Sol System Chapter 7

This Room was dirty, very very dirty. Sure it kind of looked clean, clean like it had been vacuumed, sheets had been changed, but you could just feel how it was dirty. Even the air smelled filtered, and clean air doesn’t smell like it’s been filtered, it just smelled like air. Driftwave had hacked his way into a prestigious sweet on the ship, thinking like most ships, it would be cleaner, and sure it LOOKED clean, but he could tell it wasn’t. He had only two bags with him; one had mostly a computer, and the other had mostly cleaning supplies. A box of disposable gloves was opened, a whole container of a universal sanitizer was used, and one custom made device Driftwave referred to as a “Bathroom Buster”: a can sized device he activated in the bathroom that would soak the room in sanitizer as well as glow brightly with ultraviolet, germ killing light. It would be safe to breathe the air in the bathroom in about thirty minutes, which Driftwave regretted now realizing he had to pee.

After the cleaning was done, he sat back in the chair next to the desk sideways from the bed and across from a large screen, a window was above the headrest of the bed and across the room from the door. Driftwave noticed that the nice room on board this ship was a bit like the average room at a motel. He thought back to the last place he stayed, the executive suite on the Avalon platform. He thought about the view of the ocean, the breeze he let in by leaving the balcony doors open, the salt air smelling so clean. He thought about how nice the bandwidth was on a platform with a direct satellite link. Then his smile dropped a little as he thought about the sound the wave generator made when it powered up. The flashing alarms on his screens as all his firewalls screamed at him. The way he ducked out of the room before guards stormed in.

The clean room didn’t make him feel comfortable anymore. He pulled up his computer bag and set it on the desk, clearing off the lamp and complementary data pad. He untied the rags covering the bag, but hesitated, getting up and closing the blinds to the window that showed stars before pulling out the pieces of his computer. The entire rig was custom, a series of modules he connected with large cords. A few small solid screens and a large projected screen, thrice as long as it was tall and curving slightly around Driftwave.

He checked and double checked his firewalls, ran some diagnostics, and checked for any virus. He didn’t find anything. He had no proof that the only crime he had committed was fraud to get a free suite, that he hadn’t caused a natural disaster and killed thousands of people. So it wasn’t his rig that had gotten hacked, it was the station’s computers, and whoever did it altered the system to point the breach at him. But how did they know he was there? Why would someone commit an act of global terrorism then blame him? He knew well a hacker’s vanity, when they accomplished something like hacking full control of an entire floating city they’d want the bragging rights. Why blame someone else?

He felt the shift of the entire room as the ship accelerated. He needed to figure out what to do next, and he needed to disappear till he could prove his innocence, somehow. He ran is hands through his hair, what was the next move? Where could he go? It took Driftwave a moment to realize he had only one real option. He directed his attentions to the ship’s computers, into navigation, then looked at the ship’s flight plan. He was in luck; in a week the ship was making a pass by the Mars station. That put it in Shuttle range of the floating oasis of the tech geek. Driftwave was going to the Toshi Station.