Tomorrow

The bubbling rhythm of Beenie Man's "Dude" poured into his headphones, drowning out the world around him. 3 Displays dominated his vision; to the left, his scanning worms were sending reports from all over the grid, to the right a Brazilian counterfeiter's video archive was under assault. Jack was only partially aware of the assault, occasionally typing commands into the process to keep it going, but otherwise his entire world was the screen in front of him - the admin console of the Hyroki Technologies Arcology.

Oblivious to the world around him the hacker spoke to himself as he worked, "Why do you call it the grid? That's not what it's called, you know." --

Jack slapped his headphones down to his shoulders, the tinny pulse of his Swedish raver music filling the room. He looked at Diver in confusion; he hadn't noticed her arrival and he nervously wondered how much he of what he was writing he had said out loud.

Finally, he blinked himself back into the world and responded. "No, but that's what it is. Each site has an address right, a set of numbers? Those are coordinates, Cartesian."

Diver made a "pfft" noise as she popped up to perch at the end of his desk. It pissed Jack off. He could see her knocking his rig across the floor in his head, every time she did it. He figured she knew it, too. Probably did it specifically to piss him off.

"It's not a grid because there're three numbers, dork. That means three dimensions and that makes it a matrix, right? Besides, Hobbes is the reggae head. You listen to that crappy ass techno." She was relentless in her ridicule. Jack smiled to himself; it sort of turned him on.

"Fine." He said, giving up, "I'll change it." She laughed as he highlighted the word "grid" and replaced it with "network" in his story. "Do you really get paid for these?" She asked, still laughing to herself.

"Yeah I do, when I can get them drawn. American comics are niche, but the Han really seem to like them." -- It made him good money too, but he didn't tell her that. "What do you want Diver?" As much as he sometimes enjoyed it, he was done playing.

She nodded as she hopped off the table again, all business now. "Alright. I think a friend of mine is in trouble." He snorted, "You don't have any friends. What do you really want?" She rolled her eyes and continued, "The thing is, he doesn't want my help. He doesn't realize that he needs it. That he's in over his head."

Jack sat up and actually took his headphones off. This was sort of interesting. "Really? What did he do, walk off with some Munge dealer's stash?" Diver looked at him oddly for a second, as if she was wondering what Jack knew.

"Yeah, actually." She said slowly. When Jack didn't say anything else, she went on, "It was a decent score, but the dealer found out. My friend, he thinks he's real slick, but he has no clue these guys are after him. He'd probably freak and get himself killed, if he did." She shook her head, wistfully. "I gotta find these guys and stop them."

Jack shook his head, a look of disbelief on his face. "What are you going to do to 'stop them?' Eh, Diver? Think for a second. These are Munge dealers, they're not gonna stop just because you ask them nicely." He looked as Diver clenched her fists. "And kicking their asses is just going piss them off and get them after you. You know it. That's why you came to me."

"Right," She said angrily, "that's why I came to you. So how do I stop them?" Jack turned back to the keyboard and began typing into his console. "It's a tricky one, isn't it?" he said as he worked, "Your friend has no clue, so he's not in hiding and he won't run." Jack looked up at Diver and grinned, "So I guess we need to turn the tide and make the dealers want to run. What do you know about them?"

Diver thought for a moment before saying anything, "I don't know much. I think they might be Zargon Cartel, the Munge had Swiss labels." Jack chuckled, "Bad month for them, that would be the second theft for them. I hijacked a shipment through their shipping systems a couple weeks back. No wonder they want your friend." Diver gave Jack that same queer look, but he missed it, oblivious.

Tapping on his keyboard he summoned up the Interpol registry. With a few deft keystrokes he had bypassed the login and was searching the database. "Have you seen these guys, yourself? I can see if we can ID them."

Diver began digging through her pockets, "I can do you one better, I got pictures on my phone." She hauled her HT phone from a cargo pocket on her thigh and tossed it to Jack. As he scrambled to catch it she spoke, "I caught these guys coming out the Den last night. That's when I found out they were looking for... my friend. I snapped a flick over my shoulder as I pushed past, to piss 'em off."

Jack put the phone on his desk and watched as his rig shook hands and began to transfer the contents of the phone. He'd get her texts and her phonebook, too. For a moment, Jack considered publishing them, but he remembered what Diver could do and thought better of it.

When the transfer was done he called up the flicker log and flipped through the stills. Finally he came to an image of a stair well, two red-eyed gaunt-faced Europeans looking up angrily into the lens. They were dressed in neo-retro leathers, the collars of their jackets huge, exaggerating the key elements of the retro design and the gigantic steel rivets at each joint of the seams.

"Gee, you really think they're Swiss?" Jack asked sarcastically. Only the Swiss and the Germans went in for this neo-retro stuff - and in Germany possession of Munge brings the death sentence, with no trial ahead of time. You carry; they kill you where they find you.
"Alright," Jack said, mainly to himself, "let's see who you are." He began to type feverishly, flooding the console with commands as he cropped the faces out of Diver's picture and transferred them to the Interpol search database. Finally, the search began. Jack stared intently at the screen, raptly watching each new hash mark as they marched across the console.

"Why don't you use a gui? Isn't it harder to do it all through the console?" Diver was very obviously bored. Jack just shook his head, "Yeah, exactly. Harder." As he spoke, the screen flickered, summoning up a new window; this one showing a mug shot of one of the two Europeans.

"Ah, here we go." Jack thumbed through the criminal record. "Huh, this guy is a gun, imported straight from Berne. They really want this theft problem fixed." He looked up at Diver and was surprised at the amount of concern on her face. "Wow, you must really care about this friend of yours..."

Diver said nothing, instead starring right into Jack's eyes. It unnerved him and he spoke as much to get her to snap out of it as out of any real concern. "Well don't worry; Ol' Jack is on the case. You're friend is safe."

Jack turned back to his keyboard and went to work. He would never tell Diver, but he hadn't actually burned Interpol before. He had no idea if he could actually do what he intended, or not.

"You see..." He said, tentatively, "I'll just issue a class 5 terror alert through Sec-Net implicating this guy in a plot to bomb the heavy water facility down in Balboa..." Jack secretly began to pray that Interpol wouldn't trace the alert back to the source. He wouldn't get the big death if he got caught, but what he'd get would be worse. A laser straight through the frontal lobe, 'corrective surgery.' By the time Interpol was done with him, he wouldn't know what a network was. He'd rather they just killed him. It was more humane.

Still, Jack's bravado is backed up with considerable skill... At least, that's what he told himself as he went to work. Crafting the alert wasn't easy. After the hysteria in the early part of the century, each alert had to come with a mountain of evidence, and Jack had none. He had to make it all up, and quick. It was only a matter of time before their firewall noticed the patterns of interference Jack was using as a carrier. It doesn't take real AI to pick up on patterns, it just takes time.

And a lot less time than Jack thought, apparently. A suite of new windows popped open on his display, each one a warning of a trace in progress - 12 traces total.

"Oh shit!" Jack said, slapping at the network disconnect he'd wired into the rig. The network went dead and his rig immediately shut down. "What? What?!" Diver's voice had a hysterical edge to it.

"They found me a lot faster than I expected. It's OK, I think. I pulled the rig offline before they even got past the first loop in the route but..." Diver nodded before she spoke, "But you're plan won't work. You can't do it. Can you?"

Jack sighed, admitting to himself that he was in over his head, "No. I can't. I'm sorry, Diver. I can't sick Interpol on these guys. You need to tell your friend to get out of town. These guys are for real killers, on Hobbes' level." For a moment, Jack considered calling Needle for help, but he knew it'd take someone coming after Jack or Diver for Needle to care, let alone help.

Diver turned away from Jack, obviously struggling with what to do next. When she turned back, there were tears in her eyes. "I-- I can't. I can't tell him, Jack. This guy... He took the Munge for me, this is my fault. I've got to fix it. There's got to be something we can do!" She put her hand in one of her pockets, cradling the Munge doser she kept there.

Jack thought on it for a second. The plan to put the cops on the trail of these thugs was a good one. "Damnit! It should have worked! It would have worked." Jack started to reboot the machine.

"What about just calling the police?" Diver asked. Jack laughed, bitterly, "Remember what happened at my house?" Diver nodded, not saying a word. They tried to call the local police for help, once. It got Jack's parents dead.

Suddenly, Jack's laughter turned joyous.

"Wait a minute!" He said, bouncing around in a sort of victory groove, "We don't need the police at all! We just need these guys to THINK the police are on to them." As his machine finished booting, he went back to work.

"The good news is, I can get into the Zargon Cartel systems with my eyes closed. They're pathetic... All I gotta do is forge an abort order and send it to their phones. Damn, Jack, you really are the shit, you know that?" Diver shook her head at Jack, she found his ego childish. Sometimes she thought that Jack had no idea how dangerous the world he lived in really was. To Jack, she figured, it must all be some sort of video game, a puzzle to be solved.

"Can you do it?" She asked, "Really?" Jack looked up at her, again taken aback by the obvious concern on her face.

"Yeah," He said quietly, "I can. This is easy." He shook his head, "It's what I should have done first, instead of showing off. Look, Diver, I'm sorry. You're friend will be fine, OK?" She nodded as Jack's machine beeped at him.

"Ah, see? I'm already into their mail server. I'll just forward the class 5 alert I was going to send through Interpol to them with an attached message. How about 'get the fuck out?' Too street?" Jack nodded to himself, "Yeah I'll just send a one word message with the alert: Abort." He typed a few last commands and hit the return key with grim gravity.

"There," he said, turning back to Diver, "Now all we gotta do is wait for a response. You want to hang out, or you want me to call you when I get the acknowledgement back?"

"Nah. I'll stay." Diver said, trying to sound disaffected. She failed. "Damn. This guy really means a lot to you. Is it serious?" Jack asked playfully, he wouldn't even admit to himself that he was jealous.

But, Diver shook her head, "It's not like that. This guy.. He's.. Well, I guess he's sort of like family, you know? We've been through a lot. " She looked Jack over before continuing, "I guess it could be like that one day, but it's not like that right now."

Jack nodded, a sudden sense of relief rushing through him, unexplained. He had no idea what to say next, so he turned back to the screen to see if he'd gotten a reply yet. He totally missed the surveillance camera feed popping to life on his left-side display, but Diver caught it. It was the camera in the alley behind the warehouse Jack now called home. On the grainy black and white feed a large white sedan was pulling up to the loading dock. It was an import, European.

She gasped quietly as she watched the Swiss gangsters step out of the car. Shifting her eyes over to Jack, she saw that he still had no clue. Instinctively she reached for the doser in her pocket, but fear stopped her from acting. Instead she could only watch, horrified as they walked up to the door. The death grip on her doser the only sign that she knew what was going on.

Suddenly one of them reached into his jacket. Diver was sure it was to pull a gun, but instead he produced a phone, slim and dark - probably a Korean model, or maybe one of those slick Mexican ones that were all the rage overseas, now. As she watched paralyzed, the thug looked down at the screen, then tapped his partner's back. The exchange was silent, but she could see the fear plain on their faces. Hitting buttons frantically on the phone, the Euros turned around and bolted for the car.

"Ah!" Jack beamed as he turned to look at Diver, "there you go, they sent the acknowledgement. They're on their way back to Berne, as we speak. Now all I gotta do is plant some fake evidence in the shipping system implicating our friends in the theft and they should quite the welcome waiting for them when they get back."

Diver took a deep breath, letting the doser drop back into the depths of its pocket. A wave of irritation bubbled up in her. "Make it fucking snappy, yeah? I've been sitting in this pit for way too long."

"Damn! Bitch much?!" Jack turned back to the keyboard and finished his work. "There." He snapped, "All done. You can leave this 'pit' any time you like."

Diver didn't say a word, she turned and headed for the door. As she pulled the door to Jack's pad open, Jack called out, "You could say 'Thank you' you know."

She spun around and took a backwards step through the door, "You're welcome. Asshole." She threw him the bird as she walked away.