
Crabs In A Bucket
In the darkness, they congregated in the living room. Sirens
screamed in the night, steadily approaching the street. The curtains were too
thin to completely block out the light, and the last thing anyone needed was
for a suspicious cop conducting routine canvasing to notice them.
“How did they trace you?” Tan asked.
Heat flared in Alex’s voice.
“They didn’t.
They traced you.”
“We never came close to your remote machine,” Yamamoto
said. “Yet they knew where to look. How do you square these statements?”
Alex clenched his fists. Perched on his sofa, he
rocked violently back and forth.
“I didn’t use any of my botnets. I didn’t crack any
systems. I downloaded Zen’s data shards using a VPN and proxy servers. That’s
all. It was the only exposure I had to the Net, and that took just ten minutes.
They must have found you.”
“Or they were tracking electricity use,” Fox said.
“It’s how the PSB finds hackers and terrorists, by identifying sudden,
unexplainable surges in electricity and water consumption.”
“I know. That’s why I sited my machine in an office
building with an on-site data center that caters to the tech crowd. Everyone runs their computers all day
and all night in there. One more computer drawing on the grid won’t attract too
much attention.”
“We never entered your building either. So what
gives?” Connor asked.
“They must have spotted you on the streets. I told you
about the cameras. You might have disguised your faces, but not your gaits.
They patterned your movements and tracked you to this neighborhood,” Alex said.
“If the cameras were all-seeing, why didn’t the hit team
attack this safe house instead?”
Mustafa said reasonably.
“It could be both,” Fox said. “The New Gods know we
were somewhere in Electric City. When they combed the streets and audited the
grid, they noticed that the office drew a huge amount of electricity. They
decided that we were using it as a safe house, or at least as a base to
download and decrypt the data.”
“It does fit into how the Singularity Network thinks,”
Wood said. “They measure their lives, and everybody else’s, by power
consumption.”
“And if they were looking for a hacker, they’d look
for the signs that would give a hacker away,” Tan added.
“On the bright side,” Yamamoto said, “we’re all still
alive and free. So long as we keep our heads down until the police are done
canvassing the area, we’re good.”
“You have to leave,” Alex said.
“Weren’t we under your protection?”
He sucked in a breath. Rocked slowly.
“Yes. And I’m telling you this for your own good. They
will ask the neighbors about suspicious activity. They would have noticed strangers
coming and going from this house. They will tell the police. The police will
pay more attention to the area. To me.
“I can hide my hardware, explain away the bots and the
computers, but I cannot explain you
away. You must find another safe house. It’s for everyone’s protection.”
“I understand where you’re coming from,” Yamamoto
said. “But we can’t leave now. Not when the police are right outside.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just… get ready to get out when the heat
dies down.”
“Did you manage to get anything useful before you blew
your machine?” Fox asked.
Alex stopped rocking, finally. His lips parted into
something resembling a smile.
“Yes. I decrypted the phone data belonging to the
Court of Shadows.”
“Nice!” Tan exclaimed. “How’d you do it?”
He shrugged. “Nothing special. I simply used a virtual
private cloud, imaged the data a million times, and brute-forced them all using
Hashcracker. And, yes, I connected to it using a secure data connection, closed
to outside access. I’m surprised you
didn’t do it.”
“I would have done it too, but it’s expensive. Nobody
gets rich on the government dime.”
“Nobody honest,” Yamamoto added.
Tan nodded vigorously. “Damn straight. After our
suspension, I was stuck with the hardware I had at home. Nowhere near as powerful
as yours.”
Alex lifted his nose into the air again. “This is why
I don’t rely on the government.”
“Same here. Anyway, send the data to me and we can
figure out what’s going on.”
“Already have.”
“Have you found anything interesting?” Yamamoto asked.
“My bots are still trawling the raw take. But if you
look at the titles of the documents alone, there are many interesting items.
‘Contracts and Liquidations’. ‘Five-Year Strategic Direction’. ‘Lubricant’.”
“‘Lubricant’?” Connor repeated.
“Odd, isn’t it? Even more so when it is a budget
spreadsheet, tracking payments over months and years. A spreadsheet that lists
the names of many politicians, government officials, and high-ranking police
and PSB personnel.”
“Holy shit!” Tan exclaimed. “We have it! Proof of
corruption within the PSB!”
“But it’s not everything,” Wood said. “It doesn’t
explain why everybody else is after us.”
“It could be on the data we recovered from the Golden
Mile,” Yamamoto said.
“Did you crack it too?” Tan asked.
Alex firmly shook his head.
“No. I can’t.”
“We can reconstruct it from the blockchain and try
again on a fresh—”
“No, you don’t understand. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Alex rocked again.
“It’s the file format. .VOID. It can only be read on
computers running the VoidOS operating system. The OS the Void Collective
created specifically for their own computer networks.”
“Last year, you told me you found a way to read
.VOID,” Tan said.
“And just now, I blew up the only machine I had that
could.”
“Pardon my ignorance, but you can’t just get another
VoidOS computer?” Mustafa asked.
Alex sighed.
“What do you know of .VOID?”
“Nothing,” Mustafa admitted.
Another sigh. Louder, this time.
“The Void Collective doesn’t use ordinary computers.
They use hybrid biocomputers, combining the functions of both a classical and a
DNA computer in the same machine. .VOID isn’t just a regular file format; it
functions like a bridge, seamlessly transitioning data between both computing
models as necessary. Text, video, audio, it’s all encoded as .VOID before being
uploaded on the computers. I have no idea how they did it, it shouldn’t even be
possible, but the New Gods are in the business of the impossible.
“VoidOS isn’t simply installed in a computer. It is grown. It is hardcoded into the DNA
computer component, and on startup, it self-propagates into the classical
computer component. It begins life in as a molecule of DNA in the biochip, and
on startup, it somehow crosses over into silicon. Again, I don’t know how they
did it, and no one I know does, but as far as I know that’s how it works.
“The VC exercises strict technology control. It is
extremely difficult and expensive to obtain a VC biocomputer, and even more
difficult to reconfigure it to be compatible with non-VoidOS machines. My
suppliers do not have any VoidOS-compatible machines available in stock.”
Fox shook her head. The VC took technology control to
the next level, even for the New Gods. She wouldn’t be surprised if they
developed these biocomputers solely to prevent outsiders from penetrating their
systems.
“I presume you can’t make your own biocomputer
hybrid?” Mustafa asked.
Alex shook his head firmly.
“Impossible. We need to know the DNA sequences for the
VoidOS software and the biochips. Codes that the VC jealously protects. And
before you ask, attempts at reverse-engineering were unsuccessful. The DNA
sequence is hidden in a batch of dummy DNA sequences. Processing the wrong
sequence will generate a null result or upload a virus that will brick your
computer.”
“‘We’?” Wood asked.
“My… associates.”
“Your fellow crackers.”
Alex shrugged. “We are in the same or similar
lines of work, yes. But we operate on both sides of the law. The government and the underworld are keenly interested
in VC biotech, and they collaborate on this issue more often than you may
think. Not that these efforts have paid off so far.”
“What’s the solution to this problem?” Yamamoto asked.
“We steal a VC biocomputer?”
“You’re welcome to try, but I think we don’t have to,”
Alex said. “We can recreate the data directly.”
“How?”
“In a VC biocomputer, data is stored on the biochips
while the integrated circuits handle calculations. The silicon hardware needs
to know which DNA sequence corresponds to which program, document, whatever, to
retrieve the information. Whenever the user creates a new file on the
biocomputer, the system will also create a plain text file that describes the
DNA sequence the data is encoded into.
“We have those plain text files. With them, we can
regrow the DNA sequences and recreate the data.”
“Let’s do it, then,” Connor said. “What do we need?
Can we buy the equipment from Electric City?”
Alex held up his hand.
“Not so simple. While you can grow DNA in a home kit,
for our purposes, we need maximum precision. We need an industrial-grade DNA
printer in a controlled lab environment. Fortunately for us, I have a contact
who works at the nanobiotechnology lab of the BITE. The Babylon Institute of
Technology and Engineering. He will give us access to the lab, and he’s trained
the girls to use the equipment.”
“Do we have any other alternatives? A black lab
somewhere, maybe?” Wood asked.
“It is the only option I can offer you.”
“If the New Gods know that we have the DNA sequences,
then they will monitor all locations in Nova Babylonia known to have the
capability of growing cells,” Connor said. “If we got to the BITE, the New Gods
will spot us. We’re not in the business of dragging innocents into this.”
“There are no innocents in Babylon. Never have been,
never will be,” Alex said.
Fox wondered what a man would have seen to make him
say something like that.
“It’s not just that,” Fox said. “The New Gods have all
agreed to hunt us down. If we go to the BITE, we will risk the wrath of the New
Gods.”
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” Yamamoto said
softly.
Everyone looked at him.
“Are you shitting me?” Connor asked.
“No.”
“You’re saying we should fight all of the New Gods at once.” Connor shook his head. “Brother, I
like a good fight as much as anyone else, but c’mon, we’re biting off more than
we can chew.”
“Not necessarily. You noticed they don’t get along?
Their agreement is just superficial. And there’s something about this mess that
doesn’t make sense.”
“What is it?”
“We offended the Court of Shadows and the Void
Collective. By all rights, they should be coming after us. But where are they?
Why haven’t we seen them?”
“The New Gods each have their own turf. Maybe they
don’t want to spark a war by intruding into someone else’s,” Wood mused.
“Exactly. They don’t want any misunderstandings. At
the same time, though, they all want
the data. Which doesn’t make sense. They know
we have the data. The VC and the Court can take countermeasures to render that
information irrelevant as much as they can. They can change their plans, send
their agents into hiding, conceal their slush funds, whatever. They’ll still
want to punish us, but they wouldn’t worry so much about the data. And yet the
Seekers, they didn’t kill Zen. At least not right away. They wanted the data
from him.
“This means there’s something fundamental about that
data, something in there that the VC or the Court cannot change. But the
Seekers know that if the New Gods know
that they have that data, the New Gods will dogpile them. That’s just how they
work; they can’t stand any one faction having an advantage over others.
Further, the involvement of the Singularity Network and the Liberated tells us
that the VC and the Court believes that they alone cannot handle the
situation—but at the same time, they know that if outsiders get that data ahead
of them, they will use it against them.”
Mustafa shook his head. “Man, this is making my head
spin.”
“What I’m saying is, the VC and the Court believe we
are too formidable for them to handle alone. At the very least, they must
deconflict with each other and the rest of the New Gods or risk an outright
war. On the other hand, the other New Gods each want a decisive advantage over
the VC and the Court. On the third
hand, the New Gods know that if one of them is seen as possessing that
advantage, they will be targeted and attacked.
“This entire affair is not about recovering the data.
It already belongs to the VC and the Court. We only copied it; we didn’t delete
anything. It’s about the New Gods preventing each other from gaining an
advantage over everybody else.
“The VC and the Court want to make an example of us
and ensure that their data doesn’t fall into anybody else’s hands. The best-case
scenario for the Seekers, and the other New Gods, is to recover that data and
make a copy of it without letting the other factions know about it. But the
outcome everyone will settle for is the destruction of the data we hold, and us, witnessed and verified by all
other factions.”
“They’re all crabs in a bucket, pulling each other
down,” Fox observed.
“Exactly. They don’t trust each other at all. Any
agreement they have is temporary and fraught with suspicion. It won’t take much
to drive a wedge between them.”
“How do you propose to do that?” Wood asked.
Yamamoto grinned.
“I have a few ideas. But Alex?”
“Yes?”
“I need to borrow your girls.”

Babylon Blues is a cyberpunk horror saga told in five stories. Back BABYLON BLUES: REMASTERED on Kickstarter today to read the entire collection in a single easy-to-read volume, plus a bonus story!
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