Freedom Incorporated, Peter Tylee [literature books to read TXT] 📗

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Thursday, September 16, 2066

At least the chill of night and a cool ocean breeze had mitigated the humidity. The Raven even enjoyed the air wafting across his face, tingling every nerve beneath the surface. He didn’t like Australian assignments. Too weird. America was his homeland and he was proud to call himself American. The Australian’s he’d met were too guarded, too raucous, or else too trashy. He admitted that the places he’d visited tended to attract social refuse and that if he went to the corresponding places in the States he’d find the same, but deep down he preferred to think the United States of America was superior.

He sighed, getting tired. Should I roost? He’d need to rest soon or he’d risk damaging the delicate nerve tissue that interfaced with his computer. The doctors had warned him about that - extreme fatigue was just as deadly as a bullet. Not yet. His fellow humans fascinated him and he watched these particular ones with a psychotic intensity of interest. The moon was rising and he turned to frown at it. The Raven would have preferred pitch black, all the better to stalk someone. Silver streams of light filtered through the salt-laden atmosphere and draped brightly across the cluster of houses. That will make it harder, he thought impassively.

Dan posed another problem. The Raven’s animalistic senses warned him to be cautious. Taking Jen alone would have been preferable. Her two friends wouldn’t cause a problem. Only Dan. Three untrained individuals were easy prey, but a highly motivated bounty hunter was something else entirely. Not that he was scared. He puffed out his chest with his swelling self-esteem. The Raven doesn’t get scared. And that was true, for the most part. The last time he remembered fear was prior to blacking out in hospital, immediately before the doctors had crafted him into a cyborg. Before my becoming. He thought of it as his birth, he hadn’t truly been alive before the operation. A thin smile stretched his dry lips and he felt his lower lip tear, a combination of dehydration, the salt in the atmosphere, and the parching wind. The iron tang of blood trickled onto his tastebuds and he quietly spat on the ground. That was something else he had to treat carefully. Cutting it a little fine, aren’t we? He’d made the calculations and he trusted his self-generated program with his life, quite literally. He still had three hours before irreversible damage would occur. After that, dehydration would cause the stressed nerve tissue surrounding his computer to break down, reducing him to a pile of twitching limbs. The Raven had seen it happen once, to a colleague. He’d miscalculated the time needed to re-hydrate and suffered permanent brain injury.

One more hour. Something told him the following hour would bring his chance - his only chance.

And what of Sutherland? Curiosity stimulated him into doing a preliminary database search on his competitor. And a frown replaced his earlier smile. Nothing returned from his initial fetch command. His eyes lost focus when he turned his attention inward and engrossed himself in the easily defined world of zeros and ones. A high-speed burst transmitter, which could beam three terabytes per second at maximum capacity, provided his link to the outside world. But, as a drawback, it only worked over short distances so he needed to be close to a tower. He was just thankful that a town as wretched as Tweed Heads had its own station. Statistically Australia was the country he in which he was most likely to find himself rudely disconnected. This place is worse than Mozambique, he thought with a sneer. He could still send and receive information while out of burst-transmitter range, but the data trickled in at a poky five gigabytes per second - horrendously slow for the Raven’s powerful computer-brain combination.

He fed his consciousness along the link, ensuring it was stable before committing his mind to the wireless connection. Stable? Check. So he roamed into a world that no true human had ever fully experienced. His brain extended and enhanced the operation of his embedded computer; they operated jointly at the speed of thought. He usually needed to visit only one repository for all his information requirements: PortaNet’s meticulously maintained central chipping database. But today it didn’t yield the information he needed. Personal details, height, weight, credit history… The Raven smirked until the fresh taste of blood in his mouth reminded him to stop. Dan had an interesting credit history, information he could use just as effectively as his Redback-PX7 if the opportunity arose. He downloaded Dan’s file and stored it locally, perturbed that he still hadn’t dislodged the information he really wanted. What’s he been doing for the past two decades? Who is he? He needed an answer for them both.

He extended his search to include secondary sources, the flashing of data and routing of packets tickling something deep within his mind. He found Dan listed in no fewer than 17 of his 20 regular sources, though the mere fact that he was missing from three was remarkable enough. He examined each record in turn, discarding one after the other; his suspicion elevated a notch with every incomplete record. Someone cleared his history. Maybe Dan, maybe someone else. He pressed on, determined to find what he was looking for. Nobody can fully erase the past; everybody misses at least one database. It intrigued him that someone had bothered to erase Sutherland’s past at all. He wondered why. He or she had certainly done a good job. Normally it took a cyborg to scour the world’s databases that thoroughly, and even a cyborg couldn’t erase things completely.

He retrieved and discarded 50 records in his search for pieces to Dan’s jigsaw-puzzle history. Dan had spent the past few months working for UniForce. That part was easy. Prior to that, as far as the Raven could tell, he’d been a detective working for the New South Wales Police Department. His records depicted nearly ten years of exemplary service before a psychological evaluation had rendered him unserviceable and the Department had discharged him from duty. From there the Raven had to work forward. Dan was born in 2030 and he’d lived a normal life up until his eighteenth birthday. But it was the gap that bothered the Raven - the eight years spanning 2048 to 2056 where none of the databases could account for Dan’s existence. It’s as if he fell of the face of the planet.

It wasn’t for another hour of sweating through disused and chaotic databases that the Raven finally found an answer to plug the gap. He found it in a database located in Argentina, of all places, and it had taken him 20 minutes to puncture the database’s defences. His eyes snapped back into focus and he gripped the handle of his Redback, pulling further back into the shadows and peering cautiously toward Jennifer Cameron’s apartment. An alien emotion forced him to swallow, and his dry throat scraped on the way down. It took him a while to understand what the emotion was: Fear.

*

Thursday, September 16, 2066

UniForce Headquarters

James Ellerman blinked to clear the sting from his exhausted eyes and slurped noisily on his cup of coffee. He’d been working without a break since eleven in the morning when his computer had first bleeped to warn him about a network breach. Yesterday morning, he reminded himself acrimoniously.

A quiet-spoken man, he knew his wife was going to kill him when he got home. But he couldn’t phone her now, not this early in the morning. He snorted and thought, If I ever do get home. He absently wondered whether she thought he was with another woman. Or another man? It wasn’t the first time he hadn’t come home without phoning to warn her. Last time she’d been hysterical when he finally had turned up, two days later. You’d think I’d learn. He snorted again. Snorting was his pet mannerism, which had always thoroughly irritated his colleagues. They called him Piggy behind his back because he frequently snorted at the end of every sentence.

In his first real lapse of concentration since embarking upon the tedious exercise of patching the network, he conjured an image of Susan, his wife, holding his three-month-old daughter, Lillian. His wife had a motherly smile and looked positively radiant. And the impish grin on Lillian’s chubby face made James smile too. Then his wife’s smile mutated into a snarl and she growled viciously at him, flaying him with her sharp nails while biting and screaming, “Why didn’t you call me?” James severed his daydream at that point and opened his eyes, though his daughter still pleasantly tickled his inner vision. In truth Lillian had been an accident, the result of a failure for Xantex’s Pill for Men. And while V.H.E.M.T, the Voluntary Human Extinction MovemenT, had in more recent years taken to promoting abortion for mistakes, James couldn’t imagine not having her. Sure, he was exhausted from feedings and midnight diaper changes, but Lillian Ellerman was the joy of his life. He loved to make her laugh and watch her make those cute little spit bubbles, which he found adorable and others found repulsive. Sure, he could see the world was overpopulated; he knew they didn’t have the resources to cope with more, but at least he was stopping at one. His brother hadn’t stopped until his cow of a wife had squeezed out her fourth and the puppet-government had forcibly tied her tubes. James could see their point. Why can’t they see mine? He was too engrossed with his own fatherly feelings to comprehend that the ‘other side’ did understand his feelings. It wasn’t illegal to reproduce, and the corporate rulers hadn’t yet been brave enough to mention mandatory licenses for pregnancy, but they frowned upon reproduction and discouraged it wherever possible. One child was still socially acceptable, two was the social limit, and more than two was selfish and deserved ostracism. Sixteen billion people crammed onto the small rock called Earth was approximately ten billion more than the planet could cope with. Space exploration with portal technology had come too late. If humans didn’t carefully control their spiralling population, they’d exhaust their resources before they found a new place to settle. What was the saying? Only after chopping down the last tree will you realise that you can’t eat money. James could never remember who had written that, but he intended to pay heed. Lillian was the first and the last child to spring from his loins. You see, I do care about the common wellbeing.

He diverted his thoughts before lingering guilt could consume what was left of his loving fatherly feelings.

James had no need of a monitor, though he left one on his desk anyway. Sometimes he used it, sometimes he didn’t. He piped the important information directly into his mind much faster than he could read it from a monitor. He had implants. They were quite simple really. A quick trip to the implant factory - as it was known - at company expense to have a small incision made just behind his right temple and a special plug inserted into his brain. They’d squirted some growth syrup in with it to encourage his nerve cells to bind with the fibrous ends of the device. They’d finished by drilling a neat hole in his skull and tucking his excess skin around the