Revenge for Lychee

  First published on Amazon Kindle in October, 2017.

  All rights, including photographs, belong to the author.

  This is a work of fiction and should not be perceived as an encouragement to commit crime of any sort. All similarities with anyone living or dead are coincidental and certain liberties have been taken at altering history, slightly as well as very much.

  Mature content, including but not limited to sex, violence and swearing. Reader’s discretion is advised.

  Terms and lingo explained in the last chapter.

  Revenge for Lychee

  by Aies Jay

  Wired; verb: being hooked up to the System software world

  noun: used to describe hacker or person that surgically grafted computer implants into the body, most often jacks to connect the brain directly to said System or Wire

  anno machina 3037

  I saw something today in the System and I can’t make peace with it. So I thought I’d drink until I forget it. Problem is, it’s the only thing I can’t seem to forget. The bartender, a kid of barely twenty with a terrible hairdo, seems to know that as well and pours generously as I point at my empty glass once more.

  -On the house, old man.

  I don’t even snort, I’m used to being called that. I’m considered old here, even if I’m just thirty-two. Most people on Scorpio 2 don’t live past their twenties. Why? Because as you pass twenty-one you pass your chance of becoming a Ghost in the Machine. So the legend goes. Every single hacker here, about thirty percent of the population, with only a scarce few exceptions, believes that. Some aim to become the Ghost, some don’t. Those who don’t are considered cowards or not dedicated enough to the trade by their peers. Fuck the fact that no one ever found any hard evidence that anyone of the kids that ever tried to become a Ghost succeeded. I grab the glass half-heartedly and take a deep swig of the blue, bitter sweet alcoholic liquid. I haven’t passed my limit yet as far as alcohol goes, but all other limits are passed since long. My life is technically over, my body is just too stubborn to admit it. Yun didn’t want to go on after Lychee died. She did what she’d sworn she’d do before twenty-one all her life before meeting me. She hooked herself up to the System, shoved in all the cords she could fit in her jacks, and after turning her Gate on she shoved a rusty nail into the electric socket in the wall as the System opened for her. Her note was as unsentimental as I could expect. “See you on the other side of the Cryptation”. The thin wall called the Cryptation that separates us from software, more or less this fragile, meaty world of hardware and flesh, which technically speaking is the language and creation barrier of programming, was by that either forever passed by her, or the dream of it had eaten her alive. Every day I ask myself why I don’t follow. I suppose it’s the System. In there, I can still find peace. Like all self-respecting hackers, I only feel truly alive in there. Lychee… it hurts just to think of him. He felt more real than the System, something I didn’t even think was possible, but now his existence is just an evil dream. Our baby boy didn’t even get to live a full year. He started coughing on a Sunday. By Wednesday and a lot of credits later, the doc told us he’d died in his sleep by suffocation. We were annihilated. Literally. It took a few months for reality to update the state of us but it did soon enough. Yun gave the Ghost a go, I just died inside and hid in the arms of the System and so I have since then. End of story. Or so I thought.

  I’ve lived on Scorpio 2 for as long as I can remember but I know I wasn’t born here. The memories of my parents are scant, and some of them probably aren’t they’re real at all, they’re so fuzzy. Maybe they’re just a mix of the movies or TV shows I’ve seen as a child, made up into memories by my restless mind that wanted a happy start. They say Scorpio 2 was originally one of the Arcs during the Exodus when humanity left Earth. Fuck if I know. To me it’s a soaring city of emptiness, tumbling through space with about a million flesh puppets like me trying to forget that we’re all going to die someday the best way that we can. The trajectory changes according to the wishes of the management, led by the President of this fine little almost-republic. The President is a hacker too, the finest to be had. Every year he- or she- holds a Tournament where the winner gets a price of a lifetime. I participated in my youth a few times, before I passed that magical twenty-one. You can’t participate after that, and the President resigns after he turns twenty-one, unless he’s beaten on the Tournament, in which case, the new kid takes the title, should he qualify for the job. It’s part of the rules of Scorpio 2, and almost everyone here is a Stygian, more or less devoted. It’s a weird religion and I don’t claim myself to it, never did. Worshipping the land of the dead just feels… I don’t know. It’s all in all a depressing faith, putting all their stock in the afterlife, which really isn’t that much to look forward to either. Be good, and cross the river Styx to live like a content ghost without any memories. Be bad, get stuck in the river and drown forever along with the unbelievers. Be really bad, and the Oarsman will hand you to the demons beyond and they’ll torture you forever. Not much to worship, if you ask me. I mean, I get the whole “if there is a soul it must be software since it can only be information and no hardware” bit, but the rest I don’t get at all. If I ever worshipped anything, I worshipped the System. The Grid. The Net. The Wire. Hallelujah, say it with me. Everything from the smaller pond of the Gate Systems belonging to planets or Scorpio 2, S2 for short to any native citizen, to the giant GalactiNet, the oceans and rivers of endless information, with everything from educational to entertainment info, give it to me, right here. I have never left S2 in physio but through the System I have travelled the Universe. As a hacker I’ve always stuck my nose where it didn’t belong, coming across info so mind boggling it’s too absurd to even compare to any kind of truth, played games while they’re still in development, read books that weren’t even finished, spoken to hackers I will never see the face of and taught a lesson or three to assholes that didn’t know who they were messing with. I was just as crazy as the other kids here before my life was rendered to shreds by the death of a small infant. I used to make programming and ware like most wouldn’t dream, I even came fifth place in the last Tournament I hit before my twenty-one. I was so devoted, full of joy and carefree, even if my parents left me behind when I was still a child and was put through a childhood of continuous insecurity after that. Yun became my compass IRL and I loved her as she loved me. Not like adults do, like we said, but for real. That didn’t stop her from trying to Ghost without me. With her, the last fire in me died. I just go on. Maybe I’m still in shock. The System keeps me alive.

  The software world on the other side of the Cryptation, the System, the Wire, say it with me, offers me comfort, order and freedom. It’s like flying. I have no identity there, I’m no longer Jeremy Star, the man with the rumpled sweatshirts and chinos, who buzz cuts his hair as soon as it’s long enough of a sand coloured frizz to grab, weak in body and ordinary in stature who hardly can remember the original colour of his eyes anymore, with a perpetual nine o’clock shadow. I’m Lionfish, my Avatar, and all my skills, not this fleshy matter of pathetic man. I usually don’t go out drinking after work since the System offers me all the pain relief and dulling I need, plus it’s hard to hack while blurred. I just go home to my tiny pad and crash into bed. I sold almost everything after Yun died… sold it to the local Buy N’ Trade or gave it to charity. What the hell would I need now? I need my Gate, my computer, my cords to stick in my jacks to connect, and that’s it. I prefer the Gate at my work, though. The one at home is like an old friend that has seen too much and knows me too well. The one at work is a colleague, a feeling, living thing like any Gate is to a hacker, but just a colleague. Maybe the humans felt this way about their service animals, li
ke police dogs or horses, back in the day when the animals weren’t Synthetics. All animals with a beating heart we see today that we don’t eat, and they too are still very damn few, cost of tens of thousands of creds for the tiniest creature, unless they were bought on a less than white market. It would take me less than a week to truly mourn the loss of that Gate, to be short. After work I go home, shower, drink Pro-Tea-n’ Juice, eat some Wheelie Biscuits and go to sleep. After that, two tubs of coffee, and then work, Asian food from the hole in the wall restaurant across the street for lunch, then home again, home again, repeat, repeat, repeat.

  It’s easy. Painful at occasions, but easy, and I’ve almost grown to getting used to it. I don’t believe in the Ghost anymore. I’ve met hackers so good they type faster than they think and so skilled they can hack just about any damn thing, swipe and screech faster than the top security can even notice the breech, that have taken a bath with their Gates in their arms, and there’s no sign of them in the System. I have looked, believe me, mostly for the guy who ended up raising me in the end and for Yun, of course, but no sign of any one of them, so I just can’t make myself try to cross the river Styx for that anymore, twenty-one or not. I just live, my little grey existence. Eat, sleep, work, repeat. Hide in the System. The thing is, I just can’t today. Not after what I saw. And somewhere in my heart, my grief is screaming, turning into rage.

  never untell

  Hancry’s wild dreadlock hairdo comes into my view before he does. His left eye needs surgery, the silica screen is coming undone from the tissue. Knowing his hours, I know I’m way up past my bedtime and so does he. We used to hang once, but lost contact since our friends in common drifted apart or died. We still talk, still nod at each other in a street, but that’s as far as we go. I’m surprised he’s approaching me at all. I really must look like shit. He sits down next to me with his eyebrows high, ordering a drink and then asking me the obvious

  -The fuck you doing up at this hour?

  He’s an old hacker, like me. He doesn’t believe in the Ghost either. He used to be a Stygian but lost his faith when his twin brother committed the Step, as Ghosting is called by the dedicated Stygians, without him, and then never checked in. Hancry tried to kill himself the old fashioned way after that, mixing drugs and punching guys twice his size for about a year. Now he’s one of the black market anti-reject drug pushers, an eye for business and a wallet of steel. He specializes his business in going into the harbour and selling to the kids who lie there, their bodies unconscious with cred chits clamped in their hands, that has waited for too long to get a hit. Maybe because he couldn’t save his twin, maybe to have people owe him their lives, I honestly don’t know, but he claims it’s good business. He sells a lot of hits at a time and there’s no fussing about the price. I suppose you get affordable deals as a customer anyway when your salesman never pays much for his stuff.

  -Thinking.

  I answer him, my voice a dry croak. He pokes at one of my jacks and I flinch at his touch.

  -Get off me.

  -You need a hit.

  I probably do. They’ve been itching lately and I can’t remember last time I took my anti-rejects. Company policy is that I get a check-up once every three months. I hacked the records the first week of my employment and put a worm in there, telling them once a cycle of 28 days I’ve had my check-up punctually and keep the money the firm gives me to cover the bill. I dig out one of my cred-chits.

  -How much?

  -How much do you need?

  -How much do you figure?

  He snorts.

  -Five.

  -I’ll have two.

  -Take three, at least.

  -Two.

  He sighs and shakes his head at me, digging out an ampule with three shots in it. He loads it into the syringe gun and hands it to me.

  -I’m only paying for two.

  I say and put the gun to my elbow crease. The little machine beeps when I hit the right spot and a sharp pain in my arm followed by a strange warmth tells me I’ve taken my essential vitamins. If I take it regular, I need two hits at a time for the amount of surgery I have but I never do.

  Two hits per week is standard for a guy my size with my amount of implants. I used to be so careful as a kid, knowing that waiting too long could kill me or worse, warp the implants and make them malfunction. These days? Every two weeks, if I’m up for it. The mini Gate with the extra memory bank inside my head, called a QA, Quick Access, that’s basically just enough to read mails and make connections to my main Gate I hook up to, is my biggest implant. After that I have my retina screens, three jacks and a com link, plus the QA adapter to be able to dictate mail in the quick access by the com link. That one is slow as hell though, and uses a lot of power so I preferred my old wrist Gate for that job if I have to but I rarely needed it. I’m usually in front of a proper one if I’m not on the move. I would have updated the quick access as well as the com link a while ago if I’d cared enough to go into surgery but I don’t. I plan it but never book an appointment. I had a wrist Gate, not an implant but one of those things on a bracelet, but it shorted on me and I ripped it for parts. All in all pretty below standard for a hacker but like I said, the fire inside me died, the flame with Lychee and whatever embers where left with Yun. Hancry takes the syringe gun back.

  -Cheapskate. Pay up.

  I hand him my chit and he charges me for two shots. His eyes roam over me, my rumpled clothes, my unshaven chin but most of all at the wrinkles in my face. The screens I surgically had grafted to my retinas are bioware, the finest of the finest, but it seems that itches tonight as well even if it technically shouldn’t. Maybe it wasn’t bioware after all. I’d never used that cyber doc before and I’m not using him again. He was stingy with the knock out gas and stingy with the painkillers, too.

  -Fuck’s wrong with you?

  I stare into the boo-yonder.

  -I’m not sure.

  -Yes you are.

  -I didn’t see a Ghost if that’s what you’re asking.

  The bartender puts Hancry’s drink down in front of him and he lights up a splicer, smoking it until it glows blue. The smell of synthetic tobacco reminds me of burning plastic. Behind us, someone does something that earns the cheers of half the bar. The whole thing goes unnoticed by us.

  -Then what did you see?

  I swallow. I finish my drink and try to forget my son’s birthday and how old he would have been today. The eleventh of Sept, a year and two months. Shit, the numbers come even if uncalled for. I pawned my wedding ring the day after Yun tried to Ghost herself, angry as hell with her for abandoning me. I’ve regretted it ever since.

  -Hey? Lionfish?

  I snort at the sound of my old hacker name. I used to rank in the top ten in my Community, as the scoreboards go, over all the games, programming skills and the intrusion levels I broke. Like I said, I was devoted. The guy ranking two became President but he’s gone since long, he got hit by black ice and it short circuited his body and stopped his heart. There was no reviving him. Number one tried to Ghost, unsuccessfully.

  -I’m not that guy anymore.

  -Yes you are. Want me to prove it?

  I shrug.

  -Sure.

  -What’s your username at the company? What’s your name in the System? What does your Avatar look like and when did you last hack?

  I almost giggle. He got me, hard.

  -Fuck you, Ch1na.

  I snort, using his hacker name that he hasn’t used since his twin died. He laughs back at me, knowing full well who I am, even if we don’t frequent the same Portals, or forums as the old name went. His brother called himself J4pan. Not even a twin brother keeping you from Ghosting, that must be tough as shit. So is losing wife and child. The difference is, I still hack. Hancry just pushes drugs. I have no idea what that entails, really, but it seems he copes a lot better than me. He’s had longer time to sift it but personally I feel like I’ll never sincerely laugh again. His teeth shine in the dark, a
stark contrast of white against his darker skin. His coat smells of chemicals and real, worn leather.

  -You can’t escape me. I asked you a question and the way you’re dodging it makes me beyond curious. What did you see?

  I shake my head. I want to get up, wish him goodnight and go home. The itching is already abating around my jacks. Ch1na always had the best stuff.

  -Where do you get your goods?

  -Pirates, where else? Stop stalling. What did you see?

  I take a deep breath.

  -It wasn’t a Ghost.

  -Then what was it?

  I give him a tired look, realizing I am stalling. I don’t want to say it.

  -If I tell you, there’ll be no turning back, you realize that? Not only will you know, but I’ve said it out loud too, and I’ll never be able to deny it. Ever.

  The right corner of his mouth curls.

  -Tell me.

  The fire inside me takes another quickening breath as I do.

  for the love of destruction

  The Site, or Portal, that I hit most often in the System from my old hacker days is called Axorpa. It’s my old waterhole that I keep returning to for more or less no other reason than feeling at home there and no one knows me by any other name except Lionfish there, a vending and gossiping site more or less. You can get almost anything of software there, all of it swiped or made by hacker programmers such as me, and all for free. The only rule on Axorpa is that you put in at least as much as you take out, and at least five things a year, be it swiped ware, documents, codes or backdoors to Gate Systems, bootleg music and film or even fat secrets such as the raw unfinished programming of the next H model. They are the AIs of this modern age that replaced sex dolls, lovers, butlers, security guards and secretaries all in one, depending on what model you prefer. An H model can also come on special order to look like whatever you want, for the one encumbered with too much money. I myself never owned one but I heard the current President has four of them, all hotted up by his own personal handmade ware. We’re literally making ourselves and each other redundant with those H models, currently going on number eight, the H9s currently under designing process. But never mind that, now. I was talking about Axorpa.