Howdy, all. I was going to make this one mammoth story, but I came to a natural stopping point, so I figured I'd break it into installments to get some feedback. Part 2 is in the hopper, and I hope I don't doom this story to no-sequel purgatory.
Anyway, the concept is obviously influenced by William Gibson and other cyberpunk sources--if you're a fan, here you go. If not, give it a try, eh?
Finally, the setup takes a while to get to the tickling bits, but I think it ought to be worth it. I figured a more robust background would add something. I suppose I'll see what other people think.
Okay, enough self-indulgence. Here's the story!
Room 103
Part 1
by
Kid Indy
Another shockwave rolled through the motor pool, and the roar of a gasoline explosion followed. Within the span of a second only the parts and tools and equipment fireproofed for such an occasion lacked the telling tongues of flame, and mechanics and guards dove and rolled and ran in a futile attempt to reach a nearby stream as their clothes and hair combusted. Every soldier in the area, training and instinct moving their muscles where their war-weary and shell-shocked souls could not, assumed fighting positions and prepared what weapons they had on hand for combat.
Officers and PMOS-BFI (Primary Military Operative Specialist-BattleField Information) troops subvocally activated their heads-up displays and began to download topographical specs on the base and the surrounding area, angry even as they wondered why satelite feeds hadn't alerted them to the enemy troop movements. Enlisted men just waited for something to move in the dense forest, hoping that whoever made the smoke trail that began in the fueling area and ended in the dense forest would move so that he could be the one to ace the bastard.
The rocket was still the only projectile to have come from the woods, and a BFI trained a targeting laser on the approximate point of origin and called in a mortar strike. His virtuport computer, receiving his brain's electrochemical signals and translating them into electronic code, responded shortly with an "ORDER CONFIRMED" on his field of vision. Then his brain stopped sending coherent signals as a bullet passed through it.
The outpost's Commanding Officer waited in agony for an explosion in the forest. Instead two explosions rocked his own ranks, one killing the CO instantly and another taking out three of the four BFI's behind the enlisted ranks. The remaining BFI's heads-up display froze its display for a second, only to replace his prior field of vision with a picture of a young Vietnamese woman in a bikini. He shook his head, forcing his eyes to look at what was left of the fueling station, and knew he was a dead man; the AgFront had hacked the satelite, and the remaining men and officers were alone in a world that held only death. He stood up, firing his sidearm wildly into the trees, and assault rifle fire cut him to pieces as AF guerillas advanced on Fueling Station 212-Delta on the Guatemalan front.
In Chicago, the girl from the picture sat up from her recliner. Her eyes were seeing the room instead of her optical cortex seeing the Central American cyber-battle, and she unplugged the high speed data cable from the port in her left temple. The disconnect noise still made the faintest tickling sensation on her eyelids, and she blinked and rubbed her eyes out of habit. She stood up from her chair and stretched her limbs, feeling the pull as her long legs and graceful arms assumed the routine of her post-hacking Tai Chi routine. She had airbrushed the virus image a bit, but not much: her passion for the anti-corporate cause was only slightly more powerful than her concern for physical fitness, and despite her singular skill in virtuahacking, her body was not a technician's but a dancer's.
She put light shoes on over her ever-present cotton socks and stepped out into the cold night to pursue a midnight snack. In Guatemala it was 11:30. In Chicago it was 10:30, and news of yet another guerilla attack on American forces would dominate the 11:00 news.
"It couldn't be coming from in-country. It was just coming too fast. There are only three high-speed hubs operational in that country, and every one of them is on an American base."
"Then who in the world is jacking up our intel? The U.S. Army doesn't just lose four bases to a bunch of monkeys if we know which way's up."
"Satelite feed is hard to track, General. Whoever's doing this is using commercial satelite signals to send and receive small packets in the region and military satelites to disrupt our transmissions, and whoever they are, they're coordinating almost seamlessly. I think we might be dealing with a virtu-hacker."
"A what?"
"Virtu-hacker. Someone plugged directly into the Internet through a virtuport.
No hands.
It's faster.
Of course, that would certainly rule out a local transmission--only big cities in developed countries have the infrastructure to support that kind of tech. But he could be linking to our satelites that way."
"I understand where the enemy isn't, Lieutenant. What I don't understand is how nobody has a clue where the enemy IS! How could Intel not even get a location on the gremlins that keep crippling my bases just when the bad guys show up without the firepower to take us in a straight fight?
Well, lieutenant?"
A smaller-framed man spoke up from behind the lieutenant. "I still think we should go to consultants, General."
"I don't do consultants, soldier, and you should know that the Rumsfeld era ended ten years ago."
"That might be, Sir, but our research shows that Ilium Cybersystems could probably locate and contain the electronic element of the insurgency. Japan used them to take down the Maoists in Korea, and there's no reason to think that these Central American anarchists are any more sophisticated than those groups."
"Took 'em a couple months to find those hackers, didn't it? And weren't they in Hong Kong?"
"Singapore, sir," the Lieutenant chimed in. "But they caught them when the best of the Japanese Intel services couldn't."
"They're going to cost, aren't they?"
"They are pricey, General, but no more so than losing more strategic outposts in this guerilla war would be."
The general's eyes scanned from the staff sergeant to the lieutenant. "Alright. I'll get on the phone with the Pentagon and see about these Iliad guys. I want those geeks bad."
The news anchor began to narrate in her still-acceptable midwestern accent. "Still the tool of the world's most advanced militaries and the luxury of the wealthy, the Virtual Reality Dataport, or virtuport in popular slang, stands as one of the most controversial developments in technology in recent years. The electronic device, implanted in an outpatient surgery adjacent to the cerebral cortex, uses electric signals to stimulate any and every part of the brain based on computerized codes. The effect is that a computer can relay information directly into the brain, bypassing and simulating senses, and the human brain can be trained to operate electronic devices independent of manual controls. The line between man and machine has all but disappeared."
The news broadcast shifted to pictures of engineers working, and a voiceover took control of the story: "American, Chinese, Japanese, and other advanced militaries worldwide are already fitting officers with this technology, turning each one into a more efficient fighting machine, one who in seconds can see whatever the satelites and each army's extensive electronic surveillance equipment can see. But others have jumped on as well. Surgeons have used the devices to bring extensive imaging data and the world's medical research directly into their brains. Airline pilots who once had to maneuver planes now become one with their jets. And trained diplomatic interpreters, combining the linguistic power of the human brain with computer-coded language software, can serve as go-betweens irrespective of their prior training; the virtuport lets a trained linguist's ear and a trained linguist's tongue harness nearly two thirds of the world's spoken languages."
The newscast's picture changed again, this time to a long shot of an art gallery. The voiceover continued: "But the purely aesthetic uses of this technology have proved more controversial. Religious and civic leaders worry about the potential for and dangers of full-brain pornography, and artistic traditionalists don't give any credence to "experience art" such as Phan Cong Son's." The camera cut to the face and shoulders of a beautiful woman, perhaps in her late twenties. Her long black hair fell over robed shoulders, and she emanated a quiet, confident look as she addressed the interviewer.
"No generation takes its own art seriously. Photography was a fad until people started theorizing about its artistic character, and Orson Welles had to come along before anyone considered cinema an art form. Some day, when university professors are writing books about Myers and Albrecht and Anjali, different art critics will be telling the viewing public that the next generation of technologically augmented art isn't art."
"Will they be theorizing about Phan as well?"
The young woman's flattered smile could have charmed the lens off the camera. "That's not for me to decide, is it?"
"As the price of this technology falls, look for a shift in popular culture that will rival the rise of cell phones in America and Europe. Back to you, Brian."
In General Williams's office, a thin man sat leaning forward in his seat. "You have our offer, General. Given what you know about the situation, we can apprehend the cybernetic infiltrators and produce operational intel on the Guatemalan resistance guaranteed. We'll need the operational budget you see in line 34, and the final bill is on line 38. If we don't deliver, we'll refund all of it."
"That's a tall gamble, ain't it?"
"It would be for less competent operatives. We've tracked the best in the world, and in the two cases in which the mark has escaped, you can see for yourself that we've been faithful to our guarantee." He handed another file across the desk.
General Williams took a look. Sure enough, the governments of Italy and South Korea had received multi-million-dollar refunds. "You Ilium boys seem like straight shooters. When can you start?"
"As soon as you wire the money, General."
"And all of this is off the records, right?"
"The only complaint you'll receive is that the toilet bowl cleaner the military buys from Ilium is so expensive. The people will assume that some bureaucrat is lining his pockets."
"They've been assuming that since those stories broke the first time, haven't they? Sometimes people make my job too easy."
"Yours and mine both, General."
Phan Cong Son (her friends just called her Son, often rhyming it with gone) picked up pieces of fruit and put them in a bag at a local Buddhist grocer. On the breezy spring day people exchanged money and vegetables and gossip and complaints about the governor as the chill began to leave the morning air. Son enjoyed the opportunity to venture out without a heavy coat, the freezing lake air finally giving the people some respite. Her routine, organic shopping before her day's artistic work began, refreshed her busy brain from another night's work.
A Chinese man does not stand out in certain parts of town, and the one who had been watching Son for two weeks was just as invisible as ever as he followed her, at a distance, on her daily routine. Today was different, though, and he kept one eye on the artist (Phan Cong Son, 26 years old, programmer/artist, covertly a hacker for the Agricultural Front) as he entered a terse, coded text message into a device in his pocket. Xiang (the invisible man) followed her more closely than usual as she walked up the stairs to her studio apartment. He kept one flight's distance between her and himself until she reached her floor. As she began her walk down to the fourth door on the right (Xiang knew she would be going there), he stepped into the hallway behind her.
Son turned, her muscles tensing as she saw the stranger behind her. "Who are you? Are you lost?"
Xiang, playing the helpless immigrant, bowed awkwardly and took on an artificial accent (his English normally had an Oxford accent). "You know where Wrigley?"
Son's guard dropped a bit; this must be a tourist. "You're in the wrong part of town, sir. Here, let me call you a cab." She turned her back on him and reached for her key-card. Xiang stood absolutely still as she swiped the black strip, but when she took her first step, his left foot planted and his shoulders leaned forward as he broke into a sprint behind her.
Son didn't even think about his sudden run; she was more concerned about the three gigantic men, in flak jackets and toting large automatic pistols, waiting in her tiny apartment. As her feet (in mule shoes and cotton socks) prepared to turn and run, two strong hands shoved her from behind, upsetting her balance and sending her into the waiting arms of the middle man. As she twisted to attempt to fight, two electric shocks rocked her small body, and her legs would not listen to her panicked brain. She crumpled into the arms of one of the operatives, and Xiang, now speaking rapid accented English, began to give orders.
"Bag her up and call the driver. Go! Go! Go!"
With seamless efficiency, two of the three mercenaries wrapped her in a blanket, and the third spoke into a cellular walkie talkie, calling for an escape van. Xiang moved quickly, planting a note on the apartment's small desk and running a utility on Son's portable computer, letting her primary contacts know that she would be out of town on a family emergency for a week or so and that she'd prefer that they email rather than call. Within two minutes the four men and their captive, bound and gagged, were making their way down the stairs as an unmarked white van pulled up to the curb. As an apathetic city watched them load a bundle that could have been a rug as easily as a person, Phan Cong Son disappeared down the crowded streets of Chicago.
The news reporter began with the night's top story, another ambush in Guatemala: "Military officials still maintain that the Guatemalan anarchist group Agricultural Front is a threat that will soon be contained, but the public is losing confidence, as eight ambushes have taken the lives of over one hundred soldiers' lives in the last month alone. In the studio we have General Landry Williams, commander of the Central American divisions. General Williams, thank you for speaking with us tonight."
"Thank you, Brian."
"The United States Army is still arguably the most technologically advanced fighting force in the world and certainly more than a match for the anarchist guerillas. All that said, why have the outposts been so vulnerable to attack in the last month?"
The general, who had just been briefed by his Ilium liason, held his poker face. "The enemy has been interfering with our communications apparatus. Our best men are working on that problem, and the American people can be confident that we will destroy the enemy."
"How bad would the situation have to get before the army withdrew from Guatemala entirely?"
"We evaluate that every day and sometimes every hour, Brian. We learned our lessons in the last fifty years: if an insurgent force can't be beaten, our top officials and officer corps are almost all familiar, first hand, with what that looks like. As it stands right now, this looks more like a Korean-Japanese War than a Vietnam."
"Why should the American people believe that? Hasn't the military had a tendency not to admit such things until it's too late?"
"Well, Brian, I don't expect the people to believe me. But I do expect them to keep up with the situation. I think they'll see before too long that although our enemy has been dangerous, we've been homing in on them from the beginning."
"Thank you, General Williams."
"Thank you."
Rough hands picked up Son, and she could hear a helicopter's rotor spinning. She was out of the blanket, but a thick blindfold covered her eyes, and metal cuffs kept her hands at bay. The hands, six of them that she could count, hoisted her onto the chopper, and a door shut behind her, muffling the loud sound. She could feel the aircraft lift off, and she was blind and airborne. Time passed, how much she wasn't sure, but when they landed, the door's opening let in midday heat. The men hoisted her to her feet and off the helicopter, and they hustled her along into a building. She gradually lost track of the twists and turns, but she knew when they had begun to ride downward on an elevator. She had a feeling these men knew, and she didn't bother to speak a word as they moved her along.
After she walked through another door and heard glass doors sliding shut behind her, she heard a man's voice. "Remove her blindfold, gentlemen." The cloth came off, and Son's eyes adjusted to the bright fluorescent light in the room as they focused in on a white man in a black suit, the third man in the room. (Xiang and the third goon were not present.) He was a tall blond man, probably in his late thirties, and his demeanor revealed neither malice nor victory.
"Miss Phan, you likely know that we're not here for the sake of art. We're off the record here in every way you could imagine, and as far as your closest contacts are concerned, you're in Hanoi, visiting a sick aunt. We have your cell phone, and nobody will be answering it until we say so. Do you understand so far?"
Son was silent as she tried to maintain a calm face for her captor.
"We've begun to work on your portable computer, checking its Internet history, and I have a hunch we'll find what we're looking for soon." Son's eyes narrowed; her computer always erased communications with the Front, but she knew they could try to contact her at any time.
The man's face took on a sly half-grin. "So while we're looking, why don't you change into something more comfortable for the wait?" He beckoned for an assistant to enter through a door behind him, and a short black woman came through the door holding a bikini swimsuit, modeled after the one in Son's virus-picture. Son's face flinched, betraying recognition. "I'll give you three minutes. What you haven't finished yourself, my men here will finish for you."
"Please, sir, I do try to keep my modesty."
"Modesty's gone, Miss Phan. With those robes on, you might be hiding something. The swimsuit based on your own work is just partially a joke on the part of our intel. Really, we just want to be sure you're not hiding weapons in there. Now do be a good girl and change before I get back, alright?" He turned and left the room, his assistant just behind him.
Son looked at the two remaining men, each taller than six feet and stocky with muscle, and realized she had no choice. She slipped out of her robe and underclothes, replacing them quickly with the swimsuit but leaving her socks on. The goons leered at her slender body but didn't touch her. Within minutes, just as he promised, the blond man returned to the room.
"Miss Phan, it's clear that you've taken care with your computer. How does the Agricultural Front's leadership contact you to coordinate the strikes?"
"I've only heard of the Agricultural Front on the news, Mister..."
"Johnson. Just call me Johnson. I don't believe you, Miss Phan, and I'm going to get the truth. We're going to keep searching your computer, and one of our intel men will be in shortly to see you. Gentleman, get her ready for her first session." He left the room, and the two guards sprang into action. They opened a closet door that took up a hefty chunk of the wall and pulled out what looked like a very sleek dentist's chair. On a cursory scan Son could see that the arm rests and the back sections and the leg rests all had motorized actuators; the chair could move her into all kinds of positions. The armrests and the footrest also sported padded cuffs, and she knew (thought, really, but she thought she knew) that this "questioning" was going to hurt. No matter; she had been willing to bear risk in the fight against the corporations and their American military enforcers; today she might have to die for the cause.
The guards did not have to force Son into the cuffs; she knew they had advanced non-lethal stun guns and that fighting would do no good. They secured her hands and feet, and they retired to a corner as the Chinese man from her apartment building came in through the door. Her face scowled as she realized her earlier complacency.
"So do I get to find out your name, now that you brought me wherever you brought me?"
"Just call me Xiang. And don't bother telling me any lies, because they haven't even told me the question."
"What?"
"Mr. Johnson will be back in shortly to ask you further questions. I have you for fifteen minutes, irrespective of when you want me to quit, so if I were you, I'd just enjoy the ride."
"I'll enjoy seeing you in hell, Xiang."
"Not today, Miss Phan. Not today. You're to be kept alive today." He bent down to pick up a control box, and Son could see that he had a virtuport underneath his shaggy hair. As he manipulated buttons and levers, the chair jumped to life, pulling Son's bent arms up and to the sides so that her elbows pointed out and her hands up. At the same time, pads to bear her weight extended to meet the bottoms of her upper arms, her feet slid smoothly backwards, and a pad pushed against her lower back. Though she was in no pain, her back was arched, and her bare belly protruded towards Xiang. Her smooth dancer's body curved in a graceful angle towards Xiang, and she knew that some kind of torture was coming soon. She closed her eyes and began to breathe more slowly.
"No harm will come to you, Miss Phan. Not today anyway. Just remember the question that my colleague asked you, and remember that if you refuse another question, I get half an hour." With that he reached towards Son's belly and began to dance his fingers over her abdominal muscles. Son, expecting something painful, jumped at the light touches and tried to brace against the pads, to no avail.
She let out a bit of a squeal and demanded, "What are you doing? Just get on with it!"
Xiang stopped for a moment. "Why, Miss Phan! This is 'it'! As I told you, the company has been quite clear that you're not to be harmed at this stage. That's why they sent me. Now relax and enjoy--we have fourteen minutes left." His fingers returned to the lines that charted the border between her abdomen and her hip bones, and Son clenched her teeth and shut her eyes tight, unable to move away from the tickling fingers and unwilling to let her voice react to the awful sensations that raced from her abdomen through her nervous system. As he continued, his fingers flicking from her hips to the bottoms of her ribs to her smooth sides to the soft, firm yet pliable fields of her belly, her upper body began to squirm, and a stifled moan threatened to emerge from her throat. Her mouth and eyes were still shut, but a poke under the ribs was electric, and a swipe of fingers across belly made her diaphragm want to heave, and a little pinch on the hip was too much. In spite of herself, Son began to laugh out loud, trying to sound pleading or assertive or something other than ticklish as she told Xiang "No" and to "Stop" but losing her eloquence and control over her own voice as his fingers skittered and prodded and rubbed and lightly scratched.
She thought that she could have taken pain, but this was something different: this Chinese man was not only confining and touching her but humiliating her as well; there was no heroic struggle against oppression for a little girl laughing desparately because she had become so ticklish. His hands played and played, and she gasped and laughed, squealing in spite of herself when he took a particularly ticklish spot by surprise. Her head rocked back, shook side to side, hung forward, all the while unable to tell her sensitive body to stop reacting to this wicked man's touch. Sometimes her voice would bubble, sometimes sustain a scream through four or five seconds of wild, tickling sensations. Somewhere in her memory she knew that revolutionary lives were at stake, but that part of her brain had to wait its turn as sensations and wriggling reactions dominated her consciousness.
Xiang stopped and looked at his watch. "Oh good. Eight minutes to go."
"Eight minutes? I thought you only had fifteen!"
"I do, Miss Phan. Can you imagine what an hour of that would be like?" A look of despair, too quick for the young woman to mask it, answered his question. "Don't bother acting tough, Miss Phan. You really have no chance here. Before Ilium hired me, I was an investigator in Beijing. Wealthy businessmen paid me good money to follow their trophy wives when they went astray. That's why I had no trouble tracking you once we traced the signal to Chicago. And when I'd caught them, the same men paid me good money to break their spirits. With some silk rope, some oil, and a few hours, I could get any of them to put eternal curses on their paramours. And with the threat of another of my visits hanging over them, they'd be the perfect Chinese mistresses."
Xiang's speech had given Son some time to regain her defiant composure. "I'm not some cheap whore, you bastard."
"Ah, but you fear the same thing: control. These women think they're using their old, ugly husbands for their money. They think they're calling the shots. But when I get ahold of them, as you've seen, they've got no chance. They've got no freedom. They laugh because I want them to, and as you'll see shortly, they beg not because they think they can sway me but because I become as a god to them. You see, Miss Phan, women who think they're in control can't withstand a torture that bends desire."
Son's lip quivered as she tried to stare her resistance through Xiang. She had felt the beginnings of those desires, but she swore to herself, not even half believing, that this man could make her betray her cause and her friends.
"Of course, with those women, I had only my skills and my fingers, and I broke them. You're something special, Miss Phan. With you I get a rare chance to hone my technique with some more refined tools." Son instinctively recoiled. Xiang once again used the chair control, this time to swing her legs out in front of her and to straighten her back. She now sat upright, her arms still bent and pointing up. She heard an electronic cord spooling from a spring-mounted reel, and she saw a male connector in Xiang's hand. "You see, Miss Phan, most trophy wives don't have virtuports."
Now Son began to thrash, her head shaking violently side to side as her arms and legs strained in vain against her restraints. Xiang caught her chin between thrashes, holding her head in an iron grip for a moment, and inserted the plug into her virtuport. Now he had direct access to her brain, and fear began to freeze Son. He pulled out another cable and plugged it into his own temple. A look of satisfaction crossed his face as the chair's computer brought his brain online.
"Now, Miss Phan, the device to which we're connected is unilateral in each function, as you might guess. I can do things to you that you can't reciprocate, and I can see things about you that are invisible when you look at me. For instance, I've just short-circuited the connection between your eyes and the skin under your arms. So every time I touch you there, my touch will take you as if by surprise. Let me show you." He reached out with one hand and fluttered his smooth fingertips in her armpit, and the sensation was unbearable. Son screamed and strained downward on the pad under her elbow. He kept up the tickling, and the intensity was beyond what before she could have imagined. His unaugmented tickling, though done with more care and expertise, was a candle's flame to the inferno that his casual fingers were lighting under her arm. She squealed and pealed and reeled in her chair for what seemed an eternity, until he stopped.
"That was thirty seconds of virtuport-augmented tickling, Miss Phan. You might want to consider answering the good man's question. But as I see it, I still have two minutes left, so I'm going to show you what awaits a truly naughty little girl." With some more flicks of the chair control, Son's arms lowered, and she leaned back, almost prone. Xiang reached into a cabinet in the base of the chair and produced a small vial of oil. "I always like to treat sweet feet with a bit of peppermint--that way if I slip and have a taste, I get rewarded with touch and taste." He began to peel away the ankle sock from Son's left foot.
As he slowly drew it over her heel, Son became frantic. "Don't take off my socks! I can't stand people touching my feet!"
"What happened to the hardened revolutionary who came in here, Miss Phan?" He continued to roll it down her instep towards her toes. "Certainly a bit of sensual contact doesn't frighten an artist like Phan Cong Son!"
"Please, I'll tell them how the Front contacts me! Just leave my feet alone!"
"I have no idea what you're talking about, Miss Phan. Now do relax and be a dear." He triumphantly flicked the sock away from her toes and onto the floor. "Now you're going to see what kinds of things a virtuport can do to an experience like this. You're about to feel a tingling." No sooner had he said it, and even as he rubbed the warm oil onto the surfaces of her heel and instep and sole and toes, all of her muscles began to hum with energy. "You ought to feel it concentrating in your most erogenous areas." Son closed her eyes and bit her lip as his words became flesh. "And now, every ticklish sensation that you experience is going to be amplified as earlier, plus hardwired into your brain's erotic pleasure centers."
"No, please, just stop, PLEASE!"
He left her tingling foot to whisper in her ear: "Do you not see the implications, Miss Phan? With that virtuport, you became the best computer hacker in the world. And with that virtuport, you've just become the most ticklish woman in the world. And with mine, I've become the best tickler. That lovely, warm, minty foot of yours has become a tormented sea of pleasure, and one finger--" He stood up and began to walk back towards her feet, holding his right index finger aloft. "One finger will loose the fury of the deep. One finger will take your whole body places even your delicious artist's mind hasn't been able to imagine."
Son's face twisted into a tragic mask. Xiang's finger slowly rotated as he brought his gesturing hand down towards her sole. "One finger will bend your soul, Miss Phan." With a wicked grin he faced his palm downward and laid his fingertip against the ball of her foot. And with the same grin he brought it down in a triumphant stroke.
Son's world exploded. She shrieked like a college girl caught round the ribs unawares. Her whole body writhed in the agonizing ecstasy of ticklish, sexual, world-consuming pleasure. Xiang had taken a step away from her, but her body twisted, at once begging for another killing stroke and trying to run from that awful finger.
The door opened, and Son returned to an upright sitting position.
Johnson came through the door, and Xiang unplugged himself and retreated into a corner.
Son's words could not come out fast enough. "They contact me! They send a message through the bios get to it through the startup sequence only send messages several hours apart delete themselves in a few minutes coded encrypted let me know when and where to be!"
Johnson's palm greeted her flood of words. "We already know that; they sent a transmission while we were in the other room." He held up a printout of an encoded message. "Now we need you to tell us what this message means."
Anyway, the concept is obviously influenced by William Gibson and other cyberpunk sources--if you're a fan, here you go. If not, give it a try, eh?
Finally, the setup takes a while to get to the tickling bits, but I think it ought to be worth it. I figured a more robust background would add something. I suppose I'll see what other people think.
Okay, enough self-indulgence. Here's the story!
Room 103
Part 1
by
Kid Indy
Another shockwave rolled through the motor pool, and the roar of a gasoline explosion followed. Within the span of a second only the parts and tools and equipment fireproofed for such an occasion lacked the telling tongues of flame, and mechanics and guards dove and rolled and ran in a futile attempt to reach a nearby stream as their clothes and hair combusted. Every soldier in the area, training and instinct moving their muscles where their war-weary and shell-shocked souls could not, assumed fighting positions and prepared what weapons they had on hand for combat.
Officers and PMOS-BFI (Primary Military Operative Specialist-BattleField Information) troops subvocally activated their heads-up displays and began to download topographical specs on the base and the surrounding area, angry even as they wondered why satelite feeds hadn't alerted them to the enemy troop movements. Enlisted men just waited for something to move in the dense forest, hoping that whoever made the smoke trail that began in the fueling area and ended in the dense forest would move so that he could be the one to ace the bastard.
The rocket was still the only projectile to have come from the woods, and a BFI trained a targeting laser on the approximate point of origin and called in a mortar strike. His virtuport computer, receiving his brain's electrochemical signals and translating them into electronic code, responded shortly with an "ORDER CONFIRMED" on his field of vision. Then his brain stopped sending coherent signals as a bullet passed through it.
The outpost's Commanding Officer waited in agony for an explosion in the forest. Instead two explosions rocked his own ranks, one killing the CO instantly and another taking out three of the four BFI's behind the enlisted ranks. The remaining BFI's heads-up display froze its display for a second, only to replace his prior field of vision with a picture of a young Vietnamese woman in a bikini. He shook his head, forcing his eyes to look at what was left of the fueling station, and knew he was a dead man; the AgFront had hacked the satelite, and the remaining men and officers were alone in a world that held only death. He stood up, firing his sidearm wildly into the trees, and assault rifle fire cut him to pieces as AF guerillas advanced on Fueling Station 212-Delta on the Guatemalan front.
In Chicago, the girl from the picture sat up from her recliner. Her eyes were seeing the room instead of her optical cortex seeing the Central American cyber-battle, and she unplugged the high speed data cable from the port in her left temple. The disconnect noise still made the faintest tickling sensation on her eyelids, and she blinked and rubbed her eyes out of habit. She stood up from her chair and stretched her limbs, feeling the pull as her long legs and graceful arms assumed the routine of her post-hacking Tai Chi routine. She had airbrushed the virus image a bit, but not much: her passion for the anti-corporate cause was only slightly more powerful than her concern for physical fitness, and despite her singular skill in virtuahacking, her body was not a technician's but a dancer's.
She put light shoes on over her ever-present cotton socks and stepped out into the cold night to pursue a midnight snack. In Guatemala it was 11:30. In Chicago it was 10:30, and news of yet another guerilla attack on American forces would dominate the 11:00 news.
"It couldn't be coming from in-country. It was just coming too fast. There are only three high-speed hubs operational in that country, and every one of them is on an American base."
"Then who in the world is jacking up our intel? The U.S. Army doesn't just lose four bases to a bunch of monkeys if we know which way's up."
"Satelite feed is hard to track, General. Whoever's doing this is using commercial satelite signals to send and receive small packets in the region and military satelites to disrupt our transmissions, and whoever they are, they're coordinating almost seamlessly. I think we might be dealing with a virtu-hacker."
"A what?"
"Virtu-hacker. Someone plugged directly into the Internet through a virtuport.
No hands.
It's faster.
Of course, that would certainly rule out a local transmission--only big cities in developed countries have the infrastructure to support that kind of tech. But he could be linking to our satelites that way."
"I understand where the enemy isn't, Lieutenant. What I don't understand is how nobody has a clue where the enemy IS! How could Intel not even get a location on the gremlins that keep crippling my bases just when the bad guys show up without the firepower to take us in a straight fight?
Well, lieutenant?"
A smaller-framed man spoke up from behind the lieutenant. "I still think we should go to consultants, General."
"I don't do consultants, soldier, and you should know that the Rumsfeld era ended ten years ago."
"That might be, Sir, but our research shows that Ilium Cybersystems could probably locate and contain the electronic element of the insurgency. Japan used them to take down the Maoists in Korea, and there's no reason to think that these Central American anarchists are any more sophisticated than those groups."
"Took 'em a couple months to find those hackers, didn't it? And weren't they in Hong Kong?"
"Singapore, sir," the Lieutenant chimed in. "But they caught them when the best of the Japanese Intel services couldn't."
"They're going to cost, aren't they?"
"They are pricey, General, but no more so than losing more strategic outposts in this guerilla war would be."
The general's eyes scanned from the staff sergeant to the lieutenant. "Alright. I'll get on the phone with the Pentagon and see about these Iliad guys. I want those geeks bad."
The news anchor began to narrate in her still-acceptable midwestern accent. "Still the tool of the world's most advanced militaries and the luxury of the wealthy, the Virtual Reality Dataport, or virtuport in popular slang, stands as one of the most controversial developments in technology in recent years. The electronic device, implanted in an outpatient surgery adjacent to the cerebral cortex, uses electric signals to stimulate any and every part of the brain based on computerized codes. The effect is that a computer can relay information directly into the brain, bypassing and simulating senses, and the human brain can be trained to operate electronic devices independent of manual controls. The line between man and machine has all but disappeared."
The news broadcast shifted to pictures of engineers working, and a voiceover took control of the story: "American, Chinese, Japanese, and other advanced militaries worldwide are already fitting officers with this technology, turning each one into a more efficient fighting machine, one who in seconds can see whatever the satelites and each army's extensive electronic surveillance equipment can see. But others have jumped on as well. Surgeons have used the devices to bring extensive imaging data and the world's medical research directly into their brains. Airline pilots who once had to maneuver planes now become one with their jets. And trained diplomatic interpreters, combining the linguistic power of the human brain with computer-coded language software, can serve as go-betweens irrespective of their prior training; the virtuport lets a trained linguist's ear and a trained linguist's tongue harness nearly two thirds of the world's spoken languages."
The newscast's picture changed again, this time to a long shot of an art gallery. The voiceover continued: "But the purely aesthetic uses of this technology have proved more controversial. Religious and civic leaders worry about the potential for and dangers of full-brain pornography, and artistic traditionalists don't give any credence to "experience art" such as Phan Cong Son's." The camera cut to the face and shoulders of a beautiful woman, perhaps in her late twenties. Her long black hair fell over robed shoulders, and she emanated a quiet, confident look as she addressed the interviewer.
"No generation takes its own art seriously. Photography was a fad until people started theorizing about its artistic character, and Orson Welles had to come along before anyone considered cinema an art form. Some day, when university professors are writing books about Myers and Albrecht and Anjali, different art critics will be telling the viewing public that the next generation of technologically augmented art isn't art."
"Will they be theorizing about Phan as well?"
The young woman's flattered smile could have charmed the lens off the camera. "That's not for me to decide, is it?"
"As the price of this technology falls, look for a shift in popular culture that will rival the rise of cell phones in America and Europe. Back to you, Brian."
In General Williams's office, a thin man sat leaning forward in his seat. "You have our offer, General. Given what you know about the situation, we can apprehend the cybernetic infiltrators and produce operational intel on the Guatemalan resistance guaranteed. We'll need the operational budget you see in line 34, and the final bill is on line 38. If we don't deliver, we'll refund all of it."
"That's a tall gamble, ain't it?"
"It would be for less competent operatives. We've tracked the best in the world, and in the two cases in which the mark has escaped, you can see for yourself that we've been faithful to our guarantee." He handed another file across the desk.
General Williams took a look. Sure enough, the governments of Italy and South Korea had received multi-million-dollar refunds. "You Ilium boys seem like straight shooters. When can you start?"
"As soon as you wire the money, General."
"And all of this is off the records, right?"
"The only complaint you'll receive is that the toilet bowl cleaner the military buys from Ilium is so expensive. The people will assume that some bureaucrat is lining his pockets."
"They've been assuming that since those stories broke the first time, haven't they? Sometimes people make my job too easy."
"Yours and mine both, General."
Phan Cong Son (her friends just called her Son, often rhyming it with gone) picked up pieces of fruit and put them in a bag at a local Buddhist grocer. On the breezy spring day people exchanged money and vegetables and gossip and complaints about the governor as the chill began to leave the morning air. Son enjoyed the opportunity to venture out without a heavy coat, the freezing lake air finally giving the people some respite. Her routine, organic shopping before her day's artistic work began, refreshed her busy brain from another night's work.
A Chinese man does not stand out in certain parts of town, and the one who had been watching Son for two weeks was just as invisible as ever as he followed her, at a distance, on her daily routine. Today was different, though, and he kept one eye on the artist (Phan Cong Son, 26 years old, programmer/artist, covertly a hacker for the Agricultural Front) as he entered a terse, coded text message into a device in his pocket. Xiang (the invisible man) followed her more closely than usual as she walked up the stairs to her studio apartment. He kept one flight's distance between her and himself until she reached her floor. As she began her walk down to the fourth door on the right (Xiang knew she would be going there), he stepped into the hallway behind her.
Son turned, her muscles tensing as she saw the stranger behind her. "Who are you? Are you lost?"
Xiang, playing the helpless immigrant, bowed awkwardly and took on an artificial accent (his English normally had an Oxford accent). "You know where Wrigley?"
Son's guard dropped a bit; this must be a tourist. "You're in the wrong part of town, sir. Here, let me call you a cab." She turned her back on him and reached for her key-card. Xiang stood absolutely still as she swiped the black strip, but when she took her first step, his left foot planted and his shoulders leaned forward as he broke into a sprint behind her.
Son didn't even think about his sudden run; she was more concerned about the three gigantic men, in flak jackets and toting large automatic pistols, waiting in her tiny apartment. As her feet (in mule shoes and cotton socks) prepared to turn and run, two strong hands shoved her from behind, upsetting her balance and sending her into the waiting arms of the middle man. As she twisted to attempt to fight, two electric shocks rocked her small body, and her legs would not listen to her panicked brain. She crumpled into the arms of one of the operatives, and Xiang, now speaking rapid accented English, began to give orders.
"Bag her up and call the driver. Go! Go! Go!"
With seamless efficiency, two of the three mercenaries wrapped her in a blanket, and the third spoke into a cellular walkie talkie, calling for an escape van. Xiang moved quickly, planting a note on the apartment's small desk and running a utility on Son's portable computer, letting her primary contacts know that she would be out of town on a family emergency for a week or so and that she'd prefer that they email rather than call. Within two minutes the four men and their captive, bound and gagged, were making their way down the stairs as an unmarked white van pulled up to the curb. As an apathetic city watched them load a bundle that could have been a rug as easily as a person, Phan Cong Son disappeared down the crowded streets of Chicago.
The news reporter began with the night's top story, another ambush in Guatemala: "Military officials still maintain that the Guatemalan anarchist group Agricultural Front is a threat that will soon be contained, but the public is losing confidence, as eight ambushes have taken the lives of over one hundred soldiers' lives in the last month alone. In the studio we have General Landry Williams, commander of the Central American divisions. General Williams, thank you for speaking with us tonight."
"Thank you, Brian."
"The United States Army is still arguably the most technologically advanced fighting force in the world and certainly more than a match for the anarchist guerillas. All that said, why have the outposts been so vulnerable to attack in the last month?"
The general, who had just been briefed by his Ilium liason, held his poker face. "The enemy has been interfering with our communications apparatus. Our best men are working on that problem, and the American people can be confident that we will destroy the enemy."
"How bad would the situation have to get before the army withdrew from Guatemala entirely?"
"We evaluate that every day and sometimes every hour, Brian. We learned our lessons in the last fifty years: if an insurgent force can't be beaten, our top officials and officer corps are almost all familiar, first hand, with what that looks like. As it stands right now, this looks more like a Korean-Japanese War than a Vietnam."
"Why should the American people believe that? Hasn't the military had a tendency not to admit such things until it's too late?"
"Well, Brian, I don't expect the people to believe me. But I do expect them to keep up with the situation. I think they'll see before too long that although our enemy has been dangerous, we've been homing in on them from the beginning."
"Thank you, General Williams."
"Thank you."
Rough hands picked up Son, and she could hear a helicopter's rotor spinning. She was out of the blanket, but a thick blindfold covered her eyes, and metal cuffs kept her hands at bay. The hands, six of them that she could count, hoisted her onto the chopper, and a door shut behind her, muffling the loud sound. She could feel the aircraft lift off, and she was blind and airborne. Time passed, how much she wasn't sure, but when they landed, the door's opening let in midday heat. The men hoisted her to her feet and off the helicopter, and they hustled her along into a building. She gradually lost track of the twists and turns, but she knew when they had begun to ride downward on an elevator. She had a feeling these men knew, and she didn't bother to speak a word as they moved her along.
After she walked through another door and heard glass doors sliding shut behind her, she heard a man's voice. "Remove her blindfold, gentlemen." The cloth came off, and Son's eyes adjusted to the bright fluorescent light in the room as they focused in on a white man in a black suit, the third man in the room. (Xiang and the third goon were not present.) He was a tall blond man, probably in his late thirties, and his demeanor revealed neither malice nor victory.
"Miss Phan, you likely know that we're not here for the sake of art. We're off the record here in every way you could imagine, and as far as your closest contacts are concerned, you're in Hanoi, visiting a sick aunt. We have your cell phone, and nobody will be answering it until we say so. Do you understand so far?"
Son was silent as she tried to maintain a calm face for her captor.
"We've begun to work on your portable computer, checking its Internet history, and I have a hunch we'll find what we're looking for soon." Son's eyes narrowed; her computer always erased communications with the Front, but she knew they could try to contact her at any time.
The man's face took on a sly half-grin. "So while we're looking, why don't you change into something more comfortable for the wait?" He beckoned for an assistant to enter through a door behind him, and a short black woman came through the door holding a bikini swimsuit, modeled after the one in Son's virus-picture. Son's face flinched, betraying recognition. "I'll give you three minutes. What you haven't finished yourself, my men here will finish for you."
"Please, sir, I do try to keep my modesty."
"Modesty's gone, Miss Phan. With those robes on, you might be hiding something. The swimsuit based on your own work is just partially a joke on the part of our intel. Really, we just want to be sure you're not hiding weapons in there. Now do be a good girl and change before I get back, alright?" He turned and left the room, his assistant just behind him.
Son looked at the two remaining men, each taller than six feet and stocky with muscle, and realized she had no choice. She slipped out of her robe and underclothes, replacing them quickly with the swimsuit but leaving her socks on. The goons leered at her slender body but didn't touch her. Within minutes, just as he promised, the blond man returned to the room.
"Miss Phan, it's clear that you've taken care with your computer. How does the Agricultural Front's leadership contact you to coordinate the strikes?"
"I've only heard of the Agricultural Front on the news, Mister..."
"Johnson. Just call me Johnson. I don't believe you, Miss Phan, and I'm going to get the truth. We're going to keep searching your computer, and one of our intel men will be in shortly to see you. Gentleman, get her ready for her first session." He left the room, and the two guards sprang into action. They opened a closet door that took up a hefty chunk of the wall and pulled out what looked like a very sleek dentist's chair. On a cursory scan Son could see that the arm rests and the back sections and the leg rests all had motorized actuators; the chair could move her into all kinds of positions. The armrests and the footrest also sported padded cuffs, and she knew (thought, really, but she thought she knew) that this "questioning" was going to hurt. No matter; she had been willing to bear risk in the fight against the corporations and their American military enforcers; today she might have to die for the cause.
The guards did not have to force Son into the cuffs; she knew they had advanced non-lethal stun guns and that fighting would do no good. They secured her hands and feet, and they retired to a corner as the Chinese man from her apartment building came in through the door. Her face scowled as she realized her earlier complacency.
"So do I get to find out your name, now that you brought me wherever you brought me?"
"Just call me Xiang. And don't bother telling me any lies, because they haven't even told me the question."
"What?"
"Mr. Johnson will be back in shortly to ask you further questions. I have you for fifteen minutes, irrespective of when you want me to quit, so if I were you, I'd just enjoy the ride."
"I'll enjoy seeing you in hell, Xiang."
"Not today, Miss Phan. Not today. You're to be kept alive today." He bent down to pick up a control box, and Son could see that he had a virtuport underneath his shaggy hair. As he manipulated buttons and levers, the chair jumped to life, pulling Son's bent arms up and to the sides so that her elbows pointed out and her hands up. At the same time, pads to bear her weight extended to meet the bottoms of her upper arms, her feet slid smoothly backwards, and a pad pushed against her lower back. Though she was in no pain, her back was arched, and her bare belly protruded towards Xiang. Her smooth dancer's body curved in a graceful angle towards Xiang, and she knew that some kind of torture was coming soon. She closed her eyes and began to breathe more slowly.
"No harm will come to you, Miss Phan. Not today anyway. Just remember the question that my colleague asked you, and remember that if you refuse another question, I get half an hour." With that he reached towards Son's belly and began to dance his fingers over her abdominal muscles. Son, expecting something painful, jumped at the light touches and tried to brace against the pads, to no avail.
She let out a bit of a squeal and demanded, "What are you doing? Just get on with it!"
Xiang stopped for a moment. "Why, Miss Phan! This is 'it'! As I told you, the company has been quite clear that you're not to be harmed at this stage. That's why they sent me. Now relax and enjoy--we have fourteen minutes left." His fingers returned to the lines that charted the border between her abdomen and her hip bones, and Son clenched her teeth and shut her eyes tight, unable to move away from the tickling fingers and unwilling to let her voice react to the awful sensations that raced from her abdomen through her nervous system. As he continued, his fingers flicking from her hips to the bottoms of her ribs to her smooth sides to the soft, firm yet pliable fields of her belly, her upper body began to squirm, and a stifled moan threatened to emerge from her throat. Her mouth and eyes were still shut, but a poke under the ribs was electric, and a swipe of fingers across belly made her diaphragm want to heave, and a little pinch on the hip was too much. In spite of herself, Son began to laugh out loud, trying to sound pleading or assertive or something other than ticklish as she told Xiang "No" and to "Stop" but losing her eloquence and control over her own voice as his fingers skittered and prodded and rubbed and lightly scratched.
She thought that she could have taken pain, but this was something different: this Chinese man was not only confining and touching her but humiliating her as well; there was no heroic struggle against oppression for a little girl laughing desparately because she had become so ticklish. His hands played and played, and she gasped and laughed, squealing in spite of herself when he took a particularly ticklish spot by surprise. Her head rocked back, shook side to side, hung forward, all the while unable to tell her sensitive body to stop reacting to this wicked man's touch. Sometimes her voice would bubble, sometimes sustain a scream through four or five seconds of wild, tickling sensations. Somewhere in her memory she knew that revolutionary lives were at stake, but that part of her brain had to wait its turn as sensations and wriggling reactions dominated her consciousness.
Xiang stopped and looked at his watch. "Oh good. Eight minutes to go."
"Eight minutes? I thought you only had fifteen!"
"I do, Miss Phan. Can you imagine what an hour of that would be like?" A look of despair, too quick for the young woman to mask it, answered his question. "Don't bother acting tough, Miss Phan. You really have no chance here. Before Ilium hired me, I was an investigator in Beijing. Wealthy businessmen paid me good money to follow their trophy wives when they went astray. That's why I had no trouble tracking you once we traced the signal to Chicago. And when I'd caught them, the same men paid me good money to break their spirits. With some silk rope, some oil, and a few hours, I could get any of them to put eternal curses on their paramours. And with the threat of another of my visits hanging over them, they'd be the perfect Chinese mistresses."
Xiang's speech had given Son some time to regain her defiant composure. "I'm not some cheap whore, you bastard."
"Ah, but you fear the same thing: control. These women think they're using their old, ugly husbands for their money. They think they're calling the shots. But when I get ahold of them, as you've seen, they've got no chance. They've got no freedom. They laugh because I want them to, and as you'll see shortly, they beg not because they think they can sway me but because I become as a god to them. You see, Miss Phan, women who think they're in control can't withstand a torture that bends desire."
Son's lip quivered as she tried to stare her resistance through Xiang. She had felt the beginnings of those desires, but she swore to herself, not even half believing, that this man could make her betray her cause and her friends.
"Of course, with those women, I had only my skills and my fingers, and I broke them. You're something special, Miss Phan. With you I get a rare chance to hone my technique with some more refined tools." Son instinctively recoiled. Xiang once again used the chair control, this time to swing her legs out in front of her and to straighten her back. She now sat upright, her arms still bent and pointing up. She heard an electronic cord spooling from a spring-mounted reel, and she saw a male connector in Xiang's hand. "You see, Miss Phan, most trophy wives don't have virtuports."
Now Son began to thrash, her head shaking violently side to side as her arms and legs strained in vain against her restraints. Xiang caught her chin between thrashes, holding her head in an iron grip for a moment, and inserted the plug into her virtuport. Now he had direct access to her brain, and fear began to freeze Son. He pulled out another cable and plugged it into his own temple. A look of satisfaction crossed his face as the chair's computer brought his brain online.
"Now, Miss Phan, the device to which we're connected is unilateral in each function, as you might guess. I can do things to you that you can't reciprocate, and I can see things about you that are invisible when you look at me. For instance, I've just short-circuited the connection between your eyes and the skin under your arms. So every time I touch you there, my touch will take you as if by surprise. Let me show you." He reached out with one hand and fluttered his smooth fingertips in her armpit, and the sensation was unbearable. Son screamed and strained downward on the pad under her elbow. He kept up the tickling, and the intensity was beyond what before she could have imagined. His unaugmented tickling, though done with more care and expertise, was a candle's flame to the inferno that his casual fingers were lighting under her arm. She squealed and pealed and reeled in her chair for what seemed an eternity, until he stopped.
"That was thirty seconds of virtuport-augmented tickling, Miss Phan. You might want to consider answering the good man's question. But as I see it, I still have two minutes left, so I'm going to show you what awaits a truly naughty little girl." With some more flicks of the chair control, Son's arms lowered, and she leaned back, almost prone. Xiang reached into a cabinet in the base of the chair and produced a small vial of oil. "I always like to treat sweet feet with a bit of peppermint--that way if I slip and have a taste, I get rewarded with touch and taste." He began to peel away the ankle sock from Son's left foot.
As he slowly drew it over her heel, Son became frantic. "Don't take off my socks! I can't stand people touching my feet!"
"What happened to the hardened revolutionary who came in here, Miss Phan?" He continued to roll it down her instep towards her toes. "Certainly a bit of sensual contact doesn't frighten an artist like Phan Cong Son!"
"Please, I'll tell them how the Front contacts me! Just leave my feet alone!"
"I have no idea what you're talking about, Miss Phan. Now do relax and be a dear." He triumphantly flicked the sock away from her toes and onto the floor. "Now you're going to see what kinds of things a virtuport can do to an experience like this. You're about to feel a tingling." No sooner had he said it, and even as he rubbed the warm oil onto the surfaces of her heel and instep and sole and toes, all of her muscles began to hum with energy. "You ought to feel it concentrating in your most erogenous areas." Son closed her eyes and bit her lip as his words became flesh. "And now, every ticklish sensation that you experience is going to be amplified as earlier, plus hardwired into your brain's erotic pleasure centers."
"No, please, just stop, PLEASE!"
He left her tingling foot to whisper in her ear: "Do you not see the implications, Miss Phan? With that virtuport, you became the best computer hacker in the world. And with that virtuport, you've just become the most ticklish woman in the world. And with mine, I've become the best tickler. That lovely, warm, minty foot of yours has become a tormented sea of pleasure, and one finger--" He stood up and began to walk back towards her feet, holding his right index finger aloft. "One finger will loose the fury of the deep. One finger will take your whole body places even your delicious artist's mind hasn't been able to imagine."
Son's face twisted into a tragic mask. Xiang's finger slowly rotated as he brought his gesturing hand down towards her sole. "One finger will bend your soul, Miss Phan." With a wicked grin he faced his palm downward and laid his fingertip against the ball of her foot. And with the same grin he brought it down in a triumphant stroke.
Son's world exploded. She shrieked like a college girl caught round the ribs unawares. Her whole body writhed in the agonizing ecstasy of ticklish, sexual, world-consuming pleasure. Xiang had taken a step away from her, but her body twisted, at once begging for another killing stroke and trying to run from that awful finger.
The door opened, and Son returned to an upright sitting position.
Johnson came through the door, and Xiang unplugged himself and retreated into a corner.
Son's words could not come out fast enough. "They contact me! They send a message through the bios get to it through the startup sequence only send messages several hours apart delete themselves in a few minutes coded encrypted let me know when and where to be!"
Johnson's palm greeted her flood of words. "We already know that; they sent a transmission while we were in the other room." He held up a printout of an encoded message. "Now we need you to tell us what this message means."
Great job... "the Rumsfeld era ended ten years ago", hahaha!
