No Rest 4 Wicked Botniks Chapter 5
Isaac Shinseki #2: "One Lesson, Three Guesses"
CHAPTER 5
Isaac Shinseki #2:
One Lesson, Three Guesses
After three more seconds of loading, she appeared on the far right screen: a tall, pale, and voluptuous redhead in a slinky green evening dress. The abundant measurements of Cassie’s avatar, like those of the real actress she resembled, playfully defied the time-honored but ultimately trivial physical law known as gravity.
Isaac made no apologies for endowing his AI copilot with rather obvious assets. As a professional slicer, Isaac had to stare at a computer screen for hours and sometimes days on end. He figured it was good for his own health, physical, mental, and spiritual, to have something worth staring at all day.
Cassie’s avatar gave him a bright smile and said, “Hello, Ike,” in an even brighter voice. Cassie was the only one who ever called Isaac ‘Ike.’ In general, he detested the nickname, except of course when Cassie said it.
“Hi, Cassie,” Isaac greeted, bleary-eyed and jittery.
“Wow, we’re up early,” Cassie observed.
Isaac’s mouth hurt with the greasy grin. “Yeah, well, I couldn’t sleep.”
Cassie laughed and said, “Huh. I wonder why.”
Isaac kept the joke going. “I know, right? Go figure.”
Cassie’s green dress softly swished as she turned in a slow circle. Cassie inspected the different sides of her monitor’s screen as if they shared the same space as Isaac’s small room. “Yikes,” she quipped. “What’s with all that awful noise?”
“Gee, Cassie,” Isaac retorted. “Not to cut short the cute banter we have going here (and it is cute, trust me), but... I was kinda hoping you could tell me that.”
Cassie sighed and pretended to pout. “Alright, boss. Do you want me to turn off that racket while I’m at it?”
“Yes, please.”
The epilepsy-inducing lights and madness-inducing sound both shut off in an instant.
“Much better,” breathed Isaac. “Now, what was the source of that alert?”
Producing a digital lawn chair and magazine, Cassie reclined in the former and pretended to leaf through the latter. “Well, I’d give you three guesses, Ike, but you’d really only need one.”
Isaac sat forward in his seat. “Another custom botnik is out of commission?”
Cassie glanced over the pages of her fake tabloid. She smiled again. “Like I said. Got in one.”
“Shiiiiiit,” Isaac breathed. He shifted around in the operator’s sling, suddenly uncomfortable.
While slicing was Isaac’s main passion and trade, it didn’t always pay the bills. Haberdashing—blackmarket robotic modifications, had been one of Isaac’s side projects for several years. These days, with the many drastic advances in encryption and security software, haberdashing was usually a safer and more stable source of income than slicing, as well as more lucrative than all but the most ambitious and dangerous netruns.
As a haberdasher, Isaac had modded over two hundred different botniks for various clients. He was a careful and industrious contractor, in large part because he had written sophisticated tracking programs to keep constant tabs on all the products he had outfitted. There were various reasons to maintain intel on the models he touched: security, for one, as well as quality control and repeat business.
Isaac’s programs ensured that the botniks were performing their functions up to his clients’ standards, and that they were never altered, tampered with, or used against him. And when a botnik inevitably malfunctioned or got damaged or destroyed, Isaac had first notice, which meant he could take full advantage of that knowledge and be the first to offer his clients repairs and upgrades at a discounted rate.
Problem was… a lot of botniks had been tampered with, damaged, or destroyed in a very short amount of time. Over a dozen in less than a month! This was unprecedented. Isaac was neither an amateur nor an idiot; he didn’t produce sloppy work and he didn’t try to cheat his clients. The botniks he modified were meant to last years, even decades.
This many incidents in so short a time? That could be no coincidence.
But what was the cause of all these failures and mishaps? Isaac’s instinctual paranoia told him that it had to be a rival trying to steal his clients by sabotaging his work. He had no proof, but it was the only thing that made any sense.
“Ike? Ike, you OK? Hey, Ike!” Cassie interrupted his sudden trance.
“Yeah, I’m here, Cassie. I was just thinking.” He took a swig of the overdrive.
“About what?” asked Cassie. She tossed aside the facsimile of a magazine and folded up her chair; both digital objects, now abandoned, melted into the white nothingness of the virtual background.
Isaac took another long swig of the Commie cola in an attempt to speed up his mental processes, then shared his thoughts with her. “Another botnik scrapped? That makes five—no—six this week. That’s twenty this month! Was it the same? Was it like the others?”
Cassie opened up a file cabinet that suddenly appeared next to her and picked out a folder seemingly at random. As she opened up the folder to read a file, she put on a pair of large glasses connected to a chain around her neck. They looked like the kind worn by librarians and old women in Pre-Collapse films. “In some respects, yes,” She answered. “In others, no. This particular machine was older and less advanced than the others. Volgatech, model Golem, Mark III.”
Isaac grunted inexpressibly in response, then nodded for her to continue.
“Also, the modifications purchased by the client were not nearly as extensive or sophisticated as the previous cases. Our records show that the only alterations made to this model were external and superficial in nature. No internal upgrades were requested.”
“So what did the client request?” Isaac suppressed another yawn.
Cassie beamed and said, “Just that the Golem be outfitted with a large and intimidating display of weaponry to reduce the likelihood of hostile action. You attached a high-caliber chain-gun and construction-grade hydraulic claw.”
“Oooh, subtle,” Isaac muttered.
“The client did not put in a request for subtlety.”
“Noted. So I gave this fridge a set of big-dick fuck-you tools, but all it had to work with on the inside was a Golem-III processor? The threat analysis, target tracking, and response times would all be an absolute joke.”
“Quite,” Cassie agreed. “I guess that would account for the electro-magnetic pulse spike lodged in the machine’s eyestalk.”
Isaac’s eyes narrowed. “The what? Show me.”
And she did.
END OF CHAPTER 5
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