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  Contents

  BONUS CONTENT

  1 - The Unfortunate Mr. Sanchez

  2 - Natural Jack

  3 - Lexington Avenue Raid

  4 - Market Street Meetup

  5 - Fabbertown

  6 - Off the Grid

  7 - Electric Kitty

  8 - A Detective's Remorse

  9 - Hello, Old Friend

  10 - The Cave

  11 - Going Away Party

  12 - VIP Exit

  13 - Long Time No See

  14 - A Mercenary's Debt

  15 - Special Agent Nguyen

  16 - A Beach in the Hamptons

  17 - Fuse Switch

  18 - Belly of the Beast

  19 - Maddox Unmasked

  20 - View from the Twenty-Eighth Floor

  21 - Deck of Cards

  22 - The Ask

  23 - Map

  BONUS PREVIEW Cyberpunk City Book Three - The Blayze War

  The Blayze War Chapter 1 - Winner Take Nothing

  The Blayze War Chapter 2 - Dezmund

  The Blayze War Chapter 3 - Hello Salaryman

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  BONUS CONTENT

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  — Henry Rollins

  1 - The Unfortunate Mr. Sanchez

  All hell broke loose in virtual space. Of course it did, Maddox reflected. He’d been warned as much, hadn’t he? That twist in his stomach, that annoying tickle in the back of his mind, that something’s-not-right-here feeling. They had all told him something was going to go sideways on this particular gig. But he’d convinced himself the meat was unreliable, that sometimes it overreacted, gave you false alarms. And it did, from time to time.

  Just not this time.

  “That’s it,” the company man had said a minute earlier. He’d stopped his avatar ten clicks short of Takaki-Chen Engineering’s datasphere, its virtualized digital infrastructure.

  A neat cluster of geometric shapes, T-Chen Engineering’s DS was exactly the kind of digital architecture you’d expect from a company full of engineers. No wasted space, no superfluous connections. All order, zero chaos. The company’s departments visualized as brilliantly illuminated towering rectangular partitions, like buildings in a city center, alive and pulsing with uncountable bytes of information.

  “Which one’s Logistics?” Maddox asked.

  “Pale blue,” the company man answered. “Small department on the far left, shaped like a brick.”

  The company man’s name was Sanchez, and his story was one Maddox had heard a hundred times. A disgruntled employee—pissed off at being passed over for a promotion or receiving a less-than-expected salary bump or getting nudged out of the inner circle of company movers and shakers (Maddox suspected Sanchez fell into this last category)—decided to take matters into his own hands and sell company secrets to the highest bidder. The only problem was he didn’t have any criminal knowhow. So while the company man had easy access to valuable company data, he didn’t have the first clue how to: one, steal said data without getting caught; two, sell it on the black market; and, three, hide the proceeds from his employer, the police, the tax man, and—if he fit the profile of most corporati—his wife and his mistress too.

  That’s where Blackburn Maddox came in, filling a niche in the market. Providing supply where there was demand for a specialist in the acquisition and commercialization of illicit digital assets. For a datajacker, in other words.

  “After you,” Maddox said.

  The glowing orb of Sanchez’s avatar lurched forward. The clumsy movement betrayed Sanchez as a lightweight, as someone with little experience in core-level virtual space. Your average citizen never went this deep, experiencing VS at its standard harmless level through their specs. For the vast majority, VS meant gaming, shopping, movies, business meetings, tourist overlay maps, and so on.

  Core-level VS was entirely different. A treacherous sea compared to a backyard pool.

  A visual representation of the cybernetic world, core-level VS was the real-time three-dimensional skeleton of the interconnected dataspheres and archives making up the digital universe. Core VS was a blueprint, the plumbing behind the walls, the giant machine’s hidden circuitry, rarely witnessed or experienced by the average user. To get there you needed specialized high-end hardware: a VS data deck and an electrode headset like the kind plugged into Maddox’s meat back in his office.

  It also helped if you were a bit insane. Or if not insane, at least capable of coping with the lethal threat core VS posed. Everyday VS, the variety ninety-nine point nine percent of the global population experienced, interacted with the brain only at a very superficial, harmless level via the tiny built-in brain wave sensors embedded in the temple arms of nearly every pair of specs. This was a light touch from a gloved hand compared to the choke grip of core VS, which penetrated the human brain to its deepest neural pathways, taxing its processing capability to the maximum. Brain scans of datajackers inside core VS, Maddox had once heard, lit up like a neon sign cranked to max brightness. And therein lay the danger. At the virtualized depths where Maddox and others in his field practiced their trade, you were vulnerable, your nervous system was open to any number of attacks. Your avatar could be frozen by countermeasures in nanoseconds that paralyzed your real-world meat sack like it was stuck in concrete. You could be geotagged by programs that traced your physical location. Some of the rarer, more powerful and generally illegal apps and executables—ones Maddox had some familiarity with—could alter your perception of time, turning real-world minutes into virtual hours and days, even months. Others, the worst kind, induced fatal brain strokes.

  Such were the hazards of his chosen profession. Every career had its downside, he sometimes told himself. But fuck if he didn’t love it.

  His avatar fell in behind Sanchez, and Maddox warily scanned the space around them for any hint they’d been detected. No alarms blared, no intelligent sentries came after them, no countermeasures were tripped. The cloaking app was doing its job. Maddox and Sanchez were all but invisible to everything but each other.

  As they approached T-Chen Engineering’s logistics partition, Maddox’s field of vision filled with the blue glow of the partition’s incandescence. Sanchez stopped one click short. The department loomed over them like some brilliant neon midrise.

  “It’s around the other side,” Sanchez said. Maddox followed as the company man’s avatar slid along the face of the partition until it reached the rearmost corner. The partition’s surface swirled and churned ominously, the telltale visualization of a razorwall, the security application protecting the department’s digital assets—its archives and communications and vital records. Beyond the wall’s opaque, shifting surface, company data surged and pulsed, shooting up and down and back and forth in brilliant streams of yellow and orange and white. A busy department going about its daily routine of meetings and reports and smoke breaks and office gossip. It was a world Maddox had been a part of for a brief time, working as a data security analyst at Latour-Fisher Biotechnologies. The legit world. The comfortable, insulated world of those who followed the rules, who never doubted the hierarchy, who fretted day and night over their careers and connections
. It wasn’t a world for someone like him, as it turned out. A square peg, round hole situation, but the regular paycheck hadn’t been too bad.

  “There it is.” Sanchez indicated a small dull gray box hovering just inside the wall. Exactly where the company man said he’d stashed it. The box was the visualization of an archive, inside of which Sanchez had hidden the company’s three-year mergers and acquisitions plan. Information competitors would pay a small fortune for.

  That was when the knot formed itself in Maddox’s stomach. Even though his body was a distant sensation, he still felt it. Something wasn’t right. Maybe it was the client, maybe it was the plan, or maybe it was the weird vibe the razorwall was giving him. But whatever it was, the meat was trying to tell him something.

  “You sure that’s it?” Maddox asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Stay right here,” he told the man. “Don’t move. Not even a single grid click, yeah?”

  “Yes, yes,” Sanchez said. “Got it.” Maddox heard the nervousness, the excitement in the man’s voice. Wherever it was the company man’s meat sack was sitting at the moment, his palms had to be damp with sweat.

  “You’re sure these cloaking apps are working right?” Sanchez asked.

  “They’re fine,” Maddox assured him. “If they weren’t working, we’d be deaf and blind from all the alarms going off right about now.”

  Maddox edged forward. “I’m going in,” he said, his tone confident. The rest of him, not so much. Back in his office, Maddox’s hands gestured, and inside VS a scanning app appeared in the lower part of his vision.

  Maddox moved forward and penetrated the razorwall. He felt an abrupt tingling sensation, like he’d stepped through a waterfall of freezing water. In the next moment he was through. No alarms sounded, no countermeasures appeared. Nothing on the scanner. So far so good, but he still felt a stab of doubt.

  Around him data pulsed and surged, immeasurable bytes of visualized information shooting left and right, down and up, bright and dazzling like the birth of some universe. Settling himself, he reacquired the target archive, opened it, and began emptying its contents into his avatar’s temp storage, a thief filling his bag with a jewelry store’s diamonds and gems. The box slowly dissolved and then after a few moments disappeared, signifying the end of the data dump.

  He pushed back through the razorwall, exiting the department. As he did so, he heard Sanchez let out a long breath.

  “All right,” Maddox said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Blink. The company man’s avatar glitched, winking like a failing lightbulb. Maddox backed his avatar away.

  What do you know, the meat was right.

  “What…happening…?” Sanchez’s voice clipped and cut out.

  Maddox glanced down at the scanner and quickly gathered what had happened. He hadn’t tripped any alarms himself. The razorwall status was green and there were no signs of intrusion from inside the departmental partition. It was Sanchez. An intelligent sentry had detected him.

  It happened sometimes. A function of bad luck. A wrong place at the wrong time kind of thing. Intelligent sentries were like beat cops patrolling a datasphere, programmed to look for any number of things: inefficiencies in data flows, vulnerabilities in razorwalls, legacy apps left lying around like discarded food wrappers that needed scrapping or archiving. They also kept an eye out for signs of unauthorized access, for illegal infiltrators like Sanchez and Maddox.

  Normally, Maddox’s settings would have revealed an IS’s presence. They typically visualized as crablike creatures crawling across the virtual surfaces of departmental partitions, and they were pretty easy to avoid. You simply kept a safe distance. But this one was invisible to him, which told Maddox it was a high-end IS or one that had been tweaked by someone who really knew what they were doing.

  The curious engineer in him wanted to learn more, to take a few scans and diagnostics of the thing, but the sensible side of him knew he didn’t have time. Not if he wanted to keep from being frozen like the unfortunate Mr. Sanchez, who right about now was probably flipping out, wondering why he couldn’t move his arms and legs. Or maybe he’d gotten past the initial panic, realizing what was happening, knowing that while he was frozen, the IS was also geotagging him and alerting the authorities. In a handful of minutes, it would all be over. Cops would break down the door to his home or office or rented hotel suite or wherever Sanchez had holed up to steal his company’s secrets, then they’d shock him unconscious and drag him off to jail. It was the fate every datajacker dreaded and feared. And if he stayed around any longer, Maddox knew the sentry would see him too, freeze him, and that would be that.

  So he bailed, dumping the stolen data from his temp storage and unplugging.

  And then he was back in the meat. Back in his tiny rented room. Disconnected and safe, unlike the unfortunate Mr. Sanchez.

  He peeled off the trodes, plastic cups popping from the skin of his forehead, and sat up in his eggshell recliner. A standby icon slowly rotated in the air a few centimeters above his deck, held firmly by the docking arm. The arm adjusted its position as Maddox sat up further, keeping the deck within easy reach.

  He swung his legs around and stood up, sliding his hand through the standby icon and shutting down the deck. A cigarette. Christ, he needed a cigarette.

  ***

  Beyond his narrow jut of a balcony where Maddox had barely enough space for himself and a folding chair, the nighttime City churned. Twenty stories below, ground cars congested East Harlem’s arteries, klaxon echoes and the infrequent wails of sirens rising to his ears from the City’s floor. Walkways teemed with pedestrians, a river of humanity pulsing with the reflected glare of giant holo ads projected onto building facades. At Maddox’s level, the lower transit lanes bustled with hovers, almost close enough to reach out and touch, moving among the massive superstructures of steel and concrete. The pitch of turbofan motors rose and fell as vehicles came and went.

  He blew smoke out into the open air, pondering Sanchez’s fate. The company man was probably sitting in an interrogation room right about now, sweating hard and trying to convince some hardened cop this was all some misunderstanding. The cop would ask who he’d been working with, but Sanchez had nothing more than one of the dozens of aliases Maddox worked under. Once the police learned where the two had met (an anonymous chat feed with untraceable hard encryption) and how well they were acquainted (not very, they’d never met in person), they wouldn’t bother trying to find the company man’s accomplice, knowing it was a waste of time, knowing from experience there’d be no trail to follow.

  Leaving a client high and dry, he admitted inwardly, wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of professional behavior. It was, in fact, the kind of thing that could seriously damage your rep if it got out. In the small world of high-end datajacking, rep mattered. Not so much with a little fish like Sanchez, but it mattered to the big players, the highfloor corporati who on occasion hired datajackers for big money corporate espionage jobs and who stayed current on the black market reps the same way a pro football scout keeps up with teenage talent in South America. It also mattered inside the tiny club of vain, jealous, ego-driven elite datajackers who often savored a rival’s failure. And in those moments when he thought about it—those rare instances of self-reflection—he knew it mattered to him, too. He was a data thief. He liked it. Loved it, even. And he took selfish pride in it. Call it ego, narcissism, whatever.

  The debacle with Sanchez wouldn’t get out, he was sure. It was a small gig for a midlevel corporati. A nothing job for a nobody, and since no money had changed hands—Maddox had agreed to a contingency deal, his cut paid when the stolen goods were sold—there was little to worry about. He’d even dumped the goods out of caution, washing his hands of the whole business.

  Even before it had blown up on him, he hadn’t liked the job from the start. It was nothing he could put his finger on. Not the client, Sanchez, not the target company, Takaki-Chen Engineering, not th
e nature of the gig itself. Still, something hadn’t felt right about it.

  Which was why he’d cut a hole in Sanchez’s cloak. It was a cover-your-ass move, the kind of maneuver most datajackers did from time to time but would never admit to. You compromised the security of your client’s avatar or connection, just the tiniest bit, removing a single line of crucial code in a cloaking app, for instance. And if the proverbial shit hit the fan during the gig, the countermeasures or intelligent sentinels or whatever other digital security was in place would detect the client first, leaving you a few precious moments to safely unplug. It was a bit like tripping your bankrobbing accomplice as the cops chased you both down an alley. Underhanded, yes. Douchey, most certainly. But it was an effective way to keep yourself out of jail when you had a sketchy client or a job you had reservations about.

  A part of Maddox felt for the guy. He knew firsthand that corporate types weren’t cut out for jail cells with shit-stained mattresses, much less the lowfloor brutality of police shocksticks and long, torturous interrogations.

  But the thought was a fleeting one, snuffed out by the rigid, cold practicality required by his profession. If somebody had to take the fall, it wasn’t going to be him.

  Sorry, Mr. Sanchez.

  2 - Natural Jack

  The ring announcer’s voice didn’t match his body. He was a small, thin man, well into his seventies, and the microphone trembled visibly in his gnarled, arthritic hands. The voice, though. It boomed over the PA system with the strength and clarity of an opera singer in his prime.

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I GIVE YOU SHINJI THE SAMURAI NAGANO…NAGANO.” The announcer always repeated the fighter’s last name. His signature flair.

  The raucous crowd roared when the first fighter entered the makeshift arena. More boos than cheers, Maddox noted. He took a long drink of his beer as the house lights went down and a spotlight appeared near the back of the crowd. Samurai Nagano, a sumo-sized giant with arms as big around as Maddox’s thighs, raised his arms to the noisy throng. Dressed in black ninja gear, he held a pair of blades, which gleamed in the spotlight’s glare as he crossed them over his head. The boos and cheers grew louder. Nagano knew how to work a room.