The year is 2105. True cyberspace has begun in the form of the neural-net, humans interfacing their psyche to a virtual world. A key programmer for the company that created the neural-net, Helix Carone, is now on the run having made off with their source-code. He’s hiding in one of the last remaining vestiges of true liberty, the LA Fire Zone. An area now infested with tech gangs and littered with societies outcasts.
Once financially able, Helix plans to get his biometrics altered and return to utopian society, but then something throws his plans into chaos.

Alpha Two, an android built by that same company, has escaped from the Lunar One research facility and is being hunted by the International Security Agency. Carone alone knows who is responsible, and in time he will also join its mission and discover why.

ALPHA TWO

CHAPTER 1

LA Fire Zone

1st May 2105

Helix Carone takes a calming breath, long and deep and steps from the safety of his apartment lobby. The riveted and reinforced steel doors automatically bolt locked behind him. Although the sky is overcast with heavy cloud, his eyes strain against the sudden change from artificial light. For the past forty-eight hours he has been pinned to his computer console staring at software code.
  Suddenly he is grabbed from behind and thrown back against the door. “The darkness slithers within us all!” The man’s eyes are sunken and distant. His skin wrinkled well beyond his years. His hands grasp at Helix’s chest holding Helix against the steel. Helix knocks the hands away and in the same movement throws the man to the ground.
  Helix stands over the man and notices psychestim nodes pasted to the man’s forehead. “Time to see the light my friend,” Helix says as he rips the psychestim from the man’s skin and throws it onto the cement. “Or at least—get back a little rational thought.” He then crunches the psychestim underfoot leaving the man to gaze at his loss.
  Helix’s heart is racing as he touches the cold shaft of his gun for some reassurance and glances into the distance. Before him the streets lay in wait; dark bodies hustling for transactions. He starts along the sidewalk with pace, hoping not to attract the attention of the peddlers and laments to himself, another day in the Fire Zone, redundant time.
  The irradiated and discarded CBD of LA, now known as the Fire Zone, is left to its own decline under the rule of its disenchanted citizens, referred to as levelers. Stale pungent smells permeate the air, skin and clothes washed by rain alone. Helix hears the usual talk on the streets; a steady din of chat, discussions of numbers and figures, wares and drugs accompanied by the occasional buzz of a passing shuttle.
  This walk Helix has made countless times before but it never gets any easier. The best he can hope for is to continue uninterrupted. Most don’t bother Helix. Most recognize him by his tattered clothing as a kindred soul, just another cashless leveler.
  A dark body steps from the side of a building towards Helix. “I got clips, whatever you need.” The man holds at arms length a straight piece of wood with three columns of colorful neural clips dangling within individual clear plastic sleeves. Helix brushes the merchandise aside. A shuttle then stops at the kerb giving the man something more promising to concentrate his craft on.
  The levelers consist of all life forms surplus to requirements in the real world, life seeping away through charred distant memories. Some burn out and turn into walking corpses that nobody would recognize. Others manage to persist and display their wares out of old shopping trolleys, pushing neural technology for sale at its lowest ebb—technology built to interface directly to the psyche. Illegal psychestims, neural caps and at a dime a dozen, neural sim clips to send the more adventurous on a trip to see Alice.
  The weaker members of the leveler population start a downward spiral into Zone subculture. They paste their foreheads with grey microform nodes—neural junkies wearing psychestims wherever they go, the cheapest hit on the street, the hardware cheaper than a pair of shoes and powered by body temperature. After a while the brain starts to adjust, so the junkie adjusts the stim until it fails to give satisfaction. So then they sell it and turn to old-fashion pill poppers and before they know it they're asking Lucy where reality is.
  Helix is dressed in tattered clothing for good reason, to blend in to the dull Fire Zone background. The truth belies the disguise. He is a member of the Zone elite, the scum at the top affording the luxury of the watchful eye of the Zone Security System. The Fire Zone’s big brother.
  A grim looking peddler steps towards him, so Helix steps onto the road, his leveler disguise now in vain.
  “Easy brother,” says the man also stepping onto the road to obstruct Helix. “You look like a man with some desire. You want some neural action? I got the latest stims on the street.”
  “Not interested,” Helix replies, pushing the man slightly and forcing him to walk sideways.
  “You want some pills comrade?”
  “I told you—what you got, I don’t want.”
  “Hey! C’mon! Try this stim—two seconds and your Zone is paradise.” The pusher holds out a soiled hand peppered with psycho bullshit tattoos, grasping the tiny psychestim nodes next to purple knuckles. “Come on man—stick it to ya head—I ain’t gonna charge ya to try. Two-forty for the stim, nobody cheaper than me in the Zone—try it.”
  Helix’s right hand is already sweating on the steel of his gun inside his jacket pocket and now he coils his index finger around the trigger and says directly, “I'm on the level—you bother me again we'll see how a small piece of lead stimulates your circuits.”
  “Hey—hey,” replies the man raising both hands slightly in the air as if Helix already has the weapon pointed at him. The man retreats to a group standing on the side walk. “No problem conquistador—you on some fucking other level!”
   Today, Helix thought, the Zone is giving me too much goddamn attention! Even dressed like shit, I can’t walk out here hassle-free. Do I dress worse and act like these rejects? Helix paused. No fucking way.
   He returns to the sidewalk where, at times, shards of glass crack beneath his shoes, areas not yet slept upon. Many of the buildings have little in the way of glass windows remaining. If the ‘dirty’ bombs hadn't smashed them, then the new inhabitants did, anything to kill the time. The radiation has subsided enough to make the Zone barely habitable for those on the run, the crooks and the homeless now slung together in a melting pot set to boil over.
   And so there he is. Yet another day in hell, Helix Carone, his identity and everything that makes him biologically Helix Carone prevents him from living in the real world, the monitored world. His biometrics are sampled and the systems are in place to track his every movement. The LA Fire Zone—of all places—is now his safe-haven. The company he once worked diligently for, Bioscope—with all its power and resources won’t bother infiltrating the Zone. Instead, they will wait. Wait until circumstances force Helix to resurface most likely somewhere in the mid west. Helix Carone wouldn't last long in the Zone, he's too soft and they knew it. For selling off Bioscope source-code he will pay the ultimate price, an agent of their internal security unit—Stella—will take him out, teach the others a lesson.
   He continues along the sidewalk occasionally stepping over beggars, some disfigured by the radiation. Helix would like to help them, throw them loaded cash-clips but then he wouldn't last two seconds. Money is no problem for Helix, his personal identification is. Once financially able, he plans to source a professional ID agent, get his biometrics altered and return to living free. At only twenty eight, he is Bioscope's most wanted.
   He is of an average height and slim build. His hair is dark and thick and his jaw line stubbled providing him the harder image that is required on the street, but today—it just isn’t working.
  “Hey you want something to knock out the girls? Got a semdex—cost ya sixty.”
  “Go hassle an external.”
  Semdex? Helix recalls an early Zone memory where he was knocked out by the drug. That's how he had met his business partner—Marlow. Helix had only been in the Zone for forty-eight hours. Marlow had been surprised when he recognized Helix's face from a Time magazine article on Bioscope's neural-net team. Marlow had monitored Helix from across a bar and watched as a Zone low-life made her move. A tart had sat next to Helix and dropped a crushed semdex into his glass when he was unaware. Apparently, once he was out cold, she began sifting through Helix’s pockets. She thought she had hit lucky when she found the ZX1 utility gun—outdated Stella issue, lucky until Marlow tickled the side of her head with his standard Zone issue. According to Marlow she had froze. Marlow had then asked her where her accomplice was in return for keeping the lug in the chamber. She had pointed to a skinny man with a shaved head covered in tattoos looking directly back from the bar. Marlow called the tattoo-head to join them in the seat opposite, and that was that—until Zone Security arrived and took Helix somewhere to recover and get signed up.
  That was two years ago, a memory Helix now puts aside as he turns into a side alley and finally arrives at his destination, somewhere safe. A steel plate inscribed 'Zone Security Members Only' is affixed to a black nanocarb reinforced door. Helix gazes into a scanner embedded to its left. The inconspicuous bar entrance opens just wide enough to let him in. Inside shadows dance from the light of a five foot video hologram at the far side providing a slight contrast to amber lights that hang low over round empty tables. Helix walks to the bar acknowledging Charlie the barman who promptly pours him his usual before moving on and stands behind his business partner—Marlow; an unshaven scruff of a man with shoulder length hair. He is sitting at one of the dimply lit tables and Helix listens to what he is saying.
  “I got two words for you, evolution and reality. Darwin went to the final point of evolution, that is here and now. That's not far enough man! How old is the universe?” Marlow didn’t wait long enough for an answer. “Pretty damn old. So here's how I see it—reality. Here we are lugging these colossal masses of matter around, when the neural-net has proved that we can exist in the same reality, but with minimal energy. The whole universe could be condensed from a conscious point of view and powered on a 12 volt battery. Now it seems pretty damn evident that conservation of energy is real fucking important—so I put it to you; the Sun burns out, the conscious planet condenses into a virtual world where the same laws of physics apply. Then, this 'mini' planet containing all our souls—a seed, is propelled by the exploding Sun to another younger solar system.”
  “Spaceship Earth,” comments a large bald man from the opposite side of the table, his face resembling that of a bulldog.
  Marlow immediately slaps the table. “Yep! Spaceship Earth!”
   Helix steps forward from the shadows and says, “And who's running this spaceship?”
   Marlow looks up at Helix, surprised to see him having realized Helix had been listening to one of his lectures. “The operating system. What is a man's best friend?”
  “A dog,” replies the man.
  “Exactly—reversed God. God is the frickin operating system.”
  “So we're a reality within a reality?” asks Helix as he takes a seat between the two.
  “Within a reality, within a reality, within a reality…”
  “Jesus—think I'm gonna need a stim, you’ve given me a headache,” comments the man leaning forward on the table and rubbing his head.
  “Well, you've obviously been here a while Marz,” says Helix.
  “Now the system has left some fingerprints. Take three countries—”
  “Not again Marz.”
  “Italy, Brazil and Ireland—what do they have in common, apart from being predominantly R.C.?”
   The burly man shrugs his shoulders, forcing a large underlip to protrude.
  “Seriously Marz! You finished?” snaps Helix extending a hand towards the man and introducing himself. “Helix.”
  “Sven. Pleasure,” the man replies.
  “My Zone accomplice in crime and I should add, the Zone's—correction—the world’s number one neural-net jack-hammer, Helix Carone,” says Marlow, forcing himself upright on his seat. “Sven's an old friend, he and I used to squat down on main…three?…four years ago?”
  “Yeah ‘bout four.”
  “Sven's been outta town for two years, tried making a go of it in the real world, working the shuttle lines—boss pissed him off one too many times.”
  “What happened to boss man?” asks Helix.
  “Don't ask,” replies Marlow.
   Sven cracks his fingers. “Back here beats living in the sling.”
   Helix thought about the comparison. “Well, there's plenty in the Zone who’d argue with you on that.”
  “Sure—but I'm not some junkie joining the leveler spiral!”
  “A small walk to this place just reminded me how much I want out. Sounds like you've got plans.”
  “Deliveries.”
  “I won't bother asking what and for whom—no doubt for a Zone set.”
  “Bringin' in an endless supply of X clips.”
   Helix tsked shaking his head. “People have cardiacs from that shit and still they do it.”
   Marlow interjects. “Adrenaline junkies.”
   Helix laughs. “Yeah—like you.”
   Marlow leans back in his chair and clasps his hands behind his head. “Now a man needs his kick out of an occasional X clip. See, now I have a pretty good understanding of how I would react to having some axe-wielding psycho in my face.”
  “Yeah, you mud your pants and jack out, 'fraid you can't do that in the real world Marz—except perhaps mud your pants.”
   Marlow returns a blank face.
  “And talking of clips, here's the update.” Helix reaches into his breast pocket and removes a software clip passing it to Marlow.
  “That's it? Not another—penultimate?”
  “That's it—finito, I'm sick of the damned code.”
  “What's that?” asks Sven.
  “The fait accompli, our finished product. Software to accompany our next shipment of neural caps to the masses,” Helix replies. He is glad to see the back of it. “Two satellites coming in tomorrow—think they'll take the lot.”