Freedom Incorporated (10 page)

Could he?

*

Wednesday, September 15,
2066

17:13 Andamooka, South
Australia

It had taken the better
part of a day, but Dan felt stable again. The Zyclone was pounding
on his neurotransmitters and he felt less like lying in bed until
the end of time. Now he was back to business.

His eyes darted over the
list of names.

Damn
you.
He wondered who in UniForce was selling
his list
s twice
.
That Roach
woman?
He frowned.
Someone else making a buck on the side?

This list was fresh; only
two names had faded on his screen. The Raven had apprehended
both.

He examined
every file, trying to gauge whom the Raven was least likely to
track. There were several large bounties on the list and it seemed
logical the Raven would go for them. The Raven’s return rate was
astonishing, so the difficulty of finding the targets probably
wouldn’t deter him. Dan finally settled on a medium-return
26-year-old female.
Hmm… I’m ten years
older than that.
It made Dan feel old and
he
became acutely aware
of
the pain in his joints. He hadn’t exactly
been looking after himself recently. When his wife was still alive
he used to promise every morning that he’d be careful and that he’d
look after himself. The promise usually preceded a warm kiss and
Katherine would wrap her arms around him, pull him close, and
whisper, “You’d better be careful or you’ll have me to answer
to!”

The target was
a five foot six brunette. Thin. Dan peered closer at his screen
until he could almost see the individual pixels.
Perhaps willowy is the word
. She looked scared in the photograph; he wondered when it was
taken. He memorized the contours of her face, her thin arching
eyebrows and her straight nose. He burned the image into his mind,
murmuring her physical description repeatedly.

The WEF had
issued a warrant for her apprehension – and her death if she
resisted. It perplexed Dan to think about killing her without first
knowing why, without knowing what she did wrong. He was glad bounty
hunting had never forced him into that position. Most people came
quietly, if not willingly, when facing the .45-inch barrel of his
1911. He couldn’t imagine himself pulling the trigger on a willowy
girl. Things would have to
go
horribly wrong before he’d even consider
it.

Dan kept
reading. She was untagged. He grunted.
Weren’t they all?
Some of the more
cunning criminals had had
their
microchips
surgically removed, which made
them difficult to track. Others had escaped the microchipping
squads entirely and so didn’t even
have
a scar on their
back
. But t
hey were
rare. Dan had no idea how they survived in the modern world where
people needed a microchip to do anything.
How
do
they
pay for groceries?
The micro-implant stored
the
b
ank details
that retailers needed to scan.
And they
can’t portal anywhere.
He baulked at the
thought of always using old-mode transport. It was amusing – even
fun – for a while, but the novelty quickly wore off.

And evading
the squads can’t be easy
. Teams of
chipping-officers worked with hand-held scanners in public, usually
– but not always – in crowds. Their job was to ensure everyone had
a valid reading on the scanner. They detained people who
failed
the test
and
forcibly took them to surgery to have a microchip embedded next to
their spine. It had been illegal not to have a microchip since
’59.

Dan
twitched
when he thought
about his microchip. He preferred to forget about
it, but that was difficult in his line of work. Roughly
a
million people objected to
the chips
, but everyone
else thought they were a wonderful idea. There was no need for cash
or plastic cards, personal identity theft was a dark creature of
the past, and they’d eradicated bag snatching. So what did it
matter that microchipping encroached a little on civil
liberties
?

He didn’t want to think
about it.

Dan knew the
so-called ‘unchipped’ carried microchips in their pockets to fool
the scanners and lead a somewhat normal life
.
B
ut
maintaining someone else’s identify wasn’t easy. For starters, the
DNA didn’t match, nor did the physical description. If the
chipping-officers found anything unusual, they’d whisk the suspect
away for questioning where it would quickly become evident they
were using a borrowed chip.

“
So where do I
start?” He whispered now that he had a target in mind.

The file was
sparse; little wonder she was on an exclusive list. Targets with
that kind of bounty had already evaded capture
on the easier lists
. So
other hunters had tried – and failed – to
apprehend her.
It wasn’t going to be easy,
but Dan knew his business.

And knew it
well.

He started
with all the typical databases, building a search profile from the
skimpy details in
her UniForce
file. He absently sipped a glass of water. It was
getting late, but he didn’t want to go to bed where the nightmares
could torment him.

T
wo hours later,
he’d
isolate
d
the possible suspects to a handful of
people. Even the unchipped had to leave some kind of digital
footprint. Dan usually found them in the redundant and fragmented
governmental databases that some countries maintained out of
spite.
The CMP –
Central Microchip Repository
– was
great unless you were tracking someone that didn’t have a valid
chip
.

He stood and
pursed his lips, weighing the options.
Try
to get some sleep, or start tracking her
now
?
Tired
though he was, he stared at her photograph for a long
time.

“
Okay,
Jennifer Cameron…” He rammed his 1911 Colt into his shoulder
holster. “Ready or not, here I come.”

*

Wednesday, September 15,
2066

21:55 Tweed Heads,
Australia

Jen watched
from the kitchen for a while before bringing the tray of
coffee.
They’re so well
matched.
While she was thrilled that her
best friend had found someone, it simultaneously amplified her own
emptiness. She’d looked, she’d done the dating thing, but she’d
never found what Samantha shared with Cookie. Part of her longed
for it, but another part, the fiercely independent part, rejected
it outright. She permitted herself a sigh of self-pity before
remembering that she wasn’t unhappy. Tonight was a night for giddy
excitement and perhaps joyous celebration later on.
But that depends on how lucky we
get.
She reminded herself not to become too
optimistic.

She crossed the lounge
room and balanced the tray precariously on the edge of the coffee
table.

Samantha was
gently rubbing Cookie’s shoulders and it quickly morphed into a
massage. He groaned with pleasure, though his unblinking eyes never
shifted from the screen, which he’d been staring at for three days
straight. He arched his back and winced at the pain that spasmed
through his aching muscles.
Damn.
He had to remember to stretch
every fifteen minutes or he’d seize up like cold
molasses.

Cookie was tall and thin,
though people rarely noticed his height because he was either
hunching over a keyboard or merely a name on someone’s computer. He
was the ultimate geek, or so he told himself. He had friends from
all over the globe, most of whom he’d never met. Not because he
couldn’t afford it, portal technology made it easy to jump from
Tweed Heads to Moscow, across to Portland, then over to Seoul. It
was almost too easy; the major airlines had filed for bankruptcy
less than a year after PortaNet had launched their first product
lines. Governments had since turned international airports into
international portal stations. Without restricting international
travel to those central locations, customs and immigration would
have been impossible to police.

No. Cookie had never met
his electronic friends because he didn’t see the need. The fragile
network of friendships he’d woven across the globe would quickly
collapse if he ever met them in real life. His parents had stories
to tell about that, it’d happened frequently in their generation.
The connections were platonic, of pure ideas, unhindered by the
clumsiness of body language. Even some of Cookie’s real-life
friends had drifted to the fringes of his daily life and taken a
more prominent role in his online existence.

He had
evolved.

That’s what
the social scientists called it. His mind could carry seven
simultaneous
conversations
without getting confusing. On an exceptional day, Cookie could
raise the stakes to ten concurrent conversations, but that was
pushing it even for him. And he could hold the conversations while
working on a totally unrelated problem, as he was today.
Every
few
seconds
he’d flip from one chat session to another and he always knew what
was happening where. If his friends were online, they were fair
game. And the rules of engagement stipulated that he must respond
within two minutes if someone started chatting with him. It had a
snowballing effect and Samantha was always chastising him
for
lavishing
too
much attention
on
his online friends and not enough attention
on
her. It was nearly
impossible to get his undivided attention and it was annoying when
he wouldn’t take his eyes off the screen.

But today was
different.

He’d cut the
conversations down to three: a guy in Milan was online and they
were chatting about the latest developments in superconductor
technology, a genderless screen-name from Austin was providing
invaluable assistance for hacking a UG7-rated network, and he was
maintaining his end of the conversation with Samantha and Jen. But
he was dedicating the bulk
of his
brain’s
immense processing power to
penetrate the seemingly impregnable fortress UniForce had erected
around their network.

“
So what?”
Cookie’s voice was hoarse; he’d under-budgeted the amount sleep he
needed. “It’s not like it’s hard.”

Jen raised an
eyebrow. She felt the beginning of a headache pulse behind her eyes
and hoped the cup of coffee she lovingly stroked would
kill
it before it
became
bothersome. “You
think you can do it?”

Cookie
would
’
ve shrugged
if Samantha’s thumbs weren’t working away at the knots in his
flesh. “Yeah, if I had long enough I could.”

Jen didn’t doubt it.
Cookie seemed to have endless access to that sort of
information.

“
Oh fuck,
fuck!” Perspiration started beading on Cookie’s forehead and his
body snapped to attention.

Samantha
stopped kneading his shoulders and watched the flurry of activity
on the screen as Cookie’s fingers
twitched
across his
DataHand-Dvorak
keyboard.
“What is it?”

“
Fuck
!” Cookie slammed a hand
repeatedly on the enter-key. “Fucking piece of… God damn it!” He
threw his hands up in disgust and leaned back in his chair, lacing
his fingers behind his head.

“
What is it?”
Samantha poked him in the ribs, trying to elicit an
answer.

“
JP and I had
a nineteenth-degree encrypted tunnel between here and Austin and
someone’s just fucked it over.” He snorted and ran a hand roughly
across the stubble on his chin. He couldn’t remember the last time
he’d made the acquaintance of a razor.

“
Weren’t you
getting your information from JP?” Jen asked nervously.

He sighed.
“Some of it, yeah.” Cookie replaced his fingers on the keys and
they resumed their customary tattoo on the
rounded blobs
of fire-retardant
plastic.

Jen pushed more, asking,
“So now what? Do you have to stop?”

Cookie shook his head.
“No, I’ll be right… might slow me down a bit but it should be
okay.”

Jen marvelled that he
could type and speak at the same time. She’d tried it, but usually
ended up typing what she wanted to say or the other way around.
Samantha placed a reassuring hand on Cookie’s arm and traced her
fingers along his skin until she’d sensitised it into goose bumps.
She finally stopped when the luring aroma of coffee was too much to
bear. She would’ve offered some to her lover but what he was doing
looked too intense for mug-holding. It was hard to tell whether he
was reconstructing a secure channel to Austin or resuming the hack
alone. She figured it was better not to ask, not now
anyway.