[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 15

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There were a few lithium ones as well, but the rest were sodium glass, dual carbon and aluminum titanate. I bookmarked the site. It felt nice to use a dedicated computer with a keyboard instead of my interface. The sense of physicality made me feel grounded, and secure.

This is just the beginning, I told myself. I’ll be in the apartment soon. I’ll have a roof over my head! Well, I technically do here since I’m inside the cafe, but the cubicle walls don’t even go all the way up to the ceiling.

I’ll have real food as well. My stomach growled, as if seconding that motion. I browsed the cafe’s menu from the computer, found some cheap but acceptable looking ramen and submitted my order. A few minutes later a robot arm suspended from an overhead rail, like the one in the airplane, delivered my meal.

It was steaming hot and there wasn’t any plate provided. I briefly closed my eyes to turn off pain reception for my prosthetic hand, then used that one to carefully take the bowl from the delivery mechanism and set it down on the desk.

A bug eyed anime character with a giant head on a tiny body popped up onscreen to remind me about additional fees that would be charged should I spill any of the ramen. They always use some cutesy character to say stuff like that so it will feel less threatening. What happens if you don’t abide their rules is...considerably less cute.

The ramen filled me up, though I imagine it did little to legitimately nourish me. At least if the mild stomach pains a few minutes after I finished were any indication. As if my body was protesting the garbage I’d put into it and demanding something better.

Not tonight, body! Tonight you dine on ramen. You’ll get garbage and like it, because that’s what I can afford. After that I began searching for a new arsenal of exploits. My old mainstays were now hopelessly obsolete.

It all came back to me soon enough. Within the hour I had modern equivalents of all my old heavy hitters downloaded, cleaned and ready to rock. It was the work of the subsequent hour to flesh out my tool set with all the smaller specialty programs I thought I might find a use for.

Next stop was the darknet markets. I put my feelers out to see who to sell to, who to buy from, whose services I might need soon, who to keep an eye out for and so on. Getting the lay of the land, now that my connection was sufficiently anonymous.

A lot of the listings were stolen ebike parts. Criddlers I imagine, though I have no idea where they get their fix, given how draconian the Chinese government’s drug laws are. Come to think of it, I saw something on the news about floating ebike chop shops out in the bay.

They lash their boats to floating wooden platforms built on sealed plastic drums for buoyancy. Then they use the space to store, tear down and rebuild ebikes. By randomly mixing and matching the parts, they disguise the fact that they’re all stolen.

While scrolling through the listings, I opened the cafe’s beverage menu. The flavors were all utterly alien. Snow pear? Is there really a species of pear that grows in snowy climates? For that matter, what the fuck flavor is “swallow’s nest”? Does it taste like twigs and egg?

I recognized the bubble milk tea, so that’s what I bought. With grass jelly instead of those little tapioca balls though, as I could never stand their texture. Apparently beggars can be choosers after all.

I then went searching for info about the security boxes I saw on the ebikes. However the internet in China is heavily censored, so perhaps unsurprisingly I could find no clues on how to compromise them. Probably there are US sites with the info, but access to US domains is similarly crippled here.

I searched the darknet next. There were some gadgets for sale, designed to defeat the “point cloud imagers” as they’re evidently called...but well out of my price range. Sites offering info on how to defeat their security manually were behind D-Coin paywalls.

I could tell I needed to consult someone with more expertise in this area, so I sought out a dedicated chat lobby set up by local criddlers. Someplace they could warn each other about upcoming police sweeps so they could move their tents in advance, sell meth to one another, that sort of thing. These days, even the homeless need to network.

As expected, they were planning a mass ebike heist. I mentioned offhand that I was currently sitting in a net cafe with upwards of twenty ebikes parked just outside, though for obvious reasons I didn’t specify which one just yet.

“I’m new to the area. I don’t know shit about ebike security, but Panopticon is my bitch. I can have all forms of surveillance in the parking lot offline for at least five minutes, maybe more. If you’ve got the manpower to steal that many bikes in such a narrow window-”

There was a flurry of confused posts about just who the fuck I was and how I got in here without being invited. “I’m just that good. So, any takers?” Silence after that, until one of them asked for a demonstration.

It was easy enough to set up, hampered only by my paranoia that Panopticon security might’ve meaningfully improved in the last six years. But as a government operated surveillance network, of course it hadn’t.

I knocked out Panopticon for an entire city block, hijacked a nearby autocab and had it do donuts in an intersection for ninety seconds before the transit authority remotely shut it down, locking me out. The criddlers then spent the following hour double checking my work to ensure I’d competently covered my tracks before resuming negotiations with me.

I waited another hour after that for the criddlers to consult whoever it is that gives such people orders. I suppose even rats have kings. I had no prior relationship with them, and as such was unable to negotiate any sort of partial upfront payment.

Instead, once the time we agreed upon arrived, I double checked that I had my ducks in a row...then pulled the trigger. Conceptually, very much like an invisible electronic Rube Goldberg machine. Fragile, elaborate workarounds to each security barrier executing one after the next.

The overhead lighting flickered. I heard the screech of rubber on asphalt, a few honks, and angry Chinese shouting. That wasn’t me, was it? I only meant to attack surveillance. I then heard a low pitched electrical whine as the truck pulled up.

All exterior feeds were dead by this point. Shame, as I’d like to have watched them work. More confusing shouting, probably coming from people who don’t often see criddlers pour out the back of a truck and start jacking ebikes.

I dared not go to the front in order to watch for obvious reasons. Just sat patiently until I heard the electrical whine return, signifying that the truck was pulling away. More confused shouting, this time at least a dozen different voices.

Over the din outside, I could just barely make out the manager on the phone with the cops. I could also hear lookey-lous emerging from their cubicles to find out what the noise was about. That’s when I allowed myself to join them.

Six years ago I might’ve been careless enough to go on ahead, drawing attention to myself. That was the old me. The new me moves in groups. The new me blends into the crowd. I hung back, not wanting to appear in any photographs as the police drones showed up.

They didn’t even bother to unplug the damn bikes. The sparking, sheared-off ends of the charging cables were still dangling from the sockets, snipped-out GPS trackers and PCI security boxes littering the empty parking spaces. Sloppy. But then, these are the fleas you get when you sleep with dogs. I headed back to my cubicle, noting that the exterior feeds were all coming back online little by little.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 16!}