The Escapist

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The Escapist
by James Morris
? James Morris
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
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First published in Great Britain 2005 by James Morris.
The moral right of James Morris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
ISBN: 1-905290-05-5
This book is a work of fiction.
Converted to HTML and various e-book formats by Alexander Turcic at MobileRead.
_Log 000000000001 -- I think therefore I am, therefore I act._
They arrested the code dudes in an operation sweeping the entire city. My Pocket Assistant beeped impetuously as Rodriguez dialled the tip-off pager number. Something heavy was going down. Nobody used those digits unless it was a dire emergency. I flipped the cover off the Phoenix handheld and studied the holographic touch screen. The message flashed across in chiselled 3D text:
_Pigs can fly, and they're flying right into our roost. There ain't nobody here but us chickens..._
I found a secluded spot in the changing room of Selfridges on Oxford Street, spoke the security code into my pocket computer, and hit erase. All my once valuable Intel account numbers, now useless and incriminating, disappeared off to digital nirvana, shredded according to American Federal standards and then scrambled still further by encryption software I'd bought from a Bosnian hacker for half a million Euros. I was clean. If somebody came after me during the crackdown, there wouldn't be any evidence that my diversion of American hedge funds to non-existent bank accounts had anything to do with me. No more of that stolen Yankee money for my pocket, at least not for a while. But there was a bright side. I wouldn't be spending any time in penal stasis, like the majority of London's vast hacker population.
Leaving the changing room, I handed the glitter suit I'd been pretending to try on back to the attendant and returned to the clothing racks. Despite the convenience of holographic on-line shopping, there was still something enticing about seeing all the latest clothing styles side by side on their hangers. Real shopping was never going to die, unlike real fucking. Lightweight strap-ons had become remarkably affordable and easy to use. Many people had decided that pleasuring themselves was far more satisfying than having to deal with the annoyances of actual people. Singles bars had become rare, and pornography even more profitable. But shopping was different. I loved searching for the latest attire in a physical shop. You never knew what you wanted until you found it, and the quest was almost more fun than the purchase. It was expensive, but I'd always had the extra money it cost to shop in person.
At least, I had done until a few minutes previously. I was at a loss. My most lucrative ever vein of fraudulence had reached an abrupt end. I had to find another scam, but I also needed to lie low. The easiest place to hide from police is right under their noses. That was why I got involved with COSI - the Central Office for Strategic Intelligence, and the very organisation that had captured most of my criminal colleagues.
I'd heard about the new spate of Mind Invasions from the news bulletin my Home Information System retrieved for me daily. That was, the one day a week I bothered to read the fabricated garbage the culture industry fed into Infonet. The bulletin reported how famous scientists recently returned from cryogenic sabbatical were being kidnapped and their minds drained of useful information. They were then left as vegetables, their consciousnesses irretrievably submerged in the noodle soup which was all that was left of their brains. After a bit of research into related vacancies, I'd applied for a job with COSI searching the neural highways of these unfortunate victims for clues. My fake qualifications in psychology and neurolectric interfaces, plus a natural talent for verbal diarrhoea, easily landed me the post. I started immediately. It was good cover, particularly as the job meant I could pretend to be a hot-shot neuro-psychologist. Nobody understood what it was I did, including me, but everyone agreed it was important. I also hoped that whoever was doing these Invasions would approach me to become a partner. It looked like a lucrative business, and I wanted in after the Intel Fund fiasco.
My first research subject was Eric von Kühnert. Before his kidnapping, he had been a fibre-optics expert on loan from Siemens to the postal service. He was a loner, with a taste for topless-bottomless bars. During a night hopping from bar to bar he'd been caught by the mind invaders. They'd picked him up when he was concentrating on one of the artificially-structured beauties