No Rest 4 Wicked Botniks Chapter 3
Isaac Shinseki #1: No Rest for Young Slicers
CHAPTER 3
Isaac Shinseki #1:
No Rest For Young Slicers
Isaac Shinseki was indulging in a rare night of natural, genuine sleep when the alarms suddenly went off. The shrill monotonous EEP EEP EEP and rapid-flashing yellow lights signaled the initiation of one of his many diverse insurance policies. It was the nature of such irritating but necessary security measures that they would not and could not be ignored.
So, with a sigh, Isaac rubbed at his eyes and gave himself a couple of slaps in the face. Then he climbed out and collapsed his capsule bed to face whatever inbound threat was more important than a single night of natural, genuine sleep.
Before donning the gloves and goggles, Isaac decided to grab a few more important provisions from his bathroom and kitchenette. For his meager 2:49 AM breakfast, he scarfed down half a bag of mixed Calorie Corn followed by a lengthy spray of canned E-Z Waffles. Then Isaac grabbed a soda to wash it all down. He ate and drank it all in the space of about 15 to 20 EEPs and then slapped on a couple of nicotine transdermals.
He was almost awake enough to deal with whatever problems he was now facing.
Finally and most importantly, he prepared what slicers like himself called an overdrive or commie cola. The punks still called it win-sauce or tiger blood. The recipe was quite simple. All it required was a can of Red Spice or something similar, mixed with a shot of vodka and a potent dose of sheen. The vodka wasn’t really necessary. It was just a tradition, like many others. Probably about as useful as most of them too, Isaac yawned inwardly.
All you really needed to make this concoction was some quality sheen, crystal or powdered, and a nice “black,” cherry, or cinnamon flavored soda. Sugoi Classic and Red Spice were the most popular colas these days, so they were also the most popular to mix with any uppers. Isaac himself preferred the taste of the good Brits’ Cherry Whiz-Bang. It was just one of his eccentricities, he supposed.
And heck, Texans and bikers everywhere were probably still crushing a fine “Tejana slice” into their Dapper Zapper or Professor Mixer, or whatever it was they called their cokes these days. And even those disgusting drinks imported from the Old Coasts...what were they called…? Big Apple Punch? Ornju Glad? Nasty shit! Well, they’d still do in a pinch as long as you had the sheen.
Because there was nothing quite like a commie cola to shake you up and give you the feelies of “Eff Sheep, Fuck Sleep, Dreams Be Gone. I’m Here, I’m Now, and I’m a-Ready and a-Raring to Go.” Fucking PRONTO!
At Isaac’s first sip of the overdrive, his mental fog fell away and the tiny barely furnished space of his wine cask room leapt into disgustingly high definition. Though a bit cramped, the 20x12x10 square foot interior was a definite step up from his last place of residence. He even had room for a cheapo futon version of a sofa-pool here.
He had found the so-called harakiri boxes on the 20th floor of the Nihon Hotel downtown to be a disturbingly, depressingly accurate moniker for the “room space.” They were barely bigger than his tiny bed was now. Hmmmm. Zzzzzzzz.
No z’s! Alert please! Wake the fuck up, Isaac!
Anyway, that old dump couldn’t fit even a third of his equipment. And to any serious slicer, suicide seemed like an attractive alternative to living without a complete console suite. Give me tech, or give me death.
Another sip and his fingers shook momentarily with the urgent ache to touch and caress a woman—or at least a keyboard and cursor. It was the overdrive rushing through his veins, pounding in his skull like an Afghan Tango beat, shouting at him like that damned alarm that was still shrieking overhead.
All the drugs in his system told him to destroy a man—or at least a powerful security software.
That old Mind Melters single came back to him then: Fight, fuck, or slice.
It was time. Time to plug in.
Leaping into the operator’s sling with a practiced grace, Isaac strapped himself in and fired up his primary, secondary, and tertiary processors and command engines. As the screen-lights filled up the rest of the wine cask apartment, he put on his AR gooey-goggles followed by the hardcode data-visor. Then he snapped the heavy black MMI gloves into place around his hands and forearms, carefully checking that each of the six cables was still plugged into every correct socket.
His right hand played idly with the glowing move-cube while his left hand hovered over three distinct keyboards: one Plain Meric alphabet, one Panasian polykana converter, and one Russobalt cyrilloscript. The gloves and the operator’s sling tightened around him as he finalized interfacing with Cassie.
Cassie was short for Cassiopeia. It was the name Isaac had given to his AI personality construct. He had named his copilot after the big W constellation that pointed out the North Star.
A lot of slicers flew solo on net-runs because they didn’t have the money to buy an AI or the know-how to build one, or simply because they were too paranoid to trust an AI to be their navigator.
Isaac was paranoid about a lot of things, even more so than the average slicer. Thus the flashing yellow lights and the siren still shrieking like a banshee even now at this ungodly hour of the night. But Isaac had faith in his own skills, and Cassie was a direct result of those skills. As such, she made for a trustworthy navigator, above all the petty suspicions of a paranoid mind.
She wasn’t a person, not exactly, but she was as close to that as a machine intelligence in slave-state could be.
Cassie might not have attained true synthellect, but her response times were unparallelled, and she was gifted with a charming approximation of personality. Plus, her voice and model were both constructed from pirated but immaculate samples of the always seductive actress, Joan Saffron.
All things considered, though, Cassie was still just an AI assistant. And his AI assistant had better have a good fucking reason for this zombie-hour wake up call.
He was about to find out what all the trouble was.
END OF CHAPTER 3
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