Chapter 01
Chapter 1
ALT/TAB
Dead Wizards didn’t use to talk a lot; it was one of the things Jen McAran had learnt well enough by now.
“I can’t believe you’ve screwed up like this, Alt.”
She knew she wouldn’t receive any answer, in the dark, cramped hotel room where she was standing. Words merely helped her to focus. Words were meant to make the heavy silence and the awful smell a little less hard to bear.
The lights from the street cast strange shadows on her pale face through the laths of the half-closed metallic shutters. She didn’t need more to discern the shape of Alt’s body on the floor at her feet. It wasn’t the first time she had seen one of their kind lying on the dirty ground or on some stained carpet, their brains starting to dangle out of an ear while a puddle of blood slowly formed under their heads. For that matter, it was the fate Alt had met no doubt just a few minutes before she arrived. After all, getting no answer at the door when a friend had asked you to come was more than often a bad sign.
Life was being a bitch, as usual.
Careful not to touch anything, Jen put her Walter PPK 45 back in the holster hidden under her long black coat, and crouched near the boy, examining for a brief moment his eyes still wide open, the trickle of blood on his cheek, the blackened hair and skin on the nape of his neck, where the four neural connexions had burnt out under the massive electric shock. The work of a Frazzle counter-intrusion program, perhaps even of a Hell Hound. The impulse had gone through the cortex like a bolt of lightning, never leaving Alt any chance to unplug the wires or shut down the connection in time. It was a nasty death, and one that every Wizard had learnt to fear, but the call of the Web was always stronger, and some of them simply couldn’t stop in time. Deceiving an ICE was always a reason to cheer; escaping a black ICE earnt them respect and awe from their peers, to the point that many Wizards from the Underworld had built their whole reputation on their ability to pass the barrier surrounding any server.
This also meant she wouldn’t have more than a couple of minutes to try to understand what her friend had been up to. Agents never took more than ten minutes to arrive on the scene of a hacking attempt — Agents, or the police, depending on what kind of server the Wizard had tried to attack.
“Sheesh, you bastard. You really had to get yourself killed, instead of just waiting and tell me first, eh?” she said in a low voice as she nervously tugged at her black gloves, trying once again in vain to ignore the disturbing smell of burnt flesh and brain matter floating all around her.
A sigh. She didn’t want to think of Alt, of the fun moments they had spent in the Web together, of the programs he would never show her again now, but in such a time and place, it was impossible. Not when the smell was making her feel like throwing up, not when she stared at the pale face at her feet, the long sandy blonde hair sprawled around his head, the matte rings under his eyes.
He had always been better at programming than at breaching into firewalls and well-guarded servers, anyway. Was this the reason why he had called her, to ask for help for an operation he couldn’t perform all alone? Had there been more to his frantic call, a mere hour before, urging her to drop whatever she was doing, jump in the first el, and join him here? The last thing she had heard from him was that he was on something serious, something really big, and now, Alt was dead, leaving next to no clues about what he had been attempting.