reMix

Chapter Sixteen TsujiGirl

“In between this moon and you...” Fixx hit a key, disliked what he heard and hit another, wiping his previous edit. He was enjoying himself, which was more than could be said for the kitten.

Ghost bounced into an old-fashioned plastic deck, accidentally trod on a pressure pad and the simulacrum of Ludwig Van Beethoven died mid-chord, replaced by an amphetamined-up Mozart who promptly changed both key and tempo. Fixx didn’t mind too much: he just remixed one into the other and ran a long Ginger Baker drum fill under both.

Currently he had a seventeen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus on keyboard — at least he did now, thanks to Ghost — Goldie was in there on vocals, +N2X was on korg and 303 and Fixx was thinking of using either Lennon and McCartney or the Gallaghers for backing vocals, except he couldn’t find the right file.

Flicking fingers across the deck, Fixx keyed in echo-shredded birdsong and a CySat C3N sound-grab of a tank crushing a barricade in Tashkent. He riffed machine-gun fire with rolling static and looped the lot before Ginger Baker had even finished on snares.

Sweet as honey and with more bloody layers than an over-thick piece of baklava.

Beneath it all was static from deep space, laid over a click track of quasar pulses, and at its heart was coded a fractal equation that turned and twisted on itself, opening sounds out like the petals of a never-ending flower.

LISA was going to love it. Sure, it was five years since he’d had a thing going with LISA but her tastes couldn’t have changed that much. That was the difference between AIs and humans: AIs didn’t have the capacity to make themselves over or drop out of sight. Maybe somewhere an AI had walked out on its job or nipped out to get a six-pack and never come home, but if it had then Fixx had never heard of it.

Sound echoed out of every speaker around him, danced as exploding lines of light across the black glass of a sillyscope. At least, Fixx figured that was what it was before he ripped out its streamers and wired them to the deck’s digital feed.

Back at Sony in the old days, he’d have added vision, something bittersweet lifted from a newsfeed, maybe thrown in some obscure scents, morphed up a tri-D Laura or two. But this wasn’t Sony — it was some fucked-up, cramped, still-damp cabin of an out-of-date Boeing X3 shuttle. And he was running out of time.

“Shit, Ghost, what we going to do?”

The kitten said nothing, Fixx didn’t expect it to. Black and scrawny as an empty purse, Ghost was going to be his good-luck talisman. Sure, anyone else would probably have eaten it, but Fixx prided himself on not being anyone else. That had been the whole basis of his magnesium-brief flash of fame.

Though, looking at the animal retching its guts out, Fixx wondered if it wouldn’t have been kinder just to let Lady Clare cook it. He might be strapped in but the terrified kitten was making the trip in freefall and pellets of cat shit hung in the air like black bees. Having seen the result of doing it once, Fixx was managing to avoid the urge to swat them again.

Okay, party time. Popping his last bubble of paraDerm, Fixx scratched the underside of his good wrist and slapped the patch into position, feeling warmth spread up though his arm. Inside his head, dorphs flooded in, his limbic system kicked up a gear and he forgot completely about his bruised jaw. Bayer-Rochelle had designed the derm to work on unbroken skin, but Fixx couldn’t be bothered to wait around while the analgesic soaked through.

There were three things he needed to do and, as always when Fixx couldn’t crack the priorities, he was busy doing none of them. If he’d been bothered enough, he could have downloaded an MS Routesoft walk-through for Planetside, checked out in advance where the grab happened. But the stop/start jumpiness of commercial VGR made him sick, so he was going to apt his memory instead. The only problem was, to get a current workable remembrance agent he needed access to LISA — and these days it seemed she had more hard armament slapped around her than Paris.

LizAlec was too young to remember black ice, but Fixx wasn’t. It was just a fuck of a long time since he’d done anything about it except talk.

“Ain’t that always the way?” The cat said nothing, just kept on looking sick. Fixx didn’t blame it. Approaching them was the bright side of the Moon, thousands of miles of shit-coloured, pock-marked rock with the occasional crater domed over in water and glass or roofed with earth. It made Paris look good.

Music for LISA, an APTR link for him via a pair of wraparounds, and what for the X3...? Authorization, and quick.

“Up/L youse l/code... ization need now.” The voice from Planetside traffic control was tired and irritated, reassuringly human. “Up/L youse l/code...” Give it another thousand klicks and that voice would be swearing or shouting instructions to Planetside defence control to blow him out of the sky.

Fixx grinned. Fifteen thousand miles back, the voice had been an unheard digital bitstream between his shuttle and the traffic semiAI. Five thousand miles later the voice switched to audible bio. Bringing in a human had only just happened. Fixx could imagine the bio and the trafficAI being seriously hacked off.

He was being tracked, no doubt about it. Had Planetside known he was fresh up from Paris they’d have burnt him swifter than swatting a fly. Even then, with the X3 reconfigured by a particle beam, chances were they’d be too late. For all Fixx knew, viruses had been falling like dust off his X3 even since it came into low orbit. Or maybe they all went belly-up and froze in mid-space. How the fuck was he to know? Drugs and music was his thing, not biologically grounded base-level atomic assemblers.

What he had worked out, sitting with his spewing kitten and the flight console he’d rewired as a mixing deck, was that if the shuttle was infected then he was a plague carrier. It wasn’t a good feeling. On Earth, ferroconcrete buildings tumbled down if they got infected. Up here, craters weren’t going to fall, they were going to blow open, crack apart.

Fucking darkness. Fucking cold.

Hollowed out.

How many ruptured airlocks would it take to gut every tourist in LunaWorld? Fixx didn’t know but he wondered about it, in the bit of his cortex not worrying about bluffing the traffic AI or wondering if LISA really would, after five years, forgive him in return for a piece of baroque, self-writing North African trance. And it was hard not to wonder if Lady Clare really understood she risked condemning an entire arcology to death.

If the answer was yes, then Fixx decided the bitch had to be even more ruthless than LizAlec made out. And suppose it was no? That didn’t make him feel any better.

Fixx came into landing orbit just as the cargo shuttle carrying LizAlec and Lars started its drop to The Arc. They weren’t listed on the manifest. Unless they were on there as assorted animals, because that’s what the shuttle was carrying. At Jude’s suggestion, LizAlec had cropped her hair and wrapped her head in a white cotton headscarf, wrapped tightly around her head and half-covering her face. Unwrapped, she looked like a rich-kid punk for Chrysler, but wearing the scarf LizAlec looked like a tourist-stall Madonna, the kind with a light in the base.

LizAlec knew all about The Arc, she just didn’t know that was where she was going. Leon, the smart-arse boy from CasaNegro who got them on board the Boeing X7, had promised the shuttle was Seattle-bound. He’d lied. But then, back at CasaNegro Jude had reckoned that if the little rich girl really wanted off Luna that badly, it didn’t matter too much where she went. Besides which, the kid would probably do well at The Arc. From what Jude had heard, it was full of spoilt brats trying to simplify their lives.

“L/code... L/code...” The voice at the other end had been reduced to a petulant monotone. Fixx could have called on his ship’s digital intelligence for help with what was going to happen next, but the DI wasn’t talking to him. Not after Fixx’s five-minute rant to Ghost about how Europe had been corrupted by the greed of US-owned metaNationals.

Fixx hadn’t known the X3 had a USAF biocore, an old fly-by-light hand who’d practically begged to be DI’d by Boeing. That had been thirty years before, and from what he gathered the snotty little data intelligence hadn’t been that happy when the USAF sold the shuttle cheap to the French. Which was what happened if you decided to get digital without bothering to read the small print.

“Anyway,” Fixx told Ghost crossly, as the kitten floated past his face, “the fucking fuck’s probably too squeamish to help us anyway...” What came next was definitely illegal and bios were tied to some coded-in moral cut-off, or at least that was the theory.

“Input.”

Fingers flicked over the deck, pulling up blocks of code. Fixx could have used the floating focus on his wraparounds, but he liked the solidity of a screen, the way the blocks flashed into being, even though they only existed as pixels, ghost images of binary life.

Even the Chinese didn’t have an up-front ice-breaker hard enough to crack open LISA. Fixx was trading through as a command and its echo. In the first split second of contact, LISA would reach out for the command and instantly unravel anything not recognized as legitimate, required code. The junk would be stripped out, unread, unaccessed, unravelled like strands of discarded digital DNA.

Not that Fixx wanted to turn the shit-kick rush of on-the-fly coding into the dry waste of some history lesson, but there’d been a time — way back — when the viruses came first and had to be cleaned out. When firewalls existed to limit outside access, not flame incoming viruses in some Web-based auto-da-fé.

There were kids back at Schrödinger’s Kaff who reckoned they could hack anything from the Pentagon to HKS. Fixx had been around long enough to know that for the shit it was.

“And it is, you know,” Fixx told the bedraggled kitten. “Complete fucking cack. And it misses the point...” Which was that the best way to hack a computer was to ask another computer to do it for you. Fixx just hoped LISA still loved him enough to help: and anyway, this wasn’t hacking, it was almost legitimate, at least the second bit was.

Fingers still flicking, Fixx hit LISA’s firewall, dumped the command he’d been constructing and watched the junk code inside it unravel into flashes on the screen. It would look better stacked up as graphics, but he couldn’t afford the distraction.

And as a subset of a subset ate up his Trojan horse, Fixx tried a trick that S3 had bullied and bribed out of some scared, long-dead employee at Annapolis — and then saved until they needed it, which was now.

LISA might be an old US naval AI, fuzzy as all fuck in her logic and rigid in her control parameters, but somewhere down in her core — written over, upgraded, augmented with additional layers of logic until it was almost buried — was a basic BigRedSwitch. The kind that went, if this, then that...

So Fixx clicked it, using legal code, hot-keying himself through without trouble — LISA was that old. “Sweet as pie,” said Fixx, his voice over-loud, but Ghost ignored him anyway so Fixx turned back to his deck. Sliding a series of reassurances in through the trapdoor. He had maybe five per cent of LISA’s attention now. Keying open her trapdoor would have guaranteed that anyway, but he was using old naval commands to smooth the loop. They told the subset currently on watch that Fixx not only knew what he was doing, but that he had a right to do it.

On his screen, the subset patched up half a key and waited. It was happy to wait, anything was better than acting as second back-up to Planetside’s temperature control, which was what it had been doing until called to trapdoor duty. Under the key, Fixx typed a second line, watching as both lines meshed to produce a third.

Fixx grinned.

“Welcome”, said a voice that echoed tinnily out of the flatscreen’s built-in speaker.

“Happy to be here,” Fixx typed back.

“Name?”

“Commander Bond,” typed Fixx. Nothing too senior, nothing too junior, that was the way to go. If the X3’s bio had known what Fixx was doing, it would have hung itself, but it didn’t. Fixx had ripped out its ribbons, cutting its links to the deck. And without that link, the DI was just some jerk’s memory trapped in a box. And if trashing memories was murder, thought Fixx, then half his girlfriends should be behind bars.

“Susan,” announced the voice, introducing itself. “Subset Using...”

“Okay,” said Fixx as the software began reeling off its designation, he got the picture. The voice was American, middle-aged, slightly fussy. Just what Fixx would expect from a subset originally programmed to sell visiting dignitaries on the mythic delights of apple pie, Mom and naval intelligence.

“Can I ask your purpose?”

Fixx thought about it.

“Security,” he said at last, which covered most sins. If you took out politics, religion and commerce, what the fuck was left? Sex, maybe. “Internal security,” Fixx elaborated. “I need cloaking. Nothing elaborate. Just enough to put down at Planetside...”

If the subset could have nodded, Fixx swore it would have done then. Commanders, security, cloaking clandestine arrivals, that was what it had originally lived for. Not as a control routine for a civilian base. As well as temperature, it might monitor radiation, recycling resources and air pressure in the domes, but that didn’t mean it liked the job.

“Cover following,” Fixx said, and a digital squirt carried his life story to Susan. It was heavily edited, obviously. There was the briefest of silences while Susan considered the glorious if unlikely past of Commander Bond. A silence Fixx hurriedly broke before Susan decided to do something stupid like double-check it.

“Please patch me though to LISA...”

“LISA?” The subset sounded doubtful.

“Now, please,” Fixx said firmly before the subset had time to refuse. “I want to talk to Luna Intelligent Systems Analysis.”

“I’m sorry,” Susan said apologetically, “I’m afraid...” The voice stopped. “Oh yes,” it said brightly, “we can patch you through from here.”

Fixx sighed. Give me a lever and I’ll move the Earth: no statement was truer. Even if that Greek guy hadn’t been talking about social engineering.

“This is LISA.” The voice was non-personal, efficient, not as he recalled her. And then Fixx remembered that she didn’t know who he was. All the same, Fixx felt his stomach knot up and sweat break out under his arms. He hadn’t felt like this since he was thirteen, waiting on the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin for that girl who never showed up.

“That you, sweetie?” Fixx said, less calmly than he would have liked. Silence blossomed as absolute as any shutdown. Seconds later Fixx began to breathe again.

“Fixx?” LISA sounded somewhere between shocked and hopeful. At least she did to Fixx, though he feared he might be imagining it. That level of emotional nuance hadn’t been programmed into language back when she was commissioned.

“Yeah,” said Fixx, looking at the screen. “It’s me and I need your help.”

LISA sighed, the kind of sigh that said, What’s new?

“I need to land.”

“Then get clearance.” LISA sounded puzzled.

“Like I wouldn’t if I could...”

LISA tutted. When she spoke again LISA sounded more maternal than romantic. “I don’t want to know where you’ve come from, do I?”

“No,” said Fixx firmly. “You don’t. What you want to do is get me down quietly, discreetly.”

“Really?” LISA’s voice was amused. “I can think of three good reasons why that’s a bad idea.”

Fixx could think of a hundred but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

“One, I don’t know where you’ve been. Two, you’re a shit. And three, if you can remember that court settlement, you shouldn’t even be talking to me. In fact, I should stop this conversation now. Unless there’s a good reason why not...?”

So Fixx told LISA all about LizAlec, well, everything except the bits involving him. But she was smart enough to put those in for herself. And then just to sweeten the hook Fixx pumped through StarGlazz. Not honey-wrapped but as raw machine code. And then he fed through his famous fractal equation, the one he’d stumbled over as a fifteen-year-old deckjock, wired to fuck, hacking hell out of a Segasim mixer in a cellar club called Infinite Spiral at the back of Temple Bar. He’d gone from street kid to syndication on seven continents, three orbitals and most of Luna inside a year. No wonder he hadn’t been able to hack the lifestyle.

“Well,” Fixx said, when he figured LISA had worked out that if she fed the music through the equation then StarGlazz might run for several years. “Are you going to help me?”

LISA thought about it, ran through several thousand alternatives, reduced that to slightly less than a thousand and took the most unlikely. Fixx didn’t even notice she’d been gone. “Twenty-four hours,” LISA said firmly. “Then you leave, okay?”

Fixx grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Twenty-four hours. I promise.”

LISA didn’t tell him she already knew where LizAlec had gone.