PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

9500 words.

It was a late summer afternoon, the setting sun throwing long shadows across the warehouse outside my office. The door opened abruptly and a man walked in. He had a body builder's physique, a triangular slab of muscle wider at the top than at the bottom. A thin white scar ran from his ear, along his cheekbone and down to the corner of his mouth. The pearl grey suit he was wearing made him uncomfortable despite the fact it had cost someone a small fortune.

In a quiet, calm, professional voice he announced that I had something that did not belong to me and that I must return it. I sighed, said "I don't have it anymore" and drummed my fingers on the table three times. The third time my fingers hit the table a two tonne freezer dropped from the roof and mashed him flat against the floor.

I turned back to the desk, ran the shutdown routine and set the warehouse to close down in ten minutes. I folded up my workstation and stuffed it into a pack, edged around the spreading puddle in the middle of the room and bolted for the door.

The office was a couple of shipping containers welded together and stuck in the back corner of a derelict warehouse. It wasn't high society, but the kind of work I did meant I had to avoid the limelight. I skirted the pile of crates in the middle of the concrete floor, ducked through the outside door and crossed the car park. A thunderstorm had been gathering overhead all afternoon, leaving the smell of burnished copper in the air. As I left the building a the thunder cracked out and the skies opened in a downpour.

I had to find a phone line, the old copper wire kind. I could have jacked in right then and there from my station using a packet link but the bad guys would have me before I blinked an eyelid. The packet nets were screaming with traces and taps of every kind but nobody watched the plain old telephone system anymore because nobody used them much.

The rain was hammering down now and the water sluicing down my neck had that gritty feel it gets just after a sandstorm. I doubled across the road and ducked down into the subway out of the rain. I picked the cash turnstile and ducked through, chucking a handful of change into the basket. It might raise a few eyebrows but the bad guys couldn't trace cash.

I had to wait maybe fifteen minutes for a train so I broke into the old public phone on the back of the platform and got out my workstation. A couple of minutes work with my pocket knife got my work station spliced in to the handset and I flipped it on and selected a flat panel display since I didn't want anyone looking over my shoulder.

I fired up a connection, spoofed the connection signal out of the local exchange and dialled a little used board in Finland. Marty answered immediately his icon flickering onto the screen. Marty's normal icon was an androgynous humanoid figure but for friends he usually grew himself some discernible features. This time he was a seven foot negro with a wild blue afro.

"What's up ?" he asked.

"It's Gabriel... I need some search time on a big machine."

"I can scam some time on White-Sands but it'll cost."

"Go ahead - charge it."

Marty's icon faded as he turned his attention to getting me an account. Unlike my train ride, this one would get traced but only as far as my bank account, Marty could look after himself. After a couple of minutes Marty was back.

"Okay, you're on... watch yourself, the heavies are out to get you."

"Thanks man, ciao."

It looked like my bad luck was common knowledge, information breeds fast. Marty's icon winked and he faded out to be replaced by the Sumex board at the White-Sands missile range. I fired up a search agent and sent it looking for anything in my name and fired up another to search for anything on my erstwhile client. I fired up a couple of dummy engines and sent them off to cover the tracks of the other two and then set some traps to keep an eye over them. I set the whole lot to 'store and forward' and lit up a cigarette.

Smoking was a bad habit I'd picked up from Katrina. She used to smoke dark, oily, French cigarettes that smelt like burnt tyres. She'd fumble around in the darkness for a bit and then I'd see her face, silhouetted in the flickering glow of her lighter. I'd thought I could make her give it up, like so many other bad habits.

The train caught me reminiscing. I punched the interrupt key a couple of times, slammed the lid on my workstation and lunged out of the phone box and onto the train. I picked a seat near the end of the empty carriage, sat down and fired up my station again. The agents should have got me some data before I had to disconnect.

The train rattled across the rails and lurched its way through the rubber vacuum seal on the tunnel. The lights flicked by on the walls counting out the heartbeats of the subway. I stared out at them for a while lost in thought. After a while I shook it off and fired up my workstation. I called up the data from my searches and sifted through it.

My client search had not surprisingly turned up empty and had also attracted some attention. I thought my traps had diverted it but it was possible that the Yakuza had traced it, if so Marty would be answering a few difficult questions tonight. That's business for you.

The client search was empty but the one in my name had turned up a couple of interesting items. There was a price on my head. Nothing exorbitant but I'd have to watch myself now, a lot of my former companions would like nothing more than to shop me for some quick cash. Someone had also alerted the police. The cops had already found the body and were swarming all over the warehouse, they must have missed me by seconds. I'd faked the rental records for the warehouse so they wouldn't find me that way, but they were asking difficult questions.

The Yakuza I could hide from, go respectable. The cops were a bit more difficult. Both of them made it virtually impossible. I had planned to get off at the next station and make some calls, but all of a sudden that didn't seem like a good idea. I couldn't rely on any of my contacts and now I had now where to go.

It had been a long week. Longer than I deserved. I curled up in my seat and tucked my station in behind me. Putting my head against the glass I watched the lights pulse past outside the window for a while. Then I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep. Sleep didn't come easily and I dreamt fitfully of the day I had met Kate.

When we met I was sitting in a pub on the wrong side of town, doing my best to get paralytic. I'd just lost a major case and the client had brushed me off without blinking. A mixture of anger and self pity sent me out to find the swishest bar could find and sit their drinking scotch at ten dollars a glass and pissing the customers off. I was well into my second bottle and the barman was just about to throw me out when a hand touched me on the shoulder. I turned around, ready to brush off another yuppie and looked straight into the face of an angel.

She had red hair, blue eyes and tonight she was dressed in a mix of chrome and leather, as out of place as my shabby overcoat and old suit.

"I think you might have had a bit too much to drink", she said.

" . . . I'm drowning my sorrows".

"Why don't you come home with me ?"

Shakily, I stubbed out my cigarette and got to my feet. We headed for the door, her arm around my waist. Later, I found out that a bomb had gone off in the bar that night. A satchel charge of high explosive had demolished the bar and brought down the two storeys above it. Fifteen people were killed. I never asked if she did it, and she never said.

In my dream, it was different. I pushed my way through the crowded bar, desperate to find her. I would spot her red hair on the other side of the room and push through the crowd to reach her. As I reached her she would smile at me and melt away into the crowd. Her smile was bright and sharp and her teeth were pointed just like a shark's. I awoke with the bar consumed by bright flame, people screaming and the masonry tumbling down through the cheap plasterboard roof above us.

There was a man sitting opposite me. He was nondescript and casually dressed but his eyes were hard. He glanced up the carriage towards the head of the train.

"She sent me to watch over you", he said.

I blinked and sat up, trying to clear my head, cold sweat running down my neck as the train rocked back and forth over a curve in the rail.

"Sorry I had to wake you, but he was going after your gear" he gestured to a young boy in tribal colours who was lying, crumpled on the floor in the aisle, down the carriage from me.

"Who are you ?"

"Vince, a friend."

I glanced at the kid on the floor, he wasn't moving.

"Did you kill him ?" I asked.

"No, just broke his arm to teach him a lesson."

"Jesus who are you ? How long have you been 'watching out' for me ?"

He gave me a mirthless grin, "I'm a specialist, I was camped outside your warehouse for about two weeks."

Since before this thing had started. Kate had known what she had let me in for.

"I was coming in behind that hitter when your dropped the fridge on him. Nice work".

"Thanks a bundle."

"Where are we headed ?"

"I don't know I hadn't thought that far ahead."

He grunted and looked down the train again as the door at the end of the carriage opened. A uniformed security guard stepped into the carriage and started up the aisle towards us. The guard strolled up the carriage, his thumbs hooked in his belt, and stepped carefully over the body in the aisle without ever taking his eyes of the other end of the carriage.

When he was gone, Vince glanced at me and said, "If we get off at the next stop, I know a place we can stay for a couple of days. We could walk it from the station."

"Okay", like I had a lot of choice.

The train decelerated heavily into the next station, the lights strobing by outside the window slower and slower. We got up and headed for the door.

"What about him ?" I said gesturing to the kid on the floor.

"Leave him... maybe it'll teach him a lesson".

We headed up through the station towards the street. At this time of day the station was quiet, the lull before the evening rush. People drifted through the station and a couple of beggars squatted uncomfortably on the thick plastic veneer that had been sprayed over every exposed surface. The plastic was an attempt to keep the graffiti under control and it seemed to be working, the place was as hollow and as cheerless as a coffin. Vince trailed me walking couple of paces behind me and to my right. He ambled along behind me looking relaxed. I got the feeling that was his only expression.

"How do you know we aren't being followed ?" I asked him.

Vince just looked at me, his stare boring through me like I wasn't there.

"Sorry, stupid question."

We turned right out of the station and headed up the road against the crowd. We walked for about fifteen minutes wending our way through the streets towards the river. The City was seedier here than the docks around my warehouse and more crowded. We moved out of the commercial strip around the main road and into a residential area. Vince turned left into a multistory apartment complex and led the way up the stairs. We climbed four storeys of rickety stairs and crowded into a tiny and equally decrepit lift.

The lift had no controls, Vince inserted a key into the lift and rotated it one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. The lift rose smoothly and stopped some floors higher, the doors sliding open. Beyond the lift the apartment was clean and white and slickly furnished. Vince strode out into the room and crossed to a bar against the side wall. I stood in the door of the lift and stared at the brightly polished furniture.

"Scotch ?" Vince asked, tilting a glass towards me.

"No, I don't drink"

Vince stared at me.

"Well, I don't."

He shrugged and turned back to his own drink.

"What is this place ?"

"I told you, a friend's place."

"What, exactly does your friend do ?"

Vince stared at me again, I was getting used to feeling stupid.

"Okay, okay. So what do we do now ?"

"You tell me cowboy, I'm just looking out for you."

I ran my hand through my hair chucked my station into a chair and slumped into the couch. The room was bright and shiny, the furniture minimalist. The couch I was sitting on and the bar seemed to constitute the bulk of the furniture. If there was an electronic device anywhere in the room, I couldn't spot it.

"We should really find Katrina and find out what the hell's going on. I don't suppose you know where she is ?"

Vince shrugged.

"I don't suppose you would tell me anyway would you ?"

Again the shrug. I scratched my head and put my feet up on the table.

"I won't be able to use my own deck, they'll have it's ID logged and they'll be all over me before I can scratch myself. I won't be able to use any of my regular lines either they'll have them nailed. "

I looked over at Vince. "Any idea where I can get myself a new deck ?" I asked him.

He ambled over and reached under his suit. He handed me a pocket sized computer. It was an Cyber Industries Torch, the slickest workstation for the yuppie crowd. If you ignored the flashy stuff it was probably about as fast as my machine and Vince's model had about three gigs of permanent storage.

I raised my eyebrows at Vince.

"A hobby ?"

"A professional interest."

I got up, dug my workstation out of the chair and sat back down on the couch. I put Vince's down on the table and opened mine up. I snapped out the keyboard and the display and plugged them into Vince's.

The first thing I would have to do would be to set up some new accounts and get myself some access. Vince had an account on one of the commercial service providers and aliases on a dozen sites around the country. It'd give me something to work with.

I initiated four or five simultaneous connections to the service provider and configured the workstation to use them in parallel. I opened a connection to a random University site. The structure of the University ranged itself in the air above my workstation, machines connected by the ruby threads of their network. I poked around the structure getting a feel for it. I didn't want to make a pass at their systems only to find out they were the base for some government, anti-cracking agency.

At this time of night network traffic was sluggish and the schematic barely rippled with the passage of data. The mass of the university was clustered around the admin systems but there were a number of peripheral clumps. One clump which had three independent connections to the outside network looked particularly promising.

It seemed the University had an affiliated industrial research group which would have what I was looking for. The group specialised in commercial applications for biological research, something which would require plenty of computing power. I fired up a routine and had it parse through the files to get a password. I let that go and had a bit of a play with the commercial system, testing its limits.

The commercial server was a mess. It looked like the administrator didn't like her job much. The site was a cracker's paradise, there was no protection on any of the files, academic freedom run amok. The station chimed, my search had returned an answer. It turned out that a lecturer who worked with the company thought that "prostitute" was a good password. I exploited a few loopholes in the server software and I had the whole password file including the all important 'root' account.

I restored the administrator's deleted mail and began to sift through it. About three months ago the administrator had been asked to restore the parent corporation's server when it crashed after a power spike. The usual network supervisor had been away on holiday when the shit hit the fan and the local administrator had been called in to clean up. The supervisor had set her up an account with the appropriate access and left her to it. The account was still there and had still had its supervisor access. I now had free reign on the corporation servers and access to some fairly hefty databases.

Vince tapped me on the shoulder.

"Here" he said and handed me a cup of coffee.

I took it, lit myself a cigarette and sat back to think. Sipping the coffee I pondered what I was actually looking for. Ideally I was looking for something to lead me to Kate, something about the Anarchists perhaps. I didn't fancy my chances.

The Anarchists rose out of the rubble of World War III. The third world war, known as the Short war, wasn't anything like the first two. Instead of being a raging inferno the war was a widespread outbreak of local brushfires, in its final stages it became very messy indeed.

The war had started in the Himalayas. The Indians and the Pakistanis had started their usual border disputes. It would have died quietly like the others if the Indian government hadn't been overthrown by Sikh radicals. The Pakistani's panicked and launched a first strike deep into Indian territory. Within 24 hours the countries were in full scale conflict and India was striking back on land and at sea.

The Chinese government, under increasing pressure from its democratic population, took the opportunity to re-invade Tibet to 'protect' the population. This in turn encouraged Thailand to reclaim some territory and soon there were a dozen conflicts across Asia. The malaise spread and in a week more than one hundred local conflicts burst into flame.

Yemen, the Spratleys, the Falklands, Korea, Tierra del Fuego, Iraq, the Balkans, Rhodesia, Quebec, Mexico, Honduras and Cambodia all exploded into hot blooded war. Even Europe was not immune with NATO being torn apart and a militant Germany skirmishing with its neighbours.

The war ended less than eight months later when the Pakistani's under imminent danger of losing their battle detonated their only nuclear device in the suburbs of Bombay. Eighty million people died in the inferno, many more died in the following weeks of famine and disease. Some combatants took this as a signal to unleash their hoarded weapons of mass destruction and snuffed out their opposition. The rest of the wars petered out under the influence of a resurgent United Nations.

The Anarchists were a popular reaction to the war. The group was dedicated largely to anti-establishment ideals and green ideology but mainly to the spread of chaos. As one giggling Anarchist announced on television, while a tower block collapsed behind him, "Chaos is the new world order". By definition the Anarchists had no organisation and it was often said that anyone that wanted could claim membership simply by blowing up the local phone exchange.

Katrina was a hardline Anarchist. She had joined a cadre of Anarchists when she was sixteen. The civil war in her country had claimed the lives of most of her family and she grew up with a succession of politicians promising peace but delivering nothing more than rhetoric. She took her anger out on the rest of the population.

I'd only met one other Anarchist, one of Kate's ex-boyfriends. Mike was a rabid idealist who had taken an instant dislike to me. He also taught computing security at a local University so perhaps the two were related. Kate told me that she had dated Mike because he made her laugh. I'd met Mike when I went with her to a lecture he was giving on 'disaster recovery'. I'd infuriated him by pointing out that his lecture wasn't supported by reality, I think the term I used was "bullshit".

I flipped back to my University account and ran a document search in his name. After a couple of minutes it turned up some paper he'd written recently. A bit of tracking through the Uni's financial systems and some cross referencing produced a mail address for him. I flicked open another window and connected to the address.

The address turned out to be a bare reception room, generated with an off the shelf program. An icon rose up from the table and turned to face me. It had the cartoon look and glassy eyes of an agent but it had Mike's face.

"Can I help you ?" it enquired.

"I want to talk to Mike."

"I'm sorry Mr Dillan is not receiving visitors at the moment."

"Okay, I'll leave a message."

"I'm afraid he's not taking any messages either. Could you please leave now."

I sighed and flicked back to my workstation, fired up an intrusion agent and piped it off to Mike's site. I flipped back to his connection.

The agent was still asking me to leave but stopped mid sentence. A funny look flickered across its face and it said "Of course sir, I will take your message." I flicked the machine over to verbal mode and recorded a short message. I appended my signature to it, handed it to the icon and closed the window. I set the workstation to alert me if anything came in and logged off.

Vince had taken a high chair near the bar and was playing cards. I slumped back into the chair and closed my eyes.

"Finished ?" asked Vince without turning around.

"No, I've contacted someone but I have to wait for a reply."

I turned round to look at him. He was still idly flipping cards. I turned back and peered at the workstation. I'd been out on the wire for about five hours, my cigarette had burned itself down to a snake of grey ash. I closed my eyes again. I drifted off to sleep and dreamt again of that first night with Katrina.

We had gone back to her place. Kate lived in a warehouse converted into one room apartments with hundreds of metres of inch thick plastic panelling. There were about four hundred apartments in the warehouse, most inhabited by single people who enjoyed their privacy. There was nothing to distinguish the door which we stopped in front of from the rest, but it opened to her touch. Katrina led me inside and propped me up against the wall beside the bed. She peeled off her jacket, stepped out of her shoes and came back across the room to me.

She wore a tiny black bra and her skin was as smooth and as white as cream. She put one arm around my neck and started to unbutton my shirt with the other. I ran my hand down her shoulder and brushed my palm across her breasts. She craned her head and kissed me.

We tumbled into the bed in a tangle of limbs. Kate lay on top of me her legs entwined with mine. She kissed me again and stared into my eyes from barely an inch away. Her eyes were deep and liquid. I wanted so much to make love to her but the whisky was eroding my libido and I'd soon be a babbling wreck. I stuttered and sought for the words to tell her. She put her finger on my lips and said "There'll be another time, don't worry". She rested her head against my chest and we slept the night in each others arms.

I awoke, reaching for her beside me but finding only the empty couch. Vince sat at the counter oblivious. I rubbed my eyes and drained the dregs of my coffee. My workstation was chiming gently and I straightened to answer it. Behind me Vince got up off his stool and moved over to stand behind me. I took the keyboard and set the workstation for privacy, effectively editing Vince out of any picture it transmitted. I answered the call. Mike's agent shimmered into life in front of me.

"My master has instructed me to inform you that he has no wish to talk to you."

"Come on Mike, I'm not playing around. I need to find Katrina and I need to find her now."

"I'm sorry sir, I do not know to who you are referring."

"Shut up you moron I'm not talking to you." I raised my voice, "Michael this is a matter of life and death, hers as well as mine."

It was only a tiny movement but the icon raised it's lips in a sneer. I frowned, put the connection on hold and warmed up a tiger agent, one of my best. I turned back to the screen.

"Right you bastard if that's the way you want to play it" I said and fired off the tiger.

The icon smiled uneasily. Then it flickered as the tiger hit Mike's system and started to overload it. The tiger split into a dozen sub routines, each of which spawned off a dozen more copies of itself in an explosive growth routine. By overloading his system the tiger slowed his responses and made it virtually impossible to interrupt.

It took only a matter of seconds. The icon flickered again and dissolved into a live video feed in an abrupt jump cut. It showed Mike staring at the screen of his workstation, his hands flicking across the keys as he tried to regain control of his equipment.

"Give it up Mike" I said and punched up my image on all of his monitors.

He gasped and backed away from the keyboard as if it were possessed.

"What the bloody hell do you think you're doing ?" he spluttered.

"It's simple Mike. You're out of your depth, as usual, and if you don't tell me what I want to know I'll erase your arse."

He started to his feet.

"You can't hurt me, you jumped up little..."

I glanced at my other screen, punched up the audio on his workstation and interrupted him.

"SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN !"

He slumped back into his chair. I glanced at my other screen again.

"I have access to the account numbers for all four of your bank accounts, I have a copy of all your research notes for the past two years, I know your passport number and I can turn your workstation to slag from here so stop playing grab ass and tell me what I want to know." To illustrate my point I spiked the signal to one of his monitors and burst the tube. Mike ducked his head as glass showered across the room.

"Jesus, okay, okay... I'll tell you what I know".

"Alright where is she ?"

"I don't know... all I have from her is a message she forwarded to me."

I flipped back to my other screen and brought up Mike's mailbox. The message from Kate had come from a public access terminal somewhere in the south of the City. I flipped back.

"Thanks Mike, that's all you had to give me."

I killed the video and flicked up the tiger, setting it to randomly infect and erase Mike's system. It would keep him busy for a while and stop him from contacting any of the Anarchist cadres.

I disconnected, took the address of the public terminal I had got from Mike's mail and checked it against a service register I kept handy. The terminal was one of a dozen listed in the Hive.

The Hive was what the locals called the Hyundai-Verlag arcology. Built on the river banks to the south of the City the arcology had been an ambitious social experiment. A vast economic residential complex with small scale factories and cropping farmlands. The whole thing had supposed to be self sustaining but it had never worked. I turned to Vince.

"She made a call from somewhere in the Hive."

"Can you find her ?"

"I don't know. She won't be using her own name or anything I can trace..."

I turned back to the keyboard fired up a search and called up the service line for the arcology's information support group. The arcology subcontracted their support to a local firm called InfoTech, the directory listed their head of support as "George Watts". A tired looking secretary answered my call. I rubbed my eyes and blinked sleepily at her .

"Hi this is George at InfoTech, the phones have gone down again and I need the server password to get it up again, Can you help me ?"

"Don't you have it ?"

I snarled, "Listen sister I can spend half an hour sifting through the log while you explain to the guys on the third floor why their thirty million dollar database is broken or you can give it to me now and be can both go back to sleep !"

"Okay, okay, don't get so touchy... the admin password is 'caffeine'."

"Thanks, have a nice night."

I switched off and connected to their server. Social engineering is usually the quickest way into a system but its also the most risky. Logged in as administrator, I called up the security records for the phones. The public phones kept visual records of the people who used them so the police could backtrack if something went wrong. I called up the records for Kate's call.

She hadn't changed her appearance at all. She looked just the same as the day she left me three years ago. Vince looked over my shoulder and smiled. A flash bulb went off in my head.

"You're in love with her aren't you ?" I asked.

He looked at me and said "Yes".

I grunted and turned back to the screen.

"She's my sister."

I twisted back to stare at him. He was back at the counter playing cards.

I turned back to the picture and tried to concentrate on finding her. She probably didn't go far from where she lived to make a call to Mike. That meant she would be somewhere in the Hive, along with 75,000 other people. Her name wouldn't appear anywhere in the records and I had nothing else to find her by, no credit records, no property records, nothing. I had no link between her and her past, I had nothing to remember her by except her face.

A tiny idea flickered across the back of my mind. I switched back to my University site and had another look at their network. Sure enough in one tiny corner of the University's web was an image processing lab. I sifted through the software on their specialist machines until I came across a pattern recognition package. A quick look at the software told me that it'd take weeks to run the program I was thinking of on any of the machines I had available. As fast as they were, what I had in mind was a little out of the ordinary. There was a solution though. I leaned back and scratched my head. The next bit was the tricky bit. I was sure I could do it, I just wasn't certain if I could get away with it.

The processing was going to need every bit of computing power I could lay my hands on. I connected to the University's central server and had a poke around looking for the routines which would automatically alert the administrator if there were problems. I set the routines up in a protected area to fool them in to believing the server was functioning normally and summarily killed all of the other processes. From the outside it looked like nothing was wrong but now I had a machine which was doing nothing at all. I worked through all the machines on the campus, setting up dummies and killing off their processes. It took me three hours but at the end of it I had complete control of sixty computers and processing power equivalent to about several large corporations. More than enough.

I returned to the central server and set up a routine to coordinate my search. I grabbed a copy of Kate's picture passed it to the central server and started my run. In each pass the server opened a link to the Hive's computer, took Kate's picture and passed it off to one of my sixty University machines. Each machine had a copy of the recognition software and was set to fire up as many parallel copies of the routine as it could handle. Each routine would download a set of security camera images from the Hive and scan through them looking for a match with Kate's picture. If it found one it would relay the records back to the central server which would archive them.

The process built slowly, each machine working its way up to a full load. The central server, which was worth about ten of the other machines by itself, was grinding to a halt just controlling the routine. I tweaked some settings, throwing out files and killing off routines which were slowing it down. The University would be an unhappy place tomorrow. The staff would come back to find their machines burnt out shells - I hoped their backups were in good condition because they'd be getting a good workout tomorrow.

Even with sixty machines working on it the search was taking longer than I liked. Each security camera in the Hive took pictures at 30 frames-per-second, for every second of every day and they kept the pictures for seven days. That meant I was searching a database of about nine million images for a match. Picking a face out of a crowd, a needle out of a haystack.

I started to narrow the search by eliminating certain cameras, it was unlikely that Kate would have been in the men's toilet for example. Some of the machines broke down under the load and I had to rebuild them on the fly. The whole thing dragged on but the archive on the central server built slowly. The search finally ground to a halt about five hours later. Out of half-a-million pictures I got a total of three thousand matches. I discarded all but the top five hundred and began to sift through them.

On the third try I spotted Kate standing at the back of a crowd waiting for an elevator. She hadn't changed much in two years. She cut her hair differently and her wardrobe had improved but she still looked the same, as beautiful and as a brittle as crystal. I marked the picture and flicked to the next one.

I had thirty pictures I could identify Kate in and another twenty or so probables. Out of thirty, five of the pictures were from a security camera in the same office and another ten were from cameras in the corridors around the office. I pulled the records for the office and went through the registered occupants. There were three women listed under records for the office, one was a blonde, the second was fifty years old and the third didn't have a picture or any details.

"I've found her."

Vince was motionless at the counter, like he had been carved from a single piece of granite. "Where ?" he asked.

"In an office at the top of the Hive".

He looked at me.

"Well, that's where we've got to go then."

"It won't be easy, those guys like their privacy."

Vince grinned, "I think I can take care of that".

Something caught my eye. On my screen a tiny red logo was strobing off and on in the corner of the screen. I flicked up the display. Someone had found my work at the University and was tracing it back. I punched up a few tigers at random, let them loose and disconnected. The tigers would be wreaking havoc amongst the University's systems and hopefully covering my tracks.

I punched into the commercial server I had routed my calls through and started deleting the log files. The alert started strobing in the corner of the screen again and I swore under my breath. I fired off some more tigers disconnected all my lines and shut down my workstation. Vince moved around in front of me and looked at me, trying to catch my eye.

"They found me."

"Did they find her as well ?" he asked

"I don't know, no way to tell." I shrugged.

He scratched his head and said "We'd better be leaving then."

He had taken his coat off earlier and when he stood I could see he was wearing a shoulder holster with the largest hand gun I had ever seen. He stood, shrugged into his jacket and looked at me. I rubbed my eyes and slowly packed away my workstation.

Vince walked over to the door and flicked on the security monitor. He punched up the interior cameras first and went through them methodically. When he reached the first of the exterior cameras he stopped and stared at it. A car was coming down the street. It pulled into space across the street and sat with the lights off and the engine running.

Vince grunted and said "Wait for me here. I'll be right back".

He crossed to the lift and the doors closed behind him. I punched up the monitor to watch him. He stepped out of the lift and turned left, away from the street and out of the range of the cameras. I punched up the street camera again and watched the car across the street for a couple of minutes.

Suddenly flame lashed out, lightning bright from the left hand side of the screen and the windows of the car tumbled out in a silent cascade. Vince stepped around the front of the car and beckoned at the camera.

Outside, it was raining again. When I reached the street Vince was heaving what looked like a sack out of the drivers side and onto the sidewalk. I crossed to the car.

"Jesus did you have to do that ?"

He shook his head. "Get in."

I climbed in the passenger's seat trying to ignore the stains and the gaping holes in the dash. Vince started the engine and looked at me.

"What ? Did you think they came to give us flowers ? Don't be stupid."

"Where are we going ?"

"We'll need better transport to get into the Hive. I know where we can get some."

We drove fifteen minutes across town, the icy wind whistling through the shattered windscreen. We stopped outside a chainlink fence around a darkened airfield. Vince got out, opened the gate and drove out onto the field. In the soft grey light of the dawn the aircraft crouched on the apron like huddled animals. Vince hooked around a short haul cargo plane and parked on the opposite side.

Picked out in the headlights was a military assault boat. A cross between a helicopter and a jump-jet, the assault boat was used by military forces to land troops in the midst of combat. Based on a twin engined Russian design, the boat was unarmed but heavily armoured and could reach supersonic speeds. Vince parked under the assault boat and climbed out.

"We can't steal this !" I said.

"We don't have to. It's mine."

I stood and watched him, my breath making whorls of white mist in the air. He crossed to the side of the boat, climbed the ladder and undogged a hatch. I followed him up the ladder and into the boat. The cabin was cramped and utilitarian. Vince took the left hand seat and started firing up the turbines. I stowed my workstation and strapped myself into the right hand seat using the five-point crash web.

Vince finished his check list and took the controls. The pitch of the engines rose and the boat trembled as it cleared the ground. Vince requested clearance from flight control and climbed above the City heading south to the arcology. He kept the boat subsonic and followed traffic control directions without complaint. Minutes later we were past the river and over the arcology.

Vince banked, circling the arcology at a safe distance. The arcology towered over the tangle of the City and in the morning light it cast a long shadow. The Hive was a broad, truncated pyramid with a well in the middle. The bottom of the well was a recreational park, the faces of the pyramid residential apartments and the lower levels high tech industrial factories.

Ultimately the arcology was an expensive failure. The designers could make all the excuses they wanted but the arcology had never fulfilled their promises of a sustainable and independent colony. The proximity of the City was an unavoidable temptation and eventually the unprofitable community housing was supplanted by luxury apartments, the farmlands paved over for golf courses and the altruistic experiment crumbled into rampant capitalism.

Now the arcology was populated with the emerging businesses of the upwardly mobile. The inner walls of the well were lined with offices of innovative new companies and research organisations. The average length of tenancy for a company was less than six months. Offices full of bright young executives looked down from the towering walls of the well and companies traced their success or failure in exponential arcs on the stock market.

It was the perfect place for Kate to hide. The Anarchists were so rabidly anti society that the thought of her hiding in that anthill would never occur to anyone. Vince angled the car in towards the landing beacon atop the pyramid and accelerated.

The defences were already hip to us before we started our run. The moment Vince turned toward the arcology twin trails of smoke snaked up from the nearest two corners of the pyramid and twisted towards the car. Missiles come hunting. Vince barrel rolled and snapped the nose down towards the ground, diving for the fairways spread out below us.

The crash web slammed me back into the seat and I craned my neck to see Vince, a wolf's snarl on his lips, hauling on the control column with both hands. We twisted out metres above the sward and crashed supersonic, the wall of the arcology filling the front screen. The boat heaved to the left and an a ear splitting concussion rocked the cabin as a missile detonated close behind us.Vince cut the engines, opened the airbrakes and angled up for the landing pad atop of the pyramid. The boat bucked and weaved as Vince fought it down to landing speed.

As we crossed the edge of the roof the boat slammed sideways, caught by some point defence weapon. Vince slammed the stick forward and the boat bounced and skidded along the pad, smashing into a parked air bus. The crash web snapped loose slamming me off the dashboard. Smoke poured in the cabin and heat prickled at my back. Fired by adrenaline I grabbed at my bag and threw my shoulder against the door. The door was stuck, the frame warped by the crash. Enraged I battered at it with my fist and threw my weight against it again. Vince flung his door open and hauled me out with one hand on my collar.

People were scattering across the roof of the arcology fleeing the fire. Vince ducked around the nose of the airbus still dragging me by the collar. A uniformed security guard ran towards us. He grabbed Vince by the shirt and shouted something unintelligible above the din on the roof. Vince struck the guard in the throat with his forearm and the man dropped like a stone. We ducked through the door and across the open floor of the airport.

"Where do we go from here ?"

"Her room is in the back of an office on the opposite side of well."

"We'll have to watch out for the opposition they'll be here somewhere."

We slowed to walk and moved out into the corridors of the arcology. I opened my workstation and held it in the crook of my arm. I called up a map of the workstation and traced a route to the office while Vince steered me through the crowd. We headed towards the core of the arcology.

On this level most of the arcology was commercial, cheap foot stalls and crowded clothing boutiques. As we walked we came to a public open area, the corridor running out onto a mezzanine around a small park. I directed Vince left around the park and towards the mile long escalator that would take us down to the ground. I snapped the workstation closed as we came to the top of an escalator.

A gun appeared in Vince's hand and I glanced up at his face.

Trouble" he said.

Four well built men with crew cuts and badly fitting suits were coming up the escalator towards us. In unison, the first two reached under their coats. Vince's hand flicked up and he shot them.

His gun was a Heckler and Koch caseless pistol. It fired slugs which burned solid rocket propellant for the first ten metres. Pencils of flame reached out and tumbled the first two figures backwards off the escalator. The other two hitters crouched down in the escalator and returned fire with lasers which crackled through the air over our heads. Vince fired again and turned to face me, "RUN" he roared. I turned and bolted.

In front of me another crewcut-and-cheap-suit stepped out, arms spread to catch me. I blundered into him and then clubbed him in the side of the head with my workstation and drove my knee into his groin. He gasped and collapsed with a mixture of pain and indignation on his face. I glanced back, Vince was standing at the head of the escalator one hand locked around the throat of a hitter and the body of another at his feet. As I turned to flee, Vince stumbled to his knees, body pierced by three bright emerald threads.

I shouldered aside the startled crowd in front of the lift and dived inside. I punched the doors closed, snapped out my workstation and fed a cable into the interface on the lift. The screen was cracked from where I had struck the thug and a clear viscous fluid dribbled from the wound onto the floor. Working from memory I typed blind on the keyboard and glitched the programs for three out of the four lifts by dumping files at random into their cores. I overrode the governors on my lift and sent it rocketing for the base of the arcology. I could feel the acceleration lifting my fleet off the floor.

It wouldn't hold them for long. Their team would have their own cracker and he could find and upload the source for the lifts in minutes. Of course they could also just find another lift and use it instead. I rememberd to ease the brakes on and decelerated into the floor of the arcology. The lift pivoted on it's axis and the doors opened onto the green expanse of the park in the centre of the arcology. I started out for the other side.

They had the rain on today and the mist rolled off the balconies like smoke. Far above me the walls of the arcology were visible in the mist and stretched into a bright point directly overhead. The moisture settled on my clothes and within minutes the water was trickling off my jacket in rivers.

My workstation sparked and flared as the water reached it's battery. I dropped it and it thudded onto to the turf behind me. I stopped and turned back towards it. The short had reached something crucial and it burned magnesium bright, thick white smoke curling up from the edges. The flame sputtered and died under the persistent drizzle. I knew it was useless now but I was reluctant to leave it. Eventually I turned my back on it and ran the rest of the way to the lift.

I rode the lift fifteen floors up. The corridor was softly lit and lined with fake marble and chrome light fittings that looked like misplaced toilet bowls. Even at this early hour secretaries were tapping their staccato way up and down the hall and I lingered inside the lift, unwilling to enter this ridiculously peaceful world, I didn't seem to belong. After a minute or so I walked out and turned right towards the office. The corridor was short and lead straight to a black glass wall which proclaimed it to be the office of "The Methodist Church of Instantiation". I grinned, pushed the door open and went in.

The room was small and rectangular and was dominated by a plain metal desk on the far side. Kate sat straight and stiff-backed in a chair behind the desk. She wore a slightly puzzled expression and her eyes were blank. Above her left breast there was a tiny circular discolouration on her shirt. I crossed the room to her. A lock of hair had fallen across her eyes and I brushed it back. Her skin was cold and grey.

Touching her again brought back memories. Memories of walking with her along a beach. Memories of how she talked, how she sounded and how she smelt. I remembered how it began, how we had lived and how it had ended. The unasked questions turned to lengthy silences and the silences turned to a creeping tide of pointless arguments. It ended with a hypocritical and tearless farewell. Afterwards there was a gap in my life so empty that the air I breathed seemed thinner and paler.

She walked back into my life three years later. She wouldn't say so and I wouldn't ask, but we both knew she came back because she needed my help. She needed some information from a particular file, from a particular place. It was an easy run, the file didn't need much security because nobody had ever stolen from these people and lived, not for long anyway. I copied the file for her, covered my tracks and erased the file from my workstation. The whole thing took less than fifteen minutes.

After she had gone and I was alone again I got cautious and went back to the site, just for a look. What I found made me sweat. Kate had left me an address and I called her there, punching up maximum emergency on my call. She came, dripping from the shower to answer the blaring alarm.

"What is it ?' she asked testily.

"Do you know what we've done ?"

She grinned at me. "Got you scared has it ?"

"Jesus Christ ! We can't steal from these people they'll snuff us out like insects. You've gone too far this time. You always thought you were indestructible but you're not, you can't hide from these people, they'll find you..."

"They've got nukes."

She said it softly but it rocked me.

After the short war, the United Nations had outlawed the use of weapons of mass destruction. Much to everyone's surprise no one objected and the treaty had been enforced world-wide for the past five years. It was accepted that some of the more insecure regional governments kept stock piles of chemical or biological weapons but nukes were... crude.

"They've got three, megaton class warheads, the last of the Chinese stock piles. They have them salted away on a archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The file we stole from them contains the arming procedure and the access details to the armoury."

"What the fuck do you plan to do with it ?"

She grinned again, her eyes wild.

"You can't be serious."

She had been serious though and it had gotten her killed. She had been playing with things beyond her understanding and now she sat, stiffening in this cheap office. I moved over to look at the screen in front of Kate. As I did so, my eye fell on the other side of the room where there was a man sitting on one end of the couch. He was dressed like a business executive and sat, quietly watching me. As I stared, he got to his feet and crossed the room to stand in front of the desk.

"I'm sorry about all the trouble" he said.

"Sorry ? You arsehole, you've killed a dozen people."

"We were only after her" he gestured at Kate, "the rest were incidental."

He had the same granite stare as Vince. I looked down at the screen in front of Kate. I was about thirty seconds from the end of my life and I didn't want to die.

I looked back at the man, "And now it's my turn I suppose ?"

He frowned, "There's no point in killing you. You don't have any evidence, you don't have any corroboration and most of all you aren't an Anarchist. You're a little man, you don't have any organisation and you can't hurt us. You'll be a witness, so you can pass the message on, we don't like people to mess with us."

I looked back down at the screen and clenched my fist. Punching this guy's lights out, no matter how desperately he needed it, would only get me killed. The man grinned as though I had passed a test and turned and walked out the door.

I stood beside Kate's body for a long time. I knew what I had to do but I was bone-weary. I wanted to bow out and return to my quiet life. I wanted to be comfortable and to fade into the background, but I could feel Kate's empty stare on the back of my neck and I almost imagined I could hear her sigh.

"Alright", I said softly, "I'll do it."

I lifted Kate from the chair and laid her gently out on the couch. I walked back to the desk and sat down behind the keyboard. The machine was a vintage text terminal and the screen was flickering and jumping like somebody had hit it with a pulse-charge weapon. The idiots should have stuck to breaking legs and killing people, things they understood.

I banged a three key combination a couple of times until the terminal chimed softly. The software reset took a couple of seconds and then the screen flicked up. I unearthed a simple mail program and opened up a new message. I typed for a minute or two, detailing my story and describing what Kate had found. At the bottom of the message I put a bogus reference to the armoury file that I had stolen for Kate. I didn't know where the file was now and I didn't care, someone else could find it. I finished up the message and inserted the destination address.

In my younger days I had done a fair bit of aimless cracking. Most of it was a waste of time but I had once uncovered the national emergency broadcast code. This was the code they used in case of nuclear war or natural disaster. It would reach most of the population. With a little bit of modification the code could be persuaded to cross national boundaries and reach out into the world. I typed this code into the address field, browsed the message one last time, appended my full name to it and sent it.

In about fifteen minutes my message was going to hit the net. Every computer, every television, every phone and every household appliance connected to the net was going to be screaming out my message for the next twenty-four hours. By tomorrow, somewhere between forty and sixty-five percent of the worlds population were going to know about the sordid little secret.

It didn't really matter whether it was true or not, or whether it could be proved. The vermin I was dealing with didn't like the light and the scrutiny this was going to generate would shrivel them up like a insects in a flame. It wasn't really fair, they had no right of reply, no way to respond, no chance to retaliate.

I flicked the screen off and watched the phosphors flicker down to a burning green point that faded on my retina. I rubbed my eyes, it would be good to get some sleep. I walked to the door, past Kate and headed outside. There was nothing to fear out there but men with guns. Little men with little guns.

- END -

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