"There are old operatives, there are bold operatives, but there are no old, bold operatives." - Born Whole James Seven, Bongistan Covert Actions Operative, Age of Paranoia
Words Spoken We Fear who often went by the name Speaks or Fear was a black mantid, born on Mantid Prime AKA Hivehome AKA Anthill nearly sixty years before. He was largely quiet and unassuming, following the more bombastic and publicly visible Dreams of Something More to act as her social media specialist.
He was much more and the cover was a necessity.
Since the end of the C3 War and the fall of the Unified Council, Speaks had been involved with running cybersecurity for the entire diplomatic team as well as following up on GalNet and other electronic warfare threats.
Which amused him, since he had started out as an electronic warfare specialist with the Mantid Naval Forces.
While Dreams was more concerned with herding Lanaktallan diplomats and politicians into signing the treaties and lately, a harder job, just acknowledging that the world existed outside of their virtual worlds, Speaks was more worried about what exactly was going on in GalNet since SolNet had been wired in.
There had been a few odd things that cropped up that made him sit in his room and think deeply about what could possibly go on.
The attempted assassination of System Director Brentili'ik.
The assassination of several highly placed Lanaktallan with the Night Terran's MO that occurred after the retributive system had been taken offline.
Data adjustment coming out of the core Confederate systems.
Speaks had finely tuned senses after nearly a half century of clandestine operations and his senses told him that something was going on that was hidden from everyone's view.
Which is why he had prepared multiple disconnected work spaces in strange out of the way places.
The dumpster behind Charlie's Diner in the lower income section of Council City was one such operational space.
Being only three feet high and able to fold himself up tightly meant he needed less work space. A quick adjustment to the dumpster's barcode made sure that it wouldn't be disturbed by garbage trucks. Plastic lining, EM barrier cloth, ballistic cloth, then another layer of plastic ensured the dumpster was at least somewhat safe. A dedicated GalNet highspeed linkup courtesy of the backbone trunk box on the wall behind the dumpster that Speaks easily tapped into.
Then some supplies, some heavy duty micro-quantum computer systems, and a few other 'everything's gone to shit' supplies, and he had a good hidey hole to commit nefarious schemes.
True, he had other hideouts and boltholes, but he liked the one behind Charlie's Diner just for the sheer ambience and brazenness.
The camo field made sure he wasn't seen as he rappelled down the side of the diner and into the dumpster, which opened right as he got within three feet, the hologram over the actual dumpster still looking closed, and sat down. The top slid closed and the inside of the dumpster lit up as the screens came on around him.
The first thing he did was check his postings on a bunch of message boards and VR spaces.
His Kriegslist "Missed Connections" ad was unanswered.
"Saw you walking past the crash where the rider was ejected from the hovercycle. You were wearing a blue top and pink leggings. We should meet up at a diner."
Another one: "Ryder, please come home, the crash wasn't your fault. Mom & Dad" was unanswered.
Five dead drops in fifteen days and Crashrider hadn't responded.
There was no rumor in the 'Net he was dead. If Crashrider was dead it would be on everyone's electronic lips.
Speaks wondered if the Net Runner was on an intense job or what.
Still, the black mantid signed in, put on his disguise, which was a Tukna'rn teenage female today, and began moving through GalNet. He checked a few boards, made a few posts, had a couple of VR chats, then moved to the slightly outside normal boards where the speech restrictions were slightly less.
He watched a bootleg movie with a crowd, watched a VR recreation of a bootleg concert, then looked over some titillating and quasi-legal but ultimately harmless (in Speaks opinion) discussion threads.
Speaks made sure he put forth the attitude of a bored Tukna'rn teenager. Watching something repeatedly, reading the thread repeatedly, letting one piece of media or posting lead to the next.
I look exactly like a PSA on 'Don't Let Your Kids Surf GalNet Upsupervised', he thought to himself.
He drifted a little further, checking some of his more dead drops out of curiosity.
After a bit he pushed his way into a concert, got near a group of Tukna'rn teenagers watching it, shifted his ID to one of them who was asleep and rotated his own ID, changed his avatar, and moved out of the concert with a full custom avatar.
From there, he headed down to check on something.
He'd laid a trap several days prior. Just a little honeypot sitting on a toner-mat.
Speaks was careful moving around it, looking at it. The honeypot looked like a bad disconnection by Dreams from a hypercom call that left part of her digital signature in the data. It was slated for trash cleanup but the header was messed up so that the trash collection wouldn't catch it for a few days. It sat on an invisible 'toner mat' which would just ensure anyone who looked at the honeypot would leave tracks.
He kept getting different angles.
Footprints leading away.
Speaks had to admit, he felt a little nervous.
Since the attempted hit on the Telkan System Director, he'd felt things were off.
It wasn't Lanky Covert Action, he knew that in his bones. It wasn't Confed Intel out to eliminate an effective leader and the wife of a war hero. Confed got rid of dissidents by putting them in leadership positions and promoting them.
Usually by the time the dissident realized they'd been had, they'd been a part of the system for a few decades.
It had a taste to it.
A sharp, slightly coppery, thick tang to it.
Not in reality, not in VR, just... it had a taste to it.
With the Great Lemur Extinction, Speaks knew the taste should have been far away.
It was a distinctly human taste.
Speaks took the time to run some emergency hooks then ducked into an old, largely forgotten message board from centuries ago that had drifted down in the search results until it was all the way down in the darker parts of GalNet, with only a few access points.
There, he made sure to arm himself with the weapons he needed.
He knew better than to log in loaded for combat. Lanaktallan VI systems weren't that good compared to Confed ones, but they were capable for the jobs and most of them were able to find any weapons he tried hotloading with.
Satisfied he'd be able to handle anything on the GalNet side, he slipped around the footsteps and followed them. An IP line here, a data trunk there, through a few data stores. It wove through public service networks a few times.
An older method of hiding your source, but it checked out.
Speaks knew that most of the Unified Systems 'Net runners used, at the most, a half dozen reroutes and Virtual Proxy Networks to shield their login source.
This one was at twenty-six and counting.
Whoever it was, they were willing to accept a nanosecond or two lag to hide their traces.
The closer he got, the more he tasted that thick coppery taste.
He was in medical systems now. Through the robo-nurse, past the NetMD site, through a few hospital directories, the waiting list for a free clinic, then a few others.
Part of him wasn't surprised to find the footprints ending at a SUDS network uplink.
He circled it carefully.
Extremely high bandwidth capability. Backbone access. High speed dedicated hypercom ansible linkages. Proprietary systems.
Speaks moved back slightly and thought about it.
Once the data hit the SUDS network it vanished. Nobody knew where it went or where it came from. Over the eons many corporations had looked all over old Third Republic space for where the massive computer server farm would have to be located.
Nobody had ever found anything.
Yet someone was using the SUDS network links to access GalNet and move around.
There was only one extremely improbably answer.
But there were no other answers that were credible at all.
He knew he didn't make a mistake. Too many toner-prints were visible to his eyepiece.
Which left only one answer.
The signal, the penetration, the activities, were coming from inside the SUDS network.
Speaks knew it was multiple systems. The Sentience Upload Download System. The Sentience Uninterrupted Disaster Storage.
Despite the name, it was one thing.
Where humans went when they died.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Speaks could only think of a few reasons the signal was coming out of the SUDS network.
And none of them were good.
One of the icons in his HUD went red and he jerked in meatspace as well as VR.
Someone had instantly tracked his locations. Not a single reroute or loopback or VPN had detected a single packet sniffer yet he'd been instantly location doxed across every realspace access point he'd looped into.
A quick glance told him that not only had they ID'd the twelve on the planet, his real location was in the list too.
Five figures exited the SUDS network interface, moving straight toward him. They looked like hooded Terrans that only existed from the waist up, below the waist trailing away into mist. They wore ragged robes, skeletal hands extended past the cuffs, and mist concealed everything about their faces but the burning red eyes.
Shit, black ICE, Speaks thought. He knew he couldn't just jump out. That would lead the first signal disappearance being his actual location. Speaks reached down and hit the scrambler, which would throw up an additional fifty entrance points being unmasked behind all the ones that had been ID'd.
That'll buy me a little while, he thought. Of course, in meatspace, I just bought myself maybe two minutes.
The black ICE drifted around the entrance and Speaks tensed, readying himself to run.
Five more figures exited the SUDS network hub connection and Speaks had a split second to see them before they donned custom avatars when their individual preferences loaded up.
Terrans in suits. Not modern suits, but the kind that gave most species chills.
Age of Paranoia tailored dress suits.
He'd ID'd a Hamburger Kingdom, a Mapleleaf States, a Hobbitland, an Ozlandia, and a Bongistan Imperial Islands pin.
Each of the figures were all black with a single eye in the middle of a blank featureless face.
Speaks felt his ichor run cold as they all turned and looked toward him.
Fuck this, I'm out, Speaks thought to himself. He triggered one of his retreat programs and found himself yanked up out of the abandoned sections of GalNet and into the edges of the "Dark Net", where there were no rules and laws and expectations of anything but the will to survive the next flamewar.
Before he took three steps all five of the figures with their black ICE guardians just flickered into existence.
Speaks ducked down, unlimbering a submachinegun from hammerspace and opening fire even as he scurried forward toward one of the flame boards, heading for the dox boxes. He fired a quick burst of DDOS and cross site scripting rounds, catching the black ICE when it interposed itself between the incoming fire and the shape with the Bongistan pin.
Speaks wasn't even sure it had an effect as he threw himself through the access portal.
Pictures, names, addresses, places of employment, family connections, all swirled around him as he quickly crossed the room. He saw boxes with black mantids on them appear, complete with military records, physical addresses, GalNet and SolNet login names, and more. He didn't see any of himself at a glance, but he saw a few of his alter-egos and knew those had been burned.
The group drifted through the wall and Speaks tossed a session-interrupt masking grenade. It was more to make sure that the group couldn't see what the rooms did than to keep them from following him as he wove through the VR spaces as quick as he could.
One of the spaces was active, living sentient beings putting together dox and he darted through, dropping bounty markers and pointers at the group that flickered into existence behind him.
The bounty was high enough that the dox box spox all turned and stared at the intruders, taking a good look and dropping offline so they could come in later and again and start the dox lox.
Speaks ducked through a wall as a credential interrupt whipped by him, damaging the output signal from the dox box to the sheep's wool message board wrapped around the dox box to make it look harmless.
Only a split second reaction of pulling back saved him as a black ICE reached out with icy cold talons to try to grab his left gripping arm. Behind the ICE was the shape wearing the Ozland pin. Speaks unloaded his SMG, rotating through DDOS, XSS, and a scripting injection attack.
The black ICE took the hits, but one punched through and nicked the Ozlander.
The data that came back made no sense to Speaks even as the Ozlander slapped a trojan worm patch on the wound and pointed at Speaks.
It screamed. An atonal screech that Speaks had never heard coming from a human throat unless the human's head was being pulled off.
Speaks didn't bother covering his sensitive aural sensor, instead he grabbed an 'oh shit' line and felt himself yanked to another site. Halfway up the line he felt the impact of a packet routing redirection attack hit him. He managed to shrug most of it, letting go of the line and rolling with the impact.
In the dumpster his physical body jerked.
He got up and looked around.
One of the recipe sites.
The Bongistan and the Hobbitland pinned shapes showed up, with their black ICE guards and Speaks jumped through a door and into a high activity thread.
Matrons were arguing over whether or not hand crafted, traditionally manufactured, or atomically identical forged pans and dishes were the best for cooking desserts. It alternated between reasoned arguments, emotional please, DARVO, and outright burning white flames.
Speaks ducked under an image of Razor Wit Wendy pointing and mocking a cherry pie made in a nanoforge dish with foodforge ingredients, rolled underneath the claws of one of the Fry Guys, and managed to throw himself clear of Matron Go'odmuFu'ud's razor sharp knives as the GalTube cooking show star's image clashed with that of a Untraka's FoodGuru corporate mascot.
Speaks quickly swapped out the magazine on his weapon and hid behind the smoking carcass of a BobCo Instant YumYum mascot, watching the only entry point that the others could use.
Around him Matrons screamed, bickered, made and broke alliances, hurled species slurs and epitaphs, and disassembled cooking recipes of their rivals.
All five of the shapes flickered into existence with their guardians.
Speaks held down the trigger and was rewarded by the Hobbitland avatar and the black ICE both taking a handful of posting redirect script rounds.
"ALL CATFISH HEADS HAVE THE TASTE BUDS AND COOKING SKILLS OF A MID-STROKE TUKNA'RN!" the black ICE and the Hobbitland avatar spam posted across a hundred active arguments with dozens of posts per millisecond.
Hundreds, thousands of Matrons, all of whom were not running full interlocked sensory eVR systems, rounded on the black ICE and the avatar and deluged them with thousands of screaming posts, PM, IMs, and DM's, spamming video, still images, audio, text, and everything else they could bring to bear.
Speaks saw the black ICE crash out, followed by the Hobbitlander avatar flickering and vanishing as he dashed across the room, holding his bladearms over his head as he ran.
The other four flickered and appeared closer to where he had been when he'd fired off the SMG.
He reached the far end as the four flickered and appeared where he had been when he'd fired off the SMG and taken out one of their number.
The script-mine went off.
The black ICE took the brunt of it, the worst insults and slurs that Speaks had encountered getting posted, screamed in chat rooms, and bellowed out by eVR avatars across the board. Hundreds, thousands of links.
The black ICE crashed under the deluge of screaming insulted Matrons from two dozen species, many of whom devolved into nothing more than spitting Terran curse words.
The Bongistan avatar appeared in front of him and he threw himself sideways, triggering an 'oh-shit' line, which yanked him into a hovercar modification forum. The rules were a little tighter, there were algorithms watching for shills and chills, and bots sweeping posts, but Speaks knew his SMG was empty and the VI bots wouldn't pick up the locked ammo sticks.
The Maplelander appeared in front of him and Speaks managed to duck back from a blade, avoiding it even touching him as he swapped out magazines. He turned to run and saw the Burgerlander was behind him and the Ozlander was on his right.
He knew they wanted him to duck left, probably into the arms of the Fog Lord, so he darted between the two of them, jamming the SMG into the Ozlander and firing off a burst of drive-by download commands, script injections, and DDOS into its hip.
It shrieked and flickered as Speaks ran for the a trunk line and dove in.
He panted, aware that his ichor pressure was jumping in his meat body.
Even getting close to the shades was causing biofeedback issues, packet rerouting, and worse.
He drifted along, taking random routes, hoping he'd lose them, plotting his next moves.
The alarms rang and he saw that his additional spoofed entry points were now offline and dox'd. To make matters worse, they'd narrowed him down to one of six exit points, getting the meatspace data on them already.
Stupid port registration system, Speaks thought to himself as he stepped out of the pipeline and into another VR/2D discussion area. The GalNet Login Port Registration System was largely eliminated in greater SolNet to protect anonymity, but GalNet had millions of years of complete and total registration of every iota of a user's experience.
The discussion area wasn't too bad, mostly of GalNet shows, as long as the major comment sections were avoided. Speaks grinned and headed for a particular area.
Behind him three of the four flickered into being. Bongistan, Hamburger Kingdom, Maplelander.
Great, three of the meaner ones, he thought to himself, hurrying. He reached one point and paused, working quickly. He'd already downloaded the codes, he just needed the current synch algorithm.
He knew his own weapons were useless unless he used them point blank, but that was dangerous enough he could feel a throbbing headache already from ichor-spikes. He could tell by one of the clusters he'd be blind in his left eye for at least two days even if he got medical care.
The Maplelander spotted him first and disappeared, reappearing closer to him.
Speaks kept the coding behind his back, crossloading it into a knife, even as he backed up and into an empty eVR space. He felt his avatar shift and wiggle slightly and knew he appeared cartoony, with big eyes, exaggerated antenna, and smaller bladearms.
The Maplelander appeared at the edge of the eVR space and Speaks kicked on the countdown. The Maplelander looked it over, side by side, around the edging, obviously taking full stock of the eVR space.
It had a direct hypercom ansible mass-traffic link, privately owned, and a GalNet dedicated processing node and a GalTube direct realtime uplink access.
The Maplelander floated in, instantly going slightly different, more flowing, the eye bigger, a rippling set of waves for a mouth.
Speaks backed up and it drifted closer, following Speaks around as Speaks watched the timer closely.
When it reached for him he lunged forward, stabbing with the knife behind his back.
"UwU What's This? With Cu'utMo'osu!" sounded out. Flowers shot out around them, sparkles filled the air, and it was like the walls suddenly dropped.
Tens of millions of eager fans were watching as Speaks dove through the upload node then kicked himself out at one of the cross-patchers. As he was sucked into the dataport he saw the Maplelander had been replaced with a cute cartoon Lanaktallan filly in a frilly skirt, decorated flank covering, and a puffy sleeved shirt with a pompom in each hand and sparklers firing out around her.
Two. Two left, Speaks thought to himself as he looked around the crosspatcher node. Tens of thousands of GalTube accounts were uploading to the patcher node and the rest were streaming to the service.
Speaks moved sideways to a GalNet payment processor, used that to move to a grey market payment processor, then skirted around the used vehicles section of Kriegslist, darting in and out of VR inspections and test drives of the vehicle.
He saw the Burgerlander waiting at a high performance vehicle, barely, right before he slipped through, sitting behind the wheel and trying to appear as the seller's VI. Speaks took a corner and dropped through a strange advertisement, recognizing its type.
He dropped into an alley and adjusted his avatar, quickly moving up to it. The doorman looked like a cybernetic Telkan with black fur and piston-like legs. It looked at him then nodded, the door opening slightly.
Inside was massive concert, a pirated video of a live concert from thousands of years ago on Terra. The music was pounding, driving, one of Terra's more aggressive languages being bellowed into the microphone as Speaks made his way with the ebb and flow of the crowd. He sent a single message, mostly in the clear, and kept moving, always with the crowd, keeping an eye on the door.
He saw the Bongistan one appear by gliding through the door, then ripple as the eVR system mandated a better avatar.
A Terran, aristocratic features, in a black suit, moving into the crowd, following Speaks' trail.
Near where a bunch of half-naked Telkan and Tukna'rn males were slamming their chests together with the music Speaks dropped a quick mine and kept moving, making his way toward a table. When he reached it he dropped some credits and grabbed a brew, knowing the biofeedback would eventually make him intoxicated if he drank it. Instead, he leaned against the table, slowly sliding toward the exit, and watched his path.
The Bongistan avatar hit the mine and rippled into an all black Lanaktallan.
"LAWSEC!" Speaks yelled out, pointing.
Thousands of avatars turned toward the Bongistan agent, who rippled and looked like a Terran in a black suit.
The crowd roared and surged forward.
Speaks ran for the exit.
He glanced back right before he ducked through the door.
Any avatar that got within a few feet of the Bongistan avatar just vanished, logged off instantly. Instead of making the others drop back, it seemed to fuel digital bloodlust in the crowd, who roared louder and charged forward, stopping the avatar's progress as its attack programs had too many incoming signals to process.
One, just one, he thought as he raced for one of his alternate logoff points. He could log out safely there. If he just unjacked it would leave his address behind and it wouldn't activate the crawler worm that would go through and change the access logs along the chain to delete the incoming and outgoing data chain addresses.
Speaks reached the point, glanced around, counted to ten, then logged out, breathing a sigh of relief.
A few seconds after he logged out one of the all black bipedal silhouettes drifted from a shadow, opening its single wide bloodshot eye, then drifted back the way it came, heading for the Deep Net.
-----
Speaks tapped a switch, blowing out the memory in the electronics and starting the molycircs melting down. He grabbed his bag, a couple of black tubes, and rushed to the far end of the dumpster through the swirling gritty mist of the computer equipment being rendered down to component atoms.
Thumbing a switch, he kicked the end of the dumpster by activating a personal battlescreen and rushed out into the alley, where grenades were filling the space with a half dozen different masking smokes, mists, and sprays.
Rounds hammered into the bricks, blowing apart ferrocrete blocks and puffing out dust.
Shit