<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #53

Cass made it back to the hotel first. Fede and Cessus came later, having changed clothes in a tiny public porta-potty before vanishing with the slowly dissipating crowds. The media frenzy was in full swing by the time they left, but the ambulances that came and went told them enough. They’d seen Xing come out with Marcus, carried on a pair of stretchers hooked together. Everyone had ignored each other. That much, at least, had been prearranged.

Now they stood in the doorway; worried, tired, and scared. Cass sat on the bed, stabbing at the tiny monitor hanging on the wall in front of her, flipping through feeds.

“What?” she asked.

“You get it?” asked Cessus. Cass held up her hand. It was wrapped in thick wads of toilet paper, bloody. She turned and picked up something heavy, tossed it to him.

“Enjoy it” she said, and turned back to the terminal.

Cessus hefted the old magnetic drive in one hand. He and Fede looked at each other.

“What the fuck is this?” he asked.

“A disk drive. Circa 2000. That idiot had an ancient machine without a single current port on it. Xing’s toy was useless and there was no way I could have made it out of there carrying the case it came in”.

“So you unscrewed it and pulled this out?” asked Fede.

“No” she said, standing up and brushing past them on her way to the bathroom. “I didn’t have a screwdriver.”

Tonx was on his way in, wiping his hands on his pants as she went out, and he gave her a wide berth.

“Hey” he said. “Think you can do anything with that?”

“This is ancient” said Cessus, still standing by the doorway. “I haven’t used one since I was a kid. If she just yanked it out there’s a chance she nuked some of it. And who knows what sort of security it had...”

“It isn’t likely it had any. Unless he did some fancy wiring” Tonx held up both hands “and I know he may have - but if he didn’t the whole thing should just be there. I did some searches for old manuals when we got back. Xing ought to be able to help us.”

“Security through obsolescence” murmured Cessus. “Motherfucker.”

“Not so clever enough that she couldn’t just walk in there and take it” said Fede.

“She didn’t just ‘walk in there’” said Tonx. “The case was steel. And it had funky screws nobody uses these days. It was clever. If she hadn’t had a temper she would’ve been caught. We wouldn’t have anything.”

“That’s assuming we can get this thing to work” said Cessus. “And pretty clearly they know we’re after them now.”

Tonx nodded, turned towards the terminal. “Pretty clearly.”

The media made a huge show out of the whole fiasco, running the clip of Marcus covering the Lolita with his arm just before being shocked over and over again. The clip of him tearing the arms off the last two guards before he went down was even more popular, albeit on the underground networks only. It became the hottest download of the month in less than eight hours, and advertisers were salivating for Marcus to be well enough to talk before he’d even come out of surgery. Then it was revealed that the guards were working for a government employee, which made it all the more scandalous. Due to government regulations the reports weren’t allowed to specify the relationship, but because the guards were privately hired they could still run the story. And run it they did. An unruly public that was already irritated by slowed networks now discovered what sort of people were running them. It didn’t cause riots — riots weren’t popular in China anymore — but the public discontent was felt far up the food chain.

None of which meant anything to them. What was news to them was that Poulpe was missing. He’d checked in with Xing as promised on the way to the run, but disappeared from contact afterwards. Tonx was worried the government had gotten a hold of Poulpe so he’d pulled them out of the hotel and into some spare warehouse space next to Otaku. Marcus wasn’t going anywhere, ensconced in a hospital bed and surrounded 24/7 by fawning admirers in black petticoats and publicly addressable comms, cameras on full-stream over subsidized bandwidth.

“thwith hearth” he’d told Fede, thumping his chest. He’d bitten the tip of his tongue off.

Now they were locked away, hiding sleepless trying to get to the data they had stolen. At three in the morning a few days later, in the front workroom where Xing and Fede and Cessus had first met, the three of them sat with Tonx and scanned the drive’s contents. They’d gotten it to talk to an old OS-emulator they’d downloaded from a specialist in London. Cessus had had to pay for it from a private account as they’d run out of backing funds.

“For my collection” he’d shrugged. “You can pay me back when we pull this off.”

The drive was intact and completely vulnerable. There were two partitions on the drive, one of them locked down tight with a modern encryption system. It was crackable, but would take a very long time, and they could only get the data piece by piece. Knowing what bits were useful would be trial and error.

Then there was the other partition. Not buried in the encrypted system, not part of the OS, it contained a simple, old-style web page. The web page had a password requirement, but using the emulator they were able to run a few million tries from dictionaries over it and had it open in minutes. The result was exactly one half of a DNA chain. One half of the recombinant that Fede’s code had tried to calculate.

They sat quietly for a few moments, the plain-looking web page slowly spinning that half chain in blue and black pixels. Xing bowed and quietly excused himself to go to bed. Cessus laid himself out on the table behind where Fede stood next to Tonx. Nobody spoke. Outside, in the alley, rain began to patter against the giant Pokey ad covering the window.

The silence stretched out for a long time. After a while their screens blanked themselves automatically to save power, and darkness spilled through the room.

“What now?” asked Fede. Nobody answered. Tonx rose, walked to the window. The Pokey logo stood out against the lamplight from the alley below, circling his torso. He crossed his arms.

“I don’t know” said Tonx. “I don’t know.”

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