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

theory.

He sprung like a lithe cat from his shadowy hiding place and prowled to the front door, clawing at the handle. But the lock was expensive and the alarm system sensitive. It won’t be easy to override, he thought irritably. So… the hard way. He sat with his back to the door and accessed the surgery’s network by mentally drilling through their firewall. Then he posed as a chronometer and fooled the building’s time server into believing it was nine o’clock in the morning. There was a click at the door and a flicker of lights from inside as the building sprung to life.

That wasn’t hard at all. The Raven marvelled at the gaping flaw security personnel had overlooked in the system. It was a common oversight, which granted him easy access to many medium-security premises. He slid quickly inside to avoid prying eyes and headed to the receptionist’s counter. It was a mess. So much for the paperless office. He’d already canvassed the surgery’s network, with limited success. The information he sought simply wasn’t there, so he’d expected to find a stand-alone computer with patient records and appointment times, possibly connected to a sperate internal network. But there was no such computer at the receptionist’s counter and he could make no sense of the jumbled paper.

Okay, again the hard way. He wandered the halls for ten minutes, mentally jotting the names of the surgeons that worked there. Once he was finished, he exited the building and reverted the network’s time to normal before erasing himself from the security videos. The lights turned out and the doors automatically locked, returning the building to sleep.

Next, he accessed the financial records database, using a backdoor the network ‘geniuses’ hadn’t noticed for two years. Sometimes he pitied the sheep around him. But most of the time he thought they received exactly what they deserved. He scanned for unusual deposits in the surgeons’ linked accounts.

One matched.

Sutherland had transferred 10,000 Credits into an account that belonged to a man named Doctor Ingles. A few minutes later, Doctor Ingles had transferred 1,000 Credits to a third account. Whose? He suspected the answer to that question would tell him what he desperately needed to know: Sutherland’s new identity. The Raven licked his lips and prepared to swoop. So, Doctor Ingles… ready or not, here I come.

*

“That’s five.” Chuck grinned while scanning Dan’s false chip and tagging his weapons. “What’re you trying to do? Turn me into an alcoholic?”

*

His next stop was an elite suburb on the Sunshine Coast, approximately two hours north of central Brisbane by car - or one heartbeat by portal. The cloud-streaked night was even gloomier there and the Raven cursed the humidity. The sliver-like waning moon occasionally found a gap in the clouds but barely cast enough light for the Raven to see where he was placing his feet. The walk from the portal station to Doctor Ingles’ house took five minutes. And a magnificent house it was - not the grandest on the street, that prize went to his neighbours, but it was splendid nonetheless. Its splendour made the Raven wonder how Ingles could afford such luxury on a doctor’s salary. Black-market operations no doubt. Everything was slotting into place to confirm the Raven’s theory.

And he bet the Doctor’s mansion had elite security. Not that it matters. He sauntered across the garden, ignored the floodlights, ascended the steps leading to the veranda, and punched a windowpane with his gloved fist - but the impact only caused his wrist and knuckles to smart. I hate cured thermoplastic. The Raven half-heartedly tried a boot before giving up on smashing a window.

Come on, don’t make me wait until morning. He rang the doorbell.

Moments later, a groggy voice came over the intercom. “Yes?”

“I’m looking for Doctor Ingles,” the Raven said in calm monotone.

“What do you want?” He sounded grumpy, understandably too. Honest members of society were asleep at three in the morning.

The Raven played his trump card. “I want to ask you questions about several microchip removal procedures traced to your surgery.”

Ingles’ sigh came through the speaker as a buzzing hiss. “Can’t it wait until morning?”

The Raven kept his tone level and stern. “The beckon of justice and truth can never wait, sir.”

“Hang on a minute.” The intercom static died and a trail of lights accompanied Doctor Ingles through the house. He cracked the front door just far enough to see the man on his veranda, but didn’t remove the chain. “Can I see some ID?” After all, he did look suspicious; he’d never known a cop or chipping squad officer to wear entirely black. Come to think of it, he reasoned sensibly, I’ve never known cops to work at three in the morning either. It all looked fishy and Doctor Morgan Ingles was proud to have the presence of mind to ask for identification even though he was half-asleep. He just hoped he could keep his head level when the questions started to flow.

“ID?” The Raven slowly nodded. “Sure.” But instead of reaching for a wallet, he raised a leg and kicked the centre of the door with all his might, snapping the chain from the wooden frame and sending the good doctor sprawling onto his back, clutching a broken nose. “Is that what you were looking for?”

Doctor Ingles writhed on his expensive carpet, clutching his nose with both hands and spitting blood from his mouth. “My nose!”

The Raven drew his Redback and aimed at the Doctor’s left eye, the muzzle scarcely an inch away from his cornea. From that distance, the weapon looked even more menacing, if a bit blurred. And, proud to call himself a weapon buff, Ingles recognised the PX7 model and understood what it could do. Fear shuddered through his body, overcoming the pain in his nose - a nose that was quickly turning dark purple.

“What do you want?”

“Like I said, I have some questions.” The Raven cocked his head to one side, keeping the Redback level with Ingles’ eye while the surgeon crawled backwards to slump against the parlour wall. It was more comfortable for the Raven too; he no longer had to bend so far to keep his muzzle close. “I didn’t pretend to be an officer of the law; that was your assumption.”

Ingles wrestled with his fear and managed to keep his voice steady. He studied the aggressive man’s pallor and striking skeletal structure. “You want a chip removed?” He hoped so.

The Raven shook his head in a frightening, detached manner. “No. I’m quite comfortable with my chip where it is. I want to know about Dan Sutherland.”

“Then you have the wrong doctor because I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

Brave. The Raven had to commend him for that. But foolish. He used his boot to crush the hand Doctor Ingles was propping himself up with. Then he watched Ingles’ face turned ghostly pale as he leaned more heavily upon the hand and twisted his boot. The grip of his sole was doing untold damage to the Doctor’s metacarpus. “You need fine motor co-ordination to be a surgeon, don’t you?”

Ingles could only nod. The air was already gone from his lungs and the pain forbade him from drawing another breath.

“Then you don’t want me to pulverise your hand. Which means you should stop jerking me around. Understood?” The Raven viciously twisted his boot again before easing the pressure. “Next time it’s your balls. Fair enough?”

Ingles cradled his hand and nodded. “He wanted his chip removed.”

“And you did it?”

“Yeah, of course I did,” he said matter-of-factly. “There’s good money in it.” He definitely had no remorse for his illegal actions.

“He needs a chip. Which chip does he have?”

Thinking about the damage the Raven’s boot could do to his testicles was enough to sweep aside any noble ideas Doctor Ingles had about protecting his patients’ identities. “He has two.” He squinted in thought. “Tedman Kennedy and Brent Bertrouney if I remember correctly.”

“You had better be remembering correctly,” the Raven warned menacingly. His eyes lost focus for the few seconds it took to check the profiles. Intriguingly, one linked account had received the Doctor’s payment of 1,000 Credits. Probably a refund, but best to confirm. “You transferred 1,000 Credits into his account after the operation. Why?”

How could he know that? Morgan Ingles had growing suspicious to feed his fear, making him turn even paler. He can’t be a cyborg… can he? He swallowed hard before saying, “I based the original quote on three new identities, but I could only give him two.”

“Why?”

“He wanted profiles with authority to carry arms internationally and I only had two for sale.” Doctor Ingles was regretting his greed. Sure, it’d landed him a magnificent house, but people seeking a new identity were always running from something - or someone. He should have expected that, sooner or later, ‘someone’ would come looking for him. Ingles had turned himself into his patients’ guardian. And he suddenly disliked the responsibility.

“Thank you Doctor.”

*

Sunday, September 19, 2066

N.S.W. Police Department, Parramatta Office

03:15 Sydney, Australia

“How long has it been?” Simon asked.

“Fourteen hours,” Dan replied, not wanting to taste the defeat that was looming on all sides.

“They’re doing the same to Jen as they did to Katherine?”

“Yes.”

“So how many hours does she have left?” Simon asked, as gently as he could.

“If they started right away?”

Simon nodded.

Four, plus four, plus… “Minus two if she tore her lips to breathe. Minus six if she didn’t.”

Simon didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to - Dan was thinking it anyway.

“But I know she’s alive, Slime. Don’t ask me how. I just do.” He turned back to the stack of records. That’s it, believe the intuition you want to hear and ignore the intuition you don’t, a scornful corner of his mind jabbed facetiously.

They were in a stuffy vault, sifting through mountains of paper records. Simon couldn’t help wondering how moths had found their way there, and how they’d survived with nothing to eat but bleached paper. Earlier Dan had stumbled across a nest of worms chewing on paper pulp and pooping it out in little black balls. The wriggling mass of reddish-orange bodies had disgusted them both.

It was troglodyte heaven and time-pressured-bounty-hunter hell.

But profiles were emerging - names, addresses, physical descriptions and resumes of the three people Dan suspected of abducting Jen. Esteban’s profile had been easy to complete, he was a living legend in recent crime fighting history, albeit a sinister one. But somebody had erased valuable data on Dan’s other two suspects, and done it so long ago it was too tiresome to find on crystal-cube. So they were down with the paper records instead.

“He has a real syndicate going, doesn’t he?” Simon commented, finding another reference to Esteban’s illicit activities.

“Yeah,” Dan muttered, miffed by the missing segments in the police knowledge bank. How could nobody notice? “And then they vanished.” He suspected Esteban had cleansed his record too, just not deleted it.

Simon grunted. “It’s not infallible.”

“No, especially for people with influence.”

“Influence - meaning money.”

“And connections,” Dan clarified.

Simon yawned for the third time that minute.

“Why don’t you go and get some sleep?” Dan offered.

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day,” Simon replied. “It’s been a long shift.” He stood, sending a precariously perched stack of paper cascading to the floor in a whirlwind of fragmented statistics. “Oh, shit.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it.” Dan scooped the pile roughly into his arms and tossed it brusquely into an empty box. “There. Filed.” He winked at his partner. “Now go and get some sleep.”

“You’re not coming?” Simon asked disapprovingly, secretly wishing he had the stamina to keep up.

“No,