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It didn't take long for Crypto to get top-side again. But by the time he got there, squad cars and several ambulances were swarming the three-block area. Drones with searchlights hummed overhead, armed police manned every street corner as the coroners and medics worked together to ship out the wounded and dead.

There was no sign of the mob goons who had slipped out in the initial firefight. So as Crypto hunkered down in an abandoned warehouse across the street of where the ambulances were parked, he assumed the rhino and his gaggle of scumbags had gotten away.

Kneeling under a smashed window, he peered across the street where three ambulances were lined up. Several stretchers came out with wounded. And then came the body bags, but Crypto couldn't see clearly where Doxxa was. He was expecting the medics to bring her out first, but there seemed to be no sign of her. Maybe they were stabilising her below still.

Ducking under the window between a pair of polymer crates and metal barrels forming a little trash fort, he opened his interface and jacked into the local CCTV system. It was a city utility, run by lazy government employees in a cushy office with a guaranteed pension. Of course it was easy to hack in.

With eyes all over the city, Crypto positioned himself right above the paramedics carrying a body bag between them. Their mouths moved animatedly, and Crypto quickly opened the laser mic in the security camera.

The background city noises dominated his ear-drums for a moment, then the filters isolated the voices.

"...-oo many if you ask me. But at this rate we're going to end up in the record books."

"It's hard to believe," the second paramedic said. "She's so young. And her cybernetics were high end. How the fuck did she get killed by a digital trip?"

Crypto felt something explode in his chest. His fingers felt numb and there was a faint hum just on the edge of his aural periphery. At first his mind made a series of mental gymnastics.

It's not her, he thought. They're talking about someone else.

But even when he thought it, he knew he was lying to himself. Despite laying low, Crypto kicked the nearest empty oil drum across the room with a crash.

The paramedics on screen didn't even hear as they loaded Doxxa into the back of the ambulance for transport to the coroner's office.

"She had a BSoD," the first said.

"A blue screen of death? How does that work?"

"That digital trip shit gets in the neural interface. Overruns it all until the interface literally overloads. Poor girl went blank with the pleasure of it. People feel, yeah. But you're not meant to feel that much. Brain doesn't know how to deal with it, so just shuts down. Hell, my wife is so terrified of this shit being peddled on the streets she's installed an application monitor on our kids and revoked their own admin privileges. They can't install anything without her say so..."

Crypto wasn't listening anymore. His arm went slack and the rest of the scene played out in the background. He lay there stunned, unable to move, not even aware if he was breathing or not.

She was gone. Doxxa was gone. She'd been his friend since he was a little hoodrat picking pockets and hustling tourists. They'd been fucking each other's brains out since they were barely legal. They'd built that server farm together.

And now she was gone. Just like that, with the press of a button. Snatched away by that piece of shit mobster.

By the time Crypto realised he'd dug his robotic fingers into one of the polymer crates and had reduced an entire corner to very fine debris, the ambulances had pulled away and the cops were all gone. There was no need for them to stick around. They probably had a thousand other calls to attend to. Doxxa would just be one of dozens of casualties tonight. Just another nameless, homeless kid to count among the lost. Another statistic.

Crypto wasn't sure how, but he managed to get back to Proksy's room and partially explain what had happened. But when the details remained fuzzy she'd hacked into his neural network and pulled a memory recording right out of Crypto's brain, watching the events at Doxxa's server farm play out as Crypto sat silently on her bed.

He wondered if maybe he blacked out, because at one point he blinked and realised Proksy wasn't watching the recording anymore. Her fingers tapping at her keyboard roused him and he watched her bring up a massive wall of programming code.

"What are you doing?" Crypto asked dryly.

"This is Highpoint," she answered. "You unwittingly pulled a copy off the first mobster you brained when you were investigating his drives. I managed to circumvent the write-protection and access the code. Not difficult. Whoever wrote this is an amateur... or not. They might just be terrible at their one job."

Her eyes flitted up and down as she went through the lines of code, and as Crypto watched her eyes grew wider, her expression more horrified the further down she read.

"No that can't be right... what is that... why is that there... how is that calling... oh, God. Oh, fuck! That's... that's..." she barely finished her sentence before Proksy dry heaved over her workstation.

Gripping her mouth in both hands the reptile whipped around in her chair and scrambled desperately into the bathroom, throwing her head into the toilet bowl where she ejected the contents of her stomach with a wet, splattering noise.

"Fuck, are you okay?" Crypto jumped up and ran over as Proksy recovered, panting for breath and groaning. "What is it? What did you see?"

"It... it's the code. It's horrible... it's awful."

Crypto scoffed, hardly able to believe that was all that was wrong. "What, like it's badly written?"

"Not just badly." Proksy moaned, almost retching again at just the thought. "It's the worst. Badly organised. Garbage routines that don't do anything, like concept code forgotten to be removed. Debug data not disabled for the final live version. Missing variables, unclosed loops... it's a wonder that shit even compiled and formed a working program."

"Drama queen," Crypto said, helping her up.

"It's also easy to see why it killed Doxxa, which is the worst part," she added as he helped her back to her seat. "Look at this here."

"I can't code. Looks like gobbledygook to me."

"Fine, then just listen. Highpoint is starting up routines that search for the user's personal data. Stuff in personal drives. Cookies. Browser history. Location data. Social media accounts. Everything. It then brute forces the user's encryption if it has to, then packages it all up and forwards it to a darkweb mailserver, no doubt run by the same idiots who wrote this garbage."

"Highpoint is stealing personal data?"

Proksy nodded. "And that was the part that killed Doxxa. It tried to brute force her encryption, failed, then dragged out the pleasure loop non-stop, duplicating buggy code infinitely as it attempted again and again to get through her encryption, failing every time. The trip had a complete retard moment, her neural interface overloaded and her brain shut down, unable to cope with the sensation overload."

Proksy tabbed out to another window to reveal she'd already hacked police databases and ran a query search. Moments later she brought up reports showing this week's digital trip deaths.

"The news reported five deaths by digital trips this week," she read out. "The other forty five have been kept under wraps. Forty of those in total were caused by Highpoint. The rest by random home written or foreign trips."

Crypto stared at the dossier pictures as she scrolled through them. Each showed the victims, some frothing at the mouth as they stared into space. Others lay blissfully curled into a ball as if sleeping. But every one of the fifty was horrifying.

Shitty digital trips were already a problem. But with already forty victims in a week, with God-only-knew how many before that or how many more to come, Highpoint was a fucking epidemic. And to add insult to injury, the mob was now going after people's personal data. Worse still, encrypted personal data. The only bit of privacy a person could have left in a digital age. And if the mob couldn't have it, their shitty program killed the user.

This was going too far, even for the mob. Crypto was about to say something to that effect when his phone rang. He pulled up a holo-panel and checked call-ID.

It was late, who could be calling? But the number came up as 'withheld,' and Crypto was planning to let it ring out. That was when the 'withheld' message glitched and the letters rearranged into a message.

'Answer it, Crypto.'

Shit, he thought. Whoever was calling was, or had a hacker on their side. He glanced at Proksy who saw the message as well and immediately swivelled back to her computer to furiously type commands.

Crypto let it ring a few more times until Proksy gave him a thumbs up, then answered.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Crypto. Do you remember my voice?" came the answer, scratchy and husky with age, but sensual and seductive all the same. She spoke in a low, slow tone, like she had all the time in the world, or was simply meticulous about pronouncing each word.

Crypto had no idea if it was the sinister effect it had on her voice that sent chills down his spine, or the familiarity that set him off.

"Hester," he whispered, recognising the mobster in charge of Highpoint's dissemination. "How..."

"Don't insult me, Crypto. You know I can find you no matter where you run and hide." He figured that was a bluff, because if she really knew where he was there would be mob goons knocking on Proksy's door. "But don't worry. I'm not angry with you for meddling in my affairs at Doxxa's server farm. I think we need to talk. Face to face."

"Fuck off," he snapped. "Your goon murdered Doxxa. She was my friend, and you fucking killed her just to get at her server farm so you can spread that Highpoint poison."

There was silence on the line for a moment before she whispered in his ear again. "If that's what you believe, then we definitely must talk in person. To set the record straight. Please, come by my compound. I'm sure a smart boy like you has already figured out where it is, yes?"

Crypto glanced over to Proksy who was listening in over a headset. Her eyes connected with his and she gave a confident nod.

"I'll see you soon," he said.

She was replying something to the effect of looking forward to it, but Crypto could stomach her voice no longer and cut her off mid-sentence.

"She was using an open line. She wanted to be found," Proksy explained. "I've spun you the address."

Crypto was pensive for a moment, then he straightened up and crossed the room to where Proksy kept a 3-D printer. He opened the laptop beside it, connected and booted the device. It didn't take long for him to pull up the schematics of what he wanted. A 3-D model of a gun receiver filled the screen, the first part of many he could print in a few minutes to make a working firearm.

"What are you going to do?" Proksy asked as Crypto narrowed his eyes at the humming printer.

"Hester wants to talk. Let's fucking talk."

###

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