Voices in the Stream: Phase 02 (The Eighteenth Shadow) Read online

  “Tell Mr. Proudsun it was your evening off. Besides, we were making love,” she said defiantly.

  “It’s Proudstar.”

  “Proudstar, Proudsun, Proudplanet, whatever! It was your evening off!”

  “I’m supposed to be onstream for emergencies.” He reached out the tip of his index finger and she kissed it with an audible smooch, “Besides, it was you who talked me into turning off the holotab.”

  Her eyes got big and she stuck her lower lip out even farther, “Oh, so it’s my fault?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You just said that!”

  “It’s not what I meant.”

  “Then say what you mean, Danechka. What? Are you saying making love to me wasn’t worth it? Am I not the woman you say I am?”

  He took a sip of lukewarm Mountain Dew from a can on his desk and smiled gushingly at the fairy sized girl, “Stop. You know I love you.”

  “Eeeek!” she blushed and batted her eyelashes. “You make my heart sing too, Danechka! ’Sides, it’s really that ox, Brick’s fault. Just cause he doesn’t know how to fly drones proper doesn’t mean my Danechka should get in trouble!”

  Danny smiled, “You’re funny, honey-bunny. He is an ox. But it wasn’t his fault either. He got hacked, big time. He didn’t know better.” Danny smacked his hand on his leg, “Honest to Dog, I’m not sure I could have put up a solid curtain against these guys.”

  Dina began knitting again, tiny fingers flying in a blur of light, “Of course you would have done better! My Danechka is a genius.”

  “I dunno,” said Danny, eyes analytically scanning the lines of code. “I mean, this jockey is a magic man. His code is poetry.”

  “Poetry is code and code runs the sky and the sky is so high,” said Dina. “Should I make mittens or a hat?”

  “You made a hat yesterday.”

  Dina said, “Tada!” and clapped. “See, you are a genius, Danechka. That’s why your IQ is 162! I’ll make mittens. Purple ones!”

  “Okay beautiful,” he said.

  “Danechka?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know there’s no code jockey better than you. You’re the greatest of all time.”

  He extended a finger to her lips for another kiss, “Thanks, honey-bunny.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, returning her focus to mitten creation.

  Danny shook his head and itched his long, pasty, bird-like neck. He wished the new deputy uniforms had more hemp and less polyester. Itchy. It was a bad blend. He glanced at the holoclock. 7 minutes. At least he had something to report, but knew it wouldn’t be enough to make the sheriff happy. It was a solid theory, though. And more than those idiots at MTF had.

  “Computer, bring up coyoteholo_01,” he said.

  A high resolution image of the Coyote they had pulled off the hovroad came to life to the right of his flatscreen array. The holographic cyborg chassis began to spin slowly, giving a perfect 360 degree view.

  “Display unit OS structure, monitor two.”

  The code on the flatscreen changed to a densely written language with no spaces or punctuation.

  Danny absentmindedly sipped his warm Mountain Dew, his sizable Adam’s apple thumping in his throat as he said reverently, “There’s the real poetry.”

  “Hey! I’m flickering,” said Dina.

  Danny looked at his girlfriend, “I’m sorry, honey-bunny. It’s these Federal workstations. They’re cheap. They can’t project two high defs at once.”

  “It can’t even make me life size! Stupid computer.”

  “You said you wanted to come to the office.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “But the computer is still stupid.”

  “It is stupid,” he said. “And slow.”

  Dina’s eyes got big as she looked over his shoulder, “Oh unholy crapola! Time for me to blaze, Danechka! Brick’s coming!”

  “Shit!” said Danny anxiously, extending his finger to the tiny cheerleader. “Love you! Kisses!”

  Dina popped to her feet and smooched his finger one last time, holding her knitting to her breasts with a giggle, “Kisses, love!”

  Danny tapped Enter on his holographic keyboard and Dina vanished in a whirlpool of rainbow light, leaving empty the glass surface of the desk where she had been sitting. He spun in his chair to face the door, silently berating himself for not closing the blinds.

  This is why I asked for an office with no windows. What do they give me? An office with no windows to the outside, and a big one inside that faces all of dispatch!

  The door flew open moments later, accompanied by his coworker Deputy Brick Talboy’s signature bellow, “Sooooooo? Whatcha figure out, tech-boy?”

  “Dog, Brick! Did you not get that link I streamed on the definition of a door?”

  Talboy squared up like he was entering a saloon, “Just cause you’re too special to work in a cubicle anymore doesn’t mean I can’t come in if I don’t need somethin.’”

  Danny rolled his eyes, “That wasn’t even a sentence in the English language, moron.”

  “You’re a moron!”

  “You’re a moron! Why do I even waste sky talking to you?”

  Of all the idiots…

  Brick Talboy stood framing Danny’s doorway adorned in black SWAT armor, grinning like a buffoon. His shaved head was unusually rectangular and the stocky muscles of his chest bulged under a tight fitting Kevlar vest and brown platoon pants.

  Like 1.79 meters of uncool, weight lifting dumbness I have to work with daily.

  Brick eyed the holographic Coyote, lighting up, “That little wolf packs a punch, huh? If I’d been there, when it all went down, you know? I woulda unloaded on him with this sucker,” he tapped his lightning pistol lovingly.

  Danny frowned and spun around to his workstation, “Firstly, the Coyotes are wrapped in anatomically female BIOSKIN©. Secondly, the fact that you, of all people, are given a particle weapon is the best argument yet for the downfall of western civilization. My grandpa would take one look at you and say, This country is going to shit.”

  Brick stepped through the door and smacked Danny on the shoulder, “Aww, tech-boy! Just cause I’m 100 for zip on the plasma range and you’re still punching light in an office, don’t cry! Whew! I mean, I’d mess one of them Coyotes up! Turn me loose with our MARX dogs downstairs, me on long plasma with some armor…” he rubbed his hands together with a sparkle in his eye, “I’d send these little yips to the recycle yard weepin’.”

  Danny’s eyes rolled towards the ceiling, and he nodded at the Coyote hologram, “This cyborg has more intelligence in the segments of its tail vertebrae than you do in your whole body.”

  “Tail verte-what?” Brick Talboy stuttered with the word. “Now who ain’t speakin’ English? These things might be smart, and fast, but nothing’s faster than lightning!”

  Danny spun to face him, “What if you didn’t have your plasma gun, Tesla? Or even better, what if you did, and suddenly one Coyote becomes ten? Fifteen? Eighteen? How much charge you got? By the time your brain realized what was happening, the code in their adaptive neural net would have auto-restructured a thousand times!” Danny wrinkled his nose, “Which translates to your hillbilly ass is dead. MARX dogs or no.”

  Brick smiled broadly, “Okay, okay, tech-boy. Don’t cry! There’s still a tampon dispenser in the ladies’ room, right? Use it lately? Jeezus! Here comes the boss anyhow. And hey, Everquist?”

  “What, idiot?”

  “Your skin yamaka’s showing.”

  Danny dropped his can of Mountain Dew in a fluster reaching to fix his hair, “Shit! Asshole!”

  Brick Talboy grinned with satisfaction and then stepped to one side to make room, “Sheriff, I was just tellin’ tech-boy here how much fun it’d be to open up on one of these metal poodles with a lightning rifle! Bet they’d absorb one or two shots before goin’ to slag! You killed fusion borgs in the war, right?”

  Sheriff Dale Proudstar was a mountain
of a human who rarely smiled. He made the small office seem even more minuscule just by standing in the door frame.

  He chewed an unlit cigar and grimaced at his deputy, “Talboy, don’t complicate your life further by trying to think. I can hear your brain working overtime from here, sounds like a mouse farting. You gotta mouse fartin’ twixt your ears, son?”

  Mention of being dumb was the only thing that would make Brick Talboy stop smiling.

  “No sir, I do not have a mouse farting between my ears,” he said morosely.

  “Oh, quit gettin’ damp,” Proudstar guffawed, smacking Talboy on the back with a heavy hand. “If you want to do something useful, think about the best square on a metal borg to drop a line o’ light. You’re too young to get trained for such. Ain’t like shooting plastic Fidos on the range.”

  Brick smiled and gestured excitedly to the rotating hologram, “I already done it, sheriff! I thought about it! You didn’t have lightning guns back in the day! See, even at 100 meters running, I could drop a squirt between the shoulder joint and torso, easy. Bet that titanalum frame’d relay the charge straight to the fusion engine.”

  Danny covered his eyes with a hand, “It’s a temporal, micro-fusion, matrix, you moron. Not the motor on a hoverscoot.”

  Brick shoved the back of Danny’s head, “Yeah?! When’s the last time you were in the field anyway, freckle boy? Oh wait, never, cause you’re too busy spankin’ that Vienna sausage you call a dick while you make love…” Brick waved jazz hands, “…to that holographic prostitute you got hole up in our cloud.”

  Danny spun around, furious, “Shut up, you giant asshole!”

  “Deputies!” The sheriff’s booming voice silenced them.

  Nearby employees in dispatch looked over inquisitively. The sheriff turned and gazed out across dispatch with eyes of stone, daring anyone to so much as peep, then closed the door.

  Proudstar crossed his massive forearms, grumbling, “Talboy, stuff a sock in that constantly flappin’ pie hole o’ yours. And you, Red,” he moved closer, towering over Danny’s workstation, “If you’re pulling department bandwidth projecting that half-meter Czechoslovakian nympho again I swear to fucking Dog I’ll downgrade you to a cubicle beside the coffee computer.”

  Danny pouted and said glumly, “She’s Russian.”

  “She’s a tangi-gram!” yelled the sheriff and Deputy Talboy at the same time.

  “Fine, sir. I won’t! And I didn’t,” said Danny, shoulders withering.

  “Best not let me catch you, neither,” snarled the sheriff. “Now, onto brighter and crappier topics. Please tell me you got some legs on this problem with our scanner net? It’s been nine days. Talk to me.”

  Danny turned to his workstation with renewed excitement and snatched his holotab, “Alright sir, yes. What we’ve got is a quantum hacker.”

  Sheriff Proudstar growled through his teeth, “Relayed through one of the Coyotes?”

  “No sir, check the hologram.”

  The 3D rendering of the Coyote’s mechanical chassis magnified until only the head was visible.

  “Here’s the com relay, right above the vidorb socket on this antique DOGS unit,” said Danny. “It’s a dinosaur. Seven gigahertz 802.16. It’s capable of sending close proximity streams, but that’s it. To uplink with a holoserver, she’d have to be standing in the office with us, and she’d need anti-firewall algorithms that aren’t twenty years out of date.” Danny pointed to the tight woven computer code on the flatscreen, “This here is the original, beautiful I might add, Adler code. It’s the OS these little monsters run on; pulled it straight from the solid state. But dense as it is, there’s nothing in the root level Adler script about hacking networks. In fact, I don’t think these Coyote units have ever even had a bios update. They were booted at Darkpool, went nuts, murdered everyone and escaped.”

  Sheriff Proudstar spit a wet, chewed up bit of cigar into the trash can next to Danny, causing him to lurch out of the way with disgust, “All right. So why are they here now? And what do these Coyotes want?”

  “Well sir, as you know, our second A7 unit caught the only meaningful data before being destroyed. See?”

  A grainy, 2D video appeared, showing an aerial view of the Coyote Pack leaping the shoulder of Hovroad 1500, slamming into the side of Spencer Hotshine’s Mustang, the emergency sphere containing Tara Dean ejecting, and the hovcar flying through the air and smashing in the field. All followed by a blinding blast of red light.

  “Pause,” said Danny.

  The recording froze at the point where the monitor was only half filled with light.

  Danny looked up at Sheriff Proudstar’s unresponsive face and smiled, “Here, sir, is an enhanced frame of the same moment as caught by the lead A7 as it was burning down.”

  The monitor filled with a fuzzy halo shape like a dog’s body running.

  “We missed this before I ran a frame by frame contrast lift,” said Danny eagerly.

  “What the hell is it?”

  “Looks like a dog to me,” said Brick Talboy.

  Both the sheriff and Everquist looked over at Brick and shook their heads before returning their attention to the screen.

  “I believe this is the source of our hacker, sir,” continued Danny. “At least one other battborg was out there. We know that from the tracks, right?”

  “Four other cyborgs if that’s the case, Everquist,” said the sheriff. “The prints were on the heavy side. But that’s circumstantial intel.”

  Danny looked forlorn, spinning back to his monitor, “I know. It seems like a stretch to me too. Where did they go? Tracks disappear… on the asphalt? But I’m telling you, this unknown unit shows up at the precise moment that two things happened. One, our A7 drones got deep fried. Two, all our code turns into, well, not our code. We were hacked.”

  Proudstar shook his head deliberately, “You’re always telling me how there’s maybe 100 people in the world who could cut through your firewall, Red. You say our cloud is tighter than the CIA’s. So how precisely is it this happened?”

  Danny shook his stringy, auburn locks back and forth in frustration, “I know, sir, I know. Our firewall is superior. That’s what makes this so crazy. The hack is instantaneous. What’s more, it’s camouflaged.”

  “What do you mean it’s camouflaged?”

  Danny tapped his holotablet and the display changed to a more sparsely written stream of code, “This is our data stream, the command signal transcribed to its binary foundation.”

  “All right?”

  “So the camouflage comes… here,” Danny pointed to a line in the code that contained the numeral string: 110011100011001 101501140 11100. “There shouldn’t be a character space here, or here, let alone 5’s and 4’s. Yet the code is inserted, numeral string 10150114, containing the digits 4 and 5, and from there forward we’ve got bupkis. The code after appears to be from our standard stream, but after a refresh there’s zero data. It’s just black, like a signal feeding nothing.”

  Sheriff Proudstar grunted, “I understood about half of that.”

  “Well sir,” said Everquist, his voice growing tinny with frustration, “This is the same little packet of code that pops into the transcription, around the same event, across a myriad of devices.”

  “What do you mean? Someone hacked something besides our drones?”

  “Of course! It’s so obvious.” said Everquist nearly jumping out of his chair. “Just think about it!”

  The sheriff raised his bushy eyebrows, “Tell me what’s obvious again, Red, and not only will I move your desk next to the coffee computer, I’ll have you serving it. Naked, in the rain. To homeless people.”

  Brick Talboy chuckled loudly, causing the sheriff to look over his shoulder, “Shut up, Talboy.”

  “Sorry sir,” said Brick, still giggling quietly.

  Danny continued, “I’m sorry too, sir. I’m just excited. You see, yes sir. It’s everything! Gravotemporal decay sensors from our HUD systems, the drones’
black boxes, the emergency holocorder on that stolen Mustang, it’s all the same, and it drops out of nowhere. That’s why you didn’t find any trace of the Coyote pack. Or the battborgs that trashed our drones. It’s like the computer mainframe decided to rewrite its own language spontaneously.”

  “You mean if there were battborgs, Everquist. There’s no proof of anything except a bunch of deep footprints. We cross-referenced those against the national Fido registry.”

  Brick Talboy leaned in, “I seen a bunch of paw prints in the sandbox at the park on the way to work this morning, tech-boy. Better ping SWAT!”

  Danny continued examining the code on the flatscreen without turning around, “Those paw prints were more than likely left by your mother, Brick.” He spun back to Sheriff Proudstar, “Isn’t it strange, sir, that simultaneously every sensor log surrounding this event, on a variety of platforms, fails or goes dark? In addition to the fact that all the battborgs that may or may not have been present just vanish?”

  The sheriff carefully stroked his gray mustache, lovingly, like it was a live animal attached to his face, “Strange to say the least. Is there any structure in the area that could be used as a transmitter?”

  Danny spun eagerly to the monitor array, swiped his holotablet. An aerial view of the surrounding land filled the screens.

  He zoomed in on Dax Abner’s farmhouse, “This is Abner Family Pumpkin & Gourd, the nearest farm to the crash site.”

  Brick Talboy chimed in, “Yeah-yeah, we already interviewed Mr. Abner. He’s the goody two shoes business dude who owns The Rowdy Pony. Big CNED donor. We checked his house and barn. He’s got some guard dogs, but they’re as regular dog-like as a dog can get. I scanned them myself, even checked their paws on-site. It weren’t them that was out there.”

  “As usual, that’s not the point,” said Danny. He zoomed in on the wind turbine, “Sir, this is the only nearby structure on the land high enough for a broadband transmitter, and there’s nothing. We got the usual combud and stream chatter, but all low density. I even sent a drone out in the middle of the night and floated it on top of that turbine for three hours. And… I put one over Purple Tree Farms’ turbine for good measure, plus the one across the way at Anderson Corn. They would have picked up anything broadcasting quantum density code within a half kilometer. But I got squat. Drones just burned antigrav and came home cold. So it’s got to be coming from somewhere else. Like that ghost battborg in the surveillance feed.”