John Shirley: Watch Dogs: Dark Clouds

He had been on Aiden Pearce’s trail for weeks.

Walking along the waterfront in an early November mist, under a reticent sun half-shrouded by a silky gray screen of clouds, Mick Jeremiah Wolfe was glad to be back in Chicago. Despite the cold and the mistrust and the frustration, it felt right to be here. He’d grown up in “Back of the Yards”, the neighborhood fringing what had been the old stockyards, and Wolfe felt Chicagoan from his ice blue eyes to the bottom of his booted feet. He still wore the Army boots, and Delta Force jacket—but the Special Forces jacket was shorn of its shoulder patches and insignia. They’d taken all that away from him, after the dishonorable discharge.

Six years “in-country”—first Afghanistan, then Mali and Somalia. Three Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, Two Silver Stars. And then… a dishonorable discharge for being stupid enough to listen to the low but insistent voice of his own conscience…

He should have gone with major league cynicism like the other guys.

It is what it is, he thought. For now.

Just find Aiden Pearce…

Wolfe was walking along North Lake Shore, striding along between the freeway and the old red brick buildings, hands in his pockets against the sting of the rolling mist coming off Lake Michigan. Wolfe stretched, a little, as he walked along, trying to look like a relaxed guy out for a good stretch of his legs. The rolling mist tried unsuccessfully to cloak the cars humming between him and the giant inland sea they called a lake. To his left were the old brick tenements that had been turned into upscale condos, apartments with doormen. That view of Lake Michigan was worth money.

The north wind was picking up, out there, clearing up the mist, ruffling the waves. There were sunken ships concealed within the Great Lakes, Wolfe knew; well preserved ships, some of them going back two hundred years. They were unseen monuments to the sunken dead.

And not so very far from here, inland, was another kind of monument to the lost dead: in a Back of the Yards cemetery lay the bones of his father, Colin Wolfe, killed by a bomb blast. Murdered, all those years ago. And why? Because he hadn’t bought into the universal cynicism. Killed—and by whom? The triggerman had been shot two weeks later by another thug, in a stupid fight over a woman. There wasn’t even a hope of revenge for his father… who’d made the mistake of listening to his conscience…

Only a fool listens to his conscience…

Wolfe glanced up at a light pole, and saw a ctOS camera just under the lamp, swiveling to watch him go by. He smiled at it, giving it a mock salute and continued on his way.

Wolfe didn’t mind ctOS in theory. But he knew it could be misused…

He’d like to “misuse” it himself. Or anyway, he wanted to use it for his own agenda…

The City Operating System, ctOS, was liked by most Chicagoans—so far. It fine-tuned the traffic lights to keep traffic flowing; it sent help almost instantly if there was a crash. It monitored electricity use, switching off what wasn’t needed; it identified areas of waste, of congestion of every kind. It watched out for crime. It was capable of taking emergency data directly from cell phones with the ctOS crisis app…

But applications like that also made it vulnerable—especially to Aiden Pearce, if the word on the street was right. According to Wolfe’s contacts, T-Bone Grady and a man named “Blank”, Pearce was the notorious “vigilante” of Chicago hacking. He’d spent his teenage years in street gangs, but in his twenties, Ex-street thug, Pearce had vanished into the fabric of Chicago, like a sort of avatar of the city, becoming a legend. He’d wreaked his revenge on his enemies… and slipped away into some unknown corner of the Chicago demimonde. Some people thought he was dead; some were skeptical he even existed.

“That guy? Naw, he never existed. Just a story made up by the power structure to justify its own house cleaning…”

Wolfe had heard that claim more than once. But he knew Aiden Pearce was real—he’d known him, when Wolfe was a boy and Pearce a young man, in the Yards. Pearce had been a friend of his father; a friend to Irish liberation causes, just like Colin Wolfe… It was just a matter of finding him. T-Bone had put him onto Blank who had contacted Pearce and set the meeting up.

Now Wolfe was fifty steps from his destination, up at the corner. No one was there yet. Nothing but a piece of paper spinning in a momentary whirlwind.

He glanced up again, hearing a whirring sound as another ctOS camera tracked him. Theoretically it was possible to hack into the ctOS—word from Wolfe’s DedSec contacts had it that it was the electronic “alchemist’s stone” that Pearce had used to unlock every corner of Chicago. But the Blume Corporation had redesigned it, lately, to frustrate the Aiden Pearces of the world…

Wolfe suspected that, even if half of what T-Bone Grady had told him was right, Blume Corp and the other power brokers in Chicago underestimated Pearce. Chances were, he could still break into ctOS. Pearce still had DedSec contacts —white, gray, and maybe a few black hat hackers. He made deals with them; in turn, T-Bone claimed, they dealt with Blume’s new firewalls.

What if my coming here warns Pearce off? If he’s tracking me on that camera…

But Wolfe was hoping that Pearce didn’t yet know he was being tracked by anyone. If Pearce did see him—would he recognize him? Would he know him for a friend? Or assume he was an enemy?

For all he knew, Aiden Pearce was pointing a gun at him right now, with his finger tightening on the trigger.

The wind rose, the mist swirled, the cars hummed—and then he saw someone walking down cross street toward the corner. The man had red-brown hair, wore an open knee-length brown leather coat, a brown leather baseball-style cap embellished with a cryptic symbol; he wore dark glasses, though there wasn’t much glare out here. He had a dark kerchief down around his neck. The man’s profile looked familiar.

It had to be. It was Aiden Pearce.

Blank had come through. The derelict had claimed he could get a message to Pearce. The message would be gotten to him via a “drop” on the street, instead of being transmitted—most transmission was too risky, too much chance it could be monitored. The message contained simple coordinates: a Chicago street corner, near the Lake Michigan shore. And five words: Deep in the Back Yard.

It was a code that had been used twelve years ago, when Pearce was getting out of the gangs. Pearce had gone from gangbanger to rogue criminal. He worked for himself, picking his targets and striking hard. And some of those targets, not so very long ago now, had pulled Pearce in too deep— and gotten his niece killed. Her murder had been like a pebble rolling down Chicago’s rugged hillside… starting an avalanche of crushing stone. A bit farther back, when Pearce was a gangster, Mick Wolfe had been a runner for the Chicago gangs, carrying money, cash from a host of illegal deals.