Once he had worked out how to use it, he no longer had to rely on contractors. King Jeremy could augment and hardwire the skills he required to mimic most of the characters he played in games. He had done this and then taken out the contractors just to be on the safe side. Since then he had got hold of more of the lost tech. Some of it was spectacularly advanced software, some biotech, but most of it was hardware. He had bought some, though rarely for money; most of the rest he had killed and stolen for, or arranged proxies to do so. In one spectacular case, an entire nanite-slaved battalion of the Chinese army had done his dirty work on a mountain plateau in Tibet.
Then through a series of games he had designed himself to psychometrically and intellectually test other gamers, he had recruited the rest of the Do As You Please Clan.
He was reading a blog about some emo kid with hallucinogenic blood on some vampire wannabe’s blog. As he watched, the words started to disappear.
‘What the fuck?’ he muttered to himself. He had set his systems to automatically save any information he came across on the Portsmouth situation. It was a minor AI search routine. Not only was the search routine violated, but when he checked his own internal systems he saw the scant information he did have being eaten.
‘No, no, no, no!’ The amount of time it had taken to violate his security, security far in advanced of what modern technology was supposed to be capable of, had been so small it had been difficult to measure. Only someone with access to lost tech would be able to do this, and they would either have to have better lost tech or be more skilled at utilising it than Jeremy was. He had been aware that other groups had access to the powerful technology but had always tried to avoid them unless he was stealing from them. Even then he tried to pick on people on the lower echelons, for example the ultra-rich who had just stumbled on the technology or poorer countries’ black science programmes that had found the technology purely by chance.
King Jeremy stared at the monitor, which was swiftly becoming a focus for his rage. The sounds of heavy metal and simulated warfare came from the other room. Dracimus was playing a first-person shooter. This acted as Jeremy’s soundtrack as he tore the monitor off the table, flung it across the room and reduced the rest of his immediate surroundings to so much destroyed junk.
Seething, he headed towards the pleasure dome – what they called the main area of the Boston warehouse. They had used Cornucopia to terraform, as they liked to term it, the warehouse.
When King Jeremy had found himself capable of redesigning flesh, he had kept his basic look but got rid of his imperfections, made himself more handsome and a lot more athletic, aping the look of characters he saw in films, games and comics. The irony – that he now looked like the high-school alpha males he hated – was lost on him.
Dracimus was gaming old-style. There was little challenge in gaming now, when you could control the characters with your mind. Besides, they had the capabilities to make the real world like their games if they so chose. At the moment Dracimus was using an old-fashioned controller on one of the intermediate levels on the hardest setting of the Wild Boys FPS. He was playing the hacked game at lightning speed, slumped in his shorts in the middle of their massive line of sofas. The future war played out on the cinema-sized screen that took up one of the warehouse walls.
Dracimus, if anything, looked more like a high-school jock than Jeremy, if the jock had a serious steroid problem. He acted like one as well. What Dracimus wanted he had to have, immediately.
Baron Albedo was asleep, entwined with three of his latest sex zombies. After all, nano-technology was better than Rohypnol. His face was still white from burying it in the small mountain of synthetic cocaine on the table in front of him.
Inflictor Doorstep – King Jeremy had no idea where the name had come from – was looking more and more demonic. His skin had taken on a grey cast and was starting to look more like armour plate. His eyes were black-and-red spirals. He was rendering down one of the sex zombies he had broken. Feeding the woman head first into Cornucopia, something he liked doing. Inflictor Doorstep even scared Jeremy a little.
‘We’ve just been hacked.’ That even got Inflictor’s attention. ‘We’re going to England.’
Another night on the street. Despite the warmth during the day, Beth had spent most of the night awake, shivering in her sleeping bag and staring at graffiti. Someone had painted the words THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED on the wall opposite. Beth had no idea what it meant but had initially thought it a little profound. Now it was just irritating her.
She was going to go back tomorrow. Hitch to London and get a train home. She had no idea what she was going to tell her dad. She could not see her sister as a terrorist. It would have been too much like hard work. Even with Talia’s near-suicidal taste in men, Beth still couldn’t see her even getting involved with that. On the other hand, Talia hadn’t visited her in prison, and a lot could have changed in the years since she had last seen her sister. Maybe she had been unknowingly sharing digs with a bomb-maker, but even that sounded far-fetched. On the other hand, Beth thought, someone had to share digs with terrorists. You just never think it will happen to someone you know. Her dad was going to have to be happy with what little she could give him. Maybe she should tell him to get in contact with the police.
Every time Beth felt herself falling asleep, the same question echoed around her head. Who’s to blame? She hadn’t liked Talia, but she was family. Beth couldn’t accept the pure bad luck of Talia being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone had to know more about this than she did. Talia had always been the tragic social butterfly on the alternative scene. Everyone had known her in Bradford. It would have involved a radical change of personality for her not to want to be the centre of attention in Portsmouth as well. If nothing else, someone would know what she had been doing in the run-up to this.
In the early hours of the morning Beth got up and found a place to hide her kitbag. She took an old picture of Talia, the Balisong knife and her brass knuckles, and started to wander.
It hadn’t been difficult. The clothes might have changed a little, same with the hairstyles, but all subcultures had their uniforms. She spotted them on a wide street called Elm Grove. Followed them into a narrow street with what looked like some kind of clock tower at the bottom of it where it intersected with another road. Beth was pretty sure she wasn’t too far from the sea.
The pub was in the middle of the street. It was called the Colonial Arms and had a late licence. She had heard the bustle and noise as soon as she turned into the street. It had a paved beer garden packed with people.
Inside it was warm and seemed to Beth to be full of light, though the atmosphere was strangely subdued. She wondered if it had anything to do with the terrorist incident. Had these people lost friends? The pub was made up of two large wooden-floored rooms and a smaller area up some steps set back from the bar. The bar was close to the door and it was standing room only. Beth had to push her way to the bar to order a pint of bitter with her scarce cash.
She got some looks on the way in but she had on her leather, her combat trousers and her army-surplus boots. She wore the uniform even if it was an older variant. The bouncers had sized her up on the way in as well. Wondering if she was going to be trouble. Beth hoped not but she was pleased they hadn’t searched her.