Ch03DoF

The greatest effect from the fall happened in the midwestern region of the former United States, around the former great lakes. The cascade of failures started there, and hit the local residents hard. An estimated Fifty-Five percent of the population in the region died, even more fled the region hoping to find some other part of the country which could provide stability and security. This brought a rise of violence, local tyranny, and in some places a slave economy. Chicago in particular suffered from both the die off due to starvation and collapse of infrastructure, and a massive influx of refugees looking for stability that was only found after heavily armed gangs rose to prominence as local warlords.

* * *

I don’t wear makeup, or revealing clothing with this name, in fact each name has her own rules that I follow religiously. When I’m little Liza Monay, I hunch slightly to make my 1.7-meter frame even shorter, and I wear frumpy, dumpy clothes that make me look heaver than my 53 kilos. As I prepare to be the beautiful !Zozs!, all of that changes. Gone are the dull earth tone clothing, in favor of bright shiny fabric. I change the hair on my head for a neon-green colored, sculpted spike set. !Zozs! is vibrant and alive unlike Liza. Bright glittery makeup showcases my fine bone structure, more glitter lightly covers my mostly naked flesh, enhancing the small bits that are not showing, not out of modesty, but to cause a sense of mystery, and a desire in the weak, to see what is hidden. Years of parkour and second story work, done with different names of course, have honed and sculpted my body into the weapon it is today. The makeup has the second function of softening my hard flesh, to make it seem less dangerous. We wouldn’t want to frighten my prey away would we. The final touch, the locket given to her by her mother years past, now attached to a neon-green choker, bringing attention to her long slender neck. !Zozs! is so small, and with her birdlike voice, everyone desires her, none could fear her, done, and perfect.

Today she is hunting somewhere new. She has one particular man who is today’s prey. He prefers small, subservient women. He likes to demonstrate his wealth and strength. !Zozs! is so, the perfect lure for him. The auto-cab picks her up from her lodgings, a mid-priced hotel in downtown Chitown. It flits up into the air above the masses and drops her onto the roof top of the Arc building. Electric City, one of the most exclusive night clubs in the city has the top five floors. Coming in via flitter avoids the crush at street level, but a sizable crowd is waiting at the roof top entrance ahead of her. !Zozs! does not wait for lines of common people of course. Lengthening the stride of her perfectly sculpted legs, when she struts like this all belongs to her, ignoring the masses, the normals waiting in line. With a haughty flick of her head, she passes them by, immediately being allowed through the door. As if flicking a switch, a wall of sound hits. Vibrant, percussive music, Bright strobing lights, and a pervasive aroma of sexual pheromones fill the air. Her breath quickens, and her pulse starts to race, !Zozs! is in hunting mode, seeking her prey.

Expertly dodging the mass of people crowding the floor, she dances her way between and through. In just a few moments, she is nursing the first drink purchased for her by the first weak boy, praying that she will smile for him. Her smile while only slightly plastic, gives him a slight upturn, as if to say “good boy”. Armed with a drink to wield in fending off the lesser men, she narrows in on her prey. Robert Thrum, is fifty years old, a software engineer, and head of Quantum Engineering. He grew rapidly wealthy from designing The Coin Vault. With the collapse of the old economy, years before she was born, paper and metal currencies faded into insignificance. Virtual, encryption-based currencies became the standard, and The Coin Vault, became the most secure method of storing the specific tokens associated with such coin. All that of course is not why he is her target tonight. No, tonight, he was on the menu because of Quantum Coin. The latest entry into the coin market, said to have the strongest algorithm on the market, and promising years of stability.

Finally, sweeping through the dance floor, more like making love, than combat, as those around her cede her room, she sees her target. A reserved table was on a balcony over the dance floor, Thrum and some of his Quantum lackeys are celebrating the incipient launch. Her information was correct, now to catch his eye. !Zozs! explodes on the floor, making acrobatic moves that set her apart from the ordinary dancers nearby. Seductive movement, and glances of her muscled thighs, promised boundless energy, and endless delights if they were to wrap around you. It was only a few minutes before he came down to the floor himself. According to her information, Thrum fancied himself a dancer. Before long, dancers cleared away from her as he joined her in a pool of space all to themselves. At first, they danced around one another exulting in independent movement, but before long, they were touching. Moving in tandem, he started to throw her into spins and cartwheels, flowing with the music and showcasing her limberness, and his strength. Once she touched him, he became hers. A small drop of tailored pheromone exuded from the tip of her artificial finger. According to the physical his insurance company required him to take, he was particularly susceptible to just this set of chemicals. Money well spent in the discovery process. After a few songs, and one kiss, tailored saliva glands emitting another even stronger chemical to finish the seduction, they were enroute to his home near the former lakeshore.

Thrum was unable to keep his hands to himself during the short limo ride. In a short time, they touched down on a pad overlooking the rest of his estate. Intoxicated to the point that he could barely think, she led the quivering bundle of sexual tension into his home. Immediately upon entering, the embedded computer placed in her skull, paired with her state-of-the-art quantum server back in her home miles away. With her on the inside of the security measures, the auto-hacking began. Only moments were required to own the protections within. A light scratch of her artificial finger, and he was unconscious from pure bliss. A few moments removing his clothing and gathering genetic material, and she was ready for the main event. Looping the cameras and convincing the security AI that she was allowed to be here, a mere moment of child’s play to one with her skills. Once she gained entry to Thrum’s home office, she removed the locket from her neck. Deftly clicking the hidden catches, she opened two compartments in the small container. In the first compartment, with an ancient photo of a Japanese woman her mother called her secret friend, she removed a fiber cable slightly thicker than a human hair, and uncoiled it to its full one-meter length. Attaching, the cable to 4 small, glittering blue gems 300 microns wide, and a system connector the width of her smallest fingernail, and only half the thickness. She plugged one end of the cable behind her ear, and the other to the computer under the desk. As she waited, all of the genetic samples taken from Thrum went into the second hidden compartment, completely hidden away. Amazing what you could do with someone’s genetic material.

Closing her eyes, she fully immersed herself in the stream of the server she was attached to. Many hackers liked to filter the stream, hiding away the complexity, but not her. In the stream, she was no longer !Zozs!, neither was she Liza or any of the other names she used. In here, she was known as Discovery. No secret could hide from her, and she felt no need for a filter. She controlled the stream, flowing at speeds unimagined before the fall, the segmented mind granted by her implants allowed her to submerge herself and flow as fast as the data itself. In what seemed like hours, she was finally able to tickle the data from its security enclosures. She convinced the security, that she had never been there, copied a few seconds of raw pay-data at several terabytes per second, and smoothly exited the Quantum Engineering systems leaving them none the wiser. Before she exited Thrum’s desktop system, she cleaned up the access logs, edited the bedroom security footage to leave a flattering reminder of their tryst. She coiled her tools and put them away in the locket, and cleaned up all evidence that she had been in the office itself. She cleaned and reset her finger, originally lost to her mother’s dog, Justin, when she was young. Word of advice don’t yell at your mother and shake your finger at her while her dog is standing there. Once she was all put together, she returned to the bedroom, removed the rest of her clothing, and snuggled in next to her victim.

The following morning, she was greeted by beautiful sunshine, and a tray full of food. While the drugs she fed him addled his memory of last night, the edited security system footage painted a graphic picture of their fictitious lovemaking. After she cleaned up in his immense bathroom, he even called her a cab. The best crime is of course the one that no one knows ever happened. While her mother hated men her entire life, perhaps the fact that she never met her father had something to do with it, she found that they were the best prey, weak, easily led, and grateful enough to make her breakfast before she left.

* * *

A successful thief always has a plan. Plan A in this case being so completely successful, came almost as a surprise. The perfect crime is of course one that is never discovered. Rather than a fearful run for her life, of a desperate running battle with security forces trying to surround and isolate her, it turned into a walk of shame. The mark gave her a kiss on her cheek, and called her a cab. She intentionally avoided touching her locket, containing more wealth than she had ever held before. She played the energetic, club-hopping, party girl, and was never suspected. The cab was given the address of her hotel, along with her false name, a series of dead ends that would lead nowhere if someone came looking for her after tomorrow. Of course, she stayed in character for the duration of the trip. Everyone knew that the council recorded from the cameras in cabs, as well as throughout the city.

She had long since compromised the camera system in the hotel. She set it up to report exactly what she wanted. As she slipped through the maintenance tunnels in to the old Chicago underground system, the cameras saw everything, but reported nothing. A few minutes extra to ensure that she left no trail, and that there were no witnesses. She sent a low energy wireless signal directly from her cranial implant, causing a false wall to recede with just enough room for her slight body to slip through, before closing once again, no trace it had ever existed. A faint green light, low enough that it did not damage her night vision turned on in the entryway. With her low-light modified eyes, the faint LED lights were like the noon day sun to her, granted noon in some green space, but enough that shadows were dispelled, and she could be certain nothing was hiding. Once she was certain of her safety, the weight on her shoulders lifted. The past twenty-four hours spent in the !Zozs! personality was physically draining. The constant awareness that if she made the smallest mistake, she would find herself back in the brothels, or the Market Street slave pens, or medically, waiting for one of the elite to need some of her organs.

With the tension relieved, she started transforming, she triggered the implants in her face, watching the mirror as they morphed her back to her main identity. Cheekbones became higher, the faint hint of epicanthic folds rounded out to a more Nordic look. The crafted fake hair of her Wealthy caste party girl replaced with biological hair grafted into her synthetic cranium. Her eyes changed color, and a very light film which held traces of the !Zozs! DNA was removed. Infiltrating the hated Wealthy caste was not cheap, and the costs of her implants required to become the weapon she currently was cost more than mere money. Ten years she served in the brothels, even after she had managed to escape the slave pens and the casual brutality of child hood with slave implants. Regardless of the costs, she was here now. Once she managed to start siphoning wealth from her big score, not too much or too quickly after all, she could start to punish her real targets. With a shy, simpering look on her plain, unadorned face, she became little Liza Monay, frumpy slave smock and cheap black glasses completed the transformation.

Defeating the sousveillance, normally called The Sous, by the lower castes living in the under city, was not easy. As the name implied, they were watching all the time, and everywhere. The original sensor net that became The Sous, was a simple mesh network of microscopic sensors, called nano-sensors, embedded in every wall, floor, and ceiling. The computing necessary to monitor the billions of sensor inputs would require a class 4 AI at the least. There were of course only a scant handful of Ais that advanced, and the idea that they would be wasted on slave pens was ludicrous. The cop out, simple answer, was placing a network of intelligent systems to monitor the direct feeds and build a small picture of each “neighborhood” consisting of about fifty meters in every direction with a small overlap at the edges. Once you managed to overcome the data handling required in monitoring billions of nano-sensors, the next issue became storage of the data. While each nano-sensor was only capable of transmitting a single low-res feed, they all combined into a three-dimensional high-resolution image that streamed in real time, or something like thirty petabytes of transmitted video per day. Even with the advent of quantum storage solutions, and hyper compression, it still rapidly became a chore of epic proportions. It was the borders that truly were the weakness of the system. Each neighborhood sends information to its neighbors, and they all shared localized storage. The intelligent systems, called Neighborhood Watch Systems or NWS, were smart enough to keep track of millions or billions of individual sensor feeds, and they were capable of creating the video collage that became the map, and targeting changes to the map that meant movement, and it was just this last component that was stored and transmitted. What they were not smart enough to do is track each of the stored objects. That was the job of another intelligent system known as a Storage Array Systems, of course the SAS did not really understand what they were tracking, that really took an AI of some sophistication, and it was here that Liza had co-opted the entire system. Since the identification of individuals was accomplished by creating a PF, or Personnel File. The PF had all the information on a given individual, it started with facial recognition information. Next it held gait and stride analysis, thermographic scans (got to identify sickness early to prevent plague in the slave quarters), and voice print analysis. Eventually, credit information, job history, browser history, online behavior information, DNA, and other information would be appended to the record. Liza simply inserted multiple records, and changed her face to match the facial record of the desired ID, changing the length of her stride to match was more difficult, but she managed that through wearing shoes that slightly changed her walking gait pattern. Voice was also modified by technology, a small device inserted into her voice box changed things up nicely. The over all cost of all these body modifications, implants, and prosthetics, was listed in the millions of credits. By comparison, you could buy a luxury slave for only a few thousand credits. Fortunately, Liza had designed and built some of the components herself, saving some of the expense, and earning her the capital needed to buy the remainder, and establishing herself as part of “the underground”.

Liza, looked at herself in the mirror, so used to the green light and its effects, that she automatically corrected the lowlight to a more normal light level as she looked for needed corrections. In a sort of reverse Pygmalion effect, as she removed all of the trappings of beauty and wealth, she subconsciously became shyer and more introspective, losing her erect posture, she seemed to gain a “beaten dog” sort of bearing. All of these components together, along with a modification of her implanted identification chip changed !Zozs! to Liza as far as Chitown, and the undercity administration were concerned. A quick jaunt into the storage systems netted all of her system files to ensure that they did not have anything new on her, and she was ready to go home and begin to use the newfound wealth to build her new life.

The small work space led to a series of blocked off maintenance tunnels, these tunnels also had infrequent green LEDs that she turned on and off as needed during her passage. Following a dark, dirty, poorly ventilated path, she eventually came to another false door that led to the back wall of her one room efficiency apartment in the undercity, called old Chicago by some. She again modified a few sensor settings in her apartment, and the false “Liza is here” information was replaced by her appearance. She made a habit of going once a day to each of her false ids, and ensuring that there was some real sensor data just to maintain her covers. Liza was active, while !Zozs!, was inactive. Every so often, she made effort to have each of her IDs appear at the same time, to prevent the whole alter ego problem from surfacing. After a short time ensuring that her records were all caught up, she began her day. A few coded com calls to some business partners and fences she worked with; she’d started gradually selling her ill-gotten gains. The heist of data is not like stolen goods. If you stole money, you could just go spend it immediately, only worrying about possible tax records. With stolen jewelry, you needed to find someone to buy it from you, or you would have to melt the metals and sell the components. Data was sort of both at the same time. Maybe you could use the information you stole directly, in which case that was your payoff, or perhaps you could sell some or all of the information to someone else that might benefit from it. In this case, she was going to do both of those things, while setting up a possibility of streaming additional information to keep the data brokers a little hungry.

Old Chicago somehow managed to look dirty and dingy, despite being one of the cleanest places in the world. The environment was completely artificial. Comprised of old maintenance tunnels, and what used to be surface streets and housing areas, it was now completely enclosed. The light was artificial twenty-four hours a day, and air, water, and waste were all handled by intelligent systems designed after the Fall by the Thinkers in the city above, to handle the swarms of refugees that descended upon the city, and to help control the food and service riots that came next. This of course meant that the light was not bright enough, the air had a canned flavor, the water tasted “funny”, and the waste was not removed quickly enough. When coupled with the smell of despair given off by millions of poor undesirables, you got an atmosphere that was unique to the undercity. Citizens and Wealthy from above would never really understand.

She made her way along the perfectly clean and maintained walkways to the Bazaar, a sort of swap meet, or local neighborhood mercado, that had just enough legitimate business traffic to hide the truth from The Sous; here in the Bazaar, you could buy anything you could imagine. Want someone dead, go to the Bazaar. Want to buy a little boy or girl, someone in the Bazaar could hook you up. Fake ID? hacking services? getting you out of Chitown? All of these things could be found here. Of course, they might report you to the System too. Here, while ostensibly working for credits and services traded back and forth, there were two other much more important commodities, rep and favor. Liza, had a strong hacker rep, it was known that she could accomplish most anything for the right price, and she had done so for most of the influential movers in the Bazaar. Her earlier comm calls lined up meetings with a number of important buyers and sellers. Dropping a few tidbits, like the future plans of Quantum Engineering garnered directly from the CEO himself earned her more rep, and a fair bit of cred. Stolen passwords, records direct from the servers at QE, and another bundle of stolen data passed to all of the correct hands. All of that, reinforced her rep as a low level, but resourceful hacker, no one suspected that she was hoarding even more to herself. Perhaps enough to bring down QE and those behind it forever.