SF in The City Anthology (6 page)

             
“You’re a good charactor,” Og slammed the cover of the lighter shut, “but we both know that you can’t talk your way out of this one.”

             
By this point, Patty had to force back tears. “So you’re going to kill me then? Is that it?”

             
“We don’t have to, nor would it be easy,” Og placed the cigar in his mouth and lit it as if he was the coolest man in the world. “Fortunately we had Omniambience take proper precautions in case a situation like this one would arise. You remember getting vaccinated before shooting your latest documentary?”

             
“Yes…what does that have to do with…?”

“You were told that those shots would protect you from diseases the animals carried?”

              “Yes.” Patty felt more and more anxious.

             
“Nanoids are beautiful little buggers Miss Plattson,” Og said with an ugly smile. “I love the little critters. You see, once upon a time, our ancestors saw splitting atoms as revolutionary technology. Now, we have nanomachines that can rearrange atoms in living and inorganic systems. Soon they will be even able to do more than one task at a time, allowing them the chance to reproduce themselves.”

             
“Can you just cut to the chase,” Patty sighed.

             
“Right now, there are millions of nanoids living in your brain,” Franziska chimed in.

             
“And…” Og looked at the director, seemingly annoyed that she was hogging his moment. “These machines will forever remove you as a threat.”

             
Patty scratched her head, the memory of the nanoids on her scalp only half as terrifying as the thought of them inside her skull. “Let me guess, I’ll suddenly get a tumor or something?”

             
“Killing you would be a rather stupid and dangerous method,” Og exhaled a puff of smoke dramatically. “The nanoids carry beta-amyloid proteins, which form plaque around brain cells. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, you will have a serious case of Alzheimer’s before you are even twenty-five.”

             
“If that’s your plan, why not just kill me?”

             
Og put on another one of his malicious smiles. “The death of a famous actress would demand further investigation. Your disappearance will spark rumors, like you ran off with your boyfriend, or some creeper kidnapped you. Instead we are going to silence you in plain sight. With your memory affected, people will blame your condition on drug use. Everybody knows charactors are under a lot of pressure. Maybe you couldn’t take the lifestyle anymore and downed a little too much ephemerol? In short, your death would tip suspicious parties off, but your fall from grace will make the tabloid sites for a few weeks before quickly vanishing.”

             
“Why do you want to control those peoples’ minds anyway?” Patty had resigned herself to her own fate by this point.

             
“I always wanted to deliver a villainous monologue,” Og said wryly.

             
“If I am going to be so forgetful in the near future,” Patty looked at her enemies in defiance, “you might as well tell me everything.”

             
“Alright,” Og put his feet up on the kotatsu  in front of him. “As you have probably realized by now, Central Authority has been tapping peoples’ minds for some time, collating data from the emotions and mental commands posted on the mind net. Of course, we have our fair share of enemies, and they would possess serious leverage if proof existed for our surveillance. My bosses need to make government supervision of the human mind public as soon as possible. After all, if people gladly hand up to us the power to spy on them, are we really in the wrong?”

             
“That’s a twisted way of thinking,” Patty muttered.

             
“We just needed an excuse for surveillance,” Og took another puff on his cigar and continued. “When people watch your upcoming documentary, the scene where a lion kills a cow will emit the proper frequency of light, which will activate the nanomachines in the food and drinks, which the audience members will have had time to consume. As you will recall, Sovereign Cinema is only one of thirteen theaters in the entire city that requires the purchase of food and drink for admission.”

             
“What happens when the nanoids are activated?”

             
Og’s nasty grin returned. “They will target neurons specifically related to fear and anger. All at once, mass hysteria will break out amongst the audience, followed by violence. When the official story hits the mind net, the suggestion will be that humanity has grown too arrogant and forgotten the dangers of our own thoughts. A few more staged acts of ‘bestialism’ will convince people that something is wrong enough with the human condition to warrant surveillance. We will be there to protect them from themselves.”

***

              Patty. Patty.
Patty
. This young charactor could only focus on that name and try to hold onto it. At the moment, she was in a Central Authority VTOL, though she didn’t remember what these kinds of vehicles were called. Og Husher had gone overboard with the Alzheimer’s ploy. Patty Plattson could remember barely anything from her past. What had she been doing that night? Did she have a history “characting?”

             
One nasty memory made its way to the surface, as she looked out the VTOL’s window at the urban sprawl below. She had seen this part of The City before, and she knew that she was supposed to hate it, but the name of the place escaped her. Perhaps, it started with an “A”?

             
After they had landed, two thugs removed Patty from the vehicle and threw her in a pile of garbage alongside the street. This time, she would truly smell like the real deal. They promised that people would be back in a few days to film her and take her back home. She didn’t even remember where “home” was located.

When they had gone, the charactor fumbled her way further into the jungle of housing boxes and motel towers. Hundreds of thousands lived atop each other in this metropolitan pustule. The mere thought of people crawling over each other like the genetically modified cockroaches in that refuse heap could nearly make one’s stomach turn. Then again, Patty did very little thinking at the moment. As she looked down an alley, she could see an establishment called Frolov’s Motel on the next street. For some reason, that name seemed vaguely familiar.

              Walking down the alleyway, she passed graffiti written in holographic paint. She stopped to look at it, fascinated by the way the letters would say “Dingoneks” in blue and silver one second and “Rule” in gold the next.
What was a Dingonek
? she wondered. A door opened in the wall behind the graffiti, and she got her answer.

Two men, one probably in his late twenties and the other looking to be about eighteen, walked out of the doorway. The older man seemed fri
endly enough, saying sumimasen
[13]
as he approached her and asking what she wanted.

“I don’t really know,” Patty said innocently. “Do you know who I am?”

The younger guy said that he recognized her from what limited CIE he had access to in the Abscess. “You’re Patty Plattson.”

She turned this over in her mind, or what was left of it that is.

“My name is Ángel Ehrlichmann,” the older of the two men said. “And this is my friend Charlisle Bungard. Now I don’t live in the Abscess either, but I came here to visit for a…favor. I imagine you didn’t intend to end up here, in this alley. Where are you going? I can give you a ride there.”

“I don’t remember.”

              The two friends looked at each other in astonishment. Perhaps this woman had taken too many drugs. They decided the best course of action was to invite her into their meeting space behind the wall.

             
It was a cramped room used mostly for storage. Patty still did not fully appreciate her situation, but she had just wandered into a gang’s meeting place. No outsiders, with the exception of Ángel, entered this place and left it in one piece. As the hacker in his gang, Charlisle kept a great deal of computer technology stored throughout the chamber.

             
“I have a PBS (portable brain scanner) with me,” Charlisle said.

             
“Do you really believe something is,” Ángel twirled his right index finger in a circular pattern by his temple, “with her brain?”   

             
“Only one way to find out,” the hacker held the device up to the charactor’s head. Within two minutes he had a result. “She has a bunch of beta amylase in her brain.”

             
“What does that mean?” Mr. Ehrlichmann was a businessman. He only studied the science that could make him money.

             
“She essentially has Alzheimer’s,” Charlisle shook his head in amazement.

             
“How is that possible?”

“Well,” Charlisle established a wireless connection between the nanotube network in his own brain and the PBS, “she either has a really rare genetic condition, or something screwed with her mind.”

              “Or someone,” Ángel said with a clenched fist.

             
“Now, don’t jump to conclusions. I hate the CA probably as much as you do. What happened to your friend Ananya was tragic, but we’ve got to keep level heads about this. Patty here could have fried her own brain. I’ve seen some mighty weird drugs passing through the Pillopticon these days.”

              “Drugs didn’t do this,” Ángel rubbed his hands together. “I’d bet you my bottom ECU that nanoids had something to do with this.”

             
Charlisle laughed aloud. “They’re out to get you Ángel!”

             
“This isn’t a joke,” Ángel stood up and paced the room irritably.

             
“I’ve got an idea,” Charlisle said as he accessed the mind net. “Smalley’s is just down the road, and it has some discount nanoids that are safe to inject into a person’s brain. They take longer than the high grade stuff, but they could clear all this brain plaque out in a day.”

             
“I’ll go get some,” Ángel walked out the door and summoned his hybrid hover-RV by mental command. “Once we get that crap cleared out of her mind, who knows what secrets she might hold,” he called back to Charlisle. “Maybe the CA even had something to do with this?”

             
Climbing into his vehicle, Ángel took off into the night, looking for some medicine. 

Episode 4: “
The Gray Box Hack”

“YOU HAVE AN INCOMING CALL.” The words entered Charlisle Bungard’s head, but not through his auditory canals. He was in the middle of playing a banned virtual reality game,
Shoot to Kill
, and listening to “Chiaroscuro” by the Gastraphetes with the micro-liners in his ears when the call shut off his music. Responding to the telepathic caller, Charlisle was not surprised to “hear” Norn’s “voice” in his head.

             
“We’re meeting at 9th and Patch. Be there in ten,” Norn thought to Charlisle.

             
“Is everybody going to make it today,” Charlisle thought back.

             
“Most likely, yes.”

             
Granted it was a terse conversation, but Charlisle gathered everything he needed to know. Shutting down his game, he started packing a burlap bag with his necessities – one pair of binoculars, two meal bars, a nightstick, two surveillance nodes, a flashlight, three gas grenades and hacking equipment. As the hacker in his gang, the Treaty of Oscuro Martes established that every officially recognized crew in the Abscess had to have at least one hacker; Charlisle was responsible for bringing tech to group meetings.

             
Running his hands through his green, curly hair, the teenage hacker remembered what he needed to do before taking off. He had to feed his Siamese fighting fish before leaving. Dropping some fish flakes onto the surface of the fish tank, Charlisle watched eagerly as the blue and red crowntail male viciously devoured the food. Among all his non-computer related possessions, Charlisle’s fish tank was the most well taken care off. As the fish, who the hacker affectionately named Betta, finished its food, it started to attack the walls of its tank, colliding face first into the glass.

             
“Yeah, I hate you too,” Charlisle laughed as he shut off the lights to his apartment and walked out the door.

             
Before he had even made it to his floor’s elevator, the landlord, Kim Legrand, blocked his path. With his mother gone on a six month sales trip to Prefecture 14 and his father imprisoned for spaq dealing, Charlisle had run of the apartment, which also meant he had to provide money for rent. His mother’s trip had been fruitless as of yet, so the computer jock found himself saddling the responsibility of paying off familial debt.