Freedom Incorporated (28 page)

Cookie’s heart
started thumping in his ears and his breathing was shallow.
Now… just these two files…
He worked even more furiously, his fingers slipping twice onto
the wrong keys because of the rush. But thirty seconds later, he
was done, and the air he’d been hoarding in his lungs came
explosively from his nose and mouth in a triumphant
gasp.

“
I’m in!”
Cookie slapped his hands together and massaged his aching joints.
“I’m in, I’m in, I’m in! Did you hear me? I’m in!”

Jen’s head
snapped around, her jaw slack.
What?
Deep down she’d wrestled with a
reservoir of doubts. Although she’d never said anything, she’d
never wholeheartedly believed Cookie could do it.

Samantha came
bolting from the kitchen, leapt into Cookie’s lap, and shrieked in
delight. She entwined
Cookie’s
tongue in a passionate kiss and massaged his
shoulders before ordering him to stand up and walk the stiffness
out of his legs.

“
Is it
secure?” Jen was still gaping, scarcely able to believe her
eyes.

Cookie nodded exultantly.
“I’ve gotta maintain it, but she’s as tight as a CEO’s puckered
little arse.”

*

The Raven
appealed to the sky, begging for the omen that would free him from
his shackles of restraint. He sneered at the muted light coming
from the curtain cracks.
A monitor? A
television?
Somehow he doubted they’d kick
up their feet, open a bud, and watch their favourite sitcom.
A computer, it must be.
But it flickered quickly, casting doubt on his
assessment.

Now that he
possessed the full details of Dan’s colourful life, he didn’t
intend to rush foolhardily toward the house, PX7 blazing.
No.
His time for rushed
approaches was over, now it was time for caution and perseverance.
Time would prove his ally, generating opportunities for a silent
approach and a clean kill.
One
shot.
That was all he intended to need. Of
course, he would riddle Dan’s body with a full clip, but one bullet
would seal his death. He couldn’t in good conscience leave Dan
alive, at least not for long. He needed elimination, without a
doubt. Fear was beyond the programming the Raven had written into
his electronic mind, though so far he believed it was coping well.
Emotions could spark a crash – love, hate, fear, guilt, he
personally believed they drove the other cyborgs to
self-destruction. The years between the ages of 18 and 22 were
tumultuous for humans, and a cyborg brain only amplified the
chaos.
No wonder we lost so
many,
the Raven sneered. Now, aged 28, he
felt safe. He knew how to beat the system, how to stay calm. He
prided himself on his lack of emotion.
And
now this.
It made him angry until his
programming reminded him to relax, at which point he overcame the
wave of unwanted aggression with a chilling
tranquillity
.

Sutherland
must die.
It was the first time in years
he’d given himself a non-UniForce assignment.
Cameron too.
He’d never expected to
apprehend anything but her spine. It didn’t even matter which
vertebrae since there was no chip, they’d just have to lift her
identify from the DNA.

He turned to the sky once
more and mouthed, “Hurry up.” He wanted it over with.

*

“
Right. Now
what do we do?” Samantha was first to recover from their collective
shock.

“
Now we hunt.
Echelon,” Cookie said, savouring his analogy.

“
No, first we
have to find my record in the bounty hunter database.” Jen paled to
say the words, “He’s still tracking me, you know.”

Samantha copied her pasty
pallor. “The cyborg from the mall?”

Jen nodded
solemnly.

“
Righto then.”
Cookie was about to crack his knuckles but stopped himself just in
time. Instead, he gently applied the pads of his fingers to the
grooves they’d worn into his keys. “We have a choice between saving
our skins and smashing the shit out of a computer, metaphorically
speaking.” He winced through a smile. “I don’t know about you lot,
but I rather like my skin.”

“
Where will we
find it?” Samantha asked nobody in particular.

Dan chipped into the
ensuing silence, “They have a three-tiered data repository, each
housed separately to protect against data loss in the event of a
disaster.”

“
But that’s
just how it’s physically aligned,” Cookie said, taking the tone of
a patient teacher explaining something simple to a particularly
dim-witted student. “I need to know where it is logically, in the
realm of electrons.” He started battering his keys, hard enough to
explain why he wore out two keyboards per year. “Hang on a minute;
let me take a look around.”

After a
frustrating pause he pointed at the jungle of lines he’d been
assembling on the screen. He’d built a mind-map of the UniForce
network based on the information his various applications were
feeding him.
It’s fairly standard, not
what I would’ve expected behind a UG7,
he
thought. “Here, you see this?” They could see what he was wiggling
his finger at, but had only a vague idea of the concept behind it.
“This is the way they’ve set things up.” He tapped on his keyboard
for another few minutes before drawing a blue circle in the middle
of his diagram. But the colourful shapes weren’t just for his
audience’s benefit; Cookie was embedding code behind them. “This
circle’s their main data store.”

Another ten
minutes and he’d decoded the data structures UniForce used in their
self-replicating databases. They had a mutual-master relationship,
which meant that a change to one database would replicate to the
others
, so it wouldn’t matter which one
they modified.
An intra-nano-net connection
linked e
ach database
server to its piers. It was essentially a single database
copied three times, split into a complex array of sub nodes and
highly sophisticated reference and record structures. UniForce had
implemented it so that the database engine could retrieve
information in nanoseconds. Even the complex searches, which had
taken minutes to complete on older systems, took mere microseconds
on the latest generation technology UniForce had used.

Cookie found it
enthralling. The others were just impatient, but they knew better
than to hassle him while he was working.

“
Okay, I think
I know what we’re looking at.” He squinted in concentration. Only
his subconscious mind
was
enjoying the tender strokes that Samantha was
lavishing on the nape of his neck. After a flurry of keystrokes, he
triumphantly slammed the enter-key. “I see it. This is it, here.”
He tapped a finger to the bird’s nest on the screen. “It’s not so
much
where
we can
find the bounty hunter records, that part’s easy. It’s a question
of which search terms we need to feed to the engine to get the
records we want.”

Silence.

Jen ventured into the
hush with an intrepid question. “So you’ve got my record
then?”

“
Not a
chance,” Cookie replied cheerfully. “But now I know how difficult
it’s going to be to find. It’ll be trial and error until I can
construct something similar to the front end they’re using to
access the data. From there it’ll all be smooth
sailing.”

Dan stifled a
yawn, the first indication that his developing pattern of poor
sleep was catching up with him. “And how long
i
s that going to take?”

Cookie shrugged. “Could
be twenty minutes if I get lucky, maybe a day or two if I’m
not.”

“
So are you
feeling lucky?” Jen asked. She definitely wasn’t.

He slipped back into his
semi-trance and fired a series of simple requests at the database
to see what sort of garbage it would return. A delighted frown
unfolded on his forehead – Cookie loved a challenge. Besides, he
was still euphoric over single-handedly surmounting the barriers to
the UG7-rated network.

Samantha
preferred to stay close to her lover while he worked; she enjoyed
feeling the warmth of his body. She’d spent many evenings with him
this way, while he worked on various projects. Prior to the hack
he’d been constructing the tools required for the billboard jam.
She still hadn’t fully recovered from that, and the repeated late
nights weren’t helping. Samantha didn’t understand how Cookie could
keep going when his buttocks were numb and his fingers and wrists
ached so much
.
S
he knew they were sore, she could
tell by the way he flinched with each keystroke. She’d seen him pop
an anti-inflammatory pill during their short interlude and hoped
for his sake it’d kick in soon.
Is he that
motivated?
Sometimes she wondered
where
he drew his
strength
.
S
he knew she could never endure the
physical demands
or
the psychological strain of pitting herself against a
seemingly insurmountable foe.
Maybe the
challenge really does turn him on. He’s always joking about it,
but…
Personally, she preferred
it when he was
doing
something in the workshop
, which
was really just an extra desk they’d squeezed into
their room.
Samantha and Cookie slept in the
master bedroom because they paid two-thirds of the rent, but it
still wasn’t huge – the extra desk barely fit.

The exhaustion
was catching up with her and the lines on Cookie’s monitor
were
blurring
. A
yawn escaped
and it
triggered a yawn-wave that spread around the room.
Yawns are like that.
She
smiled, her bubbly outlook shining through her fatigue. Then she
gently lowered her head to Cookie’s shoulder, not heavily enough to
prove a burden, just enough to let him know she was there. She
looked forward to a time when they didn’t have to hide their
thoughts or political ideology.
And when
Cookie and I can be alone again.
They hadn’t
truly been alone for weeks. Sure, they’d frequently been the only
people in the room, but that wasn’t the same as being alone, not
when she had to share her lover’s attention with a
computer.

Cookie, for
his part, was only semi-conscious that Samantha was even there. He
did love her, and he regretted that he couldn’t pay her more
attention, but he knew she understood the importance of what he was
doing.
A few more days, then I’ll take you
out for a romantic celebratory dinner.
He
lamented their lost time and wished their lifestyle was more
conducive toward a relationship. But hacking was a bit like the
ocean, he would’ve been unwise to turn his back to it. Once he
started a hack, he had to stick with it until the end, which meant
days if not weeks when he was tackling something as complex as a
UG7.

His thoughts
soon spun to marriage.
When?
How?
He knew Samantha was the only one he
wanted but he’d never plucked the courage to ask her how she felt
about it.
Not while we’re at
uni.
He wanted to wait a year or two, so he
had plenty of time to worry about that later. Or so he
thought.

Focus,
focus!
He berated himself unnecessarily for
the momentary lapse in concentration and delved deeper into his
meditation-like state. He’d isolated the first part of the
fetch-command structure with a lucky guess. Well, it wasn’t so much
lucky as educated, but Cookie enjoyed thinking himself lucky. He
whittled away at the rear of the problem with as much gusto as he’d
attacked the front, but UniForce had customised it so much it was
barely recognisable as a mainstream structure.
Damn.

Jen sat nervously on the
couch, uneasy with the silence but unable to think of anything to
say.

Dan came to her rescue by
saying, “I failed a psych evaluation.”

“
Pardon
me?”

“
You asked how
I could go from a cop to a-”

“
So I did,”
Jen said, briskly cutting him off. She wanted to shield her friends
from his true profession. Then, when she looked closer
at
his eyes, she realised
he was allowing her a peek into his tormented soul. “I’m
sorry.”

“
Don’t be.”
Dan shrugged. “Something happened to me that…” Even cryptically he
had difficulty talking about Katherine’s death. “It really
disturbed me.” He spread his hands, palms up. “I was on distress
leave when they called me in for an interview with the shrink. I’m
not surprised
I
flunked
. After that
they
turfed me.” Images of the interview
flashed through his mind and along with
them came
details of his wife’s death.
It angered him, though he hid it well.