Immersion (eBook)

2086

Sean Kennedy (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 1. Auflage
236 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9781682225455 (ISBN)

Infos

In 2086, reality is augmented. Dan Hunter is a field investigator for the augmented and virtual cyberspace of Immersion, the most pervasive and dominant technological platform since the invention of the Internet. A strange complaint leads him into a broadcast storm of living weapons and sensual religious orders, all filtered through augmented and virtual reality circles that spin at the speed of light. A world of evolved black projects and terrible secrets left to fester in the upper atmosphere. Once exposed, those secrets could change mankind forever!

Textauszug

Chapter 1

“See the change you want to be in the world.”

-Immersion

Vancouver, 2086.

Friday.

You’re more aware with a bag over your head. Even without cybernetics, when someone bags you with a faraday hood, your other senses get cranked.

…Maybe they are still watching…

The sweat from the Hood’s last user mixed with the metallic liner’s copper scent. Together, they almost masked the smell of the concrete floor. The hood was wet where it was touching my face. I find it’s best not to think about wet spots.

A faraday hood is a bag that makes it impossible for my subdermal cranial implants to gather or transmit data. It’s the kind of thing you’d use to terrify mediots, by isolating them for the first time in their lives. For me, the hood cut down on the unrelenting background chatter, but nothing turns it off.

I was still alive, so it was probable that they weren’t going to kill me. I still had my clothes on, so I guessed they weren’t going to ask me any questions. More than likely, I was tied to chair with a bag over my head because I was unexpected.

Hopefully this wasn’t about me; but about David Greer.

I’m a network field technician: merely annoying to most criminal enterprises, barely ranking above a security guard. I used to be an Overwatch back in the desert wars, and that always got some attention, but David Greer was the specific kind of scumbag who everyone wanted dead once they understood what he did for a living. I had a feeling whoever had me handcuffed to this chair was part of a solution we all wanted to see happen.

Besides, techs were often granted more tolerance in the crime world. If you could manipulate Immersion, you always had value. It’s a lot of “Hey man, I only work here.”

…You’re no janitor…

The internet’s free market had been running wild since the turn of the century. Universally reviled in meat space, the child-trafficking and slave vendors thrived in the dark corners of the web.

By a democratic shift, the will of the dollar allowed the vice vendors to move political power away from governments and into the claws of multinational corporations.

These corpoliticals were without conscience or oversight. They could justify brainwashing with invasive minds-i messaging and psyconstructed programming, but even they couldn’t wash off child exploitation.

Every culture has a code, a line not to be crossed. Sexually assaulting children was a good way to get skinned, but selling children for exploitation—or profiting by enabling—was a greater evil.

The Immersion market for experience products both live and recorded was a totally unregulated and unreported industry. Virtually, anything can be had for a price.

Mr. Greer was too smart to sell experience products himself. Instead, he ran the back end: the transactions that let an African crime syndicate masquerade as an educational charity for middle-class Russian youths.

As part of a student exchange program, fifteen hundred Russian kids between the ages of twelve to -sixteen were loaded onto planes. Their parents watched them walk through the airport gates, never to be seen until the first experience products showed up less than a month later. It hit the wire that middle-class Russian families paid to destroy their children. Pristine “new talent” was highly coveted by flesh vendors.

When the Russian Underworld learned someone sold their country’s children, it didn’t go over so well. Of course, there was international outrage from law enforcement, but the problem wasn’t lack of outrage.

Nobody cared if a family of five on a summer vacation wound up starring in a Serbian film or if orphan kids unwillingly donated their organs, but when over a thousand starry-eyed students with good homes and great Russian futures were victims, it was a different story. The mothers, grandmothers, and priests crying for justice on the feeds weren’t talking to the cops.

Russian crime syndicates are less showy, they just kill people.

Warren Goldberg was the mastermind of the scheme. He was picked up by Interpol in Budapest, but he never made it to the airport. They found his body handcuffed to the ceiling in an interrogation room with his head on a table.

Most were small-time, people who didn’t have the “big picture,” but they still started showing up with their heads cut off.

David Greer went to great lengths to show that he had had nothing to do with the scam. With his lawyers and PR team, he avoided prison with plausible deniability and safe harbor laws.

He used hundreds of shell companies to open temporary sessions with network providers and enough encryption to not know, creating enough reasonable doubt for his well-fed lawyers to exploit.

He could have been—and probably was—on many other networks, but one false charity connected to the incident was on a server with the network I worked for.

Even though David Greer was cleared and our network was protected, my boss was concerned he might have other shell companies with us. A PR disaster like this could make us a target, we needed to come out as staunchly against this sort of thing. Bad press and all that.

I was tasked with making sure that we didn’t have any residual contact with Greer, so I had to get at his offline files.

That’s how I wound up in my current resting position, waiting to see if I’d be found with my head in my hands.

…What if this isn’t about David Greer..?

Part of overwatching was handling electronic warfare. The military hooked up my cerebral cortex, using the power of the mind to analyze transmissions and gather intelligence. Instead of having to upgrade synthetic processors, they turned fresh-faced recruits into processors; and what a job we did.

I had a talent for spectrum analysis and machine communication. I could make longer connections, take deeper dives, and break stronger encryption than anyone in my graduating class. I used my enhanced senses to electronically envelope and target like smoke, and let my mind’s raw computational force find the cracks.

I signed up with all the other web-headed kids. I loved my gadgets, and the media had made cyborgs the ultimate image of manhood. They brainwashed us, invaded our bodies and exploited our minds. I had no idea it would go so far.

…No one knows how far it went…

Like target penetration, civilian life wasn’t a talent of mine. If it had been a talent, I would’ve realized something was off before I got bagged. All the distinctive characteristic marketing appeal of yesterday’s boutique apartments quickly fades into slumlord lies when you walk enough empty corridors.

Back then, the military had the best tech, and overwatch guys like me had the full meal deal. Technology made cybernetics so small that it was rare to implant something larger than a quarter. The military hid tech after insurgents began cutting electronics out of people to build better bombs. My implants weighed less than a pound in total, and were undetectable.

Software was where things got trickier. A vehicle is a fantastic piece of technology, but useless without a driver. Cybernetics work the same way: the capabilities of implanted devices rely on software drivers to be used to their full potential.

Overseas, my capabilities were godlike. I listened to transmissions like birdsongs, cutting through encryption on the fly, and could locate hidden electronics as easily as breathing. I felt the frequency spectrum, reading it like a shaman listening to the wind, then telling my team its secrets. Most consumer implants now were subdermal scalp brain cages, made popular by Mediots using Immersion.

Listening was easy for me, but energy transmission was the biggest hit at parties. Implants are tied into your consciousness, so the more involved you are, the stronger your ability. If your combat meditation was good enough, you could do tricks.

Coming into the civilian world, the government enacted legislation requiring all veterans to have civilian software drivers installed to integrate back into society—like the drivers were the problem.

The drivers they gave us were pathetic. I went from being state of the art weapon to a blunt club. The veterans felt we had earned our tech, and should be allowed to keep using it.

The government couldn’t tell me how to use my hands, or my ears; How should my cybernetics be any different?

To explain what it’s like to the unaugmented is impossible. Once you’ve had a taste of that power, you can never go back. My specter suite allows me to see the unseen. Anything sent wirelessly creates a sensation within me. All data is perceived in the space we call the Minds-I; a screen inside your head that displays augmented data. Eventually, descent drivers were reassembled, hacked, or fabricated from scratch by the online community.

Veterans became bone collectors, searching chip names and serial numbers, having multi-axis X-rays done to know ourselves.

North America had been at war since the turn of the century, so there were enough of us around to help put each other’s lives back together.

The darknet bubble-gum drivers were better than the MIL-SPEC stuff, but there were side effects. Booze numbed too much, and. There was no way to use drugs and function day to day anymore; too risky, and drugs were unpredictable in cyborgs. I did what every vet does: took it one day at a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.1.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781682225455 / 9781682225455