Ghost Spark - Essence Engine

Eight

Koichi got up and walked from behind the desk and through the bamboo planters. Marcus got up and followed. Miko stayed where she was. She was breathing hard and Marcus could tell she was trying to calm down.

The HUD on Marcus' glasses popped up displaying the Koichi's information that was down downloaded from legal. Marcus moved to adjust his glasses.

"Becca, I've got a data dump on Koichi coming into cortical node one. See what you can do with it," Marcus said to himself."

"On it boss."

Koichi lead Marcus through a doorway that was partitioned by heavy flexible plastic slats that formed a curtain. Once inside the entry, Koichi stopped short and turned toward Marcus.

"You can come in but you'll have to take your glasses off. "

"What if I need them to see," asked Marcus.

"That's not really the case is it? My legal dump on you tells me you have quite the career. Military. Infantry. Saw serious action in Chicago. That was some (japanese for bad shit). Took some cajones to volunteer for that work. After Chicago, you cashed out and went private. I am not surprised you got a contract almost immediately. Surviving that blood bath in Chicago is a golden ticket for anyone. Fact is most of the best mercs came out of that shitfest. The ones that didn't go crazy and off themselves that is. All of that and maybe a little more has led you here, to me."

"How so," Marcus asked.

"Convenient that my Miko found you, no? Or that you found Miko. And then she brings you here to me."

"So, she is working with you?"

"Let me show you something," he said. He led Marcus to a dark room constructed from an old shipping container. Windows had been installed on all sides. It reminded Marcus of an aquarium he used to visit as a child.

Koichi touched his finger to a pad on the side of the door. Small LEDs, no larger than a pinhead, slowly illuminated the room. The light seemed to swirl around the room as individual LEDS pulsed on and off. It was hard to track what was going on it the room.

Marcus could make out four individuals sitting in chairs with headsets on. One of the arms on the headset extended out and pressed against the forehead. A wire branched off the arm and extended back to the back of the skull where another electrode seemed to be embedded.

Marcus had seen this in the military years ago, but cyber was never really his thing. Too cerebral. Marcus needed to be able to see the situation at hand. Cyber was more daggers and shadows.

"Congratulations, your own cyber army. Doing a little meat hacking?" Marcus asked.

Koichi laughed.

"You don't know how right you are. Human hacks have been in decline since the rise of offensive automation. The further we were out of the loop, the faster the cyber wars. Battles went from days and weeks down to hours and days, sometimes seconds.

But there were a few dedicated souls convinced that wrapping a hack in meat, as they called it, could defeat a machine. They were right. But the personal sacrifice was extreme. Brain wiring, surgery and sometimes, death. The worst part was when someone got devoured by a machine," Koichi said, as he walked from one window to the next.

"They started calling them' meat shots', when an AI hacks a person. It is awesome to behold, in a macabre way. The cruel part was that even after the person was disconnected from the net, the program the AI injected was still running.

"How can an AI inject a program into a person?" Marcus asked.

"That's what I asked myself when I first saw it happen," said Koichi.