Author's note: A huge "Thank You" to bikoukumori, for a fantastic editing job.
Also, thanks to fellow author redskyes, for encouraging me to publish this.
There are only adults in this story and no artificial intelligences have benn harmed in its making.
#1: Cat killed Curiosity
Rain.
Nothing but rain for the last few weeks. Never before have I seen so many, so awfully rainy days. I actually felt like being in the old 2D VHS of "Blade Runner," flickering, broken neon lights and old, barely working CRT TVs in the store windows of pawn shops included. I hovered in front of one of those, its grey, blotted PVC awning offered a bit of protection from the torrents pouring from the skies. The badly maintained TV screens plastering the window showed a nice cross-section of what we called television in the year 2030. So it was mostly adverts, in screaming colours, huge letters and lots of close-ups. Thankfully the store owner had the volume muted.
"The ultimate for home defence! H&K TK666, rapid fire, maximum stopping power. Never fear, HK is here!"
"The Iron Stallion implant - each night, every night, and she'll never know!"
"Channel XXX, because we know what you need. Male, female, whatever, we'll show it!"
"Cybernator WarMachine! The unstoppable battle cyborg! He's fresh out of the vat, but damn, he's angry! Rated T for Teen."
I decided that braving the pouring rain was better than suffering any more product placement and so I shuffled off, clutching a worn synth-leather duffel bag close to my body, moving towards the ominously looming spires of the apartment plex I called home for the time being. Most people had more common sense than me and stayed indoors in this weather, so my only company was the usual big-city soundscape, faintly echoing, distorted dubstep remixes of ancient '80s pop songs, punctuated only by the wail of police sirens or the throaty staccato of automatic gun fire.
Finally, the shadowy monolith of "my" apartment tower was looming over me. Only a couple dozen meters and I would be out of that blasted rain. I barely felt the icy blasts of wind whistling around the towers, probably a side-effect of the meds used on me in the corporate clinic where I got that interesting implant behind my left ear.
A tingle of anticipation pulsed through my body. I had worked my ass off until finally someone important seemed to notice that I brought reasonable results in my line of work and decided I was worth bringing into the big league. So, a few days ago, a mysterious Ms. Smith called me and offered the chance of a lifetime. I didn't get to meet her, instead they sent a car that carted me through half the city, I got the implant and the bag and was sent on my way, along with some instructions on what I should do with both. To avoid suspicion, they dropped me off a dozen or so blocks away from my flat, in a part of town where tricked-out corporate limos wouldn't raise an eyebrow. That's the main reason I had to wade all the way here.
I moved a little faster, trying to evade the flooded pot holes, and finally reached the front door. Fumbling in the pockets of my drenched black coat, I produced a scratched swipe card and fed it to the reader, once, twice. But apart from a status LED feebly blinking nothing happened. Frustrated, I slammed my fist into the cheaply-made reader and promptly got rewarded with a friendly jingle and the front door opening.
"Thanks, damned piece of scrap," I snarled and entered the dingy foyer, avoiding the lift on purpose and heading straight for the stairwell instead. If I was lucky, the lift just wouldn't work and someone would have lost his lunch in the cabin, but knowing my luck, some poor idiot was bleeding out in there. So I legged it up to the thirteenth floor instead. Renewed digging in my coat pocket produced a somewhat archaic-looking set of security keys, each made for one of the several locks adorning the door to my flat. I earned my living by messing up other people's electronics, so I entrusted my valuables to the tried-and-true mechanical locks, the best you could get with my paltry earnings. They were not affected by power outages and the skills needed to circumvent them were almost forgotten as well. Okay, if someone wanted into my room badly enough, they just needed to kick down the door, but at least the locks would hold, something I couldn't say about the hinges.
I pushed the door open and was greeted by the badly synthesized "me-owowowow" of my room mate, a "Totally RealKat(tm)". The cat-sized (and vaguely cat-shaped) ball of plastic fur sat on the floor behind the door and almost looked at me with it's fluorescent orange optics, meowing happily. I plucked it off the floor by the scruff of its neck which it promptly rewarded with loud, synthetic purring and placed it gently on the bed, followed by the duffel bag and my dripping coat. I kicked my boots into a corner of the room, where they ended up next to a constantly growing pile of take-out boxes and soda cans.
My apartment wasn't much to look at. Just large enough for a fold-down bed, fold-down desk and integrated wall closet. Who needs a kitchen in the age of self-heating meals anyway? Sharing the bathroom with three others was gross sometimes, but hey, it kept the overhead down.
On the desk were my previous tools of the trade, a jacked-up-to-the-max multicore i26 desktop computer, complete with inexpertly wired VR hardware. Taking graphic user interfaces a few steps further, today's secretaries just need to look good in their DataGlasses and VR gloves, thanks to a pricey selection by pretty much every fashion designer. And thanks to fool-proof operating systems, you didn't even need to be able to type any more, just pretend you're writing your stuff while holding a virtual pen and the magic of software transforms the movements of the VR glove into written words, pretend you tuck the written sheets into an envelope and the machine fires up the mail client, sending the document to the address specified on the envelope.
These principles could easily be translated to more illicit operations as well. If a hacker were to, say, crack a bank account, he wouldn't need to mess around with firewalls and security himself any more. He would just boot up a program that in VR, appropriately enough, looks like a brick of C4, plant it to the outside of the bank account, let the software do it's work, grab the valuable data (looking usually like bags of money or file binders) and get the hell outta there. Banks naturally don't like people like me and it all comes down to a game of cat-and-mouse, me trying to avoid the bank's security guards trying to trace my data trail back to my home address by routing my way through as many innocuous systems or masking my presence while the security guys try their darndest to catch me as quickly as possible so they can send the fuzz to my door. One of the reasons I usually travel light and keep at least a backup machine hidden away somewhere.
My thoughts returned to the present and the duffel bag, still laying on my bed. I opened it and pulled out a rectangular item, tightly wrapped in several layers of plastic foil. It's a little bigger than an old IBM keyboard and noticeably thicker. Almost reverently I removed the foil and lifted it up towards the light of the fizzling light bulb providing meager illumination. In the top right corner I could make out the stylized words "Infiltrator 2.0.3.0.". Apart from a few complicated-looking jacks, nothing would tell you that this thing is the bleeding edge of computer tech, something that, combined with the implant I just got, would make a second-rate data thief like me into a millionaire, if all goes well.
It takes only a few moments of frenzied activity and my old setup has vacated the desk, making room for the new machine. My RealKat(tm), which I christened "Gibson" in a fit of insipid irony, had occupied my rickety office chair in the meantime. Gently I picked it up and placed it on the bed again before taking its place, brushing my hands over the smooth plastic. Steadying my nerves, I connected the power jack on the "Infiltrator" with a wall socket, a second cable went into the black box which connected this flat with the 'Net. A flash drive containing my software library fitted easily into a port on the machine as well and finally, a pencil-thin lead went from the "Infiltrator" to a long, serrated plug between my fingers. Gingerly, I raise my hand towards my left ear.
"Think about it as the mother of all VR setups," one of the people attending the briefing told me. No trace of Ms. Smith, just some shadowy figures in a dark room, the kind of people who pay guys like me to get their hands on other people's dirty secrets. The kind of people who'd throw you into the sewers if you asked too many stupid questions. And we all know what's down there nowadays, right? Let's leave it at that. So I just nodded sagely and felt very happy that these guys thought me good enough to bump me into the top league, even offering me the computer equivalent of a Bugatti Veyron to do their work with.
When VR became too slow, we started using electrodes plastered to our shaved skulls. They stimulated the relevant nerve centers in our brains so that we could eliminate the milliseconds wasted while eyes and hands tried to execute the brain's commands. This system never made it past it's infancy, the thick bones in the skull caused the signals to feel all too staticky, like a slightly out-of-tune radio station. Instead, we upped the number of cores on our computers, optimized code or used parallel processing to be able to do several things at once, like scrambling the automated security systems and sending decoys through the system at the same time. Simultaneously the opposition stepped up their game too, with even better hardware, more manpower and devious traps, like booby-trapped data that would infest your system with hardware-frying viruses if not opened with the right combination of biometric data and pass phrases. Let me tell you, it's a jungle out there.
But somewhere, in some underground labs, the eggheads went through the skull to the heart of the grey matter, so to speak, and found a way to couple the brain with a suitably equipped computer. No more gestures. No more voice commands. Think. Act. Dance circles around the opposition. The stories coming down through the hacker grapevines were amazing, of cyber-ninjas blitzing the most heavily defended systems, robbing Swiss bank servers like they were ancient BBSes or shutting down whole corporate server farms as if flicking a light switch. It was unreal and everyone wanted in. Most of the eager ones disappeared and only the unfortunates showed up again, mostly in the newsfeeds to the tune of "an unknown body had been found, cause of death and identity unknown".
