Freedom Incorporated (37 page)

“
I preferred
the rainforest.”

He reversed the selection
and the rainforest came back.

“
Is this my
bedroom next door?” Samantha asked, popping her head into the
room.

“
Yeah, that’s
it,” Dan replied. “The one with the double bed.”

“
Your digital
windows are cool,” Samantha said offhandedly. But she was too
exhausted to do anything but sleep. “I’m gonna catch some
z’s.”

“
Cookie too?”
Jen asked.

“
Nope.”
Samantha shook her head. “He found Dan’s study and he’s hooking up
from there. I think he wants to check his hack.” Samantha had spent
the previous night restlessly tossing and turning on a lumpy
mattress. Cookie, however, had been blissfully unaware of her
torment and recharged his batteries for a glorious seven hours. He
was tired from the walk but was ready to leap back into his attack
on the UniForce network.

“
Uh, I think I
should supervise.” Dan cringed at the thought of someone poking
around his computers. He couldn’t remember whether he’d shut them
down and there was a mound of sensitive information
there.

He heard lurid swearing
before entering the study. Cookie was hunching over his keyboard,
uncomfortable in the chair moulded for Dan’s heftier frame. His
eyes flicked left and right across the monitor, absorbing
everything that had happened in the intermission. Inwardly he was
kicking himself for being so carelessly stupid.

“
What’s
wrong?” Jen entered behind Dan.

Cookie slammed the
enter-key five, ten, twelve times before answering. “The fuckers
have… they’ve… Oh fuck. Hang on a second.”

They waited with baited
breath, wondering what had happened. It was torture. Jen and Dan
were both imagining horrors in the unbearable silence.

Shall I tell
them?
The fragment of Cookie’s mind that he
hadn’t dedicated to the hack was wrestling with that question. One
of
his
maintenance
applications had failed to cycle
fast
enough
and his tunnel had partially
collapsed as a result. It was impossible for him to say with any
degree of certainty whether UniForce had discovered their location.
But one thing was for sure – someone had plugged his hole. It could
have been a UG7 protection bot or it could have been the system
administrator. He sniggered.
You didn’t
think I’d only make one entrance, did you?
He’d had three. Now one had been sealed. Two were still
serviceable. But UniForce definitely now knew of the security
infraction, and that made him uncomfortable. N
ow
he was pitting himself against all
of UniForce’s information technology staff. It left him light
headed.

“
They’ve
sealed one of my entrances.” Cookie tried to sound calm but the
tremor in his voice gave him away.

“
So they know
we’re
here
?”

“
Yes,” Cookie
confirmed. “Before, I was unsure. Now I know that they definitely
know.”

“
So they’ll
throw everything against us,” Jen concluded.

“
That would be
the logical conclusion, yes.” Cookie admitted forlornly. It was at
times like these that he really appreciated Samantha stroking his
body. It calmed him down, making it easier to think rationally. But
he’d never begrudge her sleep. He knew she’d spent a restless night
in their stuffy little room at the Dusty Andamooka Inn.

“
Can they
track us?” Dan asked the critical question, perfectly prepared to
rip the cables from the wall if they could.

Cookie checked
his other applications, trying to ascertain the answer himself. His
tracking application had failed to respond so he’d
restarted it
, which was
why he had no way of knowing whether UniForce had
pin
ned
down their
location. It meant little for the time they’d spent in Tweed Heads
since they’d abandoned that post.
But
we’ve been exposed for
– he checked his
watch –
five minutes
here
.

The
application restarted with a green light, which meant there were no
feelers hunting them through the wires
.
At least, not
now. And nobody could complete a trace in five minutes…
right?
“We’re safe. And if they try a trace
we’ll hear about it.” He turned the volume on Dan’s speakers to
maximum, just to be sure. It was a reasonable assumption, Cookie
thought. The risk to their safety was so miniscule that it wasn’t
worth worrying the others over.

No. Nobody
could complete a trace in less than five minutes.

Dan would have
seen things differently, had he known. But he made decisions based
upon the information available and he didn’t know
Cookie was keeping him
in
the dark. “I hope you’re right.” He shivered at the potential
consequences if something went wrong.

“
Hey, I wasn’t
the one who said ‘sick em’ to a cyborg and pointed at the UniForce
CEO. I’d say that was a big risk to take!”

Dan’s overconfidence
flowed through his words and posture. “He won’t do it.”

“
I hope you’re
right,” Cookie said, echoing Dan’s earlier remark.

“
Okay, so
we’re back in business,” Jen said, easing the tension before their
testosterone could boil over. A big U-shaped desk filled most of
Dan’s study. Cookie had set his computer up on the downward stroke
of the U, so Jen perched on the other side to watch over his
shoulder. “On to Echelon then?”

Cookie
lingered in silence while he finished the maintenance on his
tunnel
.
H
is applications weren’t clever enough
to do
it
without
assistance. He’d been thinking of upgrading them with a genetic
evolution algorithm but he’d read countless reports of
th
at
backfiring
.
Some
applications wound up dumber than
they started
and n
ow
wasn’t a good moment to run the gauntlet of cutting edge
programming
.
H
e needed stability and reliability
more than brainy applications.

Something interesting
caught his attention while he was rummaging around the UniForce
network. “Hey, look at this.”

The others leant
closer.

“
It’s a
repository of business decisions UniForce have made since their
conception.” Cookie’s eyebrows twitched. “Restricted with heavy
encryption though, could take me a couple of days to
crack.”

Jen wasn’t convinced
they’d have a couple of days, not now that UniForce knew they were
there. “Save it for any spare time we have afterward.”

Dan was
peering over Cookie’s shoulder with just as much enthusiasm as Jen,
though with differently aligned priorities. He was fascinated to
know what his surrogate company had been doing. He wanted to know
what drove them, what made them tick. He wanted to know whether
they were worthy of his service
.
Are
they
law enforcement? Or just powerful thugs?

“
Can you find
their financial records?” Dan asked, drawing a curious look from
Jen.

Cookie huffed.
“Hell, man, I can find anything. I’ve got
G
od’s access to this baby now. But why
d’you wanna see that?”

“
I need to see
something,” he replied guardedly.

But the answer was good
enough for Cookie because he started rooting through network
spaghetti until he found the accounting servers.

“
Okay, here
are UniForce’s monetary transactions for the past three years.
Anything prior to that is archived and might take longer to
access,” Cookie said, sounding smug.

“
I’m
interested in the bounty hunting branch.”

Cookie isolated the
applicable records.

“
Exclusive
lists.”

Again Cookie worked his
magic. There were 53 top-level hunters active in the world, but
only 28 in English speaking countries. Sophisticated translation
programs assisted communication between the predominately
English-speaking management team and the non-English-speaking
workforce. Occasionally it led to misunderstandings, but more often
humans used the program as a scapegoat for their own errors. Its
creator, TranSys, had called it the Universal Translator – the UT.
TranSys had promoted it as a boon for globalisation back in the
early ‘30s. But, ironically, in 2037 Global Integrated Systems
gobbled TranSys whole, absorbing it into their conglomerate. The
Universal Translator facilitated vast reductions in management
requirements for the tumorous multinationals, slashing their
operating costs. This, in turn, thrilled shareholders and
overburdened the remaining employees. Burnout ran rife through
corporate ladders, though that never fazed the people at the top.
There were always plenty of willing servants to take their fallen
comrades’ places. Eventually the market found equilibrium and
efficiency soared. The new business model favoured by the UT
generation comprised of small, central management teams that
maintained rigid control over their global operation. Language was
no longer a barrier. Corporate leaders deemed irrelevant the fact
that the shift coincided with a dramatic dip in bilingualism
worldwide.

“
Can you
isolate just the Raven’s subset of purchases?”

“
Of course.”
An itemised list of purchases appeared on the screen.

“
Now do the
same for me.”

Jen stiffened in the
background, shying away from the now imminent conflict.

“
Huh?” Cookie
didn’t understand.

“
Find the
subset of records for my name, Dan Sutherland.”

Cookie jerked
away instinctively. “You’re a
hunter?
”

“
What of it?”
Dan hadn’t realised Jen was shielding her friends from that
knowledge. “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m helping you, does
it?”

He slowly shook his head,
though his eyes were still wide. “No, I guess not.”

“
Would I have
brought you here if I was going to turn you in?”

“
No.” Cookie
forced himself to relax but the effort made him look constipated.
He did as Dan requested and a similar list appeared on the
screen.

Identical.
Dan’s eyes flicked between
the two, comparing item after item. Even more interesting was the
amounts entered into the accounting system. They were wrong.
Someone’s siphoning off the top. But
who?
“Can you save that?”

“
Already
done,” Cookie confirmed. He eyed Jen with a why-didn’t-you-tell-me
look of betrayal.

Jen looked
away, unwilling and unable to defend herself from his unspoken
accusations.
So, now Cookie knows. Which
means Samantha will know soon too.
She
mentally shrugged. Dan was right – it made no real difference. He
was helping them and right now they needed all the help they could
get.

*

Thursday, September 16,
2066

UniForce
Headquarters

17:03 San Francisco,
USA

“
What a
fucking mess we have on our hands now.” Esteban disgustedly threw
his arms into the air before letting them flop by his sides. To say
he was displeased would be an understatement. It was
home
time
and he’d
been eager to return to Baltimore. It was poker night at the club.
He loved poker night.

They were crowding
James’s office. Esteban had decreed that was to be their base of
operations. Not because he liked James’s décor, it was the only
office with three available terminals. And he’d locked the door, a
significant statement. Nobody was going anywhere until they’d
sorted out the mess.

There were three separate
desks arranged in a loose triangle, though only room for one chair
in the middle. On rare occasions, James needed all three terminals.
When he utilised the full processing capacity of one, he would plug
into another and continue working. Esteban pulled the desks further
apart, making a horrible grinding sound. The desks, made from
chipboard with a plastic coating, wobbled unsteadily and James
fretted they’d come apart with Esteban’s rough treatment and his
precious equipment would tumble to the floor. But they held
together – barely – and Esteban squeezed another two chairs in the
middle.

“
How does this
work?” Michele asked, having never encountered that model of
computer before.
It was a GenSet.

God you’re
dumb.
“Here.” Esteban stabbed a finger at
the little white circle that turned it on. He hoped she wasn’t
going to be
that
annoying once she was up and running.
At least she’ll be familiar with the operating
system.

Esteban sniffed the air,
much like a prowling wolf. “Jezus, man, it’s stuffy in here. Are
you off the environmental grid or something?”