Long Live

She had a favorite room in the public stem closest to her apartment. It was narrow, but the walls were covered with cloth and the dash was all lit in red, and the kick they gave you there always went down gentle as a lamb. It had a soothing, homey feel, the kind she might arrange if she had a room of her own.

All a girl needed in life, or so they said: a room of one’s own.

But Rexa didn’t have that sort of credit, and the room in the close-by stem was for pleasure, not business. For business she kept on the move, and on that last day she chose a stem downtown, riverside, that had larger rooms but more stark and gray décor. As Rexa set up her deck, she reflected that she liked the extra space, but the place had no romance; it lacked imagination.

A lack of imagination, in Rexa’s opinion, was the world’s greatest malaise.

Once she was plugged in, deck to dash and sensors to skin –and she needed to go full-body for this job—she sat waiting to be greenlit and checked over her programs one last time. Silver, green, and red, the reasons she called this job “Christmas” in her head, all fit neatly into the top of her deck (never the dash ports; her deck had its own mask for public plug-ins). She had to touch them each before she was satisfied, and brushed her fingertips lightly over a blue cartridge resting half in her deck’s side port. At last the light came on the dash blinking once—she sat back in her chair. Twice—she closed her eyes and breathed deep. Three times—there was a faint buzzing sound, and the grid rose up around her.

***

For this job, she needed live bait. Her mark met her at the edge of an actualization of the stacks, here arranged as rooftops, towers separated by long and shadowy drops. He wore a knight done up head-to-toe in black lacquered armor; she wore an impossibly large tabby cat, not an anthro but the actual animal scaled up, with the mouth animation outfitted for speech movements. It looked exactly as disconcerting as she had hoped.

“Hello sir,” she said, mouth stretching in the too-wide smile the animation mod allowed. “Are you ready to begin your journey?” The cat came with a naturally arch, crisp voice that begged for a little theater.

“Don’t speak unless you have to,” the knight said quickly. “Lead the way.” The deep, gravelly voice he put on evened out any tremor in his tone, but Rexa had already hacked his vitals. His heart rate was through the roof, and she smiled even wider at him just to watch the feedback from his eyes twitching.

“As you wish,” she said, and took off.

The silver cartridge laid out their path, shifting the stacks beneath their feet. They tunneled under all the appropriate channels without a hitch, allowing her to keep one idle eye on her mark’s feed. The knight was in reality seventeen, and considerably less muscular than the skin he wore on the grid. He reminded Rexa fondly of her first job, back when she was in school: the destruction of Eurolink’s biggest game server. They never fully got it running again, which was a point of pride for her, but she had since realized the job had been a waste of her time. Taking toys from children no longer interested her.

The kid she led through the stacks, however, wasn’t looking to play games. She didn’t know why he wanted access to local police records—to erase some youthful misdeed, if she had to guess—but she had no intention of leading him there. He stuck close, clueless, sensing only that everything in this corner of the grid smelled official.

“Are we there yet?” he whispered, the knight’s voice brought down to a rasp.

“Just about!” Rexa said, and in some suburban stem just north of the city, a gaunt young man flinched at her volume.

The silver came to a close and the green came online, walking them in place while the shunt loaded. They stood before—or, to the knight, seemed to approach—one of the world’s most brutal security systems, but the knight had no way of knowing that. Rexa could tell that he scarcely dared to breathe as it was, intimidated by the mere sight of the set of soaring crystalline green towers with pulsing blue forcefields between them, stretching as far as the eye could see.

The green interrupted Rexa’s amusement to inform her that the shunt had successfully loaded. She turned abruptly and gave the knight the most ghastly, glorious grin the cat could muster, calling as the shunt took them:

“Many thanks for the escort, dear sir.”

And they say chivalry is dead, Rexa thought. The knight began to scream as the grid seemed to drop into the darkness around them.

***

The shunt dropped them well inside the barrier, and expelled the knight from her mask immediately. The vector she used for him had been unusual, a fragment of a horrorsim that involved waking up during open heart surgery (she’d be lying if she said that wasn’t a bit of her own humor coming through). His chainmail hand was still pawing at his breastplate when they came to take him, dozens upon dozens of white-lights. No mere nanny programs or scan-and-sears, but government grade anti-cyberterrorism drones that flickered with a every security measure code there was in existence, glowing and indistinct. They attached themselves all over the knight and tore the armor from him, leaving his raw data construct, a crackling green, faceless humanoid. They took his voice when they took his armor, but Rexa could almost hear the shrill, staccato beat of his heart feed as the white-lights lifted his spiky, sparking body up into a tower for processing. The green fixed a rider on the nearest white-light and she rose with them, silent as a ghost. From the boy’s raw data construct there were periodic bursts of physio input, which she figured to be him screaming somewhere in his stem room

Rexa thought the whole spectacle pretty, and terribly funny.

***

An admin had to take the boy for processing, and at its appearance Rexa triggered the red. Quicker than she could blink the red copied the admin’s clearance and used its protocols to meet the next highest admin, and then copied that program’s clearance, and so on until the red could find no higher clearance in the construct. When it returned to her, she wrapped it around herself like a cloak and ascended from the top of the security tower, straight to the highest-clearance operation room in the entire system of the federal government of the United States.

She had the satellites.

She had the nukes.

She had the world.

The construct for these keys to the world was a wide, smooth white chamber. The systems appeared before as glowing blue holograms, open, asking, waiting patiently to do as she willed. The red delivered her the CIA’s pathways into Russia, China, France, Germany, the U.K., and every single other system worth caring about. Then it sent scramblers down every channel and pathway below the chamber, and the security systems were shot up and shut down. Even if somebody knew she was up here, there was no one now on Earth with the clearance to get in. She had all the time in the world (the world that now lay at her feet).

Rexa sighed, allowing the cat’s tail to flick restlessly. This particular job lacked the subtlety and freshness of her last venture. She’d gone after shipping routes and grocery stores—this job would not exhibit the same quirky satisfaction of seeing her local supermarket baffled by 25 large shipments of duck meat, suffering the same mis-orders as countless others around the continent.  Still, for sheer magnitude of challenge, this entry couldn’t be beat.

But the question remained as to just what she would do now that she was up here. Her original plan had been to carefully re-knit all communication routes to the wrong destinations, but the idea suddenly seemed drab. She trolled the security feeds of government stems while she waited for a notion with more flair to strike her. Every office was in chaos and on every screen her signature sneered out at the people thrown into a blind panic. This time, however, she’d made a little adjustment to the image. Where her little exercises were normally signed with the image of a jester kissing a king’s hand, bearing the words “LONG LIVE THE KING,” there was now the image of the jester in the king’s throne with her feet propped upon his back, reading “LONG LIVE THE QUEEN.”

Queen indeed.

Rexa surveyed her new domain, ticking off all the major systems now under her control…and realized she was not alone.

“Now this isn’t the sort of activity a young lady should be enjoying,” came a voice directly into her head–someone not only with a comm line, but in the chamber itself with her. Somewhere, in a drab stem room by the river, her heart may have skipped a beat.

“Inspector!” she said cheerfully, turning the cat’s head a perfect 180 degrees and letting its smile show as many teeth as possible. “Have you come to see the show?”

“I think I’ve seen enough, Jester,” he said, “although I must admit you’ve impressed me. This time he took the form of s slim young man with a close-trimmed beard and glasses, with the affectedly fashionable garb of a university student. He was looking younger than he usually preferred. Rexa wondered if looking that way made him feel fresh for the chase, and then wondered if feeling fresh was something her inspector was even capable of.

“I’ve got you figured out, you know,” she said, letting the cat lounge back as though at ease. Her rabbit program had started the moment she registered police presence, but it would take time for the emergency shunt to find a randomized location to spirit her away to. Until then, she had to keep him talking.

“Do tell,” he said. He made no move to apprehend her, which made her uneasy.

“You’re AI,” Rexa said, and the cat’s tongue–too long–flicked out to lick its lips. “The best they’ve got, because they’d need it for me, but a bot all the same. It’s how you figured me out so quick, and why you’re so stuffy all the time.”

“I’m heartbroken to think you find me boring,” he said. She began to grow nervous. The rabbit wasn’t built for worming its way out of something this secure. The program lagged on and on, and Rexa knew she was running out of time.

“Things like you don’t have a heart,” she shot back.

“People say the same thing about you, little girl,” he said. Something about that gave her pause. She stood and faced him fully, the cat’s hackles rising despite herself.

“I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair,” he amended, raising one slim hand. “You’re hardly little, aren’t you? Twenty years old already, and about 5’5″ besides. That’s fairly average.”

Technically, she could not feel cold on the grid, or start to sweat, or go pale, but she felt it all the same. She felt her stomach drop right out through her shoes.

“You have my vitals!” she shrieked. That was it, she was over. They had her completely. “You hacked my freaking vitals!” Somewhere downtown her left arm jerked, slamming the blue cartridge into her deck until it clicked. The chamber exploded into bits of light and sound and static, cracked wide open, and the rabbit whisked her away.

***

The kick came like a brick to the face. She was jerking out of her chair and tearing off her cords before she had fully regained her sight or sense of balance. She slammed her deck shut and jammed it in her bag, the blue cartridge still smoking in its port. Her heart was pounding, her hands were shaking, and she tasted copper on her tongue. Both her nose and her lip, where she had bitten it, were bleeding. With her gear packed and no police yet breaking down the door Rexa forced herself to take a minute and look less like she had just dynamited her way out of a government construct.

By the time she left the room she had wiped off almost all the blood, but she still trembled and smelled like burnt plastic. There was nobody in the hallway to see her, police or otherwise. She began to feel hope as she took the stairs down to the lobby: had she really escaped? Had she blown the inspector to bits for good? If so, she’d miss his constant hounding. In Rexa’s opinion, if everything came easily, then nothing was ever fun.

***

Rexa made it all the way to the last row of chairs in the lobby of the stem. There in the last chair before the revolving doors sat a woman of about forty in a blue pantsuit, with shoulder-length blonde hair. As Rexa approached the woman stood and looked down at her with clear blue eyes, and she knew.

“You’re not a  man,” she sighed, defeated.

“And you’re not a demon cat or a fool,” the inspector replied. “Although the latter is debatable. You know we’d only got the vitals data off the mask, not the stem? We’d only placed you within the city. If you hadn’t tripped your physio reaching for the blast pack, well…” She spread her hands and shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Am I going to jail now?” Rexa asked, dropping her bag. She refused to cry in front of this woman.

“God, I hope so. Which reminds me: hands on your head. Lorexa Baisemain, you are under arrest for cyberterrorism, fraud, illegal software configuration, theft, treason…”