Going Shogun (3 page)

“You recognize him?”

“Peeped him before, flocking the
ladies around the hangover houses.  He’s this R14 gonzo everybody calls
Shoobocks.  Or he
was
.”

Quick recon of the apartment finds
nobody else there, so I reach over and turn the stereo down as Forklift takes a
seat at LX’s desk.  He’s got a system that would rival any Board Control Center
and then some.  Mostly all high dollar hardware that can only be bought on RollerNinja. 
Stuff smuggled out of Board compounds by disgruntled employees or two-faced
agents.  Six monitors, three PC towers and enough cable and wire to weave an
uncomfortable blanket.  Some type of data that I don’t recognize scrolls
vertically on each screen; letters, numbers, code sequences, it’s all lost on
me.  I might as well be reading Hawaiian Chinese.

I’m anxious to get moving.  The
blank stare coming from the dead hacker is giving me the creeps and all I want
is to be gone.  Another ride in
Machine
at Mach 3 would be more suitable
than this.  “Now what?” I ask. 

“Dunno.” 

Forklift is the most sedated I’ve
ever seen him.  He sighs and half-heartedly pokes at the keyboard.

All six monitors go
black and a message in white letters appears on the central four:

FORKMAN,

GODS IS GRIMY.  SEE THE
MINOTAUR.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE,

LX

“Gods is grimy?”

“Shit,” Forklift says, sitting up
quickly, leaning closer to the screen.  “He jazzed the monkey.”

“What?”

“Jazzed the monkey.  Freaked the
jones.”

“Speak English, dammit.”

“Jesus, would you get with it?  He
knew something was up, he knew somebody was coming, he’s erasing his data, and
now we have to go see somebody called The Minotaur if we want to get access to RollerNinja,
okay?  Stop being so early millennium.”

“And you got all of that from ‘Gods
is grimy’?”

“Basically it’s gonzo speak for,
‘Me.  Go.  Now.’  Simple enough for you?”

“Maybe you should do a better job
translating through those teeth.”

“Smoke a pole, happy man.”

“Whatever,” I say.  I lean back
against the wall, acutely aware that we’re squabbling like Pre-Level children
ten feet away from an unlucky stiff.  “All right.  Three questions.  Who’s this
guy, why is he dead in LX’s apartment, and who’s The Minotaur?”

“Three answers.  You know as much as
I do, no idea, and no idea.”

The only thing I’m glad for is clear
responses from Forklift, without having to decipher his usual jabberwocky. 

He gets up from the desk, walks over
and punts the body in the ribs.  “I would go so shogun on your ass if you were
alive right now.  You,”
punt
, “screwed,”
punt
, “everything,”
punt
,
“up.”

When The Board instituted their own
Declaration of Independence and decided that all men were truly
not
created equal, they probably had Forklift in mind.  He reaches down and pulls
an ID card from one of the pockets.  “Darrell Grubb – R14,” he says.  He pauses
then turns to me and I can see the anger slipping into soberness on his face. 
“It feels different when they’ve got a real name, you know?”

I nod.

“What are we gonna do with the
body?” I ask.

“Stow the yoke, I guess.”

“Forklift.”

“I mean leave it here.”

“And get busted that much easier?”

“Easy don’t matter.  They’ll find us
regardless. 
If
they look.”

We set to work wiping down
everything we’ve touched, but it won’t do much good when the Board Agents begin
their investigation.  They can find you even if you’ve breathed heavy on a
surface.  You’d never really think halitosis could have you sitting in a prison
cell.

***

Machine
hurtles down the interstate like a
green demon, headlights like flaming eyeballs, rear spoiler like a wicked cape.

Forklift doesn’t say much.  The
music is off and he’s picking at a fingernail with one of his errant front
teeth.  I’ve got a hand over my mouth, head leaning against the window, and all
I can think about is the vacant gaze of that dead gonzo.

He says, “I’m slumpin’ like heavy,”
then runs a hand through his zebra striped hair. 

“Tell me about it.”

“We should go chuzzle some suds and
flee the downies.”

“I could use a drink.”

“How about The Blue Sioux?”

“Too hippy.”

“Barney’s?”

“Too last year.”

“Um...Shaman’s Grill?”

“You’re not allowed back in,
remember?”

“Oh, right.  Hey, let’s try that new
place...what’s it called?  The one over by the restaurant?”

“Elite?”

“Yeah.”

“Can we get in?”

“11s and up.”

“But it’s all gonzos and their
sheilas, right?”

“If any jacked in screenboy knows
who The Minotaur is, he’d be there.”

“Dude, I don’t think we should be
asking around about that yet.  Not after what we saw in the apartment.”

“Board Agents find him, we’re bent
over the bar stool.  Why not?”

“I seriously wish you hadn’t gone
in.”

“Too late now.  Had to make sure my
boy was vertical.  Besides, they have no proof we did it.  The most they can bust
us with is inter-level trespassing.  That’s what, Cameo P12?”

“And that doesn’t suck enough? 
That’s another four years getting back to R11.”

“Well...”  He pauses and eases down
the ramp.  “‘
Come what, come may, time and the hour run through the roughest
day
.’”

“Ok, that’s it.  From here on out,
tone down your razzle-dazzle, beefcake, shogun dialogue.  I hate having to
translate everything you say.”

“That’s Shakespeare, man, you ever
heard of him?”

“He wrote smut movies for CineSkin,
didn’t he?” I ask, tossing a snarky jab right back at him.  But, truth be told,
if Forklift didn’t surprise me with a random bit of knowledge at least once on
a daily basis, I’d think something was wrong. 

“Jackass,” he says.  “And I can’t
muzzle my chops without diddling my shiz from the back door, true?”

“Yeah, I suppose.  Just...if we get
in trouble or have to run or talk our way out of a situation, anything like
that, will you try to keep it within a comprehensible area?”

“Sugar.”

I chuckle and it feels
good.

About ten years ago, The Board
decided that Internet Access should be a privilege granted only to R10s and
up.  Supposedly, the group of people with the highest moral fiber.  “To
preserve the integrity of the human race,” The Board said.  You can imagine the
Molotov Cocktail-tossing chaos this created. 

Cars burning, buildings burning,
people setting themselves on fire in protest. 

Pure madness.  And it was
everywhere.

The Flame Riots lasted for about
three weeks until the protestors either ran out of things to burn, or they eventually
realized it was doing nothing more than leaving a thin film of black ash on
every rooftop and flower petal in the country.

Oh yeah, it was nationwide.  You
couldn’t turn on a television without seeing a news report about another protester
burning himself at the stake, screaming about how it was his God-given right to
surf for porn if he wanted to.  What I never understood about that was the
self-sacrifice.  If he was dead, he couldn’t log in regardless.

The weather took one on the chin,
too.  There were times when you’d go for days without seeing the sun.  The cool
thing about it was, the lightning storms were amazing.  Streaks would flash
across the sky in bright blue and yellow and red spider webs.  I spent many
nights sitting on the roof of my apartment building, watching and being awed
until the black rain came and I had to duck back inside.

This law passed down from The Board
is why we have to pay LX, or someone called The Minotaur, to get us access to
the internet.

Actually, the law is one of many
reasons.

RollerNinja.com is hosted on this
satellite server that orbits the planet.  You can only access it to post or buy
items during these hour-long windows as it passes a certain set of
coordinates.  I’ve heard that there’s one over Old York, one over Hong Kong,
and another one somewhere in the Middle East.  We have to pay someone to hack
the timeframes and access codes, and hijack an IP address to use out of the
Board’s Hoard.  Our someone
was
LX.

The Board has a listing of all
computers with internet capabilities that it monitors on a daily basis; if an
unapproved system logs in, it sets off a red flag and there’s a Board Agent
knocking on your door in the next twenty minutes.  Getting access to these IP addresses
equates to having a fake identity created – driver’s licenses, birth
certificates, whatever the troglodytes used to do way back when.  But just like
the olden days, you can get anything for a price.

The site is run by these two guys
that call themselves Lewis & Clark, because they think they’re Digital Age
pioneers.  Truthfully, they’re two-bit gonzos with a good idea and godlike
status in the underworld.  But, I shouldn’t down them.  Somehow they’ve managed
to hack a satellite, keep The Board from shutting it down, and maintain a
freeroam for the past three years.  How they’ve been able to keep it running
and elude capture is anybody’s guess.  Some speculate that they give Board
Leader Gerry Johnson a cut of the profits to ignore them, but only true
conspiracy theorists, like Forklift, believe that nonsense.

See, only R10s and up have valid
access to the internet, but there are probably a million other risky souls who simply
can’t do without it, so they find a gonzo and slip him a few hundred bucks to
drum up one of these semi-legit IP addresses to gain access.  It’s illegal, but
everybody’s doing it.  Like moonshine runners during Prohibition, or kids
drinking before they’re 25 (the age was bumped...again), or potheads smoking
their weed after it was made illegal (
again
).  (I majored in Cultural
History...which is probably why I’m still waiting tables.)

Since I refuse to get hip and roll
with the proper technical knowledge, I have to trust Forklift with his plan to
get on RollerNinja because he’s the one with the know-how and the connections. 
And according to him, LX is the only guy he really trusts.  So conversely, now
that Forklift is screwed, I’m screwed.  We have to find The Minotaur, get
access to RollerNinja, steal the recipes, figure out what the secret ingredient
is, find LX and,
and
, avoid getting busted by Board Agents for a murder
we didn’t commit, whether it was done by LX in self defense or not.

We’re getting diddled in the shiz,
true.

Chapter
3

Forklift does a drive-by on Elite
and we see the line trailing back around the corner.  A dragon’s tail of early
twenties angst and apathy.  From the looks of it, with their designer shirts
and skirts and shoes, most of these people are there just to say they’ve been
to one of the hottest new clubs.  This isn’t their kind of hangout.  They’ll
walk in, have a drink or two, then move on to someplace where they can sulk and
mope without having to pretend like they’re enjoying themselves.

Word is, Elite is gonzo territory,
and people say that Lewis & Clark themselves, the Holy Grailmen of the Hacker
Kingdom, funded the setup costs.  Maybe, maybe not.  It’s simply another point
for the lower levels to meet and greet and gripe about how The Board purposely
and personally has a grudge against their Ascension efforts, as if they really
cared.

If I were on my own, without
Forklift, I wouldn’t fit in.  Not with my normal looks and my normal shirt and
my normal desire to make something of myself.  It’s the type of place I
generally avoid.

Forklift rampages into a
coffin-sized parking space like a pro and says, “Big lines mean big fun,” and I
start to balk but he’s already out of the car and agitating down the sidewalk
before I can say anything.  I catch up to him quick-like and from the tooth-accented
smile on his face, I can tell he’s already forgotten about the dead body and
our giant sized possibility of prison time.  He’s in breakdance mode, which
means I have to get ready for a long night.

He stops at the front of the line,
and for a second, I think he’s gonna cut and piss off about five hundred
pseudo-angry people.  But instead, he approaches the doorman, this huge guy
with biceps the size of my thighs, and says, “Blowtorch, my man,” as they
exchange a fancy handshake with a bustle of movements.

Blowtorch smiles and says, “Speak of
the Devil.  I was just telling Knife here,” pointing to an equally large wooly
mammoth guy, “about the time you whizzed on the grill over at Shaman’s.”

Knife says, “Been me, I’d’ve cut
your wang off and fried it up like a kielbasa.”