“Can someone get her to shut up? I can’t think.”
He didn’t turn to see how, but the girl stopped. He refocused on the code. It had the boy going from an amphetamine high to an opioid low cycle almost instantaneously.
A speedball.
Jacob created a speedball code for someone once, so he knew a little about what the code should look like and what it should do. But this code was out of control. He had to get one step ahead of it, but he couldn’t do that by hand. Jacob needed to directly link with the boy’s chip, but his chip was disabled because of…
Then the thought hit him, he was not on probation. He’d gotten so used to not using his chip, he forgot it was active, and like most hackers, his chip was modified to allow him to link with the net and with other subdermal chips.
He quickly scanned his own tattoo and tapped his code deck, sending a command linking his chip to the boy’s chip.
A rush came over him. It had been more than three years since he was directly linked to an external source. It was exhilarating. His awareness floated in code and white noise. He was everywhere and nowhere at once. The sensation was like losing a feeling and remembering it at the same time. He wanted to float and ride the sensation.
He took a calming breath. He was doing this for a reason.
The code around him danced a chaotic dance, and he tried to find a rhythm. For him, all code moved in rhythm, and finding the rhythm was always the answer to getting on top of it.
He cleared his mind and listened to the white noise. It droned in his mind, filling it with static. But deep in the static was rhythm. He just had to let it come to him. A polyphonic swirl began to envelop him, and his mind moved with it. When he found the groove in each part of the code, he began to manipulate it, slowing it down, coaxing harmony from noise. The notes of dissonance came together, modulating in a comprehensible beat. His mind moved with the beat, taking the code from its erratic jumps to a slow, pulsating series of notes.
He severed the link.
The boy lay on the ground, blinking, his breath shallow but regular.
Jacob stood, readjusting to the external world.
The girl knelt beside the boy. “Is he all right?” she asked.
“He will be,” Jacob said, walking back to his table.
His chaat sat cold on his plate. He got a to-go box and headed to Retro Media and to work.
Chapter 4
Gomez leaned against the railing, looking down on the community garden three floors below. Something was going on over by the food court. Leaning out as far as he dared, he tried to get a clear view. He blinked his left eye, kicking in its cybernetic telescopic sight. He zoomed in on the scene, but plants and the backs of people blocked his view. Someone convulsed on the floor, but that was the extent of what he could see.
“Can you see what’s going on?” Two-Step asked from the entrance of Retro Media.
“No,” he said, pulling his large frame back over the railing, “too many people in the way. We’ve got to get that surveillance system working. It’s been out for a week. I don’t like not knowing what’s going on. Is Kat working on it?”
“She was when I last checked,” Two-Step said. He moved aside to let Gomez in the store, following after.
“Well, she needs to work faster,” Gomez said.
“I’ll let you tell her that.”
Gomez stopped, thinking about how that conversation would go. “On second thought,” he said, “she can finish at her own pace.”
Two-Step laughed. “Not afraid of her are you?”
Gomez shot Two-Step a look. “Kid, don’t you have something you should be doing?”
“Kid? I’m almost twenty-one,” Two-Step said.
“I’ll say it again. Kid, don’t you have something you should be doing?”
Two-Step cast his eyes downward. “I’ve got that Tandy TRS-80 I’m modifying.”
Gomez smiled. “Go do that then. Or help Kat with the surveillance system.”
“Fine,” Two-step said, defeated. Turning to go, he ran into a rack of cassette tapes, knocking it to the floor. Tapes flew out of their cases and skid across the floor.
Gomez took a slow, deep breath and exhaled. “After you clean up this mess, of course.”
“Of course.”
Gomez made his way past the antique computers, gaming consoles, and other electronics and media lining the aisles and went to the workshop in the back of the store. Kat sat hunched over an old-style keyboard. She typed, then checked the screens on the panel in front of her. The screens showed the same static they had been showing for the last week. She shook her head, took a drink of coffee, and went back to typing.
“Not going well?”
Kat jumped, knocking the coffee cup, spilling a small amount on the keyboard.
“Jesus! Don’t sneak up on me like that, you made me spill my coffee,” she said without turning. “And get me a towel or something.”
He went to another workbench, grabbed a towel, and tossed it to her. She still hadn’t turned and the towel landed on her shoulder. She took it and wiped the few drops of coffee from the keyboard.
Finally, she turned. “To answer your question, no, it is not going well. I’m almost there, but the system keeps dropping the feed. I can get one camera at a time,” she said, punching a few keys, bringing one of the screens to life, showing the exterior of one of the sex shops. She punched another key. A second screen showed a level of one of the parking garages. A small group of pre-teens stood in the corner, passing around a nic-stem. “However, if I try more than one, this happens.” Her fingers
