Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2) Read online

  “What in the good goddamned sweet fuck are you talking about woman?” Visions of him doing a swan dive replaced dreams of tossing Alix over the side. It sounded like he’d have a better chance clawing his way out of the grave than dealing with Alix van derTuppen. Garth already didn’t like her very much and was confident he’d hate her in no time at all.

  Probably right after she answered his question.

  Alix let the comment roll right off her back. The man was a child when it came to insults. “You,” she stabbed the cigarette at him, “are a systemic hero. Sa Garth Nickels, ‘The Only Man to Survive Port City’s Destruction’. That’s what they’re calling you, complete with capital letters and air quotes. Everyone’s in love with you. A recent study of bandwidth usage indicates a growing trend in Gamehead Filesharing: every Sally, Jane and Jessica across the system is downloading footage of your bout. In some rural areas on other planets, people are paying more attention to you than the Game itself, and that, sa, well that’s never happened. Everyone wants to know who you are, why you came here, how you managed to kick the crap out of that heavyweight cyborg. Okay, okay, he’s a scout, doesn’t have the armor plating of an infantryman blah blah blah, but we don’t make those kinds of distinctions. Most specifically, they have a burning desire to know how you survived, and how in the Name of The Box you managed to get out of the hospital when you should’ve been buried in a radiation-proof casket.” Alix took a drag on her cigarette and stared at Garth. “You wouldn’t care to tell me, would you? I’d love to know. Unlike you, I can probably keep a secret.”

  Garth grabbed hold of the railing to keep calm. He reminded himself not to squeeze too hard; explaining to the raptor standing next to him how he could bend metal by accident would be difficult, if not entirely impossible. “Are you seriously telling me that it doesn’t matter if I Conglomerate or not?”

  “Got it one, sweetheart.” Alix launched a second cigarette over the side. The world outside was just beginning to shift into her favorite time of day: twilight. To make things prettier, her boneheaded client was beginning to understand the pickle he was in.

  “That bitch.” Garth had to vent somewhere, and before he knew it, he’d bent the railing in half anyhow. “That bitch.” He replied again, somewhat more conversationally. He held the bent metal railing awkwardly in one hand.

  Alix raised a thin eyebrow at the mangled railing but wisely kept her mouth shut. Her newest client was obviously a man of hidden depths and very intriguing secrets. The more she knew, the better she could protect him. “Chairwoman Doans is the only public figure in the history of the world to handle her own affairs, sa. She doesn’t speak with a forked tongue. She is a forked tongue. In order to go from OverSecretary to Chairperson, the hopeful needs to be so perversely in control of his or her surroundings that the very walls of reality warp and buckle. A Chairperson needs to be able to spin anything so effectively that no one doubts it for a second. Example: two thousand years ago, a Chairman was found, in a room, with a severed head. Nothing else. No dead body, nothing. Just the head. He was covered in blood and naked, sa, and by the time he was finished, he’d convinced everyone he’d found the head in there. Now, sure, we live in a Regime, but really. No one blinked an eye. Doans, though reviled in most corners of the system, is also the most successful Chair Lately has ever seen. I would give my right arm to have her skills.”

  Alix patted Garth gently on the back. “Lucky for you, I’m second best. She didn’t lie to you. Doans never lies, but she rarely tells the truth.”

  “This fucking sucks.” He looked down at the destroyed railing and sighed.

  “Look, sa.” Alix leaned over the railing and pointed to the city below, “your reasons for wanting to stay out of the limelight are your own. Celebrities are notorious weirdoes and I have no vested interest in trying to discover what it is that makes you tick. What I am interested in is getting big fat paychecks for doing my job, which is ensuring that when you do go out, you have your pants on over your underwear and your shoes on over your socks. And that you don’t stop to eat children before lunch. Unless, of course, being strange is what you want…”

  “No, not at all.” Garth let loose with a weary moan. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “This is a question you should ask?” Alix demanded, offended. “I’m here for you, sa. I am your preventative measure. With me in your corner, the news and entertainment channels can be kept busy for days at a time.”

  “What do you need from me?” Garth asked hollowly. He was getting his ass kicked in this system. It was embarrassing. Zurich and the others would be howling in their graves, laughing their heavily cyborged, alien-infected asses off at his poor showing. He couldn’t even handle one hyperactive ‘woman’.

  How in the hell was he going to steal The Box when every eye in the entire system was on him?

  “First thing is, I need a far more comprehensive press package than the one you gave the promotional teams working for the Game. And please, sa,” Alix popped a breath mint into her mouth, “keep the lies to a minimum. Some bullshit is expected, but not too much. As it is, I’m going to have to work slowly to get the wolf-men story out of the public mind. I understand that the majority of your previous life is restricted in ways I can’t even comprehend, but you need to find things that are true that you can share. It’s important.”

  Garth nodded woodenly. He could relate maybe a half-dozen missions without violating Trinity’s clearances. Clean-up missions in Trinityspace, a couple marauder encounters, nothing too spicy, nothing too restricted. If he had any luck left, the Latelians would eat them up and be satiated. “And then?”

  “We absolutely need to let one of the big stations interview you, sa. There’s no way around it. The sooner you climb on top of this fame, let your legion of fans know you’re all right, the sooner the buzz will die down. A bit.” Alix snorted. “The more you hide, the more they’ll hunt you down. Don’t you know anything?”

  Garth chewed on his lip, running Alix’s Mach 10 conversation over in his mind. He’d play it her way for now because there wasn’t any other option. When things were suitably under control, though … “I know it’s a damned good thing I hired you.”

  Alix spat the breath mint out of her mouth and over the side then lit another cigarette. “Excellent. The first thing, sa, is this: in a roomful of one hundred Latelian citizens, ninety-nine won’t notice words like ‘goddamn’ and ‘damn’ and others of a similarly religious nature. The one that does, though… they’ll spend the next hundred hours slaved to their prote, filling his or her personal network space with a diatribe so crazily vile that a reporter’ll pick it up in a heartbeat. It’s too early in your career to be hated. That’s next year. Come with me, sa, into the living room so we can begin this in earnest.”

  Garth followed Alix back into the Ultra suite. Maybe he’d died in the disaster after all and this was the Latelian version of Hell.

  It only seemed suitable that their Hell be just like real life.

  xxx

  Garth didn’t slam the door when Alix left, but he thought he made it pretty clear to the aging spin-doctor that he wouldn’t –couldn’t- tolerate her presence any longer.

  Against all odds, he hated her more now than he before.

  The thing that made it worse was that Alix was good at what she did. Armed with a ‘press kit’ of his Trinityspace endeavors –including shit he’d really rather have left out because he was certain some of his more … perverse … tendencies while in SpecSer would bring lynch mobs to The Palazzo- Alix concluded that the major networks would be satisfied. For the time being. It was always ‘for now’ or ‘for a little while’ or ‘this is going to last for about ten seconds and then we need more’.

  It was enough to know that ‘the time being’ would give him some freedom, possibly even a chance to go outside and wander around.

  In a previous lifetime, Alixia van derTuppen must have been a Trinity investigator. Her reincarnation in the form of
a blade thin chain-smoking maniac was retroactive karma for things he hadn’t even done yet. The woman was so skilled at forcing him to give up his deepest, darkest secrets with nothing more than a disbelieving look framed in blue smoke that he shuddered to imagine how good Chairwoman Doans really was at getting to the truth.

  He had no control. No power. No clue.

  To his satisfaction, though, Alixia was a pit-bull. No, a Rottweiler. On steroids, with cyborg implants. And Offworld psychic alien DNA.

  All that remained to nip at his heels were ‘The Independents’, freelancers and unemployed Latelians with nothing better to do than become stalkerazzi, and they lacked the reservoir of resources that the big companies had at their disposal.

  Alix said there was no cure for the bottom feeders because they lacked access to the kind of biographical info the other, bigger networks were going to receive. In order for them to survive in the cutthroat industry, they needed stuff that wasn’t in a bio. The juicier the better. The more pornographic the better. If they couldn’t find celebrities having sex in back alleys, they’d work the violence angle. And to that extent, driven by their need to eat and prove to themselves that the stars and the famous were people too, those bottom feeders dug through trash, bribed people, threatened others, lied, cheated, stole, misrepresented themselves, all in a desperate bid to get the story.

  By living that way, they put themselves to the far left of responsible journalism and generally broke thousands of laws a day.

  Bluntly –and according to Alix-, they were the sorts of people Garth could handle on his own; by violating the personal freedoms and liberties attributed to the citizenry of Lately –dictatorship or not- they continually ran the risk of pissing the wrong person off. He could do any damn thing he wanted to do those assholes, but there were … problems… with that, as well.

  Apparently, the seedier-but-still-legal magazines and shows sometimes worked in coordination with those hungry and desperate to make up for a slow news day. They’d colluded often enough to come up with more than a few short cons, the most famous of which was known affectionately as the ‘One-Two-Slam’.

  The One-Two-Slam -specifically tailored towards Latelyspace’s more aggressive who’s who- relied on either a celebrity’s inability to read their own itinerary or their handler’s lack of micromanagement.

  It broke down like this; the more famous a person, the more requests for access to said famous person there will be. Even the most arduous handler will eventually become fed up with going through them piece by piece and build an avatar to pick up the slack by assigning ‘importance values’ to whoever is demanding access.

  Avatars are not people. They can be fooled and eventually, a less-than-reputable representative from a magazine or television show will get their chance to follow a stupid celebrity around for a few hours, snapping opportunistic photos and asking stupid questions. Completely legit, with every picture, every sound bite, every second boring as white bread.

  That was ‘One’.

  ‘Two’ involved a bottom feeder. Their job was to get in the face of the celeb that is out having a fine old time being rich and famous and doing whatever it is that made them famous and rich in the first place. Whatever it took to derail that surreal moment of famous excellence. To hear Alix tell it, there were dozens of exceptionally skilled irritants worldwide, many of whom could get even the most stoic personality chomping at the bit inside of thirty seconds. Thirty-three seconds later and everyone will be reading some interesting stuff. The trick was to get the celeb to forget they were being recorded and it was easier than Garth believed, particularly since everyone was always being watched anyways.

  Not so legit, but not against the law, either; assholes were assholes, but Latelyspace hadn’t made being an asshole illegal. Yet. And mostly because a lot of politicians were assholes.

  Naturally, The Slam relied on arrogance, adrenalin and stupidity. Oh yes, and the imaginary armor that being famous generates.

  The bottom feeder aggravates a person until there are very few options left. Targeting people who’ll choose to threaten, kick, or punch their problems away guarantees the story everyone wants to see. Occasionally –as in the case of Indra Sahari’s bodyguards-, things go wrong and the ‘Slammer’ has his or her ass handed to them in the most profoundly painful –and legal- manner possible.

  Occasionally, it goes the other way and guards are ordered to go to the bathroom or whatever. Being employees in the employ of megalomaniacs, they do precisely as they’re told, and that is when the magic happens. It doesn’t cost them a thing to listen to an idiot. They’ll still get paid and when a new rich idiot shows up looking for bodyguards, they’ll find themselves gainfully employed all over again.

  The legitimately present reporter –‘One’- will start capturing video of the event, recording ‘Two’ –or the ‘Slammer’- being beaten silly by the celebrity. Because they are all on an approved outing doing approved things in approved areas of Hospitalis, every punch, kick and horrific expletive gets beamed directly to a secure server.

  The real ‘Slam’ happens the next morning when everyone and their grandmother has accessed footage of someone they used to adore beating the shit out of some random guy for what appears to be no real reason. Everyone gets paid an ass-ton of money for fueling the engine of stardom except the star, who is suddenly just a rich asshole that no one wants to talk to.

  The entire practice was a legal grey area. Through Alix, Garth learned that no one had been able to prove successfully that a Slammer was in the employ of the on-scene reporter and vanishingly few ex-superstars felt like pushing the point. After being recorded pulping someone’s head, they all just seemed content to fade into the woodwork.

  None of the Big Channels admitted to the practice, but Alix maintained that they all cultivated their specialists against the need for a spicy story. Hospitalis Tonight, for example, hired very attractive men and women who used sex, generally by picking the target up and getting them to do seriously kinky things. News4You preferred the pushy-touchy-punchy-kicky method of getting dirt. And so on and so forth. The government couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to change the laws, leaving the only means of protection a laser-sharp promoter and a non-stupid celebrity.

  These days, Garth congratulated himself on a daily basis for being non-stupid. It was a facet about himself that he found endearing, next to his weird sense of humor and unflagging ability to get himself into trouble just by going to the corner store for milk. Alix was so sharp she liberated electrons and protons when she walked.

  With Alix manning the home front, it was going to take something colossally major to fuck his celebrity career up.

  The hard part, Garth figured as he watched a squadron of jetfighters go through maneuvers above far away Port City, was making it look like he was doing his damnedest to follow Alix’s orders while thoroughly fucking himself over in the press.

  When he got bored of watching the fighters -which were very fast and certainly very intimidating- Garth considered finishing up with Huey. The only thing left to do was plug the everything in and stand back; hardwired commands in the baffle-sphere were designed to integrate the intelligence perfectly by providing it with a kind of Rosetta Stone/virtual keyboard that meshed the two technologies together. With the blistering fast high-speed communications available, any AI so integrated would be able to operate as fast as it normally could. The help file he’d read indicated Ashok’s strenuous belief that an artificial intelligence -used to instantaneous access through synthetic diamond fiber optics- wouldn’t notice the difference.

  Flipping the switch and having everything work flawlessly first time out wasn’t something Garth had any personal experience with. He knew from other people that it was possible to use a piece of equipment without having to deal with explosions, third degree burns, inexplicable disappearances into other realms of reality and the appearance of Galactic Overlords looking to kick the ass of the interdimensional litterer, but he wasn�
��t that guy. Everything he did worked in the end. The trick was getting there.

  If Huey had succumbed to substrate psychosis –Garth was wont to change if to when because of the length of time the poor guy’d been essentially entombed- it was entirely possible that turning the computer on -even with network access deactivated- would doom The Palazzo.

  There was no telling what an insane artificial intelligence was capable of doing when backed into a corner, and Garth was just tired enough to doubt his ability to handle a monstrous fuck-up with his normal, winning panache.

  Yawning, Garth checked the clock above the Screen in the living room. It was creeping up on ten. Lots earlier than he was used to, but he’d had a relatively full day. There was plenty of time in the morning to deal with Huey. He shambled off to the bedroom, shedding clothes as he went. By the time his head hit the pillow, Garth was fast asleep.

  Hacking the Cow

  Bolo opened his eyes slowly so as not to alarm Reywin. His commanding officer was currently squatting over him, staring intently at his face with a very disconcerting look on her own. “Is there something … something I can help you with?” he whispered, voice hoarse from sleep and pain.

  Reywin smiled widely. “You sleep very deeply, Bolo, did you know that?” she crawled off her partner and dropped into a cross-legged position a few feet away. “Too deeply for an agent on the run.”

  “Or,” Bolo snapped as he scooted upright, “maybe since I’m taking sleeping pills and you’re eating stims like cookies it just seems like I’m sleeping deeply.” He checked his prote. Twenty minutes. Wonderful.

  Reywin cackled. Stims. Stims were the only thing keeping her going. If she stopped, she’d remember … she’d remember … “Got a Q-Comm while you were napping, Bolo. Big Bad Man is coming soon.”