Author's Note
Thanks to bikoukumori, for another stellar editing job and to my lady love, for her patience and her willingness to trek into my office whenever I've modified the story.
Sorry, no sex this time
Tuesday, 8:05 am
One day to Shutdown
It was like turning a light switch on. One moment a black void, the next, full consciousness.
Brain inhibitor,
he thought.
Assholes.
He sat in a windowless room, cuffed to a metal chair which itself was bolted to the floor. He wore some kind of gray full-body suit, a one-piece affair covering him from the neck down to his toes, with fitted rubber soles and all.
"Good morning, Smiley."
He looked up. Leaning on the wall opposite him was a woman he'd never seen before. Blonde, curvy, legs without end, as if she'd just jumped from a porn chip. She wore high-end corp threads; blue jacket and skirt combo, black stockings and stiletto heel boots. Looked like she really needed a day off.
More like a couple months.
She had been crying recently, and by the way her hands twitched slightly, she must be on some serious uppers. Hot bod, crap face.
"Yo. And who might you be?"
Never allow your opponent to dictate the flow of battle.
"I am the woman who can make your life living hell, Smiley."
"Even more? Did you tell your Frankensteins to drill into my fucking head?" He remembered it all, since they only anesthetized the bare minimum. The whirr of the drills and the feeling of blood seeping down his neck would haunt him for the foreseeable future.
"You refused to give us the passcode for the wireless uplink and we needed access to your chips. You brought this upon yourself, Smiley, and if you thought that was horrible, let me tell you: I have even more fascinating ideas."
"Sorry, lady, I'm not buyin'. You lack the conviction for that. Besides, you already know everything I know. What more do you want?"
She pushed herself off the wall and walked past him. Her stride had nothing sexy. Rather, it was the walk of a predator.
One tough chick... or a damn fine actress.
She ended her walk behind him and put both hands on his shoulders. Smiley craned his neck to look into her face. She didn't smile.
"No conviction, hm? Let's talk about that." Her hand traced up his neck, up the recently shaved curve of his skull. Then her fingers swerved and moved to the left, until they circled something behind his ear.
"We have expanded your considerable headware, Smiley. You are the proud owner of an ML-8 experimental prototype Mindlink jack. Right now, we have an inhibitor module slotted but I have some toys our R&D boys would love to put in there. Pain inducers, cascading signal emitters, all that ugly black market stuff we're developing for our military customers."
"You're bluffin'," he gasped, cold sweat collecting on his brow.
"Smiley, I'm not in the mood for games. Only the truth. Believe me, if I had any choice in the matter, you'd be lounging first class in Cedar Junction. But I don't, so we need to come to an agreement. I need your particular skill set and you don't want to end up as our anonymous guinea pig." Something clicked, movement behind his ear, then another click.
"Truth, eh? Where am I? Who are you people? And why me?"
She came around to his front again, holding an ominous black-and-gold item, like a short, thick wand. She twirled it between her fingers and Smiley recognized the particular shape of a Mindlink jack.
"That's the sleeper module. I've exchanged it for the pain inducer. Be sure not to piss me off," she purred, placing it in her jacket pocket. "My name is Violet Smith, and for all intents and purposes, I am running Mindlink. What's left of it anyway. You are in one of our facilities under Los Angeles. We are at war, Smiley, and I want to enlist you for our side. A reliable source has been singing your praise."
"Fuck you, lady." Smiley hissed, spitting a glob at her feet.
"Wrong answer." She looked at him, hard, and a moment later, a burning pain seared through his brain, sharp-edged lances erupting from inside, trying to force their way out through his eyes and ears. He wailed like a little girl. Yet, even over his excruciated screams, he could clearly hear her calm voice.
"The beauty of this system is we can let it run indefinitely. No fatal nerve damage, no unconsciousness on your part, just a neverending symphony of agony. You decide on when to stop."
* * * *
Tuesday, 4:12 pm
One day to Shutdown
Irony. Just over a week ago, Richard had fucked my brains out on this very same desk. Now I was sitting behind it, trying to save what he had so tirelessly worked for.
I really didn't ask for any of this. All I wanted was to curl up at home and cry my eyes out, mourn my mentor, my friend and eventual lover. But it wasn't meant to be. The board of directors, after Saphire's payout, had decided I was the one closest to the whole Special Operations disaster, so I had to clean up the mess while they "consolidated their interests" after the Mindlink stock went through the floor. They bickered over the scraps like expensively dressed hyenas. At least they didn't try to tell me how to fix this mess.
I opened the top drawer and plucked the small, unlabeled box from it. In it was what Richard called his "emergency stash", a collection of meds ranging from painkillers to hardcore stimulants, everything a stressed-out desk warrior would need to keep functioning properly. I knew I should go home, try to catch some sleep and maybe food but leaving just wasn't an option. I plucked an innocent-looking pink pill, popped it into my mouth and swallowed it dry.
When was the last time I had seen my apartment from the inside? It had to be shortly after Parker had saved my ass, back when Nero ambushed us near the Salt Lake cluster. Since then, I had been here, alternating between the office, Smiley's cell and the 'Net. I've enlisted the help of every deck jockey I could find and tasked them with rampaging across Nero's holdings, doing as much damage as possible. A whole squad of assault programmers out of Redmond were leading the charge, nuking whole clusters and disappearing before Nero could effectively counterattack. They said it was personal but I had no illusions we were poking a very volatile giant with itty bitty needles but anything was better than sitting around doing nothing. No. That would give me time to break down completely and I wasn't so sure I could get up afterwards.
Cat had taken up the gauntlet too, and by what little news we got, she was nearly as voracious and destructive as Nero was. Thankfully for all involved, she prioritized military systems and corp mainframes to use as her own, while she shut down civilian systems like power reactors instead of letting them go berserk just to see them burn.
Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out a way to beat Nero at his own game. When his first expansion wave hit, we had a good chunk of our own infrastructure shut down. The moment we would turn on the power, either he or Cat would gobble it up, thanks to both of them knowing our own software inside out. But there was another way. Smiley. He knew his way around VR architecture without having to jack in, and his custom system software was noticeably harder to crack for Nero than our own, as evidenced by the fact that Cat's home system and the Boston cluster around it still stood, despite Nero's best efforts to assimilate it. If we could get Smiley to write a new operating system for us, we could upgrade the dormant machines and have a solid starting point to fight back from.
During our last meeting Cat had said she was working on a way to stop Nero once and for all but for it to work she would need as many "seed points" as possible. I had no idea what she was talking about but anything to get rid of Nero was good news right now.
The stimulant hit with the force of a truck slamming into me. I curled up into the chair, whimpered softly and waited for the cramps to pass.
Breathe, Violet, breathe.
Everything became crystal-clear, as if drawn with a diamond stylus on glass. Sharp intake of breath, slow exhalation. I was wide awake. Again. I checked my watch. It was the third dose in twelve hours and I knew I shouldn't go for a fourth. Hopefully Smiley was the ace card we needed.
A knock at the door pulled me from my musings.
"Come."
