A CTWR518 assignment from a couple weeks back. My randomly-generated prompt called for a wealthy person for a protagonist, a ship at sea for a setting, and a murder for an inciting incident.
One note: I didn't intend to name the main character after Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining. It seemed like a good name in my head and I didn't realize why it sounded so familiar until after the story was turned in. I'll retcon that, though, and suggest that in the future it becomes popular practice to name children after the villain in old movies.
So, without further ado, here are the first two pages from a theoretical novel of crime and intrigue on the metropolitan high seas:
On Thursday, Jack Torrence woke up an extremely wealthy man. He knew it before he checked the logs. He knew it before he had even opened his eyes. For a full minute he lay there in the inch-too-short folding bed, savoring the sensation. He tried out a few different adjectives. Fabulously rich. Outrageously rich. Obscenely rich. He rolled them around on his tongue. He pictured himself in a tuxedo, at a party in a hotel. His party. His hotel, even. He imagined himself in a sleek, cherry-red convertible, some ridiculous gas-powered model from the turn of the millennium, tearing through the streets of Hyderabad, or Cincinnati. Someplace inland. Someplace that didn't smell like salt all the god damn time.
He opened his eyes. Soon, he thought to himself. He made himself a cup of coffee, took a shower, put on a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and laced up his running shoes. Only then did he bother to look at the logs from the night before. At 3:07, the package had come to the front of the queue and been pushed into the cloud. At 3:16, the agreed-upon sum had been deposited into the agreed-upon account, exactly the way he had expected it.
And he had earned every last penny. He'd known the conditions when he'd taken the job: specific targets, data and encryption keys, that would have to be tracked down before they could be accessed; a high level of network security; cautious personnel. Pharmaceuticals were always cautious. And it was on a city-ship, which made access even more difficult. He had known when he agreed that he'd have to embed here, and that it might take a long time to build up information, to probe the system, to find somebody he could use.
And it had taken a long time--eight months, bobbing around the ocean in a tin can--but Jack had found Liu Yung-fa. Liu was a very nice young man who had been promoted to middle-management just a little soon. He attended religious services weekly, and volunteered for a civic organization in his free time. He considered himself a coder, and knew just enough to be dangerous. He sent money to his parents every month to support his mother's chronic illness. He had a girl back home, and had stayed more-or-less faithful to her for almost a year since he'd come to Kurma. He liked the cinema, especially social interactives and comedies.
Jack had gotten most of this from digging through the trash in Liu's office and apartment complex while posing as a janitor and a representative of the corporate recycling program, respectively. He'd accessed Liu's phone records, of course, and network usage statistics, offsite storage, email archives, and financial portfolio, by cold-calling various record-keeping agencies as a harried supervisor, as a government regulator, or as Liu himself. Liu was careful with his access to sensitive company data and had quite good security practices, but some of his employees were not quite as careful, and many of them had family in Kurma who could be quite careless. It had taken a long time for Jack to research all of these people, infiltrate the network, work his way closer to Liu, and manipulate circumstances to a point that he could take advantage of all the information he'd gathered.
He had done it, though. Yesterday, he'd obtained the last of the data he'd been hired to deliver, and as of 3:07 this morning he had delivered it. He'd done it carefully, and he'd done it well. No one directly connected to Liu knew that their information had been compromised. Liu's corporation would find out there had been a leak in six or so weeks, when competitors started publishing competing drugs. Liu himself would never imagine that he had been the source. Jack had expected no trouble with the upload or about his payment. One advantage of taking a corporate client was that businessmen tended to respect the terms of a contract. He had slept well, and had woken early only because, now that it was done, he was anxious to get the hell out of Kurma. They would be coming within range of Mombasa today, if the forecast hadn't changed, and with any luck at all he would be on continent before tea.
As Jack stepped out of the small apartment, a door hissed closed behind him. The world was quiet, bathed in the low ambient light that indicated nighttime without impairing vision. He looked up and down Bhandara Road, a corridor six meters wide and half that tall painted powder blue, lined with doors just like his. Just before dawn was the only time that the streets really cleared out; most of the residents of Kurma were coders, and most of the coders were nocturnal. Jack found the empty streets vaguely disturbing. Space was at such a premium in the city, in general, that it seemed improper to have so much of it empty all at one time. And without the heat of moving bodies, the air conditioning seemed oppressive. He set off at a brisk pace, heading upward, toward the surface.
Outside was not much better. The strong wind and the ocean spray cut through his clothing and chilled him to the bone. It was dark, too, with nothing but the moon providing light through a thin cloud cover. He had emerged near one of the edges of the city, practically overlooking the water. He peered inward, toward the center, toward the flagpole, but he couldn't begin to make it out in this light. It was only four kilometers, though, and he wanted to see the flag with his own eyes. He stretched his calves and started a slow jog up the radial.
There were no buildings on the surface of the city - in fact, there was very little on the surface. Some city-ships experimented with solar arrays to offset the enormous energy expenditure associated with running and cooling a city-wide server farm, but a complex topology made maintenance exponentially more complicated. And protecting the surface from corrosion was a serious concern. Kurma kept its topology simple, its maintenance costs down, and imported all of its energy from continental cities.
Jack's path led him up the gentle curve that defined the surface, turning the city into an enormous hexagonal bubble floating in the middle of the ocean. The flagpole at the curve's apex would be flying a Kenyan flag this morning, signaling that the city-ship had come into continental waters and was prepared to abide by the agreements between Kenya and the Confederation of Independent City-Ships. The sun was breaching the horizon as Jack approached the flagpole, and he frowned slightly as he dropped into a walk. Instead of the black, red and green that he had been hoping to see, the flag showed blue and white stripes - the colors flown by a city-ship in independent waters. He scanned the horizon, but there was no sign of the African coast.
Something else caught his eye: another hexagonal bubble floating a scant few kilometers to the east. Delphin. They'd been docked yesterday, and they'd been scheduled to remain docked for the next several days. For some reason, the enormous magnetic locks had been released and the two cities had drifted apart. Something was going on, though Jack didn't understand what. He was missing some vital piece of information that would allow him to understand. He turned toward the nearest hatch to make his way back below the surface.
He flipped on the intra when he got to his apartment. If something had happened to change the city's itinerary to this extent, there would be something about it on the morning newscast. Not everything, most likely, but enough to point him in the right direction if he needed to investigate further. The hair on his arms stood on end as a large picture of Liu Yung-fa appeared on the screen.
“--ice have ordered a temporary suspension of the city's itinerary while the investigation is being conducted, in accordance with international anti-terrorism agreements. Once again, police suspect that the murder of Liu Yung-fa is related to an apparent act of industrial sabotage. A preliminary investigation of the scene revealed that key-logging hardware had been affixed to Mr. Liu's local client, and network analysis shows recent uncharacteristic access of sensitive data. Officials are stepping up their response to this situation given the dangerous nature of the information that appears to have been stolen--instruction-sets for printing newly developed wide-deployment chemical weapons. Police have ordered a temporary suspension of the city's itinerary while the investigation is being conducted.”
Jack had gone cold. Chemical weapons? He had believed the data he was liberating from Liu to be some sort of new vaccine. What was it really for? And what had happened to Liu? Someone had killed him, apparently, but why? For the same data that Jack had already stolen?
Or perhaps he was being set up. Police had found a keylogger attached to Liu's computer, and that wasn't Jack's. Someone else might have put it there for their own purposes, or it might have been planted simply to point in the direction of industrial sabotage. Either way, it was trouble for Jack. The investigators would start by checking network traffic, local and outbound. Jack had encrypted the package before he pushed it out last night, but he hadn't bothered to reshape it. If it really was the same data that the police were looking for, it wouldn't take them long to come up with a match.
And the city was being locked down. There was no way out.