“Look, I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking, and don’t deny it, everyone is thinking it. They’re not human! We all know it’s true!”
A table-top scale hologram of a ranting raving Konrad Hajek in full lips-puckered photo-op self-importance mode hovered over the kitchen counter. Marc stood in the tiny white kitchenette and reached for the moka pot.
“Places like Redcent,” Hajek’s holo pontificated, “are cesspools—there’s a reason they call them combatZones. They’re full of rapists, murderers, foreigners, muslims, bad people…bad people, all animals!
Marc hit the button on the coffee grinder.
“Yes, they’re animals!
The whirring of the machine made it hard to understand.
They’re animals and they kill and they rape our women!”
The scent of French roast wafted through the kitchenette.
“They commit horrible crimes. Horrible crimes, every day! We all know they do, but you never hear about it in the fake media, do you?”
The whirring stopped and Hajek’s tirade was intelligible again.
“We have to protect our families!” Hajek gestured in stiff attempted earnest.
Marc unscrewed the moka pot, poured in some water and spooned the coffee into the little basket.
“Yes, protect our families, ourselves! It’s time for all of us to stand up for ourselves!”
Marc lit the burner and put the pot on.
“I know what’s going on, I always know what’s going on, and I’m going to tell you.”
Marc sliced some bread and popped it into the toaster.
“What’s going on is that we’re getting screwed, and I’m tired of getting screwed…and I’m sure you’re tired of getting screwed!”
Marc opened the fridge and pulled out some milk, butter, and jam.
“Crybaby Moronka says that we’re not doing enough for them. Not doing enough for them? Not doing enough for sub-human animals? Is she on the rag?”
The coffee pot began to gurgle.
“They’re sub-human animals! What about us? I’ve had enough of this communist mamby-pamby woke bull. And I’m sure you’ve had enough!”
Marc nuked the milk in his mug.
“Let’s build walls around all the combatZones, dangerous, crime-ridden, full of drugs! Wall them off! They’re already offGrid!”
The microwave beeped. The bread popped out of the toaster.
“Get this, I’m sure you know this, combatZones are run by gangs like Razr4Kids! Razr4Kids, get it? Razr, as in they’ll slice your throat! Even the cops and CivDef are afraid to go in!” Hajek stuck his chin out.
Marc buttered the toast.
“That’s why they’ve been offLined. That’s why their rights were taken away from them! Wall them off! Read my lips: they have no rights…”
Marc killed the holo and walked over to the bed. A pale pre-dawn glow was seeping through the sloping windows of the tiny white attic flat, revealing Audrey’s sleeping form. Her tussled platinum hair glowed softly in a pale light beginning to warm the cold gloom.
“It is six AM, chérie. You asked me to wake you up.” Marc often wondered how Audrey could sleep through anything. He kissed her with his stubbly haven’t-shaved-in-three-days-because-I’m-French face.
“What? What did you say? Six? Oh god, no,” Audrey opened her eyes, “...you have your jacket on, you’re leaving already?”
“Oui, I promised Ahnka I’d be in as soon as her headquarters opened. I’m already late. There is café and some toast for you.”
“Mmmm…this isn’t fair...” Audrey pulled Marc down and held him, feeling his sandpaper face and his soft, rumpled, faded suede jacket on her naked breasts.
He kissed her sleepy breath. “What time do you start?”
“As soon as the polls open.”
“Which is now.”
“I know,” Audrey said groggily. She swung her legs out of the bed and tried to clear her head. Marc walked over to the stove and poured her espresso, black.
“You need this.” He handed Audrey the cup and sat down next to her.
“Thanks, yes, I do need it.” Audrey held the small cup in two hands and took a long sip. “I should get dressed now.”
“You are late. Why get dressed? Are you not working in simulated reality? Jack in now. This is the advantage of SIM, non? In SIM nobody knows you are a dog.”
“You mean nobody knows I’m naked.” Audrey reached for her robe. “I just feel more comfortable if I’m dressed. Even in SIM. Especially if I have to do some serious deepFreaking.”
“Why would you be doing serious deepFreaking? I thought your little group…what was the name you mentioned?”
“Defend the Vote.”
“Bien sûr, of course, Defend the Vote. Are you not just monitoring the election?”
“Yeah,” Audrey downed the rest of her espresso and stood up, “but you never know.” She tied her robe. “The point is to make sure no one is hacking in extra votes…or subtracting them, I suppose.” Marc's eyes followed her as she walked to the stove. “Hajek has scads of money,” she said as she poured herself a refill from the espresso pot, “enough to buy himself actual firepower.”
“Actual firepower?”
“Oh, you know,” Audrey took a bite of buttered toast, “like BlackHack3rs or something.”
“BlackHack3rs?” Marc furrowed his brow in thought. “Didn’t I read somewhere that they work for the Russian mob, the Organitskaya?”
“Yeah,” Audrey shrugged, “supposedly.”
“So, you are saying that Hajeck's connected to the Organitskaya? I would think that would be big news, non?”
“Maybe,” Audrey tilted her head, “I wouldn’t know. But I do know that when billionaires run for office they expect to win, and they spend money to make sure they do. And I also know that there are people Hajek’s been associated with that have connections to the Organitskaya.”
“Seriously?” Marc got up from the bed and walked to the kitchen. He took a toast and spread jam on it. “But why is this not common knowledge?”
“Credits silence most people. I guess threats take care of the rest.” Audrey took another bite of toast.
“So, you are potentially dealing with dangerous people?”
“Maybe.”
“Then you must be very careful, Audrey. You leave one little piece of dust in your trace,” he gestured vigorously with his toast, “and they will find you.”
“Relax...I don’t leave dust.”
“But Audrey, do you know what the Organitskaya do to people who cross them?” Marc’s gaze locked on to Audrey.
“Don’t be so melodramatic. BlackHack3rs may be gridPhantoms,” Audrey’s eyes twinkled, “but I’m liquidEcho.”
Marc placed his hands on Audrey’s waist, feeling the curve of her hips and the silk of her robe cool to his touch. “Audrey, I love you. I know you are the best, but if anything happens to you, then they should cut open my chest, chain me to the mountainside, and let the vultures eat my heart.”
“That is the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Sweet? Audrey…”
“Oh, Marc. I love you, too! But, please, don't worry. This is only a parliamentary by-election, and we don’t even know if the Organitskaya is involved. For all I know Hajek’s hackers, if he hired any, are just a bunch of scriptKiddies…” Audrey kissed him. “Ça va?”
“Really?” Marc looked at her suspiciously.
“Ye of little faith.” Audrey grabbed Marc by the elegantly frayed silk scarf that hung loosely about his neck and pulled him into a deep frenchKiss.
* * *
For inspiration Audrey popped a TripTab and for a little extra edge a Rasanz (Swiss uppers, the best). She closed her eyes, the chip on her temple flared electric blue, and Real dissolved into SIM. She entered an archaic URL, typed it in the old-fashioned way, and a maze of gloomy, opaque corridors materialized. She metamorphosed into her avatar, TinkerBell, and touched the grey corridor wall in front of her. An iridescent patch appeared, the quantum state of her entangled particle’s link was authenticated, and her bioData was scanned and confirmed. Like a glittering ghost, TinkerBell slipped through the state-of-the-art fireWall, and into featureless, colourless cyberspace. An empty three-dimensional Cartesian matrix, an abstract backdrop waiting for scenery software to be initialized. But the site’s SIM code hadn’t been updated in well over a decade, and current net protocols could no longer read the ancient background generating plugIns. The silence here was absolute, heavy with the digital dust of an abandoned server farm. Out here on the fringe, the past didn't die; it just became incompatible. It was barren, obsolete, frozen in time, forgotten, and therefore a perfect meeting place for the artHacker collective known as BLANK. Here, deep in the digital graveyard, they were unlikely to be noticed by stalking spider algorithms or random sniffBots. The antiquated code acted like a natural stealth cloak, a blind spot in the modern Net where corporate sweeps rarely bothered to look. The megacorps only policed the high-traffic neon sectors; they didn't care about the ghosts rotting in the data scrap.
The gravity protocol was a global default in SIM, Tinkerbell stood solidly on an invisible groundPlane. Facing her was a group of arms-crossed, eyes-rolling, foot-tapping cartoon character avatars. BLANK did fads, and Looney Tunes was the latest. But Audrey was always Tinkerbell.
Bugs Bunny folded his arms and tapped his foot. “TinkerBell, you’re late,” he complained in his wise-guy voice.
TinkerBell released a little cloud of vexed pixie dust. “I’m not that late.”
“Okay, Doc, whatever. But now that we’re all here,” Bugs bit his carrot and turned to Yosemite Sam, “Sam will explain things.”
“The darned EU election laws require the encryption of voting. It’s called VoteX and this here’s what it looks like.” Yosemite Sam swept his hand, and a spectral barrier appeared enveloping an array of fluctuating spreadsheets of real-time vote tallies. “This ain’t no fancy-pants stuff. In fact, it’s crappy useless encryption, written by a bunch of lily-livered greenhorn EU eyeT bureaucrats. The fools built a digital fortress out of cardboard and paint.” Yosemite Sam stuck his hand through the barrier. It flickered, its defensive grid displaying critical vulnerabilities that any street-level decker could exploit with a basic decryption key. The Euro-crats had optimized the system for compliance standards, not for a targeted black-hat intrusion.
“So, to keep Hajek and his bow-legged varmints from hacking and hijacking the election, Porky Pig and I decided to cut down their chances and streamCypher encrypt every barnacle-bitten vote right away, as soon as it’s cast. We lock the doggone data down the millisecond the finger hits the glass. By the time the darned signal hits the local node, it’s already scrambled into black-box noise. If Hajek’s flea-bitten fur-bags want to rewrite this rootin’ tootin’ election, they’ll have to crack a million unique keys all at once or fry their rear end tryin’.”
* * *
At six thirty-six AM Marc logged in at the holoScreen by the front desk and walked into Ahnka’s campaign headquarters. It was a large rent-for-pop-ups commercial space. Standard issue folding tables were set on a scarred synthTile floor designed to survive millions of boots without ever looking clean. Half-eaten Danish pastries and cups of cold Americano were harshly lit by the flicker-heavy glare of cheap LED tubes that cast a corpse-like paleness over everything. Synthetic algorithmic euphoria dripped endlessly from hidden speakers, a KorpKore playlist of generic, upbeat pop designed to artificially boost productivity metrics.
Marc walked up to a table half-way across the room and introduced himself. “Bonjour, Sara, my name is Marc, and I was told I am supposed to report to you for my assignment.”
* * *
“Hey, there’s somethin’ funny going on here,” Bugs Bunny’s big ears stood straight up.
“Funny?” TinkerBell flapped her gossamer fairy wings and flew over to look, leaving a pixie dust trail in her wake.
“As in ha-ha f-f-funny?” Porky Pig asked.
“No doc, as in fishy funny. I think they’re voting dead people.”
“Dead people?” Yosemite Sam growled and looked skeptical. “As in plumb kicked-the-bucket dead?”
“Yeah, doc,” Bugs munched on his carrot, “as in pushin’ up daisies dead, thousands of dem dead voters…see? And here’s their death certificates.”
“Those shark livered varmints got to be kidding!” Yosemite Sam glared from under his huge red eyebrows, “it’s the oldest doggone trick in the book!”
“M-m-maybe you should f-f-flag the list and p-p-post it on all the social p-p-pages, and also s-s-send it to the Election C-c-commission,” Porky Pig stuttered his suggestion, “and r-r-re-attach the d-d-death certificates they’ve s-s-stripped f-f-from the citizen infoPackets.”
* * *
“Marc!” Joseph shouted over the din at the Ahnka Stemberg election headquarters. Marc stood next to the microwave oven, one arm across his chest propping-up his other arm, which in turn propped-up his chin as he broodingly waited while he nuked the cold watery remains of a pot of coffee.
“Oui?” Marc looked up from his contemplations. “Oh, hello Josef.”
“Marc, can we talk?”
“Certainement…”
“In my office.”
Intrigued, Marc took his coffee out of the microwave and followed Josef into his campaign manager’s office. Josef closed the door. “Marc, I was just talking to Sara, the young volunteer who assigned you to general office duties…do you remember, the one wearing a pink skirt?”
All morning Marc had been running around greeting visitors, stocking refreshments and occasionally answering office calls and texts.
“Yes, certainement, I remember. I could not help but notice her.”
“Yes, of course you would, she’s very pretty, and I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but it seems that she’s, ahh, noticed you, too, and that’s the point, in a way. You see, in fact, more to the point, all the young female volunteers around here appear to think you’re hot.”
“Et alors?” Marc said warily, not sure where this was going.
“Well, it seems you’re also a bit of a hit with the gay men as well. And…ahh…what I’m trying to say is that it’s all given me an idea.”
“An idea?”
“Yes. With your permission, I’d like to take a detailed scan of you to fashion a personalized roboCall hologram.”
“Moi?”
“Yes. Exactly. You. That way we, well you, indirectly, can make calls, thousands of calls at once…targeted to, ahh…to gay and female voters…”
* * *
“Great horny toadies!” Yosemite Sam shouted, “Hajek’s just gained himself a two-point lead...”
“What?”
“...and our all our fancy-pants firewalls and hoity-toity encryptions are plum useless!” Yosemite Sam threw his hat on the invisible groundPlane and began stomping on it. “The doggone varmints did hack those rust-bucket machines, but before the blasted election! They added just enough votes to squeak through without anybody gettin’ the wiser!”
“So the dead people voting was just a diversion,” Tinkerbell scowled in a cloud of angry pixie dust.
“We’ve b-b-been outsmarted,” Porky Pig stuttered, “and we’ve only g-g-got one hour until the p-p-polls close.”
“Nyaa, don’t get yer panties in a twist, doc…” Bugs was scanning the latest voter data, “I got an idea. You know dem youth voters that flooded the fundraiser at the noLine club? Well, they ain’t voted…not yet, anyway,” he added slyly, “whaddya say we help them out a little...”
“Saay, I like the idea, varmint,” Yosemite Sam stopped stomping, picked up his hat, dusted it, and wiped his brow, “but how can we make up a two point lead without gittin’ caught with our hands in the cookie jar? It’s a lot of darned votes!”
“You got any other ideas, doc?”
* * *
“It’s nine O’clock!” Josef called out. “The polls are closed! The vote is too close to call at the moment. You made a heroic effort, Ahnka and I thank you. I know we’re all exhausted, but if you can manage it, everyone is invited to join the campaign party at the Marriot Ballroom.”
* * *
“You’ve b--b-been working on hacking t-t-that V-v-voteX for almost an hour!” Porky Pig was getting nervous. “You s-s-said that it would only t-t-take half an hour. It c-c-can’t be that hard.”
“It isn’t,” TinkerBell answered, “unless you want to leave no dust, as in zero. When I’m done, nobody will ever know TinkerBell was here, but the self-correcting tunneling algorithms in the ghosting frackWare take time to arrange themselves into the proper fractal.”
“Well that’s all nice and fine, darlin’,” Yosemite Sam shouted, “but wees runnin’ outta time here, and if no dust means no votes, I say dang the dust!”
“Be quiet, I need to concentrate,” TinkerBell crossed her arms, her pointy pixie face scowling.
“Tarnations, TinkerBell!” Yosemite Sam hollered, “there’s just two doggone minutes left!”
“Yes, I know. Is the data clean?” TinkerBell asked.
“Whaddya mean, is it clean! Just load the suckers in!”
“If it’s not perfectly clean—”
“Y-y-yes, the d-d-data is clean,” Porky stammered annoyed, “I f-f-finished l-l-laundering it t-t-ten minutes ago.”
“Okay, one last thing. This will only take a few seconds…I have to inject the bioRoutine seeds into the fractal.”
“Just get-a-goin’ varmint! We only have forty-five seconds!”
“There! Now the data...”
“Thirty seconds!”
“It’s loading...”
“Ten seconds…”
“There! Done!” Tinkerbell smiled in a cloud of happy pixie dust.
“Tarnations, TinkerBell, five seconds to spare! You sure you got it all in?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
* * *
Ten o’clock. Ahnka’s headquarters were dark and deserted. The action had shifted to the Marriot Ballroom. Huge smiling holoHeadshots of Ahnka Stemberg floated like balloons above the crowd, mixing with holoBanners flashing her official ‘Truth to Power’ slogan. Melody London, monster pop megastar, was the night’s entertainment.
Just before midnight the ballroom erupted in a symphony of high-frequency chimes, ringtones, and urgent haptic pulses as devices were pinged with notification alerts. Melody stopped in mid-song. Across the floor, a hundred retinas flared neon blue and gold as holoDisplays lit up with the sudden data dump, casting an eerie, synchronized glow over the crowd. As soon as the news sunk in the crowd exploded in cheers.
Josef walked on the stage and held up his hand. Everyone fell silent. “I know you all just found out, but here it is from me, officially. As you know, it’s been a very tight race, and, up to an hour ago, most polls had Hajek ahead.”
Booing filled the ballroom.
“But…but,” Josef held up his hand again, “as you all undoubtedly just found out—and my apologies to you Melody because the news hit in mid song—as of a few minutes ago, all the votes have been tallied and Ahnka Stemberg was declared the official winner by twelve hundred and twenty one votes! And...and...” Josef held up his hand again and waited for the pandemonium to subside, “Konrad Hajeck is about to make his concession speech…”
A huge holo of Hajek lit up one end of the ballroom.
“The polls closed three hours ago and the people have supposedly spoken…I say supposedly because even though Crybaby Moronka has just been officially declared the winner…”
The ballroom broke into an ecstatic uproar.
“…that’s fake news. Trust me, it’s fake news. Why would it take three hours to count the votes? A computer does it immediately! Obviously, so they can cheat! Only a loser would vote for that vile woman. I want all my supporters to know I will not be conceding defeat, not until there’s been a recount and all possibilities of cheating, of outright fraud, have been eliminated, but that won’t happen because there is fraud, believe me, there is cheating, big time cheating, and we’re going to look into it. Tomorrow morning, I will…” As the huge holo of Konrad Hajek bitterBitched it slowly transformed into a giant black duck, and as his big orange duck-bill grew, Hajek’s speech morphed into Daffy Duck’s sputtering, spitting, vitriolic quack. “…file a complaint with the Elections Commission to have all possibilities of fraud officially investigated,” his duckbill sprayed a shower of holo spittle into the ballroom, “for now, it’s goodnight…but…”
The sound system suddenly filled the ballroom with the Looney Tunes theme, steamrollering over Daffy Duck’s sputtering words, and a holo of Bugs Bunny with a big stick emerged.
“Ain’t I a stinker!” Bugs declared as he pounded Daffy into the ground to the sound of the Merrie Melodies theme, a circle enveloped them, shrunk, and disappeared, replaced by ‘That’s All Folks!’. The lettering lingered in the air for a moment, and then it too disappeared.
There was silence in the ballroom for a couple of seconds, and then the place erupted in riotous laughter. Once again Josef held up his hand for silence. “I think Hajek’s just been BLANKpranked.”
Wild cheering.
“Please…please…let’s now have a big hand for your next MP, Ahnka Stemberg!!”
* * *
Marc woke and Audrey snuggled up to him as he flipped on a holoVid of post election analysis. It played as they half-watched drifting in and out of much needed sleep.
“…there were unsubstantiated rumours all over social media of dead people voting for Hajek, and there was literally a last minute flurry of young people voting for Stemberg, but the data indicates that the real swing demographic lay with women…”
Audrey turned to Marc. “Marc,” she said sleepily, “I never asked you what your assignment was at Ahnka’s headquarters?”
“Josef wanted me to help with the female and gay votes.”
“Female and gay?” Audrey eyed Marc suspiciously, “how, exactly?”