+
“What the hell is that?”“It’s a ping on the sensor grid, looks like we’ll be soon outta time, mon frere.”
“Shit… I’m only about half way slicing the surface of this file cluster. Not even done with a full directory walk yet.”
“You’ve had two hours! How deep does the thing run?”
“Deep… Deepest repo I’ve seen.” Torj said.
He flipped up a small panel on his microtop, LCD flicking to life, code spilling light into the room, rapid-fire, as the console copied files. The fresh infoshunt he’d had installed in his wrist last week itched.
“This will have to do I ‘spose, I knew we should have sprung for a faster unit to do this.” Torj pulled a cable from the console and plugged in, he winced a little when the data spike dropped. He tapped an unnoticeable button on the underside of his wrist.
“Uploading now. Three minutes tops.” Torj said.
“We might have that, might not. Just got a ping a few quadrants from here. Can’t you speed it up?” Seres was always impatient, she’d never grasped the delicate nature of data extraction as much as she had the feel of a sensor grid.
“If you want us to lose what I’ve got of this… sure…” Torj spat sarcastically.
“Just do what you can.” Seres replied looking out the high rise window at the wet streets below, wrinkling her nose at a faint smell of bacon cooked for far too long in a stovetop pan, she breathed out and in again, this time it was worse, the scent had taken on a charred, oily texture.
She looked at Torj, in the half-light of the microtop she could see his hand raised, where the infoshunt was located, now a smoking hole.
“Shit, shit!””
Seres ran toward the exit, slamming her back against the doorframe, sliding a fresh clip into sidearm. Pulsing magenta light flooded the room as the sensor grid flashed urgently. Footsteps echoed down the long corridor to the room Seres, and Torj’s fresh corpse occupied.
She exhaled, inhaled deeply, and whispered to herself.
“Kore wa Tōkyō no tamedesu, you bastards!”
