Freedom Incorporated by Peter Tylee (me reader .txt) 📖

Cookie admitted forlornly. It was at times like these that he really appreciated Samantha stroking his body. It calmed him down, making it easier to think rationally. But he’d never begrudge her sleep. He knew she’d spent a restless night in their stuffy little room at the Dusty Andamooka Inn.

“Can they track us?” Dan asked the critical question, perfectly prepared to rip the cables from the wall if they could.

Cookie checked his other applications, trying to ascertain the answer himself. His tracking application had failed to respond so he’d restarted it, which was why he had no way of knowing whether UniForce had pinned down their location. It meant little for the time they’d spent in Tweed Heads since they’d abandoned that post. But we’ve been exposed for - he checked his watch - five minutes here.

The application restarted with a green light, which meant there were no feelers hunting them through the wires. At least, not now. And nobody could complete a trace in five minutes… right? “We’re safe. And if they try a trace we’ll hear about it.” He turned the volume on Dan’s speakers to maximum, just to be sure. It was a reasonable assumption, Cookie thought. The risk to their safety was so miniscule that it wasn’t worth worrying the others over.

No. Nobody could complete a trace in less than five minutes.

Dan would have seen things differently, had he known. But he made decisions based upon the information available and he didn’t know Cookie was keeping him in the dark. “I hope you’re right.” He shivered at the potential consequences if something went wrong.

“Hey, I wasn’t the one who said ‘sick em’ to a cyborg and pointed at the UniForce CEO. I’d say that was a big risk to take!”

Dan’s overconfidence flowed through his words and posture. “He won’t do it.”

“I hope you’re right,” Cookie said, echoing Dan’s earlier remark.

“Okay, so we’re back in business,” Jen said, easing the tension before their testosterone could boil over. A big U-shaped desk filled most of Dan’s study. Cookie had set his computer up on the downward stroke of the U, so Jen perched on the other side to watch over his shoulder. “On to Echelon then?”

Cookie lingered in silence while he finished the maintenance on his tunnel. His applications weren’t clever enough to do it without assistance. He’d been thinking of upgrading them with a genetic evolution algorithm but he’d read countless reports of that backfiring. Some applications wound up dumber than they started and now wasn’t a good moment to run the gauntlet of cutting edge programming. He needed stability and reliability more than brainy applications.

Something interesting caught his attention while he was rummaging around the UniForce network. “Hey, look at this.”

The others leant closer.

“It’s a repository of business decisions UniForce have made since their conception.” Cookie’s eyebrows twitched. “Restricted with heavy encryption though, could take me a couple of days to crack.”

Jen wasn’t convinced they’d have a couple of days, not now that UniForce knew they were there. “Save it for any spare time we have afterward.”

Dan was peering over Cookie’s shoulder with just as much enthusiasm as Jen, though with differently aligned priorities. He was fascinated to know what his surrogate company had been doing. He wanted to know what drove them, what made them tick. He wanted to know whether they were worthy of his service. Are they law enforcement? Or just powerful thugs?

“Can you find their financial records?” Dan asked, drawing a curious look from Jen.

Cookie huffed. “Hell, man, I can find anything. I’ve got God’s access to this baby now. But why d’you wanna see that?”

“I need to see something,” he replied guardedly.

But the answer was good enough for Cookie because he started rooting through network spaghetti until he found the accounting servers.

“Okay, here are UniForce’s monetary transactions for the past three years. Anything prior to that is archived and might take longer to access,” Cookie said, sounding smug.

“I’m interested in the bounty hunting branch.”

Cookie isolated the applicable records.

“Exclusive lists.”

Again Cookie worked his magic. There were 53 top-level hunters active in the world, but only 28 in English speaking countries. Sophisticated translation programs assisted communication between the predominately English-speaking management team and the non-English-speaking workforce. Occasionally it led to misunderstandings, but more often humans used the program as a scapegoat for their own errors. Its creator, TranSys, had called it the Universal Translator - the UT. TranSys had promoted it as a boon for globalisation back in the early ’30s. But, ironically, in 2037 Global Integrated Systems gobbled TranSys whole, absorbing it into their conglomerate. The Universal Translator facilitated vast reductions in management requirements for the tumorous multinationals, slashing their operating costs. This, in turn, thrilled shareholders and overburdened the remaining employees. Burnout ran rife through corporate ladders, though that never fazed the people at the top. There were always plenty of willing servants to take their fallen comrades’ places. Eventually the market found equilibrium and efficiency soared. The new business model favoured by the UT generation comprised of small, central management teams that maintained rigid control over their global operation. Language was no longer a barrier. Corporate leaders deemed irrelevant the fact that the shift coincided with a dramatic dip in bilingualism worldwide.

“Can you isolate just the Raven’s subset of purchases?”

“Of course.” An itemised list of purchases appeared on the screen.

“Now do the same for me.”

Jen stiffened in the background, shying away from the now imminent conflict.

“Huh?” Cookie didn’t understand.

“Find the subset of records for my name, Dan Sutherland.”

Cookie jerked away instinctively. “You’re a hunter?”

“What of it?” Dan hadn’t realised Jen was shielding her friends from that knowledge. “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m helping you, does it?”

He slowly shook his head, though his eyes were still wide. “No, I guess not.”

“Would I have brought you here if I was going to turn you in?”

“No.” Cookie forced himself to relax but the effort made him look constipated. He did as Dan requested and a similar list appeared on the screen.

Identical. Dan’s eyes flicked between the two, comparing item after item. Even more interesting was the amounts entered into the accounting system. They were wrong. Someone’s siphoning off the top. But who? “Can you save that?”

“Already done,” Cookie confirmed. He eyed Jen with a why-didn’t-you-tell-me look of betrayal.

Jen looked away, unwilling and unable to defend herself from his unspoken accusations. So, now Cookie knows. Which means Samantha will know soon too. She mentally shrugged. Dan was right - it made no real difference. He was helping them and right now they needed all the help they could get.

*

Thursday, September 16, 2066

UniForce Headquarters

17:03 San Francisco, USA

“What a fucking mess we have on our hands now.” Esteban disgustedly threw his arms into the air before letting them flop by his sides. To say he was displeased would be an understatement. It was home time and he’d been eager to return to Baltimore. It was poker night at the club. He loved poker night.

They were crowding James’s office. Esteban had decreed that was to be their base of operations. Not because he liked James’s décor, it was the only office with three available terminals. And he’d locked the door, a significant statement. Nobody was going anywhere until they’d sorted out the mess.

There were three separate desks arranged in a loose triangle, though only room for one chair in the middle. On rare occasions, James needed all three terminals. When he utilised the full processing capacity of one, he would plug into another and continue working. Esteban pulled the desks further apart, making a horrible grinding sound. The desks, made from chipboard with a plastic coating, wobbled unsteadily and James fretted they’d come apart with Esteban’s rough treatment and his precious equipment would tumble to the floor. But they held together - barely - and Esteban squeezed another two chairs in the middle.

“How does this work?” Michele asked, having never encountered that model of computer before. It was a GenSet.

God you’re dumb. “Here.” Esteban stabbed a finger at the little white circle that turned it on. He hoped she wasn’t going to be that annoying once she was up and running. At least she’ll be familiar with the operating system.

Esteban sniffed the air, much like a prowling wolf. “Jezus, man, it’s stuffy in here. Are you off the environmental grid or something?”

James paid him little heed; his head still hurt too much for Esteban to drawn him into an energy wasting argument. He loosely wondered how Esteban’s office would smell if he spent 36 hours there sweating over a difficult problem.

He’d requested his best three administrators to stay back and he’d delegated to them the tiresome task of sorting out the mess on the network. Only two had agreed. One said she had a prior engagement she couldn’t break. Fine. James mentally chalked an ugly mark next to her name, one that meant she’d get no interesting projects or promotional opportunities. You have to make sacrifices if you expect to get anywhere. James’s mood was several shades darker even than Esteban’s. He’d already been slogging away for a full night and the prospect of another was painful to consider.

He switched on the videophone and adjusted the camera before dialling home. Susan answered, “You’re not calling to say you’re stuck at work again are you?”

James nodded, irritable and profoundly sad. “Yes.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and added, “Our CEO was assassinated today and they’ve declared a state of company emergency.” He lowered his voice even further. “It all happened because someone hacked the network.”

Susan sighed. “You spend too much time-”

“I know, I’m sorry,” James said, cutting her off before she could finish. “It’s not like I want to stay here, especially two nights in a row.”

Susan studied him on her display. “You have company.”

James shifted so she could see Esteban and Michele in the background. “Yeah, they’re using my office as a command centre.” He smiled bravely for her. “Look, I have some good news, but I’ll save it for when I get home, okay?”

She smiled broadly, showing her dimples. “A surprise?”

“Yep. A good one. You’ll love it, I promise.”

He heard Lillian crying in the background and Susan turned away from the camera. “Lillian’s hungry, I’d better go.”

“Okay, I love you.” James kissed two fingers and held them up to the camera.

“Love you too. Just do whatever you have to and hurry home, okay?” She waited to see his confirmation nod, said, “Bye,” then hung up and the display went black.

“Bye.” James replied into the dead receiver.

“That your woman?” Esteban’s gruff voice asked from over his shoulder.

“Yes.”

“Good looking.” Esteban always measured females that way. He had two lists, the first filled with people he’d gleefully fuck, the second with people that shrivelled his manhood. He added James’s wife to the first.

“Thanks.” James wasn’t sure how to accept the compliment coming from a barbarian such as Esteban. In truth, it frightened him. He didn’t want monster Esteban thinking of his wife that way. He soothed himself with the thought that he’d soon be home. I just have to sort this out first. It was a powerful motivator and he gingerly plugged the leads into his tender implant before throwing himself at the problem with renewed gusto that bordered on insanity.

So much ground to cover. He changed tack. Instead of examining the network’s inner barrier, he skirted along the outer ring. There was always a chance that David Coucke - if Coucke was the hacker - had meticulously covered his tracks inside the network but had been careless on his initial approach. It was worth a try.