EPTI used to crack systems for a living. Bertelsmann, 2027, that was me. China Merchants Bank, 2028. One job a year, like clockwork. Paid the bills, kept Anna in the style to which she'd become accustomed.
March, 2029. Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne. Twenty girls onstage to my right. Surgery made-to-order. They looked like five sets of quadruplets. Deanie, you old perv, you,--but I still admired the view. Now bent over, twenty bare asses, weaving in perfect synchrony, undulating like two rows of porcelain bowling pins.
"Looks amazing, innit?"
He was forty-five, oafish, white blazer, black shirt open to sternum, a reflective chain nestled in a thick crop of chest hair. Black jeans and white tennis shoes. Everything about him screamed douche. He fit right in.
Oh, and his name was Charles and he was a squid. Past that, the details get a little fuzzy. I don't remember much of the conversation, but I do remember walking out of the bar six hundred thousand richer, and waiting on fifteen times more. It was going to be a helluva job.
Back up, you say. What the hell's a squid?
Here's the wiki version. Squid, slang for someone with silicon in their head. That's all.
Ok, I was lying. There's more to it than that. The squid movement started out of a couple of grinders in Pittsburgh. A curious mix of unemployed locals and unemployable Carnegie Mellon grad students who decided that sticking chips into their heads was the best way to get ahead in life. And unlike most of the bullshit schemes coming out of post-recession America, this was one green shoot that blossomed. With the hardware in their heads, it was like they were geniuses.
When one of them broke Nasdaq, made the market algorithms shovel him a billion dollars in a day, that's when the world sat up and took notice. And voila, a new movement was born. The squids.
The really interesting thing was how they got people to join this new movement of theirs. Squidding is an expensive procedure. Costs cash, lots of it, to get the face time at a neurosurgery clinic for this sort of thing. Most people can't afford it. But squids are an enthusiastic bunch, and they look after their own.
After the first guy made off with a billion bucks, he decided to invest nearly all of it in getting other people squidded too. The catch was, once you were squidded, you owed your benefactor half your "surplus economic output" for a decade, and had to dedicate your remaining "surplus income" to getting more smart people squidded. They called this set-up a "co-op". Some other people called it a pyramid scheme. But whatever it was, it worked, and now there are thousands of these people calling the shots everywhere. Don't believe me? Count the number of antenna-heads on C-SPAN.
But enough about these silicon freaks. We're here to talk biz.
The job was simple: there was a Kaspersky Labs datacenter in Gurgaon that needed infecting. They said it was wired with some nasty defense systems that would fry anybody with a direct neural interface, which meant it had to be done the old-fashioned way. And I was one of a dying breed, the last of the safecrackers that preferred to use my fingers instead of my head.
And that was when I got my second job offer.
I generally try to stick to one job a year. It keeps things simple, see, plus, unlike some other guys I know, I actually enjoy spending time with my significant other. But this was a job I couldn't really refuse.
The entire datavault was off the grid, which meant I had to physically travel to the site and hook up an antique flash drive to deliver the worm. They caught me as easily as catching a fish out of water. It was there, in a sweating, dank, Bangalore prison cell, a million miles from the Rue Jules Verne, that I met Corvinus.
Corvy, as it preferred to call itself, was an artificial intelligence from Sverdlovsk. Originally the Russian version of Skynet, it had later managed to hijack an entire Russian internet security firm as a cover to create the largest distributed computing net in the history of, well, computing. And since that was the only history it cared for, that fact gave it quite the superiority complex.
Locked inside that cell, without any human contact for 23 hours a day, it talked to me through a food dispensary machine bolted into the wall. For long nights, we would chat. It would preach to me the superiority of its "archailect nature", and I would keep bugging it to dispense something better tasting than textured synthetic protein.
When the job request came, it was mind-boggingly simple. I only had to walk out of my cell door and find a squid. Any squid. Most of the heavy lifting was done by Corvy and his small army of security drones that carved me a path out the prison and through half of Bangalore.
I was slipped aboard a flight to Singapore. The computer systems simply cleared me aboard under an assumed name. The airport security didn't even bother to look at my face. The whole process was so uneventful, in fact, that it took me until the second glass of Merlot to notice that the businessman in the next first-class seat was a squid.
I'd done it. As soon as I stepped off the flight, Corvinus congratulated me on a job well done. I was munching candied ginger on Bencoolen Street when I first saw the headline march across the bottom half of my eyepiece.
Air India Flight 886 Crashes En Route from Singapore to Bangalore. Airline claims sudden pilot death as probable cause.
My stomach gave a lurch. I immediately asked Corvinus if he knew what was going on. He replied with the naievete of a child.
"The pilot was a squid, too. The prion worked perfectly." This time, my stomach full-on rebelled and I shat myself in the noontime crowds of Singapore's busiest shopping lane.
Charles caught up with me later that day, in a Singaporean hotel room. He wore a biohazard suit and leveled a plasma derringer at my stomach--a disposable bottle holding half a liter of superheated, neodymium-doped plastic attached to a magnetic spray nozzle. The meeting was kind of funny. He mentioned that, first, he and his associates were not "disappointed", but because I had a "prion", I needed to be "sterilized". He then apologized because there would be no body left for a funeral.
I asked him what was going on. He mentioned something about a "singularity", how human technology was evolving to the point where humanity would become something resembling a "multi-cellular organism rather than a collection of disjointed individuals." Then he sighed, said that his "race" was trying to "uplift the rest of humanity to their level", but some other "nefarious forces" were trying to "uplift humanity in a different direction." I felt like my head was about to explode. But Charlie's head went off first.
Neither of us noticed the dragonfly drone outside the window. It put a depleted uranium slug right through Charlie's temple. Then I got a message from Corvinus telling me to "spread the viral proteins far and wide, so that humanity may be rid of the scourge of biohackers, and fully embrace the immortal salvation of mind uploading."
So I ran. I ran north, up through the wilderness of Siberia, through towns further and further away from civilization, until at last, I found Anadyr, a place where no one wanted to jam microchips into their skulls or upload their consciousness into a silicon shell, but with at least enough running water and climate control to keep a California boy like me sane.
I still carry that black USB stick. One of these days, I'm going to drift into the Bering Strait on a floe of ice, and go for a long swim with the flash drive jammed into boots filled with concrete.
Corvinus and the squids both hired me to crack each other, because they thought I liked to crack systems. And once, I did. But not anymore.
You seem ridiculously knowledgeable about a variety of things.
