Xenoform Read online

  Not good. How am I back here? I don’t feel right, this is not right. I feel as if I’ve been drugged. And not in a good way.

  The woman! The woman with the grey face and blade-nails. Had she put something onto his skin? Squirted him with a narcosol spray? Leo looked around for her. The world dipped and dived as his head turned, possessed of its own pendulous momentum. It was a truly nauseating effect. He would sit down somewhere before he fell down. Panic gnawed at his nerves.

  Oh man, what if I fall unconscious here? What is happening to me? I will have to sit somewhere…

  Leo saw the mouth of an alley looming distortedly on his right and made for it on legs that felt full of a viscous, sloshing liquid. It occurred to him briefly to alert someone to his plight, maybe ask for help from one of the less malodorous-looking passers-by. Perhaps due to the paranoia washing through his jittering mind he rejected this idea at once.

  Better not to call attention to my vulnerability. I’ll sit for a moment then I’ll be okay. Man, what did she do to me? He was sure now that the woman had been responsible. The patch of skin on his wrist where she had touched him was stinging hotly and itching at the same time. As he sat in the relative peace of the alley, Leo looked at the arm where the woman had laid her hand.

  It was crawling with flies. He convulsed, spinning wildly on the dark, slimy surface of the alley floor, flapping at his wrist with the other hand. The flies were gone. He huddled dumbly into a corner, drawing his knees up to his chest. His suit was slimed with the decay and dirt of the alleyway, his eyes were bulging whitely from his face. Little tremors ran through his beautiful, useless wings. The music swirled and stretched the air, making his head spin.

  Someone was standing in the mouth of the alley, looking at him.

  Leo heard a whimper escape his lips. The silhouette seemed to observe him intently.

  ‘Whistler got you pretty good, I reckon,’ said a cultured male voice conversationally.

  Leo nodded, eager to please, terror now coursing through him. He had no idea who or what Whistler was. The buildings seemed to be poised above him now, ready to crash down like tidal waves and crush him. Enthusiastic voices came from the square outside the alley. The band was playing an encore.

  The man took a step towards Leo and grey light splashed across his face. He was older than Leo – maybe fifty – with close-cropped dark hair and a large hook of a nose on a weathered-looking face. A scar that could easily have been rectified by any back-yard surgeon ran from the lobe of one ear to the corner of his mouth. His expression was set impassively. The stranger took a metallic cylinder, about twenty centimetres in length, from a fold of his clothing.

  ‘Nice wings,’ he said and took another step towards Leo.

  Leo scrambled to his feet and ran. At least, he tried to run but his legs were not so much shaking now as actually in spasm. He bounced into a wall, cracking his head, and bursts of light obscured his vision. He rebounded, twisting and falling, and hands were on him. They sought eagerly for purchase on his clothing. For a fraction of a second he was actually grateful to whoever had stopped him from sprawling on the ground again, but the absurdity of this emotion became apparent when the grey-skinned face of the woman who had drugged him loomed through the haze above him. She was grinning. Her canines were sharpened to needle-points. Venom dripped from them. She didn’t bite him, though. Instead, the woman and an indiscernible number of other assailants crowded round him, pushing his head down and cuffing his hands behind him.

  I’m gonna die here. In a public place, drugged to incapacity and unable even to cry for help.

  Oddly, he felt only a dull acceptance of this fact now that it came down to it. The invading germ had been intercepted. These people were the immune system of the Undercity, intercepting foreign bodies and…and what?

  More hands on him now. His feet left the floor and he was turned and bundled along the littered street, away from the crowd, into darkness. He tried to scream but his chest quivered feebly and he couldn’t take a proper breath. Another shadowed figure joined this merry procession from beneath an overhanging door-lintel. Were there four of them? Five?

  ‘Wagon,’ said the woman’s voice from behind Leo’s right ear.

  At the far end of the alley a matt black van suddenly appeared, immediately braking to a smooth stop on its suspensor cushion. A small dust cloud puffed up around it. The vehicle hung a foot off the ground, menacingly silent. A door opened in its side like an eye. Multicoloured telltales blinked and winked within. Leo caught a glimpse of something that looked like a stretcher with straps attached to it. He renewed his feeble struggling, but in vain. His captors made no further sound as they manhandled him towards the waiting vehicle.

  The world was turning over. Sound and light were bleeding from it like paint running in rain. Dark figures moved about him. He thought he felt the cold of the street on his back as he was briefly dumped on the floor, then moving again. Slipping. Twisting. The man with the craggy face leaned over him. Leo could just make out the silver tube in one of the man’s hands. It moved towards him. The man smiled like a wolf. Darkness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Debian entered the bar, ducking under the low concrete lintel. There was no bouncer. The air seemed to thrum warmly, enticing him into the dimness of the room. It was cosily if scruffily furnished with much real wood and tatty throws in pastel colours. The bar itself was a huge kidney-shaped swathe of mahogany. A virtual being stood behind it glowing faintly and polishing a glass in what seemed a slightly contrived and stereotypical manner. The hologram/forcefield barman registered Debian’s entrance and he nodded slightly, making eye contact.

  This man, Jalan Frazer, was well known for his zero-tolerance approach to customer misbehaviour. His program ran off the neural simulation of the Sunken Chest’s original proprietor, now dead some ninety years.

  Debian knew that Jalan’s nod told the flying knife poised in the shadows above the doorway to let the customer through. There were reasons why the Sunken Chest managed without a doorman.

  Debian scanned the clientèle slowly. His DNI overlayed his vision with a heads-up display, picking out life forms and identifying them by intercepting their microwave net-checks and illegally reading their personal data. With a mental impulse he could search further into their details, using these initial data with a combination of brute force crackers and ingenious AI avatars. In the space of milliseconds Debian could usually find out anything about anybody. Unless they were meatheads of course – that strange breed of human who chose to opt out of the techno-revolution.

  There were two people kissing enthusiastically in one of the smoky booths to his left – an unemployed man, Simon Caldera, thirty-two years, no children, and a woman, Kathra Jones, thirty years, one child with a slight heart condition, registered nurse. His avatars checked further into their details, finding no cause for concern. To the right there was a blues musician playing slide guitar through an effects rack as large as a fridge. This man, Sharky Dave, was well known in the Undercity, but the avatars checked him out anyway: Fifty-five years old, alcoholic, employed as a professional musician for twenty years. Two women aged in their fifties, talking closely through blue ribbons of reeferette smoke checked out also – a charity worker and a machine operator in a munitions factory, no criminal records, no other cause for concern.

  The only anomaly was the clean-shaven man who sat at the bar apparently gazing deep into the rocky depths of a large Scotch, head hunched over, hands laced around his tumbler. The avatars pulled up nothing on him. The HUD displayed no overlay, either. The stranger’s software defences didn’t send any countermeasures back at Debian though – he was simply a hole in the net. The man’s direct neural interface, evidenced by the auxiliary sockets in his skull, didn’t transmit or receive any detectable data traffic. This had to be the contact Debian was here to meet, known to him only as Hex.

  Debian approached the bar, not yet acknowledging the Scotch-drinker. He sat on the stool next t
o the man. Jalan Frazer swaggered over, slapping his dishcloth over one powerful looking shoulder. Sharky Dave growled and twanged his way through Undercity Princess, a song apparently about a man who fell in love with a robot hooker and ended up killing himself with a drill.

  ‘Hey – what can I get you for?’ asked Jalan, green swamplight oozing softly from his person.

  ‘Water,’ answered Debian.

  ‘Water,’ repeated Jalan tonelessly, clearly not impressed.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Water we got, if that’s y’poison. Bottles.’

  ‘Fine. Thanks,’ said Debian, trying to keep any exasperation from his voice.

  ‘Fifteen,’ stated the barman, handing over the plastic bottle.

  Debian paid him in hard money and waited for him to return to his glass polishing, which he did with deliberate, defiant slowness. Jalan was rude but he was safe and he knew when not to listen. Debian had been coming here for years and the proprietor’s unfriendliness was actually one thing he liked about the place. Jalan Frazer asked no questions, just sold drinks and polished glasses.

  Finally, Mr. Scotch Drinker turned to Debian. His smooth-skinned and generic face betrayed no more information than his net signature. The plug sockets glinted amongst his short hair like shrapnel in his head. He rolled the Scotch around its glass meditatively.

  ‘You are Debian?’ he asked in a surprisingly soft voice.

  ‘Yes.’ Debian tried to fight the nervous urge to glance continually around himself.

  ‘I am Hex. Your new contact from the employer. You have been informed, of course. My predecessor has moved on.’

  ‘I was told that he was dead.’

  ‘As I say, he has moved on. Be assured, his death was not business-related.’

  ‘I have been assured. Otherwise I would not have agreed to meet you.’

  ‘Of course, and only right. I have the verification you expect.’ Hex held out one index finger. There was a black data-spot adhered to it.

  ‘If that thing contains some sort of virus, don’t get your hopes up,’ Debian confided in a low voice, searching the face of his contact for any deception, analysing micro-expressions on his features. He seemed genuine enough.

  ‘It’s clean. I know you’ll have multiple firewalls in that head of yours. A virus wouldn’t get in anyway. You think anyone who knew your reputation would even try?’ Hex answered equally quietly. Jalan had ducked into the back room.

  ‘You never know,’ admitted Debian. He pressed his own index finger to the data spot and the electromagnetic field reader in his digit scanned the codes on the spot. They all checked out. The contact was apparently genuine. Honestly, he hadn’t doubted it anyway. ‘All good,’ he said.

  Hex simply nodded, and the spot disappeared into a pocket of his voluminous coat. ‘You wanna go sit in a booth, out of the way a bit?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure, why not,’ answered Debian, brushing his long blonde hair behind one ear. His own DNI sockets were exposed on his head – triple-shielded highways to the brain.

  They stood – Hex towering over Debian like a puppeteer. At only five foot eight Debian was used to this. The tumbler of Scotch led them to a booth at the side of the room, seeming to pull Hex along by the hand. Debian followed, moving in a manner intended to draw as little attention as possible. He had perfected the art of walking under the radar, of being unseen in plain sight, avoiding plain sight altogether where possible.

  Hex slid onto a bench, which creaked with ancient leather. Debian sat opposite him, placing his water on the table, trying to relax.

  ‘It is good to finally meet you,’ said Hex. ‘I’m a keen follower of your work.’

  ‘My work,’ replied Debian pointedly, ‘doesn’t like to be followed. But thanks.’

  ‘I have a…commission for you.’

  ‘A job. Fine. Of course. The employer has always recompensed me well.’

  Hex leaned forward across the table. Debian could smell the alcohol on his breath but the man’s eyes were clear and piercing. He slid an old-fashioned non-networked datasheet across the wooden surface for Debian’s perusal.

  Debian read the writing on the screen without touching the device: Cyberlife Research and Development, was glowing there. He slid it back. Hex took it and cleared the screen.

  ‘You know them?’ asked Hex, his natural hazel eyes locked on Debian’s eyes of milky crystal.

  ‘Actually, no. I thought I knew most of the major players in the tech scene. Are they new?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. Apparently they’ve been beavering away in debt at the bottom of the heap for years, struggling for funding, but now they may be onto something that has piqued the employer’s interest.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Ah – the usual,’ replied Hex, indicating with a sweeping hand how broad a range of services this might include.

  ‘Specifically? Research databases, staff details, financial details – all of it, in other words. I assume.’

  Hex took a sip of Scotch, appraising Debian critically. He took in the hacker’s thin, handsome face, intense expression and understated clothing. This non-descript, slight-framed young man was the best in his business. At least that Hex knew of.

  The ice cubes, melting now, clinked in his glass. Rolling, rolling. Oily colours glistened faintly on the surface of the liquid. The two chatting ladies were leaving, gathering up their artefacts. Sharky Dave was really abusing the slide guitar now. The sound was raw, buzzy, over-enthusiastic, but all the better for it.

  ‘All of it. Yes.’

  ‘Should be no problem. The price will be as usual.’ Debian took a sip of water and looked towards the bar, where Jalan was looking busy without actually doing much.

  ‘The payment will actually be increased this time,’ Hex admitted, as if confessing an embarrassing secret.

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘You are likely to find them rather well-prepared to defend their data, rather more so than the average AI research company. They are working on a very large, very secretive contract.’

  ‘For whom?’ asked Debian, his interest fully engaged now.

  ‘You tell us.’ Hex spread his hands wide in the universal search me gesture.

  ‘Okay. It won’t be a problem anyway. I’ve been working on something new – something that will let me run rings around the average avatar. Not just a neural simulation of myself and a simple guidance routine but…’ Debian stopped himself, suddenly aware that he was about to reveal too much. Trade secrets must exist, after all. If only there was someone, one person, whom he could talk to freely about his passion, his work, without fear.

  Hex waved aside this abridged flow of information. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, echoing Debian’s own thoughts. ‘Just be careful, right? Their defence routines are pretty top-notch these days. If we could find someone to get us what we want for cheaper, we would, but none of our other…helpers has had any joy with it. These guys are using avatars themselves. Just be warned.’

  ‘Avatars are still illegal!’ hissed Debian, surprised. ‘How can a registered company get away with that?’

  ‘Maybe no-one can catch them at it. Maybe you can find us answers to these questions.’

  Debian stroked his narrow chin meditatively. Avatars! This could be a proper test of his new toy, a proving ground for his baby. He had been prolific enough over the last five years that he could comfortably retire already. His various employers, covert and overt, had paid him in accordance with his abilities. But what would he do if not this? Smoke dope and indulge in recreational acts of random cyber-terrorism? Where would be the challenge? He didn’t realise that he was smiling broadly. Hex noticed though, and gulped the last of his Scotch, satisfied.

  Sharky Dave was deep in the groove now, his growling voice rolling under and over the zinging and pinging of his guitar:

  ‘I got sixteen pills

  They cure all ills

  The one with the cross

  On the underside ki
lls.

  Take two at random

  At the foot of a hill,

  Climb to the top

  And abandon your will

  -power. Flee cowards,

  Dreamflowers litter the street –

  They’re like porcupine quills

  On the soles of your feet.

  Multicoloured poisons,

  I pour ’em out neat

  And into the corners

  Of your mind I creep.

  I got sixteen pills

  They cure all ills

  The one with the cross

  On the underside kills…’

  Debian listened absently to the music, eyes roving the shadows of the ceiling randomly, deep in thought. The dull glitter of alloy betrayed the presence of the flying knife above the door. A wiry youth with blue hair and glittering golden tusks entered the bar. Debian side-banded the HUD info about him without thinking. Jalan nodded to the tiny robot – the youth approached the bar. Debian knew that if there was anything untoward about the newcomer then his avatars would have pulled it up already and warned him.

  His brain was spinning. He let it spin, bubbling away faster than his conscious mind could even follow, full of attack code and counter-attack code, avatars and AI research, net shadows and sub-verters.

  Hex watched him, unnoticed, for several minutes. He knew what he was looking at – a genius caught up in his own world. Like an artist envisioning a great work, perhaps a painting which would be his masterpiece, the hacker was no longer truly in the room. Hex was a man who appreciated people who were good at their work. He had heard many positive things about Debian from his employer. He was genuinely impressed by this intense young man now that he had met him in person. There was something in Debian’s demeanour that made him more impressive than his appearance alone would suggest. He oozed seriousness, confidence and intelligence. Although his crystal eyes betrayed nothing, it was clear that behind them was happening a very deep, rapid thought process.