From: chandler@alaska.net (Chandler)
Subject: Repost - Jonee's problems / 1 - 5
Date: Sun Feb 19 00:54:45 MET 1995

feedback and the like to chandler@alaska.net


(1)

Jonee's got some problems. He has other problems, like earning enough for
a flight outta Dusty Cactus, like getting something to eat, like figuring
out what he wants to do with his life. But suffice to say, they aren't
nearly as pressing as problems he's got right now. The first problem's
name is Guido, and is currently accompanied by the second problem, whose
name is TEK-4500. Jonee isn't worried so much about Guido. Guido has the
speed and maneuverability of a tortoise, at least, back before they went
extinct. The second problem has him quite worried however. It has the
speed and attitude of a psychopath on crystal meth, pcp and acid all at
one. But hey, that's no problem, because right now, so's Jonee! Guido is
not designed for maneuvering at high speeds through a shopping mall. If he
were, he might be streamlined, covered in a fabric 28 times slicker than
teflon, with lungs like a marathon runner, arms like a gymnast and a ViSA
card in his right hand. In short, Jonee is everything that Guido isn't.
Cept for the ViSA. Jonee packs American Express. Jonee is in free fall
right now. He reaches out and snags a banner from the grand opening of a
phone & lamp store and pulls a 360 wrapping the plastic 4 color offset
sheet around his wrist. Jonee has a number of interesting things implanted
in his body. He never liked pockets. Things are too easy to take away when
you carry them with you. He goes subdermal. Technology got under his skin
7 years ago. He got kickout of of the Young Republicans for Christ
boarding school his parents were sending him to for it. YRfC's haven't
finished embracing the fax, cellfone and computer much less bioelectronics
/ nanotek. Guido has made it up to the rail overlooking the fountain /
arcade area of the mall. He clumsily swings the raincoat wrapped weapon up
to his shoulder and pulls off a round. Only needs one, or so the brochure
said. Guido's into brochures. Little blurbs of information. Compressed,
flow oriented. Getting the information across in the minimum of time to
let you get along to that next glossy flyer. America, land of the
infomercial. Jonee contorts his free hand a split second after he sees the
muzzle flash. The FPU in his thigh ran the numbers, calculating distance,
speed, wind and all the other variables involved in the act of 'dodging
the bullet'. Then it decided just to fuck over the flight control on the
slug itself. So the round lodges itself into a shiny marble façade and the
FPU's go back to monitoring much more interesting things, like the current
rate of descent of their owner. Jonee lets go the banner and yanks his
wings. Microfibre spinnakers each the size of a refrigerator door blossom
into the air slowing his journey down three stories of vertical airspace
to a mere 15 kph. Guido fiddles with the gun, now clear of it's london fog
concealment trying to get a fix on his quarry. Unknown to him is the fact
that FPU #23 in conjunction with Broadband Transceiver #7 are still
jamming the targeting systems of the gun. Nonetheless, he seizes the
weapon in his stubby fingers and knocks off the remaining 20 rounds in the
clip, creating serious anxiety in the fried chicken establishment where
the majority of the bullets end up. Jonee touches down with the grace on
an angel, and on neuroliginustic command, the wings fold back into his
shoulder pads with the precision of a naval ordinance test shown in
reverse. A half dozen seconds later, he's vanishes into a crowd of weekend
shoppers.

(2)

KamikazeKab 37A36 swerves into traffic gunning it's ceramic powerplant to
a fraction away from redline. The onboard computer lays a steaming trail
of hot rubbery mucus across the 12 lane asphalt desert. Screaming into the
DMV-Exempt lane the pair of blowers mounted on the hood emit a shrill
whine while the gearshift sprints through 4th to 15th in just under a
second. The onboard display zeros out as the transmission retracts from
the axle. A fat red 'OVERDRIVE' pulses across the windshield. The
horsepower from the blowers hits the car like a thermonuclear shockwave,
leaving a narrow cone of shockwave trailing just behind the spoiler. The
roads here are laid out in typical texan fashion ; smooth, wide, and
straight as the day is long. Jonee sits in the rear passenger seat,
letting the onboard suck up digital quarters from a purloined credit card.
Cabbies are a thing of the past. No more whistling jerking the thumb or
having your ride snatched out from under you by some lightfoot street
hustler. Just call the central office, and in 20 minutes or less, your own
personal cab will arrive. You can drive it yourself and save some cash, or
have a digital equivalent of MadMax put the fat lozenge of yellow
polycarbon into orbit at something near mach10! Jonee chose the latter.
Not so much because he's got cash to blow, but because where he's going,
he needs a driver with a dedicated IV drip of ephedrine. The cab swerves
past a bulky freighter and out onto asphalt ruled by the DMV. Jonee's
quarry is a cluster of tour busses arranged two by two in a very tight
formation. Doors on the cabs no longer swing out, they slide up into the
roof like the cargo hatch on some military transport. Jonee finds himself
on the edge of the slipstream, on the razors edge of a 140 mph suburban
hurricane. As the cab idles up next to one of the busses, he pulls out a
laminated triangle of waffled circuit boards and waits for the faint red
beam of the laser designator to approve his entry. It does, and a aluminum
grid slides out along the running board of the bus while a calm mechanical
voice instructs him to step aboard. Jonee jumps. Catching his weight on
one of the handholds recessed in the smooth aluminum siding of the
recreational behemoth.

(3)

"you fucking lowlife bastard whore..." slipped off Jonee's lips. The beige
interior of the bus, now devoid of all furnishings save a small cardboard
box, was filled with the soft waterfall of rushing air peeling by at 140
kph. Jonee used to live in the first of the four buses. His roommate was a
blonde designer out of the labs in london. On a hiatus from the rigors of
corporate life. Jonee coughed, correcting himself. Out to make some dough
toting her talents as one of the premiere drug designers on the east
coast. A red compact squealed and beeped getting a little too close to the
tank sized bumpers on the bus. Things ran on cold fusion, never stopped,
just stayed on the highways in a big never ending loop. Jonee would be mad
later. Being mad in texas was something people equated with their 2nd
amendment rights. Girlfriend dump ya? Clean ya out? Empty your bank
accounts? Sell your name to a narcomafia death squad? Jonee's mind flitted
into the future, wondering if she'd feel any remorse when they pulled his
amino acids off the pavement in some lowrent tenement which wasn't much
good for anything other than a public dump. They didn't bury ya. Couple
decades back they buried people, now they just injected ya with a
longchain prophase biogenetic nanocule and let your cellular structures
break down into a runny egg of a mess.

Jonee had been planning on retiring in a few years. He'd been putting all
that drug money from synthetic cocaine, androamphetamines and various
hallucinogenic into high yield CD's and gold bonds. Taking into account
that his insurance company was listing his projected lifespan at about 3
days, he felt like buying himself a birthday present. A chance at living
to see 24. Stepping out of the BOA marble anus onto the latticed brick of
the sidewalk he felt a rush that 13 years of chemical injections, smoking
blunts, running lines and dodging cops hadn't been able to satisfy.

The clerks jaw dropped. Apparently he was new to the job and hadn't dealt
with the high calibre clientele that Jonee so recently affiliated himself
with. A manager stepped over, gave a polite smile and wisked him through
closed doors to a private tea garden deep inside downtown Houston. People
don't walk around with a half million dollars and put up with bullshit. So
after being given an agreement of confidentiality about the purchase,
checking his identification to ensure he was an Economic American Citizen,
they gave him the pink questionnaire. It was one of those colors concocted
to make the person reading it think of anything but violence. Like
puppies, spring flowers, a warm loving hug. Anything but the subject at
hand. Anything but the subject at hand.

"The weapons you plan on purchasing would be used for...

a. self defense
b. paramilitary covert operations
c. felonies
d. a small revolution
e. a large revolution
f. none of your fucking business"

Jonee chose c since a didn't quite convey what he had do to, and b would
get him tagged by the feds. He walked out of the corporate tower carrying
a pair of large plastic shopping bags brimming with toys wrapped in
colorful designer papers by the manufacturer. His life expectancy had
risen a few points by the time he stepped into the helicab and swung out
over the city towards the Mariott.

(4)

Jonee turned on the shower, the bath, the televIsion and lay his gear out
on the bed. In the age of the digital, your privacy was secure for about
as long as it took the hotel computer to check you out with the credit
agency. This was the last of the stack of twice stolen cards he'd snatched
from the pocket of the hitman sent by the mafia. Back when he let those
sort of people live. Back when they just wanted to 'talk'. He began
shucking the polyfoam wrap from the days purchases discarding the
warrantee cards, registration forms and plasticine wrap. The information,
the 'How-to-Kill-files' came on little non-volatile memory cards, each of
which he laid out next to it's corresponding armament.

He hadn't slept or bathed in 195 hours. His body was a mess of synthesized
hormones, chemadrenaline and nutrient solutions slowly leeching into his
blood through a series of osmotic membranes all over his skin. Hot water
and soft cotton sheets cure what technology can't.

Special Economic Agent Ludwig Wess scrambled up the stairs of the parking
garage, drawing, cleaning and loading his gun as he ran. He'd dropped the
clip twice and was sufficiently pissed to warrant the kind of action he
was about to take. Reaching the top level he kicked open the door and
found himself immersed in rotorwash from a departing chopper. 'FUCK!' His
scream lost in the whine as the turbine geared up and the pilot cut loose.
'Why they hell did we let them keep those things after the accord of 17.'
he muttered into his radio. A staticy reply told him to police any rounds
he might have dropped on the stairs and to head back in for reassignment.

His next case arrived in a sealed red envelope by NEA courier at his home.
He gave a retinal ID for the package and sat down with a norwegian lager.
He crossed his fingers and said a silent prayer that he would get
something other than credit fraud, serving subpoenas or chasing down mafia
businessmen who had defaulted on payments to the government. He pulled the
zipstrip on the envelope and waited for the chemical hiss of security
fluid to melt away. He pulled out a white sheet of printer paper
emblazoned with the first words of his new assignment.

"DO YOU THINK WE'D HAVE SOMETHING SO IMPORTANT SENT TO YOUR HOME?!"

Followed on the back by a time, a place and a thin wafter of microcircuit
passkey.

Jonee has found that whenever he goes to sleep, he wakes up looking down
the barrel of somebody else's four-fifty-four. That's why the floor of his
suite has enough bioplastique to scare the pants of a namvet. Optical
sensors interlaced with thermal, acoustic, even a laser targeting system
sweeping the room in wide swathes of blood red light. Money buys a good
nights rest. A little tokieda copying deck hums laying down tracks of data
from the stack of cards in it's feeder mechanism. Jonee's palmtop AI is
running numbers again, trying to force open the hotel billing system, the
mob datanet and to arrange for a taxi to the airport in the morning just
in case.

Ludwig took the bus. His clearance on the sedans back at the National
Economic Agency still was up for review after he put one butt first into a
cement riot barrier chasing an international bond smuggler. Sedans drove
like shit anyway. Nothing but plastic, paint and floormats. 'This was
something heavy' he thought, 'if they were poseurs, it would be a
restaurant. if they were mob, it would be at my office.' It's in the
middle of suburbia. He steps off the bus at the curb and walks up to the
door, the microcircuit getting sticky in his hand as he sweats. He reaches
for the doorbell but the bolt clicks and the door slides inside on a
magnetic cushion. He steps into the darkened foyer and nearly trips over a
wooden box with a note attached to it. He picks up the folded slip of
paper and reads it aloud. 'Heads up?' 'What the h' He stops, hearing the
click of a .45 directly above his head and a hand at his neck.

His AI has made considerable progress against the hotels internal computer
in the night. Jonee has managed to finagle another nights stay out of the
subroutines guarding entry and exit. What the hell, it's been a while
since he could stay anywhere with relative security, and it'll probably be
a while before he can again. He flips on the tv and punches up an
interactive weather map. He scrolls across the great plains out to the
Californian coast. Checking out the drive ahead.


(5)

Ludwig squints, trying to get used to the thick slabs of memetic plastic
floating on the surface of each eye. Contacts are very sheik in reality
simulation these days. The really hot agencies, the ones who take
federally subsidized kickbacks from the cases they bust, they all use gear
like this. 'Ready?' a soft female voices whispers into his right ear. He
gulps and nods. The effect is like being placed in a narrow tunnel with
the light of an oncoming train rumbling clearly into view at Mach3. Just
before your able to focus and make out the details, you're smeared into
surgically white room. Just sitting in some avant garde chair, waiting for
something to happen. Ludwig turns his head, playing with the tracking.
It's good. About the same as real life after a couple bottles of
JackDaniels. The voice speaks to him again. 'feeling okay now?' He turns
trying to locate the source but fails. A new voice sounds from somewhere
in front of him, it begins to read file names and sources. A car sized
interactive spread erupts from the walls tagged with hypertext references
spanning a whole universe of database and agency organizations. The voice
shows him where to begin.

Ludwig blinked. 'How long was I in?' he asked. '14 hours.' the voice
replied, masked underneath the meatsuit. Meatsuits were developed for
agents working deep cover in 3rd world countries where the NEA,CEA,CIA,NSA
and the like needed a source of information which could withstand many of
the biological extremes of the environments. The result is something like
a human seal covered in strapping, cables and a slimy ooze used to pour
tactile data into the onboard computer. 'Nothing to get hot and horny
over.' Ludwig thought. 'You'll find the rest of the materials you need,
including your operational orders in the dash box of your new car.' the
voice came without the fluttering of lips. Something which was beginning
to unnerve him. He stammered an okay and tries to look professional
leaving, walking out to his new sedan, a different shade of blue. A silent
groan rolled off his lips when he saw it was exactly the same make and
model as the one he left behind.

'407!' A large chunk of red plasticboard sat in his lap, covered with
407s, his operation code. Everything was coded in the agency, part of the
effort to make life as the leading law enforcement agency machine readable
and easily digitalized. He was being sent on an extraction. A run behind
the red tape to save someone's life. And he was going to drive a sedan
doing it. He cringed. He spun the wheel, gunned the engine and pulled out
into the cul-de-sacs of texan suburbia, heading across town for the
Mariott.

They were onto him. He found the first signs on a mob contract database,
updating the information on his whereabouts. They gave a listing of hotels
in town, and the mariott was one of them. The local union of hired goons
would dispatch two 'representatives' to each location to check them out
and then call in the heavyweights. He shoves the remains of a weekends
meals onto the floor and begins to clear a spot on the bed to gear up.
Five minutes later, he's the baddest boy on the block with more hardware
than nasa, more conviction than the entire southern baptist church and a
contract on his head which just went up to 1.3 million dollars. 'Time to
party' he whispers recalling some TV Movie he watched in another hotel a
while back.

Agent Wess is wrong about the car and he's just realized it. The machines
is packed. Enough bandwidthe pouring in to give him live HDTV feeds of all
500 of the basic cable channels, enough CPU musclepower to calculate taxes
for the state of New Hampshire, and the kind of weaponry you only see on
tv. The day is looking up considerably. He pulls off the freeway into one
of the little corporate loops which are home to hotels, carwashes and
office supply stores, the raw materials for todays corporate world. It's
one of those streets all planted with little streets held up by stakes and
wire, with green grass and a gun toting handyman riding the lawnmower
forever out in those emerald seas. You can't approach or leave unnoticed.
The buildings are all topped with security cameras, the roads with thermal
and seismic sensors. The air has the crisp metallic edge of a laser
targeting grid. Ludwig swings the car into the underground garage and
files with the automated valet service. He walks into the lobby with a
bullshit smile plastered across his face. He's on top of the world.

Jonee is done up quite differently from when he was swinging at the mall.
His 28-times-slicker-than-teflon-skin now is covered by big black patched
of shiny black bioplastic membrane, each contorted and stretched like tar
dipped origami mutants. It would be very hard to describe Jonee much
better than that at the moment. He's sliding down the elevator shaft.
Jonee stops, using his hands to brake his descent. Jonee's only half there
right now. He's looking up the CADprints on the building. He pauses,
swings his head around a little and punches a hole in the drywall with his
hand. He fumbles around for a second with a knarl of cables and extracts a
universal interface jack. Most people who know how to do this would be
prepared to spend all day watching the patrons credit histories scroll by.
Jonee would love to do that, but right now he's got an appointment to
make. So he takes the easy way out. He sticks a widespectrum encrypted
transceiver. Then he lets go and enters a sort of controlled freefall down
30 stories before he gets the feed to jive with his hardware.

A halfsecond later he's asking himself why there are 30 identically
dressed business men all carrying the same rolled newspaper wearing the
same ties scattered through the stairwells and lobbies on each floor.
Jonee cringes a little bit. What he needs is a ride out. He pulses through
the security camera feeds until he finds someone who isn't wearing italian
shoes and carrying a S&W.9mm. Crewcut, blonde hair. Cheap suit. Packing a
cellphone and a GLOCK. FED! The fact that the feds would send a
representative into a hotel where 30% of the occupants have the surname
'SMITH' says something about how bad they want to reach him. Poor bastard
doesn't realize he's expendable. Jonee sighs, checking the distance to the
helipad on the roof and dismissing it as too long a climb. He passes his
hand over one of the distended patches on his bodysuit and listens as it
withdraws and slides into his hand a skeletal machine pistol. Jonee's got
some new bioware. His reflexes have been jacked up to the point where he
no longer lives in our time stream. For brief moments, he enters into a
sort of slow motion universe, where you can still see the bullet leaving
the barrel, where you can dodge the sucker punch and most of all, where
you have that one chance in a million of getting out alive. He grinds his
teeth a little and swings down from the elevator shaft onto a catwalk
above the hung ceiling.