Freedom Incorporated by Peter Tylee (the best ebook reader for android .TXT) 📕

motivation in the short term was simple - there was no need for Jen to die by the Raven’s hand, so for now he would do his best to keep her alive.

Jen’s thoughts were tumultuous too, though for vastly different reasons. They culminated into the question, “So if you believe what you’re saying, why are you here? Why not turn me over to UniForce?”

“Not everything they do is right,” he said, gracing her with a chagrined smile. “I like you,” - which was the truth, though he wasn’t going to tell her why - “and I don’t want to see you incarcerated for what you’re doing. You believe something strongly enough to risk your freedom and even your life fighting for it - regardless of how slim your chances may be. I admire that, it reminds me of… someone I used to know.”

Jen saw the hurt that underpinned his words but decided it was private and didn’t want to pry. She watched the stream of moonlight, admitted to the room by a crack in the drawn curtains, play across his face. It was like a finger from the outside world intruding on their private domain.

Dan finally lowered his eyes, no longer capable of holding her gaze. And Jen shivered. Forcing herself to look at him had consumed much of her energy and she felt exhausted, drained. She took three casual steps to peek outside and looked across the sleepy Tweed, out toward the heads. It was breathtakingly pretty, bathed in silvery light. A whimsical smile tugged at her lips when she realised she’d been chatting with a handsome man by moonlight. How often have I dreamed of that? Of course, she’d imagined a slightly different conversation, but her dream had come true. It made her wonder whether her other dreams would also come true, and if so, what unintended twists they might take.

“He’s out there, isn’t he?” Jen asked tiredly, her voice hoarse.

“I think so. It would surprise me if he wasn’t. He’s probably watching the apartment even now.” He touched his Colt for reassurance, gratified when his fingers brushed the eerily cold stock.

“So what did you have in mind? For our protection I mean.” A puff of moist air escaped with her words, fogging the glass and obscuring her view. She turned back to Dan. Ready for another duel of wills, she was surprised to find him staring at the floor.

“There are two possibilities,” Dan admitted uneasily. He wasn’t yet convinced either would work. “My original idea was to move you all, take up new identities, split with your current life and recommend you don’t do anything outrageous - nothing to get you back on the corporate hit list. I know it can be done; it’s not even that difficult. The hardest part is never looking back.” He shrugged nonchalantly and added, “Of course Samantha and Cookie would have to agree… unless they want to stay here. But I suspect it won’t be long before they’re on a bounty hunter’s list too.”

Jen paled and thought, At least it’s preferable to death and prison. “What’s the other idea?”

“If Cookie really can get us into the UniForce network, we might be able to find the bounty hunter records. If we can do that, we can set your status as apprehended. Hopefully the Raven will lose interest at that point and you’ll slip through the cracks, at least until someone notices the disparity.”

A tiny glimmer of hope sparkled in Jen’s eyes and she looked to where Cookie was working with renewed incentive.

A twitch irritated the corner of Cookie’s eye and he rubbed it with the heel of his palm. His eyes were darting across the monitor, completely unaware of the sweat building up on his brow. His mind was racing, as if he’d consumed five times his personal limit of caffeine. And that wasn’t an achievement to scoff at. Cookie’s normal daily intake of the drug was enough to corrode a rookie coffee-drinker’s stomach lining. He was desperate to evade the spotlight of detection. Three separate versions of his detection algorithm were crawling spider-like through the network to warn him of everything the system administrator did. Damn he’s fast. Cookie’s knuckles were starting to ache, the way they did when he failed to take his regulatory breaks, scheduled at predetermined intervals. His RSI was officially cured, praise going to a Xantex prescription stuffed in his top drawer. But he didn’t have time to take it now and the tendons pulling his fingers were swollen and throbbing all the way to his elbows. This must be why people get implants. It was at times like these that temptation reared its ugly head.

He was working simultaneously on three separate and equally vital problems. One application was busy backfilling a punctured file, one of the files he’d used to seed his first entry into the network. Another was in the final states of repairing a checksum. And he was using a third to penetrate the final bulwark of the UniForce net. A warning buzzed on his speakers and he shattered protocol by turning off his chat software, disconnecting himself from the distracting world of cyber-chatting. A friend in Peru would be pissed when he came back online, but if that were the worst he suffered, he’d consider himself lucky.

Another alarm flashed on his screen. The UniForce system administrator was close, sniffing at all the customary places that Cookie might have used to gain access. He’d systematically locked down every weak point on the UG7-rated network. He knows his stuff, Cookie thought, irritably blinking the stinging sweat from his eyes. Where’s Samantha? He didn’t have time to turn his head and chastised himself for the lapse in concentration as he redoubled his efforts to assault the bulwark. I’ve worked too hard to have some arsehole fuck me now.

With a flutter of excitement, he found a weakened node and slipped his tiny program into the core of the host file. Then he socketed the file and recalculated the checksum so that his dastardly opponent, as Cookie now thought of the UniForce system administrator, wouldn’t suspect that he’d altered it. There was a tiny window of opportunity when his entire campaign was vulnerable to detection but a few seconds later the checksum was in place and he’d altered the ‘modified date’ to erase all evidence of his tampering.

Cookie’s heart started thumping in his ears and his breathing was shallow. Now… just these two files… He worked even more furiously, his fingers slipping twice onto the wrong keys because of the rush. But thirty seconds later, he was done, and the air he’d been hoarding in his lungs came explosively from his nose and mouth in a triumphant gasp.

“I’m in!” Cookie slapped his hands together and massaged his aching joints. “I’m in, I’m in, I’m in! Did you hear me? I’m in!”

Jen’s head snapped around, her jaw slack. What? Deep down she’d wrestled with a reservoir of doubts. Although she’d never said anything, she’d never wholeheartedly believed Cookie could do it.

Samantha came bolting from the kitchen, leapt into Cookie’s lap, and shrieked in delight. She entwined Cookie’s tongue in a passionate kiss and massaged his shoulders before ordering him to stand up and walk the stiffness out of his legs.

“Is it secure?” Jen was still gaping, scarcely able to believe her eyes.

Cookie nodded exultantly. “I’ve gotta maintain it, but she’s as tight as a CEO’s puckered little arse.”

*

The Raven appealed to the sky, begging for the omen that would free him from his shackles of restraint. He sneered at the muted light coming from the curtain cracks. A monitor? A television? Somehow he doubted they’d kick up their feet, open a bud, and watch their favourite sitcom. A computer, it must be. But it flickered quickly, casting doubt on his assessment.

Now that he possessed the full details of Dan’s colourful life, he didn’t intend to rush foolhardily toward the house, PX7 blazing. No. His time for rushed approaches was over, now it was time for caution and perseverance. Time would prove his ally, generating opportunities for a silent approach and a clean kill. One shot. That was all he intended to need. Of course, he would riddle Dan’s body with a full clip, but one bullet would seal his death. He couldn’t in good conscience leave Dan alive, at least not for long. He needed elimination, without a doubt. Fear was beyond the programming the Raven had written into his electronic mind, though so far he believed it was coping well. Emotions could spark a crash - love, hate, fear, guilt, he personally believed they drove the other cyborgs to self-destruction. The years between the ages of 18 and 22 were tumultuous for humans, and a cyborg brain only amplified the chaos. No wonder we lost so many, the Raven sneered. Now, aged 28, he felt safe. He knew how to beat the system, how to stay calm. He prided himself on his lack of emotion. And now this. It made him angry until his programming reminded him to relax, at which point he overcame the wave of unwanted aggression with a chilling tranquillity.

Sutherland must die. It was the first time in years he’d given himself a non-UniForce assignment. Cameron too. He’d never expected to apprehend anything but her spine. It didn’t even matter which vertebrae since there was no chip, they’d just have to lift her identify from the DNA.

He turned to the sky once more and mouthed, “Hurry up.” He wanted it over with.

*

“Right. Now what do we do?” Samantha was first to recover from their collective shock.

“Now we hunt. Echelon,” Cookie said, savouring his analogy.

“No, first we have to find my record in the bounty hunter database.” Jen paled to say the words, “He’s still tracking me, you know.”

Samantha copied her pasty pallor. “The cyborg from the mall?”

Jen nodded solemnly.

“Righto then.” Cookie was about to crack his knuckles but stopped himself just in time. Instead, he gently applied the pads of his fingers to the grooves they’d worn into his keys. “We have a choice between saving our skins and smashing the shit out of a computer, metaphorically speaking.” He winced through a smile. “I don’t know about you lot, but I rather like my skin.”

“Where will we find it?” Samantha asked nobody in particular.

Dan chipped into the ensuing silence, “They have a three-tiered data repository, each housed separately to protect against data loss in the event of a disaster.”

“But that’s just how it’s physically aligned,” Cookie said, taking the tone of a patient teacher explaining something simple to a particularly dim-witted student. “I need to know where it is logically, in the realm of electrons.” He started battering his keys, hard enough to explain why he wore out two keyboards per year. “Hang on a minute; let me take a look around.”

After a frustrating pause he pointed at the jungle of lines he’d been assembling on the screen. He’d built a mind-map of the UniForce network based on the information his various applications were feeding him. It’s fairly standard, not what I would’ve expected behind a UG7, he thought. “Here, you see this?” They could see what he was wiggling his finger at, but had only a vague idea of the concept behind it. “This is the way they’ve set things up.” He tapped on his keyboard for another few minutes before drawing a blue circle in the middle of his diagram. But the colourful shapes weren’t just for his audience’s benefit; Cookie was embedding code behind them. “This circle’s their main data store.”

Another ten minutes and he’d decoded the data structures UniForce used in their self-replicating databases. They had a mutual-master relationship, which meant that a change to one database would replicate to the others, so