“Thank you again, Mrs. Seward,” he said. “The spirits appreciate your business.”
“Thank you, Yanai,” Mrs. Seward said, tapping something out on her wristpiece—her payment, Simone assumed. “I’ll be back again next week.”
“Of course,” he said, flourishing his cape to disguise his surreptitiously checking his own wristpiece to confirm payment. Mrs. Seward sniffed and walked out the door, her heels making metallic clicks on the fire escape outside. Danny looked at Simone and wiggled his eyebrows.
“The mayor’s wife,” Simone said, impressed.
“Shall we consult the spirits in my private chambers?” Danny asked in an overwrought imitation of a vampire from an old movie. Simone rolled her eyes, stood, and followed him into the back room.
The back room was much like the front, but smaller, and even more ridiculous. A circular table had a heavy black cloth over it with a crystal ball in the center, and various crystals hung from the low ceiling. In the back were a few steps leading up to an old-looking wooden door. Simone walked through the room and opened the door. Beyond that was Danny’s real office. Metal walls and an old sofa and coffee table. A desk covered in gadgets. Printers, screens, and other large electronics Simone couldn’t place lined the walls. Danny took off his turban, set it on the desk, and flung his cape over the sofa arm before sitting down.
“So what are you in the market for today?” he asked.
“I need a fake IRID. Canadian importer. Net-backing to go with it. And…” Sitting next to him on the sofa, Simone took the photo of The Blonde out of her jacket and asked, “Know her?” Danny stared at it, his eyes narrowing.
“No…. Do you think they found me?” He looked up at her, worried. Simone smiled.
“Nothing to do with you; just a case.”
Danny took a deep breath and nodded. “Want me to keep my eyes open, or a full-on search?”
“Just keep your eyes open.”
“No problem.” Danny grinned, pushing his shaggy brown hair back, revealing a metal plate just over the ear. Danny was somewhere in his early twenties, and had come to New York five years ago, running from the mainland. The US was no longer the world’s superpower. China had taken on that role ages ago, and with the various laws in the US forbidding most scientific research, all the experiments the US military did had to be kept secret. Danny was one of those.
Raised with nineteen others, he was genetically created in an underground lab near Chicago. As a child, he’d had various electronics implanted in his head. He was supposed to be the perfect spy—a hacker who didn’t even need access to a computer, because he was a computer. Danny was trained from birth to use the computer in his mind, as well as the wireless signals that were constantly swimming around him. At thirteen, he and the others could all sit quietly in a corner and surf the net to their hearts’ content, bashing down encryptions and security systems as fast as they could blink. They were always kept in small white rooms and never interacted with anyone besides each other and a woman they called “Mother,” who gave them their assignments and took their reports. At fourteen, they could hack into most classified government sites—any government. At fifteen, they were taken on field trips to the South China Sea, where they logged onto local signals and hacked into Chinese military clouds and databases.
Also at fifteen, during a routine check of what Danny (then called Odin 17) had been looking at online, his supervisors found that Danny was gay, or at least looking at gay pornography. In the US, under normal circumstances, they would have sent him to a re-education camp, but with Danny that would be a problem. The camps were outside, in the real world, where they wouldn’t be able to control his movements as easily, and where the metal plate on his head would get some attention. If the Odin Program, with its genetic modification and hacking, were to go public, it would be a disaster, both internationally and at home. And besides, they had nineteen others. They decided killing him would be easiest. But Danny beat them to the punch, hacking onto the facility servers and finding the orders for his termination.
Simone was never exactly sure what Danny had done to escape, or how he had gotten to New York, but he had shown up one night in her waiting room—wet and miserable, begging her to hide him. She had done it, without payment. She’d showed him how to create the new identity of Danny Fray and how he could easily forge his own IRID, helped him find a place to work and live under the radar, taught him how to use his skills for more petty criminal enterprises than those he’d been instructed in. Mainland troops had only come looking once, and Simone had gotten them off his back by making it look like he had gone to South America.
Simone and Danny had been close since. The mass of cloud networks over New York allowed him to access the web without being found by anyone looking for his particular ISP. He changed networks and ran through other servers in the blink of an eye. He could set up a web page and download secure information all while taking a deep breath. It looked like magic. Which is why he had become a successful psychic, telling people what they already knew: that his spouse had booked a room at a hotel a few nights ago (hotel databases were very easy to access); that her father was living in Canada. He did a lot of what Simone could do, but much faster. And he owed her. So she used him. But she didn’t kid herself; if it had been Dash Ormond’s or some other PI’s doorstep Danny had shown up on that night, he’d be here instead of Simone, using him like the mainlanders had hoped to.
“Any particular importing?” he asked, leaning back into the sofa. His eyes had the slightly glazed look they got when he was working on the Internet in his head.
“Art. Antiques. Furniture. Keep it vague.”
“Done and done,” he said, smiling, “You want the IRID?”
“It would help.”
He opened a drawer in a cabinet and took out a small thumbprint scanner and an infrared chip, which he then put into a nearby 3D printer. It began to print, oozing plastic over the infrared chip and sensor to create the infrared identification card—the IRID. It was a slow process, so he turned back to the photo of The Blonde.
“Who is she?”
“Possible mistress, possible business partner, possible pro siren.”
“Sounds sexy.”
“Could be. Hey… can you check something else out, actually?”
“Anything for you.”
“Alejandro deCostas.”
He nodded.
“Alejandro deCostas,” he read from a screen only he could see, “PhD in archeology, master’s in physics, up until a month ago worked for StableCorp in the EU. Oh, and there’s a picture. Nice. I don’t suppose this is a blind date you want to set me up on…”
“Sorry, no such luck. Just wanted to make sure he was legit before I took him on as a client.”
“If you get him naked, take photos. And if you don’t get him naked, bring him around sometime for me to seduce.”
Simone laughed. “Of course.” As long as she’d known him, Danny had never been on a date, had never had a boyfriend. For all she knew, he was a virgin. She probably would be, too, if every man she met could be a mainland agent sent to kill her.
“He looks legit. Everything checks out.”
“Good.”
Danny stood and walked over to the printer. “What’re you doing for him?”
“He wants to explore the city, looking for places where the buildings have held so that you can go down below the twenty-first floor,” Simone said with a grin.