Somewhere within The Network
The datastreams to this place were almost non-existent, you had to know how to get here, and most wouldn’t tell the way. One of the requirements was the decoding of several base 20 cryptograms and other puzzles. These changed for each individual and would change if you input the wrong answer. Once solved, you were given rather specific coordinates and a key that was yours and yours alone. Anyone who had stolen the key would find it gone from their data as soon as they tried to access it.
There was no treasure at the end of this puzzle. Instead, using the key at the data coordinates only brought you to a very specific chatroom: The Mîtege Mibate. This was a place for the best infowarriors to hang out and share information. Best of all, it was safe and completely anonymous.
The only time government info warriors had tried accessing it, they had found their access revoked, and most of them were removed from The Network for several weeks. Even Mechanon said he had no access to it, but no one believed the God-Computer.
However, unlike the rest of the digital world, which you could customize or modify to look how you liked, the Mîtege Mibate was always the same and would not be changed under any circumstances. It was always a large open space made of stone within a huge structure. The walls and pillars were carved with paleoglyphs of unknown origin that somehow slipped visitors’ minds when they left. Comfortable booths and tables with stools were interspersed with jungle flora, fantastic plants, and vines that held everything together. One side of the room was an open drop that looked out over a fantastic jungle of the same plants, flying creatures, not all avian, a light blue sky, and the earth hanging where the moon would be.
There was a bar along one side of the room, complete with a very tall humanoid that would take orders for drinks. Normally you couldn’t smell or taste in The Network. There was no gravity except what you provided in your settings. Here it all existed, a full sensory experience that was just like being in the real. You could order drinks paid for with either currency or information and feel and taste them as they were drunk. That was one attractor for the bar.
The other was that you could trade and talk with other infowarriors smart enough to get in here, but the barkeep also had tidbits of info they would share. These were usually hints to solving programming, mathematics, or physics problems. They wouldn’t outright tell you as befitting the bartender of a chatroom where only a correct solution to a puzzle would get you entry.
Limbikani Krebs arrived, opening the door with one of his six legs. The fact that he could actually feel his avatar as if it were his body was a major attractor to some of the visitors of this place, as evidenced by the suite of backrooms where more salacious activities sometimes happened between the patrons. He looked about the room and saw a good mix of people today, but he was looking for two in particular. Svallin said she was going to be there as well as Rider_99. He’d met her in her pink metallic puppy avatar, but hadn’t met Rider.
As Krebs was looking around, he locked his segmented eyes with the bartender. They were a genderless, very tall humanoid with tanned skin and a physique that looked like they worked out just enough to not be flabby. They were very close to human, but he could see the enlarged eye sockets and mobile pointed ears that were half between an elf and a cat’s. Wearing a 20 th Century bartender outfit, they had a white dress shirt, black pants, suspenders, and a red bow tie. You could tell that their fingers had extra joints and seemed to bend in odd ways when they cleaned a glass or got a drink. It was uncanny how ‘almost’ human made an avatar even weirder than being fully inhuman. They pointed their chin towards a back booth, and Krebs saw a flash of yellow plastic. He nodded to the bartender and trundled that way.
The booth was fairly large as he walked up and saw Svallin. Today she was wearing a weird yellow plastic hazmat suit complete with saddlebags and a computer interface on her left foreleg. The bubble helmet to the suit was open and leaked a pink gas that smelled like bubblegum. Next to her was a person that looked like they were in some sort of bug armor, but not Mechanese. It looked like a red and green cricket superhero, if that ever was a thing. He would roll his eyes if he could.
The pink metallic dog smiled at him as he approached, her eyes glowing slightly. “Ah, you’re finally here, Strong_Ant,” she said, giving him a happy puppy smile. “How are your girls?”
“Annoying as always,” he answered, deciding not to entertain the thought of how much she knew as he slid into a seat. “How’s your orange juice?”
“Fine,” the little dog answered with a bit of a wrinkled snout. “It’s not Grape Nehi, but I get weird looks when I break others’ verisimilitude by ordering that.”
“You care what others think in a place like this?” Rider_99 asked with surprise. The bug hero moved his body exaggeratedly.
But she shook her head. “Not usually, but I assume you two don’t want extra attention today?” Both of them nodded to her, and the ant took a seat. “Well, let’s get to it,” Svallin said. She held up her hazmat-covered paw and a data construct appeared in it. “What I have here is the data signature of a specific Mechanese woman. It was scraped together using data that was embedded in a disguise done by her for Rider_99. It also used a weave of at least twenty different Realities programming codes. Rider _99 was at a complete loss as to how to extract it and called on me. I had to remove the data from him and reconstruct it because of how intricately it was programmed.”
Krebs looked at the data signature and tried to contain the drool from his avatar’s mandibles. “Yes, I need that,” he said in a chittering way. He reached a leg out to take it.
The metal dog pulled it back. “Nuh-uh,” Svallin said and looked at him judgementally. “You know I’m a White Hat. I’m not gonna do anything that directly harms someone else. So you tell me what you’re gonna do with it.”
Backing off, Krebs was annoyed. He wanted that signature to continue the hunt and keep his organization off her radar. “The whole reason you’re trusted for this stuff is because you’re a white hat. In case you forgot, most of us aren’t. This woman killed a lot of my friends, and I want to stealthily bring her to justice,” he said.
The little dog nodded, and pink mist flowed around everywhere. Then Svallin bared her teeth a little, “You know things work better when you don’t lie to me.”
Kreb’s antennae pulled back, “I told the truth. She killed my friends and many other people.”
“I was part of the cleanup of that mess, you know. I provided the code to neutralize the coding bombs, so it’s no longer dangerous. I can tell you now that her little ‘warning’ was in response to a specific code where your friends tried to bodyjack her!” the pup said a little hotly but not violently, her teeth bared, and a little growling yap escaped her.
Krebs rubbed his antennae over his eyes, a blink response. That warning against them was deep in the code, and no one should have seen it except members of his organization. “I know it wasn’t on purpose!” He leaned forward and clacked his mandibles in anger at her. “But that’s just it! Sloppy programming like hers is dangerous in this day and age!”
His hair bristled around his head, compound eyes glittering. “Svallin, I saw fellow hackers with brains baked inside of busted skulls like they were fucking kilns. You can’t unsee that. I have to know that’s not happening again, and just your word isn’t getting that out of my head when I close my eyes at night!” he started low and serious, but his voice ended in a shout, standing up at her, waving his front four legs and clacking his mandibles in anger.
Rider _99 looked back and forth between them rapidly and held up his hands, “Whoah whoah, calm down. The vines!” He pointed at some of the vines from the walls, slowly creeping toward them.
They both stopped and took a deep breath before the pink metal pup drank from her orange juice. It was perfect, just the perfect blend of sweet and sour and the perfect amount of pulp too. But then, it always was here. The vines backed off, and a bulb of nectar arrived for the ant, delivered by a small rolling trashcan that beeped at them.
“I didn’t order...” Krebs began.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Compliments of The Bartender,” the little machine chirped. “Noooo fighting.”
Krebs nodded and shuddered. The last people that tried to start something had their avatars torn to bits by the vines. He heard they felt it happen like it was real too. “Ok, we’ll abide by your terms.”
It beeped once and left.
Calmer now. “So you want to avoid her on The Network,” the pink metal dog said. “That’s easy, don’t make enough waves that she’ll notice you. Nobody has to guess there’s a hacker when he’s clogging the datastream like he lives on a diet of cheese and burritos.”
Krebs bristled, quite literally, as all the hairs on his avatar stood on end. “I still don’t want her looking for me,” he said, smoothing down his hairs with his legs.
“She’s not,” the dog replied back a little snarkily. “You’re just fixated on her and want revenge.” She raised a paw. “I am not unsympathetic to your situation. That was a horrible thing to go through.”
He nodded in response, and she continued. “She has no clue you exist and isn’t looking for you now. Don’t be so binary.” The little dog smirked, pulled up an example of the old programming, and held it against the new. “Besides, I think her programming’s evolved to the point where she wouldn’t do anything as crude anymore. You can see there are specifics to not harm anyone here and here.” Parts of the new code lit up that showed limiters placed there. In comparison, the old code had none whatsoever and was just a general root suicide command. “I believe she thought she was attacking hardware only in this older coding. Now even with her hardware commands, it’s just a hard reset and erasure of her data.”
“Fine,” Krebs stated. “She’s not a danger anymore, but Althea still stole a lot of money from my organization.”
The dog shrugged her shoulders, “That’s part of the business of running a syndicate. I’m sure your boss will tell you. Besides, she’s been in jail, lost her career, and is now a part-time worker.” The pink dog drank the last of her orange juice and looked at him sidelong. “I’d say you ruined her quite thorougly considering what you did in Teerstadt.”
All his hairs on his face twitched, and his antennae both went straight up. “I...”
The little dog shrugged and tapped her nose with a paw. “I always find out, Strong_Ant,” she said quietly. “Now, as for this.” She hefted the new data from the biofem. “I’ve already paid Rider_99 for this because it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to blend together eight different programming codes to make a data cloak like this. I will sell you a version I’ve made, but not her data signature. If you want that, I suggest you get in the wild or try to commission her yourself. She is now rather well known for completing contracts.”
“She was rather good to me,” Rider_99 said. “I also would not like her to be harmed. She saved me from the undead in the Real.” The cricket hero shook all over. “That was a fate literally worse than death. If I had gone on my own, I would not be alive today.” He held up his hand and showed a combination holo augmented reality disguise that changed with the person. “She also gave me a very good example of how to make an adaptive AR body look almost perfectly natural.”
“Fine, then give me a sample of that. I’ll backtrack if I need to, but that AR design sounds good.”
Ah hour later, Krebs opened the helmet/upper body clamshell of his virtual dive unit and saw both Khloris and Iwai standing nearby, looking fairly nervous. “Hey, what’s up, you two?” he said casually as he pulled connectors off his arms and upper torso.
“The Boss is here,” Khloris said, her small bear ears drooping a bit. This made the musclebound Kondarian woman look rather cute in an odd way.
“Dmitrys?” he asked and sat up, putting his shirt on.
Iwai walked over and handed him a sports jacket. “No, Boss Vandeputte is here. Make yourself presentable,” she said stiffly. He looked over and saw more formal shoes and a better pair of pants than the jeans he wore were laid out for him to change into. He slid his silver thumb ring with a white gem on his right hand.
“I get it. Just turn around while I change,” Krebs said. They did so, and within moments he was led back into the apartment’s living room, where they were stopped and frisked by two huge humans in suits before being let through. His fairly large living room had been taken over by at least six other men as big as the two goons that had frisked them at the door. Two of them flanked his white couch where a medium-height, pudgy, pug-faced woman with café-au-latte with brown hair and green eyes sat with her legs crossed. She was wearing a newly fashionable suit that cost thousands of marks and had a ruby studded gold thumb ring on her right hand.
“Ah, Mr. Krebs. Good of you to join us,” she said in her gravelly voice. “I trust your negotiations went well, and we obtained some upgrades?” she asked in her gravelly voice.
“Yes, Boss Vandeputte,” he replied, head bowed. Iwai and Khloris had moved away from him but were still somewhat nearby.
“Good, good,” the human crime boss replied. “I know you’re chasing that Mechanese female...” she paused at his dark expression. “Krebs, we don’t have time for personal grudges, and I consider this a side thing. We need a general cloaking protocol so our other infowarriors can see what that damned computer is up to without a physical strike team showing up.”
“I did obtain one,” he replied slowly. “But I’ll have to adjust it to hide us from Mechanese protocols.” His hands began to sweat a bit. Then he looked at his Boss and asked quietly, “Did I do something wrong that you need to see me in person?”
“Yeah, you fucked up,” Vandeputte said as she lit her pipe blowing cherry tobacco scent through the room. “You’ve been wasting time and resources to hunt this girl, and yes, I was there that night, so I know what she did. Remember that night when you joined us?”
“I’ll never forget it,” Krebs replied.
She fixed him with a stare, “You obviously did. The goal is to get the Mechanese out of our business and to stop controlling our planet like we’re a bunch of puppets. NOT to chase a single Mechanese woman even if she did destroy a bunch of money.” She paused and looked at his two bodyguards, gesturing with the stem of her pipe, “You two weren’t supposed to indulge him on this wild goose chase.”
They all squirmed but didn’t offer any rebuttal or defense of their actions. That never went over well in an organization like this.
Boss Vandeputte snorted and nodded. “Good, I see you weren’t stupid enough to argue with me,” she said. “Knock off chasing the mecha-kitty and get back to doing what we need you for, Krebs.” Her eyes softened a bit. “Your work has helped a lot of our guys. So remember that.”
“Yes, Boss Vandeputte,” Krebs replied.
She got up and made to leave, her security heading out before she did. “Just remember, Krebs,” she called after herself. “You work for us. So put side jobs on the back burner, or I’ll be back and in a much less friendly mood.”
Krebs, Iwai, and Khloris bowed stiffly as their crimelord left the apartment. The only reminder was her cherry pipe smoke.
“Hey, Boss,” Khloris asked. “What happens if we run across her?”
Iwai answered immediately, “If she stands in our way, we fight her. Otherwise, we tag her and release her. That would fit within the letter of Boss Vandeputte’s order.”
Krebs sighed, “Right. Let’s work out so I can get this stress off and get back to work.”
“We could help you, Boss!” Khloris added in. Iwai blushingly nodded in agreement.
He looked over both muscled tomboys and shook his head. Only death lied that way. “Girls, you need boyfriends,” he said.
They looked at one another, then at him.
He smiled nervously and started to laugh nervously.