Jackie saw her again. She stood in the periphery of his vision as he secured the last byte of data from the AU server. Amongst the streams of blue code, the oceans of images and films and whispers exchanged across the galaxy, there she was as ever. She hovered in the center of that space beyond space, a place between reality and something no man had yet come to understand. A ghost from a time long forgotten. Her eyes fixed on him, and she whispered in his ear, but he couldn't hear the words. Instead, it was as though the whispers were a vision of something that had not yet come to pass.
He saw the galaxy drowned in fire, stars ruptured and consumed, a million, million starships traveling the hyperlanes to ignite the systems in war and destruction. A single banner rose, over every tower, over every palace, over every land on every planet. A single force, all united under one rule, from the ruins of fallen Terra to violet skied Arcadia in the furthest frontiers of colonized space.
"Pull him out!" It was Kev's voice he heard. "Fuck! Pull him out, Carey! He's gonna die in there!"
The sights of streaming code trembled before him, a light pulsated and then everything turned black. His eyes sprang open to a white sanitized box of a room. He gasped, rising at once as his chest pounded. His body emitted steam as he sat upright, the ice in the tub just barely maintaining his body from overheating. His arms trembled, his ocular HUD glitched and Kev helped raise his head. He disconnected Jackie's neural jack, and then struck him in the chest with a needle, injecting him with a dose of cryo-stim.
"I got you, bro," Kev's voice was full of anxiety. "Stay with me."
His body began to cool and behind Kev, Carey kept his eyes on the desktop display before him. "He's good," Carey said. "We have the data."
Kev looked back at Carey, frustrated. "That doesn't explain why he was almost fried!"
Carey swiveled around in his chair. "This is Allstar United we're pulling a heist on," he said. "They have the best net-spiders and network firewalls across the Orion Arm. You knew the risks. Jackie knew the risks."
"Course I did," said Jackie. "And they might have some of the best spiders, but not the best."
Kev shook his head as he brought down his own screen which displayed a scan of Jackie's brain. "As your doctor, I must warn you that each time you crawl across the net like that, against so many other net spiders, your neural processor decays. You are outnumbered every time. You shouldn't go into the net alone next time, we need other spiders to serve as your backup."
"So they can betray us?" he asked. "Sell us out to Irons and any other corp that might stuff credits up their ass?"
"Well, I know you won't listen. Not to me, not to your missus, but you can't say I didn't warn you, Jack."
Jackie began to regain his senses in his limbs, his ocular HUD finally sorted out and his body slowly cooled. "I saw her."
Kev turned back to him. "What are you talking about?"
"Her," he said. Jackie went for the cigarettes and lighter on the metal table next to the tub. He pulled one out and flicked the lighter, a spark, a flame. He breathed in for the paper on the cigarette to burn away to ash, the cinders falling into the freezing water he sat in. "The bitch that makes every spider on the net shit themselves."
Carey chuckled, his voice accented by the cybernetic enhancements in his lungs. He brought down the medical scanner hanging from the ceiling and aimed it at Jackie, checking his body as Kev tried to make sense of his ghost girl gibberish. "Bao Yi?" Carey asked, incredulous. "Save your strength for the fascist mega-corps, not the ghost of Christmas past. You got zapped by an AU net-spider, they caught onto your neural link and tried to cut the connection. That's all that light show was."
Jackie took another puff from his cigarette. I know what I saw, but no point arguing about it. "Well, we have everything we ever wanted, no?"
Carey giggled maniacally, shaking his head as he looked straight into him with those glowing red OptiAll eyes of his. "Oh yes. We're gonna make Anthony Irons shit himself when everything's in place."
Jackie puffed again, his body was fully cooled now, but steam still rose from his skin. "That's vague, Carey," said Kev. "Details."
"We'll upload this data onto open netspace," Carey replied. "Every schematic, every innovation or invention that Allstar United has come up with in the past decade will now belong to the people of Zoryan Prime and the whole of the Orion Arm. Even the sorry fuckers still on Earth will get a glimpse of it. And not just data on schematics, petabytes upon petabytes of corporate secrets and dirty laundry from every system under Allstar's control. Once I unzip these files that is. I'll have to do that in an enclosed network though. Any computer even nominally connected to any network will ping the AU's net spiders, and they'll fry all of us."
Jackie took another puff, he looked into Kev's eyes. His brother in arms clearly was not so impressed by such feats. He brushed his hands through his afro, scratching his head as he scowled. "All this for gadgets and Allstar trinkets, how does this bring down Anthony Irons? How does this even dent the suits?"
"It's the first step," Jackie assured. "Tomorrow we'll start the riot we planned in front of the main AU office building in Vandross District. Anthony Irons will come here to observe the investigation of this data breach himself. I'll go into the building, and off him and every corporate ass-muncher that gets in the way. When he dies, there'll be a fallout unlike any other, other corps will try to buy out Allstar, a window for the people to rise as one."
"Well, in that regard," Carey said with a skeptical smile. "I wish you luck, you'll need it. Don't know how you'll pull a stunt like that. That corpo-pig is borged out to hell and he'll have an army of corpo super soldiers around him."
Jackie took another puff from his cigarette, it was almost out. "We either win," he said. "Or everyone keeps getting shafted by Allstar."
"Oh I don't disagree with your assessment," said Carey. "But standing on the morality of your mission doesn't increase the chances of its success."
"Yeah, then why did you help us?" Kev asked. "You certainly seem not to care."
"For what the mega-corp gods do? No," Carey said with a hint of condescension. He rolled over on his chair and took the cigarette out of Jackie's hand, taking the last puff for himself. "Allstar United, SGC, Terracorp, I couldn't care less what any of them do. They exist, and we have to live by the rules they set. I'm helping with this juicy data," he said. He let the cigarette fall into the ice water in Jackie's tub. "To that end, I am your loyal hound, no more, no less, Mr. White. What you plan to do at the AU office, well, all I'll do is wish you good luck and say that I'll root for you when your face is plastered on every holo-screen and news report across the planet and every merc willing to take a sack of Allstar credit is gunning for your head on a spike."
"I'm touched," said Jackie.
Carey smiled. "You'll be touched by Irons tomorrow too, no doubt."
Kev scowled at Carey and helped Jackie out of the tub. He wrapped a towel around him and helped him dress. "Send out the word to everyone and anyone who'll hear," Jackie said. He slipped into his black pants and black shirt. "Meet up tomorrow at sunset, Main AU office, Vandross. When they see my name, they'll all be ready to give Irons a middle finger and keep them distracted." Then he looked back at Carey. "And Carey, get that file unzipped before I start my show."
"I will," said Carey as he watched Kev and Jackie leave his room into the dank corridor of the motel. "Try to make it a show the whole planet will remember." Those would be the last words he'd hear from Carey, Jackie imagined. Even if he did succeed, he would never be able to live a life without looking over his shoulder again.
It must be done, it will be done.
"What you're planning," Kev said as he followed Jackie out the motel corridor to the exit. "It'll be the largest scale terrorist attack in a decade."
"Planning?" Jackie asked, scoffing. "I've already started the attack."
Jackie was struck by the sight of his wife and son waiting by his car in the rain. His heart sank, and Kev froze beside him. Little Jackie clung to Cassandra, his cries muffled against her shoulder as tears streamed down her cheeks.
"What are you doing here?" Jackie asked, his voice low and tight. "I told you to wait—"
Cassandra stepped forward and slapped him. It wasn't hard, but it wasn't meant to hurt. The sting wasn't on his cheek but in the anguish written across her face.
"I had to find out from one of your whores." Cassandra's voice trembled.
Behind her and their boy, the holo-ads ascended into the night beyond an ocean of city sprawl and urban hell. A smile projected in red, the face of a handsome young man, his eyes obscured by the brown rain. From his lips came a promise, a dream for a better tomorrow. It was deceptive, for such dreams as those he promised were only real so long as one kept their eyes closed.
"You were never meant to know." Jackie whispered.
Cassandra's scoff was full of grief. "Oh, so you thought you'd just leave me to pick up the pieces? Wife of a dead terrorist? Your son, forever branded as the child of a traitor? You think you're doing us some favor, Jack?"
"You knew what I was," Jackie shot back. "We met at a rally. You believed in the same ideals. Marx's dream."
"I was a child then," she cut in, her voice sharp but shaking. "I thought we could change the world. Then I grew up. I realized you can't fight people like them—they're the ocean, Jack. You can't stop the tide. But you… you're still chasing this fantasy like a damned fool."
Jackie stepped closer, his hands outstretched, pleading. "This isn't a fantasy. This is for you. For our boy. Don't you want him to grow up in a world where people don't starve, where they have clean water and—"
"I only came here to see if it was true," Cassandra said, doing her best to calm little Jackie. "Never contact me again."
"Cassandra…" Kev tried to interject, his voice hesitant.
She rounded on him, her eyes blazing. "And you. You're no better. Encouraging him. Feeding his ego while he drags us all down with him. No, this isn't about the dream of your communist utopia, Jackie, this is about your ego, your desire to be the one that sparked your so-called revolution. Your obsession with being a martyr." Her eyes focused on Jackie again. "And why?" she asked.
Jackie stood upright, his eyes focused on his wife's. His spirit, for a moment, determined. "Because no one else will," he said.
She laughed, shaking her head. "Cassandra!" Jackie turned to see his brother in law waiting in a minivan in the motel's parking lot. "Let's go."
"I oughta fucking strangle you," Jackie called out. "You put her up to this, didn't you?"
His brother in law simply laughed. "You did this to yourself. Consider yourself lucky I didn't report you to the police," he said as Cassandra walked towards the van. "You should thank your wife for that."
"Cassandra!" Jackie chased after her, but she wrenched free when he tried to grab her hand. "Please at least let me say goodbye to my son."
"No!" she screamed. "Either you get in this van with me," she said. "Or you go and commit your noble suicide."
The decision was obvious to Jackie, as much as it pained him. When the silence between them lasted too long, Cassandra grimaced, her tears mingling with the rain. She reached for her copper wedding ring, slipping it off her finger and holding it out. It shook in her hand before she threw it at Jackie's feet. "Drive," she said to her brother. The van left the lot and drove off into the street, past the methed out druggies on the curb, and the scores of homeless sleeping on the sidewalk. They disappeared into the red sunrise.
"She'll come around," Kev said. "How many times have you cheated on her and she still wore that ugly ring?"
Jackie picked up the copper band, closing it tightly in his fist as his eyes began to water. "No," he said. "She's gone." He turned from the sunrise to the sprawling vista of Vandross: its gleaming high-rises, endless holo-ads, and mega-towers. Thousands of hovercars, aerial carriers, and starships clung to the crowded skyline like a miasma of flies to a rotting corpse. "Only forward now," he said. "I can't look back."