCD, just like everybody else.  There is no other way to do it, the universal communication device has information from over a dozen government institutions, including the citizen identification center, even Lifetree and Void Gate use it.”

He continued, “The Z-men have their own version of the UCD, which runs a special program to give them access almost anywhere.  When the Z-men need to verify their identity, they use their UCD to create a new ID in the Citizens Identification Centers mainframe.  The program I wrote used a UCD lifted off a dead Z-man, which was replaced by a standard UCD.  The standard UCD was destroyed and the ghost UCD left active, and nobody caught on.”

“So what’s the problem.”

“The problem is that the Z-men have controls, like everybody else.  If you want to make a transaction anywhere in the civilized world, you have to use a credstick.  Z-men are given ghost credsticks, they give them unlimited access to funds, but they are monitored constantly.  They can only access the anonymous accounts linked to the credsticks they have.”

“So you’re saying that without a credstick, the accounts are useless.”

“Not entirely.  When a person opens a new financial account the organization requests verification from various government agencies, the CIC first and foremost.  And not being able to perform a credit transfer doesn’t prevent you from receiving payment.  Creditors can access accounts for collection purposes.  My program presents a standard third party agreement, in which the person trying to collect comes to an agreement with the account holder, agreeing to unfreeze their account in exchange for allowing the creditor to withdrawal all their available funds.  The account holder can’t pay the person trying to collect directly because the account is frozen, and the creditor gets paid a standard fee for his services.  It’s completely automated.”

“I’m not quite sure where you are going with this.”

“My payroll program was supposed to create fifty registered limited liability companies, each with five imaginary board members, with twenty fictitious contract employees. I transferred the money from Holografix account to the various companies, claiming it was the annual salary payments for each of the companies.  Each board member received an average of about two-hundred thousand credits, and each employee received around a fifty thousand credits, with each company raking in about two million for that year.  After that, it was supposed to use the creditors to bounce the money all over the world, seizing all the assets from each persons account and giving them to another newly created account, which are then seized again, and so on and so forth.”

“So how did we end up with so much money?”

“I’m getting to that.  There is a normally a hundred million dollar limit to account transfers from the Holografix branch office we stole the money from.  Somehow, that got circumvented.  To create the names of the various employees, I had two lists of first names and surnames, and two separate sets of lists, one for the employees and the board members.  The program selected the names randomly, combining first names and last names, making sure to never repeat the same name twice.  The program was only supposed to select two-hundred fifty board member names and one thousand employee names.  Instead, when the system went haywire after we tried to process the Legacy virus, the program fluxed.  It went down the list and created an identity for each name combination on the list, paying each one the original amount the program specified.”

“How many names, Adon?”

“Ten-Thousand board members, and forty-thousand employees.”

“What?!  They are going to track that for sure Adon!”

“Keep your voice down.  That’s what I thought, at first.  But somewhere in the chaos of the crash, the program fluxed again.  It started consolidating the accounts into larger ones, it hacked the ghost UCD we had and accessed a delete function that allows it to erase information from any system created in Datcora, to protect the identity of the Keta.  I had no idea the Z-men were so powerful… and I don’t how the program fluxed, either.  What I do know is that it has been modified over two hundred times, each time bringing it closer to our purposes and the original intent of the program.  The modifications are making the program very difficult to track.  I thought maybe they wanted the money for themselves, but some of the modifications run counter to that theory.  We have someone very powerful watching over us, Raydin.”

Raydin said, “So how do we get the money?”

Adon said, “There is no way we can consolidate that much money through small time creditors, and our identities our compromised; our credsticks won’t work.  We need someone with the power to seize those assets, and we need new identities with new credsticks to go with them.  Even if we find someone who can help us with the first problem, the only way to establish new identities that will stand up to the kind of scrutiny would be to hack the CIC mainframe.  Personally, I think we would be better off cutting our losses and escaping Datcora for good.  Either way, it will be easier from the Wheel.”

Raydin said, “What if we buy out Humantix?”

It was Adon’s turn to act surprised.  “Are you Nutz?  You’re talking treason, Ray!”  He whispered the last part in harsh, hushed tones.

Raydin said, “Look, it doesn’t matter.  We have to get out of here.”

Adon said, “Lets go find Burk then.  Stay off your C-MAX while we are here, there are some people working for the Guard here, they will be looking for us.”

They sat down next to Burk as he raked in another large pot.  “Beginner's luck, fellas.  Give it another go?”

Adon said, “We need to talk to you Burk.”

“So talk.”  Burk spoke out of the corner of his mouth, hugging his cards close to his chest.  “I’ve got a full house.”

Adon spoke quietly.  “We’re out of here.”  He wrote a set of directions on the back of a card from the numbers tables.  “Meet us here after you are done.”

Adon nodded to Raydin, “You see that guy eyeing us in the corner?”

Raydin said, “The one next to the fire exit?”

“That’s the one.  Go keep an eye on him.”

Raydin walked towards him, while Irule approached Adon near the bar.  Raydin asked for a cigarette from the guy who had being eyeballing them.  Raydin  put this cigarette between his lips as he looked towards the holo wall.  A commercial for the new personal commuter pod “mitosis” was in full swing, claiming to be manufactured using the latest in nano-technology.  The advertisement was interrupted in mid-division by the calm female voice of the warrant officer hidden behind a flashing red screen.  “This is a Sector-wide alert.  Level three quarantine procedures are in effect.”  

Adon whispered, “Change the channel…”

Irule changed the frequency with her comjack, but every channel was exactly the same.  “A ten million dollar reward, including full citizenship, has been issued on the terrorists known as Raydin Hiroshima-Phoenix, Irule Cunningham, Burk Mayhe, and Adon Ariston.”  Burk spit into his beer as their portraits were posted.  The bartender ducked behind the bar as the other patrons eyed them.  A few got up to leave, scattering out the sides of the door.  

The rest gathered in clumps on opposite sides of the bar.  Three guys moved to the front of the crowd on each side, while the rest gathered behind them.  Soon there were two groups, each of them out for blood, as well as a couple of barflies, gathering to watch the spectacle from the sides of the building.  One of the larger bruisers from the crowd gathered near the entrance shouted to the other group, “Back off!”

Another big one on the other end shouted back.  “Don’t see your name tattooed on their foreheads.”

Raydin wired Irule, and she gave him the nod.  Raydin looked up towards the guy who had lent him a cigarette, saw he was going for his gun.  Raydin pulled up his hand as if he had a lighter, and mumbled through the cigarette in his mouth.  “Shit.  You got a light?”

The man had his hand halfway behind his back when he paused for a moment, and Raydin slammed his head into the side of the pillar next to him.  He dropped like a ton of bricks, and Raydin bolted towards the fire exit.  Irule threw over a table in front of her, and Raydin shook the door in front of him, giving it a kick.  He wired Irule, “It’s locked.”   Irule knocked over another table in front of other crowd.  Raydin, Adon and Burk followed suit, picking up their chairs and throwing them into the crowd.  They all made a mad dash for the door, but Raydin was cut off before he could catch up.  Trapped in a corner, he took a moment to send one of his charging antagonists spiraling into the floor in a controlled throw, leaving the rest tripping over his body.  

Raydin’s wrist twitched, popping the control rod into his hands.  The Snake flew from the rod and hurled itself through the air, coming to an abrupt stop, a hairs length from the thugs face.  Tiny air jets kept it still, hovering in front of the terrified thug.  The cable was gone, replaced by a shimmering strand of energy that drifted lazily to the ground.  The phase wire hung slack between the rod and the Snake, curved and held in place like a piece of solid metal.   One of the thugs passed through the phase wire scrambling to get out of the way.  It seared through his torso, and he fell to the floor in two halves.  Raydin tensed the line, pulling the wire taut against the snake, the veins in his arm tense.  He said, “I don’t want to kill anybody, but I swear I will.”

The scene went unnoticed among the two crowds, and the rest had already begun fighting each other, catching the rest of the party in the middle of a huge brawl.  Adon grabbed the nearest attacker, and put him in a headlock with his left arm.  He activated his forearm spike, its blade thrusting from his knuckle until its point rested at his attacker’s neck, drawing a small amount of blood.  He held onto him firmly, yelling, “Back up!  Get the fuck away from me!”  He backed up towards the entrance.  A few of the attackers stopped, but not all of them.  

Irule struggled out from under the grip of a barfly by elbowing him in the gut, balled her fist and backhanded him.  She reached for her stunner and jammed it into the small of his back.  A large thug grabbed Burk by the shirt and threw him on top of the bar.  He charged, leaping up on top of Burk, slamming his meaty fist into his face.  Burk grabbed the thugs hand and bit off his finger, severing the digit.  He grabbed a shot glass with his other hand and smashed it against the thug's head, rolling back behind the bar.  

He reached into his jacket for his pistol.  He waved the needler about the bar, and jumped out from behind the counter.  Adon pushed his captive into the crowd soon stood next to Burk and Irule.

Beads of sweat ran down Raydin’s forehead as more men closed around him on the other side of the bar.  One of them grabbed his arm, and Raydin screamed, “I’m not going back!”