By Christopher Hester 1988 · Last updated 9th February 2009
A cyberpunk-inspired sci-fi thriller.
Suzi was a Japanese girl who had married America at an early age. She'd flown to Nyork, chasing the dragon's dream of the promised land. In the ruby lit streets, she'd sold herself, to ease the pain of the shattered dream. Nyork had become the Grave New World of city wastelands and disused factories; urban decadance marked by broken glass from a thousand windows. Car windows, tubetrain windows, skyscraper windows. Walls had lost their brickwork under explosions of multicoloured graffiti. It had become a national pastime to decipher the forgotten meanings of the slogans and the abstract crazy lettering. When the walls were full, the spraycans had been turned upon the sprayers, daily changes of your favourite tattoodles.
Nyork was Suzi's mistake. She had blown her family with an injection of Time's Up in the soup. Supper's Ready, she'd told them grinning. Her father's Osumi yen had seen her good to the airport, taking off into the honey-orange sky she thought she'd never see again. Better than the broken paving stones of the redlight pantomime she now performed in, night to night. Hard American in wet Japanese. But they paid in dollars. The yen had gone a long while back.
I met her on the job one night. Her hair was short black, her eyes pearl grey. The eyelids had been angled and she'd lost her Japanese face. The quick exchange of dollars from my jeans pleased her, maybe more than what else I had there. But when my time was up, I couldn't leave. She pulled the silk blankets off the bed and I fell to the floor in a heap. I succumbed and headed for Jo's. Could a drink forget her?
Then I returned the next night. Not for sex, but for talk. I still payed her. Okay, let's talk, she said. I peered into those pearl grey eyes and I could see she was more than the job. What would it take to persuade her to tell?
Not much.
I fetched the soft she asked for. Suzi fed it into the comp, the bulk of her luggage from Japan. It purred for minutes, chewing the luscious new data with delight. Then she told me she had a plan. I was in on it. The comp was our portable control centre, her flat our HQ. She'd picked up on a guy named Falcon. He had the dollars. Locked tight in Fort Nyork, the city Netbank. She'd caught a few contacts in the Net, prime fishes for infiltration. But would her plan work? I helped her as much as I could. Maybe I was beginning to love her.
At first we tried a simple hack through Netbank's security. If the Net was stretched enough, it just might start to open, unmesh, and we could stick our hands through the holes. But it didn't. The cops were round the Net with their own Net, so we'd have had to go too deep. Our hands weren't long enough, the Nets were too taut. But we still had Falcon.
Suzi cast around for a month, hungry for further leads, but there were few to catch in the rain of information around us. It all seemed straight wiring, A to B connexions, barely any junctions where a name, or a number might lurk. I tracked Falcon as best I could. He was a top notch in the Netbank's infrastructure of accounts that span the State. I dreamt of tieing knots in the wiring, trapping accounts until the wires were heavy with millions of dollars. Then I'd cut the wires, and the money would fall like paper rain into Suzi's lap. But Falcon was a tough one. His status kept him from us for a long year.
Then Suzi made a breakthrough. Falcon had grassed on a friend twelve years ago. The friend had been sent on a permanent holiday to New Alcatraz for rape. Falcon had joined in the rape too, and helped clear up afterwards. But then he'd turned to the cops, son of a bitch. The friend was called Snowey, an albino from Okloma. You couldn't miss him, so the police had found him easily. But Falcon had cleared himself. The woman had recognised Snowey, but her descriptions of the other man involved were vague. The room had been dark and the man tall who had used her like a sperm bank. When Falcon turned to money banking instead, the woman had had Snowey's child. Or was it Falcon's? Time had given the case a layer of dust that was obscuring the details. Wipe it clean, I told Suzi, clear Snowey and Falcon will look pretty awkward. Then nail him, and while he's out of the Net, we'll step in with his key to the untold dollars they hide in Fort Nyork. Suzi had his key already. She was a smart hacker. But could we pull it off? If we failed we'd be under. Over.
A friend of Suzi's kept us supplied with the right gear. The soft was no problem, standard stuff from Swizland. Then there was the gun - a simple unimould pink shape, phallic and deadly. I turned it over in my hands, admiring the feel of the dimpled plastic and the ribbed handle. We thought we might need it.
The scene was set. An envelope of papers would mysteriously arrive at the Nyork Police Dept. The papers contained forged genetiprints. Undeniable evidence that the woman's child was Falcon's too. We'd hacked his medical records to ensure this. They could double check all they liked. Then we'd wait until Falcon was gone.
The rest was tricky. We couldn't move until Falcon was up for trial, so we had to stay low. A month passed, and me and Suzi spent the time with nothing better to do than... but the cops got wise. How I'll never know. Our control centre went. Marooned at the police station. The American all-in-one comp units just weren't the same. They were still using CDs! Suzi eventually scrounged a flat-shaped model, but we had to rig it up to her TV to use it. By the time we were cleared for lack of evidence (the charges were hacking, of course) the cops had turned their attentions to Falcon. Fort Nyork was open at last!
We punched slowly into the Netbank security. This time, we didn't need to stretch the Net. Falcon had left us a nice big hole in the fabric. Falcon's key fitted perfectly and we were in. I'd never seen so many names - we must have gone through almost every citizen in Nyork - all their accounts were there, like big fat juicy fruit, just waiting to be picked. Suzi used Falcon's own account to transfer the funds to. Suddenly Falcon had all the dollars in Fort Nyork in his account! If he got free again, they'd do him good for this!
We got out the way we came in. It was easy for us not to leave any traces on the Net.
Next up was Lacity. It had been rebuilt completely since the Quake and looked like some kind of playground for architecture. Colourful and geometric. I helped Suzi feed Falcon's account slow-wire into the Lacity Netbank. She knew a quiet little island in the Net that had been kept safe for years, abandonded until the owner would return. But we returned instead. We'd bought the island off the owner, a friend of a friend of a friend of mine. You can buy anything with the entire Fort Nyork finances at your disposal.
But the island became a continent. The dollars were stacked so high that people had started to notice. Someone must have spotted the slow-wires to Nyork and we were traced. It's a hard lump to swallow when you're traced like that so easily, after all your oh-so-clever tricks getting as far as we'd got. No lack of evidence this time, Suzi dear.
Falcon meanwhile did some time. But the bastard wormed his way out on bail. The Netbank must have taken pity on him. He's now back with them, while I'm sitting here in my cell. I get on well with Snowey. He tells me lots of things about Falcon. Maybe I'll have another shot at him one day. Suzi's hiding in Japan somewhere. I bet she's had her eyes reangled. Japanese again.
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