Idempotency (14 page)

“Move back! He’s with me.” Simeon spoke sternly, then gripped Dylan’s arm and pulled him up easily and quickly. As he did so, the first row of men parted and the hooded man stepped forward. Dylan dusted his hands and stuck his chest out, then carefully glowered at his new adversary. The man was hunched over, yet still matched Dylan’s stout height, and he was now less than a foot away. Bandages covered the man’s face except for his piercing, glowing eyes.

“Why do you denigrate—” The man’s face twitched under his hood, and Dylan watched a splotch of blood begin to appear on the bandage of his right cheek. The man’s head began twitching and he started yelping, almost a guttural bark. He raised his hand and slapped at his face, then started clawing at the bandage until he tore most of it away. He shouted louder, then growled. The man who had shoved Dylan moved closer and put a hand on the shoulder of his hooded friend. The crowd seemed to shuffle with unease.

Suddenly composed, the man started over. “Why do you denigrate us with this mindless corp presence?” he said barely above a raspy whisper.

“He’s needed for the cause, Jake. There’s no ulterior agenda here. Now—we’re going to move along and you all are going to go back to doing whatever the fuck it is you were about to do.”

“And what if beatin’ the shit outta a corpSlave is what the fuck we were about to do?” The grizzled young man spoke quickly with an insane-looking smile.

Dylan took note of the younger man’s odd proportion of thin bones and larger muscles, which seemed to hang off his thin limbs like fruit ripe for the picking. He was certain drugs played a large role in his physique, and he doubted the man could see his own stomach, as it was merely a cavity. The old-young man’s face was scared, scarred, and wrinkled, and he was missing a few teeth. One eyelid drooped slightly.

“Relax, Kenton. We’re leaving, and you best do the same,” Simeon replied quickly, then abruptly turned and started walking without looking back. Dylan followed without prompting.

Ten strides later, Dylan whispered to Simeon, “How’d they know I work for a corp?”

Simeon laughed. “You reek of corp smell, my man.” He took a few steps before adding, “That, and you left your BUI broadcasting. Anyone can see your bytes.”

Dylan rolled his eyes, angry that Simeon had intentionally left him to the wolves.

Ten more meters and the pair reached the path that followed the edge of the cliff face. In between shacks, Dylan could now see the voluminous body of water below them; its barren nature seemed impossibly far away. They turned left and headed south for ten more meters when Simeon abruptly stopped.

“We’re here,” he whispered. Two oversized men stood outside a hovel. One seemed to nod slightly to Simeon as he ducked inside, and Dylan quickly followed. As he entered he realized he was no longer walking on dirt—his footfalls now fell on old concrete of some type. There were no people within the structure, only an old concrete staircase heading downward. The staircase opened to a small room lit only by the ever-changing light emanating from the aniFab clothing, as well as the aniToos of a half-dozen people who appeared to be sleeping along the far wall of the room.

“They’re virtTripping . . .” said Simeon.

The room seemed to move as colors jumped and shifted. Before his eyes could adjust, Simeon had moved on. Dylan followed him through several narrow hallways wide enough for only one normal-sized torso. After what seemed to be an unnecessary dogleg, the hallway ended abruptly. Simeon placed his hand on the dead end, and the image of the wall evaporated, as did the shielding that had been guarding the room on the other side. Dylan followed Simeon into a room that felt capacious in comparison to the narrow hallways and crowded streets behind him. As Dylan’s eyes adjusted, so did his sense of space, and the room seemed a little more modest in size, about fifteen meters in both directions. The room was well-lit from open-air slits on the west-facing wall that looked out toward the Puget Sound. The walls were also providing light, as they were covered with various media displays showing metrics of data that Dylan could not glean (though he was trying). Large foam chairs were haphazardly placed throughout the room. Two females, one clearly still a child, appeared to be napping—
virtTripping?
Dylan wondered
—
while two men and one younger boy were viewing the metrics while doing coding of some kind on two large workstations that sat in the eastern corners of the room.

“Hey, Sim. Who’s the noob?” asked the young kid, no more than twelve years old. He sported a green Mohawk that flashed red erratically every few seconds.

“Everyone”—only the kid appeared to take notice of Simeon’s promulgation— “this is Boxster, the guy I’ve been talking about . . .? From
SolipstiCorp
?” This finally seemed to grab some attention around the room, as heads turned and bobbed.

Simeon continued: “Boxster, the boy here is Chicklet—” Chicklet promptly rolled his eyes, flipped off Simeon, then turned around. Simeon laughed and made some remark about growing into a new handle someday. “Moving on: Jay-san is in the far corner,” Jay-san turned his head and waved, and Dylan was surprised by his authentic Japanese appearance—it was becoming rare to find younger people of any ethnicity who didn’t appear as an amalgamation of races these days; even Simeon’s sandy blond hair was rare—
assuming it’s real,
thought Dylan.

Simeon continued: “On the other workstation we have Grepman. He’s our sysAdmin extraordinaire—solid coder, too.” An innocuous-looking man turned around and smiled innocently while waving his hand. He wore no dynamic clothing (a simple black T-shirt and black pants), and his short, neatly cut brown hair would have been in style in most decades throughout time. He had a scruffy beard that made him appear as if he were trying a bit too hard to be scruffy.

In one quick motion, Simeon pulled off his sweater—no small feat, given his broad shoulders—to reveal his flames dancing lightly on his arm as he pointed toward the next person on his introduction list. “This droned-out girl on the chair here is Mitlee, and she happens to be Chicklet’s twin sister, older by a few minutes." Mitlee had short brown hair atop the exiguous pole of an awkward pre-teenage body. She appeared to be of partial Indian decent, as did her brother, several generations past.

“And this other equally droned-out girl is my brilliant wife, Nimbus." Dylan couldn’t take his eyes off of Nimbus’s platinum-blonde hair; it practically glowed. The couple made a good pair.

Simeon went on. “Lastly, the folks virtTriping in the first room are recruits. They don’t get into
this
room. And what is this room, you ask?” Simeon paused as if expecting this to be a pinnacle of his peroration; Dylan merely shrugged. “You are in the heart of SOP’s operations center, serving user-generated darkVirts. Or, as it’s more commonly referred to on the darkNets, this room serves the SOP darkMultiVirts!”

For a moment, Dylan was entranced by all of the vacant and vacuous black eyes staring back at him. After a silent beat passed, he became tickled at the surreality of his situation; laughter burst forth harder than the vomit had earlier in the day, and it seemed to surprise even him. Through the laughter, Dylan blurted, “So this—you guys—are SolipstiCorp’s competition? A bunch of hacks trying to run an illegal operation, on illegal wires, off the corpNets? Oh God,
this is gold
!” His laughter increased toward giddiness as he said, “We are going to crush you guys.” Then he became suddenly straight-faced. “No, seriously folks, SolipstiCorp’s tech is going to crush you guys."

Chicklet, Mitlee, and Jay-san had all turned around to witness Dylan’s outburst. Even Nimbus had stirred, starting to come out of her reverie. Simeon looked hurt as Dylan’s laughter petered out and was replaced by the sound of the wind whistling through the slits in the west-facing wall. A few final bursts of giggles seeped out, then stopped.

“You shouldn’t have brought him here, Sim,” Grepman stated, grave concern showing on the lines of his forehead.

Simeon ignored him and said, “Dylan, I don’t think you realize the weight of your situation. This little group you see here has the capability—”

Dylan interrupted. “Why am I here, Simeon?” Then, mumbling to himself, he added, ”What a waste of a weekend.”

Simeon’s face hardened. In a stern voice, he said, “You are missing the mark, Boxster. We don’t give a shit about your goddamn corporation. And we don’t give a shit about being crushed. Why would we when we’re uploading our work open and illegally tunneling our servers—so as to
not be monitored
, as you yourself pointed out?”

A few wind-whistling moments passed as Dylan assumed the question to be rhetorical, then Simeon continued: “Boxst—Dylan—we are part of a larger organization—no, a
movement
—that is desperately trying to save the people of our country. The best-case estimations are placing 57 percent of the US population in poverty—”

“Extremist, left-wing propaganda—” Dylan started to mutter.

“No!” Simeon abruptly interrupted. “It’s nothing of the sort. You’ve seen them with your own eyes, just a few meters above us! How can you deny it now? And the population is only growing—grotesquely, at that. The United States is the
only
country in the world with no birth-control restrictions in place, whatsoever. There are now plenty of cheap black-market drugs for organ regeneration. Pills are traded like currency once was. This is causing the population to skyrocket. At the same time, brain, bone, and skin-cell regeneration are much, much more costly, sometimes requiring prolonged procedures . . . and you’ve witnessed firsthand the effects of extending the shelf life of the product without ensuring the same lifespan of the packaging!”

Irate, Dylan shouted, “The holoVid, my uncle—info—now!”

A strobing on the wall behind Grepman’s head, a strobing of media requested attention. Grepman swung his chair around wildly, as a similar notification was blinking in the BOI displayed on his implanted eye. He began to swing his hands wildly in midair, his fingers twiddling madly.

“What’s going on?” asked Simeon.

“Well . . . it appears—well, it looks like we m-may have—”

“What? May have what?” Simeon barked.

Grepman swung back around in his chair to face Simeon again. With as much calm as he could muster, he responded, “Well, we were doing a routine hotFix, and it appears that during the release we—or, rather, I, according to the logs—I may have—or, rather, I did, in fact—release directly to our local hosts . . . without the tunnel in place. Possibly.”

“You what?” asked Simeon.

“I didn’t realize it. I don’t remember doing it! But the logs say I accidentally may have released to our local servers, without tunneling the traffic—”

“May or did?”  Simeon barked.

“May. Did. Yes, rather, I did. I did,” replied Grepman, followed by a dumb nod of his head.

“Did you check the logs for traffic? Did we take traffic here on-site? On the local host?”

“Yes, it appears, uh, that we did,” said Grepman.

“Can you determine the source of the req—”

“No, I don’t know the source of the traffic. It was encrypted and routed through several different corpNets . . . one of which was NRS.” The twins both caught their breath at this fact, and Grepman looked back and forth at them and said, “But that could mean anything; they host the largest corpNet in the States." He paused a moment, then looked toward Simeon. “Sim, I’m sorry, I effed up. I don’t know how—I’m always triple careful about this stuff!”

Simeon flicked his ponytail back and forth. The flames on his arm began to dance wildly. Nimbus, now fully awake, looked up at him and said, “Hey baby, when did you get back?” Deep in thought, he ignored her, and she looked around the room and began to take note of the morose mood hanging in the air. “Should I ask?” she asked without getting an answer.

“Shut it all down, erase all local memory. Purge the tunnel’s private key. We’ll generate another—“

“We’re
leaving
?” Jay-san asked dramatically.

“Yes, we’re leaving. Now." Simeon left no room for deliberation.

Several team members grunted in protest, but everyone began to circle the room, kicking off a flourish of activities with the intent to leave behind no proof of their operation. As the drama unfolded, Dylan slowly swayed to the entrance of the room and leaned against the wall. He watched the chaos with a silly grin on his face. The past few days’ experiences now seemed so surreal that he had resigned to laugh it off. He turned to leave the same way he came in, and as he did, he heard a faint scream emanate from the corridor in front of him. He squinted his eyes, attempting to adjust them to the darkness beyond. As his pupils widened, a billowing gray cloud moved toward him. It gathered in front of him but did not enter the room due to the invisible holoDoor that was currently closed. Dylan was about to say something when the billow of gray smoke silently erupted into a flickering blue gas. He immediately felt extreme cold radiating off of the door in front of him. No one in the room noticed the flash of light, as most of them were already focused on their walls of media and their own BUI’s within their optical field.

“Hey, Simeon . . .” Dylan pleaded lightly, then persisted, “Simeon . . . Simeon!”

Simeon’s ponytail somehow whirled around faster than his head. He saw the blue flame immediately and was about to speak when a body suddenly appeared out of the strange smoke beyond. The body moved slowly, as if walking up the steepest of hills, until it froze completely, then toppled onto its side like a felled, petrified tree.

Simeon inhaled wildly—an inverse scream—then immediately collected himself, seeming strangely calm, as he stated, “Everyone out now!” The flames on his arm were flicking so wildly that they were licking at his neck from underneath his shirt.

Several of the team members had already fled through a previously unseen corridor on the far side of the room. Dylan was just starting to head toward the door when Simeon lunged at him and grabbed his arm. He threw him at the corridor, and as he did a small canister whizzed into the room through one of the slits in the wall. It plunked on the concrete with a metallic clink. Both Simeon and Dylan twisted their heads away from the canister toward the slits looking out to the Sound. They saw a craft of some kind hovering outside the cliff wall and humming a monotonous tone.