The Ragdoll Sequence Box set Read online

  Contents

  DataTrigger

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Function Overload

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Dead Code

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Enjoyed the book?

  Newsletter

  About the Author

  Also by J.P. Carver

  One

  When It Rains, It Pours

  The night my life went to hell, I was sweating in my hoodie and weaving my way through minor crowds of salary people on their way home. The air felt like a wet blanket, and it started to drizzle big globs of rain the moment I slipped into the alley. I swore at the rain while rolling a Dumpster over to the broken ladder of the old fire escape.

  The rain became a downpour as I started up, and it made the cement walls and metal ladders slick. I almost fell twice but made it to the crook of a window that sat higher than most of the buildings around me. I sat down, wiped short strands of my red-streaked hair from my face, and considered shaving it all off just to escape the mugginess of August.

  I licked raindrops from my lips and stared out at the shimmering images hanging above the street, from the sides of buildings. The advertisements practically floated, like glitzy streetwalkers who just wouldn’t get out of your face. ‘Newest and greatest’ had long become ‘cheapest and useless’, but the ads were flashy enough that even I found myself thinking about them long after.

  The world had become one big slogan. They had even tried streaming ads directly to people, but ad-blockers put an end to that fairly quickly. Harder to block things that exist.

  I pushed up my sleeve, and the rain washed the sheen of sweat away. I pulled the fiber wire out from its port inside my wrist, beside the tendon. White gel that kept out infection splattered across my tan skin in a fashion that reminded me of spilt milk. I wiped it away.

  Climbing always was the hard part. The rest was just prying off the lid for the section box and cracking into the system. I plugged in after the alarm was disabled, and I enjoyed the familiar tingle that ran up the nerves of my arm. My custom OS bleeped into existence over my vision in a toxic green color.

  I smiled as I read some of the code. The security guys and gals had been hard at work on some new systems since the last time I did this type of crack, but there were so many holes that I had to wonder if they did it on purpose. All that work and head-scratching for nothing. It didn’t help them that I had a top-of-the-line neural computer wired into my brain and a physical connection fiber, which made this even more of a cakewalk than it would be for most people.

  The code continued to page past my vision, displayed on a little screen implanted into my cornea. I had been reading code all my life and didn’t so much see as absorb the text, processing it as it appeared and looking for the right context and function calls.

  “There you are.” The videos for this block of advertisements showed up in a hidden partition, and the only link to it was a reference in the main part of the program to the variable r. All I had to do was trade out their files for the ones that had been uploaded to my brain case drive earlier. Transfer happened in milliseconds.

  The billboards winked off, a startling lack of light that even the tired groups on the street noticed, and then rebooted in a neon solid pink before the new videos started to play.

  More sexily clad teens and flashy graphics selling the corporation’s junk. I sneered as I unplugged myself from the panel and slid the cord back in. My fingers twitched for a second as the wire rubbed against the tendon. A simple Omni computer system would have worked just fine for such an easy crack, but the wire came in handy on the more serious and dangerous jobs I took, and there was no reason not to use it here.

  The rain started to slow as I shifted some to look out at the city where I had lived all my life. The corporate towers of light had grown like beanstalks over the years, each one trying to outdo the other, and at the top of them were giants—giants who barely knew the rabble still lived on the streets unless their quarterly reports were a little light. They played their little games, and sometimes we Crackers—those of us who broke systems for profit and fun—became their little pawns.

  Thinking about it made me feel sick. I never wanted to work for those sniffers of coke-covered bills. But a girl had to eat, and there were worse things I could have done.

  I stamped down the anger that started to eat at me and made sure the alley below was clear before I stood. I had made it halfway when a searing white light found me in the crook of the ledge and support pillar. The beam blinded me, sending me against the glass with my hand in front of my face.

  A voice croaked like a fat frog over the speaker as a warning beep went off in my ears from my neural. “Stay where you are. You are in violation of Newt-Berry Code 632. You are in the process of being scanned.”

  Beyond the light, I could make out a Hover Patrol Vehicle, floating like a bloated fly above the gap of the old twentieth-century brick building across from me and the taller office building I was nested in. The air it pushed out created a wind tunnel that threatened to pull me off.

  The scanner was pretty easy to dodge, all things considered. I gave my implanted I-Dent chip a quick wipe with a new identity and began to look for a way out.

  I’d screwed up.

  Somewhere in that dreck of code was a trigger, and I’d missed it. There wasn’t time to kick myself over it, as the new identity would only give them a minute’s pause before the computer burped out an error.

  I took my retractable baton from my canvas bag and slammed it against the glass. It cracked, the point of impact becoming opaque, but it didn’t break through. An alarm screamed from the inside, drowning out the patrol vehicle beside me as it floated upwards. I could hear muffled shouts from the roof as Central Electronic Security troopers unloaded.

  It sounded like a lot of peeps for just a girl cracking some ad time, and it sent me into a small panic. I hit the glass two more times, and the tip of my baton broke through. I flipped the baton around and used the handle end to punch out larger chunks of glass. After about thirty seconds, I had a hole large enough to squeeze my thin frame through.

  Inside, I pushed up against the opposite wall and started to scan the network for open ports. You could always count on some lazy employee trying to get in some game time during work hours, and so I checked those first. One was wide open and allowed me to crack into the security system, where I dropped a virus to wipe the digital video recorder box. Most people wouldn’t have bothered, but I felt too jittery to remember to keep my head down whenever a camera was near, plus I didn’t need CES tracking me with it.

  Down the hall was an open door, and I went for it as the searchlight appeared again and whitewashed everything. I needed to make the alarm shut up, as it locked down all levels of the building. The CES guys would have codes to burn through the locks, but I needed a terminal, as it would be nearly impossible for my neural to crack in through the air. Network ports could only take you so far.

  The room I slipped into was dark except for a toppled-over lamp on the desk, which shone against the door and made me squint. The place looked as if it had been decorated by a Wolverine; books and papers were scattered everywhere. The walls had been sliced and smashed, and the few paintings on the ground were tor
n to shreds.

  On the desk lay a black mass that looked a lot like a person. I closed the door and readied my baton as I stepped farther into the room. When I reached the desk, the mass became a man, and I nearly puked. His face had been melted to a red and white gore, to the point nothing was remotely identifiable. A burner pistol lay next to his foot, its tip still orange and smoking.

  I swallowed back bile, recoiled, and tripped over a trash can. My head smacked off the wall and sent stars dancing across my eyes as my neural skipped and flicked into pixelated junk.

  “Goddammit.” I rubbed at the pain that arced across my skull and staggered to stand straight. I rebooted my neural, annoyed that I still hadn’t got the impact problem fixed, and went to the desk again, kicking aside the trash can.

  The computer on the desk was still up, but locked. I tried to push the dead man away, but he caught on the chair and toppled over onto the probably expensive brown carpet with a thud. His blood created a splatter pattern about two feet out from him that for some weird reason sent my groggy mind into thinking about giraffes. I shook the thought away and sat down, looking for a port to plug into. There were none.

  “Crap… Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.” My fingers flexed above the keyboard, more wary of the keys than the drying blood that speckled it. I rebooted the computer and went to work. Companies always had joke security on their office computers. Too many idiots didn’t want to deal with the trouble of remembering a password other than ‘password’ or ‘kitty’. This one was ‘tipsy3’—better than most, but the dictionary cracker only gave a mild pause over it.

  The terminal belonged to an executive of some sort, since his clearance was pretty high—a small favor. He didn’t have access to the alarms, of course, but he was on the local network, with enough permissions for me to work my way toward those nodes for the floor I was on.

  The smart thing would have been trying for the cameras instead of blanking them. Eyes in the building would have stopped my heart from using my ribs as punching bags. But when I tried to access the bank of cameras, they returned a screen of static. The virus had fried the console.

  I didn’t need the cameras to know the CES guys were making their way down to me and were probably only a few floors up. It would take time to search and clear each floor, but that time was quickly disappearing. Not to mention, they were most likely working their way up, as well.

  My typing skills had degraded in the last few years, but I made it smoothly through the blocks and trips. The alarm quieted, and I stepped away from the terminal and over the man on the floor. The gates were opening, the clanking of metal echoing through the halls. I gave the man one last look before dashing from the room and down the hall. He was gonna be good nightmare fuel.

  The stairwell door banged open feet in front of me, and the light from the Patrol Vehicle flooded the hall again. A man wearing all-black gear and a helmet to match moved in slowly. His weapon was raised—an MK23a, the pride and joy of the CES. They called it the next generation in smart guns. The built-in computer told you where to aim, and all you had to do was point and shoot. They could give it to a half brain-dead monkey, and it would be able to hit the bull’s-eye. In a way, they did just that.

  CES troopers were all about doing damage. They didn’t talk; they didn’t negotiate. They got their job done with as much blood as possible—without killing you, of course. It was more fun to keep you breathing. I would’ve been surprised if they could use the toilet without someone directing them how to sit down on it.

  The only places to hide were the pillars inset into the walls every few feet. I ducked behind one and made myself as small as possible. The trooper faced away from me, but another stepped in right behind, their boots crisp and loud on the tile as they headed down my side of the hall. All this for some damn ad time. The credits weren’t even close to enough for this job.

  A video window popped open on the right side of my vision to show a bearded face in all its glowing-screen glory. Why was he calling me now? “Ziller?”

  “What the hell is going on, Ragdoll?” The light on his cheeks and forehead changed from blue to green. “CES is blowing up across Annie.”

  Annie was what Ziller called the CES Emergency Frequency Band. He’d explained to me years ago that it was from an old song. Even knowing the song, the nickname still made little sense to me—but then, dumb names were everywhere, in case someone was sniffing the line… which someone usually was.

  Radio had mostly died out years ago, and high-powered Wi-Fi bands that were heavily regulated by the city and its coffer fillers had become the replacement. We had our own little pirate Wi-Fi setup that was outside official channels. Though how much longer that would last was anyone’s guess.

  “I thought you had a simple addy job,” he said.

  “Got tripped up.” The trooper’s footsteps continued to come toward me, and I wished I could just melt into the wall. A stroke of luck had the troopers going into the room a few doors before the pillar. It was a conference room, which would take some time to clear.

  “Nah. No way you tripped on something like this, Raggy. You get bored and put an OX out on yourself?”

  “Sure, I’m that much of an idiot. I need an out—like, this second. CES is so close that we may as well be screwing.”

  “That close?”

  I ducked my head out from cover and sent a stream of the troopers coming out of the room. They turned and went toward the room opposite.

  “Holy Circuit Mother of God. You did put out an OX, you crazy bitch.”

  I growled at him as I began to slide down the hall toward another door, praying it would be unlocked. An OX, or an Order for Examination, amounted to a no-questions-asked order for your arrest. A hug from a neural Nightmare chair and a kiss from a bullet was usually how it ended. “No, I didn’t. You aren’t helping right now, Ziller.”

  “Sure I am. I’m working on getting into Annie and calling for a pullout.”

  “Taking your sweet time, then, aren’t you? Besides, when the hell has that ever worked?”

  He laughed, a burst of static in the comm, and I squinted. In the following silence, I listened as the trooper from down the hall called to the other. “High-data channel open on the floor. Wireless. Gonna jam it, so keep your eyes open. He’s here somewhere.”

  Ziller’s image became fuzzy, and adjusting the signal just made it worse. I’d heard CES had been working on powerful portable jammers, but that they could completely shut down a band was news. Bad news.

  I made it to another pillar and hid behind it as a trooper came out and started my way. They walked right past me at first, but stopped after three steps and turned toward me. I came face-to-face with a woman who could have passed for a man if not for the way her body armor fit. She started and brought her gun around. I pushed off the wall, the baton slipping from my bag.

  She screamed and fired. I screamed and connected the baton with her exposed jaw. The impact vibrated all the way down the steel-fiber rod and sent my fingers tingling.

  She lurched back, the rifle punching fist-sized holes in the ceiling and showering us both with dust and chunks of cement. I bounced off her falling body, hooked her leg with my foot, and pulled to make sure she went down completely. I stumbled down the hall, trying to get the balance to run. I needed somewhere to go.

  A map appeared in my vision, and a route showed in a tangled green line right out the window. I was five floors up.

  A bullet ripped through my upper arm as I hit the window at the end of the hall and bounced off. The bullet continued on, the glass cracking in a giant spiderweb from corner to corner. More pings sounded from behind me. The shots fired from the MK23a were practically silent.

  Taking a left around a corner, I tried to link back to the terminal in the executive’s office. It would leave behind a signature, but having my heart explode out of my chest would be worse.

  The port was still open. I started to search, the GUI representation of the
terminal sitting on my left eye. Elevators. They were the best option I had now. More pings, and more pain found me. I tried not to think about the pieces that were missing from my limbs. If not for the masking of the gun’s sensors that my neural could do, I’d already be dead.

  Building systems…

  Security system…

  System override…

  Elevator console…

  Unlock…

  Fifth floor, MicroManagement Solutions…

  The connection felt stupidly slow, which I chalked up to the CES jammer. Even then, it took only a few seconds.

  The elevator dinged as I ducked behind one of the two pillars in front of it. It crumbled under the onslaught of the two troopers, pebbles of concrete peppering my face, and the dust made me sneeze. I jumped into the elevator when the doors fully opened, pulled myself to my knees, and slammed blood-slicked fingers against the close door button.

  The doors buckled inward in bowl-sized dents just after they closed. Someone had the foresight to armor them and had saved my life.

  I pushed myself to my feet, the pain finally breaking through the endorphin rush I’d been running on. My medi-implant compensated, and a moment of light-headed euphoria made me dizzy. There was a metallic taste in my mouth that I couldn’t get rid of.

  I shook my head, leaned against the cool steel walls, and tried to breathe against the concrete dust that floated in the air. I opened my eyes, looked down, and felt my stomach lurch at the sight before me. A section of flesh was missing from my upper right arm. Another cut ran along my side, just below my breast, which stopped shy of my fourth rib.