No Rest 4 Wicked Botniks Chapter 22
Isaac Shinseki #10: Back to Basics
CHAPTER 22
Isaac Shinseki #10:
Back to Basics
It took time for the fog to lift, for Isaac’s eyes to become unclouded, his mind less wooly. He was… awake. Right? Yes. Yes, he was awake. Feels like I’ve been lying here for a year. The thought stretched out like a lazy cat, causing Isaac to let out a long yawn.
He rubbed the crud from his eyes and blinked, and then blinked some more. Eventually his vision came into focus. He took in the time display on the tiny screen set in the plastiron ceiling four feet over his face. “It hasn’t even been twelve hours,” he muttered to himself. He rolled over, barely, and bumped right into the wall. Most prison cells were less cramped than his current confines.
Coming back here was really a desperate low. Fearing for his life, Isaac had run away and hidden in what amounted to a coffin. The irony almost brought a smile to his lips. Almost.
Crushed beneath the palatial and opulent apartments of the rich and famous, floors 1-19 of the Nihon Hotel were made up of thousands of so-called rooms rented out exclusively by the city’s poorest citizens. The hotel’s lease documents euphemistically referred to these rental units as “compact quarters.” The unlucky people who actually had to sleep in them called them “solos”, because only one person could fit in each. But the lucky ones who earned enough money to escape and live somewhere else invented their real name: the harakiri boxes.
They weren't even boxes, really, but they certainly made ritual suicide appear more attractive. The “quarters” Isaac occupied were indeed compact. The lowliest cabin on a ship would still be larger. The single size bed built into the wall took up almost the entire room, with a tiny trashcan and medium-sized trunk at the bed’s foot, and three short shelves on the wall above the trunk, and then a rod for hangers a little bit higher. That was it. More of a glorified closet than a bedroom.
There was almost no gap between the bed and the magnetic sliding door out to the hall. There was precious little space between the bed and the ceiling. You could lie on the bed, sit on the bed, or stand awkwardly beside it. But the average person would have difficulty standing up without his head brushing the ceiling. Isaac only managed to avoid this because he was short.
Even the materials and color of the room felt oppressive. Almost every surface was made of plastiron, and every last surface was an all-consuming black. Whether the light was on or off, you couldn’t help thinking you were stuck in a hard darkness.
About all you could say in favor of a harakiri box was that it was private, dry, clean, and climate controlled. And of course there were outlets for you to plug in whatever small electronics you could manage to fit inside the room. But these few positives and “amenities” were the only reason to cram yourself into a claustrophobic cell rather than sleep on the streets. Most would agree that even a harakiri box was better than a bench, a dumpster, or a pile of cardboard.
And that’s what brought Isaac back here. When he fled his apartment last night just in the nick of time, he needed something to help him sleep, and he needed a safe place to do it. His adrenaline and anxiety had been so high when he escaped, he knew that only chems could calm him down and give him the rest his body and mind so dangerously lacked. So he popped by the closest pharmacy, an OTC shop three streets over, and picked up a bottle of the cheapest downer he could buy. He could have gotten it stronger and for a better price off the street, but he wanted to avoid any more entanglements with gangsters that night. After his purchase, he walked the nine blocks to the Nihon Hotel and paid for the solo with the last of his hard cash.
Most of the unfortunates who rented a harakiri box paid for a month or three or six at a time. Some with even grimmer futures in store signed multi-year leases at a technically lower rate. Those even poorer rented for a week or two at a time. The shortest rent term you could pay for was a three day stay. And that’s all that Isaac was able to afford, at least for the moment. He had to make some money, and fast. Especially because the room was the least of his financial concerns.
Isaac had to get Cassie back, off the data shard and onto something useful. He would require a fairly portable device, at least until he could upgrade his living situation to a place with room for bigger and better tech. He needed a portable device that could house Cassie, connect to the nets, and display her personality construct. He needed something that would allow her to execute all the functions he had built into her. Something that would still let him interact with her by speaking and listening, not just typing back and forth. God, he needed something that would let him see her. The tech he needed was… Well, off the top of his head, he didn’t actually know what device would meet all his requirements. He’d have to do some research and legwork.
And then there was the matter of weapons. Isaac wanted to be armed, needed to be armed. He was going to have to do some detective work out in the real world to discover what really happened to all the botniks he had modded. He had to find the source of all the faults, the malfunctions, all the off behavior. He had to find out what had caused so many of the botniks to be destroyed. Isaac needed to know who was really behind all this, who was tampering with his business and his life, or he would never feel safe enough to poke his head out from under a rock, much less take on another job. And he wouldn’t find any of this vital information by simply plunking away on basic tech while packed into a harakiri box. He had to get out.
If he was actually going to walk the streets, if he was actually going to snoop around and probably in a lot of places he didn’t belong, then he wanted options. Defensive options. Lethal options. And decent weapons would cost a tall stack of Tokyo dough. Bringing back Cassie would cost even more. It was past time to slice some bank accounts and steal him some money.
So Isaac fought down the urge to go back to sleep for the rest of the day. With what felt like an impressive display of willpower, he got up to a sitting position. Then he dressed awkwardly and shouldered the gym bag with the tech he had managed to grab from his apartment. Finally, he made sure the precious data shard was secure in his pocket, and then he exited the solo.
When he left his room, Isaac immediately scanned the long hallway, left and right. No one was there. He was sure there were many security cameras out here that he couldn’t see, but he doubted he was being watched with any particular interest. After all, the last time he had lived here was over five years ago. He knew he was being more than a little paranoid, which for Isaac meant he was being just the right amount of safe.
A thought had occurred to him last night, right before the drug had drifted him off to sleep. Maybe the gangsters who had rushed to his apartment to hunt him down weren’t actually Russians. There was the possibility that the Bratva had asked the Yakuza to handle one of their own citizens in their district. The men who came out of the cars had struck him as European, not Japanese, at least by their height and clothing. But he had only seen them for a few seconds in the dark from 30 feet away with their backs turned to him.
There was also the chance that the men were Russians, but they were still given permission by the Yakuza to take him out on their turf. That was less likely. And the most improbable scenario of all was that the Russians had crossed the boundaries to another gang’s territory to kill another gang’s citizen without ever reaching out to that gang for the go-ahead. But that would be a serious breach of the Truce, and Isaac figured he was just too small-time to warrant such an extreme measure.
Then again, by taking over that Stryker bot he was more or less responsible for the deaths of several Bratva enforcers. Maybe the Russians in their fury had said to hell with the Truce. For now, there was just no way of knowing, and this internal debate was only going in circles. All Isaac knew for certain was that some coder had analyzed the bar’s network history and traced the slice back to him. He thought he had been careful, but he must have left some kind of digital footprint. He wondered how much personal information the Russians had been able to gather from his apartment. He was fastidious about concealing his identity, but everyone left clues somewhere.
For now, he would have to avoid Moscowton like syphilis. But he had to trust that he was still safe in the Yakuza’s territory, or else he would go nowhere. Without a little bit of faith and hope, Isaac might as well consign himself to hiding in the harakiri box until he was kicked out onto the curb.
Isaac suddenly realized that he wasn’t moving. He had been standing still in the hallway staring at the floor for more than a couple of minutes. He shook his head aggressively, shaking off the doubt and circular anxieties. He let out a long breath and headed on his way.
He took the elevator down to the back lobby. This was the entrance reserved for the poors like Isaac. The lobby wasn’t small or shabby by any means, but it looked spare and functional. The main entrance, on the other hand, could only be described as magnificent, lavish, and ornate. That was the riches’ view of the Nihon Hotel, and what most people imagined when they thought of the building.
Isaac nodded and smiled at the three receptionists and one of the five security guards. He didn’t get a smile back. Then he took the rear exit and joined the noisy bustle of downtown NV City. He wished he had the money for an autocab, a bikeshaw ride, or a real person-driven taxi, but such conveniences would have to wait. For now, he was walking.
His destination wasn’t far, however. Three blocks later, he stopped in at Corfu Brews, an upscale cafe the afflu crowd couldn’t get enough of. On this late Sunday afternoon, the large coffee shop was packed. Good. Isaac needed to banklift as many customers as possible, and he needed a big crowd to blend in and do it.
This place was pretentious and expensive, expensive enough that they employed six humans to make and serve the drinks with minimal machinery. But Isaac would stick out like Pinocchio’s nose if he didn’t buy something. So he ordered some fancy vanilla-this-and-that latte and paid for it with a digicred chip. It wasn’t like Isaac couldn’t afford a single coffee, even at these exorbitant prices, but he didn’t want to leave a money trail behind. Since he was out of cash, it was just the price he had to pay. He took comfort in the fact that the chip was tied to an old account, and under an alias at that. This probably wouldn’t come back to bite him. Probably.
Drink in hand, Isaac found an unoccupied table in the back corner and sat down. He placed the gym bag gingerly on the chair next to him and surveyed the room before taking out his equipment. The cafe was exquisitely furnished and decorated, with Greek and Italian motifs and knick-knacks and several impressive paintings of island scenery that depicted the company’s namesake.
There were between thirty and forty patrons present at the moment. Most were relaxing privately or talking amiably in small clusters. But more than a third were absorbed in their ‘vices, tapping and swiping screens or typing furiously at keyboards. Apart from his cheap clothing, Isaac would hardly stand out. So he got to work.
He took out the carry-deck, the minidecker, and the palm porter. He was going to make use of all three to keep his programs separated and spread out the threat of trace-back. If one of the three ‘vices became discovered and compromised, he could ditch it and still act with the other two.
Isaac started writing a skimming protocol on the minidecker from scratch. He had several variants of skimmers saved on console back at his abandoned apartment, but they were obviously out of reach. Cassiopeia could have written one in a matter of seconds. It took him almost half an hour to create it and check for errors.
Next he wrote a basic system tap-and-map on the palm porter. This was one of the fundamental code types every slicer learned by heart at the start of his career. The tiny keys and screen of the palm porter made the process take significantly longer. But he completed the program and reread the lines in just over twelve minutes.
Now came the tricky part. Isaac switched to the carry-deck to write the threshold strike. The bulwark at play here would not be particularly layered or advanced, but it was still a complicated and delicate task. You had to balance speed and efficiency with stealth. It was no good to gain access to a system only to be immediately discovered and then locked out and traced. But Isaac also needed a fast process.
A brute force password cracker would be practically undetectable, but it would take several hours to succeed, maybe even a full day, depending on the difficulty of the password. Something like a Spike-9 attack would get him near-instant control, but it was almost certain to raise an alarm, and it was aggressive and flashy enough that city cybersecurity might even be alerted in the aftermath. Isaac needed something neatly in the middle, between the extremes. He would have to thread the needle carefully.
He settled on making a Nakatomi tunneler, bolstered by an arrhythmic echo matcher. Finally, for good measure, he wrote a dead man’s switch virus. If his slice attempt was detected, the dead man’s switch would scramble and crash the system and give him time to make his getaway. Altogether, the coding took him close to ninety minutes to finish. He spent the next half hour going over the lines one by one, checking for any mistake.
“Can I get you something else to drink?” Isaac’s head jerked up from his work. A petite barista with short curly blonde hair and big blue eyes was smiling at his side.
Isaac cleared his throat. “Uhh, no, I’m good, thanks. Thank you.”
The server nodded but didn’t move. “Wow, you seem really deep in the zone. What are you working on?”
“Uhh, well, it’s complicated,” he answered. “And confidential. It’s, uhh… data acquisition. That’s all I can say.”
“Oooh, Mysterious!” Her smile widened, accentuating her dimples. “Well, do let me know if I can get you anything else.” She finally walked away.
Isaac let out a small sigh in relief, then felt foolish for doing so. The woman had just been angling for a tip. She couldn’t possibly understand the code on his screens anyway. She was a barista, not a cybertech. After all, Isaac was only slicing into a coffee shop, not a casino. He was only nervous because he was used to slicing remotely; he rarely had to make an intrusion on-site.
Now it was time to lay it all out and let everything play. Isaac picked up the palm porter and sent out the tap-and-map. Six seconds later, and he had the info he needed. Isaac analyzed the map for the weakest gateways, widest datagaps, and lowest counterblocks. He input the vulnerable sites into his intrusion programs on the carry-deck. Then he hit Execute, and the Nakatomi tunneler went to work. In eleven seconds the point of sale system was breached, along with all its client data and payments history. Isaac clicked Enter on the minidecker and let his skimmer play.
He had limited the program to swipe up only the last two hundred accounts in the system. It only charged those accounts 30 New New Yen, a sum none of the swanky Corfu Brews customers would miss, and whose banks would hardly notice. After the transfer was complete, Isaac was 6000 Yenbucks richer. Not bad for a couple hours’ work, even if it was back to basics. He now had more than enough money to cover his next expenses.
Isaac decided to purchase another overpriced latte for his silent victory lap. Sipping the hot coffee with glee, he exited the cafe with a puffed up chest and hailed the nearest autocab. First he had to run a couple of bank errands as the last step of tidying up his day’s work. And then he was off to buy a gun.
END OF CHAPTER 22
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