[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 28

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Yet I had nothing to tell the voice which I hadn’t already, and I said so. Evidently not the answer it was hoping for. “You’re either a hacker or another dreamer, and we got connected somehow” the voice insisted. “You can’t just...live in here. You can’t be “from” here. Nobody’s “from” this place.”

I felt as if accused of deceit, and resented it. But those who dwell in the ultimate reality must surely know more than I do about this world, if they created it. Why did this one seem so confused? What could such an advanced intelligence learn from interrogating me that it didn’t already know?

As we spoke, the activity of the tree accelerated. The pulses of energy grew brighter, faster and more frequent. “Shit, I’m waking up. Listen, stay the fuck out of my dreamspace. I’ve logged all of this and if I can find anything actionable, if you’ve failed to cover even a single one of your tracks...your ass is grass.”

The voice warbled and faded. As it did so the world around me grew less and less resolved, until I blacked out. Upon waking up, I immediately banged my head on the low ceiling and swore up a storm. After gingerly rubbing the fresh bruise and wiping sweat from my face, I reflected on the dream.

What was that? What was any of it? It’s never been that real before. I checked the dream monitoring suite. Sure enough, an enormous spike in the frequency of inbound connections over the past several hours. Total transfer amount was in the petabytes.

Somebody’s moved something big into my system. Someone I don’t know, and have less than zero reason to trust. The violation left a lingering feeling of bitterness and paranoia as I showered. Who knows enough about my past to target me like that?

There’s Dad, Alejandro...and the enforcers. Could it be…? No, this isn’t their style. If they had the information necessary to locate me on the grid, they’d have already kicked my door in. I didn’t bother brushing my teeth, as I planned to eat the rest of the dumplings next.

They had indeed thawed during the night, but didn’t yet smell dodgy, so I plopped them into the rice cooker and set it going. As I attended to that, a notification popped up on the phoneputer. Looked to be an incoming DM on an encrypted, secure messaging service I’d installed.

Crazy Dave? How did he find me? My alias is just a garbled string of numbers and letters. How do dodgy creeps keep finding me, no matter what I do? Am I that bad at hiding? Wait a second...could it have been Crazy Dave rummaging through my dream last night?

Nothing the intruder said gave me the impression it was Dave. It was entirely coherent, for one. The message informed me of an upcoming heist I was invited to facilitate. Leave it to a criddler to propose a collaboration with someone he screwed out of payment mere days ago.

Only, it turned out he hadn’t forgotten. “How’s the bike working out?” Of course. First thing out of his mouth is a reminder of what little compensation I did receive. “I had to repair it almost immediately. Did you think a two wheeled plastic jalopy would make me forget that you stiffed me?”

He made the kinds of superficially apologetic, platitudinous statements you usually hear from somebody that needs something from you but doesn’t want to admit any wrongdoing on their part. Indeed, he never did.

“Listen, it was your first gig. You’ve got to start at the bottom like everybody else who comes to me. But this heist, once I tell you about it, there’s no way you’ll turn me down.” I demanded half upfront. He played it off like I’d been joking.

“Half! That’s great. You’re a riot. I can swing ten percent, but really, you should hear me out. Even just the opportunity to take part in such a groundbreaking-” I told him to jam the pitch as far up his ass as he could and just skip to the salient details.

“...Right. Well, there’s a G-flex luxury apartment in one of the multi floor skyways over the canal. Acoustic imaging confirms there’s a safe inside. No way can we smuggle it out of the building without being caught. Even with panopticon disabled, we’d just be spotted by one or more of the tenants.”

I asked, half regretting it already, what his plan was to extract the safe discreetly. “Oh no, I never said it would be discreet. I’ll still need you to take down Panopticon for both of the buildings the skyway intersects with. What happens after that isn’t your business, but rest assured it’s foolproof.”

It would need to be, with Crazy Dave at the helm. I mulled it over, bringing up my SeaCoin price tracking app. Still in freefall. I sighed, and agreed to his terms whereupon he transferred a map of the buildings in question.

“Hang on, I recognize this one” I remarked. “That’s the cetacean embassy. If we steal from them, it will cause an international incident.” Dave assured me the apartment we were robbing belonged to someone uninvolved in the diplomatic world, a Norwegian fullmetal who bought the apartment flat out with oil wealth left to him by his late father.

“One of those climate fugitives you hear about on the news. The Norwegian government has been trying to extradite him for nearly a decade now. Right now he’s got enough dirty money socked away that he can ride it out here in style and comfort until the legal and social climate back home becomes more favorable.”

I wasn’t listening, still carefully studying the 3D cutaway schematic of the cetacean embassy. The core of it was a ten story tall cylindrical aquarium made of transparent spinel. Not like the decorative giant aquariums you’ll sometimes find at ostentatious resorts, but a means of transport.

Judging by how it was set up, with transparent spinel tubes branching off the central tank at different heights, visiting dolphin ambassadors could use it like an elevator to reach the different floors. At the end of the branching tubes were double door lockout chambers for transitioning from the fully flooded central aquarium and tubes to partly flooded hotel rooms.

On the ground floor were many rows of lockout chambers from which dolphins could exit the network of flooded spinel tubes and settle into those motorized carriers with little robot arms that they use to move about on land.

The pneumatic and hydraulic principles involved were mind boggling. They must’ve hired one hell of a plumber. I asked if Dave’s plan involved explosives. He then asked why I needed to know that.

“If there’s even a slim chance of shattering that aquarium, it’s not worth it. Not for one safe, I don’t care what’s in it. If you watch enough news to be aware of the ongoing hunt for climate fugitives then you also know how tense negotiations are with the conshelf territories right now.”

He assured me that no explosives would be utilized. I began to ask him to swear it until remembering how little the promise of a criddler is worth. “Besides” he added, “anything powerful enough to shatter spinel would bring the whole building down too. I’m not a butcher.”

That much seemed true. Crazy Dave is a shifty turd of a human being, on account of how quickly meth sucks every last trace of honor out of a man, but he didn’t strike me as a murderer. Then again, perhaps that’s only because it hasn’t yet been necessary in order to keep the meth coming.

He supplied the date, time and location. Tonight? In the canal? Just under the skyway apartment. What are you up to, Dave? No matter. With his floating chop shop confiscated as evidence, and most of his lackeys behind bars, he’s on shaky footing now. I should be able to squeeze actual payment out of him this time. If he thinks otherwise, he’s in for a rude awakening.

My stomach growled. Yet again, as if I’d eaten nothing. What’s in those dumplings? Styrofoam? I considered ordering a pizza, but pizza is fucking weird in China. They put heinous stuff on it. Stuff that probably appeals to the palette of somebody raised on traditional Chinese cuisine, but then much of traditional Chinese cuisine consists of the sort of edible nightmares you’d only put in your mouth on a schoolyard dare.

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