The Daedalus Code

The Daedalus Code

by Colin F. Barnes

Colin F. Barnes’ Website:
www.colinfbarnes.com
Newsletter:
http://eepurl.com/rFAtL

Acknowledgments

A big thanks to Krista Walsh, Dave Thomas, and Dave Robison for all your editing and insight. You all helped make this a better story.

Also, thanks to Tony Lane and Aaron Sikes for your support, reviews and general encouragement.

Chapter One

New Crete - 5th District - 2047

They used to say information was power. That’s not true anymore; information is freedom. Detective Phaedra of IDEA—the Intelligent Data Enforcement Agency—had that tattooed on a patch of augmented Synthskin that covered most of her forearm.

Her original skin was burnt off by some jacked-up grinder playing cop-killer on his Personal Reality engine. Dumb kid didn’t realize his 3-D printed lasgun worked in real-space too.

She slumped opposite her partner, Detective Aegeus, in the sixth-level cop’s café—
The Force
—where the service was as surly as the downtrodden patrons.

“Have you noticed a slow down in adverts on the MeshNet, lately?” she said before taking a bite of her donut. She washed it down with coffee that was apparently made from the arse-beans of a captive monkey. Cost $300 more than a regular cup. She couldn’t taste the difference. It all tasted like chalky piss.

Aegeus, her cantankerous tumor of a partner, grunted, burped and wiped lumpy gravy from his chin with a napkin. Gravy for Job’s sake! Who the bloody hell eats congealed beef-matter for breakfast? No one but Aegeus.

“Well?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow above her Reality Overlay. Through the screen he projected an image of a tanned Greek god. Would be great for him if screwing only existed in Personal Reality. She could imagine the disappointed expression on his sex-partner’s face if she—or he—ever saw his physical form.

“I’ve not really noticed.” Aegeus placed a folded $1,000 bill on the table and stood. “But one thing I do know, I’m not getting those ads in my PR box about shooting electrodes up my arse to over-clock my brain anymore.”

“That’s a shame,” Phaedra said. “You kinda need it.”

Aegeus shot her the bird. “I’m driving today.”

“Aggy, if you drive, you’ll kill us. Look at your hands. Shaking worse than a grinder doing his own upgrades. When’s the last time you actually slept?”

He shrugged his considerable shoulders. “Not long ago. Couple of weeks.”

“Try a month.”

“What’s it to you anyway? Got all holier-than-thou lately, I’ve noticed.”

“Things are changing. Behavioral patterns aren’t predictable. And what with these university kids disappearing, there’s a disturbance in the network. Don’t you see that?”

“I see the work of a psycho jacked-up on Neuro-D. Probably using the kids as sex slaves or something.”

She shook her head. He never did look beyond the obvious. He was becoming a liability. Didn’t help that she missed out on a promotion, thus shackling them together for another damn year—assuming either of them lasted that long.

And here she was, stuck with the case to end all cases. Five missing kids from a top university—all within a week—whose parents earned more in an hour than she did in a year.

They breathed down her—and the Agency’s—neck, demanding results.

It’s not as if they couldn’t afford to pay for private investigators,
she thought, but then that’s why they were the rich fuckers, and she was an underpaid agent hunting for some prissy prom-queen called Ariadne, who was some big-shot AI designer.

Three days she’d been missing, and they’d turned up almost nothing. No one wanted to help, no one cared. It was down to Phaedra and Aegeus.

Yeah, good luck, girl,
she thought.
You’re probably already dead, aren’t you?

The city was going to hell. Anything below the fifth level was off-limits, overrun by crooks and information dealers. And as for anything above ninth, you needed a warrant from Zeus himself just to get past security. And now five grad students had gone missing in as many days.

But worst of all, the only lead they had pointed to a snot-nosed hacker called The Cretian, aka Mouse. He worked the security systems at a head-hopper’s club above town, and at 4:00 a.m. they were just opening their doors.

“Time to do some investigating, partner.” Phaedra took her gun from the table and placed it in her shoulder holster.

It was custom for the cops to put their arms on the table: for safety precautions. Just the week before, a cop bar was shot up by so-called freedom fighters. The brain-dead douches never failed to forget that it was only the cops, and a handful of tech corporations, that fought for their precious freedom.

The uninformed public gave away their independence when they let their elected governments hand over sovereignty to a cabal of tech companies. Yeah, they got shiny new tech like the Personal Reality Engine; offering a near full 3-D immersive experience of being anyone and anywhere; a way to connect with minds all over the world, but what did they do with it? Porn and virtual drug-highs. Or in hacker’s cases, full-immersion suicide: the process of letting their mind go too deep into the system so that they would suffer brain death. They thought they were uploading their consciousness to the networks, but despite the increase of unaccountable dark traffic, there was no way to prove what they thought they were doing was real. Just another part of the new levels of crazy that people seemed to want to go to.

Aegeus and Phaedra left the café, took the glass-covered transit tunnel across to the tower holding the carport. It was still dark out; only a slither of dusky grey orange appeared in the far distance. The place was too rammed with verticals now to see the horizon, but she remembered sitting here with her dad, looking out to sea, watching the sun rise. You only got that if you lived on the coast. And you only lived on the coast if you were
someone
.

She wasn’t
someone.

It was a two-minute walk, but Ageus was huffing and puffing as if he’d been made to run a marathon.

They reached her vehicle—a Cerberus FlyTech deluxe model in polished chrome—and got in. It always reminded Phaedra of a dagger with its low roof, long curving shape, and its pointed hood, the tip of which contained some of the best scanning nodes made since the military went out of business.

It stunk of sweat and lost opportunities. It was a two-seater, sleek, with full-motion 360-degree monitoring and the latest in high-performance, autopilot, pursuit computers. The FT was the only good thing about working for the Agency. Damn thing was like a rocket ship with a full complement of weapon payload.

She wasn’t ashamed to admit when off duty she’d just cruise around feeling like a badass. The FT performed equally well on a solid road as it did in the air.

She’d already decided to have its engines hacked. When she left the Agency, by choice or force, they weren’t taking her baby away.

Phaedra interfaced with its ignition protocol. A laser from the dashboard took her credentials from her discrete PR visor: a thin silicon rod that attached to her temple and followed the profile of her skull to her forehead. From that thin rod a CrystalClear screen about five centimeters square sat in front of her right eye. She preferred the mono PR screens to the full stereo immersion. There was no lag that way; gave her an extra few milliseconds’ reaction time, and that was crucial these days. 

“Here, take a shot and do something useful. Bring up Mouse’s and Ariadne’s records.” She took a vial of Liquid Sleep from her duster coat pocket and handed it to her partner. He took it with a gloved hand. His fingers trembled as he unscrewed the cap and downed the black liquid.

“Thanks.” Aegeus closed his grey, rheumy eyes and a few seconds later his fingers stopped their incessant dance.

“Address?” Phaedra asked.

“Club Noxus. Eighth level and Fifty-third.”

The FT picked up on it immediately. —
Plotting course, diverse traffic mode, ETA 23.515 minutes.

The H-core engines whined and the FT took off, flying up out of the vertical exit.

***

Even at 4:00 a.m. the traffic was a bitch. The FT did its best to plot a smooth course, but soon Phaedra had taken over the controls, engaged her twitch-senses via the PR and navigated their way up through fifty lanes of horizontal and vertical traffic.

“What the hell is everyone doing at this time of day?” She cursed as she slung the FT into a half-barrel roll to avoid some punk in a pimped Ford SkyCruiser.

“Busy. Everyone’s so busy chasing after one thing or another,” Aegeus said, his voice low and disinterested.

“Not you, though, Aggy.” Phaedra leveled out the FT, and with an impatient exhale said, “Fuck it.” She pointed the vehicle to the sky, slammed the H-core into sport mode and thrust right through the layers of traffic, twisting, banking and dodging the various taxis and boy-racers. They cleared through the busiest routes, finally leveling out into a calmer lane.

Phaedra switched it back over to the auto-cruise. “You don’t rush for nothing or no one,” she added, turning to her partner.

“Nope. Why bother? Don’t get shit done any quicker.” He scratched at his nose, yawned a little—an aftereffect of the Liquid Sleep. The deep crags in his face made him look like an Italian olive-picker from back in the day when people worked outside in the sun: shriveled and dark like a raisin. But Aegeus had barely set foot on the ground. His condition was too much PR. Too much fantasy sex and drug-high simulation. It was all too easy for him.

He was like a dead weight around her, holding her back. She often wondered why she put up with him.

Because he’s my brother, and he’s all I got.

They pulled out of the traffic, connected the FT to a docking station on a hotel tower a few buildings down from Club Noxus. Scans were weak, but Phaedra’s PR display showed her Mouse was there. She accessed his record. A string of hacking crimes ran to twenty pages. He was an athletic kid both in and out of the PR, was skilled in boxing and Wing Chun, had a good record in the fight clubs. Twenty-five wins, one loss.

“What’s the play?” Aegeus asked as he checked the settings on his lasgun and calibrated his quantum targeting.

“Keep it cool, informal. Appeal to his curiosity. We know he spoke with Ariadne three days ago, but we don’t need to bad-cop him just yet. She was obviously here for something—some information. And Mouse here has quite the record in that department.”

“Besides,” Aegeus mumbled. “A nice grad student like that from the tenth level, she wouldn’t be coming to a place like this for recreation. It’s two levels lower than her kind would ever dream of going.”

“Right. So let’s go have an informal chat. Take it from there.”

“Follow your lead.”

“You always do.”

Outside of the FT, a warm wind blew through the towers, buffeting her coat around her legs. Layers upon layers of traffic flew below and above like infinitely migrating birds. Vintage flashing signs on the side of the buildings advertised their wares. They flickered in the grey morning dawn to give it a surreal sense of familiarity.

Most of the towers no longer housed the businesses the signs advertised. There were no Holiday Inns, McDonald’s, or Subways—always ironic when most of their outlets were hundreds of feet above any actual subway. No, most of the businesses were information-based: those providing it, storing it, analyzing it, selling it, or changing it. They just kept the signs for whimsy and cover. It was hard to brand a company whose only service was to manipulate binary code.

They walked the platform across the traffic between the towers in silence. Hundreds of commuters shuffled along, their heads down, faces illuminated with the neon blues and pinks of their respective PR screens. The young kids wore the impenetrable opaque sunglass versions—which of course looked ridiculous. No one in New Crete—except those on the coast—ever needed sunglasses.

The door to Club Noxus needed no bouncers—a scanner box the size of a fist protruded from the polished obsidian surface of the exterior. It shone a scan-laser across their PRs and chirped. A lock mechanism clicked within the thick blast-proof door—a hangover from the days of the insurgence—and it opened.

Phaedra and Aegeus stepped inside to the dull drone of the early bird warm-up set. A handful of eager kids were already seated at round tables half-hidden in leather-covered booths.

The dance floor was sticky beneath her feet, and her shoes squeaked and squelched as she followed the interior map displayed on the PR. She had a trace-route running on Mouse. He wasn’t going anywhere; his heart beat at a steady 55 bpm. He sat calmly at his desk, busying himself with ensuring the club’s security remained virus-free—an hourly battle of wills and brains. A testament to The Cretian’s abilities that the club had been virus-free since the day he stepped through the door three months ago.

Phaedra nodded at Aegeus when they approached the door to the staff area. They already knew they were there, but it paid to be civil. So Aegeus knocked twice and they waited, calmly. Seconds clicked by, Phaedra saw Aegeus’s heart rate tick a little higher.

Keep calm
, she sent over their comm-meld. A silent thought, telepathic electricity. Made these situations much easier to deal with.

Yes, big guy, do as your lady tells you.
A young voice spoke over their secure channel.
Nice comm-meld
, Mouse said.
Shame your security protocols are already for sale on the MeshNet. But never mind. Come in, the door’s open. I assume you want to see me about something?

Damned kids,
Aegeus sent across before shutting down the program.

Phaedra smirked to herself and entered the room.