M is for Marked Card

The neon-red framed feeds, now reduced to anticultural IRlogs and op-eds barely worth ghosting anymore, had been pushed to the side and hung low, far from her.  They were still clustered together and the rest of her feeds were still scattered in the air, but they weren’t her main focus.  It was all background noise now.  It would sort itself out.

Sitting cross-legged in her leather chair, Alice was busy working the ICE cube of a Yakuza dollhouse.  The problem with Yakuza systems were that they were usually coded with a mixture of kanji, katakana and hiragana, which made it near-impossible for non-Nippon ICE picks to penetrate, let alone actually provide access to.  Coupled with the problem of rather aggressive, pushback type ICE cubes around their data, it made digging into them a dangerous chore.  A couple of wrong moves and the firewall could burn your nervous system out before you could pull the plug IRL.

But ICE cubes were rather friendly, when so inclined, towards data miners traveling the edges of the netsphere it was protecting.  Surface information was fair game, as it was meant to serve as a warning to whoever wanted to give it a go that inside, be dragons.  This gave Alice the perfect in to start inserting itty bitty pieces of backdoor code, each one binary locked, dormant and perfectly reasonable where the system was concerned.

Of course, when the second half of the code was inserted would be a different story, but she didn’t need to be surreptitious about her snooping – just efficient.

The thought had come to her after briefly wondering why Haruka-gumi, strict red grid dwellers, had ventured so far downtown, far outside their regular subsectors.  It further bugged her that he had been left unguarded – sure, with the more aggressive Ito-gumi managing Lazio, his status as a kyotai would probably be enough to let people leave him be, but it seemed irresponsible, especially if the data was sensitive enough to warrant retrieval by a corporate assassin.

That was the part that had given her pause.  He was corp, no two ways about it – the graceful way he moved, his inhuman speed, seemingly endless endurance, strength and coordination had told her, full body cyborg.  Maintenance of that sort of a body would be expensive; prohibitively expensive for a freelancer, even if his area of expertise was wetwork.  Add to that the slick clothes, the custom weapon… it said corporate.  But which one? Why?

She had abandoned the feeds after Mitchell had shut some of them down, at least temporarily – all that Alice had added to the main cluster was the Yakuza drone, which was currently tracking Alex Nothing’s car.  She had instead began to follow Oshihiro Nawase’s movements over the past 24 hours, tracing him back to where he had departed uptown.  It had been a chore trying to catch glimpses of an unmarked individual in a seemingly endless ocean of peripheral feeds – backgrounds of 24/7s, photographs, surveillance cameras, comm-logs… infinitesimally small pieces, when put together, traced a painstakingly lengthy path from Lazio to a dollhouse, Kiku, in the Lodi neighborhood, on just the fringe of the Milano subsector.

It was how the red grid district was organized: the closer to midtown you got, the more exotic and more expensive the places became; of course, the more niche the taste, the stronger the protection around the records.

“Come on…” Alice muttered to herself, “Just a couple more…”

The ICEpick had a simple premise: rather than trying to pierce through the defenses around the netsphere, it’d simply overwhelm it with too many intrusions at once, heading it to a reset.  That would give her eager little Trojan to slip past and give her the access she needed.

“There.  That should do it.”

Alice cricked her fingers and gave the command as she leaned back and stretched her legs.  The Kiku netsphere’s protection network began to light up, one small speck at a time, and before long, the ICE cube, stretched like a net around the globe that represented the actual netsphere, made like a cube-shaped set of strobe lights going haywire.  As the data crawlers began reporting on the push-pull of ICE Alice saw a short line of code appear and disappear.  There.

It didn’t take long for the ICE cube to start winding down, having dealt with her primary assault.  The strands of her ICEpick were shutting down, one by one.  Alice let the dancing little lights die.  Her little Trojan had already given her access.  Alice waited until the ICE cube was stable again and made sure it wasn’t traced back to her.  When she was satisfied, she went for Kiku’s internal surveillance archive.

Now all she needed to do was to try and find Oshihiro.  It was easy: she matched the timestamp of when he exited from the dollhouse to the archive and went back from there.  He went back to Kiku, entered the dollhouse, went backwards into a room where a client had been sleeping – drugged out, most likely.

“Okay… but who are you?” Alice asked.

Alice froze the recording and pulled up a facial recognition soft.  It took the database less than a second to return with the result.  Alice felt a chill run down her spine: this confirmed that he was indeed corporate.  But which one..?

His profile opened up in a window right next to Kiku’s frozen feed.  Alice began to read and every passing line made her heart race faster.  By the time she had taken in his profile, she had began to panic.

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Thank you for reading!

Below you can find a glossary of terms for clarity purposes.  Above that, you will find the previous entries.

This is the first time I am doing the A to Z Challenge – I tried last year, but couldn’t get the A off the ground, let alone continue.  This year, I came with a bit more preparation, and am hoping to make it to the end in one piece.  Well, okay, making it to the end – one pieis optional.

I thought I’d take a step back from all the action and sort of trace this to where it began.

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PREVIOUS ENTRIES

A is for Ante
B is for Blood
C is for Cut
D is for Dummy
E is for Exit Card
F is for Follow Suit
G is for Grand Slam
H is for Heading a Trick
I is for Incorrect Deck
J is for Joker
K is for Kill
L is for Left Bower

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GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Anticulture: A post-cultural phenomenon that mirrors the extremely fast consumption of vast amounts of data daily by those connected to the net.  Anticultures can be viewed as pop cultural artifacts with a extremely short life spans: an anticultural item rises, reaches memetic status and disappears in a manner of hours.

Dollhouse: Brothel.  Called as such because most brothels also feature gynoids (sex dolls.)

ICE: Intrusion Countermasure Electronics; cyber protection.

ICE cube: Layer of protection around a given netsphere is called an ICE cube, mainly because it visually manifests as a cube.

ICE pick: Any soft (or hard) used to breach through systems with ICE cubes are known as ICE picks.

IRlog: A form of 24/7 streaming, IRlogs usually contain little more than mundane events.  Compare with Twitch’s IRL streams.

Pushback type ICE: Pushback type ICE is a hostile type of ICE that does not simply contend with stopping an attack, but literally pushes back.  Since most net technology is a form of wetware at its core, pushback ICE uses the hardware-to-flesh connection to inflict damage on potential, identified attackers.