The old apartment was exactly how Rebecca had left it—sparse, pieces of clothing on the floor, with dust-ridden streaks of light creeping through the gaps in the curtains. Funny that she had left the photograph of her friends back in Tokyo, the one thing that made her think of home. She wanted to see Vex again, and suspected that she’d be seeing Mikah soon. But first, there was other work to do.
Rebecca was too impatient to wait for Officer Taylor and the police to present the results of their search. She managed to ‘borrow’ some of their resources to aid her own investigation. After a week or so she witnessed a blip on her computer screen, indicating that she had pin-pointed the location of a Nexus 8 linked to NA7’s neural implant.
Rebecca grabbed her backpack and went to the train station. Tracking people wasn’t too hard, it was simply a matter of activating the GPS on a Nexus 8 and linking it to her phone. The link gave her an in-time report on where this ‘NA7’ person was travelling—boarding a train bound for the upper city. Rebecca arrived at the station in time to dash onto his train as the doors slid closed, and then found a seat a few carriages down where she could see the back of his greasy brown hair.
She continued to crack deeper into the phone, into the hidden files—job details, data cashes—until she found some unregistered software. The phone had enough evidence for Officer Taylor to put this guy away, at least.
She’d need help, unfortunately, so she called Taylor.
‘I’ve found him.’
‘Rebecca? What’s going on? Where are you?’
‘On the train bound for the upper city. I’ll text you the address.’
The train slowed down and the man stood up. Bec got up as well and waited for him to exit at the next stop, quickly following him onto the platform.
‘Are you saying you’ve found NA7?’ Taylor asked.
‘I’m tailing him into a shopping centre. Might need some backup pronto.’
Bec tilted the phone away from her ear just as Officer Taylor raised his voice.
‘Stop, Rebecca, don’t get close to him. The police will handle this.’
‘We don’t want Nexus Rogue finding out one of theirs has been captured. Don’t worry, I have a plan. Just get here, now.’
Bec ended the call and paced up an escalator, arriving at an open shopping centre, a garden courtyard where NA7 sat in waiting on a bench. Bec found a nearby café and bought a fruit smoothie while she waited for Taylor to arrive. She didn’t want to spook NA7, and having a hunch that this man was overly cautious—they always were—she figured it might be difficult to catch him out in the open. She was also reluctant to have Taylor bring NA7 down in broad daylight, only to create a spectacle for Nexus Rogue to see.
The only thing Bec could think to do was set up a direct audio link to the neural implant in the man’s ear.
‘Hello,’ she said, inconspicuously watching her target shudder and glance over his shoulder. ‘I got some questions for you… NA7, isn’t it?’
The man glared at his Nexus 8.
‘That’s right,’ Bec said as she leaned back and sipped her juice. ‘I hacked your phone. Don’t look so surprised. No seriously, you’ll draw attention to yourself.’
‘Who are you?’ NA7 spoke in a violent whisper.
‘I’d ask you the same thing. Four years ago, you were tasked with tracking down White Rabbit – why?’
‘What do you care?’
Bec rolled her eyes and in that moment noticed Officer Taylor appear across the square, just as NA7 impatiently stood up and rushed into an alleyway. Bec and Taylor made eye-contact and she signalled for him to catch up with NA7. Once Bec finished her smoothie she went after them to the alley and found NA7 on his knees, bleeding from the nose as Officer Taylor slipped the handcuffs on his wrists. The memory penetrated Rebecca’s thoughts like a hot blade, the blood of her childhood friend trickling onto the pavement while the police stood over him. Suddenly she couldn’t look at Taylor. She turned her back on him. The air had been sapped from her lungs. Then she left.
With city light streaming through the blinds of her apartment window Rebecca sat in silence at the table, drinking coffee and tinkering with her computer. Christmas was a few days away and she was starting to notice the festivities, the glow of crimson red and neon green painted across skyscraper windows, the feint chime of what she thought was a Christmas carol. When was the last time she’d ever felt festive enough or had someone to celebrate a holiday with? Officer Taylor had left a patrol car outside, to watch her. Bec’s knuckles whitened at the thought of them. Meanwhile, the aircon in her apartment hadn’t worked since her return to Perth and the entire room was hot and stuffy. She wanted another coffee. She looked at her phone and the temptation to give Vex a call built up once again.
A heavy knock on the door startled her and she jumped with fright.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Taylor.’
‘Shit…’ Bec murmured, then stood up and opened the door for Officer Taylor. ‘What do you want?’
‘Our tech crew said you took over the neural implant hack.’
‘So?’
‘We could have handled it.’ Taylor entered the apartment and Bec returned to her desk. ‘We’re here to help you, Rebecca.’
‘No offence, but I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help, and I definitely don’t need your cop buddies fucking up my investigation. I have a stake in this and I have my orders so you don’t have to keep an eye on me all the time. Oh, and your techies are morons, they would have slowed us down.’
‘What’s your problem?’ Taylor’s voice was calm but firm. ‘You want to work alone? Why? It can’t be me – we’ve barely known each other a week.’
‘It’s not you.’ Bec glanced at her computer that was now accessing the data stored on NA7’s neural implant. ‘I’ll have the access key by tomorrow. Now, if you don’t mind—’ She gestured towards the door. ‘And on the way out do me a favour and call off that squad car or I swear to god I’m gonna start slashing some tires.’
‘Is that what this is about? It is, isn’t it? It’s the police. You hate cops.’
Bec pointed again at the door. ‘Get out. Get out of my house.’
‘What happened?’ Taylor pushed. ‘Holding a grudge from your last arrest? Or the one before that?’
‘I didn’t want any of this. Just send Kelly your damn report and leave me the fuck alone.’
Officer Taylor paused and exhaled deeply through his nose. He walked back to the hallway outside, turned, and said, ‘Merry Christmas.’
‘Fuck you,’ Bec replied. She swung the door closed and got back to work.
Rebecca glanced over her shoulder as a truck roared across the overpass behind her. She had a bad feeling about today that she couldn’t explain. What if Nexus Rogue had caught wind of her return to Perth? She travelled at a speed-walk for the rest of the way to the police station. There she found Officer Taylor at his desk, his computer tablet showing notes on Syndicate operations. They greeted each other awkwardly, pretending that their argument the previous night had never occurred. Bec felt embarrassed that Taylor refused to remove the patrol car and she never made good on her promise to sabotage it.
She handed him a USB hard drive and said, ‘Access key.’ Then she turned away.
‘Wait.’ Taylor stood up. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To get lunch.’
Without really knowing why, Bec returned to the place where Pegasus once stood. The nightclub had been rebuilt into nothing more than a vacant building awaiting renovations. There was a fast-food area nearby. She passed through a group of flickering holographic women and collected a hamburger from an automatic food dispenser, that’s when she saw him watching her from across the street. She didn’t know the man and he quickly looked away the moment she caught his eye. An icy feeling welled in her chest.
Every few seconds, as Bec finished her burger, she glanced in the direction of the man. He strolled into a corner store. Bec knew that parts of the city were kept under surveillance by the Syndicate; tiny hidden cameras mounted on the walls, aerial drones buzzing from end to end of the street. A skilled hacker could tap into any of these cameras or drones. Any of them could be watching her right now.
Bec considered calling Officer Taylor for help, but only for an instant. She didn’t need him. She could handle this herself. But what was this guy going to do to her? The Syndicate bosses wouldn’t appreciate someone causing trouble here in broad daylight, they didn’t like the attention.
Rebecca pulled her laptop from her backpack, custom designed for brute hacking jobs when she needed a quick and dirty way to break into a device. Her first task was to run a decryption of the access codes for the Syndicate security servers. While the decryption did its thing she also ran a search for nearby surveillance tech and hijacked the signal from automatic command that maintained all drone flight patterns. She patched into the camera, scanning the street until she saw a birds-eye-view image of herself on the computer screen. She glanced up at the little black drone hovering overhead, tapped into the flight controls and switched it to manual.
Her pursuer found a table outside a café. A waiter approached with a coffee. Perfect. Rebecca selected her computer’s display settings and swiped the drone controls from her laptop to her phone. She tucked her laptop back into her bag, stood up, and crossed the street. She pretended to be interested in one of the nearby TVs that showed an advertisement for a new VR Immersion device. With her phone as a control panel she steered the drone straight towards the café and it dived into one of the tables, spiralled off and shattered a window.
Then she was on the move.
One of the devices in her backpack could read a user’s biometrics – she had used the tech to develop her automatic safety switch. All it required was a DNA sample.
Panic ensued as café staff attempted to navigate flipped tables and shattered glass. Rebecca removed the adhesive strip from the biometric reader, and with the admirer’s attention fixed on the rogue drone – which attempted to fly away with its broken rotors – she placed the strip across the lip of his cup, pulling away a small sample of saliva, which she quickly fed into the device.
Her phone beeped with a notification that it had finished decrypting the security access codes. Rebecca rounded a corner and entered an alley. Syndicate establishments employed a unique security mechanism that she now relied on, potentially to save her life. She entered their system using her phone:
Underground / Security Mechanism / Automatic / Flagged Personnel / DNA Archive / Upload....
A progress bar appeared. 0%.... 1%.... 2%....
When she looked up from her phone, her pursuer stood at the end of the alley, his form silhouetted by the glare of the main street. His scowl caused an eruption of anxiety in Rebecca. The upload was taking too long. The man came after her. She tried the nearest door.
A Syndicate bar. Bec had been here once or twice before. Quiet at this time of day, the only patron being an old man stooped over his drink, and of course the lonely serving droid. The cameras were here too. So far, this whole scenario was a low-key game of cat and mouse. If Rebecca did anything drastic her pursuer might respond with equal severity. The reality of the danger she faced terrified her. The upload had reached 49%.
Rebecca walked as casually as she could to the bar and sat down at a stool, staring at her reflection in a mirror behind the liquor collection. The serving droid wheeled over to her.
‘Can I get you something?’ it said.
‘Oh, uh, no, nothing.’
79%.... 80%....
The door creaked open behind her. The man entered the bar and his gaze swept across the room. Bec lowered her head and hunched her shoulders even though the man had clearly spotted her. She watched him in the mirror. He approached.
‘Actually,’ she said to the serving droid, ‘maybe a beer.’
The droid placed down the bottle and flicked off the cap. Bec gulped a few mouthfuls. The man stood behind her now.
‘Hello,’ said the serving droid. ‘Can I get you anything? And you, sir?’
Officer Taylor, unexpectedly, slid onto the stool beside Rebecca. He leaned his back against the bar and turned towards Bec’s pursuer.
‘Can I help you, friend?’
The man glared at Taylor and said, ‘I got business with the girl. This doesn’t concern you, mate.’
The corner of Taylor’s mouth twitched. ‘This woman is my responsibility.’
‘The girl has something that belongs to us.’ His eyes became fixed on Rebecca. ‘She’s made enemies with the wrong people—’
Rebecca barely saw the handgun slide from the man’s jacket pocket before Officer Taylor wrapped his arms around her and shielded her with his body. 100%.... Upload complete. Red lights flashed from the ceiling. There came a violent zapping sound and the man screamed, the gun fired and the sound rang through the room, following by a smoky metallic scent that lingered in the air as he fell on the ground, writhing in pain.
Officer Taylor let Rebecca go and examined the still twitching body. He kicked the gun away and said, ‘What the hell was that?’
‘Security mechanism,’ Bec explained, breathless.
She was terrified that Taylor had gotten shot, but he brushed himself off as he stared at the bullet hole in the ceiling.
‘That was lucky,’ said Taylor.
‘I had it under control,’ Bec replied.
‘Clearly.’ Taylor knelt down beside the body. ‘Help me get him up. We’ll bring him in for questioning.’
ns 172.70.126.231da2