The Consortium was comprised of the three superpowers of Erde and the enigmatic Mechanon. The organization was primarily a trading bloc only concerned with making money and minimizing the fights between its members. Occasionally they would be called upon to fight pirates, but that was the extent of their cooperation. Members still had their own military forces that they used to fight one another and put down any troubles within their colonies or with aboriginal worlds. This low-level conflict was entirely disrupted by the appearance of the Sidhe in 2161.
The member nations found out they were not up to dealing with an external threat, and the Consortium had to be reorganized into the Storm League. Part of that reorganization was overhauling the command structure and the League’s finances. Before, each nation only funded their part of the Consortium’s forces, ending with mismatched units that were either overfunded or completely underfunded. Mechanon was tasked to correct this with a financial program that took contributions from each member nation, distributed them evenly, and moved money to projects that had a better chance of coming to fruition. However, some member nations complained that they were being fleeced and that the cost was too much.
Part of the solution was to create sources of income that the League would rely upon to fund its organization that did not rely upon the member nations. Several colonies that had been neglected or deemed too difficult to harvest resources from were given over to the League. These operations were then manned by Storm League troops and support workers. In addition, vast oilfields in some previously abandoned territories were recolonized. These new places were used to supply materials for plastics, medicines, cosmetics, and consumer goods that could not be denied the populations of workers on the primary realities. Other sources of income were kelp beds and automated fishing fleets that brought in much-needed foodstuffs for the growing populations of the Prime Reality and its colonies. This alarmed some in the member nations that the Storm League would become an over government that would try to control the member nations themselves.
“An Economic History of the Storm League”
Lydee Tissen
Published by Editions Cristophe Hirsche
2178 ESC
Reality of Erde
Corporate Territory of Rom
Corporate Sector of Wälsch-Bern
December 16 th , 2188 ESC
The world to Limbikani Krebs’s current perception was light, color, numbers, and void. The data streams were beautiful in their own way. They looked like multi-colored constructs made of data blocks in a sea of darkness that swirled around various spheres representing people, places, and the data centers. The centers did most of the processing in their hard-coded centers, and most people just used small access dataslates for day-to-day usage. There would be colors that would shoot out and go to another sphere as they interacted and reactions of those data spheres as they responded to the received data. But, of course, none of this was real and was only projected upon his mind by customized implants of quasi-organic circuitry that allowed him to do his job in the infamous group known as the Strong Ants. His avatar was a tiny insect-like construct that he used as a representation. In truth, he didn’t need an avatar, but he liked the look.
He was a massive, muscular, mahogany-skinned man of about twenty years in the Real World. His physique had come from many years of working in the grey market for people that didn’t quite fit in with the corporate structure of the GmbH. Although the GmbH pedaled nice-sounding fake soft socialism for their employee citizens, it was pretty much enslavement from the cradle to the grave. They shipped you off to a colony in space or another Reality if you didn’t make your sales or production quotas enough times or proved inconvenient to the bottom line.
Wälsch-Bern, the original inhabitants called it Verona, was a city near a river in the northeast of what had been known as Italy. The city center itself was preserved mainly for the Roman and Renaissance architecture for the rich corporate types that came as tourists. The locals hated them but took their money as many refused to work for the GmbH. So he lived outside the center and beyond the corporate housing that served the employee-citizens of the GmbH. Most of the people he knew worked support jobs here and there. They did things for the employee-citizens of the GmbH that they wouldn’t do for themselves and were too complicated for a robot to do.
Nevertheless, the criminal elements still existed and had merged and flowed with several other organizations until there was an almost parallel economy. The Ringvereines, or ring gangs, got things done. If there was a waiting list to get your apartment fixed, grease a few palms, and it was done. Needed something that the shops didn’t carry? They could get it for you too. Elimination of or dirt on a rival? Yep, they got it covered. The new crimelords moved through many Realities and had thousands of members.
Limbikani’s body was currently in a luxury apartment just on the outskirts of the Corporate Zone of Wälsch-Bern, where he was watched like a hawk by minders from his employers. He was on a reclining couch covered with medical monitoring instruments set to cut off his data feeds when any abnormality was detected. He was pouring over the data underlying the interface that other programmers could see. This was the true nature of the state of things, systems upon systems.
He bitterly recalled how he had gotten into this situation as he looked at the pretty lie that the computers were showing him. But, yeah, I got to see that true nature a little bit too close. The screams of his friends as their minds burned and computers slagged still haunted him this year and a half later.
###
Limbikani was logged out and resting when he heard his friends hoot and hollering in the next room that they managed to log into some chick and were going to bag a new whore. He wasn’t into that part of the business. If someone had put enough of their bodily functions under the control of implants, then manipulation of the person’s emotional state was available, but only for those genuinely skilled with compinsets. Enough to make someone feel they were in love with you or the work you wanted them to do. He thought that extremely disgusting, but when you worked with the Ringvereines, you got some people like that.
Minutes later, the screams began. Then the burning smells of roasting meat and electronics reached him as he ran into the network center. The couches holding his comrades were slick with blood and other bodily fluids as their brains and implants boiled and leaked out of their orifices. The data cores they had been using to run their hacks and scams were pouring out grey smoke, and fires were started. He and the four others that hadn’t been logged in used extinguishers and ArkaMakina healing devices to try and save as many as possible, but it was no use. They ran over, pulled all the network connections from the walls, and smashed the routers to prevent whatever was infecting their friends from jumping to them. Only one person had survived, and that was because he had barely had any implants in him.
The main Ringvereine branch had come down on them like a tonne of bricks. Their operation was compromised, and hundreds of thousands of marks had been deleted. Not stolen, but deleted like they had never existed. Huge men and Kondarrians had beat them all mercilessly and forced them to comb through the data and find out what had triggered it all. Four more of his friends had died accessing the data, guns to their heads as they were forced to plug into the remaining data cores. So when it was his turn, he went about it in a paranoid fashion. He forced them to listen to his equipment requests as he was the only one left, and he was sure that none of them wanted to die like the others just had. So first, he had programmed a compinset that isolated his implants from one another. Then he had switched to text only, routing his visuals to a crystal matrix display so the enforcers and their sub-boss could see what was happening.
He slowly took apart the timeline. Everything had happened shortly after they had accessed the woman they were thinking of trying to take over. This had been accessed through one of their data mules that they had tricked into adding adware to unsuspecting people’s data spheres. It was a simple scam. They had people running around sniffing for open ports and gave the participants a few Marks for every person they installed adware into. The malware would then search for vulnerabilities. Next, it would either drain the person’s accounts or set off enough triggers in their medical implants to make them think they were having an issue. This was set to go off conveniently near a Ringvereine-owned clinic that would be happy to help them. Once there, they could further manipulate the person’s emotions by making their heartbeat go faster or make them feel flushed. This was to make them feel like they were either in love or scared of someone there and thus get them under the thumb of the local Ringvereine.
First, they had been shoved out of her datasphere with a hard separation. Next, she had reset her implants. However, moments later, she had turned them back on. His friends had thought they had bagged a prize. Not just a woman with implants, but a Mechanese woman whose entire body was laced with technology.
They had previously been warned off the Mechanese as strike teams from Mechanon’s Reality would show up and kill everyone involved with the hack. Limbikani’s hair had raised on his arms and neck. If he had known who the woman was, he would have stopped them. This smelled of a trap. When he felt this sensation, he often pulled out of jobs and knew he would have pulled the plug before anyone went back in.
They were trying to insert medical commands as he examined the coding line by line. Yes, this was standard, he had thought. On a side system, some money moved to an Imperial Japanese publishing house, then the rest was deleted. It was there, then simply gone. There was no command for either transaction.
Oh, that is very strange. Where was the command? He had thought. In the main system, the coding became fragmentary, then froze before the displays went blank. It was as if the entire system had just committed suicide. The sub-boss had pressed him as he was the only one so far who hadn’t been killed by the dataplague. He poked at the data for hours, but there was nothing. The Enforcers were starting to crack their knuckles and look at him angrily as he went back and forth over the data.
Finally, when he was about to give up and let the enforcers kill him, he had just displayed the machine code in desperation to show there was nothing. Instead, there was a blip in the ones and zeroes just before the events. In both of the events, there was a tiny extra space. Honestly, it looked like a smudge of an underline in the coding. He ignored it as he didn’t think it was anything but dust on the screen.
He had held them off with his hand up and begged for some time to dig up one of his old decompilers. One from before the time that modern quasi-organics had made their way into the computer industry. He found it and ran it on the blip. An hour later, while he was sweating with fear, it beeped complete. Opening the file, he saw that under all the other coding in odd symbols sat pages and pages of a coding language he had never seen before.
On his screen, he saw rounded pictograph symbols that looked like ancient Mayan that had been run through a computer. These were lined up with true precision from right to left and then back from left to right on the following line. When he further examined the symbols, he found that each part of the pictographs was made up of thousands more symbols.
This got the sub-boss’s attention. The man and goons covered their eyes and looked away. Then he had been on his dataslate in a moment cursing and heading to the other room for privacy. Limbikani had heard through the door, “Yeah, yeah, he cracked it. I am looking at the stuff on a screen.” The next thing he knew, cleaners were showing up to grab everything, and he was being forced into a car ride that he was sure spelled his doom. Instead, he was brought into a very sparse luxury apartment with the sub-boss and one goon. The sub-boss, who he had learned was called Dimitrys, had made him sit down in front of a vid screen.
The vidscreen came to life with the picture of a woman. She was very well dressed, somewhat pudgy, pug-faced, with the complexion and hair coloring that spoke of mixed heritage. “Hello, Mr. Krebs. I’m Boss Vandeputte. Your organization’s… How shall we say? Benefactor. You know why you are being talked to, yes?” she had begun in a gravelly voice.
“I found something I shouldn’t have, Ma’am?” Limbikani replied nervously.
She shrugged and smiled. It looked predatory. “Yes, and no,” she replied. “Finding this was a stroke of luck for us but not so good for other parties.” He nodded and didn’t interrupt her. “Good, you know who’s in charge.”
She tapped something, and a small picture opened up on the vidscreen. It showed a video loop of gated-in troops and people being shot and torn apart by Biomen. It multiplied several times, and Limbikani began to get worried. “You see, you have found something that our ‘ally’ Mechanon would rather no one know. You know the history of computing, no?”
He blinked and nodded but snapped his mouth shut as she caught him with her eyes boring into his.
“You don’t,” she growled. “Forget that shit that’s available for you to read.” She keyed and brought up pictures of older computers. They were huge blocky things with areas to plug cartridges or large modular drives. “You see, early in the twentieth century, we were competing with the Dai Tōa Kyōeiken or, as we know it, the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. This was primarily economic but also technological. We would steal technology from one another to the point where data systems designers became utterly paranoid. It also became military after the East-West war that started in 42.”
She showed some pictures of the early room-sized computers and slabs of vacuum tubes they had used as compinsets. “They were analog primarily with hard coded read-only memory. We began to miniaturize, but compinsets were physical things for security reasons. What a computer could do was determined at the factory level. If you needed a machine that built other machines, it had to be specially programmed. If you wanted a home system that could run media, it had to be made for that. By the early twenty-first, we had reached a plateau with small AI-idiot savant systems. Still, everything we had was a similar server/dumb terminal system but not exactly what we have today. If you wanted to upgrade your terminal, you had to buy an upgrade and physically put it in.”
She shrugged and looked a bit annoyed. “We had reached as far as computers could go. You could talk to one another but couldn’t steal or copy data unless you had the physical device. It was very secure, and physical media was a thing. If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to buy or steal a copy. But, unfortunately, the divisions of the GmbH and the companies of Texico and IJ had strangleholds on the tech. This remained until your great grandfather’s time even with the Consortium’s interReality trade network.”
He swallowed dryly and glanced at Dimitrys staring at him blandly from nearby. Why the hell is she going over such ancient stuff? He had thought to himself, and the expression showed on his face. The other man jerked his head for him to keep listening to the Boss’s history lesson.
“What changed, Mr. Krebs?” she stopped and looked at him expectantly.
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After a moment, he croaked, “We got a technology infusion from other realities, Ma’am. We switched to a hybrid open system where you could load programs onto dataslates and also have secure core computers that can’t be breached.”
“And?” she raised an eyebrow.
He had panicked and blurted out, “We use the new programmable quasi organics, and you can program a computer to be whatever you need it to be now.”
The woman gave him a slow, golf clap, the gold thumb ring on her right hand catching the light with its ruby insert. “Yes, and where did these quasi-organics come from?” she said slowly.
“M.. Mechanon?” he had answered.
She nodded once. “In 2101, Mechanon contacted us and offered to ‘modernize’ our ‘stagnant’ computer infrastructure,” she said blandly. “Our greedy leaders jumped at the chance, and we did too, frankly. Unfortunately, there was too much profit to be made, as you and the other Strong Ants have figured out.” She lit a pipe and took a small puff as he sat there sweating. “There were some minor issues , though.”
Oh fuck, he thought. What the hell have I gotten into?
Blowing smoke out through her nose, she put the pipe down. “I’ll be frank, Mr. Krebs. You’re only alive because you saw those minor issues and didn’t trigger one of those strike teams I showed you vids of earlier.” She tapped her thumbs together. “Without getting too techy, can you explain in stupid people’s terms what you did?”
He looked around, feeling the itch of danger on his neck and her and Dimitrys’s eyes on him. “Umm, well, I saw that the others had some command sent to their implants and isolated mine with routines that would keep them running.” She waved her hand at him to continue, “I then isolated the program. I ran it in a slower text-only mode on the older monitor we have for watching vids so they could see what I was doing and….”
“We’ve done that before,” she said testily. “What did you do to keep the alert localized?”
He thought hard and said, “We pulled all the network connections and smashed the routers right after the infection began. We thought it would jump to us.” He had swallowed lightly. “Um, then I shut down the computer’s speakers and my internal networking and only used the machine in front of me in case it used a sonic viral exchange.”
She nodded, “It’s sonic, visual, and jumps through networks once you’ve seen it.” Vandeputte continued, Your little subroutines in your implants that were isolated apparently have trapped the virus quite effectively. Lucky, but sometimes these discoveries are only through sheer dumb luck.”
“Ma’am?” he asked timidly. “Am I gonna die?”
She shrugged and nodded, “One day, but not today. We’ll get you some rehab and remove all your implants with a biomancer nearby to regenerate your missing parts. It’s gonna suck, but we’ll put some new clean GmbH parts in there with no Mechanese parts.” She grinned evilly at him, “You’ll learn new meanings of pain, but It’s worth it.”
“Why are you doing this? What’s wrong with the Mechanese parts?” he replied as he slowly relaxed.
“All of them have an underlying code that allows that fucking computer to do what it wants with us,” she growled with hatred. “We weren’t given ‘technical innovations’ by that bastard. Instead, we were invaded and willingly gave control to that piece of shit.”
###
She was right. Limbikani had learned new meanings of the word pain. His body was crisscrossed with healing scars and bulges of the new implants that took up more space than the sleeker Mechanese ones. At least they don’t come with free spyware and viral infections, he thought. Well, at least not Mechanese ones. I’m pretty sure my employers have them laced with the stuff. It was made here locally just like the parts he had sent to be installed into Edelweiss by the woman who had killed all his friends.
Limbikani looked over images floating in his vision of the woman whom he had put a hit on. Althea Ventricorum d’Argus, tall, athletic, pale skin and pretty, model-worthy looks. The worst thing was you didn’t intend to kill anyone at all. It was a mistake, he thought, shaking his head. The coding was clear. It was only to make the scam equipment kill itself and overheat. Unfortunately, the viral scam software had inadvertently also infected his less cautious friends. The kill commands were also sent to them as they searched for copies of the software to find and remove.
I was doubly lucky that day. I never downloaded the latest releases cause I was too fucking lazy, he thought to himself.
The blockchain data that defined the digital currency had also been deleted. This affected several million Marks across the entire underworld banking system because they had bits of that fucking malware. If it hadn’t been time-limited, it would have murdered millions of people with bits of that coding as it bounced around The Network. He had worked for months to isolate and destroy that line of compinsets. Unfortunately, it still took the lives of people who tried to examine it. Wondering where their digital money had gone, they re-examined when the money had disappeared. This made it think the time was still valid, and it reactivated. About six hundred dead for a loosely worded warning to leave her alone. Althea, you bitch, you’re not only dangerous but a sloppy programmer.
The side work with the terrorists was at the behest of Vandeputte. Yeah, they were up to no good, but they did pretty good work for his employers. They really had hard-ons for killing any Mechanese or putting a thumb in the eyes of Mechanon, but you had to be sure to keep them on a tight leash. He figured they were from one of the more magic-minded realities the way they refused to get any implants at all and were pretty inept with technology.
His contact, Carolyn, was getting better at using the tech. However, she still had an adorable way of tapping the keys and leaving the dataslate’s camera in angles that piqued his interest. She was Asian in descent, not IJ, but maybe from one of the less integrated colonies. That accent… he shook his head. “Nah, nah, boy you’re not gonna get any hot terrorist into your bed,” he said out loud.
Muffled, he heard, “What was that? You need us to order you a girl again?” One of his minders was making themselves known in his virtual environment.
He logged out, and the helmet/upper body clamshell he used to log into virtual turned off and folded open. Two tall, muscular women stared at him. One was Kondarrian, in a black pinstripe suit she had custom-made after watching a gangster movie from NewHome. She had tanned fur and long blonde hair. The other, in a similar purple outfit but showing more cleavage, looked like a huge, brick red-skinned human with white hair and two large horns on her forehead. She was an Oni from Anglio.
“Khloris, Iwai,” he began and stopped a moment later as the Oni squared her jaw and made her bottom tusks come out a little. “Sorry Tsugi-san, you know I have issues with remembering that.” He unhooked himself from the machine, undoing the little connectors attached to his skin.
She pouted at him, “You get to call me by my first name without honorifics if I become your mate. I have told you several times.”
He shrugged, “Yeah, if I want you to tear off something important to me in the throes of lovemaking, I’ll do that.”
She wrinkled her nose, and the other woman punched her on the shoulder. “You let me call you, Iwai-chan,” the bear-woman said, a smile on her muzzle.
“Th-that’s different!” Tsugi Iwai replied, her complexion turning even redder. “Besides, the young master needed us to order him another woman for the night,” she said, changing the subject.
He shook his head. “I was lamenting that my contacts and targets are all pretty and extremely dangerous. Besides, I saw what happened to the last gal I asked over. You two scared her so badly I am black-listed, even by our own company girls.”
They both shrugged at the same time. It looked like something they had been practicing. “We have to protect you,” Iwai began.
“Yes, she could have been carrying something out of here that compromised you,” Khloris continued. “We simply had to cavity search her and scan her for any data.”
He rolled his eyes and retorted, “You both used hard scrub brushes to wash her, and I had to pay a fine. Even Dmitrys was mad at me until he saw your faces.”
They looked away nonchalantly, “No need to thank us,” Khloris said. “Besides, which one of your targets or contacts did you want to bed?”
He stopped and just stared at her. The nerve of this woman! he thought. Fine, they want to play this way. I know they both want to use me. If I make them jealous, maybe they’ll take care of my problems for me.
“Oh, maybe that Mechanese woman,” he started, and they both stared at him intensely. “Er, what?”
“If you wanted that, then you have Iwai-chan,” Khloris said flatly. Then, she looked to her fellow minder, “I bet it’s that boy. He wants to fuck the boy.”
Iwai looked at him critically, “Yes, Carolyn, the pseudonym of the contact. He is stunning. I would want a go at him myself, though I doubt he’d survive it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Limbikani said. “I like girls. Carolyn is a girl. Girl voice, girl face, girl body, all-girl.”
They looked at one another and started laughing, slapping one another on their shoulders. He stared at them as they both shook their heads in mirth.
“Sure,” Iwai continued. “We’ll get you someone like Carolyn, as long as we get to watch.”
“You’re both cracked,” he replied and shook his head.
Several hours later, Limbikani was back in his virtual environment running his ant programs through the data tunnels. They were there to sniff out the extent to which their society had been infiltrated by Mechanon. He had been quiet so far, not doing anything beyond tagging the infiltration points. So far, he noted that all the manufacturies of the larger nations that had adopted the quasi-organic processor techniques were heavily infiltrated. However, some smaller countries like Zambeziland, Seychelles, the Micronesian Federation, and Caribbean Combine had no infiltration due to their use of older and cheaper techniques.
He had his organization buying processors wholesale through a myriad web of side companies. Still, He wasn’t sure if Mechanon could track it all. The computer was brilliant and had itself tied through the entire Network. Most of it was looking for takeovers of specific computer systems and a very complex program set to go off if its fabled “Devil” ever appeared. He still had issues with the language as it seemed to be a variation of the Mechanese language that the inhabitants spoke. The fact that it was base twenty versus the standard base ten or hexadecimal had thrown him for a loop.
He supposed that it was tied to the origins of the computer. Still, no one had ever managed to visit Mechanon’s homeworld without very tight controlled tours. Those only showed the incredibly futuristic cities that the populace lived in, surrounded by boundless uncontrolled wilderness. The fact that the entire population consisted of Biofems and Biomen that lived and breathed war and hunted for their Devil concerned many people. The architecture he had seen on the vid was vaguely reminiscent of the futuristic cities he imagined in the early twentieth, with gleaming white buildings accented by silver. The population moved around in groups and looked uncannily alike, barring their skin patterning, which flashed on and off at crazy rates.
Looks a bit like a computer took Incan and Polynesian architecture and then chromed it up, he thought to himself as he looked through some video archives. Well, base twenty was used by the Incans, so maybe… But, their language is nothing like either of those language groups. Had to be some bizarre history there to have come up with that mess.
He brought up the communication program again and pinged a request to speak with his contact. There were a few things he wanted to get straight. He then sat down and worked on some more coding for the compinset plague he was going to release temporarily. Unlike his target, this would vaporize itself and not leave any traces.
There was a slight ping in his ear, and he opened a window that hid his face with complex fractals that made him look insectile. He doubted anyone could break his encryption, but then Mechanon had proven itself a worthy foe. Carolyn’s pretty face appeared soon. Her Asian eyes, beautiful face with its small bow lips, dark eyes, and long, black, straight hair always got his heart racing.
“Hello, Qiángdà de mǎyǐ,” she said using his pseudonym.
He swallowed. Even Carolyn’s voice gave him thrills. Damn, he had it bad. He coughed, then started up. He was thankful he wrote that instruction to make his awkwardness come across as chittering. “I want to know if your plan is in place. I know the target has made it there,” he said quietly.
A slight bob of her head, “Yes, we shall take care of this Metal Demon. The creatures do have weaknesses, especially alone. A small attack will be tried at first to gauge its readiness. Failing that, we have backup plans.”
He nodded and shrugged. “Be sure to take the target out. If the Biofem notices what I do to the network, she may be able to counter some of my tactics. You don’t want to take her out during the attack, do you?”
Carolyn shrugged. “We have experience fighting Jīmó,” she said lightly. “There are several ways to take them out, plus this one has annoyed us in the past.”
That was a weird phrase , he thought, but let her continue.
“The Jīmó have infiltrated and control the Storm League from within its financial wings. This will be a tremendous blow against them.”
He nodded, remembering all the slight changes Mechanon had made to the League’s structure. Using funding and contracts, the computer slowly shaped it into something it hadn’t been initially. It was now an independent armed force, with its own financing and heading in a direction that wasn’t controlled by the member states much. Instead, they’re turning into an over government that will start policing all Realities without input from the places they’re supposed to protect.
“Yes, they do get a lot of money from the oil. Whether it’s turned into plastics, cosmetics, fuel, or other things, we seem to need a lot of the damned stuff. Erde is almost out of it, considering how much we use. With this, we may prove that the League needs oversight in its money-making ventures.”
The woman’s eye twitched, and she nodded curtly. “Yes, or stop doing things like this to places you did not come from,” she said tightly.
Ah crap, I made her mad, he thought. Then, aloud, “Ahem, yes, perhaps we should rethink ways to keep stuff going here.”
She nodded to him again. “We shall need your attack on Teerstadt’s network in three days in the evening. We shall deal with the Jīmó tomorrow, or failing that, we shall take her out in the general confusion of the attack. Be prepared to fight, Qiángdà de mǎyǐ. We do not know if there will be others, and the GmbH’s infowarriors are also strong.” The connection shut down.
He grabbed the bridge of his nose. “I fucking hope they take care of Althea, or I’m gonna have a hell of a time fighting her in the data stream.