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Invasive Species

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Open-faced Mushroom Blastocyst – A Novella

by Adam Rothstein

Fungus is a delicious food, but it makes a confusing way of life.  We’re lucky most eschatology is written in books, rather than in the heated course of the blood vessels in our stomachs.

Available in These Editions:

Paperback Version 2.0

This edition of version 2.0 is printed on #20 bond, with an #80 cover stock, and stapled flat, 8.5″ X 5.5″. It totals 61 pages.

OFMB is an experiment in “version” publishing–the idea is that the work is finished, but leaves open the possibility of change in future editions, hopefully with the support and remarks of readers.  You are being invited to enjoy the text, and pass on any comments or criticism you might have, to improve the text and presentation in the future.

Because we are asking your help in this process, we are taking the step of offering the current version, 2.0, for free.  All you need do in return is provide a little bit of feedback to the author about your experience reading the book.  And, throw us a buck for shipping. Sound good?

$1 (practically nothing.)

Digital PDF Format

If perhaps providing feedback sounds like a lot of work in exchange for getting something for nothing, there are also PDF copies available digitally for download here. Available under Creative Commons license, as usual.

By Adam Rothstein
 
Published by Brute Press
 
http://www.brutepress.com
 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
 
Read/download it in PDF format here
 
The temporal-gram looked authentic, but a categorical paranoia told him authentic was worse than the alternative. Grant had managed to conduct his business thus far without getting caught, not to mention living to the relatively healthy age of twenty-eight, only to the credit of his pessimism. In a day and age when the most vital data was invisible but ever-present, suspicion wasn’t only a virtue, but a world-view. And furthermore, it wasn’t every day Grant Drexoll received messages purportedly from himself.
 
He looked up at the delivery man, watching the green-and-gray, uniformed and slumped shoulders disappear around the corner of the stained hallway of Grant’s building. The man had exhibited a perfect combination of routine disaffection in his routine labor, combined with mild, bored interest in why a person who could afford a private apartment would need a hand delivery. Most Time-Wire customers simply had their messages transmitted via account, direct to datalink. Grant was similarly mystified by this unusual interruption and did not offer much conversation. The unshaven man, after handing him the folded, laser-print envelope in a matching green-and-gray seemed almost relieved to abandon any interest in specifics. Grant quickly pulled the door closed, blocking the lazed deliverer’s view into the maze of cables and peripherals that Grant called his life.
 
While Grant was certainly on the cutting edge of many technological trends, he had not embraced the temporal-gram with the same enthusiasm as most people. Frequent users who had accounts with Time-Wire, Past Pass, or TempMissions often joked that they actually hadn’t ever gotten along without them. Maybe it was the watchful paranoia in his mind dissuading Grant from the practice. In a more practical sense, Grant had never quite seen the use. The present was important, the rest was archives. And regardless of this message’s short contents, he didn’t see this instance changing his mind. It even might be considered as further evidence to the sageness of his original distaste.
 
Grant dealt with information. Or perhaps, he dealt in information. He was an information mover: selling it, occasionally buying it, and most often locating the information and connecting one end of the exchange with the other. It was the most perfect commodity; information made the world go round, and kept everything in it from falling off. It took brains and know-how to be able to find the information that was most profitable, and better wits than the person on the other end of the datalink who was attempting to thwart that profit. Sure, it was illegal sometimes, but Grant had always thought of in these terms: someone was going to make a profit out of the information, so it might as well be him, rather than the person who currently possessed it. “Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.” Grant had read that particular bit of information once, and agreed precisely. It wasn’t as if one terminal owned the data more than another, and it was safe bet the current possessor hadn’t come by it legally either. But at the end of the day, the possessor had nothing—information was only good to those who could access it. Access was the real production of information. And the laws hadn’t caught up with the current state of data production once in the past 700 years.
 
Be this as it may, the law, and Grant himself, normally still dealt with data in one temporal dimension at a time. It wasn’t as if tempral-grams were difficult to understand. Sending information to another time was relatively simple compared to Grant’s livelihood. When a temporal gram was transmitted, it simple was, in the sending and receiving time, instantly. It wasn’t really “going” anywhere. Grant, the master data handler, was almost startled by the direct, honest fact of the piece of paper in his hand. But the content of the message in front of him was more startling, as well as confusing:
 
Time-Wire Inc. Temporal Transmission Services

From: Grant Drexoll

Transmit Time: April 19th, 2153: 0612 UET

Location: TWI Loc: 480528-1239

To: Grant Drexoll

Delivery Time: April 18th, 2153: 0835 UET

Location: 192- 596A Lexton Terrace Tower

Hub MAX 394AYT-596URE

Routing: Subset-R

[message reads]

Follow up on deal suggested by H. Lannice—take deal for option-extra, schem. job. Trust me (you). Cheers, Grant.

[message ends]
 
The message was cryptic at best. He understood his own private notation coding; “option-extra” meant a piggy-back exploitation job under the pretext of simple data theft. “Schem. job” was standard hacker slang for system schematics often sold on to others to help plan future jobs. But this term even the NSA knew—hardly a secret code. The rest of it, Grant had no frame of reference upon; who was H. Lannice and what deal had she suggested to whom? Furthermore, why would Grant send a message to himself telling himself in half-code, half-plain text to do something he probably would have done anyway without prompt? The whole thing was very suspicious, and holding the thin sheet of paper in his hand instilled him with a sense of insecurity. Without even knowing the score, he felt it was compromised, and decided to do thing he always did when cornered: move, as fast as possible.
 
It most likely that the message was a fake, attempting to push him into an action or to get him caught in the act of something. The Time-Space Stability and Security Act had made bio-identity verification required for sending any temporal message. But just like any system, the laws could be bypassed even easier than a temporal services company’s equipment safeguards. The first thing to do would be to have a look at Time-Wire. Their systems would have some clues.
 
He moved about the apartment, collecting his gear and getting dressed. As he reached for his terminal, the doorbell rang again. Grant froze. Crouching down behind his kitchen counter, he silently slunk into the bedroom, where he could read the bio-sensor screen on the wall.
 
H. Lannice Front Door 0839 UET.
 
The cursor after the readout blinked. Grant’s heart thumped. What should he do? Answer, and send her away? Play it cool, and take the deal? There wasn’t time to think! He listened silently, as the sound of her sighing and shifting her weight in front of the door reached his ears. Shit!
 
The screen blinked its “depart” message, and closed the entry to the log. She was gone. It was better this way. He would find out as much as he could before meeting with her. If she was interested in a job, she would contact him again. They always did.
 
Grabbing the mini-terminal, he headed out the back door to the fire stairs. If it was a trap, he would be better off making an anonymous connection first, to thwart anyone spying on his home connections. If somebody was trying to manipulate him, his move would require speed and silence.
 
Clipping the terminal into the undercoat straps in the small of his back, he clattered down the steps, took a right out the door at the bottom and bounded over a pile of trash in the alley. The bus was just pulling up to the corner, and Grant swiped his card to get on and was away even before the sullen Time-Wire employee had lethargically moved his green-and-gray vehicle out from the stinking gutter and down the street the other direction. Grant snorted in amusement. He had learned to be fit at the early age of fifteen, moving information peripherals the physical way as a runner in FreeDat. All the fiber optics cables in the world were not an excuse for letting one’s physical speed suffer entropy. He had escaped more than one bad hack by keeping his six-foot wiry frame in good shape. Sometimes running a few feet-per-second faster than an NSA patrol officer was even more evasive than a programming execution less than a few nanoseconds long.
 
As the bus headed downtown, Grant had more time to think about the situation. He was pretty sure that something big was going down. If the message was authentic, then his future self was trying to change the present. This was impossible of course, but this was the only way the attempt to sway Grant’s actions made any sense. Alternatively, if someone was trying to set him up, then they would also be trying to change the present; swaying his actions the opposite way, into a trap. What could they know? Were they using a time-portal? But still, what could that tell them?
 
Temporal-grams were one thing, and viewing portals something else entirely. After a good fifteen years of temporal technology advances, a message—a standard, consumer temporal-gram—could be sent through time by anyone for little more than the cost of the data and the milliseconds needed for present-day processing. The genius of the breakthrough in inter-dimensional physics was its simplicity. It was simply a matter of flopping the same circuit at two different points in time. A message on a piece of paper reads the same from one minute to the next, and a digital switch flows electricity the same direction from one moment to the next. A particular point in space becomes the same space, in a new time. Through the accidental discovery of so-called “pre-light”, it was easy enough to swap electrons back and forth between two moments in time. Use a little bit of energy, some complicated vector math, and sub-atomic physics to keep two parallel electrons in different energy levels, and the jumping electrons would act as a binary time beacon, in either “on” or “off” state in both times, switching as easily as a light switch. A circuit, in two different points in time (the precise span depending on the focus) would read the same, regardless of at which point the switch was activated. With a time circuit micro-processor scheduled in periods alternating as either receiver or transmitter, one could coordinate the circuits through the entire life of its existence. One could read a digital message before it was written; the circuit hadn’t so much as fallen “out of time”, as it became omnipresent of time: connected to all time in which it existed. It had taken the scientists a year to figure out the strange oscillations of the first experimental circuit was actually a message they were receiving from the future! But at that point they began to transmit it back to themselves a year earlier, it all made sense.
 
To the hard-core dimensional physicists, “before” and “after” ceased to have any real meaning in any discussion involving time physics; the future and past message simply were the same, and it was only to the consumer that the time-line model of time-space needed to be preserved. Grant had attended a lecture by one of the more famous dimensional physicists once, but had found the wizened professor’s bizarre language of “constant and continuous universal unfolding of the nowness of now” almost as hard to follow as the math. Grant had inferred from his rosy cheeks and overly dilated pupils that the professor was as much of an imbiber of synthetics as some of his followers.
 
But while it was easy to make a circuit alignment exist in the same space across time, actually viewing “into” time was another matter. This required the stabilization of a portal linking two different times together in the same space, not just in all times, but at one particular time. Now and tomorrow, but both today, not just “universally now”. Time might be a mental illusion, but space was still real, and very difficult to mold. Because of the inter-dimensional scale of matter and energy, it was virtually impossible to make matter exist at two difference times at once, although some scientists speculated that such an occurrence was behind the origins of our spatial universe. But, with a powerful enough energy vortex, a “null spot” could be forced that would allow photons to reflect across time dimensions and exist as a projection: a sub-atomic version of a pin-hole camera obscura. This was as close as technology had come to developing a literal “time machine” in the pattern of the fantasy stories, and as close as science in this universe would, conceivably. And as the furthest reach of technology, it required similar extremes in equipment, energy, and monetary expenditures.
 
Grant closed his eyes as the bus bumped into the slow-moving traffic of the FreeDat District, and tried to think. If tracking him via a time portal camera even was possible, who would invest in renting portal time just to track him: an info mover? When the technology was new, many people thought they could make their fortunes by telling their fortunes, so to speak, and had sunk incredible sums of money into the new field. But eventually the time bubble had burst when society had fully understood the Theory of Consistency—something the scientists had tried in vain to explain from the beginning. Being able to catch a glimpse of distinguishable light through the flow of space-time did not mean one could change space-time. Seeing the future was about as good as reading tomorrow’s news. In other words: you got the headlines, but you couldn’t be there. In history the headlines mattered, because it was as good as memory. But in life the headlines didn’t matter at all; everything else did. Remembering you had once been hit by a car, or even knowing you were going to be hit by a car didn’t make you better at dodging. The disappointment was cultural in scope. There were urban legends of people gone crazy looking at themselves in the future, endlessly watching themselves sitting at the same machine in the future looking at themselves in the further future, until they died from undernourishment, only after being stunned into a coma upon seeing their own deaths. But these tales had been proven to only be such, and after it had been uniformly acknowledged that the next day’s winning lottery numbers would, for one reason or another, continue to elude all those who were not going to win, the temporal industry had settled to a fairly level plateau of business activity, with modest growth. It was simple, really. Grant had explained it to one of his less-than tech savvy uncles by using a tight rope-walker as an example. With the old view of time, a tight-rope walker might wonder if he was going to fall off on his journey across the rope. But what the tight-rope walker didn’t have to wonder about is whether or not it was possible to walk to the middle of the rope. If the rope wasn’t strung through the air, it could not be walked on at all. Most people viewed the walker as the metaphor for the temporal dimension, constantly at risk of falling one way or the other. What the Theory of Consistency made clear was the understanding of time as the rope; without its stretching from one moment to the next, there would be no way to walk through the air. One might as well shoot an arrow into the air, and expect it not to come back down! Seeing one’s future could only occur if it was part of the past that led to that very future; in other words, if the rope’s tension made it possible to walk.
 
Fifteen years later, temporal services companies generally served as personal messaging and calendar services, or synchronizing accounting records. They advertised the ability to literally deliver “your message before your eyes”. Personal correspondence, important data, and anniversary reminders were received because a message was sent after the successful remembrance. After a few months of using a service, customers became used to the uncanny feeling of sending a message back to themselves simply because they had received it the day before. It was no different than expecting to receive a letter because one had dropped it in the mail a day earlier. Portals were generally used for research purposes, teasing out bizarre logical inconsistencies in the theories of space-time. Cats locked in cages with poison gas, and so forth. There were journals dedicated to the topic, but since the Theory of Consistency became popularly understood, only the techs paid attention.
 
If a person in the future was trying to give a message to Grant, it would either work in his benefit, or it would not. Perhaps they had figured out some way to use a time portal to see his time, and from their observations they thought they could change things. But the intended effect could only either happen or not happen—there was no attempt to do anything. If indeed it was himself in the future, he would have already received the message in that self’s past, and he would know the message’s effect. It must have succeeded, then. Even someone pretending to be Grant would know whether or not the plan has the intended effect. So was he doomed to follow whatever course this observer was planning? If it was truly a future Grant, he would end up better off. But if someone was playing him, was Grant then doomed to walk into the trap?
 
Or was someone watching the watcher? Was the future Grant, under the belief he was helping, only going to cause Grant to fail in an even further future? Or was the person leading him into a trap not aware that Grant would eventually escape in a future future? There was no way he could see far enough ahead to be sure. Such puzzling possibilities like these were good; it was more tight rope, more opportunity to keep his balance and escape. So, who was it, pulling the strings, and how many strings were there? Grant knew high stakes games; like so many communication lines and datalinks that he had stripped down, subverted, and manipulated over the years, most chains invariably double-crossed several times before leading back to themselves—a snake so large it couldn’t help but bite its tail. There was no way to know for sure, but his over-determined fate left a wide avenue of freedom. Every wall was a potential ladder, and over that wall… well, no one knew. He supposed he would have to play it out.
 
Grant opened his eyes and smiled, right in the face of the business man sitting next time him on the plastic seat, embarrassing the man and causing him to look away. Regardless of what was going to happen next, and who was watching it or trying to move the walls around, Grant would be sure to play the situation right by simply trusting his instincts, just as he always had.
 
He bounded off the bus with another swipe of his card, and dodged across the street to Net Gayne, perhaps the second-seediest data café on the FreeDat strip. Three blocks over at Byters you could get a side of the hottest illegal synth on the market with your unfettered, anonymous data access. Grant sometimes visited that hell hole for more entertaining purposes, but Net Gayne’s juke box had better bass tracks that helped him in his work.
 
Nodding to Jim behind the bar, he grabbed the tea poured for him and unclipped his terminal as he walked towards his usual booth in the back. Sitting on the red vinyl surface, Grant couldn’t help but fondly acknowledge the smell of circuits and stale liquid that permeated the curved bench below the overhanging bass woofer. He sipped the tea—the house blend of herbs and low-grade synth brought a steadiness to his heart rate—and set up his wireless to run a constant program of accessing the juke box and an hour-long online automated shopping browse, so his computer would seem busy to any wireless snooping devices. Meanwhile, he created an on-the-fly processor partition to access the anonymous ground-line broadband, via the thin cable poking surreptitiously through the foam-stuffed bench. Another early lesson that Grant had learned: sometimes low-tech trumps high-tech when one tries to remain discreet.
 
The custom-partition contained only the basics; an operating structure with multi-language prompts Grant has designed himself. It was built like a black hole, so that anything in it could not stray past the event horizon into the rest of the mini-terminal. When he was done with it, the partition would collapse upon itself, and cease to exist. This meant that it was practically untraceable from the outside, and in the event that something really went wrong, he could pull the plug, and then there would be nothing.
 
As the Midwest House bass beat began blaring over the café’s system, Grant keyed his moves, bouncing out a fast-paced staccato into the terminal. He brought up Time-Wire Inc.’s commercial site, acting as if he was a new customer trying to start up a contract account. As the flashy, attractive graphics depicted the green-and-gray cartoon “T-W” trademark mascot dancing with elastic stick-legs over an animated time-line “highway” in the corner of his screen, Grant surreptitiously watched the server’s progress from a piggy-back view as it added new the customer’s false information into its database. With the ease of a skilled mechanic looking underneath the hood of a fully-charged car, Grant personified a quart of conductant poured into the engine, via thirty-five lines of specialty code, tapped out from memory. From this bizarre vantage point within the Time-Wire database program, he could see the operation of the entire account system, and move wherever he wished from inside. Of course, the sophisticated system countermeasures would detect any change to the information without proper biometric authorization, and naturally, any meta-changes to the system structure. But Grant was here to look, not to touch.
 
Entering the location coding of his crumbled temporal-gram printout, he circulated through the system with all the other database queries until the information appeared on his screen. He examined the data associated with his message, while letting the commercial site interface struggle with an overly long postal address, which would ultimately prove to be outside current deliver areas. His temporal-gram appeared to be a valid message, with bio-certification. The date was valid, and the message showed as delivered. But the location code looked strange, appearing to have too few characters for a typical private account. When he attempted to track it, the location came back empty.
 
Now the commercial interface, still attempting to process his sign-up, was asking for billing information with a minimum of one thousand dollars credit. Grant entered one of his throw-away accounts from a check-cashing place a few blocks away. As the information went through, Grant squeezed in a query of the billing information for the mysterious location code. Maybe it was a corporate account? After half a minute of cloaked search, the answer came back. The “T-W” character jumped in excitement as Wilbur Termert became a new Time-Wire subscriber with a two-year commitment, and Grant Drexoll’s jaw dropped as he saw the corporate account paying for the temporal-gram: Flance-Jansen Corporate Network Security.
 
Everyone knew that Flance-Jansen CNS was about the surest bet in the stock market, and pretty much an unwritten truth in info-futures investment. But the information movers actually knew why—they held a tight fist’s cold grip around any information that could be plugged into a socket. Some even suggested that the corporation had gotten its start by hiring hackers to stage the National Identity Crisis for the purpose of profiting from the resulting security scare. Grant had always been skeptical of this particular theory; they would have had to consolidate not only one, but at least seven of the biggest talents in the information exploitation industry to be able to pull off such a conspiracy. And while the corporation had the funds to buy that talent, they certainly didn’t have the weight, being a corporation, to earn loyal hacker allegiance. Regardless of the theories, the fact remained: Flance-Jansen had emerged as the most trusted name in network security by the end of the crisis, and they had accomplished this through brutally efficient net tactics. They were a source of nightmares to all but the most skilled movers.
 
Grant simulated a lost connection with the commercial site, and evaporated the partition. This revelation answered some questions, but spawned a host of others. Now he knew the biometrics which identified himself as the sender could be false; if anyone could easily spoof a biometric, a Flance-Jansen operative could.
 
Maybe they even sent the message on some sort of a time echo, sending it from the present, to the future, and back to the present. That would explain why they thought they could still manipulate him; by having a future computer set up as a mirror, the message would reflect back without reporting it to anyone, like playing catch with a brick wall. Since no one in the future was actually involved, it would appear according to anyone reading it that the message had come from the unchangeable, Consistent future, but it would not necessarily have been affected by the Consistency. It would include all the weaknesses of speculative action, and therefore it could be as slip-shod as the motivations of the person sending it. But speculation was often the stimulus to action, for good or worse, and if someone was trying to push him into a trap, it would be as good an attempt as anything. Grant had thought of this possibility several years ago, and had even suggested it on a net forum as a way to manipulate present day decision-making with false indicators of temporal continuity. At the time, it had been ignored as a theoretical long shot. But at this moment in time, Grant knew that following any sort of brief indicator was the possibility of being trapped by what one didn’t fully understand.
 
But if Flance-Jansen was trying to set him up, now or in the future, what chance did Grant have at escaping? And from what exactly was Grant trying to escape? Why would a premium-contract security firm be interested in a relatively low-market information mover like Grant? It could be an attempt at pre-crime investigation, still attempted by more bellicose security firms. But any company as savvy as FJ knew it was almost entirely fruitless. The only criminal that could be caught before the crime was a criminal that would be caught after the crime. Consistency, yet again. Clues that didn’t exist in the present didn’t suddenly appear when looking in the past.
 
He was about to unplug his terminal from the datalink, when the terminal chimed a message sent in from his home network. The image of a woman standing in front of his apartment door appeared. He only glanced at her face, instead following the image of her hand as it reached up towards the camera lens, swiping a card through his data drop slot. She turned and walked away as the camera shut off, and the data was relayed to his mini terminal by the home.
 
H. Lannice Front Door Data Drop 1005 UET
 
He popped it up, and a simple non-net text message was uploaded.
 
From: H. Lannice

To: G. Drexoll

[message reads]

I have a job you might be interested in. I am a data technician for Flance-Jansen CNS. There is a system update in under a week that will allow certain one-time vulnerabilities to potential data stripping. I can show you the access, but need an outsider to do the work and move the data. I ask for the typical 10%. Contact me at my civilian routing with a personal ad if you think we can do business.

[message ends]
 
It was not unlike the many other solicitations that Grant received from disaffected data technicians willing to betray their corporations to someone else willing to take the risk. Typically, Grant would then send the inconspicuous response, in this case an anonymous sexual solicitation, to signify his interest without alerting the corporation, which would invariably be monitoring the employee’s personal communications. They would then meet and discuss the vulnerabilities and data in question, and Grant would see if it was worth his time, which it was only in about a third of the cases. Most data technicians had delusions about the importance of their jobs; the fact was, a list of thousands of credit account numbers matched with names and addresses often caused more trouble than it was worth, and frankly wasn’t much more worthwhile than a basic number generator. The real data was much more specific, names and dates that referred to system changes and router pathways. The most lucrative data was, of course, data signifying access to other data. The metaphor was simple enough: stealing a load of consumer goods is difficult despite the availability of unguarded warehouses; it requires storage of the loot, and someone to move the goods. On the other hand, stealing a list of truck delivery times for a whole month was as small as the chip holding the data, and could be sold for near a third of the value of the potential stolen goods the list signified. It was basic economic theory to Grant; minimize cost and risk while maximizing profit.
 
The offer of data from Flance-Jansen CNS was one of a high potential profit. Such a security firm would have some very interesting and profitable data in their systems; anything from lists of clients and service points, to actual system schematics. And, if Grant could do a piggy-back schematics job while taking some data, the job could be quite profitable down the line. But what about the message from his future self? Which part of this was more than it seemed? He would be damned if he was going to come out the victim rather than the criminal by the time it was over.
 
He would have to do some more research. Now: without wasting time. It was risky to proceed against such a target, but he was already in this thing. In info-moving, knowing was… well, not complete all, but certainly most of the battle. Besides, this little taste of netting had got him feeling frisky. He shuffled his connection to the juke box, causing it to pump out some of the early tracks from the Great Lakes minimal electro movement, an echo-infused dub house sound that hadn’t been in fashion for ten years, never really catching on in a major way outside of the underwater cities. Grant bounced over to the bar for another cup of the house tea while the other patrons in Net Gayne that afternoon grimaced at the music and wondered why their requests to the jukebox seemed to be ignored by the server.
 
Grant plopped back down and set to work forming another partition on his terminal. This one would have to be not only soft-secure, but physically secure if he was going to attempt to enter Flance-Jansen’s systems. He popped open the access panel of the scratched plastic box and took out his chip fingers. He touched the static-ground pad built on the underside of the table, and then inserted the narrow plastic tool and began flipping the nine hemisphere jumpers he had personal installed into the processor net. The jumpers had 362880 possible alignments. He chose one he hadn’t used in some time. Closing up the box, he rebooted the surface partition. The physical network doubled, doubled again, and then folded over to form two parallel partitions, each with its own matching black-hole partition. One remained linked to the wireless surface interface still shopping the Asian online outlets, while the other was actually physically removed from the circuits of the former by the hemisphere jumpers. He had in effect cut the “corpus collosum” of his system, but along an asymmetrical, jagged path, like a mutilated fingerprint. It was so fractallized, a schematics program would have to go over his system close to half a million times before it even got close to understanding half of the structure, let alone peripheral networks. Now there was no way that even the most powerful overrides could link back to his surface system.
 
There was less power available in this separate hemisphere partition, but the safety was its own power. He connected to Flance-Jansen’s internal network (some movers recited the address to themselves like an infernal mantra), and began his hack. He knew a few backdoors on their Genset XC5 SuperComputers, remnants of design flaws even the designers of the third-most expensive computer system on the planet had been unable to clear completely. He had happened upon them at a design expo a few months ago as he took a self-guided tour through the GenSet system display. Three of the pathways had been reported on network security discussion pages in the weeks after the conference and been closed almost immediately; apparently Grant wasn’t the only one doing a bit of self-guided touring. But two others had not. This knowledge, combined with the very exclusive knowledge of precisely which system version Flance-Jansen currently used, would be his way into the network. Grant smiled to himself. It was nice to be good at something. But even so, he would not have much time.
 
Inside the system, Grant checked the personnel files on H. Lannice. Lannice, Helen. Employed for the past seven years as data technician, desg. ISS. Clearance level 8. The clearance seemed high; she might have some very interesting data to sell. But then again, it was very rare for someone with a good access to turn on a corporation. Job satisfaction and loyalty increased with access and pay, naturally. He wondered was “designation ISS” was. It was not a designation he had heard of before, and it was not in any of the departmental directories. He quickly wrote an advanced search; targeting internal departmental correspondence rather than intra-departmental correspondence. An unknown departmental designation would have to be known by those in the department, even if it remained hidden from the rest of the corporation.
 
A few tricky security encryptions later, Grant was tracing the odd communications of the ISS department. Why these internal memos were encrypted so heavily from the rest of the Flance-Jansen network, he could not figure out. It seemed to be an accounting department of some kind, tracking data transfers within the corporation. He queried H. Lannice’s employee code, to see with which projects she was personally involved.
 
As he began the query, a dozen indicator windows from his own system popped up, frantically flashing wildly. He quickly pulled the plug on that particular search, and silenced his presence on the network to a standstill. It was a trap. He silenced his packet transfers, and sat dead in the water, waiting to see if they had heard him.
 
He flipped quickly through the indicators to see what sort of safeguards were in place. His expression grew steadily grimmer. It seemed that every single file and pathway linked to H. Lannice’s name was trapped; any access was immediately recorded to some sort of dynamic log. This was not just a single access trap, but several traps laid over multiple places of her system record. It was not just a beehive he had stepped on, but a floor made of bees.
 
Grant began carefully maneuvering around the quagmire, coding quickly, his thin data streams acting like deft-fingers carefully lifting the trip wires, looking for a way through. His eyes widened as data appeared on the screen.
 
A particular project file had burst loose into his grasp. She was tracking, mapping, and analyzing data involving illicit transfers of data to outside the FJ network. ISS stood for Internal System Security. She worked for the internal network security department of the most powerful network security department in the whole world network. Grant had stumbled into a sting, the seriousness of which could not be topped. And what’s more, he had not only fallen into it, but he had been pushed by a message from his future self.
 
Then his screen flashed red again. More and more indicators popped up, representing immediate and deep hits to his system security. Red messages came first, from the hacking hemisphere partition, then yellow from juke box partition, then in black from his surface system. Black indicators meant they were mapping the main board, and feeling the surface of the processor net. Black indicators were very bad. How was this possible? All three systems were being simultaneously attacked, from five different points within the Flance-Jansen network. But the juke box program wasn’t even on the hard line! His scripts deflected them, only to have eight more attacks come up from new locations spanning across the globe, from Melbourne to Madagascar. He moved to block these, confusing and deadening each connection, but then they disappeared, and twelve more different attacks targets each of his systems individually, some from Flance-Jansen’s headquarters, others coming up so quickly, he couldn’t even get a location to identify.
 
Grant’s fingers flew over the keypad, loading up three different dodging patterns, activating far-flung peripheral sleeper networks with a couple hundred terminals each, all miming his machine and sending useless attacks back at his own attackers, attempting to distract them. All he needed was to briefly send his attackers spinning through the global network so they could not get a location locked, and then he could have enough time to plug the hole he had punched in the FJ net, and unplug. As he executed, he watched seven of the twelve attacking machines fade, but suddenly no less than thirteen thousand separate attacks hit him, dodging the peripheral nets and hitting his systems full on, locking his processor and slowing his systems to a less than a crawl. The indicators stalled, half-loaded, unable to pop up their warnings of locations and attack types under the strain. His system was an inch from crashing or locking him out completely. Sweat rolled down Grant’s face as he popped his knuckles, unable to type as quickly as his stimmed brain needed. He had lost. They had disabled him, and if they could find all three of his systems at once, they had surely locked down on his location already. He didn’t both to listen for sirens. The NSA never used them.
 
He glanced at the open, empty door of the Net Gayne, and gave up, simply smacking his power button. But the system would not turn off; it was completely jacked. The screen went black and the ominous green font of an NSA security program scrolled across, in as close to lock-step as pixels could move. It shined with the green, primal fear of the data mover, right into Grant’s amazed eyes.
 
Grant Drixoll: We have entered and halted your systems. Please remain still as our agents are now arriving on the premises. You and your networks are now under arrest. You have the right to implant non-transmission…
 
Some data handlers didn’t even try to run; their lifestyle of complete network incarnation made their bodies near worthless, and the thought of being hit by a NSA stun round was enough to make them lose bowel control without the aid of the chemical munitions. But for Grant, the complete compromising of his terminal marked the beginning of his flight, not the end.
 
He shoved the table aside, sending it rocking backwards, long legs beginning to stride even before he was fully on his feet. The trashed terminal was covered in spilling tea, sending up electric arcs mildly to the bass beats pulsing through the room. As Grant dashed for the back exit, seven other customers saw him and pulled their plugs, grabbed at terminals and peripherals, and ran to the other doors. Anyone who could recognize what the beginning of a NSA hit looked like and had a reason not to be around when it came, could tell what way the wind was blowing. The sounds of boots began to syncopate with the music.
 
Grant flung the back door open and took off down one of the city’s countless alleys, over trash cubes and the occasional person. Looking behind him out to the daylight of the main strip, he saw black clad figures coming out of vans flashing with blue dazzle laser. He ran, pumping stimmed-up legs to the music still in his head. The synth pumped in his veins, tinctured now with fresh, natural adrenalin, helping his body interface the network of back pathways that connected the storefronts to the hidden arteries of the city’s utilities. He heard shouting, and turned to see a trio of plastic-armored figures running at him, with less agility, but certainly as much speed. The horrible buzz of a stun round wormed past him and shattered a window with its horrible noise, as much as the dead weight of the aluminum projectile. Grant dodged sideways down another alley as the ozone-smelling electric propulsion invaded his senses. Another passing round sent a trash cube next to him flipping upward through the air end over end, as he evaded, first left, then right and right again, trying to lose the agents chasing him behind utility antennas and more stacks of trash cubes. He shot up a stack of packing cylinders and over a fence, feeling the steel rake his back as he rolled over the top. A round plinked off the fence. Dashing away from the other side Grant almost ran headlong into a tourist lost in some synth haze, wandering through the alley behind what must be a pleasure club. The man shouted and stumbled as Grant rushed past him. As Grant turned to look, he saw the hapless tourist violently seizure, drop to his knees, and projectile vomit. The remaining echo of three loud buzzes roared through the narrow gap between the buildings. Grant ducked inside the pleasure club’s open back door, pushed through the heavy morning crowd to the front and out through the door into the main street, leaving the haze of smoke and revelers behind him like a mist. He felt sorry for the sucker who got hit with three stun rounds in a row; catching one was a trying, three-hour ordeal, but three of them at once, and on top of a head full of synth… well, Grant doubted the tourist would ever wish to return to the city.
 
Grant wondered at the agents chasing him; while the NSA men were known for their exuberant brutality in person, they normally didn’t just throw off shots so wantonly, precisely for that reason. Innocent bystanders hit with stun rounds caused questions, and many reports. They would think nothing of giving a target an extra round in the stomach to make him think twice about running next time, but they rarely shot from the hip. They must have really wanted Grant in the bag.
 
Thankful for his long legs and the opportunity of the pleasure club, Grant quickly pushed into a crowded tram car headed towards the port. If they had compromised his terminal and knew his name, there was no way Grant could go back to the apartment. Down by the heavy lifters of the quay it was relatively quiet with few people. He could hide out around there and think of his next move.
 
Grant quickly ducked down behind a large woman as three black clad figures moved past in the street spread in pursuit formation. As the tram lifted off, Grant raised his head for a last look, and noticed, much to his surprise, that the agents were not agents at all. Their armor did not bear the insignia of the NSA, only a single blue square marked their shoulders, and it gleamed metallic in the lights of the strip as they continued into the crowd, heads turning as they searched for Grant. What was happening here?
 
Down on the quays, the huge yellow lifters gnashed in effort as they shifted tons of metal upon other tons of metal. Grant walked along the banks of the giant canal, and felt for the first time in his adult life that things were rapidly progressing beyond his control. The life of information moving was well known to him. Breaking systems, turning pathways, stealing data and thwarting agents were his bread and butter; it was his chosen profession. But this was a much bigger system, with unfamiliar rules. Someone from the future was attempting to manipulate him, a machination that, by the laws of time itself, was not possible. First, he receives a message telling him to do what he was going to do anyway. Second, he gets an unheralded trap invitation from a high echelon FJ Internal Security operative. Third, he encounters the network set-up from hell, which impossibly breaks a hemisphere lock. And Fourth, he is chased by a trigger-happy para-military network security team with an uncanny response time. Time-space was confusing, but these things were incomprehensible.
 
Maybe it was all an elaborate ruse to trap him in the present day. It could be a time echo. But if so, it was not anything like the typical traps run by the NSA. It would have to be someone else entirely. Someone else who looked suspiciously like the NSA but didn’t play by the NSA rules, and what they did, they did much better than the NSA. Was Flance-Jansen running their own police force? Not only were the rules changing, new rules were being made where they never had been before. Agents with unknown masters, messages across time and space, all of these effects had causes Grant could only grasp at.
 
Maybe the message really was from himself. In truth, this made more sense than the rest of it. Rather than being a literal message, perhaps it was meant to stir Grant into action to avoid a trap in this present time. A sort of pin prick, to get Grant moving before something or someone else moved on him. It certainly didn’t seem to have worked very well, as he had only narrowly avoided capture back on the strip, and all of his equipment and resources were now unusable in the present time. Grant now had nothing, no terminals or datalinks, nothing to use except his feet to run.
 
But then again, Grant thought sarcastically, he did just escape, relatively unscathed, from three incredible scenarios he had never heard in even the most embellished hacker war stories. Maybe he should try and play his future self at his own game. Perhaps in this strange manipulation of the system of time-space, there was a niche for Grant to grab. The idea was risky, because there was no improvement of the chances of success other than those that already existed. There would be nothing that Grant could get from the future Grant that Grant already didn’t have. But maybe it would provide a stepping place to move from. If ever Grant was cornered, it was now. Therefore, he desperately wanted to make a move. But if without any resources, his best actions were reactions. Maybe the future was what he could react against.
 
Grant walked into the Time-Wire Inc. outlet and picked up a tablet from the wall to begin writing his message. The office down by the quay certainly was a much dingier facility than other TWI locations. The warehouses across the street had been closed for sometime, and the bar next door didn’t look like it got much business. At least not the kind that any actual business man would want. If it hadn’t been for the port offices nearby, this rundown location would have been closed along time ago, or perhaps never even opened.
 
Putting down the stylus, Grant previewed his message. Never having sent a message to himself before, he wasn’t quite sure how to phrase it, but if it worked it would work and form wasn’t important. He sent it to himself PR, which meant that it would remain in the network until Grant came to an office to get it. Maybe he wouldn’t get it. But then again, he didn’t know any other address. And this way, future-Grant couldn’t get his message without biometric certification.
 
Time-Wire Inc. Temporal Transmission Services

From: Grant Drexoll

Transmit Time: April 18th, 2153: 1456 UET

Location: TWI Loc: 475942-1459

To: Grant Drexoll

Delivery Time: April 29th, 2153: 0742 UET

Location: PR

[message reads]

Hi, it’s Grant.

Your message got me in some trouble, to say the least. I don’t know whether I should be angry or grateful, but I guess we’ll both figure that one out soon enough. But, could you tell me what to do next? What’s the next step? I know you won’t tell me anything I don’t already know, but just say something: anything with some meaning. I’m working on just about nothing here.

Thanks buddy,

Grant

[message ends]
 
He thought the ending was stupid, but didn’t know what else to write. ‘Sincerely?’ Or: ‘See you soon?’ Did you even make sense to say good-bye to one’s future self? Anyway, it would have to do. He paid with one of his throw away credit accounts, waited while the woman at the desk checked to see if there was an instantaneous response. There wasn’t. Grant sighed. Apparently this plan had been a bust. The future Grant could have sent a message back to this precise time from whenever he received it, and yet he did not. This probably meant Grant would be picked up by whoever was after him in the next few hours, or else something else would happen that would cause Grant not to go get the message, nor to respond. As Grant walked out of the office and down the street, the whole idea began to seem silly to him. How would sending a message to himself have given him any inspiration? If his future self had any help to give, he already would have given it. Now Grant was back where he started, with lots of questions and few clues.
 
Suddenly, Grant was completely uninterested in the possible intricacies of the time and space continuum. He saw three black vans speeding around the corner from up the block and heading straight towards him.
 
Somebody else intercepted it! The original message was a fake! He took off down the side street to the sound of screeching wheels and heavy boots. He saw a metallic blue square flash in the evening light behind as he careened down a staircase into an abandoned pedestrian passage way. There’s no other way they could have located me so fast. In the present, it would have taken at least fifteen minutes to trace my credit access. He fled in the dark, tripping over unidentifiable obstacles. He heard men chasing him, and almost wondered if he should just stop and be caught, but his instincts took over as he heard that familiar buzz fly pass his head. Running for what seemed like hours, he found a dark conduit access pipe and hide inside.
 
That evening, upon stumbling back inside Net Gayne, Grant’s face reflected the proprietor’s consternation as he flopped onto a stool.
 
“Goddamnit, Grant! What the hell happened? Bringing a bust down on my place, sending the customers flying! Look at this place, late-evening and completely dead. I’m lucky those agents just gathered up your terminal and left… but I might as well be closed down, how much business I’m going to draw now. Normally I have to scare the scriptkids out of here, but I thought you were a professional, man!”
 
“Yeah, Jim… you and me both. I have no idea who I am now… or when.”
 
The tired man behind the bar poured tea and pushed it to Grant slowly, trying to show a lack of desire to do so.
 
“What was it, man… a bad tip? You don’t make mistakes in your coding, so it must have been a mistake in the choice of job.”
 
Grant took a sip, and let the stim-synth tune his mind.
 
“Something like that. I was set up by, well… still not quite sure who.”
 
Jim nodded as if he understood. “It’s a tough business alright. Well, not as tough as trying to make an honest buck as a property owner here, but far be it from me to complain…”
 
Back in his booth, Grant let the music wash over him as the extra-velo synth mix Jim prepared washed through him. His focused mind combed over the situation. A man sends himself a message to yesterday. The man received the message before it was sent. The man will not do anything upon receiving the message in the past he would not have done before sending the message in the future, even though the receiving is prior to the sending. There must be a complete loop; it is not fate, not a single cause, but a chain of events that cannot change, only occur. Someone would only try and fake this message if it the effect of the message was already real. The intention was meaningless, then—there were only the long line of effects. Then there could be no fake message after all, only messages. It doesn’t matter who sent the message at all. Either there was a rope to walk on, or there wasn’t. The rope is the key! There is no passage of time, only time itself. There was not a set-up, only the set itself. It was not incomprehensible, it was undeniably simple. All Grant had to do was follow the rope. Either he would fall off, or he wouldn’t.
 
Grant pushed back from the table, and strode over to Jim, who regarded him, somewhat unsure.
 
“You couldn’t want another of those extra-velos. I mixed that one pretty strong…”
 
“Jim. Where can I get a weapon?”
 
Jim took a step back, looked away.
 
“Oh don’t be silly, Drexoll. Your weapons are numbers, symbols, bits of data, ideas. You can do more with them than any idiot holding an assault…”
 
“Don’t patronize me, Jim.” Grant leaned close to Jim over the bar, his eyes darkening. Jim looked down at his tea-stained bar.
 
“Fine. But now you really are out of your league. Go see this guy, hangs out over by the Cantilever Club. Short guy, fashion mods. You’ll recognize him as soon as you walk in. But I still think that…”
 
Jim looked up, but Grant was gone.
 
The metal was cold inside Grant’s coat. It was strange to see a weapon not made of plastic, but this was an older gun. It used exothermic chemicals to fire its slugs rather than pulses, so it caused no magnetic interference. More kick, said the small man with green eyes that had placed its cold, heavy body into his hands, but lets you know the power you’ve got in your hand. It had been significantly cheaper, so Grant was able to afford it with the last disposable credit card he had on him.
 
Grant walked down the street until he finally found what he was looking for. He clutched his coat closed against the chill of the night, and stepped inside the public access booth. Calling up the directory, he punched in H. Lannice. There it was: on the other end of LEX Hub, towards the… yes, T was to the South on that side, near the shopping complex. He was about to leave, when he saw something. He waited for thirty seconds, to make sure he saw it. A narrow flicker ran along the bottom of the screen. It couldn’t be. All the F series terminals were pulled out almost twenty years ago! He ran his fingers inside the card slot. The contacts were in the old alignment. He reached back to the crack between the terminal and the booth. He flipped the documentation panel out, which unbroken, surprisingly. It was an F series! He’d get a couple rounds of drinks for sharing this antique back at Gayne. But since he was here, he might as well…
 
He pulled out a dead credit card. Finding two parallel contact ridges, he carefully snapped the card in half between them. Placing each piece back to back, he carefully lined up the contact ridges on the outer sides, and inserted them into the slot. It was a tough fit, but he slid them in. The screen blinked and shut down. He pulled the cards out, and the machine blinked on again, and began booting up. It worked! He had never tried it on a real F series in the field before, only on vintage collector pieces. It gave him a thrill, like back in the first days of his net-exploits.
 
The F series had a glitch in the card reader. It would short the system if the contact was crossed top-to-bottom. And, when it rebooted, it would reboot directly into service mode, which was fully unlocked. He had realized when he saw the flicker at the bottom of the screen. What he was seeing was actually the restricted page information, which in the F series format was all contained on the same screen. Of course, scrolling was locked without authorization. But now rebooted, he could do anything he wanted. Long distance calling, changing some aspects of account information, and even shutting down power and utilities for the block. Of course, doing so now would sent a crew out here in about three hours, after which they would undo whatever he did, and remove this amazing terminal.
 
But what he could do was read the restricted directory information on H. Lannice. Naturally, there would not be much there. But perhaps fire exits would be listed, or vehicle information. He called up the screen, and paged through it. A new address, recent hookups… all in the past week. But there was… what did that mean? It must be a mistake. But it couldn’t be a mistake. Grant didn’t understand it even though he was staring right at it: in the official, restricted file, was a jurisdiction “Hold” code on her address, name: H. Lannice. She was under watch by the police? Crime code: 34495-1B… sustained information theft, minimal intrusion? Why was a top level FJ operative under house arrest for a minimal information theft? As far as the NSA agents who processed 344– level crimes were concerned, she might have been their boss! She might have been their boss’ boss.
 
There was nothing else for it. He was certainly going to have to point the gun at her now.
 
There was one light on in the apartment, clearly visible from the fire exit side of the building. Somebody was in there, even though it was this late at night. Or early in the morning, depending on which way you thought about it. Grant gritted his teeth, and tried to wipe the twitches out of his eyes. Jim was right about the synth mix. Good thing too, otherwise he’d have trouble keeping his eyes open at all. Quietly padding up the balcony corridor, towards the back door of the luxe-style block apartment, Grant held his weapon tightly. The guy he’d bought it from showed him how to make sure it was loaded, and he hoped he could figure the rest out from the wide array of old-fashioned Aktion films he’d absorbed as a kid. You pulled the top part back… there. He felt the trigger slacking. Would he actually have to use this thing? It would be the last bit of tight rope left—if he needed it. Despite everything else, he still had no idea what was behind that door.
 
It was a simple magnetic lock. Easy enough. He caught his breath right before he did it. Easy now, Grant. Walk in fast, but stay calm. Point the gun at the face of the nearest person, first thing. One more breath, and one more blink. He pushed the door in hard, and followed after it.
 
He was pointing the gun at a woman in an short, black dress, lying across the couch. Grant’s bloodshot eyes darted back and forth, but it was only her. She yawned, stretched her arms, and pulled herself into a sitting position. She tucked the dress underneath her, and crossed her legs.
 
“I thought maybe you’d be early for some reason, and we could catch a late dinner. I guess it’ll have to be breakfast after all. I’ll have to change.” She made to get up, but Grant moved the gun into her path.
 
“Well aggressive is one thing, but antagonistic is another!” She made a somewhat irritated face at him. Self-consciously, he backed up from her, but checking himself, he steadied the gun. He knew better than the follow the suggestions of attractive women, be it a change of clothes or anything else.
 
“H. Lannice?”
 
“Helen.”
 
“What is it you want with me?”
 
“So it’s direct to business, then. Suits me.” She sat forward, rearranging the papers she had on the low table. “Have a seat, Drexoll. We have some paperwork to do.”
 
He remained standing. “I’ve beaten intrusion raps before. And even if you get me on it, I didn’t touch a damn thing. I’ll be out in three years, tops.”
 
She looked up at him, through her smart, brown hair. “Oh these?” she held up the collection of documents. “This isn’t evidence, and I’m sure not one of the cops. This is a contract, Drexoll.” She handed a thin set of papers to him, as she searched for a pen.
 
Pointing the gun at the table for the time being, Grant took the paper, holding it out level with the weapon so he could look at all three of them. It did appear to be a contract.
 
“You know who I am,” she said, crossing her legs again, and looking back to study him. “You know who I work for. You also know that we are using some new, unconventional methods. Now you know we are offering you employment. An exclusive two-hundred year contract with Flance-Jansen. You work under me, as part of my team. Internal System Security. The most secret of the secret—the ultimate network. You don’t get better tools than what we get, and you don’t get better access. Not to mention, you don’t get better pay.”
 
Grant looked around the apartment. “I’ve seen nicer digs than this.”
 
“Oh this?” She looked around with a surprised expression. “I don’t live here. This is just one of my public offices. One of eight.”
 
Grant glanced back at the contract in his hand, and dropped in to the table. He sat down in the chair opposite her, turning to face the rest of the room at an angle. He rested the gun hand on his knee. Lannice shot him a quizzical look, and then gave him a smile. It was a nice smile, but not quite sincere.
 
“I don’t get it, Lannice. Why Grant Drexoll? What does Flance-Jansen need with an info mover?”
 
Now the smile was a bit easier to believe. “We have plenty of techs, Drexoll. Skilled ones, too—the best. But in ISS we cover networks that aren’t so, how should we say: technical. Don’t get me wrong—it’s challenging work. Too challenging for a bunch of info-heads, perhaps. We need people with other skills. Technical skills, yes, but also a certain flexibility. People who can adapt, and change. Networks are an ever expanding field, you know.”
 
She leaned to one side on the couch, stretching one of her long leg out towards him. “That’s a nice antique,” she said, pointing her toe towards the gun. “A ‘forty-five,’ they call them? Looks good in your hand.” She increased the smile, and caught his eye with a bit of sheen glancing off the tights she wore under the dress. He returned her gaze.
 
All of a sudden the leg swung outward, her foot catching the pistol right above the trigger guard. It flew from his hand, smashing into the wall to his right, while she deftly rolled her hips three-hundred sixty degrees in the same direction to carry the force of her kick. She was still sitting on the sofa precisely the same, her hips only to side of where they had been before, when the gun clattered to the floor and went off. The amazing noise of the gunshot started Grant into understanding of what just happened. He stared at her, in silent amazement.
 
“You can go pick it up now, if you want. The firing pin is now bent. Pity. It was a lovely antique.” Grant decided to stay seated, leaving the gun where it was. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It was merely a demonstration. You see? That is part of my flexibility… excuse the pun.”
 
“I’m hardly a manual combat specialist.”
 
“Of course not! We already have one on staff. But you did evade two separate squads of our secret incursion force, kept secret by the fact the never miss their mark, especially not twice.”
 
“I’d keep training them if I were you.”
 
“And you might! But your evasive skills are not your true talent, Drexoll. You have, shall we say, a way with time.”
 
“Time is the one thing I haven’t been succeeding with, lately.”
 
“On the contrary! You’ve been doing marvelously, from what I’ve seen. They say memory is a big help. But even more so, an ability to think in a networked way, but ‘off the network’, so to speak.”
 
“Or off the tight rope?”
 
“Sorry?”
 
“Forget it.”
 
She leaned closer to him, hands on knees, arching her back a bit for emphasis. “We need you Grant. FJ is looking to expand its expertise. They call it ‘time-dynamics’, but that’s just a buzz-word. You already know what it is. You know its not just rapid, accurate messaging, and calendars that extend in both directions. It’s the ultimate net, Drexoll. And we want you to hack it.”
 
“You can’t hack it. It’s consistent. That’s the point.”
 
“That precisely is the point. You can’t rewrite time, you can only make moves in the present. But we have a remarkable tool, letting us expand the present as to include all of time itself, from an information point of view. Our range of knowledge isn’t limited by anything now. Any information, past, present, or future is available, we just need some clever techniques and philosophy to access it. But more importantly, we need to make sure its secure. Not if, but when some outsider develops the techniques to cut through the networks, and starts mining time for information, we will be there first.”
 
He thought about it. An infinite temporal net sounded exciting. He tried to imagine hacking a network in four dimensions.
 
“What if I say no?”
 
“That’s your choice, of course. But I remind you that Flance Jansen does have enough evidence to convict you on intrusion. Only three years max, as you said. But would you rather go to Incarci-Max for three years and not see even a payphone during that time, or work for the biggest company in the industry, developing a field so new it doesn’t even exist except in a potential dimension? Would you rather go to prison.. or work with me?” She raised her eyebrows, letting him do his thinking for himself.
 
“Where do I sign?”
 
“On all the lines below. And I’ll need your ID. Your real one.”
 
It took less than twenty seconds.
 
“Welcome aboard!” she smiled, then she looked at the time dynamic data form: 0608. She quickly turned serious. “I hate to force you into it, but we do have to go right to work. Your first assignment is, how should we say—’time critical’.”
 
She pulled another folder from underneath the table. “Everybody gets the same first assignment in this department. I completed this assignment, and now you will. I have a good feeling about you though, Drexoll. I think you’re going to set the record. Just under twenty-four hours from now, I’ll bet—I’d put money on it, but I’m not the sort.”
 
“What do I have to do?”
 
She opened the folder and handed it to him. “It’s a recruitment. You are to track down this suspect, and set up a situation under which he’ll have no choice but to join the unit.”
 
Grant looked into the open folder. It was a dossier, with a large photograph of the mark. It was a picture of himself. Not a bad shot, either.

Scab Suite – A Novella
by Adam Rothstein 

106 pages
published by Brute Press
Portland, Oregon
2008 

Available in these editions:

Paperback

Printed on 60# Offset
Covered in Pre-scored, 80# Cover Stock
Glue, and Staple-bound by Hand
$5.49

Digital PDF format

Free under Creative Commons license
“Scab Suite” pdf format 

B was our second adventure, not nearly as successful as the first.

Who cares, other than that?

Brute Press A was our first experiment, launched in the Winter/Spring of 2006. 

Here is the release statement.  Consider it a snapshot in time. 

Brute Press’ inaugural publication, “A”, officially drops today. This 34-page behemoth contains 100% Brutal Printed material, direct from the Brutes to you. Each copy is hand-made and individually numbered, for an all-around quality page-turning experience. 

Featured artists: 

ben critton
jeff honeyman
jon isaac
david lineal
adam rothstein
miles strucker 

poetry, stories, and not-fiction.
Price: $2, includes us postage.
Maximum literature, for a minimum price. 

Currently available in these editions: 

Paperback
Printed on standard office paper
Covered in 80# Cover Stock
Saddle-stitched (staple)
Each copy numbered in red ink, of limited edition of 500

Digital PDF format
Read/Download it here
$0, under Creative Commons license 

Pictures of the paperback

Preview

This preview of Miles Strucker’s short story was originally posted on the Brute Press blog, the precursor to the web site.  Once the digital versions of A are online, the preview will be superfluous, but here it is anyway, for nostalgia’s sake.

<snip>

The Strangeness (of Things)

He was exceptionally good at hiding for an older man with urinary problems. If it wasn’t for the urinary problems (or more precisely, the great pressure) there’d be no reason why he couldn’t stay in his corner office, curled up under his desk, castled in by a chair and a fern, for at least another eight hours. After all, in eight hours the office would be cleared out, left to the darkness of hollow cubicles and gently humming wires. He could skip to the bathroom if he wanted.

The fact that his strawberry skin was beginning perspire, however, told him all too well that peeing would hardly relieve the great pressure (or the fear). If this had been the first time there wouldn’t be fear. There would be sweating, and the great pressure, and certainly a good deal of hiding, but no fear. Fear was a product of experience, of knowing what was going to happen next. In twenty minutes or so, his secretary would deliver the messages and say hello, just as she always had. As to the others who popped their heads in to say hello, and suck all the air out of the room, she behaved quite the opposite—as a draft might.

“Mr. Shannon?” She’d place the morning paper on his desk, noticing that the fern had been moved. That’s strange, she had seen him walk in earlier that morning. Then she would hear him breathing. “Mr. Shannon. Sir, you’re in here?” Formally exposed and not being able to control his chest bulging up and down or the sound of his belt pulling taut, he would have to acknowledge her. “Allyson, close the door….”

<snip>