Fic: Meat 2/8 (Sherlock BBC)
Jul. 8th, 2012 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: Meat
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story.
Thanks tokeevacaereni for all her beta help!
Previous chapters: 1
“Are you planning on telling me what’s going on here, then?”
Your knowing what’s going on would be entirely superfluous to requirements. Besides, not knowing doesn’t seem to impede your functioning the rest of the time.
John rolls his eyes. “You know, you’re not actually obliged to be more of a prick than normal just because I’m out of hitting distance,” he points out, and gets a derisive snort in response.
God, though. He’s missed this. Even the parts that involve getting remotely insulted, which probably goes to show that there’s something wrong with him. Well, okay, there’s plenty wrong with him, he knows that—but it doesn’t seem to matter so much at times like this. For Sherlock, a case is a puzzle to occupy his brain; for John, it’s a chance to feel not-quite-useless for a couple of hours. He might not go out of his mind with boredom without them the way Sherlock does (or did, at least; these days, his fits of restlessness are quieter, screened by electronic walls) but he lives for the battlefield just the same.
And today, the case isn’t all that’s piqued his interest. Scraps of information about Sherlock’s life before they met are hard to come by, and most of the time John’s sense of decency keeps him from prying. One of them has got to have boundaries, after all. But the terse confirmation that this isn’t just any school, that it’s the one Sherlock went to—the one he got kicked out of aged sixteen—has John curious. He blows on his watery coffee and eyes the security gate across the street as though it might tell him something if he looks at it hard enough. Sherlock could probably tell him the precise number of students, who their parents are, and how much money they make, plus which of the mothers is having it off with the head, but, predictably, all John sees is a gate.
The time display in the lower-right corner of his vision reads 10:02. Eight minutes to kill before breaktime comes and the kids spill out into the street. He wets his lips before speaking.
“So,” he says, “What’d you get expelled for?”
A pause, and for a moment John doesn’t think he’s going to get a reply. Then: Breaking through security and using the school system to access the matrix proper.
John chuckles quietly. “Thought it might’ve been something like that.”
Then hacking into the records of a governmental office.
“Christ.” John shakes his head. “You’ve always been trouble, then.”
They weren’t important records.
“Still. Bloody hell. No wonder they couldn’t cope with you.”
The reasons for my expulsion were entirely spurious, Sherlock informs him, and John smirks, imagining his indignant expression and then imagining how much more indignant he must’ve looked at sixteen. They should have thanked me for highlighting the weaknesses in their security protocols. A pause. Mummy was furious, however.
John smiles.
Then, a thought occurs to him. “You know,” he says, “that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you mention your parents.” The shadowy figure of Mycroft—John’s spoken to him via screens but never in person, so he doesn’t feel like they’ve properly met; he’s old-fashioned like that, or just unaccustomed to the habits of the powerful—has always seemed to play the parental role alongside that of irritating older sibling.
Focus on the task at hand, John. Time to get to work.
The letters ‘SH’, hitherto hovering in the bottom-left corner of John’s line of sight, blink out.
The gate opens, and a mass of teenagers pours out. They’re in uniform—old-fashioned—chattering and laughing. A significant portion of the mass makes for the fast-food stand where John bought his coffee, the kids shouldering past him without a second glance. A small knot gathers just around the corner, though, out of sight from the school gate. Sixth-formers, at a guess. They lounge against the wall, muttering to each other as they exchange disks and derms and fags.
John studies them for a long moment, picking out the signs Sherlock told him to watch out for. The hair shaved or tucked back behind ears to display garishly-coloured inserts, the bright blues and yellows of stimulant derms stuck on beneath shirt-sleeves, the bad posture indicating hours longer spent hunched over a deck than strictly necessary for schoolwork. Most of them gather in a sort of conspiratorial cluster, though one kid—short and skinny, sucking nervously at his cigarette—stands apart, frowning to himself and eyeing the rest of the group in occasional flickering glances, as though he’s listening to the conversation but doesn’t quite have the nerve to break into it himself.
That, in the end, is what does it, makes John fix on this particular kid. The sense that he’s not certain he belongs there, the vulnerability, the darting intensity of his gaze. A bit unsure of himself; a bit more likely to do something reckless to prove his worth.
John’s not exactly a stranger to that sort of feeling. He was a teenager, too, once.
He catches the kid’s eye as he makes his way over, conscious of movement in the huddle at the corner, curious eyes darting in his direction. He nods, ignoring it. “Alright?”
The kid shrugs, flicks ash onto the pavement. After a moment, he looks sideways at John. Suspicious, but curious. Good.
“You look as if you know how to use a deck.”
“Yeah. So?” Affected overtones of mockney and Sprawl, but the posh is showing through with his nerves. Definitely a wannabe-cowboy.
“Any good?”
Another sideways look. “Not bad. Who’s asking?”
“Nobody you need to know about.” John jerks his head in the direction of the school building. “Internal security here. Reckon you could take it down for ten minutes or so?”
The kid narrows his eyes. “What are you, security? Copper?”
John laughs softly. “Do I look like one?” He waits for the kid to look him over—the shabby beige jacket, the fact that he’s a good two inches short of the minimum height requirement for most security firms—and, after missing just about everything that might indicate actual danger (oh, look, he doesn’t even need the rig to hear Sherlock talking in his head), decide he’s harmless. John slips his right hand into his jacket pocket and slips the disk he’s carrying halfway out.
The kid’s eyes light on it straight away. “What’s that?”
“Yours, if you can get the systems down at midday and keep them disabled a little while.”
“Icebreaker?” The kid’s head is cocked to one side now, and his expression’s hungry. He casts a little glance over his shoulder to be sure that his mates are getting this.
John nods, shortly. “Experimental. If you can use it, you can keep it.”
“Where’d it come from? Corporate?”
John shrugs. “It’s not my job to know that sort of stuff,” he says, which is true enough. He has no idea where, or precisely how illegally, Sherlock procured the software, and he definitely has no desire to find out.
Not that this is the first, or even the twenty-first, illegal thing Sherlock has talked him into doing during a case, of course. And really, given the dubious-at-best status of his day job, it’s not as though John’s got much room to complain about any of that. Black clinics can be dodgy as fuck. The first few months after discharge, before he had any kind of reputation, he pulled casual shifts in the lower-stratum Chiba clinics—not the ones you think of when you think of Chiba, the pricey places producing high-end custom work, but the real dregs—and some days, he felt honestly sick with disgust at himself just for being there. He didn’t even take every job he was offered; it helped him preserve some vague semblance of self-respect, even if he knew the client would just move on a couple of doors down the street, to a surgeon who wouldn’t ask any questions. The London ones, for the most part, are the same. Sarah’s a rare proprietor who shares his sense of responsibility.
He was lucky, to get the job with her. There aren’t exactly many other employment options for an ex-military (and ex-government military at that, which makes him as good as a dangerous Bolshevik in the eyes of the corporate extraction boys) doctor with bargain-basement augmentations and a leg that threatens to buckle under him with phantom pain whenever he goes too long without being shot at. No corporation is going to headhunt him to take care of their top research brains, that’s for sure. And besides that, there are—well, all the things John can’t quite make himself see eye-to-eye with, no matter how many times he reminds himself that they’re just standard business practices, that the companies have to adopt them to compete. The poison sacs; the organ-failure timebombs employed to keep high-level personnel tethered to their companies. He doesn’t think he could be a part of all that. Yes, the military uses similar tactics to prevent desertion, but at least soldiers who go AWOL just get marked, not killed. And you know what you’re letting yourself in for, when you join up; you don’t regain consciousness in an unfamiliar med-bay with some grinning suit on a monitor informing you, ‘Hi, you work for us now! Welcome to the company, and by the way, if you don’t check in with our doctors on a regular basis, you can say sayonara to your kidneys.’
John knows it’s all just degrees of the same thing, really. He knows you tell yourself whatever you need to believe to live with your decisions. He sticks with his morals, such as they are, anyway.
The kid is looking at him, biting his lip.
“Well?” John asks him. “Are you in, or do I need to look else—”
“I’m in,” the kid says, quickly. He holds out his hand for the icebreaker.
“Oh, no. After you’ve done the job.” John nods in the direction of the fast food (and—like all those places—under-the-counter cigarettes and software) stand. “Ask Speedy.”
The kid looks doubtful, and John reaches into his other pocket for an unmarked currency card of whose provenance he’s also gladly ignorant.
He holds it out. “Deposit,” he says. “Two hundred New Euro.”
The kid nods again, tucks the card into his pocket, and then darts in the direction of the little group on the corner, lighting up another fag and no doubt itching to boast grandly about the job he’s just been offered, and how that must mean he’s the best console man in the whole school.
He just shrugs and shakes his head importantly when they press him, though. Apparently he’s not daft enough to start boasting before he pulls off a job. Good—though it wouldn’t matter too much if he did. The kid won’t get more than a slap on the wrist even if he is found out; it’s only an internal system. It was breaking into the matrix, where corporate systems lie, that got Sherlock booted out. This is the sort of thing teenage wannabe-cowboys do all the time; kids are always ahead of the technological curve, and even a school tutoring the offspring of the wealthy, like this one, doesn’t have the money to get cutting-edge systems installed. Nobody’s likely to bat an eyelid.
And just in case questions do get asked, Sherlock’s set in motion a dozen rumours that might explain a stranger’s wanting to shut down the security systems of a private school—a teenage elopement, a staff member running a sideline in illegal software, and a journalist looking for dirt on an ex-pupil among them—and ensured scraps of digital correlation for the majority. Surveillance cameras will be shut down with the security systems, and nobody’s likely to notice an unassuming, beige little man with none of the trademark modifications of the modern criminal in the ensuing confusion. They’ll be more interested in finding the prankster—whose boasting rights ought to propel him right to the top of the popularity tree for at least a couple of months—and in avoiding the interference of bureaucracy as best they can.
In any case, he and Sherlock are (mostly) legitimate operators, working alongside the police—and where their activities aren’t strictly legal, it’s the kind of not-strictly-legal to which London mostly turns a blind eye. The chances of this getting traced back to them are slim to none. As long as John manages to grab the Powers file without incident, anyway. He hopes Sherlock knows what he’s doing. (Okay, probably a given.) He hopes the kid knows what he’s doing. He hopes he knows what he’s doing.
* * *
The kid’s as good as his word. At twelve precisely, ‘SH’ blinks up in the corner of John’s vision. He’s made himself scarce for the hour-and-a-half after depositing the icebreaker with Speedy, and now he’s browsing the hardware in a shop on the other side of the road, trying his best to look as though he knows what he’s looking at. Even if he did, the prices in this neighbourhood are astronomical—but nobody gives him a second glance. Places like this sell to rich corporate types and underground operators who’ve managed to get lucky alike; there’s no such thing as a typical customer.
Security’s starting to fail, Sherlock’s voice informs him. Get ready.
It’s a big school. John passes unnoticed among the crowds, no doubt getting mistaken for a tutor or, at a pinch, a member of maintenance staff. He walks as purposefully as he can, hoping that he looks like he knows where he’s going, and aided—mostly—in the endeavour by Sherlock’s voice inside his head.
The records office is on the second left corridor, but that’s not what you want. Those are the current records; the cores hooked up to the matrix. If what we need was in there, we wouldn’t have had to bother with this charade at all; I could have got them in seconds.
“Yes, thanks,” John mutters under his breath. “Just in case a few hours away from your ego had made me start to forget the sheer size of it.”
You know I detest false modesty.
“You wouldn’t know modesty if it smacked you in the face and then apologised for not hitting hard enough. Where am I going?”
We want archive records; they’ll have kept the disks, probably in filing cabinets. Basement. Next staircase on your right. Look under ‘incident reports’.
He finds the disk easily enough. It’s obvious from the dust that nobody comes down here, but luckily that means nobody’s disturbed anything in years, either. Doesn’t take long, and he’s back out, through a side-door and halfway down the road before he hears an alarm sound inside the school building.
“Alright,” John says. “That was easy enough.” He’s smiling to himself, even though he hasn’t exactly done anything earth-shattering—just walked into a building, nicked a disk, and walked back out again. Perhaps it’s just the feeling of being necessary, for once.
It’s a start, Sherlock admits.
“Right.” John pauses a moment. “So, that Carl Powers. Was he a friend of yours?”
Hardly. You know me, John; you don’t imagine I was a popular child, do you?
“Can’t believe the other kids failed to be charmed by your sweet and caring nature.”
Most people are idiots, as I’ve told you time and time again.
“Yeah, and you never tire of reminding me how well I represent the general population, eith—hang on.”
John breaks off, noticing something out of the corner of his eye. Though he’s not expecting to be followed, he’s been keeping an eye on the crowds in shop-window reflections and occasional sideways glances as he walks, out of habit as much as anything. But a security guard would chase him openly; the figure that seems to have followed his path a little too closely for a little too long is just following. It hasn’t gained on him at all.
He turns, and sees a red-headed woman duck into a shop doorway. Trying to look as though she isn’t following him. Not security, then. One of Mycroft’s people? He hasn’t seen her before, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He frowns, wondering whether he should try to duck out of sight while she’s hiding from him, and that’s when the kid on the scooter ploughs into him.
It gets him right in his bad leg, and the leg folds under him, making him sag heavily against shop-front glass.
“Ow,” he hisses. “Fuck.” Then: “Sherlock?”
The ‘SH’ in the corner of his vision is blinking. Once, twice, then it vanishes.
John groans.
“Excuse me?” There’s a bloke leaning over him, offering him a hand up. He has big, concerned brown eyes, a discreet logo in flecks of dark gold woven into the irises. New models; swanky. “Are you alright?”
John blinks. He lets himself be pulled upright, steadying himself against the shopfront with a hand. “Yeah, thanks. Just need a sec.”
The bloke shakes his head in the direction of the scooter kid, who’s already vanished into the distance. “Bloody teenagers. Need a hand with anything?”
“Um.” John inhales; has to struggle not to reach into his inside jacket pocket and check that the disk is still there. “Could you flag down a taxi for me? Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
Once he’s safely inside the cab, he digs in his wallet for an analgesic derm, pulls up his trouser leg and slaps it just under his knee. Then he reaches into his jacket, sighing with relief when his fingers find the hard plastic edge of the disk.
They find something else, too. John frowns as his touch encounters the unfamiliar objects. Three of them. Tiny. He pulls them out of his pocket and holds them up to his face.
They look like… seeds. From real fruit, not the mushed-up-and-reconstituted nutrient crap that most Londoners eat on the go. They weren’t there before. The bloke who helped him up must have slipped them into his pocket. That’s the only possible explanation.
John’s brow creases in confusion. He tries to remember what the bloke looked like, apart from the expensive eyes. Plainly dressed, he thinks, short hair, no really noticeable modifications, but that’s about it. The disk and his wallet are unscathed, so the bloke didn’t take anything. Some kind of arty prank? The bloke was too old, and not outlandish-looking enough, to be part of a street collective, but John guesses he could be an independent operator, or a student from one of the private colleges. They pull that kind of thing sometimes; a hangover from the old university rag weeks.
He really has no idea. He’d ask Sherlock, but the bottom-left corner of his vision stays stubbornly empty.
“Bastard,” he mutters to himself—then quickly adds, “Not you,” at the driver’s startled glance. He rests his forehead against the window, and sighs.
* * *
“You did know him, though, right?” John asks, once he’s got back to the flat and handed over the disk. He’s stretched out in Sherlock’s usual place on the sofa, for now. The pain in his leg is fading; he’ll have a nasty bruise, but nothing more, and he’s more relieved at that than he’ll admit. Sherlock spared a sideways glance at him when he came in, and, though he didn’t say anything, John allows himself to believe Sherlock is relieved he wasn’t badly hurt. He can’t quite convince himself Sherlock feels guilty for abandoning him like that, earlier, but then he’s not stupid enough to expect miracles.
“Hmm?”
“Carl Powers.”
“No. I made it my business to know about him, after his death—or, at least, I tried to. His files had been passed on to the police, and I wasn’t able to persuade them to give me access. Nor could I risk obtaining them by illegal means once they knew that I was interested.”
“That why you called me an idiot when I suggested we go to Lestrade for a warrant instead of breaking into the place?”
“Among other things, yes. Powers was a year younger than me, and he died shortly after my expulsion. I gathered that the general consensus was that he’d been attempting to copy me. He managed to get into the matrix proper and—it was assumed—encountered black ice, which killed him. Death by misadventure was the verdict.”
“And you don’t think that’s what happened?”
“Powers was of slightly above-average intelligence; breaking security as I had would have taken either a genius or a reckless idiot. Perhaps both. He couldn’t have done it without help. It didn’t fit. The record should allow me to trace his actions; find out what actually happened.”
“And this has to do with the data theft how, exactly?”
“It doesn’t. The data theft’s irrelevant; it was committed in order to draw my attention to the message the thief left for me. To this.” Sherlock turns the disk over between his fingers, then heads for the deck. “Someone’s playing a game with me, John. I don’t intend to lose.”
He slots in the disk, and presses the trodes to his forehead. It’s only then that John remembers the pips in his jacket pocket. “Wait a sec,” he starts to say. “Something else odd happened on the way—”
But Sherlock’s eyes are distant; he’s already left the room.
* * *
The firewall approaching, white and enclosing, reaching to the limits of his sight. A weakness in it; he (Powers) heads straight for it. A weakness that should need to be looked for; a weakness even Sherlock didn’t find first time.
Through. And then.
Something comes at him. Flat and black, rotating fast, and close—
The recording ends.
This is what Powers saw before he died. That settles it, then. He had help—help finding his way past the firewall, and straight into a trap. Carl Powers didn’t run into black ice. Black ice came looking for him.
Petty rivalry, no doubt. Powers was clever enough; entertained ambitions of making a living as a console man. Probably, in the way of the offspring of the rich, he romanticized the cowboy demi-monde; imagined himself at the peak of it, holding court to a ragtag entourage of console men and street samurai, dealers in illicit software and criminal hangers-on. Perhaps, like Sherlock, he saw it as a method of escape from a life of stultifying convention—though that’s less likely. Powers was steady and orthodox enough, at bottom; no conflict to speak of in his home life. Had he lived, he’d have worked out his teenage rebellion in short order and been taken on by a major corporation. He’d be making serious money, now.
A teenage rival, though, with the wherewithal to set up a trap like that? Vicious to the point of obsession; lacking conscience; brilliant? Is that—grown to maturity—the mind facing him now?
Could be interesting.
Sherlock works as quickly as he can, after that. Pulls up the details of what he saw; compares the behaviour of the program to contemporary innovations in the field. Comes up with a likely point of origin: Dublin.
Back into the financial system. Back into the construct. He seats himself at the simulated deck. His fingers fly over the keys in the construct as in the physical world.
Irish connection uncovered.
A beat.
Well done, you! I take it my little extra incentive helped you on your way?
Incentive?
What, John didn’t tell you about my little message? Well, ordinary people can be so forgetful, always ignoring the important stuff…
Sherlock waits.
I suppose it was a little cryptic for him; we shouldn’t expect too much, should we? Pips, Sherlock. Pips.
A threat.
Well, of course. Five’s the tradition, but apparently you’re just not that good at making friends. Never mind, though, three will do. And you did it! You saved her.
His mind races. Of the people close enough for him to care about, there’s only one the thief can possibly mean.
If you hadn’t solved my puzzle in time, well… bye-bye, Mrs H. She had a repairman in to look at her simstim deck yesterday afternoon. Don’t suppose you paid him much attention. I’d buy her a new one, if I were you. Word of advice, though: don’t go with Hitachi. Their security’s terribly shoddy, honestly, I’m shocked…
* * *
John’s startled out of a half-doze when Sherlock leaps to his feet and clatters down the stairs into 221A. Surprise and adrenaline keep him from wincing as he levers himself up off the sofa and follows.
Sherlock’s standing in the middle of Mrs Hudson’s flat, the power lead from her simstim unit dangling from his hand. The unit sparks and dies. She blinks at him in surprise; he’s breathing hard.
“Don’t let anyone into the flat,” he says. “Not without one of us here. It’svery important. Do you understand?”
Mrs Hudson’s hands flutter at her breast in distress. “Sherlock! What are you going on about now? First the unit dies on me—still in warranty, mind you, that was a mercy—and now you’ve gone and—”
“Do you understand?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Good.” And without another word, Sherlock turns on his heel and heads back up the stairs.
“Er,” says John. “Sorry about that.” He attempts a laugh. “You know how he is.”
Mrs Hudson gives him a worried look. “Is there something going on, John? Are you two in some kind of trouble?”
“No—well. I don’t think so.” John shrugs. “To be honest, I don’t know any more.” He lets out a sigh. “I don’t know.”
Chapter 3
Author:
anactoria Characters/pairing: Sherlock/John, Irene/Kate, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade
Rating: R
Warnings/contains: Drug use, prostitution, character death. (None of this takes place ‘onscreen’, and, given the nature of this AU, death is not an entirely stable concept…)
Summary: Cyberpunk AU. Sherlock wants to disappear. John wants to stop him, but how’s he supposed to help when they’re barely in the same world anymore?
Notes: This story is set in the world of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but it’s not a fusion; I haven’t tried to slot Sherlock and co. into the roles of Gibson’s characters, and I hope you don’t need to have read them to make sense of the story.
Thanks to
keevacaereni for all her beta help!Previous chapters: 1
“Are you planning on telling me what’s going on here, then?”
Your knowing what’s going on would be entirely superfluous to requirements. Besides, not knowing doesn’t seem to impede your functioning the rest of the time.
John rolls his eyes. “You know, you’re not actually obliged to be more of a prick than normal just because I’m out of hitting distance,” he points out, and gets a derisive snort in response.
God, though. He’s missed this. Even the parts that involve getting remotely insulted, which probably goes to show that there’s something wrong with him. Well, okay, there’s plenty wrong with him, he knows that—but it doesn’t seem to matter so much at times like this. For Sherlock, a case is a puzzle to occupy his brain; for John, it’s a chance to feel not-quite-useless for a couple of hours. He might not go out of his mind with boredom without them the way Sherlock does (or did, at least; these days, his fits of restlessness are quieter, screened by electronic walls) but he lives for the battlefield just the same.
And today, the case isn’t all that’s piqued his interest. Scraps of information about Sherlock’s life before they met are hard to come by, and most of the time John’s sense of decency keeps him from prying. One of them has got to have boundaries, after all. But the terse confirmation that this isn’t just any school, that it’s the one Sherlock went to—the one he got kicked out of aged sixteen—has John curious. He blows on his watery coffee and eyes the security gate across the street as though it might tell him something if he looks at it hard enough. Sherlock could probably tell him the precise number of students, who their parents are, and how much money they make, plus which of the mothers is having it off with the head, but, predictably, all John sees is a gate.
The time display in the lower-right corner of his vision reads 10:02. Eight minutes to kill before breaktime comes and the kids spill out into the street. He wets his lips before speaking.
“So,” he says, “What’d you get expelled for?”
A pause, and for a moment John doesn’t think he’s going to get a reply. Then: Breaking through security and using the school system to access the matrix proper.
John chuckles quietly. “Thought it might’ve been something like that.”
Then hacking into the records of a governmental office.
“Christ.” John shakes his head. “You’ve always been trouble, then.”
They weren’t important records.
“Still. Bloody hell. No wonder they couldn’t cope with you.”
The reasons for my expulsion were entirely spurious, Sherlock informs him, and John smirks, imagining his indignant expression and then imagining how much more indignant he must’ve looked at sixteen. They should have thanked me for highlighting the weaknesses in their security protocols. A pause. Mummy was furious, however.
John smiles.
Then, a thought occurs to him. “You know,” he says, “that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you mention your parents.” The shadowy figure of Mycroft—John’s spoken to him via screens but never in person, so he doesn’t feel like they’ve properly met; he’s old-fashioned like that, or just unaccustomed to the habits of the powerful—has always seemed to play the parental role alongside that of irritating older sibling.
Focus on the task at hand, John. Time to get to work.
The letters ‘SH’, hitherto hovering in the bottom-left corner of John’s line of sight, blink out.
The gate opens, and a mass of teenagers pours out. They’re in uniform—old-fashioned—chattering and laughing. A significant portion of the mass makes for the fast-food stand where John bought his coffee, the kids shouldering past him without a second glance. A small knot gathers just around the corner, though, out of sight from the school gate. Sixth-formers, at a guess. They lounge against the wall, muttering to each other as they exchange disks and derms and fags.
John studies them for a long moment, picking out the signs Sherlock told him to watch out for. The hair shaved or tucked back behind ears to display garishly-coloured inserts, the bright blues and yellows of stimulant derms stuck on beneath shirt-sleeves, the bad posture indicating hours longer spent hunched over a deck than strictly necessary for schoolwork. Most of them gather in a sort of conspiratorial cluster, though one kid—short and skinny, sucking nervously at his cigarette—stands apart, frowning to himself and eyeing the rest of the group in occasional flickering glances, as though he’s listening to the conversation but doesn’t quite have the nerve to break into it himself.
That, in the end, is what does it, makes John fix on this particular kid. The sense that he’s not certain he belongs there, the vulnerability, the darting intensity of his gaze. A bit unsure of himself; a bit more likely to do something reckless to prove his worth.
John’s not exactly a stranger to that sort of feeling. He was a teenager, too, once.
He catches the kid’s eye as he makes his way over, conscious of movement in the huddle at the corner, curious eyes darting in his direction. He nods, ignoring it. “Alright?”
The kid shrugs, flicks ash onto the pavement. After a moment, he looks sideways at John. Suspicious, but curious. Good.
“You look as if you know how to use a deck.”
“Yeah. So?” Affected overtones of mockney and Sprawl, but the posh is showing through with his nerves. Definitely a wannabe-cowboy.
“Any good?”
Another sideways look. “Not bad. Who’s asking?”
“Nobody you need to know about.” John jerks his head in the direction of the school building. “Internal security here. Reckon you could take it down for ten minutes or so?”
The kid narrows his eyes. “What are you, security? Copper?”
John laughs softly. “Do I look like one?” He waits for the kid to look him over—the shabby beige jacket, the fact that he’s a good two inches short of the minimum height requirement for most security firms—and, after missing just about everything that might indicate actual danger (oh, look, he doesn’t even need the rig to hear Sherlock talking in his head), decide he’s harmless. John slips his right hand into his jacket pocket and slips the disk he’s carrying halfway out.
The kid’s eyes light on it straight away. “What’s that?”
“Yours, if you can get the systems down at midday and keep them disabled a little while.”
“Icebreaker?” The kid’s head is cocked to one side now, and his expression’s hungry. He casts a little glance over his shoulder to be sure that his mates are getting this.
John nods, shortly. “Experimental. If you can use it, you can keep it.”
“Where’d it come from? Corporate?”
John shrugs. “It’s not my job to know that sort of stuff,” he says, which is true enough. He has no idea where, or precisely how illegally, Sherlock procured the software, and he definitely has no desire to find out.
Not that this is the first, or even the twenty-first, illegal thing Sherlock has talked him into doing during a case, of course. And really, given the dubious-at-best status of his day job, it’s not as though John’s got much room to complain about any of that. Black clinics can be dodgy as fuck. The first few months after discharge, before he had any kind of reputation, he pulled casual shifts in the lower-stratum Chiba clinics—not the ones you think of when you think of Chiba, the pricey places producing high-end custom work, but the real dregs—and some days, he felt honestly sick with disgust at himself just for being there. He didn’t even take every job he was offered; it helped him preserve some vague semblance of self-respect, even if he knew the client would just move on a couple of doors down the street, to a surgeon who wouldn’t ask any questions. The London ones, for the most part, are the same. Sarah’s a rare proprietor who shares his sense of responsibility.
He was lucky, to get the job with her. There aren’t exactly many other employment options for an ex-military (and ex-government military at that, which makes him as good as a dangerous Bolshevik in the eyes of the corporate extraction boys) doctor with bargain-basement augmentations and a leg that threatens to buckle under him with phantom pain whenever he goes too long without being shot at. No corporation is going to headhunt him to take care of their top research brains, that’s for sure. And besides that, there are—well, all the things John can’t quite make himself see eye-to-eye with, no matter how many times he reminds himself that they’re just standard business practices, that the companies have to adopt them to compete. The poison sacs; the organ-failure timebombs employed to keep high-level personnel tethered to their companies. He doesn’t think he could be a part of all that. Yes, the military uses similar tactics to prevent desertion, but at least soldiers who go AWOL just get marked, not killed. And you know what you’re letting yourself in for, when you join up; you don’t regain consciousness in an unfamiliar med-bay with some grinning suit on a monitor informing you, ‘Hi, you work for us now! Welcome to the company, and by the way, if you don’t check in with our doctors on a regular basis, you can say sayonara to your kidneys.’
John knows it’s all just degrees of the same thing, really. He knows you tell yourself whatever you need to believe to live with your decisions. He sticks with his morals, such as they are, anyway.
The kid is looking at him, biting his lip.
“Well?” John asks him. “Are you in, or do I need to look else—”
“I’m in,” the kid says, quickly. He holds out his hand for the icebreaker.
“Oh, no. After you’ve done the job.” John nods in the direction of the fast food (and—like all those places—under-the-counter cigarettes and software) stand. “Ask Speedy.”
The kid looks doubtful, and John reaches into his other pocket for an unmarked currency card of whose provenance he’s also gladly ignorant.
He holds it out. “Deposit,” he says. “Two hundred New Euro.”
The kid nods again, tucks the card into his pocket, and then darts in the direction of the little group on the corner, lighting up another fag and no doubt itching to boast grandly about the job he’s just been offered, and how that must mean he’s the best console man in the whole school.
He just shrugs and shakes his head importantly when they press him, though. Apparently he’s not daft enough to start boasting before he pulls off a job. Good—though it wouldn’t matter too much if he did. The kid won’t get more than a slap on the wrist even if he is found out; it’s only an internal system. It was breaking into the matrix, where corporate systems lie, that got Sherlock booted out. This is the sort of thing teenage wannabe-cowboys do all the time; kids are always ahead of the technological curve, and even a school tutoring the offspring of the wealthy, like this one, doesn’t have the money to get cutting-edge systems installed. Nobody’s likely to bat an eyelid.
And just in case questions do get asked, Sherlock’s set in motion a dozen rumours that might explain a stranger’s wanting to shut down the security systems of a private school—a teenage elopement, a staff member running a sideline in illegal software, and a journalist looking for dirt on an ex-pupil among them—and ensured scraps of digital correlation for the majority. Surveillance cameras will be shut down with the security systems, and nobody’s likely to notice an unassuming, beige little man with none of the trademark modifications of the modern criminal in the ensuing confusion. They’ll be more interested in finding the prankster—whose boasting rights ought to propel him right to the top of the popularity tree for at least a couple of months—and in avoiding the interference of bureaucracy as best they can.
In any case, he and Sherlock are (mostly) legitimate operators, working alongside the police—and where their activities aren’t strictly legal, it’s the kind of not-strictly-legal to which London mostly turns a blind eye. The chances of this getting traced back to them are slim to none. As long as John manages to grab the Powers file without incident, anyway. He hopes Sherlock knows what he’s doing. (Okay, probably a given.) He hopes the kid knows what he’s doing. He hopes he knows what he’s doing.
The kid’s as good as his word. At twelve precisely, ‘SH’ blinks up in the corner of John’s vision. He’s made himself scarce for the hour-and-a-half after depositing the icebreaker with Speedy, and now he’s browsing the hardware in a shop on the other side of the road, trying his best to look as though he knows what he’s looking at. Even if he did, the prices in this neighbourhood are astronomical—but nobody gives him a second glance. Places like this sell to rich corporate types and underground operators who’ve managed to get lucky alike; there’s no such thing as a typical customer.
Security’s starting to fail, Sherlock’s voice informs him. Get ready.
It’s a big school. John passes unnoticed among the crowds, no doubt getting mistaken for a tutor or, at a pinch, a member of maintenance staff. He walks as purposefully as he can, hoping that he looks like he knows where he’s going, and aided—mostly—in the endeavour by Sherlock’s voice inside his head.
The records office is on the second left corridor, but that’s not what you want. Those are the current records; the cores hooked up to the matrix. If what we need was in there, we wouldn’t have had to bother with this charade at all; I could have got them in seconds.
“Yes, thanks,” John mutters under his breath. “Just in case a few hours away from your ego had made me start to forget the sheer size of it.”
You know I detest false modesty.
“You wouldn’t know modesty if it smacked you in the face and then apologised for not hitting hard enough. Where am I going?”
We want archive records; they’ll have kept the disks, probably in filing cabinets. Basement. Next staircase on your right. Look under ‘incident reports’.
He finds the disk easily enough. It’s obvious from the dust that nobody comes down here, but luckily that means nobody’s disturbed anything in years, either. Doesn’t take long, and he’s back out, through a side-door and halfway down the road before he hears an alarm sound inside the school building.
“Alright,” John says. “That was easy enough.” He’s smiling to himself, even though he hasn’t exactly done anything earth-shattering—just walked into a building, nicked a disk, and walked back out again. Perhaps it’s just the feeling of being necessary, for once.
It’s a start, Sherlock admits.
“Right.” John pauses a moment. “So, that Carl Powers. Was he a friend of yours?”
Hardly. You know me, John; you don’t imagine I was a popular child, do you?
“Can’t believe the other kids failed to be charmed by your sweet and caring nature.”
Most people are idiots, as I’ve told you time and time again.
“Yeah, and you never tire of reminding me how well I represent the general population, eith—hang on.”
John breaks off, noticing something out of the corner of his eye. Though he’s not expecting to be followed, he’s been keeping an eye on the crowds in shop-window reflections and occasional sideways glances as he walks, out of habit as much as anything. But a security guard would chase him openly; the figure that seems to have followed his path a little too closely for a little too long is just following. It hasn’t gained on him at all.
He turns, and sees a red-headed woman duck into a shop doorway. Trying to look as though she isn’t following him. Not security, then. One of Mycroft’s people? He hasn’t seen her before, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He frowns, wondering whether he should try to duck out of sight while she’s hiding from him, and that’s when the kid on the scooter ploughs into him.
It gets him right in his bad leg, and the leg folds under him, making him sag heavily against shop-front glass.
“Ow,” he hisses. “Fuck.” Then: “Sherlock?”
The ‘SH’ in the corner of his vision is blinking. Once, twice, then it vanishes.
John groans.
“Excuse me?” There’s a bloke leaning over him, offering him a hand up. He has big, concerned brown eyes, a discreet logo in flecks of dark gold woven into the irises. New models; swanky. “Are you alright?”
John blinks. He lets himself be pulled upright, steadying himself against the shopfront with a hand. “Yeah, thanks. Just need a sec.”
The bloke shakes his head in the direction of the scooter kid, who’s already vanished into the distance. “Bloody teenagers. Need a hand with anything?”
“Um.” John inhales; has to struggle not to reach into his inside jacket pocket and check that the disk is still there. “Could you flag down a taxi for me? Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
Once he’s safely inside the cab, he digs in his wallet for an analgesic derm, pulls up his trouser leg and slaps it just under his knee. Then he reaches into his jacket, sighing with relief when his fingers find the hard plastic edge of the disk.
They find something else, too. John frowns as his touch encounters the unfamiliar objects. Three of them. Tiny. He pulls them out of his pocket and holds them up to his face.
They look like… seeds. From real fruit, not the mushed-up-and-reconstituted nutrient crap that most Londoners eat on the go. They weren’t there before. The bloke who helped him up must have slipped them into his pocket. That’s the only possible explanation.
John’s brow creases in confusion. He tries to remember what the bloke looked like, apart from the expensive eyes. Plainly dressed, he thinks, short hair, no really noticeable modifications, but that’s about it. The disk and his wallet are unscathed, so the bloke didn’t take anything. Some kind of arty prank? The bloke was too old, and not outlandish-looking enough, to be part of a street collective, but John guesses he could be an independent operator, or a student from one of the private colleges. They pull that kind of thing sometimes; a hangover from the old university rag weeks.
He really has no idea. He’d ask Sherlock, but the bottom-left corner of his vision stays stubbornly empty.
“Bastard,” he mutters to himself—then quickly adds, “Not you,” at the driver’s startled glance. He rests his forehead against the window, and sighs.
“You did know him, though, right?” John asks, once he’s got back to the flat and handed over the disk. He’s stretched out in Sherlock’s usual place on the sofa, for now. The pain in his leg is fading; he’ll have a nasty bruise, but nothing more, and he’s more relieved at that than he’ll admit. Sherlock spared a sideways glance at him when he came in, and, though he didn’t say anything, John allows himself to believe Sherlock is relieved he wasn’t badly hurt. He can’t quite convince himself Sherlock feels guilty for abandoning him like that, earlier, but then he’s not stupid enough to expect miracles.
“Hmm?”
“Carl Powers.”
“No. I made it my business to know about him, after his death—or, at least, I tried to. His files had been passed on to the police, and I wasn’t able to persuade them to give me access. Nor could I risk obtaining them by illegal means once they knew that I was interested.”
“That why you called me an idiot when I suggested we go to Lestrade for a warrant instead of breaking into the place?”
“Among other things, yes. Powers was a year younger than me, and he died shortly after my expulsion. I gathered that the general consensus was that he’d been attempting to copy me. He managed to get into the matrix proper and—it was assumed—encountered black ice, which killed him. Death by misadventure was the verdict.”
“And you don’t think that’s what happened?”
“Powers was of slightly above-average intelligence; breaking security as I had would have taken either a genius or a reckless idiot. Perhaps both. He couldn’t have done it without help. It didn’t fit. The record should allow me to trace his actions; find out what actually happened.”
“And this has to do with the data theft how, exactly?”
“It doesn’t. The data theft’s irrelevant; it was committed in order to draw my attention to the message the thief left for me. To this.” Sherlock turns the disk over between his fingers, then heads for the deck. “Someone’s playing a game with me, John. I don’t intend to lose.”
He slots in the disk, and presses the trodes to his forehead. It’s only then that John remembers the pips in his jacket pocket. “Wait a sec,” he starts to say. “Something else odd happened on the way—”
But Sherlock’s eyes are distant; he’s already left the room.
The firewall approaching, white and enclosing, reaching to the limits of his sight. A weakness in it; he (Powers) heads straight for it. A weakness that should need to be looked for; a weakness even Sherlock didn’t find first time.
Through. And then.
Something comes at him. Flat and black, rotating fast, and close—
The recording ends.
This is what Powers saw before he died. That settles it, then. He had help—help finding his way past the firewall, and straight into a trap. Carl Powers didn’t run into black ice. Black ice came looking for him.
Petty rivalry, no doubt. Powers was clever enough; entertained ambitions of making a living as a console man. Probably, in the way of the offspring of the rich, he romanticized the cowboy demi-monde; imagined himself at the peak of it, holding court to a ragtag entourage of console men and street samurai, dealers in illicit software and criminal hangers-on. Perhaps, like Sherlock, he saw it as a method of escape from a life of stultifying convention—though that’s less likely. Powers was steady and orthodox enough, at bottom; no conflict to speak of in his home life. Had he lived, he’d have worked out his teenage rebellion in short order and been taken on by a major corporation. He’d be making serious money, now.
A teenage rival, though, with the wherewithal to set up a trap like that? Vicious to the point of obsession; lacking conscience; brilliant? Is that—grown to maturity—the mind facing him now?
Could be interesting.
Sherlock works as quickly as he can, after that. Pulls up the details of what he saw; compares the behaviour of the program to contemporary innovations in the field. Comes up with a likely point of origin: Dublin.
Back into the financial system. Back into the construct. He seats himself at the simulated deck. His fingers fly over the keys in the construct as in the physical world.
Irish connection uncovered.
A beat.
Well done, you! I take it my little extra incentive helped you on your way?
Incentive?
What, John didn’t tell you about my little message? Well, ordinary people can be so forgetful, always ignoring the important stuff…
Sherlock waits.
I suppose it was a little cryptic for him; we shouldn’t expect too much, should we? Pips, Sherlock. Pips.
A threat.
Well, of course. Five’s the tradition, but apparently you’re just not that good at making friends. Never mind, though, three will do. And you did it! You saved her.
His mind races. Of the people close enough for him to care about, there’s only one the thief can possibly mean.
If you hadn’t solved my puzzle in time, well… bye-bye, Mrs H. She had a repairman in to look at her simstim deck yesterday afternoon. Don’t suppose you paid him much attention. I’d buy her a new one, if I were you. Word of advice, though: don’t go with Hitachi. Their security’s terribly shoddy, honestly, I’m shocked…
John’s startled out of a half-doze when Sherlock leaps to his feet and clatters down the stairs into 221A. Surprise and adrenaline keep him from wincing as he levers himself up off the sofa and follows.
Sherlock’s standing in the middle of Mrs Hudson’s flat, the power lead from her simstim unit dangling from his hand. The unit sparks and dies. She blinks at him in surprise; he’s breathing hard.
“Don’t let anyone into the flat,” he says. “Not without one of us here. It’svery important. Do you understand?”
Mrs Hudson’s hands flutter at her breast in distress. “Sherlock! What are you going on about now? First the unit dies on me—still in warranty, mind you, that was a mercy—and now you’ve gone and—”
“Do you understand?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Good.” And without another word, Sherlock turns on his heel and heads back up the stairs.
“Er,” says John. “Sorry about that.” He attempts a laugh. “You know how he is.”
Mrs Hudson gives him a worried look. “Is there something going on, John? Are you two in some kind of trouble?”
“No—well. I don’t think so.” John shrugs. “To be honest, I don’t know any more.” He lets out a sigh. “I don’t know.”
Chapter 3
