Freedom Incorporated by Peter Tylee (the best ebook reader for android .TXT) 📕

could do to a body and it wasn’t a pretty. Comes with the job I guess. He swallowed hard and poured a cup of office-coffee, which looked more like muddy water. It was lukewarm and bitter, and made his stomach cramp, but it diluted the ghastly images in his mind.

So, someone shot him with nanotoxin and took his fifth thoracic vertebrae. Simon skimmed the remainder of the autopsy report and keyed the case number into his computer, trying hard not to let his frustration boil over at the busted spacebar.

The Department’s database had more information than Superintendent Vincent had handed him, but it still wasn’t much and probably wouldn’t be in Simon’s final report. There was a list of names and destinations corresponding to the portal activity in the surrounding suburbs for two hours before and three hours after the murder. In total, it was nearly 85,000 entries. Nowonder he didn’t bother printing it. The period of interest coincided with the homeward rush of commuters. Simon entered a few search terms to refine the list by ruling out private portals and eliminating all portal activity after seventeen-hundred hours. The list shortened to just over seven-hundred entries. On a whim, he decided to eliminate everything but the portals in Meadowbank. He honestly doubted that anybody would be stupid enough to kill a man in the Meadowbank reserve and flee using a portal in the same suburb.

Twenty-six entries. He briefly scanned the list, but the seventh entry caught his breath.

What? Simon sat straight in his chair and arched an eyebrow. Dan?

He double-clicked the applicable entry and squinted at the details. Dan Sutherland had portaled out of Meadowbank station to his home address in Andamooka at 16:18. What were you doing there buddy? Simon rocked back in his chair and stroked his neat goatee, lost in thought. It’d been a long time; it felt like years since he’d last seen Dan. Time was funny that way; it was really only a few months. Five? Six months? He couldn’t be certain.

“But… he couldn’t have…” Chief Inspector West entered his access code for the WEF apprehension database and scanned for Adam Oaten. He impatiently watched the flashing cursor and sipped some more of his coffee, unblinking. After a grinding sound from his antiquated hard disk, the list of possible matches appeared for his inspection. There were only two and he checked both. One was for an Adam Oaten somewhere in Florida but the other was for Sydney, Australia. Tingling with adrenaline, Simon’s set his coffee a safe distance from his trembling hands. But… not Dan. He checked the DNA profile listed on Adam Oaten’s WEF database record and compared it to the DNA taken at the autopsy. It was the same. He was both relieved and terrified to note the apprehension status - target terminated. The WEF had only issued an apprehension warrant. Adam Oaten’s death was only permissible if he resisted.

Okay, so someone from UniForce tried to nab the guy and he put up a fight. He shrugged. It’s not the first time. The disturbing element was the possibility, no matter how slim, that Dan was somehow involved. It was death by nanotoxin after all. Simon had heard that Dan had crossed over to the private sector, but he couldn’t believe Dan was wantonly cruel.

Could he?

*

Wednesday, September 15, 2066

17:13 Andamooka, South Australia

It had taken the better part of a day, but Dan felt stable again. The Zyclone was pounding on his neurotransmitters and he felt less like lying in bed until the end of time. Now he was back to business.

His eyes darted over the list of names.

Damn you. He wondered who in UniForce was selling his lists twice. That Roach woman? He frowned. Someone else making a buck on the side?

This list was fresh; only two names had faded on his screen. The Raven had apprehended both.

He examined every file, trying to gauge whom the Raven was least likely to track. There were several large bounties on the list and it seemed logical the Raven would go for them. The Raven’s return rate was astonishing, so the difficulty of finding the targets probably wouldn’t deter him. Dan finally settled on a medium-return 26-year-old female. Hmm… I’m ten years older than that. It made Dan feel old and he became acutely aware of the pain in his joints. He hadn’t exactly been looking after himself recently. When his wife was still alive he used to promise every morning that he’d be careful and that he’d look after himself. The promise usually preceded a warm kiss and Katherine would wrap her arms around him, pull him close, and whisper, “You’d better be careful or you’ll have me to answer to!”

The target was a five foot six brunette. Thin. Dan peered closer at his screen until he could almost see the individual pixels. Perhaps willowy is the word. She looked scared in the photograph; he wondered when it was taken. He memorized the contours of her face, her thin arching eyebrows and her straight nose. He burned the image into his mind, murmuring her physical description repeatedly.

The WEF had issued a warrant for her apprehension - and her death if she resisted. It perplexed Dan to think about killing her without first knowing why, without knowing what she did wrong. He was glad bounty hunting had never forced him into that position. Most people came quietly, if not willingly, when facing the .45-inch barrel of his 1911. He couldn’t imagine himself pulling the trigger on a willowy girl. Things would have to go horribly wrong before he’d even consider it.

Dan kept reading. She was untagged. He grunted. Weren’t they all? Some of the more cunning criminals had had their microchips surgically removed, which made them difficult to track. Others had escaped the microchipping squads entirely and so didn’t even have a scar on their back. But they were rare. Dan had no idea how they survived in the modern world where people needed a microchip to do anything. How do they pay for groceries? The micro-implant stored the bank details that retailers needed to scan. And they can’t portal anywhere. He baulked at the thought of always using old-mode transport. It was amusing - even fun - for a while, but the novelty quickly wore off.

And evading the squads can’t be easy. Teams of chipping-officers worked with handheld scanners in public, usually - but not always - in crowds. Their job was to ensure everyone had a valid reading on the scanner. They detained people who failed the test and forcibly took them to surgery to have a microchip embedded next to their spine. It had been illegal not to have a microchip since ‘59.

Dan twitched when he thought about his microchip. He preferred to forget about it, but that was difficult in his line of work. Roughly a million people objected to the chips, but everyone else thought they were a wonderful idea. There was no need for cash or plastic cards, personal identity theft was a dark creature of the past, and they’d eradicated bag snatching. So what did it matter that microchipping encroached a little on civil liberties?

He didn’t want to think about it.

Dan knew the so-called ‘unchipped’ carried microchips in their pockets to fool the scanners and lead a somewhat normal life. But maintaining someone else’s identify wasn’t easy. For starters, the DNA didn’t match, nor did the physical description. If the chipping-officers found anything unusual, they’d whisk the suspect away for questioning where it would quickly become evident they were using a borrowed chip.

“So where do I start?” He whispered now that he had a target in mind.

The file was sparse; little wonder she was on an exclusive list. Targets with that kind of bounty had already evaded capture on the easier lists. So other hunters had tried - and failed - to apprehend her. It wasn’t going to be easy, but Dan knew his business.

And knew it well.

He started with all the typical databases, building a search profile from the skimpy details in her UniForce file. He absently sipped a glass of water. It was getting late, but he didn’t want to go to bed where the nightmares could torment him.

Two hours later, he’d isolated the possible suspects to a handful of people. Even the unchipped had to leave some kind of digital footprint. Dan usually found them in the redundant and fragmented governmental databases that some countries maintained out of spite. The CMP - Central Microchip Repository - was great unless you were tracking someone that didn’t have a valid chip.

He stood and pursed his lips, weighing the options. Try to get some sleep, or start tracking her now? Tired though he was, he stared at her photograph for a long time.

“Okay, Jennifer Cameron…” He rammed his 1911 Colt into his shoulder holster. “Ready or not, here I come.”

*

Wednesday, September 15, 2066

21:55 Tweed Heads, Australia

Jen watched from the kitchen for a while before bringing the tray of coffee. They’re so well matched. While she was thrilled that her best friend had found someone, it simultaneously amplified her own emptiness. She’d looked, she’d done the dating thing, but she’d never found what Samantha shared with Cookie. Part of her longed for it, but another part, the fiercely independent part, rejected it outright. She permitted herself a sigh of self-pity before remembering that she wasn’t unhappy. Tonight was a night for giddy excitement and perhaps joyous celebration later on. But that depends on how lucky we get. She reminded herself not to become too optimistic.

She crossed the lounge room and balanced the tray precariously on the edge of the coffee table.

Samantha was gently rubbing Cookie’s shoulders and it quickly morphed into a massage. He groaned with pleasure, though his unblinking eyes never shifted from the screen, which he’d been staring at for three days straight. He arched his back and winced at the pain that spasmed through his aching muscles. Damn. He had to remember to stretch every fifteen minutes or he’d seize up like cold molasses.

Cookie was tall and thin, though people rarely noticed his height because he was either hunching over a keyboard or merely a name on someone’s computer. He was the ultimate geek, or so he told himself. He had friends from all over the globe, most of whom he’d never met. Not because he couldn’t afford it, portal technology made it easy to jump from Tweed Heads to Moscow, across to Portland, then over to Seoul. It was almost too easy; the major airlines had filed for bankruptcy less than a year after PortaNet had launched their first product lines. Governments had since turned international airports into international portal stations. Without restricting international travel to those central locations, customs and immigration would have been impossible to police.

No. Cookie had never met his electronic friends because he didn’t see the need. The fragile network of friendships he’d woven across the globe would quickly collapse if he ever met them in real life. His parents had stories to tell about that, it’d happened frequently in their generation. The connections were platonic, of pure ideas, unhindered by the clumsiness of body language. Even some of Cookie’s real-life friends had drifted to the fringes of his daily life and taken a more prominent role in his online existence.

He had evolved.

That’s what the social scientists called it. His mind could carry seven simultaneous conversations without getting confusing. On an exceptional day, Cookie could raise the stakes to ten concurrent conversations, but that was pushing it even for him. And he could hold the conversations while working on a totally unrelated problem, as he was today. Every few seconds he’d flip from one chat session to another and he always