Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1) by Niall Teasdale (e reader TXT) 📕

look away. ‘With the full cooperation of ViraShield, I’m sure we’ll have this wrapped up in no time,’ she said.

~~~

‘It’s the same as Chiba,’ Yasuda said. He had removed his headgear to reveal a young Japanese man with mid-brown hair and brown eyes. ‘No biological agents. No chemical agents. No indications of nanotechnology. That’s aside from PIN, obviously. This is ViraShield, they all had ViraShield PIN. Version fourteen in every case, but you’d expect that.’

Tatsu frowned. The lack of evidence was more than a little annoying. Lack of evidence seemed to be becoming a thing. When she got the company data, maybe the victims would reveal something. ‘What did version fourteen do? I don’t really keep up with PIN products.’

‘Ha! No, well, you wouldn’t.’

‘There are some medical nanomachines floating around in my cerebral fluid, but I don’t really need PIN. If a virus can get to my brain, everyone has something to worry about.’

‘Yeah. Fourteen… Well, it was a catch-up exercise really. Kamiya Medical Systems came up with a home subscription system on a monthly update cycle. The other providers have been rushing to give their customers the same. ViraShield came out with theirs before anyone else and their market share ticked back up nicely.’

‘A monthly update? That seems like overkill.’

‘It’s the home aspect that really sold it, but there are people still paranoid enough about unknown viruses that monthly updates will sell. Normally, you have to go into a clinic to have the software updates installed. Kamiya came up with a way of doing it securely via your home system or even your implant. It’s more convenient.’

‘You use Kamiya PIN?’

Yasuda grinned. ‘Sure do.’

Chiba, 23rd July.

ViraShield were not exactly prompt about sending over the employee data. Their building had been targeted on Tuesday at lunchtime and it took them until lunchtime on Wednesday to provide the files.

Several of the victims had worked on ViraShield 14.0. Arima had been on the security systems. A guy named Hasegawa had been a general nanomachine programmer. Others had worked on a few other parts of the system, including the update application. One Tarou Mizushima had been responsible for part of the authentication system on the nanomachines and he had been among the fifteen dead in ViraShield Tower. Then again, 14.0 was the latest product and a lot of the workforce had probably had their hands in it.

There was the possibility of corporate sabotage, so Tatsu had taken a look at Kamiya Medical Systems. Maybe they were taking out the opposition by killing off key employees. Maybe, but it seemed unlikely. ViraShield was a one-product company. They had been set up to manufacture a PIN product and had never diversified. They claimed their focus gave them an edge over the competition, but it had been Kamiya that had come up with the innovative new version. Kamiya produced more than just PIN. They were a big player in the medical technology market, even producing medical robots and nanodrugs. While ViraShield had bitten into their share of the PIN market with 14.0, the PIN market represented only a percentage of their portfolio, and not an especially large percentage. There was little point in them risking something like this to increase their market share.

So, Tatsu went back to the employee data, hunting for anything significant which might connect the victims, and she was still working on it at seven p.m. on Thursday when her internal radio announced that Scoop was on the air.

Pretty much all forms of broadcast media had moved onto the internet by the time the Cyberwar had started. It was all regulated, monitored by the government for content. Things had only got more controlled after the war. You needed a licence to multicast, supposedly to ensure that bandwidth controls were enforced and that ‘misinformation’ was not spread. The Nippon News Service was the official multicast service for Japan, but that was only viewed when you wanted to know what the government thought about something. Even then, the presentation was generally dry and uninformative, turning viewers off and over to something like TNM. Tokyo Network Media was probably the largest service provider in the country with viewers outside the Tokyo–Yokohama region it technically served. It did entertainment programming as well as news and documentary output, but even there the citizenry knew that the content was approved by the government and TNM had something of an anti-refugee bias.

And so people had turned to older means of broadcasting to satisfy their needs. AM radio had made something of a comeback since the technology to broadcast was fairly simple and cheap to build. Similarly, with a small app on your implant, you could tune in without much expenditure; a few yen and you could listen to something uncontrolled by anyone.

It had started in Chiba, spread to the other refugee zones, and then even the younger Japanese outside the refugee zones had picked it up as a way of broadcasting their own brand of entertainment. Not all the stations were news-based. In fact, a lot of them were music stations. Bands would set up a station to publicise their music, a few getting into the mainstream even if they came out of Chiba.

The music stations were generally ignored by the TYMPD. They were illegal, but no one thought them worth the time to break up. Many of them lasted only a month, or even less, though Chiba Electronic Dance had been going for years and was still popular with its odd mix of EDM, Nightcore, and disco. The news stations were another matter, and Scoop was at the top of the pile.

Begun in twenty-ninety-five, Scoop was responsible for leaking government and corporate documents, exposing scandals, and generally messing with the establishment. If they had a motto, which they did not, it was ‘Stick it to the Man!’ Their star reporter, responsible for the burning of a number