[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 18

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I scoped out the net cafe from the pedestrian space up on a platform above it. The police drones were gone, and the ebike parking spaces were mostly full again. I pulled in between a gaudy pink and white sit-down scooter that looked like it was designed for a Disney princess, and a modest red and gold cafe racer lookin’ thing. Would’ve looked halfway nice if not for all the dried mud on it.

Both were plugged into the same post, blinking indicators on their dashboards confirming that charging was underway. I tugged out the retractable charging cable from my bike and plugged in at the next post over, double checking the little display between the handlebars to ensure it was receiving juice before dismounting.

My cubicle was how I left it, as I’d paid upfront for the full six days. The small island of comfort and security I was able to afford on what little D-Coin I still had to my name. I settled into the reclining computer chair, then ordered some baozi and a snow pear tea.

I also ordered a distributed computing bridge. I knew I’d need it to get any use out of those trash phones. I’ve seen DIY masters use these things to build supercomputers out of everything from gaming consoles to “smart” coffee makers. Anything at all with a chip and a bridge port.

The upside is the bridge itself is fairly cheap, and you can add onto your total computing power one device at a time. Ideal for...shall we say, “urban scavengers”. Every new device I can put my hands on will help me mine coins that much faster.

About forty minutes after the overhead delivery arms brought my food and drink, I got a notification from the front desk that a delivery drone had dropped something off for me. I consented to the fee, then headed up to the front to fetch the package.

Smaller than expected, but the build quality looked good. I powered it on to make sure it worked before giving it four stars on the site I ordered it from. I next ordered a keyboard, mouse and fresnel magnifier so I didn’t have to squint at the shitty little screen on the main phone.

They arrived the same way within the hour, the manager giving me increasingly suspicious looks following each new package. “Hamburgers!” I explained in English. “From America.” A look of recognition and comfort replaced his suspicion.

“Ah yes, of course. You Americans and your precious hamburgers, ha-ha. Yee-haw, pardner!” He poked my admittedly conspicuous paunch. Despite not quite understanding what cowboy slang had to do with sandwiches, I rolled with it.

I guffawed, gave my tummy a big ‘ol slap and cracked another throw-away joke that pandered to his preconceptions of Westerners. I then headed back to my cubicle with the final package, peering over my shoulder a few times on the way to make sure he wasn’t watching me or talking on the phone with anybody.

The exterior feeds were still up. I peeked at them every so often to check on my bike. There’s no fancy app to monitor charging, just the LED on the dash that blinks when charging and glows steady when full. I could just barely make it out despite the grainy video quality.

Just then, there was an accident in the street. The feeds gave me a front row seat to it. A woman was struck by a red egg-shaped tuktuk. As I looked on with morbid curiosity, the driver got out to check on the victim.

She lay twitching in the road, obviously in need of serious medical attention. He ran his fingers through his hair. Then looked around, got back into his tuktuk and began slowly running her over. She cried out in pain, beating uselessly at the ungainly three-wheeler’s front bumper.

I’ve seen this before. The law here is unusually severe when it comes to restitution. Whoever is determined to be at fault in an accident must pay the victim’s medical bills for any accident related injuries...for the rest of their life, if need be.

This law had the opposite of the intended effect. Drivers commonly make sure to finish the victim off rather than suffer the financial burden of supporting their recovery for years or decades. An ethnically near-homogeneous country of two billion with some of the most extreme wealth inequality on the planet has perhaps an unsurprisingly brutal take on the value of individual lives.

I’m no great philanthropist. About the best I can say for myself is that I’ve never killed anybody, as blood makes me squeamish and murders attract a lot more police attention than robberies. But for all I knew I was the only witness, and that tuktuk happened to use onboard software I knew how to take control of.

The driver looked this way and that in obvious confusion as his own vehicle began backing off the woman’s broken body of its own accord. I locked all the doors to keep him from fleeing, and submitted both the relevant video excerpt depicting the crime and our address to Panopticon, flagged for urgent police review.

It took them over two hours. I went outside to check on the woman. To my surprise, it was the partygoer I’d spotted through the skylight on my way out to the bay. I don’t think she recognized me, but then she looked barely conscious.

I called an ambulance, which landed about a dozen feet away a few minutes later. Two sterile white medical robots loaded her into the aerial ambulance’s patient compartment before docking themselves to charging alcoves mounted to the outside of the vehicle in anticipation of takeoff.

There was no wind as it lifted into the sky, tangled lanes of flying traffic cris-crossing at various altitudes above it. Just a barely audible hum, and a prickly feeling on my scalp and arms. I’d assume it was magnetic, except in that case it ought to rip my prosthetics off.

Instead it silently ascended into a priority sky channel, and accelerated towards the nearest medical center. “There” I thought. “That’s my good deed for the decade.” I ambled back inside to resume work on the phoneputer.

The most tedious part was flashing the correct firmwares to each phone. There was a different one for every brand and they all had to be the same version number. On top of that, the firmwares were a collaborative community project so I had to hunt the files down across a bunch of personal blogs and shit instead of getting it as a single package from a manufacturer’s support site.

When they were at last all humming together in unison, talking to each other as a unified whole, I wanted to cry with relief. It served as a reminder why bridge computing setups are the province of novelty-hungry hobbyists and not serious power users.

Still, this mess of wires and phones can do something a “real computer” can’t. Because it’s so parallelized, huge parts of it can fail and it only gets slower instead of stopping altogether. Like how you can chop off a starfish arm and it simply grows a new one.

That makes it uniquely robust against attacks, as their effects can be quarantined to a single phone which is sacrificed to save the rest. This hard separation between devices often succeeds at containment where nested virtual machines fail.

It’s not stable, but it’s scrappy. The right solution at the right time for a rat like me, running lean, flying under the radar. I adjusted the fresnel lense until I could comfortably read text on the display of the phone I’d chosen to serve as the monitor.

It occurred to me I could set the phones up in a grid and combine their small displays into a larger one, but I’d have to buy a considerably bulkier, costlier device for that. We’re talking a niche market within a niche market here.

I put it on my to-buy list after setting up my custom stack of miners. SeaCoin, a new ICO from the conshelf territories, looked to be trending reliably upwards. I set up 70% of my stack to mine SeaCoin and the rest to mine NeuroCoin, a longstanding rival for D-Coin’s second place slot just below FedCoin.

D-Coin is my usual mainstay. Rather, it was the mainstay of old me. Another habit I meant to break in order to make what little paper trail I couldn’t avoid leaving as difficult to associate with my old identity as possible.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 19!}