The True Story of the Lies of Quincy Jones/CKstory

[spectre]

Hey all,

I was inspired by LordOfSyn's story....

I, like LordOfSyn, wrote up a character story, taking some artistic license with the CK material, though I tried to make it rather light or nonrelevant. I am kinda taken with the Red Hand and Digital Noise characters so I decided to write a story that involved both of them. Hopefully it'll be entertaining at least, critique is also welcome if its constructive!

Enjoy!

[spectre]

Quincy Jones began his career as an agent of the streets, dueling on the Matrix was his way of supporting the cause, and making a buck. It was a source of leisure as well as work and ultimately something he was passionate about. His mentor, Red Hand, had recruited him at a young age. Quincy’s parents were killed in the New Seattle riots when a Mars Inc. Security Drone had killed everyone on a deep-water crawler mining for rare earth metals. Mars Inc. had tried to cover up the incident but a few industrious media scuds and hacker cells had turned it into a full blown rebellion. The resulting destruction was horrific. Quincy’s parents had been a keen reminder of how powerful corp backlash could be.

Since then Quincy had been training with Red Hand; who had sired a few other orphan hackers as well such as the infamous Digital Noise. The Red Hand provided the bunch of them with passage as guardian ad litem and moved along with many other refugees seeking asylum to the Back Bay Slums of NBZ. The plan was part of a PR stunt engineered by Mars as a humanitarian mission for Bravestar, designed to ease the pressure on them from the public. KH was only too happy to oblige, getting an amazing kick back from the Mars hardware group and an unprecedented boost in their operational scope against rival Knight Horizon in New Boston Zone.

Back Bay was the best of a worse situation. He’d come into adulthood with a good head on his shoulders a few credits from running Hedlozz to gang members back before it belonged to KH. In fact, the battle that stemmed from the territorial conflict in Old Kenmore and Back Bay was the first time Quincy remembered hearing the name, Cyber Knights. They seemed to come out of the woodwork to fight against the KH security troops. They had temporarily buoyed the hopes of everyone outside the walls.

“The act of betrayal is best learned through the icy multisensory experience of a Matrix dive...”
-The Red Hand, The Streets Bible, 2209AD

Jones’ first Matrix dive (outside their network) was in tandem linkup with Red Hand and Noise. The job had been to head into an innocuous node nicknamed “BordrLnd.NET”, an early entertainment net for wealthy NBZ execs looking for a taste of the slums to enrich their lives, all while within the comfort of their ivory towers. Once there they would scout for weak accounts to scavenge. The Matrix was good to them that night as time slowed down and their mental activity increased to light speed. At such a point they became their web-face, existing more in the Matrix than in the real world. Quincy had learned to love this with almost a fervor. They busted through firewalls and passcode sec like a hot knife to butter, armed with an array of homecoded weapons.

The following several months were an array of planned hits. Dueling with Expert Systems was good training but dueling with Machine Intelligences was an order of magnitude better, and more fun. They quested for glory and fame while Quincy kept busy setting up a a new base of ops in an old bomb shelter and began to make life better for himself. But the good, easy times couldn’t last. AzTek upgraded their Matrix trace programs and cut deals with a good number of Knights for added Matrix security. Times were a changing.

Barely a year after he’d made that first dive, he got sick. His first tumor had appeared in his guts. He didn’t have the yen to pay for the doc yet. So Red Hand and Noise dove for the monies to pay while Jones was laid out, on the verge of death. When they unplugged, chaos erupted. Their heat was suddenly off the charts.

Matrix security had been dispatched like the harbingers of destruction. Their network node was crashed, one of the orphan divers, Sierra Foxtrot, died instantly from feedback. Digital Noise was gone as well, either taken into custody or geeked by a Sniper team. Red Hand’s allies, the last Kens from Kenmore, just vanished off the grid. Nanotrackers had found Red, and had waited outside the Old Boat Repair while they watched it burn, engulfing his mentor, his adopted father forever.

Quincy watched in horror from his bedside SRVR-table, and saw the news wire light up with news of the hacker sting op. “~~~Finally,” the Boston Zone Herald said, “the notorious Matrix hacker, the Red Hand, has apparently been caught red-handed. Leader of the Kens has also been taken in for questioning in conjunction with the violence happening right now in Old Kenmore, KH Security Chief has declined to offer the names of the apprehended and dead. We join the scene live with….~~~ ”

Quincy plugged in like a reflex and tapped into the backdoor of the Matrix Security Bands, hoping he wouldn’t find the destruction he knew was coming for him. He had only an eternity of milliseconds to discover what fate awaited him when he unplugged. He saw from a half dozen cameras in the zone the strikeforce that was tracking his connection to Red Hand. They had four Drones and it looked like a squad of hardened riot troops heading down the street.

Jones only had a moment to make up his mind, his new matrix dataport took over from his sluggish grey matter. He calculated and weighed the odds he could survive bunker-busters, and it was marginal at best. Not an option. The second simulation calculated the odds he could make it if he ran. Marginally more hope. After several more attempts he realized that this was the only option he could find that had any chance. He delved into his bag of tricks and coupled his idea with a diversion. He called up his homemade dialer, and began to call all the phones in the zone. They sprang to life with a warning message that KH was back to clear out everyone for demolition of the Back Bay Slums.

Back Bay sprang to a life, long thought dead. People turned out in numbers to harry the riot police even as the drones began to cut a swath through the ensuing calamity. Quincy hobbled from his terminal and turned on the big electro-magnets that was lashed to his hardware. If he was lucky he’d puke before long and lighten his load. Even so he was weak from days in bed.

He quickly made his way to his backdoor, not the obvious one that was cemented shut, but the one that was excavated by the family that had used this shelter to live through the nanoslag storm that had torn apart pieces of Old Boston. He barred the door from the outside and shoved the debris away that camouflaged the entrance. He would not come back here. He made his way upward and came out of the sewer sludge into the grey daylight. He was dirty, horribly sick and on the verge of passing out when his adrenaline began to pulse through his veins again. Up ahead was the nano-trackers scouring the area for any remains, his former home already pouring smoke into the open air. The streets were in chaos as rocks pelted the reinforcements that had shown up and bullets ripped through the air. The lead tracker looked up at him and their eyes met. “That’s him!”

He began to run again. Running anywhere, he was out of options at this point. He lightened his load a second time by tossing some frags into their path. He only had to make it across the street into Charles Bank, Mars territory…

Just at that point, the dome suffered a breach. Apparently terrorists had chosen that moment to detonate a piece of the dome above them or perhaps it simply collapsed. He saw the toxic waste and detritus coming down, he could only run harder. “If he could just get away”, Jones thought, “he would never curse the name Mars Inc again. “

He ran so hard that he didn’t even see the taxi rolling down the road into Charles Bank. He only had time enough to widen his eyes, as he ran smack into it. His vision blurred, “Now you owe ME one chummer!” a deep voice said with a chuckle, “I grew up in Southie, you’ll be safe there.”

It was the last thing he heard before feeling himself hoisted into a car and promptly going unconscious.

He awoke in a dirty hotel room, the wall paint said B-Street Extended Stays. He moved to get up then realized that he was covered in gauze and tubes poured out his life fluids into various machines humming and beeping cleaning him of toxic sludge and cancerous cells. His entire body felt like pulverized meat. He needed new everything, and he needed to get started. First, his body said, first you gotta sleep more.

A day later, he was awakened by King, who had been waiting on him since he picked him up in his self-styled “battle taxi”. In the weeks that followed, he began to rehabilitate himself with orders from the doc at Sacred Heart. As he did so he began to ease into some computer work for some of Kings friends. Particularly he enjoyed working for Finnigan’s Delivery Service. He made many friends in the Fennian quarter over those weeks and months. The Black Rose and the Howling Sea Inn became his regular hangouts and soon he had built up enough money to pay King back and get into the good graces of some connectors. He began a series of Matrix raids on KH, who had been responsible for the deaths of his friends and mentor. He scoured every scrap of paydata he could find on them and slowly began to build up his contacts list on his new Yatsuma PDP-450. This also financed his first forays into body mods as well, such as ceramic bone grafting and his new memory implant. By then he’d been shot at a few times and had lived to tell the tale, but knew that he needed more protection if he couldn’t brawl with all those ganger fools. So he made room in for his MT Executive Pistol and Jaguar Armor. All the while helping out where ever he could against the corps, except his lucky company, Mars. As he delved into the Matrix he began to see some signs of a hacker he thought had died a year ago. Digital Noise was alive. How could that be?


......more to come if you like!

[taatuu25]

I like it.
+1 karma!
:-)

[LordofSyn]

:-) +1 as well

I am glad that my story was your muse. Good story so far. I, for one would like to see how far down your rabbit hole goes, to turn a phrase. I chose to write my current story in un-orthodox form.
But I am also glad to see that you not only used mine as a springboard, but also managed to use two of the other character sketches. very nice. Huzzah!

[spectre]

Thanks all! Just having a ball making some stuff for everybody. I have to say that writing isn't my strong suit however.

So I definitely appreciate the +1s!