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freosanSorry for the spam. About 1 800 words. No real warnings, except for the usual misuse of Spanish.
Two weeks after Futatsu’s death, SingKueh brings his laptop to Boss’s tent.
Rela’s there at the time, talking strategy, and winces when she sees him. He’s wearing white, again, like ‘Tatsu said he did when he first came here. She tries to keep the look off her face but she knows he’s noticed.
He doesn’t say anything, though, until Boss prompts him: “SingK’. Nice to see you out and about. What’s up?”
“A few weeks… before his death, Futa installed some things on my computer. One of them apparently had a timer attached,” he says. His voice is not nearly as confident as it used to be. “Last week, it set off, and gave me… several files, one of which included a password and instructions.” He sets the laptop down on Boss’s desk, carefully not disturbing the maps, and flips it open.
While it’s booting up, Rela decides to indulge her curiosity. “What were the other files?” she asks. SingKueh winces. “They were personal.”
And that sounded interesting, for sure… but she wasn’t going to push it, not as brittle as he seemed. See, she could be socially aware, when she wanted to.
The computer finishes booting, and SingKueh clicks a few keys, then spins it around to let Rela and Boss see the screen.
It’s covered in the green-on-black readout that Futatsu always used, in a language Rela doesn’t know. “What’s it say?”
Boss looks intent and makes a shushing motion at her. “Later. SingK’, are you sure this is accurate?”
“I double-checked a great deal of it, but some of it is impossible – several of the sources are anonymous or dead.” He motions to one of the incomprehensible lines of code. “This is a file containing references, but I think half of this he managed to come up with by himself. A lot of it comes from hacking the EarthSphere’s databases,” he adds. That only makes Rela more interested – and frustrated.
Boss has pushed his wheeled chair over to the desk, and is pouring over the information. “This is huge,” he says. SingKueh nods. Rela makes an annoyed, pointed noise and SingKueh looks over at her.
“It’s a database listing all the movements the EarthSphere has made in this war,” he finally explains. That doesn’t help at all.
“Explain in terms I can relate to?” she prompts.
Boss doesn’t even look up from the screen – he’s typing rapidly and new read-outs keep coming up. “Proof positive that they’ve been operating outside their own laws,” he tells her. “This stuff… it’s all kinds of illegal,” he mutters. “’Course we knew that…”
“He also has a program that he says will automatically hack their public-address system,” SingKueh adds. “I don’t know when he found the time to work on this but…”
Rela jumps at that, and so does Boss. “You mean we can -” Rela breaks off, and sheepishly nods to Boss, allowing him to speak. “…We can communicate with them?”
SingKueh nods, smiling without humor. “And we can put this information…” he motions at the computer “…onto their internet.”
“The best possible weapon we could get,” Boss mutters, and starts digging around his desk. Rela hands him the flash drive before he can ask for it, and he starts copying the files.
“So what’s so maravilloso about it, anyway? So they’re evil bastards, we knew that already,” Rela says, glaring at the screen. The… she thinks they’re Asian characters, Chinese probably… they annoy her. She never did have a chance to learn Chinese.
SingKueh nods. “Yes, we did, but the populace of the colonies did not. This is proof. Even if the people are skeptical, they will demand explanations; if popular support of the war drops…”
“Then the EarthSphere bastards will leave us the fuck alone!” Boss chimes in. He looks distinctly happier than usual, which is to say he’s not frowning.
Rela is. She’s always had trouble seeing viewpoints other than her own; she can’t quite get a handle on the fact that the colonists – evil though they undoubtedly are – don’t know what they’re doing down here. They’re like kids with flies, she thinks, ripping out their wings just to watch. Why’d someone cause all that pain and not care about it? At least kids have the excuse of ignorance. She can’t believe that the colonies have the same.
She hates the comparison but it’s all she can think about some days.
“We’ll have to plan it real good. Hack the system and spread the data all at once…” Boss is saying, typing frantically. He types in a continuous stream, without looking at the worn-off keys, a sign that he was born in a generation before the world went to hell. Rela can’t type fast, neither can anyone her age. She doesn’t trust computers much, though she can use them if she needs to.
SingKueh nods, and moves pins on Boss’s everpresent city map. The orange ones are for their operatives. The blue is for the EarthSphere’s. Green means friendly town, red means enemy base. They shift every day as Boss and Rela get radio calls, as SingKueh’s informants trickle in, as word-of-mouth and runners come into the city. Right now, SingKueh is putting a fluorescent orange pushpin right in the triangle that marks the city’s highest still-standing skyscraper.
“We’ll transmit from the Cieloban. It is the only place we’ve successfully hacked the EarthSphere internet. Futa had a few wireless boosters; we’ll attach those to the top…” he says. Boss picks up his train of thought, and Rela remembers that they’ve known each other as long as she’s been alive. “…And we’ll have someone prepared to do a radio/television speech right when we get things patched through.”
Both the men, right then, turn to Rela, with matching serious expressions. “What?” Then she gets it. “Dios mio, no. You’re not getting me on anyone’s screens….”
Boss explains gently, which she hates, because he sounds condescending in a way that it’s impossible to get annoyed about. “It has to be someone who knows what they’re talking about, which leaves one of us three, and it has to be someone who they can sympathize with, and that leaves you,” he says.
“No estoy simpatica!” she protests, but she can see the logic – if she didn’t know ‘em, SingKueh and Boss would be kinda scary, given that they’re both scarred and Boss constantly has stubble and SingKueh’s left eye is milky white.
SingKueh’s voice is deadly serious. “Lady, this is necessary.”
She nods. “Yeah, I know. Si, si, I’ll do it.”
***************
It’s a flat-skyed, blank, empty day – the kind of day that makes cats go around with their tails fluffed and dogs whimper and hide. The sky is grey and the sun is invisible, and looking up is like looking into infinity. It’s humid and still and the rain is so close it’s almost tangible, but the drops turn out to be illusions.
Rela hates it. Every time she moves, she shivers, though she’s not cold. The weather isn’t helping her at all. She’s supposed to be in charge here, in control; Boss gave her the job. Said he wouldn’t trust it to anyone but her.
She has what amounts to an honor guard. It’s bizarre. Four of her friends – Schuu, of course, along with Ross, Hali and Maddox – have come along with her to the Cieloban, because she is not carrying a weapon. They all wear orange arm-bands, which wasn’t her idea but which she finds rather flattering, since they’re obviously supposed to be the shade she dyes her hair.
Today, though, her hair’s been dyed back to a natural brown, a few shades lighter than it should be. She’s wearing a crew-neck sweater and, weirdly, jewelry – small silver earrings and a delicate necklace.
Her nails have been painted, but she’s not wearing makeup. Over the ridiculous ensemble – at least she’s still wearing cargo pants and boots, since she’ll only be shown from the shoulders up – she wears an EarthSphere-scavenged flak jacket. She’s supposed to look delicate and innocent and ravaged by war. She wonders if it’s even slightly convincing. Maybe the last part.
Ross is staring at her like he’s never seen her before, and SingKueh’s reaction wasn’t much better. She sighs, and starts up the steps, with her posse behind her.
On the fourteenth floor she passes the hackers, looks instinctively for a long brown ponytail, and winces when she catches herself. They wave to her, and she smiles back, but it’s weird. She only knows them through Futatsu.
The video transmission equipment is on the sixteenth floor. Ross and Hali continue up the stairs, headed for the wireless boosters on the eighteenth and highest floor. The hackers wanted them on the roof, but Boss and Rela had vetoed that. Too much of a risk. It's bad enough they're eighteen stories up in a city that's mostly under five stories high.
She might look innocent and delicate, maybe, but she’s determined not to act it. She radios Boss and SingKueh, making sure they’re in position with the hackers, and nods to Schuu to get ready for the video feed. She stands on a stack of books by a window, the better to get a view of the ruined city, and counts down silently. Five. She hates public speaking. Four. What if they bomb this place right in the middle of the upload? Three. It’d actually be good for their cause. Two. Maybe they already know about this and have changed all the codes.
One.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen of the EarthSphere Colonies Pacem, Chelonian, and Victoria.” Look innocent, look innocent! “This transmission is coming to you from Spain, in the Western Hemisphere of Earth. My name is Rela, and I’d like to make a few things known.” Keep talking, make sure it’s English, nervous is okay but don’t get mad…
“As of this moment, my friends and I are uploading files to your internet.” Talk faster, you only have minutes. “There’s a database of every move your government has taken since the start of this war in 2046. I invite you to look over this, and then ask your leaders what they were thinking. Two-thirds of these movements were never presented to the public, never debated, never recorded. The cold-blooded actions of your government have resulted in so much destruction…” Dios, don’t stop talking! “And so much death… Three weeks ago, one of the men who raised me…” Okay, go ahead and tear up, fine. “…was killed by EarthSphere soldiers acting without orders. A month ago, my city was firebombed. The actions taken – no, the crimes committed – by the EarthSphere government…”
The screen fizzles, and Schuu hits the off switch. “We’ve been blocked.”
Rela steps down from her small podium, already pulling her hair back into its usual braid. “Upload status?”
Maddox shakes his head and Rela flicks her comm on.
“’Kueh, tu oye?” she snaps.
“Yes,” she hears. SingKueh sounds tired.
“What’s the upload status?”
“Upload complete,” he says, with a note of triumph, and Maddox and Schuu break into identical huge grins. Rela feels herself do the same.
Two weeks after Futatsu’s death, SingKueh brings his laptop to Boss’s tent.
Rela’s there at the time, talking strategy, and winces when she sees him. He’s wearing white, again, like ‘Tatsu said he did when he first came here. She tries to keep the look off her face but she knows he’s noticed.
He doesn’t say anything, though, until Boss prompts him: “SingK’. Nice to see you out and about. What’s up?”
“A few weeks… before his death, Futa installed some things on my computer. One of them apparently had a timer attached,” he says. His voice is not nearly as confident as it used to be. “Last week, it set off, and gave me… several files, one of which included a password and instructions.” He sets the laptop down on Boss’s desk, carefully not disturbing the maps, and flips it open.
While it’s booting up, Rela decides to indulge her curiosity. “What were the other files?” she asks. SingKueh winces. “They were personal.”
And that sounded interesting, for sure… but she wasn’t going to push it, not as brittle as he seemed. See, she could be socially aware, when she wanted to.
The computer finishes booting, and SingKueh clicks a few keys, then spins it around to let Rela and Boss see the screen.
It’s covered in the green-on-black readout that Futatsu always used, in a language Rela doesn’t know. “What’s it say?”
Boss looks intent and makes a shushing motion at her. “Later. SingK’, are you sure this is accurate?”
“I double-checked a great deal of it, but some of it is impossible – several of the sources are anonymous or dead.” He motions to one of the incomprehensible lines of code. “This is a file containing references, but I think half of this he managed to come up with by himself. A lot of it comes from hacking the EarthSphere’s databases,” he adds. That only makes Rela more interested – and frustrated.
Boss has pushed his wheeled chair over to the desk, and is pouring over the information. “This is huge,” he says. SingKueh nods. Rela makes an annoyed, pointed noise and SingKueh looks over at her.
“It’s a database listing all the movements the EarthSphere has made in this war,” he finally explains. That doesn’t help at all.
“Explain in terms I can relate to?” she prompts.
Boss doesn’t even look up from the screen – he’s typing rapidly and new read-outs keep coming up. “Proof positive that they’ve been operating outside their own laws,” he tells her. “This stuff… it’s all kinds of illegal,” he mutters. “’Course we knew that…”
“He also has a program that he says will automatically hack their public-address system,” SingKueh adds. “I don’t know when he found the time to work on this but…”
Rela jumps at that, and so does Boss. “You mean we can -” Rela breaks off, and sheepishly nods to Boss, allowing him to speak. “…We can communicate with them?”
SingKueh nods, smiling without humor. “And we can put this information…” he motions at the computer “…onto their internet.”
“The best possible weapon we could get,” Boss mutters, and starts digging around his desk. Rela hands him the flash drive before he can ask for it, and he starts copying the files.
“So what’s so maravilloso about it, anyway? So they’re evil bastards, we knew that already,” Rela says, glaring at the screen. The… she thinks they’re Asian characters, Chinese probably… they annoy her. She never did have a chance to learn Chinese.
SingKueh nods. “Yes, we did, but the populace of the colonies did not. This is proof. Even if the people are skeptical, they will demand explanations; if popular support of the war drops…”
“Then the EarthSphere bastards will leave us the fuck alone!” Boss chimes in. He looks distinctly happier than usual, which is to say he’s not frowning.
Rela is. She’s always had trouble seeing viewpoints other than her own; she can’t quite get a handle on the fact that the colonists – evil though they undoubtedly are – don’t know what they’re doing down here. They’re like kids with flies, she thinks, ripping out their wings just to watch. Why’d someone cause all that pain and not care about it? At least kids have the excuse of ignorance. She can’t believe that the colonies have the same.
She hates the comparison but it’s all she can think about some days.
“We’ll have to plan it real good. Hack the system and spread the data all at once…” Boss is saying, typing frantically. He types in a continuous stream, without looking at the worn-off keys, a sign that he was born in a generation before the world went to hell. Rela can’t type fast, neither can anyone her age. She doesn’t trust computers much, though she can use them if she needs to.
SingKueh nods, and moves pins on Boss’s everpresent city map. The orange ones are for their operatives. The blue is for the EarthSphere’s. Green means friendly town, red means enemy base. They shift every day as Boss and Rela get radio calls, as SingKueh’s informants trickle in, as word-of-mouth and runners come into the city. Right now, SingKueh is putting a fluorescent orange pushpin right in the triangle that marks the city’s highest still-standing skyscraper.
“We’ll transmit from the Cieloban. It is the only place we’ve successfully hacked the EarthSphere internet. Futa had a few wireless boosters; we’ll attach those to the top…” he says. Boss picks up his train of thought, and Rela remembers that they’ve known each other as long as she’s been alive. “…And we’ll have someone prepared to do a radio/television speech right when we get things patched through.”
Both the men, right then, turn to Rela, with matching serious expressions. “What?” Then she gets it. “Dios mio, no. You’re not getting me on anyone’s screens….”
Boss explains gently, which she hates, because he sounds condescending in a way that it’s impossible to get annoyed about. “It has to be someone who knows what they’re talking about, which leaves one of us three, and it has to be someone who they can sympathize with, and that leaves you,” he says.
“No estoy simpatica!” she protests, but she can see the logic – if she didn’t know ‘em, SingKueh and Boss would be kinda scary, given that they’re both scarred and Boss constantly has stubble and SingKueh’s left eye is milky white.
SingKueh’s voice is deadly serious. “Lady, this is necessary.”
She nods. “Yeah, I know. Si, si, I’ll do it.”
***************
It’s a flat-skyed, blank, empty day – the kind of day that makes cats go around with their tails fluffed and dogs whimper and hide. The sky is grey and the sun is invisible, and looking up is like looking into infinity. It’s humid and still and the rain is so close it’s almost tangible, but the drops turn out to be illusions.
Rela hates it. Every time she moves, she shivers, though she’s not cold. The weather isn’t helping her at all. She’s supposed to be in charge here, in control; Boss gave her the job. Said he wouldn’t trust it to anyone but her.
She has what amounts to an honor guard. It’s bizarre. Four of her friends – Schuu, of course, along with Ross, Hali and Maddox – have come along with her to the Cieloban, because she is not carrying a weapon. They all wear orange arm-bands, which wasn’t her idea but which she finds rather flattering, since they’re obviously supposed to be the shade she dyes her hair.
Today, though, her hair’s been dyed back to a natural brown, a few shades lighter than it should be. She’s wearing a crew-neck sweater and, weirdly, jewelry – small silver earrings and a delicate necklace.
Her nails have been painted, but she’s not wearing makeup. Over the ridiculous ensemble – at least she’s still wearing cargo pants and boots, since she’ll only be shown from the shoulders up – she wears an EarthSphere-scavenged flak jacket. She’s supposed to look delicate and innocent and ravaged by war. She wonders if it’s even slightly convincing. Maybe the last part.
Ross is staring at her like he’s never seen her before, and SingKueh’s reaction wasn’t much better. She sighs, and starts up the steps, with her posse behind her.
On the fourteenth floor she passes the hackers, looks instinctively for a long brown ponytail, and winces when she catches herself. They wave to her, and she smiles back, but it’s weird. She only knows them through Futatsu.
The video transmission equipment is on the sixteenth floor. Ross and Hali continue up the stairs, headed for the wireless boosters on the eighteenth and highest floor. The hackers wanted them on the roof, but Boss and Rela had vetoed that. Too much of a risk. It's bad enough they're eighteen stories up in a city that's mostly under five stories high.
She might look innocent and delicate, maybe, but she’s determined not to act it. She radios Boss and SingKueh, making sure they’re in position with the hackers, and nods to Schuu to get ready for the video feed. She stands on a stack of books by a window, the better to get a view of the ruined city, and counts down silently. Five. She hates public speaking. Four. What if they bomb this place right in the middle of the upload? Three. It’d actually be good for their cause. Two. Maybe they already know about this and have changed all the codes.
One.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen of the EarthSphere Colonies Pacem, Chelonian, and Victoria.” Look innocent, look innocent! “This transmission is coming to you from Spain, in the Western Hemisphere of Earth. My name is Rela, and I’d like to make a few things known.” Keep talking, make sure it’s English, nervous is okay but don’t get mad…
“As of this moment, my friends and I are uploading files to your internet.” Talk faster, you only have minutes. “There’s a database of every move your government has taken since the start of this war in 2046. I invite you to look over this, and then ask your leaders what they were thinking. Two-thirds of these movements were never presented to the public, never debated, never recorded. The cold-blooded actions of your government have resulted in so much destruction…” Dios, don’t stop talking! “And so much death… Three weeks ago, one of the men who raised me…” Okay, go ahead and tear up, fine. “…was killed by EarthSphere soldiers acting without orders. A month ago, my city was firebombed. The actions taken – no, the crimes committed – by the EarthSphere government…”
The screen fizzles, and Schuu hits the off switch. “We’ve been blocked.”
Rela steps down from her small podium, already pulling her hair back into its usual braid. “Upload status?”
Maddox shakes his head and Rela flicks her comm on.
“’Kueh, tu oye?” she snaps.
“Yes,” she hears. SingKueh sounds tired.
“What’s the upload status?”
“Upload complete,” he says, with a note of triumph, and Maddox and Schuu break into identical huge grins. Rela feels herself do the same.