Crash Flux 1: Welcome To The Machine (2 page)

With her free hand she reached behind the chair, pulling out the hypodermic needle strapped to the back.  It felt like a gun inside her hands.  She rolled his head all the way back and pushed the needle into his neck, pulling the trigger and injecting him with the drug.  She placed her hand over his wavering eyes, until he passed out a moment later.  She then pulled the neural uplink out from behind the chair and stood up, leaning over as she placed it on his forehead.

She pulled the zipper up and reached into her jacket, slapping the black pack with the skull and crossbones logo on the front until a cigarette slid out into her fingers.  Two ticks later the manager opened the sliding door to the storage unit.  He looked at her cigarette and said, “You have any more contraband?”

She spoke with the cigarette between her lips.  “Get your own.”

Alfredo gave her a familiar pout.  She rolled her eyes, reached into her pack and handed him one.  He smiled as he lit his cigarette.  He blew a cloud smoke into the air.

“Is he under?” he asked.

“Yeah.  He’s in for a surprise when he wakes up.  Can I borrow your UCD?”

“Don’t you have a C-MAX?”

“I don’t like to use it for local calls.”  

Alfredo shrugged and tossed her the phone.  “We are moving out in half an hour.  Ditch the UCD when you are done with it.  I needed a new one anyway.”

She dialed Adon and said, “Are you all set up?”

Adon came through on the other line.  “The simulation is ready to go.”

She hung up the UCD.  She loaded another drug cartridge into the hypodermic needle and injected him again.  She took a long drag off her cigarette.  She activated Melvin’s neural uplink and said, “Sorry Melvin.  Looks like you’re fucked.”

*

Melvin Halocauster woke up inside his office.  He felt dizzy, confused, not sure where he was or what he was doing.  He had no idea how he got here.  Jeff from opened his door without knocking and said, “Feeling okay boss?”

“I’z feelin’ little dizzy”

“Must have had a late night last night with that stripper.  We need you to authorize an account, just came up this morning.  Big commission on this one.”

The Holografix screen loaded vertically on top of his desk.  The circular keypad loaded horizontally, its keys arranged in a spiral, and his fingers passed through the holographic image clumsily.  He focused on his password, lightly brushing his fingers on the pad as the keys lit up.  The password flashed on the screen, and Jeff popped through the door one more time.

“Sorry champ, we didn’t get that.  Could you enter your password one more time?”

Melvin hit the keys in sequence one more time, and the world disappeared around him.  He awoke, tied up to a chair, with two figures standing over him in the dim light, a man and a woman, their silhouettes standing out in the darkness.  The woman removed the neural uplink from his forehead, and said, “Thanks for the password Melvin.  Looks like you won’t be mind-fucking any more working girls into giving you any more freebies, huh?  Oh well.”  She injected him again, and he started to fade.  The last thing he saw was the light from below the sliding door disappear beneath his feet.

*

The burst hit Raydin like a ton of bricks, and just like that, he was out, and under, and programmed to receive.  He began to meditate, finding his center, an endless desert plane of cracked earth.  The pain fell away, and he let the fear pass through him.  The program ended, leaving his mind a tangle of shorted wiring.  His nerves were shot to hell, his skin and muscles burning and twitching.  Most of the damage was temporary, though he would probably never remember what he saw in there.

He felt suction towards the bottom at the sticky fluid drained out from the bottom of the suspension tank.  He lay shivering on the floor, the dark room illuminated only by the orange glow of the large heater.  The world became a blur as the lights came on and the door hissed open.  The footsteps of the men hauling him out echoed down the hall.  They removed his blinders, earplugs and the neural uplink.  Pain flared through his body as he was dressed in a jumpsuit and thrown onto a gurney.  They wheeled him down the corridor and onto the street, leaning him against a fence in the prisoner pick-up zone.

Raydin’s eyes rolled back up into his head, the light reflecting off his violet iris.  He rolled over, twisting his wiry frame off his back and onto his stomach.  He grabbed his hair with both hands, pulling at it to distract him from the pounding in his head.  He spotted a couple of dark shapes waiting behind the fence, beside the gate.  Voices coalesced around him, the voices of friends.  “…Hurry up, get the shades on him, before the CR program decompresses.”  A pair of opaque shades was placed over his eyes, replacing the overload of visual input from the CR program with counter iconography designed to speed his recovery.  Drooling, he grinned broadly at the batches of flashing images.  He felt a slight sting from the hypodermic needle, and his mind went into focus as the drug took effect.  He remembered what his father told him.  “Those who run the cracks know how to look after their own.”

Raydin said, “Is my comjack on? Am I wired?”

Raydin lifted his shades, smiling as he spotted Irule’s curvy silhouette, her dress wrapped tight around her body.  Six feet tall, her hair was cropped, braided, and shaved at the sides.  She struggled to pick him up as Raydin passed out.  Irule lightly slapped him a couple times and said, “You okay Ray?”  He nodded an affirmative.  She said, “Take it easy.  You’re back online.  You aren’t but five minutes out of the hole and you’re trying to reconnect.  You’re going to overload.”

Another, shorter, silhouette wrapped his arm under the crook of Raydin’s arm.  Raydin felt the stress of the last few days take effect, and ejected his half-digested nutrient feed all over floor.  “Damn it Ray, these are brand new shoes.  Put your shades back on.”

Raydin looked up and said, “Adon?”

Raydin smiled, bared his teeth.  Adon came into focus, silver eyes and slicked back, soft-metallic hair.  His eyes rolled over Adon’s refractive suit, glimmering with so many wildly shifting colors that Raydin had to look away.  He said, “Nize’ suit.  Wher’z Burk?”

Adon answered “Burks hiding out in my shop.  He should be safe there.”

Adon and Irule struggled to pick Raydin up onto his feet.  Irule swore and removed her shoes.  Adon smiled coyly, and they finished hoisting Raydin onto his feet.  Raydin said, “U get th’ codes?”

“Yeah, we got him, everything went tick tock, just like you said.  Melvin is going to be locked up tight inside that storage unit for two days.  Did you get the triggers?”

Raydin pulled his left canine from his gum.  Adon took the tooth and held it up towards the light, revealing the almost invisible circuitry on its base.   Raydin looked up and smiled, “We stil’ on?”

Adon said, “Holy… how did you manage…”  He laughed and shook his head.  “Look at this guy, drooling, can’t walk, can’t talk, and what’s the first thing he wants to do?”  He plugged the tooth into his business phone, uploaded it onto his private server.

Irule said, “Just relax, okay?  I’m going to jack you in to the Tower Terrace until we get back to Adon’s shop.  You think you can handle a little VR?”

“Do it.  It’ll feel lik’ a fu’kin’ vaca’sh’an c’mpar’d to-”  He yelped, interrupted by Irule running the address of the Tower Terrace simulation through his comjack.  He closed his eyes and she said, “Sorry about that.  Try to keep upright.”

A burst of static assaulted his senses, and he slowly settled into the simulation.  He sat outside a small café, at a small patio table on a lonely, quiet terrace.  He commanded his virtual persona to move to the edge of the terrace, overlooking Datcora from a virtual sky.  He took in a deep breath, feeling the flux of rich sensory input.  Three days without knowing the touch of dream-fabric of virtual reality.  Enhanced smell, enhanced hearing, enhanced sight, nothing but blue skies, fresh air, and the city, hundreds of miles below. 

Raydin, like Irule, had undergone a neural enhancement procedure, installing a system known as the Cognitive Enhancement Memory Augmentation Communications System, CEMACS, or C-MAX for short.  Inside of Raydin’s brain, crystal circuits distorted time and space, forcing faster than light communications.  A black case the size of his thumbnail contained enough storage to record the exact location of every cell in his body.  The jack embedded in his forehead grew warm, and a bright, glowing, radiant dot appeared on his forehead, then disappeared.

Raydin looked down over the whole of Datcora, a massive structure covering the west coast of old America, surrounded by a transparent dome of orange light, protecting the residents from the freak electrical storms that plagued the continent.  The Hub lay at its base, a black hexagon five miles tall, surrounded by expansion rings.   Stretched between thirty tiers, billions of lines of composite titanium wire mesh were strung between thousands of kilometers of altered state carbon beams, supporting porous chitin that was half the weight of concrete and twice as strong.

Raydin’s eye wandered across the skyway network projecting out of the Hub.  Different colored lanes supported between long series of paired structural beams formed the maze of cargo roads that fueled the arcology’s commercial infrastructure, each in turn connecting with the twenty to a hundred lane solid chitin super-freeways that crisscrossed North and South America.  Millions of hovercraft and other vehicles formed an electric pulse, beating to the heart of the nation-city.

Centered in the Hub was the Wheel, a pit of concentric circular platforms, descending downwards and inwards like a massive strip-mine.  Tiny dots of light from the V.T.O.L. craft pulsed in and out of the infrastructure built atop the spokes of the Wheel, following the halo of lights from the guide beacons surrounding the platforms.  At the very bottom, a spiral staircase of skyscrapers curved inwards as it climbed upwards, creating a jagged spire that reached up out of the Wheel and into the sky, the exclusive province of Datcora’s ruling class, known only as The Towers.

It all culminated at Datcora’s apex, the Central Processing Spire.  Taller than Mount Everest, clawing its way to the peak of the spire from the base of the catacombs which lay at its foundations, it was the heart of New Babylon.  The CPS was the heart of Datcora, the foundation of earth’s commerce and information trade, processing an infinite influx of data from all over the world.  It pulsed, humming loudly, bending and twisting time and space, bending the light around it to form an artificial matrix of semi-intelligent thought.  Atop the spire, ascending with it as it continued its reckless climb towards the stars, the spiked, hex ring elevator rotated in a circle.  It was the all seeing eye of the Primus, the undisputed ruler of Datcora.  

All around the arcology’s massive framework, the skyways expanded east, north, and south, into and across the badlands, into the major sub cities of the North American Trade Alliance and bridging the gap between the other four nation-cities of the world.  The sky blazed, the electromagnetic radiation reacting with the pollutants in the air and creating a fractured kaleidoscope of color.  Every once in a great while, the streams of sky would turn blue and shift like liquid helium, rippling across the surface of the stratosphere, away from the sun. 

Raydin’s point of view switched back and forth between the tower terrace and reality, his vision sputtering with the garbled input his brain was sending his C-MAX.  They made their way through endless series of fences and institutional buildings, navigating the narrow pedestrian walkways.  

Raydin eased back into the simulation.  He could not see Data Core’s foundations from the Terrace.  Somehow, that made sense.  There were people who lived in the underworld, out of sight, and out of mind.  

The Hub was his home.  It housed one point eight billion people.  The lighting never changed, the people worked ten tocks a day, every day.  Personal property was outlawed, with three exceptions: furniture, electronics, and clothing.  Those who did not come to work on time were forced to live in the under-works as property of the state.  

The only hope lay in winning, breaking through that magical barrier that made you a G-8 citizen living in the Hub into a C-1 employee working in the Wheel.  There was always a chance you could win the lotto, or keep working once you hit the ceiling, hoping for a rare promotion.  For those who ran the cracks, G-4 was as high as you go.  It was every code-monkey’s dream to find the brass ring, the ticket out of the Hub and into the Wheel.

Raydin began coughing, and Adon stopped for a moment by a drinking fountain.  He took the chit card and inserted it into the slot, and the timer on the fountain began counting down from sixty seconds.  “Lousy bastards, cost me two credits for a drink of water.  Take a drink ray.”  Raydin stumbled over to the water fountain, washing the taste of nutrient feed out of his mouth.  He tried to stand up, then doubled over coughing and fell to the floor.  Adon said, “They really did a number on him.”

The occasional a glossy ebony ‘scraper touched the ceiling, but the only way to the next tier was through the passenger lifts and the skyways.   The lighting embedded in the roof cast no shadow, emanating from no single source and yet blanketing the Hub in a dull glow.

Adon and Irule shoved people out of the way, into the harsh grind of the Red Light district.  People gawked and people stared, “sneers and jeers,” as their friend Burk put it.  Wearing the only clothing they could afford, the impoverished minority wore flats, colored t’s with no decoration whatsoever.   Bought out of a vending machine, it cost less to buy disposable clothes than to buy new ones.  The rest wore black and white attire, mass produced button-less white and black business shirts and v-cut blouses.  They wore ill-fitting slacks with plastic zippers, thin business skirts cut as short as the women dared.  And every single one of them wore a neural uplink around their forehead, connecting them to Virtual Reality, severing their connection to this world.  He hated them.  To Raydin, the majority was the enemy.  Their uniform, sneering caricatures burned him.  He spit at their feet, the prejudiced, their conformist disdain being the last thing he wanted to see after spending three days in utter oblivion.