Cyberpunk short story: Phlashpoint
I wrote a short story today; it's a rough edit, but it might be interesting:
The rain bombarded the glass panels as red and blue light scattered across the face of the edifice. The sounds of thunder and precipitation concealed the quiet clattering of weapons and the muffled sobs of the hostages within the office, sitting in a circle facing inwards with their hands secured. The assailants moved in a noise pattern, rotating amongst the darkened cubicles randomly to throw off any attempts at sniping. The list of demands stretched on for pages, but the choice of hostages would be their undoing. None of the hostages were of particular import, and though their families would mourn their passing if the attempt went wrong, our refusal to concede to terrorists necessitated a violent resolution.
I pressed myself flat against the roof, the water standing against my body wetting my armored vest and flooding against my chest. I ignored the sensation, and let myself slip into the digital network which bound the building together. One of the hostages had an accessible video feed, but he saw nothing important and I was unable to communicate with him according to my operational protocols, so I simply reached out to the various machines in the office. The attackers had chosen their location poorly; while they had eliminated the security cameras, there were plenty of computers that I could reach into and assert my influence. The corporate firewalls were no match for my intrusion, and the computers quietly flickered to life, giving me their cameras for eyes and their microphones for ears. I assembled the data, letting the floor of the office lay itself out.
There were five attackers, rotating in a randomly generated pattern. While it would be impossible to predict where they would go, I could pinpoint their locations at any given moment. Their gear was fairly drab, but utilitarian. Light military headware, probably surplus from some less stringent country, with fire-by-wire implants running into an eclectic mix of assault rifles, personal defense weapons, sidearms, and even a sniper rifle. They were loaded for bear, but frugally. Nothing they owned was more than ten years old, but nothing was newer than five, which means that they would be using first or second generation fire-by-wire firmware, and their headware was probably of a similar age.
I let myself grin and was disturbed by the water bombarding my teeth. I pulled myself back into the mission, focusing on the targets. The first target was a cakewalk; his gun was a fire-by-wire only, so all I had to do was flash his firmware with a custom driver, compiled to look enough like the proper driver until you instructed the gun to fire and the magazine ejected. He had no fire-by-wire sidearm, so he was as good as neutralized as I could do without manually disarming him; a simple timebomb virus in his headware would reset the system and flash the driver when I was ready to move in.
I slipped into the head of the second, and peered around. His eyes were his weakness; I could see through them, which means that I could shut them down. I prepared a wiper for his fire-by-wire system, and then uploaded a malicious variant of the lens driver for his cybereyes. I set up another time bomb, carefully synchronizing the begin time with the slight variation in the cerebral clocks in both attackers. The third assailant’s situation resembled the first, so I simply executed the same procedure, then crept into the fourth.
I let my sadism get the better of me, and reached my hand across his chest; a pacemaker kept him alive, but I could make that work against him with a moment’s notice. The particular model was supposed to be tamperproof, but there was a secret backdoor that I exploited through his monitoring system. He would still be functional, but with a simple attack on his fire-by-wire, I could knock out his primary weapon and hopefully in a panic he would fail to access his sidearm.
Number five was a more troublesome case. His intruder countermeasures actually warranted my attention, and I should have noticed something was up when he began to move towards the most secure location in the building. I thought I had managed a clean intrusion, looking like nothing more than spam from a decrepit junk server, but he saw through my masking. I arranged some nasty countermeasures, a reset followed by a nervous system overflow, the most obvious of the hacks, and dropped a timebomb on his doorstep so he would reset with the others.
I pulled myself upright on the rooftop. I would be working in a two man team, myself and a gun junkie from Public Defense, and he was officially the heavy weapons of the deal. I had run my own hacking bounced through his headware as a countermeasure, not because it was necessary but because anyone would think he was the actor, and that way I would go completely undetected. This was the one maneuver I made which actually impacted the situation. He stormed up from below, and I slipped in from above, silently removing one of the window panes before sending it falling fifty feet to the ground. Shots rang out, and the fifth assailant suppressed the stairwell as I neutralized the first two attackers. They were easily disarmed, and I slapped restraint units on them without the need for flashy gunplay or loud violence. I moved to silence the third when he drew his sidearm, an older revolver that was not fire-by-wire, and blasted a chunk of the cubicle wall beside me to polymer dust. I slid towards him bracing on my left knee and delivered a powerful kick with the right, sending the man flying back against the cubicle behind him.
The revolver clattered onto the ground, but the noise had alerted the other two terrorists to my presence, and I tossed the restraint unit haphazardly towards the man as I pulled myself to my feet. It chirruped cheerfully as it deployed, pinning the man and his hands so that he could not interfere. I drew my own weapon, a fire-by-wire bullpup PDW with a hard trigger for emergencies. The extra feature saved my life as my own fire-by-wire system complained, and only the lack of a dedicated magazine release on my weapon, being modded to support fire-by-wire rather than a more modern “no hands required” model, saved me from having to rapidly reload as the fourth target charged at me, swinging his now unloaded rifle like a club. He was gasping for breath and clearly distressed, but continued to press his assault while the fifth assailant navigated the cubicle farm to assist.
I fired three rounds through his chest, sending him reeling back, and followed with three more to his back and neck. I spun and the fifth terrorist was already charging. Neither my disruptions for his fire-by-wire or his nervous system had any effect, judging by the bullets raining down with a disturbing degree of accuracy, rounds pockmarking the cubicles and floors as I sprinted behind cover and kept moving. The fight became three dimensional; he and I both launched ourselves over cubicles, trading fire as we went. I emptied my magazine, the remaining rounds flying towards the attacker as his salvo reached me, sending me flailing wildly into a cubicle.
The hits were inconsequential; judging by my impact sensors, I had gotten hit six times in the left leg without serious damage to the internal components. I reviewed my combat logs to see if the target had been eliminated, but the low light rendered making such an assessment impossible. I pulled myself loose, shaking off the cables that embraced me as the cubicle wall groaned under the stress. The top of my right arm was bleeding from where a shard of glass from a now destroyed monitor had penetrated my armor, but otherwise I was unscathed. I hoped my opponent had less fortune in his injuries.
When I found the target, I was surprised. While I had clearly seen his firmware as belonging to an archaic grunt level military setup, he was fully cybered and his face was that of a very modern combat cyborg model I had seen in a test demonstration. The only reason he remained down was that my rounds had found a more effective resting place than his; bodily fluids both mechanical and organic oozed from the wounds in his chest, and a round lodged in the top of his spinal column told me why his glaring face was not matched with violent action.
I locked down my system, turning off all wireless communications. If he had spoofed me, he could very well be a hacker of a much higher paygrade. He opened his mouth to speak, and put a round from my pistol into his chin. While the round did little more than tarnish his appearance, the point was made. I deployed a restraint unit, and it bundled his incapable limbs. I walked over to a window and punched out a pane of glass. I tossed a blue flare down, flinching as the rain hit my arm. I walked back over to the cyborg and pressed his skull against the wall with my left hand. Three microtools crept through the subtle crevices in his exposed headgear and physically disabled his wireless protocols.
I sent a message to my superiors, letting them know that the building was secure and a hostage rescue team could enter to clean up, then went to find my fallen ally. He was plastered against a wall, his rifle discarded by his side, magazine on the floor. He had been shredded by the torrent of bullets from the fifth terrorist, who had moved when I had hacked into his systems. I withdrew from the field, retreating to the rooftop.
I wrote a short story today; it's a rough edit, but it might be interesting:
The rain bombarded the glass panels as red and blue light scattered across the face of the edifice. The sounds of thunder and precipitation concealed the quiet clattering of weapons and the muffled sobs of the hostages within the office, sitting in a circle facing inwards with their hands secured. The assailants moved in a noise pattern, rotating amongst the darkened cubicles randomly to throw off any attempts at sniping. The list of demands stretched on for pages, but the choice of hostages would be their undoing. None of the hostages were of particular import, and though their families would mourn their passing if the attempt went wrong, our refusal to concede to terrorists necessitated a violent resolution.
I pressed myself flat against the roof, the water standing against my body wetting my armored vest and flooding against my chest. I ignored the sensation, and let myself slip into the digital network which bound the building together. One of the hostages had an accessible video feed, but he saw nothing important and I was unable to communicate with him according to my operational protocols, so I simply reached out to the various machines in the office. The attackers had chosen their location poorly; while they had eliminated the security cameras, there were plenty of computers that I could reach into and assert my influence. The corporate firewalls were no match for my intrusion, and the computers quietly flickered to life, giving me their cameras for eyes and their microphones for ears. I assembled the data, letting the floor of the office lay itself out.
There were five attackers, rotating in a randomly generated pattern. While it would be impossible to predict where they would go, I could pinpoint their locations at any given moment. Their gear was fairly drab, but utilitarian. Light military headware, probably surplus from some less stringent country, with fire-by-wire implants running into an eclectic mix of assault rifles, personal defense weapons, sidearms, and even a sniper rifle. They were loaded for bear, but frugally. Nothing they owned was more than ten years old, but nothing was newer than five, which means that they would be using first or second generation fire-by-wire firmware, and their headware was probably of a similar age.
I let myself grin and was disturbed by the water bombarding my teeth. I pulled myself back into the mission, focusing on the targets. The first target was a cakewalk; his gun was a fire-by-wire only, so all I had to do was flash his firmware with a custom driver, compiled to look enough like the proper driver until you instructed the gun to fire and the magazine ejected. He had no fire-by-wire sidearm, so he was as good as neutralized as I could do without manually disarming him; a simple timebomb virus in his headware would reset the system and flash the driver when I was ready to move in.
I slipped into the head of the second, and peered around. His eyes were his weakness; I could see through them, which means that I could shut them down. I prepared a wiper for his fire-by-wire system, and then uploaded a malicious variant of the lens driver for his cybereyes. I set up another time bomb, carefully synchronizing the begin time with the slight variation in the cerebral clocks in both attackers. The third assailant’s situation resembled the first, so I simply executed the same procedure, then crept into the fourth.
I let my sadism get the better of me, and reached my hand across his chest; a pacemaker kept him alive, but I could make that work against him with a moment’s notice. The particular model was supposed to be tamperproof, but there was a secret backdoor that I exploited through his monitoring system. He would still be functional, but with a simple attack on his fire-by-wire, I could knock out his primary weapon and hopefully in a panic he would fail to access his sidearm.
Number five was a more troublesome case. His intruder countermeasures actually warranted my attention, and I should have noticed something was up when he began to move towards the most secure location in the building. I thought I had managed a clean intrusion, looking like nothing more than spam from a decrepit junk server, but he saw through my masking. I arranged some nasty countermeasures, a reset followed by a nervous system overflow, the most obvious of the hacks, and dropped a timebomb on his doorstep so he would reset with the others.
I pulled myself upright on the rooftop. I would be working in a two man team, myself and a gun junkie from Public Defense, and he was officially the heavy weapons of the deal. I had run my own hacking bounced through his headware as a countermeasure, not because it was necessary but because anyone would think he was the actor, and that way I would go completely undetected. This was the one maneuver I made which actually impacted the situation. He stormed up from below, and I slipped in from above, silently removing one of the window panes before sending it falling fifty feet to the ground. Shots rang out, and the fifth assailant suppressed the stairwell as I neutralized the first two attackers. They were easily disarmed, and I slapped restraint units on them without the need for flashy gunplay or loud violence. I moved to silence the third when he drew his sidearm, an older revolver that was not fire-by-wire, and blasted a chunk of the cubicle wall beside me to polymer dust. I slid towards him bracing on my left knee and delivered a powerful kick with the right, sending the man flying back against the cubicle behind him.
The revolver clattered onto the ground, but the noise had alerted the other two terrorists to my presence, and I tossed the restraint unit haphazardly towards the man as I pulled myself to my feet. It chirruped cheerfully as it deployed, pinning the man and his hands so that he could not interfere. I drew my own weapon, a fire-by-wire bullpup PDW with a hard trigger for emergencies. The extra feature saved my life as my own fire-by-wire system complained, and only the lack of a dedicated magazine release on my weapon, being modded to support fire-by-wire rather than a more modern “no hands required” model, saved me from having to rapidly reload as the fourth target charged at me, swinging his now unloaded rifle like a club. He was gasping for breath and clearly distressed, but continued to press his assault while the fifth assailant navigated the cubicle farm to assist.
I fired three rounds through his chest, sending him reeling back, and followed with three more to his back and neck. I spun and the fifth terrorist was already charging. Neither my disruptions for his fire-by-wire or his nervous system had any effect, judging by the bullets raining down with a disturbing degree of accuracy, rounds pockmarking the cubicles and floors as I sprinted behind cover and kept moving. The fight became three dimensional; he and I both launched ourselves over cubicles, trading fire as we went. I emptied my magazine, the remaining rounds flying towards the attacker as his salvo reached me, sending me flailing wildly into a cubicle.
The hits were inconsequential; judging by my impact sensors, I had gotten hit six times in the left leg without serious damage to the internal components. I reviewed my combat logs to see if the target had been eliminated, but the low light rendered making such an assessment impossible. I pulled myself loose, shaking off the cables that embraced me as the cubicle wall groaned under the stress. The top of my right arm was bleeding from where a shard of glass from a now destroyed monitor had penetrated my armor, but otherwise I was unscathed. I hoped my opponent had less fortune in his injuries.
When I found the target, I was surprised. While I had clearly seen his firmware as belonging to an archaic grunt level military setup, he was fully cybered and his face was that of a very modern combat cyborg model I had seen in a test demonstration. The only reason he remained down was that my rounds had found a more effective resting place than his; bodily fluids both mechanical and organic oozed from the wounds in his chest, and a round lodged in the top of his spinal column told me why his glaring face was not matched with violent action.
I locked down my system, turning off all wireless communications. If he had spoofed me, he could very well be a hacker of a much higher paygrade. He opened his mouth to speak, and put a round from my pistol into his chin. While the round did little more than tarnish his appearance, the point was made. I deployed a restraint unit, and it bundled his incapable limbs. I walked over to a window and punched out a pane of glass. I tossed a blue flare down, flinching as the rain hit my arm. I walked back over to the cyborg and pressed his skull against the wall with my left hand. Three microtools crept through the subtle crevices in his exposed headgear and physically disabled his wireless protocols.
I sent a message to my superiors, letting them know that the building was secure and a hostage rescue team could enter to clean up, then went to find my fallen ally. He was plastered against a wall, his rifle discarded by his side, magazine on the floor. He had been shredded by the torrent of bullets from the fifth terrorist, who had moved when I had hacked into his systems. I withdrew from the field, retreating to the rooftop.
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