Green Light in the Undercity

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 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.