As a little celebration, I decided to take a break from the usual Python articles I write and bring you this instead — hope you’re a fan of Richard Morgan!
My Stack was Intact
by C. C. Python Programming
Ah, liminal space — a place where you’re no one, waiting to be someone — again.
I swung my legs off the cot, feeling the unfamiliar weight of the sleeve settle over me. It shifts, feels like thick liquid in a balloon — takes time for it to feel natural. The sound of rain pattered against the window in digital overlay. It’s meant to be chaotic but it’s too perfect, tries too hard to be random. I sat there, watching the drops slide down the windowpane and knew it wasn’t real.
Beyond the pane stretched Neo-Tokyo’s tech district, a glittering hellhole where the only escape was to end up like me — a brokered sleeve running on borrowed time.
Behind me, the hiss of the door opening. I turned as a figure entered, an industrial bot. “Good, you’re sitting up. Calibration report’s complete,” the bot said. “The sleeve will stabilize with use. Force yourself to move.”
“Force,” I muttered, flexing my hands experimentally. The joints were stiff, sluggish. “I’m thirsty.”
The bot’s head tilted in a slow shake. “Not a real thirst, just the body’s instincts firing off signals it hasn’t yet wired.”
The bot was right. The stabilization cocktail they’d pumped in before activation would keep hunger and thirst at bay for hours, but the ghost of it lingered.
The bot stopped in the doorway and tapped its wrist. “The client has graciously given you one hour, fifty-five minutes have elapsed,” it added as the door slid shut. No explanation, no context — just the clock already ticking.
My name is Vax, or at least the version of me in this sleeve. No, I’m not a private investigator or a soldier. I’m a coder — a Python programmer who’s spent more of my lives debugging algorithms than running through dark alleys. Yet here I am, thawed out from cold storage because some faceless corporation brokered my existence.
The client was Ashira Takamoto, CEO of Takamoto Technologies, a corporation responsible for nearly every major advancement in artificial intelligence over the last three decades. Her son, Rin, had disappeared two days ago, and all conventional methods of tracking him had failed. With missing people, the critical window is forty-eight hours.
That was where I came in. My specialty wasn’t cracking heads or breaking teeth. It was unraveling digital threads, finding patterns, sifting through the Mesh to follow trails no one else could see.
Missing from the contract’s fine print was the unspoken truth. Takamoto Technologies didn’t need a solo programmer to track down a missing person. Their AI/ML systems — sophisticated enough to map the Mesh — could have found the teenager in hours. But technology wasn’t the problem; optics were. Dirty laundry wasn’t something a company like Takamoto aired in-house. In Japanese corporate culture, especially at a monolith like Takamoto, the appearance of infallibility was everything. A missing teenage heir wasn’t just a family crisis; it was a potential scandal, a chink in the armor of an empire built on precision and control.
That’s why they needed someone like me — an outsider, unconnected, unimportant. My task wasn’t to wow their board or maintain their image. My job was to get dirty, to go places their spotless systems couldn’t without raising questions.
I’d hack, chase trails with augmented bodies, deploy neural hacks, black-market implants, and use AI mods designed to rewrite reality itself. None of these tools would ever officially touch Takamoto Technologies.
The problem was, this wasn’t my sleeve. My old one had been destroyed in an unfortunate encounter with a drone swarm. I didn’t even hear the bastards coming. One second, the alley was empty; the next, it filled with the buzz of high-speed machines descending like mechanical locusts. Too many to dodge, too fast to outmaneuver. Whether I was targeted, or it was an accident, I still don’t know.
Then Scavengers — vultures with the ethics of old-world lawyers — found me in the alley and picked my cortical stack from the wreckage. To them, I wasn’t a person; I was a commodity. The scaves legally sold me off to Cold Storage, LLC, where my consciousness sat inert, as a file on a shelf, waiting for someone desperate enough to pull me out and put me to use.
“Mr. Vax,” Ashira’s voice came through my neural implant, crisp and commanding. “Have you … adjusted?”
“Nearly,” I replied, glancing down at my wrist-mounted holo-display.
There was a pause, deliberate. “I gave you an hour to come around. You now have an hour to clear at least one district,” she said. “Milestones, Mr. Vax. I’m fine with knowing where he isn’t, as long as it gets us closer to where he is. One hour.”
The holo-display glitched from the disconnection, a stutter of light before going dark. I cursed under my breath. Either the sleeve’s calibration was off, or Takamoto’s system didn’t trust me enough to keep the connection stable. Either way, it left me feeling as blind as I’d been in cold storage.
I stood and stumbled across the room to the desk against the wall. The desk was bare except for an old, half-functional keyboard wired to a holographic display. I flexed my fingers over the keys, grimacing at the sharp twinge in the wrist. Typing felt unnatural, a chore made worse by the sleeve’s sluggish response. My old fingers had moved with the precision of a practiced coder.
I opened a bare-bones terminal on the holo-display tapped into a low-level access port tied to the Mesh, routing through layers of encrypted nodes. A tracer script I’d stashed months ago began to crawl through fragmented pings and incomplete data packets to map out Rin’s last-known digital footprint. I started with locations around the Takamoto home and the building Ashira Takamoto worked in. In moments, all of Tokyo would know I was tracing Rin.
The timer ticked in my peripheral vision: fifty-eight minutes, eleven seconds — ten, nine. I clenched my jaw. The work was the same, even if the body wasn’t. The tracer crawled through a subnet, sweeping zones, but it wasn’t enough. I needed hounds — visual confirmation — to fully clear each sector.
I pushed away from the desk and crossed back to the cot, pulling the sleeveware from its sterile package. Dressed and while heading out the door of the liminal space, I felt things slowly begin to align. A message blinked into my vision: Stack intact.
Thirty minutes later, I ducked into a small, dimly lit café that catered to coders and hackers. The air had a chemical bite of spilled synth-alcohol mixed with recycled oxygen and ozone. Sliding into a booth, I connected my neural interface to a public terminal and began digging deeper into the Mesh.
The tracer code reported that Marunouchi had been cleared. Rin had been there only once in the past year. Odd, I though Rin would visit his mother at work more often.
“Looking for someone?” a voice drawled. I looked up to see a woman leaning against the booth, her sleeve a patchwork of cybernetic enhancements. Her left eye glowed a computer blue, scanning me.
“Depends,” I said cautiously. “Who’s asking?”
“Name’s Kiera.” She threw her digital card on the table, a holographic resume and images of her team appeared. Four of them, each with a sentry drone. “I’m a K9er. Heard you’re looking for Rin Takamoto. Word travels fast in this district.”
I leaned back, keeping my expression neutral. “And what makes you think I’m looking for Rin?” I asked, my tone just shy of disinterest.
Her cybernetic arm flexed as she pushed off the booth and slid into the seat across from me. “Because you’re sitting in this dump, jacked into a terminal that’s pinging every hound on the Mesh with tracer code. Subtle you’re not.”
I frowned. “If you already know, why not skip the small talk?”
She smirked, flashing teeth that were unnervingly sharp. “Because people like you never tell the whole story until we poke at the edges. So, let’s start simple. Who hired you?”
I hesitated for a fraction of a second. Kiera caught it, her glowing eye narrowing. “Can’t say, right? Let me guess. Corporate leash. Takamoto herself?” She leaned forward, her voice dropping. “You know what you’re stepping into, right? Rin’s not just some kid who got lost playing the Mesh. The stakes are heavier than you can handle solo.”
I sighed. “I know.”
Her smirk widened. “Smart. You’ll need me.” She extended her hand, the faint hum of servos accompanying the gesture. Her other arm pulled back her digital card. “Five thousand creds for me and my team. We sniff out every zone your fancy tracer clears for twenty-four hours.”
“Five thousand?” I raised an eyebrow. “For what? Walking around with drones and barking at shadows?”
“You want Rin found? That means clearing ground you can’t touch, talking to people you don’t know, and getting into places your tracer can’t map. You’re paying for expertise, not toys.”
I grimaced. “I can go as high as three. Anything more, and this whole job becomes a loss for me.”
She tilted her head, considering, then leaned back with a grin. “Four, and I’ll throw in a field drone for recon. Top-of-the-line AI. Tracks, scans, and keeps its mouth shut. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said, shaking her hand. The servos in her palm hummed, then sent a static jolt through my fingers. Synth on synth. I didn’t flinch, and her smirk told me she noticed.
Kiera slid out of the booth and gestured for me to follow. “Come on. My team’s waiting. I’ll brief them and you’ll correct me if I get anything wrong.”
My neural HUD flickered. An incoming call. Takamoto. I sighed and accepted the connection. “Mr. Vax,” Ashira said, her tone cold. “Update.”
“The tracer cleared Marunouchi,” I replied. “Rin’s not there. It’s clean. I’ve hired a team to scour the physical zones and double-check. We’re on the move.”
“Good,” she said, though her tone showed no satisfaction. “This needs results, not effort. Keep me informed.”
The call disconnected without another word. I exhaled, flexing my stiff fingers. Kiera raised an eyebrow, her glowing eye judging me.
“Corporate leash pulling tight already?” she quipped, smirking.
“Always,” I muttered, motioning for her to lead the way.
We stepped out into the chaos of Neo-Tokyo, the streets were cluttered with every augmented lifeform known to man. From the 100% humans — sharp-eyed salarymen in impeccable suits, their neural implants humming as they worked through invisible interfaces — to the nearly broken droids, their battered bodies scuffed and dented from overuse, barely holding together as they shuffled between tasks.
Kiera’s team was holed up in a repurposed auto garage two blocks from the café. A half-assembled mech loomed in the corner, its metal frame gleaming under the flicker of a faulty holo-lamp.
“This is Vax,” Kiera announced as we entered. “Our client.”
Three heads turned toward me. The first belonged to a man with chromed arms and a face half-covered in circuitry. He didn’t speak, just nodded once before returning to the task of calibrating a small, insect-like drone.
The second was a woman whose skin shimmered, some kind of sub-dermal camouflage tech. She gave me a once-over and snorted. “Another corpo hire? Great.”
The third was a towering synth, its body sleek and humanoid but without a doubt, mechanical. Its glowing optics fixed on me as it spoke in a deep, resonant voice. “Objective?”
“Rin Takamoto,” Kiera replied, sliding a holo-map onto the table in the center of the room. “Vax here’s running a tracer that’s cleared Marunouchi. We’re starting there and working outward.”
“Kid went missing in Marunouchi?” the chrome-armed man asked, his voice distorted by a vocal modulator.
“No,” I corrected. “Tracer says he passed through. He’s long gone, but we need to make sure the zone’s clean before moving on.”
The synth nodded. “Efficient.”
Kiera gestured to the map. “We’ll split into two teams. Synth and I will sweep the north sector. Chrome and Chameleon,” she nodded toward the others, “take the south. Vax, you stay on the Mesh and feed us updates.”
I crossed my arms. “You’re the hounds. I’ll be watching from above.”
The team moved fast, deploying drones and tapping into local surveillance feeds as they swept through Marunouchi.
Kiera’s team stayed just out of range of the security patrols, blending into the bustle like ghosts in the machine. They moved with precision, slipping between crowds and hugging the edges of glowing storefronts. Even in a district as polished as Marunouchi, there were shadows to exploit — and Kiera’s crew knew them all.
Plugged in, I monitored their progress from the safety of Kiera’s garage, my holo-display filled with real-time feeds from their drones. The tracer continued to clear zones, but something felt off. The data was too clean, too precise, as if someone had scrubbed the area before we arrived. It was the rain all over again, the digital overlay.
“Kiera,” I said through the comms. “Anything?”
“Define anything,” she replied, her voice tinged with amusement. “I hate Marunouchi, it’s so fake. Everything’s polished and precise. I don’t see how people breathe here.”
“That’s the problem,” I muttered. “It’s too clean. No random pings, no stray signals. The data flow feels… sanitized. Like someone’s scrubbed the place.”
“Someone doesn’t want us to find something?” Kiera asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my tone low. “Someone’s hiding something, and they’re good at it.”
Kiera’s voice crackled back through the comms. “How good?”
“Corporate-grade,” I replied. “This isn’t someone just covering tracks. It’s someone deliberately erasing everything we’d use to trace them.”
I stared at the scrolling lines of code on my holo-display. The tracer was running, but it wasn’t enough. Whoever sanitized this data knew how tracers worked — they’d stripped out the noise that gave the patterns context. I needed something better, something that could find the gaps where the data should be.
“I’ve got an idea,” I muttered, more to myself than to Kiera. “If they’ve sanitized the data, they’ve left gaps. Holes where signals should exist but don’t. The absence of noise is its own kind of pattern.”
“Okay,” Kiera quipped. “How long?”
“I’m writing code now,” I shot back.
“Take your time, genius. We’ll keep sniffing.”
I tuned her out, focusing on the lines of code forming in my display. The algorithm needed to map the Mesh like a digital echolocation, not looking for signals themselves but for the spaces where they should’ve been. Noise, pings, fragments of discarded data — anything real would leave behind traces, even in a sanitized zone.
I glanced at the timer in my peripheral vision: twenty-two minutes left. No room for errors. The new code began to run, its code branching out like digital tendrils, mapping the gaps and stitching together the invisible threads that had been erased. All artificial, of course, but each calculated with probabilities — scoring what could exist in real data and flagging anomalies that defied the noise patterns expected in a chaotic, living Mesh.
“Come on,” I muttered under my breath, watching as the first set of results began to populate the display. Fragments of missing data lit up like holes in a sheet of static.
“Vax,” Kiera’s voice cut through the comms. “I’m in front of Takamoto Technologies. Lot of armed security. More so than usual.”
Half ignoring Kiera, I focused on the code. “There you are,” I muttered, my pulse quickening. “You didn’t clean everything, did you?”
“You’re at Takamoto Technologies?” I asked, tuning back in.
“Yes, bu — ” Kiera’s voice cut off with a sharp crack, followed by a metallic clang and a burst of static.
“Kiera?” I called, sitting upright. Silence. A faint hum of interference filled the comms.
“Kiera, respond!” I barked, already pulling up her drone feed. The tracer results could wait. If she was in trouble, we’d just kicked over a nest of vipers — and I wasn’t ready to find out how deep this went unprepared.
Kiera’s drone connection stuttered for a moment before stabilizing, offering me a disorienting view of the chaos outside Takamoto Technologies. The camera swung wildly, showing the sleek façade of the building and then the pavement, where Kiera’s unconscious body lay sprawled, her cybernetic enhancements flickering a SoS. A shadow crossed the screen — a figure in dark tactical gear, helmeted, their face obscured.
“Damn it,” I hissed, patching the feed to Kiera’s team. “Chrome, Chameleon, get to Kiera’s location now. She’s down, and she’s not alone.”
Chrome’s distorted voice came through the comms. “On it. ETA two minutes.”
“Make it one,” I snapped.
The drone continued to record, its AI subroutine following the shadowed figure as they barked orders to unseen subordinates. Another pair of operatives hauled Kiera’s limp body down an alley, then into a side door. My holo-display flashed red as I tapped into the security feed of Takamoto Technologies, trying to track them inside.
The tracer pinged loudly in my neural HUD, an alert rippling through the lines of code. The gaps in the data had led to something — a cluster of digital activity deep within the heart of Takamoto Technologies. Among the sanitized noise, a digtial mask: Rin.
“There you are,” I muttered, pulling up the building’s internal schematics. His signal was coming from an isolated floor near the top of the tower — a restricted area.
I launched another script, a natural language processor scouring Takamoto Technologies’ networks for keywords like Rin, tracker, K9er, hound, merc, augmented woman, street or cybernetic specialist. Moments later, the code flagged several connections. I hacked into each one, sifting through encrypted feeds until I found them. Audio connected first.
“You brought her here?” a man hissed, his voice dripping with venom. “How stupid can you be? She’s a K9er! You didn’t think she’d have someone tracking her? Did you get her drone?”
“She was sniffing too close,” another voice said defensively. “We had to act. The drone got away.”
“You’ve just lit a beacon to my doorstep!” the first man snarled. “Takamoto’s leash dog will know exactly where to find us now. Where did you put her?”
“Mechanical room in the basement.”
Traced the audio to a wall display in a conference room, a few lines of code and the camera feed came into view. I cycled through angles, locking onto the source of the conversation. A tall man in a suit stood in the middle of the sleek conference room. His graying hair and calculating glare marked him as someone used to being obeyed — a director. An opencv script confirmed the man was Takamoto Technologies’ director.
“Do you have any idea what this will cost us?” he continued, his voice rising. “Her team are already on their way here. My plans are delicate — delicate! We can’t afford this kind of exposure.”
“She’s just a grunt,” the second voice said. “And her team’s scattered.”
“You’re wrong,” the director snapped, pacing. “And that damned leashed dog. That’s the problem with Takamoto — Ashira clings to these loose ends in the Mesh. Do you understand what I stand to lose if this falls apart?”
The henchman hesitated, then nodded.
“Billions,” the director spat. “This company could be sold tomorrow if it weren’t for her damned principles. Billions! And now, thanks to you, they have a breadcrumb trail leading straight to us.”
The director’s tirade made it clear — this wasn’t about Rin anymore. This was about power, money, and taking down Ashira Takamoto. An inside job.
“Mechanical room in the basement,” I muttered, echoing the henchman’s earlier words. Kiera was alive, for now. I pinged her team through the comms.
“Chrome, Chameleon, I’ve got eyes on Kiera,” I said. “She’s in the basement of Takamoto Technologies. Mechanical room. South entrace from the alley. Get there fast.”
“Copy that,” Chrome replied, his voice steady. “We’re at the building now.”
Just as I was about to dive deeper into the network for additional information, the video feed glitched. A red error message flashed across my holo-display: ACCESS DENIED.
I frowned, fingers racing over the keyboard to reestablish the connection. Another attempt. Another error.
“Damn it,” I muttered under my breath. Someone had spotted me.
I tried a backdoor, rerouting through a less-secure subnet. Before I could get far, the network locked me out entirely, throwing up a corporate security message: Unauthorized activity detected. Session terminated.
“Synth,” I barked into the comms, already on edge. “Someone just iced my connection. They’re onto us. Get to Kiera, fast.”
I bolted out of the garage, darted across the street, and slipped into the pneumatic tube terminal. Moments later, the pod sealed around me with a hiss, propelling me toward Marunouchi in a blur of compressed air and artificial gravity. I tried reaching Ashira, activating the secure line she’d provided, but the call refused to connect. The message blinked across my HUD: Blacklisted.
The director had someone on the inside — a tech savvy enough to not only spot me but also sever my lines of communication with Ashira. I couldn’t warn her.
I peered around the corner of the building near the pneumatic tube’s exit terminal to see Takamoto Technologies tower. Its sleek façade loomed over me. I stayed in the shadows, weaving through the alleyways, my heart pounding against the unfamiliar rhythm of the sleeve.
The main entrances were a no-go. The director’s security would be watching those like hawks. I circled the building, looking for a weak point. Around the back, I found it: a side door in a narrow, dark alley, nestled between two industrial vents spewing warm, metallic-scented air.
The entry key panel beside the door was old, a relic compared to the high-end systems guarding the front. I crouched beside it, pulling up a toolset on my holo-display and cabled in. A few lines of code later, the panel chirped, and the door unlocked with a soft click.
I slipped inside, closing the door behind me. The air was dense with the scent of coolant and machine oil, the walls lined with exposed conduits and industrial pipes.
Inside, I paused, recalibrating. This wasn’t a job anymore. This was survival — Kiera’s and mine. I needed a terminal, one on the network.
I moved cautiously, my eyes scanning for a maintenance terminal among the clutter of exposed conduits and rusted cabinets. A faint glow from the far corner caught my attention — a terminal embedded into the wall.
The screen buzzed with a low-resolution menu, a relic of outdated tech. I checked for a cursor and found it blinking. “A heartbeat,” I thought before pulling the network cable from its port, I connected it to my sleeve.
The rush of data hit me instantly, a flood of building schematics, surveillance feeds, and security protocols cascading across my holo-display. The interior of Takamoto Technologies unfolded in my mind’s eye, a labyrinth of corridors and floors.
“Kiera’s team,” I called through the comms. “Are you in?”
“Just stepped in,” Chrome’s distorted voice replied. “What’s your location?”
“Basement level, maintenance room. I’ve tapped into the network. Kiera’s being held in a mechanical room down here. I’ll guide you.”
“On it,” Chameleon added. “Keep the map feed up.”
Their signals synced to my holo-display, glowing dots moving through the digital blueprint as they made their way toward Kiera’s location. I monitored their progress, my heart pounding with each step.
Chrome’s voice crackled through the comms. “We’re at the door.”
“Hold on,” I said, tapping into the room’s surveillance feed. The grainy video showed Kiera slumped against a wall. No guards in sight.
“Clear,” I confirmed. “Get her out fast.”
The door creaked open, and Chameleon slipped inside, her camouflage tech shimmering in the dim light. Chrome followed, his heavy frame moving with surprising precision.
“We’ve got her,” Chameleon reported. “She’s breathing but unresponsive. Augments are fried.”
“Stabilize her and move. I’ll keep overwatch.”
As they carried Kiera out, I shifted my focus to the isolated floor near the top of the tower. The director’s earlier rant made it clear — that’s where Rin was. I pulled up the restricted area’s surveillance feed. No direct visuals, but the lack of data itself was telling. Someone was intercepting the cameras, leaving only static.
“Chrome, Chameleon,” I called. “You’re clear for now, but we need to hit the top floor. Rin’s there. Head for the stairwell.”
The team moved. Kiera slung over Chrome’s shoulder as they climbed the stairwell. I patched their feeds into my holo-display, the grainy video filling my vision. Every floor they passed increased the tension.
“Almost there,” Chameleon said, her breathing steady despite the pace.
They reached the door to the restricted floor. Chameleon raised her hand, signaling a halt.
“I’m opening it,” she whispered.
The door creaked as it swung open — and all hell broke loose.
Gunfire erupted, the sharp cracks deafening even through the comms. Chameleon dove for cover as Chrome spun, shielding Kiera’s body with his massive frame. One of the team went down instantly, a spray of blood marking the wall behind him.
“Ambush!” Chrome bellowed. He dropped Kiera and returned fire with an automatic weapon integrated into his cybernetic arm. Henchmen fell as bullets tore through the narrow corridor, but their numbers weren’t small.
“Fall back!” I yelled through the comms. “Hold position until backup arrives!”
“Backup? Who is going to help?” Chrome demanded.
The tracer feed auto activated. The signal grew stronger, pinpointing Rin’s exact location. A small room just beyond the firefight. He was close.
I connected with Ashira through the internal network, my voice sharp and urgent. “Ashira, I’ve located Rin. He’s on the top floor, restricted area. Your director’s people are holding him, and Kiera’s team is pinned down.”
“What’s your status?” she asked, her tone ice-cold but decisive.
“I’m in the building. I’ve tapped the network, but my team can’t hold this alone.”
“I’m on my way,” she said. “Hold them there. I’ll handle this personally.”
The line went dead, but I didn’t doubt her. Ashira wasn’t one to leave loose ends, and this was as personal as it got.
The restricted floor became a war zone. Ashira and her private security forces stormed the area, their precision a scalpel in the chaos. The director’s henchmen fell one by one under the relentless assault.
Amid the gunfire, Ashira reached the room where Rin was being held. She kicked the door open, her neural-linked weapon humming with power. Rin sat slumped in the corner, his eyes wide with fear but unharmed.
“Rin,” she said, reaching out to him. He hesitated for a moment before rushing into her arms.
The fight raged on behind them, but Ashira wasted no time. “We’re moving,” she barked to her men. “Secure him and cover our exit.”
The director, cornered and desperate, made his final stand in the conference room. He lunged for a weapon, but Ashira’s men cut him down before he could fire. His body slumped to the floor.
As the dust settled, I let out a shaky breath, my hands trembling from the intensity of it all. Kiera was alive, Rin was safe, and the director was dead. For once, everything had gone as well as it could have in a job like this.
I opened the comms. “Good work, everyone. Let’s — ”
A sharp crack cut me off. Pain exploded in my chest, and I stumbled, looking down to see blood spreading across my sleeve. I turned my head, catching sight of the shooter — a programmer I recognized. We’d crossed paths before, at hackathons and cafes, we ran in the same circles. I didn’t know she was a killer.
“You’re… like me,” I muttered, choking on the words as my knees buckled.
She smirked. “Not like you. Saw you in my systems the moment you plugged in. I protect what’s mine.”
“It’s not yours.” The irony hit harder than the bullet. Another coder, another tool caught in the corporate grinder. Two tech heads, both used and discarded. The difference? She didn’t know it and would live to talk about it.
I hit the floor hard, my vision dimming. My neural HUD flashed warnings I struggled to register as I read its last message, “Stack… intact…”
You can also find this article at Medium.com
