The Bodyjackers

[P3nT4gR4m]

"Gentlemen, I can do this from one cube. Right now I have backdoor access to six hundred and fifty fully beamed DNS servers. Fully beamed! That means that everything I trip is trusted and mirrored on every lightbox on the hypernet. For a nominal fee I will reroute every transaction of any major credit stream through the logger of your choice. I could provide loggers if you don't have your own but, quite frankly, if you don't have your own loggers you have no fucking business talking to me?"

"I can sandbox any corporate cluster you care to mention and, unlike the competition, I will guarantee downtime anywhere up to five days. That's a whole working week your company has the monopoly on trading. Nowadays there are only a handful of corporations that could survive more than forty eight hours offline."

"Give me three days and I'll set up passive surveillance on your target of choice, cctv feeds, credit transactions, cellular and voip channels. You'll experience more of your marks life than he will."

"So, gentlemen, what's your pleasure?"

The meet had been set up by Southie so I knew these guys were legit or rather illegit which amounted to the same thing from my point of view. They weren't feds, I knew that but they didn't look corporate either. The suits didn't sit right for one thing. Whatever these guys usually wore to work it wasn't tailored by Armani. Military? Idealogues? In my line of work it doesn't matter, I'm quite happy to play either side of any conflict of interests as long as the credits are there and, whether they think they can get away with paying for it or not, the credits are always there.

Lesson 1 - never try to rip-off a hacker. It's fucking pointless.

My headset chirped in my ear, told me the three of them were kosher. I'd run retinal, voiceprint and DNA samples through Central Intelligence, National and international police and social security databases, when they'd first walked in the door. Nothing. These guys were ghosts. I relaxed a little. Cloaking a live surveillance warrant triples the price.

"We need someone who can hack Sensenet", the big guy told me.

"Then good luck finding someone," I spat back, "assassination aint my bag."

Sensenet - neural hypernet interface, full immersion surfing as if you were there. Taste, touch, smell... It was the porn channels who pioneered it. Fried a few brains in the early days using reverse engineered military targeting rigs. Found out that with a bit of duplexing they could send signals back into the brainstem, instead of just reading the output.

Of course it was banned, after the first couple of hundred masturbating cabbages returned from their in brain fuck movie, paralysed from the bollocks-up. Didn't make much difference, the porn sites had always operated in and around the edge of the law. There was too much demand to let a little legislation stand in the way of profit. They kept ploughing money into the technology and eventually perfected safe enough kit. Nowadays, with enough credits, you could experience anything you could imagine, firsthand, from a parking lot handjob to gang raping a four year old. From the kid's point of view.

Eventually it went mainstream. There were medical applications, telecoms, entertainment... pretty much anything you could do on the hypernet you could use a sensnet jack to do but the only thing you'd use a hacker for was a hit - overload the wetwall protections and send a garbage dataflood straight into the brainstem. Mark would have a seizure so bad his eyes would explode out his fucking head. I didn't need it. I might be a bastard but even bastards draw the line somewhere. I drew mine a ways short of murder.

"We don't want anybody killed," the woman said. She looked vaguely oriental but it's hard to tell these days. Anyway a smart player would be wearing active collegen - remould the features to whatever the hell you want to look like. I know I was. Doesn't pay to be recognised in my line of work. Being unrecognisable helps immensely. "We want someone stolen."

I was losing my patience with these freaks and almost ready to show them the door but curiosity got the better of me. "You got about ten seconds to explain yourself lady. This had better be fucking good." I was playing it cocky but then what the hell were they going to do? The two guys were packing enough firepower to level the building and the chick had a string laser and some kind of nano acid but, since I'd disabled the powerpacks and my sentry guns were ready to fill them with half a kilo of armour piercing slugs per second if they so much as blinked at me the wrong way I figured I had the upper hand.

"What we require, Mr Cross, is for you to hijack a Sensenet datastream and download the users consciousness to our server."

"Are you out of your fucking mind lady? Did Southie put you up to this? This is a joke right?"

"Mr Cross, this is no joke. We will provide the interface software you will gain access to the ..."

"Look bitch I've listened to about as much of this bullshit as I care to, now I suggest you take your sci-fi story asses the hell out of my building right now before I lose my sense of humour completely and turn the watchdogs on you."

I signalled the miniguns to spin up and acquire targets just to drive the point home. In their favour they never as much as flinched.

"We understand that you may or may not believe that what we are attempting to do is impossible, this is of no import, Mr Cross. What does concern you is fifteen million untraceable credits for getting our payload behind the wetwall."

Fifteen fucking mil? For fifteen mil I'd kill the bastard myself, principles or no fucking principles and she was right. I didn't need to believe what they were doing. What the fuck did I care if their hocus pocus worked or not?

"Untraceable you say?" I turned on the most charming smile I could manage with this face. "Okay. Show me the credit streams"

[Urraco]

I like.
It's like cyberpunk with a more exciting plot line.
To be continued?

[P3nT4gR4m]

chapter 2 next couple of days

[P3nT4gR4m]

I ran through the checklist once more for luck.

Pulse rifle - one of - check
backup mags - two flanchette and two exploding tip with tracers - check
shoulder mounted rocket launchers - check
cattleprod - check
harpoon gun and 700mtr monofilament zip line  - check
gasmask - check
gas  - check
nightvision and infra-red spectrum enhancement visor - check
repulse, frag and incendiary grenades  - check
personal forcefield  - check
biomace - check
big fucking knife - check
smaller backup knife - check

My list told me I was ready. Every nerve ending in my body disagreed. I was beginning to think I was losing my mind. I mean yeah, fifteen million credits. I'd do pretty much anything for fifteen mil but go outside? on the street? There were public access telepods in the foyer of every building in the city. Anyone wanted to go somewhere, all they had to do was step inside, punch in the destination and "kazzam" they stepped out the other side. Anywhere in the world was just a split-second podjump away. Well, almost anywhere.

There was one datacenter in the city with no pod-access. A place known to only a select handful of hackers and anyone who knew about it knew better than to go near the fucking place. The more I weighed this up the more it looked like a suicide mission. I was going to kill myself for fifteen mil that I'd never see on account of being permanently dead but, if I was going to take this contract, there was no other way. I had to go see Upload.

Pulse rifle - one of - check
backup mags - two flanchette and two exploding tip...

I made my way to the roof. There used to be doors on the groundfloor of some of the older buildings but they were sealed up a long time ago to meet safety regulations. The only way outside was via the roof and, from there, find a way down to the street level. Fucking street level. I still could hardly believe I was doing this. The steel blast doors, leading to the security corridor, slid open and an automated warning told me I was "about to enter an unprotected environment".

My body armour rattled as I tramped out the corridor and onto the roof. I flicked the safety off the pulse rifle and set the shoulder cannons to acquire and confirm. I now, effectively, had eyes in the back of my head. Eyes that cry heat seeking napalm tears. Upload's datacenter was half a klick northwest of here and I had the choice of travelling rooftop to rooftop, with the harpoon and zip-line, trying my best to avoid any flesh hunters on my way or heading down to ground level and taking my chances with the animals that they hunted.

I decided to hit the ground running, at least I had a technological advantage over the beasts and the scatter-paint on my armour should prevent the snipers on the roof getting a bead on me. I walked over to the parapet and looked over. All I could see was fog about 100mtrs down, I switched the image enhancer on my visor and scanned the street below for any sign of movement. All quiet but, lets face it, that wasn't going to last long. I climbed onto the fire escape and started my descent.

It took about 4 hours to reach the canopy, about 100feet above street level. Fatigue was getting the better of me so I took a shot of "regen", a mixture of caffeine amphetamine and steroid derivatives, and leaned against the wall of the tower for a couple of minutes to let the effect kick in. I could hear the jungle noises down below, birds, frogs, insects, fuck knows all what else. I felt the humidity, rising like sweat and permeating my clothes. My nostrils were being assaulted by the pungent reek of plants and fungus and animal shit.

Fucking nature, we should have wiped that motherfucker out when we had the chance.

[LMNO]

WHY AREN'T I IN THIS STORY????

[Honey]

I like where this is going.

[P3nT4gR4m]

WHY AREN'T I IN THIS STORY????

At the risk of compromising my artistic integrity, I'll do you a deal...

[P3nT4gR4m]

Surprisingly the crosstown trip hadn't been that bad. I still had a mag and a half of exploding tips, a couple of frag grenades, about a quarter tank of nerve gas, more than half a powercell worth of forcefield and I'd saved most of my shoulder rockets, barring the two I'd had to use on the fucking elephant. On the downside I was down to my last half dozen cigarettes and I couldn't even bring myself to look at the level on my Regen hypo.

Upload's compound was straight ahead, two hundred meters. Now for the dangerous part. My best chance was to locate a retinal scanner and hope he saw me before the laser cannons did their thing.

I saw the ret-camera on a post next to the gate of the compound and set to cutting my way through the last of the thick vegetation blocking my path. Upload had this place locked down tighter than a nun's asshole. You don't usually get in touch with Upload, he gets in touch with you. Every step I took toward the gate seemed to echo with the click and whirr of tiny motors, busy ensuring that all available ordnance stayed pointed directly at my vital organs. I looked into the scanner and waited for whatever happened next.

What happened next was a quiet "pshhht!" sound, followed by a stinging pain in my ass, followed by everything going black.

I woke up on a table in a small room with a steel door and no windows. The walls, ceiling and floor were sterile white tiles. As my head cleared from the fuzzy remnants of whatever the hell I'd be shot with the first thing I thought was a jail cell. Then I remembered how I'd gotten here in the first place.

"Upload you crazy insane bastard, let me out of here!"

I heard the trademark insane chuckle from a hidden speaker, somewhere in the room.

"Mr X-man visits Upload," announced the ridiculous singsong voice "to what do we owe the pleasure mr-X? Upload wonders. Yes we do. Teeheeheeheehee."

Upload was a machine dwelling intelligence, not an artificial intelligence but a genuine human mind or, rather, a colony of minds uploaded through the hypernet. Upload became Upload as a result of some madcap transhumanist fuckhead, using a sensenet interface to transfer his consciousness to a lightbox. Others had followed Upload's example but Upload had been ready and basically hijacked the streams, subsuming and assimilating their consciousness into his own.

Upload was a thousand intelligences, working in parallel, the result was an incalculable level of pure fucking genius surpassed only by the level of sheer insanity that comes with a thousand personalities in constant battle for control of the ego. If there was anyone on the face of the planet who could make sense of my latest contract it was, ironically, the one that made the least sense to anyone but himself.

I slid off the table and reached for the door. Why was I not surprised the door was locked? I banged on the thick steel with the palm of my hand.

"Open the fucking door!"

There was another chorus of tittering followed by the loud "clunk" of a lock sliding open. I pushed the door open and stepped through.

"Mr-X has to tell Upload why he visits or Upload gets cross with Mr Cross. Teeheeheeheehee."

"I have a contract. Customer wants me to help steal a mind."

"Never mind Mr-X. What's on your mind. You were always on my mind. Out of sight, Mr-X, out of mind."

I was pissed off but I couldn't help admiring the datacenter. At least ten thousand lightboxes in racks of fifty, stretched off into the distance, connected by the glowing umbillici of quantum flux-cabling. Each lightbox holographically storing about twelve million teracubes of data (1,099,511,627,776³ bytes) more than enough to mirror the entire hypernet. The quantum cables transmitted datasync packets which replicated any changes made on one to the entire grid, instantaneously, over any distance. Upload had enough here to service the whole fucking planet a hundred times over. But then I guess a single human consciousness requires a fair few teracubes.

"I need to know if it's possible," I tried to steer the conversation back to business "can you just steal a persons mind from out of their head?"

"The answer is in the wetware Mr-X. Upload's little bits and pieces all wanted to escape, yes. Wetware can be hacked. Much more difficult it would be but wetware could be hacked. You not careful, Mr-X, maybe Upload hack your little wetware, make you want to join us. Hahahahaha!"

So that was what the payload was. A goddamned mind-virus. Make the infectee want to transfer. I had to know one thing.

"What happens to the body if the mind is uploaded?"

"The body moves to the rhythm. Boogie woogie," the voice howled, "Upload's bits and pieces all let the body die but if you feed it and look after it, yes, no reason body won't be okay. No mind, just body. Nevermind. Teeheeheeheehee."

I don't know why this made me feel better but it did in some small way. What I was doing was still fucking inhumane but fifteen mil took the edge off.

"I'll be on my way then, thanks."

"Mr-X not be such long time next time, tick tock. Come back visit."

"Get a fucking telepod in here already. The commute is a bitch."

[Richter]

Reads a lot like Gibson, but more badass, and it moved along better. 

[P3nT4gR4m]

I arrived back at my apartment just as the sun was going down. I dropped into the sofa and was asleep before I hit the cushions.

I opened my eyes and tried to work out how long I had left before I was required to do this thing. About forty eight hours, give or take. The three suits had left me a telepod IP address and clear instructions not to be late and, by the same token, not to be early. Ordinarily I'd have hacked the pod feed and sneaked in for a look about, prior to the main event but I got the distinct impression these guys were serious and, more importantly, organised enough to post a watch.

My next port of call was Southie's crib. Partly because he'd set up the deal and I wanted to pick his brains for as much back story as he could give me and, more importantly, he had a deadzone - a little counter-surveillance bubble, with direct line access to a pirate lightbox and a diffusion field to block any of the usual methods the feds and the syndicates have of keeping tabs on people. I grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes and headed down to my building's telepod.

I stepped inside the grey glass cubicle and punched in Southie's IP. There was the usual white flash and slight feeling of nausea which always seems to pass before you've even had a proper chance to notice. I stepped out the pod and walked across the deserted lobby to the elevators, pressing '352' as the doors slid shut behind me.

Southie's front door was the stuff of legends. Theory was if the building was nuked and reduced to dust the door would still be usable by anyone with the determination to dig through the rubble and a winch strong enough to lift it out. The main structure was a ten centimeter thick diamond/titanium nano-alloy which, once forged, was incapable of being cut through by any method human science currently had to offer. The locking mechanism, as I'd been told my the man himself, had so many combinations that the guys who sold him it had only ever worked it out to about twelve and a half million digits. Basically nobody knew how hard it was to crack.

It was already open when I got there. I hadn't called ahead to arrange the meet, there was no need. Southie knew I was coming to see him the second I entered his address in the telepod. He was that good. The ghost in every machine on the hypernet. Southie watched everything that went on on this planet. Nothing caught him by surprise.

Correction, nothing right up until the plasma charge entered the base of his neck at just the right angle required to spray the contents of his skull across the kitchen ceiling and partway down the wall he'd been facing at the time, chopping some mushrooms with a chef's laser knife if the scattered fungus and finger mixture, littering the counter and floor were any indication.

If I thought for a second Southie wouldn't have vaporised me in the pod as soon as he detected it I'd have had a gun with me but the rules were - no guns. Only now, in light of his new kitchen décor, did I realise how justified his paranoia was. Matter of fact it was tragically obvious Southie hadn't been paranoid enough. I was feeling the same way and some cold steel in my hand would go some way to addressing this.

I was pretty sure a guy as cautious as Southie would have something under his pillow. The famous stronghold door had slammed shut behind me when I walked in. The way I figured the situation either the bad guys were outside and I was relatively safe or they were in here with me, in which case I'd better hurry the fuck up and join the arms race. I sprinted for the bedroom, my heart trying it's best to bust it's way through my ribcage.

Sure enough there was fifty kilowatt Magnum, under the pillow, all tucked in and sleeping like a lethal little baby. I checked the battery pack - full charge. Decided it was about time I started breathing again. A quick sweep of the apartment helped my respiration no end. Place was empty, 'cept for me and the corpse of my late associate. Now what?

First off I had to hack the municipal servers and erase the pod transit logs. Last thing I needed was a record that I'd been here around the time of death. I was glad I hadn't had breakfast cos I had a feeling the authentication on the deadzone would have had me barfing it all over the floor pretty fucking quickly. I picked up the las-knife from the kitchen floor and pointed the cutting beam tip at Southie's vacant expression. Only one way to bypass a retinal scan...

The wall slid open with a faint "swoosh" and the eyeball made a sickening "splatt" as I dropped it on the wooden floor and stepped through the translucent, glowing diffusion field. I wiped my fingers on my jeans, leaving a slug-trail of bloody jelly and sat down at the console. It suddenly occurred to me that, for the moment, I was the most powerful hacker on the planet. Small comfort. Southie had been a good guy, the best. I'd miss the crazy fuck but that would have to keep til later. Right now I had enough on my plate trying to make sure I didn't end up in the same fucked up state.