Disclaimer: I do not own the LINK series. They are owned by Lyda Morehouse.
Cecily, the Hacker
“Transaction complete.”
Excellent. That was easier than I thought. I didn’t even have to utilize my routine ruse. Usually, if I hack anywhere with a hack guard, then I have to run something to take their attention off of what’s actually going on, such as having to cover a major transaction. All transactions now have to be monitored by a hack guard to make sure that all the only thing transferred into the bank is credits; it used to be that anarchists would try to sneak viruses into their accounts in order to cause havoc and chaos. But their hack guard must have been on break or something, because no one even noticed my presence until it was too late.
“Run a cover program, just make sure that no one is able to trace the hack back to this location,” I command.
The avatar of a pink kangaroo cocks its head in the display window I have opened in the corner of my vision. My avatar reaches in its pouch, and withdraws a tiny cover program, a sleepy little pink joey. Mate sets it down on the ground, and off it hops, scurrying to do my bidding.
“There is an incoming call from Credit Suisse,” Mate informs me. “Accept connection?”
“I’ll take it,” I reply, nodding. Mate minimizes its own window and opens a new one, bearing the face of my personal accountant. Old an honorable as the Swiss Banks are, he is on a live feed. I open the connection under the same.
“Guten Morgen, Fräulein Kensington. All is well with you, I hope?” Köpfle asks.
“Indeed,” I reply. “I hope all is well with you, as it is midnight in Zürich. Is there a problem?”
“None, Fräulein Kensington. We just need your confirmation code to complete the transaction into your account.”
“I’m terribly sorry for forgetting,” I say. I truly am. As long as the transaction isn’t complete, that’s a possible link for anyone investigating the robbery to follow. I would be pleased if they didn’t even know what continent my bank is located on, much less that it is a Swiss bank. I send my confirmation code to Köpfle, who looks remarkably put together for midnight.
“Thank you, Fräulein. That all seems to be in order. Thank you for banking with Credit Suisse.” The transmission ends, and I close the window.
Oh, Jeezus. I breathe a sigh of relief and lean back in my chair. The little things like that are going to be what get me in the end. I really am too careless to be in this line of work. But then, what would I do with myself if I wasn’t a hacker and a thief? Perish the thought.
I offline for a moment, paying attention to Mate’s functions. I wave one of the display screens, and it swivels over towards me. God, this thing is so outdated. The display screens were still touch-sesitive back when Mate was manufactured, and they came incased in titanium. Nothing like the light, Plexiglas screen encasements you find in modern transports. I had to barter some hardware extensions just to make this thing be able to interface with my handheld.
“Mate,” I ask vocally. “What’s our current position?’
The pink kangaroo hops onto the screen. When I constructed the avatar for the Airtank’s processor when I was little, I adopted the same for my own avatar. Because I’m directly wired into the Airtank during operations, the avatar can go back and forth between me and the craft.
Mate hops across the screen, and behind its tracks are left the coordinates 27?65 S by 132?31 E. About an hour away from home at this rate. Right on target. I’ll be home in time to catch some shut eye before having to make the rounds. After all, today is Thursday, and the United States Military Discard Service makes its run once a week. Gotta love the States; as soon as your excluded from the club, they dump all over you.
“Open main viewing window,” I command. The metal blast shield slides back with large, clanking noises to reveal a rather magnificent view of the Bush as we soar over it. Any local aircraft keeps low altitudes, as well as a large decal of the Australian flag on the bottom of your craft, in order to let anyone on the ground know that you’re an ally. We have a tendency to fire at foreign aircraft around here.
The Bush is still beautiful to me, even with all the junk that other countries have dumped. The deep camel colour of the dry, sandy ground stretches out as far as the eye can see, covered sporadically by hardy green shrubbery. Of course, everywhere there are dismembered engines, discarded tank and plane parts, anything that the US or European Militaries couldn’t make any use of anymore, but that they didn’t have room for in their own fills. We don’t mind the scraps they dump on us, but it does strike a nerve when they decide to have “let’s clean out our ancient nuclear silo” parties. That we’re not so partial to.
Daddy used to tell me stories when I was little of Australia before the War. He would talk about Sydney, about the famous Opera House, of going to see rugby matches, surf boat races, museums and the like. He met my mother in Sydney, when it was still a live city, on Bondi Beach.
Right after the War, when everyone was still freaked by the Medusa bombs and science in general, when everyone was getting into the whole Theocracy thing, Australia didn’t follow in suit. A vast majority of the federal parliament was Atheist, as it was very trendy in Aussie at the time, and they wanted no such thing. Everyone else got very huffy, and at first they were just displeased.
The US struck first. They put an embargo on all trade from Australia. Japan, of course, sequentially boycotted us, and there went our two biggest trading partners. After that, all countries refused to trade with Australia. We thought for a while that we might be okay, that we could work it out. If more people became farmers, we could support our population. After all, we had barely twenty five million people on the whole continent. They would just leave us alone, and we’d scrape by.
We were wrong.
After the trade embargoes came the air raids. For a people who had supposedly declared that science was the root of all evil, the sure didn’t seem to mind using it against us. Everyday, more than two hundred new attacks were reported in each major city. Then came the bombing. To say they bombed the shit out of us would be an understatement. Day in and day out for over a month they ravaged Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Darwin. This, of course, absolutely annihilated the LINK nodes.
We were virtually defenseless; how were we supposed to be able to stand up to Interpol, backed by the US, Europe, and India? Without the LINK, people fled from here like plankton from the whale. There was an average of thirty thousand people jumping ship each week.
So now, seventeen years later, there’s a little over sixteen thousand people still here. The government no longer exists, so there are no laws, really; everyone lives by their own rules. As such, we’ve become a bit of a safe haven for adherents of the outlawed religions, scientists, and, within the last six years, wire wizards.
A team of wire wizards still left here called Jackaroo assembled in ‘66 with the express purpose of getting the major nodes back online. Since then, they’ve gotten Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide up, and they’re working on Brisbane and Perth. Perth will be the one that will make me happiest; I have the easiest access to it, as it’s the closest. The rest of the world be damned, Australia is coming back.
A Groundtank is grinding away at the dry earth beneath me. Mate hops into view. “They are accessing your craft ID tag. Jam signal?”
“Nah,” I reply. “Let ‘em access it. The tag on here is still for the Australian Air Force. If they care enough about who I am, they’ll drop me a line.”
Sure enough, another of the swiveling display monitors in the pit flashes to life, and I pull it toward me. Mate hops from the main display to this communications screen, where their message comes up through the Airtank’s system as an archaic, Java-based chat applet. The Military used to run on Java instead of the LINK because enemies would expect them to be on the LINK, and would be befuddled when they found no evidence of LINK connection between soldiers.
“Accept message?” Mate asks.
“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, put it through.”
Military ID#3047896: Unidentified Airtank, do you copy?
Huh, so they haven’t put a personal ID on their craft either. I was just lazy. What if they’re part of the Phantom Patrol? I thought that was just a legend. On principle, foreign soldiers don’t set foot on Australian soil, as if they’re afraid the lawless and godlessness will rub off on them or something. But there’s urban legends about religious fanatics who come looking to kill those of us that are still here, nicknamed the Phantom Patrol. They fix up discarded Australian Military vehicles and go around massacring people. A sudden nervous shiver runs up my spine. That tank is probably packing more than me, and they can fire up, while I would have to maneuver and lose serious time before I would be able to shoot at them.
“Would you like to run this through your LINK connection?” Mate asks.
“No, I can be tracked if I connect to the LINK. Are they using their LINK connection or are they routing this conversation through the tank?”
“This conversation is being run through the Groundtank’s communications system.”
“We’ll just stay on an even playing field then, shall we? Machine to machine.”
Military ID#6703321: Yeah, I copy.
Military ID#3047869: How’s the view from up there?
I breathe a sigh of relief. This is a signal to let me know that they are friendly, and their way of discreetly asking if I am.
Military ID#6703321: Just incredible, mate.
Military ID#3047869: Is that a relief. We heard rumors of a Phantom Patrol attack in Oodnadatta and have been kinda edgy ever since.
Military ID#6703321: I hear that. I just hope that the Phantom Patrol crap really is bullshit, you know?
Military ID#3047869: Don’t we all? Safe flight, mate.
Military ID#6703321: Good luck, and whatever higher power be with you.
Military ID#3047869: None, my friend, that’s why we’re here.
I smile to myself as the connection terminates.