Ghost of the Gods - 02 (7 page)

Sarah had read RFID bracelets had been originally sold to the USAG as a way to eliminate unreliable computerized facial recognition systems. The bracelets simply worked and Enforcers grew to rely so heavily on them that it became a source of weakness. The bracelets were in fact a blind spot she and Mark were about to exploit. Enforcers never looked at faces and only double checked using fingerprints when making an arrest. Each RFID code was considered as infallible as the word of god. Why question it? Why notice a face that doesn’t belong? Why follow basic police procedures when you can be lazy and right at the same time?

At protectorate entry portals, officials issued visas by programming identities into blank RFID bracelets using a tablet peripheral called a crypto RFID burner. All important ID information was stored remotely in a supposedly unhackable central database. While burners and the special apps were not publically available, they were no more tightly controlled than any other piece of law enforcement gear. Strict control of the equipment was unnecessary because without a valid database password and network access to the central data store, burners were useless hunks of plastic and silicon. In addition to the technical challenges, some very effective free market deterrents to forgery were also in place. Simply, there was an almost nonexistent black market demand for forged RFID identities. The demand for RFID identities was low because it was impossible for two identically encoded bracelets to exist at the same time inside any protectorate in the country. So a cloned bracelet resulted in instantaneous arrest. This made duplicating a living person’s identity useless. Lacking the hefty profits from identity theft, criminal enterprise largely ignored this niche forgery market. As a result, it was impossible to come by a burner on the black market because no one wanted one. High dollar boutique counterfeiters like Ike were the only option if you needed an assumed identity inside a protectorate.

Sarah drank the last of her third beer. Mark was also nearing the end of his third. One of the benefits of a nanotech brain—if you could call it a benefit—was that alcohol had no effect. The Enforcers had finished their food and left a few minutes ago. Sarah absentmindedly examined from memory the clear plastic bracelet she’d had on her wrist last night. The RFID chip in it was nonfunctional. Ike had given them bracelets as samples of his work. He had called them souvenirs. The band was a quarter inch thick and an inch wide. The dead RFID chip with all its electronics were visible inside the plastic like a robotic insect trapped in amber.

Abruptly, Sarah felt Ike’s presence from blocks away as he neared the bar. She tightened her filters, reducing the distance at which emotional data was accepted.

“They’re here,” she whispered.

She unobtrusively removed the Beretta from her pocket and placed it in her lap. Minutes later Ike and a bald, muscle bound alter ego she had not met before both slid into the booth, taking up position across from her and Mark. Ike set a ratty looking messenger bag on the table. Sarah used her nanotech brain and the n-web to invoke superimposed medical schematics over each man. With the schematics she could monitor for stress and other telltales of trouble. Their circulatory systems and organs were displayed as color illustrations, while readouts showed metabolic information. Under her scrutiny both men became something close to medical experiments. She could see that Ike’s colleague had taken heavy doses of steroids for much of his adult life. The superimposed schematic showed an incredible amount of
plaque
clogging several arteries. The hulking, neo-Nazi heart attack in waiting wore Army fatigues and a bulky camouflage jacket. A swastika was tattooed on his left wrist. She decided to nickname him Meathead.

Mark began sending her memory capsules containing stray thoughts he was capturing. She in turn began relaying back to Mark the radiated emotions she was experiencing. In one of Mark’s memory capsules, she relived Meathead’s fixation on a silencer equipped MAC-10 machine pistol hanging from a sling under his jacket. Sarah’s pulse rate went up. The MAC-10 was an indiscriminate weapon. It fired a thousand rounds a minute. Recoil made it as impossible to control as a fire hose. It was the kind of weapon only a psychopath could love.

Meathead began radiating an increasingly murderous vibe like a bare high intensity light bulb ready to burst. Mark was signaling her to stay calm, which was not an easy thing at the moment. She was debating about prophylactically putting several bullets into Meathead right now. The stream of memory capsules containing stray thoughts from Ike and Meathead continued. Ike was a geyser of harmless mental chatter centered on his ego. There were vignettes of him in the role of the best forger in Chicagoland and fantasies about how this deal would boost his rep. He was jazzed to sell each of them a set of bracelets with custom matched identities. Meanwhile, Meathead was thinking about food and killing some small guy who’d eyeballed him as they’d walked in. Meathead was busy running every slang term he knew for
homosexual
through his lizard brain. The memory capsules showed Meathead’s violence was not directed at them. Sarah relaxed a few degrees but stayed on edge. If that disgusting rant continued too much longer she might just kill him anyway and make the world a safer place. All of this had transpired in a matter of frantic seconds.

“I have just what the doctor ordered,” said Ike as he lovingly tapped his messenger bag.

“How do we know they work?” asked Mark.

“Now you’re insulting me,” said Ike. “I thought we were friends.”

Sarah knew Mark was provoking Ike so she could get an emotional read. Between her sense of Ike’s stress level and emotions, and Ike’s abundant mental noise, they could easily tell if he was lying or being straight with them. All telltale signals looked good.

“You know we love you,” said Sarah.

“Just gotta ask,” said Mark.

“Cool, baby… Okay, now I gotta ask. You got the coin we discussed?”

“No coin,” said Mark. “I have something better—a mint condition advanced armored military Hummer with all the trimmings.”

“A Hummer… Hey man, that’s not what we spoke about. Now if pretty Sarah here wants to give me a hummer in the back of the Hummer, I might knock fifty in gold coin off the package deal, but I don’t need any wheels, man. A mil Hummer will get you jack shit from me. Right, Birdman?”

“Yeah, ah-huh,” grunted Meathead, aka Birdman.

Sarah laughed at Ike’s counteroffer. She knew they had him hooked. Underneath all the banter Ike was drooling. Cars were free for the talking, they were everywhere, but an advanced armored military Hummer was not your average street rental. The military version was very hard to find and usually came with soldiers who’d shoot you dead if you tried to drive off in it.

“The Hummer is all we’ve got,” said Mark. “Take it or leave it.”

“You’re killing me, man. He’s killing me, Birdman. All right, all right, what ’bout this. Three grand in gold coin and the Hummer.”

“Mil Hummers are hard to find and worth a lot more than the four-K in gold you’re asking for the package,” said Mark.

“Fuck, man. I came to do business and Mr. Shithead here is pulling my chain!”

“Calm down,” said Mark.

“Calm down… What, you litt’l fucker telling me to calm down. You calm yourself down. What the fuck! Fuck you—and fuck your little poontang too!”

Ike was staring at them with his best
I gonna kill you
look. Sarah could tell much of it was an act, but Meathead was staring at them and licking his lips. The thug’s metabolic readings were showing excitement, and she was picking up hints of something like sexual arousal mixed with violence. A drop of sweat crawled down her back. She could feel the subtle changes in trigger pressure of her Beretta as she squeezed up the point where the hammer catch would release. A puff of wind on that trigger was all it would take to put a bullet in her target’s lower chest. She had her firing solution mapped out. Two to Meathead’s chest from under the table, then rise up and point blank bang into the brainpan. Swivel and put one in Ike’s brainpan just to be sure he wasn’t packing. The entire firefight would be over in seconds. These fools had no idea who and what they were up against. During her police days she had won every combat shooting competition she’d entered. Now with her nanotech brain and flawlessly tuned body, her reaction time and speed were almost twice anything she could have achieved during those competitions.

“Shhhhhit,” said Ike.

Sarah sensed an emotional change flood over her from across the table. She in turn started breathing again. Ike’s street sense had kicked in and was leveling off his hormones. The medical schematic overlaid on Ike confirmed he was calming.

“Yeah, okay,” said Ike. “Fuck it. Let’s make a deal.”

After a trip outside to confirm the condition of Ike’s new wheels, they were back inside finishing the transaction. Ike was all chatty again and one happy octogenarian. Meathead was finishing off his second burger with chili-cheese fries. Sarah was beginning to wonder if Ike paid him in coin or calories. She despised Meathead and had caught him examining her body repeatedly while he ate as if the burger was a TV dinner and she was entertainment on the Playboy Channel.

“Okay… now lookie here,” said Ike. “To make sure a bracelet works, put it on and buy something. All the stores near the portals accept RFID, including this fine establishment. We got three sets of bracelets for each of you, with three different picture perfect ID matches. The IDs are from people gone missing during the supply
shortages. It’s a sad thing the dead have become so bountiful. Now remember, like we discussed, the fingerprints on each ID are what’s on file for the deceased. It’s too bad we couldn’t use your digits, but like I said… Since you told me your prints list you as Enforcer bait, it just won’t work. Now, ’cause I like you, I’m throwing in matching sets of driver’s licenses and Socials for each identity. What do you say to that?”

“I’m throwing in a kiss,” said Sarah.

Ike looked like he was going to blush.

“Now, these bracelets work just like the souvenirs I gave you. They turn on when you close the hidden latch and turn off when you open the latch. But you gotta be real careful where you turn ’em on and off. Because when a reader catches the scent of your RFID inside a protectorate for the first time, you’d better have things set up so that it doesn’t look like you just materialized out a thin air like Supergirl. You gotta always keep a map in your head so that every RFID scan makes sense. If your scans look wildly out of place, they are gonna come gunning for you.”

Ike leaned forward across the table as if he were about to whisper the secrets of eternal life. He licked his lips.

“What makes these babies worth serious coin is that each bracelet is in Big Brother’s database with either a forged exit or entry trail for Chi-Town. Without a foolproof exit trail, you’re busted trying to walk in. If a bracelet is switched on inside Chi-Town without an entry trail, a big red bull’s eye is gonna be painted on your sorry ass. The bracelets with the green sticky labels have fake exit trails and the ones with the red sticky labels have fake entry trails and are very useful for getting out of Chi-town if Enforcers are after your pretty little ass, my lovely Sarah. You each have one entry and two exit bracelets. Don’t mix ’em up!

“As part of my no extra charge extra service, all these bracelets are flagged in the DB as intermittent. RFID is far less reliable than the man would like everyone to believe. Flagging your jewelry as intermitted will help keep eyebrows from rising when you switch on your exit bracelets even if they have not been scanned in days. The lazy asses will just figure it’s flaky jewelry and not ghosts appearing out of nowhere. A bracelet can probably safely go a week with no scans, but to play it smart you’re gonna want your exit bracelets popping up every few days. Give ’em each a little exercise by switching ’em on and off in the middle of a crowd where it’s too much trouble for Enforcers to count noses on their video surveillance screens and figure out there’s one too many.

“Now for the fun part. Big Brother’s rules say everyone in Chi-town’s gotta work, so these entry bracelets have primo job assignments. Both of you are docs. Nothing fancy, you dig, just Marcus Welby kind of docs, and that means the man is gonna pay you forty-five thousand work credits a month. You gonna be able to buy whatever you want.…”

“Whoa, Ike, I’m not a doctor,” said Sarah. “This is not going to—”

“Hush now, sweet Sarah. Do not worry, cause Dr. Ike has your back. I assigned both of you to work at the St. Monica family clinic on South Halsted Street.”

Ike was beaming with pride. The emotions radiating from him made it hard for Sarah not to smile.

“See, the special deal is this,” said Ike. “St. Monica family clinic burned down and isn’t planned to be rebuilt till next year. While Big Brother is smart about some things, he is very stupid about other things. Everyone at St. Monica is on paid vacation. Trust me, you gonna get half a mil a year in funny e-money to do nothing.

“Now, last thing. There are twenty roto-gates at each entry to Chi-Town and there’s normally an hour wait. Today we got three-hour waits and those guards are working up a sweat slinging the hash. So you are gonna be safely lost in the crowds. Just one more boring Caucasian couple. The good thing about Enforcers is they are lazy sons of bitches. With a bracelet, there’s no fingerprinting to get through the gates even though they got fingerprint readers. All fingerprinting goes on inside the visa building when issuing a new bracelet. So as long as your bracelet scans okay, they gonna ignore you. There’s just too many comings and goings even on a normal day. They don’t even spot check. So no one is gonna find out your prints don’t match the bracelets unless they arrest you inside for something stupid. So don’t be stupid. I don’t want all my artistry going to waste. It’s bad for business.”

Eye of the Storm

Mark Freedman – Chicago Protectorate – January 30, 0002 A.P.

Mark was frustrated. Over a week had passed since they walked through the roto-gates entering the Chicago Protectorate, yet the location of the singularity remained elusive. Their directional sense of tides in the n-web was now useless. Once they got within a few miles of the singularity, their sense of direction began to lose resolution until it felt like the singularity was all around them. It was as if they had walked through a hurricane’s vortex and into the eye of the storm. Inside the miles wide void they felt unsettled and at times mildly disoriented or uncoordinated. Something about this space seemed to slow their thinking. When they ventured a little deeper inside the vortex, the seductive pull of the singularity increased, and they lost many of their networked abilities, including data-floods and mental communications. Curiously, some basic types of assists still worked, and Sarah’s ability to empathically feel other’s emotions remained, but at a reduced level.

The void covered far too many square miles of city streets to easily search. Over a course of days they had wandered the area, sensing nothing useful. There were hot and cold spots where the effects on them varied, making it even harder to guess the location of the singularity.

Mark had returned again and again to the assist, which displayed the architecture of the n-web, and every time it provided nothing useful. The virtual rendering geo-projected onto real space around him was minutely accurate in both location and scale. It even showed how much data was flowing down each pathway, but as he walked closer to the vortex, the projection became noisy, like a bad television signal. The geo-projected pathways entering the vortex appeared bent and distorted, eventually fading out as if made of smoke. If he walked too close to the vortex or stepped into the eye of the storm, the n-web display was completely lost. He knew the n-web’s pathways were still there functioning all around him, unchanged. The problem was the data used to produce the three-dimensional rendering was corrupted enough by the singularity to make it useless. In outer space it would be possible to see matter and light approaching a black hole, yet see nothing beyond the event horizon. The same appeared to be true for this singularity. Data flowing through the n-web was no longer visible beyond the singularity’s event horizon. This maelstrom was truly a mental and emotional gravity well within the n-web.

Mark had gone up to the roof of the six story apartment building in which they were staying. The building was located miles from the vortex. He was seated on a bench someone had long ago dragged up there. In a few hours the sun would be dipping below the edge of the city. The clouds were dark as if bruised with snow. Great rays of sun pierced through gaps in the clouds, creating shafts of light that illuminated whole swaths of Chicago.

Mark was preparing to invoke another series of huge data-floods. These would be fine-tuned, using the meager fresh information they had about the vortex. He looked within by meditating on his body and his breath. He needed to quiet and firmly anchor his mind. He knew over 60 percent of his brain was hybrid nanotech. When the seeds had metastasized, the restructuring process proceeded rapidly at first, then slowed. Mark did not know if this was the natural progression or a problem that would ultimately lead to premature death instead of extended life. He and Sarah both wondered if there was something more needed to complete the evolutionary step and if that
something more
was connected to the singularity.

Time had passed with agonizing slowness. Wind gusted across the roof, pelting him with gritty dust. Mark stifled a moan from pain lancing through his skull. He was relentless in his search for information inside the vast data stores of the god-machine. The data-flood was coursing through him like an overwhelming electrical current. The pain was agonizing. It felt as if holes were being drilled into his skull and yet he held on. The mass of his cerebral cortex was too small to handle the flood of information. The nanotech hybridized neurons in his brain were being forced to realign to the flow. The very structure of his cerebral cortex was acting as a sieve, allowing fine particles of data to pass through while retaining the larger debris. The god-machine was far more organic than a conventional computer. Mark had not been aware of this characteristic at first because of the interface’s casual similarities to modern software, but as he grew more accustomed to the interface and it grew more accustomed to him, a kind of relationship was forged. He would often find himself relating to the machine as a living thing. At this moment it was a hulking monster at the brink of crushing him.

The data-flood abruptly ended as if a wire had snapped. To anchor himself Mark dug his claws into the simulated reality that surrounded him. He felt like a survivor, battered and washed up on the jagged shore of a stormy sea. His mind was filled with more new memories from this data-flood than he could possibly retain. His memory capacity was now so much greater than when he was an organic, but it was not nearly enough. The majority of the knowledge he’d just gained was fading quickly in the same way as a dream. He was desperately sifting for fragments worth retaining in long term memory. There was just nothing useful. He had hoped this time it would be different, had hoped the question he had mediated on until the flood began would have brought him the knowledge they needed. They still knew nothing critical beyond what instinct and educated guesswork provided. He was no longer convinced they would even recognize the singularity if they saw it. Beyond the fact that it radiated from a single location somewhere in this city, they had no idea of its size or nature. Did it exist inside a hybrid, a group of hybrids, or was it something that functioned on its own? Did it have a physical structure at all or was it just a program embedded in the fabric of the n-web? They had no idea.

The way data-floods worked always reminded Mark of praying. He would focus on a question to the exclusion of all else. Eventually once his focus exceeded the required threshold, a reply from the god-machine would come. If the question was narrow, the response was manageable and painless. If the question was broad, the response came in a torrent of mind bending pain and insight. He could not help but wonder if many of the answered prayers and gifts of enlightenment in ancient religious texts were misunderstood encounters with the god-machine.

The semi-transparent touch interface for god-machine commands was floating in space before him like a phantom control panel. He preferred this interactive way of working with the god-machine than the thought driven data-floods, but it had serious limits. He had grown used to how the computer interface worked: It was a tactile virtual reality flawlessly superimposed over his physical surroundings. As the months passed, labels on the command tablet and other interface elements appeared less in the runic language of the Creators and more in English. The interface was adapting to him. Mark closed his mind off from the god-machine interface. The tablet and trackball floating before him winked out of existence, returning his surroundings to normal.

Mark stood up and looked over the waist high concrete wall that separated him from a fall no one could survive, not even a hybrid with the capacity to rapidly heal. The roof was littered with trash and some old ratty beach chairs. An arctic wind was blowing in off the great lake. He wondered fleetingly about the temperature. An assist displayed 28 degrees in small lettering superimposed over the lower part of his vision. The assist had been periodically alerting him so he did not unnecessarily cause frost damage to his body. He should have been freezing, dressed only in a heavy sweatshirt and blue jeans, but this improved body felt comfortable. There was only the slightest sensation of coolness on his exposed skin. Under heavy loads his nanotech brain ran much hotter than an organic brain. This additional heat warmed his blood above normal. It was helpful to be in a cold place right now, which was part of the reason he’d gone up to the roof.

Gazing down at the streets below, he saw the corridors of Chicago as tall alleyways covered with grime. The streets were traveled by pedestrians and bicycles, but absent were all private cars, which were prohibited within the city. Everywhere he looked there was damage from the days of the plague. Gutted buildings loomed over a city of ruined lives and shattered dreams, but the city was being rebuilt. Some replacement infrastructure had been put in place so well it seemed like it had been part of the original city plan. Other repairs were so jury rigged that they could fail at any moment and often did. Electrical power was for the most part reliable, though brownouts happened almost daily. Natural gas service was permanently shut off, and so the boilers in many buildings no longer worked. Apartments with fireplaces were at a premium. High capacity water filtration systems had gone in overnight to bolster the USAG’s Orwellian claims of protection from future biochemical terrorist attacks. The nationalized telecom services provided data speeds so high that pundits were predicting wired Internet was going the way of the dinosaur. Public Wi-Fi hotspots were already a thing of the past. Mark thought it was odd and even suspicious that the USAG would deliver mediocrity in so many ways except wireless service. Was it their version of opiates for the masses, a way to ensure distribution of their propaganda, or for some even darker purpose?

It was odd to be in the heart of a great city and not hear horns or sounds of traffic. In its place was a softer drone of voices that blended into an unintelligible sound, which oddly felt like a conscious, living thing. The singularity he and Sarah were hunting in Chicago was brighter in his mind than the city itself. Mark yearned to find it with an emotional and physical hunger that surprised even him. He had sensed the singularity before Sarah. Months ago, he’d felt its presence as a missing thread in the fabric of human thought. Sarah sensed the singularity like an emotional void in the collective soul of humanity.

Even though the nanotech restructuring of his body was proceeding slower than it had been, Mark continued to evolve in other ways. Every day he could drink a little more heavily from the surrounding ocean of stray thoughts that humankind swam in, and at will, he could filter the cacophony down to a single thread of consciousness. The ability gave him a powerful feeling of connectedness, but in practice it offered an unreliable strategic advantage. He only received thoughts that were leaked from the subconscious. This was not the same as reading someone’s mind. To make matters worse, not everyone leaked. A third of the people were blank enigmas, while others were a chaos of prattle. Sarah was able to do something very similar with emotions but with one staggering advantage: Virtually everyone radiated emotions. Mark had tried to understand what she experienced, how she felt other’s emotions almost as her own. He knew what he digested as stray thoughts were only a pale shadow of the emotional invasion saturating her hybrid mind. Likewise from her perspective, he knew she did not fully comprehend the world of noisy thoughts that he dwelled in.

Mark was staring at the people traveling back and forth on the sidewalk below. They were dressed in every color imaginable. The presence of so many people was the first thing that had struck him when they’d entered the city. The population figures for Chicago were only a fraction of the pre-plague census numbers, but still shockingly high compared to the Outlands. He was subconsciously keeping a running count of how many people passed by. This was something that would have been impossible for him to do as an organic, and now his nanotech brain did it without even thinking.

Sarah had been gone for twenty-four hours and would soon be back. Mark knew this from the stream of memories she was broadcasting to him. In sequences of small memory capsules, like frames in a movie, she relayed to him what she was experiencing while mapping out the perimeter of the singularity’s vortex. It was not circular as they’d originally thought. It was blob shaped and encompassed about six square miles of city blocks. The Chicago Protectorate occupied 220 square miles. Mark had originally assumed the singularity was at the center of the vortex, but he was no longer sure of that. Several days ago they had repeatedly tried to walk what they thought was a radius through the vortex but failed to locate the singularity. Chaotic data flows had somehow mentally spun them around, leaving confusion in their wake. This mental chaos complicated what was already beginning to feel like something he was losing control over.

The sound of a pushcart vendor drifted up from the street. Mark watched as an Enforcer Humvee crawled by, forcing people out of the way. Even from this distance, his brain ached from the unrelenting pressure of the singularity. He was so frustrated! He wanted to smash everything in sight. He turned and kicked a rusted trash can across the roof, tearing it open. A glimmer of pain in his leg arrested the outburst. The trash can had dug a ragged gash in his shin. Within seconds the pain had been blocked.

He was consumed by a powerful sense that time was running out to find the singularity. He still had connections with some of his colleagues in the scientific community. Scientists were some of the least likely to believe the propaganda they were being fed. This morning he had received a warning from a colleague, Karla Hunt. She had used a photographer’s blog as a blind drop. It was an arrangement they had worked out during their last face to face meeting. The warning was encrypted, using an unbreakable steganographic algorithm. The blog contain a large amount of uploaded amateur and professional photographs, which made it perfect for this kind of encryption. Karla was an insider, a director running a top-secret BARDCOM lab on countermeasures to nanotech seeds. Her immediate superior was General McKafferty. Mark knew the general all too well. BARDCOM—Biological Armaments Research and Development Command—had been the general’s fiefdom for the better part of a decade. The man had tried to imprison both Mark and Sarah when they were at the BVMC lab after the general had taken over control of the CDC in the midst of the crisis.

Karla was warning him that the nanotech was evolving, mutating into something even more stealthy and smart. This news was a shock. Was the nanotech mutating inside him too? He could feel the hybridization unceasingly spreading within him, replacing a little more of his wetware with every passing week. Would there come a point when he would no longer be himself? He could already be beyond that point and not know it. How could a machine ever hope to know it’s a machine? Mark felt his limitations and some of them were clearly imposed from without. With all the vast information available to him through the interface,
why had he not known the nanotech was evolving? The only explanation was god-machine censorship. The more important question was why. It was times like this that Mark felt more like a specimen than a free man.

With surprising force, an assist yanked his full attention to the pedestrian crosscurrents on the street below. A superimposed orange glow highlighted a man’s head. The glow was part of a medical schematic projected over the target. Orange was the color coding used by the god-machine to identify nanotech seeds inside living tissue and blood. The man was a foot taller than the people around him. He moved in a way that was oddly graceful, almost as if floating. Mark could not discern any physical details other than stocky build, long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a black parka. The orange glow suffused the back of the man’s skull, which indicated the presence of a much larger than normal swarm of free swimming naontech COBIC. Responding to Mark’s intense interest, the assist snapped a mental photo and enlarged it while using image enhancement to fill in some of the missing details. The result was a grainy, magnified frozen image seen in his mind and not through his eyes. The enlargement showed the telltale neurological structures of a hybrid brain. In the past two years, the closest thing to another hybrid he or Sarah had encountered was that psychopath Alexander and he was long dead from his own suicide by explosion.