Tapeworld Heist

1. The Strider

The Strider

Isaak

Blue lights flashed rhythmically on endless rows of electro-galvanised steel plates, the cavernous server room brimming with effervescent metal shelves. Flickers of machine noise periodically broke through a gentle but pervasive hum.

A blue light shifted red, then faded back to blue in the space of seconds.

“That’s the one,” the strider said as he walked over to it. His hands were a blur as they dug through his side bag, emerging with a rainbow ribbon connected to a decades-old tape recorder still tucked inside the bag.

The strider flipped the ears off a steel rack on the blue-lit shelf and slid it halfway out. The light stopped pulsing. Behind him, a new blue light joined the flashing chorus as the disconnected processing unit failed over to a new instance.

On the steel rack he’d pulled out were multiple extruded aluminium and polymer shapes: GPUs, CPUs, hard drives, and other miscellaneous hardware. He quickly found what he was looking for: a grey access port.

“Do you see it?” A woman’s voice echoed through the steel corridors.

“Yes. Like you said, there’s a data port.”

There was a slight pause before she answered. “Great. Glad to see the info’s solid.”

The strider connected the rainbow ribbon to the data port, pressed the red button on his tape recorder, then swiftly sat on the marble floor.

“We’ve got five minutes to kill,” he told the shelves around him. The tape recorder did its spinning dance with a light whizzing sound as dark-brown tape wheeled within it.

“How heavy is the transfer? Terabytes?” the woman asked, hurry in her voice.

“Two hundred and forty megabytes. But this is early nineties hardware, bronze-age transfer speeds compared to nowadays.”

“Oh… Got it.” But it sounded like the woman on the other side didn’t really “get it” at all.

“I’ll check for any more counter-measures in the system,” he said, his fingers jabbing at the semi-translucent touch screen on his lap.

There was another short silence before she said, “Let me ask you something, Ike.”

“It’s Isaak,” he said, only half focusing his attention on her voice, the immediate reply almost an automatic response to the unwelcome nickname she still used despite all the times he’d corrected her.

She continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “Everything else in that place is packed with bleeding-edge computers. What’s an old SCSI port doing in a souped-up server room?”

This time her voice sounded very close to his ear – a conspiratorial whisper.

“For this, exactly. Making our life harder. Obstruction through obsolescence…” His fingers continued to dance over the touch screen. “It’s not a SCSI port. It looks like an old hard-drive port, but like, not really? I’m surprised you didn’t expect it, Astrid. This hack being your idea and all…”

“The leak was sloppy,” she admitted, sounding vaguely defeated. That was new.

The “Record” button on his tape deck flipped up. The transfer was complete. All that was left was for him to extract the target and leave.

“Is it ready?” Astrid’s question temporarily turned all the lights green.

He got up, stuffed the rainbow ribbon back into his side bag, and slid the rack back into place, flipping its ears. Then he made his way in quick strides towards a blue-tinted door at the far end of the room.

But he froze at a sound in the corridor beyond it. Footsteps.

“Did you get it?” Astrid hissed. Her voice came in cold, out of the walls.

Isaak moved away from the door again, careful not to make any noise with his feet.

“I need all the data from that place, Ike. Get through that door and find the rest!” There was anger in Astrid’s voice now.

His heart beat faster.

“Listen,” he whispered back. “There’s someone else here. Were you expecting anyone?”

He knelt down behind one of the server racks, a parade of reflected blue lights playing on the ceiling.

“Astrid?” he prompted, when she didn’t respond. Worry gnawed at his gut. He moved his hand to touch the see-through plastic stuck to the side of his head. His fingers trembled.

“Get through that door!” Astrid repeated. “I need that data.”

He took a deep breath and moved his fingers away from his temple.

This wasn’t part of the plan. He was a strider, not a soldier.

“You’ve got all you need, Isaak.” Astrid’s voice was gentler now, and came into his ears as if she was kneeling there right next to him. “I’ve given you the tools you need.”

He didn’t know what she meant. His mind was racing but kept coming up empty. Faintly, he heard the roar of a crowd… He shut his eyes and a tear rolled down his face.

He was about to make for the door again when it swung open.

In the frame stood a man clad in black-and-blue plastic armour over a grey uniform. Belts and straps encircled his arms and legs. A weapon drawn in his hands: a handgun, see-through. There was no visible bullet chamber or ammo.

Isaak, caught by surprise, stood directly in the man’s line of sight.

Time seemed to slow down. The man shouted an incomprehensible vocalisation; it didn’t sound like any language Isaak recognised.

Isaak dug into his pocket. To his surprise, his fist wrapped around the cold metal of a gun. This is what she meant. The strider produced his own sleek weapon, all black.

Across from him, the man in black and blue barked again, another noise that was more digital rain than language.

Visions of everything that might happen next flashed through Isaak’s mind. Be shot. Shoot. Give yourself in. Be shot. Shoot. Be shot. Shoot.

Shoot.

Shoot.

Time froze.

Isaak fired his revolver. The gunshot echoed through the server farm and all the lights blinked in unison. The bullet, bright as gold, lit up the corridor until it reached the man, hitting him square in the head. Everything happened in the blink of an eye.

The man collapsed to the floor.

“Fuck.”

He hadn’t wanted to pull the trigger, but had been left with no choice. The man in black and blue would have shot him. Isaak tossed the revolver away on impulse.

There was no blood on the body. Relief flooded through him. It was a bot.

And yet something about it didn’t feel right.

He looked away, shaken.

The man in black and blue had looked and behaved like a human. Bots, AI, artificial beings were advanced, but usually you could tell. Cold language. Overtly indulgent. Sycophantic. Talk to enough bots and you’d start catching the signs.

This felt too real. His heart ached and he coughed, his throat dry.

“Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” He almost swung his hand at a wall, but stopped himself. “Astrid… What the fuck did you just make me do? This place was supposed to be empty!”

There was no response. Astrid didn’t seem to be there anymore.

“Leak was sloppy alright…” he muttered to himself.

All his life he’d yearned for freedom, security, happiness. He thought he at least had freedom, if nothing else.

But doing Astrid’s bidding like this wasn’t freedom.

Isaak sat down and leant against the concrete wall.

He studied the still humming corridors of the data centre one last time.

His eyes slid back to the man he’d shot, and he looked again at the dead man’s face.

His eyes were open. The emptiness behind them beckoned to Isaak, pulling him in like a grim embrace.

Isaak closed his eyes tight, trying to erase what he’d just seen. He removed the piece of tape on the side of his head.

Deep black, a near liquid darkness, engulfed him. For an instant there was only him, his bag, and the void.

He felt like shouting or kicking something.

Or, better yet, both at the same time. He rubbed over his moustache and beard, the crisp sensation earning the approval of some part of his brain.

The part that could tell he was in Brixton right now, and he hadn’t really been in that data centre just then.

The part that was quickly getting to work on trying to forget what had just happened.

Glossing over the messy details to conclude that he hadn’t shot anyone, or that if he did, they probably were a bot. Almost certainly. Right?

He bit down his emotions and leaned back into the black office chair in his cheap studio home – not exactly where he’d hoped to be at thirty.

The kitchen area, unlike in most bachelor pads, was clean, dirty dishes nowhere to be seen.

Tofu blocks, boxes of InstaMeat, and cans of beans lined the small pantry.

Behind him was a bookshelf stuffed with studiously read books, a mix of sci-fi, tech writing, and various hardware and software reference guides, all bought in the hopes the gods of Silicon Valley would hurry up and jump-start the future.

That was how he used to think, until he started these gigs.

The future was already here, it turned out.

Fuck Silicon Valley.

Tonight’s stride lingered in his mind. Nothing like that had ever happened before. They’d been pure sneak runs: in and out, zero contact. Raiding digital warehouses in that other place. There was money in it.

The tape recorder had proved useful. His eyes went to the data stick on his desk, hooked up to a roll of duct tape next to it. He’d got what Astrid wanted. It might not be everything, but it should be good enough.

Typically the loot was encrypted, impossible for him to examine himself. This time, however, as he transferred it from the tape to the stick, he realised the data seemed to be readable. He tried to look away, but caught a glimpse of an acronym.

GK

It disappeared as the transfer finished.

He didn’t recognise it, but Astrid always kept the details of the data strides to herself.

Tonight’s set-up was nothing new. She managed him through the earpiece, he got in and took the stuff.

Every place he’d visited so far had been unguarded – forgotten caches of data.

So why had there been a guard there this time?

He grabbed his phone off his desk and thumbed through the avatars of his contacts. It wasn’t a long list.

Astrid. His gut clenched as he thumbed the pop-culture character she used as an avatar. It was an anime woman, some character he didn’t – couldn’t – recognise.

It rang three times before she answered.

“I already told you not to call me IRL,” Astrid said by way of a hello, her tone taut.

“I’m not happy about how that went,” he said, straight to business.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ike. I’ll see you at our usual appointment.” Their “usual appointment” being when and where he’d hand her the stolen property, and she’d pay him for the service. She started a hurried goodbye, not even attempting to hide the contempt in her voice.

He swallowed. He wasn’t used to facing up to people in positions of authority over him, but he forced himself to speak before she could hang up. “Don’t fuck with me, Astrid.”

“That’s the opposite of what you said when we first met, if I remember correctly.”

Huh. That hurt.

He chose to ignore her remark. The past was the past. What happened happened. It was over between them. Strictly business now. “I’m having some difficulty” – he measured his words – “processing what happened tonight.”

“And what did happen, Ike?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth together.

He couldn’t tell if she’d hated him from the start, or only after she ended things between them.

“Break-up” would be too strong a word. They had been “acquaintances with benefits” and she had withdrawn the benefits.

That’s how she’d put it. He’d pretended back then that it didn’t hurt him, but it did.

Not that he’d loved her or anything. But the moments after each…

session together, were moments of peace, when his mind wasn’t engulfed by the pile of shit he was in. By how far he’d fallen.

“Oh, I know, I know,” Astrid said now, “you don’t like to be called that…

” She sweetened her voice, manipulating him again.

Astrid was more than fifteen years his senior.

That had made it easy to seduce him, he thought.

Wrap him around her little finger. He’d grown so used to it now that he had stopped fighting against it.

“I gave you that gun for a reason. The day after tomorrow, the Boulevard, ten o’clock. Bring your homework.” She hung up.

Sullen, Isaak stared at the phone in his hand, then at his desk. Various torn bits of duct tape were stuck to it. His free hand reached for his aching right knee, massaging it over his jeans.

His fee for tonight’s heist would at least go a long way towards making rent for the next few months. Just a few more jobs and maybe he would actually be able to sort his shit out. That meant dealing with more of her, though. And dealing with whatever had happened in there…

The man’s blank, dead face flashed in his mind.

Pain throbbed through his knee, distracting him from one pain with another.

He put his phone down and just stared at the wall above his desk for a while, trying not to think about anything. The white paint job was mostly seamless. But he could still tell where he’d done it.

Months ago, when he’d found out that his career as captain of the team was done and it was all over for him, he’d taken down the London Lazarus poster and ripped it to shreds, cursing his manager, his team, the fans, the ReSport itself.

But it was a DM from his teammate that made him punch the wall.

We’re very sorry to have to do this… Maybe, when you get better, you could come back.

His knee stress syndrome was permanent. He was never going to “get better”, and they knew it.

Since his knee being fucked up wasn’t quite enough, Isaak’s angry outburst gave him a broken hand to round it off. His metacarpal had healed since then, but not perfectly. He fingered the lost knuckle of his left hand. It still bothered him.

The fresh memory served as warning. Shooting that man in the Tapeworld tonight, bot or AI or not, had triggered all of his anxieties.

He shuffled uncomfortably in the chair, the hair on his skin rising up like the room was charged with static electricity.

He searched desperately for peace of mind, but it was a feeling he had long-since forgotten how to access.

Eventually, he got up from the chair. He would take his worries somewhere else tonight.