Cycle Thieves is a new short story published on the excellent sf site, Futurismic. I’ve just read and thoroughly enjoyed it — it’s a great blend of hard-boiled detective story, fact-paced action, nerdy post-cyberpunk and thought-provoking rumination on the future of social technologies. Duffy is a dotcom veteran in London who uses an impressive and well-realized suite of social technologies to stay in touch with his old pals from the boom-times, like You-Who?, a bit of phone software that sounds a special ring whenever he gets within a few blocks of a pal, allowing him to manufacture lucky, serendipitous encounters. His good pals are actually rather unlikable — arrogant, rude. . . Actually — it’s worse than that: it turns out that one of his friends has installed trojans on all his devices that rip off the data of those nearby and funnel it away, and the police have threatened to bring him down for the crime unless he figures out which friend it is first.
Mark Ward wrote the story and it’s only his second publication. Based on this, I’m certainly looking forward to reading his next.
The policeman placed a sheaf of papers before Duffy. “And this is the evidence. You, well, your phone, is the key. When it meets other blocks of code spread around the gadgets of your mates those strange things start to happen. We think the code was crafted from some brutal utility turned out by a People’s Republic propaganda unit turned spam outfit. Very clever stuff. Different attacks get kicked off when different people are together. That’s why it took so long for us to work it out. It also grabs any spare processor cycles to crack away at any passwords or security software it finds. Cycle theft, that’s what it’s called. Among other things.”
(Thanks, Jeremy!)