Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 38

"Sugar! Sugar! Sugar!"

"You can say shit Mel, we're not six."

Mel is doing that thing where her eyes are fixed on the middle distance, open but not really seeing. I know that she's reading a ticker tape of messages that flies across her eyeline, a kind of Weaver news feed tailored for Spiders. Intelligence for agents on the frontline.

We are sitting in a car with tinted windows opposite a hyper-corpo plaza adorned with hyper-corpo art, where the Republic of London's sole remaining media corporation has its palace.

The building shoots heavenward, an arch piece of power architecture, gleaming amongst the filth of old London. And in the plaza outside, a semi-permanent camp of protestors and migrants, people with grievances trying to grab the attention of camera crews. Mel told us they sometimes even try to storm the entrance.

Hardcore corporate security teams patrol with every kind of weapon imaginable, lethal, non-lethal, visible and invisible.

"The backups are gone." Says Mel.

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"The safe house where I stashed the backup got made last night, everything in it got cleared out."

"And you only made one back up?"

"Jesus there has not been time, while you were at school we were under constant attack. I can't just upload the thing to a half dozen cloud servers, got to wrap it in nine layers of cryptography first. Access the web through a dozen proxies. It is hot data. Bots all over be crawling for it."

"So, it's OK we have the tape, we go in. It's still OK right."

"Yeah, it's fine but if we get jumped, arrested or the contact turns out to be a traitor, then we lose everything."

"What do you say Ursula?"

"If they got the backup when they busted that safe house last night, then they already know what's coming, if we don't act now, we lose our chance." I say.

Out the corner of my eye, something moves real fast. I turn to see someone throwing something heavy at one of the mercs. Trash can. He fires back with a heavy-duty Taser. You can see smoke coming off this old guy. Things are escalating.

"Bollocks, I can't leave you lot here with that going on, the riot squad will be here in a minute. This could go west, I've seen arguments over spilled beer in this city go to full scale civil unrest in minutes, cars torched."

"We will come in with you. Pretend it's a school trip. Bring your daughters to work day." Suggests Ty.

"Some kind of blended family this." She laughs.

"We're all screwed anyway." Vash adds, sagely.

"Jesus why did I swear to Amanda bloody Loveless to follow you, an idiotic child into the eye of every storm your whims and fancies take you. I'm supposed to be the adult in the room." Mel directs this squarely at me.

But she takes us anyway. Wading through the throng of bodies in the plaza with ease, a touch here a shove there, manipulating the bodies to form a slip stream in which we follow hand in hand like baby ducklings following mother.

At the gates she has an argument with a corpSec monster, giant roid-monkey in glistening body armour covered in corpo logos like a race car.

But Mel has the magic words, all thanks to her Weaver connections, and of all the people clamouring to get in, it's us that end up going through the airlock doors, and trudging through the marble floored entry hall through something pretty darn similar to airport security.