Notes:
1 I wrote this for a supplement for IZ that never came close to getting published.
2 It was intended to be part of one of the metaplots .. plus, I love Dane and Patel too much to let this be their only tale.
3 Interface Zero was published by Reality Deviant publications. I don't know who owns the rights now.
on to the story:
A Larger Perspective
It was the world - the tiny, egg shaped world floating in the space above the desk with it's promises of infinite pleasures whispering in his brain - it was the world that distracted him.
"Agent Costa?"
Costa was BOPE soldari - a killer as well as a cop. Even as his eyes registered the short, middle aged Indian man standing before him, his wrinkled trench coat and shapeless hat, Costa's hand was dropping to draw his gun.
Without question he would have gunned down the man. This was a crime scene, a lab set up for the production of a drug that was no less dangerous because it wasn't chemical. Anyone here who wasn't a cop was dead. But he didn't get the chance.
"Agent Costa!" There was a hand on his wrist, squeezing in just the right way and he couldn't move it. "Relax." Costa felt rather than saw the person behind him, and in that combat tried and tested part of his brain, he sensed this person would kill him very easily unless he did as the short man said.
"We're on the same side, Costa." the man explained. "We have some questions to ask. Could you go fetch your commander and tell the others we're here? We wouldn't want any accidents to happen."
Costa released the tension in his body, and the hand was suddenly gone. When he looked, there was a woman - a girl; young, short blond hair, rail thin under the black suit, white shirt and narrow black tie. Sunglasses covered her eyes as she leaned causally against the desk. He felt like he should sneer, and knew that would be a mistake.
He called up her ident, or tried to. Instead of the usual name, address, work info and criminal history, what he saw in front of his eyes was a puke green omega symbol, and nothing else.
"What are the Omega Protocols doing here?" he asked the Indian man.
"Trying to get a larger perspective." was the only answer. "Now go."
Costa backed out of the room, unwilling to turn his back on the two. The man in the trench coat was gazing at the view of the cityscape beyond the grimy nanoweave windows. The girl seemed to be studying her fingernails, but behind those sunglasses he was sure she was staring at him.
He closed the door to apartment #2001 and piped a call to the commander's TAP - let him deal with it.
It was the world . . . it had to be the world.
They listened to the heavy boots disappearing down the hall in silence. Finally Patel took off his fedora and spoke.
"Because Machismo is alive and well in Brazil. Because we going to get more cooperation if we intimidate them than we could by flashing our idents." He looked over at Dane. "That's why we did it."
"Did I ask?"
"You wanted to."
He ran his fingers along the walls, making a slow circuit of the one room flat while Dane knelt down by the desk.
"Anyway, I know how much you enjoy seeing big toughs scared off by a teenage girl."
"I'm 32," she protested for under the desk.
He didn't point out that she didn't look it. Her grandmother had genefixed her mother, and she could still pass for 18. Of course, she was lucky to pass for 21.
There was a ping and a virtual window opened next to him, the Protocol's symbol on it. The window slid open and Patel reached in to remove the file waiting there. The window closed and vanished.
“Central's sent an email,” He unfolded the file, the odd sensation of holding an object that wasn't there itching his hands. “We got the local police report.”
Patel folded it back up, then selected a carpeted corner of the room, away from the window, and smoothly sank into the lotus position. He drew a small kit from beneath his coat and opened it. "Alright, Dane, what have you got?"
"Well, the server appears home made - cobbled together from networked Booster Boxes. It looks amateurish. They pretty much glued it to the underside of the desk." She stood up and looked at him over the desk, the world still placid in the space above the desk. "It's definitely a MORG, and it's addictive - I can feel the damn thing trying to get into my head. It looks like the admins screwed up the config and were trying to tweak into something they could use without recompiling the whole thing."
She walked around and away from the desk, into the corner opposite Patel. “And it isn't. It isn't what it looks like. What have you got?”
“Scent analysis got a few traces – no solid idents yet. No one has been in here physically for months – I don't know if the locals have realized that yet. There was a lot of pipe traffic in here a few days ago. The BOPE are trying to trace them back to point of origin.”
“After a few days?” Dane snorted, then paused. “A few days... wasn't there a story on a big corporate raid around the Argentinian border sometime last week?”
“Two separate raids. Same day. On a single Nova Personnel site.” Patel checked his own Booster Box, strapped to his wrist like a watch. “It's the big blue building you can see out the window.” He finished fiddling with his programs, floating like jewels in the air before him. He waved his hand and they were sucked back into the Box as it passed by. He put on a pair of thin latex gloves (made from real latex, Dane knew, and worth a fortune) and opened a small glass jar filled with a white paste.
"You don't need that, you know. And it's illegal here." she said.
"Then you better keep our comrades from seeing it." He scoped up a bit of the paste.
"Guard the door."
"Sam...."
"From the outside." he clarified. "Keep them busy if they come back, I should be quick." When she made no reply, he stopped and looked at her. She held out for nearly 2 seconds before looking away, grunting, and stepping outside. She didn't slam the door. He knew her control was better than that.
Patel rubbed the paste (compound Ingno Cepar 125-x2, to be exact) across his throat and jaw, screwed the lid onto the jar. By the time the drug had truly started effecting the neuron firing pattern in his neo cortex, his real eyes were closed, his TAP had created a virtual version of his body in the space before, and the input/output flow to his brain had been hijacked. The virtual Patel stretched, scratched it's head, then walked towards the egg shaped world preparing to make the weird mental leap required to step inside an object smaller than one's fist.
Dane stood outside the door, fuming silently to herself. They called him 'The Monk,' - he had actually done a stint in a mountain monastery in the Himalayas about the same time her mother was getting knocked up on the outskirts of Atlanta. That was before he discovered the joys of police work.
She turned and started looking for a good spot for leaning when the building exploded.
No, not exploded. No damage, but she had felt - a wave, a wave in the Deep. She raised out of the combat stance. It must have punched right through the firewalls that lined the building, and would have come from . . .
She was through the door before she could finish the thought, moving through a swath of virtual light. Patel - virtual Patel - was standing in front of the desk with a triumphant smile on his face.
She glanced at his body - okay - and then the room – physically empty. Virtually, however: workstations, a data forge, the black floaty disks were probably pipe assists, a store of VRT weapons and armor . . . the game world was still there, but there was a perimeter field around it. To keep it out of the way, she realized.
"Where the hell did this come from?" She walked through a white board display, her skin tingling as she stepped through the object. "Somebody was planning some big fun."
"Not planning, " Patel said, "planned." His virtual form disappeared and his body twitched, stood up, and he was inside looking out of his eyes. "They hid this in the MORG. It should have been deleted after the raid, but somebody got greedy. Got stupid. We've got our lead."
"Boots in the hall." She said, "What say we put the BOPE's 'cooperation' to work?"
“Daddy's home, Daddy's home!”
De Silva waved at the the two little girls, their blond hair done up in pigtails, who ran to greet him. They halted their head long rush a few feet shy of the driveway.
“Not now, please! Daddy's had a long day.” He pulled his briefcase out of the car, and smiled at the little girls making puppy dog eyes at him. He laughed. “After dinner, okay?”
He trudged up the walk to the red brick split level ranch house, tired but happy. His wife opened the door as he approached, took his coat and briefcase.
“Hi, honey,” she pecked him on the cheek. “How was your day?”
“Good, I guess. I'm going to churn some numbers – give me a call for dinner?”
“Of course. Drink?”
“Sure. Thanks, hon.” De Silva closed the door to his study, sat in his chair and called up his workstation interface. Few emails, nothing pressing. His wife set down his single malt without a word. When he looked up at her, she smiled, then turned and left.
There was a report on his real kid – off at the boarding school he was receiving the new '88 chemical therapies, which should boost him two percentile in IQ. Even better, the empathy deadening syndrome had had minimal effect. Based on his performance scores at the school, he was a lock for a directorship in Yoi Jango Telecom someday.
De Silva made a note to visit the scamp when he graduated to middle school. He was checking his to-do list when something moved into his light. He looked at the window, and framed in the light of the setting sun was a short man wearing a trenchcoat.
“That's very good.” He said, “Most life-like. And you are?”
“Omega Protocols. You are Albrecht Melo De Silva, a manager in the Conception Group Department. A special projects man. Idea man - you're quite good at it. Thinking outside the box, yes?” The little man – well, Virtual Ghost – moved out of the light circling towards the door.
Albrecht raised a shotgun and fired.
The blast would have been echoing if it had been physical weapon but it wasn't. The attendant smoke - the virtual smoke - would obscure vision for the Ghost, even if it survived. Albrecht dropped filters to block out virtual objects (like the smoke) and shot out a command to the workstation (self-destruct all data). He rose, strode to the door, and opened it.
What was happening caught up with him, and he hesitated.
His chest exploded.
“I hate it when they don't banter.” whispered a voice in his ear.
Albrecht couldn't see it with the filter up, but he could feel the spike going into his back. His hands beat at his chest, trying to get a hold of the weapon they couldn't touch. There was a wrench, and a sensation of absence that was some how even worse, and he fell to his knees.
“De Silva, I am charging you with information trading, conspiracy to commit espionage (corporate), and hell, we'll see if we can stick you with anything for the MORG.”
Albrecht tried to raise his head, but found his voluntary muscle control was gone - the trojan in the program that must have just been jammed through his chest was messing with muscle control. Gun smoke – real gun smoke – tickled his nose and he made out the firing of guns – silenced, of course, but still audible. That would be the kids and the little woman.
“How and why, Albrecht? Your people hit Nova, but something else happened. You launch an attack, unrelated, hours after someone else? I don't buy it. Who was the first raid? Who was behind it?”
A pair of legs appeared in the doorway, dressed in black slacks and limping. "The kid got a lucky shot." A female voice explained. "We good?"
Though he was not a religious man, Albrecht prayed. His world was falling away and the abyss was opening before him, so he prayed. He didn't expect an answer.
He got one.
There was - light. A presence. Nothing changed, still the hard wood floor inches beneath his nose, the smell of blood and smoke, the voices of the police here to end him, but there was some thing else. Some thing was here.
He stood, enraptured with the most high, most scared, and turned to Patel. "I have done my father's will." he said. Then the hollow point slug from the gun of the the thing pretending to be his second daughter entered the back of his head, and he was done.
Patel and Dane stood in the council chambers in Omegaland. That wasn't it's real name, of course, but Patel kept calling it that.
"We're still fighting for the corpse, but between the BOPE and Yoi Jango, it isn't likely." Said the figures in shadows. "But this event will weaken both, and we can take advantage of that. Change is coming to Brazil, and perhaps we will have some say in the matter."
"Anything more about the upgrade?" asked Patel.
"The chip Albrecht had? The data you harvested was unenlightening. A prototype brain booster. We question it's importance - he could have received information or programming through regular channels."
"His records were trashed, his history deleted. I realize it's a long shot, but this piece of wetware is the only anomaly we can follow up on. No stone unturned."
"It's new technology, yes, but nothing radical. As a corporation, Ser Neurocom has as honest a record as can be hoped - the beta tests seem to be run in good faith. It may just be an coincidence."
Dane spoke up. "You weren't there. There was, at the end, there was something . . ."
"Ah. The 'odd feeling', We have reviewed your log, Agent Dane. Visual, auditory, virtual and even neural activity records. There's nothing there, other than a distraction that let the simulacrum get the drop on you. It happens.
"Anyway," the shadowy figures continued, "You both did a good job. Go to Detroit, investigate Ser, report back if you find anything. I hear they're playing the 1984 Tigers against the 1911 Giants - you should catch the game. That's all."
On a north bound plane over the Caribbean, Dane and Patel opened their eyes simultaneously. Dane stretched while Patel pulled out some files.
"You do believe Ser had something to do with this." Dane said. "That's why we're really going to Detroit, right?"
Patel studied a press release - the new Ser Neurocom Intuition Chip. He didn't look up as he said, "Same reason as always, Dane. Trying to get a larger perspective."
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