Supplejack Read online

  SUPPLEJACK

  by Les Petersen

  © 2017 Les Petersen

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Jo and Aiden

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  People are like cutlery. Most pieces are mere utensils, exact replicas of each other; you use them to do the usual tasks pieces of cutlery are used for: some cut into the flesh, some pin and prod at the food, some scoop out all the sweetness, some you just use to stir your coffee with. But other people – and some pieces of cutlery, of course – are more specialised. They’re more considered, more engineered, more designed for a specific purpose. You use them on rare occasions when nothing else will do the job. Like myself, for instance. I have the kind of specialisation used to get the Escargot snail out of its shell – though why anyone would call snails a delicacy is beyond me. Still, I know how to clamp the shell, how to get around the curves and into the depths of the shell and how to pry all that delicate flesh out.

  Cutlery. People. Some are delicate, refined, almost sensual creations; others are unchanged from when Neanderthals feasted on the mastodon.

  Some pieces, though … well, the nicest thing you could say about them is that they’re multi-skilled.

  But I’m getting too philosophical about this. After all, cutlery had very little to do with my life when the whole thing started. I was just trying to be a whole person, to “be myself” and it wasn’t easy. Life was dirty dishes, empty rooms and the stale chatter of the PAN when I worked – a banquet of take-away and cold pizza and one too many drunken nights.

  And if I was to identify one moment when it all began to crash around me, when the plates began to tumble from the table and the waiters stood around horror-struck, it would have to have been when SmartGuy first appeared.

  He intruded on my life late one evening when I was working at the plant, catching up on strategic planning. The phone warbled and I answered it, expecting Shahn or Kren who often called me late at night, but it was an old man projected into the room by the holo. Dishevelled grey hair, working smock stained down the front with food. He looked like a bad portrait of Einstein. When he smiled, he showed teeth etched and dyed with ancient Celtic symbols. The artist had used green dye and it gave Einstein a nasty look.

  “Jack Dayzen?” he said as he looked around the room, orienting himself to the space so his holo could interact with the furniture and make him look as if he was in the room.

  “Last time I looked, yeah.”

  He sucked on his teeth, smiled a little. “Got a bit of info for ya.”

  This late at night I didn’t want a hawker or some spam artist displaying his wares. “Who the hell are you?”

  He grinned greedily. “Not your Fairy God Mother, that’s who. You want the info, or what?”

  The screen showed no link ID, no caller address, no time elapsed, no charge register. A call from nowhere. It piqued my interest. If I listened to what he had to say, he might tell me how he got around the firewall. “If you must.”

  “It’ll cost you,” he said.

  I sat back in the chair and tapped my fingers together in front of my face. I said to him, “That, buddy, is the oldest line in the book. I must have heard that line a million times, and each time they also offered a set of steak knives to go with it. I’m not in the market; if I was I’d open a chain of restaurants. At least I’d have the cutlery. So, thank, but no thanks.”

  “You haven’t even heard what I have to say!” he said, indignantly.

  “True. And I don’t want to. Why don’t you go somewhere else? Good-night.” I fanned the switch and he whispered out of there, leaving just a tail end of static. I rose out of the chair, tried to ignore the feeling that someone else had been in the room and walked over to read the latest reports. My silent contemplation was short-lived, however, because my mobile began throbbing against my side. I didn’t have to guess who it was so soon after I had cut the connection to the office phone. This guy was resourceful if nothing else. The phone was a Galahad, an unlicensed attachment to the network; he shouldn’t even know it existed, let alone how to access it.

  I tapped the chin mount and answered it, ready to give the guy a serve, but the screen showed a board schematic rather than a face. It looked very familiar. Cut crystal pathways and laser nodes. Gold on carbon black. Three atoms thick. The connection was severed before I could read enough of it to see if it was one I had created myself, though its sequencing was very familiar. The phone rang and I fanned it active.

  He popped into the room, put his hands on his hips and smiled his green smile. “Interested?”

  I walked back to the desk and sat down in the chair, tossing the reports aside. “In what?”

  He scratched his chin and looked at me carefully. “A personal financial service, shall we say? Mind if I have a seat?” He perched on the edge of the table before I could say no.

  I tried to ignore the closeness. Holos these days are so good you would swear that a solid person was standing before you. Except there are no shadows and the eyes have white pupils so you know the holograph isn’t a real person. They passed that law just after the first bank robbery in absentia. “You said you have some information. Now you’re selling a financial service? Which is it?”

  He grinned, raised an eyebrow and rolled his jaw to one side. “Well, it’s both., but let’s call it a financial service anyway.”

  “If you must. All right buddy, I don’t have to accept anything you say. Let’s hear your terms.”

  “Cheap as all hell, Mr Dayzen.” He flashed a green smile. “Thirty million dollars up front, and two percent of all your wealth on close of deal.”

  How do you react to something like that? “What the hell for?”

  Einstein shook his head, still smiling. He stood up and walked halfway across the room before turning, tucking his arms behind his back and looking down his nose at me. “Oh, there’s no hell in it, Mr Dayzen. It’s completely free of hell and it’s simple as pie. I give you a personal service to take away and do what you want with. Air-tight. All ends tied together.”

  Something was screwy and I wasn’t having a bar of it. “As I said before, thanks, but no thanks buddy. I’ll call you when the colonel cooks his last chicken. Have a nice day.” I fanned for closure.

  The projector stayed active, even when I tried twice more. His grinning face watched each move and when I sat back in the chair, perplexed, he gave me a wave. A child’s wave. Fingers turning over at the end.

  “I wield power, Mr Dayzen,” he said, taking to the chair near the door. “I could have cut onto your screen any time I wanted over the past few weeks, and I can keep it open for eternity. If you want to cut me off, you’ll have to pull the plug, but it will be the worst thing you could do.”

  That was one thing I hate about holographics, the ease someone has in taking over your personal space. His was an intrusion I didn
’t want. I looked up at the security camera in the corner of the room, hoping I could use it to intimidate him. It was aimed at the wall.

  “Don’t worry about that, either,” he said, seeing the direction of my gaze. “Temporarily out of service. As are all the mikes in the room, but rest assured I’m not threatening you, Mr Dayzen. I have a very good offer for you, something well worth listening to.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him, but I could always tell the security team I was trying to draw information out of him if things turned nasty. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get down to business, then.”

  He smoothed out his moustache, tapped away at something on his thigh – most probably a concealed flexiboard. “Now that we are secure,” he said as he looked over his nose at me, “I’ll let you have it straight. A simple proposition. I’ll give you a completely new life. I’ll take everything you’ve got and wipe it clean. All your affairs sorted out, all your money laundered, all your carefully constructed past dumped in the bin. I’ll give you a new family, a new job, a whole new sparkling life. What do you think?”

  I sat and took it all in. Life was complicated enough without rearranging it the way he was suggesting. “Why would I want to do that, huh? I’ve got all these plans for a restaurant chain.”

  “Because it will fit in so nicely with your latest project.” He rubbed his chin and waited for me to respond.

  I looked up at the security camera again. Its lens was still and lifeless. “What project?”

  He chuckled and nodded as if he was sharing a secret. “Very good, Mr Dayzen. You showed no emotion on your face when you said that. Very poker., but let’s not waste time. What I don’t know about you doesn’t matter. I know your real name, your real address, all your bad habits. And most importantly, I know you’re thinking of leaving all this behind. All that money you’ve invested – oh, what are you doing with such a cache, Mr Dayzen…but forget that. I can help you with your project.”

  “You’re mistaken, buddy.”

  “Am I? Look, I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think it over. If you say yes, I’ll give you a new set of clothes, a new set of papers, a new set of bank accounts, everything. You walk out of one door and through another. I’ll even throw in the info on how I got through Bell’s Gatekeeper.”

  “For twenty million dollars?”

  “Thirty million dollars and two per cent of all the money I handle for you.”

  “And if I say no?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not the kind of person to threaten you, Mr Dayzen. I’m a businessman, not a goon. If you say no, I’ll just have to find another client, won’t I?” Before I could respond to that comment, he’d disappeared like a phantom lost in the moonlight.

  Chapter 1

  Saturday morning. Five years later. I could barely remember Friday night. I leant my head against the window’s cool pane and watched the city shed the neon cocoon of night. Drab clouds burst into songs of colour as the sun came up, orange light speared through the departing darkness and splashed the high-rises near the beach, making them as golden as if Midas had stumbled through the city after a night of devilry, colliding with the buildings on his way home. A flock of pigeons gyrated across the city, whirling in a wave of grey froth and heeling over to the east, clattering into the sunrise. High above them the Newcastle shuttle zipped toward Badgerys Creek with its sponsor’s signs flashing, while advertising dirigibles floated up over the park like bloated goldfish, selling media space. Above the trees in the park, electric kites circled up into the heavens, catching the last of the night with their silver fins, flashing red symbols at a waking market. From the roof of an apartment at the far end of the street, an inflatable billboard of a naked male looked my way. He lounged on a deserted beach, advertising the latest production of a home-based media company. He raised a hand and waved. I ignored him, watching instead as the townhouse complexes lining the street shut down their automated light shows and turn on early morning sprinkler systems, creating grand avenues of rainbows as the sun cut through their mist.

  It was a pretty sight, but too loud for my drunken mind. I read the images like a fool standing before the wisdom of the ages, seeing the symbols and not their meaning. My mind was closed to thoughts, my sight shifted from point to point like a surveillance camera tracking actions and feeding an unseen watcher. The snort of Gracelands was clearing the brambles in my mind, so everything ticked along perfectly without requiring human intervention. It’s how I like to start the morning. Some people rely on coffee, some on a belt of whisky, but some of us need harder kicks or a combination in a cool glass.

  The heat in my head was lifting slowly. Sixteen floors beneath me the automatic gates to our apartment block opened to allow the few people who still maintained the ritual of a jog around the block to exit. The gardener began cleaning up the pamphlets that had blown across the lawn from the mailboxes. She seemed almost to be rolling up a carpet of colourful squares or to be plucking multi-coloured flowers from the verdant green lawn. A Siamese cat sat on the knife-edge of the roof not thirty meters from me, licking its paws, black and white against red. An idyllic vision, something Shahn would have painted, even if she couldn’t sell the painting. I stood there watching, seeing more than she’d have, seeing the barely hidden rubble, the broken walkways, the predictability of it all. The cat was most probably an illegal clone that had gone feral, and the beautiful cityscape was ruined because some apartment windows were bricked up from inside; the tenants not wanting to spend another day with the sounds floating up from the street. Shahn would have ignored that little detail. I couldn’t. Training has its uses. And its drawbacks.

  The cat stopped licking its paws and looked down to the corner of the street so I looked to see what had caught its interest. The road was bare for a moment and then, for the third morning in a row, mailers began circling our block with sound systems blaring. The red and yellow vehicles—hump-backed and eared with those famous arches—were covered in video screens and amplifiers, all of them squawking out their jingles. They bumped up and over the cardboard barricade the local Retirees had laid down near their complex and wheeled along the road to begin another run. The last, rear-guarding the others, wore Luddite graffiti around its delivery chute. It complained blackly: “The beast is fed!” Insulated by double-glazing I couldn’t hear the ads, but I watched them for a while, thinking of Indians attacking a wagon train. The Billboard waved to them.

  If my son had survived to see this sight he might have wondered at how the world worked, or how I could live in it. Then again, he might not have worried about it either, because he’d be just old enough to attend ‘proper’ school for the first time, instead of Kindy or Playgroup. He might have been too excited by that possibility to be bothered trying to figure out all the twisted roads through life.

  But he hadn’t survived. And I lived in a world where nothing endures for long without becoming corrupted.

  The rising sun was far too bright to stare into any longer and I could still taste the vodka. It’s supposed to have very little taste, but sense-enhancement and the spark of Gracelands meant I could feel the corrugated rush of it in my throat even twelve hours after drinking it. My head was thicker than a blast-door and I felt like my eyes needed to have a shave, not my chin. I rubbed my face and looked at the nude on the billboard. He gave me a wave. I gave him the bird.

  It’s something you should do every now and then, this staring out of your windows. You should look at the landscape and remind yourself of the reality outside you mind, because once you’ve lived in virtual for a while it all changes. Reality never looks tidy. It never looks clean enough or truthful enough. Maybe that’s why the Beautification is taking place, with everything being cleaned until it shines in the sun like newly polished silver.

  I could hear myself complaining and stopped myself.

  But nature’s way is to tarnish what seems perfect. Take me for instance: a thirty-year-old man with no family, few friends and an apartme
nt that is more cell than home. I was once perfect (well, maybe not perfect, but close enough), and I’d almost had a family. Now? Well, at least I still had my good looks and natural charm…

  I looked once more around the horizon and flexed my shoulder muscles to prepare for the day’s work then closed the drapes and prepared myself for the last run of the week. I flicked the battery-jacket over the back of the couch, checked connections, took to the chair. I didn’t care how I looked: sweat stained T-shirts are part of my work attire. So are the slippers. So are the boxer shorts. You live how you want to when you’re not on the Cloud.

  Well, maybe the boxers were a little over-the-top.

  An uneasy feeling stirred in my stomach like a half-formed memory I couldn’t put my finger on, but I settled down to work anyway. I dragged the holoface projectors off their stand and fitted them to my forehead –, which made me look like I had budding horns on my head; adjusted them so they sat just in front of my hairline, flexed my wrists, stretched my back and rolled my head on my shoulders. Then I began a manual entry to the Needle, tapping on the keyboard without really putting much effort into touching the keys, just letting the commands roll out of a half-focused mind. It’s a pleasure to work with keys every now and then and I use it as a ritual. I could just as well bang a gong or chant mantras into the mike if I needed to, but punching a keyboard does the trick for me.

  The PAN kicked in and we powered up. I slapped away the firewall’s memory check, watched the config run on its course, leafed through the Organiser. I checked to see where each of the PAN units was in the room in case I had to reach for them. Bleeder lay on the table at my wrist, his broach-like shape standing watch over the towering console of the fire-wall–an LED flashing like an erratic heartbeat, telling me his drives were reading inside his cream-coloured casing. Beside him, HaRf sat propped above the index, a torus of silver as large as a wristwatch. He hummed through the source code, logging it all with his usual masculine thrum while his Siamese twin, GaZe, lay silently listening. Sansan, the leader, matched my feed by infrared feed, taking the flexiboard’s input, duplicating it and running the maze with live encryption as I typed away. The Needle was a blue dice-sized cube attached to the bat winged flexiboard. Medusa lay on the window sill, recharging her batteries, her long slender profile looking like a silver fountain pen in the cradle.