Susan's Plague

Chapter 2 - Overwatch

     Abi's slender figure cut gracefully through the crowded bar, her dirty blond hair done up in a pony tail and a tray of drinks balanced on one hand.  It was a fairly typical job for a girl in her twenties, and a good way to pay her way through school while still having a little spending money for important things like shoes.  

Waiting tables at Weltschmerz was a decent job, but it was located in one of the worst areas of the Old Cities. Many neighbourhoods were sketchy, the Rendering District was outright dangerous. The job had some perks though, she got to see a lot of really good bands, the bouncers usually did a good job of keeping drunk patrons in line and the tips were great. Tonight the place was packed, it seemed everyone wanted to see Uncloned Sparrow despite the 400 GlobalDollar price for tickets. 

Abi liked the band and had seen them a number of times at other venues, tonight she had the pleasure of meeting them earlier when she arrived at work. It had so far been a very good night, in fact the night's only detractor was an earlier visit by a MiST unit asking some questions, when one of the bouncers got a little insolent, they stunned him and carried on with their business. Abi got the impression they were looking for something or someone, but they left soon enough and things got back to normal.

Tonight she had some really good tables and the tips were adding up. New Daylion boots, the latest fall trend, might soon grace the burgeoning shoe rack in her closet. The thought made her smile as she returned to the bar to load another tray.

The night wore on, the band rocked out and Abi's feet started to hurt. Fashion had its price. Separate from the large crowd enjoying the show, three young men sat quietly in the oxygen bar at the back of the building, despite their words being all but drowned out by the music they spoke as quietly as possible, each focused on their small, hand-held Netpods.

Miller Chang, Trey Hall and Nicolaus Corvid should not have been meeting like this. They knew it, but Nic deemed it necessary. Trey was especially nervous since he made a living engaged in activities that would be considered legal grey areas, other times he was a flat out petty criminal. He was long on charm, but his moral compass suffered from slight deviation issues. He tried to keep a low profile since he was known to the authorities and there was a standing detain-on-sight order issued for him. He did not feel that meeting at a crowded bar was very low profile, nor wise. He frequently checked the time and was trying to hurry the others along. While they were aware of the earlier raid, they figured MiST was unlikely to check twice on the same night. That knowledge did little to assuage their paranoia though. It was a bad assumption.

"I'll make this as quick as possible."  Nic said and tapped the display deftly with his long, thin finger.

"Bring your nearfields online and I'll flash your units with the latest firmware. This upgrade includes better encryption, remote kill, eavesdropping detection and a bunch of other good stuff I'll not get into. The secured applications will no longer use your CIT keys - while they provide good security they also tie you to your device and I think we want deniability at this point. Miller, you will need to generate a secure pass-phrase like Trey and I use, 40 characters minimum length."

"What?" Miller scoffed, "How the hell am I suppose to remember that?"

Nic carried on without comment, "Also, the units are always in passive RF listen mode and can detect most, if not all MiST comms and scanning gear that is active within 1000 meters, they will not come online if that is the case.  They will automatically sync with the server farm back at my place twice a day for the latest information and I can push data over a secure band to them when needed. They also run on the DarkNet mesh, less chance of the traffic being scooped. Downside is, DarkNet is not as reliable."

Nic was the kind of eccentric techie other techies idolized. Driven and at times fanatical, he was equal parts savant and revolutionary. In hacker circles his exploits were legend, like the time he found a way to game the GlobalDollar cryptocurrency. The hack was so high profile it was covered by the Meta media outlets for an entire week. At that point he took a hiatus from hacking and went dark.