The room was well-designed, surprisingly. Well, the first room. A comfortable little spot. He did the wall-screen thing. It was in vogue among people who didn’t like AR lenses and the like. Could be he was against modding entirely. I wasn’t. Rooted lenses were cheap enough, but they lacked for the processing power I preferred and rooted externals… well, they were much easier to spot by Virsec types. The name pretty much gives that one away, so I’ll skip explaining it. There was a fashionable desk and a bed with one of those Japanesey on-the-ground frames. A door on the right. Bathroom, maybe. The adjacent rooms were no joke. Servers. Hefty ones. The heat in the room told me they couldn’t have been quantum. Old. Weak. Symmetric.
“I thought there’d be more human skin.”
He walked away into the other room, scoffing as he went.
Marine leaned over when he was gone. “He’s probably going to hide the bodies.”
I did a half-assed laugh and so did she.
Honestly, I was getting a little pissed off. The hardware in his room belonged in a museum. I mean, there were purists, sure. People who swore not to use tech based on all sorts of idiotic theories, but there’s a limit. I thought. But then I spotted his trick.
A fucking hardline. A phone. An old one. I read they used to be able to trace them. Voltage differences. There were only a few hundred of them left. Or that was the rumor.
“You’re fucking kidding me.” I turned to Marine. “This fucking guy?” They were legendary. And Asshole was an asshole.
She shrugged, quelling a laugh. “His mom bought the building.” She quieted herself when she heard shifting from the far room. “He found all the equipment down here. Bought some fancy shit for this main room.”
I whispered back. “He found a fucking hardline? In his mom’s basement?”
She just laughed and walked away, toward one of two chairs in the room.
I should explain a few things. Firstly, I am not a notorious criminal. I am a poor person who is good enough at puzzling pieces that I can do things. Mostly for Marine. Mostly on hardware she has in hand. I know, very vaguely, that there is an upstream from Marine. She… she knows people. Probably. I think. We don’t talk about it. Or she doesn’t. I used to ask.
So that’s me. Hardlines. Whew. Okay. Phones, in the before time, went through the walls. They carried a low voltage electrical signal over a line. Slightly higher when a call was going on. You could send data over them. Crazy easy to tap into, but super easy to notice the tapping, since catching and reading the signal degraded it. Super predictable stuff. Decades ago, phreaking came alive again. A lost art that involved fucking phones to death and then playing with them in very dirty ways. Not… I should be clear. That was a metaphor. Mostly a metaphor. They were slow and shit and nobody liked them. Low resolution. Awful. But, forgotten. And things that get forgotten become useful again.
I put myself in a seat at the desk and spun around. It is customary, in such situations, to say “wee” very loudly, but I didn’t want to end up in a very pathetic fight with Asshole if he was particularly sensitive about people enjoying themselves in his antique store.
“So does he charge for this shit or what?”
“Yeah.” Marine sighed like the question made her sad. “He always… you’ll see.”
“I knew he was a god damn pervert.”
“People who want to fuck me aren’t all perverts.”
“Agree to disagree. I bet he keeps fresh cucumbers and shit. I bet there’s a barrel of lube. Real specific lube.” I did my best Asshole voice. “I got the unscented because I want to smell you just like you are. Uhn, yeah. Little sexy fuckin’ cucumber sandwich bitch.”
“I can fucking hear you, shithead!” Uh oh.
Marine was probably going to die. Her hand went over her mouth and nose and she went red and writhed in the chair. Rather than laughter, she let out a squealing “huuuuu” sound. Tears were leaking from the edges of her eyes.
I called back to Asshole since he wanted in on the conversation. “You know you can’t use zucchini, right? They got that knobby end.”
Marine palmed around helplessly for something to throw at me. I threw her a pad of paper from the desk and she threw it back as hard as she could. She missed.
Asshole came back with a folder and Marine coughed, straightening up and standing up from her chair. He offered the folder.
“Best I got. They’re two weeks old.”
“Two weeks?” I spun in the chair. “Seems pretty old.”
He talked to Marine to address my question. “It’s Vircore. No one has anything newer.”
“It’ll have to do,” she said. “What do I owe you?”
His voice changed from man of mystery to romance novel cover model. “For you? You know it’s free. But maybe…”
“No.” She turned and walked past the desk. I stood as she went and Asshole ended up next to me.
“Dodged a bullet, really. I hear they’re brown.”
I walked off and he followed, hopefully to shut the door and maybe die in his mom’s basement.
Asshole chimed in one last time as we went out to the landing. “And don’t bring him again.” He shut the door behind us.
“Well, I thought it was a pleasant trip.”
We were walking up the stairs. Marine’s attention was on the papers she’d been given so she ignored me.
“Okay, I guess serious time. Two weeks is pretty old, Mar.”
“Mar?”
“That’s the part you want to discuss?”
“No. But yes. Sounds awful. Mar?”
“It’s either that or Rinny.”
“Or Marine. Which is my name.”
“Don’t be a cunt,
