TWO MONTHS EARLIER
'Atleran?'
'Here.'
'Avardi?'
'Here.'
'Bitman?'
Silence prompts the grey-haired holoteacher to scan the classroom with his lifeless eyes. 'Bitman?' repeats the hollow man, and a youth stirs in his seat, scowling.
'Here!'
'Boonell?'
Another youth stifles a yawn with her hand. 'Here, here.'
I almost yawn too. It's stuffy in here under the bright striplights. I'll swear the air-cons are sucking the oxygen right out of the classroom.
It's just after two o'clock on a Friday afternoon with the sunlight tilting in through the big windows, and we still have two dreary classes to get through. It feels like this school-week is never going to end.
All around me students try to control their impatience as time crawls - one slow second after another - towards the relative freedoms of the weekend. We're only three minutes into the enforced silence of the lesson, and already the students are starting to play with their hands or pick at their noses, fidgeting on seats that are constantly monitoring their life-signs for levels of alertness and attention. By the sounds of it a few of the chairs are already starting to buzz, vibrating under some flagging kid who's wandered off into a daydream - the plastic seat reshaping itself sharp and uncomfortable beneath their numb backside until the kid complies, sits up straighter, gets with the program with a sigh.
'Buller?
Once again there's another long silence in the room.
'Buller?' repeats the holoteacher. 'Buller? … Buller? … Buller?'
It sounds like his algorithms are caught in a loop.
'Ah, Farras got arrested for truancy,' pipes up the prettiest girl in the class. 'My best-friend's sister's boyfriend said he saw him getting dragged from his house last night by the cops.'
'Yeah,' drawls another girl. 'My bro was telling me they hauled him down to the psych ward for school-phobia or something. He says they've got Farras all zapped out on tranquillisers. I guess it must be pretty serious.'
'Thank you,' replies the teacher with all the impassiveness of a reanimated corpse. You'd think they could have spent a little money adding personality routines to these things.
'Filch? … Filch?'
A digital clock counts down from the allotted fifty lesson minutes. A camera stares at everyone from a high corner. The classroom walls are festooned with glittering holograms of Xmas decorations, since it's nearly that time of the year again to go crazy with shopping. A few strategically-placed 3V screens run suitably festive 'educational infoticements' on non-stop loops, selling products to products in the making.
'Henno?'
'Here.'
'Janit?'
'Here.'
God how I've come the loathe this place.
Five days now pretending to be a brow-beaten student at this corporate-run highschool, eating toxic canteen meals and sitting in classrooms as suffocating as mass graves, and I'm just about ready to eat my hand. Thank Chrizt this is my last day here, my last day in school ever again. All I have to do is finish downloading what I need to without interruption, then somehow make it through the next forty-five minutes of this Political Economics class, and I'm gone. Puff.
If nothing else, Orange Hill High has been an eye-popping experience for someone who had never even set foot inside a school before this week. Having been 'homeschooled' in the wilderness by my parents, I now know what mass schooling really involves. I now know what every kid has to go through on this Sprawl World that we humans call Plenty.
It's been easier than I was expecting, pretending to be a student here. I'm older than these kids by a few years, but they all look older anyway due to cosmetics and stress and bad diets, so I've hardly been standing out. My natural solitary tendencies have lent me credence too, not talking much beneath a hoody that I always keep pulled over my head whenever I'm in public, as shelter and protection from the social intensity of my own species.
What am I doing here? Why have I been putting myself through this hell for five long days now?
Because I'm looking for something that's been stolen.
I'm what they call a tracer in the Sprawl. A professional who retrieves all manner of things that have been stolen from other people - people who don't much like Law Enforcement's chances of getting it back for them, or who otherwise can't go to the cops. Stolen vehicles. Pets. Online identities. Drugs.
It's a living, though so far just barely. At least it beats punching the clock every day. Besides, I love doing it. I love all the hacking, the stealthing, the breaking and entering, and that's what counts, surely, if you're going to be spending half your time doing something like this and risking your neck in the process.
Right now, an online dealer of spaceweed is hiring me to get back a stolen haul of cryptocurrency, known as crips; three-hundred-thousand worth in Standard Credits, snatched from his online vending account by some lucky hacker who had somehow harvested his access codes. About an hour after I had accepted the job, I'd already traced the theft to the Wire access of this particular highchool. It looked like the lucky hacker was a highschooler who'd been accessing the anonymous Deep Wire through the school's public network. But the digital trail ended there.
So lacking any alternatives, I cracked into the school network and enrolled as a fake student.
The first day was fun, for about three and a half minutes. And then the bells went off and we were herded into a classroom filled with rows of desks, where I sat like everyone else at the instruction of a holoteacher - nothing but a tangle of light beams and digital coding projected from a lens - and the door closed shut with a soft hiss, and the roll call was taken, and then the slow litany of information began drip-dripping from the hologram's mouth in a rhythm that said, you are sleepy, sleepy, sleepy. The air grew stale. On the wall clock, just like now, the remaining lesson minutes slowly counted downwards. In the confinement of their seats, the kids started to fidget and fart.
It came to me how this was the very first class of a seven hour day, on the first day of a five-day week.
Dear god, I thought in sudden horror. What have I signed up for?
It's pretty much been downhill since then, at least in regards to what I've been learning about highschool. The tracing job has been fairly lousy too – mostly eavesdropping on student's conversations in order to get a read on the possible hacker, which isn't nearly as interesting as I'd thought it would be. There are a lot of kids in this place, and they all seem pretty closed-mouth about things. They don't give much away. Maybe it's all the cameras with their microphone pickups. And the armed security guards who seem to tower everywhere the kids are gathered in numbers. And the constant rumours of paid student informants (snitches) and uncover cops. And the arrests of their peers in front of everyone for smoking, swapping downloads, sharing 'extremist' views, talking back to their holoteachers.
Yesterday, I was all for ditching this plan of mine and coming up with something more direct. But then I had a stroke of luck.
I finally traced my suspect down.
I knew it was him when I spotted the kid scrawling >>>Animal<<< on a desk leg during a Customer Relations class - which is the kind of style a young hacker might use to write his handle online. It wasn't much to go on, but then I noticed the small scanpatch on his bag for the CryptoNation. He's too young to be a citizen of the CryptoNation – I know, because I had to wait until I was eighteen before I could become a citizen myself. But it was another clue.
Some sniffing on the Wire confirmed what I already knew in my guts. >>>Animal<<< was a budding hacker who boasted of small-scale rip-offs to his pals on the hacking boards of the Deep Wire. Usually small thefts of cryptocurrency from scammer merchants of illegal goods. Though I was intrigued to see that >>>Animal<<< also claimed to support the Resistance in his hacking too.
The guy is sitting in front of me right now, in the next row over. He's the one who answered the roll-call with a scowl, Dav Bitman.
The kid hardly looks like he's in possession of three-hundred-thousand Credits worth of crips. Neither does he look like a secret supporter of the Resistance. He just looks like a regular-sized fresh-faced youth in jeans and T-Shirt; someone clever enough to keep his head down when he needs to, maybe even sly enough to enjoy a little phone phreaking on the side, or cracking into the school's system to change his grades – but surely nothing heavier than that.
If I hadn't already found his stash of stolen cryptocurrency, I'd have started doubting my instincts by now. And doubting my instincts is something I really hate to do. But find the stolen crips I did, or at least the trace of them, and where they went to – right there in his bag, on his personal Slate. Within the Slate's frozen memory, the stolen crips are being held inside a virtual crypto-safe, suitably called Animal's Hungry Piggy Bank, which itself is contained inside a firewalled space that can't be accessed from the Wire.
That's why I'm sitting here now, with my own Slate running in stealth mode on my lap beneath the desk, hidden from sight of the holoteacher and the camera.
Even though the kid's Slate is in his bag, he's made the mistake of keeping it on low-power mode. So I can still access it through a short-range radio link known as a Fang connection – the kind of localised link-up that lets kids swap ringtones while they're slurping Slurpy Cola's together at lunchtimes. For the last five minutes I've been successfully hacking the device from where I'm sitting.
Bitman's virtual safe is firewalled behind layers of armour and front-ended by a poly-encrypted lock. I haven't even bothered trying to crack into it, since I'm getting paid by the day, not the decade. Instead, since the safe is a basic home-user affair, without all the super-sophisticated protections of a more advanced model, I've instead hacked my way into superuser access of his Slate, and from there I've used some sneaky parsing script to take a 'snapshot' of the entire shape of the virtual safe held in frozen memory. Now I'm downloading the whole thing onto my own Slate while erasing the original on his.
Essentially, I'm ripping out the safe from the wall.
To be continued ...
(cc) Creative Commons Licence BY-NC-NDThe High Wild is a passion project that I'm releasing on Steemit as I write it. The artwork is my own. With the support of readers, I'd like to release a High Wild novella as a free ebook when it's finished, under the Creative Commons license. Please consider supporting the project by Upvoting and Following, or give a TIP for the author's efforts! Cheers.
