Spycraft, 2475 A.D.

A Nocturne from Where Eagles Dare...

Art by Kevin John Jacob | Layout Design by Spookitty

It’s been said what worries you, masters you, and to that end I’ve managed to suppress all trepidation within me. I walk the nights without fear, without the cloud of nerves fogging the mind, and in my field, that clarity is of paramount importance.

My name is Roger Steele, my profession is reconnaissance, and my target: the Artificially Controlled Eco-System. Chiefly where it’s housed, though I’d love to step inside the network itself should the opportunity arise, to see this grand architect of all-consuming control up close. And to say I’ve come close on occasion is no exaggeration.

It all started at the tail end of February, rolling into March, year of our Lord 2475. I was in deep, deep as you could get and as deep as the Force had ever been. I had taken up grunt work in the Tower Network. 100-something stories of 100-something towers of pure electric nonsense holding up that big beautiful dome that worked the city thermostat like a Swiss watch. Months ahead we had talked about organizing an “accident” before realizing all the headache would do was give the citizenry some much-needed Vitamin D. So here I was, normally the duke of the ball, dressed in overalls and spinning a wrench on the off-chance dear old Ace needed a hand. As if.

At least, that’s what I would say if she was in good health. We had been made aware of peculiarities in the city since 2455 or so. Reports of inexplicable phenomena like the 607 Incident in ‘59, the results of which the boys back home are still sorting out, even a decade on. Then there was the curiously weakened state of the border. The restorative nanotech had once made the comically inadequate chain-link fence no better than a titanium wall, and yet here we were cutting it open like scissors through cloth. The common denominator in these revelations, the vigilante Lita Ridgefield, and the closest thing I got to a mole in this derelict dumpster of a town, was the one who knew who to point to and get me the gig through the front door. The right forgers, the right wardrobe, and the right tower.

Tower 8X, one of the largest staffed. New faces weren’t uncommon, and they cycled employees on a bi-weekly basis. I popped in during the changing of the guard. It was on my first week that the lay of the land was made plain as could be. Monitor stations on each floor, keep guard over the coverage levels on Haven’s great big bubble. Historical records showed 95% as the standard production of coverage on each tower. The birth of old Ace in 2376 set the network to 100% on all towers.

The new standard was 89%.

She was, indeed, growing weaker, as we had been suspecting. Still perfunctory, still functional, but something was slipping the old girl up. Playing coy, I asked around if the rate was unique to 8X or if certain towers were pulling weight to even out the coverage. And all answers were the same: 89% was the new standard.

Only mildly exciting thing about it were the keyboards we used. Fifty billion buttons, the big red one being your thumb’s anchor in the whole tableau. Neat trick I was taught was that you could lock off functionality to keep from interfering with A.C.E.S, rendering it a sort of microtonal piano to play on. If I ever got deathly bored, I locked it off and pulled a melody out of thin air. Didn’t matter whose, sometimes a little Coltrane, sometimes a little Mozart, sometimes Schoenberg which went over like a cancer cure. Lord knows why, but hey, at least they were hip to the tunes. Also kept me calm and “out of trouble.”

One guy who I found rather fascinating was a monitor for the first floor. Had to be because the poor chap was in a wheelchair and his rig was too wide for the elevator. I got dropped down to the first and gigged with him. Name was Glenn Deighton. A nice Joe Schmo gray, took everything life flung at him in good humor. Asked why the wheelchair and not augs, and he simply shrugged and said “figured it was more fun this way, the challenge.” Never did tell me what put him in there. Offered him a drink after our shift, which he was quite enthusiastic about. Even invited me back to his pad for another round after he hit the gin-joint of choice; Spanner’s. Biggest shock was an upright piano in the back, no piano roller or automation to speak of. The cat had my curiosity, now he had my friendship.

I played a few bars of Mingus, swung some of Mahler’s 2nd (sacrilege I know, but I’d been playing it straight all my life), but like in 8X, the piano was one of my touch points in the business. Something to unwind with, to keep you grounded, but thinking. It also entertained the host who had invited me.

When we made it to his apartment, I found quite the peculiarity; his module was busted to hell and back. And it looked like he was the one who had taken the liberty. “Tried everything to get it back online.” he said, rolling up to the synthesizer in the apartment kitchen. “Kept sending for the repair boys, but they are quite backed up these days, requests out the ass, mouth and ears.”

“Must be nice, all that peace and quiet.” I chuckled. “Not having the damn thing squawking your schedule every millisecond.”

That’s when we knew we were both on the level. I kept all the cards close to my chest safe for the discontentment of a frustrated citizen. He, seemingly guarded and unguarded all at once, idly mentioned “friends” who he was hoping could lend him a hand in “fixing a few things around here.”

“Need a hand?” I asked. We shook on the deal right then and there.

Ah yes, but how were they to “fix” things? The top question to ask. The answer: access codes. Not just one, two, or ten; fifty. A 50-code strand to get into the network. Not control nor a true court with the electric goddess, but a door into that strange, seemingly impenetrable dimension. A chance to rifle through the greatest operating system in the world’s history, and if lucky, maybe sneak a few previews of future military action. It was a stretch, but the greatest strength and weakness of this point in Haven’s history was desperation, that great grabbing of straws to find some way of at least salvaging the situation. A situation that left the populace in its own, strange lucid state. The memories of a golden age, now long since thrown to the wind for reasons no one was allowed to know.

Everything appeared alright, but the failure of various services, various technologies regarded as integral, was painting a different portrait that everyone could sense. They felt in their apartments and on the crime-riddled streets, streets left to rot as the automated arms of the law focused solely on the vocal opponents of the system, regardless of the nature of their complaints.

The how was explained to me quite clearly: he had his own inside gal, one “Damita Jo” who he fashioned a makeshift data drive tucked behind her ears. It worked wirelessly, siphoning codes from potential access points. She was purportedly a White Coat, so she’d be right in the belly of the whale, copying the seven-digit keys to the kingdom. I never had the privilege to meet her beyond a five-inch photograph he kept on his desk in a shabby private office where he did his tinkering. The office was one of the job’s perks, a luxury afforded to those working for the state in any capacity, seeing as more and more of the citizenry were willing to bite the hand meant to feed them.

Once she had finished the fetch-quest, he took the drive, made a dupe, and would hand it off to me. Or rather that was the original plan before I let Lita and Knox in. They didn’t like the directness of it all, a partial distrust of this surprise ally and the thought of me sticking my neck out this far on a gamble. Deighton was still chipped in some capacity, meaning he kept an interior log of conversation. He swore up and down he severed his link to the network though, and after a preliminary scan, I was convinced. They also didn’t take kindly to the retort that risk in this business is like air; you need it to survive.

Instead, we opted for a chain. Upon duping, he handed it off to one of Lita’s boys, Mulligan, a veteran of The Avenger’s Creed she had set up years ago, then to her, then to me after which I would access the network via remote terminal outside the city so I could book it if things got hot. I acquiesced; after all, you can’t go over the handlers’ heads. Unfortunately.

It was a month before Damita Jo had her bag. I had taken to the usual thumb-twiddling, and in the evenings, ivory-tickling to pass the time by while waiting on Deighton and his dame. We kept a healthy distance from each other on the day shift and only spent a few nights at Spanner’s in each other’s company.

When Damita finally came up for air, it wouldn’t be without a rough-up. Someone knew and someone knew enough to try and open her up. They had beat the bitch up something fierce, but Deighton’s trick of engineering paid off; the drive went undetected. And for as cruel a world as Haven could be, they couldn’t quite afford to lose a staffer for WCC. Once let go, she made her rendezvous with good old Glenn and disappeared. She’s probably out in the desert now as we speak.

From there, the dupes were made, but the fellow made Mistake #1: he tried them on for size. Swears his terminal was encrypted, but encrypted terminals don’t make headlines in Comm/Ent. They also don’t kill the middle-link of the chain.

STATE DEFECTOR DEAD? went the slug on the news flash, old Mulligan’s black-furred mug right next to it, some bogus charge of “interfering in food synthesis.” The drive never came.

Naturally, I paid Deighton a visit, dressed in the old leather jack and black ensemble. Certainly gave him a start when he opened the door. Said I blended into the evening shade to perfection, safe for the gray fur. I simply smiled that warm, friendly smile we had shared during our time in the Tower Network. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to play him a dead man’s rag.

We met in his office, and he told me everything I’ve noted here, but with a few extra details, namely what he found in the network itself. He dropped the discount private eye routine and got on the level; he believes something’s alive in there. Something other than A.C.E.S. I thought he was officially off his rocker, but he did try to make it up. He started scrawling out the codes from memory. Jotted two out, but soon, he began to hear a knocking sound. I calm him down, he gets another two out and off he goes bitching about the knocking. And now I’m left with that sweet, sinking feeling that I had put my faith in a hound who wasn’t playing with a full deck.

Halfway through Code 7, he drops dead. The electric snap was a familiar sound, that of an informant’s chip frying. Guess he reconnected during his peak inside Pandora’s box without knowing. Over-under was five minutes before the fools rushed in, so I dove through every drawer and snatched up every storage unit he had on him and in the office. Even though he had given the drive an “acid bath” to kill the forensics trail on Jo, the little man tying knots in my gut told me he still had it. It was a hunch, but hunches had worked out before. And the dumbass was dead anyway, so what the hell, why not?

On Minute Four, I swung out the back door, just as they hit the front. Like a dope, I had parked my ‘69 Charger a block down. But like a part-time genius, I at least kept the wristcom on me. One press of the recall button and that black beauty came screaming up the alley for me. I threw the box of tech in shotgun-side, hit the gas, and spent the next ten shaking off the synthetic fuzz they keep in charge.

Lita and I had been playing a game of who could waste more autocops in a single run. I was going up against a 20-year champion, but we weren’t counting her whole decades-long bombing run to the leader-board. I would’ve made a neat little score this time, but it wasn’t quite past curfew, meaning civilians could get hurt, which left me playing the old lead foot waiting game; stay moving longer than they can stay chasing.

Sure enough, they gave up the ghost and my ride and I were home free. I cruised to the darkest corner of the Eastern District, parked, and whipped open the mobile terminal from the back seat. Time was of the essence, and I imagine A.C.E.S. would work overtime to geo-locate anyone who could break in the way Deighton had, and his materials. It was among all the useless photographs, idle animations made on his terminal, whole terabytes worth of junk that I found it. The original.

I matched the first six codes of the strand, and the tip of what he had started before being so rudely interrupted. Queued up the procedure to generate an access point, ran all 50, tapping that étude out in a fit of high-tech Lisztomania, and then…I saw it. Saw exactly what he had seen.

The head of a white wolf, with red eyes. Not photo-real, more a piece of simple graphic design. At first I thought I was handed a virus, but no, that was the face. The Face. The face of modern tyranny, rendered in crisp fashion, and sat in my lap. I did all the idle snooping I could, probing daily procedure and propaganda regimes to be run in Comm/Ent. Even got sneak previews of the latest “Amalgam Pictures” that the network had thrown together, haphazard grafting of tropes and aesthetics for the merriment of a dwindling audience.

But in the background, something was being said. In tough-to-crack, bit-crushed tones, something was verbalized:

TANGO ECHO, LIMA LIMA, MIKE ECHO.

Tell me.

What the hell the most sophisticated computer on the planet was doing using the old NATO phonetic alphabet was beyond me. And what it wanted me to tell it was another million-dollar question without an answer. My gaze drifted towards that vague wolven face that had greeted me upon entry into the network.

It was changing.

Its eyes were green now. Then red. Then green again. I took it as a loading timer, until it came to fill the screen. It hung there for a good five seconds before bashing typing a phrase out at the base of the head:

INDIA NOVEMBER, HOTEL ECHO, ROMEO ECHO, WHISKEY INDIA, TANGO HOTEL, HOTEL ECHO, ROMEO.

In here with her.

With Ace it seemed. Before I could even reply, the screen tore to black, pixelating into nothing. With the same electric snap that befell Deighton, the terminal died a sudden death in my lap. Whoever was in there wanted to talk. And whoever was in there, Ace had found them. And this terminal.

I put a round from the Mauser in it for good measure and left it junked in the alleyway. Explaining the situation to Lita and Knox was like speaking first-year Latin to your priest; some of it gets through to them, but the rest gets jumbled by your own inadequacies. In my case, inadequate knowledge.

Against my better judgment and my own obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, I decided to bring all the micro-drives and storage units back with me, not just the one with the access codes. I hadn’t finished blasting through them once I got my hands on the crown jewel, so I figured Nic’s boys could do with some scavenger hunting as a consolation prize.

I did keep one file though; he had made a five-minute piece, set to a busted recording of “In a Sentimental Mood” on an electric piano. Soft, lush gradients against a warm, quarter-tone down-tuned take on an old favorite. He was a nice fellow, just a little too eager for his own good. Maybe after we take it all over, my retirement project can be curation. He made some work worth displaying amongst all that dreck.

Now for the godforsaken sum-up: if what worries you masters you, then I’ve finally found something to worry about. Not just a sprawling, all-controlling, all-powerful yet seemingly deteriorating operating system that held the lives of millions within a delicate balance, but now a rogue agent somewhere in its depths.

Malign, benign, it doesn’t really  matter. She’s been breached. And the only thing worse than knowing the face of this electric goddess was knowing that she’s not alone in there.

And yet, I sit here, months after the ordeal, and no answers. Not even a lead. My cover was never blown at 8X, but after a while, any possible in-roads were sealed shut by the oldest trick in the book: indifference. No one cared enough to stir the pot nor about the job itself. It was all just watching numbers and checking energy conduits. And jacking into the cyber-metric data display only gave me those same stupid numbers and that same stupid 89% standard.

It was right around then that things were beginning to pop off in other sectors of the city. Protests were more vitriolic, organized movements with colorful names like “Stop the Bots” and “Haven Reformation.” My money was on most of them being feds, laying the cheese on the city block-sized mouse trap. We’ve all agreed to let it play out before we make any moves.

I’m making this log on my drive back to Base. Lita and Adam figured it best to ferry me out while the homegrown chaos agents turned all the heads. Everything’s wrapped in a nice, lead-lined package, safe from any electric bullshit, and in the meantime, I’ll try and put five pieces of this thousand-piece jigsaw in some sort of order. Such is spycraft in the year 2475.

Agent Steele, signing off.