StarFall Comics
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Metal Fire
#10 False Maria 04
Kimberly Roberts' attempts to hide from the people who helped strip away her humanity have failed. Hamilton's clandestine engineers have been using modem connections to remotely connect to her computerized brain and rewrite her personality. The only person who can help her now is a computer hacker named Ed, who she's violently kidnapped and brutally beaten to an inch of his life.
The following evening, Gregory and his two programming cohorts were back in the office. The two techs were fiddling with their systems, trying their best to pretend not to be interested in Gregory escorting his well-mannered and menacing guest into the privacy of his side office.
"So," Poe dropped, as Gregory closed the door behind them. Poe stepped off to one side, relaxed and casual but for one hand up behind his back. Gregory slowly walked to his desk, hovering over his office chair but not actually sitting down. He waited for Poe to continue. He wondered if Poe kept a gun tucked at his back.
"So," Poe repeated.
"I think... I think we're done," said Gregory, trying to put on his official authoritative meeting voice, the one he used in meetings with his staff. It came off a little higher pitched than he remembered it. "Whoever... whoever woke it up, they had to have seen what we were doing. And, it must know what we were doing. Like I told Mr. Hamilton over the phone, I... I don't think it'll risk going back online again anytime soon."
"Mr. Reeves, Mr. Hamilton does not believes this project is over," Poe put bluntly. He nodded at Gregory, indicating he should sit back down. "We will all wait tonight and see if Metal Fire returns back to regular schedule." Gregory almost managed to interject before Poe cut him off with a well-trained glare. "If it does...if it comes back online, we'll be here to act. We'll see if we can correct this."
"What if it doesn't?" Gregory asked.
Poe looked Gregory over grimly. He did not answer.
"I don't like this."
Ed ignored the sentence. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe if he just kept working this time...
"I don't like this! I really, really don't," it growled, and yanked the fist full of wires and cables from the back of its head. The jacks made a sharp popping sound as they came out, and Ed's screens all suddenly went black again.
Dammit. Ed sighed. Then he winced, a couple ribs letting him know he probably should be in a hospital.
"It's fucking creepy," the silvery form sitting beside him said, dropping the bundle of wires to the ground. "That's my brain you're looking at. My brain and I don't like it when Hamilton is looking at it and I don't like it when YOU'RE looking at it."
Ed couldn't help but stare as the metal girl stood suddenly, and stomped back to the bathroom. To try and look at the back of its neck in the mirror. Again. It felt the base of its skull, like the gold plated connections back there were dried scabs that could be rubbed off.
Half of him couldn't help but notice a teenage girl. A well developed fifteen-year-old girl. Well, fifteen by what it claimed, anyway. Fifteen, and not shy about walking around this decrepit apartment with no clothes on while a complete stranger sat watching it.
But the other half of him saw the interlinked metal where the smooth pink skin should be. He saw the closed vents running down its back. He heard the near silent spinning and whizzing of hidden motors that made up the insides. He knew this girl would never grow up.
Because he knew it wasn't a real girl.
But it was glaring back at him. Pissed off for staring, Ed could see it in the television flicker in her eyes. Something about it reminded him of the opening of the Outer Limits.
"This was a mistake," it said, coming out of the bathroom, all washed over with frustration and anger and stubbornness. Arms crossed over her chest. "You need a doctor. And I don't need anyone in my head. I know what they're doing now. All I need to do is stay disconnected, and the can't get to me anymore."
Oh great, this again. "We don't know that," Ed tried, calmly.
"If I'm not connected, they can't put me to sleep."
"We don't know that for sure," he tried. This was the third time he's had to convince it to let him connect up. He felt like he was explaining networking protocols to a pocket calculator. "Look, before you smashed... before you showed up at my place, you called me. A second before you showed up. How did you do that?"
It opened its mouth to retort, and then shut it again, as realization drowned her stubbornness.
"See, there!" said Ed pointing. "That's at least some sort of mobile in there. Most likely hooked up to a cellular modem. And that's not even counting WiFi or Bluetooth or whatever else. I need to find this stuff." He sighed, and continued "Look, even if they connect, I'll be right here. I'll make sure they don't do anything. You'll just be sleeping..."
"It's not just sleeping," it yelled at him. "These are guys fucking with my head. And they can put me to sleep, and they can come here while I sleep and do anything they want because they can turn me off like a VCR!"
"Look..." Ed started before getting cut off.
"You don't know these guys. For sure they know someone's here with me. Maybe not you, but they know someone's here. If I'm back on, and they... they shut me off again, they'll send someone. They'll know I can't stop them if they can watch me sleep online." A frown, deadly serious. "These are not nice people. These are straightforward; shoot you in the back kind of people. I've met them before. They will come in here and shoot you dead. They'll shoot you dead, and I'll be right here doing nothing... 'cause I'll be asleep, having my brain defragged or whatever it is they're doing!"
"Okay, okay," he conceded, putting his head in his hands, digging the heels of his palms into his closed eyes. That didn't last long, as a jab of pain from a swollen cheek reminded him he was actually in pretty bad shape. That hospital idea wasn't sounding overly bad.
He wasn't cut out for the action, thriller crap. This wasn't going to work. He couldn't concentrate if he knew there were fucking gunmen coming to kill him. Hell, even if she was wrong and no one came, Ed was sure he'd die of sheer paranoia right now.
He could almost hear Val's I-told-you-so's.
But he needed it online. He needed it at least connected. To see how it all worked, how that fantastic operating system managed. He needed direct access to the system for a prolonged period. If anything to, find any way of shutting that network hole.
Assuming he could even make heads or tails whatever he found.
Jeez, this would be much easier if...
If...
Ed stopped. He turned, looking at the robot. Then he looked back at the spare systems at his feet, currently doing little more than running iTunes and filling a couple widescreen monitors with beat matched screensavers. Then back at the robot.
He clicked his tongue a couple times, thinking. Okay. Okay, yeah, this might work. "I have an idea," he announced, "but you're not going to like it."
"Why not?"
"Well..." he said with a combination of caution and wicked anticipation, "If you thought people dialling in and mucking around with your brain like it was an open source project was creepy, this is going to really freak you out."
A knock on the office door, and one of the programmers poked his head in.
"Greg? You wanted to know when she came back online?" Gregory stood up, relief bunching up in his throat, and followed the kid back to the computers.
"Everything's on schedule," said the tech, sitting at his desk, and bringing up a terminal window. "I have the regular network connection, I'm getting good responses. I've already sent the shutdown command and you can see, the upper and lower consciousness numbers are coming down. There's some suspicious activity in some areas, but that's expected to be expected from last night."
The two of them watched the crawling characters on screen. The other programmer across the room was tapping away on his keyboard; get updates on a variety of processes.
"Bring everything down," Greg said, biting his lower lip. He slid over to and empty terminal, and logged in, getting a mirror of the system outputs. "Put everything in standby or sleep. Everything, the whole system. If we can figure out what happened..."
"Can you erase what happened last night?" Poe asked.
"Well..." Gregory started, confused, but already seeing how it would come together. "Well, yes. I mean, it's just system logs, after all. We could just copy some of last week's non-activity files over anything referencing last night..."
"Don't explain it to me. I won't understand it anyway. Just go ahead." Poe snapped open an expensive cellphone, and hit redial. A single ring later, a muttered party answered. "It's me," replied Poe to the other end. "Round up some reliable people and get over to the Roberts apartment. There are one or more visitors there that we need evicted." A pause. "I'll stay on the line."
Gregory must have been staring at the man for a while. Poe eventually looked in his direction, still on the cell phone, and then covered the microphone as he whispered to him.
"Eyes to your screen, Mr. Reeves," he chastised.
Jackson jacked the headpiece to the cellphone on his belt, then made sure the microphone was near enough to his mouth. He couldn't help a bit of nerd-like glee; a few years ago, this sort of communication was restricted to spy novels. Now anyone could pick better equipment for his or her mobile at a local electronics shop.
After confirming he still had his live connection to Poe, he repeated what he was there to do for benefit of the other two grim looking men in the van. Go up, grab whoever's up there; remember to keep silent, or they may attempt to revive the robot; preferably alive for questioning, but not a priority.
All three nodded in agreement.
Jackson opened the side door of the van, and the three of them crossed the street to the dark apartment building. Using a provided set of keys, they unlocked the front door, and quietly filed in. The windows were boarded up, the lights long broken or burnt away. The only light was the filtered moonlight through the cracks in the sills and the walls and the doors.
Once inside and out of sight of the street, all three men unzipped their jackets and pulled out large pistols they were obviously very comfortable in using. Jackson put a finger to his lips, and pointed down the hall toward a winding set of stairs.
"We're inside," Jackson reported over the phone. He then looked at the other two and nodded up at the ceiling as they reached the base of the stairs "It's on the third floor. Keep quiet until we're right outside the door."
"Did you see that?" one of the men in the front whispered. The three of them looked up at the first landing, where the startled gunman was pointing his pistol. "Did you just fucking see that?"
"What - what did you see?" Jackson said, looking up to the next landing.
"I saw something move up there," the man rasped nervously, cocking the gun. "It looked like that thing in the jungle in that movie... Jeez, there it was again!" he stepped back suddenly. The others staggered back suddenly, pistols ram rod straight at the stairs, pointing at nothing.
Poe was buzzing in his ear, but Jackson wasn't listening. He thought he saw it too. There seemed to be a weird roundness to the nothing up the stairs. Like the peeling paint on the walls weren't... quite flat. It was hard to make out, but you could catch it in the corner of your eye when... when it moved?
It was moving! It was moving right at them! The man at his right shivered! Two shots went out at the shape.
There was a spark of a ricochet, bullets bouncing wildly off metal. For that brief second, the distorted emptiness flickered to television static. Two red flickering points and a lithe steel form before a scan line wiped it back to dark nothingness.
"Oh fuck," Jackson managed. The three of them fired blindly at the stairs. Between the gun flashes, the thud of shots drilling into old wood, the sharp scratch of that flickering static when they connected, they heard only a nasty giggle from the near invisible teenager.
"Jackson? Jackson? ... REEVES!"
"What?" jumped Gregory, spinning from his screen and knocking over a small pile of printout.
"What's going on?" Poe barked. He had his hand over the cellphone, but Gregory could still hear a massive amount of commotion coming from the other end.
"What's going on with what?"
"You said she was asleep!"
"She is asleep," Greg replied, confused. He pushed back in his seat, giving Poe a clearer look at his screen. Not, as an afterthought, that it would make much sense to him, of course. The other techs craned their necks, and then looked at their own screens in confusion. "She's completely shutdown and immobile."
Poe furrowed his brows, and thrust the cellphone at Gregory's direction. There were sounds of men yelling, sporadic gunfire, and science fiction laser effects. Disturbing crunching, cracking sounds, all of which were filtering through a tinny sounding speaker.
"My men beg to differ..."
Ed sat in the dark apartment, only the computer screens and funny scented candles the robot liked keeping him company. He had two keyboards in front of him, and he pounded away at both of them with abandon. Despite the expected danger, he could help grinning as he worked away.
On his right, he had a couple terminal windows going. He was backtracking the intruders' connection and tip-toeing right past the intruders firewalls. He was sweating with a mix of concentration and anticipation. Whoever these guys were, they were very, very good, and Ed had to be very, very careful they didn't see him crawling around.
Once inside, he parsed through their system to their versioning software. He marvelled at the sheer amount of information they had. They'd been at this for months! Wow! A backlog of applied patches, several copies of previous system, ready to be re-installed in case of a fatal crash, a planned upgrade path, complete with milestones and due dates! Everything you'd need to work on a clandestine artificial intelligence!
A quick look at the system clock reminded him he couldn't afford to browse around. He skipped right into the directory structure, looking for the source code for the Metal Fire networking module. As he started a WGET on the appropriate TAR files, he stole a moment to look at the monitors on his left, hooked up to the spare systems grinding away. The spare systems the intruders were hacking into.
The systems they thought was the head of a shutdown mobile weapon. Ha!
It hadn't been easy to convince the robot. Just bringing up that its brain was anything but flesh and blood got it nauseous; it almost threw up when he pointed out that Hamilton's programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the operating system in its skull... or a copy of that operating system running on one of the tower boxes at his feet.
It had taken him almost two hours to convince it there wasn't any other way. Not that that was completely true, mind you. They could always run. He could have gone through the BBS' logs and might have been able to backtrack. It was possible they would have been online waiting for a connection. It might have meant risking a day or two lying low, but Ed was pretty sure he could have found them eventually.
But he was curious. And he really wanted a stand-alone copy of that AI system. Hell, once they got started, he was surprised at how easily it configured itself, the hypnotic user interface gliding over the relatively primitive hardware and echoing its parents' configurations as best as it could. Just watching it go through the motions of responding to Hamilton's programmers was amazing!
The snapping gunfire a couple floors below shook him up.
Crap. He turned back to the screens on the right. He tried to ignore the pounding and cracking. He tried to ignore the yelling and shouts coming from downstairs. He especially tried to stop imagining the noises coming any closer.
It didn't last long, though, and was eventually replaced by an ongoing groaning, like from some sickly animal that was mangled in the underside of a car. He was turning up the volume on the music player it when his downloaded beeped its completion.
Okay. Okay, we don't need you boys anymore, he thought as he sent back down the pipe a couple particularly nasty lines of code. This was the same code that had cooked his laptop a night or two before. If his experience was any indication, they'd be lucky to be able to get power to their computers, never mind doing anything more complicated than adding integers.
The terminal windows sputtered disastrous feedback, spit trash characters randomly as the computers on the other end fell apart. He smiled, satisfied, as he watched files and folders on the other end corrupt and regurgitate, and finally blinking off completely. The connections to the robot's OS copy quietly disappeared.
"Bu-bye, assholes," Ed waved to his screen.
Gregory sat dumbfounded, staring at his blank screen. Everything was gone. Everything. The other two techs were swearing aloud, slamming on their keyboards. He must have been staring dumbfounded at his own useless, infected hardware for a while because he had completely forgot about Poe. Until the man heaved a disappointed sigh, and closed this cellphone with a plastic clack.
"Mr. Reeves, can you and I have a private conversation in your office?"
The question was much too curt to be taken as an actual request. Poe walked to the side office and held open the door as Gregory slowly got up out of his chair. He took a moment to look over the faces of the two younger programmers, their expressions mirroring his own; paralysed fear. He sulked into his dreary, off white office, and sank into the guest chair as Poe closed the door behind them.
"This isn't my fault," he started suddenly. "This isn't my fault. This was never anticipated! There was never supposed to be someone with... if we knew...if we were told, we would have... we would have planned for..."
Poe said nothing, but did tilt his head at the last sentence.
"I didn't mean it was your fault," Gregory said desperately, one hand gripping the arm of his chair as if it would back him up in this matter. "I just meant... I mean, I don't think... anyone knew this was going to..." He choked on the words for a long couple seconds, then finally managed to squeak out "God, you're not going to kill me, are you?"
Poe smirked. "I'm not going to kill you."
"...Really?" Gregory rattled his fingers against the chair arm a second. "Oh." His nervousness didn't go away, if anything, it became worse by the sudden lack of direction. "Um. So... so then we're okay?"
"After a fashion," Poe said. Gregory flinched violently when Poe moved his hand from behind his back. He didn't seem relieved when he saw a fat envelope instead of a pistol.
"The remainder of your fee, Mr. Reeves." Gregory looked confused for a second, and Poe went on somewhat reassuringly "As you said, these events were not your fault."
Gregory silently took the envelope, his fear and nervousness replaced with stuttered confusion. This was not how he imagined outright failure to be rewarded.
"Tomorrow morning," Poe lectured, "an accountant for your company will suddenly discover a rather well hidden but massive financial irregularity. After a short investigation, they will discover large amounts of money have been illegally funnelled away from where it's supposed to be. Unfortunately, all the paperwork they'll find will plant the blame firmly on you."
"What...?"
"Come, Mr. Reeves," smiled Poe smiled pleasantly, obviously enjoying Gregory's mix of terror and confusion. "How did you think we were paying you?" He let the matter sink in before continuing.
"Mr. Hamilton would like you to continue working on the I-Form project. You'd be working with Dr. Anabali, who is looking forward to your hearing of your practical experience with the fully evolved I-Form. You will have a new working environment, a new place to live, a carefully constructed alias to avoid complications, and, let us not forget, protection from a sure to be furious Metal Fire.
"If you refuse..." Poe stopped, looking at his manicured fingernails, as it would hold a particularly witty phrase, "Take my word, prison is not a comfortable way to pass time."
The shock held onto Gregory like a deep limestone core, being eroded away by a feeling of inevitable defeat. He looked up at Poe, considering how to respond, but after minutes of silence, he saw there was no need. Poe knew what Gregory's answer was going to be. After all, that was the point of the blackmail.
"Don't worry, Mr Reeves," Poe said reassuringly in a tone that was not reassuring at all. "This is only beginning."
Author's Notes!
So, last issue was the third part of this four part story. It was also the issue written in that 'burst', with this issue coming almost five years later. Hm, I think I said all that before in the last Notes. Oh well, it's not like I actually read this stuff anyway :P
So, here's the issue I'm most... well, I wouldn't say "worried"; I wouldn't have posted it if I wasn't happy with it. It's the issue I expect to be the most out of place. Because of teh time between writing issue nine and writing issue ten, any momentum I gained in terms of plotting, of theme, of getting used to characters, etc is whoosh out the window. I may as well be finishing off some other writer's arc.
I think this is clear in two places, in my humble "I'm completely talking out of my ass as I have no idea how to properly analyze any written work, never mind my own work" -iness. The wrapping up of this arc, and the characterization.
As I've more or less admitted in previous notes, I have no technical knowledge in terms of writing fiction. I didn't even take any creative writing courses in high school. Other than Jack M Bickham's 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them), my whole education in becoming an author has been reading novels and comics and thinking "hell, I can do better than that". :) Personally, I think some of my more interesting phrasing and sentence structures are born of the fact my grammar is horrendous and I have no idea how to proper put together a sentence.
So, in regards of this issue, I was not surprised when I realized I wasn't actually sure how to tie off an arc, resolve immediate plot elements, and keep the impression there will be more without adding some sort of blunt "never fear, this series is not over yet" sentence.
So I had Poe actually say a blunt "never fear, this series is not over yet" sentence. Sigh :)
Also, writing this, I noticed I was pretty comfortable with introducing elements and setting things up. Then I noticed I wasn't so certain on how to provide a satisfactry resolution! So the end of this arc may come across as very clumsy. Look, they're working together now! Look, gunmen are after them now! Look, Eddy beats the other hackers! Look, Kimberly beats the gunmen! Look, Reeve is done for now! That's the climax right? Right, yes, that was it! Whee!
The next arc is just two issues, setting up the status quo. Being little but set up for "how things are" between Ed and Kim and Hamilton, I expect to have more fun figuring out how to give a satisfying "that's all folks" to the reader. Hey, at least Val will appear again for a bit :)
Speaking of characters... argh! Poe, as far as I can tell, is still flat! He had the personality of a cardboard cutout with a gun taped to it. Hell, I probably could have replaced him with a cardboard cutout with a gun taped to it, and only changed the story by reducing some cumbersome dialogue. I was in the second draft of this issue when I finally figured out where I was going with Poe. So, next arc, hopefully both him and Hamilton will fill out a bit. If not three dimensional, maybe at least a clever bevel on the edges :)
Ed may suffer a bit. I dunno, I like him, and I tried to get his portion consistant with the way I wrote him five years ago. I hope I got it right. More likely, there's a speed bump and a change, and eventually (in future issues) a return to how I was happy with him.
Kimberly's all over the place the whole arc anyway, so whatever :P
What else was I going to say... um...
Oh, two new things I tried! One, incorporating some of the thematic elements Tom encountered in issue seven. Two, introducing a sub plot element in the way Reeve, Poe, and Ed perceieve Kimberly. Usually, that's the sort of element that would work best as a subtle underpinning, but considering I threw it in four issues later, I expect it to be very in the face of the reader: "look, I'm trying to be clever and set something up for later"! It would probably work better if I wasn;t struggling with the other parts of the writing.
I lied, three things! I added a paragraph at the top that acts as a "this is where we are and what is happening now" intro to the issue. I can be thought of as the cover of the issue. It also will be picked up as text fed through the RSS, and therefore what will appear as the Excerpt on the RACC mirror site. Ah, see, I can be clever :P
Letters Page!
So not only did I forget to add these authors notes to issue ten, but a minute before I tack them on to the mailing list, Tom's review of issue nine comes in. Here it is.
Man, I am entirely spoiled by getting a detail examination of each issue. I'd just like to take this moment to acknowledge it, that I appreciate it, and to thank Tom for doing the favour... thanks Tom! :)
So, when I plot a story, I basically write it how I think would sound good to me. If I can come back a day or two later and I like the flow of it, then it's a second draft or a third draft to smooth out some sentences, tighten up somewordy places, add personailty, flavour, and such. Then, off to a friend to proofread, berate me on my genocidal grammar and spelling, and to get his opinion on how it falls together.
What's really great about Tom's detailed replies to the issues is he can point out why the issue sounds good to me. Pointing out how the story still worked well despite my reservations on the beats and the shift in view point. And explaining why it works. I learned a lot in his last three replies.
Now, the catch is to take it to heart without it going to my head :) Maybe I'll suffer for the improvement? I know of one or two novelists that, as their series contiunes, become better writers but poorer storytellers. It's like as if some of the "grudginess" of the earlier works were some of the appeal of they style.
The sentence thing... yes, I admit it :) I catch myself doing it too, sometimes. I pad out a sentence with what I think are clever or witty phrases until they've ballooned to three times the length. If I don't like the sound of a sentence, I'm more apt to throw more words at it before I try to improve it. The technical goobly-gok of the computer hacking and the description of Kimberly's robot point of view is where it most obvious. If you think it's bad now, you should see it before I go through it :P
Okay, enough for now! Thanks for reading all, thanks for your thoughts Tom, and I hope you like issue ten :)