Check

These days, you didn't jack anymore.

There was a bar, The Gentleman Looser, were you could still hear stories. Kids wearing

trodes and riding virtual sharks through walls of ICE. Street Samurai guarding the meat-husks

those console jockeys left behind while punching deck. The old-timers spinning those threads of

nothing were five stories above me.

I lay down on the gel mattress of the pod I rented under the wrong part of town. Cold as

the skin of my back sank into its blue form. The pod-hotel was in a converted station of the

London Underground. A lower level of what was once Kings Cross Station. Now, the thorny

crown of the cyber-criminal underworld. The hotel - The Spear - was a haven for those who

needed to step out of their bodies. Business or pleasure.

I thumbed the switch behind my right ear and felt the familiar pins-and-needles slide

along my body until it all went numb. A cold light danced on the inside of my eyelids. Sharp

static. A metallic taste snaked up my throat. My body kept on breathing. The channel changed.

My mind was in Silicon Alley, Manhattan, riding shotgun in the head of my Rnin, Vedrin. The

Shark to my Remora.

Our mark was a fin-tech accountant named Jakob Fgger who worked the books for the

Otsuka-FujiSoft zaibatsu. NTT Data, their largest competitor, needed Fgger's offline ledger so

they could quietly buy out Otsuka-FujiSofts third party suppliers in the hopes of becoming

Japans largest tech giant again. The off-line part was what made this a pain-in-the-ass. I wasn't

into physically breaking and entering, hence why I needed Ved. A low IQ heavy who had a
quantum pouch installed: I could see what he saw, feel what he felt, and pass seamlessly into

any tech within a few meters of his physical location.

* * *

Vedrin stepped out of the elevator on the 27th floor. I could feel him wipe the oil off his

hands with a silk handkerchief. There had been a security drone in the elevator. That idiot

snapped the reinforced titanium shell clean in half. I couldve shut it down fast as thinking.

I know the janitor in the building, the neanderthal grunted. Hell clean it up before

morning.

I hoped that was soon enough.

I phased from his cramped skull to the wall panel by the door of Fggers office. Swam

above the translucent glow of information inside the biometric scanner. Tendrils of light

stretched to a horizon that wasn't there. I dipped my non-form into the digital ooze and reordered

a few segments of the code. If Id had teeth in that moment, I mightve smiled.

The door opened with a pneumatic hiss, and I sensed Vedrins circuitry move into the

room. I phased again to a security camera hidden in a bust on Fggers desk. I flipped 0s and 1s,

quickly erasing the door opening and looping the video in one flourish. Seamless.

I could feel tech all over the room: a warmth without heat. I had never felt this much buzz

in a single room. Bizz, with a life of its own. I sank into a hard-drive and watched 0s being added

to account balances. Jesus.

Vedrin sat down at the desk in the middle of the room and picked up the glass cube that

sat behind the watchful bust. The ledger. I drifted from his fat fingers into the device. An offline

cache like this required a tactile link.

 The code it safeguarded looked more like a tesseract than its physical form. I dove, trying

not to get tangled in the unending fibres of information. Names. Account numbers. Contracts.

Years of sale prices and delivery manifests. I moved to the core of the code, and began weaving a

small node of my own that would link the information to NTTs Tsukuba server. Their techs

would pull the relevant information and my little backdoor would unwind back into the nothing

between lines of code by sunrise. No oil on my hands. To me it felt like hours of work, but time

passed differently in this non-space. Only two minutes of sitting still for Veddy, but Im sure he

was out of thoughts to keep him occupied long before I crawled back up his arm.

There was a chess board set up on the right of the desk; game in progress. I noticed a

move. I over-rode Vedrins control, and borrowed his right arm for a moment. Bishop to C5.

Check. Checkmate in 6 moves. As the piece was set down, I felt drawn to it.

I sunk in, and found myself standing on the ocean floor. Each grain of sand a data node. A

kelp forest of programs reached for a non-existent sky. What the fuck was this?

I felt something coming toward the doors to Fggers office and retreated from what had

seemed to be just a chess board. A moment of static I hadnt expected, and I was back in Ved. I

saw the handle on the large oak door begin to turn just as I flew back to the biometric scanner.

Even with the time dilution, I didn't have time to be delicate. I ripped at the threads of code,

fraying them beyond recognition. I shifted to the camera above the elevator doors: three men,

none as big as Vedrin, but numbers counted for something. Back to Vedrin.

Window, I wrote into his optical readout.

Ryan, I got His sentence was cut short when the door was pulled off its hinges by

Fggers security and three rounds punched through his thick skull.
 I saw what he saw, felt what he felt, but I was alive to dwell on it.

The dull green light inside my pod. I gasped. Back in The Spear. Clawed at my face. It

was whole, but I could feel where Vedrins skull had split. The phantom pain of half a missing

face would haunt me for a long time. I closed my eyes, trying to forget, and I could see kelp,

reaching for a sky that wasn't there. A memory burned into my minds eye?

Standing on the ocean floor, I turned around and saw something new. A nautilus shell.

Then it was a man. Every ratio golden. Too perfect to be anything but artificial. This wasn't

residual. Something had followed me out of the board.

I looked into the cold light of its eyes.

Check, it crackled electric. Check mate in 6 moves.