2.4
By the time we make it back to the HQ parking lot and Fingers switches off the ignition, a familiar face comes squawking from farther down the alley, passing streetfolk who don’t even so much as glance, too preoccupied with their strides, their commutes, their hustles, to give a damn. It’s Dance, and he’s got something tucked under his arm like a football. When he closes the distance, I realise, with curious eyes, that it’s a cardboard box. It’s difficult to make out what he’s saying at first, but as we step out of the jeep, it becomes apparent that he’s calling Fingers’ name.
He stops, and they talk for a bit. Not a long conversation by any means. Dance has ‘cargo’ he has to haul off to some buyers, which in layman’s terms means he’s done some chemistry and someone wants a taste. He pops open the boot of a nearby Reverie—a boxy, rust-bitten relic of a car that looks like it’s barely holding together. The faded paint, once some indistinct shade of green, is nothing more than a patchwork of scrapes and grime, with strips of reflective tape lazily slapped over the dents. Inside the boot, scuffed boxes are strapped down with bungee cords. He tosses the box inside; vials clink against one another.
I snag a look through the creeping flaps: the vials bubble with a peculiar shade of dark yellow, one that reminds me of crushed spider pus. The vials aren’t even secured; they could have very well shattered from the drop, and all Dance’s work would have gone to waste. Does he care? Probably not. Do I? Not really, though I am curious as to what sort of chemistry he’s cooked up. Is it medicine, like the liquid in the MX-3 inhaler? Or is this stronger shit, something the real crackheads are paying for? Either way, it doesn’t take a genius to see how this guy makes his money, though it does beg the question of how he can supply so much of the stuff. Perhaps what Dr. Maelstrom said about cyberjunkies giving everything they have for the buzz is true—sacrificing their bodies, their minds, and whatever shred of a life they have left, just to chase that fleeting high, the kind that makes you forget the world, but leaves you hollower each time.
Dance mentions that he’d cooked up a batch of virothene, which I presume is the medicine from the other night, the one he’d injected Cormac with. He says he left them in the red room.
“And these buyers, who are they?” Fingers asks.
“Some cunts from the beaches.” Dance shuts the boot and lets out the nastiest, most sickening cough I’ve ever heard, not even bothering to cover his mouth.
I step back and chuckle. “Seems you could use one of those shots yourself.”
“Just a head cold,” says Dance. “Couple of ibos’ll sort it. Wastin’ money tryin’ to cure it completely, mate.”
“If you say so,” I respond. “What’s in the boxes anyway? They look... interesting.”
“You’re awful chatty now, eh?” Dance leans against the boot, creasing his bushy eyebrows. He taps his fingers along the taillight. “Last night you were a mute duck.”
“I don’t mean to intrude,” I say.
“Be nice to the girl,” says Fingers. “One day she’ll be your ticket out of this shithole.”
Dance smirks, folding his arms. He crosses one foot over the other, leaning back fully now. “Know chemistry, Rhea?”
I shake my head. “Not the faintest clue. But I’d love to learn.”
“Well,” he says, smirk deepening, “this stuff—calls itself Lumina in the shops, but we just call it Shine—ain’t like your usual junk. It’s a neurotransmitter booster, yeah? Makes your brain light up like a Christmas tree. You’re sharper, quicker, think you’re invincible. Reckon you could take on the whole of Techstrum if you dosed up enough.”
Fingers snorts. “Until you get hooked.”
He nods. “After a while, novelty runs out; yeah, that’s right. You end up braindead, like some of the choomies waltzing ’round N.A., vomiting, pissing, sleeping in dumpsters.”
I shiver. “And this is legal?”
Dance laughs, a low, bitter sound that comes straight from the abdomen. “Hear this sheeeeila? This city’s laws are just guidelines for the rich. Shine’s the golden ticket for anyone who thinks they’re too clever for the gutter. Problem is, it’s cooking the city from the inside out. One dose at a time. You’ll see what I mean eventually, mate.”
“I think I already have,” I say, thinking of the faces outside Dr. Maelstrom’s office, and of the story he told me about the scrublands.
Dance heads around the front, hops into the driver seat, and says, “Don’t touch my doooooozies while I’m gone.” He slams the door. I nearly think it’s going to collapse, given how dilapidated it is, but it holds just fine.
The engine struggles to a start. Several chuffed growls later and he takes off onto the main road, off to whatever crackhead lunatics want to sample his product.
Fingers tells me he’s been doing this for years, creating and selling drugs, well before she ever met him. He’s a master of the art, as good as they come, but yet here he is, stuck in the same crumbling apartment, scraping together scraps compared to what he could be making. Compared to what corpos make. I’m not sure if he’s satisfied with his position, but I sure like to think that someone like that has the potential to improve society rather than decline it further. He could cure people, people like Raze’s sister, people like that vomiting man, people like me. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but the point remains: he’s wasting away to nothing when he could be working on something greater, although I suppose he wouldn’t have the scratch. The only people supplying him are the addicts, not the government. Guess there are two ways of looking at it.
The crowd tunnelling through the alleyway thins out as Fingers and I head for the Old Mill, but only by a little. Some folk don’t move at all; there’s a little nook off to the side just before the entrance to the apartment complex. A tarp is sprung across it, and underneath there’s a man shouting something, though it’s impossible to tell exactly what until we get closer. He looks old, probably early seventies, with a receding hairline, and he’s wrapped in a long, mildewing oilcoat, boots that reach above the shins, and sunglasses, the sort blind people tend to wear, though something tells me he can see just fine. There’s a little hat which one might assume is a collection bowl at first, but oddly it’s turned over, with eddies lying around it.
“Change?” the man yells, his voice worn and stitched. “Change?”
He repeats this. It’s all he really has to say. Just another panhandler.
Fingers tells me he’s The Afternoon Change Man, and that he does this for a couple hours before going back to sleep in his little recess. Homeless, sure enough. Can’t have enough of those in Neo Arcadia, I suppose.
Later, down in Dash Two, things are a little calmer. We waste no time and get straight to work on the video. Fingers boots up the file in the computer room which normally shows the cameras of the apartment complex. I take a seat across from her and load it up on my side, too. I play it several times, analysing it as much as I can, but nothing seems to stand out to me. It’s just simple drone footage showing a cargo ship with dockworkers on board. However, after a while, I begin to notice things that I hadn’t before. Cameras, particularly located at the back, centre, and front of the ship. There’s a chance there are more, but according to Fingers, the spoofer should be able to sniff out that technology in a heartbeat, and that I should be able to manually override each one, or at the very least, temporarily swap out the data. There’s a feature embedded in the spoofer that can link two separate devices and mirror their perspectives, meaning if anyone is monitoring them externally, they might not notice two cameras displaying the same footage in real time. Fingers also says the spoofer can freeze or ‘glitch out’ the camera tech. I think that would be the smartest choice. This is especially useful for infrared cameras. Fingers says such tech can pick up on the Chroma-Skin. So, the first point of order would be to glitch out any cameras installed along the dock.
I wonder, however, if there would be any armed security onboard, given the nature of the goods being transported. From the video, it’s difficult to tell. It's quite possible that, if there are weapons, then they might be concealed. It's also possible that the armed security is in the ship itself, on the lower levels, or somewhere around the loading bay. Fingers mentions that some of them, if not all, might have similar infrared technology embedded in their visors, especially at nighttime. So, it’s important for us to establish a path that would minimise the risk of exposure, but given the footage, there aren’t many options.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
We discuss a lot of different ideas, everything from arriving from the water, dressing up as dockworkers, to faking an inspection with manufactured IDs. None of that would work, for obvious reasons.
Then I notice something: the crane pulley rail. A cargo crate rolls along the crane pulley on the shipyard and then stays above the dock, waiting to descend. It came from the shipyard, from one of the straddle carriers. Perhaps if we were to manage to get inside of one of these things, to hack into one with the spoofer, then it might simply carry us along the pulley and ease us into the centre port of the cargo hold, the gap at the centre of the ship. It looks like the pulley system is used to organise the crates, to move some into the centre, while others remain on the dock. There’s certainly enough space on a ship this massive to fit a hundred at least.
But Fingers explains that this could go wrong, that the crane might not drop us in the centre port, but rather on the dock, and someone might spot us if we were to try open it. But I mention that we can use the spoofer to check the cameras for clearance, or to perhaps cause a distraction.
“It’s risky,” Fingers says.
“I think, compared to navigating through most of the shipyard and then climbing onto the ship, it is better,” I say. “You can see from the video that the straddle carrier is unoccupied while the crate slides across the pulley. They must take breaks after so many loads.”
“And what if they’re finished with all the loading by the time we get there?” Fingers says. “What if there are no more crates to unload? We can hardly supply a decoy crate in the meantime. The plan falls short. Come on, I need you to think, Rhea.”
She’s right. I hadn’t considered that before. Even in the video, it looks like most of the cargo is being hauled off. That plan’s a bust.
Fingers blows raspberries, lost in thought. “What if we... went there earlier?”
I wipe sweat from my brow. The heat of this den is really getting to me, despite the fan on the ceiling. Or maybe I'm hot with embarrassment from suggesting such a silly idea. “Earlier? What do you mean?”
“Rather than showing up at night,” says Fingers, “we show up during the day, when infrared systems are likely to be turned off. Or at the very least, when they’d be less effective and more prone to error. Navigation would be simpler. Chroma-Skin would be less detectable.
“Second to that, they’re likely to still be loading cargo during the day, likely to still be organising it with the pulley crane. It is a really large ship. And remember, there are multiple ships there that we can’t see, each needing their own set of cargo. This is an illegal shipment, meaning illegal cargo is mixed in with real cargo all along the shipyard. In theory, they will have a spoofer of their own, which tags illegal cargo as real cargo, but with the central ship, the straddle carrier will only pick out the list of cargo showing up on its database.”
My eyes go wide. “Which means it will take a long time for the carrier to pick up all of the illegal cargo spread throughout the shipyard,” I say, sounding like a student pretending to understand complex algebra after the teacher explains it for the third time, only I do understand, and well. “So, we don’t need to worry about rushing. We just need to wait for the right crate to come along.”
“Ding ding,” says Fingers. “Tell me that won’t work.”
I contemplate it. It quickly becomes apparent that she’s been in this line of work for quite a long time. I failed to recognise that the people organising this shipment were also conning, scheming, using spoofing software to complete their plans. As a result, it’s likely there are no practical fail-safes in place. They can’t call in reinforcements without tipping off someone else about the entire operation. No, they're operating on the assumption that everything is perfectly smooth, that their systems are airtight. But they’ve overlooked one detail: they’re too focused on getting the job done quickly, while we’ve got time on our side. We don’t need to rush; we just need to be patient, to wait for the perfect moment to slip through the cracks.
“Questions?” Fingers asks.
I take a moment before responding, staring up at the ceiling fan and leaning back on the swivel chair. The blades run round and round, causing the white light from the screens to blink shadows across my face. “How do you know which crates are spoofed? How do you know which one we should hide in?”
She smiles, reaching into her pocket. “Simple.” She pulls out the RFID spoofer and tosses it to me.
I catch it without a problem, getting the idea. “This can tell which is which?”
“Not only that.” She leans forward, hands clasped together. “You can sniff the data from one of the crates being carried onto the illegal ship, copy the shipment code, and swap the data with any of the carriers in the field. It will show up on their system as a match, and they will carry it on board, regardless of what it is. We wait till night, exit, and make our way towards the tag containing the snake device, know?”
“Do you know what the tag of the device is?” I ask.
“5-22-9-12,” she says. “Rico sent me the deats. You’ll be able to see it with the spoofer, but obviously, it has a giant snake symbol on it, too.”
I look at the spoofer, then at my inanimate arm, wondering if this will be an awkward situation. I can only use one arm. This means I’ll have to insert my neural wire into the spoofing device and then take it out at several points. That’ll likely slow us down—a lot.
“The Chroma-Skin will hold it,” Fingers says, as if reading my mind. She seems to have an answer for everything. “We’ll strap it around your shoulder. There’s a little pouch.”
“Exactly for spoofers?” I ask.
She nods. “The reason Rico offered ’em up to begin with. Aside from, of course, cloaking you entirely. The suits were designed by netrunners, for netrunners. Though, they are outdated. Now cybernetic enhancements are more advanced than that. Can implement spoofing hardware into people’s bodies, and the software into their neural impulses. Comes with risks. Like suddenly having your brain fried from a malfunction.”
“Sure hope nothing like that happens.” I sit up straight. “Hard to really trust modern technology. It’s all so.... What’s the word?”
“Unstable,” Fingers says.
I shake my head. “Nah, that’s not it. It’s more like... it’s pretending to be perfect, but it’s not, like it’s deceiving us.” I place the spoofer on my lap, tapping my foot.
“Synthetic,” says Fingers.
I snap my fingers. “Exactly. Synthetic.” I pick up the spoofer again and stand, eyeing it curiously. “All this technology, it’s so much. You don’t know how shocked I was when I found out I had this blade embedded in my arm. And the way it works, as if the neurons and nerves are all interconnected, part of the same body, when deep down I know they’re manufactured somewhere in a lab or a sweaty workshop.... It’s bizarre. I’m sure it was like this back in my time—I’d be surprised if it wasn’t—though something tells me everything is way more advanced now. Especially with all the chemistry Dance is cooking up in that lab of his.”
“Things only really started picking up when Techstrum took over,” Fingers says. “Which, eh, I think it was like only fifteenish years ago at this point? I’m not sure. I’ve lost count. But yeah, the company seems to constantly be propelling society forward in terms of tech, while leaving it behind in everything else.”
“And what about the chemistry?”
Fingers shrugs. “Eh. Not sure. Never really thought to ask.”
“Dance?”
She slaps her knees and then stands. “Yup. Not something I’m all that curious about. I learn a lot of information from Cormac.”
“Cormac?” I remove my jacket, finding that the heat in this box of a room is nearly wiping me from the inside out. I’m drenched in sweat and the hairs on my legs are standing, prickling away at my skin like tiny needles. It’s a little awkward, but I ease the first sleeve out of my dormant arm by tugging my shoulder and then whip it off cleanly. I place the jacket on the coatrack. I can feel the sweat gluing the T-shirt to my body.
“Cormac was once a mercenary for the NACP.” Fingers looks at me sternly. “Worked for them for ten years or so, part of a fast-response unit dealing with crazies, but when they partnered with Techstrum to develop a device that would—” She hesitates, her gaze flickering to the ground before meeting mine again. “—control people, he walked away.”
“In what way?”
“Controlling people? Well, it’s disturbing. Supposedly the government wanted to use Techstrum’s capabilities to develop neural interfaces that would manipulate thoughts, rewrite memories, and essentially turn people into ‘puppets’.”
My eyes flare wide, and my skin crawls. “That’s sick.”
She sighs. “From what I understand, Techstrum didn’t really want to create that sort of thing. The government wanted to spread it across the poorer area to help reduce crime rates. The main thing, at least according to Cormac, was that it was supposed to suppress emotions like anger. It was some really advanced crap. Don’t think we’re at that stage where it’s possible, but yeah, Cormac walked away after he saw the papers.”
“How did he get access to them?”
She shrugs. “Didn’t ask that either. Point is, after he left, the government wanted him gone. Thought he was too dangerous. Sent someone to assassinate him. Almost died.”
“Jesus Christ,” I say, unable to grasp what I’m hearing. “Do you think they’re still working on it? This... mind-control technology or chemistry or whatever the hell you wanna call it?”
“I sure hope not. Hard to really tell with a government as fucked up as ours. Crawling with corruption and greed.” She’s trying to be humorous. I can tell by her tone.
“The whole fix with Quillon Bennett, about retrieving the schematics...” I say slowly. “... It’s not just about making a lot of money, is it? Not just about getting schematics for this man, about taking a huge risk. It’s about finding out the truth for you, isn’t it?”
Silence impresses itself upon us. It’s so heavy I can feel the weight bear down on my shoulders.
“Good question,” she answers. “Let’s wait and see.” A smirk crosses her face.
I decide to cut the conversation there. I already know enough. It’s certainly concerning to hear that something like that was ongoing within the walls of the city’s government. Perhaps this was their answer to avoiding another uprising. To avoiding people getting sick of the wealth dichotomy. To avoiding any form of pushback. If what Cormac says is true, then it’s no longer about wealth, but about complete and utter control over the city.
It makes me sick to my stomach.
I might bring it up with Dr. Maelstrom tomorrow, after the procedure is complete. If that man has access to the dark net, and potentially files not readily available to the public, he may know something more that Cormac didn’t, although the chances of that are unlikely as things stand. For one, I’m sure he’s not the only one with access to the dark net. There are likely thousands. For two, if information like that leaked, it would be made known to the public already. Things like that don’t just get swept under the rug, not even by netrunners.
I decide to take a break from working on the video file. I grab a water from the fridge near the red room, then head outside to get some fresh air, to cool down even. It’s still as busy as ever, with people flowing up and down the alley in bountiful bunches, despite the gloomy, elephant-grey skies. The voice of The Afternoon Change Man breaks through the hum of the crowd, his worn voice echoing out, “Change?” one last time before he turns back to nap in his recess. It’s a simple question, but it hangs in the air like a challenge waiting to be tackled.