Crossing Infamy

Chapter 1 - Kalix

"Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?" I ask the middle-aged man standing on the other side of the desk. He looks helplessly down at his phone, which he told me had a faulty hologram projector. Well, technically he said a "shotty" projector, which I've previously learned from Melia, is British for faulty.

"Oh, I s'pose I haven't." He shrugs and long-presses the power button, standing with a look of uncertainty while waiting for it to restart.

"Hey, Lizzy, could you give me a hand with—" Melia, my co-worker, starts to ask, emerging from the back of the store. "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize you were with a customer. Well, when you've got a minute..."

"Oh, go ahead," the man says with a chuckle. "I'm sure I can handle turning this thing on again by myself."

After using the old reliable customer service smile and nod, I follow Melia to the storage room.

"It's this old locking mechanism again, won't recognize my access card. Darn thing's been acting up for years, but the owner won't replace it. How'd you fix it the last time, anyway?"

"I just bypassed the scanner with a PIN descrambling algorithm. Let me give it a try..." I pull my phone from my pocket and scroll through some old code files until I find the one I'm looking for. "Could you grab me that cable?"

Melia hands me the Cortland-branded J3 cable from the top of a nearby shelf of outdated products, and I plug one end into my phone, and the other into the back access panel of the card scanner on the storage unit.

"Why do you need to plug it in, anyway?" Melia asks, watching as the program downloads at a snail's pace. "I thought everything gets transferred wirelessly."

"Normally it would, but because it's not a legitimate program recognised by the system, it's easier to force the installation with a physical connection," I explain.

"Legitimate?"

"It's not a program developed by the company that programmed the lock — it's technically hacking. Not illegal, of course, since you work here and are allowed to access the storage unit, you're not actually accessing it without permission. But, y'know, the lock program doesn't know that."

Finally, the program completes and the lock pops open. Melia breathes a sigh of relief.

"Right, thanks, Liz. You're a lifesaver."

She retrieves a boxed Cortland J6 smartphone from the unit and heads back out to the front desk. Remembering the man with the broken phone, I reluctantly follow her out.

Yes, this is what I've been doing for the past two months. After escaping that morals-gone doctor who wanted to use me as a lab rat, and of course, the UNBI, I fled to the United European Kingdom under the alias Elizabeth Nightingale. Now, instead of my previous routine of school in the daytime and hacking for dark-web clients at night, I work as an IT specialist at a computer repair shop called Cache Crash in Soho. No one knows who I really am — not even Melia, one of my only friends here.

Well, actually, there's one exception. Darien Quintrell, or as he's known on the dark-web, OutlawResolve. We met when I first arrived in London, and he's been helping me stay hidden from the authorities. As it turns out, hiding from the law in a country I've never been to with little money, virtually no life skills and half my internal software useless since disconnecting my cybernetic interface from the net is no easy feat. Looking back, it's a damn good thing he found me before someone else did. Since then, he's helped me maintain my cover and blend in in this new place. It's thanks to him that I don't have to avoid cameras anymore — together we managed to come up with a scrambling algorithm that disguises me to any nearby devices with FaceRec. He even helped me set up a hidden net connection so I could get my interface back online.