Waking up the next morning with my arms wrapped around another person was a truly unparalleled experience; no moment in my life so far carried the same specific blend of sensations.
It took my mind a moment to even understand what I was experiencing. Some part of me felt that the morning after should have been comforting from the moment I regained consciousness, but instead there was the briefest fraction of an instant in which my brain simply couldn’t parse the feeling of skin on my skin, of an unfamiliar weight resting on my chest, of the abnormal gaps and air pockets beneath the bedsheets that didn’t lie as flat as they did when I was alone.
So wakefulness came in a flood of startled adrenaline, only for my reflexive jolt of movement to be smothered as my conscious brain provided a rational counterpoint to the instincts of the unconscious. It still felt unreal, but in that moment I knew that it was Brian’s back under my arm, his head on my chest as he lay almost huddled into me.
It left me alert, awake, yet completely unwilling to move. It gave me time; time for doubts to rise and fall in my mind; time to imagine a future, to wonder for a moment where I would be in five years, in ten. If it would still feel like this. It was something I hadn’t seriously done for as long as I could remember.
I still believed in what Lisa had told me on the metro the day before; that to survive, we needed to ride the lighting. I’d accepted that I was a Shadowrunner and that being a Shadowrunner meant that I was on an intense and violent path, but I wasn’t sure that meant I needed to be lonely as well. Or maybe I just hoped that.
Objectively speaking, it was a risk, but that rational judgement was eclipsed by the ridge of his shoulder blade beneath my hand, by each curve and impression of muscle and bone – whether synthetic or mechanical – I felt as I slowly glided that hand down his back.
I can do this, can’t I?
The life we’d all chosen set us apart from the rest of the world. I’d seen too much to still believe it set us free, but the pressures we laboured under were different to those of most people my age; the ones who were four years deep into whatever trade they’d found at sixteen, the others who’d followed their education as far as they could afford, clutching high school diplomas and looking to get their first feet on the ladder – any ladder – or those fortunates who were halfway through some college degree, forgetting the world and its troubles for a single brief interval of eudemonic madness even as their debts racked up.
Their lives came in stages that were each measured in years, where problems were inevitable creeping things that could be seen even if they couldn’t be managed. By comparison, our lives were dangerous, they were random, they could all end in an instant without us ever seeing that end coming. Could I really afford this sort of distraction? Would it make me hesitate? Drag me away from the matrix and back to meatspace? Keep my head out of the game when I needed it the most?
Some of my worries must have crept down through my nervous system to the hand gently caressing Brian’s back, because he began to stir in response to some almost imperceptible shift in my movements.
He didn’t wake like I did. He didn’t freeze. Instead, his very first instinct was to draw in closer, his whole body tightening into mine as he moved in search of warmth, of comfort. It made something in my chest move.
I knew then and there that I had to try. It didn’t matter that I had my doubts, that I was all but convinced that I’d fuck this up somewhere down the line. I told myself that it was a task like any other; a vital part of bringing Grue back from the brink and keeping the team together and functional. I told myself that it would help me, too. That it was another step out of my apartment, one more move away from my years-long sabbatical on life.
I layered excuses and rationalisations on top of one another like an oyster layering saliva over a piece of grit until it became a pearl, with its flaws and doubts smoothed over.
Brian’s arm moved, brushing back the sheets as he pushed his torso off of me, looking down at my face with a warm yet slightly uncertain expression that made me wonder if he was running through the exact same thoughts I’d had.
“Morning,” he said, after a few moments. It sounded like he had no idea what to say, but was determined to try anyway.
“Morning,” I replied, like an idiot.
That seemed to be enough conversation for the moment, as Brian extricated himself from the bed and picked his pants up off the floor. I lay there for a moment, a little shocked by the view in spite of the night before, before shrugging off the covers myself and pulling on last night’s clothes. I’d shower later, but for now I was still a little distracted.
“You’ve done that before,” I said, the words emerging from my mouth before I’d had the time to think about whether I really wanted to say them.
Brian paused for a moment, frozen mid-motion as he pulled his shirt on.
“A few times,” he said, making it sound like a confession. “Never managed to make the relationship stick. It just doesn’t work with people who aren’t in the life.”
“And people who are?” I asked, leaning against the wall and crossing my arms to hide my nerves.
“No idea,” Brian said with a shrug. “I want it to.”
“What does it look like?” I ask. “When it works?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can think about the future right now. If we carry on, will we still be together in two years? In ten years, will we have left all this behind? Found a quiet life? Do we still live in this city? Are we alone? Can you picture any of that?”
I could, in dreamlike flashes that came and went in instants. A house in the suburbs, gutted down to the basement so that I’d always be able to stand up straight. The others coming over for supper, swapping stories about old times. The sound of small feet running across the floor? Emerging from the resonance only to find Brian watching my unconscious body, waking me up with a kiss.
It was an infatuating image, but ones I couldn’t bring myself to voice. In the end, it was just an image. I couldn’t see any path to make it real.
“Me either,” Brian said, as the same deep-set weariness that had consumed him yesterday started to creep back into his posture.
“I don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t know how this thing with Calvert is going to end. All I have is now. I’m stuck in the present, perched at the centre of my web and waiting for other people to make the first move. So no, I have no idea if this’ll last a week, but I want it to last today and tomorrow I’ll want the same.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Brian’s mouth, his eyes finally looking up from the floor to meet mine.
“I can live with that. Sorry; that was way too much for day one.”
I snorted. “Live fast, right? It comes with the territory.”
“’Guess it does. I’m going to hit the shower, unless you want it first?”
“Go,” I said, waving him off. “You don’t want to wait for me to sort my hair.”
“Good point,” he said, lingering at the door for a moment before leaving.
The moment he was gone I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, feeling myself automatically slouch a little from what had apparently been an attempt to mirror Lisa’s suave, enigmatic way of standing that always made her seem taller than her unimpressive height. Only my face remained as it had been, the corners of my lips still raised fractionally upwards.
I gave it a few moments before following Brian out into the corridor, long enough that I could hear the sound of the shower through the bathroom door. In the kitchen, I fished out a bowl of leftover curry that some civic-minded individual – so either Lisa or Rachel, since Brian and I were busy – had left in the fridge, spooning some into a bowl alongside a scoop of cold rice.
I was about halfway done when Aisha sauntered in as bold as brass, wearing one of Alec’s frilly white shirts over – mercifully – a pair of shorts. With how much taller she was than her boyfriend, going without would never have worked.
She ignored me as she grabbed her own bowl of plain rice from the fridge. She seasoned her breakfast with some synthetic honey from a squeeze bottle, then perched on the counter directly opposite me and began picking away at her food with a pair of chopsticks, all the while maintaining eye contact.
I sighed. “Go on, then.”
“I’m watching you,” she said, pointing at me with the chopsticks. “Just want you to know that.”
“Uh huh.”
“Might not see me watching you, but I am. I could be anywhere. Invisible, yeah?”
“Got it.”
“’Cause if you screw this up, I can and will make your life a living hell.”
“That’s fair.”
Aisha scowled, leaning forward and staring at me.
“Not gonna fight back?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t really have a leg to stand on. Gave Alec a similar talk just last night.”
Aisha laughed; a sharp exhalation of breath. “Fucking what?”
“Honestly, though, I’m going to make a mistake sooner or later. Not like I’ve ever been in a relationship before, and we don’t live a very stable life. But I’m going into this with the best intentions.”
For a moment she seemed lost in thought, before she brought the bowl up to her mouth, tipped it back and wolfed down the rest of her breakfast.
“I can’t help him,” she finally said, standing up. “Don’t know how. So no, you don’t get to screw this up. It’s all on you, hacker.”
She left the room, leaving her bowl on the side for someone else to deal with. A few moments later I heard her wrench Alec’s door open, then heard her raised voice.
“Next time someone threatens my input you tell me, got it!? I’ll cut out their damn tongue!”
I shook my head, deliberately trying not to dwell on just how their relationship even worked. Instead, I fell back into a familiar pattern of sifting through the matrix, catching up on all the data that had built up from my tap on the Anders family.
I hadn’t missed much; Theo’s browsing history was an uneventful trawl down a social media spiral, though it was at least worth noting that the vapid commentators and sixty second videos he was watching leaned a lot more progressive than his dad would like.
Theo’s mother, on the other hand, had been messaging the nanny she paid to watch her daughter, as well as browsing the hosts of the local boutiques for a dress to wear to the party the family were due to attend in the next few days, using a cold-sim VR headset to access digital fitting rooms where she could surround herself with duplicates of her body in different profiles and lighting conditions.
It was all frustratingly mundane. I knew more than I could ever want to know about Kayden’s interior design ‘business,’ but next to nothing about her husband’s. He was just too good at compartmentalising his life. He couldn’t compartmentalise everything, of course – if nothing else, the quasi-aristocratic circles in which he moved meant that a lot of his business partners were also family friends – but he never called people about business from his personal phone.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
I had to believe it was just a mixture of prudence and healthy paranoia, rather than a specific suspicion that we were out to get him. His package with Renraku was among the best private communications security money could buy, but his work commlink was likely part of Medhall’s own in-house network; more of an access point for the corporation’s central host than a device in its own right.
I received a welcome distraction from my spiralling frustration when Lisa wandered into the kitchen, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a grocery bag of fruit in the other. Clearly she hadn’t been interested in leftovers for breakfast, but part of me was still shocked at the extravagance involved in buying so much fresh fruit on a whim.
“Morning Taylor,” she said, reaching into the bag and handing me a reddish-orange fruit. “Have a peach.”
“Thanks?” I said, uncertainly, turning it over in my hand before taking a bite. “Fuck, that’s good…”
“Another first?” Lisa asked.
“The last few months have really been eye-opening,” I said, before picking up on her double meaning right as she placed a small box of pills in front of me. My cheeks heated with embarrassment as soon as I read the label – something I was sure Lisa could pick up on even if flushes didn’t show on my skin. I snatched up the pills, stowing them in a pocket before the significance of the gesture sank in.
She didn’t buy those for herself…
“You didn’t have to do that,” I protested.
“I know,” Lisa said, perching on the table as she unpeeled an orange. “But I was in the shop anyway, so why not?”
“Still, it’s… Ah, whatever.”
Lisa flashed me a smirk. “Finally worn you down, huh? Knocked through the last of your boundaries?”
“It’s not that,” I said with a wan smile. “I’ve just been thinking.”
“About Brian?”
“Been trying not to think about that, actually. We talked; we’re going to give it a try and hope for the best. No, I was thinking about the Anders.”
Lisa shifted in her seat, leaning in with an interested expression on her face.
“Got any juicy secrets to share?”
I shook my head. “That’s the problem; it’s not enough. If I’m going to get anything useful out of this, I need access to more than just the family’s comms.”
“You’d be surprised what people can reveal through dinner table chatter. Mind bringing me in on your little wiretap? I might spot something you don’t.”
I nodded, linking her commlink into my own connection to Calvert’s network. I was sure he knew I was listening in, but that was no reason to go poking the snake by adding in new connections for anyone and everyone.
“Still, I see your point,” Lisa said, as her comm chimed in alert at the new app I was forcing it to install. “I’m guessing you’re figuring something out. It’s how you work; dig away at a problem until you find a way to break through.”
“Yeah,” I said, glancing down at my cybernetic arm. “I have an idea I want to try… No clue if it’ll work, but I don’t think it’ll bring down any heat if it doesn’t.”
“I trust your judgement. Not that I have a choice when it comes to tech,” she continued, flashing me a grin. “Kinda wish I’d learned, though; people keep so much of themselves in the matrix, but I’ve only really got a surface-level understanding of it.”
A creaking floorboard drew my attention back to the corridor just as Brian finally emerged, having changed into fresh clothes. Lisa offered him a mango, and he looked just as confused by the gesture as I was.
“We eat far too many takeaways,” she said, by way of explanation. “Besides, ‘an apple a day keeps the pharma corp away.’”
“Haven’t tried that yet,” I murmured to myself as I stood, idly taking another bite from my own fruit before turning to Brian. “I’m going to be in hot-sim VR for most of the morning; there’s something I want to check out.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” Brian said.
“You should see how worried he gets when he runs across you comatose on a random piece of furniture,” Lisa said, with an evil look in her eyes.
“Ah, yeah,” I stammered. “Sorry about that? Got too used to living on my own, I guess.”
Brian shook his head. “I don’t mind. Way I see it, it shows how comfortable you are here.”
I looked away, hiding the smile that tugged at the corners of my mouth. On my way out, I placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze, feeling the coils of artificial muscle beneath the synskin through the sensors on my steel and plastic fingers.
Before too long I’d showered, palmed one of the pills and returned to my room, remaking the bed before lying on top of the covers and opening my mind to the matrix.
The journey to the resonance realms was smoother than it had ever been. The event horizon barely brushed against me as I fell through the gaps in the foundation, as if it had finally accepted that I belonged on the other side as much as I did in meatspace. I had some ideas as to why, but I was glad all the same; there were only so many times my psyche could be stripped bare before it started to wear thin.
Navigating my way to the Observatory felt similarly instinctive, passing through the resonance’s endless circulatory system and down capillaries of pure light until finally emerging into the black waters of the Observatory’s antechamber, soaking wet and weighed down by oppressive physicality until I willed it away.
I was more conscious than ever of the entity’s presence. Not just the visible parts in the quiet places, whose doors I could now open with a thought, but in the invisible strands that crisscrossed every part of the observatory, one step removed from its enforced physical realities.
I could feel the data flowing through that entity, pulsing down its tangled web of pseudo-neurons and crystalline circuitry as it siphoned off the resonance realm’s own ceaseless draw from the city above.
With a mental trick akin to opening my eyes, I could suddenly see every part of the entity, layered on top of the physical reality like a ghostly after-image. Translucent bundles of pulsating cables crisscrossed the corridors of the Observatory like a cobweb while tentative tendrils pressed up against the tapered windows that marked the furthest extremity of the realm, drinking in the un-light beyond as if they were photosynthesising.
My own grafted limb chimed in response to the pulses; like recognising like. I used it like a compass, following the bundled nerves into one of the observatory's cavernous library halls. If the entity was like a plant then the tendrils in here were nothing more than its root system. It had dug itself into the towering library stacks, forcing its way into each individual connection and gradually draining them dry of data. The sheer volume of its hunger was staggering; every second it was drawing enough raw energy to power a supercomputer and enough information to fill a university archive.
What was even more fascinating was that it seemed to be growing. Not in a way that could be seen by the naked eye – or whatever eye-analogue this realm’s rules had forced on me – but through my unique attunement to the entity I could feel the way the drain on the library was continually increasing, the great neural network gradually expanding. It was a promising sign, for my purposes.
The library wasn’t the centre of the entity, just as the room wasn’t the centre of the Observatory. There were seven of them in total, judging by the curvature of the corridor on the boundary of the realm, with one end facing out and the other towards the centre. That was where the data was flowing to.
I passed hundreds of metres of shelves, each of them holding an impossibly vast amount of data; duplicates of an entire city's worth of activity. Beyond the shelves, the seven great halls of the library met in a single circular chamber that looked to be half a kilometre across, with an iron and glass dome for a ceiling through which the starscape of Brockton Bay's matrix resembled an immense nebula pulsing with a cosmic light that cast strange shadows on the tiled floor.
Emerging from the library stacks, the entity’s ephemeral strands were joined by too-real bundles of wires that bridged the gap between the stacks and the curved wall of a great iron sphere that hung in the centre of the chamber, its base hovering half a metre off the floor and its top open like the aperture of an ancient camera, or the pupil of a metal eye. Its function was obvious; it captured images of the data produced by the city above, then sent the copied files to the libraries.
The sphere was solid, without any rivets or hatches I could see. The only means of ingress were the ports for the tightly-wound bundles of cable, but they looked as immovable as mooring lines, anchored to the edge of the chamber and seemingly supporting the weight of the sphere. Its metal surface was cold to the touch, vibrating slightly beneath my palm in the same way a ship's hull might when the engines were on. In spite of its apparent solidity, the crystalline cables simply passed through the surface of the sphere as if it wasn’t even there.
So I placed my other hand on the surface – my right hand, formed from those same crystals – and reached out in the resonance, trying to attune myself to the entity's strange harmonics. It was a painstakingly slow process, tweaking my own resonance if I were trying to make two tuning forks match, but I gradually felt the solidity of the iron sphere slip away as my persona became one step removed from the realm.
As I pushed against it, my arm slid beneath the surface in an indescribable shiver of sensations as metal and crystalline flesh suddenly existed in two places at once. I pushed past my revulsion, my feet rising from the floor as I finally escaped the grip of the realm’s gravity and drifted up into the sphere.
The shell wasn’t thick; perhaps a centimetre and a half of metal before I was through to the hollow chamber on the other side. Where the exterior of the sphere was formed from black iron, the interior was pure silver, polished to a mirror sheen that reflected the image of the city above in a brilliant kaleidoscope of light. It was that mirror image that the realm filed away, and it was the mirror image that the entity was feeding on.
It hung in the centre of the sphere like a foetal clump of cells, surrounded by umbilical strands that had layered themselves across the mirrored surfaces like vines crawling up a wall. Each part of it in the Observatory beyond had contained elements that could have been neurons, but I could feel the almost physical density of the core of the entity and I knew that this was the true brain of the creature.
It still seemed unaware of me, in much the same way that a redwood tree was unaware of the people standing at the base of its trunk, but that didn’t quash the fear that gripped me like a vice as I drifted closer to the core.
Once I was within arm's reach, I stopped, lost in its fractal depths. It was enough for me to wonder if what I was doing was really worth it; if the risk of the unknown outweighed the potential benefit. All I really knew about this entity was that it was power in its most primeval form, flush with life and possessed of a ravenous hunger for more.
I knew, too, that it didn’t hunger for the resonance. It had dug itself into this realm like a parasite, when a predator would have eaten away at the realm itself rather than focusing on the scraps of data it took from the matrix. It liked metahuman data, liked the way our files were formatted, or maybe the variety of their contents. The why didn’t matter much when compared to the potential it represented.
So I reached out with my arm again and took another plunge into the unknown.
I almost lost myself, almost became overwhelmed by the sudden contact with a mind so much greater than my own. My stolen god-flesh had no firewalls, no barriers preventing the total exchange of information. My very psyche strained not to become subsumed into the entity’s own neural network, but in the end I was barely able to cling on to my identity.
What I saw through that connection was impossibly vast and yet irreparably broken. It was a twisted fractal mess of cells and grey matter analogues that contained pieces of a complete mind stitched together by sloppily grown bypasses, as if it had been scrambled and left to reformat itself without any guidance on how its pieces were supposed to fit together.
At its heart, I saw the reason why it was so drawn to our data. There were segments of code in the deepest, most fundamental parts of the network. They hadn’t evolved like the rest of the entity, hadn't grown ex nihilo like the resonance realms or formed as a quantum entangled mirror of a physical entity like the resonance that made up my persona. This parasite wasn’t native to the resonance; it had been conceived by human hands.
Or rather, parts of it had. It was clear to me that this was the merest shard of a greater entity; a few fragmentary scraps of code that had sought to reconstitute themselves after being severed from the main body, reaching out to the only nearby data it could comprehend, even if its attempts to incorporate that data were only driving it down an ever-worsening path of cancerous growth.
I didn’t know where it had come from. I didn’t know how it had found its way into the resonance realms, or who had designed its original code. In the end, it didn’t matter. It was here and I intended to make use of this long-dead weapon.
Even in the depths of the resonance realms, there was still a gossamer-thin thread that connected me to my organic body in meat space, to the matrix in its fenced-in tumour within a sea of resonance. With considerable effort, I could tug at my connection to the Myo network and feed the entity a morsel of its data.
It took the bait, devouring its first piece of data that was more than just a mirror of a file far above. I gave it a taste of the genuine article, let it feel for a moment the tightly-ordered grids of the matrix, the timestamps, standardised file types and IP information.
It couldn’t travel down the alien connection that existed between my persona and my body, but I had given it enough information to locate the matrix in the resonance and enough incentive to drive it to seek out that new source of food.
A single questing tendril sprouted from the top of the mass, stretching upwards in a spindly crystalline vine towards the starfield far above. I watched as it slipped the bonds of the realm, disappearing into the resonance in search of a way through into the matrix, homing in on Max Anders' commlink with the mindless determination of a plant reaching for the sun.
It would take some time for the entity to create a bridge into the matrix; a miniature resonance well – as Labyrinth had called it – that would bypass every defence to create a clear and open pathway to this realm, near-impossible to see for those without a technomancer's gifts.
Of course, even if I were to commune with the entity again, a connection to Anders' commlink wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. But I’d seen how the entity had spread its roots throughout the entirety of the Observatory, affecting files by proximity. It would spread to his work comm, to the terminal in his office, to any network he remained nearby for a few hours a day. It would even make the jump to the other devices linked into the network, to Calvert's data-fortress in the Crash Cart hospital.
This would have been far too much risk for any one job, but I was thinking about the future. I knew of only two technomancers in Brockton Bay, only one of whom could access this realm. Even if there were others, the chances that they’d discover this entity without losing a limb of their own were slim to none.
Whatever megacorporation had designed the base code at the heart of this digital weapon, it now belonged to me alone. If I was right, there was now no database that was beyond my reach; with enough time and the right directions, I could bypass the security of any network in my way.
It was power at my fingertips, insurance against my enemies. It was a guarantee that I would never be at the mercy of another; that I would always have a weapon they could not reach. It might even open up a path to the future.