Some Short Fiction for Plutocracy 2060

Coded Betrayal

The late evening air was heavy and wet, and the immense concrete forest of apartment buildings and businesses around him relentlessly radiated the heat accumulated during the day. His skin glistened with an oily stew of condensation, sweat, and airborne grime. July was an ugly month in Korea, especially in a big city like Busan. GiJu hated leaving his airconed fortress of solitude during the sticky summer months, but a job was a job. He spotted an old women running a food stand, causing his stomach to make a forceful request for some dok boki. Moments later he was positioned by the old lady, wolfing down spicy-sweet cylinders of cooked rice dough from a styrofoam bowl.

He willed a semi-opaque window to appear in his field of vision, hanging horizontally in the air above his food bowl. To anyone else it looked like he was staring at his meal, but GiJu was looking at his target’s profile displayed on the floating chimerical monitor he conjured up. Could something that only existed as a series of logic gates mad e of 0s and 1s on his braincomputer really be said to be “hanging in the air”? Perhaps not, but it was both convincing and effective. It was a digital phantasm. He knew his internal computer merely translated those 0s and 1s into something that stimulated his visual cortex in just the right way as to make him hallucinate a 2D Mind’s Eye Window.

The MEW that “hung in the air” displayed every bit of data he could scrounge on Lee Myung Soo, his target. GiJu had hacked up Myung Soo’s medical history, financial transactions, school records, and pedabytes of other seemingly innocuous titbits; like his 16 year old daughter’s secret abortion that no one knew about except her doctor (and GiJu of course), or his secret affair with a soap opera actress. Most of the details his Daemon’s recon bots filtered through didn’t matter, but GiJu was nothing if not thorough, and he had to maintain that reputation if he wanted to continue to keep his pristine reputation. He felt it especially important on this contract, as his employers were the North Korean mafia. Apparently his target was running for a higher office, and part of his campaign was eliminating organised crime. Projections had him way ahead of the competition, which was why GiJu was getting some serious credit to ruin this man’s career.

Finding Myung Soo’s extramarital affair had been easy enough, any newb PI or hacker could have done that. But not every hacker could change a consensual affair into aggravated rape and battery. GiJu could. Just as he slurped down the last bit of dokboki a facial recognition bot that he had implanted into the security system of his target’s office alerted him that his target was on his way out. Anticipating his target’s next move, GiJu made his way to the love motel where his target was expecting a romantic rendezvous to take place with his mistress. She would be there of course, but GiJu had done an especially fastidious job of mind hacking her that afternoon. She would remain in a motionless trance while her mind was in a theta state loop. She would continue on this way until her digital dream ran its course, ending at 1:32 a.m.

Careful to avoid being seen, and editing himself out of the video footage of any camera that he encountered as he past them, GiJu opened the door to the love motel with the key he had acquired from the tranced out mistress. There she was, lying on the bed in the exact position he had left her in; eyes closed, clothes torn, and body supine. Her left cheek was swollen and purple, just like her upper lip. She was still an exquisite looking women, even at 38 years old with a busted up face. He could have scored an extra 5,000 euros had he been willing to do the goon work on her himself, but that small detail he refused, so the NK thugs had done it to her before GiJu had hacked her Daemon. However dubious they were, GiJu felt some ethical lines had to be drawn. After all, his mind hacks weren’t even real right? Sure, he had hacked her Daemon so that she would remember a fight with her lover Myung Soo, in which he beat her up and raped her, but it wasn’t real. Not like the bruises on her face were...

Soon, GiJu would do the same mind job on Myung Soo, leaving each of the lovers with the memory of a rape that never happened, a non-crime with one extremely distraught victim and a guilty non-perpetrator. While absorbing the sight of the helpless woman, GiJu noticed that the thugs had fucked up. Myung Soo was left handed, so the bruises on her face ought to be on the opposite side of her face, and they didn’t leave any finger bruises on her upper arms or shoulders. God only knows if they properly applied the DNA evidence. These were the kinds of inconsistencies a defence lawyer lived on. Not that it was GiJu’s problem of course, he was the consummate professional and had done his job to perfection. At least the female half of it. He heard the doorknob turn, it must be Myung Soo, the other half of his job. GiJu would get to know the man intimately over the next few hours...

Neotech Junkie

Abira’s Daemon alerted her to an incoming mail from her bank. She had long ago altered her Daemon’s settings so that is no longer had a voice unless necessary. Something about having a disembodied voice cheerily advise you about events, especially personal events, creeped her out. “You have mail from your mother”, “Your friend Gilli’s birthday is tomorrow”, The WHO suggests that you are due for a breast exam”, “The bacterial census in your vaginal mucous indicates an imminent yeast infection, you should add Euprotol to your nanodoc”. At best it made her feel schizophrenic, at worst like Norman Bates was stalking her from the inside out. Instead, she changed her preferences so that now she just had a sudden non-verbal awareness when there was wireless news, and read about the details as text in a Mind’s Eye Window. She did just that with the bank message.

The 2D semi-opaque MEW popped into existence in the upper left corner of her field of vision, the default position as determined by her OS, her Daemon. On the phantasmal monitor was a list of all of her account’s transactions of the past 30 days., and her current balance, 4,682.63 euros. She was always amazed at the fact she made as much money as the CEO of a small company, lived in a bachelor’s suite, only owned 3 pairs of shoes and a spartan wardrobe, didn’t drink, gamble, or do drugs, but had the account balance of your average factory worker... She expanded the translucent MEW to include all the transactions of the last few years and came to the same conclusion she always came to when she did a little self auditing: its the enhancement mods.

If put on a line graph (which she did, displayed in another MEW), her account steadily rose over periods of months with almost no withdrawals, then suddenly would plummet to almost nothing, the the cycle would repeat. Whenever she had enough money, she upgraded some part of her body, DNA, or added another implant. She willed the MEW to display all her wetare modification purchases of the past decade:

January 12th, 2051 - Atlas Musculoskeletal Weave, 22,481.41 euros
August 3rd, 2052 - Omnitech Motorchip, 25,871.38 euros
July 19th, 2053 - Arachnodermal Weave, 34,523.90 euros
October 2nd, 2055 - IronMan Skeletal Reinforcement, 61,231.44 euros
April 22nd, 2056 - Lazereus Sythorgans, 51,341.82 euros
January 6th, 2057 - Crisis Response Boosters, 22,542.21 euros
November 12th, 2057 - Omnitech Motorchip (Platinum Edition), 112,012.92 euros
June 9th, 2058 - Mongoose Hypertime Processor, 120,019.08 euros
February 23rd, 2059 - Logisticks Cheetah Grafts, 21,884.21 euros
March 3rd, 2059 - Ronin Shadowskin, 29,762.02 euros
August 30th, 2059 - Argos Optics, 62,812.53 euros
December 25th, 2059 - Sureshot Targeting Matrix, 27,422.12 euros

The alarming total at the bottom caused no small amount of discomfort. 682,526.21 euros. She had spent well over half a million euros on cybermods. Abira knew she wasn’t one of those body dysmorphia types though. Hell, the government even recognised her enhancements as tax write-offs for her job; she was a samurai, and being a living breathing combat machine was expected of her. In a few hours there would be a new entry in her bank account, Megawraith Cloakers, 116,212.61 euros. Abira decided that when the total modification tab reached a million she was going to celebrate... Maybe by buying a nice new upgrade. Bionic woman eat your heart out!

She willed the MEW out of existence, and tried to dispel her financial angst with a bit of neo-zen reflection, aptly abbreviated by the expression often just at the edge of her lips: “Fuck it”. As she rode the elevator down to ground level from her 15th floor apartment she ignored the incessant AV advertisements playing on three sides, and instead examined herself in the one side that remained a mirror, the back. She saw what she always saw, her 178 cm frame. It was lean, athletic, and powerfully muscled from countless hours at the gym and a musculoskeletal weave. She looked like a gymnast except for the fact that she somewhat remained the pneumatic breasts and hips of her Persian mother. Despite its hardness, it conveyed femininity; graceful, powerful, and catlike in its movements. The same could not be said of her face. A “Butter Face” as some said. Her large nose was all angles and had clearly been broken several times. She had the cauliflowered ears and muscled brows, cheeks, and lips of a boxer. Her chosen life had not been kind to a face that hadn’t even been considered pretty in the Spring of adolescence. Her head was shaved short, a black stubble covering the tea color of her natural skin.

After a little more zen reflection she was satisfied with both her account balance and her appearance, and the scope of introspection was replaced with the anticipation of zipping down the street, breathing the night air on her Infinity Nightshade autobike.

The Immortal

Joseph Blazic watched the morning news on a Mind’s Eye Window as he sipped his hot Americano in his lavish high-rise office. It showed footage of one of his old business partners, Alex Shy. The grotesquely beautiful newscaster was explaining how Alex had been killed late last night, shot 16 times by a fanatical group opposed to the practices his bioandroid company engaged in. “Poor Alex, should have spent less on his vintage car collection and more on personal protection” mused Blazic. He doubted many people on the planet spent as much on life preservation as he did though. Redundancy organs, elite samurai bodyguards, and both skin, bones and clothing were reinforced with bullet-proof nihlkinetic nanomaterials. Even his original hair had long since been replaced with natural looking fibers that stiffened into a literal “hair helmet” the instant it encountered an amount of kinetic energy high enough to hurt him.

Blazic was sure he could have survived the same shooting Alex hadn’t, with no more injuries than a few bruises to show off to expensive call girls. Not only was he practically immune to anti-personal weapons, but he had added legions of anti-pathogenic and anti-toxic nanocolonies to his nanodoc implant, making him equally fortified against diseases and poisonings. Unfortunately there was no security software available for his Daemon to make him completely immune to mind hacks, the hackers always seemed one step ahead in that department. Consequently, to avoid Daemon hacking he permanently modified his CHERV to run in autistic mode, unable to connect to the internet. It made him seem a little quirky or backward to his business associates, but he just didn’t feel comfortable exposing his mind to the Sword of Damocles that was the internet, so he completely relied on his PDA and PCs to connect. Blazic was 80 years old, but looked not a day past 50 and would likely stay that way indefinitely thanks to his expensive Lazures celluar rejuvenation treatments that rendered him immorbid. To Blazic, death was just another surmountable obstacle, one he had felt that he had overcome thanks to his longevity treatments and near invincibility.

He was the CEO of Ozymandias Soulmates, a bioandroid company that created anatomically correct, living breathing robots that acted precisely as their consumer wanted them to. As far as the fundamentalists and naturualists were concerned he was the devil himself. His androids easily passed the neo-Turing test. and Denmark and Japan had already legalized human/android marriages. His friend Alex ran a similar company, hence his death at the hands of “Jehovah’s Fury”, a christian terrorist organization radically opposed to pretty much anything that modern technology came up with. Blazic’s colleagues felt he was paranoid, but he saw the newscast reporting Alex’s death as the pudding that provided the proof for his cautious atitude. He knew they’d have him in a guillotine if they could.

Suddenly a Mind’s Eye Window popped up in the air in front of him, displaying a smirking non-descript male face. “You’re right Mr. Blazic, we’d love to see your head topple from your neck into a basket, but a poisoning will have to do”. Blazic jerked up suddenly at the MEW, almost spilling his coffee. MEWs shouldn’t pop up like that without him commanding it, especially since his CHERV’s connectivity potential had been permanently severed. He checked his connection status: not connected. Where the fuck did this thing come from?! Was it embedded in the download newscast he just watched? But that had been clean of viruses! “No Mr. Blazic, I’m not some virus, at least not the kind you mean”. Blazic willed the MEW to close. Nothing hapened. When he turned his head away, the MEW tenaciously swivelled with him, fully opaque and floating in front of him. “I’m the poison thats killing you now. Well at least I’m the simple AI that speaks for the poison, but identity problems like that are for metaphysicians, not businessmen, am I right Mr. Blazic?”

This wasn’t real, he was dreaming. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his palms into the sockets. The MEW displaying the smirking face still hung there in a shower of rainbow starbursts and darkness from closed eyes and pressure from his palms. Shit. All at once his skin tingled and his blood boiled, a carbonated beverage coursing through his vessels. He told his hand to reach for the panic button but his arms fell dead moments after they left his eyes. The sizzling sensation was replaced with a cool numbness as he slumped into his plush leather chair. Fuck. “That would be the paralytic kicking in” the hanging face said smugly. “Who are you?!” Blazic mentally snarled at the MEW, while his physical face remained static and drooling. The fact that the poison had an anthrolingual AI meant that the poisoner either wanted to gloat, there was a way to negociate out of this, or both. “Like I said, I am the poison running though your veins, or nanofactory capable of producing a variety of poisons to be more accurate. The paralytic I administered is just one of my arsenal. “Who made you?” Blazic retorted testily. “Ah. Why am I in your blood... The same reason your friend Alex was shot 16 times. Your business is creating blasphemous abominations that spit in the face of God. You pave the way for all humanity and suck the evil milk from Satan’s teet. I am Jehovah’s Fury”. The AI’s rhetoric teetered on the edge of comedic satire, but Blazic’s slumbering muscles lacked the ability to produce laughter.

“How can I be poisoned? Everything I consume I scan and run through biological and chemical filters, right down to the air in this office. It’s all clean. Even if the filters failed, why isn’t my nanodoc wiping you out right now?” Blazic was both curious and stalling. “You certainly did represent considerably more difficulty to my progenators that your friend Alex... So they just threw the ingredients into you one by one, each of them passing the tox screens. Then I assembled myself, a sublime gestalt, and infected your nanodoc. In a sense, now I am your nanodoc. Ironic no?” To spill this much info the molecular hacker working for Jehovah’s Fury must be a serious megalomaniac. “One part of me came from your whore last night, another part from your new suit, yet another from the the atmosphere of you skybus, and the last part is still warm.” The face in the MEW glanced down at Blazic’s Americano.

It was time to begin the diplomacy. “What do you want?” Blazic thought at the face. “access to your production lines at prototype level. Complete access. I will give you addresses to drop off the necessary security info. If you do not, I’ll set your blood to boil. Take a few moments to think it over.” Blazic took those moments, He could guess why religious nutjob terroristswould want unlimited acces to his base model. If they had a molecular hacker skilled enough to make this nasty little guy, God only knows who they could punish the consumers who purchased models that Jehovah’s Fury had tinkered with. Blazic was ruthless and was as passionate about self preservation as you could get, but not a mass murderer. His pride wouldn’t let society remember him that way. Besides, he still had his contingency plan... With a leap of faith Blazic thought “Fine you Christ fucking automaton, boil my blood!” The AI responded “The pain you will receive in the next few seconds will doubtless be the worst of your pathetic life, but will remain a pleasant memory compared to the eternity in the lake of fire that follows!” Blazic knew the AI would die with him, but it was small comfort. A few moments later a white hot spasm suffused his body, a pain so hot he figured a lake of fire could only sooth the burning. Everything of Blazic was seared away by that sun of pain... at least everything that made up Blazic 1.0.

Soulfood

“Your weight is at a level very dangerous to your health, please consult a physician.” My Daemon’s voice rings in as usual at this time of day, dinner time. I’m fat. Disgusting. I look into the full length mirror, evaluating my pudgy body, noticing the two creases in my belly when I bend at the hips. My fingers fill with loose flab when I grab the skin above my hips. Hunger is the Rat in my “stomach”, clawing its way out in an absurd inversion of the famous toture method of the Spanish Inquisition. It’s time for a meal, but I know my shell is trying to trick me into thinking it is hungry. I learned long ago about its tricks, and how to stop them. My mind needs nourishment, not my bloated frame.

In the past I would have indulged my casing’s weakness, but feeding the Rat within only made it bigger and stronger. I would feed it all it wanted, only later gaining the force of will and discipline needed to purge my body of the thousands of calories it had demanded. I’ve learned to stop these bulimic breakdowns, mastering my shell, a homunculus ace pilot. My flesh is a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, but I can’t give in. I have to be the stern yet wise parent. I connect to the net, to feed what is really hungry: my mind, my spirit. I need soulfood. WDS.soulfoodfeast.lux had saved my life. No more messy purging that burnt my throat and corroded my teeth with the Rat’s acid. Soulfood is clean and it feeds the source of the hunger without needlessly fattening the body, providing all the pleasures of even the most decadent food.

WDS.soulfoodfeast.lux is my default homesite for the World Digital Sea, so the fully immersive 3D environment loads instantly as I log on, replacing the environment of my bedroom with that of an entrance to a fancy restaurant. “Hello madame Roswell, would you like your usual table?” says the immaculately groomed maître d in a French accent. He is new here, and I can’t tell if he is someone’s avatar or a bot. My avatar looked and dressed the same as my ugly physical shell, I couldn’t delude myself by creating some flawless avatar for me to prance around the World Digital Sea in; that would be lying to myself and everyone else. As I looked around the lavishly decorated restaurant I saw the tables were filled with Kens and Barbies, people living lies. I receive a few stares as I follow the maître d to my table, people likely surprised a seeing such ugliness and obesity in a realm where your avatar’s appearance is entirely up to you. I could have walked in as a minotaur had I really wanted to. I sit down in the plush chair and order the daily special; lemon grass sole, Greek salad, Gorgonzola gnocchi, pizza vesuvio, deluxe nachos, and blueberry pie, fudge brownies and ice cream for dessert. The Rat would be satisfied, but it wouldn’t get one calorie, and its a greatly satisfying realization. The fragrant food comes and each dish is more delicious than the last, flavors flood my “mouth” and when I swallow, the digital delights feed the real hunger, bypassing my coil’s stomach, going directly to the hunger in my mind. The meal completely satisfies my hunger, and the Rat calms down. I’ve exposed my body’s greedy trick. I tip the waiter, pay for my meal, and triumphantly disconnect.

Physical reality replaces the digital veil of perception and I smile as I lay down in my bedroom. I ask my Daemon how much weight I’ve lost since starting soulfood. “You’ve lost over 11.3 kilograms, you now weigh 32.4 kilograms. By the laws of your region I’m required to tell you that your weight is at life threatening levels. Kwashiorkor has begun to set in, and your liver and kidney’s are being damaged. Please consult a physician.” 32.4 kilograms... My target weight is 30, and I’ll get a new dress once I shave off that last troublesome inch.