Slogans - Prince XML

Chapter 7
“Startlingly aware of the world around me. Otherwise fine.” She winks coyly and
knowingly, suddenly reaching forward to brush something from her sculpted boots.
“Good. You called me. You have information.”
“I’ve been scouting, meeting people. ”
A Christian angel is hanging around, croaking its worn-out hymns and crawling on its belly
in the street. It flaps its wings spasmodically, begging for Belief amongst the pigeons. It is
almost impossible to exorcize these from private rooms. They have rights that few other
characters in the game have. Den kicks an empty coke can at its blackened form, to shoo it
away and sits down. Can’t escape the fucking Christian missionaries, but his filters make them
all look like shit.
“Tell me about the alarm.”
“I found an involvement of class one software corporation in online services. Alarm
fourteen,”
She is true craftsmanship. Her diction is almost flawless.
“Okay, tell me more.”
She tosses her head slightly and looks up as she speaks, giving her a slightly bitchy edge, just
right. “Street sellers in Bangkok are now offering portals for sex services using a new
proprietary protocol. It has the signature of a class one. It seems to be tied to some special
hardware. I’ve captured the signature for you.” She hands him a small ball, which is a
representation of a data file. He stuffs it in his pocket for later, effectively transferring the file to
his private storage.
“How many cases have you seen?”
She shrugs. “No established trend yet. It might just be a prototype in testing, but it was
public. It was more of an anomaly event than a repeated signal.”
Interesting, Den thinks. A class one software company is a major player with a virtual
monopoly interest. Why would they be involved in the sex trade? “Were there any unusual
signs?”
“Well this is interesting,” Mary says. “I managed to observe the stream from the second
session I found. It was encrypted, but an analysis of the stream indicates an alphabet of about
thirty characters, plus or minus ten percent. It could be Cyrillic or it could be Scandinavian.”
“Not American? Even more interesting.” He pauses to think and she waits with the defiant
look of someone with an attitude. It is a feature that he requested long ago to make her more
sexy.
“How many people using it?”
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