The instant flash of an oncoming train jolted Rebecca out of her daydream. She was on the 11:31am heading towards Perth, her earphones in, alone with her thoughts of home and the mission, of Kelly Jade, and the prospect of seeing friends from her life before.
Someone had made a hopeless attempt at scratching a message in the window, or maybe it was just illegible vandalism with no meaning to it at all. A tubby man in front of her messily ate a Subway sandwich and the distinct aroma of toasted bread made Rebecca’s stomach groan. She checked her watch and tried to figure out how much time had passed since she spaced out.
The train stopped at the next station. A girl came through and sat in one of the backwards seats at the end of the carriage so that Rebecca was facing her. Bec continued to stare out the window, every now and then glancing in the girl’s direction and wondering if she had quickly looked away. Rebecca recognised the name of the metal band on the girl’s black t-shirt and contemplated if the jeans she wore were ripped when she bought them. The girl looked over in Rebecca’s direction and Bec quickly looked away.
The train whizzed through a dark tunnel and came out alongside an immense complex of built-up apartments and other city facilities. Rebecca’s home was on the fringe of this layered suburbia, in a place where people still lived pretty close to the ground and the surrounding bushland had not yet been completely obliterated. Her destination, however, was deep within the city, in a place that people referred to as the underground.
The train stopped. Two Transperth guards stepped on. No, they were cops. One of them carried a remote clipped to his belt, a new short-range EMP emitter. Rebecca tried not to stare. She had nothing to hide, but she shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
The cops moved to the end of the carriage and faced down the length of the train. They were checking people’s devices for unauthorised software and proceeded to scan each phone individually for flagged programs, eventually checking the girl up ahead from Rebecca, and then the man who was scrunching his Subway wrapper into a ball, and then finally, her.
Rebecca handed her own custom-style phone to the officer and he hesitated to accept it. Nexus was the standard sleek-looking brand that everyone used these days. Rebecca’s phone might as well not exist; it was a tribute to her cynicism of any big corporation that practiced marketing schemes like planned obsolescence. Why would someone want an expensive phone that was designed to break? Not to mention the vulnerabilities. With the advanced malware tech from the 2020 attacks still floating through cyberspace almost any amateur could hack a Nexus phone.
Rebecca purchased the schematics for her phone on the Dark Web from an associate over in England who boasted the device’s impeccable hacking ability. Bec had then given the schematic to Mika, who delivered it to one of his contacts, who then custom made the phone. Impenetrable to malware with specific functionality, it became the perfect weapon for a hacker like Rebecca.
‘Is this a registered device?’ the cop asked her, cautiously eyeing the phone.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Bec. ‘Loads of people are getting these.’ She tapped it on the side of the chair. ‘Real sturdy. Here, check it.’
The cop scanned her phone and his device displayed a green light. He moved on to the next person. Bec’s systems could easily trick their scanners. Whenever Rebecca witnessed these mandatory searches she figured the world had a good reason to fear hackers like her. The authorities had the most to lose, of course, when the 2020 cyber attacks stripped any semblance of technology and order from their hands. Now, just a few years since the attack, if you controlled the data, you controlled everything.
The girl in the black shirt had disappeared by the time Rebecca reached her stop. She walked through the tunnel leading to the street and passed into an alley, near a fast-food store that smelled of grease and coffee, like a cramped sauna heated by the sizzling of a grill.
Rebecca pondered how many times she had made this twenty-minute walk to Robb’s Electronics. Nothing had changed.
She went on, spotted the store’s flickering blue neon sign. In the display window were a few Nexus phones, laptops, smart watches and VR setups. A sticker on the window said: 100% registered. Fortunately, Rebecca’s key still worked.
The interior of the shop was surprisingly tidy, nothing like how it looked when Robb was alive. Bec paused for a moment as she noticed the icy feeling in her chest. Behind the counter was a hallway with multiple back rooms. She tried not to think about what she had seen there, but the image clawed its way into her mind—Robb’s motionless body, the blood. She quickly looked away. Around the walls were shelves stacked mostly with small pieces of tech, computer parts and special mods. An old broken-up VR headset sat on a round table in the middle of the room, surrounded by screws and scrap-metal.
The chime sounded as someone opened the door and Rebecca jumped with fright – her mind had begun to wander again.
‘Sorry,’ said the man who now stood in the entrance to the shop, ‘didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘You didn’t,’ Bec quickly replied, crossing her arms.
He had neat hair, dark skin, no augments, and tired yet friendly eyes.
‘Are you Rebecca Marshall?’ he asked.
Bec didn’t respond.
‘I’m officer Taylor,’ he said, as he reached out to shake Bec’s hand.
She just looked at him, unsmiling.
‘Show me your badge,’ she demanded. When he lifted the underside of his jacket to reveal the police badge clipped to his belt, she said, ‘Let me see.’
He unclipped the badge and handed it her, and she snatched it from his hands, examined it, then returned the badge back to him.
‘I’m Bec.’ She still didn’t shake his hand.
‘I guess caution is a virtue in your line of work.’ Taylor smiled bleakly, and glanced around the electronics store. ‘Kelly mentioned you didn’t want to work with me. Can I ask why?’
‘The captain sent me here to get a job done,’ Bec replied coldly. ‘So long as I do that, I don’t see why anything else matters.’
‘If we’re going to be partners, we’ll have to trust each other.’
‘Captain Jade sent you to keep an eye on me. I don’t need your help finding the access keys, or the buyer.’
Taylor picked up a piece of scrap metal and twirled it in his fingers.
‘Yeah well, we’ll see about that. I guess you chose to meet here, then, because you don’t need my help.’
Bec turned towards the back rooms and said, ‘Let’s just get this done.’
Down the hallway to the first room on the left there was a computer set-up. The screen flickered to life and displayed a password message as they entered. No point trying her old password—she would have to break in.
‘Bec, what exactly are we looking for?’ Taylor asked, standing behind her.
Rebecca took out her phone and began the hack as she explained, ‘I don’t exactly know yet. It’s a leap of faith but maybe Robb hid the access key to NR’s dark server somewhere on this system, somewhere even Stan wouldn’t find.’
‘Stan?’
‘My old co-worker. He took over the shop after Robb… well… anyway, I’ve gained access to the system. Nice to see Robb left our cyber-security in Stan’s capable hands.’
It occurred to Rebecca that maybe Robb intended to leave the store, and so many other things, to her. She was his protégé, after all. He trusted her more than anyone, or at least, she thought he did.
The hack was slow-going after breaking into the system and Taylor paced back and forth around the room while Bec searched for any encrypted data relating to an access key.
‘Anything?’ Taylor asked, after fifteen minutes.
‘Nada,’ Bec replied, then she saw it. ‘Hang on, there’s something here. A file was copied then deleted. But they didn’t erase it completely.’
Taylor looked over her shoulder at the screen.
‘Could it have been your old co-worker?’
‘One way to find out.’
She checked the timestamp: 30 July 2029, 05:41:07PM.
Not long after Robb died. She wasn’t working here when this happened. Whoever did this would have been caught on the surveillance cameras. She accessed the old archives and opened the video file from that day, scrolled forward to the appointed time, and pressed play.
From the fuzzy high-angled view of the security camera they witnessed someone enter the store. The man moved with purpose, checking over his shoulder before striding directly towards the back of the store and turning into the room where they now stood. Bec scrolled back and replayed the clip.
‘Do you recognise him?’ Taylor asked.
‘No.’
‘Look there.’ He pointed at the screen.
The intruder had a shaved head and Bec glimpsed the device attached to his temple. She had no doubt that it was a neural implant, a piece of tech not often found in these parts. Having a neural implant was like installing a computer into your brain to enhance cognitive function. Other than the device itself, it was easy to spot the electric glow in the user’s eyes, the same glow as in Jean Fey’s eyes.
‘It looks like a neural interface,’ Taylor pointed out. ‘Proof that he’s with Nexus. No common criminal would be walking around with one of those.’
‘Let’s find out who you are,’ Bec murmured to herself as she worked on the computer. If that man had used a neural interface to hack into Robb’s system then he might have left a fingerprint, any residual data would be enough for Bec to track him down.
The trail led Rebecca to a standard Nexus phone set to factory settings. It was registered to a guy named Mike Bellary who, according to his daughter’s Facebook, died in 2024. Bec started off by going through his contacts, a list of codenames like WR_2099 or KV_2082. These guys had adapted their method of codenames from the Transhumanist movement, where the two letters represented a set of initials, and the numbers indicated the year they were born plus one hundred. But the phone owner’s name was only listed as NA7. His most recent text was sent on the day before the break-in at 3:09pm to KV_2082: Potential fix on White Rabbit.
KV… Rebecca thought that this could be the buyer. More concerning though was the knowledge that these people were looking for Robb. But why? What had he done?
Bec turned to Officer Taylor.
‘Do you think you can locate this NA7?’ It was only after the words had been said that she realised she had asked for help from a police officer.
Taylor nodded. ‘I’ll put a request through – see what we can dig up.’
With nothing else to gain from being in the store, Bec got up and left. She wanted to get away from that place, and away from Officer Taylor.
ns 172.69.7.5da2