Better Lucky than Good? — fiction (Fadian pt1) Cyberpunk

(You can also read the story in basic sexy black [here](Better Lucky than Good? — fiction (Fadian pt1)).)

Better Lucky than Good?

The Harborside building was a somewhat ironic name, given that rising sea levels had turned everything from Newark to Brooklyn into a single body of water, The New York Archipelago. The Harborside was now an island, one small bit of Hoboken that remained above the waves. Its basement sealed and industrial-gothic buttresses steadying it on its slowly decaying foundation, it was emblematic of a nation without an infrastructure. And yet, for all that, it was considered prestigious: only the wealthiest non-corpors could afford to purchase a room at The Harborside. It was the first encouraging sign Rembrandt had encountered in three weeks.

Passage from the Union City Deregulated Zone—that corporate-sponsored slum-in-a-bottle used for entertainment purposes—was on a skiff that Rembrandt swore was made out of GoLonger sports drink bottles glued together with atmo sealant. The little freak working the single pole that masqueraded as the craft's engine looked as though he'd been dipped in acid; even his filter mask couldn't fit his face without a helpful length of cord to cinch it up. Inside his chrome-hued integral mouth filter, casually vaping gongzuo to kill the smell of the archipelago that somehow made it past the micro-weave, dressed in the unchanging standard of male fashion so as to indicate financial power and the platoon of Security Soldiers that would airdrop on anyone stupid enough to touch him, Rembrandt gave the impression of a conquistador. But with the blazing lights of the DeRegZ behind him and the dark waters of the archipelago lapping at the base of The Harborside, it was impossible to tell if he was embarking on a conquest or returning from one.

The Harborside security admitted him up without interrogation, orders having been left to keep out of his way. Foolish, he thought as he entered the elevator and nodded to the little man who pushed the buttons; Fadian could be wrong, I could be coming to kill him. Why not have them take the heavy mass-driver I've got under my arm?

Fadian's rooms, laid out in that luxurious last-century style when pre-fab apartment stacks were but a warning of fiction, were not at all what Rembrandt expected. But that, after all, is what he expected. He wandered through each one, his hands in his pockets to give the impression of casual curiosity rather than suspicion of ambushers; a matter of courtesy, confirmed by Fadian's amused smile.

"Not what you were expecting?" Fadian asked, leaning back in a chair as complicated as an ejector seat from a V-68. In his early twenties, probably, his skin tone and thinness made him a local; the sparkle of K10-50 eye mods made him successful. But simply affording a room at The Harborside told Rembrandt that much. "In the vids, the villainous hacker lives in some kind of dark lair, surrounded by bits of old tech he's salvaged, dropping chems of questionable pedigree, and rocking out to some hardcore PharmaRock—with or without the recreational hormone aerosols." Rembrandt made his face do something like a smile. "That is some chair," he said. Fadian grinned and swiveled gently, his fingers moving over the screen of the appcon attached to the right armrest, about where the control stick would have been in a VTOL. The appcon was wired to the chair and the chair to Fadian's sub-dermal jacks, feeding the computer's interface to his K10-50s; some people were never offline. "In my line of work, you do a lot of sitting. Ergonomics, man, you gotta respect the ergonomics."

Rembrandt nodded tolerantly. "I've been in many such rooms, Mr. Fadian," he said.

"Fadian, dude, it's not mister," Fadian said.

"Of course, what was I thinking?" Rembrandt said.

"It's just a handle, you know?" Fadian said. "Your name's not really Rembrandt, is it?"

Rembrandt did that thing with his face again but Fadian was starting to think it wasn't a smile at all. "And every single one of them dealt with the hacker myth differently," Rembrandt said as if he had not been interrupted. "Some accepted it, some rejected it, some had a little fun with it. My interest, however, has always been in whether they lived up to it in another sense. Corbin assured me that you would."

"You got it, dude," Fadian said. "Right down to the biz, no problem; I'm cool. So Corbin said what you actually want is a schematic of the AIC headquarters megaplex."

"Preferably," Rembrandt said. "A way into the neuronetics lab would be enough, however."

"Right," Fadian said and pinched the bridge of his nose. "So the thing with trying to steal facility schematics is that it's practically the hardest thing to hack. Ever. Corporate warfare, man, it's been going on for centuries, right? Even before the 35th Amendment made it quasi legal, corps were fighting each other out in the open. And something like the layout of your competitor's headquarters? Pretty important. They bury that shit these days. The facility maintenance net will have it but the faci-net won't be connected to anything. It's not like some corpor needs his bedroom door fixed so he calls up facilities on his IDac and says, 'Get up here.' He'd have to use a hardwired facility interface, a wall-mounted screen."

"I'm familiar with them," Rembrandt said.

"Of course," Fadian said, not taken in by the pigmentation alteration Rembrandt wore when walking through non-corporate territory. "So the only way to access their faci-net would be to physically connect to it. Like, we'd need to already have access to the AIC building; and not just some dickhead's room appscreen, either. I'm talking a network terminal, probably tucked away in some sub-basement. Then we could rip a copy of the schematics. But, hell, if we could get in there, you wouldn't need the schematic, would you?"

"No," Rembrandt said. "It's not like Corbin to waste my time like this."

"Easy, dude, there are other options," Fadian said, raising his left hand. "There was this one job I did—I'm not going to tell you when or where, no details—but we were kind of in the same situation. Some guys needed to get into this room in a megaplex, needed a route in and some idea of internal security. Now most of these corps, right, still need to communicate with the outside world. Those nets are much easier to hack; every mega that has multiple offices will have a social site—so their employees can meet up and fuck (I've already hacked AIC's)—and have something they use to communicate with third parties. Those transmissions are just out there, floating up to satelites. It's mostly a game of encryption and, shit, cryptography is a blast. Anyway, so we get a line on this megaplex ordering a big-ass piece of gear from a supplier overseas; something they couldn't manufacture themselves. They don't encrypt the order too much because who cares. It isn't a secret that they work in this field; their ordering a piece of gear is worthless data. Except to us. So I order a big-ass piece of gear, too, but a different piece. I have it shipped at the same time to roughly the same place, so it and the corp's piece arrive at the warehouse at the same time. The warehouse isn't guarded all that well because the stuff they house is so big you'd need a VTOL or hovertruck to get it out of there. We sent in a dude. He swapped the labels on the gear containers so the corp got the wrong piece. He also embedded the shipping container with a passive surviellence suite. The container then went into the megaplex, down to this room we wanted, and they unpacked it; it wasn't what they ordered so they sent it back; when it reached the warehouse on its way back to the supplier, we sent the dude in again and he pulled the surveillence suite. It had recorded everything and we had our route down to this room."

"Very nice, Mr. Fadian," Rembrandt said.

"Thanks," Fadian said, scowling at the mister. "Can we run something like that? They ever order shit?"

"The room we are after is the neuronetics lab," Rembrandt repeated. "Everything there, by it's very nature, is small. If they lacked any gear, they would simply build it on-site or at one of their other facilities, shipping via SS VTOL. So no, not an option."

"Okay," Fadian said, rolling his eyes. He hoisted himself out of his chair, plucking the wires from the jacks under his arm, and walked over to a little steel-hued refrigerator to retrieve a bottle of water. "You want anything?"

"No,"

Fadian sipped his purified water and paced the length of the room, increasingly uncomfortable under Rembrandt's unflagging stare.

"Corbin also told me you have a guy on the inside," Fadian said. "Some sort of professor out of Princeton."

"Yes," Rembrandt said. "He is how we know that what we want is in the neuronetics lab."

"So he has access?" Fadian asked. "Could he wear a bug into the place to map it?"

"He does not have access," Rembrandt said. "He is in communication with a couple members of the team, whom he had trained when they were earning their certifications."

"So you know their names?" Fadian asked.

"First names," Rembrandt said. "And only ever seen text. He logs on to an AIC network for the comm with the neuronetics team. We only have his side of the conversation."

"Should have bugged his IDac," Fadian said, killing his water.

"We didn't want to risk detection by AIC," Rembrandt said.

Fadian shrugged. He crossed his arms and leaned against the windows that looked out over The New York Archipelago, the lights of the various megaplex towers gleaming brilliantly through the fume.

"And there's no way you can get him into the lab even for a second?" Fadian asked.

"He has no access to the AIC facility," Rembrandt said. "The closest he will come is a party to be held in three days, in the south-west dome of Central Park."

"A party, huh?" Fadian said. "What kind of party?"

"The useless sort," Rembrandt said. "If you cannot get me the schematics of the facility, Mr. Fadian, then we have no business." He turned to go, his hand sliding inside his jacket.

"It's just Fadian," Fadian said, "and take it easy, man. We'll get there. This party he's going to: is it being thrown by his pals in the neuronetics lab?"

His right hand still inside his jacket and his left hovering near the door handle, Rembrandt said without turning, "Yes."

"So they'll all be there, right?" Fadian said.

"Presumably," Rembrandt said.

"Perfect," Fadian said. "That's how we'll do it."

"Explain," Rembrandt said.

"So I just happen to have a copy of ESCHER," Fadian said.

"The facial recognition software USIntel uses?" Rembrandt said.

"Fuck, man, nothing impresses you, huh?" Fadian said.

"No," Rembrandt said. "How did you obtain it?"

"Ever hear of the Moldovian Protectorate?" Fadian said; Rembrandt shook his head. "That's not surprising. It existed for about 17 months, up until November of last year. OHH wanted it carved out of what had been Romania, to protect its mining rights. With OHH's VP Finance sitting on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it was easy to stage a coup. Ha! They dropped 300 h-aug cyborgs from USArmy on the capital; afterwards it looked like a cross between modern art and a termite mound. So, in order to have a—you know—a government, USIntel then dropped a pre-fab embassy building on the rubble. And it came fully stacked with all the software a newly formed puppet could possibly need, from accounting to —"

"To the ESCHER," Rembrandt said. "That's right," Fadian said. "But then one of the Uni-Slav Confederacy states got pissed about it and called in a chit with Russia, rented a couple divisions of armor, and took over the place. Ridiculous: the mining rights were worth maybe fifty-billion. Anyway, USArmy was tied up in Pakistan and didn't have any quick reaction force that could get there in time to save the embassy pre-fab. Orbital artillery would have fragged it but USIntel didn't want to lose whatever it had picked up. So they asked around and it turned out that NovaCorp had a sub in the area."

"NovaCorp held off a few divisions of Russian armor?" Rembrandt asked.

"Careful, dude," Fadian said. "You almost slipped and looked impressed. Not exactly. They were delivering an AI chipset to Greater Persia and when they deliver something like that, the brothers bring some serious hardware. They dropped in their own h-augs to pull the computers, burn the rest. Thing is, NovaCorp leaks like a sieve. And I just happened to be ripping something from them at about that time."

"So luck," Rembrandt said. "You obtained the ESCHER software through luck."

"You know what they say," Fadian said, shrugging: "better lucky than good."

"They are wrong," Rembrandt said. "How will it help us?"

"If you can get a bug onto your friend the professor when he goes to this party," Fadian said, "and he sees all of the people who work in the neuronetics lab, we'll get a profile of each of them. I already told you I hacked AIC's social site—they call it VillageSquared, can you believe that? Everyone is real careful not to talk about their jobs on it, in part because it's seen as gauche but also because if you're classed as a security risk, your promotion prospects go down the drain. But they're not that careful. I'll crawl VillageSquared with the facial rec software and identify all of the neuronetic lab's people."

"And?" Rembrandt said. "Knowing who sleeps with whom will not get us into the lab."

"No but their pictures will," Fadian said. "Look man, normal people—you've heard of them, right?—normal people take a shit-load of pictures. It's the modern addiction. Had been booze, then weed, now pictures and short vids. Every single one of those lab rats will have hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures. Barry looking at porn on his IDac when he should be working; Shelly with a hangover after New Years; Chow nearly puking when Enrique let a particularly horrendous fart rip. But in each of those seemingly innocent pics, right, there's a background: a bit of a corridor, a break room, a window, an open doorway. A couple of these are harmless; a thousand of them are data. With it, I can have ESCHER assemble the bits and pieces into a rough mapping of the neuronetics lab and the corridors connecting it to the outside world. And I mean rough: it'll have gaps but it'll do the job. All we need is to know who works there. And we can get that by photographing everyone at this little party. If you can get a bug on your friend the professor. Can you bug him?"

"I can," Rembrandt said.

(To be continued next week . . .)

Submitted January 02, 2015 at 09:05PM by fingolfin_was_nuts http://ift.tt/1vQq9P7 Cyberpunk