Chapter IV: Recreation

“Compile, run test series 5 and then shut down”, Mona snapped at her terminal before leaving for the coffee machine. To her, the whole thing stank. She’d just spent a fortnight surviving on caffeine, interfacing the servo controls of the tracking unit of the project they were working on, with Janos, the communication protocol that had independently been developed by SuryaTech as a common standard for all their projects.

She could understand Prakash’s frustration. Her task was no less challenging-develop a focusing system with a camera that could zoom up to a square centimetre, and lock onto a continuously moving target with precision. This was fine as far as setting up a robot system went, but this system had to have armour plating, and electromagnetic shielding, which would slow down the servo motors….

Then again, what was the point of it all? What was she working on anyway? The secrecy and ‘need to know’ clearance that shrouded everything that went on maddened her. At least her colleagues too shared her angst. She walked out to the lobby, slamming her palm impatiently on the biometric scanner to summon the lift. Prakash, Albert and Ravi would be waiting for her at ground level. The feeble rays of the evening sun trickled in through the gigantic plate glass that covered the atrium. Crowds of hovercars passed overhead in long lines, like flies, vertically arranged in lanes in ascending order of speed. People streamed in and out. For some, like herself, it was the end of the day, while work was just beginning for the rest.

For some reason, looking at the glass windows made her feel like a termite in a glass case.

She sighed, and braced herself for the walk across the football stadium sized ground floor area. A huge holo-display had been set up, publicizing yet another partnership program between Surya Industries and Maxim Enterprises of Hong Kong. It showed a changing photomontage of beaming faces, buildings, facilities, scientists-all that went into SuryaTech.

“Surya and Maxim-redefining the future!”

Mona rolled her eyes at that one. They had been ‘redefining’ the future for so long that she couldn’t understand if she was living in the past or the present. Who actually got paid to write these slogans, she wondered.

A moment later, she was striding towards Prakash, Ravi and Albert, who were waiting for her near the entrance.

“So, what’s the plan? “

Ravi grinned. “Go home, get drunk, hook up a psychedelic neural pattern tape, and get high!”

“She wasn’t talking about how you usually spend your evenings, Ravi”, Prakash said with a straight face. Ravi punched him as the four of them guffawed. It was almost a sense of release, and utter relief, to leave the imposing SuryaTech building, and continue their banter as they made their way to the parking area. Everyone could sense it, a cloud of oppression and uncertainty that enveloped them everyday while they were at work. Every evening when they left, it would dissipate. No one spoke about it, however. It was one of those things that everyone understood.

They were riding Ravi’s new hovercar, one of the sportier new models with integrated hi-speed vertical manoeuvring. “Watch this trick,” he said and spoke into his infolink

“Set Destination-Monty’s”. The mini screen on the dashboard changed to confirm the new destination as the popular dive bar, and autopilot engaged.

“Yeah, so you added voice recognition to the console, so what?” said Mona.

Ravi and Albert looked at each other, then at the other two in the rear seat. “That’s what you think”, Albert winked and flipped up a plastic lid with a glowing red button below it.

“Brace yourself kiddies….”

The next moment the car lunged forward and up, entering the hi-speed lane above them. It went even higher, and raced towards its destination at what seemed like 300 miles an hour. Five minutes later, the speed dropped automatically, and they made a smooth landing in one of the seedier parts of the city.

“Next time you try breaking the sound barrier you might tell us in advance, cowboy”, Prakash grimaced. “How the hell did you fly so fast? Stole an Ion Engine from somewhere?”

“No.” Albert’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, as he stroked his goatee. “These are Fujihara afterburners. Increases engine power by up to 400 percent for a short while.”

Prakash’s jaw dropped. “What the hell did you pay to get those? They would cost 300 thousand credits on the black market. You’d have a hell of a time just smuggling them in, anyway. These engine mods are illegal. Besides, you realize the local friendly Ramsevak patrol wouldn’t take kindly to our flying stunt?”

“Let’s call it an… ah…funds transfer”, said Ravi. “I did someone a favour, he owed me, I made a good investment on my earnings, right?”

Mona groaned. “When will you ever learn to live on the right side of the law? Alright, so now I’m not gonna ask again.”

“That presupposes your identifying the right side correctly, Mona”, said Prakash softly.

She gave him a queer look but said nothing.

“Well, the down side is, afterburning gulps up fuel…see, I’m already down by 20%”, said Ravi, changing the topic.

The four of them stepped out. Snow had already started to fall. They stood in an abandoned industrial complex, outside a large, nondescript building with a neon sign that flashed ‘Monty’s’. The ‘t’ had long since flickered out, and the rest of the letters seemed in danger of following suit sometime soon.

A few other hovercars were parked in the narrow street. They hadn’t been used for quite a while, judging from the thick snow that covered them. Prakash produced a cash card, and swiped it to pay the cover charges on the scanner near the door, which then dutifully slid aside to let them in.

It felt dark and cool inside the bar, the feeling heightened by the diffused lighting that the soft shade LED panels on the ceiling gave off. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, which combined with the multicolored rays from a spinning globe on the ceiling made for interesting hallucinatory effects. Across was the dance floor, where a large number of people gyrated to music that could only be heard by clipping a small aural amplifier to the back of the neck. These were available at no extra charge. It was a great help, because only those who wanted the loud music would hear it, and thus it was possible to carry on a conversation in the place without having to shout.

A sign on the wall read:

Coming soon!

The cYBe4DeM0nZ live!!

All of next week! A heavy metal fan’s dream come true! Prepare to be blown away by the funkiest neural patterns, exclusively composed for your cerebral pleasure!

“Atleast we know what’s hip and happening”, said Albert dryly. The four of them occupied a corner booth after ordering their drinks, and all eyes turned expectantly on Prakash.

“Well, people, let’s face it, we don’t usually get to know what eventually becomes of our projects, but this definitely takes the cake. For starters, today’s phase 7 testing was declared a failure, as I had told you all earlier. “He raised his hand to stop the indignant comments that the other three sought to voice.

“As you are aware, on the last test, our accuracy rate for facial recognition was something like 99.78% after running a comparative search on one million records, with a seek time of 794 milliseconds. During this test, it reduced further to 780. Even that was not apparently good enough for Dr. Sehgal.”

“Arrogant bastard”, Mona said sharply. “By any other standards, for an airport security system this would be excellent. I subjected all the servo motors to individual stress tests as specified. Sehgal’s got it in for us, that’s all.”

“Exactly my point, Mona. If it was just an airport security system being implemented, then we all deserve pats on our backs.”

Realization dawned slowly, but inevitably, like the pinprick of light that eventually becomes an oncoming express train.

“He mentioned something about a targeting system and then clammed up.” Prakash went on.

“AGT-4360”, Albert whispered almost to himself.

“What??”

Wiping beer from his goatee, Albert straightened up and looked around at the rest of them. “I overheard Sehgal mention that to his terminal’s voice recognition system. I think it’s a project code.”

“Why would he be so careless as to use voice recog for something like that,” Ravi’s chubby features crinkled into a thoughtful frown, “unless you were completely invisible around there, eh, Albert?”

Albert flushed. “Well…ok, I….” He sighed. “Alright, I admit I was testing out a fiber-optic camouflage jacket in the vicinity….”

Before the collective gasp, he quickly added, “This was last month, before they added the motion sensors, remember.”

He clapped his hand over Mona’s mouth as she opened it. “No, I’m not gonna tell you where I got it. Ask no questions, hear no lies…”

He got a kick under the table in reply.

“I’m heading to the dance floor, you guys coming?” Ravi had already grabbed a pair of headphones. Prakash saw him linger at the DJ’s booth and sighed. Ravi was a confirmed neural implant junkie. Soon he had joined the crowd that swayed and pulsed to the unheard music. Prakash decided he too would, for once, try a neural pattern. He too selected a clip-on headphone. Along with the heavy metal that instantly assaulted his ears, a series of alternating low and high frequency waves pulsed into his brain via the metal stripe pattern on the back of his head. Not as good as Jolt, but then it wasn’t a program he’d written. The effect of Jolt was like a mule kick to the jaw. This was like being slammed repeatedly by a whole herd of them. He reeled as the neural signal, attuned to the thump of the bass drum, attacked the pleasure centres of his brain, making him see a kaleidoscope of exploding light in front of his eyes, and feel like he was floating off the ground. Two minutes was more than he could stand. It took another minute to return to normal. Mona regarded him with amusement. “Too hot to handle?” she asked.

Prakash nodded, then scratched his jaw and looked at Ravi and now Albert, with wonder. “How can they stand it? I like Beethoven and Bach, the neural versions are so soothing, but this…”

“You’re getting old”, Mona said matter-of-factly. “Besides, this beats working our butts off in SuryaTech any day!” At least that was something they both agreed upon.

He pondered over what she had said, all the way home in Ravi’s hover car. Yes, he thought, as he unlocked his flat and entered, he was getting old. He could still remember, his father, growing older and sicker gradually due to the lethal radiation his battalion had faced during the war, and fading away by the time Prakash turned six years old. He was raised by his mother, on an army widow’s pension, combined with the job she had at Surya Software (which would later merge with several other companies to form SuryaTech).

He reached into his cupboard and withdrew an old plastic box. An old silicon processor lay inside it, its 400 odd golden pins reflecting the light. It was an antique 256-bit transmission controller, that encrypted and routed network traffic of up to fifty thousand users in real time-quite an achievement for its time. He ran his finger over the familiar signature on the reverse side. His mother had been on the team that developed the instruction set for this processor, and several more. It was the time when cold fusion technology had at last been perfected to allow everyday usage. The press had waxed eloquent about how mankind’s energy requirements were completely satisfied, the initial flurry of inventions that followed included hi thrust ion engines, which enabled the development of hypersonic aircraft that connected any two points on the planet within four hours, flying at the edge of space. The invention was timely, because fossil fuels had reached their final crisis in terms of supply. A few other horrifying inventions, including portable laser weaponry, also owed their existence to cold fusion.

He stood on the balcony. A stratoliner appeared as a glowing blue dot on the horizon, then the thunder of its four ion engines grew to a deafening crescendo as it approached for landing, the exhaust nozzles glowing incandescent in the night, floodlighting the drab city below in eerie shades of blue, and leaving a long vapour trail that persisted for several minutes.

He could still see her waving to him at the airport, ten years ago, before leaving for an international seminar in Beijing. He could still see the liner soaring vertically preparatory to its hyperbolic sub-orbital flight trajectory. And then he could see it going up in a white hot ball of flaming plasma, like a meteorite in reverse.

His train of thought abruptly derailed when the vidscreen piped up in its Oxford accented voice-”You have a call”.

It was Bahadur.

“Saab, did you have dinner? Shall I have it sent up to your place?” His face showed a hint of reproach, as he wiped sweat off it.

“Yes, please Bahadur. And please go easy on the oil.” Prakash was in no mood to dress up and go out again. Besides, his thermal jacket’s battery needed recharging.

A few minutes later, Bahadur’s assistant was at the door, with hot parathas wrapped in thermal foil. The meal left him satiated, yet disturbed.

He shook himself. Time to get rid of these depressing thoughts. “Gimme an Ecstasy, level 3.”

The Ecstasy program, as opposed to the Jolt program, sent waves of relaxing signals to his tired brain, to bring him to a calm and peaceful state, preparatory to falling asleep. And it was on the border of sleep that it struck him.

He had to have heard of AGT-4360 somewhere. He got up, turned off the Ecstasy program and sat down at the vidscreen.

“Console. Secure log in. Set up cloak.”

This was enough to start a background program that threaded his terminal across the world’s computer networks, hopping continents, twisting and recrossing itself, encrypting itself with a different cipher along each route, to make him virtually untraceable. All he had to do now was make the final connection.

By the first decade of the 21^st century, wireless networking had become the norm across the world as hardware became cheaper. It also proved to be a blessing after the war, as there were no wires to snap or re-lay. Hence, nearly half a century later, the only places still using wiring were those who were paranoid about security.

Like SuryaTech.

He dialed his own office telephone number. The term ‘telephone’ is loosely used; it was his remote access unit, which would instantly contact his infolink, wherever he was within the premises of Surya Tech. The screen confirmed that a connection was established, before he disconnected. That was all that was required. It was a signal sent to his office terminal, which would now launch a distributed attack on the project file server. To kill time, Prakash had once written a stealth program that would execute instructions passed to it whenever the processor on a system was idle. He had swiftly propagated this little program across his office, so that now he had about fifty computers at his disposal, all working in tandem to break into the project server. Of course, there was the dirty work of clearing up the log files, he would attend to that first thing in the morning. Now for some well deserved sleep.