Scourge
L.V. Bell
The dumbwaiter by the reinforced steel door opened its gaping maw at exactly 6:00 AM to deliver a tray with breakfast and the week’s targets. I snatched it from the cavity, impatient for the next part of the ritual. The console to my right flared to life. A timer in the far corner of the leftmost screen flashed six hours, then started counting down. Thank the stars, Blackbeard didn’t want to talk over things today. I needed all the time I could get.
The day’s menu offered a Parmesan-and-chive egg soufflé, a bowl of fresh strawberries, and a thermos of tea. Oolong, if my nose wasn’t lying. I poured a quarter of it into my favorite cup—the phoenix one with gold inlaid around the bird’s flames—and helped myself to a strawberry as I read over the list. Blackbeard wanted something special if she was willing to bribe me with fruit.
Assignment one: photos of the king of England’s honeymoon. The wedding to Queen Five had been a month ago, but people remained obsessed with royalty, even in the twenty-second century, and the paparazzi hadn’t acquired any scintillating images since the big day. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. A boring prize and too easy to obtain.
Assignment two: a report on the latest terraforming breakthroughs at the International Cooperative for Space Exploration. Even easier, and I could guess the customer. Despite publicly participating in the global effort, Russia remained determined to plant their flag first for some reason. Maybe because Mars was the red planet.
Assignment three: a list of dark money donors contributing to the reelection campaign for the current president of the Global Congress. I’d been expecting that target for a month. Politics was forever a profitable business and worth keeping up on for someone in my line of work, but it didn’t warrant the fruit.
Ah, there it was. Assignment four: the as-of-yet incomplete manuscript of the final VanGelder novel. Save the best for last, Blackbeard always said. Maybe that’s why she let the other morons in the guild take their cracks before handing the task to the one person who could get the job done. I sniffed, the earthy scent of tea filling my nose. She was probably looking for my replacement. Good luck.
If it hadn’t been for more important tasks, I might have already pirated the manuscript. The greatest desert saga since Dune had enthralled me as much as it had the rest of the world, though I wasn’t as bothered by the decade-long wait for the final installment. Besides, I didn’t see a point in stealing the ending until it was ready. But Blackbeard had never been one for patience, and even an unfinished manuscript would fetch a pretty price when she was done reading it herself.
In any case, I expected none of these projects would push my schedule past the usual two-hour timeline, and I needed every spare second my talents could buy now that the real target was in sight. Not the flashy tabloid photos or political deals Blackbeard was always chasing. They had value, sure, but the treasure I sought would rewrite history. And with any luck, today it would become mine. After I saw to Blackbeard’s list, of course.
The breakfast tray found a place on the mahogany desk that housed the instruments of modern pillaging: a built-in computer console with enough processing power to run a small city and six wraparound screens that bathed my adolescent body in blue light.
“Good morning, lovely,” I said, greeting my single window to the outside world.
I settled into the plush chair custom-made to fit my youthful frame and got to work. The ghost program woke at my gentle caress of the controls. I hated to lose the processing power, but it was necessary to prevent Blackbeard and other potential eavesdroppers from looking over my shoulder. No reason to be pillaged myself. Instead, the ghost displayed an edited version of my interactions with the world beyond the screen to keep the essence of my skills hidden while maintaining Blackbeard’s belief that I needed the full six hours allotted to collect the treasures she desired.
The royal pictures were acquired before I’d polished off the last strawberry. The terraforming report tied for completion with the soufflé. I poured a fourth cup of oolong. The list of donors took a little longer. The curls of steam had faded from my tea when the data finally surrendered to my tender encouragement, leaving the VanGelder manuscript the only impediment to pursuing my own treasure.
The timer in the corner showed an hour and seventeen minutes had passed. The donor list had taken longer than anticipated.
I rolled my shoulders, willing the muscles to relax, and drummed my fingers on the console.
Tap, tap, thwam.
The final percussive motion of my index finger brought me to VanGelder’s home server. I leaned in and got to work.
Here, at last, lay a prize worth my effort. Firewalls, encryptions, snares hidden behind every potential vulnerability I thought to exploit—the sea around my virtual ship grew increasingly stormy. The usual tricks weren’t nearly enough. I finally gained access to an email account with correspondence between author and editor, which should’ve been the end of it. Instead, it explained why Blackbeard had sent the strawberries.
VanGelder had written the manuscript by hand. With an actual pen. On actual paper.
“You mad genius.”
Having read the novels, I should’ve expected such a twist. There was no better security in the world than a hard copy. It also meant I was screwed.
I thumbed through a number of other emails to confirm the manuscript existed out of anyone’s reach. The author had scheduled an in-person delivery to the editor for last week and—I sat up straighter—the editor had sent a note thanking VanGelder for trusting him enough to make a copy to mark up.
One corner of my mouth twitched to a smirk.
A minute later, I let myself into the publishing house’s servers. A quick search led me to the editor’s personal console, which in turn guided me to the copier he’d used. Then came the long shot. Copiers were antique bricks left over from the pre-digital era. I’d never heard of a functioning one, much less attempted to hack one before. The operating system was a joke, but, depending on how solid the underlying firmware was, Blackbeard might have to send someone to physically lift the hard drive.
Luck, however, favored me a second time. A minuscule vulnerability granted me access to the drive’s history, and a quick search found the digital record the machine had kept from the scan required to make the copy.
Tension fled my shoulders. Three simple commands, and the manuscript downloaded itself onto my drive with the day’s other treasures. Another command encrypted the four files, compressed them, and prepared them for delivery to Blackbeard at the appropriate time. I leaned back in my chair and reached for the tea. It hit my tongue cold.
“Ugh.”
I dumped it in the orchid beside my desk and picked up the thermos.
Empty.
The timer provided yet another irritant. A full three hours and two minutes had passed. The manuscript acquisition would see me robbed of solitude at lunch so Blackbeard could congratulate me. The revelation of my success—necessary to maintain my place as her favorite, or at least her most useful, hacker—would see my console go dark until the delivery of the next week’s assignments. She wasn’t stupid, and a mind like mine could wreak a lot of havoc if given unfettered access to a computer.
My fault for hacking the most powerful corporation in existence without permission or a ghost to hide my efforts. I may be a verified genius—everything from technology to languages to music came to me as easily as breathing—but I’d been a dumb five-year-old kid. Blackbeard had modified connections to the room after that. It didn’t matter how I retrofitted the console, I couldn’t reach the interwebs without permission, and she restricted my access to six hours a week. Thus, the threat was successfully neutralized without damaging profitability.
Except that depriving me had made me better at my craft. I would’ve enjoyed basking in the irony, but I had a mere two hours and fifty—I glanced at the timer—seven minutes to retrieve the secret of the Fountain of Youth from Legacy Corp. And I was close, I could feel it.
Once again, my fingers rapped on the console, landing me right where I’d been forced to leave off the week before. Legacy’s encryptions were wound tighter than a Gordian knot. To date, I’d spent a total of 1,872 hours stretched across 302 weeks, and I still couldn’t find the sword to cut it away from my prize. A reality made more aggravating by the fact that I had spent those six years in servitude to Blackbeard. More than half my life lived in this hole. I’d considered abandoning ship more than once, but the tools I needed to reach the Fountain were here and, once it was mine, I would be free of more than just my captain.
Not that my time in Blackbeard’s guild had been horrible. Quite the contrary. Life here was more lavish than I’d imagined possible when my former guardians forced me to hack Blackbeard’s private accounts and lift a cool two million credits. I’d protested, but they’d insisted. It was less than one percent of what she had in the account. What harm could such a small sum do?
Rule number one: never hack a hacker.
But rather than yanking me before the law—the most terrifying thing an unsanctioned child could imagine—Blackbeard rescued me from the den of half-starved urchins our beneficent global government considered an orphanage.
Dumb to call it that. The advent of the Fountain sixty-four years before I was illegally conceived saw death all but cease to exist. Nothing but a bad memory from the primitive world predating Legacy Corp’s biggest breakthrough.
Of course, no one considered the negative repercussions immortality might have before making it free to the public. Sure, disease and aging were as dead as death, but the planet had been suffering from lack of resources long before the expanding population became immortal. Even the Lunar settlements and planned Martian colonies weren’t enough to relieve the pressure on Earth. So until someone in the Global Congress managed to pass a sterilization law, there would be places for irresponsible couples to dump the children they weren’t allowed to have and were too moral to dispose of pre-birth.
But the horrors of being an illegal couldn’t touch me once I attracted Blackbeard’s attention. I don’t even think the staff noticed when I disappeared. Too busy enjoying the spoils of my latest exploit. Blackbeard slipped me away in broad daylight to this palace of a room in her fortress of a mansion on the other side of the world where my talents could be put to better use in a more comfortable setting.
It would be a shame to say goodbye to the luxury foods and high-end tech, but I wouldn’t need it once I made humanity mortal again.
My fingers flew across the console, their te-ka-tek composing a symphony. My magnum opus was so close to completion, it was a sprint against time.
One I seemed destined to lose. Again.
The borders of my screens flared red. Simultaneously, the ghost delivered the day’s plunder to Blackbeard. Thirty seconds later, it began playing a recording of my performance of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. The timer showed less than eight minutes remaining in my access window. Curse Blackbeard’s impatient reading habits.
Worse still, my momentary inattention unleashed a technological kraken. Legacy’s firewalls closed in, their many tentacles wrapping around my virtual ship, squeezing until it snapped. The next thing I knew, I’d been booted from the server.
“Shit!”
Part of me wanted to throw caution to the wind and dive back in, but if anyone caught me in Legacy Corp’s servers again, I’d be flayed within an inch of my illegal life, chucked into the darkest hole on Blackbeard’s property, and left to rot. She might rule the world’s most feared hacker guild, but Legacy Corp owned the world—privilege of discovering immortality and all—and they defended their property like it was the last source of clean water on the planet. Those who hazarded so much as an unsanctioned peep at their firewalls were charged with crimes against humanity and prosecuted as terrorists. Those who went further simply disappeared. Permanently.
Hence Blackbeard’s promise regarding my fate should she ever catch me sniffing around their security again. Legacy’s IP was the only thing on her no-go list. I wondered vaguely if the Fountain could preserve someone from starvation. Until death was back on the table, that would be an ugly way to live. I closed down everything but the ghost program, which continued to play the cello recording.
Eighty-four seconds.
The empty thermos and strawberry bowl found their places on the tray beside the soufflé ramekin. I found my place too, on the stool in the music nook opposite the console. My second-favorite instrument came eagerly to my hands. The recording was in the final seconds of the third movement. My fingers danced across the cello’s neck. The bow hovered over the strings, moving with music still silent. The timer flashed.
Three.
Two.
One.
The console went dark. The music continued, my instrument picking up precisely where the recording left off. I poured myself into the movement of it, feeling the pressure of the strings against my fingers, the vibration of the sound traveling through the bow as I swept silence into song.
All sense of time melted into tones as rich and lonely as my existence in Blackbeard’s prison cell. That’s what it was after all, antique furniture, designer meals, and state-of-the-art technology aside. And I was still just a meal ticket.
Lunch, in this case.
The whir of the locks in the reinforced steel door to my cage pierced my musical meditation and alerted me to the impending breach of my solitude. My eyes closed. A minute later, I heard the door hiss open. The familiar pock-pock of designer stilettos rang against the hardwood floor.
“Just set it down,” a female voice said.
Softer footsteps moved into the room, deposited something on the solid mahogany table to the right of the music nook, and left. The door closed with its typical whir-whir-whir-click, sealing me and my guest inside.
“Scourge.”
I could feel Blackbeard’s gaze on me.
“Come here,” she said.
“Let me finish the suite.”
“I don’t have all day.”
I broke contact with the strings with a jolt and snapped to attention, eyes open, back as straight as the cello at my side, bow across my forehead in full salute. “Yes, Captain.”
One of Blackbeard’s finely manicured eyebrows arched. Its new purplish-red color didn’t do anything to make her plain face more attractive. The fake tan wasn’t helping either. “How many times do I have to tell you this is not a ship and I am not your captain?”
“But I am a pirate.”
“Hacker.”
I shrugged. “Pirates are more fun. Either way, I’m pillaging for your benefit, so you’ll be my captain until that stops.”
She smirked, and I could almost see the thought in a bubble over her head. Never, then.
Keep on believing it, I thought back.
“Have it your way,” she said. “For today, at least. Consider it a reward for acquiring the requested valuables.”
“I better get a bigger reward than thanks. The effing manuscript took me all morning.”
It wasn’t a lie as far as she was concerned. The ghost program had me struggling with it until it kicked on the music.
“Don’t curse,” Blackbeard said. “And don’t I always reward you well?” She pointed at the covered tray on the table beside her.
I treated her to a lopsided grin, set the cello down, and pranced over to lift the lid. Lunch was comprised of an ahi tuna steak as thick as my fist, a spring salad, and toast with avocado slices. Fresh produce twice in one day? Someone must have already paid for the VanGelder manuscript. And for dessert—my mouth watered—a chocolate trifle with actual shavings of the stuff on top. Cacao was worth as much as gold these days. I’d only been treated to such a delicacy twice before.
“And this is why you’re Blackbeard,” I said. “Loyalty secured through reward rather than terror.”
“Can’t you just say thank you?”
“Thanks, Captain,” I said, and meant it. I snagged a piece of toast and shoved it whole into my mouth.
Blackbeard smiled. “Thank you. I’d love to stay and hear how you figured it out—”
“It’s a thrilling tale.”
“—but I have more pressing issues to—”
BOOM.
I sank to a seat in front of the meal, picked up a fork, and speared myself a piece of tuna. “Issues, you were saying?”
Blackbeard shushed me, her gaze intent on the door to my room.
BOOM.
The lights flickered.
The fish practically melted in my mouth. “Sounds like the scurvy dogs on deck be messin’ around with yer cannons, Cap’n.”
She didn’t spare me so much as a scowl as she crossed to the door and pressed her hand to the scanner built in where the doorknob should’ve been. Normally it would’ve lit up and opened the door. Today it remained as black as my console.
Blackbeard tapped a small silver band on her wrist. “Johns, what’s going on?”
BOOM.
“Johns!”
The lights went out.
Backup power kicked on security lights for all of twenty seconds before those died as well. Something fleshy thumped against the door.
“Shit!” she snarled.
“Don’t curse,” I said through a mouthful of ahi. “Set yerself at ease, Cap’n. The scurvy dogs’ll rescue—”
“Shut up.” Her fingernails scrabbled along the door.
I shrugged and went back to my food. She could toy with things all she wanted, but with the security system down, there’d be no getting out from this end. She’d made sure of that after the second time I tried it.
The fish, salad, and toast had disappeared before she gave up, but I took my time with the trifle. I held the little glass bowl to my nose, breathing in the smell of rich cacao until I couldn’t resist. At that point, I collected the smallest spoon from my tea set, one I generally used to stir in sugar, and drew up the smallest of bites. Smooth cream met my tongue, and then—absolute heaven.
“Oh yeah,” I sighed to myself. This was totally worth waiting another week to steal the Fountain. Lucky Blackbeard didn’t know my weakness. With enough chocolate, she could’ve kept me a willing member of her crew for the rest of our unnaturally long lives.
I was two bites in when the security lights flicked on. Blackbeard sat on the floor, arms folded over her fake breasts, a scowl twisting her red lips.
I grinned and lifted a third spoonful of trifle. “Told you they’d rescue us. Or you, anyway.”
Her scowl deepened, her eyebrows threatening to meet in the middle of her forehead, though I wasn’t sure what annoyed her more, me or the fact that she’d had to sit on the floor in her designer pencil skirt. Or maybe it was the missing nail on her right ring finger. Either way, I turned my attention back to the trifle and did my best to keep from snickering.
The fifth spoonful had just met my tongue when a familiar whir heralded Blackbeard’s imminent liberation.
The door hissed open a crack.
Blackbeard turned her scowl upwards. “About ti—”
I looked up at her hesitation. Wide eyes erased every hint of her former irritation.
“Told you she’d have a safe room,” a male voice said.
The door swung wide, revealing a mob of SWAT officers in full riot gear.
“Boss, there’s a kid in here with her,” one of them said, his mask muffling his words. “About twelve years old, Asian descent. Can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl.”
I rolled my eyes. “Does it matter?”
“Bring them both,” came the answer from somewhere down the hallway.
Two of the SWAT team pulled Blackbeard to her feet. A third headed my way. I dropped the tiny spoon and shoveled the remaining trifle into my mouth with my fingers. No way was I going to let that go to waste, no matter what else was going on.
The officer gave me a napkin. I licked my hand clean before wiping. He took my other hand and escorted me into the hall and up a flight of stairs.
The room at the top was unbearably bright. In the time I’d worked for Blackbeard, I could count on one hand the times I’d seen the sky. The last one had been three years ago. A gift for my eighth birthday. I blinked wildly, trying to clear my vision so I could appreciate the view.
The officer guided me toward Blackbeard and the others so we could continue our extraction as a group.
“Out of curiosity,” she said, “what finally did me in?”
The officer who’d spoken earlier gave a grim laugh. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.” Blackbeard’s scowling eyebrows reasserted themselves. “Enlighten me.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I understand the temptation. But going after the Fountain of Youth, of all things? You’ve really lost your touch, Reuter.”
Blackbeard stopped dead.
Thank the stars for that. It kept everyone from noticing me stumbling over my own feet.
The officer on her left pulled her arm. “Come on, now. Don’t got all day.”
She ignored him, her eyes on his superior. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Honestly? Yeah.”
Blackbeard stepped forward. “I would never sanction an attack on Legacy Corp.”
The officer leaned in until his riot mask met her nose. “Protest all you like. The hack originated from this location. From the exact room where we found you, in fact.”
My brain lost contact with my feet, no longer sure which direction was up. A hurricane whirled through my head, half-baked thoughts that had no chance of saving me battering the inside of my skull like cannonballs.
The hallway was silent a moment before Blackbeard turned to me, and, for the first time since I’d met her, I understood how this utterly average woman had managed to maintain her grip on the world’s most fearsome hacker guild for the last fifty years. I’d have flayed myself and pitched my worthless hide into a hole for her if it would’ve rescued me from that gaze.
“Scourge.”
Every eye in the hall landed on me.
My stomach instantly regretted that last handful of trifle.
“You ungrateful, brainless, backstabbing little shit!” Blackbeard stomped her foot so hard she broke the heel off her stiletto.
She stumbled into the arms of her captors. They hauled her away before she could regain enough balance to claw my eyes out. A nice gesture, but it didn’t matter much. She wouldn’t go down honorably with the ship I’d sunk, and when the guild found out what I done … Well, I was dead either way.
I looked up at my guard. “Now what?”
He shrugged. “Haven’t had a juvenile in custody in decades.”
I leaned forward on the balls of my feet. The lack of any firm policy could play in my favor.
“Age means nothing,” the officer behind me said. “And if this kid is the hacker, the people upstairs are going to want a lot of answers.”
The leader nodded. “Interrogation, same as Reuter. The suits can sort it out from there.”
Consensus reached, the officer at my elbow nudged me forward. A second officer fell in on my other side.
I stifled a grin as they escorted me the same way Blackbeard had gone. An interrogation meant questions. Questions often led to conversations. And conversations offered opportunities. After all, the human mind was just another kind of computer to hack.
About the Author
A story addict from a young age, L.V. has a passion for all things science fiction and fantasy. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing, and her day job is managing projects in the satellite-communications industry. When not madly scribbling words for the muse, L.V. can be found dancing at the Colorado Renaissance Festival or judging beer competitions with her husband. She is currently working on a sci-fi novel, of which this story is a spin-off. Visit her at lvbell.com.