The city managers that had taken over the city when the last of the Rebels had been forced out hadn't changed it's name but many people started differentiating between the walled in area and the area outside of it that used to be part of the city. They called the bubble part LA classic or just LAC, because it was older it was said, although the rapid changed would quickly make that seem ironic. The outer part was still just LA.
Xapo glanced out the window at the usual crowds. Strangely several people seemed to look away the moment he looked out. He knew that if Thisisall had succeeding in hacking into the implant network that his time was limited to act. Even though everyone had maintained there own free will throughout the years of upgrades of the neutral implants, in practice if someone bypassed the firewalls and also obtained a high enough security clearance then then could use AI to make people think just about anything.
Thankfully he had such a security clearance. There was an implant scanner between the two front seats of the smartcab. He reached for it but just as he was about to slap his hand down on it he felt a furry hand grab his wrist. He looked over at the mod. He saw two wide beautiful eyes starting into him but her pupils were wide and her irises were starting to glow. Her teeth were clenched and he knew that her fight or flight instincts had been triggered. Clearly her mind had been hacked.
He only had a second to grab the secret weapon that he kept hidden in his jacket pocket: a pen that fired a powerful opiate into an attacker via a dart and instantly knocked them out for a few hours. He grabed the pen aimed and squeezed. A tiny dark fired into the teen's neck and she slumped forwards a little but he pushed her back into her seat without making it look obvious. It looked like she had nodded off.
He glanced back and the cop was still following. He put his hand on the scanner and gave his passcode. Now the cab would do as he said. He used his watch to load a program into the car's memory and told the car "lose those cops and get me to Datalab."
Datalab was a business that provided cyber security services by day and hack services at night. He knew if anyone could help him at this point, it was a certain hacker genius who just happened to be a good friend. He had developed an interface between computer hardware and the dreamscape. The dreamscape was a basically a network gateway into "dream level" or automated level of actual human minds that were connected to it. The interface was used for either inserting computer simulations into people's minds or extracting raw conceptual data out into the networked systems.
Since he had developed it though and saw it hacked and saw corporations fight for control of it he had changed his thinking and came to regret giving the world such a powerful technology. Now when he want consulting, he worked under the radar to try to reverse some of the damage without having to go through the systems already corrupted by the abuse of his technology.
Suddenly the cab turned into an alley and raced across several blocks, not even stopping and street crossings and then quickly turned into a one-way street going the other direction. A few block later, it was into another alley. The cop was too slow to adjust and he got left behind.
"Car, stop for a second" Xapo said. The car stopped and he pushed the sleeping teen out into the alley. He took another pen out and shot her with an antidote before speeding away.
To be continued...