The Den

A small excerpt from what I intend to turn into a larger story.

Lyric flopped onto her saggy old couch and turned on the wall screen. She’d spent the day finishing a job, a legit one too, for RunCorp, cataloguing and encrypting their new client information database. Of course she left a couple of hidden access points. Just in case. But for now she was completely alone and with nothing pressing to do. A glorious, quiet Friday evening. All she needed was a beer. No beer until RunCorp paid her next week, though.

 

As Lyric navigated through the menu for something to watch the little communication device in her arm began to beep.

 

From: Mako Takahashi

Babe I got something you NEED to see. Wanna go down the Strip later?

 

The Strip? Oh, goody.

 

From: Lyric Van Der Klee

Ok, show me. But don’t call me that.

 

A call request appeared immediately. She let it ring a few times before answering, and immediately wished she hadn’t answered at all when she saw her boyfriend’s face on the little screen.

 

‘Mako, what the hell have you done to yourself?’

 

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Tiny, on-screen Mako folded his arms across his chest.

 

‘Dunno, might be that you could light up this whole apartment with your skin?’

 

‘Think of how cool it’ll look down on the Strip on tonight!’ She could barely make out his features, but the blue glow was unmissable.

 

‘You look just like every other bored kid with more credits than sense. Besides, I was gunning for a night in. I wanna watch Akira again.’ The clubs down on the Strip were sleazy, noisy and populated with rich kids with nothing better to do than make themselves as eye-catching as possible and strut around like peacocks.

 

‘ C’mon Lyric! Nobody cares about ancient cartoons. What have you got against mods anyway? You think you’re too good for a bit of body art?’ He was getting that aggravating smirk again.

 

‘Mako, tattoos are body art. This is the kind of vanity mod that soft kids from private schools get just because they can. Look, I can change my eye colour by blinking! No, thanks.’ Lyric got up and emptied a packet of instant noodles into a bowl as she spoke. ‘Besides, I’ve got nothing against mods, provided they actually have a purpose.’

 

‘Your arm is not a mod, Lyric. Are you eating noodles again?’ Mako changed the subject as Lyric put the bowl in her ancient microwave.

 

‘I can’t afford real food. Also, my arm is made of titanium and is designed to be better than the one I was supposed to be born with. Therefore, mod. It makes my life easier. Unlike your new-found glowiness, which frankly is a waste of cash.’

 

‘If you think it’s such as waste of cash then maybe you should go hang out with your buddies down in the Den! None of them can afford a vanity mod.’ Yep, there was that rich boy whine. Time to bail.

 

‘Mako, I don’t wanna argue with you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

 

‘Fine. I’ll go down the strip by myself then. And you need to eat better!’ Then the tiny screen on her communicator went black.

 

Ugh, boys. With luck he’d go stale on the stupid mod in a month when everyone else got it and it wasn’t alt anymore. A subcutaneous implant that leached a bunch of chemicals in order to make the wearer glow in the dark held no interest for her. It wasn’t going to help her get into any high security Government databases. Now, a wireless network jack…that was a mod she could use. Or the rumoured MindLink transmitter that apparently allowed you to project your consciousness into an object from a distance. But then, if Lyric could afford that kind of thing she wouldn’t be sitting at home eating instant noodles and wishing she had beer.

 

Her wrist communication device beeped softly.

 

From: Mako Takahashi

I’m sorry, I don’t like fighting with you xxx

 

‘Oh f**k off.’ Lyric muttered at her wrist before turning her attention back to the wall screen. Five minutes later, it beeped again.

 

 ‘Oh for f***s sake Mako!’ Lyric looked down. But the message wasn’t from Mako, or anyone she recognised. In fact, there didn’t appear to be any source at all.

 

From: - - -

Hello, Lyric.

 

Who the hell was this? She tapped away at the communicator, firing off queries and commands, but two minutes passed and Lyric still had no idea where it’d come from. Apparently it had been sent to her wrist device anonymously, using an impossible path of routes and re-routes that had completely obliterated the original signal.

 

It was no mean feat to stump the best hacker in the Causeway. Whoever this was, they knew their s**t. Lyric frowned. So much for her quiet night. But the message was there on her screen and no immediate solution presented itself. On that fact alone it was intriguing enough to investigate.

 

Lyric stared at the message on her wrist again. Hello, Lyric. What the hell? Why go to so much effort to be anonymous, just to say hello? Unless of course, it was more than what it seemed. Maybe this warranted further investigation. But Lyric hadn’t paid her last bill, so there would be no net connection in the dingy little apartment for a couple of weeks. Choosing between net connection and food was a close call. All she had was the device in her titanium arm, and that was basically useless for any real digging.

 

She replied.

 

From: Lyric Van Der Klee

Who the hell are you?

 

Another two minutes went by with no response.

 

From: Lyric Van Der Klee

Well?

 

No answer.

 

From: Lyric Van Der Klee

Well, f**k you too.

 

If the mystery person wouldn’t respond, maybe she could try down at the Den first thing tomorrow. At the very least she would be able to access the net. Of course it meant that she’d have to actually put on pants and go outside on her day off. Another minor defeat in the epic battle between Lyric and pants. Eh, we’ll see how this plays out. Maybe the mystery person would get the message.

 

Lyric finished watching Akira and moved onto Howl’s Moving Castle. Old school storytelling at its finest. Her collection was so old you couldn’t even download them anymore because no-one even knew about them. She’d had to do some serious digging around in half a dozen different historical databases to find the treasure trove.

 

Half an hour in, her wrist communicator beeped.

 

From: - - -

The future is not a straight line. It is filled with many crossroads. There must be a future that we can choose for ourselves.

 

So much for a quiet Friday night. Lyric hunted through the mess on the floor for her jeans and headed out.

 

Though Lyric’s usual route to the Den was fairly short, it involved climbing two chain-link fences and dashing across the courtyard of a security compound. Most people deemed it ‘risky’. Lyric deemed it ‘training’. This night she was through in 32 seconds. Not her best effort, but not a bad sprint taking a belly full of ramen into account.

 

As Lyric approached the Den breathing hard, her wrist beeped again. She looked at the screen. The first greeting was gone.

 

From: - - -

Nice night for a run, Lyric.

 

Okay, that was…odd. She forced herself not to look around. A nondescript door, painted matte black, stood closed before her. Lyric knocked, three lots of three sharp raps. The door swung inward and she was engulfed by darkness.

 

The Den was, literally, a den. It was the big underground brother of Lyric’s apartment. It was dark and warm and crowded with every bit of hardware you could think of. The tech-head mecca of the Causeway. And after that latest message, it was probably the best place for a person to squirrel themselves away in.

 

‘Ho, Ric! ‘Cha doin’, woman?’ Lyric was nearly knocked over by the force of the hand slapping her on the back.

 

‘You trying to beat me to death, Jag?’ Her assailant was well over six feet tall and weighed at least two of Lyric. Jag was covered head to toe in tattoos. The huge woman laughed.

 

‘Never succeeded yet. Where’s that pretty boy of yours?’

 

’Had enough of Mako for one evening. I got something else I need help with aside from pretty boys. By the way, if you see an shiny blue man wandering around, don’t tell him I’m here. Last thing I need right now is my own six foot personal glow worm.’ Not that it would matter since Mako wouldn’t come anywhere near the Den unless he absolutely had to.

 

‘New mod, huh. Don’t get whatcha see in him. But what’s so coked that you need help with it?’ Jag raised a pierced eyebrow.

 

‘Eh, Mako has his uses.’ Lyric held out her wrist. ‘Check these messages out. Source’s been scrambled and I’ve got no net at home for a while.’

 

Jag laughed again and her voice boomed through the Den. Several figures seated around the periphery glanced over. ‘You forget to pay your bill again?’

 

‘It was that or starve.’ She made for the nearest empty terminal. Jag followed. Lyric flicked the device out of her titanium arm and plugged it into an empty port just as it beeped a third time.

 

From: - - -

Run, run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.

 

‘The f**k?’ Jag had seen the message too.

 

‘Exactly. That’s number four. I ran a scan from the communicator but it’s scrambled. No idea who this freaknut is or what they want.’ Lyric started to run the signal through some tracking programs. ‘What the hell? It’s giving me fifty different IPs.’

 

Jag grunted. ‘ ‘Kay. Follow the path backward? That’s the first thing Dot does.’

 

Lyric hammered away at the keyboard. Nothing. ‘Huh. It should be easy enough to trace with this software. But all I get is a useless bloody loop.’

 

‘A loop? The hell do that mean?’ Jag was great and all, but her skills were more within the realms of ‘door b***h’ than ‘super-spy’. She came to the Den because she was Dot’s girlfriend. She was good at keeping out the undesirables though.

 

‘I mean it’s got no f*****g beginning. The signal’s just going around in circles!’ Lyric rested her head in her hands for a moment. ‘There’s gotta be a way to break it. Is Tristan around?’

 

Jag nodded and jerked a thumb toward a corner behind her. ‘You might not get much outta him though, he’s hung up good on some tip that come in from Big John. Some government bizzo.’

 

‘So Big John’s come out of the woodwork again. Nice of him to contact me.’ The government mole had been silent for months, and now he chooses Tristan to deliver his information to instead? Ouch. ‘Go get him. I’m not leaving till I solve this.’

 

Jag blinked in surprise, but turned toward a guy with the lime green mohawk, who was hunched over a laptop in the far corner. ‘Yo, Tris! Lyric’s got some anonymous messages she can’t trace. Some real coked-up s**t, man!’

 

Tristan was nearly as good with breaking into networks as Lyric, but he was also pretty much the last word in tracing signals. He’d turned up a month ago with a dodgy-sounding backstory about bailing from Centrepoint after a messy breakup. Lyric figured if you had to resort to a dumb story like that, then the truth was probably best kept secret. He’d most likely run foul of some underworld bigwig and needed to disappear. The one occasion he’d met Tristan, Mako had taken an instant dislike to the guy. Lyric secretly found him fascinating.

 

To her surprise, Tristan dropped what he was doing straight away and hurried over. ‘When did the first message come through?’

 

‘ ‘Bout 7. I thought it was Mako at first since we’d had a".’

 

‘How many have you had since?’ There was an unmistakable tone of urgency in his voice.

 

‘Uh…four, all up.’

 

Tristan nodded and sat at the terminal. He remained silent for ages, staring intently at the screen and tapping keys so quickly it was impossible to follow. Others began to drift over to see what had the two best hackers in the place so stumped.

 

Finally, Tristan sat back and sighed.

 

‘Can’t find it.’

 

‘What do you mean, you can’t find it?’

 

‘I mean that signal doesn’t have a source. It didn’t originate from anywhere.’ Tristan folded his arms and frowned at Lyric’s communicator, sitting on the desk. A tattoo of a dragon wove its way down from his right bicep, head resting on the back of his hand. It had been done in bioluminescent ink, the scales rippling as his arm moved. That was a good use for glowing mods.

 

‘Bullshit. Signals have to come from somewhere! A first grader could tell you that.’

 

‘This signal doesn’t. Either you’ve got one hell of a hacker on your tail, or"’ he stopped, looking thoughtful.

 

‘Or what? Some piece of technology suddenly became capable of conscious thought?’

 

‘Exactly.’ They both stared at the wrist device. It beeped.