"Itty Bitty Bigger World: Scrambled:"
Oct. 21st, 2014 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyMy smartware toned me out. "Life safety response, active suicidal, floor 160 of Quincy Tower."
I sat up, spilled my drink and RAN for the door. Only with a quick snake of my arm did I manage to retrieve my backpack in time.
Out of service tags, qualifications, other trivia all go out the window for a life safety response. The San San arcology computers think that if something is not done, right now, someone's gonna die, right now.
The problem with towers is that elevators take time. Even if a qualified team happened to be within a minute of the capsule lobby, it would still take three minutes for them to get to the top. That's four minutes too late.
I'm here now. I threw myself flat in the empty elevator, facing up, and it surged straight upward at high G when it realized what I had done.
Ding. Rushing wind. Someone had breached the tower envelope. Neat trick.
And the active/suicidal was standing by the blown-out window ledge with a presumed smartgun pressed against his own skull. Nothing like platform redundancy.
The floor's police bot, a rudimentary older model, was prepared to instantly stun him -- at which point he would fall off the ledge.
I drew my smartgun from my backpack (it tamely howled in my smartware as it called EVERYONE EVERYWHERE) and pointed it at another human being.
He had started to point his own gun at me. Instead he hesitated and put it back to his own skull.
I smelled a rat. I subvocalized.
"Emergency traffic, armed flyer unit and anti-fall platform needed immediately. Correction active/homicidal repeat active/homicidal."
_Query_, correction? Acknowledge emergency traffic, units dispatched.
"Put it down or I shoot!" he shouted over the howl of the air escaping the building.
"You can jump or you can shoot yourself, but you may NOT take anyone else with you!" I replied, shouting over the noise as well.
Unbidden, a tactical graphic occupied the lower left of my visual field. The tower. An armada of flyer units were inbound, but the nearest armed CHP flyer would be there in three minutes. I could not select for details of armament, but a CHP flyer would be equipped with all the things. Which was good.
However, a Santa Clara County aerial fire platform showed ETA: TBD/15 meaning that in theory it would be there in 15 minutes, but in practice it had not yet been manned.
The graphic should have appeared the instant I was dispatched. Why did the graphic wait for... me to call for help. Oh shit.
I knew what direction I was going to have to take this one. My head hurt already. Timing was going to be critical.
"I mean it! Drop the gun or I die!"
He didn't mean it. He wanted a killing. He had something. Monofilament rappel rig, personal jump harness, allies on the tower exterior. I even looked for a rope around his ankle. Millimeter-wave radar from the building secware showed a harness all right, and a spool gun behind his back with sticky harpoons.
This was a trap. He was the bait. I was the target.
I stepped out of the elevator and it promptly fell at max speed.
I advanced on him holding a steady bead on his chest.
"STOP!" he screeched with a total change of intensity. Now he meant it.
So I did. CHP now two minutes out. Possibly several lifetimes.
Integrity schematic of the building indicated that he was not going to cause a structure collapse with his little toy gun. Or mine for that matter. So I side stepped to the rescue equipment locker to...
and stopped cold. Trap. Bait. Jaws.
The handle. Contact poison on the handle, IED on the door, harness rigged to fail.
I subvocalized for the police bot to scan the locker. It whined the electronic equivalent of "Right _now_ boss?" but spun as if to comply.
The tactical graphic did not update.
Wheels within wheels, traps within traps.
The thought saved my life as I threw myself around a corner... not from the man, but from the rigged bot as it detonated.
He took a piece in the chin but stood there with his heels on the blown-out window frame and blood running down his neck.
He leveled his gun at me. No more foreplay. I matched his move and shouted "WHY!?!" just before pressing the solenoid.
He actually stopped. Mexican standoff. Both of us were fast but neither of us could press a trigger before the other one would see it and press his.
"Orders," he said calmly.
"Whatever they're paying you, I'll double it!"
He actually laughed. "Double my cancer? You'll double my cancer?"
A CHP lifter came hovering into view behind him and I winced. This was going to hurt a LOT.
Sure enough, it did.
//
"Extra! On the spot with the zot! Reclusive tyco Anderson in daring duel with madman! Tower trouble! So the fun loving CHiPpies zapped them both!"
//
I woke up in the back of a CHP lifter. Not the first time. But it always sucks.
A trooper was encouraging me to vomit in a particular direction and "drink this," which I did.
My backpack was at his feet. I could tell by how the fabric lay that my smartgun was back inside it.
"Someone wants you dead," the trooper said quietly. You think?
I tested whether my smartware worked. It did - I was not in custody. So I pulled up a You Are Here graphic. Here was halfway to Vallejo Barracks.
"The tower's been evacuated. Lots of traps. You do realize the elevator nearly took you out, yeah?"
I recalled stepping out of the elevator just before it left. Apparently, according to the trooper, it had then accelerated straight down, under power, and taken out the elevator pit in the sub-basement with extreme prejudice.
"Software traps and IEDs, Bay Area Rescue Team is on scene investigating. Boiling hot water in the sprinkler systems, electrified floors, doors that try to close into people, carbon monoxide burner in the HVAC... it's like someone seriously screwed with the building smartware _and_ brought their own lethal hardware."
Sounded like fun, for values of haunted house from hell. Hundred and sixty floors of that would be a challenge even with full gear.
"We'll be at Vallejo soon. How are you feeling?"
I could see by the EMS sigil on his collar that he was also a paramedic. So I told him honestly.
"Yeah, you look like you've had a rough day. You may not want to take anything though unless you've got one heck of a snooper in your ware."
Definite point. My headache redoubled. Aspirin, or aspirin with cyanide?
I was going to have to start wearing gloves again. Many wealthy people did. Dammit.
The lifter landed, recognizably through the windows as at Vallejo Barracks, and we tromped (well, they tromped, I winced) in escort formation to a ready room. I had the dubious honor of being the escortee.
"Detail reporting with one, 1335 hours."
"Dismissed," the CHP Captain said easily as she eyed me up and down unfavorably. Tall, blonde, command presence, impeccable uniform, hawk eyes that narrowed when she saw the vomit on my tunic.
"Stunned not drunk, ma'am" I blurted.
She nodded coolly. Her augments clearly saw into the backpack; then her eyes twinkled and her smile turned little-girlish.
"You have a kitten bot?" she gushed.
"Yes ma'am." I subvocalized scratchily and the kitten bot leapt out, jumped up on a desk and arched its back for attention.
Everyone gets one bot. Otherwise we'd be overwhelmed with bots in public. Leasing your bot license to say, a media company is a way for even the poorest person to make some money over the basic stipend. The limit doesn't apply in private cubic of course, where you could have as many bots as you wanted.
The CHP Captain petted the bot for a while as it twitched, flicked an ear, and finally purred into putty. She knew how to pet a cat.
Suddenly, she was all business.
"Anderson, you have been in four incidents today. That may be a record. Explain?"
"I think the last was a set-up. Did the timeline open with my calling Emer?"
"Yes."
"Definitely a setup. I was paged Life Safety to active/suicidal about a minute prior."
"So someone may have hacked Dispatch. Lovely." And Dispatch was a CHP function, critical to the arcology's survival.
Of course, they could have hacked my ware. But if they'd hacked my ware, why had I been able to call out? For that matter, just blank my visual or goatse it just long enough for the bad guy to get his shot off?
Ware was supposed to be so unhackable that you could do things like direct neural interface with it safely. As an old fart, I'd always stuck with subvocalization and projection instead -- intrusive but not invasive.
"Need to follow this up RT, excuse me." And it was as though she had shut me out, become a blank wall. She definitely had direct neural inputs. She also trusted me enough to essentially go somewhere else and leave her body behind in my custody.
Yes, we were in a secure police building. That just meant dumb building ware and lots of bots.
She opened her eyes. "Your ware is solid. You were spoofed. Local HF transmission using override protocols. You may have been steered to that floor of that building by your search algorithm however, so you'd be in range of the rogue transmitter."
Spoofing was annoying, but no danger to the arcology.
Someone willing to rig a whole fracking tower to get one person definitely was.
The interrogation took about two hours, interspersed with kitten petting breaks. By the end of it, she knew slightly more about me than most of my past lovers, had a detailed rundown of my crazy day to date, how I felt about it -- and had slipped me two fast-acting analgesics from her own private stash.
What was a drug crime or two between new friends?
Captain Amy Tsien frowned and sighed.
"No one loves redwood trees that much. But so far the most credible of the groups trying to take credit for the Quincy Towers sabotage is the Terra Liberation Front." TLF was a bunch of crazy crackpots who genuinely believed that lowering the human population to a billion or so would solve all problems for the lucky survivors, and to hell with the other thirty billion and change.
Their idea of gradual population control was a capsule programming error at rush hour and a casualty count in the thousands.
She rubbed the kitten's belly as she continued.
"You are a high net worth individual but there are hundreds of thousands as wealthy as you in San San. Not worth kidnapping, barely worth killing for that matter. You've cast a lot of swing votes in stockholder elections and your clout score is damn high. But most of that is because you're invested in San San holdings rather than tied up directly in real estate. Your estate goes to a mix of charities -- including the 11-99 Foundation I see.
CHP's own charity.
"All solid long term performers. You've made a lot of enemies of the sneer-at-you-in-the-corridors sort, but no one really heavy. Hmmm. Did you know the tongs like you?"
I shuddered. "No."
"Organized Crime has a note that the tongs have been told if they have an issue with you, back way off and talk to some old man who lives in Corridor North and runs a hot dog stand, and he'll take care of it."
I knew exactly who she was referring to. I'd spent long hours taking philosophy with Bao over an amazing variety of "hot dogs" - but the only illegal thing I'd known he was into was procurement of exotic meats. You know, SPAM.
Interesting.
I sat up, spilled my drink and RAN for the door. Only with a quick snake of my arm did I manage to retrieve my backpack in time.
Out of service tags, qualifications, other trivia all go out the window for a life safety response. The San San arcology computers think that if something is not done, right now, someone's gonna die, right now.
The problem with towers is that elevators take time. Even if a qualified team happened to be within a minute of the capsule lobby, it would still take three minutes for them to get to the top. That's four minutes too late.
I'm here now. I threw myself flat in the empty elevator, facing up, and it surged straight upward at high G when it realized what I had done.
Ding. Rushing wind. Someone had breached the tower envelope. Neat trick.
And the active/suicidal was standing by the blown-out window ledge with a presumed smartgun pressed against his own skull. Nothing like platform redundancy.
The floor's police bot, a rudimentary older model, was prepared to instantly stun him -- at which point he would fall off the ledge.
I drew my smartgun from my backpack (it tamely howled in my smartware as it called EVERYONE EVERYWHERE) and pointed it at another human being.
He had started to point his own gun at me. Instead he hesitated and put it back to his own skull.
I smelled a rat. I subvocalized.
"Emergency traffic, armed flyer unit and anti-fall platform needed immediately. Correction active/homicidal repeat active/homicidal."
_Query_, correction? Acknowledge emergency traffic, units dispatched.
"Put it down or I shoot!" he shouted over the howl of the air escaping the building.
"You can jump or you can shoot yourself, but you may NOT take anyone else with you!" I replied, shouting over the noise as well.
Unbidden, a tactical graphic occupied the lower left of my visual field. The tower. An armada of flyer units were inbound, but the nearest armed CHP flyer would be there in three minutes. I could not select for details of armament, but a CHP flyer would be equipped with all the things. Which was good.
However, a Santa Clara County aerial fire platform showed ETA: TBD/15 meaning that in theory it would be there in 15 minutes, but in practice it had not yet been manned.
The graphic should have appeared the instant I was dispatched. Why did the graphic wait for... me to call for help. Oh shit.
I knew what direction I was going to have to take this one. My head hurt already. Timing was going to be critical.
"I mean it! Drop the gun or I die!"
He didn't mean it. He wanted a killing. He had something. Monofilament rappel rig, personal jump harness, allies on the tower exterior. I even looked for a rope around his ankle. Millimeter-wave radar from the building secware showed a harness all right, and a spool gun behind his back with sticky harpoons.
This was a trap. He was the bait. I was the target.
I stepped out of the elevator and it promptly fell at max speed.
I advanced on him holding a steady bead on his chest.
"STOP!" he screeched with a total change of intensity. Now he meant it.
So I did. CHP now two minutes out. Possibly several lifetimes.
Integrity schematic of the building indicated that he was not going to cause a structure collapse with his little toy gun. Or mine for that matter. So I side stepped to the rescue equipment locker to...
and stopped cold. Trap. Bait. Jaws.
The handle. Contact poison on the handle, IED on the door, harness rigged to fail.
I subvocalized for the police bot to scan the locker. It whined the electronic equivalent of "Right _now_ boss?" but spun as if to comply.
The tactical graphic did not update.
Wheels within wheels, traps within traps.
The thought saved my life as I threw myself around a corner... not from the man, but from the rigged bot as it detonated.
He took a piece in the chin but stood there with his heels on the blown-out window frame and blood running down his neck.
He leveled his gun at me. No more foreplay. I matched his move and shouted "WHY!?!" just before pressing the solenoid.
He actually stopped. Mexican standoff. Both of us were fast but neither of us could press a trigger before the other one would see it and press his.
"Orders," he said calmly.
"Whatever they're paying you, I'll double it!"
He actually laughed. "Double my cancer? You'll double my cancer?"
A CHP lifter came hovering into view behind him and I winced. This was going to hurt a LOT.
Sure enough, it did.
//
"Extra! On the spot with the zot! Reclusive tyco Anderson in daring duel with madman! Tower trouble! So the fun loving CHiPpies zapped them both!"
//
I woke up in the back of a CHP lifter. Not the first time. But it always sucks.
A trooper was encouraging me to vomit in a particular direction and "drink this," which I did.
My backpack was at his feet. I could tell by how the fabric lay that my smartgun was back inside it.
"Someone wants you dead," the trooper said quietly. You think?
I tested whether my smartware worked. It did - I was not in custody. So I pulled up a You Are Here graphic. Here was halfway to Vallejo Barracks.
"The tower's been evacuated. Lots of traps. You do realize the elevator nearly took you out, yeah?"
I recalled stepping out of the elevator just before it left. Apparently, according to the trooper, it had then accelerated straight down, under power, and taken out the elevator pit in the sub-basement with extreme prejudice.
"Software traps and IEDs, Bay Area Rescue Team is on scene investigating. Boiling hot water in the sprinkler systems, electrified floors, doors that try to close into people, carbon monoxide burner in the HVAC... it's like someone seriously screwed with the building smartware _and_ brought their own lethal hardware."
Sounded like fun, for values of haunted house from hell. Hundred and sixty floors of that would be a challenge even with full gear.
"We'll be at Vallejo soon. How are you feeling?"
I could see by the EMS sigil on his collar that he was also a paramedic. So I told him honestly.
"Yeah, you look like you've had a rough day. You may not want to take anything though unless you've got one heck of a snooper in your ware."
Definite point. My headache redoubled. Aspirin, or aspirin with cyanide?
I was going to have to start wearing gloves again. Many wealthy people did. Dammit.
The lifter landed, recognizably through the windows as at Vallejo Barracks, and we tromped (well, they tromped, I winced) in escort formation to a ready room. I had the dubious honor of being the escortee.
"Detail reporting with one, 1335 hours."
"Dismissed," the CHP Captain said easily as she eyed me up and down unfavorably. Tall, blonde, command presence, impeccable uniform, hawk eyes that narrowed when she saw the vomit on my tunic.
"Stunned not drunk, ma'am" I blurted.
She nodded coolly. Her augments clearly saw into the backpack; then her eyes twinkled and her smile turned little-girlish.
"You have a kitten bot?" she gushed.
"Yes ma'am." I subvocalized scratchily and the kitten bot leapt out, jumped up on a desk and arched its back for attention.
Everyone gets one bot. Otherwise we'd be overwhelmed with bots in public. Leasing your bot license to say, a media company is a way for even the poorest person to make some money over the basic stipend. The limit doesn't apply in private cubic of course, where you could have as many bots as you wanted.
The CHP Captain petted the bot for a while as it twitched, flicked an ear, and finally purred into putty. She knew how to pet a cat.
Suddenly, she was all business.
"Anderson, you have been in four incidents today. That may be a record. Explain?"
"I think the last was a set-up. Did the timeline open with my calling Emer?"
"Yes."
"Definitely a setup. I was paged Life Safety to active/suicidal about a minute prior."
"So someone may have hacked Dispatch. Lovely." And Dispatch was a CHP function, critical to the arcology's survival.
Of course, they could have hacked my ware. But if they'd hacked my ware, why had I been able to call out? For that matter, just blank my visual or goatse it just long enough for the bad guy to get his shot off?
Ware was supposed to be so unhackable that you could do things like direct neural interface with it safely. As an old fart, I'd always stuck with subvocalization and projection instead -- intrusive but not invasive.
"Need to follow this up RT, excuse me." And it was as though she had shut me out, become a blank wall. She definitely had direct neural inputs. She also trusted me enough to essentially go somewhere else and leave her body behind in my custody.
Yes, we were in a secure police building. That just meant dumb building ware and lots of bots.
She opened her eyes. "Your ware is solid. You were spoofed. Local HF transmission using override protocols. You may have been steered to that floor of that building by your search algorithm however, so you'd be in range of the rogue transmitter."
Spoofing was annoying, but no danger to the arcology.
Someone willing to rig a whole fracking tower to get one person definitely was.
The interrogation took about two hours, interspersed with kitten petting breaks. By the end of it, she knew slightly more about me than most of my past lovers, had a detailed rundown of my crazy day to date, how I felt about it -- and had slipped me two fast-acting analgesics from her own private stash.
What was a drug crime or two between new friends?
Captain Amy Tsien frowned and sighed.
"No one loves redwood trees that much. But so far the most credible of the groups trying to take credit for the Quincy Towers sabotage is the Terra Liberation Front." TLF was a bunch of crazy crackpots who genuinely believed that lowering the human population to a billion or so would solve all problems for the lucky survivors, and to hell with the other thirty billion and change.
Their idea of gradual population control was a capsule programming error at rush hour and a casualty count in the thousands.
She rubbed the kitten's belly as she continued.
"You are a high net worth individual but there are hundreds of thousands as wealthy as you in San San. Not worth kidnapping, barely worth killing for that matter. You've cast a lot of swing votes in stockholder elections and your clout score is damn high. But most of that is because you're invested in San San holdings rather than tied up directly in real estate. Your estate goes to a mix of charities -- including the 11-99 Foundation I see.
CHP's own charity.
"All solid long term performers. You've made a lot of enemies of the sneer-at-you-in-the-corridors sort, but no one really heavy. Hmmm. Did you know the tongs like you?"
I shuddered. "No."
"Organized Crime has a note that the tongs have been told if they have an issue with you, back way off and talk to some old man who lives in Corridor North and runs a hot dog stand, and he'll take care of it."
I knew exactly who she was referring to. I'd spent long hours taking philosophy with Bao over an amazing variety of "hot dogs" - but the only illegal thing I'd known he was into was procurement of exotic meats. You know, SPAM.
Interesting.
