"Truth suffers from too much analysis." - Zensufi saying
The turbolift didn't move, and it took his country-boy mind a whole ten seconds to realize
that he'd already hit the 242nd floor without feeling any gravs, all the time thinking that
perhaps he should have taken his old pappy's 14-guage shotgun from underneath the moldy desk
drawer marked with red paint splotches. The floor scanner tracked Kola's geometry and began
shuffling through it's interbank even as the lift decelerated to two gees and began
depressurizing. The doors didn't open on 250. He cursed with the best of them. The security
scanner's viral probe sniffed Kola once and reeled back in what would have been horror if it
had been programmed for such a response, then quickly initiated the main 'frying' sequence to
isolate the contamination. Within seconds the elevator shaft would be sanitized in a stream
of fire and death and sent back down like a fall from grace. Kola inhaled deeply, blinked
twice and closed his eyes. In his mind, he rearranged the detonation charges in a triangle
facing the sealed outer doors, and the tight-beam flipped through several metres of plasteel
to contact the charge controls. His cranial kal spoke softly to the security bombs and gently
coaxed their cooperation with soothing cryptokeys. The turbolift filled with green-blue impact
gel as the detonation coruscated through the entire shielded floor and pierced the seven layers
of filter doors so meticulously installed by Health Services at extreme expense to prevent just
such an emergency. Swimming through waist-high engineered mucus, Kola scrambled through the
blasted portals towards the office corridors, trailing the interface web which had just saved
his life. The web retracted back into his skinsuit while he checked the clip on his hydra and
began plowing through the sonic screens in a frantic dash towards the glass façade of the
building. He was running across a mezzanine gallery decorated in glass mosaics when the
smell of charred metal ripped through his nostrils like a hyena's breath. Whipped his legs
up and away - the laser streamed in a pink arc beneath his feet and smoothly clipped through
a decorative acanthus column. Kola didn't bother firing back, but let loose a salvo of
fin-missiles from his hydra towards the reinforced oculus window ahead. The flower-pattern
glass disintegrated outwards as air pressure equalized, clearing the way for a spectacular
leap which never materialized. The lasergun relocked and filled the oculus with sparkling
glass fragments of ruby and carnelian. Kola grunted and inhaled as his legs propelled him
towards a wafer-thin side window, knowing the lasergun's pseudo-AI had guessed incorrectly,
but also knowing that his second choice of exits would certainly be the more painful. With
a dull plop his skinsuit burst against the window, only cracking the middle panel without
piercing it. In the spirit of efficiency, some damn internal sensor had already begun
scheduling window repairs by the time Kola reached for his directional grenade. The laser
sliced through his forearm and then flashed wildly when it hit the reflective metal coating
his radius and ulna, bursting into a rainbow of diffused colours. There was little blood,
but Kola's mind had already filled with panic when the grenade emitted a muffled 'wump' and
the room was replaced by a swirling blue-black mist as he was sucked outside into the void.
Falling downwards, he really felt the gees as wind howled across his face and the skinsuit
ejected an octopus-like mask across his face. Disorientation lasted too long and the first
parachute shot out at a completely wrong angle. Kola twisted his face away from the glittering
sparkles of the night sky eyesats and towards the flaming expanse of the city grid below.
The organic sides of the Union InfoBank zipped by like a twisted highway. Forearm felt numb
where the methedrine was already taking effect, but the initial pain had yanked his mind
towards stability once again. A few deft movements had him righted feet towards the earth
again, plunging ever faster towards the slick waters of the Sound. It wouldn't increase his
life expectancy to drift slowly across Manhattan airspace while aerodrones converged with
centimetre-precision tracking. Kola's slim body jetted down like a knife through the
protozone layer over the old skyscraper district, trailing fake mass emitters which would
deceive the drones for a few seconds. Twenty metres over the oily waters the second
parachute burst apart into a thousand filaments, each of which traveled horizontally for
a hundred metres in a fern pattern. He slid gently into the lukewarm water and chopped
the filament parachute off before it strangled him in its microfibres and began swimming
underwater towards the shore at a leisurely pace. His wage-meter clicked at $9,261 just
when he reached the industrial coastline. It had been an expensive night for financial
transactions.
$1.90 THE TRICKLE
Anonymous remailer sent me a defunct address for my girlfriend. She'd had it patched and now the damn remailer was filtering out the crap I was sending here. It's amazing what a little poking can do to people. Not like she'd petitioned through undernet or anything. No, probably shacking up with some neurotic cypherpunk who deleted her card the minute he saw she was from the meaner side of Boston's Alley, or whichever side is the meanest in the 'old new england' parlance.
$1.45 THE DELUGE
[wage-scale VII, income range $1.2m-$4.9m, 'cosmo' profile 2, age bracket 70-75, full benefs, enclave, stock]
"Gold Coast Chinese leaders today met with agents of the Triplex Bonds Association,
who are negotiating on behalf of over 11.3 million bond traders worldwide for a settlement
to introduce filtering programs into the Imperial Chinese network to prevent what the TBA
calls 'unauthorized financial flow regulating systems'. Capital controls software which in
any way hampers
the movement of financial transactions has been banned globally under the 2024 Matrix
Reconstruction Regime."
$0.92 SLIDE UP
wage-scale V.4, daily contract renewal
$0.17 DE SIECLE
She ran past the lurid dreams of twilight and rounded the corner just in time to see the car whip past in a liquid arc of collision lights and spraying impact foam. The bluish foam muffled the impact as the Pumaran plowed into a shopserve tenement and disappeared in a halo of cheap red brick dust and twirling crystal glass. She clutched the thin wafer with clawing hands and whispered a rhyme from her grandfather's ancient
$0.00
-----
Real fuckin' crypto
© 1997 Philip Cassini
$3.00 ENTRANCE
[wage-scale II, income range $10,000-$23,999, 'heartlands' profile 2, age bracket 36-40, pension suspended]
'Hello, Shelly Barran here for the Local Evening Newz! Tonight : plasmotics plant fire kills six after computer malfunction; actress Megan Farlow dies in tragic plane crash; the latest spills on fongy Hollywood productions;
and later, holy hijinks as Ferntown's priest gets mashed in a feline ambush!
[insert splash montage]
"Good Evening Mr. Ashlen. This is Global News Monitor for Friday, June 5, 2032."
[hypernewslinkupdatelangcommonenglish20:42:05-05-V-2032]
"GlobalComm announced third quarter increases disaster as military engagement in Jericho Freehold revenue downtime violation of almost unprecedented scale in the history of the Office of Religious Affairs will object strongly to APES withdrawal of Protocol agreements American Apparatus detained crypto-fugitives involved in sixteen killed in Himalayan Zone spiro-infection of indeterminate mutation joking that quote the president does not advise from the Directorial toilet unquote further arbitration may lead to eventual $57 billion settlement quit only to receive a firm rebuke from the Joint Chair for alleged inept handling coalition of euro cash double-indebtitude stock fixes set at 1.56 to the yen cannot investigate for lack of subDNA remnants involving complete corrosion will not deny or confirm violations of decon procedures at Narita wreck will proceed with salvage operations despite toxicity levels in excess of 3.6ppm acknowledged yesterday that Netwatch personnel had neutralized in excess of 19TB meat memories Amnesty's joint statement denouncing use of electroshock weapons demonstrators within the Oakland Arcology to stop spreading fears that Minutemen could repeat another explosion of such fuel-air munitions within Federal airspace Eagle Guard categorically denies financial impropriety in cash-flow inducers partly as a result killing victims with surgical precision selfish genetic expression invokes fears of VITAS-4 pandemic of early NewCen-"
[link complete. $0.35 charge R-3978109572349]
"Mail, send full resumé all companies."
Damn. Hopefully someone at Allied Signal will need a datatrician tomorrow.
She wasn't herself anymore, not with the collapse of the soft underbelly of her life, the part that had whined and cajoled and ingratiated to get the little pay increases, the meagre scale upgrades, the soft playmer couch.
The mail murmured softly 'Confirm employment at Brooknow Selenics wage-scale V.54 for June 6 2032?'
'Confir-!' blurted out before she registered the enormous scale increase. '-wait! Details on employer.'
'Brooknow Selenics is a leader in the field of advanced sub-genetic and selenic construction, as well a profitable trading partner in the East-Coast Trading Regime and a fully-licensed member of the American Medical Collegium, (application granted 01-27-2017). Housed in the Elvyn MacArthur Federal Territory, St. Louis, Brooknow Selenics maintains a high-morale and high-scale production atmosphere that exceeds Protocol guidelines for safety, comfort, ethno-creedal, physical, emotional and psychological integrity.
Please insert more globocash to continue,
or contact your local credit coordinator to
arrange further services. This mediabook
has been a presentation of the Union
Information Bank, © 2034 Int'l Protocol
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