I did a little B&D on my enthusiasm. I was pretty confident, but still… “By convincing the system that the car isn’t being skragged.”
Chuy shook his head. “Now just how you gonna do that, homber?”
I sat up straight. Below, rising sounds indicated that Kilbee and Huong were deep in the hearta Mexas. “VR.”
Chuy smiled. “That’d maybe fool the box vits, if you’re good enough. But it doesn’t affect the underlying analytics.”
I leaned forward. “I’m not just talking virtual reality sight-wise. I’m thinkin’ virtual weight.”
Easing back in his chair, Chuy glanced amusedly out and down to where Kilbee was all over his girl. Kilbee always got all the best-looking ones. Damn anglo. “What the hell is virtual weight, man?”
“Something I been playing with, thinking about ever since you introed me to our faz night games. See, before I got interested in splitting finitives, I wanted to be an artist. I can not only make a car look real through VR, I think I can make it feel real, too, if I can get into the distribution yard main box.”
Chuy was thinking hard, still doubtful. “Even if you can fool the yard box into thinking something’s still there that ain’t no more, the place’s still gonna be full of yardeyes. You’ve done enough slipos to know we got five, maybe ten minutes at the most to pull the old in-and-out before some Eye shows and makes us. So maybe you can work this thing and maybe you can’t. It don’t matter un ratass because we ain’t got enough time to make it worthwhile. And even if you did, we can only take what we can carry. We can’t drive a van into the distribution yard, much less a truck. Esqui tried that and I told you what happen to him. The Eyes’d be all over us for unauthorized entry in a minute, even before you could start setting up. Best we can do is get a set of riffy wheels into the employee vehic lot, like you seen.”
“We don’ need ten minutes to skrag a container,” I told him, having thought it all out as best I could before opening my mouth. “And we don’ need a truck. We’re not gonna vacuum the damn thing. You won’t have to carry nothin’, neither.
“The Eyes and vit cameras don’t track the containers after they’ve been sent on their way and left the yard, and there ain’t no vits on the mainlines. Only box sensors. No point in tryin’ to follow real-time pictures of containers snappin’ past at three hundred per, so they just put up representations. Schematics. Virtuals. We can substitute our own damn virtuals, man. I can do virtuals like you never seen. That’s the easy part. The trick’s insertin’ them into the network, foolin’ the sensors when you sub the dupe, and givin’ it staying power ‘til we’ve safely skragged our load.”
Chuy pondered some more. Then he chugged the rest of his Cabo, wiped his lips, and smiled that little hard smile of his. “What you need to try this, miracle man?”
I told him. He repeated the list to himself, though I didn’t know how sophisticated his knowledge was or indeed if any of it would be familiar to him.
“Zenitrov portable, Komitsu modem, Digibm peripherals. The other stuff I don’t recog. Sounds like you got expensive tastes.”
“I didn’t say it would come cheap. The Zenitrov’s the only portable with enough crunch to handle the VR mass and the graphics.” I waited.
Chuy watched condensation creep down the sides of his gold beer bottle, blotting the droplets with a fingertip. “You’re talking a lot of money. What if Huong and Kilbee don’t go along?”
I shrugged, feigning indifference. Inside, I was excited not merely by the possibilities but by the chance to really make use of the natural talents I’d developed in Rehab.
“Well, Kilbee’s always boasting how he can skrag some real money if he ever needs to. Maybe he’ll make up any shortfall.” Chuy leaned forward. “But you better know what you doing, amigo, or else start looking for an easy route over the mountains.”
I smiled, but I didn’t feel that way inside. Chuy wasn’t screwing around. Chuy never screwed around where money was concerned.
It took longer to set up the program than to acquire the necessary equipment, even though I’d spent weeks working out a lot of it in my head. Kilbee grumbled and Huong looked downright skeptical, but Chuy persuaded them. I spent a lot of time in the basement of Chuy’s constricted, three-story codo, accessing the arcomplex library under an assumed code and designing the probe.
When I thought I was ready I did some practicing on small stuff and it all seemed to work, but cracking the inventory box at Nick’s Liquor and Narcotics wasn’t the same as what we were going to try.
There was no need for everyone to go along. In fact, with just Chuy and I we’d be that much less conspicuous. Huong and Kilbee watched doubtfully as Chuy and I rumbled off beneath a quarter moon in a stolen Solarmax.
Kilbee’s fancy card got us into the employee lot at the distrib yard, like always. I made sure the backpack was secure on my shoulders. Then we blew up our drunk dolls, slid out of the car, an’ started into the yard, absenting among the clicks and hums of the hundreds of induction containers.
I kept waiting for Chuy to pick a likely target. It seemed like it took him hours to make a decision, but inside he was as nervous as always, though not as nervous as me. Finally he stopped me next to a container with simple graphics.
“Don’ look like much to me.”
“Hey,” he whispered in my face, “you leave the picking to me. Now do it, if you’re gonna. If you can.”
I nodded and moved to the front of the container, searching along the edge while Chuy kept a restive, silent watch for roving Eyes. When I accessed the interlock I broke the seal and found myself looking at a heavy-duty but pretty standard communications module. I slid the backpack off and took out the Zenitrov, fumbled clumsily with the peripherals while Chuy cursed me, my ideas, and my mother under his breath, trying not to nerve me but at the same time uneasy at hangin’ in one place for so long. Containers rumbled and drifted around us.
I got in pretty fast, if I do say so myself. The distribution yard box was big, lots of volume. What you’d expect for so complicated an operation. I munched the stats on this particular container right away, because I was plugged into it. That was the easy part. I floated around inside the box space, orienting myself until I felt comfortable. I knew I didn’t have much time for sightseeing. Not with Chuy constantly prodding me in the ribs.
I worked the Zen’s tactiles until I knew everything there was to know about the container I was into. It seemed pretty promising, but it was a little early to start gloating. We didn’t have anything yet except a little access. First I subbed the program dupe I’d shaped and that zeeped into the matrix smooth as lotion on a beach bunny’s buns. So far so bueno.
Implementation was a lot trickier. It’s one thing to shape a program and insert it, another to get it up an’ runnin’ in the box. I grabbed the shipping info from the container and inverted it, got a good look at the structure, and dumped it into the waiting template I’d so carefully installed. Then I made kind of a silent prayer and plugged the template into the ass end of the container’s up-and-run.
Chuy was tugging on my shoulder as I ran a couple of redundancy checks. “Come on, homber! If you ain’t done it by now, you ain’t never going to. Let’s get out of here.”
I pulled out, leaving nothing behind me in the distrib yard box but empty crunch, nothing to trace the tickle. I was fumbling to get the Zenitrov back into its holster as Chuy half led, half dragged me back through the yard. As we ran, making no noise in our expensive pylon skimmers, I could hear the voices of two Eyes just passing behind us and a chill went up my back. Too close, man.
Chuy didn’t say nothing until we’d orphaned the stolen Solarmax and were back in his clunker. “So? How’d it go, ‘Stebo?”
“I don’ know.”
His tone turned unfriendly. “What you mean, you don’t know?”
I looked earnest. “No way to know if it worked until Thursday.”
“Why Thursday?”
“I though
t I explained it to you. Everything depends on the container’s shipping instructions. Its stats said it’s programmed to join a train heading north on Thursday at five P.M. It won’ move ‘til then.”
Chuy looked thoughtful. “So we can’t do nothing but wait until then.”
I nodded.” ‘Til later, really. For when I set the template.”
He sucked in a deep breath. “Amigo, it gonna be three nervous days.”
He wasn’t half as nervous all three days as I was that first hour.
Thursday noche found the four of us hanging near the receiving yard behind the Garcilasco Mall. Nothing unusual about that. The delivery area was bare except for a couple of empty containers. At two in the morning there was nobody around, not even an Eye. No reason for a patrol here. Even the Ensenada police didn’t come around often. They didn’t need to. There were easier places to break into than an armored, fully alarmed mall, with its thermosensitive vits and animorphed Dobermans. As for the loading dock, there was nothing there to steal.
Kilbee had actually rented the off-loader transport. If some federale did stumble accidentally onto us, we’d tell him we were just waiting to move a friend the next morning and couldn’t sleep, so we’d decided to lay out for the night and suck a few sense sticks. Chuy an’ Kilbee decided the story would sound better if it didn’t come from four guys sitting in a stolen truck.
Huong tossed his stick stub through the window and glared at me. “I think you’ve just been pissing wind, ‘Stebo. This ain’t gonna work.”
I checked my watch for the fourth time in the past half hour. “It’s not time yet, Huong. There could be unexpected holdups in the network, extra traffic. All week I’ve been watching the vit news. No thefts reported from the system, so nobody’s found my artwork. Abstain, man. Everything’s workin’.” I spoke boldly. I didn’t have no choice.
Kilbee was fondling his vibrato. “You talk real big, ‘Stebo. Maybe you think you’re smarter than us ‘cause you can fold a little crappy box work?”
“Ease off,” said Chuy. He stared single-mindedly at the two maglev lines that led to the big loading dock behind the mall. “Give it time.”
“Yeah, sure.” Kilbee turned to gaze tiredly out the window, resting his head against his closed fist and slumping in his seat.
I sat up fast. “Something’s coming.” Everyone forgot about everything else and sat up straight to look.
It was a container, ambulatin’ smoothly according to program, heading toward the back of the loading dock. I tried to see past it but there didn’t appear to be anyone following it on the track or on the street nearby. I felt a hand squeezing my arm hard. Chuy, his eyes glittering.
We piled out of the truck and just watched while the container, neat as you please, slid down the elevated induction track and came to a stop exactly as I’d programmed it to. Kilbee came out of his trance long enough to give me a quick, totally unexpected hug. Then he was backing the truck around while the rest of us anxiously scanned the mall’s access street.
The container’s module obediently responded to the come-hither call from the standard beacon in the truck cab and slid inside. Huong and I shut the rear door and away we went, the whole damn container snugged safely within.
At the abandoned warehouse down in the old harbor industrial district we cracked that beautiful sucker. Chuy had picked a car destined for the Dai-Syntec Combine works up at Algo-dones. The container was crammed with all kinds of good stuff: sense-screens, blank moto paks, expensive nodulators.
When our private little fire sale was fully concluded and fenced two weeks later we gleaned about six hundred thousand, including an unexpected eleven thousand for the vacuumed container itself. Remarked and calligraphed, with a brand-new identifying module, it was sent cruising surreptitiously south toward Salvador and a new life.
Mi compadres were more than a little spizzed, you know?
There was nothing about our abscond in the vits for three weeks. Then I found a small item in the Strip financial section, had a hard copy made, and showed it to the gang at Chuy’s.
“Dai-Syntec Corporation today announced the disappearance—see, man, they don’t say theft—of a container load of valuable componentry. Insurance adjusters are investigating, but the loss is believed due to box error.” Box error my ass, I half shouted, and everyone had fine words, mostly obscene, for the investigators at Dai-Syntec.
I could imagine the consternation in Company Receiving when their container arrived—and there was nothing there. Their box screens would show the container, whose simple rectangular appearance and markings I had artfully duped in VR, right where it belonged on the delivery track. Instruments would dutifully register its arrival weight as six point two tons, including cargo. But when they’d go out to the unloading dock to look for it, there’d be nada there. The boxman would check his stats and visual and there’d be the container, big as life. Except there wasn’t nothing in actual reality. Only in virtual reality. A ghost container. No wonder they were sayin’ the loss was due to box error.
As soon as the real container had deviated from its original programming and split from its northbound train, my template had kicked in and subbed a virtual one in its space. All the way north, at all the checkpoints, monitors would’ve recorded the virtual substitute according to the eager feed from my art and indicated nothing amiss. Meanwhile our container had turned sharply south and wended its merry way to the mall dock. If anyone had actually flown over the train as it was speeding north and run a real-time inspection they’d have seen a container-sized gap between a Simas mobile reservoir and one from China. The whole business wouldn’t have worked in the twentieth cen, when a train consisted of a line of cars dragged along by a single energy source located at the front. But with each induction container individually powered, it worked just fine for us.
All the poor sucks at Dai-Syntec ended up with was a lot of virtual confusion.
We celebrated for a week, and then flattened. We had plenty of money, too much for Chuy to launder all at once, but nobody was hurting for kosh. We stayed smart, too. Nobody ran out and bought six cars an’ twelve platinum chains. We had our fun, but quietly, even took a month in the sun at Cocos Annex; soaking up the UV, overawing the SCUBRA ferns in their tight diving suits, and cruising with the hammerheads.
Six months later we did it again, but this go-around only realized about a hundred fifty thou. Chuy hadn’t picked such a good one this time. Amazing how fast we got spoiled. We didn’t push it, though. Didn’t want to risk making a pattern, or leaving a trail for some Intuit to sniff out. So we waited another three months before hitting again, and this time we tried a completely different part of the yard.
Chuy like to spizz when we cracked that container.
“Holy Virgin of Guadeloupe!” I remember him hissing, half chokin’ on the exclamation. Huong and Kilbee didn’t have a clue, but I did, and I didn’t say a thing. Couldn’t. But I know my eyes got big.
Huong dipped into the crate Chuy had popped and scooped up a handful of carefully bubble-packed cotton candy. “What is this stuff?”
“Superconducting composite fibers,” Chuy told him. “They use this stuff to put together big boxes. The kind that run the phone companies and military hardware. It’s all rare-earth doped under special conditions. You know what this shit costs, senwhore?”
Huong found out soon enough, as did the rest of us. We made a million and a half and this time you didn’t have to search the vit news to find out about the skrag. It was all over even the general broadcasts by the first of next week. You could smell the Intuits the company hastily hired searching for a clue, a hint, anything. Even our tough-ass purchaser split for a rapido vacation down Sudamerica way as soon as the deal was done-did, it having gotten too hot suddenlike in Ensenada to stick around. We just hung at Chuy’s place and savored all the noise.
This time I’d added a little fillip to the riff, too (by now I was gettin’ pretty cocky). Instead of putting in a VR-V
W program that would remain locked in the box, I had it dissipate in the mid of the desert halfway to Tucson. For days the vit news was dense with shots of frustrated federales swarming over a bare patch of cactus and sand out in the omphalos of noplace, where the container was supposedly plucked off the rail, scratching along beneath the maglev tracks, sweating and lookin’ serious unhappy. The only thing they found was an eloping college couple from TSU and a couple of poker-faced chuckawallas. We laughed ourselves silly.
But the heat was getting caliente serious, and we talked about quitting. Chuy made investments for us all, and we had plenty of kosh in the Isthmus to last each of us a lifetime. We discussed it and habled it for half a year, and finally decided to give the game one more spin.
Now that I look back at that time I think it was for the kicks, you know? You get addicted to success. Theft is its own high, fiscal remunerations aside.
We checked the yard three times before we decided to go ahead, but any extra security had faded away in the months since our last visit. After the furor over the fiber filch had died down, things got pretty much back to normal. The ennui didn’t look like a feint. Chuy and I went in as usual, lookin’ for something different this time. One more big skrag and we’d dump the Zenitrov and its damning peripherals and my clever artwork in the middle of the Golfo. One more.
We had to hide once to avoid a trio of Eyes, waiting half an hour until we were sure they were long gone. Then Chuy called me over to a cold car. I waited and watched while he studied the markings, the design.
“I don’t know what the hell’s in here,” he whispered to me, “but it oughta be interesting. Says organics under cold.”
“Shit, Chuy,” I muttered, “we gonna steal a load of chickens?”
“C’mon, omber. Where’s your curiosity? It’s got the profound max security seal, which means it’s full of valuable Bio. We can get rid of anything before it degrades.” In the galvanic darkness of the yard, his eyes were shining. “Let’s try skragging something a little different.”