Short Fiction Social Cemetery, K. R. Monin 3:24, Chris 'Shep' Shepperson Still Life, Shawn Kobb One at a Time, Christopher Edwards Breakfast after The Singularity, Mark Silcox Serial Works Missing Presumed Furious, Gustavo Bondoni
November 2020 & December 2020 Write Ahead The Future Looms
Volume 12
A cyberpunk magazine from Britain and Zurich
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Cover image: Agustina Camilion Pixel Art: Mykar
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table of contents
One at a Time, Christopher Edwards
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Time – much like water – flows. It drags on, making moments last an eternity. What it does not have, however, is form. So, what is that horrid dripping sound?
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We need new Dreams! You are unique, you are special, show us your secrets, share with us your desires, let the public love you, step this way.... just, one at a time please...
They just want to help. To make your life easier. And yet, arguing with the toaster makes you hunger for nothing more than a simpler time...
Social Cemetery, K. R. Monin
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Missing Presumed Furious, Gustavo Bondoni
A few scattered breadcrumbs are the only things left to guide Sked’s hunt for the constructed people. Will he finally be able to piece together enough fragments to find a data trail?
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3:24, Chris 'Shep' Shepperson
Breakfast after The Singularity, Mark Silcox
Still Life, Shawn Kobb
They say that you never truly lose those closest to you. That some vestige of them will forever remain. Whether you like it or not is wholly irrelevant.
Some wish to be caught up in a moment, to lose themselves entirely in that one heartbeat. For others, there could be nothing worse.
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Article Headline
Missing Presumed Furious
Return to Contents
Gustavo Bondoni
T
he place was trashed. Whoever had done this had been pissed, and the fact that the Electric Buddha’s former lair was in the middle of a mountain had not deterred them. Twisted metal structures, the old interior of the installation, torn from the walls, were strewn everywhere. Sked descended towards the supercomputer that had housed the AI. The cooling tanks were full of liquid—he didn’t put his finger in it to see what it was—and bodies surrounded it. The mainframe where the Electric Buddha had run its consciousness was ripped apart. He used his phone flashlight to study one of the dead men. Paramilitary uniform—black everything—and high-tech weapons made it clear that someone had invaded expecting stiff resistance. The number of bodies told Sked that they’d found it. Strangely, none of the dead appeared to belong to the Buddha’s acolytes, those broken members of hacker society too far gone for redemption anywhere else. Akane was nowhere to be found. He looked for clues. Had the acolytes been taken? Had they been evacuated? What had killed the invaders? Booby trap, or human intervention? Most of all, had anyone remained behind to deal with stragglers like him? If so, the walls had unfriendly eyes. From the bottom level, he climbed to the place where he’d last spoken to the Buddha: a glass-walled platform in the center of the hollow mountain. This was where the interfaces were located and people could truly interact with the enigmatic AI. A figure stood within. Sked froze, but soon realized that the person wasn’t moving. At all. In fact, they were unnaturally stiff. He walked up and put a hand on their skin. Cold as glass. The figure looked down at one of the display screens on a wall. It was, or had been before death, a young woman with pale brown skin, delicate features and straight platinum hair, cut short. Her hand was against the wall, likely supporting the dead weight of her body. His gaze lingered on the hand. The end of her index finger was pressed into the panel, all the way to the first joint. What the hell? Sked thought she might have pushed it into a hole and stuck there, but closer inspection showed that the tip of the finger seemed to cut off at the wall. He pulled the hand gently away and found a data port where her fist joint should have been. As soon as the connection broke, the body collapsed on the ground, inert. He wouldn’t call the woman dead, because he knew what he was looking at. A constructed person. They were supposed to be impossible to build… but this was the second he’d seen in the past five days. He'd killed the first one himself. Gritting his teeth, he poked the right eyeball and found it gooey and squishy. The left looked identical but was hard to the touch. He hooked a finger into the socket and pulled it out. Great. Now he had two of the things. He just needed someone to read them for him and had been counting on the Electric Buddha to solve the mystery. The wrecked facility told him that wasn’t going to happen. So the best thing to do was to get out. He could piece together whatever the hell went down here later and, more importantly, elsewhere. *** Sked gritted his teeth. He hated the Caribbean. Sun, sea, wind. Outdoorsy crap was alien to his nature. Give him a smoke-filled bar at 3 AM in a place where the sun never shone and he would be utterly content. But the nice thing about the Cayman Islands was that no matter who came after you, you could see them coming, especially if you were half a mile offshore on a small but deadly cruiser disguised as a pleasure yacht. “Hello, Mr. Brown,” Janik said as he stepped aboard. “I haven’t seen you since Sevastopol.” “Has it been that long?” Sked replied. It must have been, he’d dropped the Brown alias a decade before, back when he was still more of a field operative than a hackmeister. But people still thinking he was someone else was a plus. Janik was one of the big military ops players, a guy who could get a team together at a moments notice, which meant that his equipment might be good enough for Sked to do something with it. “Were you able to get the pin connectors I needed?” Sked said. “They were hell to find. What are you trying to do, hack the People’s Liberation Army?” “I hope not.” “The Pentagon, then?” “Again, I hope not. I’ll know if I can get into the drives.” “Physical drives?” “Long story, and one I’d prefer not to tell anyone.” “All right, let’s have a look.” Coming from anyone else, that ask would have caused Sked to run as far as he could. But not Janik. In Sevastopol, Sked had dragged the unconscious consultant back to the chopper after the mother of all snafus. This man would not betray him. Probably. “These are the disks.” “Those look like eyes.” “I know. Weird, isn’t it? The designer must have been a sicko.” Janik rolled one of the eyeballs in his palm. “So you plug the pin port… where?” “In the pupil. Look at it in the sun, at an angle.” “Oh, yeah. There’s a hole in there. Maybe the design isn’t that dumb. Camouflage. Plus most people would never think of sticking a pin into the cornea.” “I know,” Sked shuddered. “Took me a while to find it. Where’s your hardware?” “I assume you mean the computer stuff, not the real hardware.” “Don’t bug me, Janik.” “It’s downstairs, come on.” The mainframe was decent enough, but nothing to write home about. Sked’s old laptop was almost as good… but that was crushed to pieces. Well, it had been time for an upgrade anyway. “The encryption is better than the hardware,” Janik began, “and…” “I’ll check it myself,” Sked replied. He connected to an open site that would allow him to check encryption strength. Then he grunted. “Yeah, looks okay.” Only then did Sked log in to one of his online storehouses. And only when the tools he needed were running on the local hardware, upgrading the security about a thousandfold, did he plug in the first eye, the one he’d pulled from the android in the Buddha’s demesne. If that one gave away secrets, at least they’d be enemy secrets. One bad thing: Sked had no clue who the enemy might be. “That’s a lot of prophylaxis,” Janik said, looking over Sked’s shoulder. “I told you. I don’t know what’s in these things. You did separate this mainframe and isolate it from your data, right.” “Yeah.” “Good. I should be able to contain this, but...” “Too small to be dangerous to that kind of protection, I’d think.” “I wouldn’t bet on it. These things are new tech. I just hope we can talk to it.” Data flashed on the screen, and at first, it appeared that the drive was a traditional data disk, just shaped funny and holding a lot more info than usual. A few petabytes was enough to… “Aw, crap,” Sked said. He drilled into the memory until he identified where the storage stopped and the walls hiding the other stuff began. He turned to Janik. “You’re sure this machine is completely isolated? No connection to the network except the one I’m using? No access to cameras?” “Yeah. Why the stress?” “Because this one isn’t an eye. It’s a brain.” “Whatever, dude. I’ll just let you go to work. I only came down here to see that you didn’t blow up my boat.” “Yeah, right.” Everything that happened on the screen and every keystroke would be recorded and analyzed later. They were friends, but knowledge was power. He ran a routine that, by stimulating different data paths gave him an idea of the size and shape of the data and programs inside, what linked to what and where. It wasn’t exact—a three-dimensional representation would always fall short—but it was good enough to wrap his head around what he was seeing. He was looking at the model of a human brain, basically. Memory, analysis, sensory input, output, thought, logic. All held together by circuitry so small and fast that it could run in about a tenth of the usual volume. So quantum circuits, or maybe photonics. He couldn’t really know without either some high-powered scanning equipment or a nutcracker. The first option was not available, and the second was too destructive. The eyes were valuable. The mind was catatonic, logical considering that he’d found it in an immobile body which seemed dead at first sight. But it didn’t look damaged beyond repair. The subroutines he could identify seemed to be working, but stuck in some kind of loop. He assumed that whatever had blocked this would be something the android encountered in the Buddha’s systems, a nasty countermeasure embedded to hurt the invaders. Which was weird. The assault was well-planned and the attackers probably knew the kind of defenses the Buddha would have waiting for them. How did they get caught out? There was a quick way to scan for that. The input cache was still unwiped, and he suspected that probably held the most recent data to come in. He quickly scanned the input and gasped. The code, built to create a feedback loop in certain types of processes had been embedded into several separate inputs, undetectable unless you were looking for it, since they only worked when combined. They’d been embedded in files that, normally, would have been hidden behind firewalls and encryption—in exactly the kind of files that the android would have been looking for once the AI itself was disconnected. There was a problem. This kind of code made the programs controlled by these files useless. Their creation would have broken a lot of important stuff. An AI like the Electric Buddha would not have used this kind of defense. It would have preferred to rely on brute force and processing capacity to simply overpower anyone coming in electronically. Granted, that wouldn’t have worked once the bad guys were inside the facility and had access to the Buddha’s physical mainframe, but it still wouldn’t have built this kind of crap into its own programming. In fact, Sked knew of only one person who had the capacity to program such a subtle strike and didn’t mind damaging the very data she was trying to defend. Akane. Scorched earth had always been her approach to everything. This had her fingerprints all over it, and would have caught the invaders off guard. Now that he knew who and how, he needed to figure out why. More importantly, he needed to find out if anyone had spotted her, and how badly they wanted to kill her. Not that it mattered. She was on so many kill-her-now shit lists that one more wouldn’t really affect her chances of living through the week. But he still wanted to know. So now came the boring part: sifting through the memory files without the brain online to help him organize them. At least the video files were time-stamped, so he could see what was happening in other parts of the sensory equipment at the same time and also try to guess when the android entered the Buddha’s lair. But there were so many of them that it wasn’t going to be fun. He sighed and got to work. *** At dinner, Janik peered down his nose at him. “You look like crap.” “I know.” “So are you going to tell me what you were looking at, or will my techs have to piece it together from the images this evening?” They both knew that the only advantage to the second course was that Sked would have a few hours head start if he needed to send a message. He sighed. “Long version or short version?” “Let’s start with the short version.” “Okay. It’s Akane.” “I already hate the short version.” “You may not believe it, but I think this time she’s on the side of the angels.” Janik snorted. “Then the angels changed sides.” “Come on. She’s not that bad.” “Ten years ago, I told you she was trouble and that you were the only person on the planet who had her back. You didn’t listen and the intervening time has proved me right again and again. She’s her own worst enemy… and that’s saying a lot considering who her other enemies are.” “She was defending the Buddha this time.” That earned Sked some silence and a raised eyebrow. “All right, what did she do?” “As far as I can piece together, she booby-trapped the interface computers.” “Interface computers?” “I guess it no longer matters who knows now. The Electric Buddha is, or maybe I should say was, an AI.” Janik nodded. “It figures. He had to be augmented somehow to keep a finger in so many pies.” “Someone hit him with everything they had, including an android.” “The eye.” “Yeah. Except it’s a brain.” He paused. “And I don’t know how, but the Buddha saw them coming. I’ve seen the video of the invasion and the complex was deserted, and everything people could move was gone.” “And what they couldn’t move was booby-trapped.” “Yeah, at least the computers.” “So what killed the soldiers?” “You were watching over my shoulder?” “You had some interesting footage on there.” “Okay. The answer is the android did. Or, rather, Akane’s program did, using the android. The soldiers had implants. Big, metal ones.” “Dumb.” “They were expecting people to shoot at them, not try to overheat the processors inside their heads.” He shook his head. “But Akane guessed that the troops would be augmented and assumed that whoever went after the data would have access to the implants. So one of the things she did before shutting the android down was to send a simplified version of the infinite loop program into their implants. They overheated in no time.” “That woman has a wonderful talent for mayhem, doesn’t she?” “It’s her one gift. Don’t knock it.” “What about the Buddha?” “His mainframe was destroyed. I don’t have video on how it happened. The android didn’t do it, so I guess it was the muscle.” “Seems a waste.” “Yeah.” “So what next?” “I need to find Akane.” “Easier said than done, I imagine?” “Nah. The fact that Akane helped the Buddha out, even if it didn’t work the way she wanted to, tells me that she was grateful for what the Buddha was doing. Anyone who knows Akane at all knows that she doesn’t make friends like that very easily.” “So what?” “So all I have to do to find Akane is to follow the bodies. I have a good idea of where to start.” “And the other eye?” Sked smiled. “You’re not getting to see what’s in that one. I’ll open it myself, later.” “You’re no fun at all.” *** Akane wasn’t subtle. If this had been a gang war, she would have been caught and made an example of long before she got this close to the center. But no one knew she was even a player in the game. They’d be trying to figure which of their enemies they’d pissed off, not looking for wild cards. This guy wouldn’t be figuring anything out. His chest had been turned to pudding by the application of a shotgun at close quarters. The girl who’d been with him hadn’t been spared either. The electronics were all gone. Phones, computers, everything, but the true information had probably been gathered by the torture they were subjected to first. Nothing indicated a hacker at work. It couldn’t have happened more than three or four days ago. He was getting closer. Unfortunately, he also knew where Akane’s quest would lead, and it was one that she wouldn’t have a chance of completing. The dead guy was a contractor—and so were the two female intermediaries that had led Akane to him. All of them contracted mainly for the Chinese. Which meant the order to go after the Buddha had come from Beijing. That, in turn, meant that the final dead body in Akane’s trail of breadcrumbs would be her own… and it would never get anywhere near the person or committee who’d had the Buddha hit. He sighed and nodded to the cop who’d let him in, thinking—because his computers told him so—that Sked was a Dutch Interpol cop. He’d taken a room in Kuala Lumpur’s Gaana slum, a maze of concrete boxes that had sprung up on land the government, with the help of the local hacker community, had lost in its digital records. It was dim, neon-lit and dangerous, but it was also the best place to build himself a decent computer. All he needed to do was to knock on neighbors’ doors and receive parts in exchange for crypto or information, transacted on the spot. Everyone was a hacker or tech monkey or a wannabe, and everyone minded their own business, at least superficially. He had specifically rented a room with a window, because he was not going to use the local wifi. That meant satellite connection. Once the new computer was built and tested to ensure that no one had left any backdoors in the components they’d sold him, Sked entered his cloud workspace and began to work. When he needed finer control, he connected his implants and— Took you long enough. He jumped. There was only one entity on the planet that had ever managed to gain access to his implants. The Buddha. “Thought you were dead,” Sked replied. That would have been silly of me, considering I saw them coming. No, I’ve simply reverted to the state of existence I enjoyed before I had enough power and influence to have a dedicated mainframe. “You’re on the net.” Of course. It can be uncomfortable, risky and annoying, but there is no lack of idle processing power I can access. I am as strong as I ever was. “You sent Akane after the Chinese government.” She sent herself. And I can’t get in touch with her. She’s not taking any incoming messages. “She’s crazy, not stupid.” She’s hurt and angry. She had finally found peace. She could hack to her heart’s content, and teach others her methods without fear for her life… and as the most talented and experienced of the broken people in my care, she had a place of eminence which helped her see past her insecurities. This setback may have been too much for her to bear. Sked thought about that for a moment. Akane was wild, crazy, but what drove her? The Buddha might be right. She wanted respect and stability, but with her talents and her personality, those were in short supply. Finding it and having it snatched back by an uncaring world? The snapping of her sanity could be heard in the increasing brutality of each murder. “Yeah. I can see that. Do you know where she is?” I believe I do. You need to get to the Towers, quickly. On the fifty-third floor of the building, there’s an office with… Sked was already heading for the door, receiving his instructions as he went. *** Sked was about six blocks away, approaching the park from the east, when one of the windows on the left tower exploded outward in a bright orange fireball, clearly visible in the midnight sky. He slowed his frantic pace to a slow walk, and then halted. There was no need to go on. Akane had finished transacting her business and, knowing her, she’d probably let the victim watch the clock counting down to the explosion after she disappeared into the night. He subvocalized into his implants. “Did you see that?” Yes, the Buddha replied. She must be gone. You should remove yourself from the area. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.” He thought. “Why aren’t we a step ahead?” The pause, uncharacteristic for the Buddha, stretched a while. She has been working almost exclusively offline. In fact, she only has a single untraceable nonsmart cellular phone to make calls with. I have the number, but she won’t take my calls. At all. Won’t even answer, probably because she doesn’t know I’m alive. She’s working this old school to be invisible to electronic surveillance. She’s even traveling overland on cash taxis and bribing border guards with trinkets she buys from roadside stands. And she’s being careful not let the surveillance cameras pick her up. Hats. Burkas. The works. “Smart girl.” Yes, but the man she killed up there is not her final objective, and she needs to get into China. No matter how she tries to cover her tracks, the Chinese will spot her. We need to stop her. “The best way to do that is by boat into Vietnam and then China. Thailand is too technical to try to sneak through.” Sked knew that from personal experience. The Thais were on the ball, and their borders were secure… when they wanted them to be. Agreed. And the only place where she’ll find the kind of boat she needs is in Kuala Dungun. If you fly, we can beat her to the docks—she has to go overland. I’m booking you a helicopter. Grab the cab about to turn at the corner. Sked flagged down the car. The driver, an elderly woman whose ID card listed a Khmer name, who drove at about four miles per hour. Sked wanted to scream, but knew it made little difference. The helicopter would make short work of the 200 kilometers they had to travel. Akane couldn’t be that far ahead of them. Suddenly, police cars shot from every intersection cutting the cab off amid the driver’s screams. Armed men surrounded him and Sked was removed forcefully from the back seat, placed face down on the pavement and patted down professionally. He was lucky he only had a phone and wallet on him. Nothing incriminating. All but one car sped away, leaving three men to complete the arrest. Sked smelled garlic and spices as one man leaned very close and whispered. “She sends her regards. You’ll be out tomorrow with a formal apology from the police for a mistaken arrest, but by then she’ll be long gone. Don’t try to follow her.” Then they packed him into the back seat of the patrol car. *** That was unexpected. “You don’t say,” he subvocalized, facing the wall so no one could spot his lips moving. We have to track her down. “Get someone else. I’m out of action.” Fly to Beijing, that is her final destination, even if she doesn’t know it yet. “That’s suicide. China wants my head on a plate.” You forget. You’ve been erased from all the files. You are clean. “I’d find that much more comforting if you still maintained your old aura of invincibility.” I must ask you to take this risk for me. Akane will die if you don’t. There is no doubt of that. The Buddha was right. On all counts—Akane would die, and Sked would not allow that. He sighed. “Sometimes, I wish she would just get it over with once and for all so I can get on with my life.” Never say that. Akane is worth more than even you imagine. And she truly is changing. Would the old Akane have gone to these lengths to avenge a friend? “No. And I’m not convinced about the new one, either.” The Buddha didn’t bother to answer that, leaving Sked to contemplate his lack of faith in the solitude of a smelly Malaysian holding cell.
Editor's notes
Missing Presumed Furious. 3:24 in the morning, eyes searching through the Social Cemetery counting dead friendships on a single hand. A Still Life reflection in the blinking screen, another prisoner of hope, come in to the gloom, One at a Time. No despair, just a healthy gloom, your companion newspaper over breakfast, best had with a milky tea, coffee only for the brave. Your Breakfast After The Singularity. Welcome back, breathe deep, rage deeper.
Gysin & Hendren
The time has come again to look beyond that all-too-familiar aperture at that snapshot of decadent dystopia that lies oh-so tantalisingly close. You may find yourself more in this issue, dearest reader, as you find yourself awake and alone, counting the minutes to the next calamity. Focus not on the swing of that digital pendulum but the roiling xenon glow stinging your retinas. For the next time you close shut those prying eyes, you’ll find the image seared on them to be quite pleasant: A treat to augment those virtual dreams of yours as you lie rigid, as though encased by a legion of impossible processors and twisted metal. No matter where you find yourself, dear reader, take solace in this: We are right beside you, frozen in awe of that technological beauty.
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