1. Very Clever, Mister Blond.
by MolokoBot

Since childhood they've said I was clever and, beyond clever, immesurably Intelligent. My test scores popped each thermometer in it's turn, or at least that's what Mrs Stubby, the school psychologist implied. Yet, my inevitable triumph of the will seems indefinitely postponed.

Confined as I am now, I must extract from you a vow of adamantine discretion; consider this unilateral admonition your nondisclosure agreement.

The circumstances to which I'm lately reduced would be humiliating if I thought they were my final context. It was blow enough to be undone by she who was, in retrospect, merely clever, who seduced and cruelly abandoned me. The trisexual tart! But for her betrayal, this would all be bearable.

Yet I will not surrender.

You see, I've laid a trap for the Crackistani spies, foreign agents of the Governments who fear my powers, who torment me through the pasteboard walls of this motel with their coughing synchronized to my thoughts and actions. Each time The Final Solution to my predicament begins to well up within me they cough, or make some bumping noise, or laugh, or play their insipid musical diskettes, or place upon their hotplate some malodourous concoction they claim, when questioned obliquely, is food. I think you can see how this interrupts the coalescence of my intricate thoughts.

But this I could overcome if it were not for the Landlord at my door at every promising hiatus in these neighborly torments. I know the Landlord to be a Ziontologist, and that he makes use of his Ziontology connections to track my movements about town, to log my comings and goings, and to deploy various technological harassments for maximum psychological and disruptive effect. His encrypted knocking pattern is insidious enough, but, when he presses the buzzer to let himself into the building complex, a sound contrived for maximum Pavlovian efficacy sears my sensorium like the twisting of a knife.

I think you can see how distracting (to understate my case) I find this.

But the doorbell is nothing compared to the fusebox.

Both the Crackistani agents and the Landlord will, at moments coordinated to maximize damage, furtively unscrew the fuses from the circuit box in the hallway, near the resonant wooden stairs that ascend from the street to this floor. The timings of these power outages always occur precisely as I am about to save some critical computer file, or upload to certain servers software I've revised to do my bidding, or submit to various forums broadsides against, biographical information about, and photographs of my tormentors that will unleash against them an army of censure, harassment and outrage.

I may yet have the last laugh though, as I've crafted a deterrent, a booby trap of sorts, to regain those critical seconds I need: along the wooden floorboards beneath the fusebox I've scattered a slurry of broken glass, crankcase oil and ordure which should keep them at bay, or at least give them food for thought.

The fools! They don't know who they're dealing with. 
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2. Pink Dragon
by Jet Lynx

I was very serious in all that I told you in November, as we gazed upon that pattered menu board before us. I was honest in everything I said and gave to you. I know I startled you, but then you believed.

Your velvet lush blue violets seeping right out of you on to me… Oohh, where we touched felt like rowan crimson peppermints puffy spheres pillowing all over me.

Not sure, for sure that you got or retrieved that second e-mail I mentioned to you then… I have been afraid to contact you again, afraid that they might hurt you. But! There has been much gathering. Universally… can you feel them too? They have begun to bend the spectrum and are working their way thru. I’m just glad they don’t know how to crinkle it, only of few of us can and have ever been able to.

Performing it is correct in your assertions to me, as I wept thru most of our conversations. But you, as you thru time, had always held consultation for anyone’s needs. As again, you did prove to me.

Bigger I said, I thought it much larger than that. And you quite agreed…

You have been a radical one, to me a dangerous companion to keep. But, I think you have mellowed with age a bit… Like all good Scotch should be.

Only Three… I have read, No… not the others... They told of their futures. Knowing already what they say, I did not need to see. You, a gritty one it is certain, the grinding of stones sparked embrace.

They just want to kill them you know, as they strike out against their own lives. Like leading cattle to slaughter they just let them hang there and bleed. What will matter, in time and space is that the right ones survived.

The man that brought you there, that night did ask of me over and over… He didn’t recognize, but he partly already knew. You should know, I did allow him to see thru the snow covered spruce trees burning flicker… She there, speaking to me. But you saw too… If you choose to remember it. Did you not like what I did to you? I thought it time to seep and his key cast upon your last book to me. For the reasons you wrote for all to see. He will be fine… don’t worry. I just sort of made him feel drunk a little bit for a moment or that whole year he thinks.

How many provings must be shown and given back to them. How long until they listen. Always with their destructions and chunked up half bitten realities. They know not of their own kind or of its abilities. You speak of the leaves and I for the animal… the forged caustic reality burning through on to them, will surely change them. It has already begun.

I have included a few of my writings for you to read, but I won’t send these to them… I am just submitting this one. Besides that… they probably already have them… You should see how much stuff they have sucked off of me… kind of flattering and hairy scary at the same time. But thru it all, I have been happy that some of them listened and acted upon them.

You would be amazed at the things I have seen and done to them… having TSA jumping after our meeting was invigorating. I have decided to call this message to you Pink Dragon, with a picture of one of mine… I captured on my cell phone for you to see. I will only tell you his name in person though… As he is not much into sharing me.

I was too, going to mention to you… I will be by the oceans side in the next month… wondering if you might have more time for me. As you probably can tell, there is a lot to discuss and our time is growing shorter each day. 
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3. Egalitarian Deceit: 4-7
by **************


4: 'Do you have dedication? How much?'

'On the path. Intensely focused. Adherence to commitment.'
'No distraction. No division. Focus on achievement.'
'Set a goal. Make a goal. Persistence is my virtue.'
'I won't stop; I won't quit; My patience is a statue.'

'Call me stubborn. Call me Boring. Your names and labels fail, '
'Obstinate. Recalcitrant. Equally as stale.'
'They matter not, are meaningless; you're wasting time: tock-tick'
'I'm on path, intensely focused; my dedication is atomic.'


5:58pm. Dedicated. This is Jyl. Twenty-five years old with two years spent on post doctorate research in biochemistry; more specifically, synthetic molecules designed to block specific neural receptors. Her dedication isn't natural, or maybe it is; understanding which is true is what motivates her.

Like Jyl, you know dedication; you are compelled to live with commitment and focus to tasks, to learning, to being the master of your objectives, but are you more dedicated than Jyl, or is she more dedicated than you?

Jyl clicks, 'record,' and speaks, "several synthetic molecules RB2235, RB2236 and RB814 will bind to receptor sites and block selected neural-transmitters, but none of the delivery methods permit proper selection of desired targets with exclusion of untargeted sites in other regions. Trials 25600 through 25700 failed to produce desired results."

Such tedious and repetitive work would drive any other human to boredom and risk mistakes, but not Jyl. However, exhaustion is a risk, and her 12 hour work-day is complete. Jyl cleans her lab, locks her journals in a firesafe, packs her backpack and exits the lab to the R&D corridor of labs.

6:00pm. Welcome to ProtoNeuroMed (PNM) R&D Lab's high tech security, with security as impressive as claims from any main-stream television program for the masses about flashy international spies or a brazen “look at me! I'm robbing a bank!” bank heists. Of course, not all impressions are good, but you know that.

Emotionally insecure office-gossips in this building say this, "security-show," is for investors, but they also say Jyl's department will be losing funding next month. Less accurate with predictions than drunk weathermen reading tea leaves, these gossips said the same thing last month, too. Oblivious to both rumors, Jyl is never included as a node in these meat-space, social networks. Her indifference to coworkers and lack of interest in lives of these mooks has isolated her from office cliques, and the overhead incurred by being a router of such addle-brained traffic; these oxygen-wasting entities are the demographic and target audience of those that make so-called, "Reality Television shows," and their pseudo-authentic dramatic events , which are choreographed almost as much as those over-the-top wrestling programs.

Near the end of the corridor, Jyl passes through a card-controlled door and visits a security desk for her floor. Two guards sit behind a desk. One is writing some sort of report while polling video surveillance displays on his second screen. A second guard focuses on securing a deck of virtual playing cards on his computer screen with an ineffective sorting algorithm. To any outsider, it would appear as though he is just playing solitaire, but sometimes things are exactly as they seem to be. On his second screen, he has a, “live,” Internet news video feed from a local TV news station with the audio turned up loud enough to hear from the hallway. Jyl visits the self-service status board to mark herself, "out," and arms the alarm to cover the zone for her lab: "Ready. Clear. 60 seconds until...", then she presses another button and the readout informs, "skipped. Armed." Jyl thinks, "whoever thought it a good idea to put arm/disarm pads outside the zone being, 'secured,' is an idiot."

6:05pm. The tinny sounds of news from the tiny on-board computer speaker of this second guard whines into the room. "Investigators say Tom, the person of interest, is not a suspect, but he is wanted for questioning. Tom ....", begins the news story as a picture from Tom's student ID appear on the second screens video. Jyl recognizes Tom as a neighbor boy she was permitted to play with when she was younger, but that was before the accident. On observing Jyl walking by the security desk, the second guard tries to hide his game of solitaire and turns down the volume of his computer, but none of this matters to Jyl.

Walking 3 flights of stairs to the second floor, Jyl visits the empty employee exercise room. Using her card-key, Jyl gains access and begins her workout. 6:07pm.

After a ten minute warm-up and stretch, Jyl stares into a mirror, and flatly
whispers, "happiness." Jyl looks around the room to verify she is still alone, and begins her workout. 6:59pm, she checks-out of the exercise room with her card-key. 7:03pm, she passes the front desk. 7:05pm, unlocking her bicycle to ride home. 7:07pm, ten miles home, pacing her speed to match the stoplights and traffic patterns she has memorized, she arrives at her apartment complex: 7:35pm.

7:37pm. At the doorway of a half-open door to Jyl's third story apartment, splintered wood around the door frame describes the force used to pry open this door. Compression of wood at two points in the door frame suggest a crowbar or similar tool may have been used. "Irritating. This is not part of my routine, " thinks Jyl. She listens for anything out of the ordinary, but hears nothing strange. She leans her bike against a hallway wall outside the door to her apartment and pushes the door open to discover what is left of her landlord on the floor. Bloody hand-prints on the drapes, carpet and a broken glass table bear witness to the violence that transpired here. The smell of freshly brewed coffee drifts from the kitchen, and two cups of hot coffee steam from the dining-room table.

7:38pm. "What a mess!" thinks Jyl. "This will take hours to clean, and I probably won't get back my full deposit."

Red and blue lights traverse the window, warning of the approach of an
emergency vehicle, but Jyl hears no sirens. "I really don't need this
inconvenience to end my day. I have to get up early for work tomorrow. This
not part of my routine." Jyl backs out of the apartment, retrieves here bike
and quickly walks passed the stairs she took to the third floor. The sounds of
many footsteps can be heard running up the same stairs she took to her third
floor apartment. She opens a door that leads to an attached parking structure,
passes through, mounts her bike, and rides towards the exit. Not looking back, she speeds away from her apartment.


5: 'Jack and Jyl went up the hill, in a vacation van.'

'Reflect upon our past, we choose our colored paint.'
'Blue is cold, black depressed, and brown is often quaint.'
'What colors do you choose, when you have no notion, '
'How to feel, not re-lived, a genuine emotion.'


At age 12, Jyl completes her GED and is accepted to college. Her parents Jack and Maureen, and her younger brother Samuel are packing a minivan to vacation in Yellowstone for the summer. Jyl has just 15 minutes of allocated free-time with Tom before she must pack her items in the minivan and return to her studies.

"Yellowstone? That place with geysers that stink like farts?" asks Tom.

"Yeah! An Archaea was found there living in really hot water in the 1970's -- hotter than previously predicted possible. It is so awesome to know about life living in extreme environments!" replied Jyl.

"Blah blah blah Biology says you, Miss Geeky-Pants." replied Tom with a smirk.

Jyl proceeded to punch Tom arm. "Since you are not interested in Biology, would you prefer another demonstration of Physics?" Jyl asks and she bunches up her hand into a fist and feigns a scowl toward Tom.

"Einstein was a masochist; learning Physics hurts, "replied Tom as he rubs his arm and chuckles while dodging the next attempted, 'demonstration,' proceeding grab one arm and put her in a neck-lock until she stops.

"What will you do over summer?" asked Jyl, as she gives up with her, 'demonstration.'

Tom releases Jyl and quickly steps to the side, in case she changes her mind. "Ah. I found an old computer in the garage. I'm going to take it apart and try to make it work. I want to know what's on it, " replied Tom. "I don't have much time, because my parents are going to throw it away before we move. We'll be gone by the time you get back from Yellowstone."

Jyl's watch alarm signals the end of her allocated free-time and she frowns. "We can always email each other when I get back," says Jyl, trying to reassure herself as she walks away from Tom.

Jack and Maureen rent a minivan for their summer vacation to Yellowstone. For Jyl's family, a vacation is a change of location and scenery, not a chance to relax. Jyl is expected to continue her home schooling to prepare for college. Maureen continues reviewing legal documents, and Jack works on complex problems related to efficient use of materials when mass-producing products. Jack and Maureen take turns with lessons for Jyl and Samuel following a state approved home-schooling plan. In addition to home schooling plan, Jyl's parents test Jyl and her brother on the material covered as part of guided tours through the park.

After two months at Yellowstone with her parents, and nobody but family to share her thoughts and ideas, Jyl feels the unhappiness in realizing one of her two free-time friends back home will have moved elsewhere by the time she gets back.

"Issac Newton-Super-Fist Attack!" Jyl yells as she punches a pillow. "Passive Resistance is no match for my Fist of Physics!" she continues as she breaks an uneasy smile and sighs.

"Jyl? Are you alright in there?" asks Maureen from the living room.

"Yes mom. My pillow was threatening me with an attack of inertia, to encourage me to remain at, 'rest,' but my forceful application of Newton's Laws of motion has defeated it," replied Jyl.

"There is some soup on the stove that would be less carbonized if you introduced a little entropy or at least redistributed its molecules," said Maureen.

"Ack! My soup is burning!" exclaimed Jyl as she runs to rescue it.

Without others to share it, Jyl spends the rest of her free-time eating soup and staring out the window of the cabin, trying to imagine what life will be like at college. Tomorrow, it will be time to return home and prepare for her first Fall semester at college. I wonder if my books for fall classes will be waiting for me.


6: 'What goes up, must enter darkness.'

'Sweet slumbers: beyond time's grasp'
'Awoken for a moment: blood, thud, crash'
'Now dark slumber: colors they fade'
'"Please wake up!" Voices, they said'


"What else do you remember?" asks Doctor Fedge. She is a psychologist, holding a pen and pad, scribbling something too small for Jyl to read from her bed. Doctor Fedge looks up to see Jyl as Jyl is now staring at the ceiling. Some of her hair has grown back, but does not fully cover the scars and evidence of stitches and staple tracks that march jagged trails across her head.

"We packed the minivan, and headed home. I fell asleep in the back seat next to my brother, and then there was a bright light, and I tasted something like a 9 volt battery, and smelled buttered popcorn, and then darkness. The next thing I remember is waking up in this hospital." replied Jyl.

"Do you understand what has happened?" asked Doctor Fedge.

"Yes." replied Jyl.

"Would you like to talk about it?" inquired Doctor Fedge.

"There is no value in talking about what cannot be changed," stated Jyl flatly.

Hoping for a reaction, Doctor Fedge pushes, "You know your father and brother died in an accident on the way back from Yellowstone."

"Of course. I have been told this, and I've been told I was in a coma for 6 months, and MRI showed serious brain damage. Parts of my skull were removed to decrease risk for more damage due to swelling. Doctors did not think I was going to survive, and I nearly died several times while at the hospital. Once I was considered in a stable condition, I was moved to this convalescent home, and was never expected to leave my comatose, and non-responsive state. I know that my mother ended her own life when she was told there was no hope for me, and my brother and father died in the accident. You continue to prod and push me, to inquire about my mental health, but you can plainly see I am not emotional, and am very much in control."

"Do you blame doctors for providing what we now know as incorrect information to your mother? Your mother may not have ended her life if she thought there was a chance you would recover."

Jyl looks at Doctor Fedge. "Blame implies fault, but there is no evidence to suggest there was any intent by doctors to misrepresent my case to my mother. Unless that changes, there is no fault and therefore no blame."

"How do you feel about being the only survivor in your car?" inquires Doctor Fedge.

Jyl looks up towards the ceiling. Her eyes dart left, and right, providing evidence of new thought, and contemplation on this new question and after a brief silence, "I don't feel good or bad; accidents happen to everyone."

Both Doctor Fedge and Jyl are silent for several minutes. Doctor Fedge shrugs, and externalizing her own feeling asks, "Do these questions cause you to feel frustrated?"

Jyl looks at Doctor Fedge and thinks for a moment. "This, 'feeling,' is like an irritation more than frustration, but it is similar. It is the perception that an attempt is being made to repeat the same dialogue or better described as interrogation with hopes that there will be a different response this time, and this futility or insanity in repeating the same discussions we have every week in juxtaposition with your expectation that somehow this week will be different from last week makes me feel my time would be better spent reading or learning something new than talking with you."

Doctor Fedge writes several words onto her pad. "It is great to see you communication skills, vocabulary and ability to reason appear unharmed by the accident." Doctor Fedge scribbles a few more notes on her pad and looks up. "Your aunt Sharon is executor of your parents' estate and accepted lawful custody of you. She has handled the burial of your parents and brother. She has asks how you are feeling..." Doctor Fedge pauses at this point, and clears her throat. "She wants to know if you are well enough to have a visit from her. As you know, she employs me to assess your condition, and I think this is a very good time for you two to spend time together. Would you like her to visit you during our next session tomorrow?"

"I don't care. I would really like a book to read. It is really boring in here," said Jyl. "My books for the fall semester at college should have arrived through the mail. If six months have passed, I have missed my fall semester, and most of the spring semester. I want those books so I can start while I am stuck here. I wish to contact the university about my being accepted last year, and see if they will permit me to enter this fall."

"I understand; let's see what happens tomorrow, and maybe we will consider these topics when we talk with your aunt," answers Doctor Fedge.


7: 'Repetition, practiced skills, fish out of blender'

'Specialize, learn it well, and master one more skill, '
'Cost is time, time is spent, and spent to pay this bill.'
'Once it's spent, won't return, forever it is lost, '
'In economics, it is named: opportun...ity cost.'


7:40pm, Jyl is still riding away from her apartment. Abrupt changes bother Jyl. "It is difficult to optimize a schedule for peak efficiency when variables beyond my control thwart my attempts to recognize patterns in the chaos and bring some order to what otherwise appears random," thinks Jyl. "I need to considers these new events and plan a new routine to route around these inconveniences."

For the first time this evening since leaving work, Jyl looks at her watch: 7:45pm. "Food, shower, clothes and sleep are what should be next. I have my old student ID. I have my university routine, and the university is nearby. I can use the wireless Internet there, they have vending machines, I can also use the library, showers in the dorms, and laundry rooms to clean my clothes.”

Jyl looks at her watch again as she arrives on campus on her bicycle: 7:59pm. She rides to the dorms, to lock her bike. 8:08pm. The south door to these dorms had a, 'feature,' to open it without a key: pull it quick and hard while lifting up with the handle, and school maintenance never fixed it. Looking at her watch again: 8:09pm.

Finding the, "Lost & Found box," in the laundry room, she grabs a long, heavy coat with a hood. She also spots a current student ID and peels the current year sticker for this from this ID, and affixes it to her ID. Borrowing the coat, she tosses her clothes into a washing machine with a "soap ball" someone left behind and wears the coat. Next she heads for the shower. It is strange that nobody is in the dorm and she can't hear anyone else in the building. 8:11pm. Remembering how theft was an issue when she was a student, she hangs her backpack on a high hook on the shower wall. Though the showers have no soap dispensers, the sinks have them. Prying open these reveals a plastic bag of soap she takes to the shower and returns when finished.

8:18, shower complete, she puts on the long coat, grabs her backpack, and heads to the laundry room, stopping by the announcements bulletin board. 8:20pm, here is where they post credentials for guests accessing the university's wireless network. A notice proclaims that the dorms will be closed today and tomorrow for mold inspection. A vending machine resides next to the announcements bulletin board, where she buys a sandwich and chips, eating them while walking back to the laundry room.

8:19pm, she knows she has approximately 20 minutes before the washing machine completes its cycle. She pulls her laptop from her backpack, powers up, gets on the university wireless network, enters credentials from the hallway board, and begins browsing library resources on-line. 8:21pm, and she has found the university's college of law, law library web services. She finds several papers written by law professors of the law college at the university, and links to several of their blogs. One details with far too many words, some of the biggest mistakes made by clients in criminals cases.

"Law enforcement can't help your client. They gain absolutely nothing in talking to police when they suspect your client of a crime. Even seemingly innocuous questions can lead to serious problems in defending a client if they are answered by the client..." The blog post continues within this paragraph, providing examples of problems associated with talking to law enforcement, or district attorneys.

Long ago, Jyl learned about how skilled professors and academics understood the value of structured writing, and how this can be leveraged by intelligent readers. Each paragraph in this blog is a topic of discussion or complaint. To save time, reading the first line of each paragraph will provide a summary of complaints, and if details on a specific complaint is desired, then further reading of that paragraph is possible. Graduate work requires optimizing time spent reading since there is always too much to read. It is necessary to skim or skip sections that include content that is already known and understood. Order makes this possible.

After 17 minutes of reading, it is 8:38 pm, Jyl starts the dryer to warm it up in anticipation of the washer completing its cycle.

8:41pm, the washer buzzes its cycle is complete. Jyl moves her clothes to a dryer, and returns to reading. For such a small load, she estimates 15 to 18 minutes, and while she waits, she reads about techniques used by law enforcement to convince or encourage witnesses and people suspected of crimes, to talk about their experiences and provide evidence to be used against them at a trial. "Police will lie, even go so far as to claim you can go home once you tell them what they want to know. This is almost always a ruse. Clients should never trust police when they are suspected by police of committing a crime and...."

"The police will not stop looking for me because my landlord's body is in my apartment," thinks Jyl. "If I flee, I lose my research. I can't avoid the inconvenience of being involved unless I give up my work: unacceptable. The fastest path to limit time wasted by law enforcement is to use a lawyer. My aunt Sharon is a criminal lawyer; I will contact her tomorrow morning during my first lunch break. This is irritating; what a waste of time and money." 9:00pm.

Jyl checks her clothes, and they are dry. Changing to her clean clothes, Jyl powers down her laptop, packs up her things and leaves the dorms to grab her bike and head to the library's 24 hour study room. 9:21pm.

9:25pm, her bike locked up outside, Jyl finds a remote corner-desk in the library's 24 hour study room with privacy/noise guard on the back, sharing one side with a wall, another wall to the back of here seat, and exposing only her side to people walking by this desk. She finds several reference books and encyclopedias on biology, and scatters them on the desk, opening them to random pages. She wears the long coat to warm herself from the air conditioned space, and drapes the hood over her head to provide shade from the lights. She slumps her torso over her backpack on the desk, hugging it like a pillow, and winds its straps around her arms to make theft difficult without waking her. Campus security won't bother students that fall asleep studying unless they look too homeless or drunk. Her stage was set. It is time to sleep. 9:28pm.

Being back at the university, Jyl's dreams center on time here as a student and student employee working in the library bindery department. Unlike her peers, she applied for her advanced degree at the same university she earned her BS in Biology and was accepted with a fellowship and research grant. Memories returned of sabotaging her classmates in classes where professors graded on curves. She sees herself hiding library books on subjects of study before people could check them out, denying them access to material. Dreams being what they are, her undergraduate scheming transforms to her advanced degree sabotage of her classmates. She sees herself creating fake experimental data on university web pages using credentials to accounts of student left behind in the computer labs, then linking to them with on-line sites like wikipedia as a disinformation campaign to anyone researching these topics. She sees herself altering library books by inserting incorrect content and re-binding books after-hours in the library as a student employee. "This is the game. I wield chaos as a weapon to slow the advancement of those that claim to be my equal, and bring order to my house," she thinks as she stands on top of the library. "Cross me, and suffer consequences. I have are no allies, only enemies and occasional agreements made for personal advantage. I will win at any cost." Dark clouds circle above her as a miniature vortex appears above the campus, and suddenly, the landscape of the dream changes. She is back in the warm light of her apartment, looking over the body of her landlord, smelling the freshly brewed coffee and steaming coffee cups, and there on the kitchen floor is a shadow of what looks like a human form, then a smell of buttered popcorn and the taste of a 9 volt...”

5:00am, Jyl is awoken by the sound of the alarm on her wristwatch as her dream ends. Remembering pieces of her dream, she wonders about the purpose of these events that have ruined her routine, and interrupted her work: "Is someone doing to me what I have done for so many years to other people? No. That makes no sense; nobody in their right mind would go to so much trouble, and they would have nothing to gain. Was someone actually in the kitchen when I was there, or was that a displaced artifact of dreaming? None of these questions are important now. It is time to go to work, and call Aunt Shanon to make an appointment; it is time to resume the game." 5:01am. She has 59 minutes to get to the lab and start another 12 hour work-day. 

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4.Hot American Justice
by Matt Barron

Dear Peter,
Please find below a story that I’m working on. I ran into a remarkable – at least, remarkably strange – young man on the street the other day. He told me a very strange story. I would like to get your advice before going to publication, since you seem to be the expert in this sort of thing. What follows is my transcription of our conversation, and a few side notes. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

-------
"I used to be just a lowly lab tech."
The young man is finally starting to talk. He has lead me to a rooftop, quite insistently. Curiosity led me this far. His attire begged, no, pleaded many questions.

I was eagerly awaiting his story. So I sit quietly. light a cigarette. Give him space for talking. I reached into my pocket and activated my voice recorder.

"I worked in that building down there. The sleek glass one, with that swoopy sculpture out front. I never was sure what it was supposed to be, but I guess that giant ambiguous artwork is some sort of badge of honor among giant world dominating conglomerates."

I looked at him, and down at the building. It was a little dingy

"Well, it was more of an aspirational goal.

"They have brilliant scientists. Oh, on the technology front, PB was second to none. Excuse me, I'm a bit thirsty, I'm gonna drink some water... But they could have maybe used better safety controls."

The kid was wearing some sort of American Flag robe, and carried a water bottle, from which he constantly seemed to be drinking. I worried briefly about having to deal with a possible hyponatremic coma in the near future. He continued on.

"You see, that's why I'm up here. But that story is kinda boring. Virus-this and gene-splice that . . . Long story short, they're the guys that spliced day-glo genes from a jelly-fish into some "Scene" kid's liver and made the worlds first bio-laser. Fantastic, cool stuff if you're into military stuff like lasers.

"Me, I was just interested in paying rent and finishing my degree. You don't even get to play with cool stuff like gene splicing till you've finished your third doctorate in molecular biology, so I wasn't really holding my breath while I worked there.

"Right, so I'm sure you could guess the rest. Test tubes, beakers, sleep deprived college kid, accidents, breaking glass, you've seen this movie before. One thing leads to another and the next thing you know, you've contracted a powerful gene-splicing virus that has no idea it hasn't gone through human trials yet. Cute things, really, viruses. Like Kittens, except for you spend a week laid up with a fever, vomiting your guts out, and suddenly you wake up dead. At least, that's what the paperwork says, I'm sure. Most people probably don't get superpowers from modified influenza G1H7B. . . I guess that makes me special.

"You know, I bet it's pretty hard for most people who find themselves with super powers (or super-cluessness) have a hard time figuring out how to go about protecting their crime ridden metropoli from evil ne’er-do-wells. Personally, I didn't. It was kind of a no brainer, really.

"You see, Influenza g1H7B modifies human kidneys, giving the active mitochondria of those cells the ability to produce proteins that glow. Excuse me a second, sorry, I need another sip of water.

"Yeah, well, these proteins don't just luminesce. In the presence of light, they cascade photons, just like a laser. Normally you don't illuminate your kidneys, so this stuff was really just a laboratory curiosity. But you see, during that week of vomiting I mentioned, I learned something interesting. There is a time that these proteins get exposed to light.

"Damn I wish this city had more crooks. Finally! There, see that guy? Just grabbed that woman's purse. Here, take the binoculars. See him? Watch this."

At this point, He pulls open his robe, takes aim, and lets loose a powerful stream of glowing green justice. I caught a brief glimpse of a snuggie logo on the inside as I try to look away. Almost instantly, the would-be mugger's shoes vaporize. It'll be another full two seconds before the actual stream of urine hits the perp, both of which are still steaming at the time, adding insult to injury.

"Yeah, see. You know how long it took me to figure out how to use this? Pretty quick - I been doing it for a while you know. Forget about fighting bad guys, pissing on them is much more gratifying"

He finishes his story, and shakes a few last drops of bioluminescent urine on the rooftop below us. It sizzles and melts through.

You see, the reason I’m writing you is that I'm not really sure what to do with this story. Usually I would rush to my editors office with some grainy photographs and demand a front page slot, but I can't bring myself to print this, so I'm writing to you, Peter. You've always been helpful on this front. I'm sure the citizens of this city would feel relieved to know someone is watching out for them on the rooftops, but I don't think anyone would really approve of his, er, vigilante style of justice. 

-----------------------------------------------
5. Joel
by FirmWarez

5 August 2011. 03:16 in the morning. It is still 102 degrees in Las Vegas. Vs ~ 331.3 + 0.6Tc.
That gives a speed of sound of approximately 355 m/s, or 1165 ft/s. The 158gr 9mm projectiles impacting around me have a muzzle velocity of about 940 ft/s. Quite subsonic; and fired through the suppressor on the other end of this business the shooter is effectively stealthy. On my side however, those slugs still make a serious sound punching through the air, not to mention a frankly terrifying noise as they hammer and splatter on the concrete of the parking structure I use for cover.

It started with a simple hypertext link; one of those “a friend of a friend” things on a mundane social networking site. Mundane was the word of the day -- so mundane I didn’t notice it at first.
What I did notice was that this person’s posts, pictures, likes, actions – all dull and mundane – we’re too dull…and directly coincided with major events unfolding. Joel, the friend of a friend, seeming “friends” with half the planet, also seemed to be the world’s least interesting man. “I went shopping today. I spent $17.45”. Pictures of meaningless landscapes. A bland profile picture in a white button up shirt, an unremarkable face. No doting on kids, no drama with frenemies, just pictures of suburbs, trees in the park, clouds in the sky. A million friends but no girlfriend -- or boyfriend for that matter. “The weather was nice today, I went for a walk at 6:30”.

It was a spring of change as obvious as that vernal analogy seems. Peoples of many nations once under the harsh thumb of mindless tyrants were rising up and making their voices known. As an self proclaimed “min-archist” I cheered from the sidelines for freedom, watching tweets and buzzes and vids propagate as freedom spilled across the dry lands, more welcome than the rare rains.

Maybe I watched too deeply, too interested, too investigative. I don’t know why I did a simple C(r) = NSXY - (SX)(SY) / Sqrt([NSX2 - (SX)2][NSY2 - (SY)2]). But I did, and I became convinced.
It couldn’t be coincidence.

Every post, every check-in, everything about Joel’s page was temporally connected to the events unfolding on the world wide stage. He would post, and the state department made an announcement.
Joel announced that he went to the store for coffee, and NATO fighter planes would run a sortie.
At times I felt half mad; but it was repeatable beyond expectation. If this was a paranoid delusion it was the best I had, my own personal Nash equilibrium. Joel posted, tweeted, and I tuned to the world’s media to see what would happen next. The patterns were indisputable.

I became obsessed with seeing what deeper information lay hidden in Joel’s personal page.

Every spare moment was devoted to Joel’s info. My late nights became illuminated by glowing monitors, digging through old collected philes on every form of spook-dom I could recall. I think all those of my profession of electronics and software had some interest in the technology of espionage, and I for years I had stuffed away books, stories, presentations from technical conferences, and now I was convinced that somewhere in all those philes-because-its-cool I could find a way to see more into Joel.

I obsessed over Joel. Is there a real “Joel”, or is this personal page merely an electronic dead drop? I combed his posts for additional information, I looked for anything that carry additional meaning. His posts. His friends. Anything and everything. I added his friends. I scanned them for activity. I told no one of my discovery.

The spring turned to summer. Some of the international games seemed stale mated; others came to a conclusion. When there was a spike in activity in the world, there was a spike in Joel’s activity.
My obsession waxed and waned as well.

By late summer the situation in one country, long considered a friend of those I would call enemies, had drastically deteriorated. Tales of violence and torture as daily tools of the “police” were coming to light. Joel’s social life blossomed. New friends. New pictures. New posts.

I’m not sure why it took my so long to make the critical connection that changed my life. Perhaps the associated technology was so old, something long forgotten tucked away on a shelf, exciting in its day, but now merely old. But still useful…through the haze of memory it popped out.

Joel routinely talked about the buying items, and going for walks. Each of those included a dollar amount he spent, or a time he left for his walk. All dollar amounts were greater than $10, and less than $20.

During these days of intensified resistant in that far off land, Joel’s walks and shopping trips became almost routine. In anticipation I dug through my old gear; my pulse rate went up as I connected equipment and the time grew nearer. GMT – 5. Joel had spent $14.55. I connected the audio out to the line input on my PC, ready to record whatever sounds came out. The minutes ticked down, and I tuned my old shortwave receiver to 14.55 MHz. My room was filled with the sounds of AM static. Crackles and swooshes. Pops and hisses. Then the non-silence of an unmodulated carrier signal, and…the ping-pong of two notes! My palms were sweating as I started to record to my hard drive. A second after the tones played a female voice repeated “Attention!” Three times. Did she have a French accent? It was hard tell.

“15. 37. 18. 22. 33…” The female voice slowly and purposefully spoke a series of two digit numbers.
After a short time the numbers topped, and there was the sound of digitally modulated signal. Not musical like a fax machine, but the harsh squawk of a modem. After the data burst there were two seconds of dead carrier, then the initial two tones again and the whole message was repeated. The carrier dropped away, and once again the radio interpreted only the background hum of the universe.

I sat there flabbergasted. I replayed the recording over and over. I knew of course what this was.
Back in the cold war they were called “number stations”. We used them. They used them. No one talked about them; everyone knew what they were. Instructions to operatives, sent with one time pads.
The connection between the old tech and new was haunting.

I couldn’t sleep. I had to find more. I analyzed the modem squawk and found it to be very simple old fashioned FSK, at only 4800 baud. This message, over a radio medium now more common in the third world than the first, was designed to reach out to people who had to make do.

I focused on the data stream: I knew the numbers themselves were secure. The nature of a one-time-pad. I was no crypto specialist, but I have read a couple of books “applied” and “privacy” books over the years. As with the audio itself, the modem data revealed nothing but a string of numbers.

I played the audio over and over while digging through old paper files. A manila folder marked 2006 held what I was looking for: some notes from a talk on steganography. I began to review the concept, when simultaneously I had a new message online and a phone call. I stopped the recording of the “numbers”, multi-tasked and answered the phone while clicking on the new message.

I heard and read the same thing: “You are following Joel too closely.” A bit shocking yes, but not too surprising. Of course someone with access to the right logs knows exactly who is following Joel. I was just a “friend of a friend”. My interest in the mundane had caught someone’s attention.

At this point I was supposed to be scared off, to let go of Joel and return to my normal life. It just wasn’t that simple for me anymore. People like me dream of connecting their technological prowess to “something bigger”. Add on top of that pure obsession, coupled with not an insignificant amount of sleep deprivation, resulted in a compulsive resolve to continue. From early on I wanted to know what was hidden from me. It resulted in a life of engineering and technology, listening to airwaves, snooping for open wireless access points, snarfing video feeds. Rational or not I decided at that point to keep going, even to step over the lines I dare not cross before.

I quickly downloaded all of Joel’s pictures. My short reconnection with the steganography I attended years ago, the folder still in my hands, told me that there was something more to be seen in those images besides the dull suburban landscape around Joel’s daily activities.

In addition to the analyzing these images, I had another priority. I needed to know who else was following Joel. This would require returning to the more seedy side of my net friends, some people I hadn’t really interacted with since college. I mean, afterwards I “went legit”, got a good job with a well known firm, and pretended like I didn’t know the meaning of xploit. But now I needed to know, more than anything I had wanted to know before.

So there’s the background. That was the spark that led to someone shooting at me at no-o-clock in the morning in Las Vegas. Those early days of this adventure were nothing but the fun of discovery; the days leading up to Las Vegas were a blur.

I dug through a number of steganography options. I reviewed open source options, played with some
source code.

unsigned int Q = 0;
Q += (Pixel01.RedChan%2);
Q += (2* (Pixel01.GreenChan%2));
Q += (4* (Pixel01.BlueChan%2));
Q += (8* (Pixel01.AlphaChan%2));

I let my code crunch the pictures. While hacking on this, some free beer for my old friends reopened doors. Database exploits were never of much interest to me, but now they were the tool I needed to get what I wanted. My beer soaked friends would be happy to drink and black hat their way in to the inner workings of a popular social networking site, while I worked on finding what was hidden in those images.

I was close, and I knew it. After digging through everything I could find on steganography it was obvious these images were being used to convey information. I had to believe that it was a matter of time before I knew what that was. I was about to compile, and an IM window bleeped to life.
“W00t!” It was my questionable friends. “d00d u gotta see this. Aint’ talking here; only IRL. Now.”

I pushed my project on to a laptop, along with all of my “Joel” philes, and drove across town. The city at night seemed like a glowing movie prop; not real, an imagined bit of scenery just to make things seem more real. The stillness of the sleeping buildings was at odds with my anxiety. I got to my friend’s downtown apartment and nearly ran up the stairs with excitement. The door opened and I was met with music that sounded like a missile strike, throbbing and synthesizing layers of moody electronica.

“Word! Come check this out. This hax0r is good”. My friends talked like they typed. One sat a system with three monitors. So they were able to get the information I wanted – the answer to the simple question “who is really following Joel?”. From Joel’s tons of “friends”, there were a handful of true “followers” – people like me who read everything. “Ok, so these are the followers” said one of my buddies. “Look at their IP addresses – from all over the world. See this guy? He always logs on from a cyber café in Lebanon. But that’s nothing – you gotta see what Doc found”.

All these years later and my friends still referred to each other with by their handles. I hardly remembered the sobriquet I used; I had tossed it away like so many other college pranks. These guys were still PeN1f, DrNex, and Proto-c4ll. The good doctor opened a beer bottle. “Yeah, we’re lucky to have captured this part. This guy is good.” DrNex proceeded to replay a session where he could see someone reading all of Joel’s posts, but then cracking in and removing his tracks. “If we hadn’t seen that happen real time we never would’ve known this guy was watching your friend”.

My friends knew nothing about why I wanted to know about Joel. They were happy to be in the hunt, for any reason. If they hadn’t had found they weren’t the only ones sneaking around inside that system, they would’ve got my info and then played around with the site for their own nefarious reason. But nothing gets these “d00ds” going like competition, and it was on.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew this wasn’t a game anymore. We were playing with something that could have real world impacts. I knew it, but I ignored it. We’re talking guys with guns, feds or worse, after me. After my friends. I honestly knew it, but I chose to ignore the risks and side with the buzzing rush of electronic breaking and entering.

“So Doc,” I said, “what have you found out about this uber guy?”

Doc laughed. “Not much, but maybe enough. Lamer was good enough to hide that he had been there…
but when we caught him, not good enough to hide where he came from.”

“What’s that mean?”

Proto-c4ll turned a laptop around. “Check this.” They had a trail. Cover-his-tracks ninja-boy was connected to a system that hosted a forum. A private, not public, hidden forum…”that fell victim to the same xploit we used to hit that social site. What a noob.” Proto-c4ll laughed.
“But, check it out. And people think we’re crazy” said Doc.

The boys had extracted the info from the database of the private forum and reconstructed it in readable format. It was almost as lame as Joel’s tweets and updates. “Listened to the radio. Do not enter blue zone.” “Joel is online.” “Joel’s friends know about Marcus.”

I looked at the postings, knowing the deeper meanings my friends hadn’t yet imagined. “Give me a copy of that.” “Sure thing.” “You guys rock. Do me a favor and forget about this, ok?” I hoped the old debt they owed me, the legit one who helped them through some legal difficulties, was enough. “Yeah, whatever.” “Don’t be an asshat, ok?”

I took a copy of their data, and left.

By now the sun was coming up, it was time for some coffee. I finally did what I hoped was the last compile on my steganography code. I ran it on Joel’s picture gallery. The pieces were all coming together. The images contained one-time pads. I used that to decode the audio message I had recorded from the number station. “Friends: avoid structure 35, Jabadeen. Joel”. A date was included. The modem squawk looked like grid coordinates. I still didn’t know whether Joel was a real individual or a complete fabrication, but I did know now what Joel was doing.

I suddenly felt very small; as though the world around me had grown bigger and beyond my comprehension. There was a physical sense of shrinking. I worked to clear my head, and looked over the messages from the hidden forum. It became obvious that those on the hidden forum were not friends of Joel. Not only were they following him, but they were actively engaged in working
against the forces of Joel.

I called DrNex. “Word.” “Doc, I need to see real time what’s happening on that forum. Can you do that?” “Yeah, no prob.”

We set up a scheme to feed the forum to my laptop. I don’t know why I wanted to keep watching this, but I just had to, even though the more I watched the more I felt as though I were being watched.

Traffic was picking up on the secret forum. It became apparent that “Joel” was indeed an individual, as well as a network based method of disseminating information.

“Joel will be in Las Vegas soon. 1st w/e August.”

“We will meet him this time.”

Las Vegas. I hadn’t even thought about it this year. When I had time there’s an annual convention I would hit in Vegas, something of interest to tech guys like me. The whole Joel affair had taken over all my thoughts, and I hadn’t even considered it this year.
I was going to Vegas.

I did something I hadn’t done in years. I logged on to IRC, irc.PeN1f.org. #3amigas. Why those three ‘tards who always seemed to be in the same room maintained an IRC channel to talk to each other is completely beyond my understanding. But they did keep it running, and there they were.

==I2R has now joined #3amigas
*DrNex slaps I2R around with a trilobot
<DrNex> l4mer. Can’t believe you’re here.
<I2R> goin on roadtrip re: this wknd. u b there?
<DrNex> yeah, me and Proto-c4ll. peewee’s staying here to finish a job for a client.
<PeN1f> somebody’s gotta pay the beer bills
<I2R> kew. Got a room?
<DrNex> sure, for you. Not at the con hotel, Proto was too slow
<Proto-c4all> at least I remembered this year!
<DrNex> we’re flying out tomorrow. How about you?
<I2R> Not sure. Bus maybe?
<Proto-c4ll> Bus? That’s leet. Not.
<I2R> Whatever. I’ll see you guys there. I’ll msg when I get on site.

I did decide to go bus. Cheap. Less overhead. The ride to Vegas was uneventful. I showed up late the night before the con started. Doc and Proto would be there already, probably at a pre-con party, drinking beer, whatever. They had left a key for me at the front desk. I settled in to the room, and did something I hadn’t since the warning call: I checked up on Joel.

“Joel’s status: Joel is on vacation.”

That’s what I need. I had been running for days, trying to solve all this. I couldn’t sleep on the bus. I went down to the casino, drank a couple of beers, and then headed back to the room and crashed.

The next morning Doc and Proto-c4all got me up to hit the con. I told them most of the story. I didn’t tell them about the connections to world events, the military strikes, the real politicking. They interpreted the Joel vs. Ninja thing as a game – “Like the lost dude’s thing” as Proto-c4ll put it.

I spent most of the day with those two, listening to talks, drinking beer, taking in the sights,
all the while keeping up with the secret forum.

“Joel is here.” “Do you know his location?”

We hit a party that night – DrNex always got invites to the parties. I was almost completely disconnected from my reason for being here. Then Proto-c4ll pulled me across the room. “Dude, PeN1f is flipping out. Talk to him.” Proto pushed a phone into my hands. I stepped out of the party room.

“What’s going on?” “This game isn’t; and they’re on to you. That uber-dude who covered his tracks?
He’s after you. And us too…” I didn’t hear PeN1f on the phone, only what sounded like someone beating on a door, and then nothing.

I looked for Doc and Proto back in the party, but they were nowhere to be seen. My current mental state was not the best for making a decision. I felt like I was floating. I turned to leave. I realized I had two guys walking me out. “Come on, it’s time to bring this to an end.”
My escorts were pushing me towards an elevator. Each had a grasp on my arm. I weighed my opportunities for escape. The elevator dinged, and as the doors opened some pranksters moving hotel furniture burst out. My attempted captors momentarily lost their grip on me, and I bolted.

I ran down a stairwell, and out an emergency exit, tripping an alarm. I sprinted across the street to a parking deck, hoping to find concealment, cover, and evasion in its concrete corridors.

So a simple accident and hacker like curiosity led me to quickly calculating the speed of sound on a parking deck in the middle of Las Vegas. The muffled whumps of the suppressed weapon being fired at me came to a stop. I was frozen, hiding behind a barrier.

A voice yelled out “Come on Joel, give it up. You know we’re on to you, you have no place to hide.”

-----------------------------------------------
6. Articulated
By Luna Lindsey

Andrea chugged down the energy drink. No one knew why, but it made the morphogenetic transition process easier. To fill time, she stretched and practiced a few martial arts moves. It didn’t matter, she wouldn’t be using this body for Operation Dream House. But Chase still had a few things to finish up before they could begin.
They dubbed her Skipper. It was just a code name, but it bothered her. Ken thought it was hilarious, fitting. Of course he was using his real name, which he also thought was hilarious. He looked nothing like Ken, just as she looked nothing like Barbie. But he ran the show. It’s not like IncogNeato paid them anything, so if humor kept him motivated when dreams and idealism wore thin, so be it.
The empty warehouse served unofficially as the hidden base for IncogNeato’s Southern California branch. It smelled like old trucks. In the center of the vastness stood a musty old couch, a row of old metal desks lined end to end, a 3D printer, and the four of them.
Communications expert, Riya, leaned into a broken office chair swinging her leg through the air, chewing on a wad of bubblegum. She snapped it loudly. Then she apologized into the mic attached to her ear. And resumed talking. Code name Teresa. Brown girl with brown Barbie name. Andrea wondered if it was insensitive, and Ken could be kind of a jerk about these things, but Riya didn’t seem to mind.
Ken reviewed the final plans with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, while Chase, code named Todd, hovered over the printer, poking at it now and then. The hum finally stopped, and he removed an object. He flexed the fleshy limbs of the freshly-molded body, insuring proper articulation as it hung limp and naked in his hand.
“Your fetch is ready,” he said.
“I see that,” Andrea replied, stepping closer.
Andrea eyed the thing and briefly felt inadequate. She ran her hands along her own stocky middle, her body fit but not thin, her own hair short, coarse, and starting to gray. Her t-shirt hung off of her like a tent, almost completely covering the top of her shorts.
The doll in Chase’s hand had long silken blonde hair, soft curving breasts, narrow waist, broad hips, and such skinny, skinny legs and arms. The toes poked delicately to a point.
She reached out to touch the anorexic doll in awe. The life-like skin felt cold to her fingers, but she knew, soon enough, that it would warm. The muscles would tighten under her control, and she would look out through those precious tiny blue eyes.
She would be so beautiful.
Andrea stopped herself. She had fallen for their corporate brainwashing. Again. That’s how good they were, and that’s why they had to fight them. She shook her head to rid it of the unrealistic ideal, so she could like herself again. She was awesome. People loved her /because/ of her imperfections. She could fight bad guys with her bare hands and eat dessert without puking it back up.
This replica Barbie doll, if it were a real human being, would probably pass out from lack of food and muscle mass.
It was the perfect disguise for infiltrating the Sony-Mattel® corporate offices. Anyone finding it lying about would mistake it for one in the latest line of Sony-Mattel® My Real Barbie™ fashion dolls. At this size, she could easily enter the building through the ventilation system. And she could avoid any intrusion detection systems by being the size of a small animal. She wouldn’t even register a significant heat signature.
My Real Barbie™ was just what it promised. Andrea could hear the ad playing in her head like a soundtrack. REALISTIC GRIP. SEVENTY-FIVE FACIAL EXPRESSIONS AND MICROEXPRESSIONS. RECOGNIZES TWENTY DIFFERENT COMMANDS. AUTHENTIC BEATING HEART.*
Andrea added a footnote in her mind’s eye: *A real, live beating heart of a living creature.
Then the soundtrack continued: BASED ON ACTUAL HUMAN DNA.
Americans should have been outraged. But somehow, like many cultural phenomena in the past century, few had been disturbed. The efforts of protest groups came a little too late. No one knew about the product until it had been released. Instead of being appalled, parents mugged one another at department stores during every sold-out delivery, just to get their hands on one in time for Christmas.
Animal+human rights protestors just seemed cruel after that. Cruel and frivolous. No one wanted to take favored toys away from doe-eyed twelve-year-old suburban girls.
This time would be different. Mattel® planned to release a new toy. They had learned of it well ahead of release. Protests were powered by information, and information was IncogNeato’s forte. They could stop this latest advance in toy brutality in time.
“Ready?” Chase asked, motioning towards the couch.
“Can we dress her first? I mean, she’s not entirely anatomically correct, but still…”
Chase handed her the Barbie-sized ninja suit made of black matt vinyl, with integrated harness, covered in a dozen tiny little pockets. Using tweezers, he had already filled each pocket with micro-sized tools of the trade: grappling guns, tape, glue, drill, lasers, nano-ooze, homing beacon. She even had a lock pick set made of extendable wire.
No weapons. If it came to that she would use her body and her smarts.
At least this time she’d be humanoid. For one mission, her fetch had been a limbless blue cube and she had to scoot around just to move.
Andrea awkwardly tugged the tiny outfit onto the flaccid body. It reminded her of being a little girl, when her parents tried to make her play with dolls instead of playing baseball. It also made her think of her puppy that died when she was nine. Floppy and lifeless.
“Where’s the shoes?” she asked.
Chase handed her a tiny pair of pink plastic high heels.
Andrea looked at him like he was holding a dead wasp. “You expect me to be able to walk in these things?”
He shrugged. “They don’t exactly make tabi boots for Barbies.”
Andrea frowned and tried to throw the shoes away. Chase grabbed them and put them on anyway. He propped the figure up on a collectible doll stand.
Andrea met his eye and nodded once. Then she strode to the threadbare couch and plopped down. She struggled to get comfortable, but a spring jabbed her in the back. Her exercises could not protect her from the crick she was going to have in her neck.
Chase approached her with an Ultra-NanoSD card in his left hand and a small syringe in his right.
“Hold still, Skipper. You’re going to feel a tiny pinch.”
Andrea distracted herself by feeling annoyed at the code name again, and then at the name NanoSD. It technically wasn’t even micro. She could see it with the naked eye, even if the chip itself was a sixteenth the size of her pinkie nail. Chase held it by the applicator, a flat piece of plastic the size of a quarter.
The pinch was hardly a mosquito bite. The syringe now held a drop of her blood. He dripped it into the side of the applicator. The blood channeled down into a series of nanotubes and soaked into a circuit in the SD card.
Chase flicked at the chip a couple of times and held it up to the light.
“We’re good,” he said. He squeezed her hand three times. “You ready?”
Andrea nodded and took a few deep breaths. Chase pressed the SD card into a slot in the fetch’s neck.
In that moment, Andrea became Skipper.

***

Her first sensation was the grip of plastic around the back of her neck, and then a giant Chase loomed over her. He gently unhooked her with fingers the size of her head.
She tried taking a step but immediately fell forward. She felt the pain in her knees as if it were her own.
Immediately, she flicked the shoes away. Having walked only an inch in her shoes, she felt sorry for the My Real Barbies™ who had to walk around in those things every day. They threw her off balance more than her impossibly-proportioned body and too-small feet. As she guessed, barefoot was best. Any tacks or pieces of glass lying around would come up to her shins anyway.
Her center of gravity was too high, her legs too narrow. She steadied herself against Chase’s thumb as she slowly learned to walk all over again. She found if she bent her knees slightly, and leaned back, it kept her upright well enough.
“You all right down there?” Chase’s voice boomed down from the height of a skyscraper above her. “Do we need to delay the mission?”
“Just give me a minute. I’ve got this.”
“What?”
She shouted as well as she could. “I’ve got this! Can you bring me my headset? I said BRING ME MY HEADSET!”
Her voice shouldn’t sound so weak. If they ever used this pattern again, they should redesign the voice box.
She took the miniature headset from Chase, the old style that fit over her head, squishing her perfect hair. A wire ran to a box the size of a hip flask. The latest in miniaturization tech couldn’t get it any smaller. There would be no fully augmented reality or wireless internet for Ninja Skipper. She would be able to access a few pre-specified pieces of data from the SD card, but all of her communications would be over the mic.
She fitted the device over her head and clipped the hardware to her belt. It all fit perfectly thanks to on-demand manufacturing. If only Chase had thought to print her some shoes.
“Testing. One, two, three,” she said.
Riya’s voice rang in her ear. “We read you. Encrypted communication active. Over.”
Skipper nodded and then rifled through her pockets to check on all her goodies. Then she practiced martial arts forms while she listened to the sound of Riya chewing gum in her ears. She tried to ignore the eyes of the other team members gawking at her. Moreover, she tried not to look at her own sleeping form on the couch. The disorientation made her reel and always made her want to vomit.
Pretty soon she was throwing high kicks better than she could ever hope to in her human body. That’s why she was always chosen to drive the fetches. Her ability to adapt quickly to hemoglobin-based morphogenetic remote tele-control bodies set her apart from dozens of other eager members of their little clandestine non-profit organization.
She performed a deft backflip ending in a whirling roundhouse. “I’m ready,” she said. “Take me to the Dream House.”
Chase brought her a twelve-inch metal frame with a harness for the van ride. She strapped herself in, and he placed her in the front seat. The seat belt wrapped around the frame to get Skipper safely to the dropzone. She could also see out the window for the entire drive.
Headquarters had closed hours earlier, and aside from a few feeble streetlights, darkness engulfed the back parking lot. Chase pulled up next to the building, just out of sight from the closest camera. He released Skipper from her traveling contraption and set her next to the wall, behind a bush.
His door slammed shut, and tires squealed as he sped away.
Skipper closed her eyes and accessed the SD card, pulling up the entire 3D building map in her mind. She took note of her current position and the target on a desk in a cubical just five hundred feet away. She looked down at her tiny bare feet, feeling prickly against the mulch. It might as well be five hundred miles.
Left thigh pocket, spider silk grappling. She gripped the plastic handle and pressed a red button. A gossamer line zipped up three stories and planted itself firmly into the wall partway up. Certainly not high enough, but she had two.
“Surveillance report,” she whispered into her mic.
“Clear,” came Riya’s voice. Skipper stepped back a few feet from the building, pressed the green button, and the silk retracted, yanking her up with it. Holding on with one hand, she retrieved the grapple’s twin in her right thigh pocket, and did the same for the next three stories.
Rinse repeat.
Her body felt buoyant as she flew through the air. Her proportional mass made any bumps and scrapes minor. Anticipation fled in favor of excitement; this was going to be fun.
At the apex, she launched a short length of spider silk into the side of an HVAC unit and slowly reeled herself down to the surface of the roof. Easier than walking. Especially on these feet.
But walk she must, five hundred feet, through this rooftop city of vents and antennae and AC ducts. She began her journey with a single step, and hoped there were no animals living up here.
She brooded on her target. It sat on the desk of toy designer and genetic engineer, Mikal Pernislav, a brand new, mint in box, numbered 1 of 50000 Limited Edition individualized My Real Barbie™ with YourDNA™.
The public had not yet heard of this product. Boxes twenty through fifty-thousand sat on warehouse floors in Zhenjiang, China, ready to be shipped in one week’s time. Like the original My Real Barbie™, product launch was planned as a surprise. No press releases, no time for controversy, no time for ethics debates, just an instantly and massively popular toy on WalMart® and Toys’R’Us® shelves everywhere.
Like My Real Barbie™, this toy was a living thing. Unlike My Real Barbie™, this one would not be remotely activated upon product registration. No, My Real Barbie™ with YourDNA™ came with a USB7 DNA processing kit, and would only awaken after a small saliva sample from each twelve-year old girl was sent, along with registration, to the Mattel® website.
Then the doll would magically come to life and play dress-up. Your child’s own face pasted onto a supposedly perfect adult female body.
Batteries not included. Or needed.
If this weren’t insult enough, IncogNeato had obtained intelligence indicating the terms of the End User License Agreement, which purportedly passed the full intellectual property of Your(child’s)DNA™ to Sony-Mattel, Inc.
Forever.
Skipper looked back. She’d crossed the halfway point. She rubbed at the base of her skull where the Ultra-NanoSD slot itched a little bit. Where her own blood resonated with her DNA and formed a link to the morphogenetic fields where her true self was stored in the ether of the universe. Her physical brain and DNA were merely tuning devices, not actual data storage for her memories and personality. Fetch technology allowed the blood on the SD chip to tune in instead. Like pulling up Wikipedia on a phone instead of a desktop PC.
Convenient technology for voluntary telepresence. But imagine a generation of girls who no longer own the rights to their own morphogenetic frequency. The beginning of a slippery slope leading to human enslavement. Or worse.
This story had to break before those toys hit the market. Before a deluge of cultural entitlement set this precedent in stone.
Operation Dream House: Gather information and proof of the new Barbie, including the text of the EULA, without leaving a trace.
Skipper had reached the vent at the far end of the building. It stuck up from the roof and curved towards her, yawning and open. She reached for her silk grapple, and then heard the spine-chilling squeak.
She turned, a feeling of dread sweeping over her. The rat’s nose twitched not three inches away from her, sniffing, trying to decide if lifelike meat smelled like food.
It lunged.
Skipper held but one thing in her hand: the grapple. She shot it behind and to the left of the rat and it struck the side of a stairwell housing. She pressed the green button and it dragged her lurching along the ground past the rodent and halfway up the wall.
The rat turned. His whiskers twitched; his beady red eyes flashed, as if he were more intelligent than she, and as if she had just made a big mistake.
He ran her direction, and then began walking up the stucco wall as if it were a floor.
A cable ran from the small building across to an antenna fifteen feet away. With the second grapple, she launched herself into the air to dangle, this time, hopefully, out of the rat’s reach.
It was not the most comfortable position.
The rat glared at her from the top of the housing. It was then that she noticed the cleaning brushes attached to his sides and stomach.
This was no ordinary animal. She was looking at a genetically-modified commercial cleaning rodent – a Honda® Moustodian™.
“Riya, come in!” she shouted into the mic.
“It’s Teresa, Skippy.”
“Yeah, whatever. What does Wikipedia say about the Honda Moustodian?”
“Ugh,” Riya said. “You found one of those? Hold on…”
While she waited, the rat took a few tentative steps into the line.
“Hurry up!” she shouted.
“Cool, we should get one of these to clean up the base. Only $129.95.”
“What do I need to know to fight one?”
“Well, it says here, in addition to the brushes and ecologically-friendly bio-safe cleaning saliva, these animals have been given slightly-above-average intelligence. For a rat. This cross-references to the entry on rats which indicates this creature could possibly be quite smart. I recommend running.”
He was coming towards her, now with confidence.
Skipper let go of the wire, lowering herself twelve inches on the spider silk.
/Let’s see him climb down this./
It lurked above her, pacing back and forth. She wondered now if he planned to eat her or take out the trash. She looked below, hoping for some kind of escape. Where ever she went, he would follow, and she didn’t exactly bring her 9mm automatic.
That’s when she spotted it. A bright yellow box of D-Con thrown casually against the stairwell housing. While she steadied her aim, she wondered three things simultaneously:
How did they keep the Moustodians from eating the rat poison?
How did they keep the Moustodians from throwing the box in the trash?
And how long did these damn pellets take to actually kill a rat?
She briefly wondered if the Moustodians had been made immune to the poison, but her thoughts were interrupted by a rapidly incoming D-Con box. The force made her swing back and forth, and at that same moment, the rat had figured out that he could keep her swinging by grasping the silk with a foreclaw.
A second later, he had figured out how to reel her up. She gave the cord more slack and fumbled with the box, reaching inside the hole for a pellet.
The box slipped out of her hand, taking her attached second grapple with it, but at least she held one foul-smelling green cylinder in her hand, the size of a tall beer can in her tiny Kung Fu grip. She held it up to the rat hopefully, expectantly. He had pulled her within reach, but wanted nothing to do with the poison.
Instead, he snatched her hand and squealed. She felt the pain of a deep scratch but she did not bleed.
“Fuck this!” she shouted, and pressed the release button with the thumb of her free hand. The rat could not hold on, and she fell.
She lay beside the box and the unwanted pellet. She only had a moment to catch her breath before she spotted the rat at the base of the stairwell, racing towards her, teeth barred, antibacterial extra-sanitary spit dripping from his jaws.
Calmly she stood, attached the pellet to the end of her grapple gun, and fired.
The pellet lodged in the rat’s mouth, and instinctively he clamped down.
And exploded.
The rat tumbled, headless, while bits of flesh and brain slowly rained down around her.
“Did you hear me, Skipper? I said my code name is Teresa,” the voice cut in again. Then as an afterthought, Riya added, “Over.”
“I read you,” Skipper said. Her words came out easily, and she realized she didn’t really need to catch her breath at all. This body needed no oxygen. “Make a note to buy some D-Con for our next infiltration, in case we meet with any further rodents of unusual size. Over.”
“Noted. I mean, roger. In comes in two flavors. Poison or explosive?”
“Explosive. Headed into the Dream House now. Over.”
Skipper gathered a couple of pellets into her pockets, recovered the other grapple, and left the box and rat where they lay. She was to leave no evidence behind, but this should look like a defective Moustodian whose natural hankering for rat poison had overcome his synthetic programming.
She hoped Mattel® would not receive a refund from Honda®.
At the duct, she pressed her ear to the metal to listen for rat sounds. None.
According to the map, the desk was only a few yards over and just two stories below. Skipper slowly lowered herself into darkness.
Once her feet safely rested against the cool metal, she put on her headlamp and switched it on. A single pinprick LED lit up the whole conduit. Not surprisingly, the surfaces shone spotlessly.
When they’d briefed this part of the operation, Skipper had imagined herself crawling through the vents, but at this size, she could walk upright. Her feet didn’t even make a sound as she progressed to the next downward thoroughfare, and then to the proper register.
She peered down at the room below through the vent slats. Gray cubicles grew in their neatly planted farm rows. Less boring than a typical office, each worker proudly displayed their projects on desktops and cube walls: Matchbox™ cars; Fisher-Price® My First™ toys including My First Harley™ and My First Implants™; Polly Pockets™; brightly-colored toddler learning sets; cars, planes, trains, and movie franchise action figures.
The row directly below her contained disproportionate levels of pink. This must be the Barbie team. Her target stood tall and proud below, two desks over, partially obscured by the cloth-covered half-wall. No one was working late.
In a pocket she found the laser cutter and began slicing through the backs of three screws. They fell with a soft clatter to the duct floor. She pocketed them and gave the vent a hard kick. The remaining threads groaned and she kicked again. They came free and the vent cover tilted partially outward. She pivoted it on the remaining screw, leaving an opening just large enough for her to squeeze through.
Skipper anchored some spider silk to the false ceiling and hooked the grapple onto her harness. She lowered it a few inches, and hung there. Shifting the cover back into place, she retrieved three replacement screws. No one would ever know she’d been this way.
Then she lowered herself to the desk.
She reached her target unimpeded. Barbie™ stood, regal like a princess in her blister pack tower, surrounded by curtains of pink labels. IMPROVED! it declared. IMPRINTS TO YOU!
She didn’t know whether to dread or pity it.
A shadow hid the doll’s face, which suited Skipper just fine. She had wondered if they shipped these with blank faces, which would make them difficult to sell, or if they somehow stamped on a default face until the children had a chance to submit their DNA. Either answer disturbed her, and she didn’t want to find out.
Anyhow, the samples she took should tell her team everything they really needed to know.
First, the nano-ooze.
She fished out a bottle the size of a rat pellet. She twisted off the top and poured the viscous black liquid along the seal of the blister pack. According to recent regulations, this packaging was not completely sealed, and could be pulled apart in the back, leaving a very thin crack.
The sludge expanded and contracted and then began moving like a slug into the package. She waited for it to spread to all paper within the box, wrapping itself along the edge molecules of black-ink letters. It would ignore the glossy pink cardstock and seep into what really mattered: the full text of the EULA enclosed in a tamper-evident Tyvek® envelope sealed inside a taped-over plastic bag.
Within five minutes, it headed back to the point of origin, and Skipper scraped the ooze back into the jar. Back at the base, the imprinted molecules would reform the characters on specialized paper, and then burn through, leaving something like a stencil. They would end up with a transcribable document.
She pocketed the liquid EULA. Now for proof that the doll actually contained the technology to imprint the DNA of children.
Skipper felt a brief flash of sympathy for the creature that stood before her. After all, she had just walked 500 feet in her shoes. Or rather, barefoot because the shoes hurt too much. And now she was going to jab it.
She retrieved a collapsible needle from another pocket and removed it from its plastic sheath. She extended it until it stretched nearly four inches: long enough to reach the flesh within the blister pack. And only 16µm in diameter, thicker than a nanotube, thinner than an acupuncture needle. Just small enough to puncture the plastic without leaving a trace. If she weren’t so small herself, she’d have a hard time holding on to it.
The needle pierced the plastic and approached the exposed upper arm of the still figure. Skipper pressed on until it dug into meat. She winced as if it were her own arm, and then slowly withdrew the sample and deposited it into a vial.
A crinkling sound came from in front of her. From inside the blister pack.
She looked up, and met the eyes of a very angry little girl.
Shit. She didn’t think to check the sides to see if it had already been opened, imprinted, and then closed back up. This must be Mikal’s daughter.
The doll struggled against the zip-tie that held her to the box. So much for leaving no trace. She hoped they’d assume something went wrong with the product itself. Maybe it would cause delays. More time for them.
She slowly backed towards the edge of the desk where her grapple dangled. The box fell forward. She could hear the doll scraping the inside, scratching at it, trying to escape her glass coffin.
Skipper grasped the grapple and zipped to the floor. She doubted the toy could free itself from so much plastic and shipping bondage. But now it started to scream. To call for help.
Another imprinted My Real Barbie™ Gettin’ Fit™, not in the original box /or/ in mint condition, peered down at her from the next desk over. It’s face contorted in what must be expression #24 of 75: Rage.
Skipper had to make it to the mailroom, and fast.
She scanned the office for a quick means of escape. A pink convertible rested on another desk, thankfully close, and in the right direction, towards the mailroom. Her grapple hook brought her quickly up to its level while the first Barbie continued to scream and the second searched for a way down from her perch.
Skipper reached under and flipped the ON/OFF switch. The tiny motor began running. She jumped into the very uncomfortable front seat to make her getaway, but suddenly realized she had no means of driving it. The augmented reality headpiece, hanging out the passenger side, was sized to fit a little girl, not Barbie herself.
Meanwhile, GetFit had somehow climbed down to the floor, and now made her way to the cubicle, wearing a tank top, horrible pink legwarmers over lighter pink stretch pants, and a wicked grimace.
Cursing, Skipper slammed her hand against the steering wheel. The car lurched forward, the wheels began spinning, and she raced toward the edge of the desk.
The plastic car sailed over the edge in style, landing with a clatter and continuing its forward momentum. Skipper tested the steering wheel. Useless. Without that AR band around her head, she would have no control over this vehicle.
Behind her, GetFit chased at much lower speeds, but still at a run. She only had a lead of a few feet. Ahead of her became a pink blur, an obstacle loomed up, and then she was flying through the air.
She landed, hard, on her head. Fortunately due to her size, gravity did little damage. She stood and looked around. Then grinned.
At last, a /real/ vehicle. Her convertible’s engines whined below against the tire of a Power Wheels® Fashion Driver Jammin’ Jeep™ with brainwave-activated autonomous acceleration and steering.
She couldn’t reach the pedals, but then she didn’t have to.
GetFit effortlessly closed the distance and grabbed hold of the front tire, ready to climb. Skipper stood at the wheel and thought to herself, with firm conviction, /Vrooom!/
A wet crunching sound came from the spinning front tire. The doll below her squeaked just before her head rolled off to slam against the wall.
Skipper shuddered at the gruesome sight in her rearview mirror. Unlike the dolls of her childhood, this new breed was not designed to have their heads ripped off.
She spun the jeep to a stop at the mailroom door and leaped to the floor. Using the grapple, she climbed to the top of the counter. From somewhere down the hall, she could still hear the first Barbie screaming. The sound was coming closer. This wasn’t done yet.
She pulled an envelope from a neat stack. It was nearly as long as she was tall. Embracing a pen in her arms, she wrote the address of a post office box rented out to a fake identity. She wrote the same address in the return space, just in case. Then she unfolded a stamp from one of her pockets, wet it on the moist sponge Mattel® had so graciously provided for such a purpose. Then she pulled out the itty-bitty sample vials and placed them inside.
She sealed it and dragged the load across the table, careful not to fall in the shredder, and dropped it into the outgoing box.
Now, to dispose of herself.
The screaming had stopped, and cautiously, she peered below. 1 of 50000 peered up at her with expression #12, evil delight. Incredibly lifelike, and on the face of a child. Skipper slowly removed a rat pellet from her pocket, and, wincing, dropped it.
There was a small pop and the sound of a doll falling over.
Maybe they would think the two dead Barbies had gotten into a fight over Ken. She hoped.
Skipper jumped from the countertop into her ride and spun down the hall until she reached the kitchen. She set the Power Wheels® heading back the other way, unattended, and then grappled her way into the trash. She hid her body as well as she could in the bottom of the bag before logging out and returning to her own aching body in the warehouse.
Mission accomplished.

***

Three days later, after they retrieved the samples from the post office, a serious of well-placed blog posts caused a huge stir of outrage on the internet. Celebrities demanded the end of the entire Barbie line of toys, Senators debated further regulation of the toy industry, anarchists demanded the end to all intellectual property, libertarians demanded free market solutions, socialists demanded an end to capitalism. In the end, freaked-out parents, by and large, refused to purchase My Real Barbie™ with YourDNA™ or without it. Forty-five thousand toys remained in warehouses. A month later, deep-fried Barbie legs were rumored to be a delicacy in Zhejiang, China.
Andrea and Chase hung out at the base, waiting for their next mission. She took a deep breath on the couch, while Chase sipped coffee and played a game at one of the desks.
“Spot me, will ya?” she asked. She walked over to the desk, set the morphogenetic transference on a sixty-second timer, and returned to the couch.
She wasn’t sure what she had expected, visiting that tossed out Barbie fetch. Maybe a flash of pain from a mangled body in a trash compactor. Or perhaps the blackness and weight of a ton of trash above her. But she’d walked five hundred feet with those articulated limbs, and now she wondered its fate.
Instead of a forgotten landfill, she found herself in the hands of a small child in a run-down apartment bedroom. The wallpaper peeled a little bit, and the bed sheets looked a little stained. All the toys around her seemed a little broken or smudged. All of them were a few years out of date.
Janitorial staff must have found her and taken her home.
The girl giggled and rammed her head into a dresser a few times, and then forced her to kiss a Ken doll. Her shirt was ripped off and haphazardly replaced with an evening gown.
A voice called from somewhere else in the house. The girl set her down inside an older model Dream House™ with sun-faded pink walls. Then she ran off to eat dinner.
Andrea had the place to herself. She walked around the canopy bed to the battery powered elevator. She looked down the hall to the fireplace and hot tub. All the promises of a better life. Be a good girl, it seemed to say. Keep your hair nice, your nails clean, and your body shapely. Fill your head with knowledge of the latest fashions, and you too can have a nice place to live.
But those dreams were plastic, and the pink a little too garish. Andrea logged out, and went back to saving the world. 

-----------------------------------------------
7. ALL CAPS
by: Edward Nickelson

Adrian didn't have much time. The alarm had been sounded, not by him, but he doubted the building's security would care about that when they found him clutching this data module. He could hear the stomping polythene jack boots as well as the tapping of arachnid like legs of a KLM series guardian; the rain like tintinnabulation belied the fact that it weighed two tons and was probably sporting more weapons than your average third world government could marshal.

Luckily he was still connected to the building's systems and could tell where all the security forces were by their IFF's. Unfortunately they knew their business and were not depending on the system to inform them. Their search pattern had surrounded him and the conference room where he had hard-plugged into the system. He had only one escape route left. He had been hoping to make a stealthy escape though. Sure you don't keep your reputation as the world's greatest adventurer/hacker by going unnoticed, but he considered it a breach of the spy work ethic to make the sort of escape he was about to make.

As building security poured into the room from the sides, shouting at him to give up, taking positions behind tables and around walls, rolling gas grenades, and audio/visual shock grenades, and wifi static grenades. Possibly some incendiary and shrapnel grenades if this data module had on it what Adrian suspected it did. The KLM-48 tip-tapped its bulk through the double doors behind the soldiers and started spinning its chain gaussrifles up to firing speed.

Time slowed to Adrian as all this happened and with his left arm he raised his signature weapon, an HK assault gyrojet launcher with a double edged tanto welded into it like a bayonet with an arm brace so both the gun or short sword can be effectively wielded one handed. He levelled his weapon not at his attackers but at the window behind him and dumb fired three rounds turning the glass instantly white with micro fractures spidering out from the three holes he made. At the same time with his right hand he threw the neodymium data core at the window and followed right after it in a dive worthy of an olympic swimmer.

The glass sparkled around him like the stars he had seen in old photos. There was a roar behind him as the grenades erupted.Shooting stars made of gauss pellets flew by overhead, the security guards no doubt, the KLM wouldn't waste ammo like that. He fell thirty stories in that serene scene, falling was safe. Once the falling ended it either meant he hit something and died, or he would be an airborne target for the archology's AA grid to take out. Ultimately dodging AA barrages sounded easier than dodging the earth so he activated his jetpack and surged forward grabbing the datacore then diving into the old city that surrounded the archology. With any luck the AA batteries are programmed not to aim down into the impoverished masses outside their walls.



Adrian arrived at the buyers airship around 0100. She was there wearing a gossamer black dress that left just enough to the imagination to let his imagination run wild, and he knew then that she was going to betray him. Alexa Petrov, Chief of Corporate Relations for the Rus Corp. the de facto owners of the Russland-Ukrainian empire and most of the northeastern Eurasian continent ever since the mobs imploded a decade ago.

"Adrian darling, I see you survived as usual." She said, Russian accent rolling off her tongue beautifully. "When the news reported an incident at the Musashi-Bergmann Archology I started to worry, I forgot you liked to do things rough and messy sometimes, but you always get the job done," and she handed him a martini. "You did get the datacore, yes?"

"Of course, but first lets talk about the job. Someone else set off the alarm, what are the odds of two thieves in one night?" Adrian said, putting down his martini without drinking it.

"Very low, are you sure you're not slipping?" and she came right up to him and straightened his flight coat before looking him in the eye through her long lashes.

"No, my technique is as good as ever," he said, "which is why I have to wonder. You're the only one who knew I was going tonight. So was I just the distraction for your own team, an expendable loss? Was this revenge for when I first met you and stole your plans for the Hieronymus Machine? Or was it just about the money? You have been trying to sell M-B new security measures haven't you, maybe you had to prove to them they needed it."

Alexa backed away from him pouting and putting on the hurt eyes of a doe, "Actually it was you we wanted. Boys." Suddenly Adrian was grabbed from behind, one strong pair of arms latched onto his left arm and immobilised the weapon on it and the other gave him a bear hug from the right.

"You and all the information you have acquired in your career. The theft was just to bring you here. We needed you to steal something within your specialisation of 'Information Retrieval' but something physical so you would have to come in person. A 10 hellabyte datacore, more then even your connection speed could transfer."

Adrian did not let her continue to the part about how they would torture and kill him for what he knew, he had heard it all before. Instead he curled his body in his captors' arms and shot his right knee over his left shoulder breaking one handler's nose followed by shooting the same leg straight down breaking the other man's leg. He then leapt into a flying round kick to the left mans temple crumpling him instantly, landed and gave a stern look to the man on his right who decided to stay down and nurse his tibia.

Then he raised the razor tip of his gyrojet gun/sword to Alexa's throat and said, "I have eight usb crystal jacks at the base of my skull to plug in any specialised knowledge and expertise I need on the job but four of those jacks are always full. The first two are a high band transmitter for large data transfer to local systems and a low band for long distance calls. The third is a top of the line graphic interface, the same kind rich kids use to play Transcendent Life. Since you're mostly just a sales person I wont bore you with why that's useful in my line of work."

"The fourth chip though, the last one which I always keep jacked into my skull and never ever for the life of me take out; not to upgrade or sleep or replace with some other vitally needed skill, is a physio-reflex skill chip and on that chip is a label that reads, 'Bruce FUCKING Lee' and the 'fucking' is spelled with all caps." Alexa swallowed involuntarily and Adrian's tanto drew a single drop of blood from her porcelain throat. "Remember that when you file your report. ALL CAPS."

"Now here is your datacore, I expect my pay to be wired to my account by the morning. Pleasure doing business with you and please come again," Adrian Perez, world famous Adventurer/Hacker, said as he walked to the door. "Oh and I programmed your ship to self destruct 60 seconds after I leave."

"Wait," Alexa said, "How did you know I would betray you? What gave it away?"

"Just something my mother always told me."

She smirked, "And what is that?"

"Never trust a woman."

"Your mother had a sense of irony."

"I would tell you what she said about men but we're mixed company." He grinned at her, "Now I suggest you get to an escape pack. Until next time." Then he leapt out of the airship. A minute later he felt the shockwave of the ship exploding followed by the reverse shock of its vacuum bags rupturing and filling.

Setbacks aside it had been a good evening but something she said had him bothered. If they were after him then they had no reason to tip off the security at the archology. There was a third player in this game. This was going to be a long night. 

-----------------------------------------------

8. Coin Flip
by alep luup

Most people never have to stare down the barrel of a gun and take in the abyss therein. Muzzle so close to the eye that you're afraid a blink will set it off, your eyelid touching the abyss will get you pulled in. You experience temporal relativity as the moment grows near-infinite, and perhaps you're hoping the second never ends and you stay alive; or perhaps you're hoping the hole you're looking into would suck you in already, so you could be free of the uncertainty. You experience absolute focus as your whole being is suddenly unaware of the rest of the world, or the man holding the gun, or even itself. All that remains is the promise of a bullet springing from the abyss, and you wonder if you'll have time to see it.

Anatoli was surprised how, a year to the day after the fact, his impressions of that second were as vivid and accurate as experienced in the moment. He'd always wondered how other people have life-defining moments, because no matter the hardships he'd endured as a child in his home country, or on the long and painful journey to escape that and find a better life in the West, or after, he'd never had a moment like that. A moment that held its effect on Anatoli so long after it transpired, and that had defined his life every day since. A moment he couldn't share with anyone.

"Anatoli, my boy, you don't want anything to happen to your old man, do you? We take care of him now, the Bratva is all the family he's got, all the family he ever needed. But nothing is free in this world. So you need to do this favour for us, or else we'll have to let him be on his own. And he's got plenty of enemies that would love a shot at payback."

So did one of the men say, in a kind tone, as the other one (the bald burly brute acting as 'muscle') pulled the gun back from Anatoli's face. And every weekday after that Anatoli would make his way to the corner of Hyde and Ellis, up a narrow, addict-infested stairwell, and into the dark and smokey room that the two shared. Boris would always enjoy giving him a pat-down, rough and angry as if he'd always wished Ivan had let him pull the trigger that one time, in the alley they first met. And Ivan would always be smoking and drinking, cigarette ash and drunken spit decorating the keyboard in front of him, usually with one or two windows opened to disrobing cam-girls. With a big grin on his face, Ivan would always tell Anatoli never to be late again (he wasn't), and get to work faster already or the old man is going to die tomorrow. Anatoli sat down at the computer the two had for him, by Ivan's side, and flicked the monitor on quietly. "Would Ivan or Boris face the barrel of a gun the way I did? Would they think of it every day after it had happened, dissecting the moment like I do?" The gun was not too far from reach. They had it lying on the table since the first week he started coming to this dump of an apartment, and Anatoli had too often fantasized about just grabbing it and shooting both men. But his plan will be a much better punishment.

"My boy, you must finish this today! We take a trip tonight, and your work will finally pay off for the Bratva! We're all going to be very proud of you, and tomorrow your father's going to be well again!"

The drunk Ivan was very enthusiastic about all of this, as if reuniting the boy with his father had been a personal dream of his. Anatoli was tired of Ivan always playing the role of a concerned uncle (with advanced psychosis and chronic alcoholism), not in the least because it did remind him of an actual uncle, a man so repugnant to those around him that his wife stabbed him in the throat with her knitting pins one evening. When this had happened Anatoli was only 7, so he couldn't understand why something like that would happen—but after spending a year with Ivan, he'd very much like some knitting pins himself.

Anatoli logged into the machine and looked at his bot command window: a few thousand more clients had checked in, and he had nearly 10 million computers at his disposal right now, all ready to do his bidding at the push of a button. He felt a rush of adrenaline as he tried to grasp the magnitude of what he'd achieved. The Bratva took him because they knew he used to be a Sibear, and the hacks he pulled for the brotherhood weren't any more spectacular than what he'd done in school. But this time, his actions were going to have important consequences on a scale he'd never thought of before. And he was about to make some powerful enemies — but, hopefully, some damn impressive allies too. No way to go back now even if he'd want to.

The Bratva had understood that the next big heists — like the next big wars — were going to happen online, and they'd long established themselves on that playing field. From semi-legal gambling and pornographic ventures, to anonymous online narcotics outlets and straight-up phishing and carding operations, they had been the only organized digital cartel. Anybody else looking to get a slice quickly got sent either to the Police or to the mortuary. They were ruthless in how they operated, but Anatoli knew their biggest weakness: they handled problems online the way they did on the street, with a generous application of punches and bullets.

A knock on the door startled Anatoli: nobody ever came to this apartment before, for a whole year. Not during the 12 hours in the daytime when Anatoli had to be here, at least. Boris lets two scantily-clad girls come in, as a man about Anatoli's age follows them, laughing and smoking. Ivan's grin subsides, but he doesn't move at all, just takes another swig from his bottle and nods to the newcomers.

"Boris, what do you think you're doing?" says the man, gently pushing the brute aside as one of the girls looks angrily at the bald man. "They are my guests, and unless you're going to start patting me down too, just let'em be." Ivan nods to Boris, and he sits back down on his chair besides the door, watching TV.

"I-van, my man!" lamely tries to rhyme the man. "What is happening, what's the 4-1-1 up in here? We ready?"

"Yes, we can go, everything is ready here. Right, my boy?"

Anatoli nods affirmatively as he's scanning the newcomers. The girls appear to be twins, though maybe it's just their identical clothing and the platinum hair tricking the eye. The guy tries to be flashy, a poor imitation of the pimps in the '70s, only instead of purple fur he dons some ridiculous shirt that looks like a tattoo artist's scratchboard. The gold chains seem thicker than the man's scrawny neck, and they give him what appears to be a slight hunch. A pair of white shades rest on the back of his head.

"Oh, is this the princess that did all the work for us, Ivan? Yo, I'm going to be your daddy on this trip, so from now on you listen to me, kid! Here" — Anatoli felt how heavy the gold rings on the man's left hand were as they impacted with his left cheekbone — "that's so you don't forget me. Name's not important, you just call me Warlock. My code can tear through the online world like a warlock's magic would tear through a kingdom."

Anatoli had to stifle a chuckle hearing the lengthy introduction and especially Warlock's comparison. Right, magic. Only the gold would bedazzle anybody.

Warlock introduced the girls as Kaya and Maya, though Anatoli didn't make a point of trying to differentiate them anyway. He looked back to the screen, staring at the blinking cursor in the command window, thinking how quick it would be to just disband this digital army he'd created and not let the Bratva have it. Maybe one dead man was better than whatever these thugs had in mind.

"Let's go, Ivan, I've got a busy evening tonight!" winked Warlock, motioning to the twins, then grabbed the bottle and took a swig himself.

***

Anatoli couldn't tell where they were going from the sounds of the road, and the bag over his head prevented him from seeing anything. It didn't really make much difference, but the hour-long trip was very boring this way. Boris was driving and, from the sound of things, Ivan was napping. Alcohol and heat don't mix well.

The trip eventually ended and, when his bag was removed, Anatoli saw four nearly identical vans stopped alongside theirs, in the courtyard of a large warehouse. Four other young men looked at one another as their handlers also unloaded them from the vans and shoved them towards one of the warehouse entrances. Some of those other boys had been treated much worse than Anatoli, as blackened eyes and bloodied ears stood witness.

They went through one of many identical entryways into the warehouse. They were shepherded through back-scatter scanners and down a long corridor, passing many closed doors along the way, all with military-type armed guards posted. This seemed like a serious operation, and Anatoli found himself surprised of how well the Bratva had been organized. For a while, Ivan and Boris' attitudes were all that he experienced of the Brotherhood, and he even began to wonder how and organization that employed their kind was any good at crime. But Ivan and Boris were babysitters, pretty low on the food chain, despite their scars and their tough-guy attitude. This was a proper operation, worthy of the kind of reputation the Bratva had.

They went into an elevator, and Anatoli could only tell from the slight jerk, when they started moving, that it was going underground. There were no buttons or lights anywhere in the elevator, and as far as anyone could tell one of the two armed guards posted by the door was remotely operating it. Anatoli took this moment to observe the other boys a little better: all in their early 20s, like himself, looking scared and staring at the ground with tired eyes. The tell-tale sparkle that Anatoli say in his own eyes after hours upon hours of coding and hacking, when everything but the eyes looks dead, flushed of blood or life. But the eyes want more, and the glimmer speaks volumes about the addiction they're all consumed by: the hack. So Anatoli could, at the very least, assume they were all like him, pretty good hackers forced by the Bratva to work on some kind of project. He was curious what kind of work they had to do, but something told him he wasn't too far now from finding out.

Warlock waited for the elevator and spat as they arrived, then commanded everyone to follow him down a somewhat poorly lit corridor. Anatoli could tell they passed a communications room as he heard the hum of an HVAC. Red lights leaked from under the doors, and at one point, just as one of the doors closed, there was a glimpse of two naked girls and some old men surrounding them. A whiff of something illegal followed the closing door and, insofar as Anatoli knew anything about these things, it wasn't herbal.

They went down a narrow staircase at the far end of the corridor and into a vaulted room (which Warlock 'summoned' open, probably with the aid of some sort of voice recognition software). A platform extended towards the middle of the space, and 6 computers were arranged in alcoves around the tip of the platform. Warlock pointed to the other machines, and sat himself down at the centre console from where he'd also be able to watch what all the other monitors were showing. One by one, the boys sat down at the computers, and Anatoli ended up in one of the two spots directly in front of Warlock's post (though the swivel chair their apparent master sat on made any notion of 'front' relative). He'd realized his mistake as soon as Warlock's boot tapped the back of his head not so lightly, but there was nowhere else to go. Only the place next to him was empty, for now, and Anatoli wondered why.

"OK, barbarians, listen up! I am Warlock, I am your master, your daddy, your god, really, and you better do what I tell you or I'm going to use you for certain unpleasant experiments in cybernetics. You all worked for me for the last year, you just didn't know it. I've been watching your computers remotely and I must say, your code is crap! I could write better exploits doing tequila shots while I'm getting head and have a gun in my face! You're all pretty pathetic, but apparently you're the least pathetic of'em all. So you'll have to do."

Another kick to the head, though this one didn't seem as convinced as the first one. That's two — Anatoli planned to return them very soon.

"What you peons don't know is how brilliant my plan is, and how I'm going to make the Bratva very rich today! While you were writing exploits and building botnets, I tuned up the Digicoin client with a little special something. And pretty much everyone in the swarm got 'upgraded' to that client, and today they're all going to be donating their money to our cause."

Well, that was kind of the truth. Anatoli did most of the work Warlock claimed as his own, including the hack on the official Digicoin servers and mirrors. He was particularly proud of replacing the checksum and signing toolchains on some of the core developers' machines, so that they wouldn't know they'd been compromised. He hacked the CDNs serving Digicoin, and the ISPs upstream from the servers and mirrors, some of the big Cisco routers along the way, anything and everything he could do to erase his own traces, and make it seem as if the clients had never been tampered with.

Digicoin was Bitcoin renamed, and nothing much else. Some company found a way to claim some patents on the core Bitcoin technology and, while unable to entirely shutdown the network, they managed to seize domains, have ISPs court-ordered to do deep-packet filtering against possible uses of the 'illegal' client, and have two core developers forced to use Digital Monitoring Software (the equivalent of a trojan/rootkit, only you can't try to remove it, because the Government put it there) so that they wouldn't keep working on the old software. The net effect is that many switched over to Digicoin, but there was also a great influx of new users as media attention to the court case brought the technology on TV. Good marketing made the system very popular, so much so that nearly all of the 21 million coins had been generated, and many exchanges allowed dollars and euros to be traded for Digicoins. For a long time now, the exchange rate had been pretty constant, around $100 for a Digicoin.

Anatoli knew this because the Bratva knew this. While they'd search him everyday for flash drives and guns and recording devices, Ivan and Boris never thought to carefully inspect his wristwatch, or his belt for that matter. So that's what Anatoli used as a Van Eck (electromagnetic) sniffer, picking up on just enough information from the drive of the machine to reconstruct it at his home and craft an exploit. And once he had remote access to the machine, he managed to access the warehouse server farm by piggybacking on Warlock's snoop link using a network stack 'tweak' that let his packets fly on top of the TCP stream Warlock would open. Yet another hack, to be able to bypass the stream altogether and get himself a direct link into their server farm, came when he realized that Ivan's cam-girls were in fact slaves in the warehouse underground. The stream from Ivan's computer wasn't encrypted, was on-demand, and made for a much easier target to exploit than anything else he'd found up to that point. It would let Anatoli disguise his own work as a video stream, avoiding unwanted attention from the server IDS or any of the system administrators that would be watching the traffic everyday.

The door flew open and a loud, expletive-ridden diatribe directed at the guards, the Bratva and the Warlock could be heard. Anatoli turned in his seat enough to notice who was delivering the very risky speech, just in time to see the Warlock slap a young woman once, and then quickly again after she spat him in the face. Something resembling the barbell of a tongue piercing flew out of her mouth, and a little blood dripped on the floor.

"You little... We'll need to make sure you learn some manners before you come back here. Guards! Take her to the Barracks, as a gift from me to all of you, and don't bring her back until she's quiet. Whatever you do, mind the hands and the eyes, or she'll be worthless to me."

Anatoli shuddered thinking what the Barracks treatment might be like. He wasn't sure if torture was all they had in mind, but he knew there wasn't much time left before things would be getting really ugly at this compound.

Warlock moving away from his overview post meant Anatoli had time to load up a little kernel module he wrote a long time ago. It was for fun at the time, but it got to be quite useful in the last few months. He had a little module that would run two commands even though only one was typed: it would execute what was typed, literally, but it would also pick characters from the command string and covertly run a secondary task on the machine. There were some tricks and some tweaks he had made to the module especially for today, and anyway he didn't need to run too many hidden commands. Just enough to make some people on the outside aware of his digital and physical addresses, here in the Bratva's compound. And there was one other ace up his sleeve.

"What the heck are you doing, dumbo?" scowled Warlock towards Anatoli, reading off his screen. "Why do you `cat` to `grep`, you bloody moron? Geez, who ever thought you were a hacker?" Another kick in the head, and this one could've been serious, it wanted to follow through all the way. But it was slow, weak rather, as if a slower, or a more tired, man had done it. Anatoli had seen the tell-tale signs of steroid use in Warlock, and the garbage bin was full of empty energy drink cans and short, thin, plastic straws. He had a hard time picturing Warlock 'tired' in any common sense of the word.

Yet something had changed in his demeanour. He was sluggish, lazy, leaning back in his chair and scratching constantly his cheek until it started bleeding.

"Enough, let's do this! Make those 10 million accounts give me all their Digicoins! You!" — the fourth kick — "bring up your control console and tell those machines to donate the money to these accounts! Kill everything else, I need the swarm to verify the transactions as quick as possible!"

All the hacked Digicoin clients had a remote trigger programmed in. Not a backdoor per-se, but rather a code path that was waiting for a certain hash, a known transaction to make its way in the network. Anatoli rewrote some tiny bits of the client to avoid generating a certain transaction verification hash. When the network did see the hash, however, every client would donate all of its account balance to one of 40 peers, all operateed by the Bratva.

One of the other hackers brought up his own console, ready to make the 40 Bratva accounts hit up the exchanges and convert the digital cash into various world currencies. Yet another brought up the bank accounts on the other side, ready to make some transactions and make the money even less likely to be traced in case anyone would try that.

"I need the transaction block that generates the hash" spoke Anatoli, without facing Warlock, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. Warlock tried to type some commands in his own computer, but somehow managed to mistype thrice in a row before getting it right.

"Read if from your computer's /dev/random, it's mapped to the data now."

Anatoli piped the data into his tool, hit enter, and waited. Warlock's interest was directed to the display of the 40 Bratva accounts, each slowly growing as they were receiving donations. A status indicator showed 5, then 10, then nearly all of the accounts being verified by the network, and a total of nearly 20 million Digicoins were transferred. The exchange process had started, and Warlock was now standing up, leaning forward over his desk at the computer screen showing all the transactions being processed. Some bounces through Caiman banks, and soon the Bratva would be 2 billion dollars richer, all thanks to Warlock.

Warlock's phone rang as the alarm started blaring, and the guards initiated lockdown for the room. He rushed towards the pod besides Anatoli, as the height of the platform sheltered him from the infernal noise of the alarm.

"Yes, yes sir! What? What do you mean, gone? No, we just transferred 2 billion INTO the accounts. No, the alarm's going off, I don't... cops? How? Damn it!"

Warlock was visibly shaken, and very pale, but the urgency in his voice wasn't matched by his movements. He stumbled as he tried to stand up, and fell face first on the floor. The thud his head made as he bounced on impact was accompanied by a good splatter of blood from his nose and mouth. He couldn't stand up, and a faint noise came from his direction.

Anatoli didn't stop at hacking the official Digicoin client: he hacked those 40 Bratva accounts also, some time ago, setting them to report false transactions when they saw the trigger hash. The network verified some transactions, that was true, but they weren't the ones Warlock was expecting. Instead of Digicoins going into the Bratva accounts, the Caiman bank links had been used to siphon the brotherhood's financial holdings, convert them into Digicoins briefly (to lose their trace) and then have all those funds donated to women's shelters, to drug rehabilitation clinics, to orphanages, and to any other institutions that could help the Bratva's victims.

Muffled shots could be heard outside, and the guards opened the door to leave. Behind them snuck the brunette from earlier, seemingly unharmed by her trip to the barracks. She went straight to Anatoli and jumped in his arms, kissing him without restraint, while the other young men in the room cheered and hugged.

The Bratva seemed to take as many precautions as they could, yet somehow they missed the fact that all the hackers they had rounded up for this job had worked together previously in DEFCON CTFs, and some were even fellow Sibears. Or that Kayla, the spunky brunette that spat Warlock with a neurotoxin she'd concealed in the barbell of her tongue ring, was Anatoli's girlfriend.

The Police had a warrant out for Dave "Warlock" Brennan and between that and what this warehouse was, Anatoli and his friends hoped they might be able to get out of the whole deal without handcuffs.

Anatoli walked over to Warlock's convulsing body and kicked him in the head four times.

"Magic." 

-----------------------------------------------
9. The How to Steal the World Affair
By John McNabb

Nappy confidently walked down the sidewalk and then took the six steps down to the entrance to the Little Flower Tattoo Parlor at 2600 Broadway, New York City. He was tall, six foot four, medium build, wore a black tank top, to show off his colorful tats, over tight leather slacks, earrings, and kept his polarizing sunglasses on inside.

In the backroom, he pushed on a concealed panel on the wall, which opened a sliding door. He stepped through into an elevator which quickly whisked him ten floors below the surface and into C0US1N headquarters carved out of the bedrock below Manhattan.

“Nappy, there you are,” said Illy, his partner. Nappy eyed Illy lustily, taking in her skin tight leather slacks, all six foot two inches of her, and low-cut bustier which showed almost all of her substantial bosom. While Illy did have some tasteful tattoos on her arms, and earrings of course, there were no markings on her large well tanned breasts.

“Tell me dear,” he said in a low voice, standing close behind her, “where do you hide a gun in that outfit?” Illy just rolled her eyes and turned away.

“Thank you for coming, both of you,” said W, the head of Section One of C0US1N. He was dressed slightly more conservatively, in a brown tweed three piece suit and a brown bow tie, as he customarily dressed. W’s real name and identity was a closely guarded secret. He gave their tattoos a sharp look. Nappy and Illy shrugged, gave a mental command to their neurological implants, and the tattoos disappeared. Their neurological implants were powerful micro computers that also gave them direct mental control over a limited number of body conditions, allowing them to regulate breathing, adrenaline, and blood flow, as well as providing an always-on communications channel.

“This briefing,” he continued, “is being viewed by thousands of C0US1N agents across the globe. Our decades long struggle against SHR1K3 may finally be reaching a conclusion, where we can win or lose the world. While we are confident that we can win a hacker v. hacker war with SHR1K3, we must never let down our guard.” C0US1N was a decades-old international police organization supported by nearly every nation on earth, because of the threat of world domination by SHR1K3 to the entire planet. C0US1N’s lead agents were an American, Nappy, and a Chinese-Russian, Illy.

“Please permit us to first review some of the most significant battles against SHR1K3 over the last ten years, that have brought us to this point.” He nodded in Nappy’s direction.

“In The Bring in the Clones Affair,” said Nappy, “we discovered by finally decrypting their cloaked communication channels that SHR1K3 had been developing human cloning technology in the Amazon for over twenty years in secret, and had just starting experimenting with accelerated growth methods to bring the clones to adulthood in less than five years. As many of you may recall, it was a very bloody fight that succeeded in wiping out the clones and destroying the facility.”

“Are we really sure that we got them all?” asked an agent from Hong Kong, which Nappy picked up on his implanted comm unit embedded in his skull.

“We are as sure as we can be,” Nappy said, looking at his hands.

Illy then took over. “In The Night of the Zombies Affair, in West Africa, SHR1K3 had succeeded in producing a drug from teratodoxin, datura, and scopolamine that produced an effective zombie-like state that they used to create an army of thousands of zombies, that they planned to use to take over all of Africa. Fortunately, our scientists quickly found an antidote that was used in a mass aerial spraying to cure all those unfortunate people.”

“Thank you Mr. N and Ms. I,” said W, who insisted on speaking properly at all times. “Also, we need to remind you of The Anubis Gate Affair, when SHR1K3 hacked the universe itself by creating a wormhole into a secret alien base under Antarctica. We never found out where the aliens came from or how they got there, unless it was by a similar rip through the universe, but we were sure they had nothing but the worse intentions for us. SHR1K3 may have stolen some advanced technology from the aliens before our agents destroyed it with a low yield nuclear weapon.”

“But let me now get to the point,” said W. While each of those missions were definitely successes for C0US1N, and we did set them back years, unfortunately it now looks like each of them did contribute to their overall master plan, which all of us know is to take over the world.”

“Since the days after World War II, about 75 years ago, we have been battling SHR1K3, which was formed by survivors of the Nazi party and the SS, and which will never give up their mission to create a Fourth Reich. Now it looks like they may have found a way to do it!”

W turned to the wall behind him, which started to show images from recent news reports from the many internet news outlets.

“First, there are the reports of the kidnappings of 50 hackers from all over the world, the most recent one being the abduction of the entire team which won the Capture the Flag hacking competition at DEF CON 28 in Las Vegas last year.”

“Second, our monitoring of worldwide communications network, satellites, and the internet, have shown numerous, subtle but unmistakable, tampering of the signals. We are working around the clock to identify what is happening, but we have to conclude that SHR1K3 is probably behind it. We have known for some time that they are extremely interested in electronic mind control techniques, and it looks like they may have some new developments in that area. They have plenty to go on, of course, considering the long history in this area, such as the CIA project MKULTRA, as well as projects BLUEBIRD, ART-CHOKE, CHATTER, CASTI-GATE, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI, THIRD CHANCE, MKSEARCH, AND MKOFTEN.”

“Finally,” said W, “and this is most strange, we have reports from our agents in North Korea that a Doctor Kotobuki, who has been working at the infamous Camp 22, had defected to SHR1K3. The reports say that he was performing experimentation on head transplants with human subjects, presumably as a macabre way to try to provide practical immortality to that nation’s leaders.

“Section 4, Research Branch, reports that there have been recorded limited success of head transplants in dogs, monkeys, and rats. Combine this with cloning and one could perhaps create virtual immortality, since transplanting ones head onto a clone of oneself avoids any issue of tissue rejection. So far as we know, this hasn’t been tried on a human, unless such experiment shave been conducted at Camp 22, which is infamous for its human experimentation.”

“SHR1K3 has also been very interested in the works of many other mad scientists, we could call them, including Johann Conrad Dippel, Giovanni Aldini, Sergei Bruyhonenko, and Andrew Ure. Without getting into more unpleasant details, they were all interested in reanimating dead flesh in one form or another.”

Nappy and Illy tried to not look startled by that last bit of news. The situation had turned a corner from merely dangerous to catastrophically surreal.
“Our intercepts show that they have traveled to a remote area of the Himalayas, where we must presume that SHR1K3 has a facility,” said W. “So that is where we must go.”


Twenty hours later, the DHC-3 Super Otter was cruising at 29,500 feet over the Himalayas as Nappy and Illya prepared for their HALO skydive to the roof of the world. In a High Altitude Low Opening jump, one can avoid detection by radar because the plane is above the range of ground based radar.

The plan was for them to go ahead and to infiltrate the SHR1K3 facility, to do whatever they could to discover what SHR1K3 was up to and to disable their radar and air to air missile defenses, before the main strike force could arrive and storm the facility in about six hours. Time probably was not on their side.

Nappy and Illy prepared for their jump by breathing 100% oxygen for 45 minutes to flush nitrogen from their blood stream. They carefully checked all their equipment, since there was no room for error in a HALO jump. They wore helmets and full oxygen masks. Just before the jump they switched their oxygen from the planes supply to the bottles they carried with them.

It was too noisy in the small plane to talk, but there were able to talk through their implanted comm units. “Remember,” Nappy said to Illya right before the jump, “SHR1K3 is all for equal opportunity: the opportunity for everyone to be their slave.”

“Nappy, you always know what to say to cheer me up,” said Ilya, as they jumped.

They then experienced two and a half minutes of free fall, reaching terminal velocity. It seemed to them like less than thirty seconds, and that they weren’t moving at all. Then the automatic parachute activation device opened their elliptical parachutes just in time. With their night vision goggles and gps built into their implants, they each were able to land safely in the dark in a small clearing about half a mile from the castle.

C0US1N had earlier re-tasked one of their spy satellites to do low orbit flyovers. The few high resolution black and white photos obtained from the satellite, after a quick review by C0US1N squints, revealed that the facility was in fact a full size replica of Wewesburg Castle in Westphalia, Germany, the only triangular castle in Europe, which was the headquarters of the SS, Hitler’s private army, during the Third Reich.

From the satellite photos one could see the triangular castle, with its signature circular North Tower, unmistakable as a replica of the original, which was partially destroyed – all but the north Tower - by the Nazis to keep it from falling into Allied Hands. From the ground as they approached it in the dark, Nappy and Illy could make out an enormous stone structure with light leaking from dozens of shuttered windows.

There was also a parade ground to the East of the castle, where Nappy and Illy could see lights. Tonight was June 21, the Summer Solstice, an important pagan holiday for the Nazis. As they got closer to the castle they could see a sight that hadn’t been seen on Earth since the Nuremberg rallies.

They could see a few thousand soldiers in brown uniforms parading with torches around a central dais with a large “eternal” flame, and they could hear triumphant Germanic singing. Looks like the Solstice ceremony was keeping most of the inhabitants of the castle busy outside, which is why the assault was planned for tonight. The Nazi’s and now apparently SHR1K3, considered Nepal to have mystical properties, a possible ancestral homeland for their mythical Aryan race, so presumably put a lot of faith in their paganistic ceremonies to take place here.

Nappy and Illy were dressed in flat black full body jumpsuits designed to show a smaller radar signature, a sort of stealth suit. They were wearing the same helmets and masks they wore during the jump, which provided oxygen to help them handle the low air pressure of this altitude. They were both armed with official C0US1N issue HK45 45 caliber 10-round handguns with silencers, two Mark 3 knives, a HK416 assault rifle strapped to their back with quick release clips, and various other goodies in their knapsacks.

They snuck around the back of the castle, out of sight of the ceremony and toward a side of the castle with a door that was less than 50 feet from the surrounding forest. There was no fence and they could not detect any electronic alarm system, so they quietly slowly crawled along the ground toward the door. The door was locked, or course. Nappy quickly picked the lock and they were inside.

Illy immediate sprayed an opaque foam over the surveillance camera inside the door, as Nappy tapped into it with some of the electronic gear in his bag. Since it was unlikely that a human being was actually watching all monitors all the time, it was unlikely they were spotted and that the castle guards would assume the camera had malfunctioned.

Nappy then released the dozens of miniature swarming spy robots he also brought with them. The quickly and quietly circumnavigated all the hallways, slipped under doors, and penetrated every nook and cranny of the castle and delivered the information back to a small handheld computer where the two humans could see a three-dimensional plan of the castle appear. Along with the video that they go from hacking the surveillance camera, they were quickly able to find out what was going on in the castle.

Their two objectives, and the quickest route to them, were thus identified. The fifty hackers were found in a large room where they all appeared to have been zombified, carrying out instructions from SHR1K3 to do what looked like a macabre Capture the Flag competition. While their skin wasn’t green, it appeared to have a green tinge, their eyes were glazed over, and their lips appeared too red. Illy’s job was to get to the 50 hackers, give them the anti-zombie treatment that had worked in the Amazon, find out with their help what they were doing, what they were hacking into, and enlist their help to hack into the castles radar and missile defense system.

“Organize a group of hackers?” she muttered under her breath. “I’d have more luck trying to herd cats.”

Nappy’s job was to get to Doctor Kotobuki, who had defected from North Korea, and find out what he was there for. They could see a large medical lab in the dungeon of the castle, where the Doctor was presumably performing horrendous experiments on human beings like we formerly did in Camp 22. They could also see a few dozen large plexiglass canisters that appeared to contain people, alive or dead they couldn’t see, and a large box big enough to hold a human head. The Doctor, who they could see only from behind, was busy doing something on an operating table in the center of an operating theater, and appeared to be alone.

Before they left on their respective missions, Illy, through their hack of the camera, reprogrammed the surveillance cameras along their routes to loop their signals from the past ten minutes, so their passage would be undetected. They did not see many people in the castle, almost of its inhabitants were indeed at the ceremony outside.

Illy quickly but quietly ran through the spacious corridors, with their massive stone walls lined with lit torches, to the hackers. After picking the lock of the door to the room, she spotted three guards and quickly shot them. As they fell she took out a large spray can and doused the room with the anti-zombie formula. The hackers look dazed and confused, naturally, and it took about ten minutes for them to come to their senses.

“What are we doing here,” said Zero Kelvin, one of the hackers, “can someone please tell what in hell is going on?” They all started talking almost at once, with questions, swears, and confusion.

Illy, playing Den Mother, patiently quieted them all down and explained the situation. She got their attention, of course, since a beautiful six foot two busty blonde Chinese-Russian woman dressed all in black holding a recently fired HK45 automatic would be noticed anywhere.

Unfortunately, the zombification process had caused partial amnesia, and they couldn’t remember what they were hacking into or why. By quickly hacking into the equipment in the room they were able to determine, though, that their job appeared to be to hack into virtually every communications channel in the world. The goal seemed to have been to feed a continuous extremely low frequency alpha-wave signal into every internet, video, and audio channel in the world, and they had to conclude that the signal was some form of electronic mind control. This was all done via uplink to communications satellites, since there was no physical internet backbone, fiber or otherwise, in Nepal.

“The signal also included ultra-short bursts of subliminal messages,” said one of the hackers. “Like a blipvert, but without the head-exploding part.”

To buy time, she first had them hack into the building’s security system and seal all the doors and windows, trapping the soldiers outside, at least for a while. The hackers found that easy to do, since they were using Linux and Free BSD boxes and the castle security system was running on Windows. Illy also gave them copies of C0US1N’s industrial strength hacking software, but most of them didn’t take advantage of that because they could access their own store of zero-days, trojans, and other tools and were able to easily break through the castles defenses.

“We need your help to knock out these facilities,” she said. Illy then showed them the location of the radar and missile defense systems, which were primarily in the infamous North Tower. She gave each of them weapons and ammunition from the nearby armory, a small but lethal amount of plastic explosive from her backpack, and organized them into 4-man teams to take out each emplacement, led by the hackers there who were actively serving military of their country.

As she was sending them on her way, Illy lost the signal she had been getting from Nappy’s com unit, indicating that he had lost consciousness. She quickly headed in his direction for her second rescue of the night.



Nappy had quickly found his way to Kotobuki’s operating theater, and was able to quietly sneak into it and watch for a few minutes. He saw a few disembodied heads floating in plastic or glass tanks, some headless bodies on operating tables, and various body parts lying in a heap on a table. And there was that one head-sized opaque plexiglass box sitting all by itself in a place of honor in front of the Doctor.

Then the lights went out.

He woke up tied to the operating table with Kotobuki looking kindly on him. Next to him was Krull, the Doctor’s assistant, who had snuck up behind Nappy and knocked him out.

“Ahhh, now you are awake, we can talk,” the Doctor said. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” He removed a syringe from Nappy’s arm.

“My name is Spike Canetti” Nappy said cheerfully. “I’m from Stull, Kansas.”

“Come now, Nappy, we both know that’s not your real name.”

“I represent the Global Mutual Life Insurance Company,” said Nappy. “We were growing concerned that you didn’t have sufficient life insurance, and they sent me here to offer you a policy at reasonable rates.”

“Certainly not,” he said, waving his finger back and forth. “I tried to contact the Commandant, but it seems that you have disabled all communications in the castle.” Illy had also jammed all electronic signals, except her channel to and from Nappy, and cut all wired communications in the castle.

“You really should consider the benefits of full term life insurance for you and your family, if you have any,” said Nappy.

Kotobuki frowned. “I suppose there really is no need for talk. I have much better use for you.” He held Nappy’s head tight in both hands.

“Are you sure? What do you have in mind?”

“First, we will isolate your head in a plexiglas box, with a tight fit around the neck,” he said. “Then we will slowly cool the head to reduce all neurological activity to the minimum possible. We will carefully cut into the skin of the neck and prepare constrictions on all the major blood vessels. Then we quickly cut off your head, while simultaneously constricting the blood vessels to keep the head intact. Your brain and head will stay alive for a short period of time, with no loss of faculties, just long enough to transplant it onto another body.”

Nappy, despite the icewater in his veins, tried to not gulp aloud.

“I may not be a famous doctor like you,” he said as coolly as he could, “but so far this doesn’t sound like it will work. Isn’t cutting the spinal cord irrevocable? Has a head transplant on a human every worked?”

“But, my dear sir, that is the beauty of it!” said Kotobuki. “We get to find out if this time it will work. What you don’t know is that we are very close to restoring the spinal cord after being severed, there have been developments we have made in stem cell research which have promise to solve that problem once and for all.”

“While this question is, of course, imminently very interesting to me,” said Nappy, “the more important question is why is it so interesting to you?” He thought of pointing out that the breakthrough in stem cell research, if true, would have major beneficial uses in society, but he didn’t think that argument would work with this specimen.

“You could get the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this,” said Nappy. “Why, you would be hailed worldwide as the savior of millions of paraplegics, by allowing them to walk again. You would have more research money than you could ever spend. Hospitals all over the world would be named after you. Isn’t that what you want from this?”

“Those are trivialities,” said Kotobuki, flicking his finger into the air. “You poor dumb American. Your bankrupt, corrupt, bourgeois, capitalistic society has eroded your mind. Your time will soon be over, as will the time of the traitorous false Maoists and Russians. Our true leader is coming back to us, to save the world as he tried to do many years ago.” He unconsciously turned slightly toward the mysterious head shaped box.

“But, Doctor, isn’t it interesting that……” Katobuki cut him off.

“Now you talk too much. Enough talk. I think you are just trying to buy time. Krull, lets prepare him for…….”

Katobuki suddenly stopped talking as he fell over, dead, because Illy had shot him between the eyes. She then shot Krull and cut the bonds from Nappy and helped him off the table.

“We have to get the hell out of here, right now,” she said. “The foundation is full of explosives, and we found out that SHR1K3 has initiated a self destruct sequence for the castle, to keep it from getting into our hands. We have about 5 minutes.”

“He injected me with a truth drug, probably scopolamine.” He had a dry mouth, one of the side effects. “But I don’t think I told him anything. What about the hackers? Did they help you to disable the castle’s defense system?”

“Yes, but that hardly matters now. I told the hackers to get out as fast as they can, through a secret tunnel we found under the dungeon. The soldiers have all disappeared, it appears they don’t want to be caught in the blast, which could be a big one.”

They sent a message to W to fill him in, and arranged to have the strike force pick up them and the hackers on mountain ridge about a half mile away. They would have to hurry, though. They couldn’t run too fast, though, because of the reduced oxygen in the low pressure air at this elevation.

As the VTOLs hovered over the ridge, lifting the hackers one by one into the planes, there suddenly was a large BOOM that shook the mountain. They could see the castle, except for the North Tower, totally disintegrate in a cloud of smoke and debris.

Illy turned to Nappy, as they were being lifted into the rescue vehicle, and asked, “whose head do you suppose was in that box?”

“Who else?” he said. 
-----------------------------------------------
10. Insecure Box
by Episkipoe

I'm sitting on the stone floor of the Rend Lake rest area. Vending machine Sun Chips on my left side, sitting cross-legged with a trackball on my thigh, laptop in front of me. Plugged in, recharging. Back against the wall, cranking out some code that came to me while I was driving.
He comes in dripping, waiting for the rain to stop. The dark clouds rolled in sudden and fierce, but they won't last long.
He sits next to me, periodically peering at my screen. Looks at me quizzically. I'm swearing at my machine, but when I notice that he's listening to me I subdue my stream of obscenities and start explaining.
"I refactored the learning algorithm, trying to more faithfully model LTP."
"What's that?"
"Using a modified hidden Markov model to determine the deltas for the weight vector utilizing a time by signal matrix."
"What's that?"
"Which part is confusing you?"
"All of it."
"Well, look. I loop over the elements here. Shit, I'm missing an equal sign, resulting in assignment rather than a test for equality. No wonder it's crashing. "
"Cool"
"Yeah, totally."
I realize that explaining it to him forces me to think about the code quite differently. More pedantic and careful. Traits I tend to eschew. He could help me find bugs before I even compile the code, let alone fire up the debugger. A tool like this is too powerful to pass up. I decide to take him with me. I don't bother phrasing it as an offer; thankfully he seems eager to come along.
He tells me that his name is Voltaire. I don't think that is his real name. I decide to call him Volt. I tell him my name is Edgar Illin' Poe, but he should call me EIP. I pretend that I've long forgotten my given name, but I just hate being called Bob.

I'm making room for his suitcase in the car, displacing the ramen and whiskey. He asks me about the box.
I picked it up last night from Nick Oliveras, an individual I met in one of the shadier back alleys of the Internet. He offered me 160 dollars to deliver a

package. I needed an excuse to get out of town for a couple of days so I found myself in Grant Park at 23:00 meeting a lanky kid with a mop of tussled brown hair, wearing black slacks, a black wife beater and a pistol in his waistband. He apologized for looking disheveled, "I was just working out." He handed me a shoe box wrapped up in duct tape and a piece of paper with a Tampa address on it.
Nick held it underneath a street light to show me that the one end that is not covered in tape is adorned with drawings of little skeletons. He then whispered to me "Do not tarry. Death follows this package."
I think he intended a dramatic exit, slipping into the shadows, but I parked my car in the same direction he was headed so we walked alongside each other in awkward silence until I reached it.

Volt grabs the box. "Dude, are you kidding me? You have no idea what's in there? Could be drugs."
"Yes, I've hitherto been operating under the assumption that's what's in there. Now put it back."
"Feel the weight of this. Now I'm no expert, but this has got to be worth way more than one sixty. Screw Florida, let's just sell it ourselves."
"Look. This isn't ebay. If I fail to deliver this box it isn't negative feedback I have to worry about. My life depends on it."
Volt cradles the box in his arm, pulls a knife from his pocket and cuts through the tape. The little knife sticks and snags. Some gray powder spills out.
"Cocaine! Jackpot."
"Uhh, I don't think that's cocaine." I sigh as he sniffs it. "Does it smell like cocaine to you?"
"I can't really tell." He dips his finger in and scoops some into his mouth.
"Are you high?"
"I don't know, I don't think so. This tastes like ash."
"Why would someone put ashes in an Adidas box? Wait, what's this?"
There's a piece of paper glued to the underside of the lid that reads CREMAINS OF: LAVERNE R. ERSBO
"I got dead person up my nose!"
"Well, you shouldn't have sniffed so hard. I tried to stop you."
"Bullshit"
"So, what's her street value?"
He laughs sarcastically. "Fine. We'll take Grandma to Florida. It's where she belongs." We apply some fresh tape to the box and put it back in the trunk.
We get in the car and take the highway south.

Voltaire is quiet for a while as he familiarizes himself with the radio controls. Failing to find a song that holds his interest he clicks it off and asks me "So, what do you do? I mean, besides stuff like this."
"Well, I was a programmer for a bank. It was fun at first, just to have a job where I could spend the whole day coding. So much to learn, fueling my curiosity. But it wasn't long until it became boring. I decided to move on to something more my line. A place where creativity is encouraged and bad code can be rewritten rather than maintained. You can't imagine the nightmares I had."
"Scary?"
"Yeah. Like the one where I'm a webserver and can only speak in SQL and PHP.
"That doesn't sound scary"
"Well, I woke up drenched in sweat. And it took a long time to convince myself that it wasn't real. And the whole thing is just so symbolic of my role.

I'm just a tool, but I want to be the samurai, not the sword. So for now I've gone ronin, freelance."

"Do you have any games on this thing?"
"Well, I've been working on this neural net to control a killer robot."
"What?"
"Hold the wheel. Here, click load, click Stabby. There's the robot."
"That's a square"
"Cube. A 3D simulation. Use the arrow keys to rotate. Robot. Press space to watch him destroy some humans. See, villagers."
"These are teapots."
"Right. Well, no. I mean, they're simulated people."
"This thing isn't really intelligent, is it?"
"Well, that is an excellent question. It is commonly called 'artificial intelligence' but by artificial we don't mean not-real, but rather, simply that it was created by the artifice of man, as opposed to created by not-man, which in this context would be called nature. It's just a game of semantics, but really you could say that our own intelligence, that is to say human intelligence, is artificial in that it was created by man. Well, man and woman, but I mean man in the sense of the species, not the gender. And now we're only starting to get at the question of what it means to be intelligent. What really constitutes intelligence? An arbitrary threshold on a continuous variable which emerges from an amalgamation of relatively simple components. I find this discourse to be rather invigorating, don't you?"
"Um, no. I mean that it's stupid. The square isn't moving. These teapots aren't getting destroyed. Oh, now the whole thing crashed. This sucks."

We stop in Paducah for dinner. I check my email and find another death threat waiting for me. I've been going back and forth with some chuckle-head that's upset because I managed to grab the username EIP on a couple sites. He seems like a real nutjob so I conceded it to him on all servers except for those on my personal domain. After he started going after my home network I wrote some scripts to mailbomb him. After a few escalations there was some collateral damage. It really wasn't my intention to expose his mother to a dump of rotten.com and all that porn, but I must admit I'm kinda glad it got him kicked out of the house. Well, he's decided that I should die for that: "I am the EIP and that to which I point will next be executed. And tonight I point at you."

Now, this isn't the first time some Internet tough-guy has threatened to kill me, but this one did attach a .jpeg of my apartment so I decided it would be best to play it safe and be elsewhere until this blows over.

I'm putting gas in the car when Volt reaches down and taps his knees.
"I just realized that I'm not wearing pants."
"I wish you wouldn't say things like that."
"I didn't even know I'd packed a pair of shorts. But look at me, I'm wearing some. Hot damn! Hey, let me drive."
"Alright, fine."

Coding in the passenger seat I work through a few bugs and read a book while the simulation runs. I'm currently going through the Norton Anthology of English Literature. To save a few bucks I usually buy my books used. While I personally don't write in books I have on occasion enjoyed the insight of readers that have come before me. However, the previous owner of this copy of volume 2 went overboard. Like in Don Juan, where it reads:
"Her struggles ceased with one convulsive groan;
On her sire's arm, which until now scare held
Her writhing, fell she like a cedar fell'd."
The note in the margin reads "she falls."
This is the literary equivalent of commenting i++; with /*increment i here*/ Infuriating.

I'm looking out the window. Without my glasses things in the distance look softer. The world is swathed in fuzz, it loses the perception of precision The trees at the horizon are just a solid smear of green. Clouds melt into the blue sky.
Strange though, that the things nearby are also so blurry. Eyes must be getting worse. Then I realize how fast we're going. "Hey, slow it down a little, will ya? We're trying to fly under the radar. Do NOT get us pulled over."
"Sorry, chief. But I'm racing this Miata." He glances in the rear view window. "We're winning"
"Does he even know that he's racing?"
"He might have figured it out when I flipped him off. He stopped signaling his lane changes, so I've done the same."
"Jumping Jesus. It's a wonder you still have a license."
"I guess it would be. Technically I never got my license."
"Wait, what? No license? But that story you told me... The one that ended with you getting a DUI. You think that you would've mentioned not having a license."
"Actually, that time I was on a horse. Didn't I mention that? That was the best part of the story."
"You can't get a DUI while riding a horse."
"That's what I said!"
"Pull over."
"I'm not going to pull over here, too dangerous. Can you wait until we get off the highway a little bit"
"Fine, fine. Just slow it down a little. OK?"
"You got it. I'll try and keep it in the double digits."

It's getting dark as we come up on Nashville.
"Hey boss, don't you think it's quitting time? It's beer thirty. Let's hit the bars."
We each order a pint then find a booth near an outlet so I can plug in the laptop.
"Don't look now, but I think that the guy from Miata just walked in."
"This should be great. I really hope you don't expect me to get involved. You had this coming. Just take it like a man."
"Oh, he's coming towards us. I'm getting out of here."
Volt dashes from the table and is out the back door as I'm still gathering cords. I hear breathing in my ear. I turn around and come face to face with a pasty, balding gentleman, about two stone overweight. He's grinning oddly. I start to apologize on behalf of Volt and explain that while it was my car I wasn't the one driving it. But he cuts me off before I can get through any of that.
"Hello there, Y.T., my little courier. Hand me the package and no one gets hurt."
"Just who in the hell are you calling 'whitey'? You're paler than me and that's quite an accomplishment. I'm actually rather proud of my deathly pallor.

And you'd better keep your hands off of my package."
"No, no, you philistine. It was a Snow Crash reference."
"And you want to be my Hiro? I'm sorry, but you seem to have mistaken me for a teenage girl. Who are you?"
"Just give me the box."
"Uh huh. You want my box. But we just met. Buy me a drink at least."
"According to your dossier you may still prove useful to us. It'd be a shame if I had to kill you." He pulls a snub-nose revolver from his pocket and leads me outside. I open the trunk and hand him the box.
"So, who's Laverne?"
"She was my partner. You have been hired to take her to the trophy room, but I cannot let that be her final resting place. She will be avenged. Give me the address and I'll let you walk away. But remember that we'll be watching you. And so will they." 

-----------------------------------------------
11. And He Fulfilled the Role for which He was Designed
By Katilynn Lentz


The key is to never look back. It makes you look bad ass when you blow things up and it keeps you from going insane when your career is killing people. The other key is to always have at least seven weapons hidden on your person at anytime, not including the ones that should be part of your attire (knifes that come out of the tips of your shoes, poison in rings, lasers that come out of your glasses etc), because other people wanting to kill you as well is a big occupational hazard.

Any expert will tell you these rules. But I live to break the rules. My very essence breaks every rule science has ever insisted upon; which is why I walk around in some chucks, jeans and a leather jacket with a single gun strapped to my hip. My sunglasses are just that and the ring that lives permanently on my right index finger has no hidden compartment; only a tracker so that Siv can keep tabs on me.

I sat there on a lounge chair drinking Everclear watching the building that I set fire to burn to the ground. I heard the metallic snap of a gun being cocked behind me. The gun was pressed against my neck.

“Put the gun down, kid,” I said, taking another swig out of the paper bag covered bottle.

“Stand up.”

“I’m actually pretty comfortable here,”

“Get up, baghal”

I stood up and turned to face my would-be attacker. He was three heads taller than me. His fingers were longer than my whole hand and his skin was almost transparent. His green blood made his skin look the color of algae. He was a Namuh; Siv’s favorite species to use as a grunt. They were quiet and lived for a very long time and reproduced like rabbits so they were dispensable. Judging by his skin color he was around 150 years old. A hundred years younger than me. Still pointing the gun at me, he grabbed the one on my hip and threw it as far away as he could. Which was quite an impressive distance.

The Namuh wrapped his long fingers around my arm and dragged me over to a small Space Hopper. Space Hoppers were small, uncomfortable and could only go short distances. Our destination, most likely Siv, must be close. The door slid open to reveal a small control room. We stumbled in and the Namuh handcuffed me to one of the chairs. He sat to the left of me at the controls and closed the door. He put his gun in his coat pocket and didn’t seem to mind that I could obviously see what he was doing. He pushed a button and a screen dropped down in front of me. Siv’s face appeared. She smiled thinly, the way she does when she is very angry. I was beginning to regret leaving my Everclear by my lounge chair.

“James,” She said. “You succeeded I presume.” Her thin black eyebrow arched at an almost unnaturally sharp angle. Her lips pursed which extenuated her pointed chin.

“Well, yeah, and it was most unnecessary to send the crony.” I muttered.

The Namuh grunted. I ignored him.

“On the contrary, it was all too necessary,” Siv said, putting a stray black hair behind her ear. I scoffed but didn’t comment further. “You will be at my base in about twenty minutes. I will meet you when you get here. Make sure to trim the fat.”

By that she meant I needed to kill the Namuh once we arrived. I nodded and the screen went blank. The screen when back into the ceiling and I turned to the Namuh. “Onward!”

“What did she mean? Trim the fat?” The Namuh looked at me, purely curious.

I ignored him again. I don’t like lying and I’m actually pretty bad at it. The Namuh nodded his enormous head and gripped the joy stick that controlled the Space Hopper tighter. He started the engine and we lifted in to the air. I closed my eyes and I sighed.

“I have a partner.”

I opened one eye and looked at the Namuh. He was sweating. He looked like he was going to cry.

“Really?” I said, not even trying to cover up my disinterest.

“We are expecting.”

“Okay.” From what I knew about Namuh reproduction it involved hundreds of eggs hatching and crawling away and never seeing the parents again. I don’t see why he would think such an emotionless ritual would save him. Unless he thought I didn’t know about Namuh reproduction. “Well your hundreds of offspring won’t know you anyway.”

“Please.”

“Tell me something: why don’t you just not take me to the base? Why don’t you kill me?”

“I can’t. Marra Siv has my partner. She will let her go if I return.” His partner was most assuredly already dead. I looked at him. His eyes were glued forward. “You work for her voluntarily.”

“Yes.” Not completely true, but not really a lie either.

“Why would you do that? What she does…”

“She’s a smuggler. Getting rid of people is my job.”

“‘Getting rid of people’ is that what you call it?”

“Kill. Murder. Assassinate. Slaughter. ‘bump off’. I have no qualms with my work.”

“You are sick, quattiel.”

“No, I am all too well.”

“We are here.” He landed the Space Hopper.

I lifted my hand and jiggled the handcuffs. “Take them off, please.”

“Don’t kill me.” The Namuh pleaded, taking a key out of his coat pocket and unlocking the cuffs. I punched him in the stomach with my right hand. He stumbled backward and fell onto his chair. I elbowed him under the chin, knocking his head back. I grabbed the gun from his coat.

“Don’t tell me what to do.” I shot him. Right between his enormous pale eyes. I wiped some brain matter off of my sleeve and put his gun in the holster on my hip. I opened the door and sauntered down the ramp. Siv was waiting for me there. She smiled and I lowered my head. The only time I ever felt regret was when she smiled like that. She turned toward the makeshift base made up of brown tents and portable buildings. She didn’t look back. But I live to break the rules. I turned around. I could see the Namuh through the Hopper’s doorway and I stared.