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

both him and the Raven.”

Very smooth. Esteban approved of her explanation and hoped Jackie would believe it. He thought there was a good chance, especially since it came from the beguiling Michele.

“That’s not what I meant.” Jackie refined her question, “What information do we have on him? He’s a top-level hunter so he must be somewhat dangerous. He’s harbouring a target, is it possible he’s turned against us?” How pissed is he that you’ve been selling his lists to a cyborg?

Michele ostentatiously displayed her mediocre keyboard skills while accessing the database for Sutherland’s file. Her fingernails scratched against the glass tabletop and made James wince, Jackie grimace, and Esteban scowl. “He broke the previous record reaching exclusive level - it only took him 68 days.” She read aloud the brief account of Dan’s sad life, the prose dry and unemotional.

Jackie tilted her head and peered down her nose when Michele had finished. “Esteban, contract five million for him too.”

Esteban nodded, hiding the fiendish glimmer in his eyes.

“I’m disappointed in all of you,” Jackie said matter-of-factly.

What an inspiring leader. James felt sick.

“I don’t want any more network breaches. And I don’t want any more cyborgs working for us. Is that understood?”

They nodded.

“Scan the files and isolate the cyborgs. If they’re on active duty, retire them. If they protest, execute them. I’m charging you three to handle this situation. Quickly. Quietly. But I expect frequent updates.” Jackie stood, indicating that their impromptu meeting was over. She waited while the others scuttled from the room before also marching out.

Now, for the shareholder meeting. She wondered how best to break the news. At least they won’t expect me to smile, she thought. A sombre backdrop suited her fine.

Jackie did not intend to do Paul’s job for long. She just needed to find someone malleable enough to match her needs. But until then, I’ll have to do this public relations crap. She sighed. If you want it done right, do it your goddamned self.

*

Friday, September 17, 2066

11:02 Andamooka, South Australia

The sun was biting.

Jen’s skin already stung from the abuse. She just knew it was going to start bubbling and peeling at any moment. They’d been trekking through the harsh South Australian desert since eight o’clock, when Dan had collected them from the Dusty Andamooka Inn. She squinted at him, cursing herself for forgetting her sunglasses. Boy, he must be tired. But Dan showed no outward signs of fatigue despite walking since six. How he’d covered so much ground so quickly was a mystery to Jen, whose overnight bag felt like a thousand tonnes of useless junk.

Samantha and Cookie had barely spoken since Jen roused them from their lumpy, broken-spring bed. Energy conservation was high on their agenda. It was a high priority for Jen too, but she’d engaged Dan in conversation for the first quarter hour of their ordeal. In the end he’d ordered her to stop talking and save strength. He’d also chivalrously offered to carry her bag, though she’d refused. Now she was beginning to wonder why.

“Here we are.” The strain in Dan’s voice betrayed the fatigue that the rest of his body didn’t show.

“Where?” Cookie swept the horizon but saw nothing that reminded him of civilisation.

“Home, sweet home.” Dan showed them to a flight of marble steps that descended into the ground.

“Down there?” Samantha’s eyebrows shot up.

“Uh-huh.” Dan nodded. “Didn’t you guys know? Half of Andamooka is built underground. It protects us from this intolerable heat and the chill of night. Earth is a wonderful insulator.”

“How much of this is yours?” Samantha asked. There weren’t any fences. She distantly wondered whether they’d been walking past invisible houses for the past three hours.

He shrugged. “Over to the main road, a few hundred metres that way,” - he waved to the east - “about a kilometre that way” - to the west - “and about two kilometres back from the road. Some orange poles designate the boundaries of local properties. We’ve never bothered with fences. The soil can’t hold crops anyway so it’d just be an expensive waste of time. Besides, this way the wildlife can come and go as it pleases, which is especially important for the great reds.”

He did it again, Jen thought, wondering why she wasn’t used to it yet. He surprised me again. Who would’ve thought wildlife conservation would concern a bounty hunter? I thought only activists harped about stuff like that.

Sweat was pouring off Cookie’s forehead and dripping onto the arid ground. He was ready to drop his computer and he was glad Dan had carried his duffel bag or he’d never have made the distance. “Can we go inside?”

“Sure.” Dan skipped down the steps. “Careful, watch yourselves.”

His front door was thick wood impregnated with the Vacuum Rubber, the best insulating material industrial scientists had manufactured since the health-hazard asbestos days. He ushered them in and invited them to dump their bags wherever they found space on the floor.

It was cool inside, especially when stepping from the oven-like desert. The colours Dan had chosen were tranquil and the ambiance from his lighting soft. The lights illuminated automatically when he unlocked the door. Thirty square metres of thermo-cell generators powered all his electrical appliances. He’d erected them at a place where the shape of his land radiated the heat to a perfect focal point, half a kilometre away. Thermo-cells were similar to solar cells except more efficient - they could generate 1,000 times the power under the right conditions. Dan had buried a battery reservoir to store the excess electricity. It was big enough to meet his energy needs if the sun spontaneously switched off for three days.

Jen noticed how spacious it was, not the cramped quarters she’d expected. Not a bad idea, she admitted reluctantly. Living underground saved space and minimised the human impact on the environment. She approved.

“You want the tour?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Jen said, speaking for herself. The others had crashed onto the first couch they’d found and were politely declining the offer with exhausted waves.

He steered her from room to room, playing at tour guide in a way that made her smile and occasionally even laugh. Jen could clearly see that no woman had lived in the house for a long time. The arrangements were neat and efficiently, but simply not the way a woman would put things. It made her wonder who the beautiful woman in the photographs on Dan’s mantle was. She stood transfixed by them while Dan uncomfortably mumbled something about the fireplace beneath and hurried her toward the next room. She was excruciatingly curious, but too polite to ask. He’d been smiling in those photographs, a warm smile that radiated happiness - nothing like the twisted smirks and joyless curling of his lips that she’d seen from him. She looked happy too. Whoever ‘she’ is. His wife perhaps? Jen noticed Dan’s wedding band for the first time. Hmm… it must be. Another marriage that turned sour and ended in divorce.

“And this shall be your chamber.” Dan waved her into the final room with a flourish of his hands.

It wasn’t a large room, but neither was it small. A comfortable bed occupied the middle and a recessed wardrobe fit snugly into one corner. He’d obviously spent quite a bit of money on the digital window that covered much of the far wall. With bevelled edges, just like a real window, it displayed a magical scene of lush fronds and ferns. The foliage swayed with a simulated breeze and the sun filtered through a canopy of tall gumtrees.

“It’s from the Daintree,” Dan explained. “Before it was destroyed.”

“It’s real?” Jen staggered forward, wishing she could open the glass and step through to smell the aroma of damp forest. She couldn’t believe such a landscape had ever existed. It was too perfect. Surely it had come from an overpaid animator’s imagination.

“It was real. The picture anyway. The processor’s creating the breeze and using an algorithm to calculate the movement of the sun. It depicts true light angles and absorption rates on the various textures. I believe you can watch the sun set through this window.” Dan pressed a button on a wall-mounted control panel and the sun arced gracefully across the sky, lowering over a digitally created horizon with an orgy of pinks, oranges and reds.

Jen was mesmerised. She’d seen digital windows before but she’d never experienced one so intimately. It felt as though she was gazing at a rainforest rather than a few coloured pixels on a screen.

Dan reset the sun and it leapt back to its 11 o’clock position. “If you watch for long enough you’ll see a flock of lorikeets and maybe a kangaroo. I think one of them has a joey.” He pressed another button and the scene shifted. “Or, if you get bored, you can try an underwater landscape.” A myriad of colourful coral sprung to life in a vibrant aquarium that teemed with fish. “But they’re the only two I have.”

“I preferred the rainforest.”

He reversed the selection and the rainforest came back.

“Is this my bedroom next door?” Samantha asked, popping her head into the room.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Dan replied. “The one with the double bed.”

“Your digital windows are cool,” Samantha said offhandedly. But she was too exhausted to do anything but sleep. “I’m gonna catch some z’s.”

“Cookie too?” Jen asked.

“Nope.” Samantha shook her head. “He found Dan’s study and he’s hooking up from there. I think he wants to check his hack.” Samantha had spent the previous night restlessly tossing and turning on a lumpy mattress. Cookie, however, had been blissfully unaware of her torment and recharged his batteries for a glorious seven hours. He was tired from the walk but was ready to leap back into his attack on the UniForce network.

“Uh, I think I should supervise.” Dan cringed at the thought of someone poking around his computers. He couldn’t remember whether he’d shut them down and there was a mound of sensitive information there.

He heard lurid swearing before entering the study. Cookie was hunching over his keyboard, uncomfortable in the chair moulded for Dan’s heftier frame. His eyes flicked left and right across the monitor, absorbing everything that had happened in the intermission. Inwardly he was kicking himself for being so carelessly stupid.

“What’s wrong?” Jen entered behind Dan.

Cookie slammed the enter-key five, ten, twelve times before answering. “The fuckers have… they’ve… Oh fuck. Hang on a second.”

They waited with baited breath, wondering what had happened. It was torture. Jen and Dan were both imagining horrors in the unbearable silence.

Shall I tell them? The fragment of Cookie’s mind that he hadn’t dedicated to the hack was wrestling with that question. One of his maintenance applications had failed to cycle fast enough and his tunnel had partially collapsed as a result. It was impossible for him to say with any degree of certainty whether UniForce had discovered their location. But one thing was for sure - someone had plugged his hole. It could have been a UG7 protection bot or it could have been the system administrator. He sniggered. You didn’t think I’d only make one entrance, did you? He’d had three. Now one had been sealed. Two were still serviceable. But UniForce definitely now knew of the security infraction, and that made him uncomfortable. Now he was pitting himself against all of UniForce’s information technology staff. It left him light headed.

“They’ve sealed one of my entrances.” Cookie tried to sound calm but the tremor in his voice gave him away.

“So they know we’re here?”

“Yes,” Cookie confirmed. “Before, I was unsure. Now I know that they definitely know.”

“So they’ll throw everything against us,” Jen concluded.

“That would be the logical conclusion, yes.”