Chapter 15 #3
“Bet I can manage that,” Jason said. “Keep an eye out for the Feds.” He pulled up Digelight’s website in his smartspace.
The staff list was too sparse, so he searched JobNet for anyone listing Digelight in their professional history.
There: Juan Vargas, currently employed as a network admin here.
He brought up Juan’s MeNetID and scrolled through it.
The man had a college-age daughter, Julia.
Family made good leverage. Through her MeNet feed, he found the profile of her boyfriend, who’d recently posted a video titled “I think my girlfriend’s not a real Latina.
” He watched a few seconds, started to close it in disinterest, paused, watched a little more, and said under his breath, “Bingo.”
He downloaded the video, and during the few moments that took, he connected to his backup storage drive online and retrieved his tools.
He trimmed out a section of video, ran a single change on it via an open-source AI-powered sound editor, and queued it.
Then he called Juan’s work number and shared the call with Sprite.
As the phone rang, he activated his voice mask, pitched three octaves lower than normal.
Good social engineering usually meant getting the other person onto your side, but the leverage Jason was intending to use wouldn’t work with that.
So when Juan answered, Jason opened by saying in his inhumanly deep voice, “Hey, Juan, remember your daughter?”
“What?” Juan said.
“Remember her? Julia? You know, attractive, dark hair, five-foot-four-ish, really good grades. Your daughter. Remember?”
“What do you mean, remem—”
“What would you do to keep her more than a memory?”
“Oh god. Who are you?”
“Let’s just say we have a mutual acquaintance. He’s not happy with you, for reasons I’m sure I don’t have to go into.”
“What reaso—”
“But he’s willing to forget about you, and about Julia, if you help us send a little message.”
Juan’s voice was shaking. “You’ve got the wrong guy! I don’t have anything to do with whatever you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh. But do you remember Julia?”
He almost screamed, “She doesn’t have anything to do with it either!”
“Do you know where she is right now?” Jason paused just long enough for him to start to speak, then interrupted. “I do.” And he played the video clip.
“Oh god!” Julia half screamed, half panted. “It hurts so bad. Make it stop!” She’d just eaten a habanero, but her father had no way of knowing that. And Jason had pitched Julia’s voice up just a notch at the end, which made her sound not merely distressed but downright panicked.
“God, please,” Juan said. “Oh, god, please.” Jason couldn’t tell if he was addressing him or praying. Maybe both.
“My associate’s gonna send you a remote login request,” Jason said. “I need you to verify it.”
“Why? To mess with Digelight? I can’t, I’ll lose my—”
“—daughter?” Jason interrupted viciously.
Silence.
“Juan,” Jason said in a kindly tone, “I want this to end well just as much as you do. You know we can’t do any real harm to Digelight. We just want to send a message. Help us do this, Juan. For Julia.”
There was a long pause. Then Juan whispered, “It’s done.”
Jason hung up.
Sprite was looking at him with a strange expression. “That was kinda creepy. I think you scarred that guy for life.”
“Just movie stuff,” Jason said dismissively. “Think how grateful he’ll be when he learns his daughter’s safe.” If someone had come to Jason the next day and said, “Whoops, it was all a prank; your sister didn’t really get flattened by a sports car,” he’d have been ecstatic. “You in?”
Her eyes focused inward. “Yep.” Juan had used his biometrics to verify Sprite’s request to log in to his MeNetID from a virtual machine on her own phone. “And wow. He has top-level access.”
“Great. Dish me up a diversion.”
“One order of chaos, coming up.”
The far side of the dance floor exploded.
Fire bloomed behind the balconies, and a concussion struck Jason’s eardrums. Smoke rolled and cut off the neon lights, leaving the dance floor illuminated instead with a flickering orange glow. The combined shriek of shock from thousands of throats masked even the blare of the fire alarms.
“What did you do!” Jason shouted as sprinkler water cascaded around them.
She was laughing. “Fade your smartspace.”
He hesitated a moment before obeying because it had lit up with the words Walk Calmly To The Exit and a red line showing the route they should follow on the floor. But he subvocalized the fade order—and gaped.
There was no fire. The club lay darkened, but that was because half the lights had been switched off, and the other half were playing orange light across the dance floor.
A fresh thump caused the people around him to scream and duck from an explosion he couldn’t see.
Without the visual cue of the fireball, it was obvious that the concussion came from a loud bass note blaring from every speaker at once.
For a moment he sat with his mouth open, then shook his head. “And you said I’m creepy?”
“I whipped it up real fast while you were talking to Juan,” she said. “Everyone sees the fire across the club from them, so it doesn’t have to look that real.”
Jason’s response was cut off by bodies knocking into him as people from the neighboring booths shoved each other as they tried to get past. Sprite pulled back into the corner of the booth to avoid them. “Get going!” she told Jason.
“What about you?”
“They’re not after me.”
He nodded, gave her one last glance, and plunged into the crowd. The throng pulled him along, and through the heaving mass, he caught glimpses of the NNA agents trying to hold their ground against the tide of humanity compressing against the exit.
“Those Feds aren’t connected to the club’s Net,” Sprite warned, appearing in a chat box. “They don’t see the fire. And they’ll be running facial scans. Also, there are copbots outside, and you can bet they’re running scans too.”
“Got it covered,” Jason said, eyeing a costume-wearing clubber a few squashed bodies in front of him.
He was dressed like a 1980s cyberpunk in torn jeans, leather jacket, and an extravagant helmet festooned with a dozen low-tech doohickies, which he’d pushed up on his forehead to see better.
Jason strained forward and plucked it off his head, then ducked and let the crowd flow around him.
The man’s protests faded as the crowd carried him away.
Jason put the helmet on, with some difficulty because of all the legs jostling him, lowered the dark visor, and stood.
As he squeezed through the doorway, he passed within six feet of one of the agents.
The man gave him a hard look from underneath his glasses, but all he could do was suspect.
He couldn’t get near enough through the crowd to be sure.
Anyway, the cyberpunk helmet probably matched Jason’s disheveled street clothes.
He let the stampede carry him outside. Drones whined above, playing painfully bright lights along the streaming crowd, and copbots stood revolving slowly in the stream of humanity, but they were too dumb even to get suspicious at one more helmeted clubber. “I’m out!” he said.
“Get somewhere safe,” Sprite said. “I’ll be in touch.” She winked out, leaving him alone.
But not entirely alone. Someone else must have connected to the club’s local Net, because his phone received a 3D message that opened automatically.
A spider the size of his fist descended in front of his eyes, riding a thin, gossamer line.
When it was level with his vision, it stopped with a bounce and twisted on its thread until its two rows of eyes were staring into his.
From the startled shrieks of everyone nearby, he knew he wasn’t the only person to see it, but the message was meant for him.
Sure enough, words appeared beneath the spider: Run and Hide, Little GH05T.
He might have thrown the NNA off his trail, but he’d pulled the Collective back onto it. He broke his connection to Digelight’s local Net just as the spider began its leap at his face.