Neofed - Let's Play Walkthrough Part 4

The Silence: The Boy Who Cried Drone

First time I spotted one of the drones I was sixteen. This was years ago, when Gnossis Search Corp was still spying on US citizens secretly for the NSA, and thus had to keep their Wi-Fi and cell phone eaves-dropping operations on the down-low, rather than parading around the fact that they ran a for-profit Panopticon. In those halcyon years of the Tech Boom 2.0, the “Big G” was still in the courting phase with crooked tech regulators, when they only multilaterally controlled the FCC. One seat at the table of a digital security council consisting of Friendbook, Totech, Orange Inc and the fading revenants of the Gormenghastian TV and newspaper empires, slowly dieing a death by a thousand downloads. A time when the corporation’s stock valuation was still the equivalent to the GDP of half the Balkans, rather than the entirety of the European Union. In these humble beginnings, the tech giant’s hoodie-wearing CEOs pilgrammaged, yearly, before the phalanx of a Senate Antitrust subcommittee, like pre-Church of England Henry VIII, begrudgingly kneeling to kiss the ring of the pope. There, by the mock-outraged senators whose campaign war-chests Gnossis had helped fill with “donations”, Gnossis was publicly flogged for conspicuously failing to erase archives of closed user accounts, for loopholing their way out of Do-Not-Track laws, for “accidentally” programming an email spam filter to blacklist anti-Wall Street communications as “suspicious activity”. Bad, bad Gnossis. The American people and the Federal Communications Commision Will Not Stand For This infringement of their privacy and freedom. But eventually, with enough network lock-in, hostile takeovers, and board member job offers for annoyingly principled congress people, they finally finished infiltrating and buying out the US government – following the hallowed American Way of the banks, pharma, and military corporations before them. Shoulders of giants, and all.

With no federal regulator or antitrust cops left whom they didn’t have on a leash, Gnossis went solo into the espionage business, started operating out in the open with impunity. Let a thousand wifitapping spyvans bloom. Now they could eavesdrop on citizens for their own profit without masking it under the guise of the marketing euphemism, “personalized search optimization”. They auctioned off the Gnossis smartphone GPS coordinates of Iranian dissidents to their current iteration of authoritarian torturers. Sold out the e-mail chains connecting the organized resistance of securities fraud whistleblowers who tried to bring down the vampiric megabank aristocracy before they nuked the US and global economy a second time. (And with Gnossis’ routine extermination of the financial freedom fighters, the banksters won, again). Unlike the formerly relevant United States -- cowboys fecklessly taking drunken potshots at oil-rich Arabic countries, hastening the twilight of the American empire-streak – Gnossis was efficient, a tyranny of nerds, settling for nothing less than a thoroughly blueprinted autocracy. Code is law, and they were a dictatorship of naïve software engineers, dictating their “perfect” world through their codes. Let there be free information, that all people might frolick finally in the endless Library of Babel, as we charge them for access to it, cash in on search advertising, and sell off keyword real-estate. Let that the authors, engineers, and other content producers of our post-industrial society who relied on revenue from their work (evil revenue!), newly jobless, be allowed to find redemption circuitbreaking Tickle-Me-Elmos to sing the Zelda theme, and other venerable DIY “Maker” hobbies with their unpaid cognitive surplus. Let there be omnipresent 24/7 data collection on every living user and non-user and Wifi enabled device, that our systems might better improve their search algorithms and model the world down to the last grain of sand and financial transaction. And, once they saw that it was good, headed out for p’zones and a DnD night, leaving free dominion over every living thing to the red-tied, derivatives trading serpents, dwelling in their walled garden.

From my bedroom window I’d seen flashes of chrome molded into the shapes of sea creatures, pelagic finned apparitions soaring against the night sky, bright and surreal as daydreams. They’d never be visible more than a second or two, but I was certain I wasn’t imagining things; I’d pinched myself to be sure. My parents thought I was loosing it. Dad would mention specialists for my “problem” at the dinner table every other night. Mom would shoot the propositions down with a look. [i]He’s just in that phase, honey. You remember high school.[/i] I once overheard them arguing whether to send me to one of those overmediation rehabilitation camps in the signal-free New Mexico desert.

Supposedly they were the last island of offline geography on Earth since cyberspace’s near-total colonization of the physical world, a pocket of Irish monk-scholars, preserving civilization as language was burnt to the ground by txt-speak, knowledge and history cannibalized by Big Search as Friendbook became the country of origin of every human on the planet. Apparently it was the site of some abandoned DoD experiment into city-spanning invisible EMP shields involving superconducting hadron membranes powered by tesla spheres. Supposedly all the participants had died of unknown causes, but that didn’t stop high-ROI seeking speculators from starting an internet rehab school there during the online-addiction hysteria, especially with that Faraday cage marketing gimmick sweetener. All the first hand stories I’d heard spoke of electroshock Ludovico torture, nanite lobotomy, exorcising the cyber-Beelzebub through hard bone-grinding labor – ironically, the labor was usually assembling iPads. Like some kind of Road to Wellville nutter-clinic for the digital age, run by the kind of people who build prisons the size of Delaware and sardine pack twenty inmates to a cell. Eerily reminiscent of the epidemic of ponzi artists who lured gullible illegal immigrants into unaccredited for-profit colleges, and run away with the FAFSA loan dough.
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“The boy needs help. It’s working great for all those goggle-screen wearing ‘net zombie kids over in China.” Dad said.

“Children are tortured to death in those camps. And our boy is not a zombie. He’s a bright kid if you bothered to pay attention.” Mom defended.

Nobody believed me. I was the boy who cried paramilitary drone.

So I recorded video. Days and days of drive space filled with the empty bigness of night sky, nothing but starry void, and the occasional fuel cell howl of a passing maglev train. A couple times I swore I could just make out the sillouette of a curling diamond-ended tentacle, or the shadow of a dorsal fin, carving itself in the white noise sea of cosmic background radiation. Like the old black and white hoax photographs of sea monsters that once drew busloads of tourists, drove Scottish fisherman to dedicate their lives to their discovery, scowering the night-films became an obsessive cryptozoological hunt through the depths of the troposphere for my own personal airborne Loch Ness. I’d watched segments of footage over and over till I memorized every twinkle of venus, every thick cloud of Californian pollution wiping itself across the face of the moon. For a while I wondered if I’d seen the drones at all, or was I descending into a Fortean madness, an apopheniac seeing dragons in driftwood, falling for my own long-necked toy submarine fabrications. Then, one night, as I was packing up the binoculars and gigapixel highspeed cam, possibly for good, there came the now-infamous, multi-million hit ‘tube video known globally as “Noctopus”. Finally I had it, the money shot was barely a second of space-calamari, but there it was; a real live UFO, plain as day, or at least plain as my 3D HD cameraphone’s resolution could manage.

The next day, I was preparing to prove my parents and the universe wrong in a blaze of viral video glory (and come away possibly with a reality TV contract, if I milked my new found starpower right with the Hollywood Big Fish). Then, suddenly, my uploaded mpegs mysteriously vanished into the intarwebial ether. I checked through archived logs of my uploaded and deleted videos, but everything was completely wiped. No NetTube error message, no violation of terms-of-service notice, nothing. Not a half hour later, guys in federale suits showed up, told my parents I had ‘tampered with government property’ via unlawful blackhat internet hacking, and had stolen classified files from the Pentagon. I knew that earpiece-man’s case was a bullshit cover story the moment they namedropped the Pentagon. That five-sided hunk of Swiss cheese couldn’t keep a secret for five seconds since they’d outsourced their IT to shady low-wage contractors without PO Boxes on six different continents, none of them English-speaking and most of them fronts for Chinese espionage, gold-farming sweatshops, and Russian botnet gangs. Probably handing their newly acquired specs sheets, detailed blueprints for US stealthbomber drones, across the cubicle wall to KGB revenants, grinning like cartoon wolves.

I told the faux spooks as much, but the shade-faces claiming to be “FBI” didn’t find constructive criticism by a prepubescent very entertaining. Then again, they don’t find anything entertaining. When stand-up comedians assassinate Mother Theresa and land themselves in the basement-level ring of hell as Satan’s prison-bitch, the punishment they suffer in that final ditch of Malebolge is an eternal gig performing for an alcohol-free nightclub packed with G-Men.

“Feds carry warrants. And they don’t get their suits custom tailored by Brioni’s paramilitary division,” I commented.

“You’re in a world of trouble, son. Let’s not make this any worse than it has to be.” The spook said, brow knitting above a wall of black glass as he emptied my pants drawer on the floor.

“Actually I think it’s you who’s going to be in the hot seat when your corporate leash-holders discover that you couldn’t prevent a kid from releasing embarrassing and possibly incriminating evidence that could crucify them. I’ve already got a Cloud-based killswitch in place to release the footage if you rent-a-Gestapo try and get your Gadaffi on. I’ve got a public-relations C4 strapped to my chest, the cops will be up your asses in seconds.”

A bold move I could barely believe I had the gaul to utter, and I think I might have shissed myself a second later. The suit closed the door and the masks came off. Shades-in-Chief withdrew a ziplock of marijuana and three other caches of powder like blue-speckled laundry detergent which I didn’t recognize but I knew, somehow, were catastrophically illegal. He spilled a little of each narcotic on me like some cursed pixie dust that gets you locked up instead of makes you fly. He then proceded to plant the evidence in various crannies about my room – in my workstation heatsink, behind my V for Vendetta poster -- as coolly as if he was dumping his dirty work socks around his apartment, just to make a point.

“US police departments outsource their dispatch, evidence, and case file management to Gnossis Search. We set the parameters of law enforcement, kid, we control what the cops see and don’t see, they’re blindered by our case-rank algorithms. Really, don’t fuck with us.” His eyebrow did that dispassionate shrugging-caterpillar frown again, patted me on the chek.

The suits did a CIA-grade wipe of my hard drive: sledgehammer to the magnetic discs. They walked me out in cuffs, parading me out in front of the neighborhood and half the internet’s worth of bloggers and e-journalists as a hacker tar-n-feathering. My dad just stood there, shaking his head, then went out with a dirty senator for eighteen holes and lines of coke off a Paris Hilton clone’s cleavage. My mom just stood there, and tried not to cry.

A court order forced me onto the Italian leather couch of a kiddie shrink, to whom I explained the conspiracy to cover up my drone video in fully lucid detail with logical riguer a philosophy-major could be proud of. The shrink sat there, nodding, pretending to take notes on his smart pad but was really trying to beat his Angry Hamsters high score – I could see the airborne dayglo rodents reflected in his prop spectacles. In the end he aired out some rusty diatribe of bullshit psychobabble, claimed I was seeing “semiotic ghosts”, then diagnosed me as a paranoid schizotypal, pumped me full of happy juice. Made me hallucinate six hours straight, once. Sometimes I can still see the fleets of celaphopodic spydrones, aerodynamic as the oily spaceships of some Flash Gordon antagonist, descending through the padded-room’s single window. They come to extract my bodily fluids, rich with my personal data, via hypodermic USB cords, fly the specimen of my deflated body back up to the mothership, en route to planet Gnoss, populated by a species of little green men evolved without senses of humor, perpetually frowning in their shades. They extract my info-essence, my life’s story written in RNA and a million internet posts, and snort the white powder off the cleavage of a Paris Hilton the color of fiat money. Just to make a point.

They put me under a couple times, “routine tests” they said I was “too young” to understand. Woke up with a tender crotch and red marks all over my chest they claimed I’d self-inflicted. Luckily my mom worked up the courage, found some dirt on the crooked fuckers, blackmailed the clinic and got me out. Mom explained in the car ride home that the clinic jacked livers for organ money like the District Ten kids jack cars, except the street urchins don’t have several Harvards’ worth of lawyers or Big Pharma friends with the president and half of Mount Rushmore in their back pocket. Mom had some serious fucking balls. At least she fought for me, unlike my dad. That fucker wouldn’t fight for anything, stood for nothing, first out the door in a fire alarm. It’s people like that made the world the way it is, ran out the exits with the chandeliers in hand and let the whole building just burn down.

On the bright side, being walked into a police car in handcuffs for half the known universe bumps you up to the top of the grooming order in high school, and the fact that you were arrested and served time for attacking Gnossis and the US government means you’ll never go to bed alone in college, brimming with all your hacktivist-badboy mojo.

I liked to think I was the first to surf the cusp. Because shortly thereafter, UFO videos spread like contagion. There was an outbreak of alien-abduction news cycles, bandwagonny hard sci-fi novels riding the wave of hysteria meme-juice. Plastic-faced NetTube talkshow hosts dragged on ‘experts’ with ‘para-aeronautics’ degrees from two-day-old Estonian online universities to be interviewed. There was a desert downpour of tourism business and false hope for dead Arizona extra-terrestrial gimmick towns. Instead of oval alien heads, there were silver penguin t-shirts, flying squid balloons. “Drone-Wars” arcade games were canted against fifty year old bar jukeboxes still operating on US fiat coinage. Gnossis denied everything, of course, waged a multi-billion PR campaign to make the Koch Brother climate-denialists blush, even blacked out their own website for a day, holding the collectively outsourced memory of their 3 billion users hostage until they cried for their congress people to pass SAPA; the Stop Aerial Photography Act. But still, the wave resonated, built into a global tsunami of publicity and pro-bono journalistic exposes, until the first bow-shot threats of hard litigation ultimately forced Gnossis’ hand. They had to buy out the US government or face a debilitating nightmare of major privacy, anti-wiretap, and antitrust lawsuits from which the mega corporation would never wake. Especially with the salivating competition circling like hyenas, just waiting for the search giant to topple, ready to pick the market share meat from its ribs. It cost them dearly; half their “Gnossis University” geek frathouse was braindrained away as they reallocated salaries earmarked for hot young Silicon Valley talent to US government bribes. But once all the King’s Horses and King’s Men and King’s Attorneys General were bought and paid for, then Gnossis let all their skeletons hang out of the closet, with bitter apathy. Yes we are spying on you. Yes we are selling your private life to unknown third parties. Yes, privacy is dead: but it’s for your own good, really. We’re still not evil, we’re just progressive. Get over it.

I guess I like to think I did finally catch my Loch Ness monster, brought it out on stage for all the world to see, giant black tentacles and all. Even if it continued to terrorize, at least now the creature couldn’t hide in the occult depths of my subconscious.

The Silence: Making Shift

Leeloo strode down Kurzweil and 3rd, past the Amazing Bass display windows that once showcased hardcovers and paperbacks, thick freshly minted tomes of deep thought and edification, great literature to science fiction to Big Idea bestsellers. She traced a single digit through the grimy ash acreeting on the glass like a child fingerpainting dreams into a breath-fogged backseat window.

“I can’t believe I used to hang out here. I read the entire Sandman series cover to cover three times lounging right in that corner loveseat of the Starbeans Café.” The loveseat was re-upholstered in leopard print and was crowded by surround stereo systems.

“I cracked my first bank server while deep into a Kevin Mitnick autobio here. Over an iced chai latte. I had to have my iced chai latte,” I commented into her inner ear via remote uplink, seeing things through her eyecameras.

“For me it was the caramel frappe. I met my first ex-boyfriend doing a Lady-and-the-Tramp thing with two straws. He eventually revealed himself to be a total tool, though.” I refrained from comment.

“What happened?” I extended the pause long enough to make it clear it was a philosophical inquiry and not a dig at Leeloo’s mating game record.

“Right? I can’t even afford coffee anymore. The only dates I can go on are blind ones in dark alleys.“ An awkward bubble filled the space. I veered.

“Insane to think a whole generation is coming of age, never having read anything longer than a Yelp recommendation or a Youcast, two-hundred-word, voice-written microarticle.”

The print age of the previous millenia had already become a foreign country, whose language consisted of strange dis-abbreviated words, who performed bizarre rituals involving embedding texts into dried sheets of plant life, reading them for sheer “enjoyment”. Once chameleonic Kindles and Nooks and other elderly-friendly smartgadgets in book clothing weaned the majority of the population off of their paper and cardboard with quiet paper-like interfaces and “scripted pageturn actions”, they shed their dead media facades and bombarded their 5-year contract, network locked-in “readers” with micromedia feeds, Angry Hamsters and streaming Tubeflix. The mental equivalent of dumping chickenfried double steakburgers and candy coated Snickers bars onto a plate of fresh balsalmic salad. Gadget companies disclaimered “People can choose to read if they want,” just like heroin addicts can always choose to inject a half ounce of refined opium into their median cubital veins, especially when needles are flashing at them all day. Readership dropped 50% the next year, despite skyrocketing purchases of ostensible “readers”, permanently distracted by the endless buffet of apps and entertainment. Universities replaced Literature courses with “Creative Texting 101” and “Wikipedia Tweaking 212”. The Big Electronics trusts laughed haughtily all the way to the bank at an international authors strike that lasted two days. The Nobel Prize winners and New York Times Best Sellers then joined the legal sector, selling their warm orifices on the street, living in megamalls-turned-crackhouses like everyone else. Ghostwriting protest signs for tear-gassed demonstrators. Though where attorneys had been replaced by a machine intelligence explosion, writers saw their jobs destroyed by a human intelligence implosion; two indices which are ultimately inversely proportional, coupled, like gold and fiat currency.

In that light, Krash’s vapidity should’ve been no surprise. There remained one book, browned, frayed, furring with dust in a corner of the display window, like a broken tombstone, titled with the ironic epitaph: “The End of The Book: How The Digital Revolution Will Save Literature” by some Harvard economist. The sun setting on the deep-thought epoch of Shakespeare and Galileo, of Jefferson and Joyce, the alien world of print falling into the black hole of the post-literate society leaving only this freeze-frame on the event horizon, fading into entropy. In the Astounding World of The Future that we had arrived in, there stood, in place of books, arrays of booming, rattling carspeaker cabinets the size of refrigerators. Hot blue rim lights fanning neon like clip-on male plumage. 3D holographic windshields sporting realtime Twatter feeds and huge-breasted virtu-girls dancing in licorice thongs and dark-elf ear prosthetics. Leeloo’s eyecam quickly panned away, as if by electromagnetic repulsion.

Working in an adjacent garage/chop shop was a large Hispanic in a wife beater and skinny jeans. The chico’s chest and arms were covered in blood-powered neon tattoos of Aztec gods that glowed like the runes emblazoned into the forehead of some trad-fantasy movie protagonist.

“This is the contact?” I whispered, watching dermal Technicolor creation stories and the Cortezian battle of Tenochititlan rage on tan skin through Leeloo’s optic nerve. The ocular cinematography bobbed vertically twice in confirmation.

He was flanked by two kids failing at pretending to be useful, waving car jacks around like sparklers, decked in gold-spraypainted plastic chains and baggy mid-calf basketball shorts. Banger garb that went out of Cryps fashion in the previous decade but which hit cultural centers like Bollywood years later like stealthy and long-travelling tsunami waves, leaving whole high schools flailing in floods of bombastic Punjabi Crunk, Canadian Ford F250s inexplicably covered in Confederate flags. That, and the way they barely understood the Mexican’s English or Spanish meant they were obviously escapees from some mass-murdering Coke packaging plant outside of Mumbai that was nuked from orbit after the soft drink star destroyer took off for friendlier police state regimes run by the diamond warlords-cum-noveau riche in the blood soaked jungle of the Congo. Or perhaps these were refugees of some Pacific island atoll nation swallowed by a trillion carbon belches that melted half of Antarctica.

The contact turned, revealing his back adorned with the “OBEY” street-kanji for Tony Montana waving his Little Friend, and Harry Potter characters stenciled straight from antique DVD covers. Mint Chamber of Secrets discs with artwork were trading up near the gallon price of water futures on the Bizaar, so depending on context, the luminescent ink could be taken as postmodern irony or the blacklit stains of a teen fangasm that failed to come out in the wash of adulthood. Sparks showered the grease-blackened floor as he directed a home-industrial 3D printer to carve out of a stainless steel sheet what looked like a frame component for one of those pre-Crash era “rearview mirrors”.

“Didn’t they phase those out years ago?” Leeloo opened. It was true the mirrors had become an unnecessary expense after human driving was illegalized. A liability eliminator made a liability by market force. As he turned, the expression marking his face could’ve been captured in emoticon form via a colon followed by a dash. : / He regarded Leeloo for a brief moment, eyes set in bags the color of morgue lips making a half-hearted attempt at trying to read her, as if he’d given up expending energy on his own survival in District Ten. Life was a toxic asset, awaiting liquidation. He returned to his work, lathing away.

“Right. It’s a retro thing,” he commented, ensuring the precision of the machine incision through re-melted steel. The accent coming from the Latino was cognitively dissonant, way Berkelian, surfer-nerd touched with the effeminate sigmatism characteristic of North Cali GLBT coloring. The crunchy granola lisp. It was almost certainly a joke; the retro bit, not the accent.

“More probable explanation is homey is jailbreaking the cars to allow actual people to get behind the wheel.” I whispered like a little bluebird into Leeloo’s cochlear plug. She shrugged in annoyance, made it look causual, like a shiver.

“I like what you’ve done with the place, Rodney. It’s cushy. Hearthy.” Leeloo stepped further into the shop, out of the field of view and audio of a streetlight surveillance camera, the hemisphere of oily onyx glass hanging ominously like a malevolent urban stalactite.

Rodney glanced up from his work over tortoise shell wire-rim glasses, “Yeah. I’m trying to get the jump on the next real estate bubble. The Bay Area is coming back, I hear.” A shrill barrage of explosions, like Times Square new years eve fireworks interrupted the Amazing Bass subwoofage. Leeloo and Rodney turned in time to see some hydrogen-powered grease-cooker blow out the windows of a Taco King, now also caught on fire next to the smouldering Sharper Image. The conflagration had been raging for over an hour, and there were no ululations of firetrucks, not even the automated fire extinguishing teams that had replaced human firefighters were anywhere in sight. Laughter choked up from all parties.

The two Indo-Pacific flunkies stroked their thin Asiatic goatees, examining Leeloo like a car they were considering jacking, mouthing some glib series of hodge podge slang like, “Let’s check bitch legit home.” Even though I was merely inhabiting Leeloo’s headspace via remote feed, I felt a deep sense of violation, a kind of surrogate objectification.

“I don’t know how you women handle that shit on a daily basis.”

“It grows on you,” Leeloo lied into the mic, with nausea.

“Get the fuck out of here and bring me the aluminum powder kegs like I asked before I sell you and your VerIDs to the embassy,” Rodney yelled, the idling teens waddling away in their low-crotch pants like giant tropical penguins.

“You know there’s daycare for that,” Leeloo deadpanned.

“My sister’s boyfriend and his buddy. She needs me to keep them from mugging greycollars, ripping off fuelstations with armed clerks. So I occupy them, Rodney’s afterschool science program. Family is family. Or whatever.” He kicked the chrome digitigrade toes of the automated steel printer as the hydraulics stalled out on the pivoting platform supporting the half-sculpted shell of the rearview mirror. The podium readout had bluescreened on a critical kernel error.

“Puta!” Rodney banged the screen, calling up a debugger on his personal tablet, landlined to the printer’s interface.

“So how much are jailbroken autocars going for on the dark market these days?”

“Not nearly enough to cover the hazard pay,” Rodney sighed. “Illegally converting self-driving cars to human-drivable was a booming black market, given the burnout rate of vehicle radar/ultrasonic sensoriums, whose replacement fab-schematic files are tightly monopolized via FDRM. Not unlike the music and movie IP cartels who monopolized digitized art and entertainment earlier in the century through content locks and mass lawsuits. If your smartcar’s brain scrambles, you have to cough up a ten thousand dollar fealty to your Big Auto lord to get it fixed. Then there’s the fact that you need Level Five Premium Internet – ringing in at a hundred dollars per day -- minimum to utilize the Cloud-based self-driving artificial intelligence. All of this payable only in US dollars.”

“That’s the Devil’s Currency,” Leeloo footnoted.

“Exactly. Fully surveiled and hyperinflated toilet paper.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well most of the underclasses – i.e. everyone outside of Blue County – would opt right out of the formal auto market for the riskier but actually affordable shadow economy, and that’s good for us. But then that also meant plunging quarterly reports for corporations and dwindling car loans for banks. They weren’t happy about that.

“After the global real estate fraud bubble 3.0 turned the entirety of the physical Earth into a debt-shackled planetary Gulag, the bankster Reign of Terror, having consumed the entirety of realspace, reared its bonus-hungry maw on fabricated cyber-objects. “Real estate” bubbles became “virtual estate” bubbles. Patenting not just software, car designs, better mouse traps, but language itself, even parts of history. For a few months the prison industry Gulags were filling with people who used copyrighted words or phrases like “friend”, or “Gnoss it” as verbs without paying royalties. You could not reference the second World War in a book or movie without coughing up to Omniversal Media half your commission or production budget. Bilderberg Group praetors almost daily gave unholy birth to patent-shark multinationals who landgrabbed physical design-space, drafted armies of patent-commandos from the new ‘white ghettos’ of lawyers displaced by advanced expert system roboattorneys. In the age of decentralized manufacturing when t-shirts to iPads to Maseratis could be ‘baked’ out in your garage while you slept by autonomous self-reproducing pansubstance extruders, laser-fabs, and assembler droids, the PIAA (Patent Industry Association of America) will call down an airstrike of lawsuits and/or actual Earth-scorching daisycutters if they catch you printing out even an abandonware ’04 Honda Civic.

“Chinese coder-slaves rig miniscule, virtually undetectable structural flaws into 3D printer instructions – a lugnut a nanometer too big here, a brake line polymer cocktail slightly unbalanced there – leading to catastrophic failures and fatal crashes on the road. Car companies like Xinjiao, Totech, Autonomobile then intentionally propagate the sabotaged files throughout the BitTorrent shipping routes of pirate networks, seeding killer-schematics like viruses in porn. But there is no malware-scan for physical engineering soundness, and thus the IP sharks created a paranoia-deterrent, scaring patent bootleggers off the grounds with intellectual property landmines. MakerBot rootkits, Rep Rap Trojans are routinely steganographed deep within the guts of the blueprint code, instruct sintering appendages to burn through their own DLP projectors, or start the laser arm spinning like a disco-ball and fry everything and everyone in a fifty foot radius. Your open source living room factory, innocently churning out custom auto-CADed coffee mugs and Edward Cullen tees, suddenly becomes a sleeper cell of machine homicide waiting to massacre your family in a gory cloud of rogue code and granularized industrial arsenic. So all that’s opened up a massive sinkhole in my balance sheet. My cousin and former senior partner, he got careless, didn’t read between the Java lines to see that his downloaded, ripped fab was fusing nitrogen and glycerin into his head gasket. CyberSec forensicbots are still mopping him up out of a crater of silicate glass that used to be an underground fabtory at Fisherman’s Wharf. Poor primo.” Rodney dabbed himself in a sign of the cross, leaving smudges of grease on his forehead like the residue of some Ash Wednesday sacrament.

“So why are you operating a death machine?” Leeloo inquired.

“I know enough about software and mechanics that I think I can take the gist of the designs and attempt to re-engineer a new model based on my study of the blueprints, even if they’re faulty. Reproducing the object in my own words, rather than pirating, so to speak. But any attempt will involve some amount of downside risk, complications.”

“I see. So you were a mechanic or something, before the Hot Class War?” Leeloo asked.

“I’ve actually got a PhD in nano engineering from MIT. Want to see it? That worthless piece of papyrus is hanging right in my office,” He pointed to a blown-out section in the non-functional Barnes and Nobel women’s bathroom, sealed up with a printed plexiglass door faced with plastic imitation-wood venetial blinds, stolen from the design of some 40’s detective’s office. Atemporal media mashups bleeding into physical reality, Frankenstein architecture. I could see the certificate from here.

“Graduated with honors and still couldn’t find a job along with 90% of my class, dumped out into this lawless wasteland of an economy. My parents worked 16 hours a day trimming trees, living under floorboards to allow me to indenture myself to a ball-and-chain of 200 thousand in unforgivable student loans, blow twenty eight years of my life, all so I could change tires and flip burgers. American Dream? American Scam.” Rodney rabbit punched the podium readout again, cursing as he twisted a knuckle the wrong way.

“So you’re an egghead geek in chopper’s clothing. Why bother with all the getup?”

“You’ve got to blend in, around here. Locals don’t take kindly to nerds, whom most can’t differentiate from the upper crust lawyers and traders and the rest of the people who caused the mess and stomp on their face. Besides, the hippies finally got their way and the yuppies have gone extinct. There is no middle class, there is no educated class in pressed shirts and clean shoes. Now it’s just one giant sprawling ghetto of beggars, criminals, and slumdogs with varying levels of education.”

“Right. Don’t tell your little cadets about that degree. You might lose some of that street cred, drop some ‘legit’ness.” Leeloo sniped coyly.

“So let’s cut the History Channel special and get to business.” Leeloo picked up a monkey wrench, one could assume hot off the press, given the slightly more oxidized prototype lying next to it, the Home Depot original from which it had been pirated.

“Let’s,” Rodney said, going over blocks of questionable code with a digital magnifying glass.

“You know the deal. We need the Cage,” Leeloo spun the wrench in the palm of her hand, flicking it with the tip of her index. It rang with an unnaturally thin chime, too low a specific gravity to be pure stainless steel. Some Protean-Age genetically modified ore. Rodney remained unresponsive, giving off the façade of work absorption.

“The Cage, Rodney,” Leeloo came again, impatiently.

Rodney continued scrolling with casual swipes of his finger across the screen of his tablet, occasionally zooming in with thumb and forefinger on some particularly suspicious snippet.

“You know there are almost infinite places to hide a software bug? Even if you run a program for years, you might never encounter the underlying issue until the perfect storm of conditions is met. Dozens of fortune 500 tech companies made it through with horribly infested software, relying on the notion that no one would ever do anything unusual with it, would never test it.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“The more you use and stretch the program, the more likely that the bug is to surface, and thus need to be eliminated. I’m thinking I don’t actually want any extra stretching going on around here.” Rodney said, rebuilding the latest version of his rearview mirror fabricator executable. I had had about enough of this cryptic fuck.

“Put me through to him,” I whispered.

“Spook, I don’t know if that’s the best-“

“I said put me through, now.” I growled. She reluctantly pulled a mini resonance speaker from a back pocket, patched my VoiP through it.

“Look, Rodney. Homes. I don’t know what kind of pop-tarts-and-forum-warriors outfit you take us for, but it’s insulting. But moreso to yourself, an upstanding sub-legitmate Ashlands businessman with decades of premium-grade Ivory League brain grooming, making yourself look so stupid by trying to fuck with us with this bait and switch schtick.” My voice was no doubt tinny and broken by static, but it got his attention. He pulled his face out of his screen, took off his glasses and glared, as if trying to see through space and time.

“Who is this?” Rodney set his tablet down.

“I think you know. I’m the silver lining in this mushroom cloud of a former city which you so obviously loathe. By the way, that Autonomobile fuel cell design you’ve got there in your datavault is sheer perfection. Artwork. Chinese IP cyberspies couldn’t have reverse engineered it better in a thousand years.”

“How did you know- How did you get ahold of that?”

“Details, details. I’ll let you pull all-nighters scanning through your server logs for the next few days trying to find that little “perfect storm” of bugs which I exploited. We don’t have time for that right now.”

“What do you want?”

“Same thing we agreed upon before. The Cage.”

“It’s crawling with CyberSec fauna out there, you’re probably looking at the drone swarms on your MRI right now. How can I be sure one of your operators isn’t compromised, won’t blow me wide open with an intercepted com?”

“It’s not going to have any rotten apples, because they’re hunting for apples and we’re oranges. We’ve been working for months without a single in-op transmission interception and I don’t plan on breaking that record. And even if there is a SNAFU, you’re protected as an associate. You’ve got an immunity deal with Generation Hex, backed by the full faith and credit. And, unlike the US government, we always bailout the little guy.

You’re hotfabbing cars for real people to drive, but how long are you going to let the fat cats in Ameribank City drive you, control your destiny? Hiding around in holes, giving up your rights, your dignity, your humanity, in exchange for another day of survival in hell. When are you going to take the wheel? Don’t you want to get back at the assholes who destroyed any and all possibility of the ‘good life’ that you’ve spent your entire life spinning their gears like a good little hamster for? All so the Blue Bloods could have another twenty mansions in Martha’s Vineyard they never live in, another junket in the imperial suite of some Geneva hotel, another fifty non-autonomous Maseratis ordered merely for display, never to be driven? Well, we’re serving up that revenge, on a chilled silver platter, right next to their $20,000 retsina. We’re tearing down the Wall, one cell tower, one offshore bank account at a time.”

“Look, I just can’t risk it.”

“Risk what? We’re in a goddamn war here, it’s a risk to just sit by the wayside and let Blue County turn the West Coast and the rest of the world into an uninhabited Martian desert. We’re the toilet bowl of the super rich, and if we don’t start swimming up, we’re only headed further down the tubes.”

“I’m not interested in buying war bonds. I need real ROI. I’ve got niche here, buyers. The sniffers find out I’m moonlighting for Hex Gen, a known hacktivist network, I’m over. This is systemic risk on my balance sheet I can’t hedge.”

“You’re guaranteed to go under, you don’t help us turn this Titanic around. How long before some stray heatseaker with an antimatter payload wipes you off the asshole of the USA that is District Ten like a shitstain? How long until some big dark market player decide they don’t really like other Plebians developing their own intellectual property if it cuts into their market share, and they take you out like they did your Primo? Survivability drops to zero faster than minimum wage in the Ashlands.”

Rodney stood, silent, churning, electric tattoos flashing faster, brighter as his heartbeat elevated. Hieroglyphic Voldemorts and Spanish Conquistadors blazed bright crimson red, consuming vast swaths of his chest.

“I know you’re not just another cold survivalist, Rodney. Think of those kids. We both know it’s only going to get worse. How long do you think they can hold out here?”

Rodney’s homies-in-law returned with ponderous clear plastic sacks of some fine silvery powder, like crematorial remains, or volcanic ash. The one in the stupid sideways beanie yanked open a feeder tray in the posterior of the 3D printer, nearly breaking it in the process. Tweedle dumb whipped out a butterfly knife, sliced open the top of the bag with all the elegance of an epileptic kindergartener, spilling a good amount of the grey powder on the crotch of his shorts. Leeloo gagged, no doubt automatically formulating an unspoken pre-mature ejaculate joke. Ambiently emasculating.

“Pour shit mo’ tight, foo,” his partner chastised. They did at last manage to refuel the printer with the granulated steel, with several more scoldings from the resident alpha male.

Rodney’s shoulders heaved in a sigh, bioluminescence receding.

“Fine. You can have the Cage. One hour. I’m sending the authorization codes through your ‘liaison’ here.”

“Direct link, no wireless,” Leeloo approached, outstretched her arm, pulling back black shirt cuffs over pale skin to reveal her wrist’s IVSB jack. Rodney did the same, interlocking palms. They synced up, initiated the transfer, forearm LEDs flickering. Biodata was pretty much the most secure you could get on the street. Perfectly concealed, difficult to steal without a skill saw. Viscous substrate made the stored bytes invulnerable to EMP wipe attacks and remote downloading. In the age of ubiquitous electromagnetized silicon, the meat became a kind of shield, a sanctuary of flesh. And given the exposure of one’s central nervous cloud network, allowing a nefarious party to blow out your heart with an adrenaline hyperspike, a direct IVSB transfer was also a testament of trust. The closest thing to a binding contract, in a world where trust in governments, business, economies, paper money, had been completely destroyed by endemic fraud, fiat, and exploitation. A wrist-to-wrist blood pact, sealed in commingled electrons.

“500 Ts, right?” Rodney said, ejecting his arm from Leeloo’s as the transfer completed.

“No, you know we only pay in silver grams. Untracable, untrackable, no counterparty risk. It’s the only way to fly in the business. Blood and bullion,” I corrected.

“Right. Silverspook. Should’ve known.”

With the 3D printer’s metallic stock replenished, Rodney re-ran the latest build of his rearview mirror program. Bursts of compressed air, like a craft lifting off, as the additive manufacturer sprang to life. A chrome steamroller-like mechanism oscillated back and forth across the plane of argent powder, laying down successive layers of binder. It was like watching the micrometer-thin slices photographed by magnetic resonance imaging of a brain. Not a minute later, the machine completed its work. It left a cube of powder, looking exactly as it had at the start of the job. Rodney reached in, pulling out a perfect replica of a Xinjiao Phasma rearview mirror. He blew loose grains, revealing metal, plastic and glass components printed straight in, moving parts in smooth working order. Leeloo followed him into a back room, containing an equally perfect replica of the rest of the Phasma, from tail lights to lithium batteries to supercapacitor-powered electric motors. Rodney installed the rearview, adjusting it for optimum visibility.

“Let’s get driving,” he smiled.

The Silence: Kennedy High

The school was a sagging public husk, the color of dead trees, and now served as the scratch paper for urban-tribal grafitti tagging battles, squatting cubby holes for the Deadweight refugees of the endless economic recess. Frayed steel reinforcements wormed out like bone fragments from fractures in the concrete. The layout itself was indistinguishable from a prison; high barbed walls and claustrophobic passages, CCTV panopticon of a since-failed mini police-state. Since handed on the torch of civ-lib infringement to the far more menacing, off-balance sheet tentacles of Gnossis and the Olympian cabal of information-financial empires, who’d hollowed their nation-state Titan-parents into a North American Weimar Republic. The school was, ironically, an apotheosis of 80’s apocalyptic riot fear, rode in on a dark wave of paranoia over children’s safety. Infamously designed, like other Cali schools, by the San Quentin architect. Bullet proof polycarbonate windows the size of police car dividers. Several glass panes had been chiseled out of their cavities, leaving random empty sockets of jagged concrete, like the methed-out mouth of a stage four wyre addict. The impervious quartz probably serving now as anti-riotpolice riot shields in guerilla firefights against Cybersec’s drone paramilitary. Kennedy High’s star spangled banner was somehow yet waving despite the surrounding entropy, flying bright amongst the red glare of car fires and distant artillery skirmishes burning the night an eternal crimson twilight, some grand sardonic District Ten joke biled up by its collective subconscious. It was nice to see that Americans could still pull together to accomplish great things.

The bombed-out factor of Kennedy High was extreme, even among the municipal dereliction all around, and the rubble lay with a certain archaic stillness that suggested it had been hit long before the Intellectual Property Wars or the Plebland Austerity Riots. Caused, perchance, by some unforeseeably Gaiagenic Black Swan disaster, an earthquake turned armchair humanitarian guilt-sink. Or more likely, a stray missile mis-launched by a Killerhunter autono-drone, whose iffy slave-labe North Korean QA allowed the hypersonic deathmachine’s buggy AI to turn AWOL. Or, perhaps, the school’s decimation was the result of active human malfeasance, the only commodity in abundance nowadays. Whatever the true culprit, the truth was now redacted from the universe’s cache by the sandblasts of time; any bombshell fragment, any fingerprint of high-explosive residue that might indict someone had long been sandpapered by weather, fallen down a storm drain. The digital media footprint of the event would’ve equally vanished beyond the one-hundred-forty character memory horizon of contemporary humanity, attention spans eroded by a half-century’s outsourcing of mental faculties to ubicomp. Smartphone Zen retardation, 24/7 connectivity imprisonment by the ever shrinking digital Now, the last page of status updates, this moment’s car-crash. In our world, history washed away like unnoticed dead bodies swept down the Hudson, amongst shoals of shredded bank paper. To be swallowed by the vast sea of last-moment’s Shiny #trend, the bitrotting, fundless remains of actual longform journalism soundbytten to meaningless shreds by bottom-dwelling pseudo-reporter clickwhore feeding frenzies, regurgitated by aggregator leeches, erased finally into oblivion by the cleaner wrasse of corporate reputation scrubbers. The uberglomerate’s personal free market incarnations of the Ministry of Truth.

“Ohmguhz, Kennedy High, I used to go here. Fuck this place.” Krash Koarse vocally broadcasted a dozen decibals too loud. With corporate sensorwebs engulfing the world like fallout, physically shouting was the meat-quivalent of Chirping your VerID hash and TorrentCoin account number to the known universe on Friendbook, like public fucktard number one. What am I talking about, “like”?

“Dosboot said right here. Unless I’m geohacked. Which is impossible, so we should be standing at the end of the rainbow.” Krash Koarse backhanded the stone age LCD readout of his radio frequency meter. “Piece of shit paleogear must be bricked.” The kid flipped his annoying fucking devil lock that was supposed to be steemo-coldpunk-fanime or whatever musical chairs label it was this millisecond. I swear I would cut that fucking thing off with my nanotube shank he did that one more time. Maybe accidentally knick a pretty little emerald eye.

“You scanning GSM too? They could be pushing any spectrum here, FYI.” Leeloo advised, grazing Krash Koarse’s arm with her halogen white Snooki nails that jammed the fashion signal of her exgoth-turned-stable-single-mom black jeans with the branding equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy.

“What? Yeah, of course I’m scanning GSM. Pfuh.” The n00b unsuccessfully tried to bury his fail under a façade of relaxed posturing and random button presses. It was obvious that for “Krash Koarse” (what the fuck kind of alias is that?) manipulating a real device was beyond his smart-gadgetified head, so used to being manipulated by dVices that he had to reflexively check a Gnossis search engine to remember his own name. Another skull datamined of its grey matter, leaving a walking ‘net-dependent vegetable with chronic anterograde amnesia. Like the rest of the “Premium Internet” brainslave herds, forking over arms and legs to tech giants just to recall on their pocket-neocortexes how to button their cuffs and tie their shoes. Stumbling like blind infants as they reached for their ‘Gnossis maps’to download directions just to make it around the corner to the grocery. You knew when they jacked the price of wireless service, forcing the poorest links to fend without their search, their mental wheelchairs. The next wee, news feeds would be flooded with hundreds of thousands accidentally napalming gas stations with lit cigarettes, sudden infant homicides would skyrocket as mothers bottle fed Diet Coke to their babies. Course, the MSM-generated tweets cloaked in astroturfed robo-avatars would disinform everyone that the explosions were the result of World Class War suicide terror, and that the infant deaths were due to lack of proper and regular “vaccinations” which were Trojan horses for biosubversion and involuntary drug addiction. And the digitally lobotomized hoi polloi, without the mental scaffolding to disagree, accepted it. The Digital Revolution was making Pol Pot look like a small time butcher. A more streamlined Final Solution, like wars or the crack dropped by the CIA like weed killer into black and minority neiborhoods in the 70’s. filled the role of stabilizing hyperinflation by killing off demand, or in the Plebland case, simply eliminating the unnecessary worker. Astounding how you could wipe out several billion years evolution of pre-Cambrian spatiotemporal awareness with a decade of gadget abuse. I wouldn’t wager on him making it through boot camp.

And neither would Maxx, who had ADHDed off to test his Genie-Gene™ biohacked “hammer fists” on a no-parking street sign. Screeching plosives each time the lugnut haymakered the sheet metal with his hypertrophied knuckle bones, bulging like ossiferous battering rams. Weather-curled paint flakes poofed up like toxic confetti, to be inhaled by his dilated nostrils. But in Maxx’ dire case, the brain damage might actually have made him smarter.

Raised by rats in some Ashlands refugee tenement, part Samoan part Siberian, Maxx was a refrigerator, physically and mentally. Keanu Reeves on a strict regiment of steroids and paint thinner. After you finish unwravelling your braintube around how a Samoan and Siberian would ever find themselves in the same geospatial vicinity and reproduce, there was the more pressing connundrum of how to keep the bull from wrecking the China shop for five minutes. But Maxx was insurance muscle, and it never hurt to walk with a big stick, especially in District Ten.

“Maxx, buddy, let’s cage the hulk for a bit, k?” I sighed. He paused for a beat, gave me this vacant bullmastiff look, then resumed piledriving as his brain’s angular gyrus failed to connect the dots and decode the figure of speech.

“The shackles of the shadow plutonomy set upon us by the bastard children of capitalism, those errant barons of the Digital Endarkenment, cannot be broken by clenched fists, but by clasped hands.” Philacrat addended from behind a bird’s nest of dreadlocks and puffy eyes drowning in seas of weed-laced LSD. Fucking professional vaporware PhDs. Another entirely different phyla of Ashland creature, evolved isomorphically to be just as annoying. The manchild would’ve been useless as the litany of embossed wax-sealed paper he rode in on and the academic-ese seasoned word-salad he subsisted on but for his Enclave sugarparents connections and a marksmanship proficiency, randomly acquired through some prof’s gig-security bullshit elective entitled “Interpretive Riflery”.


***

Join Generation Hex they said. Hack the Planet they said. I was supposed to be busting down corporate datavaults, throwing wrenches into the Enclave’s corrupt computerized system of economic machination and outright violence spun as “counter-jobless-insurgency”. Or at least training an elite team of hacker-operatives. But here I was babysitting a daycare for meme-gurgling script kiddies, braindead meatheads and runaway haute-poseur trustafarians entertaining their La Resistance and cyberpunk badass pipe dreams. One of’em was even wearing a goddamn Matrix trench and shades.

Yes, shades. At night.

Cleaning up their fuck-ups, as they free-associated and loled at each other in txt speak. I swear I could hear their neural constellations disintegrating, every time one of them opened their mouth or checked a Feed. If these were the ‘best minds of a generation’ the San Fran jobless Ashlands could offer up against Gnossis, Ameribank and the mogul overlords, we might as well just throw in the towel.

I patched a back channel through StormCloud to Dosboot, the Hex-Gen handler and asshole in chief back at HQ, towel in hand.

“Welcome to uncle Chai’s MexiThai takeout. Try our new pad thaiquitos. Press one to hear our menu. Speak the name of the dish or dishes you’d like to order, after the tone.” Cultureless female automated-response voice.

“Isn’t it a Holiday in Cambodia?” I deadpanned the human handshake. Squall of white noise then the static cut out to silence, like rustling fabric, like a mask coming off.

“You. This better be the second coming of Steve Jobs or they’re going to Bradley Manning your ass in solitary for a fortnight.” The voice was a retro chimera, composed of Super Mario coin-bleeps and 14.4 kbps modem fireworks, molded through a vocoder into English phonemes, then animated by an autotune. A singing Nintendo. The melodification was supposedly always a randomly selected song, though I suspected Dosboot nefariously chose them for contextual irony/annoyance. This time the voice was answering in Rick Rolls. Classic Dosboot.

“It’s FUBAR, Dos. I can’t do this. These n00bs, they couldn’t hack their way into their own Friendbook accounts if they rubbed all five braincells together and OD’ed on synaptic accelerators. I’m beyond done here.”

“Have a little faith there, Nietzsche. They’ve all met the prereqs of basic training, they’re all qualified.” Dosboot’s ‘Ghost of Christmas 80’s’ voice changed stations, now channeling Eye of the Tiger. Qualifeeeeeeyed. Minimoog bassline galloping over a rocky TR-808 drum machine. Fucking asshat was probably laughing his ass off with his hand over the mic.

“That’s bullshit and everyone, including CheX, knows it.”

“The one of which we do not speak!”

“What’s it matter? The great Master CheX, legendary hacker who took out the Citycorp bank and Totech servers with nothing but a pee-wee whistle and a galvanized paper clip. The whisper lurking in the ASCII walls of every encrypted IRC channel, the go-to namedrop of every upstart lowbit-boy, the grand story upon which geeky apathetic atheists found religions. And where the hell is he? MIA since the burning of ChromeNet.” The 8-bit flourishes died down so long I thought Dosboot had hung up.

“Tell me about your father.” The voice finally said in a fifty-cent East German Freud accent. “Unfortunately, comrade Silver Spook, we’re short on ground troops after the last Cybersec sting, during the Golden Gate raid.”

“So, what, we going to put out posters now? Start a Chirper account? ‘Like!’ us on Friendbook? Enlist in Generation Hex in return for prepaid college tuition?” We once were warrior-hacktivists, taking out the fat cats, corporations, bankers, hard-right fanatics, censors, governments, all the toxic waste that the weak, cowardly masses scared of loosing their meal tickets let build up like tumors of cholesterol on an artery wall. One for all and all for the lulz. Generation Hex had been a core cadre of random alpha-hackers surrounded by an umbra of anonymous volunteers. ‘Rhizomatic decentralized organization’ or whatever the tenure-track buzz-vulture bloviators were calling it from their cushy armchair-mounted Chirper feeds while we were busy doing the revolution in the real world. But now we were out, actively recruiting, like some kind of 20th cen army. Key leaders had gone dark, and words like “mission quotas” and “clients” had started burbling up like oil bubbles in the StormCloud chatter. It was feeling all a little too eerie, too, dare I say it, ‘corporate’.

“This is not what I signed up for, Dos.” Another breath of interference that might’ve been leaves rustling or a server farm stirring awake. Or a human breath. A car alarm truncated the sound.

“Change is coming, old friend. Generation Hex, this… group, movement, terrorist organization, revolution, whatever you word it. We are assymetrical, starfish, spontaneous. Prone to combust, volatile. We are Legion, like all upwellings; poltergeists of the zeitgeist. We are everyone and no one, and, thus, we are anyone. We become anyone who Is Someone, enough. Unstable, like the roiling void of the quantum vacuum waiting to Become, like a pencil standing on its head, waiting for the slightest push. Push is coming to shove, Spook, in many directions at once. All you can do is be ready when Movement happens. And make sure the little starfish are ready as well. Everything changes. But nothing is truly lost.”

“Alright, alright, Yoda. I get it. Just stop misquoting Neil Gaiman.”

“Touche mein brunter! Hang in there for this mission, I’m sure you’ll get transferred to a desk job. Viva La. Go on fight the good fight.” Dosboot signed off to the tune of Anarchy In The UK. Typical.

***

“Second rule of Generation Hex. Leeloo. Go.”
“Never EVER use the Internet, social media, or the cloud,” she recited verbatim, complete with requisite audible caps on the “ever”, no hesitation.
“Precisely. No one cares about the Fruit Loops you ate for breakfast or wants to see pics of your latest bender. But more importantly, social media is an INSTANT violation of rule #1: Do not get sensed. Face-2-Face should be the communication mode of first and last resort. If you can’t Face-2-Face, go for Necrotech: abandoned landlines, Web 1.0, carrier pigeons, smoke signals, ANYTHING but the mainstream cloud. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES may you use a shiny sheep’s dVice over any of the Premium Internets.”

“This aspect of Generation Hex will undoubtedly be the most difficult hurdle for you n00bs to overcome with your ubiquitous dVice addiction. This means absolutely no Angry Hamsters, no Friendbook, no Chirper updates, no Gnossis Search, no Direction Finder. There will be withdrawals. You will become disoriented, nauseated, suffer panic attacks, crises of identity, and possibly a nervous breakdown. You will writhe and cry for your precious touchscreen in your sleep. But this is a necessary phase in order to release you from the ‘vice’ that is your dVice. In order to master technology, you must first emancipate yourself from your slavery to technology.”

“First rule of Generation Hex. Krash.” I spun my Hexpad on the heel of my palm, awaiting an answer.
“Um, uh.” He squinted, I could see his hand twitching towards his coin pocket, itching for his dVice. “Thou shalt not get sensed.” He gasped through gelled bangs.
“Good. Why is this rule #1. Philacrat, enlighten us.” I began to pace, unconsciously.
“If they can sense you, they’ve got you. Invisibility is priority #1.” Dreadlocks noted.
“Oooh, scary. The Gnossis boogeyman is watching!” Krash pulled the edge of his Neo coat up over nose and mouth, in a mock-spy act drawing a round of lulz.
“Go on, laugh it up. Part of the Hex-Gen mindset is the cultivation of paranoia. This principle is exponentially more important while you are active in a mission. The eyes of Cybersec fully permeate every inch of fiberoptic cable, spectrum of wireless communication, every CCTV and drugstore security camera, with shadow fleets of drones disguised as everything from hummingbirds to humans.” A fly simultaneously landed on Maxx’ shoulder. He recoiled violently, swatting it as if it contained H8N3 frog flu.
“In truth, hyperawareness is about common sense. You get careless, you get tracked, you’ll find yourself neck deep in three months of solitary, one of the Big Corrections private prisons, or biking your legs off in the Enclave’s human power plants, make a Chinese sweatshop look like a Swiss junket. There is no touchy-feely human rights-respecting progressive government. There is no Miranda Hand-holding, Habeas Corpus, just insurgents and enemy combatants with brainmatter containing vital info which must be neurohacked using any cruel and unusual means necessary. You better fucking believe the Plutos’ Big Brother really is out there. And not just watching you but reading your emails, listening to your Friendbook convos, tracking your cellphone triangulated GPS coords. They know you. They know you biblically. They know you better than the staphyllocus bacteria populating your intestinal tract knows you. True paranoia is defined by wholly imaginary threats, like schizo nutjob conspiracies, OCD hand-washer germophobia and Al Qaeda boogeymen. In our case, the threats are as real as chromosome bombs.”
I paused, letting their little imaginations ferment that last thought stream, no doubt constructing morbid images of sudden killswitch death, bursting arteries and artificial cancers, spurred into rapid metastasis by a mouseclick.
“Alright, let’s get on with the entrance exam, shall we.”

***


We trekked around the premises, looking for better reception. The school library’s Greco-deco columns had buckled inward, as if it had imploded under the inescapable gravity of some singularity, the institution now a mountain of weed-sprouting rubble. Deeply dead, though weather and/or battle-induced physical collapse occurred long after the library’s spirit and raison d’etre had been extinguished by pervasive e-readers and the usual status quo illiteracy devolution. A humane euthenization.

“Krash, you need to switch to isotropic mode. You’re in X-axis.” I attempted, futilely, to illustrate this 5th grade Cartesian geometry concept, drawing imaginary latitudes and meridians with my index finger on the miniature orange 76 ball protruding from the frequency sensor. Krash Koarse sprained an underused hippocampus attempting to recall concepts without his Gnossis search engine crutch – one of the mission parameters – and he whined the telltale whine of the Chattering Class. An infant’s milk-bleat formed in an adult larynx. I grated a strata of enamel off my teeth.

“Oh, here we go. Wait, this is just some stupid Ken High derelict signal, wuhtehfuh,” Krash meh’ed.

“You really think a high school server farm survived a tomahawk missile and a decade of rain damage? Come on. That’s just network camo.” I pulled out my Wi-Fi anylyzer, black square the size of a Noughties phone, held it up to their open-mouthed stares.

“The VerID shows up like a gov node but the signal’s got orthogonal frequency-division, multiple access. 6G tech, gotta be a Gnossis hotspot.” Leeloo elucidated with jarring competence in her twee-goth voice.

“Good. Very good.” Which it was, excellent diagnosis, even. “Were you a network admin in a past life, perchance, Leeloo?”

“Not really. Just a fast learner and an ex-IT assistant at a Bay Area plumbing headquarters. Before natural-language expert systems undercut IT jobs and specially tooled construction bots eliminated human plumbers, putting me and my potential bosses all out of jobs.” She did that rolling vacant shrug endemic to West Coast American teen girls. It lent her an air of crass innocence, for a moment.

Leeloo had the most seniority of the Hex-Gen prospects, and the most promise. She was smart enough, another seed of potential left un-nourished in the badland remains of the “Land of Opportunity”, ruined by our parents’ generation. Bright, but severely handicapped when it came to romantic involvement. Caked foundation smoothing out the assymetrical topography of once-broken cheek bones told a history of violence addiction; chronic male-abuse junkie, inseminated by a childhood incident, probably. Slit-back t-shirts revealed ovals of flesh like soft brown slugs. Cool grey wolf’s eyes glowing in densely layered shadow. In the artsy diffuse dayglo of the warzone, she might’ve been mistaken for a nu-goth cam-porn microdiva. One of the grad student Suicide Girls, filling the funding void left by the barbed divorce of FaFSA and Pell grant budget gutting with anonymously redacted credit card payments made by men in cold marriages and jackdicts desensitized to their airbrushed android Pleasure Dolls. Seeking more believable interactive fantasies. Kinky for the real, damaged-slumgirl thing. Reality drew a premium in the enclave’s Matrix of overdesigned silicone breasts and sterile celeb-clone faces, making Leeloo a Velveteen Rabbit among Barbies. Pain, in Gated Heaven, was alien, and pain could not be faked, though the persona artists certainly tried.

I felt for her, I did. She reminded me so much of mom. But she had to stop falling for these idiots like Krash. I guess his saccharine benignity would be an upgrade from what she’d come from. And she needed a fatherfigure for that bun in her oven.
Ind Cell Tower

“According to the meter, the cell tower should be right where that flag pole is standing.” Krash said. “Wait, that means…” Thatta boy, click the Legos together...

Philacrat guffawed, sending his dreads sailing back like the black snakes of a roboriotcop netgun. “Gnossis tech, ensconced in the shell of America. How poetic.” Of course it had to be in the flagpole, the artifact most likely to outlast time and bombs. It’d taken them long enough to figure out.
Ashlands

I glanced around at the Ashlands, formerly middle class San Fran neighborhoods from Richmond to Inner Sunset, razed into Southeast-side ghetto by a 60% unemployment rate’s worth of white collar firings and “austerity” pillaging. It was quiet tonight. Nothing but the usual muted bubblepack pops of distant firefights, hooded bulky shadows of looters scuffling away, the nightly clamor of household turmoil; spouses screaming at each other and their kids, the occasional dish shattering, women screaming, normal domestic abuse. Gunfire erupted from the Payday Loans/Cash 4 Gold place, slotted between the tattoo parlour and the Amazing Bass car audio shop sprouting like fungus from the rotting redwood log of a bankrupt and liquidated Benz and Nobel’s bookstore. A guy in a red-stained suit stumbled out onto the sidewalk along with a screaming woman. It was ok, though; police departments across the country had closed down due to budget gutting, so we didn’t have to worry about any cops showing up during our operation.
A terminally laid-off male attorney shambled across the street. Weather-frayed Gordon Gekko coiffe, womanly hands grimed black, and a bloodied nose, he gave the vibe of a cushy declawed housecat forced out into the alleys with the migrant Toms. Came up and tried to offer us blow jobs. "Twenty TorrentBucks a piece, come on. I swallow, brush my teeth, look. Handjobs, fifteen dollars, let’s do this guys." We had Maxx frown, which shoed him off quick.

***

“This is fuckin’ boring. Where are these CyberSec n00bs? Chickenshits. I could pwn their servers with my eyes closed. Man, this is so blirk’ed,” Krash Koarse spurted some net lingo I didn’t recognize. He gave up on the signal hunt, dumped the frequency sensor in a jacket pocket, pulled out his dVice to check social media status updates.

Leeloo blinked inch-long lashes, tinkled laughter. She swiped his synthleather-clad arm with a bright flash of nail, like a cat batting at a juicy blue fin tuna. “Krash, you’re such a hellboy. Reminds me, Shirl and Xavier are totally down for Shinjuku night tonight over at their place, themes are red-n-black and steam-nazi-zombies. I’m planning to rock my Full Metal Necromancer. Think you’re up for it?”

“Yeah, I just need to make sure I’m back by 11, my friend’s vegan black metal band is playing at The Derelict, the guitarist is MIA and I need to sub for him.” Krash said, staring at the animefied avatar of Trent Reznor on his Life Planner app, which told him what to do every second of his life. A digital leash.

“Alright, alright, enough soc-networking the flash parties or smart mob indie shows or whatever. Focus on the mission, people.” I tried to nip their smartphone hyperactivity disorder, with all the hopelessness of a border collie herding an oxephant.

“Wait, let me check my Gnossis Nitelife Planner” Krash Koarse’s hand dipped again into his vacuum-sealed skinny jeans, defying several laws of physics in the process. More importantly, he was defying rule #3 of Hex-Gen: Do not use the Premium Internet, ever.

“Krash, what the fuck are you doing, you know the code,” I caged a scream. He pulled his hand out, the little over-designed obelisk of ivory plastic plugged into his wrist’s biojack.

“It’s a dumb rule. I don’t see why we can’t just use way faster 6G networks, all the best GnossisApps.” Krash shrugged flippantly. “‘We’re so not Evil.’ Haven’t you seen the Gnossis viral ads? Harry and Fergie, ‘Fuck the System’ Ft. BizNiz and Lord Dada? They’re only ranked at the top of all the musical taste recommendation engines, duh. They’re cool hacker geeks just like us, totally cyberpunk legit. I’d give my Angry Hamsters account and my level 70 Werewolfaerie zeppelin mage to have a Red Bull with’em.”

Leeloo’s heavily lined eyes bounced back and forth between Krash and I, giggling went up a half-octave too high. The A-student good girl caught between the peer and hormonal pressure of cheering the bad-boy she's got a thing for, or taking the teacher's side.

Krash Koarse had already queued up an InstaFlix video playlist on the palm-sized v3D screen of his dVice. An a-cultural soundtrack blared forth, bastardized together thoughtlessly from audioclips of 90’s Panzer-boot-dance, 70’s hard punk and 80’s black-fist hip hop. Would’ve made Vicious, Reznor, and Chuck D roil in their graves, buried in the mausoleum of a Melrose Tower Records. The “geekstar” CEOs of Gnossis swaggered about in black leather dusters and shades, plugged into the back of their heads were chrome brainjacks stolen from the set of that millenial Chris Cunningham vid. They were ‘spittin troof to tha system’ in that trendily awkward nerd rap, as they typed command line ‘hax’ into bankvault keyboards. Android latex chicks did bungee backflips out of skyscraper windows. It was the unholy spawn of a noughties techno-thriller rehash, a transhumanist infomercial, and a crunk music video.

The four of them gathered around the little glowing altar, staring transfixed, mouths gaping in that drooling “o” that knocks off 50 IQ points.

"Krash, guys, maybe we should stay focused on the mission. I mean, this is not just another session of Caper gaming or the paintball-and-animatronics simulations back at the Generation Hex Warehouse. This is the real deal, someone could get hurt, or worse..." Leeloo made a valiant attempt, but ultimately succumbed to the attention tractor beam of the 'Tube, hypnotized by the cuteness of Krash's annoying crybaby bangs. I firmed up for an intervention. Tuned down the cool science teacher vibe a bit, played up the smug alpha-hacker role.

“Look, kid, I don’t care what you think you know about those two Gnossis PR puppets, or what you think about the rules. You need-… Would you turn that goddamn thing off when I’m talking to you!” I raised my voice to the brink of yelling, trying to keep it discrete. I was loosing them. I felt like a single foster parent facing down an orphanage of crack babies.

Krash looked up from the video, flipped his flame-dyed triangle of bangs like a middle finger. “Why should I? What the hell do you know? All you ever do is make us turn off our phones, hike around in dumps like this. We never get to hack nothing.”

“Krash, you listen to me you little shit-“

“You’re just an old man, playing with your old broken junkware, ‘Silver Spook’. You’re like a hand calculator in a 6G world.” The others laughed, returned to bobbing their heads to the autotuned, algorithm-generated pop-mush that was supposed to pass for music.

Now, I like to think I’m a pretty patient, Zen guy. I don’t drum my fingers on the supermarket conveyor when the elderly lady is informed, over the course of a half-hour argument with the android checkout doll, that the foodstamp program has been discontinued since the US government was downgraded to triple-F, and perhaps grandma should try growing button mushrooms in her old shoes. When I get jacked in the MegaMart parking lot by some junkie wyrehead looking to score some cash so he can jam more Troadz into his cranium, I don’t hack the circuits sticking out of the black-caked, infected holes in his skull and sell the Voodoo-zombie as a sweatshop slave to the Chinese for a wet wad of T-Bucks. Even though I could. But I choose not too, and the financial straits I’m in right now, I won’t say I’m not tempted by the grey market cash, some nights.

Which is why I tell myself that what I’m about to do next is for the sake of a child’s education, even though my superego is insistently informing me it’s really cause I just want to wipe this fucking shitstain off the face of the Earth like a bad sector from a hard drive.

I whip out my HexBook, slab of dulled onyx-black fiberglass that could be an East-Asian Union gov-issue laptop, but could just as easily pass as a long-tail reprinted hardcover of The Naked Lunch. Nowadays if you’re carrying around an honest-to-Gutenberg, tree-bark and ink book, people will cross the street diagonally and rubberneck at you, the retro lunatic ex-librarian or humanities professor, still clinging to his primitive bound dumbscreens filled with long-winded text messages. More importantly, Blue County’s robofuzz will as quickly spam-filter you out of its Person Of Interest database, dismiss you as a future- and culture- shocked Luddite, a bad acid-flashback regurgitated by the 20th century. The corporate enforcement AIs will file your dossier in the “benign irritant” subfolder, next to the PTSD shellshocked Vietnam and Iraq vets that once rotted to death in the streets, left with only a cardboard sign for food and a purple heart to use as toilet paper and dry their tears on the colder nights when the bottle is empty and the forgetting is hard. Forgetting was even harder for the homeless English and History PhDs, who had a degree in remembering.

I start churning away commands on the HexBook, linking up wirelessly to Devil Lock’s toy as the kiddies shit and giggle away. Krash’s dVice has a universal IVSB jack (intravenous serial bus) plugs directly into his left brachial artery, and the gadget is powered by blood glucose and oxygen, artificially metabolized into sweet electricity. The Gnossis dVice is built for maximal connectivity, while confidentiality is not even on the table, thanks to 95% of the planet in near-vegetative state not knowing or caring how their beloved tech works as long as they can still get Jersey Shore and can still dig virtual turnips in Farm Wars. The privacy settings are all worthless PR smokescreen; it takes a PhD in computer science to navigate the gauntlet of loopholes, and Gnossis’ indentured code monkies change the settings every week. The little dVice gadgets are like spy-sponges, soaking up all that juicy personal data which Gnossis or whoever can then sell off to advertisers or identity thieves or dissident-hunting dictators or to enemy nations/corporations. Or to severely fucking disgruntled hacker terrorist/revolutionary cell mentors like me.

So once I cut through the dVice’s outer shell of security, it was all cake; fields of unsecured data fanning out like delicious, gooey cake batter, ready to be kneaded, molded. Like a bank vault with the door wide open, the tellers insisting you help yourself, security guards handing out inkbomb-free bags like party favors.

From the dVice-to-bloodstream junction, it’s just a straight shot up the ulnar nerve, hard right at the shoulder blade to the central nervous cloud network and…

Krash’s stupid laughter is interrupted by a sharp cough, followed by a paroxysm of wheezing.

“What the f-“ he coughed again, wincing. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Dude, are you alright?” Leeloo sidled up to him, hands fluttering like white butterflies, uncertain if they should pat him on the back or give him a Heimlich.

“A decade ago, or several millennia in ‘net’ years, they had these things called inhalers. If you, say, had an acute asthma attack, you’d stick this little oval tube in your mouth, press a button, and breath in an aerosol hit of corticolsteroids, went straight to the lungs. They worked great, everyone with asthma carried one in their pocket. Talismans against the wheeze demon.” I illustrated, holding out my hand, taking a deep huff from an imaginary tube.

“Then along came pulmonary implants. The miracle of dispersed bioware, injected swarms of nanoscale machines permeating the body’s inner space, forming an intranet of ‘cloud computing’ right under your own skin. Choirs of American Med Association angels sang its praises on high, for their HMO pimps. They could automatically monitor your condition, 24/7/52, and if an asthma attack came on, the biocloud would respond by nanofabbing and releasing the appropriate medication directly to the affected area. It was brilliant! Now you didn’t have to lug around that cumbersome inhaler tube. Then, to make it even easier, they connected everyone’s internal nanomachine smart-inhalers, pacemakers, IVs to the internet, where medical service providers could easily update and control the bioware in your body. You didn’t have to see a doctor, didn’t even have to *think* at all, the machines would just take care of your asthma for you, batteries included! Course, the doctors weren’t too happy about that, physician and GP strikes set off like wildfire, but the HMOs just forced smiles, waved about the billions of dollars in ‘savings’ they were raking in as a result of no longer having to pay all those fat salaries bloated up by ten-years’ of med school. And pretty soon, the inhaler people went out of business, and inhalers went out of production, like betamax and paper books. If you still had an inhaler, man, you’d be so uncool. So inefficient! It’d be like using a hand calculator!”

By this time, the kid’s wheezing had started to sound like someone bouncing on a squeaky toy, and Krash’s pasty white face had blossomed flush and puffy, like a girl’s breast deep into a sex session.

“In asthmatics, such as you, the innerspatial network of bioware inside your body continuously secretes a trace amount of the appropriate steroid to the lung tissue preemptively to prevent the onset of asthma attacks. Unfortunately, over time, the body builds a dependence on this drug, and removing it causes an instant, acute withdrawal, like any other drug which one consumes profusely for long periods of time.”

I snatched the dVice out of Krash’s shaking hands, tossing it aside to clatter on the pavement.

“But it was ok, because HMOs would never think to hurt their own patients. Ah, our benevolent corporate dictators, our philosopher kings of the American health system.”

“Spook, maybe you should, ease up, man,“ Philacrat started. The other students had gathered around Krash like a trio of panicking first-day paramedics, hovering, but at the same time keeping their distance, as if they might somehow be infected with whatever hellion-juju had taken over their fellow padawan’s body. They were now shooting fearful glances my way, backing up, like I might bare multiple sets of serrated dagger-teeth at any moment.

“What the hell are you *hack* doing to me you fucking psycho!?” Krash spat. I turned a little virtual knob on my HexBook, like twisting a knife in a voodoo doll, and Krash’s compromised bionetwork obeyed, further reducing the coticolsteroid output to his lungs. His body had begun shaking, his torso heaving, as if it were attempting to purge itself of some demonic possession.

“Excuse me, Mr. Koarse, I am speaking now. We need to show respect to others while they are talking. Please raise your hand and wait your turn.” Krash didn’t raise his hand. He was in no condition to raise anything. The other three stared on in horror. No one else was feeling brave. I continued the lesson.

“Of course, most people didn’t realize what would actually happen if the buttons on their inhalers were no longer in their hands but run remotely by computers, computers programmed and controlled by major pharma companies. Companies who have since been subsumed by tech-financial megaglomerates.”

Krash toppled onto the sidewalk, bucking violently. I patted an avuncular hand on his shoulder. His bronchial squealing and whooping cough had ebbed, but it wasn’t a sign of improvement. Quite the opposite. The ominous “silent chest”. A point of no return.

“Settle down there, kid, you don’t want to accidentally whack your head on the curb and send yourself into a coma. Your body is just going into shock, the real hard broncho spasms are coming. Just ride it out.” The bright green eyes smouldered with teenage rage, glowing like cartoon plutonium rods, and I was quite certain he would’ve torn my throat out at that moment, if he had the necessary oxygenation in his arms and control over his nervous system to do so.

“Now, I’m betting you’re just dying for one of those ‘old broken junkware’ inhalers right about now, hm?”

I could see the fight leaving him now, being slowly replaced by pure insectile fear, Darwinian survival. Krash’s eyes bugged. He gasped for air like the last specimen of blue fin tuna, flopping on an Osaka dock.

“What’s that?” I bent over, cupping my ear. “I thought you wanted to do some ‘leet haxxing’? Well, this is us doing some haxxing. Pretty cool, huh? Or do I need to dye my hair with Clorox and binge on Hot Topic leather, stick computer chips in my skin in order to be ‘totally cyberpunk legit’?” Krash’s lips had waned ice-blue with cyanosis, and I wasn’t sure whether he was conscious enough to understand and reflect on my very important koan. This thought made me extremely angry, though I couldn’t be sure whether it was because a student would miss an important lesson or because I wouldn’t have the pleasure of knowing I’d epically zinged the little fucker.

“Spook, you’re killing him! You’ve made your point, let him go.” Leeloo outburst, finally. I’d been wondering when she was going to show some real color for her latest man-candy.

“You. You of all people should know better. We’ll be having words after this operation is over.”

I won’t lie; some bile-fermented primal part of me really wanted to kill him. I’d be doing the world and the human race a favor by cleansing the genepool of this sack of afterbirth shit out by womb of cybertard-space, this vapid braindead waste, this answer to the Fermi Paradox: species-wide gadget-based devolution, a Mcluhan-esque end game: the medium is the mass-extinction. The thought of Krash Koarse playing babydaddy to Leeloo’s unborn progeny was almost enough to send me over the brink. But then some insufferable other piece of me, that those sci-fi guzzling armchair nerds would call my “Ghandi neurons”, descended upon my napalm-filled heart, putting it out like God’s own fire extinguisher. And then all I see is this little snot-nosed kid, helpless, sniffling and cold, and it hits me like a bucket of icewater; I’m seeing myself. This is me, ten years ago, out on the street, blowing about aimless as a wind-tossed, month old newspaper, stupid and reckless and dadless and alone.

I turn on the bioware asthma meds, put the hack in full reverse, retract the digital tentacles from Krash’s intra-cloud and sever the connection to his dVice.

“How can I explain this to you in a language you can understand. ‘I find your lack of faith disturbing’.” But Krash’s eyes stay lifeless and inert and I get this black quicksand feeling. Oh God, he’s not breathing. I find myself mentally babbling half-remembered movie snippets of prayers to Gods I’ve never even considered believing in, hoping that one of those apathetic deities up there who seem to get off on watching us stupid talking monkies burn our world down might actually check their status updates for once and trade my life for this kid’s.

Then he hacks up a massive ball of brown phlegm, like the holcrux of Azazel from one of those exorcist thrillers, gasps for breath like he’s being born again. Leeloo is on him like a warm lavender-scented blanket, showering him with kisses and sweet inanities.

Published!

The Ghosts of Cloud City, a post-apocalyptic short storified episode of my earlier fiction is up over at the scintillating bunker of wonders that is Mythaxis. And a special shout out to Gil, webmeister and editor thereof, a man who truly does his darndest out of curatorial love. For while we highfallutin 'authors' lounge about in Starbucks spewing daydreamt hallucinations, those in the editorial cutting room toil unceasingly to polish the material into gleaming publishability!

I also particularly liked the header art he created for my story. Spot on interpretation.

Be sure to check out some of the other stories as well, I am truly honored to be situated amongst such talent.

The Troubleshooter Part 4 - Debugging The Class War

The Phasma’s lithium-air powered electric engines whined down like a CPU going into hibernation. Jack got out, patting it on its onyx-finished grapheme hood, a dog having completed his master’s task. Its 6G/wifi antenna wagged back and forth, almost in celebraton, as it piloted itself back out of the Cybersec employee entrance and to the nearest recharging station to quench its thirsty cathodes.

“Good morning, Jack – underscore - Newman. Your bodily presence is required by Director Winkleman in the War Room-“ The patrolling goliath-class security bot boomed. Its vocal synthesizer’s formants were selected purposefully to sound like the Skynet sci-fi military bot cliche, pop-cultural short hand igniting instantaneous fear and awe. Not that its Totech engineers had gone all bark-no bite and skimped on firepower; the Leviathan MK4 could level a city block in short order, if the economy wasn’t already taking care of that job.

“Ok, ok Gengis, I’m on it. And I thought we talked about pointing that gattling railgun in people’s faces. You’re never going to score with the vending machine if you come on all gung ho with the banana in the pocket thing.” Blasts of compressed air exhaled as the hulking twenty tons of metal obediently lowered its weapon in compliance

“Sorry Jack – underscore - Newman.”

“Oh, and ‘command rename self equals Jack Newman’, I’ve got no middle name.”

“Understood, Jack Newman.”

Ionsdaleite synthdiamond blast doors parted, the opalescent allotrope face marred by a black star-shaped burn mark. The only epitaph of the last suicide bomber, a Volkswagon packed with plastique explosives, driven in by some jobless Deadweight, turned terrorist.

“They’ve got to send some janitorbots to clean that shit up. Getting weird, you know? As if we need to be constantly reminded how badly the Pleb insurgents want to World Trade Center us.” Jack complained to the checkpoint guard as he squeezed his head into the qMRI/MEG brain scanner. The guard’s face was a mask of paramilitary professionalism.

“I agree sir, but the cleaners are malfunctioning. Head still, sir, you know the drill.” A thousand micro trodes glommed onto Jack’s cranium. Encephalometric identification was the new Black in security world. The machine flashcarded three randomly selected words (‘pig’, ‘justice’, and ‘blue’ this time) each causing a unique storm of neural firings mapping to Jack’s “envisioning” of the concept as it formed in his third-eye. The flux of thought-notes in turn harmonized into specific electromagnetic field symphonies, billowing colonies of idea association and metaphor generation, which the scanner matched to previous concept-cloud recordings of the user down to the quantum microtubules. Deep encryption, whose hash algorithm consisted of the user’s subconscious, their snowflake-unique personality, and whose key was the resulting stream of consciousness itself. Des Cartesian verification: “I think therefore I am me.”

EID was unbreakable, short of owning a living, atom-for-atom replica of the original noggin. You couldn’t even shove someone’s head in at gun point, as the scanner factored in the brain wave differentials resulting from duress. Thought-scans racked the brains of James Bond rehash writers and Tom Clancy clones alike; gone were the days of ghosting into covert compounds by peeling a micropore gel pad off a martini glass for a hand print, dangling an eyeball by the severed optic nerve before a laser scan. But they were +1 for Jack’s company. Of course recommendation-engine enabled MediaGen AIs wrote all the scripts and mashed up “your own personal movie” with a virtual keypress, so filmmaking itself had already gone the way of typesetting.

“How’s Suzy doing?”

“Good, sir. Tomorrow’s my day off, I’m planning to take her to Gagaland.”

“That’s great. Be sure to get some good footage. Holopics or it didn’t happen!” Jack unslotted his head as the machine cleared him.

“Of course, sir.”

“Well I better get in there and get them out of their handbasket.”

The Cybersec War Room was a sprawling mess of unoccupied screens strobing crisis-red, left vacant by employee machinesourcing. Understaffed threefold, and with demonstrations and riots spreading like wildfire across the skylight newsfeeds, all the king’s blazers and all the king’s polo shirts were scrambling to put Cybersec’s drone-army together again. So, basically, a usual day.

“Outstanding. What hemisphere of the sky is falling today, my brethren?” Jack cracked his knuckles as his dVice communed with the Cybersec intra-cloud, laminating another layar of context-info over his FOV. Avatar icons, framed in the Cybersec branding scheme of gold and blue popped up over the heads of team-mates with status microblurbs, all of which read, “stressed”. There were only seven human agents on the floor this morning, compared to the hundreds of robotic operatives deployed in the field and hundreds more AI handlers, fighting Pleb insurgents, preventing terrorist attacks by the billions of layed off workers who’d snapped. Near-pervasive automation of police and military. with humans handling the troubleshooting and highest-level issues, guiding overall objectives. Making sure the bot bureaus and armies were acting in the best interests of their owners, the private enclave megaglomerates, the only game in town after government budget gutting left law enforcement without enough change to pay for badges Three such ranking Troubleshooter agents under Jack pow-wowed around his terminal.

“Here’s the tweet briefing. With the help of that sexy patch you sent this morning, we’ve managed to plug most of the holes in the Sherlock 4.0s’ heuristics. But things are getting ugly out there and we’re running out of fingers here, Jack” Stasia, the colorful NorwAsian resident den mother and lead psych/social engineering agent reported, biting a tye-dye polished nail for emphasis/flirtation. “The Replicants seem to have stopped targeting innocents, thankfully. The fixed code eliminated the facial-rec bug and rooted out the false-positives we were getting for individuals on the kill-list and other wanted suspects.”

“Have the QA algs come up with an explanation for the bugs?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, it seems like the user info and social graphs Facebook sold us contained fabricated data which ‘framed’ innocent individuals.” Stasia snapped open a Facebook profile-pic of an innocent schoolteacher who had been gunned down. Steganographic overlay showed minute anomalous distortions; the ridge of a nose sharpened here, the geometry of a jawline squared there, effectively altering the identity registered by the 8-parameter Cognito algorithm. Jack sighed.

“Let me guess, we’re not sure if the data rot is coming from within Facebook or from someone paid to hack into Facebook and tweak certain users’ pics and social networks to make them appear like they’re connected to or harboring terrorists. Or if the tampering is coming from a mole right here in Cybersec itself.”

The Russian lead security consultant cleared his throat. “I assure, we have no security breach.” Sekyuritee bureech, interjected sharp, snide Slavic consonants which betrayed a Cold War one-up condescendence that refused to die, like the Cold War’s two errant once-superpowers, still limping along on the fumes of their own mythology. “I run hand-code omniheuristic firewall around server, four hundred million node botnet defense web with rotating protocol. Cybersec like Pentagon, or Kremlin more like. Even more secure than those, since I break in there four year ago, steal secret-“

“That’s enough, Kirov. Plausible deniability, comrade, plausible deniability.” Jack cut him off, then turned back to Stasia. “Well at least the bots aren’t homicidal anymore, that’s a plus in any rubric. Winkleman will be happy to have some good damage control news for the Meths upstairs.”

“Right. But…” Stasia nervously tapped the subdermal dVice beneath the skin of her forearm, powered by intra-artery hemoturbines.

“But.”

“But, apparently the roboagents’ threat-analysis threshold has dropped too low. We had one agent on Broadway and Eighth that didn’t attack until the hostile was about to point-blank it in the face with an RPG. Suffice it to say, that Replicant has been terminated.” Stasia deflated slightly, as if she could’ve prevented it.

“So essentially, we’ve got Ghandibots.” An older Samuel L. Jackson cleared the gravel out of his throat and spit on his own 5.11 Tactical Boots, kicking the Janinator bot as it whirred over dutifully to clean the saliva from its lord’s besmirched footwear. “Fuckin’ typical.”

“Thanks for the pithy framing, Darius. Ok, so we’ve got to up the Replicants’ fight/flight mechanisms. What’s the status on the riots?”

“See for yourself.” Stasia lobbed into Jack’s headspace a direct ocular, aural, and limited somatosensory uplink to one of the robo-operatives on the front line. Jack clicked “accept”, slid through a digital wormhole into the shoes of Replicant “GI134”.

RPLCNT. Remote Piloted Low-latency Cyber Neural Tele-operative. “Replicants” colloquially. The descendant of the Predator Drone and anthropomorphic robotics, the RPLCNT was the Holy Grail of the battlefield: the android soldier. The “skinjobs”, made popular during the Intellectual Property Wars, struck terror into the hearts of terrorists, bloodlust into the hearts of military-industrial complex thinktanks. In the age of zero-casualty war where machines killed your technologically disadvantaged enemies for you while you puppeteered them comfortably from your Pentagon armchair, what were once Earth-shaking events called wars were now one-sided video games – 4X real-time-strategy games with epic graphics. The usual roadblocks to wars of choice – public outrage as the flag-wrapped coffins started piling up – were stripped away, reopening a whole new and deadly chapter of brute-force colonialism. Any country that had some resource – oil, water, lithium – desired by some bigger, ostensibly “civilized” country was promptly invaded by soldierbots, leaving the ashes for UN peacekeapers to sort out. True colors were revealed as no cover story of “spreading democracy” or “protecting human rights” or “The War Against (Abstract Concept)” was necessary. No need to install a friendly genocidal dictator to maintain a steady supply of oil or slave labor. Hundreds of millions died beneath the cold steel barrel of remote-controlled terminators across the world. The Middle East and Africa were scorched into strip-mined wastelands in short order.

Plumes of smoke rampaged spitefully across the Corona commercial sky of Blue County Enclave, filling the gold white and blue reflected in the mile-high glass towers of Ameribank City with mad black ash the color of the San Francisco Pleblands. Dell Boulevard was a Great Flood of jobless marketing reps, nurses, biotech researchers, construction workers, lawyers, and every other niche and faction of obsolesced human protesting their obsolescence, overflowing the banks of the sidewalk. Millions upon millions marched, epithet-splashed signs held high, fists pumping in the air. Deafening cacophony, like two thirds of Bay Area were cavalcading down these streets: not far from the truth, given the 60% unemployment rate. They were dressed in their former work clothes – dark suits, firefighter turnout coats, ER scrubs – clinging unflinchingly to the threads of their fading identities. Roaring choruses of angry chanting came in disorganized viral waves, “No more automation!” “Eat the Plutos! Eat the rich!” “End the social cuts!” “I am not a gadget!” . Teams of humanoid-robot riot police carrying shields, stunwhips and microwave dispersal guns patrolled, spread thin by the sheer numbers, trying to keep the crowds away from storefronts, and occasionally entangling in skirmishes with the more violent rioters. The furious demonstrations stretched for miles, from the interstate all the way to Nexus Square in the financial district.

“Fear not, till Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane.” Stasia said, startling Jack out of his telepresence reverie. He windowed the robo-operative’s feed to his right eye and ear to split his focus between the Cybersec War Room and the demonstrations.

“Ok, this is bad, but not code red, yet. It’s not so out-of-the-ordinary: the protests and riots have been going on for months, their numbers have gone up maybe 30% since last week. The change is really only quantitative. Nothing our RPLCNT, military bot, and drone teams can’t handle.” Jack rejoined.

“Yes, perhaps. But quantity has quality all its own.” Kirov koaned cryptically, brows knitting as if recalling some painful demonstration of this concept in his days back in Sovietland.

“Right. ‘The Will of The People’ and everything, very touching. It might’ve even been a moving scene, if they weren’t hopeless Deadweights, inhibiting legitimate business and destroying private property.” Jack said.

A Starbeans and two McDenny’s had had their windows smashed in, gaping hole in the 99 cent double cheeseburger ad drizzling loose glass. Masked thugs short-circuited the android clerk with French fry lard and overturned the register in a cloud of green confetti, looting the cash. An Ameribank financial tower had been been defaced in radioactive green graffiti with tags reading, “Heister Barons” and “Too Big To Exist”. A fireman hurled a flare into a Lamborghini, setting it ablaze, only to see the fire put out by the wrist-mounted hose of a firefighter droid who had taken his job. A flashmob shoved the bot with its firehose into the burning car, then rocked the AI-driven firetruck till it toppled over, igniting a paroxysm of foaming mouths cheering with anti-robot schadenfreude.

“I don’t know, man, what’s so legit about fucking copyrighted RealDolls selling copyrighted-DNA vatburgers cooked by copyrighted 90 IQ microwaves? I mean, I’m no prized Harvard economist, but isn’t there supposed to be some good ‘ol honest human labor adding value in this supply chain, as opposed to just some aristocrats owning shit that makes shit by itself? I shooed off a fuckload a’ hookers back in my beat days, but at least they shook their asses off for their mon-” Darius’ voice was a black Tom Waits’ as he hacked a gob of carcinogenic phlegm, punctuating one of his chance warrior-poet insights. Jack ignored them.

“See, this is why computers need to run things. People will always get themselves into a downward spiral of nasty brutish fuck-upedness,” Jack captioned the scene.

Jack’s visual feed studdered as a thrown rock struck robo-operative GI134 in its polymer deltoid. Jack’s nerve-nanos, networked with his dVice, zapped him with electrostatic in his right shoulder, simulating the hit like a total-body rumble controller. Jack’s mount turned its head on its servo-powered neck in an automatic programmed reflex. Its facial rec immediately identified the hostile, unfolding a dossier above his head revealing every detail from his body temperature to his Funstation gamertag to the date and time of his first kiss. Langley, Jonas. 19. Two counts of minor theft from Enclave members, three counts of destruction of Enclave property, one count tampering with Enclave systems.

“Yeah, you like that, fucking toaster?” The little imp flipped his peacockish punk-cut, tossed another rock that rang the bot’s femur like a tubular bell. The bot however failed to engage the operative.

“Yeah, looks like we do need to up the aggression on these pacifist security bots.” Jack sighed. He whipped out a flurry of commands, which erected a virtual façade of realtime dubbuggers. He tested the junctures in the bot AI’s executive logic for the weak link that was providing the chrome soldier with too much conscience.

“Bingo, here we go.” Jack dislodged a neon silver key in the AI’s morality registry, spoke an incantation for voice confirmation. “Disengage Assimov Safety, all agents. Access code: X90D3C401” The first rule of robotics: “a robot may not injure a human being” thrown out the window as whimsically as cancelling a credit card. The operative’s human-like unconditional altruism vanished like a Catholic schoolgirl’s mores upon discovering the joys of a co-ed college kegger, or a politician discovering lobbyists. The newly malevolent GI134 immediately engaged its weapon systems, mapped a path between the hordes of protesters and began approaching the stone caster, who was hiding behind the now flaming Lamborghini.

“Jonas Langley, you are under arrest for assauling an officer. Put down your weapons. You have ten seconds to comply.” The RPLCNT’s voice was scientifically calculated to evoke fear and submission responses in the human species, a potent mix of lions roar and James Earl Jones’ Vader.

The punk flipped the bird and tossed another rock. The RPLCNT raised its arm toward the perp, its swat jacket and synthetic human skin showing for the first time. The tangerine peacock wave instinctively vanished behind the immolated sports car.

“Recalculating…” Darth Vader said, in its irritated GPS nav voice. Infrared revealed the little rebel was grasping the metal chassis of the vehicle, and the bot’s neural nets crackled, put together the concept of metal conductivity and electroshock incapacitation, formulating a plan. Something shuttered open in its palm, compressed air firing twin electrodes which struck the passenger door, delivering 1.2 million volts of electricity straight through into Peacock Head. His body ragdolled. GI134 made its way around the vehicle to discover him writhing on the ground in an epileptic mess.

“Resistance is futile, Jonas. You’re done.” Jack spoke through the medium of the bot. Though his words came through in the same fearmongerish voice, the miscreant could tell it was a human controller by the unmistakable change in inflection and diction. The rioter’s mouth twitched, foamed, but he eventually regained control of his vocal chords.

“F-F-Fucking Enclave fascists! C—c-come out of your climate-controlled b-b-bunkers and f-f-fight me, pussy!”

Jack bristled, engaged a virtual joystick, guiding the operative’s palm-mounted taser towards the anime banged forehead. “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, mother fucker.” The perp was knocked out instantly, the body spasming unconscious.

“Jesus, Jack.” Stasia grimaced.

“He’ll live. These assholes need to be taught a lesson. Look, their rage against the machines and the ‘Blue Bloods’ is withering and will continue to wither as the days wear on with no regime change, no bargaining, no talks, no ebbing of the tide of human job displacement or return of their precious ‘social safety net’ that they’re hoping for. Their “color revolution” is a pipe dream that will never come. It will be tough, but we’ve got to break their spirits to win. Then this, too, will pass if we just keep the system’s gears oiled and operating.”

Jack drew a rectangular frame around a cross-section of marchers within the operative’s feed, zoomed in, and tossed it up into the War Room holo-display as a case-in-point for the others. One could see the desperation setting into heavy, sinking, cyanosized eyes. Crisp ironed work shirts becoming filthy torn rags, grimy faces sporting bloody and bruised cheekbones from beatings by the robotic riot police, such as the one Jack was jacked into. Who knew how much longer these protesters could hold together?

“Jack, I don’t think you’re seeing the whole picture here.” Stasia’s calico-tipped digits rifled through a list of unit bookmarks, the operative IPs scrolling like credits on fast-forward. Upon locating it, she tapped into the feed of another military bot posted deeper into the San Fran Pleblands. The War Room dimmed, as if the space were filling with the darkness of the scenes streaming through the holographic display.

An office worker and his family, now living out of a car and cans of pork ‘n beans. A long-terminated doctor, tearing the sleeves from his lab coat to patch the bloodied, swollen eye of a flight attendant. People fighting tooth and nail over mere scraps of food as the City By The Bay dissolved into anomie. Bodies of those who had starved, been trampled, or were slaughtered by Cybersec security bots lay unburied in the streets, swarming with flies. A truly horrible, apocalyptic scene, but a nightmare which had persisted for so long it had become the Normal. The early 21st century with its 10% unemployment, Islamist “terrorism” hysteria, climate obsession, and mere billion starving African kids, that foreign country of the past now seemed the dream. A utopia, Eden, fading like the hopes and dreams in a twelve year-old’s eyes as he threw away his astronaut action figure, and picked up a rifle, to fire upon a military bot. The hulking droid turned, its AI identifying the child as a hostile, raised its .50 cal cannon to return fire.

The images seared his eyes, the bloody puddle of limbs exhuming memories of Diego's car crash, and Jack turned away. This was not his responsibility. Don’t let the Deadweights drag you into their framing of the situation, Jack remembered from his Cybersec training.

“All I’m saying here is let’s think outside of the Enclave box. If the social economic fabric continues to deteriorate this way, we might find ourselves mired in a Chinese-style revolt. Let’s just think about multi-pronging here, using a little more carrots and less sticks, start multilateral talks with the demonstrators” Stasia pleaded.

“We don’t negotiate with Jobless. That’s official Blue Blood policy, straight from the top. I’ll take your suggestions under advisement.” Jack began, escalating the responsibility up the chain of command. He felt the slightest pang of hypocrisy, then remembered his position. Remembered his responsibilities to his family.

“These people brought this upon themselves when they became lazy, when they chose to take government handouts, failed to make themselves of value to productive society. When they became Deadweights. We’re just the Troubleshooters, we fix the bugs in the system and get the hell out of the way. We do our job. And you’d all better fucking well do your job, or you’ll find you soon won’t have one, just like them.”

Jack could almost hear the simultaneous gulps of the three Troubleshooters as they considered the possibility of being tossed out of the Enclave’s sanctuary into the hell-on-Earth of the Deadweight Pleblands. Employees were constantly having their shifts eclipsed, being replaced by AIs and androids left and right. The lucky few still with a job did everything to gain edge, to prove value and desirability to the Blue County Plutos, the infinitely rich Owners of the Universe whose itchy trigger fingers were always eager to fire more “Deadweight” human employees.

***

“Ah, I am thinking you should all seeing this.” Kirov added a third layer of Trouble to the Troubleshooters’ holographic agenda board.

The feed was streaming from an air-dragon drone, patrolling invisibly above another section of the city near Gnossis Plaza downtown, its near-translucent eel-like body undulating in the sky like the ghost of a great Chinese festival puppet. Below, clouds of protesters seemed to be coalescing, galvanizing around a storm eye: a man in a blue janitor workshirt and cap, megaphone in hand, perched atop the Gnossis Plaza fountain.

“Brothers and sisters, this is a war. This is a war on the people of this city, of this country, of this world. A war initiated by those in power, by the global plutocracy. By the puppetmasters of the financial-military-robotics complex, and the tools that they have bought and paid for that they call a government.” The man continued speaking to thunderous cheers and applause. A human-musician, grunge-reenactivist band started playing an autotuned techno rehash of Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up”.

“Alright who is this asshole. I want his Facebook page as fast as inhumanly possible.” The Sherlock 4.0 AIs churned away, cyberdetectives examining every fingerprint and CCTV snapshot in meat and cyberspace. Potential vocal and partial-facial rec matches popped up like playing cards on the warboard. The AI’s neural nets were still tangled though, none of the hits showed high probability. Jack needed religious fundamentalist-caliber certainty.

“We need a better angle,” Jack determined.

Stasia conjured the air dragon’s virtual flight stick via her dVice with an interlocking-finger hand gesture, a ninja magic kuji-in summoning the mythic beast of stealth. She piloted it downward, descending the valleys of glass formed by the dizzyingly tall financial towers, towards the roiling crowds below.

“We’ve got positive ID. Paolo Guevarao. Higher-up in the World Class War, San Francisco chapter.”

“Motherfucking, World Class War. Of course.” Jack sighed.

World Class War’s official Cloudsite blurb was, “a coalition of organizations dedicated to the betterment of the lives of the underclass around the world.” There was Human Rights United, the bleeding heart Peace Corps on steroids, whose mission statement was improving basic living standards of the 80% of the world that was drowning in poverty. Then there were the anti-robotics Autonomites and Association for Human Agency, the 21st century wave of Luddites who believed the way forward through the Marxian human-obsolesence dilemma was backward, a return to the relative dark ages of the end of the 20th century. They believed a Turing Test should be enforced such that the smartest robots allowed were furbies and Call of Duty mook AIs. The Open Source Ecology people were the spiritual progeny of the enviro-commies, who gave away self-replicating tractors to third worlders in an attempt to create a plague of self-sustaining, close-knit, resilient communities: a truly apocalyptic scenario. Then of course there were the many departments of Ivory Tower Post-Capitalist, and charlatan futurist like the Venus Project people. Those academics mostly just sipped overpriced coffee and got off on viral 70’s sci-fi documentaries about the bad bad bad System, which had to be overthrown and replaced with their dissertation-plans for a Perfect World, which were diatribed in twelve chapters of crypto-Marxist theoryspeak. Armchair activism, no real affect on reality. Benign growths. Then there was the veritable rainbow of lone-wolf conspiracy nuts, anarchists, stoners, miscellaneous anti-System cultists, angsty malleable teen girls joining said cults, horny teen boys eager to mold said teen girls, neo-jihadists, and wanna-be trust-fund baby revolutionaries.

Somehow, World Class War had managed to unite, however loosely and contingently, all of these disparate, often seemingly conflicting (dis)organizations into one, fairly cohesive whole. It was almost as if WCW had evolved organically, of its own right, in response to post-post-industrial existence. Like the Anarchists who sprung from the side of Industrialization, like 911 terrorism that was forged by and retaliated against Globalization, World Class War filled a sort of societal yin to the execessive yang of exponential global inequality.

But for Blue County Enclave, i.e. for Cybersec, i.e. for Jack and his team, World Class War was an ugly hydra of nonviolent organized resistance against the Enclaves. The Plutos would’ve jumped at the first chance to disappear the lot of them, Mexico City style. But they had this nasty universalized tendency to not commit any outward aggression, thus disallowing brutal aggression against them, for fear of repercussions. “If you can’t get this little Plebian charade under control, we’ll find someone who can,” Jack recalled from his last meeting with director Winkleman.

“I want the RPLCNTs, the drones, the Sherlocks up this guy’s ass like a 6G enema. I don’t want his blood sugar to change without us knowing about it.” Jack demanded. “Also, let’s blackout his #World Class War channel from the search engines and recommendation engines.”

“What about social media updates? Those digital grass roots tend to be the biggest vectors for these revolutionary movements. Remember what happened in Iran? Total mess.” One of the cadets on the lower level asked as he was busy tweaking the Gnossis pagerank algorithm to force WCW related sites to the 300 millionth result page of any ‘net search.

“Right, well the Friendbook and Yawper updates are filtered by personalization algorithms, too. I mean who wants 50 tweets a day of their loner aunt’s cat? We just tweak the recommendation engine relevance ranking so that any tweet or status update or message permutation remotely resembling ‘World Class War’ or ‘WCW’ is immediately deemed by the filter to be as useful to the user as, say, a forwarded knitting-personality quiz. Or just have any communications containing the blacklisted terms automatically marked as spam. Boom, no more La Resistance grapevine.” Jack corrected.

“Wait, isn’t that like censoring the internet? Aren’t there net-neutrality laws against that?” The younger cadet brought up, looking up from his crystal workspace.

“Oh, look, we’ve got a virgin in the house. No, kid, it’s just called, ‘creative use of internet personalization.’ We’re just helping people find what they need, and ignore what they don’t need to see; it’s win-win. And don’t say ‘censorship’, people might think we’re China or something.”

“But you’re manipulating people’s communications with each other for ulterior ends-“ the kid began, before Jack raised a hand to cut him off.

“And thank God for the United States of Suckers who believe tech and social media companies give a shit about their customers’ data. Welcome to the real world, son. Now get back to work.”

Jack sat back in his hyperergonomic chair, reclining into expensive pneumatics and Italian leather tanned and put together by real Italian robots in Milan. What he needed was an in, a thin wedge to slide beneath the security nightmare of focused, organized, populist resistance and pry it away like a limpet. He rolled his knuckles on the mysteriously clear carbon polymer of his desk,

“Sherlock, please investigate potential connections between World Class War and violent insurgents within Bay Area,” Jack queried in conversational English. The Sherlock detective-AI’s very primitive and utterly uselss ancestor, something called “Watson”, could only answer Jeopardy questions, in question form. Luckily for Jack, Sherlock was fairly fluent, although Jack did have to tweak the AI’s lexicon cores now and again.

“Jack, there are 3,891 possible connections between World Class War and said violent insurgents.”

Jack nearly jumped out of his seat.

“Take autobus 32 from local WCW chapter at 4th and Lexington, turn right at 8th and…” Not those connections. Jack sighed, sprung open the Sherlock’s semantics kernels and rewired some of its digital axons to new synapses. He tried again, crossing his fingers. Come on baby, show me the Lead.

“Jack, it appears there have been a few incidents of violent attacks against Blue County Enclave by individuals technically affiliated with World Class War. The connection is obscure, however I confirmed it by cross-mining intercepted emails, daily behavioral patterns and confirmed the relationships via graph traversal of relevant social networks.” The machine replied, and not without a certain sense of satisfaction, although Jack had probably programmed that effect in at some point.

“Wow, excellent work! Don’t get cocky.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Well, let’s see it.”

The Sherlock accessed audiovisual archives of an incident two days prior at Gnossis Plaza. The AI multiplexed the simultaneous feeds of a squadron of RLPCNTS, Leviathans and CCTV cams on the holographic warboard, reconstructing the event like a four-dimensional jigsaw from a panoply of vantage points. The mass World Class War demonstrations were in full swing, as usual. Then, suddenly, the RPLCNT riot cops began arresting one another, only to discover their EnforceWare suspect-targeting had been compromised by hackers. On the audio channels, the intranet police chatter had been replaced with audiobook readings of Das Kapital. Worm-subverted paramilitary bots danced ‘the robot’ then dove thorax-first into the public fountain like giant steel lemmings, shorting their circuitry. Masked rioters then hurled firework bombs at disoriented cops, shattered storefront windows, and started bon fires precariously near buildings. Bank towers were broken into, the fractured ink-black glass spraypainted with the head of Guy Fawkes.

“What is it with these anarchists and the Guy Fawkes? Alright, looks like these guys have a few braincells. We got no facial rec cause of the masks and the voiceprints are blizzarded out in the protests. Let’s mine the scene for a suspect.” Jack said. The Sherlocks hunted for patterns – a fragment of jawbone curvature here matching a second of garbled vocal there, a walking gait here cross-referencing with a height and weight. Linkable constellations in the Exabyte-sized ocean of data that might triangulate an identity.

Minutes passed of the Sherlocks digging without a hit, the equivalent of all the police forensics teams, FBI and CIA analysts who ever lived working nonstop for several hundred years. Stasia broadened the investigative algorithm, had the AIs flip through various scopes and light spectrum filters: infrared, UV, without result.

“Come on people, we need something, anything. Any bone to chew on.” Jack facepalmed.

“These guys knew what they were getting into. They even pulled the gravel trick, stuck rocks in their shoes to throw off the gait analyzers.” Darius commented, pointing out the arrhythmic skipping in several video clips.

After one of the AIs reported a hit that turned out to be someone’s face reflected in a perp’s sunglasses, Jack was about to shift the incident to the backburner, call the lead a cold trail and move on.

“Alright people, let’s pack it up-“

“Jack, from speech analysis, look like this guy have heart condition.” Kirov offered just as Jack was about to jump to another event. He spun his monitor around to reveal an aural spectrograph like a rainbow colored ultrasound, the heartbeat pounding like an underwater bass drum. The timbre and rhythm of the suspects heart overlayed almost perfectly the stochastic patterns seen in heart patients, averaged across a hundred billion records fished up from the Gnossis archives.

“Ok, so he must have medical nanites holding that bum ticker together, which need to be uplinked to a health center doctor-AI for continuous nanoware updates. Find all heart patient communications with hospitals originating from this GPS point for the suspect’s hospital feed. Once we intercept the outbound packets of from his body to the med center, those subcellular nanobots’ bioinformatics, it’s just a matter of hacking his DNA sequence out of his bloodstream nanomachines,” Jack said.

“Jack we’d need to get a signed waiver for that personal info.” Stasia cautioned.

“Are you kidding me? We work for Gnossis, the biggest search and social networking megaglomerate in the world. ‘Personal info’ is a meaningless term for us. Besides, we’re the cops here, we’re the good guys, catching the criminals. Kirov, you broke into your last boss’ bodyware and changed his internal medication dosage right? You’re on point.”

In the span of a minute, the Russian had multilaterated the target’s position, tapped into his cranial 6G cellular jack, bypassed his body’s firewalls, intercepted a cybercyte transmission, cut through the target’s DNA encryption, and sucked the man’s amino acid ID right out of his cell walls.

“We have the DNA sequence,” Kirov announced.

“Have the AIs cross reference it with fetal genome registry.” It took another clearance code and a second for the Sherlocks to unearth the individual who’s DNA sample, collected at birth, matched the target’s.

A rather unremarkable, pale-pink female face emerged in the 3D space, revolving slowly.

The Troubleshooters stared on, rubbing their eyes as if the moving portrait staring back at them were some phantasm software artifact in their retinal overlays.

“What? No. That’s impossible. Not. Possible. There must be a bug.”