Cybertheft (by CE Zacherl)

Jarred blew the smoke away from the barrel of the 9mm Pistol.  He always imagined that when he learned to use a real weapon, it would be something a little more high tech.  The high tech doodads were kept under lock and key by the upper level scraper residents.

Ness Mutt chuckled at Jarred’s stereotypical action to blowing at the end of the gun.  “You know, there’s no reason at all to do that.”

Jarred shook his head, “It’s for effect.”

Kayla hopped down from her perch on top of the exhaust shaft.  Apple was still in another world, sitting with her Virta-Goggs@ strapped to her head and an old keyboard across her lap.

“Feel a little safer now, Jarred?”  Kayla spoke as she swayed over to him.

Jarred nodded after handing Mutt a wad of cash.  Mutt walked around the corner to deposit the cash in his suitcase that used to carry a 9mm and two mags but still carried another firearm.

Kayla leaned into Jarred, her weight against his, “He’s not the guy who taught me, but the resistance is stretched pretty thin right now.  He seemed to know what he was doing…”

“Damn right I know… If you want to make sure you’re safe, just bring me along next time.  I was SpecOp for the India-Pakistani War,” Mutt bragged.

“Well, now that you mention it.  We’ve got some work to do, very soon,” Kayla stated as a challenge.

Ness Mutt grunted as if he didn’t care, “I got dropped deep behind the lines in Pakistan to secure some chemie when those Ay-rab commanders went ballistic.”

Apple, Jarred, Kayla, and Mutt were crouched behind a long prefab plastic desk.  Beyond, they could see the heavily fortified clear doors and the Enviro@ chamber beyond that was the foyer to this sky scrapers lowest level greenhouse.

Apple glanced back out of the wall length window as she set up her laptop and leaned against the desk.  It was a long way down to the ground.  She shivered and tried to dig her butt into the floor in hopes of preventing any chance of going out the window.

Apple felt a strong squeeze on her shoulder and turned her head to look eye to eye with Jarred.  He gave her a reassuring nod.

Jarred looked to his other side, Kayla was sweating like a flu-victim.  Kayla was usually the confident, strong leader; now she seemed shaken.  Wendell’s gory death was having a profound psychological effect on her.

Mutt, on the other hand, was smiling with a sick confidence.  He leaned over to the nervous looking girls.  “Once, I lost my section-mate right before he and I were supposed to quietly kill two guards.  I killed them both, all by myself.  I just made the first one such a horrific kill that the second guy was stunned.”

Kayla smacked his chest and turned red with embarrassment, “Shut up.”

“Okay, let’s get this over with.”  Jarred walked around the edge of the desk in a slouched fashion that made his height only barely more than the desk.

Gary Jones was in another world.  It was an alien beach, and that alien beach was covered in a wide assortment of alien babes that appeared to be in various forms of undress.  The huge variety of aliens; made it difficult to determine if they were naked or if they just had minimalist clothing.

He approached one of the shortest aliens that wore nothing except its own orange-red skin.  He was just about to sling a cheddar pick up line when the whole beach started to float away from him.  No, he was sinking into the sand.  No, who the hell is this?

Gary’s Virta-Goggs@ clattered to the floor as the girl removed her fingertips.

The girl’s hair was unkempt, wild and beautiful in its chaos.  Her outfit was a form fitting navy blue dress, cut in all the right places. The outfit didn’t quite match her temperament.  In a way, the awkwardness was even more a turn on to Gary Jones.

“Well, well.  Is it my birthday?  Christmas?  Why don’t you come have a seat on Uncle Gary’s lap?”

The girl obeyed gingerly and innocently batted her eyes.  Gary did not notice the knife and syringe the girl kept tucked in the back of one of her long, black leather boots.

“After all hell broke loose and the big guns laid waste to both countries, we had to find places to hunker down and stay out of sight.  Just like this.  I was hiding out in a barn and had to kill five men that found my spot.  I stacked them up like cord wood,” Ness Mutt bragged in a low voice as he and Jarred Dobson crouched in the enviro-chamber outside of the greenhouse levels of the sky scraper.

Jarred shook his head subtly and tried to get a better view of the inside of the greenhouse.  He hoped that Kayla was okay and wished he was some big shot war veteran like Mutt.

Suddenly, the yellow lights in the chamber started flashing and sirens started to whoop.  A small door on the upper wall opened and a nozzled device popped out and faced the inside of the chamber.  A robotic voice started repeating, “Contaminant, contaminant, contaminant, purge inevitable.  Safety measures disengaged.”

Both of the men looked at each other for a moment and then there was a sound like a lighter firing up and they both slowly looked back up to the nozzle.  There was a small pilot flame at the front of the nozzle.

Mutt paralyzed in place, eyes wide with shock and fear.  Jarred managed to drag Mutt out the door right before the flames engulfed the room.  Jarred forced Mutt’s body down to the ground and proceeded in his own stop, drop, and roll.

Apple’s computer was slung in a side bag and as she helped Jarred to carry the gibbering Mutt out of the immediate vicinity.  Surely, security personnel would be arriving soon.

Mutt, Jarred, and Apple were at the rendezvous point for only a minute or two, time to catch their breath, when a clacking sound alerted Jarred and Apple.  It didn’t sound like feet or shoes, more like the pad of a heavy security robot.

“Why in the hell do we keep finding ourselves running away all the time?  I feel like it’s all I ever do.”  Kayla spat out, “And what the hell is up with Mutt?”  Apple and Jarred tried to interject, but were tongue tied.

Jarred sighed with relief as Kayla bent to remove her tattered and broken high heels.  “He freaked out; I barely got him out of there as the shit hit the fan.”

“Weird.  Flashbacks I guess?”  Kayla said during a heavy exhale as a theory and shrugged her shoulders.

Apple finally got the chance to speak, “Let’s GTFOOH!”

The group made its way out of the sky scraper, avoiding the security response.  They watched from a ground car as red and blue flashing lights filled the skies around the sky scraper greenhouse levels.  Instead of travelling to their normal meeting place, Apple drove the group outside of downtown and to the edge of the suburbs.

Apple pulled the car up along the paved concrete that formed a vast flat barrier to the massive greenery that was the city limits.  They could barely see the Shenandoah Mountains in the soft moon light.

Apple turned the key in the ignition and got out her laptop, turning on multi-frequency white noise, “sup?”

Apple looked back over her shoulder at the distressed Mutt and the calmly breathing Jarred.  Kayla’s gaze followed Apple’s.

“Are you all right Lt?”  Jarred emoted to Ness Mutt as his hand landed on Mutt’s shoulder empathetically.

Mutt shrugged the hand aside and muttered something inaudible.

Kayla fully turned around in her seat, “Okay, speak up, what’s the deal?  What happened with you back there?”  She stared intently at Mutt, still waiting for an answer, “You know, when we are in the shit like that, we are relying on you to be the type that stands strong when others are weak.  What’s the deal?”

Mutt started crying, tears rolling down his cheeks, his choked up words were almost incoherent.  All three of the other car passengers tilted their heads to try to better hear his words.

Jarred gasped as he finally managed to put together the words and looked up toward Kayla and Apple.  He again tried to put a hand on Mutt’s shoulder to show him support, but the pathetic man nudged away from it again.  “He seems to be saying that his stories are all made up.”  Mutt nodded, Jarred continued, “so apparently he has never seen action and he obviously seems to have the nerve of a tormented house cat.”

Kayla stared at Mutt and just started to shake her head, in utter disappointment.

Apple did not have much of a reaction; she simply turned back to the car wheel and moved her hand to the ignition.

Jarred frowned at the reactions of Kayla and Apple and tried to yet again put a comforting hand on Mutt’s shoulder.

In response, Mutt collapsed down, his body limply hanging in the foot rest area of his seat, his whining and moaning dying down to a whimper.

“Srsly?” Apple started to turn the ignition key, but before the engine caught, Kayla put a hand on Apple’s.

Apple looked to Kayla and Kayla spoke up, ignoring the whimpering man, “So that is not all we have to share, one of us actually did something useful back there.”  As she said this, she looked into the rear view mirror at Mutt.  “I got some good bits of information out of Mr. Jones.  He is such a sicko.”  She shivered and shook her hands.

Jarred did have to admit to himself that Kayla looked pretty nice in the sultry outfit she was still wearing.  She looked uncomfortable in such a dashing, dressy style, though he thought that almost made her seem the innocent, attractive type.

Jarred shook his head rapidly to clear the thoughts and get back on the topic of Gary Jones, “Is he the worse for wear now?”

“Nope, except for a few bruises and a slice on the hand, he’ll live,” Kayla was quick to respond to leave no doubt that she did not murder him.  “While he was the CEO of Walls Corporation, he personally oversaw some work that is not in the corporate records.  Looks like a full room server install with maximum physical and virtual security algorithms.  With cry baby over there, there is no way we could hope to break in to that server room.”

“Not IRL anyway,” Apple added as her head leaned back and she smiled with satisfaction.

Kayla looked at the young girl quizzically and moved on, “There is something important about whatever is on that server, something specifically put in place for the Oathed Technocrats.  It seems to be some sort of byway for their intranet to move data out onto the internet or some computer mumbo jumbo.”

Jarred could see that Kayla felt awkward by the technical complexity, “I think it may be about time that you discovered the virtual world, Kayla, and I know just the teachers for you.”  He patted Apple on the forehead as her head leaned far back across the front seat headrest.

“Ugh, and be one of those gamer slash addict types.  Well, well, we’ll see.   Maybe you two can pull off an infiltration without me,” Kayla was trying to piece together plans and leadership in her head in real time while conversing; it was not easy.

Having discussed future efforts and the fate of their brief Resistance cell member, Ness Mutt, Apple finally turned the key.

As Apple pulled her car into its parking space in the basement levels of her home sky scraper, a curious news report played via her streaming radio, “Kal Killmon here, wealthy industrialist, Gary Jones, was found dead in a nearby greenhouse, apparently poisoned with a complex toxin.”

Related stories on Nevermet Press:

Visit the original post, The Trivium Proportion, Part 7 (A Cyberpunk Tale), by David Phillips, at Nevermet Press. Subscribe via RSS, Twitter, or Facebook.