The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2) Read online

  Everybody ‘loved’ Dan.

  The man likes coffee, so he can’t be all bad.

  A soft beep came from DeWinter’s workstation along with the creak of a chair as the man leaned back. Joey smiled at him, noticing his shirt seemed a little loose. He still rocked a glorious muffin top, but the buttons didn’t seem about to pop off and kill someone anymore.

  “Got a hit? Anything good?” asked Joey. “Hey… looks like you’re losing some weight. Won’t be long before you’ve got Mindy all over you.”

  DeWinter chuckled and patted his stomach. “Thanks. Trying, and I could be her father.”

  Mindy’s chair chirped as she spun to face Joey. He admired her gothy black skirt, heavy boots, and black-and-white striped leggings and sleeves. “Joseph… you’re going to make me go to HR.”

  He laughed. ‘Mindy going to HR’ was a running joke. They’d hired her after she’d been arrested for breaking into the Manticore Investments main network as a seventeen-year-old. Evidently, the Division 2 detective who’d brought her in had been a little free with his hands. Days after she’d made the transition from prisoner to employee, someone patted her on the shoulder and she’d threatened to drag him to HR. One of the field agents quipped she’d drag the food reassembler to HR, and Mindy overheard. Ever since, she’d made a joke of it herself.

  “Oh, come on, Mindy.” Joey grinned. “You know you dream about DeWinter covered in massage oil.”

  She stared at him, eyes narrowing.

  Joey indicated his chest. “Whipped cream on each nipple…”

  “Thanks, Joe,” said Simon. “Now there’s a mental image I’m going to need vodka to get rid of.”

  “Fuck you all,” muttered DeWinter.

  Chuckling simmered around the workstations.

  A soft beep from Joey’s terminal drew his attention. Excitement dawned for a second until he realized it meant nothing interesting. The scan of the finance software ended with a pass. No suspicious code detected.

  Thok!

  His skull rattled inside the skin around it. It took a second for shock to wear off and a tiny point of pain to manifest at the back of his head. He reached up and found a dart, stuck in bone. “Ow.” He glanced at Mindy, who had a set of four (now three) darts on her desk.

  “Get my point?” She folded her arms.

  Joey raised an eyebrow at DeWinter. “I think our relationship has moved to the next stage. Penetration.” He grunted and jerked the dart out of his skull, blinked a few times, and tossed it into the dartboard hung to the left of her display panels. “Wow that felt weird.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not in the handbook,” said Simon.

  “Neither are my balls in your mouth,” said Joey.

  Dan Simon cringed. DeWinter chuckled. Abby sputtered and covered her mouth to stop from laughing.

  “I’ll take myself to HR,” said Mindy, before spinning around to face her workstation again.

  Simon sighed.

  “Besides,” said Joey. “Mindy’s got it bad for Abby. Even put an upskirt cam under her desk.”

  Simon’s face reddened.

  “Aww, why’d you tell her?” said Mindy.

  Abby blinked, and peeked under her desk. As soon as she did, Mindy cackled.

  “I hate you both,” said Abby, in a playful tone.

  Silence, save for the bubbly slurp of coffee going into Joey’s mouth, pervaded the circular work area for a while, accompanied by the occasional pleasant beep of an analysis routine completing. Joey traced his finger around his desk while debating how much some superfan might pay for early access to the Monwyn game on his screens. Of course, no one would be able to play it until the servers went live. Joey grinned at the thought of all the fantasy junk littered around the server admin’s office at the Imperial Hotel. That poor idiot would’ve sold his mother for a chance like this.

  DeWinter laced his fingers behind his head and yawned. His terminal made a squawking noise, and he leaned forward to read something closer.

  “That sounded promising, in a ‘someone’s doing something they shouldn’t’ way.” Joey stretched back to peek.

  “Nah, nothing actionable. I’m scanning the source code for some indy spy game named Unum, and the thing got a hit on a few references to ‘The Five.’”

  “Oh.” Joey rolled his eyes and resumed watching letters and numbers grind across his screen. He glanced up and right at a plasfilm printout of a Citycam shot showing him and Nina standing in the street after leaving the Starpoint production facility. An inconvenient plume of smoke blocked the shot at the moment they’d kissed, but them staring into each other’s eyes captured the mood even better.

  “So you think they exist?” asked DeWinter.

  “Huh?” Joey glanced at him.

  “The Five.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Mindy.

  “Who knows?” Abby twirled hair around her finger. “I could see it. Stranger shit’s been known to happen.”

  Joey admired her for a few seconds. Large eyes and a wide nose with a cute upturned tip coupled with a take-no-shit personality and technical competence would’ve made for a long, and likely disappointing pursuit if he hadn’t already found Nina. Not that he had any intention of messing around on the side or leaving her, but he could at least acknowledge Abby’s appeal. “Maybe.”

  “What?” Simon leaned back. “Five what?”

  “Wow…” Joey laughed. “You really do have your head so deep in the P&P you can’t see anything.”

  The women snickered.

  “I don’t spend every waking minute reading the policy and procedure documentation.” Simon folded his arms and stared at Joey. Overhead lights glared off his baldness.

  “Conspiracy wonks think there’s these five senators that run the entire UCF like some kinda shadow government.” Joey slurped another mouthful of coffee.

  “I heard they’re all supposed to be chosen from high-ranking military officers… usually with intelligence backgrounds.” Mindy glanced over her shoulder at them.

  “Something like that.” DeWinter reached forward to tap a button. “Looks like this game is intended as fiction. It’s just tripping the filter for the phrasing.”

  “Well, there ya go.” Joey held up a finger. “If the Colon Expander 3000 flags it, there must be some truth to it.”

  Simon stared at him. “Colon Expander?”

  “I’m getting HR!” said Mindy.

  Abby put her head down, muffling laughter with her arm.

  “No, no, no.” Joey waved him off. “I’m not talking about the thing in your nightstand, I mean the scanning software.” Simon gasped. “Oh, and you really should be careful. The power grid around your place is pretty old. You might melt wiring.”

  “Oh, for the love of…” Simon sighed.

  “He’s got a point,” said DeWinter.

  “I do not have a sex toy!” yelled Simon.

  The entire floor seemed to go quiet.

  Simon turned florid crimson.

  Victory is mine, shouted Joey in his mind.

  “That’s not what I meant.” DeWinter shook his head. “Why would Argos flag it if it didn’t mean anything?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if The Five were real.” Joey shrugged. “Not like I give a shit honestly. Some people are always going to have power, some people are always going to want it, and the rest of us just hope the sodomy stops before we lose too much blood.”

  “You have a colorful imagination,” said Abby.

  Simon smirked. “What is your fixation with that?”

  Joey chuckled. “You take everything literally, don’t you? I mean the way society gives it to the common schmuck in the ass. Taxes, heavy-handed police, threat of the ACC doing whatever, drudgery jobs, drugs, gangs, society as a whole. There’s maybe two people for every ten thousand who can really claim to be happy.” He slurped more coffee. “Unless you’re like me and Mindy over there and just don’t give a fuck. Ride the missile like a horse all the way to
the target, laughing on the way in.”

  “Riding a missile.” Simon raised his eyebrows. “You’re just one sexual metaphor after another.”

  Joey leaned back and raised one eyebrow, hoping ‘are you for real’ appeared across his forehead. “Sometimes riding a missile is literally riding a missile, not a giant pulsating dick. Ever hear ‘fiddling while Rome burns?’ What are you thinking about?”

  Simon grumbled and tucked in to his cube, out of sight.

  “You don’t really seem the type for government work,” said DeWinter. “Usually, we get the gung-ho ones.”

  Joey chuckled. “Probably because I’m not.”

  DeWinter responded to another ‘pass – no suspicious entries detected’ notification. “So, why’d you sign up? I know you’re not another Mindy scenario.”

  “Wish I was there for that. She’d look good in cuffs.”

  Another dart hit him in the back of the head.

  “Yow!” he yelled, grabbing the metal shaft sticking out of his skull.

  “That asshole detective thought so too.” Mindy held out her hand to accept the dart back.

  “You take him to HR?” Joey winked.

  She grabbed another dart from the rack.

  “Hey!” He raised his hands. “Easy…”

  Mindy put it down.

  “You two are going to give Simon a heart attack,” said Abby.

  “Which form does he need to fill out to properly submit a crass but humorous comment?” asked DeWinter.

  Mindy, Abby, and Joey stared at him in shock.

  “He’s evolving,” whispered Joey. “We have the first signs of a sense of humor.”

  Joey plucked the dart out, handed it to Mindy, and rubbed the wound. “Signing up was the most dangerous thing I could think of to do at that moment. Plus, I had about forty credits left in the account and I got kind of addicted to the whole food thing.”

  DeWinter raised one caterpillar-like eyebrow. “As opposed to hooking up with a Class 3 doll? That’s gotta be a heck of a ride.”

  “Heh, yeah.” Joey’s laugh sounded insincere even to him.

  Admitting the storm of emotion that took him as soon as he’d first made eye contact with her in the New Hope center would destroy his persona here, so he went along with DeWinter’s shallow humor. It might’ve been a virtual avatar, but something about her hit him in a place he didn’t think he even had. Nina had developed a reputation as a bit of a hardass, the ‘new girl with something to prove.’ While he couldn’t argue she had a moment or two that lived up to that, the overall image people had of her couldn’t be further from the person inside. Maybe she’d erected a shield around her emotions too.

  Beep.

  “Oh, big surprise, the Mon―” He coughed. “Monster file passed.” Nice. Cleared my queue and it’s only 4:28. He wrapped up the post-analysis report, entertained another brief daydream about owning some drooling fanboy, and hit the key to send the code off to deep storage. Aside from any future need to reference it should the demands of legal proceedings require, Division 9’s copy wouldn’t see the light of day again.

  “You sound almost disappointed,” said Abby. “It’s such a headache when something flags.”

  “That’s the fundamental difference between us.” Joey smiled. “You see this as work. This is what I do for fun.”

  Mindy held up a thumb, but didn’t look back.

  “You people are screwed up. Fun is clear sky, clear oceans, and sixty miles an hour.” Abby leaned back, eyes closed, probably dreaming about personal watercraft again.

  “I see your point. If I had a body like that, I’d probably want to be in a bathing suit as much as humanly possible.” Joey nodded.

  Abby shifted around to look at him with an alluring smile. “Honey, I go to the cove off Sector 1041.” She winked. “No one wears bathing suits there.”

  It didn’t matter if she’d merely said that to tease him or really did frequent the nude beach. He grinned.

  Joey kicked off the cube wall and spun back to face his terminal. Four Grade 9 decks connected in parallel, sleek black rectangular forms that made him think of ‘stealth starships,’ if such a thing existed. Thin lines of dark blue light along the front edge conjured the image of tiny windows in the side of a massive deep-space battleship. Before he’d been hired, he’d have sold vital body parts to get his hands on hardware like this.

  With his queue cleared, he could bug out for the day. Of course, everyone in the room worked on call. If something big hit the fan, they’d all have to come back. But feces to fan blade interaction had been calm as of late. Unfucking what asshat did to Katherine I can do from here… though retribution might be an issue. He eyed the wall to his left, picturing Simon slobbering all over a chance to make trouble for him ‘using official equipment for illegitimate purposes.’ Half of what he wanted to do was legal. The fun part, not so much.

  Joey slid his chair close to the desk and reclined. Two wires with interface plugs extended on motorized arms from the back of the headrest and plugged in to his head. Since taking the job, his implants had undergone a few upgrades. He got the multitasker he’d been lusting after, as well as a second jack. Both of his head ports had been upgraded to M6s, which had an advantage over the M3 in that they contained modular sub-processors that took the load of common, mundane tasks off the deck and left more resources open for the happy stuff. They’d also given him a component that could supposedly block a telepath from eavesdropping on his thoughts. Of course, that one they would take back (by force if necessary) if he ever resigned.

  He figured taking the job worth it since he got to play with major tech and muck around in places he didn’t belong. Sooner or later, he’d have probably wound up like Mindy and been nabbed. Though knowing his mouth, his ass would’ve been in a black bag.

  The plugs snapped home at the same instant and his surroundings shifted in two tenths of a second. He stood in a blank cube of a room with blue grid lines in the gloss black walls. By default, Division 9 techs didn’t use custom avatars as much as the same shadow figure, which he assumed inspired by old ghost-hunting shows. Anyone who he allowed to see him would perceive a vaguely person-shaped suspension of jet-black smoke. Division 9 decks operated on a hidden layer of the GlobeNet. Only other Division 9 hardware―or C-Branch―could sense his presence. Any equipment physically located within the UCF had to be compliant.

  Economies of production often extended the shroud to servers and networks hosted elsewhere, though any serious target within the ACC or ‘non-allied’ nations didn’t support it, leaving them no more hidden than any other user who didn’t belong there. Good thing the Division 9 hardware could smoke most things not made by C-Branch. He swore the military intelligence people must’ve found some kind of alien technology. The ACC might’ve had a four-to-one advantage in numbers, but everything they used followed the doctrine of as cheap as possible.

  Joey pictured the data relay node at the Edmonson Memorial Starport. The cube room faded away to a huge chamber with a building-sized amethyst CPU crystal in the center. Millions of glowing pink-purple orbs of light swarmed around it like fireflies, occasionally pausing for seconds at a time or darting into the crystal. A dull roar reminiscent of a massive waterfall filled the space, emanating from a thick ray of energy that raced away from the crystal’s top point, heading up into the blackness of outer space.

  Teleporting around the net didn’t carry the same thrill it once had, since as a Division 9 Net Ops agent, he had the authority to do so. Of course, he’d been doing it for years already, so what little excitement he once got from it he found easy to overlook. Joey’s shadow body glided upward and grasped a black tube, visible against the backdrop of space only by the absence of stars in its path.

  The restricted military link baffled him. They used advanced versions of the civilian relay equipment with half again the bandwidth, but only supported a fraction of the users. While he had no trouble grasping the idea of a private military conduit
, all that wasted throughput irked him in the way a blind billionaire owning a six million credit hovercar would irk him.

  Okay. Analogy fail. A billionaire wouldn’t remain blind.

  Joey glided across the vastness of space for nineteen seconds before Mars came into view. Ahh, home shit home. The last time he’d seen the place, the government wanted him dead. He raised his arms over his head, and laughed like a fool as he flew down toward the planet’s surface. Black energy fluttered around him, though no wind met his face.

  After landing, he teleported to the primary Mars Defense Force system, Olympus, housed in a server cluster on Tier 1 of Primus City. The network disregarded him entirely. Joey walked down a mirrored steel corridor, sidestepping MDF cybersecurity people going about their day to day. None reacted to him, which had the eerie quality of making him feel like the ghost his avatar resembled.

  While hunting about for the files Grant manipulated to mess with Katherine, he pondered those wild stories of actual ghosts trapped wandering in places for decades and decades after death. Nina claimed to have seen one, and Division 0 had some files that either proved ghosts existed or classified eighteen percent of their people as shit nuts.

  He went to the citizen records and pulled Katherine’s tile. Sure enough, twenty-six entries had all been added within the past month. He traced all but the first two to falsified MDF employee IDs.

  “Oh, Grant… you silly little unicorn. Inventing false police officers is naughty.”

  Joey reached a shadowy hand into his insubstantial chest and extracted a wispy indigo spider with a body as big as his fist. He tossed it to the floor, where it burst into hundreds of copies. They swam out and over the data nodes, replicating until they formed a moving plaque of inky darkness. Each arachnid represented a searcher program sniffing the access logs and buffer memory of every system any connection had taken. That Grant had created, or paid someone else to create, fake MDF officers didn’t worry him at all. Compared to Earth, Mars struggled to keep basic things (like breathable air) operational, and didn’t have the time or the equipment to really throw at cyberspace. Some of the newer places in Arcadia City or the UCF military bases kept up with technology, but hacking the MDF was no more sporting than beating up the kid on crutches. Joey had managed free access to their system before his fourteenth birthday.